cannabisnews.com: 60s Icon is Promoting The Vision Thing





60s Icon is Promoting The Vision Thing
Posted by CN Staff on March 23, 2003 at 19:54:53 PT
By Peter Howell, Movie Critic
Source: Toronto Star 
Austin, Tex.—The man in the flowing tie-dyed shirt, red clown nose and black FBI ball cap spies a microphone sitting on the table in front of him. He leans his bulky frame forward to make an important announcement. "I did not, ladies and gentlemen, put the acid in the Kool-Aid at Watts," he intones, warming to the topic."In fact, I spent the evening on a microphone saying, `The Kool-Aid on the left is for the children. The Kool-Aid on the right is the electric Kool-Aid, get it? Now let's go through this again ....'
"But when people had been dancing for three hours to the Grateful Dead, they'd come off the dance floor and they'd just grab something wet, and it could be 300 micrograms of stuff. So that's how that occurred — and I didn't do it!"The man at the mike, looking right at home with it, is the immortal Wavy Gravy, born Hugh Romney 66 years ago: activist clown and charitable peace maker, Hog Farmer, Merry Prankster, deflator of pomposity, lifter of spirits and perpetual reminder of the freak circus that were the hippie years of the 1960s. He's perhaps best known as the official voice of the Woodstock Festival, all three of them, the emcee who in 1969 told the hungry multitudes at Yasgur's Farm, as documented in the film Woodstock, how he and his Hog Farm commune were going to make a pile of oatmeal go a really long way: "What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000!"What he has in mind on the day of this interview at Austin's popular hippie diner Threadgill's is something much tastier: a chicken-fried steak with all the fixings, including mashed potatoes and gravy (of course).But as he's waiting for his order to arrive, he also wants to address the outstanding matter of the electric Kool-Aid incident, which gave its name to the 1968 book by Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The book in turn inspired the new eco-tour docu-comedy Go Further, by Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann, which opened Austin's South by Southwest Film Festival earlier this month and which, not coincidentally, features the distinctive voice of Wavy Gravy as a groovy weather announcer."I maintain that a coincidence is a miracle that God doesn't take credit for," Gravy interrupts.So all this stuff actually does connect, you see, and Gravy is serious about the electric Kool-Aid, even though the incident happened in 1966.As with the late Frank Zappa, another '60s icon who was straighter than he seemed, people just seem to assume that Gravy is a major user and promoter of drugs. This wild thought may have something to do with the way he dresses, his relaxed attitudes toward herbal entertainments (he once sold a kilo of dope to the Beatles) or the fact that, as a member of author Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters in the 1960s, he roared around California highways in a psychedelic school bus that was fuelled on peace, love and LSD.He was also a regular traveller with his pals in the Grateful Dead, especially its leader Jerry Garcia, and the Dead weren't exactly known as abstainers."I never advocated giving psychotropic drugs to people without them knowingly and willingly taking it," Gravy says, getting all serious for a moment. "Never! That's where Kesey and I parted company."He realizes that the drug connection could hurt his important charity work for the Seva Foundation, a remarkable Third World relief effort that this year marks its 25th anniversary. Seva, based in Gravy's home state of California (with a Canadian office in Vancouver), brings medical relief to indigenous people in remote areas. For most of the past quarter century, Seva has raised money worldwide to pay for cataract surgery in places in Tibet, Nepal and remote corners of India, where preventable blindness has taken a terrible toll."If you're blind in Nepal, you're rolling down the hill," Gravy says."They refer to blind people as `mouths without hands.' It's devastating to towns and villages. And with just a simple operation that costs no more than 30 bucks and takes maybe 15 minutes, you can extract a cataract and sew in an interocular lens so you don't need glasses. Bandages come off in a week and you can see again."We've raised money to pay for two million eye surgeries in 25 years. It's a miracle."Wavy Gravy was the man, as Toronto rock fans may recall, who managed to get the Dead to play Toronto in 1984 for the first time in many years. They had sworn off coming to Canada, freaked out by our border police ("they got tossed because of Bob Weir's vitamins"), but Gravy persuaded them to come to the Kingswood Music Theatre at Canada's Wonderland for a joint Seva benefit concert with the Band."We made $250,000 and back in those days the operation was probably 10 bucks, so that's a lot of Tibetans and Indians and Nepalis who now aren't bumping into stuff. But the show almost didn't happen. To get them to come — you wouldn't believe it — I had to promise (Dead drummer) Mickey Hart that if they looked up his butt with a flashlight, I'd be in the room to hold his hand."The Dead are back again, the surviving members recently reconvening after an eight-year hiatus following Garcia's death, and it seems the whole '60s peace, love and stop-the-war vibe is back, too — which explains why Gravy is sporting a large button reading, "Back By Popular Demand." His visit to Austin was in aid of numerous things, including attending SXSW events and selling his rent-paying collage art creations of pop icons Elvis, Kesey, Lenny Bruce, George Harrison and others viewable online at: http://www.wildaboutmusic.com But he was also there to promote and join Austin's big peace rally last Saturday against war in Iraq, a powerful mass statement in the home state of George W. Bush."We've got the anti-war movement before the war and we've never pulled that off before,'' Gravy says, smiling. "I'm just hoping that the millions and millions of voices throughout the world will cause somebody to blink politically and maybe we can dodge this one, although everybody says we can't."He's been popping up at various peace rallies for months, just as in the '60s, and he's been collecting his favourite anti-war slogans. His two favourites to date are, "Hemp Is A Herb And Bush Is A Dope" and "The Last Time We Listened To A Bush, We Had To Spend 30 Years In The Desert."Despite all signs to the contrary, he remains a staunch optimist about the world."Let's just say that we're all the same person trying to shake hands with ourselves and war is a complicated way of getting acquainted," he says, smiling. It's good to see at least one person is at peace. Note: Wavy Gravy fundraises for cataract surgery Still denies role in acid Kool-Aid prank at Watts.Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)Author: Peter Howell, Movie CriticPublished: March 22, 2003Copyright: 2003 The Toronto Star Contact: lettertoed thestar.com Website: http://www.thestar.com/ Related Articles & Web Sites:Intrepid Tripshttp://www.intrepidtrips.com Jerry Garcia - Audio Clipshttp://www.jerrygarcia.com/clips.htmlSpirit of Merry Prankster Lives On in Event http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread14297.shtmlNostalgic For The '60s http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread12753.shtmlRegrets, They’ve Had a Few http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread12535.shtml
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Comment #2 posted by Truth on March 24, 2003 at 13:44:46 PT
Wavy Gravy
Wavy's summer camp is an outstanding place to send your kids. Camp Winarainbow has a web site if you're interested. Our kids went there, I highly recommend it. They also have a week of adult camp for us older kids. Wavy rocks!
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Comment #1 posted by JR Bob Dobbs on March 24, 2003 at 04:46:40 PT
Wavy Gravy
What if LSD hadn't had to be hidden and underground? What if Hugh could have said, "Would you like some LSD in your Kool-Aid?" instead of beating around the bush extensively which obviously didn't work. I can't blame Hugh for not wanting to get busted; but without prohibition, these people would not have been dosed accidentally.
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