I’ve already mentioned that I’ve been dispensing with a lot of stuff, the kind of winnowing that I like to refer to as “Death Cleaning.”* This has included going through a series of stored-away boxes and plastic bins which dated back to moving into my present house in the 1980s. While somewhat illogical, this isn’t, I think, unusual. When we move, we’re moving forward, and there’s a tendency to liberally bundle and box up those things we think we might still want – and then in the new place, present time takes over and one never gets to unboxing things one doesn’t need right away.
Things of mine I found in these dusty bins? Music tutorial books, and books on French poetry and language. The former because this was the height of the LYL Band’s live performance era and I was hoping to increase my skills and knowledge, the latter because I was interested in translating Symbolist and Modernist French poetry.** More than 40 years have passed. I now know that I know just a bit more about music: mostly what I’ve found out about in order to create the over 850 Parlando Project pieces composed this century. That’s what became my tutorial: doing. I never got around to translating as much French poetry as I planned, though you will still see that interest playing out here sometimes. Back then, I thought French poetry was the key to English-language Modernism, and while that’s not entirely untrue, I now know the American influences some of the French poets took note of.
One night in this clean-out task, working in a small room with shelving that I think had once been the coal or oil bin for our Edwardian house’s early furnace, I pulled open one of the stacked boxes there.
It was likely the contents of a desk or file cabinet drawer packed away by my late wife in the 1980s. Inside the larger cardboard one, there was a metal box, the kind one might keep important papers in – but this one was filled mostly with things she had written. Looking through the pages, there were a few things that might have dated back to high school, and a selection of poems and short-stories, some for college classwork,*** some for her just post-college time when she submitted and had published poetry. A couple looked like work for articles she had published in Seventeen, then a glossy magazine for the teenage girl market. Also in the cardboard box were the contents of many a desk in that era: sheets of typing paper, the chalky white strips that one could carefully pinch just above the belettered hammer of a typewriter to blank out a mistyped character, and a few miscellaneous things from a job she’d had with Control Data.
I was steeled for the job of getting rid of things that had an adjudged expiration date of meaning or usefulness. I could easily chuck the general detritus of this typewriter wielding ghost, but I couldn’t throw out the manuscripts. How many poems were in the stack? Might I be able to perform some of them here? Maybe. “Death cleaning” sternly says you won’t get around to it. The Parlando Project whispers otherwise.
In this case, Public Image Ltd was not involved: Renee’s metal box and folder of youthful creative writing work.
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So, the metal box went into the to be saved pile – but of course there is no real keeping. I’ve survived my late wife for 24 years, and I’ve been with my living wife for almost exactly as long as I was with my wife who died all too young at 43 years old. Actuary tables say I will die before any more such multidecade interval. Death cleaning has its solid argument: the writings of a young woman, or those of myself, the young man she partnered up with, will not have any enduring memorial. It’s a near certainty that is so too of all the poets I’ve known. We write words like the immortals do, with the same goals, to the best of our craft – but there are only so many niches in the pantheon.
Today’s musical piece is a poem I wrote condensing that experience. I can imagine the readers I used to have in my small group of poets wondering at an imperfection of the poem’s ending. “Why end this personal poem with such a mundane little observation about – what? – a business you don’t even name? Needs another draft.”
And I confess to you here, that’s the thing I’m trying to say. The most practical and commercial things we do in life come to an end, are forgotten – all that stuff we’re told we should be doing instead of writing poems, making music, or creating art. So then, forgive us our arts.
You can hear my musical performance of the poem I call “Exhumation” with the audio player below. I wanted this to have rough edges, and so the guitar recording tries to capture and leave in pick and fretboard noises that you’d usually not hear by intent. What if the intended audio player gadget is not where I say it will be? No worries, some ways of reading this blog toss it out, but I supplythis highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*I think when I first heard the term it was “Swedish Death Cleaning” and the process was imbued with practical Scandinavian modesty. The florid sentimentalist of objects within me has to listen to the memento mori enlightened elder in me: these are simply artifacts of one person’s life that are meaningless once that life ends. Somewhere in the corner, there’s a Modernist, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, in an Existentialist infested coffee shop, who exhales in blue and says to no one in particular, “Well, it’s all meaningless, save for what you compose it to be.”
