Publishing mogul Felix Dennis was staring at the Caribbean Sea a few months ago, sucking down cocktails with fellow gazillionaires at Basil's Bar on the beach in Mustique. He mentioned his old friend Mick Farren, and a voice in the crowd raised an eyebrow. "That mad old cunt?" queried Mick Jagger. "He's still around?"

Despite his own best self-destructive efforts, Farren's still wheezing (can't shake that goddamned asthma), still a loon. The man Dennis became acquainted with three decades ago "while standing in the docks together waiting to be sent to prison," for the crime of being a card-carrying member of the underground press, is virtually unchanged. Except that he coddles his long-suffering liver now and again.

However, even Farren realizes it's tough to be a full-time anarchist when you're pushing 60. These days, the author/musician/conspiracy theorist/raconteur spends much of his time in a cluttered apartment off the heart of Melrose, staring at the television or into a black computer, trying for the umpteenth time to write the Great British Psychedelic Fantasy Novel, which, upon publication, will likely either be ignored, or, at best, dismissed as mediocre sci-fi.

He is in his office, surrounded by alien masks and other UFO detritus, a Che Guevara flag draping the curtains, Bart Simpson dolls, and evidence of his life's work - books, CDs, photos, handbills. Here, Farren dreams up new unrealities to sink his prose into; that is, when he isn't trading transcontinental can-you-top-this villanelle poems via fax with Dennis or playing gigs with the Deviants - the Fugs-inspired band he formed in the '60s and has periodically returned to ever since.

For almost 40 years, Farren's stormed through the counterculture like Zelig's Furry Freak Brother: he played with the Stones at Hyde Park in '68; had an affair with author Germaine Greer; was an editor at the New Musical Express in the mid-70s during the punk rock explosion; co-wrote an off-Broadway musical based on the last words of Dutch Schultz with ex-MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer. A remarkable, decidedly unmarketable life.

"He's the real thing, across the board: as a political artist, as a thinker, as a writer, as a lifelong participant in the avant garde," says journalist Mim Udovitch, who assigned Farren his first Village Voice article - an essay about why the British never floss their teeth. "He never got stuck in nostalgia for any of the movements he's been affiliated with and he has always produced original, progressive work. He's like the last bohemian standing."

***

Mick Farren sits at the back bar at Silver Lake's Spaceland on a lonely Thursday night in March, waiting to take the stage with the Deviants. You can't miss him - he's the geezer with the long velvet coat, barrelhouse gut, rock star hair the shape of a blow-dried barrister's wig, and round Lennon-esque glasses. Budweiser in hand, he bemusedly describes a successful gig the week before in San Diego, where the promoters did the band right respectfully, treating them to a bit of post-show cocaine.

There are no such celebrations at Spaceland. When the Deviants appear, shortly before midnight, about 20 people of varying degrees of interest remain in the club. Still, the show goes on and the band crank out noisy, agit-proppy rock for about 45 minutes. After 35 years onstage, Farren can still work it. "I'm a lousy singer, but an excellent rock star," he says later. He holds onto the mike stand for dear life with one hand, waving a cigarette like a wand with the other. When guitarist Andy Colquhoun periodically lets rip, Farren retreats, resting his body against a wall behind the stage. He huffs and puffs, wearily taking long drags, followed by hits off his asthma inhaler. He looks like he might explode.

Undeterred by this bad evening at the office, Farren returns to his home laboratory, where a typical day goes something like this: Roll out of bed with a pencil-thin joint of cheap-ass pot in one hand, flip a fag from a pack of Merit Ultralights (purchased in bulk from an Indian reservation) with the other. Scratch impressive mane and inhale impressive amounts of smoke, followed by a bone-shaking, loogie-coated cough. Reach for inhaler. It's 3 in the afternoon.

Later in the evening, Farren'll break to watch his beloved Simpsons. "As far as I'm concerned, The Simpsons is high art," he says. When the sun comes up, he'll call it a day. He's currently working on the fourth of his quartet of modern vampire novels for Tor Books (Darklost, The Time of Feasting, and the to-be-released later this year More Than Mortal are the others). The rock 'n' roll memoir Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, is also in the can, but hasn't a U.S. publisher. Heather Wood, his editor at Tor, says Farren is a consistent mid-list seller, which keeps him published, but Stephen King he ain't.

