​What is the place of the serious musician in today’s society? What is the point of creating music, art and writing that has no commercial potential? Why am I even continuing this series of posts exploring the catalog of New World Records to uncover fifty gems?

These are all questions I continue to ask myself. When only 65 percent of American’s even bother to read, it’s going to be a lot, lot, less of those readers who have a specific interest in experimental music. Of those who both read and have an interest in experimental music, even less will care about these particular records or composers.

Yet the work must go on. I continue to write about this stuff because there is value to what lies on the fringe. The experimental tradition is marginalized, despite the ways that the explorations of those who do experiment continue to provide resource benefits for the culture at large when their innovations move from the edges and into the mainstream.

Rarely performed, seldom heard, these pieces are nonetheless an important part of our sonic ecology. There are plenty of things we never see, never hear, never know about, that would make life difficult if they did not exist. It’s neat to know about things like gut bacteria and life at the bottom of the ocean, and little bugs who play important roles in the life of the forest.

Yet the heads who appreciate this kind of thing are out there, and I will continue to do my part to bring this material to new listeners. Keep on experimenting, even and especially when you have no idea where it will lead.

First up we have one for the synthesizer and Science Fiction fans, and at the end we have a once popular American operetta from the 1800s… just to show that the things people care so much about now, will in time themselves be forgotten.

DAVID ROSENBOOM - FUTURE TRAVEL

David Rosenboom’s epic journey into the solar system while dancing along lines of sequenced synthesis was first released on the short lived Detrot label Street Records. New World Records released it on CD in 2007. It has since been reissued again by Black Truffle in 2024 with another vinyl pressing and digital release.
At the time this piece was being composed he was busy thinking deeply about a kind of “propositional music” that he defined as “complete cognitive models of music.” From this vantage point music emerges from the process of making propositions. In this respect it might have more to do with the Miles Davis album On the Corner, than at first thought. From these propositions musical models are built and works can be created.
As part of his musical training Rosenboom studied with Lejaren Hiller. He even ended up playing violin on one of the renditions of Hiller’s Iliac Suite on a vinyl of Computer Music from the University of Illinois released in 1967.

Learning from Hiller gave Rosenboom an appreciation for what could be done with technology.

He wrote about how “Hiller’s work was more about algorithmic compositions and compositional concepts applied in technological modeling, and what was possible at the time. So yes, it was technology, but it was also new notions about the brain and how we hear and how we think and how we make models. Something that has stuck with me ever since, that I really developed there, was -and a lot of people were exploring this- was the idea of compositional modeling; that is, that model building and then setting the model into some form of animation can fuel a compositional idea, and produce all sorts of new ideas for musical language and pieces and so on.” (2006 Interview of Rosneboom by E. Soltes in Oral History of American Music.)
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Rosenboom is also a violin player in addition to being a master of the Buchla (and the brainwave encephalaphone). Violins merge with treated female narration in this science fiction and space music odyssey. This is essential listening for anyone wishing to expand consciousness beyond the borders of earth.

His music is certainly fertile with ideas. The accompanying piece “And Out Come the Night Ears” from 1978 is another masterpiece. It’s a 28 minute piano and Buchla duet that makes my head spin as it oscillates into a cyclonic centrifuge. This is maximalist music of a wild and adventurous variety.

​RICHARD MAXFIELD AND HAROLD BUDD – THE OAK OF GOLDEN DREAMS
Many music aficionados will recognize the name of Harold Budd, especially if ambient and electronic music are part of their interests. Richard Maxfield gets talked about much less. This album contains four Maxfield pieces, and two by Budd. That is a good thing because it helps us to get to know Maxfield, and rewards the person interested in Budd with a new musician to think and learn about. David Tudor also plays piano on this album on a piece that Maxfield wrote for him, so it turns out to be brilliant trifecta.
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As I have come to learn, All Roads Lead to Fluxus, and Maxfield is one of those roads that can lead us back to the influence of the art movement. He put on a concert in the loft of Yoko Ono alongside his buddy La Monte Young. He taught at The New School where John Cage was also teaching. He was interested in all kinds of sound sources, processes, and practices. The selections here showcase some of the range of his interests.

A lot of this stuff sounds kind of old hat to those of us who have embraced noise and texture as prime musical units. We forget exactly how radical these gestures in sound were when they first exploded from the loudspeaker. But Maxfield was an innovator, baby. A lot of his works prefigured more well known applications of the same approach or technique by other composers.

For instance, Piano Concert for David Tudor involves the use of a microphone on prepared piano strings mixed into a three channel montage that Tudor played additional piano alongside in accompaniment. John Cage had already done the prepared piano, but Karlheinz Stockhausen had not yet done his more famous mikrophonie which achieves similar sounds.

​His Amazing Grace from 1960 uses tape loops played at various speeds that produce complex phasing and overlaps. This work came before the now-taken-as-gospel minimalist tape loop pieces of Riley and Steve Reich.

I was lucky to recently read an excerpt from my friend Martin Patrick’s forthcoming book on Fluxus, the chapter on sound. He really does an excellent job of putting Maxfield in context and showing the influence of Fluxus across unpopular and popular music. I will be looking forward to reading the finished version and the rest of the book. Patrick had previously contributed essays to the Sub Rosa release of The Stolen Symphony albums Fluxus and Neo-Fluxus vol. 1 and 2.

His was a sad story, as his life was cut short by suicide when he jumped out the window of the Figueroa Hotel at age 42 on June 27, 1969.

La Monte Young’s MELA Foundation has his archives.

Budd sure knew how to write a song title “The Oak of the Golden Dreams” was probably the first piece of music I listened to by him when I saw this CD at the library in my early twenties, and I picked it up based on the title. With drifting dronalities, and measured Buchla improvisations, it reminds me at times of the all night music of Terry Riley or the raga inspired improvisations of La Monte Young.
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I guess that brings us to why these two artists were put together on this CD. Richard Maxfield was said to inhabit the pre-minimalist spirit, while Budd’s 1970 composition for a droning Buchla box in E-flat shows the way other musicians were picking up on that minimalist thing.

