EP 42 John Law

Episode 42 with John Law is out now! Meet John Law, a foundational figure in the San Francisco underground art scene. He is here to promote an upcoming documentary about SantaCon, while simultaneously tracing the cultural lineage that connects the Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society, and the early years of Burning Man. Law emphasizes that these movements were rooted in a philosophy of creating one’s own culture through collaborative, non-commercial, and often transgressive experiences. He offers a critical perspective on how Burning Man evolved from a grassroots zone trip into a large-scale business, highlighting the often-overlooked contributions of visionaries like Gary Warne and William Binzen. His story celebrates a history of participatory art and urban exploration that prioritized genuine human connection over institutional structure.

ALSO! On Thursday February 5th at the Roxie theater at 6:15 the SF Indie Festival will open their movie festival with the San Francisco premiere of the Santacon documentary. Go to the URL below right now to get a ticket, they will sell out fast. You can also stream it if you can’t make it to SF, check out the URL below. It is an amazing documentary all about the history of Santacon from the same director that made “Class Action Park” about Action Park.

https://sfindie2026.eventive.org/welcome

https://johnwlaw.com/

Please visit https://shadowoftheman.buzzsprout.com/ for all of the details and links.

Email shadowofthemanpodcast@gmail.com if you want to be a guest or if you have any concerns about the show.

Please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, it REALLY helps the show to even appear in search results.

Transcript

Before we start, I would like to ask your help to do two things. First, tell a friend or two who you think might like the show. And second, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The more reviews the show gets, the more likely it will even appear in search results. Thank you, and now on to the show. 

They make the trek out to Burning Man for a week and a day. After a lot of work, oh, there's a lot of play. Party party drama drama drama b**** b**** b****. Year after year, they come back to scratch that itch. They all say their lives have been changed. After many years, lives have been rearranged. That changes what this show is all about. You'll see the impact. of burning up and out. So sit back, relax, and cancel all your plans. These are the stories about the shadow of the man.

Hello and welcome to the Shadow of the Man Show. I'm your host Andy. Now I had nothing to do. This is that Andy. Today our guest is the one, the only John Law. Welcome. Hey there Andy. Thanks for asking me to do this. I say I think

well no you're a very special guest. You have the go back like I mean as we were talking about beforehand uh this show is about like you know the impact and influence of Bernie man on people but like you you proceed and post dates in Bernie man and and one of the main reasons I wanted to have you on the show uh because this is going to come out on February 2nd and the the Santa Con documentary has its uh San Isco premiere, right? Uh, so let me get this straight. So, it's going to be February 5th. It's actually going to be like the opening movie, right? So, it's like

Yes, it's the opening movie. That's correct.

Yeah.

For the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival and it's February 5th 6 p.m. at the Roxy Theater. And uh you can get tickets by going to San SF Docfest or to the Roxy. And uh yeah, come on down.

Yeah. And you can I think also for people who are not in San Francisco, I think they can they can stream it too, right?

I believe so. Yeah, if you go to the uh Docfist website, I think you can find that link for that. And uh yeah, the film uh took four four and a half years to make.

Oh, really?

The film director Yeah, the film director Seth Porges uh has two other feature films, feature documentaries under his belt. Both of which are excellent documentaries and I'd recommend them, too. One of them is called Class Action Park, which he made about six years ago, seven years ago.

And it's a documentary about Action Park, New Jersey, which is a crazy crazy movie.

Oh, I watched it.

Have you seen that one?

Yeah. Yeah. No, cuz I grew up in Northern New Jersey. I I I went to Action Park as a kid and after watching that documentary.

And you're alive.

Well, no, it's funny cuz like

you're alive to tell the story.

Like after watching the documentary, I was like, "Wait a minute, everything makes sense now." Like every time we would go to park. I remember coming home with just like a splitting headache and just being like no like, "Oh, I think I got a concussion like every time."

Right. Well, the place was run by run by gangsters who allowed the teenage stoner kids to basically run everything.

Yeah. And then there was like the operations.

I remember seeing like there was the one slide that I remember when I went there as a kid, it was never open. We're like, "Why isn't this one open?" It was the one that goes down and it does like the loop-de-loop. We're like, "That's Yeah. Crazy. And then like in the documentary, they're like, "Oh, yeah. We sent one or maybe two people down and they got severely injured or stuck."

Oh, yeah. Well, my buddy uh my buddy Jason Scott who works with the Internet Archives uh he grew up in New Jersey and he used to go there all the time. He's in the movie actually talking I believe he's talking about that specific ride and how ridiculously dangerous it was.

And didn't they like pay one of their employees? They're like, "Okay, we'll give you like 50 bucks or whatever it is." It's like to to test it out. and go down and like okay

yes that's in the movie that's correct it's it's a brilliant film and really really illuminates uh you know the being a kid a stoner kid in the uh like like ' 80s or in my case the mid70s the film and how that people are acting in it is the closest thing that I've is one of the two closest things I've seen on film to my my own teenage years uh running around as a you know as a juvenile delinquent teenage

the other other one being

well I was born in San Louis Abyispo, California. Moved to Oxford, Mississippi when I was five. Moved to Big Rapids, Michigan when I was six, which is where I grew up. I would say I grew up there for nine, 10 years. Uh, and that's where I lived a teenage life, much like what you would see in class Action Park. And then, uh, Johnson City, Tennessee for a year and a half, a year, and then Knoxville for a few months, and then, uh, I came to San Francisco in 1976

when I was, uh, 17.

Wow. Well, just the one last thing for the Action Park movie, one thing that Another thing that totally resonated with me was like there was some line I don't know if it was some woman or saying she's like yeah the whole park it was all janky. It was like something that you know your your crazy uncle Andy would build in his backyard. And I was like

wait a minute like at that time I built this like zipline in my backyard. Cool.

And it takes a little engineering, right? And so like I didn't quite read the instructions and so I had my son who was like maybe six years old like I I set it all up and it was kind of at a fairly steep angle and

and I was like, "Yeah, try it out." And he goes down and it's like, you know, like smack into the tree and like, "Ooh,

yeah." You know? So then after like five or six like attempts, I was like, "Okay, I think I got it dialed in now." And he was just like, "Yeah, I I'm not going to be using this thing anymore."

So when I saw that movie, I was like, "That's me

parenting. There you go." So So that was his first feature feature doc. And then his second feature doc which was uh uh produced and he was hired by Netflix to uh to direct. He didn't choose the project but it's brilliant. It's called How to Rob a Bank. And I I got to I got to describe this because uh I mean you you also should come see the Sakai movie. It's awesome. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But How to Rob a Bank is a movie about a dude up in the Pacific Northwest in the 80s who's like this Adonis godlike, you know, like like hippie looking guy who hangs out he lives in a treehouse that he built. It's got like a like a like a hot tub in it and he hangs out with all these like super hot yoga hippie chicks, right? Of course.

And uh and they live in this he lives in this treehouse, right? And then his other life is as is as the most wanted is as the most wanted uh uh

is as the most wanted uh uh uh bank robber in the Pacific Northwest.

Wow.

Um for for a multiple year multiple year period, he was he was known of by the FBI and uh and other agencies as uh Hollywood. They call him Hollywood because very polite when he robbed these banks with his two buddies. So, the movie's about that and it's pretty amazing. And then his third feature film went to Santa Con. He started working on about four or five years ago and he knew he he was friends with Scott Beal who was my partner in Laughing Squid and old friend and like original he did the original website for Burning Man um for the Burning Man connection and uh really great dude and he's in New York now and uh and he called me goes hey this friend of mine you know he's made these movies and uh I was sitting at a bar with him and he asked me about Pentacon. I told him about it and also the fact that we're involved in, you know, these other cacophony, Burning Man, whatnot. And he wants to make a film about it. And I'm always wary about people who want to do that. I've been approached a bunch by people want to do this project or that project and they're usually full of baloney, but Scott endorsed him. And so, uh, I met with him and talked to him and Rob Schmidt, who's the original Santa, my buddy Rob Schmidt, we talked to him, and, uh, so we decided to help him out with the film. And, uh, he took him four years to make it. He flew Rob and me to New York in 202. to where I attended the first Santa Con that I've been to since 1998 in New York was the last one I I I attended and had a part of

and it was great. You know, we we

Yeah. like like watch cuz I watched it. I remember that scene with like the two guys come on Time Square and it's like all just like the looks on your face.

Yeah. It was a It was a whack. It was a whack, you know, and and Santa Con and Burning Man have way more in common than you might think.

Yeah. Yeah.

But with that said, uh the event um you know the the movie is a pretty good telling. We got uh Seth and his uh his editor and his uh his his uh other people on his crew video footage. There's really good video footage from 1995 which was the second San Francisco Santa uh 1996 which is the Portland Sacon the first one 97 the first LA Sanacon and 98 which was the first New York City Sacon which later on long after we lost control of it not that we were trying to control it the Later on, that event in New York had as many as 40,000 Santaas on it, which is, you know, I mean, hard to imagine and completely ridiculous, but uh but yeah, the film he made, I like it. It's pretty cool. It's dedicated to my best friend who passed away recently, uh Chris Radcliffe, who uh an early uh Burning Man character. He's basically the Neil Cassidy of uh Cacophony Society, Burning Man, and he makes Neil Cassidy look like a p****. Honestly, he did. Um but with that said, and Uh, and I mean that with all with all love, you know. Sorry, you know, to be use a detrimental term there, but uh but that's what Chris was. And he's film's dedicated to him. The original bad Santa.

Yeah. I got to say that that one photo of him in uh that like uh God is the evening gown with the bolt-action rifle. I was just like, "Wow, he looks hot."

Yeah. He's a better looking woman than he was a man from a from a distance.

Absolutely.

Yeah. I know. I was just like M but yeah yeah yeah so yeah come out and see the film it's on the 5th support the filmmaker and the San Francisco documentary film festival which is an awesome awesome ongoing I think they've been going for 25 years or something like that Jeff Ross is an old uh you know community guy from San Francisco Underground that's been running that film festival for forever and uh yeah it's a cool cool cool uh uh festival and the you know I like the movie whoever you might like you might not come dress up as a Santa Claus you know I mean at least I don't care if you do or not but Seth the filmmaker I think would love to see a bunch of people are in Santa suits. He'll He'll be there and there's going to be a Q&A with the filmmaker, Seth, Rob Schmidt, the original Santa, and me uh on stage after this. So, you can throw s*** at us if you want or whatever.

How big is the rock?

How How big is the rock?

290 seat. 290 seats.

Oh, so everybody, if you're hearing this now, get your tickets now if you can.

Yeah, I would. It'll probably show up and who knows? Who knows? Yeah. And so, uh yeah, the Doc Film Festival is a great thing. Oh, and I could point out another another uh pimp out here. The next night at the doc festival, which is uh the February

6,

here's a film that you really really really want to see. It was uh produced and and uh uh directed by In Decline by the the activist group in Decline.

Uh and uh

uh it is a fil I can't even describe it. Okay, it it's a 40-minute long film and it's on a double bill with a documentary about the the the the residents who if you know who that is, you know, you want to see that. too. But the film is called Cream, C R E A M. And it's made by Ryan McFersonson. And uh it is he took he sourced 700 Wuang Clan Clan songs and he re he made a movie he made uh Romeo and Juliet with zero AI. It's all liveaction, all real actors. And he recreated uh the the the story of Romeo and Juliet with all of the dialogue for all of the actors taken from Wuang Clan songs. And it's acting the acting is Sterling. He It was a very well produced film. Extremely well produced film. The actors are all pro LA f****** actors. And it is really powerful.

