Rosenbush Cafe

In 1975, exposed to my first of many years of migraine headaches, I summoned the courage to remain at the July Jam in Jackson, Mississippi, not only to write a review of the day-long event for the Southern Miss Student Printz (I was after all a Journalism Major) but to see Todd Rundgren and Utopia. Even with the searing pain I am still glad today that I went to the concert, hanging with my friends, and seeing one of my favorite and most innovative of rock musicians.

Last September, no migraines, but no money either, so I missed his first ever “A Wizard/A True Star” concert in Akron, Ohio. AW/ATS (1973) was, and remains, a wonderful example of what was possible given the engineering genius Rundgren brought to the recording studio (I have written on Rundgren before under Obsessive Collector ) when he jammed an hour’s worth of music on one vinyl album, a feat never before attempted.

Starting off with a signature guitar riff, S1 was a continuous collection of songs without breaks. The only silence was at the end of La Feel Internationale, when the exhausted needle finally reached the label! S2 was more traditional music, but again, another group of memorable songs.

From the concert in Akron, three songs, all originally on S2; Cool Jerk, Hungry for Love and I Don’t Want to Tie You Down.

During the psychedelic era I was not as fortunate to see the Boston-based group, Ultimate Spinach (keyboardist/guitarist Ian Bruce-Douglas and singer Barbara Hudson), who never ventured nearby but nonetheless, I collected their first three albums Ultimate Spinach (1967); Behold & See (1968) and Ultimate Spinach III (1969) but so far not buying Sacrifice of the Moon: Instrumental Music of Ultimate Spinach (2006).

US was an example of the experimental tripping music where drugs may have enhanced such songs as “Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess,” “Mind Flowers,” “Ego Trip,” or “Fragmentary March of the Green” but like so many other psyches, there was something about the music that transcended drugs. I cannot lie; when I first heard MFs I was not stoned but years later, when I listened to it again, under the influence of magic pixie dust, there were differences; most assuredly the echo effects and reverberations added to the esoteric and trippy lyrics of taking that journey into the center of my mind where more profound thoughts were hiding beneath the veneer of American civilization’s fear of freedom away from self accentuation.

Hip Goddess is still a unique song utilizing an instrumental passage with the Theremin, an electronic musical instrument created by Russian physicist Lev Sergeivich Termen (Léon Theremin in the West) known primarily for use in films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” and Robert Wise’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still” for its haunting and eerie effect. Few people today, with the exception of contemporary musicians such as the talented Thereminist Armen Ra (he is linked under Fine Wines and Spirits), realize this instrument’s potential or that historically it was part of an experiment in a Russian government-sponsored research into proximity sensors or that after Theremin demonstrated it to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin he was so impressed that he began taking lessons!

Unlike Dr. Robert Moog’s keyboard-played Moog Synthesizer (most famously played by Wendy “Switched-on Bach” Carlos and Keith Emerson of the rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer), the Theremin is a seemingly simple device that allows the user to create music by moving their hands over two metallic loop antennas; one for oscillators for frequency and the other hand for amplitude.

Simple in concept but one still needs training and skill to perform complicated musical selections. I have one album by the psychedelic group Hawkwind (In Search of Space, 1971) proving, at least to me, that knowing how to use a Theremin is only worthwhile if all the music is good, which was not, aside from “You Shouldn’t Do That” and “Children of the Sun.”

Recently, I gave the first Ultimate Spinach album, containing HG, to a dear friend, who I wanted to get the full benefit of that era.

I was not sad to say good bye to a record, from my collection from forty three years ago; no trepidation in liberating an element from my personal cultural awakening during the psychedelic age.

I was cheerful and capable of sharing an authentic serving of American musical history from the epoch only people my age undoubtedly remember, excluding flashbacks!

Groovy.

Visions of Your Reality (1968); Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess (1967):

the obsessive collector

While doing routine maintenance, which means looking through past posts for dead links and music and movie excerpts removed due to copyright infringements of because no one wants to share great music, I cam across my pre-Christmas musical retrospective and found that three of the songs no longer were viable. Well, since there are no holidays in April unless you count Earth Day on April 22nd, I thought it would be fun to remove this from last year and bring it forward into nearly four months.

