12 minute bass solo, Arlington Theater February 28, 1980

Trouble often follows the creative soul. We know troubled artists, troubled poets, troubled writers, and especially troubled musicians. Jaco Pastorius (December 1, 1951 – September 21, 1987) is integral to some of the most expressive, creative, and joyful music ever created, and he’s not immune to trouble. At the height of his collaboration with Weather Report his personal eccentricity develops into diagnosed disorder. After five years (1976-81) Pastorius’ time with Weather Report is over.

Jaco Pastorius, 1981 - photo credit, Chris Hakkens

Two of Pastorius’ Weather Report bandmates, Peter Erskine and Wayne Shorter play on Pastorius’ 1982 solo album, “Word of Mouth,” along with a remarkable ensemble of jazz greats. Touring to support the album, despite the poor sales performance, the band is 21 strong. A delivered follow up album fails to impress Warner Bros. executives, and it’s shelved. Released instead is a live album from the 1982 Word of Mouth Tour.

The Word of Mouth tour must have been an incredible show to experience with 21 jazz greats on stage together

During a Word of Mouth tour appearance in Tokyo Pastorius reportedly shaves his head, paints his face black, and throws his bass into Tokyo bay. Diagnosed with bi-polar disorder in the days following, the next five years are filled both with incredible music and terrible mistakes.

$12.50 - more than a half day’s pay at the time to witness history being filmed, “Shadows and Light” - now seems incredibly inexpensive to witness such an incredible moment - photo credit: me

I saw Pastorius onstage just twice. The first time was a few months before the Arlington show at the taping of Shadows and Light, Joni Mitchell’s incredible concert feature film produced at the Santa Barbara County Bowl. In the film Pastorius takes a soaring bass solo but counter to my memory of a front somersault over the instrument lying on the stage, that’s not in the film. Maybe I’m confusing it with the Arlington Theater performance which may have ended with his signature front flip. Regardless, I was hooked by Jaco’s unmatched command of the fretless electric bass, and by his overall enthusiasm.

https://youtu.be/xrAs7-LT6VE?is=-6zJg97ctocdfRNV

Jaco Pastorius, Joni Mitchell 1979 Shadows and Light Pat Metheny,M.Brecker, Lyle Mays+Don Alias - and The Persuasions! A musical treat!

Epilogue

I wrote about Weather Report and more of the 1980 show can be found here on Aggrovox.

Coney Island Baby, Vicious, Walk on the Wild Side, Heroin recorded June 30, 1980, Theatre de Verdure, Nice, France TRT 21:36, stereo

Lou Reed – photo credit Getty Images

Lou Reed, Florence, Italy. June 14, 1980, in the Parco della Cascine more than 10,000 people share a two-hour Lou Reed performance on a warm night in a park-like setting. Two weeks later Reed plays for fewer than 2,000 in the Theatre de Verdure in Nice, France, a faux Roman outdoor amphitheater built in concrete five hours up the coast from Florence. Reed and his touring band — Michael Fonfara, Chuck Hammer, Stuart Heinrich, Ellard “Moose” Boles, and Michael Suchorsky play, per the best available documentation, the last night of the European leg of the Growing Up in Public tour. No official recording of that show exists. This is the unofficial tape.

The Florence show is a similar setlist to the recording I made in Nice two weeks later on a warm Monday night on the Riviera – credit YouTube

4 Songs - Twenty-one Minutes Thirty-Six Seconds

Reed gave an interview in 1971 describing songs like “Heroin,” and “Walk on the Wild Side.” He said they were meant to exorcise darkness, not glamorize it. He also said his song, The Bells, is “about suicide, but not a bad suicide.” Reed was a notorious interview for nearly his entire career.

$13 for 130 minutes of vintage American rock and roll; a great value for money proposition for the French audience on a warm Monday night – photo credit: Stephen Pedroff

Exorcising darkness is a tidy phrase, the kind that gets quoted because it sounds like he’s explaining himself. What’s on this tape suggests something messier and more interesting. Across these four songs, “exorcising darkness” doesn’t look like one fixed thing night after night. Sometimes it looks like turning an artist’s biggest commercial success into the shortest song in the set; when a song has been performed enough times that it starts being a job. Sometimes it looks like what happens when a song fixing counter culture’s power over violence becomes a power anthem. And sometimes, on a good night, something closer to the thing itself happens – out where the artist chooses to stay in the dragon pit where creativity happens.

On this night, performed live “Coney Island Baby” loses its dedication to the woman who inspired the song. The verse that begins the song and makes it a personal diary entry about Reed’s dream to join the football team (and win the girl?), is gone. At the end of the song the shout-out to ‘Rachel Humphreys and the kids at P.S. 192’ is simply gone, replaced by a guitar solo. “Vicious,” always a cultural meme based on the wit of Andy Warhol, gets bigger and meaner. “Walk On the Wild Side,” Reed’s hit is dispatched at a breakneck pace, like something he wants behind him. And on “Heroin” - the longest track in the set list by a full two minutes - the song becomes the rush and the comedown, exactly as the writer and his dragons intended.

The tape documents four songs and four different exorcisms on the last night of a tour in a foreign country; Reed succeeds and the audience wins.

Press play. Then keep reading.

Coney Island Baby, Who it was and what it was

Built from a poem Reed wrote in 1971 for The Harvard Advocate, originally titled “The Coach and Glory of Love,” the song is a love letter to his then-girlfriend Rachel Humphreys, dedicated to her and “all the kids at P.S. 192” in its closing lines. On the album the song is a quiet, nearly acoustic confession. None of that survives here. The performance starts with the second verse, “When you’re all alone in your midnight hour” skipping the first two verses and the bridge. The Nice performance ends with the ‘glory of love’ refrain and impressive guitar solos. No dedication at all to Ms. Humphreys and the kiddos.

The 1984 Robert Quine, Lou Reed version of Coney Island Baby, September 25, 1984, Capitol Theatre

The Nice tape hits much differently than the studio version. Soaring electric guitars fill the space where the diarist’s feelings once were. A documented 1984 performance with guitarist Robert Quine shows Reed taking the song in a harder, more theatrical live direction, screaming through the ‘glory of love’ refrain. The Nice performance is an interesting point in time in the song’s arc: a private confession slowly changes through time and performance into something that satisfies a crowd.

Vicious, You hit me with a flower

The song’s origin story is one of Reed’s most-repeated legends.

Andy Warhol suggests the title for the song, and when Reed asks what kind of vicious he means, Warhol answers with the image that became the opening line. “You hit me with a flower” is an instant meme, and Reed says he writes it down nearly verbatim. A generation understands the lesson that the power of culture outsmarts violence to effect change. On the album the song is glam-pop, and under three minutes. Live at the Theatre de Verdure, it runs 4:10 and it’s anthemic; filled with power chords. Reed leans into a more urgent, even menacing vocal register. He practically snarls, “Baby, you’re so vicious” by the end of the first verse.

Paris 1974, Vicious comes at 15:55 in this amazing clip – credit YouTube

The ‘angry’ version of the song isn’t new for the 1980 tape. A live version from December 1973 (released on Lou Reed Live) runs 5:55, nearly double the studio length. When Reed plays “Vicious” on the last night of the 1980 European tour, the song has apparently settled into a role as a designated live showcase number - a song built for big performances, and one that keeps getting bigger, not smaller as the years pass.

Walk On the Wild Side, Hi Bruce

Reed’s most successful chart hit reaches #16 in the US and #10 in the UK. “Walk On the Wild Side” is a Bowie/Ronson-produced guided tour through real people from the Warhol Factory: Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro, Jackie Curtis, and Joe Campbell. On the album it’s a catchy bassline with airy backing vocals that turns it into inescapable radio furniture. None of that is present in the 1980 Nice version where it runs a brisk 3:10, much shorter than the studio cut. On the tape Reed sings the first verse in an almost Dylanesque time signature, with an out of sync cadence that seems to struggle to catch up.

“Lou Reed Live: Take No Prisoners” includes a 17-minute version of Walk on the Wild Side (first song) recorded at The Bottom Line in NYC over 5 days, May 17-21, 1978 and released in November on Arista Records

There’s real precedent for Reed treating this song casually rather than reverently in concert. On “Live: Take No Prisoners” (1978), he talks over his own biggest hit mid-performance to riff about Bruce Springsteen being in the crowd. “Hi Bruce!” The Nice tape isn’t chatty, instead it feels like he’s channeling his resentment for the song by speeding through it.

On a Monday night in Nice the vibe is more electric campfire sing-along than hip counterculture. It’s the one song of the four live versions that clocks in faster live rather than slower.

Heroin, Riding the dragon

Reed reportedly writes the song at Syracuse University years before the Velvet Underground exists and it’s famously the first song Reed ever plays for John Cale. Heroin (the song) may be a big reason the band forms at all. On the Nice tape the song is a slow build toward a crescendo, then a slowing pace and quieter tone. It’s a musical version of injecting smack, and the song does exactly what it is built to do.

The purity of intent from this 1965 Lou Reed and John Cale recording that most consider is an inexpensive copyright proof of several songs, including Heroin – credit YouTube

On the Nice tape the song features the soaring guitars of Chuck Hammer and Stuart Heinrich. The ’67 original on “The Velvet Underground & Nico” is a different song; one is a spoken word confession and the other a full rock opera. Critics describe the changes in tempo and other effects in the song using the same language as the drug user, ‘It’s the rush and then the comedown.’

Reed’s own account of the song’s intent, given in a 1971 interview, is that songs like this are meant to exorcise darkness rather than glamorize. It’s a disputed claim that’s been argued about since the record’s 1967 release, when radio stations refused to air the song because of the drug use. The tension between a song that seems to successfully mimic the activity it supposedly condemns, regardless of the author’s professed anti-drug intent is controversial 60 years later. It deserves to be the longest track on the tape at 7:34.

Epilogue

In the set list below three songs are missing from my tape(s): Sweet Jane, Real Good Time Together, I’m Waiting for the Man. I fully expect these three songs to eventually turn up on the end of another tape.

When archiving the ‘big box of tapes’ I first found the Reed encore on the end of a Devo show recorded at the same venue. The tape that is labeled, “Lou Reed Nice” and has the ticket stub tucked in the case is a full 90 minutes. The fact that the ‘full’ tape starts at the head of the tape with Coney Island Baby suggests I knew I was likely to run out of tape with just 90 minutes and started recording the show on the B side of a ‘used’ tape.

As soon as I find the missing songs I’ll digitize and post here – I’m especially hopeful I’ll find Sweet Jane and I’m Waiting for the Man.

1. Sweet Jane — 1970 — Loaded (Velvet Underground)

2. Real Good Time Together — 1974 — 1969: The Velvet Underground Live

3. I’m Waiting for the Man — 1967 — The Velvet Underground & Nico

4. Coney Island Baby — 1975 — Coney Island Baby

5. So Alone — 1980 — Growing Up in Public

6. Vicious — 1972 — Transformer

7. Walk on the Wild Side — 1972 — Transformer

8. Standing on Ceremony — 1980 — Growing Up in Public

9. Heroin — 1967 — The Velvet Underground & Nico

10. Love Is Here to Stay — 1980 — Growing Up in Public

11. Berlin — 1973 — Berlin

12. The Kids — 1973 — Berlin

13. The Power of Positive Drinking — 1980 — Growing Up in Public

14. How Do You Speak to an Angel — 1980 — Growing Up in Public

15. My Old Man — 1980 — Growing Up in Public

16. Keep Away — 1980 — Growing Up in Public

17. The Bells — 1979 — The Bells

18. I’ll Be Your Mirror — 1967 — The Velvet Underground & Nico

19. Pale Blue Eyes — 1969 — The Velvet Underground

20. Street Hassle — 1978 — Street Hassle

21. Rock & Roll — 1970 — Loaded (Velvet Underground)

22. You Keep Me Hangin’ On — 1966 — Originally The Supremes; not on a Reed studio album

22 songs and over 130 minutes of tape. No wonder it’s on three tapes!

For more from the Nice concert:

The Bells

The encore

The Bells, recorded at the Theatre de Verdure on the beach in Nice, France, June 30, 1980

Memories of the Lou Reed show are fuzzy - for good reason. After the show I jumped on my Vespa and while zipping along the Nice "beach road" (300' above the Mediterranean) I met a car coming the other direction and then immediately met headfirst the thigh-high stone wall on the edge of the cliff. Well, chin first

The Bells, released in 1979 features a nine-minute title track. Standing on the concrete amphitheater steps holding a microphone steady without a break for 11 or 12 minutes is no joke. I’m thinking: “The tape is gonna run out before this song ends…” Some in the crowd are also wondering if it’s going to end, mostly because it seems like it will a couple of times, and they are quick to begin applause in the gaps before it finally ends. On the recording of the show, which is spread out over two tapes, The Bells gets the same rapturous response as the rest of the songs.

The Bells, Lou Reed 1979, Arista Records; this is Reed’s second to last album for the label that released “Rock and Roll Heart” (1976) “Street Hassle” (1978)

Curious about the song, I researched contemporary critics and found something unexpected: two of the sharpest writers of the era who generally disagreed about most things, both love the song (if not the album, at least). Lester Bangs reviews the album for Rolling Stone in June ’79 and says the title track is “quintessential Seventies music,” comparing it to Miles Davis’s “He Loved Him Madly” instead of any rock comparison. Bang says it is “vertiginous as a slow, dark whirlpool.” OK.

Greil Marcus reviews the album in the Village Voice that same month and dismisses almost everything else on the record - he thinks most of it is aimless, half-finished riffs - but not The Bells. When the song finally breaks open, Marcus calls it “the real death waltz,” the one place the album’s promised mystery actually shows up.

The Bells, live at HMV, London, England July 4, 2011 – The Gig Channel YouTube

It’s nine minutes and change on the album, and over eleven on the tape. Nobody was easing into this one that night.

For context in 1979 a nine-minute studio track wasn’t unheard of, but it was rare, and rarer still without an edit. “Hey Jude” ran 7:11 and topped the charts exactly as recorded. “MacArthur Park” hit #2 at 7:21, also unedited. But a lot of the era’s other long songs only became hits once somebody cut them down - “Won’t Get Fooled Again” trimmed to 3:34 for radio, “Free Bird” to 4:43, Donna Summer’s seventeen-minute “Love to Love You Baby” shrunk to under five before it charted at all.

Almost nobody was playing The Bells on the radio in 1979, and standing on those concrete steps that night, I don’t think anybody in that crowd expected to hear the whole thing either.

It’s never turned up on any of Reed’s official live albums. Documented setlists suggest just 40 live performances happened across three decades. I have one on tape.

More from this show soon on Aggrovox. It was interesting finding most of the encore on the end of the DEVO tape, but I’m very glad I found the second Reed tape – it was worth the wait!

The first Aggrovox article about the Lou Reed show in France

Caption: “Inner City Blues” (Marvin Gaye, James Nyx Jr.), “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (Brooker, Reid, *Fisher), “Feelin’ Alright” (Dave Mason) – TRT 15:34

Joe Cocker, 1980 National Stadium, Dublin, photo credit: Leahtwosaints (Flickr)

A Joe Cocker concert experienced in a pub, a 2000 seat theater, or seen from the nosebleed section in a stadium is always and equally an intimate affair. His voice doesn’t just originate with him; it’s like a wholly separate sentient presence. It envelops the stage in a cocoon of emotion, and his fellow musicians feel it. Steve Van Zandt from the E Street Band credits Cocker with bringing the “soul of Ray Charles” to the rock and roll stage. Audiences feel it too; the cocoon expands outward to embrace their appreciation.

The result is that a good Joe Cocker cover makes listeners forget about the original. Just ask Randy Newman. Cocker turns ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’, Newman’s song about a bossy “weak sort of fellow” in Newman’s own words, into an excuse for Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger to have as much simulated hedonistic sex as possible with an “R” rating in the movie “9 1/2 Weeks.”

Joe Cocker – You Can Leave Your Hat On official music video; “9 ½ Weeks” 1986, Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger, produced by PSO, distributed by MGM

In 1978 Cocker moves to actor Jane Fonda’s ranch in the hills above Santa Barbara. Contemporary reporting suggests substance abuse is behind his desire for isolation. Within months reports begin to trickle out that he’s frequenting local live-music venues. Over the next four years he tours internationally when dates are available to him, often without record label support, and during the same period he does not release a studio album. It’s the longest gap in his career. The only album he records is “Alive in America” in 1981, and it’s a gem.

Recorded in 1981, “Alive in America” released by NMC Records 2001

In late 1979 or early 1980 Cocker plays a one-off show in two-sets at The Head of the Wolf bar/restaurant on State St. Several months, maybe a year later he headlines a show at the Arlington Theater, the largest indoor venue in town – 2,000 seats.

“Joe Cocker Arlington S.B.” and “Defective” in ink on the case insert - nothing written on the tape label. No date. Eight songs. 40 minutes. No explanation. No historical records available. Nothing else on the tape, which for some reason now works perfectly

Thousands of live performances ago means that memories are hazy and some are hazier than others. The Arlington tape is labeled with the artist and venue, and then “defective.” It’s like Jodie Foster bringing back 18 hours of static in the film, “Contact.” The handwriting is mine, and the tape contains more than just static but it doesn’t help improve any memories.

The First Santa Barbara Joe Cocker Show

It’s the ‘extra’ mystery show in a bar/restaurant in downtown Santa Barbara, months before the Arlington Theater where the memories sharpen.

The band is finished setting up beyond the far end of a long wooden bar which faces a row of heavy wooden four-top tables and low, leather backed chairs against large plate glass windows. Gleaming wood is everywhere and freshly lacquered it whispers ‘upscale’ to the country club and yacht club set who are the usual patrons of the steak and seafood restaurant. Tall nautical themed swiveling chairs with wood backs are turned to look down the length of the bar towards the rear of the building. It’s a comfortable spot to rest an elbow, order a beer, and rest a foot on the brass railing underneath to watch the band about fifty feet away.

Facing the front of the building, and the bar’s State St. entrance the band is at least five or six members strong, plus Joe. It’s two guitars, bass, drums, what is probably a Fender Rhodes piano, and if memory serves, two or more horns. The band is behind Cocker who stands at the mic stage-center on a small makeshift stage about eight inches high. It’s placed against the building’s exterior wall just beyond the side door of the bar that leads out to Ortega St. The riser and PA partially block the exit which is now mostly unusable. It’s a Fire Marshal’s nightmare.

Ed Garner, a background surfer actor in Frankie Avalon / Annette Funicello beach party films of the 1960s is founder and owner of The Head of the Wolf restaurant/bar at 633 State Street; the building is the “oldest established drug store in Southern California” according to the 1955 Native Daughters of the Golden West plaque on the corner of Ortega and State St.

The only significant stage lighting primarily illuminates Cocker, while the band stands in deep shadow for the show.

The bar is full, but it’s not crazy ‘Hey, we’re all getting laid!’ Caddyshack full. The Wolf has a reputation as an upscale meat market on the weekends. Tonight everyone there is recognizable as a starving artist or a struggling local musician. It feels like a stag night with all the scruffy dudes in the room, and very, very few are likely to benefit from the venue’s reputation. It’s a word-of-mouth show - no advertising - and it’s a cold, dark, and rainy night outside which may account for the sane crowd size. Locals out for their Thursday night surf and turf dinner are clearing out double time as the unwashed masses start to trickle in and the drummer starts a soundcheck right after the kitchen closes at nine.

