A Brilliant Flashback

Posted September 29, 2008

Saturday night I took a trip back to the 1970s and found two groups of people. One remains unchanged — seemingly frozen in time. Another group has taken what they learned in the seventies and used it to change the world.

The occasion was a benefit concert for the Seva Foundation at Oakland’s beautiful Paramount Theater. It was geezer rock for a good cause. With single surprising exception, the musicians were museum pieces, stuck in the past. The concert organizers however, have spent three decades teaching and learning. It turned out to be an uneven concert, but a remarkable story.

The Seekers

In the late sixties, Larry Brilliant was an idealistic medical student. He moved to San Francisco from Michigan to do his internship and befriended a local free thinker and concert promoter named Hugh Romney. Romney was a New Yorker who had taken walks with Albert Einstein as a child and had been one of Bob Dylan’s earliest friends in Greenwich Village.

When American Indians occupied Alcatraz Island in 1969, Brilliant joined them as their unofficial doctor. Some filmmakers made a movie about the occupation and paid Brilliant with a plane ticket to India. Brilliant ended up staying for many years, first studying in a Himalayan ashram with the Hindu mystic Neem Karoli Baba.

Baba instructed Brilliant to rid the planet of smallpox. Brilliant, ever the obliging student, joined the World Health Organization’s smallpox eradication program that in 1980 certified the worldwide end of what had once been the world’s most terrifying disease. At some point during these years, Brilliant encountered another student of Neem Karoli Baba, Dr. Richard Alpert, a Stanford-trained psychologist who had been fired from his tenured position at Harvard along with his colleague Timothy Leary for distributing the hallucinogen psilocybin to undergraduates.

Brilliant returned to the US and reconnected with Alpert
and Romney. Both men had changed their names. Alpert had taken the
name Ram Dass (“servant of God”) and had become a popular writer and
speaker on spiritual awareness. Hugh Romney had become well known for a
muddy concert in Woodstock New York that had almost turned into a
nightmare. Romney captured and shaped the spirit of the event when he
distributed a whole lot of granola and famously offered that "What we
have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000!". At a concert a few
years later, BB King dubbed him Wavy Gravy, and he decided to keep the
name.

When Brilliant returned to the States, he and his wife Girija
Brilliant, an accomplished public health professional, published an
article entitled Death of a Killer Disease about their
experience eradicating smallpox. It was a personal account of their
decade in India that concluded with an appeal to readers to find the
compassion and understanding to support international health programs
to benefit those struggling with poverty.

Readers were moved, and soon
$20,000 of donations arrived in Larry and Girija’s mailbox. The first donation that the Brilliants received was a check for $5,000
– a significant amount of money in 1978. The money came from a 22 year
old who had recently taken his own spiritual quest to India. The
experience had so moved him that he shaved his head and had taken to
wearing Indian clothes. The young donor was a circuit board designer
at Atari named Steve Jobs.

Inspired by the supportive response, the Brilliants gathered friends and colleagues to discuss their next public health
project. Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy were among the 20 or so who showed up
in Ann Arbor in 1978. They considered a campaign to eradicate diarrhea, then
the leading killer of children (Brilliant says that Gravy proposed
to hold fundraising concerts under the slogan “No Shit”). But knowing
that 80% of the world’s blind could have their sight restored with
simple cataract surgery, the group decided to focus on eradicating
cataract-induced blindness.

One of the founders introduced the group to Dr. G. Venkataswami, a
retired eye surgeon in India who was just setting out make cataract
surgery affordable to the poor. That was the beginning of Seva’s
partnership in the high-volume eye clinic that would become the
internationally acclaimed Aravind Eye Care Systems.

Thirty years later, Seva-supported programs and partners have helped
three million blind people to see again through affordable cataract
surgeries. In just the past year, Seva’s Sight Program benefited over
500,000 people worldwide, including more than 25,000 children. This is a staggering achievement –very few
charitable organizations can claim to have had such a profound impact.

Two people, more than any other, have been responsible for keeping Seva
financed. The first is Ram Dass, who according to Brilliant “would just
do another 40 city book tour whenever we really needed money”. Ram Dass
was not at the event and appears in public much less these days, although he has a
thoughtful video on the Seva website. The second fundraiser is Wavy
Gravy ("I’m in it for the buzz, man"). He is passionate about Seva, and has organized annual concerts
for them every year since he got the Grateful Dead to raise $100,000 in
1978. It has been a long, strange trip and Seva ("to serve without regard to self") appears to have achieved the kind of momentum and
international standing that assures it a strong future.

