Hippie icon, former Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor and official "clown prince" of the Grateful Dead, Wavy Gravy is probably best known for emceeing the first Woodstock Festival, where he famously said, "What we have in mind...is breakfast in bed for 400,000!"

But in the nearly 40 years since, Gravy (a.k.a. Hugh Romney) has also spearheaded efforts to cure blindness, prevent Native American diabetes and provide a healthy dose of laughter-as-medicine for the tired and disillusioned. He has done this largely as the fundraiser for the Seva Foundation--the nonprofit he helped found in 1978 along with Ram Dass, Google's philanthropy CEO Larry Brilliant and others.

May 15 marks Gravy's 72nd birthday, which will be celebrated with a sold-out concert at the 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley. Proceeds benefit Camp Winnarainbow, the circus and performing arts camp run by Gravy and his wife for the past 35 years.

With Seva turning 30 and the birthday blowout at 142 Throck on the horizon, we talked to Gravy at his home in Berkeley about the upcoming Wavy Gravy documentary, a Woodstock-for-kids book he's writing and his overall colorful tie-dyed history.

YOUR DOCUMENTARY--SAINT MISBEHAVIN': THE LIFE & TIME OF WAVY GRAVY--HAS BEEN IN THE WORKS FOR OVER EIGHT YEARS NOW. WHAT'S THE HOLDUP?

Documentaries take a long time, I'm told. It's been odd, having a film crew following me around for so long. It's like another set of skin, almost. But it'll be coming out in January, we think at Sundance--they invited us last year. In fact, they even extended the presentation time for us to make it. But my executive producer, D.A. Pennebaker--he's the guy that did "Monterey Pop" and "Don't Look Back"--he said, "We're not making a movie for Sundance; we're making a movie to make a movie."

It's an enormous amount of work and time that's gone into this darn thing.

HOW DID YOU, A NON-MUSICIAN, BECOME SO ASSOCIATED WITH ROCK 'N' ROLL?

Well, I was a teenage beatnik. And we took over a pizza parlor in the basement of a bar on Huntington Avenue in Boston and we started jazz and poetry on the East Coast, before anyone did it in New York or anywhere. And I began reading my poems at the coffeehouses, ending up in the Gaslight. I talked the owner into allowing us to have folk music in-between poems. And my timing was fortuitous--it was the launching of the great folk revival.

I remember when Bob Dylan first came in. He was wearing Woody Guthrie's underwear, I'm not kidding. He says, "Hey, can I go on?" And it was a hoot--I just grabbed the mike and I said, "Here he is! A legend in his lifetime! [In a stage-whisper] What's your name, kid?" Well, we ended up sharing a room over the Gaslight. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" was written on my typewriter.

HOW DID THE POETRY READINGS MORPH INTO EMCEEING ROCK FESTIVALS?

As time went by, it became extremely tedious for me to just keep reading these darn poems, so I began to talk about the weird stuff that happened to me from day to day. And next thing you know, I'm opening for John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk.

HOW LONG DID THAT LAST?

We're just beginning to kick into the early '60s...I went down to L.A., met my beautiful wife, who at that time had a restaurant. She put peanuts in my hamburger and I fell in love.

OBVIOUSLY, A SPECIAL WOMAN.

My wife and I put on an event in Southern California--we had arranged to do a sunset tribute to [avant-garde monologist] Lord Richard Buckley. We had mailed out all the invitations with maps on how to get to this very special mountain in Topanga Canyon, called Moonfire. And uh, the night before, it was raining and raining and people are calling up, "What are we gonna do?"

WELL, WHAT DID YOU DO?

I come down in the morning and there are 50 people in Day-Glo clothes in my kitchen, cooking eggs. Well, it's the Grateful Dead and the [Merry] Pranksters--they've arrived to do their show at the Unitarian Church in the Valley, called "Can You Pass the Acid Test?" And it's raining and raining and I couldn't take it anymore and I said, "OK, call off the sunset--let's all go to the Unitarian Church and do this acid test thing."

As it was getting toward sunset, a bunch of us drove to Topanga and walked down this muddy road in the pouring rain. And the minute that we got to the spot, the rain stopped, the clouds parted and the most beautiful sunset that anybody ever saw in the history of their lives went down. And I was so embarrassed that I had called off the sunset.

So ever since, whenever I am scheduled for an event--I don't care if the place is on fire, underwater...man, I'll get a snorkel! I'll do it. Even if only three people show up, it turns out that it's worth it in the long run. So that was the message I got from Lord Buckley, who said [dramatically], "The flowers, yes, the flowers! But the people are the true flowers! And it has been a pleasure to momentarily stroll in your garden." So yeah...