And uh you know I kind of you know Wu Chang I could take him or leave him before but now I mean he after after checking out the language and how absolutely Shakespearean and a modern idiom it is. It blew my freaking mind. I can cuss on this thing. Right.

Oh you Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry. Yeah.

Blew my f****** mind. And uh and it's just a beautiful piece of work. And that's uh February 6th at the Roxy It's part of the documentary film, but please come to see that. Tell all your friends. I don't know. It'll probably be on TV TV sometime later. Uh like the Santa Con movie will eventually be on streaming, but uh you know uh I would totally recommend coming to that that showing. It's you know, I've never seen anything like it actually.

Wow. That that sounds like

Yeah, you can check out the trailer of work like Yeah.

Oh yeah. And and Wuan Clang digs it. They they you know, they kind of you know like if not sanctioned it, they they didn't they didn't sue him. Let's put it that way. Okay. And they seem to like it. You know, he's gotten some feedback from their management and uh yeah, they're digging it, you know. Um and uh it's just wonder,

right? Because like like legally with like copyright

700 songs,

but you can sample like up to like x amount of seconds, right? You know, like without, you know, having he's not sampling the music. He's using the he's using the language. He's taking the words.

Yeah. So, you're just take like one line one

Yeah.

one line in one line in a in a conversation. an that a character is having would be one line from one song and the next line would be a line from another song. He spent a lot of time on this.

Oh my god.

Okay. And the language works and if you watch the film, it works in a Shakespearean fashion. I'm a big fan of certain Shakespeare plays, seen him perform, watch movies versions and he gets it and the and the comparison between original Shakespearean language, you know, from 500 years ago and the Wuang clan is pretty pretty pretty dope as they would say.

Wow. What What's that one called? That movie?

It's called Queen. C R E A M C period R

R period E period A period M period.

Uhhuh.

And uh I don't want to say any more about it other than the fact that it's a retelling of that uh Romeo and Juliet story and it's hella better than uh than the one with Leo DiCaprio in it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

People today would be like Leo DiCaprio as Romeo. He's so old. It's like now the young one.

Nothing nothing against him, but you know, but you know, this this movie is is really fresh.

Yeah. So, I'm So, back to the the Santa Con. Um Well, when I was watching, I was actually amazed that there was even video like

Oh, did you watch the the whole film?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I watched it like when the the New York premiere happened. Actually streamed it like like when that came out and I was

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. I was like, I had to watch this. Yeah.

By 1995, uh Chuck Ino, who Chuck Teroino, who is with Weird TV, Weird America back in the early 90s. He's basically one of, if not the first uh uh uh creators of uh reality TV, literally. Uh Weird TV was a a network show that was on at like 2:00 in the morning for and had two seasons. And he literally all he was interested in weird people and interesting people. He's a wonderful man and uh a cool guy. And he just he traveled around the country, mostly West Coast, but around the country looking for interesting people doing weird s*** and he would film them and put it put them on his syndicated TV show and he found San Francisco in ' 9394 right when like everything was happening. It was very active scene here. I mean it was pretty nuts actually and he just filmed all kinds of people and s*** doing stuff here in San Francisco and then uh folded it into his TV show. He made the first first real movie uh about Burning Man called Burning Man 1994

and it's an hour long and it was on VHS tape. I don't know if he's released it anywhere else.

I think I have the actual VHS tape that even though I don't have a a VHS player.

It's a really good piece of work and he covers he does a lot of quick super quick edit stuff which was very new at the time. It was actually experimental and uh and it and and then interview stuff and interspersed with stories and characters and it's a really good piece of work. Uh and then uh yeah, his weird TV was pretty cool and it kicked off all these other uh all these other reality TV shows which all blew up and then became you know, a lot less sincere, let's put it that way, than his work.

Yeah. Formula.

Um,

yeah. And so there was him and then and then Scott Beal uh shot uh the Portland Sacon and actually made a short movie out of it called You Better Watch Out, which is about uh I guess it's about 45 minutes long or something like that. And so both of those guys are pro shooters and they're all miscellaneous other video along the way. And then uh LA uh Doug Wellman shot that and Chuck shot it and Uh, I don't think was Scott there. I Scott might have been there as well. So, we had a lot of cameras in LA. And then New York City was shot by Scott and uh uh and uh and Herod Blank shot 16 millimeter uh film of a lot of the events. And all of that footage uh was licensed to Seth Gorges to make the Sanacon movie. So, and it's I don't know whatever. I mean, I'm in it so whatever. I mean, what do I know? But go check it out and you know, throw stuff if you don't like it and you know, buy me a drink. Buy me and Rob. If you do and shout a drink if you do like it.

Oh yeah. Well, I definitely owe you a drink cuz I loved it. Yeah. So the the first Sienna Con was what? 94 then, right? And that's correct. There's no video. You have even photos.

There's no video. I I looked when we were doing the cacophony book into Carrie Galbreth and Kevin Evans and I were doing tail creating tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society. I

mean, yeah, that book 320 p 3 20 full color pages art direction by Carrie Galbreth. Original artwork by Kevin Evans. editing and original writing by me and Carrie and Kevin to a degree. And uh when when they were making that when they were making that book, I searched there were a couple of things that I searched for uh that I couldn't find. I was looking for any images from Santa 94. And I I talked to everybody I knew. Not a f****** thing. The only thing that exists from Santa 94 is a wonderful like two-pager that Stuart Mangram wrote for his Zen. You remember Z? They're made out of paper, you know, and you mail them to people. Mailing stuff, you know, little guy in a blue suit comes you know, takes an envelope, you know, a piece of paper and takes it and they put it in a truck and a plane and fly it to wherever it's going, right? So that's how stuff used to get put around back in the day. And so Stuart did a zen paper zen called Twisted Times. And uh he wrote a wonderful piece on the first uh Santa. You can find it on sanarchy.com, which is a website that's still uh uh hosted by Laughing Squid and that's Sanarchy.com. And the event was originally called Sanarchy, not Sanacon.

And uh and so anyway, so uh you know, that's cool. I couldn't find it. The other event that I could not find any photographs for was one of the most stunning events I've ever been. It was a cacophony society event of sorts, and it was at uh it was at the Odon Bar in uh like what what was it 2001, right? Uh uh uh September 9th, 2001. Uh 9 or September 11th, rather 2001 911.

Uhhuh.

And uh and uh there was a cycle bike rodeo had a adjunct um you know, that did these little theater pieces called Exploding Puppet Theater, which is run by uh Danny Waters and and a couple of other folks in Cycleside Bike Rodeo, which I can talk about later if you don't know what that is. But anyway, it's a wonderful performance troop. And the Odon Bar was run by uh by Chicken John and uh and his crew. And uh he had a show booked. The Exploding Puppet Theater was booked there on uh uh you know on the 12th, right, the day after 911. So 9:12 they were booked there. Everybody of course was blown up. You know, we were all like out of our minds after 911, right? What the f***** going on?

Yeah.

And and then Danny girl Danny says, "Well," and Chicken says, "I'm not closing the bar. We're just going to be there. We're going to keep going." To his credit.

Um, you know, like and uh and then Danny says, "Okay, we're going to do the play." And they they usually wrote their plays right beforehand. And they did kind of a punch and Judy thing with like a cardboard box and they'd make cardboard figures and they have them pop up and down.

Really wonderful. So, under Danny's uh toutelage uh or her direction. They create they recreated the 9/11 flights. They built these tiny little cardboard twin towers. They got some little little cardboard planes, little cardboard people, and they flew the planes into the f****** uh the the the the towers inside their little TV their cardboard TV box. And that the bar was packed. Okay. I was standing on the bar with another 20 people. It was packed to the gills. You could have heard a a f****** pin drop.

That was my question. Yeah. Yeah.

Nobody said anything. They did the thing and then and then and then the tension broke. Some people started shouting and yelling, "That's not funny." They ran. They they left. They were all pissed off. Other people were crying. Other people were hugging the cycle side crew going, "Thank you for doing that." It was the single most punk rock thing that I've ever seen in my entire life. Including cutting pig heads with chainsaws and spitting the mats on the audience in a downtown parade. most total punk rock thing I've ever seen. And it was really beautiful. Really beautiful.

Yeah.

Beautiful thing. And uh

well that's okay. Going to the whole punk punk rock thing. It's like that's I think something that people think about like like Kop or more specifically like Burning Man, they think it's like ah it's a bunch of hippies, you know? So it's like no it's more punk rock than than hippie. Wouldn't you say?

Not anymore. But yeah,

I mean well in the beginning

I mean it incorporates a lot of things. It incorporates a lot things into it now of course because it's a much bigger event but no and when it started it wasn't a punk rock it wasn't exclusively at all a punk rock even slightly I mean the punk rock was part of it you bet but there were a you know variety of types of people that came out from the very beginning cuc society was not was not punk rock like any kind of doctrine punk rock group at all although there was a lot of crossover and the earlier suicide club certainly there's crossover with the punk scene that started a year before the suicide club 767 really is when the punk scene started and the suicide club started in 77 but our scene was always much smaller uh you know there were like a hundred people in the suicide club from the 70s on and cacophony had maybe

I don't know

what

there's that many in the suicide club I don't know the suicide club was

there were 100 people

there were 100 people on the mailing list I've been archiving all this stuff so I'm pretty pretty sure on the dates and times and actual numbers there were 100 people on the mailing list that we had for the suicide club back in 19 77. Uh there were 30 people maybe who were super active in the club. Let's put it that way. But there were 100 people on the mailing list. And the suicide club

came out of an earlier iteration of creativity called Kim University which was part of the uh the 1960s free university free school movement which started in 1964 when they had the uh the free speech um uh conflict on UC Berkeley campus where uh Mario Savio stood on top of the cop car and made the made the preach uh you know made the speech about free speech and how important it was to any kind of you know human autonomy and human decency and that's where the free speech movement started which by the way we're pretty foolish by allowing free speech to go by the way of the dinosaur and I hope we stop doing that cuz it's really stu really stupid but beside you know not to get into politics here but so the free university movement started at the same time and it started because uh and this is like I'm telling you this because this is a precursor to Burning Man. Burning Man did not start because one windag through his uh his uh his rib on the desert and there was Burning Man. That's an absolute fallacy 100%. And anybody who's involved originally in the first few years knows that.

Get into that. So anyway, so

you're anticipating all my questions because my my next question was going to be is who who is or who was Gary Warney? Is it Warie or Warren?

Gary Warren.

Warren.

Yeah. And that's I'm I'm getting into that. It require we have an hour and a half here and if you want to know about the pre pre- Burning Man history, that's what I'm talking about.

