Ed Ochs

Freedom Spy: David Jove and the Meaning of Existence Ed Ochs

Canadian-born David Jove was an actor, singer, songwriter, musician, poet, sculptor, writer and filmmaker. He could have been successful at anything he wanted to do, but it was the free-thinking 1960s and he wanted to be a magician, an alchemist, and a master of time and space. Instead, through heights of guile, gumption and glibness previously unseen in rock 'n' roll high society, David Jove achieved notoriety with one wave of his magic cane when in England he became known as "The Acid King" after partying with The Rolling Stones, and getting Keith Richards and Mick Jagger arrested in a landmark case in 1967. A few years later he became a fugitive, fleeing Canada on a felony charge, blazing a trail of music and adventure across three continents before slipping into Hollywood in the early '70s to be close to his wife, comedienne Lotus Weinstock, and young daughter, Lili Haydn. In 1980, Jove produced the pioneering pre-MTV punk-music cable-TV show "New Wave Theatre," hosted by Peter Ivers, an unsolved murder victim in 1983. He later launched the popular, top-rated website, thewholetruth.com. FREEDOM SPY is the author's first-hand, fact-based account of his friendship and writing partnership with Jove. It is the first-ever glimpse into the life of the controversial, talented, enigmatic dynamo the author calls "the wittiest, wildest, most brilliant runaway mind of the psychedelic '60s."