moon traveller herald

  Acme Oyster House - Circa 1996 [APRIL 4, 2024] - White Panther Party Activist, jazz writer, MC5 band manager and poet John Sinclair, famously and unfairly imprisoned in 1969 for marijuana use, died Tuesday in Detroit. He was 82. His cause, as potently sung in John Lennon’s It Aint Fair John Sinclair [in the stir for breathing air] became an important rally point in the fight to legalize pot. His influence was also important in helping to create a politically radical school of high-powered rock n roll. That notwithstanding, he also diligently promoted a school of writing known as Jazz Poetry. The school could also be called Blues Poetry. In the '80s Sinclair moved to New Orleans, started doing a radio show, and started writing and performing poetry, mostly about blues.  His masterwork Fattening Frogs for Snakes - Delta Sound Suite," took the lives of the 20th Century American blues artists and applied a precisely descriptive and musical poetical form to its representation. Si...

To Jim Haas: Looking at this picture of Big Jay McNeely ignites a flying moon traveller firecracker in my brain.  There is this place there - where a legendary rhythm & blues saxman is wailing and honking forever.  My brother Michael and I saw Jay at the Night Stage club in Cambridge in the early 1980s, and it was a gas -  A funny thing though – it was all incendiary. But I cant, when I sit down and try, remember all that much. Anyway here goes…What I remember was we won tickets to see him. I'd been studying blues like a mad monk, and had to know more and more. Had seen Cleanhead Vinson, for example, who'd recently thanks to Harry Duncan's brilliant slate making, had gigged with Sunnyland. This honking sax-oriented feverish R&B was part  of Sunnyland's area of interest – back in the days, days with JT Brown, Jump Jackson, Oiver Alcorn. Was glad to win the tickets. Also knew him as composer of I Know There Is Something on Your Mind*  – a killer track r...

HB. 1-2-3; 2/22-4 (142) How long, o lord? I cry for help but you do not listen! I cry out to you “Violence!”     but you do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin Why must I look at misery? Destruction and violence are before me; There is strife and clamorous discord. Then the lord answered & said:    Write down the vision Clearly upon the tablets so that one can read it readily. For the vision still has Its time presses on to fulfillment & will not disappoint If it delays, wait for it it will surely come it will not be late the rash man has no Integrity but the just man because he has faith – shall live. Found in book on Calumet St in 2014, Boston, Mass. USA This seems to be a scribe's recreation of portion  of book of Habbuk.It appears on the back side of Reserve Room Book routing slip  

This is a version of Sunnyland Train that John Sinclair recorded with Ted Drozdowski. He took some from the Sunnyland Blues and mixed with the great Robert Palmer. I am more partial to a version he did that was produced by genius Andre Williams (Jailbait). This is a version of Sunnyland Train that John Sinclair recorded with Ted Drozdowski. I am more partial to a version he did that was produced by genius Andre Williams (Jailbait). http://www.amazon.com/Sunnyland-Train/dp/B008PSSFVU/

MY BABY ALWAYS GOES OUT/SOMETIMES COMES BACK/I ASKED HER WHERE SHE WAS BUT SHE'S TIGHT LIKE THAT...

First heard the Paul Butterfield blues band early in the summer of love 1967. We lent the record among our crew. For us they were something of a sleeper among the tremendous abundance of creative bands at the time. Certainly different in that they were closer to the roots of street expression - more so than some of the crimson and chiffon butterfly "psychedelicists" that were about. That year I caught on to Taj Mahal, Canned Heat, the Dirty Blues Band and the Butterfield Blues Band, whose lead guitar player, Mike Bloomfield, was a very big notch above anyone else on an instrument that was coming to define the era. He was the first rock guitar hero, ahead of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, and held the mantle, Mickey, at least for a while. When I re-imagined Black Orpheus ( itself a reimagining of Orpheus in the underground) I imagined Mike Bloomfield as the Pan-like protagonist, probably having learned by then that his guitar was the transcendental and evocative...

BLUES  |   DRBOPMOG  |   POESY  |   DERACINATION  |   ELECTRONIC BARD SYSTEM #FragmentaryIda #blues #take1 Fragmentary Ida - was a bad backslider.  but like a sentence fragment. I was partial to her. Fragmentary Ida - Didnt have no heart - in fact she was missing  a suitcase full of parts. Ida would come and Ida would go. Which part would be missing - you would never know. Fragmentary Ida - came to me in a dream. I was sorting through the hardware - heard somebody call her name. Late one night. Ida come home. Boys are playing coon can, coon can craps and poker.  I was holding two eights. and fumbling with the Joker. She takes off her falsies puts them in the bureau. She straps off her prostheic leg,  now she's purring 'yoo-hoo' She takes off her black wig, one glass eye goes in the secretary. with the good one she winks  its past your bedtime honey Oh Ida...

Yesterday would have been Langston Hughes' birthday. I always counted him as a chief blues poet, but I never knew the full extent til I heard this whole record today-courtesy of WHRB. The Weary Blues. Sounds a lot like Jack Kerouac - or vice versa. Backing ranges from Red Garland to Charles Mingus. Blues Montage (Parts 1, 2, 3) http://mog.com/m/track/767331?ci=40000

Sunnyland Slim Meets Little Brother Montgomery- This poem depicts Sunnyland's first encounter with Little Brother in Canton, Miss. in 1923. Jack Vaughan, of Boston, Mass. recorded this reading Jan. 19, 2013.

