Ya Ho Wa 13 Has Risen from the Grave
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=6526&IssueNum=233
Fun for kids, senior moments for hippies at the Echoplex
11-22-07
By RON GARMON
er name was Mecca, and her Delta-bumpkin dress twisted in stylish
frenzies as she danced. Whatever the psycho-dramatic issues at stake
with her blonde moppet partner, the furious conviction of their
performance at Echoplex stopped everything else going on. It was
abandon and ravishment contained in choreography that led
imperceptibly into the syncretic pandemonium of the night's opening
act. Psychedelic Pecksniffs might dismiss Hecuba as a beat-heavy
update of first-wave L.A. hippie-rock, like Sweetwater or
Kaleidoscope, but such revered ancestors are simply more chunks in a
cauldron already brimming with punk, prog, hip-hop, and the kind of
bracing dada typified by pixie-ish Isabelle Albuquerque cooing, "I
taste the black/I taste the white/I taste the brown/I taste the Filipino."
Indeed. They shut down far too soon and we were left to our devices.
The heavily-advertised rebirth of local 1970s psych-curiosities Ya Ho
Wa 13 fetched a sizable haul of Hollywood neo-hippies and their
crusty elders on Friday, November 16. There were many friends in the
crowd, along with some accouterments of Burning Man subculture. The
massage table and (V.I.P. only) chill space looked like bric-a-brac
displaced from the Mutaytor show uncoiling many blocks west on Sunset
at Safari Sam's, leaving much slack to be picked up by hipsters,
stoners, and assorted beards. Onstage, Entrance mainman Guy Blakeslee
was taking care to set his microphone's reverb at Tomb of Zuul
levels, which made a hallucinogenic smear of between-song banter. The
set was a long series of heavy psych jams, varied at intervals with
Blakeslee's shot-dog ululations echoing dismally off the concrete.
Outside, a scabby 1970s animated version of Alice in Wonderland
flickered on stretched canvas like a low-budget acid trip.
Veteran rockers took things over from there. Sky Saxon had worked
with a spin-off version of Ya Ho Wa 13 long after his brief fame as
lead singer of the epochal 1960s proto-punk quartet the Seeds, his
career bookending L.A. psychedelic rock's weird history from first
proto-punk snarl to last cosmic sigh. Roky Erickson's recent stand at
the El Rey showed off old-skool psyche's still-potent charms to
advantage, but Saxon just appeared tired and the hard-boy sneer of
1967 is now thinned to a conversational wheeze. Outfitted with a new
band (featuring the ubiquitous ex-Germ Don Bolles on drums), Saxon
presided absently over distended versions of Seeds hits like
"Pushing' Too Hard" and "I Can't Seem to Make You Mine," pausing at
intervals to jabber obscurely of the cosmos and Arthur Lee.
The great man eventually shut down to make way for the headliners.
YHW 13 released nine albums worth of "spontaneous music" back in
their brief mid-'70s heyday, as house band for the Source religious
cult. The Source operated a trendy Hollywood vegetarian restaurant of
the same name, and the albums they gave away for a dollar each at the
eatery now command exorbitant prices on the vinyl underground. The
cult slowly disintegrated when the leader, Father Yod, died following
a 1975 hang-gliding accident after the Source cult decamped for
Hawaii, but YHW 13's un-nameable, ad-hoc combination of tribal
drumming, folkie fervor, ecstatic chants, and deep-space musings
borrowed from German kosmiche was too strange to stay buried forever.
The catalysts for this unlikely comeback were Saxon's tireless
interest in the cult's music and message plus publication of the
Family's memoir, The Source: The Untold
Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family (Process
Books). YHW 13 was bright-eyed and full of excitement as they led us
through an opening chant that ended with our taking 108 deep breaths.
