Thomas, Pat
WORK TITLE: Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Thomas, Patrick O
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://roomonetwofour.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.fantagraphics.com/artists/pat-thomas
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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PERSONAL
Born April 6, 1964.
ADDRESS
- Home - Los Angeles, CA.
CAREER
Speaker, musician, drummer, journalist, producer, and author. 4 Men With Beards, Artist and Repertoire (A&R) Director; Water Records, A&R Director; Light in the Attic Records, Seattle, WA, A&R consultant. Wheedle’s Groove, coproducer.
WRITINGS
- Listen, Whitey!: The Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975, Fantagraphics (Seattle, WA), 2012
- (Coauthor, with Les McCann; edited by Alan Abrahams) Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann, Fantagraphics (Seattle, WA), 2015
- (Coauthor, with Jerry Rubin) Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary, Fantagraphics (Seattle, WA), 2017
Also contributor to periodicals, including Ptolemaic Terrascope, Mojo, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Crawdaddy.
SIDELIGHTS
Pat Thomas is most well known for his involvement within the music industry. More specifically, he is a journalist, producer, and artist and repertoire (A&R) director, having worked with numerous artists and record labels throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He has conducted interviews with a number of noteworthy figures, from Paul Williams to Allen Ginsberg, and has also aided in the creation of numerous albums from the likes of Gene McDaniels, Les McCann, and Aretha Franklin. In addition to his work as a producer, Thomas has also released his own music in the past by working with other artists. He is also the author of several books, all of which touch on music history from an artistic perspective.
Listen Whitey!
Listen, Whitey! The Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 is one of Thomas’s books. It deals specifically with music released by black artists throughout the era of the “black power” movement, which launched in the mid-1960s and ended in the mid-1970s. While the black power movement can be associated with civil rights, it is its own thing entirely, taking the basic principles of civil rights as a movement and framing them in a more urgent, proud, and assertive way. Listen, Whitey! views the growth of the black power movement from a musical standpoint, evaluating how the music of the period was influenced by this new political stance as well as how this form of expression affected American society. In evaluating this part of American history, however, Thomas takes a look not only at musicians of the era, but also poets, politicians, and other influential figures that took the time to speak out and make their voices heard during the period.
The is composed of several chapters, each of which addresses one facet of the black power movement and the music from the era. For example, one chapter focuses on black comedians from the period, such as Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx, and how their routines related to the views of the movement. Much of the book is devoted to the less often talked about artists of the period and their impact upon the black power political landscape. For instance, Thomas delves into the creation of Black Forum, a label that branched directly from Motown and published some of the most important speeches from some of the most noteworthy black activists and politicians. Another section of the book zooms in on responses to the movement from white musicians, some of whom used their platform to show their support. Los Angeles Review of Books contributor Rickey Vincent remarked: “The book remains consistent with its vision, and Thomas delivers black power with authority.” He added: “Neither glorifying or demonizing his subjects, Thomas presents the black radicals who populate his book as intelligent, caring human beings in motion towards a confrontation whose necessity was as clear as day to them.”
Did It! From Yippee to Yuppie
Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary is another of Thomas’s books, written in “cooperation” with its titular subject, Jerry Rubin. In creating the book, Thomas used much of Jerry Rubin’s own writing to expand upon the book’s biographical content. Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie covers the life of activist Jerry Rubin, a businessman who devoted himself to the concept of social change. The novel starts from the very beginning of Rubin’s life. Rubin came from humble beginnings, having been born to a family headed by a truck driver father who was able to gain the resources to help other people in his line of work earn better working conditions. Rubin’s father became a source of inspiration for his own work as he grew and began developing his own professional life.
Rubin got his start within the working world as a journalist for the Cincinnati Post. It was during this period of his life that he again came into contact with activist causes, this time in the form of written protests penned by the University of California (UC), Berkeley’s student body. Seeing this outreach inspired Rubin further, leading him to pursue a degree at UC Berkeley himself and joining the social causes there as often as he could. He became heavily involved in the protests surrounding the Vietnam War, and his attempts to send a message to the government eventually escalated to the point that he received a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee. From there, Rubin became involved in several other activist causes, soon finding a partner in Abbie Hoffman, a revolutionary who cofounded the Youth International Party, or Yippees.
As the protesting began to die down, Rubin slowly settled into a somewhat calmer life. He sought work in New York, using his skills to seek out innovative business ideas within the realm of alternative energy and conservation. Rubin began partnering exclusively with companies seeking to create change within the world, and he built a platform to help these companies gain more traction within the business world. Rubin also released his own book and eventually shifted his focus from energy to the human diet, as well as empowering younger people to pursue their ideas and build an empire of their own. The book ends with Rubin’s death during the early 1990s when, during a jaywalking trek through traffic, Rubin was hit by a passing vehicle. One Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book “[a]n eye-opener for those who remember the ’60s” and “for everyone else, a welcome introduction to that tumultuous time as illustrated through one of its most memorable personalities.” On the Shelf Awareness website, Bruce Jacobs said: “Did It! is not just the Jerry Rubin story–it’s an epochal picture of an entire generation.” Pop Matters writer Linda Levitt commented: “Did It! is not only an important historical document, it’s a deeply engaging and entertaining book.” On the Los Angeles Times website, Paul Krassner wrote: “In ‘Did It!,’ the biographer captures Rubin’s story with fairness—affirmative and negative perceptions are both presented through the subjectivity of seventy-five prisms.” Andrew W. Griffin, writing on the Red Dirt Report website, remarked: “Pat Thomas clearly went to great lengths to put together this remarkably readable and interesting book, which showcases a time in recent American history where embracing ‘meatballism’ seemed like a safe bet.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2017, review of Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary.
Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2017, review of Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie, p. 44.
ONLINE
Alter Net, https://www.alternet.org/ (March 14, 2012), Emily Wilson, “Listen, Whitey! Talking With Author Pat Thomas About the Black Panthers,” author interview.
Aquarium Drunkard, https://aquariumdrunkard.com/ (November 30, 2015), review of Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann.
Berkleyside, http://www.berkeleyside.com/ (November 9, 2017), Andrew Gilbert, “Yippie for Berkeley! Jerry Rubin’s life and times according to Pat Thomas,” author interview.
Blurt, http://blurtonline.com/ (July 13, 2017), “Incoming: Oral History Book on Jerry Rubin and The Yippies.”
Fantagraphics Books, http://www.fantagraphics.com/ (May 1, 2018), author profile.
Live Work Oakland, http://liveworkoakland.com/ (November 4, 2013), Shoshone Johnson, “Find the Feeling! An Interview with Pat Thomas, Author and Historian,” author interview.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (October 17, 2012), Rickey Vincent, “Louder Than a Bomb: On the Sounds of Black Power,” review of Listen, Whitey!
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (August 31, 2017), Paul Krassner, “Hippies, radicals, pranksters: Jerry Rubin has a bio and Paul Krassner has our review,” review of Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie.
Pat Thomas Website, http://roomonetwofour.com (May 1, 2018), author profile.
Pop Matters, https://www.popmatters.com/ (August 9, 2017), Linda Levitt, “Performance Artist, Provocateur, Revolutionary: The Wild Life of Jerry Rubin Finally Drawn Together,” review of Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie.
Red Dirt Report, http://www.reddirtreport.com/ (August 23, 2017), Andrew W. Griffin, review of Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie.
SF Gate, https://www.sfgate.com/ (April 12, 2012), Julian Guthrie, “Pat Thomas explores black power movement’s clout,” author interview.
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (September 22, 2017), Bruce Jacobs, review of Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie.
Village Voice Online, https://www.villagevoice.com/ (September 19, 2017), R.C. Baker, “Jerry Rubin’s Weird Road From Yippie to Yuppie,” review of Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie.
Vinyl District, http://www.thevinyldistrict.com/ (May 12, 2017), “TVD Radar: Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary by Pat Thomas in stores 8/30.”
WFMU, http://blog.wfmu.org/ (March 8, 2012), Nate Knaebel, “Seize the Time: Pat Thomas, Black Power, and Listen, Whitey!,” author interview.
- Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary - 2017 Fantagraphics, https://smile.amazon.com/Did-Yippie-Yuppie-American-Revolutionary/dp/1606998927/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521089459&sr=8-1&keywords=Did+It%21+From+Yippie+to+Yuppie
- Pat Thomas - http://roomonetwofour.com/bio.html
HOME BIO WRITING MUSIC ACADEMIA CONTACT
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PRESSARTICLES ABOUT PAT
“Producer, Label Honcho, Performer, Journalist Pat Thomas is San Francisco's musical catalyst.”
by Mark Keresman
San Francisco WeeklyABOUT RUNT & WATER
“Hot, sexy, and dead?”
by Kimberly Chun
San Francisco Bay GuardianARTICLES ABOUT MUSHROOM
“Mushroom What's Yer Cosmic
Pleasure? ”
by Jerry Kranitz
Aural Innovations #29 (October 2004)For nearly a decade, Pat Thomas was the A&R Director of the San Francisco based record companies; Water Records (CDs) and 4 Men With Beards (vinyl Lps). These two reissue labels established themselves via reviews and features in the New York Times, Billboard, Mojo and on NPR: All Things Considered as one of the premier reissue labels - focusing on 1960's-1970's rock, jazz, folk, and soul.
As a producer, Pat was directly involved in revamping the recorded catalogs of 1970's cult-legend Judee Sill, 1960's acid-folk pioneers Tom Rapp & Pearls Before Swine, and 1960's singer/songwriter Ruthann Friedman - including unearthing much previously unissued material. Other artists Pat worked closely with include Terry Reid, Holy Modal Rounders, Patty Waters, Les McCann, Gene McDaniels, Tom Verlaine, John Lydon, John Sinclair (Mc5) and the estate of Allen Ginsberg.
Some of the titles that Pat oversaw reissued (on CD and/or LP) include Public Image Limited “Metal Box”, Television “Marquee Moon”, Dusty Springfield “Dusty in Memphis”, Aretha Franklin “I Never Loved A Man”, the soundtracks to the Michelangelo Antonioni movies; Zabriskie Point and Blow Up, Les McCann and Eddie Harris' “Swiss Movement,” Elaine Brown’s “Seize The Time” and Gene McDaniels “Outlaw.”
Working as a freelance journalist Pat has interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed, John Cale, Paul Williams (founder of Crawdaddy magazine), Marty Balin and Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane amongst others.
As a drummer/producer/musician, Pat has performed and/or recorded with a wide range of diverse artists including Krautrock legends Faust, Kevin Ayers of Soft Machine, Daevid Allen of Gong, Pete Brown (lyricist for Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton on the Cream albums), singer/songwriter Victoria Williams, Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate and others.
During his tenure with Water Records, Pat began working on a research project centered around the Black Panther Party with a focus on the protest recordings that the Black Power movement inspired during the 1960's and 1970's - this led to establishing strong working relationships with two key leaders of the Black Panther Party David Hilliard (Chief of Staff) and Party chairman Elaine Brown (including releasing her landmark 1969 album "Seize The Time" on CD). As well as meetings with Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, and other Panthers. Over a period of 5 years, Pat uncovered dozens of rare/out of print/forgotten Black Power recordings in all areas of jazz, soul, poetry, speeches, interviews, and rock/pop music - eventually amassing what might be considered the largest collection of its kind. This has led to speaking engagements on the subject of Black Power music at San Francisco State University, Merritt and Laney Colleges in Oakland, and the College of Alameda. His research project brought him into the Huey P. Newton archives at Stanford University and received enccouragement from represenatives of Bob Dylan, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, and Graham Nash of Crosby Stills Nash and Young.
Pat is currently A&R consultant for Light in the Attic Records in Seattle. Recent projects for LITA include; Winter's Bone Soundtrack, Michael Chapman and Wheedles Groove II.
His book “Listen Whitey - The Sights and Sounds of Black Power” is due out this fall from
Fantagraphics Books. - Fantagraphics - http://www.fantagraphics.com/artists/pat-thomas
Pat Thomas
Pat Thomas is an A&R director who has reissued vintage recordings from Elaine Brown, the Watts Prophets, as well as many others. He is the co-producer of the Wheedle’s Groove series of releases archiving the soul music of Seattle during the 1960s and ’70s. His essays and interviews have appeared in Mojo, Crawdaddy, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Ptolemaic Terrascope. He has also lectured at UCLA, San Francisco State University, Evergreen State College, and Merritt College. Thomas currently lives in LA.
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Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin...
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Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975
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Thomas, Pat: DID IT! FROM YIPPIE TO YUPPIE
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Thomas, Pat DID IT! FROM YIPPIE TO YUPPIE Fantagraphics Books (Adult Nonfiction) $49.99 8, 1 ISBN: 978-1-60699-892-2
Rich in yippie/hippie goodness, a scrapbooklike biography of the agitator and gadfly who went from the barricades to Wall Street--and ticked everybody off at every point along the way.Mention the word "yippie" to a person of a certain age, and the first person who comes to mind will most likely be Abbie Hoffman. That's not quite fair, writes music and pop-culture journalist Thomas (Listen, Whitey!: The Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975, 2012, etc.): "Abbie was a fan of Jerry before Jerry even knew Abbie existed." Active in leftist politics since the early 1960s, Rubin (1938-1994) was a Zelig of dissent, everywhere at once, influential to everyone he met--including soon-to-be-former Beatle John Lennon and a re-emerging Bob Dylan. Rubin was also one of the Chicago Eight, a guy with an FBI file a foot thick, under suspicion for every sort of mayhem, including a presumed threat to lace the water supply of the Windy City with enough LSD to send every Chicagoan on an intergalactic trip. (Here, Thomas helpfully fact-checks: "it would take five tons of acid to effectively contaminate the water supply," showing just how outlandish the government's investigations could get back in the day.) As the author writes, sardonically, Rubin was so controversial that his prep school didn't invite him back for the 25th anniversary--but enshrined him as one of the class heroes at the 50th, by which time he had come back from living underground and become an investment banker, earning the enmity of many erstwhile comrades. Things did not end well for Rubin, author of the famed take-it-to-the-man countercultural manifesto Do It! Thomas's oversized, overstuffed book, studded with photos and news clippings, charts that unlikely trajectory, noting, sympathetically, that "no matter who Jerry was at any given moment...it was never a put-on." An eye-opener for those who remember the '60s; for everyone else, a welcome introduction to that tumultuous time as illustrated through one of its most memorable personalities.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Thomas, Pat: DID IT! FROM YIPPIE TO YUPPIE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329310/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=1c8c5738. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329310
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Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary
Publishers Weekly.
