“I went to a party on Nelson’s Sausalito houseboat and wound up in a house in San Rafael in a scenario that involved some folks I’d met at Nelson’s party — three beautiful hookers, John Gilmore and a chimpanzee wearing bondage gear and assless chaps…”

John Perry Barlow and Ted Nelson blew into Mondo space around the same time…  probably mid-1990, as the magazine was just taking off. At the time, Barlow was fresh off the farm… that is to say, it’s my impression that he’d been laying low as a gentleman rancher in Pinedale, Wyoming for many years and was just starting to get into the wind. (He’s been running around at a fair pace in the wider world ever since.)

Morgan Russell had met him at some public event and was bringing him around to meet us.  I remember that there was some fair warning that Barlow was coming around… and that he was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which I knew nothing about.  At the time, I thought Robert Hunter wrote all the words for the group.  I was not, obviously, a deadhead, but was nevertheless excited to meet someone connected to their scene.

The actual meeting is a blur, although I do remember we gathered around the fireplace and talked agreeably for a long time.  Did he give us $1,000 right then and there to help with the project, or was that later?   How the money happened for those transitional Mondo moments is a curiosity to me… one that will be explored in more depth in the History Project book.

I’m pretty sure that Ted Nelson smoked his first DMT on his first visit to the Mondo house and that he found it impressive.  Some time very soon thereafter, I went to a party on Nelson’s Sausalito houseboat and wound up in a house in San Rafael in a scenario that involved some folks I’d met at Nelson’s party — three beautiful hookers, John Gilmore and a chimpanzee wearing bondage gear and assless chaps…  but that story I will hold for the book itself.  (And I’m only lying about the chimp.)

In this unpublished segment from an hours-long chat between the two — really organized as an interview with Ted — Nelson goes into his rap about “biostatus.”  He had explained his biostatus concept to myself and Russell one time, sitting in his office at Autodesk and, to be honest, I couldn’t quite grasp the novelty of it as it sounded like basic sociobiology (Nelson seemed surprised that I knew of such things.).  Maybe it’s a behaviorally-specific exfoliation of sociobiology… a few years before people started talking about evolutionary psychology?

This was during a brief period where the hacker genius John Walker — cofounder of Autodesk,  the famously successful Sausalito, California-based producers of AutoCAD, let the experimental freaks in.

At some point around 1988, Walker, as head of Autodesk decided to use the company’s wealth to experiment. There was the Virtual Reality project, worked on by Eric Gullichsen among others. “Cyberpunk” SF writer and math genius Rudy Rucker was hired to create a Cellular Automata program called CelLab, and James Gliek’s CHAOS.  

And perhaps most interestingly, our man Ted was gifted with the opportunity to try to achieve the Xanadu vision —I always understood it as a hypertextual project linking everything to everything in an ever-evolving and highly intelligent way (and with much more intentionally than… say…  Google).

Owen Rowley was also there in some capacity, and those of you who know Owen Rowley (rhymes with Crowley) know just how cool that is.

A monthly speaker’s program featured Timothy Leary and Todd Rundgren, among others.

As you can guess, it was an interesting (and casual) place to spend an afternoon. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but at some point, fiscal responsibility (some might say sanity) returned, John Walker moved on, and Autodesk returned to its core task.  Carol Bartz became CEO.  You’ve heard of her.

The conversation between Nelson and Barlow took place in a restaurant in Sausalito and was published in 1990 in MONDO 2000 Issue #4 under the title “Caverns Measureless To Man: An Interview with Xanadu Founder Ted Nelson by John Perry Barlow.”

Listen to Nelson tell Barlow about “biostatus”

Listen to the audio now:

Previous MONDO History Entries

Psychedelic Transpersonal Photography, High Frontiers & MONDO 2000: an Interview with Marc Franklin

Gibson & Leary Audio (MONDO 2000 History Project)

Pariahs Made Me Do It: The Leary-Wilson-Warhol-Dali Influence (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #3)

Robert Anton Wilson Talks To Reality Hackers Forum (1988 — Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #4)

Smart Drugs & Nutrients In 1991 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #5)

LSD, The CIA, & The Counterculture Of The 1960s: Martin Lee (1986, Audio. Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #6)

William Burroughs For R.U. Sirius’ New World Disorder (1990, Mondo 2000 History Project Entry # 7)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 1 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 2 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

The Glorious Cyberpunk Handbook Tour (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #9)

Did The CIA Kill JFK Over LSD?, Reproduced Authentic, & Two Heads Talking: David Byrne In Conversation With Timothy Leary (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #10)

Memory & Identity In Relentlessly Fast Forward & Memetically Crowded Times (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #11)

The First Virtual War & Other Smart Bombshells (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #12)

Swashbuckling Around The World With Marvin Minsky In How To Mutate & Take Over The World (MONDO 2000 History Project #13)

FAIL! Debbie Does MONDO (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #14)

Paradise Is Santa Cruz: First Ecstasy (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #15)

William Gibson On MONDO 2000 & 90s Cyberculture (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #16)

It was the Escape From New York tour with The Ramones, Blondie and Tom Tom Club. I was backstage at Berkeley’s Greek Theater with Bart Nagel interviewing Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth of Tom Tom Club and Talking Heads when Debbie Harry wandered in.   She came right up to me. “You’re the MONDO 2000 guy?”  “Yes.” She came up closer, lowered her voice to just above a whisper and asked, “Do you have any of those new drugs?”

