Themes

 

Work-in-Progress on the Adventures of an American Rock Band in Java in the Early Seventies

Rock Musical Odyssey in Asia

Round-the-World People

Psychedelic Emissaries

Koca-Kola Men Sing the Mandala

 

"Oh, I know you. You're a round-the-world people."

-- Greetings from a bejak (rickshaw) driver in Singapore, 1970

 

"Hey koca-kola man. Hey Moon man."

-- Greetings from a Laotian to one of the authors, in the capital of Luang Prabang, 1969, the day after Armstrong's Moon landing

 

 

 

 

Preface

 

Like many of our counterparts during the sixties and seventies, the two authors underwent incredible experiences on the road in Asia.

 

One set out in 1967 as a straight-laced Phi Beta Kappa college graduate who joined the Peace Corps, headed for the boondocks of India to do whatever good he could manage to do with his own two hands. The other arrived in Asia soon after, traveling overland on his own devices, a woolly-minded rock-music hippie, filled with visions of finding the ultimate Omega.

 

Their paths somehow crossed in Singapore in 1970, and together with a mostly itinerant, mostly American contingent, they decided to take refuge in Java, where they set up shop with a friendly welcome in the form of official Indonesian government support, emanating out of then President Suharto’s office. The goal was to kick ass musically, and to forge a universal musical idiom, while plunging irretrievably into the magical, mystical, and to them quite mysterious cultures of Java and Bali.

 

This is their forays in telling their story. We think you'll enjoy the unusual, lived elements of their adventure -- at once typical of the time, and yet unique, bizarre, zany.

 

Two strengths of the authors are worth noting at the outset: The ex-Peace Corps volunteer went on to spend nearly twenty-five years in American publishing, and will see to it that the story is "complete and satisfactory" -- and, if requested, in electronic format, coded for typesetting, or ready for disk-to-film technology

 

The rock musician went on to become a successful psychologist and psychotherapist and thereafter a thriving management consultant in Silicon Valley, and has already begun to apply his analytical skills to reconstructing the nuances of the story, by taping interviews with Indonesians and American friends and family who witnessed or participated in the events.

 

We propose that this is a sixties-to-seventies story that will put a new twist on the recurring themes of those times, and of our times today.

 

The Setting

 

Time: the early seventies. Place: the lush, tropical countryside of Java. Theme: a true story (as far as the participants can recollect) of innocence lost and of souls brought back from the edges of darkness. They were an earnest and likable, and laughable, lot of musicians and tag-a-longs, fleeing the violent upheavals and perceived degradations of America in the sixties.

 

Like opportunistic pranksters, they made Java a temporary home -- a coconut republic overrun with toy generals awash in petro dollars. Several Indonesian high-muck-a-mucks eagerly sponsored the Western rock band that first came together in Singapore -- along with their scantily clad dancing girlfriends -- to perform in government-owned nightclubs. There, local taxi dancers and hostesses of all color were available during and after hours for the clientele's enjoyment.

 

Aides of President Suharto shuttled up to their mountainside studio to review the band’s rehearsals. The pranksters served coffee laced with drugs. The women danced topless to the music, covered only in body paint, under black lights. This was the crazy side of two cultures seeking an escape via the psychedelic trappings of the sixties

 

Other players threw themselves into the act. The Jakarta bureau chief for the Associated Press, a jolly Brit who liked to moonlight with his own band, also helped sponsor the group -- while his counterpart, the bureau chief for UPI, a self-made Texan with a sharp eye for the absurd, fresh from duty in the bedlam of Saigon, hosted them with much good cheer when they were in the Indonesian capital.

 

In the background, thumping like a clumsy Wagnerian leitmotif signaling the impending end of the world, the world as everyone then knew it, was the meaningless war still raging in nearby Vietnam. With this backdrop, the band played its way around Indonesia, welcomed with open arms as the ad hoc, de facto representatives of the new psychedelic alternative to American machismo -- the "underground" culture as the Indonesians called it -- a new culture about which much was written and heralded in the third world (usually amidst dire establishmentarian warnings laced with pejoratives to the youth of Singapore or Indonesia), but little was known firsthand. And that’s one reason everyone loved the Prophecy band.

 

There was of course a more serious side to this story. One of the troop was the grandson of a Nobel Laureate; his older brother ran a major stateside research center for NASA. An other had graduated with honors from an Ivy League college and was on his way home after a stint of doing some good in the Peace Corps in village India. Another, a graduate of Julliard and a musical prodigy with perfect pitch, who had left a solid position as lead trumpet with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. As the scions of respectable middle class families, they all could have been pursuing more sensible life pathways: There was lots of talent and lots of brains, and the many hopes of fine families invested in them. And there also was enough money to set them up as an experiment in bicultural living and music making in the boondocks of Indonesia.

 

All of them had spent time on the way over trekking in the Himalayas in search of gurus and genuine spirituality. Underneath the surface, they were terribly earnest about finding some holy grail in Asia. As the story unfolds, they soon ended up in Bali, in the hands of a sympathetic shaman, learning firsthand about an ancient and vibrant folkway.

 

One day they were given a parade through the streets of Bandung --

the city in which the late president Sukarno (liberator of the Indonesians from the Dutch) had gathered the third world together for the first conference of non-aligned nations. No group of Americans every got so close to the Bandung people. The band was written up in the nation's magazines as the first Western rock musicians to bring underground culture to the country. Thus true diplomacy was achieved and the lives of these two peoples affected -- from the bottom up by such unplanned, zany encounters -- while the officially sanctioned influencers, the diplomatic corps, took shelter from the sweltering country in air-conditioned safe houses farther away in the Jakarta capital.

 

The group touched the lives of many Indonesians and Asians, whose portraits will also be painted in this book: A young woman from the streets of Bangkok. A village headman in Bali. A young university student from Sulawesi. The band tried to re-write their own lives. And tried to redefine the meaning of the music of their time. Two decades ago, they were already probing beyond New Age into multi-cultural living and creating.

 

Yes, they failed to achieve many of the goals they set for themselves, such as recording a hit song or having enduring inter-ethnic marriages. But, as this story shows, there was enduring fun and wisdom embodied in their quest.

 

 

 

Start of the Journey

 

The story could might well begin out of temporal sequence, with a powerful episode, such as C.L. eloping by a full moon in Bali. Or the band's crazy-quilt commune in the hills of Java.

 

The story might then jump briefly to the present time, with C.L. and W.A. discussing the significance of what happened, taking somewhat diametrical views about the past, creating dramatic tension between the two narrators. C.L. always takes the more straight-laced view of events, having remained somewhat on the outs with the band and their hippie philosophy. When they reveled in "spacing out" he took the position that the object of life was "to space in," to fully understand where one is and what was happening.