It’s unclear which musicians back Cocker that night. Poor recollection and zero research success suggests it may be members of the regional and legendary R&B Bombers, or local legends like Jeff Elliott, Gary Sangenito, and Randy Tico. Maybe it’s his ’80-’81 touring band in town for rehearsals: Mitch Chakour (music director, piano, guitar, backing vocals), Cliff Goodwin (guitar), Howie Hersh (bass), B.J. Wilson (drums), Bob Leinbach / Larry Marshall (keyboards), Maxine Green, Beverly Greene, Ann Lang, and Beth Anderson (backing vocals).

In the 120-year-old building the band plays two sets, each six or seven songs and memory says the setlist is very similar to the tape. At the Arlington show seven of the eight songs on the tape are on the “Alive in America” album. The Head of the Wolf show might be Cocker prepping songs for the road. The Arlington recording certainly captures Cocker beginning again, living in the hills above Santa Barbara, replacing substance abuse with new love and living amongst nature.

Joe Cocker and Pam Baker in an undated photo - credit: Mike Daines/REX Features

Cocker himself has said that meeting Pam Baker, a camp counselor in Santa Barbara, was the reason he got himself back together: “She made me think positively. I was very down on myself. She made me realize people still wanted to hear me sing, and convinced me I could escape the downward spiral.” The two remained in Santa Barbara until 1992 when they moved to Colorado to found “Mad Dog Ranch” and the “Cocker Kids Foundation,” in the small town of Crawford. The two remained married until Cocker’s death in 2014, and reports suggest Baker attended Cocker’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in November 2025 in Los Angeles.

Between sets at the Head of the Wolf Cocker sits in a makeshift ‘backstage’ area at a few tables behind the riser (I can’t see what he’s drinking). He’s surrounded mostly by serious-looking people who nobody recognizes. We guess that the backstage crowd are non-locals; we’re used to celebrities in town by now as Hollywood has discovered the relative anonymity of high hedges and large estates in the hills above Montecito.

No recording exists of the Head of the Wolf show (according to Google or even sustained AI searches). The same is true for the later Arlington show – repeated Google searches turn up zip, nada.

Caption: “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window” released as “Mad Dogs & Englishmen: The Complete Filmore East Concerts” (2006, six discs)

At the Head of the Wolf near the end of the second set, “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” changes what was a relaxed warmup set before a tour into something completely different. The energy and the intimacy of the performance ratchet to eleven. Maybe it’s not on the level of a “With A Little Help from My Friends” at Woodstock, but it’s close enough six blocks from the Pacific on State Street. If it weren’t for the fact that The Beatles did such a great job with their own tune, Cocker’s version would notch another victim on the microphone documenting original versions that have been forgotten.

If history repeats, and it always does, the remainder of the Arlington show will surface; discovered on the “B” side of one of the more than one hundred tapes that still haven’t been indexed or previewed for more than 40 years. It’s undeniable that the Arlington show happened, and it may also be true that the Head of the Wolf show may be lost to history.

The Songs

“A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

Even the song’s own writers can’t settle on who deserves credit. Gary Brooker and Keith Reid took songwriting credit in 1967. Organist Matthew Fisher — whose Bach-inspired line is arguably the song’s most recognizable element — isn’t added as a co-writer until a 2009 UK court ruling, 42 years after the fact. Sometimes stuff just takes time…

This undated performance of A Whiter Shade of Pale by Joe Cocker sounds remarkably similar to the version on the Arlington tape - @Muzon, YouTube

“Feelin’ Alright”

The Dave Mason original flopped. Traffic released it in 1968 and it didn’t chart in the UK at all. In America it only reaches #123, never cracking the Hot 100. Mason, who wrote it, has said he thinks the song survives today partly because “Joe Cocker’s version is so damn good.” Dozens, maybe hundreds of versions of the song have been produced since, propelling the tune to anthem status. The version on the tape is testament to the power of a Cocker cover to propel a song to new levels.

1970 concert film, “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” – from the official Joe Cocker YouTube channel

Saturday Night Live, October 2, 1976, Season 2, Ep. 3, the legendary John Belushi, Joe Cocker duet

“Inner City Blues.”

The Arlington tape likely presents a very early live performance of the song that Marvin Gaye and James Nyx Jr. wrote for the Sheffield Steel album sessions and then cut from the album’s 1982 release. The song is eventually released with the album’s reissue in 2002. Cocker sings it live at the Arlington and then the cassette tape sits in a shoebox for roughly twenty years before the public ever hears a recorded version.

“Inner City Blues” Loreley, Germany 1983 - YouTube

‘Inner City Blues’ was bumped from the 1982 release of Sheffield Steel, and then included in the album’s 2002 reissue.

The only artifact of both shows might be an imperfect memory and a defective cassette tape.

Epilogue

The best comp I can find for the Arlington recording is “Alive in America” on Apple Music and Spotify. It sounds like a raw board mix, and it’s from a concert recorded in Colorado in 1981 according to the liner notes. Why is was recorded, and why it took twenty years to release is beyond my ability to discover with Google. The album has a metric ton of vocal presence in the mix, and the set shares seven of the eight songs on the ‘defective’ tape from the Arlington.

I’m certain that someone out there will remember these two Joe Cocker appearances in Santa Barbara, with much clearer details. I hope to hear from them! The purpose of Aggrovox is continuous learning, and I can’t wait to hear from the Musicstack-o-sphere with the actual details of the these two shows!

If I ever do learn more, I am 100% ready to be wrong about many things, lol. Maybe there were no horns at Head of the Wolf – there aren’t any on the tape from the Arlington. Maybe I have the dates completely wrong. I tried to sleuth, and what I came up with is my best guess. Maybe it wasn’t a cold, rainy night in Santa Barbara when Cocker and his band (whomever they were) set up in a State St. bar.

The only thing I’m certain of is that I recorded the tape, and it’s from a show at the Arlington in the 80’s – it doesn’t match any set list I can find from a show he played in the 90’s. While it’s unlikely I didn’t have a backup plan when this tape failed, it’s possible. Bringing extra tapes and batteries was my M.O., so the idea that I gave up doesn’t feel right. In summary, I’m immensely hopeful that one day soon I’ll find the remainder of the show.

Arlington Theater Set List

Look What You’ve Done - Leo Nocentelli 1982 Sheffield Steel

I Can’t Say No - John Bettis, Daniel Moore 1978 Luxury You Can Afford

Feelin’ Alright - Dave Mason 1969 With a Little Help from My Friends

A Whiter Shade of Pale - Brooker, Reid, Fisher 1978 Luxury You Can Afford

Inner City Blues - Marvin Gaye, Nyx Jr. 1982 Sheffield Steel (2002 expanded edition)

I Don’t Wanna Live Without Lovin’ You - Bolton, Warren, James 1981 Alive in America

Just Like Always - Jimmy Webb 1982 Sheffield Steel

The Jealous Kind - Bobby Charles 1976 Stingray

“Alive in America” Joe Cocker, 2001, Spotify

Sail Away / Louisiana 1927 / God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind) / The Girls in My Life (Pt. 1) — recorded live February 29, 1980, Campbell Hall, University of California Santa Barbara — previously unreleased

A billboard on Sunset Ave. in Los Angeles c. 1980 promotes the Born Again again release that the Campbell Hall show supports, photo credit: Robert Landau, from his book and museum exhibition Rock 'n' Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip

On June 9, 2026, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, Taylor Swift walked onstage at Disney’s Toy Story 5 world premiere and sang You’ve Got a Friend in Me in duet with Randy Newman, 82, at the piano. The two of them traded the most uncomplicated, purely beloved song in Newman’s catalog. The crowd loved every second of it.

https://youtube.com/shorts/n2xakNfWblE?si=yOlWMKh2pIuaWOUE

Six weeks earlier, the New York Times published its 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters list. Taylor Swift was on it. Randy Newman, despite receiving nine votes from the professional songwriters the Times polled — more than Billy Joel, more than Patti Smith, more than James Taylor — was not. The panel overruled the voters. Variety’s Chris Willman suggested, acidly, that the list may have been partly engineered to land a Swift interview.

Meanwhile a cassette tape recorded on Leap Day 1980 waited in a box in Santa Barbara to reveal Randy Newman’s performance for a lecture hall full of students and faculty. The songs here are not Newman’s crowd-pleasers. They may be, however the songs that explain everything.

Is Disney’s Five-Eighths World Inhabited by Five-Eighths Characters?

Disneyland is built at five-eighths scale. It’s a little more complicated because the scale subtly changes with height and mass. Walt Disney said every brick, every gas lamp on Main Street U.S.A. is scaled down, in his words so they “made the street a toy, and the imagination can play more freely with a toy.”

The scholar Karal Ann Marling called it the architecture of reassurance. Umberto Eco filed it under “the absolute fake.” The miniaturized America is the mechanism by which the actual America gets mythologized, with the awkward chapters edited out, the scale adjusted until the visitor feels larger than life, and in complete control of life. The visitor is at the center of the story at Disneyland (and clearly also in the company’s movies and other brands).

Disneyland when it opened 70 years ago, 5/8th scale castle included, photo credit: Disenyland promotional image

Are Disney’s characters also metaphorically 5/8-scale, and are their stories about reassurance? When Swift performs I Knew It, I Knew You at the Toy Story premiere she puts her own voice into the film’s cowgirl character. Finding true love mirrors the wedding of the century between Swift and Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden days before her duet with Newman. Swift is written into the scene: and Jessie and the pop star both find their true loves in the story, one real, one pure Disney dream machine.

Randy Newman has spent fifty years doing the literary opposite, writing himself out of the scene, but with the same achingly good melodies. He writes characters at life size: the slave ship owner, the flooded farmer, the abandoned poor, and God watching Cain kill Abel. Where Disney adjusts reality until visitors feel better about themselves, Newman holds a steady gaze until listeners reckon with themselves. The tenderness is what implicates.

Smiling and Telling the Truth

The Roman poet Horace described his method as ridentem dicere verum — telling the truth with a smile. His nature was ‘to laugh, not to flay’ by mocking personal folly rather than the concept of evil, inviting the reader to recognize herself in the fool rather than congratulate herself for identifying the villain.

Savage satire says: look at that. Gentle satire says: look at yourself.

Like one of Newman’s many film scores, the melody makes the satire by compelling the audience to want to join the narrator in ‘Sail Away.’ Reckoning with what that means comes next. Greil Marcus, in his 1975 study of rock and American culture Mystery Train, put the mechanism plainly: ‘[Newman’s] best songs implicate the listener.’

Roman poet and philosopher Quintus Horatius Flaccus, commonly known as Horace, December 65 BC – 27 November 8 BC

Implicate. Not instruct. Not accuse. Implicate.

The Rolling Stone critic who reviewed Born Again in 1980 called the album Newman was touring with the night of this tape ‘unremittingly snide,’ suggesting Newman had ‘shrunk to the size of Martin Mull.’ The tape answers that charge. The audience at Campbell Hall on February 29 was not being sneered at, nor were they sneering at anyone else.

Sail Away (1972, Sail Away)

Newman wrote ‘Sail Away’ from the point of view of a slave trader pitching his offer to a prospective captive in Africa. The sweetness of the melody is the tragedy.

Etta James covers Sail Away

Newman has said he didn’t want to simply declare that slavery was awful — that felt too easy. His unreliable narrator doesn’t know he’s the villain. He believes in what he’s selling. That belief is the horror. The New Republic argued that ‘Sail Away’ debunks American exceptionalism with a panache no progressive scholar has equaled. The proof is in the covers: Etta James heard the knife in the song immediately. Bobby Darin sang it straight and missed it entirely. That gap — between the listener who catches it and the listener who doesn’t — is where Newman has always lived.

Bobby Darrin covers Sail Away

Louisiana 1927 (1974, Good Old Boys)

In the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, roughly 700,000 people were left homeless. The federal response was indifferent. The North looked away. Newman wrote about it from the perspective of a Louisiana resident watching Coolidge arrive by train to do nothing — ‘a little fat man with a notepad in his hand.’

Aaron Nevile and India Arie performs “Louisiana 1927” (song starts at 2:30)

In a 2008 interview with the Village Voice, Newman said he wouldn’t have kept playing it except, “It’s the same tune as “Sail Away.”’ One melody. The slave ship and the flood. The promise of America and its abandonment of the same people that promise was made to.

When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, ‘Louisiana 1927’ became the unofficial anthem within days. Aaron Neville performed it at an NPR fundraiser that September. The song had been waiting thirty years for the occasion. In June 2026, CBS News included it in its Essential American Songbook — 250 songs nominated by notable Americans to mark the country’s 250th birthday. The same month, Taylor Swift sang ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me.’

God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind) (1972, Sail Away)

Newman is an atheist who has said he ‘never had faith, but he has respect’ for the idea. He also famously said, “There’s no joy being an atheist.” The God he invents in ‘God’s Song’ is not the one in the Sunday hymnal. Newman’s God is cold, amused, contemptuous — watching Cain kill Abel, ignoring unanswered prayers, professing to love mankind the way a child loves a prized toy.

Etta James covers God’s Song (Why I Love Mankind)

In interview Newman continues to refuse the stock anti-theist position. He inhabits the indifference from the inside and invites the audience to sit there with him.

The Girls in My Life, Pt. 1 (1979, Born Again)

The Live 1982 recording is the earliest known circulating live performance of the song. The Campbell Hall tape predates it by two years. The unreliable narrator is the Newman’s prototype: someone who can’t see themselves as other do, aren’t clearly rendered with enough interiority for themselves so that others have no choice but to marvel at the blind spots, while looking for their own. The narrator isn’t a monster, and not a saint. He’s just a person – like the listener.

The Girls in My Life, Pt. 1 – Red Moon Rising

Tenderness That Implicates

Robert Hilburn’s Newman biography carries a jacket blurb from Bruce Springsteen calling Newman “…our great master of American song and storytelling.” Newman’s method works because it doesn’t punish. Elvis Costello once said that Newman’s portraits of grotesques carry “the smallest but essential sliver of sympathy.” That sliver is not mercy granted to the character. It’s the door left open for the listener.

Robert Hilburn’s biography at 544 pages is the definitive work on Newman’s life and work; Amazon

‘Sail Away’ has been sung straight by people who heard the beauty and missed the trap. ‘Rednecks’ has been adopted by the people it was written about. Gentleness, as a satirical strategy, is only as effective as the listener’s willingness to catch it. Newman cannot control that. He writes the song. He trusts the room.

At Campbell Hall on Leap Day 1980, the room caught it. The applause after ‘Rednecks’ was the night’s devastating final turn, the one that points the accusation back at the audience. Tonight the applause the way it does like at the end of a play when people know they’ve heard something true. The tape caught that too.

Newman has said that songwriters are supposed to put themselves in what they do, and that audiences like them best when they do. Taylor Swift perfected the tradition, and she built an empire on it. Newman wrote himself out for fifty years, into slave traders and rednecks and indifferent gods and men who can’t see themselves.

The songs on this tape about the flood, the slave ship, the cold deity, and the man who can’t see himself sat in a box. The culture kept the toy song. It handed it to the bride.

The tape is what got left out. Press play.

Row “B” (second row?), center aisle; no wonder the tape sounds so good; I never sat that close to the stage during class, lol

Recovered Set List — Campbell Hall, UCSB, February 29, 1980

1. They Just Got Married (1979, Born Again)

2. Yellow Man (1970, 12 Songs)

3. Marie (1974, Good Old Boys)

4. Birmingham (1974, Good Old Boys)

5. You Can Leave Your Hat On (1972, Sail Away)

6. Ghosts (1979, Born Again)

7. Short People (1977, Little Criminals)

8. Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America (1979, Born Again)

9. Louisiana 1927 (1974, Good Old Boys)

10. The Girls in My Life, Pt. 1 (1979, Born Again)

11. The Story of a Rock and Roll Band (1979, Born Again)

12. Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear (1972, Sail Away)

13. Sail Away (1972, Sail Away)

14. God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind) (1972, Sail Away)

15. In Germany Before the War (1977, Little Criminals)

16. Political Science (1972, Sail Away)

17. A Wedding in Cherokee County (1974, Good Old Boys)

18. Linda (1968, Randy Newman)

19. Rider in the Rain (1977, Little Criminals)

20. Guilty (1974, Good Old Boys)

21. Rednecks (1974, Good Old Boys)

Epilogue

The set list is listed as “recovered” because the show spanned more than one tape. For some reason several songs are on the Weather Report encore tape. I don’t have a clue why, and I expect to continue to find odds and ends on tapes as I work my way through the archive of 200 tapes. Last week while trying to piece together a Bonnie Raitt “Stop Diablo Canyon” benefit show I ran across a two-song solo performance by Graham Nash, including “Just a Song” which was just beautiful.

For more from the Randy Newman concert on Leap Day 1980, visit:

Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear, Short People, You Can Leave Your Hat On, Rednecks recorded live February 29, 1980, Campbell Hall, University of California Santa Barbara, TRT ~10 min.

This production still from Newman’s 1979 SNL performance looks remarkably like the Randy Newman the audience saw on Leap Day 1980

The Randy Newman songs streaming here were found ‘hiding’ on a tape with a Joni Mitchell ticket stub tucked into the clear plastic face of the cassette box. The stub is for the concert filmed in 35mm for Mitchell’s epic “Shadows and Light” concert feature. I was there, but that’s not what’s on the tape. Instead, it’s a Mitchell commercial album and thirty-odd minutes of a Ravi Shankar performance I recorded at the Ojai Music Festival (I’ll digitize that concert another day).

On a tape with Joni Mitchell and Ravi Shankar, I find several songs from the 1980 Randy Newman concert

At the end of Shankar’s recording is Newman’s encore from Campbell Hall - on Leap Day in 1980 (read more and listen to additional clips from the concert here: “Randy Newman: Chemicals, the Flood, and the Big One”). It’s a precious haul: “Rednecks” is part of the encore. It’s impossible to write about the controversy surrounding Newman’s songs, nor his omission from the NYT “30 Greatest Living Songwriters” list without talking about “Rednecks.” The first article tries, but it was written before discovery of the missing songs.

A rainy night on the UCSB campus finds Randy Newman discussing the flooding taking place at his home in Los Angeles while he entertains the campus audience

The New York Times’ critics panel polled 36 professional songwriters to create the ‘best’ list. Nine songwriters include Newman on their ballots. Bonnie Raitt and David Byrne both rank Newman #1 on their ballots. The NYT’s critics’ panel overrules the actual writers. Newman’s nine votes across all voters ties Jimmy Webb (also excluded), and beatsBilly Joel (7), Patti Smith (6), and James Taylor (6); all are excluded. Two artists who each receive just two votes are on the list.

What convinced the NYT panel to remove Newman from the list?

Will Layman gets it the most right in his article, “The ‘30 Great Living American Songwriter’ Debacle,” when he calls the NYT list “a Frankenstein thing…” He rightly suggests that the critics’ panel want a list that will cause a ruckus and collect eyeballs so they can anoint their favored hip ‘innovators’ in pop songwriting. And he reminds us that lists aren’t journalism.

Writer Will Layman’s article in Substack makes a convincing case that ‘clicks’ outweighed rational thought in the final selection of artists in NYT’s ‘best of’ list

Layman digs deeper when he responds to statements made by Joe Coscarelli, one of the NYT authors of the article. He says, “our task was to complicate what came back to us” (from the 36 writers who were polled). Layman correctly interprets this to mean the list would have been overweight, “clogged at the top with way too many rock and singer-songwriter types... most of them... white guys.” Among those that Layman names: Newman.

