Steve Lacy

Brion Gysin was a Renaissance man in a century with a 15-second attention span. In a world where people are known for “doing one thing well,” Brion mastered a variety of disciplines which he employed to express himself at any given moment. Gysin was a painter, author, editor, musical anthropologist, inventor, philosopher, mystic and restaurateur. And to add insult to injury, he wore each of those hats with ease and remarkable panache. Surrealist ringleader Andre Breton, Beat novelist William S. Burroughs and Rolling Stone, Brian Jones all recognized his brilliance, yet Brion’s work, for some reason went virtually un-noticed by the public.

As an artist, Gysin painted otherworldly figures that danced around the canvas like cryptic Arabic and Japanese calligraphy. He was embraced and then quickly expelled (for vague reasons) by the Surrealists. In truth, Brion simply wasn’t the type to espouse the party platform, no matter how bizarre the doctrine. (Although he’s been associated with the Beats through his connection to Burroughs, Gysin would never claim to be one of that clubby bunch either.)

Gysin (L) Burroughs (R)

Most folks find it difficult to comprehend how one person could create such a tremendously diverse body of work. That troublesome cliché – a jack of all trades and master of none simply doesn’t fit in Brion’s case. There was nothing half-assed about Gysin’s multi-disciplinary approach to art. For those that didn’t get it, or couldn’t accept one man producing novels (The Process, The Last Museum) paintings, recordings and a device which induced a trance-like state called The Dream Machine, he let his pal William Burroughs do the talking. “Brion was incapable of fakery!” the infamous junkie novelist snarled.

Steve Lacy is the soft-spoken master of the soprano saxophone. He first came to prominence accompanying Thelonious Monk. An ex-patriate, living in Paris, Steve has been frightfully prolific, releasing dozens of albums. Lacy has had many fruitful collaborations – most notably with pianist Mal Waldron and his wife for over thirty years, vocalist/violinist Irene Aebi. (“And it just keeps getting better,” Lacy said, regarding Irene.)

Like Brian Jones, Ornette Coleman and the rest of the world, Steve Lacy was originally introduced to the passionate swirling trance music of The Master Musicians of Jajouka through Brion Gysin.

John Kruth – When and where did you first meet Brion Gysin?

Steve Lacy – I don’t know when I didn’t know Brion. We got together in ’72 but our paths had been coming together for a while before that. We were working on similar things in different areas. I met him in Paris at Victor Herbert’s house where Irene and I were living as caretakers. Brion came to a party one time and we met and started talking. I hadn’t realized that I had heard him years before on an English record of electronic poetry. I think it was his pistol poem and some of his other manipulations and permutations like “I Am That I Am.”

Kruth: How did your collaboration begin?

Lacy: I knew he was the inventor of the Dream Machine and I had a song called “Dreams” and was unhappy with the lyrics, so I gave the melody to Brion to write some new lyrics. It was astonishing, absolutely like a dream. It worked beautifully and we recorded it in ’75 with Irene singing in two voices in major seconds with a sextet. It’s been re-released on a triple CD in Paris from Sarava. It includes a couple things we did with Brion along with “Somebody Special.”

Kruth: What was your writing process like?

Lacy: It was a wonderful, very unusual collaboration. Sometimes we’d do a performance where he would read and I would play melodies, or I’d set his lyrics to music and Irene would sing them. It was a lot of fun to just wing it. We were between words and music really.

Kruth: So his words were the spark for the music.

Lacy: Every time he read, it was different. I listened to his voice a lot and talked with him and set his lyrics to music. The melodies were taken from the sound of his voice, the way he read. Brion was a great reader and a great performer. He really knew what to do with a microphone. He had a great voice and could improvise like a jazz musician.

Kruth: Were there any particular performances or pieces that still stand out in your mind?

Lacy: Through the years we worked together a lot and produced nineteen songs, stage works and performed together in Amsterdam, Paris and Italy, at poetry festivals and museums. We did a version of “Naked Lunch” based on Brion’s cut-ups as a dance/theater piece. It was performed in Italy and France but we never took it anywhere else. There were two dancers in black leather, the sextet, two singers and décor by Brion. Brion’s slides were projected. It was wild! The show was called “Brackets,” that was in 1982, in Milan. It was a really far-out show. We did a lot of theatrical things although we never could bring them to America.

Kruth: Wow, what a shame! Brion was involved in so many things. It’s odd how he was ignored.

Lacy: Brion had many, many lives, in different parts of the world with all kinds of different professions, from heavy labor to Broadway productions. He had connections to so many different circles of people. Lots of important people in my life I met through Brion. Many other people also had the same experience. He was a catalyst! Brion had certain powers. He was a uniquely charged, charmed person. I mean, to me, he was a genius. He was a multi-faceted genius. People couldn’t believe he could do all those things. In the mid seventies he did a photomontage. He took a camera, a Leica, which he focused on the Pompadeu Museum, which was being built at that time. He took an apartment right across the street from it and took a series of still photographs, creating permutations of the view. They were some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. Brion had a show at a little obscure gallery in Paris, Gallerie Raph, I think it was. When you walked in and saw all these crazy colors, in a series like that, it just hit you right in the eye. The show was a knockout and not one piece was sold! The gallery was completely empty. His work was ignored.

Kruth: Well, at least your music better appreciated in Paris!

Lacy: Most of what I’ve done in Paris goes right by people, then twenty years later it comes back, re-issued. They’re a little bit slow there for certain things. But you could get wasted anywhere. You could starve to death in Paris and hit the skids here (in NYC)!

The Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar (photo by Kruth)

Kruth: Did Brion ever take you to Jajouka, to play with the Master Musicians?

Lacy: I didn’t know him when he lived in Morocco. I knew him from Paris, in ’72 until he died. We jammed with Bachir’s father. There’s a cassette of that floating around somewhere. Brion had a vision and arranged it and sure enough it worked out great. I met them (The Master Musicians) at somebody’s house outside of Paris and we played (later on) in Casablanca.

Kruth: There’s a story that some nuns at a Catholic school brainwashed Brion into believing he had a tin ear and absolutely no musical aptitude.

Lacy: “He was extremely musical. I thought Brion was a musical genius! I gave him back music in a way but he already had it from Morocco. That kind of music he could deal with. He had been very frustrated. When I first met him, Brion had been carrying around the lyrics to ‘Nowhere Street’ since 1949. They were the lyrics for an un-produced Broadway show based on the life of Uncle Tom. The idea was to make a musical based on the book (‘And To Master, A Long Goodnight’) he had written. He had talked with composers and producers but nothing came of it. Brion showed me the lyrics and I flipped. That was the beginning of our collaboration. I set “Nowhere Street” to music in ’79.

JK – Yeah, that’s on Songs, the album you made together. That album is absolutely brilliant! It’s one of the hippest records I’ve heard in my life! Years ago I had a radio show on a college station in Milwaukee and played the living hell out of it. A couple of cuts were “not suitable for airplay,” particularly “Luvzya,” his rap poem. People were absolutely shocked, calling the station saying, “What the hell is this?”

Lacy - I’m afraid that album’s out of print now. He put so much love and work in that. Brion was there in the studio, listening to us in ecstasy while we performed his songs… The thing that impressed me most about Brion was his taste and discretion and his humor and of course his erudition. This cat had educated himself – he knew literature, painting and music and theatre and dance. His taste in music was pretty good. Brion appreciated (and worked with) Don Cherry. At the same time he also had a cheap, trashy side where he liked low-class junk music. He was really, as he would say “multi-farious.” He had a trashy side but he had a golden side too.

Kruth: How did Brion manage to completely slip through the cracks? Do you think he purposely dodged fame?

Lacy: No, Brion craved attention and he deserved attention but he took it from unlikely sources. I don’t know what happened with the surrealist show. There is so much jealousy, deception, intrigue and shenanigans going on in Paris, and that surrealist group was full of those things. That was a trauma that really hurt Brion terribly. He was pretty young at the time because it was back around 1936. He had an astonishing life if you add up all the things he’s done. I have a couple of his drawings from Morocco that are just beautiful. The same guy that made those also wrote (the novel) “The Process,” made photomontages, created performance pieces and wrote song lyrics. Burroughs said Brion was the only man he respected and trusted. Burroughs really loved Brion and vice versa. We were very tight. We were dear, dear friends. I loved the guy. Frankly, I have the feeling that it’s still early to talk about Brion. He’s like an unknown quantity.

EVS in his backyard, Westport, Ct circa 1989 - (photo by Kruth)

Never underestimate the impact a harmonica in the bottom of a Christmas stocking might have on an unsuspecting youth. Or the fate one’s life might suddenly take after receiving a gift of a ukulele, courtesy of an adoring aunt. Of course the power of the media can be overwhelming – in Eric von Schmidt’s case, it was radio, having grown up before the proliferation of television. His love of music began with pop songs heard on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade. Hiding under covers late at night, he listened to the Grande Ole Opry, against parental orders, (not that his folks had a problem with hillbilly music – they just didn’t want their son staying up past eleven). Before he’d even heard of the folk process Eric was improvising lyrics to old songs – mostly dirty limericks to entertain his older brother Pete and his gang of buddies. Von Schmidt’s illustrious illustrator father Harold, whose portraits of the rustic American west regularly graced the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, soon bought his son a fifty dollar Gibson guitar. In 1948 Eric caught an earful of Lead Belly’s “honey-smooth” voice on WQXR out of New York, inspiring him to track down Huddie Ledbetter’s album Negro Sinful Songs. Just six strings short of the King of the 12-string guitar, von Schmidt dubbed himself Lead Belly’s devoted disciple and worked up a killer rendition of “Good Night Irene,” in hopes of charming a comely high school lass by the same name. A spirited teenager, Eric was not deterred when Irene failed to put out or by the lack of applause from the atrophied audience at his debut gig at the local Methodist church.

When a friend claimed to have seen a big black man with a head of wooly white hair much like Lead Belly’s just ten miles away in Wilton, Eric scoffed at the tale; doubtful the Southern music legend would be found in the uptight white suburbs of Yankee New England. A few days later von Schmidt sadly discovered his hero’s obituary in the newspaper. Ledbetter it seems was survived by his wife, the former Martha Promise, of Wilton, Connecticut.

During a stint in the army beginning in 1952, von Schmidt happened to read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and began ordering peyote from Moore’s Orchid Ranch of Laredo, Texas. Five dollars bought between one hundred to one hundred and fifty buttons, including shipping costs, delivered with love by the U.S. Mail. Amazingly enough the vision inducing plant was completely legal at the time! With an honorable discharge, Corporal von Schmidt headed to the sands of Sarasota to paint, frame pictures and build a boat named for John Hurt (the blues man, not the actor).

By ’55 Eric had won a Fulbright Scholarship and took off to Italy with paintbrush and pallet, only to discover much to his dismay that his five-string banjo pickin’ drove the locals crazy. Back in Cambridge by the summer of ‘57 von Schmidt lived the carefree bohemian life, gigging regularly at local coffee houses (although Eric has emphatically stated that coffee has never been his idea of “a real drink.” As Eric, Geoff and Amos wisely advise, “Better stick to rum”). He soon became a fixture at the legendary Club 47, all the while painting and drafting the occasional poster for Joan Baez’s concerts.

In 1961 he collaborated up with communist scholar/guitarist Rolf Cahn (who already recorded for Folkways) cutting an album of country blues and folk songs. Showing up on von Schmidt’s doorstep like a ragged, pudgy Huck Finn was Bob Dylan who crashed on his couch while taking a crash course in the folk blues, making quick studies of Eric’s renditions of “He Was a Friend of Mine,” “Wasn’t That A Mighty Storm” and “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.”

EVS with Farina & Dylan doing the overseas stomp.

On New Year’s Eve 1963, Eric flew the coop, hooking up with his irrepressible compadre the Cuban/Irish dulcimer strumming/ songwriter/author Richard Farina in London, where they played hoots, a communist wedding and recorded an obscure album, accompanied on harmonica by a trans-Atlantic troubadour named Blind Boy Grunt (AKA Bob Dylan). That same year Dylan cut his debut album for Columbia, dropping von Schmidt’s name on the spoken intro of his version of “Baby, Let Me Lay It On You” (It seems the song’s title as well as its author has changed from time to time over the years. Although it’s been attributed to von Schmidt, Dylan and Reverend Gary Davis, the tune originally appeared on a 78 by Blind Boy Fuller).

’63 also saw the release of The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt on Prestige Records, best known as the home of cutting edge jazzmen like Eric Dolphy and Cannonball Adderly. Accompanied by Geoff Muldaur on guitar and Fritz Richmond on washtub bass of the Kweskin Jug Band, the album is a classic of its genre.

He was soon off to the farm in Henniker, New Hampshire, to make art and babies, all the while illustrating kids books, songbooks and dozens of record jackets for Vanguard (dig those fine-lined portraits of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Reverend Gary Davis).

1965 was clearly a watershed year for all. In the wake of last year’s Eric sings von Schmidt, (his first album of all original material) Ric made his first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, growling “Grizzly Bear” to a capacity crowd, while Dick and Mimi Farina’s fans danced wildly in the pouring rain and mud, three years before the blissed out hippies at Woodstock. But it was Dylan who held the trump card, electrifying the folk world with a little help from Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. His fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home hit the street spreading the on von Schmidt with an ad campaign better than any Madison Avenue agency could ever have dreamed up. On the album’s surrealist blurred cover sat Bob in his finest British mod guise, caressing a gray kitten surrounded by a batch of his favorite records. Lotte Lenya, Robert Johnson, Ravi Shankar, The Impressions and Lord Buckley were all represented as well as his own Another Side of Bob Dylan and The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt. And that’s where I, and most of my generation got on board. I begged my mom to drive me over to Two Guys From Harrison, a discount department store and with the money I had saved raking leaves, bought every disc on that record jacket I could find. After all, they came recommended by Bob himself. Eclectic as Dylan’s taste was, (having just passed my first decade, I wasn’t quite ready for Lotte Lenya and Robert Johnson, I must admit was rather scary) many of those artists have remained life-long personal favorites.

Unquestionably it was Eric von Schmidt that spoke most directly to me. At the time my sister’s beatnik boyfriend had already begun taking me to see Mance Lipscomb and Reverend Gary Davis at a local college that sponsored monthly folk concerts. To this day I thank God my sister preferred shopping for shoes at Altman’s to witnessing the spectacle of hollering, sweaty Negro blues men.

In case we still had missed the boat, Dylan returned again writing a set of brilliant liner notes for Who Knocked the Brains Out of the Sky, Eric’s 1969 psychedelic folk rock opus. Championing his old pal’s cause, Bob claimed “the glad, mad, sad, biting, exciting, frightening, crabby, happy enlightening, hugging, chugging” legend of the Cambridge folk scene, “whose name itself had become a password,” “could sing the bird off the wire and the rubber off the tire.” In his best Muhammad Ali bravado Dylan continued boasting and toasting like a phat rapper with the mike in his hand. “He can separate the men from the boys and the note from the noise. The bridle from the saddle and the cow from the cattle. He can play the tune of the moon. The why of the sky and the commotion of the ocean.” Now what could anyone possibly add to that? One has to wonder why this man wallowed in obscurity for so many years.

No matter how “the voice of his generation” crowed about the magnificence of von Schmidt’s music, art would always take the front seat in Eric’s Oldsmobile. He soon became immersed in a series of fantastic murals depicting decisive moments in American history such as the Seminole King Osceola signing the Treaty of Removal, Custer’s Last Stand and The Alamo,

Von Schmidt did not record again until 1970 when Poppy Records graciously footed the bill for 2^nd Right, 3^rd Row. With friends like Geoff and Maria Muldaur, Amos Garrett, Paul Butterfield and Garth Hudson of The Band (looking like the re-incarnation of Brahms with a squeezebox) dropping by Woodstock’s Bearsville Studio, the sessions resulted in a sonic jewel of pure beatitude.

Which at last, brings us to the disc you hold in your hands. A year later, in the fall of 1971, old friend producer/singer/guitarist Jim Rooney (with whom von Schmidt would soon collaborate on their Bible of the Cambridge folk scene, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down) booked another date with Eric at Bearsville Studio. Joining the jam this time was Christopher Parker, the young drummer who wowed the crowd at Woodstock with his mesmerizing solo on Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice.” Rick Danko and Crescent City legend Bobby Charles round out the ad hoc Greek chorus of Maria, Geoff and Amos on the haunting “Lost In The Woods.” The old standby “Stewball” (originally “Sku-ball” in Ireland, a derogatory name for a horse with no pedigree”) was culled from Leadbelly’s songbook. Garth bumps the groove with a growling pump organ while Maria spreads the sweetest harmony this side of Mrs. Butterworth’s soul kitchen. Speaking of kitchens, this home recording of “Fast Acne” (a hysterical Zorba the Greek-inspired remake of the original tune which appeared on Eric Sings von Schmidt) was cut in a fit of inspiration on Eric’s two-track Wolensack at his beachfront house in Sarasota. But with 1972 came the untimely demise of Poppy Records and with it, the unreleased Living On The Trail slipped into oblivion.

Geoff Muldaur- backstage at the Club 47 Reunion at Boston Symphony Hall. The reunion took place over two nights, December 28th and 29th 1984 (photo by Kruth)

Nearly fourteen years later I made the acquaintance of Geoff Muldaur, while the blues warbler was in the midst of some serious bird watching on Martha’s Vineyard. He informed me that Eric had recently returned to his parent’s home in Westport from Provo, Utah after a strange string of deaths in his immediate family.

Living down the road from him, in Greenwich, I thought I’d pay the legend a visit. He in turn invited me to a gig he was playing with some friends at Boston Symphony Hall that December. And suggested I bring along my mandolin.

It seems Tom Rush had organized a 25^th Anniversary reunion concert of Club 47 performers. Among them were Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Mimi Farina, Peter Rowan, Bill Keith and Jim Rooney and the Kweskin Jug Band (sans Jim and the mysterious Mel Lyman). Not all the great music took place on stage that glorious weekend. There was plenty of jamming backstage and at pickin’ parties in hotel rooms until the wee hours of the early morn.

Richard Greene, Peter Rowan, Bill Keith and Jim Rooney warming up backstage at the Club 47 Reunion (photo by Kruth)

While biding adieu, Jim Rooney kindly invited me to drop by if I was ever down in Nashville. A few months later I took him up on his word, and crashed on his couch for a weekend. At the time Rooney was working for the legendary producer Cowboy Jack Clement. His apartment was filled with music - guitars, old records, and piles of tapes. Most intriguing were the two track masters Rooney had squirreled away from his days in Bearsville. Most of them were marked with the name of the performer, the date and the instruments they played. Suddenly one jumped off the shelf, in an anonymous blank white case with no identifying marks other than a shopping list scrawled in pencil across the back - dishwashing liquid, eggs, beer, potatoes… that sort of thing. I cued up Rooney’s reel-to-reel and pushed play. A familiar sounding guitar came bounding out of the speakers and the voice was instantly recognizable but the song was something I never heard before. Indeed, each tune was a revelation.

Upon Rooney’s return, I punched play again and watched his face widen into a big easy grin. “Oh yeah…” he recalled, “that’s that old record of Eric’s that never came out. Where the hell’d you find that?” Needless to say we called von Schmidt immediately while I dubbed a copy of the lost session for myself. In the meantime Eric continued on his earthly mission of painting a dazzling series of murals depicting the legendary blues men and women of yesteryear while releasing a rare new record every once in a blue moon.

Sometime in 2001 I met Kevin Eggers at the infamous Chelsea Hotel. It didn’t take long before Eric’s name came up. Eggers inquired about the rumors he’d heard that von Schmidt was in poor health so I filled him in on Eric’s gruesome battle with throat cancer in recent years. With the loss of his larynx and his ability to communicate reduced to a croak, the importance of this lost recording has never been more apparent. There’s no need for tears. Von Schmidt’s painting today is more inspired than ever and if you happen to drop by for a visit, he’s sure to kick your ass in a round of bocce.

The Taoists have always been fond of reminding us that no matter where it leads or how difficult it may be – we should just continue following the path. If Jerry Garcia (who in latter days with his white beard somewhat resembled an obese Eric von Schmidt) was around today, he’d surely agree, “Yes… yes… What a long strange trail it’s been!”

Beyond the occasional overly-cheerful McCartney ditty, the Beatles rarely, underestimated the intelligence of their fans. You could learn a lot from the ad-hoc crew of gurus, movie stars, musicians, boxers and comedians on the front of Sgt. Pepper.

Chosen by the Beatles and assembled by artist Peter Blake, the classic cover revealed many of the band’s wide-ranging inspirations. Standing beside wax replicas of their former selves fashioned by Madame Tussaud, the Beatles, clad in bright satin Edwardian marching uniforms and sporting droopy mustaches, presented their obsessed fans with the notion that they belonged to, and were only a small part of the greater whole.

This was not the first time we’d seen artists publicly pay homage to their peers and heroes. In the blurry cover photo to his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan, suddenly looking more surrealist poet than Okie songster, sat amongst piles of his favorite albums, recordings by Delta blues man Robert Johnson, German chanteuse Lotte Lenya, the soul/gospel group, the Impressions, sitar master Ravi Shankar and stand-up comedian/ philosopher Lord Buckley. Bob was slyly hipping us to a new world of music and consciousness, if you were smart enough to pick up on his lead. There was some pretty strange stuff in that mix, but I figured if Dylan dug it, it was good enough for me.

Being the most expensive record cover in the history of pop (£3,000 at a time when £50 was the norm) Sgt. Pepper sported a gatefold photo of the band, plus a fun insert of cardboard cut-out pictures of the group, with a mustache and sergeant stripes, along with another first, the song lyrics printed as a libretto on the back sleeve. Not even the poet laureate of folk-rock, Bob Dylan, had published his verse for his fans to painstakingly analyze.

With the release of the 50^th Anniversary box set, the Beatles have at long last driven a stake through the heart of the Rolling Stones’ flawed (but hauntingly beautiful) foray into psychedelia, Their Satanic Majesties Request. Released in December 1967, six months after Sgt. Pepper, Satanic Majesties was a glorious mess, thanks to their voracious consumption of drugs of every variety, and being hauled in and out of various courts and jail at the time. The Stones claim they remember very little about making the record. But one thing their album had that no other band boasted at the time was a lenticular 3-D cover. But the Beatles have now stripped them of that distinction with the new repackaging of Sgt. Pepper. Both images, having been created by the late British photographer Michael Cooper, only provoked the acerbic John Lennon to further criticize the Stones for routinely copying his band.

Following their August 1966 performance at Candle Stick Park in San Francisco, the lads from Liverpool (who had since migrated south to London) were fed up with being fab. The mayhem of their concerts prevented the Beatles from progressing as a live act. Taking refuge in Abbey Road, the recording studio offered a much-needed haven from struggling to play the hits over the din of screaming teenagers. A creative heady atmosphere engulfed the band, as new songs and sounds quickly developed, thanks in part to their fondness for pot and LSD, and new technological leaps in overdubbing with 4-track tape.

Paul McCartney apparently had a brainstorm. By creating an alter-ego, the band could liberate it from the tight corner they’d found themselves in. Some claim their new identity was inspired by Doctor Pepper, a favorite soda unavailable in the U.K. at the time, which British movie and rock stars shipped across the Atlantic by the case-full. In the copious liner notes to the new box set, Paul explained that he’d misheard the band’s faithful bear-like roadie Mal Evans say, “Sergeant Pepper” when he actually mumbled something about passing the “salt ‘n’ pepper.”

McCartney had recently hung out in Haight Ashbury with the new bands who sported longer hair and long names like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Suddenly the idea of the Beatles seemed rather “old hat” and thus, a new direction began to take shape.