Exactly. That's exactly and and and so university came out of a genuine goodwill concept that a lot of uh professional educators had in the United States in the 1960s and that was at that time was a time of incredible turmoil way more than we're having now by the way um just to put it into context for you kids um big turmoil uh people were being assassinated left and right and uh major major major street movements bigger than the ones we're seeing now uh fighting against the uh you know opposed to the Vietnam War in and in favor of the uh the uh rapidly expanding civil rights movement of the time which was a brilliant and genuine and needed uh desperately needed movement. And so a lot of young people were pretty pissed off about what was going on and there was a lot of uh unrest. So educators in uh in the univers of goodwill in the universities decided well we want to connect up with students you know and and and you know we want you know we're here to help them and here to be you know like educational. So what's the current zeitgeist? What what do kids want to do and the idea of free uh you know free commodities, free you know education that sort of thing was in the air at the time along with a bunch of other ideas. And so this this concept of the free uh university free school movement took hold and had and and developed a lot of uh leverage a lot of footage over the next uh several years and there was no central clearing house for it. There was no central philosophy. It kind of evolved out of uh out of European uh uh uh um um public education theory. and writers and educators and then was kind of filtered through the American educational concept and system. But the idea of free universities was particularly in in regards to San Francisco Bay Area was students and educators coming together creating a curriculum and classes that were all free and then teaching them for free, people interacting with them for free. And this this concept took all kinds of different faces all the way across the country. country and like a lot of stuff. The only good thing about being around for a long time is if you're paying attention, you start to discern patterns and you see things that you see things that disappear that were hugely important and influential at one point in time and before the internet and of course the internet's going to all blow away when the cloud blows away and you know whatever AI apocalypse we might be facing but in the meantime a lot of the stuff you can find we have this uh you know what do you want to call it uh um um you know wall of information attached tower of babble of information coming at us constantly, but if you're discerning, you can sift through that and find real information about certain things. Back in the day, you couldn't. I mean, something would happen and maybe it was it was recorded in a newspaper or maybe, you know, like a magazine or something and a lot of that stuff just goes away completely. So, the free university movement, which was enormously influential on all kinds of things, there's very little about it online. Very little about it online. Okay. So, San Francisco had like UC Berkeley had a free school school. Uh San Francisco State had a couple. First one was like uh the experimental college I think is what it was called starting in 1965. That ended in 69 or 70 and then they started a new one called university like community university and uh it was an it was a a function of SS state and they created created a little format for a little protocol for it and a stu they they uh engaged student administrators a couple three of them and they create created a a a class calendar that came out three times a year and they would uh run these free classes. Many of them were in the SS state classrooms that weren't being used at the time. A lot of them were off campus in uh different places, people's homes, you know, uh restaurants, whatever. And they encouraged people to do whatever kind of classes they wanted to. This was happening all across the country at the time. And there were hundreds of these schools. I mean, New York City, all the all the Sunni colleges had free schools. You know, you University of Michigan. I mean, there little literally hundreds of them if not in every major university around the country. And like I said, there was no central doctrine. So some of these free schools were andor ended up being fronts for religious or political groups. A lot of them were that way. Some of them were just Yeah. Some of them were free form and very idealistic and genuinely trying to do what they're saying they were trying to do, which was to to uh to uh uh create these uh avenues of and communication networks of people learning different things and and working together. But the the Bay Area iteration I know more about because I was here. Uh I ended up joining uh the suicide club and commun university at the same time in February of 1977 actually November of 76 for university and then February of 77 for the suicide club. And the format of that uh organization at that time uh the the the student administrators in 76 had gotten into a little tiff with SF State because the quote classes quote unquote classes they were doing some of which were very kind of traditional. They had like conversational French or the physics classes uh you know uh automobile how to fix your automobile classes, how to make tofu, any point being anybody could do any kind of class they wanted to as long as it was free. You didn't charge money for it. You could barter stuff and uh I'll talk about that in a minute. There was a format for bartering. All of this is pertinent because you'll see where it had an influence on later Burning Man. Uh this is which is what your interest is, which is Burning Man, which is very small part of my interest. But with that said, so that so the uh Kum University uh SF State uh they had a they had an office in a in a quanet hut on SF State

campus. There were three or four student administrators. One I think one or two positions were paid and by 1996 Gary Warren had become the student chief student administrator for university. His

answer 76

I'm sorry 76 excuse me 76 1976

and uh took First to qualify this, I've worked with a lot of people in my time in all kinds of different projects, creative projects, and a lot of pe, you know, the the word visionary is one that's very overused. A genuine visionary is pretty rare, you know, and I've been around some people, Steuart Bran, who's undeniably, you know, really, you know, has had visionary uh uh moments and all that. I've been around other people, prominently people who involved in Burning Man, who not only not visionaries, they're windags. But uh with that said, Gary Warren in my estimation he he died in 1983 at the age of 35 or else you would all have heard of him

for a variety of reasons but he was a genuine visionary. He would come up with an idea for an event and and he he his initial concept which which he shared with a lot of people at SF State and who were in community university was free the idea of free exchange of ideas and creating culture through this you know through building it yourself through making your own culture and he really believed in that. Um, and uh, he and Adrien Burke, Rick Laskkey, uh, there there were a bunch of Kathy Hardy, a bunch of people involved early on. Uh, you know, who who shared this vision. And so the idea with with Kim University was to keep free exchange of ideas and and to build culture. Okay. So they got into some trouble at SF State because the idea of free ideas branched out from what you might consider traditional education, educational models into some pretty pretty out there stuff, right? Including like they'd have uh they were really into uh into um pranking and in urban exploration stuff kind of early on.

Mhm.

And uh so some of the events, some of the classes would end up being events like they'd have uh like clown costumeuming and then pie fighting contest or how to how to do that properly. They'd watch like an old old old uh Charlie Chaplan and Buster Katon films and then they'd you know they they they'd have that as a class. Um they'd in between you know the conversational French and the theoretical physics classes and uh and so uh also they do exploration things where people would go they they they meet at a certain point and go on an exploration like a geo uh uh uh uh what do you call pap a paphysical exploration as Gary might have said he was pretty uh influenced by the data as as kind of early suicide club was influenced by the data um by the data scene and uh and so they did what there were a couple things that broke the broke the camel's back at SF State as an actual official, you know, like legal, you know, entity. And one of them was they at that time in the late '7s like streaking, which is basically getting naked and running around in places you weren't supposed to be, was kind of a fad for a while. And so they did a couple of of incidents where they did streaking situations, you know, on the on the campus and other places. That was one that pissed off some of the alumni uh the alumni, deep pocket alumni people, you know, who helped pay for the school.

Well, the other one was a thing called the pie of the month club, and this right before my time and it was legendary when I became involved. Pie of the month club you sign up for it as a class through university and then the idea is you you would and this became a pattern for future events too where the organizer of the event would say well this is what you need to bring to the event this is what you might be able to expect from the event this is what we're expecting of you and then you would make an agreement to be part of the event and the agreement you know you you would you expected to you know kind of keep to the agreement you know through the course of the event itself and so the uh so with the pie of the month club. It was like you show up and you say, "Bring a a a list a notation of when you can be assassinated and when you cannot be assassinated." For instance, if you had a retail job somewhere and if somebody assassinated you at your job, you would get in trouble and lose your job, you would say, "Please don't assassinate me between the hours of uh 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday." If you were a teaching assistant and you were in a class, you know, in a classroom situation and you didn't want to, you thought that might be deletterious to your, you know, ongoing academic career, you'd say, "Well, please don't assault me while I'm doing my TA duties or whatever." And you could say that the rest of the time you were open open uh there's open range on you. And then through some arcane method lost to history, they would determine who the assassin was and who the assassinated was to be. And then the assassin could conscript anybody they wanted to to uh help them assassinate the uh you know, the mark, the target, and the target didn't know, right? So, you could do funny things like uh and it branched out at from what I heard in all kinds of paranoid conspiracies where you know you could you could approach somebody and say hey we really want you to help us with this like do and then you'd pie them right that was your setup for them right so uh I heard that there were a couple of instances one guy TA did get pied while teaching right he was assassinated another another person was at dinner with and I don't know if these stories are apocryphal I've heard them many times from older people so I assume there's some truth to them but another person was uh at dinner with their parents who were visiting from back east somewhere and the waiter brought out a covered dish which was a pie and the person got pied in front of their parents. Okay. So, this thing turned into a giant like mythic s*** show and stuff was going back and forth and so the administration at uh city uh at SF State got a lot of heat from some of the alumni. I remember one one letter that one uh uh you know really uh well-healed alumni sent to the uh student newspaper. I I archived this s*** which is how I know this, but he sent a letter going talking about these forked pathetic creatures running around naked and how how can the university possibly support this sort of degeneracy. So anyway, they got in a little tiff and Gary being Gary said, "Well, okay, let's just look around and let's take this out and turn it into a 501c3 nonprofit," which they did. They left SF State. He at the time was a was a nent book seller and he wanted to open a bookstore and he partnered with Oz Cused who was a guy who started the roommate referral service which later uh influenced Craigslist and they both opened a storefront. They opened a storefront on Judah uh I think they had it in another place first and then they moved to Judah Street and 10th called it circus of the soul bookstore and Oz ran the roommate referral service which is a place where you'd come in this is before computers you'd come in and he had thousands of listings of of places to to rent a apartments and you'd look through them and then you know they'd ask what your requirements were what your specifications were and they'd find an apartment as I understand it Craig Newark was uh uh influenced by this and it was a seed of the idea for starting Craigslist so So anyway, so Gary ran the bookstore out of there and Kim University and Oz ran roommate referral service out of there and uh and then it was uh you know then they could do what they wanted because they're 501c3 nonprofit school. They had to be careful and this is where the suicide clubs comes in because more and more of the university classes were becoming uh more extreme you know psychogeeography stuff or you know stuff that was some stuff that was even quasi legal right none of it was immoral or unethical which is a important point but you know as I my son. And as I like to say, uh, you know, unethical is something, you know, immoral is something you never do. You just know what it is and you don't do it. Uh, illegal is often negotiable, right? And so, and so, uh, they started doing classes out of the out of the book Gary's bookstore. And then they decided they realized at a certain point when they looked at what the state requirements for 501c3 schools were that they needed some liability separation for university just in case something happened. And so they said, "Well, let's start a secret group to do the more extreme things, right?" And Gary was enamored and some of the other folks involved were enamored of uh Victorian adventure fiction. And they took the name the Suicide Club from the Robert Lewis Stevenson uh uh you know, series of stories, not quite a novel called The Suicide Club about a group of English dilotants that put their worldly affairs in order to live each day as though it were their last. And one of them gets assassinated by one of the others randomly without not randomly, but under some arcane process. And so that's what the that's what the group was was was based on. Okay, I'm done with that for now. Got a question?

No, I don't know. It almost reminds me of like a Montipython kind of thing.

Kind of one another influence on that whole scene.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so point being there was an entire subculture uh created long time before Burning Man that had its own mores, its own kind of uh you know, ethics and concepts among which were No trace, which we practiced in the suicide club. We didn't call it that. We just didn't trash or f****** environments that we were in, even if they were uh urban uh you know, abandoned urban environments. We didn't leave our garbage. I I remember doing an event in an abandoned mortuary uh in an abandoned funeral home, a huge one. And we it was a big event, a lot of people, and we we usually would have a we had a had a big potluck dinner at the end of the event. And we carried all of our garbage out. We didn't even leave it in an abandoned building. Okay? And that was part of the uh ethos of that group which was so profound and uh really uh effective and me as a you know 19-year-old 18-year-old juvenile delinquent joining this group I learned that you could not follow the rules and do what you wanted to do in a sort of anarchist situation although we were not doctrinary anarchist at all without being an a****** or screwing up you know uh the rest of society around you just had to be mindful of what you were doing I mean who cares if you climb the Golden Gate Bridge in secret as long as you don't fall on their car Right. I mean really should you care about that?

So things like that you know um obviously if everyone was doing it it would become a problem but everyone is not doing it.

So how long did the suicide club live for? Would you say it was like 77 to

February 1977 to April 1982. That was the official run of the group. Uh we kept doing events that were similar through the mid 80s. Although we didn't have an official group that we did it under. And things broke up in a way. Gary died of a heart attack. attack which was devastating uh devastating to many of us like truly devastating I can't describe I'm still it still hurts me to even think about it and he died at 35 um and uh the the suicide club ended shortly after that and uh so you know and what was the question there

well no I was going to because the suicide club was a little more like insular right I mean like there were

it became more it became more insular in the beginning it was not at all

yeah

yeah not at all um it became more insulin. Sure. Um Oh, hang on a second. I lost you there.

