["The difference between an eccentric and a kook is an eccentric has money"-Forrest Fenn.]

Each month over the next year Sothis Medisa will feature a very brief sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the impotent troubadour Tiny Tim, whose freakish ways paled compared to his mastery of song. This month we are going to look at the amazing metamorphosis of Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill, Brother Blue.

(If you are interested in the background of WHY I am writing these notes on American weirdos you can read this post by John Michael Greer on Johnny Appleseed's America.)

​Each of these sketches has come about by current research, fascination, and synchronicity. A number of the characters in this series have been new personalities for me, people whose lives I've only discovered within the past year or two. Others, like Henry Flynt, I'd heard of but hadn't investigated before.  Tiny Tim and Joybubble's had been the only two whose lives I'd read something about. In any case I'm noticing a trend where a lot of the people I've just discovered have been storyteller's such as U. Utah Phillips, Ray Hicks, and now Brother Blue.  

The man who came to be known Brother Blue was born in a rough, dirt poor section of Cleveland, Ohio. "I'm like a flower who grew up in rocky soil," he said. His father worked as a bricklayer and the neighborhood they lived in was white. Brother Blue said of it, "We were one black button in a field of snow."

Born as Hugh Morgan Hill on July 12, 1921, his younger brother had mental retardation, and couldn't pronounce "Hugh" right, and called his older sib "Brother Boo". When Hugh became a storyteller in the 1960s he changed his name to Brother Blue in part to honor his little brother. His sibling also had an obsession with butterflies, and this symbol became an important motif in Brother Blues declaimed tales. 

As a school lad, the man whose Hugh was Blue, became inspired by grade-school teacher, Miss Wunderlich who gave him the encouragement to do his best. She saw in him a bright light and nurtured his nascent  spark. 

Brother Blue served the United States during the atrocities of WWII in the army in both the Europe and Pacific theaters. Yet he had a calling towards a different theater than the theater of war, and when he came back home, having risen to the rank of first lieutenant, he went to Harvard under the G.I. Bill of Rights. He got a degree in social relations which was a combination of psychology, sociology and anthropology. In 1950 he married Ruth Edmonds, a force of nature in her own right, and then went on to earn his Masters degree in playwrighting from Yale in 1953. 

Even as much as he was drawn to theater and the works of Shakespeare and other playwrights, he had a hard time writing plays. Yet he did well in describing his story ideas to his friends, thus he gradually metamorphed from playwright-by-training to storyteller-by-calling and inclination. 

So Brother Blue settled into his vocation as a storyteller, telling stories on the street, in schools, theaters, festivals, on the corner, from pulpits, on streets, in prisons to inmates. He eventually went back to school again for his doctorate, which he received in storytelling. He performed his thesis, which was on the topic of prison storytelling, with accompaniment from a 25-piece jazz orchestra. It was this time that he also adopted the name that had come to him from his brother.

He also adopted his brothers favorite animal, the butterfly as his personal iconography. He would paint butterflies on his face and hands and he dressed from toe-to-tip-top-of-the-head in bright blue clothing, often adorned with ribbons and balloons.

To him storytelling was sacred. It was a path of redemption and awakening bringing the storyteller and those in the orbit of the story further on a path towards universal harmony. And all of creation was in the orbit of the story according to Brother Blue. He said, “When you tell a story, you tell it to all creation. It’s cosmic. It never goes away.”

Brother Blue had a number of signature tales, but one he would often say began this way. "From the middle of the middle of me, to the middle of the middle of you ..." As he declaimed he would use his entire body and being to also telle the tale. He would use his hands to make magical gestures, and tap on his heart and point to the heart of his audience. "I am older than the oldest stories, I am the storyteller."

One of his stories that dealt with the archetypal "storyteller" was that of Muddy Duddy, a musician who had the power to hear the sound of a harp playing deep within the earth.

Yet he also spun one man versions of Shakespeare, rapping them up, jazzing them out, improvising and throwing in elements from the news of the day, or being inspired to bring in elements from whomever happened to be in the crowd. He used stories as his standards, but was able to extrapolate, interpolate, and condensate them down to essential meanings. His favorite tales from whom he called Will the Shake were Othello, Romeo and Juliet and King Lear.

He mixed the old with the new, saying "I bring Homer to the streets. I bring Sophocles." And: "To tell stories, you should know Chaucer. You should know Shakespeare. You should know Keats. You have to be constantly reading. You read, you think, you create. You have to know the new moves: You must be able to rap and be able to sing the blues!"

Storytelling became his life, his mission. He performed frequently at Storytelling Festivals, sometimes showing up and declaiming on nearby streets, not even at the festival proper which was the case when U. Utah Phillips first encountered him and was caught under his spell. Phillips recalled how Brother Blue leaned into the audience with a presence. This leaning in to the present moment was something Phillips said influenced his own storytelling. 

He was also flown around the world to tell stories in various countries for various occassions. Besides teaching through stories Brother Blue also worked as an educator at the Episcopal and Harvard Divinity Schools. With his wife he taught the Harvard Storytelling Workshop. 

As a genuine griot who claimed had been anointed to storytelling by a kind of holy fire, he also employed instruments in his telling of tales. Like Ray Hicks he had adopted the French harp -or harmonica- as his main instrument, but he also employed drums and tambourines, and even chains. The chains were genuine slave chains he used in one of his stories on that subject.

At Harvard he studied with Albert Bates Lord, a professor of Slavic and comparative literature. In 1960 Lord had authored the book The Singer of Tales.  His  book discusses oral tradition as a theory of literary composition. Building on the research of Milman Parry, Lord worked with him to record Balkan guslar poets. In his book he applied their findings to Homeric and medieval epics. 

In Brother Blues storytelling he mixed all of the things he had learned from the western cannon, with stories from the African American and African traditions and Asian traditions. He read, he thought, he created.

​Meanwhile his wife Ruth Edmonds Hill was no slouch either, and she was big into the storytelling game herself. She worked as scholar, oral historian, oral storytelling editor, journal editor, educator, and as an advocate for historic preservation. Sometimes she was called Sister Ruth. 

Sister Ruth was most widely acclaimed for her work on the Black Women Oral History Project. This project consisted of interviews with 72 African American women from 1976 to 1981, conducted under the auspices of the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, now Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Sister Ruth coordinated the project and devoted herself to its completion. Many of the women interviewed were in their 70's, 80's, and 90's. 

Sister Ruth continued to collect oral histories. She made extensive field recordings, and guided interviews, of Cambodians, Chinese Americans and other ethnic and sociolect communities. Just as Brother Blue caused him to be an in demand storyteller in far locales, Sister Ruth traveled widely to conduct research and participate in conferences. 

