When the crisp Autumn air starts circling in the Ohio valley, and the leaves start changing, I have a tendency to dig out my folk records, specifically the ones in the notional genres of psychedelic folk, freak folk, and apocalyptic folk. It’s the place where my inner romantic and my inner goth are on good terms with my inner hillbilly who likes to retrace his roots to songs sung in the hills of Appalachia.
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Like so many others, I first got into this style of music by tracing the influences and tastes of Current 93’s David Tibet. Sometimes you find the very best things in a discount bin at a big chain record store. In this case it was Media Play and I found for three dollars a Current 93 import comp called Emblems: The Menstrual Years. It was a two-disc set and the first disc had some of their dark sound collage music from the early records like Dawn, Dogs Blood Rising and Imperium. The second half portrayed their foray into a nebulous realm where acoustic guitars met with Tibet’s enchanting and esoteric lyrics. I knew I wanted to listen to Current 93 even though I hadn't heard them before because I knew what the name referenced, and it was something important to me as a teenager and young man.

The year was 1999 (notice that three nines in the year are actually three sixes upside down -and like David Tibet I am sick sick sick of six six six). I got hooked and started collecting.  It was easy to get taken into his gnostic world of heretical Christianity. I became transfixed by his visions of the Antichrist, Noddy, and his evocations of a primeval world where Christo-Pagan themes permeated and interfused with a post-industrial and experimental sensibility.

From my obsession with the music of Current 93 itself, I soon traced back the influences and citations Tibet himself was enamored with, because I was as enamored of him and his work as he was of these influences. Chief among these was Shirley Collins, the Incredible String Band, and the singular Comus, whose song “Diana” was covered by Current 93 on their record Horsey.

I wasn’t the only one turned on by this material, and my discovery was just in time to coalesce with the freak folk boom of the oughts. Weirdos like Davendra Banhart had rediscovered the work of Vashti Bunyan, and guitar maestros like Ben Chasny and his Six Organs of Admittance project were mining the finger picked lore of American Primitive guitar cross phased with influences from the psychedelic end of the folk revival. The time was ripe to get into this music. Reissues were coming out, and new bands like Espers and Faun Fables were writing songs that bridged the tradition into another era. Every Autumn I get the urge to revisit these strains of music.

Of course, the various flavors of folk feel right to me anytime I’m in the mood, and there are a lot of great artists continuing to mine these streams, as well as adjacent territory. Folk music, in any form, is folk music because it is a living tradition. I am grateful for artists like Sally Ann Glassman and Mary Lattimore who continue to bring their traditional and metamodern sound visions to life. Here I want to take a look at three favorite albums from the British folk revival that are perfect for autumn as the wheel of the year turns. There are plenty of other albums I’d like to write about too, and I hope to bring you some more of them in the future, if not this season, than maybe next Autumn.

THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND: WEE TAM and THE BIG HUGE

We will start our journey in the year of 1968, when the Incredible String Band released their album(s) Wee Tam and the Big Huge. In Europe this was released as double LP, but in the United States they were split into two separate albums. While I love The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, this one (or two as I heard them) remain absolute favorites. Some people seem to get kind of weirded out by listening to the Incredible String Band. They think they will become some kind of crazy hippie or something. But is that a bad thing?
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The Incredible String Band was formed by Robin Williamson, Mike Heron, and Clive Palmer in Edinburgh in 1966. All of them are multi-instrumentalists, and their albums are filled with a hallucinatory variety of traditional instruments put to lysergic use. Incredible String Band used a plethora of stringed intstruments: guitar, banjo, sitar, zither, dulcimer and more. To this they added an expanded palette liable to include whistles, flutes, washboard, kazoo, harmonica, organ, and all manner of hand drums, among other oddments. Some of these were played by additional members that had come into the fold from their hippie communal lifestyle. This can be seen on the cover of Hangmans Beautiful Daughter. Current 93 made a homage to this moment on their own cover to the Earth Covers Earth album.

Mick Heron tells how it was living together. “...we were touring maybe six months of the year and by that time we all lived together, in eight cottages joined together in this place called Glen Row. When we were not on the road we were either in the studio or playing each other songs we'd written. So it came out of the experience of just being in each other's company all the time.” Songs like “You Get Brighter” recall what it must have been like in those days of free love.

