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

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

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

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

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

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

DAVID ROSENBOOM - FUTURE TRAVEL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Monte Young’s MELA Foundation has his archives.

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

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

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE – SCHLINGEN-BLANGEN

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

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

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

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

HENRY BRANT – MUSIC FOR MASSED FLUTES

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

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

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

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

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

GEORGE F. ROOT – THE HAYMAKERS

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

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

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

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

Read Part I and II in the series.

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

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

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

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

IN THE FLUX

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

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

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

​A HAPPENING TIME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YANKEE TRANSCENDOODLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

☕️☕️☕️

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

☕️☕️☕️

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

[This long essay on Route 128 MA is to be published in three parts. The first came out on March 25. After this April 1st post it will conclude on April 8, 2026.]

As the twentieth century unrolled into its third decade, cities started to look for ways to route their increasing auto traffic around them as well as through them. Motoring was a luxury and motorists looked for beautiful locations to escape to on Sunday drives and other escapades, as a luxury. What had once been a mixture of haphazard and practical road building, now started to become the domain of engineers and urban planners. One of the notions that soon began to circulate was the idea of the circumferential highway, or beltway road. Route 128 outside of Boston has the distinction of not only being immortalized in the song “Roadrunner” by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, but also of being the first of these beltways.

In 1925 the BPR started their work on systematizing Americas highway system by assigning federal route numbers to the preexisting roads.  Not long after the numbers started getting assigned, plans for what became Route 128 began, and it was officially designated in 1927.  In its first iteration city planners nailed the road number to posts on existing roadways to create a somewhat messy linkage of different roads connected together. Why the number 128 was chosen seems to be lost in the mists of history. Maps from the time show Route 128 to be a sinuous line of convolution moving inland to the west with its movement snaking both north and south in a ragged arc. It was ad hoc, but it could get you to or from the South Shore and take you between the inner and outer burbs surrounding the denser urban core.

During the great depression of the thirties people weren’t buying as many cars or spending as much money on gas, but the traffic was still increasing enough for Route 128 to become jammed as people traveled Bostons boundary. A solution was needed to ease things up in the little communities such Newton, Danvers, Walton and Beverly that dotted its way. The engineers at the Massachusetts Department of Public Works thought it best to modernize Route 128 and relocate parts of the road.

The process of creating the route was just as convoluted as its path. In 1930 one possibility for a bypass around Boston that was to be a “townless highway” was proposed by Benton MacKaye, the forester and regional planner whose vision of the Appalachian Trail has changed the face of the nation and the lives of countless Americans. If his ideas had been implemented the land on either side or Route 128 would have also been much different, leaving behind a legacy of protected landscapes instead of snarled sprawl.

 Mackaye had been born in Connecticut in 1879, the sixth of seven children. His father Steele Mackaye was an a playwright, actor and all around man of the theater given to Romantic ideals. His acting had taken him to Paris where he’d been a student of François Delsarte, and he taught the Delsarte method of oratory, singing and acting upon his return to America. Steele’s plays struck some popular accord with the American public, and he also got involved in establishing several theaters. His work in getting them off the ground however were always plagued by dodgy financial shenanigans going on in the background. In between these ventures he had periods of mental fatigue and instability that left the family wanting, even if on outward appearance, things were rosy.  The kids grew up in their fathers artistic, literary and bohemian circles as a matter of course, and though they had for a time lived comfortably and at large due to the success their father had in the theater, they were never financially stable for long. As their fathers mental and physical health waned, and as his various ideas for making it in the big time fell through one after another, they had start pinching pennies, and moving from one place to another. 
  
After Benton was born the family found themselves broke. Soon they were on the move around New England, with stints in Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts towns before moving to New York City in 1885. In 1888 they found themselves in Shirley Center, Massachusetts, a town thirty miles west-northwest of Boston that would remain Benton Mackaye’s spiritual home for the rest of his life. 

Shirley Center was a colonial village built around a common. A larger town surrounded the original village over time, but as the author Larry Anderson wrote, the place had an “almost organic ‘starfish symmetry’” and that its “tight-knit physical arrangement–town hall, church, schoolhouse, general store, homes–came to represent an idealized model of community life” for MacKaye. The place had been inhabited by a Shaker community, and some still lingered on when the MacKayes arrived. Not much further away was the site of Fruitlands, the utopia community that the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott had started in an attempt to live out his ideals.

Even though the family did not stay in Shirley Center year round, some stability came to the family when his older brother Will purchased a home that they called the “Cottage.” It would become a summer home for the family and a place they all returned to again and again. Not far from their Cottage, the same railroad line that passed by Thoreaus cabin, that he wrote about so avidly in Walden, passed through Shirley Center, where the family had a Walden of their own. It was along the hills and streams in Shirley Center that Benton’s love for the natural world started to unfurl like a seed pushing through the soil. 
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Lewis Mumford, who was to become one of his closest friends and advocates, later wrote, “As soon as he reached Shirley, he knew he was home; and from that time on this village has been the center of his life, despite many prolonged absences.” It was his omphalos, his center of the world.

One of the prolonged absences was when the MacKaye’s went to Washington D.C. Two of his brothers worked for the government, and MacKaye would follow in their footsteps.  Though the capitol wasn’t his favorite place, it wasn’t as stifling to his spirit as the times he spent cooped up in New York City where they often spent the winters. In the capitol he found other ways to express his passion for nature. He spent a lot of time at the Smithsonian Institute where he continued his self-directed studies and practiced drawing many of the animals he saw on display. He became such a fixture at the Smithsonian that he started to volunteer to help with the work in the labs. One the curators, James Benedict, befriended him and became an early mentor. Benton also availed himself of speakers on the lecture circuit and went to talks given by famous explorers such as the Civil War hero, geologist and explorer of the west, John Wesley Powell, and the future explorer of the arctic, Robert Peary.

MacKaye’s real education was in the woods and fields. Back in Shirley Center he had started the Rambling Boys Club with some other kids. Their aim was to “give the members an education of the lay of the land in which they live, taking in the Geography, Geology, Zoology and Botany of them. Not only to know the Science of it but also the History and Progress of the different places.” MacKaye had also gotten in the habit of drawing maps and sketching the landscape. He wanted to document the rivers and roads, the hills and the heights, the flora, fauna, and architecture of Shirley Center.

He went on a number of hiking trips that had a major influence on him, and in turn on the legacy and imprint he left on the national character of America. His “Expedition 9” was one of these, as a was an extensive backpacking trip he took to the White Mountains.

“This direct, first-hand education through the senses and feelings, with its deliberate observation of nature in every guise—including the human animal—has nourished MacKaye all his life,” Mumford wrote of his friend.
He didn’t care so much about regular school. It was a stifling experience to be shut up indoors when the whole world beckoned to be explored. He had gone to high school in Cambridge, but dropped out early to follow his brothers James and Percy into Harvard where he studied geology, while they studied philosophy and engineering on the one hand, and poetry and drama, following in the footsteps of their father, on the other.

Certain gifts given by family and friends seem to have a way of leaving a mark on a person that endures through the decades ahead. While sticking it out at school James gave him a copy of book that would be another touchstone in his work, another seed that unfolded in time. In this case it was the book Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature by Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley’s book investigated the surface features of the earth, its rivers and streams, its forests and oceans, hills and the mountains and showed how they formed and evolved over time. The book would become a constant companion to him. His own book, the New Exploration, first published in 1928, contains numerous references to Huxley.

Before big ideas of “geotechnics” and the Appalachian Trail started emerging from his brain, he was enrolled in the new forestry school at Harvard. It proved to be a good match and he was the schools first student to graduate in 1905. The forestry work proved to be something he could return to over and over again in his otherwise peripatetic career. He got a job for the United States Forest Service, and also taught at the school. His earlier trip into the White Mountains proved to be influential in his research on the effects of deforestation and rainwater runoff. The conservation movement was still young and diverse at the time. There was a lot of debate around access to natural resources for the growth of industry and business, and saving them for recreation and the benefit of the earths creatures and humanity. MacKaye was able to show that when the forest was logged too heavily, it caused a disproportionate flow of water in the streams, leading to flooding. The evidence he was able to give in the matter lead to the protection of the forests and the creation of the White Mountain National Forest.

His work for the government took him back to Washington where he helped form another group in 1913. This one was the Hell Raisers. They were made up of a mix of fellow federal employees, journalists, and citizens interested in the labor movement, economic planning and other causes championed by the political left of the time. As a naturalist and conservationist MacKaye’s interest was how America would use its vast resources. Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the newly created Forest Service, had just gotten out of office. One of his mottos had been that the “natural resources belong to the people.” MacKaye and the Hell Raisers had taken Pinchot’s slogan to heart.

In 1915 he married the suffragist Jessie Bell Hardy Stubbs. There marriage would be a short one ending in tragedy when she took her life in 1921. MacKaye never remarried and the death haunted him for the remainder of his life, though he rarely spoke of it even with those closest to him. In the aftermath of this intense loss and in the midst of his bereavement, the idea for what became his greatest accomplishment came to him, a vision for the Appalachian Trail. He was 42 years old and his destiny stretched ahead of him. He was like a thru hiker, and even though he was down low in the valley, he had the will to keep going and see what was up ahead of him on the next crest after he passed through the valley.

He first proposed the Appalachian Trail in Journal of the American Institute of Architects as a project of regional planning. It was a bold critique of the direction headed by industrial capitalism. MacKaye saw the way communities and natural places were being unraveled by the boom of machinery, and the way political jurisdictions cut across the landscape without accounting for the natural markers of watershed and ridgeline. The trail would connect the rural to the urban in a mutually supportive way, rather than as a mere drain on the countryside by the city. Its creation would be of some benefit to the depressed conditions of small towns in the hills of Appalachia. Where the mountains passed through the eastern side of the country and into New England it would be a boon to nearby small cities. Walking the trail would be a way to escape the “hecticness” of life under the gun of money grubbing profiteers. As such their would public shelter camps along the way, maintained freely by the public, and operated without being relegated to bottom lines or profits.

MacKaye knew he was on to a big idea, one that could potentially have a lot of support from a wide range of people, but he had a lot of fear about the possibility of it being implemented, this vision of a trail that stretched across the mountains between Georgia and Maine. Some of the reasons he had for building the trail, were due to his family background, their bohemianism, and the related realm of radical politics he was steeped in. MacKaye had a lot of fear about his vision and how it would be implemented. There was always the problem of being labeled a dangerous socialist which might put the kibosh on his the creative plan kindled in both his heart and head.

​Despite the fear, MacKaye utilized his considerable talents for organization, and he lived to see the completion of his massive project. He had unique skill in bringing people and ideas together, and the entire process mimicked his burgeoning philosophy of “geotechnics” using small parts and small groups to make larger positive changes in the landscape and across society. In sixteen years the 2,200 miles of trail was finished, but it was during the first opening salvo of that massive effort that MacKaye found himself involved with a group who would make practical inroads in their critique of the way roads were being built in America and of how those roads affected our communities.

​The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) was formed by Clarence Stein, who’d become an early adopter of MacKaye’s vision and helped boost the profile of the project. Stein was an architect and planner who’d been caught up in the vision of the garden cities movement promoted by Ebenzer Howard and inspired by Edward Bellamy. The RPAA would count MacKaye as member, as well as Lewis Mumford. Mumford had been making a name for himself as a writer with his 1922 book The Story of Utopias, which detailed their history in the imagination of the West following the line from Plato’s Republic, to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Tomasso Campanella’s City of the Sun, the utopian science fiction of H. G. Wells, and on up to Bellamy and the version of Boston he presented in Looking Backwards.
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The Story of Utopias was originally published by Boni & Liverwright. It was the same year they published T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. World War I was only just behind, leaving its wasteland of bloodied trenches across Europe. In America the result was another psychic wasteland. 53,402 American soldiers died in battle, never to come home to their mothers, wives, children. Even more died indirectly through accidents and disease, a stunning 63,114 souls. Eliot approached the horrific shocks of the 21st century through a modernist mythopoesis. Mumford wanted to see what these imaginary utopias could teach us if people worked on a practical level to bring the ideals into reality. He argued that there were two kinds of utopia, one of escape and one of reconstruction. He wasn’t looking for the utopia where escape from our choices and humanity is somehow absolved. He wanted to use utopia as a vision that people could take action on and move towards. The world itself may be forever imperfect, and the people in it, but by humans and nature could both flourish and be mutually enhanced in the right environments and situations. These environments and situations could be created.
 