Her and her husbands lives intertwined around oral culture: storytelling and recording the stories of everyday people.

In 1981 Brother Blue appeared as the character Merlin in George A. Romero's film Knightriders. It's a Romero film that deserves to be more widely seen. It grew in part out of his fascination with the Society for Creative Anachronism. It is modern retelling of Arthurian stories in the guise of a traveling troupe of carnies/Renfest  travelers whose particular gig is jousting on motorcycles. The group tries to live by a code of chivalry and honor gone from modern life, and consistently face obstacles with police, townies, and competition from within their own ranks. 

In this setting Brother Blue as Merlin, dressed in his usual attire acts as a spiritual guide to the king of the troupe. In film the camera zooms in on the butterfly painted on his hand in a moment of melancholy. He waves goodbye to the camera during a funeral he is officiating. Brother Blue was deeply aware of all that his animal symbol implied: gestation and transformation, change and emergence.

In his 88 years he received many accolades and awards. In 1999 he received the National Storytelling Network Lifetime Achievement award, for "sustained and exemplary contributions to storytelling in America.” The man who gave the award to him said, "His mother is verse, rhythm and rhyme, and his father is reportedly inverse time.” 

After his death in 2009 his wife Ruth received in his honor a posthumous W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, named for William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the first African American to earn a Harvard PhD in 1895.

Brother Blue really believed that stories change the world. Speaking of this nation's history he said, "America, I love you for what you could be! Come on America!"

He exhorted his audience and his students to tell stories from the heart. "From the middle of the middle of me, to the middle of the middle of you ..."

Brother Blue's is still out there. Now he can flutter in the spiritual realms, his soul having emerged from the cocoon of this material world. 

There are a ton of Brother Blue videos up on youtube that are worth checking out to here and witness his storytelling prowess. 
RE/SOURCES:

Ahhhh! A Tribute to Brother Blue & Ruth Emonds Hill, Yellow Moon Press, 2003

Brother Blue: A Narrative Portrait of Brother Blue a.k.a Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill, by Warren Lehrer, 1995

https://www.wbur.org/news/2009/11/05/obit-brother-blue

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/arts/27hillobit.html

https://www.harvardsquare.com/history/characters/brother-blue/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Blue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Edmonds_Hill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Women_Oral_History_Project

In 1961 Sender built a small studio in an attic space at the conservatory. It didn’t consist of much but the schools Ampex tape recorders and some contact microphones that Sender, Oliveros and the others started playing around with. In December of that same year Sender and Oliveros put together a series of concerts called Sonics.

Each of these programs began with an improvisation, followed by playing a pre-recorded piece of tape music. At this point Morton Subotnick got it in on the fun, and joined them in their free improvisation. It wasn’t long before the idea for a studio got proposed, so they started building one.

The musical equipment the SFTMC wanted to use was expensive and their funding was meager. This forced the hands of the members to get creative and build some of their own equipment. It has served them, and the others who followed in their footsteps well as this DIY spirit was part of their whole attitude when creating the center in the first place. Building their own circuits from scratch just further baked in the can do, do it yourself attitude that was essential to the Californian spirit. The idea of circuit design as score was further reified by the essential work done at SFTMC.

Pauline had won a prize in the Netherlands for her choral piece Sound Patterns, so she was next to go off to Europe. When she came back Ramon and Subotnick had done the footwork to get the SFTMC incorporated as a non-profit, and from that point it was time to get busy making music.

Ramon Sender wrote of another aspect of their motivation to create the SFTMC. “We have felt that somewhere where the composer can find brought together all the necessities of his art in an atmosphere conducive to his developing his own personal utterance free from the pull and the tug of stylistic schools and from the competitive scramble that typifies much of the musical activity of today.

“Somewhere there should be a place where the fragmented elements of our musical life could be be melted together and recast through the reestablishment of the artist’s dialogue with his community in a new and vital way. A place where new music would find dynamic and vital expression for our own era, and by its own vitality not countenancing the isolative practices of the cliques that sicken the musical life of today.”
​
The SFTMC was to become such a place, born out of its rough and ready, rumble tumble beginning. With little in the way of funding they used whatever they could scrape together. Pauline said, “It was considered, what you called a classical electronic music studio, because it was built out of equipment that was never intended for making music. It was equipment for testing in laboratories and like that.” For instance there were no sound mixers at the time as we know them today. Instead they used a telephone patch bay to passively mix the sounds. The term "patch", still widely used in electronic music, especially in terms of modular synthesizers, came from this early use in telephony and radio studios, where extra equipment could be kept on standby and patched in at a moments notice should one device fail.  The reconnection was  achieved with these patch cords and patch panels, like the jack fields of cord-type telephone switchboards.

Over the course of its life the SFTMC had homes in a few different locations. The collective was given access to 1537 Jones Street in 1962. This was a huge mansion space that was going to be demolished in a year, but in the meantime it became the perfect spot for holding shows a normal venue wouldn’t touch, and an academic hall wouldn’t allow. Since they ran the space they could also experiment with multimedia and performance art. As experimental music made contact with the emerging psychedelic culture, and with Subotnick already having a hand in multimedia it was a natural outgrowth of their activities. Film, light shows, dance, poetry –all of these found a place at the SFTMC and often combined with new music.
​
Sender writes of the time, “Throughout this period we have remained independent of any university or college connection, and retained a balance in our relation to the community between our activities as a cultural agency on the one hand, and a sound recording studio on the other.”

The first year the SFTMC gave nine concerts. These included electronic pieces, and performances of new works by living composers. Lucio Berio and John Cage pieces would be rehearsed and put on their, as the teachers in the schools had no interest in this music, yet. Some of the pieces were radical for the time, such as a Robert Davis piece that had four naked people sitting on toilet seats.

This kind of venue, and the concerts put on by the ONCE Group in Michigan (to be discussed later in this chapter) became a template for the many iterations of the DIY music scenes that would emerge over the next several decades. Unutilized space was recreated in service to the arts.
​
Next the SFTMC moved to 321 Divisadero Street. The building there provided ample space for both the studio and the performance aspect, including two auditoriums. It was big enough to sublease rooms for other community groups, such as the Anna Halprin’s Dancers Workshop and KPFA, one of the flagship stations of the independent Pacifica radio network.

