Melvin James Lyman (March 24, 1938 – March 1978) was an American musician and writer, and the founder of the Fort Hill Community, which has been variously described as a family, commune, or cult."The Mel Lyman Personality Cult Revisited" by Kliph Nesteroff.
Early life Lyman grew up in California and Oregon. As a young man, according to the music newsletter The Broadside of Boston, he spent a number of years traveling the country and learning harmonica and banjo from such musicians as Brother Percy Randolph and Obray Ramsey.Notes on Mel Lyman. The Broadside of Boston, Sept. 18, 1963MEL LYMAN (March 24, 1938 – March 1978) In FolkWorks, online version of the 2001-2007 magazine of folk & traditional music for Southern California.
During a period in the early 1960s, Lyman lived in New York City, where he associated with other artists, filmmakers, musicians, and writers. He was a friend of underground filmmaker Jonas Mekas, which led to the studios of Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner. He learned the art of filmmaking from Conner and made some films with him.
Musician
In 1963 Lyman joined Jim Kweskin’s Boston-based jug band as a banjo and harmonica player. Lyman, once called "the Grand Old Man of the 'blues' harmonica in his mid-twenties",Harmonica by John Bowers. Coronet, May 1965, pp 138-143. is remembered in folk music circles for playing a 20-minute improvisation on the traditional hymn "Rock of Ages" at the end of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival to the riled crowd streaming out after Bob Dylan’s famous appearance with an electric band.
Some felt that Lyman, primarily an acoustic musician, was delivering a wordless counterargument to Dylan’s new-found rock direction. Irwin Silber, editor of Sing Out Magazine, wrote that Lyman’s "mournful and lonesome harmonica" provided "the most optimistic note of the evening".On the Scene by Robert J. Lurtsema. Broadside, Aug. 18, 1965
Writer In 1966, supported and funded by Mekas, Lyman published his first book, Autobiography of a World Savior, which set out to reformulate spiritual truths and occult history in a new way. In 1971, Lyman published Mirror at the End of the Road, derived from letters he wrote during his formative years, starting in 1958 from his initial attempts to learn and become a musician, to the early 1960s as his life widened and deepened musically and personally. The final entries, from 1966, simply express the profound joys and deepest losses which defined and gave his life direction and meaning in the years to come. The key to the book and the life that he lived afterward are stated simply in the dedication at the beginning: "To Judy, who made me live with a broken heart".Felton, D., "The Lyman Family's Holy Siege of America", Rolling Stone, December 23, 1971, pp. 40-60.Lyman, M., Mirror at the End of the Road, United Illuminating, Inc., 1971.
The Lyman Family The Fort Hill Community It was his relationship with Judy Silver that brought him to Boston in 1963. Again, Lyman became acquainted with many artists and musicians in the vibrant Boston scene, including Timothy Leary's group of LSD enthusiasts, International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). Lyman was involved for a very short time and, against his wishes, so was Judy. Knowing LSD’s power, he felt she was not ready but stated "the bastards at IFIF gave her acid … I told her not to take it. I knew her head couldn't take it."
Lyman’s fears turned out to be justified and she left college and returned to her parents in Kansas. According to one of the anonymous sources interviewed by David Felton for Rolling Stone, "Judy got all fucked up – this is his second old lady – I mean like she got really twisted. I don't know if it was the acid or the scene or whatever, but she split. She went back to Kansas. She was totally out of the picture by the summer of 1963. Judy is probably the most important thing in Mel's life. He worshipped Judy, really loved her. Then she split, you know? She couldn't help it, she was totally freaked out. They took her away."David Felton, "The Lyman Family's Holy Siege of America". Originally appeared in Rolling Stone 98, Dec. 23, 1971, pp. 40-60, and Rolling Stone 99, Jan. 6, 1972, pp. 40-60. Reprinted in Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America, David Felton, ed. (San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1972) and reprinted in its entirety in Steve Trussel's Mel Lyman archive.
Lyman was by all accounts very charismatic and later, after Judy had left, a community tended to grow up around him. At some point Lyman began to view himself as destined for a role as a spiritual force and leader.
In 1966, Lyman founded and headed The Lyman Family, also known as The Fort Hill Community, centered in a few houses in the Fort Hill section of Roxbury, then a poor neighborhood of Boston. The Fort Hill Community, to observers in the mid-to-late Sixties, combined some of the outward forms of an urban hippie commune with a neo-transcendentalistAvatar # 1 socio-spiritual structure centered on Lyman, the friends he had attracted, and the large body of his music and writings. One of the stalwarts of the community was Jim Kweskin, Lyman’s former band mate.
