DIG THIS WITH BILL MESNIK AND RICH BUCKLAND- THE SPLENDID BOHEMIANS

Good ideas are elusive, and you never know when one is gonna smack you in the head - literally. 

Sometimes, when life is squeezing the juice out of you, and things are going off the rails, it takes a minor cataclysm to put things back into perspective. 

Then you can reset the whole narrative, and move forward.

Christmas, 2019 was like that for me.

Our artists today represent a very specific category within the folk music genre, which lately has come to be known as “Freak Folk”: one is a contemporary singer-songwriter, and the other is an “ancestral” group (when you consider they derived from the early 1970s, before there was even a category for it); one hails from the U.K., the other from California. However, both The Incredible String Band and Joanna Newsom share an “off the grid” sense of musicality and exist in a space well beyond any pop music fashion - past, or present.

JOANNA NEWSOM

Who doesn’t like harp music? It’s the preferred instrument of the angels, after all, and Joanna Newsom is indeed one of those. Whimsical, profound, incandescent - all these adjectives apply to this nerdy goddess, who, I was delighted to learn, is also the life partner of the silly comedian, Andy Samberg (and, cousin to the Governor of California). These personal stats ground her in a concrete reality that detracts a bit from her mystery, but, at the same time enhances her approachability. 

Listening to The Sprout and the Bean is like being gifted a pass to the 100 acre wood to visit Pooh, or transported to an elven glade where everything - (animals, plants, earth, and water) is imbued with magic - where the pantheism between man and nature serenely collapses all sense of temporality…. Whoa…getting a bit woo woo here. Never mind all that. Just enjoy her otherworldly conjurings!

THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND

The Scottish duo of Robin Williamson and Mike Heron formed the nucleus of one of the strangest musical acts of the last century. It takes a moment to get past what initially seems like off-key meanderings to appreciate that there is a deep level of sophistication and prescience here, in terms of world music, that still sounds fresh and modern - over 50 years later.

Props to Joe Boyd, the genius UK producer at Elektra records at the time, for discovering, recording, and introducing this band of medievally dressed musical magicians to the world. And, they would have made an even bigger splash (no pun intended), if the inclement weather at Woodstock hadn’t delayed their scheduled performing slot - (Melanie grabbed it) - which forced them to crowbar their gossamer stylings within the hardest of hard rock line ups the next day. As a result, their ethereal charms went unappreciated. Our featured cut, Waltz of the New Moon displays their unique vision and vocal technique perfectly.

THE KEROUAC PROJECT: https://www.kerouacproject.org/

JACK KEROUAC SCHOOL OF DISEMBODIED POETICS: https://www.naropa.edu/academics/schools-centers/jack-kerouac-school-of-disembodied-poetics/

The thread of Jack Kerouac’s literary and personal life in the American imagination might be unwound succinctly in the following terms: ambitious and fun-loving young man leaves behind his small-town upbringing to chase heroes and dreams in the American West, finding along the way new paths to enlightenment while blazing a trail for generations of seekers to follow.

It is a theme familiar to most of us, because more than a few of our favorite novels embrace it. It is also, in the case of Kerouac, almost entirely a fiction. The man most associated with the peripatetic Beat Generation spent more than half his life in his hometown of Lowell, Mass., living with his mother. This master of the postwar American idiom grew up speaking the French dialect of his Canadian immigrant parents and actually attempted an early draft of On The Road (the book was eventually published in 1957) in the dialect of his Franco-American community. Despite the image of a modern spiritual seeker who eventually found a home in Buddhism, Kerouac was born and died a self-identified Catholic; and despite his iconic status as a chronicler of the road, the most prominent theme in Kerouac’s novels is a mysticism of place.

Kerouac’s mystical visions had another specific theme—the crucifixion. In Maggie Cassidy, Christ speaks to him from a crucifix after confession:

“My child, you find yourself in the world of mystery and pain not understandable—I know, angel—it is for your good, we shall save you, because we find your soul as important as the soul of the others in the world—but you must suffer for that, in effect my child, you must die, you must die in pain, with cries, frights, despairs—the ambiguities! the terrors!”

The Autobiographical Novels of Jack Kerouac

Visions of Gerard (written 1956, published 1963)
About Kerouac's saintly older brother, who died as a child.

