If anyone in this world had front row seat for the counter-cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s it was Wavy Gravy. From the Greenwich Village beatnik scene to the Acid Tests, Woodstock and more, Mr. Gravy (born Hugh Romney) had a hand in all of it, often using his particular brand of off-kilter humor to shed light on the absurdity of the age. These days everyone’s favorite hippie clown is busy doing what he’s always done—sharing zany stories of his past adventures with the masses. I caught up with Wavy to talk about his upcoming show in New York City (October 20 at City Winery), the awesome work he does with the SEVA Foundation, convincing the Grateful Dead to play a benefit show, bringing comedy to political activism, his children’s summer camp and much more.
You’ve got a couple of upcoming shows on the West Coast and in NYC, “Hippie Icon, Flower Geezer, and The Temple of Accumulated Error.” What can we expect from these shows? What’s going on here?
It’s basically my life and times and all of the weird stuff that I’ve encountered. We’re gonna’ spend some time with our lovely grandchildren and do the dinner thing and then segue into the “Cement Apple” and the City Winery, which is October 20th.
What I’m gonna’ do is spill the proverbial beans. Everything from when I went around the block with Albert Einstein when I was five years old. I’ve survived three Woodstocks. The first one made me famous; the second two got me paid. I’ve got a lot of stories about that. It’s not only Woodstock number one. I remember Woodstock two with Green Day and Billie Joe Armstrong getting on the microphone and saying “I bet you idiots can’t hit us with any mud” and it had just rained and a couple of hundred thousand people reached down and grabbed a handful of mud and threw it at the stage. You could have planted rutabagas on that stage in about a minute and a half. Three minutes in you couldn’t tell who was which band member because they had all turned brown. In fact, a security guy was pounding on Mike Dirnt, the bass player, because he thought he came out of the mosh pit. It was hilarious. You had to—no, you didn’t have to be there. I was there and I’ll tell you all about it and many other things.
I’ve done the Gathering of the Vibes every year for 15 years, I’ve run a circus and performing arts camp called “Winnarainbow” for close to 40 years. I am now getting the children of the children who first went to camp. We do 700 kids a summer, 150 at a time in 17 teepees and they learn juggling, tightrope, trapeze, unicycle, tall stilts. Our theatre department goes from Shakespeare to improv, our dance department from hip hop to West African. It’s survival in the 21st century or “How To Duck with a Sense of Humor” and a castle of compassion. They’ve got all that timing and balance. They learn numbers and letters in school. We teach them timing and balance. These kids give me nostalgia for the future, let me tell you.
Also my life is involved with a charity called SEVA which I have been doing for about 38 years with our house band. In the beginning it was the Grateful Dead and it was in Michigan. It was first formed in Michigan—Walden Woods, Michigan. I got out of the plane in Detroit to come back to the Bay Area and who should be on the plane but the Grateful Dead. They didn’t have parachutes so they were at my mercy. I got them to do the benefit.
The first one was at Kaiser Auditorium and Bill Graham didn’t know it was happening — “Why am I the last to know about these things, goddammit!” I was with Steve Parish, who was Jerry’s roadie backstage and listening to the band play and Bill comes by and slips me a note and I open it up and it’s a check for $10,000 for SEVA and I’m like “Why are you doing this?” and he goes “Because you did not hit on me my friend.”
I’ve got a bunch of Bill stories, lots of Jerry stories and all the other bands that I’ve interacted with. I just got to spend time with David Crosby and Graham Nash—David left early and gave me a guitar pick to remember him by but both David and Graham have played The City Winery where I’m gonna’ be October 20th and they liked it. They say I’m gonna have a good time there.
Sweet. So is this the kind of thing we can expect from the shows then? Crazy anecdotes about The Grateful Dead and Bill Graham and whoever else?