Tonight, they unlimbered a ferocious barrage of astringently abstract
rock that sunk the audience into a swaying trance. These long
white-noize ragas achieved a rare kind of ragged grandeur, even as
the crowd began to thin perceptibly. The bedraggled Saxon joined at
the finish, his suddenly stronger voice lifting the gentle cacophony
skyward, toward that Yahweh who reportedly knows a good joke when He sees it.
--------
Remain in light
Chasing after Aquarius with the Source Family
BY MAX GOLDBERG
Wednesday November 14, 2007
"The body, and its pleasures and powers, is rarely far from the
spirit in California," Erik Davis writes in his introduction to Isis
Aquarian's firsthand account The Source: The Untold Story of Father
Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and the Source Family (Process). Many generations
of Californians have enjoyed a mix of healthy eating, nature
appreciation, and magical thinking, but few have done so with as much
colorful exuberance as the Source Family, a group of angelic
longhairs that thrived in the Hollywood hills in the late '60s and
early '70s under the guidance of Father Yod (a.k.a. YaHoWa, Shin Wha,
and Jim Baker), a fast-talking rascal with the hair, beard, and robes
of a latter-day Zeus.
What began as a small commune of hippie restaurateurs (the group ran
the Source, the veggie restaurant where Woody Allen has his Los
Angeles lunch with Diane Keaton in Annie Hall) soon swelled into the
hundred-plus-member Source Family.
As Baker grew more assured in his Father role, so too did his
leadership become more outlandish, both in terms of teachings (which
dabbled in many incoherent mystical strands) and practices (which
infamously incorporated tantric sex rituals and polygamy). The
family's experiment in living had stops in Hawaii and San Francisco
(the Guardian's classified section is mentioned twice in The Source)
before Father Yod died in a hang-gliding accident in 1975, a notably
quiet way to go in a decade that also saw the Manson Family's carnage
and Jonestown's horror.
Three events this week an audiovisual-enhanced discussion at
Artists' Television Access, a signing at Aquarius Records, and a live
performance at Cafe du Nord commemorate the publication of Isis
"Keeper of the Record" Aquarian's Source Family primer, a stitching
together of testimonies and primary documents. As is often the case
with informal accounts, the book is wracked with cliché, most
frustratingly in the form of new age truisms used to elide meaningful
experiences. There are, though, more than enough weird and wonderful
details to make it an enjoyable read (for example, the rainbow diet
of avocado, eggplant, red onion, banana, filberts, tomatoes, and
alfalfa sprouts), and something like pathos emerges when family
members reflect on their experiences ("Probably 60 percent of my
memories come from one single year of my life").
Still, it's their glamour that holds our attention. There were dozens
of similar-minded spiritual groups at the time, but nothing quite
like the Source. Comparing the group with the earthier Love Israel
Family, Aquarian writes, "[We] had a house in Hollywood and served
organic cuisine to rock stars; our women wore custom-designed
jewelry.... They had trucks, and Father had a Rolls Royce." The
Source Family cut a path defined more by aestheticism than
asceticism, and one of the chief pleasures of Aquarian's book lies in
the ephemera commandments, names, menus, costumes that, even in
their most disposable forms, explode forth with the group's high
hippie style. Davis makes the crucial point that for the Source
Family, "spirituality was a creative act of avant-garde exploration.
In this regard, cults can be like art collectives."
This is certainly the case with the music, most of which came under
the aegis of Ya Ho Wa 13, a core group capable of the thundering
Dionysian grooves necessary to underwrite Father Yod's commanding
vocal presence. Besides being incorporated into Source Family
meditations, the band played in town (a supplementary CD to
Aquarian's book includes a surreal performance at Beverly Hills High
School) and cut numerous one-take albums (she estimates 65 in a
two-year period, though many have been lost).
The band's changing permutations and relentless output anticipated
the working methods of collective groups such as Acid Mothers Temple
and Sunburned Hand of Man.
Can one enjoy the art without being a kind of spiritual tourist? It's
a difficult question, but one worth asking in light of the Source
Family's reemergence amid major excavations of the Age of Aquarius
(see: freak folk, hippie chic). It goes without saying, but the
various sponsors of this week's Source events are impeccably hip:
Other Cinema, Aquarius Records, and the locus of much of the current
Aquarian fever, Arthur magazine.
