Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

Or, almost. The following night, the conservative commentator on a local TV station devoted his entire on-air editorial to berating me and Shazam, accusing us of a shameful, unpatriotic act every bit as seditious as burning an American flag, suggesting that the scruffy lot of us should face criminal charges for insulting and destroying the currency of the realm.

We were not arrested. And several weeks later, I was commissioned to create a happening at an art center in an affluent Seattle suburb. One more example, I guess, of how nothing sells like controversy.

On August 20, 1966, “A Low-Calorie Human Sacrifice to the Goddess Minnie Mouse” was presented at the Kirkland Arts Center, the opening event of the town’s annual summer arts festival. To prepare the prospective audience, and to ensure that I didn’t find myself in a situation that might prove as stressful, as embarrassing, as the subversive dude at Current Editions, I included the following disclaimer on the flyer that was circulated to announce the event: “It is not the purpose of this happening to be comic, tragic, satirical, political, social, provocative, poetic, charming, enlightening, artistic, entertaining or even interesting. This happening has one purpose only: to happen.”

Well, it happened all right. And while I can’t claim it did prove artistic or entertaining, it was evidently provocative. It also — from my perspective, at least — got rather interesting. Especially after the cops came.

I fear I cannot take full credit for the police raid. The event got out of hand, true enough, but only because its sponsors had swallowed whole the misconception that a happening was supposed to be some kind of audience participation affair, and in publicity and at the door had, unbeknownst to me, encouraged spectators to become physically involved in the performance. I’d designed the “Low-Calorie Human Sacrifice” as a considerably more elaborate and nuanced presentation than “Stronger Than Dirt,” had recruited and rehearsed more than a dozen Shazam Society members (along with an erotic dancer from Seattle’s leading go-go club), and carefully orchestrated the whole show so that it would for all of its unruly appearance unfold in a theatrical procession that even Chekhov could have understood, if not wholeheartedly endorsed. Alas…

I’d made a tape loop of Joni James singing “I’m in the Mood for Love,” and as the song played over and over, over and over, my dancer was to periodically deliver, in succession, huge trays of fruit, vegetables, and whole raw fish to the assembled Shazamers, posed formally as if for a group portrait and heavily armed with art supplies. Each participant would select a food item, and eat it or decorate it or both as he or she saw fit. (By the way, each time my dancer emerged from the wings she was to have discarded some of her clothing, and she was hardly overdressed to begin with.)

This business had been under way scarcely ten minutes before spectators, apparently signaled by the well-meaning festival director, began lobbing old wooden printing-press type (thoughtfully supplied by the clueless sponsors) at us. Insulted, one of my performers hurled a turnip in retaliation. Taking this as its cue, most of the audience left its seats and merrily stormed the stage. Alas. It was at that point that my happening became a melee.

No punches were exchanged, no bones broken, but chaos reigned, paint and produce filled the air, and the dry-cleaning bills must have been staggering. At one point I encountered the festival director, the attractive wife of a Seattle surgeon, who was wandering about in the fracas, a dazed and helpless expression on her face. Spattered with green paint, her coif undone, she just kept muttering, “Somebody put a fish down my blouse, somebody put a fish down my blouse.” And all the while, Joni James kept singing “I’m in the Mood for Love.”

I’m unsure how the evening would have ended if the police hadn’t come. They’d been called, as it turned out, not by a concerned citizen reporting a riot at the fine arts center, but by Maxine Cushing Gray, a kind of professional smut-sniffer who wrote a bland, prudish brand of art criticism for an upscale Seattle weekly. Ms. Gray had seen fit to summon law enforcement because my dancer was, in Ms. Gray’s opinion, “indecently dressed.” In point of fact, the dancer was now hardly dressed at all, unless green paint could be considered clothing.

Police presence brought things to a rather abrupt end. The place cleared out with amazing speed. The dancer and I were detained, but once the cops heard my side of the story — and got their eyes full of her — we were released with a warning. And while their warning didn’t specifically state that I should refrain from ever staging another happening — like most of the audience, the cops never really comprehended what a happening was supposed to be — it didn’t need to. I’d already come to that conclusion.

As if I didn’t have enough distractions, I agreed in late 1966 to host a weekly show on KRAB-FM, one of the very first listener-supported radio stations in the nation. Called, with a nod to Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground, the show aired at ten o’clock on Sunday nights, a less than ideal spot for a broadcast; the signal, outside the greater Seattle area, was as weak as baby bird farts; and my voice, as previously stated, was so flat it made that faux “Uncle Sam” sound like Beyoncé. Nevertheless, Notes From the Underground had devoted listeners from the start, primarily because it dealt in a positive, even celebratory manner with the three basic food groups of the era: sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Skating on ice just barely thick enough to keep from plunging the worried station into the punitive waters of the FCC, I delivered audacious bits (often culled from underground newspapers) on such timely topics as civil rights, war resistance, ecology, abortion, police brutality, political corruption, consciousness-expanding chemicals, and alternative lifestyles. Mostly, however, I played recorded music, the new music shunned by commercial stations from coast to coast.

It happened to be one of those rare times in the course of human history when the popular music of the day was also artistically and socially important music, though you’d never know it from listening to AM radio. Wed to a rigid old format that demanded that no song on the air exceed three minutes in length, AM stations stubbornly refused to play album cuts (the majority and best of which had broken free from the three-minute straitjacket), so even as the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, et al dramatically altered the soundscape of the English-speaking world, commercial radio sugared the airwaves with bubblegum singles.

Inner cities were burning, an unnecessary and immoral war was raging, gender stereotypes were in flux, protesters of many stripes challenged the barricades, an unprecedented generation of ecstatic truth seekers flirted with its neurological destiny, and all the while Seattle’s KJR and KOL trotted out a teenybopper sound track of aural fluff. For a couple of hours on Sunday night, Notes From the Underground sought to provide a relevant, sympathetic, irreverent refuge from obnoxious advertising, disc jockey prattle, and Top 40 inanities. In fairness, many AM stations did eventually come around, adopting a playlist of songs from higher up the food chain, although, for example, I was playing The Doors’ “Light My Fire” a good six months before it aired on KJR. And with that, children, I — whose voice was the vocal equivalent of week-old roadkill on a Tennessee truck route in mid-July — with that I made my contribution to radio broadcasting.

I could have made another. One Sunday, as I waited to go on the air, a stranger dropped by KRAB’s rather ramshackle one-story wood-frame studio. Thin as a spaghetto, the guy had long, wild black hair, a pointy black beard, and wore a Mexican poncho across which like a bandolier was strapped a cheap guitar. In other words, he looked not unlike a thousand or more other skinny, hairy, ostensibly musical young men then yo-yoing up and down America’s West Coast. He talked like them, as well, scarcely introducing himself (he said his name was Charlie) before treating me to an earful of peace, love, and total liberation. Even as he mouthed the prevailing hippie philosophy, however, he did it with an articulation that was impressive and an intensity that was nothing short of galvanizing.