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<h1 class="left">Ray Selby goes by the moniker ‘Tarot Ray’. Although he finds himself hardly ever touching the tarot these days, the former Londoner attributes his lifelong interest in the mystical cards to a run-in with an American lady (or an Australian one, he couldn’t be too sure) on the beaches of Goa in the 1970s, who read his tarot for him. Ecstatic about the spirituality of it all (Ray reminds me that he considers himself a spiritual man), he spent his days devoted to learning the cards, among the other endeavours he pursued on those moon-dappled beaches. But of course, life often came in the way, as it’s so habituated to doing. He searches for the ideal quote to describe the phenomenon, and I pipe up hesitantly and complete the sentence he lost midway to reference Lennon’s “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” To this, he gives me a gracious, hearty laugh of approval and draws me further into the conversation with an impeccable thread of storytelling, characteristic of his former magazine editor persona.</h1>

<h1 class="right">The first time I met Ray was on a video call that lasted all of two hours, where he very amicably welcomes me to the all-wooden interiors of the houseboat in which he currently resides, on an Amsterdam canal, in a solitary culmination of all the years he spent travelling and socialising and knowing “nearly everyone". He wears his now-white hair long, in a ponytail that runs down the length of his back, in a nod to the former glory of his black locks.  Ray confides that the only reason he agreed to this interview was that the name of the magazine “dirty” sounds much like his very own ‘The Stoned Pig’, with the two names having a similar disregard for conventions of their time, and matching in spirit. I am curious about the conceptualisation of the ‘free-speaking magazine’, and ask him why it was described so, to which he corrects me laughingly and adds that the terminology is actually “the freest magazine, on the world’s freest scene.” He coined those words himself, and his triumphant smirk reveals to me how proud he was of it. I would be too.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">Ray looks back at his life in Goa with a softness in his eye, it was, after all, the paradise-adjacent that looked starkly different from his childhood in grey post-war London. It was in Goa he fell in love and had his children, where he became part of the village furniture for many years and met the good people he holds close to his heart, where he lived on the very edge by taking on the monumental task of evading death, and finally, where ‘The Stoned Pig Magazine’ was birthed, and printed, and handed out widely to the interested.</h1>

<h1 class="right">The magazine ran between January of 1975-1976, and in this time, it grew from a black and white, four-page issue, with a head-block designed by a paid local artist, to become at the end of the year, a multicolour, glossy magazine, carrying the art and ideas of a community of travellers living in Goa– going into depth about the philosophies of psychedelics and tantra, the alternative society that erupted on the once-deserted beaches, rock n’ roll musicians of California-origin, full moon parties, and New Year parties, and Christmas parties, heartfelt letters to the editor, and the occasional advertisements for flea markets on people’s porches. In the freest magazine on the world’s freest scene, under palm tree shade on Anjuna’s nudist beach, on toasty sand placed beneath crisp ocean, in the drug-induced reverie (or one fuelled by meditation), there happened to be a time in the 70s, when pigs really did fly.</h1>

<h1 class="right">The following conversation weaves in and out of the details of Selby’s life that coincide with the creation of The Stoned Pig Magazine.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">dirty: What brought you to India, Ray, and the beaches of Goa in particular? When did you arrive here?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ray: I've got to admit, Rudyard Kipling. I read him as a child, especially the book ‘Kim’. Incidentally, I got the chance to re-read Kim in my twenties, on the same road that he was on, the Grand Trunk Road. I was reading his travels, and the milestones at the same time and thought, I am here! I always dreamed of going to India, but I came from a very poor family in London– my father was a hand tailor, my mother worked at a shop, and in those days after the Second World War, we had no money. There was no university for someone like me, it wasn't even considered possible. I finished off as a clerk, pushing paper from desk to desk. It was horrible! And so, I spent a year planning. I was going to do the craziest thing anybody ever did, I was going to escape my little bureaucratic prison, get out, and live a life of adventure, even if it killed me. Which I expected it would! I had no idea of what I was going into.</h1>

<h1 class="left">It was the very end of July, or the beginning of August 1970 when I had just turned 22, I took the ferry out to Belgium, put my thumb out, and started hitchhiking east. I just carried on, and the further I went the more I felt at home. The people I met were my kind of people, we were a community, you know. I mean the press used to call us hippies, but we didn’t. We called ourselves travellers. And so we travelled. I wound up eventually, of course, in India like everybody, and then Nepal. By then, it was December, and it was getting very cold. We heard everybody saying “You should go to Goa, it’s lovely down there!” I’ll never forget the moment of my arrival in Goa. I believed, sincerely, that I was in paradise. Palm trees, blue skies, warm sea, lovely, friendly people, and a free atmosphere. We could do whatever it is that we wanted, nobody cared, and that was such a wonderful, freeing feeling. Although it had its drawbacks, because a very few people went a bit crazy, and they could do some terrible things, and nobody was there to stop them. We had to do it ourselves. But for most of us good people, it was just paradise. I stayed until it was getting too hot, in late Spring, and when the monsoon came, I went off travelling, back to the Himalayas, all over India, seeing all the famous places. I was doing it all on a shoestring budget, because I had no money, really.</h1>