What distinguishes today's backtracking from the brief vogue for
peace signs and psychedelic guitar washes in the early '90s is the
depth of the fascination. Seekers aren't contenting themselves with
the usual icons; they're hungrier than that. How else to explain
reissues of everything from Terry Riley to Karen Dalton, the
popularity of Arthur, and the crowds when Alejandro Jodorowsky's
fantasias (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) played at the Castro Theatre
some months ago? A week before the Source Family gathering at ATA,
the same venue hosted another convergence of '60s esoterica: Ira
Cohen (the publisher and filmmaker behind the mirror- and
mind-warping Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda) introducing Julian
Beck's documentary Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika.
As the cultivation of influences matures, younger artists and
musicians begin to reshape the past in more interesting, nuanced
ways. One such avatar is the LA-by-way-of-Baltimore blues banshee
Entrance (né Guy Blakeslee). Booking him as the opener for the Ya Ho
Wa 13 reunion is a brilliant stroke, since it properly asserts the
bill as a cross-generational dialogue. Did Devendra Banhart consult
the Source Family group shots before convening his own family
portrait for the cover of Cripple Crow (XL Recordings)? Might there
be something of Father Yod's TEN (the eternal now) teachings locked
in White Rainbow's recent bliss-minimalism opus, The Prism of the
Eternal Now (Kranky/Marriage)? I'm inclined to think so, especially
after having learned that certain taste-making record producers love
to gab about the Source Family. It would seem that the sons of Father
Yod have become elders in their own right.
Elements of Aquarian culture will always be at best ridiculous and at
worst morally vacuous. As Father Yod could pass megalomania off as
free-spiritedness, so too is the current crop of (mostly white)
aficionados sometimes guilty of confusing creativity with fetish: for
surface, ornament, texture, and, inevitably, Native American
signifiers. And yet, now as it was then, much of the work being
produced is vividly realized and buoyantly energetic. Flipping
through The Source, one does indeed experience a kind of timelessness
quite apart from the star gates, comets, and prophecies.
Forty years later, the book's disarming photographs do not seem to
represent individuals so much as an ideal, a vision of beauty that endures. *
--------
Father Yod Knew Best
http://www.laweekly.com/news/features/father-yod-knew-best/17104/
Looking back on L.A.'s Source restaurant and the cult that fed it
By DOUG HARVEY
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
On August 25, 1975, former Sunset Strip restaurateur Jim Baker
launched himself off a 1,300-foot-high cliff on the easternmost shore
of Oahu. Although he had never hang-glided before or even trained
for it he was confident his instincts would kick in and allow him
to negotiate the notoriously tempestuous thermal trade winds off the
mountainous coastline. And they may well have, except for a sudden
calm that caused him to immediately plummet downward hundreds of
feet. He recovered control and managed to glide out over the Pacific
for 10 minutes before navigating back to crash-land on the beachfront
Waimalano campground. Although he appeared to have no serious
injuries, Baker was unable to move and was taken home, where he died
some nine hours later. He was survived by his 13 wives and 140 or so
sons and daughters.
For the most part, these were his "spiritual" sons and daughters, as
Baker had been going by the names Father Yod (rhymes with load) and
YaHoWha for five years as the leader of the Source Family, a
quintessential sex, drugs and rock & roll New Age hippie commune that
lived in the Chandler mansion in Los Feliz and operated a highly
successful health-food restaurant also called the Source at
Sunset and Sweetzer. "Father," as Baker was most consistently
referred to, was a Cincinnati-born Medal of Honor Marine and jujitsu
expert who came to L.A. after WWII to audition for a role as Tarzan
and fell under the sway of Philosophical Research Society founder
Manly P. Hall's eclectic mysticism and the proto-hippie lifestyle of
barefoot granola-munching Nature Boys like eden ahbez and Gypsy
Boots. Baker opened a Topanga Canyon sandal shop, followed by two
successful health-food restaurants favored by the Hollywood elite.
