And Counting

Today I begin my seventh decade on this big, blue marble. I remember sitting in Sister Concepta's class in 1965. She was explaining years becoming decades becoming centuries. Sister stressed that the 21st century begins on 2001, not 2000, since there was no year zero. I did the math realizing I would be 47 at the beginning of the next century, and thought that I'd never get to be that old. At age eleven, 47 seemed ancient.

As the years progressed, my awareness of life's ephemerality strengthened. Originally, the target date for my demise was 27 like Robert Johnson, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, et.al. That goal passed, and my sights set on 32, the age the real life Dr. Gonzo, Oscar Zeta Acosta, thought would be his end point. Acosta made it to 39 before his disappearance and alleged death. Time for me, like the de Rochemont brothers' old newsreel, marched on with no end in sight.

Despite my best efforts to live as dissolute a life as possible, the years paraded past. Yet now with six decades of polluted water under my ramshackle bridge, I feel younger and healthier than I have in a long time.

Why, you may ask. I ponder the same question on a daily basis. Clean living and pure thoughts...that obviously isn't it. Genetics explains some of it. But I believe my true fountain of youth springs from the well of friendship with which I have been blessed.

It begins with my muse, Kristin. She got me back to playing music and writing. Without her support, I would not be playing guitar in public, nor writing this blog. My family has always been there despite the fact that I often take them for granted. Then there is the fraternity and sisterhood of musicians in Fells Point and beyond. Their support and encouragement to this old folkie has been heartwarming. Akin to them are the fellow vagabonds and
denizens of my neighborhood.

Paradoxically, the most recent two groups are among the oldest. In the past few months I have reconnected with compadres from prep school and college. These soul mates have rekindled a friendship and brotherhood that complete my circle of life.

To all of you, I humbly express my most heartfelt thanks. In the words of the old Christian hymn, will the circle be unbroken, by and by lord, by and by.  As ever - BB

"Some may never live, but the crazy never die." - Hunter S. Thompson

Dark Side of Gonzo

Last night I saw For No Good Reason, a documentary about Ralph Steadman. My first exposure to him was through his illustration work with Hunter S. Thompson. The title of the documentary comes from a response Hunter usually gave Ralph when asked about why they were attempting some bizarre assignment.

Steadman felt that whether it was the Kentucky Derby, the America Cup Race, the Foreman/Ali fight in Zaire, or the Honolulu Marathon, the plan was to disrupt, fool around and generally malign the participants and spectators at the event. They could be mean, almost cruel, and that was the dark side of gonzo. His artwork portrayed that darkness.

Unfortunately for most, the illustration of Thompson's work and maybe his Flying Dog beer labels comprise the extent of their Steadman knowledge. He is much more prodigious than that. I strongly urge you to find his illustrated editions of Alice in Wonderland, and Treasure Island. Experience his biting political satire through his work in Punch and Private Eye. His graphic, brutal honesty and biting ridicule lambast the greed-heads to use one of Hunter's terms.


Several birthdays ago, a friend gave me his book, Doodaa. It's an interesting fictional autobiographical biography about Gavin Twinge. This book showed me that gonzo owes as much to the illustrator as the writer. I consider myself as bull-goose looney as most deranged denizens of disturbia. This book revealed my amateur status.

Watching the documentary, I discovered his autobiography of Leonardo DaVinci, I Leonardo. It dumbfounded me that I had never heard of this book despite that fact that it was written over three decades ago. I delight in discovering treasure and look forward to experiencing this work of art.

The depth and vibrancy of Steadman's art transcend the experience of reading a book. His work truly adds the dimension of dementia. For that reason, I would not consider him a cartoonist or illustrator. Picasso said an artist was a receptacle for emotions. Viewing the amalgamation of emotions evoked by Steadman's work, one cannot deny that he is truly an artist. As ever - BB

"Stop doing those filthy scribblings, Ralph! You'll get us thrown out." - Hunter Thompson to Ralph Steadman during their first assignment at the Kentucky Derby.