In general, I prefer the songs written by Robin Williamson and sung in his high voice the best, but I do love those that Mick Heron brought to the table too. The interplay between them, and the other musicians are where this incredible fusion happens. The Incredible String Band is the sum of its parts and if they had been separated it wouldn’t have been the same. 

Songs like “Job’s Tears” and “Maya” are transcendent and transportive. Other tracks like “Ducks on a Pond” are full of poetic power and tap into the place where bards call down songs of transformation and magic. It’s got the best damn kazoo, harmonica and washboard playing on any record I ever heard. 

Robin Williamson would go on to write a book with fellow Scottish esotericist R.J. Stewart on Celtic Bards, Celtic Druids (1996). He also combined forces with another seeker in the Western Mystery Tradition, John Matthews to pen two more volumes, From the Isles of Dream: Visionary Stories and Poems of the Celtic Renaissance (1993) and The Bardic Source Book: Inspirational Legacy and Teachings of the Ancient Celts (1998). Williamson is an accomplished harpist and traditional storyteller, making the connection to the bards of old even more resonant.

Williamson also released a number of solo records. Continuing in the bardic mode, the harp became his main instrument and he became quite accomplished. Among the gems is a soundtrack he creted for a theatrical production of the Mabinogion called Music for the Mabinogi.

It should probably come as no surprise to fans of the genre that the following two entries also feature Robin Williamson and Mike Heron as guest musicians. They really are that incredible.

SHIRLEY COLLINS: THE POWER OF THE TRUE LOVE KNOT

Shirley Collins had already been recording for close to ten years when Wee Tam and the Big Huge came out. At this point she was reaching her first apogee, with further climaxes to come, followed by a long period of silence that began in the 1970s, and triumphant return starting in the 2010s egged on by the encouragement of David Tibet to return to singing.

Whereas the Incredible String Band would have you flying high on hallucinogenic wings into newly composed songs, Collins takes you down a saturnine notch into a world of false lovers, death, and murder. In other words, a large swathe of the subject matter of traditional song. This was certainly part of the appeal to me when I got my first mail-ordered Shirley Collins CD in the mail, The Power of the True Love Knot. The sadness of things which I had felt in my life, and found solace inside the music of Current 93 was present in droves. I could quite identify with mordant tones in these old but timeless songs.

The Power of the True Love Knot isn’t all weeping and tears, though much of it is. At the heart of the album was an idea Shirley had found across folk music, “the idea of true love as a power outside society's control.” These song-stories and ballads tell these stories of lovers united, torn apart, found again, the power of the knot is unbroken, just as the circle does not break. Mike Heron and Robin Williamson both make appearances on this album, as does her stalwart sister Dolly Collins who plays her custom-built pipe organ on a number of the pieces. 

Songs like "The Unquiet Grave" are perfect as we move into October and there are many ghost stories to tell and hear.

Rarely, as a music collector, am I an absolute completist. But I am with Shirley Collins. All of her albums are educations, as are her two books. The first of these books, America Over the Water was about her romance with Alan Lomax and collecting songs with him in the fields of the South. It is an absolute must read for the student of folksong.
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Speaking of R.J. Stewart who I mentioned above, he also plays plucked psaltery on the Shirley Collins song, “One Night As I Lay on My Bed,” a most incredible story of the Otherworld. 

VASHTI BUNYAN: JUST ANOTHER DIAMOND DAY

While the Incredible String Band and Shirley Collins were busy in the studios and at concert halls, another folk singer was getting started on a path that would lead to her traveling in horse drawn Romany style wagon all the way from London to the Isle of Skye 650 miles away. Her name was Vashti Bunyan and the great appeal of her music is it’s nursery rhyme and lullaby quality. While Shirley Collins may have mined the ballads at Cecil House, Bunyan was writing her own songs, but they were clearly inspired by a familiarity with fairy tales and a way of singing to keep oneself entertained while on a long journey. That is nowhere more apparent than the song “Come Wind, Come Rain” on her classic album Just Another Diamond Day.

