Rathbone's Ramblin' - Oz magazine

[rathbone]

OZ 39 The cover of No 39 was a big mistake. The issue didn’t sell well and the feedback from the distributers was that most punters took it at face value and assumed that it was, indeed the first edition of Thrilling Murder Comics.

Inside it was a real mixed bag, with pieces on the trial, on Lenny Bruce, Morocco, Vietnam and the Greening of America.

“The idea of greening involves colour, flowering, freshness of spring and, above all, respect for what is organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic. As things are now going there is a real possibility that intelligence may survive on this planet only in the form of self maintaining and self reproducing steady state electronic mechanism , having no need for atmosphere and no feeling or emotions to obstruct their relentless efficiency. In such forms, abstract thought, logic, mathematics and physics could continue to flourish on the planet, and some would see in this a triumph of purely spiritual principles over the trammels of the flesh........”

The Vietnam piece was an interview with a GI called Ronnie Allen who was 20. “Hard to say how many friends I’ve watched die. Depends on what you mean by friend. I can say anything from 50 - 100 - 150. Both GIs and South Vietnamese. I’ve had four really personal friends killed and there have been about eight others maimed for life. They’ve lost a leg or an arm or their eyes......They throw people out of helicopters to get them to talk. They all take two of them up in a helicopter and tell the first one to talk. If he doesn’t, they’ll get him by the door and tell his friend if he doesn’t talk they’re gonna throw him out. They’re trussed up, hands and feet tied together with hands behind backs. A lot of them will talk and a lot of them won’t. They get him up to ask him a question. He won’t talk. They’ll hit him a couple of times. Ask him to talk. He won’t talk. They’ll take him to the door of the chopper and sort of hang him out and hold on to him. He still won’t talk or make any moves likely to give us information so they’ll throw him out the helicopter ......”

As Phil Spector pointed out in the piece on Lenny Bruce: “Lenny was the only truthful philosophical genius of our time. He died from an overdose of Police.”

[rathbone]

OZ 40 This was a bumper edition 5th Anniversary issue.

The lead article was : “Never Trust Anyone Over Thirty........ It is one thing to boast ‘We are all Vietcong’, and self flattery to believe it. Recognising that violence is the first law of Gross National Product does not necessarily justify its use as a revolutionary weapon. Fighting fire always with fire ultimately leaves nothing worth saving......Not that the achievements are nil. The campuses crackled and smoked for a while, until everyone settled back down to their PhDs. Thousands have been given the courage to go their own ways, sidestepping toil for unworthy ends, risking their pensions for a life of poetry and adventure.....Lives, relationships and preconceptions have been shattered and reborn by the movements of liberation for blacks, gays, women and children. And even if the mass of society grind on, maybe shuffling to a new kind of music but bowed down by the old kind of motives, then while carving inroads isn’t as exciting as blowing up the fortress, it’s still better than not even bridging the moat......After five years of OZ thousands have been affected by the surfaces of counter culture, but who by the essentials? OZ has, alas, slackened its search for new talent, leaning too heavily on its special effects, mistaking the tradition of editorial eclecticism for sloppy standards, tolerating sometimes hysterical propagandaish rubbish..... There are enough radical reactors to begin a fourth world, but everyone’s still fighting over where to put the flag. “

There was an interview with John Peel which got things into perspective: “My reaction to music has always come from the small of my back and crept slowly up to the nape of my neck into my hair. I’m consumer, not a critic, and when I’m asked what my interests are outside music I reply immediately ‘Liverpool FC’, and there the list ends.”

Dear OZ, OZ has lost it’s guts. Your articles have become very acceptable these days. The magazine that once spanned all strata of thought and ideas is now exclusively middle-brow. Most of the features could have been written by one man. (They’re not are they?)
Yours faithfully, C Newcombe.