 

Then the story unfolds somewhat chronologically: while C.L. is in the American South teaching in a black college -- even introducing the writings of Malcolm X to incredulous black students in the sixties South, W.A. is having mystic experiences in the Rockies. The scene moves onto the road in Asia: C.L. is buried in an Indian village in the Peace Corps. W.A. is entertaining the troops on r 'n' r in Bangkok. Soon they meet in Singapore. The following are snippets and sample vignettes , that will make up the story.

 

Indonesian Government Friends Adopt the Band

 

The scene soon shifts to Java, where the band is adopted by the government. They become "unofficial" emissaries of the new popular Western culture.

 

The group was adopted by "De," an aide to the presidential family in the capital of Jakarta. They are pictured here in the backyard of De's government villa, under a fertile papaya tree, whose prolificness symbolized the garden-like quality of Indonesia.

 

All human affairs in Indonesia, from daily business to the highest levels of government, were conducted family style. It was polite to call respected men "Bapak," the same word that means "father" when used in the context of the family. De used government organizations to sponsor their stay, despite the protestations of immigration authorities who were suspicious of the band's intentions. The group remained throughout their stay De's "own crazy kids from America." (Officially the band had no visas. Their passports were kept in safekeeping by De. Since he worked directly for President Suharto -- actually for the first lady of Indonesia -- the immigration authorities were at a loss to enforce the rules on in-country stays for foreigners. C.L. was given a surat jalan (travel pass) by De, about which the immigration office would shake its head and say "Tsk. Tsk. This just isn’t done."

 

 

Rock in Java

 

The band sets up shop in Java, in a small village called Lembang, north of the prominent city of Bandung in central Java; and soon becomes famous throughout the island. They have created a homemade sound studio capable of professional recording.

 

They jump into the heart of Javanese pop culture. The cover of "Varia" magazine, August 4, 1971. The Prophecy band, featured in the country 's major magazines, was hailed as the first Western emissaries of rock -- dubbed underground music by the Javanese, because to them rock culture took root in the West and then in the East from the bottom up.

 

Rock culture was not only hidden from view when it first took root in Indonesia, but aptly in the garden setting of this tropical island-nation, it caught on spontaneously and sprouted everywhere. No one could control the musical invasion any more than they could stop the makeshift, on-the-cheap shenanigans of these merry Prophecy pranksters.

 

The Prophecy Gives an Outdoor mini-Woodstock at the Bandung Institute of Technology. The Prophecy band performed for thousands of enthralled fans all over Java. This concert at the Bandung technical college kicked off with a parade through the town, where a few years earlier the late president Sukarno had hosted the first conference of non-aligned nations of the world. "The Americans are coming! The Americans are coming!" Bandungians jovially exclaimed. Thusly the relations between peoples can be shaped, more by such serendipitous face-to-face encounters than by all the well-crafted overtures of governments.

 

Prophecy Acts Out Their Dreams

 

[Excerpts from CL's 1971 Journal, Lembang, Java]

We put the myth of Dionysus into action, and we hit the wall of reality. The sixties revolutionized consciousness, but on the road of excess by which we sought the palace of wisdom, many of us lost our minds, lives or careers, through drugs, sexual orgy or (my vice) constant challenges to authority. The sixties, rebelling against the bourgeois conformity and respectability of the '50s, took life to its extreme and explored the far edges of the possible....The psychedelic sixties were about opening oneself to sensations and messages from above, below and beyond the social realm. We sought the oracular, the mystic, 'vibrations' between people and planets.

 

-- Camille Paglia, "Ninnies, Pedants, Tyrants and Other Academics," The New York Times Book Review, May 5, 1991

 

What gives value to travel is fear...we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. We come across a cascade of light, and there is eternity. This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing. If we understand by culture the exercise of our most intimate sense -- that of eternity -- then we travel for culture. Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal's use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.

 

-- Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942, noted by C.L. in Kathmandu, Nepal,1969

 

 

We had a dream, many dreams. Danny's was to sail the oceans carrying his own rock music to the far corners of the globe. For Mike, a Hawaiian surfer and son of a World War Two ace, it was a tropical island covered with fruit trees: Bali suited him just fine. Olaf, the tall Swedish scion of a Nobel Laureate family, pictured a hilltop laboratory in which to make electronics the servant of spiritual concerns. The musicians wrote songs to knit these dreams together and to lure others to join in their shenanigans.

 

We are round-the-world people We are rock cathedral Moving East Away from the Beast

 

We knew we were part of what amounted to a mass migration of young people in the sixties and seventies away from America. We headed out over many roads, winding through exotic places like Ibiza, Beirut, Kabul, Kathmandu, Bali, until we all met by chance in Singapore in 1970. It didn't matter to us how any of us got to Singapore, or through what countries we had passed to get there, or under what guise -- as world traveler, hippie, expatriate, or Peace Corps volunteer.

 

We believed that we all followed a single mythic road, with each seemingly divergent route converging onto a single time and place. While traveling through rural Asia in search of our mythic place and time, we were often terribly flipped out on music, on psychedelic drugs, or on the sunshine and surprises of the moment. Sometimes we were terribly down and out, miserable and alone in some rundown village or way-station in Nepal or Bankok, feeling light years from anything familiar and home. I don't know of any time in history when so many of a nation's children were dispersed to the wind like seed pods in search of more hospitable soil.

 

The group that I met one bright day in Singapore in early 1970 were a pack of merry minstrels, full of earnest fun. You could easily miss what lay beneath the music and games -- their profound and determined quest to grow beyond themselves, beyond their origins, into new and better global citizens. They disguised themselves with humorous names that were at the same time as revealing of their true nature as they were self effacing. We all added to their anointed stage names poor puns to help along the odyssey, like "Life is reel."

 

There was a sense that the stage names fitted the make-believe aspects of their lives. Sure we said "Life is just a stage," but we quipped, "Who's the audience?" The playful nametags were part of our dead-earnest search for our true beneath-the-surface character. The Australian drummer called himself Spunky. The Hawaiian surfer, Jet Stream. The tall lanky Swede, descended from a famous family of scientists -- one a Noble laureate, another an important figure in NASA -- was dubbed Phloton. And there was Sky Walker, the bass player. Zoum, the adept guitarist. Whiz, the musical prodigy who once played a lead trumpet with the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

 

And alas, as the most serious one and a little older than most of them, one who had just spent over two years slogging it out in rural India as a Peace Corps volunteer, I was dubbed Papaji. We told ourselves that we were all in search of something divine, yet simple and human -- a joy we were convinced could be achieved only together, culturally and communally, through you and me, with the help of our music that enshrined and tied together everything in the celebration of the moment. In Singapore, against the backdrop of hysteria about a worldwide onslaught of hippies, and xenophobia about the West.