You bet whomever else! Whoever pops up in my soul. You know we actually drove two busses from London to the Himalayas which is recorded in this amazing movie called Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie made by Michelle Esrick who worked on this film for 10 years. We opened it at SXSW maybe three or four years ago and it has been on Showtime, it’s been on PBS, they showed it in all the movie theaters in America and then all over Canada. It’s an amazing documentary. We never looked at it until it was done and finished. It’s amazing, it’s a thrill and when I get into extreme geezerhood and I start to forget stuff, I can watch this movie once a week and remember who I was.
You’ve been MCing Gathering of the Vibes for some time now. Can you talk about how you got involved with Gathering of the Vibes?
My god, my chromosomes have amnesia. I’ve been doing the darn thing for close to 15 years I think and it’s the only time I leave camp Winnarainbow—to Gathering of the Vibes or to Woodstock. Like I said, I’ve survived three of them and if Woodstock comes back I’ll go. In five years it’s gonna’ be 50 years and that’ll be a big deal. Otherwise I just do Gathering of the Vibes because I’m an integral part of Winnarainbow and I like to give as much energy as I can to these kids because these kids are our future and they give me nostalgia for the future.
The Vibes is just like, it’s become my family, and I feel like I know all these people and enjoy not just MCing the show, but to wallow amongst them and exchange molecules and smiles and hugs and it’s an excellent festival. People don’t need to be told to pick up the trash. They are conscious concertgoers, which is a rare thing on planet earth. I’ve got to honor that and respect it and I am thrilled to be part of it.
This year you actually performed with Edward Sharpe and Leftover Salmon. Does that kind of thing happen often? How do you like getting on stage with the musicians?
Well, let me just tell you this—Vince [Hermann] from Leftover Salmon is my friend. They were bus rats and I’ve been connected with them since the beginning. I got to spend some time with Vince in Colorado where he took me to the festival honoring the frozen dead guy, which is some Lithuanian or something and once a year they pack him on ice and parade him downtown. I actually have a tee-shirt that says “I survived a frozen dead guy show.” It’s hilarious and Vince allows me to come on stage and grab a mic and make up stuff with the band playing and he is bouncing back and forth and we share a collective wacko together that develops into the music. I enjoy doing that with them.
Hot Tuna—I often get to go off with those guys.
The Magnetic Zeros! Those guys, holy moly! Edward Sharpe is the name of the dude with The Magnetic Zeros? The drummer in the middle of their set, I was getting tired and he jumped off the drums in the middle of a tune and ran over and gave me his drumsticks which I have in this room to this moment. And I adored them and also “Dispatch”—I got jiggy with “Dispatch” also. Hopefully we’ll be doing some SEVA stuff with those guys in the future.
How are your shows formatted? Do you have a few stories that you intend to tell or are you just sort of winging it? Is the audience participating?
Well sometimes the audience participates. At the end of the last show I did I asked if anyone had questions because the next to the last show I did people said “Well, how come you don’t ask if anybody has any questions at the end?” So I thought I better do that, and I asked that the next show and nobody had any questions. So, you win some you lose some. You never know what’s gonna’ come down the pink or what’s gonna’ come out of my ass. I may begin chronologically in my life or whatever pops up first and if I get stuck I made a couple of notes in a little book. Just one word to kick myself off, like Paul Krasner once told me “When I do a show I always write down seven things in case I get stuck.” I took his advice except I wrote down about 47 things. I’ve hardly scratched the surface.
How did you first get involved with SEVA? What is the organization’s mission?
SEVA came out of the beautiful brain of an amazing woman named Nicole Grasse who headed up the smallpox eradication in India and Southeast Asia. She could be talking to me one moment and then swivel around to deal with the Prime Minister of whatever country. And she was an elegant woman in a Dior dress except it’s a copy. She brought measles vaccines through anti-aircraft fire into Lisbon. She’s just this incredible, incredible woman and she pitched us about SEVA and about how 80% of the people in the world that are blind don’t need to be and can get their sight back and when we first started doing stuff in the beginning it was just 5 or 10 bucks that would enable someone to have a cataract surgery in the third world. If you’re blind in the third world they refer to you as a mouse without hands, it’s pretty devastating to the family and to the village, the whole deal. And suddenly you’ve got your sight back! You’re able to look at your kid, your grandchild, your wife and your work! You are once again plugged back into society and it’s an extraordinary thing when I am able to say to an audience that every seat in this theatre is equivalent to somebody in the third world not bumping into shit. That’s kind of thrilling.
