Bringing Back the ‘60s on the Wavy Gravy Train

‘The ‘80s are the ‘60s 20 years later: old feathers on a new bird,” Wavy Gravy told the faithful audience who had come by to pay their respects on Sunday.

There weren’t many diehard ‘60s revivalists in the four tiers of bleachers on this, the final night that the tiny Heliotrope Theater was to be open before its lease ran out. Five--maybe six dozen at most--paid the $10 apiece to see the Heliotrope’s last show, and Hugh (Wavy Gravy) Romney, 52-year-old legendary loco laureate of the Woodstock Nation, was the headliner.

“I knew him long before he was Wavy Gravy and he’s great, just great,” said Ed Pearl, former owner/operator of the old Ash Grove coffee house. Like the others in the audience, Pearl was a true believer in the ‘60s. Next year, he plans to reopen the Ash Grove which burned down in the early ‘70s.

But Sunday night, he said, he was just another Wavy Gravy fan. To the delight of aging hippies and their grandchildren alike, Romney did an hour of nostalgic counterculture comedy in full clown makeup.

The anti-Establishment stand-up comic spent most of his stage time sitting down. Hunched over on a stool at center stage, he spun tales about his glory days when it was fashionable to play practical jokes on the police and walk the streets of Berkeley looking goofy.

Unfortunately, Romney explained, three dozen miles away the Grateful Dead were playing to a packed Long Beach Auditorium--the same Deadhead audience that might be inclined to visit the Heliotrope. Unlike Heliotrope owner Hamilton Camp who has been struggling for a year to meet the $2,700-a-month rent for the Silver Lake bistro, the Dead are currently riding the crest of a popularity wave.

If they had timed it a little better, Romney said, they might have been able to get some of the Dead or a few other of Wavy Gravy’s ‘60s confreres to drop by for the wake.

But the fans who showed up didn’t seem to mind.

They listened, rapt, when Romney explained that he has a bad back from his many protest run-ins with the police. He painted stars on his first full-body cast and named it the all-star cast. When he wound up in the hospital a second time, he had friends collect currency from around the globe so he could paste it on his second full-body cast and call it a cast of thousands.

Romney said he dropped to 78 pounds at one point. That’s when he began painting his face and going to jail in costume.

“Whoever heard of a cop beating up a clown?” he asked.

For years, he was a frequent and unabashed consumer of controlled and uncontrolled substances. He ran the LSD recovery tent at Woodstock. He recounted the days when peyote buttons the size of pizzas were to be had by enterprising hallucinogen aficionados. He doesn’t recall smoking pot with ex-Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg, he said, but admits tongue-in-cheek that it is a remote possibility.

As a founder of the legendary ‘60s commune the Hog Farm, it was Romney who nominated his prize hog Pigasus as a candidate for President during the ill-fated Democratic convention of 1968 in Chicago. It was Romney, too, who uttered the semi-famous line from the stage at Woodstock:

“What we had in mind was breakfast in bed for 400,000!”

He recalls with no little pride that Lenny Bruce was once his manager, that Bob Dylan typed “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” on his typewriter and that Jackson Browne once shared a holding tank with him following an anti-nuke demonstration. At that one, he went as Santa Claus but still got arrested.

Romney’s act was too tinged with the bitter angst of the New Left survivor to elicit belly laughs from his audience, but there was a constant hum of warm, familiar giggles. With a one-string instrument he called his “ektar,” Romney led the faithful through a dirge of hope called “Basic Human Needs” and read a Shel Silverstein anti-drug poem to violin accompaniment about “The Perfect High.”

But such highs are as much an anachronism to the Heliotrope survivors as tie-dyed shirts and Peter Max posters. Marijuana smoke was nowhere in the air and the strongest mood-altering drug up in the bleachers was a couple of half-consumed bottles of imported beer. Wavy himself said he gave up cigarettes a year ago after smoking a pack a day for 35 years. That, he said, is why he is a bit portly these days.

Actor/singer/impresario Hamilton Camp, 53, is developing a slight paunch too, but otherwise showed little of Wavy’s own ravages of aging when he and his appropriately named Hamilton Camptown Family band warmed up the tiny crowd for Romney.

Backed by wife Rasjadah on percussion, Hamilton Jr. on rhythm guitar, daughter Henrietta on keyboard and sons Stephen on drums and Lewis on lead guitar, Camp’s band is a genuine family affair. With Randy Newman, Bob Gibson and Bob Dylan in their repertoire, the Camptown Family Band closed out their own Heliotrope stand with eight songs of protest and pain--a musical set distinguished by the absence of a single love song.

In the dressing room/office before the show, Camp and Romney recalled the pre-Beatles ‘60s when the two of them met as members of an improvisational theater group. Greenwich Village . . . Chicago . . . Woodstock . . .

But times are different now. Scratching out a living is not as easy as it once seemed to be.

Romney is setting up a 60-city tour early next year in order to support his Sava Foundation for international health care, and in order to support himself. (“It’s a fun- d raiser,” he says. “I’ll do one free show in each city for the foundation and one show for the Gravy.”)

Camp, too, can’t freewheel the way he once did. Beside the tough lesson in Reaganomics that the Heliotrope has been, there is a family to feed and he does it by falling back on the more lucrative of his professional pursuits, acting.

He leaves for Rome at the end of the month to appear as a four-armed creature in the Empire Films Production “Arena.”