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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

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

Harvey Pekar: Working Class Intellectual and Everyday Visionary

Gary Warne: Communiversity and the Suicide Club

Who Was Matokie Slaughter?

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams

Fakir Musafar and Friends

Going Native In America

Weird Weather with David Wills

Running Off to Join the Circus with Jim Tully

Dwelling on the Fringe with the Hubbards

Brother Blue: The Butterfly Bard

Raymond Thundersky: The Cincinnati Construction Clown

Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song

Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood

Ray Hicks: Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains

On A Pilgrimage with Peace

The Long Memory of Utah Philips

The Iconoclastic Shenanigans of Henry Flynt
​

It can be a funny old life, the things that happen to you, the people that you meet. My wife Audrey and I experienced a chance encounter when we took a brief pause in the routine to visit the great city of Cleveland a few weeks ago this past June. We wanted to spend some time slowing down, walking along Lake Erie, hiking in the metroparks, and doing some urban psychogeography in their wonderful downtown, where we stayed. It was a great visit.

After a first day of visiting the lake, eating at the excellent Cleveland Vegan, and exploring the old Arcade downtown, looking at the architecture, and finding a late night pho shop, the next day was spent once again hitting the streets. There were two places on my list I really wanted to go, though Audrey would tell you there are way more and that there are always way more. She wouldn’t be wrong, and it can be hard to put up with, that drive to go see or do one more thing, after which there is always one more thing. She puts up with a lot.

​The first stop after dipping our toes back into the lake at Edgewater Park was Zubal’s Books. Harvey Pekar had been on my mind since we were in Cleveland, as it rightly should be. I knew about Zubal’s from an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, where they visited the great store, that is housed in part, in an old Twinkie factory. We made some great scores there, a great book haul. I wouldn’t have known about that store if I hadn’t seen the clip. I’m really glad we went, and made it in time for the two hour window they are open to the public. Most of their business is mail order.

One of the titles I found was by Paul Feyeraband called Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, which proposes that it is counterproductive to have a single methodology with regards to scientific practices.  It's closer to the top of my list now because it seems to me, we are witnessing the endgame of the one true science. I also found a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald called Blue Flower about Novalis, which I knew nothing about before.  It seems to me the Romantic expressions of science via Goethe and Novalis are worth investigating as another thread or way science that could have been followed. These readings ought to go well alongside Henri Bortoft’s The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way Toward A Science of Conscious Participation in Nature.

After visiting Eclectic Eccentric and the neighboring Loganberry Books, where I also nabbed some more titles, we ate Michael’s Diner right on the Rapid Transit tracks in Shaker Heights. I should have gone for the Polish Fish Boy. Then we went to the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes and walked around the protected wetland as the rain drizzled. Finally we wound up at our last stop for the day, Lake View Cemetery. This place was designed by landscape architect Adolph Strauch who designed Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati, just a few blocks from where we live. Strauch had been inspired by the book Kosmos by Germany polymath Alexander von Humboldt who had written in it about Chinese garden cemeteries.  Kosmos can be considered part of the German Romanticist tradition in the science vein. Something was in the air.
 
After stopping at President Garfield's memorial, there was just one more thing I wanted to see in the cemetery, the Haserot Angel.

We drove up to it and after I got out of the car, a guy noticed my plates were from Hamilton County and he struck up a conversation saying he'd gone to the University of Cincinnati. He was very friendly and we had a nice conversation. He mentioned that he'd been the partner of Harvey Pekar's widow, comic writer Joyce Brabner, for fourteen years before she had died last August. He told me his name and the like, and that he'd just been visiting their gravesite (Brabner is buried next to Pekar but doesn't have a headstone yet).  His name was Lee Batdorf and he was a journalist at times. In meeting him it felt like we'd gotten a handshake from the city. If the timing of our day had been just a little off, and if I hadn't gone to that one last spot, I might not have met him. Meeting Lee Batdorf and having this encounter really charged me up and I'm very grateful for his friendliness.

When we got back home, and I got back to work at the library the next day, I put the graphic novel history "Harvey Pekar's Cleveland" on hold. When it came in, like some many other people in Harvey Pekar’s life, Lee was a character in this final work.  Zubal's books was also featured in the book. I hadn't read this one before, even though I'd read some segments of Pekar’s long running American Splendor and other works.

That was some of our Cleveland adventure. I recommend the city for anyone looking for a modest Midwest getaway. When you go, make sure you take the time to go visit Pekar and pay your respects to him by leaving a pen or pencil at him and Brabner’s grave.

Ordinary lives can transformed into the extraordinary through the medium of art. That is what Harvey Pekar did with his life and with the people whose lives he documented in his ongoing comic book series American Splendor. He celebrated the ordinary and gave it a lasting form.

The past decades have shown that when art is disconnected from everyday people it becomes a pastime for the elite. When it is embraced by working class intellectuals it can become a medium of shared experience, rather than a rubicon to be navigated through a maze of academic jargon and interpretation. When the artist in question also works a day job they stay in touch with the world of working people. When they also stay in their home town, in the Midwest, in middle America, they can’t be bent to change their form into the dominant styles. In the case of the writer who doesn’t sell out, they can’t be bought and made to write stories that conform to the preferred narrative trends of a culture in any given time. If they make their buck in some other way that doesn’t compromise their values, they can forge a path through life on their own terms with a foundation of a day job.

Such was the case of Cleveland comic book writer Harvey Pekar whose longest running day job gig was as a file clerk for the VA Hospital.

The boundary between work and play need not be so rigid anyway. There can be a flow between them, if artists weren’t always so eager to quit their day jobs and go pro. I don’t think there is anything ethically wrong with making a living out of what a person creates, but the potential to play to the tastes of the market must become a great temptation when paying the bills rides on paychecks derived from art, music, books.

If the work done is in accord with some kind of principle along the lines of what the Buddhists call right livelihood, it not only is rewarding in its own right, but becomes fodder for further creation, and gives an artist the grit needed to push past obstacles, to overcome the drudgery sometimes involved.  The creator who has not done much work, who has gotten to their position from nepotism, who don’t need to work, or didn’t reach the ability of being able to go full time in their chosen vocation, without having to grind onwards through shifts and shifts at the day job, will have a fundamental disconnect from people who don’t know what it is like to live a life of privilege.

As a writer of comics, music and highbrow literary criticism, Pekar sidestepped that issue by never giving up on his day job until the time of his legitimate retirement. He wrote and worked on his off time, and any time he could squirrel away on breaks and when things were slow on the job. In this respect Pekar is a patron saint of slackers everywhere. And like good slackers, he worked his ass off.