We’ve done 3.5 million sight-saving surgeries orchestrated throughout the third world. We started out in India and Nepal and then Cambodia, Tanzania, Egypt, there’s an eye clinic on the side of Mt. Kilimanjaro for heaven’s sake. And the Grateful Dead were the first guys involved and I’m flying back from the first SEVA meeting and they just so happened to be on the plane when I got on in Detroit, and since they didn’t have any parachutes I went to work on the drummers.
I always start with Billy and Mickey and get them on board. Then Jerry. He’s—or he was, he’s not anymore—however, I still yearn for his company. We used to enjoy art together. My last hours with Jerry were spent exploring the art of Andy Goldsworthy backstage before a show. I happen to have a bunch of Jerry art that he has passed on to me and I have done some art of Jerry [myself]. I do minimalist collage. I don’t know if you have ever looked at any of my stuff. That’s how I first got to visit the projects in India. I went to Madurai because I had an art show in London so they were flying me over there so my wife and I were already there. Previous to that, I didn’t want to spend money on my airfare to go look at our projects because that same money would mean a bunch more blind people not bumping into shit. So I was hesitant to go until I did.
There’s this hospital in Madurai, India called Aravind. The guy that put it all together started with 12 beds and now it’s 12 hospitals. His name was Dr. Venkataswamy, which is like Jones over there. He was on our SEVA board and it was really wonderful to see him standing backstage digging it all at Dead shows. Doctor V—we called him Dr. V instead of Venkataswamy. He had these really arthritic really pretzel hands and he had these special instruments made so that he could continue to do cataract surgeries. Even though his fingers were bent out of shape he was still a master of it. At his hospital, if you had money you could pay, but if you didn’t have money it was free. After he passed on his family continued on in that mode.
We also put together a hospital in Lumbini, right near where Buddha was born in Nepal. We had avoided bricks and mortar until people asked for it. That’s the thing. We like to do stuff not from the top down, but from the bottom up. Seeing what the folks wanted, we’d try and help them acquire whatever that was and this time it was a hospital in Lumbini and I actually got to visit it. In Madurai I got to put on a doctor’s clothes and scrub up and I was standing next to this surgeon as he removed a cataract from the eye of one of the poorest of the poor. It was the highest moment of my life, totally transcending anything out of psychedelics. I mean it just took me into the light and… So people ask me why I do this, and I’m basically in it for the buzz. It gets me high. Kesey gave me a great line, when Kesey passed I wrote this haiku: “They say Kesey’s dead / But never trust a prankster / Even underground.” HA! Remember my Jerry haiku?
No. How does it go?
For Garcia, when he passed. It goes like this: “The fat man rocks out / Hinges fall off heaven’s door / Come on in, says Bill. That’s a good one. That’s a keeper. So now, I’ll be sharing poems and haikus.
I was a teenage beatnik—did you know that? I used to read my poetry in Greenwich Village. I started jazz and poetry on the East Coast when I was going to Boston University Theatre School. I read in Time magazine that they had done this jazz and poetry in San Francisco, and I was like “I know some musicians and I’ve written some poems, let’s do that!”
So we took over the basement of this pizza-joint bar on Huntington Ave in Boston called “The Rock.” The place was called the rock and the pizza place was called “The Pebble and The Rock” and they acquiesced to us and I got the students from the museum school in Boston to decorate the place with black tablecloths and mobiles. We got some musicians together and we did it, and over the years I got some amazing musicians to come do jazz and poetry. I got Don Ellis and Jaki Byard. There were some great, great musicians that I did jazz and poetry with. We used to go to Hartford, CT every Monday and make a pile of money. I invented a cover charge in Hartford, CT back in the early 60s and it lasted well into the 70s. Go figure.
Do you have any other stories from your beatniks days?