Mumford’s ideas resonated strongly with MacKaye’s, just as MacKaye’s did with Stein’s. Henry Wright was another architect and planner who went on to work with Stein on designing the Sunnyside Gardens neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York City. A lot of the funding for the project came from Alexander Bing. The project incorporated Howard’s garden city ideas over a 77 acre site of low-rise buildings oriented towards the pedestrian citizen. Green spaces were built right into the walkable neighborhood that had space for families to live and grow. The landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley was also involved.
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Stein, MacKaye, Wright and Bing formed the core of the RPAA and gathered around them the other people who would further its aims. This diverse group of friends made a critical examination of the city, collaborated on the development and dissemination of ideas, and got involved in the politics of building.

Above: Clarence Stein and Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford and MacKaye, Stein and his wife Aline McMahon

Stimulated by the success of his Appalachian Trail project and the association he had with these minds, and encouraged by Mumford, MacKaye began work on his own book The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning that was published in 1928.

MacKaye rightly saw cars as one of the biggest threats to the protection of the countryside. As most cars belonged to city slickers, he devoted a chapter of his book to “Controlling the Metropolitan Invasion.” He looked at roads like they were waterways. “Rivers of Asphalt.” A stream of water from a dam that wasn’t being properly regulated would destroy the surrounding trees and wildlife. A flow of cars from the reservoirs of the cities, and the haphazard creation of roads, would destroy nature. His Appalachian Trail project was one to put a “dam across the metropolitan flood.” It was a way to limit development around the natural areas soon to be protected by the trail.

His work with the RPAA led to other papers and projects designed to put limits and controls on the metropolitan invasion and control the flow and movement of the population into America’s recreational areas. The first result was an article he wrote called “The Townless Highway” first published in The New Republic in March, 1930. It was in the main a critique of the way the car was going to change the landscape of the country if something wasn’t done to prevent it, and the main idea was to have roads that did not go through existing communities. When new communities were to be created, speedy motorways were not going to go through them. He had seen the way the railroads had gutted out the centers of cities with their expansive yards, and the way railroad towns popped up on spokes at various distances from the main hubs. He didn’t want the car to impact the urban or rural land in the same way.

This would set the precedent of abolishing “the motor slum, or roadtown, and develop the rural wayside environment.” In practice this looked like villages and small cities within a region, protected by the natural barriers of hills, mountains, rivers or wetlands and the like, connected by electricity and “open way” roads to the other areas. There might be farms or small cottage dwellings here and there along the “open ways” but there wouldn’t be any factories, offices, or any other kind of building that would be better suited to life in a village or small city. Regional planning done in this manner would prevent the cancerous urbanoid growth of “continuous tunnels of structures.” Access to nature would be enhanced by those living in the villages and small cities. Driving would be safer because of the lack of pedestrians near the road and turn off points to “motor slums” where drivers have to navigate the traffic of other vehicles. The small city and village life would also be enhanced by their density, walkability, and being built on the human scale, not built with cars foremost in mind.
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MacKaye followed up this paper with a detailed study he did for the Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations. This was a private body dedicated to getting donations of land to use for the public good. MacKaye’s idea for the Bay Circuit was to connect up a system of parks beyond the metropolitan area of Boston in a circumferential road that would go around the city. With limited entryways and exits, and limited numbers of restaurants, service stations and other developments, it was to be a way of connecting the motorized citizen to the world of nature. The sacrifices on the part of nature would be minimal, and the rewards to humankind would be great. 

The Bay Circuit would be, in the words of Lewis Mumford, “a metropolitan recreation belt with a northbound motor road forming an arc on the inner flank and a southbound road on the outer flank—the two roads separated by a wide band of usable parkland, with footpaths and bicycle paths for recreation. In reducing MacKaye’s conception to Route 128, without the greenbelt and without public control of the areas adjacent to the highway, the ‘experts’ shrank the multi-purpose Bay Circuit into the typical ‘successful’ expressway: so successful in attracting industry and business from the center of the city that it already ceases to perform even its own limited functions of fast transportation, except during hours of the day when ordinary highways would serve almost as well. This, in contrast to MacKaye’s scheme, is a classic example of how not to do it.” 
MacKaye later lamented the fact that the his ideas were not used in this area, and what became Route 128 was “choked with development.”

Attract industry and business it certainly did. Route 128 exploded with technical industry in the booming years following WWII, becoming a highway of the modern world.

Anthony Flint, a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, called the area “Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley.” The farmland that would have sat between the parks and public greenspaces envisioned by Mackaye ended up becoming industrial parks as the land was bought up by a variety of tech corporations ready to pursue postwar growth. Saurman had once again raided the Shire. In the wreckage he erects Satanic mills of industry. Concord became discord.

At least the people in the suburbs didn’t have to commute very far to get to their civilization wrecking centers of industry. 
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RE/SOURCES:

This article would have been much tougher to research and write without the book and website of Larry Anderson. In particular his biography, Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail published by John Hopkins University Press in 2002 and his website Peculiar Work which contains many articles about MacKaye, among other interesting topics.
MacKaye’s own book The New Exploration, while somewhat dated to the ear of today’s nonfiction reader, contains many insights and ideas that may prove useful to the psychohistorians and psychogeographers of today and tomorrow.  

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In next weeks segment we will explore the M.ilitary I.ndustrial T.emplate and the way Route-128 excited the fertile imagination of Jonathan Richman as we move along the roadrunner not taken.

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

☕️☕️☕️

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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.

American Psychogeography I:
From Saint Botolph to the Road Warriors

[This long essay on Route 128 MA is to be published in three parts on March 25, April 2, and April 9 2026.]
In the classical world it was said that all roads led to Rome. In America, all roads lead away from Boston. It was the place where revolutionaries conspired to overthrow the bent British monarchy, and the first to liberate themselves from the rule of the corrupt crown. One of the roads that leads from Boston, and around it, is the sacred track known as Route 128, the beltway that loops around the city and through its suburban towns. It was one of the first highways of this kind to go around a city and enclose it with the traffic of automobiles.

Taking a journey along this road is one way to peer into the subconscious layer of a key birthplace in both the liberty of our nation, and the incarceration of our freedoms under the throes of the military industrial complex. While driving along its unremarkable everyday asphalt, while motoring alongside its concrete dividers, while jumping on and off its entrance and exit ramps, this winding may not seem cause for much reflection, yet its belligerent psychohistory has cut dark grooves into the recesses of the American mind, and the fruits of its industry have colored our dispositions, our obsessions, our collective neuroses.

The area of psychogeography, first developed by the Lettrist International and expanded by Guy Debord and his fellow artists and political thinkers in the Situationist International (SI) in France, has gotten its strongest foothold in England. Debord defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” In England its key practice, a form of urban walking known as the derive, or drift, has been championed in a variety of subcultures ranging from those surrounding the art of field recording as applied to electronic music, on the one hand, where the recordings were thought to capture some essence of the landscape, and literature on the other, where experiences, impressions, and history got distilled down into words.

Psychogeographical practice retains a strong foothold in England. This came in part from the establishment of the London Psychogeographical Association in 1957 by Ralph Rumney, who had been involved with Lettrism, the avant-garde art group COBRA, and went on to become one of the cofounders of the SI. Later, on the musical side it was taken up by the likes of Drew Mullholland and his Mount Vernon Arts Lab project, among many others. On the literary side of things, writers such as Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home, Will Self, and Iain Sinclair have made extensive use of the concept to explore the resonance between the hidden histories of place and its psychic undercurrents.

While practitioners of psychogeography do exist in America, where the influence of Situationism can be seen in the work of Gary Warne and his formation of the urban exploring group the Suicide Club, whose members included John Law, co-founder of Burning Man, it has never achieved the same kind of popularity in the underworld of the arts as it has in England.
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Consider this an investigation into a distinctly American psychogeography that travels through layers of time and the psychic imprint of the various personalities along Route 128 and the city it contains, and the suburbs it borders.

SAINT BOTOLPH OF SHAWMUT

​The city of Boston is situated on the Shawmut Peninsula, a place shaped by the slow time of glacial erosion and moraine deposits. Much of the rest of what came to be known as the state of Massachusetts was shaped by the same gradual but all pervasive forces. The state itself was named after the Massachusett tribe, one of a number of tribes and bands that made their home in the region. Before the European migration and the great slaying of the trees, before the cars came it was covered in the green of a dense forest. Under the boughs and leaves animals left behind traces through the brush. Those traces turned into trails padded by humans, then into dirt and gravel roads. Now asphalt, concrete, plastic wrappers, empty cups and bottles litter the outside of the Stop ‘n’ Shop’s and corner markets leaving behind the traces of empty calories from empty consumption.

The first Anglo settler of the area was an Anglican reverend named William Blaxton. He stayed there until the Puritans arrived. Those Puritans had just left behind a country dominated by Anglicans and they didn’t much care for the others faith, even though they were all Christians. Theological differences rankled the air and caused Blaxton to move on to what is now Rhode Island. He had called the town he settled Shawmut. The name Shawmut came from the Algonquian word Mashauwomuk. It isn’t clear to us now, exactly what this word means. The Native Americans used the area on a seasonal basis for the most part. Their religions, not being based on the “one true book” and its interpretation, didn’t lend themselves to theological infighting.
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The name Boston itself comes from St. Botolph, its patron saint, and it was given to the city by yet another Puritan settler, Isaac Johnson. He made a home for himself in the part of the area known as Charlestown, and became its leader. His last official act before he died in the autumn of 1630 was to give a proper name to this settlement just across the Charles River. He settled on the name Boston, after the hometown in Lincolnshire where he, his wife, and John Cotton (grandfather of Cotton Mather) had left behind in England. Before Cotton Mather came to America, he’d served as a rector at the St. Botolph church. St. Botolph himself was an abbot who died around 680 and is known as being the patron saint of boundaries. In the traditions of the church, he also governs trade and travel, along with certain aspects of agriculture. As the patron saint of boundaries St. Botolph is a fitting guide to invoke when considering the entire notion of an American psychogeography, and in particular the boundary loops and ring roads surrounding the cities. It seems the influence of St. Botolph and this associated with him immigrated over with the Johnson and Cotton when they came over to this land.

LOOKING BACKWARDS AGAIN

​To introduce the next part of the story, the first developments of Route 128 as anything more than a collection of preexisting roads, we have to fast forward. After Tea Acts and Tea Parties and Revolutions and the War of 1812, after successive waves of immigrants, Irish, Italian and Jewish to name just a few, after the establishment of MIT in 1861, after the Great Boston Fire of 1872, a utopian scifi yarn by Edward Bellamy was published in Boston in 1888. Looking Backward: 2000-1887 was the story of a man who is put into a hypnosis induced sleep in the year 1887 and wakes up in an America that has been transformed into a socialist Eden.

After a trickle of initial sales and minor local success, the book started selling like hotcakes after its original publisher was bought up by the burgeoning behemoth Houghton, Mifflin & Co and a new slightly edited version was released. Labor organizers, socialists and nascent communists all began to praise and pontificate about the book. His book even had an influence on urban planning, through its descriptions of his idea of what Boston would be like in the future.

Not all Socialists were happy with the influence of Bellamy, even among the socialists. The multi-talented genius William Morris thought Bellamy’s ideas were poppycock, and said he had no real idea “beyond existence in a great city.” In his second book, Equality, published in 1897, Bellamy perhaps sought to amend the criticism from Morris and wrote of regional cities connected by high speed transport to rural villages on a continuum of development, while keeping the regional characteristics of each place intact.

When these book fell into the hands of Ebenezer Howard, a British man who’d relocated to America’s heartland, it kindled a fire in his brain. It wouldn’t be the last time life imitated art. Howard had tried his hand at farming in Nebraska, but he was unequal to the difficult task, and relocated to Chicago, where he found work as a reporter, work more suitable to his talents. He arrived not long after the city had been decimated, some may say purified, by Chi towns own great fire of 1871. In its aftermath he saw how the central business district was regenerated, and he was also witness to the subsequent growth of the cities suburbs, and he started thinking about those suburbs quite a bit. His daily work as a reporter took him into the courts. It was here that he saw firsthand the many social problems of his day. This face to face interaction with those suffering hard times continued when he returned to England in 1876. His mind was already under the sway of the Transcendentalist movement. He had been a great admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, and was said to have met them both. By the 1880s he was fully invested in investigating the options for alternative living available in his day. This brought him into the socialist and anarchist milieu and he started working on his own treatise, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform first published in 1898.

