February 19, 2025 • 54 mins
Margaret continues to talk with Jolie Holland about a multigenerational punk band from the 70s that introduced punk ethics to punk rock.
https://expmag.com/2019/01/when-your-real-life-friend-is-your-facebook-troll/
Rebel Clothes, Rebel Songs, Rebel Pose: Anarchists on Punk Rock 1977-2010, anonymous
https://www.ubu.com/papers/cage_montague_interview.html
John Cage, Anarchy
The Story of Crass, George Berger
https://crosseyedpianist.com/2017/07/15/silence-presence-and-challenging-conventions-thoughts-on-john-cages-433/
https://www.soundoflife.com/blogs/mixtape/history-punk-music
https://fastnbulbous.com/punk/
https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/punk-politics-music-rebellion/
https://beltmag.com/mc5-detroits-godfathers-of-punk/
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/our_wedding_crasss_magnificent_romance_mag_prank
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/301-february-26-1980/british-anarchists-found-not-guilty/
https://thehippiesnowwearblack.org.uk/2016/03/12/vi-subversa-and-poison-girls-an-appreciation/
https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/henge-history-80.html
https://jprobinson.medium.com/the-rotten-etymology-of-punk-86db2fcc16f8
https://www.cbc.ca/strombo/news/crass-thatchergate-prank
https://libcom.org/article/stop-city-demonstrations-1983-1984
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zon Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, Hello, Hello, it's a message from your host, Margaret Kiljoy.
That's a crass reference. It's the show about crass. I'm
allowed to make crass references. That's the thing that I
can do. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. Welcome to Cool
People Who Did cool stuff. And it's a podcast. It's
part two. You should figure that out by now. But
I have to always ramble incoherently at the start of
(00:25):
every episode until I introduce my guest, which this week
is Julie Holland.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
How are you?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Hello, I'm fine. How are you doing.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm okay. We're recording this the same time as last time,
so we're both actually dealing with ambient horror of the
destruction of the little positive things that the government it
did for people. But you know, it's okay. The sun
will eat the earth eventually, anyway. That's what I always
remind myself.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Yeah, yeah, I just grab all the coping mechanisms that work,
you know, whenever I need them.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Yeah, that is, that is what they're there for. I'm
gonna eat ice cream after this. That's my primary coping
mechanism for real. Yeah, yeah, I eat vegan ice cream.
As after when when times ago are hard, I eat
ice cream.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
It's great.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I have no regrets.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Sometimes you need this, like the blood sugar to your
brain immediately.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Yeah. I feel like it's important that every podcast are
of like at least some sort of terrible thing that
they do to their body. But I like, basically don't
do drugs or drink, so I hit upon sugar.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
The thing that works absolutely the best for me is
just working out. It's just it just.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
That's the good version that makes you, that makes your
life better.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Drinking doesn't do anything for me. I like mescal, but
drinking doesn't. You know, it's not a coping mechanism. I
tried that one time and I was like, oh, this
doesn't do shit for me.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, drug stress me out and then you like worry
about the police and stuff. I was terrible when I did.
I never understood because like when I was like a
street kid, I feel like I got searched by cops
like three or four times a week, and so I
just didn't understand how people did drugs. I was like,
if you have drugs, you get caught. I don't understand.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
And taxes. I was a street kid in taxes and
we did rote atessin.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
It's what they did in high school. But because I yeah, yes,
it's legal. Yeah. Uh, the kids don't do drugs anyway,
don't do drugs, yeah, don't whatever. So we're talking about punk,
which has all kinds of opinions about drugs. Actually one
of the things that I didn't even get into. And
some of the old West Coast punk scenes they literally
(02:49):
had people already talking about like before straight edge people
were like had critiques of how the hippies were dropping
out and by using drugs they were like backly dulling
their senses. They were making straight edge arguments in nineteen
seventy seven on the West Coast. Yeah, and it was
just really interesting to me anyway. So in the US
(03:11):
you have the reproletarianization of the middle class, right, more
and more people are suddenly I mean, middle classes a
lie anyway, Either you work for money or you don't.
If you make money by owning things, then you are
not working class. If you make money by working, you
are working class. But the middle class is a conception
that people come up with, and people were falling out
(03:32):
of it. But the UK's economy wasn't doing particularly better
in nineteen seventy four, a successful minor strike brought down
the Conservative government, which meant that labor was in charge
when the economy fell apart and the country went to
the International Monetary Fund for a loan. In the year
nineteen seventy six, the country saw twenty three percent inflation.
(03:53):
And I think we've talked about this a couple times
in the show before. If you get a loan from
the International Monetary Fund, it's like going to a loan shark.
But instead of like they're.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
The devil, they're the devil. You're making a deal with
the devil.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, instead of breaking your legs, they break the working
class of your country's legs. And that same year there
was a massive drought and a huge heat wave and
everyone was told to cut their water use by half.
It was so hot that the pavement was melting or
tarmac as they call it over there. But what's funny
is so that happens all the time now over there.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yeah, that's just regular.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah, unemployment had more than doubled as far as they
can tell. The reason the economy of the UK fell
so hard was basically that had been built on the
blood of the colonies and the colonies had broken free.
So the collapse of the empire fucked the UK good,
I mean fuck them, but like.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
It mostly fell on the working class, who's who was fault.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
It was not right totally, but they still for a
moment had kind of a strong social net until Thatcher
in the eighties. And we'll talk about that. But like,
while compared to the US, that still whatever.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah, compared to the US there they're doing so much better.
I was on tour and I needed to get some antibiotics.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
And it just it blew my mind how easy it
was over there.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, you know, at midnight, at midnight, I was like, oh,
damn it, I have a ut.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
This is a uti, you know, and we got a sorted.
It was amazing.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
I remember once staying with my friend in a French
squat and she had fucked up her thumb and like
pretty badly. She needed to go to the doctor. And
I was like, God, what are you going to do?
And she was like, I don't know. And then in
the morning I talked to her and she was like, Oh,
I'm French, I'm just going to go to the doctor.
I'm not in America. Like even though I'm a broke squatter,
(05:44):
I can get my thumb taken care of, you know.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
It's so beautiful.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
A lovely friend of mine got pregnant in Texas, moved
to France. Yeah, and she had ended up having like
a pretty complicated pregnancy and she had to stay a
little bit longer in the birth center or whatever, in
the hospital, whatever it was.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
And on her way out, the French nurses were like,
we're so sorry, we're going to have to you know,
because you're American.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Nothing that's not all covered. I'm so sorry, we're going
to have to ask you to cover this. It was
twenty euros.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah. So the UK it's not doing so well, but
you know, everything's comparable to other things. The UK was
having a moment too, where it was pondering something that
it always seems to be pondering. It was pondering should
we become even more racist? In nineteen seventy six. You
(06:46):
ever seen Eric Clapton's racist tirade from nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
No, that's hilarious. I think I heard a more recent one.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
No's he's for someone who built his career off off
like very not subtle shade of blackface. That man has
some fucking golf.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yeah. In nineteen seventy six, the famous guitarist Eric Clapton
went on stage and gave this massive fucking racist rant
that I will not and cannot read on air, full
of old timey slurs telling foreigners to leave the country.
He starts it off with by being like, hey, do
I have any foreigners in the crowd? Raise your hands,
get out of here. And then he goes on and
(07:29):
in this he says, quote, I used to be into dope.
Now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man. And then
he shouted keep Britain white. This was not subtle.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
That is incredibly unsubtle.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Good for him, yeah, something like in twenty eighteen he
finally he apologized for saying half racist stuff. And I'm like,
you literally said I'm into racism. That's not half that's
the whole thing, that's all of racism. When you say
I am into racism, they.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Love caging and pretending something's a joke, like I don't.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Know, yeah yeah. And this is literally the reason that
the social movement and like concert movement Rock against Racism
started in the UK was in response to Eric Clapton
being a massive bigot eventually passed that torch on to Morrissey,
as we all know, but he started Yeah, that broke
(08:28):
my heart. I know that one. That one fucked me up.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I saw him kind of recently, just just by chance,
because he was at like a festival. He was so good.
I wanted to come back.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
I believe he's a good musician, but a good songwriter.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
He was.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
It was glorious. He sounded amazing. I want him to
like go to some rehab or something.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
I want to racism rehab, racism rehab, I think because
he said it takes courage to be gentle and kind,
come on, which just means he's a coward. Yep, he
does not have the courage to be gentle and kind.
He's a massive bigot. And if I was in the UK,
you could sue me, but I'm not. I'm in the
US anyway. So England was having a moment. They were
(09:17):
really going through some stuff. When the sex Pistols came
on to one of the three TV channels in England
in nineteen seventy six and were goaded into saying the
word shit shyly. This was a huge, huge deal. I
expected this to be like when Rage against the machine
like went on BBC and like, uh, played fuck you.
I won't do what you tell me without censoring it,
(09:38):
you know, yeah, which is a brilliant moment in music history.
But literally, they like kind of said something under their
breath and the guy was like, wait, what did you say?
And he was like, oh, I said something I can't say.
And the guy's like, no, what did you say? And
he's like oh shit, and they're like ah back in
the seventy something seventy six, yeah, and then punk was everywhere.
(09:59):
This was the best pr move they could have possibly made.
Although they almost went to jail. I think I don't
know enough about sex pesscical history. I don't care enough
about them. This it blew up. But as a mainstream fad,
by nineteen seventy eight, Punk's moment in the sun had passed.
New Wave was in, except there were now scores of
(10:19):
punks and they weren't going to move on. They were
going to build a worldwide scene and they were going
to build it more DIY, a bit more underground. But
you can't even truly I mean you're talking about millions
and millions of records. It's just not on TV to
the same degree after nineteen seventy eight to cut over
to Canada for a second. As author and eco terrorist
Anne Hanson put in her book direct Action Memoirs of
(10:42):
an Urban Gorilla, she wrote, quote, the parents of the
punk kids were wooed into complacency through slick marketing of
the illusion that corporate America was moving towards a society
free of pollution, with equal opportunities for all. Both men
and women could drive to their corporate offices and their
BMW's listening to the sounds of Bob Dylan or the
(11:02):
Rolling Stones. At school, the punk kids were pushed to
make decisions about their future careers by the age of
twelve so that they could end up in the right
stream that would lead to well paid jobs for the
privileged few who could afford to go to university. And
that didn't happen. So that's what punk was the response to.
(11:24):
And instead these kids disappeared into DIY spaces and they
built a vibrant and chaotic scene. The dancing and early
punk was dead simple. If nothing else, you just pogo.
You just jump up and down in time to the music,
or not in time to the music, as I usually did.