KPFA has been a prime disseminator of experimental and culture since it first went on the air in 1949. It reached a peak of new music experimentalism under the guidance of Charles Amirkhanian, who was the music director of KPFA from 1969 to 1992. KPFA was also the second home for Don Joyce of Negativland and his effervescent collage show Over the Edge, founded in 1981, which was another touchstone of experimental west coast culture.

In her work at the SFTMC studios Oliveros took a different tack than the time consuming and laborious tape editing process Morton Subotnick had used on his piece for the King Lear production, and standard in musique concrete. She thought the cut and splice method was all-together too intensive so she started learning how to use the tape decks as a delay system. This would be the precursor to the Enhanced Interactive System (EIS) that she used in consort with her live music playing in various versions throughout her career. She also liked to record very long sections onto tape and then play them together in continuity.

Another way she learned to manipulate her sound was by varying the record and playback speeds of the tape. She also experimented with difference tones and in doing so invented a new way of making electronic music. To create difference tones she used equipment with rich Lafayette tube oscillators, and set them above the range of hearing, around 40,000 hertz. This effect was exemplified in her 1965 piece created at the SFTMC, Bye Bye Butterfly.

Speaking of this in a 2016 lecture she said, “Then there would be differences between the two or three oscillators that I would use. If you know what a tube oscillator looks like, it has a big dial in the center of the face and it has the possibility of setting ranges so you can go above the range of hearing or in a certain range that is in hearing and below the range of hearing. The only way you could change the pitch of the sound was me to turn this dial, so that was not necessarily a good way to make some music. By setting these oscillators at above the range of hearing... I learned this from my accordion teacher. He taught me to listen to difference tones. Difference tones are the difference between two or more frequencies because they produce the difference between them below, and also above. At 40,000, in that range, you hear the low difference tones. When I first heard the difference tone sounding, and it corroborated my way, then I added the tape delay system that was used in ‘Bye Bye Butterfly.’ The way I was playing the oscillators was by just barely turning the dials. I had reduced that aspect of oscillator playing to being able to sense where you wanted to be in an improvisational way, and by listening to what was coming out. I was listening intently, and performing, to get the sounds that I got. I was very interested in layering sounds, and in taking the same tone and then microscopically varying [it] so that you got side bands, they were called. This was a simple setup, actually, but it could produce very complex results.”
​
Radio operators had already figured out how to use side bands for communication. Pauline figured out how to use the same principle for modulation of audio waves. The seed that had come from listening to her grandfather’s crystal set and her father’s shortwave radio had morphed into the transformational oscillations of Bye Bye Butterfly.

As the SFTMC got up and running it drew in many creative minds who wanted to work with tape. One of those minds was Don Buchla, a California native and inventor of the Buchla Modular Electronic Music System.
​
Buchla had been born in Southgate, California in 1937. His mother was a teacher and his father was a test pilot. As a kid he took naturally to working with electronics and made a hobby out of building crystal radio sets, tinkering with ham radio gear, and welding his own electro-acoustic instruments together out of scrap steel and various components. When he went to college at the University of California in Berkeley and got a degree in Physics and the pursued a Ph.D. While working in that direction he got some practice in building klystrons at the Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory.

Klystron’s were the first really powerful tool for making radio waves in the microwave spectrum. It was first built in 1937 by Russell and Sigurd Varian. It was made from a specialized linear beam vacuum tube that was used as an amplifier to boost the radio signals from the UHF range up to the microwave range. The low powered version of these instruments were used as oscillators for microwave relay communications links, and the high powered klystrons were used as output tubes for television transmitters and radar. They were also used to generate the strong burst of power needed for modern particle accelators, and it was for this last use that Buchla built these instruments. His technical skill enabled him to work on some NASA projects, as he worked towards his doctorate.

But he never got that Ph.D. The establishment at Berkeley wasn’t changing fast enough for Buchla, who got turned on and tuned in to the spiritual frequency of the sixties, and so, dropped out. 

Yet school had provided him with some very important turn ons. In addition to the klystrons and other emerging high-tech he also got exposed to musique concrète. It appealed to the same part of his creative mind that liked to make electro-acoustic instruments, and he wanted to mix his own musique concrète. His tape machine was limited in functionality, but soon, word got to him of the SFTMC where he could use their more versatile three-track tape recorder.

His visit to the SFTMC was one of those historical moments that give birth to a whole new strand in the web of his destiny.  Morton Subotnick was in the studio, and Subotnick mistook Buchla for someone he had been in contact with to design a ring modulator. It wasn’t Buchla but Buchla had the electronic chops to make it happen, and it wouldn’t be that hard for him. Even more it was just the kind of thing that got Buchla energized and excited. Buchla and Subutonic talked about what could be done.

Ramon Sender was also there and Subotnick and Sender started telling Buchla how they wanted to get away from the laborious processes involved with making electronic and electro-acoustic on tape and work with something more immediate. They wanted a tool that had the power of an analog computer but was also small enough for them to work with directly, something that could produce the results equivalent to that in a studio space but in a smaller set up.

Stemming from this meeting Subotnick and Sender commissioned Buchla to build an “electronic studio in a box.” Lucky for them they had just gotten a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the SFTMC’s 1964-65 season and they used five hundred dollars of that money to pay Buchla for his work.

Don had already worked with analog computers so he chose to use transistors and voltage-control for his nascent box. Voltage control was especially useful as it allowed the user to play discrete notes through the oscillators. So far in the electronic music that had been made with knob controlled test equipment, a composer would have to shift manually up or down through the frequencies to reach a desired note.

This innovation made many of the tape processes redundant (though they still have their own use and charm). The electronic composer would now be free from the task of splicing tapes of frequencies recorded off oscillators and other test equipment. This is also where the sequencer enters electronic music history. He had the idea to put sixteen preset voltages into his device, the musicians could switch between. In doing so he created the sequencer.
Buchla delivered on his commission in 1965. Besides the sequencer his box had ring modulators, oscillators and other features. It turned out to be a far out hit when it was played at the psychedelic festivals being put on by members of the counter-culture in San Francisco.

As Buchla worked in California, Robert Moog was on the east coast working on his own name sake synthesizer. Independently of each other they both created voltage controlled synthesizers. This simultaneous creation of the Moog on the one hand and the Buchla Box on the other also set into place what is now seen as two different schools of synthesis, west coast and east coast. Both styles have the patch at their heart, the way the cables are connected between inputs and outputs of the synth to create their characteristic sounds.