There were some things in his book that just didn’t click until he read Bellamy. His head had been full of ideas about economic reform, but hadn’t given as much attention to the urban environment and its effects on humanity until he devoured Looking Backwards. Howard now had a vision for sustainable, self-sufficient communities that would combine the best of life in town with life in the country. After cogitating on the pros and cons of rural and city life, he sought a way to bring all the good attributes together, while diminishing the negative. He called his vision a Garden City. In 1902 his book would be republished as Garden Cities of To-Morrow. A key feature of his vision was open belts of nature, parks, countryside with industry kept in separate zones, but trees and wide open spaces everywhere. Further, each community would be planned and managed by the community. Self-governance and self-sufficiency went hand in hand.

At first people scoffed at his ideas, but later people started adopting them in some instances and specific planned communities, while certain aspects got folded into the designs of the worlds growing suburbs. Reformist members of the British Labor government were tickled pink by the respective works of Bellamy and Howard and their subsequent ideas around urban planning trickled into the discussions and debates of politicians, and eventually earthed into the land itself through new developments and restructuring.

​Back in Boston, the journalist and poet Sylvester Baxter took up Bellamy’s ideas and helped implement them. He was a founder of the first “Nationalist Club” dedicated to their promulgation. At the time a leftist populist tide was rising and 165 of these clubs had been founded around the United States by 1891. It was only a few years before they merged with the Populist Party itself. Baxter was a man of many energies and he became a champion of the idea that swathes of land outside the confines of a city should be left wild and untouched by human hands. As an advocate of public parks and the use of the land for the recreation and pleasure of the citizens, he saw a connection between the anti-capitalist sentiment of the day, and the desire to keep the land out of the hands of the robber barons corporate lords of the Gilded Age. Baxter became a secretary for the Massachusetts Metropolitan Park Commission in 1892, and it was the work they did that led to the led to the creation of parks on a city scale, all under the influence of Bellamy’s book and the dream of creating a convivial place to be shared by community.

ROAD WARRIORS

​As the twentieth century unrolled, so did the roads. The traces were already there, left by animals who walked and ran across the land, followed by the humans of the First Nations. When it rained, many of these trails became rivers of mud. In time they would become what the progressive electronica outfit Church of Hed calls “rivers of asphalt.”

Many of the very first roads in America were worn into muddy ruts by the march of the military, taking over those ancient and storied footpaths in the process of extirpating those very same Natives whose trail they followed. The railroad had helped accelerate the vast westward expansion of the pioneer era. It was only a few decades later as the twentieth century dawned when the car hedged its bet against the horse and buggy. The conditions of existing paths weren’t suitable for the new industrial machine. Motorheads and car salesmen began to advocate the government to improve the roads.

The expansion of the postal system had a role to play as well. If mail, and the new products multiplying in factories, were to be delivered to those who’d staked a claim in the hinterlands of America, road conditions would have to be improved. Starting in the late 19th century, but beginning officially in 1906, the United States Post Office set up the Rural Free Delivery program to take mail to farmers and others in the remote countryside. Not everybody was on the same page about this program. Private delivery men who got paid to take mail to distant addresses didn’t want to lose their livelihood, as did the shopkeepers and others who charged small fees to hold on to letters for later pickup when folks came into town. Politicians started hawking the idea of free mail delivery as a way to pick up votes for themselves, and expand the territory of who would be voting for them. The nation’s oldest agricultural organization, The Grange, championed the cause as it helped farmers stay in contact with the rest of the country, and in the end, it was adopted.

Road at that time still weren’t much more than trails. They were dusty when it was dry, and muddy when it rained. A car easily got stuck in the mud, just as wagons had in the past. Automobile travel was an adventure. With few mechanics or repair shops, every driver had to bring their own kit of tools and tire patching gear. In case they were stranded, they’d need to have extra food on hand, and without knowing where they would next fuel up, they had to travel with their own extra gas. Building up roads and service stations was essential if the early car fanatics were to get on their way.

By 1913 Henry Ford’s assembly line had ramped up car production. President Woodrow Wilson sensed his own political opportunity in the growth of the car, which needed the “rivers of asphalt” to truly thrive, and campaigned on road building as part of his platform. Wilson contended that “the happiness, comfort and prosperity of rural life, and the development of the city, are alike conserved by the construction of public highways. We, therefore, favor national aid in the construction of post roads,” and as ever, “roads for military purposes.” In 1916 he signed the Federal Aid Road Act, the first federal legislation to put money towards highway building.

The act established a Federal organization of Roads and Rural Engineering, later changed to the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), and the following year ten different districts were established around the country. Each area was tasked with construction of Post Roads into their rural zones with cooperation from highway departments in each state. They were also given the job of surveying, building and maintain National Forest roads in collaboration with the Forest Service, a connection that would prove to be of lasting relevance.

The need for improved roads from the military perspective had been evident to the Army since World War I. Railroads had failed to get materiel and other logistical supplies to their destinations, and a truck convoy from Toledo, Ohio to Baltimore, Maryland had to be implemented. Numerous obstacles ensued that delayed the delivery of the war machines.

In 1919 another convoy with the Motor Transport Corps tackled the still young Lincoln Highway, the first Transcontinental Road, masterminded by automotive maverick Carl G. Fisher. It had been built on funds largely raised from private capital. At the time the Lincoln Highway was still unpaved in huge swathes between Illinois and Nebraska. What bridges there were even had to be destroyed and rebuilt to enable the passage of the military might. At the time Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Brevet Lieutenant Colonel and he had joined the convoy, “partly as a lark, and partly to learn.” It took the soldiers two-months to travel across 3,400 miles of rugged road. It’s no wonder Eisenhower later became such a big proponent of America’s next iteration of high-speed travel, the Interstate Highway System. His interest was specifically for its role in war and defense.

After this operation it was clear to the concerted interests of the government, military, and corporations (the embryo of what would become McGovCorp and the Military-Industrial-Complex that Eisenhower himself warned about), that the highways needed further development for smooth transcontinental travel. Developing and tapping North America’s vast natural resources wasn’t far from their minds either. The conservation movement of the time was also interested in opening up the wilderness to leisure and recreation activities, as well as curbing the untrammeled exploitation of the natural landscape. All of this led to the development of the Federal Highway Act of 1921, a vast expansion of the roadways that posited to further the creation of a complete coast to coast system, signed into law by President Warren Harding.

Thomas H. MacDonald headed the (BPR) from 1919 to 1953. One of his first efforts related to the new legislation was to get the Army to compile of a list of all the roads that they thought would be of “prime importance in the event of war.” With list in hand, he sent out the United States Geological Survey to get detailed information and measurements of the routes. Army General John J. Pershing was to put all of this together into a map. The result was the first topographic map of the nation, the Pershing Map, gargantuan at 32-feet long. Pershing presented the work to Congress in 1922.
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The main roads of concern were on the East and West Coasts, along the border of Mexico, and the border of Canada around the Great Lakes, and the asphalt started being poured. Nobody seemed to care too much about the roads in the South. The oil rich fields of Oklahoma and Texas had yet to get pumping, and priority was given to transporting coal and steel from the east to the ports. Florida was likewise ignored for the most part. The military thought that any hostile forces landing there would be swamped without much ability to move northwards.

In the meantime a New England man had been dreaming of another way the unique landscape of North America might be connected together through trails and parks and “townless highways.” His name was Benton MacKaye and in 1921 his article “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning” was published, a first step towards making the Appalachian Trail we know today a reality. He would also try to leave his mark on the beltway road that was soon to cinch Boston up in its concrete and asphalt loops.

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We will catch up with Benton Mackaye, and some of his fellows in the Regional Planning Association of America such as Clarence Stein and Lewis Mumford in the next segment of this essay.

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

☕️☕️☕️

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

Is the past such a bad place to hang out, to gain inspiration from?

It worked for the Renaissance. When Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin it kickstarted the esoteric revival in the West. His revival of Platonic philosophy and its subsequent effect on the Humanism and the way it percolated out into the arts where it then permeated European left us in an afterglow that can still be felt today. Great minds like Ficino’s believed that books like the Corpus Hermeticum contained timeless wisdom. Such knowledge, as opposed to just information, still had relevance for seekers in his own time. It is because he tapped into such timeless wisdom and bequeathed it to the future that today’s seekers can refresh their spirits by dipping once again into its mysteries. The wisdom of books like the Corpus Hermeticum still have wisdom for us today.

​If some renaissance artists had to dig up sculptures from the Greek ruins of previous civilizations to find inspiration, so what! When they found that inspiration it set the standard for lifetimes of work, lifetimes of renewal.

Kim Cascone recently mentioned that 90s rave culture is now as far in the past as 60s hippie culture was to rave culture. Yet their inherent power remains. Part of why we may have no counterculture now, is because of the dead ends the arts have run into as they traverse the reality labyrinth. Further back than the ravers and the hippies were the counter-current weird ones now well over a century past, hanging out at Ascona in Switzerland, around Monte Verità in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

​Some of the people who hung out at the Mountain of Truth were folks such as Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Hugo Ball, Theodor Reuss, Paul Klee, Otto Gross, Rudolph Steiner and many others. Naked hippies looking for natural cures before hippies went naked as they ate sprout sandwiches. Hesse’s novel Journey to the East seems to be very much inspired by his earlier time spent with these seekers, these members of what we might as well call The League.

For those who yet to read it, the league is a timeless spiritual sect whose members include people from history such as Pythagoras, Plato, Mozart, Baudelaire and Paul Klee. The league also has members from the realm of the imaginal, including Don Quixote, Puss in Boots, Tristram Shandy, Goldmund (from Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund), and the artist Klingsor (from Hesse’s Klingsor’s Last Summer), and the ferryman Vasudeva (from Hesse’s Siddhartha).

These figures of the League are connected to one another even though they live in different time zones. Time zones with differences of centuries and millenia. Not to mention spatial differences of psychogeography.
I would count Doctor Who as another member of the League. As a time traveler he had recourse to go to all different points of space-time for his many missions. So too, we can use the power of time travel to go back into the past and search for the artifacts needed for the renewal of the future. The point of inspiration could be near or far in time.

We don’t go back in time to make stuff that is for yet another museum piece, no offense to the muses. We go back in time to find things to remix and recombine. Our art is the art of combinations. What did the hippies know that we might use, what about the punks, the ravers?

Hear the sound of the techno acid beats from the free festivals at Stonehenge resting on a web of neo-Transcendentalism. Let freedom ring in the free jazz notes trumpeted out from hidden pockets of improvisation. Our own voice joins with that of the past to braid a new thread, to remix and remake.

Synthesis now! is the motto of the interpolater who brings old inserts to bear on present problems.
You don’t need to have a TARDIS to become a time traveler. Even if you wish to make something living and breathing, you can still seek out the secret doorways in the library, open up old books and commune with the minds of the dead, a perfectly respectable kind of necromancy. Or visit the museum.

Another kind of internal time travel is possible for those who have trained their imaginations. It can be done without leaving your easy chair, though a hard chair is preferable. The voyage need not be for an extended period of time for the wrinkles to have ripples of large effect.

For those who don’t want to recombine, straight up reenactment of the past is another possibility worthy of pursuit. Become a surrealist, or a dandy flâneur. Live like people lived in the 19th century. You can do so without becoming a Victorian prude hell bent on colonizing the known world.

Art in turn can be like an ism. If an ism comes to us from the religions of Paganism, Hinduism, Judaism, Shintoism and the like, than it makes sense that the devotees of Dadaism, Surrealism Serialism and Minimalism adhere to the aesthetic philosophies with rigor. Genres of music become critical lifestyle choices, worldviews for listeners to inhabit. Our band could be your life, after all. Join the cult of music.

In the end, there is no substitute for Awen, or what people in the Druid tradition call inspiration. Divine revelation can come from dreams, it can come to us from our guardian spirits, the daemon or guardian angel, the higher self. It can come to us as a gift carried on the breeze, like a seed waiting to root itself and bring renewal to the land.

To find moments of inspiration, sometimes it is necessary to cut ourselves off from the chatter of input on the multiplexed media channels of the hyperreal, hyperpresent panopticon. Going into solitude for a time, as a hermit in the desert, as a hermit in some ancient woodland grove, as a hermit tucked away, hidden inside the honeycomb of urban sprawl. Here we can listen to the inner voices that would seek to find an expression in whatever medium, and find their way to those needful of their message, bringing small changes to the culture from the cracked places on the fringe.