This sonic document shows a slice of composition spanning ten years and how one person can become a mostly unknown pioneer, and others became well known followers of burgeoning musical trends.

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE – SCHLINGEN-BLANGEN

As far as minimalists go, Charlemagne Palestine doesn’t get the love he deserves. He prefers to call himself a maximalist.

Palestine’s music is not very well known today, partly because there are few recordings available, but also because he moved on to working in other forms of media as the massive commercialism of minimalist music developed in the late seventies and early eighties. His seemingly narrow escape from the title of “minimalist composer” was fortuitous since what that has come to imply in musical terms today does no justice to his work. His music is distinct from what became mainstream minimalism by its focus on sound rather than process and its deep emotional expressionism. Thus, Morton Feldman is a much closer neighbor in this work than it to Riley, Young, Reich and Glass.

​“Schlingen-Blängen” is a drone organ piece which demonstrates Palestine’s genius for pulling unbelievable sounds, colors and effects out of a familiar instrument. It is basically one chord sustained for seventy minutes with infrequent additions and removals of tones and changes of registration. This approach to making music, of using stasis to force the listener into concentration on the sound itself, is very difficult to do well and this album is one of the few successful examples of this approach. First, there is the choice of the initial chord and its registration. Already it is clear that the musician has exquisite taste and expressive powers, not unlike Messiaen in those aspects. Then begins the impressionism. The old Dutch organ in the church of the small Friesland village of Farmsum Delftzijl starts magically to sing its own melodies and rhythms without the player needing to move any controls. The illusion of rapid activity is the result of interferences among the components of the chord within the organ and the church. Such effects are not unfamiliar but their depth and extent here are staggering. These rapid cycles are staggering in their intensity, melody and colors, as though Palestine was playing some non-existent process-music score. But he is not, and it is as painfully beautiful as the original chord. Palestine’s comment, “I’m the living hybrid in my own work of the physical gesturality of Jackson Pollock and thes piritual color chemistry of Mark Rothko,” hits the nail on the head.

The quality of the recording conveys enough of the massive physicality of the experience to be satisfying while still conveying the sadness that one couldn’t have been there. The acoustic space of the old church is precisely rendered. Anyone that enjoys drone music and static sound painting in any genre should have a listen. Charlemagne Palestine’s music here is a true rendition of the archetype.
Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca can be thought of as some of the spiritual inheritors of Palestine’s musical approach, as can David Tibet’s work in Current 93, but the latter in a different register, that has more to do with the way Palestine uses stuffed animals amassed on his piano as vessels for the spirits he meets in his strange communion and personal mysticism.

HENRY BRANT – MUSIC FOR MASSED FLUTES

When was the last time you listened to a bunch of flute players have it and throw down on some music? Probably not too recently, which is why you should listen to the work of Henry Brant. Not just one flute, not just two flute, but some massed flutes up in this contemporary music situation.
Brant believed music could be complex. He believed it could be contradictory and paradoxical, just like everyday life is complex, contradictory and full of shit that doesn’t make any sense. As David Lynch once quipped, “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.”

This music does have its own sense, and it can be quite striking, just like the hidden logic of the everyday world with all its beauty and pain, war and peace, love making and violence, random luck and disaster.
Brant was born in Montreal to American parents in 1913, and started composing at age eight. His instruments of choice were the violin, flute, tin whistle, piano, organ, and percussion. He could play all these at a professional level and was very familiar with all the instruments in the orchestra even if he didn’t play them as such.

His childhood prodigy was further shown when he was included in the 1933 book by Henry Cowell, American Composers on American Music. Brant was only 19 when it came out. His essay was on oblique harmony. This seems like it should also be an oblique strategy. The ideas he presented were precursors to his later interest in musical spatialization.

Brant worked his ass off teaching at several colleges, conducting for radio, film, ballet, and jazz, composing, orchestrating. By the 1950s he started working on his ideas of spatialization. This would have been the same decade Stockhausen’s early efforts at symphonic spatialized music. Basically the idea is the placement of performers around the hall as well as on the stage. Electronic music later took the idea into multi-speaker set ups that sound could be moved around through. This is the “fourth dimension” of musical composition, and became increasingly important over the twentieth century and can be seen as an aspect of space music.
Included on this album is his piece Angels and Devils from 1931. This is considered the first flute orchestra of the twentieth century and was inspired after he heard the five flutes being played in Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.
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Also included is 1984’s Mass in Gregorian Chant for Multiple Flutes (subtitled Mass for June 16). This is my favorite piece on the CD. The spatial component of antiphonal singing inside the acoustically tuned spaces of the great Gothic cathedrals was part of his interest in this music. The source material he was the Graduale Romanum, the official book of liturgies for the Roman Catholic Church, with masses sung on June 16 being the focus.

​Ghosts and Gargoyles from 2001 rounds out this flute-centric invitation into the world of Henry Brant.

GEORGE F. ROOT – THE HAYMAKERS

Now we go back to the root of American music. One of them anyway, that root being George F. Root. Root was a Massachusetts farm boy who left for Boston at age 18 with a flute in his hand to try and get into the orchestra. That would have been around 1838. He got jobs as church organist and music teacher, the did a tour of the European continent, came home and started trying his hand at writing popular sentimental songs.
One of these was his song “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!” from 1864 became a Civil War classic of sheet music, setting the song of war to the tune of “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

Seven years before that, though, he had written The Haymakers, an operatic cantata, one of the first large scale works of American music. The Chicago Tribune wrote on Januar 9, 1860, reviewed the work, praising “... the freshness of its music, which, combined with the naturalness of the plot, depicts with great truthfulness, while it slightly idealizes, the labors of the American hayfield.... The Italian opera walks on stilts, deals in exaggeration, and treats largely of kings, queens, dukes, and nobles. This is purely democratic, exalts labor, ridicules the useless city dandy, and holds up for your admiration the sturdy Farmer and his household, who learn from nature, the pure, the true, the beautiful....”

