Today’s performance happened a decade later in 1981. This is a series about performances, so I’ll leave out a lot that happened in-between, but in summary, I left school, began working in a nursing home and subsequently spent almost twenty years working in nursing roles, the bulk of that in what were called, in those days, Emergency Rooms.*  I rather liked the work, as it was undeniably useful, and the broad ad-lib nature of the responsibilities fostered teamwork between staff. There was something else about it too: if one’s own life was not going smoothly or following some path of professional advancement, a great many of the people you took care of were having a worse day than whatever day you were having.

In the mid-Seventies I decided to try to teach myself how to play guitar, and a couple of years later I moved to Minneapolis Minnesota, where I reconnected with Dave Moore. In the middle of that decade a musical movement was forming which had no name for a year or so until it started being called “Punk.” Once something gets a label, folks will come along and take what the label describes as a goal or set of expectations that should be met — but the musical acts that were already there when that label was created didn’t have those restrictions. They were all over the place in musical intents and tactics.

But there was something that united those that were there to be called “punk” founders ex-post-facto. I’ll use this military metaphor: what happens when a regime has fallen, when the standing armies are no longer functioning, yet a struggle continues? Pressed into the battle are the irregulars, the untrained — and those punk-before-the-name bands prime movers were often: poets, artists, & writers, not musicians. Nor were these figures reactionaries who hated hippies, Rock’s traditions, or exploratory musical moves. For the large part they wanted to take up the fallen banners of what had been exciting about Sixties music and to carry them forward. Where they were in opposition, they were against those credentialed musical acts that weren’t doing that.

Well Dave Moore and I were writers, poets. I’d learned a little about how to play guitar. Dave could play keyboards. This new musical moment was allowing a new “underground” of original music bands to pop up in Minneapolis. What Sixties banner could we take up?

The list of artists we shared as touchstones would be long, and what we thought we could take from them would be a long list too. Let me select but one: The Fugs.

Andrew Hickey, the writer behind the excellent music-head project The History of Rock Music in 500 Songs has a maxim he deploys often in his work: “There’s no first of anything.” When a wise writer gets to questions like “What was the first Rock record” or “Who first played electric guitar” and stuff like that, it’s actually impossible to set objective criteria or establish exact dates, but being aware of that useful maxim, the Fugs can be claimed the first Punk band, and they didn’t start in the middle-Seventies, but in the middle-Sixties.

The Fugs and their implications and cultural inflections are too long a story to tell in this post. If my energy holds out, I’ll make my account of the Fugs a “bonus episode” here, but in short, starting at the beginning of 1965 in NYC’s Greenwich Village, two poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg began caterwauling songs with various accomplices in what they advertised as “Total Assault on the Culture.” I suspect they saw themselves as an outgrowth of the “Jug Band Music” branch of the Fifties and early Sixties folk music revival,* but the Fugs material was a substantial expansion from the folk-revival jug bands. The Fugs performed single-entendre odes to sex acts, anarchist satire and political protest, translated excerpts from ancient Egyptian or Greek literature, settings of literary poetry, dispatches from drug takers, and the other daily concerns of Bohemia.

Kuperberg and Sanders did not have professional voices. Their first album is so out of tune that the vocal timbres can drive even those that might entertain their political and cultural points to “turn that damn ‘singing’ off!” You’ve heard me sing here — that sort of “we’ll give it a go anyway” audacity actually comforted me.

Dave and I started playing informally in our living rooms, and between the two of us we quickly developed a dozen or more original songs. Our fresh material addressed the social issues of the on-coming Eighties: the Reagan rightward tilt, the local “big boys who always run things” (as Dave put it in one of his songs), and working class experiences. Unlike the Fugs we largely eschewed the aggressively sex-positive topics and the recreational drug-use reports.***  This rundown makes our early songs sound more like doctrinaire agitprop that I think they were. As songwriters we both were fond of the character study, which is by its nature more complex than a protest sign or bumper sticker.

Dave (the more businesslike and socially competent of the two of us) soon set us out to perform publicly by making arrangements with Ed Felien, a long-time city activist who was at the time running a café called Modern Times in South Minneapolis. We started to use a stage at one end of the dining area there to perform publicly.

One of Dave Moore’s posters for the LYL Band appearing at the Modern Times Cafe in the early Eighties

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Audiences were small, but it was fun to do. The stage had an upright piano for Dave to play and the place had two vocal microphones connected to a low-volume PA. I played an acoustic guitar which I had to pick with all my might to keep up with the volume of Dave’s two-handed piano chording. I was the weaker of the two of us as a performer, but because of our equality practice of alternating songs, I could feel that Dave’s steadier and more confidently presented songs could keep the audience satisfied, and I enjoyed the accompaniment role during his songs.

