This story originally appeared on Jon S. Randal Peace Page on Facebook, 14 May 2021, in celebration of a good man’s 85th birthday.
Hugh wasn’t your run of the mill clown. The son of an architect, Hugh grew up in a nice, middle-class Princeton, New Jersey home. His clown career began rather oddly, by writing poetry. That was back in the 1950s, yet he already had the clown spirit.
He matured into a young man, did a short stint in the Army before going to College in New York and in Boston. His poetry turned from verse to beat style, and fresh out of school he started doing some standup comedy and some improv. He was pretty good at anything he tried. That was a long time ago, and nothing has slowed him even today as he turns 85.
As a child Hugh met Albert Einstein, although he was just age five and had no idea that the old man who took him for walks was one of the greatest physicists the world has known. Between then and now he became good friends with a host of other interesting and influential people. Mostly celebrities of some kind, like Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Bob McKernan of the Grateful Dead, Yippies founder Paul Krassner, author and prankster Ken Kesey, spiritual teacher and psychologist Ram Das, Bob Dylan ̶ he even met and befriended Jimmy Carter.
He married his best friend with whom he has remained head over heels in love since 1967. Older and wrinkled, the two look like young lovebirds when they sit together holding hands.
Hugh established a commune, led a psychedelic bus caravan to Woodstock, emceed several concerts, got busted for protesting a nuclear facility while wearing a Santa Claus suit, founded a circus camp for kids, partnered with Ram Das and others to establish a foundation that has helped the blind see again, and ran a presidential campaign for nobody.
Entertainment Weekly called him the “clown prince of the counter-culture.” Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead called him “a saint in a clown suit.” Paul Krassner insisted he was “the illegitimate son of Harpo Marx and Mother Teresa.” If you ask him, he will tell you that he’s merely a “temple of accumulated error.”
Hugh will be 85 tomorrow and remains one of the more iconic yet almost anonymous figures to come out of the 60s. If you manage to sit him down long enough to have a conversation, he will almost always come off the wall with some imaginative insight, or he’ll reel off a tale from his past that some might think to be a bit tall.
Hugh was, and still is, always there with just the right joke, and when needed, a helping hand. His timing has always been good.
No matter how the world treated him, he just kept cruising along, making the best of it. Those jokes are part of his armor. He was quoted in Rolling Stone as saying “if you don’t have a sense of humor, it just isn’t funny anymore.” Those fantastic stories mentioned above? Ram Dass told Rolling Stone that “everything Wavy says is true, although it’s all unbelievable.”
The reader who was fortunate to have lived through the wild and wonderful era of the late 1950s and into the 60s and early 70s has probably already solved the mystery of who this guy is, but for those who were not so fortunate, this is the story of the life and times of the big, jolly clown we have come to know as Wavy Gravy, Hog Farmer extraordinaire.
Over the years Wavy proved himself to be more than a clown. He was determined to “do something good for a change,” so he became an activist. Rolling Stone said in that interview that “…his creative activism on behalf of peace, justice, and good humor is legendary.”
He never bothered coloring inside the lines ̶ making the telling of his story a head spinning experience, so let’s do this somewhat chronologically. He was born Hugh Nanton Romney Jr. on May 15, 1936. His parents lived in Princeton for only a short time. It was as a young child that he would take walks with his neighbor. Later he would recount his memories of the mop of white hair and the twinkling eyes of that neighbor ̶ Albert Einstein.
He had a natural talent and would often pull stunts to make people laugh. He completed high school in Connecticut then did that short tour with the Army ̶ but the Army wasn't right for Wavy. He was a peaceful man. When he came home, he went to Boston to study theater. He knew he was destined to become an entertainer ̶ he just didn’t know how it would play out. His whole life was by the seat of his pants, so he just experimented. It was around this time when he began writing poetry, and found he was good at that too. By his judgement, it was time to hit the road.
In 1958 he wandered into New York City and found the Gaslight Café ̶ one of the beatnik coffee houses in Greenwich Village. There he started reciting his beat poetry to the gathered hipsters. The crowd enjoyed it. He became a regular and soon was asked to become the joint’s entertainment director. Other early beatniks wandered into the coffeehouse. He would hire some to recite poetry or play folk music.
One of these was a young Bob Dylan. The two became friends and later shared an apartment. Dylan even used Wavy’s typewriter to write the first draft of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.