264.23 (June 5, 2017): p44. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary Pat Thomas. Fantagraphics, $49.99 (264p)
ISBN 978-1-60699-892-2
Thomas (Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975) captures the life and legacy of Jerry Rubin, a 1960s radical turned savvy businessman, in this illustrated biography of an American sellout. The book traces the trajectory of Rubin's life from his birth in 1938 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of a union leader, to his role in the antiwar movement of the '60s as one of the founders of the theatrical militant group Youth International Party (or "Yippies"), through to his financial success as a businessman and early proponent of the self- improvement movement, to his death in 1994 when he was hit by a car while jaywalking in Los Angeles. Creatively presented in an anecdotal scrapbook style combining text, posters, flyers, diaries, calendars, photographs, and assorted ephemera, the book draws from 75 original interviews with Rubin's friends and foes to create an oral-history-style biography. Along the way, Thomas captures electrifying moments from the last half century of American history. Color photos. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary." Publishers Weekly, 5
June 2017, p. 44. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495538361 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=603f7c50. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495538361
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- Aquarium Drunkard
https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2015/11/30/invitation-to-openness-the-jazz-soul-photography-of-les-mccann/
Word count: 590Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann
dizzygillispe
“We all have these abilities. What I’m saying is, ‘Use them! Get into it deeper! Go for it even more!’” — Les McCann
At the piano, Les McCann is a dominating soul jazz force, but unbeknownst to many, he lived a double life behind the camera. He shot thousands of photos throughout his long career, collecting beautiful and candid shots of those with him at the forefront of black culture. McCann’s photography is exhibited in Fantagraphics’ Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann, which collects his photos from 1960-1980, compiled by longtime manager Alan Abrahams and writer/archivist Pat Thomas.
Upon moving to Los Angeles, Thomas paid McCann a visit, having worked with him on reissues of albums from his back catalog. Hanging out in his apartment, admiring the pianist’s watercolor paintings, Thomas happened upon a photo of Jimmy Carter. “It was a professional looking photo, but I just thought, ‘I wonder if Les took that?’” Thomas says. He inquired, and McCann surprised him. “He grabbed a bunch of very dusty 8x10s from near his bed, and there’s Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, and he says, ‘Oh yeah man, I’ve been taking photos for years.’”
flack
McCann’s eye for the moment is astonishing. You see it in Count Basie’s wide smile, in the ecstatic photos of drummer Sonny Payne, in the passionate shots of Stevie Wonder, Nancy Wilson, Mahalia Jackson, Pops Staples Tina Turner, and Lou Rawls, along with many more. “It’s almost easier to list who’s not in the book,” Thomas says. “There’s Coltrane, Miles, Duke, Louis Armstrong, Cannonball…basically every major jazz artist, then you throw in Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, Redd Foxx. It’s something.”
turnerAs it turned out, there were more photos than just those hiding in McCann’s apartment. Abrahams had more McCann pictures in Baton Rouge, where the staff of a local Walgreens ended up playing a pivotal role in the creation of the book. In possession of negatives but no contact sheets, Thomas was faced with a problem. “There’s not a lot of photo labs left,” Tomas says. “Alan had the bright idea to go into Walgreens.” The staff at the photo development lab there couldn’t create contact sheets, but offered to make prints of the photos. “[They said] ‘They’re gonna be 50 cents apiece,” Thomas laughs. “Alan negotiated with the manager to get them for five cents apiece or 10 cents apiece, something reasonable. There was this young kid in there who was like, ‘Oh my god this looks incredible,’ so he basically stayed up all night at Walgreens and printed off a print from every negative.”
Released in conjunction with Omnivore Recordings’ definitive reissue of the long out- of-print album of the same name, Invitation to Openness connects McCann’s spiritual approach to art across mediums. “This is what I’m programmed to do, which is the most important thing in my life: to enjoy what I’m doing,” McCann says in a long-form interview included in the book. “And what I am is, ‘I do what I do.’ It’s not just one thing. I see it the same as the music, same as the paintings. It’s all connected.” words / j Woodbury; all photos by Les McCann
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- The Vinyl District
http://www.thevinyldistrict.com/storefront/2017/05/tvd-radar-did-it-jerry-rubin-an-american-revolutionary-by-pat-thomas-in-stores-830/
Word count: 485TVD Radar: Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary by Pat Thomas in stores 8/30
By TVD HQ | May 12, 2017VIA PRESS RELEASE | Fantagraphics Books and Pat Thomas author of the book Listen, Whitey! The Sights & Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 announced today the release of 1960s-70s counterculture icon Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary on August 30 2017. Fans can pre-order the book here.
Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary is an oral and visual history of the infamous and ubiquitous Rubin – the first ever biography of the co-founder of the Yippies, Anti-Vietnam War radical, Chicago 8 defendant, New Age/Self Help proponent, and social-networking pioneer. Entire chapters chronicle bizarre interactions with Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger are described via interviews and diaries – some found in Rubin’s personal archives and published for the first time – along with photographs and correspondence with Yoko Ono, Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Weather Underground. Also explored is the oft-misunderstood relationship between Rubin and his partner-in-crime Abbie Hoffman.
“America hasn’t lost its way, just its sense of humor and the sound of Jerry Rubin’s laughter, as captured in Pat Thomas’ excellent book Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary,” said Rex Weiner, author of The Woodstock Census and The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. “Thomas’s writing combines a true fan’s enthusiasm and curiosity with an aficionado’s deep knowledge of music, politics, and pop culture, not to mention the kind of intellectual’s wiseass skepticism that would have made Lester Bangs a kindred spirit.”
75 of Rubin’s co-conspirators were interviewed for the book including fellow Chicago 8 Defendants, participants in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement; Paul Krassner, Judy Gumbo, Nancy Kurshan, John & Leni Sinclair (of the White Panthers & MC5), Rennie Davis, Country Joe McDonald and dozens more reveal in their own voice – vibrant stories of the era. Often left out in histories of the radical sixties, twenty women speak out in their own voice!
Pat Thomas is the author of Listen, Whitey! The sights & sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 and the co-curator of Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980 (both published by Fantagraphics). He has appeared on the BBC and NPR as the author of Listen, Whitey! and was a consultant to the PBS documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.
As a music reissue producer, Pat Thomas has compiled a 3-CD Allen Ginsberg box set (featuring Bob Dylan): The Last Word on First Blues. He has also curated CD and LP reissues of Public Image Limited, Watts Prophets, Judee Sill, Dream Syndicate, The Shaggs, Terry Reid, Michael Chapman, Jon Hassell & Brian Eno, Tim Buckley, Pearls Before Swine, and many more.
This entry was posted in The TVD Storefront. Bookmark the permalink. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment. - Blurt
http://blurtonline.com/news/incoming-oral-history-book-jerry-rubin-yippies/
Word count: 465Incoming: Oral History Book on Jerry Rubin and The Yippies
Leave a replyThat would be the OTHER Jerry who waved his freak flag high…
By Uncle Blurt
Most of you are too young to even recognize the names “Jerry Rubin” and “Yippies”—and no doubt more than a few of my peers are too senile now to remember ‘em. But for those of us who staggered through the ‘60s and ‘70s and lived to talk about it, the significance is huge. From the college campus free speech movement of Amerikka and the anti-Vietnam War forces who railed against the Emperor Nixon, all the way to our current era in which Occupy groups resist institutional oppression and are paying witness to the eroding of democracy under the regime of Emperor Trump, there’s both relevance and resonance to be found in the anti-authoritarian efforts of Rubin and his peers.
Now there’s a book to go with the sentiments. Did It!, by veteran journalist and music archivist Pat Thomas, is due from Fantagraphics on September 5. Thomas is the author of Listen, Whitey! The sights & sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 and the co-curator of Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980.
Some details:
Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary, is billed as “the first ever oral and visual history of Jerry Rubin and The Yippies.” It features an impressive supporting cast, too—raise your hand if you know the names Paul Krassner, Chicago 8 Defendants, Black Panthers, John & Yoko, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Phil Ochs, Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Studio 54, Timothy Leary…
“[Rubin was] co-founder of the Yippies, Anti-Vietnam War radical, Chicago 8 defendant, New Age/Self Help proponent, and social-networking pioneer. Entire chapters chronicle bizarre interactions with Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger are described via interviews and diaries – some found in Rubin’s personal archives and published for the first time – along with photographs & correspondence with Yoko Ono, Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Weather Underground. Also explored is the oft-misunderstood relationship between Rubin and his partner-in-crime Abbie Hoffman.
“75 of Rubin’s co-conspirators were interviewed for the book including fellow Chicago 8 Defendants, participants in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement; Paul Krassner, Judy Gumbo, Nancy Kurshan, John & Leni Sinclair (of the White Panthers & MC5), Rennie Davis, Country Joe McDonald and dozens more reveal in their own voice – vibrant stories of the era. Often left out in histories of the radical sixties, twenty women speak out in their own voice!”
This entry was posted in Books, Music News and tagged dig it, fantagraphics, jerry rubin, pat thomas, yippies on July 13, 2017 by Fred Mills.
- Los Angeles Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/louder-than-a-bomb-on-the-sounds-of-black-power/
Word count: 2002Louder Than a Bomb: On The Sounds of Black Power
By Rickey Vincent
OCTOBER 17, 2012
“WHAT HAPPENS TO A DREAM deferred? Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun?” Langston Hughes asked in 1951, “Or does it explode?” An answer came when the Black Power Movement burst upon the American political and cultural landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Movement took on significant dimensions in many realms — politics, public policy, education — but nowhere was its impact more tangible than in the culture, especially music. Movement activists utilized more than speeches, proclamations and marches to motivate their followers: rhythmic, expressive, improvisational music also propelled the struggle. Unlike the gospel-fueled Civil Rights Movement, Black Power had fewer ties to the church than to the street. Its rhetorical models included the self-aggrandizing rhymes of Muhammad Ali and the militant sloganeering of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, while its urgent resilience found a danceable counterpart in the soul music of James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, and hundreds of others.
But that was the tip of the iceberg. The explosion of black militant activity in the late 1960s was the shadow substance that informed every dimension of black life, from the Black Panthers to Soul Train. Yet these varied manifestations have long been too far underground, too disparate to make coherent sense of. Pat Thomas’s new book provides an intervention. Listen, Whitey!: the Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 recovers the works of many musicians and activists whose messages were originally deemed too radical for mainstream consumption. They may still be.
The title of the book, Listen, Whitey!, is a misnomer of sorts. Certainly the artists depicted here wanted all of America to hear their outrage, and to take heed of their threats of an uprising. But they were speaking to their own people as well, as the Last Poets so effectively described in their song “Niggers are Scared of Revolution.” Basically, when it came to Black Power, everyone was listening.
One of the advertisements reprinted in the book reveals just how broad the audience for this material was. A promotional advertisement for the Last Poets’ album This is Madness, printed in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, claimed “If you are white this record will scare the shit out of you.” As if that were not startling enough, the ad continued with the pitch: “If you are black this record will scare the nigger out of you!” We can safely assume that this kind of material is unlikely to appear in Rolling Stone today. This kind of documentation highlights one of Listen, Whitey!’s strengths: its breadth of explorations of Black Power’s influence on everything and everyone from Motown, to jazz poetry and performance, to comedians, to radio DJs, to the rock music counterculture. In short, Listen, Whitey! delivers Black Power as Americana.
The book is meticulously detailed, reflecting Thomas’s skills as a researcher (and record producer), yet conversational in tone, balancing the voice of a rock critic with the heft of a historian. For each chapter, organized along themes ranging from spoken word poetry to political manifestos to radical chic populism, Thomas interweaves narrative history and critical commentary with a bold, contemporary design that presents not just a musical history but a visual one as well. The sharply colored layouts that enliven passages on Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, and even social critic Stanley Crouch (in his radical period) aren’t just here for eye candy; Thomas understands that the Black Power Movement’s spirit of radical change was embodied in visual iconography as well as text and rhythm. At its best, Listen, Whitey! can’t simply be read; it must be witnessed.
No group understood this better than the Black Panther Party, who are a clear inspirational source throughout Thomas’s narrative. The Panthers loomed large in black and white America’s imagination, and the book includes numerous news articles and cultural productions centered on, inspired by, or performed by them such as the Playboy magazine interviews of party leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, re-printed here in all their full frontal rage.
However, while the Panthers, and Black Power in general, are often associated with the aggressive, masculine rhetoric of male militants, Thomas also opens a window to the poetry of Nikki Giovanni, Jayne Cortez, Camille Yarbrough, Maya Angelou, and Ruby Dee, important figures whose influence within the Movement isn’t always recognized. Likewise, he also discusses the contributions of other forgotten or under-regarded radicals as playwright Lorraine Hansberry and humorists such as Redd Foxx and Dick Gregory.
An entire chapter is devoted to another set of personalities connected to the Movement: white rock artists that responded to Black Power, such as John Lennon, who “gives Black Power a chance,” as Thomas puns, with songs such as “Attica State” and “Power to the People.” Thomas also provides an important discussion of “George Jackson,” Bob Dylan’s chilling ode to the Black Panther leader, Jackson, who was slain in 1971 during an attempted escape from San Quentin Prison. (The never-before-reissued acoustic version of Dylan’s song is featured on the book’s companion CD.)
Another important rediscovery is Thomas’s account of Black Forum, a little-remembered subsidiary of Motown Records. The public mythos of Motown was and is that the label was firmly entrenched in the integrationist ideals of Martin Luther King Jr., and had little to do with the black radical movement. Thomas decisively debunks this notion. He reveals that in 1969 Motown Records founder Berry Gordy was convinced by three staffers at his Los Angeles office that the label had an obligation to produce works that reflected the voices of the streets of Black America. Gordy then authorized the creation of the Black Forum imprint, which, between 1970 and 1973 released speeches by Martin Luther King (Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam), Stokely Carmichael (Free Huey), Langston Hughes, and Margaret Danner (Writers of the Revolution); Black Panther leader Elaine Brown’s second album of revolutionary ballads, Until We’re Free; and Guess Who’s Coming Home, heartbreaking audio verité documents of the voices of black soldiers in Vietnam. These records did not sell well, but the experiment reveals that Motown Records, like every other institution in America, was affected by Black Power in dramatic ways.
In contrast to his comprehensive discussion of Black Forum, Thomas only touches on the most popular soul music of the day. While R&B superstars like Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown receive brief acknowledgment, Thomas is more intent on seeking out the less obvious artists who help form a broader, deeper foundation of the radical, raw material of the era. This is understandable: previous cultural historians have explored the political charge of songs like James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud” in depth, and Thomas’s stated aim is to give other, lesser known (but often more radical) artists their due. Still, soul music, arguably the center of black cultural experience for much of the 1960s, shares important connections with Black Power. The soul aesthetic incorporated the spirituality and expressiveness of the black church, the hopeful mythos of the American democratic experiment, and the aggressive force of black nationalism into a sound and style that redefined black Americans and, in the process, America. From Motown to James Brown, much of the ‘identify formation’ of the day for black youth was driven by the physical feel and emotional tone of soul music, which absorbed and gave rhythmic life to the changing attitudes and new demands other figures discussed in Listen, Whitey! expressed in words and deeds.
For the most part, Thomas chooses to explore the most direct ideological expressions of black power in America, and leaves out the funk groove — the revolution in rhythm — to other authors. This doesn’t seem to me to be an oversight on his part. When historians of the period, including Thomas (and myself), have asked many of the black militants of the period what they thought of James Brown, and Sly Stone at the time, their responses have been fairly consistent: black power in pop culture, while enjoyable, was a superficial step toward real social change, a phenomenon that could as easily be co-opted and commodified by Hollywood and other mainstream cultural institutions as it could be turned toward generating a revolutionary consciousness. Soul music can inspire a revolution and yet just as easily inspire a pop wasteland. Thomas sidesteps this conundrum.