Cosmic Comics

In 1954, the year I was born, Dr. Frederic Werthman published Seduction of the Innocent. The book described the serious harm comic books caused America's Youth. Ironically within a few years, comics entered their Silver Age. For non comic book fans, the Golden Age began in the mid-30s with the inception of Superman, Batman, et.al.

Silver Age writers like Stan Lee and artists like Steve Ditko at Marvel, Mark Waid and Terry Dodson at DC, created the comics with which I grew up. My age group still suffered from the small-minded antagonists who believed Werthman's drivel. Luckily, my parents did not fall into that school. They saw comics as a fun, creative outlet.

Of course comics did affect my mind, but not in the ridiculous manner the good "Doctor" thought. They opened worlds of imagination, magic, mystery and otherworldly visions. Years later when I began exploring inner space, the lurid art and wild stories took on new meanings.

This will come as no surprise to those who know me, but the less popular comics appealed to me. I liked Thor, Hulk, Superman, Batman, etc., but my main attraction went to the more bizarre. Cosmic Boy, a founder of the Legion of Super Heroes, time traveled to Earth from the 31st century with Lightening Lad and Saturn Girl to recruit Super Boy. Dr. Strange, a neurosurgeon who masters magic to defend the Earth from evil. It wasn't until my collegiate philosophical endeavors that I realized that Eastern mysticism and Jungian psychology filled the pages of his comics.

Reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I discovered Ken Kesey's love of comic books and his connecting Captain Marvel and Nietzsche's book Thus Spoke Zarathurstra. How's that for the seduction of the innocent, Dr. Werthman?

The late 60s turned me onto the underground comix of R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton and others. These lurid, sexually-charged, obscenity and drug-ladened stories set my world on its ear. At the same time I read Kerouac's On the Road and Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels, The Strange and Terrible Saga of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. With a nod to
Shakespeare, my worm had turned.

The beauty of art can exist with the ugliness of depravity. The Chinese concept of yin and yang, or the German literary movement, Strum un drang, show that opposites comprise the core of their antithesis.

Comics have entered a new age and are now called graphic novels. Perhaps it's the old curmudgeon in me, but the term sounds grandiose. I remember in 5th grade when Sister Charles Louise found me reading The Amazing Spiderman hidden inside my geography book. I can imagine her reaction if I had stood up and said, "But Sister, it's a graphic novel!" As ever - BB

"Now I've always been puzzled by the yin and the yang
it'll come out in the wash, but it always leaves a stain
Sturm and drang, the luster and the sheen,
my baby leaving town on the 2:19" - Tom Waits, 2:19

Destivley Bonnero

I have seen this term listed as a form of Cajun/French. It's not. The phrase comes from Dr. John aka Mac Rebennack. Meaning "everything is fine", the phrase arose from the Doctor's own vocabulary created from New Orleans drug and musician underground patois. They would speak in this extemporized slang to confuse both the police and the squares. Like the Big Easy's music, the language is colorful, creative and to quote Mac mos'scocious.

I've listened to the music of New Orleans my entire life. As a child, I would sit with my father listening to Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt and Pete Fountain. I never knew it at the time, but they all came from the Crescent City making the roux that became my musical gumbo.

At 12, I was given a tenor banjo. Popular in the early part of the 20th century, this short necked,
four-string banjo was used in ragtime and traditional Dixieland music. In a few years, the guitar's siren call supplanted the tenor. But, the occasional foray into jug band music would resurrect my Vega Little Dixie.

In 1969, then Police Commissioner, Frank Rizzo, closed the original Electric Factory, Philly's rock venue. After that, Electric Factory Concerts were held at the Spectrum. One of the first was Dr. John, The Night Tripper. He was the opening act, but I cannot tell you who headlined the show. I had fallen under Mr. Rebennack's hoodoo spell and remain entranced to this day.

His psychedelic rock overtones with the underpinning of New Orleans jazz and R&B harkened back to the music I had listened to with my Dad so many years before. But it was more than the music, his feathered, buckskin costume, the Voodoo paraphernalia, the burning incense wove its spell. He had three Nubian beauties as back up singers. The show was a rockin' erotic, exotic explosion that blew away this naive 15-year-old.