With the arrival of Sgt. Pepper on May 26, 1967, the album poured out of every window and every car radio, wherever you went. I was with my mother in Woolworth’s Department Store in Asbury Park when I first got a glimpse of the famous album cover.

My mom told me to put the record back on the rack. “It’s not the Beatles,” she said. “Look at them. It’s a bunch of old men with glasses and beards. It’s somebody called Sgt. Peeper’s Lonely Band.”

Fifty years later we were presented with the release of the new Sgt. Pepper boxset with remixes by Giles Martin (Sir George’s son). Beyond the lovely packaging, the redux offered a compelling argument for McCartney and Starr as one of rock’s finest rhythm sections. Paul’s melodic bass parts and Ringo’s drums really popped out, in a few “new” places, particularly on “Fixing a Hole,” and “Good Morning, Good Morning.” Sonically the mix offers a bit more depth and sparkle. Certain details, like the swoop of strings and the cacophonous horns on “A Day in the Life,” as well as the fox hunt in “Good Morning, Good Morning” that caught your ear a bit differently.

But what struck me all these years later about the album known as “Rock’s Greatest Masterpiece,” is how little actual rock, or “rock attitude” could be found on its tracks. More often than not, brass, sitars, harpsichords and a variety of organs regularly replace the guitar. McCartney’s bass often plays a two-fold role, bumping the song’s rhythm along while playing catchy melodic riffs that manage to simultaneously support and stay out of the way of the vocals.

In some ways, the Beatles seem profoundly out of touch with the pivotal moment in which the album was made. Amid the sixties sexual revolution, they are happily proposing marriage to the sound of old timey clarinets on “When I’m Sixty-Four.” In “Lovely Rita” McCartney invites a cute meter maid to tea and winds up “sitting on a sofa with a sister or two.” It’s all very quaint when compared to the Doors who dared us to “Break on through to the other side,” while Hendrix had that itching desire to “Stand next to your fire.” “She’s Leaving Home,” featured a cascading harp and shimmering string section over which McCartney addressed the problem of teen runaways from the parent’s perspective. As spring 1967 blossomed into the Summer of Love, middle-class refugees across America headed for San Francisco (with or without flowers in their hair) to live on the street and dig the free dope and free love to be found in Haight Ashbury. Nobody gave a damn about their parents, they were just part of “the Establishment.” In comparison, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band hardly seemed radical. But within its grooves lay a few masterworks, like “A Day in the Life” (along with the double A-sided single “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” released months earlier in February) which transported us to new realms of consciousness, beyond the “marmalade skies” as John sang in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

George Harrison’s lone contribution, “Within You Without You,” (after “Only a Northern Song” was axed) was stunning, unlike anything on the album musically and lyrically. Since picking up the sitar in 1965 after succumbing to its mesmerizing drone while on the set of their second film, Help, “The Quiet Beatle” began a rigorous study of Eastern spirituality. Such a powerful rejection of materialism coming from a twenty-something rock star who could have anything or anyone he desired, was nothing short of unimaginable. Once more, as with Revolver’s “Love You To,” George relied solely upon Indian musicians to help create his hypnotic prayer for peace and love, without help from any of his bandmates. The track ends with a round of hysterical laughter tacked on, as if to say his lilting philosophy lecture was all a cosmic joke.

Despite its brilliance and ambition, Lennon wasn’t terribly impressed with the whole affair. As he later pointed out: “[Sergeant Pepper] is called the first concept album [but] it doesn’t go anywhere…But it works because we said it works... Otherwise every song could have been on any other album.” Following the breakup of the Fabs he taunted Paul with the opening refrain of his haunted “How Do You Sleep?” singing. “So Sergeant Pepper took you by surprise…”

The Byrds’ David Crosby addressed the naiveté that lay beneath the era’s idealism when he confessed; “I would’ve thought Sergeant Pepper could’ve stopped the [Vietnam] war, just by putting too many good vibes in the air for anybody to have a war around. Somehow it didn’t work. Somebody isn’t listening. I’m not saying stop trying, but the inertia we’re up against, I think everybody’s kind of underestimated it.”

In some ways, times haven’t changed much over the last five decades.

Buy Me a Coffee!

Rock ‘n’ roll and revolution make strange bedfellows. While Elvis, Little Richard and Jerry Lee upset the apple cart of Eisenhower’s hum drum 50s, little had changed socially until Bob Dylan arrived - a rock ‘n’ roller in bumpkin guise… complete with work shirt and Greek fisherman’s cap, lifted from his hero, Okie troubadour Woody Guthrie. With a high intellect, command of the English language and an acoustic guitar he howled “Blowin’ in the Wind” “Masters of War,” and “The Times They Are A Changin’,” throwing down the Zeitgeist like a line in the sand for all to see…

Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand

Bob continued to confront and unnerve “Mr. Jones” by challenging the norms of polite society with reams of surrealistic lyrics, juiced by a mad careening electric jugband that caused many of his loyal fans to compare him to “Judas.” With a choir-boy clear voice and neatly combed hair, Phil Ochs wrote and sang some of the best op-eds ever strummed, while Dylan, who some complained “couldn’t sing” abandoned protest songs, leaving “the cause” to the likes of Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez (who regularly warbled his edgy verse). But revolutionaries tend to be a rather tone-deaf bunch. Melody is lost on them. They are more concerned with agendas and ideals. Clipboards and bullhorns are their standard equipment.

Brother Wayne rockin’ with the MC5

While the Argentine Marxist Che Guevara was a romantic figure, a militant saint with far-away eyes, as portrayed by Cuban photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez (AKA Korda), I never heard any music emanating from his famous portrait. Only marching boots and machine gun fire. Following his execution on April Fool’s Day 1965, Che’s black beret was bequeathed to the Black Panthers, a deadly serious bunch (and for good reason!). Huey Newton and company couldn’t “get on up” to Sly and the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music,” as they were too busy being gunned down in the streets of Oakland, Chicago and New Haven.

But I was just a kid when all this was happening and hadn’t met any revolutionaries until years later when I was hired to play sitar for Tom Hayden, to give a “sixties touch” to an evening commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement in 2012. The former Senator of California and member of the Chicago Seven didn’t seem to hear a note of my exotic noodling, as his attention was focused on some long-forgotten manifesto that may have been a far better blueprint for America’s future than the quagmire we find ourselves in today.

While books like Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and Jerry Rubin’s Do It! provoked legions of teenage white kids from coast to coast to pump their fists and chant “Free Angela,” it was the music that always spoke to me – immediate, direct, and visceral.

Inspired by the “Prague Spring” (which began with mass protests in on January 5^th 1968) the Rolling Stones’ released a new single, “Street Fighting Man,” that August glorified “marching, charging feet” which led to a “palace revolution,” while the Doors’ “Five to One,” featured Jim Morrison’s mad command, “We Want the World the World and We Want It Now!” I saw the Doors live at Asbury Park Convention Center in the summer of ‘68 and naively believed the Lizard King, our psychedelic savior would surely deliver on his promise, Released in August 1968,

August ‘68 also saw the Beatles finally take a political stand with “Revolution.” But the song, which was recorded twice – both slow (for The White Album) and fast, as the B-Side to “Hey Jude,” inadvertently revealed just how out of touch the band was when Lennon couldn’t decide if he was “in,” or “out,” when it came to the issue of “destruction.”

In 1971 John returned with his agitprop anthem, “Power to the People.” But John and Yoko’s traipsing about the countryside in their Silver Cloud Rolls Royce and donning Military chic – gun belts and army helmets, was seen by many as a pose that “didn’t mean shit to a tree,” as Grace Slick sang in “Eskimo Blue Day.” Which brings us the Jefferson Airplane’s 1969 album, Volunteers, which featured the band chanting “We are all outlaws in the eyes of America,” like a Wagnerian choir on the opening track. The record closed with Airplane sounding another clarion cry:

“Look what’s happening out in the streets
Got a revolution (got to revolution)”

One would have thought Roger Daltrey’s hair-raising scream on the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” was enough to eviscerate “the old boss,” but with the passing of time the song has come to resemble an old statue in the park, a sad remembrance of what might have been.

None of these bands were as rad as the Motor City Five, except perhaps the Fugs, (formed in 1965 by a pair of anarchist hippie poets – Ed Sanders, and Tuli Kupferberg who tried to levitate the Pentagon on October 21, 1967). Hailing from New York’s Lower East Side, the Fugs were anti-establishment to the core. They hated war, extolled smoking dope, and loved sex. But their hysterical/satirical songs were rooted in folk music and lacked the explosive dynamic of the MC5’s Molotov rock.

Still rockin’ in more recent years…

While the Fugs inadvertently got me suspended in ninth grade for leading a singalong of their song, “Wide, Wide River” (which contained the refrain “Flow on, river of shit) on the bus ride home one day, a fistfight nearly broke out, two years later when I played the MC5 in my Music Appreciation class. To like the 5 or the Stooges at the time, was a dangerous business. The MC5 were a raunchy, scraggly, ugly bunch, that made the Stones look… dignified. Check out Rob Tyner (nee Derminer – who dubbed himself Tyner, after John Coltrane’s pianist McCoy Tyner) prancing about like a beady-eyed, speed-addled witch doctor with his wild frizzy mane and gap-toothed grin.

Most East coast kids dismissed the 5 and Stooges as second rate, “white trash” bands from the Midwest. But once again, they got it wrong. They weren’t “white trash,” although Iggy was raised in a trailer park until Bowie came to his rescue. They were White Panthers! – Radical? Hell, yes… What’s more radical than freedom? And the White Panthers wanted everything and everybody to be free. Their manifesto called for Free Music! Free Love! Free Food! and Free Dope! And that reckless free-for-all soon brought the heat down on the band’s manager, the outrageous and outspoken poet John Sinclair.

“There weren’t too many people in prison with marijuana charges at the time,” Sinclair told me. “So, what was the big deal? It was alright for Thomas Jefferson to grow marijuana in Virginia. Sadly, dope is a product. When they realized how popular it was, it turned into this big fight over who was going to control the sales. Either they will put you in jail for it, or they will make you buy it.

“Some good things came out of that terrible mess,” John reckoned, referring to his entrapment. “They held that big rally and John Lennon got me out of prison. I liked the Beatles a lot before I got to know him, but I mean, that was heaven sent!”

Whether the public considered them revolutionaries or sell-outs, Lennon/Ono flew to Ann Arbor on Thursday, December 9, 1971, to loan their cultural clout to the rally aiming to free John Sinclair, who had been found guilty and faced an extremely harsh ten-year prison sentence for selling two marijuana joints to an undercover agent. Other high-profile luminaries scheduled to appear included Allen Ginsberg, Black Panther Bobby Seale, and Yippie instigator Jerry Rubin (who convinced John and Yoko to play the concert) along with Stevie Wonder, who soon would start addressing the problems faced by Black America on his 1973 masterpiece Innervisions).

This was Lennon’s first public acoustic set since playing skiffle with his old mates, the Quarrymen back in Liverpool. John’s brief performance was comprised of new political material - “Attica State,” “Luck of the Irish,” and the bluesy “John Sinclair,” which he wrote in honor of the marijuana martyr.

The next day The Detroit News slammed John with a headline complaining that “Lennon Let His Followers Down.” Following Stevie Wonder with a fifteen-minute acoustic set of four short songs (and none of them old familiar Beatle hits) undoubtedly inspired the negative review.

I should point out that Brother Wayne Kramer’s brand of guerrilla chic was not on sale down at the local Army/Navy store. He flaunted corkscrew hair, frilly shirts ala early Kinks and a silver cross at his throat – style and moves (wiggling his arse at the crowd while unleashing a flood of mean leads from his guitar) that gave the glamorous Marc Bolan a run for his money. And Kramer could jam, like… well, a “motherfucker.” But it wasn’t just a flashy display of chops. It was about “bringing it.” Givin’ everything he had. As guitarist/singer/songwriter Johnny Hickman of Cracker put it upon hearing of Wayne’s recent passing… “His TONE! It’s like Godzilla with soul!” Wayne’s special sonic sauce blended the mad/rad skronk of free jazz saxophonists Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman with all the volume and visceral metallic edge the electric guitar had to offer. And this was years before punk, boys and grrls….

Surprisingly Detroit homeboy Lester Bangs wrote some clank about the 5 in the Nov./Dec. 1970 issue of Creem, dismissing their cover Sun Ra’s “Starship,” as an “embarrassing dud.” (Hey Lester, name another bunch of white boys playing Sun Ra at the time!) The late/great Bangs also bemoaned the hype that initially surrounded the band which “promised the moon and failed to get off the launching pad.”

And there’s some truth to that. But for the 5 it was the moment that mattered most. Their records never compared to experiencing the band live. The sheer adrenaline of watching the video of the MC5 at Tartar Field at Wayne State University in Detroit, taking no prisoners with “Ramblin’ Rose,” and “Kick Out The Jams/Looking At You” will make you a true believer. If not, better get your pulse checked. Wayne was so great they named the damned college after him!

Rock on Wayne Kramer and thank you for no holds barred - full throttle rock - unapologetic, lusty, and dangerous!

And now for a brief postscript recalling Wayne’s generosity of spirit. “A few years ago, Wayne brought me in to teach songwriting to men in prison,” singer/songwriter/ producer/multi-instrumentalist Marvin Etzioni (of Lone Justice fame) said. “Once a week I went to Jail Guitar Doors in downtown Los Angeles for a semester. It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least. I suggested they each write every day, every night. Even if it’s just a word, a sentence. Soon after, a former crack head told his mom he discovered writing poetry and songs. She said, ‘I didn’t know you could even write.’” And remember, as Marvin advises… “Kick out the jams for as long as you can.”

Here’s the link if are able to donate to Wayne’s cause, Jail Guitar Doors - https://www.jailguitardoors.org/donate

This piece first appeared in the Milwaukee Shepherd/Express and in Ugly Things magazine.

Born in 1932 to an aristocratic family in Istanbul, Arif graduated from the London School of Economics. But jazz was his first love. In 1956, Arif, a be-bop fanatic and self-taught composer and arranger, met Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones at a concert in Istanbul. They were so impressed by his compositions that he received the first Quincy Jones Scholarship to Boston’s Berklee College of Music.

In 1963 Mardin was hired by Atlantic Records as an apprentice to Nesuhi Ertegun after meeting the Turkish producer at the Newport Jazz Festival. “In no time Arif went from being a ‘hey you’ in the studio to writing horn sketches and string parts,” Jerry Wexler recalled in his autobiography Rhythm and the Blues. Wexler was not only “impressed by both his enormous talent” but appreciated Arif’s ability to stay cool under pressure.

“They were a formidable production team… like the ’27 Yankees!” recalled Atlantic producer Joel Dorn, who co-produced the Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway album with Mardin. “Arif was supremely talented. He knew all kinds of music. He knew more about be-bop than anybody. He’d talk about the difference in the Dial or Royal Roost recording of some Charlie Parker song. You know that old song ‘You’ve Come a Long Way from St. Louis?’ Try comin’ from Istanbul to Muscle Shoals! It defines what he did. He could make the funkiest records with Wilson Pickett and then make a record with Placido Domingo and both of them were right for what they were. Then he’d go make a classic disco record and I doubt he’d ever been in a disco in his life, but once he knew what the music was about he knew how to create it. There’s not another guy who can do what he did. Arif carried his brilliance very gently. He didn’t have a typical music business demeanor. I always thought he could have been the perfect headmaster of a top private boys’ school in England. When I came to Atlantic in the mid sixties he was the studio manager, schlepping tapes back and forth from the warehouse three blocks away. They finally gave him a shot to write string charts at fifty dollars a pop. His first bust-out record was The Rascals’ “Good Lovin’.” All of a sudden he wasn’t just the studio manager any more.”

Arif (bottom row right) with Aretha and the Atlantic crew.

“When I joined Atlantic Records in 1963 the legacy of Ray Charles had been carefully nurtured by Ahmet (Ertegun) and Jerry Wexler,” Arif told me in an interview a week before his death. “When Aretha joined Atlantic that became her sound, she joined that tradition. It was an incredible legacy. That was the sound – gospel with background vocals, horns, funky rhythm section. It had roots in church but it was also jazz.”

Mardin cut jazz sides by Max Roach, Herbie Mann, Charles Lloyd, Freddie Hubbard, Eddie Harris, Sonny Stitt and the Modern Jazz Quartet and was behind the “blue-eyed soul” hits of Dusty Springfield, Hall and Oates, Average White Band and the Bee Gees, whose career he salvaged with the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, the best-selling album of all time. With over forty gold and platinum albums to his name, Arif’s hit parade included Judy Collins’ “Send in the Clowns,” “I’m Every Woman” by Chaka Khan, Bette Midler’s “The Wind Beneath My Wings” and “You Belong to Me,” by Carly Simon. Mardin produced a surprisingly diverse list of artists that included everyone from Willie Nelson, Cher, John Prine, Brook Benton, Manhattan Transfer, to The Culture Club and Ringo Starr as well as contributing arrangements to the South Park movie soundtrack Bigger, Longer And Uncut.

Arif remained integral to Atlantic for nearly forty years until 2001, when he became the senior vice-president of EMI’s Manhattan Records where his first project was to produce Norah Jones’ Blue Note multi-million selling debut Come Away With Me. He returned once more in 2004 to guide her sophomore release, Feels Like Home.

Mardin won twelve Grammy Awards and was inducted into the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. By the end of the decade he had completed his first and only opera, I Will Wait.

“Arif was gentleman at all times,” Dorn pointed out. “He fought the cancer right up to the end. He didn’t weep. He didn’t beef. He’d recently been working on some old big band charts that he’d written years ago for Herb Pomeroy’s band at Berklee.”

Arif’s swan song will be an album of his own compositions co-produced with his son Joe and featuring an all-star cast of his favorite divas including Norah Jones, Chaka Khan, Bette Midler, Carly Simon and Dianne Reeves. He was buried in Istanbul.

This obit appeared in Wax Poetics shortly after Arif’s passing twenty years ago.

Back then my mom used to employ a carpenter named Frank Bell as a handyman to help out with her interior decorating business. Frank also drove me to school each morning in his red and white Chevy pick-up truck. That old truck with its farty muffler always managed to turn a few heads when we pulled up in front of “The Academy.” All the stuck-up preppies in their crested school blazers, chinos and penny loafers would look over and sneer when “the white trash” arrived.

Nashville Skyline was released 57 years ago, on April 9, 1969.

Frank smoked Lucky Strikes, the kind with no filter. And he listened to country music on the radio, long before I was introduced to it by way of the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. The first time I heard the likes of Merle Haggard or Johnny Cash was when their voices came wafting from the little dashboard speaker of Frank Bell’s pick-up truck.

Johnny Cash wasn’t just a country singer. Even Bob Dylan considered him “a folk hero.” Ruggedly handsome with an aw shit smile, that radiated a cocky confidence. All the gals, it seemed, wanted to be with Johnny while all the guys wanted to be him. But there was only one Johnny Cash, no matter how many times you stood before the mirror all dressed in black, squared your shoulders and dropped your voice and said, “Hullo… My name is Johnny Cash…” But as we’ve come to learn, it wasn’t always so easy being him. For all the glory won there always seemed to be a ring of fire or three that he had to navigate. There are plenty of sordid tales about Cash getting busted for picking flowers in suburban gardens in the wee hours of the morning and smuggling speed from Mexico. Although flesh and blood, the man became iconic, on par with grade school legends Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyon. From back when America was uh… “great.”

The strong, silent type is a foundational component of Country Music. There’s an old Seinfeld episode when Elaine dates this dude who always got a far-away look in his eye whenever The Eagles’ “Desperado” came over the radio. Something similar used to happen to Frank Bell whenever Glenn Campbell sang “Wichita Lineman.” I had never witnessed that kind of reverence for music before. He’d stare off into the distance, about a mile down the road from the traffic light, and take a long, slow drag on his cigarette and tell me gently but firmly to “Hold it down, Sport,” for the next couple of minutes until the song faded into the sunset.

I liked Frank. I thought he was cool. There was nobody else like him in our little Jersey suburb. But I knew I could never be like him. I hated cigarettes, despite trying hard to like them for a couple of weeks. And although Frank slicked his hair back in an oily pompadour, I wasn’t goin’ for that “Greasy Kid Stuff,” look which was, by then out of style after the arrival of The Beatles.

At the time, there were only three major television channels and a couple of local stations that broadcast kid’s shows, baseball and B-movies. I would watch anything with a guy playing a guitar. It didn’t matter who it was… Andy Griffith was pretty good, kinda folksy, sitting on his front porch in bucolic Mayberry, gently strumming his Martin. Then there was Tennessee Ernie Ford, who was kinda slick and cheesy, and Glen Campbell who my dad said was “whiter than mayonnaise.” But there was no disputing how he played guitar and sang. Hee Haw was another story altogether. My mom was something of a snob. A sophisticated gal, with great taste in art. She was fond of New York Ash Can painters like Raphael Soyer and Joseph Stella and was a big fan of Andrew Wyeth long before posters of “Christina World” became popular décor in girl’s college dorms across America. But much to mom’s dismay I loved Hee Haw. My dad said it was because I liked Southern gals with big hair and tits. And while he had a point, it was Roy Clark’s lightning fast pickin’ and Charlie McCoy’s high/lonesome harmonica that put me under the spell of country music. If it hadn’t been for all those Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan records and watching the civil rights struggle unfold in our living room night after night on our old black and white RCA, I might’ve dropped the hippie trip right then and there and adopted a steady diet of Jimmy Dean sausages and Goo-Goo bars.

It wasn’t long before I got my hands on a mandolin, fiddle, and banjo, and exiled myself, up to the hinterlands of my bedroom for hours on end, listening to Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe records, learning how to play that exhilarating, exotic music called “Bluegrass.”

In the late sixties/early seventies Bluegrass was truly the “alternative” music of its day. When most baby boomers were frying their ears and brain cells to Led Zeppelin and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, there were a few longhairs in the crowd like (banjoist) Tony Trischka, Andy Statman (mandolin), and (fiddler) Kenny Kosek, whose group Breakfast Special brought a radical edge to the traditional Appalachian Mountain music. But it wasn’t long before their “Newgrass” renditions of old standards like “Turkey in the Straw” and “Arkansas Traveler,” bore the influence of Chick Corea and Weather Report.

Perhaps the first to shatter all pre-conceived notions of what constitutes a country singer was Elliot Charles Adnopoz, AKA Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. “The Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys” Jack was a “Member of the Tribe,” (as Jews often refer to each other) who wasn’t about to allow his dreams to be hemmed in by anybody’s anemic imagination.

Then came the “Harvard Hillbillies.” Gram Parsons (known to his mother as Ingram Cecil Connor III) who arguably invented Country Rock when he briefly joined the Byrds, and steered the long-haired California folk-rock darlings to Nashville, where they recorded Sweetheart of the Rodeo which featured Parsons’ classic “Hickory Wind,” along with songs by the Louvin Brothers, Merle Haggard and another unlikely country convert, Bob Dylan.

Another Crimson graduate, singer/songwriter/producer Jim Rooney would trade in his master’s degree in the classics for a seat behind the console at Jack Clement’s Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa (producing country/folk songsters Townes Van Zandt, Nanci Griffith and John Prine). Swapping Classics for country, and Harvard for Hank wasn’t a difficult decision for Rooney. “I like any singer named Hank,” he once told me.

(Bill Keith & Jim Rooney (left-handed guitar) and crew at Boston Symphony Hall - december, 1984 - photo by Kruth

Singer/guitarist Peter Rowan would leave Harvard to continue his education at the “University of Bill Monroe.” Best known for his soaring high/lonesome vocals, Peter later joined the bluegrass supergroup Old and In the Way (with Jerry Garcia). Rowan also penned the comical dope anthem, “Panama Red,” (popularized by the New Riders of the Purple Sage) among other Alt-Country classics like “Midnight Moonlight,” and “Land of the Navajo.”