He also avoids an engagement with the soundtrack music from black action films of the era, commonly referred to as “blaxploitation” films. While the black action heroes of Shaft and Superfly have later been valorized by rappers like Ice-T and Snoop Dogg, their significance to the Black Power impulse has always been problematic. The black action films of the early 1970s involved detailed recreations of the street life — an important breakthrough in black cultural representations. Yet their narratives rarely included characters involved in the political struggle for change. These films’ ambiguous relationship to the Black Power movement may have disqualified them for inclusion in Listen, Whitey!; in any case, a proper assessment of the most complex and compelling of these films would require a book of its own.
There are other notable omissions. The absence of more than passing reference to the Nation of Islam, arguably more radical in its separatism than the Panthers, is interesting; Louis Farrakahn’s 1960 recording of “The White Man’s Heaven is a Black Man’s Hell,” though it falls outside of the Thomas’ 1965-1975 timeframe, would nonetheless have been a compelling inclusion on the CD. Likewise, Nathaniel “Magnificent” Montague, the Southern California DJ and entrepreneur who coined the phrase “Burn, Baby, Burn!” months before the 1965 Watts uprising, an avid historian and collector of African and African-American literature and cultural artifacts, deserves his own treatment.
Moreover, though Thomas does focus on the black comedy scene, he tends to foreground the racially antagonistic elements of works of Redd Foxx, Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor but leaves out the foul mouthed antics of Rudy Ray Moore’s “Dolemite” (“Dolemite 4 President”) or Clarence Reid’s surreptitious X-rated “Blowfly” character. Their rebellion against Western norms of propriety, was, in its way, just as anti-establishment as Black Power radicals and at times; a comedy routine that upturned white cultural norms provided a catharsis as powerful as any Stokely Carmichael speech. Rather than give us a fully-developed sense of the absurdist or ironic humor that many black entertainers used to convey radical messages (sometimes across racial lines), Thomas plays it straight.
The book remains consistent with its vision, and Thomas delivers black power with authority. As a white author discussing black radical history, Thomas risks being seen as an exploitative outsider profiting off of the dedicated and dangerous work of black revolutionaries. Yet projects like Listen, Whitey! and the recent Swedish film The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 — a compilation of rediscovered news footage of many of the movement’s leaders — are among the most overt expressions of black advocacy to gain public airing in our so-called “post-racial times.” Neither glorifying or demonizing his subjects, Thomas presents the black radicals who populate his book as intelligent, caring human beings in motion towards a confrontation whose necessity was as clear as day to them. “The only historical revisionism I’ve done is to present Black Power with the respect it deserves,” he states in his conclusion, adding, “I challenge those who view the activists and artists of the movement as a blemish on 20th century American history to reconsider them as patriots.” Perhaps now, without a gun barrel pointed to their collective heads, “Whitey” will listen, and the rest of America can reconsider the position of the black radicals of the day.
¤
- Revolt of the Tapes
https://revoltoftheapes.com/2012/08/14/pat-thomas-author-of-listen-whitey-the-sights-and-sounds-of-black-power-1965-1975/
Word count: 3074PAT THOMAS (AUTHOR OF “LISTEN, WHITEY! THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF BLACK POWER 1965-1975”)
14 AugWhen we consider a particular, spectacular, over-stuffed and overdue book by Pat Thomas – entitled, “Listen Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power, 1965-1975“ – we can’t help but shout, “What it is!”
That’s not because we’re insensitive, insecure and unfunny – or at least, it’s not just because we’re insensitive, insecure and unfunny. It’s also because a book like “Listen, Whitey!” needs to be approached with the knowledge of what it is.
“Listen, Whitey!” is not a book about politics, necessarily, though it is of course highly politically infused. “Listen, Whitey” is not solely a book about music, either – though the music is there, along with a love for it that clearly pulses through Thomas’ core.
And “Listen, Whitey!” is also not all-encompassing, not a history lesson, and not a collectors guide. We understand that many may not be able to separate The Black Panthers from the concept of “Black Power,” or may not even be able the tell the difference between Black Power and Black Sabbath. “Listen, Whitey!” doesn’t concern itself too much in this arena, either.
Yet in the introductory chapter of the book, the subject terms to the history of the phrase “Black Power,” including the words and legacy of (now largely forgotten) Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. In his 1967 book, “Black Power: A Form of Godly Power,” Clayton asserts the following:
“Unless man is committed to the belief that all mankind are his brothers, then he labors in vain and hypocritically in the vineyards of equality.”
What “Listen, Whitey!” is, then, is a book-length discovery and celebration of how the concept of Black Power – one of the many, varied and emerging ways of liberation – influenced the culture of the time. It is also, without question, one of our very favorite books of the year.
The discussion of why exactly that is the case is perhaps framed best by our chat below with author Pat Thomas, who was kind enough to respond to our ridiculous questions below. Enjoy.
Is it surprising to you that – after your many dedicated years as a music fan, music performer, writer, label owner, etc. – your first proper book to be published would be one with a political context equal to its musical content?
That’s a very a good question, as I had two dreams in life – to either be a rock star or a student agitator (you know, one of those guys in the 1960’s who had taken over the college president’s office). I didn’t get too far on the rock star thing – although I had a mildly successful career as a “B” or more like “C”-level indie-rock musician and slightly more successful career as an “A”-level reissue producer and “B”-level record company maverick. So, the “Listen, Whitey!” book basically combines both ambitions into one … and when I lecture about “Listen, Whitey!” on college campuses – which I’ve done quite a bit of, from UCLA to USC to San Francisco State to Evergreen College – I feel like that student agitator!
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Do you see yourself as someone who has spent much time thinking about what you ultimately “want to do” (for lack of a better term) within music, or more the type to take action and figure out its fit into your work at a later date?
Wow, you’re kind of blowing me away with these questions, as they are more insightful than most interviews I’ve done. I have spent decades of my life trying to decide “what I really want to do” – yet, I’m not one to sit around, so while I’m “thinking,” I’ve generally been really busy actually doing stuff – recording music, releasing CDs of my music and that of many other people (such as in my A&R position at Light in the Attic Records) – either new or old stuff, occasionally doing the odd bit as a music journalist. I’ve written for “Crawdaddy,” “Mojo,” and The San Francisco Bay Guardian. I’m a Doer and a Thinker, I guess. But I don’t retroactively give it meaning, although some ex-girlfriends might beg to differ.
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In your teenage daydreams, aside from magically turning into Arthur Lee, what did you most hope to accomplish from your perspective as a music fan?
I had a pivotal moment around 1976 when I saw a Paul McCartney “Wings Over America” TV special – and I thought, man, I’d love to just play music and tour. At that point, I made a commitment to learn the drums and join a band – and I did about a year later.
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What was the first awareness you had as an adolescent regarding the mere existence of “black power” being expressed in a musical context?
Pat: As a kid? I don’t think I grasped the concept of “Black Power” then – I was too young – despite (or because of) being born in the early 1960’s. Watching the TV show “Soul Train” (which was not a political act unless you came from a white, middle-class background like I did) just baffled the shit out of me – I didn’t understand that music at age ten. I’ll concede that I didn’t grasp how damn amazing that music was until I was around thirty, and then I knew that black really was beautiful.
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What misconceptions did you hold at the time about what “black power” meant as a mode of musical expression, specifically? What misconceptions, if any, did you hold later in life that were dispelled by the writing and research of “Listen, Whitey”?
As I said, I didn’t really grasp it back in the early 70’s – but I did grasp that Abbie Hoffman and the YIPPIES were incredible funny and wild and that ultimately led me to Bobby Seale and eventually the Black Panther Party … but that process took a long time.
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Speaking of research, the mere scope of “Listen, Whitey” contains an almost terrifyingly broad cross-section of areas of note – from relevant social sciences to music industry distribution techniques – all handled with considerable balance and aplomb. How did the scope of the book evolve from the origin of the idea to the finished product? Given the proper resources and dedication, we find that every chapter of “Listen, Whitey” could ultimately translate into a book-length investigation.
Wow, thanks again. I should hire you as a publicist – you nailed that one, better than I could have.
Well, originally, the project could have been a “box set” of music and spoken word CDs and some DVDs of movies, but too many cooks spoiled the pot as they say, and so I decided to rethink the whole thing and do it as a book – with myself as Captain Trips. I kept the story of the Black Panthers to a minimum, as that story has been told before – but I did want to tell the genesis of the story and tell it with a warm and fuzzy glow – as I love those guys and gals a lot – and wanted to do the Party justice. Originally there was a bit more about the Civil Rights era that led up to the Black Power Movement – but my publisher wisely yanked that, as again that story is elsewhere, but I wouldn’t have minded leaving a couple of thousand words about that. Yes, someone else should expand the Jazz section of my book into a whole separate thing – I’m not the right guy to do that, but I’d love to see, say, journalist Derk Richardson of Oakland and legendary jazz producer Michael Cuscuna tag team that someday.
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What content do you wish you could have had the time or space to elaborate on even more fully?
Again, the jazz section could have been bigger – better? – but I got overwhelmed and I also knew that space was a consideration – as well as my patience.
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What relevant content which was excised completely brings you the most pain?
Damn, I wish my had my old computer on right now, and I’d cut and paste what got taken out that I didn’t want to have taken out – it wasn’t super exciting, but a couple of things about Black political and/or music gatherings of the early 70’s that did NOT result in any recordings, hence the reason that they got yanked – for space reasons. Precursors to “WattStax,” if you will. When I mentioned that to my fellow archivist Rickey Vincent, he was shocked, but he’s published a few books, so he knows the game.
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“Listen, Whitey” uncovers so much source material that has remained un-catalogued for years – why do you think that is?
As my pal Rickey Vincent said, “What took so long?” That, I can’t answer. Part of the reason is that most of what I wrote about is NOT easily available on CD, iTunes, YouTube, etc. – and people are no longer patient to do the research and pre-internet, it was nearly impossible to do a book like this, as I didn’t know what I was looking for, til I found it on a blog or Ebay.
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It really is mind-blowing to think of a label like Motown, with so much to lose fiscally, being willing to release an album like “Guess Who’s Coming Home.”
You got that right! The companion book took another decade or so, for Wallace Terry to find a publisher and a couple more years for a PBS movie to go with it!
Can the above-ground music industry be rightfully accused of losing any nerve it may have once had, or do you think this reflects the changing priorities and “de-politicization” of the music-listening public as a whole? Some combination of the two?
I think a combo of the two (and again, these are some damn good questions, my good man!). Lots of nerve has been lost – in fear of offending someone – as in not being politically correct, but more likely, in fear of being TOO political – as everyone likes their entertainment to be kept “lite and breezy!” these days. So, you are correct.
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Was there a particular record or performance that by description alone sounded like something that must be included in the book … but ultimately resisted your archeological efforts?
There was a record on Ebay that ultimately sold for way more than I could afford that I never saw again – a Black female folk-blues singer named Mable Hillery who had an album called “It’s So Hard To Be A Nigger,” released in 1968.
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Is there one record in the book that took more effort to uncover than any other?
Well, mmmmm … some records were harder to find than others – some of the Black Forum Records on Motown are easier to find than others – but most of the time, I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found it, such as that SNNC album of gospel songs that I stumbled upon in a dusty old record store in Seattle – and then good luck trying to out “more info”!
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How much – if any – resistance did you receive during your research regarding the fact that an overview of the sounds of Black Power was being compiled by (for lack of a better term) a white dude?
As I’ve mentioned in previous interviews – the Black Panthers treated me with respect and love . They were way more “down to earth” than half of the hipster (and white) indie-rock musicians I’ve met in my life!
We’d like to get your thoughts on two of the more stunning songs included on the companion “Listen, Whitey” compilation. The first being “Who Will Survive America?” by Amiri Baraka and the second being “I Hate the White Man” by Roy Harper. Baraka’s track is not only musically distinctive, but attitudinally as well, expressing an almost joyful nihilism, while the Roy Harper song fits snugly within his overall musical output, with unforgettably poetic lyrics “written in response to the many injustices that the peoples/tribes of Europe had inflicted on greater Humanity in the modern age,” in the words of Harper himself. Can you describe the first time you intersected with both of these songs, and why both were chosen to fill the limited space available on the compilation album?
“Who Will Survive America?” is THEE song on the compilation, never on CD before – never reissued anywhere. I love the lyrics and the groove – it must have gotten played a hundred times while working on the book. I don’t always agree with Amiri’s personal politics – but I do respect his ‘tude. “Joyful nihilism” – that’s brilliant! “I Hate the White Man” was not a track that I originally planned to include, but others suggested it and I’m glad I caved in (I didn’t really put up an argument), as I loved the sentiment and the fact it was not only a white guy, but also a British one. The Harper song I’d known for decades, in my pre-political years, as just someone who loves English folk-rock (dating back to the 1980’s). The Amiri song I didn’t discover until I dove into this whole project and when I heard it – I was transfixed. Amiri was the final “hold-out” to agree to be included and I was freaking out that I might not get it. It took some sugar in my mouth and some honey in my heart to get it.
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Can you pinpoint any specific books from your own experiences that radically transformed the way you think about a specific time for music, a specific genre or a specific artist?
From the perspective of the “Listen, Whitey!” project, I was greatly inspired by two autobiographies by two key Black Panthers – Elaine Brown’s “A Taste of Power” and “This Side of Glory” by David Hilliard. Those are both “must reads” for all humans – white or black. In terms of music books that inspired me in some way for this project – perhaps Julian Cope’s “Krautrock Sampler” is the best example.
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When was the last time that you were legitimately blown away or otherwise fully enthused about a music-related book or longform journalism piece?
Another very good question! A Seattle writer named Chris Estey did a piece about Phil Ochs that was like Lester Bangs, more about Chris (growing up in Spokane in the 1970’s) than Phil’s music that was brilliant – more details here.
What else? Let me think for a moment. Ok, one more, a detailed study of Van Morrison’s music – not his life – it digs into what literature inspired Van’s lyrics, what other music inspired his music, some of the origins of the songs in general. It’s called, “Hymns to the Silence: Inside the Words and Music of Morrison,” by Peter Mills. I wrote an essay about the book that can be found here.
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What elements to you look for in books and other writing about music?
One thing I look for is accuracy – it’s amazing how many books have bone-headed mistakes. Books about specific bands or albums that have the wrong year for when the records came out – the 33 & 1/3 series has mistakes like that. Not all of them, but some. I also look for stories that I haven’t heard before – new or freshly uncovered information about records I know well.
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What music have you been listening to lately?
Nearly all vintage music –by the likes of Kevin Coyne, Sandy Denny, The Who, The Kinks and Shirley Collins to name a few.
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If push comes to shove, what’s your favorite Barbara Manning song of all time?
That’s a difficult one – as I love so many of them – but for today, let’s go with … “Pulp” from an a Manning LP called “Truth Walks in Sleepy Shadows.”
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Indian novelist Arundhati Roy – a massive, massive Tangerine Dream fan, no doubt – said the following in her 2003 book, “War Talk”:
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Your thoughts?
Not sure what to say on this one – although I do like it.
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What’s next for Pat Thomas?
Already working on my next book – which will be similar in format to “Listen, Whitey!” – focusing on the 1960’s YIPPIE radical leader Jerry Rubin and his pals, such as Abbie Hoffman.