Somehow, he attracted the attention of comedian Lenny Bruce, who took him under his wing and promoted him as the talent he was, and for a short time acted as Wavy’s manager. He moved from poetry to standup comedy. “I decided to skip the poems and just talk about my weird day,” he told Rolling Stone. He opened for acts like John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Peter, Paul & Mary. At the Living Theater he created a show he called the Phantom Cabaret in collaboration with a couple of then unknowns ̶ Tiny Tim and Moondog.
He got tired of New York winters and California was looking mighty attractive. He moved to San Francisco in 1965 where he hooked up with the Committee Improvisational Theater Company. It was there that he met his wife, a bit part television actress then named Bonnie Jean Beecher. Bonnie had appeared in shows ranging from the Twilight Zone to Star Trek. She was working at a café when they met. She put peanuts in his hamburger. It must have been good because the two married shortly thereafter. After meeting Ram Das, she would change her name to Jahanara Romney.
They were living in a one-room cabin outside Los Angeles when one day a busload of oddly dressed people calling themselves the Merry Pranksters appeared. Suddenly Jahanara and Wavy had about forty extra people staying at their little house. The Pranksters came there for a reason. They needed help. They offered Wavy and Jahanara free rent on a mountaintop in exchange for taking care of forty hogs. The former caretaker, old Saul, had been taken down by a stroke.
This became the birth of the commune known as the Hog Farm. With Wavy at the helm, the place became locally famous… or perhaps infamous. As the commune grew and gained greater fame, they began hosting some truly historic events, putting on concerts and light shows at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Acts like Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and of course the Grateful Dead ̶ all performing with the Hog Farm light shows dancing behind them.
While with the Hog Farm, Wavy and Jahanara gave birth to their only child ̶ a son they named Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney. Kind of a crazy name, so he just goes by Jordan.
After a bit, the Hog Farmers grew weary of sitting in one place and decided to take their show on the road. They landed in a different locale every night, but otherwise not much changed in their way of life. They simply caravanned around the U.S. in psychedelically painted retired school buses. This lasted about seven years. They performed in front of a great variety of audiences, but preferred college campuses. College students really enjoyed the psychedelic performances.
As Wavy puts it in that Rolling Stone interview, “We were a light show, a rock band, a painting, a poem, an anti-war rally, and an anthem for freedom and change.” They gained a reputation for capably and easily serving large crowds with food, first aid, and sanitation while putting on an entertaining show and promoting peace, goodwill, and happiness.
That reputation caught the eyes of some ambitious dudes back east. Artie Kornfeld, Michael Lang, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, the guys who came up with an idea for what they called an “Aquarian Exposition, three Days of Peace & Music” outside Woodstock, New York. These were the organizers of what we now call simply Woodstock. They had been so impressed by the first of the giant festivals, held two years earlier in Monterrey, California, that they became determined to bring the idea to New York, but they really didn’t know how to do what they planned. The artists they spoke with insisted on security at the event, but wanted someone "to work with the crowd, not against them." Remembering Monterrey, the answer was obvious. They contacted the Hog Farm.
Wavy and the others quickly responded that they would be happy to oblige. Instead of security, they called themselves, the “Please Force.” Just as they did on their road shows, they also took over other responsibilities ̶ running the free kitchen, the “freak out” tent, ensuring toilets were serviced, providing blankets when the weather turned cool and wet. They helped find lost people, fed the hungry, and talked people down from bad acid trips.
Because the show location had to be changed at the last minute, and the construction crews didn’t have time to fully complete the scaffolding and stage area, the Hog Farmers helped run wires and cables. Wavy was recruited to make public address announcements between acts and following the rain showers that transformed the field into a sea of mud. The Hog Farm made sure the show went on, and Wavy was at the forefront of their efforts.
After it rained overnight and into the early morning hours, Wavy took the stage and made probably the most iconic announcement of the event ̶ “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000!” Entertainment Weekly dubbed that line to be “one of the top entertainment lines of the 20th century.” The Hog Farmers made good on that offer. Enlisting volunteers, they delivered a cup of granola to everyone out in that great sea of mud.
The organizers planned for 40,000 attendees. They got half a million. Because of Wavy and the Hog Farm, what could have been a disaster didn’t even qualify as a problem. Because of their success at Woodstock, they were invited to do the same at the Texas International Pop Festival, held just north of Dallas in Lewisville, Texas. It was that festival where Wavy became Wavy. Until then he was Hugh. His work and his attitude, combined with his jolly, joking attitude impressed B.B. King, and the two became fast friends. It was B.B. who hung Hugh with the moniker of “Wavy Gravy.” He was never Hugh again.
