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‘The heaviest dude I ever met’: Another side of the Father Yod and The Source Family saga
02.11.2015
11:35 am
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yod and followers
 
I’ve never been much of a joiner. Working in groups, team sports, board games even, have never really been the most appealing things to me. I’m fiercely independent and intentionally contrarian at times even to my own detriment, making me probably the least suitable candidate for communal living in the world (let alone religious cult membership). This does not mean I don’t find the whole phenomenon fascinating on some level, especially when we’re talking about the high level psychedelics of The Source Family.

As many of you are very well aware, The Source Family, the great 2012 documentary directed by Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille, compellingly lays out the story of that otherworldly “Aquarian tribe” of white-robed mystics searching for “God Consciousness” on the fringes of 70’s L.A. counterculture. Famously, the group made some of the strangest, most sought-after and sometimes straight-up creepy psychedelic recordings the world has ever heard while running the organically charged Source Restaurant in L.A. in order to finance the entire metaphysical enterprise under the spiritual tutelage of one Jim Baker (aka Father Yod, aka Ya Ho Wha).

But, if the 2013 doc didn’t already supply you with everything you felt like you needed to know about the Source Family, and if you’ve already read The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wha 13 and The Source Family then the two-and-a-half hour film below is sure to help you fill in a few more blanks. A student film project created in conjunction with cooperative members of The Source Family and made a decade before the 2012 film, this one is called Revisiting Father and the Source Family. A very young looking Evan Wells directed it, and lets not kid ourselves here, it could use some editing. But give the guy a break! He was still in schooll after all, and the film is still very much worth watching if this kind of thing is your bag. Many of the same folks from the 2012 The Source Family documentary speak their minds here but there are also several interviews with family members who don’t show up in the later movie. What the film lacks in slick production, it makes up for in raw, in-depth interview footage of people telling honest, wild tales from the inner circle as it were.
 

 
More insane stories about 6’ 6” family spiritual leader, Jim Baker, whom one former family member calls “The heaviest dude I ever met,” pervade the film. We get some additional information about Baker’s supposed military conquests including one completely over-the-top incident in which Father Yod claimed to have shot down a whole a bevvy of attacking Japanese fighter pilots from the deck of a sinking navy ship in his “former life.” The general attitude towards the guy is “Man, you couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.”

The sounds of the family band, sometimes called Ya Ho Wa 13 are prominent in the film and the utopian hopes for spreading the wild garage band’s message around the world are discussed in depth. Baker’s business acumen and even flaunting of monetary gain as an avenue to spiritual freedom is also explored once again and additional stories appear from the Source Restaurant which was one of the first organic dining establishments in the country and which supposedly made more money per square foot than any restaurant in the United States during a certain period in the ‘70s.

Revisiting Father and the Source Family also takes a look at what some people saw as the “spiritual snobbery” of the fringe group (everybody had to be beautiful) and the inherent lifestyle conflicts contained within it (Baker eventually took on thirteen wives). This film goes into far more detail about what some would call the inevitable fracturing of the group than the 2013 film, and there’s definitely an acknowledgement by some of the interviewees that a lot of people are embarrassed to admit that they were ever a part of the whole thing.

One striking thing about both films though is that some of the former members of the Source Family seem to have never really left. Many of those interviewed continue to refer to Baker as “Father” without a hint of irony. Some people will of course say that they were simply brainwashed robots looking for a father figure they never had, making them ripe for the drug-fueled ravings of an out-of-control megalomaniac. That could very well have been the case for some. But others clearly believe that they actually discovered something in the Source Family that was so goddamned enlightening that the average human being will never fully get it, a sentiment that’s expressed again and again throughout both dialogues. I have no idea, but they speak with a matter-of-fact ease about a chosen lifestyle that would absolutely push the limits of what most people’s accepted social mores could bare, and that makes these first-person testimonies fascinating to watch one way or the other. 