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“Listen, Whitey!” available from Fantagraphics Books
“Listen, Whitey!” compilation LP is available from Light in the Attic Records
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THE VAGABOND STORIES → - Alter Net
https://www.alternet.org/story/154559/listen%2C_whitey%21_talking_with_author_pat_thomas_about_the_black_panthers
Word count: 1887Listen, Whitey! Talking With Author Pat Thomas About the Black Panthers
The writer of a new book on Black Panther culture speaks on researching his project, Occupy, Huey Newton, and more
By Emily Wilson / AlterNet
March 14, 2012, 1:00 PM GMT10 COMMENTS
After moving to Oakland in 2000, Pat Thomas started reading about the Black Panther Party and hanging out with some of the Panthers still living in Oakland. such as David Hilliard, who had been their Chief of Staff and Elaine Brown, who was the first woman Chairman of the Party. A musician, music journalist and reissue producer, Thomas started to think about the impact of the Black Power movement on popular culture, and uncovered dozens of rare/out of print/forgotten Black Power recordings in jazz, soul, poetry, speeches, interviews, and pop music.
With the material he found, Thomas wrote Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975, a newly released coffee table book about the art and music of the Black Power Movement. It offers reproductions of flyers, album covers by artists such as Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets, and advertisements and photographs from the black power era. The book also chronicles little known history such as the Black Forum label, a part of Motown that released politically charged albums by Langston Hughes, Ossie Davis, Bill Cosby and others, and an 1971 episode of the musical comedy show The Partridge Family, where the family and some members of the Panthers perform a song together in Detroit.
Light In The Attic Records is presenting the companion soundtrack to the book, with 16 tracks, including Stokely Carmichael’s “Free Huey” speech, a piece by comedian Dick Gregory, Elaine Brown’s “Until We’re Free,” Gil Scott Heron’s “Winter in America,” and Bob Dylan’s out of print single “George Jackson.”
Thomas talked with Alternet about writing a good chunk of the book in just two weeks after years of research, how Huey Newton went to China before Richard Nixon, and how the Panthers walking around with rifles will always get headlines over the Panthers feeding kids a free breakfast.
You grew up in upstate New York. Were you always interested in the Black Panthers or did that start when you lived in Oakland?
My interest in the Panthers did not come out or explode or start until I moved to Oakland in 2000. I have always been interested in counterculture and Oakland is the birthplace of the Panthers, so over a period of years, I started reading books and tracking some of them down, and the whole process was very organic, I wasn’t trying to do an academic project or write a book. I just wanted to hang out with them.
How receptive were they?
They were receptive because I was not interviewing them. I never stuck a microphone in anybody’s face. I never conducted formal interviews. I really got to know them as friends- we’d occasionally go out to dinner or have lunch. Obviously they knew I was curious about their history. I’d read books, and ask them about some incident and they’d tell me their version or what really happening or what have you. The best way I can describe it is let’s say, 20 years ago Norman Mailer moved next door to you. You’d say, “Well, I’m going to start bending Norman Mailer’s ear when I see him out watering his flowers.” I just saw an opportunity – I’ve always been enamored with the '60s, so rather than watch a documentary on TV, this way I got to hear it straight from the people who lived it. I was just enjoying it.
Because of your music background, was it the music that people were involved with that interested you initially?
It became a spin-off. Elaine Brown was the only Black Panther that made music and recorded albums. Eventually I got to know her and kind of picked her brain about her music activity. Music became a natural extension. Just like I was interested in the hippie culture, and from that I got into all kinds of psychedelic and classic rock. From the Black Panthers, I got interested in all kind of militant soul and jazz and stuff. With the music research I kind of went off on my own tangent and a lot of that was little scraps of information on someone’s blog or on the back of an album cover. That research became sort of intermittent and often tedious.
Tedious because it was hard to track stuff down?
Tedious in a way that was both exciting and nerve wracking. Part of me was like, “I hope I don’t find another album,” and part of me was like, “I hope I find another album.” The book was turned in a year late, but that provided me with probably another 50 albums, so the book was that much better by being late.
You said you didn’t go into this research planning to write a book. What was point you decided you wanted to write one?
In 2008, I was in college, and I had the summer off, and I had time on my hands. I don’t feel like I wrote the book because I wanted to – I feel like I needed to. I just sat down and in a two-week period, for about 10 hours a day, I just wrote and wrote and wrote. By that point, I had done so much research, that except to refer to a book for a quick fact check or a quick date, it was kind of all in my brain. After two weeks, I had 30,000 to 40,000 words, and I was just exhausted, and I didn’t look at the manuscript for about six months after that because I was kind of drained.
What did you feel like you really wanted people to get from this book about the Black Power movement?
Well, for obvious reasons most of what has been written has been very political or analytical or academic. You know, almost any book about history is going to have the author’s particular bias. If you’re a military historian trying to write a book about World War II, that’s your bias. I was trying to write a book that was pro-Panthers, but not with an agenda as to what I wanted to say other than to sort of humanize these people. To me they were more than just statues frozen in time; they were people I was hanging out with in current day. I just wanted to capture their humanity in some way. Militancy or their strident side was just one part of it. I wanted to focus on how their legacy crossed paths with pop culture. You know, I talk about this wacky "Partridge Family" episode where they meet the Black Panthers. It’s not a dogmatic book. Most stores will file it under music – it could be filed under political culture. I didn’t want it to be filed under black history/sociology. It’s meant to be, for lack of a better word, fun.
You say you wanted to show the Panthers' warm fuzzy side.
At the time it was happening, it doesn’t make for controversial or exciting news for the front page of the New York Times or Time Magazine. In other words, if the Panthers are rolling down the street with rifles, that’s front-page news. If the Panthers are feeding schoolchildren a free breakfast, that’s on page 20. That’s still the way it is. Controversy is what sells papers. I follow the Occupy movement, and what tends to get attention? It’s when protestors burn down a Bank of America building. It’s never going to be protestors have been living peacefully in this camp for three weeks and everybody is loving it.
You make a point in the book about how young the Panthers are.
As a young person and a teenager I’d watch Woodstock and I’d think everybody playing Woodstock must have been about 35. No, everybody playing Woodstock was about 22. As I started doing the Panther research, I realized these were young people. They were in their early 20s, most of them self educated, maybe a couple of years of community college, obviously no Internet, and somehow they created a worldwide movement. Huey Newton went to Red China and met the Chinese government in 1971, a year before Richard Nixon made his famous trip which went around the world like, America finally breaks into Communist China and talks to them after 50 years or whatever it had been. Well, Jesus Christ, the Panthers did it the year before. I mean, that’s amazing. A couple of black kids from Oakland are in fucking China hanging out with the Chinese Premier. People forget this was such an amazing grassroots movement and quite successful for a bunch of young people who were not rich, did not have money, didn’t have masters degrees, they were just doing it.
You bring up things most people don’t know about like The Partridge Family episode and the Motown label, Black Forum. For you what was the most surprising thing you found doing research?
Their youth was one thing that hit me, but also the fact that most of them came through, at least through the '60s and '70s. I mean, a lot of people died along the way, Huey was killed in ’89, I guess it was, but, I remember talking to David Hilliard who was Chief of Staff of the Panthers, and I said to him, “Dude, by all accounts, you should have been dead by like 1970. Somebody would have shot you, a cop, or you did some prison time and somebody would have attacked you in prison. The fact that you’re still here is amazing.” I mean, their resilience – these people are survivors and they kept on going. It wasn’t part of my book to go through everyone who died and is still in prison. Just the fact that a good chunk of them came through the other side and continued to do interesting things.
Was having a soundtrack your idea or your publisher’s?
That was my idea. The thing about the soundtrack with the exception of just a couple of songs – I mean there’s a section on Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, Hendrix, there is a chunk to acknowledge the popular artists, but it does tend to focus on the obscure. People are going to read this book and be like, “Damn, I need to hear some of this shit.” I just wanted a cross sampling. Obviously, there could have been three or four CDs, but I thought here’s one nice compact discs where there’s really a lot of different ideologies on that one disc, including some spoken word and some comedy. A good chunk of what’s on that album I discovered doing my book research.
- WFMU
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2012/03/seize-the-time-pat-thomas-black-power-and-listen-whitey.html
Word count: 1266Seize the Time: Pat Thomas, Black Power, and Listen, Whitey!
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As author Pat Thomas puts it, “Every revolution needs a soundtrack!” And in the late-'60s/early-'70s, the soundtrack and the revolution were often one in the same. In hs new book, Listen, Whitey!: The Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 (Fantagraphics), and companion CD/double-LP of the same name (Light in the Attic), Thomas examines the Black Power movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, the explosion of creativity happening across the musical spectrum at the time, and the now-obscure Black power protest anthems that resulted from the two movements intertwining.A writer, producer, and musician, Thomas has also worked at Water and 4 Men With Beards, where he began his research for the Listen, Whitey! project. Surely the crate-digging chops he honed while at those labels came in handy when tracking down some of the impossibly deep musical relics from the heyday of the would-be black revolution (most notably Black Panther house band The Lumpen).
It’s almost shocking that no one has explored this topic in depth until now, given the longevity of the Black Power aesthetic and our continued obsession with "The '60s." When taking into account the rocky state of our nation (politically, socially, and culturally) and the fledgling Occupy movement creeping into the mainstream, it seems not only timely but essential. (Although one shudders to think what a consensus-driven Occupy soundtrack might sound like.)
I spoke briefly with Thomas over email about, among other things, the origins of his interest in Black Power anthems, Motown’s brief foray onto the scene, and the need for more politically charged music today. I’ve also included some choice fists-in-the-air jams for your pleasure via Youtube.Where does your interest in the musical wing of the Black Power movement come from?
Well, I’ve always been a huge music fan—especially of 1960’s and 1970’s material, mainly rock, then folk, then later jazz and soul. So after exploring everything from English folk to krautrock, there wasn’t much left in my wake, except African-American social-political material
Was there a particular track or album central to the movement that really peaked your interest?
I think it kicked off when I heard Black Panther Party member Elaine Brown’s 1969 singer-songwriter album Seize The Time, then I heard the Watts Prophets—and it all started from there (also I worked on getting both of those artists full length albums reissued on CD several years ago).
I read something many years ago about the Black Panther party of Oakland (the founding chapter) having a house band. Do you know anything about this?
My pal Rickey Vincent turned me onto that band, they were called The Lumpen. He’s written a whole book about them that’s coming out in a couple of years. But yeah, I found the single, and the A side is included on the Listen, Whitey comp CD that I put together.
How did the party itself use music to promote their platform?
As one of the Lumpen said, “Not everybody reads, but everybody listens to music.”
A lot of jazz musicians looked to Black Power for aesthetic and philosophical inspiration. How do you see musicians like, say, Archie Shepp, Phil Cohran, and the Art Ensemble, to name a just a few, fitting in to this story?
Well, they did dig the Panthers, but the jazz musicians generally embraced the more Black Nationalism side of things—which meant they believed in looking toward their African roots, in terms of clothing and sometimes changing their names—adding traditional African names to their given “American” names.
You include some fairly well-know white artists on the album, John and Yoko chief among them. Do you see Black Power in retrospect as more of an all-encompassing people's movement?
Mainly, I wanted to show that Black Power crossed paths with the white counter-culture and rock/pop culture.
I've always been interested in the various offshoots of Motown. Can you talk a bit about the Black Forum subsidiary? To what degree do you think this represented genuine solidarity on the part of Barry Gordy with the Black Power movement and to what degree was it a cash-in? Certainly, one doesn't think of Motown as a politically oriented label.
Barry wasn’t that political, that label was started by other Motown execs that were more militant than he was—he green lighted it, paid for it, but it wasn’t a cash in. None of the Black Forum records sold in large numbers, the other Motown execs did it because they were angry at MLK’s death (and rightfully so) and wanted to speak out with getting these more "out-spoken" recordings out there in the market, except that the main problem was Motown’s chain of indie distributors generally refused to stock the albums, so they didn’t make it into stores.
So how did you go about tracking down such obscure records? Did they turn up in used shops or did you have to go to the source?
What I mean is this, a Motown regional distributor, say located in Chicago, would order 500 Supremes LPs and 500 Temptations singles from the warehouse in Detroit and then perhaps 20 copies of whatever the new Black Forum release was. Several of the Black Forum releases are quite rare and I waited months for them to come up on Ebay and then I had to pay serious dollars for some of them, others were a bit more common.
While there are politically oriented artists out there today (dead prez and Immortal Technique in hip-hop come to mind), you don't really see many expressly political statements being made in music these days. Certainly not in the mainstream, and not much in the underground either. Are protest songs a thing of the past? Is this a good thing or bad thing?
I think it’s a bad thing that there is not more politics in pop music. But look at the change in the media, there was a time when Rolling Stone magazine was a symbol of the counter-culture (pick up an issue from 1970 and see what I mean), a time when pop culture and the counter-culture were almost the same thing. There’s no more counter-culture (except in areas that I don’t know enough about to speak on record) and pop culture, is what, Lady Gaga?
Do you think potent political activism needs an artistic and musical component in order to be successful?
Every revolution needs a soundtrack!
Are there any tracks that you were forced to leave off the set you would have liked to include?
There were some tracks from the Flying Dutchman label—early Gil Scott Heron and some wacky Stanley Crouch spoken word stuff (when he was LEFT wing, rather RIGHT wing, as he is today) that I really wanted, but it got tied up in legal issues and what not.
Posted by Nate Knaebel on March 08, 2012 at 01:36 PM in Art, Books, History, Interviews, Music, Nate Knaebel's Posts, Video Clips | Permalink
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- Amoeba
https://www.amoeba.com/blog/2012/03/people-s-republic-of-northern-california/pat-thomas-signs-listen-whitey-sights-and-sounds-of-black-power-1965-1975-at-the-booksmith-in-sf-4-10.html
Word count: 535Pat Thomas signs "LISTEN, WHITEY! Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965 – 1975" at The Booksmith in SF, 4/10
Posted by The Bay Area Crew, March 15, 2012 04:46pm | Post a Comment
Listen Whitey Sounds of Black Power Pat Thomas Booksmith Amoeba San FranciscoOn April 10, 2012 at 7:30pm, our friends at The Booksmith will host reissue producer/music scholar Pat Thomas for a signing of his new book LISTEN, WHITEY! Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965 – 1975 and the companion album (out now on Light in the Attic Records), which is being called the definitive Black Power aural document!
Over a five year period, Pat Thomas befriended key leaders of the seminal Black Power Movement,Elaine Brown Huey P Newton Black Forum Motown Records dug through Huey Newton’s archives at Stanford University, spent countless hours and thousands of dollars on eBay, and talked to rank and file Black Panther Party members, uncovering dozens of obscure albums, singles, and stray tapes. Along the way, he began to piece together a time period (1967-1974) when revolutionaries like Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, and Stokely Carmichael were seen as pop culture icons and musicians like Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon were seen as revolutionaries.
LISTEN, WHITEY! chronicles the forgotten history of Motown Records; from 1970 to 1973, Motown’sBlack Forum Motown Records Black Power subsidiary label, Black Forum, released politically charged albums by Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, Bill Cosby and Ossie Davis, and many others, and explores the musical connections between Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Graham Nash, the Partridge Family (!?!) and the Black Power movement. Obscure recordings produced by SNCC, Ron Karenga’s US, the Tribe and other African-American sociopolitical organizations of the late 1960s and early ’70s are examined along with the Isley Brothers, Nina Simone, Archie Shepp, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Clifford Thornton, Watts Prophets, The Last Poets, Gene McDaniels, Roland Black Forum Motown RecordsKirk, Horace Silver, Angela Davis, H. Rap Brown, Stanley Crouch, and others that spoke out against oppression. Thomas further focuses on Black Consciousness poetry (from the likes of Jayne Cortez, wife of Ornette Coleman), inspired religious recordings that infused god and Black Nationalism, and obscure regional and privately pressed Black Power 7-inch soul singles from across America. The text is accompanied by over 200 large sized, full-color reproductions of album covers and 45 rpm singles, most of which readers will have never seen before.