Wavy was the activist’s activist. When he protested, he did it with style and dedication. On several occasions he was pummeled by unamused police. One such incident severely damaged his back. Injuries bad enough that he had surgery to fuse several vertebrae, and was put into a full body cast. He still uses a cane when he walks.
He was no sooner out of that cast before he and Hog Farm took off for another gig. This one took them to Pakistan. They were met by 42 other people from 17 nations, arriving in two buses filled with food, medical supplies, and bottles of bubbles. This was in 1970, and it was a relief convoy to Bangladesh taking desperately needed supplies to the country following a devastating cyclone.
Their goal was humanitarian, but activist. They hoped to embarrass the government into providing more aid. Wavy spoke mockingly of that government ̶ “My God, there’s hippies doing it. We’d better do it better.” They never got to their destination. The Indo-Pakistani War broke out, so they diverted to Nepal where they distributed their supplies to displaced Tibetan refugees. Wavy was never going to miss an opportunity to do something good.
They went back home with mixed spirits. But Wavy was not deterred. He started a new adventure. He began wearing clown costumes and visiting children in the cancer unit at Oakland Children’s Hospital. With his costume, face paint, and a red rubber nose, he brought smiles to the kids. He spent the next seven years trying to offer some cheer to those desperately ill children.
After one such visit, he didn’t have time to change or remove his makeup before attending a political rally in People’s Park. It was a protest like many others he had attended, often coming away with bumps and bruises provided by the police. A strange thing happened this time. The police didn’t attack him. Following that rally, Wavy was quoted as saying, “Clowns are safe—the cops don’t want to be photographed clubbing a clown!”
The year 1976 was the American Bicentennial. It was also the year when Wavy launched the first of four Nobody for President campaigns. He believed that the U.S. needed badly to change the way we thought about politics. According to Wavy, “Nobody stood for peace, love, honesty and humor, an all-too-rare platform on the national election scene. Of course, Nobody lost, but everyone gained.”
A couple years later a fellow from Wavy’s past contacted him. Larry Brilliant was the former hippie doctor from the Hog Farm. He was also known for being in the leadership team of the World Health Organization’s smallpox eradication program. Brilliant invited Wavy to join a diverse group of public health doctors, spiritualists, and activists to jointly found the Seva Foundation. According to their public information, “Seva is dedicated to working to improve health in underserved populations, and with its partners, has restored sight to over four million people in developing countries.”
Just a year later, in 1979, Wavy founded the circus and performing arts camp, Camp Winnarainbow. The camp has grown and is still active today, with Wavy and Jahanara still active participants. At Winnarainbow the kids develop self-confidence, learn to trust others, practice timing and balance, learn about community, and most importantly, they learn the value of a good sense of humor. Many of those kids have grown to become community leaders “who are helping seed a sweeter, saner, more humane world.” The camp established a scholarship program so that economically disadvantaged kids could reap the same benefits.
Over the decades Wavy has called on his many musician friends to come and perform in concerts that he organized to benefit his projects. The well-known musicians come back year after year, out of their love and respect for Wavy Gravy and the great work done by Seva and Camp Winnarainbow.
Then came the Wavy Gravy movie, a feature-length documentary created by Michelle Esrick. Saint Misbehavin’ was released in 2009. In short order it had won numerous film festival awards. It was aired on Showtime and PBS, is distributed on DVD, can be found on Netflix and Amazon Prime. The New York Times reviewed it, saying “Like its subject, Saint Misbehavin’ is an unabashed love letter to our world that defies the cynicism of our age.”
Wavy Gravy is getting old now, yet he still has that mischievous sparkle in his eyes and his wit is as sharp as ever. These days he spends a good bit of time in his meditation room “conjuring fantastic collage art pieces glued to rough-hewn rounds of wood from trees at Black Oak Ranch, the Hog Farm’s country seat.” He is just as apt to pick up the phone and call Joan Baez or David Crosby attempting to cajole them into coming to one of his concerts as he is to take a walk in the park with his lifetime love, Jahanara.
This is a long read, I know, yet the story told here only scratches the surface of the truly epic saga of Wavy Gravy ̶ a man for all people and all ages. He more than achieved that goal he set for himself way back when he was a teenager. He did indeed do something good, and he made a difference.
https://www.campwinnarainbow.org/
I knew of him, but not really about him. This is a very fun read. Thank you.
I do have a vague recollection of him. Great article. Some folks are too good for this world.