Paul Krassner Interview Part 2

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! GRATEFUL DEAD PERFORM IN RARE POLITICAL BENEFIT FOR BLACK PANTHERS! EXTRA! EXTRA!









Paul Krassner Interview, Part 2
By Sunny Sundowner
(As published in the current issue of the Desert Valley Star www.desertvalleystar.com)

When we last left our “Counter-Culture Hero,” we were hitting on a couple of the aspects of the un-official “Anthem of the (Nineteen) Sixties: Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll.” We were left with his take on what might have happened had his Yippie co-founder Abbie Hoffman and Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick been successful in dosing Richard Nixon’s beverage with LSD at a White House Social event for his daughter, Julie.
Paul says that his “religion” is “coincidence” and I truly believe it! Right as the issue of the Desert Valley Star came out with Part 1 of this interview, it was announced in the L.A. Times that, after a year-long battle, 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!" But the plot thickens- when I called Paul to tell him this news, he reported that what was even more amazing was that when I called he was just writing about a previous experience he’d had with John Lennon! “Truth is stranger than fiction!”
Sunny Sundowner: It’s interesting how you previously related that your LSD and cannabis use at concerts such as with the Grateful Dead would cause you to lose your inhibitions about such things as dancing in public. Well, speaking of LSD and the Grateful Dead, I wanted to get your take on this: (according to former Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully’s biography, “Living with the Dead”) back in the sixties, Jerry Garcia and his first wife, Sara were having a “bad trip” on LSD, or “acid bummer” as it was called back then. In spite of their “freak out” (the term’s original meaning), they had the good sense to visit Jerry’s song-writing partner Robert Hunter, who surmised the situation and proceeded to leaf through a book that he pulled down from his shelf: Tim Leary and friends’ version of “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” titled “The Psychedelic Experience.” Jerry and Sara were on the edge of their seats waiting as Hunter was perusing different parts of the book for a while, and then finally closed it, looked at them and said, “It’s OK.” They couldn’t believe that was all there was to it, asking “It’s OK?” That then turned into their “mantra” as they left, going into a positive new experience, murmuring “It’s OK!”
Paul Krassner: Um, well I guess that sums it up- two words!
SS: Kind of like Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing?”
PK: Uh huh, right… and sometimes it just takes that “little nudge” of reassurance, which is what Hunter did. He had to sum up this profound book in a very simple way. I like that- this relationship between “profundity” and “simplicity”… or it could just be because I’m lazy. (Big Laughter)
SS: “The Lazy Man’s Guide to Guru-ship.” Then, oddly enough, what that very book recommends having for those embarking on a “psychedelic journey,” Jerry, decades later, became: a “guide,” musically-speaking, for thousands of young people taking these inner “journeys.” It’s also interesting that the Grateful Dead were one of the only groups that didn’t ever really do political benefit concerts…
PK: Well, they did do a benefit concert for the Black Panther “political prisoners” at the Oakland coliseum in 1971…
SS: Oh, I forgot about that! What a statement of “Counter-Culture Unity” that must have been! Were you there for that?
PK: Yes, I was there with a bunch of Merry Pranksters. It was really exciting. The unity of counter-cultural diversity was strong but unspoken. Everybody was frisked by Black Panthers before we were allowed to enter the concert hall. Later, I asked Ken Kesey what his reaction was. He replied, "I stood very still."
SS: Well, I hope he got stoned so he could dance, too! (Laughter) I guess what I was thinking about was more about the Vietnam War protests. I read that the Dead didn’t play at protests because they felt their music itself was their “anti-war protest.”
PK: Well, because it was “positive.” So it was “political” in that sense, because a Dead concert was really a “Camp Re-union” and a “Healing Ceremony” for many… but most of all, it was a sense of “Community” that was as much the attraction of it, as was the music itself.
SS: And we might go so far as to say that, in addition to being a healing ceremony, it was a “spiritual experience.” One interesting aside, though, came in an interview with Jerry later on, where he was asked what he thought about this one faction of “Deadheads” who considered him to be “God,” and he responded that he would tolerate it until they came for him with the “nails and a cross.” (Laughter) But you had an interesting bit of Jerry Garcia trivia about his “spirituality” involving “The Urantia Book”…
PK: Oh yeah- Garcia read the entire Urantia Book…
SS: And that’s like over 4 inches thick!
PK: Yeah, and it’s in small print. Back in the sixties, there was a legend that if you read the entire Urantia Bible, which is sort-of “science-fiction” in its own way- a mix of science-fiction and spirituality… but if you read the entire book, then ‘three elderly women would come visit you.” But Jerry told me that he never got that visit… and he was very disappointed. (Laughter)
SS: Do you think he considered it a waste of time, then? (Laughter)
PK: No, he had a “twinkle in his eye” about it- and he knew that it was the “journey” of reading it, rather than the “goal” of meeting “three elderly women.”
SS: Exactly! Well, in regards to another “new age” topic, do you have a belief one way or another on re-incarnation?
PK: Well, it’s inconceivable to me- I can’t separate consciousness from the physical brain. It’s just my own limitation. But even if, objectively, it was a true process, I would use it as a metaphor- I’d try to live my life as if it was my “last incarnation.” And, then have reincarnations in my own life. For example, my writing career has been essentially non-fiction and humor.
SS: And you could say that each one of your books or issues of “The Realist” was one of your ‘incarnations” in itself.
PK: Yeah, in a “sub-division scale.” But in a larger division… I’ve got two new books, one of which is “Who’s to Say What’s Obscene? Politics, Comedy and Culture in America Today,” with a forward by Ariana Huffington. And the other is “In Praise of Indecency- Dispatches from the Valley of Porn.” They’re both collections of my columns and articles… but my current obsession now is to work on novels. So, for me to work on fiction: that’s a new “incarnation” for me, because I have to make everything up. I have this friend who is a novelist, Avery Corman, who wrote his first article in the early sixties for “The Realist,” and then went on to write two novels that later became movies: “Oh God!” and “Kramer vs. Kramer.” So I called him and told him how I realized that writing fiction was difficult because you have to make everything up, and he said, “Come on Paul! You’ve been making stuff up all your life!” And I said, “Yeah, but that was journalism!”
Get more Krassner at paulkrassner.com!