He read books and newspapers on his break times. He made phone calls to editors when he was on break. This grounding in the realities of work, made him the quintessential person to document what life was like in twentieth-century century Cleveland, in the twentieth-century rust belt of Midwest America. He was connected to his city and to the people who lived and worked there. Yet in the drive to create, he mastered the use of his free time, and distinguished himself as a comics writer, as a pioneer of the graphic novel memoir, of slice-of-life strips, as a jazz writer and record collector, as a keen collaborator with many of the great illustrators of his day.  

Pekar didn’t have outlandish style in dress. He didn’t need to don a beret to show he was an intellect of caliber. He could pay his own way through his work, and use his day job as a thrust block to generate the material for his comics.

​Thank goodness Harvey Pekar didn’t give a flying fuck about kryptonite. He hated superhero comics, and wasn’t interested in what some person with special powers could do. Who needs those anymore? He gave us the everyday everyman. The person on the street. These are the everyday people who populated his works. People your average non-corporate executive might run into while riding the bus home from work, or talk to in their neighborhood, or bump into at a convenience store. As he wrote about it later, “I don't ever write for entertainment, like no Hollywood stud or nothing. See, all that stuff, it doesn't mean anything! Plots and villains, all that stuff just to sell cereal and underwear.”

Pekar’s parents were Polish Jews who had emigrated to America where they ran a grocery store. His father was a Talmudic scholar and his mom knew Hebrew and a good deal about Jewish religion and history. She was also an avowed communist until the USSR sided with Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis in 1956. As a Zionist she would have rather had them side with Israel. Pekar’s parents worked all the time, and he spent a lot of time with his grandfather speaking in Yiddish.

Pekar grew up in a mostly African American neighborhood of Cleveland and got to see first hand the racial and class striations bifurcating America. He also came of age just as Cleveland had reached its industrial peak. Born on October 8, 1939 he was just entering the workforce when the 1958 recession hit. Having difficulty finding a regular give gave him lifelong respect for gigs.

Listening to the radio, going to used bookstores, and hanging out at the library were lifelines for Pekar and introduced him to a wide range of ideas. He was a bookhound and a record collector, with his main interest being jazz records. He started writing criticism in 1959 when his first piece appeared in The Jazz Review.

In 1962 Robert Crumb moved around the corner from where Crumb lived at 107th street and Euclid in the heart of Cleveland where hipsters hung out and bohemia swung. Crumb stayed their for four years working at the American Greeting Card company and the two became friends over their shared love of jazz. Here was one of Pekar’s entries into the world of underground comix.

He had been thinking about writing comics for awhile, the ideas percolating after conversations with Crumb, but they took awhile to gestate. In 1972 he drew some stick figure panels and showed his work to Crumb and illustrator Robert Armstrong. Both of these artists, already established in the scene, offered to illustrate Pekar’s stories. His first work in the medium ended up being a one-page piece called “Crazy Ed” that found its way onto the back of The People’s Comics a one-off issue by Crumb.

Over the next four years he wrote a number of other stories that were illustrated by a variety of artists and in appeared in various publications. Following the success and confidence building experiences of getting his stories illustrated and in print he started to focus on writing his own full issue series. It was 1976, two hundred years into the American experiment of independence, and the DIY spirit was everywhere inside the counterculture. His efforts with American Splendor fit right in with this mindset, as seen in the undergound comix movement, the underground press, and zine culture. His stories showed his life with frank realism and profound psychological depth. Ten years of effort paid off in 1986 when Doubleday released American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar collecting the first ten issues.

From his work, it didn’t seem like Pekar was pretentious. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a difficult grouch. His second wife had ambitions to become a career academic, and this was what eventually drove them apart. He didn’t want to leave Cleveland or the gig he had at the VA. She was determined to teach at an Ivy League school -though she never made it quite that far, but did get a gig of her own at a school in New England. Close enough for academic work, one can suppose. Her literary acumen was what got him into reading contemporary literary literature. I guess that’s called lit fic, and it turned out he really liked the stuff. But just to get back at her for leaving him, he started writing reviews for highbrow journal Review of Contemporary Fiction, where she would likely read his reviews. Yet in the way that he lived, he showed that a life of the mind isn’t limited to life of people in an ivory tower. Becoming a cultural critic requires no fancy degree.

His success at this point was in no small way related to his third wife and love of his life Joyce Brabner, who he had married two years before. Brabner was a caring soul who worked with people in prison and kids who were in trouble. She taught them how to write as a way of dealing with the monotony and drudgery of prison life. She wanted them to have an imaginative interior life. Something to help them cope. But she needed to cope herself. Noting the heavy emotional toll the kind of work she was doing took, she got involved in comics and fandom, something she’d loved since her childhood spent reading Mad Magazine. This eventually led her to become a co-owner of a comic book shop in Wilmington, Delaware. The shop stocked American Splendor, but one time, she didn’t get to read the latest issue before it was sold. So she dropped a note to Pekar in the mail asking if he could send them another copy. After this the two started corresponding, then talking on the phone together. Later she had some business to do in Cleveland and decided to visit Pekar while she was there. The two hit it off and got married the very next day. (Brabner is an American iconoclast herself and will eventually have an article dedicated to her own distinct life, work, and contribution to comics and culture.)

​The story of their courtship and early time together was told in “American Splendor No. 10” that he gave the title “Harvey's Latest Crapshoot: His Third Marriage to a Sweetie from Delaware and How His Substandard Dishwashing Strains Their Relationship.”

Because Pekar wrote about the people in his life and the world immediately around him, she knew what she was getting into with him. Part of her attraction to him was his radical honesty, and this led to a degree of openness that served them both well, and they only parted at death. Brabner became a regular feature in his comics over the years, and later, when they took in a foster kid and made her their own (that right there should tell you what kind of people they were), Danielle Batone became a part of the stories. So did Pekar’s bout with cancer, and his struggles with depression.

Pekar said that his work was about “a series of day-after-day activities that have more influence on a person than any spectacular or traumatic events. It's the 99 percent of life that nobody ever writes about.”

​After his death in 2010 one of his coworkers wrote “His writings in “American Splendor” reflected the way he was with us: a direct and unpretentious Everyman with an engaging, original slant on the issues of everyday life. Although tactful discretion was not one of Harvey's strong suits, he was on speaking terms with everyone from the lowest to the highest, and he kept his common touch despite literary fame from his comic books and movie. He added a unique, bright, off-beat note to the daily routine of our medical center.”

