It is like being a ghost.
There is no individual reality. A rock musician on tour is like the sudden genie-from-a-jug materialization of acetate sounds pressed on a twelve-inch disc. He appears, full-blown, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, for six thousand hyped-up aficionados. He does his turn, and leaves the stage to his afterimage, still burning in the minds and pudendas of his audience. But he is still just a human being. And on tour, that isn’t nearly enough.
So everyone he meets relates to him as a shadow. To his fellow group members, he is just another unit of a whole in which they, themselves, are units. Relating to them is like relating to one’s large colon or big toe. To the roadie or the promoters or the managers, he is a commodity that must be both humored and pampered, yet must be kept in line like an irresponsible child. To the fans he is either something to ogle or something to fuck. They want a piece of him.
Genuinely touching anyone, reaching anyone on a human level, is impossible for a superstar rock musician. They are all treated as totems, and no one really wants to know that god has graveyard mouth in the morning.
So there is loneliness.
So there is boredom.
So there is a heaviness of spirit that leads a man into sublimating his natural tendencies toward gentleness and cleaving to those around him. He uses, and is, in turn, used. For Three Dog Night it takes different forms in each of the members of the group.
Jimmy Greenspoon, the brilliant organist, vanishes behind a veil of existentialist poetry and Delphic utterances. Trivia and compulsive wisecracks save him from having to examine the ugly territory around him.
Michael Allsup, the little guitarist, has gone deep into god. He buys health foods and fresh fruits in markets and contemplates the pure life. It is a strikingly removed existence from that through which he moves.
Joe Schermie spends time with his Fender bass and his music and his brad-studded wristband, grooving on the life of a matinee idol, remembering his youth in the streets, trying to reconcile himself as a whole entity, and caught between laughter and mock violence.
Cory Wells, the second of the three lead singers, literally becomes faceless to the observing mass between performances. He holes up in his suite, he writes to the people who write him, he reaches out from within walls of his own making for a touch of gentleness.
Floyd Sneed, the drummer, vibrates silently to the emanations from the town around him, picking up the feel of prejudice or picking up the feel of wholesomeness, and waits for the nighttime, in which he can flex his muscles and dominate through his music an audience that was single souls to begin with, that is now a unified entity. He trips on power, the power to meld an auditorium into one mass mind.
Chuck Negron exists from moment to moment, living out the time till he can go home to his new bride. He can eat filet or Jack in the Box, because neither is real. It is all dream fantasy, extending back into a childhood past when he sang on the stage of the Apollo in New York, extending on into the future to the time he will no longer be singing. And trapped between the two, like the chambered nautilus—a snail that carries its many-roomed shell on its back—he moves through the days of a tour like a doomed prisoner serving his time.
Danny Hutton, the third of the three lead singers, celebrates his existence by savoring everything around him. The most dreary little Texas town is seen in multifaceted images, never as the reality. Condemned to the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, Hutton would work behind the varying colors of crimson. His is perhaps the perception most removed from truth, yet closest to maintaining sanity.
And all of them use the tv set.
They turn it on when they enter the motel room, and they frequently leave it going as they pack their bags out the door on departure. It is sound, it is movement, it is life-of-a-sort. It is companionship, demanding nothing, saying nothing, really. Unlike the vampire hordes of groupies and fans, the tv gives and expects nothing in return, not even attention.
It is acceptance on the lowest possible level.
It is having life going on, during the death hours of inactivity and banal conversations with stoned strangers. It is a piece of moving art, sitting there. It is no more significant than a lava lamp or a landscape painting in a strange house. But it serves a purpose no one who ever helped develop television could have guessed. It soothes and accompanies and staves off loneliness.
Television, the great enervator of the American people, has come full circle. It is now—in the most precise sense of the McLuhanesque idiom—merely a medium. A moving, talking, nonreacting adjunct to the life going on in the room where it stands. No one watches, no one hears, yet it plays on. Phosphor-dot paladin guarding against the shadows of loneliness.
The only question that must be asked is this:
If the music is so ennobling, if the enrichment of the “love-peace-music” trinity is so messianic, why do the very creators of that holiness need the debased and mindless movement on a tv screen to help them support their lives?
Perhaps the answer, cryptically, lies in the fact that the favorite tv show of Three Dog Night is…Sesame Street.
64: 15 MAY 70
Dear Mom:
How are things in Miami Beach? The weather here has been balmy and pleasant. The news has been dark and destructive. But then, I guess you get the same news in Florida that we get here.
You know, it occurred to me the other day, Mom, that you have always been very groovy about my writing for the Free Press. Since my background—Midwest Ohio, middle class, et cetera—is the same as yours, I know you have got to have some trepidations about this column and where it appears, yet you’ve never said a word. I send you the paper each week and you sometimes mention it, but you never really venture an opinion. Perhaps it’s because we got it understood between us many years ago that I’d live my life my way and you’d live yours your way, and we don’t bug each other about what each of us does, but I sorta know that your finding my words every week, sandwiched in between ads to immortalize the penis and Mao Tse-tung posters for sale, has got to give you pause.