Moog’s east coast style was exemplified by subtractive synthesis, achieved through voltage controlled low pass filtering (VCF). These VCF’s have typically employed a transistor ladder circuit that give the Moog its punchy and sharp sound that has become its sonic signature. The oscillators can produce pulse, square and sawtooth waveforms from multiple outputs. These are then put through the filters which subtract some of the harmonic elements of the sound before being swept with resonance to create changes in timbre. The signal is then routed to the voltage controlled amplifier (VCA) before going into the speakers or headphones of the musician. Further envelopes can also be placed on the sound, shaping the wave through attack, decay, sustain and release. With a patch in place it was able to be played by a traditional keyboard, giving its otherwise alien appearance and sound a certain familiarity, making the Moog palatable to musicians across the land.

The west coast style differs by employing a form of additive synthesis to simple waveforms. Instead of removing harmonics they are added to the signal. Buchla wanted his synthesizer to mimic acoustically generated sounds through the manipulation of recorded audio. One of the tools he used to change the sound in the west coast systems was the waveshaper where the input and output of a signal are mapped and then have a mathematical shaping function applied to the sound in either a fixed or variable form. Another element that gives the west coast approach its unique sound is the use of low pass gates (LPG). These act as a combination of a VCF and VCA. The LPG works in the subsonic range and sounds are only heard when control voltage (CV) is employed.

Buchla’s creation was also unique for its use of vactrols, or a light emitting diodes and photo-resistors. When voltage passes through the LED it emits light into the photoresistor. When voltage is applied to the photoresistor it develops a current proportional to the voltage applied to the LED, making the photoresistor, in effect, a voltage-controlled resistor. A vactrol can be used to adjust any parameter that would normally be used by a potentiometer or variable resistor. It was another way of doing things that typified the west coast style. Buchla used the LPG and the vactrol to create naturalistic percussive sounds modeled on bongos, marimbas and other instruments.

As mentioned before, Buchla’s instruments also incorporated a sequencer into the design. These were not featured in Moog’s instrument. What made it even more exotic is that it featured touch plates that responded to the amount of skin applied to their surface. Moog’s instrument responds as a typical keyboard, depending on how hard or soft you press the key you get changes in dynamics. By changing the sound by how much skin was applied Buchla created a way for the human to have a close and intimate connection to the instrument. The lack of keyboard also gave his line of instruments a totally new look, feel and sound. The musician thus approaching them is able to sidestep some of the typical ways of thinking about music making, ways that the keyboard reinforces. Buchla’s designs allow the musician to enter a new sound world, where intuition and experimentation are encouraged.

This was all a natural outgrowth of the west coast mindset. This idea of interfacing with the circuit would later be taken up by the low voltage and circuit bent instruments of Q.Reed Ghazal, to be explored later, some of which allowed the electricity to pass through the human body and back into the instrument.

For Morton Subotnick, Buchla’s inventions would go on to be the basis for his most touted composition, the electronic and psychedelic masterpiece Silver Apples of the Moon (1968). For this piece of music Subotnick employed a larger, expanded and more complex set up, the “Buchla 100 Series Modular Music System.” Buchla’s wizardry as instrument maker was a boon to Subotnick, whose musical imagination proved to be a boon to Buchla. Buchla’s instrument helped unleash Subotnick’s genius and expose him to a greater audience, and Subotnick’s playful and inventive music exposed the genius of the man who made the instrument, creating interest among musicians and listeners in his synthesizers. 
​
The same year that Silver Apples of the Moon came out, introducing synth music to a larger audience, another album came out that exemplified the east coast approach to synth making: Switched On Bach by Wendy Carlos. Her choice of synth was the Moog, and her choice of what to play was from the classical repertoire, Bach. These different albums, both beautiful in different ways, set these schools of synthesis along their different routes of musical exploration. The west coast synths and emergent style charted out a new path linking them with the other west coast builders who had come before, and those were to follow.

The SFTMC eventually received a second Rockefeller Grant, this time for $200,000. The additional funds meant they would be able to do more with their studio and performance space. Yet before the Rockefeller’s would fork over money to the non-profit they wanted them “to have a responsible fiscal agent and that was Mills College, not us crazy artists,” according to Oliveros. So the SFTMC merged and became part of Mills College and Pauline became its first director. The grant had stipulated that it be a place “for the composition, study, and performance of contemporary music” and was shortly thereafter renamed the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM).

The transition from the SFTMC to CCM happened over 1966-67 years. Many exciting concerts and events were scheduled and performed. Stockhausen came to visit in January of ’67 and gave a lecture on Momente, his work for two pianos, ring modulation and shortwave radios which at that time was still a work in progress. He also gave Bay Area premiers of Zyklus, Mikrophonie No. 1, and Telemusik.

After only a year working as director of the center Pauline got a teaching gig at the University of California. Stockhausen’s technician Jaap Spek stepped into her shoes briefly, and was then followed by co-directors Anthony Gnazzo and Lowell Cross. It was in these years that David Tudor came and gave lectures at the CCM, and performances of Variations IV which featured many of the electronic music boxes Tudor had designed and built himself.
​
All of these influences laid a groundwork for musical experimentation and collaboration that was to follow in the next decade of the 1970s when the CCM was directed by Robert Ashley. For the next twelve years between 1969 and 1981, under his guidance the center became a remarkable nexus of creative activity in music, technology and art. Robert came to California by way of Ann Arbor, Michigan and the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music which is another major circuit in the story of DIY electronic music.

RE/SOURCES: (for Part I and II)
https://www.kqed.org/arts/12248119/fifty-years-of-limitless-possibility-at-the-center-for-contemporary-music-at-mills-college

https://www.moogmusic.com/news/san-francisco-tape-music-center

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harry-Partch

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Cowell

Lousi Barron / Bebe Barron, The Forbidden Planet OST

https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2013/06/secret-circuits

https://thequietus.com/articles/19418-morton-subotnick-interview

https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/morton-subotnick-the-mad-scientist-in-the-laboratory-of-the-ecstatic-moment/

The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press.

https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=San_Francisco_Tape_Music_Center

https://sfcmhistoryblog.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/ramon-sender-and-new-music-at-the-conservatory/

https://web.archive.org/web/20040220191722/http://www.otherminds.org/shtml/Amirkhanian.shtml

Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network by Matthew Lasar, Temple University Press; Updated, Subsequent edition (April 14, 2000)

https://moogfoundation.org/remembering-synthesizer-innovator-don-buchla-1937-2016/

Klystrons, Traveling Wave Tubes, Magnetrons, Cross-Field Amplifiers, and Gyrotrons by A.S. Gilmour, Artech, 2011

The Tube Guys, Norman H. Pond, Russ Cochran, 2008

https://www.kqed.org/arts/12248119/fifty-years-of-limitless-possibility-at-the-center-for-contemporary-music-at-mills-college

https://www.moogmusic.com/news/san-francisco-tape-music-center

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2008/04/20/electronic-music-pioneer-bebe-barron-dead-at-82/

https://reverb.com/news/the-basics-of-east-coast-and-west-coast-synthesis

https://electronicmusic.fandom.com/wiki/Vactrol

https://www.mills.edu/academics/graduate-programs/music/center-contemporary-music/archives.php

A Wild Composer: Morton Subotnick Interviewed by Robert Barry https://thequietus.com/articles/19418-morton-subotnick-interview
​
Ankeny, Jason. "Pauline Oliveros Biography". Archived 2014-10-26 at the Wayback Machine 98.5 Kiss FM.