Farren's authored 22 books of fiction 11 of nonfiction, recorded more than a dozen albums (though few of either are actually still in print), and cranked out countless magazine articles. Composer Glenn Branca once hailed Farren's 1978 novel The Feelies, as the true birthing of cyberpunk.

Yet Farren has acquired neither riches nor fame. Well, he is recognized in Japan as the missing link between English hippies and punks. And in his homeland, Farren is an off-the-cuff legend, an always-entertaining talking head on British '60s documentary programs where he recounts his obscenity trial, his rock festival organizing (1970s disastrous Phun City, whose bill featured William Burroughs and the European debut of the MC5), and his trench work as an editor of the influential underground newspaper the International Times.

"We knew all about Mick Farren and the Deviants," remembers Joe Strummer. "I first came across them playing on a flat-bed truck up on the hill overlooking the Isle Of Wight Festival. They provided a fine soundtrack as the French anarchists attacked the double fence on the perimeter, and all hell broke loose."

Farren's world has always been a slight distance from the main stage, the sort of place where hell wrestles free from order, in the low-end parallel universe of cultdom. Which is fine, he says; reality never suited him much, anyway. Though the mainstream's knocked gingerly on occasion - screenplays that got sucked into turnaround purgatory, books that've been optioned, sometimes more than once - he's firmly ensconced on the bohemian fringe.

"Do I feel bad to do all this work that doesn't come to fruition? Of course I do," he says. "And even if it does get made, it's liable to be a horrible piece of crap anyway. The problem is that it is good money, but people get used to the good money and you up your nut. And after you've got the nut you panic even worse than you panic now and then you end up writing Alf and shooting heroin, apologies to Jerry Stahl."

Could it be.... paranoia? Certainly conspiracy theory's been part of his stock in trade since the Kennedy assassination. Henry Beck, a writer and drinking buddy of Farren's from New York, says his friend's stubborn attitude works against him when the money's on the table. Deep down, Micky is a bit of a sad boy with more brains than he knows what to do with. He's always prepared to be misjudged," Beck says. "He'll be at a producers meeting and suck down 18 Merits, wonder where the free drinks are, and they'll look at him like he's from outer space. He's a hard guy to market. He bites himself in the ass, but that's part of his charm."

Charming, yes, but also a bit of a mule about trench work. "My problem with his writing is that he doesn't rewrite," says Dennis. "I've always thought Mick could be a great writer if he had a dedicated editor. He doesn't go through agony of writing."

Farren's response? Fuck it, basically. "I have a short attention span," he says. "Let's just say I couldn't spend my life perfecting the unified field theory."

***

It's 1979, and Margaret Thatcher has driven Mick Farren from England to New York. He rings up Ira Robbins, querying him about writing a column for Trouser Press, a nascent 'zine covering the punk and new wave scene. The young editor is overjoyed. "We were little kids and it was fantastic that someone of his caliber wanted to be friends with us," Robbins says. He broke the editorial piggy bank for Farren's column, called "Surface Noise" - $50 - but they were thrilled to pay it.

And I was thrilled to read it. As a wannabe suburban punk growing up deep in the San Fernando Valley, Trouser Press was my travelogue to the outside world. I was a serious disciple of "Surface Noise," with its hard-boiled, melodramatically apocalyptic style. The Rev. Farren could prophesize doom with the best of them; amid articles about Spandau Ballet and Southern punk rockers, he's in another universe altogether, ranting about the terror of the Reagan administration.

Like Robbins, I was stoked when Farren expressed an interest in writing for the Los Angeles Reader, where I was managing editor, in 1993. He'd moved to L.A. a few years earlier, partially at the behest of his girlfriend, partially to take a crack at Hollywood, thinking there might be a place for him after the success of David Lynch's Blue Velvet and Quentin Tarrantino's Reservoir Dogs.

I too gave him a column, called "Panic In the Year Zero," but paid him a princely sum of $100 - on publication, a big deal for a paper not known to dole out editorial checks for up to two months.

The Reader indulged Farren's soapbox: TV, conspiracies, Howard Stern, TV, UFO's, TV, smoker's rights. Like many others before me, I got to know Farren while seated next to him on a barstool, at L.A.'s finer taverns - the Formosa, Three of Clubs, Cat and Fiddle. He held court in his high-pitched middle-class Queen's English, the wizened old coot giving the kid advice about how it's all supposed to be done.

