Antonio G. Pereira © 2019 Antonio G. Pereira
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Confessions Of A Raving Unconfined Nut: Misadventures In The Counterculture. This is essentially Paul Krassner's autobiography, and it will keep your undivided attention. Krassner has a very good memory, and starting with his childhood in Brooklyn, takes you on a Roller Coaster ride through his memories. From the beginnings of the magazine he created and published, 'The Realist' (you can read and/or print out the entire archive of issues at his website: Go to the Internet Archive https://www.archive.org Type https://www.paulkrassner.com into the Wayback Machine and then choose Jan. 11th 2019 and click.), you meet the many people he has known and associated with. The Satirists, Comedians, Activists, Magazine Publishers, Musicians, there're all here; Vaughn Meader, Tom Lehrer, Steve Allen, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Hugh Hefner, Dick Gregory, George Carlin, David Frye, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Phil Ochs, Larry Flynt, among many others. His associations with The Yippies, as well as The Diggers and The Black Panthers, as we meet Emmett Grogan, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, Tom Hayden, Mae Brussell, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Bill Graham, Cass Elliot, The Grateful Dead, The Fugs, Owsley Stanley etc....
Some of the most fascinating chapters are, 'Lenny the Lawyer' (about Lenny Bruce), 'My Acid Trip With Groucho Marx', with Krassner's description of the making of Otto Preminger's infamous film 'Skidoo', starring Jackie Gleason (who became a Right Wing Show Business FBI contact for J. Edgar Hoover) and Groucho Marx (who ended up tripping on L.S.D. with Krassner -Otto finally decided to try out the shit for himself!) The two chapters, 'The Parts Left Out Of The Kennedy Book' and 'One Flew Into The Cookoo's Nest', are interconnected, as they cover the assassination of J.F.K., the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the Manson Family (the murders and subsequent trial), Manson's odd, shaky and uneasy relationship with Tex Watson, after they both ended up in jail (in separate prisons), resulting from the murders, Manson's background in Scientology and his use of some of the psychological techniques on the young women in The Family at Spahn Ranch, as well as his ties to The Process cult. And finally, the Watergate Break In (masterminded by E. Howard Hunt - read the article: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-last-confession-of-e-howard-hunt-76611/ ), conspiracy theorist Mae Brussell, who's groundbreaking article for 'The Realist', (that essentially laid everything out in detail - The Realist Issue No. 95, August 1972 - The subsquent article by Paul Krassner, "Dear James McCord" in Crawdaddy Magazine, the March 1974 Issue, makes spirited reading as well. A series of back and forth letters, in which Krassner proceeds to stick a pin in pompous ass Nixon crony McCord's balloon.), and which Krassner was able to publish due to John Lennon & Yoko Ono giving him the cash (they were in turn being harassed by Hoover and the FBI, in partnership with the Nixon Administration); laid the groundwork for Woodward and Bernstein blowing the whole thing wide open in their series of articles for The Washington Post.
In later chapters that cover the 1980's, which (accompanied by the rise of the Reagan/Bush Right Wing Presidency, runaway corruption and greed on Wall street, and the Television Networks News Division's gradual abandonment of all responsibility, and streamlining into 'Entertainment News'), bore witness to the spectacle of touring debates between G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary, and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin's 'The Yippie's vs. the Yuppie's' (for an informative companion piece, go to Paul Krassner's website, and access Realist Issue No. 130, Summer 1995. The Jerry Rubin Issue.)
As we near the end of the book, in the final chapters, 'Pranks For The Memories' (pages 339-342) and 'Bloopers and Outtakes: The Parts Left Out Of This Book' (pages 369-371), Krassner's wickedly funny sense of humor is intact, as he takes aim respectively, at (1). Richard Nixon (A priceless 1974 piece of satire for Chic Magazine, titled "A Sneak Preview of Richard Nixon's Memoir"; sure to have driven Tricky Dickey into Alcohol Dependency, and H.R. Haldeman spinning in a Pinball Machine, hitting every score bell and causing the machine to go TILT. ), and then (2). his battle in court with Rupert Murdoch's Fox Television Network, over the use of Dan Castelleneta's introduction on his live comedy album, 'Irony Lives!' (Castelleneta is the voice of Homer Simpson in The Simpsons animated cartoon show on that network), and the case is decided in favour of the Fox Network's bank of powerful attorneys; but ends up with Krassner leaking the banned introduction of Homer Simpson's voice, on his own website, which crashes because there were so many hits! (He also reproduces the introduction verbatim, in print, in this book.) As he states, "Whoever thought that Homer Simpson would be considered intellectual property? D'oh!"
This is quite a memoir, and well worth reading.
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