The Lyman Family's Holy Siege of America

[Truth4Youth]

An old Rolling Stone article that may be of interest to some people here.

The Lyman Family's Holy Siege of America
by David Felton

"The Manson Family preached
peace and love and went around killing people.
We don't preach peace and love..."
-Jim Kweskin


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Introduction
At the south end of Boston lies the Roxbury black ghetto, a dirty oasis of trees, homes and small stores that suddenly emerges from blocks of old factories and railroad yards. Like many of our nation's famous darktowns, Roxbury includes hundreds of decaying apartment buildings housing too many people on not enough land, ruthlessly noisy elevated trains, and a sprawling, brand new, all concrete police district station.
Yet there's something different here. It can be seen from all over Boston: a tower, an ancient brick watchtower that rises needlelike from a secluded hill - Fort Hill - in the center of Roxbury. A relic from the original American Revolution, the structure stands some 70 feet above an abandoned city park. The stone tablet commemorating it is itself nearly 100 years old and starting to crumble around these words:

On this eminence stood ROXBURY HIGH FORT, a strong earthwork planned by Henry Knox and Josiah Waters and erected by the American Army June 1775 - crowning the famous Roxbury lines of investment at THE SIEGE OF BOSTON.
Five years ago a small community of young white intellectuals and artists from the Boston-Cambridge area moved onto the hill and "took over" several empty apartment houses bordering the park. Relations with the black neighborhood immediately deteriorated, and soon guards, members of the new Fort Hill Community, could be seen patrolling the fort for the first time in almost 200 years.
Since then peace has returned, relations have improved, and there is some question on a recent summer evening why guards are still needed at Fort Hill. Or who, exactly, is being watched. It's dark, about 9:30 PM, as one of them approaches holding a flashlight. He appears troubled, glancing nervously up and down a long row of houses now owned by the community. Inside the first house some 60 Fort Hill members are eating dinner, methodically cleaning their plates after a 12-hour work day. Suddenly the guard turns and walks briskly to an area at the rear of the houses where garbage is dumped. He shuts off his flashlight and from a large green plastic garbage bag secretly retrieves a suitcase packed the night before. Then, without looking back, he runs as fast as he can, as fast as he's ever run, past the garages, past the basketball court, past the tool sheds, down the long dirt driveway at the rear, through the winding paved streets of the ghetto and the straight paved streets of the first factories, past the nearest subway station, where they'd be sure to check, to a second station, blocks and blocks away, more difficult to find.
As the sentry boards a subway train, safe for the moment, the interior lights reveal his panting, boyish face. He is Paul Williams, a rock author and first editor of Crawdaddy Magazine, who several months ago gave up his writing career to join the Fort Hill Community.
"I was very frightened, sure," he admitted later at his New York hideaway. "I said I was leaving the day before and they said I wouldn't be allowed to. They said they'd be watching me 24 hours a day. So I was super paranoid, super cautious. But that doesn't bother me. I mean, they owed it to me, in a sense, to keep me on the hill.
"If I grow enough, someday I may come back. I care about Mel Lyman more than anyone outside of myself; someday I may be able to care about him more than me. [The people who can, have something really beautiful going.]"

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I am going to burn down the world
I am going to tear down everything that cannot stand alone

I am going to shove hope up your ass

I am going to turn ideals to shit

I am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble
and then I am going to burn the rubble
and then I am going to scatter the ashes
and then maybe someone will be able to see something as it really is
Watch Out


- Mel Lyman

Intro

Part 1: What Ever Happened to Jim Kweskin?

Part 2: War Games at Bootcamp Melvin

Part 3: A Visit to the Wax Museum

Part 4: Days of Wrath on the Western Front

Intermission: Hello Boys: A Visit from the Karma Squad

Part 5: Invasion of KPFK: The Program of Richard Herbruck

Part 6: Hosanna, Hosanna

Part 7: [Melvin] at the End of the Road

Epilogue

Lyman Family's Responses to Felton

[Username]

~


Mindfuckers


Thanks for posting T4Y.

I was a big-time fan of Jim Kweskin and remember hearing, back in the day, he had joined a cult but never really followed up on it until recently...like for the past week I've been (coincidentally?) reading the articles you linked to, and it's every bit of frightening.

Shades of Laurel Canyon.
~

[slomo]

I don't know when that was written, but I lived on Fort Hill from 2001-2002. A dump then, and even more so now that the economy is unraveling.

There's now an ultra-modern mosque, fwiw.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Mindfuckers was an outstanding good book, way ahead of the curve on diagnosing the dark side of the 60s.

[Username]

~
Jim Kweskin - Sophie's Back In Town"



Dear Jim,

You gave a concert at Kent State University in 1970 and I was there.

I was surprised you performed without your jug band. Little did I know what you were into at that time. ( What Ever Happened to Jim Kweskin? )

Anyway after the concert, it may have been the following day, I saw you sitting all alone on a wooden bench inside one of the buildings as students hurried about on their way to class. You were wearing a black knit cap and a pea coat, and seemed absorbed in the book you were reading, which happened to be The Godfather.

