Interview Charlie Brown Turn On Tune In Take Over

INTERVIEW: 

CHARLIE BROWN

TURN ON TUNE IN TAKE OVER

A taped conversation with Charlie Brown, freak extraordinare, candidate for California State Legislature, and Boo Hoo of the Berkeley Bag of the Neo American Church. Charlie Brown was in Detroit in early February, with him he brought beautiful weather, beautiful Indian stories and the message of oneness. Half of the conversation was lost due to mechanical fuck-ups.

CHARLIE BROWN: "This peace pipe is about three feet long, the bowl is clay, I made it myself. I use a mixture of Indian wild tobacco, eucalyptus leaves, sweet bay, sage and grass."

PUN: "How do you find this stuff to smoke, how do you know it will get you stoned?"

CB: "I live with the Indians quite a bit and I spend a lot of time in the wilderness, and there are all these things growing that just say 'smoke me'. You know my spiritual guides do an awful lot about getting me stoned. Like there are times when I need to be stoned, you know, to dig something and so they see to it that I get stoned, like if I need to be stoned they see to it that I am in a situation where there are drugs. But like sometimes I need to be stoned, like I've smoked the pipe with all these things in it but no grass, and I really get stoned like as stoned as I get on acid, other times I've smoked the pipe with grass in it and I didn't get near as stoned."

PUN: "Where are you going from here?"

CB: I have a few speaking engagements in Chicago and Kansas City, then back west. I have to speak at the University of Colorado."

PUN: "Where are you coming from?"

CB: "Berkeley. I've been getting the truck ready for this speaking tour, we have a whole planet to turn on, and what I want is for everybody to turn on, so I travel around speaking on campus and doing things like I did at the Grande Ballroom, playing my autoharp and rapping between sets, radio, TV. I'm trying to get some better understanding and communication going. You know the whole scène is spreading like wildfire over the whole planet. Like dig it, it's the NEW AGE CONSCIOUSNESS, this is the new age that has been prophesied in all the major religions and dig it, it's happening now. There is no power on the planet that can stop it. Our society is fucked up, I mean it's really sick. You've probably read Grapes of Wrath, well all these people went Oklahoma to get land, their own land, to live on and grow their own food on, and then the bankers came in and drove the people from the land. These are the people who I call the slave makers, the bankers. Man, they drove the people off their land, and dig it, the ghettos are packed with people who should be living on their own land and growing their own food. The slave makers get the people off the land where they can survive and they get them into the cities where the people are helpless and they can't survive without depending on their SYSTEM, and then you're trapped, you're trapped into car payments and house payments. But like the whole thing is breaking up because people are turning on and what's responsible for this more than anything else is drugs."

PUN: "Right, but straight people don't want to believe that drugs have anything to do with it, like if we go someplace to speak, one of the questions that is always asked is why can't you turn on without drugs? The women will sit there with plastic hair and plastic tits and weird shit all over their faces and say, 'Well I'm turned on and I didn't have to take LSD."

CB: "Right, of course they've been brainwashed and programmed, they think they're alright. Here, I'll show you the Indian Peace Pipe Ceremony. (Pointing pipe to east) To the east wind where the day begins. (Takes toke) (Pointing pipe to the south) To the south wind which brings us warmth. (Takes toke) (pointing pipe to the west) To the west wind where the day ends. (Takes toke) (pointing pipe to the north) To the north wind which brings us all that is cold. (Takes toke) (pointing pipe to earth) To earth mother who takes care of her children. (Takes toke) (pointing pipe to heaven) God father and all you cats out there be sure to get us good and stoned. (Takes toke)............(pause)............See why they call it a peace pipe? If we could get everybody in the world to sit down and pass the peace pipe around we wouldn't have any more wars. Like lifetimes previous to this I was an Indian, and we can't talk about pushing the white man into the sea, the white man is our brother and what we have to do is turn him on, turn him on or all of us will be destroyed together. And the Indian way will survive all others, and hippies are turning on to the Indian way because it is real and natural. People are sold all those products, and you know people do motivational research on Madison Ave. and they fuck with your mind without your knowledge or permission. So you feel like you need to buy these things because it's what they're putting out over the tube. The slave makers have got to keep the people separate and hung up in possessions, they have to keep them from turning on and from loving each other and they put out all these lies and things to keep the people divided and fighting each other. They have to make them so neurotic they can't fuck and they can't love. Not fucking makes them more neurotic. Read Wilheim Reich's Sexual Economy, Function of the Orgasm. A mother cat doesn't need Dr. Spock to tell her how to raise her kittens, but like the human animal who is supposed to be most in-