Stage diving was a staple of early shows in particular,
which is essentially a trustful you climb up onto the stage,
(11:47):
breaking the rules of the venue and the barrier between
band and audience, and then jump into the crowd, trusting
that strangers will catch you. The previous generation had had
these huge stadium rock bands with their finely tuned sound,
with millionaire rock stars who were further and further from
any working classroots that they might have come from. Some
(12:07):
of them still sang about revolution, but it was hard
to believe them. With punk, anyone can make a band,
anyone can make a fanzine. A fanzine called Strangled put
out a cover that showed how to play three chords,
with the caption here's three chords, Now form a band.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
That's great.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
That's so good.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I always remember the the Beatles talking about walking across
town to find somebody who knew another knew how to
play another chord.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
I love like even more than punk music. I love punk,
the punk ethos, and I love the idea that like
you can go to a show and listen to your
friends who suck and have an amazing time, and you
can go to a show and listen to your friends
who are amazing and have an amazing time. And your
friends who are amazing might break out of that local
(13:04):
scene and play nationally, or they might break bigger than
that and play internationally or signed to a label or
whatever the hell, right, But that doesn't make them better
than the band that sucks it. Just well, it makes
their music better, but it doesn't make them like as
people better, and it doesn't even necessarily make it. You're
still gonna have an amazing time at like a basement
punk show, you know, I mean, or you're gonna have
a terrible time, depending on punk is not perfect. But like,
(13:26):
I don't know, I love that about punk. I love
that And it's actually funny because it's like people complain
all the time about how everyone has podcasts, and I
sometimes complain all the time about how everyone has podcasts.
I mostly complain about how I have a lot of podcasts.
But I lovets, Oh thank you. But I love that
anyone can start a podcast, I you know, like I
(13:48):
love that it it's it's it's zines. It reminds me
of zines as a culture thing, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Yeah, it's a radio zine.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yeah, And some people are listened to by ten people,
and some people are listening by ten million people and whatever.
You know, that's cool.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
It's a little de democratic.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, And if you get enough listeners, dear listener, on
your podcast, here's three chords. Start a podcast, you might
end up one day pivoting to ads. Thank you, thank you.
That's why I get paid at all. And we're back.
(14:36):
So you have these bands that you know, sex Pistols
is running around saying anarchy in the UK. You have
enough people run around saying anarchy in the UK long enough,
and suddenly you're going to find people who mean it.
Suddenly the anarchists are going to come onto the scene
in a major way. And if you want to be
cynical about it, to spoil next week's content, you guys
(14:58):
sort of this pissing contest who's like the most authentic
versus everyone else who's like a poser or sellout or whatever.
But we're not going to focus on the bad elements
of punk just yet. And no one epitomized living true
to your values more than the band Crass, at least
at first. They are the band that spearheaded this particular
wave of anarcho punk and in order to talk about crass,
(15:21):
we have to talk about the fact that they're all
a bunch of hippies, which is like one of my
favorite things about them, well, most of them. One of
them was a young punk.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
How are we defining hippie in this sense?
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I will tell you, and I believe you're gonna believe me. Well,
they wouldn't have called themselves hipies. They would have called
themselves freaks. I love that they're like from the movement
that would be called by a mainstream person like hippies,
but amongst themselves they identified as freaks. God, all that
kind of stuff gets so complicated. Like I remember, like
(15:51):
trying to explain to someone the difference between a krusty
and a crustpunk.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
You know, yeah, yeah, exactly. I always remember this comic.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
I forget what it was who drew it, but there
was this, uh, somebody's calling this woman a hippie and
she ended up doing something real tough at the end,
and she's like, I told you, I'm not a hippie.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Hippies are nice.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
And what's really funny is that like Crafts are pacifists,
but they're angry about it. I wouldn't even know I
call them nice. So yeah, like I like.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Freak, that's that's uh, that's useful.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
I mean coming from Houston and being out and queer
since I was thirteen, like I fully you know, experienced.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
The other ring.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Yeah, and like how it was so funny, like how
easy it was to be a freak growing up in
Houston in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
No, I I I think it's kind of fun to
have these like labels that are non labels like queer,
you know, like freak. Kind of feels like it could
be that where you're like, I don't know whatever, there's
lots of different things. I'm not pinning it down for
you figured it out yourself.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, it's a very it's a very big banner.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah. And so we're going to start with two of
the folks behind Crass, a man named Penny Rimbo and
a woman named jeev Ousher. Geev Ousher was born in London.
She was the youngest of four children in a working
class family. Her older brother died at age twelve when
I think she was four. Her dad cleaned out chemical
boilers at the Ford Factory and did not live to
(17:28):
be old because that's not a good way to live.
To be old.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
It's a terrifying job.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah. Her mom made sure that they still got to
go on holiday every year, but that meant they took
a car three miles down the road. When she was
sixteen or so, she went off to art school, the
South East Essex Technical College and School of Art. It's
a trade school primarily most of the students are in
(17:53):
the trades like welders and shit. But they have an
art school.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
There too, so like probably commercial art.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yep, exactly, that's the next line. It focused on commercial art,
graphic design, illustration, that kind of thing, and not like
art for art's sake or avant garde and not.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Like high art.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, she was one of only two working class people
in the place, and she put her nose to the
grindstone and worked her ass off while her more middle
class and upper middle class peers were more willing to
just kind of fuck around. One of those people who
was willing to kind of just fuck around because he
was from a more middle class or upper middle class background,
was a man who named himself Penny Rimbo. Penny is
(18:34):
a girl's name in England, and I think that's worth knowing.
And I love when men take on women's names because
I did it for a decade before I came out
as trans. And also there's like a weird, just long
history of musicians doing that. The two of them, they
were more into the artsy shit than the commercial shit,
and they became friends and they fell in love. G
(18:56):
was a beat who dressed like a tomboy, but with
stockings and short skirt. This is the early sixties. Penny, meanwhile,
wore a combat jacket and Chelsea boots, which are those
boots that rural lesbians wear. That's like my identification with
Chelsea boots, you know, like if you're like, oh, those
boots that every queer person I know who lives in
the country whars those. Penny had been born outside of
(19:21):
London in nineteen forty three to a upper middle class family.
His father fought in the war World War II as
an engineer, blowing up and rebuilding bridges across Europe and Africa,
and then wound up working for the World Bank, which
is not a good way to be ethical. Penny has
dedicated his life to being a class trader, though an
awful lot has been written, and I've read an awful
(19:43):
lot about how class affects his politics a lot of people.
The fact that he's middle class is used against the
band Crass constantly, even though many of the members, including
the kind of primary singer, was working class. Whatever. He
rejected wealth from a young age. He wrote once quote,
ever since I was a kid, I thought that whatever
(20:05):
I got, i'd share. What else can you do? I
don't really believe you can change governments, but you can
change your immediate environment. You can live a life of
sharing and giving and taking. His first political campaign was
the campaign for nuclear disarmament, And it seems like he
was always very concerned about authenticity right from the start.
He's like kind of the main it seems like the
(20:25):
one who's just like no, anything that is not true
to our values in the following specific way is you know,
like he was into the Beatles for a while, but
then he was annoyed at them for selling out. And
at one point while he was in school, for anyone
who can't see Jolie's making a like yeah whatever, yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
It's like how how are what does that even mean?
Speaker 3 (20:47):
They had like all those screaming girls, like they couldn't
even they couldn't even play music.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
After a while, like how how could they not sell out?
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah, like the whole discourse around selling out. We're gonna
talk to you about it more when we started talking
about like how Cress kind of developed what they developed into,
which I actually I mean I still like crass, but
like I don't give a shit about the conceptions of
nineteen seventies like UK punks about what counts the selling out.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Yeah, it's just funny.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
I mean the idea that the Beatles were not sold
out from the beginning is also really funny.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
I mean they kind of went.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
The other way. They moved toward they tried to move
toward art.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Yeah, they got artsy, Yeah, totally. At one point while
it was in school, he won a contest to make
pop art for the Beatles. But then he didn't let
the Beatles sign his painting because he didn't want them
scribbling all over his art. And that's classy, sang.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
Yeah, that's that's really having a backbone right there.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah. G was maybe the more directly political of the
pair of them in terms of like being concerned not
just in like ethical values, but like political campaigns. She
was radicalized at school. She got really involved after the
Aberfan disaster in nineteen six sixty six. In October, a
(22:02):
slag heap from a coal mine slid into a Welsh village,
killing one hundred and forty four people, mostly children between
seven and ten years old. Because it crushed some schools.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Oh so sad.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah, and it the whole thing had been preventable. People
knew that it was going to happen. And I've, like
I live in West Virginia, I've like had some hand
in like some of the coal mining protests and stuff
around here, and like the same kind of stuff happens,
Like the stuff from coal mining just gets like stuffed
wherever they can, and they do it as cheaply as possible,
(22:37):
and then the dam's break and then it kills people
because they don't care about poor people. And that's probably
going to be a shocker to the listeners this podcast.
And after they got out of school, g goes off
to the Royal College of Art but was rejected from it,
so she starts working at an art center so that
(22:57):
kids can come and learn art if their schools didn't
offer it. Penny meanwhile as an art teacher too, working
at a continuing education center, and feminism was always on
their minds, I actually would say that, like their commitment
to feminism and pacifism is like more actual part of
their politics than like anarchism specifically.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
I feel like my scene of friends that loved Crass
were politicized.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
By them and in a really beautiful way.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
And I wish that that group of people had taken
the feminism a little bit more to heart.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
That is an ongoing thing for Crass with their fans,
because like, pretty fairly shortly along in the band, there's
like multiple women in the band and they have like
women are singing actively feminist songs, and then some of
the men start writing and singing feminist songs about like
how masculinity is defined and how we need to betray
it and like all this stuff, and they would still
just be like, Yep, our fans will sing along and
(23:57):
don't do anything about it.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
But so Ghost, it's hard. It's hard. Feminism is hard.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, And G wanted to prioritize her independence, so after
college they both started renting rural places about ten minutes
away from they just like lived near each other instead
of moving in together. Right, she was like, well, I
need to be my own person.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yeah, And after a couple of years, and this makes
sense to me, you know. After a couple of years,
g moved in with Penny in the place that is
now legendary, a place called dial House. And when I
say legendary, I mean to a very small subsection of people,
but it used to be a large subsection of people.
An hour outside of London, there's a town called Epping.
Outside of Epping, there's a village called north Weald. Outside
north Wild there is a cottage called dial House. UK
(24:44):
addresses are funny because a lot of the houses of names.
I used to laugh every time i'd send a package
to England when I did distro, because I'd be addressing
it to like Icicle manor third Rock past the Lane
in Merlinshire or whatever. Fully, and I told this to
my UK friend and she pointed out that every American
(25:05):
address is one nine, three, two, one four, five six
seventy fourth Street B. She got her ass. Dial House
was first built in the fourteen hundreds, speaking of just
like I mean, just I don't know whatever. It was
built in the fourteen hundreds and slowly expanded over the centuries,
but it had been derelict for a long time. When
(25:26):
Penny moved in. When I first heard about dial house,
I just literally assumed that he was like a trust
fund kid and his parents had bought him a house
when he got out of school. You know, Yeah, this
is not what happened. He actually worked and for many,
many years, I think for decades they rented the place.
It had been derelict for years, and when Penny moved in,
it had just been used by like local kids for parties.