**Mixed in were some faded to brown music papers from the Seventies and Eighties: Punk, New York Rocker, Sounds. I had them in the to-the-trash pile, but my kid wondered if they could digitize them and upload the scans to the Internet Archive. I doubt they will ever get around to that, but they’re young and should enjoy those provisional ideas.
***The little college she attended allowed her classes with Howard Mohr and Phillip Dacey.
The experience of the fourth performance in this July series was unlike the previous three. Those reading along may recall that each of the first three I’ve written about this month left me with its own distinct feeling of disconnect, of ways that I had not been able to reach an audience. I could’ve taken the performer’s side in this failure to connect — there is a long and necessary tradition of confounding audience expectations after all — but emotionally I couldn’t live with that unreservedly. Given that the core of the LYL Band was a band of poets not reliable professional musicians, and those poets were reflexive non-conformists singing songs that held up to examination or ridicule civic and cultural matters, I should have expected that outcome.* Intellectually, I understood this, but emotionally, it bothered me, particularly after the U of M concert I wrote of last time.
Society picks a few non-conformists, perhaps ones bound with redeeming qualities or compelling evolutionary necessities, and is fine dispensing with the rest.** If it didn’t do this mostly, well, the non-conformists wouldn’t be non-conformists would they? The LYL Band in this metaphor is the platypus.
But as I said, today’s performance is different. Somewhere in the mid-1980s a couple of nurses at the hospital I worked at had an idea: they wanted to put on a Prom to remediate memories of less-than-accepting Proms from their high-school years. What a great idea! They set a date and went about decorating a house’s basement with festooned crepe paper and colored light bulbs, plastic flowers, and some cardboard gilding, just as small school gyms had been transformed in teenage midcentury America. One of the nurses knew I had a band, would we be the rockin’ dance combo for this event?*** Sure, we’d do it — if we could find a drummer.
If nothing else, the perceived (by me) failure of the U of M concert from last time cemented in my mind that playing electric instruments without a backbeat couldn’t sustain the illusion that we were a Rock band. Someone knew a drummer. He agreed. We rehearsed with him a single time, and Dave and I selected from our repertoire songs that might be fit for dancers.
When the night of the Alternative Prom arrived, we set up in the house’s basement. We had no PA as such for vocals at this time, so I used a small Radio Shack mixer connected to my home stereo for the vocals, with no provision for monitors. I even set up one mic for any members of the audience that wanted to sing backing vocals.
The Prom attendees arrived. Some had scrounged old formal wear from second-hand stores, and even accessorized with corsages, while others were in come-as-you-are casual dress. Some came with their we’ve-achieved-adulthood-now partners, others just themselves. Given the nurse-origin of the event, women were in the majority. How many in the audience? Again, memory can’t count, but the basement was soon quite full, just enough room to dance, maybe 30-35 people? I really can’t be sure. I think there was some food and drink, but I don’t recall the particulars as my mind was keyed up for the performance.
Our little trio began to play about 10 p.m., myself with my electric guitar, Dave with his Farfisa combo organ with grey bass-register left-hand keys, and our for-the-night-drummer at his kit.
Dancing broke out, and continued through our roughly 60 minute set which concluded with a cover of Wilson Pickett’s garage-rock classic “In the Midnight Hour.” I don’t know what experiences any of my readers who play instruments have had, but let me say that if you ever get a chance to play for a dancing audience, I highly recommend it. I believe that music (and to a degree, its sibling art poetry too) are meant to move bodies. While I have never been a very good “rhythm guitarist,” here in a trio I had to fill that space however shambolically I could. It helped that the drummer was good, and fully-invested in “more cowbell,” and Dave’s left hand on the organ grey keys filled in well for no bass player.