It wasn’t just a new generation of long-hairs like Gram and Keith Richards who loved and emulated country music (although Mick Jagger’s twangy vox on the Stones’ “Dear Doctor,” “Dead Flowers” and “Faraway Eyes” smacked of parody). Punk rockers also worshipped hard knocks troubadours like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard (whose “Okie from Muskogee” took the hippies to task for their unpatriotic dope-smoking ways) while George Jones and Porter Wagoner, all gussied up in their Nudie suits and big shiny hair, were admired for their prodigious drink and drug consumption and harrowing battles for their sanity in “The Rubber Room.”

Country music’s irrepressible charm went far beyond anything I could imagine. Even Jazz giant Thelonious Monk claimed he listened to it because he “liked the stories.” The music has an innate ability to cross barriers, luring everyone from redneck to hipster, to recent immigrants unable to understand the lyrics.

In the mid-eighties I’d rented a railroad flat in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, just down the block from the famous Cammareri Bakery featured in Cher’s 1987 film Moonstruck. It was a predominantly Italian block, except for our building, which oddly allowed me to live on the top floor and a Filipino family one flight below. The first floor was occupied by the landlord’s mother, a little old Sicilian widow who spent her days gossiping with a clutch of other widows, standing together like a bouquet of black tulips sprouting through the sidewalk.

Every Sunday morning while most folks on the block attended church, the Filipino family held a service of their own, repeatedly singing along to records of “You Are My Sunshine,” and “Keep on the Sunny Side,” in hopes of improving their English. It was beyond surreal. I remember seeing the father and young son walking down the sidewalk, sporting blue and white gingham shirts and cowboy hats made from some indeterminable material, whether rubber or plastic.

No matter how one might desire to belong to something, whether a family, a religion, a culture, a lifestyle, we ultimately are what we is.

Years ago, the mandolin virtuoso Andy Statman told me, no matter how much he loved Southern roots music… No matter hard he studied or how well he played it… No matter what clothes he wore, or if he even grew big Elvis sideburns, he would never fit in. He simply wasn’t of the South. He was from New York… and Jewish.

Andy Statman - December, 1984

While deeply inspired by the Father of Bluegrass, Bill Monroe, Statman’s musical horizons were stretched by another master musician, John Coltrane, whose modal meditations moved him to explore the emotional tonalities of the tenor saxophone. Another crucial shift in Andy’s musical development came after discovering the Ukrainian clarinetist Dave Tarras lived nearby in his Coney Island neighborhood. He soon began to apply his ample jazz chops to learning the haunting ancient melodies of klezmer music.

So, you never know where the music will take you. In 2005 I met Ornette Coleman, the iconoclastic free jazz saxophonist. When I went over to his loft to interview him, he noticed the long fingernails on my right hand. “You a guitar player?” he asked. “I play lots of different strings,” I replied. “But mandolin is where my heart is.”

“Oh, I love the mandolin! My cousin used to play it. I play the violin you know…. We’d sit around all afternoon and play what we called ‘porch music,’” he said.

Famous for his brisk abstract compositions and bleating tones on alto sax, Coleman also played left-handed fiddle in a skittery scratchy style that sounded like bluegrass from Venus. Jamming with him was an exhilarating and enlightening experience to say the least. His old partner/collaborator, trumpeter Don Cherry used to say “I love country music! From every country!” But this was intergalactic string band music from another dimension.

And while we’re on the subject of musical outer limits… In January 2022 the Eddy Brothers - guitarist Jake and his brother Carter on bass, contacted Statman about doing a recording session with banjoist Ned Luberecki. “They came up from West Virginia to my house, and we practiced and cut an album live in the studio in Bushwick (Brooklyn). “Jacob is a thoughtful shredder,” Statman chuckled. “Incredibly fast and incredibly frightening and Carter is amazing. Ned has a unique style on banjo. He’s an expansive player.”

Following the sessions they played a series of gigs around the Ohio Valley, followed by a Spring tour of New England. “One day Jake asked me, ‘Have you ever played the Opry?’ I said, ‘No.’ So, he asked them, and they said ‘Yes,’ and gave us a date - June 22, 2022. It was amazing. I was treated like a king!” Andy enthused.

“When I played with Vassar (Clements) he liked to point out that the music appealed to all kinds of folks. Sometimes he’d tell people that one of his musicians in his band was Jewish. He never meant anything bad by it. It was like he was bragging. But I didn’t want to be referred to as being Jewish. I was well aware of it at every truck stop we walked into.

“It was in the South when I stopped eating ham and pork,” Andy chuckled. “There was a big spread for the musicians and one of the guys said, ‘You don’t eat that right? cause you’re Jewish. And I thought yeah, he’s right. I guess not… But I’ve never had any problems down South. If you’re a nice person and can do the job, there’s no problem. It’s obvious who and what I am. If anything, they like it.”

On his recent visit to Nashville, Statman was standing outside a 7-Eleven dressed in traditional Hasidic garb, with a yarmulke and tzitzit, (tassels knotted to keep the wearer of mindful of the Torah’s commandments) when a couple of bikers pulled up and said, “Howdy rabbi!’”

(Skaggs - photo by Kruth - backstage at the Opry 1985)

“Ricky Skaggs is a good friend. He’s an Evangelical Christian. He introduced us at the Opry,” Andy explained. Later he took us out to the best kosher Indian restaurant in town.

A highlight of the set came when Andy played best-known composition, “Flatbush Waltz” which he jokingly referred to as “a minor standard.” “The Quebe Sisters covered it. And when we performed it, the people recognized it. It was a great experience to play into the famous WSM microphone. All my heroes played into that mic. People flipped! We got a standing ovation.”

It was America at its best. Nobody made any dumb jokes about Andy’s cowboy hat being too small and the Opry has already booked a return visit for Andy and his band at King Monroe’s Court.

Sign by Kruth

Everything was alive

in your absinthe-green eyes

When only deep shades of blues

could still sooth your black moods

and red vineyards cloaked you from

the darkness of the ever-encroaching winter

Some say it was glaucoma or lead poisoning

that caused you to see halos around everything

But maybe you were just closer to heaven

then that drab bunch of potato

eaters who lived next door

Everything you witnessed breathed electricity

The shape of the wind spun turbulent skies

as gray clouds like dark birds rose from your pipe

and sunflowers danced with delight

in the vase on your table

All the colors we knew turned a different hue

When you painted them

and the wheat waved back in gratitude

So, drop that pistol Vincent,

the paintbrush will always love you better

No one would see the world through your eyes

for another hundred years

And by that time, you were long gone

Never knowing your paintings

Hung in a thousand hearts in Paris

Illuminated a million minds

from Amsterdam to New York

where your splintered visions

are still sold as posters and postcards

with romantic words scribbled on the back

Odes from lovers you longed for

before the reaper appeared

in that eternal wheat field

where they found you

lying beneath your easel

JVK - hard left, Cork to my right on bass, with Morrie Shapiro on drums and Mona Christensen - vox, and the unknown conguero stirring up some art school jam.

Cork had recently won a grant from the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) to spend a year in Berlin, taking in the fervid atmosphere, while making, and exhibiting, new art. A tangle of black wires, fluorescent tubes, and archaic hardware, Marcheschi’s sculptures and installations sparked and sizzled with raw arcs of electricity that made your hair stand on end. They would have been as much at home in Frankenstein’s laboratory as in a Soho gallery.

So, I jumped at the opportunity to help Cork (for school credit, of course) and flew to Berlin in the cold grey winter.

Cork (R) with his father Louis (L) Minneapolis, 1978. photo by Kruth

Cork’s studio and apartment were both located in Kreuzberg, a murky medieval village where raw slabs of meat hung in shop windows and thick coal smoke belched in black clouds from brick chimneys, just a stone’s throw from “die Mauer” - the wall.

The late Seventies was a wild time to be in Berlin. Punk was exploding all over the city. There was a new esthetic everywhere you looked - from music, to fashion to graffiti. The clubs were packed nightly for bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Suicide, and Nina Hagen.

Although I never crossed paths with Bowie and Iggy, who allegedly were in town and partying hard at the time, I did meet the sculptor Ed Kienholz, who had a studio just down the hall from us and I dropped by a few times to see him and take in his ghostly visions. Those visits inevitably led to a few stiff drinks, and rounds of poker in which Ed routinely bilked me out of every Deutschmark in my jeans.

After a couple months in Berlin, we loaded up Cork’s Volvo and headed southwest, through the bleak terrain of East Germany, to the idyllic village of Tubingen, just north of Munich. The Kunsthalle was organizing a retrospective of Richard Serra’s work, and they allotted Marcheschi a decent-sized gallery off to the side (which we accidentally transformed into a giant coil, so powerful that the director’s heart began to palpitate).

The Kunsthalle gallery became a coil! A moment of calm before Cork stepped on the switch - photo by Kruth Tübingen, Germany 1978

Tragedy had pulverized Richard years before I met him. In November 1971, Serra’s “Sculpture No. 3” had been installed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The piece consisted of two five-ton steel plates leaning precariously against each other. One of the plates had slipped and fallen, trapping and killing a museum worker – a man named Raymond Johnson -beneath its mass. When visiting the museum briefly before the tragedy, the Russian photographer Roman Vishniac, called attention to the piece, claiming it was structurally unsound. Unfortunately, no one paid heed.

Serra - Tübingen, Germany 1978 - photo by John Kruth

Johnson’s wife filed a lawsuit against the artist, the museum, and the and whoever had built the sculpture Apparently, the slots holding the steel plates in position had been cheaply made. In addition, the rigger had failed to follow the installation instructions properly. It turned out - as the jury was amazed to learn – that he hadn’t read them. He was illiterate. Serra and the Walker were absolved of all blame. But a dark existential cloud hovered over Richard from that point on.

“Serra was opaque, impregnable and forged, but a really good artist,” Marcheschi recently recalled. “When I did my show at the National Gallery in Berlin, they had to remove this piece by Serra, a sheet of lead about twelve square feet, mounted flat on the wall, and held up by many, many nails. The workers who deinstalled it were not hired by the gallery. They were from the government and didn’t give a shit about art. So, they start pulling out the nails. We’re at the other end of the gallery, when suddenly there was a holler. We turn and see the entire sheet tear loose, flowing off the wall like an upside-down wave. It tumbled four men and two ladders but everybody was fine. This was probably the only lighthearted accident with one of his sculptures.”

Kruth with flute - Minneapolis, 1978

After finishing work on Cork’s installation, I began wandering around the Kunsthalle with my flute, checking out the acoustics, until finding the perfect nook, and sat down and improvised for an hour or two. Reverberating through the museum, the sound soon drew the wounded giant into my world. His emotional state was immediately palpable. He stood listening for a moment and then asked if I would “serenade” him while he worked.

Serra - Tübingen, Germany 1978 - photo by John Kruth

By that time, Richard understandably had sworn off iron and worked exclusively on large sheets of paper attached to the wall. The drawings he made, whether done in oil stick, lithographic crayon, or charcoal, were completely black. The week I spent with him, I never saw him wearing anything but the same black pants, shoes and T-shirt. And, so far as I knew, he never ate - only drank great steins of German beer (yes, I know it’s a food), and smoked potent joints of Thai weed. I’d like to think my ethereal flute improvisations helped soothe him, but I’m not so sure they were anything more than a pleasant distraction. I often envisioned myself as the Fool to Serra’s King Lear.

A few years later I saw Les Blank’s documentary, The Burden of Dreams, about the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, in which the film director attempts to haul a 320-ton steamship (also made of steel) over a very steep hill in the Amazon. It turned out there were multiple illnesses, injuries and even deaths amongst the actors, extras, and workers on the set. Filled with self-loathing, the director in his thick German accent, claimed he belonged “in a lunatic asylum.” I couldn’t help but think of Richard, another visionary at the top of his game whose art had killed a man.

Serra - Tübingen, Germany 1978 - photo by John Kruth

Nearly ten years after being “on the heath” with Richard Serra, catastrophe struck once more when two workers were injured - one seriously - while moving “Reading Cones,” a sixteen-ton steel sculpture (yes, he’d gone back to working in metal). The $200,000 piece collapsed, slamming to the floor and pinning both men for several minutes. The falling slab of steel also took out two cast-iron support columns, causing structural damage to the five-story Soho loft, home of the Leo Castelli gallery.

In September 2007, my lovely partner, the painter, Marilyn Cvitanic, and I decided we had better get uptown to MoMA and see the new Serra instillation before it was taken down. The New York Times described “Sequence” as an enormous “double figure 8… a sinuous funhouse, composed of a dozen plates of steel.” Knowing Richard’s history, Marilyn understood my trepidation when it came to walking into such a “funhouse.” But I did it, and marveled, once more, at the man’s brilliance.

But then, as we were leaving, we heard a thunderous boom that rattled the whole museum as if Godzilla’s foot had just come through the roof. A moment later, guards began nervously ushering everyone out the front door.

“Oh no, not again,” Marilyn sighed.

As a kid, Freddie and a friend rode their bikes to the “other side of the tracks,” to black neighborhood of St. Pete, to hear Louis Armstrong play. Armstrong allegedly shuttled the underage boys in through the side door, where they sat in the kitchen and shared a meal with Satchmo and his musicians. Years later Fred was ecstatic when Armstrong recorded his song “Everybody’s Talkin’.”

Fred Morlock eventually became known as Fred Neil, adopting his grandmother’s last name, whether hoping to disguise his identity when enlisting in the Navy, underage at seventeen or as a more mellifluous stage name.

Once out of the service and obsessed with Hank Williams, Fred made a pilgrimage to Nashville to take in the sights and sounds of the legendary Ryman Auditorium, where he supposedly performed on the Grand Ol’ Opry. While finding “Music City” inspiring as a fledgling songwriter/guitarist, Neil soon headed north, arriving in New York City, in March 1958, where he found work as a staff writer at the Brill Building, cranking out tunes for $40 a week.

After recording a handful of singles that went largely unnoticed, Fred’s first glimmer of success came in September 1958 after Buddy Holly cut his song, “Come Back Baby.” Credited to Fred Neil and Norman Petty, (Holly’s manager and producer who brazenly put his name on everything he touched) the song wasn’t released until five years after Buddy’s tragic death in February 1959. That March, Neil played a barely audible guitar on a session for Bobby Darin’s classic “Dream Lover” at Atlantic Studios in Midtown Manhattan.

In July 1961, Neil’s blues rocker “Candy Man” was cut by Roy Orbison as the B-side to his mesmerizing hit “Crying.” Beverly Ross, who co-wrote the tune with Fred claimed Orbison’s version was enough to make her “commit suicide,” but after the song peaked at No. 25 on the Billboard chart, she had a change of heart.

Roy Orbison

With his soulful baritone vocals and propulsive 12 string guitar, Fred Neil quickly became the best-kept secret of the early sixties “Folk Boom.” Spending his nights carousing around the clubs and coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, until he eventually landed a gig as the emcee for the afternoon hootenannies in the smokey basement of the Café Wha? on MacDougal Street. Fred would have a lasting impact on the music and careers of many of his fellow artists, including Dino Valenti (best known for his 60s anthem “Get Together,”) the bluesy roots singer Karen Dalton, along with Peter (Yarrow) and Paul (Noel Stookey) of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, country crooner Hoyt Axton, freak-folk pioneer Tiny Tim, and comedians Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Hugh Romney (AKA Wavy Gravy).

According to Bob Dylan’s memoir Chronicles, it was Fred who gave him his first gig after arriving in New York in the winter of 1961. “He said I could play harmonica with him during his sets. I was ecstatic. Freddie had the flow, dressed conservatively, sullen and brooding, with an enigmatical gaze, peachlike complexion, hair splashed with curls and an angry and powerful baritone voice that struck blue notes and blasted them to the rafters with or without a mike. He was the emperor of the place, even had his own harem, his devotees.”

“I used to play in a place called Café Wha?” Dylan told journalist Bert Kleinman in July 1984. “It always used to open at noon and close at six in the morning. It was just a non-stop flow of people, usually they were tourists… looking for beatniks in the Village. I used to play with a guy called Fred Neil, who wrote the song “Everybody’s Talking” that was in the film Midnight Cowboy… He had a strong powerful voice, almost a bass voice, and a powerful sense of rhythm. I would play harmonica for him, and then once in a while, get to sing a song… when he was taking a break or something. It was his show. He would be on for about half an hour…” Dylan continued, recalling the non-stop conveyor belt of musicians and comedians that played the Café Wha? each night. “You’d get fed there,” Bob pointed out, “which was actually the best thing about the place.”

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It took many months and twice as many phone calls to get Quincy Jones on the line. But once he called back and started to talk, the man was everything you could have hoped for in an interview - genuine, high-spirited and insightful. As the purpose of my call was to get a couple quotes for the biography I was currently writing, Bright Moments – The Life & Legacy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk (Welcome Rain, 2000) we mostly stuck to Quincy’s experiences in the jazz world. But his mercurial mind and unbridled appreciation for other people’s music were hardly fixed to any particular genre. I finally had let him go after a generous twenty-minute chat, not wanting to take up any more of his time. Talking with Q, as Rahsaan would say was some “Big, bad beautiful bright moments” indeed.

JK: Back in the early fifties you were on the road, playing trumpet in big bands.

Q: I was with Dizzy Gillespie. Benny Golson was my roommate! In those days the young guys were just out there to blow man… guys like [legendary trumpeter] Clifford Brown. We never thought about limousines (Laughs). We’d run into people like Ornette Coleman down in Texas. So, when we got to Columbus, Ohio we ran into Roland Kirk.

That was in 1951, when I was playing with Lionel Hampton’s band. He was definitely an individual. He was awesome! He reminded me of a bag lady! He had the three horns and all that shit around neck and something he called the “evil box, that he played that made wild sounds. He was always experimenting, and I loved that. Rahsaan could go way out, but he always started with the basics - the blues. A consummate musician.

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Back in the early eighties I used to have a cat named Cooder. I named him after the multi-instrumentalist for a couple of reasons. First of all it was a good name for a cat. And granted Ry is a cool guy who deserves to have a cat or maybe a sailboat named after him. After all he’s made a lot of great records over the years and has introduced us to all sorts of music and musicians that we didn’t even know we’d been sleeping on, from all corners of the globe – black, white, Hawaiian, Latino and Indian. But it was really that feline’s soulful yowl that made me think of the man, of his soaring slide-guitar which alternately wept, full of lonesome and regret or howled like a feral October wind from which there was no hiding place.

Besides Cooder, the cat wasn’t all that cute. He had a couple rough edges, much like Buddy, the hero of Ry’s latest song cycle My Name Is Buddy – Another Record by Ry Cooder.

Upon first listening to Ry’s latest disc, that portrays the adventures of a fearless feline who hoboes across a Steinbeckian landscape while spouting old school populist messages, you might find yourself scratching your head in wonder. Yet with Buddy, Cooder seems to have come full circle in his career, with a righteous return to the roots of American music. On his 1971 self-titled debut Ry warbled a weary “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” With the war escalating in Iraq and the price of gas surging over three dollars a gallon that question seems as pertinent as ever.

“Now is now. Then is then,” Ry told me in a recent interview, clarifying any misconception that the new album was a deliberate return to his original style. “I’m sixty now,” he pointed out. “We’re all seasoned musicians that have developed the touch on our instruments. If you add up all the years of everybody that played on this record… [Cooder hesitated, then laughed] Oh maybe we shouldn’t go there!”

Ry Cooder grew up in LA and began playing the tenor guitar when he was three. His father, a folksinger who played cowboy and Woody Guthrie songs, exposed him to the “radical music” of Pete Seeger, Leadbelly and Guthrie, along with plenty of Mozart, Beethoven and chamber music. As soon as his hands were big enough, Ry reached for the six string. By age twelve Ry had become a serious student of American folk music, infatuated with the Guthrie and the dustbowl era (Cooder’s second album from 1972, Into the Purple Valley featured a great version of Woody’s “Vigilante Man”). He studied records by Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins and Josh White as well as Etta Baker, spending hours learning their songs and copping their signature riffs. By age fifteen he’d picked up the five-string banjo and mastered both bluegrass style finger-picking and frailing techniques. Although he’d placed first at the Topanga Canyon Folk Festival competition Ry soon gave up the instrument as he had little love for its tone. He claimed it was too cumbersome and “all that banging” just gave him a headache. By the time Cooder was seventeen he’d become a studio musician, augmenting pop records with an arsenal of exotic stringed instruments, including the Appalachian dulcimer and a Venezuelan tiple, as well the mandolin. Cooder’s mandolin style was a revelation for those of us that had no clue just how funky the eight string instrument could sound.

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About thirty years ago I wound up in the hospital with an out-of-control thyroid condition. I had lost a lot of weight and was really weak. My good pal Chris Poehlman actually carried me down the stairs and delivered me to the hospital where I wound up in ICU for the next four days, but not before I grabbed Jack Kerouac’s The Scripture of the Golden Eternity off the shelf and stuffed it into my jacket pocket, just as Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisioned them. I think it was a combination of things that pulled me through - a good hospital staff, regular visits from friends and Kerouac’s Buddhist tale (which he wrote as a sutra after being challenged by Gary Snyder aka Japhy Ryder).

Gary Snyder

I was in rough shape and would read this little book a few times throughout my hospital stay - stanza by stanza with long rests in between. I found it (and still find it) inspiring. “It came on time.”

1

Did I create that sky? Yes, for, if it was anything other than a conception in my mind I wouldnt have said “Sky”-That is why I am the golden eternity. There

are not two of us here, reader and writer, but one, one golden eternity, One-Which-It-Is, That-Which- Everything-Is.

2

The awakened Buddha to show the way, the chosen Messiah to die in the degradation of sentience, is the golden eternity. One that is what is, the golden eternity, or, God, or, Tathagata-the name. The Named One. The human God. Sentient Godhood. Animate Divine. The Deified One. The Verified One. The Free One. The Liberator. The Still One. The settled One. The Established One. Golden Eternity. All is Well. The Empty One. The Ready One. The Quitter. The Sitter. The Justified One. The Happy One.

3

That sky, if it was anything other than an illusion of my mortal mind I wouldnt have said “that sky.” Thus I made that sky, I am the golden eternity. I am Mortal Golden Eternity.

4

I was awakened to show the way, chosen to die in the degradation of life, because I am Mortal Golden Eternity.

5

I am the golden eternity in mortal animate form.

6

Strictly speaking, there is no me, because all is emptiness. I am empty, I am non-existent. All is bliss.

7

This truth law has no more reality than the world.

8

You are the golden eternity because there is no me and no you, only one golden eternity.

9

The Realizer. Entertain no imaginations whatever, for the thing is a no-thing. Knowing this then is Human Godhood.

10

This world is the movie of what everything is, it is one movie, made of the same stuff throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what everything is.

11

If we were not all the golden eternity we wouldnt be here. Because we are here we cant help being pure. To tell man to be pure on account of the punishing angel that punishes the bad and the rewarding angel that rewards the good would be like telling the water “Be Wet”-Never the less, all things depend on supreme reality, which is already established as the record of Karma earned-fate.

12

God is not outside us but is just us, the living and the dead, the never-lived and never-died. That we should learn it only now, is supreme reality, it was written a long time ago in the archives of universal mind, it is already done, there’s no more to do.

13

This is the knowledge that sees the golden eternity in all things, which is us, you, me, and which is no longer us, you, me.