(25:46):
Before then, the place was at the end of a
dirt road, and instead of pain rent for the first
several months or years or something, he fixed the place up.
At first, it wasn't anything particularly radical, just a strange
little place that he lived alongside eventually two of his
coworkers from where he taught at that school. But in
nineteen seventy he quit that job and he wanted to
(26:09):
do something more radical with the place. He wanted to
build an open house. Later, he explained his dream like
this quote. I love the idea of somewhere where people
could stop to tell their story, with a comfortable bed
for the night, and go on their journey. My original
dream was that if I created one of those, then
everyone who visited would go off and do something similar.
(26:31):
Dial house gets called commune, or it gets called an
arts community. He gets called a lot of things. It's
an interesting model. Multiple things I've read said, like the
dishes are usually clean there. I think people had to
do their own dishes. The food was communal more or less.
Anyone who wanted to come over could go into any
room they wanted that wasn't a private bedroom. If you
wanted food, you'd cook it, probably for everybody. So it's
(26:55):
basically somewhere between a collective house, a commune, and a
crash pad. And it's like not trash like a crash pad.
It's not like everything for everyone totally all the time.
No bedrooms like people assume communes are just seems nice.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
I wonder about the tradition of that kind of stuff
in Europe and the UK, like like the like the
idea of a pub is super interesting, and that a
pub is a public house.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Yeah, you know, and I and I love learning about
like and this is why I was reading Calvin and
the Witch or this is what I was looking for
in Calvin and the Witch. Is a history of the
heretical movements, and a lot of them had these communal
situations too.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Yeah, and like these big like the begines, Okay.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Like little little rumors that I've heard about them, these
like collectivist traditions.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, so I wonder. I wonder where that came from.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
For them, I wonder too, And I I think it's
like a I think it's developed from hippie culture, but
I'm not one hundred percent certain, but it is a
kind of interesting spin on it, and I like the yeah,
the comparison, like the public house kind of thing. His
two roommates were like, well, I don't want to do that.
I want to be able to write my name on
(28:18):
my food. And so they moved out, and other folks
moved in, supposedly without no one was like particularly upset
by this one resident. His name is Dave King. Later
he drew the crass logo, which if people haven't seen,
it's worth seeing. Is not a visual medium. But honestly,
I think the reason that Grass was successful is this logo. Like,
I mean, they're a good band. Well, no, they're an
(28:40):
interesting band, but they like they were branded really well,
and the crass logo is a very successful and dramatic
piece of symbolism. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. Dave
King said about the place, quote, what was very interesting
to me was the atmosphere of timelessness that seemed to
exist around the house. Seemed like the days could last forever,
(29:02):
and being young, you maybe also stay up all night.
There was a certain benign drift that would happen that
I think is the potential source of mystical experiences. Essentially,
he was saying that, like, even without drugs, there was
a kind of altered reality experience of like leaving the city.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
That's yeah, that's beautiful.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
That reminds me of some of my friends' houses and
some of my experiences of collective houses like that.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
It does have this feeling of being out of time. Yeah, yeah.
Defining the sense of out of time is, uh, how
do you do that too? Does it remind you of
fairy tale? Like? What does what does that mean?
Speaker 2 (29:42):
It makes me think literally of like the concept of
the land of fairy where time passes differently, years and
years go by when you just spend one night in
Faerry or the other way around. You know, like the
idea that like you go to this other place and
time just works differently. And I've experienced that basically in
places kind of like this myself too in it. I
(30:04):
love it.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
That's beautiful. I want to. I want to. I want
the campfire ghost story version of that.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Yeah. And in Dial House, one room became a music room,
and soon enough people started making weird avant garde shit.
The Dial House folks were part of this movement called Fluxus,
which I am not an expert on. This is not
an episode on Fluxus, but this is basically the avant
garde movement. It is heavily inspired by our man, the
(30:31):
gay anarchist John Cage. It's into making events rather than
finished pieces. It's generally anti commercial. Sometimes it's like people
kind of call it neo data. Yoko Ono is probably
the most famous practitioner of this stuff today. And I
was going to give a weird tangent about the time
I ask you a question, but I'm not gonna do it.
(30:52):
Ah that okay, wait, no, I should probably do Okay,
So here's my weird tangent. So, when you were like
a teenager, you went and saw the the John Cage exhibit,
you know?
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Yeah, when I was sixteen, I saw Yoko on a
exhibit and I was not impressed. I was like, because
it didn't to me, it didn't have much Like I
was really into craft at the time, right, I was like,
because I didn't know what I wanted to say as
an artist, but I like really was like interested in
like people like learning the craft really well.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
And yeah, like where's the chain mail?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Oh, I mean like I mean like the like although
that would have interested me definitely. I was definitely making
chain oil at that point, but like, I mean the
like technical expertise and shit, you know, yes. And on
the wall there was like forty pictures of this blurry
it's the same blurry photo of an eye, and then
under each one it said like I remember this, and
(31:46):
it was like different memories related to eyes, and the
very first one said I remember when I was born
and looking up into the doctor's eyes. And I thought
to myself, yoko on as a liar, yoko and as
a fraud. Fuck this right, so rude?
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Teenagers are so rude.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
I was like, there's no way this lady remembers being born.
To hell with this, all of this is bullshit. That
was what I walked away with. The person I went
with was not impressed about my take on this. And
then I was in arts school a couple of years
later and Yoko Ono came and gave a talk, and
I like waited in line to ask a question. I
was like a young anarchist, and so everyone in the
crowd is like, ah, fuck, this bitch is gonna ask
some like fucking like shit about the World Trade Organization
(32:26):
or something, you know, And I get up and I
think I got her. I'm like, Yoko Ono, do you
remember being born? Because in my mind, if she says yes,
then she's lying, and if she says no, then she's lying, right, yeah,
And Yoko Ono says, oh, that's such an interesting question.
(32:48):
My first memories are reoccurring dreams of being born and
looking into the doctor's eyes. And I was like, oh, fuck,
yok Ona's legit. I'm an asshole.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
You are an asshole. That's real, sweet before you go.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
But I didn't. I didn't be like do you remember
being born?
Speaker 1 (33:08):
You know?
Speaker 2 (33:08):
I was just just like, hey, what what's up?
Speaker 1 (33:10):
You know?
Speaker 2 (33:11):
And so yeah, that was how I got convinced that
the art is real. Everything's fine, and so fluxus is
the super arty stuff that drives the right wing mad.
And also it didn't impress sixteen year old me. But
now I think is really cool, and honestly, like some
(33:33):
of the fluxus type stuff, it doesn't really impress me personally,
or it's not it's not what I go for personally,
but I I respect the shit out of it, and
I love how much it triggers chuds, you know, and
some of it creates incredible, amazing things. So I'm not
whatever anyway, I swear I'm not a total philistine, just
(33:54):
a slightly one. Now dial House the run a weird
art people in their weird hippie house and four of
them start an arty noise band called the Stanford Rivers
Quartet with percussion, piano, keyboards, and flute and trombone, and
they would do artsy shit that's really cool, honestly, like
develop new styles of musical notation that were like visual art,
(34:15):
and so if you paint with red lines and that
it's up to the reader the musician to decide what
the red means in terms of how they should inflect
the notes as they play them and stuff like that.
Rad Yeah, no, I genuinely think it's kind of cool.
And then they had an avant garde band called Exit
after that, and this one lasted longer and it was
(34:35):
a free jazz avant garde band and they named themselves
after quote the direction they expected the audience to head
in droves.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
That is one marker of the success of a band
for sure. My friend Stephan Jikusco, he that was one
of his markers and he's he's the main brains behind
the Doughnut band that I referenced previous episode. Yeah, he
(35:05):
yeah stuff And to Cusco, what a genius. I love
that man. Yeah, and he's got his stuff on band
camp that I would love to direct people to. The
like noisy art stuff I was involved in to some
degree as a child.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
And I remember like when I like when I started
watching like art films and stuff. For a while, I
was like, I don't really get it, like not even
just like like experimental and abstract film. And then I realized,
I was like, oh, the way I zone out to
this stuff is different, and it kind of creates an
altered like an altered reality experience. And then I was like, oh,
that's the point. It's not just a narrative or whatever.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, that is the point. And I personally hate dissociating,
so I have to. I have to. I want more
exciting experimental music. I can't. I can't deal.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
With the like long, long, long, long, empty sort of
like extremely slow shot kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
But one of my favorite ways that I've heard a
lovely experimental musician describe the point of his work is
that he considers himself a collaborator with nature. Yeah, and
that's how he thinks about generating sound.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
That makes sense. When they created Exit, there's a few
core members and anyone could come and go from the band,
so I like they're collaborating into the space they're in.
The audience when they play can come up on stage
and join them. Often they start with like eight musicians
and end up with eighteen musicians. And they played a
(36:49):
lot of shows, especially like festival and weird art places
for weird art crowds, and at shows they would hand
out presents, art prints, packets of seeds as long as
the audience gets something. They never charge admission, I believe once.
And they always started an hour early before the set
time on the which is this is where they this
is how they punks learn from this to punk, we
(37:11):
should need to put the punctual back in punk or something.
They would start an hour early so that by the
time the audience came in. They came into quote a
musical environment which had not been conditioned by their presence,
so like the things already happening.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Ooh, that's so beautiful that I know.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
And then they would play until they felt like stopping
or the venue turned off the power. In nineteen seventy two,
they threw an avant garde festival called Ices International Carnival
of Experimental Sound, which was about two weeks long. Penny
said about it, quote the great end not so great
avant gardis worldwide came to it and performed mostly for nothing. Financially.
(37:56):
It was a disaster, but it was a fantastic festival,
really lovely. John Cage played at it, and one of
the people who helped put it on. This is a
complete side note. I just can't not put this in.
A guy named Harvey Matso was a former FBI informant
who testified before the House of un American Activities like
(38:18):
he was like a communist who had turned on all
of his friends until they found out he was actually
an FBI informant the whole time, until he turned on
the FBI, and he he turned trader and he helped
bring down McCarthy and spent three years in prison, and
then he moved to the UK because both in the US,
both the like left wing people and the right wing
(38:39):
people hated him and he just needed to get out.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah, but we need to make room for people to
come back. I don't know. It's hard to trust. It's
hard to trust a turncoats.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
But yeah, I know, I know you're like, I would
hold this man at arm's length, thank him for what
he did, be mad at him for other stuff he did.
It's complicated, but then he helped organize this thing, so
I love it. But Exit didn't last too much longer.
And why it disbanded. Okay, so it disbanded in nineteen
(39:08):
seventy two also, and it disbanded for kind of a
cool reason. Penny realized that he was being seen as
a guru. A lot of his students were joining the band,
and he would often like take his students out to
the woods to like make art by just building little
houses for the fairies out of sticks or whatever, you know,
And he was like, I want to keep teaching, I
want to keep making music, but I'm not trying to
(39:30):
be a fucking cult leader. Like I'm not trying to
be weird about it.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Yeah, so many cool bands from that time ended up
getting really culty, Like the Amazing String Band got super.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Cool, Okay, I believe it, Like yeah, they went scientologist.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Oh fuck, And so I just like really appreciate that.
