The Test Tube and the Scale

  We walked back from Ocean Beach on a late afternoon, Friday. The sky was overcast, as if the teeming void held by the Pacific had emptied itself into the space behind our atmosphere. Walking through Golden Gate Park, I couldn’t shake the sense of isolation imposed upon us by our recent visit to the sublime; we were silent on our return to Haight-Ashbury, largely an echo of the immense density of silence that is a hallmark of the natural world, and, which, at a certain geographical point inside those oceanic waters, can literally crush you. The core of silence I was carrying with me—the same one everyone carries, at all times—began to expand within the confines of my skull. Its expansion is potentially toxic, if only because it’s fueled by heat from what the mind tells it to believe. Brain chemistry, though more powerful than cognizance, can sometimes be redirected by the mere whims of consciousness.   The mood of alienation began shrinking once we caught a taxi outside the H...

  Every election cycle, Americans—registered voters or not—are reminded of the atmosphere in which we live, choked on the party exploitation of our tendency to fall into habitual bicameral thinking. It’s difficult living in extreme polarities; so difficult that, in this country, only the homeless, prison populations, and the mentally infirm are subjected to it. Abandonment in these extremes is a condemnation to reality as remote from conventional living as are the high rise apartments of heaven.     Listening to Lee Scratch Perry’s City Too Hot, released in 1978, when CIA involvement aimed at disrupting Prime Minister Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government, People’s National Party, was at critical mass, you hear clearly evidence of how we live in the grey areas between extreme polarities. City Too Hot is about the chase for equilibrium, our flight into the fancy of “self care,” that empty terminology of a privileged American generation having congratulated itsel...

  Near the start of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band—The One That Got Away, Ken Shimamoto’s authoritative online account from 2002     of that band’s searing yet short lived history, which can be found with a Google search, you come across an anecdote told by SRB bassist Gary Rasmussen about a backstage encounter between Fred Sonic Smith and Eric Clapton, following a Cream show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, which the MC5 opened. What is remarkable about the recollection of this exchange isn’t so much what it’s about—the absence of a Cream rhythm guitarist—as its setting. Shimamoto, a practicing guitarist with stage and studio experience, whose influences span Hendrix to Pete Cosey, arranges his interviews with band members Rasmussen and Scott Morgan—along with Radio Birdman founder Deniz Tek, MC-5’s Wayne Kramer, Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson, Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton, and Detroit bassist Ron Cooke—along traditional narrative/oral history structures, and features a recu...

Is there any more durable a symbol of middle class consumer excess than an outdoor neighborhood shopping mall with manicured grounds and vigilantly maintained water fountains, and a semi-detached General Cinema twin screen, first run movie theater, featuring nationwide major distribution titles? My childhood enchantment with Seminary South Cinemas I & II began in an edifice erected as an environmental correlative to the late century American personality; non-descript and functional. The lobby, a vast and empty square room with two glass half walls near the entrance, and beyond that, crimson red upholstered walls, is where the intrigue began. From the ticket dispenser machine, a dull silver contraption that functioned at the ticket seller’s wrist level, elegantly spitting out a stamp sized ticket when one of two buttons on a register was pressed, to the mysterious relationship between the concessionaires and their wide variety of candied snacks and sodas, which inventory never seeme...

Exiled from banality, the outsider expatriates to borders within rock and roll desperate to outrun reality’s status quo. Finding there only others of the same ilk, we storm our new topography with an inebriated passion that ultimately reorients our psychological weaknesses towards a new understanding of the realities of vertigo. On Neil Young’s debut record with Crazy Horse, the mythological conceit of the outsider, along with the outsider’s primary theme, absence, haunts its most well known single, Cinnamon Girl. Two versions of that single exist; the version from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and the version originally recorded for that record which includes a co-lead vocal sung by the late Danny Whitten, whose vocal track Young had erased for the now familiar FM radio staple. On Cinnamon Girl, absence makes itself known with the phantom non-appearance of the titular girl, whom we experience only as an object of desire, vibrant inside of two individual imaginations, the lyric narr...

  The excitement begins almost at once. An introductory guitar lick followed by the authoritative voice of the Ghost of History Present, also known by his stage name, New York genius Tuli Kupferberg. Equal parts reportage, cultural unmasking, and satirical agitprop—all of it definitively rock and roll—the Fugs’ CIA Man generates excitement by shrinking the distance between audience and performers, the Fugs’ instinct for spontaneity connecting us with inspired creative thought processes rooted in the traditions of high and low cultural Jewish modernity. Before the academic and literary acknowledgment of the voice of multiculturalism, post-modernism drew attention to the artistic potential for restating twentieth century modernist ideas in audio, video, and written languages appropriated from popular culture. This, along with Kupferberg’s personal history of lower east side radical bohemianism and political left wing activism, shaped the sensibility that emerges from CIA Man. Both Ku...