Members of Lyman's Community briefly included the young couple Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, two non-actors who had been discovered and cast by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for the lead roles in his second English-language feature Zabriskie Point. Michael Kindman, founder of the East Lansing underground newspaper The Paper, briefly worked on Avatar and remained with the group for five years. He later wrote of his experiences in his book My Odyssey Through the Underground Press.Michael Kindman, My Journey Through the Underground Press. In Ken Wachsberger, ed., Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press Vol. 1, pp. 369-478. Mica Press 1993, and Michigan State University Press, June 1, 2011. Kindman's account of his Fort Hill experience, reprinted in its entirety at Steve Trussel's Mel Lyman archive.
Journalist and poet Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy rock magazine and author of Das Energi, spent a few months on Fort Hill. He told David Felton he had had to escape under cover of darkness after being told he would not be allowed to leave.
Although Lyman and the Family shared some attributes with the hippies – experimenting with LSD and marijuana and Lyman’s cosmic millennialism – they were not actually hippies; in fact, the ethos of the community was virulently anti-hippie. Female members dressed and behaved conservatively and male members wore their hair relatively short by the standards of the era. According to both Felton and Kindman, Lyman discouraged sexual activity and at least once ordered a pregnant member to get an abortion.
Couples were discouraged from spending private time together. Women were expected to be obedient and serve in domestic capacities only, while men were expected to dominate and control them. Members turned over whatever money they had to the Family. Funds were used to purchase houses in the Fort Hill area for members to live in, construction tools, and vehicles, along with sound and video recording equipment for Lyman's use. The community's primary activity was construction and remodeling work. The foremost goal was to provide a supportive environment for Lyman to do his creative work.
According to both Felton and Kindman, a macho, bullying ethic prevailed and guns were frequently brandished. Lyman seemed to believe that one could only be truly creative when one was "real" or "awake" – defined in practice as experiencing intense pain or anger – and that fear and cowardice caused one to remain "asleep" or even to die. People were subjected to rigid discipline and highly structured lives."As Paul (Williams) explained it, the men generally started work at nine in the morning, broke for breakfast at 11, broke again for lunch at four and finished work and cleaned up just before dinner at nine in the evening. It was a schedule Mel had worked out for maximum health, appetite control and work output. Times and amounts of coffee intake were similarly dictated." David Felton, "The Lyman Family's Holy Siege of America", Part I. Rolling Stone. No. 98, pp. 40-60, Dec. 23, 1971. Williams was a member of the Lyman cult for several months according to Felton. The Avatar By the Spring of 1967 the Fort Hill Community had become an established presence in Boston and, along with members of the wider community in greater Boston and Cambridge, came together to create and publish the underground newspaper Avatar. It contained local news, political and cultural essays, commentary and more personal contributions, writing, and photography from various members of the Fort Hill Community, including Lyman. Throughout the first year of its existence, it cultivated a national audience and many more people visited Fort Hill at that time, some eventually staying and becoming part of the community.
Rather than the gentle and collectivist hippie ethic in other underground publications of the time, Lyman’s writing in Avatar espoused a philosophy that contained, to some readers of the time, strong currents of megalomania and nihilism and to others a powerful alternative voice to the prevailing ethos.Avatar #16
In the Spring of 1968, after working very intensely on each issue, the Family gained complete editorial control of Avatar for the final issue of the paper. Later they founded their own magazine, American Avatar, which continued the editorial directions of the newspaper. Lyman’s writings in these publications brought increased visibility and public reaction, both positive and negative.
His writings, along with others in the publications, could be poetic, philosophical, humorous, and confrontational, sometimes simultaneously, as Lyman at various times claimed to be: the living embodiment of Truth, the greatest man in the world, Jesus Christ, and an alien entity sent to Earth in human form by extraterrestrials. Such pronouncements were typically delivered with extreme fervor and liberal use of ALL CAPS.
KPFK Debacle According to both Felton and Kindman, Family member Owen deLong applied for and eventually got a job as program director at alternative community radio station KPFK in Los Angeles. Although he had not mentioned Lyman or American Avatar, deLong immediately began taking the station in what management and staff considered a peculiar direction. When Lyman's "history of rhythm and blues" tapes proved to have been recorded at a volume too low for quality broadcasting, deLong interrupted the third broadcast and asked listeners to call the station complaining about the sound.
The alacrity with which the switchboard lit up suggested a pre-planned campaign by Family members. When recording engineer David Cloud pointed this out, deLong assaulted him and was subsequently fired. Family members including Mark Frechette later came to the station ostensibly to remove some shelves they had installed, while verbally attacking station staff. The police were called and station manager Marvin Segelman hired a private security guard for the station for the next week. Family member George Peper confirmed to Felton that Lyman had ordered the attack.
Post-Manson Family On The Dick Cavett Show in 1970, Mark Frechette said Lyman's group was not a commune: "It's a 'community', but the purpose of the community is not communal living. ... The community is for one purpose, and that's to serve Mel Lyman, who is the leader and the founder of that community."