It seems fitting that this country, founded to have no kings, should use as its subject matter the working people keep us fed and connected to the very land itself.

​The New World Records version marks this important piece of histories first appearance on CD.

Read Part I and II in the series.

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.

​One of the jobs of a freak is to run off and join the circus. Sometimes it is a metaphysical circus. Joseph Byrd was one such freak, born December 19, 1937 just above one of the holes on the Bible belt, Louisville, Kentucky. His family moved to Tuscon, Arizona and it was in that desert heat that he learned some of his first instruments. These happened to be accordion and vibraphone. Piano, guitar and violin lessons have been standard for kids learning music for a long time. It’s high time to follow Byrd’s example and get kids interested in the accordion again, and the vibes, man, the vibes.
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After high school Byrd went to the University of Arizona where he had one of his many encounters with previous avant-garde luminaries. In this case it the study of composition under Dr. Barney Childs. His teacher was a musical autodidact for the first quarter of his life, until he got to know the ultra-modernist Elliot Carter and Lenoard Ratner in New York on the one hand, and Aaron Copland and the crowd around the Tanglewood musical festival in Massachusetts on the other. Childs was interested in improvisation, chance operations such as in his piece “Roachville Project”, and jazz. He liked listening to Charles Ives, Paul Hindemith and John Cage. In 1967 hr co-edited the book Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music.

​Byrd said of Childs that “He was very old school, yet modernist, and he forced me to be disciplined. He was an English professor, not Music, though he had a Ph.D. in both. I was very much under his spell, and he helped me get a teaching assistantship at Stanford.”

Being in California put him close contact with the minimalist trinity of La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Young was then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

IN THE FLUX

​M.A in hand he crossed the coast to New York City where their were further influences on his mind and imagination. Fluxus was one of those influences and it was felt both ways, from Fluxus to him and from him to Fluxus. It is indeed a fertile field. La Monte Young was their in the thick of it as well, as was John Cage who Byrd went to study music under. Jackson Mac Low was also in the mix with his performance poetry and other varieties of art. Action in art was the name of the game, doing something, getting out there and making a scene. One of those scenes was in the loft apartment of Yoko Ono, and that’s where Byrd had his first performance, 1961. An auspicious beginning, if you call that his beginning and not the jazz music of Duke Ellington and Stan Kenton he liked to play on highschool. From whatever point of time you look at his beginning it was auspicious.

Unlike a lot of the people in John Cage’s extended circle of influence, he didn’t fall totally under his spell. For the most part, that was because he wasn’t a trust fund kiddie and he had to work to make a living. Full time. The work contributed to his discipline, while he continued to marvel at the happenings that were happening.
It was in this period of 1960 to 1963 that Byrd also studied under Morton Feldman. The free floating blocks of sound characteristic of Feldman mesmerized Byrd, and he incorporated yet another influence into his own vast oeuvre.

As he studied, he worked, and one of his jobs was as an assistant to music critic and composer Virgil Thompson, another interesting and storied cat who brought a neoromantic and neoclassical sensibility into the American strain of classical music. As Byrd worked, he composed and by 1962 there was a recital of his work at Carnegie Hall.
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Some of those compositions were later recorded decades later for issue for New World Records on NYC 1960-1963.

​A HAPPENING TIME

As with his previous mentor Barney Childs, Thompson directed Byrd onto another fateful path. Time-Life Records was looking to create an album of music from the Civil War era. Knowing how to write and arrange counterpoint made Byrd something of an odd duck among the experimental set he hung out with. The fact that he made money doing so, caused some to regard him as a sell-out. His willingness to get paid gave him other skills that the other people didn’t have in this in turn made his later worker rich and interesting.

Along the way he got sidetracked by falling in love with Dorothy Moskowitz, who he worked with on another project for Time-Life, The Life Treasury of Christmas Music. They were both arrangers on this album, and it makes you wonder if somewhere along the way they stepped under some mistletoe.

Moskowitz was a graduate of Barnard College where sh started writing her first compositions. Barnard was a small womens liberal arts college and the smallness of it gave her the freedom to experiment. She comments that, “Had I gone to a place like Oberlin, where there were serious musicians, I might never have had the audacity to do what I did. As it turned out, Barnard College taught me audacity, if nothing else. Its lack of music reputation wasn’t a stumbling block. It was actually an opportunity in disguise.” This was followed by a brief time at Columbia where she studied under tape and flute master Otto Luening.

Their relationship was intertwined with music and at Time-Life the couple worked on a series of records about the history of the United States. Moskowitz produced these, did the research, and wrote the liner notes. Capitol Records had produced these albums and they ended up hiring Byrd to be a staff arranger and producer. He was good at that, but not as good at the politics inside the company, so he ended up quitting to go to work as an assistant teacher at UCLA with the intention of getting his PhD in ethnomusicology. He didn’t end up finishing that degree, but the fertile west coast scene proved to once again stimulate his growth in creative directions.

​Moskowitz joined Byrd at UCLA as well. The year was 1963. While he was studying different musics of the world, she was as well, specifically their vocal styles. This led her to singing on the album Vocal and Instrumental Ragas from South India with Gayathri Rajapur, a player of the gottuvadyam, a kind lute-style veena instrument similar in shape to the sitar, but fretless and with 20 or 21 strings. They were joined on the album by Harihar Rao, a tabla and sitar player. Rajapur was a student of Budalur Krishnamurthy Shastrigal and other masters of Carnatic music like Musiri Subramania Iyer, T.Brinda and Swaminatha Pillai.

​Moskowitz was also teaching at UCLA too. One of her classes was called “Feminism and I,” and while they were busy with all of this activity, Byrd still managed to have the energy for even more artistic expression and musical magic. Byrd was another student of Rajapur.

The difference between East Coast and West Coast was a big one for Byrd. “If I was a tiny fish in the pond of avant-garde New York, I was a pioneer of experimental music in LA.”