 

I was hooked right away on this spontaneous crew, and without a second thought was seduced into becoming the straight man for their crazy plans to build a musical commune in the heart of central Java.

 

It became obvious from the first few days with the Prophecy that we all were a bundle of naive, and probably irreconcilable, contradictions: Schemes to return to a simpler way of life, while becoming famous recording rock stars at the same time. Everyone was riding on mind-waves of Woodstock. The band sometimes looked like an acid head cruise around edge city, in pursuit of a shimmering elusive vision of the future. A vision strong enough to carry us half-way round the globe to tropical shores, or up Himalayan mountainsides to mystic redoubts. No place was too remote. No peasant encounter too unimportant to us in those days. We took every one as a revelatory connection of the moment -- that were supposed to add up to a larger meaning and a better life in the here and now.

 

I think we got it all mixed up much of the time as we talked about Atlantis and the Bible, in the same breath, with equal seriousness. We scanned the world's news media for events that were portents taking us towards an Omega point out on the distant horizon. In the jungles of Java, surrounded by pristine landscapes, it felt like a great coming together of the peoples of the Earth. Our sense of theater made us see it was all still a movie. We did laugh at ourselves, the self-ordained musical prophets. And we let the cameras roll.

 

 

 

 

One Night in Java at the Rock Music Commune

 

One evening we concocted what we liked to call a full-moon conspiracy in central Java, near Bandung. The green hills behind our communal house merged into the slopes of the local gunung api -- fire-breathing mountain that formed part of the Ring of Fire encircling the Pacific rim. Our hilltop overlooked steep ravines winding toward the base of the volcano. A sulphurous mist masked the flickering full moon. And thick vegetation extended its arms around rice terraces carved like little steps in a make-believe sand box.

 

This primeval and ancient island remained pristine where we were: Volcanic eruptions and the monsoonal rains continually renewed the land. Though it was aged and ancient, it was renewed, rich, and full.

 

As the sun set behind this magical setting of greens, and grays, and browns, I imagined that a camera panned from the moonlit volcano to the full moon rising over the misty ravines, past palm trees, paddies, to the house. Camera quickly moved to the back door, which suddenly burst open. Spunky, the young bushy-haired Australian drummer who faintly resembled Harpo Marx, jumped through the door dressed like a Shakespearean jester, bells tinkling on his wrists: "Aiye e! It's the full moon. Freak. Freak. Yahoo."

 

Sky, the bass player, was dressed in a tight Flash Gordon suit, sleek, and feline. "Oh it's ffneevert tonight." He chuckled at his favorite make-believe words. Ti, the attractive French wife of the lead guitarist and songwriter, Django, joined them: "Bewitching," waving her dark green cape.

 

"Be which one? Which one to be?" was Spunky’s rejoinder in his jazz-like playfulness. The rest of the band emerged onto the hill behind their community house. The imagined camera with flowing rapidity panned in on the back door as each member of the Prophecy stepped out. Camera then swept out to catch a full view of the Javan hillside, with a panorama of the nearby volcano and paddy terraces. We all assembled in drag for this night's frolic:

 

Django -- with guitar, dressed in white tails, a Mod tux. Whiz -- with flute, long hair to his shoulders, wearing Chinese embroidered silk shirt and pants Phloton -- grandson of a Nobel prize winner, dressed in a lab suit, carrying a glowing circuit that make s him look like an alchemist Feather -- in a silk dress with winged sleeves Jet-Stream -- in whites Zoum -- in whites with guitar. Papaji -- in academic robe, grayish

 

As the imagined camera panned out over the tropical hillside, a chorus struck up, belting out one of their self-proclaimed songs of self:.

 

Full moon. Full Moon.

Back in the Garden.

Back in the Garden -- Marakesh

Back in the Garden-- Formentera

Back in the Garden-- Kandehar

Back in the Garden-- Chittral

Back in the Garden-- Bombay Black

Back in the Garden-- Goa Back in the Garden-- Benares

 

Butterfly On a Daisy, O Butterfly

 

-- Lyrics by Django

 

 

Good Time Soul Music

 

The musicians worked up a trancelike frenzy with the chorus of "Back in the Garden." I visualized a close-up of Phloton's face leering benevolently into a complex of wires and transistors that glowered in the night. He raised the circuitry slowly towards the Moon... Even I got swept away. Being around the band made psychedelic drugs superfluous.

 

Their stoned zaniness was contagious. Even the Javanese, including highly placed government officials, would soon get into the act. I saw the Moon dance in a spectral sky -- a sequence of light on light. Then an expansion out of a central point of colors, until the Moon was engulfed by flaming lines of color. I was hallucinating again even though I avoided taking any drugs: This Moon-mandala with flashing colors, soon became transmogrified into the technicolor lights decorating Spunky's drums.

 

My reveries outside the Prophecy communal house blurred and I found myself sitting in the homebuilt recording studio we had assembled on this remote hillside. Inside, in the small sound studio the Prophecy built in their house in Lembang, a light show began. Prophecy music. Feather and Ti danced in the corner. Phloton and Papaji sat entranced on the floor. Jet Stream jumped round wildly near the door. He seemed on the verge of bounding out into the moonlight.

 

Slides of Kathmandu taken by Papaji flashed on the white walls of the studio. A picture of a Tibetan refugee on the mountain trails of Nepal -- his face wrinkled, his eyes filled with misty soul beams -- weathered, aged, wise, like a gnarled, benevolent tree. Everyone began to hum before the picture of the Tibetan. His eyes seemed to respond to the chanting, though he was light years away in another world that was now linked to ours . The message of his face was transferred to the Prophecy's studio and seemed to meet their chant -- many distances were bridged.

 

Through these images that we created, time and distance melted away. I was reminded of the cross of Christ, these thousand of years later, as stark, as compelling as it ever was that day on Calvary. I was convinced that humankind had indeed created time travel, a form of telepathy through these eternal images, yet we refused, or were unable, to recognize and believe in what we had achieved. Instead, we fell back upon the ordinariness of our daily lives, as a crutch to help us limp from each morning until night -- ignoring the miracles around us.

 

And then I realized that it was the craziness of the Prophecy that made my mind drift off into those realms of mind and time travel, but which now shook me out of my stupor. Zoum interrupted my reverie by saying, "We've traveled so far man. To so many places."

 

Django then sang:

We are gypsies in an alley cat band. Singing on diamond sands.

 

Sky Walker: "It's so good to be free to be." Then, adopting a gunslinger's swagger, "Yessiree, we're the Karma Kids. Sharp' and sure shootin'. We've got a helluva karma here, us Karma Kids."

 

It was impossible to say where it began, where our collective adventure began, because it seemed to us to connect back with many times and places, to connect with many lifetimes. There was this thrilling exhilaration about it, about all those different kinds of people meeting together out on the road in the global village -- an exhilaration that we had finally come home to each other, come to a warm place in our dreams, come out of the cold, selfish turmoil of the modern world.