Drag City have recently released two Source Family albums—Savage Sons of Ya Ho Wa and Kohutek—on vinyl for the first time since the 1970s.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Father Yod’s flower-powered ego trips and the utopian wet dreams of The Source Family
The Source Family: God has a rock band
The Source Family’s Isis Aquarian, this week on ‘The Pharmacy’

Posted by Jason Schafer
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02.11.2015
11:35 am
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Father Yod’s flower-powered ego trips and the utopian wet dreams of The Source Family

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Father Yod and his 13 wives.
 
At the age of 18 I thumbed my way from Northern Virginia to Los Angeles. Picked up by long-haul truckers, who introduced me to Black Beauties, and an ex-con in a Rambler American who generously shared his Lucky Strikes, I managed to make the trip in three sleepless days and nights. When I got to the City Of Angels, I made my way to The Source restaurant, a hub of hippie activity that I was anxious to experience. The place had a rep for being a very cool gathering place for spiritually-inclined hipsters, Laurel Canyon rockers and Hollywood celebrities. John and Yoko frequented the joint. They liked the menu’s wide selection of salads and protein drinks. Woody Allen satirized the place in a scene in Annie Hall when he orders bean sprouts and “mashed yeast.”

The Source had energy and its long-haired white-robed staff generated some genuinely good vibes. For a hippie from the downcast East Coast, The Source radiated a sunny magnetism that drew you in and made you feel that the future might be golden.  And for awhile, The Source was golden. It made money (as much as ten grand a day) and it made converts to the Aquarian Age philosophy spun from the ego of the restaurant’s massively charismatic owner, Jim Baker (Father Yod).

Baker was a former WW2 war hero, martial arts expert, bank robber and an acquitted killer (two quick karate chops, two dead bodies). He possessed the well-honed patter of a con man and an unquenchable lust for life. When he discovered the hippie movement, it was like a hardboiled character out of a Jim Thompson novel wandering into Richard Brautigan’s world of LSD, poetry and hippie pussy. A few hits of Orange Sunshine, some classes in Kundalini yoga and the scent of patchouli-basted pubes propelled Baker into a spiritual phantasmagoria that transmogrified the warrior into the cosmic Father Yod.

Baker attracted a following of young hippies looking for alternatives to their suburban alienation and middle-class angst. In Father Yod they found both a guru and a sense of paternal security. He established a commune of about 150 flower children, the Source Family.

Transfixed by his personality and lulled into blissful acceptance of his “Enlightenment For Dummies” distillation of the teachings of Yogi Bhajan, Alan Watts, Swami Satchidananda, Krishnamurti etc., his followers got a brain-addling dose of the cosmic warm and fuzzies. Throw in some exotic rituals involving group sex and ganja and you had one very happy cult-like collective with the usual misogynistic tendencies lurking under the groovy free love surface. Yod ended up with 13 submissive wives, most in their late teens and early twenties. He was 50 years old and he knew how to nasty.

Despite Baker’s power-tripping ways, the Source Family was to many of its members the real fucking deal. In the downhome archival footage that comprises much of the new movie, The Source Family, you can see genuine happiness on the faces of Baker’s followers. In filmed interviews conducted in recent years with core members of the family, few have any serious regrets. Many attribute their successes in life (several are millionaires) to Baker’s teachings. Some, on the other hand, do bear scars, most of whom are women. Their deep love of Baker was betrayed by his lust for the seemingly endless flow of teenyboppers streaming through his bedroom door. Baker displayed the classic behavior of many new age gurus during the ‘60s and ‘70s. From Rajneesh to Chogyam Trungpa, these cosmic poonhounds couldn’t resist the power and glory of the peach-fuzzed meat pit of mortal delight.

The Source Family is a fair-minded film that benefits from a motherlode of footage and photographs taken over the course of several years documenting the group from its beginning to its bittersweet end. Behind the scenes at the restaurant, home births, group gropes, concerts by the Source Family’s psychedelic rock band (Sky Saxon was briefly a member) and various westernized tantric practices were filmed by one of Baker’s wives, Isis Aquarian, who also wrote a very fine book on the commune. This makes the movie uniquely intimate and powerful (even Baker’s death is filmed).