In his first year back in California he hooked up with a jazz cat named Don Ellis who was a whiz on the trumpet. Ellis was also a bandleader, drummer and composer. In early 1963 he had participated in a jazz workshop in Hamburg, Germany put together by the NDR, then went over to Stockholm, Sweden where he helped put together some events that were similar to the happenings being orchestrated by the freaky folk of Fluxus.

In 1964 he made his way to UCLA where he started studying ethnomusicology. Harihar Rao, who Moskowitz had sang with, was another connective link in the scene. Rao found great inspiration in the music of India through Rao, and started experimenting with time signatures, different meters in jazz improvisation. Ellis and Rao went on to co-author a paper, “An Introduction to Indian Music for the Jazz Musician.” Ellis was thus an early adopter of world music influences that would go on to be explored in the work of other musicians such as Don Cherry and Jon Hassell.

Byrd and Ellis started putting on concerts and co-founding the New Music Workshop with the trumpet player.
“In the year we were together, we had concerts of experimental jazz interwoven with music by Charles Ives, Henry Brant, Edgard Varese, Earl Browne, Morton Feldman, and Stockhausen. Dorothy performed John Cage’s Aria hauntingly with a vibrato-less voice she had honed in study with our teacher of South Indian music, Gayathri Rajapur.”
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When Ellis left Byrd took the New Music Workshop into even freakier terrain. The terrain of the happening, an area of activity first explored by his fellow Fluxus enthusiast Allan Krapow, and taken up by the likes of John Cage into something he would later call a “Musicircus.” Yet he was also going into somewhat commercial terrain. Byrd was friends with Linda Rondstadt, and at the time she fronted a blues band. He got her to play during a happening called “Steamed Spring Vegetable Pie.” He had taken the name for the event at random from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Seeing a rock band be part of the experimental conviviality got him thinking that rock music might be a suitable vehicle for bringing fresh perspectives for the medium of sound to the astute listeners.

​Byrd would go on to form his band, but in the meantime, Byrd would become a communist.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Starting a band was, for Byrd, the “logical step to seek a bigger audience, to turn art in a more socially radical direction (also to be more honest about sex and gender after the failure of the ‘Love Generation’ the previous year).”

He had broken up with Moskowitz in 1966, the failure of his personal relationship, and they remained friends, but it didn’t take long before she was back in New York.

Love wasn’t enough to change the world after all, and Byrd got involved in radical politics. He quit going to school and started teaching at the Pasadena Art Museum and the UC Irvine Extension. He was still doing performance art events and happenings, but as with much experimental art, there wasn’t much money involved. The events broke even, but didn’t provide a living. A rock band might do it, though. And a rock band would be a way to inject experimental and radical philosophy into the minds of the American public.

As ever, Byrd found encouragement and supporters, this time from Art Kunkin who wrote for the Los Angeles Free Press. He asked Kunkin for the seed money he would need to start the band. In the meantime he had found another comrade in the anarchist composer Michael Agnello.

Byrd and Agnello would differ in their ultimate aims however. Where Byrd wanted to slip the Revolution into the performances and the revolutions per minute on a recording, Agnello really wanted to be a “‘Digger’ band that would live on a commune.”

In the meantime Byrd asked Moskowitz to come back to California to be their lead vocalist and she accepted to the opportunity. He gathered others from the avantgarde and ethnic music circles he was steeped inside into the fold. Strangely, he invited no rock musicians.

As Byrd told Klemen Breznikar at Psychedelic Baby Magazine, “I had first met violinist Gordon Marron when I was rehearsing music for an all-Morton Feldman concert; Craig Woodson was an African drum specialist, Rand Forbes was a virtuosic modern-music classic bassist. Dorothy was perhaps the only one who had multiple skills. We were very conscious that we were plunging into rock without any real knowledge of, or experience in, the medium. We had played Cage and Stockhausen, African and Indian music, and I thought we could simply bring all that to rock. But we knew almost nothing about the roots of rock and roll.” The one player who came from the world of rock was Stuart Brotman, a bassist who had played in Canned Heat.

They called the band The United States of America. According to Moskowitz using the name of the country was their way show their “disdain for governmental policy. It was like hanging the flag upside down.”
One thing the group did have in common with other rock groups was their familiarity with drug culture and the psychedelics of the time. When they made their album, it was filled with an exuberant hallucinatory otherworldliness and a touch of paranoia.

They were able to successfully mix their training in classical idioms and their experimental tendencies with the leavening of the popular rock blowing peoples minds. Byrd was listening to Blue Cheer, Jefferson Airplane, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Beatles. He was an early fan of Randy Newman. These sensibilities percolated into the mix. He applied ring modulators and octave dividers to Marron’s violin and they hooked up contact microphones to the drums in an example of Stockhausen’s mikrophonie. Woodson also attached slinkies to his cymbals for added tone color. Byrd himself used a monophonic synth built out of oscillators created by aerospace engineer Richard Durrett.

Another influence were the psychedelic Texans of Red Krayola. Byrd had gone to a lot of their rehearsals and was friends with the group. He liked their Dadaist approach and the iconoclasm their band leader Mayo Thompson, his attitude of not giving a shit, and his not caring about any kind of commercial appeal. As much as they inspired him, The United States of America would not follow the same tactics. Byrd was aware that unimpeded Dadaism was incompatible with the planning inherent in his communist philosophy, and he wanted their music to be marketable. It had to have a claim on the attention of those outside the enclave of weirdos he was used to hanging around.

The Monterey Pop Festival had just happened as the band was still in formation and rehearsal mode, honing their sounds and writing their songs. Yet every band was getting signed by record producer Clive Davis and they happened to be in the right place at the right time, despite not even having played their first gig.

They did hit the stage starting in late 1967 with performances at Ash Grove in LA. It must have been quite the sight. The practice of putting on happenings had prepared Byrd for a crazy live show. Besides all of their electronic gear, they had a calliope, a large American flag made of neon tubes whose stripes flashed in alternating red and white, and a plaster nun statue. It’s not clear why they had a plaster nun. Byrd also thought they were the first rock group to use fog machines. Most of the band was in darkness with a pin light on Moskowitz. True to their classical origins, they played from scores, rather than having the rock songs memorized down pat.