Time marched on. At Siena College, I met my guitar mentor. I remember exactly the day I told him of my love of Dr. John's music. He said, "Do you know Professor Longhair?"  That simple question led to  Henry Roeland "Roy" Byrd aka Professor Longhair aka Fess who led to Allen Toussaint, the Meters and a life-long love of New Orleans music.

The musical trough of the Big Easy never goes dry. From Sidney Bechet to Dave Bartholomew to Randy Newman to John Mooney and Bluesiana, to Eric Lindell... its music gently caresses the soul like tendrils of Spanish moss across the skin on a warm Louisiana evening. As ever - BB

"Hot can be cool, and cool can be hot, and each can be both. But hot or cool, man, jazz is jazz." - Louis Armstrong

Auld Lang Syne

It's not New Year's, but the events of the past few weeks evoke "the days gone by" or whatever translation of Robbie Burns' Scots you prefer. I know several, but the connotation is the same, remembering old times.

Bishop Eustace Prep School awarded it's Excalibur Award to a good friend from my class of 1972. That impetus caused a reunion of sorts with many friends from that stage of my life. Simultaneously, a small circle of friends from Siena College starting reaching out. So in the course of 10 days, I reconnected with two pivotal links in the chain of my existence.

In June, I begin my seventh decade on this big, blue marble. Reawakening these relationships has paradoxically disrupted my aging process.

I met up with several of my Eustace alumni, and while greyer and less spry, our irreverence and zany humor survived. So did our enjoyment of imbibing sundry potions and herbal treatments. Within minutes our conversations harkened back to those four years, 1968-72. Our class was transitional. We were the last all-male class to graduate Bishop Eustace; the last freshman class that went through hazing (yes beanies, stupid chores dictated by upper classmen, etc.) The Vietnam war raged; college campuses were aflame. We all faced possible conscription. All the while listening to what I consider the best soundtrack ever. That was music to remember.

In August 1972, I entered Siena, a Franciscan college on a small, bucolic campus outside Albany,

NY. Little did I know the phantasmagoria that would emerge. While I stayed for four years, I did not graduate. Some Franciscan canon that your GPA had to be higher than your blood alcohol content.

But alcohol was not the only alchemical elixir with which we experimented. The sirens' spell of Kerouac, Burroughs, Thompson, Kesey, et. al. beckoned me.   I embraced the libertine lifestyle of Rimbaud and Verlaine. Envisioning myself as an artist, I attempted to make myself mad and so truly experience joie de vivre. I was an artist without an art; emboldened by the words of Neal Cassady, "Make your life your art."

Sometime around sophomore year, collegiate activities took a backseat to Fallstaffian debauchery. I saw myself as the Ringmaster, creating misadventures each more daring and droll than the previous.

Examples:
Taking hallucinogens before partaking in the pre-computerized hell that was class registration. That

semester I enrolled in metaphysics, epistemology, Eastern philosophies, late-19th century British writers and contemporary American literature. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Or the hitch-hiking trip from campus to Dayton, Ohio for St. Paddy's Day. Or stealing car batteries to keep a friend's GTO running until he could afford a new alternator. Or, wandering through an ROTC mixer joining into conversations muttering nothing but inane utterances: "Mergle, merglewert, fleegelphilmpt..."

Looking back on those days, I'm not sure if I was exploring bohemian lifestyles, or running away from the specter of responsibility. Mayhaps both motives existed on the same thoroughfare. Be that as it may, the exceptional phenomenon of those halcyon days were the bonds of friendships we forged. They have withstood the strain of time. For that, I am truly thankful. As ever - BB 

"The poet is a madman lost in adventure." - Paul Verlaine

Ill Spent Youth

I endeavor to avoid the pitfalls of nostalgia. Despite that caveat, I do look fondly back on my youth.
They were halcyon days when viewed through the silky cocoon spun by the white, middle class culture of 1950's America.

