The Spider's Web - John Esam's Sixties

by Andrew Schmidt

http://mysterex.blogspot.com/

There's a famous photograph of John Esam sitting in London’s Royal Albert Hall on Friday 11 June 1965, eyes behind dark glasses, roll your own in his right hand, watching, smiling, as the woman next to him throws her arms to the sky in joy, and Allen Ginsberg, Aiden Mitchell, Gregory Corso, Paolo Leonni, Richard Fainlight, Michael Horowitz, Laurence Ferlinghetti, and Simon Vinenoog - a new generation of poets - shine their light on the tribe-gathering Poets of the World - Poets Of Our Time reading director Peter Whitehead is filming as Wholly Communion.

The Spider, as his English friends have dubbed him, is waiting his moment to read, at this, the real dawn of the 1960s in England. He's leaning forward, excited, not at all daunted to be in such high company. A Kiwi poet from Hastings.

Although little known at home his tale is sprinkled liberally through the history of the 1960s counter culture in Britain, Europe, and America. His gift was being there. Being involved. In publishing. In drug experimentation. In film. Avant garde music. A complex web of sightings and happenings.

When I contact him early in the new millennium he says he's never been back to New Zealand. That no one will remember him. And it's true. His New Zealand trail is light. A childhood on an orchard in Hastings. Time spent time in Auckland and Wellington. Sightings at free jazz nights. Self confessed drug experimentation. In a 1961 letter to his friend, Margaret Garland, Esam, describes stumbling down the hill from Victoria University high on Nembutal. "There was a circle of intense light about me. I was looking down a tunnel at a field. Then I heard a voice coming through the grass, the tree in the corner of the field—Nature—calling my name, “John ... John ... Come ... Come ...’ beckoning me. The life went out of me into that world; I possessed nothing of mine any more, no talents, no personality possessions, no life of my own ... I considered this for awhile, then straightened up, and went down the hill to find a chemist, a florist and a stomach pump.”

In June 1961 he'd have a poem - Knowledge and Wisdom - published in literary journal, Landfall. The first of three that decade. When I tell poet and writer Kevin Ireland, who was at the Wholly Communion I’m writing a story about New Zealand beat poet, John Esam, he's first fractious and angry, relenting only at the second interview. Ireland met Esam in Wellington in the early 1960s when he hung out with artist Ivan Johnston. “There was symbiotic relationship - self fashioned and self created - between Johnson and Esam. A symbiotic friendship,” Ireland remembers, before describing the poetry scene in those years. “We were bohemians before there were beats, then we read Kerouac, and realised this was what was happening. It was an Australian, United States, and New Zealand thing. There was no beat alternative in London. They were way behind. They were more into the Young Communist League and French surrealism while we were into existentialism. A true alternative lifestyle not based on anything that went before.”

Sometime in 1963 John Esam left New Zealand in search of that community. Successfully it seems. He's spotted in Paris in October 1963 at a reading with Australian beat Daevid Allen as part of Arts Du Language Biennale de Paris.

His next confirmed sighting is London in 1964 when English counter culture pioneer and king pin John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins remembers him blowing in from Greece with mime artist/ actor Daniel Richter, who had a part in Planet of the Apes. Richter and his wife Jill had had a bookstore and magazine, Residue, in Athens, and were connected to the New York underground. In London Esam lived with them at 101 Cromwell Rd with writer George Andrews, the house’s owners' Nigel and Jenny Lismore-Gordon, friends of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, folk singer and TV show host Julie Felix, poet/ film-maker Paolo Leonni, and City Lights publisher/ poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

It was there they hatched their mad idea - Esam and the Richters - for a poetry reading at the Royal Albert Hall highlighting the international nature of the new poets. Jill Richter put up the hall hire money. Her husband, their flatmate Esam, and poet Alex Trocchi organised the show. The first major coming together of the British counter culture. From then on Esam would never be far from the unfolding action. He became an enthusiastic disciple of LSD, then still legal, after meeting Michael Hollingshead, the man who introduced Tim Leary to acid then returned to England to set up the World Psychedelic Centre in Pont Street to recreate the environment from Milbrook, Leary’s acid retreat. In 1966 Esam appeared with some of his heroes in Conrad Rooks’ cult movie, Chappaqua, a semi-autobiographical surreal movie about a withdrawing heroin addict and his cold turkey hallucinations set in Paris, and filmed by cult great Robert Frank.

Esam plays The Connection alongside William Burroughs (Opium Jones), Ravi Shankar (Sun God), Allen Ginsberg (Messiah), Jean-Louis Barrault (Dr Benoit), Ed Sanders of the Fugs, and Ornette Coleman (Opium Eater), whose soundtrack was considered “too good” by the directors of the movie, and has only recently been released by Get Back Records. The Jazz fan in Esam was also busy, getting together with Steve Stollman, brother of avant garde jazz label ESP Records’ owner Bernard Stollman, to establish the Sunday afternoon Spontaneous Underground at the Marquee club. A series of happenings which linked the earlier beat events with the rising psychedelic movement by featuring ESP artists and the early avant-garge period Pink Floyd. All that activity attracted attention and in February 1966, John Esam was busted at his home in South Kensington throwing several thousand trips impregnated in sugar out the window. Despite the fact LSD wouldn’t be illegal until September 1966 Esam was charged with possessing ergot, thought an ingredient of LSD, and illegal under the Poisons Act. John Esam, 31, described as a freelance writer, appeared at the Bow Street Magistrates Court on 6 April 1966 along with 19 year old Russell Page, like the Lismore-Gordons, another of the Cambridge set, soon become one of the men behind Pink Floyd’s pioneering light show. They were charged with conspiracy to distribute the drug known as lysergic acid diethylamide and remanded for a fortnight. Esam was also charged with receiving a tin containing a quantity of LSD-25 knowing it to be stolen. Frederick Klein, aged 25, actor, jointly charged with them, absconded, and there was a warrant out for his arrest.

