MISS MERCY<\/strong> <\/h2>\n\n\n\nINTERVIEW AND INTRODUCTION BY STEVE OLSON <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nPHOTOS BY DAN LEVY AND COURTESY OF MISS MERCY<\/strong> AND PAMELA DEBARRES<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nJUICE MAGAZINE #64<\/strong> (2008)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen they say \u2018been there, done it\u2019, it applies to Miss Mercy\u2026 From Acid to Rockabilly and back\u2026 some get the chance to see the amazing, some get only to read about it. Some just know, some just think they do. Miss Mercy\u2014there\u2019s only one, now you get the chance to read about it\u2026 It only happens ONCE.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\nSTEVE OLSON: What is your name? Ravee Raveon?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nMISS MERCY:<\/strong> That was my hair name. Ravee Raveon. During the punk days, after Miss Mercy, I was a hairdresser. I was \u201cRave On\u201d from Buddy Holly and then I put Ravee with it. My original name was Judy Peters, but that had to go. It couldn\u2019t be Lesley Gore. Who\u2019s gay by the way\u2026 whoops.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhere did you grow up?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nI was born in Burbank and then we moved up north.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So you\u2019re a Californian?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWell, I lived in Florida and Texas for a little while. We lived all over the place. My father was a gambler, so we went everywhere the racetrack was. He was deep into gambling, so every place we lived had a racetrack, and a dog track. That was my life. We lived every place. Then he\u2019d always have to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Did he owe some money?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nSomeone tried to put cement shoes on him, so we split. My mother was a registered nurse. Then dad got into taking diet pills. He was a speed freak. He was also dating a top Vogue model. She was taking diet pills, so he started taking them. I think that I inherited that need for speed from him. When I was 15, I was fat, so they gave me some diet pills, too. Then we moved to San Mateo, California, which had a racetrack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You weren\u2019t too far from San Francisco.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWe were close enough to get on the bus and go to North Beach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the jazz scene?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nNo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the beach?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nAt first, I went to North Beach. In 1965, I went to North Beach to City Lights. I went to the first love in. It was an experimental drug thing at Fisherman\u2019s Wharf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What do mean the first \u201clove in\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt was the first experimental LSD party. The first guy I went to bed with was a beatnik named Frank. At least, that\u2019s what he told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How old were you then?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nI was fifteen. I was listening to Wolfman Jack on my radio. There was a record shop there in North Beach that played John Lee Hooker, so that\u2019s where I first heard that. Then I had a girlfriend that gave me some LSD. This was before LSD really came out. My girlfriend Monty Moore was the only beatnik in my high school. Her mother was a junkie, a morphine addict, so Monty was always by herself. We ended up in juvenile hall together, time and time again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why were you ending up in juvie?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n[Laughs] One time, I turned myself in. I didn\u2019t want my parents to own me. That caused me trouble, so I turned myself in and the authorities took over owning me. I was an incorrigible ward of the state. Monty Moore was from across the tracks. It all happened very quickly. Then I was with Tom Donahue who was mixed up with Sly Stone. Anyway, my girlfriend Monty Moore dressed with these crazy elf shoes and a magician cape. It was very David Crosby in a female. I was in love with her. She gave me a ride home one day to San Mateo after we had been hanging out with the beatniks. She hands me a little pill and says, \u201cTake that.\u201d So I take it. She says, \u201cYou\u2019ve got lemons in your mouth.\u201d All of a sudden, I tasted lemons. Then she dropped me off at my house and didn\u2019t tell me a thing. There was no media on LSD yet. I\u2019m in my apartment with gypsy bracelets all the way up my arm that started turning into snakes as I was looking at my arm. Then I was getting into my radio. I was crawling into my radio. Then I looked out my second story window and saw a carnival, which in reality was a carport. Then the walls started breathing. I almost lost my mind. That\u2019s how I got on LSD. In North Beach, I was hanging with the beatniks, but I was also into the blues. Then the beatniks\u2019 hangout became a tourist spot. There was a lot of nude dancing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What else did you get to experience besides the lemons in your mouth?