 

When Papaji started his journal, it was self-pretentious and terribly serious, because this shared vision -- a shared delusion if you will -- was so real and palpable to him. The journal began:

 

We're an open book, whose story you've opened to -- our story -- the threads of a prophetic musical family, gathered together for our brothers and sisters, to weave together into one dream:

And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. -- Acts 2:17

A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. -- St. Mark 6:4

 

 

 

 

Turning to a Prologue from W.A.

 

1965. None of us would have guessed what the other was doing at that time. In fact, none of us even knew each other. We were spread, quite literally, all over the world. But, each of our lives was being shaped by some planetary karma to eventually meet and create together the amazing quilt of the Prophecy story in Indonesia. Of course, everybody alive has some cosmic caramel connection, a nd we all impact each other. But this was something quite special, perhaps magical. Ultimately, the experience changed all of our lives in quite profound ways.

 

Yes, 1965. Charles Levine, idealistic Phi Beta Kappa reared in Queens, NY. Boyhood friend of the soon to be famous Paul Simon. He followed the

idealism of the civil rights movement from his Ivy League high-falutin physics/mathematics background at Columbia to teach at an al l-black southern college and march with Martin Luther King. His parents freaked when he returned to his staid Queens neighborhood with his black girlfriend.

Ward Ashman, escaping midwesterner from Ohio, emigrating to the University of Colorado in Boulder to kowtow with the emerging New Ag e culture of transplanted California hippies escaping the soon-to-be-fallen-off -the -planet state, bringing with them the newfangled LSD, hashish culture. The Rockies, the Himalayas of the Americas, beckoned to him as a place to find the mystical that he had always sought, but which the homogeneous culture of central Ohio had never inspired.

 

Riff, Afro-Cuban dude from the Brooklyn projects. Grew up next to the Naval Shipyard with the flashing night redness and shadows of th e thrown rivets preparing the Navy ships to fight in far off Viet Nam. Music was his life and he found success in the small recording studios of the City singing and playing the bass guitar. Great voice, idolized the ultimate Smoky Robinson. But, like other youthful blacks not able, oriented or desiring the safety of college draft evasion he received his greetings from Uncle Sam and pursued

the relative safety of the Air Force.

Batuan, the mid-caste, smart young man from a tiny village in Bali. Just tasting the very beginning of a few intrepid tourists to this al l-to- soon-to-become island mecca. Sitting with the elders in the village square just trying to figure out how to put their society together after the anti-communist pogrom all throughout Indonesia. This was a bloodbath worse than the 400 years of wars and skirmishes with the colonial Dutch. Villagers killing villagers, family against family. Even the revered volcano, the mother of the planet had blown its stack and devastated the island's agricultural economy. Survival and getting enough food to survive had become the focus of every conversation.

Robbie, the intelligent and adventurous Indonesian Christian from Sulawesi, the island of the fabled Bugis pirates in northern Indonesia. Trying to find a way to escape the limitations of family expectations and his physical challenges from childhood polio. Left on a sojourn throughout Indonesia to find meaning in his life. Eventually being drawn to follow the wild crazy group of westerners who called themselves the Prophecy band.

 

Savitri, the young Thai beauty struggling to find her survival in the R&R ravaged economy of Bangkok during the Viet Nam war. Living in the midst of the Bangkok cult of easy money, just give the GI's what they want, sex, drugs, and more sex. But the easy money, brought easy pain, as the traditional Thai values were torn to shreds under the watchful eye of the US air bases and the slick Thai entrepreneurs who flocked to the center of world-class corruption. The birth of the ultimate red light district--the whole city looked away as the politics of "easy" prevailed in a once strong city-state.

 

And finally, Django, the visionary who relished his forays into the realm of benevolent insanity. Born and bred in Baltimore, lots of drugs, and wedded to the realm of "illusion" as his mistress and musical accompanist. Found his soul mate Ti, his personal French beauty in his t ravels. Prophecy was his vision of the ultimate rock group. Hidden far from the ugly visage of the USA and the rip-off record industry in which he had found fleeting success with his Warner Brothers release of Dreams and Illusions.

 

There are many many more in this story, to name a few, Phloton, Spunky, She, Sky Walker (named long before the Star Wars hero), Jimmy, Gridley, Amalie, Jumpin' Jet, Dewanto, Ati, Suarti, Eyes.

 

RFK, Martin Luther King, Timothy Leary, LBJ and Michoacan marijuana were the topics of conversation among the throngs of stoned baby -boomers. Turn on, tune in, drop out was the ethic that carried the boomer-hippies into the streets of San Francisco and the inner cities of the USA. Rock music was the medium, Marshall McLuhan the ersatz guru -- even though only the more educated hippies had ever heard of him. Something he said about the "global village" rung a chord among all of these characters. Something that led to them to keep searching for something beyond the local 60's events. Something that smelled of adventure. Something that smelled of the pungent aroma of Afghani hash and Burmese opium. Hell, if you're gonna be in the 60's why not do it all the way. Let's fucking drop out of the whole US scene? Besides the best dope is cheap and legal out there.

 

All of us found our own ways. Riff brilliantly outsmarted his racist authorities in the Air Force in Japan by pretending to be an incompetent. Yet at the same time he was making big bucks as a R&B star with the famed House Rockers, the first black act to make the big-time in Japan. So wild that he was deported for possession. So adventurous that he went on to southeast Asia where the stakes were big in the drug game, and where the lure of easy money through R&B drew him in. Drawn by the smiling face of Savitri, whom he met while she was a go-go dancer at one of the House Rockers gigs in Tokyo.

 

Charles continued his idealism. The Peace Corps. He went all the way, to a tiny village in southern India, learned the language, even became quite adept at playing the indigenous Indian violin. Months went by without him seeing any westerners at all. He loved it. You'll have to ask him sometime about that story. He loved it so much that when his stint was up he continued his adventures in Asia. Eventually found the ultimate cross-cultural prize by marrying the beauty of Bali, Suarti the Balinese dancer who embodied the magic of that mystical island.

 

Ward left to go overland to India, inspired by the Beatles and by reaches of the world's populations. All we remembered as we moved through this rich tapestry of language and culture was the eerie, almost warning-like prophecy of McLuhan...The Global Village, The Global Village.

 

W.A. Talks about His State of Mind Then

 

You know, I never thought I would ever return to the USA. It was just an ugly memory. The fear of being sucked in to the mess of Viet Nam, and into the corrupt political-economic culture which I saw stretching its tentacles into every small third world culture I moved through. Usually, Coca-Cola came first. You know what was most frustrating about this? I would drink the coke too.

