The Great Speckled Bird May 4, 1970 vol 3 #18 pg 4
Contradictions among the People
If you weren’t at the Sports Arena Sunday for the Community Benefit, you missed some good times and some terrific music. What was to have been a community happening bringing us all together around our own music and musicians-in a setting provided by people living in the community itself turned out to be a sparsely attended occupation of the Sports Arena, sleeping bags, Ripple, dope, and all the rest-just very few people. The kids-who did pay a couple of dollars for community use didn’t seem disturbed by the small numbers, however, and we had one of the best times we’ve ever had at the Sports Arena. None of the bands was less than good, some were very fine, and the Stump Brothers, with three Grease Band musicians, almost blew the roof off the building! When Hampton joined them to sing a few songs, it was too much. But how can bands be expected to play for a mere handful of people?
We could get into just how good the music was, but it’s more important to say quite a bit about the good thing most of the community missed out on. First of all, we have to realize that the Rock concert Sunday was organized by and for the hip community. Community Center people got their shit together and worked with Murric Enterprises, Steve Cole of Discovery, Inc., The Electric Collage, and members of the community to plan and execute what they thought would be one of the best things to happen in the Atlanta Hip Community. Some of the cream of the local Rock scene volunteered to play (they should have been paid but weren’t, for obvious reasons). Posters were made, tickets were printed up, a beautiful stage was built (designed by T. P. of the Community Center so that it can be used again anywhere it’s needed, the park, etc., or disassembled for the lumber), the Electric Collage was ready to put on one of its very best shows, a volunteer stage crew was put together (Cole said it could have been one of the best ever to work on an Atlanta Rock show), the Sports Arena was rented (they had to pay for cops they didn’t ask for, and also for a window that was broken before folks started working in preparation for the benefit, plus countless other small hassles), free transportation was arranged from the Center to the Sports Arena-and what happened? The “hip” community did not support its own benefit. Nothing hip about that. The few hundred freaks who did show up at the Sports Arena had a groovy time, but had the hall been filled, we could have raised much-needed money to go into community institutions, and the music would have been way up there with the best ever heard in Atlanta.
Week after week, kids have been paying from $3 to $6 to hear top-name groups at the Sports Arena and the Municipal Auditorium—in all that time, no one has spent the time and energy and work that went into the benefit; Murray Silver never built a decent stage, and the sound this past Sunday was the first time Rock music has been heard the way it should be heard in the Sports Arena. Are we so hung up on the star syndrome bullshit that we don’t recognize the healthiness indicated in our community by the presence of many, many fine, developing Rock bands? Bands can’t exist without audiences to hear them, and any fool can tell you that most of our local bands do much better work consistently than the lousy set that Canned Heat played at the Sports Arena a couple of weeks back, for one example.
But more than these-the work that community people put into the benefit, the together organization and coordination of the people behind it, the willingness of the Electric Collage, Discovery, Inc., and the local bands to give their time and energies to us-beyond these factors lie the simple truth that MANY OF US ARE IN JAIL! And more and more of us are going to be going to jail in the next few months. The fact that this particular benefit failed to arouse any decent community response, coming as it did after an assault upon our community by Atlanta city police and the passing of a loitering ordinance aimed at freaks and Black people (who else, in your wildest imagination, could it have been aimed at—doctors?) just makes the charge of stupidity and hiplessness that much stronger against what we like to call our “hip” community. Folks were all full of love and peace after the police riot on the strip, after the loud, noisy meetings in the park, after the ridiculous Hoffmanesque courtroom scene, and everybody was talking about how the city is on our side, how Massell weeps about what happened on the strip, etc., ad nauseum. What we didn’t know is that one of the freaks whose charges were dropped was busted for contempt by Judge Brock right in the courtroom, hastily separated from the rest of us, and practically held incommunicado in jail (in solitary because he refused to have his hair cut) while idiot hippies were talking about peace and love and how the city is on our side. Why anybody would get hung up in whether or not the city is on our side is beyond me—a lot of us are wondering whether or not WE are on our side!
Think about the fact that hard drug pushers are doing their thing in full knowledge of the police while Wayne Scott, who was trying to do something to get rid of the shit in our community, is in jail for possession of grass. Think about that fact that one of the bands that didn’t play at the benefit was the River People, and the reason they didn’t play is because they don’t exist, and the reason they don’t exist is because one of the most brilliant musicians in Atlanta, John Ivey, a beautiful cat, is serving a THREE YEAR jail sentence for a first offense of possession of marijuana plants found growing in the basement of a house he hadn’t even moved into! Some of the kids busted during the loitering police riot were really screwed in court, and some are still waiting to stand trial just for doing the right thing in the right situation.
A lot of kids don’t want to throw rocks and bottles, don’t want to fight back and don’t want anybody else to fight back. Well, that kind of thing is up to you and in a larger sense to the community, but there is absolutely no reason under the sun why you shouldn’t support your own institutions. They are merely another form of fighting back against the people trying to screw us, and the less dependent we can be on ourselves, the more dependent we are on people outside the community. Self-reliance is the only way we can prevent the loss of the community we have. Who has done more to rid our community of hard drugs? If a few thousand people had turned up at the Sports Arena Sunday, community institutions could have paid rent, bought needed supplies, expanded operations, got some people out of jail, been ready for more busts, paid all the musicians who knock themselves out giving music to the people, and a lot more, too. As it is, the community bank account isn’t all that much changed from where it was before the benefit. What is really frightening is that when community people actually took it upon themselves to canvas the neighborhood, trying to give the benefit tickets away just so the-bands would have an audience large enough to inspire them to play, most of our people wouldn’t even take the tickets for free. There’s just no way to look at this situation without realizing some very frightening things that may take even more frightening concrete forms this summer when masses of new kids come into Atlanta. Let’s hope they’re more together than those of us who already live here, because they sure as hell can’t depend on us for leadership.
A hearty “FUCK YOU!” to the Atlanta “Hip” Community, and a great deal of gratitude and appreciation to those freaks who supported the Community Benefit and who will form a nucleus for a growing and expanding hip community.
—miller francis, jr.