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| John with John Dunbar in 1967 |
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| John looks as his wife Marianne Faithfull greets Peter Asher |
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| John Dunbar outside the Indica in 1966 |
The Model of Hipness
By Kevin Jackson
Sunday Telegraph (London)
May 12, 1996
It was 30 years ago today, well, give or take, about seven months that one of the most momentous encounters in the history of the popular arts took place. Launched on the mischievous phrase, "Go and say hello to the millionaire."
The millionaire in question was John Lennon. The addressee was Yoko Ono. The venue was the Indica Gallery London W1 and the date was November 9, 1966. As one recent chronicle of those heady times put it, "The person who effected this introduction, whilst of historical significance, has never been widely acknowledged." Credit where it is overdue then,for good and ill, the man who brought John and Yoko together was the owner of the Indica Gallery John Dunbar.
Today, Dunbar leads what seems an agreeably unfused life, drawing and making various art objects which he sells from time to time at exhibitions held in his roomy flat in Maida Vale. The latest of his productions is a suspended nest of wire that catches the light refracted from a prism mounted on a windowsill.
A likable, unassuming chap, he seems happier to discuss the novels of Anthony Powell. "Just around the corner," he points out, "is the Little Venice canal into which Pamela Widmerpool threw a manuscript by X Trapnal" --than reminisces fondly about wild and crazy escapades with rock stars. Indeed, as he says, the craziness of some of those escapades is precisely what stops him from summoning up neat anecdotes of the period at will. In the words of the old gag: If you can remember the 60s, you weren't really there.
Three decades ago, however, Dunbar was quite definitely one of the presiding spirits of what Time Magazine, unfortunately, christened "Swinging London." Friend and collaborator with Paul McCartney as well as the Lennon -Onos, husband to Marianne Faithfull, an energetic and influential go between from the worlds of avant garde art, film, and pop music and wittingly or otherwise, a youthful mentor to those who were hungry for the cultural omniscience he wore so lightly.
In her autobiography, Faithfull (which he has not read, :in case it makes me annoyed"), his former wife recalls, remembers the Dunbar of the early '60s as being into bebop jazz, Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Beethoven's last quartets. They first met in 1963 at a staircase party at his Cambridge College. Churchill.
"John had a beautiful, sensitive face, and he was the model of hipness," she said. They became partners the same night and were married in May 1965. She gave birth to their son, Nicholas, that November. In the interim, Marianne Faithfull, the impressionable convent girl, had been discovered at a party by Andrew Loog Oldham, who recorded a Mick Jagger/ Keith Richards song entitled " As Tears Go By " and became a famous pop singer.
The transformation had happened behind his back. They had rowed, and Dunbar went off to Greece for the summer of 1964. On his return, they met up in a cafe and were in the process of patching up their quarrel when a song called " As Tears Go By " came on the radio, followed by the announcement that the super new hit (that had been released on August 24) was now at number nine in the charts. She almost choked on her coffee, but the actual cool concierge of bebop and Beethoven proved unexpectedly tolerant about the whole pop scene, though he would have had good reason for foreboding.
For example, when Bob Dylan came to England early in 1965 for the concert tour, which was mordantly recorded in Don Pennebaker's documentary, Don't Look Back, Marianne received an imperial summons to his suite at the Savoy. Dylan rapidly selected her for the role of chief concubine. His principal seduction ploy was to claim that he was writing an epic poem about her and then tear it up before her eyes in a fit of artistic pique. Despite being every bit as awed by Dylan as everyone present, she resisted, pointing out that she was about to be married to an English poet.
Dylan was duly scornful, the more so when he discovered that this English poet was no more than an undergraduate. When the two young men finally met, Dunbar was dressed in an untypically fogeish tweed jacket, a copy of The Guardian crammed into his pocket. Dylan went into a jealous rage and sneered at Miss Faithfull that her bea was a wearer of horn-rimmed spectacles and an intellectual jerk.
Undaunted, she went on to marry Dunbar and the following week at the Cambridge register office. Dunbar was sufficiently romantic to gather his bride a bouquet of May blossoms picked from the nearby fields. Though their honeymoon was hardly the stuff of maidens' dreams. They spent it in Paris in the rowdy company of the beat poets, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso. "Mantra slathering, beatniks," according to Marianne Faithfull, "careening around our hotel room, throwing up, spilling cheap Rosee all over the place and ranting on about the Rosenbergs, Rimbaud, Tanger and Buggery."
Their Chelsea flat became a popular center for the emerging London scene. Paul McCartney and his then-girlfriend Jane Asher were among the regulars. Dunbar began contributing a fortnightly column on art to the Scotsman, but his real ambitions were more practical. According to Marianne Faithfull, the whole cultural revolution was first plotted out in a Chelsea espresso bar as early as 1963. Other accounts suggest it was hatched rather later in 1965. When Dunbar was introduced to Barry Miles, known simply as Miles, by an American writer, Paolo Leoni, the three men huddled together. Miss Faithfull writes, "to plot the building of the New Jerusalem." Still working towards her A-levels at the time, she was deeply impressed by the sight of these "three mad intellectuals, all dressed in existential black, charting the future of the globe."