Critical examination of the NYT decision demands a deeper dive still. Newman isn’t just some “white guy,” he’s the most prolific writer alive examining archetypal white guys who have an (imagined) axe to grind. He uses the literary device of the unreliable narrator perhaps better than any other songwriter in history. In so doing he shines a light on the weakness, racism, and failures of his many characters – with greater clarity than anyone writing contemporary popular music today, maybe even more clearly than anyone currently writing about popular culture.

The extent to which society misunderstands and misappropriates Newman’s unreliable narrators is an indictment of society, not Newman. And it’s exactly the reason he was unceremoniously booted from the list despite the votes he received.

Visit any smoke-filled bar in Memphis today (or any one of a thousand towns in America’s South) to experience in first-person 1974’s “Good Old Boys,” and some of Newman’s most controversial characters

Missing the point of Newman’s satire is like saying George Carlin is a bigot because he mimics bigots in his act. It’s like arguing that Jonathan Swift supports Lilliputians starting bloody wars over disagreements about which end of an egg to crack open first (some critics in 1721 did…).

Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear (1972, Sail Away)

Newman reports he discovers his songwriting voice and the unreliable narrator while unsuccessfully trying to write a song for Frank Sinatra Jr. Working with what were many unfulfilling drafts of a light-hearted pop song, the rhyme “a coat to wear” and “a dancing bear” stick in his mind. He invents the character of Simon, who believes that the proper coat and a dancing bear will gain him entry to polite society. When Newman invents Simon he is quoted in interviews saying this experience is the moment his songwriting changed forever.

“Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear” was a minor hit for British pop group Alan Price Set in 1967; Newman didn’t release a version until 1972’s “Sail Away”

Newman’s incredible cast of characters draws listeners into his songs like Dickens’ characters draw in readers. At a conservative count across 20+ albums and including a musical adaptation of Faust with wholly new characters (!) Newman has so far created over 200 characters! Witnessing the birth of Newman’s unique artistic voice and then following his prolific output is a rare ‘few-in-a-lifetime’ experience for his fortunate audience.

Rednecks (1974, Good Old Boys)

In 1970 Lester Maddox is famous as the face of Southern white racism. Maddox appears on the Dick Cavett show and it’s a disaster. Fellow guests Jim Brown, the famous NFL icon, and author Truman Capote witness Maddox melt down when Cavett won’t apologize for suggesting that some of Maddox’s admirers may be bigots. It was in fact Brown who suggested white bigots in Georgia might be upset to learn ab out Maddox’s work in support of black voters in the state - after Maddox spends fully two minutes bragging. It’s comical that Maddox turns his anger on Cavett and largely ignores Brown sitting right next to him.

“Rednecks” (1974) recalls the Dick Cavett Show spectacle

Last night, I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show
With some smart-ass New York Jew
And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox
And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too
Well, he may be a fool, but he’s our fool

-Randy Newman, “Redneck”

The song’s narrator then describes going to the park “with some paper” to write the song. It’s clearly the narrator’s story, and not Newman’s.

Notice any difference between the song set-up in this version from 2017, and the same song performed 30 years earlier at UCSB?

Newman can be forgiven his literary license recasting Cavett in the song as a “New York Jew” - Cavett himself is a Protestant from the Midwest, not Jewish. Not everyone buys the defense that the song is “satire, not endorsement” and some question whether Newman gets a pass here. Newman says he has performed the song live only once in the past decade, and further says he might perform it in San Francisco, but not St. Louis, and only for an audience that “knows me well.”

The song ends with Newman’s unfiltered examination of the fundamental assumptions every audience that hears the song makes about racism, and freedom. It’s a startling narrative departure, but he does it so infrequently that it lands with thunder. At Campbell Hall nobody is unmoved by the song’s ending, and the applause builds a convincing argument that the college audience, at least, hasn’t entirely missed the point of Newman’s narrator.

Newman’s brother Alan, a physician in Los Angeles has said, “Randy hates it when people don’t realize he has created an insensitive persona on record to serve as a dramatic device,” and that the narrator in the song “is not somebody he likes.” He adds that Randy considers civil rights and racism among the country’s most important domestic issues, while also “asking for compassion for bigots” through the song.

Short People (1977, Little Criminals)

Asking audiences to stick with characters beyond the impulse to reject them is Newman’s genius. “Asking for compassion” isn’t the same as suggesting anything beyond attempting understanding. Nobody should believe Newman asks us to forgive the unforgivable; he shows us the ‘hidden’ sin, like Dorian Gray’s portrait in the locked room at the top of the stairs. In both cases audiences witness private guilt made visible.

Randy Newman’s uncle, Alfred seen here in a production still is credited with creating the “Newman System” of scoring films with a live orchestra to an edit of the actual movie; it shouldn’t be a surprise that Randy is one of the most prolific musical storytellers in history

In 1978 Newman reaches his commercial peak, charting the single, “Short People” (1977, Little Criminals) all the way to #2 on Billboard magazine’s Hot 100. No other song in his career, before or since, comes anywhere close to the success. “Short People” has another distinction, no other song stirred up as much controversy nor consequences for Newman.

“It sounds really mean today,” he says after the first chorus; it’s easy to understand the author’s uneasy attitude about his most recognizable offspring

Radio stations ban the song. Civic groups rally to denounce the writer, and coalitions of short people demand redress. The fact that the song is 100% satire, that it lampoons the prejudice espoused by the narrator, and that Newman intends to pillory offense has little effect on the public perception.

Newman has performed the song only once since 2016, making this never-heard version something of an archaeological find.

You Can Leave Your Hat On (1972, Sail Away)

In a 2013 Newman interview on NPR he’s asked about, “You Can Leave Your Hat On” and he describes the character as a bossy romantic partner: “he’s a pretty weak fellow.” Intending to satirize the type of toxic masculinity common today in social media apps and online comment sections, the song takes on a life of its own in 1986 with Joe Cocker’s cover version for the film, “91/2 Weeks.” Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke’s kinky sex couple and the song become an unfortunate match made in heaven.

In a terrific interview by John Eddington in 2015 we find the definitive version of Newman’s intentions for the character

A lone male audience member erupts in a forceful applause when Newman comes to the line, “Now shake ‘em.” The audience doesn’t go along, and the sharp clap hangs in the air. Newman looks up from the piano briefly and when the chorus comes around, he deadpans, “I know, it’s pretty exciting.” If anyone was at all ambivalent about what Newman expects the audience to think of the song’s protagonist, there is now no doubt.

Misunderstanding, and misappropriation appear to be the fate of Newman’s ‘controversial’ songs. This same error in judgement feels like it’s at the root of his deletion from the unserious NYT list.

Epilogue

Should I have included “Sail Away” in this group? It seems that fewer people misunderstood that particular Newman song. I can’t find anyone who wrote ‘that’s pro slavery!’, but I didn’t do a deep dive. PS - it’s a haunting version. LMK if anyone wants to hear it, or any of the other songs.

Partial Set List

(I don’t think I’ve found the whole show yet - that’s how bad my labeling was)

1 They Just Got Married 1979 Born Again

2 Yellow Man 1970 12 Songs

3 Marie 1974 Good Old Boys

4 Birmingham 1974 Good Old Boys

5 You Can Leave Your Hat On 1972 Sail Away

6 Ghosts 1979 Born Again

7 Short People 1977 Little Criminals

8 Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America 1979 Born Again

9 Louisiana 1927 1974 Good Old Boys

10 The Girls in My Life (Part 1) 1979 Born Again

11 The Story of a Rock and Roll Band 1979 Born Again

12 Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear 1972 Sail Away

13 Sail Away 1972 Sail Away

14 God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind) 1972 Sail Away

15 In Germany Before the War 1977 Little Criminals

16 Political Science 1972 Sail Away

17 A Wedding in Cherokee County 1974 Good Old Boys

18 Linda 1968 Randy Newman

19 Rider in the Rain 1977 Little Criminals

20 Guilty 1974 Good Old Boys

21 Rednecks 1974 Good Old Boys

Four songs in twelve minutes: “Ghosts,” “Political Science,” “A Wedding in Cherokee County,” “Rider in the Rain”

Row 8, center aisle, seat #1 and eye level with the stage for the sold-out concert. I don’t recall why I have such great seats; Campbell Hall on the UCSB campus is a round building with a renowned acoustic design, it’s used as a lecture hall and has a seating capacity of 860 – photo credit, Warner Records promotion

Santa Barbara is recovering from ten-days of biblical flooding. Six back-to-back Pacific storms bring nearly a full year’s rainfall to Southern California in ten days. Over twelve inches fall along the coast, and twenty inches or more saturate the mountains. The 1980 Sierra ski season is one for the record books.

Inside Campbell Hall, everything and everyone is soggy. I’m doing my best to keep the Sony D5 cassette recorder running, and the matching Sony stereo microphone dry. On playback today, like modern magic the tape captures everything faithfully – the fidelity after nearly half a century is remarkable. Newman’s piano is bright through the PA, the acoustic brilliance of Campbell Hall’s proscenium stage projects every nuance of his wonderfully unique voice. Even the audience sounds good on the tape.

The February 29, 1980 Randy Newman concert at Campbell Hall recording was made on a Sony TC D5 cassette recorder with matched Sony stereo and the tape has never been commercially released; believed to be the only known recording of this performance

The college audience receives Newman warmly. His unique songwriting demands critical thinking, perfect for these inquiring minds. His mega-literate stories span America’s complicated history, especially with race, and that night Newman’s words resonate with the audience’s sense that a remarkable set of events is unfolding.

The day before I watch in amazement from my apartment balcony on Del Playa Ave. in Isla Vista while a piece of cliff the size of a semi-truck falls into the ocean with a ‘whump’. My roommates and I find seaweed and bits of battered sea life stuck to the sliding glass doors on the second floor from a storm that lashed the building all night.

Leap Day feels in retrospect like the perfect night for a Randy Newman concert. His artistic voice is unique, as is his one-of-a-kind delivery while he’s singing about topics that no one else wants to touch. When the NYT “30 Greatest Living American Songwriters” article excludes Newman, the music world’s shit hits the fan.

Variety’s headline screams, “Where in the Actual Hell is Randy Newman…?” So respected among his fellow songwriters is Newman that he is reportedly one of the top two vote getters, and yet the Times’ critics cut him out.

Variety writer Chris William asks the question all Newman fans ask themselves when the NYT “Greatest Living American Songwriters” list is published

The music writer Sean Fennessey, pays Newman a compliment in his terrific 2017 article, “Randy Newman’s American Monsters” when he writes, “Newman is one of the most covered artists of recent times — Norah Jones, Joe Cocker, Etta James, Three Dog Night, Nina Simone, Bette Midler, and Ringo Starr have all taken a crack — but his songs have rarely worked properly in the voices of others.”

Randy Newman’s American Monsters, Sean Fennessey, Aug. 2, 2017 – The Ringer

Tonight is pure Newman: just his voice, solo at the piano. Until I listen back to the recording, I’d forgotten how completely he charms the audience. Newman’s banter between songs creates cinematic-level intimacy for nearly a thousand strangers on a rainy night in a crowded, darkened theater.

Before Newman’s more biting satirical political content hits, he has a problem to share with the audience. “My house is flooding right now, man” he drawls. “Not sure what I’m gonna do.”

Then he invites us further into his state of mind. “My house got flooded so I’ve been depressed” he tells us at one point, and then, “I gotta take a lot of pills now and I just realized I haven’t taken any today.” Two sentences offering rare access to the inner monologue of one of the most astute cultural humorists in a generation. Famed composer John Williams reportedly said on a Connecticut Public Radio interview that he thought of Newman as a sort of ‘musical Will Rogers, or Mark Twain’.

Robert Hilburn’s writing in the LA Times was the ideal for every high school kid in California of my generation dreaming about a career writing about the arts; his book, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman” is a must read for every Newman fan

Newman at the piano on a rainy night in 1980 is a slightly rumpled, self-deprecating, (maybe) chemically dependent, and depressed man with a flooded house and a gift for melody that reaches back generations to his family’s deep Hollywood music tradition. His uncles Alfred and Lionel Newman scored more than 200 films, and the extended family gathered routinely and made music at the uncles’ large house on LA’s West side while Newman was growing up. It may be that same house, Newman’s ancestral center that is flooding that night.

“Born Again” released in 1979, and while the track “Ghosts” receives universal critical praise the album is not a commercial success compared to his earlier albums -

“What Color Were They?”

Using his narrative voice to encourage change is table stakes for Newman, and controversial for others. When the song’s narrator is a racist Southerner after the Civil War, Newman isn’t defending or promoting the character’s point of view, he’s decoding him and inviting us along.

Randy Newman in a production of his musical “Faust,” covered by the Hollywood Reporter

There is a moment in the set during Newman’s song “Ghosts” that deserves its own accounting. I unfortunately missed the first two lines of the song - a tape change done too slow perhaps. In the darkened hall a male voice cuts through during the song’s second verse. There’s already some tension in the room. Not anger. A young man’s tenuously raised voice; he has done a calculation and wants the room to know it but doesn’t quite have the force of his own conviction. “What color were they?” he yells into the dark after the song’s narrator uses a colloquial term. The young man’s tone suggests that he hopes for agreement from the audience – but he doesn’t get it.

And then nothing. Newman doesn’t acknowledge it. The audience doesn’t pick it up. The question hangs for a second and then the room swallows it whole, the way rooms swallow things that don’t have an easy solution.

Hearing the raised voice my reflexive response is agreement, ‘Yeah, you can’t say that’. Then I realize the reflexive response misses the chance Newman gives us to inhabit his characters so we might understand them – and he’s invented a seemingly Dickensian volume of odd humans, and not a few animals to help us. Missing the chance to understand Newman’s menagerie means missing the point of his writing and his art. We don’t ‘agree’ with the narrator - we understand him, and through understanding we move the conversation and society beyond his limited perspective.

Drop the Big One

By the time he performs “Political Science” the set has already moved through a significant amount of new material. The audience has had four months to absorb the songs on the new album, “Born Again.”

Newman performs Political Science on John Mulaney’s limited Netflix series, “Everybody’s In LA

“Political Science” is on Newman’s album, “Sail Away,” released in 1972. It’s a Vietnam era song, eight years old now. In 1980 lives hang in the balance at the height of the Iran Hostage Crisis and an aging actor who many are convinced is senile sits in the White House. The song feels very relevant.

The narrator surveys a hostile and ungrateful world and arrives at a solution of bored simplicity: bomb it. All of it. Except Australia. It’s a satire of American exceptionalism and the song challenges us to push back. It’s the voice of the “average American,” the guy at the end of the bar who’s had enough, whose patience with complexity has run out, who just wants it dealt with.

The crowd laughs and cheers throughout. “Conservative crowd,” he says, “I wasn’t expecting that!” It’s practiced patter from Newman the studied performer.

He knows what he has engineered; the audience reaction to the line about dropping the big one isn’t 100% the ironic laugh of people in on the joke. There’s something else in the reaction. Something that sounds if you listen to the tape, uncomfortably like support for the idea of nuclear obliteration. Between the weather, Iran, and Reagan who sent National Guard troops to the same campus nine years earlier, the crowd tonight has an uncomfortable amount in common with the guy at the end of the bar.

Most crowds likely play right into Newman’s narrative hands night after night. Could it be reminiscent of the Marx Brothers working out scenes on stage for their movie “Night at the Opera” in a Vaudeville house in the 1930’s, charting and measuring every laugh night after night?

Audience participation makes Newman dangerous. His songs are controversial, but not in the obvious way. It’s not the content that make his art dangerous, which is outrageous on its surface, it’s the structure that turns the audience’s own exhaustion into the punchline. The narrator’s perspective is outrageous. The audience knows the narrator is out of his mind and yet there’s relief in their laughter when he arrives at his horrific conclusion. Newman expects self-reflection when we agree with his narrators. We are supposed to learn something about ourselves that makes going along the next time a little less reflexive.

“It’s My Favorite Thing I’ve Ever Written”

After “Political Science” comes “A Wedding in Cherokee County.” Newman introduces the song by saying he’s taken it from an old Albanian folk song. Before starting the chorus, he readies us, “This is the Albanian part,” and sings “I’m not afraid of the gray wolf that stalks through our forests at dawn.” Howls from the crowd prompt him to tell us, “This is the favorite thing I’ve ever written! I’m going to play that part again.” He plays the chorus again and the crowd erupts.

Randy Newman, “Good Old Boys” 1974 Reprise Records, starts one of his most controversial songs, Rednecks

“A Wedding In Cherokee County” is not a well-known song. It does have a few truly great lines, but there are so many great lines in Newman’s work it’s impossible to keep track. He’s a one-man meme machine. What the song does have is Newman’s quintessential self-deprecation. Newman sits at the piano and plays the thing he loves most, which turns out to be hysterically funny.

“A Wedding In Cherokee County,” Berlin 1994, with a terrific introduction

“Everything I’ve written is funny,” Newman has been quoted as saying in interviews. He sounds more than a little proud when he tells an interviewer, “More of my songs are intended to be funny than almost anyone else, outside of ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic.”

Rider in the Rain

The set ends with “Rider in the Rain” — it’s been a standard for Newman live performances since he debuted it on national TV on Saturday Night Live in 1978. “Guilty” is still to come as an encore, but ‘Rider’ is the emotional conclusion, and Newman engineers it perfectly. It’s more like a one-man Broadway show than a concert. *

“Rider in the Rain” is from Newman’s album “Born Again,” released four months before the Campbell Hall show and after the song debuted on SNL a year earlier - Newman is live with members of the Dirt Band but it’s behind a NBC paywall today. A great publicly available version is his collaboration with Linda Ronstadt and Ry Cooder in 1983.

At first glance “Rider in the Rain” doesn’t seem like it should be the song that brings down the house, but it does. The crowd has heard it maybe a handful of times at most. It’s not “Short People.” It’s not “You Can Leave Your Hat On” (he plays those hits during the show). “Rider in the Rain” is about a man striking out to make his fortune – the American dream brought to life – leaving behind a wife, and a mother – a lone man with a horse … and some rain. It’s really high tongue-in-cheek satire of the great American western.

Best of all the song contains a natural bridge that invites the audience to sing along. What happens next is a demonstration of what Randy Newman can do with a room. The Sony D5 captures the room rising — the individual voices becoming a collective voice, finding the melody, and the melody filling Campbell Hall. Newman is more than pleased.

This is what it costs to earn a singalong. You’ve got to take the audience somewhere first. You’ve got to make them laugh at themselves, invite them to laugh along with you, ask them questions they don’t want to answer, and then tell them the thing you love most. Only then can you invite them to sing in a university lecture hall with a flooded house and forgotten medication and a tape recorder running eight rows back. The chemicals, whatever they were, do not appear to have been essential to the process.

Epilogue

Newman recently collaborated with Jon Batiste on the song and short film, “Lonely Avenue.” Seated at the piano in the film the artists’ generous spirits shine through the hazy, filmic scene. As the song’s final note sustains on the piano, Newman gently takes Batiste’s hand and kisses it – a gesture that feels like grace, like he’s saying, “Thanks.” For the beauty of the music, for the shared moment, and for giving voice to the words that Doc Pomus wrote, and Ray Charles made famous in 1956. I’ll always remember Newman’s voice hanging in the air at Campbell Hall granting me a little of that same grace.

Lonely Avenue – Jon Batiste + Randy Newman

The February 29, 1980 Randy Newman concert at Campbell Hall recording was made on a Sony TC D5 cassette recorder with matched Sony stereo microphone from row 8, center, Campbell Hall, University of California Santa Barbara. The tape has never been commercially released and is believed to be the only known recording of this performance.

*It’s unfortunate that a one-man Broadway show for Newman never happened. The sheer volume of his catalogue and the variety of the characters in his songs would seem a natural for creative interpretation.

TRT 26 minutes: Brown Street / Forlorn / Rockin’ in Rhythm / Birdland — Arlington Theater, Feb. 28, 1980

On a rainy February night at the top of State Street in Santa Barbara, Weather Report is fresh off their Grammy win the night before and they treat the damp audience to over two hours of musical joy.

I started digitizing my audio archive at the end of 2025 – I couldn’t look at the boxes of 40- and 50-year-old tapes in the garage any longer, knowing they would eventually turn into dust. These performances deserve more. I feel like they demand more.

As I was getting familiar with Substack in late ‘25, I created the Aggrovox publication and included an image of the early stages of an Excel spreadsheet. I had indexed about half the tapes by then, and the list was 60 rows and growing. I posted to my 1k followers on Bluesky as well, hoping to grow an Aggrovox audience. (It’s slow going after six months, but I’m learning with every article).

Glen Dunlap saw my post on Bluesky and left a comment. His uncle, Dick, a lifelong jazz musician was starting hospice and Glen believed he would especially like hearing the Weather Report show.

In nearly 50 years of dragging these tapes around in boxes, nobody had ever asked to hear anything specific. Glen is the first.

Joe Zawinul, keyboards; Wayne Shorter, saxophones; Jaco Pastorius, electric bass; Peter Erskine, drums; Robert Thomas Jr., percussion. Recorded live at the Arlington Theater, Santa Barbara, CA, February 28, 1980. Sony TCD5 cassette recorder, Row MM Seat 30. Presented by Stephen Cloud – photo credit Chris Hakkens

Glen’s uncle lives in my hometown. Richard “Dick” Dunlap (December 7, 1939 – June 2, 2026) is a keyboard player, composer, visual artist, intermedia artist, and long a significant figure in Santa Barbara’s creative community. Born in Seattle in 1939, he received an MFA in painting from the University of Washington and taught in the Art Studio Department at UCSB from 1969 to 1977 — the same years that Weather Report was forming and releasing its first records. Dick’s jazz career starts in the 1950’s and he has been performing ever since. He recorded an innovative art installation featuring solo piano improvisation at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1981, a year after the Arlington show I recorded. In 2024 he released the recordings of the Art Museum event as what Glen describes as part of the “Dick Dunlap Archival Liberation” project. Dick’s most recent album, Confirmation, was released in 2026, curated by uncle and nephew together.

Writer Joe Woodard writes about Dick’s installation at the Santa Barbara Art Museum, and his introduction to Household Ink Records

When Glen reached out, Dick was at home in hospice care.

When I heard from Glen, I immediately started digitizing the Arlington tapes, adding some basic mixing and EQ, and finally I uploaded the full show to YouTube. I don’t post full shows, and I never post without writing about the performance. This seemed like the right time to make exceptions.

Glen wrote back four days later: “We had a nice listening session, thank you…it was fantastic!”

I like to think of their reaction to the 26-minute medley near the end of the show: Brown Street, Forlorn, Rockin’ in Rhythm, and Birdland. The four songs run continuously, one piece flowing into the next, the way Weather Report played it every night on the 1980 Night Passage tour. The Milan show from late 1980 includes the exact same sequence in the same order. So does every other documented setlist from that year.

Complete 1980 Weather Report concert, Milan, Italy

After listening to the show many times while I was digitizing and mixing, Brown Street stood out to me – it’s so … happy. I originally reached out to Weather Report’s drummer, Peter Erskine to ask his recollections of the song.

Brown Street runs about twelve minutes during the Arlington performance. The studio version on the band’s album 8:30 runs about four minutes. The eight-minute difference tells the listener everything they need to know about the difference between Weather Report recorded for an album, and the band playing live. It’s such a marked change that it sometimes takes a careful listening to match the live version to the album version. (Ask me how I know…)

Peter Erskine produced a Billboard Jazz Top 10 album using live performance tapes created by the band’s sound engineer, Brian Risner, and was released by Sony Legacy November 20, 2015. A drum solo featuring both Erskine and Robert Thomas Jr. is not included in the set.

In an email exchange with Peter, I tell him I plan to write about Brown Street because it’s so approachable, and so uplifting. He graciously replies and tells me that he agrees, “It is a friendly and uplifting sojourn of a piece.”

The origin story of Brown Street is worth telling carefully, because it may be more nuanced than what the album credits suggest.

The album reads: “Brown Street, composed by Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter.”

The full story, according to Erskine who was in the room the day the song was written, is a bit more complicated.

As Erskine explains, it’s 1979 and Joe Zawinul is living in Pasadena. He has a music room in his home and a Nakamichi cassette deck that records essentially everything that happens in that room. Wayne Shorter is there. Erskine is there. Jaco Pastorius is not there, but he and Erskine add bass and additional percussion later.

Peter Erskine’s autobiography, No Beethoven: An Autobiography & Chronicle of Weather Report, is described by Neil Peart, Rush founder and fellow drummer, as “among the best musical autobiographies I have read. Peter’s story is absorbing and compelling…”

Erskine describes to me the inspiration he used to start the collaboration that day. “I began the piece by playing a variation of a beat I had heard former Weather Report percussionist Dom Um Romao play on one of his albums,” he told me, “And the tune spun itself from that beginning.”

Zawinul and Shorter collaborated on the melodies, and the song took shape. Also in the room: Erich Zawinul, Joe’s young son. “He was a small child at the time,” Erskine says. “He was in the room, playing with some shakers at some point during the initial playing of the piece.” Erich is credited on the album.

The home cassette recording was later transferred to 24-track two-inch reel-to-reel tape. Shorter went back and reproduced much of what he’d improvised to get a better saxophone track. Jaco and Erskine added percussion after the fact. The Nakamichi home recording becomes a track on the band’s Grammy-winning live album, 8:30.

Winning the Grammy for “Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental” for their album, 8:30 the night before the Arlington show, it was the first year the category was awarded by the academy

Erskine describes his feeling that the rhythm that gave structure to the song in that living room in Pasadena was a foundational element to the tune, and he asked Zawinul if he shouldn’t receive a co-writing credit along with Shorter.

“Sing me one melody you wrote on that piece!” Erskine reports that Zawinul responded.

Today Erskine is philosophical about the experience. “He was not always the most generous of men.”

I asked him why the song is called Brown Street. “To be honest, I don’t remember why he called it that,’ Erskine said. ‘I seem to recall that it had to do with brown-skinned people and they lived on this make-believe avenue called Brown Street. Not sure …”

After Brown Street the medley moves through Forlorn — sparse, atmospheric, almost unsettling, a piece that The Annotated Discography suggests echoes the emotional weight Zawinul associated with his childhood in Austria — and into Rockin’ in Rhythm, a 1930 Duke Ellington composition co-written with Barney Bigard and Irving Mills. It’s the only cover in the Arlington setlist. The temperature shift from Forlorn’s slow desolation into the swinging Ellington is one of the more dramatic moments in the show.

Then Birdland.

Weather Report’s 1977 album, Heavy Weather won virtually every jazz award and over the next decade sells one million copies – only a handful of jazz albums have ever reached platinum status

Zawinul wrote Birdland, named for the famous Broadway jazz club that hosted Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis in the bebop years. It appeared on 1977’s Heavy Weather, and the opening synthesizer riff became one of the most recognizable instrumental passages in American music of the last fifty years. When the band launches into it at the Arlington — after Forlorn and Rockin’ in Rhythm have set it up — the room knows instantly. You can hear it on the tape.

A note on the tape itself: somewhere in the first verse of Birdland I had to change cassettes. I did it quickly. The gap is brief. You’ll hear it.

Dick Dunlap heard it too. The local keyboard player who has been performing jazz since the 1950s, who was teaching at UCSB the year Weather Report first came to Santa Barbara, who spent a lifetime making music in this city — he heard the whole thing, tape change and all, from his house on Anacapa Street.

Glen said it was fantastic.

That’s enough reason for me to keep digitizing the tapes.

Row MM, near the interior aisle is not a preferred location for the recording, but even with a less than perfect location for the mics it’s got plenty of presence 46 years later! The very next night, Feb. 29 – it’s a leap year – I record an extra-charming Randy Newman performing while his house in Los Angeles is flooding, at Campbell Hall on the UCSB campus (stay tuned).

—

Weather Report released Night Passage in November 1980, nine months after the Arlington show. Most of the songs in this medley — including several you’ve just heard — were road-tested on the Night Passage tour before the album existed. The Arlington audience heard them first.

The percussion solo that follows this medley on the tape is the subject of the companion article, Weather Report: The Percussion Solo, also on Aggrovox.

Peter Erskine’s autobiography, No Beethoven: An Autobiography and Chronicle of Weather Report, published in 2013 by Alfred Music, chronicles his years with Weather Report and beyond. Neil Peart called it ‘among the best musical autobiographies I have read.’ In 2015, Sony Legacy released The Legendary Live Tapes: 1978–1981...”

Dick Dunlap’s music is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube at richarddickdunlap.bandcamp.com. Buy it here: https://dickdunlap.com/shop/.

Glen Dunlap’s photography is at glendunlap.com.

A little Photoshop/AI chicanery to set the scene: a rainy Thursday night on State St. in Santa Barbara before the doors open at the Arlington Theater

The growing crowd is bundled up against a cold night, and a light rain is falling as we mill around underneath the lighted movie palace marquee of the Arlington Theater at the top of State Street in downtown Santa Barbara. There’s genuine anticipation for the doors to open, first because we will soon get out of the drizzle and second because Weather Report hasn’t performed locally for more than five years – and not since their breakout hit Birdland dropped in ‘77.

The band lineup circa 1980: Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Peter Erskine, Jaco Pasorius, and Robert Thomas Jr. – photo credit Chris Hakkens

The band’s 1975 appearance in town featured a markedly different lineup. Tonight, only the two founders, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter make the return trip. They bring with them a new bass player, Jaco Pastorius, and a new drummer Peter Erskine, with Robert Thomas Jr. joining the band just weeks earlier adding hand-percussion. While the first show was an intimate evening in a large lecture hall on the UCSB campus (my ticket was $3.00), tonight the band commands 2000 seats – the largest indoor venue in town. Playing the Arlington Theater is a major step forward for Weather Report, and a direct result of the crossover success of their 1977 hit song “Birdland,” written by Zawinul for their album Heavy Weather.

The band’s album Heavy Weather features “Birdland,” their crossover hit that brought them new audiences from well beyond traditional jazz fans

I didn’t know that night that I was probably seeing Peter Erskine for the second time. Before joining Weather Report, Erskine played the drums with Stan Kenton’s big band orchestra, joining the group when he was only eighteen! I’d seen the Kenton orchestra as a student; they played regularly at the University of Redlands Memorial Chapel, walking distance from my high school. Some of us attended the concerts as a ‘cultural enrichment’ activity. Kenton recorded Live at Redlands University for his own label from a series of 1970 recordings made at the campus. History suggests that Kenton was intensely involved with music education events for students and civic groups at his tour stops.

Peter Erskine in a promotional shot for Tama drums – photo credit https://petererskine.com/blog/

I exchanged emails with Erskine while doing research about the recording, and I asked him about his experience with Weather Report and that night in Santa Barbara. Erskine recalled, “I remember the Santa Barbara show … it was at the end of a domestic tour, I think…”

In 1980 Peter was just twenty-five – two years new with the band - he could have been my older brother. If I’m honest, I went to the show to see Wayne Shorter’s amazing sax, and I also knew that Jaco Pastorius was playing bass. I witnessed Jaco’s showmanship five months earlier at the Santa Barbara County Bowl on the night Joni Mitchell’s Shadows and Light concert was filmed. I knew what to expect from Jaco — I’d seen him let a final note sustain, walk off stage, then stroll back to tap a switch ending the note. That kind of thing stays with you.

Jaco Pastorius (1951-1987) as he places his bass on the stage during a solo; sustaining a single note on the bass and then reportedly doing a running flip over the instrument to end the solo – photo credit Chris Hakkens

“Jaco, yeah, he used to do that all the time,” wrote Peter about Jaco’s bass solo antics. I originally sent Peter an email offering to send his archivists my master tape. He politely declined and suggested I send him the digital file instead, which I did.

I had a Sony TCD5 with me at the Arlington that night — a cassette recorder the size of a hardback book, with spare tapes and batteries. Tonight I’m in row MM Seat 30, about two-thirds of the way back, and on the right side of the room.

Row MM, Seat 30, behind the soundboard on a rainy night at the Arlington Theater, from promoter Stephen Cloud who was a fixture as a local and regional concert promoter in the 1980’s, including the famous Joni Mitchell “Shadows and Light” concert – photo credit me

I also learned from our correspondence that the band won their first Grammy the night before theArlington show, for “Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental.” Peter wrote: “the band had won a Grammy the night before (and we didn’t even know we were nominated!) … I seem to recall that we drove up and back from LA for that concert, it was near the end of a domestic tour...”

That’s not a band resting on their laurels…

When Peter asks about how I made my recording I tell him about my D5. He writes back that he had also owned a TC D5. “I loved that Sony tape deck … traveled far and wide with one.”

Weather Report circa 1980 – photo credit Jun Tendo

In the second hour on the tape, after a 26-minute Birdland medley Zawinul, Shorter, and Jaco step back. Erskine and the percussionist Robert Thomas Jr., only five weeks on the job — step forward. No bass, no keyboards, no saxophone. Just the two of them.

Eight minutes. The audience on the tape is largely quiet - in a way that live concert audiences almost never do. Not polite quiet. Held-breath quiet.

I asked Erskine whether he and Thomas had rehearsed the solo before the tour. “I don’t recall our rehearsing the solo,” he told me. “We might have come up with some general guideline of how to start or end part of it.”

He added: “Drum solos are generally in need of ending sooner than they do.”

This one didn’t.

Robert Thomas Jr. on hand percussion, and Weather Report co-founder Wayne Shorter – photo credit Chris Hakkens

Two musicians who had barely played together, no rehearsed framework, finding a shared language in real time in front of 2,000 people.

That’s not just impressive drumming. That’s something closer to the moment when discipline and freedom stop being opposites.

Peter Erskine is that kind of drummer.

2008, Peter Erskine and Michel Benita – photo credit gianky

I tell Peter that I plan to write a follow up piece about the Birdland medley, and I ask him to describe what it was like to play with Zawinul, author of the band’s crossover hit. He reports that working with Zawinul was collaborative, but also at times combative.

“Making music with boxers — they like it when you punch back.” In another interview Erskine recalled that during an early tour with Weather Report he had the distinct impression he might be getting pushed around a little as the ‘new guy’ so he deliberately disobeyed a cue from Zawinul mid-show. He braced to be fired, but Zawinul called it a “graduation.”

You can hear Erskine’s freedom inside the solo on this night. He isn’t accompanying anything, or anyone. He’s in a conversation with Robert Thomas Jr.

2013 Peter Erskine – photo credit Johan Broberg

The Arlington recording may well be one of earliest known of a percussion solo with both Erskine and Thomas. Only one other surfaces in my research, on a YouTube recording of a September 1980 show in Milan, Italy.

When I send Peter the digital file of the Arlington show I get an almost immediate response: ““listening now… and pretty much hating the way I sound on everything. Oh well …”

1980 Weather Report – a complete concert recording from the September Milan, Italy show

It’s hard listening to the Arlington concert to imagine what possible fault anyone might find. I’ve listened to the entire show multiple times now, piecing together clips around the tape and battery changes, adding some EQ, etc. I can’t find anything that registers below ‘incredible’ anywhere on any of the tapes from that night.

The cassette of the Arlington show has been sitting in a box for 46 years. I’m digitizing an archive of 120 or so concerts I recorded around the world, and this is one of the first I’ve worked through carefully. The 128 minute Weather Report concert represent two cassette tapes, some fumbling in the dark to turn them over every 45 minutes, and possibly a battery swap somewhere around the 90-minute mark, just a few bars into Birdland (of course).

The Legendary Live Tapes: 1978 – 1981 – the definitive Weather Report archive produced by Peter Erskine reveals the band’s successful translation of their highly produced studio efforts into stirring live performances

That’s not a complaint. That’s the whole point of seeing Weather Report live – an immersive sonic experience, cinematic in scope. Seeing the band live is to witness their individual musicality beyond the constraints of the studio, stripped of the overdubbing and sophisticated electronics the band soars.

I’m looking forward to writing more about the show, Peter Erskine’s written recollections, and the incredible 26-minute medley near the end of the show: Brown Street, Forlorn, Rockin’ in Rhythm, Birdland. The drum solo streaming here begins immediately after Birdland.

Epilogue

In the 46 years since the Arlington show, Peter Erskine has appeared on more than 700 albums and film scores, won two Grammy Awards — the first with Weather Report for 8:30, the second for Best Large Jazz Ensemble with Michael and Randy Brecker and the WDR Big Band — and joined the faculty at USC’s Thornton School of Music. In 2015, Sony Legacy released The Legendary Live Tapes: 1978–1981, a four-CD box set produced by Erskine from soundboard cassettes made by Weather Report’s live engineer Brian Risner, supplemented by audience recordings sent in from fans around the world. Stanford University digitized and restored the tapes. The set reached #7 on the Billboard Jazz chart.

TRT 3:17, “Erzulie” is a multi-track recording performed and likely written by “Jimmy Mourra” (possibly a stage name) and produced at Santa Barbara Sound in downtown Santa Barbara in approximately 1981

Today’s tape is officially “The Mystery Tape” – completely unlabeled, and the artist is a ghost online - no trace exists that I can find. There aren’t many tapes in my archives with literally nothing written on them, and this is probably the only tape with no online research available.

As soon as the tape starts, I hear the unmistakable clicks and test tones of a tape produced in a studio. These are my first clues that I’m probably listening to a local recording session, of which I have many.

Then the song starts.

This is what we were going for when we shot the big bonfire scene in the backyard at my parent’s house – they had a big fire-ring we could use for free; it didn’t look this with our 1980’s TV cameras; Image courtesy ChatGPT (terrifying)

In 1980 or ‘81 I bought a portable Sony VO-4800 3/4” U-matic video recorder, probably the first privately owned machine of its type in the region. It cost more than twice as much as my first car, a VW Bug. My parents helped me swing the financing - it was probably a $100 per month payment (when rent was $500!). I couldn’t afford the multi-thousand dollar three-tube camera that went along with it, but there were several of those already doing duty in local studios. I figured (correctly) that some of the camera owners would want to escape the studio to pursue location work.

To pay for the deck I leveraged my ownership into paid local production gigs, and in LA, the Bay area, wherever I could. Instantly I found myself in interesting places, meeting interesting people, and doing interesting things. Champagne, models, mansions, sports cars, and a cast of Gatsby characters – all because of a videotape recorder.

The original ¾” master tape – safely in a Ziploc bag because it’s ‘quarantined’ due to a slight coating of mold inside the cassette on the tightly wound vinyl tape – it’s 50/50 whether the tape can be recovered

Hearing the unmistakable first verse of “Erzulie,” instantly transported me to memories of the music video shoot. I was introduced to Jimmy Mourra by someone at Santa Barbara Sound, the preeminent multitrack recording studio in town. I don’t remember much about being hired to produce and direct Erzulie, but the result remains the only ‘bone-fide-headed-to-MTV’ music video I ever directed. I think it aired a few times, but I can’t swear to it.

I remember the production vividly because it was filled with an amazing cast of characters: Hollywood royalty, actual royalty, leggy models, a darkly beautiful costume designer, Montecito trust fund babies, and the prince of Port au Prince.

Let’s start with Jimmy - call him the mystery prince of Port au Prince. He was introduced to me as the son of a wealthy merchant from Haiti (which his family fled when Baby Doc was deposed). Today he’s a ghost online, “Jimmy Mourra” may be a stage name. There is an historical record of a Mourra family in Haiti - members of the Levantines, the late 19^th and early 20^th century Haitian immigrants from the Levant region spanning modern day Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. If the family I identified through research is the same, they were extremely successful and politically connected in Haiti. This would track with Jimmy’s background because the recording project and music video likely cost the equivalent of a quarter of a million of today’s dollars, all spent in hopes of making Jimmy a recording artist and star. I don’t find any evidence to suggest that any of those hopes were realized.

Next - the actual royalty, perhaps a baron. At the time he’s the owner of a series of international nightclub establishments that only serve champaign and caviar. His 400i Ferrari barely fits through the studio doors, but he’s not excited to see it driven pel mel at dusk on the backroads of Montecito with Jimmy at the wheel. In the end we use the 400i Ferrari in the studio, and another, a 308GTS for the driving shots. I know, it doesn’t make sense, a 2+2 inside and a 2-seater outside. You’re right. I have no logical car, or continuity explanation.

The best part of engaging with the 400i’s owner is the nightlife after the shoot at his luxe club where I meet actual Hollywood royalty, Robert Mitchum who may have been something of a regular at the club, because I see him there more than once. Full transparency: back in the day I’m not at this club often; a glass of champagne costs the equivalent of an entire night of beer and cover charges at the more plebeian local clubs featuring live local music.

Audrey Hepburn, with film history’s greatest bangs as Sabrina Fairchild, the portrayal that earner her a second, Best Actress Oscar nomination, Paramount Pictures, 1954, written and directed by Billy Wilder

The beautiful and mysterious costume designer from LA steals my heart within minutes of our meeting during the lengthy pre-production. She’s sophisticated, artistic, worldly, wise, and she has killer bangs as I recall. I’ve been a sucker for bangs ever since Audrey Hepburn came back from Paris in Sabrina. I knew her bangs were out of my league, but I had the conviction of youth on my side. I choose to remember that there was a flash of chemistry, a possibility of assignation but sadly (for me) there was no affair.

The beautiful Sabrina-esque costume designer settled on outfits for the band that I remember looked suspiciously like Gulf Racing livery from the movie Le Mans, while Jimmy wore a white racing suit to read better on camera (as one of his many costume changes) and he looked a bit like Elvis Presley in “Speedway” - If I had the original footage still I would try cutting it against clips from both movies…

The second Ferrari – the 308GTS driving car - came from the high-stakes backgammon playing heir to a local beachside hotel fortune. He spent, it seemed, every waking hour in a poolside cabana, he had a perpetual head cold and he was willing to do the stunt driving. A perfect fit! I’m sure I wasn’t insured for most if not all of what I just wrote. Our hotel heir also agreed to allow Jimmy behind the wheel so that he could drive into and out of shots.

Our high-roller heir suggested he drive at a dangerously high speed over a famous hump on a backroad behind Montecito. I repeat, it was not my idea. He caught air – on purpose - but risked life and limb and a potentially catastrophic $85k mistake for the delicate car with a hand-built tube chassis. I never heard from him again after delivering a check poolside at the hotel while he played backgammon with a Middle Eastern looking gentleman who seemed very excited.

The 308GTS – the “Magnum” car - what 80’s music video would be complete without one?

Finally, there were the gorgeous leggy models. I learned that leggy models travel with a large staff of requisite hair and makeup support; and so while there were plenty of leggy models there was an abundance of delightful support staff. Jimmy, as the star of the production may have fared well in the environment. When the internet inevitably finds him, we can ask!

The Mystery Tape immediately piqued my interest; I’m glad I succumbed

The surviving cassette recording of Erzulie is “full on 80’s” - and even that’s an understatement. I’m not a music critic, and I have no desire to question decisions anyone makes in their twenties. I’m certain my decisions from that time would not survive very close examination.

The production values are good on the track; Santa Barbara Sound Design is a proper professional studio where Joe Cocker, Kenny Loggins, Depeche Mode, Blues Travelers, Charles Lloyd, Herbie Hancock, YES, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and many others have cut albums. Is that an early Moog I can hear on the track? If so, it may have been played by my college music professor from the Creative Studies department at UCSB. At the end of the day, Erzulie is a fascinating artifact of the dawn of a new (and now slightly infamous) decade.

Dom Camardella, continues today as the owner of Santa Barbara Sound Design and he has worked on at least ten albums with trumpet great Maynard Ferguson in addition to the studio’s many clients

I’ll share the music video if I can get it transferred successfully, but I put those odds at roughly 50/50. It’s a shame because the ¾” tape is likely one of the only copies of the production, and it really does capture a representative time in local culture.

If anyone can help find Jimmy Mourra, please let me know!

John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1912 or 1917 – June 21, 2001). Streaming tracks: I’ll Never Trust Love Again, Cheating Game, Boogie Chillun’ (maybe)

A terrific article in Louder Sound provides a written and audio compilation of John Lee Hookers discography and history - https://www.loudersound.com/features/john-lee-hooker-essential-albums

I’m integrating a new Nakamichi vintage desktop cassette deck into my project to digitize 100 live concert recordings I made 40+ years ago. Subscribe (it’s free) and follow along.

As I get ready to start digitizing, I spot an odd-looking John Lee Hooker tape – just the tape and the plastic shell, no paper liner with my usual cryptic notes. It stares at me among the first 10 tapes I pull from the many dozens of cassettes (more or less neatly arranged) in the 30-gallon garage organizer bin on the floor of my office.

I wrote about the show I recorded at Casa de la Raza, when the Santa Barbara Blues society made his appearance with the Coast to Coast Blues Band an annual treat - https://aggrovox.substack.com/p/john-lee-hooker-boom-boom

The show at Casa de la Raza on September 14, 1984, wasn’t the band’s first trip to Santa Barbara. Thanks to the Santa Barbara Blues Society, one of the most active in America at the time, John Lee Hooker and the Coast to Coast Blues Band were no strangers to the area. Members lived variously in Los Angeles, and San Francisco (John Lee’s adopted hometown) - Santa Barbara was a convenient meeting point between South and North.

For some reason the LA-based members experienced a transportation issue, and they were so late that night I had the time to meet the sound engineer and together we created a pretty good dedicated AUX ‘recording’ mix on the board. Of all the tapes I expect to discover, the John Lee Hooker encore is a treat; for the quality of the recording, the mix, and how well the media has held up.

I doubt this tape has been played more than twice since it was recorded. Maybe that accounts for the great presence of the performances. The tape starts after the band comes back for the encore. The prior 90 minute John Lee Hooker labeled tape I ditgitized (see article link above) ends with a performance of Healthy Thing. I can’t explain why I didn’t immediately start recording when the band came back, if in fact the song was their last but it doesn’t feel like it. Just like I can’t explain the few minutes of dead air during Deacon Jones’ final solo (I edited it out but left 1 sec. of silence - out of respect). The Deacon’s solo work, truncated mysteriously as it was, is still magnificent, btw.

The new workhorse – special thanks to Joe’s Guitar Shack in Newburg, OR for sorting the machine for me!

All I can remember about the night, and vividly, was how hot it was, and how packed we all were in that room. I remember also that it was dark, OSHA violation dark and the only light I had at the sound board other than the dimly lit VU meters on my deck was light bouncing from the stage 40 feet away. Not exactly studio conditions, so I hope everyone will be forgiving.

Who knows, I may find another cassette with the final missing piece of the show! I’ve only indexed about 10% of my recordings so far.

For example, on the B side of the mystery Hooker tape I found an unmarked live Bob Marley show! I have no recollection of recording a Bob Marley show. The tape is not labeled but it sounds suspiciously like one of the shows he played in ’78 or ’79 at the Santa Barbara County Bowl. I indexed a Peter Tosh show I recorded around the same time, so I guess it’s possible.

I’ll dig into the Marley music archaeology next, just as soon as I figure out how to optimize the manual azimuth adjustment on the new deck. Logic Pro suggests the play head on the new deck will benefit from some azimuth tweaking (normal) specifically for the tapes I recorded on the Sony D5. Full transparency, the audio stream on this article is ‘pre-azimuth-adust’ and it sounds just fine.

Yeah, I had never heard of a Goniometer before, and I once held an FCC broadcast engineer’s license! Apparently, the fuzzy blue ball in the middle should be a straight-ish line and the yellow and red bars on the horizontal graph on the lower-right should be green when I’m done.

Songs

Cheating Game (partial, and may also include a little Ray Charles, Losing Hand)

Boogie Chillun’ (maybe, and maybe Voodoo Woman and probably something else)

If anyone knows that actual names of these encore songs, I would love to hear from you!

2:58 - stereo audience recording

Studio promotional photo: Elvis Costello and the Attractions

Many thanks to for asking how Elvis Costello’s performance of “Big Tears” sounds from the 1982 show I recorded. I am more than a little pleased to answer that question.

My recollection is that I was standing floor level for the show; the performers would have been a few feet above my eyeline. The same omni-directional Sony stereo mic that I used to record the Elvis Costello show had in the past, in the right position in the audience, done a good job recording other events. The Bowl, however is a 4.500 seat sandstone amphitheater and the design and materials ‘muddy’ the mid-range significantly in the recording, resulting in a ‘hollow’ or ‘boxy’ sound that’s tough to dial out with EQ. In person the audience acoustics are terrific, and several significant live albums were recorded there (Joni Mitchell, and Bob Marley come immediately to mind).

My lawn seat ticket stub; great unobstructed view of the band, but maybe not the best spot for the microphone; $13!

Being so close to the stage likely worked against this recording - the mic is picking up too much of the monitor mix for the musicians and not enough of the PA speakers, which would have been on the far edges of the stage. The recording sounds like the PA was ‘missed’ by the microphone.

The remastered original from 2021, Universal Music Group

In 1982 the Santa Barbara County Bowl was little more than a concrete pad - a big one, with an orchestra pit and small lawn area (where I was likely standing), and then 30 - or 40 rows of bench seats. It was built in the 1930’s as a Works Projects Administration (WPA) depression-era civic project. Dozens of laborers quarried the stone locally, and then cut and laid each block by hand - it’s a really remarkable ocean-view performance space.

The Santa Barbara County Bowl with the ocean in the background beyond the city, much as it would have appeared in 1982, prior to the multi-million dollar remodel completed in the 2010’s.

Today, thanks to the efforts of the Santa Barbara Bowl Foundation, and the bowl’s longtime manager, Sam Scranton (don’t miss the Sam Scranton Terrace if you visit!), the place has been turned into a world-class concert venue. Over $30 million in inflation-adjusted dollars donated by the community built a new state of the art band shell with modern sound reinforcement and lighting installations, updated artist’s green room facilities, new restrooms, and new seating.

I’m planning to digitize a few other bowl shows soon, and I’ll be interested to see if the mic position changes the quality of the recordings. For a comparison, the Lou Reed show I recorded in a similar amphitheater setting in Nice, France sounds much less hollow. For that show I think I was standing in front of the mixing board in the center of the venue, and the PA is delivering a decent mix.

If anyone has any other digitization requests from the Santa Barbara Elvis Costello show, here’s the set list as a reminder.

SET LIST

Green Shirt

Accident’s Will Happen

Pigeon English

Hand in Hand

Shabby Doll

Big Tears

Watch Your Step

On the Beat

One in Every Home

Watching the Detectives

Long Honeymoon

Town Cryer

Kid About It

Temptation

Unknown cover [?]

You Belong to Me

New Lace Sleeves

Allison

Radio Radio

Pump it Up

1^st Encore

Imperial Bedroom

Tears Before Bedtime

Backstabbers (O’Jays cover) medley into

King Horse

Big Sister’s Clothes

2^nd Encore

All These Songs (Allen Toussaint cover)

Mystery Dance

Shipbuilding

What’s So Funny About Peace Love and Understanding (Nick Lowe)

Wednesday, June 25, 1980, Theatre de Verdure – 47 minutes, stereo audience mix: Girl You Want, Whip It, Planet Earth, Uncontrollable Urge, Blockhead, Mongoloid, Jocko Homo, Smart Patrol / Mr. DNA (partial), Gates of Steel, Freedom of Choice, Secret Agent Man, Satisfaction

Devo will play around 30 “Mutate, Don’t Stagnate” tour dates between now and the end of 2026 – the recording shared here is a 70% match for the current tour, only a handful of newer songs aren’t represented!

A late June evening in Nice is a perfect example of the ideal conditions for human preservation that define the Riviera - along with the diet, the lifestyle, the wealth and just about everything else about the place. The perfectness slowly marinates lucky humans, keeping them plump and juicy long past a normal sell-by date.

On the night of the Devo concert it’s shirtsleeve weather at the open-air Theatre de Verdure. The faux-Roman amphitheater was built in 1946 on a few acres of prime beachfront property. It’s part of the Jardin de Albert 1er dedicated as tribute to the King of Belgium in 1914 after he refused passage through his country to German troops in WWI; troops intent on invading the South of France.

Seated the Theatre de Verdure holds 1,800, and with the front section converted to a standing-room audience the capacity jumps to 3,200. Both numbers are small compared to many of the venues on the band’s 1980 European Tour.

Today the Jardin de Albert 1er is a public space of more than 50 acres that connects the city to itself along the four-mile Promenade des Anglais - literally ‘the walkway of the English’ named at first informally to describe the influx of landed English nobility who flocked to the shoreline on vacation after WWI. The city of Nice was less affected by the war than many places, and beachfront property without rubble and bomb craters was hard to come by in most of Europe in 1920. These 50 acres today must be some of the world’s most valuable parklands in the world - a single waterfront acre here is tens of millions of dollars. Now that’s city planning that benefits the citizenry!

The Promenade des Anglais, built as a six-foot wide crushed gravel path in 1920 by workers left homeless and destitute at the end of WWI was the brainchild of an English Vicar who reasoned that the British tourists needed a decent place to walk along the sea and the locals needed jobs

In 1980 the Theatre de Verdure didn’t have much in the way of infrastructure, and it’s since been extensively remodeled. The original smallish stage was low, and therefore it was easy for anyone in the crowd already pressed hard up against the stage to just hop right up. I saw it happen six weeks after the Devo show when the Clash (!) played the same stage. (Yes, I recorded that show too, but it’s a long story; there’s a beautiful woman involved and I no longer have the tape).

The crowd loved the band’s performance so much that they rushed the stage at the end of the show. Strummer and the others kept soldiering on by retreating tactically to the drum riser to attempt an encore. The stage filled with fans creating a mosh pit around the band, whirling and whacking into each other with tremendous force. And spitting. The fucking spitting was … just unnecessary, and I never understood it. After barely a song the band is overwhelmed by the frenzied fans who rip the instruments out of their hands as the drum kit falls apart and the cymbal stands topple into the crowd. Encore over.

A contemporary music event at the Theatre de Verdure in Nice, France; behind the crowd seated on the stone benches is the Mediterranean Sea - imagine 3000 crazed Clash fans and a huge mosh pit in front of the band!

How is it possible that 46 years after I recorded Devo the band continues to win new fans worldwide? The title of Devo’s “Mutate, Don’t Stagnate Tour” may hold the key. Mark Mothersbaugh’s and Gerald Casale’s theory of de-evolution unlocks an evergreen part of the modern zeitgeist that consistently rejects all attempts by society to demand conformity, and embraces the responsibility of the individual to enact change (even de-change I guess). In the 1970’s the band’s message is a warning about the soullessness of governments and corporations, and about an entire generation creeped out by the existential blandness of suburban sprawl. Today the band’s songs could just as well indict AI and ‘the algorithms’ that offer Gen Alpha and Gen Z the modern equivalent: submit or be culled from the herd.

I count at least 30 tour dates between now and the end of the year and I admit I’m nearly the band’s average age and I can’t imagine that much travel

What may be most remarkable about the Theatre de Verdure recording is that it is 70% identical to the 2026 tour! The songs streamed here are rearranged from the original recording I made that night to mimic the ordering found in recently published set lists. Notably missing from the 2026 tour the band may be limiting playing their famous covers of Secret Agent Man and Satisfaction. Just in case these two songs aren’t in attendance because of some wicked corporate IP legal hack, in the spirit of resistance I edited them into the stream.

A 70% match between shows played 46 years apart!

Of special note on the tape is a terrific version of Uncontrollable Urge. As a reminder the streaming file is optimized for a pair of good earbuds or noise cancelling headphone – it sounds pretty good on an iPhone, too! Uncontrollable Urge comes mid-way in both the historic and contemporary sets; the band is warmed up and in full voice, the house mix is fully dialed in, and the crowd is feeling it. The twenty-ish songs whip by at a breakneck pace in less than 90 minutes, including a break for the encore.

Devo circa 1980 Freedom of Choice tour, photo: Chris Walter

The discipline of the sets across 46 years may a mirror of the discipline the band has built into the Devo brand from the beginning, and it shows up in the band’s (and the brand’s) longevity. I like to think it’s paying off for everyone, including the band and both new and old fans. Not a bad legacy for a few college friends who created a totally unique world view in a few weeks or months in a college dorm room and then kept it alive through the decades as a compelling story that continues to resonate on the world stage.

I hope to have a chance to see Devo in concert this year. It will be more than a little interesting to note differences in the arrangements of the material, which became clear while editing as I placed the 1980 songs in the 2026 timeline. The through-line of the order of the songs in the contemporary set feels a little different, more personal maybe, and it’s hard not to sense a honed perspective informed by 50 years of writing and performing.

I would greatly appreciate the reader’s thoughts about the quality of the recording. Did it surprise and delight? And, thanks for reading!

Author’s Note

Many years after the show in Nice I was back living near LA when I read in the Hollywood trades that Mark Mothersbaugh had created a music production company in Los Angeles and that he was killing it scoring for film, TV, and even commercials. I expected no less of his enormous talent and I sent him a letter addressed to the studio - an actual physical letter, it was pre or very early internet - suggesting that I wanted to be in the Mark Mothersbaugh business, whatever that was. I had nearly a decade of recording studio and broadcast TV experience behind me (my broadcast engineer’s license may even have still been active) and I offered to be their 30-something intern, sweeping the floors if necessary. Sadly, I received no reply. The offer’s still good, Mark! Put me in coach!

John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1912 or 1917 – June 21, 2001). Streaming tracks: Boom Boom, Never Get Out of the Blues Alive, Locked Up in Love Again, Serves Me Right to Suffer

It’s a warm Friday night, September 14, 1984, inside Casa de la Raza, Santa Barbara’s Chicano Community Center on the city’s industrial lower Eastside. The audience is packed into the 2000 square foot main hall of the converted two-story cement factory warehouse. During the day the space is filled with students studying after school at cafeteria tables, or there might be a community meeting in progress.

The Blues Brothers movie held the top spot at the box office in the summer in 1980 and introduced John Lee Hooker to a new generation of Blues fans singing Boom Boom as a thinly disguised autobiographical character, ‘Street Slim’

At one end of the darkened hall the small stage is pressed up against the far wall of the 90 x 25’ room. The makeshift stage raises the performers about two feet above the concrete floor, an elevation that sees the band standing roughly solar plexus level above the 300+ heads in the crowd. Sight lines are terrible, if not non-existent. Halfway back in the hall and shoved tight against the side wall the sound board is a small U-shape collection of 8’ cafeteria tables covered with black tablecloths. A few small permanent light fixtures hang above and in front of the stage and these are augmented by two temporary lighting towers tucked behind the crowd-facing PA speakers.

Casa de la Raza has been a Chicano cultural center in Santa Barbara since it opened in 1971. The building is designated a City of Santa Barbara historic landmark, but in 2025 was red-tagged because of fire safety concerns. The community continues to rally to restore the center, donations are welcome: https://www.lacasafounders.org/ Mural by Manuel Unzueta

Calling the Casa de la Raza an ‘intimate setting’ is an understatement. A month later, the Red Hot Chili Peppers perform an eleven-song set in the same room to a packed house

John Lee Hooker, (August 22, 1912 or 1917 – June 21, 2001) grows up with the strong musical influences of his stepfather, William Moore, a working Mississippi Delta Blues guitar player. In interviews Hooker often repeats that he and his father are the only two musicians with their unique style. A young John Lee performs as a solo act at house parties while still a teenager. By the 1930’s he’s making small barrooms jump on Beale Street in Memphis, stomping out songs with his left foot and just a guitar. By the 1950s he’s in Detroit and playing fully electric while often appearing with a supporting four- or five-piece band.

In his terrific video bio of Hooker, Ian Ross Cohen collects and expertly presents an impressive archive of Hooker’s performance clips and stills and provides a thorough primer on the life and career of the artist

In the 1960s Hooker plays hundreds of shows every year, including dozens of festival dates in Europe. It’s impossible to overstate how important these overseas appearances will become to both rock and roll in general and to Hooker’s career. In 1962 he headlines the American Folk Blues Festival which includes stops in Manchester, England where member of the Rolling Stones – formed just months earlier - attend, and in London Eric Clapton and Stevie Winwood are in the crowd. In subsequent years the British rockers who first experience Hooker at the festival acknowledge his inspiration and many will go on to collaborate with him.

The American Folk Blues Festival, 1962-66 brought foundational Blues artists to European audiences, and John Lee Hooker was a headliner on the first tour

Musically the Casa de la Raza show feels like peak John Lee Hooker. He starts the 1980’s by appearing in the #1 movie in America, The Blues Brothers, playing a fictional version of himself – Street Slim. By the mid-eighties the music industry seems to have forgotten him and once again he’s playing small clubs for a few hundred people. In 1989 Hooker releases The Healer – his collaborative album that wins two Grammy Awards and cements a triumphant return to commercial success.

The production values of The Healer are extraordinary; recorded at the Plant (I always heard it called ‘The Record Plant’) in Sausalito, at Russian Hill Recording in San Francisco, and at The Village Recorder in Los Angeles. Featuring Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, George Thorogood, Canned Heat, and Los Lobos.

The Healer reintroduces John Lee Hooker to yet another generation of fans and is part of one of the most remarkable comeback stories in music. When Hooker plays Casa de la Raza in the mid-eighties he has no recording contract, and seemingly is remembered only by die-hard Blues fans. Hooker’s manager, Mike Kappus, and Hooker’s slide guitar accompanist Roy Rogers imagine a collborative album to pay homage to Hooker’s influence on generations of musicians. Carlos Santana is a long-time Hooker devotee, and it’s his support that finally makes the album commercially viable.

The Coast To Coast Blues Band

The four piece band behind Hooker at Casa de la Raza in 1984 – The Coast To Coast Blues Band - isn’t the same lineup on The Healer. For the album the producers opt for ‘superstars’, eschewing even Hooker’s longtime band leader, Deacon Jones in favor of Chester Thompson - famous for his collaborations with Santana, and his for his work with Tower of Power in Oakland, California. The resulting ‘studio’ sound of The Healer is very different from the ‘small unit’ sound that tears up the Casa in September.

Melvyn “Deacon” Jones (December 12, 1943 – July 6, 2017), founding member of Baby Huey and the Babysitters, was John Lee Hooker’s band leader and collaborator for 18 years. In 2008, his autobiography The Blues Man: 40 Years with the Blues Legends was published

For over 18 years Melvyn “Deacon” Jones (Organ, Vocals) is Hooker’s band leader and collaborator. He is responsible for the soulful “richness” behind the famous ‘Hooker Time’ boogie. His masterful Hammond B3 playing and vocal backups are the gospel-inspired melodic voice of The Coast to Coast Blues Band (CCBB).

Michael Osborn (Lead/Rhythm Guitar) is also a mainstay in the CCBB. He provides the steady, driving rhythm guitar that allows Hooker to play his more erratic, improvisational lead lines. Osborn solos frequently on the Casa de la Raza recording - laying down prodigious blues riffs. He famously trades licks with Carlo Santana at Hooker’s 1985 show at The Stone club on Broadway in San Francisco.

INSANE jam at The Stone on Broadway in San Francisco, March 30^th 1985, featuring Osborn, Hamilton, and Richards from the Casa De La Raza show, and featuring an ultra-rare guest appearance by Carlos Santana; shout out to Jeff Vash who archived his performance sitting in for Deacon Jones on B3 this night at The Stone

Larry Hamilton (Bass and Vocals), another legendary member of CCBB and a highly accomplished New Orlean-born blues and soul musician. He plays on Hooker’s 1986 Grammy-nominated album, Jealous. Before working with Hooker, he writes and records with Blues legends including Etta James, and Albert King.

Tim Richards (Drums) introduced on the recording “from the medfly area” of Los Angeles, like Hamilton and Osborn Richards is an essential member of the CCBB lineup. He also plays on most of the tracks on Hooker’s album, Jealous.

The John Lee Hooker Songs

Boom Boom was first recorded on his album Burnin released in 1962 on Vee-Jay Records. The song is probably the most memorable of Hooker’s performances with The Band during The Last Waltz farewell concerts in San Francisco. In The Blues Brothers Hooker appears as “Sweet Slim” and he sings the song live during filming – almost unheard of for a Hollywood musical number.

Boom Boom is recognized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of the “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll”

T

he story of Hooker’s inspiration for the song is revered Blues history. As the story is told, Hooker was frequently late for his gigs at Wille Mae’s Apex Bar, at 7649 Oakland Avenue in Detroit. The bar was pivotal in Hooker’s career - he played the venue hundreds of times from 1943 through the early 1960’s. Reportedly he wrote Boom Boom during his famous 1961 residency. With so many ‘parents’ it’s impossible to be certain of every detail, but in interviews Hooker describes an Apex bartender, variously referred to as Willa, Luilla, or Luia saying, “Boom Boom you’re late again!” and “I’m gonna shoot you down.”

The original Apex Bar still stands in Detroit’s North End. While the business faced periods of closure and neglect in the early 2020s, it has avoided demolition and remains a recognizable piece of the city’s musical geography. Photo: Scott Laidlaw, Flickr

Never Get Out of These Blues Alive, is the ten-minute-long title track from his collaboration in 1972 with Van Morrison. The album re-introduces Hooker to another generation of European roots Blues fans.

Critic Nolan Dala writes of John Lee Hooker and Van Morrison’s memorable recording of Never Get Out of These Blues Alive, “Van Morrison collaborated with legendary bluesman John Lee Hooker on countless recordings over three decades. Most of these Blues standards, mixed in with some original compositions, went unreleased. Many are only available on bootlegs. However, some sessions are available on YouTube.”

Locked Up in Love Again (‘Find My Baby’) was first recorded in 1952 and subsequently made famous on the 1959 Chess Records album, House of the Blues. The song is a classic one-chord boogie, complete with the famous “Hooker Time” hypnotic drone-like rhythm. The talking blues time signatures are famously ‘suggestions’ for Hooker so the band watches his left foot stomp closely to shorten or lengthen a phrase to stay in the pocket. The song opens the final night, Feb. 7, 1997, of Hooker’s collaboration with Tom Petty during Petty’s twenty-night Fillmore residency.

Serves Me Right to Suffer, is the title track of his 1966 Impulse Records album of the same name and the second song in the Tom Petty Fillmore set. The most famous version is the Van Morrison collaboration on the 199'7’s Don’t Look Back, which won the Grammy for “Best Traditional Blues Album,” while the title track itself took home the award for “Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals.”

On the 20th and final night of the Tom Petty residency (February 7, 1997) Hooker joins the Heartbreakers for a legendary guest set that includes three of the songs on the Casa de la Raza recording: Locked Up In Love Again, Serves You Right to Suffer, and Boom Boom.

Epilogue

To this day I don’t know why I thought that Hooker’s sound engineer that night would welcome my request to grab a stereo feed directly from the mixing board so that I could tape the show. I do remember that the show was chaotic – half the band was stuck in Los Angeles and very late to the gig. I also remember collaborating with the engineer to create a separate ‘recording mix’ – that’s how much time we had because the performers were late. This is before cell phones, so nobody knew where the players were.

I also don’t recall why I even thought it was a good idea to show up at any of the concerts I recorded with a professional tape recorder. I do remember that I always brought a stereo microphone, and a small zip lock bag of connectors – RCA, line balanced XLR, etc. and plenty of cables – so that if a board connection might be available, I would have the correct cable.

If anyone is interested in hearing any of the other songs from the set list send a DM and I’ll put it in the queue for digitization. I only have 95 more shows to digitize…

This is the first time in 40+ years most these tapes have been played – many have NEVER been played since they were recorded. I’ve been dragging them around in boxes for nearly 50 years. smh

SET LIST - CASA DE LA RAZA (the show starts with the B-side first, go figure)

Side B

0:00:30 0:02:35 Vamp for late band members

0:02:35 0:07:20 T.B. Sheets

0:07:20 0:10:36 Maudie

0:10:36 0:16:34 I Cover the Waterfront

0:16:34 0:23:20 Locked Up In Love Again

0:23:20 0:31:24 Serves Me Right To Suffer

0:32:10 0:36:22 Dimples (feat. Deacon Jones)

0:36:22 0:44:24 Red House (feat. Deacon Jones)

Side A

0:00:00 0:03:00 Band introductions

0:03:00 0:11:55 A Little Bit (Try Me)

0:11:55 0:16:27 I Didn’t Know

0:16:27 0:25:38 I Tried So Hard

0:25:38 0:32:15 Boom Boom

0:32:15 0:38:55 I’ll Never Get Out of These Blues Alive

0:38:55 0:45:34 Healthy Thing

Pale Blue Eyes,” “Street Hassle,” “Rock & Roll” medley “You Keep Me Hanging On” recorded live June 30, 1980, Theatre de Verdure Nice, France

Why the tape matters: 1980 is peak Lou Reed. The album “Growing Up in Public” releases weeks after he’s married to Silvia Morales, beginning what most consider the longest and most stable creative period of his life.

The band performs 25 times during the last half of the year, and they perform “Pale Blue Eyes” just four times. Twice the song previews at small NYC shows where the band works on material for the upcoming tour. In Europe it’s performed just twice, including on the last night of the European tour. It’s a warm Monday evening at Theatre de Verdure at the open-air amphitheater, just steps to the Mediterranean Sea in Nice, France.

Theatre de Verdure, Nice, France

In America, “Funkytown” tops the Billboard charts in June 1980, and “The Blues Brothers” leads “Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back” at the box office.

Funkytown; The Blues Brothers

The streaming live performance includes 99% of the show’s encore: “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Street Hassle,” and “Rock & Roll” medley into “You Keep Me Hanging On” by the Supremes.

The tour in 1980 tour supports Growing Up in Public which is written and recorded over six focused weeks in January and February at George Martin’s AIR Studios in Montserrat, France. Production concludes days before Reed must return to NY to marry Silvia Morales, on Valentines Day at his E 52nd St. apartment.

Growing Up in Public album art

Michael Fonfara, Reed’s longtime collaborator receives co-writing credits on the album, and he leads the band on the 1980 tour. On the live recording Reed introduces Chuck Hammer on guitar synthesizer, Stuart Heinrich on lead guitar, ‘Moose’ Boles on bass and background vocals (and likely the falsetto bridge on Street Hustle), Michale Suchorsky (‘the best drummer in the world’), and Tony Scaduto, who Reed identifies as the band’s “sound man” and tells him on the tape, “Sorry about your foot, man!”

The Velvet Underground Pale Blue Eyes poster art

The show at the beach in Nice for around 3,000 fans is the final night of the European tour, and one of the band’s most intimate. Many of the other gigs on the continent are staged in 30,000 seat arenas.

The show ends with a nearly 32-minute encore that kicks off with the rare live performance of Pale Blue Eyes. In 1969 when the song is released, the lyrics and melodic form of the song suggest to critics that Reed and The Velvet Underground will survive the departure of their muse John Cale, and that the band is evolving beyond its avant-garde noise roots into a rock ensemble capable of melodic beauty.

The audio on this large 1980 arena show from Milan, Italy (“RARE MASTER”) is better in some ways than my own recording - mostly because it was likely recorded directly from the sound board. It’s worth a listen, and it starts with a very nice version of Sweet Jane.

The live concert file starts a few bars into the band’s encore as I fumble changing tapes. The show is long – more than 120 minutes, lasting well beyond the single 90-minute blank cassette I have prepared. ‘Luckily’ I find another tape in the bottom of the backpack in the dark. I make sure it’s on side B where I hope I last stopped recording; in most cases this should work. Not this time. I don’t remember rewinding the tape to listen to the encore of the DEVO show I recorded a few weeks earlier. As I result, I now have a Devo encore that ends prematurely, and a mostly complete Lou Reed encore.

I hope to digitize the tape with the full show in the coming weeks. 46 years later the depth of the hits in the set list still surprises. “Sweet Jane,” “Wild Side,” “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Vicious,” “My Old Man,” and “Alone.” The tour set list is a strong 22 songs.

Song Year Album

1 Sweet Jane 1970 Loaded (Velvet Underground)

2 Real Good Time Together 1974 1969: The Velvet Underground Live (written ~1969, first released on this live album)

3 I'm Waiting for the Man 1967 The Velvet Underground & Nico

4 Coney Island Baby 1976 Coney Island Baby

5 So Alone 1980 Growing Up in Public

6 Vicious 1972 Transformer

7 Walk on the Wild Side 1972 Transformer

8 Standing on Ceremony 1980 Growing Up in Public

9 Heroin 1967 The Velvet Underground & Nico

10 Love Is Here to Stay 1980 Growing Up in Public

11 Berlin 1973 Berlin

12 The Kids 1973 Berlin

13 The Power of Positive Drinking 1980 Growing Up in Public

14 How Do You Speak to an Angel 1980 Growing Up in Public

15 My Old Man 1980 Growing Up in Public

16 Keep Away 1980 Growing Up in Public

17 The Bells 1979 The Bells

18 I'll Be Your Mirror 1967 The Velvet Underground & Nico

19 Pale Blue Eyes 1969 The Velvet Underground

20 Street Hassle 1978 Street Hassle

21 Rock & Roll 1970 Loaded (Velvet Underground)

22 You Keep Me Hangin' On 1966 (Reed's is a cover)Originally The Supremes; not on any Reed studio album

Freedom of Choice, JOCKO-HOMO, Whip It, Girl U Want, Satisfaction, Uncontrollable Urge

In this 1979 Devo concert photo from Drew Schlesinger the band appears in hazmat jumpsuits, minus the Energy Dome plastic hats.

Twenty-two songs in less than 75 minutes – three-minutes and thirty-five second average per song. No chit chat, no band intros. Nothing that would suggest a traditional rock concert. Traditions aren’t part of de-evolution unless they are being banished or reimagined. The large projection screen behind the five-piece band at the Theatre de Verdure in Nice is the main stage feature. Bathed in garish colored lighting from above, the stage has kick lights on each performer and conspicuously absent is the usual long-throw back-of-house spotlight on the lead singer. It’s alien looking to audiences on purpose. The weird lighting and the bad 50’s sci-fi movie costumes invite the audience’s complicity in the descent of man; it’s our de-evolved future landscape come to life.

Gerald Casale plays bass during the band’s 1979 tour, photo: Drew Schlesinger

The band is tight. Metronomically tight. And there’s considerable musicianship, especially for an ‘art project’ band. Contrast Devo’s performance to an early Talking Heads show; it’s another art school student band that demonstrates less accomplished musicianship. Bob 1 and Bob 2 (Mothersbaugh and Casale) are the locked-in guitar and synth heart of the band’s sound, and with their brothers Mark and Gerald (Jerry) are more than a decade into the Devo journey together. Their drummer, Alan Myers is known as the ‘Human Metronome’ and is the only drummer the band can find who is capable of playing the rigid unwavering timing and intricate time signatures like the 7/8 beat of JOCKO-HOMO.

When Devo signs with Warner Brothers Records in 1978, they’ve already played hundreds of small gigs and released two singles on their own Booji Boy Records label.

Booji Boy Records, the label’s second release, Side A “Satisfaction” and Side B “Sloppy” in 1977

The 1980 European tour is their second on the continent, and much grander than the 1978 tour which reportedly featured overnight drives in the tour bus between dates in France and Germany. The Freedom of Choice tour is now selling out 5,000 seat theaters and booking multiple nights in a city, and the band now flies between cities while the equipment truck drives overnight.

Devo appears on the French TV show, “Chorus” in 1978, YouTube:

In America the band’s reception is less universally positive. Rolling Stone magazine and other critics of the day dismiss the band as “emotionless,” or simply as a “joke band.” French audiences on the other hand immediately recognized the band’s satire and political statements from the ’78 tour and in 1980 they are hailed as returning heroes. The French perfected satire as a potent political weapon with writers like Voltaire and Moliere. These writers also turned satire into a tool for social change. French audiences recognize Devo’s motives immediately: surviving a powerful King takes some wit when the potential penalty is a quick proclamation, “Off with his head!”

Designed by co-founder Gerald Casale and based on inspiration found in light fixtures from his former Catholic school, Devo’s Energy Domes are specifically designed to collect and recirculate Orgone energy back to the wearer; energy that would otherwise escape from the crown of the head, photo: band promotional

‘Social change’ may be proto-Devoian Gerald Casales’ ultimate endgame. It’s an undercurrent in many of his interviews, and his expressed belief in de-evolution is contradicted more than a little by the fact that he appears to take great joy in continuing to create art and music. Maybe we are doomed, unless we aren’t.

If the end is coming, hopefully it won’t happen before the 2026 tour is completed.

Devo at The Riviera Theater, Chicago, IL, May 11, 2024 – YouTube, John Lyman. The 2026 “Mutate: Don’t Stagnate” Devo tour kicks off near Casale’s vineyard in northern California at Hard Rock Live in Wheatland, CA on April 3rd.

The first Devo show I see is in 1979 and includes the “Dove Band” as the ‘opening act’. The simple stage is backed by a large screen behind the band projecting what looked suspiciously like home-made 8mm film. The audience loves it and the message is fully appreciated: don’t be a spud. After playing a handful of fitful cover tunes and hearing not a small amount of grumbling among the 900+ capacity crowd at Campbell Hall on the UCSB campus that night, the band rips off their fake paper leisure suits to reveal their gym-style black costumes underneath.

“It Takes a Worried Man” by Woodie Guthrie. Was this song’s performance and Mark Mothersbaugh’s ‘sermon’ on NPR’s August 9, 2024, Tiny Desk Concert a throwback to ‘Dove, the band of Love’? YouTube, NPR Music

The staging, the music, and the costume effects work perfectly together and to tremendous approval. Devo audiences immediately become willing participants in reimagining the boundaries of a rock concert. The projected visuals feel like a natural progression from the Grateful Dead’s Acid Trip concerts made with overhead projectors and chem lab glassware ‘borrowed’ from college classrooms. ‘Organic’ is a good descriptor of the presentation – the music and the visual spectacle are of a piece and have an unmistakable unified field theory at their center.

Booji Boy, photo: band promotional

Devo is in good company with other notable mixed media performers including: Kraftwek’s The Man-Machine tour used projections of Bauhaus typography and graphics, The Tubes integrated video screens and live actors on stage, Laurie Anderson mixed her live performance with her projected shadow integrated into screen images. The most well-known adherent might be Pink Floyd and the massive “Mr. Screen” round projection wall featuring surrealist animations and film segments.

“Mr. Screen” as seen at the 1975 Three Rivers Stadium Pink Floyd performance. Photo: Joseph R. Stercz

Devo’s screen hits differently; looming over the stage General Boy (Booji Boy’s dad) barks orders, timed with the performance as a functional part of the night’s ‘lecture’ on de-evolution. It’s not a stretch to consider Devo’s performance a sermon, not unlike the band’s twist on their creative inspiration, the religious pamphlet of pastor B.H. Shadduck PhD, entitled, “JOCKO-HOMO The Heaven-Bound King of the Zoo.”

The 1920 religious pamphlet, published by Pentacostal Publishing, Louisville, KY

Dr. Shadduck argues that man’s fall from grace is the beginning of de-evolution and the pamphlet today stands as a sometimes-hilarious quasi-scientific argument against evolution. He is one in a long line of religious zealots who go to great pains to tie the benefits of science-denial to piety and comparisons to modern MAGA are hard to miss. The good doctor asks America: How can man be ‘better’ than he was while living pre-sin in the Garden of Eden? Devo twists the argument to ask: doesn’t observable fact demonstrate that man is de-evolving while he gains technology but loses humanity?

Devo circa 1980 Freedom of Choice tour, photo: Chris Walter

For Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, the end stage of de-evolution finds us no longer people, we are all Booji Boy son of General Boy, satiric stand ins for de-evolved humanity. It fits well today: a dictator and a man-child in a plastic mask (post aesthetic surgery perhaps) wearing a dirty tracksuit and a diaper. In Devo’s films – a subject for another exploration - Booji Boy delivers high-pitched sermons about the ‘truth’ of de-evolution.

Booji Boy appears in the band’s earliest art-project films

After the show and when the crowd has mostly drifted out of the venue, I linger at the sound board when suddenly Gerald Casale appears, still in costume. At the time I had no idea that he was co-founder of the band, or that he was primarily responsible for the outrageous visuals that made the band unique. I tell him that I was born in the Akron/Canton area (I knew enough about the band to know they were from my home town), I’m a student in Nice for the semester, and that I saw the band at UCSB (and loved it). I also mention that I plan to travel with my recording and film equipment in tow (a dual sound 8mm Nikon movie camera lent to me by a professor and complemented by my D5 recorder) to seek an interview with Stefan Kudelski, the inventor of the Nagra portable tape recorder.

With some enthusiasm ‘Jerry’ invites me to ‘get on the bus’, and travel with the band to the next tour stop (in Amsterdam!). I’ve been kicking myself ever since. The one time in my life I’m invited to get on the bus, and I have class the next day. I decline Jerry’s kind offer. I never find Kudelski. I am never again invited to get on another bus.

I learn a valuable lesson that night. If you are invited to get on the bus, you should 100% get on the bus. It’s a corollary to the lesson learned in the film Apocalypse Now, when the tiger appears in the jungle: “Never get off the boat, man!”

SET LIST and Tape Log

Side A

00:00 01:00 Freedom of Choice Theme

01:00 03:46 Whip It

03:46 06:28 Snowball

06:28 08:50 It’s Not Right

08:50 11:43 Girl U Want

11:43 14:24 Planet Earth

14:24 18:19 S.I.B. (Swelling Itching Brain)

18:19 20:48 Penetration in the Centerfold

20:48 24:07 Secret Agent Man

24:07 27:18 Pink Pussycat

27:18 30:36 Blockhead

30:36 33:58 (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

33:58 37:05 Uncontrollable Urge

37:05 40:25 Mongoloid

40:25 43:13 Be Stiff

43:13 46:30 Gates of Steel

SIDE B

00:00 04:37 Freedom of Choice

04:37 09:28 Jocko Homo

09:28 15:01 Smart Patrol / Mr. DNA (incomplete)

Recording Lost* Gut Feeling (Slap Your Mammy)

Recording Lost Come Back Jonee

Recording Lost Tunnel of Life

*About a week after the Devo show I was back at the Theatre de Verdure for Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, which I also recorded. I haven’t constructed the exact sequence of events but somehow, I managed to record Lou’s 30-minute encore over the last three songs of the Devo show. It’s a shame I lost the Devo songs, but the Lou Reed encore is incredible so there’s that.

Running a little over 18 minutes - roughly one side of a typical LP - Advice to the Lovelorn performs a literary and audio autopsy of modern love

Ed, Chairman of the Department of English at UCSB in 1968 pictured after his retirement from teaching in 1987 at his home in Goleta, California – Santa Barbara Independent

Before listening to “Advice to the Lovelorn” it helps to understand where Ed’s experimentation with audio composition began.

Against the backdrop of the national campus protests of 1969, and as the new decade dawns the professor in UCSB’s English department ⁽¹⁾ crafts a unique response to the government-imposed state of siege gripping the campus and the nearby student enclave of Isla Vista (IV). The government’s violent response to campus unrest, and to protest in the one square mile beachfront student community adjoining the campus inspires Ed and his collaborators to create a performance art experience, “A Legal Assembly.” The single performance at UCSB’s Campbell Hall provides the community’s answer to the police and campus administrators who have declared that all assemblies are illegal.

Governor Ronald Reagan calls in the National Guard, decrees an overnight curfew, and is famously quoted as saying, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” Aggressive police tactics help escalate angry protests into a series of riots. Joe Melchione, El Gaucho Newspaper

https://adamuseum.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/97/#:~:text=Pictures%20of%20police%20raids%2C%20the,trenches%20of%20the%20IV%20riots

Events overtake UCSB and IV that catapult the students, faculty, and the larger community into national attention. On Wednesday, February 25, 1970, protestors torch the Bank of America and Governor Ronald Reagan takes little convincing to send 600 National Guardsmen to patrol the streets with fixed bayonets. The juxtaposition is striking; students hustle to class wearing flip flops riding skateboards and bikes while National guardsmen, many the same age as the students stand guard over the bank.

John Filo (left) with a camera in hand, overlooking the National Guardsmen and students on May 4, 1970. Photograph by James Coon, Kent State Shootings Photographs from Various Sources.

Less than ten weeks after the National Guard is stationed in IV, students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder at Kent State University in Ohio will be shot dead by National Guard troops.

National Guard troops stationed at the top of the Embarcadero loop in Isla Vista, February 1970 - Joe Melchione, El Gaucho Newspaper

Ed’s lifelong collaborator Frank Goad reports in his recollections of the night at Campbell Hall on the UCSB campus that Rolling Stone magazine gave the only performance of A Legal Assembly a “rave review.”

The show starts with Dick Johnston’s Shakespearean-style narrator addressing the audience while standing in a pool of blinding white light dressed only in a surgical gown. When he finishes introducing the players, Noggin (Ed Loomis), Crayon (Frank Goad), and Dry Paint (Dick Johnston) he turns to leave the stage and provides the audience with a full view of his bare ass.

Contemporary accounts note that Ed reads from his own prose with a semi-metronomic baritone voice, keeping ‘logic-time’ for the piece that connects the disparate elements. Frank Goad later writes that the Rolling Stone review described the performance as a ‘light show’, ‘concert’, and ‘a reading’. There is little doubt that the event presented spectacle, in the finest tradition of the form.

The night in Campbell Hall is nothing less than the Big Bang Moment for the audio explorations that Ed will continue with his collaborators and by himself for the next thirty years.

After the Big Bang

Advice to the Lovelorn may be Ed’s most ‘mainstream’ audio composition – the most album-like. In the piece, “What is Literature?” (reviewed Here) Ed takes the audience on an audio and musical journey through myth and religion to discover the roots of inspiration and creativity. It’s an intellectual exercise in observation; finding order in both the syllogistic and the qualitative moments of the creative process. ⁽²⁾

Ed’s poetry collection from 2000 features several pieces first published in 1970 in “Poems of a Cockroach”

Advice to the Lovelorn feels unique among Ed’s experimental audio compositions – it may be more personal, like theory put into practice, and it demonstrates that he’s interested in much more than an intellectual deconstruction of literature, or creativity, or even ethnic mythology. It’s Ed the novelist, grappling with a new set of narrative tools and devices and using them to make us feel, to teach us, and perhaps help us to improve the human condition.

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” was Ed’s oft repeated admonition to students, which traces directly to the “Stanford Formalism” he studied as a PhD student in the 1950’s. Advice to the Lovelorn sees the emotional narrative taking the wheel. It may be that Ed intends the work to continue his investigation into the tension between the formalism of his mentor at Stanford, Ivor Winters, contrasted with the emotion-driven narratives saturating contemporary electronic media (radio, TV, films, etc.). I listen to the work like the “A” side of an LP; it’s a series of 6 ‘tracks’, each about as long as a typical song on the radio. Each track is a discrete song, but when experienced together the effect is more like an 18 minute ‘rock opera’.

Advice to the Lovelorn includes found sounds, voice characters, musical instruments, and electronic synthesizer sounds that repeat musical themes and it ends with a sort of natural sound coda that returns the listener to a world filled with the order of nature, and delight.

The work’s verdict on love? Maybe that love is inescapable. Maybe that the pursuit of love begins at many different places for different reasons in the human heart, it progresses, and then sometimes cools or ends. Maybe that love is completely unpredictable and will always make a mockery of structure and formalism.

NOTES

Kenneth Rexroth Place in San Francisco – Beatrice Murch, 2007

(1) Ed’s chairmanship is a turning point for the department; in 1968 he invites Kenneth Rexroth, ‘Father of the Beats’ to join the English deptartment faculty and the move is reportedly met with “rage and shame” by some in the academic community. Rexroth famously taught a course called “Poetry and Song” and the Montecito Journal reported the class was colloquially referred to as “Rexroth’s Nightclub” where students would perform skits or play instruments and Rexroth would lecture on everything from jazz to Gnosticism. Rexroth lived the last 14 years of his life in Montecito. A more “Qualitative” worldview than Rexroth’s would be hard to find. https://www.montecitojournal.net/2023/05/16/kenneth-rexroth-a-poet-of-montecito/

(2) Follow the link to hear Ed’s work, “The Lear Project” and read about the tension between the syllogism of the school of Stanford Formalism espoused by Ed’s academic mentor, Yvor Winters, and the modern qualitative expression style of media entering the culture in the 60’s and 70’s that challenged it. https://aggrovox.substack.com/p/the-lear-project

Full transparency, when I recorded this Elvis Costello concert in 1982 I was a fan, but it was this live performance that woke me to the incredible depth of his musical abilities.

On Friday, June 2^nd, 1978, Elvis Costello and the Attractions played Robertson Gymnasium on the UCSB campus. Associated Students (AS) Concerts, the in-house booker for the university may have been having a rough time selling the show - few students likely knew who he was. His only prior US appearance of note was an odd TV performance on SNL four months earlier that played like a rehearsal. He had zero mainstream radio play; only college radio stations were covering him, and his records could only be found in specialty music stores like Morninglory Music in Isla Vista.

Elvis Costello, Rob Gym 1978 – Karl Mondon, Daily Nexus

Most UCSB students at UCSB were listening to Southern California artists like The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstadt, and Jackson Browne, or yacht rock artists like Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers and others. In 1978 Van Halen and the new arena powerhouse bands were just being born in Los Angeles - a world away.

Radio Radio, 1977 Saturday Night Live Performance; the band’s last performance on SNL for the next 12 years. Contemporary observers reported that Lorne Michaels stood next to the floor camera in Elvis’ eyeline displaying his middle finger for the entire performance.

About an hour before the scheduled start of the show, AS started giving tickets away.

“Elvis Costello? Never heard of him. I’ll think about it, thanks.” Dismissively I took the tickets from the volunteer. I recall being annoyed that a rock band would use Elvis’ name – even though I wasn’t an Elvis fan. Of course, I had no idea that the artist’s birth name was Declan Patrick MacManus, and that Elvis’ persona had been very carefully crafted. But by 1982 Elvis reports feeling trapped by the character, and on Imperial Bedroom the album songwriting is attributed to ‘MacManus’.

Rob Gym is only slightly larger than a big high school gym, but it punched far above its weight in the local music scene for decades. Yes, I was at the Dead show, but not the Cream show (before my time), and the gym is also the location of one of the best live shows I ever saw, the marathon and legendary 3-hour 1975 Bruce Springsteen show.

Thanks to the small army of the volunteers handing out tickets Rob Gym fills to two-thirds capacity by the time the opening act leaves the stage – most, including me completely miss the opener, Mink Deville, even though the show is running nearly two hours behind.

I arrived late on purpose to catch what I thought would be the last hour of this ‘unknown’ Elvis usurper and instead I arrive just as Elvis is taking the stage - it’s nearly 10pm and the gym has an 11:30 curfew! Contemporary reports blame Nick Lowe for the delayed start - he supposedly went out to dinner in Los Angeles not realizing Santa Barbara was 90 minutes away by car at a minimum. It may make more sense that Elvis had no intention of playing to the small crowd that arrived on time.

What happened over the next 100 minutes is legend in Rob Gym lore. My seats are even good! Center, 15 rows back - ideal!

Elvis from the jump is spitting every word, draped over the mic stand and leaning into the crowd from the very edge of the temporary elevated stage. A much too bright sickly green spotlight at his feet points up under his chin giving him a ghoulish look. He stands pigeon toed in dress pants wearing black Chelsea ‘winklepicker’ pointy toe shiny shoes, a button-down shirt, and a dark blue suit jacket. With the spotlight from below exaggerating his features and giving him green skin, he looms over the crowd looking like Jacob Elordi in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.

Karl Mondon continues to work in photography in the Bay area and published a series of ‘Now and Then’ illustrated books comparing historical photos to their modern-day locations. The other photographer credited, Diane Michalek doesn’t appear in online searches. A search for the writer, Mike Pullen, doesn’t reveal a continued career in journalism.

The Attractions - Pete Thomas, Bruce Thomas, and Steve Nieve - are grooved and smashing it following their controversial live SNL TV appearance a few months earlier. The band has been together for about a year by the time of the Rob Gym show and it’s just their sixth tour stop supporting This Year’s Model (the band’s first album to top the UK charts, it hits #4).

A record label promotional image circa 1978 - Photo by Chris Gabrin/Redferns via Getty Images

This is Elvis’ breakout year; a couple of months prior he is playing in front of a few hundred people at the Whiskey on the Sunset Strip, and now he’s whipping thousands of college kids into a frenzy.

The crowd in Rob Gym is instantly energized. Several women in the audience near me seem to be having an even more robust reaction than usual. Elvis as bad boy is killing it! Freshmen are getting lucky! Dogs and cats are living together!

The set list hits like a series of stiff jabs to the face.

Mystery Dance, (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes, Watching the Detectives, Pump It Up, Radio, Radio, the song that got him banned from SNL a few months earlier. One after another in rapid succession. No banter, no band introductions, just a sonic assault. One song barely ends before Elvis turns to the drum riser to count in the next song. They only have 90 minutes to get through a packed set list of 30 songs…

FROM THE FRONT LINE TO THE IMPERIAL BEDROOM

Four years later it’s a very different Elvis who comes to town.

The show is Elvis’ third in Santa Barbara, each at a progressively more prestigious venue. Between the UCSB appearance and the County Bowl he plays the venerable Arlington Theater.

This Year’s Model from 1978 is Elvis’ definitive punk album, and his first record with The Attractions. Four years later and Imperial Bedroom features a much matured quartet. Keyboardist Steve Nieve, fresh from months in the studio with a real producer, grows his arsenal from a Vox Continental organ and ‘insta piano’ synth, to rocking a grand piano on stage, plus an early Emulator I, a Prophet 5 synthesizer, and even an accordion. The band’s sound is different. The songs are different, too. These stories are of relationships much later in their timeline – well after the honeymoon.

After months in the recording studio Imperial Bedroom debuts and it’s a significant departure from the band’s prior recording efforts which focused on laying tracks mostly live. The influence of producer Geoff Emerick complements Elvis’ expanding musical interests. The critics are wowed.

At the Bowl show Elvis performs several songs from Imperial Bedroom. Three are offered in the live recording above: Shabby Doll, The Long Honeymoon, and Tears Before Bedtime. He plays others as well, including Town Cryer, Kid About It, One in Every Home, and Pigeon English. I suppose if someone really wanted to hear them I could do a mix…

The Santa Barbara Bowl as it existed in 1982. The bare stage transformed for every show prior to the multimillion-dollar renovations that created the modern venue that exists today - thanks to the efforts of countless volunteers, and the Bowl’s longtime manager, Sam Scranton.

Shabby Doll comes early in the set and begins the night’s investigation of relationships progressed to contempt. The song describes the protagonist “lying limp and soaking / He was openly broken / By just a shabby doll.” Elvis paints a vivid picture of transactional relationships as “she’s putting him off and putting you on.” Elvis spits his words in disgust, reminding the listener of a famous rendition of “Tamp the Dirt Down” performed in 1989 about the UK’s Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

In 1989 at age 35 Elvis has a voice as sharp as any in the culture. Coupled with his incredible musicality and writing talents he lowers the boom on Margaret Thatcher in Tamp the Dirt Down.

Imperial Bedroom is Elvis’ first collaboration in the studio with producer Geoff Emerick, famous for producing solo projects for Sir Paul McCartney. Elvis’ lyrics are becoming some of the finest poetry of a generation, but now his partnership with Emerick brings new musical interpretations, new influences, and a new complexity in the studio mix. The album’s baroque pop song melodies create dramatic tension with lyrics that mark Elvis maturing as a writer, and as a performer – he’s engaging every part of his art, and it’s working for audiences, and also importantly for the critics.

Music writers mark Imperial Bedroom as the moment that Elvis Costello officially graduates from being a “New Wave Star” to becoming a “Musical Polymath.”

Slant Magazine staff writer Huw Jones’ contemporary review proclaims that Imperial Bedroom, “…affirms Costello as a poet laureate for the counterculture and a restless musical genius all in the space of 50 topsy-turvy minutes.”

On tour, the highly produced sound of the album’s tracks - recorded over months in the studio with Emerick’s rich, layered arrangements - revert to the more direct and driving delivery of a typical rock quartet. The differences between the recorded and live performances are striking and they help highlight the musical transition underway. The County Bowl show captures a unique moment on Costello’s path to creating one of the most varied, important, and prolific song catalogues in history.

SET LIST

Green Shirt

Accident’s Will Happen

Pigeon English

Hand in Hand

Shabby Doll

Big Tears

Watch Your Step

On the Beat

One in Every Home

Watching the Detectives

Long Honeymoon

Town Cryer

Kid About It

Temptation

Unknown cover [?]