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<h1 class="right">dirty: Tell us a little about your life in Goa in the 70s. The beach counterculture, the communities, the people you met.</h1>

<h1 class="right">Ray: Well, I made a living there, I made a life there. We rented this beautiful Portuguese house in Anjuna, but I also lived in the villages of Vagator, Arambol, and Chapora. It was a time of madness, really. When I first came to Anjuna, there was nobody there, just fishermen and coconut tappers, making feni. It all got commercialised over the years. There was a band that played, with people mostly from California. The trouble is I can’t remember the name of the band. I always called the people who sat up on the stage, pretending to play– ‘The Beautiful People’. I was much more of a spiritual person. For me, it was all about learning philosophy and psychology, which I also wrote about in the magazine. I met my wife in Goa. Towards the end of the season, when we’d been lovers, this German lady we saw on the beach said “Wow, you’re very pregnant”. At the time, I remember saying “No, no she’s just putting on a bit of weight.” And then I had my first daughter, and everything changed. We couldn't live the way we lived. It was still a very free life though. We started our own little health food business, selling it down at the market, doing home delivery and selling from our home. Life was expensive, and we had little money, but we managed and sometimes we didn't. We had our tragedies, we had terrible tragedies. I lived on the edge, right on it. I came this close to death so many times, and yet I'm here telling you that. And that’s the amazing thing.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">dirty: Was it the people you met, and the life you led, that got you interested in creating a magazine of your own?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ray: Yes. The whole point of Goa in the early 70s was that it was a free community. There were no rules, anybody could do what they wanted. I started The Stoned Pig partly because of my dream of being a journalist. In London, I actually got turned down by the local newspaper on the grounds that I couldn’t do shorthand. I mean, who uses shorthand now? I think Stoned Pig was my way of doing it anyway, saying “Damn you all!”</h1>

<h1 class="left">I just had this idea one day. It was about the same time, there was a French man in a tea shop, who in a conversation said, “Did you know, over at Baga, the people with campers are making a flea market”. Marché aux puces he called it, which is French for flea market. He asked us what we think about putting up one here in Anjuna, and everyone said it’s a great idea. That flea market eventually turned into one of the biggest markets in Goa, it’s weekly now, a phenomenal festival-like event in Goa, but to think that it had such primitive origins as in a tea shop! I decided that I was going to go to all the tea shops along the stretch and put up signs asking if people want to contribute to the magazine. I wanted to know if we have any poets, any writers, any artists, anybody who wants to contribute because I wanted to create a vehicle for talented people to express themself and circulate their work. I knew many people who were incredibly artistic. And that’s how it began. I made this 4-page thing, found a printer in a local market in Mapusa, and got it printed. I got an artist to do the first issue’s logo and wrote some of it myself, got others to write in it. It eventually led to a second issue. When this guy Eli read it, he saw a possibility for his own writing to be published. And so he became my partner in the project and together, we proof-read, arranged, and brought alive the next few issues of The Stoned Pig.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">dirty: Did you ever send copies of The Stoned Pig to the local newspaper that rejected you?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ray: No, but I should’ve.</h1>

<h1 class="right">dirty: You know the question I’m coming to next. How did the magazine come to be named ‘The Stoned Pig’? What’s the story there?</h1>

<h1 class="right">Ray: (laughs) I knew you’d ask, everybody does. With the political environment of the time and the censorship, I was a bit worried about using the word ‘stoned’. My partner in the project Eli, (who is working on an autobiography that speaks about his life in Goa in that time period) explains in his book why it’s called The Stoned Pig. You see, in those days, the beach toilets were serviced by pigs! You are a journalist working for a magazine called ‘dirty’, so I’ll say it how it is. No one to insult here. The toilets then had a base of concrete, and the upper part was a palm hatch. You went inside one of those, a concrete base with a hole in it, you squatted and shit right there, and the pigs would actually come up right behind you. It was designed such that they couldn’t get to you, so you were safe. The pigs then ate the shit as it came out. So, consequently, a running joke amongst us all was that, so many people take drugs in this place, the pigs must get really, really stoned. And that’s why we called it The Stoned Pig!</h1>

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<h1 class="right">dirty: Which brings me to your delightful pig mascot OINK, an acronym that stands for the Open Institute for Natural Knowledge. What does that mean, really?</h1>