So one day, we’re playing on the Modern Times stage to a small crowd. Late in the first set we did a topical song of mine “The Ballad of J.W. Hinckley,”  a song set parodically to the form of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again.”  The song was voiced as being sung by the titular young man from a well-off family who had just shot President Reagan and his Press Secretary in the hopes of impressing Jody Foster. The point of the song was that due to Hinckley’s privilege and America’s laissez-faire gun regs, he was free to make his attempt even after he’d been caught trying to carry guns onto an airline flight. Yes, I suppose there was a wicked wink in my use of the chorus borrowed from Steely Dan’s song: “You go back, Jack, do it again” — but the subject of the Dan song is a chronic loser, and the Hinckley character in my song was non-heroic too.

We took a little break between sets and we were winding up the first song of our second stint when a thin older man entered the dining area carrying a long-gun. Dave was sitting at the piano, facing sideways, stage right. I was right down in front at the lip of the low stage. The man walked up next to the stage, raised his gun at me, and began his spiel.

So what! Let’s take up a song in honor of Mr. Reagan — in his honor….He’s a wonderful man. He may turn this country around. Let’s have both sides of the story. I think I am well educated (both sides) and I don’t have a pointy head anymore.”

Well, once again someone was missing the subtle point a song was trying to make — but I didn’t try to debate the armed man. In my ER job I’d dealt with many angry people, even agitated, insane folks in the midst of mania or paranoia. My default tactic in such ER cases was to listen to them calmly, perhaps waiting to gently redirect them if they calmed down or had a question. It was actually rare in my ER years to have to struggle to restrain them (those who had been violent outside were brought in already restrained).

I listened to the man talk, trying to present myself as interested in what he had to say. What he said seemed almost composed, as if he was (like myself) trying to perform. He was present for less than a minute, but in gun-time things slowed down. I remember trying to judge just how much height I had from the low stage: could I kick or throw myself down over the leveled barrel of the long gun, forcing it to ground, followed by my younger body pinning the older man? No, my acoustic guitar would impede me. I can’t recall if I thought to look at the position of the man’s trigger finger — perhaps I thought such a clear glance rather than paying attention to his speech might be a tell. I didn’t have time to recalculate much, as the man finished saying his piece, turned and walked out onto Chicago Avenue just as he had come in.

Dave, I suspect elevated in expressiveness from being in his outgoing performer mode, said into his vocal mic “We love it when guns show up!”

Did this incident cause me to have stage fright problems? You might think it odd, but it did not — I still wanted to perform, but my problem as a performer continued to be my lack of sufficient performer’s skills and my issues with being confident in what I was able to convey, leading to a progression within a performance of accumulating failure of “nerve,” and the ability to project confidence.

On top of one of the tables in the Modern Times dining area, I had placed a little tape recorder to record our performance. I’d hit record for the second set minutes before the man walked in with the gun. Later that year when we created our only official record, we melded in part of the incident as an intro to the studio version of “The Ballad of J.W. Hinckley,”  and you can hear that with the audio player below. One additional note on the ending part captured in this performance of the song: in my younger years I could improvise poetry over guitar. I think I was modeling that on early Patti Smith, whose first recorded pieces captured at poetry readings were done that way.

Audio player gadget below. What, no gadget to be seen? It’s not stage fright, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog will suppress showing the player.  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*In most hospitals these days they’ve been expanded to departments or subsections, with varying services. All the systems that deal with the acutely ill, trauma victims, mental health crises, or those that have no other place to go for healthcare have been expanded — and I lived through a lot of that change in my lower-level position — but the first Emergency Room that I worked in was literally a room or two located by a ground level entrance where an ambulance could pull up likely staffed by folks with a higher degree of licensure to drive a commercial vehicle than medical training.

**This was in effect a largely white effort to revive a largely Afro-American genre of string band music with vocals that often would include double entendre songs performed at lively tempos. One advantage in the commercial folk-revival was that a jug band group could allow more specialization, grouping effective instrumental musicians with appealing singers. In the mid-Sixties US West Coast, the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish started as jug band revivalists. On the East Coast, Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band and the Loving Spoonful worked out of that style.

***Exceptions? We did cover two Fugs tunes “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side”  and “I Couldn’t Get High;”  and though we never played them live, we did play the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat”  and an original song adapted from a local poet’s poem called “Pussy from the Black Lagoon”  that was renamed on our sole official recording to “Lucy from the Black Lagoon.”

The Fugs were typical male mid-century bohemians in that women’s equality and perspectives were issues rarely addressed. One of my early original songs from 1980 dealt with the then famous case of Mary Cunningham, a freshly promoted VP at the Bendix Corporation who was rumored to be having an affair with the CEO. Employees gossiped, and the Corporation’s board requested that Cunningham be fired. She resigned. The CEO? He remained. I didn’t know then, and I can’t find a quick answer in a web search today if they were actually having an affair, though the two did marry