He was like, no, I'm too anti Thiritearian for this,
Like I'm not. That's not what I'm doing here, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
It's dumb. Yeah, that was the That was the real
season of CULTI bullshit. Yeah, I mean not that we're fully.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Out of that, but uh, everything old is new again.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
I was those collective trance people were hard into.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Yeah, yeah, I you know, you see how like stepping
outside of mainstream society is very appealing for very good reasons,
and that can absolutely get culty. You know, when you
asked earlier if I was certain air hippies, I'm going
to describe to you this next chunk of their life.
Dial House kept going and a young man named Wally
Hope started hanging around Penny Rimbau and a few other
(40:30):
people swore that he could do magic. Like one summer
day he said, hey, guys, check this out, and suddenly
it started snowing and there's like multiple people saying that
this happened, and other people are like, no, that didn't happen.
Not who were there that day that I'm aware of.
People in Crass have different opinions about this guy. He
was a trust fund dropout and he had visions about
(40:52):
an egalitarian society of sun worshippers who would live at Stonehenge,
and it was going to start on Summer Solstice nineteen
seventy four. They were going to go and squat Stonehenge
by having a music festival. Is how I know they're hippies?
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Oh real, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
The poster read free Stonehenge off rocks off every Sunday forever.
And then because they're like chill, they wrote all the
people living near Stonehenge to give them a heads up
that they were all about to move there and like
become weird squatters on the land and so but here's
the letter that they sent. I'm going to read the
whole thing because I love it. On the road home,
(41:32):
there's random capitalization on the road home. Sunday, Dear sir,
with all well meaning respect, our Lord God and his
son Jesus Christ have ordained a spiritual pilgrimage to Stonehenge
on twentieth June twenty first, et cetera. To fulfill the
two commandments, Love God, love your neighbor. You are and
will be our neighbor. We beg for help, friendship, and trust.
(41:55):
If the gathering is overflowing big, we will give you
any help you need, but you might us respect. We
are to God's law and trying to balance the violence,
corruption ensuing Third World War, oily energy crisis to manual
communal farming, love, peace and freedom, your best mate, Wally,
help for the kids?
Speaker 1 (42:14):
X my goodness, Yeah, how's that going to go over? Till?
These like rural I don't know country people out there.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
So I don't know as much about what the actual
farmers made of this, but I do know what happened.
More broadly, a few hundred people showed up the UK's
first synth duo Zorch was the only band that played
Oh my God, and some folks stuck around for a
while after the festival and squatted. Their goal was to
(42:45):
lasten to a winter solstice, and everyone who was there
changed their name to like Wally something that's not Culty, No,
not at all, and then they basically just like a
journalist was there and was like, look, they all just
like sat around and ate terrible food that they didn't
know how to cook, and they did drugs, and they
talked about lay lines and pyramids, and they were eventually
arrested and kicked out. The journalist was not impressed. Dear listener,
(43:07):
I am not either, but whatever, more power to them. Likewise, Wally,
the original Wally, decided that there should be another one
of these festivals. But he was arrested at a squat
for possession of LSD, and then when he took him
to the prison, he refused to wear the prison uniform
because they said it gave him a rash, so they
threw him into a mental hospital where they told him
(43:29):
that he was schizophrenic and they locked him up for
a while. The second festival actually happened without him. They
actually kept happening until they were shut down violently in
nineteen eighty five. Thousands of people came there and there
were two stages. Joe Strummer, later of the Clash, played
with a band called the one oh one Ers and
(43:51):
Dial House. People honestly didn't really think much of the festival.
They were annoyed at the rich hippies pretending to be
Native Americans and like living in tepees and real and
on from stage called Penny and undercover cop. I think
because he like didn't look enough like a hippie or whatever,
you know, while he was too in custody to attend
the second festival, and he never saw the ones that
(44:13):
came after it either, because he died. It was ruled
as suicide, and it was probably suicide in its way,
but Penny was convinced for years that he'd been murdered,
not just done in by the horrors of nineteen seventies
met mental institutions, but straight up murdered and covered up
by the police. Penny was kind of having a rough
(44:33):
time around then. This would be the Long Dark Night
of the Soul moment in the movie. Gee had just
moved to New York and they broke up and they
actually I think this is really sweet and pretty feminist.
They had a divorce even though they didn't get married. Wow,
and they're like gonna be friends and co collaborators to
this day, Like they're both still alive. If you're listening,
(44:55):
I hope I did this right, and I'm sure I didn't.
There's so much written about you all. There's so much. Anyway,
Penny was drinking heavily and a lot of his like
peaceful hippie outlook was getting replaced by the fear of
repression by the state because he was like, they just
killed my friend, right, and he was investigating his friend's death,
and the cops would tell him like hey, They would
(45:16):
like pop by and be like, hey, you need to stop.
You need to stop investigating this death. And so he
wrote a whole book with all of his evidence called
Homage to Catatonia, which is a sick pun on the
Homage to Catalonia. Absolutely, he later burned it. It was
never published that I can tell. There's multiple other people
who have used this title for other things over the years.
(45:39):
But and then another Wally, like another person from the
Stonehenge encampment, was murdered, probably by like local rednecks. Basically
he was tied to a tree with a joint in
his hand. It was like an anti hippie murder. Probably. Yeah,
these days, Penny is less sure that the original Wally
was murdered directly so much as killed by the heart
(46:00):
of the medical system.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
It's really creepy that the cops kept coming around and
saying stop looking look into this. I mean, that's those
are red flags right there.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
I know absolutely, you know. And when I say he's
less short, I mean he's less short, not he is short,
you know, like just it's a to many people, it's
an open question. But in some ways an arcopunk was
born from the innocence of the hippies being bashed up
(46:29):
against the injustices of the mental health and judicial systems,
and they saw themselves as a response to the failure
of the hippie movement to fundamentally change society. Dialhouse started
realizing society wasn't changing. Things were getting worse. Penny Rimbo,
in his book The Last of the Hippies wrote, Oh,
(46:49):
that's the other reason I can call him a hippie.
He wrote, Society, the state in the system hadn't fucked off.
They'd not only stayed right they were they'd grown stronger. Slowly,
as people woke up to the fact that turning on
was turning off and dropping out was copying out, the
(47:10):
horrific reality of the nuclear world forced its way back
through the escapist blur of those psychedelic dreams. The dream
had been that if you created your own life independent
of the system, the system would leave you to it.
Looking back on it now, it seems pathetically naive, but
for maybe fifteen years it had sustained the lives of
thousands of people. The ultimate failure of the hippie was
(47:33):
exactly the ostrich like approach to life. A hippie utopia
surrounded by a world of hate and war was like
snow before the summer sun.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
I mean I always think about how mindfulness was used
by the Japanese military.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Yeah. I have like conversations a lot with one of
my therapist friends about, like, I love cognitive behavioral therapy
and the ability to brainwash yourself like gotten me it's
it's probably saved my life. But my therapist friend, a
different one than the one you taught me cognit behavioral
therapy was like, but it gets used to get people
(48:10):
to accept things that they shouldn't accept.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Yeah, as a tool.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Yeah. And Penny also wrote quote, I think people like
Jagger and Bowie stole our hopes and turned them into money.
Their castles are built on our money, the movement's money.
Bowie could have done something, but he didn't do anything.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
I'm friends with somebody who played drums with Bowie.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
For years. Oh shit, And he said like that man
was obsessed with money, and I thought, I think to myself, like,
all right, you're lucky.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
You're a drummer. You get paid as a band leader.
This is my defense of Bowie.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
In that moment. I was like, you have to be yes, yeah,
it is hard to pay a band and be on
the road, and it's like one of the most expensive
small businesses you can run is a band. Yeah, but
I appreciate what he's saying about Bowie collectively. Is is
that like in response and you know, in relation to
(49:14):
the collective dreams. It's like this man wove some beautiful
spells that a lot of people responded to. But yeah,
I think he's just an artist.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:26):
No.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
And it's funny because like if you read different people
in Crass talking about Bowie, Penny fucking hates Bowie, right,
but like Steve Ignorant is like, oh no, yeah, I
really like Bowie, like you know, did a lot for
like being able to dress up like a freak. And
you know, it's like and you just have like people
have different thoughts about him, but the thing you're saying
about like yeah, like yeah, as a band leader, you
have to be obsessed with money. Someone needs to make
(49:48):
sure that people get paid. And I think, what's so funny.
We'll probably talk about this more like in future episodes too,
but like, you know, you have this like, oh, we're
all going to become rock stars and become millionaires off
the back of everyone who buys their stuff, and then
you have this reaction and an arcopunk is absolutely reaction,
and they're like, we won't get rich, you know they do,
Like I think that they're like eating some food, right,
(50:10):
but they are like really sticking to their guns about
keeping their products cheap, their shows, like you know they are.
They stay earnest their entire lives to this, right, And
then so you end up with this like in order
to be an activist you have to volunteer for it
kind of attitude for decades and in the past like
ten fifteen years, that's starting to break and people are
(50:31):
starting to as what we were saying earlier, being these
two ideas can be in conversation with each other, Right, Yeah,
you have your initial idea, fuck ya get rich, and
then you have your other idea like, no, you must
live like a monk to have good politics. And then
also in a society with good social services, and then
you have people being like, oh, that critique is really valid,
(50:54):
but I need to get paid in order to do this.
You know.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
Yeah, it's a job. It's a really hard job.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
Yeah yeah, and most people need jobs. But what did
we're actually at the end of this episode what they
do instead of being hippies forever. You already know, they
become crass and they change the world. But how exactly
it happens we're going to talk about next week. But
first we're going to talk about how people can support
(51:23):
you with your job of making music or just listen
to the music, or do whatever else you want people
to do besides starting a cult. You're not allowed to
start a cult.
Speaker 1 (51:31):
No, I don't. I was raised in a cult. That's
why I was a homeless teenager.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Oh okay, cool, I was.
Speaker 1 (51:37):
Yeah, I was brought up in a stupid fundamentalist religious
group and that's why I was on the street. But
my shop is open whenever I'm not on tour, and
that's a Jollihand music dot com or come see me.
Speaker 2 (51:53):
On tour a touring anytime soon.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
I'm mostly playing private shows up the West Coast and
then I have a show March sixth in Bellingham at
the odd Fellows, and I'm playing Chicago at Constellation on
March fifteenth, so y'all come see me. Oh yeah, I'm
going to play. I'm going to play with my friend's
(52:21):
health and Beauty in Chicago. It's going to be great.
Speaker 2 (52:24):
And if people want Julie's merch, it is beautiful. Like
I don't frame every random show or music related thing
that I get, and.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
I'm so honored, thank you. And that illustration is by
Jack Follows, who's a really gorgeous non binary anarchist game
designer who you should follow on Patreon.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Hell yeah, and uh, for my own plugs, I already
plugged that. I have a book. It's a book. It's
called The Immortal Choir holds every voice. And I also
have a substack, and all the important posts are free,
and all of the posts that are more personal, some
of the posts that are more personal or behind a paywall,
and you can follow me there on whatever level of
(53:07):
free or not free you feel like. And also, I
don't know, times are hard, but we can take care
of each other. That's my plug, take care of each other.