The companion soundtrack is a cross-cultural overview that sees Bob Dylan’s out of print 1971 single “George Jackson” reissued for the first time along with several selections from Motown’s long forgotten Black Forum label.
Find out more about the signing with Pat Thomas HERE!
Relevant Tags
Gene Mcdaniels (1), The Last Poets (2), Watts Prophets (2), Clifford Thornton (1), Art Ensemble Of Chicago (2), Archie Shepp (1), Nina Simone (17), Sley Brothers (1), John Lennon (37), Bob Dylan (59), The Last Poets (2), Gil Scott-heron (10), Stokely Carmichael (1), Eldridge Cleaver (1), Bill Cosby (2), Langston Hughes (1), Amiri Baraka (1), Bobby Seale (1), Ossie Davis (1), Black Forum (1), Motown (12), Black Panther Party (3), Huey Newton (1), Black Power (3), Pat Thomas (1), Roland Kirk (2), Horace Silver (2), Angela Davis (1), H. Rap Brown (1), Stanley Crouch (1), Jayne Cortez (1), Ornette Coleman (5), Black Panthers (4) - SF Gate
https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Pat-Thomas-explores-black-power-movement-s-clout-3451460.php
Word count: 1253Pat Thomas explores black power movement's clout
BOOKS Producer looks at black power movement's vast influence on pop cultureBy Julian Guthrie Published 4:00 am, Monday, April 2, 2012
From the music scholar Pat Thomas' new book, "Listen, Whitey!" about the Black Panther movement in Oakland. Photo: Courtesy Of Fantagraphics Books
Photo: Courtesy Of Fantagraphics Books
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From the music scholar Pat Thomas' new book, "Listen, Whitey!" about the Black Panther movement in Oakland.Music producer and scholar Pat Thomas became intrigued by the Black Panthers when he moved to Oakland in 2000 and began to understand the impact a group of radicals had on reshaping the political and cultural landscape of their time. Thomas spent five years researching the Panthers and was struck not by the sociological influence or the dogmatic politics but by the impact on pop culture.
Thomas' new book, "Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975," has just been released with a CD of Black Panther poems, music and speeches.
"The book is unique in the sense there are plenty of books about the Black Panthers and black power," Thomas said, "but this book focuses really on the pop culture angle and yet still gives people a sense of what the movement was all about. It was a time when radicals and revolutionaries were considered pop culture icons, and musicians were considered revolutionaries."
We spoke with Thomas, who now lives in Seattle, over the phone. He will be in the Bay Area next week to read from his book.
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Coming Out Stories: Tyler Oakley... Entertainment WeeklyQ:Why was the 1967 picture of Huey Newton sitting in the oversize wicker chair, wearing a beret, and holding weapons such an iconic image?
A: Well, the short history is that Huey had been arrested on charges of murdering an Oakland policeman. The Free Huey movement wound up expanding into the hippie and white counterculture movement, as well as with those who were protesting the Vietnam War. A lot of white, middle-class kids began to embrace the Free Huey campaign. It became cross-cultural. You'd see the poster in college dorms, and you'd see it in the ghetto. It was a time when Rolling Stone magazine was in San Francisco, and it was as much about the political makeup of youth as it was about the music.
Q:I was amazed to read in your book that even the Partridge Family did an Afro-style pop tune.
A: The image of the Panther became something even Hollywood playfully played with. You had Tom Wolfe's book "Radical Chic," and you had folks like Leonard Bernstein hanging out with the Panthers. Everyone wanted to get close to the heat.
Q:Which musicians inspired the Black Panthers, and which were inspired by the Black Panthers?
A: I was really surprised to find out that Huey Newton was really into Bob Dylan, and when the Panthers started, besides having people read Chairman Mao's little red book, he also said he wanted everybody to listen to Dylan albums. Dylan played an important role. Thus the cover image of the book, of Newton holding a Dylan record cover.
Q:Tell me about the companion CD, which you put together based on rare recordings you found.
A: It has 16 tracks. It has Bob Dylan, some speeches, some music by Elaine Brown. A lot of the tracks or speeches had very limited releases at the time.
Q:Was the music for the black community or white community?
A: It really was for the black community. I do have Dylan and Lennon, but 90 percent of the recordings I write about in my book were made by blacks to be listened to by blacks. "Listen, Whitey!" is not technically correct, as it was really "Listen, my fellow brothers and sisters."
Q: You are white and writing about black power. Did you ever encounter any questioning over your interest or your legitimacy?
A: All the former members of the Black Panther Party treated me with respect and shared their knowledge and personal history with me, because they knew that my interest was genuine and sincere, that I had no hidden agenda, no political ax to grind. Frankly, I've found hipster indie-rock musicians to have more attitude when I've hung out with them.
Q:Has the word "revolution" lost its meaning today?
A: Yes, you hear things like Ford Motor produces a revolutionary style of driving, or there's a revolutionary new hair product. I think revolution has lost its oomph.
Q:What haven't I asked that's important to the book?
A: I want people to remember that the Panthers were not just about carrying guns. It's important for people to remember that it was an era when music was as important as politics, and politics was as important as music. And there was a warm-and-fuzzy side to the Panthers, the side that did incredible things for the community.
Pat Thomas reads from "Listen, Whitey!" 7 p.m. April 10 at Booksmith, 1644 Haight St., S.F. 7:30 p.m. April 11 at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley.
Julian Guthrie is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. jguthrie@sfchronicle.com
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http://liveworkoakland.com/2013/11/04/patthoma/
Word count: 4427Find the Feeling! An Interview with Pat Thomas, Author and Historian
shoshonej November 4, 2013 Civic, Community Voices, Living, OakTech, People 0Pat Thomas, recording industry executive by day, longtime Bay Area resident and music historian, transformed his encyclopedic understanding of late 60’s and early 70’s music into 2012’s captivating coffee table book Listen Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power. It is published by Fantagraphics Books, accompanied by a CD featuring some incredible—and often overlooked—Black Power musicians.
Listen Whitey!
The cover of Thomas’ book shows a shirtless Huey P. Newton, 1959 alumnus of Oakland Technical High School. Newton is holding his favorite Bob Dylan album.
Listen Whitey! was named one of the top ten music books of 2012 by Spin. I spoke with Pat Thomas this week about his life, work, and ambitions.
Shoshone Johnson: What does Black Power mean to you, Pat Thomas?
Pat Thomas: (Laughs) Well, first of all, I’m a white, middle-class, middle-aged guy, so I don’t make any claims that I know what it’s like to have been in the struggle, I don’t make any claims that I’ve been ostracized for my race or gender.
I’m the typical middle class white guy. I guess what attracted me to writing about the Black power movement is that I felt it’s been unjustly maligned over the years. The Black Panther Party were more than just a bunch of guys wearing berets and carrying guns.
My book goes a long way towards presenting the Panthers in a different light. It’s not merely about the history of the Panthers but also how it intersected with pop culture and music and everything else.
I want to make sure I’m not skirting the issue, but as a historian, I felt that I had to set the record straight. I tell students that they should read Elaine Brown, David Hilliard, Aaron Dixon. They each have autobiographies. Then they could look at something more critical, like Hugh Pearson’s Shadow of the Panther. Those are like the two extremes. The autobiographies tend to be the more positive side. Pearson is probably too critical. I decided in my book that I wasn’t going to explore the demise of the party because it’s not what the party was about.
SJ: What do you think of Maulana Karenga’s US Organization, who invented Kwanzaa?
PT: All of the Black Power organizations provided Blacks, especially young Blacks, with a sense of pride and purpose. So all organizations had the best intentions of their members at heart.
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A lot of Panthers are personal friends of mine. I have to admit that I have a bias. Kwanzaa is the US Organization’s lasting legacy, in the same way that the Panthers’ lasting legacy is the free breakfast programs, sickle cell programs, and so on.
At the end of the day, all of these organizations need to be celebrated for the positive things that helped bring the community to 2013.
SJ: After a long hiatus from recording political singles, Bob Dylan released a single about the San Quentin inmate and Panther, George Jackson, which he never re-released until he gave you permission to put the song on the Listen Whitey! CD. What are your feelings on Bob’s involvement?
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PT: I would never compare Bob to…Obviously, he’s white, like me, so he’s no Huey Newton or Ron Karenga, but in his own way, writing that song was incredible, like when he wrote the Hurricane Carter song. That was really great.
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For whatever reason, that song sort of got buried not long before it came out. It was never on a CD, or a “best of,” or a box set. It’s out now on the Listen Whitey! CD, and it’s the first time anyone’s been able to buy a new release of it since 1971, which is awesome, you know?
SJ: Yes! How did you contact Bob Dylan?
PT: Well, my day job is that I’m in the music business. I didn’t have any special connection to him other than that I knew how to reach him. I wrote a letter to Dylan’s personal management explaining what I was doing, what the book was about, what the CD was about, and within 24 hours, the management wrote back saying, “yeah, we talked to Bob, he loves this.”
The super cool thing was that when the book and CD came out—there’s a website, BobDylan.com—that is all approved by him. He has a section for the things he’s into. Normally, frankly, it’s just things about himself that he likes, like maybe a good review or a good interview. And, so, in a very very rare case, last year, he put the LA Times review of my book on that website, which is unheard of, and the next day his personal manager wrote to us and said “hey, me and Bob really love this book and this CD, we’re really proud to be part of it.”
So that was really cool, you know. As a long-time rock’n’roll fan who’s been listening to Bob since the 70’s, that really meant a lot to me.
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SJ: The sheer amount of legal work you put into getting the rights for the compilation shows the amount of experience you have in the industry. What’s the key to that?
PT: You have to be diligent and patient. It can take weeks or months for people to get back to you. And you have to have sincerity.
A compilation like that is not a moneymaker. It’s not like the Greatest Hits of the Beach Boys, or Super-Hits of the 60’s, Volume 1, so the people that you’re talking to—when I’m talking to Dylan’s people, or the Smithsonian owned a few pieces, Eldridge Cleaver’s estate—they need to know that your heart is in the right place and that you’re sincerely interested in that. And that was the key to the success of the CD.
SJ: There’s a famous story about Martin Luther King, Jr. asking Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to stop using the phrase “Black Power,” at a speech and Carmichael saying he could not stop. What do you think motivated his decision?
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PT: The 60’s is where the term “generation gap” came from. So you had a bunch of people that had been born right around WWII—the Baby Boomers. These were young people in the 60’s, maybe 25 at the oldest.
Then you had the older generation: King, other members of SNCC and SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference). Martin was great, but he was old-school. He wore a suit, he was a minister, and he knew that that was the way that he needed to get his work done. Carrying a machete and a machine gun wasn’t going to work for him.
And then Stokely, you know, it’s the power of the young. I think it was Malcolm X who once said, “the movement needed me and Martin.” It needed both sides. The Panthers were a direct extension of Stokely and SNCC.
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David Hilliard of the Black Panthers told me that in the South, for Martin or the early SNCC guys to go to a lunch counter and protest was enough to stir up some s***. In the city of Oakland, you probably could sit at the lunch counter, so that wasn’t really gonna change much. In the North, you needed to carry a gun walking down the street, The movement needed the paramilitary as well as the nonviolent vibe in order to pull it all together, in my opinion.
SJ: Do you believe that the very early Panthers were not explicitly in favor of overthrowing the government, and the later Panthers were?
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PT: That leaves out the fact that there was a divide between Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. Eldridge thought that overthrowing the government was the way to go, OK? And Huey believed that it was the food programs and that type of stuff. So it goes like this: early Panthers (66-68) are Eldridge and Huey on the same page. It’s kind of paramilitary, they’re carrying guns, they march on the Sacramento State Capitol. Then, as we get into 69-70, Huey starts to back off from the gun thing, and starts to say, let’s start doing the feed the kids, sickle cell.
Meanwhile, Eldridge is in Algeria and he’s saying let’s get machine guns and tanks. What finally happens is that Huey is in Cuba, Eldridge is exiled and can’t come back, and Elaine Brown and Ericka Huggins come along, and they run for city council, they set up an amazing school in East Oakland, and the next thing you know, Elaine Brown is meeting with Jerry Brown, of no relation, the governor of California, and she becomes very active in the political system of Oakland.
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I think that’s where the Panthers made the biggest changes, because they were able to sway which judges got nominated in Oakland…
I lived in Oakland for fifteen years. For me, one of the Panthers’ greatest legacies is that if you go into city hall, whether it’s to get a building permit, or pay your taxes, or change your shoes—whatever you have to do there—99% of the employees there are African-Americans. The city of Oakland has a very strong Black presence now in the government, which is great.
image
A lot of the Panthers were geniuses. Huey P. Newton memorized the entire state of California penal code so that if a cop was messing with him he could say, “according to paragraph 5, chapter 1, you can’t say that to me.” That’s f***in’ incredible!
Elaine Brown, super smart, Eldridge, a deep thinker. Fred Hampton, 19 years old, this guy’s probably one of the greatest public speakers that ever walked the face of the earth! These people were like 22, 23, 24.
These are young people building this s***. I look back, and I think, wow, that makes it even more intense. This was pre-internet, too. There was no Black Panther Facebook page. These guys were doing this one house at a time, making phone calls, using mimeograph machines. This was really one person at a time joining. Grassroots, one blade of grass at a time.
SJ: So you’re white, but what’s your ethnicity? What’s your family like?
PT: I’m half Sicilian and half Welsh. The Sicilian side, I guess, has got a lot of piss and vinegar. Some might argue the Welsh side has a lot of piss and vinegar too.
My parents were not lefties. My dad was a more conservative, Republican type. My mom was a little strong on women’s rights, but we didn’t sit around and read Mao’s Little Red Book. They were not demonstrating against the Vietnam war or anything like that. I had a brother who was ten years older than me, so in the early 70’s, he was already a teenager, and he discovered this book by a white guy named Abbie Hoffman, who was a radical activist. And he let me read it.
The book was called Steal This Book. It’s got a lot of humor. It talked about how you could go on a college campus in 1971 and, by hooking one phone up to an electrical circuit, you could probably cook every phone on campus in one go. It was full of little secrets like that. I’m like ten or eleven, reading this, and it’s funny to me. It’s not even a political thiing so much as a humorous thing.
As I got older, I started to really respect what the white radicals had done in terms of protesting the Vietnam war, the Chicago riots in ‘68, and through them I began to hear about Bobby Seale and the infamous Chicago 8 trial.
And then, frankly, my feelings on most of this stuff were pretty much dormant for probably a decade or so, and then I moved to Oakland around 2000 or so, and I just decided, hey, I live in Oakland, I’d like to know more about the Panthers. I started reading books, I started befriending Panthers.
I had this incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience where I could read a book about the Panthers, and then I could ask Panthers their views. So I’d say “hey, last night I was reading this book and they said that in April ‘68 this happened,” and they could say, “well, yeah, but I think it was more like this…” And I didn’t formally interview.