Oh.

Oh, there you go. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. No. Um in the beginning, the only thing the only thing that separated it from the general population was that you had to join it as a class through community university. Okay.

Now, this is another thing that's really interesting to people who want to organize uh uh events and do, you know, like cool underground s***.

Basically, the the suicide club, you have to have people that are conducive to that sort of thing. And before the internet, it's easy to find them now on the internet. easy to find people who are, you know, interested in the most arcane subject, the most obscure subject you could imagine. You'll find a hundred of them online, you know, somewhere.

Back in 1977, forget it. Right. Finding,

you know, I mean, Ela Mo Ela Fronte, who's one of the OG Suicide Club folks, she was also an attorney and an accomplished person and part of the 70s scene. Um, and which which involved a lot of uh, you know, a lot of a lot of sex with different people. And she said one time memorably, it's like I can find some dude, you know, to sleep with any bar in town, but finding a really good freak is extremely difficult.

Okay, that's a good point.

And God bless her, she was right about that. So the reason the suicide club could even exist, and this took me some time to figure out over the years is that it was it came out of an existing scenario, a free university, a free school called Kum University that a three had a 30,000 person mailing list at that time. Okay. So out of that 30,000 people, most of whom were, you know, between 18 and 30, young, you know, excitable people, you know, in the prime of their life, starting to do things. Out of that 3,000 people, only a 100 people signed up for the suicide club because it sounded pretty scary, right? And so, but you needed those 3,000 people to get 100 people who had the wherewithal or the interest or the, you know, the whatever to to actually take the risks that were presented to them and that they soon started to create for their themselves. in this little subculture that we were creating at the time. And uh and so that's super important to know uh because you know now with the internet you don't need it. You don't need to have that kind of a of a background to to uh a filter to get people who would be interested in doing this sort of thing.

Yeah.

I don't know if that makes sense or not but

Yeah. And then we'll later on we'll get to you know well we get to right now like cacophony like so SF cacophony like when did that start up and and you and you guys had a a different kind of concept, right? So, you came up with the um the the newsletter, the rough draft, right?

Well, we had a newsletter. We had a newsletter in the suicide club. It was called we called it the newsletter. It was mailed out.

Yeah. I actually need to re I actually need to iterate on this a little bit more. Sure. Sure. The the newsletter in the suicide club was mailed out every month.

And the reason that organization was not an organization, why it was so profound in my estimation uh now in you know 50 years, 40 years in retrospect is because of the system. that was set up mostly by Gary Warren because he wanted to have a he wanted to have a group that he's involved with that he didn't run that he wasn't the leader of that that self-organized and how do you do that I mean communism really doesn't work very well anybody who studied history will admit that it's just you know I mean it's a great idea but wrong wrong species um but you know people people are selfish and self-involved and communism is never going to work because whatever that's another argument for another time um so so uh with the new newsletter. The way that they set it up, Adrien Burke and Gary, is that anyone in the group could list any event they wanted to in the newsletter and you you'd write up the event up. You'd say what you needed to bring on the event. People needed to agree on the individual events, you know, what you know what they were or weren't going to do if they came on it. But the newsletter itself, the editorship of the newsletter rotated every month to a different person. And everyone in the group was encouraged, I mean, they weren't required, there were no requirements, they were encouraged to edit the newsletter, right? So, Uh, pretty much everyone, most people ended up editing at least once, which means that sometimes, you know, like the Pierre Bar would edit it and it was illegible and he it was late and getting it to the to the post or somebody else like Don Haron or uh or or Nina Feldman would edit it and it was beautifully laid out and perfect and, you know, mailed on time. But that wasn't the point. The point was that everyone was encouraged to do it. No one controlled it. No one controlled the only organ of uh of cohesion that we had. The other thing we had a a treasurer quote unquote and uh you know the mail cost like at that time was like 5 cents for a you know for a postage stamp or whatever 4 cents. So you had a treasurer who would handle the you know $150 $120 or whatever it came in for postage and the treasurer rotated every four months. So nobody nobody even controlled the tiny bit of money that was involved.

So what that created for 5 years which is a long time for something that's so unstructured to exist I think if you look at history right what that created was a group that was genuinely

motivated through collaborative collective uh energy, power and and and uh and uh and ideas and it worked pretty well for for several years.

Yeah. Well, I think something we'll get to a little later, but um

I think it definitely works like on a like a on a smaller scale because it's like

once things get bigger and bigger and bigger and then bureaucracy and everything, it's like it all goes out the window.

Absolutely. That's obvious to anybody who's ever studied civilization. with the suicide club with the newsletter. I mean, it wasn't like you left them at like coffee houses and stuff. It was like a closed list that like you had to university cataloges we left at coffee houses. We actually did we get dressed up in costumes three times a year, silly costumes, and we would deliver stacks of uh university uh class calendars to coffee houses, bars, uh other nonprofits, and all that. And I I remember actually a funny incident. I feel I still feel terrible, terrible, and ashamed of this. say about this. All right. We were distributing uh we were distributing uh calendars on on Hate Street and I was dressed up as a like a like a hillbilly bum with a you know like red union suit and a and a straw hat and uh there's a cowardly lion. You know we had all these people in costume and uh and Luis Armowitz one of the OG Suicide Club folks was dressed up as a Raggedy hand and she was a super tall super cute gal rag super cute raggedy hand and we're walking down Hay Street and we see Harvey Mil walking towards us. Harvey at that time was famous locally but not nationally, right? He was famous locally because everybody Oh, Harvey the first, you know, he was really well regarded. And

was he mayor at the time or was before like was he he wasn't mayor yet, right?

He was never mayor. Harvey Milk was supervisor.

No, George Musone. George Moscone was mayor. Harvey Milk was supervisor and he was only supervisor for a year and a half before he was assassinated. So anyway, to my story, um we're walking down the street and so Louise, you know, I saw him and she goes, "Oh, oh, uh supervisor milk. Here, have one of our calendars. And he totally New Yorkked her and walked right by her. Didn't even look at her, right? And I was so pissed off. I said, "Hey, man. f*** you." And then he was assassinated a month later, two months later, and I felt so s*****. I felt so terrible that I told him the f***. And who knows, maybe he was in a bad mood. Maybe he didn't like girls. I mean, who knows why he maybe didn't notice her, right? It would be hard to miss a 6' tall raggedy ant. Okay, but so anyway, that's a story. I admit it. I'm ashamed of it. I'm ashamed. But I said that and so God bless you Harvey Milk. I'm real sorry.

Yeah.

So, uh, yeah, we also met George Moscone, the mayor, one time. It's really funny. Um, we were, uh, my friend, uh, Jason and I. Jason was a local, uh, uh, journalist and also a major player in the suicide club, creating events. And, uh, he was working for one of the local, uh, I think for the Berkeley Barb. And, uh, and, uh, this this this guy, what was his name? Uh, uh, uh, uh, s***. He was Richard Nixon's chief of staff. Um Charles Coulson. Charles Coulson had had a revelation while in prison because he went to prison for the Watergate uh for the Watergate in Braglio. And in prison, he saw God and and uh became a charismatic uh born again Christian and he wrote a book, a bestselling book uh you know, which he then was pimping out after he got out of prison. And so he was giving a talk in the Fairmont Hotel to the uh Young President Society, which is a group of like you know, young guys under I think they're under like 35 years old who who uh uh commandeered million-dollar corporations, right? So really ruthless group of people and he's giving a prayer breakfast to them. And so Jason set it up through his editor got a photographer and uh set up an interview with him for after this talk and it's like at 8 in the morning or something ridiculous like that. And so we went there I went there with my girlfriend Joyce as a backup, right? And we went there Jason essentially to interview this guy to pie him in the face because Pying was a thing at the time, right? Big thing at the time. Aaron Kay, the yippy pie man, was an influence on us. And uh and so we get there, Coulson comes out of this room with all these like these ruthless capitalist dudes. And uh and then Jason pulls him aside. Hey, I'm here to do the interview. And he's like fidgeting with his but and he whips out. He does he doesn't end up doing it. And so he does a short interview and Coulson kind of blows him off and leaves. And we we we walk out. I remember Jason kicking the wall like f*** I can't believe it. I I clinched. I can't. And he like turns around. He runs back into the lobby. the Fairmont runs across the lobby over to the elevator off in the left wing and we we run in behind him and I and I had a backup pie right from Aaron's cream Aaron's bakery and a backup chocolate cream pie in my in my satchel. So he runs across the lobby and and uh Coulson just getting in this elevator and I see his hand go into the elevator and he turns around and runs back through the lobby and Coulson's bodyguard does a flying tackle of him in the middle of the lobby. Coulson comes out of the elevator wiping chocolate cream pie out of his eyeball. calls, right? And he and he knows this is a hit. He doesn't want anything to do with it. And he gets his he says to his body, "Come on, let's get out of here. Let's just leave it alone. I don't want to prosecute the the the the uh the the hospital, not the hospital, the hotel staff." It's like, "What the f***** going on?" Right? And so the uh you know, the uh uh the hospital uh the security guy for the hotel uh finally gets involved and Coulson's gone by then. And he goes, "What was that all about?" And uh and uh she says, "Well, that was Charles Coulson." And the guy's Coulson. Yeah. He was wasn't giving a talk in one of the rooms. He goes, "Yeah." He goes, "Coulson. Coulson. I've heard that name." He goes, "He was Richard Nixon's chief of staff." And the security chief at the hotel goes, "Oh, Nixon, huh?" He goes, "You know what? Don't worry about the pie in the elevator. We'll clean it up. Don't worry about it. Just get out. Get out of here."

Wow.

And there's a actually it was covered by the Chronicle. There's an article in the Chronicle about it. They covered it.

And so that was kind of things that we did in the suicide club. They were kind of ancillary

events. That wasn't an official event, but it was, you know, like a suicide club influenced prank.

Um, and so, uh, anyway, back on the cacophony

Well, on the cacophony, yeah. So, when did, uh, cacophony start up and how did that, uh,

coffee started in 1986 in early '86 and a bunch of us in the club had kicked around the idea of starting a new group pretty much for years and nobody pulled the trigger on it until Gene Mashoffski, who's one of the main organizers in the later day suicide club, and all the people involved in first cacophony year were they were all suicide club. uh alumni and she has the idea uh along with a couple of other people and she has a meeting at her house and uh and and in that meeting um they kind of come to the idea to start this group and you know legends and myths and whatn not get started so I I you know I'm doing an archiving project for the last 20 years on this material and so I try to cross reference people's ideas and people all remember things differently okay they they just do including me and I get it wrong myself sometimes I I I totally know I'll admit first to admit that. So if you can triangulate any particular incident or situation from two or three three or four different, you know, points of view and kind of cross reference them, you can kind of get an idea of what might have happened. Okay, that's the best you can get with history. And uh and so uh the idea the name rough draft that I've been told and I think most people agree, Jean and Louise Jar Milowitz and another person maybe Lance Alexander were walking down the street when they came up with the name uh uh Cacophony Society. Okay. And then later at the meeting, uh, they were going to have a we're going to have a newsletter and, uh, the suicide club newsletter we called the newsletter because it was a suicide club. That was a the reference there, you know, to kill yourself with a noose. Uh, and with the Kaggy Society, it's they kept putting it off, putting it off, putting it off, and finally it's just like, well, it was the rough draft of the newsletter. And finally, it was just like, well, f***, let's just call it rough draft. Okay. So, I missed out on the first couple of months of Suicide Club because James was my girlfriend. We just broken up and she was going to murder me and I couldn't didn't come around and she was a formidable woman you didn't want to mess with and so I got involved a couple months later and I'm not one of the contrary to what you may have read or seen in this you can't control media as you as media will understand okay I am not a co-founder of the cacophony society I'm original member original member of the suicide club involved in cacophony from very early but not a co-founder and whatevers you know most people don't give a s*** about that but some people do and so Gene Mashowski to be exact founded the cacophony society along with the help of six or eight other people including uh uh you know Joe Weinstein, Sandy Hatch, uh Sarah Jeziorski, uh Sheila Stone, uh uh Lewis Bril, um I'm forgetting some people. Uh you know, there's a bunch of people involved early and they're all old Suicide Club people. So that's how it started and then within a few months we were up and running and uh I got involved in in in creating events similar to the ones I done in the Suicide Club. And then we also did the monthly, you know, newsletter, the rough draft, and it it had the very same format in that anybody could list an event who's involved in the group. We didn't have a, you know, like a whatever you want to call it, like an introductory. You didn't have to go through any kind of a hazing or introductory process to be a member. You could just join. And like the propaganda says, you know, you may already be a member. Okay.