ARTISTIC  LINEAGES AS A WEST COAST EXPERIMENTAL CIRCUIT

​While Laurie Spiegel was wrestling with GROOVE and VAMPIRE at Bell Labs interest in the musical use of the new microcomputers was beginning to emerge in the homebrew, hacking and DIY scene on the west coast. The solar center around which the action orbited was the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) in Oakland, California.

The west coast had already been a vanguard location for experimentation in music.  There was something of a loose tradition forming around creating new musical instruments there, as exemplified in the work of Harry Partch. Partch had been one of the first western composers to systematically work out microtonal scales. Writing compositions in these scales required new custom built instruments. His unique instruments and unique music embody the west coast spirit. But it wasn’t just Partch who was experimenting with new musical instruments out on the pacific edge it had been John Cage and Henry Cowell as well.

Cowell had been a key explorer of atonality, polytonality, polyrhythms, and non-Western modes in the first half of the twentieth century. When he wasn’t composing Cowell put time into writing a book titled New Musical Resources, which he penned from 1919 to 1930. Its main focus was on the rhythmic and harmonic concepts he had used in his compositions, along with some speculative music theory. This book had a lasting impact on the American avant-garde. It also got him into the game of helping to design new musical instruments. 

​After his book was published he commissioned Léon Theremin to create the Rhythmicon, also known as the Polyrhythmophone. It was a transposable keyboard instrument that could play notes in periodic rhythms proportional to the overtone series of a chosen fundamental pitch. It was the world’s first electronic rhythm machine. Cowell had proposed to Theremin that it could be built around a system of photoreceptors. It was able to play up to sixteen different rhythm patterns at the same time. Syncopation of these rhythms was optional. Cowell wrote a number of works for the instrument but it remained forgotten until Joe Meek decided to dust one off in the 1960’s and use it in his baroque pop music productions. 

Cowell’s influence spread not only from his compositions and writing, but from his work as a musical teacher; one of his students was Bebe Barron. She went on to help design, with her then husband Louis Barron, the innovative circuits and cybernetic organisms heard on the soundtrack to the Forbidden Planet.

The Forbidden Planet soundtrack from 1956 is hailed as the first entirely electronic score for a film. The producers had originally wanted Harry Partch to score the film, but he was cast aside when they heard what the Barron’s were capable of. Bebe and Louis had been brought in to make some of the sound effects. When the producers heard the amazing sounds the New York created by the couple they were hired to compose the entire hour and ten minutes of the rest of the film. MGM wanted them to move to Hollywood to be close to the film studio as the picture was made, but the couple already had all the equipment they needed back home where they were equipped to do electronic and tape work.

Even though the Barron’s weren’t Californians, through their connections in Hollywood and their innovative score they brought experimental electronic music to the movie going masses. In the liner notes to the soundtrack the composers explained their approach, which was in part influenced by their reading of Norbert Wiener and his ideas about cybernetic systems. Louis went so far as to follow the equations presented in Wiener’s book and was able to build electronic circuits which he manipulated to generate sounds. From this and other seeds the Barron’s helped spread the idea that a circuit diagram itself can be considered a score, and this idea of the circuit as score in turn took deep root at the SFTMC and later CCM, where it continued to spread and migrate from.

The Barrons: “We design and construct electronic circuits which function electronically in a manner remarkably similar to the way that lower life-forms function psychologically. [. . .]. In scoring Forbidden Planet – as in all of our work – we created individual cybernetics circuits for particular themes and leit motifs, rather than using standard sound generators. Actually, each circuit has a characteristic activity pattern as well as a ‘voice’. [. . .]. We were delighted to hear people tell us that the tonalities in Forbidden Planet remind them of what their dreams sound like.”

The circuits they built for their composition used vacuum tubes and carried that warm rich sound known and loved by musicians. According to how they designed the circuit it would have various characteristics in terms of timbre, pitch, and rhythm. They were especially fond of ring modulation circuits and also of applying further amplification of the signals to the circuits. Sometimes the amplification was so strong the circuit overloaded and burned out. They captured all of these sounds on tape and used the resulting library of sound to build up their compositions, using long phrases and tape delayed rhythms to create a unique sonic world unlike the other work being done with electronics and tape elsewhere in the world.
  
Another sonic lineage can be traced as the pathway of a circuit from Henry Cowell to John Cage to David Tudor. Of his many interests Cowell had written a piano piece called Aeolian Harp in 1923. It featured extended techniques that involved the player plucking and brushing the piano strings. These were a direct precursor to John Cage’s prepared piano pieces.  

David Tudor had started playing Cage’s music in 1951, giving the premiere of Music of Changes, Concert For Piano and Orchestra and 4' 33". In part through Cage he later took up composition himself. He had worked with Cage on many of his indeterminate electronic pieces and had started to learn how to build his own electrical instruments. These musical circuits and instruments that he built came to be considered as compositions in and of themselves with the circuit design as a type of graphic score. David Tudor would go on to have many ties with the CCM, giving performances, and teaching there, as detailed below.
The Barron’s and the Tudor’s shared a similar philosophy when it came to their circuits. David Tudor had said, “I don’t like to tell the machines what to do. It’s when they do something that I don’t know about, and I can help it along, then all of a sudden I know the piece is mine.”

Don Buchla was another west coast instrument builder who also had a huge influence on the shape of electronic music to come. His modular synthesizer system changed the way people approached and thought about making music. His designs shared an absence with Tudor’s: the absence of a keyboard with which to play the boxes and synths. Using an organ type keyboard to control something that wasn’t an organ and didn’t make piano sounds didn’t make sense in Buchla’s way of thinking.