Bunyan’s love of folk music came from a source that inspired and continues to inspire countless others: Bob Dylan. When she first heard his Freewheelin’ album at age 18 while on a trip to New York City she determined she would become a singer. She certainly has the voice and the gift. Back home in England the following year she was introduced by a friend of her mum’s to the manager of the Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham. Marianne Faithfull had just left the label he worked for and their was a space to be filled, and this became her window of opportunity. She was tasked with covering a Mick Jagger and Keith Richards song, “Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind.” Jimmy Page, ever the studio musician and helping guitar hand, even recording with eccentric freaks like Screaming Lord Sutch, was brought into add his licks. The B-Side was one of her own songs, “I Want to Be Alone.” That was 1965 and another 45 followed the next year, though both received scant attention at the time. A few other gigs and songs followed such as her masterpiece in melancholy, “Winter Is Blue,” a song I still can’t listen to all that often for fear of it setting me down into saturnine moods. It’s a fantastic number though.

In the meantime, Bunyan was working at a veterinary practice while she was trying to get a music career off the ground, when she heard about an artists community in Skye being set up by the Glaswegian bard of psychedelic folk pop, Donovan. She had just got back in touch with Robert Lewis, who became her partner and later, father of her three children. Lewis had been in art school, and it being the height of the sixties, she quit her job and they made the decision to travel to Skye the way some of her Romany relatives from her maternal grandfather’s line might have: in a wagon and pulled by a horse.  

“It was a way to escape, but with a purpose. We didn't know where we were going to be tomorrow, but it'd be somewhere down the road. What saved me was that I didn't have to think too hard about anything except wood for the fire, water for the horse. Immediate things.” Part of their inspiration was the burgeoning back to the land and appropriate technology movements. “I had wanted to go back and find out how things used to be before the internal combustion engine, without thinking how hard life could be.”

Along the way, through the experiences they had and the kind people who helped them out, they got in touch with the magical side of existence. There were trials and tribulations, but also meaningful connections and people who encouraged her to record her music.

 “I wanted to get back that feeling of childlike wonder, to remember what it was like to find the world extraordinary.”

The songs on Just Another Diamond Day transmit this kind of magic and wonder, and with their sing-song mother goose style lyrics, certainly connect the listener back to their own inner child when they knew magic was real.

​My favorite song is probably “Rainbow River” but they are all enchanting, and contribute their inherent magic to reenchant the world.

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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 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. 

Something many people who are creators of some kind can agree on is that AI should not be taking over the jobs of artists, writers and musicians. Yet Fantasy and SciFi author Joanna Maciejewska claims she wants “AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

I want to do my own laundry and dishes so I have a reason to make art. Cleaning out the cat box and changing the litter will never be the job of a robot. I do not fantasize about a fully automated luxury capitalism communism replete with unlimited resources to cater to my whims so I can focus on the art life. While washing the dishes I find the key that solves a problem in an essay, story or poem. Cleaning up my dog poop and going to the grocery store on my own, instead of having other people delivery my food to me, are when I get captivated by an idea that I might work into a music mix for Imaginary Stations or a future sit-in on Trash Flow Radio. At my library day job, I started off as a shelver and I still don’t mind filing books on the shelves, or more often in the catalog department, unpacking the boxes of books and taking the cardboard outside to throw into our recycling dumpster. That’s when I’m dreaming of the next thing I am going to write and share. The work of my hands in so-called drudgery gives freedom to my mind.

I don’t need robots or any kind of AI to do this work for me. It is when I am doing this work that I am connected to the same or similar grinds as my fellow humans. My creative work is not so special that I have to waste valuable electrical energy having some machine, that will probably break down and need to be fixed by a specialist, to do my chores for me. I’d rather stay connected to the rhythms of the household and the rhythms of life, to the rhythms of my spouse, and our pets, and our plants than have it all taken care of for me as if I lived in some space station bubble like George Jetson, disconnected from physical reality and the biology of life.

No flying cars for me, they don’t exist anyway. No self-driving cars either. Put me in the drivers seat. I don’t want the machine to the do the driving. If someone else is going to be driving, maybe its because I’m going somewhere with family or friends, or sitting next to another citizen of the city I call my home and taking public transport. Riding the bus to work as I did for two decades until my department moved into the post-industrial hellscape sector of the city. Riding the bus, I got a lot of reading done, and time to think, jot notes down in my notebook, and write drafts. That’s a far cry from a self-contained isolated self-driving car, with no hope of interaction between the different mixes of people you get to meet on the bus. Free from distraction, free from the cares of an actually lived life.