On Pekar’s gravestone his epitaph reads “Life is about women, gigs, and bein’ creative.”

As a life philosophy it is hard to beat. Let’s take a look at the three main components.

Life is about women. Married three times, and with girlfriends and hookups in between, its safe to say Pekar liked women. He is certainly not alone in this assessment. On his tombstone it all says he was a beloved husband and guardian. He was married to Brabner for twenty-six years before he passed away. He was Batone’s guardian from the time she was nine, seeing her into adulthood. She would have been around 21 when he died. These were the women in his life, along with coworkers and friends. Pekar had said in his comics that he is pro-feminist, even though his works sometimes showing him arguing with women. He was a passionate man, and perhaps a bit neurotic, but from reading his work, it seemed that Brabner and Batone helped keep this high-strung man grounded.

Then he said life is about gigs. Pekar came of age in 1959 when work was really hard to come by. This gave him a healthy respect for work. Pekar was a practical man, and he knew that to get by in a city that had started its economic decline when he was just starting to come up inside it, meant he had to find the gigs, the jobs. He went through a bunch of them before landing his perfect gig, a job as a civil servant file clerk for the VA. He did his work, he collected his jazz records, and wrote jazz criticism, he collected his books, and wrote literary criticism, he put together and self-published his comics, all in any spare scrap of time he could eke out of his existence. There was little money in the comics for him, and even after the film about his life was made in 2003, he struggled to pay the bills. But he schlepped on with the gigs and made his way. It would have been easy to not read, listen to music, and write, got to work, come home and watch TV. Instead, he took the subject matter of his ordinary relatable life, with all its grouchiness and grumbling, dialed it in to make it extraordinary and epic.

​The third prong of his epitaph is Bein’ Creative. The first two provide the glue that created the foundation for his further achievements. Through his efforts he wanted “to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing,” To get people to see the beauty in their everyday lives. People often think that in order to have a life, you need to have some money, or some kind of silver spoon handed to you so you can do what you want. Sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes what you need is a job, a 9 to 5 that forces you stick to a certain routine, a marriage that keeps you focused on the happiness of another person, and someone younger to care for and help bring up in the world. Beyond that, a bit of creative gumption to come home and keep working, work on the weekends, work early in the morning. That’s the kind of shit that turns a person into a working-class hero. That’s some real American splendor.

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

Gary Warne: Communiversity and the Suicide Club

Who Was Matokie Slaughter?

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams

Fakir Musafar and Friends

Going Native In America

Weird Weather with David Wills

Running Off to Join the Circus with Jim Tully

Dwelling on the Fringe with the Hubbards

Brother Blue: The Butterfly Bard

Raymond Thundersky: The Cincinnati Construction Clown

Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song

Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood

Ray Hicks: Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains

On A Pilgrimage with Peace

The Long Memory of Utah Philips

The Iconoclastic Shenanigans of Henry Flynt

.:. .:. .:.

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. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

As I promised in previous posts on the Songs of the Five Elements, and Songs of the Nine Planets, I am continuing the series with the music of the Zodiac -which will itself now become a series. There is no better place to start then Mary Lou Williams. 

Mary Lou William’s was born under the sign of Taurus. The sign of the bull is ruled by Venus, the planet of beauty, so it is no wonder she was able to hear the music of the constellations and transform them into her sensual and expressive modernist jazz composition, Zodiac Suite.

Born on May 8th, 1910 she was a child of Atlanta, Georgia but a product of the Midwest, growing up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Playing piano was something of a survival strategy for Williams. Her hostile white neighbors liked to throw bricks at her house, but this animosity was alleviated when she started playing piano for them. Music really does soothe the savage beast. Perhaps it can even soothe the racist beast. By the age of six she’d graduated to playing parties, and by seven was dubbed “The Little Piano Girl.” I suspect even the infant Jesus smiled down on her playing, just as he did on the “Little Drummer Boy” because she later converted to Catholicism, but not before passing through an exciting life as a traveling performer and arranger for some of the great names in jazz history.   

This phase started at age twelve when she was swinging through the Orpheum Circuit chain of vaudeville and movie theaters. The nineteen-twenties were roaring and she got to see it from the vantage point of a precocious adolescent performer. She must have been a musician in a former life to come back into this one with her fingers ready and poised to channel the music of the spheres onto the black and white of her cosmic keyboard. In this time she moonlighted in Duke Ellington’s band the Washingtonians. Then, a few years later, while in Cleveland, she met her first husband, the saxophonist John Overton Williams. She followed him and his band the Syncopators back to his town of Memphis before hitching a wagon with him out west to Oklahoma where he’d been invited to be a part of Andy Kirk’s group, Twelve Clouds of Joy.

Something about this band and the number twelve must have followed her around for her life. Some quality about the number twelve must have resonated in her soul. After all, the twelve signs of the zodiac are numbered twelve, as are the apostles of Christ, of whom she later dedicated herself to. In numerology twelve is connected to the starry heavens, as suggested by the constellations. It is also the combination three (ternary logic, triolectics and the trinity) and four (the number of the directions and their elements).

​It wasn’t all easy listening for her out there in Tulsa. It wasn’t a smooth jazz ride. Any working musician knows there are hours of toil and other jobs taken just to keep the bread and bacon the table. She found herself hauling corpses for a local undertaker for a spell while her husband got to play. The band moved to Missouri, Kansas and there she found herself sitting in with them at last. Here her own compositions started to flow into the mix of Kirk’s repertoire. The song’s “Mary’s Idea,” “Roll ‘Em” “Little Joe from Chicago, and “Froggy Bottom” all came from her creative mind. 

​Her recording career promptly followed beginning in 1929 with arrangements for the group, and the following year she cut her own solo piano to wax with “Drag ‘Em” and “Night Life.” She was getting hot and the records started selling, opening new doors for her in the music world as her star rose to prominence. She became Kirk’s permanent second pianist, had solo shows lined up, and found herself sought after as an arranger by the likes of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Earl Hines. 

With fellow Twelve Clouds of Joy bandmember Dick Wilson she produced “In the Groove” in 1937. The cigarette companies were even lining up to work with her and she wrote “Camel Hop” to the delight of Turkish tobacco enthusiasts and sellers across the land. (I wonder if they paid her in camel cash.)

Benny Goodman at this point wanted to keep her under his wing, but she liked being able to be the queen of her own world, and work with whoever the muse directed her to. Around the same time, the muse, or at least cupid, had bailed on her marriage, and she left John Williams in 1942.