[rathbone]

OZ 41 “Like most women, I have never been free of the fear of rape. From a very early age I have thought of rape as part of my environment, something to be feared and prayed against like fire or lightning. I never asked why men raped; I simply thought of it as one of the many mysteries of human nature...... But though rape and the fear of rape are a daily part of every woman’s consciousness, the subject is so rarely discussed by male intellectuals that one begins to suspect a conspiracy of silence......When I was young my image of the sexual offender was a nightmarish amalgamation of the bogey man and Captain Hook. He wore a black cape and he cackled. As I matured so did my image of the rapist. Rape, I came to believe, was only one of many unfortunate evils produced by sexual repression. Yet though the theory that rapists are mentally ill is a popular one, this belief has no basis in fact. Studies indicate that sex offenders do not constitute a unique or psychopathological type, nor are they invariably more disturbed than the control groups to which they are compared......Every man I meet wants to protect me, I can’t figure out what from.”

The Night Assemblies Bill, if it becomes law, will enable a local council to break up, by force if necessary, any unauthorised gathering of people after midnight. Permits for gatherings must be applied for 4 months in advance. As if that wasn’t enough an amendment to the Bill states that wherever a local council decides any gathering is endangering public order it can disperse that gathering, no matter how small. This Bill is intended to end rock festivals.

Dear Readers, In an effort to encourage readership participation, we intend to increase our letters column in forthcoming issues. Note: We reserve the right to cut, chop, mutilate and edit any letter that we find offensive, boring, libelous or more than usually insulting.

[rathbone]

OZ 42 Did you hear about Mrs. Blackaller, who was recently convicted of seven charges of wasting police time during the OZ trial? She is the wife of some pathetic Old Bailey clerk who no-one had ever heard of until she began to write herself anonymous letters. She invented a pile of monstrous lies involving death threats from the OZ gang. A suspicious policeman noticed that the anonymous letters were all written on the same stationery and, despite unconcealed pressure from the authorities, an intrepid Sussex desk sergeant traced it back to Mrs. Blackaller and decided to prosecute. Mrs. Blackaller was convicted of all seven charges, notwithstanding loyal testimony from her husband, who has now presumably resigned from the Old Bailey in disgrace.

There was also this from Jimmy Reid of Upper Clyde Shipyards: “ Most people, most of the time, accept things as they are, that work is not satisfying but a means to make money to satisfy other needs. That they have little control over their lives. That they are lucky if they stay out of the clutches of the landlord or the law. That life is made bearable by a bit of sunshine, the cup final and the kids. People get so used to being bottled up, trod on and ordered about that they don’t notice it’s happening after a while. Except that the very conditions of work and the unsatisfied needs of everyday life continually force people into conflict with things as they are. And in every conflict people see new possibilities which they call their rights, their dignity, their freedom. A rat race is for rats. We are not rats. We are human beings.

Did you know that the British Standards Institute accepts defective product up to 0.5%? Which means that of Britain’s total output of 100 million condoms a year, half a million have holes in them.

[rathbone]

OZ 43
There was a fascinating copy of a letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, with some equally fascinating graphics from Martin Sharp. “ It is true that there may be moments when one becomes somewhat absent minded, somewhat visionary. Some become too absent minded, too visionary. This is perhaps the case with me, but it is my own fault. Maybe there is some excuse after all. I was absorbed, preoccupied, troubled for some reason, but one overcomes this. The dreamer sometimes falls into a well, but is said to get out of it afterward. And the absent minded man also has his lucid moments in compensation. He is sometimes a person who has his reasons for being as he is, but they are not always understood at first, or are unconsciously forgotten most of the time, from lack of interest. A man who has been tossed back and forth for a long time as if on a stormy sea, at last reaches his destination; a man who has seemed good for nothing and incapable of any employment ends in finding one and becoming active and capable of action. He shows himself quite different from what he seemed at first.”

As many of you will know, OZ has agreed to pay substantial damages to Mr. Robert Goldie Butler, a school teacher referred to in OZ 28, the Schoolkids issue. Although the sum of money which is to be paid the Mr. Butler is indeed substantial, the total legal costs incurred could perhaps best be described as astronomical. We have met hip lawyers and we’ve met pigs. We’ve met lawyers who cursed the magistrate and lawyers who shook our hand. But now we come to think of it, we’ve never met a poor lawyer.