While I grew up in pleasant surroundings the world was in turmoil. Here's a brief list of events that occurred while I aged from 5 to 10:

1959 – Revolution in Cuba led by Fidel Castro

1960 – U2 pilot Gary Powers shot down over Russia  - war possible

1961 – Berlin wall erected – war possible

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis – war imminent

1963 – President John F. Kennedy assassinated

1964 – Troops, not just advisors, sent to Vietnam beginning a police action - semantically a new term, but war nonetheless

 

1964 was a bellweather year. The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Rolling Stones first album, the Civil Rights Act passed, to paraphase a song from that year, "The times they were a'changin.'" One mostly unnoticed thing that happened in 1964 was a garishly painted bus left La Honda, CA filled with a Merry Band of Pranksters searching for a kool place.  

https://vimeo.com/24145054 

Little did I know how much this bus trip, and the tidal wave that followed it, would affect me. 

Over the next eight years, I emerged from my protective pupa. This metamorphosis transformed a quixotic idealist into a thrill-seeking vagabond. The works of Kerouac and Burroughs led me to the underbelly of society. Dive bars, dealers, con men, junkies, hoodlums filled me with a strange exhilarating fear. The antics of Ken Kesey and Hunter Thompson led me into the alchemical search for enlightenment and bull-goose looney craziness.

Did I achieve aforementioned enlightenment? Not really, kind of, maybe...I'm not sure. My chemical experiments certainly manifested a different perspective on viewing this world. But I did learn that seeking answers in a substance is like looking for music in an instrument. They are tools nothing more. Understanding hides among weird scenes inside the gold mines of our own experiences. That vein of wisdom lays dormant until we are in the correct state of mind to make use of it. Whatever the hell that means. Don't ask me, I just write this stuff.

As for the craziness part, ahem, well, I ah...let's just say that part has been redacted from the official records. Maybe some day there will be a Freedom of Misadventures Act, but names will have to be changed to protect the guilty. 

I'm still waiting on some of those psychedelic promises to be fulfilled. Take LSD. We were told that the major problem would be the flashbacks that could occur at any time. So I figured it was a special promotional offer. Buy one, get one free! I'm still waiting on that free trip. All these years and nothing, no flash of colors, no life-changing insight, not that feeling of a oneness with the universe that an acid trip could produce. Thinking back, it was like a metaphysical time-share without the set of free golf clubs. And I don't even play golf. As ever BB

"And I said look here brother-who you Jiving with that cosmik debris?  Now is that a real poncho or is that a sears poncho" - Frank Zappa, Cosmik Debris

 

With Friends Like You

A couple of Saturdays ago, I perambulated to a few public houses for live music. I am fortunate to live in a neighborhood where several establishments within walking distance offer entertainment. My intention was to enjoy the bands, have a few beers and get home before the bars close at 2am. To quote Robbie Burns,

"The best-laid schemes o'mice an' men

Gang aft agley."

Part of my scheme succeeded. I purchased only beers. However convivial, charitable cherubs must have spread their wings over Fells Point that day. Numerous compadres offered me additional libations. My polite demeanor forbade refusal of their largesse.  I have itemized the day's Homeric intake. 

2 Irish Whiskeys, 6 Natty Bohs, 1 single malt scotch, 1 Jagermeister,  2 Bombs, 1 lemon drop, 1 red-headed slut and a tequila.

 Please note that this did occur over a 11 hour period. It started at Leadbetters around 3pm for a Mike Darby/Hootenanny performance. Then to Cat's Eye Pub for the blues of Nothin' But Trouble followed by the eclectic sounds of Eddy & the Haskyls. Despite my intention, the evening ended with the brightening of the house lights and announcement of last call. 

One would think that my expansive experience exploring the domain of bars, taverns and pubs would have taught me better. One would be mistaken.

To my amazement, the following morning did not bring a gargantuan hangover. Angelic forces must truly been at work that weekend. A degree of fogginess muddled my consciousness.  My mouth was a paradoxical blend of arid dryness and pasty sludge. Ceteris paribus, my condition was remarkable.

The benefit of an exploit like that should be a lesson learned. Armed with the knowledge of such a foolish occurrence, my behavior should improve. I would not book that bet. As ever - BB 
"I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone's imagination." - Hunter S. Thompson