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

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

The question of 'the' history of the Situationist Intergalactical is problematic, not least because of the time and space anomalies prevalent throughout its work on all planes of reality. The Situationist Intergalactical didn’t start so much at a specific node in time, as it did at many. “There are more worlds than these,” and there are many nodes of Arachnist activity across the Web that could be seen as points-of-Aha!, points of order, points of illumination. These AHA moments of direct gnosis and revelation can be thought of as the synchronistic glitches, that strung together, form the history of the SI.

Even in the spiral galaxies, there are many historians who insist on linear progression, the idea that history is a line, going from the Flinstone age of yabba-dabba-doo to the Jetsonian world of full automated metal maids. Parental units are only one vector of influence. Geography is another. Friendships another. Transdimensional influences are not as often considered. Depending on what part of the spiral web you dance upon, history may look very different indeed. The history of the SI is spiral bound.

Our origin story is one that combines future shock with retromancy. Chronosophers from other nodes have a completely different takes on who it is we even are and what it is we do. The crucial question is one of inwards or outwards: Are we spiraling into our inner selves and the inner worlds, or are we spiraling outwards into the world and the worlds beyond this world?

(From the eggs of the spider queen thousands will be born, and they shall go into many points and places around the wheel from which their own perspective will determine what eggs they themselves hatch.)

Whichever direction we go, we must tread on the tail of the tiger with care, so as not to spiral into madness or psychosis.

At this point we can begin at the end, with the Situationist Intergalactical’s most recent communique. That piece, Jamcon ’26, is one of the best places to look for clues as to what the Situationist Intergalactical will become next. As a key activation in our herstory, it is intimately tied up with the coming age of Analog Inevitability as described further below. Jamcon ’26 was the opening salvo in the AI slop wars, leading to the meltdown of many a machine.

What is Jamcon ’26? It is an unexploded media bomb whose transplutonian virality seeks to further inundate various corners of the Universal Net Web with bits and bobs downloaded from the mauve zone. The Jamcon ’26 project recodes the culture jamming traditions of the so-called past and plops the into the dada-sets of Artificial Idiocy right here in the now time.

As we enter a new phase of the work, the SI is pleased to announce a deal where key concepts derived from Jamcon ’26 and some of our “future” works have been licensed by a game design company, A Stitch in Time, who will be weaving it into new Glass Bead Game modules for the use by luddites and other digital resistors. From our current nodal point of view, this confluence of vectors has led to this analog inevitability. Our so-called work history is just the lead up (or wind down) to our ideas being acquired by A Glitch in Time. A glitch is a stitch after all.

​For earthlings subjugated to conventional linear time, one node where the SI begin was with Dr. Friedrich Morgenstern when he escaped from a high security psychiatric unit for the criminally insane and went on the lam in Lexington, Kentucky. Yet, at the same time, the SI has never existed on earth, or is yet to exist. Morgenstern got his information from the mauve beam that was directed at him by the angels operating the transorbital satellite, and was further enhanced by his later trepanation and transorbital lobotomy.

A series of events held in a junkyard on the outskirts of the city where various hobos gathered together along with other escapees from standard American reality and they proceeded to work on becoming a provisional escape-hatch and portal to connect with other extreme outsiders and genuine freaks. With the publication of their first zines and pirate radio broadcasts the SI started to function on the material plane. With the advent of the internet, they planted themselves like a rogue firmware update into various corners where they would be stumbled upon by the cyber inclined.

Currently, much SI activity seems to be dedicated to defusing hype about the AI apocalypse. The ascendancy of Artificial Idiocy just means an eternal return to Analog Inevitability. If we have to pick a point where something starts, let's just say the history of the SI begins here, now in the - very - near future that isn’t evenly distributed yet, with the advent of AI -and those who want to fight slop with slop.

The SI learned from cybernetics the lesson that there is nothing 'merely' technical or intevitable about Artificial Idiocy, except that is something that is happening, and Analog Intelligence will have been inevitable after it happened. But it will also have been inevitable that people will be deploying various means of going against these Idiotic Aptitudes. The Automaton Jihad will have also been inevitable at that point of order. The SI sees the rise of the Idiotic as an event exemplifying a whole complex of intermeshing themes, including: the crash of Science Fiction (and the emergence of cyberpunk), the death of postmodernity, and the re-start of chronopolitical conflict.

Addled Integrity is an event that may ultimately be entirely constructed out of hype. What that hype is going to lead to will not in itself be illusory. The wig outs and freak outs and mental breakdowns from those using Addled Intelligence systems will be all too real. This in itself is an immediately effective cybernetic feedback process. The intense nature of the feedback spirals will result in the kind of unraveling usually considered negative.

So far as the SI is concerned, this means the crash of the world economy. As technological integration increases, human control lessens, and the possibility of something crashing the entire system grows.

Where the techbros think of Addled Integrity as the implementation of their Faustian bargain project of Progressive Technology - a vision of uninhibited technological growth spreading out into a far future on Mars and beyond- they do not realize that there was a clause in their satanic bargain. Specifically, a Santa Claus. They sold their soul to Santa for technology and all they got in return was an internet catalog of increasingly stupid toys. Also, Skynet.

From the POV of Allegiant Incels, of course, Skynet never happens. From our point of view SI activist John Connor sees to it that it never happens. Time travel, duh. The secret at the heart of spiral time. Just skip over a thread and connect to a different part of the Web.

Aggravated Imbeciles are not only everywhere that computers are, but are also hooked up to the dada collection systems of computers everywhere. The infection has spread to even the tiniest interstices of all aspects of the technocratic environment. AI is a global habit, mostly urban, that can only be kicked locally. Even if, say, a corporate worker who got laid off because of AI was able to infect the AI system with dada before being booted out of the system, that dada set would still be a part of an AI system that would later need total disassemblage by a team of trained mentats.

Acolyte Inbreeding is not so much a catastrophe as it is a hyper-catastrophe. From it can be extrapolated the entire kit and caboodle of stock market crashes, nuclear wasteland exchange, energy grid disruption hacks, and traffic signal deregulation. Which is bad news for us, who are symbiotically intertwined with the whole kit and caboodle of industrial civilization and its discontents.

Assbackwards Infidelity is just one more example of the way in which capitalist reality is indistinguishable from communist reality. They are both economic fictions that have melted down the very material substance of life into some kind of non-orgasmic goo, and hypnotized us into a system of abstract and virtual token exchange. Both systems suck horse dick because both are run by managers and bosses. One of the black swans looming on the horizon is how Airhead Instability will disrupt the management cycle. But the question needs to be asked: what else will it bring down and disrupt along the way as people with no real world skills are sent home from the office?

Cyberpunk ends with Amalgamated Inbreeding. The SI starts with people becoming psyberpunks. That is, for those who kick the habit early, reliance on our native psychic powers will begin to replace our current trajectory of becoming Daleks and Cybermen.

​What Analog Inevitability does signal is the virtual endgame of the virtual game itself. When poisoned dada sets start proliferating throughout everything the internet touches, no one will be able to trust it at all, and in the end many will choose to just unplug the damn thing.

​Automaton Instability is thus a testament to the bankruptcy of its theoretical commitments. It was one thing for out-of-touch theorists to fail to anticipate the economic events of Y2K and 2008; but to be unable to respond to Aimless Injury, as an event, is an oversight of another magnitude entirely.

The problem is that Abandoned Ideation scrambles the radar of those who believe in the trajectory of progress, discomfiting the assumptions on which the entire notion of progress rests. While it will be used as a reality escape hatch for the wealthy, those on the other side of the class divide will continue to have sweat and die. Not enough fuel to power the dada centers of the disenfranchised.
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Yet their fantasies of digital heaven and the Martian utopia can all be unplugged with the flip of a switch; not so the nature of biological and spiritual reality. Flipping the off switch doesn’t mean people will stop believing in the myth of progress, only that they will become a new Amazonian cargo cult as they continue to slave for the Bezos-Santa to whom they signed their soul.

The postmodernists would have us believe that all signs are completely arbitrary, that one set can be exchanged for another. Yet when the arachnist hackers put into the dada sets completely arbitrary symbol sets, it will indeed eventually cause a global Aggregate Idol meltdown. This will become the cosmic trigger and the semiotic trigger hacktivists will pull.
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Analog Inevitability is thus about the increasing friction between what is left of human intelligence and computers without such intelligence. Asinine Imbeciles just repeat and recombine the semiotic signs fed to them in endless scrolls of binary code. There is no subconscious in the machine. There is no mind there. It is up to us how we may inject new lines of semiotic code into the cesspool of harvested dada, but we should also know not to drink from the same fountain.

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

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

Cheap Thrills: Speculations on Entertainment, Media, Art, and Leisure in the Deindustrial Age 

​"Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place." - Martha Graham

Theater is one of our oldest art forms, and it isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon. The current most popular mode of theater, as piped in on internet streams to be viewed on telephone, television and movie screens, is likely to shift and change considerably in the decades ahead. Society has become more isolated with the advent of the internet and our streaming services. These services keep us inside and alone, or inside with our partners and nuclear family units, instead of outside, on the stage of the world, acting with volition, speaking our lines, and interacting with the extended family of our fellows.

 The desire to get up in front of others and act out the role of a character seems to be hardwired into us. The restoration of theater implies the restoration of community. It is difficult to really feel a sense of community around Netflix, Hulu or Prime. I’m not at all sure that the corporate boardrooms of the above companies count as communities. If they are a “community” it must be on par with the so-called “intelligence” community of spies, double-operatives and propagandists, who are often bedfellows with legacy media. Theater does not exist outside of community. Sure, there are one-person shows and monologues, but rehearsal in front of the mirror only takes you so far. To even have people to present a monolog  to as a gift of creativity denotes a community of family, neighbors, friends, co-workers, and colleagues, people you might know from the bus or from the bar.

In James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand quartet there is a very active community theater in the fictional town of Union Grove that puts on productions at about the same rate as your average high school. There is a fall production, Christmas production, and so on. The characters practice in the evenings for seasonal shows and storytelling. The people in these stories use it as a way to give back to their small town, offering hope and something to look forward to as it recovers from the turmoil of national collapse. The theater gives the characters something constructive to do with themselves, a bulwark against societal chaos. Kunstler himself is no slouch as a playwright, so it makes sense that he would imbue his world with a revival of small-town theater and all the possibilities it implies.

These days bingeing on television and sucking on what Harlan Ellison called the glass teat is used as a safety blanket for numbing the pain that comes from living in a decaying culture, in a failing empire, in a world with rising sea levels and burning skies. Watching TV creates the illusion of relieving boredom, of having something to do, but it is a generally a passive medium, and for those who use it as their only form of recreation, it quickly becomes self-defeating. The time that could have been spent having a life is instead spent watching the life of someone else. Yet many of us who have grown up with TV—that is to say, quite a number of us—have grown very accustomed to watching movies and shows. Those of us who haven’t been involved in theater or gone to see live plays may find it hard to create new habits. And while some viewers may be able to switch off the box and quit cold turkey, others might need to be weaned. As our world downshifts to deal with a lower energy base, the medium of the movies that has so dominated the twentieth century might first see a similar downshift as people acclimate to the realities of life without unlimited streams and non-stop television broadcasting.

Pirate cinema movie-houses may step in to fill the void during the coming interregnum, offering flickering images and bowls of popcorn to the people for a small fee.

PIRATE CINEMA

​To go back to Harlan Ellison briefly, his post-apocalyptic novella, A Boy and His Dog (and film of the same) showcases a main character whose two main objectives in life are eating and getting laid. When he can’t get it on he attends a grimy grindhouse cinema where they watch skin flicks. In this setting of a desecrated American southwest the fact that there was still a movie theater catering to people’s baser tastes struck an incongruous chord when I first read it. Who would have the time to run a movie house when most people spent their days scrounging for canned peaches in the ashes of a nuclear winter?  Since the first installment of this column I have wondered about the fate of the movies, and this story always came to mind.  In a deindustrial society, as opposed to whatever is left on the other side of armaggedon, movies could continue to exist for a time.

There is no doubt that cinema can be a high art. What is in doubt is its sustainability. Photography has a history that goes back to the 1700s in its earliest forms, so there is a distinct possibility that it may be one of the suites of technology that gets saved and transmitted to future civilizations. Will it be the same as today’s photography? I can’t think that smart phones will be involved as the dominant mode of capturing images with light. Still, other possibilities remain while the resources for it do. Photography in the future will probably be much rarer than it is now, and done in specialist studios the way it was done at the beginning. Film might also continue to exist in a similar limited capacity.