The mystical was what drew me. There was something "out there" that I wanted. Something beyond the LSD trips and the dope highs. If I was scared and disoriented enough I could get it. Like the time I almost was trapped in Iran because I my VW hippie van had broken down and I couldn't leave the country without the vehicle. Nobody spoke English on that border between Iran and Afghanistan. I had to go back, leaving my girlfriends to go on without me. What if I was would be lost somewhere in that dusty place where the VW had broken down.

 

After all the villagers were quite unfriendly with this hippie and his two braless girlfriends. I just hoped that my friends would inform the US embassy in Afghanistan if I never returned. Yeah, it worked. The fear, the gaping hole of meaning in your life when nobody speaks your language, when people are staring at you and when time goes on without definition. Recently I realized that I am addicted to the adrenalin rush of fear and of continuing to move into the unknown. Now I see that there are better ways to understand human psychology than being engrossed in the pursuit of fear-based experiences.

 

Anyway, I did get some big doses of fear and the supernatural during this experience. Especially in Bali when I became the recipient of a centuries-old magic amulet which embodied an old sage and two Indonesian tigers in spirit form. Scared the shit of me when it disappeared and then several weeks later reappeared, and especially when Savitri's mother saw the spirits around me when I first met her in Bangkok. No one ever told her about the amulet. There is something to this psychic stuff after all.

 

But, my first love was music -- rock music. I started when I was 11 in my first band, the fabulous Savages. Almost got electrocuted on the first gig when I touched my guitar and the mic stand while in bare feet. After all, we were the Savages and had to wear Alley Oop caveman suits. No shoes was essential. Quite a shock! Became a big star in Columbus in the Ravens. Continued on through college and even made the cast of Hair in New York. I turned it down, though, to pursue my travels and the backpack and guitar hippie archetype that I wanted to embody.

 

Years on the road in Asia finally led to the Prophecy. This was a hippie rock ‘n’roll dream. Big money, big connections with a banana republic government, no visa problems, very foxy and sweet Indonesian girls. I remember writing to Charlene, my traveling partner from England to India that this was the ultimate dream come true. Almost two years in Indonesia and several more with various incarnations of the Prophecy in Asia left me with indelible impressions that I want to share with you

 

Getting to Indonesia

 

That sweet smell hit me right away. Tropical flowers, fresh air, cool night air. "Dingin", they say in Indonesian. Maybe 60 degrees and perfectly clear skies. Starlight was enough to walk anywhere in Lembang. It had been a long day. Riding the steam engine train up the hills from Jakarta to Bandung. Feeling the periodic "spit" of a cinder, still hot, zipping past or touching a part of my face while I stuck my head out the window to look at the green and earth tone tapestry of the myriad rice fields.

 

Stoic-faced water buffaloes cast their brown eyes towards the sky as they pulled the top-heavy, side-leaning two wheeled wagons filled with fresh cut rice hay. I could see the other brown eyes peering toward the train. I projected a certain wistfulness in their gaze as the brown bodies under the green cone-shaped hats watched the train carry their foreign cargo through the land they had farmed for a millennia. The shrill scream of the steam whistle aroused me from my visual meditation as I looked to see my partners, Sky and She smiling at me.

 

"I can tell that we're getting closer," Sky whispered to me. "Feel the air is cooler, this is what Flame said when we get high we are in Bandung!" We all laughed about getting high as Sky pulled a joint out of his pocket. "Jesus, what about a bust on the train," I shot back. To no avail was my concern for Sky had already lit the joint and passed it to She.

 

Nobody seemed to care at this point. There were about 10 roosters in their bamboo cages watching us along with about 10 "Ibu's"(older Indonesian women), as we passed the joint among us. They squatted on the floor of the train, even though they had seats nearby, so that they could sit close to the roosters, I guess. Or maybe so that they could get a closer look at these strange foreigners in their puff-sleeved, purple shirts and tight white pants and that strange female with us with her jiggling breasts.

 

As we rode the train I drifted into thoughts of our adventures thus far. I had met a lot of crazy people in my travels thus far. Many drug-infested, ego-tripping poseurs who were not my style at all. As we were far away from the limits of our own culture there was a lawlessness that we lived by, almost a "frontier" reality.

 

Except that the frontier was always in some third-world republic which had a long history of turning the other eye when strange (and generally illegal) things were going on. Indeed, the road was the place to go crazy if there ever were an ideal place to flip out. Some people never did get back from their freak outs, some people were swallowed into the culture of the road and only the residue of a gaunt, hollow-eyed, jaundiced, bearded weirdo with long stringy hair would remain. When I saw these burn-out cases I always wondered how they survived. Sometimes they would beg from the locals, other times I would see them in the dark corners of the murky hangouts where we ate along the way from Kandahar to Kabul to Kathmandu.

 

As we continued on I felt we could have been in Mongolia for all I knew. Indonesia was a vast, yet unknown place to most of the world travelers. It wasn't well known for its dope (of course I later found out that Sumatra is a world-class center for great weed). And at that time, few of us knew about the magic of Bali. So, I wondered as I pushed my face into the lush green smelling air of the cooling day, what is next? I carried my new and expensive black and gold Gibson Les Paul guitar that Charles had paid for with Jet's money in Singapore. This was real was it not? I mean, who the hell sinks a bunch of money like that into a wigged-out idea? Little did I know at that time that Jet was just as "out-the re" as any of us, and that he had money to burn at that time from his dubious enterprises.

 

Bandung is a famous town, a university town with an air of the intellectual. It is up in the mountains of western Java, where the cool weather is conducive to thinking, rather than taking naps as is absolutely necessary in the low, tropical climes of Jakarta. As I looked at the taxi drivers when we disembarked from the train, they looked more awake. Who knows, maybe I was projecting, but they didn't have that sleepy sense of the lowlanders.

 

As always, the dust began to waft into low-lying clouds all around the train as taxi drivers and hawkers of all types rushed to the tired and hungry travelers from Jakarta, slowly climbing off the train. I watched the women with the chickens. They put the cages on their heads and wrapped their luggage in the faded brown batik cloth that all of them had. They were earth tone people all the way from the herb-chew caused brown stains on their craggy remaining teeth, to the deep brown of their skin and eyes, to the red and brown multi-colored faded batiks that they wrapped around themselves and their possessions. They made small, slightly crooked figures with their chicken cage hats moving silently through the crowd of eager men waiting for our business.

 

I was quickly awakened from the trance of watching these women as Sky pushed me towards a waiting "bemo" truck, which was going to drive us up the mountain 25 miles to Lembang for the grand sum of 80 cents American money. My amazement never stopped about how cheap it was to live in Asia. "Another day in paradise" ,I thought to myself as I bowed my tall body into a circular crouch so that I could fit into the ancient truck cargo space designed for people at least 1 foot shorter than me. "Yeah, 80 cents, but look what you get" I yelled to Sky across the river of engine noise and pungent blue exhaust fumes that accompanied us on the 45 minute journey to Lembang.