I’d considered what should be our encore if the performance worked, and my idea was to lean on my still patent Patti-Smith-inspired vocal improvisation skills. The planned framework would be the ultimate chestnut of its era “Louie Louie,” a three-chord song that I would connect with whatever songs came into my head by converting them to fit “Louie Louie’s” three-chord-trick cadence.
Dave started the encore, his voice hoarse from singing without the benefit of vocal monitors that night. “Louie Louie” soon slid into Dave’s song “Sugar Rush.” As the guitar breaks and audience sing-alongs carried us forward toward midnight, I merged in other songs: “Like a Rolling Stone.” “La Bomba.” “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “Fortunate Son,” and finally, tiny snippets of the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Sweet Jane.”
The performance was over. Art is hard to measure, harder yet when it’s rough-edged, imperfect, and improbable; but it may have been the single best LYL Band performance, despite (or because) of its unconcern for sophistication. The recording is crude too, and the vocals suffer from the lack of monitors and strained voices. The funk of the sweaty basement, the joy of the dancers remediating their teen-age years, the surrounds of dance steps and emotions: none-of-than can make it directly onto audio tape. But Rock’n’Roll isn’t a juried competition. On any one night, with any one audience, it’s a shared mood of ecstatic feelings, and no level of skill and fidelity sans those feelings can’t maintain it.
I can’t find any pictures from the Alternative Prom, but for visuals I put in a bunch of LYL ‘80s posters and pictures from other gigs, including the U of M concert I wrote about last time. One level of our non-conformity: we tried and succeeded in not dressing for the part of a punk band.
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*If only in a footnote, I feel a need to note the death of Tom Lehrer this week. He really made an impression on me, and Lehrer’s presentation was, like the early LYL band, centered on the idea of gleefully rubbishing many cultural standards and pieties. I even tried to work in a punked-up version of his “We’ll All Go Together When We Go,” as our answer to “99 Luftballons.”.
If the Fugs, that other band of poets, were arguably the first punk rock group, I suspect any acerbic singer-songwriter from my generation had listened to Lehrer’s LPs. Here’s one odd thing I noted in the reaction to his death, and the inevitable short pieces on his career: I have yet to see a conservative weigh in with their view. No tut-tutting from the religious cultural nationalists on Lehrer’s satire tearing down the church and militaristic state. No remarks on his musical asides to sexual laissez faire oppressing or not-oppressing in the proper ways. No public-health consequences drawn from his 1953 ode to “The Old Dope Peddler” recorded when Lou Reed hadn’t turned 12 years old. Somewhere there may have been some “he’d be cancelled today” edge-lord free-to-be-fascist Lehrer elegy, but the respectable conservatives are leaving the field to the crickets. My theory: there’s an audience result that isn’t “enemy list” notoriety, but is more at “never heard of him” where Lehrer resided for 75 years or so.
**Frank Zappa, who understood a scientist’s cool examination of such things, had this quote: “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
***Let me do a capsule American Rock history lesson here. During the 1960s and into the early ‘70s the nation was full of small musical combos made up of young semi-professional musicians. They had different models: some wanted to be the Ventures, or Booker T and the MGs, others The Beatles, or Animals, The Young Rascals, The Rolling Stones, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, or the Yardbirds. By later in this era many of these combos took on psychedelic trappings and had converted to ballroom and movie-house stage ambitions, but for a few years before, these “garage rock” band’s gigs would be bars, under-21 not-bars or teen-clubs, and youthful social functions such as high-school dances and proms.
It took me an extra beat or two to continue this series, because I soon see myself as inappropriately going on too long about myself — this recounting influences and small events, even if personally meaningful, starts to seem out of proportion. I don’t know if there’s another way to write memoir than to engage in that “objects closer to the mirror” distortion, but I can’t help but think it’d be more appropriate if there was some greater payoff in achievement. The simple fact of the matter is that these are not stories of a performer’s early days before finding a notable level of success with audiences — more its opposite.
I’m grateful for the hundreds that might read one of these posts, for the thousands of times someone has listened to one or another of the audio pieces over the years. I try and honor your attention by being respectful of your time. I’m not so much afraid of embarrassing myself as I’m afraid of wasting your time.