That’s one of the things I stress to journalists is that I never put a microphone in front of anybody’s face, because, as soon as you do that, the dynamics of the interview change. Obviously, you and I are being taped, I assume, but that’s fine because I’m not telling you secrets of the ’60s because I wasn’t really there. But when you ask someone who was on the front lines what happened, they’re probably going to tense up.
What makes my book a little bit different from an academic book is that I quickly realized that no two Panthers remember things exactly the same way. For instance, one Panther might say, “I remember there was 500 people there and it was raining,” and another Panther might say, “I remember there was 300 people there and it was sunny.” I decided that the facts were not as important as the feeling behind the facts. Does that make sense?
SJ: Yes, absolutely.
PT: I consider myself a historian, but I argue with other historians about the fact that I don’t give a s*** if it was a Tuesday afternoon or a Wednesday morning. Who gives a f***? That’s not important. What’s important is, what did that particular moment mean? That’s what makes my book a little different from other books.
I’m not trying to nail down the facts: I’m trying to create a feeling, and I’m using music as the main feeling of the feeling.
SJ: Like a meta-feeling.
PT: Yeah, exactly.
SJ: Have you ever felt like your whiteness gives you safety, like it’s the reason you don’t worry about being taped?
PT: I don’t have an FBI file, I’ve never been in prison, I’ve never been jailed.
There’s the term “white privilege.” I do believe it exists.
I think what allowed me, in some ways, to befriend the Panthers, is they realized that I didn’t have an agenda or an axe to grind. The fact that I was sincere about wanting to know more and appreciating what had happened. I’m not saying that a Black person couldn’t do that either, but I wasn’t trying to say “I’m Black, and this is how I feel about the movement, and I’m going to compare it against yours.”
Obviously, race was not really ever discussed, frankly.
Elaine Brown said, one day, “One thing I like about you is you’re not trying to be Black. You’re not trying to interject some lingo or rhetoric. You’re not hanging out with Blacks and trying to pretend you’re the white rap guy.” I think she appreciated that I was not trying to immerse myself in the culture so much that I was looking like a clown. I’m coming at it from a bit more of a pop culture angle than a racial angle.
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There’s a gender angle, too. This is something that’s come up quite a bit for me and others I’ve talked to. For example, Aaron Dixon (founder of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party, which influence Jimi Hendrix) came to Los Angeles recently, and he’s a good pal of mine, so we were hanging out, and I attended a couple of his book lectures, and several other Panthers came and spoke, asked questions, and told stories.
They were talking about what I call the “post-Huey years,” when Huey was in Cuba, and Elaine and Ericka Huggins andPhyllis Jackson were running the show and doing the hard work. I think that somebody should do a book specifically on women Panthers. The Black Panther Party is looked upon as a very male-based organization and, I’m sure, in those early years, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a woman in the Party. But once a lot of key members are in jail, or left the Party, or were in exile, it was the ladies’ chance to shine, and those female Panthers kicked some serious ass!
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There are male Panthers who resent Elaine because they had to take orders from a woman. That’s hard to do for any guy, especially in the ’70s when men are not exactly liberated yet. So that’s an interesting side angle: the gender issue versus the race issue.
SJ: Are there any musicians recording today who carry the Listen Whitey! spirit?
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PT: The best example for me, personally, is Boots Riley of The Coup. Boots has strong roots in the Panthers—his parents were both radical activists. Maybe someone like Michael Franti. I’m trying to focus on SF Bay Area people because that’s what I know. I don’t follow a lot of rap. Nas recorded a Panther tribute. I think he even took a photo of himself in a wicker chair.
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There’s some very political rap that I may not be aware of because I’m not following it. But I will definitely say that Boots and the work he’s doing in the Occupy movement is very impressive.
SJ: What drew you to Oakland?
PT: I’ve always had an interest in counterculture. I met Abbie Hoffman briefly in the ’80s. I was very, very obsessed with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac died in ‘69 so I never met him. But in the ’80s I met Ginsberg, I interviewed him, I traded a few letters with him.
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Wherever I’ve lived geographically I’m always kind of curious. Before I lived in Oakland, I lived in San Francisco for about a decade, so I immersed myself in the history of San Francisco, like the Fillmore West, the history of North Beach, the Beatniks, Golden Gate Park… I have a natural attraction towards anything that happened from about 1965 to 1975 in any city I happen to be living in.
My interest in the Panthers started casually.
I was trying to buy a house and it was way too expensive to buy a house in San Francisco, so I looked in Oakland and bought a house in the East Oakland hood, frankly. I moved there and I decided I’d learn more about the Panthers.
I didn’t write that book because I wanted to write it—I wrote that book because I needed to write it.
It became like, why do people climb Mount Everest? Because it was there. Why did I write a book about 300 obscure Black Power recordings? Because they were there, you know? I just felt it needed to be done. There’s a lot of passion in that book.
SJ: There’s a metaphor I hear the Panthers use a lot about the American Indians. I am a Cherokee on my father’s side. So I’ve always noticed the references, and I noticed in Stokely Carmichael’s speech, he said that the “white man succeeded in wiping out the red man.” I’ve been getting to know the American Indian cultures, and they still exist, and they’re still vibrant. Why would leaders refer to the genocide as though it were finished?
PT: I think he means it in the broadest strokes of the term. There was a time when the entire country was all Indians or native Americans and there was no white guys. So by the time California is settled by the end of the Gold Rush, effectively, they’re gone. I can assume, if I was native American and I was living on a reservation, that I might listen to that comment and it might piss me off a little, but I don’t think it’s meant to be demeaning in any way.
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SJ: It sounds like a rallying cry.
PT: This is something that I probably should explore more. There were rumors, and even some facts, that the US government was planning to rebuild internment camps and put white and black radicals in there. Somebody could probably find a letter that describes that. I think that was a real fear, and there was also a reality of COINTELPRO. It goes back to the killing at UCLA: one of the best ways to get rid of organizations is to have them turn on each other. Even though I’m kind of anti-US Organization, they were probably pushed a little bit by the Federal Government. What helped kill the Panthers off was this big division between Eldridge and Huey. The FBI accelerated and deepened that division. Huey kicked out hundreds of East Coast Panthers because they were on Eldridge’s side, and a lot of that was fueled by the FBI feeding people’s paranoia. What might seem paranoid or grandstanding by Stokely was probably closer to the truth than any of us would want to believe. The FBI didn’t just kill the Panthers off with guns: they killed them off with these bulls*** trials. That wiped out the New York Panthers.
SJ: Whatever happened to (short-lived, but influential, Black Power record company) Black Forum Records?
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PT: It’s great that Berry Gordy funded the company and gave it the thumbs-up. Ultimately, Berry was a businessman: he was more interested in putting out the new Jackson Five record.
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The other thing was that Motown, its distributors, the record stores, and even the fans weren’t quite sure what to make of this. I mean, yeah, Langston Hughes, he’s a legendary writer, but, “there’s this Temptations single, that looks really cool!”
It was hard for them to sell and market Black Power stuff, so by the mid-’70s it started to slow down. And also, the landscape was changing,
I mean, disco music was starting to come in and become more popular, the Panthers were disintegrating, the Vietnam war was over, and the political climate was changing, and it began to be more about having fun. The Panthers were now in their 30’s, and they were going back to school, marrying, having kids. You couldn’t wake up every morning and think about the revolution; you probably had to think about getting a good day job and taking care of the wife and kids and things. The demise of the Black Forum label came at the time of that changing demographic.
SJ: So now that you’ve distributed this book worldwide, what have you been working on and what can we expect in the future from you?
PT: I’m doing a book on white radicals next, specifically focusing on Jerry Rubin and the Yippies. It won’t have as strong of a musical background, although Rubin intersected with John Lennon a lot, and Phil Ochs. It’s not gonna be a music book. This one will be not overly political, but it will have a pop culture view of the Yippies and anti-war movement.
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But, like Listen Whitey!, it’ll be a coffee table book, with a lot of photos, and a lot more first-person quotes. This time, I amsticking microphones in front of people’s faces.
SJ: Good idea!
PT: I’ve done about thirty interviews, so that’s a very different angle. There’ll be a lot of people talking in their own voices in that book. There’ll also be a second volume of the Listen Whitey! CD focusing on jazz. Weird, cool, free jazz and soul jazz.
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SJ: It’s interesting also to frame your book as “about white radicals.” I also notice a real intense Jewishness in Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin-
PT: Oh, yeah, totally! It’s all about the Jews! Jerry Rubin is a Jew, Abbie Hoffman—
SJ: Bob Dylan.
PT: Their lawyers, Bill Kunstler is Jewish, yeah. Some people have told me that I need to explore the Jewishness of the movement!
I’m not quite sure how I’m going to do it. I’m glad you brought that up. It’s both a little funny and very serious at the same time.
SJ: I know you’ll find a way. Thank you for this interview, Pat. It’s been fun!
PT: Yeah, thank you, Shoshone!
Tagged with: #blackpanthers, #blackpolitics, #blackpower, #bobbyseale, #bobdylan, #coffeetablebooks, #fantagraphics, #hueynewton, #listenwhitey, #local, #radicalism, books, downtown Oakland, East Oakland, feature, Hip hop, history, Identity, Music, oakland, people directory, Politics, profiles, Youth
- Shelf Awareness
http://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=648#m11313
Word count: 336Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary
by Pat ThomasIs the world ready for an oversized, illustrated history of famous 1960s political firebrand Jerry Rubin? San Francisco music producer and journalist Pat Thomas (Listen, Whitey) thinks so. Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie is a collage of the political and cultural ambience and artifacts of the '60s. If Rubin, who died in 1994, is best known for his affiliation with radical Abbie Hoffman, Thomas makes it clear that Rubin was the more refined of the pair. Hoffman and Rubin were the Cheech and Chong of the politically active, protest-marching side of the decade's youth movement. They formed the Youth International Party, targeting what Rubin called "the Marxist acidhead, the psychedelic Bolshevik." The Yippies made their name with the 1968 Festival of Life gathering during the Democratic Party convention in Chicago. With the violence that ensued and the arrest of Rubin, Hoffman and their fellow "Chicago Eight," American political history took a decisive turn.
Thomas scatters his text with hundreds of archival photos, journals, manifestos and broadsides from the era. He also includes quotations from participants in the political furor of the times and musicians like Dylan, Lennon and Ochs who created its soundtrack. He includes excerpts from books by the likes of Norman Mailer and Eldridge Cleaver, as well as Hoffman's Steal This Book and Rubin's own Do It! From Rubin's roots in a family of Jewish merchants and truck drivers in Cincinnati to his later years as a stockbroker and New Age spokesman, Thomas tells the complicated history of a man who made a revolution and then struggled to find his place in its aftermath. Did It! is not just the Jerry Rubin story--it's an epochal picture of an entire generation. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.
Discover: In Pat Thomas's biographical, illustrated history of Jerry Rubin, he captures the political turmoil that made the 1960s a generation-defining era.
- Berkleyside
http://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/11/09/yippie-berkeley-jerry-rubins-life-times-according-pat-thomas
Word count: 1415Yippie for Berkeley! Jerry Rubin’s life and times according to Pat Thomas
By Andrew GilbertNov. 9, 2017, 9 a.m.
Pat Thomas talks about his new biography, Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary (Fantagraphics) at Pegasus Books Downtown on Sunday evening.Berkeley was already churning with Free Speech Movement protest when Jerry Rubin arrived on campus in 1964 as a sociology grad student. Within weeks, he abandoned his studies to devote himself full-time to activism, playing a key role in launching the Vietnam Day Committee, one of the first campus organizations founded in opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Rubin, who died in Los Angeles in 1994 at the age of 56 after being hit by a car while jaywalking, went on to co-found the Yippie party and helped spearhead the protests at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, which led to the political theater of the Chicago 8 trial. These days, Rubin’s legacy has faded into the background, but Pat Thomas is looking to change the focus with Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary (Fantagraphics), the first biography of the essential but strangely overlooked activist.
Thomas has spent much of the past 25 years expanding the way we think about 1960s and 70s. The drummer and former Bay Area resident was the driving force behind the ambient jazz-groove collective Mushroom, but it’s off the bandstand that his work has had the farthest reach. As a producer and tireless spelunker into archives and back catalogs, he produced dozens of reissues by seminal but overlooked musicians as the A&R director for the San Francisco-based labels Water Records and 4 Men With Beards.
In 2012, various projects culminated with his landmark book Listen, Whitey!: The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 (Fantagraphics) and companion Light In the Attic album documenting the music and speeches associated with the Black Panthers and Black Power movement.
Thomas talks about Rubin and Did It! Sunday at Berkeley’s Pegasus Books in downtown. I caught up with him by phone from his home in Los Angeles. Our conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
Pat Thomas, author of Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary (Fantagraphics). Photo: Kristin LeuschnerGiven your history with Listen, Whitey! Allen Ginsberg and immersion in the music of the 1960s, it’s not surprising to find you telling Rubin’s story. But how did you get started on this project?
The short version is that I realized there were five books out about Abbie Hoffman and none about Jerry. Around the time I finished my book Listen, Whitey! I went back to college at Evergreen State College. Early on, one of my professors told me that I’m old and too smart to be sitting in a classroom with a bunch of kids. I proposed doing this research on Jerry as a school project, and with success of Listen, Whitey! my publisher asked me to write another book. I got ahold of Jerry’s family, who were very enthusiastic, and they turned me loose on Jerry’s personal archives, with lots of stuff that no one had seen before.
Considering his founding role in the Vietnam Day Committee, why does Jerry Rubin tend to be overlooked and underappreciated as an early catalyst in the anti-war movement?
He became a villain because he put on a suit and tie in the 1980s and popped up on Wall Street. But contrary to what a lot of people think, he did not become a Republican and endorse Reagan. He was not selling shares of Exxon. He was trying to get people to invest in solar energy. He’s been forgotten because people thought he went to “the other side.”
Jerry Rubin leading one of the fall 1965 Vietnam Day Committee protests at the Oakland Army Terminal.
The fact that he’s been overshadowed is sort of paradoxical given that he pioneered a kind of political theater that’s become a hallmark of activist politics on the left and the right.
I love the whole Occupy Movement, but one of the things that lead to its demise, is that people want a leader. I can’t name one person connected to the OM. You need to be a little bit of an egomaniac and an asshole to get things done. The Black Panthers – who I love dearly, plenty of critical things I can say. It takes some chutzpah. Guys like Bobby Seale and Jerry Rubin were pretty young, in their 20s. They didn’t have any funding, they used the power of the media (in an old school fashion), no twitter, no Facebook, a lot of real work got put into spreading their political message – Now you tweet something funny, get 3,000 likes and “bang” – you’re considered an important leader in the media in 2017!
It’s interesting that some figures who really did do a 180-degree ideological turn, like Eldridge Cleaver, are much better remembered than Rubin.
The thing about Eldridge Cleaver is that that the progressive media glommed onto the Black Panthers (in a good way) – it’s still an interesting story today. In a perverse way, Jerry came to be more controversial (in 2017) than the Panthers. I think that might be because so many of us are Jerry’s. If we were around in the 60s, we fought against the war, recharged our batteries in the 1970s, maybe got MBAs in the 1980s. With Jerry being such a public figure, his transformation seemed more dramatic than the average Joe’s. I’ve had this conversation numerous times with someone sitting in their executive suite telling me Jerry’s a sellout, and I say, well, your arc follows Jerry’s!
