VLVL2 60s drugs, politics, jazz, Mingus, Monk, Leary

[pynchonoid]

July 19, 2003
Beneath the Underdog
Sitting in with Mingus

By LENNI BRENNER

I don't remember the date in 1963 when I met Charles
Mingus, but historians will have no difficulty
locating the exact spot: I was coming out of Tim
Leary's crapper, he was coming in.

Although everyone refers to him as Charlie, I don't.
He hated the diminutive. At any rate, we met again
around Tim's kitchen table. Tim served coffee, and I
filled my corncob with Mafia-preferred weed. We and a
couple of Tim's young hanger-on's made small talk
until the pipe came round to Mingus. He puffed on it,
passed it on, and calmly looked at his host:

"Tim, you're a very nice person, because the people
who got us together only know very nice people. But
understand that me, Monk and Miles buy our acid by the
jar," the fingers of his left hand making a pint jar.

Point elegantly made, he continued: "When we started
out we used to do heroin on the lower east side, and
we used to say 'Oh man, how hip we are.' But the
roaches were climbing up the walls." His right arm
pointing to those long dead native Manhattanites as
they strolled up their ancestral walls. "Now we're
making over a $100,000 a year, each. Miles lives in a
renovated Russian Orthodox Church." (I doubt the
Bostonians caught his meaning, but that's the ne plus
ultra of architectural sophistication.) "You think
you've found the philosopher's stone in LSD. But, for
all the acid we've done, I had to come to Boston to do
a civil rights concert because down South I'm still a
nigger."

Silence. Ever see a for-real honest-to-God shit-eatin'
grin? Tim had sat down at his own table, a very nice
guy, with one of the world's great musicians as his
very nice guest. Wouldn't you smile? But that silence
got to stretching, and that natural little smile froze
on his face until someone got up in pity and said
something to end that singular scene. Heraclitus said
"expect the unexpected" and, by chance, there I was,
sitting across from one of the worldliest people on
the planet, and one of the stupidest.

Why was I there for that extraordinary coven? On
October 30, 1962, Stanley Mosk, the Attorney-General
of California, spoke on the Berkeley campus of the
University of California. I took him on in the
question period, and shredded the state's drug laws.
That created a sensation on a campus already boiling
with civil rights agitation. I announced that I would
have more to say the next day at the traditional
soapbox spot at Bancroft and Telegraph. When I got
there, comrades in the Young Socialist Alliance
ordered me to call off the speech. They had no
position on drugs. As I was their local oratorical
star, anything I said would be taken as their views.

I made the speech, and got charged with violating
discipline. The executive committee couldn't get the
2/3rds vote needed to expel me, but they got 60% to
suspend my voting rights. I had to carry out YSA
decisions without objection until they lifted the
suspension. Whereupon I resigned in protest.

That and subsequent speeches defending the right to
use marihuana, peyote and other non-addicting drugs,
while calling for medical clinics for heroin-users,
attracted substantial student support. We set up a
Committee for Narcotic Reform but it ultimately faded
out.

In spite of our success in organizing good new people,
none of the then socialist and communist groupings saw
the importance of what all political persuasions now
say is one of the major questions of our age. Not one
gave us any assistance. Given unreasoning sectarianism
on their part, the inexperience of most CNR members,
and my failings, that pioneer effort was foredoomed.
But I then went east to try to build a national
movement. In 1963 Harvard bounced Leary from its
faculty over his work on LSD, and that brought me to
his table. Mingus had spent the night at Tim's.

>From everything I'd read about Tim, I felt like
Mingus. But that didn't prevent me from wanting to
work with him. Building coalitions in defense of
people's rights means trying to work with folks
holding very different, sometimes very wrong ideas.
But his lack of any comeback to Mingus's superb
commentary and its implied questions - not a wrong
answer, no answer - convinced me, yea unto a
certainty, that nothing good could come of any
dealings with this ultimate drug-mystic space captain.

There was really nothing new about Tim. The starting
point of his thinking about drugs, if you can call it
that, was Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, then
the Bible of the drug wackos. But if drugs open any
door, it is not to any true reality behind what is
external to ourselves. They bring to the fore
unconscious instincts inside our psyche, normally held
down by the junk-yard dog of repression. That allows
us to think in new ways and about forbidden things.
But it doesn't follow that the new thoughts are
necessarily correct. That depends on who you are, and
what you are thinking about.

As Mingus said, Leary thought he had the philosopher's
stone in LSD. Mingus, like most people, understood
that if you have real enemies you must beat them, or
they beat you. "Praise the Lord and pass the
ammunition" was a hit song during <W.W.II>, and we all
knew it. In that spirit, Mingus liked LSD, but for him
it was recreational. He knew that all the LSD in the
world couldn't end racism. However Leary wasn't Black.
He didn't have to end anything. All he had to do was
get some LSD, "turn on, tune in, and drop out," and he
left the world's woes behind while he contemplated the
cosmos.

While Sandor Rado's classic Freudian work on
intoxicants, The Psychoanalysis of Pharmacothymia, was
correct in focusing on the narcissistic component of
drug use and abuse, it is important to remember that
intoxicants are 1st off a form of oral gratification.
Oral fixation underlies a vast spectrum of human
expressions, including religion, especially in its
fanatic forms. Indeed Leary had been reading oriental
religions. In 1965 he went to India and became a
Hindu. His LSD-induced narcissism 'confirmed' the
oriental notion of spiritual oneness of the universe
behind the material world and its conflicting
appearances. To update Marx, if religion is the LSD of
the people, LSD became Leary's religion.

When our table-talk broke up, Mingus went into the
front room. I came in a minute later. I had caught
Thelonius Monk, Max Roach and other jazz greats, but
at that time I was more interested in folk music than
jazz. Though I knew of Mingus's reputation as a great
bassist, I had never heard him, even on records. Now
he played beautifully at an upright piano. I listened
for about 45 wonderful minutes. [...]

<http://www.counterpunch.org/brenner07192003.html>


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