This might have something to do with why she quit the Twelve Clouds of Joy. Harold “Shorty” Baker also quit with her. The two were in a new relationship together. They hooked up with drummer Art Blakely, at least musically, and formed a six-piece ensemble. Six is half of twelve, a number of the sun, but this group didn’t stay out in the daylight long, and the band dissolved. Soon she had a showcase for herself as a member of Duke Ellington’s group, but that didn’t last terribly long either.

Planting herself in New York City she got a taste of the radio bug, hosting her own show on WNEW, a Class A clear-channel radio station that had begun operation in 1922. The aim of her show was instructive, to pass the torch and inspire younger musicians. Mary Lou William’s Piano Workshop is the kind of thing I’d like to hear on radio today. This corresponded with her role as a mentor at the time to heavyweights Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. The jazz world was poised for bebop and she was right there when it happened. In an interview for Melody Maker the songstress recalls, “During this period Monk and the kids would come to my apartment every morning around four or pick me up at the Café after I'd finished my last show, and we'd play and swap ideas until noon or later.” As for the radio station, Boris Karloff would later ride the airwaves of WNEW in the following decade, with his 1950s children’s radio program. I bet there was nothing like cuddling up to Karloff’s voice as kid.

It was after this that Zodiac Suite poured out of her being. The zodiac is a common word for those of us interested in astrology and astronomy. But what is it exactly? The word comes from the ancient Greek, zōdiakòs kýklos (ζῳδιακός κύκλος), which means a “cycle or circle of little animals.” From there it went into Latin, zōdiacus, and then slipped into English. The zodiac can be considered as a belt around the Earth that extends about eight degrees north and south of the ecliptic, or the path of the movement of the sun around the celestial sphere. Because many of the constellations of the zodiac appear as animals or mythological figures, that’s how it got the name, circle of little animals. Not all of them are animals, but enough are to make it stick: Leo the Lion, Taurus the Bull, Pisces the Fish, Scorpio the Scorpion, Cancer the Crab are all examples.

In composing the Zodiac Suite she followed ancient tradition. Musicians have long sought to communicate the nature of celestial bodies through the medium of modulated sound waves. Her suite is one of the most successful and pleasing to the ears of our times. It rightly consists of twelve interconnected pieces, one for each sign. It starts with Aries and ends with Pisces, the same way the zodiacal year begins and ends with the Vernal Equinox, the point of its eternal return in spring.

The piece is as much modernist classical as it is modernist jazz. The year was 1945 and the whole midcentury thing was ready to burst. This music was a part of that, and the era can be heard when you listen to the original Asch recording. The music evokes those times so perfectly

The idea had first come to her in 1942 when she’d gotten hold of an astrology book and was inspired to write pieces for her musical friends. She had the first three written when she set about playing them on air at WNEW, and improvised the remaining nine. Al Lucas backed her on bass and Jack Parker on drums. Later she went into the studios of Asch Recording. Moe was always hungry for something new to press to record, and he championed Williams. She brought in Lucas and Parker to record the suite with her as a trio for Mr. Moe.

William’s work prefigured the later work of jazz and classical composers who sought to fuse the two together. The sound here is also distinctly American. Though it has twelve as a number, it has little in common with dodecaphonic music. There may be some influence, but it is slight, and while she liked the trio Asch recording, she wanted to do up Zodiac Suite with an orchestral backing and she started to re-sculpt the pieces into that for such a format.

 At the time she was in a relationship with Milton Orent. Now who is Milt Orent, you ask? Milt was a double bass player who’d received a classical musical education and had a deep knowledge of twentieth century composition. He worked as a studio musician and arranger for NBC radio. And while Williams was with Orent he played her the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, and probably some other cats who’d gone atonal. Orent gave Williams his input when she recast the suite for a large ensemble. For her own part, she put in more opportunities for the players to improvise, prefiguring the scores of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen where certain segments are left up to the players intuition. Still, Zodiac Suite doesn’t sound European at all, but clearly American, as each piece jaunts through the nature of each constellatory sign.

Her general blueprint did remain and most of the pieces are dedicated to people who were born under a particular constellation. She dedicated “Aries” to Billie Holiday and Ben Webster while “Taurus” was for Ellington. Her lover Shorty Baker got “Gemini” while Lem Davis was given “Cancer.” A surprising number of influential jazz musician are born under the sign of “Libra” and she dedicated it to Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. The rest of the signs follow suites with the luminaries of the age.

This version was first performed at the Town Hall in New York City on New Years Eve, 1945. A couple of obstacles threw themselves in the way and part of the show was bungled, leaving Williams sick for a week. This kind of thing can happen to a dedicated artist. Meanwhile the tapes for the recording went missing and it ended up being bootlegged around in Europe.

​A number of recordings now exist including the first trio version on Asch. Aaron Diehl and the Knights have meanwhile recorded a smashing version, just out in 2023, of the orchestral/big band version. This recording is more in line with the modernist vision she had when revising it for the concert hall, and the shades of modernity in classical music are foregrounded a bit more here, than on other recordings. 

The music life can be a hard life. Everyone knows about the rock and roll casualties lost to drugs. The jazz casualties are just as great, and heroin had long been a part of its subterranean underworld. We know about the marijuana use in jazz circles, can understand it, even celebrate it by lighting up a spliff, as one may now do with full legality in many states. Yet the heroin was there all along, getting into the bloodstream of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis among many others.

I don’t know if this was what was on her mind, but something snapped in Williams when she was on tour in Paris, France, 1954. She got up from the piano and that was it, for many years. She was done. Dizzy Gillespie’s wife Lorraine had turned to Catholicism, and Williams followed, converting and shifting the direction of her life, away from the musical service she had given her many fans, to service in the form of the Bel Canto Foundation she started to help the poor, to help poor musicians, and those suffering from the tragedy addiction so often brings its way. With the money shed earned in her career, and some gifts from friends, she opened a half-way house and thrift store in Harlem.

Charlie Parker died in 1955 and she stayed away from music after that for awhile, putting her energy into the new efforts she was making on behalf of those in need. Still, she became close to two priests who told her she could use her prodigious gifts in service to the creator, but it she wasn’t ready just yet to get back to the work destiny had in mind for her. Dizzy Gillepsie also encouraged to get back to composing at the piano. Nobody wanted her to quit playing.

Another priest named Father O’Brien ended up becoming very close with Williams and helped her as a manager in the 1960s. He even had a part in getting her to establish a new jazz club in Manhattan and she got swinging again. Gillespie had introduced her to Bishop John Wright, from Pittsburgh. With his clerical help she went back to the town where she’d first performed and started the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival.

