What's so Wrong with Love and Peace?

Adventures in the European Underground 1965-67

Through the years 1965 to 1967 we follow the author experiencing and living in Europe’s underground. He takes us from the bottom of the insane ward of infamous Wormwood-prison in London to the heights of meeting Allen Ginsberg – one of his great idols – before the seminal event of `65– “The Wholly Communion” at Albert Hall. He moved across Europe, lived several months in the red-light district of Antwerp, and had his first acid experience in Ibiza and Formentera. When he realized that his girlfriend was pregnant all lightness disappeared from their ecstatic wild life and the existence of an outcast lost all it’s glamour. To make things worse: the army was also after him! From a desperate and failed attempt to be straight and a father he escaped to Guernsey, an island in the English Channel, where he mended his broken body and soul. – And just in time… for the London of 1967, where he founded the ”Commune One West Hempstead”, took a lot of soul-searching acid trips, designed psychedelic posters and met many outstanding characters, who meanwhile either have died or became very famous. Brummbaers trip began when he was thrown out of his home, because he invited some social misfits to celebrate Christmas on Earth with him. The book ends four years later with a huge “Christmas on Earth” party in the Olympia-Convention Halls in London, with everybody attending, from Jimi Hendrix to Eric Burdon, the Who, Pink Floyd, and an audience of many thousands.

Brummbaer was born as a fugitive just after Germany’s capitulation in 1945. Across Europe he had erratic and colorful careers stretching from pavement painter to comic book publisher to nightclub designer. Brummbaer's fine art and underground magazine Germania brought him recognition in Europe during the 1960s, and he orchestrated light shows for musicians such as Frank Zappa and Tangerine Dream. He found his most expressive medium when he discovered the computer. He was the primary computer animator responsible for the special effects in the Tristar motion picture Johnny Mnemonic. He also created several innovative openers for SIGGRAPH’s "Electronic Theater," and has long been a pioneer in the world of digital animation where he has been noted for his signature hallucinogenic style. In the autumn of 2003 he was diagnosed with Head and neck cancer. During several months of chemo- and radiation-therapy he wrote a novel titled “Runaway Jesus”, which recounted his experiments with the drug dextromethorphan hydrobromide (DXM). He survived the head and neck cancer, but in 2007 was diagnosed with bladder cancer, which was treated with two bladder resections. At the moment he is cancerfree, and has written his second book: “What’s so wrong with Love and Peace” about the years 1965 to 1967. These two books are part of a trilogy about how the “Sixties” really were, told by somebody who was in the midst of it. With a great sense of humor he reminds us of the absolute naiveté of this worldwide child crusade against the machine. As he says in the preface to his second book: “To sum it up, we were naïve but determined drug-taking runaways, and believed we could achieve world-peace, the cessation of national borders, the abolishment of money and property, feed and educate the poor, and spread the spirit of free love, within the time-span of about five years!” And all this -- driven by the power of love! Who could possibly decline such an offer?