14

What name shall we give it which hath no name, the common eternal matter of the mind? If we were to call it essence, some might think it meant perfume, or gold, or honey. It is not even mind. It is not even discussible, groupable into words; it is not even endless, in fact it is not even mysterious or inscrutably inexplicable; it is what is; it is that; it is this. We could easily call the golden eternity “This.” But “what’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare. The golden eternity by another name would be as sweet. A Tathagata, a God, a Buddha by another name, an Allah, a Sri Krishna, a Coyote, a Brahma, a Mazda, a Messiah, an Amida, an Aremedeia, a Maitreya, a Palalakonuh, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 would be as sweet. The golden eternity is X, the golden eternity is A, the golden eternity is /\, the golden eternity is O, the golden eternity is [ ], the golden eternity is t-h-e-g-o-l-d-e-n-e-t-e-r- n-i-t-y. In the beginning was the word; before the beginning, in the beginningless infinite neverendingness, was the essence. Both the word “god” and the essence of the word, are emptiness. The form of emptiness which is emptiness having taken the form of form, is what you see and hear and feel right now, and what you taste and smell and think as you read this. Wait awhile, close your eyes, let your breathing stop three seconds or so, listen to the inside silence in the womb of the world, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, re-recognize the bliss you forgot, the emptiness and essence and ecstasy of ever having been and ever to be the golden eternity. This is the lesson you forgot.

15

The lesson was taught long ago in the other world systems that have naturally changed into the empty and awake, and are here now smiling in our smile and scowling in our scowl. It is only like the golden eternity pretending to be smiling and scowling to itself; like a ripple on the smooth ocean of knowing. The fate of humanity is to vanish into the golden eternity, return pouring into its hands which are not hands. The navel shall receive, invert, and take back what’d issued forth; the ring of flesh shall close; the personalities of long dead heroes are blank dirt.

16

The point is we’re waiting, not how comfortable we are while waiting. Paleolithic man waited by caves for the realization of why he was there, and hunted; modern men wait in beautified homes and try to forget death and birth. We’re waiting for the realization that this is the golden eternity.

17

It came on time.

18

There is a blessedness surely to be believed, and that is that everything abides in eternal ecstasy, now and forever.

19

Mother Kali eats herself back. All things but come to go. All these holy forms, unmanifest, not even forms, truebodies of blank bright ecstasy, abiding in a trance, “in emptiness and silence’ as it is pointed out in the Diamond-cutter, asked to be only what they are: GLAD.

20

The secret God-grin in the trees and in the teapot, in ashes and fronds, fire and brick, flesh and mental human hope. All things, far from yearning to be re-united with God, had never left themselves and here they are, Dharmakaya, the body of the truth law, the universal Thisness.

21

“Beyond the reach of change and fear, beyond all praise and blame,” the Lankavatara Scripture knows to say, is he who is what he is in time and time-less-ness, in ego and in ego-less-ness, in self and in self-less-ness.

22

Stare deep into the world before you as if it were the void: innumerable holy ghosts, buddhies, and savior gods there hide, smiling. All the atoms emitting light inside wavehood, there is no personal separation of any of it. A hummingbird can come into a house and a hawk will not: so rest and be assured. While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light.

23

Things dont tire of going and coming. The flies end up with the delicate viands.

24

The cause of the world’s woe is birth, The cure of the world’s woe is a bent stick.

25

Though it is everything, strictly speaking there is no golden eternity because everything is nothing: there are no things and no goings and comings: for all is emptiness, and emptiness is these forms, emptiness is this one formhood.

26

All these selfnesses have already vanished. Einstein measured that this present universe is an expanding bubble, and you know what that means.

27

Discard such definite imaginations of phenomena as your own self, thou human being, thou’rt a numberless mass of sun-motes: each mote a shrine. The same as to your shyness of other selves, selfness as divided into infinite numbers of beings, or selfness as identified as one self existing eternally. Be obliging and noble, be generous with your time and help and possessions, and be kind, because the emptiness of this little place of flesh you carry around and call your soul, your entity, is the same emptiness in every direction of space unmeasurable emptiness, the same, one, and holy emptiness everywhere: why be selfy and unfree, Man God, in your dream? Wake up, thou’rt selfless and free. “Even and upright your mind abides nowhere,” states Hui Neng of China. We’re all in heaven now.

28

Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.

29

Are you tightwad and are you mean, those are the true sins, and sin is only a conception of ours, due to long habit. Are you generous and are you kind, those are the true virtues, and they’re only conceptions. The golden eternity rests beyond sin and virtue, is attached to neither, is attached to nothing, is unattached, because the golden eternity is Alone. The mold has rills but it is one mold. The field has curves but it is one field. All things are different forms of the same thing. I call it the golden eternity-what do you call it, brother? for the blessing and merit of virtue, and the punishment and bad fate of sin, are alike just so many words.

30

Sociability is a big smile, and a big smile is nothing but teeth. Rest and be kind.

31

There’s no need to deny that evil thing called GOOGOO, which doesnt exist, just as there’s no need to deny that evil thing called Sex and Rebirth, which also doesn’t exist, as it is only a form of emptiness. The bead of semen comes from a long line of awakened natures that were your parent, a holy flow, a succession of saviors pouring from the womb of the dark void and back into it, fantastic magic imagination of the lightning, flash, plays, dreams, not even plays, dreams.

32

“The womb of exuberant fertility,” Ashvhaghosha called it, radiating forms out of its womb of exuberant emptiness. In emptiness there is no Why, no knowledge of Why, no ignorance of Why, no asking and no answering of Why, and no significance attached to this.

33

A disturbed and frightened man is like the golden eternity experimentally pretending at feeling the disturbed-and-frightened mood; a calm and joyous man, is like the golden eternity pretending at experimenting with that experience; a man experiencing his Sentient Being, is like the golden eternity pretending at trying that out too; a man who has no thoughts, is like the golden eternity pretending at being itself; because the emptiness of everything has no beginning and no end and at present is infinite.

34

“Love is all in all,” said Sainte Therese, choosing Love for her vocation and pouring out her happiness, from her garden by the gate, with a gentle smile, pouring roses on the earth, so that the beggar in the thunderbolt received of the endless offering of her dark void. Man goes a-beggaring into nothingness. “Ignorance is the father, Habit-Energy is the Mother.” Opposites are not the same for the same reason they are the same.

35

The words “atoms of dust” and “the great universes” are only words. The idea that they imply is only an idea. The belief that we live here in this existence, divided into various beings, passing food in and out of ourselves, and casting off husks of bodies one after another with no cessation and no definite or particular discrimination, is only an idea. The seat of our Immortal Intelligence can be seen in that beating light between the eyes the Wisdom Eye of the ancients: we know what we’re doing: we’re not disturbed: because we’re like the golden eternity pretending at playing the magic cardgame and making believe it’s real, it’s a big dream, a joyous ecstasy of words and ideas and flesh, an ethereal flower unfolding a folding back, a movie, an exuberant bunch of lines bounding emptiness, the womb of Avalokitesvara, a vast secret silence, springtime in the Void, happy young gods talking and drinking on a cloud. Our 32,000 chillicosms bear all the marks of excellence. Blind milky light fills our night; and the morning is crystal.

36

Give a gift to your brother, but there’s no gift to compare with the giving of assurance that he is the golden eternity. The true understanding of this would bring tears to your eyes. The other shore is right here, forgive and forget, protect and reassure. Your tormenters will be purified. Raise thy diamond hand. Have faith and wait. The course of your days is a river rumbling over your rocky back. You’re sitting at the bottom of the world with a head of iron. Religion is thy sad heart. You’re the golden eternity and it must be done by you. And means one thing: Nothing-Ever-Happened. This is the golden eternity.

“Its hell being a legend, ‘specially if you’re living!”

- Jethro Burns

My folks really tried to bring me up right. They sent me to an expensive private boy’s school. On the weekends my mother took me to museums. She didn’t want me watching “trash” on TV. Their definition of “trash” extended beyond the barrage of Saturday morning cartoons to shows like Star Trek and The Munsters and Hee-Haw. Mom, love her as I do, was always something of a snob. Although a Jersey girl to the core, she spoke with a Philadelphia accent. She said “chalk”olate not “chawc”olate. She had a big problem with the South. She didn’t like it one bit, least of all the King of the Trailer Parks - Elvis Presley. In an era when people fought for civil rights, no son of hers was going to grow up listening to hillbilly music! Back then the only real pickin’ a suburban Yankee boy could see was on TV. That’s why I watched The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show, in hopes of catching Flatt & Scruggs or Andy pickin’ his Martin. And then of course there was Elly May Clampett.

“Jethro” Burns (left) with “Homer” aka Henry Haynes

But Homer & Jethro? They were a pair of goofy old dudes in straw boaters and candy-striped jackets. I dug The Beatles and Peter Max’s flowing, flowery psychedelic visions. Those guys wore bow ties and sold Kellogg’s Corn Flakes! Yet Homer & Jethro were true radicals, in their own way. If one bothered to look (or better yet, listen) below the surface it was obvious they were as revolutionary as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. In the era of protest with everyone burning draft cards and bras and shouting “Power to the People,” Homer & Jetrho were rebels of the first rank. They had a healthy disregard for everything, including Bill Monroe.

In his zany column “Jethro Speaks,” (in which he offered unusual recipes like baloney gravy) for the Spring 1981 issue of Mandolin World News, Burns interviewed himself, (after a supposed interviewer failed to show up) asking” “What do you think of Bill Monroe’s playing?” “I try not to,” his favorite mandolin player dryly quipped.

David Grisman on the cover of MWN

Jethro’s protégé, mandolinist/guitarist Don Stiernberg recalled the time the Bluegrass Boys came to Jethro’s adopted hometown of Evanston, Illinois, sometime in the eighties: “Bill and Jethro had apperently been in contact with each other and planned that he would come and sit in. There was a wonderful exchange between these two mandolin icons. Bill said something along the lines of, (imitating Monroe’s Southern lilt): ‘We’ve got a man here tonight who is a great mandolin man. Ladies and gentlemen, the great Jethro Burns! C’mon up here Jethro! Jethro walks on stage and Bill says, ‘Well Jethro, you lookin’ good.’ Jethro says, ‘Thanks Bill, you look pretty good yourself.’ Bill says, ‘What would you like to play for the folks here tonight?’ And Jethro says, ‘How ‘bout the one we rehearsed?’ Then they tore through ‘Rawhide’ and ‘Roanoke’ - in harmony!

“American mandolin playing basically falls into two schools - Bill Monroe or Jethro Burns,” Stiernberg said. “When I played with Jethro (as a duo or in his band) he never played chop chords or used Bluegrass voicings. They’re two different aesthetics. Because Jethro played so differently from Bill and was a wise guy on stage, always making jokes, people thought he didn’t like Bluegrass and was trying to put Bill Monroe down. But that wasn’t the case. They knew and respected each other. Jethro especially liked Bobby Osborne, Jesse McReynolds and Dean Webb’s playing. He liked the guys that played real clean as that’s how he tried to play.”

“He was one of the greats. There weren’t too many mandolinists at the time who were into that style of swing,” klezmer mandolinist/clarinetist Andy Statman said. “I got Playin’ It Straight and It Ain’t Necessarily Square back in the mid-sixties and wrote all the songs out and learned to play them,” Andy recalled. “Jethro was a multi-faceted type of player who explored different techniques like the way he used chords in his solos. They used to be regulars on the Jimmy Dean Show. Homer was a great rhythm guitarist. He was very much Jethro’s equal. They had their act but they were actually very urbane.”

“Homer and Jethro were as hip as anybody! People like Count Basie, Freddy Green, Stan Getz and Nat ‘King’ Cole all hung out at their gigs,” Don pointed out.

“I never heard anybody say ‘Jethro Burns.’ They’d just say ‘Jethro.’ It was the same thing with Miles. If anybody said ‘Miles Davis,’ you knew they were just gettin’ into jazz,” producer Joel Dorn said with a chuckle. “He was really respected but he never got the kind of recognition that he should have. But the people that dug him really dug him! If people knew Jethro was comin’ by it was a big deal, there’d be a crowd at the (Atlantic Records) studio. One night he came by with Les Paul. The two of them in the same breath? People were flippin’ out!”

Dorn, who produced Steve Goodman’s Say It in Private for Asylum in 1977, “first met Jethro when he came in to play on an old song Steve’s father used to sing him called ‘There’s A Girl In The Heart Of Maryland.’

“Homer & Jethro used to be Nat ‘King’ Coles’ favorite opening act. He loved them! Whenever Nat was in Vegas he would request that they opened for him. Nat was a baseball freak. He knew so much about the game he could’ve managed his own team. And Jethro loved baseball just as much. His son Johnny was a pitcher who almost made it to the majors but had an injury that stopped him. So they talked a lot of baseball. Once a night Nat would sneak up behind Homer and Jethro on stage and whisper the name of one of his songs and they’d make up a parody of it – which was their specialty – right on the spot. One time Nat walks up behind Jethro and whispers “Answer Me My Love,” which was his hit at the moment. Jethro without skippin’ a beat immediately starts to sing; ‘Answer me knucklehead, under-f**ked and overfed” and Nat just about fell on the floor! They always had an answer for him.”

Jethro’s love affair with the mandolin actually began as an act of defiance. His older brother, Slim (“a pretty fair country musician” by Jethro’s account) forbid him to touch the instrument while he was away at work. Meanwhile Burns played “Little Brown Jug” until he “just about drove himself crazy.” He soon began playing square dances and hoedowns with his three brothers, Curly on tenor banjo, and Slim and Aitchie on guitars.

“He started on the mandolin really young, at either age five or six,” Stiernberg said. “And everybody around him, his brothers all played a stringed instrument. His hands were really big and he could reach things that other players had difficulty with.”

By age twelve Burns left school and became a professional musician, as a member of the String Dusters, which included his future partner Henry “Homer” Haynes, who he met at radio station WNOX in Knoxville in 1932.

Haynes and Burns, with mandolin and guitar, plugged into one amp and sharing a mic, worked as a duo under their nicknames “Junior and Dude,” until changing their handle to Homer & Jethro one night, four years later, when an emcee mis-introduced on a radio show.

“They’d been partners for ten years when they went off to war. Jethro was in the Pacific theater while Homer went to Europe. They had no idea if the other was dead or alive. They took him off the front lines and put him in the Army band, where he played guitar. They both survived, returned and picked up right where they left off. Can you imagine? It’s totally incredible,” Don said. “It’s like a movie. I used to wonder how Jethro could be so confident and secure. He played so well. He was always funny, saying whatever came into his mind. My theory is that after they lived through World War II, they took nothing seriously. Jethro found the humor in every situation and always had a good time.”

Signed to RCA Victor in 1949, they soon had a hit with a wacky take of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” trading punch lines and innuendos with a demure June Carter. The record label even came with an apology to the songwriter, Frank Loesser. They were soon regulars on WLS in Chicago and recorded “Pagliacci” with the wild and wooly Spike Jones. Homer & Jethro it seemed, were laughing their way to the top.

The rare occasion when Homer & Jethro’s deadpan humor failed them came in Canton, Ohio, on New Year’s Eve, 1952. They were on stage when Hank Williams’ manager, standing in the wings, gave them the “stretch” sign. Hank, the headliner, was late. They obliged, nearly playing a full second set until the fretful manager finally called them off. Something was obviously wrong and Jethro wanted to know what the problem was.
“Well, the son-of-a-bitch has found a new way to miss a show,” the manager reportedly groused.

“How’s that?” Jethro replied.

“He died!”
With that Homer and Jethro began to beat on him for having made such a callous remark over the death of their fishing buddy and America’s arguably greatest country musician.

“Hank had kick-started their whole career,” Don pointed out. “Once he gave them permission to parody his songs, then everyone else did. They loved Hank and attributed a large share of their success to him. Homer & Jethro knew everybody who was anybody in their day. And everybody knew them! Hank Williams, Rosemary Clooney, Nat ‘King’ Cole’ Johnny Carson, and lots of baseball players too…”

“Around 1965, a friend of mine bought Playin’ It Straight. We went home and put it on his record player without realizing it was on 45,” David Grisman said recalled. “The first tune, ‘If Dreams Come True’ was kind of slow. So it was believable for the first minute. But when he started to get goin’, it was ridiculous! So he made an even more amazing impression on me, due to faulty technology.

“I heard Jethro was teaching, every Tuesday afternoon at a music store in Evanston, Illinois. So in the summer of 1973, I was planning on driving across the country, from the East coast to California and I booked a lesson with him. I planned my trip to coincide with that. I met him and took the lesson. He made a huge impression on me with his knowledge of music. He knew all the songs in every key! He had huge hands and was a technical wiz. After that we kept in touch. I was a bluegrass picker just gettin’ into other things. I was so struck by Jethro using Black Diamond Strings that I bought a set and put ‘em on my old F-5. I played ‘em in the car all the way to California and then took ‘em off. That was it for Black Diamond Strings!

“He thought I was pretty good. On the way out he introduced me to this young kid who’s sitting there waiting for his lesson. That kid was Don Stiernberg.”

Stiernberg first met Jethro in 1972 after his mother had heard an ad on the radio offering mandolin lessons with Jethro Burns at Main Music. Stiernberg confessed he was reluctant to go at first, as he was “a geeky fifteen-year old.” Thankfully his folks, who had to drive nearly an hour to the store, pushed him. “It turned out to be one of the greatest things that happened in my life,” he said.

The cost of the lessons? Just ten dollars! Don recalled his teacher as “easy going, relaxed, positive, and supportive.” Just the kind of nurturing a geek needed after playing an admittedly “dismal and pitiful” rendition of “Soldier’s Joy’ for the “greatest mandolin player in the world.” Jethro’s response? “Donny, that was great! You’ve got all the tools!” he told him. “Years later I realized he meant I had a mandolin and a pick,” Don joked. “But at the time he made me feel very capable.

“He taught me how to play mandolin from scratch” said Stiernberg, who also took guitar lessons from Jethro and backed him up “when other guitar players weren’t available, or when we did those recordings for Acoustic Disc. He was a master of jazz guitar as well, playing in the manner of the guitarists of his time – Wes Montgomery, Howard Roberts, Joe Pass and Barney Kessel. He played guitar almost as long as he played mandolin. But ultimately it was about entertainment.”

Because Homer & Jethro told corny jokes and wore ridiculous outfits, the public and critics alike thought of them as “entertainers” and failed to recognize their world- class jazz chops, Jethro ultimately found himself in the same boat as Fats Waller, Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Zappa, other brilliant musicians whose comic genius obscured their virtuosity.

Simply put Jethro Burns made the mandolin a jazz instrument. He was spontaneous, inventive but most of all, he swung his ass off, on an axe that most people thought was “too plinky” or lacked range of depth and expression to handle the job. Don believed there was “a deep connection” between Benny Goodman’s clarinet phrasing and Jethro’s single note leads. Stiernberg regards the instrumental records Homer & Jethro cut for RCA as “the mandolin player’s Holy Grail.”

Like Thelonious Monk, Jethro re-invented old standards and gave them a stamp, all his own, as singular as fingerprints. And like Reverend Gary Davis who inspired an entire generation of longhair guitarists to play rags and blues, Jethro too, was a teacher who inspired a new wave of mandolin pickers to stretch the boundaries of bluegrass to incorporate swing and jazz changes into their music, which ultimately influenced new genres called “Newgrass” and “Dawg.”

In 1980 David Grisman produced a solo mandolin record of Jethro’s with no accompaniment called Tea for One. “He played chord melody style standards, just the mandolin. People told him you can’t do that! He said, ‘Well, I just did!’ It’s another masterpiece,” Stiernberg laughed.

“Jethro first moved to Evanston in 1948,” Don recalled. “A lot of people wondered why a ‘country star’ would live there but he appreciated Chicago. It was one of the few cities at that time that had two major league baseball teams. He used to joke on stage, ‘I moved to Chicago to watch major league baseball and I may move away for the same reason.’

“They flew everywhere to their gigs and the newly built O’Hare Airport was the largest airport in the country at the time. So they wanted to be close to it.”

“He always traveled a lot, so he had to go through the metal detectors they installed after they started hijacking planes,” Joel Dorn recalled. “So Jethro goes through and sets the thing off. Then he takes off his watch, takes his keys and everything else out of his pockets and goes through again but the bell is still ringin’. The woman says to him, ‘Well you took everything out of your pockets, so what else could it be?’ Jethro looks at him and says, ‘Must be the lead in my ass, lady!’”

“My first impression of Jethro?” Sam Bush said, repeating my question with a laugh. “Well I guess I was listening to the Grand Ole Opry as a kid, before I was playing the mandolin yet and Bill Monroe came on and played ‘John Henry’ and I thought it was totally incredible. My father, who wasn’t a big Bill Monroe fan said, ‘That ain’t nothin’! Wait till you hear Jethro Burns do that kinda stuff.’ Then I saw him on TV. Without a strap on his mandolin, he effortlessly ripped off this beautiful solo and went right back to havin’ fun with comedy, which was just as effortless as his playin’. Then my friend Alan Munde made me a tape of Playing It Straight, which blew my socks off. After all these years, as much as I used to watch him play and sit and learn licks from him, I’m just now starting to understand his playing better.

“When I saw Jethro on The Joey Bishop Show wearin’ a tuxedo and playin’ a beautiful red mandolin, that’s what I wanted to do! It’s no accident that I love block inlay so much after I saw Jethro’s mandolins with that block inlay.

“In January of 1973, the Newgrass Revival was playing a week at a club in Indianapolis and things kept occurring that made us late every night. First, we bought a used PA system that didn’t work. Then a couple nights later I went to Nashville to get the mandolin that I still play to this day, a ’37 Gibson F-5, from Norman Blake and I was late gettin’ back. Then I went to Evanston, to meet Jethro and that’s when a kid from Bowling Green, discovered Chicago traffic. So I was late gettin’ back again that night. But there I was in the ‘House of Jethro.’ I met his wife, Gussie, and his son John. Jethro told me to go down to the basement and wait for him for a couple minutes, he’d be right there and we’d do some playin’. So I go down and there are all these great shots of Homer & Jethro. ‘Big Red,’ his red electric mandolin was hanging on the wall, right next to his dartboard. He never missed!” Sam added with a laugh. “I was only twenty and was freakin’ out. I didn’t find out until my 50^th birthday party when John Burns got up to tell a couple of stories, that Jethro sent me downstairs and then looked at him and said, ‘I’m gonna f**k him up!’ And he did!” Sam laughed. “He gave me so much to stuff to learn and I didn’t have a tape recorder. Over the years we’d see each other at different festivals or in Chicago. The Newgrass Revival used to play at a place called the Amazing Grace, in Evanston, which was about a mile from Jethro’s house. Sometimes he’d share the bill with us and I’d feel strange that my hero was opening. I didn’t understand it, so I talked to Jethro about it. He said, ‘Get over it! If you’re lucky enough to stay in this business as long as I have you’ll be opening for everybody!’

“One time he told me, ‘Why don’t you plug that thing in? I can’t hear you!’ I said, ‘I don’t like the tone when it’s plugged in.’ Jethro said, ‘Tone! Who cares about tone? Nobody ever told me I had great tone! But they can hear all my notes. Now plug that thing in! Who do you think you are? Bill Monroe?’ I said, ‘I don’t know… maybe.’ And he said, ‘Get over that too!’” Bush chuckled.

“Big Red had such incredible tone,” Sam continued. “I pride myself on having a good tone. I’ve got a great old F-5 but when the two of us would sit down together, it wouldn’t matter what mandolin he played, whether it was the Washburn or his new Gibson F-5L, I could always hear his notes just as clear and loud as anything I could play. He used Black Diamond Strings because they were cheap. He played with low action and used a little jazz pick. His touch made the notes stand out. In Jethro’s hands any mandolin would come alive!”

Bush is now the “proud owner” of Big Red. “I bought it from John a couple years ago. I’ve got ‘em both, the red electric and the A-5 Florentine, which are both matching 1959’s.