Dear OZ, Why have the early experiments with different formats, such as the flowerchild poster (No.5), the fold out cover (No.4), the stickers (No.11) and the Magic Theatre (No.16) given way to such a standardised presentation? I’ll still keep reading you anyway. (I can’t forget the feeling of liberation I got when I read No. 6 and found the underground, but think it over. Fraternally, Rod.

[rathbone]

OZ 44 contained probably my favourite cookery column. It was about .....

” an ordinary restaurant in northern London. Maybe a dozen tables, good cutlery and glassware, bright table cloths, rather inviting pictures of chateaux and provincial France on the walls. A menu offering the staples of French cuisine at reasonable prices. It’s called The Gadabout. An ordinary restaurant? On the surface certainly. But another glance at the bilingual bill of fare and you’ll notice one particular specialite de la maison that tops the lot for originality: Cassoulet De Grand Souris - or to put it another way, Rat Stew........

Mrs Starr is a cheerful, earthy woman who has spent many years in the Lanquedoc area of France from where she derived most of the inspiration for her cooking. She saw nothing remarkable about this particular item on her menu and in fact pointed out that the Terrine De Campagne was made herself from the same sources. “Mostly we catch them ourselves out the back. Islington is literally overrun with rats and mice and they’re a completely free source of good animal protein. Nobody has complained. It’s only been on the menu since last October. I know of no law that I’m breaking, but if I’m eventually told to stop these two items, of course I will.”

As far as catering premises are concerned which come under the provisions of the Food Hygiene (General) Regulations 1970 even if a cafe proprietor has a kitchen or even dining room crawling with rats and mice, there is no way under which his premises can be shut down. All that can happen is that he is disqualified and the average fine that such proprietors have been awarded in the court is £11. H then simply bypasses the law by signing the cafe over to his wife, brother or whoever. Profits remain, customers still come in and the rats make sure they continue well fed.”

[rathbone]

OZ 45 Apart from the fold-out poster issues, OZ 45 was the largest of the magazines. It is too large to hold comfortably in the hand to read, and is best put down flat on a table.

Most of it was devoted to alternative consciousness or “ The Art of contemplating your navel”. There was a lengthy interview with Timothy Leary and extracts from Baba Ram Das’s book “Be Here Now”. The latter had a profound affect on me. I bought the book and have been largely living by its tenets for the last forty years.

Probably more influential was an article titled “Don’t Just Stand There, Spray Something”. Up until that time graffiti had been done with a can of paint and a brush. This article advised that things were much easier if you used the cans of spray paint sold by car repair shops. It outlined half a dozen different ways of making graffiti. Though the article was signed by Mao Tse Tung In Cheek, thousands of people took him seriously and graffiti turned into street art overnight.

Dear OZ, This is about a happening in my home town, Edinburgh. This is a town which is pretty well a straight’s paradise, but there are more and more good heads rising out of the idealogical excrement. And it so happens that these people gather at a place called the Harness. This a big cave of a room above a sports car and babycham type disco in East Fountainbridge. On Saturday the doors flew back and a half dozen or more nattily suited motherfuckers trucked in. They snuffled around, poking their snouts into a few drinks, found nobody stupid enough to let themselves be hassled, thought for a moment and said “Everyone not in a seat, get out.” The much busted Johnny Sutherland and his killer three-piece took the stage and played the pigs out with a heavily amended version of ‘Jailhouse Rock’. Now you know the score, let the heads of Edinburgh know that they’ve got to pack themselves into the Harness and by their very presence shove the pigs noses up their own arseholes. Power to the people. Keith Leadbetter.

(For those who can remember, this was the raid on the White Elephant, which resulted in it losing it’s licence and re-opening as Valentinos.)

