A note from the underground January 30, 1985
Dear Bob Fass:
I listened to your radio program this morning with late
regret. I live in great fear of losing people like you from the airwaves who
give me great joy. I have listened to your program on and off for many years;
there has always been a connection between me and the radio station, early on
when you still occupied the old church and my two closest friends hide under a
table there, tripping on LSD, wondering where all the sounds were coming from.
Recently you brought back very tender times with the old
tapes you played, particularly those surrounding the protest at the Chicago
Democratic National Convention in 1968 when my uncles did everything possible (short
of chaining me to the furnace) to try and keep me from attending.
Old names popped into my brain: Peter Rabbit, Gandalf, Jude
and all my other friends from St. Mark’s Place and the Renaissance Switch Board
where I hung out with Abbie Hoffman. – all of whom disappeared when I wasn’t
looking and when the old East Village began to change.
These were very tender memories and I thought could not be
recaptured because of the passage of time.
I was 17 in 1968 but felt so old and wise, wiser than I feel
now even though I have since read, studied, written and breathed those days,
trying to find my place in them – perhaps a foolish endeavor when I never railed
against the machine or felt the need to bring violent revolution the way many
of my contemporaries did. Still, your tapes brought their visions back into my
head, and rekindled the wish I could have stood like them, self-righteous in
their indignation and so self-confident in their deluded beliefs in social
justice.
My daughter is about
to turn 14, lost now in the great wilds of Pennsylvania, though born in the
midst of madness when her mother and I still lived on the Lower East Side
(1971) desperately trying to keep the faith with what later proved a faithless
movement, we needing to trade in our sandals. Love beads, bellbottom jeans and Nehru
jackets for something practical, even though we (my best friend Hank and I) had
memorized all of Alice’s Restaurant as if our national anthem, singing it over
and over from the first day we set foot in Manhattan during the summer of love,
harmonizing as we strolled the streets of Times Square and the meadows of
Central Park, until we made our way to Washington Square and learned new songs
from David Peal and his east side compatriots – Peal and Hank side by side at
Woodstock later, and then even when the village turned dingy and the flower
people turned into flower pots veins bursting with something far more lethal than
Miracle Grow.
All that time, we listened to you, out there in the ether,
like a spirit of something we desperately wanted to believe in, even when we
knew we could not, raising you up on the pedestal of the righteous when we knew
all along you were no different from the people you wanted to bring down, the
way all revolutionaries turn out to be just like the illusive dictators they
oppose.
We listened to you and then remembered, carrying your voice inside
our heads even as we strode out into the real world you and your followers knew
nothing about, our fingers still bruised like the fingers of our blue-collar fathers
were, blisters on our fingers, not from playing guitar, but from the brutal
reality of making a living.
And still even then, even knowing just how artificial the
promises you made us, how unattainable the fictional world you created, how out
of touch your perfect world where racism and bigotry can’t exist, we continued
to hope you might be right, knowing you couldn’t be, knowing that no matter how
many protests you inspired, leaflets you handed out, radicals you interviewed,
the world would continue to be the mean-spirited corrupt place we out here had
to struggle with, with no slogan to make it better, no preaching to convince
the masses that we can build a perfect world or even reshape the corrupt one
into slightly more perfect. We believed in you each time we heard your heavy
voice come over the FM airwaves, as you cast a spell we momentarily accepted as
truth – you being more honest in your faith than the usual radicals, you truly seeking
love and peace, when most of the radicals professing social justice merely
wanted power, their time at the levers to control us the way the bad guys you rail
against do.
I listen to you know from in front of a hot oven where I slave
to make my living each overnight, part of that nostalgia for a time and place
when we all sang in the streets and put flowers in the barrels of soldiers rifles
– long before the radicals turned mean, and spat on soldiers coming home from
war, or threw rocks at them on campus, when the summer of love turned into a
very, very long winter of hate – a very real climate change we must continue to
endure even now, all these years later, having learned that the protests of yesterday
become the intolerance of tomorrow.
But we always have you, always can listen in the midst of
darkness to your soothing voice telling us how it ought to be, how you hoped it
might have become, and we take comfort in that illusion right up until you go
off the air and the real world rises around us again to tell us different.
Keep the faith, brother, even if it is all an illusion
Your friend
Al
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