Eden Ahbez - The Complicated Life And Times Of A Simple Man

Photographs of Eden Ahbez have one thing in common - an expression that does not radiate the contentment you might expect of someone who devoted his life to finding heaven on earth. He looks intensely unhappy. Not even a twinkle in his eye, the hint of a smile. Laughter is a lesson best learned early in life, and young George Alexander Aberle didn't get much chance to be happy.

Born poor in Brooklyn, 1908, sent to an orphanage, Aberle grew up in the depression, becoming a hobo, criss-crossing America in poverty. He got jobs where he could, played a little piano, and ended up in California, the promised land. In the 'thirties, he found welcome and a shared ideology with the Wandervogels,  a bunch of peaceful anarchists, mostly German, who'd rejected contemporary society and lived according to the back-to-nature tenets of Lebensreform. The Nazis had outlawed the movement, but kept the bits they liked - chasing each other naked through the woods, mostly - for the fun-loving Hitler Youth.

Aberle changed his name to Eden Ahbez, cut the soles off his shoes, sat in a tree and learned to play the flute. The first hippie? Not even close. Will Pester fled Germany to California in 1906 to escape military service, growing his hair and practicing free love and lap steel guitar in a Palm Springs shack, when shacks were the only real estate in Palm Springs, and Pester - almost unimaginably - the only white resident. Pester basically wrote the whole Hippie manual half a century before Today Malone sold flowers on Haight Street.

The original Nature Boy, Will Pester, inventing Americana, yesterday. Habitually naked, he dressed formal for the shoot. Note signed postcards - a source of tourist income - in shirt pocket.

Pester acted as mentor to Ahbez, who became the nominal leader of the Nature Boys.

Gypsy Boots top left, health foods pioneer and inventor of the smoothie. He'd later swing into Steve Allen's TV show dressed as Tarzan. Eden, looking unsure of himself, front left.

Ahbez wrote poetry and songs, and composed Nature Boy - ostensibly about Pester - in 1947 while living in a cave. The tune comes from a Jewish song - he’d learned Hebraic melodies at the Brooklyn orphanage. He finagled sheet music to Nat King Cole, who sat on it for a while before realising what a potential hit it was and hunting down the composer, then living rough under the Hollywood sign in some kind of personal manifest destiny. Cole's recording was a monster, monster hit, number one in the charts for eight weeks in 1948, spawning many cover versions by the biggest stars of the age. After royalties were settled, including a generous cut for a previous user of the original tune, but leaving out Dvorak and the anonymous traditional Czech folk composer who would have had an equal claim, Ahbez made a shitload of money which he didn't particularly want, or even need. Money couldn't stop his adored wife from dying of leukemia, or his son from drowning. Heaven on earth continued to elude him.

He cut an album in 1960, Eden's Island (The Music Of An Enchanted Isle). It was no match for even post-army Elvis pablum, and sat ignored in the easy listening racks alongside the straightest and squarest. These days, it's frequently referred to as a "masterpiece", and it would be wonderful if that were true. But he can't sing, and spoken word stretched over an album of bland exotica, featuring his uncertain flute playing, seemed like a product without a market.

Eden Ahbez was an honest, loving man at the genesis of a culture that would spread around the planet, a man who got lucky with one immortal song. He died in '95 after a car crash, aged eighty-six.

SMiLE, guys! Eden n' Bri, Gold Star Studios '67. Maybe the timing of the shot was unfortunate, but these guys aren't exactly communicating here. That's a wood flute Eden's holding. In case you were wondering.

This piece is a massively abbreviated account of an incredible, complex, and still largely undocumented life. An internet search will turn up a wealth of material.