Williams had long had the gift of teaching and Wright got her a gig as a teacher at Seton High School. Her mind had turned by this point to the sacred implications of music in worship. She was commissioned by the church to write the music for a mass and it became the first ever mass done in the style of jazz, the Pittsburgh Mass of 1964. It ended up being released by Folkways as Mary Lou Williams or The Black Christ of Andes. It had developed out of a piece she wrote in honor of St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of mixed-race people, barbers, innkeepers, public health workers, all those seeking racial harmony, and animals, for his feast day in 1962

​The work is a visionary masterpiece of spiritual jazz incorporating the blues, avant-garde idioms, and spirituals. She had found her way back to music, and continued to teach, stressing the importance of jazz history and its place in American life.

​Her work is well worth acquainting yourself with as you take another trip around the sun.

​​.:.  /|\  .:.   .:.  /|\  .:.    .:.  /|\  .:.

(We'll get to Stockhausen and his Tierkreis cycle next. I've touched on it before briefly in the previous link and also briefly in this Brief History of Space Music as well as an early essay of mine for Brainwashed.com: Music from Sirius: The Dreams of Karlheinz Stockhausen, which I can't find on the site anymore, but it looks like someone put up on Scribd -and also has been referenced in some academic papers - who knew!? 

​In the patches of sound bites that make up the quilt that is Negativland's 2020 album The World Will Decide, the song “Before I Ask” portrays an underlying feeling of panic that persists throughout the experience of the album. With the help of the voices of Siri, Alexa and Google, the song is able to convey a certain message about social media usage in this day and age, and how scary it can be. It contains the vocals of David “The Weatherman” Wills, who intensely shouts absurd questions into the void, each question getting weirder than the last. Like some songs on the album, this track contains a dark undertone in terms of sound. It’s the type of sound that makes people’s heart beat faster and faster, the feeling of uncertainty pushing down on them.  

Longtime Negafan's will know that the Weatherman, or the "dumb stupid Weatherman" as he is called. (Yes, sometimes he operates under the moniker of the Clorox Cowboy under certain unclean and dirty conditions.) The Weatherman is no stranger to shouting at electronic voices or having conversations with recordings. 

He is also no stranger to wiring up his whole house with outside microphones to record ambient sounds. The Weatherman is something of a "home tape" recording enthusiast, and also a radio scanner enthusiast, and a radio ham jamming enthusiast.

Remember JamCon '84? This was the collection of Over The Edge episodes presented as a radio documentary covering a convention of amateur radio jammers, with commentary on radio jamming and Culture jamming, and the history and cultures surrounding them. This whole aspect of listening to jammers in California jamming other ham radio operators was something the Weatherman really got into with his many trusty scanners.

All this jamming makes more and more sense the more you listen to Negativland. David Wills (born April 3, 1954) is one of the founding members of Negativland, and since the band hardly made any money over the first few decades of their existence, he worked as a cable repairman until he retired from that job in the 1990s. If you know he worked as a cable repairman it makes songs like "The Playboy Channel" of which he is the main narrator, or "lead singer" take on a whole new resonance.

As a cable repairman, audio enthusiast, and person who loved to make all kinds of tapes of just about everything, especially family tapes, the detritus of the Weatherman's audio recordings are littered throughout the Negativland discography, and he took center stage in many episodes of Over the Edge.

His notable Over the Edge contributions include the episodes that make up the Willsaphone Stupid Show, The Weatherman's Dumb Stupid Come Out Line, Sex Dirt, and many others. As a frequent contributor and caller over the years the Weatherman's contributions can be found in many episodes of the Over the Edge. One of his greatest contributions to the show was the Booper, heard on nearly all episodes of the OTE since he first gave one to Don Joyce.

The Booper is an electronic oscillator invented by the dumb stupid Weatherman. It has been described as "an electronic noise-making device that creates unstable feedback using multiple transistors and an FM radio receiver. The resulting sounds are different each time they are played but are sure to excite the ears and engage the mind."

Wills is also a founder of the Fake Bacon Society. He is also a recluse with a bit of OCD about cleaning and cleaning products. Fans will recognize him armed with 409 and other cleaning products to wash away the sex dirt. Because he is a recluse, it has been difficult for fans of Negativland and sometimes even the band themselves to contact him. He just goes into recluse mode. Sometimes he has shown up in virtual form at Negativland concerts on a TV screen or video projector. Starting in June 2008, The Weatherman has been posting audio, video, pictures and more from his enormous archives on his section (Dumb) of the Negativland website. Many off air recordings there to listen to for the radio and scanner enthusiast.

The best way to get a sense of his personality is to listen to the radio shows he is a part of, and those Negativland songs where his vocals are prominent. You could also learn a lot from this video At Home with the Weatherman.

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

Once a month over the next year Sothis Medias will feature a brief sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the transformations of the Butterfly Bard, Brother Blue. This month we are going to explore Cincinnati legend and outsider artist, Raymond Thundersky.

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

Once upon a time when I was in junior high and high school, I started seeing a man out and about on my skateboarding-and-metro-bus-riding excursions around the city. It was a man I became somewhat afraid of, though I later learned those fears were unfounded.

I was afraid of him because he wore a clown collar and carried around a construction workers lunch box. Some people called him the construction clown. As I got older I wondered if he was some kind of John Wayne Gacy impersonator, as Gacy had been a construction worker who moonlighted as a clown. Even though I love the circus, clowns are high up on the spectrum of creepy, for me anyway. Maybe he was just a fan of ICP, yet I never saw him with a bottle of Faygo.

Most of the time when I saw him it was downtown, near construction sites. I've always loved going downtown, ever since the summer after the sixth grade when in the summer my mom put me on a metro and sent me down to see my sister at her workplace, the Bagel Stop, and go to the Friend's of the Library book sale on Fountain Square. I still have the poetry anthology I picked up that day. As I got further into skateboarding, downtown became one of my favorite spots, and it was just a quick bus ride away, and only fifty cents on the weekends, and during the summer. Downtown also happened to be a favorite spot for the construction clown, but at the time, I didn't know why.

There was one occasion where I was waiting at a bus stop in Westwood -a layover stop across the street from the then still going Westwood Movie Theater- and the construction clown was waiting with me. He kept staring  at me but not talking, as if he knew I was scared, and delighted in making me more so. I contemplated skating down the street to another bus stop, but knew he would still end up on the same bus with me.