We're gonna mostly get through this, most of us, and
that's the way it always is going to be, because
none of us were getting out of this is a
live thing. When you're alive, you're guaranteed to die. That's
(53:28):
what keeps me happy. Why am I rambling? I need
to go eat food, but I will see you all
next week.
Speaker 4 (53:41):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 2 (53:54):
You get your podcasts.
Cool Zon Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, Hello, Hello, it's a message from your host, Margaret Kiljoy.
That's a crass reference. It's the show about crass. I'm
allowed to make crass references. That's the thing that I
can do. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. Welcome to Cool
People Who Did cool stuff. And it's a podcast. It's
part two. You should figure that out by now. But
I have to always ramble incoherently at the start of
(00:25):
every episode until I introduce my guest, which this week
is Julie Holland.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
How are you?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Hello, I'm fine. How are you doing.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm okay. We're recording this the same time as last time,
so we're both actually dealing with ambient horror of the
destruction of the little positive things that the government it
did for people. But you know, it's okay. The sun
will eat the earth eventually, anyway. That's what I always
remind myself.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Yeah, yeah, I just grab all the coping mechanisms that work,
you know, whenever I need them.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Yeah, that is, that is what they're there for. I'm
gonna eat ice cream after this. That's my primary coping
mechanism for real. Yeah, yeah, I eat vegan ice cream.
As after when when times ago are hard, I eat
ice cream.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
It's great.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I have no regrets.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Sometimes you need this, like the blood sugar to your
brain immediately.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Yeah. I feel like it's important that every podcast are
of like at least some sort of terrible thing that
they do to their body. But I like, basically don't
do drugs or drink, so I hit upon sugar.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
The thing that works absolutely the best for me is
just working out. It's just it just.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
That's the good version that makes you, that makes your
life better.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Drinking doesn't do anything for me. I like mescal, but
drinking doesn't. You know, it's not a coping mechanism. I
tried that one time and I was like, oh, this
doesn't do shit for me.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, drug stress me out and then you like worry
about the police and stuff. I was terrible when I did.
I never understood because like when I was like a
street kid, I feel like I got searched by cops
like three or four times a week, and so I
just didn't understand how people did drugs. I was like,
if you have drugs, you get caught. I don't understand.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
And taxes. I was a street kid in taxes and
we did rote atessin.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
It's what they did in high school. But because I yeah, yes,
it's legal. Yeah. Uh, the kids don't do drugs anyway,
don't do drugs, yeah, don't whatever. So we're talking about punk,
which has all kinds of opinions about drugs. Actually one
of the things that I didn't even get into. And
some of the old West Coast punk scenes they literally
(02:49):
had people already talking about like before straight edge people
were like had critiques of how the hippies were dropping
out and by using drugs they were like backly dulling
their senses. They were making straight edge arguments in nineteen
seventy seven on the West Coast. Yeah, and it was
just really interesting to me anyway. So in the US
(03:11):
you have the reproletarianization of the middle class, right, more
and more people are suddenly I mean, middle classes a
lie anyway, Either you work for money or you don't.
If you make money by owning things, then you are
not working class. If you make money by working, you
are working class. But the middle class is a conception
that people come up with, and people were falling out
(03:32):
of it. But the UK's economy wasn't doing particularly better
in nineteen seventy four, a successful minor strike brought down
the Conservative government, which meant that labor was in charge
when the economy fell apart and the country went to
the International Monetary Fund for a loan. In the year
nineteen seventy six, the country saw twenty three percent inflation.
(03:53):
And I think we've talked about this a couple times
in the show before. If you get a loan from
the International Monetary Fund, it's like going to a loan shark.
But instead of like they're.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
The devil, they're the devil. You're making a deal with
the devil.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, instead of breaking your legs, they break the working
class of your country's legs. And that same year there
was a massive drought and a huge heat wave and
everyone was told to cut their water use by half.
It was so hot that the pavement was melting or
tarmac as they call it over there. But what's funny
is so that happens all the time now over there.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yeah, that's just regular.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah, unemployment had more than doubled as far as they
can tell. The reason the economy of the UK fell
so hard was basically that had been built on the
blood of the colonies and the colonies had broken free.
So the collapse of the empire fucked the UK good,
I mean fuck them, but like.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
It mostly fell on the working class, who's who was fault.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
It was not right totally, but they still for a
moment had kind of a strong social net until Thatcher
in the eighties. And we'll talk about that. But like,
while compared to the US, that still whatever.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah, compared to the US there they're doing so much better.
I was on tour and I needed to get some antibiotics.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
And it just it blew my mind how easy it
was over there.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, you know, at midnight, at midnight, I was like, oh,
damn it, I have a ut.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
This is a uti, you know, and we got a sorted.
It was amazing.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
I remember once staying with my friend in a French
squat and she had fucked up her thumb and like
pretty badly. She needed to go to the doctor. And
I was like, God, what are you going to do?
And she was like, I don't know. And then in
the morning I talked to her and she was like, Oh,
I'm French, I'm just going to go to the doctor.
I'm not in America. Like even though I'm a broke squatter,
(05:44):
I can get my thumb taken care of, you know.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
It's so beautiful.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
A lovely friend of mine got pregnant in Texas, moved
to France. Yeah, and she had ended up having like
a pretty complicated pregnancy and she had to stay a
little bit longer in the birth center or whatever, in
the hospital, whatever it was.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
And on her way out, the French nurses were like,
we're so sorry, we're going to have to you know,
because you're American.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Nothing that's not all covered. I'm so sorry, we're going
to have to ask you to cover this. It was
twenty euros.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah. So the UK it's not doing so well, but
you know, everything's comparable to other things. The UK was
having a moment too, where it was pondering something that
it always seems to be pondering. It was pondering should
we become even more racist? In nineteen seventy six. You
(06:46):
ever seen Eric Clapton's racist tirade from nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
No, that's hilarious. I think I heard a more recent one.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
No's he's for someone who built his career off off
like very not subtle shade of blackface. That man has
some fucking golf.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yeah. In nineteen seventy six, the famous guitarist Eric Clapton
went on stage and gave this massive fucking racist rant
that I will not and cannot read on air, full
of old timey slurs telling foreigners to leave the country.
He starts it off with by being like, hey, do
I have any foreigners in the crowd? Raise your hands,
get out of here. And then he goes on and
(07:29):
in this he says, quote, I used to be into dope.
Now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man. And then
he shouted keep Britain white. This was not subtle.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
That is incredibly unsubtle.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Good for him, yeah, something like in twenty eighteen he
finally he apologized for saying half racist stuff. And I'm like,
you literally said I'm into racism. That's not half that's
the whole thing, that's all of racism. When you say
I am into racism, they.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Love caging and pretending something's a joke, like I don't.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Know, yeah yeah. And this is literally the reason that
the social movement and like concert movement Rock against Racism
started in the UK was in response to Eric Clapton
being a massive bigot eventually passed that torch on to Morrissey,
as we all know, but he started Yeah, that broke
(08:28):
my heart. I know that one. That one fucked me up.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I saw him kind of recently, just just by chance,
because he was at like a festival. He was so good.
I wanted to come back.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
I believe he's a good musician, but a good songwriter.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
He was.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
It was glorious. He sounded amazing. I want him to
like go to some rehab or something.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
I want to racism rehab, racism rehab, I think because
he said it takes courage to be gentle and kind,
come on, which just means he's a coward. Yep, he
does not have the courage to be gentle and kind.
He's a massive bigot. And if I was in the UK,
you could sue me, but I'm not. I'm in the
US anyway. So England was having a moment. They were
(09:17):
really going through some stuff. When the sex Pistols came
on to one of the three TV channels in England
in nineteen seventy six and were goaded into saying the
word shit shyly. This was a huge, huge deal. I
expected this to be like when Rage against the machine
like went on BBC and like, uh, played fuck you.
I won't do what you tell me without censoring it,
(09:38):
you know, yeah, which is a brilliant moment in music history.
But literally, they like kind of said something under their
breath and the guy was like, wait, what did you say?
And he was like, oh, I said something I can't say.
And the guy's like, no, what did you say? And
he's like oh shit, and they're like ah back in
the seventy something seventy six, yeah, and then punk was everywhere.
(09:59):
This was the best pr move they could have possibly made.
Although they almost went to jail. I think I don't
know enough about sex pesscical history. I don't care enough
about them. This it blew up. But as a mainstream fad,
by nineteen seventy eight, Punk's moment in the sun had passed.
New Wave was in, except there were now scores of
(10:19):
punks and they weren't going to move on. They were
going to build a worldwide scene and they were going
to build it more DIY, a bit more underground. But
you can't even truly I mean you're talking about millions
and millions of records. It's just not on TV to
the same degree after nineteen seventy eight to cut over
to Canada for a second. As author and eco terrorist
Anne Hanson put in her book direct Action Memoirs of
(10:42):
an Urban Gorilla, she wrote, quote, the parents of the
punk kids were wooed into complacency through slick marketing of
the illusion that corporate America was moving towards a society
free of pollution, with equal opportunities for all. Both men
and women could drive to their corporate offices and their
BMW's listening to the sounds of Bob Dylan or the
(11:02):
Rolling Stones. At school, the punk kids were pushed to
make decisions about their future careers by the age of
twelve so that they could end up in the right
stream that would lead to well paid jobs for the
privileged few who could afford to go to university. And
that didn't happen. So that's what punk was the response to.
(11:24):
And instead these kids disappeared into DIY spaces and they
built a vibrant and chaotic scene. The dancing and early
punk was dead simple. If nothing else, you just pogo.
You just jump up and down in time to the music,
or not in time to the music, as I usually did.
Stage diving was a staple of early shows in particular,
which is essentially a trustful you climb up onto the stage,
(11:47):
breaking the rules of the venue and the barrier between
band and audience, and then jump into the crowd, trusting
that strangers will catch you. The previous generation had had
these huge stadium rock bands with their finely tuned sound,
with millionaire rock stars who were further and further from
any working classroots that they might have come from. Some
(12:07):
of them still sang about revolution, but it was hard
to believe them. With punk, anyone can make a band,
anyone can make a fanzine. A fanzine called Strangled put
out a cover that showed how to play three chords,
with the caption here's three chords, Now form a band.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
That's great.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
That's so good.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I always remember the the Beatles talking about walking across
town to find somebody who knew another knew how to
play another chord.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
I love like even more than punk music. I love punk,
the punk ethos, and I love the idea that like
you can go to a show and listen to your
friends who suck and have an amazing time, and you
can go to a show and listen to your friends
who are amazing and have an amazing time. And your
friends who are amazing might break out of that local
(13:04):
scene and play nationally, or they might break bigger than
that and play internationally or signed to a label or
whatever the hell, right, But that doesn't make them better
than the band that sucks it. Just well, it makes
their music better, but it doesn't make them like as
people better, and it doesn't even necessarily make it. You're
still gonna have an amazing time at like a basement
punk show, you know, I mean, or you're gonna have
a terrible time, depending on punk is not perfect. But like,
(13:26):
I don't know, I love that about punk. I love
that And it's actually funny because it's like people complain
all the time about how everyone has podcasts, and I
sometimes complain all the time about how everyone has podcasts.