“A keyboard is dictatorial.” He later said when explaining his choice to leave it behind. “When you’ve got a black-and-white keyboard there, it’s hard to play anything but keyboard music. And when there’s not a black-and-white keyboard, you get into the knobs and the wires and the interconnections and timbres, you get involved in many other aspects of the music, and it’s a far more experimental way. It’s appealing to fewer people, but it’s more exciting.” 
 As electronic music continued to evolve these ideas bounced and played off each other and off other ideas. Even as these musical practices and equipment evolved the idea of circuit design as a score in itself remained a fundamental idea within the discipline and continued to mutate as musician-builders started getting their fingertips burned on soldering irons as they homebrewed their own. 

THREE MINDS BEHIND THE SFTMC: SUBOTNICK, SENDER AND OLIVEROS

Today we take for granted that tape is something sounds and video can be recorded onto and manipulated. In the fifties and early sixties when this and the other organizations explored here had just gotten started a magnetic tape recorder was something that was more at home in the suitcase of a spy than a tool used by a musician. The San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC) was founded, like its compatriots in the Radiophonic Workshop and the GRM, to explore the creative possibilities of working with magnetic tape. It was also created as a resource for musicians who wanted to work with these tools who otherwise wouldn’t have had the access to a studio.

Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick and Pauline Oliveros started the space as a “non-profit cultural and educational corporation.” It brought the growing do it yourself or DIY ethos into an area of music production that had been dominated by the studios of large radio and television station such as the BBC, NHK, and WDR. The creative spores released by these institutions and others like Bell Labs found fertile soil in California where the attitude of the pioneer still held sway. The center grew out of Subotnik, Sender and Oliveros’s deep love and involvement in avant-garde composition. Yet on the west coast, there was as yet, no specific place dedicated to the production of electronic sounds using reel-to-reels, tape loops, and an arsenal of six oscillators. So they built a space of their own that was to become a hive of musical, artistic and intellectual activity.

​Before diving in to their work at the tape center, a look at how the three composers  who formed it ended up in San Francisco, how they started working with tape in the first place is warranted.

Morton Subotnick

Morton Subotnick was the only California native of the three who started SFTMC, having been born in LA in 1933. He had gone away to Denver for college in but came back to his home state afterwards and was at Mills College in Oakland as a student during the late ‘50s. The liberal arts college had been and remains a hotbed for experimental music, John Cage having taught classes there and gave percussion concerts there in the 40’s, and Subotnick became part of that tradition. Subotnick had been a clarinetist since he was a kid and loved to write and play music. But it was in 1959 that he first had a go at making electronic music.
While at Mills he had played in the San Francisco Symphony, and composed material for TV (KQED), dance and theater pieces. Herbert Blau, director of the Actors Workshop ringed him up one day and commissioned him to write some music for a radical stage production of King Lear. Subotnick remembers the strange vision the director was going to use in the production, "It was going to take place in a kind of primordial humanity and the sets and the costumes were made from seashells."

So instead of using traditional instruments for traditional incidental music Subotnick got the idea to make a piece using tape. The actor Michael O’Sullivan had been cast for the lead role and Subotnick wanted to use his voice as the basis for the piece. “So I recorded Michael - Herb directed him - the way he was going to do the storm scene, a year in advance. I recorded it and made all the music from his voice. I cut and pasted and upside down and backwards, fast and slow. It took me almost a year."

With the actor’s voice now discombobulated in a slew of different ways he felt like he had something, and even more than the finished music it came with an insight that the tape recorder could be used as a broad canvas for painting with sound. “I realised something that I had not thought of before then, which is that I really didn't like being on the stage. And I thought, well, this technology could create a new paradigm, a new environment for composing. It would be like painting. You would be composing music as a studio art. I made the decision at that point that this new technology was going to allow for everything to be different. A new kind of composer."

Around the same time a photocopy of some lectures by Marshall McCluhan that were to become the book Undertsanding Media were being passed around in Subotnick’s circle. The book itself had not yet been published, but the ideas inside were blowing peoples minds. He was also seeing ads in the papers for the new transistors that had just started to be mass produced, and the electronic based credits cards that made a step towards making society cashless. McLuhan’s ideas mashed with the transformations he was seeing in the world around him.

With a musique concrete piece under his belt he had the idea of really moving into composing on his own, and away from playing the clarinet. He said of this moment in time, “Well I can’t give up the clarinet and writing for instruments. I don’t know anything about technology, so I have to see if I have the aptitude before I say to the San Francisco Symphony, ‘Goodbye, I don’t want to see you anymore.’ I’m going to put the clarinet away. I’m not writing any more music.”

Out of this came his 1961 piece Sound Blocks, which was his way of testing the waters as a composer before leaving the symphony. Working with the artist who did the visuals for King Lear he created a multimedia piece that involved something akin to the liquid projections of the sixties, four tracks of tape and two stereo tapes, and poet Michael McClure reading from his Flowers of Politics. The audience ate up the forty-minute piece that presaged the psychedelia that had started to emerge in that decade.
​
Realizing he had an aptitude for this new kind of music and media Subotnick eventually made the decision to become a new kind of composer.

Another new kind of composer had also been studying at Mills College. Ramon had been born in Madrid, but left with his parents for the United States during the Spanish Civil War. In New York he counted Henry Cowell among a string of composition teachers that also included Elliot Carter and George Copeland. While hanging around with the crew who surrounded Carter and Milton Babbit he got to attend a concert demonstration that was to have a profound effect on the later course of his music. The demonstration in question was of the music of Bebe and Louis Barron. Louis showed off some of the circuits and networks he had built. While Sender had enjoyed the strange sounds he heard, he also recalls that he felt the Barrons had received “a lot of very intolerant, kind of down-there-noses looks from the New York composers, who considered his approach very lowbrow.” The next segment of the entertainment that evening proceeded to open up a door to musical vistas in Sender’s mind. They played Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge.

Having heard what the Barron’s had done with electronics, and what Stockhausen had done with electronics, voice and tape, Sender realized the many possibilities tape could give the composer, though it would take a little while for the experience to gestate inside and for him to get his hands on a tape recorder as these were not in great supply at the time. When he finally did start using tape it gave him a new freedom.