Another time, stoned and cotton mouthed on my way back home with a friend who was spending the night, the construction clown got on the bus and sat behind us. He put his hands on the arm handle or rest in front of him,  that was also part of the seat I had my bottom on. It was quite unsettling. Most people don't rest their hands on those blue plastic bits if a person is sitting on the seat in front of them.

I'd see him around for years to come after, though in time, without as much frequency. It was only later I learned he was an artist. An outsider. An outsider artist. And that it wasn't his lunch he was carrying in the lunchbox, but his colored pencils, crayons and paper. 

​Raymond Thundersky was obsessed with construction sites, and deconstruction sites. It was the demolition of buildings he most liked to draw. And I also learned he was a Native American. Besides the construction clown his other nickname was the Chief or the Mohawk Chief. 

Though Cincinnatian's inhabit a landscape vibrant with the traces of past cultures, the Moundbuilders, the Adena, the Hopewell, and later the Shawnee, with burial mounds set in the midst of urban neighborhoods and in our many parks, the presence of a Native American community here seems absent to me. Personally, I have known just one or two Native American's in this town. 

His obituary in the Cincinnati Enquirer says he was born in California in 1950. His father was Richard Brightfire Thunder-Sky, the last full blooded chief of the Mohawk tribe. His dad was born on St. Regis Reservation on border of New York and Canada. At some point Richard went out to California to work as an artist and actor. He had appearances in nine Hollywood Westerns... Cowboy and Indian films in other words.

He was Hungarian on the other side of his family. Another form of noble lineage, came from his mom whose father hailed from the Habsburg Dynasty. Irene Szalatzky met Richard at a party in an American Legion in NYC, where her father had emigrated to after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Married in 1946, the couple popped out two before coming to Cincinnati in 1961. & they had a long marriage of forty-three years. The couple had settled in the Northside neighborhood, and this was where I encountered Raymond around the streets and waiting for the bus when I was in my early twenties, just before his death in 2004. 

Raymond's drawings were monomaniacal, in a way similar to Louis Wain's: whereas Wain was obsessed with drawing and painting cats, cats, more cats and when painting cats he was drawing cats. Thundersky's single minded focus centered on construction and demolition sites, with a small dose of clown. The clowns weren't so much in the pictures as they were in the cryptic captions he would write on a drawing where something was being built such as "New Clown Costume Factory." He also brought his ancestry and their possible trajectories into the mix with titles like "Future Mohawk Freeway."

​I have friends who also have tendencies towards a certain single minded focus. Some might say they are on the spectrum. Hell, we're all on the spectrum somewhere, or there would be no spectrum to be on, no point A or point B. Yet those close to Mr. Thundersky thought he might be autistic even though he was never formally diagnosed.

Yet he was assigned a social worker named Bill Ross in 1999. Ross was also an artist and once he gained the trust of Thundersky he was invited into the mans Northside apartment, where over time he got to know a bit more of the background of Thundersky's family. Thundersky's father apparently left California to get a job here in Cincinnati as an ironworker alongside several other Mohawk families.

For her article "Trickster, Artist and Native American" Mary Annette Pember notes that, "Ray Cook, an editor at Indian Country Today Media Network who is from the St. Regis Mohawk tribe notes that “Thundersky” is not a Mohawk name. He speculated that Raymond’s father might have changed the family name while working in Hollywood into something considered 'more Indian.'"

And further: "According to David Stadden, Ojibwe, Public Relations coordinator for the St. Regis Tribe, neither Raymond nor his father Richard Thundersky are enrolled in the tribe."

Cook however did note that photos of Raymond showed a strong resemblance to Mohawk families.

Raymond's childhood love of the circus and admiration for his father's work on construction sites gave birth to his distinct and unique way of dressing, and his independent vision as a self-taught artist.

In 2001 Keith Banner and Bill Ross put together a small show of Raymond's artwork, and it set the stage for the legacy that was to follow the Cincinnati icon, with his pieces later traveling to shows across the nation and around the world.

He left behind over 2,000 drawings of demolition and construction sites when he died. Building and destroying were for him fused together. There was no creation without destruction. 

In 2004 Ross and Banner Founded Thunder-Sky Inc. This is a non-profit gallery and small storefront in Northside that has been a home for other outsider artists. It provided workspaces and a place to exhibit works whose origins lay outside the academy, outside the realm of production conferred by the economy of the art world and beyond the scope of art schools.

​Raymond was still alive when the space first opened, but he didn't like to work there. He preffered his own routine and methods, though he did like to go to the parties and openings held in the space.

Keith Banner noted that “Raymond was a cultural and spiritual figure who, through the persistence of his art-making and brave exploration of his own aesthetic universe became a touchstone for what it means to be creative and alive.”

The same year the gallery was founded Raymond passed away from cancer.  Artworks, a non-profit group that pairs students and professional artists to paint murals all around Cincinnati made a mural of Raymond Thundersky at another outsider artist hot spot, Visionaries & Voices. 

As a youth I didn't understand Raymond or what he was about. I didn't see beyond the clown suit or beneath the hard hat or what lay inside his lunchbox. Even though I was naively afraid of him, I'm appreciative of my encounters with him around the city.

Thundersky Inc. closed its doors at the end of 2020. But I swear I can feel the spirit of Raymond walking down the streets, looking for new demolition sites and seeing what new buildings are sprouting up in his old haunts.

Each month of this year I am posting a very brief sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the phone phreakery and child like sense of wonder present in the life of Joybubbles. This month we are going to explore the ukulele strung shenanigans of that soprano toned vaudevillian throwback, Tiny Tim. He lived a life full of verve, vision, vibrato, and not a few eccentrities. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The history of phone phreaking has fascinated me since I was a kid and first learned that people explored the telephone network as a hobby. In junior high I learned a trick using a paper clip on a payphone to get free phone calls -usually back home in Westwood from Cheviot telling my parents I'd be out skateboarding longer -or asking for a ride. Or to page someone to try and get some weed. I remember being sold a joint of oregano instead. 

I always thought I'd like to learn to phone phreak, but that era was already mostly dead out just as I was learning about it. Instead I got on to bulletin board systems before right around the time America Online was getting online. The phreaks still called to my imagination.

When I read the book Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley I got a much more intimate history of the phreaks behind the phones. One of those was a guy named Joybubbles. He was born in Richmond Virginia on 25 May 1949,  as Josef Carl Engressia, Jr.

Joybubbles was a maverick who had perfect pitch. That talent allowed him to whistle his way through the phone system. 2600 hertz was the magic key to get you into the Ma Bell's magic telecommunications kingdom. 