I mostly complain about how I have a lot of podcasts.
But I lovets, Oh thank you. But I love that
anyone can start a podcast, I you know, like I
(13:48):
love that it it's it's it's zines. It reminds me
of zines as a culture thing, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Yeah, it's a radio zine.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yeah, And some people are listened to by ten people,
and some people are listening by ten million people and whatever.
You know, that's cool.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
It's a little de democratic.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, And if you get enough listeners, dear listener, on
your podcast, here's three chords. Start a podcast, you might
end up one day pivoting to ads. Thank you, thank you.
That's why I get paid at all. And we're back.
(14:36):
So you have these bands that you know, sex Pistols
is running around saying anarchy in the UK. You have
enough people run around saying anarchy in the UK long enough,
and suddenly you're going to find people who mean it.
Suddenly the anarchists are going to come onto the scene
in a major way. And if you want to be
cynical about it, to spoil next week's content, you guys
(14:58):
sort of this pissing contest who's like the most authentic
versus everyone else who's like a poser or sellout or whatever.
But we're not going to focus on the bad elements
of punk just yet. And no one epitomized living true
to your values more than the band Crass, at least
at first. They are the band that spearheaded this particular
wave of anarcho punk and in order to talk about crass,
(15:21):
we have to talk about the fact that they're all
a bunch of hippies, which is like one of my
favorite things about them, well, most of them. One of
them was a young punk.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
How are we defining hippie in this sense?
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I will tell you, and I believe you're gonna believe me. Well,
they wouldn't have called themselves hipies. They would have called
themselves freaks. I love that they're like from the movement
that would be called by a mainstream person like hippies,
but amongst themselves they identified as freaks. God, all that
kind of stuff gets so complicated. Like I remember, like
(15:51):
trying to explain to someone the difference between a krusty
and a crustpunk.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
You know, yeah, yeah, exactly. I always remember this comic.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
I forget what it was who drew it, but there
was this, uh, somebody's calling this woman a hippie and
she ended up doing something real tough at the end,
and she's like, I told you, I'm not a hippie.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Hippies are nice.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
And what's really funny is that like Crafts are pacifists,
but they're angry about it. I wouldn't even know I
call them nice. So yeah, like I like.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Freak, that's that's uh, that's useful.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
I mean coming from Houston and being out and queer
since I was thirteen, like I fully you know, experienced.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
The other ring.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Yeah, and like how it was so funny, like how
easy it was to be a freak growing up in
Houston in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
No, I I I think it's kind of fun to
have these like labels that are non labels like queer,
you know, like freak. Kind of feels like it could
be that where you're like, I don't know whatever, there's
lots of different things. I'm not pinning it down for
you figured it out yourself.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, it's a very it's a very big banner.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah. And so we're going to start with two of
the folks behind Crass, a man named Penny Rimbo and
a woman named jeev Ousher. Geev Ousher was born in London.
She was the youngest of four children in a working
class family. Her older brother died at age twelve when
I think she was four. Her dad cleaned out chemical
boilers at the Ford Factory and did not live to
(17:28):
be old because that's not a good way to live.
To be old.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
It's a terrifying job.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah. Her mom made sure that they still got to
go on holiday every year, but that meant they took
a car three miles down the road. When she was
sixteen or so, she went off to art school, the
South East Essex Technical College and School of Art. It's
a trade school primarily most of the students are in
(17:53):
the trades like welders and shit. But they have an
art school.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
There too, so like probably commercial art.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yep, exactly, that's the next line. It focused on commercial art,
graphic design, illustration, that kind of thing, and not like
art for art's sake or avant garde and not.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Like high art.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, she was one of only two working class people
in the place, and she put her nose to the
grindstone and worked her ass off while her more middle
class and upper middle class peers were more willing to
just kind of fuck around. One of those people who
was willing to kind of just fuck around because he
was from a more middle class or upper middle class background,
was a man who named himself Penny Rimbo. Penny is
(18:34):
a girl's name in England, and I think that's worth knowing.
And I love when men take on women's names because
I did it for a decade before I came out
as trans. And also there's like a weird, just long
history of musicians doing that. The two of them, they
were more into the artsy shit than the commercial shit,
and they became friends and they fell in love. G
(18:56):
was a beat who dressed like a tomboy, but with
stockings and short skirt. This is the early sixties. Penny, meanwhile,
wore a combat jacket and Chelsea boots, which are those
boots that rural lesbians wear. That's like my identification with
Chelsea boots, you know, like if you're like, oh, those
boots that every queer person I know who lives in
the country whars those. Penny had been born outside of
(19:21):
London in nineteen forty three to a upper middle class family.
His father fought in the war World War II as
an engineer, blowing up and rebuilding bridges across Europe and Africa,
and then wound up working for the World Bank, which
is not a good way to be ethical. Penny has
dedicated his life to being a class trader, though an
awful lot has been written, and I've read an awful
(19:43):
lot about how class affects his politics a lot of people.
The fact that he's middle class is used against the
band Crass constantly, even though many of the members, including
the kind of primary singer, was working class. Whatever. He
rejected wealth from a young age. He wrote once quote,
ever since I was a kid, I thought that whatever
(20:05):
I got, i'd share. What else can you do? I
don't really believe you can change governments, but you can
change your immediate environment. You can live a life of
sharing and giving and taking. His first political campaign was
the campaign for nuclear disarmament, And it seems like he
was always very concerned about authenticity right from the start.
He's like kind of the main it seems like the
(20:25):
one who's just like no, anything that is not true
to our values in the following specific way is you know,
like he was into the Beatles for a while, but
then he was annoyed at them for selling out. And
at one point while he was in school, for anyone
who can't see Jolie's making a like yeah whatever, yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
It's like how how are what does that even mean?
Speaker 3 (20:47):
They had like all those screaming girls, like they couldn't
even they couldn't even play music.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
After a while, like how how could they not sell out?
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah, like the whole discourse around selling out. We're gonna
talk to you about it more when we started talking
about like how Cress kind of developed what they developed into,
which I actually I mean I still like crass, but
like I don't give a shit about the conceptions of
nineteen seventies like UK punks about what counts the selling out.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Yeah, it's just funny.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
I mean the idea that the Beatles were not sold
out from the beginning is also really funny.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
I mean they kind of went.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
The other way. They moved toward they tried to move
toward art.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Yeah, they got artsy, Yeah, totally. At one point while
it was in school, he won a contest to make
pop art for the Beatles. But then he didn't let
the Beatles sign his painting because he didn't want them
scribbling all over his art. And that's classy, sang.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
Yeah, that's that's really having a backbone right there.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah. G was maybe the more directly political of the
pair of them in terms of like being concerned not
just in like ethical values, but like political campaigns. She
was radicalized at school. She got really involved after the
Aberfan disaster in nineteen six sixty six. In October, a
(22:02):
slag heap from a coal mine slid into a Welsh village,
killing one hundred and forty four people, mostly children between
seven and ten years old. Because it crushed some schools.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Oh so sad.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah, and it the whole thing had been preventable. People
knew that it was going to happen. And I've, like
I live in West Virginia, I've like had some hand
in like some of the coal mining protests and stuff
around here, and like the same kind of stuff happens,
Like the stuff from coal mining just gets like stuffed
wherever they can, and they do it as cheaply as possible,
(22:37):
and then the dam's break and then it kills people
because they don't care about poor people. And that's probably
going to be a shocker to the listeners this podcast.
And after they got out of school, g goes off
to the Royal College of Art but was rejected from it,
so she starts working at an art center so that
(22:57):
kids can come and learn art if their schools didn't
offer it. Penny meanwhile as an art teacher too, working
at a continuing education center, and feminism was always on
their minds, I actually would say that, like their commitment
to feminism and pacifism is like more actual part of
their politics than like anarchism specifically.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
I feel like my scene of friends that loved Crass
were politicized.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
By them and in a really beautiful way.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
And I wish that that group of people had taken
the feminism a little bit more to heart.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
That is an ongoing thing for Crass with their fans,
because like, pretty fairly shortly along in the band, there's
like multiple women in the band and they have like
women are singing actively feminist songs, and then some of
the men start writing and singing feminist songs about like
how masculinity is defined and how we need to betray
it and like all this stuff, and they would still
just be like, Yep, our fans will sing along and
(23:57):
don't do anything about it.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
But so Ghost, it's hard. It's hard. Feminism is hard.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, And G wanted to prioritize her independence, so after
college they both started renting rural places about ten minutes
away from they just like lived near each other instead
of moving in together. Right, she was like, well, I
need to be my own person.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yeah, And after a couple of years, and this makes
sense to me, you know. After a couple of years,
g moved in with Penny in the place that is
now legendary, a place called dial House. And when I
say legendary, I mean to a very small subsection of people,
but it used to be a large subsection of people.
An hour outside of London, there's a town called Epping.
Outside of Epping, there's a village called north Weald. Outside
north Wild there is a cottage called dial House. UK
(24:44):
addresses are funny because a lot of the houses of names.
I used to laugh every time i'd send a package
to England when I did distro, because I'd be addressing
it to like Icicle manor third Rock past the Lane
in Merlinshire or whatever. Fully, and I told this to
my UK friend and she pointed out that every American
(25:05):
address is one nine, three, two, one four, five six
seventy fourth Street B. She got her ass. Dial House
was first built in the fourteen hundreds, speaking of just
like I mean, just I don't know whatever. It was
built in the fourteen hundreds and slowly expanded over the centuries,
but it had been derelict for a long time. When
(25:26):
Penny moved in. When I first heard about dial house,
I just literally assumed that he was like a trust
fund kid and his parents had bought him a house
when he got out of school. You know, Yeah, this
is not what happened. He actually worked and for many,
many years, I think for decades they rented the place.
It had been derelict for years, and when Penny moved in,
it had just been used by like local kids for parties.
(25:46):
Before then, the place was at the end of a
dirt road, and instead of pain rent for the first
several months or years or something, he fixed the place up.
At first, it wasn't anything particularly radical, just a strange
little place that he lived alongside eventually two of his
coworkers from where he taught at that school. But in
nineteen seventy he quit that job and he wanted to
(26:09):
do something more radical with the place. He wanted to
build an open house. Later, he explained his dream like
this quote. I love the idea of somewhere where people
could stop to tell their story, with a comfortable bed
for the night, and go on their journey. My original
dream was that if I created one of those, then
everyone who visited would go off and do something similar.