 

Asian villages close down early. After 8PM there is almost no one awake unless there is a celebration of some type, in which case the Javanese and Balinese are happy to stay up all night. By the time we got to Lembang there were no lights anywhere. Our address was hard to read and we didn't speak Indonesian at that point so finding the "Prophecy" house was required waking up one of the owners of a small tea shop in the middle of town, who was sleeping on the table of the shop. I could smell the pungent remnants of the now-familiar "kretek" cigarettes in the shop. Imagine the smell of burning clove and vanilla together and you have the smell of a " kretek" cigarette. The man was quite friendly, so much so that he walked us to the house, telling us in a combination of sign language and simple Indonesian that this was an old house of the Dutch, but that now a famous general from Bandung owned it. "The generals are everywhere", I thought to myself, "I can see that peaked military cap right now perched on top of his head, like one of those photos you see in the dingy shops of Jakarta."

 

We all hoped we were at the right place because it was so late, but we were heartened that there were still lights on. Such an unlikely looking place. It was long and had the reddish tile roof of a California mansion in Topanga Canyon somewhere. But right next door was a little farm with a cream-colored, rather skinny goat who looked at us with the bleary eyes of a sleep-dazed tabby cat woke n up from a great nap. The goat was curious, though and moved towards us. "She" took this as a good sign, and moved towards the go at, but as soon as she did the front door of the mansion opened, spilling yellow light all over us and transporting a troop of long- haired, laughing people towards us, arms outstretched.

 

"You guys must be the rest of the band!" a guy barked out, "Fuck it, here's a joint of great Sumatran stuff. This ain't dope, it's HOPE!". "This has to be Django", I thought to myself then "Wow, what a fox", I whispered to Sky as I looked at the blond, obviously European lady with Django. "Oh, that's Ti" Sky said. Apparently Flame had told Sky that Ti was a major French beauty, and was married to Django. "Allo," Ti was the next to welcome me with her French accent, just like the way those chanteuse French actresses with cigarette holders answer the phone in the old black and white movies where everybody has their hair slicked back. One after the other we met all the members of our new tribe: Spunky, Phloton, the Wizard, all amazing people waiting to be known and understood through the reveries of jamming in the first class recording studio newly built in the garage of our mansion.

 

 

Returning to CL’s Lembang Journal

 

 

As we got to know each other I kept coming back to questions about being an American. As a group we were mostly American, not all obviously, but the Americans were the majority. But we questioned what was an American after all? Traveling on the road in Asia gave me a new feeling about being an American. I would find myself in some remote distant place and meet a group of Americans and we would look at each other -- some black faces, some white, an Italian-looking person, a Jew, a Wasp, an Hispanic. How could these all be Americans? What the hell was the American trip, and how could you explain it to the people of some village or town in the developing world that most Americans look and are different from one another?

 

Melting pot? No, there was no need to glorify it, at all. Our differences clearly showed that America was not much of a melting pot at all. So I tried to look at it for what it was, to face the naked facts after many years in the backwoods of Asia: The conclusion was inevitable that America didn't exist as a country at all. Not the way any part of the third world did, with its masses of distinct groups, and tribes, and races of peoples.

 

It came to me in flash sitting in that Java commune with that zany group of musicians: America was mostly a state of mind, a creation somewhere on this planet -- a creation as much by the rest of the world as by the streams of immigrants who washed up on American shores -- even going back to include the original immigrant settlers, the native American Indians -- who built up the communities and businesses from one coast to the other. America, the idea that is, was created by the world, especially by Western, Enlightenment Europe, intoxicated with the newly found magic of science.

 

As Phloton once put it, "Put it all together and you have to accept the fact that the experimental method that Newton laid on the heads of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century was very heavy magic." Out of a Western Europe intoxicated with the Rights of Man, with Individualism -- all very new and revolutionary ideas -- came the main thrust for the invention called America. Sitting around the with the Prophecy in our Lembang mansion, it was clear that America could only be viewed as an experiment on behalf of the entire world. A free-for-all probe into something new. Something still in Idea Space.

 

America, it was clear to us then in the seventies, was also rapidly becoming an ecological disaster -- because the idea of America, created in large part by Europe -- had gotten out of hand and had run away with itself. I had always thought that was why the French, who more clearly saw America as a brainchild of the Enlightenment, had such misgivings about us, and made so much noise in the sixties and seventies about the American invasion, fast food, Franglaise, and Harvard MBAs.

 

What we all pondered in those Prophecy days was whether America, the child of the world to first reach economic and technological take-off, could now reach a spiritual take-off and head off the ecological (=life=spirit=soul) disaster we all felt was looming before us.

 

That's how Papaji viewed the coming together of the Prophecy commune in Singapore around March 1970. That is why we were on the road, were in our late twenties and early thirties, young but had already seen so much, so many places and times. Maybe it was the weariness of travel, or the excesses of drugs and the music we indulged in, but we seemed old for our years -- possibly living up to Gertrude Stein's adage that America was really the oldest country in the world, because it reached the twentieth century first.

 

America had reached the edge first, as Django and Sky would have put it. America the original freak child of the planet. Can she pull it together in time? Can she get off that head of steam, now nuclear and electronic, that first launched her? Can she go beyond technology, beyond affluence, beyond power, beyond acid -- which to Papaji's way of thinking were all the same trip -- into something better?

 

Rilke had said it best for Papaji:

 

Earth, isn't this what you want: an invisible arising is us? Is it not your dream to be one day invisible? Earth! Invisible! What is your urgent command, if not transformation? -- Rilke

 

And then, Papaji, sitting in the hills in Java, looking into the hearts and souls of his American sidekicks, tried to carry on Rilke 's thoughts:

To return to the Earth, to the aboriginal grace whence we came.

Beyond our cunning, whirling dervish of words

Transformed back into earth, invisible, harmonious,

Synchronized in love, in ecology with an enveloped mind both tantric and solar.

In preparation for such alchemy

We metamorphose in silence into the new Earth rise.

 

And sometime later that day, some of the other Prophecy band got into the act of completing Rilke’s thoughts:

Hey Moon Face You're watchin My Earth Rise

-- Sky Walker

This life's for reel. It's our movie, and we're the main attraction.

-- Django

 

 

These images flashed through Papaji's mind as the music session that evening, they called it a full-moon conspiracy, wound down. The gang liked to call their state of mind "edge city," where the many freaks of the world cavorted -- the Jesus freaks, music freaks, and science freaks alike -- all trying to grok the cosmic juice. I felt the same energy as that radiated by the Kuta Beach trancers, whose singing raced above the palm treetops.