A bit more background may be necessary here. It all dates back to the time AT&T implemented automatic switches. These used tone dialing, a form of in-band signaling. There were tones used intended only for AT&T personell, but if a person with a phone happened to know those tones, they could use them even if they didn't work for the company. The 2600 hz tone caused a phone switch to think a call had ended while still leaving the carrier line open, allowing those who knew how to do it to make free long distance and international calls -at a time when these were very expensive. 

It was a huge loophole in the phone system the phreaks started to exploit and build a culture around. Joybubbles is credited with having discovered the tone around 1957, though at that time he still went by Joe Engressia. He was seven years old and blind. He figured out that whistling the fourth E above middle C (a frequency of 2637.02 Hz) would stop a dialed phone recording. Not knowing what he had done, he called up the phone company and asked why the recordings had stopped. Joe Engressia is considered to be the father of phreaking. After he learned what it did, he began to use the ability to make friends and talk on the phone with people around the country.

Other phreaks started figuring out the 2600 secret as well. Bill Acker ("Bill from New York" on the phone lines) figured out how the operating principles of the network. He used a tape recorder to play a 2600 tone to the same effect. John Draper who was friends with Joe discovered the whistles that came as a free toy in Cap'n Crunch  boxes produced the necessary tone, and he took his nome de phreak from the sugary cereal.   

When Joe went to the University of South Florida in the late 1960s he earned himself the nickname "the Whistler" for his many mighty phone feats. He had figured out how to make the phone company think he was calling from a different location, thus circumventing the chance of being traced, and more importantly, the chance of getting billed, or worse. Still, he did get caught and disciplined by the University.

After picking up a degree in philosophy he  moved to Tennessee where he continued to be a phreak. Eventually the phone detectives tracked him down. The phone company SBT&T first noticed his phreaking activities in summer 1968, and an employee of the Florida Bell Telephone Company illegally monitored Engressia's telephone conversations before ratting him out to the Feds.

He was arrested and charged with malicious mischief. It might have been mischief, but he was just having fun, talking to people, exploring the network, and seeing what he could do. He got a fair amount of publicity from his arrest and the public adored him as a blind genius. It also helped spread the art of phreaking to others who wouldn't have heard about it had news not ran with the story. 

​He subsequently gave up phreaking, but remained active with ham radio. It shouldn't be suprising but many phreaks were also hams. Joe had the call sign WB0RPA, and held an amateur extra class license, the highest grade issued. He also earned both a General radiotelephone operator license and a commercial radiotelegraph operator's license, as well as a ship radar endorsement on these certificates. He even qualified for the now-obsolete aircraft radiotelegraph endorsement on the latter license, a license few people rarely got in the first place. 

He also remained active operating phone story lines. Story lines and joke lines were something phone enthusiasts put together with rudimentary answering machines. A number was given out for the line, and a person could call and listen to the recording, of jokes, the story, or whatever other subject the operator chose to speak about.  "Stories and Stuff" was the name of one his lines which he usually updated on the weekend. In the early 1980s, he ran a phone line called the "Zzzzyzzerrific Funline." It was listed in the very last entry in the phone book. On the Zzzzyzzerrific Funline he called himself Highrise Joe and would rant about how much he loved Valleyfair amusement park. Another regular topic he talked about was Up with People, a non-profit that promotes a five-month program involving travel, the performing arts, volunteering, and various workshops focused around intercultural communication to teach young adults how to interact in a multi-cultural environment and create change in communities with varying needs.

In the 1980's Joe started using and then adopted the name Joybubble's. This was followed by a decision to quit being an adult and leave his responsibilities behind him. Part of this decision came as his way of reclaiming the childhood he had lost as someone who had been abused as a kid.

In 1982 he moved to Minneapolis where he established the Church of Eternal Childhood. He became an ordained minister and set it up as a non-profit. The visionary aim of his church was to help adults reclaim the joys of childhood. He lived a monastic lifestyle in support of this goal, supporting himself on disability with occassional side gigs doing research on smells for the scent industry. Part of the outreach of his church involved reading to kids at library's and setting up phone calls to kids with terminal illnesses. He neve did lose the love of the phone. 

In 1991 he changed his name legally to Joybubbles. He used the name as the line in the sand between the unhappiness of his own childhood and the life he made for himself. 

From the time he changed his name until his death on August 8, 2007 he continued to do the work he felt mattered most: spreading a sense of childlike wonder to the world. 

“I wish everybody would take a little time, even if it’s only once a month, to get out of the rat race into the sandbox and play like a child.”

From his little apartment in Minneapolis he reached out across the telephone to people all over the world to give them his unique take on life, and spread his joy. 

“People ask me: ‘What’s your secret of happiness? You seem to be happy most of the time, when we meet up with you.’ Well, I’ll tell ya: I think one of my greatest secrets of happiness is that I can cry really hard when I need to, and I can let myself feel way, way sad. I think that crying is not a breakdown; it’s a breakthrough, and sometimes when I’m putting myself together, I have to let myself come apart.”

.:. .:. .:.
​
Sources: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/us/20engressia.html
https://www.twincities.com/2015/03/13/daily-juggle-my-child-led-me-back-to-joybubbles-the-eternal-5-year-old/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles

​Do you like what you have read here? Then consider signing up for Seeds from Sirius, the monthly webzine from Sothis Medias. It rounds up any blog posts here as well as containing much additional material, news of various shortwave and community FM transmissions, music,  deindustrial fiction, strange meanderings and more: 
http://www.sothismedias.com/seeds-from-sirius.html

​Last month in the American Iconoclast / Great American Eccentrics series we looked at the work of Peace Pilgrim. This month we are going to listen to some stories with Ray Hicks, Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

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

Respect is something I have for Ray Hicks, for the life he lived, the stories he told, the lives he touched. Lenard Ray Hicks August 29, 1922 – April 20, 2003) was a bard without ever calling himself a bard. He lived on Beech Mountain in North Carolina his whole entire life, knowing the land and its moods the way a long time married couple know each other. He was a storyteller, and a keeper of the Jack Tales, and these were his favorite to tell.

The most well known Jack tale is the one about when he goes and sells a cow to buy some magic beans. Instead of ending up in the poor house Jack climbs a huge beanstalk and comes face to face with a giant in the clouds. There are many more of these Jack tales besides the beanstalk story: Jack Frost, Jack the Giant Killer, Little Jack Horner, and This is the House that Jack Built just to a name a few. The stories are of Cornish and English progeny and were passed down as fairy tales, nursery rhymes, legends of the olden times. 