Of course, everyone has a Farren story, and they all seem to involve alcohol. Such as the time Farren and Wayne Kramer were mistaken for a couple of "faggots," narrowly escaping a major fracas. "Back in my drinking days, we generally would get hammered everywhere we went," Kramer says. "We were at a rough and tumble bar on the Lower East Side and talking about what great guys we were; I may have given him a kiss. Some fellows took exception, manly men. Some remarks were passed back and forth." They were tossed from the bar before it got ugly.

Or the days when he played a weekly poker game at Felix Dennis' Soho flat in London. According to Dennis, Farren was a fearsome poker player. One evening, Farren was sure he had a winning hand. Problem was, he was out of money. So he stood up and tossed his belt - which had an impressively large turquoise-adorned silver buckle - on the table. At which point his leather trousers fell to his ankles. "He's a good gambler, but he needs a manager, Dennis says. "He needs someone to whisper in his ear and tell him to go to bed."

My stories were more garden variety: I drove him home when he was too pissed to stand up, pretended not to notice when he spat up on the bar, and held him steady when we was wobbling. But he also held me steady, and I treasured his history with the underground press and his curmudgeonly, almost quaint stance against authority. He was like a cartoon version of the '60s in the flesh. Everyone bent a little bit. Not Mick.

He became a mentor and a hero, a professional moral standard by which I could never measure. Most memorably, he attended my mother's funeral in 1994. With his ever-present black leather jacket, wild 'fro, and cowboy boots, he blended in beautifully at the chapel. Could have been one of my mom's ex-boyfriends, in fact.

Mick traveled to the service with another friend, writer David Ulin. Driving up the 405, Ulin described frustration over a piece he was writing, stressing about structure and voice. Farren, as usual, had a simple, logical solution. "Don't worry about art. Just have fun."

***

Mick Farren was born in 1943, and raised in a minuscule village called Clapham ("300 people and a goat"), where his mother bred boxers. "The great secret of me is I'm a country boy," he says. "I always gravitated to the largest cities because I wanted to get out. Fuck them hippies going back to the country. The country sucks, man. It's full of bad-tempered, stupid people and hostile farmers and religion and god knows what. It's no fucking fun. My idea of a good time is not to watch the traffic lights."

Farren was an unhappy only child; his father was killed during World War II, and he was raised by a "horrendous stepfather," he says. He retreated from the monotony of life by concocting elaborate fantasy worlds, a tactic that would come in handy when it came time to earn a living. "I have entertained the ideas of alternative universes for as long as I can remember," he says. "I would go away for days on end and become Flash Gordon, interrupted only for meals. And I've been much the same way ever since."

He quickly blossomed into an angry young man in wait, manifesting in his proclivity for blowing shit up, such as the local bus shelter. "I was a very good bomb maker by the age of 10," he says. Showing an aptitude for drawing, art school eventually replaced explosives as Farren's primary creative outlet, which was just as well. "They don't call it performance art in small towns, you know," he says. "They call it a felony."

Of course, British art school in the '60s was little more than Pop Star U. "It was like going to bohemian camp for four years," Farren says of his stint at St. Martin's in London. "The girls told you what to wear and thus was born the Rolling Stones and the Pretty Things and The Who and the Deviants. Without art schools, there would be no British invasion."

Fueled by Bob Dylan, the first Fugs album, early Velvet Underground demos dubiously obtained, and fistfuls of amphetamine, the Deviants were born in 1966. Not that anyone could have cared less. Their rough garage snarl scared off British record labels. "'Piss off and die' was as constructive as it got," Farren says. "'You're fucking terrible.'"

So the Deviants put out their first record, 1967s Ptooff! themselves, and soon became regulars at London's swingin' UFO club and on the English ballroom and festival circuit. The counterculture was becoming commodified and the attention got pretty heavy for the shy, insecure boy from the country. "It's like surfing for the first time," Farren says. "You can't look around and enjoy it because you're too busy staying on the board. It was complete overload, moving into dementia. Because we already decided to top off this already fairly complex ice cream sundae with a cherry of marijuana, and then LSD. Jesus Christ, nobody had a prayer."

