Joining Joseph Byrd's Metaphysical Circus

​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.

Barney Childs

​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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