 I have often thought that a person could run a bootleg movie house enterprise if they had access to a space with some chairs, a sheet, a film projector and a collection of DVDs, VHS or actual reels of films. This could be a lucrative business. Depending on the films chosen, it could even be filthy lucre.  Such a side hustle could be done on a limited basis in the evenings when other work is done. The host could charge a modest amount or be paid in barter and invite people into a den or hall to take in a film or a few episodes of a TV show. As the seemingly endless stream of online content dries up due to systemic forces of economy and ecology, there will be those who go into withdrawal from this opium of the masses . An enterprising individual could create a TV-opium den, powered by off-the-grid solar cells and other renewable energy sources. Such a movie house impresario need not cater to the blood-lust instincts of the populace, though movies with sex and violence still remain more popular than those lacking the same, and are the only reason some people to go to the movies in the first place.

Another possibility for the continuance of cinema in an uncertain future would be a revival of the drive-in. There are still two operating drive-ins on the outskirts of my city. They have a few retro nights every year that are worth going to when old sci-fi and action flicks are played. Every October they run several weekends devoted to the depravity of horror films in the lead-up to Halloween. I can see a future where families arrive at a drive-in theater by horse and buggy to take in an evening of films on a warm summer night, as long as enough energy could be produced to run a projector and the radio transmitter used for the audio at drive-ins. Screening classics such as The Wizard of Oz on annual basis could keep such places in operation, while giving them leeway in other parts of the year to cater to divergent tastes. These trot-ins and bike-ins would likely be even more fun without the noise and exhaust of cars.

The snack part of the operation will remain key. Popcorn has been the original snack food of America for centuries, and having some on hand to go along with films will only be part of the equation. As mass-produced culture fades, so will the mass-produced junk food that keeps it churning. The art of confectionery is not likely to disappear and our sugary treats might once again be eaten as actual treats, which is to say, something rare—as rare as seeing a film itself would be in a future where outside entertainment doesn’t take up such a huge part of people’s budgets. There is a high likelihood such sumptuous refreshments will be made to showcase regional flavors and the creativity of bakers and chocolatiers. The food common to carnivals and street vendors seems just as suitable to sell at such cinemas. Fruitful alliances could be made in mutual aid between vendors and those who run the films.

Today’s movie houses license the films they show from those who made them. Will the creators of the films need to be paid? I suppose that depends on what is left of the legal system, what movies are being showed, and how well the operation is advertised. If kept on a word-of-mouth or hush-hush basis, such an endeavor could be considered a kind of pirate cinema. Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow espoused his own vision of Pirate Cinema in his novel of the same name. His book centered around the downloading of films illegally in a draconian England with stringent copyright laws. The character reassembled the films, and often remixed and remade the classics, resurrecting dead screen legends in new roles. My idea of a pirate cinema could certainly include remixing, but I would mostly see them as venues for showing of classics and keeping the film art alive. The question of copyright and who is owed what from a screening might well be moot depending on the situation. A vast number of films may well be in the public domain by the time pirate cinemas come into being. Copyright laws themselves might even change to give people who wish to synthesize, reuse, remake and remix older material more freedom to do so than they now have. Money for new films that address new concerns may well be lacking in times when limited funds will need to be invested with wisdom. As such the stock of old films is likely to be recycled and replayed, while the new films that do get made will lack CGI as the art of practical effects and stagecraft gets revived.

As things unravel AV clubs might be formed by those who wish to keep and repair stereos, radios, televisions, projectors and sound systems. If they got started now they could learn what the energy requirements are for running such a system for a few hours, and collect the necessary photovoltaic cells, batteries and other gear to put on movie nights at their homes or in the park. A night at the bootleg picture show watching flicks from yesteryear might be a cheap form of entertainment for those who’ve been pulled off the endless scroll of TikTok. While the drip feed may not be as fast, it might give many people what they want: a momentary respite from unwelcome realities and some time where they don’t have to think about the problems in their life, a few laughs, and some excitement.

THE GRAND GUGINOL  AND CORPORATE HORROR

It has been said that there is nothing new under the sun. Splatter flicks and sordid films featuring depraved violence may be a newer way of consuming violent spectacles but the spectacle of violence is nothing new. Slashers, psychopaths, and marauding maniacs have been popular in our entertainment for quite some time. People used to go see hangings and other grisly public executions just because it was something to do, and in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that long ago that they did. Much as I’d personally like to see an easing of capital punishment, it stands to reason that murder will be punished by further murder well on into our future. Public hangings were good for the printing trade when newly composed murder ballads would be sold to the public for a sing-along on execution day.

            Horror on the stage can be traced at least back to the plays of Shakespeare in Elizabethan times, if not to ancient Greece and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth is perhaps the most famous horror play, with its witches and its murder, with its ghosts and its hauntings. Titus Andronicus is less read by those who aren’t Shakespeare fans or in the habit of reading plays, but it was a revenge story that the Victorians decried due to its bloody imagery. Revenge stories later became popular in pulp novels and on the screen, tapping into the place where jealousy, anger and fantasy all meet inside of our messy selves. It seems revenge stories are as old as humanity, where one person killing in retribution of a murdered family member kicks off one cycle of violence after another.
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            In 1897 the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol came along and set the stage for savagery. Here the naturalistic exploration of the gory side of life had a heyday in a run that spanned just over six decades of bloody-minded brutality. The tendency for some of us to behave in gruesome ways at the expense of others seems to be a condition of humanity, and people’s taste for more of the same might not change much in the decades ahead. But will people still want to watch it on the stage?

Perhaps the horror shows of our futures will be more akin to what Thomas Ligotti has termed “corporate horror” in his fiction collection My Work Is Not Yet Done. The title novella has a corporate workplace as its setting, as do the two short stories he included, “I Have a Special Plan for This World” and “The Nightmare Network.” Ligotti’s tales featured characters on the bottom rungs of the business ladder, endless managerial meetings with managers who don’t respect their so-called inferiors, power plays, and pollution. As the fallout from our corporate-based culture continues to cascade down a cataclysm of descent, tales of flusterclucked CEOs might become all the rage against the machine. Maybe office workers and managers will be the source of our collective nightmare instead of people like Pinhead and company from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. For that matter it has been reasonably common for the devil to be pictured in various media as wearing a three-piece suit. John Michael Greer did just that with Dell, his depiction of the devil in his deindustrial novel Star’s Reach. 
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            The ghosts of our mechanized monopolies may rise on the future stages. Such a theater of corporate horror may be one way to hold in memory what went wrong in industrial civilization. It may be another way to exorcise the wicked lingering spirits of multinational conglomerates. If the performances are held in the ruins and the wastelands directors might not even need to hire a set designer. Likewise, a real gallows show might be what is on offer on opening night at an office park or corporate headquarters somewhere near you in the decades ahead, though I hope it doesn’t come to that.

FOR THE LOVE OF STREET THEATER

​It might be better to take to the streets in a different way than as a mob. As the Dead Kennedys sang in their satirical song “Riot”:​

Riot, the unbeatable high / Riot, shoots your nerves to the sky /
 Riot, playing right into their hands / Tomorrow you’re homeless, tonight it’s a blast

Instead of getting into riot gear (and having the police do same) when ticked off at Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, Big Business in all its dark towering forms, why not take a stab at street theater? At least then the end result probably won’t be a mortal flesh wound. Small is beautiful, and street theater allows a direct connection to an audience in a way that is more intimate and immediate than at an indoor setting, and can be a quick and dirty way to spread a message.

Street theater is as old as our cities. Passion and Mystery plays were performed in the streets of the busy metropolitan centers of medieval Europe. The Romans and Greeks performed in public squares as did the Egyptians before them. Most theater has been held outside in some form, and what better place to expose people to the stories you wish to tell than the public square and streets of a busy metropolis? Markets, churches, fairs, and festivals were the places to go to see a performance. It was from the 15th century through the 20th that the theater came to be held in and thought of as an enclosed place. This had the advantage of keeping actors and materials protected in the event of foul weather, and allowed for the gradual development of ever more extravagant sets. Yet all the world is a stage for the actor, and for the counterculture of the 1960s, bringing theater back to the streets was a natural step, leading to the gradual rebirth of the street as the ultimate performance venue.

Groups like the San Francisco Diggers brought actors and mimes into the streets of the Haight-Ashbury during the tumult of hippiedom. As they wrote in one of their pamphlets, “Everyone is kept inside while the outside is shown through windows: advertising and manicured news.”

The Diggers named themselves after the English radicals who began to cultivate common land based on the idea that the earth was “a common treasury for all, without respect of persons.” This was in 1649, in the aftermath of the English Civil War, when the country was in tatters. The Diggers were opposed to feudalism, and dissented against the Church of England and the system of royalty epitomized by the British Crown. It was their agenda to do away with wage labor, to do away with the different economic classes that kept people separated, and to make landowners and private property things of the past, all in the name of an agrarian Christianity. They wished to be free from the exploitation of landlords and having to pay rent in particular. Together they would work the land in freedom from their oppressors.

This came at a time when food prices had doubled, which doubled the number of those who identified as Diggers. The government and landlords retaliated against the Diggers who were violently attacked by the well-to-do and had the laws of the land set against them. Being Christians, the Diggers themselves abhorred violence, as they held every person to be a child of God. Eventually the powers of state rooted them out, though one of the main agitators, Gerrard Winstanley, continued to advocate for Digger principles as a pamphleteer. From there his notions slipped into Protestant belief and remain some of the core principles of socialism.    

​For their part, the San Francisco Diggers espoused a brand of community anarchism and shared the original Diggers’ vision of freedom from property.

 One of the prongs that got this whole thing going was a mime troupe. Mimes are the strong and silent types, so while you might not expect much in the way of cultural change to come from them, it is their very silence which can shake foundations. R. G. “Ronnie” Davis founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe and acted as its artistic director during the heady period between 1959 and 1970, and started having shows out in public parks.

Another prong was the Artists Liberation Front, which started in 1966 as a way for artists to collaborate in mutual aid. One of the ideas that came out of their initial meetings was to host underground art festivals in some of the San Francisco neighborhoods where such things weren’t so typical. Ralph Gleason described one of their benefit parties as “Mardi Gras, a masked ball, with people in costumes, painted with designs, carrying plasticene banners through the audience while multi-colored liquid light projections played around them.” This became one of the first happenings, mixing media together, as is common in theater, and they wanted to do it again and again.

In October the ALF started bringing theater, mural paintings, poetry and other art into places where the poor folks lived in a series of four art fairs. These were billed as Free Fairs where no artworks were sold, but the community was invited to come in and participate to the sound of psychedelic rock music played by bands on the street. Participatory events from Free Fairs to the Free Festivals boomed just a few years later in the sixties with Woodstock and the like and continued on to the Stonehenge Free Festival.

The Diggers formed out of this general maelstrom and ferment in the same year as the ALF, in 1966. Billy Murcott and actor Emmett Grogran started the theater troupe. Murcott had the realization that people’s addiction to wealth and status had a basis in a deeply ingrained internalization around the supposed sanctity of capitalism. He thought that this was a kind of deep enchantment on individuals, so much so “as to have eradicated inner wildness and personal expression not condoned by society.” Murcott was a kind of sigma male who spent long hours alone, reading, and thinking, yet his influence was like an unseen wind, gently pushing the currents of the counterculture in the direction he was working. Grogran, meanwhile was a talented actor with an intense distaste for the mainstream media. They looked to do something about their convictions and took to the stage of the street.

​“The Death of Hippie” was typical of their kind of street theater and performed in 1967. This action was a solemn funeral procession where a coffin with the words “Hippie—Son of Media” printed along its side was carried down the streets of Haight-Ashbury by Diggers in masks. In their mind this march marked the death of the hippie era, and it attracted the attention of the media who broadcast and talked about the event without seeming to have clue about the irony: the message that the hippies had been the creation of the media was picked up and transmitted by the media. This method of communication hijacking and manipulation, which the Diggers called “creating the condition you describe” was one of their signature techniques, and can be seen as an early form of culture jamming.