Things started getting freaky early in 1969, when Baker opened his
third restaurant the Source and became a devotee of Sikh
kundalini master Yogi Bhajan. Baker began speaking and directing
meditation sessions in the restaurant, and though still a follower
of the yogi channeling a new synthesis of traditional and original
esoteric teachings. Attendance soared, and soon Baker and his growing
group of followers were dressing in white cotton robes and turbans,
living communally in the Chandler mansion (a.k.a. the Mother House)
and following a rigorous program of spiritual practices involving
elaborate breathing techniques (beginning with a single six-second
hit of sacred herb at 3 a.m.), cold showers, radical shifts in gender
roles, yoga, chanting the Tetragrammaton, natural home birth,
magickal visualizations, Aleister Crowleyian ego-suppressing rituals
and tantric sex.
During this period, the Source Family was one of the most
high-profile and unusual of the many new religious movements
proliferating in Los Angeles, not least because of their uncommonly
high standards of grooming and cleanliness, their economic
self-sufficiency and work ethic, and the fact that they didn't openly
proselytize. Potential members, in fact, were obliged to undergo a
period of sexual abstinence and cross-examination as well as
surrender all their material possessions to the group, washing dishes
(or other chores) at the restaurant and taking a vow of
confidentiality in order to partake of the spiritual teachings.
It was this commitment to secrecy and the modest recruitment schedule
(along with the fact that the story ends with a hang-gliding accident
instead of a mass suicide in Guyana) that kept the Source Family a
vague rumor for 30 years. In fact, they probably would have remained
in limbo had it not been for the efforts of an on-again, off-again
member of the group called Arlick known in the mundane world of
maya as Sky "Sunlight" Saxon. Saxon had been the driving force behind
the seminal L.A. garage band the Seeds, whose "Pushin' Too Hard" was
a national hit and was later recognized as one of the essential
precursors of punk. By the punk era, Saxon had pretty much fallen off
the cultural map except for occasional
where-are-the-acid-casualties-now appearances marked by cryptic
utterances concerning God being a dog. Then, sometime in the '80s,
rumors began circulating among record geeks about Saxon's involvement
with an obscure psychedelic tribal musical collective called Ya Ho Wa
13 whose flurry of self-released recordings quickly became one of
the most sought-after (not to mention strangest) of vinyl rarities.
Ya Ho Wa 13 was, it turned out, the musical wing of the Source
Family. Between 1973 and 1975, various incarnations of this loose
subcult (Father Yod and the Spirit of '76, the Savage Sons of
YaHoWha, Fire Water Air, etc.) recorded approximately 65 albums'
worth of mostly improvised material nine of which were released on
their own Higher Key label and sold through the restaurant. The
earliest recordings featured actual songs written and performed by
newly renamed members of the Family primarily Djin, Pythias,
Sunflower and Octavius. It wasn't until Baker now known as YaHoWha
mandated improvisation and began contributing freestyle
vocalizations that something extraordinary occurred. Just how
extraordinary would remain pretty much a secret until 1998, when
Saxon who turns out to have been only peripherally involved with
some of the later recordings negotiated the release of a
now-legendary 13-CD box set by the Japanese specialty label Captain Trip.
Over surging psych-rock jams, YaHoWha sang, howled and chanted
extemporaneous sermons (as well as playing gong and kettle drums
while whistling like a theremin) that summarized much of his
philosophy in catchy slogans like "Die to live again" or "I can be
you and you can be me ultimate orgasm we will see!" The originality
of the best of these albums ranks them with the greatest outsider
musical artifacts of the era, on par with An Evening With Wildman
Fischer or lounge-singer-turned-acidhead Johnny Arcesia, whose vocals
are often remarkably similar to YaHoWha's. Most strikingly, YaHoWha's
obvious humor about himself and his situation dissolves the
prejudices that most of us have regarding "cults" and their often
difficult cultural byproducts. (Battlefield Earth, anyone?)