Doctor Sax (written 1952, published 1959)

Maggie Cassidy (written 1953, published 1959)
Youthful porchlight romancing in Lowell.

The Town and the City (written 1946-49, published 1950)

Vanity of Duluoz (written and published 1968)
Kerouac's last published novel, a memoir of early days.

On The Road (written 1948-56, published 1957)

Visions of Cody (written 1951-52, published 1972)
More about Neal Cassady.

The Subterraneans (written 1953, published 1958)
Kerouac's pathetic love story about a black girl who dumps him for Gregory Corso.

Tristessa (written 1955-56, published 1960)
Junkie prostitute girlfriend in Mexico.

The Dharma Bums (written 1957, published 1958)

Big Sur (written 1961, published 1962)

Desolation Angels (written 1956-61, published 1965)

Satori in Paris (written 1965, published 1966)
A tr

To spur my songwriting juices, I got this deck of "Oblique Strategies" cards, created by Brian Eno, designed to prompt creativity. Here are a few examples. 

INSIDE / OUTSIDE 

(Oblique Strategy: “THINK - Inside the work, outside the work”)

Inside - outside: it’s hard to reconcile

Inside is terrified, though outside may beguile

If I stay inside I just might hide from tribulations and the trial

Of outside’s obligations to display the latest style.

Inside is a cozy place, my home made out of bricks

Outside is an endless space, with hucksters full of tricks

Who wait around each corner to deliver blows and kicks

Or, subtler art to break your heart no medicine can fix

INSIDE - IT’S WARM

OUTSIDE MAY DO ME HARM

OUTSIDE - IT’S COLD

INSIDE I’M GROWING OLD.

It might agoraphobia, this reluctance that I feel

Or, maybe something nobler, some grace for me to heal

It might be something sinister, a cage of the mind too real

But, whatever the urge I need to emerge a person who can feel.

Inside - outside: sings out of harmony

A discordant strain of grief and pain

An obvious forgery

Turn on the light, step into the night

And accept what’s meant to be

Wherever you go, at least you’ll know

What it feels like to be free.

REVERSE 

(O.S.: Reverse)

I’m stuck in reverse, and way round the bacK

The brakes are all worn and the axle is cracked,

The steering is worthless, it’s totally whacked

I’m headed for trouble and everything’s black (and everything’s black)

I’m up to my elbow in sulfurous muck

And as far as all I know I’m dead out of luck

But, if it’s not too late I’ll sell you my truck

Let fate steer the crate, and earn Satan a buck

Reverse ain’t the worst           

If you face it with grace

It’s like running in place

Or, a pie in the face         

Reverse is just relative                 

A black hole in space

It ain’t something you need to erase.      

Perhaps I’ve been looking at my problem all wrong

Maybe Reverse is the point of my song

It could be “ass backwards” will make me last long

And, what doesn’t kill me might build me up strong.

FOOL’S GOLD

(O.S.: what are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate.)

HAVE A DESIRE TO CREATE, BUT NOT A SINGLE IDEA

WOULDN’T IT BE REALLY GREAT TO PULL AN “AVE MARIA”?

I’LL PRAY TO THE GOD OF ART 

TO ASSIST ME AND OPEN MY HEART

OR AT LEAST TO MAKE A START

TOWARDS SOMETHING TRUTHFUL, SOMETHING BOLD, SOMETHING HONEST

THAT’S NOT FOOL’S GOLD.

IT’S NOT MY FINEST HOUR

BUT I WON’T LET MYSELF BE SOUR

I STILL HAVE HOPE FOR SUCCESS

AND THOUGH I SPEAK TO AUDIENCE OF ONE

WE’RE STILL HAVING FUN

SO FORWARD! AND DAMN ALL THE REST!

I SHOULDN’T COMPLAIN IF THERE’S NOTHING TO GAIN

BY YEARS OF WASTED TOIL

THE UNIVERSE HAS MADE IT PLAIN

WHY BURN REGRETFUL OIL?

I’LL PRAY TO THE GOD OF ART 

TO ASSIST ME AND OPEN MY HEART

OR AT LEAST TO MAKE A START

TOWARDS SOMETHING TRUTHFUL, SOMETHING BOLD, SOMETHING HONEST

THAT’S NOT FOOL’S GOLD.