[rathbone]

Welcome to OZ 46, a rich, juicy, bumper stew, which won’t win friends or influence anyone, but tastes fingerlickin’ fantastic. It spans 1930 to, well, eternity. You can sing along with Cole Porter while trudging through the long line of little red bookshops with John Hoyland. You can squat in it yourself, with our street talking guide, and increase your word power with our lexicon for screaming queens. What else? There’s the cut out sensation to end them all (save it and make a fortune), a sad inside account from PROP, the prisoners’ union, a true confessions put down of prick priggery , a portrait of Paris for those who think the Commune will make a comeback, Richard Neville on his favourite subject, himself, a call for an amnesty for all dope offenders, and a full colour flashback to the Great Moments of Rock. Who says that OZ has lost its sting? And there’s all the stuff we haven’t even told you about.

Are you sick of paying rent to some thieving bastard who won’t lift a finger in return? Maybe even worse, you haven’t got anywhere to live at all. If so, Stop looking for a moment. Why not Squat? In London and all over the country there are many thousands of houses standing empty. Mostly they’re gonna be knocked down. Councils, landlords, speculators all have their greedy eyes on the land on which old houses stand , land which they feel could be developed much more profitably. Whole neighbourhoods are being cleared. Pity about the people of course.

[rathbone]

OZ 47
As can be seen from the cover, OZ 47 covered many of the regular subjects: Women’s rights, the Environment, American and British politics, the Third World, even how to blow up a satellite.

For me, though, it was most memorable for an obituary of Derek Elm, a name now sadly almost all but forgotten. As you may have picked up from other of my posts of this forum, I have a thing about poetry. Derek Elm was a poet. Through my adolescence he became one of my favourite poets. What makes this issue especially poignant for me is that after it I gave my copy of Derek Elm’s only book of poetry ‘The Common Cause’ to a guy called Sheugie Gilchrist, who had been prompted to borrow it by reading this obituary. Sheugie promptly went off to Japan and the book went with him, and I have never been able to get another copy. It’s one of those on the mental list that I hunt for in vain in second hand bookshops, Amazon and Ebay.

‘The only way to reach the working class’, Elm said, ‘is through the standard of culture that they’ve been educated to accept and, whether you choose to accept this or not, the working class has been educated to accept a very low standard of culture.’

His poetry was all about ordinary people:
“The chip shop ladies stand around
In overalls, not lace
While steam and grease and unwashed hair
obscure their simple grace”.

As he expressed it ‘Why be so contemptuous of common people’s experiences? One of the traditional art forms of the common people is poetry. These art forms have been usurped by a handful of academics and it is our job to return them. The artist’s task is to inform, not administrate.’

Derek Elm died in a house fire just after Christmas 1972. He was 29. He once wrote “I am pleased to be called a crank. A crank is a small instrument that causes revolutions.”
Oh, how I empathise with that.

[rathbone]

And suddenly with OZ 48 it was all over. Quite simply, the money ran out. The last interview was with Timothy Leary. The last article was on building your own quadrophonic sound system.There was no last letter because there was no last Dear OZ page.

As a final flourish, it contained Wanker’s World, a special five page supplement of pure filth. “Newsagents are reminded that this magazine is of a strictly adult nature. Please keep it well out of the hands of minors. After all, the obscene publications act could put you away for a twelve stretch. Keep it clean or keep up those payments. You have been warned.”

“No space. No time. History repeats itself. The clock on the wall gives me four p.m. October 31st 1973. At five o’clock the printer’s final deadline comes into effect. How does one phrase an obituary in two hundred words for a magazine (damn it, OZ was more than a lousy magazine) that has eaten up the best part of the last five years of my life, and a lot of other people’s lives besides. For many of us working at OZ it was the focal point of our daily existence. A hideous form of marriage between humans and an inanimate concept. And as in all marriages, the energy feedback remained a continual, occasionally terrifying, two way process with a dynamism and tension that alternately sapped and sustained each partner. We used and abused OZ for our own purposes. We hurled it bodily from one editorial extreme to the other. We left it and came back to it a dozen times. We cursed it, passed it around and grew jealous of it. We treated it like a baby and it kicked us in the teeth. We shat on it, spat on it and wasted it. And now that it’s an adolescent and leaving home, none of us can believe it. It’s getting late and I’m not sure how to finish. History repeats itself. No space. No time.”