22 Facts About Mel Lyman

Melvin James Lyman was an American musician and writer, and the founder of the Fort Hill Community, which has been variously described as a family, commune, or cult.

Mel Lyman was a friend of underground filmmaker Jonas Mekas, which led to the studios of Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner.

Mel Lyman learned the art of filmmaking from Conner and made some films with him.

In 1963 Mel Lyman joined Jim Kweskin's Boston-based jug band as a banjo and harmonica player.

Mel Lyman, once called "the Grand Old Man of the 'blues' harmonica in his mid-twenties", is remembered in folk music circles for playing a 20-minute improvisation on the traditional hymn "Rock of Ages" at the end of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival to the riled crowd streaming out after Bob Dylan's famous appearance with an electric band.

In 1966, supported and funded by Mekas, Mel Lyman published his first book, Autobiography of a World Savior, which set out to reformulate spiritual truths and occult history in a new way.

In 1971, Mel Lyman published Mirror at the End of the Road, derived from letters he wrote during his formative years, starting in 1958 from his initial attempts to learn and become a musician, through the early 1960s as his life widened and deepened musically and personally.

Again, Mel Lyman became acquainted with many artists and musicians in the vibrant Boston scene, including Timothy Leary's group of LSD enthusiasts, International Foundation for Internal Freedom.

Mel Lyman was involved for a very short time and, against his wishes, so was Judy.

Mel Lyman was totally out of the picture by the summer of 1963.

At some point thereafter Mel Lyman began to view himself as destined for a role as a spiritual force and leader.

In 1966, Mel Lyman founded and headed The Mel Lyman Family, known as The Fort Hill Community, centered in a few houses in the Fort Hill section of Roxbury, then a poor neighborhood of Boston.

Mel Lyman later wrote of his experiences in his book My Odyssey Through the Underground Press.

Mel Lyman told David Felton he had had to escape under cover of darkness after being told he would not be allowed to leave.

The foremost goal was to provide a supportive environment for Mel Lyman to do his creative work.

Rather than the gentle and collectivist hippie ethic in other underground publications of the time, Mel Lyman's writing in Avatar espoused a philosophy that contained, to some readers of the time, strong currents of megalomania and nihilism and to others a powerful alternative voice to the prevailing ethos.

Family member George Peper confirmed to Felton that Mel Lyman had ordered the attack.

The community is for one purpose, and that's to serve Mel Lyman, who is the leader and the founder of that community.

Mel Lyman seemed to share some traits in common with Manson, which raised the Family's profile and established Mel Lyman in the public mind as a bizarre and possibly dangerous person.

Unlike the Manson Family, Mel Lyman's did not explode in a dramatic denouement.

Turner states that the group believed "the world would end on January 5,1974" and that Family members should prepare to be taken to Venus via UFO: when this did not occur, members whose "souls weren't ready" were blamed for having kept Mel Lyman from participating in the ascension.

Mel Lyman relates feeling "a surge of love and belonging" in the compound before being alienated by the traditional gender roles.