(26:31):
Dial house gets called commune, or it gets called an
arts community. He gets called a lot of things. It's
an interesting model. Multiple things I've read said, like the
dishes are usually clean there. I think people had to
do their own dishes. The food was communal more or less.
Anyone who wanted to come over could go into any
room they wanted that wasn't a private bedroom. If you
wanted food, you'd cook it, probably for everybody. So it's
(26:55):
basically somewhere between a collective house, a commune, and a
crash pad. And it's like not trash like a crash pad.
It's not like everything for everyone totally all the time.
No bedrooms like people assume communes are just seems nice.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
I wonder about the tradition of that kind of stuff
in Europe and the UK, like like the like the
idea of a pub is super interesting, and that a
pub is a public house.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Yeah, you know, and I and I love learning about
like and this is why I was reading Calvin and
the Witch or this is what I was looking for
in Calvin and the Witch. Is a history of the
heretical movements, and a lot of them had these communal
situations too.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Yeah, and like these big like the begines, Okay.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Like little little rumors that I've heard about them, these
like collectivist traditions.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, so I wonder. I wonder where that came from.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
For them, I wonder too, And I I think it's
like a I think it's developed from hippie culture, but
I'm not one hundred percent certain, but it is a
kind of interesting spin on it, and I like the yeah,
the comparison, like the public house kind of thing. His
two roommates were like, well, I don't want to do that.
I want to be able to write my name on
(28:18):
my food. And so they moved out, and other folks
moved in, supposedly without no one was like particularly upset
by this one resident. His name is Dave King. Later
he drew the crass logo, which if people haven't seen,
it's worth seeing. Is not a visual medium. But honestly,
I think the reason that Grass was successful is this logo. Like,
I mean, they're a good band. Well, no, they're an
(28:40):
interesting band, but they like they were branded really well,
and the crass logo is a very successful and dramatic
piece of symbolism. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. Dave
King said about the place, quote, what was very interesting
to me was the atmosphere of timelessness that seemed to
exist around the house. Seemed like the days could last forever,
(29:02):
and being young, you maybe also stay up all night.
There was a certain benign drift that would happen that
I think is the potential source of mystical experiences. Essentially,
he was saying that, like, even without drugs, there was
a kind of altered reality experience of like leaving the city.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
That's yeah, that's beautiful.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
That reminds me of some of my friends' houses and
some of my experiences of collective houses like that.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
It does have this feeling of being out of time. Yeah, yeah.
Defining the sense of out of time is, uh, how
do you do that too? Does it remind you of
fairy tale? Like? What does what does that mean?
Speaker 2 (29:42):
It makes me think literally of like the concept of
the land of fairy where time passes differently, years and
years go by when you just spend one night in
Faerry or the other way around. You know, like the
idea that like you go to this other place and
time just works differently. And I've experienced that basically in
places kind of like this myself too in it. I
(30:04):
love it.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
That's beautiful. I want to. I want to. I want
the campfire ghost story version of that.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Yeah. And in Dial House, one room became a music room,
and soon enough people started making weird avant garde shit.
The Dial House folks were part of this movement called Fluxus,
which I am not an expert on. This is not
an episode on Fluxus, but this is basically the avant
garde movement. It is heavily inspired by our man, the
(30:31):
gay anarchist John Cage. It's into making events rather than
finished pieces. It's generally anti commercial. Sometimes it's like people
kind of call it neo data. Yoko Ono is probably
the most famous practitioner of this stuff today. And I
was going to give a weird tangent about the time
I ask you a question, but I'm not gonna do it.
(30:52):
Ah that okay, wait, no, I should probably do Okay,
So here's my weird tangent. So, when you were like
a teenager, you went and saw the the John Cage exhibit,
you know?
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Yeah, when I was sixteen, I saw Yoko on a
exhibit and I was not impressed. I was like, because
it didn't to me, it didn't have much Like I
was really into craft at the time, right, I was like,
because I didn't know what I wanted to say as
an artist, but I like really was like interested in
like people like learning the craft really well.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
And yeah, like where's the chain mail?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Oh, I mean like I mean like the like although
that would have interested me definitely. I was definitely making
chain oil at that point, but like, I mean the
like technical expertise and shit, you know, yes. And on
the wall there was like forty pictures of this blurry
it's the same blurry photo of an eye, and then
under each one it said like I remember this, and
(31:46):
it was like different memories related to eyes, and the
very first one said I remember when I was born
and looking up into the doctor's eyes. And I thought
to myself, yoko on as a liar, yoko and as
a fraud. Fuck this right, so rude?
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Teenagers are so rude.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
I was like, there's no way this lady remembers being born.
To hell with this, all of this is bullshit. That
was what I walked away with. The person I went
with was not impressed about my take on this. And
then I was in arts school a couple of years
later and Yoko Ono came and gave a talk, and
I like waited in line to ask a question. I
was like a young anarchist, and so everyone in the
crowd is like, ah, fuck, this bitch is gonna ask
some like fucking like shit about the World Trade Organization
(32:26):
or something, you know, And I get up and I
think I got her. I'm like, Yoko Ono, do you
remember being born? Because in my mind, if she says yes,
then she's lying, and if she says no, then she's lying, right, yeah,
And Yoko Ono says, oh, that's such an interesting question.
(32:48):
My first memories are reoccurring dreams of being born and
looking into the doctor's eyes. And I was like, oh, fuck,
yok Ona's legit. I'm an asshole.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
You are an asshole. That's real, sweet before you go.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
But I didn't. I didn't be like do you remember
being born?
Speaker 1 (33:08):
You know?
Speaker 2 (33:08):
I was just just like, hey, what what's up?
Speaker 1 (33:10):
You know?
Speaker 2 (33:11):
And so yeah, that was how I got convinced that
the art is real. Everything's fine, and so fluxus is
the super arty stuff that drives the right wing mad.
And also it didn't impress sixteen year old me. But
now I think is really cool, and honestly, like some
(33:33):
of the fluxus type stuff, it doesn't really impress me personally,
or it's not it's not what I go for personally,
but I I respect the shit out of it, and
I love how much it triggers chuds, you know, and
some of it creates incredible, amazing things. So I'm not
whatever anyway, I swear I'm not a total philistine, just
(33:54):
a slightly one. Now dial House the run a weird
art people in their weird hippie house and four of
them start an arty noise band called the Stanford Rivers
Quartet with percussion, piano, keyboards, and flute and trombone, and
they would do artsy shit that's really cool, honestly, like
develop new styles of musical notation that were like visual art,
(34:15):
and so if you paint with red lines and that
it's up to the reader the musician to decide what
the red means in terms of how they should inflect
the notes as they play them and stuff like that.
Rad Yeah, no, I genuinely think it's kind of cool.
And then they had an avant garde band called Exit
after that, and this one lasted longer and it was
(34:35):
a free jazz avant garde band and they named themselves
after quote the direction they expected the audience to head
in droves.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
That is one marker of the success of a band
for sure. My friend Stephan Jikusco, he that was one
of his markers and he's he's the main brains behind
the Doughnut band that I referenced previous episode. Yeah, he
(35:05):
yeah stuff And to Cusco, what a genius. I love
that man. Yeah, and he's got his stuff on band
camp that I would love to direct people to. The
like noisy art stuff I was involved in to some
degree as a child.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
And I remember like when I like when I started
watching like art films and stuff. For a while, I
was like, I don't really get it, like not even
just like like experimental and abstract film. And then I realized,
I was like, oh, the way I zone out to
this stuff is different, and it kind of creates an
altered like an altered reality experience. And then I was like, oh,
that's the point. It's not just a narrative or whatever.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, that is the point. And I personally hate dissociating,
so I have to. I have to. I want more
exciting experimental music. I can't. I can't deal.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
With the like long, long, long, long, empty sort of
like extremely slow shot kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
But one of my favorite ways that I've heard a
lovely experimental musician describe the point of his work is
that he considers himself a collaborator with nature. Yeah, and
that's how he thinks about generating sound.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
That makes sense. When they created Exit, there's a few
core members and anyone could come and go from the band,
so I like they're collaborating into the space they're in.
The audience when they play can come up on stage
and join them. Often they start with like eight musicians
and end up with eighteen musicians. And they played a
(36:49):
lot of shows, especially like festival and weird art places
for weird art crowds, and at shows they would hand
out presents, art prints, packets of seeds as long as
the audience gets something. They never charge admission, I believe once.
And they always started an hour early before the set
time on the which is this is where they this
is how they punks learn from this to punk, we
(37:11):
should need to put the punctual back in punk or something.
They would start an hour early so that by the
time the audience came in. They came into quote a
musical environment which had not been conditioned by their presence,
so like the things already happening.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Ooh, that's so beautiful that I know.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
And then they would play until they felt like stopping
or the venue turned off the power. In nineteen seventy two,
they threw an avant garde festival called Ices International Carnival
of Experimental Sound, which was about two weeks long. Penny
said about it, quote the great end not so great
avant gardis worldwide came to it and performed mostly for nothing. Financially.
(37:56):
It was a disaster, but it was a fantastic festival,
really lovely. John Cage played at it, and one of
the people who helped put it on. This is a
complete side note. I just can't not put this in.
A guy named Harvey Matso was a former FBI informant
who testified before the House of un American Activities like
(38:18):
he was like a communist who had turned on all
of his friends until they found out he was actually
an FBI informant the whole time, until he turned on
the FBI, and he he turned trader and he helped
bring down McCarthy and spent three years in prison, and
then he moved to the UK because both in the US,
both the like left wing people and the right wing
(38:39):
people hated him and he just needed to get out.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah, but we need to make room for people to
come back. I don't know. It's hard to trust. It's
hard to trust a turncoats.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
But yeah, I know, I know you're like, I would
hold this man at arm's length, thank him for what
he did, be mad at him for other stuff he did.
It's complicated, but then he helped organize this thing, so
I love it. But Exit didn't last too much longer.
And why it disbanded. Okay, so it disbanded in nineteen
(39:08):
seventy two also, and it disbanded for kind of a
cool reason. Penny realized that he was being seen as
a guru. A lot of his students were joining the band,
and he would often like take his students out to
the woods to like make art by just building little
houses for the fairies out of sticks or whatever, you know,
And he was like, I want to keep teaching, I
want to keep making music, but I'm not trying to
(39:30):
be a fucking cult leader. Like I'm not trying to
be weird about it.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Yeah, so many cool bands from that time ended up
getting really culty, Like the Amazing String Band got super.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Cool, Okay, I believe it, Like yeah, they went scientologist.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Oh fuck, And so I just like really appreciate that.
He was like, no, I'm too anti Thiritearian for this,
Like I'm not. That's not what I'm doing here, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
It's dumb. Yeah, that was the That was the real
season of CULTI bullshit. Yeah, I mean not that we're fully.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Out of that, but uh, everything old is new again.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
I was those collective trance people were hard into.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Yeah, yeah, I you know, you see how like stepping
outside of mainstream society is very appealing for very good reasons,
and that can absolutely get culty. You know, when you
asked earlier if I was certain air hippies, I'm going
to describe to you this next chunk of their life.