Forget radio or television, it is difficult to go into any mall, store or public venue after Thanksgiving and not be inundated with Christmas Music. Call me Scrooge Rosenbush but I went into a local Winn Dixie recently only to buy a bag of cat food, some potato chips and a soft drink and in the few minutes to select those items I was literally ready to puncture my eardrums with steel needles.

Seasonal music brings out the worst in me and I won’t even name the countless tunes that shriek into my brain and cause damage to the frontal lobes. I do not have an aversion to people enjoying the spiritual aspect of this time of year but enough already. I rarely listen to the radio for this reason finding that even Public Radio goes over-the-river-and-through-the-woods and when they reached Grandmother’s even her Victrola was cranking out music that incited the Wolf to eat her, but not before smashing her antique musical device to tiny bits.

For those of you who have decided to avoid public places, radio, teevee and do not answer your front door for fear it will be carolers wishing you something merry I have compiled a short list of personal favorites that have nothing to do with this season.

Don’t try and understand why I picked them just enjoy them. Kalliope Amorphous reminded me of the wonderful music, that evokes emotions, in her December 21, 2009 Music Muses Monday

When the Weavers made a hit from Leadbelly’s “Good Night Irene,” is was bittersweet because the folk singer did not live to see his song reach such a large audience. The Weavers do justice to both the song and the man by acknowledging him so here is the original version.

More Music Follows if you would like to hear it then click more and get more

Most people who know of Brewer and Shipley’s probably are more familiar with their reefer hit, “One Toke Over the Line,” but “Witchi-tai-to,” off their 1969 “Weeds” LP pays homage to Native American composer, singer and musician Jim Pepper, whose original follows, B&S’s. Pepper was the pioneer of fusion jazz and brough rock and jazz together. The talent tenor saxophone musician brings this peyote healing chant from the Native American Church, which he learned from his grandfather, into our hearts.

The Kaw and Creek born Pepper, from Portland, Oregon released in the song on the 1971 on Embryo records, “Pepper’s Pow Wow.” Pepper died in 1992, at age 50, of lymphoma.

Brewer and Shipley - Witchi-tai-to

Native American Jim Pepper’s Original; ends abruptly

Another version of Pepper’s song

Any Rundgren fan knows he started as a member of Nazz, an early psychedelic group who released three albums, starting with Nazz, followed by Nazz, Nazz and ending with Nazz 3, before Rundgren released Runt with his hit “We Gotta Get You a Woman” in 1971. With “Open My Eyes,” you cna already hear the Rundgren guitar riffs that he would become famous for, but the ending of this music video has an addition of the cover a later Utopia LP but the final bars of a song from his LP “Todd.”

Also, in his version of “No 1,” (from 1973’s “Todd”) Todd has altered lyrics from the surrealistic poem. Gone are “Legs long and tan without a break, even the to the neck” and “suddenly, simulaneously, an eclipse and a snowfall, flakes melt instantly on the shoulders like wet silver, burning little holes all the way to the marrow. All the birds leave raking turquoise ruts across the velveeta sky, it’s time to scream.” The portion with “puckered flesh like avocado sags into a green pool” came before the birds but hey it is still a great song.

Originally, the scream echoes into wind and guitar and was indicative of a bad, but intense, acid trip.