One of the interesting things I’d forgotten is that before Rubin arrived in Berkeley in 1964 he’d been working as a journalist, a wannabe muckraker, and you make a strong case that his journalistic experience gave him a strong sense of how to create irresistible narratives and images for the press.
He knew that embellishment was a key tool. In 1972, he went to the GOP convention in Miami and told a press conference that 10,000 naked Yippies are going to run through the streets. Afterwards he admitted to someone that’s not going to happen. He knew that outrageousness would get front-page attention. I think our best social critics are comedians these days. I wouldn’t call Jerry a comedian, but he used humor to disarm people.
Looking at what’s been happening in Berkeley and other college campuses over the past year, you could argue that various factions of the right, call it the alt-right or the troll-right, have adopted Rubin’s politics-as-theater tactics far more effectively than the left.
There was an op-ed piece, recently in the New York Times, that said Donald Trump is a spinoff of Jerry & Abbie in manipulating the press. I got in a lot of Facebook debates about that and claims that Milo Yiannopoulos is a modern day Yippie. Milo and Trump are peddling white supremacist garbage. Jerry was trying to get us out of Vietnam! But in a perverse way, the right has figured out how to use Yippie tactics better than anyone on the left these days. The left doesn’t have a much of a sense of humor.
One thing that was striking about Rubin was his gift for finding and making allies, like launching the Vietnam Day Committee with Cal mathematics professor Stephen Smale and activist Barbara Gullahorn.
He knew enough to track down Ralph Gleason at the San Francisco Chronicle. He was a networker. Long before Linkedin and Facebook, he was creating these events at these hot spots, Studio 54 and the Palladium in New York City, that were all about getting interesting people together. He knew the power of networking throughout his whole life. In the book, I reproduce a couple of pages from his phone book and there’s Dylan, John & Yoko, Ram Das. It wasn’t so much that he was into celebrities, though he did like being around famous people. He really was a great organizer, and that meant being able to pull different people together.
Related Stories - Pop Matters
https://www.popmatters.com/did-it-from-yippie-to-yuppie-jerry-rubin-2495384205.html
Word count: 1473Performance Artist, Provocateur, Revolutionary: The Wild Life of Jerry Rubin Finally Drawn Together
Linda Levitt
09 Aug 2017
A high point of my college years was the chance to truck up to the ballroom in the University of Texas student union for the Yippie vs. Yuppie debate, the supposed showdown between Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Length: 272 pages
Author: Pat Thomas
Price: $49.99
Format: Hardcover
Publication date: 2017-08
Amazon"Kids who grew up in the post-1950s live in a world of supermarkets, color TV commercials, guerilla war, international media, psychedelics, rock 'n' roll, and moon walks. For us, nothing is impossible. We can do anything." -- Jerry Rubin, 1970
Pat Thomas begins the author’s introduction to Did It! with a straightforward calling-out: “Jerry Rubin was a sellout. That’s why you don’t like him. He didn’t live up to your nostalgic 1960s dream, but he couldn’t live in the past. He was bored being a counterculture hero like his former comrade, Abbie Hoffman. To use a cliché, Jerry was ahead of his time.” Well, yes.
A high point of my college years was the chance to truck up to the ballroom in the University of Texas student union for the Yippie vs. Yuppie debate, the supposed showdown between Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Lore among the leftist GenXers was that Rubin was a sellout, and we should have Hoffman's back. As I recall that long ago night, I didn't want to disagree with Hoffman or Rubin -- they were my heroes for what they did as collaborators and allies, and while they debated, I didn't want them to disagree. I remember being deeply saddened by Hoffman’s death by suicide in 1989, and both disheartened and disappointed by the seeming ridiculousness of Rubin, a larger-than-life character, dying after being hit by a car while jaywalking in Los Angeles.
Indeed, Rubin and Hoffman were part of a mythos that had a lifelong connection for me. While neither has a prevalent place in contemporary public discourse, I was still astonished to learn that Pat Thomas’s Did It! is the first biography of Rubin, 13 years after his death. The oversized book is a testament to an enormous persona --or as Hoffman is quoted on the inside front sleeve, an ego “almost as big as mine, but not quite.” While Did It! is a coffee table book, it's far more than just that: it’s difficult to resist pulling the book into your lap to read not only Thomas’s narrative but the hundreds of clips, letters, and ephemera collected for this tome.
Did It! pays homage to DO iT!: Scenarios of the Revolution, Rubin’s 1970 book. Both books feature a design that blends text, photos, and typographic styling for a collage effect that also creates a sense of movement and energy. This design is not only a response to DO iT! but also a statement about Rubin himself. Jacob Covey, who created the cover art and book design, notes that “Jerry Rubin's talent was getting noticed by bringing together disparate elements in culture. His protest performances were clearly crafted to disorient, but his later years in establishment drag were no less so. He always used his perceived image to affect change.”
In 2012, Rubin’s ex-wife Mimi Leonard gave Thomas “complete access to Jerry’s personal archives (untouched since his death in 1994): thousands of photos, letters, journals, clippings and diaries that spanned from the 1950s to the 1990s” (x). He interviewed more than 75 people who had connections to Rubin at different points in his life and includes snippets of these discussions throughout the text. These bits of dialog give the book a conversational tone while also enhancing the credibility of Thomas’s story. The many voices are reflected in the book design as well. Covey adds, “Rubin knew it took a central figure to bring people together but it took all of their voices to get heard. In this book, those voices tell a more complete story -- and the many design elements keep people looking.”
Sidebar profiles -- often consisting of several pages with a different page design from the main text -- tell the stories of people involved in Rubin’s life: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Stew Albert, Phil Ochs, and Timothy Leary, among others. Thomas also profiles many of the women whose stories have long been left out of the histories of the counterculture and the Yippies. Finally, women like Judy Gumbo, Nancy Kurshan, and Mimi Leonard have their stories told as part of the larger stories of the Left.
Thomas’s extensive interviews and use of Rubin’s archives create a powerful and relevant narrative. A curious reader wanting to learn more about an anti-war activist might Google that person’s name or scan their Wikipedia page, but will not have access to the broader story without further reading: the connections among people matter deeply. Thomas enhances biographical background with reflections from contemporaries like Paul Krassner and Lee Weiner. Archival documents include scores of photographs, newspaper clippings, and personal letters.
Among the documents scanned for the book is Rubin’s Statement to The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which he wrote when subpoenaed by the HUAC on 16 August 1966. The folds on the document create a visceral, three-dimensional sense that powerfully creates authenticity and connection to real, lived history. Rubin concluded his testimony fittingly: “As for you, gentlemen, History will condemn you.” (31). He did not have the opportunity to testify, since, in one of the early instances of Rubinesque parody and performance, he arrived at the hearing wearing a rented costume of an American Revolutionary soldier’s uniform. Unwilling to engage Rubin’s antics, the committee dismissed him. Later, in Did It!, Thomas quotes Hoffman saying that was the first moment of symbolic warfare that guided the aesthetic of the Yippies.
Thomas’s chronology moves through the creation of the Yippies to the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, where the Yippies organized the Festival of Life in nearby Grant Park. The festival is now a notorious moment in New Left history, as the Yippies and their anti-war, anti-establishment cohorts were subject to extreme acts of police brutality. Rubin, Hoffman, and six others were eventually arrested for conspiracy and inciting to riot. As much as Rubin’s political acts were public performances of excess and parody, so was the trial of the Chicago 8 a performance for both the Nixon administration and the defendants. Jerry and Abbie’s guerilla theater performances encouraged the significant media coverage of the Chicago 8 trial. Thomas reports that “they averaged about seven minutes of coverage every night on the three national networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS” (103). They rushed home from court to make sure they didn’t miss the news. In the end, all of the convictions were overturned by an appellate court.
Nixon’s 1972 reelection was the breaking point for Rubin. His daybook from that year -- pages of quickly jotted notes, phone numbers and journal-style entries covering a double-page spread in the book -- “shows that he practically moved from Manhattan to San Francisco within hours of the election being called. He shed his Yippie identity and popped up in the Bay Area just weeks later -- freshly shaved, with shorter hair, and spouting the virtues of self-awareness therapy” (158). With this major transformation, Rubin began the path that led to him being rendered a sellout.
Rubin remained loyal to his former Yippie companions, including Hoffman, who went underground after being arrested for selling cocaine. On the other hand, many in Rubin’s former circle were critical of him. Shortly after arriving in San Francisco, Rubin became involved with Erhard Seminars Training (EST) and other kinds of therapy, began a relationship with gestalt therapist Stella Resnick, embraced the sexual revolution, and began writing and talking about his masculinity. Rubin’s initial surge of involvement with the New Age movement culminated in the publication of Growing (Up) at 37 in 1976.
Thomas drives home the point that Rubin was not a sellout but rather a sort of visionary. Not only did he pioneer the idea of social networking and share his enthusiasm for innovative technology like Apple computers in the early '80s, he advocated for socially conscious entrepreneurship, the aspiration of countless GenXers and Millennials. Did It! is not only an important historical document, it's a deeply engaging and entertaining book.
Rating:
biography abbie hoffman pat thomas the sixties cultural history review counter-culture did it! from yippie to yuppie jerry rubin an american revolutionary - Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-krassner-rubin-20170831-story.html
Word count: 1957Hippies, radicals, pranksters: Jerry Rubin has a bio and Paul Krassner has our review
By Paul Krassner
Aug 31, 2017 | 10:00 AM
Hippies, radicals, pranksters: Jerry Rubin has a bio and Paul Krassner has our review
Jerry Rubin (right) and Paul Krassner share a joint in the late '60s. (Fantagraphics Books, Inc.)Pat Thomas, the author of "Did iT! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary," had noticed that there were six books about co-activist Abbie Hoffman, but none about Jerry Rubin, so Thomas welcomed the challenge. Seventy-five co-conspirators were interviewed for revealing anecdotes galore (including me), and this tome is a unique oral and visual history heavy enough to sink into your coffee table.
Rubin had written a few books himself, though. The first was 1970's "DO iT!" Under the influence of Ritalin, he recorded all the material swirling in his mind, and his girlfriend Nancy Kurshan transcribed 700 pages that had to be severely trimmed down. That book was heiress Patty Hearst's favorite, radicalizing her, especially the part about rebelling against elite parents.
In January 1964, Rubin was 26 with a thick handlebar mustache, bored as a journalist for the Cincinnati Post. He moved to UC Berkeley for grad school, but dropped out during his first semester. He then asked so many questions about local politics, filling his notebook so much, that several activists thought he was a cop. But by May 1965, at the Berkeley campus he had organized a Vietnam teach-in, the largest in the U.S.
Jerry Rubin speaking at Harvard in 1969.
Jerry Rubin speaking at Harvard in 1969. (Spencer Grant / Getty Images)He called me in New York, inviting me to speak there. I urged him to also contact folksinger Phil Ochs, who could perform appropriate songs between speeches. Rubin had never heard of Ochs, but he accepted my suggestion. They would eventually become deep friends.
When Rubin was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, he wore a rented American Revolutionary costume, and he gave out copies of the Declaration of Independence. As the marshals carried him out, he yelled, "I want to testify!" He had manipulated the media to spread his patriotic message on radio, TV and the front pages of newspapers across the country.
Peace activist Dave Dellinger invited Rubin to be the project director of an anti-war event at the Pentagon in October 1967, where Ed Sanders of the Fugs would lead the ritual of levitating the building. Rubin moved to New York and met Hoffman. Mutual admiration developed quickly. Their brains were complementary. Hoffman was the right lobe (spontaneity) and Rubin the left (list-making).
When Rubin was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, he wore a rented American Revolutionary costume.
Share quote & linkThey led a nonviolent group to Wall Street and threw a load of single dollars from the balcony onto the floor, where stockbrokers stopped everything and grabbed the cash. These political pranksters then explained to the waiting reporters the connections among money, poverty and war.
An idea of Rubin's sidekick, Stew Albert, glued the straight New Left together with stoned hippies. That hybrid phenomenon was already in process at various protests. It would serve as a conception of the Yippies, the Youth International Party, which was born at the home of Hoffman and his wife, Anita, on the afternoon of Dec. 31, 1967. This informal alliance of activists celebrated with Colombian marijuana at our first meeting to plan a counter-convention to the Democratic National Convention scheduled for Chicago in August 1968. On the way to a New Year's Eve party, I rubbed some fresh snow into Rubin's bushy hair. It was a Yippie baptismal rite.
Jerry Rubin (right) with Norman Mailer.
Jerry Rubin (right) with Norman Mailer. (Fantagraphics Books, Inc.)In Chicago, a sense of competition was developing. Hoffman bought a pig for president, but then Rubin decided to purchase a bigger, meaner, uglier pig that was released at City Hall. Tom Hayden chastised Rubin: "Are you going to have a press conference and make very serious statements, or are you going to have a whole Yippie guerrilla theater performance?" Meanwhile, billy clubs and tear gas were being used indiscriminately and sadistically outside the convention hall. Later, a government-sponsored investigation concluded that it was "a police riot."
Nevertheless, in 1969, a trial took place of the Chicago 8, including Black Panther Bobby Seale, whose crime was to deliver a speech. His lawyer was sick, but the judge wouldn't allow him to defend himself. Seale shouted that he had such a right. Who could've guessed that in an American courtroom, a defendant's mouth would be gagged and his body shackled to a chair? When the judge finally kicked him out of the trial, it became the Chicago 7, two of whom were Yippies. As if to prove it, Rubin and Hoffman entered the court one day wearing judicial robes.
John Lennon and Yoko with Jerry Rubin(far right) playing percussion onstage at the Apollo Theater
John Lennon and Yoko with Jerry Rubin(far right) playing percussion onstage at the Apollo Theater (Bob Gruen / Fantagraphics Books, Inc.)In biographer Thomas' diligent research, he realized that the men got credit for the Yippies while the women weren't acknowledged. Powerful spouses — Anita Hoffman and Judy Gumbo Albert — deserved recognition. So did several others. Judy Lampe designed the Yippie logo, using a style of Japanese lithography she had studied. Robin Morgan left the Yippies to organize a feminist rally against the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, N.J., in September 1968. The Yippies' office was run by Kurshan, Rubin's girlfriend, and Walli Leff, whose husband, Sam, served as the Yippies' archivist. In 1970, Kurshan left Rubin because of his fame and egotism. Without her, his ability to be a leader temporarily disintegrated.
Likewise, John Lennon had gone through an awful breakup with the Beatles, fueled by disagreements with Paul McCartney. Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, moved to New York and met Rubin, who persuaded them to play at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally in Michigan. Sinclair was the leader of the White Panthers and the rock band the MC5, and the rally got him out of prison, where he'd served two years for a pot bust.
I couldn’t resist publishing in the Realist magazine this headline: Former Yippie Leader Asks Not to Be Called Former Yippie Leader.
Share quote & linkAfter the protests at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami, Rubin moved to San Francisco and dropped out of politics. He became a New Age junkie — meditation, the est movement, yoga, Rolfing, health food — happily recommending the virtues of self-awareness therapy. But later on, he confessed, "There's not really much for me to do, and I'm pretty bored right now. The war is over." Yes, the Yippie was gradually morphing into the Yuppie.