The poet Gary Snyder reminded us in his Zen wisdom to “chop wood and carry water.” Those basic chores were part of poetry. Stephen King reminded us that “Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”

This is a useful reminder to give myself, because when I put art before life, my relationships suffer. Our microcosmic relations are the basis for the world relations in the macrocosm, and we can all see how well they are going. We aren’t so special as creators that we need to make someone else take care of things for us, whether its another human or a robot. Interdependence is good, and then we all have a chance to support each other and allow our unique gifts to flourish in community.

AI in the arts is in itself dead end direction. Some of the specific tools, such as speech synthesis, or image generation, have the potential to be used artistically, have even more potential for application in détournement and culture jamming. Meanwhile they are getting used by the corporate state to jam human culture with their sloppy seconds. The best way to detox from the overstimulation of the simulated spectacle remains to go offline and get away from the machines. This is where direct engagement with our own home economies becomes so vital. The machines have made us alienated from our own labor. Labor itself is not alienating, no matter how much Marx you’ve read. When done in the spirt of vocation, calling, and in presence, labor is as vital as the viriditas of the evergreen world. We aren’t owed a living by machines whose tendency towards entropy and rust is quicker than our own tendency to arthritis and blindness.

In the words of a meme I am a soul “driving a meat coated skeleton made from stardust.” While I grant that all of nature is animated by sparks divine, there is a difference between the LLM residing in a case of silicon coated metal. Do robo dolls have souls? No AI disempowered dishwasher will ever wash the silverware I inherited from my grandparents with the same care and memory of their lives. No AI disempowered washing machine will ever make a record like Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine. Nor will it do the same work of the sun when I hang the clothes I bought from the thrift store out on the line, and never for free. All of these machines are predicated on the burning up of ancient stored sunlight that requires the continued pillage of our mother to gain what? A few idle hours, whose leisure may be wasted on video games and television. Downtime further immersed in the spectacle is no break. Real work, the repair of our homes, the repair of our earth house hold, requires we use our hands.  

Gary Snyder reminds us again of the duty of a poet. “As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.” So lets get dirty.

Common work holds us all in common bonds and can help renew and restitch a world unraveling. Without the worn work of caring hands putting needle to thread and patching up those threadbare places, we risk losing the very weave that holds households and communities together. Let me do the common work while I share my dreams. Let me plant the seeds. There will be time to sit on the front porch with a notebook and pen in hand to also do the work of the scribe. They are not separate.   

Maciejewska emphasized in her viral X post that, “just to clarify… this post isn't about wanting an actual laundry robot. It's about wishing that AI focused on taking away those tasks we hate.”

But why should we hate those chore which we alone can infuse with the poetry of daily life?

Analog Intelligence begins at home, in doing the things that the index of influencers and the industrial-entertainment complex bemoans as beneath them. Essential skills are gathered by doing unpleasant things. Sometimes making art can be drudgery. Keeping our homes clean, our water carried to do the cooking, the wood chopped for the stove, all are ways to keep the hearth fire burning. And doing them even when we don’t feel like it gives us the grit to push through artistic obstacles when those get tough.

​And after the floor has been swept, and while the socks are being darned, and the stew is bubbling on the stove, we gather round to share our dreams and stories together. No robots required.

When the world doesn’t make sense, we find the need for crazy wisdom. Since the world never made sense, and probably never will, crazy wisdom remains an eternal remedy, a universal panacea in times when the only way to go forward is to embrace paradox. Where can the crazy wisdom be found? Sometimes you can hear it on the radio, if you happened to be tuned in to the right frequency at the right time. But some sometimes a bit of time traveling is also in order to find the stations with crazy emanations.

One purveyor of crazy wisdom over the airwaves was Wes “Scoop” Nisker, born December 22, 1942 in Norfolk, Nebraska. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Poland and he was raised in the faith of his father. Somewhere along the way he migrated to San Francisco with many of other burgeoning freakazoids who had been drawn by the allure of hippiedom to the west. At age 26, just a year after the summer of love, he got his start on the FM station KSAN.