“After Jethro passed away it wasn’t long until Gussie did too. She decided to sell some of Jethro’s instruments to Dan Mills from George Gruhn’s in Nashville. I happened to walk into Gruhn’s shop and they’d just gotten them in. They weren’t even tagged yet! I recognized the cases. The red electric had F-holes with a big T-90 Gibson guitar pick up in it. I tried to buy it from him years before but he said, ‘Oh you wouldn’t play it. You’d just play that old beat up thing you like.’ Well they didn’t want that much for it but there was still no way could I get it. It was very humbling, the way I did get it. Bela Fleck and my wife Lynn got in touch with about twenty-five people who each made a donation and got me that mandolin for my birthday that year. I’ve had the electric mandolin since the late eighties and then a couple years ago, John called me and offered me the round-hole mandolin. He said there were only a couple people who he thought his dad would want to have it. I said, ‘What about Don?’ John said, ‘Well he’s got two kids in high school and you don’t!’ It wasn’t like I needed another mandolin. I’ve got my own model Gibson mandolin. But since I acquired this mandolin I realized I know virtually nothing about round-hole mandolins. It’s definitely inspired me to get down and learn more about Jethro’s chord solos. Of course I used to sit right in front of him and watch him but it was over my head at the time,” Bush admitted. “Now I can finally start to understand a little bit more about him. He’d take (imitates Jethro’s voice) ‘a little tune off the radio, I heard today by Billy Joel called ‘I Love You Just the Way You Are,’’ and he’d do an awesome chord solo that was gorgeous. He could do it with anything! He’d play ‘Mississippi Sawyer’ with jazz chords and you’d never think it was the same tune!”

“Jethro pioneered the chord melody approach after he was left at that crossroads in his career when Homer suddenly passed (on August 7, 1971) and he was wondering what to do. I met him just months after Homer died,” Don recollected. “He was teaching a lot then and would use chord melody arrangements as a way of teaching the mandolin. He put such hip changes to the standards. He always said if you want to learn some really great chord changes just watch old Doris Day movies. He’d sit there and watch the film and then afterwards work out all the songs from it. One time he tried to count how many songs he knew. He got up to eight hundred before he got tired of counting.”

Steve Goodman

Enter Jethro’s second partner in crime: Steve Goodman. “Steve had gone to hear (guitarist) Johnny Burns’ band play and Jethro sat in,” Don recollected. “They met and Jethro casually said to him, ‘If you ever need a mandolin player call me!’ It was soon after Homer had passed and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself career-wise. Steve came along at a really good time and started using Jethro on tour and records. Not only was he well-paid and having a good time but Steve introduced him to a whole new generation of musicians and fans who never would have known anything about him. He really had two careers – with Homer & Jethro and then with Steve Goodman. Suddenly he was playing folk and rock festivals and college dates. They made quite a pair, visually, on stage. Jethro was a big, giant guy and Steve was this little itty-bitty guy,” Don said with a laugh. They would play off that and the difference in their ages. It was good fodder for humor. They’d come out on stage and people would laugh and they weren’t even doing anything! I think Jethro saw quite a bit of himself in Goodman.”

As Stiernberg pointed out, Steve not only was “a fearless entertainer and great picker,” but “a clever writer” as well. Goodman not only wrote what has become an American standard, “City of New Orleans,” but a number of left-field masterpieces that a joker like Jethro could appreciate - “Talk Backwards” or “Vegematic” and “Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.”

Goodman also loved the mandolin and played a Flatiron mandola on which he wrote a beautiful pentatonic-based melody called “If Jethro Were Here.”

“Here was a guy who used to go fishing with Hank Williams, hanging with the guy who wrote ‘City of New Orleans,’ Don marveled. “And Jethro really appreciated that Steve respected him enough as an artist to hire him and get him out in front of big crowds and a whole new set of people. He had the Jethro Burns Quartet open for him on a number of occasions, so that’s how I got to know him. (Don played second mandolin in the band with guitarist John Parrott and six string Fender bassist Neal Seroka.) They were like two peas in a pod, because of their intelligence and wit. So they clicked. They were soul mates.”

Sometime in late 1973/’74 Sam Bush played a show in Pennsylvania with David Bromberg, Tut Taylor and Norman Blake. “This guy, Hank Dean, wanted to cut a jam session record (released by Flying Fish, featuring fiddler Vassar Clements and included Bush, Taylor and Blake, along with Miles Davis’ alumni Dave Holland on bass.) I told him, ‘You should get Jethro Burns!’ And they did. Jethro walked in and said, ‘Hey Mr. Producer, what are we gonna play?’ Hank said, ‘We’re just gonna have a good time,’ he said. And Jethro said, ‘I came down from Chicago just to jam and have a good time?’”

Although Bush was happy to bring Jethro to the session, he soon found himself at a loss as Burns covered all the bases with his dazzling solos. “Here I was, the one who suggested getting Jethro on the record in the first place and after every time he played I felt like there was nothing left to say at all. What could I do? Jethro just played everything you should right there! But, hey it was a good learning experience.”

“One time I felt like I was stuck and I asked him if he saw me doin’ anything wrong and without hesitation he said, ‘Yeah, the strings are not even two inches wide. Why does your hand go a foot with each stroke?’ It was a good question. I’ve been workin’ on refining it ever since.”

Sam learned plenty from Burns over the years while taking plenty of ribbing in the process. In the autumn 1981 edition of Mandolin World News, Jethro’s column, titled The Disappearance of Sam Bush said: “Any person living or otherwise having information as to the whereabouts of the aforementioned Sam Bush, please keep it to yourselves. You know where he is. I know where he is – the question is does Sam Bush know where he is?”

“He’d just stick it in and start twistin,’” Sam said with a chuckle as he imitated Jethro again: “There’s Bush with his tape recorder. They’re cute at that age. But I know what he’s thinking.’ He’s thinkin’ ‘God, I hope he never dies.’ But I will and he’ll be left, all alone, not knowin’ who to copy!’”

But Bush took Jethro’s teasing in stride: “Jethro taught me its okay to make fun of everybody,” he said. “He’d say, ‘Hey Bush, you wear a garter belt? I do ever since my wife found one in my glove compartment!’”

Burns was never above taking an occasional shot at himself. “It will be sold in a plain brown wrapper,” he wrote in Mandolin World News about his supposed new album, Porno Mando. “In it I will take the mandolin to places it’s never been. I will also leave it there!”

In January, 1979, Jethro and Tiny Moore, with the help of David Grisman did just that – took the mandolin to some new brilliant corners of the universe. A summit meeting of a pair of the world’s greatest mandolin pickers took place in the parking lot of a Mill Valley Howard Johnson’s motel. The two “long lost brothers,” as producer David Grisman described them, Jethro and Tiny Moore were about to join forces to cut the innovative and entertaining Back to Back. Tiny wielded his one of a kind Paul Bigsby custom 5 string electric mandolin that he used to improvise solos with Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys and Merle Haggard’s Strangers while Jethro’s fingers danced effortlessly up the neck of his Gibson A-5. They were backed by an impeccable rhythm section of, bassist Ray Brown and Shelly Manne on drums, along with another veteran of the legendary Texas Playboys, Stratocaster master Eldon Shamblin.

Burns was so inspired by all the fresh ideas being implemented at the session that he remarked, “Man, that Eldon Shamblin, every chord he plays is from the 1980’s!” What makes this comment particularly poignant is that he made it a year before the “Me Decade” had begun.

The band bopped and swung their way through a baker’s dozen of classic jazz numbers by Ellington, Reinhardt and Grappelli, Lester Young and Dizzy Gillespie along with a couple tunes of their own and even a waltz by the Father of Bluegrass.

Grisman’s Acoustic Disc label re-issued this gem in 2004 along with a second disc of alternate takes. If you never heard it, or you haven’t replaced your old vinyl copy – this music is as fresh and alive as the day they cut it back in the winter of ’79.

In the original liner notes to the album, David, (who made a guest appearance on a couple numbers) voiced his only regret over the project – it seems that Tiny, Jethro and company had finished the sessions early!

“He was way psyched about playing on Back to Back with Ray Brown and Shelly Manne. And they all clicked. It was amazing,” Stiernberg said. “Jethro had the confidence and ability to play with guys like Joe Venuti. Back in the Homer & Jethro days, the lead guitar (on their albums) was played by George Barnes Hank Garland or Chet Atkins. Chet was Jethro’s favorite musician. He said he showed Chet his first hot guitar licks and that the two of them would kill time as roommates by transcribing Oscar Moore solos from Nat King Cole records!”

Jethro and Chet Atkins were also brothers-in-law, married to identical twins. Chet’s wife, Leona and Jethro’s wife, Lois (known affectionately as Gussie) had performed as a singing duet known as The Johnson Twins. Chet also produced many Homer and Jethro records, including their instrumental masterpieces Playing it Straight and It Ain’t Necessarily Square.

“Jethro had a huge amount of musicianship,” Grisman enthused. “He played quite a bit of lead guitar on It Ain’t Necessarily Square. It’s amazing. You can tell instantly that it’s Jethro. When I made that album with him and Tiny Moore, I had (guitarist) John Carlini write some charts for it. One of them was an arrangement for three mandolins of Bill Monroe’s ‘Moonlight Waltz.’ There were some unusual harmonies in it. After we recorded it, when we got down to mixing the album, I noticed that Jethro wasn’t really playing what was written. It wasn’t hard to read. They were simple but unusual parts. I was wondering about it (Jethro’s ability to sight-read). I didn’t want to put him on the spot and say ‘Hey Jethro, play this! So I took the liberty of getting an oval hole mandolin and a thin pick and dubbed in a couple of bars, just so it fit the arrangement. I never told him!”

“In 1987 Johnny called to say Jethro was sick and wanted to record as much as possible,” Don recalled. “He had cancer for roughly three years before it got him in 1989. After his time with Homer & Jethro and Steve Goodman, he saw himself as a mandolin player and that is what he did at his shows. Towards the end of his life he used say he had ‘nothing to prove, he was just playing nice tunes.’

“There’s demand for his music now. Young players can hear it. Kids from coast to coast are learning his arrangements and it’s gratifying to see,” Stiernberg said. “He literally wrote the book on techniques that people are just now coming around and picking up. His chord melody arrangements are so deep. And there are so many of them. People trade them now on the web. As well as the series of books he did for Mel Bay with Ken Eidson’s transcriptions. He literally wrote the book on how to play the mandolin. There’s plenty there! It’s a deep legacy of music. Knowing and working with Jethro has been one of the greatest blessings in my life,” Don said. “He really loved to play and make people laugh.”

The night before completing this article, I ventured out in what the emcee of the show called “Dracula weather,” to Caldwell College, deep in the heart of Tony Soprano’s New Jersey, to see the Italian classical mandolinist Carlo Aonzo (backed by four additional mandolins including Barry Mitterhoff). They performed a stunning repertoire that included works by Vivaldi, Mozart, and Paganini to a standing ovation. For his encore, the virtuoso played a piece called “Jethro’s Tune.”

Originally published in Fretboard Journal #18 Summer 2010

It’s all a blur… OC in the kitchen - phab phone photo by JK

I’d finally done it. Somehow I managed to scrape together the loot, eighty some bucks to buy the Ornette Coleman box set Beauty Is A Rare Thing and was on my way home, gazing at the coveted object in my hands, clutching it possessively, like my dog with his rawhide chew, on the lookout for anyone who’d try to suddenly jerk it free from my desperate grasp. So I strolled down the sidewalk, grateful to the universe, for at that juncture in my life eighty dollars was tantamount to approximately one quarter of my entire holdings in the world. There I was, cradling the box in my hands, like a true believer with their Bible. When I got home I called my pals, not to make them jealous, but to share the wealth. But no one cared. A detached, “oh, cool” was about all their excitement could muster. So I listened to the whole thing – six hours, by myself.

Most of my girlfriends and many of my closest friends, musicians among them, could never relate to Ornette’s music. I usually go to his concerts alone (as has been the case with Ravi Shankar). I’ve considered getting new friends but have come to the realization that certain things are best pursued as solo interests. For most folks Coleman’s concept of Harmolodics is “a bit brisk,” as Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson once told me. So these days I simply enjoy the music instead of proselytizing and annoying those in my orbit. It rarely converts those that can’t be bothered to listen and besides, I get paid for that sort of enlightenment work as a music professor.

The revolutionary intellectual theory of Harmolodics is purely democratic in its truest sense. Every instrument is equal. There is no sonic hierarchy or caste system. No one is designated to playing support or the outfield. Its roots can be found in early New Orleans group improvisational ensembles with the counterpoint of wailing cornets, tailgating trombones and slippery licorice sticks.

The great bassist/composer Charles Mingus once referred to Coleman as a “calypso player.” And although he might have meant it as a slight, he had a point. If the listener could locate that place inside themselves where playfulness once romped freely and drop the overbearing process of discursive analysis that bricks up their windows and doors of perception (as William Blake once put it) they’d hear his music for what it is – the crazy carnival of the soul. So just give it up and let Coleman’s joyful sound (from the original quartet to the jagged funk of Prime Time to the sonic marmalade of Tone Dialing) wash over you and you’re bound to experience the full effect of his music, which is not only “brisk” but ultimately refreshing.

There was a feeling of cautious optimism in the air as I strolled down the sidewalk to Ornette’s midtown loft. It was November 8, 2006, the day after the Democrats swept the midterm election, along with the surprise resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. We sat in a large open loft, sparsely decorated with a colorful African tapestry and the Dorothy Baer painting of the man with two faces that adorned the cover of Coleman’s 1977 release Dancing in Your Head. Also hard to miss are a pair of life size portraits of Geronimo (an inspiration to him through-out his many years of struggle as a musician) as well as a wall sized print of Eddie Adams’ disturbing photograph of a South Vietnamese police chief executing a member of the Vietcong. (“Look,” Ornette said gently, pointing at the image Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, “he smiled when he did it!”)

Coleman spoke thoughtfully, barely whispering at times as he occasionally tugged at his lower lip. He was at once gentle and warm-hearted but a bit heady. Between the metaphysics and the metaphors I found the air getting a bit thin as we ascended the dizzying heights of Harmolodic theory, and unraveled the riddle of existence.

Joining us was baritone saxophonist James Jordan, Ornette’s jovial cousin from Fort Worth, who has played and collaborated with him since the early days.

King Curtis

JK: King Curtis, David Fathead Newman, Prince Lasha, Dewey Redman and yourself all came from Fort Worth, Texas. What is it about that place that produced so many great saxophonists?

OC: Well, first of all I think their mothers did it. Like my mother did. But Fort Worth is where the West began. It was a really open city. Everyone traveling to California, or on their way to Mexico, all came through there, people of all different nationalities. Some people, when they reached Fort Worth, they don’t go nowhere. There were all kinds of musicians there. When I grew up, I really liked Charlie Parker, but there were guys from there like Red Connors who played like John Coltrane and Ben Martin that I liked better than Charlie Parker.

JK: David Fathead Newman says there were a lot of great musicians from the Dallas/Fort Worth area that no one’s ever heard of.

OC: That’s true. Believe me, I know it from experience.

JK: Did you ever see Bird play live?

OC: Yes, I saw Charlie Parker in L.A. in the forties. He was playing standards. But he played them fine. Then he just walked away. I think he and John Coltrane had the most influence on instrumental music in modern jazz. But me, I was always trying to find the idea, not the melody. I never believed that the idea was the melody. I believed the idea was only the idea. I still think that way. Coltrane studied with me for a while until one day he wrote me a note that said, “I found it.”

JK: Ideas are frightening. Suddenly Coltrane wasn’t playing those nice ballads anymore and it scared a lot of people. How did your relationship with Atlantic Records begin?

OC: [Pianist] John Lewis [of Modern Jazz Quartet] had a mature relationship with Nesuhi [Ertegun]. Nesuhi never asked me about anything musically or directed me. He just recorded the music. I made about five or six records for them. I don’t like to bad mouth anybody but I didn’t make very much money there. In jazz there’s not a lot of opportunity for success. The records were more like advertisements, to let people know what you were doing. It’s not really for making money.

JK: Over the years you recorded for Atlantic, Blue Note, Columbia, A&M, but more recently your albums were released by independent labels.

OC: I’ve been trying to stay in business with sound and I’ve discovered that if I give everything away I can stay in business forever. [Laughs] But today there’s no reason, there’s nothing that can keep someone from materializing whatever they conceive of.

JK: A lot of people don’t like the word “jazz.” They feel it’s derogatory or it doesn’t accurately describe their music or in some cases it’s even a way of segregating the music. Rahsaan Roland Kirk called the music “Black Classical Music.” Yusef Lateef prefers the term “Autophysiopsychic Music” and you developed “Harmolodics” (Coleman’s theory which first appeared in print in the liner notes of 1972’s Skies of America album, is comprised of one part harmony/one part motion/one part melody).

OC: In the sixties and seventies the frequencies were changing and musicians were trying to get away from different styles like rock, jazz and funk. I never thought about styles. There’s no style in my head. I only think in terms of musical ideas. I’m still thinking about where’s the idea now in 2006.

JK: What inspires your ideas and concepts?

OC: The brain doesn’t have imperfections. There’s always something that someone is thinking that jars the situation but you can’t participate in it until you find out what his goal is or how it’s constructed to understand the form that it exists in and obviously sound doesn’t have any beginning.

JK: The band on your most recent album, Sound Grammar features two bassists, Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga. Last June at Carnegie Hall, you added a third bass player, Al McDowell [on electric bass guitar] to the group. Are you elaborating on earlier ideas that began with the trio of sax, bass and drums at the Golden Circle concerts? [Recorded live in Stockholm in 1965 and released by Blue Note Records].

OC: No, no. I never hire any specific combination of instruments to play with me. When someone wants to study with me and asks to play with me, I always let them. That’s why I’ve had most of the experiences I’ve had. When Pharaoh Sanders started playing, he played more ideas on his horn than anything else. Improvising is really about playing ideas, and ideas don’t have any parents. What is an idea but an idea? The idea can inspire or challenge. Sound is eternal but the name of the note is not the sound. It’s just a title, like my name doesn’t make me another race. It’s kind of like that. I guess every sound has a meaning.

JK: In Indian music each note of the scale is related to a sound in nature, whether it’s the wind or water or the sound of an elephant trumpeting. Do you relate to that system?

OC: All systems, like rhythm and blues or be-bop still use all the same notes. You have different grammar in sound and different grammar in language. The amazing thing about grammar is that it’s a mental idea that has less questions and no answers. If you had to spell to talk, nobody would be talking! [Laughs] Let’s face it, the English language is the most intelligent but the most fucked up language at the same time. Since the races on the planet don’t respect any particular sound, you can curse in any language. [Laughs] But improvised music doesn’t have any class or caste system. Most people use systems to expand their image and make some coinage doing it. They find a thing that hits and they package it.

JK: Yes, that’s what Yusef Lateef calls “the commodification of emotions.”

All of your drummers [from Billy Higgins, Ed Blackwell to his son Denardo] have had an idiosyncratic approach towards rhythm.

OC: I have always wanted to have more rhythm. Rhythm doesn’t have any parents and doesn’t have a style either. It just changes everything that touches it equally. You can’t dominate rhythm. Some call it the upbeat or the down beat but you either have to find a way to relate to it or let it pass.

JK: While Harmolodics allows musicians an incredible amount of freedom, it still has some boundaries, which are defined by your compositions.

OC: When I say Harmolodic or sound grammar, I think about how many families speak a different language with the same meaning. They’re not saying anything different but they use different sounds to relate with each other. Imagine, what is sound? It’s not air. It’s a sound! There’s no definition for it. It’s something that you bump into and then hear. Some force has got to stop it before it makes a sound. It’s the closest thing to what we believe in when we say God. It’s the closest evidence of God. You can’t see it. You can’t destroy it. It destroys itself when it leaves and becomes something else. Let’s put it this way, most people look for and try to relate to truth in their environment. So, the most true and advanced thing that I can think of is to open more eternity for humanity.

JK: Yes, that’s what you do.

OC: I think religion plays a great role in all of that.

JK: It’s not easy for some people to handle that level of intensity. Every time I’ve seen you play, part of the crowd gets up and walks out. It’s almost as if it wouldn’t be an Ornette Coleman concert if everyone understood the music. Years ago Jean-Phillipe Allard [of Polygram Records in France] said he thought the world had finally caught with you. Is that the case? Has the world caught up to you yet?

OC: I’d like to know which world are you talking about? [Laughs] No one really knows what the quality of being human actually is. Music has a quality to it that no other sound actually has. But it’s not always appreciated. For instance, I have seen tap dancers that had more of a horn player’s sound. The horn players couldn’t keep up with them. (taps his feet).

JK: It’s a phenomenal art form that sadly has become lost. I wanted to ask you about your violin playing…

OC: Oh Lord! [Laughs]

JK: Are you left handed or was this a deliberate decision on your part to play the instrument differently from everyone else?

OC: I’m left handed, yes. In western music all the instruments have a tempered scale which they think is going to support everything in sound, which it’s not. The C is the violin, Bb is the trumpet, the bass is the F instrument and the reeds are in Eb. But the only reason you need a key is to lock your house when you go out. [Laughs]

JK: Have you heard any music lately that inspires you?

OC: A cantor named Joseph Rosenblatt. You should listen to him. [Leave it to Coleman to both surprise and educate with one answer. Researching Rosenblatt I found he was born in the Ukraine in 1882 and was a celebrity by age nine, able to sing entire passages from the liturgy by heart. First appointed cantor at eighteen by a Hungarian synagogue, the Edison Record Company discovered and recorded him in 1905, releasing one of the first known records of cantorial singing. Caruso was so moved by his voice he tracked Rosenblatt down to hear his stuff. He then moved to New York in 1912 and was the highest paid professional cantor of his day. The next year Victor Records recorded him, followed by Columbia in 1914. During the 1920’s Rosenblatt performed on the Vaudeville circuit and was featured in The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson but suffered a fatal heart attack in 1933 while on a world tour. Admittedly, the Old Testament blues might not be your cup of borscht, but it’s deep stuff, so check out the wailin’ cantor].

JK: Is there any music out that you’re aware of but have never heard?

OC: I never heard an American Indian pick up an instrument and really express themselves with it. That’s gonna be some note!

JK: While popular western music is built on a hierarchy of sound, particularly the symphonic orchestra, which has yet to acknowledge the saxophone, you treat all instruments as equal. There is no caste system in your music.

OC: It’s [the symphony orchestra] a very intelligent discipline, but it’s like going to school and learning the same thing over and over again. If they’d allow symphony people to read and improvise, the music would be going somewhere. But they can’t do that because all the people involved have to pay their bills. It’ll get better one day I’m sure.

JK: When you go to a concert and all those instruments are tuning up, there seems like so much potential for something new or different to happen but then it’s the same old thing.

OC: Yeah, you’d think something was really going to come down the pike. But then it doesn’t.

James “Blood” Ulmer - photo by Stan Schnier

JK: You’ve worked with so many great guitarists over the years, including James “Blood” Ulmer…

OC: Oh, Blood Ulmer! He came and studied with me for a long time. He created his own theory but nobody yet knows what it is. I’m tellin’ you he scientifically broke down unison. He knows that shit backwards! When he plays the blues, he can make you think what you’re hearing disappear.

JK: You’ve also played with Jerry Garcia and Pat Metheny, yet you’ve said the electric guitar is a “difficult instrument.”

OC: That’s because they’re built in a certain key but are not confined to any resolution. When you write a melody and it’s played on an F instrument, it’s gonna sound like that instrument. Therefore you can’t listen to those notes and be inspired by some new notes. You’ve got to deal with those notes. It’s like a woman putting on lipstick, it’s the same thing.