[For Barney Beal.] After long listening on blues, there eased up on me a slightly sorcerous curiosity about some of the places the music found on its way. On or off the beaten track as one would construe it is Louisville. Thoughts on which I share with you here.  Not too widely known is it that it was a hot bed once of Jug Band music. There is hardly a music that surreally sounds more like the lost track of a silent movie. Which offers strains of swirling basic American tributaries. Few musics more so that for the cost of closing your eyes can take you back in time. While New Orleans, Chicago and Memphis were the milestone towns on the rivers of jazz, blues and rock n roll, there were others, Louisville among them. On the Ohio River in the 1920s, it was for a time the center of the Jug Band music sound. Minstrel shows and string bands roamed the nation in the 19th century, sometimes selling magical elixirs and snake oil. This was songster music, predating the appearance of bl...

Oh Let us live in Joy. When I first got to Las Vegas I wondered from casino to casino until there was no alarm. Now years later I could be anywhere. No matter where, ever pulling levers, Augustine come to heaven and hell. It was easy enough to keep drinking there, where tremendous illusion was rapping. We shared a table with L.A. grandma and her granddaughter to see the Tropicana floor show. Granma remembers the big lobster, the coldest coke, the dancing girls with the most perfect bodies. And we went from show to show and store to store until there was no alarm. Just thunderbird trinkets and cold chandeliers making the noise of coins in the fountain. Oh Let us live in Joy.

Walter Davis was a St.Louis blues pianist, well recorded in the 1930s and 1940s. He is usually mentioned as part of litany of Missouri players that could include Pettie Wheatstraw, Henry Townsend, Roosevelt Sykes. It's not too well known that Missouri was a hotbed of blues activity at one time. Sunnyland Slim told me he more or less spent 10 years in the area, after leaving Mississippi but before going to Chicago. Davis style is something like the other Mo. players.. but different too. He had a staccato approach that shows the way to drone-like rocknroll (and even the Velvet Underground) more than boogie woogie does! His lyrics could be racy, and quite evocative, as Doing Something Wrong (I Can Tell by the Way You Smell). His biggest song perhaps (recorded widely by others) was ComeBackBaby. I wouldnt mind crediting him with the original Sloppy Drunk. He did a number called Sweet Sixteen that was used in part for a later version by St. Louis's Charles Berry. Davis (no relatio...

The passing of blues guitar great Hubert Sumlin has brought forward many tributes. One thing that comes across is that he was kind, sweet, and a unique player, to which I can attest. When the blues came first my way via a Boston visit by Sunnyland Slim and Paul DeMark, I soon met Hubert. When I was a kid of 16 I had a 45 of Killing Floor/Going Down Slow so I knew his playing – if not his name - from early on. Later, in the 1980s he was, together with Sunnyland Slim, Louisiana Red and Sam Burckhardt (see picture above of him and Hubert) a house guest, especially quiet and thoughtful of others. When Slim and Paul arrived in Boston 1979 the talk soon turned to Hubert. It was Paul who told me he was Howlin Wolf's guitar player and that said a lot. The first day Sunnyland and Paul DeMark were in town the first thing they wanted to do was hook up with Hubert Sumlin. How did we find people in those days? It's hard now to imagine. There was a grapevine, not a cellular phone network. ...

He came out of the Los Angeles desert like a Merc chopped and grueled on airplane fuel. Like Big Daddy Roth in a refrigerator graveyard. Put an apple on the head of an insect lawn trophy. Wore and intricate Troutmask replica, and blowed the tropical hotdog night blues til dawn. Heard the news this afternoon that Don Van Vliet was dead. Where do we find words for Capt. Beefheart's passing? I don't know more than to say what a great surrealist brilliant and unique! Saw him at Town Hall in N.Y . in early 1970s. I cannot think of a greater concert of rock music I ever saw. At that point it was rock for Beefheart - but counterpuntal and baroque unlike any other, at least up to that point. How big was he then? Well, Bob Seeger opened. Because of schoolmate Harry Duncan got to meet him - that was in the 70s. Very much an artist, constantly creating. Worrisome though too because he was always jumping around. Talking til dawn. Putting you on. Through Harry in a way the D...

The blues line is a long line but it reached magnificent acme in the work of artistssuch as Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson, Chester Burnett, John Lee Hooker, McKinley Morganfield, Roosevelt Sykes and others among an initiate group that grew up (in very many cases) in Mississippi in the early 20th Century and in many other cases survived to venture north to Chicago and Detroit and be recorded. Their work ultimately influenced culture, art and music, including 1950s' and 1960s' rock n roll and rock. These blues poets forged art under conditions of poverty and repression as well as amidst frantic social and technological upheaval, and their music reflected a syncopated and prophetic world that still obtains. In "Fattening Frogs for Snakes - Delta Sound Suite," poet John Sinclair takes the meager history that has built up around the above mentioned and other essential blues artists, applies a precisely descriptive and musical poetical form, and magically and quite sympathe...

For Edward Albee. The doctor is the receptacle of the myth. The doctor found his week-dead wife In the jarred coffin On his lawn after the flood. The apples are getting heavy He said. And they are tearing down The limb. The doctor slit his wrist With an electric knife Cutting Thanksgiving turkey. In the old pylon pole South He’d let Bessie Smith To bleed on the highway Back when it rained Five days. The doctor is the receptacle Of the myth, And he is walking lazily Toward infinity. -Jack Vaughan