Mel Lyam married Jessie Benton, the daughter of the artist, Thomas Hart Benton, the cousin of Garth Benton, the father of Drew Benton, the daughter of my late sister, Christine Rosamond Benton.

The Gooch genealogy ends thus;

Children of THOMAS BENTON and RITA PIACENZA are:

i. THOMAS PIACENZA7 BENTON, b. Private.

ii. JESSE P. BENTON, b. Private.

I met Jessie once at the Fort Hill commune. I lived down the street two blocks in a commune I and four friends founded in 1970. We exchanged food and ideas.

With the rekindling of the Culture Wars by the Pope over sonic imaging and birth control, I must assume the War on Hippie Bohemians has been rasied from the Dead – Heads. When you add together my history with alternative societies and thinking, you can conclude I am the Big Boss Bohemian Man – the Last Hippie Man Standing!

Come and get me – Ratzinger! You dirty rat!

Jon the Nazarite

Melvin James Lyman (March 24, 1938, Eureka, California – April 1978, exact date and location unknown) was an American musician, film maker, writer and founder of the Fort Hill Community.

[edit] Musician“ Mel Lyman played harmonica like no one under the sun / Mel Lyman didn’t just play harmonica, he was one. – Landis MacKellar[1] ”

Lyman grew up in California and Oregon. As a young man, he spent a number of years traveling the country and learning harmonica and banjo from such legendary musicians as Woody Guthrie, Brother Percy Randolph, and Obray Ramsey.[2] In 1963 he 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”,[3] 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” [4]

[edit] FilmmakerIn the early Sixties, Lyman had been drawn to New York. The music and fellow musicians that he found there led in turn to a larger circle of writers, artists and filmmakers. He became friends with underground film-maker Jonas Mekas, which led to the studios of Andy Warhol, and Bruce Conner all of whom he counted as both teachers and inspirations for his later film work. Several of Lyman’s films have recently been digitally restored to be included in the permanent collection of the Anthology Film Archives,

[edit] WriterIn 1966, supported and funded by Jonas 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, through the early Sixties as his life widened and deepened musically and personally. The last entries are from 1966 which simply express the profound joys and deepest losses which defined and gave his life direction and meaning in the years ahead. The key to the book and the life he lived afterwards are stated simply in the dedication at the beginning “To Judy, who made me live with a broken heart” .[5]

[edit] The Lyman Family, The Fort Hill Community and the AvatarIt was his relationship with Judy which brought him to Boston in 1963. Again, Lyman became acquainted with many artists and musicians in the vibrant Boston scene including, among others, Timothy Leary’s group of LSD enthusiasts, 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, “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.[6] Lyman was by all accounts very charismatic and later, after Judy had left, a community or family naturally tended to grow up around him. At some point thereafter Lyman began to realize 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-transcendentalist[7] socio-spiritual structure centered on Lyman, the friends he had attracted and the large body of his music and writings.

Although Lyman and the Family shared some attributes with the hippies– prior experimenting with LSD and marijuana and Lyman’s cosmic millennialism–they were not actually hippies either in appearance (female members dressed conservatively and male members wore their hair relatively short by the standards of the era) or beliefs (while Lyman and other Family members had fathered children by different women, polyamory was eschewed in favor of serial monogamy).

By the Spring of 1967 the Fort Hill Community had become an established presence in Boston and it, along with members of the wider community in greater Boston and Cambridge, came together to create and publish the 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. The paper and magazine set new standards in content and design later adopted by more mainstream publications. Throughout the first year of its existence it created what became 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 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.[8]

“ I am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble / and then I am going to burn the rubble / and then I am going to scatter the ashes / and then maybe SOMEONE will be able to see SOMETHING as it really is / WATCHOUT ”
—Mel Lyman, Declaration of Creation [9]

After working very intensely on each issue, in the Spring of 1968 the Family gained complete editorial control (some say adversarially) 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 pro and con. 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.