So I thought, this week, I’d just drop you a note to explain why it is
that I write a television column for such an unsettling (from your position) newspaper.
First of all, I suggest you read all of last week’s Freep. Not just my words, but all of it. The Kent State slaughter, the Ohio State debacle, the draft board illegality item, all of it. You won’t find much of that stuff in your Miami Beach newspapers, Mom, and I know sure as hell you won’t find it in the Los Angeles Times. And where you get most of your information, from the 6:00 news, you’ll find only vibrations of what is going down. Uh…going down, Mom, means happening.
Vibrations that are as untrustworthy as the refracted pain just before a coronary. It tells you there is trouble in the system, but not precisely where, nor just how bad.
So let me hip you, Momma, that the trouble is bad. Very bad. Worse than the alienating aspects of the 6:00 news and its Spiro-inspired insistence on impartiality can possibly tell you. I watched the news clips from Kent State and I saw the kids fleeing in horror from the guns of kids no older than themselves. It was a terrible personification of the two sides of today’s American morality, Mom. Kids killing kids. But the ones who pulled the triggers—with what I suspect is the same emotional fracture to be found in the Jack Armstrongs who slaughtered at My Lai—were puppet-mastered by fat old men who lived elsewhere. I saw an interview soon after the murder of those four students, with the brigadier general who had ramrodded the National Guard outfit that went into Kent. He was a liar, Mother. It didn’t take any particular political position to see that the man was a weak, frightened buck passer, petrified that he was going to be brought up on charges of incompetence and dereliction of duty. He lied, Mom; he sat there and his chin quivered and he evaded and he mumbled phrases to offscreen voices. “Snipers on the rooftops,” he mumbled. But the highway patrol reports that have been published since the tragedy—which have not
been exploited on tv for some obscure reason—insist that the cops on the rooftops who had a full view of the scene saw no snipers. “My boys may have acted hastily” was the nearest thing to an admission of wrongdoing the good general mumbled, Ma. Then he went into a long mumble about how they were only boys, were scared, weren’t trained in combat tactics. He did go on, Mom. And no one seems to be horrified that they’re offering as an excuse for the murder of four innocent kids and the wounding of god knows how many others, that untrained, trigger-happy, inept kids were sent in to a college campus (not Cambodia, not Vietnam, not Laos, not West Berlin, a college campus that belongs, at least in large part, to the students who were butchered) with loaded weapons.
Even Spiro did a tv interview with David Frost, in which he excused it all with that rationale.
So if you wonder why I write for the Free Press, Mom, it is because I know that the tv you are watching every night allows these obfuscations to obtain some weight. It allows the clouding of horribly simple incidents, and it permits you and the other members of the Silent Majority to dodge the responsibilities of joining with youth to end this madness before the country kills itself.
You see, Mom, I write the column because the cop-out that is built into the apathetic life for you and all the other good, uncommitted folks out there is one that wears ever thinner by the day. The explanations grow less reasonable, the smiles grow more strained, the faces of Mitchell and Nixon and Spiro and that general tell us they are lying, even as you try to believe them. Because if you can believe them, Mom, it will mean you won’t have to face the fact that time has caught up with us. That America today is being intravenously fed on the blood of its own children. I write the column so your generation will just once simply ask the question: who is the enemy?
Because it seems inconceivable to me, knowing what a loving, reasonable person you are—as must be all those others out there—that you could come up with the answer: the children.
They’re killing our kids, Mom.
They’re slaughtering them at home and abroad. No longer can long hair or liberal lifestyle be offered up as reasons for this kind of charnel-house behavior. No longer can the fat old men in their eyries far away be permitted to send kids to kill kids, with moron alibis as shabby afterthoughts, and tv announcements that support of Nixon’s war policies are running two to one against.
Because you see, Mom, for all the wonder tv offers, it cannot catch the tenor of the times. For all the computer analyses of the way voting will go in an election, television cannot sniff out and predict the winds of change that sweep across our land.
Walter Cronkite and Howard K. Smith won’t tell you this, Mom, but the country is finally getting unified. It’s tragic that it took the deaths of those four kids to do it, but it’s happening.
So I’m writing this column every week to tell you that truth, Mother. To tell you that I received sixty letters last week from all over the country, saying the column helps, that lone people pretending to be scuttlefish are actually in accord with the hopes and dreams of the kids at Kent, that those people need to look somewhere for words of hope that will lift them out of their doomsday depressions.
Because you see, after the Kent State horror, and the four-hundred-some colleges that went on strike, and the complete victory that got that scumbag Fascist egg-sucker Reagan to shut down the schools in California (and even his cue card that said: NOW WEEP, RONNIE didn’t fool any of us), people wandered around simply wanting to hide. Simply wanting to turn off. Simply wanting to throw in the towel. Simply wanting to cry and say fuck them, fuck them all, let them die, every last sonofabitch of them! And that’s so wrong, Mom, so terribly wrong, that I have to write to you and tell you that it’s finally happening…that the country is pulling together.
