BY ED FELIEN
David Morton was the son of an art professor at the University of Minnesota. He was one of three Minnesotans who went on the Freedom Rides in the South in 1961. Since then he had dropped out—did psychedelics, didn’t have a straight job and grew his hair long. He was probably the first well-known hippie in Minnesota. He formed a jug band called The Jook Savages. The name was taken from the Juke family—a family with hereditary low I. Q. and a tendency to criminality that had made them living arguments for the eugenics movement. Assuming that title, becoming a member of the Jook Savages, meant you were telling the world that you were fucked up and dangerous.
Janice Crabb, an old friend, was den mother of the Eater House. She was getting welfare, had a housing supplement and food stamps and wanted to share her largess with interesting people who might attract young people to help with the cooking and minding the children. We called ourselves the Eater House because that’s the only thing we all had in common. There was one couple in the huge mansion we shared in the black community in St. Paul that hardly ever came out of their room; she seemed to enjoy his attentions and didn’t mind cooking and waiting on him. When he finally came out of the room, he said they were going to leave and join the Beatles. They left and we never heard from them again. There were other musicians that came and went, but the core of tenants were members of the Firehouse Theater. Janice didn’t mind calling it The Eater House, but she always said she was a member of the Jook Savages. Later, David and Shirley Morton and their daughter Larkspur came to live with us before David took off for the woods in northern Minnesota.
We sat around the large kitchen table every afternoon and evening singing and playing music. We had many guitars, a mandolin, sometimes a pump handle bass, and kids beating out tempo with chopsticks on a Quaker Oats cardboard drum. Our musical career peaked at a performance of The Eater Family Circus at Dania Hall on the West Bank of the University campus.
I had begun to write songs:
Why won’t you leave us alone?
What is it you think we done wrong?
Tell me how old you think I’ll have to be,
Before you think I should believe all that I see,
Before you stop draftin’ and messin’ over me?
Why won’t you leave me alone?
What do I have to do to get you off my back?
Why must it always be either the poor or black?
Why can’t you check on your own side of the track?
Why can’t you leave us alone?
Someday will come when you’ll understand
People who dream belong in this land
Maybe by then, you’ll learn to give a damn.
Why won’t you leave us alone?
Some other friends had moved out to Georgeville. They had been loosely connected through Stone Age Industries, probably the first head shop on the West Bank, started by Susie Shroyer. They had been selling crafts they made but decided they wanted to move out of the city and into the country. A real estate entrepreneur, Larry Johnson, came into the shop one day and told them about a building he owned in Georgeville, Minn. They could all live there for very cheap rent. It sounded good. There was no plumbing. The well for the building had been contaminated. They would have to dig a new well and put in a hand pump, build an outhouse, find a wood cook stove, use the propane gas heaters until they could heat with wood, but by late winter of 1969 they had things well enough under control that the women decided they could move in. Two of the men were potters, and the first thing they did in the spring was build a kiln. There were seven of them to start with, but the group grew to 20 during the summer of 1969. There was a two-acre organic garden (before organic became fashionable) and a sauna in the basement. We were almost self-sufficient and quite proud of ourselves.
Keith Ruona and Susie Shroyer were the couple that organized the caper and made it happen. Keith made the deal with Larry. As far as I know we never paid rent, but we did offer Larry and his family a place to stay whenever they wanted, and ultimately we completely changed Larry to the point he grew out his hair and started printing bumper stickers saying “Build Utopia.” Keith knew all the farmers in the area: where to get fresh ground flour and oats, where to get chicken manure, where to gather firewood. Susie organized the kitchen and the crafts and pottery that we sold in the Georgeville Trading Post downstairs.
Everyone worked—either in the garden, or the pottery, or making craft items, or fixing cars. Occasionally someone would stop by and sit around all day. I was generally delegated to talk to them: “Look, everybody here works a little bit to make it happen.” “Oh, but I’m a poet.” “Yes, I know. We’re all poets here, so help us with the weeding in the garden tomorrow, OK?”