In the sixties rock music on FM was still a rarity. AM was where you went to listen to rock and roll, and that was just the first generation of rock music, not the weird psychedelic stuff coming out of the burgeoning freak scene. Before Nisker would be able to get his Scoop, that portion of the broadcast band now allocated to FM had to get pioneered. We’ll take a brief detour into one of the ways that shook out, and how it related to Nisker.

​One of the early FM pioneers was Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue. Donahue’s radio career had started in 1949 at WTIP in Charleston, West Virginia. Then he moved to Philadelphia’s WIGB where he was on the air for nine years, only to make a sudden departure. That departure came just as WIGB was under the gun by authorities looking to uncover the payola racket afflicting the industry. It later came out that Big Daddy had been in on the take. In the meantime, he worked at WINX before heading out west for San Francisco where he’d been given the opportunity to “make a winner out of loser station” KYA by former WIGB program director Les Crane. The year was 1964.

While Big Daddy was trying to make KYA suck a little bit less, he also got involved in the racket business. Er, the record business I mean, starting a record label with another WIGB alumni Bobby Mitchell (later known as Bobby Tripp on stations in LA). Together they formed Autumn Records that had hit numbers by the likes of The Mojo Men, and none other than Sly Stone as one of their producers. Their records really started charting after they signed The Beau Brummels whose career Donahue boosted. It was a happening scene, man, and soon Big Daddy was getting his fingers into the pie of the nightclub game with his own psychedelic host spot, a place called Mothers if you can dig. Later Donahue started producing concerts as well, helping to get people moving and shaking.

By the time 1967 was underway, Donahue’s mind was getting blown by the strange sounds wafting out of the underground. AM radio didn’t want to have anything to do with that kind of high weirdness though. In response to their establishmentarian minds he wrote an influential article for Rolling Stone, titled, “AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves.” He took the Top 40 format to task, and in the wake, ended up taking over the programming of foreign language FM station KMPX. What emerged was the first free-form radio station in America. At the time nobody really paid attention to what was happening on those FM frequencies making it a perfect place for freaks to plant their flags. Big Daddy had made his move ushering in a new era and style of transmission, helping to invent what came to be known as underground radio.

KMPX was a commercial station, but during his four-hour long broadcasts of music fresh from the psychedelicized minds of hallucinating hippies, he was able to promote not just the music, but the permissive lifestyles of those who wanted to let it all hang out. It became a sensation, man.

The listenership of KMPX bloomed and boomed, probably bonged too, soon catching the interest of those in the advertising biz, as well as the record stores and head shops. Donahue’s success was copyable and the management at KSAN asked him to help shift its gears towards rock. KSAN was still a corporate outfit though, owned by the NYC corporate conglom Metromedia. They found a way to gain a listenership by appealing to the youth movement and created a distinct voice by bringing in DJs who were part of the counterculture and could spin the right records and whose political talk would jibe with the patchouli scented paisley vibes of the times.

They took chances on the airwaves that other commercial stations would be afraid to do, for fear of losing the almighty advertising dollar, such as when they opened up the phone lines for community discussion following the stabbing death of a concert goer at the Altamont rock festival in 1969. When the first volleys in the war on drugs were being thrown after President Nixon took office that same year, free speech was also being targeted. Radio stations that catered to the counterculture were seen as a threat. Then FCC commissioner Dean Burch proposed that any stations playing music that had drug-related lyrics be kept under the watchful eye of Big Brother. He wanted to ban such music entirely. All of this put DJs in a bit of a pickle. It was already hard enough playing what you wanted as a DJ if you worked for one of the more mainstream station managers. The more adventurous stations such as KMPX and KSAN chose to stand up for free speech and keep on playing what they wanted when they wanted all while delivering satirical political commentary.   

It was in this milieu that Nisker was able to make a name for himself on the airwaves, and get the scoop on his nickname in the first place. Nisker wrote songs, and he also found himself at the forefront of audio collage art. Part of his practice involved cutting up and splicing together disparate bits of music, along with interviews and sound effects to create surreal sound worlds whose humorous juxtapositions called into question the standard positions on offer in the lamestream media.

Nisker became a newsman for KSAN, migrating to KFOG later in his career. But his news was unconventional and filled with dark comedy. He’d give traffic reports where he’d say things like, “People are driving to work to earn the money to pay for the cars they're driving to work in. Back to you.”