A number of bands that came out of Minnesota in the Eighties did gather national attention — the scene punched above its weight — but as in most artistic or commercial activities, even a successful scene had many more failures-to-thrive than notable acts.* This band of poets, Dave and I, wasn’t going to be one of the notables. Today’s performance was an inflection point for that.
We’d recorded our official album, which was released on cassette tape for lack of capital funds to get LPs pressed.** The local alt-weekly, The Twin Cities Reader, reviewed it, and its cover linked us, the LYL Band, with a new record from The Time.
The Time article promised on the front page teaser was a longer feature in the same issue. Great, but too forgotten too often local rock band Fine Art and their guitarist Colin Mansfield gets mentioned here too.
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As reviews go, Paul Fishman Maccabee’s “So engagingly out-of-tune and cheerily offensive: it could well become a cult item” wasn’t exactly Robert Sheldon’s “Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months,” but it allowed us a modicum of creditability. We were trying to evolve from a pair of acoustic folkies to an electric rock band (the recording was largely played on electric instruments), but we were doing that in a meandering way. A neighborhood guy, Jonathan Tesdell played electric guitar — and, we were assured, conga drums. I hoped he might become our analog to the Fugs Ken Weaver as he joined up with us.
At the time of that Reader review we got an offer to play at the University of Minnesota. We took them up on it. We were practicing regularly now, trying to solidify our repertoire. This could be, if not our break, our foot in the door.
A small blip in our ascension dropped before the show date: the University called and asked what kind of music we should be billed as. I think Dave gave them a capsule description of our weirdness — and Dave’s an articulate guy — whatever he said it included the genre label “Punk Folk.”
That week as I walked across the never-named-that John Berryman bridge to the U, I noticed the posters along that span and on into the campus. They said “local PUNK FUNK.” Typo? Mishearing? I don’t know, but if Punk Folk wasn’t yet a common genre category in the early Eighties, Punk Funk was a term Rick James was using at this time for his work, and in the less-commercial indie scene the term was used to describe acts like James Chance’s NYC No-Wave skinny-tie-white-guy James Brown extrapolation. We were a trio expanding from acoustic instruments to electric ones without a bass player or a drummer.
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Photo in the poster by Renee Robbins. L to R: Dave Moore holding my tiny CasioTone that was my first synthesizer (it was also a calculator). Jonathan Tesdell, the new guy in the group and 25th Century Quaker, and Frank Hudson trying to look like he had Jazz chops, which he didn’t. Yes, our backup singers “The Cookies” did serve cookies and cider to the audience. The Replacements confounded audiences at key times in their career, but they never tried that.
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The day of the concert came. We loaded Dave’s newly purchased used Farfisa combo organ and my homemade speaker cabinet for it, Jonathan’s Firebird electric guitar and Roland amp, my sound-hole pickup 12-string acoustic and heavily modified Japanese Sixties’ electric guitar along with my Fender Princeton amp into our rattle-trap old cars. On arriving, we found the concert location was a broad stage, the width of the room in front, with audience seats for a few hundred.*** The venue had supplied a full-sized Yamaha grand piano for Dave to play. I recall it had a paper band across the keyboard, which I joked was like the “sanitized for your protection” bands on a hotel toilet.
The audience arrived, accumulating to not a full-house. My memory isn’t clear on this, perhaps just a third or a quarter of the seats. Even so, that could mean at a minimum there were 80 people there, and unlike the shows at Modern Times, most weren’t folks we knew from the neighborhood. I don’t know what Dave or Jonathan felt, but I was hoping to put on a good show, to put forward our intent: some satire and civic points, some music with the not-necessarily-perfect, but perfectly-necessary energy of the still underground indie music movement that was also called around then “College Rock.” How well would we go over with this barely-Rock, with this audience, at this college?
