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 On the Road with John Sinclair - Lee Harris Lee Harris Croft -
Thursday, September 4, 2008 @ 7:00-8:00 pm [20-0842]
Suffolk, UK At Home with the Legendary Lee Harris I finally started venturing out into London on the last Saturday in August when I hooked up with my spiritual leader, Rev. Ferre van Beveren of the THC Ministry, and his lovely companion Ms. Moira to meet the London underground legend Lee Harris at his venerable head shop on Portobello Road called Alchemy. Standing on the sidewalk outside the shop having a smoke and waiting for Ferre to appear I heard somebody call my name and looked up to see the New York City filmmaker Steve ______ of Bonefilms striding toward me with an incredulous smile on his face. It finds out that Steve's in London to screen his film Celluoid 1 at the Portobello Film Festival around the corner on Monday night, and he pulls me down to the festival site to sit down together and have a very fine joint. Steve and I agree to meet again at the screening on Monday night before I split back to Alchemy to find Rev. Ferre and meet the illustrious Lee Harris. A native of South Africa, Lee's life was set on its future course when he attended the African National Congress in 1955 as a teenager and joined the struggle against apartheid being waged by Nelson Mandela and his comrades. By the late 1950s Lee had removed to London and got involved in the theatre, acting and writing plays and participating in the general artistic ferment of the period that would evolve into the cultural revolution. He was at the epochal underground poetry gathering headed by Allen Ginsberg at the Albert Hall in 1965 and followed the forward motion from there, reaching his apotheosis in 1968 at the Alchemical Wedding with John Lennon and Yoko Ono and hanging with Ken Kesey and the Hells Angels from San Francisco during their extended stay at Apple headquarters. Following the Alchemical Wedding Lee experienced what he calls an "alchemical transformation" and became a leading advocate of psychedelic experimentation and cosmic consciousness from his ephemeral booth at the Portobello Market where he hustled a modest living peddling incense, ginseng and other exotic products he copped from Chinatown merchants. Soon he was selling rolling papers, pipes and other hippie paraphernalia, rock posters, underground comix and hip records from a Portobello Road storefront called Alchemy—London's first head shop. From his command post at Alchemy Lee stayed intimately involved in successive waves of alternative activity in London, from Free Concerts with the White Panthers to publishing underground comix and magazines to punk rock and reggae music to his current incarnation as spoken word artist "The Spiritual Kid" performing and recording with electronic ensembles like River Styx and the Mystery School Players as heard on CDs he's produced like E.W. with Howard Marks and the collection Alchemy: 30 Years of Counter Culture. Ferre and Moira and I have some good laughs with Lee Harris and leave Portobello Road with an invitation to come out to Lee's 400-year-old cottage in Suffolk on Thursday to enjoy a meal and conduct an episode of my radio show (217) with Lee's testimony, some of his music and some of mine. We stop in a little park around the corner and smoke some hash before departing, Ferre and Moira back to their pad in Orpington and me to take the tube back to Wood Green, where I'm still charged up from the day's activities and start working on a pair of radio programs centered on a long conversation I'd had with the Japanese writer, musician and producer Gaku Torii at the Ooze Charm Coffeeshop when I was in Tokyo at the end of June. These came out as episodes 215 & 216:
At Home with the Legendary Lee Harris For this episode I took the National Rail Service train from London to suburban Orpington to meet my spiritual leader Rev. Ferre van Beveren, his companion Ms. Moira, and the estimable young Mr. O.J. to drive from Moira's place all the way to Suffolk in East Anglia to the venerable home of Lee Harris, "The Spiritual Kid" and legendary figure in the development of the London underground since the 1960s. Lee served us a fine home-cooked meal and sat still for my questioning, his responses to which I edited and interspersed with recordings by River Styx, the Rolling Stones, Afrissippi, Lee Harris & Howard Marks, the Mystery School Players and the Drum Druids, most of them taken from Lee's productions titled E.W. with the Mystery School Players and Alchemy: 30 Years of Counter Culture.
Playlist 217 [00] RFA Tag > Baba Israel Intro[01] Opening Music: Lee Harris & River Styx: The Spiritual Kid[02] John Sinclair Intro & Opening Tokes with Rev. Ferre & O.J.[03] Rolling Stones: Sympathy for the Devil[04] John Sinclair Conversation with Lee Harris (Part 1)[05] Afrissippi & John Sinclair: Fulani Journey[06] John Sinclair Conversation with Lee Harris (Part 2)[07] Lee Harris & Howard Marks: 3 Men in a Boat[08] John Sinclair Conversation with Lee Harris (Part 3)[09] Lee Harris & the Mystery School Players: Alchemical Changes [10] John Sinclair Conversation with Lee Harris (Part 4) & Outro[11] Closing Music: Drum Druids: Underground Influences[12] Baba Israel ID
Hosted by John Sinclair for Radio Free Amsterdam
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