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nI was getting away from conservative San Mateo. It could have had something to do with the diet pills they gave me because they thought I was fat, but I was into music. I got to meet Tom Donahue and I was into KYA radio. Then I followed the Beau Brummels and met them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What do you mean you followed them?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nI was a groupie. I followed the Stones all the way to Sacramento and ended up in a room with Brian Jones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What do you mean? I know what you mean, but elaborate a little more.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nMy girlfriend and I went to Sacramento to see the Stones. Patti Labelle and the Bluebells were on that show. It\u2019s the show where Keith got electrocuted. He went like ten feet in the air and they closed the curtains really fast. Everything broke up. As soon as Keith got electrocuted, we jumped in the car and followed the Stones\u2019 car. We were following them and then they stopped at one spot, got out of the car and got into a limousine to fool people, but we were still hanging in there right behind them.We get to the bungalows and I heard Mick saying that the police beat Keith up. I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s true, but Mick was flipping out that Keith had gotten arrested. He flipped out at Altamont. He was a flipper-outer, but I loved him. I ended up in a room with Brian Jones going through his suitcase. The other one, Charlie Watts or Bill Wyman, I couldn\u2019t really tell the difference between the two, got locked out of his hotel room, so he\u2019s there with Brian. I\u2019m not on a sexual trip yet. That started six months later, when my beatnik came in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What year was this?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n1965. I was in love with Brian Jones. There was no doubt in my mind. He was just there going through his suitcase calmly. I think he was stoned, so we just hung out in the hotel room with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How is it that you ended up in the hotel room with him?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nHe let us in.He was very sweet. I had a cute girlfriend, but he didn\u2019t hit on anybody. We just ended up in there. That was the beginning of my real groupie-ism. It started with The Rolling Stones and the Beau Brummels. I wanted everything I heard on the radio to be accessible to me. I wanted to be there. I wanted to know the people on the Ed Sullivan Show<\/em> or whatever else. Then the beatniks moved over to a coffeehouse called the Blue Unicorn, which was right next to \u201cPanhandle Park\u201d in Haight-Ashbury, so I start going there and hanging out. That\u2019s where I met the beatnik guy named Frank. We had sex and I said, \u201cIs that all there is? It hurts.\u201d[Laughs] I\u2019m hanging out with beatniks and, suddenly, Bob Dylan plugs in his guitar and the whole Blue Unicorn changes. You could see the hippies come in and the beatniks going, \u201cNo, no, no.\u201d The hippies came from that whole plug in for some reason. I believe that Dylan started it by plugging in with Bloomfield, so they started playing that kind of music at the Blue Unicorn. Everything started rolling and then the hippies were there, but we thought the hippies were un-hip. That\u2019s what the beatniks used to say. I don\u2019t know where hippies came from, but I know for a fact that Hollywood had the motion picture business as a tourist attraction and New York had Broadway. San Francisco had Alcatraz and Fisherman\u2019s Wharf, but that wasn\u2019t really drawing in the tourists, so they made hippies the new tourist attraction. I believe it was a media thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhere else did you go to see bands?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWell, then the Fillmore and the Avalon opened, so I was at those gigs. I was taking acid like crazy and I kept going back to juvenile hall. Linda Yacoubian, who became Texacala Jones and, in the punk scene, became the chick lead singer of Tex & the HorseHeads, was my best friend at the time. We were in juvenile hall together. We were best friends and almost got married, but I married Shuggie instead. She came to LA after I came to LA. During the San Francisco hippie trip, I got on the sixth cover of Rolling Stone<\/em> with my boyfriend, at the time, Bernardo. That\u2019s who I followed down to LA.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat was the hippie scene like?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nI was shooting speed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s not very hippie like.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n[Laughs] No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s more Beatles-ish.