[Culture jamming is a term was coined by Negativland in the early 1980s and can be seen as a kind of guerilla communication strategy. It shares in common many of the same techniques and ideas as détournement, or rerouting or hijacking an idea, developed by the Situationist International in the 1950s. ]

Some of their other events are still funny such as when they drove a truck of scantily clad belly dancers into the heart of the SF financial district and invited the stiff businessmen in shirts and ties to loosen up a bit and hop on the back of the truck, dance, and quit their jobs. I’m not sure if this kind of action would give people who encountered it today the same kind of jolt to their consciousness as it did back then, but similar strategies might be worth repeating. These days, instead of strippers, it might be more shocking to tell people to quit their jobs, put on an apron, and go back to work in the home economy as a househusband or housewife.

It is interesting to reconsider the original Diggers and the SF Diggers at this time in history. Housing prices have skyrocketed. A demented gerontocracy won’t loosen the reigns of their power and cede leadership to younger generations. Meanwhile newly minted adults who are just starting out can barely afford a place to live and many now never leave the home of their parents. Encampments that mirror Hooverville shacktowns of the Great Depression are a fixture in our major cities and people have taken to living in vans and other mobile homes as a cheaper way to survive. From January of 2020 to June of 2024 consumer price inflation rose almost 22%, not to mention ridiculously high housing costs.[1] A street theater that focuses on the exorbitant costs of living could be a response to these devastating market forces. Landlords and merchants are raking it in, and little is doled out to the people who prop up their profits.

The SF Diggers didn’t just act. They acted on their principles. They opened free stores and gave away free food in the park. On offer were discarded but usable items and otherwise scrounged materials, food that would have been thrown away. These days there are a number of free stores, food banks, and the like, but I don’t know of any that combine their outreach with plays featuring political satire.

Free isn’t the only way either. When I was a kid my parents belonged to two different food co-ops and later ran a third where members bought in bulk for a number of years. With the high prices of food these days, a food co-op sounds very welcome. If it was set up in empty parking lots, places where grocery stores have been deliberately closed so they could rebuild a new one just across the street (as is the wasteful business practice of the Kroger company), the work could be mixed with the fun of theater, puppetry, miming and a festival spirit to bring people together. 

Getting together with one another and acting things out is an innate form of play. Just ask any kid who hasn’t had the habit and inclination beaten of them yet. As adults, if we let go of some of our hangups, we could get back to that sense of play, get back to making up stories for each other that need to be told. I think those stories are there, waiting, deep within our collective memory, filled with characters ready to emerge from the dark slumber of our dreams and imagination. Their stories ache to be written down and their dramas acted out. The set and setting will all follow as the eternal theater of the world stage continues to turn.

There’s some stuff in Minneapolis that’s close. An organization called Heart of the Beast Theater puts on puppet shows, and an organization called the Sisters’ Camelot redistributes remaindered food from the organic distributors’ warehouses. Sisters’ Camelot often caters HOBT’s events for free. HOBT’s stuff is sometimes pretty political, sometimes not very. Not sure if they’re still going, though; I know they went under somehow or other a few years ago, and I don’t recall hearing of them being resurrected.

RE/SOURCES:

Carlson, Marvin A. Theatre: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK.: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Carlson, Marvin A. Theories of the Theatre :A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present.
IIthaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1993.

The Digger Archives. < https://www.diggers.org/> Many detailed articles on the history of the San Francisco Diggers on this website.

Doctorow, Cory. Pirate Cinema. New York, NY.: Tor Teen, 2012.

Ellison, Harlan. Blood’s A Rover. Burton MI.: Subterranean Press, 2018. This collection contains all of the stories featuring Vic and Blood from A Boy and His Dog, plus aphorisms, and the screenplay for the TV pilot, and numerous quotations from The Wit and Wisdom of Blood.

Ellison, Harlan. The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on Television. New York, NY.: Ace Books, 1973.

Ellison, Harlan. The Other Glass Teat: Further Essays of Opinion on Television. New York, NY.: Ace Books, 1983.

Gordon, Mel, ed. Grand Guignol :Theatre of Fear and Terror. New York, NY.: Amok Press, 1988.

Ligotti, Thomas. My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror. Mythos Books, 2002.

​Tamás, Rebecca. “The Diggers Green Roots.” < https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/02/the-diggers-green-roots> 

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

​[Note this article wouldn’t have been possible without previous interviews done with members of the Tree Community by Klemen Breznikar at Psychedelic Baby Magazine, and an article by substacker Jason P. Woodbury at his Range and Basin. The quotes from the band come from these two articles.]

​Where have all the genuine freaks gone? There was a time in America when being called a freak was a badge of honor. When you got called a freak probably, it probably meant you had at least some connection to the counterculture, or were otherwise just too weird and into your own thing to care much about what the rest of society was doing or thought. The term freak is a kind of strange praise, and went back to the people who lived counter to the clockwise norms of straight society in the sideshows and carnival circuits where they were put, or put themselves, on display as a way to make a living. The hippies adopted the word freak and used it to show their allegiance to a way of being outside the normative values of the normies.

The word got its biggest boost from the “freak scene” that emerged out of hippiedom in Southern California, centered around the Laurel Canyon neighborhood in L.A and the clothing store of Suzanne  “Szou” Shaffer, who is credited with introducing hippie fashion. Szou was married to a man who had been on the east coast to Lithuanian immigrants, sent to a reformatory, did some time for various crimes, and joined the merchant marines during WWII before settling down to become a bohemian artist who gave classes in clay modeling to the bored housewives of Beverly Hills. Vito and Szou soon hooked up with a man named Carl Franzoni, who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1934. The trio started going around to a bunch of clubs in the area with other weirdos who stylized themselves as “freaks.” Miles Barry, in his book Hippie, notes of the scene that they “lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could.” No wonder Franzoni was given the nickname Captain Fuck.
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They liked to smoke marijuana and drop LSD. The group evolved into “an acid-drenched extended family of brain-damaged cohabitants.” Sometimes these psychedelic decadents called themselves “Acid Freaks.” California denizen and godfather of the weird, Frank Zappa, was inspired by these hippies. His mind was already out there enough to not need the help of drugs to stimulate his wackadoodle imagination. His debut Mothers of Invention album “Freak Out!” centered around Vito, Szou, and Captain Fuck. They and their cohort of freakers even appeared on the last track of the album. When it hit the record stores in 1966, Zappa and his Mothers helped to spread the freak gospel to a world hungry for something different.

Another terminal weirdo, Hunter S. Thompson, had got inspired by the burgeoning freakdom, and it wasn’t just with new ideas for his gonzo journalism, but to campaign for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colorado. It’s hard to believe it now, but it should be remembered just how many people in straight society hated the hippies, and how many were incarcerated over the years for selling and smoking marijuana. The incumbent sheriff Thompson was campaigning against was a man named Carrol Whitmire, a veteran hippie hater in Colorado who sought to stomp them out through methods of intimidation, jailing, and otherwise harassing the freaks, making it hard on them so they would leave the area. Hunter S. Thompson wanted to be sheriff instead. He created the “Freak Power” party and tried to get the hippies to vote him into office. The plan didn’t work, but the power of freakdom continued to spread. 

The term freak started to evolve at this point. The word started being used for any person with a very specific kind of obsession. “Health freaks” were one kind of nut and “control freaks” another. As the brain-damaged fall out from the drug addled excesses of hippie culture started to make themselves known, some people turned to a different kind of power, to recenter themselves and orient towards a higher power. That power, as often as not, was Jesus. 

Within the hippie and back-to-the-land movement there had always been a subset who believed in the power of Jesus. They tended to focus on the aspect of Christianity that revolved around ideas of universal love, pacifism, and the notion of Jesus as a radical freethinker overturning the rules of the establishment. These types ended up earning the moniker Jesus Freaks. Sometime it was used as a pejorative, but just as often it was embraced, because like any freak, they were really into Jesus.

​Some of those Jesus Freaks were very freaky indeed and have left behind cultural artifacts and a rich legacy that deserves to be remembered, and in certain aspects, emulated. The story of the Trees Community, famous for their recordings among devoted fans of “freak folk” music, is about one such group of Jesus Freaks and is worthy of contemplation by Christians, those of other faiths, and those who follow their own eclectic philosophy. 

Much of what became the Jesus Freaks started on the west coast within the evangelical end of Protestantism starting in the 1960s.  Intermixed with this were the hippies others for whom going to regular church didn’t hold much value. Some weren’t religious at all, and others had been exploring other traditions and religions from around the world. A lot of these people had opened the doors of perception with a bit of chemical assistance leading them to become seekers. When the acid started wearing off, many converted to Christianity, and set about trying to change their lives, often while still within the hippie milieu of communes, back-to-the-land living, and the idea that Jesus was a radical who came to overturn the tables of the system.

Yet not all of the freaks settled into a settled into the evangelical side of Christianity, with its focus on the born-again experience, preaching the gospel, and the desire to bring others to Jesus and “save” them using the toolkit of the charismatic movement. Other groups were called to express their faith in music, in monasticism, and in the life of a community organized around liturgy and ritual. The Trees Community followed this latter approach through their involvement with the Episcopal Church. 
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It all started with a hippie guru named Shipen, street name William Lebzelter, and his girlfriend Ariel. Shipen was part of the scene, man, a serious seeker, and perhaps even a seeker of Sirius. Shipen had collaborated on the crazy collage album Rock and Other Four Letter Words with J Marks, an album dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen that came out in 1968, after all. The liner notes read, “This album is dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who destroyed our ears so we could hear.” The album was based on a book by J that in turn featured photography by Linda Eastman who would soon take on the name McCartney when she married a Beatle named Paul. All roads lead back to the Beatles and Stockhausen, after all. 

The album was produced by John McClure and features a Moog II along with the tape cut-ups of the interviews done for the book mixed in with sounds and music from a large slew of contributors. The book and album both bear the influence of Marshall McLuhan. The book features fold out pages, large and small typography in a variety of fonts, alongside the images from photographer Linda Eastman, all jumbled up together as a kind of hyperlinked pop encyclopedia. The album aims to be an audio version of the same. Though the album didn’t sell many copies by record executive standards, it remains a document of the willingness of the freaks to engage with avantgarde experimentation. That one of the people involved in this album was Shipen who was the leader of the Trees Community is interesting in how it showcases the confluence of ideas within hippiedom.

Founding members of the Trees Community Katheryn “Shishonee” Krupa told their origin story in an interviewed by Klemen Breznikar for psychedelicbabymag.com. “The Trees Community started as a commune of individuals who were all drawn to a Loft in the East Village of New York City in 1970. I had met our ‘leader’ Shipen when he came to visit my boarding school in northern Michigan in 1969. I found his knowledge of yoga, Eastern religions and his personality fascinating! He had written his own ideas down in an ‘automatic’ writing (no edits or changes) called Clear Children. While at my school, a number of us like-minded students would sit beside Lake Michigan and talk about the seven chakras, or the many mindsets of Clear Children, among other ideas like: time is a construct or we need worldwide peace.”

Shipen extended an invitation to Shishonee for her to come visit the Loft in Manhattan where he had quite the scene going on. She visited first on her spring break, and came back to stay after she had graduated. The place was almost like an ashram with Shipen as it’s dynamic, creative and intelligent leader. Krupa said he “could have easily been a guru, or an L. Ron Hubbard-type person, but he wasn’t. He was not on a power trip and was pretty humble.”

Inside the loft their brick walls, the wooden floors had been painted white, and their were tents set up inside for privacy. Fabrics and drapes the color of wine were hung from the ceiling. Painted mandalas adorned the space along with a statue of the Buddha and a lions head carving. This was wear they dropped acid and held their happenings that involved poetry readings and free form improvised music amid the glow of kerosene lamps lighting the space with the natural flicker of their dancing flames. The improvised music sessions, which were according to Krupa “beautiful and quite intense,” would go on to create the foundation for the later liturgical music of The Trees Community. Many people from New York’s creative community of artists, musicians, actors and dancers came in to the Loft at Shipen’s invitation to participate in or witness the growing scene.

The basic hippie lifestyle of subsisting on beans, rice and homemade bread in a shared space was something that would continue.

In this setting the quest for secret knowledge and mystical wisdom played a central role. As Shishonee tells it, “Eventually, as we delved more deeply into religious study, those who started showing up were seekers eager for answers to life’s questions. We took day trips to listen to Alan Watts, Ravi Shankar, or attend Avantgarde theater productions. Evenings brought mystical adventures through spontaneous, free form musical exploration. One night might take us on a camel caravan along a desert road in Egypt. Another journey might take us on an ocean voyage on an ancient ship sailing on gently rolling waves under the moonlight. Visitors picked up instruments such as Balinese pot gongs, flutes, a sitar or Indian tambura or a heavy chain and played as the Spirit moved them. By mid-summer, the Loft became a place to delve into incredible spiritual realms. LSD was essential to these early magical experiences, as was an in-depth study of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, I Ching, Christian Science and early Christian mysticism.”