The band had also recorded demos and sent them out to Columbia. Agnello and Byrd got into it over the politics of selling out when Columbia Records came back with an offer, giving the band an opportunity to make an album, so Agnello quit. Brotman left with him.

A record contract isn’t anything without lawyers getting involved, and Columbia sent one down when it came to sign the contracts. Byrd went with the groups manager, Malcolm Terrence, to a meeting wearing a black suit and a priests collar he used to mystify and intimidate these lawyers. The tactic enabled him to get a $35,000 advance rather than the $20,000 they had first been offered. For a communist, Byrd was really interested in getting the money. The band used it get costumes, equipment, a rehearsal space, and he was able to pay the members.

Yet, there was always conflict within the group even as they hit one of their goals. Byrd had a distinctive vision of what he wanted in the band, and did a lot of the writing of the music. They were all brainiacs too, and fierce individualists, with heated debates, arguments and diatribes all part of the dynamic. True to the name of the band, Byrd wanted to run thing as a democracy, but that didn’t work either.

In Richie Unterberg’s book Unknown Legends of Rock and Roll, Byrd is quoted as saying, “The idea was to create a radical experience. It didn’t succeed. For one thing, I had assembled too many personalities; every rehearsal became group therapy. A band that wants to succeed needs a single, mutually acceptable identity. I tried to do it democratically, and it was not successful.”
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Yet, they managed to get the album recorded before the whole thing exploded and disintegrated, splitting apart. Before it did split, they had been joined by Ed Bogas as a member.

Following the release of the album, the group went on tour along the East Coast. Touring just wasn’t in the works for the band, and it pretty much disintegrated after their first effort. Marron, Forbes and Bogas all quit. Moskowitz tried to keep the USA name alive as a musical group with Rubinson, but it didn’t take long for that to fizzle out as well, though the trio had recorded some demos that later appeared when the album was reissued.
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Byrd was left to his own devices, and in time they each went on to do their own things. That album went on to inspire other groups and the noise-rock that would form out of the mixing of punk with experimental music in the seventies. A direct influence can specifically the late Tish Keenan of Broadcast. The melding of musique concrete with rock and roll, and Moskowitz’s unique vocal stylings left an imprint that can be heard as one of the definite influences in Broadcast.

JOE BYRD AND THE FIELD HIPPIES
As the band dissolved, Byrd flew on to his next appointment. His friend John McClure from Columbia had a new assignment for him. McClure was the head of the classical Masterworks division. He thought Byrd was brilliant and made the offer for him to put out a second album, but it needed to be done in two months.
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The result was the frenetic trippy masterpiece The American Metaphysical Circus, a name also used on the first song on the United States of America album. With song titles like “You Can’t Ever Come Down” sung by Victoria Bond, his songwriting was certainly tapping into the lysergical zeitgeist. The other songs were also cranked out in a time constrained fit of creativity.

​Songs like “Leisure World” show a familiarity with the problems of housing a growing elderly population. The piece was narrated by ABC voice over artist Ernie Anderson. The “Sub-Sylvian Litanies” opening up the first half of the record are where some of the real magical juice is contained, though the entirety is a strange and fascinating fall down the rabbit hole quit of American music.

In time both the lone United States of America album and the American Metaphysical Circus achieved cult status. The latter sold over at least 100,000 copies, though Byrd never received a royalty payment from Columbia. He never get one for the United States of America either. He’s not the only musician to have suffered such a fate.

It is such a shame that culturally important work so often receives little renumeration for its creators that they can live their lives.

YANKEE TRANSCENDOODLE

Byrd had an expansive mind, and his musical interests spanned centuries. As part of what can be called the American experimental tradition, he had the attitude and disposition of an explorer. Early forms of American music had become one of his interests.

In 1976 the country of the United States of America was in full on celebration mode. Even the hippies, the freaks, and the burgeoning punkers were getting in on the fifty state party. It makes sense that Joseph Byrd, former leader of the band the United States of America, would want to put out his own tribute to the nation. By this time he had a serious education in the older musical styles of the USA, and on this solo outing he was in a position to reckon with the countries past while looking forward to the future. If the past was populated with traditional tunes, such as “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” the chosen instrumentation was state of the art electronics.

Byrd’s sonic arsenal included the ARP 2600 Synthesizer with Oberheim Expander, the Oberheim 4 voice Polyphonic Synthesizer, and a TAPCO 2200 graphic equalizer. It was recorded with Sony four-track and two-track recorders, and the end result was released on John Fahey’s Takoma label.

​This connection to Takoma, and Fahey, through the label it was put out on, is another feather in its Americana cap. It’s not American Primitive guitar music, but it certainly captures a bygone era and the national spirit while managing to sound space age. According to Byrd, “the sounds depict brass bands, wind bands, calliopes, fifes and drums, Regina music boxes and Wurlitzer automatic organs, music hall orchestras and whorehouse pianos, a chorus of boy whistlers, jazz bands hot and sweet, a Kentucky parlor on a warm afternoon in 1902, the bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814, the Conquest of the American Wilderness, and a 15-year-old girl cornetist in church on the Fourth of July.”

That bombing of Fort McHenry was the event that inspired “The Star Spangled Banner,” though it was set to the music of an old English drinking song. Perhaps that’s the most American thing about it: the tune was lifted from elsewhere and put into service for something new. Only one song on the album isn’t a traditional patriotic tune. Byrd carves us his own slice with “The Conquest of the American Wilderness.”

Each of these songs is rich history and legend. For instance “The World Turn’d Upside Down.” That number had first been written as English rebel song in 1640 and published as a broadside in protest against rules of Parliament surrounding the celebration of Christmas. The Anglican lawmakers wanted the day to be solemn, not filled with the revelry the Catholics were want to put into their alcohol infused festivities. That solemn policy was too popular. The legend goes that when General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington at Yorktown in 1781 this was the tune British bands and musician went out and played. Hearing it done playfully and with humor on synthesizers is a real treat.