In spite of the sudden availability of this wealth of rare material,
the Source remained pretty much an unknown quantity though
speculation was plentiful. Unbeknownst to the world at large, the
remnants of the Source Family which had officially dispersed within
a couple of years of YaHoWha's death were coming to terms with its
legacy. A couple of Hawaiian reunions occurred first to finally
scatter YaHoWha's ashes on the 20th anniversary of his fatal flight,
and then to observe the birth of the Aquarian age on September 17,
2001 (as predicted by the Great Pyramid). Family archivist Isis began
organizing the enormous quantities of photographs and ephemera and
writing a definitive history of Baker and the group. Initially
published privately for Family members, The Source: The Untold Story
of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family came to the
attention of Jodi Wille and Adam Parfrey of the maverick publishing
house Process. Wille helped edit and expand the history, which now
includes a number of dissenting voices regarding the purity of
YaHoWha's motives (and a CD of previously unreleased recordings,
including a live gig at Beverly Hills High!).
Not that Isis' version of the story is all peaches and cream. As with
most prophets, YaHoWha's thoughts began turning to the coming
apocalypse. At around the time he began to lose interest in the
musical project, he became convinced that America was on the brink of
a series of cataclysmic upheavals nuclear war followed by
earthquakes, tidal waves and volcanic eruptions. When one of the
Family children became seriously ill with an untreated staph
infection, emergency-room doctors alerted the authorities. Fearing a
crackdown, YaHoWha realized it was time to sell the restaurant and
head for the hills of Hawaii. No danger of military invasion,
tsunamis or volcanoes there!
While the inside scoop on the high-functioning days of a utopian
religious movement is a rare and fascinating thing in itself, it is
the account of its unraveling that makes for the most compelling
reading, throwing the accomplishments of the spiritual social
experiment into high contrast. Without the income provided by the
restaurant and the relatively tolerant and supportive environment of
Los Angeles, the vision began to fray at the edges. The populace of
the Family's first Hawaiian destination, Kauai, was decidedly
unwelcoming, and doubts and paranoia arose among the flock and
their shepherd. A contemporary article from the local paper The
Garden Island quotes YaHoWha desperately offering the services of the
Family to "police the airports" to drive the also-unpopular hippie
"parasites" off the island, if only the authorities would "look the
other way."
That didn't work. In 1975, YaHoWha bailed with a small entourage on a
peripatetic world journey, searching for a new home in Thailand,
India, Nepal, Egypt, Greece and a half-dozen other locales. The
remaining Family members had to persuade the Hawaiian welfare
authorities to buy them airplane tickets back to the mainland. After
regrouping briefly in San Francisco (where they refurbished a haunted
mansion and YaHoWha basically revoked the sexual privileges of his
sons in a vain attempt to make them get jobs), they decided to try
Hawaii again. It was around this time that Father got interested in
hang-gliding.
Usually, accounts of communal spiritual movements are
sensationalistic "exposés of brainwashing cults" or whitewashing
"defenses against prejudicial conspiracies." The Source: The Untold
Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family is something
else. The participants in this story seem uniformly intelligent,
straightforward and better off for their brush with the infinite.
Most cherish their time with YaHoWha as a central transformative
period in their lives, even when they have gone on to make millions
in the construction industry or found other fringe spiritual
communities to shelter them. And the Source Family is just one of
many such under-documented experiments from a period of recent
American history that was quickly swept under the rug with
unwarranted ridicule and fear mongering. I'm not convinced that the
release of this book is a harbinger of the imminent transformation of
our species' consciousness and the basic structure of society. But it
at least allows us to discuss the possibility again without snickering.
---
Also read Tapping the Source: Excerpts from Isis Aquarian's cult chronicle
http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/tapping-the-source/17105
.
No comments:
Post a Comment