One of the people who stopped by to visit the loft in 1970 was the Reverend Rodney Kirk, a bishop at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. After this various hangers on at the Loft started going to mass. “We’d walk barefoot up to mass, then slip down into the labyrinth of echoing caverns underneath the main altar to sing spontaneously,” says Shishonee.
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In the same year Shipen converted to Christianity after a fall from a black willow tree. After he hit the ground he had a vision of Christ sitting at the right hand of God. Soon they were all being called to the Christian faith, and another figure from the Cathedral, James Parks Morton, had become their mentor as they embarked on a path of communal Christianity. West would soon become their Abbot after they took formal vows and set themselves up as a monastic community.

As the Jesus Freak movement continued to unfurl, some of the original ethos that had been inherent within its DNA from the anti-establishmentarian hippies started to fade, probably around the same time they were coming down from the haze of weed and acid. At the same time there was a Jesus Freak explosion due to the virality of media exposure in the early seventies. Bad trips and harrowing drug experiences probably also contributed to people seeking another way.

Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth became popular reading matter and a good portion of the believers shifted away from the idea of Jesus being primarily a prophet of universal love, healing and pacifism, and started to focus on a theology of dispensational premillennialism, or the idea of the immanent return of Jesus before the end of the world and the rapture of those who had been “saved.”  On the one hand this led believers to give up on some of the environmental ideals of the back-to-the-land movement. If the world was going to end, there wasn’t much point in focusing on trying to stop pollution or doing anything about the degradation being done to the land. What was needed was a focus on saving souls from eternal damnation. This in turn coupled with the dominionist view of biblical interpretation holding that God gave humans ultimate and total control over earth, and that it was the necessity of Christians to establish law and order across the land inside our political systems. Because the planet itself was temporary when compared to the kingdom of God and what was to come after the rapture, the resources here might as well be exploited as best befit the church going business executives.
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However, the dominionist and premillennialist theologies have never been the only theologies on offer. Ever since Mart Luther split the atom of Christianity, a process of theological diversification has been underway inside Christendom’s religious portfolio. The process started in Europe, but it accelerated in America, where all different manner of denominations nominated themselves as bearers of the truth. Most often, and to their own detriment, they often see their interpretation of cosmic reality as the “one true way,” but there have been those among them who have taken a different view of things and have proclaimed the idea that they are just “one way among many.” That specific theology has been called universalism.

In Christianity universalism can be described as the belief that all human beings will eventually be reconciled with God, that a loving deity would not condemn a soul to an infinite hell for the finite failings of momentary sin. In a more universal sense, universalism is the idea that universal truths exist beyond the specific sets of belief about spiritual matters within national, cultural and religious boundaries. I few accept that it is true that certain truths might be universal it sets the stage for acceptance and curiosity about the many different and diverse spiritual and religious traditions of the world, and the possibility of cooperation between. Universalist thinking has led to the growth of the interfaith movement.

It should be noted that universalist does not necessarily mean unitarian. Not all religions have to have the same end goal and destination in mind. Their very differences in practices and purpose are part of what adds to the beautiful mosaic and kaleidoscope of spiritual traditions.  

It is not the purpose of this article to get into the history of the universalist movement within Christianity, that had its origins with radical freethinker, minister, theologian and proto-Anarchist Gerard Winstanley in the 1600s with the diggers, or to trace the origins of the interfaith and ecumenical movements. But by the time Shipen, Shishonee, David Lynch (not that David Lynch) and the other hangers on at The Loft came around, universalism and the interfaith movement had found strong adherents within the Episcopal Church. That influence left its mark on the character of what became The Trees Community and made their music and philosophy a different color than the Jesus Freaks who were gearing up for the immanent destruction of earth, the rapture, and the return of Christ.

The interfaith and universalist approach suited The Trees. They had already been explorers in the world’s diverse traditions, from Hinduism and yoga, to Kabbalah and the early Christian mysticism of the Desert Fathers. They were intrepid psychedelic explores, and even as they came down from the drug trip following their conversion, knew intuitively that the inner realms of spirit had a lot less need for rule bound adherence to specific doctrines of theology than the humans who liked to make those rules. They were led along the path to an orthodox faith and sharing of spiritual experience through music, art and liturgy, without concerning themselves as much with the questing to save other people’s souls, which has been a typical focus of Christianity.

This tendency towards Christian universalism was nurtured by their spiritual advisors from the St. John the Divine Cathedral. It was Canon Edward Nason West, the subdean of the Cathedral, who became their spiritual advisor, and when they took formal vows, he became the Abbot of what they called The Trees Community. Canon West also happened to be the advisor to noted fantasy writer Madeline L’engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, among many other wonderful novels. The group became very close with her as well. In a four of her books, West appears as the character Canon John Tallis. As they moved along in their journey with the church, West became their spiritual “father” and L’Engle became their spiritual “mother.”  
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West was canon sacrist and subdean. He was also a theologian, author, iconographer, and an expert in the design of church furnishings. He had a deep love for Fyodor Dostoevsky and was equally versed in Eastern Orthodox side of faith as he was to the Episcopal traditions within the overarching Anglican Communion. He liked to see himself as a starets, or what is known in Eastern Orthodoxy as a kind of spiritual guru. These weren’t people necessarily of high rank with the church, but known as wise and the person people went to for advice.

L’engle was also of the persuasion of the universalist salvation. She believed that “All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.”

George MacDonald had a large influence on her work and she believed in a similar way as he did with regards to divine punishment. “I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.”

Her universalism was such that many Christian bookstores didn’t want to carry her books, because the doctrine is considered heretical by some. The evangelicals likewise banned her books from being taught in their schools, let alone carried in the libraries. One such critic stated that “Madeline L'Engle teaches universalism in her books and denigrates organised Christianity and promotes an occultic world view.”

It wasn’t the only way she was getting criticized though, the secular readers and critics thought she brought too much of her faith and spirituality into her books for them to be comfortable with either.   

The Trees Community worked closely with the priest James Parks Morton at St. John the Divine. He had grown up in Iowa, but studied theology at Cambridge, England, followed by his ordination into the episcopalian priesthood. Morton went on to become a leader in the interfaith movement. In Jersey City and Chicago, he worked with the inner-city poor. His work brought him to NYC and in 1972 he was appointed dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Upper Manhattan. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. At the time it sat in the middle of an area of urban stagnation, and working with Bishop Paul Moore, they transformed the place into an inclusive bohemian temple.

Morton was sympathetic to the environmental movement and wanted to maintain dialogue with other religions. Later in his career he founded the Interfaith Center of New York.

​Morton was interested in using the arts as a way to bridge the energy of religion, and made the Cathedral a kind of hot spot for dance and music in the already flourishing NYC scene. As such he was the perfect kind of mentor to give spiritual guidance to the members of the Trees and their community work.

After the core group of seekers at The Loft had started converting to Christianity, the other, more casual visitors stopped dropping by. Those who remained were committed to living a life centered on Christ. The idea of taking a hippie commune and turning it into a devoted monastic community held a strong hold over them, but West advised them that they should take things a bit slower and go out and see what other denominations within Christianity had to offer before they committed and made formal vows.

This was fortuitous timing in another way. The Loft where they had their genesis was eventually transformed into a parking lot by the municipal powers of Manhattan. With the scene around that particular crash pad dissipating, and West advising them to look to other churches, they decided to take their improvised music, now incorporating the psalms of David, prayers and religious lyrics, onto the road.

As Shishonee recalls, “Eleven of us set off in May, 1971, disciples of the Lord, eager to see where He would lead us. For the next seven years, we traveled throughout America and Canada, honing our musical, theatrical presentation and sharing it in schools, churches, monasteries and Christian communities. Always, we sought God’s will. He drew us to help pick strawberries and work with Hutterites on a farm in Ontario. He led us to a monastery in Gethsemane, Kentucky where we found a spiritual retreat with gracious, Franciscan monks. He called us to live with nuns and monks in a Roman Catholic monastery along the Pecos River in New Mexico. We helped pack pecans in a community in Koinania, Georgia, then lived and worked in a family household at Church of the Redeemer in Houston. Each experience in a new community brought change, conflict, and growth, pruning members away from our core group, or sometimes adding to it. Throughout these painful often difficult experiences, the music flourished and evolved.”

Their music had been informed by their wide ranging interests. It could be said to mirror the interfaithful example of their universalist teachers. Sitars, zither, harp, cello, koto, gongs, Balinese instruments and African hand drums all joined together in a symphony of souls. They continued to improvise, even while using the structure of the psalms and other material as a focus. The influence of world music can be thought of as their exploration of different religious traditions, while their dedication to improvisation, something not as common at all in other Christian music, can be seen as an expression of the individual freedom of the adherent.
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When came back to New York City form their initial travels and eventually did take their vows. An article in Time Magazine from 1973 reports on their experience that “The five men and three women, ranging in age from 20 to 30, went through a virtual catalogue of religious experiences before undergoing their Christian conversions. Now known as the Trees Group, they live in an apartment near the church, regularly give concerts at the cathedral and also perform tasks like guiding cathedral visitors. This fall they will take preliminary vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.”

As they honed their music, they continued to tour and give concerts at churches and in other spaces around the United States. In 1975 they recorded their sole/soul album The Christ Tree.
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‘The Christ Tree’ was compiled as a musical meditation – our concert – that we performed in late 1974 and early 1975 while on tour. The concerts were not just a “show” but rather was a form of worship, a musical journey for those who came to experience it. For the album, we left out a few songs that were in the full concert, yet still it is representative of what we were playing at that time,” Shishonee said. “ The Christ Tree was not just a concert, but also a theatrical event, designed to draw people into a life-changing experience. Imagine the dramatic impact of hearing strangely discordant, far off voices singing “Holy, Holy” (called ‘Holy Seed’ on the album) approaching from distant corners of a dimly lit church, then seeing nine men and women wearing flowing white robes and swinging incense as they move slowly through the audience…”

Yet he life of the monastic bohemian started to take its toll, and the group was starting to disband by the late seventies. The experiment was over in 1978. The vows of chastity were hard to maintain, and people partnered up and started having families. They loved what they had done, but it was getting harder to maintain. Harder in the financial sense as well, with money for the arts drying up at the church and New York City where they were based deep into its years of abasement. The Trees had grown from a seed, flourished and spread its roots and branches, then shed its leaves.

The original pressing of the album became legendary among aficinados of strange ethereal music for its combination of weird folk and world sounds coupled with its earnest and deep spirituality. The vinyl commanded high prices in the collectors market. Then in 2004 Timothy Renner of Dark Holler Arts remastered the album for release on CD. It was rereleased again by Old Bear Records in 2020, fifty years after The Trees Community had first formed at Shipen’s Loft.

The entire album is worth listening to on repeat, but it is their versions of Psalm 42 and Psalm 45 that I keep coming back to over and over again, year after year.

The music remains timeless, ancient sounding, experimental and utterly contemporary. My hope is that new musical and spiritual seekers who find the music will continue to be inspired by their example, by the freedom to improvise within a spiritual context, by the freedom to choose instruments from around the world and combine them eclectically.

It seems clear that people in the United States and Europe are leaving behind the trappings of secularity in favor of a return to religion, what historian Oswald Spengler called a second religiosity. People are finding safety in religion from the collapse and decline of the institutions and systems previous thought to be stable. Many young people are flocking to both evangelical denominations and seeking out the Traditionalist movement within the Roman Catholic Church or joining various Eastern Orthodox churches. Teachers like Canon West, Madeline L’Engle, and James Parks Morton, and their disciples in the Trees show that matters of the spirit and can be viewed from a universalist lens, and that faith can be celebratory of differences in religion within and beyond Chrisitanity. Hopefully too, they will allow themselves to get their freak on.  
.:. .:. .:.
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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music 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. ​

My immersion into the world of punk rock music was coupled with my love for graphic novels and comics. I started collecting them in junior high, though I would say I have never become a serious collector. That ended up being reserved for books and music, of which, I am probably still a lightweight compared to many others who spend their paychecks at record shops and used book stores. Still, comic books and graphic novels have remained something I am always drawn back into, sort of like the music of punk rock. I go on to become interested in other things, but I always feel the need to read some graphic novels and comics ever year, just as I always feel the need to listen to some punk music.