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nNo, that\u2019s not Beatles-ish. The Beatles only smoked pot then. They were very against other drugs. I don\u2019t remember them doing any. I think the speed came in later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I thought Abbey Road was written on speed.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYou may be right. You also had William Burroughs on heroin. Most writers were on speed. Tennessee Williams was on speed. John F. Kennedy was on speed. He had Hitler\u2019s doctor over there, Max Jacobson. Jacobson was a doctor in New York that had Kennedy injecting speed. I met Jacobson and went out of my way to know him.He was a wonderful man. Amphetamines had been around since the Japanese fighters. The kamikaze pilots used it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What about Rommel the Desert Fox? He was the ultimate conquering general and he had a lab on the frontlines. The enemy troops were falling to the wayside because they were tired.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nEveryone was using it. Don\u2019t think that Elvis didn\u2019t get some shots. Nixon was the other president that got treated with amphetamines. They injected him too. He had a psychiatrist that was Shuggie\u2019s psychiatrist. He told him that Nixon was being treated for taking too many amphetamines. They had been using amphetamines on presidents for years. Jacobson had Jackie Kennedy on speed too. That might explain all of her changes of clothes and decorating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She could change fast.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYes. The CIA brought over Jacobson. He was a German Jew, which was really interesting. As soon as I got to meet him, they took him away. They also took his formula. He had a new formula to get people off speed and heroin. Jacobson wanted to talk about what he had done to people, including his own daughter, and he had this new formula. We went over to Jacobson\u2019s house and he said, \u201cI want to show you what I\u2019ve done.\u201d He brought in a heroin addict who had no recollection of doing heroin after the injection of this formula. He could do these injections and say, \u201cYou no longer need heroin.\u201d And it went away. He was so happy about it, but then they took away his license and his formula. Right after that, you had Jim Jones come up in Guyana. He was also, supposedly, a speed shooter. There was all that stuff in the Kool-Aid that you would use when you mind-alter people. Charles Manson was another one. There were a lot of drugs involved with that and I believe they were all formulated from Jacobson\u2019s formula.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So you\u2019re at the Fillmore and the Avalon. What kind of bands were you seeing?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThey had the greatest array of bands. My favorite group was 13th Floor Elevators, but I had a bad acid trip when I went to see them at the Avalon. Someone had given me LSD with strychnine. I had just come back from juvenile hall. I was taking this girl on her first trip, but I got the bad half. The guy that ran the Avalon saw that I\u2019d been poisoned. Chet Helms took me and put me in a room and turned 13th Floor Elevators on. I went through all the greenness of being poisoned and then came back out of it. He went downstairs and was talking to my friend. She was having the best trip in the world, but I got poisoned. A lot of people died from getting LSD with strychnine. Then I got into shooting meth amphetamines, which was a big drug then. Don\u2019t let them fool you. There were hippies that were all about peace, love and flowers, but there were also the freaks that fashioned themselves after Fellini, Aubrey Beardsley with the vintage velvet and flowers in the hair. There was a whole other scene there. I was one of the freaks. Then the mob moved in and took over the LSD trade. I\u2019d go and visit my boyfriend Bernardo when he was in the hospital with hepatitis. He was very bright yellow. They called it \u201cmellow yellow\u201d. He looked like a damn banana. I would go into County Hospital and they would come down from the psychiatric ward and show me their acid. The government had tried to give LSD to the army, but instead of making them more like warriors, they were all putting down their guns. The Army was like, \u201cThis is not working.\u201d So they gave the LSD to the psychiatrists. That great looking dude actor, Cary Grant, was on LSD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They were testing it on him?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe psychiatrists were using it on patients. The psychiatrists would have to wait days for them to come down. It was like One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest.<\/em> It really was like that. When I visited Bernardo in the hospital, they would come down from the psych ward and sell LSD to me for $5. I was like, \u201cI\u2019m not taking this shit. I know what the government is trying to do.