 

"The greatest collection of actors the world has ever seen," Django says of the Prophecy and of the Indonesians too, "but the play's for real, and for reel."

 

'Grok' means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed -- to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. If I chopped you up and made a stew, you and the stew, whatever was in it would 'grok' -- and when I ate you, we would 'grok' together and nothing would be lost and it would not matter which one of us did the eating.

-- Heinlein

 

 

I think about the Kuta Beach trance dance. The gamelan tosses off metallic pings and gongs through the palm fronds near the beach. The first dance is merely introductory. The moon flickers recognition in a sky that looks flat, it is so close to the earth, to the spot marked out for the dance. Many world travelers and freaks are in the audience, too, zonked on chemicals that are new for the dancers and trancers. The Hindu sense of multiplicity coats over and assimilates everyone into this scene. -- Papaji's journal

 

The way I see the role of religion in the third world, in India and Indonesia, sacred ritual focuses energies. I believe that religious moments of the future will involve symbolic happenings, occasions, and opportunities. Shrines will be total sensoriums, goof rooms, kozmik toys, and electronic flash cards. Priests, exuding cosmic confidence, will act as a guides; they will be reference librarians in the temples of total knowledge. It is crazy!

-- Papaji's journal

 

During an interview for a Jakarta newspaper:

 

Question: Why the name Prophecy for your band?

Django: Because the universe is expanding. We are trying to ride the leading edge of the expanding universe. We're like discipl es in search of Christ. Music is our religion, like Christ used to knock over the tables and chairs in the temple. There must be som ething religious in what we're doing or we wouldn't be doing it.

 

EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE? Astronomers have long agreed that the universe is expanding in all directions at enormous speed -- so enormous, in fact, that is has been assumed there might be more to the universe than could be measured by any telescope. But now two scientists at Ohio State University believe they have detected the leading 'edge' of the expanding universe....[They] avoid any discussion of the cosmological implications of [the] research....In the minds of most laymen, however, the suggestion that the universe has an 'edge' evoked a different question: what is the nature of the space into which the universe is expanding? 'We may never be able to understand that in strict, scientific terms, " says Kraus [director of the observatory]. 'We may have to find answers to questions like that in philosophy.'

 

-- Newsweek, September 7, 1970

 

 

Monologue by Jet Stream, who enjoyed mixing with Indonesian businessmen. The other night this Javanese nightclub owner lays this trip on me about building a Disneyland in Java, with heliports, submarines, and cable cars into the crater of the steaming volcano. But he doesn't understand how we all got here, a whole group of American musicians and artists, living in Central Java, so I tell him, "Yea. Its magic," and he gulps. He's so Javanese at heart, and every Javanese believes in magic to the core of his bones. But he is also a successful wealthy businessman, reaching Westward to make big deals, with big people, big money. Big, big, big, is all he thinks about. And into his little nightclub overlooking Bandung, we jump in, out of some other dimension, out of time, out of space, out of sight. It was timeless.

 

Jet Stream always greatly enjoyed impressing the natives.

 

Spunky: "The other night the Wizard sat up in bed, still asleep, and said, 'You can choose your world, as far as I'm concerned.'"

 

Papaji replied, "Funny you should say that Spunky, but the other night you also sat up in bed, still asleep, and said, 'Yeah, I dig it, but where?' You guys must be talking to each other in your dreams."

 

 

Balinese Hindu-Buddhist Thought

 

The scene then shifts entirely to Bali, where C.L. has built a thatched roof hut in a small village and become romantically involved with a young village dancer. The band follows C.L. to Bali. Both the romance and the band's enchantment will be told.

In Sanskrit Mandala literally means circle and center. Its traditional design often utilizes the circle -- symbol of the cosmos in its entirety -- and the square -- symbol of the earth or of the man-made world....Jung and the Orientalist Richard C. Wilhelm relate the idea of the Mandala as a therapeutic device to the Mandala as a ritual, meditative technique conducive to mystic exaltation ."

-- Arguelles and Arguelles, Mandala (Shambala, Berkeley: 1972).

 

Section of a Balinese mandala painting. The group became close friends with many artists of Java and Bali, including a village leader and painter named Batuan. The mandalas painted by Batuan reflected the sacred and ever-changing world of his Hindu-Buddhist philosophy: At the center, God created all around him/her, including the butterflies, flowers and vegetation, demons, and airplane crash representing fallible new technologies. This worldview penetrated the musician's thinking, taking them further away from the American culture they left far behind.

 

 

Demons and Deities of a Balinese Folk Healer

 

 

The art of painting is enmeshed in the healing arts of Bali. The musicians found a natural and sympathetic route through the universal medium of their art to the magic of Bali. This magic was not esoteric in the context of the island's living culture, but was almost commonplace, very much alive and breathing. Did the village shamans of Indonesia penetrate the accumulated layers of alienation and anguish the group felt? The drama of healing remains an integral part of the on-going encounter between West and East. The sketch depicted below was made for the authors by the folk healer and artist, Ketut Liyer of Bali.

 

 

Interview with I Dewa Nyoman Batuan, Head of the Village of Pengosekan, Bali

with Ward Ashman, on March 23, 1991, in Pengosekan, Bali.

 

 

Q: This is a meeting we're having with I Dewa Nyoman Batuan, and the meeting is on the 23rd of March, 1991, in Pengosekan, Bali. Batuan is a very old friend of the Prophecy, and we'll be talking about his experience now as a leader of the village during that time that the Prophecy and Charles were here. So I will be doing some of this in English, (Batuan: "and some in Indonesian") and I'll be taking notes as well.

So I think if you start with what you had already talked about, when Charles and the band came here, that the village had never seen anything like that.

A: Yeah, when Prophecy come to our village at that time it was like something special for us. Because why? We'd never seen something like that before. Tidak pernah melihat, ja. We have not a radio, we have not television, and never see something like that and then make our people in the village, it's like a big question, ja? They don't understand, but they know that it is a band, but they don't know what feeling they get from this band, they cannot know about that. But, because it is a new thing, all the people think like "Wah, this is something that is special."

And then because the first time the group came to our small village, during that time it was special for the Balinese people, because the Balinese people always believe that when something is special it is because God likes us. Something special we can see is something people believe, because of God. I think it is true, because everything coming from God.

And then after the Prophecy play that night in the center of our village, in that time in our bale banjar, which means place for meeting people, and we use that, but at that time the bale banjar was broken, you remember? Still the villagers want to pick that place. And that made us in Pengosekan at that time what I say, like special. And then in every corner of the bale banjar people stay there, sit down with a friend and talk about what is happening with this band

And for me, because I never seen, too, difficult for me to talk for the people to [make them] understand...I just say like music. And then we just translate, because [its] like a gamelan in Bali at that time. This is like a drum (kendang in Balinese), and this way one understands what that means.

