His early career was managed by
Lenny Bruce who brought Romney to California in 1962 where he did a live recording of
Hugh Romney, Third Stream Humor as the opening act for
Thelonious Monk at Club Renaissance in Los Angeles.
The Hog Farm The
Hog Farm collective was established through a chain of events beginning with
Ken Babbs hijacking the
Merry Pranksters' bus,
Furthur, to Mexico, which stranded the
Merry Pranksters in Los Angeles. First Romney assembled a collective in
North Hollywood, visited by musicians such as
Ravi Shankar and
Tiny Tim (whom he managed). After moving to
Sunland, a suburb in the
San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles, Romney was evicted from his one-bedroom cabin after the landlord discovered that a large group of assorted pranksters and musicians were staying there. Two hours later, a neighbor informed Romney that a nearby hog farm needed caretakers after the farmer had suffered a stroke, and Romney accepted an offer to work at the farm in exchange for rent. Local people, musicians, artists, and members of other communes began staying at the mountain-top farm. In his book
Something Good for a Change, Gravy described this early period as a "bizarre
communal experiment" where the "people began to outnumber the pigs". Throughout the mid-1960s, both Romney and his wife,
Bonnie Beecher, were employed in Los Angeles. He worked for
Columbia Pictures teaching improvisation skills to actors. Beecher was a successful television actress, appearing in episodes of
The Twilight Zone,
Gunsmoke,
Star Trek, and
The Fugitive. By 1966, the Hog Farm had coalesced into an entertainment organization providing light shows at the
Shrine Exposition Hall in Los Angeles for music artists such as the
Grateful Dead,
Cream, and
Jimi Hendrix. Beginning in 1967, the collective began traveling across the country in converted school buses purchased with money earned as
extras in
Otto Preminger's feature film
Skidoo (1968).
Woodstock Festival At the first
Woodstock Festival, Romney and the Hog Farm collective accepted festival executive Stan Goldstein's offer to help with preparations. Romney called his group the "Please Force," a reference to their non-intrusive tactics at keeping order, e.g., "Please don't do that, please do this instead". When asked by the press—who were the first to inform him that he and the rest of the Hog Farm were handling security—what kind of tools he intended to use to maintain order at the event, his response was "Cream pies and
seltzer bottles" Romney made announcements from the concert stage throughout the festival. He later wrote in his memoir that "the reason that I got to do all those stage announcements was because of my relationship with
Chip Monk [sic]. Chip built the stage at Woodstock." At the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's psychedelic tribute to the 1960s "
I Want To Take You Higher", Romney's sleeping bag and tie-dyed false teeth were displayed. He and
Paul Krassner appeared there on the last day of the exhibit on February 28, 1998. Romney, as Wavy Gravy after the first Woodstock, has been the
Master of Ceremonies of, and the only person to appear on the bill of all three Woodstock festivals: the original festival in 1969, the 25thanniversary
Woodstock '94 festival in 1994, and the 30thanniversary
Woodstock '99 festival in 1999. On the morning of the 20th Anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, he and author
Ken Kesey were interviewed on
Good Morning America, live from the Bethel concert site, where he discussed his experience as the MC of the event.
Wavy Gravy name origin At the 1969
Texas International Pop Festival, two weeks after Woodstock, Romney was lying onstage, exhausted after spending hours trying to get festival-goers to put their clothes back on. He later explained, "They had these conga drummers on the stage, and I said, 'Don't dance on the wavy gravy'. Then someone announced that
B.B. King was there, and he was going to play for free. I started to get up, and I felt this hand on my shoulder and it was B.B. King. And he said, 'Are you Wavy Gravy?' and I just said, 'Yes, sir,' and he said, 'Wavy Gravy, I can work around you.' And he stood me up next to his amplifier, and
Johnny Winter comes from the other side, and they played all night long." Romney said he considered this a mystical event, and assumed Wavy Gravy as his legal name.
Phurst Church of Phun and clowning After frequent arrests at demonstrations, Wavy Gravy decided that his arrest would be less likely if he dressed as a clown. Romney therefore co-founded the
Phurst Church of Phun in 1960 as a secret society of comics and clowns dedicated to ending the Vietnam War through the use of political theater. Romney also performs more generally as a clown, including entertaining children, work that includes such traditional clown activities as joke-telling and magic tricks. As Wavy Gravy, he has served as an official
clown of the
Grateful Dead.
Art Wavy Gravy has also been recognized for his work as a
collage artist, with work presented at a solo exhibition in April 1999 at the Firehouse Gallery in New York under gallery owner Eric Gibbons. He had an exhibition, entitled
Wavy Gravy Retrospective (1996), at the Firehouse Gallery of Bordentown, New Jersey. He began exploring collage in the early 1960s, and his first works were created in the period where he lived above the Gaslight in Greenwich Village; he has stated that he was inspired by a
Max Ernst collage he saw at the Bitter End, when he opened for
Peter, Paul and Mary. His collage work includes larger pieces done for celebrities in the
San Francisco Bay Area.
Neo-pagan appearances Wavy Gravy's first appearance at an event in the
Neo-Pagan community was at the WinterStar Symposium in 1998 with
Paul Krassner. He appeared there again in 2000 with
Phyllis Curott, where he joined Rev.
Ivan Stang in a joint ritual of the
Church of the SubGenius and his Church of the Cosmic Giggle. ==Ventures==