\u201d The government and the mob got in there and Haight-Ashbury got taken over very quickly and became very dark. I met Charles Manson there. I heard Manson talking to someone and I was on acid in the other room. Bobby Beausoleil was there too. Manson was talking about how it was going to go down. I think he got blamed for a lot of shit that the CIA did. I think they used Manson. He was talking about how there would be blood in the streets. It started to go through my head, but I was trying to throw it out because I was on the really good acid. I took the original Sandos LSD from Sweden. They were handing out the Owsley acid. You could get free food from the Diggers and the punch at the Avalon.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHow did you know Beausoleil?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nBobby Beausoleil was my neighbor when I was in LA. He was going out with my girlfriend at the time. I don\u2019t know what happened there, but I still believe that Manson was under that formula that came from Jacobson. It all tied in somehow. I still think Manson was trying to be a revolutionary and not a killer. I don\u2019t know what they did to him. I don\u2019t know what happened to him to make him like that. He was never there at the killings. Beausoleil has said in interviews that he killed a guy over a drug deal with the Hell\u2019s Angels. A guy had sold the Hell\u2019s Angels some bad drugs and they were really pissed and they were going to come after him. Beausoleil was over there trying to talk to the guy about fixing it, but the guy wouldn\u2019t fix it, so they killed him. In order, to cover it up, they used the girls. All the girls had a crush on Beausoleil, so they went over and killed these other people to cover up what Beausoleil had done. They were like, \u201cHe couldn\u2019t have done it, because it\u2019s been done again.\u201d Manson was never at any of the killings, but, supposedly, he made all these people do these things. I still have questions about that. I really do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So then you had to get out of town.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nI had to leave and I\u2019ll tell you why. The juvenile authorities went over to my mother\u2019s house in San Mateo. My dad had left. He was out gambling all over the place and he left my mother alone with her nursing. She took pills too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were a lot of drugs going on back then.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt wasn\u2019t just hard drugs. The pharmaceutical companies were giving you diet pills to lose weight. They were handing out Valiums as tranquilizers. Then you\u2019d have a few martinis in the evening and then take a sleeping pill. How many drugs is that? How far gone was America, at that point, in the \u201850s?It was martini hour. Anyway, I was all tied up with the juvenile authorities. And that\u2019s where Yacoubian and I kept meeting. She was great. She was a little hippie chick. When I was with Shuggie, she became involved with \u201cBlackbyrd\u201d McKnight who played with George Clinton. They tried putting him in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but that didn\u2019t last long. She had moved in with him by then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I heard that.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nAt one point, after I got out of juvenile hall, my mom called me. She had told the juvie hall people that I was missing because I hadn\u2019t been reporting to her. They told her that they just wanted to talk to me. Of course, when I walked in there, they arrested my ass. They put the handcuffs on me in front of my mother. I was like, \u201cYou know what? I\u2019m crazy. Take me to the nuthouse.\u201d I didn\u2019t want to go back to juvenile hall because you couldn\u2019t do anything in there, but they sent me back to juvie first. When I was in juvenile hall, I got a visit from a flying saucer. It landed in the playground. We were up on a hill. It woke Yacoubian and me up. The UFO talked in lights and it said, \u201cWalls cannot hold your soul.\u201d That was the message I got. From then on, I could astro-project myself outside. People would say, \u201cHey, I saw you at the Avalon the other night.\u201d But I really wasn\u2019t there. I was in juvenile hall in my cell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
[Laughs] What bands were you seeing in the hippie days?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nI started getting really into the blues. At that time, Chet Helms and Bill Graham ran the Avalon and the Fillmore. I saw 13th Floor Elevators and Quicksilver Messenger Service, which was my favorite. Then I saw Bo Diddley with an arrow shooting out of his guitar. I remember that. I was high as a kite because they kept putting acid in the punch everywhere. Everybody was there. Janis Joplin was there. That\u2019s when I first met Janis. The shows were very versatile. Then Jimi Hendrix walked in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How was Jimi?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nHe was amazing. I talked to Jimi at the Fillmore, because he came up to me and he was talking to the girl beside me that was from Hollywood. I told Jimi, \u201cYou don\u2019t want that broad. She\u2019s fake.\u201d Then I met him again at Monterey before I was in the GTOs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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