There is something that happens when two particular voices blend together that transcends all understanding or logic. And, when those voices share the same DNA, the magnetic pull is such that they become one voice. We’ve heard that family blend many times: The Everlys, The Wilsons, The Gibbs, The Andrew Sisters, etc. The list goes on.

One of the most uncanny examples of this phenomenon belongs to Charlie and Ira Louvin, those titans of Country and Gospel music. When they sing with religious devotion, such as they do here in The River of Jordan - you can hear God and his miracles working in every keening, harmonic fifth. The other song presented today features Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, - a pair of folks about as far from siblings as you can get, but whose vocal cords also combine miraculously.

THE LOUVINS

The first time I heard of Ira and Charlie Louvin was through Emmylou Harris’s 1975 version of If I Could Only Win Your Love, and I had to know from whence this other-worldly sound originated. Like a hound on the scent, I tracked down several recordings from the brothers, and sat open mouthed as song after song cut through me. 

The Louvins, whose birth name was Loudermilk (cousins to the noted songwriter), had a contentious relationship, owing to Ira’s drunken temperament and womanizing. Charlie contemplated going solo, but Ira’s early demise, at 41, in a drunken car crash, made the decision permanent. 

Ira usually takes the high harmony, but they had the ability to switch mid way through a song so that it was often hard to tell who was covering which part.  Truly one of the all time great sibling singing duos. 

ALISON KRAUSS AND ROBERT PLANT

A musical marriage made in heaven that no fiction writer could have invented, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss came together in one of the most celestial combos ever. The Led Zeppelin frontman, renowned for his soaring falsetto, melds with the rawboned steadiness of bluegrass’s sweetheart in an eclectic stew of influences that somehow create a single entity. Today’s featured song, Please Read the Letter, nestled among cuts by the Everlys, Gene Clark, Mel Tillis, and Townes Van Zandt was written by Plant and his Zeppelin brother, Jimmie Page, and is added seamlessly to the mix.

The resulting album, Raising Sand, produced by the curatorial genius T-Bone Burnett, was released in 2007, and swept the Grammies and Americana Music Awards, taking its place in the pantheon of beautiful enigmas.  

2021 was a hell of a year: 

My wife, Chemayne, passes in December of 2020, during the height of the pandemic; 

The following year is spent stumbling in a maze of confusion - (to be honest, the smoke is just starting to clear); 

Some solace is found online with a slavic angel of mercy;

Chemayne's cat, Boo, and I (the remaining survivors) learn to tolerate, and even find comfort, in each other; 

Work, and music continue;

Red Dead Redemption 2 becomes an obsession;

and, of course.... there are lots of vivid dreams. 

    THE QUEER AWAKENINGS OF A WILD BOY PURSUING THE NOVA EXPRESS

On September 6, 1951, William Burroughs killed his wife, Beat legend Joan Vollmer. At a friend’s apartment, she balanced a glass on her head, at Burroughs’s behest. He had contracted a lifelong mania for guns from duck-hunting excursions with his father, and was never unarmed if he could help it. He fired a pistol from about nine feet away. The bullet struck Vollmer in the forehead, at the hairline. She was twenty-eight. He was devastated, but readily parroted a story supplied by his lawyer, a flamboyant character named Bernabé Jurado: the gun went off accidentally. Released on bail, Burroughs might have faced trial had not Jurado, in a fit of road rage, shot a socially prominent young man and, when his victim died of septicemia, fled the country. Burroughs did the same, and a Mexican court convicted him in absentia of manslaughter, sentencing him to two years. In the introduction to “Queer,” Burroughs disparages his earlier work and adds, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death,” because it initiated a spiritual “lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”

“There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs

“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”
― William S. Burroughs

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.”
― william s. burroughs

“You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible”
― William S. Burroughs

“If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.”
― William S. Burroughs

“I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.”
― William S. Burroughs

“When you stop growing you start dying.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

Dead or alive? Today, we feature one of each: two exquisite female singer-songwriters from the 70’s - one a heroin casualty, and the other a remarkable example of patience rewarded. Judee Sill could have been a Laurel Canyon diva on the order of a Joni Mitchell, but, an unquenchable, self-destructive thirst put a stop to her success; and, Linda Perhacs, a name lost in the archives of time, until a fluke, third-generational cult of folky weirdness reopened her long dormant chrysalis of talent. 