HOW DID YOU GO FROM THERE TO STAYING AT THE HOG FARM?

My wife and I moved to a cabin in the woods. We'd had enough acid tests. But the [Merry] Pranksters called us up and said, "Look, they're doing a shoot for the cover of 'Life' magazine. And we'd like for you to be a part of it with us and the Grateful Dead."

And while we were posing for the cover of "Life" magazine, [Merry Prankster] Ken Babbs stole the bus and suddenly we had, like, 45 houseguests. The landlord went insane. You can't have 47 people living in one room. And so we were evicted. But an hour-and-a-half later a neighbor comes down the road and says, "Old Sal up on the mountain had a stroke, they need somebody to slop them hogs!" So we were given a mountaintop rent-free, and were to take care of these gigantic beasts. At that time I was teaching improvisation to neurologically handicapped kids in Pasadena, and later at Cal State. But that's why they still call us to this day, "The Hog Farm."

HOW DID YOU AND THE HOG FARMERS END UP AT WOODSTOCK?

I'm part of an expanded family--I'm just a clog in the hog. They'd elected me as the tongue dancer, but how we do things is we get in a circle and everybody has input. And what we wanted to do was to go on the road to help stop the war and raise consciousness--and that was the Hog Farm and Friends Open Celebration, which turned out to be a convoy of buses driving around the country, putting on shows.

So then [Woodstock documentary producers] Warner Brothers says, "Duh--let's make a movie about that, and at different stops, we'll fly in our big stars, like Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell and Jethro Tull and like that." And then prior to this film, we got pulled off the road to do this music festival in New York called Woodstock.

WE UNDERSTAND YOU'RE WRITING A CHILDREN'S BOOK ABOUT WOODSTOCK?

Yeah, it's plodding along. My son is doing the art for it. He's very busy, so it's going at its own speed. I wanted [to include] the sharing and caring. Janis Joplin had this line in the film, or maybe it didn't even make it into the film, where she said to the throng, "If you have any food left, share it with your brother and sister, and that's the person on your left and the person on your right." And people got a whole print about sharing and that's what it's about. I want people to be able to explain Woodstock to their grandchildren, or their children or like that.

HOW WILL YOU ADDRESS THE SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK 'N' ROLL ASPECT OF WOODSTOCK?

Yeah, well, I don't think I'm gonna put too much sex and drugs but there'll be a bit of rock and roll, and perhaps there'll be some inference to other stuff--but it'll be very low-key. We'll see.

YOU COME FROM A TIME WHEN ROCK AND ROLL WAS ASSOCIATED WITH ACTIVISM--WHERE'S TODAY'S ACTIVISM?

Well, Vietnam was raging and the music stood up against the war, as we did. I mean, it went on and on and on--but what made it different and what put the young people in the frontlines was the draft. See, because there's no draft [now]. And because Bush, very brilliantly, is not showing the bodies when they come off the planes. This has been a record month for violence but it hasn't even made it to the front page, you know. It's just humiliating. I mean, we put 10 million people in the streets in protest against this war when it first started out. And Bush had a nap.

THE ANTI-IRAQ WAR MOVEMENT SEEMS AT A LOSS.

We're starting to pose it differently; we're starting to make a change in the Congress and, hopefully, in the presidency. Now I'm just hoping that our next leader will pull us out. I've been supporting the Nobody for President Campaign since 1976...I still think Nobody's perfect.

ASIDE FROM NOBODY, DO YOU ENDORSE A CANDIDATE?

I've thrown in my support--well, Nobody made me do it--for Barack Obama. It's the only political candidate that the Grateful Dead has supported. And he had me after Iowa.

WHAT'S YOUR PROUDEST ACCOMPLISHMENT THUS FAR?

I think my greatest legacy--and it'll be obvious when people finally see the movie--is the kids of Camp Winnarainbow. We're not trying to produce little circus stars or stars of the stage and screen. It does happen. But what we are producing, with all this circus skills and stuff, are timing and balance. I mean they can learn their numbers and letters in school but there's a whole hemisphere of the brain that's almost totally ignored in our culture, whereas we develop these kids that can deal with anything that comes down the pike, with timing, balance, compassion and hopefully, a very well-developed sense of humor! And laughter is the valve on the pressure cooker of life.

WHAT'S THE SECRET TO LIFE, WAVY?

I'm in it for the buzz, man! There is a high when you--like Ken Kesey told me--"Always put your good where it'll do the most." And I mean I really, really, really heard that. What great advice that was.

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