Book review: "Confessions of Raving, Unconfined Nut"

I knew little about Paul Krassner before starting this book. But I was eager to learn the background of the man who People Magazine once called "The Father of the Underground Press," so into the rabbit hole I went.

Krassner is a comedian, satirist, and writer who was embedded in the counterculture antics of the 1960s. He was a close friend and co-writer with controversial comic Lenny Bruce. He hung out with , author Ken Kesey (famed for his LSD "acid test") and counterculture guru Timothy Leary. He joined with the members of the "Chicago 7" during the incendiary protests at the Democratic Convention in 1968. 

In “Confessions of Raving, Unconfined Nut,” Krassner's autobiography, he tells stories about all of those people, and more. 

Krassner challenged social standards on obscenity, pornography and political expression. He never met a rule that he didn’t feel should be challenged. The motto of his left-wing newspaper, "The Realist," was “Irreverence is our only sacred cow.”

I don’t envy Krassner’s life – he takes too many drugs and finds himself unable to maintain any stable relationships – but boy does he have some good stories to tell.

There’s this one, for instance, when he was hanging out with the drug-taking Lenny Bruce:

“When I first met him, he would shoot up in the hotel bathroom with the door closed, but now he just sat on his bed and casually fixed up while we were talking. That’s what we were doing one time when Lenny nodded out, the needle still stuck in his arm. Suddenly the phone rang and startled him. His arm flailed, and the hypodermic came flying across the room, hitting the wall like a dart just a few feet from the easy chair in which I uneasily sat.”

Then there was the day, during his time as editor of "The Realist," when two Catholic schoolgirls were interviewing him. Two women that worked at the newspaper walked in totally nude. "'Sorry to interrupt, Paul,” said Sheila, “but it’s time for our weekly orgy.’ The interviewers left in a hurry.'"
That was his one and only threesome, he said.

Krassner was most famous -- or infamous -- for a hoax. In 1967, he "revealed" supposedly unpublished excerpts from William Manchester's book on John F. Kennedy, "The Death of a President." In fact, it was all written by Krassner, including one passage which described Lyndon Johnson having sex with Kennedy's body. This earned Krassner a lot of hate mail. Which he loved. 

After the 1960s, with so many taboos being broken and boundaries challenged, Krassner's star faded. He found it harder to shock people. By the 1980s, he said, "Bad taste had become an industry."

---

(Please support this blog by clicking on an ad.)