I was on the stage performing when my nerve started to fail. That came during the song that the audience showed the most response too: four-songs-in we played a number that I think we informally called “Booker T” or “Memphis Thing”, an instrumental based on a nice riff I’d come up with as something of a concession to new-member Jonathan, the non-poet who wasn’t much of a lyrics guy. I could sense the audience perking up with that piece’s groove, hopes out there in the seats that things were going to lock in for more of a Rock show. Did some of the audience come for the poster’s Punk Funk? Did they at least expect something more like the other young Twin Cities rock bands that would play the Longhorn, 7th Street Entry or Duffy’s? Whatever, I knew “No, it’s not going to lock in. We’re going to do more folk songs about social issues and weird observations from two poets.” Not being able to change that, however true the set list was to our concept, dismayed me — yet I needed to carry on, while confidence was draining away.
I recall those feelings hanging on after the concert. Rather than having stubborn pride in presenting our band and its shambling, eclectic, cabaret setlist, I felt I’d let the band down. If Dave, the better performer felt any of this, he didn’t show it, and Jonathan , as ever, was by nature a quiet, pacific guy. I remember sitting in the car after loading back out immersed in a sort of punk folk funk, and on the radio — of all things — came Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile/Slight Return.” I, the guitar-playing poet. heard him in my mood not as the obligatory guitar-great Hendrix, but as the lyricist Hendrix, the kid who’d scrawled spaceship doodles and poetry in his school-lined notebooks.
I stand up next to a mountain
And I chop it down with the edge of my hand
I pick up all the pieces and make an island
Might even raise a little sand
That’s what artists do. We are at essence pretentious, that thing we fear, that prideful sin we are sometimes called on. And the charge, that indictment, is sometimes true: we fail, or sometimes certain audiences fail, sometimes we lack conviction, sometimes we are convicted, a just verdict. Still, we think we can raise mountains, raise up islands from our imagination. Sometimes that imagination lets others climb on those mountains, take shelter on those islands — other times we fall through our dreams. When nothing is beneath our feet, are we falling or flying? Hendrix continued, singing:
I didn’t mean to take up all your sweet time
I’ll give it right back one of these days
When I took up your time today with the continuing shaggy dog story of my band of poets, I asked if it was worthwhile telling this story about a band that didn’t make much of an impact. Here’s a plausible reason: despite that outcome, I’d do it again — maybe harder next time— and the music-making with fellow poet Dave Moore continued, continues. I know some of my readers are younger and are making music or other art within a career that doesn’t yet know it’s apogee. Have courage: you’re falling or flying.
Here are two pieces from a lo-fi tape of that U of M concert in 1981: Dave’s adaptation of a poem by Kevin FitzPatrick “Bugs in the System” and my own Surrealist summer meditation “China Mouth.” You can hear them with the graphical audio players below, but if you don’t see those players, the highlighted titles are links that when clicked on will open a new tab with an audio player.
And here I am singing the third song in the concert’s set list, “China Mouth”, a song of Summer discontent. The “Memphis Thing” groove-oriented instrumental I write about above was the next song we played.
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*An off-the-top-of-my-head Eighties Twin Cities list: Prince, The Time, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Soul Asylum, Babes in Toyland, Alexander O’Neal, The Jayhawks, Flyte Tyme (Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis, largely as important producers). And like most scenes, the above acts are a quick list of those someone elsewhere might have heard of, when there’s a list at least as long of good acts that remained at local hero status. Given the LYL Band’s penchant for satire, I could also have mentioned that the Eighties saw the Twin Cities grow a substantial comedy scene, one participant in that became our bass player for a while.
**I believe it was the first cassette-only release in the Twin Cities scene. I duplicated the cassettes myself, and Dave made the packaging for them. I got the idea from ROIR in New York City who in 1981 put out its first cassette-only release (James Chance and the Contortions). Their release and ours followed the introduction of the Sony Walkman, a small battery-powered portable cassette with headphones that was a cultural artifact of the era. I wrote a press release for our recording that exclaimed “Teach your Sony Walkman to crawl!”
***Looking online today I see there are two possible Wiley Hall rooms, one that seats just under 700 and another 362.
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
Frank Hudson 