JK: You mean that they can change the shade of their lipstick but in the end they still have the same face.

OC: [Laughs] Yeah… But what is a female sound? You can name it but it’s only an identification. I’ve found that there is something eternal in sound.

JK: [Ornette’s one-time partner, trumpeter] Don [Cherry} called it “the eternal now.”

Don Cherry

OC: Don would call it that, yes… Don was a fantastic person and a fantastic player, really, really talented. There’s got to be a sound of the present. Not the future or the past, but the present, but I don’t know what it is. And I don’t know anyone who knows either. But really, sound has no parents. There’s got to be something in the present that we are all missing.

JK: Well, the present is hard to nail down. It’s continually slipping through our fingers and our ears.

OC: Whatever it is. I have no idea what it is, praying, going to work, those sounds are needed for your needed survival - “Kiss my ass” and “Hello baby!” [Laughs] It’s true, ain’t it? But there’s one thing you can count on, that’s death. Death hates God. It’s obvious that nobody walking around made themselves. Not even my mother. The simple thing about being alive is that everything dies and the only way you die is if something kills you. So basically we are invisible/visible.

JK: Vaishnavas (devotees of Vishnu) believe that when someone is born they “appear.” And when they die they “disappear.” So one’s birthday is actually regarded as the day of their appearance and when they die it’s the day they disappeared.

OC: Musicians might disappear but music will never absolutly disappear. I can’t imagine death being in love with anything.

JK: Nothing but itself.

OC: But then it would probably reject that. But you know, you don’t have to die to be born.

Eric Dolphy

JK: Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler and John Coltrane, were all spiritual seekers who tried to commune with God with their horns. The saxophone seems to be a good tool to pray with.

OC: Yeah, yeah… Let’s face it. There’s some force, something that created human beings. Gotta be! And you can’t dial ‘em up or send ‘em a card and can’t talk to them. They don’t have any use for you in that sense. They made you visible while they stay invisible.

JK: A lot of musicians, like Charles Lloyd, have called their musical path “a mission.” Would you say that’s the case with your work?

OC: The thing that I’m trying to do is find the note that made the key. And the note that made the key doesn’t exist because it’s sound.

JK: Any parting thoughts?

OC: Creativity does not need matter. But matter needs creativity. Now those are some pretty intellectual words. Whatever knowledge is, it is not something to discuss. It’s gotta be a concrete belief. Best thing to do is to be as human as you can.

OC, JK and the late/great Claire Daly (photo by Marilyn Cvitanic)

This article was the first interview I did with Ornette. It appeared years ago in Waxpoetics.

RIP Country Joe… here’s a piece I wrote for the

NY Observer back in May of 2017

Before we start peering through the rose-tinted kaleidoscope of nostalgia at the old days of the San Francisco psychedelic renaissance, let’s get the story straight of how Country Joe & the Fish got their name… As their original guitarist/organist David Bennet Cohen tells it: “Joe McDonald and E.D. [Eugene Denson, the band’s friend/manager] were sitting around E.D.’s cottage in Berkeley trying to think up a name for the group. As they both had revolutionary tendencies, they wanted a name reflecting their political position. Leafing through Chairman Mao Tse Tung’s ‘Little Red Book’ when E.D. found the phrase, ‘The revolutionary is a fish that swims in the sea of the people.’ From that came ‘Country Mao and the Fish.’ But Joe said it might cause confusion as America didn’t recognize Red China. So, E.D. suggested ‘Country Joe and the Fish, with ‘Joe’ being Josef Stalin.

“Joe’s approach was… profoundly cerebral. His concept was basically to get a few people around and make something happen,” lead guitarist Barry “The Fish” Melton explained. “None of us were professional musicians, except maybe for David, who came from New York. [Drummer Gary] Chicken Hirsh was somewhat professional, but only because he was a few years older than the rest of us.”

“When I got to California in 1965 I had been playing guitar, mostly folk songs,” David said. “I didn’t decide to buy an electric guitar until after seeing the Beatles’ movies. They finally got me to accept rock ‘n’ roll. I had been really opposed to it before that. I started hanging around the guitar shops and a few small local clubs called the Jabberwock and the Questing Beast, where we’d perform for five dollars and food. The Jabberwock had an old beat-up piano and Barry went nuts over my boogie-woogie playing on songs like “St. Louis Blues.” Country Joe wanted an organ player in the group after Highway 61 came out and Barry told him that played. Church organs were really big intimidating instruments, with all those pedals. I’d never played organ before, but I wanted the gig,” Cohen laughed. “So, the band got me a Farfisa organ. I had no idea what I was doing. None of us did! We were just making up this music, creating a sound and then it became real. Later the reviews said I had ‘a unique style.’ But I was just copying my own guitar riffs!”

“We’d been a jug band but we didn’t play in a conventional way,” Melton said. “We were doing something new. We deliberately walked a different path. It wasn’t like we discussed it. We bridged folk and jazz with bluegrass, country and blues. It was an improvisational folk music, like what the Grateful Dead exploited commercially. When you’re creating something new you can’t be held to any standard of criticism.”

Just six weeks after the band formed they decided to record an EP comprised of three songs, and release it on the obscure Rag Baby label, as no record companies were pounding on their door… yet. The disc included three tracks that soon appeared on Electric Music For The Mind And Body: “Section 43,” “Bass Strings,” and “Love.”

“We weren’t even sure we were going to remain a band for very long, but we wanted to make a record,” Cohen said. “The E.P came out surprisingly good.”

Soon after the band signed with Vanguard Records. David continues the saga: “Joe signed a terrible contract for twelve albums in three years! But we were very happy about it because they had this hip folk image that we really liked. We recorded the first album [Electric Music] in three days, and although it could have been better, but it was definitely impressive. It was recorded on an eight track. For the most part we did everything live, with the vocals overdubbed later. [Producer/ author/ musicologist] Sam [Charters] pretty much stayed out of the way let us do whatever we wanted. Sam convinced us to fire our original drummer John Francis Gunning, an alcoholic beatnik conga player who once ended a drum solo by falling off his stool. It was a weird, heavy change for the band, but Chicken’s drumming was much better. He didn’t play flashy solos. He was solid and rarely lost the beat, and most importantly, he understood ensemble playing. But, even though musically we were much better, there was something intangible that was lost. We were becoming a ‘professional’ rock band...”

here’s the full album on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCPCv_MlpvgtY0dHdU-0r2cnAaGyh8Yg3

Released May 11, 1967, Electric Music for the Mind and Body opens with “Flying High” a slinky, sleazy blues featuring stinging lead guitar riffs, juiced with a mad electric vibrato that was popular amongst San Francisco guitarists like Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane and John Cippolina from Quicksilver Messenger Service.

The album’s second track “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” was the only single from Country Joe to (barely) crack the Billboard top 100. The tune opens with a slippery organ glissando from David Bennett Cohen. His sound was more reminiscent of Tex-Mex rockers like Question Mark & the Mysterians, and Augie Meyers of the Sir Doug Quartet than Al Kooper’s Hammond riffs on “Like A Rolling Stone,” which (along with Brit Invasion bands the Animals and the Zombies) made the instrument an essential part of ‘60’s rock. With lines like “volumes of literature based on herself,” Country Joe’s lyrics revealed the inspiration of Dylan’s surrealist poetry that illuminated his recent albums, Bringing It All Back Home, and Highway 61.
“Death Sound Blues” reverberated with a loud rattling tambourine and a stinging lead guitar by Barry Melton bearing the influence of the late/great guitarslinger Mike Bloomfield (who later produced one of Barry’s solo albums). “Barry and I went to see the Paul Butterfield Band and Mike Bloomfield was fabulous,” Cohen recalled.

“We went to see ‘Butter’ on acid and realized we had to be electric,” Melton explained. “Butterfield’s ‘East-West’ [released the previous year, in 1966] really stuck in my mind. They brought Mid-eastern riffs into western music. I grew up in L.A. and the folk scene was really thriving at the time, at a club called the Ash Grove. Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal and David Lindley all played there. There was a lot of what later was called ‘world music’ happening. I went to see Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Kahn recording at World Pacific Studios, as well as [Egyptian oud player/singer/percussionist] Hamsa El Din and Kimeo Eto, the great [blind] koto master.”

Within the purple poetry of “Porpoise Mouth” Country Joe, who enthusiastically embraced every possible taboo of the time, offered a hilarious metaphor for oral sex, as he sang “I hunger for your porpoise mouth and stand erect for love.”

Featuring David Bennet Cohen’s keyboards, with a spell-weaving finger-picked guitar and bluesy harmonica riding atop driving tribal drums, the rambling instrumental “Section 43” was the perfect psychedelic free-form jam, to dance the night away.

“We started packing the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom. The dancing was pretty weird, vaguely sexual and slithery,” Barry laughed. “People didn’t always get a backbeat. Sometimes the beat would get suspended or dropped altogether. They’d either be happy or pissed off, but to be honest we didn’t care what people thought.”

Side two of the album kicked off with “Superbird” in which Country Joe took dead aim at LBJ’s promise of the Great Society and the voracious war machine that fed it. “C’mon out Lyndon with your hands held high,” MacDonald jeered, threatening to send the establishment’s water-boy “back to Texas, [to] work on [his] ranch.”

A Byrds’ style folk-rock number follows with “Sad & Lonely Times,” complete with warm-heart harmonies and twanging country guitars. Despite a surprise jazzy 9^th chord tagged on the ending. the song sounded like something of a throwback, even by 1967 standards. “Joe had already written most of those songs long before we recorded the album. They’d already been in his repertoire,” David explained.

Next up is “a stone groove” blues tune called “Love,” that Country Joe sang in his dirtiest Janis Joplin (yes, they were an item for a hot minute) inspired raspy yowl. Cohen and Barry trade licks as Bruce Barthol’s bass pumps underneath. But the fade comes too fast on what was clearly the best jam the album had to offer.

Six months before Mick Jagger casually wondered “Where’s that joint?” in the midst of the Stones’ psychedelic free-for-all, Their Satanic Majesties’ Request, Country Joe openly urged his pals to “pass that reefer round” on “Bass Strings” (most likely named in honor of Barthol’s gentle, walking bass part). Joe’s meandering vocal delivers one of the classic stoner lyrics of the ‘60’s: “I believe I’ll go out to the seashore, let the waves wash my mind. Open up my head now, just to see what I can find. Just one more trip now, they know I’ll stay high all the time.” Barry Melton bends and twists elastic riffs from his guitar as MacDonald repeatedly whispers L.. S.. D.. as the song fades.
“The Masked Marauder” follows, another loopy, drippy, trippy waltz perfect to flounce around in the glow of the ever-morphing light show. “We were pretty stoned. Most everyone was high almost all the time,” Cohen confessed with a laugh.

Complete with clanging wind chimes, distorted guitar harmonics, a mournful recorder and echoing voices, the album’s closing number, “Grace” was the band’s sparkling sonic valentine to Jefferson Airplane’s siren, Grace Slick.

“Around that time, a friend asked if I wanted to see ‘the Airplane,’” Cohen recalled. “I didn’t know what he was talking about. I thought he was going to take me to the airport! So, we went down to the Haight and met Marty and Jorma. Their mansion was full of beautiful guitars! Then we went to see the Dead, who I was familiar with and I heard Jerry doing exactly what I wanted to do! Soon after we played a gig at the Berkeley campus and Jorma and Jerry came down to see us.”

Ten years before punk broke in New York and London, the San Francisco bands defiantly stood in opposition to the slick, polished pop bands that dominated the radio and were presented weekly on The Ed Sullivan Show. There was a do-it-yourself, Devil-may-care, go-for-it spirit, that defined the new groups from the Bay area, whose unvarnished sound unnerved even the likes of Pete Townshend.

“I couldn’t see how the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin or Country Joe could be taken seriously,” Townshend told author Harvey Kubernik (in his new fab picture book 1967: A Complete Rock History of the Summer of Love). “Their sound was so ragged and raw,’ the Who’s guitarist groused. “Now I see better what they were doing, and just like the Who, it was not just about music, it was about message and lifestyle and change… [but] it took a while to understand that.”

I was met with a distinct feeling of indifference from the two veteran 60’s rockers when I queried whether any plans for a reunion concert to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love were in the works. In fact, the city of San Francisco seems like it would rather forget the much-revered counterculture renaissance ever happened at all, as there seems to be nothing on the horizon to celebrate that wild, wonderful moment in time.

“In two years will be the 50^th anniversary of Woodstock,” Barry said casually, as if to hint that the future might possibly allow for one last concert.

“Joe is a complicated guy,” David Bennet Cohen offered. “I left the group by the end of 1968. Playing with Country Joe & the Fish was like playing the absolutely best gig and worst gig of your life at the same time.”

Syd initially discovered Council and Anderson while reading the liner notes to Country Blues 1935–1940, the 1962 album by Blind Boy Fuller, released twenty-one years after the legendary guitarist (known to his mother as Fulton Allen) died in his midthirties from kidney failure. Born “in the sticks” of Laurens, South Carolina, on February 12, 1900 Pinkney “Pink” Anderson ran away from home at age fourteen to join Dr. W. R. Kerr’s Indian Remedy Show. For the next thirty years, he traveled the Southeastern United States, singing and hawking snake oil to gullible crowds. He first learned the rudiments of country-blues guitar from “Blind Simmie” Dooley, and together they played blues, rags, and hokum numbers for tips on street corners and parties, until eventually cutting four tracks for Columbia Records on April 14, 1928. With respectable sales for their two singles, “Papa’s About to Get Mad” and “Every Day in the Week Blues,” Anderson was offered another chance to record, but he declined when his mentor was not invited along to the session. While Anderson sang of the many hardships faced by Black Carolinians, he did not scream, shout, or moan the blues, as was common across the Deep South. His delivery, while weary, possessed a warm and friendly resonance. Floyd “Dipper Boy” Council, the man with whom Anderson would be eternally linked in the annals of popular culture, first recorded in 1937, touting himself (much to Fulton Allen’s chagrin) as “Blind Boy Fuller’s Buddy.” Informed by ragtime piano players and the quick, clean picking of string bands, the Piedmont style of guitar he played revealed a lighter, more bluegrassy feel than the harder, cutting-edge blues commonly played from the Delta to Chicago. In 1956, Pink Anderson gained a little notoriety with the release of American Street Songs, an album he shared with the blind guitar virtuoso Reverend Gary Davis, who was also from Laurens, South Carolina. But there is little doubt that Andersen and Council would have been designated to the dustbin of obscurity had it not been for Syd Barrett’s passion for American roots music.

Pink Floyd’s visionary - Syd - far left…

“I finally tracked down Pink Anderson in Spartanburg, South Carolina, around 1968, ’69,” folk/blues singer and guitarist Roy Book Binder recalls. He had this little house, a tiny shack, on the “wrong side of the tracks.” He’d written his name, Pink Anderson, with a stick in the concrete in front of his house, and there was a padlock on the door. I asked somebody if he was dead, and they said, “No, he just don’t like people lookin’ at his business!” So I sat on his porch and waited for him to come home. I was playin’ one of his songs on the guitar when he came up the street. He looked at me. I looked at him. He was pretty friendly. He was a bootlegger. As they said around the neighborhood, “You could always wake up Mr. Pink for a drink!”

Roy Book Binder - the “Travelin’ Man” has hit the celestial highway - RIP

Pink had had a stroke a few years before—that’s why he didn’t play the folk circuit [during the blues resurgence of the mid-’60s], otherwise he would have been a sensation. He was an okay guitar player, but he was really an entertainer who worked traveling medicine shows as far back as 1912. But, by the time I met him, he didn’t play much anymore, and his timing was off. He was pretty skinny, so I bought him some groceries and had his phone put back on.

British music fans adored these veteran blues musicians not only for their raw, unvarnished sound but for their hard-knocks life stories, which often elevated them to legendary status in the minds of young, passionate Brits.John Mayall (whose band the Bluesbreakers featured a parade of young guitar virtuosos, including Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor) took up the mantle for J. B. Lenoir, writing and singing “I’m Gonna Fight for You J. B.,” which helped gain a greater recognition and appreciation for the Mississippi born bluesman after he died in a car crash in April 1967. Cream’s thunderous rendition of “I’m So Glad” helped earn Skip James over $10,000 in royalties and paid for the obscure Mississippi singer and guitarist’s tombstone following his death in October 1969. But beyond the novelty and bewilderment of adulationfrom a small cult of English blues fanatics, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council reaped little if any benefit from their association with Pink Floyd, as Roy Book Binder recalls: Eventually, we got Pink some gigs in upstate New York, and he was on—like a firecracker! He didn’t skip a beat. He was funny and great. There were write-ups in the paper, and he was surprised that people knew who he was. He certainly didn’t know who Pink Floyd was! His son went after them for some money, but they never played any of his music. Maybe they could’ve done one of his songs and tossed him a couple of grand . . .

Then I heard he died and I didn’t believe it. So I went down there and contacted the welfare department, and they showed me where he was buried. I had a tombstone put down on his unmarked grave that said “Pink Anderson—Recording Artist,” with a guitar etched into it. Whenever I can, I stop by and clean it off with a little moonshine.

This piece was excerpted from my book Lunacy: The Curious Phenomenon of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, 50 Years On - available from Good Reads or amazombie - https://shorturl.at/q5Hu2

I first met Lou Reed in 2008. He was standing on a street-corner in the Meat Packing District screaming into his cell phone. “New York! …New York, New York! Ya ever heard of it? Manhattan! New York City!!!”

The Godfather of Punk was clearly frustrated with the operator on the other end of the line, who was most likely in India, or some other distant land and was letting the poor soul have it. It could’ve been a scene out of a Woody Allen film. Reed, after all, was the quintessential New Yorker. He even named his benchmark 1989 album New York. Although it name-checked Rudy Guliani and Bernard Goetz and immortalized “The Halloween Parade,” the record was hardly just nostalgia for locals.

Since his early days with the Velvet Underground, Reed portrayed his hometown as both subversive and glamorous. No matter where you first heard his songs, they instantly transported you into a kinky netherworld where junkies, transsexuals and a smattering of social deviants were just everyday people.

Like the twilight-gray landscapes of the New York’s Ashcan painters, Weegee’s harrowing black and white photo journalism, or the drug-addled beat poetry of the 42nd Street hustler Hubert Huncke, Reed’s songs never flinched or relied on artifice in their gritty depiction of urban life.

Beyond his heavily orchestrated song cycle Berlin (1973), Reed was a firm believer in boiler plate rock ’n’ roll usually built on a pair of loud grinding guitars, throbbing bass and a simple driving beat. But he also wrote tender ballads that evoked a sense of place on par with the Beach Boys’ SoCal sun-bleached anthems or the Beatles’ hazy stroll through the streets of Liverpool in “Penny Lane,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

Reed led you down the dirty midnight boulevards of Gotham to St. Marks Place in “Sally Can’t Dance,” and let you eavesdrop on the juicy gossip of “New York Telephone Conversation.” With “Walk on the Wild Side,” anybody could experience all the glam Max’s Kansas City had to offer without donning the obligatory streak of eyeliner or teetering about in platform shoes.

“Lou was to New York as Faulkner was to the South, or Brecht to Berlin,” producer Hal Willner explained. “He was New York from top to bottom. He was born here and died here…He saw it change, but he never disappeared. Almost every record of his was made here. It was his city. Tourists would see him and Laurie [Anderson] on the street and know they’d been to New York.”\

Hal Willner photo by Kruth

“Lou was pure New York street,” concurred Steve Katz, guitarist with the Blues Project, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and producer of Sally Can’t Dance. “I grew up in a New York Jewish home as well, but I didn’t have the same kind of problems Lou had. The Velvet Underground was scary! They were into a whole different thing sexually and drug-wise. But amazingly enough, he made it! He knew how to pace himself.”

Steve Katz of Blues Project & BST fame - photo by Kruth

“I was a songwriter from the Village at the same time Lou was a rocker from the Lower East Side,” recalled Eric Andersen. “I saw Lou with the Velvet Underground at the Dome and I did some screen shots and a film for Andy [Warhol] but never met Lou until Andy’s funeral. The first words out of his mouth were that Warhol was the only person in the music business who never tried to fuck him.”

“We became friends and later co-wrote and recorded my song ‘You Can’t Relive the Past’ for my [1999] album of the same title. I was always struck by how disciplined he was. I was lucky to be invited to see more than a few of his great shows in Europe including a performance of Berlin in the city of Berlin, itself, which came off great and had soul.”

E.A. in Venice Beach photo by Kruth

Willner first began working with Lou while producing his 1985 tribute album to Kurt Weill, Lost In The Stars, for which Reed sang “September Song.”

“We’d read a quote somewhere that Lou said he wanted to be known as the Bertolt Brecht of rock ‘n’ roll. Our first conversation was rather awkward,” Willner recalled. “But then he brought me into his world. He’d just cut New Sensations (1984). He didn’t need me but he wanted someone there to bounce things off. There was nothing pretentious about him, whether he was crazy or rational.”

“Producing Lou was a great exercise, a lesson in listening. You had to be tuned in. It was a humbling experience to work with him considering that Andy Warhol, David Bowie and Mick Ronson had all been his producers in the past.”

Trumpeter/bandleader Steven Bernstein (Sex Mob, Butler Bernstein & the Hot 9) who frequently arranges the music for Willner’s live events appeared on Reed’s 2000 album Ecstasy (produced by Willner) contributing soulful horn arrangements for the funky “Mad,” the ragged rocker “Paranoia Key of E,” and the aching ballad “Tatters.”

Bernstein!

“Lou in general did not like ‘beauty,’ ” Bernstein said with a laugh. “He was a rock and roll musician all the way. He his music played loud and if you couldn’t deal with it and had to hold your ears, he’d tell you to get off the stage…‘Now!’ As primitive as he was, Lou knew what he wanted and could articulate it. But he trusted me to take care of his music,” Bernstein said, recalling a chamber music arrangement he wrote for Reed’s “Candy Says.”

“He’d said, ‘You almost got it right!’ Everybody thinks of Lou as a hard ass, but that was only if he didn’t know you. He was a very accessible, very public person. You’d see him on the street with no bodyguards. After we first met and started working together he’d kiss me like an old-school Jewish uncle.”

Why all the nostalgia for Lou Reed now?

Gotham’s iconic rocker/poet, who exited this world on October 27, 2013, at age 71 is being feted with an epic free tribute show on July 30 at the annual Out of Doors Festival in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center.

This all-day multimedia marathon named “The Bells” in honor of Reed’s 1979 album, is being curated by Laurie Anderson and Hal Willner, in conjunction with Jill Sternheimer, the producer of the concert series.

As with most Hal Willner happenings, the upcoming event teems with the possibility of the unknown. “Everything is continually changing” Willner said with a chuckle, regarding the celebration which begins at 10 a.m. with a group tai chi lesson led by Reed’s teacher, Master Ren Guang Yi.

Starting at 11:00 a.m. there will be a sound installation entitled “Lou Reed – Drones” in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall, created by the feedback freely flowing from six of Reed’s guitars.

Then at 11:30 a.m. the house band (which include Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley, producer/guitarist Don Fleming (Gumball) and Kenny Margolis of Mink Deville and Cracker on keyboards, will back a variety of singers from David Johansen, Lenny Kaye and the Bush Tetras to the legendary downtown performance artist/punk rocker Kembra Pfahler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black for a rockin’ set of Lou’s tunes.

Starting at Hearst Plaza at 3 p.m. poet/shaman Anne Waldman and actors Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi. and a slew more will read Lou’s lyrics until 7:30 p.m. when, at the Damrosch Park Bandshell, Laurie Anderson, Anohni, Garland Jeffreys, Victoria Williams and Jenni Muldaur (among many others) will present “Lou Reed’s Love Songs” with musical support from cellist Jane Scarpantoni, bassist/producer Bill Laswell, and saxophonist/composer John Zorn.