Now Ray Hicks family had come to America in the 1700s and his great-grandfather on his mothers side was Council Harmon  (1803-1896). Harmon's grandfather Cutliff Harmon (1748-1838) was believed to have brought the Jack tales to America when he came to settle. They found themselves in North Carolina, living deep in the hills where these stories, alongside the skills of instrument building (banjos, dulcimers' and more), distilling, foraging for food and medicine, were passed on from one generation to another. Ray grew hearing the stories and hearing the songs. The Harmon-Hicks family was  also known for having a unique knowledge of old British ballads. 

Living on the mountain, working on the land, knowing how to read the weather, knowing what tubers to eat when he was watching the cows up in the grazing patch, not even age ten. Hearing the stories whisper themselves to him as if by a wind on the mountain, seeing the hex signs his ma had painted on either side of the front door on the porch ceiling to keep out the ghosties, the knowledge percolated inside of him.

Sometimes when he was out on the land, tending to things, working alone, Ray would pull out his  Franch harp from the front pocket of his overalls and start to play. Sometimes the birds would come and listen. Perhaps because Jack still a harp, and Ray was a kind of Jack himself, he was skilled at playing the French harp -the Harmon-ica. 

Ray was experienced with old time ways of healing. A Granny Woman often came to the family when someone was sick or injured and to help deliver babies. She once saved Rays leg when it had been hit with a slop bucket thrown at him by his sister, after he stole some precious cake she was baking for her honey. The Granny Woman applied a poultice of wheat flour to his injury and it healed him. Later Ray became famous as being able to get rid of people's warts. People would even send him letters asking for help getting rid of their warts. He knew the formula and was able to do this even if they weren't sitting their together on his front porch for a spell.

Ray was a tall man, standing nearly seven feet. Perhaps some of the blood from the many encounters Jack had with giant folk had spilled into him. 

When he spoke, he spoke as if from out of time. His peculiar dialect was a bit strange even for other Appalachian's. The Hicks and Harmon families had preserved in their speech many old English terms, some that had last seen regular use in the 15th century. He learned his stories the way other storyteller's do, by listening, copying and then developing the mastery to spin a yarn.

"I wasn’t teached. That’s the way I growed up a-talking. I learned my Jack tales mostly from my dad’s father, John Benjamin Hicks. My grandmother Julie told Indian, witch and haint tales, too. I’d set and pick the burrs out of the hanks as she spun, and listen. They were both well in speech.”


The Jack tales had changed somewhat after coming to America, just as the Ballads had. In the Appalachian versions the tale would often feature a sheriff in place of a king or nobleman. 
To make his way in the world Ray worked as a farmer and mechanic. He kept to the ways of collecting herbs and plants, such as ginseng and many others, as way to make living. 

The first time he told stories in public was in 1951. He'd been invited to speak to a classroom of students at an elementary school. Since that time his reknown as a teller of tales started to spread.

Ray married Rosa Violet Harmon, who had also grown up on Beech Mountain. They had five kids together and raised them in the same cabin he had grown up in. 
He said his family was a family of talkers and that sometimes they talked just to try and out talk each other. Because talk was entertainment and that's what people did when they got together. Talked, sang, broke bread and talked some more. 

In 1973 he was invited to perform at first National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. He was invited back many many times. This festival is considered to be a major point in the revival of storytelling, and the festival is still a going concern. It's very fitting Ray would have told his tales there in their first year. 

Folk musician David Holt, who considered Ray to be one of his mentors said of him, " He was what we call an all day talker. He would start talking the minute you got there…start right in on a story. He had the most amazing accent, kinda talked way back in his throat. He’d say, “Jack seen a man comin down out of the woods with a great big head and he was knocking big trees down and hittin big rock boulders and wasn’t even hurtin’ a hair in his own head… he said, ‘Hello there. Who are ye?’ ‘ My name is Hardy Hard Head.’ ‘Well Hardy hard Head you must be…into my ship.’ ” By the end of the day he’d still be talking, telling you the story. You’d get up and say, “Ray, it’s gettin late, gotta go.” He’d follow you all the way up to the car standing in the road still telling the tale. You’d just have to put down the window, wave and say, “Ray, I’ll see you..love you” and drive off with him still standing there still telling the story in the middle of the dirt road."

Ray learned not to plan out his tale telling in advance. He called his style of story improvisation "unthoughted". “I learnt not to plan my stories. That’ll ruint you. I just tell the one that hits my mind when I hit the mic.” 

In 1983 Ray was named a heritage fellow through the National Endowment for the Arts. He had to be dragged to Washington to receive the award from then vice-prez George Bush. And while he was unimpressed with the fast city ways of the nations capital, it was the one of many honors and awards given to him over the course of the rest of his life. 
As Ray became famous for his gifts at telling tales, he turned down a lot of opportunities to be on TV shows and the like because he never wanted to travel farther from his home than it would take to get back the same day. He was so dedicated to his place in the world that he said no to these requests. Instead he often spoke to schools in the surrounding area. He also didn't go around talking about his ability. He had a humility about him that made it to where even some of his neighbors on the mountain and around the area didn't know the treasure they had living so close to home.

His home was important to him. It had been built in 1912 by his grandpa and with help from the extended family. He lived in it his whole life. Ray felt weird and odd when he went further afield. 

Hicks died of prostate cancer at the age of 80 in 2003 and his wife followed him into the silent clearing of the woods in 2014. 

There are many other great videos of Ray on youtube, including an hour long documentary called "Last of the Old Time Storytellers". 

The biography of him by Lynn Salsi “The Life and Times of Ray Hicks: Keeper of the Jack Tales” is a great book for those who went to dig further. In a way it is really his autobiography. It’s his words that she recorded and collected over many years and then edited into cohesive life story. Reading it you feel like you are sitting with him and his family for a spell on his cabin porch underneath the hex sign painted there by his mother to keep out the ghosties, privileged to be listening to him tell his tale. It’s a true bardic transmission.

Other re/sources: 
https://www.rayhicks.com/
https://www.davidholt.com/mentors/ray-hicks/
​https://wncmagazine.com/feature/giant_storyteller

​Do you like what you have read here? Then consider signing up for Seeds from Sirius, the monthly webzine from Sothis Medias. It rounds up any blog posts here as well as containing much additional material, news of various shortwave and community FM transmissions, music,  deindustrial fiction, strange meanderings and more: 
http://www.sothismedias.com/seeds-from-sirius.html