It wasn’t really a rural commune. We were living in a two story brick building with three storefronts downstairs and an apartment and ballroom upstairs. And there was a railroad track with freight trains running on it twice a day right across the street. But, still, it was more rural than I had ever been. Georgeville was a ghost town. Only a hundred miles from Minneapolis, but it had been abandoned when the railroad didn’t stop any more and all the lumber had been cut. There were many abandoned houses, an abandoned schoolhouse and our building. There were a few houses in town and Toots’ Bar, which served 3.2 beer. Population: about 20.
I made a movie about it, “Georgeville Commune, 1969.” It’s interesting as a record of the time, and it was a hit at the University Film Festival a few years later, but it was a music video before the age of slick music videos and a 16-millimeter color film hand-spliced before videos allowed mixing and editing on a computer. I worked on it all fall and most of the winter: editing, splicing, hand gluing sections together, adding a sound track and mixing the sound and visuals. What took me four months now can be done in a couple of days on a computer. To get psychedelic triple exposures, we had to wind back the camera and try to remember what we were shooting over.
I put in a lot of my songs:
I don’t go into the city much any more
What would I go in there for?
You cannot breathe the air
The people just stand and stare
And what are you doing there?
Out here we bake our daily bread
You’ll always find a warm bed
And what have you got instead?
I don’t go into the city much any more
What would I go in there for?
And some of the philosophy that I’d picked up: “Before Buddha was enlightened, he chopped wood and carried water. After he was enlightened, he chopped wood and carried water. Chopping wood is good karma.”
And a story I remembered that a priest told at mass when I was 10 years old: “An angel took a child down the halls of eternity and pushed open the first door marked hell, and it was a long table with food piled up on it and people sitting on chairs behind the table with knives and forks too long for them to reach the food to their mouths. And the door closed, and the angel opened the next door marked heaven, and it was a long table, piled high with food, and the people behind the table with knives and forks too long for them to reach the food to their mouths, but they had learned to feed the person sitting across from them.”
Doin’ what I know to be right
You don’t have to worry about me tonight
There’s a cold wind, backin’ in from the East
But that cold wind, don’t worry me in the least.
Looks like winter is settlin’ in
Glad I landed here in the midst of friends
Sometimes I wander a long way from home
But my love for you, it doesn’t roam
I’m doin’ what I know to be right
You don’t have to worry about me tonight.
We got visited by evangelists one afternoon. They set up their microphone across the street from us, and we sat down on our side of the street and listened to them. They played music. We liked to play music, so I joined them and tried to play along. Then I sang them my spiritual:
Well, I guess I don’t want to be Jesus,
Rasputin or even Oscar Wilde
I want to live to be a hundred
I want to see the world and smile
Cause there’s too many died before their time
Too many been locked up tight
They don’t need me up on Calvary
If you see those boys, tell ‘em I was all right
Cause I’m not going out again
To try and save this old world
I going to gather ‘round my friends
Find us a farm and settle down.
They packed up and left and we danced in the street.
Of course, the song wasn’t exactly true. I never did really look for a real farm. I was still strongly attracted to the city, and I was still foolish enough to believe I should “try and save this old world.”
One early fall night at Georgeville I was reading the U.S. Constitution, and I came across the part where it said no appropriation for an army should be for more than two years. In other words, there should be no standing army. The founding fathers recognized that a standing army and a permanent military class were a danger and a threat to democratic government. Also, the Constitution said only Congress has the right to declare war. A President cannot engage in war without the consent of Congress.
I was angry about how the whole country had been lied to, and I was determined to do something about it. I wrote a one-page leaflet explaining very simply why the Vietnam War was unconstitutional, illegal and immoral. I typed it up and went into Minneapolis and had it copied and stood on the corner of 4th Street and 14th Avenue Southeast in Dinkytown, near the University campus, and tried to hand them out. It was an early frosty, almost wintry day. I was standing on the corner in front of Gray’s Drug Store, and no one was taking the leaflet I was offering. No one wanted the added burden of something else to think about on what seemed like the first day of winter.
“There has to be a better way to market this idea,” I thought.
In some of the head shops I had seen copies of The Oracle and The Seed, underground tabloid newspapers from San Francisco and Chicago. I liked the color burns in The Oracle, the pschychedelic drawings and the hippy appeal, and I liked the straight-on local politics of The Seed.