The audiophile Steve Feinstein called him “the dean of FM rock radio newspeople,” saying further that, “since 1968 and the days of progressive pioneer KSAN, he's been crafting irreverent, satirical sound collages that present news as an ongoing drama in the theater of life. The timing and rhythm of his work brings to mind music; no wonder that two record albums have compiled his newscasts.”

He first got his nickname from Abbie Hoffman when he got the scoop on the Chicago Eight defense team, learning that they would be calling uber beatnik Allen Ginsberg to the stand for poetic testimony. Recalling the end of the conspiracy trial years later, Scoop reports that “in 1970, after the guilty verdicts in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial were announced, the San Francisco Examiner had an article saying that the rioters (in Berkeley) were listening to the KSAN news to find out where to go. And they were, of course, because we were giving them directions.”

Some of his other highlights include the time hippies were rioting in People’s Park because a parking lot was due to be constructed. He was on the air with John Lennon at the time who told Scoop to “tell them all to be peaceful.” For hippies, they sure did seem to riot a lot. The Black Panthers and Timothy Leary were among his many other illustrious and infamous guests.

As with many people in his generation, Scoop looked to the East for spiritual wisdom. In rejecting convention, the hippies also rejected a lot of things that could have given them direction that were part of the West’s wisdom traditions and rich spiritual heritage. He converted to Buddhism where he found a home for himself, in time becoming a meditation instructor, and co-editor of the Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind. He later combined his gift for comedy and stand-up with his gift for elucidating the eight-fold path. His comedy routines played up the paradoxical nature of human experience and religious experience. In this he remained true to his Jewish roots and the rich history of comedy and humor in the Judaic tradition. In a way, Scoop had become a kind of rabbi, even if not a traditional one. He was a teacher. Through his presence on the radio, and the gravitas developed through years of meditation and study of eastern scripture, and his various writings, his status as counterculture veteran and royalty, he was able to give his unique take on things all while making people think, laugh, and reflect on the commonalities that bind us together in the human condition.   

Back in 1995 when his book If You Don’t Like The News…Make Some of Your Own, whose title came from his tagline while on the air, came out, he wrote of the times that “it's obvious we can't go back to the America of the '50s, where people are moral, where there's no violence in the streets, where everybody has a nice house in the suburbs with cars and kids. That America never really existed, anyway. The whole country is on a completely different course.” The same seems true today, when so many hippies have been humbled by age and the shattering of their idealism. The world they envisioned hadn’t materialized out of the aether the way Scoops radio transmissions did. Yet there are still things that the Aquarian generation symbolized that are worthy of considering, and sometimes enacting. Their commitment to freedom of expression and speech, and their animosity towards being surveilled by their own government remain live issues. The voice of alternative media itself, embattled as it is, was a key win for all people who wish for a kind of radio that is different, that is local, that gives its DJs and programmers creative control.

Scoop thought that his generation and those who came after him were born in a transitional era. One of Scoop’s famous audio collages was when he interviewed a hippie who had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge for “spiritual advancement.” He presented that audio alongside Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” over top of The Byrds song “Eight Miles High.” Now we are in the long come-down phase from those kind of high hopes. Yet we are still in need of direction, whether it comes from the traditions of the west or the east.
Scanning the headlines today I think we could really use the crazy wisdom embodied in Scoop’s tagline: “If you don't like the news ... go out and make some of your own.”

I look forward to reading the stories created by those who are wise enough and crazy enough to go take his advice.

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This article first appeared in the Radio Enthusiast e-APA coordinated by Frederick Moe.

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 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. 

Read the other entries in my American Iconoclast's & Eccentrics series:

Harvey Pekar: Working Class Intellectual and Everyday Visionary

Gary Warne: Communiversity and the Suicide Club

Who Was Matokie Slaughter?

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams

Fakir Musafar and Friends

Going Native In America

Weird Weather with David Wills

Running Off to Join the Circus with Jim Tully

Dwelling on the Fringe with the Hubbards

Brother Blue: The Butterfly Bard

Raymond Thundersky: The Cincinnati Construction Clown

Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song

Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood

Ray Hicks: Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains

On A Pilgrimage with Peace

The Long Memory of Utah Philips

The Iconoclastic Shenanigans of Henry Flynt
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