And so we kept the structure

and the organization down to a minimum like we had with the suicide club. The ideas around cacophony that were different, which are there were some Um they were mostly formulated by Lance Alexander and Lance was a OG suicide club character. He hadn't done many events in the Suicide Club. You know, he hadn't really been involved in organizing many events and I think he felt like he wanted to have more input on cacophony and he thought about it deeply and he he looked at what the sui and he wrote about this and you can find all of his writings in the first chapter of our book tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society which you can find it's uh in its second printing paperback printing you can find online and uh

published by Last Guest Publishing, co-authored by Kevin Evans and Carrie Galbrath and uh and and and included, you know, stories of hundreds of people in the group and uh you know, a bunch of pseudonyms and all kinds of stuff. So, uh so Lance, his concept was take from the suicide club all of the points that seemed like they worked really well and then also have another column of all the different uh different suicide club kind of, you know, like uh concepts or or or or um trends or whatever you want to call them that that we were involved in that did not work so well and then with cacophony kind of lean towards the ones that worked and kind of not not emphasize the ones that didn't work. And so we kind of did that. We took a lot of his uh you know and like like I say once again you know Jean started the whole thing rolling but Lance was basically wrote the closest thing to a to a manifesto for cacophony. We never really had a serious manifesto at all. Um um but he he wrote the closest stuff to it. And uh his main observation was that the secrecy in the suicide club towards the end of the group really ended up kind of poisoning it in a way because we didn't get new blood in and that that was that was it was better to risk an open face to the general public and risk getting somebody we didn't want or maybe risk the authorities hearing about something we didn't want them to hear about.

Was that really concern like that was that really a concern on the suicide club? It definitely was. We were climbing the Golden Gate Bridge regularly going in all kinds of in live in structure sites. You know, of course, it was a small probably a smaller concern to the authorities than we thought at the time and we got quite paranoid about it and literally, you know, like through social pressure, you know, like basically convince people. I mean, there was there was a controversy in the suicide club the last year about press or no press. I mean, originally there were three or four articles written the first year of the suicide club and then we got real paranoid about it and discouraged, you know, everybody from encouraging uh uh any journalistic uh you know like representations of the group including uh Mother Jones magazine was planning to do a feature article on the suicide club and we basically spiked that 100%. Uh Wii magazine which is Bob Gion's uh second uh imprint after penthouse magazine. They had they wanted to do a piece on the suicide club and we told them to pound sand. There's another author I'm not going to mention his name but he's a well-known well- reggarded uh uh documentary uh uh writer who had written several bestselling books and he wanted to write a book about the suicide club and we literally shut him down. Uh there's another an academic named Jenny Graham Scott who wrote a book about the suicide club which we shut down. It was her I think it was her doctoral thesis and uh but we shut down the book and and not like we could make them do anything but we just didn't help them you know we stopped assisting

and we weren't threat we weren't threatening to kill them or anything we don't want to help you with this and so we we shut that down and

that was good for some reasons and bad for other reasons right I mean nothing's black very few things are black and white. And so not getting new blood into the group after community university ended because university during this period kind of faltered and failed and we no longer had the 30,000 person mailing list. We were no longer putting the suicide club as a class in the community university calendar. So structurally, you know, like reach out like

Yeah. We we lost our our new blood. And so in cacophony we chose not to do that. We were like okay we're just going to like let if the press wants to cover s*** that's great. They have to be part of the event. you know, we want them to come out and like play as part of the event, but yeah, if they want to cover something, sure, we're not going to shut them down. You know, we might even encourage it a little bit. Um, and uh, but we'll probably take some of the more dangerous and stupid things that we're doing and not put them in the newsletter and just do them by invitation, which is sort of what we started doing.

So, you had things like like like sounds like cacophony, too, right? So, like adjacent.

We had another column. We had another column that included that. That's correct.

Yeah.

And so, the the official quote unquote official coffee events were, you know, were listed in the newsletter, Rough Draft, and then there was a there was a music column that was done for a while by Chandler White, who's a incredible musicologist, and uh and then the Sounds Like Cacophony. I forget who first did that, but it was probably in like late ' 80s, uh maybe 88 or 89 that somebody did the first the first sounds like uh you know, um um iterate or like like list on the newsletter.

Okay. So, cacophony starts up in ' 86 like Larry goes and drags his crude wooden man to Baker Beach.

Larry and Jerry James who the guy Jerry James who's the guy who built the man who is full 100% partners with Larry who gets left out of his story a lot

a lot and who integral who was 100% integral and as much of the face of the event through the late 80s as Larry was.

Oh yeah.

So just to correct that misconception the name God one more. Oh Dan Miller as well. Yeah Dan Miller was was Larry's roommate at the time and always involved always involved in event. Dan's a great guy and uh but not a major not a a major organizer in it. He was organizing groups or

setups or building scenarios or what I mean he built the man worked on it with Jerry.

Yeah. So in ' 87 you know those guys like build this crude little wooden man and I've heard they they were just kind of like breaking wood with their hands

pretty much. Pretty much

Jerry Jerry was a finished carpenter and Dan were finished. So, they knew what they were doing.

Oh, yeah.

But they had never built a man. They never built a man before. But you have to interview both of them, you know. They'll tell you their story.

Oh, I've already interviewed Dan Miller. Yeah.

You haven't you haven't interviewed Jerry James, though?

Oh, he's on the list. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got to interview him definitely. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, he was full on the face of the event at the time. He's the one who who contacted us in Cacophony Society. He literally reached out.

I could ask my question cuz like like what was which was worth checking out the egg? You know, like was Larry or or or Jerry or those guys like part of cacophony before this Paul Baker Beach thing or it only like were after?

No, they weren't. But there's someone who is and this is the actual Genesis story of Burning Man. Mary Growlberger,

okay, who is 20 years older than me. She's still alive. She's 87 88 years old. She was in the suicide club in uh the 70s and she lived up the street from me in the inner sunset. I lived with a friend of mine, Mary Freeberg. Uh I'm sorry, Mary Freriedman, whose two children been and Nell were seven and n years old at the time and Mary Growlberger lived up the street with her son Fletcher who was 7 years old at the time.

Mary, the two Marys were in the suicide club and uh their kids were also suicide club kids. We used to carry them into abandoned buildings on our backs and and carry them into the cable housing of the Bay Bridge. This is these are true stories. Maybe not the wisest thing to do, but we thought we were doing it safely at the time. And so Mary Growlberger was in the suicide club and at the time she was a a single mom on welfare and living in a you know like a small apartment and she joined the suicide club and was in it came on events did stuff was really I knew her cuz she lived up the street her son Fletcher I used to swing him around and throw him up in the air he's like my kind of like my my nephew along with Ben Ben and Nell who were the kids that I lived with and they were the Suicide Club kids there's another kid named Taz I forget his parents' name uh but there were a couple of kids that were involved in the group and so Mary Grberger um I lost track of her in about probably 79 or 80. I I just sort of lost track of her. And then I didn't meet her again for like 9 years, 8 years. And in the in the interim period, she went out and she was, like I said, she had been in San Francisco since the 60s. She was uh uh uh you know, like uh you know, 20 years older than me at the time. She had a bunch of a whole group of people from from working uh uh uh you know, uh on different art events and whatnot. So she had a whole con you know, community of people that she was involved with before the Suicide Club. And she started doing these summer solstice beach burns on Baker Beach.

Yeah.

And she did them every year on on the solstice. She invited a bunch of her friends and they would hang out and they bring musical stuff and they'd bring their art. She asked them to bring their art and at some point evidently somebody burned one of the pieces of art and that became a thing. Jerry and Larry uh you know uh were knew her. Um I think Larry knew her through Janet Lure who was his uh his girlfriend at the time. and uh who knew Mary and they were both in a pottery class together uh you know at Fort Mason and I went there a couple times and uh

you know I knew Jan a little bit. She's a nice gal and uh so so that's how Mary was connected and uh and uh there's another connection I can't really comment on but it was a pretty profound one. And so Mary was doing these things on the beach and that's one of the things that it absolutely of course why would it not have been something that they kept in mind when they started doing the Burning Man thing. Right. And and my guess and this has been told uh uh uh Michael Hopkins, who's not the best historian there is, but he's a pretty good storyteller. You know, you know him as Flash.

Yeah.

Right. He tells a story that they were watching the movie Wicker Man when the light bulb moment occurred. Now, I would take anything that he says with a grain of salt because he's a very colorful,

you know, storyteller and facts, you know, don't have a lot to do with the stories usually. But with that said,

with that said, That rings true to me because, you know, they're on the beach doing an art event on the solstice, right, with people burning art and then they see this man in the movie, right? I mean, that's my bet. And and it's a myth, you know, the actual underpinnings are are mythologically obscured in a certain way because Larry was self- mythologizing always.

Yeah. Okay.

Literally selfth.

The story that I sort of heard was that so so Mary had been doing these summer solstice like little beach her and things and then when it came to 1987 uh Larry like I guess she was kind of tired of it or something and she was like wasn't kind of bothered and so Larry was like well I'll go and like and then and Larry had

as the story go there's a rumor has it you know it's like oh he he had like broken up with that I forget her name that woman but he was kind of sad and whatever cathartic kind of thing like I'm going to make this wooden man take it down to the beach but it was just kind of just like a random

kind of art you know there was no real thought it was just like I'm going to build this thing go down to the beach and then they light it on fire and then all a sudden a whole bunch of people come up.

Why would you build a man? Why would you build a man to do that?

I don't know. Yeah,

right. You would if you' just seen the wicker man and you also been going to a summer solstice event, smoking some weed and burning art on the beach.

I'm just saying, you know, I'm not a forensic psychologist or anything, but uh you know that seemed that rings out of all the stories that people tell and the poor memories that people myself included have, you know, and how difficult it is to literally think you know, literally pin down the exact thing that happened, right? I would lean in that direction. And knowing Larry later and how much he uh created uh uh stories that really had very little grounding in in actual history or truth, you know, I would say that there's a good chance that that's probably what happened. That's what I bet money on it. But, you know, I can't prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Well, as all this time has gone by, maybe we could start a new rumor. Maybe he killed somebody want to dispose of the body and he made me like Well, that did happen. can't we can't talk about that. We were we're signing non-disclosure agreements.