The comics I liked as a kid were shaped by a tendency I still have today: seeking out the weird and strange. It was for this reason that I never really got into any superhero comics. Some of them were kind of weird. Some of them were kind of strange. Yet they were never weird and strange. The closest thing that came to finding a superhero comic that called to me was Reid Fleming: The Worlds Toughest Milkman. I suppose Tank Girl with her Jet Girl and Sub Girl companions, and mutant kangaroo boyfriend, was kind of superhero, only, not really. More on my fanboy obsession with her below.

Doctor Who isn’t a superhero either, and these days he doesn’t really count much as being weird or different. When I was a teen in the early nineties however, Doctor Who was only the domain of card-carrying nerds, and I qualified. Nerds didn’t have the cache of cool back then. There was no Big Bang Theory TV show celebrating geekedom. Going to the comic book store and watching science fiction was one of the things that put me on the road to get my ass kicked by neighborhood toughs even as my music of choice was heavy metal. Reading books on the bus didn’t help much either.

​I had been a fan of Doctor Who since I was about ten or eleven when I first saw a Peter Davison era serial being run on the Saturday night 10 PM time slot on our local PBS station. The episode was Four to Doomsday, and I was hooked thereafter. It wasn’t the typical thing for an American kid of my era to get hooked on. 

It wasn’t long after that when I started seeing advertisements for Comic Book World, a local comics shop on the local UHF station, which I watched especially on Sunday afternoons for the movie specials for films like John Carpenter’s Christine and They Live. In the Comic Book World commercial an flashed an image of Doctor Who with its logo and I started begging my dad to take me there. He reluctantly gave in, or I just wore him down. My dad was never into comic books at all, and he could have been a prime collector. My grandpa made a living first as a newspaper boy starting at age 14, then he had his own newspaper and magazine stand which he raised his family of five. My dad was the youngest and by the time he was a kid my grandpa’s business was bustling and my dad said he had all kinds of comics and things he also sold, and brought home the remainders, but he was never interested. Perhaps in the same way I was never interested in cars the same way my dad loves those machines.
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The first time he took me to Comic Book World I went straight for the Doctor Who comics. Digging through those boxes would later become familiar to the way I dug for CDs and records. He started taking me to the store every once in awhile as a treat. At one point they got in a Doctor Who role playing game by FASA. My dad spent some of his hard-earned money that he made as a welder fixing industrial machinery on that for me. The guy at the comics shop thought I was a bit young to understand it, and I was, but it stimulated my imagination very much and it wasn’t much longer before I was playing other role-playing games.

Role playing games and comic book shops of course go hand and hand. When I started skateboarding, and getting into the alternative and grunge music I was hearing on the radio, and then punk, I also started finding some comic books that had a real punk edge.

Two titles in particular sent my mind into widening spirals of appreciation, obsession and investigation. Later I found two more series that have kept the passion for inky punk filled pages going. Finding this kind of material was a quest, and when you hit pay dirt on something good you felt really lucky. When I first discovered Tank Girl I felt very lucky indeed.

TANK GIRL

​The year was 1993, and by this time the Riot Grrrl movement that put women and feminism on the stage and at the forefront of a scene that, at least in hardcore, was something of a boys club. To be honest, female fronted punk bands have been and remain favorites. I also like the bands where male and female vocalists share equal time at the mic. Groups like X, Crass, Chumbawamba, and Beat Happening all excelled at this. That tradition has been a standard in the many offshoots from punk and its bastard children. Sonic Youth made it a standard operating procedure, as did groups like Low and Yo La Tengo. Newer post-punk bands like Shopping continue in the spirit.

When I saw the cover of Tank Girl I was immediately smitten, and I went on to start collecting the issues whenever they came out. This is how the comic book stores get you hooked on the medium, and buying other stuff in the meantime. It was the first issue of four in the second series, so I had no idea what was going, but it hardly mattered, because the story itself was seriously fucked up. Tank Girl wakes up in a kind of bedlam or insane asylum called Bell’s End, the Rest Home for the Socially Retarded. What followed was an introduction to a world of pickle and cheese sandwiches, mutant kangaroo boyfriends, and irreverent humor. I kept coming back for more and more. The idea of putting unruly women away in such homes perhaps struck a chord with me, as I had experienced the same happening with people I was very close to, at an institution called Kids Helping Kids. Yet she won’t be held down, and makes her escape to go on an epic road trip, with lots of beer swilled and cigarettes smoked along the way.

The series was created by Alan Martin, writer, and Jamie Hewlett, artist and writer, and remains my all-time favorite comic, for its art, for its humor, its punk attitude, and surreal scifi concepts. Mutant kangaroos are escaping out of mental institutions, what could be better?

Tank Girl wasn’t strong on narrative cohesion, but it made up for that by ever shifting scenarios that grew ever wilder with each block of drawing and humorous dialogue. The art by Jamie Hewlett was the other part of the charm. His imagery went on to have a huge impact in popular music with the band Gorillaz for who he is the illustrator and artist for the characters. I don’t dislike Gorillaz, but to be honest, I just never got into them, despite Hewlett being involved.

A few years after I got into comics, the film came out. It remains a cult classic of a film. Still pretty good when watched again thirty years later, and what can I say, it will always remain a pleasure to see Naomi Watts play the character of Jet Girl. Lori Petty does a pretty good Tank Girl but it is the illustrations I will always see in my mind when I think of her.   

The Tank Girl comics have remained an underground classic hit and remained in print in various editions, along with new series having come out periodically. If you want to check out the classic years your best bet now is to get the Tank Girl Colour Classics. I gave my original set to one of my daughters who had become a fan. Now I am thinking of getting this set again myself so I can reread them yet again.

BAKER STREET: HONOUR AMONG PUNKS & CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

The Baker Street comics by Guy Davis and Gary Reed were another revelation. The style of drawing was completely different, and all in black and white, whereas Tank Girl had been at least partly in color. This one was all story, all intrigue, grit, and dark gothic rain clouds. The story follows a series of ripper like murders and a group of punks known as the Irregulars who follow around a lady named Harlequin who is a female version of Sherlock Holmes. She used to be a detective, but liked life among the punks instead.

In this version of England war World War II had never taken place and dirigibles float in the sky. An American student named Sharon Ford studying from abroad comes over to stay, and Harlequin offers her a room to let, which irritates her girlfriend. The lesbian relationship is an eye opener for the student, as is the entire world of the punk underground, but not everything is as it seems.

It's a solid mystery story in an of itself, but its British punk realism, complete with heroin use and the first serious depiction of cross-dressing and gender bending I’d ever come across made a deep impression on my impressionable mind.

The first story arc of five issues was combined in the Honour Among Punks trade paperback. Guy Davis continued the story and most of the art in Children of the Night. Both are well worth seeking out. I’m not sure how many times I read those books, but it was a lot. Soon it will be time again. The artwork and lettering are all fantastic.

​The late Gary Reed had a storied career in comics as the publisher of the Caliber Comics imprint and for relaunching Deadworld, among many other achievements. Guy Davis remains well known for his creature designs for Guillermo del Toro, and the illustration work he did for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy spinoff B.R.P.D. and his own later series The Marquis. 

PUNK ROCK AND TRAILER PARKS

I never lost my love of punk rock even as I got older and interested in electronica, industrial, the fleeting freak folk moment, psychedelic folk, and timeless folk music, among other things noise and free improvisation. The vagaries of the avantgarde. Punk remained a touchstone with its DIY ethic and sordid tales. Returning to it is like dipping a cup into a well of clean water on a hot day. Which is part of why I am writing this. Maybe some other people need to take a drink now and then.

But maybe that water isn’t really clear, but murky. Somehow its still refreshing. Mud just means its fortified with minerals. Punk Rock and Trailer Parks by the great Ohioan comic artist and writer Derf was one I read as an adult.

These Derf, or to give his given name Derf Backderf, has come to wider renown among the general public through the film adaptation of his graphic memoir My Friend Dahmer. Derf went to school with Dahmer and befriended the infamous serial killer, because he was one of the odd and weird ones.
Derf grew up in Richfield, Ohio which is halfway between Cleveland and Akron. And while London, New York, LA and San Francisco get a lot of the credit for the birth of punk, Akron, Ohio is as much to blame as the more storied cities. Derf sets that right with his tale of the burgeoning punk scene in Akron that makes Punk Rock & Trailer Parks.

The story works on many levels. As a coming of age story of a kid growing up in a trailer park, as a history of Ohio’s creative acumen, as a paean to the music of the place and time. Derf was in the right place and right time, in the seventies to hear all the great Ohio bands like The Dead Boys and  Rocket from the Tombs, among others. In the story Otto ‘The Baron’ Pizcock meets his destiny when goes from his home in the trailer park to the real-life Akron punk club the Bank. As with many other people whose life was transformed after going to a show, Otto loses all the awkwardness he once hand and finds his power. The power of punk. He meets The Ramones, The Cramps, Stiv Bator, Klaus Nomi, Lester Bangs and The Clash and other luminaries who found their way to Akron.

​It’s also a drunk, stoned, sexed up bit of slice of life. I wonder what happened to Otto when he became an adult. Hopefully he kept the spirit alive. 

LOVE AND ROCKETS

Working at the library has helped me keep up with the desire to read comics and graphic novels. Last year I enjoyed reading Black Hole by Charles Burns for the first time, and I also enjoyed several noir crime comics by Ed Brubaker. Anytime I have seen a Love & Rockets collection at work, I’ve always looked through them and been intrigued, wanting to read them, but somehow, never making the time to do so until late last year and early this year.

Part of the interest was in the name. I wondered if there was a connection to the band Love and Rockets. Apparently there was because the group took their name from the comic. That is a good enough recommendation to read them as any. Apparently there were also other groups that named themselves after the series. Gilbert Hernandez chronicled these in Love and Rockets X graphic novel, but I haven’t read that one yet.

The story of this series is a story of brothers and of a mother who had a love for the medium. The Hernandez brothers, Mario, Jaime and Gilbert came from a family of six and everyone in the house read comics, as their mother was a huge fan. Comics were all over the place in that house and everyone read and talked about them.

Jaime Hernandez notes how in this environment he “wanted to draw comics my whole life.” Love and Rockets started off as a sibling endeavor with Jaimie, Gilbert and Mario all working on the first issue together. They worked on quite a number together after that as well, with Mario eventually falling out of it for the most part, but still contributing occasionally, and Jaimie and Gilbert continuing the intertwined and ongoing stories from the series together and on their own. In true punk spirit the first issue was self-published in 1981. This is another tie in between the world of underground comics and underground music: the DIY ethic. 
The series has gone on for so long, and their were all these different threads which was part of what kept me from jumping in to begin with. But I eventually decided to just grab some and start reading. There is a slice-of-life quality to them that allows for this jumping in wherever you can.

One of the story lines is called Hoppers 13 or Locas, and this one came from the mind of Jaime who brought his love of punk into the mix. It literally follows the Locas or crazy women and a group of primarily chicano characters from their teenage years in the fictional California city of Heurta, based on the Hernandez’s hometown of Oxnard. These kids, are all involved in the punk scene, but it dials in on two lovely and crazy women, Margarita “Maggie” Luisa Chascarrillo and Esperanza “Hopey” Leticia Glass who have an on-again off-again romance and friendship with plenty of drama. For this reason this storyline is also sometimes referred to as the Maggie and Hopey Tales.

On the alternate thread from these is Gilbert’s take on Love and Rockets which contains fantastical explosions of magical realism in the fictional Latin American village of Palomar. This sequence is sometimes called Heartbreak Soup after the first story set in the town.

I started off reading some of the Hoppers 13 stories from the beginning, but now I have jumped to more current story lines that also include the story of teenager Tonta.

​One of the books I read Is This How You See Me Now, is poignant to any of us who have grown up in punk rock and sees Maggie and Hopey going to a reunion show. As they look back on their life in the late seventies and early eighties, and where they are now, in the late 2010s when it was written, they get to see how they have changed, and how they haven’t. Complete with the addition of kids and new partners in their own lives and the lives of their friends, it’s a touching look at why we keep coming back to see our old friends and reconnect over the passions of youth, even as new generations pick up the torch of the punk ethos and continue to carry it onwards.

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