More than anything else in the world I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your performance, but my heart would not stop racing and I couldn't muster up the courage to shower you with the adoration I felt inside. One smile from you or one word of kindness would have been all it took to sweep me off my feet at that moment. So I guess it was a good thing, because being so young and vulnerable I would have followed you anywhere. (gulp)

Several years later I wrote you a letter asking about a song you sang, Simple Boy, and you wrote back to me with the words and chords to that song.

Some of my best memories of that time, were of playing and singing your songs with our makeshift family jug band. I played guitar and sang, my sister played fiddle, her husband guitar, one brother played banjo, one brother on the washtub bass and my mom played harmonica.

Good times.

Then here recently, well I guess it was back in March and April, I came across the articles posted about your relationship with Mel Lyman. You can say I was a little disappointed...no... troubled by...no wait a minute, Jim, I was shocked...yes shocked.

I continue to try to make excuses for what happened like, "It must have been that hit on the head." or "It must have been the acid."

Whatever. The music is not the same anymore. Not as free and easy and fun.

I see on youtube, you're still out and about and performing with Geoff Muldaur and that's good. I'm glad.

I'd be even more glad if perhaps someday we could hear your side of the story? or idk, maybe an apology if one is due?

Your Friend,
Terry

*******


re: "hit on the head"

"And Kweskin was dealing. Kweskin was a pretty heavy dealer - top quality 'A' reefer, strictly grass. Then Jim had a really bad experience. He went to New York to pick up some grass, and some people ripped him off. They bashed him over the head with a brick - he was almost killed. It was a very traumatic experience for him, really turned his head around about a lot of things. This was in '65. I don't think he ever dealt after that again. It seemed to be a turning point in his life and, I would say from a distance, the Jug Band's life."

re: The Godfather

Two other books, I later discovered, were especially important on the Hill and had been read by everyone: The Godfather, because, as one girl put it, "We're just like the Mafia up here." And Instant Replay, because Mel digs football, really digs it, particularly televised professional football. During the season all four communities devote their weekends to it (and now Monday nights, thanks to the ABC network), usually watching two games at once on side-by-side color TVs. It all has to do with a team of people working as one unit at the direction of one man or something.

~

[Username]

~
Sixties Folk Icon Makes Rare Appearance

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/music/six ... oid=651782

Jim Kweskin's Jug Band was positioned for stardom. Then he pulled the plug.

By Hal Gelb
February 27, 2008

There are waiters and waitresses, receptionists and Realtors, but for
an artist, Jim Kweskin has an unusual day job. He manages and is part
owner of Fort Hill Construction, a multi-million dollar outfit that
does, the singer-guitarist says by phone one workday morning from an
LA job site, "high-end building and renovation."

The construction gig is so much at the center of his life that the
one-time leader of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, the funky, infectious
'60s aggregation that Fresh Air rock historian Ed Ward places in
importance alongside the Beatles, Byrds, and Rolling Stones, rarely
performs or records. "I'm not trying to make a living at music," he
says, and adds, "It's a good feeling."

So when Kweskin takes the stage at the Freight & Salvage Friday
night, it will be something of a rare occasion. "I keep my finger in
the pie," he admits, "but not a tremendous amount."

The Jug Band, which first brought Maria Muldaur to national
attention, played Kweskin's typical repertoire, an eclectic mix of
almost entirely pre-'50s Americana: good-timey tunes, folk, blues,
pop, and early jazz. A pillar of the Harvard Square folkie scene that
spawned Joan Baez and then a national attraction ­ Janis Joplin
opened for them when they played the Fillmore ­ the Jug Band was
being positioned for pop stardom by Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman,
when Kweskin pulled the plug.

"Once I realized I had to play music for a living ­ which meant all
the time ­ it stopped being fun," he recalls. "There was too much
time away from home, too much repetition." He grew unhappy "playing
music with kazoos" and moved on to a few non-Jug Band albums,
including the deeply moving Jim Kweskin's America, before stopping
recording entirely in 1980.

Following Mel Lyman, the Jug Band's charismatic Santa Rosa-raised
banjo and harmonica player, into the commune Lyman was putting
together on Fort Hill in Boston's Roxbury ghetto pulled him further
away from a musical career. When asked to describe the community's
ethos, Kweskin simply says, "It's just a family, a bunch of people
who live together and share." That was the original attraction.
"Being together with a large family, with people who were inspiring
to me and who I grew to care about."

He even refers to Fort Hill Construction as his family's business.
"There was a bunch of rundown houses," he recalls, "and we moved in,
because at that time we were quite poor." Over the course of a couple
of years, the community bought the houses and learned how to fix them
up. "And after a while people said, 'Hey, you guys do pretty good
work. Why don't you work on my house?'"