You know, when I first started at The Gaslight people would go around the block four deep because they wanted to come in and look at Beatniks. That was the buzz. We’d have a certain number of poets read and then pass a basket around and people would throw photos of dead presidents in the basket and the poets that read would share the money and then some others.
So I was the poetry director, me and John Brent at the Gaslight and after I got out of theatre school it got tedious writing these poems, so it turned into haiku. In between poems, I would talk about the weird stuff that happened to me in my life until this guy came along and said, “Look, skip the poetry. Just talk about the weird stuff.” And he started mailing me around the country.
I did Peter, Paul, and Mary’s first gig ever anywhere at a place called The Bitter End in NYC. I toured with Ian and Sylvia in Minneapolis, Chicago at The Gate of Horn and all that stuff. I did stand up for them. Just saying whatever came out of my head, it didn’t come from too much reality. I was mostly just tripping, talking about whatever fell out of my brain. I opened for John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk doing stand up. These days I don’t stand up anymore, I do sit-down. But it’s always an adventure and you just never know what’s going to pop up.
I actually heard a funny story about you from a friend of mine. She is the daughter of a friend of yours, Ed Rosenthal.
Oh yeah!
Justine, she’s good friend of mine and she told me that when she was a little girl, you came and stayed over at their house. You slept in the guest room next to her bedroom and the next morning you told her parents that you could hear her farting through the walls all night. She was very embarrassed by this, because she didn’t think she farted in her sleep.
Maybe it was only the wind. I remember nothing. Though Ed and I did go up to the Hilton once—in Indianapolis I think—and we were sponsored by HEAD: “Hoosiers Embarrassed About Dan.” I’m talking Dan Quayle here. I told loads of stories and Ed showed slides of buds with little purple hairs on them or something. He would show these buds and everybody would cheer.
That sounds about right.
Because of my children’s camp, I’m kind of low-key about drugs, although I do speak for medical marijuana. I can’t get too heavy into psychotropics and all of that stuff, although I can talk about the ancient times and this traveling road show I did with The Grateful Dead called “Can you pass the Acid test?” I’ve got a lot of those stories.
Are there any other political issues that are near and dear to your heart? You’ve always been very politically active. How do you see the political climate today?
Well, I don’t know how aware you are of my political leadings when I was in the committee we campaigned for LBJ, and then LBJ and Robert McNamara got together and killed more people than anybody since the Atilla the Hun. So next time around we ran a pig for president, who was very famous. Her name was Pigasus and she was the first black and white candidate for that high office. And then when we came back from Asia in ’72 we discovered that the Zippies, which were a spinoff of the Yippies, were running a rock for president. So I said “Hey, if you liked our pig we’ve got a great rock.” I had this rock that I picked up at the base of Mount Ararat, where Noah crashed his ark and the first rainbow came. We ran a rock for president and a roll for vice president and at different rallies we would pass out different rolls—like cinnamon roll, jelly rolls, bagels. The idea was that you could always eat the Vice President.
One day I lost the rock in a taxicab in the Village after a recording session in New York and everybody was searching for the rock in the Village and on the radio from up the spinal telegraph came “Nobody for president.” Nobody’s perfect, of course, and so we ran Nobody for president pretty much non-stop for 3 elections. We changed it—they had the “Air Force One,” and so we made our bus the “Nobody Won,” because if nobody wins, nobody loses. For the speeches we used these lined up clicking teeth and that’s a whole story. But the last election I defected to Obama and all these anarchists got on my case and I said “Look, nobody made me do it” so they couldn’t argue with that.
This has been great Wavy. Do you have anything else you would like to add?
Nope, I think my life is now basically SEVA and camp. I like Obama. I think he’s got a hard job. I don’t know what’s gonna’ happen next but as Kurt Vonnegut said so brilliantly, “History is a list of surprises” and I like a good surprise. I hope I will be a good surprise to anybody who comes to my City Winery shows and anywhere else I pop up. I will enjoy taking your mind around the block or around the universe or whatever comes first.
