The Test Tube and the Scale

  In those days, in the time before Starsky and Hutch, in the TV broadcast era of Mary Tyler Moore and Lawrence Welk, if you walked out of the front door of my father’s house at the corner of Drew and Bryan, and took a left, you’d be walking east in the direction of Interstate 35-W. The second house on your right was where my best friends Junior and Paul lived, in a three bedroom house—their family had converted an attached garage into a bedroom—with their parents and an older sister, Kathy, another brother Louie, and two more sisters their senior, Janie and Stella. Remember that scene in The Exorcist when, near the exorcism’s grim finale, Karras comes back into the bedroom from having taken a well deserved break, and discovers Merrin’s dead body; remember that look of dumb uncomprehension on the girl’s face, before the demon Pazuzu has fully grasped that Merrin is dead? Stella always looked like that, like an aggressive demon paused, but she did decipher for Paul and me the whispe...

  After her arrest in the late summer of 1975, Patty Hearst famously gave “urban guerilla” as her occupation to processing authorities, a provocation that effectively capped a high water mark in this country’s late twentieth century flirtation with armed resistance to what was then called the “United States capitalist war machine” among its militant, radicalized youth. By the time of Hearst’s capture the inflammatory rhetoric of that era had been worked into the rock and roll common tongue by artists compelled to bring contemporary real world energy into the recording studio, and focus it into a creative passion that would lend combustible properties to their material. When T-Rex released the 45 rpm single Children Of The Revolution in September, 1972, ten days and three years before Tania’s arrest, performers from Rob Tyner to Jimi Hendrix had already stylized the physical, confrontational attitudes of those boldly misguided idealists whose sudden presence in American media signal...

  Psychedelia dramatized the practice of late twentieth century self-introspection. Its music, when accompanied by the use of psychotropic drugs, intensifies, shapes, and colors mental processes randomly, resulting in a waking dream experience that’s akin to an auxiliary reality; the virtual, hallucinatory externalization of one’s subconscious mind. This brief respite from sanity, the trip in which one does not differentiate between arrival and departure—an Odyssey without Odysseus—contains the seedling of risk of never properly recovering from the self-inflicted brain damage. In 1972, following the disbandment of Salt, the short lived Ginger Baker-led band project formed shortly upon his move to Nigeria, that group’s core trio of instrumentalists—Berkeley Jones, guitar, Laolu Akintobi, drums, and Mike Odomosu, bass—formed the acronymously named Blo. From its debut record, Chapter One, released in 1973, Chant To Mother Earth is about the religious experience of paring the human wil...

  Artistic improvisation is a high wire act in which the artist stakes that part of himself who’s only brought to life under pressure of the moment. The artist, in a state of absolute freedom, may only return to the safety of the ground beneath him by exposing a consciousness he is otherwise predisposed, like most of us, to keeping secured by lock and key. In 1971, roughly four months after the body of James Thomas Ramey—better known, along with his band the Babysitters, by his stage name Baby Huey—was found dead in a Chicago motel room of a heart attack likely caused by a heroin overdose, Curtom Records, co-founded by Curtis Mayfield, released the LP, The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend. Closing side one of the posthumous record is Ramey’s cover of A Change Is Gonna Come. The cover version’s first two verses demonstrate a finely executed pathos the band and vocalist pitch solidly between the lyric’s blues resignation and hymn influenced entreaty. Then something unexpected happe...