No, people think that's real. So, um yeah. So, after 1987, I mean, well, was that even on like Cacophany's radar at that point?

88. Michael heard about it and put it in the newsletter and I think that's when Jerry James contacted us. Yeah.

Ah, okay.

It might have been late ' 87, early 80, something like that. Okay.

But it was Michael that made the initial the initial connection I'll you know you know that as I understand it you know and then I met with Jerry Jerry came and met with us and he was cool immediately hit it off with them we immediately understood what they were doing and like oh this is f****** awesome like a great thing you know and so we started uh promoting it started working on it uh and uh and by by 1990 Michael and I were doing security

through uh radio connection we had we had police scanners in our ears and we're listening to the cops as we're trying to bring the components of the man down and get down to the beach and we worked directly with Jerry James with that, not with Larry.

Yeah,

Larry was off smoking cigarettes somewhere.

Always smoking cigarettes. Yeah.

Yeah. Well,

yeah. Um God, what was I was just thinking of? Um Oh, yeah. No, because in reading the the San Francisco Confidence Society or the Tales of the Confidence Society, like I kept seeing interspersed here and there like mentions of Larry, like there would be like atomic cafes and just Yeah.

Yeah. So like would he like So afterwards like he kind of

started doing conf stuff like

no everybody was a member. You all, you know, you might already be a member. Larry came on three or four or five events. I don't know how many.

And uh and he was involved in uh in uh as a character in a couple of events.

Well, this the third Atomic Cafe he was prominently involved in as a as a character. He didn't organize the event. Yeah.

But as a character playing a role in the event, he was he was and also in uh Let The Eat Cake. I think the last iteration of Let Them Eat Cake, which Peter Dodie did, which is a wonderful event where we all got dressed up as French aristocracy and went out and helped food not bombs handing out food to to

Did you guys get like or some people get arrested like Miss P and a couple they did that was what I wasn't on that one but the one that I was on there were about 20 of us really beautifully dressed there's photographs of it I think

where did you guys get those costumes I was like wow

costumeuming at the time there was there were costume outlets Louise was a costumeumer Coulter was a costumeumer that made costumes uh there was a bunch of folks in the in the group that made costumes I can get into that later. I mean, a bunch of questions.

Yeah, there a bunch of women involved in Early Burning Man that almost never get any real credit for anything. A bunch of women involved and we'll get into that if you like.

If you don't mind, I have there's this thing that this one of the parts of the Tales of the Cacophony Society book that like totally like stuck with me. Uh was Kevin Evans.

Oh, yeah.

Bringing brain man to the black rect. If you don't mind, I just wanted to like if if I could just read like a couple of paragraphs of like what what he wrote, right? Because I think this is going to blow a lot of people's minds. Um

well, I'll just read the whole thing. It says, "Bringing Bernie man to the Black Rock Desert by Kevin Evans. Labor Day weekend 1989. I with my roommates P Seagull, Don Sto, and Cynthia Colnik attended a wind sculpture event in the Black Rock Desert sponsored by the Creative Collective Planet X in Gerlac, Nevada. We constructed and hauled a lightweight mobile canopy bed sculpture on top of a tiny sedan out to the remote inhospitable area in Nevada. The surreal local combined with multip with mobile sculptures uh was both incredible and inspiring. That weekend was was one that had a great and lasting impact on my life. I never wanted to leave. The desert attracted and stirred me. I knew I had to go back. When I returned to the Bay Area and started my final year at art school, I rallied a few friends and schoolmates around the idea of planning a a Labor Day weekend trip to the Black Rock Desert. I had been reading essays by Hakeim Bay. Everyone says Hakeim Bay. And his eyes struck, his ideas struck a chord. At the time, I was experimenting with the technique of forcefully augmenting or destroying parts of my artwork as a meditation on impermanence and flexible reaction to sudden change. These concepts fuse into a plan to generate a creative temporary incident in the black rock with a central theme, the ritual destruction and immulation of sculptures and art constructed for the event with the peculiar empty location as a stage set. For an insolvent young and naive art student, this vision seemed far too grand and expensive to accomplish alone. I decided to present the scheme as a as a cacophony society event, a zone trip to fellow cacophinist John Law. Uh other members of the group were later recruited uh M2 or Michael Michael Danger Ranger uh and logistical planning commenced. A few months from the target date of the expedition, many of us from the Cacophony Society attended what was to be the last Baker Beach burning burn of Burning Man in San Francisco. Fortunately, via the intervention of Yeah, fortunately via the intervention of local authorities, the monolithic figurine was not raised amidst chance of burn it anyway and pagan-like drumming. A few of us cacophinous, including including Miss P and Dawn, thought it'd be a great idea to invite the architects of the wooden construct along with our for our voyage to the bizarre setting. May looking at the biggest, most elaborate piece of firewood, a glorious confflrgation.

Sure. Yeah, fits. Yeah, fits. Um, yeah, Kevin, the first time I ever heard anybody ever say the words, "We should bring this thing to the desert was when we got shut down on Baker Beach when Kevin said it out loud. I had never heard it mentioned before." And we had had uh meetings with uh you know, the uh the also the um um um Planet X crew uh Mel Lions or malfunction was his art name and John Bogard had been doing stuff out in the desert for a long time. We were aware of that. We were totally aware of that. I had been to the desert before myself with friends from work from uh sign company I worked for um American American Sign Company, Steve Yonman and Bobby Brandon and Steve's girlfriend Terry. I can't remember the last name now. I so I had been to the desert before myself. Kevin had been out there in '89 with P and Cindy and and Jerry James was on that. Jerry James was on that trip as well. And so they were aware of the desert and so like a lot of great ideas, you know, there was a there were there were a lot of uh uh cosmic synchronicities or whatever you want to call them. And so Kevin, you know, uh mentioning that idea, it was like a light bulb moment. Every like, well, yeah, you know, because what are we going to do? We're shut down on Baker Beach. What are we going to do now? And so Kevin and I listed the event in the newsletter, I think in March or April of that year, and like we're planning and we sed started planning the actual logistics of doing a run to the Black Rock Desert. And so uh and then we did and we collected some information about it, talked to other people about it. Kevin had had the idea originally and I'm like f*** yeah. I mean I've been out there that's a great place. It was I can't even it's hard to describe and we were so excited when we both talked about the Black Rock Desert when I first realized that they had been out there and he realized I had been out there. We started jumping up and down like little kids.

Wasn't Larry something

reluctant to the whole idea of going out to the black?

Yeah. He didn't like the He didn't really like the idea, but he was broke out of out of out of money out of time and had really little had little uh uh uh you know it's like we were suggesting it and it's like either do it or not do it right because he was dead in the water literally Jerry and he had had a falling out over Larry doing something and Jerry standup guy and whatever I mean you know it's a personal situation that rose it was really ugly and Jerry dropped out of the entire thing he had been supporting the entire thing financially he literally paying for the wood he had a tiny f****** apartment and a garage which he did he ran his small carpentry business out of And uh and so he was getting really a lot of pressure and not feeling like doing it anymore. And and Michael and I and the rest of the cacophony group kind of stepped up and brought it out to the to the desert that uh that year that same year night that it was shut down on Baker Beach. I rented the first box truck got went around everybody helped load it, you know, with stuff including components of the man and uh drove out drove out of the desert hauling a porta one porta toilet behind the behind the rider box truck. You know, I think it was writer. I don't remember their photo. There's photos of it. And uh and yeah, so that was the first year in the desert. But yeah, I mean that that you know like the zeitgeist at that period of time was such that I don't know. It's almost like it was ordained. I mean I'm not a religious person at all. It almost seems like it was ordained that we would end up in the desert. And my experiences out there which paralleled Kevin's were that it was a blank slate. I mean you could and and and and you could do anything. And I knew from I knew from dealing with uh police agencies and uh and different constituencies in that regard that if we were going to do something like this, we needed to be as far the f*** away from civilization as possible. And from the very beginning, the whole seven years that I was operations manager for that event, I set the location for the for the actual camp for the event. And I set it as far away from the road as I could up Playa as close to the as close to the conjunction of you know like Persian and Wo County as possible. And also close to Humbult County. So, it's up in the Black Rock and the left part of the desert, you know, the uh western northwestern part of the desert in order to in order to keep it as far away from any jurisdictions as possible because I knew that they didn't they wouldn't care as much about that location and we'd probably be left alone. Um there's a lot of stories about the first year on the desert lake. The first law enforcement character to come out there was in 1990. We had been set up on the on the PLA for I don't know like a day or two probably a day actually because we had come through uh we had come through Gerlac with a caravan arriving at dawn and we stopped at Bruno's and all had breakfast and there were probably I don't know I want to say 25 people in that caravan so that was a big deal for Bruno's at the time it wasn't

I'm sure you guys stuck out like a sore thumb

yeah and and the word got out we found out later from our friends in town that we we forged some really strong relationships with people in town we found out later that the word was that some Satanists from Frisco were heading up Playa to do whatever do satanic rituals. So So I'm out there standing, you know, in the middle of nowhere up by the black rock way north on the Playa and I see a car coming at us and you can see a car and there were no cars out there like none, right? Our cars are the only ones and you can see a dust plume from like 5 miles away. I saw a car coming at us. So I immediately made sure that walked over was in the area that you know that car was coming at and sure enough it was a uh it was a GG. Not Ger, it was a uh um a federal uh uh a federal um um what's the agency up there? The

BLM

BLM. It was a BLM uh uh uh law enforcement truck. And the guy stopped and he got out. He was a cowboy looking dude with a mustache and a cowboy hat. And his name was Joe Leaf. L E Af. I introduced myself and said, "Hey, how's it going? You're probably curious about what we're doing." And I walked we introduced him to a bunch of people, walked him through. The man was standing up. So it's probably we probably been there for a couple days. The man was standing up and I explained to him I said, "This is the thing. It's based on, you know, like ancient ritual and like the I probably said the wicker man and we're not don't worry, you know, I joked about it, you know, don't worry, we're not going to be burning anybody to death in it, right? And uh and you should come back. I think it was that night or the next night was the was we're going to burn the figure. And I said, you should come back and check it out. And he like walked around. He's very friendly, very civil, met with me, met Michael, and met some other people. We shook hands and he drove away and that's the last time we saw him. The second law enforcement guy to come out was Dick Meyer and he Oh, there's there were a couple actually. There was a wash out county sheriff's uh had a guy and what was his name? Um Joe last name started with a G I can't remember anymore. And Wow County at the time we were mostly in Persian County and Washaw County but Persian County did not have an outpost in Gerlac. Okay, Persian County was uh Love Lock and they had to drive all the way around the mountains their their deputy sheriffs to get to the playa, right? It was a long drive for them and there were only a handful of deputies in the department, right? It was a huge huge physical area. small staff, right? And so they had a reciprocal law enforcement agreement with wash out county who kept a little outpost in Gerlac. And this dude sheriff from Wo County, Joe, I can't remember his last name now, but he would come to Wo, he would come up there occasionally and, you know, once a month, who knows how often, very, very seldom, maybe would do a little circuit, you know, drive up the drive up the trail on the west side of the Playa, you know, up to Soldiers Meadows or whatever, or Double Hot Springs or something, but very rarely would see those guys. And So they had a reciprocal law enforcement agreement where he would watch county if something bad was going down, right? They would maybe interdict and then they would contact Persian who would then come out. So that was the situation that they had. I dealt with law enforcement my entire seven years there. Got to know some of these people pretty well. I knew uh Persian County Sheriff's Ron Skinner really well and his wife and uh and uh and so we had forged these, you know, good relationships with them. We didn't b******* them. Michael and I and other people were involved in that. Uh later Chris Campbell and you know uh uh and uh I mean we were so well regarded in town early on that Bruno allowed us to store s*** on his land without charging us any money for it. Now he was making money with you know people coming into the bar and the restaurant. But tell me that if anybody who knew Bruno you know it's like he wasn't charging us money to store her s***. I had several containers on his property. Did not charge us money for it. So uh I thought that was pretty interesting. And uh uh Forester, the the local propane guy was making bank and he was really friendly. We were friendly with him and you know the other folks running the bar. I mean I remember first coming to Kurac first time I came into it in the mid 80s driving to town there's like five bars and no churches and I'm like hm I could I could like this place.