Behind that, because your group come to our village, it is some symbol for us, because in that time Pengosekan people think "Pengosekan coming better at that time about life." Especially in that time our village was still very poor, you can remember at that time, ja? Still like forest at that time, original, ja, very quiet. And we had quiet, but still we need something for our food. When the Prophecy come at that time, people think "this is from God."

Q: You mean life was still hard at that time; hard to get food?

A: Ja, when the time Prophecy come, people think, "Maybe God give something for me." [This thinking] start in that time. And it was true, because after Prophecy come to our village, because Pengosekan people believe that something is from God, they want, and then the Prophecy want to keep something from our culture, they want to look at my culture for more understanding.

And Balinese people want to look at the Prophecy culture too. Charles told us what the Prophecy meant, that it was music, and sometimes I say to Charles, "What you do, we don't like it!" Because [it is] nothing [to us], but Charles say that it is good [in Western terms]. But it was hard for me to understand [so] that we sometime we talk with Charles about it to understand more.

Q: "What you do, this is nothing" What do you mean by that?

A: I don't understand. Tidak mengerti music. Saya tidak tahu, dimana, dimana bagus? I don't understand the music. Where is [there] something good in its? Because [it has] singing or something like that.

Q: Apa ini ? you wonder what is this?

A: Apa ini penting, ja. (Why is this important?) Tapi sebenarnya kultur. (But it is truly culture.). Dari barat itu, ja. (From the West that culture.). Western culture. Tapi, untuk kami di Pengosekan...easy for me to tell, "just like gamelan" I say. For Westerners, this is just like our gamelan, I think. In Bali, we have gamelan, but in the West (I tell the villagers) it is like gamelan, but includes singing, like that.

Because we have many time to talk about the Western life, and Western music. And then we talk about my music because of the Prophecy coming to our village. So it was very special for me. Keep more understanding about my own culture, like my gamelan. And then looking for the Prophecy music, because Pengosekan people don't understand, too hard for him to understand. Make him more, what calling is, more strong to trust their own music.

Q: So the Prophecy helped you to feel stronger about your own culture?

A: Yes, too hard for the villagers to understand the Prophecy, and because they have their own gamelan orchestra, more easy to understand their own culture, and so they want to make the gamelan grow up as a result of seeing the Prophecy.

Q: That's great, I didn't know that!

A: Yeah, that I see at that time. Before we have gamelan already, but not grow up like that. But because they see Prophecy, they like to see the band members very "aggressive" in their music, they have the feeling, "Why not try in my gamelan, too?"

Q: You mean that they want the music to be more "hot," like the Prophecy music?

A: Yeah, they want the music to be more hot in the gamelan.

Q: Musik panas (hot music)?

A: Ja, musik panas and more kuat (strong). And they feel very strong to keep the music strong too. To make the gamelan stronger.

Q: So it was a positive influence for the Prophecy to come to the village of Pengosekan?

A: Yeah, it was a positive influence for us. And then behind that we talk with Charles about the life system of the Prophecy. In that time we think that Western or American life is always better. Charles we see from outside only. Because I look that they come form America to here by airplane, they come with better systems, with radios, and something special. So that when I compare it to ourselves, our Balinese life is so low. So poor, in a materialistic way. Still everything is poor in our culture too at that time.

I think we have lost some meaning about our culture. I talk a lot during that time with Charles, and we understand more about our own culture, and then starting in that time we think both sides. We start to think, (and more tourists come to Bali -- some rich and some not so rich), and this makes Balinese people understand more that "tourists are not different than me". Before, I always put my level as lower, much lower than the western people. This was 20 years ago, but from him (Charles) too, because we talk much at that time about what was good in Pengosekan, and what good in the West, it made me trust more in myself. "I am no different than him."

Because they (Prophecy and Charles) tell to me, "something good is here in your village". They see the gamelan -- melihat Gamelan, dia senang dengan gamelan -- and then that is something special we find after Prophecy come to our village.

Q: So the Prophecy had helped make Pengosekan a stronger village?

A: Sure, they have made stronger in two ways. More stronger to find food, and more stronger to trust our culture. Because what they saw in me, because people don't understand, they think they have better, gamelan better than what they have, because they want to keep the gamelan in the village. We have many different types of gamelan. But now we have so many more songs that we have made for the gamelan in our village.

It started from that time of the Prophecy, now we have a very strong gamelan group. Because when Prophecy come to our village, two things we got. From the people in the Prophecy we can tell they come to our village to see the painting and woodcarving and all the Prophecy people like the Balinese painting.

And Balinese painting is a strong part of our Balinese culture, and it makes me more strong about my culture. And then, all the people before forgot about painting, because in 1963 until 1965 it was communist, ja? Broke our island, there were no people to make painting. But after Prophecy come, it helped us to make better and then because we think, "Tourists always like to buy something" and then many people, more people want to learn about my culture, about painting, weaving, woodcarving. This is true.

Q: So I will ask you another question. What I'll do is ask you one question, and then when I have enough information, I'll ask you another question.

How did the contact with Charles and Prophecy affect you as a person?

A: Oh yeah, this first time because in that time we go to Kuta at the beach, and sell things . We call in Bali dagang lancong, (itinerant selling), you understand, ja? We sell things to the tourists directly. Because we contact with the tourists, we meet with "Jimmy" (Charles' friend), tell to tell, and they come to our village. Because I know at that time that the western person likes to go to the village to see what the life is like in Bali.

But in Bali at that time it was still a special place for the Westerners (not many came to Bali at that time). And then we meet, and sometimes we talk. Because I need to meet with the Westerners to talk about business, to sell our things. First I am meeting with him for business. That is first because we like to sell things to them. But they help us too, because they try to sell paintings in America...Charles did that too. Now that means by starting this business, we get more food in Pengosekan. But, from that food we are able to keep a stronger culture in Pengosekan. And because we want to sell the paintings, and because they are paintings from our culture, it makes our culture more strong and the village more strong. And more people want to keep it and learn about the culture.

Before we were able to sell the paintings to the Westerners it was very hard for us, we did not have enough food at that time. Before 1975, Bali, especially my village of Pengosekan, people did not have enough jobs. Why? Because we have 100 families, but not enough land to farm. We had more people than land. So we could not grow enough food.

Q: So I want to ask you again, and go back to the original question. How have you changed inside from this arrival of the Prophecy ?

A: We want to change by becoming more strong with our culture. Always we find from the Westerner that they do not seem as happy as we think they would be since they are from the West. Before we think that they are all happy because they have enough money, enough food, they have a good country. Like that, always we think the Westerners are good, you know. But we cannot see, what is good behind what we see outside. I think after we look at them, we see that they are missing something, too hard to get happiness.