Damn.  Not right now.  I offered to look into it for her the next day but she was otherwise occupied so my 30-second fantasy of doing 2cb or some other designer hallucinogen with Debbie Harry was nipped in the bud.  We exchanged contact info and I went back to the interview.  Meanwhile, Nagel got Debbie to pose for some photos.

During the process of prepping Mondo issue #3, we decided to do a section on “21st Century Fashion.”  Both Mu and I were fans of the look of those trendoid club culture magazines with a hint of surrealism like Wet and Fad and Impulse that were popular in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  We figured we could find a futurist SF twist on all that and not only would it look good but we could tap into a potentially rich vein for advertising revenues.  Man, did we ever wind up taking a ton of shit from (some of) the nerds and the righteous hippies and certain types of feminists for letting that bit into the mix.

Anyway, we somehow got Debbie to agree to be interviewed by phone on the topic of 21st Century Fashion.

Now, I’d read some pretty enjoyable Debbie Harry interviews. I mean, she wasn’t going to be Derrida or even Ted Nelson, but she could be pretty damned clever and epigrammatic in a sort of Warholish way.

This was not to be one of those instances. St. Jude’s daughter Tresca wanted in on the interview so she and Jude joined me at the MONDO house/office at the assigned time and we called Debbie.

As you’ll hear, she sounded vaguely drowsy and pretty much told us that she didn’t have anything to say about anything… particularly fashion.  Plus, she was having a difficult time hearing us… which will derail pretty much any exchange.  “This interview is gonna suck,” she told us

As anyone who has ever edited a magazine that has even a partial pop culture gloss will tell you, the planned celebrity interview that winds up being pretty vacant is a hazard of the game.  You have to somehow perform a save. You’ll find the few good lines and run them below some pictures; or maybe — if you’re daring — you’ll just turn the show over to the interviewer/author and have him/her cover the fail over with fancy bullshit or — if you don’t care about the celeb — with snark.  In any case, you’ll find some excuse to include the star’s name — maybe even her photograph — on your cover.

I liked Debbie Harry.  So I squeezed what I could from this uncomfortable exchange and later, Debbie agree to let me fax her a few more questions…  which bordered on aggressively obnoxious.  For example:

M2:  You have the opportunity to star in another Cronenberg film, but he wants you to have reversible plastic surgery on your internal organs. Would you rather:
A)    Have your stomach turned into a pollution-belching urban landscape?
B)    Have the collective information of all Haitian voodoo chiefs pass through your subconscious all at once via a microprocessor in the right brain.
C)    Have your cervix turned into a mongoose?
D)    Shoot R.U. Sirius for asking these questions?
E)    Act in Lassie Does Detox?
F)    Other?

DH:  B & D

But she wasn’t actually pissed and one day I returned to the office with a message that Debbie Harry had called and asked for me.  I called her back and I don’t remember what we talked about… and we never really talked again, but I’ll always treasure the brief interaction.

And now, because one should also show the warts sometimes, the uncomfortable and brief phone interview with Debbie Harry.

Listen to the audio now:

Previous MONDO History Entries

Psychedelic Transpersonal Photography, High Frontiers & MONDO 2000: an Interview with Marc Franklin

Gibson & Leary Audio (MONDO 2000 History Project)

Pariahs Made Me Do It: The Leary-Wilson-Warhol-Dali Influence (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #3)

Robert Anton Wilson Talks To Reality Hackers Forum (1988 — Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #4)

Smart Drugs & Nutrients In 1991 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #5)

LSD, The CIA, & The Counterculture Of The 1960s: Martin Lee (1986, Audio. Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #6)

William Burroughs For R.U. Sirius’ New World Disorder (1990, Mondo 2000 History Project Entry # 7)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 1 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 2 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

The Glorious Cyberpunk Handbook Tour (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #9)

Did The CIA Kill JFK Over LSD?, Reproduced Authentic, & Two Heads Talking: David Byrne In Conversation With Timothy Leary (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #10)

Memory & Identity In Relentlessly Fast Forward & Memetically Crowded Times (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #11)

The First Virtual War & Other Smart Bombshells (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #12)

Swashbuckling Around The World With Marvin Minsky In How To Mutate & Take Over The World (MONDO 2000 History Project #13)