His love life had a certain pattern. On his first date with Stella Resnick, a therapist, he said: "I'm going to marry you." She wanted to be independent, so they lived together until he was too controlling. Back in New York, his "I Want" laundry list included "I want a beautiful blond society wife." Mimi Leonard fit that description enough that before they had left for dinner, he'd asked her to marry him. She wasn't that interested, but five weeks later they moved in together and married the next year.
They also developed a creative partnership. Their first collaboration was "The Event: 14½ Hours That Could Change Your Life," but they both also needed to get jobs. She became a commodities broker at ContiCommodity, a top firm. He appreciated her success and decided to go to Wall Street. He finally was titled marketing director at the John Muir Co. Many people thought Rubin had sold out, not knowing that his job was "investigating new companies of the future, including those producing solar and other alternative-energy sources." He created a weekly networking salon, a precursor to Facebook and LinkedIn.
Ad for "The Event"
Ad for "The Event" (Fantagraphics Books, Inc)In high school, Rubin wore a bow tie. Nobody else did. But in countercultural days, he claimed that a necktie was a hangman's noose. However, now that he was dancing in the world of finance, he wore a necktie, sort of like having worn the appropriate revolutionary costume for HUAC. He stated, "Money is the long hair of the '80s."
He actually sent out a press release requesting that the media no longer refer to him as a former Yippie leader. I couldn't resist publishing in the Realist magazine this headline: "Former Yippie Leader Asks Not to Be Called Former Yippie Leader." Indeed, Rubin and Hoffman went on tour with a debate, "The Yippies Versus the Yuppies." At a San Francisco nightclub, I moderated their performance and mentioned, "If Abbie Hoffman were to throw money in the Stock Exchange today, this time, Jerry Rubin would invest it."
Jerry Rubin, center, at his business networking salon at Studio 54.
Jerry Rubin, center, at his business networking salon at Studio 54. (Sonia Katchian / Fantagraphics Books, Inc.)In "Did iT!," the biographer captures Rubin's story with fairness — affirmative and negative perceptions are both presented through the subjectivity of 75 prisms. Dellinger regretted inviting Rubin to organize the Pentagon event. Mimi and Jerry had two children, and she divorced him, yet they remained best friends and partners.
Hoffman and Ochs both committed suicide, and Rubin might as well have: On a November evening in 1994, he was jaywalking across Wilshire Boulevard when he got hit by a car as he turned around to wave at his girlfriend, Tiffany Stettner, and a friend, Fred Branfman. They'd just had a meeting to discuss his organization about helping disenfranchised black children in Los Angeles, providing all kinds of creative ways for them to be educated. He died two weeks later.
When Rubin was alive and anyone criticized him, Hoffman defended him: "You can say that you lay across the train tracks leading to the Oakland Depot where the soldiers were being sent overseas to die in Vietnam." Hoffman wasn't aware that Jack Kurzweil, Berkeley professor and activist, said to Rubin, "One of the young kids who was so bound up in the passion and ecstasy of it that he was going to lie down on the tracks. Jesus, we've got to drag the kid off the tracks." Rubin responded, "Oh no, let him stay there. If he dies, it will be great publicity."
Was that a literal nuance or just a taste of his sardonic humor? In 1994, Rubin (who'd paid $85,000 personal income tax the year before) met another Jerry Rubin (a peace activist who lived in Venice, made $6 an hour potting orchids and had $2 in the bank). Yippie-Yuppie said, "Gee, people think it's me who's broke. That's not good. I'm running a business, and I can't have that perspective." So he made an offer: "Hey, I'll give you $10,000 if you change your name to anything — and $20,000 if you change it to Tom Hayden."
Krassner is the editor of "The Realist Cartoons" collection and the author of "Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture."
Did iT! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary" by Pat Thomas
Did iT! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary" by Pat Thomas (Fantagraphics Books, Inc.)"Did iT! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary"
Pat Thomas
Fantagraphics Books: 272 pp., $49.99
- Village Voice
https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/09/19/jerry-rubins-weird-road-from-yippie-to-yuppie/
Word count: 1573Jerry Rubin’s Weird Road From Yippie to Yuppie
by R.C. Baker
September 19, 2017
In the late Sixties, Rubin and his Yippie movement gained fame as the clown princes of the counterculture. FantagraphicsIn early 1968, Abbie Hoffman said to Jerry Rubin, his partner in flamboyant protest, “I hate America enough to run the risk of getting killed.”
“No, no, no!” Rubin answered. “You don’t hate America the way that any black [person] you can point to does. America has been in large part good to you.”
That exchange helps explain both the duo’s effectiveness in ridiculing the federal government, the military, and the media, and the philosophical schism — part real, part an early manifestation of “fake news” — that later developed between these brothers in provocation. Hoffman was always eager for a fight or a joke; Rubin was always up for an enthusiastic debate.
In the copiously illustrated Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary, author Pat Thomas’s narrative ricochets like a pinball through Rubin’s collaborations, conspiracies, collisions, and friendships with many of the counterculture heavyweights of the 1960s — including the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, and John and Yoko, to list just a few. Thomas chronicles seminal events from different viewpoints, assembled through multiple interviews with surviving associates as well as dives into Rubin’s personal archives of press clippings, datebooks, letters, canceled checks, and other ephemera.
Rubin’s father was a delivery driver for a bakery in Cincinnati; he won election to a leadership position in the Teamsters Union on the platform of reducing a six-day workweek to five. Years later, when Rubin (1938–1994) was at his height as a rabble-rousing freak, he would remember his father as “a real crusader, out there battling for the working man.” This work ethic rubbed off on Rubin, who landed a job covering sports for the Cincinnati Post shortly after he graduated from high school. In 1960 he was impressed by reports of students at UC Berkeley protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch hunts for so-called subversives. Years later, in his book Growing (Up) at 37, Rubin recalled that his goal became to leave his boring newspaper job and “go to Berkeley and help create events that would become radio headlines in between Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, headlines that would inspire other people like me locked up in the prison of no choice.” He finally made it to Berkeley in 1964, throwing himself into the burgeoning anti–Vietnam War movement; soon, he was organizing teach-ins against America’s increasingly brutal involvement in the conflict, and encouraging activists to lie on the railroad tracks to disrupt the movement of troop trains in Oakland. Equipped with an understanding of the power of the media learned from his earlier newspaper work, Rubin pointed out that if one of the more zealous protesters got run over by a locomotive, “it will be great publicity!” This particular scenario did not play out, but Rubin was proved right a few years later when protesters were gunned down by National Guardsmen at Kent State, turning more citizens against the war.
A young Jerry Rubin meets presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson on the campaign trail. FantagraphicsRubin’s budding reputation as an anti-war provocateur got him subpoenaed by HUAC in 1966. Unintimidated, he rented a Revolutionary War costume and penned a barn-burning statement to read before the committee. His getup discombobulated Congress — they refused to let him testify, though he did manage to declaim, “I am wearing it because America is degrading its 1776 ideals.” The key question he had wanted to ask the committee was found near the end of his declaration: “With what madness does America equate destruction of Vietnam with freedom and victory?”
In the summer of 1967 Rubin found himself in New York City to speak at an anti-war rally. As author Thomas points out, “His rhetoric echoed a bit of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl-era poetry: ‘We are a dangerous country, a neurotic country possessing deadly power.’ ” There, he met Hoffman, who had already been working with civil rights activists in the South and honing his theatrical side with the Diggers, a San Francisco group engaged in political street theater and free community services. Rubin went along as Hoffman and some co-conspirators brought the New York Stock Exchange to a standstill by tossing dollar bills from the balcony and laughing as the traders pushed at one another to get at the money (though others booed and shook their fists at the agitators). Rubin and Hoffman quickly became friends, reveling in this guerrilla action that raised questions about the way American corporations were profiting from a savage and pointless war.
In the fall of ‘67 the duo split for Washington, D.C., joining in the spectacle to exorcise the Pentagon by levitating it, with thousands of protesters chanting, “Out, demons, out.” As always, this street theater carried with it the serious intention of bringing more people into the protest, using absurdity to expose the risible lies about the threat the North Vietnamese communists posed to America. Next, Rubin and Hoffman (the Abbott and Costello of revolution) headed to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, where they ran a pig for president under the Youth International Party (Yippie) banner. Mayor Richard Daley’s cops were not amused; they busted heads indiscriminately while newsmen, choking on teargas, recorded the grisly beatings as protesters chanted, “The whole world is watching!”
As the Sixties staggered into the Seventies, Rubin published his most famous book, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution. He and his comrades endured trials and convictions, basically for disturbing the peace, and then appeals overturning those convictions. They celebrated the lowering of the voting age — those who were drafted into the war could now vote against it — then cheered the end of the draft, President Nixon’s fall, and, finally, the war’s end. But as the decade ground on, Rubin’s speaking engagements and book contracts dried up, and he needed to find a job. Because, as one old lefty pal pointed out, “radicals don’t have good pension plans.”
With his usual focused intensity, Rubin sent out hundreds of résumés, and eventually landed a job on Wall Street with the brief to investigate “new companies of the future, including those producing solar and other alternative-energy sources.” There were no end of folks calling the former stock-exchange prankster a “sellout,” but those who knew Rubin best saw his search for socially conscious companies as an extension of his earlier radicalism. By the 1980s he was organizing mass social-networking parties at Studio 54 (decades before Mark Zuckerberg dreamed up Facebook); photographs in the book show that there were more women and minorities trading business cards on the dancefloor than would ever be allowed onto the exclusive golf courses where the old boys’ network reigned. During this period, Rubin, clad in suit and tie, and Hoffman, still in tie-dye, would sometimes appear onstage together, debating the legacies of their glory days. Yuppies, those Young Urban Professionals of the Reagan era, were on the rise, and Hoffman groused, “You know, they cheer me, but they’re gonna do what Jerry says!” Although he wouldn’t admit it, Hoffman was following Jerry’s lead, too — making a killing in commodities trading.
A prescient booster of Apple computers, seeing them as another way to spread the progressive word, Rubin had moved into marketing health food, seeking — as Stella Resnick, an ex-girlfriend with whom he remained close, put it — a “connection between personal growth and social consciousness, between liberating the mind through therapy and having a healthy body and eating wholesome food.” By this time Rubin was living in L.A., and in the Nineties he began to think of a holistic approach to all he had learned from his years as an activist and a businessman. Resnick recalled, “One of Jerry’s last projects, begun just prior to his death — that of teaching inner-city kids to become entrepreneurs — might have united all the disparate personas of his life, if he had lived long enough.” Unfortunately, in 1994 Rubin was struck by a car as he was crossing Wilshire Boulevard. As Thomas writes near the end of his book, “Having been a New Yorker for most of his adult life, he exercised his God-given right to jaywalk — across eight lanes of L.A. traffic.”
In a 1970 essay, Rubin had summed up his conflicted love for the country he protested against: “I am a child of Amerika. If I’m ever sent to Death Row for my revolutionary ‘crimes,’ I’ll order as my last meal a hamburger, French fries, and a Coke. I dig big cities. I love to read the sports pages and gossip columns, listen to the radio and watch color TV. I dig department stores, huge supermarkets and airports…. I groove on Hollywood movies, even bad ones.” Only his diet would change when he grew up.
Now would be a good time for a Hollywood producer to see the wisdom of a big-budget Rubin biopic — we need it more than ever.
Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary
By Pat Thomas
Fantagraphics
272 pp. - Red Dirt Report
http://www.reddirtreport.com/rustys-reads/book-review-did-it-jerry-rubin-american-revolutionary-pat-thomas
Word count: 789BOOK REVIEW: "Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary" by Pat Thomas
Fantagraphics Books
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Andrew W. Griffin | August 23, 2017
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4.5 RustysBOOK REVIEW: Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary by Pat Thomas (Fantagraphics Books) 2017
Chock full of photographs, interviews, and even a chapter on attempts to “levitate the Pentagon” – for peace, of course – Pat Thomas’s biography on Yippie radical Jerry Rubin – the first ever, as it turns out, and a long-time comin’ – is nearly overwhelming in its overview of Rubin’s life, views, visions, comrades, and many achievements, much to the chagrin of “The Man,” particularly in the early days of his uncompromising activism.
And that was to end the Vietnam War, push for social change and to make America reflect the values its long claimed to aspire to and hold dear.
Thomas (Listen, Whitey! The Sights & Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975) is very, very cool and hip to the counterculture, having also compiled an Allen Ginsberg box set, cureated CD and LP reissues by everyone from Judee Sill and The Dream Syndicate to Tim Buckley and Public Image Ltd.
So, out of the gate, Thomas stars off, in his introduction, telling us about a man who was a leader who was also ahead of the curve. Who, despite compatriot Abbie Hoffman's criticisms, was not the "sell out" he seemed to be in the 1980's - the Jewish Yippie-turned-yuppie from Cincinnati, before his death in 1994. The Suit. The Man. Wasn't that what the Sixties Generation, the Baby Boomers were fighting?
But Rubin was smarter and more shrewd than Hoffman and the rest. He paved the way for those environmentally-conscious entrepreneurs you hear about on the West Coast and elsewhere.
"Beware the Creeping Meatball" was a way of telling those willing to listen that we needed to avoid "the acceptance by society of mediocrity as a virtue."
As former Canadian-Stalinist-turned-American-Yippie Judy Gumbo recalls in the book, soon after meeting Rubin, that while he was intense and not always easy to get along with, his passion was infectious. Gumbo recalls him saying in his recognizable "exaggeration-made-believable-by-enthusiasm voice" that "The way to eliminate fear is to do what you're most afraid of! Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball!"
The Yippies, from YIP, or "Youth International Party" a counter to the National Death Party (the Democrats), who were to meet in Chicago in Summer '68 (and we know how that turned out) for the launching of a new "reality," as they called out to like-minded young people. As he says in the pre-Chicago announcment, "Begin preparations now! Chicago is yours! Do it!" (Bold emphasis ours).
Multiple pages are devoted to folk singer Phil Ochs' link to Rubin and how the clash in Chicago during the Democratic convention really had a serious impact on Ochs, with him cutting back on live performances and becoming convinced that the Yippies were incapable of really "provoking any kind of change in the status quo." The topical troubadour would tell the media that America died in Chicago and that a "fascist military state" had arisen out of Chicago's ashes. Ochs' mental state would take a major dive by the time the 1970's rolled around, with the civil-rights movements and social-justice movements having splintered into factions and fallen apart as a generation became worn out and even Bob Dylan was turning inward and living in the country.
Rubin lamented Ochs' death by suicide, stating that "What makes you angy about Phil's death ... here's this nonviolent person, who sang about nonviolence, his life was a statement for nonviolence, who dies by hanging himself. It doesn't make any sense." And Rubin was not alone in sharing that opinion.
In any event, the Yippies were not winning over folks in Middle America, particularly with their support of "Vietnamese peaseant guerillas" and "The black and other struggling people in America."
But The System was determined to shut 'em down. Just note the Chicago 8 Trial debacle, hanging out with John Lennon and Yoko Ono and, by the time 1980 rolled around, he seemed like a different person - a Yuppie - who did not support the GOP and Reagan, but Gary Hart, not unlike his contemporary, "gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who was also deeply affected by what happened in Chicago years earlier.
Pat Thomas clearly went to great lengths to put together this remarkably readable and interesting book, which showcases a time in recent American history where embracing "meatballism" seemed like a safe bet.