At that time I was living in a glass house on stilts in Laurel Canyon, and my main concern was that I didn’t really know where the ground was. I’d long had an absolute conviction that I could fly – not soaring high through the clouds like I’d later get a scale model of Jonathan Pryce to do in Brazil, but skimming along happily just a few feet off the ground. The sense-memory I had of flying at that height was so intense that it was hard to believe it only came from dreams, and I suspected that one tab of acid was all it would take to get me demonstrating my supposed aerial prowess from an upper window with potentially fatal consequences.
People have sometimes accused me of not being able to distinguish dreams from reality, and it’s true that when it came to my recurring night-flights of fancy I had been mercifully spared the process of (literally!) disillusionment where you wake up thinking ‘That really happened,’ but then the vision gradually leaves you. I suppose if the mind really is more powerful than the body, then my brain could have convinced all those little muscles that this momentous event had earned its place in their individual memories – which is pretty much how it works for phantom limbs, but in that case you’re dealing with a nervous system trained over a long period of time to assume that certain things are going on down below.
Maybe all dreams of flying are just your subconscious response to the fact that your dad threw you up in the air a lot as a little kid. I know Freud would offer another, earthier interpretation, but I was never a big fan of his, being more of a Jungian myself. A Neil Jungian, that is. I’ve always really loved Neil’s music – Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse, all of it – as well as identifying strongly with his no-bullshit approach to the human psyche. So fuck you, Sigmund, I’m sticking with the ‘dad throwing you up in the air a lot’ theorem.
The first chance my dad got to throw me up in the air was in November 1940. I was born a month after John Lennon and half a year before my fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan (who took a while to realise that was what his name should be). In American terms I was a pre-war baby, because the land of my birth decided to sit out the first few dances of the Second World War, until the Japs marked our card at Pearl Harbor.
My dad, James (‘Gill’) Gilliam – who’d been in the last operational cavalry unit of the US army for a while before the war – tried to re-enlist, but they told him he was too old and his horse-riding skills would be no use against the Nazi blitzkrieg. In any case, his primary duty was to throw me up in the air a lot, so I’d have an excuse for all those flying dreams in later life. As a consequence of this enlightened intervention on the part of the US military (which would not be the last benevolent decision it would make on behalf of the male Gilliams, but more of that later), the war had no impact on my early life at all.
There was none of that formative trauma which is normally so vital to the evolution of the artistic mind (although that absence would in itself become traumatic in later life, proving a serious obstacle to any attempt to pass myself off as a Renaissance man). I arrived two years before my sister Sherry and eight-and-a-bit before my brother Scott, so I’d made sure my feet were firmly under the table before any competition arrived. I was smart, happy and in good health – in short all the things you’d want in a child. I’d later joke (and if a man can’t use material he’s been road-testing all his life in his own memoir, when can he?) that my father was a carpenter and my mother was a virgin, so what other choice did I have than to be the chosen one?
I love the out-of-focus-ness of this kid. I was moving too fast for the cameras even then. My mum’s hair is the subject of the piece – look at those precise curls, and that’s a really good parting – but the object of her attention is, well, what exactly? My parents appreciated what they had, and they always admired the creature, but they could never quite grasp the true nature of its identity . . . There’s an element of vanity about Mrs Beatrice Gilliam that I find very interesting in retrospect. The meticulousness of her parting once almost got her lured off the straight and narrow. In the mid-1930s, when she was working in a Minneapolis restaurant called Hasty Tasty, a smartly dressed woman kept admiring her hair and asking if she would come and do her and her friends’ the same way, and my mum found out afterwards that this potential client was the wife of the notorious Minneapolis gangster ‘Kid’ Cann who used to procure local women for him and his good friend Al Capone.
There are a few family pictures of us outside rented houses in Minneapolis, but the first home I actually have memories of is the one at Medicine Lake, out of the city, which my parents bought and moved us to when I was four. The house was basically a summer cottage – not made for 40-degrees-below-zero winters, and not really meant to be lived in at all in the cold season, but it was all they could afford at the time, so we made the best of it. I remember my dad insulating the whole place and digging out the basement.
We lived there for several years with an outside toilet, which we called a ‘biffy’. It was a two-holer – presumably to delineate us from the poor people, who only had one hole. You’d think we might’ve complained about having to troop out there in Arctic conditions, but it was normal to us. That’s the great thing about kids – normal is normal, so what are you complaining about? That’s just the way the world is.
Years later, once I’d run away to join Monty Python’s Flying Circus, I used to drive my parents crazy by referring to myself as ‘poor white trash’. They hated me doing that, because they weren’t poor white trash – they worked very hard. We didn’t have much money, but we never felt ourselves to be poor.
My dad did lots of different jobs to keep the grizzlies from the door. At one point he worked on the Alaskan highway – driving earth-movers – at another as a coffee salesman. Either way, he was away a lot, and the template of a hearth maintained by the mother, and a father who comes back from his travels as a glamorous figure, is one I have tried to build upon as an adult – to the extent that my wife Maggie claims she raised our three children as a one-parent family.
It’s intriguing how these patterns repeat themselves without one necessarily being aware of it. I never realised I was away that much when my kids were young, and similarly when I was growing up, I never felt like my dad wasn’t around. Even if L Ron Hubbard himself were to audit me, I don’t think he could come up with a memory of an absent father. Because Dad was always building stuff and fixing things up, we were constantly aware of his presence. Who could forget the day he finished work on the inside toilet and made a tree-house out of the remains of the old biffy?
The thing I remember most clearly about the winters was when Dad would tie an inner tube to the back of the car and whoosh me around the lake, whiplashing all over the place, shouting at the top of my voice. That was fantastic.
Those three destructive little words ‘health and safety’ had yet to reach Minnesota. My dad took me out shooting from a very early age. We had three shotguns in the house – a 12-gauge, a 16-gauge and a 22. They were definitely there for hunting rather than protecting us from the evils of the world. You’d go out