The Source Family is opening theatrically and on demand in May. I urge you to see it. It’s refreshing to experience a movie about American counter-culture, particularly the hippies, that doesn’t present its subject with a snicker and a sidelong glance. This is an honest exploration of something real and significant: the search to find what we already are but have forgotten, the search for the self. It ain’t easy and it can get sloppy, but it’s the only game in town worth playing.

In Alejandro Jodorowsky’s masterpiece El Topo , a cosmic gunslinger goes in search of his spiritual master in order to kill him. The idea being that in order to really be free, we must be free of our masters, our gurus. In the case of Jim Baker, he didn’t wait for his students to kill him. He did the job himself. After years of proclaiming his Godhood, he awoke to the revelation that he was a mere man and had nothing left to offer his followers. He calmly flew off a mountain cliff in a hang glider that he had no idea how to operate. The God literally crashed to earth and died nine hours later. The coroner found no broken bones or internal bleeding. His body was whole and intact. For three days his corpse was attended to by his beautiful young wives. As in life, Father Yod died with a contented smile on his face.
 

 
The Source Family band, Yahowha 13, has a growing reputation among fans of psychedelia and it is well-deserved. The following tune, “Fire In The Sky,” is pretty amazing. Positively Beefheartian. It’s from the rare and highly collectible album Savage Sons Of Ya Ho Wah.

 
Previously on DM: ‘THE SOURCE’: AN EXTRAORDINARY NEW DOCUMENTARY FEATURE ABOUT THE ‘SOURCE FAMILY’

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.19.2013
12:05 am
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‘The Source’: An extraordinary new documentary feature about the ‘Source Family’
03.13.2012
03:22 pm
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The Source, an extraordinary new documentary feature about the “Source Family,” a little-known hippie counterculture enclave living in Los Angeles in the 1970s, premiered at the SXSW Film festival this year. Co-directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos, The Source intimately examines the lives of a group of spiritual seekers who came to follow a charismatic but deeply flawed polygamous guru who opened one of the very first vegetarian restaurants in America. The Source restaurant was a Sunset Strip landmark for over two decades, attracting clientele like Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Willam Morris super agents and various other Tinseltown notables with its healthy food and good-looking staff.

Who were the Source Family?

Jodi: They were a utopian group of 140 beautiful young people who, for a time in the 70s, lived together in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills and explored the cosmos with a man named Father Yod, a controversial restaurateur turned spiritual leader. They had a popular vegetarian restaurant on the Sunset strip that movie stars and musicians frequented and they had their own rock band.

What was it about Father Yod that was so special that he could attract followers so easily?

Jodi: He was a wizard, a war hero, an outlaw, a conceptual genius, a father figure and a friend. He was fearless and he had a sense of humor. He showed those who were seeking how to make magic real in their own lives. And the ladies loved him.

Didn’t Woody Allen use the commune’s health food restaurant as the backdrop for some anti-Los Angeles sentiment in Annie Hall?

Maria: Indeed he did. It’s an iconic scene because it defines the great polarity at the time between the two coasts. The Source was an epicenter and represented the West Coast’s fixation on health and mysticism, which his character, “Alvy Singer,” a cynical New Yorker, perceived as self-indulgent and superficial.

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How did you come to make a film about The Source?

Jodi: While I was helping to put together the book about the group (The Source, Process Media 2007) with Isis and Electricity Aquarian, Isis suggested we shoot our interviews with family members on video. Once Isis’ showed me her mind-blowing Source archives with the Super 8 home movies, color slides, scrapbooks, and hundreds of hours of audio recordings, I knew we had to make a film. I then brought in Maria, a talented and experienced commercial director and a longtime friend, to help bring things to the next level. The universe unfolded from there.

Are the Source Family still together, in some form, in 2012?

Maria: They’re no longer an active family— they dispersed in 1977 after Yod’s death. But the internet has reconnected many of them and they also have occasional Source Family reunions. The band reunited in 2007 when the book came out, and since then they’ve toured nationally and released new three albums. While the Source Family members all have their own lives now, it’s clear when you talk to them that most still have one foot in Yod-land.

Below, an exclusive clip from The Source.

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.13.2012
03:22 pm
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