“ Love isn’t something you find, something you do, something you study. Love is something you BECOME after there is no more YOU. – Mel Lyman[10] ”

[edit] Later developments, and Lyman’s deathIn 1971, Rolling Stone magazine published a cover exposé, an extensive philippic on the Family by associate editor David Felton. The Rolling Stone report described an authoritarian and dysfunctional environment, including an elite “Karma Squad” of ultra-loyalists to enforce Lyman’s discipline, the Family’s predilection for astrology, and isolation rooms for disobedient Family members. Family members disputed these reports.

“ The only difference between us and the Manson Family is that we don’t go around preaching peace and love and we haven’t killed anyone, yet. – Jim Kweskin (perhaps in jest)[11] ”

The Rolling Stone article and the earlier trial of Charles Manson, who seemed to share some traits in common with Lyman, raised the Family’s profile and – whether fairly or not – established Lyman in the sensationalist part of the public mind as a bizarre and possibly dangerous person.

But although Lyman deeply understood Charles Manson and even corresponded with him once, and was sometimes revered as a Messiah-like figure by the Family, it would be inaccurate to overstate the similarities between the Manson Family and the Lyman Family. The Lyman Family was larger and more stable and productive than Manson’s. Unlike Manson’s group, Lyman’s included many persons of accomplishment and note, such as Kweskin, therapist and actress Daria Halprin,[12] actor Mark Frechette, and pioneering rock critic Paul Williams. And although the Family was often accused of strong-arm tactics in dealing with neighbors and alternative-community groups, they certainly never killed anyone or even manifested serious homicidal intent.

However, in 1973, members of the Family, including Frechette, staged a bank robbery. One member of the Family was killed by police, and Frechette, sentenced to prison, died in a weightlifting accident in jail in 1975.[13]

Frechette said the place 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.”[14]

Thus it has been said that, unlike the Manson Family, Lyman’s did not explode in a dramatic denouement. Rather, the Family took a lower profile and carried on, quietly building on the relationships formed in the turbulent early years. Lyman died in 1978, age 40, under unknown (but presumably natural) circumstances.

After Lyman’s death, the Family evolved into a more conventional extended family- small, low-profile, and prosperous. The skills and work ethic honed in refurbishing the structures of the Family compound led to the founding of the profitable Fort Hill Construction Company. The Family acquired property in Kansas and other places. Many Family members went on to successful careers. Although some former Family members have rejected him and perhaps that part of their own past, all current members still revere Lyman, as do many former members.
Jonas Mekas (Lithuanian pronunciation: [ˈjonɐs ˈmækɐs]; born December 24,[1] 1922) is a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, and curator who has often been called “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema.” His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals across Europe and America.

Jonas Mekas (Lithuanian pronunciation: [ˈjonɐs ˈmækɐs]; born December 24,[1] 1922) is a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, and curator who has often been called “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema.” His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals across Europe and America.

In 1954, he became editor of Film Culture, and in 1958, began writing his “Movie Journal” column for The Village Voice. In 1962, he co-founded Film-Makers’ Cooperative (FMC) and the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. The films and the voluminous collection of photographs and paper documents (mostly from or about avant garde film makers of the 1950-1980 period) were moved from time to time based on Mekas’ ability to raise grant money to pay to house the massive collection. At times, Mekas personally paid its housing rent and, at low points in external funding, he had to restrict access to the collection. Easily, he can be credited with single-handedly saving large portions of the avant garde films and associated materials.
He was part of the New American Cinema, with, in particular, fellow film-maker Lionel Rogosin. He was heavily involved with artists such as Andy Warhol, Nico, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Salvador Dalí, and fellow Lithuanian George Maciunas.
In 1964, Mekas was arrested on obscenity charges for showing Flaming Creatures (1963) and Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950). He launched a campaign against the censorship board, and for the next few years continued to exhibit films at the Film-makers’ Cinemathèque, the Jewish Museum, and the Gallery of Modern Art.
From 1964-1967, he organized the New American Cinema Expositions, which toured Europe and South America and in 1966 joined 80 Wooster Fluxhouse Coop.
In 1970, Anthology Film Archives opened on 425 Lafayette Street as a film museum, screening space, and a library, with Mekas as its director. Mekas, along with Stan Brakhage, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, James Broughton, and P. Adams Sitney, begin the ambitious Essential Cinema project at Anthology Film Archives to establish a canon of important cinematic works.
http://www.trussel.com/f_mel.htm