<h1 class="right">Ray: It means nothing at all! We were coming up with ideas for the magazine, and Eli spoke about it particularly, cause we wanted to create an institute that was the anti-University of Goa, giving out knowledge on all that wouldn’t be taught in institutionalised society. We spent a lot of time laughing about that. We were young!</h1>

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<h1 class="left">dirty: No judgement at all there. What was the process of creating the magazine like?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ray: It was so primitive! We made it in the hot season. Down inside this tiny little printing press, where every single letter was letterpressed. Every letter had to be placed into a galley. One by one. We had to do a test sheet and it all had to be proofread, and corrected. It took a long time. The illustrations were done by hand on paper and transferred, by a local company, into printing blocks. There was Vidal of Nomad Studios who inserted a light-bulb on the Pig’s head in his magnificent cartoon and gave us the idea to call issue 3 a “Special Enlightened Issue”, and the German artist Bruno who made a new front cover in his exploding palm-tree design, which still stands as one of the great favourites of Pig readers.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">dirty: Did you sell the magazine at any particular cost for all the effort?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ray: We gave it away for FREE. We used to print a thousand copies and give away a bunch of them. Many appreciated it, but many of those selfish, greedy people left them littered on the beach which made me very upset.</h1>

<h1 class="left">dirty: Sign of the times, then?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ray: I suppose so. We lived through a period some called the "Death Trip”, where you went into a kind of trance. Some used drugs, some used yoga or meditation to reach a point where you were basically dead, and come back to life again. Many people were going on this death trip. There’s a supplement not included online, authored by Eli, which was given away with the last issue. It included quotes from philosophers and this person called Eight-Fingered Eddie, which discusses it.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">dirty: What was your favourite piece that you wrote for The Stoned Pig?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Ray: The piece that discusses Aldous Huxley’s book ‘Island’, and the poem to my first daughter. You’ll notice the last magazine was also a tribute to “Welsh” Mike, the bass player in the band in Anjuna, who died stupidly. I was with him before his death. He read a book by a man named Arnold Ehret, about becoming pure through diet, and died of protein deficiency, in spite of us begging him to eat.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">dirty: I also noticed how the release of each issue coincides with a stage of the moon. Why so?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ray: Well spotted! So many of the folks who made up our community, in North Goa, in the 1970s, found themselves there, in rejection of the Western society from which we came. Living so freely, gave us the opportunity to be proud of being what we called 'freaks' - rejects of that society, for one reason or another. It was easy to do back then, in view of the level of technology available to us. Almost no one had a watch, a camera or any of the gadgets that we are so used to having in our pockets now, in a single compact device. Therefore, we turned our backs on modern time-keeping and reverted to the ancient, natural methods - sunrise, noon, sunset, full moon, new moon, Siva's moon, Winter, the hot season, monsoon etc. We were living in the slow ancient Indian time. So, our parties, our lifestyles and the publication of the Stoned Pig were timed to Moon phases, not numerical values on a clock or calendar.</h1>

<h1 class="right">dirty: The transcendental way of life, the one of those you call the “freaks”, is a running theme in the magazine. Could you elaborate on the practice of it?</h1>

<h1 class="right">Ray: It was the mainstay, some of us spiritual people used it as a kind of tool to reach an elevated state of mind. Eli has written extensively about the use of psychotropics and tantra. The movement of us “freaks”, as Eli puts it, was supposed to stand for peace, love, and transcendence from the hang-ups of established mentality.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">dirty:There are exciting announcements of live music gigs being played in Anjuna, or of beach parties under the full moon, in the Stoned Pig. Can you leave us with a visual of what these looked like?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ray: We had all our parties on the beach. It was madness. Absolute madness. Mind you, Anjuna was a nudist beach then. There was live music, with musicians who were mostly American as only they could afford the equipment. There was no electricity on the beach, and it only came at the end of 1975. Before that, all their electronic music was made using a generator. All the musicians had their own name, there was Goa Gil on guitar, “Trumpet” Steve, “Welsh” Mike on bass. It was an open-air party, so there was plenty space on the beach. There were fires, mad people jumping through these fires, lovely Goan ladies selling chikki and coconuts and mangoes and watermelons. And there were a lot of drugs. I tried all of them. I realised that I don’t like losing control of myself, so those drugs, like LSD, didn’t suit me very much. I was only doing it because my mates were, as with my alcohol use, when I was a teenager. We were the lucky ones, you know, the ones that lived to tell it all. Not many of us survived those days. That time of our lives was so special because we were young and so free. Or I wonder if it was the time, place, and situation we were in that made it special. Whatever it was, it was a magical time.</h1>

<h1 class="left">We had an expression in the 70s that applies wonderfully, and goes a little something like “There's nobody here but us, folks.” And I still hold that to be very true.</h1>

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