And what was the population?

That was kind of our relationship.

I don't knowund couple I don't remember. 100 people couple And

yeah, something like that.

Wow.

And I remember Bill Stapleton at the at the g the Texico station. He was awesome. We had a really good relationship with him, you know, and Cecil, you know, you know, on the station and and the, you know, was Bruno's daughter and yeah, we developed really good relationships with all of them. I'm still in touch with I haven't been there. I haven't been to the Ply since 1996 and we're still in touch.

Oh, really?

Um, so yeah, it was a great

Have you been out to the Black Rock Desert? Just like, you know, any other time? I haven't been there since 1996.

Oh, really?

I did. I was 7 years on the desert. It's a perfect memory. I'd like to keep it that way. I I would I would literally weep if I saw what's been done with the damage that's been done to that physical environment out there.

Um, and it would be it would be very I just don't want to see it, you know. I'd rather I I have a great life doing a whole bunch of other things.

Yeah.

And I I don't need it. I'm not I'm not a cultist like so many people involved in Burning Man.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, 1990 to 1996. I mean, the days, you know. So, what did this mean for

Yeah, but what does this mean for cacophony like back in San Francisco? Like, so I I interviewed Miss P. She was going to come out in a couple of months. But, uh,

I don't know. She was saying that like, you know, that she could sense, you know, like, you know, like in 1907 Golden Gate when they had to have like the meetings, you know, people get like after the, you know, 1990 and you people came back. She said just it kind of like sucked the oxygen out of the room or it's just like everything was just all kind.

Sure. I mean, the the first three years on the the first three years on the desert were uh cacophony events literally um you know the entire input like threequarters of the people were cacophony members or more uh and uh and it and it grew a little by actually doubled every year but but by 1992 like there was a 199

yes I'm getting into that that's but by by 1992 uh William Benzen who had been coming to Bernie man since the the first one on the desert. I think it was actually I think he was at the last one on Baker Beach too. And he was a local photographer, artist, really talented, really talented, large format photographer, like world class. And uh he's a cool guy, very uh uh philosophically inclined and soft-spoken and uh very thoughtful and very well read in arcane areas of interest. And uh we got to be friends and uh he had this idea from from the beginning this this thing he called Desert Sight Works and he conceived of it he conceived of it as a in partnership with Burning Man to some degree and he talked to Larry a lot about his ideas uh for Desert Sightworks and he developed this whole concept about artists creating their own environment in a temporary setting kind of in tune with the temporary autonomous zone concept and oh there's another aside here woman uh which I'd like to just go off on for a minute Carrie Galbra co-author of our book and and OG cacophonist She came up with a concept through her interest in uh uh in uh Russian uh uh uh fiction and uh and and film of the zone trip idea which he got from Andre Tarovsky's uh movie this stalker which is based on a science fiction novel written by uh uh Boris and I forget his brother's name Struggotssky the Struggotsky brothers and it's a really interesting story about how some weird unknown alien craft landed on the planet at some point and they occupied this whole area that people couldn't really go into because some unknown force and then they sort of left just sort of leaving their detritus, you know, random half-hazardly and randomly like a roadside like they stopped at a roadside place and just left their garbage basically. And then after they left human beings, they would try to go into the zone. It was called the zone. Some people would just die randomly. They couldn't make it through. Other people would go in and they'd come back with some object that they came from the zone that was made of some hor some whatever I mean really wealthy it made them wealthy or changed their lives in some incredibly positive way so it became a thing trying to go into the zone and in the zone the idea is anything could happen physics didn't work the same way that it did in the real world and you just didn't know it was going to happen to you when you go into the zone that was kind of the basic her basic concept extrapolated from the story and then the and the and the and the movie and she incorporated this into her whole cacophony career as such as it was and She was very involved, did a lot of events, really brilliant gal, really wonderful friend, and she's the one who brought in all the artists, uh, Kevin Evans and Vanessa Kumerly and, uh, and and a bunch of the other artists that that became involved with cacophony in, uh, in 19 uh, uh, 8990. But anyway, um, so the, uh, you know, this whole concept of the zone was very powerful. And then with the desert site work, see, a lot of stuff happens concurrently, not necessarily with the indiv ual authors knowing about the other authors. You know what I mean? If you like really study history carefully.

Yeah.

Ideas that become ideas that become pivotal or instrumental in a in a cultural progression. A lot of times a lot of people kind of have the same idea different parts around the world without being connected necessarily. And so there's something to that theory and because Bay come up came up with this temporary autonomous zone theory which Carrie was unaware of when he was writing papers about it before he published the book TAZ. I think he published it in '92. I'm not sure but there were he'd written stuff about it beforehand which you could have read about. Carrie came up with her concept in you know 88 and we did the first zone trip to uh which was to Los Angeles which is a zone you know Los Angeles.

Yeah we did the first uh yeah the first zone trip in uh 80 89 I want to say. Was it 88 or ' 89? Anyway we went down there and we did a second one and then the third one and then the fourth one was a Black Rock Desert. It was literally called you know, the San Francisco Cacophony Society zone trip number four, Bad Day at Black Rockck in the newsletter. That's what it was. And uh so Carrie needs I mean, you know, like a lot of women involved in this whole whole progression and history has gotten very little traction for for her involvement. She passed away tragically

a few years ago.

Oh yeah. It was really sad. Really really really heartbreaking. But uh you know I mean you know I wrote a memorial for her that's in the the front plate in the second edition, the paperback edition of our book.

But she was a truly integral figure. She was in integ. You want to speak philosophically,

historically, and as far as influence on the culture that we were creating, she's easily as important as Larry, if not more so. Okay. And she's never spoken of. Mary Growberger, that would never have happened without her input. You know, P Seagull, very important. P Seagull was basically the, you know, the hostess and the uh, you know, the the the the denom for all the dysfunctional idiots who who were formulating these these ideas. And so Desert Sight Works with William Benzen, he formulated a very specific philosophical uh uh uh treatise which he wrote and uh was working with Larry on it. He thought he was working with Larry on it and uh he approached me and some uh other folks in cacophony. I think the first one uh first desert site works that we did was in 1992 and we did it at Black Rock Springs and it was uh uh William designed this structure We we did costumed events. Uh we did an ongoing like 24-hour just sort of weird inclusive I wouldn't even call it an event. Um but we uh also did uh photographs of people in because William in addition to like trying to put together groups of people to create our own like I don't know if you want to call it art event would be the wrong thing but like like living experience right creative living experience. experience. He wanted to capture the experience in his large format photos. Now, he's shooting like like I don't know like massive plate photograph 8 by 10 or whatever and he's going to get like in in 3 days he might get six photographs total each one and they're all like oh yeah and they're all you have to look at his photos to believe them they're printed out you know 10 ft wide they're inane photographs

and uh and he's had a couple of he's had a couple of gallery shows but but regardless so he wanted to capture this activity in his photographs and if you look in the book You'll see a really crappy small version of some of the photos. There's one at Black Rock Spring where I I installed a bunch of neon underwater neon in Black Rock Spring under

you can ask how it's done if you wanted if you want to digress, but trust me, it was safer than it sounds.

And uh it was all insulated. All the all the electrode connections were totally insulated with silicon glue.

Silicon glue. And the transformers are mounted on on platforms up in the reads off the side. So you would have to get right up next to the uh units in order to catch any kind of a corona effect, any kind of a buzz from it. And you'd have to break one of the unit to get shocked to death. And even then, you probably wouldn't die.

But uh and and I put a bunch of other neon in the in the uh in the in the in the uh the weeds around the front of the thing. And and he he set up his camera and took a photograph of this. And we had like 15 or more people in the pool with colored lights moving around.

And so he had this incredible photographs that he took of Black Rockck Springs with the Desert Sightworks crew in the spring. And so we were up there for several days and it was one of the most amazing experiences ever. And so the next year and he's talking to Larry about this the same time and he William was envisioning it as a collaboration between Desert Sightworks and Burning Man. Boy was he fooled. But uh with that said um the he planned it the next year and he had he had engaged us in cacophony to help with the first year. We helped out in the second year and uh I I was basically operations manager for the event. Hauled all the s*** out there. Uh William and Judy West She was an administrator at at uh at uh uh uh project arto. They knew a bunch of artists and they went to open openhouse art uh presentations and also talked to their friends at project arto and recruited you know like I don't know like 50 artists to come and be part of the second desert site works and at burning man on the desert we had nothing like this in 1992. The 19909 911 and '92 Burning Man they were cool they were fun. And there's a little bit of art. Serena Deah from from England and Larry to his credit got a a European artist that he knew casually to come and bring some of her her art. There were these uh weaker figures that she brought out. Um um my friends uh uh uh Carl Howser and uh and Vince Kowski were both neon benders that I knew through the neon trades and they're also artists. They both did art installations early at Burning Man. Uh Vince did a crop circle, neon crop circle flat on the ground and And Carl did a a Dr. Hoffman's bicycle with moving neon on a bicycle which is pretty wild.

Wow.

And really impossible to do. And that was like 91 92. And these are the guys that did the glass for the man as well. I mean I designed the neon for the burning man but I wasn't a glass vendor. I was a sign hanger. And so these guys actually made the glass that I designed to put on the man. So that's how that originally came about. So but back to the story. Um there was no

it was no large scale massive art event with all these different is coming to it. Desert Sightworks was designed to be that. And we had 100 people at Desert Sight Works on at Tgo Springs. And at that time, you know, there was a there's an underground uh uh what do you call it? Uh uh uh sweat lodge. There were all kinds of art installations, physical art installations. I did a neon uh uh tracing of the hillside behind us. Several hundred feet of neon outlining outlining the the large hill behind us. Um Tom Plumbley did a this crazy uh like a long like a 50 or 60 foot long snake made out of snake ribs. It was set up in the trench in the hot springs trench. I also put some neon alongside the trench. Will William made a beautiful kingpost trust bridge that went over Togo Springs that you could so you can walk over the spring. Um there were a bunch of other artists from Artto and from the city that did installations and Paradox Pollock uh major figure.

Yeah. In October I I

wonderful man. Wonderful man. Got a brother of mine. Love him.

Oh, yeah.

And a really cool dude. And he came out uh with uh Fred Adler and uh and uh kind of what we're show uh um I don't know if Kate I don't know if Kate McGlin was involved at that early. She might have been. And uh uh Harvest King who was a a a dancer and and an artist. They were in a troop at that time called the Ape Theater. And they were uh in a in a storefront in the mission that Fred Adler rented. And so Ape Theater came out to the to the uh 1993 Desert Cybers at Drago Springs and did like a 20 or was it 40 48 hour

48 hour performance. Yeah. Life cycle.

Yeah, that's right. 48 hour immersive.