Least of all the lead singer, who was going bonkers. After three Deviants albums, Farren was tossed from the band, while on tour in Vancouver. "I was completely insane," he remembers. "I was totally drugged for almost three years. I actually collapsed and went to hospital the moment I got home. I was a basket case."

Farren made a solo record, Mona -- the Carnivorous Circus, in 1970 and had a cup of tea with the Pink Fairies, but he was burnt to a crisp with music. Instead, he turned to the relatively sedate world of underground journalism. He landed at the International Times while moonlighting as a doorman at the UFO and dabbling with the White Panthers. Operating the IT -- whose sister publication, Oz, was run by Felix Dennis -- was a struggle, often relying on the kindness of rich freaks like Pete Townshend and John and Yoko to make payroll.

Life underground also meant you were never above suspicion from Scotland Yard. When a militant group called the Angry Brigade began setting off explosives in London in 1970, Farren's home was raided by the bomb squad, where they found nothing more than a quarter ounce of hash, which Farren was ordered to flush down the toilet.

There would be more trouble with the law. Farren was slapped with an obscenity charge as the editor of a comic book called Nasty Tales, a compilation of racy British and U.S. strips. Soon after the first issue was published in 1971, Farren, his partner, cartoonist Ed Barker, and two others, were arrested. "It was serious obscenity, two years in jail," he says. "We spent 18 months preparing for trial, went to trial, got acquitted and I decided I didn't want to play that game any longer."

Instead, he decided to make use of all those Flash Gordon adventures played out in his head. His first sci-fi novel, The Quest of the DNA Cowboys, was published in 1976. "I wanted to do a form of science fiction that used a kind of surrealist imagery that was in the advanced rock 'n' roll song,," he says of his early work. "In rock 'n' roll songs you get little vignettes. You had to imagine it for yourself. The predominant pop culture around it soaked through - anything from spaghetti westerns to Bruce Lee movies. I was trying to make all that mesh in a form of science fiction that kind of logically followed on from the '60s new wave and Bill Burroughs and Harlan Ellison, trying to get beyond that and what Bill had done previously and wasn't doing anymore. Stick all that in the blender and you add your own touch."

To support his writing, Farren began working for the New Musical Express just as punk was breaking in the U.K. But the corporate NME took a toll on Farren's soul. "I didn't like being at the NME. It was a hard wrench to be working for the man and made me quite alcoholic." His 1978 album Vampires Stole My Lunch Money provides a horrifying time capsule of the artist's psyche at the time. The record's a sonic car crash of self-degradation, whose titles include "Half Price Drinks," "I Want a Drink," "Drunk In the Morning," and "(I Know From) Self Destruction." He felt better when he changed continents and got to New York, except that it was like Disneyland for boozehounds. "I had a serious problem with 24-hour drinking," Farren says. "Not a drinking problem, but the temptation was kind of overwhelming."

Despite his conspicuous consumption, Farren continued to pump out books, even making a stab at a broader audience 1980, at the behest of an editor. "I was sternly told that I really ought to pull back and take some of the ideas I've got and Star War-ize them, and I might have a successful book, which kind of proved true," he says. The result was 1981s The Song of Phaid the Gambler, which he's described as Maverick in the far distant future.

But between a divorce and drinking, New York was slowly killing him. "If he had stayed in New York, Mick would've ended up in Bellvue," says Beck. "Any city where he could walk to his choice of taverns was the wrong choice. He was often waking up some distance from where he wanted to be. Not a fun thing."

**

Given Farren's aversion to driving, and the dreadful state of taxi service, Los Angeles might be the safest big city on earth for him. It's certainly given him a chance to glean some adult perspective. "I find Mick Jagger kind of stupid actually," he says. "The guy's running around singing 'has anybody seen my baby' and picking up girls at his daughter's birthday party. I feel that what you have to do is try to move into some sort of old gunfighter mode. I ain't young and sassy any longer."

Tellingly, he's even willing to allow himself to be labeled, sort of, joining the Horror Writers of America, if only for the pragmatic purpose of getting health insurance.

"Aside from joining the union, I don't want to be defined," says the old and sassy author. "You know, I'm a fucking hippie poet who writes psychedelic novels and the fact that it falls in the realm of File Under is a bit frustrating. Fuck it."