JUDEE SILL

There is a recent documentary, LOST ANGEL, that covers the tragic spiral and conflicted soul of the artist Judee Sill: reform school alum, heroin addict, prostitute, prisoner… followed by the release of two widely admired albums, then, tragically, her untimely demise at 35 from an O.D. 

But, it’s her music that matters and endures: startlingly original, quirky, deeply felt folk rock, tinged with ironic humor and pain, in a mix that elicits complex emotions. 

As Jesus loved the sinners and rejects of this mottled world, Judee, fearing that she would be lost, longed for the salvation that the Savior would bring. And, in the persona of the  “Phantom Cowboy”  (also the title of a 1935 Western movie), Judee evokes that ever elusive “Action” hero that will come, rescue her, and carry her safely to heaven.

LINDA PERHACS

In this, our internet age, it’s been posited that everyone has the potential to be a star - but in 1970 there was a different algorithm working, and for a dental hygienist with musical talent… what were the odds?

Linda Perhacs’s brilliance had a shot at being acknowledged when the dental hygienist gave her demo to a patient, the noted film composer Leonard Rosenman. He got the message, and produced her first record, Parallelograms. It was released and sank, and Linda resumed her quiet life. 

Cut to 2014 - 44 years later, and Linda’s record is rediscovered, thanks to “The New Weird America” folk music movement. It was repackaged and released on CD, and what a blessing to hear that ethereal, crystalline voice reanimated.  And, at 81, with a couple more albums out, Linda is a dental hygienist no longer. She’s an inspiration to aspirants everywhere. 

What a year 2014 was! 

That's what motivated me to start this diary, which is now going on year 10. 

It was such a hairy time, in fact, that as a way to process it all,  I hit upon the idea of creating a musical diary, using the I Ching - (something I'd been obsessing about) - as my guiding structure. 

My sister-in-law, Lea died suddenly, but before that Chemayne and I were mandated custody, by Court Order, of our nephew, Gunner. 

Oh, yes... and, then, out of nowhere, I contracted Bell's Palsy, which paralyzed half of my face. 

It's in the rear view mirror now, but, geez... that was trippy. 

What we’re offering today is something completely different: two outlier artists (although one is a French icon) who created off-kilter, out of the box, almost unintelligible nuggets of artistic brilliance. These cuts are linked, not only by the fact that they both feature sinuous bass lines and orchestral flourishes, but that they are produced by artists whose stances were  uncompromising, prickly, unknowable - and, touched with stardust. 

SCOTT WALKER

Scott Walker, whose rich, deep baritone was first introduced to the world in the early 1960s, with the internationally famous group, The Walker Brothers (they weren’t) - and their hit single “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore.” When he went solo he faced an uphill battle, trying to gain public acceptance for his dark, and tangled personal visions. I became enamored of his work when I heard his musical evocation of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. By 1970, his solo career went silent. Probably, as a financial imperative, he rejoined The Walker Bros, for some moderately successful MOR cover filled albums. 

But, in 1984 Scott’s mojo returned, triumphantly, with the album “Climate of the Hunter” from which this cut, Rawhide, derives. (Don’t worry about trying to figure out the lyrics - just let it wash over you). Against all odds, the “30th Century Man’s”  time had come, and there was a whole new generation of acolytes, eager to drink the magic potions Scott was uncorking. 

SERGE GAINSBOURG 

Serge Gainsbourg’s unique 1971 concept album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, is a suite of songs telling the story of a doomed, illicit romance between a middle aged man and a 14 year old girl named Melody, portrayed by his muse, the dreamy actress and model, Jane Birkin, who also graces the cover.

Produced far before the “Me Too” era, this provocative and subversive pop-music drama was not offensive to the French; on the contrary, it cemented the French chameleon’s iconic status, and the celebrity couple became the subject of much tabloid journalism. His stylish, outlaw decadence generated a fascination that continues to this day. 

Gainsbourg, born Lucian Ginsburg, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, was a manufactured creation. He took his nom de musique as a tribute to the English painter Thomas Gainsborough. And, after surviving the German occupation of France during WW2- (he recalled having to wear the Yellow Star, which identified him as a Jew) - he went on to carve out an indelible new identity of swagger, writing and producing over 500 pop hits spanning several genres. He was one of a kind.