That's correct. Performance involving most of the people out there and it was phenomenal. I mean uh Pepe Ozan was involved in that troop and later went on to great prominence at Burning Man. Um so this is going on through at the desert fireworks. It was mind It was one of the five most amazing things I've ever been involved in my life, which is saying a lot. And basically that was in summer solstice of 1993. We invited all of those artists to come out to Burning Man 4 months later. All of them. And they literally picked up Desert Sight Works, moved it to Burning Man. Larry Harvey had no in very little input on this, actually none. And they basically moved out to Burning Man. So if you came to Burning Man in 1993, you were basically involved in a desert site of that had partnered with Burning Man, brought all these artists out to you know to uh uh you know join the handful of artists that were there and the cacophony society early on we never identified as an art group. We did not identify as a as artists. There were artists in the group but it wasn't conceived of as an art group. It was conceived of cacophony was like the suicide club was conceived of as your life. I mean this is actual a

a living creation of culture. not art. We weren't in that box of art, but the art got involved in cacophony when Carrie Galbrath brought over her friends from the art institute, from the CCAC, the college of arts and crafts and and and uh from the SFAI that she knew. Those people came over, you know, and then Cacophony had more artists involved in it. But Burning Man as an art event really truly took off in 1993 and that was like I would say 70% the input of William Benson and the desert Judy West and the Desert Sightworks crew and uh and this is almost entirely forgotten history. It's still you can find it. It's out there. There's some stuff online about it. Some people have read it. But what happened was and I was involved in operations at the time. Wasn't paying attention. And after the first two Desert Sight Works, I just dropped out of it because I my duties with Burning Man were increasing. Michael and I were both involved in it quite a bit. We put our business on uh we had a signed business that we were involved in with Chris Radcliffe and we put our business on hold for like a month or two while we did Burning Man. And so I I sort of dropped out of that whole thing. And you know, Larry took off with the uh media and uh and theme. You know, we start we didn't really have an official theme yet, but he you know, he had more to do with uh uh uh uh like being the frontman for the event, I guess you would say. And so he was working with William and he basically took all those ideas, all the philosophy, all the written concepts that Benzen had, took them for his own and kicked Bill to the curb. And he was forgotten and for years slandered. And a lot of people involved in the later iterations of Burning Man who would hear about William Benz and oh who's that crank right the guy was a true in his own regard an actual visionary artist and putting this thing together making the photographs which are which you know are uh you know are in collections I mean that was one of the reasons why I dropped out I just didn't want to have anything to do with the event after 1996 I didn't want to work with Larry Harvey

yeah well also I mean just kind of exponentially grew and I 96 was actually the first year that that I went and

Larry Larry Larry's involvement in the event

Larry's involvement in the event and the main thing he brought to it and was very powerful was doing anything anything that came to him any little thing any big thing that came to him that would help grow the size of the event he immediately he immediately took it in and and used it anything that's his main interest was growing the event he told me and he wasn't joking I want to see a million people out here I thought he was nuts but uh uh but uh he back to something like early on we were talking about like uh you can kind of keep something small and and do it forever you know or you know you can like make things will get exponentially larger and then it's like by by nature it's like perman

yeah well why did it grow so much so much like a zone

we had so much goodwill by 1996 but by by the time I left that event we had so much goodwill so much grassroots support it was It's hard to explain. It was really well regarded in the in in the San Francisco and it and and and and gradually the world, you know, the nationwide kind of undercultures. It was very well regarded and it has so much goodwill behind it as a grassroots event that when Marian Goodell got involved, who's a professional publicist, she could take that energy and push it forward, which she did. Larry, you know, she she'd let Larry talk blah blah blah blah blah, but she ran the event pretty much from getting involved a couple years after I left, well, a year after I left and then coming to run the event within probably 3 years after I left.

Mhm.

And God bless her, you know, I mean, they needed somebody, you know, if they're going to turn into a big business and and a large event and take that take underground goodwill.

What's that?

And Harley, too.

Harley Dubla.

Yeah. Yeah. Harley. Yeah. You know, Harley. Sure.

Yeah.

But Marian uh, you know, was the power behind that 100%. Marian was the only person involved in that event after 96 without whom the event wouldn't exist and there are reasons for that. Um, one is that Wo County swiped their gate in 97 and Har uh uh you know uh uh Marian had a lot of experience dealing with public relations, dealing with real companies and she shamed the county into giving the money some of the money back and she took all that grassroots support turned it into a press campaign that was hugely monumentally successful in supporting the event and that's why the event kept going. It would have ended had it not been for that.

Yeah. So Stuart Mangram in the back of your book like wrote that in 1996 Brandy man and cacophony society had a a very messy divorce. Is that how you would describe it?

No, that's how Stuart sees it.

That's Stuart.

No, not really. I mean cacophony cacophony was never an organization. It was never a very good organization. The only thing cacophony was was a concept. It was a it was a uh an idea about how to come together, how people could come together and create their own world. I mean, as an organization like the Suicide Club, it was a terrible organization. It was not a very good organization. It was a brilliant philosophical concept and it brought people together. And cacophony was killed not by Burning Man, it was killed by the internet because cacophony as an organizing

as an organizing principle, cacophony, all it did was bring people together. The only organ like with suicide club was the newsletter and meetings. We'd get together and have a meeting. right? Once a month and drink beer at Edinburgh Castle or Tommy's Joint or whatever.

And so, no, Burning Man, you know, yeah, Burning Man uh definitely is the 800 lb gorilla in the room. There's no question. But Burning Man, the biggest problem with people, you know, looking at Burning Man is the end all and be all it's not. Burning Man is part of a cultural shift, not the cultural shift. And people who are heavily involved in that event because it touches them so deep, some of them so deeply, it's cultic in that aspect. And it and that they get caught up in that

and that's that's a mistake. That's a dead end. And and the power of the event the power of the event which still exists to this day is in the small breakout groups the uh theme camps or whatever people giving some small area of creativity because it's not nearly as large as it used to be but some small area of creativity that they might not be able to find back home. They can do it on the ply to some degree. You can't burn things anymore. You can't but you still have more creative free free hand than you would you know in in Oakland or in New York or whatever LA or whatever. Oh yeah.

And that's the value of the event. People come there. It's also a convention that people go to once a year and see all their friends. Those are the in my mind those are the two great val two great values of the event. The rest of it is a bunch of hoie.

Far because it's basically the the hypothesis of my entire show. There's this whole people talking like oh what does the impact influence that and pretty much every one of my guests like they eventually kind of come around to the same point where you know it's like it's family it's connection. You know, it's I mean, and I can see it through the whole through way through like you're saying like through Suicide Club, through Cacophony, through through Burning Man, through all of these different children of Kacophony, you know, Sacon, the Ida Rod, this this beta breaker salmon run, the the adbusters.

We're creating our own culture.

Yeah. But we're creating our own Burning Man turned it into a business.

Yeah. Well, people even even Burning Man to a degree, you know, I mean, I think it's like why it continues is because people is people connecting and people together and yeah, you know, you create a

and that's it. But the rest of it, the rest of it, you know, the 10 principles, give me a f****** break like like Larry had, you know, went to the burning bush, right? I mean, it's a just a bunch of Sorry. I mean, leave

like Yeah,

it did. And and it's predicated on an earlier iteration of principles, which was written kind of as a joke, but also as a tutorial, which Gary Warren wrote and mailed out in the Suicide Club newsletter late in the year of 1977 after we've been going for about eight months and he did he did what he called the 12 chaotic principles it's in the newsletter you can look it up online and uh and the 12 chaotic principles each one was based on some event that we did that blew up in our face and why did it blow up in our face oh because we didn't stick together oh s*** we should stick together right pretty simple right and so those 12 and I gave the I I I gave the newsletter a copy of the newsletter with the 12 uh uh chaotic principles to Larry in 1991 and I said hey check this out it's kind of cool Interesting. I also gave him a copy of Fawn Brody's uh biography of Joseph Smith as a joke. I said, "Here, you ought to read this, Larry." You know, 92 or 93. Fawn Brody's biography, Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet.

Yeah. Anyway, it's a it's an end joke.

Um I mean, Larry had messianic, it was clear he had these silly messianic feelings that early. And so, I gave him the copy of the book as a joke. I also gave him a copy of uh of The Prince Um, but I think you'd read that. I think you'd read that before.

Well, I remember. Okay. I don't know if you know this is true or not, but I don't know where I heard this, but I I know at some point, I don't know if it was like in 96 during all of this craziness, but like Larry saying Bernie man is my legacy. And I guess to some degree it is.

Yeah.

You think that's like the better parts of Burning Man are the legacy of a lot of people. The better aspects of the event are the legacy of lot of people what Larry always missed which made him not part of the community right I mean he had this and he wasn't you know always just like philosopher king he wasn't that bright around that stuff he read some books he incorporated things into he's very clever he incorporated some things into his Burning Man philosophy but you know Marian ran that event from way up from way early and the only reason it's still exists to some degree um from what I've been able to see and uh you know god bless her you know I've never seen anything bad about her. Um, you know, I know people have some issues with her, but whatever. That's up to them. So, uh, yeah, I don't regret anything. I had a great time. I had, uh,

six wonderful years in one pretty harrowing year. And on the balance, I, you know, God, what a great time. Um, what a great bunch of people. What an amazing on the balance, what an amazing experience for me. Uh, and it's part of, it's it's right up there, you know, among some of the best experiences of my life. involved in that event.

Well, working with Survival Research Labs,

going to be one of the longest interviews I've had. But, uh, one one last thing. Um, thought I saw somewhere that you wrote something about if it wasn't for cacophony, you would either be a drunk welder in Texas or like a junior professor at a small college. Is that is that true? I did say something. I'm being paraphrased there, but yeah, I said something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. If I weren't for if it weren't for the Suicide Club I would be like a drunken welder in Iowa or uh you know like a petty academic somewhere.

Wow. Wow.

Yep.

Yep. And I still I believe that or I'd be dead or in jail depending on how the how the brakes hit me back in uh you know mid70s when I was you know headed that way.

So you were like what 18 19 when you encountered suicide and then

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so now all these years later in in your your old age

I'm 6 Seven, I'm still involved, heavily involved in the urban exploration scene worldwide. It's a very vibrant scene and can't talk about it. Yeah, really can't talk about it. But no, I traveled eight times last year uh six of them to go to different events in different parts of the world and uh locally a lot of stuff going.

Yeah. Know that um Benjamin walks you know caveat magister he was telling me about like the

Yeah, I know Benjamin.

Yeah. So I guess even now day today in San Francisco there are these kind of like suicide society likeesque kind of groups, but they're they're like they're very kind of private. They don't even want to be like talked about.

They're very private. Yeah, I can't I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Never heard of them. But no, there's a lot of stuff going on in the underground. And and for people who are interested in finding it, if you're if you persevere and you really are interested in finding these groups, then you'll find them. And if you can't find them or if you do find them and you don't like them, start your own goddamn group and don't call it Burning Man for Christ's sake.

Yeah. Well, one place maybe you might run into one of these people is at the San Francisco premiere of the Santa Con documentary coming up on February 5th at 6:15 Roxy Theater only with 200 something seats. So get your tickets now,

right?

Or

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for pimping it out. Thanks for Thanks for pimping it out a second time. Yeah. Come on out. It'll be a lot of fun. And uh you know, you can throw s*** at us if you want to.

All right.

Sorry about Santa. What can I say? Never apologize. Well, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful interview.

All right, Andrew. Yeah, thanks for having me. Um, you know, all right, I'll have my attorneys contact you later.

Sure.

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