Before Sender discovered the power of tape he felt he had been overtrained in music, taught so much it, and studied with so many teachers, that it resulted in a paralysis of analysis. “There came a point where I was so self-conscious about composition I was all tied up in knots. The tape recorder was a great ‘freeing’ device. It gave me, I felt, the same freedom a painter has to put a stroke on a canvas and stand back and [look at] it.”
​
In 1959 Ramon Sender went to the San Francisco Conservatory to study with Robert Erickson. It was there he met Pauline Oliveros who was also there for Erickson’s composition class. Pauline and Ramon both became interested in improvisation under Erickson’s influence. The school had a home-style Ampex tape recorder that could do two-track playback and one record. Ramon quickly realized how he could manipulate the recorder in various ways and decided to use it to create his piece Four Sanskrit Hymns as his work for the class. Working on the piece, learning how to do sound-on-sound tape dubbing, and using multiple tape players at once to construct compositions got Sender hooked on the phonics of tape, but he needed a dedicated space to work with the tapes in. He needed a studio.
​
So he set about building a room in the Conservatories attic. One of his friends was guy named David Talbot who was a technician at KPFA and he built him a small board to run his sound through. Another friend sold him his first personal tape recorder, an Ampex 601-2.
A tapehead was born and journey begun.      

Pauline Oliveros

The third member of the original SFTMC trio was Pauline Oliveros. A native of Houston, Texas she was already playing music in kindergarten, the beginning of a lifelong fascination with sound and listening. She listened to everything, all the time. When she was nine she started to play the accordion which was to be her instrument of choice.

Pauline was also a deep listener. To her the entire world of sound was rich with latent musicality. Reflecting on listening as a kid she said, “I used to enjoy my grandfather tuning his crystal radio. I liked the sounds of tuning the radio much more than the program. My father had a shortwave radio, which also I enjoyed the sounds of the shortwave tuning as well. Those were sounds that I liked.”

As she continued to excel at music in school, and with the encouragement of her pianist mother, she added violin, piano, tuba and French horn to her multi-instrumentalist stockpile. At age sixteen, feeling the call of her vocation, she resolved to become a composer, and in time went to college in California. There she supported herself in part by giving accordion lessons. It was at San Francisco State College where she met Ramon Sender, Terry Riley and Loren Rush.

With Terry and Loren she formed one of the very first free improvisation groups. Terry had been commissioned to make a piece of music for a film score, but he hadn’t written anything, so he recruited Pauline and Loren he took them over to the studios at KPFA to use their trusty Ampex tape recorder. With no score and just the instruments they sat down to improvise and catch the results on tape. Terry was on piano, Pauline on French horn, and Loren on koto and percussion. They improvised several five minute takes. They had a lot of fun playing unscored music together, and Terry had something tangible to give to the film makers as a result. When they listened to the playback together they all realized they wanted to continue playing improvised music together.
​
In the same time period Pauline had started taking classes with Robert Erickson at the San Francisco Conservatory. Pauline’s mother had also gifted her with her very first tape recorder. She met Ramon Sender in Erickson’s class and when Terry and Loren went to Europe, Pauline started improvising with Ramon. These elements of improvisation and creative use of tape remained mainstays throughout her long career as a composer and musician, with the accordion was never far away. Soon electronics were also added to her expanded pallet of sound. 

.:. .:. .:.

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory: Telecommunications, Electronic Music, and the Voice of the Ether.

.:. .:. .:. ​Do you like what you have read here? Then sign up for Seeds from Sirius, the monthly webzine from Sothis Medias. It delivers blog posts here to your door while gathering and sowing much additional material, news of various shortwave and community FM transmissions, music,  deindustrial fiction, strange meanderings and more: 
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Each month of this year I am posting a very brief sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the phone phreakery and child like sense of wonder present in the life of Joybubbles. This month we are going to explore the ukulele strung shenanigans of that soprano toned vaudevillian throwback, Tiny Tim. He lived a life full of verve, vision, vibrato, and not a few eccentrities. 

(If you are interested in the background of WHY I am writing these notes on American weirdos you can read this post by John Michael Greer on Johnny Appleseed's America.)

​There is much more to the story of Tiny Tim than his Tiptoe Through the Tulips or his marriage to Miss Vicky on the Johnny Carson Show in December of 1969. Tiny Tim was a  true 20th century troubadour, and deeply religious all American freak, whose eccentricities were only matched by his encyclopedic knowledge of popular songs. He was an archivist, entertainer, and a dandy with a ukulele. He loved show business with all his heart, all most as much as he loved Jesus. Through prayer and devotion he overcame the obstacles placed in his way to live his dream of being an entertainer.  
 
His love of old and mostly forgotten tunes dated back to his time as a kid. Born as Herbert Butros Khaury on April 12, 1932, he also went by Herbert Buckingham Khaury. His parents were of mixed religious background, and Tiny came from a priestly lineage. His mother was a Polish Jew and daughter of a Rabbi. She immigrated to America in 1914 from Brest-Litovsk, now part of Belarus. His father had been a textile worker in Beirut, Lebanon whose father was a Maronite Catholic Priest. The Maronites are an ethnoreligious Christian group whose members belong to the Syriac Maronite Church, an Eastern Catholic Church in full communion with the Pope and Catholic Church. The founding of this branch is attributed to St. Maroun  who led an ascetic life in the Taurus Mountains.  The Syriac Marionite Church is totally cool with having their priests be able to marry and have families, which is how Tiny ended up with a Rabbi grandpa on one side, and a priest grandpa on the other side of his family tree.

When Tiny was a young little whippersnapper of five years age his father thought he needed a Gramophone and he was right. It was a vintage one, wind up, and Tiny got his love for listening to the old tunes, and how he ended up getting a huge amount of his repertoire straight from the mouth of the horn.

Listening to records on the Gramophone became an addiction for Tiny and he soon caught the disease for LPs, becoming an early music and record hound. He became fascinated with the technology, with the music, and with the entertainment business. Sitting around in his New York home listening to records he started memorizing the songs, and singing them. 

​One of the first 78's he heard was "Beautiful, Ohio" sung by Henry Burr, as this was a record his dad gave him, along with the player. Burr became a very early radio singer and recording artist. In 1920 Burr made his inaugural radio appearance using a microphone from a wooden bowl with an inverted telephone transmitter. Broadcasting from Denver, Colorado this choice bit of early DX was heard by the descendants of gold bugs and others living in San Francisco. Burr was also credited with singing over the telephone lines from New York to diners wearing headphones at a Rotary dinner in California. The same year he signed a contract with the Victor record company. He became one of Tiny Tim's heroes.  

One of the music hound habits that helped build up Tiny's deep bank of songs was that of going to the New York Public Library. He spent most of his free time there. As Frank Zappa once quipped, “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” And since Tiny didn't want to get laid, believing that even kissing and touching should be refrained from until marriage, he got himself a world class education in America's popular music from years gone by from his immersion in the resources available at the NYPL. He read everything he could about the recording industry and making records, and everything he could about people like Henry Burr and others from the first few waves of recording artists. He also studied sheet music and when photocopiers became available he would copy sheet music. He continued this hobby for the rest of his life.

