The 1st Desert Valley Star "Annual Pot Issue!"

The Latest Desert Valley Star- July 4th: Freedom 4 Cannabis- 1st "Annual Pot Issue" Is Already A Collector's Item on the 1st Day It Arrives On the Streets! Geoffrey Earendil's AH-mazing artwork on the 1st High Desert Cannabis Dispensary (full page) Ad Features the Tibetan Dancing Chittapati flanked by an Indian Shiva Baba Worshipping Lord Shiva w/his Ganja-filled Chillum. Page 3 has Sunny Sun-Downer's AH-mazing & Hilarious Interview with "60's Counter-Culture Living Legend," Yippies Co-Founder/Realist Editor & Author of Countless Books- Paul Krassner!
Conch-Us Times Blog-Bonus- Tim Leary on "Smoking Marijuana"- Copy & paste the following link & go to: "Live And Let Live" from the 1970 album "You Can Be Anyone This Time Around" w/musicians Steven Stills, Buddy Miles, others... The title cut and "What Do You Turn On When You Turn On?" are also HIGHLY Recommended (& remember- Tim was saying this just about 40 years ago! Are PEOPLE finally Listening? Has the 100th Monkey Started Laughing?!)
http://new.music.yahoo.com/timothy-leary/albums/you-can-be-anyone-this-time-around--202184921
Now HERE's a suggestion for you multi-tasker-types: While you're listening to Tim & one of the first "Brotherhood of Eternal Love" public experiences, you can open another window, come back here & read the following interview- for a multi-faceted-experience! (Also- don't miss AH-nother AH-mazing coincidence at the end...-=0=-)
DANCING WITH CANNABIS AND THE DEAD-
The Sixties Culture’s Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll (Not-Necessarily-In-that-Order)
Sunny Sundowner’s Interview with “60’s Radical, Yippies Co-Founder, Counter-Culture Living Legend”
(And Desert Hot Springs Resident) Paul Krassner

SS: I thought we could touch on, among other things, the un-official “Anthem of the Sixties,” or “Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll,” but I wanted to do it in reverse order…
PK: OK.
SS: Do you feel that the rock n’ roll music of the sixties helped lead to a revolution of spiritual consciousness in the West?
PK: Well… At the time that the hippies started turning on with rock n’ roll, what was going on WAS a spiritual revolution. My good friend Lenny Bruce had a line: “The people are leaving the Church and going back to God!” (Laughter)
SS: No wonder he pissed off the government!
PK: Yeah, that was part of it… It’s just that there was no law against blasphemy, so they had to get him for the language that he used… The main word they persecuted him for was the same word that Country Joe & the Fish popularized at the original Woodstock Concert with their infamous “Fish Cheer”: “Give me an F!...” and of course you know the other three letters. So, rock n’ roll music… I’m eclectic in my musical tastes, but if I had to choose only one, rock n’ roll is my favorite. Partly because of the association with the counter-culture, and partly because- I belong to a “Secret Army”… That only dance when they’re alone… And rock music made me want to dance- especially if I was stoned. I went to Egypt in 1978 when the Grateful Dead played at one of the pyramids. I was hanging out with (Grateful Dead Manager) Bill Graham there. I had already taken acid and he gave me a ‘marijuana cookie’
SS: They had them back then, eh? I thought it was just “brownies!” (Laughter)
PK: Whatever you’d want to bake! And… we were both back in the area between back-stage and the stage itself… dancing- And he confessed to me that that moment was the first time he had ever danced in public. I said: me too! But I think that the music provided the missing link between your body and your spirit. It united those aspects. So many of the songs were about “optimism, hope and the mystery itself.” So it was an integral part, not just of spirituality, but also of politics. There were songs about racism, the Vietnam War, about how cruel humans could be. These songs were a response to those things saying we wanted to replace ‘fear’ with ‘joy’ and the music was a soundtrack for that process.
SS: One of my recent articles for the Desert Valley Star focused on the music of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the energetic effect it had on one’s metaphysical energy centers, or “Chakras,” if you will. So I was wondering if you remember an “Experience” or two with him?