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CHARLIE BROWN

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telligent of all the animals doesn't know how to raise their own babies. This shows something about people, like they're so far out of reality that like these drugs people take, like acid, and it's a psychic shock, suddenly they are faced with reality. . .I am prepared to travel anywhere and survive. Everybody should be prepared to leave the cities at 15 minutes notice and live off the land. I have a Tipi made out of nylon, it's 19 feet high, I've been in it in all kinds of weather. One time when the CIA and FBI were following me around making trouble for me the authorities came in 14 miles from the end of the road to teil me I couldn't set uf my Tipi in the wilderness."

PUN:"Are you into astrology at all?"

CB: "Yes, you know in Berkeley astrology is common dinner conversation. People are studying it and digging it and now some people are starting to get educated and not just brainwashed. Now people are getting turned on to their bodies and to all J.C. was talking about. Are you a member of the Underground Press?"

PUN: "Sure."

CB: "I'll give you my address, 104 Rainbow Path, box 9051, Berkeley 94719. I'm'a priest on the vows of poverty and I've vowed service to others and that's my life work, helping other people, but I don't get paid for it. So like anybody who thinks what I'm doing is worthwhile can contribute by just sending anything they want to the address I just gave you. I have a record album, Teton Tea Party with Charle Brown'. Broadside number 305, it's a Folkways album. The liner notes are the best presentation of my philosophy I've seen yet. I have an acid test case before the courts in California. Someone had to test the laws about acid use in religious services, and so my spiritual guides saw to it that I was busted. So we put out this press release, it said I smoked grass and use acid and I consider them sacred sacraments, I carry them in a bronze cross around my neck and in a wooden crucifix in my bag. My spiritual guides brought it to pass I was busted Easter Sunday after taking the Easter sacrament of 1500 micrograms of acid. There was some out of sight testimony in my case. The day before my trial I spent running around San Francisco handing out press releases to all the press, and all the press was there when the DA asked me 'Well, how much of these drugs do you use ' and I said different amounts for different occasions. Like the morning before my trial I took 250 mies of acid, 4 peyote buttons and a marijuana brownie. And like the Press picked up on it, and you know there I am on TV stoned out of my head, but I'm not some kind of green monster or anything but I can say like here is a situation that isn't handled the best way possible. It has to be straightened out and what I'm proposing is the most logical solution. That is, legalize acid for religious uses and research uses and those uses only. And like these drugs can be extremely dangerous, but then they can be the biggest spiritual boost known to mankind, used rightly. There are all of these people talking sense about drugs you know. The grass laws are going to be changed in the next session of the Cal legislature. They could abolish all the grass laws today but the public could never accept that. Like my program is to turn on the press so they can work with us."

PUN: "Yeah, the media is going to be their downfall, because like now the people who control the media control people 's heads, and they never show them anything new or anything to expand their consciousness, they are trying to keep the people as unconscious as they can, but now the kids are turned on and they listen to the songs and they read the Underground Press papers and they know what's going on, they can see. And the kids can tell true art forms, like they can tell what is real art like between the Monkees and the MC5.

CB: More and more people in the media are turning on and they are starting to experiment and get some art in their work. There is only one way this whole thing could be stopped, and that is if this planet were turned into a bunch of astroids between Mars and Venus like the planet that used to exist between Jupiter and Mars. Some planets make it and some don't, just like everything else. One thing people have to stop doing is identifying with the body, you are not that body, you are a spirit, energy, you are not your body. That is what Buddha, Jesus and the rest of those cats were telling us. You the spirit are eternal, everlasting. So why soul should you fear death? You get people turned on spiritually and they have no fear of death. Fear of death is one way of making slaves of people. But people are getting turned on to reality now. Who would dream that four of the masters would reincarnate as four funky rock musicians? But 'Seargent Pepper 's Lonely Hearts Club Band' is turning on the whole planet of young people. This album is a teaching device. The hippy movement is the most important social movement in this nation's history.

TOUCH

To touch to touch

is all there is, all 

there ever was. Yet

we are made afraid, dis-

trust what is most to us, spend

so much of what could have been

love, constructing an excuse for it, some

permissible context, some name, until

what is love is

not love is

no longer even rememberable, not song, b

more like a dove sound, like

that, that pressing of air on the throat.

And we are smothered by it, are

too much alone.  Our song

is skin, we must sing, 

must touch, it

is time.

David Franks