At age eleven he started learning to play instruments, first the violin. He would perform for his parents in the evening. At age thirteen he had an appendectomy. The year was 1945 and the harsh war years were coming to a close. He put his down time in recovery to good use, feeding his imagination and spiritual life by reading the Bible and listening to the radio.

On the school front he wasn't doing so well, having repeated the tenth grade a few times before dropping out to make his own way in the world. Frankly, school bored him and he new his destiny was the stage. By this time he'd already picked up the mandolin and ukulele as an instrumental player. While singing along with the radio one day he discovered he could go up higher than he'd thought, having a fine falsetto voice full of verve and vibrato.      

During his early years of struggle (to be followed by later years of struggle following his commercial high-point as the ruthless entertainment industry thrust him aside) he worked as a messenger for the offices of Metro Goldwyn Mayer in New York. This line of work made him even further infatuated with showbiz.  

Tiny decided to enter a talent show which was the debut of his newly discovered falsetto, with the song "You are My Sunshine." Now with a taste for the spotlight he started going to various amateur nights and clubs, performing for whoever would let him on the stage. He played in the New York subways as a busker.

He needed even more than his high voice to stand apart from all the talent trying to make it big in the Big Apple. He started dressing weird and after seeing a movie poster for actor Rudolph Valentino who was sporting long hair, he decided to grow his out as well. This was all years and years before the heyday of the hippie. People thought he looked like a freak, and he kind of was. He also took to wearing a pasty white makeup and put lotions on his skin. His mother wanted to have her son, now in his twenties committed, or at least checked out by the shrinks at Bellevue hospital. His dad talked her down.

He still hadn't adopted his signature moniker of Tiny Tim during this time when his family thought he was nuts for trying to make a go at a singing career.  

1959 was a fateful year for the young balladeer. He was working at Hubert's Museum and Live Flea Circus in Times Square under the name Larry Love the Singing Canary. He got himself a manager who started sending him off on auditions, where he continued to play unpaid. At a club in Greenwich Village he sang Tiptoe Through the Tulips and it became his piece-de-resistance. 

​His first paid gig was at a gay and lesbian bar in the village where he played for six nights a week and for six hours a night earning him ninety-six bucks a month. It's kind of ironic that it was his first paying job as later Tiny Tim was noted for his prudish and strident views about sex, as well as his homophobia. It was at this time, after following the midget act, that his manager gave him the name Tiny Tim. He had arrived at the foot of the ladder but he still had ways to climb.

A helping him came along when he started appearing in films, such as Normal Love (1963) and You Are What You Eat (1968). In the latter he sang a version of I Got You Babe and this helped him get onto the television program Laugh In, which he became a regular on. 

In 1968 he released his first LP, God Bless Tiny Tim. As he got more time in the spotlight, and other albums followed, people started to wonder whether or not Tiny Tim was just putting it on as schtick to get into the big time, or if he was as genuine as he seemed. Those who got to know him, realized it wasn't an act. Tiny was a romantic idealist and his persona was part and parcel of who and what he was. 

​In 1969 he married his first of three wives Miss Vicky on the Tonight Show. Going into the seventies he continued to perform and make appearances though his popularity had started to wain with the fickle public. He charged on though, appearing in horror movie Blood Harvest (1987), and releasing his own albums on his Vic Tim Record Label when his contracts with the big league labels were over. 

And when he stopped being able to perform in the big venues, he kept on playing in the smaller ones. In the 1990s several more albums were released. It was in the mid 1990s when apocalyptic folk musician David Tibet of Current 93 fame became obsessed with Tiny Tim. 

Tiny Tim shared with David Tibet various esoteric and eschatological views about the end times and Christianity. Like Tibet, Tiny's views were also not within the mainstream of Christian theology. Among other things Tiny believed in aliens and thought the Antichrist would most likely come from a distant galaxy. Tiny and Tibet conversed frequently with each other over the phone.

On Tibet's label Durtro he released the album Songs of an Impotent Troubadour that contained his more off the wall songs. It contained such classics as “I Used To Love Jessica Hahn, But Now I Love Stephanie Bohn,” “Santa Claus Has Got the AIDS This Year" and “She Left Me with the Herpes.” The final track was a collaboration with David Tibet called “Just What Do You Mean by ‘Antichrist’?" Steve Stapleton, best friend of Tibet, also used some of Tiny Tim's material on Nurse With Wound releases.

​Besides his non-traditonal views on the Christian end times, Tiny Tim had some other eccentricities. He bathed and washed himself often, placing an extreme importance on bodily cleanliness. This went along with his mental ideas of cleanliness. He would spell out "S-E-X" when speaking of that subject. When he brushed his teeth, which he did four times a day, he used his own mixture of Crest, Macleans and Gleem to give them a significant shine. After his baths, he wouldn't dry off with a regular cloth towel, which he thought was just a vehicle to harbor germs. He only used disposable paper towels, of the Job Squad or Bounty Microwave variety.

Yet if you were hanging out with Tiny Tim you were probably talking about music, when not discussing the alien anti-christ. If you named a song, he'd tell you who wrote it, who recorded, in what year and how it did on the charts. If he had bought the album he could even tell you what he was wearing when he bought it.

Yet the entertainment business that he loved so much discarded him when he couldn't be used to make a buck for the big guys anymore. Yet he scraped on. In 1995 he moved to Minneapolis to live with Miss Sue his third wife.

On November 30, 1996 he was scheduled to play a charity event for the Women's Catholic League Ball. A band was scheduled to play and back him, but the band leader wouldn't play the songs Tiny had brought with him, even though he knew a whole catalog of standards in his head. So Tiny took to the stage for the last time accompanied by himself on ukulele, playing songs with great verve. He never once let the venue dictate how he performed. He gave it his all. He'd already been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and after singing Tiptoe through the Tulips one last time he came off the stage shaky. He'd had a heart attack while singing the 1920's song he'd made into anthem for the Flower Children of the sixties. 

When asked about death he said, "I am ready for anything that happens. Death is never polite, even when we expect it. The only thing I pray for is the strength to go out without complaining."

At the event, a doctor in the audience tried to resuscitate him, and EMT's were called to the scene, and he was rushed to the hospital, where he died moments later. He didn't go out complaining at all, he went out singing. 

​​Do you like what you have read here? Then sign up for Seeds from Sirius, the monthly webzine from Sothis Medias. It delivers blog posts here to your door while gathering and sowing much additional material, news of various shortwave and community FM transmissions, music,  deindustrial fiction, strange meanderings and more: 
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