Not the way Nixon wanted it. Not the way Spiro keeps demanding it—
behind our Leaders. But in the right way, the best way, the way born out of troubles so great and evils so omnipresent that room for political positions no longer exists.
In New York, Mom, people are standing on street corners and arguing, trying to reason it out. In Austin, the demonstrators are putting the girls three-deep in the front ranks, hoping the National Guard won’t willingly shoot down females. In Ohio, four thousand people turned out for the funeral of one of those Kent kids. And they’re massing in Washington today. With Senators and Congressmen beside the longhaired kids. And there will be more marches and more demonstrations, and more action.
Because Nixon went too far this time, Mom. He defied not just the “vocal minority,” but all the people. Drunk with his importance he said to hell with the whims of the people, and he acted like a petty tyrant. And the kids felt the tremors first, and they acted. And already frightened, the Establishment acted, and killed. And those four didn’t die in vain, Mom, because for each one of them that sank beneath a bullet, ten thousand uncommitted swelled the ranks of the people who speak for humanity, not property rights.
Had tv the guts, Mom…did it but acknowledge its obligation…it would tell you that. It would tell you that the time is now for all of you who have sat back and hoped the storm would pass to join us. To come with us into danger and possible death…to bring this country back to a position of sanity.
But tv won’t, so I do. I tell you of the letters and the phone calls, and the frustration of the people, and the need for unity. I tell you we can no longer call each other rotten names, and click our tongues with disapproval. We have to cling together, Mom, or Nixon and his death legions will kill us all, working from the left straight across.
That’s why I write this column, Mom.
So take care of yourself, and a happy Mother’s Day.
Your loving son,
Harlan.
65: 22 MAY 70
In the week following the most divisive horrors in recent American history—Kent State murders, Cambodian quagmiring, New York construction workers amucking, Georgia blacks slaughtered—TV Guide comes forth with the most consummately hateful cover imaginable. As though intent on taunting the tenor of the now vocal majority, that singularly Establishment-oriented handbook proffers the Right-Wing Dart Board: a painting of Spiro Agnew by Norman Rockwell.
It is impossible to talk about the many things on the agenda—the wrap-up of the F-310 business (use Texaco Lead-Free), the 60 Minutes segment on the Bill of Rights, a Susskind spectacular featuring a dozen ex-GIs who opted for sanity over lunacy by exiling themselves to Canada, the truth about how our boys in Vietnam booed Bob Hope when he toured espousing his rally ’round the flag shtick—because the eyes cannot leave the news shows, the mind cannot escape the volcanic temblors threatening to split this country, the emotions cannot wrench free of the overriding misery and sadness of hopeless frustration to which we have been consigned.
How can I dote on some silly situation comedy and its banality when my mail brings me letters like these?
“Dear Mr. Ellison:
“I have never before felt the urge to write my thanks to an author but your book, ‘The Glass Teat,’ deserves thanks not only from me, a thirty-five-year-old establishment cat, but from the whole range of American conditions
…I believe that in the quiet, alone hours, even those people who are embarrassed by the smell of their own bowel movements know that what you say is true. Reality, like douche powder, must be sold…As shitty as it makes my mouth feel, I must say, ‘You’re a good man…’”
Signed, Harold Conrad, Portsmouth, Virginia.
And, from the other side, this one:
(Included with this letter is a news story datelined Kent, Ohio, from The New York Times Service, bearing the headline: Should Have Kept Agitators Out of Kent, Residents Say. Just a few excerpts from the article, which my correspondent has pencil-annotated as “The Common Man: Part III.”
(“It’s a shame it had to take killing to do it, but all those kids were someplace they shouldn’t have been,” said Dick Richards, a florist lunching at the weekly meeting
of the Lions Club…there is little disagreement among the townsfolk of Kent. It’s too bad, they say, but the National Guardsmen were right—the students shouldn’t have been there. There’s a minority that cause trouble, and outside agitators that shouldn’t be let in. And the troublemakers have long hair, use bad language, go barefoot, and even destroy property, and they had to be stopped.
(“I make my living in Kent,” said Don Ruble, who operates laundry machines in dormitories. “But I wouldn’t send another son there.” The teachers fill them full of wrong ideas, he said, and they come home rejecting the adults and their values. His eldest son went to Kent and now teaches retarded children in Cleveland. “I respect him for that,” but the two have grown so apart in thinking that “I don’t even want to see him.”
(“My own gas station man said they should have shot 100 of them,” said Tom Bohlander, who sells Fiat cars and Honda bikes near the campus…. “They’ve got to keep order some way. One thing they ought to do is chase them all out if they don’t get their hair cut and cleaned up,” said Harry Miller, a 58-year-old house painter. At Water and Main Streets, the center of Kent, five men talked about the shooting. “If I would have been shooting, I’d be shooting more than they did,” one said.
(“If I would have had townspeople with guns out and on their roofs to protect their property, you would have had a lot more than four dead kids,” Mr. Richards said at the Lions Club meeting.
(“The people I talk to say it’s a terrible, terrible shame they had to be killed, but how long are we going to put up with these punk kids?” said Dale Miller, who works at a bank.)
“Dear Harlan: