Back in the early nineties I used to frequent a little smoky coffee shop called Fuel in the trendy River West neighborhood of Milwaukee. Famous for its killer coffee and lousy service, the place was a popular hangout for gangs of glum Generation Xer’s playing hooky while getting cranked on espresso and nicotine. The joint defined rustic charm, with spray-paint graffiti scrawl and band posters plastered to the walls and steamed-up windows and a rickety screen door that slammed behind you, announcing your entrance. One grey spring afternoon I stopped in for a “Hippy Hoagie” and a “Tall Americano” when I noticed the general malaise had reached an all-time low. All that whiny “alternative” bellyaching didn’t help matters much. Suddenly the sweet relief of Aretha Franklin belting “What you want, baby I got it,” came bursting through the speakers. Every head in the room involuntarily began to bob in time to the backbeat, as lips a moment ago that had been occupied with food, cigarettes, coffee cups and gossip automatically began to mouth that infamous phrase “Re, re, re, respect - just a little bit.” Then came that sax solo - big, ballsy, brassy, carved forever like your high school sweetheart’s initials into tree trunk of your brain. Not a note wasted. “Straight to your heart like a cannonball,” as Van Morrison used to sing. A moment later some lanky grunge orphan climbed atop his table in his high-top Cons and holey blue jeans and began to skank, holding a sub sandwich like a tenor saxophone while blowing into one end and moving his fingers in time, along the bread crust, as King Curtis wailed. His friends all laughed and clapped along. The scene was one part Animal House, one part Blues Brothers. By the end of solo, the sandwich had disintegrated. Lettuce, tomatoes, cheese and onions were everywhere. With his moment of spontaneous mirth over, the kid fell back into his booth, doubled-up with laughter.

By the time my lunch arrived, another Seattle band was moaning and groaning about how “sucky” was and the room once again slipped back into its perpetual state of depression. Over the years that little moment has stuck with me as proof that King Curtis was a genuine soul doctor capable of healing this wounded world with just a blast of brassy breath.

Arif Mardin

“He was fantastic!” Atlantic Records producer Arif Mardin in an interview conducted just a week before he passed away last June. “Curtis was a great musician, a jazz player from Fort Worth steeped in blues and soul. He once told me how he went to Birdland to watch the old timers jam. They were playing ‘Cherokee,’ which was very complex, but he knew it. So he took his solo and at that moment he realized he was in the wrong key. The old timers, instead of playing it in the regular key of Bb had changed it to B or A, something unplayable. So he stopped playing and one of the old timers, I think it may have been Ben Webster, said to him, ‘Son, if you don’t know how to play in every key, don’t come here!’ So he went back to Texas and practiced and practiced and then came back to New York. The old timers were testing him. It was like going to college,” Mardin chuckled. “Besides the saxophone, he’d play bass and guitar on funk numbers. Unbelievable! We used to experiment together for hours late at night in the studio. I have tracks that still haven’t been released.”

In Curtis Ousley’s day (born February 7, 1934), his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas was a highly segregated place where the ratio of black to white folks was about one in ten. Starting on the sax at age eleven, Curtis attended I.M. Terrell High School where he met Ornette Coleman, who hipped him to chord changes. Coleman would comment years later that Curtis had a “beautiful sound.”

Texas has a long tradition of great, in your face tenor saxophonists that included Arnette Cobb, Buster Smith, Don Wilkerson, James Clay, David “Fathead” Newman, plus a dozen other guys we’ve never heard of.

“I really can’t say why there are so many fine musicians came from Dallas and Fort Worth,” Lone Star sax legend David “Fathead” Newman said. “There were people like King Curtis, Ornette Coleman, Prince Lasha and Dewey Redman. And there were many more before my time. My mentor was Buster Smith and there was Red Connors, who was a bebop man who was way ahead of his time. I played alto in his group when I first met Ornette Coleman. We were both still in high school and Ornette was playing tenor and I played alto.

“I didn’t know Curtis in Fort Worth,” Newman explained. “He left town at a very early age, in the late forties. When I got New York in ’54 he was already recording for Atlantic Records. That’s where I crossed paths with him, when I was playing with Ray Charles’ group. He was a good saxophone player, very well-respected, but he wasn’t so well known in my circle as a straight-ahead jazz artist. I loved bebop but you could never make any money playing it and I suppose that’s one reason why King Curtis went in the opposite direction, playing rhythm and blues – so he could earn money. Ornette, to earn money, played with the blues guitarist Pee Wee Clayton while I backed-up Lowell Fulson and T-Bone Walker for four or five years, playing one-nighters across the South and the Midwest, until I met Ray Charles.”

“Fathead was my guy but when I heard Curtis, it gave me the same kind of feeling,” Atlantic producer Joel Dorn said. “They were both Texas cats but of two different stripes. Curtis only went as far as tenth grade. By then he was making more money than his teachers, blowin’ horn. Like Willie Mays, Curtis was already playing in the majors by the time he was fifteen. He was a good businessman with plenty of street smarts. Curtis was a thug or a gangster, but in the warmest sense of the word. He was a nightlife cat, a street cat, an action cat. He was one of those guys that was a man when he was a boy. He knew his way around. Curtis bridged the black world to the white world. He was like an ambassador between black and white people. That was one of his gigs. The first time I saw his name was on The Coaster’s ‘Zing Went the Strings of My Heart’ or ‘Charlie Brown.’ It was credited on the label - Tenor Solo by King Curtis.”

Joel Dorn in his DJ days

The Coaster’s 1958 hit “Yakety Yak,” which featured Ousley’s signature stuttering, sputtering sax, with its short, tight phrasing and jabbing notes, single-handedly defined what a R&B sax solo was all about. Although gutbucket growlers like Sam “The Man” Taylor and Jimmy Wright were still in high demand, Curtis’ horn soon moved to the forefront of R&B records by Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown.

Ousley took his success in stride and with plenty of style. When Ornette Coleman first arrived in New York in 1959, to make his debut, the man with the “beautiful sound,” King Curtis, picked him up in a Rolls Royce.

“King Curtis is the most unknown famous musician of the twentieth century,” said Steven Bernstein of New York’s jazz funk juggernaut Sex Mob. “His solo on ‘Respect’ is constantly being played by somebody, somewhere in the world but for whatever reason, his contribution has never been fully acknowledged [Thankfully Curtis got some props from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2000]. His music is always being referenced but it’s nearly dropped out of sight. Not only was he a great tenor player but he was a real groundbreaker. Curtis opened for the Beatles! He was the first black musician who was allowed to produce his own records at Atlantic. When he started out he had four or five different contracts. He was always making records. He started out making twist records to making early proto-organ soul to having the Kingpins then when “Pretty” Purdie started hitting the drums harder, he bumped it up to the next level of actual funk music.”

“I talk about Curtis all the time. It’s hard not to!” the master of funk drumming, Bernard Purdie said. “I met him when I first came to New York in 1961. I was in school in Maryland. It was one of the best times of my life. He had a group called the Kingpins. I got into playing with him because I was doing something a little different. I didn’t know I was doin’ something different at the time. That’s how I look at it. I didn’t think about why it was special but it turned out to be that way. It was just a job to me. He wanted me mainly to do studio work. Then he hired me as a bookkeeper. I learned a lot about the business from Curtis. He was a very smart businessman. I learned about publishing and production, how to negotiate and how to be a band leader. He was very charismatic, one of the sharpest dressers out there. He got along with people. He knew talent and had a knack for bringing the right people in, people who knew their job. It was all about creating a sound.”

By 1962 America was deep in the throes of a new dance craze - the Twist. Not to be out done by Sam Cooke, Gary U.S. Bonds and Chubby Checker who dominated the charts with “The Twist” and “Twistin’ the Night Away,” Curtis chalked up his first hit with “Soul Twist” for Encore Records. The song went to number one on the R&B charts and was soon immortalized by Sam Cooke in the lyric to his “Having a Party,” which included the line, “Play that song called ‘Soul Twist.’”

For months Sam had begged Curtis to join his band. He even offered him a solo spot during the show. Although he appreciated Cooke’s offer, Ousley repeatedly turned him down, claiming he “couldn’t afford to go on the road,” as he was in constant demand for session work.

By January of ‘63, King Curtis was back in Texas, briefly sharing the limelight with Cooke. “I only ever travel with those I like. I never worked with them I don’t,” Curtis explained, after taking a brief break from the studio to sign on with Sam’s posse. The good times they had were legendary (check out Peter Guralnick’s book, Dream Boogie). Ousley was a passionate gambler, who loved shooting dice playing cards and known to pitch a wang dang doodle until dawn.

“I met Curtis around 1964 when I was a disc jockey in Philly,” Joel Dorn recalled. “He’d made an R&B instrumental album that fit in with the stuff I was playing on my show. I had an Atlantic theme song (David ‘Fathead’ Newman’s ‘Hard Times’) and about every third or fourth tune I played was an Atlantic track.

“One time Curtis came to Philly and played Pep’s,” Dorn recollected. “Pep’s regularly featured Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderly, Mongo Santamaria, Dinah Washington, Ramsey Lewis, Yusef Lateef and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Once in a while they would bend the rules and bring Curtis in with that killin’ band. His travelin’ band had Chuck Rainey, Bernard Purdie or Ray Lucas, Cornell Dupree, Richard Tee, Eric Gale - the rhythm section that we all used years later in New York. Some of those guys were hard to handle but he could keep ‘em all in tow. He was legit with them and they didn’t give him any shit.”

Curtis stopped by radio station WHAT for an interview with Dorn, who plugged his upcoming show at Pep’s. Joel spun a handful of his R&B sides like “Soul Serenade,” as well as Curtis wailin’ on Jimmy Forrest’s “Night Train,” a standard in strip clubs from Barstow to Bangor, along with a couple tracks from his straight-ahead Prestige date with Nat Adderly.

“We kinda hit it off and started hangin’ out together,” Dorn said. “I was like a kid, learnin’ on the job but some of the older cats were really nice to me and put up with my bullshit and lack of experience. I had one foot in ‘hip’ and my other foot in ‘huh?’

“There was a waiter at Pep’s, a black dwarf they called ‘Tink, short for Tinkerbell. He was about four foot three. Curtis had just got into bowling and had gone out and bought, at that time, a fifty dollar custom-made bowling ball. There was an all-night bowling alley over at the 30^th Street train station in Philly. But he couldn’t bowl for shit and Tink beat him! So I went back and told everybody at Pep’s that Curtis got iced by a dwarf. He came into the club that night and everybody - the waitresses, the bathroom attendant, all the bartenders - nobody let him go.

“We used to have some serious fun,” Dorn continued. “The extent of my drug use during my early years at Atlantic was smokin’ reefer. One night we’re out, floating around when Curtis took me uptown. When he got out of the car everybody knew him – all the cats that came through Bumpy Johnson and were runnin’ the streets of Harlem all gave Curtis respect. If there was trouble and things got a tad rambunctious, he knew how to cool everybody out.

He told me to keep my big mouth shut and to watch and listen. I was learnin’ on the fly. I was hip, but with training wheels. It was like Andy Hardy’s first trip to New York. He took me to this place and there was a guy, a black cat, as big as the door he was standin’ in front of. But when he saw it was Curtis he was cool. So we go inside and there are all these Cuban women with no teeth, smokin’ cigars. Their faces looked like old suitcases. They’re cuttin’ heroin and blow. I didn’t know one from the other. It all looked like Johnson’s Baby Powder to me!” Joel chuckled. “I could hear my parents saying, ‘When you go to New York, go back to the hotel. Don’t go to any bad neighborhoods. Don’t give your name to strangers.’ And there I am with Curtis at the kind of place you only see in movies. Then he did something to me that he said some other cat did to him. He said, ‘Stick your tongue out.’ Then he took the tiniest bit of smack and put it on the tip of my tongue. He said, ‘Don’t ever do drugs, but if you ever do, that’s what heroin tastes like. So if you do it, make sure it tastes like that or it’ll kill you.’ Then he waited a couple minutes and did the same thing again with the coke. I loved him for doin’ that.”

Atlantic’s soul/funk mastermind, producer Jerry Wexler, (who first coined the term “R&B” as a journalist at Billboard) had a tight connection to the King. “I used to work very closely with Curtis on all my sessions,” Wexler told author Mark Bego. “He had a great nose for musicians. He always found fantastic people, including Jimi Hendrix.”

Lady Soul Herself!

In 1966, Hendrix briefly joined King Curtis & the Kingpins (New York’s hottest session band that drove “Lady Soul,” Aretha Franklin to the top of the charts). But Jimi’s flamboyant clothes and wild guitar style were clearly at odds with the cool dignity of Curtis’ stylin’ suits and tight arrangements.

Trading licks with Cornell Dupree, who Ousley brought up from Ft. Worth, Jimi complained of being “kept in the background. They didn’t like too much of that feedback.” Hendrix cut three tracks - “Linda Lou,” “How About You,” and “I Can’t Take It,” with Curtis and company before he was “discovered” playing at the Café Wha? in Greenwich Village by Chas Chandler, bassist with the Animals. Chandler instantly spirited Hendrix off to swinging London, where Jimi’s psychedelic blues soon became the soundtrack to England’s mushrooming hippie scene.

Aretha’s All-Star Atlantic Crew - Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin, Tom Dowd, Gene Paul, Donny Hathaway, Bernard Purdie and Chuck Rainey, Jerry Jemmott, and Cornell Dupree

Another music legend that Curtis brought to the table was Donny Hathaway. “I was makin’ the second album with Roberta [Flack]. It was all ballads like ‘The Impossible Dream’ and ‘Let It Be Me.’ We cut it with her trio. There was a sound goin’ with that record but she said she wanted to cut some sides with Donny Hathaway, Joel Dorn recalled. “So we did two songs, ‘Reverend Lee’ and a thing called ‘Gone Away’ which didn’t really fit. It shoulda been the start of the third album or a single or something. Donny was gonna arrange and play on the songs and do a little background singing when I get a call from Wexler. He says, ‘We got a problem. Donny Hathaway won’t work with a white producer.’ He said, ‘I got a solution. Can you work with Curtis?’ I started laughin’! Can I work with Curtis! Yeah I think so! I could do anything with Curtis. We were pals! So Curtis was workin’ with the musicians in the studio while I was in the control room but I wasn’t allowed to say anything. If I needed to tell him somethin’ we’d find a spot where we could talk, but not in front of Donny. I was on my best behavior that night. I knew it was gonna be a big record and Donny was their new guy. I wasn’t gonna be the reason he was gettin’ mad. I didn’t care if he wanted to work with a white producer or Luna, the Starkist Tuna! That was his business.

Donny flew up from Washington and was in a bad head that had nothin’ to do with me. He demanded that the string players, who were scheduled to be there at two in the morning were there while he cut the rhythm tracks, so they hear what he’s doing. They don’t care. You put the music in front of them and they’ll play it with their feet. It doesn’t make any difference. They were playing cards, going out for dinner, checkin’ the stock market and it’s costing a trillion a minute. I don’t want to say anything that could possibly impinge on Donny’s posthumous privacy but Curtis would come into the control room and call him every name that you don’t want to hear. Meanwhile I’m Jerry Mahoney without Paul Winchell! We get done around four in the morning after making rough mixes. I get back to my place around seven o’clock. The phone rings at about 9AM. It’s Noreen Woods, the gatekeeper for Ahmet [Ertegun] and Jerry. Everything went through her. All the artists talked to her. You always checked with Noreen. 99 times out of 98 she was right on the button. She knew everything that was going on, when it was cool and when it wasn’t cool. She said, ‘The shit is gonna hit the fan!’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said that Donny had hid little cassette recorders all over the control room to trap me, to hear what I was sayin’ about him. And what he got was Curtis sayin’ all this shit! And it was Curtis who discovered him playing at a black disc jockey convention in Washington, D.C. [in 1969]. Donny and his partner Ric Powell had made the Everything is Everything album. When Curtis heard it he flipped and called me. He said I found a guy down here you won’t fuckin’ believe! This is IT! He’s gonna be the next big one. Wait till you hear this shit! The next morning he played me a rough mix of ‘The Ghetto.’ The record was good but it needed a real Atlantic remix to get it right. Curtis did a lot of work he never got credit for. He really wanted to make it as a producer and thought that Donny was gonna be his ticket in, but it didn’t work out that way.

Hathaway’s first album, Everything Is Everything hit the record stores in 1970, showcasing his stellar songwriting and arrangement abilities but more importantly, as producer Jerry Wexler described it, his “gorgeous plush-velvet voice.” The album also featured the first of his duets with Roberta Flack, a cover of James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend.”

Nine years and four albums later, at age thirty-three, insecure and overweight, Hathaway jumped from a fifteenth floor window at the Essex House, overlooking Central Park. Although the NYPD ruled his death a suicide, Donny’s friends and family believed otherwise.

“If you wanna hear Curtis’ greatest stuff, don’t listen to his albums. Listen to the solos he took for other people,” Atlantic Records’ engineer Gene Paul pointed out.

Curtis first signed to Atlantic in 1965, making waves with “Memphis Soul Stew” as well as a funkified version of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.” Two years later in February, 1967 he made history, taking the bridge from Sam & Daves’ “When Somethin’s Wrong with My Baby” and inserting it into the middle of Aretha Franklin’s cooking cover “Respect.” Curtis’ smoldering sax then catapulted the song to a whole ‘nother dimension.

“The song was originally in C,” Arif Mardin, who engineered the session, explained. “Then he modulated up to F sharp, jumping to a totally unrelated key. It was unbelievable.”

In March of 1971, Aretha hit another highpoint in her career, taking the stage of the Fillmore West in San Francisco, backed by King Curtis and the Kingpins with Bernard Purdie atop the drum throne, organist Billy Preston, guitarist Cornell Dupree, Truman Thomas on piano, bassist Jerry Jemmott and Pancho Morales on congas, along with the Memphis horns. Wexler had negotiated with Bill Graham to host and record Franklin along with Curtis’ group on March 5, 6, and 7. Atlantic underwrote the three night gig as Graham couldn’t guarantee Aretha’s usual fee in such a small setting. As the Fillmore was home to Bay area psychedelic jam bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, Aretha and Curtis gauged their repertoire towards winning over the longhairs by performing a mixed bag of funked-up Beatle, Led Zeppelin, Simon & Garfunkel and Stephen Stills’ tunes. If that wasn’t enough, Ray Charles, who happened to be in the house on the third night, joined Aretha and Curtis on stage for an unrehearsed encore of “Spirit in the Dark.” Wexler and Atlantic’s big gamble still continues to pay off to this day. Live at the Fillmore West, Curtis’ eighth album for Atco turned out to be the best-selling album of his career. (And check out Rhino’s box set complete recordings of all three nights entitled Don’t Fight the Feeling.)

“Those performances were fantastic,” Arif enthused. “The way they played together was like a chamber orchestra. The atmosphere at the Fillmore was electric. The audience was so receptive. I will never forget it!”

Steven Bernstein

It’s been over ten years since Steven Bernstein produced a night of King Curtis’ music at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn. The experience took the trumpeter/ bandleader/arranger deep into Curtis’ musical process. Preparing for the show, Steven not only studied Ousley’s arrangements but managed to recapture and reproduce to the essence of its elusive funky feel. For the gig he hired a crew of young musicians who grew up on Curtis’ sound along with a couple high caliber veterans - David Fathead Newman and Cornell Dupree.

“The session musicians on those records were really responsible for the sound but nobody really recognized them,” Bernstein said, delving into what he called his “King Curtis Revelation.” “We listen to the music but don’t talk about who’s on those records. People play the music but wind up changing essential compositional elements like the drums, which don’t necessarily play the back beat. They’d play on the two or the four while the guitar filled the missing beats. It’s like a web, a weave of bass, drums, piano and organ. It’s more like jazz in the way it interacts. Curtis directly influenced the way I think about music. I’ve based a lot on compositions on his style and recently cut ‘Soul Serenade’ on (his big band project) the Millennial Territory Orchestra’s new disc.”

During his last year on the planet King Curtis had become Aretha’s musical director, produced an album by Sam Moore (recently released) and cut his posthumous album for Atco Everybody’s Talkin’ which featured a wild arrangement of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

“He was playing incredible electric saxophone on all of those projects, which showed another direction he was headed in – the saxophone with a wah-wah pedal,” Bernstein pointed out.

Curtis was at the peak of his powers when he was tragically killed on August 14, 1971, in front of his Manhattan brownstone on west 86^th Street. In his memoir Rhtythm and the Blues, Jerry Wexler wrote that he “had never felt such rage, such fury at fate.” While Wexler described the great saxophonist’s death as “pointless” and “a chance occurrence,” Joel Dorn believed Curtis’ anger was ultimately his undoing. “Curtis had a real temper,” Joel said. “Doc Pomus used to tell him all the time, ‘Curtis, you gotta control that temper of yours. It’s gonna kill you some day.’ And it did. Some Puerto Rican cat was sittin’ on the front step of his house when Curtis told him to get lost. He said, ‘I’m goin’ inside and if you’re not gone in ten minutes, I’ll throw you off the steps.’ He should’ve just stayed in the house and let that guy sit on his stairs. Who cares? But he went back outside and the guy pulled out a butcher knife and stuck it in his heart! Curtis was D.O.A. at Roosevelt Hospital. When Doc called me to tell me the news he said, ‘Remember what I told you? I knew he was gonna die because of that temper!’”

“Oh, it was like an episode of Kojak or something,” Steven Bernstein groaned. “It was the summer of ’71, back when the Upper West Side was funky. He was a carrying an air conditioner when he told the guy to get off his stairs and that was it. The irony was that Curtis was this huge black guy killed by a little skinny Puerto Rican drug addict.”

Perhaps even more ironic was the fact that “one of the most loved men in the record business,” as Aretha recalled King Curtis was killed in a town he loved and ruled: New York. He had always considered the South a far more dangerous place. “In the South,” Ousley once said, “you have to restrain yourself to make sure you come back alive.”

The night before King Curtis’ funeral at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in NYC, Curtis’ good friend, Duane Allman improvised a stunning rendition of “Soul Serenade” at an Allman Brother’s show in Boston. Duane, who played guitar on Curtis’ album, Instant Groove, recalled his friend as “One of the finest cats there ever was, an incredible human being.” Two months later, on October 29th Duane died in a motorcycle accident.

As Reverend Jesse Jackson presided over Curtis Ousley’s funeral with Stevie Wonder, Brook Benton, Duane Allman and Cissy Houston in attendance, the Kingpins jammed “Soul Serenade” and Aretha gave it her all on “Never Grow Old.” It’s thirty-five years later and King Curtis’s sound hasn’t aged a bit.

This article first appeared in WaxPoetics

Additional source material for this article came from:

The Queen of Soul by Mark Bego

Rhtythm and the Blues by Jerry Wexler with David Ritz

Ornette Coleman – A Harmolodic Life ­by John Litweiler

Dream Boogie - The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guarlnick

Jimi Hendrix - The Ultimate Experience by Johnny Black

I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You by Matt Dobkin

buy me a coffee!

“HANG IT UP, TAKE IT DOWN, HANG IT UP, TAKE IT DOWN

DON’T MISINTERPRET IT FOR NO CLOWN

‘CAUSE IT’S THE STRAIGHT AHEAD TRUTH GOIN’ AROUND.”

- RRK

It’s easy to see how most people got the wrong idea when it came to Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He just didn’t fit very neatly into anyone’s concept of reality. It’s not everyday someone like him comes careening down the pike, glowing with the pure spark of originality.

At the height of his powers, “Rahsaan” as he later became known, stood on the edge of the bandstand, rocking in rhythm, with his eyes hidden mysteriously behind a pair of wrap-around shades. Decked out like a psychedelic African shaman in a striped dashiki, sweat busting from every pore, Kirk played three saxophones simultaneously.

He was truly a sight to behold with his nostrils flaring like a mad bull and his cheeks puffed-out like a monstrous chipmunk, pumping air continuously into a strange array of instruments that hung from his body like crazy plumbing or tangled octopus tentacles, all stuck together with masking tape.

The uninitiated often felt they had witnessed a supernatural one-man Vaudevillian freak show. Perhaps in comparison to the cool understatement of Miles Davis or the graceful elegance of the Modern Jazz Quartet, they had. But from this unlikely mass of auditory armor Kirk coaxed and evoked the entire history of jazz (or “black classical music” as he preferred to call it).

People are quick to condemn what they don’t understand and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, during his short life, provoked more than his fair share of wrath. Confounded critics and astonished audiences who couldn’t comprehend his unique gift frequently accused him of gimmickry.

Jack Tracy, who signed Kirk to Argo Records and produced his first nationally released album Introducing Roland Kirk in June of 1960, originally heard about this incredible musician from pianist Ramsey Lewis. Lewis (who would soon become famous for his funky soul/jazz hit ‘The ‘In’ Crowd’) was gigging in Indianapolis at the time when he phoned Jack back in Chicago to inform him of his amazing discovery.

“I remember going by after our gig and being wiped out, totally blown away,” Ramsey declared. “Not only by his musicianship, which was super high but by his ability to communicate with the audience. Not only musically but with a sense of humor, philosophy and humanity! It was mind-blowing what he would do with multiple horns and make it all make sense and come out as great music. His ability to be very cerebral and at the same time, a very earthy musician, just floored me. It blew your mind but at the same time it reached your heart.”

Jack laughed recalling how Ramsey raved about his fantastic find. “He said, ‘I heard a guy here who knocked me on my ass! His name is Roland Kirk. He’s blind and plays three instruments at one time. I told him to look you up when he gets to Chicago.’ I said, ‘Oh God Ramsey, what are you gonna lay on me?’” Tracy chuckled. “He said ‘Listen to him!’

“I don’t know how much longer it was when the receptionist at Chess Records said, ‘There’s someone at the door to see you.’ I came out and there was Roland. He was really ragged, poorly dressed and pushing this old golf bag on wheels. It was filled with all his instruments!

“Roland was so assured of himself. He knew he had something to say. He made it known that he was going to be recording for us, no matter what I said,” Tracy recalled, sounding flustered. ‘There was just no way to avoid him.”

Tracy soon found himself in a quandary as how to present such a powerful and original artist to an unwitting public. “He was so new! I wanted to make it a little easier to get him heard, and get him some support,” Tracy said.

At the suggestion of his friend, Chicago impresario Joe Segal, Tracy teamed Roland up with another multi-instrumentalist, trumpeter/saxophonist Ira Sullivan. The resulting album featured a batch of introspective ballads and vampy blues numbers that showcased Kirk on tenor, flute and two unknown exotic horns called the manzello and stritch.

“The first impression I had of him was from an article I saw in Jet Magazine,” Ira Sullivan reminisced. “I used to read it on the commuter train going from the suburbs to Chicago. There was a picture of a guy with three saxophones in his mouth and his cheeks puffed up with one of those basket hats on his head like Monk or Dizzy used to wear. I said ‘Oh my God! Who is this?’ It said this cat was part of Dinah Washington’s traveling entourage and did this ‘act’ with three saxophones. They didn’t talk about him as a serious jazz player, it was an ‘act.’ Naturally I was intrigued. I thought it provocative. Low and behold it wasn’t a year later that I went to Louisville, Kentucky and somebody said to me, ‘Oh man, you gotta see this guy. He’s playin’ three horns at once!’ I wanted to check him out but I was workin’ later than he was. We were at a place called the Tap Room when he came in on his off night and I heard this big stir. The stage was suspended in air with a gangplank that you’d walk across, like on a ship. Well, somebody yelled, ‘Hey, this guy wants to sit in!’ and there was Roland comin’ with his three horns hangin’ ‘round his neck! I went down the steps, grabbed his hand and helped him up and we blew. That was our first meeting.”

Rahsaan with a another guy named Sullivan

That night as everyone packed up to leave, Kirk asked Sullivan if he knew anyone in Chicago who could help him land a recording contract. Ira told him to track down Joe Segal.

“The next day I took him to the train station. We got there early. I called out to the engineer ‘What time is it?’ He called back, ‘Nine twenty-seven.’ Roland felt his watch and said, ‘No, it’s not nine twenty seven. It’s nine twenty-nine!’ So the engineer called to the other engineer, ‘Hey Charlie, what time is it?’ He said, ‘Nine twenty-nine!’ And I thought Jesus he’s even got better time than a railroad!” Sullivan chuckled.

The following Sunday, Roland Kirk found Joe Segal running a jam session at the Sutherland Hotel. Segal was skeptical about giving any time to what he assumed was “a novelty act.” But eventually he acquiesced and allowed Roland a couple minutes at the end of the night. Knocked out by what he heard and saw, Joe suggested that the stranger find a place to hang his hat. He was sure Kirk would find plenty of work in the Windy City.

Sullivan soon returned home to Chicago to find Roland Kirk taking care of business. Plans to record for Argo, Chess Record’s short-lived jazz label were in the works and in return for his help, Ira was asked to play the date.

“I’ll never forget the first time I heard Roland Kirk,” wrote German jazz journalist Joachim-Ernst Berendt. “He was playing on the street, three saxophones in his mouth, standing in front of the ‘hotel’ in which he lived, a squalid flophouse on the South Side of Chicago, surrounded by children, women on their way to shop and a few old men.”

Just a few days later Berendt was blown away again when Don De Michael of Down Beat, invited him to a recording session on South Michigan Avenue.

RRK on the cover of downbeat

The moment Joachim stepped foot into the control room a sensational sound sent him reeling. “Nice sax section!” he complimented the producer Jack Tracy. “That’s no group, that’s a single saxophonist,” Tracy pointed out. “His name is Roland Kirk.” On the other side of the control room window stood the same remarkable blind busker he’d seen on the street draped with musical instruments. “I can just hear the critics,” Jack quipped, “They’re going to say, ‘My God, first Ornette Coleman and now this!’”

After the session, Joachim invited Kirk to return with him to West Germany and play a jazz festival in Essen. “Roland looked at me as if an idiot was talking to him. For years he’d tramped through ghettos and sleazy bars and here was somebody who wanted to take him to Europe. He didn’t believe me,” Berendt exclaimed.

Shortly thereafter Roland Kirk made his concert debut at Gruga Hall in Essen. He was in fine company, sharing the bill with jazz legends J.J. Johnson, Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald and Bud Powell.

After appearing at Essen Jazz Days, Berendt took Roland to Baden-Baden, where he played a television show accompanied by “Europe’s best rhythm section,” expatriates Oscar Pettiford on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums.

“MY LIFE BEGAN IN COLUMBUS, OHIO,

BUT MY SUCCESS BEGAN IN WEST GERMANY!”

- RRK

“When you see Roland Kirk, you might think, ‘Here comes a circus musician,’ Berendt explained. “But when he begins to blow, you will hear a homogenous and pleasing saxophone section. And each note is soaked in funk and gospel feeling.”

Jon Hendricks, songwriter, arranger and scat singer extraordinaire of the legendary vocal group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross often crossed paths with Roland back in their early scuffling days in Ohio. Kirk’s originality and virtuosity impressed Hendricks immensely. “When I first heard him I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ But it was no circus trick, I’ll tell you that,” “The James Joyce of Jive” claimed. “The guy could play all those horns!”

“Rahsaan created a universe of his own, musically, spiritually and aesthetically and that was just too heavy for most people,” declared Kirk’s friend Todd Barkan.

Barkan’s association with Rahsaan Roland Kirk actually began in 1954, on a bus in their hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Todd was just an eight-year-old kid on his way to a minor league baseball game when something different caught his attention.

There on the backseat of the bus sat Roland Kirk, playing his saxophone to the rhythm of the grinding engine. He wasn’t actually playing a song. He was spitting and sputtering, flutter-tonguing the reed along to the vibration of the motor, as it accelerated and slowed down.

Throughout his life whenever he traveled, on buses, trains or airplanes, Kirk would grab a flute or harmonica and play along with the sound of spinning wheels and whirring engines. His keen hearing allowed him to lock into the rhythm and find a tone or harmony that he would oscillate to match the speed of the moving vehicle. It was just his way of having fun while connecting to his environment.

Staring in wonder, the curious kid approached the extraordinary stranger, who, little did he know would have a profound effect on the rest of his life.

“He had some horns around his neck and a flute and I thought wow! This guy looks pretty wild. So I struck up a conversation with him,” Todd recalled. “It turned out he wasn’t a Columbus Jets fan at all! He was going to meet his girlfriend. He didn’t have a seeing-eye dog, just a weird cane with a wheel on the end of it. He started talking about Duke Ellington and he invited me over to his house to listen to some records. Rahsaan lived in a middle-class black neighborhood across the river, within walking distance to my house. He was about eighteen years old, living at home with his parents. He was ‘Ronnie’ Kirk then!” Barkan said fondly.

“We used to listen to music all day in his room. We’d spend one day listening only to tenor players, then another afternoon listening to alto players and another whole day just listening to baritone players. It didn’t matter that I was ten years younger than him. He knew I loved the music and we used to just study it all the time.”

Kirk’s love and respect for old tenor masters like Don Byas, Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins was immediately apparent to anyone who came within earshot.

“He had an incredible span of knowledge when it came to jazz. He knew everybody! Most of his contemporaries believed jazz began with Charlie Parker,” Jack Tracy pointed out. “But Roland loved people like Teddy Wilson and Johnny Hodges. He knew their work backwards and forwards. It seemed like he had listened to every record ever made! You could almost say he had a ‘phonographic’ memory. It was as if he could remember everything he ever heard in his life.”

“I constantly think about music,” Kirk explained to Melody Maker on his first visit to England in 1963. “When I go to sleep, I actually dream about music and hear things, which I try to play during my waking hours. One night about five years ago, I dreamed I was playing three instruments at once. The sounds and feeling created coincided with what I had been seeking on one instrument.”

“Kirk was a piece of work,” critic Gary Giddins proclaimed in the Village Voice. “One on which Rabelais and Barnum might have collaborated”

Joel by Marilyn Cvitanic

Joel Dorn, Kirk’s friend and producer after he left Mercury Records in the mid-sixties to record for Atlantic and finally Warner Brothers, explained how the title to his album “The Return of the 5000 Lb. Man” came about: “A friend of mine once asked me, ‘What’s so great about Roland Kirk?’ I told him, ‘If a 5000-pound man was coming to town, would you go see him?’”

You’ll find more Bright Moments here: https://shorturl.at/2k4AX

Joaquin first came to California during the Gold Rush of the 1850’s. According to a novel written by the end of the nineteenth century, Murrieta and his family were brutalized (in some versions, his wife/and/or sister was raped while his brother was hung) by a gang of Caucasian miners, said to be jealous of his new found wealth.

L-Murietta, R-Zorro

Joaquin, along with his friend Manuel Garcia, also known as “Three-Fingered Jack,” organized a gang of angry hombres who became known as the Five Joaquins, to avenge the greedy gringos. Soon every crime in the territory, from robbery to cattle and horse rustling and murder was added to their names, yet Murrieta’s ragged band of desperados found support, sustenance and sympathy amongst Anglos and Hispanics alike.

By May of 1853, California Governor John Bigler had hired the ex-Texas Ranger Harry Love to round up a posse and hunt down the Five Joaquins, along with Three Fingered Jack. They were all well paid and before summers’ end had cornered the outlaws, killed them and cut off Garcia’s hand along with Murrieta’s head, and preserved them both in brandy. Not only did they return said body parts for their reward, but more money was to be made by putting them on exhibit as curiosities for which ghoulish spectators paid the exorbitant price of one dollar each to gaze in awe and disgust. Despite nearly twenty people signing sworn statements that the head in fact belonged to the legendary outlaw, a woman claiming to be Joaquin’s sister scoffed at the absurdity, pointing to the lack of a facial scar that clearly identified her brother.

find it here! https://shorturl.at/uBPGU

Rumors began to circulate claiming that Murrieta was free and roaming the countryside once more. With the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, Murrieta’s head was lost, ultimately adding to the mystery of the man while taking with it all trace of evidence that might quell any future argument. He soon became a folk hero, appearing in dozens of songs, books and movies and is said to have inspired the legend and popular 1950’s television show, Zorro.

Big Z, little O

Essentially a re-write of Superman, Zorro, in the hands of Walt Disney’s studio was by day (like Clark Kent) the mild mannered Don Diego de la Vega, a cowardly bookworm until the sun set when he donned his sleek black mask and cape, grabbed his sword, mounted his black stallion and avenged a series of greedy, corrupt commandantes and magistrados who oppressed the local California populace. Contrary to this heroic version of the legend, Murrieta, in the words of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, was rumored to have drunk and slept his way through every saloon and bordello up and down California’s Mother Lode.

Buy Me a Coffee!

One of the first novels to be published in California, in 1854, was The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murrieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, written by John Rollin Ridge under the pseudonym of “Yellow Bird” (or Cheesquatalawny, his Cherokee birth name). This thinly disguised account of Murrieta’s life was the first work of fiction published by a Native American writer in the United States. It turns out that Yellow Bird was something of an outlaw himself. After killing a man in a horse trading deal in1850, he lit out for California hoping to find his fortune during the Gold Rush. After hitting rock bottom, he turned to writing dime-store novels, poetry and newspaper articles. Yellow Bird may never have realized the historical importance of his work, which unintentionally provided the first real insight into the life of Mexican/Americans in California following the Mexican War in 1848.

Today Murrieta’s legend in song remains robust, whether eulogized in seamless two-part harmony over the driving rhythm guitar and effervescent accordion of the Norteno duo Luis Y Julian, or the flowing strings, cascading harps, blaring trumpets, and emotive vocals of singer/actor Felipe Arriaga.

Peter Rowan (photo by Kruth, mid-80s)

“Back in the seventies you used to see ‘Viva Murrieta!’ painted on vans around southern California and New Mexico,” singer/songwriter Peter Rowan pointed out. After reading a biography on “The Robin Hood of California,” Peter was inspired to write and record an eight minute epic ballad entitled “Joaquin Murrieta,” which recalled the Hispanic outlaw’s famous exploits.

“Either he got away to Mexico, where he became a folk hero… and they’ve preserved his saddle in a museum to this day, or, as the official government report said, he was killed by Captain Harry Love, along with and a guy known as Three-Fingered Jack Garcia,” Peter said, raising one eyebrow, referring to the uncanny similarity between the legendary bandito and his old friend and one-time band-mate Jerry Garcia (of the Grateful Dead), who once played banjo with Rowan in the bluegrass band Old & In the Way and had lost part of his middle finger on his right hand in a childhood accident.

Translated into English from the Spanish and published in Irwin Silber and Earl Robinson’s Songs of the Great American West, the ballad “Corrido De Joaquin Murrieta” conveys how the ruthless outlaw made “any American tremble at [his] feet.” Sung in a first-person narrative, the song recounts Murrieta’s traumatic childhood after he was orphaned “without anybody to love [him],” and describes how his “brother was killed,” and his “wife Carmelita was [raped and] tortured.” The ballad portrays Murrieta, along with his faithful friend “Three Fingers” as great defenders of “the good and simple Indian,” while “fighting with Americans” with cartridge belts crisscrossing their chests and their pistols drawn.

Tonight we celebrate “3-Fingered Jack” Hope to see you!

Buy Me a Coffee

David “Junior” Kimbrough

For a good part of the eighties and early nineties I toured around the Midwest and South, playing bars, rock clubs and colleges in an old white 1970 Dodge Tradesman van.

Although it had that legendary unstoppable slant six engine, maintenance was still a constant concern. The guy who really understood and appreciated my van better than anybody was a drummer named Erik Tunison, who played in a Wisconsin punk/metal band called Die Kreuzen, that sounded like hell unleashed from a beer can. Erik was a gentle scholar and a monster drummer with a knack for Zen mechanics. When my ignition switch crapped out one frigid March morning, he replaced it with a doorbell. All I had to do was push a button and my four-wheeled steel polar bear instantly began to growl.

Erik with Keith Brammer, bassist of Die Kreuzen

After a handful of albums on the Chicago indie label Die Kreuzen went down in flames. I played on a few tracks on their last album, appropriately titled Cement. They’d been a pet project of producer Butch Vig before he hit pay dirt with Nirvana’s Nevermind. Butch had a little studio in Madison, Wisconsin known as Smart. He’d just returned from the West Coast with rough mixes from the sessions with the fledging Seattle grunge band in tow. “I think I might’ve cut a hit song,” he said, bringing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” up on the board. Everybody just stood there stunned, staring at the faders. “Damn!” I said. “That reminds me of ‘Satisfaction.’ Every kid in America with a guitar is gonna want to learn how to play that!”

JK on the mighty mandocello with DK

In the meantime, Die Kreuzen (with the help of copious amounts of vodka) began to disintegrate, just as they were about to sign with Sony. Disgusted and desperate to get out of town, Erik needed to escape. I suggested we make a pilgrimage south, to the Mississippi Delta, the home of the blues. A handful of gigs along the way would help pay for the gas and motels. A couple calls later we were booked and ready to roll.

Our first show was in Chicago, at a little joint called the Elbow Room where we improvised a free jazz version of the Rolling Stones’ Baroque ballad “Lady Jane” that made the tables levitate. While loading up our gear after the show the doorman wished us luck, saying we were “a dangerous combination.”

Stopping at Graceland, we were met in the parking lot by a little Philippine dude with big sideburns and greasy hair who crooned “Don’t Be Cruel.” I soon found myself taking back every disparaging remark I’d ever made about Elvis Presley after walking down a tunnel of gold 45’s before coming to a stop in front of the wall of platinum records. I must admit I even got a little choked up as I stood beside the King’s “grave,” even though he’s not even buried there.

Our next stop was Oxford, Mississippi to play another gig and glean whatever inspiration might come from standing on William Faulkner’s porch. I hadn’t played many gigs with a pool table smack in the middle of the room before and was already feeling about as nervous as a New York Jew-boy could be on his first trip to Mississippi. But as long as I could shred on the mandolin I knew I’d be welcome in most of the South.

After the show, a couple of Gomers came up to chat:

“Hey, ain’t you from New York City?” the first one asked.

“That’s right!” I replied.

“Are you Eye-talian?” the other one said.

“Nope,” I replied and before I could say another word the first fellow blurted out, “See, I told ya he’s a Jewish! That’s ten bucks you owe me!”

“Hey man, where’s my cut? I asked.

“See… I told ya – He’s Jewish!” the first guy repeated. With that I bid them, “Good Shabbus, y’all!” and packed up my gear.

A couple nights earlier we’d played Saint Louis and made the acquaintance of a fine guitar player named Cary Hudson from a band called Blue Mountain. Cary was from Oxford and recommended we that make it down to Junior Kimbrough’s Juke Joint, in Holly Springs, Mississippi while it was still there.

Cary Hudson/Blue Mountain’s Special Rider

“It’s one of the last genuine Juke joints around,” he promised. But before we went, there were three important things about Junior’s that we had to know.

Junior’s Juke Joint - where it all went down…

“Number 1 - don’t get there before midnight ‘cause nothin’ goes down till the clock strikes twelve,” he told us. “2, don’t drink the moonshine. It can kill you. And number 3 whatever you do – keep away from the women. Don’t even look at them. If they don’t kill you, their old man probably will.”

The following night Erik and I waited till the stroke of twelve before heading out to the hill country. A single naked bulb flickered on the porch and a couple battered old cars sat, parked in front of the place when we arrived. But inside was a different world altogether. People were drinking and shouting and carrying on. At first, I didn’t hear any music and figured the band must have been on break. It was no surprise that we were the only white folks there. Everyone seemed to be having a good time except for Junior, who sat alone, half-heartedly strumming an old beat-up guitar on a dilapidated stage. He was playing softly, almost absent-mindedly, to himself. Nobody was listening. Suddenly a group of young dudes circled us, checking out Erik’s hair. I could understand their interest. It certainly was different - shiny blond and cut in a heavy metal/Viking helmet. One of them flicked his golden locks with his finger and said, “Man, you got funny hair!” That’s when I suddenly recalled that Erik always carried a knife in his boot. But he was a good-natured chap and I never doubted his instincts for a moment. He knew the brother was just goofing on him. There was no animosity to be found. A moment later someone grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around.

“Hey, do you play? Can you play man?” he said.

“You mean music? Well, yeah, uh, sure, I play some guitar and mandolin and some harmonica,” I stuttered, as he began pushing me towards the stage where Junior sat alone, tuning his guitar. There was a cheap Korean bass lying face-down on the floor, completely out of tune. I picked it up and began twisting the tuning pegs, trying to grab a few notes off Junior, who didn’t seem to notice my presence. He began chunking out a steady, driving rhythm and howled into the microphone like someone had just punched him in the gut. “Oh baby, baby, why do you do me like you doooooooo?” He was playing blues in the key of E – plain and simple, low down, and dirty. I fell in behind him with the best Willie Dixon bass line I could muster. A moment later the old dude looked up, glaring at me with blurry blood-red eyes. Junior looked like he’d drunk a vat of that nasty moonshine or had been bitten by a werewolf, or both. He scared the hell out of me. I wanted to run but I was now with saddled the responsibility of keeping the groove going. So, I stood my ground. By then I had also attracted the attention of the entire crowd who wanted to see what this weird white boy could do. There was no backing down now. A moment later a couple guys delivered Erik to the stage, where he began to lay down a rock-solid beat on a set of drums that sounded more like wet cardboard boxes.

I suddenly felt an enormous pang of white boy embarrassment over everything I’d been given in life and how much of it I’d wasted along the way. I grew up in the Jersey suburbs, where my friends went off to college and left behind better instruments in their bedroom closets, than the junk we were playing. I was afraid to know what was going on in Juniors’ mind but I do remember thinking that Erik and I had left Milwaukee on a pilgrimage to pay homage to the blues and if Juniors’ Juke Joint wasn’t Mecca, then what was?

We were diggin’ a deep groove when suddenly two young guys pushed their way through the crowd and stood by the side of the stage, glaring at us with plenty of attitude to spare. Obviously, the band (Junior’s son Kent and bassist Garry Burnside, son of the late/great blues singer R.L.) had arrived. We immediately bowed out, returned their instruments and slinked off, back into the crowd. A minute later they laid down some of the most monstrous funk I’d ever heard, while Junior abandoned his guitar and began to howl relentlessly into the microphone.

Unbeknownst to us, while warming up the house, a fellow Caucasian slipped into the room. He was short with an academic, nerdy look. He quickly cornered Erik and began asking him a bunch of annoying questions like where we were from and how we knew about the place. This soon gave way to a lecture about the “importance of blues music” and “the authentic atmosphere” of Junior’s club.

“The Juke joint will soon become a thing of the past,” he bemoaned. Having traveled with Erik over the past few days I felt like I’d gotten to know him pretty well and sensed that any minute this fool was also about to become “a thing of the past.” It was a testimony to Erik’s good-hearted nature that he managed to refrain from reaching into his boot and slashing that nitwit’s throat.

Grabbing his big black leather shoulders, I steered Erik through the door and gently nudged him towards the van, while envisioning the headline in the Oxford morning paper, screaming, “Three Yankees Start Rumble at Local Juke Joint. One Dead.”

The next day we continued on our pilgrimage to Clarksdale, to pay homage to Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, stopping on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River to cool our heels in its soothing, haunted mud.

Twenty years later, in the summer of 2004, my sweetheart, the painter, Marilyn Cvitanic and I attended a blues festival in Istria, Croatia, when, from the back of the crowd, I recognized the drummer. Sure enough, it was Kent Kimbrough, Junior’s son, laying down a funky beat.

PS thanks to Cary Baker for the photos of Junior and his Juke Joint.

This story is chapter from my forth-coming memoir - Something Happened to Me Yesterday... My Strange Life in Music

(Album cover art by Eric von Schmidt)

It all began in the summer of ‘63 when Elektra producer Paul Rothchild felt the time had come to put together an album of young white blues singers. Amongst the best of this often mocked genre were a bunch of country-style blues pickers hailing from the coffeehouses of New York, Cambridge, and Minneapolis, including Dave Van Ronk, Spider John Koerner, Eric von Schmidt, Geoff Muldaur and Danny Kalb. Rothchild’s hunch (as with Tim Buckley, the Doors and Janis Joplin) was spot on. The album sold nearly 300,000 copies.

On New Years Eve, 1964, Danny Kalb, a session guitarist on albums by folk singers Judy Collins and Van Ronk, began assembling a band of fellow blues fanatics that would include drummer Roy Blumenfeld, guitarist Steve Katz of the Even Dozen Jug Band (which featured Maria Muldaur and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian) and classical flautist turned bassist, Andy Kulberg (Check out Kulberg’s electric flute on “Flute Thing,” written by Al Kooper, who nicked the riff from Barney Kessell and was later sampled for “Flute Loop” by the Beastie Boys). Tommy Flanders, a Mick Jagger look-alike from Cambridge, Mass., fronted the group.

Steve and Danny (photo by Kruth)

“It’s a funny story,” Steve Katz said, recalling his audition for the Blues Project. “I was used to playing acoustic guitar and Danny came to see me because [guitarist] Artie Traum had gone on vacation to Europe for a couple weeks and he wanted to know if I could sub for him. I told him I never played electric guitar before. I put a D’Armond pick-up on my [Gibson] J-200, plugged it in and the feedback was so ridiculous I just turned it down to zero. It looked like I was playing with the band but nobody could hear me. Afterwards Danny told me, “That was some really tasty playing.”

Appropriating their name from the hot selling album, Kalb’s crew had their first audition at Columbia Records. Producer Tom Wilson (best known for Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”) called in session guitarist turned organist Al Kooper to loan some support. (Columbia passed but they would later sign with Verve, with Wilson at the helm.) The next day over lunch Kooper was asked to join what he later dubbed “The Mystic White Knights of the Blues.” But around the Village (after Flanders’s departure over refusing to pony up for new equipment and the artistry of Steve’s mom’s scissors) the Blues Project became known as “The Jewish Beatles.”

Although the band’s diversity and eclecticism produced some great music, (Kalb lived only to jam the blues, while Katz’s specialty was wistful ballads like Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” and Kooper led R&B cookers like “Shake Me, Wake Me”) it ultimately would suffer an identity crisis which led to its early demise.

“Kooper and Kalb’s insanity got to the point like they were bashing each other heads together. Al and Danny used to have fights on stage to see who could play the loudest and the highest,” Katz recalled. “Whenever they did this they would make mistakes but the audience at the Café Au Go Go which was always very stoned and would look at us and say, ‘Far out!’ [Laughs] and I would turn to Roy and say, ‘My god that was the worst sounding thing I ever heard in my life!’

Roy at the kit (photo by Kruth)

“I always took chances musically,” Kalb countered. “Al’s organ and my guitar were like two intersecting horn lines that kept building and building in the manner of Charlie Mingus’s horns in his Jazz Workshop. These days our music and the contribution we made seems like it’s been air-brushed out of history.

“We were out in California when Tommy Flanders quit and we were about to break up. We didn’t know if we could go on without a lead singer,” Danny continued. “So we went back to New York and played the Café Au Go Go, on the same bill with Muddy Waters and were debuting our version of [Muddy’s song] ‘Two Trains Running.’ It was eleven minutes long and we’d changed it all around. And Muddy was there, watching. He meant everything and a half to us. After the set I asked him what he thought. And he said, ‘You really got to me.’ And that’s my reason for living today!”

Danny, rehearsing for his last Blues Project tour (photo by Kruth)

The band fell apart in ’67. Al, inspired by arch rival Paul Butterfield’s Blues Band, opted to add horns to the mix while Kalb was staunchly opposed. Exit Kooper with Katz in tow. Enter (the original/pre David Clayton Thomas) Blood, Sweat and Tears, whose brilliant debut album Child Is Father to the Man (produced by John Simon) featured Kooper’s funky white boy soul arrangements. Kulberg and Blumenfeld would hook up with Seatrain, the first post Beatles band that George Martin produced and Danny Kalb, after a long bad trip to the “Twilight Zone” is back once again playing blues in small clubs with passion, taste and chops.

Published in Waxpoetics # 30 - 2008

Kruth & Kooper (photo by Susan Kooper)

PART 2: DANNY KALB -

I LOVE THE LIFE I LIVE AND I LIVE THE LIFE I SING

As a young refugee from Mount Vernon, New York, Danny Kalb arrived in Greenwich Village in the late 1950’s where he soon heard the likes of Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, John Herald, Marshall Brickman and Eric Weissberg playing in Washington Square Park. “It wasn’t niche time yet,” Danny said. “Everyone was open to new possibilities and happiness.”

Kalb started out taking lessons with Jerry Silverman but Dave Van Ronk soon became his mentor. “He was only eight years older than me but it might as well have been an entire lifetime,” Danny chuckled. “He had so much heart. He was so funky. I couldn’t tell if he was a white man or a black man when I first heard him on the radio. It turned out that he was a white black person, just like Elvis Presley. He was a piece of work, very irreverent, a rebel, an anarcho-Trotskyist. Like Elvis, Dave deeply understood and brought his own thing to the black experience. They went beyond race. They were both bold, catalytic sparks. Their music didn’t come out as an imitation. That’s why I wanted to study with him. I’d come from a folk and rock ‘n’ roll background. I was playing electric guitar back in high school with a dance band called the Gay Notes,” Danny laughed. “That was before gay was gay. It was truly an American band, comprised of two Italian working class guys and two Jewish intellectuals. We played Elvis and Carl Perkins. After that fell apart I started to play acoustic guitar and went off to college in Madison, Wisconsin, where I met Bob Dylan. I was playing guitar more than studying.”

Kalb soon returned to New York where he continued his education at the University of Van Ronk, majoring in the finger-picking techniques and transcendental wisdom of the Reverend Gary Davis.

The highly-revered Reverend

“I was deeply into the blues and had heard the Reverend’s record Harlem Street Singer before I started taking lessons from Dave. I was deeply affected by the singing and the playing of this man. Some guitarists just heard his incredible playing, but for me, I saw it as a total experience in the depth of understanding of the relationship to nature and God. It was like the first time you heard Roland Kirk or Charlie Parker records or saw [John] Coltrane or Muddy Waters live. It didn’t speak of small things. It had the power to change your life. Ultimately he made me happy. Gary Davis brings people a lot of happiness. His faith in God takes you beyond a negative or sour view of the world. He didn’t worry. He just played. And that’s the key. We all worshiped Gary Davis, he was like Mount Rushmore, Mount Everest or the Atlantic Ocean.”

But it was also the early sixties, the time of the British Invasion and the exuberance of the Fab Four and the Rolling Stones could not be denied.

“I took my acoustic guitar playing and transferred it to the electric guitar. My style really grew out of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry with some Dave Van Ronk and a little bluegrass in there. I also love Django Reinhardt. But it’s not conscious. I just play from the heart,” Danny said, reaching for his old battered Gibson J-200 that he bought from Barry Kornfeld back in ’61 and began to finger-pick the blues. With bass player and trio in tow, Kalb soon formed the Danny Kalb Trio and began playing gigs at the legendary Gaslight Cafe on MacDougal Street, opening for (and inspiring) Doc Watson to show up the following night with an electric guitar, much to the shock and chagrin of the audience and the club’s owner.

Kalb’s career began to take flight as a session guitarist, accompanying Judy Collins and Dave Van Ronk on their records. But with the release of Elektra’s The Blues Project, a compendium of young urban (read white) blues singers from across the country, including Van Ronk, Spider John Koerner, Geoff Muldaur and Eric von Schmidt, Kalb not only found himself in the company of a bunch of prestigious pickers, but on a disc that sold 300,000 copies. It was time to get a band together and capitalize on the blues frenzy that was heating up across America. Kalb’s friend Artie Traum was the obvious choice for rounding out his trio of guitar, bass and drums. But when Artie headed off for Europe on summer vacation, Steve Katz of the Even Dozen Jug Band (which featured Maria Muldaur and John Sebastian) quickly filled his shoes. Katz claimed he “didn’t even own an electric guitar” when he auditioned for Danny’s new band, and was asked to join for his “tasty playing” after inaudibly strumming his Gibson J-200 fitted with a malfunctioning pick-up.

“Try the wine!” Gulp some grape with The Blues Project

The Blues Project was a fine choice for the band’s name. Not just because it already rang a bell thanks to the hot-selling album, but the blues were the touchstone for the band’s six original members, which soon included Tommy Flanders, a Jagger-esque front-man from Cambridge, MA and organist/guitarist Al Kooper, fresh from the monumental session that produced Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone.”

Kooper met his fellow “Mystic White Knights of the Blues” at an audition with Tom Wilson (Dylan’s producer at the time) at Columbia Records and although the group failed to impress the suits with Steve Katz’s mellow rendition of Eric Andersen’s “Violets of Dawn,” (perhaps they were expecting some blooze) Wilson then signed the group to MGM/Verve and Kooper was immediately recruited as a full-time member.

But ultimately the Blues Project was an eclectic mix with so many diverse styles that the group appeared to be suffering an identity crisis. While Al offered high octane R&B rave-ups, Danny was deep into the blues. At the same time, rhythm guitarist and harmonica player Steve Katz covered gentle caressing ballads like Donovan’s “Catch the Wind.” Add to that mix, bassist Andy Kulberg, whose psychedelic jazzy flute improvisations on “Flute Thing” was, as Kalb recalled “very lyrical and very adventurous.”

In 1966, the two leading “white” blues bands of the day, Greenwich Village’s own Blues Project and Chicago’s Paul Butterfield Blues Band (which featured a black rhythm section; Jerome Arnold on bass and drummer Sam Lay) were booked back to back for a weekend “showdown” at the Café Au Go Go. Danny recalled the first time he witnessed Butterfield’s legendary axeman Mike Bloomfield in action: “It was not a fun night. There was a lot of raw meat and feathers scattered ‘round the barnyard. After I first heard Michael I thought about taking up animal husbandry or woodworking,” Kalb chortled. “I was through, washed up. In awe and in deference to, and in anger at Michael Bloomfield, I immediately changed my style and started playing lots of fast notes like a mandolin.

“Over the course of the three nights “everyone was playing at the highest level and the audience was ecstatic. For the last set of the last night the two bands crowded onto the bandstand together, two drummers, two bass players, four guitarists, Kooper on organ and Butterfield on harp to jam the blues. We broke into that friendly, warm essence of black music which brought everyone together – “When the Saints Go Marching In” and that’s how it ended. No quarter was asked or given and in the end no overt damage was done.”

With the departure of the original front man Tommy Flanders over a financial dispute (he didn’t feel like he should have to pitch in for equipment as his voice was his instrument) the Blues Project soldiered on. By the time they were booked to play the Monterey International Pop Festival in June, 1967, Kooper had quit the group and played his own set.

“Not everything about the time was lovely,” Kalb grumbled. “The counterculture was turning dark and violence would soon erupt in the streets but the real problem was that as a band we weren’t coming up with anything new after a while. We weren’t writing very much. The Blues Project had broken up in California after our lead singer, Tommy Flanders left us and we didn’t know if we could go on without him. So we got together in this Los Angeles hotel room to jam before we returned to New York and went our separate ways. And it sounded pretty good. By the third day we started to realize that I could sing the blues, Steve [Katz] could handle ballads and Al [Kooper] was good at the R&B stuff. So we thought that maybe we could keep on going. We called up Howard Solomon at the Café Au Go Go in New York, who’d heard about Tommy quitting and we told him we wanted to try it again and he said okay. We went back to New York and about six months later we played a night at the club with Muddy Waters.”

Over the last few months the Blues Project had worked up a stellar arrangement of the Mississippi blues man’s “Two Trains,” building it up, section by section. “Muddy was there that night, standing by the side of the stage, watching. He meant everything to us. Everything and a half!” Kalb laughed. “After the show, as he was packing up I walked up to him and asked him what he thought. He said, ‘You really got to me.’ And that’s my reason for living today!”

“I went through a couple of really rough spots in my life,” Kalb confessed. “It all added to my understanding of myself, because it forced me to go through, what [psychologist Carl] Jung calls ‘the dark night of the soul,’ where you really have to question yourself, emotionally, politically, socially and see what’s really going on.”

These days, when he’s not playing his guitar, Danny time is spent re-examining his past, his generation’s triumphs and failures as well as the current political climate.

“A lot of us had been deeply involved in the movement. I was twenty-one in 1963 when I went on a freedom ride. They were beating up people and taking them off to jail at segregated amusement park in Baltimore. I was more scared on that bus than at any time in my life. I was not white, I was not black, I was green with fear!” Kalb laughed. “But It’s a good world,” he continued. “It’s a positive world and music heals. It’s the key to spiritual revival. Always be open and always stick to the foundation of your values.”

Last year saw the release of Grossman, Kalb and Katz which features some fine picking all around and a great Katz original, “Kettle of Fish” which Kalb points out “ends the revolution.” (The disc is available from Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop imprint.) In recent months Danny has been gigging around the east coast with his trio which includes drummer Mark Ambrosino and Bob Jones on bass (Lenny Nelson is also heard holding down the bottom on Kalb’s new disc).

I Gotta Live The Life I Sing About will be released this fall from Sojourn Records. The disc includes three Kalb originals plus the Reverend Davis’s “If I Had My Way,” which Danny has used as a closer to his shows for nearly forty years, as well as Billy Boy Arnold’s “I Wish You Would” and Mahalia Jackson’s “I Gotta Live The Life I Sing About In My Song,” which inspired the album’s title.

“I like all kinds of music. From folk to blues and classical music, any form of expression that makes sense to me and tugs at my heart,” Danny said. These days Kalb prefers the quiet songs. “It’s a great blessing to be less frantic,” Danny chuckled. “Anybody who picks up an instrument can touch God if they want to by sitting in a chair and letting the air go in and out and letting it happen to you. All the stuff just comes together. It certainly has for me later in life.”

Published in Sing Out! Volume 52#3 — Autumn 2008

Danny Kalb left this world November 19, 2022.

Below - November 14, 2012, Syracuse, NY - Danny’s last go-round with the Blues Project - from left to right - Kruth, Jonathan Kalb, Roy, Danny, and Steve on bass, playing Al’s tune, “Flute Thing.”

Your faithful author playing “Flute Thing” and “Alberta” with BP -

A personal note about playing with BP….

It’s kinda like I threw a boomerang thirty-five years ago and it came back one day when Steve Katz called and asked if i’d like to join the Blues Project for their upcoming east coast tour in November, 2012. I told him that “Flute Thing” was the second thing I learned to play on the flute (after Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Serenade to a Cuckoo). As Andy Kulberg is no longer with us, I’d be filling in for him on “Flute Thing” and playing mandolin, harmonica, perhaps a bit of guitar and the Indian zither - the bulbul tarang aka “the green machine” - The breif “Reunion Tour” began on Wednesday, November 7th, and took us around New England, NY State and City for 10 days, with Danny, his brother Jonathan on bass and guitar, Steve and Roy and no… Al Kooper didn’t join us!

PS Roy Blumenfeld is currently out touring with an all-new lineup of the “Blues Project” featuring the fine guitarist David Aguilar. Check ‘em out!

Buy Me a Coffee

Like many twentieth century American musicians Felix Cavaliere is a crazy quilt of cultural influences. Growing up in the burbs of New York City, he played Schubert and Mozart before catching the doo wop bug and forming Felix & the Escorts (which included Neil Diamond) in the early sixties. Then came the lightning bolt revelation of soul singers Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye along with the rollercoaster licks of jazz organ genius Jimmy Smith. Mesmerized by the Hammond B-3, Cavaliere played Vegas casinos, shook and shimmied to “The Peppermint Twist” with Joey Dee and the Starlighters and witnessed Beatlemania pre-Sullivan – all of which planted the seeds for the Young Rascals, three Italians and a Canadian guitarist who were tossed into the Blue-Eyed-Soul bag along with the Righteous Brothers and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels (who could kick some genuine jam). Although the Rascals never harnessed nowhere near the same kilo-wattage as the Who, Townshend and company were hardly alone when it came to playing “Maximum R&B.” (The time has finally come to give Dino Danelli’s drumming the respect it deserves. And Gene Cornish’s snarling twang wasn’t far behind that of Telecaster master Steve Cropper.)

Dino

But by April ‘67 the tight edgy combo of organ, guitar and drums that drove “Good Lovin’” to Number 1 back in’65 was nowhere to be found on “Groovin,” the laid back anthem that ushered in the Summer of Love on an ethereal breeze of harpsichord, harmonica, piano, vibes, congas and bird calls.

Felix soon found his bliss at the lotus feet of Swami Satchidananda, as he engaged in meditation and sun salutations, expanded his consciousness and the Rascal’s sonic horizons beyond the pale of his fans, fellow bandmates and record label.

The Swami

No matter where the music has taken him over the years, Felix still talks like a New Yorker, sounding more Marty Scorcese than Cowboy Jack Clement. I had to remind myself that he lives in Nashville these days and not down the block when we spoke by phone back in early December of ’07.

JK: What was your first real gig?

FC: My first gig was as the youngest member of a big band. It was a transitional time, between two periods of music. I used to do a little segment in the show, playing a Fats Domino /Jerry Lee Lewis/ Little Richard kind of thing as rock ‘n’ roll was starting to come in and before I knew it, that’s what the band became known for.

JK: Then you put together the Stereos, an integrated group and started playing talent shows.

FC: It’s not the same Stereos that made a record, which I still get credit for. Not that I mind the credit but those guys only had one hit and I got the credit for it. It never dawned on me that it would be a problem that the band was racially mixed. The fact was they were the only guys who could sing. After that I was invited to a black club in New Rochelle where I was introduced to the Hammond organ. I could not believe what I was hearing. It really affected me, just blew my brain out. I had to learn to play that thing. So I went off to school and started researching it. Then I had to actually find one. I went down to New York City and of all places it was Macy’s. Being a teenager there was no way I could afford to buy one.

JK: I’ve read somewhere that you saw the Beatles before they hit the states.

FC: Yeah, I was on tour with Joey Dee [and the Starlighters] over in Germany and Sweden when I saw the Beatles. I was a classically trained musician so I could see what they were doing. I decided what I would do when I got back over here was to find the best musicians that I could, which meant I stole the frontman from a bunch of other groups.

Dino Danelli was a hot drummer who as a teenager had already played with jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton’s group and toured the R&B circuit with Little Willie John. Playing organ in Joey Dee and the Starlighters, Felix met his future band-mates, R&B vocalist Eddie Brigati (who had taken his brother David’s place in the band) and Gene Cornish while touring Europe spreading the jubilation of “The Peppermint Twist” across the continent.

Upon their return the trio dumped Dee and hooked up with Danelli, who Felix had previously gigged with in a Las Vegas casino house band. Rehearsing down in Felix’s basement, Eddie, Gene and Dino ripped through a dozen songs until, as Cornish once remarked, they “hit magic.”

L-R -Eddie, Gene, Felix & Dino - The Young Rascals grow up (knickers and cute caps not included).

An impish prankster of the first order, Eddie showed up to the band’s first rehearsal clad in Little Lord Fauntleroy knickers. The joke stuck. Like Gene Cornish said: “Before we had a hit record, before people remembered the name, they remembered the kids with knickers.”

The time was ripe with the British Invasion in full throttle and a constant stream of soul hits percolating on AM radio. New York promoter/manager Sid Bernstein signed the Young Rascals just months before presenting the Beatles at Shea Stadium in the summer of 1965. Knickers aside, it was the band’s music and energy that ultimately impressed Ahmet Ertegun. After catching them at a Westhampton nightclub Ertegun immediately offered the Young Rascals a contract.

JK: There are a number of firsts when it comes to the Rascals. Not only were they the first rock band to sign with Atlantic but you guys were the first white group on the label. On top of that, you were actually given the license to produce your own records, at a time when creative control was virtually unheard of.

FC: I fell in love with Berry Gordy and Phil Spector, who wanted to produce us. But I didn’t want to go with Phil because I didn’t want to be a third party. Even though I adored his work, I didn’t want Phil or anybody coming along and producing the band. I wanted to do it. There was a little bit of consternation with the guys but I held my ground. We were offered deals with Columbia and Capitol but the only people that would give us that opportunity was Atlantic. The guys in the band said, ‘Who do you think you are?’ I said, ‘I know what I’m doin.’ You gotta trust me.’ This is where God stepped into our lives and put Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd with us in the studio. I thought I’d passed away and gone to heaven! Atlantic provided us with this very fertile garden, the soil was perfectly tilled. All we had to do was throw some seeds in and they grew. The environment at Atlantic Records was made for music. You were in the room where John Coltrane recorded. You could feel that presence, that life. Everyone there was interested in making the greatest music they could make. It was a great family and I was so proud to be part of it, believe me.

JK: Wow, sounds like a dream come true.

FC: I was twenty-somethin’ and walked into the room with the boy wonder - Tommy Dowd and this guy from Turkey (Arif) who talked like Count Dracula. He was a Berklee professor with a bow-tie who could tell me anything I want to know about music. I’d sit down with him at the piano and play him what I thought the chart would be, then he played it for me and I’d go oh! It was a joyous experience. In those days you had more latitude and could stretch out. We were the producers. We were in charge and had free studio time. It was incredible. Wilson Pickett, rest his soul, used to get very angry. [Affects a gravelly voice] ‘Man, I can never get in the room with those Rascals in there.’ So as long as we were makin’ hits it was fine.

JK: What was it like working with Tom Dowd?

FC: Tommy was well established before he met us. He was so far ahead of us. I’d say ‘Tom, I’d like to try this’ and he’d say ‘I already did that an hour ago, you got any more ideas?’ He taught me how to make it happen in the room, the same way jazz artists did. Make it happen and then stop the tape. I saw him do that many times. With ‘Good Lovin’’ he said, ‘Man you got it.’ I said, ‘No, I think we got another one in us.’ And he said, ‘No, you got it man!’ After it became a Number 1 record I was a believer. He knew! When the Rascals made their first record we were a live band, not a recording band. We had to learn how to sing on a mike. We spent a lot of time finding sounds. Today you can just pop in a sample that somebody worked for months on.

Atlantic’s in-house wizard engineer/producer had a mutual respect for the Rascals as well: “They were a macho band,” Dowd once said. “Three of them could sing like birds, but they played aggressively, even on ballads. There was an energy to them, a positive energy. They put on a great show and they were fun.”

Tom Dowd

FC: Tom had good ideas about music but he kind of backed off with Arif there. He knew he wasn’t needed. After a while Tommy left to work on other projects. Between Arif and me, we had it covered. Arif was unbelievable. I don’t know what to say about him other than thank God I had the pleasure and privilege to work with him. Believe me, I know I’m a lucky guy. Now if I could only dunk, then I’d be happy!

Felix had to go and promised to get back to me a few days later. That night I called Lenny Kaye, legendary punk guitarist, author (check out his latest book You Call It Madness) and producer of the classic garage band compilation Nuggets.

LK: I must have been eighteen or nineteen. I was kid goin’ to school at Rutgers in Jersey and by a stroke of luck I decided to take my date to a genuine New York disco where I saw the Young Rascals before they made their first record. I saw them at a club called the Phone Booth, which was a discotheque that had little phones which you could call a neighboring table.

It turned out that DJ Bruce Morrow had also seen the Rascals tear it up at the Phone Booth. While walking my pug, Louie, the next day I bumped into Cousin Brucie on the street in Greenwich Village.

BM: I’ll never forget my first meeting with the Young Rascals. They met me after my WABC radio show and covered me with a long muskrat coat and hustled me off to the Phone Booth. The next thing I knew, they were on the stage, performing the most amazing set. They were energetic, on target and so together. It was obvious to me that this band was going to make it big time.

Lenny the Kaye

Lenny Kaye felt the same: They were a fantastic group. I loved their arrangements. They had such an incredible dramatic impact. They were very baroque, really unique. Dino was quite an accomplished drummer. He had a very tight, military way of playing drums. And Gene’s lead on ‘I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore’ was fantastic, simple and clear. They certainly encapsulated their moment. They were definitely the sound of Long Island. There was a whole host of groups blossoming at the time with the big Hammond B-3 sound. Billy Joel was in the Hassles and there was the Vagrants and especially the Vanilla Fudge, who were quite baroque. Felix had played in Joey Dee and the Starlighters, who had that big organ sound. If you listen to Joey Dee’s version of ‘Shout’ you can find the underpinnings of the Rascal’s sound. They were essentially playing dance music. It was great to watch them. They had a real sense of presentation and a real look but their music wasn’t cute. It was as hard as rock ‘n’ roll got at that moment. They took ‘Good Lovin’’ to the stratosphere. I love ‘I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore.’ Eddie had this yearning in his voice. It was a total melodramatic classic.

The Young Rascal’s first single was recorded in November of ’65. Sung by Eddie, “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore” smoldered with passion and climbed the charts to number 52.

FC: “Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart’ [written by Pam Sawyer and Laurie Burton] was given to us by the Atlantic staff. It came from somebody at Motown publishing. We hadn’t developed a writing talent yet. We’d found [the Olympics’] ‘Good Lovin’ in a record store.

JK: In 1966 the Rascals opened for James Brown for his debut at Madison Square Garden.

FC: Yeah, our managers knew one another and so they got us on the bill. It was a freakin’ show, a real gas. We hadn’t really surfaced yet.

JK: Were you guys wearing knickers?

FC: Probably. I think so. But everybody dug us, which was good enough for me.

JK: The Rascals created a lot of controversy by demanding that black bands share the bill with them. Right from the start you were advocates for equal rights, whether you knew it or not.

FC: The Rascals had crossed the line. They played us on the black stations. The classic story is when Otis Redding came into the studio and said, “My God you guys are white! Until we saw you, how could we be sure? We had no clue.” We did a gig with the Friends of Distinction, who did “Grazin’ in the Grass.” They came up to us backstage and said, “Thank you for puttin’ us on the show because we don’t get a chance to play too much for white people. We’re always in the black thing and our music is crossover music like yours, only we’re goin’ the other way. I said “Bingo! We gotta bring the people together through the music.” I had no idea at the time [the implication of] what I was saying.

JK: Did any of the other New York bands coming up at the time inspire you at all, like the Lovin’ Spoonful or the Blues Project?

FC: I know John [Sebastian] and Al [Kooper] but the guys that really got me, if they weren’t dark, I didn’t get too excited. You know Ollie Woodson? He took over the Temptations after Eddie [Kendricks] and David [Ruffin]died. If anybody on the planet sings better than him, call me! (Laughs) Anytime I think I’m really good, I put him on. He’s ridiculous and nobody knows his name!

JK: Amazing guys like that slip through the cracks all the time. It seemed like things happened really fast for the Rascals.

FC: We started making records and we had hit after hit after hit. It was unbelievable! We recorded a live album which never surfaced but the interesting thing was that a lot of songs we played on that album mysteriously ended up being hit records for other Atlantic artists. We’d been covering songs, but the way we covered ‘em turned Atlantic on to the idea of Wilson Pickett doin’ ‘em. They got ‘Land of a 1,000 Dances’ from us and gave it to Wilson, which was cool but they never gave us any credit for it. There were some things at Atlantic that I wished I’d never seen. Like for example a record would come in from Spain and the next thing you know it would come out with an Atlantic artist doin’ the same thing.

JK: Speaking of the Latin feel, the congas on “Groovin’” were a fresh, new sound for pop radio at the time. Was the band inspired by Mongo Santamaria or Herbie Mann?

FC: I grew up listenin’ to all that stuff. I used to go to the Newport Jazz Festival. My chops were never up to where I could call myself a jazz player. I didn’t have the discipline to sit down and learn all that stuff. When you make it kind of young, you tend to let that stuff slide. But that’s where my heart always was and you gotta bring your fingers up to where your heart is.

JK: Talk about heart, King Curtis played sax on “It’s Wonderful.”

FC: Oh Curtis was bad man. He would come in and we’d throw the track on and he’d hit it in one take. I’d say, ‘Do you wanna try another one?’ and he’d say, ‘What’s wrong, don’t you like that one?’ Forget it, he was a monster! What a loss. His bass player Chuck Rainey also played on our records.

In 1968 Felix and Eddie responded to the combined tragedies of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations with “People Got To Be Free,” a steamin’ hunk of funky message music that shot straight to Number 1 and topped the Billboard charts for five weeks. Ironically Atlantic Records balked at first hearing the song, thinking the public would scoff at its lyrics, coming from a group of white boys famous for energetic odes to adolescent love But ‘People Got To Be Free,” soon became the Rascal’s hottest disc. It was also the last time they’d reach number one.

JK: As the Rascal’s music continually developed it began to carry deeper messages about the condition of the world and where it was headed.

FC: I got involved with Bobby Kennedy’s campaign and wanted to support him and throw our voices behind the cause. We played some shows [to support RFK] and were very, very active. In those days I was a very political animal. One of the things about growing up Italian in a WASP neighborhood was that I was very against racial prejudice. I felt it was wrong. Through-out college I espoused my belief that we were all created equal, except for when it comes to music (Laughs).

JK: You mean except for James Brown and Ray Charles.

FC: There ain’t no contest man. (Laughs) In ’68 I was dating a lady who was there, at the [Robert] Kennedy assassination. So I decided to write this song and bring it to my partner [Eddie]. I was serious about the whole thing. Its nice making a living and making money but once in a while you’ve got to draw the line in the sand. This is where I’m at. And like everything else I probably got a little too involved and went overboard but that’s my nature. Well, Atlantic was very opposed to it. Jerry [Wexler] gave me a hard time about it. I love him man, but we used to go at. We were both really stubborn, me, a stubborn Italian and him, a stubborn Jew. Thank God it came out and went to Number 1 in all the oppressed countries in the world – Hong Kong, South Africa, and Berlin at that time. I’m really proud of that!

JK: You’d think that issues of black and white wouldn’t be such a big deal in the music business. Of course we know that blacks were constantly ripped off by whites over the years but white people still getting uptight and making an issue over black music in the late sixties?

FC: There never has been a conflict with me. There never was. This is music! When I made that statement [about bringing people together through music] and it came out, well, as they say, “Oy vey!” I had no idea the trouble it would cause. We lost so much work. Stokley Carmichael and people like that came up to us and said, ‘We understand what you’re doing and we appreciate it.’ God put us on a black label and there was a reason for it – the music married, the feeling married. Hey, without Africa there’d be no drums except for marching bands (Laughs). There’s no such thing as rock ‘n’ roll without the black contingent because there’d be no rhythm.

JK: How did you connect with so many great jazz musicians?

FC: Bein’ on Atlantic, all these jazz dudes were walkin’ down the hall, guys like Hubert Laws. And Arif would always bring in ace players. I loved them and wondered how I could get them on my records as I wasn’t a great soloist. They loved it as they were introduced to the white rock world and I loved it because – look at the friggin’ solos I got. It was part of the joyous, harmonious thing that Atlantic created.

JK: Once the Rascals began branching out and making albums instead of focusing on hit singles, Atlantic’s support virtually dried up over night, which seems odd as they released some of the more left-field jazz of the day by Yusef Lateef, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Les McCann and Eddie Harris, stuff that Joel Dorn produced.

FC: Now there’s an A student for you. Joel’s a gem. But look, a friend of mine once wrote a song called, ‘It’s Not the Money, It’s the Money,’ (Laughs) Face it, that’s what it’s all about. It’s not about art, although they were one of the most artistic labels that ever existed.

JK: Well, the Rascals were masters of the hot, smokin’ three-minute pop tune. It seems like you were stuck in a similar boat as the Beach Boys, whose fans abandoned them after Brian [Wilson] started getting arty. Do you think the fans and Atlantic just want you to stay a great garage rock band and never change?

FC: Yeah, I think that’s what they expected us to do. But it’s hard for an artist to stay in one place. Even with classical music I couldn’t stop extrapolating until my teacher finally had enough.

JK: Like the Beatles with Rubber Soul, the Rascals eventually had to grow up. So you dropped the knickers and the “Young” from your name and suddenly you’re putting out more introspective stuff like ‘Groovin’’ and ‘It’s A Beautiful Morning.’

FC: Without the Beatles none of this would have happened. It’s not like they were the end all and be all of music, but their contribution was beyond words. The radio had to play the Beatles so when they stretched out, everybody could stretch out. And the doors they opened? There’s no words that can say. They were brilliant and beautiful. If a duck sang it, it would be great.

JK: Though they ‘Groovin’’ and ‘People Got To Be Free’ were big commercial hits, they resonated profoundly with the counterculture. Why didn’t the Rascals play Woodstock?

FC: One of the reasons that groups become supergroups is their management and their marketing. The guys behind the Beatles, the Stones and Zeppelin were very good managers. We didn’t have that special ingredient. Our manager wasn’t one of those guys who couldn’t see what needed to be done, which was to get ourselves to place of rarity. For example, you never saw Zeppelin on television. But we were on Ed Sullivan so many times I had my own locker. (Laughs) You’re here again? C’mon man lets do something different, like maybe PBS or something. But I didn’t know anything about marketing.

JK: Other than the Beatles you were one of the first groups to bring a spiritual vibe into your music.

FC: Well, I lost my mom when I was very young and I’ve always been looking into what life’s all about y’know… But George [Harrison] had a hand in helping me with that. I went to his home in England and I asked him before I actually jumped into the water ‘cause I’m the kind of guy who goes all the way into the swimming pool. I don’t just dip my foot. So I asked him, ‘Is this for real?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely. No question about it.’ I didn’t really need much more than that. I had met my teacher, Swami Satchidananda at a television show. [Producer] Steve Paul was doing a pilot for a show and asked us to appear on it. We said sure. I had just finished reading [Yogananda’s classic] Autobiography of a Yogi and meeting him was like lightning, like hearing the Hammond organ for the first time. I told the guys I’d catch up with them in a few minutes and got on line to meet the master and all the kids knew me ‘cause they were there to see the show. But I didn’t care. I was oblivious. So I got up there and touched his feet with my hands, looked up and saw his eyes and there was nobody home. I kept staring at him and I saw the universe. I saw the void. And then he tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Excuse me, could you move along, you’re blocking the line.’ (Laughs) I felt a putz. I lost it. I was overcome. I never saw anything so clean. I was blessed to meet somebody like him. As we were going through these years of all of the hits, and the joy and the bliss I really became aware of what I was about. At that time, my job was to connect people to the source and I thought, hey, I’ll gladly do this. As we learned to lose our ego and disappear into the void, my band couldn’t read it.

JK: Sorry to bring up the Beach Boy comparison again, but when Brian started coming up with all of those intricate arrangements and spent more and more time in the studio, the band eventually mutinied. And they never went anywhere after that, just stayed an oldies band.

FC: Well, you’re right on. Swamiji [Satchidananda] used to tell us that if you want something no matter what it may be, treat it like your shadow. You turn your back on your shadow, but it follows you wherever you go. So the band, when they saw whatever was following me, notoriety, more interviews, they totally misunderstood it. Now, turn the clock ahead thirty or forty years and Eddie’s starting to get into it more [spiritual philosophy]. When first I introduced Laura Nyro to Swamiji she literally burst into tears. I had to leave the room and leave them alone.

JK: Her album Christmas and the Beads of Sweat is an under-appreciated gem.

FC: Laura was the most pure artist I ever met in my life. She only played in two keys. She had no idea what she was playing – flated fifths or elevenths… She would listen to the mixes in mono after I worked my ass off. She could care less. She had no monetary aspirations what-so-ever. And she wasn’t that wealthy until later years when her publishing was sold. All those Muscle Shoal guys came up for the session. She’s changing tempos and keys, putting retards in the middle of songs and they were right with everywhere she went. They were perfect gentleman, saying, ‘Yes m’am, if that’s what you want.’

JK: And Duane Allman played guitar on that record. How did you wind up involved with that project?

FC: I became friendly with Laura Nyro through David Geffen who asked me to produce it. I said I’d love to. I told him, ‘I just love workin’ with Arif, let me bring him in.’ She was a Columbia artist. So we started Mevlana Productions, named after a Sufi mystic. Y’know Turkey was once a feudal empire and that’s how they treated everyone at Atlantic, including Arif, who was Turkish! He was on salary and workin’ like crazy. So we produced the album and within a month Arif was vice-president at Atlantic. They got the message! If they didn’t take care of him, he was gonna leave.

With Search and Nearness, which featured improvisations by Ron Carter, Hubert Laws, and Joe Farrell, the Rascal’s music continued to grow in ways the fans and even members of the band couldn’t fathom. Meanwhile record and concert sales nosedived.

Lenny Kaye again: When the birds started twittering behind the tracks, and ‘Groovin’’ happened they started to get artsy and jazzy and the whole sense of their music became more pastoral. They moved into progressive rock, toward a more arranged, softened sound. They lost a lot of their grit. The classic Rascals were a true group and when it became more of Felix’s thing, the others couldn’t find a place within it. When they started to stretch out it didn’t sit well. They strayed from their roots. They were originally a dance band with a strong sense of rhythm behind them. It takes a very special group to be able to evolve and move out of their formula. Maybe it would’ve been better if Felix had gone off to do his thing without the umbrella of the Rascals, which he did after a while.

With Brigati and Cornish gone, Dino and Felix signed to Columbia Records in 1971, recording Peaceful World and The Island Of Real, which Cavaliere considers the best album of his career. Eddie and Gene were replaced with Buzzy Feiten (guitarist with Paul Butterfield’s Blues Band) session musician Robert Popwell, who’d worked with Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, and Philly soul singer Ann Sutton. But by 1972 the Rascals called it quits. With thirteen gold and two platinum albums later, the ride was finally over.

In 1997 the Rascals were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But even thirty years and sales of thirty million records couldn’t quell the long-time animosity between the band. At the ceremony all were accounted for, with Eddie Brigati standing alone on the opposite side of the stage to accept his award.

JK: It’s sad to think that after all the great music and the various ways we’ve tried to raise our consciousness over the years that we’re still faced with so many of the same problems that plagued us back when the Rascals were rockin.’

FC: I look at our world today and don’t know what to say anymore. I live in the Bible belt now. It’s 2007 and we know all this stuff about atoms but we still can’t figure out that we’re all really the same yet? It’s very baffling.

Published in Waxpoetics # 30 - 2008

If you happened to have read Bob Dylan’s 2004 memoir Chronicles, you probably caught a reference to a little-known folk singer from his early days in Greenwich Village named Karen Dalton. Bob, who recalled singing “with her a couple of times,” had some heavy praise for Karen Jean Cariker, as she was formerly known in her hometown Enid, Oklahoma, callIf ing her his “favorite singer. Karen [which all agree] had a voice like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed” [which no one else has ever claimed, although Dalton recorded a sultry version of Reed’s “It Hurts Me Too” on a lightly fingerpicked 12-string in 1969]. Beyond her reputation as the “Hill-Billie Holiday,” Karen was also said to have been the muse for the Band’s yearning Basement Tapes lament “Katie’s Been Gone,” sung by Richard Manuel.

Dylan - L, Dalton - C, Neil - R at the Cafe Wha?

“She can sure sing the shit out of the blues,” crowed Fred Neil, another Greenwich Village legend from back in the day, who not only possessed a deep natural groove to his folk blues but wrote such enduring anthems as “The Dolphins,” and “Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me.” “Her voice,” is so unique that to describe it would take a poet,” Neil claimed. A daunting task indeed. Concoct all the metaphors you can, from purple to fleeting, but Dalton’s weary warble speaks for herself when she sings “I’ll never get out of these blues alive.” There’s no doubting her pain for a minute. As Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders once put it, “Karen made Janis Joplin sound like Betty Boop.”

Dalton’s music is not always easy to listen to. Tragedy clung to her like sinister perfume. Her quavering delivery and the way her songs wobble and stagger before coming to a sudden end, show little to none of the professional production values found on Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez records of the day. Arrangements be damned. Overdubs on Karen’s albums often seem like an afterthought, an attempt to sweeten the tracks. Although surrounded by excellent studio musicians, she usually sounded best solo. Be sure to hunt down the priceless black and white footage of her on Youtube performing the lilting, lazy “Blues Jumped the Rabbit,” recorded in Summerville, Colorado in 1970. Also strongly recommended is a video of Ms. Dalton fingerpicking her Gibson B-45 twelve-string guitar (complete with a D’Armond pick-up) in some funky folk grotto, which helps bring the long-haired earth-mother troubadour with the turned-down eyes to life.

Having a strong aversion to the studio, Dalton recorded sporadically over her short, tumultuous career beginning with It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s going to Love You the Best (for Capitol Records in 1969) and two years later In My Own Time (1971). Various rarities, including a live album called Cotton Eyed Joe recorded in 1962, was later released in 2007, followed by 2008’s stripped-down Green Rocky Road, a portfolio of home recordings cut in Colorado between 1962 and 1963. More unreleased tracks entitled 1966 came bobbing to the surface in 2012 and three years later, Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs by Karen Dalton appeared in 2015.

Hoping to fill in a couple of cracks in Karen’s mysterious history, I recently interviewed a few of her old friends and collaborators, including her one-time producer, ex-pat Harvey Brooks, (bassist with Bob Dylan, the Electric Flag and Miles Davis) currently living in Israel.

Brooks - Center - with the Electric Flag

“I first met Karen in Woodstock through Michael Lang and Fred Neil in 1970 when Lang asked me to produce her new album In My Own Dream,” Brooks recalled. “She loved and respected Billie Holiday and was honored by the comparison but Karen sang Karen. That was all she knew about singing. Most of her influences [on the guitar and banjo] came from rural mountain music and later people like Fred Neil. She played the mood and feel of the song that she was interpreting. I was able to arrange a large part of the rhythm tracks to her taste because of this quality.”

“I didn’t know Karen well,” veteran Greenwich Village singer/songwriter Eric Andersen confessed. “Mostly by reputation and myth. But she sang beautifully on the afternoon I met her in her Woodstock rental house. Fred [Neil] played guitar and I hummed along. She closed her eyes dreamily on a blues. I loved her attitude, loved her singing, loved her soul. She and Billie Holiday were truly sisters in more ways than one.”

Perhaps it should be pointed out that Dalton herself, claimed her brassy, laid-back, behind the beat phrasing was more inspired by Bessie Smith, than Ms. Holiday, although she recorded and often performed “God Bless the Child.”

“Karen was an interpreter of song. She enjoyed finding good songs and making them her own,” Harvey continued. “Writing songs was not something she did. She felt that her time was better spent finding that special song. Before we started recording Karen, Mike Lang and I spent many hours listening to demos, albums and calling our friends to find songs that would be fun, that would say something, feel good and be challenging to record. After I worked out the song forms with Karen we went to Bearsville Studios to record the rhythm tracks. Karen was comfortable because she sang live with band and we had the option to use the vocal or not which we could determine at a later time. On the tunes like ‘Katie Cruel,’ we did them live with Karen playing and singing. She had consistent time in her playing. At this point in her career, I believe she wanted to make a real attempt to break through her obscurity and was open to my suggestions. We had mutual respect for each other.”

Dalton’s personal life was quite tumultuous. Everyone who knew her would eventually witness the impact drugs had on her life.

“Karen had serious problems with drugs and alcohol,” Brooks concurred. “Her addictions led to ill health and eventually the premature death of another great vocal innovator.

“I hung with Karen and her husband, but she was stoned most of the time,” Mark Ross recalled. “America’s Most Famous Unknown Folksinger,” multi-instrumentalist Mark Ross first came to Greenwich Village in 1967, after the folk scene had already peaked. A new pack of self-styled singer-songwriters and aspiring rock bands now dominated Bleecker and MacDougal Street’s legendary folk clubs like the Kettle of Fish, the Gaslight, and Café Wha?, which had featured nightly sets by Fred Neil, Odetta and Ian and Sylvia.

“By 1968 I was kitchen boy, lighting and sound man, and permanent third act at the Gaslight on MacDougal Street. All for five bucks a night, and a lot of nights I slept on the lobby carpet of the club,” Ross laughed. “Karen was wonderful on stage. She was a riveting singer who phrased behind the beat. She played mostly traditional songs on a long-necked five-string banjo, which was two frets longer than usual. She tuned it down to D instead of E. It was so dire in the Village at the time. During the day, we’d go busking up at the bandstand in Central Park, playing songs like Woody Guthrie’s “The Old Cracked Looking Glass” and “Katie Cruel,” [a song she so strongly identified with that the name above her doorbell to her Sullivan Street apartment read “K.T. Kruel”].

However you choose to spell it, “Katy Cruel” originated as an old Scottish folk tune, which Karen picked on her banjo in a sprightly claw-hammer style. Today the lyric continues to stand as a haunting metaphor for her dark odyssey from Oklahoma, to New York City to Woodstock.

“When I first came to town, they called me the roving jewel.

Now they’ve changed their tune, they call me Katy Cruel.”

Between poverty, addiction, and a tumultuous personal life - she allegedly lost a pair of bottom front teeth that were punched out after getting in between two lovers who furiously duked it out over her affections. Not a great look for publicity pics. But Dalton never seemed particularly interested in publicity. Karen was something of a phantom when it came to the music business. There is still no known recorded interview with her, and only a few photos remain, although a few rare clips can be found on Youtube of her picking guitar outside of a cabin and doing chores around the kitchen, living the rustic back to the country dream that rock stars like Bob Dylan, the Band, and Neil Young exemplified in the bucolic backwoods of Woodstock and Topanga Canyon.

While most folksingers who came through the ranks of the Greenwich Village clubs like Folk City and the Bitter End were raised as college educated/middle class kids, Dalton’s kin were closer to the source. They sang in church and presented Karen with a fiddle when she was just a child.

Peter Stampfel described Dalton as “a nineteenth century cowgirl/pioneer woman,” yet simultaneously described her as “queenly” and “brutally honest,” to the point where “she could intimidate anyone.” Part Irish, part Cherokee, Karen appeared quite strong-willed but Stampfel revealed a more vulnerable side of her personality when he recalled rehearsing with Dalton for gigs that never happened. She would often wind up finding some last-minute excuse like “feeling under the weather” and inevitably cancelling the performance. “She disliked performing almost as much as she loved music,” Peter explained. Karen preferred to “just play music with friends in her living room,” which perfectly explains the “porchy” sound and feel of most of her recordings, except for In My Own Time, a mixed bag which leapt from the soulful sway of Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” to a punchy take of the Band’s “In a Station.” While Dalton’s live set was comprised of traditional folk songs, her records featured recent compositions written by her peers, Fred Neil and Tim Hardin.

“No one was interested in the old songs anymore,” Mark Ross said. “By the late sixties, you had to be a singer-songwriter to get a record contract. Karen got by because she had such a powerful voice.”

Since her tragic passing from “an AIDS related disease” in 1993, Ms. Dalton, like Nick Drake, has had a more successful posthumous career. The obsession of a small but fervent cult continues to this day. Beyond the sporadic rare release of some newly discovered home-made tape, is the recent publication of a 160 page bio/comic book, published in September, 2017, entitled Karen Dalton – Jeunesse d’une Femme Libre, de Greenwich Village à Woodstock, written in French and illustrated by Cedric Rassat and Ana Rousse.

Everything about Karen Dalton leaves us wondering, wanting more, to find some sense of closure to the enduring saga of her sad, short life. Years later, as various pieces of the puzzle continue to appear, we are still attempting to see the whole picture of her understated brilliance.

This article first appeared in the British mag Folk Roots #417

Growing up in rural Gore, Oklahoma, Joe Melson’s musical odyssey began leading a local group called the Fannin County Boys that played school dances and whatever small clubs where they could find a gig. After graduating high school Joe moved to Texas, enrolling at Odessa College where he sang with a rockabilly band called the Cavaliers. Eventually Melson crossed paths with Ray Rush, a local impresario who introduced him to Roy Orbison.

According to Melson, both Roy and Claudette adored his song “Raindrops,” (a gentle waltz of lost love which Orbison later recorded on his first album Lonely and Blue) while Joe was struck by the potential of Orbison’s voice. As both men were already capable of writing “a pretty good song,” on their own, they reckoned they might come up with something extraordinary if they put their heads together. Joe claimed there was no set format to their organic approach to composing. For inspiration they’d cruise around together, they carefully listening to analyzing the latest sounds pouring from their dashboard speaker, grabbing catchy bits of lyrics and melodies that they’d later fashion their new songs on.

As working at home with Claudette and the baby was out of the question and the Caddy was too cramped for both of them, Roy and Joe rented adjacent rooms at the Odessa Motel, holing-up for hours at a time, working alone at first, coming up with a smattering of scraps and phrases before sitting down together with a couple of guitars to hash out and refine their ideas. Their original attempts were immediately abandoned. But after Melson played Roy a particularly hip guitar riff which Orbison deemed “uptown,” they’d found the hook for their first successful collaboration.

“Uptown,” Roy’s second single for Monument, was a snappy little number about a social climbing bellhop with an eye on the girls and big plans for the future. Driven by Bob Moore’s syncopated bass walk and Boots Randolph’s raspy strip club tenor sax, “Uptown” sounded like something you’d hear in the Rat Pack’s repertoire more than the commercial country music produced in Nashville at the time. Joe Melson dubbed “Uptown” “class rock.”

Melson - L, Orbison - R

When Roy approached Fred with his brainstorm of a using string section to give “Uptown” a shmeer of sonic gloss, Foster told him “‘Good luck finding one in Nashville.’ Nobody was using them at the time. Most folks were listening to fiddles on the Grand Ole Opry. The only thing that was holding the Nashville Symphony together in those days was violin rosin! But if that’s what he wanted I wasn’t gonna stand in his way.”

“Anita Kerr called me and said ‘I found four string players that I think will be alright.’ Anita was a great artist and pianist in her own right. She kept cotton in her ears all the time. She said she couldn’t stand the sound of traffic because it was out of tune. She had perfect pitch. She’d blow into a bottle of Heineken and tell you it was in E flat. And she was right! She’d line us all up and conduct us singing ‘On Top of Old Smoky.’ She would meet and talk with the musicians and work very hard at the arrangements.”

The glorious shimmer of a string section (no matter how humble their origin) on their song made Melson ecstatic. Both he and Roy claimed it was “the most beautiful sound in the world.” But Wesley Rose, the former accountant who fancied himself a record producer, considered the extra-added expense self-indulgent and extravagant. Doubting his client’s lack of star power, Wes would confide to Fred his fear that Roy could never make the big time because of his looks. Rose’s remark caused Foster to lose whatever dwindling respect he had left for him. “With friends like these,” Fred said, “who needs enemies?”

Released in January 1960, “Uptown” was Orbison’s first record since “Ooby Dooby” to hit the Billboard charts, hustling its way to Number 72. Although it failed to turn the record industry on its ear, the modest success of “Uptown” assured Roy and Joe and the folks at Monument that they were at least barking up the right tree.

The B-Side to “Uptown” was another story altogether. Anyone listening closely to Roy’s songs was sure to discover some sinister undercurrents running through his lyrics. Although disappointment, heartbreak and betrayal were common themes in Roy’s music “Pretty One,” the second keeper of Orbison and Melson’s partnership, was a particularly creepy portrait of a spurned stalker out for revenge. Roy’s breathy vocal was riveting, bone chilling stuff, sung from the point of view of a jilted boyfriend warning the flirty girl (who he never refers to by name but continues to call his “Pretty One” despite her wanting nothing more to do with him) that she will soon have her come-uppance one day when she discovers her youth and beauty have faded. The singer sounds disturbed yet oddly calm. There’s no need for him to stoop to sadism like throwing scalding coffee in her lovely face and scarring her for life like Lee Marvin’s character in The Big Heat. Instead the singer takes pleasure in biding his time, knowing that time will pay his darling “Pretty One” back for all that she’s done.

John Lennon, a big fan and influenced by Roy’s music, was once an angry young man himself, who wrote plenty of “stalker songs” early on in his career that included “You Can’t Do That” and “Run for Your Life.” Whether taking perverse pleasure in pushing his fans’ buttons or revealing his dark side, John, in the bridge to Paul McCartney’s chipper little Summer of Love ditty “Getting Better,” casually reveals that he beat his woman and “kept her apart from the things that she loved.” One might argue it’s only a song but beneath their cheery façade, the Beatles as well as “the sweetest man in rock & roll,” (as Rolling Stone’s Steve Pond later dubbed Roy) apparently had plenty of demons to wrestle with.

By March 1960, Orbison’s all-star team of writers, musicians and arrangers were all in place, working together to create a sound that would sell millions of records. Although it never made Number 1, Roy’s next single for Monument made him a star.

“We approached things a little differently back then. At least I know I did.” Fred Foster told journalist Rachel Di Gregorio. “I told Roy, let’s forget about gimmicks. His first success had been this little teen thing called ‘Ooby Dooby.’ And I said that’s not going to endure. We need to make music that will last; that we can be proud of. I always thought, lets make every record as good as we can possibly make it, put it out and just hope it sells enough so we can continue to do this. Roy agreed with this mentality.”

Bill Porter, who engineered all of Orbison’s classic Monument sides greatly admired Fred Foster’s “uncanny ability to pick the right kind of song, to pick the right people to do the arrangements and then [step] out of the picture and [leave] it alone.”

While both Melson and Orbison claimed to have come up with the title to “Only the Lonely,” rather than break-up their budding partnership, they ultimately agreed to disagree over the rankling issue. Roy maintained he’d originally written the song with Elvis in mind and even tried delivering it to The King early one morning when he pulled up to the gates of Graceland at the break of dawn in his Cadillac with Melson riding shotgun. The guard soon returned with a note from Presley saying he had a houseful of company who were still sleeping off last night’s party. Whatever his condition, Elvis was unable to answer the door. Presley blew him off, albeit gently, and promised to catch up with Roy again soon in Music City. He didn’t.

According to Fred Foster, Elvis always kept an ear open to whatever Roy was doing: “Whenever we released a new record I’d get a call from Elvis’s people. Sometimes it was Lamar Fike, a couple times it was Elvis himself, requesting a few boxes of the latest single, which he’d pass along to his friends.” Whether he was partying or deep in slumber The King had missed the boat with “Only the Lonely,” as did the Everly Brothers, who turned a deaf ear to the song when Roy tried to sell it to them before finally cutting it himself.

While Orbison’s gentleness was unique for most male singers of his day, Johnny Ray’s 1951 single “Cry,” revealed a new level of vulnerability and sensitivity previously unimaginable. Ray’s live shows regularly climaxed as he rose from the piano and threw himself to the floor, tearing his hair out and weeping uncontrollably in an inconsolable fit. In contrast to World War II vets who were expected to silently suck up the devastating trauma they’d recently witnessed on the battlefield, such unbridled displays of unbridled emotionalism were unheard of from a man who wasn’t considered deranged or insane. Johnny’s histrionics would soon earn him the dubious title of “The Prince of Wails.” The kids ate it up, wholesale. Ray’s over-the-top shtick quickly reached new extremes when Screaming Jay Hawkins’ 1956 hit “I Put a Spell On You” featured lunatic ravings that would have proved any man certifiable.

Even James Brown wasn’t above feigning such theatrical breakdowns with “Please, Please, Please.” Dropping to one knee the Godfather of Soul would beg and plead for redemption until his faithful attaché helped him back to his feet again. Draping him in a velvet cape, he gently led him away, a broken man. But just as Brown reached the edge of the stage, he would spin around on the heel of his shoe and leap back to the microphone again to sing one last chorus, whipping his crowd into a frenzy.

The pervading mood of melancholia soon shifted to one of morbidity, triggered by Nicholas Ray’s benchmark 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause which culminated in a deadly drag race scene, when the new kid in town, played by James Dean bailed from his car at the last moment before it flew over a cliff. His opponent wasn’t as lucky and died senselessly over a macho game of chicken.

Teen tragedy sagas (the tackier the better) would reach their apex (or nadir, depending on your perspective) nearly a decade later in 1964 with Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve,” which featured such campy production touches as screeching tires and angelic harps crescendos, courtesy of the brilliant Beach Boy, Brian Wilson. In a bizarre coincidence Jan Berry would become partially paralyzed two years later, after crashing his Corvette just a few blocks from the deadly corner they’d made famous.

Years before Berry’s life was forever changed on that fateful night in Beverly Hills, Mark Dinning had soared to the top of the charts in 1959 with his masterpiece of macabre kitsch, “Teen Angel.” Over a gently strummed acoustic guitar, (undoubtedly influenced by the Kingston Trio and the growing folk revival) Mark sang a maudlin ballad of a young girl squashed by a train one night after she returned to the tracks to fetch her high school ring.

Hoping to cash in on the fashionable mood of gloom, Roy and Joe struggled with writing “Come Back To Me My Love,” which caused Fred Foster to wince in its obvious mimicry of Dinning’s haunted hit. Foster wisely suggested they scrap the tune but save Melson’s back-up vocal hook, a catchy, empty-headed string of nonsense syllables and work it into a new song which quickly became the counter melody to “Only the Lonely.”

Recorded on March 25^th 1960, “Only the Lonely” had more in common with the high-polished pop cranked out by New York’s Brill Building writers than anything coming out of Nashville. Orbison’s vocals, in style and spirit were much closer to Neil Sedaka than the chart-topping country singers of the day.

Released on May 1^st, 1960, “Only The Lonely” was backed by “Here Comes That Song Again.” Orbison’s smooth as glass vocals slid effortlessly over the loping syncopated beat, accented by a “Chop Sticks” style piano and the luminescent chime of a xylophone [played by multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy] releasing a spontaneous pandemic of goose-bumps amongst the hopelessly insecure from coast to coast. Meanwhile on the other side of the pond, Jeff Lynne, Roy’s future producer and fellow Traveling Wilbury counted himself amongst the lonely souls that Orbison was confiding in. Add to that a clutch of back-up singers cooing Melson’s counter-melody that was so mellow and catchy, it had most of America (and the rest of the world) singing along before they knew what they were doing or what the hell “dum dum dum dummy doo-wah” even meant.

Bill Porter would also play an integral role in the song’s creation. “There’s a story about “Only the Lonely,” and I’m gonna sort of take credit for the Orbison sound, because as a result of what happened with that recording, he had a trademark,” Bill told journalist Michael Fremer in 2009.

At first Porter was perplexed over how to record a piece of music with such a wide dynamic range. He watched quizzically as Roy gently strummed his guitar, working out the vocals with a couple of guys he assumed were hangers-on, who seemed to be “sort of like singing” at best. The next thing Bill knew, Roy turned to him and said, “‘That’s the sound I want.’ These guys are whispering the words and I thought, my God! I’ll never get that on the mix. If I opened the mike up that much, it would let everything else in.”

Porter like most engineers traditionally built his mix off the rhythm section of guitar, piano, bass, and drums, and then added “the sweetening strings” back-up vocals and finally “put the artist on top,” in “kind of like a pyramid.” With “Only The Lonely” he was forced to throw out the map and take the uncharted route. Bill took Joe’s gentle countermelody and “mixed down from that instead of mixing up [which allowed him to] get that on top of the mix fairly easy.” That “dum dum” sound became Orbison’s trademark. That’s what made that record,” Porter pointed out, “that soft, breathy vocal.”

“Only the Lonely” clearly had a lot of angles to it, some of them unimagined by Roy and his crew who all pooled their talents in to make it happen. Rock journalist turned deejay Dave Marsh’s take on the song was both surprising and undoubtedly aggravating to Roy’s fiercely devoted fans. While “not a song about masturbation,” Marsh claimed that “masturbating may be the only solace for an artist whose persona is as desperately paranoiac as Roy Orbison’s.” Dave felt the singer’s overwhelming sense of longing and isolation created “the perfect setting for the utter self-pity that so often accompanies wanking.”

Sad and hilarious as Dave’s theory is, he had a point. Beyond the obvious lyrical metaphor, the song’s gentle rhythm steadily bumps the melody along until it reaches a strenuous crescendo. As the song builds to its glorious climax, Roy hits an impossibly high note that, as Marsh writes, “shrugs off all the agony.”* Perhaps Monument should have released “Only the Lonely” with a couple of cigarettes and a complimentary lighter.

Whether or not Orbison was aware of the subliminal messages encoded within his music, he appeared that July on American Bandstand, lip-synching his latest hit for a throng of awkward adolescents, under the auspices their clean-cut host, “America’s Oldest Teenager,” Dick Clark.

Clark liked his rock ‘n’ roll clean and wholesome and presented it that way, while Mr. Marsh and his kind would just have to wait until 1967 for the Beatles’ lysergic opus Sergeant Pepper to start spinning records backwards to get their satanic kicks.

Although Orbison originally believed “Only the Lonely” was “an exclusive statement,” to his surprise he would soon discover “the club is very big,” (pg 25 roadkill) bigger than he had any idea. Peaking at Number 2, “Only the Lonely” was unable to stop Connie Francis, Brenda Lee and Elvis Presley from skipping ahead of him and capturing the top slot.

Meanwhile Roy and his band toured relentlessly behind the song, ping-ponging across the continent in an ill-conceived, haphazard schedule that not only drained him physically but managed to exclude some of the obvious and more lucrative venues. Oddly enough Roy Orbison wouldn’t perform in Chicago or L.A until years later, in the 1980s.

Recorded on August 8^th, 1960, Orbison and Melson’s follow-up seemed like commercial fluff compared to their most recent single. “Blue Angel” offered no haunted portraits or psychologically disturbed characters or dark tales of unrequited love. Lyrically “Blue Angel” was rather sappy, a trite knock-off about teen love, all too typical of its time. Its power lay in its simple but insidious melody. Over a chorus of cascading sha la la’s and string of silly yip yips that incited months of involuntary sing-alongs, Roy ended the tune with a stunning falsetto that was simultaneously loose and controlled as a Zen master’s brushstroke.

“Blue Bayou,” another Orbison/Melson hit.

Joe Melson had grown weary of living in Roy’s shadow. What began as a lucky break had soon become a cruel fate. As Orbison’s partner Joe helped him climb to the top of the charts with his catchy refrains and blue reveries. A fan of R&B and doo-wop, Melson coached Roy in the vernacular of the style, hipped him to singing behind the beat, which took some of the square edges off his very white delivery. In return, Roy gave Joe a brief shot in the spotlight, but try as he might Melson never stole Orbison’s thunder.

Personality-wise they were like night and day. While Orbison was laid-back and unassuming, Melson as Terry Widlake recalled, was “always pumped up and preening in front of the mirror, until it nearly drove his wife insane. I think it constantly ate at him, that everybody was chasing after the four-eyed nerd who sang the songs instead of him.”

“Joe Melson wanted to be a star. He had more hair than any guy I’d ever seen,” Bob Moore chuckled. “He was a little strange but he had a lot of talent.”

Signed to a publishing deal with Acuff/Rose Publishing, Melson would cut a total seven singles for their in-house label, Hickory Records, backed by Nashville “A” Team, the same crack band heard on Orbison’s tracks. But the records didn’t exactly jump right off the shelves. I think it constantly ate at him, that everybody was chasing after the four-eyed nerd who sang the songs instead of him.” Whatever notoriety Joe ultimately enjoyed, he eventually realized, came from his association with Roy Orbison. While “Melson” never exactly became a household name, Roy, with his new partner Bill Dees, soon hit the top ten in the U.S. and Number 1 in England with “It’s Over.”

Over the years both Joe Melson (Roy’s first significant collaborator) and Bill Dees remained in Roy’s shadow, all but forgotten, hoping one day the world would finally discover their integral contributions to the music that made him a star. In his liner notes to Blue and Lonesome, Roy’s friend and neighbor, Boudleaux Bryant claimed it would be “an unpardonable oversight to overlook the contribution of Joe Melson to Roy’s meteoric rise to stardom.” Bryant pointed to the album’s five songs on which they collaborated, including “Only The Lonely” and “Blue Angel.” “Together,” he wrote, their songwriting created “a perfect vehicle” for Orbison’s voice.

Bryant also admired how Roy and Joe transformed the innocuous “doo-wah” a phrase routinely employed by 1950’s back-up singers, into “a pleasing little vocal gimmick” along with an entire vocabulary of “yea-yeas” and “dum de-dums” which were “artfully woven” in and out, throughout the songs which, Boudleaux claimed, “when combined with Roy’s vocal gymnastics made magic.”

Frustrated in the role of Roy’s junior partner, Melson knew he’d never have a hit of his own as long as he remained low man on Orbison’s totem pole. And Roy, like many of his peers began touring with pick-up bands (whose members were increasingly younger and paid less in exchange for the rare opportunity to jam with a legend) in lieu of footing the bills for his whole entourage. Joe would soon find himself left behind on Roy’s Trans-Atlantic tours.

With titles like “No One Really Cares,” Melson’s solo material belied a sense of hopelessness in the situation. Banking on his association with Roy, Joe continued carrying Orbison’s mantel of the perennial loser (which he helped to create). But Melson’s slick pompadour and lucky somabitch smile only backfired on him, making his brand of lonely sound bitter.

As their partnership fizzled out, Orbison began writing on his own, before temporarily collaborating with Candyman/rhythm guitarist Bobby Goldsboro, who later scored a Number 1 hit with the cloyingly sweet/tragic tale of a young widower called “Honey.” And whenever he felt uninspired, Roy knew he could always count on Cindy Walker and Don Gibson whose tunes were custom-tailored to fit his hard luck persona.

Complain as they might, Orbison’s collaborators found themselves in some exhilarating circumstances they most likely would never have experienced left to their own devices.

Joe Melson in his later years.

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“Alf” AKA Freddie Lennon

Not surprisingly Julia’s family disapproved of Alf, who they considered a nothing more than a lowlife. Employed as a ship’s steward, they doubted whether Lennon could ever be a reliable husband, as he was often gone at sea for long stretches of time. But despite their repeated warnings and protests, Julia impulsively married Alf (after having taunted him to propose) in a private civil service on December 3, 1938. Just barely two years later, John Lennon was born. By then, the war was in full tilt, despite Hitler’s false promises of peace to Chamberlin. For two nights prior to October 9, 1940, Liverpool had been pummeled by the Luftwaffe’s bombs. But on the night John arrived, the city was strangely calm. Two nights later, the German bombers returned once again.

With little available employment in Liverpool, Alf’s time away at sea steadily began to increase. He’d been gone for a six month stretch, between September 1942 and February 1943 and then shipped out again the following July, this time for sixteen months, in which he was arrested and jailed twice - once in Algeria and then winding up stranded in New York City, before returning to Liverpool, only to discover Julia, who had no clue whether he was dead or alive, was now pregnant with another man’s child. To help curb the inevitable gossip and shame, the baby girl was immediately given up for adoption, renamed and whisked off to be raised in Norway. Throughout this period of domestic chaos, John was temporarily sent to live with his Uncle Sydney (Alf’s brother) and Aunt Madge, until his wayward father, determined to repair his broken home, arrived to retrieve his young son. But in the interim Julia had taken up with another man with whom she would have two daughters. Although they were still legally married, she had no intention of returning to Alf.

Julia & John

Claiming he was taking John shopping for new clothes Alf took his young son to the seaside resort town of Blackpool where they stayed at the home of a former crewmate for the next few weeks until Julia eventually tracked them down and arrived unannounced. A confrontation ensued that would psychologically scar John for the rest of his life. Once again Alf begged Julia to start over, but she would have none of it. To settle the issue, the child was commanded to make a choice between his mother and father. Having recently bonded with Alf, John initially picked his dad until he saw his “mummy” getting ready to leave and ran to her in tears, throwing his arms around her waist.

While many of The Beatles’ early songs were fabricated dramas reflecting the problems faced by young lovers, the lyrics to “Mother” sprang directly from Lennon’s childhood experience, memories that he’d struggled to forget, but was now determined to confront in hopes of freeing himself, once and for all from the trauma that still lingered.

While musically simplistic, Lennon’s latest batch of songs were unlike anything he’d ever written and recorded before. Influenced by Bob Dylan who had bared his soul with bitter break-up songs like “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright,” and Roy Orbison, who fearlessly wore his emotions on his sleeve in his song “Crying,” John began to reveal his inner self with “confessional” songs like “Help,” which no one initially took too seriously due to its upbeat tempo. Besides, why would anyone believe the leader of the world’s most popular band when he sang about being “really down” and “so insecure?” Certainly, it was just more role-playing, like so many of John’s earlier songs. But with their next album, Rubber Soul, released in December 1965, it was obvious that The Beatles had begun to grow up – fast! As Dylan keenly observed, they were “no longer cute anymore.”

Rubber Soul featured Lennon’s melancholy masterpiece “In My Life.” Along with the surprisingly dark and tormented “Girl,” John was now writing and singing songs that threw open the book of his life for his fans to freely ponder and interpret. The lyric to John’s “Nowhere Man” portrayed a self-absorbed lay-about who understood but couldn’t care less that the world was passing him by. “Isn’t he a bit like you and me?” John sang knowingly. But how could Lennon have been talking about himself? It had barely been two years since that fateful night when a new joyous brand of mayhem exploded across America when The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. And now here he was already attempting to puncture the myth that being a Beatle was hardly as “fab” as we’d all been led to believe.

Having shed what he later called the poetic “gobbledygook” lyrics of psychedelic masterpieces like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “I Am the Walrus,” John began to write with new emotional transparency. Lennon’s introspection and honesty would soon reach an unprecedented level with the elegiac portrait of his mother in the gently finger-picked “Julia” on the White Album. With just an acoustic guitar and his voice, John allowed himself no place to hide.

Arthur Janov - whose Primal Scream Therapy inspired Lennon to scream his pain for Plastic Ono Band.

Whether he knew it or not, John Lennon had been a prime candidate for psychotherapy long before first picked up Dr. Arthur Janov’s The Primal Scream. As Lennon once observed, “If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create.” Determined to heal himself and shed a past which continued to loom heavily upon him, John immediately agreed to work with Janov, who later claimed the ex-Beatle was in a severely angry, damaged state when he first arrived at his Santa Monica, California clinic for what was tantamount to a psychic bloodletting.

The inspiration for Janov’s controversial Primal Scream therapy originally struck after one of his patients recalled a bizarre scene they’d recently witnessed at an experimental theater performance. An actor, wearing nothing but diapers curled up in a fetal position and began to scream repeatedly for their mommy and daddy until he suddenly began to wretch. Noticeably relieved after having vomited, the actor then wended his way through the shocked and disgusted audience, sharing samples of his fresh puke, distributed in plastic bags, as if it was a sacrament or a souvenir.

Convinced this might be developed into a useful method to help heal the deep wounds of early childhood trauma, Janov immediately began writing a book about a new cathartic process he coined as The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis. Published by E.P. Dutton in 1970, a copy was sent to Lennon with no apparent reason other than the hopes of a possible endorsement from an ex-Beatle.

John Lennon never did anything halfway. From his prolific use of LSD, to competing with his fellow Beatles to see who could meditate the longest at the Maharishi’s ashram, to his and Yoko’s brief dalliance with heroin, to their Bed-Ins for world peace, to their fist-pumping revolutionary phase with Yippie Jerry Rubin, John’s passion, no matter how short-lived was always total and complete, until the next fad struck.

Plastic Ono Band’s opening track “Mother” was Lennon’s ultimate attempt to free himself from the psychic umbilical cord that still bound him to the specter of his negligent and tragic mother, Julia. The song began with four lumbering chimes of a church bell, that could be taken to symbolize the final laying to rest of The Beatles - with each toll representing each member of the group. Or maybe John employed the doleful carillons to announce the death of the 1960’s dream of peace and love, which he, the self-described “Dream-weaver” had once helped spearhead, but was now unceremoniously proclaiming “over,” in the shocking lyrics to his song “God.”

As John told Jann S. Wenner in his famous 1970 Rolling Stone interview: “The dream’s The dream’s over, and I have personally got to get down to so-called reality.”

However one interprets them, the bells cast a gloomy funereal atmosphere over the opening song and set the tone for the rest of Plastic Ono Band. John claimed the inspiration struck while in Los Angeles, watching a horror film on TV. Whether it was coincidence or something floating around in his consciousness, as John had dismissed his pilfering of Chuck Berry’s lyrics from “You Can’t Catch Me,” which he’d nicked for the first line of “Come Together,” Black Sabbath had also opened with the ominous tolling of bells. The eponymous debut by rock’s (arguably) first heavy metal band was released on February 13, 1970 in the UK, (and then four months later in America, on June 1^st) well before the arrival of Plastic Ono Band.

Had John Lennon been familiar Black Sabbath? It was obvious that Ozzy Osbourne had taken a couple of style cues from John, borrowing his White Album era hairstyle and round glasses. Either way, Lennon was certainly well-aware of the Top Forty, as revealed in his nasty note explaining why he decided to return his MBE medal to Queen Elizabeth. Dated November 25, 1969, Lennon wrote: “Your Majesty - I am returning this MBE in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts [the song made the Top 20, peaking at Number Fourteen].” At that point, Sabbath’s debut album had already clawed its way up to Number Eight in England and Number Twenty-Three on the Billboard charts America.

Aloof as they were, The Beatles didn’t exist in a total vacuum. They later took credit for inventing heavy metal, (a term first credited to Beat novelist William S. Burroughs, from his 1962 novel The Soft Machine) with The White Album’s apocalyptic rocker, “Helter Skelter.”

Both “Mother” and “Black Sabbath” were slow, “heavy” plodding dirges that exuded an ominous atmosphere. While Yoko provided the “wind” as she was credited in John’s liner notes, Sabbath employed the soundtrack of a full-blown thunder storm on their song. Either way, the London-based Hammer Films, producer of fabulous tacky horror movies, was the probable source of inspiration for both artists to employ the haunting bells.

But the bells were only the beginning. From Al Jolson’s black-faced tearjerker “Mammy” to the Rolling Stones’ “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadows” (dedicated to a struggling unwed mother confronted by the looming ghost of her mother) songs about one’s mom have usually spelled trouble. Nothing was more outrageous than The Door’s oedipal opus, “The End,” in which an unhinged Jim Morrison screams, “Father, I want to kill you, Mother… I want to…” Hoping to dodge an inevitable storm of controversy Elektra Records understandably substituted “fuck you” for an undecipherable a lunatic feral howl that teemed with self-loathing. Lennon would later confess to having overwhelming oedipal desires towards his mother Julia after he accidentally brushed her breast with his hand as the two enjoyed an afternoon nap together.

Even naming one’s band “The Mothers,” as the mad maestro Frank Zappa would discover, was fraught with issues. Irked by the implications of the group’s moniker, Verve Records demanded The Mothers change their name, which led to Frank’s playful bastardization of Plato’s quote, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” So, any inference their original name conjured had been successfully dodged. Afterall this was a gang of scraggly long-haired men, dubbed “The Ugliest Band in Rock” who appeared in drag on the jacket of their third album We’re Only In It for the Money (a vicious/hilarious parody of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which nearly cost Verve a lawsuit until they reversed the album’s cover photo with the gatefold image of Frank in a dress, and pigtails, with his band, looking like a motley crew of bearded spinster aunts.

It’s interesting to note that after John and Yoko performed at the Fillmore East with Zappa and his band on June 6, 1971, their impromptu jam would be credited to “The Plastic Ono Mothers” on side four of John and Yoko’s 1972 double album Some Time in New York City.

Upon John’s return from California following months of therapy sessions with Dr. Janov, he arranged a session at Abbey Road with bassist Klaus Voormann and Ringo Starr on September 26^th. Lennon “wanted, as quickly as possible, to get this feeling down before it changed,” Voormann told Rolling Stone. Upon entering the studio Klaus immediately noticed his old friend was “very much taken by that experience he went through.” In Japan Plastic Ono Band would be released as ジョンの魂 (John no Tamashii), which translates to John’s Soul.

Lennon always preferred his rock ‘n’ roll raw and direct, except for a brief excursion into the syrupy realms of psychedelia that began in 1966 with the ethereal drone of “Tomorrow Never Knows” and peaking the following year with the surreal “I Am the Walrus.” After leaving The Beatles, John’s initial solo offerings packed a surprisingly jagged edge, from “Instant Karma!” to the avant-garde adventures inspired by Yoko and the ad-hoc crew of musicians which comprised the ever-changing Plastic Ono Band.

Beyond the menacing presence of the four overdubbed bells, John’s Plastic Ono Band was strictly a stripped-down affair, the antithesis of the over-the-top production that Phil Spector was famous for and the album credits left many wondering if the legendary music man was the album’s “producer” in name only.

Spector had clearly left his mark on George Harrison’s first solo outing, All Things Must Pass (released just a few weeks before Plastic Ono Band on November 27, 1970) when he repeatedly buried the wispy-voiced singer under his trademark sonic “Wall of Sound,” comprised of multiple guitars, keyboards, horns and drums.

According to bassist Klaus Voormann’s description, the making of Plastic Ono Band was more akin to a field recording of some sort of mysterious initiation rite than the typical multi-tracked, polished product of the day. Like an inspired jazz improvisor or bluesman brimming with emotion, Lennon wanted to get in the studio and lay the music down as quickly as possible, before the feeling faded. Released just a few weeks before Christmas, Plastic Ono Band seemed more like a portfolio of wounds and scars than his first solo album.

John’s barebones esthetic on Plastic Ono Band was his way of keeping the music in the moment and fresh. With the recent release of “Cold Turkey” and “Instant Karma!” John Lennon seemed more present in the studio than he’d been for years. Many of the basic tracks were cut in a matter of two or three takes, captured at (what the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson coined) “the decisive moment.”

“The album was recorded in an adrenaline rush, with little time expended on discussion or rehearsal,” Klaus Voormann recalled. Lennon passed chord charts around with the song’s lyrics “written bigger than normal,” Klaus explained, prompting the musicians to read the words and consider how their accompaniment might better fit the feeling that John was seeking.”

“He did not want to make a production with lots of instruments and production,” Klaus told journalist Anthony DeCurtis. “He wanted to do something as fresh and direct as possible… a real close, intimate atmosphere,” with just Voormann on bass and Starr on drums. “He just played the song and Ringo and I played the simple way we both enjoy playing… And it seemed to be exactly what he was looking for… The playing itself, to him was not that important. It was more important to capture the feeling. We did mostly one or two takes. There’s a lot of mistakes in there,” Klaus confessed. “But it [his bass playing] was just like a pulse, exactly what John wanted. He loved it.”

“It’s not easy to play so simple,” explained D.J. Bonebrake, drummer with the legendary Los Angeles punk rock band X. “He’s got the kick on the 1 and 3 with the snare on the 2 and 4, with an added kick every couple of measures, on the and of 4. It reminds me of Al Jackson Jr. (drummer with Booker T. and the MG’s whose nickname was “The Human Timekeeper). “You can’t get better than that… except maybe for Ringo. He’s got perfect time and perfect groove. At the end of the verses, he replaces one of the 8th notes with a 16th note. But on the third verse, the bass drum becomes more complicated. At the end of the song, his snare fills match John’s vocals when he begins to scream “Mama don’t go!” Suddenly he is in 7/8 time (or 2/4 with a measure of 3/8 or 6/16). Either way Ringo’s fills always have a great shuffle feel to them.”

Ringo and Klaus recording P.O.B.

Spector, from Voormann’s perspective was nothing short of “brilliant… He didn’t have to do his big sound. He could do something very fine, delicate and sensitive, whatever was appropriate for the song and the moment.”

When Lennon howled “Father you left me, but I never left you” he was struggling to shed a long-time bitterness locked in his heart. While John’s father had abandoned the family when he was only nine, Phil’s dad would commit suicide when he was the same age. Neither knew of the trauma the other had suffered. Lennon’s painful wail would prompt the deeply unstable producer to claim, in a moment of uncharacteristic sensitivity, that John was “like the brother I’d never had.”

Chosen as the album’s single, “Mother” was issued by Apple Records on December 28, 1970. There was little doubt that many of John’s derogatory remarks in his lengthy Rolling Stone interview were inspired by the nagging fact that George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” had spent a month atop the Billboard charts while “Mother” peaked at #43.

It’s interesting to note that the single version of the album’s opening song was only released in America (there was no UK issue) in a monoaural pressing and edited to down 3:55 from its original length of 5:29. Gone were the ominous opening tolling bells and the radio-friendly version of “Mother” quickly faded after the last verse. The B-Side, Yoko’s explosive “Why” didn’t do much to help sales.

Sidebar - Intrepid Interpretations: “Mother”

Covering Lennon’s highly personal songs from Plastic Ono Band was something of a losing proposition for most artists. They demanded a lot from an artist and meant having to enter a deep emotional state in order to sing John’s bitter lyrics with the level of conviction that few artists have ever shown or known.

In the year following Plastic Ono Band’s shocking release, Barbra Streisand (of all people!) recorded “Mother” (along with Lennon’s gossamer-gentle “Love”) on her album Barbra Joan Streisand. While seeming nothing short of bizarre, the diva did an admirable job with John’s lament.

Kicking off with long sustained churchy organ chords, and supported by droning cellos, Streisand sang the wallpaper off the wall. Thankfully she didn’t try to out-scream John on the song’s famous coda. Instead Streisand’s voice soared, sounding like she meant every word of this tragic farewell.

Maynard Ferguson gave Lennon’s tortuous dirge plenty of sizzling hot trumpet on his confounding version of “Mother,” from his 1972 album M.F. Horn Two. John would have undoubtedly had difficulty recognizing his own song as Ferguson’s rococo arrangement packed absolutely none of the emotional power of the original song. “Mother” seems like a peculiar choice to jazz up. Perhaps Ferguson chose it for its repetitive vamp (over which John screamed “Mother don’t go”) as the foundation for Stan Robinson’s burly tenor sax solo. But this (and many jazz) interpretations of Lennon and other Beatle songs in the past most likely led John to make his famous disparaging remark, calling the music, “the worst kind of music… ever created or imagined.”

Not surprisingly, country rocker Shelby Lynne sang Lennon’s classic as a cathartic way of dealing with her own personal trauma suffered after her father shot her mother in an alcoholic haze and then killed himself when she was just a teen.

Bringing some blue-eyed soul to the song while adding a few warmer chords to John’s skeletal melody, Shelby’s version morphed into something of a light grunge anthem. An echoey vocal mix adds a somewhat cerebral quality to the song. Perhaps the most effective aspect of her arrangement is the cliff-hanging ending which evokes the feeling that comes with being abandoned suddenly.

Other versions of “Mother” include those by The Roots, Lou Reed, Christina Aguilera, and David Bowie.

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Hard pressed to put a joint of meat on the table, Robin faced a death rap after he was caught allegedly poaching venison in the Royal Forest. Hood had no choice other than to “fight the power” - the evil Sheriff of Nottingham, who he deemed unworthy of respect. Living by the age-old honorable creed - steal from the rich and give to the poor, he repeatedly put his life on the line for his Band of Merry Men (and Women of Valor) while ultimately keeping nothing for himself.

While canonized in song for their gallant struggles and selfless deeds, we find, in reality, very few outlaws over the course of history were tireless champions of the poor, let alone “saints.”

For well over a century the legend of America’s most notorious outlaw, Jesse James has continued to flourish through an endless array of songs, TV shows and movies. The Missouri train and bank robber’s myth has worked its way into the hearts of millions of Americans, whether north or south of the Mason/Dixon line. Like Robin Hood, Jesse too has been celebrated for his fabled philanthropy, although there is little to no substantial proof of his purported displays of compassion and generosity. Meanwhile, Woody Guthrie’s ballad not only praised him for practicing radical charity but extolled James for having “a hand, a heart and a brain” as well.

With the fall of his beloved Confederacy in 1865, James, along with his brother Frank and their friends were pushed to take desperate measures. Jesse soon became a national hero thanks to the glorified reportage of James Newman Edwards, a journalist with The Kansas City Star whose glamorized dispatches focused not on the outlaw’s desperate, gritty life but on the James Gang’s criminal-chic style.

Edwards’ accounts not only sold copy but drew fierce support and sympathy from the populace, spiking Jesse and his brother, Frank’s fame to that of Wild West rock stars or perhaps a band of swaggering saints.

“Jesse James,” a traditional three-chord tune has been sung and strummed by everyone from Uncle Dave Macon in 1929 to Burl Ives and Woody Guthrie in the 1940’s (who’d previously sung his “Ballad of Jesus Christ” to the exact same melody and chord changes) to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Cisco Houston and the Kingston Trio (whose 1958 hit single “Tom Dooley” set off a brief outlaw/murder song craze) at the height of the folk revival of the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s.

In 1971 the New Riders of the Purple Sage (a San Francisco Grateful Dead spin-off band, who took their name from a Zane Grey western) would fashion their own version of Jesse James’s legend with a bubbling bluegrass ballad called “The Glendale Train.” Written by the band’s singer/guitarist John Dawson and driven by the Dead’s Jerry Garcia on banjo and a slippery pedal steel guitar, this heavily revised good-time yarn about the actual James Gang bank robbery paints an overtly romantic and highly fictional portrait of the desperate escapade, ending romantically with the heroes thundering off on their horses with “$16 G’s” stuffed into their saddlebags, after having left “two men lyin’ cold.”

The lyrics also describe the train’s faithful porter Amos Wise who was found “in fifteen pieces, fifteen miles apart” after having been being blown to bits by the dynamite that Jesse and his pals allegedly used to open the safe.

While the New Riders’ version of the James brother’s legend makes a great song, no one was actually killed during the Glendale (Missouri) bank robbery which took place on October 8, 1879 after James and his new crew (which included neither brother Frank nor the Younger brothers) hoisted an enormous boulder onto the railroad tracks, bringing the train to a grinding halt. The passengers rendered sitting ducks had very little recourse as the outlaws picked them clean, one by one. It had been three years since the James Gang knocked off the bank in Northfield, Minnesota. In the meantime, they’d been lying low, letting the heat blow over, while living as respectable farmers in Tennessee.

By 1976, Warren Zevon’s ballad of “Frank and Jesse James,” was an altogether different homage to the James brothers. The lead-off song from Warren’s self-titled debut produced by Jackson Browne, featured an Aaron Copland-esque piano interlude which evoked the open plains, along with a catchy chorus compelling the outlaws to “Keep on riding, riding, riding, until you clear your name.”

Fitting to their ragged image Irish punk-rockers, the Pogues, cut a campy rendition of the tune (slurred by Peter “Spider” Stacy, not the band’s usual lead singer, Shane McGowan) complete with clanky banjo, tin whistle and kitsch pistol shots which ricocheted from speaker to speaker, on their 1986 break-through album Rum Sodomy and the Lash (produced by Elvis Costello).

Generally considered a traditional song, “The Ballad of Jesse James” is most-often credited to Billy Gashade, and was first recorded in 1925 by Vernon Dalhart, famous for his recording of “The Wreck of the Old 97” which sold in the neighborhood of seven million copies the previous year. Although Dalhart (born Marion Try Slaughter in 1883) had studied voice at the Dallas Conservatory of Music, he stuck with the vernacular style of the Lone Star cowpoke, which, combined with a weepy fiddle and rudimentary strummed guitar, greatly appealed to down-home folks across the West and South. 78 recordings of his “Ballad of Jesse James” are still known to turn up in Missouri at antique shops and garage sales to this day.

Slide guitarist/producer/musicologist Ry Cooder would arrange two excellent versions of “The Ballad of Jesse James” in 1980 for the soundtrack to The Long Riders, Walter Hill’s film depicted the Younger/James gang by teaming up the Keach brothers – Stacy and James with the Quaid brothers – Dennis and Randy, along with three Carradines – David, Robert and Keith, as well as Christopher and Nicholas Guest as Charley and Robert Ford (the cowardly assassin of Jesse James). This clever casting, as well as Cooder’s great music and wardrobe, loaned the film a strong sense of authenticity.

In 1998 “The Belfast Cowboy,” Van Morrison would make an unexpected return to his folk roots, when he recorded a live album of rough ‘n’ ready skiffle numbers in collaboration with the legendary Trad. Jazz bandleader/trombonist Chris Barber and Lonnie Donegan (MBE). Donegan, (who inspired a young John Lennon and his first band the Quarry Men to cover “Rock Island Line”) rose to fame in the UK by interpreting American folk and blues by Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie back in the 1950’s, years before Morrison caught the public’s ears with his Ray Charles-inspired vocals and self-penned hits “Gloria” and “Brown-Eyed Girl.” To the crowd’s delight Morrison delivered “The Ballad of Jesse James” in his trademark passionate slur, as Donegan’s keening harmonies drifted above the singer’s huffing-puffing delivery.

“The Ballad of Jesse James” remains alive and well in the twenty-first century, revived once more by Bruce Springsteen on The Seeger Sessions, the Boss’s 2006 tribute to the folk legend, Pete Seeger. Springsteen’s album is particularly unusual as he deliberately chose to steer clear of controversy by choosing not to sing any of Seeger’s political songs (which he was most famous for).

A particularly inspired version of “Jesse James” also worth mentioning was performed by the South Memphis String Band (featuring Luther Dickinson, best known as the singer and hot lead guitarist with the North Mississippi All-Stars and multi-instrumentalist/singer Alvin Youngblood Hart) on March 18 2010 at Music in the Hall in Oxford, Mississippi.

African-American folklore is also not without its own Robin Hood figure. Found in the “Ballad of Railroad Bill,” Morris Slater, as he was known around the Deep South, was a sympathetic outlaw hailing from the backwoods turpentine camps of Tombigbee, Alabama.

As a traditional folk song, “Railroad Bill” became part of the repertoire of Hobart Smith, Etta Baker, Mississippi John Hurt and many others during the height of America’s folk music revival of the late 1950’s/early 1960’s.

Folk singer Cisco Houston claimed that Railroad Bill gained his sobriquet from breaking into boxcars and distributing the bounty to his impoverished neighbors. According to the various verses that immortalized him, Bill had more badass “gangsta” attitude than Robin Hood and Jesse James put together. Famous for lighting big cigars with ten-dollar bills, he was not merely a ne’er do well but a wife stealer as well. Living on the lam for many years, Bill was eventually tracked down by the authorities and killed in 1896. But not before he laid a couple of sheriffs and a deputy in their graves, along with some poor guy named McMillan on a full moon night.

The depression era bank robber Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd who modeled himself after Jesse James turned out to be quite different than the man glorified by Woody Guthrie and later eulogized by Bob Dylan and the Byrds on their 1968 country-rock opus Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Although he generously shared his booty with the backwoods Oklahoma folks who kept him fed and out of reach from the long arm of the law, Floyd’s reality was far from the man depicted in Guthrie’s populist ballad. Pretty Boy had in fact killed six people in the process of knocking off banks.

According to Guthrie, one Saturday afternoon, in the town of Shawnee, Oklahoma, “Pretty Boy” Floyd and his wife went a-riding into town in a wagon when a deputy sheriff came along using “vulgar words of anger.” Floyd, gentleman that he was, couldn’t allow such behavior in the company of his fair wife. To remedy the situation, he grabbed a log chain while the deputy reached for his pistol. In a matter of moments Floyd “laid that deputy down” and became a fugitive, who temporarily found refuge in the wilds of Oklahoma. Meanwhile “every crime” in the state was “added to his name.” Nonetheless he was given shelter by “many a starving farmer.” And in return for their kindness and generosity, the outlaw (although it is not stated how he came up with the cash) paid their mortgages and “saved their little homes.” In Oklahoma City on a Christmas Day, a carload of groceries mysteriously appears with a note that even rhymed: “You say that I’m an outlaw, you say that I’m a thief, well here’s a Christmas dinner for the families on relief.”

It’s interesting to note that Floyd became the first modern day outlaw to make his getaway, not on a horse but in a Ford. He was tracked by highway patrolmen employing the most modern form of technology – the telephone. Floyd (like Jesse James before him) was a brilliant manipulator of the media, giving provocative interviews that fueled the public’s imagination.

“To live outside the law you must be honest,” Bob Dylan once observed in “Absolutely Sweet Marie” The lyric implies the outlaw must create and live by their own strict moral code, one that is often more righteous than practiced in “respected society.” But listening back to Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Desire, one must wonder where he was getting his advice at the time. His epic ballad “Hurricane” about the ill-fated boxing champion Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was an undeniably great song, told in eleven verses, all lovingly embroidered by Scarlet Rivera’s sweeping violin.

Bob did a noble thing, trying to get a fair trial for an “innocent” man who was rotting away in prison by telling his story. He even got some of his cool friends together to play a benefit concert. In the end, Carter, after serving nearly twenty years was finally freed from prison in 1985.

(The ruling of guilty was overturned in 1976, but Carter was reconvicted later the same year. A second conviction was ultimately overturned in 1985 and Carter was finally freed from prison.)

But Dylan’s song “Joey,” was a bad idea from the start with its disturbingly naïve refrain: “Joey, Joey, What made them want to come and blow you away?” In a three-minute musical version of The Godfather, Dylan tells Gallo’s tale with cinematic detail nearly equal to that of director Francis Ford Coppola. “Born in Red Hook, Brooklyn,” Joey “opened up his eyes to the tune of an accordion.” After Gallo avenged a gang of thugs who came to rub out his brother, he did “ten years in Attica, reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich.” Not only was Joey a jailhouse scholar but upon his release from prison he “dressed like Jimmy Cagney.” From that day on, according to Bob, Gallo went straight. He “would not carry a gun” as he was “around too many children.” But then one day, for apparently no reason, his enemies murder him in cold blood in a Manhattan clam bar.

Dylan’s perspective in his attempt at canonizing Gallo, actually robs the man of the outlaw’s inherent karma. What goes around comes around. You live by the gun, you die by the gun. There’s something terribly just about it. It doesn’t matter that he served his time, the seeds of Gallo’s revenge were planted years before he hung up his weapon. Joey knew why they came and blew him away. So why couldn’t Dylan figure it out?

Nothing provokes our sympathy more than watching someone take a stand for what they believe. Even if they’ve committed a crime, we are quick to forgive when the end is drawing near. Time is running out and there’s something terribly romantic about it. Perhaps that’s what makes “Vincent Black Lightning 1952,” written and recorded by the British singer/songwriter and ace guitarist Richard Thompson arguably the greatest outlaw song ever written. It’s hard not to keep from sobbing as “Young James,” who is brought in for armed robbery lies on his deathbed after a shotgun blew a gaping hole in his chest. He has dazzling visions of angels in leather and chrome swirling above him, come to take him home as he hands his sweetheart, “Red Molly” the keys to his “fine motorbike” and dies.

With his wire-spoked halo, Thompson’s rebel martyr ascends this troubled world. Attaining the ultimate goal of every outlaw he is finally free at last, beyond reproach for all the wrong he’s done, while leaving behind a weeping lass, who will forever carry a torch in his name.

Excerpted from my book A Friend of the Devil – The Glorification of the Outlaw in Song from Robin Hood to Rap (Backbeat Books 2017)

Like Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman before him, Albert Ayler’s life became a mission to raze jazz to the ground and reinvent the music on his own terms. Demanding total artistic freedom, Ayler heroically expressed himself with a range of sounds, colors and depth of emotion that few musicians (then or now) have been capable of producing. Braking down conventions of tonality and timing Albert spearheaded a collective group of improvisers whose riotous “energy music” inspired Down Beat editor Dan Morgenstern to describe Ayler’s sound as “a Salvation Army band on LSD.”

By refusing to swing or blow over traditional chord changes, Albert not only managed to alienate himself from the public but from many of his fellow musicians as well. Ayler abandoned the antiquated innovations of bebop, claiming it was too simple, likening it to “humming along with Mitch Miller.”

“It’s a new truth now,” he proclaimed. “And there have to be new ways of expressing that truth.” Like his hero/mentor John Coltrane, Albert believed that music could be used as a tool to change people’s minds and put to end to ignorance and war. Ayler’s dream was to bring peace to the world through his much-maligned music. “Our music should be able to remove frustration, to enable people to act more freely, to think more freely,” he declared.

Employing a thick reed and an extraordinarily powerful vibrato, most often associated with New Orleans brass players but rarely heard on saxophone, Albert’s horn brayed, moaned and wailed, inspiring critic Larry Kart to describe Ayler’s playing as “the biggest human sound I ever heard.”

“Oh, Albert was a sweet guy. I loved the times that I spent with him,” (trombonist and member of NY Eye and Ear Control) Roswell Rudd once said. “He was kind of shy and spoke real soft. Then he’d get that horn out man and what a big sound that was! Like all outdoors when he played. There was no doubt about who had the lead. He was like a New Orleans trumpet player. He put it right out in front with capital letters!”

Born July 13, 1936 in Cleveland Ohio, Albert, the eldest son of Edward and Myrtle Ayler, grew up in the racially integrated upper middle class suburb of Shaker Heights. Six years later Albert’s younger brother, trumpeter and co-conspirator Donald was born on October 5, 1942. A baby sister died at birth, unnamed. His mother once recalled that at the age of two Albert held a footstool up to his mouth and blew on the leg, as if it were a horn.

Ayler’s father Edward sang, played violin and tenor saxophone in Dexter Gordon’s style but never fully realized his ambition of becoming a professional musician.

After watching Albert mimic playing a horn to Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman records, Edward gave his son his first saxophone lesson. Insisting that Albert practice incessantly, Edward wound up venting his personal frustration and beat the boy when he only wanted to go out and play with his friends in the street. On Sundays mornings Albert could often be found playing duets with his father at church.

Even as a child Ayler had a penchant for playing free music. He later claimed, “I’d be playing a ballad and my father would say ‘get back to the melody, stop playing that nonsense.’ But I knew there was something there. I’d be standing in a corner playing and trying to communicate with a spirit that I knew nothing about at that particular age.”

Edward Ayler continued tutoring his son until the age of ten when Albert began his formal musical training with Benny Miller at the Academy of Music in Cleveland. Miller had locally performed with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and also traveled to Africa to study the roots of black music. Albert’s technique soon improved to the point where he played first chair in the John Adams High School band. He also doubled on oboe. Miller claimed the young Ayler had a photographic memory for sheet music. He soon earned the nickname of “Little Bird” for his uncanny ability in replicating Charlie Parker’s fluid be bop solos. Ayler later claimed to have met Bird in 1955. Upon shaking his hero’s hand Albert said he instantly recognized “a spiritual quality in the man.”

As a teenager Ayler was all but consumed by his passion for jazz. Only his love of golf could rival his obsession with his horn. In an era when the sport was anything but integrated Albert became a champion golfer, displaying tremendous skill and grace on the fairways. For a short time he actually entertained the notion of turning pro.

By age fifteen Albert joined his friend tenor saxophonist Lloyd Pearson’s group, the Counts of Rhythm. At a jam session at Gleason’s Musical Bar, they met Little Walter (Jacobs) famous for blowing amplified blues harp with Muddy Waters. Little Walter hired the two teenage boys on the spot as his new horn section and gave them their first taste of life on the road.

Albert was “so excited he could hardly believe it,” Edward Ayler said, recalling the day his son burst through the front door shouting “They’re gonna take me with ‘em, they’re taking me!” But it wasn’t long before Albert began to sing the blues himself between the hard travelling and hard drinking he was suddenly exposed to.

Ayler felt that being out among “those deep-rooted people,” was an important learning experience. Sadly Albert and Lloyd were nowhere to be found on the album’s credits when Little Walter cut his next disc for Chess Records.

Although gutbucket blues are a powerful medium for personal expression, Ayler found little challenge in playing the music. He would often experiment with pitch and “false fingerings” while on the bandstand, much to the chagrin of the musicians played with.

Lloyd claimed that Ayler “was more advanced then anyone. He had a helluva technically big tone. It takes a long time to get a tone of that quality,” Pearson said in his colleague’s defense, pointing out that Albert was quite adept at playing “standard tunes like they weren’t nothing.”

After graduating high school, Ayler attended college briefly but dropped out to join the army in 1956. Stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, Albert jammed with saxophonist Stanley Turrentine as well as bassist Lewis Worrell and drummer Beaver Harris, who would eventually join Ayler’s band. While in the army, Albert traded in his alto for the more robust tone of the tenor sax, claiming the larger horn possessed the true sound of the ghetto.

During his stint in the army Albert was forced to play concert music up to seven hours a day. Ayler hoped his cohorts might want to expand their musical horizons beyond the army repertoire, but the commanding officer forbid Albert’s band mates to talk to him, claiming he was insane.

In 1957, Albert, along with Beaver Harris, was shipped over to France where the pair frequently jammed and hung out in Paris nightclubs. Although Harris was impressed by Ayler’s “super chops” he still thought Albert was “more or less a honky-tonk player.”

While in Paris, Ayler became obsessed with the French National Anthem, “La Marsiese” which he jokingly nicknamed “La Mayonnaise.” The rousing anthem became the inspiration for a handful of his compositions including “Infinite Spirit,” “Spirits Rejoice,” and “Light in Darkness.”

A photograph of Albert dated November 9, 1958, shows him in uniform, blowing tenor sax with the T.N.G. 3rd regiment big band. He is the only African-American in the picture. Alienated and estranged from his fellow musicians, it was at this time that he claimed he received “the call” while listening to a John Coltrane record. Mesmerized by the power of ‘Trane’s tenor, Ayler believed the great saxophonist was speaking directly to him through his horn.

Years later John Coltrane would whole-heartedly embrace Ayler’s artistry, claiming Albert had moved “the music into even higher frequencies.” ‘Trane would eventually become Albert’s champion, helping him financially and using his enormous influence to squeeze him onto concert bills and ultimately landing him a decent record deal with Impulse Records.

Discharged from the Army in 1961 Albert headed for Los Angeles but like Ornette Coleman before him, he soon found himself ostracized by the local music scene. The West Coast cool school personified by the soft breathy understated tone employed by Paul Desmond and Lee Konitz was the antithesis of Albert’s exaggerated expression. Once again Ayler found himself an outsider, his outrageous music deemed too “country” and unsophisticated by the few critics who bothered to listen.

Oddly enough, Redd Foxx, a struggling stand-up comedian at the time, offered Albert some much-needed words of encouragement, reminding him to keep true to his vision. “Play what you believe in,” the future TV junkman Fred Sanford advised Ayler.

Throughout his life, Albert was financially supported by his parents, who always welcomed him back home whenever the struggle to survive became too much for him to bear. Once again Ayler found himself in cloistered Cleveland, bored and alienated. With the exception of the broad-minded blind multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk from Columbus, few of the local musicians would play with him whenever he’d stroll into a jam session toting his horn. Most folks would just grumble at the sight of old “Bicycle Horn” as they called him.

Whenever the argument over Ayler’s “ability to play” arose, the issue usually became moot once the naysayer got an earful of his extraordinary tone. Judging Albert Ayler as a fraud brings to mind the buffoon who stands before a Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art, blabbing on about he could do that if he had a bucket of paint and some canvas. The sheer stamina needed to create a work of such Herculean vibrancy often decimates its creator.

At this time Albert began distancing himself from the Baptist church and developing his own personal belief system. He no longer viewed himself as simply a musician but as a shaman with a saxophone on a mission to heal the world with music.

Shamanism is tricky stuff. It’s an act best caught live - you had to be there. It doesn’t always make for great records. Marc Ribot concurs: “The main thing I got from listening to Albert Ayler’s records is that his records, and I suspect his concerts, since I never heard him live, are not primarily aesthetic commodities. What you get from an Albert Ayler record isn’t a polished aesthetic gem where everything is perfect. What you get is an artifact of a ritual experience.”

By the winter of 1962, Albert would flee Cleveland once again, flying to Stockholm, where he hoped to find an audience for his music. Ayler wound up playing for children and supported himself by playing commercial music. After an irate promoter pulled him off his stage Albert befriended avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor and drummer Sunny Murray who described him as “depressed.” After hearing Taylor’s unit of free-form improvisers Ayler begged to join the group and traveled on to Denmark with them.

In Copenhagen, Albert would soon cross paths with trumpeter world music pioneer Don Cherry who was touring Europe with Sonny Rollins, another hero of his.

Bernard Stollman of ESP Records first heard Ayler at a little club called the Baby Grand on 125th Street. He later described Albert as a “little guy” with “a huge horn. Bernard remembered Ayler jumping on the stage and blowing “torrents of sound.” Stollman, an attorney who didn’t even own a stereo at the time, was so moved by Ayler’s performance that he introduced himself to the saxophonist as a record company executive and begged Albert to cut an album for his new label. A year and a half later Albert cut his first disc for ESP (actually his second album. His first was My Name Is Albert Ayler recorded in Sweden). By mid-1963 a lack of work once again forced Ayler to return to Cleveland where he lived with his parents. Albert had brought fifty copies of his first record home which he tried to sell them on street corners, with little success.

Although ultimately damaging to his career Coltrane would eventually embrace Free Jazz and abandon the soulful ballads and modal styling that brought him a hit in the spring of 1961 with “My Favorite Things.” Blowing chorus after chorus with unbound ferocity Coltrane would unwittingly chase his fans from the clubs while inciting critics to claim that he was out to “destroy jazz.”

If Coltrane had indeed destroyed jazz then Albert Ayler sent the music hurtling beyond the outskirts of Pluto. It was Ayler who melted the music down and left its corpse an unrecognizable smoldering lump. The saxophone in Albert’s hands had become another instrument altogether, a far cry from the horn that Adolph Sax had in mind. Albert’s exaggerated tone and oscillating pitch produced notes far beyond the normal range of the tenor sax. “It’s not about notes anymore!” Ayler would declare.

Tonally, Albert’s horn was the closest a saxophone ever came to resembling the soaring feedback of psychedelic guitarists Jimi Hendrix or John Cippolina of Quicksilver Messenger Service and brings to mind pure electronic sound waves as produced by the Theremin. Whether Albert was inspired by electronics or psychedelia one can only guess. One look at the trippy lettering on the album covers to Love Cry and Live in Greenwich Village and it seems obvious that Impulse was blatantly trying to market Albert to the hippies. Scorned by the jazz community Ayler hoped his forward-looking music might connect with the “New Generation” who were in the throes of abandoning traditional religious practices and embarking on their own personal spiritual journey of self-discovery, embracing everything from Buddhist meditation to experimenting with LSD.

In the years since his death, Ayler’s music seems to have influenced more guitarists than saxophonists. “It is possible that he may have been looking to imitate those sounds,” Marc Ribot said (referring to Hendrix’s guitar and the Theremin). “Guitar players can only at best envy sax players. We’re always trying to make up for our breath not being in it.,” he added with a chuckle. Over the years Marc has recorded Ayler’s “Ghosts,” “Bells,” and “Saints” “It’s deep stuff,” he added with a sigh.

“There was a very good FM station in my hometown of Syracuse that used to play a lot of free music and psychedelic rock and that’s where I first heard Albert Ayler and the Holy Modal Rounders,” Gary Lucas recalled fondly.

““Albert’s music was soulful, playful and very American-sounding music. It was the stuff! Ayler was a fantastic composer who utilized folk melodies within the framework of his compositions. I responded instantly to “Ghosts” because of the folk element. It was very beautiful and a natural for me to cover, which I did on my very first recording that I did in 1988. (From a compilation called Live at the Knitting Factory). It became a staple in my show,” Lucas explained.

In 2000 Violent Femmes cut Albert’s “New Generation” for their album Freak Magnet. Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie had been playing “Universal Indian” for years with his own band and recently recorded Albert’s “Change Has Come” on a new album which features his shakuhachi flute playing.

Just 15 years old when he first discovered Albert Ayler, Ritchie recalled: “It was the farthest out music around, along with John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Ayler’s music was incredibly rootsy in an abstract way that appealed to me. He took it to the point of hysteria, which was an interesting approach but was sometimes it was too much.”

While Ayler’s music has the ability to mystify some listeners, its force frequently repelled others. While in the army, multi-instrumentalist/composer Anthony Braxton experienced a sudden loss of popularity when he tried to hip his friends to Free Jazz. “I started having problems in the army,” Braxton confessed. “I would play the music they wanted me to play: we’d play classical music, and marches. It was clear that I was a proficient technician. What wasn’t clear to them, however, was the music I really wanted to play. For instance my parents sent me Albert Ayler’s record Bells and Coltrane’s Ascension. I played the records and after five minutes everybody in the barracks came and was ready to kill me. Because I was attracted to this kind of music people thought they couldn’t like me. Fortunately, I was able to have some friends who could relate to some of the activity I was into.”

The sheer apocalyptic intensity and outrageousness of Ayler’s sound blew the door of modern jazz off its hinges, leaving the gate wide open for a new crew of reed-bending revolutionaries to come trouncing through in his wake. With Albert’s call for “spiritual unity,” Coltrane (who called excitedly to tell Ayler he was playing like him during the sessions for Ascension) to Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp all filed suit, with Braxton, Peter Brotzmann and John Zorn

Albert Ayler wailing prayers to the infinite in a hand-tailored green leather suit was clearly another glittering link in the 14-carat gold chain of audacious black performers that stretches back to Josephine Baker, Little Richard and James Brown and continued with Jimi Hendrix and Prince.

Bob Thiele, Ayler’s producer was keenly aware of the saxophonist’s potential to reach a larger audience. Thiele saw Albert as crossover R&B singer whose wild fashion sense and cosmic message (with the help of Mary Maria Parks’ lyrics) would make him a star. With Henry Vestine of the electric boogie band Canned Heat joining on guitar and Bernard Purdie laying down a rock-solid 4/4 beat, Ayler had suddenly abandoned the avant garde, given up the good fight and cut an album of populist message songs that you could twist to.

“It was an obvious attempt by Impulse to make Albert Ayler’s music a commodity,” Marc Ribot assessed. “The music clearly wasn’t jazz and as far as rock and roll records go they are some of the oddest to be found. It may not be any accident that they were Ayler’s last two records.”

Listening to the interviews with Albert on disc nine of the exquisite new Revenant box set Holy Ghost, Ayler sounds bewildered and deeply frustrated the failure of these projects. Compounded with years of rejection and guilt over his brother Donald’s nervous breakdown in

This disappointment seems to have delivered the one-two punch that led to the discovery of Ayler’s body on the bottom of New York’s East River on November 25^th 1970. .

To this day, mystery and hyperbole still shroud Albert’s death. Everybody from vengeful drug dealers, the Mafia, “the man” and God (in Amiri Baraka’s poem “The Dark Is Full of Tears”) murdered Albert Ayler. Mary Maria Parks had little to say on the daunting subject. “Albert chose to take his own life,” she said in a recent late-night telephone interview. “I called his parents in Cleveland.”

“Albert met everyone with a smile,” Mary said in reverie. “He was cool and very educated. I thought he worked at the post office!” Parks said with a laugh. At the time Mary Maria had an office job and sang gospel. “My girlfriend was a wild flower. She was hitting on him. But he was looking at me from the corner of his eye. I sat down and he kissed me on the cheek. ‘Nice meeting you,’ I told him, but I had to get home to Brooklyn. ‘I’m going there too,’ he told me. Soon after, I received a note from him saying he had to see me again.”

Ayler had a reputation as a real lady’s man and a clotheshorse who sported leather suits, pointed boots and fur hats. At the time he met Mary Maria he was married to Arlene Benton. The couple had a daughter named Desiree but would separate two years later in February, 1966.

Much to his brother Donald’s chagrin, Albert had found his muse and new collaborator in the poet Mary Maria Parks. Inspired by poems Albert found in her notebooks while “rambling through” her stuff, Ayler began setting Mary’s lyrics to music. “I wrote ‘Message from Albert,’” Mary claimed. Thiele resented her influence on Albert and denied her credit on the album. “I thought he would die if he didn’t record ‘Music is the Healing Force of the Universe!’ she said with a laugh. “I did the original vocals on the record but they were replaced by Vivian (Bostic) Parks also claims to have produced Albert’s stunning Love Cry sessions but when the record was released the credit read Bob Thiele. Mary Maria Parks had found herself persona non grata in a boy’s club, the jazz world.

One of Park’s fondest memories (that no one can dispute) was of making music together. With Albert on tenor, Mary Maria (whose musical background included playing piano and harp) picked up the soprano saxophone at his suggestion. One time they had been run out of Prospect Park in Brooklyn for their incoherent caterwauling. “Oh he was somethin’!” she recalled. “I was whistlin’ on my soprano! I played soprano until my knees shook!”

Like a crazy saint or a wandering prophet whose fierce beliefs carried him through an endless series of trials and tribulations, Albert’s short visit on earth was fraught with plenty of scorn and degradation. Twenty years after his death, a plethora of malicious metaphors keep coming whenever his name appears in print. In 1992 one cranky critic in the pages of Stereo Review derided the re-release of Ayler’s Love Cry, as an “audio nightmare” and likened it to the musical equivalent of “New Year’s Eve in Times Square.” Author Eric Nisenson also slammed Ayler – calling his music an “intense cacophony the likes of which the human ear has not heard outside of medieval insane asylums.”

When seeking hard answers to the great mysteries of the universe it seems that Ayler wound up sadly bewitched by his own vision. Like Ray Milland in The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, perhaps Albert simply “saw too much.”

With his sax lifted skyward and his eyes fixed somewhere on the great beyond, Albert didn’t merely play to the faithful few who attended his sporadic club and concert dates, he was playing to the hosts of the Heavenly Mansion! He wailed like a madman possessed, trying to cleanse his tormented soul.

“All I do is meditate,” he once said. “I practice and I meditate. You have to go all the way, because that’s what Coltrane did. The picture that he showed me when I looked into his eyes, was (of) the universal man.” Ayler undoubtedly believed the world was in “end times” as described by Saint John in his apocalyptic vision in the bible’s final chapter, Revelations. “It’s late now for the world,” Albert exclaimed. “And if I can help raise people to new plateaus of peace and understanding, I’ll feel my life has been worth living as a spiritual artist.”

Whether howling with joyful abandon, or wailing an eerie cry of anguish and despair, Ayler’s scope of emotion was astounding. He envisioned himself “a true messenger,” not just of jazz, but of the Holy Spirit. His melodies ebb and flow over majestic waves of rumbling drums and crashing cymbals. Ayler’s passionate saxophone cries with an overwhelming melancholy as if judgment day was near and his soul would finally be reunited with God.

“Damn, the cat sure got weird!” Lloyd Pearson exclaimed after hearing Ayler upon his return to Cleveland. Albert at the time played only soprano saxophone, claiming to be studying Arabic music. His horn sounded more like a Muslim imam calling the devoted to prayer than an instrument on which jazz is played. Ayler was seeking what he described as “the real music and the real religion.”

“It had a lot to do with God - which sounded strange to me at the time,” Lloyd later confessed. To Pearson’s ears Albert’s music resembled chaos more than any spiritual music he was familiar with.

Although based on old gospel songs and New Orleans style collective improvisation, Ayler’s music was oddly written off as self-indulgent by Miles Davis who complained that Free Jazz musicians had forgotten their “folk roots.” But Albert Ayler, if nothing else, was truly a folk musician. Ayler’s compositions were variations on folk themes much in the same way that Hungarian avant-garde composer Bela Bartok employed old peasant and gypsy melodies as the Ayler’s source of inspiration came directly from old Negro spirituals, Italian marches and New Orleans funeral dirges. Using traditional music as a blueprint for their compositions both men expanded on simple themes until the original songs were transformed into something new and unrecognizable.

“My drummer, Milford Graves, he plays folk from all over the world, like very, very old tunes, you know before I was even born,” Ayler explained to journalist Frank Kofsky.

Indeed, the chore of timekeeping had been completely dispensed with by Albert’s innovative drummers Sunny Murray and Milford Graves.

“People often think of Free Jazz players or somebody doing something different as moving ahead but Albert Ayler was also moving backwards in his own history to some kind of church music and also towards a greater harmonic simplicity. In that way he was moving forward and backwards at the same time.”

It’ll be thirty four years ago this November that a tormented saxophonist plunged into the cold gray abyss of East River (as did Hart Crane before him and Spalding Grey would just last year) in hopes of finding the peace he tried so create on this earth.

Whether blowing with joyful abandon, or wailing an eerie disquieting howl full of anguish and despair, Ayler’s scope of emotion was truly astounding. Looking (and listening) back to Revenant’s box of rarities, it is now clear for anyone willing to suspend their belief system (a standard requirement when dealing with all matters spiritual) that Albert Ayler was indeed a true messenger, not just of jazz, but of the Holy Spirit.

In 1998 poet Amiri Baraka, one of Ayler’s first true believers to sing the controversial saxophonist’s praises in print, had a bit part, playing the role of a crazy homeless sage in the brilliant political farce Bulworth.

“You can’t be no ghost; you gotta be a spirit!” Baraka tells Warren Beatty who plays the hip-hop crazed Senator Jay Billington Bulworth.

Suddenly that phrase comes rushing back to me with profound meaning. Maybe after thirty four years the time has come for the world to no longer fear Albert Ayler (and his music) as a ghost that haunts but as a spirit that endures and inspires.

While denouncing the Devil’s music, Davis found himself surrounded by some of the finest “blues cats” the Piedmont had to offer. Among them were harmonica virtuoso Sonny Terry (known to his mother as Saunders Terrell) famous for his trademark “whoopin’” harp style, Bull City Red (formerly known as George Washington), as well as the Trice Brothers - Willie and Richard and a diminutive guitarist full of bootleg and swagger known as Blind Boy Fuller.

Unless willing to beg, there were few ways a blind man, whether black or white, could eke out a living at that time, beyond sitting on a street corner all day playing an instrument for tips. It was a dilemma that Gary Davis and Blind Boy Fuller understood all too well.

When Davis first crossed paths with Fuller, he claimed the younger guitarist “didn’t know how to play but one piece and that was with a knife.” Knife, slide or bottleneck guitar, played in an open tuning, was a style that Gary abhorred. “I don’t think nothing of that! You’re cheating your own self. It ain’t so respectable,” the Reverend later told Stefan Grossman. “People think it’s a pretty thing but it’s not.”

“Respectable” or not Davis had no trouble mastering the technique himself and would record just one number, employing either a pocketknife or a glass cigar case for a slide on “Whistlin’ Blues,” with his guitar uncharacteristically tuned to an open D6 chord.

“For one thing he knew how good he was,” David Bromberg imparted. “He really didn’t have much good to say about any of his peers. If you happened to ask him about Blind Blake, he would allow that Blake was ‘a sporting guitar player.’ That was his highest praise.”

“He had no equals, and he knew it,” Dave Van Ronk concurred. “He was a merciless critic.” Dave recalled the Reverend parodying legendary blues men Lightnin’ Hopkins and Blind Lemon Jefferson, for as great as they may have been, their singular styles were a cinch to mimic for a guitarist of his caliber. One night Van Ronk was playing a gig in Detroit, when, at the end of his set, which showcased a couple tunes by the Reverend, he discovered Gary and Annie in the house. But all feelings of trepidation and incompetence soon vanished when the Reverend complimented Dave for playing “a right sporty guitar,” praise that he reserved only for the likes of Blind Blake.

“Gary had a massive ego,” Barry Kornfeld chuckled. “The fact that he lived in a slum or had no money meant nothing to him. He knew who he was and how good he was. Blind Blake was the only musician he had a good word for and if you listen to Blake, you can hear several instances where Gary learned something from him.”

*

One of ten children born in Wadesboro, North Carolina, Fulton Allen lived a lot of life in a short time, recording nearly 135 songs over a five-year stretch between 1935 and 1940. Described as “small, quiet and polite,” Blind Boy Fuller was a notoriously natty dude, always dressed in a sharp suit and tie. Willie Trice who accompanied Fuller to New York in 1937, to a recording session for Decca, claimed he “never wore dark glasses or shades and his cap [or fedora] was always on his head.”

Accompanied by Sonny Terry’s wailing harmonica and throbbing jaw harp and Bull City Red’s washboard, spanking out a syncopated rhythm, Fuller could be found most days between the long rows of tobacco warehouses playing for factory workers at quitting time, or down on East Pettigrew Street, raising a ruckus outside the local barbershop, movie theater or greasy spoon.

Cigarette sales remained high throughout the Depression, keeping most working folks of Bull City employed and able to afford to toss a nickel or a dime to a band of street singers.

“It was payday every night if you work it right,” Brownie McGhee once said. “Maybe a girl [might] take you up and feed you a good meal too.”

An exceptional guitarist and singer in his own right (Walter) Brownie McGhee, in his early years took the sobriquet of “Blind Boy Fuller Number Two,” after writing and recording “The Death of Blind Boy Fuller” following the guitarist’s death in 1941.

In April 1933, the Superintendent of Public Welfare W.E. Stanley wrote a letter addressed to the Durham chief of police requesting that Blind Boy Fuller “be allowed to make music” at whatever location he deemed fit. On top of whatever meager income, he managed to generate with his guitar, Fuller received a monthly relief check for $23.

Reverend Gary Davis

*

Talent scouts scouring the Carolinas and Virginia for authentic folk music during the nineteen twenties and thirties routinely ignored black musicians. When it came to blues, the Piedmont style repeatedly took a backseat to musicians from the Mississippi Delta.

“When you think of his playing… what tradition did he come out of?” Woody Mann mused. “There really wasn’t a tradition. ‘The Piedmont School’ handle that Davis was deemed to have been a part of is a regional style and very limited. Piedmont was just a catchword for that style of fingerpicking.”

J.B. (James Baxter, AKA “Jimmy”) Long harbored no such prejudices. A blues fanatic and manager of the United Dollar Store on West Club Boulevard in Durham, Long’s shop sold dozens of 78’s by local greats including Josh White and Buddy Moss. As a part-time talent scout for the Perfect Record Company, J.B. eventually got wind of a street singer named Blind Boy Fuller and wasted no time in arranging an all-star recording session in New York City with Fuller, Davis, Sonny Terry and Bull City Red. With his wife and young daughter in tow, Long chauffeured the musicians north to Manhattan. On the way Fuller so greatly coveted Gary’s new National Steel guitar that Long was forced to make a pit stop at a Richmond music shop and buy him a similar instrument for fifty dollars.

The sessions began on July 23^rd, 1935, and lasted three days with Davis recording just two blues numbers before abruptly refusing to cut anything but gospel songs from that point on. Davis and Long had a strained relationship at best. As Gary abstained from alcohol at the time, he immediately became judgmental and aggravated when J.B. plied his fellow musicians with a case of beer. He soon found himself the odd man out as the studio became the domain of Blind Boy Fuller, who then recorded a dozen tunes while Bull City Red cut eight. Much to Long’s frustration, Davis would lay down an additional ten gospel tracks. Not only did he abhor Gary’s holy blues numbers but found his zealous hollering grating.

Along with Red (a decent guitarist in his own right) scratching rhythm on a washboard, Davis found himself curtailed to the role of playing sideman to Fuller, adding his trademark lightning riffs to “Rag Mama Rag” and “I’m A Rattlesnakin’ Daddy” which sold well for both the A.R.C. and Vocalin labels. According to Willie Trice, Art Satherly of ARC (the American Record Company) who was on hand to supervise the sessions, called Davis “the playingist man I’ve ever seen.”

Not surprisingly Gary had an axe to grind with Fuller, whether over Long’s preferential treatment of him or simply due to the younger man’s success. While Fuller was just in his mid-twenties, Davis was already approaching forty and considered as a guitarist’s guitarist. As Willie Trice claimed, “He was educated on them strings. While you were playing one chord, Gary would play five.” Critical of “Rag Mama Rag,” Davis dismissed Fuller’s perky hit song as nothing more than “cheap guitar playing.”

Stefan Grossman recalled Davis as a “very competitive and jealous guitar player and performer. He had developed his own style as he wanted to be sure his music would stand out amongst the rest.”

Years later in the November 1966 issue of Blues Unlimited, Gary shed some light on the awkward situation, claiming J.B. Long “didn’t do me right, you know. He give me but fifty dollars [and] kept the royalties. In them days,” Gary pointed out, “I thought fifty dollars was some money.”

Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee

Sonny Terry also felt exploited by Long, claiming, “At the beginning he got all the money [but] we didn’t care ‘cause it got us our start.”

Davis, who’d been repeatedly abused throughout his life, frequently cast himself in the role of the victim. The figure of fifty dollars he reportedly received has repeatedly been disputed over the years. In one interview Gary claimed that Fuller had received $450 for his trip to New York, while he was paid a paltry ten dollars per tune. As Davis cut twelve songs that should have added up to $120, while Long, in his income tax statement claimed to have paid Fuller half the amount that Gary griped about.

“Gary was a very stubborn man,” Eric von Schmidt imparted. “‘Bullheaded,’ as he was described by more than one of his contemporaries. Still more important was that by the time [he recorded for Long] Gary had already washed his hands of playing the blues. By then he was an ordained minister and could only be persuaded to cut two blues, ‘Cross and Evil Woman Blues’ and ‘I’m Throwin’ Up My Hands.’ The rest were gospel songs. On the other hand, Blind Boy Fuller wrestled with no such angels,” Eric observed.

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Peter and company at the Lone Star Bar - mid 80s - with Flaco, Sam Bush and Bela Fleck and drummer Larry Atamanuik (photo by John Kruth)

Relix: How did Earth Opera begin?

Peter Rowan: David Grisman and I met in Cambridge after I had left Bill Monroe about ‘64 or ‘65 and we started playing these tunes that I had written in Nashville that were too esoteric for commercial country releases. David had been playing mandolin on the west coast with Jerry Garcia and Herb Pederson. Then he came east, and I came up from Nashville and we got together at Ralph Rinzler’s apartment. He had a mandocello and was applying it to some songs I had written. Instead of playing bluegrass rhythm, I was playing more arpeggiated patterns to back up my songs and we were doing them at a slower tempo where we’d really stretch out the time.

Relix: Wasn’t Grisman playing electric mandolin as well?

P.R.: Yeah, he had an electric Gibson mandolin that had lots of feedback and fuzztone. We started out like the Incredible String Band, as a duo, but the folk scene was changing so fast that even Elektra records, who had signed us on the virtue of a demo we did, thought we should expand the group, so we added drums and stuff because we were getting gigs where we had to rock pretty heavily, gigs with the Doors and people like that.

Relix: Were you playing at the Fillmores and the Avalon Ballroom?

P.R.: We never made it to the west coast. The band broke up when it went there. We never had the management or the booking coordinated to the degree where...my head wasn’t into business, nobody else’s was either. We just hoped those elements would fall together. We didn’t know what was needed. Every time a big manager would approach us and tell us to change our sound, we’d say we just wanted to do what we were doing because we’re really into the music. We went all the way from acoustic mandolin, guitar and mandocello to playing saxophone. I played tenor and David played alto. Richard Grando influenced us and turned us on to Coltrane and people like that. There was a band in Boston called the Far Cry and an herbalist named Richard Martin played sax in that band. I sat in on some sax jams and had these amazing experiences where the saxophones would be playing freely, intertwining and as the guitar player, I could make up any chords that I wanted and the saxes would just follow my direction. This started to change my outlook on music because it opened up so many possibilities. It was dangerous. Without having a business head and a mind for finding one style and sticking with it, which is what Bill Monroe always said, “Find that style and stick with it!,” it was a tremendous experimentation going on all the time. Then Earth Opera began to suffer because we lost our direction. We got too far afield. It made for great live performances but it also made for alot of unknowns and craziness and psychic torture.

Relix: After Earth Opera ended you joined Seatrain.

P.R.: Yeah, I went back to Nashville and was hangin’ out with Kris Kristofferson when he was making his first album. I was amazed. I thought I’d stay there and work on projects, pick up the threads. But I got a phone call from Richard Greene from the west coast, who had been the fiddle player with Monroe when I was with him. Richard had started playing with bassist Andy Kulberg and the remnants of the Blues Project, a New York band (which featured Al Kooper and Steve Katz, who later formed Blood, Sweat and Tears).

Richard Greene (photo by John Kruth)

We started doin’ things like “In the Pines” and Richard and I played a few acoustic gigs together. All of a sudden, all that lack of direction and experimenting became very focused. Seatrain had management. Albert Grossman (who managed Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin) handled the band. We were immediately playing gigs all over the east coast. We moved back and forth from coast to coast a couple of times. We played a lot of college gigs and the post Woodstock rock festivals. There was a pretty good rock scene in San Francisco so we played there alot. Then we finally got drummer Larry Atamanuik, who had been with Ronnie Hawkins and was an alumnus of the same school of music as The Band.

Relix: Did you play any other instrument in Seatrain other than the guitar?

P.R.: I tried to bring the mandola into it, but it was a foreign element in that conglomeration. We were a pretty hard rockin’ band. We mostly did kick-ass music like “Orange Blossom Special” and “Sally Goodin.” We’d segue those fiddle tunes in with my songs of Kulberg’s opuses, where we’d feature the fiddle. In Earth Opera there was a lot of free-form stuff based solely on intuition. In Seatrain, all of that stuff had been worked out and was calculated to give maximum energy to the performance with no questionable periods of silence of searching notes.

Peter playing mandola (photo by John Kruth)

Relix: Was Seatrain the first band George Martin produced outside of the Beatles?

P.R.: I think so. He did Cilla Black and a few other people in England.

Relix: Seatrain produced four albums altogether. You hadn’t joined the band by the time the first album came out and you left the group before the last album was released.

P.R.: Well, the thing about Seatrain was, my electric guitar playing had become so specialized. It was good for me. It focused me but I found that when I’d get off the road, I couldn’t play an acoustic guitar. My chops were all screwed up from playing these worked out parts and arrangements. It kind of panicked me a little bit. When you focus really hard in one direction, something has to ease up in another. It was incessant touring.

Relix: How long was your stint with Seatrain?

P.R.: Three years. We toured for two of them. It was very exciting. I’d love to do a Seatrain reunion. I can now appreciate what was goin’ on in that band. I wanted to do the things I did in Seatrain when I left but I couldn’t do them, which was how the Muleskinner album [which included the late great Clarence White on guitar, banjo ace Bill Keith, David Grisman on mandolin and the dazzling fiddle work of Richard Greene] and Old and In The Way which included Jerry Garcia on banjo, David Grisman, fiddler Vassar Clements and bassist John Kahn) came about. That was a total return to acoustic music and lit a fuse for the bluegrass revival, from an urban or rock ‘n’ roll point of view. I’ve met a lot of people who started out listening to Old and In The Way and ended up loving the Stanley Brothers or listening to Flatt and Scruggs. That music turned a lot of people on to what came before.

Relix: Did Muleskinner ever perform live in front of an audience?

P.R.: Yeah, we did a week in L.A., appeared on a T.V. show and that was all there was. After that it was Old and In The Way and three albums with the Rowan Brothers (Asylum).

Relix: Was your whole family musical?

P.R.: My grandfather Wallace and Uncle Jim played ukes. They knew Hawaiian and swing tunes like ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ and ‘Red River Valley.’

Relix: Was the ukulele your first instrument?

P.R.: Yeah, a baritone uke, it was made of plastic. I went out and got a dog leash and made a strap out of it…. like chains and phony leather.

Relix: The dawn of punk!

P.R.: We let our ukes hang low! [laughs] After a year of playing Elvis and Everly Brothers songs, the frets on my Arthur Godfrey ukulele were worn down into the fingerboard, ‘cause they were made of plastic. I didn’t know there was anything else, for a while. As a kid, we’d go up to my grandfather’s place for a big family party and we’d be strumming tennis rackets all year long, waiting to get hold of his guitar. We’d get there and his guitar was so beautiful. It was wood! shining... I look at it now and it was the most beat up hunk of wood you’ve ever seen. It’s was called a Monterey. The insignia is stenciled on the peghead. That guitar meant everything to me as a kid.

Relix: Were your parents musicians?

P.R.: Yes, they both played piano. My dad danced and sang and did soft-shoe routines. My mother played the classics. My dad would play some old college tunes and start tripping on the chords. Halfway through a song, he’d just go out, arpeggiating like crazy on the piano. I’d say ‘Dad! What are you doing?’ and he wouldn’t even hear me. He’d just be improvising these arpeggiated sequences and that in a sense was one of my first musical directions. When you couple that with Bill Monroe just chopping chords and expecting you to hit the next note in time, in key… it’s lethal man! [laughs] It’ll make you write some funny songs!

Relix: When did you write your first song?

P.R.: At ten. It was called “Blueberry Blues.” I wrote it on Cape Cod.

Relix: When did songwriting become a focal point in your life?

P.R.: When I broke up with my first girlfriend. But actually, I had a rock ‘n roll band when I was twelve called The Cupids. I wrote a song called “Crazy Joe” which was our theme song. I remember going out and buying Elvis’ first records at the grocery store.

Relix: The grocery store?

P.R.: Yeah, I’d ride my bike to Capp’s grocery. The first records I bought were Homer and Jethro. I liked them. Then one day I was listening to this gospel station out of Boston and all of a sudden, I heard ‘That’ll Be The Day’ and I said, ‘My God! What is this?!’ Then I turned to the next station, and it was just finishing. That hour, that second the record was hittin’ the airwaves of Boston. Joe Smith, the president of Elektra records, was the D.J. It was happening on every station. I couldn’t believe it! I said ‘I’ve found it! This is what I’ve been looking for.’ So, I formed this band, The Cupids, and we played sock hops all around Boston.

Relix: Could you talk about your song writing process? What influences you to write and how do ideas and images come to you?

P.R.: Mostly what happens is, I absorb impressions of things. I’m pretty impressionable. I believe that songs that come to me are a gift from God. They’re of the spirit. Maybe I feel that way because I’m naive and don’t have any sense of craft about what I do, but I just write down what comes and that’s pretty much the way the song is finished. Sometimes I’ll write a song that has maybe forty verses and I’ll have to hone it down. I’m like a vessel and different ingredients are poured in, stirred around and then some kind of fire is laid under me whether it be an emotional or intellectual fire, physical environmental or something that cooks the stew...then I drink it [laughs]. Relix: Do you tend to write the words first or do you get a melody in your head and then write the lyrics or is each song different?

P.R.: Each song is individual. Most songs come complete. Other times I’ll check my notebooks and read the words and a melody will be implied. When I write country music I lean towards simplicity. I usually sit with the words and fool with them until they sing right. The whole idea is to get them out from my mind through my mouth with my breath to the listener’s ear. I do a lot of writing on the road. When I have a moment on an airplane, I’ll write a few pages or when I have a moment at my hotel room. It’s a mystery how the songs come out. I enjoy it very much. When I started writing, I wrote outdoors. When I started singing, I sang outdoors. I sang to the waves. I sang to the sky. I sang to the trees in the forest. Up in the hills, on the cliffs, that’s where I really started to sing. It was a form of communication between us kids. We’d be several miles apart out there in those hills and if you wanted to reach out to somebody, you’d have to holler. The holler became a yodel, and the yodel became making up songs. I learned songs from watching cowboy movies. But I always return to the earth and natural things as a setting for my music. It feeds me. In the Grand Canyon the rocks really sing! Or to go to the New England woods where I grew up and smell the juniper trees and feel the texture of the rocks, Because I saw it when I was so little, it grows in my mind, my memory. It’s the basic source of everything I write about.

Relix: There’s a strong sense of place in your songs. Could you talk about the cast of characters who you write and sing about, like Panama Red?

P.R.: They’re parts of myself or people I’ve met. It’s trying to see things from the point of view of someone else, that is a character whether historical, fictional or mythological. At the moment I happen to be writing more personal songs. About my feelings, separation, love... I’d like to get more into words and the craftsmanship of words, in the poetic sense, the intricacy of language. I write down everything that comes and I think that’s what the muse wants. Then you get given deeper songs. I get a lot from jam sessions, and I love to make up songs on the spot. That was the basis of the Rowan Brothers music. We spent our time doing that and then for a hobby we made records [laughs]. I really don’t try to make a song uplifting. But I go on the faith that if the song is uplifting to me, it will excite other people. Even if it’s a sad song it will open up some emotions from listening to it. Rather than point things in a certain direction, I just go with it and see where it wants to take me. Songs have a life of their own.”

Relix Magazine

Peter Rowan - the night we heard the news that Richard Brautigan died - (photo by John Kruth)

(the program from the Lead Belly Memorial)

It was McGhee who was responsible for Davis’s brief cameo appearance that night at Town Hall. Following the intermission, John Lomax introduced Gary, as “One of these great street musicians,” of the same stature as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly.

(The Rev - photo by Stephan Grossman)

Suddenly the Reverend appeared from behind the curtain, and kicked off the evening’s second set with a spry ragtime instrumental number titled “Marine Band,” as well as a jaunty rendition of “You Got to Move” As the immaculately hip comedian Lord Richard Buckley once said about “The Nazz” (his nickname for Jesus of Nazareth), “When he laid it down, Wham! It stayed there!”

Released on April 23, 1971, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers included their cover of “You Gotta Move,” which slightly resembled a song Reverend Davis had played for decades before recording it in 1962. Built on Mick Taylor’s stinging slide guitar riff, the Stones’ slinky arrangement, owed more to Mississippi Fred McDowell (who cut the song in 1965) than the Reverend’s version.

Meanwhile, as Sticky Fingers raced up the charts (selling nearly three million records) Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records (who produced records by Fred McDowell, Texas bluesman Mance Lipscomb, zydeco accordionist Clifton Chenier and recorded the original version of “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die,” the popular anti-Vietnam war anthem by Country Joe & the Fish) wasn’t about to sit idlily by and watch McDowell get swindled out of a fat royalty check. On July 6, 1976, Strachwitz filed a claim for $700,000 in California’s federal court against the Rolling Stones (specifically Mick Jagger) on behalf of his own publishing company, Tradition Music, along with Manny Greenhill’s Chandos Music, who managed the Reverend’s songwriting affairs. It seemed that both Davis and McDowell held copyrights on the song for their previous arrangements of a spiritual which originated in the Black church, that had been previously recorded by Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Five Blind Boys from Alabama. The parties eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, despite the Stones’ then-manager, the notoriously shifty Allen Klein’s ludicrous claim the tune was written by Jagger and Richards.

The Rolling Stones (whose name was inspired by Muddy Waters’s song “Rollin’ Stone”) had been hardcore blues devotees since the early 60s, when Brian Jones and Mick Jagger got their start in Alexis Korner’s band, Blues Incorporated. Whether they’d first heard “You Gotta Move” on a record, or performed live, the Stones began playing the song on their 1969 US tour before cutting it at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Alabama in December 1969. Most likely they assumed it was another old PD [public domain] blues tune, and put their name on it, while leaving the matter of whether the authors were dead or alive to their lawyers to sort out.

“They probably figured, ‘this is our version and that’s good enough, we’ll take the credit,’” Willie Aron offered. “On Modern Times Bob Dylan recorded a version of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” by Muddy Waters, although Tommy Johnson probably recorded the first version of it. And who knows where he got it from [perhaps Hambone Willie Newbern]?”

While Dylan’s arrangement of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” remains musically true to the blues standard, his lyrics take a detour to a poetic no man’s land where Muddy Waters, Johnny Winter, or anyone who ever played the song would dare to venture. Suddenly we find ourselves tagging along with the rambling “blue-eyed son” of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” on his endless odyssey where “the landscape is glowin,’ gleamin’ in the golden light of day.”10 Bob’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” is a great example of the folk process. While he clearly borrowed the song’s melody and arrangement, he refashioned the lyric, going far beyond a cautionary tale of the ill effects of hard drink and women. Claiming authorship for writing eleven new verses to a tune that’s old as the hills should not be ridiculed as plagiarism but seen as a continuum of a musical legacy.

“The oral tradition of music is a slippery slope,” Willie Aron continued. “A lot of people claim the white man stole the blues. But the truth lies in how the oral tradition is passed on, which is not just limited to an interracial exchange but is more of an intra-racial experience – something that constantly happens within the races. It’s very easy to argue and scream, ‘Cultural appropriation!’ But that’s not necessarily the case as plenty of Black musicians take music they’ve heard from other Black musicians and claim credit for it.”

“It gets tricky,” explained Jeff Place, three-time Grammy winner and senior archivist at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. “I would compile a Lead Belly anthology and a Woody Guthrie anthology and there would be songs where Woody and Leadbelly were playing together, folk songs that predated them both, and the Lead Belly people had copyrighted it as a Lead Belly song and the Guthrie folks had done the same… the same song on both albums! One group of people would argue, ‘No that’s our song,’ while the others said it was theirs… I’d tell them, ‘Look, I gotta be consistent here, it’s the same song!’

“The case study is ‘Man of Constant Sorrow,’ which goes back to this old shape note hymn known as, ‘I Am a Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow,’” Place pointed out. “Then Dick Burnett, [a blind banjo player and fiddler who appeared on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music] wrote a secular version of it. And Emry Arthur [whom Greil Marcus credits as the song’s author] recorded a different variant of it [in 1928]. The Stanley Brothers come along and added that chorus…”

I am a man of constant sorrow
I’ve seen trouble all my days
I bid farewell to old Kentucky
The place where I was borned and raised

Whoever wrote it, the song had wings of its own. After learning the Stanley Brothers’ version, Kentucky banjoist Roscoe Holcomb recorded a harrowing a cappella rendition in 1961. The same year Judy Collins released “A Maid of Constant Sorrow,” with a voice as clear and sparkling as her famous blue eyes. A year later Bob Dylan put a Woody Guthrie/Okie twist on the song for his 1962 debut album.

Rod Stewart’s 1969 self-titled solo album (better known in the U.K. as An Old Raincoat Will Never Let You Down) featured a gritty take of “Man of Constant Sorrow.” While Rod’s husky vocals and Ronnie Wood’s slide guitar (along with a few lyric changes) evoke the down and out feel of London’s back alleys, their arrangement differed only slightly and was not enough to attribute the songwriting credit to one “R. Stewart,” as it appeared on the record sleeve.

“Everyone hears the Soggy Bottom Boys doing their version of the song [an earlier Stanley Brothers’ arrangement credited to Carter Stanley in the Coen Brothers’ 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?] But I wouldn’t credit the Stanley Brothers for it on one of our records,” Jeff Place explained.

John Cohen, a fledgling folk musician who formed the New Lost City Ramblers with Tom Paley and Mike Seeger, was in the house that night in 1950 for the tribute to Lead Belly, and recalled Davis’s impromptu performance as “stunning,” claiming he never “witnessed or even imagined such a guitar virtuoso before.”

With a glorious baptism of warm applause that rained down upon him, the Reverend Gary Davis had officially arrived in New York, never to look back. As Sonny Terry used to say, “Carolina was a good place to be from.” But it would still be a few more years before the concert dates and recording contracts came rolling in.

*

Just a note before I go - sorry Dear Readers for having fallen off the slippery Substack slope in the last month. I’ve been playing more music than writing about it in recent weeks - oh, and Happy Birthday Mississippi Fred!

Steve Lacy

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

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

Gysin (L) Burroughs (R)

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

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

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

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

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

Kruth: How did your collaboration begin?

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

Kruth: What was your writing process like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EVS with Farina & Dylan doing the overseas stomp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buy Me a Coffee!

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

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

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

Brother Wayne rockin’ with the MC5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still rockin’ in more recent years…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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