You Belong to Me

New Lace Sleeves

Allison

Radio Radio

Pump it Up

1^st Encore

Imperial Bedroom

Tears Before Bedtime

Backstabbers (O’Jays cover) medley into

King Horse

Big Sister’s Clothes

2^nd Encore

All These Songs (Allen Toussaint cover)

Mystery Dance

Shipbuilding

What’s So Funny About Peace Love and Understanding (Nick Lowe)

END NOTES: Two months before the Costello show at the Bowl, The Clash took the same stage for a 20+ song set that showcased their own musical transformation from pure punk to the ‘world music’ sounds of Sandinista and Combat Rock.

Contemporary review of the Elvis Costello 1978 concert at Robertson Gymnasium at UCSB, from Mike Pullen in the Daily Nexus student newspaper.

Ed Loomis, service record photo, Ed and his brothers, and at the end of WWII

In eighteen plus minutes Edward Loomis’ experimental audio composition, “What is Literature?” presents like one side of a vinyl LP, with each track telling part of the rock opera story. From a literary perspective the work is like a novella with chapters, or a contemporary TV script with commercial breaks. Listeners might even describe the composition as ‘a sound poem’.

A prior essay about “The Lear Project” discusses Loomis’ exploration of the tension between the ‘Stanford Formalism’ of his mentor, Prof. Ivor Winters at Stanford University and the non-syllogistic ‘qualitative’ narrative structures that begin to dominate contemporary media in the 1960’s.

In What is Literature Ed explores whether Winters’ formalism can co-exist with Qualitative Progression, and it’s unlikely that the exploding availability and capabilities of electronic media played no part in Ed’s determination to experiment with narrative form and structure.

Ed presented this cassette to the author and it contains a pre-release stereo mix of the Grateful Dead album, Wake of the Flood. Ed said, or at least I recall he said that the band used Ed’s new Swiss NAGRA 1/4” tape recorder, which likely would have been rare at the time, to create the final mix tracks used to master the album’s vinyl. I am 100% prepared for TapeHeads everywhere to correct my recollection of the story, but there is no denying that it is spooky to hear the test tones and then the album starting with no vinyl noise.

The Moral Autopsy of the Mundane

If The Lear Project (produced in 1998) represents the final, complex resolution of Ed’s narrative theories, What is Literature? produced two decades earlier functions as the essential primer.

The characters and locales in What is Literature? include a Mayo Indian elder, a Mayo village and its Pascola and Deer Dance celebrations, a mature woman reflecting on her strict upbringing in her Goleta, California home, a young girl who perhaps stands in for the protagonist in Ed’s short story, “A Kansas Girl,” his wife and other voices are heard in the distance, an assortment of found sounds and music completes the list, and Ed himself narrates while slightly out of breath on a walk or jog. It’s a cast of characters and environments designed to test the limits of formalism, and perhaps an attempt to begin to understand the role of the qualitative in literature.

The Pascola and the Deer Dances of Mexico are a mixture of Catholicism and indigenous Indian mythologies

The Cueva de la Serpiente and the Snake Myth

The first track treats listeners to Ed answering his own question. Slightly out of breath he muses,

“What is literature? It’s a personal consciousness; a literary experience that resides in each being to itself alone. It’s all literature; anything when you get into it.”

The composition then explores one of humanity’s earliest proto narratives from the Mayo snake myth - at least 10,000 years old.

“As the Mayos told it

You enter the mouth of the snake

Pass through the belly

And exit through the anus

Then you are in the snake cave

The greatest one appears and wraps you ‘round

From toe to chin

And if you are unafraid, he lets you go

You take your trophy from the wall

And you go on.”

Contemporary Mayo snake dances feature communal participants passing through an arch (“the mouth”), passing through the snake and gaining symbolic mastery over the obstacles of life. This digitization of Cueva de la Serpiente depicts serpents and people on their journey. It may be 9,000 years old and is from the The Sierra de San Francisco, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. The paintings are attributed to the ancestors of the Cochimí people, artists who maintained a consistent, disciplined style of “Great Murals” for nearly 10,000 years, creating a massive “rational statement” of their world across the canyon walls.

The snake myth is central to the argument of What is Literature? The work suggests that the myth can be interpreted as the literal act of the writer, or the act of any creation.

Passing through the “belly” of the snake represents the artist entering the raw, often problematic chaos of experience and emotion (the qualitative). Being wrapped from “toe to chin” symbolizes the total immersion in a life-or-death moral challenge (how should we live with our fellow humans?). Emerging with a “trophy” signifies the successful application of the rational; the protagonist in the story evaluates the experience and presents an formal (and relatable) narrative. A parable, no less than Joseph Campbell’s “A Hero’s Journey.”

The Resolution

What is Literature? presents listeners with Ed’s ‘solution’ to the tension between the formal and the qualitative. The myth is the answer. When ‘the great one’ wraps the protagonist from toe to chin it is the intentional application of the artist’s internal morality in the face of peril that earns the trophy, and it is the act required to propel the individual forward. The character arc isn’t far from Ed’s novel, “End of War” where an infantryman refuses to allow the ambiguity of the fog of war to change his moral compass.

Every sound chosen in the piece is a moral selection Ed makes, and each selection proves that a formalist can find order in any material. As Ed’s student the message was clear: we were ‘sentries of clarity’ who had the Wintersian responsibility to use art to insist that a moral order was applied to the chaos of life. We learned that the ‘raw’ must be met by the author’s (and listener’s) curation, and then acceptance or rejection of the presentation.

What is Literature? challenges listeners to find the rational while passing through the snake.

Edward Loomis, PhD, 1924 – 2010, Prof. of English University of California Santa Barbara

The next installment presents Ed’s composition, “Advice to the Lovelorn.”

For fans of What is Literature? the author suggests further research about “Noggin, Crayon, and Dry Paint,” Ed Loomis, Frank Goad, and Dick Johnston, the performers behind “A Legal Assembly” presented in the Fall of 1970 at Campbell Hall (UCSB). The performance reportedly earned a rave review from Rolling Stone magazine. Created and performed in the immediate aftermath of the burning of the Bank America in Isla Vista the work tested the boundaries of the legal definition of ‘unlawful assemblies’ – a tool used by authorities at the time to justify almost limitless police power in affected areas. Author’s note: I sent an email to UCSB’s “Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts” at UCSB to see if any record exists of the performance.

Coda

For a contemporary qualitative progression narrative example the TV series, “Station Eleven” displays the “across the genre” attributes noted by Winters; the show constantly jumps between three distinct ‘qualities’ of time: The Before, Year One, and Year Twenty. The author of the original novel, Emily St. John Mandell in interviews has said that the use of Shakespeare is the result of the novel’s survivors preference of Shakespeare to modern stories because his stories were ‘what is best about the world’ – and structurally they are the source of truth for the emerging world.

The Lear Project, experimental audio composition, Edward Loomis, 1998, stereo 00:22:20

Private Edward Loomis, U.S. Army, 1943

Edward Loomis (1924–2010) was a novelist, a WWII U.S. infantryman who saw action in the invasion of Germany, and a professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, whose life’s work served as a rigorous investigation into the intersection of moral responsibility and narrative. A PhD student of the formidable literary critical theorist Yvor Winters at Stanford University in the post-war years, Loomis became a central figure in a mid-century literary tradition that rejected modern impressionist narrative for the “plain style.” In later years his work focused on the emerging formats of published and electronic media.

Plain style narratives as defined by the school of “Stanford Formalism” require that every sentence, (or every recorded sound) present a rational and moral evaluation of the human experience. The Lear Project pushes back, and asks: Can a rational presentation of Lear’s madness include the qualities of madness in the presentation? The experiment is on full display at the eight-minute mark in the composition, when Ed’s voice keeps a steady rhythm while found sounds create a landscape of perhaps the interior mind of Lear.

Loomis translated the high-stakes survival of the WWII foxhole while an infantry private in America’s Big Red One into his literary discipline, earning a reputation among his students and peers as a “steady hand” who viewed the creation of art as an essential moral act. Whether through his critically acclaimed war novels or his experimental late-period audio projects, Loomis remained a steadfast sentry against intellectual chaos, famously challenging his students to decide whether they were “part of the solution or part of the problem.”

Pre-publish collection of Ed Loomis’ prose and poetry

Edward Loomis and the Architecture of Moral Clarity.

Behind the formidable intellect was a man who navigated the 20th century with the quiet intensity of a combat veteran who had seen the world at its most fractured. In his later years at UC Santa Barbara, his mentorship became a bridge between the classical discipline of the past and a modern landscape he viewed with a deeply curious eye. His experiments in electronic media don’t necessarily reject Winter’s Stanford Formalism school of literary critique; instead, Loomis attempts to extend our understanding of narrative against the rapidly evolving media landscape of the 70’s, 80’s, and finally the digital age.

The Artifact: The Lear Project (1998)

The Lear Project, produced in 1998 by Edward Loomis, is a rare audio artifact. The experimental audio composition is not a traditional reading of the Shakespeare play. The composition is a “Sonic Formalist” distillation of the essential elements of Lear’s emotional madness. The exploration demonstrates Loomis’ efforts to merge the qualities of electronic multimedia with one of the most formal of all literary forms: Shakespeare’s tragedies. He takes the skeletal remains of King Lear and subjects them to a barrage of digital edits, industrial noise, and “found” sonic textures. The work is jarring but also a disciplined effort to organize the chaos of Lear’s madness into rational structure.

The Lear Project is both a new way to experience the character of Lear and an exploration of moral clarity in artistic expression. The project represents Loomis’ effort to bridge the formalism of the Stanford school with the emotional expressionism of popular culture which by the late 1960’s was publishing content at a furious rate.

The reader who asks why Ed Loomis might be considered important may note a world today in which media is being used by some to ‘prove’ that facts don’t matter, that math doesn’t matter, and that science doesn’t matter. Media, including social media plays an outsized role in the current fad of fungible truth, while fictional narrative seems now a more reliable reporter of truth about the human condition.

Letter from Ed Loomis to the author in the Spring of 1999.

The Wintersian Foundation: Literature as a Moral Act

To understand where Loomis’ experimental audio compositions fit in his canon, listeners must first understand the shadow of his mentor, Yvor Winters. At Stanford, Winters established a rigorous school of thought known as Stanford Formalism for his PhD students. He taught that a poem or a story was not a mere expression of feeling, but a “rational statement of human experience” and a moral judgment. Winters famously fought against the “Fallacy of Expressive Form,” or the idea that if a subject is chaotic, the art must be chaotic too. For Winters, the artist’s duty was to provide an ordered, “Plain Style” evaluation of life rather than merely reflecting its “mush.” This was the intellectual environment that Loomis experienced in academia, and it feels only natural for it to become a central focus and later a productive source of artistic tension in his work.

Yvor Winters, University of Chicago Archives

The Loomis Canon: From Foxhole to Hollywood

Loomis’s early canon, including End of War (1958) and The Charcoal Horse (1959), applied plain style ethics to the life-or-death stakes of military service. In these novels, clarity was not just an aesthetic choice; it was the only way the protagonists could survive the war. This survival-honed clarity eventually found its way into the cultural zeitgeist through Loomis’s friend and fellow Winters student, the screenwriter Stanford Whitmore. When Whitmore penned the screenplay for the 1962 film War Hunt, he named the protagonist Private Roy Loomis as a direct tribute to Ed. Played by a young Robert Redford in his feature film debut, the character became the physical manifestation of the Loomis ethos: a “steady hand” soldier who refuses to be consumed by the psychological rot of war. Though Loomis did not write the film, the character of “Private Loomis” acted as a public expression of the principle that creates a character with a rational mind maintaining his integrity amidst a landscape of moral breakdown.

War Hunt, T.D. Enterprises 1962, Private Roy Loomis played by Robert Redford in his first starring screen role, and the screen debut of Redford, Tom Skerritt, and Sidney Pollack

The Literary Mechanic: Understanding Qualitative Progression

The Lear Project demonstrates a central Winters’ concept: Qualitative Progression. At its core, Winters tell us that Qualitative Progression is a literary construct that relies on emotional or sensory transitions rather than logical or narrative ones. While traditional stories move logically (Syllogistic), Winters and Loomis examined contemporary media’s depiction of modern life, and Lear’s madness as a stream of disconnected sensory data (Qualitative). The theory’s basic tenets include:

· The Lack of Plot: There is no clear cause-and-effect

· Associative Leaps: The reader moves from one image to the next based on a psychological “vibe” rather than a rational argument

· Tone as Glue: The only thing holding the poem together is the consistency of the atmosphere.

To his students Loomis offered as an example the inescapable interstitial TV commercial. Each thirty-second ‘poem’ creates an emotional narrative. In some case that narrative is ‘confused’ (proving Winters’ point) solely based on the qualities of the adjacent pieces of media. The reader might imagine a bubbly TV spot for family vacations at a tropical beach location, followed immediately by a news report announcing the massive loss of life in a tsunami. The adjacency creates an unintended narrative (unless one is so jaded as to ascribe intention to the coincidence). The jarring gap between the two qualities of the emotional notes creates new narratives, heavily informed by the audience’s perspective.

Loomis uses this ‘quality of experience’ in The Lear Project to deconstruct the play, creating a series of abrupt qualitative shifts that force the listener to maintain a rational distance; something that the character of Lear cannot manage.

Winters’ formalism rejected the author’s reliance on qualitative progression, writing “The poet who adopts the method of qualitative progression abandons the most important of all his tools, the power of rational selection and of logical development; he commits himself to a method which is essentially one of undifferentiated and unguided feeling, and which, in its extreme forms, is indistinguishable from the stream of consciousness of the clinical psychologist.”

Winters often linked his theory to the work of modernist poets like Ezra Pound (specifically The Cantos) and T.S. Eliot. Winters’ most famous takedown is that Eliot uses a chaotic form to express a chaotic mind. In “Prufrock,” the narrative is fragmented, repetitive, and indecisive which mirrors Prufrock’s own character. Winters argued that if you are writing about a man who is “disintegrated” or “weak,” you should do so with a style that is integrated and strong. By making the poem itself “drift” like Prufrock drifts, Eliot (in Winters’ view) ceases to be a poet and becomes a mere reporter of neurosis.

T.S. Eliot 1923, Wikipedia

Winters targeted the famous opening lines:

Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table...

He argued that the jump from the evening sky to an “etherized patient” is a qualitative leap that lacks rational necessity. In works structured by qualitative progression, readers might jump from a description of a Greek myth to a gritty scene in a modern-day London pub. There is no narrative reason for the jump; the connection is purely “qualitative”—the two scenes evoke a specific, shared irony or despair that the poet wants audiences to feel.

The author admits a bias, having memorized all 131 lines of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in college for an exam. The Lear Project dives into an interesting question: Should modern media and technology (think LED walls for film and TV production, the ubiquity of CGI in most modern production, streaming, influencers, etc.) modify the ‘importance’ or legitimacy of narrative qualitative progression?

Ed Loomis, 2009, Santa Barbara Independent

Modern Context: The Sentry of Clarity

In the modern media landscape that Loomis sees emerging in his three decades at UCSB qualitative progression begins to dominate film, TV, and even some novels. Like the storm in Lear the trend threatens to overwhelm media and our ability to think clearly. Loomis’ experimentation with qualitative progression in The Lear Project offers a construct with which to interpret everything that we hear, or see, or read. He tests whether qualitative progression can co-exist with the rational and whether it might contribute to the moral responsibility championed by the plain style.

In The Lear Project Loomis uses sounds as structural units that must be “justified” by a rational motive, he provides us with the tools to deconstruct the digital noise of our own time. Whether we are watching a Hollywood blockbuster like Easy Rider or scrolling through a chaotic social media feed, Loomis reminds us of the infantryman’s discipline: the ability to hear the signal through the static.

In publishing The Lear Project, here the audience is offered more than an archival recording; they are offered a manual for the modern mind to become, as Ed believed we should attempt to be, part of the solution.

While Yvor Winters focused on the “cold” logic of the printed word, Loomis seems to have used his experiments with audio production to investigate if precision and moral judgment can exist in the arrangement of sound just as they do in a sentence.

Formalism in Loomis’ Works

The close reader may pull a thread and discovers how Loomis applies his “Stanford Formalism” discipline to very different textures of narrative:

• The Charcoal Horse: This is perhaps his most “Wintersian” work in its psychological stakes. It deals with the ethics of responsibility and the consequences of action. Loomis applies formalism here by stripping away sentimentality; he treats the narrative with the same clinical, moral clarity that Winters demanded of a lyric poem. The “structure” of the story is the argument.

• Romeo and Juliette in LA: Here, the application of formalism is in the mapping of a classic structure onto a modern, chaotic landscape. By taking a foundational narrative and placing it in Los Angeles, he is looking for the “universal” and the “rational” amidst the sprawl. It’s an exercise in seeing if the “Plain Style” of human tragedy can survive in a city of neon and artifice.

• The Short Stories: In his short fiction, readers experience his obsession with the motive. Winters taught that every word must be “justified” by the emotion it intends to convey. In his stories, Loomis often focuses on a single, sharp moment of realization, avoiding the “fluff” of traditional commercial fiction to get to the “bone” of the character’s moral state.

Easy Rider, Pando Company 1963

The Storm vs. The Trip: A Study in Intent

To understand the importance of Loomis’s “Sonic Formalism,” one might compare the “Storm Scene” in The Lear Project to the celebrated “Acid Trip” sequence in Easy Rider. Both utilize the same raw materials: distorted audio, rapid-fire edits, and a departure from linear logic. Yet, where Easy Rider uses these techniques to invite the audience to surrender to a sensory blur as the character’s ego dissolves onscreen, Loomis uses them to sharpen the listener’s focus.

In Easy Rider, the narrative presentation mimics chaos. It is the Fallacy of Expressive Form in its purest state; the film becomes chaotic because the characters are high. To Yvor Winters, this would be the ultimate artistic abdication.

In contrast, when Loomis interrupts the howling winds of Lear with industrial static and glitching repetitions, he is not asking listeners to “feel” Lear’s madness. He is providing a rational evaluation of it. Each sonic interjection acts as a formalist’s punctuation mark, a reminder that we are witnessing the collapse of a moral structure. Loomis doesn’t want listeners to drown in the storm; he wants them to see the storm as a structural failure of the King’s character. He uses the noise to build a “Solution”—a clear, audible map of moral decay—rather than contributing to the “Problem” of mindless emotional immersion.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Fantasy Films 1975

The Cuckoo’s Nest Paradox

A film like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest heightens the audience’s emotional engagement by pitting a “lovable” rebel against a “rigid” institution. The formalist does not inherently hate the institution; the formalist hates unjustified emotion.

Winters would likely have seen McMurphy not as a hero of the spirit, but as another form of chaos. Loomis makes room for the character in the context of the film, and in The Lear Project, he doesn’t take sides in the way a Hollywood director might. By stripping King Lear down to its “Plain Style” essence, he forces us to look at the motive behind every character’s action. He replaces the “heightened events of the day” with a cold, sonic autopsy of human responsibility.

The Sentry of Clarity

By placing The Lear Project alongside these icons of the counterculture, we see Loomis’s true value. He was the sentry who stayed at his post long after the “Summer of Love” had faded into the digital age. He understood that the sheer volume of media and persistent integration with our everyday lives threatens to overwhelm our ability to think clearly. Through his “Sonic Formalism,” he provides us with the infantryman’s warning: listen to the signal and ignore the static. Loomis reminds us to choose the “Solution” over the “Problem”, and perhaps to remind us that literature, at its best, is a moral act that when best practiced intends to be part of the solution.

In future installments here additional Loomis compositions, including “What is Literature,” “The Artist as a Young Man,” and others will be explored.