“John Brown’s Body” showcases one of the core wounds in American history, a wound that still smarts to this very day as we continue to wrestle with the aftermath of slavery, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War.

According to Greil Marcus, Byrd cryptically included the leftist anthem “The Internationale” on the track labeled “Grand Centennial Hymn.” The crypto-Marxist inclusion of “The Internationale” is Byrd’s way of injecting his own leftist politics into the mix. The song was originally composed after communard Eugène Pottier fled France after the fall of the Paris Commue in 1871, first to Britain, and then to the United States in 1873.

A lot of this music is probably unfamilar to most people today unless they happen to have spent time in a marching band, going to lots of parades, or hanging out on antique merry-go-rounds.

It’s a lot stranger than all of the classical moog albums that came out in the seventies in the wake of Wendy Carlos’ switched on masterpiece.

Now in the time of our own semisesquicentennial, there are a lot worse ways to celebrate than spending time with the music of Joseph Byrd.
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The writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to support me.

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.

​[This long essay, a kind of psychohistorical drift, on Route 128 MA is to be published in three parts. The first came out on March 25, the second on April 1st, and this segment concludes today, though their may be future installments on the theme of American Psychogeography.]
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As the area around Boston got developed, the greenspace around Route 128 became “Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley.” The farmland that would have sat between the parks and trails and townless highways envisioned by Mackaye ended up becoming industrial parks as the land was bought up by a variety of tech corporations ready to pursue postwar growth. Saruman had once again raided the Shire. In the wreckage he erects Satanic mills of industry. Transcendental Concord became a note discord. A note with the seed of cyberpunk embedded within.

​Route 128 soon became its own kind of information superhighway, as electronics firms seeded the area, growing as businesses and then growing new kinds of silicon lifeforms. The farms and fisheries were cleared and made way for the building up the automotive industry, and the fields around them for the creation of factories churning out machine tools and all the kit and kaboodle that the make electrical world possible.

Then the big engineering minds who had connections to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sauntered in to continue the buildup of the areas electric powered might. MIT had roots going back to 1861 in Boston and their cooperation in military research had gathered up steam in WWI. It went on full display in the lead up to the United States involvement in WWII. The mad scientists at MIT wore the lab coats while their politician suppliers donned the full cloak of global empire from Great Britain in the aftermath of the war.

Among those involved was the cyberneticist Vannevar Bush. He was one of the founders of the American Appliance Company in 1922. Their project was to usher us into a new age of refrigeration. Perhaps this company should give another kind of chill, as they eventually evolved into Raytheon, the U.S. defense contractor and industrial corporation whose key work is manufacturing military grade weapons. As ever the commercial electronics that trickle down to the happy American consumer are just a byproduct from the applied research in how to kill and destroy.

Their eventual buildup into global bomb blasters can also be seen as stemming from their failure to keep things cold. Their refrigerator design was a flop, so they moved into the glowing world of radio. It started with the purchase of patents from C.G. Smith and his rectifier tube from the AMRAD company who went on to become X-ray innovators. At this point the company changed their name to Raytheon and went on to success by selling the S-tube that allowed radios to work on home electrical grids, helping to usher in the golden age of radio.

Then in 1927 Bush built his Differential Analyzer, an early mechanical computer that would pave the way for the mainframes that followed in the wake of WWII.

During the 1930s, as Benton MacKaye’s pans for the Bay Circuit were bypassed and the commercial agenda for Route 128 unfolded, other radio tube companies moved their operations into the area. These included Hygrade and Sylvania who later merged into the Hygrade Sylvania Corporation. General Radio moved into the area as well, along with the scientist Edwin Land, who went on to start Polaroid. Then in 1939 the first Radio Shack catalog was published by the Boston based company.

By the end of the decade another researcher into the nascent world of cybernetics and information technology came on the scene. It was a gentleman by the name of Howard Aiken. He was a physicist at Harvard, and with help from the school and IBM he created the Harvard Mark I, a giant electro-mechanical beast that weighed five tons and was the first programmable computer.

By the end of the following decade Claude Shannon had created the first chess playing computer at MIT. Over the course of those years this burgeoning sector had blossomed from the establishment of the Rad Lab at MIT, short for the Radiation Laboratory where all manner of things such as radar and radio research were conducted, to the continued growth of Raytheon and its involvement in computers. The aided the war effort through the building of magnetrons, a high-powered vacuum tube that converts electrical energy into high-frequency microwaves.

In the 1950s the growth along Route 128 further accelerated. An Wang had immigrated to the United States from China in 1951 and started Wang Laboratories. Wang was a pioneer in the area of Random Access Memory, receiving a patent for Core Memory in 1955 that he sold to IBM.

In 1952 a section of Route 128 was opened from Danvers to Needham. A parade was scheduled to celebrate the occasion. The elephants who had been brought into lead the parade didn’t cooperate with their human handlers, and got “cold feet” because the asphalt was still hot. On November 4th of that year Dwight D. Eisenhower became the 34th president of the United States. In his 1961 farewell address, he would warn us all of the growing military-industrial complex. A complex whose research had gathered in one cluster around
Route 128. The elephants were getting cold feet about the cold war.

In 1957 computer engineers from MITS Lincoln Laboratory set up shop in the Massachusetts town of Maynard to establish the Digital Equipment Corporation. In 1970, the same year that Jonathan Richman started his band the Modern Lovers they shipped their first 16-bit minicomputer the PDP-11/20.

​Over the intervening decade of the sixties, missile interception became a thing with the Raytheon HAWK system which was “like hitting a bullet with a bullet.” The space race against those evil communist soviets was on, and many of the corporations who had planted themselves around Route 128 applied themselves to the mission. Computer Aided Design was born at MIT and Wang Laboratories perfected the art of computer typesetting. Wang furthered the industry by developing logarithmic calculators and word processing software. All of this ushered in the modern world, and it was the world Jonathan Richman bathed in every night as he ran the roads in his motorcar, with his radio on, keyed in to the energy percolating out from all of those laboratories.