There will also be various films shown through-out the event, including a screening of Julian Schnabel’s 2008 concert film Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

“The work is complete now, and a lot of Lou’s overlooked stuff is coming to light,” Willner said. “The TV show Bloodline has recently been using songs from The Raven. It’s hard to go wrong with this material. Lou won’t ever become obsolete.”

This article was originally published in the NY Observer on 07/28/16.

The title of the first Conjure album was borrowed from his 1970 collection of verse. The music, a sonic stew whipped up by an all-star crewe (including Taj Mahal, Allen Toussaint, the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Lester Bowie, Carla Bley, Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Steve Swallow) was stirred and seasoned by the visionary producer Kip Hanrahan.

“There’s nothing new about rap,” Ishmael Reed said. “I was on an album back in 1967 called The New Jazz Poets on Folkways Records.” Drop the needle on that old slab of vinyl and hear Reed deliver “The Jackal-Headed Cowboy” in a commanding, husky voice. A flood of images tumbles from his lips in a punchy, rhythmic flow. “Tupac Shakur name-checked me in his song ‘Still I Rise,’ so I get invited to these hip-hop panels where everybody is fifty years younger than I am. But they get on my case for representing the older generation,” Ishmael chuckled.

“My friendship with Ish goes back almost four decades,” Hanrahan recalled in a hyper Bronx staccato. “His contrarian posture, and prowess, and clear enjoyment of verbal boxing has put him at uncomfortable odds with enough fashionably established voices in the media and the cultural scene to have blocked him from the center stage.

“The Conjure project was almost too easy to set up. More than any other writer I know, Ish and his American Magic Realist Griot genius, and I’m using that word with care, has had a hold on musicians from a cascade of musical and cultural angles, including musicians who weren’t famous for being the type to ‘read.’ From the beginning, almost every musician I approached said ‘Yes!’ with the first phone call. Allen Toussaint, Steve Swallow, David Murray [of the World Saxophone Quartet], Carla Bley, Lester Bowie, and Olu Dara all jumped in at the mention of Ish’s name. Some, like Steve Swallow, Gil Evans, and Taj, knew his work intimately.”

Reed’s classic novels Mumbo Jumbo, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Flight to Canada are essential reading. Reed’s evocative/provocative writing teems with blues, gospel and jazz rhythms, the literary equivalent to Charles Mingus.

(Taj Mahal backstage Bottom Line NYC Dec 1 1984 - photo by John Kruth)

“Yeah, that’s why I could easily get into it!” Taj Mahal said. “I’m a big Mingus fan. First of all, both of us are the same size!” he said with a laugh. “Mingus always had great titles like ‘All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife was Your Mother.’ That inspired my song, ‘You Ain’t No Streetwalker Honey, Mama, but I Sure Do Like the Way you Strut Your Stuff.” That was straight outta Mingus.”

“I first met Ish in ’76. We became friends through Cecil Taylor when he was working with Baryshnikov and wanted to make a film [Hanrahan has a background in avant-garde film, having worked with Michael Snow and Jonas Mekas]. So, I needed a script and Ishmael Reed was my favorite writer. Besides his poetry, I was a big fan of his novel, Mumbo Jumbo, but I also really liked The Last Days of Louisiana Red, which is not one of his favorite books! It always makes him roll his eyes when I bring it up,” Kip laughed. “So, I called him, and he said ‘Sure!’ Ish was as magic in real life as his books were. He’s a real contrarian. As he says, ‘Writing is Fighting,’ but he has a real loving, caring side too. He came up with a great script called Kill the Mover, with Cecil being the mover. I was gonna direct it, but when we met with Baryshnikov’s people, they wanted a ‘real director,’ if they were gonna use his name to raise money. They didn’t want me. They wanted a Hollywood director with a name and a track record. Baryshnikov was very sweet, but when I mentioned Ishmael Reed’s name to his businesspeople their eyes narrowed, like ‘Uh oh! This is not what we had in mind!’ So Ish got Bill Gunn on board, who was like one of the two black directors in Hollywood, along with Melvin Van Peebles. But Baryshnikov’s people wanted control and were gonna interfere with it. I’d been involved with making independent records with Carla Bley, but in film it was really hard to have any control. The film budget was like $350,000 where making a record would cost $17,000. So, I told ‘em ‘No! No changes in the script. No changes in the director or our control or we’ll walk.’ Bill Gunn thought that was pretty funny. He said, ‘Try that and see what happens,’ knowing exactly what was gonna happen. I did it and they, of course said, ‘OK… Walk!’ So, my five-dollar move sank the whole thing. I told Ish, ‘Let’s do a record instead.’ I said, ‘Let’s get a great band together and commission music from some great people. I asked Ish who he wanted to write the music to his poems, which already hint towards song form.”

Reed picks up the story: “We discussed the possibly collaboration with Cecil Taylor, involving a film we were doing called Personal Problems which now is considered a classic since it’s been in revival. The New York Times called it ‘an orthodox work of art.’ One of the film’s highlights was a gag scene where Kip plays a white radical and I’m a right-wing black owner of a hot dog diner and we go at it.”

“Ish is a true contrarian. Some people think he just says things to get under their skin,” Kip laughed. “He said, ‘Y’know white people on the left think just because Obama was black and a democrat, that he was working for them.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ Then of course, a few days later when I was in my hotel room, it struck me… He’s right. He’s usually right. It’s just that people don’t wanna or can’t hear it at the time. I thought he was just saying it to needle me.”

“When the collaboration with Cecil Taylor didn’t work out, he sent my book of poetry, Conjure, to different composers and we did a concert at the Public Theater [New York],” Reed recalled. “We had a huge audience, had to turn away people and we got an excellent review in The New York Times. Allen Toussaint came up from New Orleans at his own expense. I didn’t know who he was at the time! He had a lot of class. He wouldn’t pose for a photograph unless he was wearing a tie. He sang ‘Happy Birthday’ for my daughter. She was so shocked she dropped her camera. Kip knew people like that!”

Kip

Like the best producers, Hanrahan possesses that Svengali-like power that artists depend on to pull large projects together and make them happen.

“Kip was very important to my writing,” Reed continued. “It was through Kip that I’ve been able to connect to a wider audience than what’ve I’ve had for my novels and poetry.”

“Allen Toussaint and Steve Swallow came in whole-heartedly. They were really the center of it, along with Ish and Taj of course,” Hanrahan explained. “Gil Evans immediately jumped on it. But Gil was sick and never finished the piece because he was down in Mexico trying alternative treatments for his cancer. He never made it back… Everything was based on Ish’s esthetic and words. Conjure became a record, and then a band, with whoever was available. David Murray’s a great saxophonist, unlike a million fake Coltrane guys from the late ‘60s to the early ‘70s. David’s roots were between Coleman Hawkins and Albert Ayler, who were not fashionable at the time. He has that tone! Don Cherry also said yes, but never made it on the album as he was dealing with the problems of addiction at the time. As soon as I realized he wasn’t gonna make it, I called Lester [Bowie, trumpeter with the Art Ensemble of Chicago] who was fantastic, as a person and collaborator. Lester took the gig seriously, but not too seriously. He didn’t want to write out charts and would rather come up with the music on the spot. Tt was more interesting and exciting for him that way. So, he worked up this rough vamp [for ‘Foolology’]. It has great spirit!”

Culled from Reed’s 1978 collection of poems, A Secretary to the Spirits. Bowie delivers the punchline of “Foolology” - “Never do business with someone for whom April 1^st is an important date,” like he’s having the time of his life, as a clutch of soul sisters echo his every phrase.

“When Lester couldn’t do the concert at the Public Theater, I called Olu Dara, who played and made some great tracks on the album,” Kip said.

“The album’s opening track, ‘Jes Grew,’ was actually a prose passage, taken from Mumbo Jumbo that David turned into a song,” Kip explained. “He was really on his creative game.”

“David Murray arranged that bad boy,” Taj Mahal said. “If I hear somethin’ that’s perfect already, I’m not gonna go and do somethin’ stupid with it!”

“I like working with a lot of drummers and bass players. Their voicings are different from guitars and piano. The counterpoint moves differently,” Kip pointed out. “I love working with Steve, and Jamaaladeen. Ornette [Coleman’s] band had that sound! Then Andy Gonzalez would play against Jamaaladeen on his baby bass. It was a lotta fun.

“Ish sent mimeographs of like twenty-five poems around to the different musicians, some of which were published, and some weren’t. So, they could pick whatever they liked. Steve Swallow was a tremendous fan of Ishmael’s and probably gave ‘The Wardrobe Master of Paradise’ to Carla.”

Congas lay down the groove for “The Wardrobe Master of Paradise.” The horns freely weave as in New Orleans music, where everybody solos simultaneously, without stepping on each other’s toes.

“That arrangement came from Carla Bley,” Taj recalled. “It was Carla’s melody, but she wouldn’t sing it. I said, ‘Damn that’s great. Carla, you should do it.’ She said, ‘Oh, no! I’m not a singer! You have to!’ I was like, ‘Are you sure?’ I basically used her guide vocal when I did the phrasing ‘cause she did such a great job of it. And then I punched it around a bit, to fit my style.”

“Was there any trouble singing poetic phrases that don’t always neatly fit into a basic rhyme scheme?” I asked Taj.

“It was basically the same for me,” Taj replied.

“Did it give you more room to improvise?”

“Oh yeah, most definitely,” Taj replied. “You just find the melody, get it to buzz right and fit in the track. And then whatever incidentals come up, you can bounce off that. For me Ishmael’s poetry could’ve worked with just one instrument or even as an a cappella.

“It’s still fresh music! It was good at the time and it’s still good now! It was a real departure from the music that people know me for,” Taj explained. “I was able to use some of my jazz chops. And what a great band! I mean, Allen Toussaint, Jamaaladeen Tacuma! That’s worth the price of admission alone.

“I would run into Ishmael on the street in Oakland,” the raspy-throated Mahal recalled. “We’d go sit down at the Mediterranean Café and talk and drink tea or have a beer or glass of wine or somethin’ He was always interested in keepin’ up with what it is.”

“Betty’s Ball Blues” was tailor-made for Taj, who framed the lyric with a slinky guitar riff. Reed’s makeover of “Betty & Dupree” reinvents the story of the eighteen-year-old Frank DuPre, who, after a couple gulps of moonshine, kills a man while holding up an Atlanta jewelry store when he couldn’t scrounge the cash for a suitable diamond ring for his bride-to-be Betty Andrews. Barrelhouse pianist Kingfish Bill Tomlin first recorded “Dupree Blues” for Paramount Records in 1930, long before it became a hit for the raspy-throated R&B shouter Chuck Willis in 1958. Taj had been playing a version of the Willis number for years before transforming it into a lazy swaying hula blues with a slippery slide guitar in the early 90s. It’s an old story that people never seem to grow tired of hearing.

“That’s what I liked about it,” Taj said.

Recalling the 1983 recording session, Hanrahan marveled at “Taj’s presence and joy of music, and his enthusiasm and love of Ish’s work” and how Mahal masterfully “brought the band down to a slow mid-tempo easy ride,” creating the feel he needed to deliver Reed’s fateful saga of Betty and Dupree.

First published in Reed’s 1972 collection of poetry Conjure, “Betty’s Ball Blues,” evokes the night that “Betty dressed in scarlet and threw her man a ball.” The raw lust only hinted at in earlier versions of their fateful romance is suddenly center stage to Reed’s rendition.

Betty touched his organ, made his cathedral rock.

His worshippers moaned and shouted,

His stained-glass windows cracked.

No matter how down Reed gets, a mystical quality always seems to illuminate his verse. Betty’s sexual hold over Dupree drives the poor boy mad ehnough to steal and commit murder for her. As Taj sings:

Dupree he shot the jeweler,

She had him under a spell.

The calmest man in Sing-Sing

Is happy in his cell.

“Betty’s Ball Blues” caught fire with Taj, Toussaint, Murray, Olu Dara, the double bass attack of Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Steve Swallow and Billy Hart on drums. The track has got the real feel.

“Oh yeah, everybody played on that one,” Taj said. “I like cuttin’ live as opposed to overdubbin’. It’s like the difference between butter and margarine! You know what butter is, while margarine is somethin’ they came up with later.”

“The turning point came when I walked into the Soul Kitchen where I’d go for gumbo on Telegraph Avenue and they were playing Taj doing ‘Betty’s Ball Blues.’” Reed recalled. “The song has been used as a theme for a weekly radio show on KPFA, ‘The Visionary Activist.’ There are astrological lyrics in the song. I said, ‘This is really it!’”

Vol. II

While the first album Conjure, had a more stripped down and rootsy feel, the follow-up 1988’s Conjure ‎– Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon was a somewhat slicker affair. Built on sturdy funk grooves, the music was now on equal footing with Reed’s poetry, if not overpowering it at times.

The text seemed to function differently between the first and second albums. “For Conjure, Ish sent me poems he’d written. I didn’t know if he expected them to be sung or recited. All I knew was the last thing anyone wanted to hear is bongos behind somebody reading a poem,” Kip chuckled. “I sent the poems around to various people to write music to. In Carla’s case she wrote the melody and recorded a reference vocal track of her singing ‘The Wardrobe Master.’ Allen didn’t get it immediately. He initially wrote music to accompany the poems but when he heard how everyone else approached it as songwriting, he went back to the hotel and wrote melodies for the words. By the second record, Ish was intentionally writing lyrics, which people wrote music to. They weren’t trying to incorporate his poetry into a piece of music.

“Both Allen and Steve wanted a cleaner esthetic,” Kip explained. “We cut the album at Sorcerer [an appropriately named studio for such rituals] which had a lovely old Neve [recording console], with a lower, rich sound. We mixed the album at Skyline, on an SSL and everything in the studio was geared towards that Eighties upper mid-range sound. Also, working with Allen on the second record was a different experience. On the first record, he was along for the ride, watching everything and enjoying it. On the second record he took more control of the production. All the weird stuff I was writing, on guitar, Allen wrote it out, and then broke it down to its core, and came up with alternative chord voicings. He got the horns together. I wasn’t objecting to it because it was Allen! But between the studio, the mix and Allen’s presence, it wound up more slick. I was thrilled to have Allen work his magic, so I started to along for the ride.”

The ride begins with the street funk of “The Author Reflects on His 35th Birthday” buoyed by Don Pullen’s organ. “I don’t know how Steve [Swallow] did it, but he took the poem and made that song,” Kip said. A sunset weariness spills from the horn’s bells as the poet talks with the spirit, asking for strength, and the “meanness” he needs for self-survival… “Pawnbroker mean, Miles Davis mean, Pharaoh mean.”

Eddie Harris’s tenor sax spars with the congas, making short, sharp rhythmic jabs, stinging like a fistful of hornets as Don Pullen’s swirling organ riffs float light and feathery as a butterfly as Eddie evokes the mystical changeling known as Loup Garou. “Eddie wasn’t supposed to sing ‘Loup Garou Means Change Into.’ Kip points out. “But how do you say no to him? We didn’t have a singer at first because Taj couldn’t do it,” Hanrahan confessed. “Bobby Womack did two songs, but it took about fourteen hours just to cut his tracks.”

Womack delivers Reed’s humorous “‘Sputin,” a funky portrait of Rasputin to a “Right Place Wrong Time” groove, over Leo Nocentelli’s percolating guitar. “Leo [best known for playing with the Meters, his session work with Supremes, Temps, played with Otis Redding] came up with the riff to ‘Sputin’ right on the spot,” Hanrahan recalled. “Then Allen and I did all the layering in the studio. He really showed me how to craft a pop record. Then we went to LA and got Bobby Womack to sing on top of it.

It’s a delicate balance between making a great record that inspires you to shake your ass when such fine imagist poetry is at stake. But as Womack sings, “Man, I love to dance!”

The haunting “Nobody Was There” features Olu Dara on vocal and wailing harmonica. “Oh, that was pure Olu!” Kip enthused. “The woman singer on that track was Dianne Abbott, Robert DiNiro’s wife, who was in a few scenes in Taxi Driver. She was a friend of Olu’s. She did some live shows with us and was wonderful to work with.”

The delicate lyricism of the poem, is perfectly accented by Toussaint’s gossamer piano as Ishmael reads, “I heard a spider crawl across the silverware, I opened the drawer, but nobody was there.”

“Running for Office for Love” was divided into two parts beginning with a soft prayer-like a cappella that melodically recalls “Afro Blue.” “We first tried it as an a cappella with Clare Bathe singing,” Hanrahan explained. “She had a gorgeous voice but was thrown at first by singing the piece without a track. Allen, who liked simple, uncluttered arrangements, was thrilled by the whole thing. He always liked to boil everything right down, with little or no ornamentation.”

“My Brothers” reveals a sly kind of humor that the great jazz vocalist Oscar Brown Jr. was known for. The protagonist bemoans his friends abusing his good nature and taking pot-shots at his physique and character. That’s Don Pullen singing Reed’s lyric, as his fingers dance freely across the keyboards.

“Fernando Saunders recommended Grayson Hughes, who was fast and easy to work with, which was good as we were running out of money and time,” Kip confessed. Hughes growls and shouts Reed’s warning “Beware: Don’t Listen to this Song,” as Toussaint hammers the piano keys, and the rhythm section lays down a monster groove.

“Ishmael was there, throughout the recording sessions, as a presence. We recorded his parts in Oakland, when he sang the Cab Calloway’s ‘Minnie the Moocher.’ He was really wonderful with the kids,” Hanrahan recalled. “But it was a hard record to make in some ways… We ran out of money. I [Kip’s imprint, American Clave] had formed a partnership with Sting’s label, Pangea Records. They were supposed to pay us the money to make the record up-front, but they didn’t. My lawyer at the time advised me to use my credit card ‘and they’ll pay you later. It’s nothing for them,’ he said. So, I maxed out my credit and they never paid me! I had to finish the record contractually without any money. I threw the record together as best as I could and finished it before it was anywhere near ready. That part of it was a drag, but we did it! The band toured in the late eighties and again in the early nineties with Little Jimmy Scott and Jack Bruce. Don and Allen formed the most fantastic keyboard section together. But the hang got very heavy as Don was dying of cancer at the time… Ish and I kept talking about doing another album but I didn’t have money. I was caught up in a long legal battle, trying to get paid.”

Vol. III

Suddenly the years began to fly by. “In the early aughts David Murray said, ‘Let’s do it!’ So, we got the band together and went to Paris and played a blues festival. Then we went to Japan. It was a thrill to work with Ish and I think David’s among the deepest and most restlessly brilliant musicians/artists of our generation, and a deep and beautiful person, even if we clashed at times,” Hanrahan confessed.

“Taj joined Conjure for a short tour in the early aughts, in either 2002, or 2003,” Kip recalled. “When Taj couldn’t do it, I called Bobby Womack, but he wasn’t available. So, I called Jimmy Scott and Jack Bruce. We had two basses in that band Anthony Cox and Jack, who also sang. The only constant members of the Conjure band have been Ishmael, David Murray and myself.”

With great grooves, Reed’s singular lyrics and percussion galore, 2005’s Bad Mouth covered much of the same territory as the two previous Conjure albums. Yet it is arguably the best installment yet!

“Have you ever seen any reviews of Bad Mouth?” Reed asked. “That album was neglected! Part of the problem with the public hearing these records, is that Kip is understaffed. He’s a true artist, and really deserves recognition,” Reed stressed. “But people fail to see the commercial possibilities in him. You gotta just about sell your soul before anybody takes notice, with all the junk out there.”

Add to that the multitude of adversarial forces Ishmael Reed has had to contend with himself over the years… “Y’know, I wrote a novel called Reckless Eyeballing (1986), which was sort of the end of my career in the United States, thanks to the many white feminists who didn’t bother to read the book,” he chuckled. “I became persona non grata after I was on The Today Show and said I didn’t like the movie, The Color Purple. There was such a backlash because I wasn’t part of the ‘[Alice] Walker Cult.’ They boycotted me at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. But the boycott collapsed after some people actually read my books [laughs]. Each generation of black writers has faced the same thing. It goes way back to the communists in the 1930’s. There’s always some outside group demanding they obey their blueprint. First it was the left, and now it’s the right… If bell hooks [pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins] wanted to succeed, she had to write for white feminists. So, I’ve had to cultivate audiences around the world, in Europe and Africa. I’m not great at languages but I studied Yoruba for about five years and went to Nigeria and read my poem ‘Mo Ku Lana’ [‘I Died Yesterday’] before an audience, which included some of the country’s top intellectuals. After you read the first line, people sigh. They are on your side, ‘cause you’re speaking their language, even if you make a mistake.

I learned Japanese and wrote my book, Japanese Spring. I have been published in, and traveled to China… Israel… And that’s how I’ve survived. My last five books have been boycotted and ignored by the New York Times. I’m a MacArthur Fellow. I don’t know if this has happened to anybody else of that stature. I’m eighty-three years old now. I learned a long time ago, in order to survive I had to be on the offensive.” Hearing Ishmael’s trials and tribulations first-hand brings a deeper understanding and appreciation of his slogan “Writin’ is Fightin’.”

Yet throughout all his battles San Francisco’s First Jazz Poet Laureate has kept in fighting trim. Bad Mouth opens with Alvin Youngblood Hart’s weary, yearning voice on “I Died Yesterday” packing all the soul of a Lead Belly field holler or Son House’s emotionally devastating “Death Letter Blues.” “I had that in mind when I wrote that,” Reed concurred. “You can hear the hammers, like on the chain gang.”

“The last section of Love Supreme is a pentatonic minor, a slave scale, heard in black spirituals,” Reed recently wrote in Alta magazine. “This slave scale has generated a billion-dollar industry,” used, as he points out, as the feel-good soundtrack for advertisements and TV shows. “The complaint one hears from Oakland musicians is that while the blues have increased the revenue streams of imitators like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Eric Clapton, the pioneers are neglected.”

Perhaps Bad Mouth’s most gripping piece is “In a War Such Things Happen.” “It was early 2003, around the time of the invasion of Iraq.” Kip recalled. “We came up with a pedal, [with bassists] Anthony Cox and Fernando Saunders playing behind him. We made it up live, at a soundcheck with Taj answering Ish. On the record Alvin took Taj’s part and kind of imitated him. Alvin said the call and response bit made him think of that old Foghorn and Leghorn cartoon,” Hanrahan laughed. “But thank you Ish, that was a fantastic piece.”

“Where did that line come from?” I asked Ishmael. “Was that something Donald Rumsfeld once said?”

“That was typical of Pentagon talk, when they talk about collateral damage,” Reed replied. “I didn’t hear someone from the State Department use those exact words. In this case, I think it was about a wedding party that was destroyed.”

Musically “In a War” evokes the deep emotional chaos at the heart of Albert Ayler’s music. “David Murray was influenced by Albert Ayler. I knew Albert!” Reed recalled. “We spent an afternoon together, drinking and listening to Charles Ives with his brother [trumpet player Donald] at my apartment on Second Avenue in New York. That was back in 1969.

“For Dancer” showcases Hanrahan’s passion for percussion. Hand drums have a way of making our blood percolate, provoke the ancestors dance, evoke forgotten ceremonies whose meaning has been lost but still speak to our collective subconscious while conjuring spirit, pure and bright as flames, licking the night sky.

“The entrance to hell is not a cave, but your mouth,” Reed incites in the title poem as his recitation gives way to David Murray’s melodic inventions, until Nocentelli rips our collective skulls off with a searing Jacob’s ladder of electric lightning. A dizzying geyser of sound gushes from Murray’s screaming sax framing Ishmael’s harrowing imagery.

