Social Discipline is incredibly excited to present the adventurous life of Jeff Perkins, a hidden gem of the American underground.
This massive five-hour podcast, recorded in Berlin in June 2024, explores his fascinating journey—no one else can claim to have performed for Yoko Ono and John Cage, created legendary light shows with The Velvet Underground, Sly and the Family Stone, and The Germs, programmed the first Kenneth Anger retrospective in L.A., and encountered both Charles Manson and members of the satanic cult The Process.
Jeff joined the military in the 1960s and was stationed in Tokyo, where he met Yoko Ono in the early ’60s. He began performing some of her pieces there and later in New York. Perkins also filmed Ono’s classic Film No. 4 (Bottoms), a Fluxus work. His first independent contribution to the Fluxfilm Anthology was Shout. He was at the heart of the 1960s New York avant-garde scene, surrounded by figures like La Monte Young, Jack Smith, and Angus MacLise.
In January 1967, Perkins moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a programmer at Cinematheque 16. Influenced by Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, he began producing powerful light shows and collaborated with bands throughout the ’60s and ’70s—ranging from The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Grateful Dead to the punk scene with X and The Germs. He even refused to do a show for the Sex Pistols due to a disagreement with the promoter. Perkins was a close friend of Terry Jennings and, in fact, entrusted his archive to La Monte Young. While in L.A., he was neighbors with the artist James Turrell.
In 1980, Perkins moved back to New York and started a loft project just a block away from Ground Zero, reminiscent of George Maciunas’ artist loft spaces. To finance it, he worked as a cab driver. He remained deeply connected to cinema, particularly through Anthology Film Archives, where he proposed a John Cassavetes retrospective to Jonas Mekas and later became a manager. In 1994, Nam June Paik—who coined the term “The Fluxus cab driver” for Perkins—invited him to perform at Anthology Film Archives in a homage to Yoko Ono. His performance, Butthead, was a great success. His legendary loft became a hub where one could easily encounter visiting filmmakers like Pedro Costa and Albert Serra.
In 1989, Perkins organized a series of lectures at Anthology Film Archives with Henry Flynt and Tony Conrad, reuniting the two after years of estrangement. Flynt would become a lifelong friend. In 2008, during the financial crisis, when I lived with Jeff, we organized a series of four-hour lectures by Flynt in the loft’s kitchen, focusing on the crisis and communist economics. I vividly remember Tony Conrad attending one of them in his elegant pajamas.
Perkins has directed two critically acclaimed films—one on abstract painter Sam Francis and another on the legendary Fluxus figure George Maciunas. He is currently finishing editing a film about Henry Flynt in Berlin.
This podcast concludes with an excerpt from his piece Movies for the Blind, which features recordings of conversations with passengers from his time as a New York cab driver.