​On the 16th of May 1951 Jonathan Richman was born. Before the year closed out the public radio station WGBH began to broadcast and the Museum of Science opened. The Korean war was still ongoing, Truman was President, and campy science fiction flicks were invading the new drive-in theaters. the Boston Red Sox had finished up the season with 87 wins over their 67 losses. The air was alive with the crackle of radio signals and curving baseballs.

Richman’s dad was a traveling salesmen peddling goods across the roadways. In time he would initiate Richman to the way of the road, taking his teenage son out on treks with him in the car, driving around Massachusetts. His mother taught reading to kids who had a hard time learning to read. The family lived in the suburban town of Natick, Massachusetts, “in the far western reaches of Boston, impaled by Route 9,” as Richman is quoted in the book There’s Something About Jonathan by Tim Mitchell. Natick was a “halfway house between the city and the open highway…a blandness between the bleakness of subways, expressways, and skyscrapers and the magic of neon, radio towers, and ‘fifty thousand watts of power’…”

Those fifty thousand watts of power probably came from the station WMEX, a station that left a radio frequency burn in Richman’s heart. “When I was eleven I had a crush on Debbie Salvin. This was 1962. She and Janet Woish listened to WMEX - the teenage station of that time. Well, when I came over to Janet’s to pester Debbie, I’d hear ‘Johnny Angel,’ ‘Torture,’ ‘Summertime Lover’ and songs by Connie Stevens and Tommy Sands. So pretty soon I was there with the transistor radio hearing ‘The Locomotion,’ ‘The Watusi,’ ‘He’s A Rebel’ and everything else. That music is in my heart now as it always will be.”

The suburban landscape of tract houses didn’t do much to stimulate Richman’s imagination, but the roads and the rock and roll delivered over the medium of radio did. Richman was an earnest kid, and his continual sense of wonder left him at odds with other people, with other teenagers. Rock and roll was a lifeline in the sameness of the suburbs. Soon he had a transistor radio with him at all times, to tune in to and resonate with the frequencies that gave him, already a dreamer, something else to dream about. When WMEX boosted their power up to a mighty fifty thousand watts in the daytime during the late 1960s, and respectable five thousand at night, Richman would have been able to tune in the rock sounds that soothed his soul.

​Benton MacKaye’s fiend Lewis Mumford had gone on to spend much time thinking about the ills caused to society by our long-term investment in machines, and the ills of suburbia. Mumford was critical of urban sprawl and thought suburbia inculcated a childish way of looking at the world in the people who lived there. In his 1961 masterpiece The City In History, Mumford writes, “In the suburb, one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world, except when some shadow of evil fell over a column in the newspaper. Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion.”

Natick was place of such illusions is just on the outside of Route 128. Natick forms one of the loops on the beltway that cinches up Boston’s angling streets. Natick is a word from the Massachusett language meaning “place of the hills.” The name for the state itself derives from the tribe and comes from a term in their tongue meaning “At the Great Hill,” by which they meant the Blue Hills that stood above Boston Harbor from the south.

“Roadrunner” would become Richman’s most famous song. But in order to get to that point, in order to become a singer himself, instead of the painter he at times dreamed of being, he first had to have an encounter with the Velvet Underground, heard first over the radio when a DJ played “Heroin.” Richman didn’t need the drug, but he sensed in the music of Reed and Cale and the rest of the Velvets a new kind of rock music that he could mainline via the power of electrical communication into his own veins and bring into his own being, to emanate something of his own, something equally American, something equally new.
He recalls having “I heard live bands in junior high but didn’t start singing or playing till I was 15 and heard the Velvet Underground, out of New York City. They made an atmosphere and I knew then that I could make one too!”

He had already been making music. He already had an amp and a guitar. Now he had the reagent. When the Velvet Underground started playing in Boston, he started attending their shows, got to meet and hang out with the band, it began a process of transformation.

Highschool in suburbia was a real drag for someone as wide eyed as Richman. He knew what he wanted to do even if he didn’t quite know how to get there yet. There was no class for rock and roller on offer in the curriculum, and Richman thought there were better things he could do with his time. His parents thought differently, and so he managed to stay and graduate.

If human creativity can be conceived of as tapping into a field of consciousness, the field of consciousness he found himself inside was one of innovation. The success of radio, from the first morse code pulses sent out by Marconi to its successive apogees in the voice of Wolfman Jack broadcasting the religion of rock and roll out of the radio towers. Richman was a convert.

He was such a convert to the rock and roll religion that after he graduated high school in 1969, he made the pilgrimage to New York City to meet and hear his idols, the Velvet Underground. He couched surfed at their manager Steve Sesnick’s place as he worked odd jobs and tried to make a go of it as a rock and roller himself. He did manage that, but not right off the bat, and he went back home, where he promptly formed a band with a neighbor and some other friends.

​Richman was driven, and he started to write songs, and some of those were inspired by his travels as a teenager with his father, out on sales trips around the area. The Howard Johnsons and “Stop ‘n Shops” held a special appeal to him. They might have been sickening to MacKaye, a symptom of the motor slums he wished to thwart, but for Richman they held an everyday beauty. The stop ‘n shops and new fast food joints held an allure of satisfied desires, and there was comfort to be found in roadside motel rooms. It all filled him with a sense of wonder. This unadulterated happiness and pleasure in what life had to offer was innocent in him, and free from pretense. When he was finally able to translate these feelings into music on his song “Roadrunner” about driving along Route 128 the joy in these things came through without artifice. Buzzing through it all was his love affair with radio, which he had a nonstop communion with, using it as a way to modulate his very being.

