Jesus, no wonder Lionel had a stroke. What a nightmare it must have been for him to see the honest rebellion that came out of World War Two taken over by a witless phony like Warhol. . . the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Lights, Noise, Love the Bomb! And then to see a bedrock madman like Ginsberg copping out with tolerance poems and the same sort of swill that normally comes from the Vatican. Kerouac hiding out with his “mere” on Long Island or maybe St. Petersburg. . . Kennedy with his head blown off and Nixon back from the dead, running wild in the power vacuum of Lyndon's hopeless bullshit. . . and of course Reagan, the new dean of Berkeley. Progress Marches On, courtesy, as always of General Electric. . . with sporadic assists from Ford, GM, ATT, Lockheed and Hoover's FBI.

And there's the chill of it. Lionel was one of the original anarchist-head-beatnik-free lancers of the 1950's. . . a bruised fore-runner of Leary's would-be “drop-out generation” of the 1960's. The Head Generation. . . a loud, cannibalistic gig where the best are fucked for the worst reasons, and the worst make a pile by feeding off the best. Promoters, hustlers, narks, con men -- all selling the New Scene to Time magazine and the Elks Club. The handlers get rich while the animals either get busted or screwed to the floor with bad contracts. Who's making money off the Blues Project? Is it Verve (a division of MGM), or the five ignorant bastards who thought they were getting a break when Verve said they'd make them a record? And who the fuck is 'Tom Wilson,“ the ”producer“ whose name rides so high on the record jacket? By any other name he's a vicious ten-percenter who sold ”Army Surplus commodities“ in the late 1940's, ”Special-Guaranteed Used Cars" in the 1950's, and 29 cent thumb-prints of John Kennedy in the 1960's. . . until he figured out that the really big money was in drop-out revolution. Ride the big wave: Folk-rock, pot symbols, long hair, and $2.50 minimum at the door. Light shows! Tim Leary! Warhol! NOW!

The Distant Drummer, vol. I, no. I, November 1967

Collect Telegram from a Mad Dog

Not being a poet, and drunk as well,

leaning into the diner and dawn

and hearing a juke box mockery of some better

human sound

I wanted rhetoric

but could only howl the rotten truth

Norman Luboff

should have his nuts ripped off with a plastic fork.

Then howled around like a man with the

final angst,

not knowing what I wanted there

Probably the waitress, bend her double

like a safety pin,

Deposit the mad seed before they

tie off my tubes

or run me down with Dingo dogs

for not voting

at all.

Suddenly a man with wild eyes rushed

out from the wooden toilet

Foam on his face and waving a razor

like a flag, shouting

It's Starkweather god damn I Know

that voice