Dial House kept going and a young man named Wally
Hope started hanging around Penny Rimbau and a few other
(40:30):
people swore that he could do magic. Like one summer
day he said, hey, guys, check this out, and suddenly
it started snowing and there's like multiple people saying that
this happened, and other people are like, no, that didn't happen.
Not who were there that day that I'm aware of.
People in Crass have different opinions about this guy. He
was a trust fund dropout and he had visions about
(40:52):
an egalitarian society of sun worshippers who would live at Stonehenge,
and it was going to start on Summer Solstice nineteen
seventy four. They were going to go and squat Stonehenge
by having a music festival. Is how I know they're hippies?
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Oh real, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
The poster read free Stonehenge off rocks off every Sunday forever.
And then because they're like chill, they wrote all the
people living near Stonehenge to give them a heads up
that they were all about to move there and like
become weird squatters on the land and so but here's
the letter that they sent. I'm going to read the
whole thing because I love it. On the road home,
(41:32):
there's random capitalization on the road home. Sunday, Dear sir,
with all well meaning respect, our Lord God and his
son Jesus Christ have ordained a spiritual pilgrimage to Stonehenge
on twentieth June twenty first, et cetera. To fulfill the
two commandments, Love God, love your neighbor. You are and
will be our neighbor. We beg for help, friendship, and trust.
(41:55):
If the gathering is overflowing big, we will give you
any help you need, but you might us respect. We
are to God's law and trying to balance the violence,
corruption ensuing Third World War, oily energy crisis to manual
communal farming, love, peace and freedom, your best mate, Wally,
help for the kids?
Speaker 1 (42:14):
X my goodness, Yeah, how's that going to go over? Till?
These like rural I don't know country people out there.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
So I don't know as much about what the actual
farmers made of this, but I do know what happened.
More broadly, a few hundred people showed up the UK's
first synth duo Zorch was the only band that played
Oh my God, and some folks stuck around for a
while after the festival and squatted. Their goal was to
(42:45):
lasten to a winter solstice, and everyone who was there
changed their name to like Wally something that's not Culty, No,
not at all, and then they basically just like a
journalist was there and was like, look, they all just
like sat around and ate terrible food that they didn't
know how to cook, and they did drugs, and they
talked about lay lines and pyramids, and they were eventually
arrested and kicked out. The journalist was not impressed. Dear listener,
(43:07):
I am not either, but whatever, more power to them. Likewise, Wally,
the original Wally, decided that there should be another one
of these festivals. But he was arrested at a squat
for possession of LSD, and then when he took him
to the prison, he refused to wear the prison uniform
because they said it gave him a rash, so they
threw him into a mental hospital where they told him
(43:29):
that he was schizophrenic and they locked him up for
a while. The second festival actually happened without him. They
actually kept happening until they were shut down violently in
nineteen eighty five. Thousands of people came there and there
were two stages. Joe Strummer, later of the Clash, played
with a band called the one oh one Ers and
(43:51):
Dial House. People honestly didn't really think much of the festival.
They were annoyed at the rich hippies pretending to be
Native Americans and like living in tepees and real and
on from stage called Penny and undercover cop. I think
because he like didn't look enough like a hippie or whatever,
you know, while he was too in custody to attend
the second festival, and he never saw the ones that
(44:13):
came after it either, because he died. It was ruled
as suicide, and it was probably suicide in its way,
but Penny was convinced for years that he'd been murdered,
not just done in by the horrors of nineteen seventies
met mental institutions, but straight up murdered and covered up
by the police. Penny was kind of having a rough
(44:33):
time around then. This would be the Long Dark Night
of the Soul moment in the movie. Gee had just
moved to New York and they broke up and they
actually I think this is really sweet and pretty feminist.
They had a divorce even though they didn't get married. Wow,
and they're like gonna be friends and co collaborators to
this day, Like they're both still alive. If you're listening,
(44:55):
I hope I did this right, and I'm sure I didn't.
There's so much written about you all. There's so much. Anyway,
Penny was drinking heavily and a lot of his like
peaceful hippie outlook was getting replaced by the fear of
repression by the state because he was like, they just
killed my friend, right, and he was investigating his friend's death,
and the cops would tell him like hey, They would
(45:16):
like pop by and be like, hey, you need to stop.
You need to stop investigating this death. And so he
wrote a whole book with all of his evidence called
Homage to Catatonia, which is a sick pun on the
Homage to Catalonia. Absolutely, he later burned it. It was
never published that I can tell. There's multiple other people
who have used this title for other things over the years.
(45:39):
But and then another Wally, like another person from the
Stonehenge encampment, was murdered, probably by like local rednecks. Basically
he was tied to a tree with a joint in
his hand. It was like an anti hippie murder. Probably. Yeah,
these days, Penny is less sure that the original Wally
was murdered directly so much as killed by the heart
(46:00):
of the medical system.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
It's really creepy that the cops kept coming around and
saying stop looking look into this. I mean, that's those
are red flags right there.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
I know absolutely, you know. And when I say he's
less short, I mean he's less short, not he is short,
you know, like just it's a to many people, it's
an open question. But in some ways an arcopunk was
born from the innocence of the hippies being bashed up
(46:29):
against the injustices of the mental health and judicial systems,
and they saw themselves as a response to the failure
of the hippie movement to fundamentally change society. Dialhouse started
realizing society wasn't changing. Things were getting worse. Penny Rimbo,
in his book The Last of the Hippies wrote, Oh,
(46:49):
that's the other reason I can call him a hippie.
He wrote, Society, the state in the system hadn't fucked off.
They'd not only stayed right they were they'd grown stronger. Slowly,
as people woke up to the fact that turning on
was turning off and dropping out was copying out, the
(47:10):
horrific reality of the nuclear world forced its way back
through the escapist blur of those psychedelic dreams. The dream
had been that if you created your own life independent
of the system, the system would leave you to it.
Looking back on it now, it seems pathetically naive, but
for maybe fifteen years it had sustained the lives of
thousands of people. The ultimate failure of the hippie was
(47:33):
exactly the ostrich like approach to life. A hippie utopia
surrounded by a world of hate and war was like
snow before the summer sun.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
I mean I always think about how mindfulness was used
by the Japanese military.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Yeah. I have like conversations a lot with one of
my therapist friends about, like, I love cognitive behavioral therapy
and the ability to brainwash yourself like gotten me it's
it's probably saved my life. But my therapist friend, a
different one than the one you taught me cognit behavioral
therapy was like, but it gets used to get people
(48:10):
to accept things that they shouldn't accept.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Yeah, as a tool.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Yeah. And Penny also wrote quote, I think people like
Jagger and Bowie stole our hopes and turned them into money.
Their castles are built on our money, the movement's money.
Bowie could have done something, but he didn't do anything.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
I'm friends with somebody who played drums with Bowie.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
For years. Oh shit, And he said like that man
was obsessed with money, and I thought, I think to myself, like,
all right, you're lucky.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
You're a drummer. You get paid as a band leader.
This is my defense of Bowie.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
In that moment. I was like, you have to be yes, yeah,
it is hard to pay a band and be on
the road, and it's like one of the most expensive
small businesses you can run is a band. Yeah, but
I appreciate what he's saying about Bowie collectively. Is is
that like in response and you know, in relation to
(49:14):
the collective dreams. It's like this man wove some beautiful
spells that a lot of people responded to. But yeah,
I think he's just an artist.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:26):
No.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
And it's funny because like if you read different people
in Crass talking about Bowie, Penny fucking hates Bowie, right,
but like Steve Ignorant is like, oh no, yeah, I
really like Bowie, like you know, did a lot for
like being able to dress up like a freak. And
you know, it's like and you just have like people
have different thoughts about him, but the thing you're saying
about like yeah, like yeah, as a band leader, you
have to be obsessed with money. Someone needs to make
(49:48):
sure that people get paid. And I think, what's so funny.
We'll probably talk about this more like in future episodes too,
but like, you know, you have this like, oh, we're
all going to become rock stars and become millionaires off
the back of everyone who buys their stuff, and then
you have this reaction and an arcopunk is absolutely reaction,
and they're like, we won't get rich, you know they do,
Like I think that they're like eating some food, right,
(50:10):
but they are like really sticking to their guns about
keeping their products cheap, their shows, like you know they are.
They stay earnest their entire lives to this, right, And
then so you end up with this like in order
to be an activist you have to volunteer for it
kind of attitude for decades and in the past like
ten fifteen years, that's starting to break and people are
(50:31):
starting to as what we were saying earlier, being these
two ideas can be in conversation with each other, Right, Yeah,
you have your initial idea, fuck ya get rich, and
then you have your other idea like, no, you must
live like a monk to have good politics. And then
also in a society with good social services, and then
you have people being like, oh, that critique is really valid,
(50:54):
but I need to get paid in order to do this.
You know.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
Yeah, it's a job. It's a really hard job.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
Yeah yeah, and most people need jobs. But what did
we're actually at the end of this episode what they
do instead of being hippies forever. You already know, they
become crass and they change the world. But how exactly
it happens we're going to talk about next week. But
first we're going to talk about how people can support
(51:23):
you with your job of making music or just listen
to the music, or do whatever else you want people
to do besides starting a cult. You're not allowed to
start a cult.
Speaker 1 (51:31):
No, I don't. I was raised in a cult. That's
why I was a homeless teenager.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Oh okay, cool, I was.
Speaker 1 (51:37):
Yeah, I was brought up in a stupid fundamentalist religious
group and that's why I was on the street. But
my shop is open whenever I'm not on tour, and
that's a Jollihand music dot com or come see me.
Speaker 2 (51:53):
On tour a touring anytime soon.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
I'm mostly playing private shows up the West Coast and
then I have a show March sixth in Bellingham at
the odd Fellows, and I'm playing Chicago at Constellation on
March fifteenth, so y'all come see me. Oh yeah, I'm
going to play. I'm going to play with my friend's
(52:21):
health and Beauty in Chicago. It's going to be great.
Speaker 2 (52:24):
And if people want Julie's merch, it is beautiful. Like
I don't frame every random show or music related thing
that I get, and.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
I'm so honored, thank you. And that illustration is by
Jack Follows, who's a really gorgeous non binary anarchist game
designer who you should follow on Patreon.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Hell yeah, and uh, for my own plugs, I already
plugged that. I have a book. It's a book. It's
called The Immortal Choir holds every voice. And I also
have a substack, and all the important posts are free,
and all of the posts that are more personal, some
of the posts that are more personal or behind a paywall,
and you can follow me there on whatever level of
(53:07):
free or not free you feel like. And also, I
don't know, times are hard, but we can take care
of each other. That's my plug, take care of each other.
We're gonna mostly get through this, most of us, and
that's the way it always is going to be, because
none of us were getting out of this is a
live thing. When you're alive, you're guaranteed to die. That's
(53:28):
what keeps me happy. Why am I rambling? I need
to go eat food, but I will see you all
next week.
Speaker 4 (53:41):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 2 (53:54):
You get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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