The principal tools of this revolution were to be the Indica, a combined Art Gallery and bookshop. Its name, Dunbar explains, "comes from the classification 'Cannabis indica', although more respectable citizens would be told it was an act of homage to the then fashionable status of all things Indian." Back for the project, to the tune of about £1600, came from Peter, Asher, brother of Jane, and half of the singing duo Peter and Gordon. Together with Asher, Dunbar, and Barry Miles, who rented a building in Mason's yard off Duke Street for about £20 a week. Paul McCartney helped put up the shelves, designed and lettered the wrapping paper, and Indica opened in January 1966 with the bookshop (Miles domain) upstairs and the gallery (Dunbar's) downstairs.
The book shop was moved to Southampton Row a couple of months later, leaving the Mason's Yard premises to Dunbar and art. Neither Dunbar nor Miles was a model capitalist. "I never liked the business side of it too much," Dunbar says. "You know, actually dealing with the rent and the electricity bills." Yet the gallery initially thrived, partially because of the conspicuous patronage of the Beatles. Both Lennon and McCartney were bought from the gallery. And McCartney would often put a handout in their direction, partly because it was such a lively place, what with Ginsburg living in a flat next door, William Burroughs, Baleful president just around the corner, and Rowan Polanski, one of India's best customers, often dropped by late at night to make a new purchase.
"All of our exhibitions were very successful in terms of publicity," said Dunbar. "Because there wasn't anything else going on in London, so the papers couldn't leave it alone. Plus, there were pop stars and stuff around, and our openings were kind of wild."
Soon, Indica was a noted center for every kind of fashionably non-painterly art, with a particular leaning toward the kinesthetic. At the same time, Dunbar's friendship within the rock world was flourishing. With McCartney, who, in those days, be it remembered by those who knew him as the 'cuddly one' that the girls liked was the avant-garde Beatle, the one who was into Luciano Berio and Stockhausen.
Dunbar made a series of short, eight mm and six mm films, shooting random footage around London, and then retreated to McCartney's flat, where they would sit up all night editing them to the Beatles' own electronic compositions, "crazy stuff with guitar and cello," McCartney described it. As results were shown to Michelangelo Antonioni in London at the time to film Blow Up, but the master's response is not on record.
All this amounted to a notable coup for a man fresh out of college. He had gone to Cambridge to read natural science, biological stuff, rather than a tedious course, and had only changed the history of art for his final year. Asked what knowledge of art he acquired by the time he graduated, he replied, "None," and laughs disarmingly. What Dunbar lacked in academic depth, however, he made up for with a good eye, a gift of constantly bumping into the right people, and a lifelong familiarity with creative types.
Dunbar's '60s were not all fun, however. Enjoyable notoriety and jollities at Indica were shadowed by disaster in his love life. After flirtations and fumblings in and around the rock world, Marianne Faithfull ran off with Mick Jagger and took their son with her. Though they had long since been back on cordial terms, her flight began a period of estrangement, which reached its peak in 1972 when he took out a high court action against her and eventually regained custody of Nicholas.
In the meantime, Dunbar, the great introducer, had accomplished his most far-reaching introduction. He says that he's now hazy on the precise details, but the general agreed-upon version runs something like this. On December 10, 1966 [sic], the Indica Gallery was to present a show entitled Unfinished Paintings and Objects. Suspecting that his pal, John Lennon, would find it interesting, he invited the musician along for a private view the evening before. Lennon was perplexed by the objects on show: an apple with a £200 price tag mounted on a pedestal, a board with nails hammered partway in, and a note saying, " Hammer a nail in" and so on.
Dunbar led Lennon downstairs to a room in which assistants were darning a huge canvas bag, went over to the small Japanese woman dressed in black, and whispered, "Go and say hello to the millionaire." Yoko Ono walked up to John Lennon and presented him with a card inscribed with a single word, "breathe". John panted. The rest you know.
It was in the nature of the times that enterprises such as Indica seldom lasted long, suffering from its owner's understandable preoccupation with other matters. "Once you've done something like that, you know what an incredible hassle and pain in the arse it is". The gallery closed in 1967, and the bookshop went into liquidation at the end of 1966 owing £500.
Dunbar retreated to the countryside of Northumberland for a while, eventually returning to the art world for a few years, with a stint with the British Council in the early 70s. Since then, he has served another son named William, in honor of the great Scottish poet William Dunbar, and set up as an artist in his own right.
Some of his drawings have been published in the United States in journals edited by his brother-in-law, the poet Ed Dorn, and others. Sales of his sculptures and other objects seem to cover household expenses, maintaining him in the way of life he describes as "genteel poverty." Impeccable or not, he certainly appears to enjoy a thriving social life. Our first meeting had to be postponed because he'd been out on the tiles until seven that morning, and he wears the air of a man essentially contented with his lot.
Not long ago, his son, Nicholas, now 30, also became a father. "Marianne and me-- grandparents," he laughs. "We never thought that would happen."