Kweskin tends to use the word "community," not "commune" for Fort
Hill. "The next word after 'commune' could be 'cult,'" he notes.
That's a term Fort Hill has heard a lot. In the 1970s, a Rolling
Stone cover story pictured Fort Hill as an acid-fascist cult with a
megalomaniac Lyman as its Charlie Manson. Kweskin calls the article
"a chop job, full of falsehoods. They really tried to destroy us."

"Why would they do that?"

"To sell papers."

"Did the community change as a result?"

Yeah, he laughs. "We stopped giving interviews to newspapers."

More recent press accounts are cautious but laudatory, pointing to
Fort Hill as one of the few communal experiments to survive the '60s.
How'd they manage that? "Strong people. Committed. The personal
relationships. A lot of it had to do with who Mel Lyman was, helping
us getting this family going."

Articles point especially to the children raised in the commune.
They're described as responsible, studious, courteous adults. And to
Kweskin's delight, a number of them are into music. "I've taught
music to almost all the kids and some of them have grown up to be
quite good musicians. That's a very good feeling."

One of the "kids" is the remarkable singer Samoa Wilson, with whom he
recorded two recent albums, Now and Again and Live the Life on Blix
Street Records. Kweskin also has two forthcoming CDs, one featuring
his fingerpicking and another that captures a jug band extravaganza
at the Great American Music Hall where he jammed with John Sebastian,
David Grisman, and Geoff Muldaur. He's been gigging again with
Muldaur, the Jug Band's singer/guitarist, ever since they reunited at
a memorial for Fritz Richmond, the band's bassist and jug player
extraordinaire, in 2005.

All in all, Kweskin may play a dozen or two dates a year now. He
plays "when I feel inspired, when I have some music in me or
something that I want to play for people. Then I feel very alive onstage."
~

[IanEye]

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[D.R.]

It seems this thread should be merged with the one on the Fugs and Attica, and the article by Ron Jacobs...

[bks]

If you're skimming this thread, don't miss the Tab commercial IanEye posted. Absolutely mind-blowing.

Found this as well, re: the death of Mark Frechette in prison and life at Fort Hill:

Janet Diamond on May 29, 2010 at 4:02 pm

I new Mark very well. He and I, my daughter Christine, his wife Betsy and son Tristan formed a family of sorts — at least the kind of family possible during the amazing ’60s. Mark and I were lovers with Betsy’s okay. Betsy and I were friends and we cared for each others children.

Betsy did not exactly leave Mark, nor did I. Neither of us would accept Mel as “god” or submit to his despotic and bipolar regime. So we were kicked out. Mark, infatuated by Mel, stayed. Betsy and I got a house one block from Mel’s compound so we could still be around Mark. When Mark left to make Zabriskie Point, we remained in Boston. Mark called Betsy to tell her about Daria and Betsy said,”Janet, he’s cheating on us!” Then we both laughed at the notion of cheating which was so ’50s.

When Mark robbed the bank, it was not for the high minded reasons he gave. He did it under Mel’s command because all the money he and Daria gave to Mel had been spent and Mel wanted more money. Mark said all that other stuff to keep the heat away from Mel.

I hate Mel, but Betsy was too sweet and generous to hate anyone. Marks death may have been ruled accidental but it was not. Mark wrote of jealousy in the prison. He had just finished a play that was going to be produced off Broadway. He was due to get out in weeks. The decision to call his death an accident was made almost immediately without any investigation. Marks stage play was, as usual, Anti-government (not Anti-American). Everyone we knew was anti-government: The Vietnam War had been going on almost as long as we could remember. Every knew guys who had died their or who were crazy or addicted by that experience. We felt the older generation had deliberately ruined ours for values we despised. Mark was not an anomaly, he was part of a generation of disenfranchised kids who felt their only recourse was mass action, and we knew we were being spied on by the FBI.

So, yah, he was revolutionary, but we all were. Pictures of burning children can do that to you. It’s hard to understand today, but loving someone did not preclude loving someone else.

Daria left for the same reason Betsy and I did, Mel demanded that any woman in his compound must submit to sex with him which was supposed to be a high honor. Many did, we didn’t. We believed in free love, not forced sex.


http://popcultureaddict.com/movies-2/za ... omment-391

[NeonLX]

I almost fell for my own innocence back about the time of that old Tab commercial.

[happenstance]

New book is first original reporting on the Mel Lyman Family in decades

https://www.amazon.com/Astral-Weeks-Sec ... 0735221340

"There’s no evidence that Morrison and Lyman ever met, but their trajectories through the book operate like melodic counterpoints. With his harmonica, Lyman serenaded mournful fans who were departing the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, after Bob Dylan’s scandalous electrified set. In “Astral Weeks,” Morrison abandoned the amplified sound of his earlier work in favor of acoustic instruments. Lyman was a charismatic leader able to create and sustain a community through the force of his character. Morrison was hotheaded and irritating to many of the musicians who played with him, and he exasperated a series of managers. Both men believed fiercely in the power of their own internal visions and were propelled by the tumult of the late sixties. Each has a legacy that endures half a century later." - New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultu ... l_facebook