The next day, The Times - under the headline - Vision of Hell Drug Charges - Two Men In Court - quoted prosecutor George Shindler as saying, "LSD-25, which has recently received much publicity, was a hallucinatory drug, and it was an offence to sell it without a prescription. “It is clear that Esam is in touch with people all over the world who are taking this drug,” he added. They were back in court on 10 May 1966 charged with unlawfully selling the drugs LSD25 and DMT without a prescription between 14 June 1965, and 21 February 1966. Esam was also accused of receiving a tin containing LSD 25 knowing it to have been stolen. Esam’s counsel said his client was pleading Not Guilty to the charges and reserved his defense. Page also reserved his defense. When Esam was told that he had no right to sell drugs as he was not a chemist. Esam replied: “I am quite aware of that, but until you have used this stuff (LSD) properly you do not know how exhilarating it can be." Bail for both was renewed.

When the LSD furore broke in the tabloid press, Michael Hollingshead fled, but Esam stayed put, and if legendary hash dealer Howard Marks is to be believed, kept using the drug. In David Leigh’s High Time - The Shocking Life and Times of Howard Marks, Leigh recounts a visit by an acid bearing Esam to Marks at Oxford in August 1966. Esam banged on Howard’s door at the top of a Balliol stairway. “Hi, we’ve been told you were a groove,” he said. He had a pocketful of sugarcubes at three pounds each. “I can get you as much as you like. I’m making it at home in the kitchen.” Marks bought Esam’s sugarcubes and pushed them hard around Oxford.

Then Esam together with psychologist Steve Abrams, and Paolo Leonni organised a Legalise Marijuana meeting which eventually lead to The Times full page ad signed by many notables. The meeting included guests such as singer and model Nico, and the Police, drawn by the event’s effective advertising. The police raid was announced next day in the press with a photo of the participants with their eyes blacked out under a Smoking Marijuana after Midnight headline. In January 1967, nearly a year after they were busted, John Esam and Russell Page were acquitted of all charges after Professor Ernst Chain, a Nobel prize winner for medicine said in evidence that in his opinion the drug did not conform to the existing poison rules. Albert Hofmann, the original distiller of LSD, then gave evidence that the ergot used to make LSD was different from the one banned in the Poisons Act.

No one would have blamed Esam for lying low after that but 1967 proved just as furious a year. He was assistant director on Peter Whitehead’s “swinging London” documentary, Tonite, Let’s All Make Love In London, which featured Allen Ginsberg, The Small Faces, and Mick Jagger, amongst other period movers. The hard rolling times were beginning to take a toll on Esam. His friend Jenny Lismore-Gordon thought him full of fear. "Esam had already been busted in Paris in the early 1960s, and had been in prison, and was very bitter about that. He was very paranoid,” she recalled. Steve Abrams concurs: “After the trial Esam was a changed man. He wouldn’t have anything to do with drugs. He didn’t take another drug for ten years. He was so miserable, he’d have been happier to have taken them.” He may not have been taking drugs but he was still heavily involved in the counter culture editing Image, a glossy magazine that ran to over ten issues in 1967 and 1968. Contributors included Oz artist Martin Sharp and photographer David Larcher.

When an issue was confiscated in the United States a fund raising concert was organised in a fortnight. There was only time for one press ad. Christmas on Earth Revisited was named after a Barbara Rubin film of a 1966 Allen Ginsberg poetry reading. The all night show, designed to follow up successful psychedelic gatherings 14 Hour Technicolour Dream and Love-In Festival, both held at Alexandra Palace, was staged in the cavernous Kensington Olympia on Friday 22 December 1967, and featured the top English acts of the day including The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, Soft Machine, The Move, Pink Floyd (Syd’s last major show before flipping out), Graham Bond Organisation, Sam Gopal Dream, DJ's John Peel and Jeff Dexter, The Move, and Tomorrow. The Who, scheduled to play, didn’t turn up. Despite the attendance of up to ten thousand fans the show was a failure financially. It was a really cold winter and the venue was out of the way, and many hippies had gone home for Xmas.

Those who went saw three simultaneous 360 degree light shows on towers, bumper cars, a plastic inflatable hanging from the roof, movies, and a fashion show. A movie filmed of the event was a disaster. The old 16 mm film stock was degraded. In the end little was useable because the footage was too dark although some shots appear at the beginning of Jimi Live in Monterey film, and the See My Music Talking video (now called Experience). A similar event at the Paris Olympia to recoup the losses was an even greater disaster. That's where John Esam drops off the radar. There was Haiku, a poetry collection in 1968 with Tom Raworth and Anselm Hollo. He also penned the sleevenote for Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper’s left field solo album, 1984, in 1972. Other than that details of John Esam's movements in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s are scant until 1998 when Australian beat eccentric Daevid Allen discovered while visiting avant garde composer Terry Riley that John Esam was living near San Francisco. He found Esam immersed in the teachings of Gurjieff’s Third Way. A founding member of a thriving agricultural community set in low hills on red soil with a magnificent fountain surrounded by a thriving and carefully composed selection of herbs, vegetables, and flowers. In 2000, Esam finally got some due in his native land when Knowledge and Wisdom was included in Auckland University Press' Big Smoke - New Zealand Poems - 1960 - 1975. Four years later he released Orpheus Eurydice - Songs Late and Early, Poems 1954 - 2002, a live CD of Esam reading his masterwork on 21 Septembert 2003, which included the voice of friend and avant garde composer Terry Riley.