Larry Brilliant has continued to live up to his name. In 1985, before
the creation of the world-wide web, he joined another remarkable friend, Stewart Brand,
to launch The Well – one of the world’s first online communities. Two years ago, Google named Brilliant Executive Director of Google.org, a
foundation endowed with 3 million Google shares (at their height, worth
about $2 billion. About half that now).

I had not heard of Seva when I showed up for the concert. I had met
Larry Brilliant a couple of times and thought very highly of him, but I
had no idea that he had founded Seva. I had no idea that his best
friend was the Berkeley fixture, a generous clown referred to by Paul Krassner as “the
illegitimate son of Harpo Marx and Mother Teresa”. Wavy is now 72 and
stooped after three spinal surgeries, with puffs of kinky white hair
showing underneath his white derby. He carried his trademark cane with a large rubber
fish on the end of it and wore his clown nose. This is a Silicon Valley story
that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with
passionate entrepreneurship.

The Musicians

So how ironic and sad that the concert itself was so frozen in time
(not that it mattered – the performers were donating too). As Seva was
being founded, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and David Crosby had all
done their best work. Bonnie Raitt had done a lot of her best work, but
she takes more risk and bloomed later ("Nick of Time" did
not come out until 1989).

Raitt opened with an acoustic version of James Taylor’s "Rainy Day
Man," before bringing out gospel singer Ruthie Foster. Foster, the only
non-geezer on the stage, had, according to Gravy “left a smoking hole
in the lawn at the San Francisco Blues Festival this afternoon”. Slide
guitar virtuoso Roy Rogers joined Raitt for a bluesy "Gnawin’ on It,"
and Jackson Browne came out to sing "Thing Called Love" with her.

The musical highlight of the evening, hands down, was Elvis Costello – a virtuoso
who continues to evolve and impress. I haven’t followed him closely,
but this is not the punk “Pump it Up” Elvis I expected. He sang
Raitt’s "Love Has No Pride" with an aching passion. He even managed to
ignore the two white-haired dudes who slid in from the wings for a bit
of celebrity harmony: David Crosby and
Graham Nash. They could raise a lot of money for Seva by releasing that song
alone — really impressive.

The crowd was starting to warm up, so Jackson Browne took the stage and
quickly put out the fire. Browne had five amazing years in his mid to late
twenties. His 1972 debut album, Jackson Browne gave us "Doctor My
Eyes", "Rock Me on the Water", "Jamaica Say You Will" and "Song for
Adam". The following year For Everyman sold a million copies, mainly on
the strength of the debut effort. Late for the Sky (1974) included the melancholy "For a Dancer" and the apocalyptic "Before the Deluge". Martin Scorsese featured the title cut in Taxi Driver. In 1976, Browne
released The Pretender, probably his darkest album –
which is saying something. The title track may be his best and best
known song although Running on Empty (1977) is probably his biggest
commercial success.

But this guy is frozen in 1977. Maybe he is
as tragic as he has been trying to tell us for all these years. Maybe
he is the Prozac-deprived Pretender who really is Running on Empty. He
turns 60 next week — and last night he played cuts from his new album Time the Conqueror (why not just call it Ready for the Embalmer?) Thankfully backup vocalists Chavonne Morris and Alethea Mills showed evidence of a pulse as well as some fine pipes.

Part of the ready-for-the-archive feel to the evening is that Raitt and Browne spend a lot of time on left wing political causes.
Browne has even worked a lot of dreary "why is impeachment not on the table?" lyrics into his latest. Both worked hard for John Edwards, both helped found an anti-nuke group
of musicians following the Three Mile Island nuclear generator accident
in 1979. The causes are not my concern — just the feeling that performers are culturally stuck in 1978, and they are politically stuck in 1968. (Confronted with this observation at the concert, a friend countered "true, but 1968 was a very good year").

It was a fascinating evening, mainly because it contrasted people with forty years of genuine experience with those who had four years
of experience repeated ten times.