​When the Modern Lovers first formed, and before they had settled on a final name, Richman had called themselves, “The Modern Lovers, the Dance Band of the Highways.” The last part was promptly dropped but it lingers around Richman and all the tracks he has left in space. “The Dance Band of the Highways” may not be a household name but Route 128 became immortal the day Jonathan Richman got his first inkling of the song “Roadrunner.” The year was 1970. He was nineteen, he was in love with the modern world, he was in love with the radio towers and all the electrical wires that lit up the area with glowing industry, he was in love with driving, and more important than anything else he was in love with modern girls and modern rock and roll. When he drove up and down Route 128 late at night his imagination got fired up. Cruising in the late 1960s under the starlight the world seemed to open up. The evenings were electrified. The electricity powered rock music and held new expanses of knowledge.

His connection to the Velvet Underground did pay off. John Cale had produced the demos, including the songs “Roadrunner” and “Pablo Picasso” that wound up on the Modern Lovers album. Cale said that “There was very little that was orthodox about Jonathan. Like his views on life, his views on music and art were much more from a childlike and dream-filled perspective, which allowed him to create his own special reality.”
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And Richman sang with innocent childlike glee “With the radio on / I’m in love with Massachusetts / And the neon when it’s cold outside / And the highway when it’s late at night / Got the radio on / I’m like the roadrunner.”

​His friend and fellow musician in the Modern Lovers had said that he and Richman “used to get in the car and just drive up and down Route 128 and the Turnpike. We’d come up over a hill and he’d see the radio towers, the beacons flashing, and he would get almost teary-eyed. He’d see all this beauty in things where other people just wouldn’t see it.”

Richman’s song is a bridge between the optimism of the 1950s and the suburban hellscapes then emerging. It is a bridge between the industrial parks of the high tech sector, and the cruising culture of rock and roll that has no greater tech than cars and radios and blasters. It’s the bridge between the unbridled optimism of boomers high on progress, and the sneering cynicism of Generation X and the actual future of no future that all of this was heading too.

​Richman liked his car as much as he liked women. “The highway is your girlfriend as you go by quick / Suburban trees, suburban speed / And it smells like heaven.”
The film American Graffiti came out in 1973, the year after “Roadrunner” was recorded, and it captures a similar flavor and psychic terroir. Wolfman Jack is howling from the radios throughout, and is central to the plot of the movie. The car and the radio are one. There is no cruising culture without the power of the AM coming out through the speakers late at night.

In the song Richman speaks of the “Spirit of 1956.” In 1956 the Platters had number 1 hits with “The Great Pretender” and “Only You.” James Brown had his debut single released. Elvis Presley hit the television variety shows and the film Rock Around the Clock reeled across the movie screens spurring movement on the dance floor and an explosion of teen culture as Bill Haley and his Comets headed for the stars. Rock and roll was here to stay, and it was something to do twenty four hours a day, all day every day, “patient in the bushes next to ’57.”

Lester Bangs, in a two-part review for the Stooges proto-punk album Fun House, said that their arrival on the scene and subsequent embrace by the youth movement signaled “the decline of Western civilization.” Richman was another ingredient in the protopunk stew, but he leant the movement some of its innocence, magic and mystery that would later reappear in the work of groups like Beat Happening, who also flouted the cynical aspect of punk.

As the 1970s waxed the fortunes of the firms on Route 128 waned. Silicon Valley’s fortune was starting to wax, and in their early years, before their complicity with the surveillance state, and their own contracts with weapons manufacturing firms, the early California hackers were opposed in ethos to the establishmentarian mindset of the east coast engineers. California was an escape hatch from the military industrial template. Punk rock was an escape hatch from the ponderous proceedings of prog, and the celebrity worship culture on display in the rock god shows held in stadiums. Richman was riding the protopunk wave, the wave of hundreds of bands started under the influence of the Velvet Underground, and his own influence went on to be one of the formative pulses kickstarting the punk rock movement in England where the Sex Pistols had adopted “Roadrunner.” It makes sense that the afterlife of “Roadrunner” would have such an influence on the development of punk. Joan Jett, one of punk rocks godmothers was also among the first to cover the song.

​From a mythological perspective the song is perfectly aligned with the god Mercury and Hermes. It is about travel and communication, about moving at high speeds. Yet Mercury and Hermes are also tricksters. Even the iconic cartoon and bird the song was named after has a connection to the trickster spirit through its close association with Wiley Coyote.

​Roadrunners are chaparral birds, a kind of ground cuckoo native to the southwestern part of the United States, Mexico and Central America. They are desert creatures. They like to run away from their predators, such as coyotes. Though they can fly, their feet are capable of fast movement and they move along the ground. And though Richman likely never saw one in the wilds surrounding Boston, most Americans his age had seen the roadrunner on Looney Tunes.

In Native American stories the coyote is a kind of trickster being, and when he makes his presence known, you can be sure that things are going to change, things are going to get shaken up. Jonathan Richman remains a pivotal figure in the shake-up of underground music, but his character is more like that of the bird than the coyote. Still in love with the modern world, he is chased by the changer down Route 128, and along that same path he flew, so many things were ushered in for both good and ill, computers, weapons. The country was never the same.

​Perhaps the ultimate trickster trick was played on the people who live in Boston, and on their fellow Americans via the concentrated thought energy that pours out of the realms surrounding the doom loop beltway. What could have been built according to the ecological vision of Benton MacKaye, instead blubbered into the hot potato of defense contracting, the creation of industrial effluvia whose complexes still ensnare the collective psyche. A road meandering through parks and preserves and protected places was instead poisoned. Where there had once been human settlements interspersed with nature, we were instead given the Sprawl.

[Another version of the classic song -you’ll want to listen to all the versions, I promise.]
RE/SOURCES:

This article would have been much tougher to research and write without the books, There’s Something About Jonathan by Tim Mitchell, The City in History by Lewis Mumford, the website Route128History.org by Alan Earls and his book Route 128 and the Birth of the Age of High Tech, and numerous other websites and sources.
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In next weeks segment we will explore the M.ilitary I.ndustrial T.emplate and the way Route-128 excited the fertile imagination of Jonathan Richman as we move along the roadrunner not taken.


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The writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.