PK: Well… Jimi Hendrix was the first “black Yippie.” The “Yippies” back in the sixties were the “Youth International Party”… and he had a Yippie button on his hat, and one thing the Yippies did besides protest the Vietnam War in Chicago in 1968, was to, on Valentine’s Day of the next year, send out hundreds of rolled joints to people in many different professions- teachers, lawyers, anyone we could think of. There was even one particular person they sent one to because his name in the phone book was “Peter Pot.” And each joint was mailed with a leaflet with the truth about marijuana and the unjust laws against it. So, Jimi paid for the pot… that was his contribution to that act of the Yippie’s “Guerilla Theater.”
SS: “Now it can be told…”
PK: In New York, the next year, in ’69 at Woodstock another thing that stands out in my mind, with all the incredibly good music that was there, was Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” because this was a gathering of the tribes from around the country and internationally, that had seen the “American Dream” morph into the “American Nightmare. That version expressed, for me, that anguish and disappointment of what was happening in the country- culturally, politically, spiritually… and that it articulated the consciousness of the audience- which, again, I’m projecting… but it was optimism that we have an alternative value system, and we’re going to LIVE IN IT- It’s not going to be an ‘abstract thing” in this country. So the ‘soul-full-ness’ of the wailing of his guitar… symbolizing that out of this “empire that was beginning to crumble”- I mean, we can see that more and more now over the decades, crumbling under the weight of it’s own corruption, there was another “empire” building, that we called the “counter-culture.”
SS: And you were on the fore-front of that counter-culture. Well, speaking of that concert, I’m reminded of the other famous ‘sunrise set’ by the Jefferson Airplane, with Grace Slick waking everyone up with “Look what’s happening out on the streets- Got to revolution!” the opening lines of the title-cut of their album “Volunteers of Amerika” (the original title before RCA records made them change it to just “Volunteers.”) That leads me to ask you a question regarding something that she talked about in her autobiography, “Somebody to Love?” Because she was friends with Nixon’s daughters before she moved to San Francisco, she was invited to some social function at the White House that Nixon would be participating in. But here’s the really wild part: she took as her date, your sixties Yippie Co-founder, Abbie Hoffman, and their plan was to dose the punch bowl with LSD so that hopefully Nixon would get dosed & see the “error of his ways.” So, I was just wondering what you think might have been the result if they had succeeded in their “mission.”
PK: Well, that’s a hypothetical question…
SS: I know- it’s a big “IF!”
PK: I don’t know… Abby would have gone to jail sooner? (Laughter)
SS: I was just wondering if you might be able to give an impromptu scenario of Nixon on acid- affecting the political situation of this country.
PK: Oh, I thought he WAS on acid! (Laughter)
SS: But it was the “Brown Acid” they warned people at Woodstock NOT to take!
PK: He didn’t listen when they said that! (Laughter) I don’t know… Allen Ginsberg always thought that he could create world peace if he could get- at that point it was Kennedy and Krushev, to both take LSD. I think because it helped serve as a vehicle to connect the sub-conscious and the conscious minds- but people projected their own experience on it and assumed that that would also happen with somebody like Nixon. But I think that acid would strengthen or extend a value system that somebody already had. So Catholics would have a “Catholic Acid Experience,” Jews would have a “Jewish Acid Experience”… whatever the symbols were. The best example is when I was at (“Acid Guru”) Tim Leary’s place in Millbrook (New York). When we were talking, the phone rang and he let me listen in- it was a stockbroker who was calling Leary to thank him for turning him on to acid, because it gave him the courage to “sell short.” By the same token I met a Socialist who, as a result of his acid trip there, gave a talk to the Socialist Scholars Conference about why Socialists should take acid. So whatever ‘vision’ someone had, acid could expand it. So I, being an Atheist… people couldn’t believe it, saying, “you mean you took acid and you didn’t find God!?” and I would say, “No, I found several more gods not to believe in…” (Laughter)
-Award-winning satirist Paul Krassner edited the groundbreaking countercultural magazine, The Realist (1958-2001), but when People magazine called him "Father of the Underground Press," he immediately demanded a paternity test. Visit paulkrassner.com.
Addendum: Paul tells me his religion is "coincidence," & I truly believe it! Right as this issue of the Desert Valley Star came out with this interview, it was announced in the L.A. Times Calendar Section's "Quick Takes" that Yoko Ono finally won possession of 10 hours of video tapes of John Lennon & his family, one part of which shows "Lennon smoking marijuana and joking about putting LSD in Nixon's tea." Here's a link you can copy & paste to see a story about the beginning of this case in the NY Times:
http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSN2242733520080422?feedType=RSS
Could we then have coined a new term, I ask: "L.S.Tea?-=0=-