Reed’s socially/political charged lyrics are another link in the lineage of black protest songs from Lead Belly’s “Bourgeois Blues” to Max Roach’s album We Insist and Gil Scott Heron’s message music. “There’s a long piece called ‘Jazz Martyrs,’ in my most recent book of poetry, Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues, which addresses the kind of politics found in jazz, from Charlie Mingus to Lena Horne, Max Roach and Sonny Rollins,” who told Reed that being Black in America is just “another day at the front.”

A fuzz drenched boogey, “Tokyo Woman Blues” features Billy Bang’s violin screaming like a fire engine on fire. “Billy Bang was a genius!” Reed said. “He traveled and performed with us. I loved his work. There have been great black violinists, all the way back to slavery.”

Reed’s “Go to Jazz” kick’s off Bad Mouth’s second disc. “When I die, I will go straight to jazz, no need to encounter the Nazz!” he announces. “I was the first jazz poet laureate at the San Francisco Jazz Center. We presented some diverse programs, with Native Americans, all different groups… Irish-American night, Jewish American night, Italian-American night. A young woman who was a descendent of Al Capone, read a poem about a huge salami attacking New York! I had a great time. I got a commission from BART [Bay Area Transit] to do a huge installation of a poem that greets commuters every day when they come into the station. I got poems on sidewalks, on buses all over the country! So, I consider myself to be a public poet! But in Europe I’m known as a songwriter. When I get my BMI royalties from Conjure, it’s from Europe - Italy, German, Scandinavia, Japan, all over… but nothing from the United States. Which shows you the status of jazz here! The United States has always had a thing about black culture, whether it be jazz or Black Lives Matter, they’ve always had a problem with it. It gets a lot of resistance. That’s what the invasion of the Capital was all about!

Each time we did “Go to Jazz” live, the band put a different tune behind it. While there’s a certain amount of improvisation inherent in the musician’s performance, Reed’s writing and recitation remains both economical and concise. “His kind of spontaneity was more like, after a session or live gig, he’d go back to his hotel room and come up with some incredible poem,” Hanrahan explained. “In the studio or on stage he doesn’t do that.”

Dancing in the Shadows

There seems to be an invisible spirit, a loa that surrounds and feeds Conjure, in whatever form it takes – whether as a performing band or a series of albums. There were several people, who, for whatever reason, intended to write music or perform live with the band that never made it onto the albums.

Hanrahan had previously mentioned Gil Evans and Don Cherry: “We wanted to get Dr. John. He would’ve been perfect for Conjure. I know Ish was fond of his Gris-Gris album. As Kip recalled, “He came by and checked out the project and seemed very interested in what we were doing, but then he couldn’t be found. I think he’d gone into rehab at the time.” Then it turned out that King Sunny Ade had been in the studio while we were recording the first album. Taj had brought him in but didn’t say anything,” Kip said, a bit exasperated. “A photographer who was taking pictures asked me, after King left, why didn’t I ask him to play on the record? I said ‘What are you talking about?’ Then he told me, ‘That was him, in the African robe and cowboy hat! He just left with Taj!’ My jaw just dropped. I was busy working and nobody mentioned it!

“Bill Withers was another,” Hanrahan continued. “We asked him, but he said, ‘I don’t write or read music and its uncomfortable for me to sing somebody else’s song. I’m not really a trained musician and not comfortable with that.’ It was the coolest way of saying no I’ve ever had. There was no pretense. He was absolutely honest and sweet. He dug the poems and said, ‘I’d like to write poetry like that.’”

Conjure, (the band) has not gigged since 2012 and Ishmael Reed has been working on his own music these days. “I played trombone as a kid. I was not very good… terrible,” Ishmael admitted with a laugh. “But I started studying jazz piano at the age of sixty. I was inspired after touring with Conjure. Playing piano has definitely influenced my writing. My latest book Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues was inspired the sound that the recently photographed black hole makes, which is in B flat! I concentrate on the work of Bill Evans, Monk and Bud Powell every day.

The Ishmael Reed Quintet released a CD. David Murray, and my wife Carla Blank [who plays violin] is on there. She’s got good style. There’s no drums on the album. Sometimes I felt overpowered by them on the recordings with Kip. He likes a lot of drums, but I wonder sometimes if they don’t drown out the words. And besides, the piano is percussive. Y’know this jazz poetry thing is pretty much a racket!” Reed chuckled. “I call jazz criticism a white-collar crime!”

somewhere on route

from egypt to jupiter

(or was it saturn to japan?)

sun ra lost his sunglasses

they were in his ruby

encrusted rucksack

with his toothbrush

interplanetary passport

and baby grand piano

if you find them

don’t look through them

whatever you do!

you might be blinded

by enlightenment

dumbfounded by designs

of time and space

and hallucinate heavenly

harmonies of the omniverse

(Drawing by the fabulous Joe Ciardiello from our book Like Jazz)

Remember "Sun Ra: Do The Impossible" premieres Tonight - Feb 20 at 9/8c on PBS.

Although Yoko described her mother, Isoko, as “very beautiful,” she claimed she lacked the genuine concern or ability to needed to nurture her children. Isoko, in Yoko’s estimation, was like “having a film star in the house,” who would “show you a film of food” when you were hungry rather than to cook for her family. Despite all the trappings that came with being a member of a wealthy family, Yoko claimed she never felt “really fulfilled.” Unable to relate to her mother, she was also “scared of the maids,” who she claimed often vented their feelings of personal frustration and anger on herself and her siblings. Not only did Yoko’s parents expect their daughter to follow strict customary Japanese protocol, she found her nannies and personal tutors “very tough” as well.

A “sensitive child,” Yoko always sensed her father, Eisuke’s profound disappointment in her. While in therapy sessions with Arthur Janov years later, Yoko exclaimed that “lies are coming out and I’m starting to find out what a phony person I am….” Ono claimed to “hate” herself for “always trying to please them,” and for feeling weak and being “afraid of losing them.” But, as she’d instinctively known, her family would never love and understand her and eventually “they’d go anyway.”

In 1940 the Onos briefly moved from Tokyo to Long Island, where Yoko attended public school. When she was eight years old, the family returned to Japan, in the spring of 1941, with the world on the verge of war. A financier, Eisuke was soon sent to work in Hanoi. That December, the bombing of Pearl Harbor changed everything. As a wealthy family, the war did not impact the Onos immediately. Meanwhile, her classmates at school began to taunt her, calling Yoko “an American spy,” for having lived in the States. They teased her for dressing like an American girl, wearing her hair in Shirley Temple-style ringlets. Estranged at home and school, Yoko began to feel like an outsider wherever she went. As the daughter of a Buddhist and Christian, she also differed from many of her friends, although this cultural mix would later inform her art, which freely combined elements of Eastern and Western culture.

Turning increasingly inward, the young Yoko found solace in solitude, writing poetry, drawing, playing piano and composing songs. “Art allowed me to communicate in a way that didn’t require so much courage,” she later explained. Her creativity was essentially a coping mechanism. Yoko’s innate shyness led her to conceive of “Bagism,” a concept that involved climbing into a large bag where she could safely peer through a pair of holes at the harsh, chaotic world outside. The idea was to create a safety zone for herself and anyone seeking sanctuary. Once inside the bag, no one could ascertain the sex, ethnicity or beauty (or the lack thereof) of the person hidden within.

Yoko described her father, Eisuke, as an emotionally stunted man who was incapable of complimenting his daughter’s creativity. Taking out his personal frustration at having abandoned his dream of becoming a concert pianist in order to satisfy his father’s dying wish - that he pursue a career in finance in order to properly provide for his family, Eisuke would traumatize Yoko by measuring her fingers, and bluntly informing her that she should abandon any hope of pursuing a professional musical career as they were too small to play the piano properly. When Yoko explained her dream was to become a composer, Eisuke replied that it was impossible for a woman in Japanese society to achieve such a goal and perhaps she might consider becoming a singer. To her surprise he offered to support her whimsical ambition by paying for vocal lessons. Years later, Yoko expressed gratitude and pointed out that her father was more progressive than most Japanese men in that he did not expect her to get married and have children and eventually encouraged and helped her attain her career goals.

In April 1944, ominous squadrons of American B-29 long-range bombers suddenly darkened the sky above Tokyo, reducing the city to flame and ash. In the aftermath of the nightmare, food and clean water became scarce. From that point on, Yoko claimed her family was “always hungry.” There was a shortage of “everything… even toilet paper,” she said. The Onos held out as long as they could, but after Isoko found an unexploded bomb in her garden, she packed up her children with whatever belongings they could carry and fled by train, to the small farming village of Karuizawa. East of Tokyo, the small town of Karuizawa, which lay at the foot of snow-peaked Mount Asama, seemed like an idyllic sanctuary. Yoko recalled that her mother often romanticizing about moving to the countryside where the “beautiful, honest farmers” lived and worked. But Isoko’s fanciful illusions were soon shattered after the food shortage triggered an atmosphere of mounting distrust. Rather than welcoming and helping fleeing refugees, the locals began to despise the intruding wealthy city folk. “Our money couldn’t buy food,” Yoko explained. Whether or not the family ate, she explained, “depended on the farmer’s whims.” Desperate for a bowl of rice and cabbage, Isoko traded her heirloom jewelry for something her children could eat. Yoko recalled how she quickly turned into nothing but “skin and bones.” With the family servants gone, Isoko was forced to do chores a woman of her social stature never imagined. Yoko and her siblings would spend their days searching for food, taunted by the local children for “smelling like butter.” Their derogatory remark was meant as an insult, as butter, although common in America, inferred wealth as it was never part of a traditional Japanese diet. Beyond the problems they encountered in Karuizawa, the family had also lost all contact with Eisuke, not knowing if he was dead or alive. To their relief they would learn that he wound up in a P.O.W. camp in Hanoi.

Horrific descriptions of the bombing of Hiroshima soon arrived, compounded by the tragedy of Nagasaki. But without a radio no one was sure exactly what happened or if the war had finally ended. Returning to Tokyo on the back of a truck, Yoko, now thirteen, with her mother and two siblings, witnessed the brutal and shameful defeat of her country. It was at that point the young girl came to understand two of the major principles of Buddhism. First and foremost, that all life is suffering. And secondly, everything is impermanent. “You don’t want to possess anything [because] you might lose it,” Yoko explained, claiming she lost interest in anything material or maintaining relationships as they were certain to vanish in time. “I just didn’t care and was proud that I just didn’t care,” she said. (This austere attitude drastically changed years later after John retreated from the music business to become a househusband and raise their son Sean, while Ono became a dedicated businesswoman, increasing her family’s wealth, making wise investments.)

Isoko had inadvertently given Yoko hope when she told her daughter, “you can write about this when it’s over.” Following the war Yoko returned to the safety and privilege of an affluent life, attending Gakushuin, a prestigious school, whose student body included Emperor Hirohito’s two sons – Akihito (who in 1989, became the 125^th Emperor of Japan) and Yoshi (the younger brother, a poet who allegedly had a crush on Yoko).

At nineteen Yoko returned again to America, moving with her family to the affluent suburb of Scarsdale, New York. She soon enrolled at the prestigious all-women’s college, Sarah Lawrence. But as an art student Yoko became frustrated and dropped out during her third year, after dismissing all traditional forms of expression - from painting, writing poetry and music, as limiting and dissatisfying. “I was like a misfit in every medium,” she later confessed.

Art, for Yoko, went far beyond neophyte dabbling or fulfilling the requirements to receive a degree. It became an obsessive search for what she referred to as “an additional act,” in order to keep from “going mad.” Feeling like she was literally hanging by a thread, Yoko’s salvation came after visualizing herself grasping tightly to a kite string. “The kite,” she explained, “was me.”

Shy and “very inhibited,” Yoko remained a virgin until she was twenty-four, when she eloped with the experimental pianist/composer Toshi Ichiyanagi in 1956. While her husband became well-regarded amongst his peers at Julliard and the New School, (where he studied with John Cage) Yoko soldiered on, unrecognized. “I was always writing… sending things to the New Yorker,” who offered nothing but “a polite refusal,” she recalled. Frustrated and ignored, Yoko began seeking fulfillment in having affairs with various men, but wound up “always having abortions,” because, as she claimed, she was “too neurotic to take precautions.” Overwhelmed with guilt, Ono eventually confessed her transgressions to husband, convincing Toshi, who she described as “very kind,” to save face by leaving her and returning to Japan, as she had been such a dreadful wife.

(Yoko with John Cage)

Back in Tokyo, Ichiyanagi would help organize John Cage’s first tour of Japan in 1961, in which Yoko would sing Cage’s “Aria” and lay across the strings of the piano while he played a piece titled “Water Walk.”

Back in New York, Yoko would rent a dingy cold-water loft at 112 Chambers Street (for $50.50a month) where she organized what became the first Downtown loft concerts in December 1960. While providing a platform that gave “far-out people a chance,” Yoko now had her own space, where she could develop and perform her latest works at pass-the-hat parties which were attended by downtown artists like LaMonte Young and Henry Flynt, as well as art world luminaries from John Cage and Max Ernst to Peggy Guggenheim.

Years later Flynt, the composer/electric violinist credited with having coined the term “concept art,” recalled the scene as “informal” with “no standards,” yet at the same time, “viciously competitive.” At his first performance at Yoko’s loft in February 1961, Flynt, determined to apply the radical concepts of Free Jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman to piano, found his fellow artists “so square, [he] couldn’t make anything plausible happen.” Trying not “to be discourteous to Yoko,” Henry climbed atop the piano bench (rather than the piano itself) and played a mix of bird calls, squeals and screeches by biting the mouthpiece of a clarinet. His performance abruptly concluded after employing a pair of toothpicks and a rubber band as musical instruments. Flynt claimed he was appalled by “the ordeal of the avant-garde,” which he sadly deemed no more than “a competition to be the most preposterous, most senseless, the most incomprehensible.”

“If you wanted to do head games, there was no reason for them to be in a concert of music,” he said (a sentiment similar to those levelled at Yoko and John by scores of critics for their radical collaborations in 1969, whether in Cambridge or Toronto). Flynt reportedly returned to Ono’s loft the following day, to perform “a more conventional concert” proving his credibility to any scoffers by employing traditional music charts. Disillusioned with the avant-garde, Flynt spent the next decade developing a new genre he dubbed “New American Ethnic Music,” which bravely blended everything from hillbilly to garage rock to minimalism and Indian ragas.

Living and working in such a tense atmosphere only helped exacerbate Yoko’s feelings of instability. While grappling with reoccurring thoughts of suicide, Ono began writing the series of instruction/poems that would comprise her first book, Grapefruit, which she considered “a collection of paintings in printed form.” Ono found writing very therapeutic - “a cure for myself without knowing it,” she told journalist Charles McCarry.

(Grapefruit - a later edition published by Simon & Schuster - 1970)

Not surprisingly she couldn’t find a publisher for the book, which was eventually printed in Japan in 1964 in a limited small-press edition of five hundred copies. Grapefruit would later reach a wider audience after it was published in America by Simon & Schuster in 1971. The poems or “pieces” as Yoko termed them, were a series of evocative commands, and metaphorical recipes that, like Zen, have a powerful way of making readers think beyond the comfortable boundaries of their minds. “Line Piece,” playfully instructed readers to “Draw a line with yourself. Go on drawing until you disappear.” Although an impossible and surreal act, this radical concept was nothing new. There have been plenty of artists over the years, such as the eccentric New York painter/jeweler Axel, (AKA the “Bloody Genius”) who, whether deliberately confronting societal taboos or simply hoping to attract attention to themselves, have produced intensely personal artwork by using their own blood without facing lethal consequences.

Enigmatic and provocative, Yoko invited her readers to “Burn [Grapefruit] after you read it.” “This is the greatest book I’ve ever burned,” John later exclaimed in the jacket notes for the small, square-shaped yellow book. They were both unquestionably aware of the controversy attached to burning books, from ancient China through the Third Reich. Lennon himself had recently experienced an ugly backlash in the American South when gangs of irate fans swarmed down to local church parking lots to ignite their “Beatle trash” in big dumpster bonfires after his “Bigger than Jesus” comments in March 1966.

Like so many of Ono’s concepts, her motivation was to spur the viewer/reader/listener to reconsider their understanding and acceptance of the world around them. “Her book Grapefruit speaks for itself,” John wrote to Joe Franklin. “It is now in its fourth edition – paperback. Yoko calls them instructions to help you through life rather than poetry.”

Lennon dubbed Grapefruit “beautiful and profound,” believing its inscrutable Zen-like kōans “could help [people] to live.” In John’s not-so-humble (if not somewhat naïve) opinion, his wife was “one of the world’s most important artists.”

Presented by the eccentric impresario Norman Seaman, Yoko’s concert at Carnegie Recital Hall on Friday, November 24, 1961 showcased her original “pieces” – “A Grapefruit in the World of Park,” “A Piece for Strawberries and Violin,” and “AOS - dedicated to David Tudor.” Ono hand-lettered the life-size poster herself in big bold India ink letters on a quilt of newspapers, stuck together with cellophane tape.

Following the concert, Ono returned to Japan where, much to her surprise, she suddenly found herself in demand – albeit briefly. Yoko showed her art and gave poetry readings until an American reporter wrote a scathing review, claiming she’d stolen the bulk of her ideas from John Cage. According to Ono, the charge was absurd, as Cage, she claimed, disliked her work, considering it “too sexy or erotic. The whole trend [currently in vogue at the time in] New York was for homosexual cool art.”

It seemed that the disgruntled journalist had confused Toshi with Yoko when it came to the impact of Cage’s influence. According to Mark Swed’s May 2015 article in the Los Angeles Times: “Throughout the ‘60s [Ichiyanagi] adapted Cage’s ideas to his own voluminous interests [which] reached a kind of climax with his kitchen-sink Tadanori Yokoo opera.”

Meanwhile Ono “went through hell,” as no one in the Japanese press came to her defense over the fraudulent accusations. To compound her problems, her mother felt that publicly defending herself would be distasteful and humiliating, and that she must maintain her dignity by remaining stoic and silent. Feeling “unloved,” Yoko attempted suicide and was immediately committed to a mental hospital where she was sedated and put under observation.

While convalescing, Toshi visited his ex-wife, bringing with him an aspiring American artist named Tony Cox, who had seen some of Yoko’s pieces in an avant-garde art anthology and had flown to Japan in hopes of meeting her. Initially Ono refused to see Cox, claiming, she was in no condition to receive visitors. But Toshi insisted and Yoko eventually acquiesced.

As she’d previously begged her friends and family years before while desperately holding on to the kite string of her life, “Please accept me, I am mad,” she confided to Cox. Finding Ono in an asylum seemed to spark a romantic if not heroic urge in Tony: “I helped get her out of the hospital,” Cox told People magazine in 1986. Yoko and Tony were soon married in November 1962. Their daughter (and only child) Kyoko was born the following August. “Yoko felt very strongly, that if she had kids, the husband should help take care of them. I agreed to it before the marriage,” Cox explained. But Yoko, as he revealed, quickly “got sick and tired” of being “too close to somebody.”

“I just had a baby and didn’t want it,” Ono told Esquire in 1970. Yoko felt as if she’d been coerced into giving birth by both her ex-husband and the man she’d recently married. Believing the cause of her nervous breakdown had been triggered by her numerous abortions, Toshi told Yoko, “It’s lousing you up,” while Cox vehemently opposed terminating the pregnancy. Yoko initially felt that having Kyoko was “a mistake.” “I love my child, but I never loved her when I had her,” the brutally honest Ono admitted. Leaving Cox, Yoko returned to New York, where her husband, with Kyoko in tow, quickly tracked her down. Feeling trapped again, she soon fled to London.

Fiercely independent, Ono would always remain married to her art before another human being. At best, Cox was welcome to tag along for the ride as an occasional collaborator, but Yoko mostly viewed his role in the scheme of her life as a necessary househusband.

After the organizers of a Belgian film festival refused to show Ono’s new Film No. 4 on December 26, 1967, Yoko, Tony and the French poet/political activist Jean-Jacques Lebel publicly protested by dancing in the buff. They were immediately arrested and fled the country after being released on bail. Their trial called for a mandatory sentence of three months behind bars if they ever dared set foot in Belgium again.

Two months later, Yoko would perform with Ornette Coleman at Royal Albert Hall.

While Tony was away in France with Kyoko, Yoko Ono moved in with John Lennon. Years later she confessed to becoming “a nervous wreck” who “despised herself,” but not for reasons one might assume - such as being wrought with guilt over leaving her husband and child, or for being branded as a “homewrecker” by the press for stealing John away from Cynthia and Julian. Instead, her gloomy emotional state was triggered by the unexpected success her work was currently enjoying in London. “My name became bigger,” Yoko explained. “But it was a high price to pay.”

At the time only two hundred and fifty copies remained of the first printing of Grapefruit, but not due to a sudden flurry of interest and sales. It seems an unhinged “friend” entrusted to store Yoko’s books, finally read it and faithfully followed the author’s instructions in its provocative introduction, setting them all ablaze.

While such whimsical concepts as “the sound of people perspiring” struck most folks as complete nonsense, Yoko’s boundless imagination spoke directly to John, aggravating him at first, until eventually seducing him. Ono’s unique use of language and poetic metaphor seemed to illuminate the far corners of Lennon’s mind. Bewitched by this strange, diminutive Japanese artist, Lennon wrestled with her baffling messages: “Why is this woman telling me to do such mad things?” he pondered. Judging from her writing and artwork, John’s initial impression of Yoko was of a “fantastic, pushy, aggressive, woman’s liberation type.” But Lennon soon realized that was only another image she projected, while at her core “was a coward.” While Yoko often described herself as “very shy,” John soon realized he underestimated her remarkable tenacity.

John originally claimed he wanted to record Yoko as a solo artist for Apple and had no intention of collaborating with her, let alone “falling in love and getting married.” “The only way to show her, was to show her pure… nude,” Lennon explained. “It was going to be her – not me. All her gallery shows were always white, and it was just going to be her, just in this whiteness.”

While designed by British painter and collage artist, Richard Hamilton, the minimalist the cover for The Beatles double album (released November 22^nd, 1968) bares the unmistakable influence and esthetic of Lennon’s Japanese concept artist girlfriend. Visually and musically The White Album was a deliberate departure, an attempt to “get back” from the psychedelic trappings of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the more recent Magical Mystery Tour.

Overnight a fresh new minimalism was in vogue, as John and Yoko began dressing in monochromatic matching outfits (either all white or black, depending on their mood). At the same time, Lennon stripped his music down to its core, exposing his tormented emotional state in songs like “I’m So Tired,” and “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” while boldly revealing a new level of gentleness with “Julia.”

The tape that John and Yoko assembled upstairs in Lennon’s Weybridge home studio during the first night they spent together would soon become an album in need of a cover. “It’s a very strange feeling seeing yourself naked,” John confessed. “There’s a little chill…” At Apple John and Yoko were taken aback when they were met with “the most ridiculous Catholic onslaught… They really gave us hell,” Lennon said of his bandmates. “They were saying ‘Why?’ Just like you’d be expecting [Richard Nixon’s corrupt Vice President Spiro] Agnew to say ‘Why? Why?’”

(Why - Plastic Ono Band at its best!)

“Yoko used to tell me about the in-laws she married,” Lennon quipped, comparing Paul and George’s judgmental attitude to unbearable family members. But for the “Two Virgins,” appearing naked together on their album was no big deal. “We forgot the shame,” Yoko remarked. “We didn’t do it for pornography,” Lennon insisted, although he offered no further explanation or “meaning” behind what many considered nothing more than outrageous publicity “stunt.”

Me book - available from Amazombie - here… https://shorturl.at/l5PRA