Nazz Open My Eyes

Todd Rundgren tells us in “Heavy Metal Kids”

I was a sweet young kid once
Now I’m a full grown crank
And when I die I’ll probably come back as a Sherman Tank.
I know that I could make this world so peaceful and calm
If I could only get my hands on a hydrogen bomb

Todd, 1974

eXisTenTiaLNihLisT (WARNING: Adult themes. The SG site contains nudity and plenty of imagery and writing that is not intended for children or adults who are upset by the subject matter discussed below. This post was started earlier in May, several weeks before my near-fatal automobile accident on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 at approximately 2:45 p.m. EST. As often with eXisTenTiaLniHLisT I am writing as a Dadaist in a consciousness stream, albeit, with my off-beat humor sense thereof, and so I have looked at what I wrote and am confident that I can leave it alone realizing that when it was started life was no longer or shorter until Tuesday. I’m happy being a man, but the prospect of coming back as an empowered woman would by OK, provided the world is a better place. My last several days, however, has taught me another valuable life lesson: be strong and happy with your lot for tomorrow may never arrive! The crash left me unable to finish a myriad of updates that will come later in June, especially after some extremely important issues that have less to do with the Cafe than everything else important in my life. — May 30, 2009)

I’d rather come back as one of the Suicide Girls
Celebrating the alternative beauty of pierced and tattooed bodies augmenting the goth culture and punk rock with unashamed and unafraid of displaying nudity. I first heard of the SGs a few years back and like anyone with curiosity was interested in learning more:

Were they girls that wanted to die? No, no, no.
Were they girls who wanted to live? Yes, yes, yes.
They were girls who showed a variance on the beauty is only skin deep or in the eye of the beholder motifs.

A small group of them were on display in the episode of CSI: NY, Oedipus Hex where at the fadeout Suicide Nixon invites series regular Danny Messer (Carmine Giovinazzo) out to see where the night would take them, but naturally he doesn’t take the opportunity; “Being with a Suicide Girl, you don’t know what you’re missing!”

Like any good fantasy, after the fadeout, I envisioned Danny enjoying the wildest ride of his life as he indulges in public sex, ending up arrested by fellow CSI Stella Bonosera (Melina Kanakaredes), who cuffs the poor bastard to a lamp post, invites all the co-workers to paint his body like a black light poster and leave him stranded in Central Park, but only long enough for his boss, Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) to ride by with his gf in a horse-drawn carriage. “I’d ask for your gun and badge but looks like you left them with your pants,” he says. Suddenly, Danny awakens, aroused, but only to find himself at home in bed alone! He is late to work and when he arrives no one is in the building and then he awakes again, still aroused, this time with Suicide Nixon locking his handcuffed wrists, over his head, to the bedpost. The rest is left to your imagination.

The episode was more serious than my rave: a fresh-faced midwestern teenager, who wanted to be an SG gets murdered instead by a jealous guy, while real SGs are on-stage involved in a blood drenching scene a la Carrie. It was a good, if not great episode, because the death reminds us of the fragility of life and how easily is can be taken - even in fiction.

A few weeks later, probably due to their, pardon the pun, exposure, I was flipping teevee channels one evening, at the far end of the progamming dial, I stopped to view a naked girl being photographed in a bathtub. There were more tattoos on her body than water and studs piercing eyebrows, nose, tongue, navel and, yes, below the water line. I had stumbled - out of my chair -into the final half hour of a documentary on Suicide Girls.

I’m a very ordinary male without tatts, piercing or a goth wardrobe and aside from having a beard since the seventies I’m not much of a risk-taker. There are plenty of scars from cat scratching and the number of times I’ve struck my head on anything that could leave a mark means aside from some baldness I fear that with my head shaved it would resemble the surface of the moon.

I will never be mistaken for the racy blond but this is fantasy after all!

For shame, since an eXisTenTiaLniHLisT should open the portals to everything and nothingness physically as well as mentally. If I can scheme to get a fictional television character into trouble I might as well conjure a bit for myself. If possible, I’ll come back playing a keytar in an girl band like Von Iva.

The Obsessive Collector invites you to relax, even if for milliseconds as he takes you on a musical journey, courtesy of Vangelis, King Crimson and the music of the Seventies. As typical of my love of convolution in writing, there are detours into my back lot tour of MGM in 1977 with actor Sidney Lassick, and almost meeting Richard Dreyfuss, recalling Irene Pappa’s orgasmic chanting on an early Vangelis (Aphrodite’s Child: 666) LP and seeing the Empire State Building but not going into it! If you enjoy Savoy Brown, and who doesn’t, Tangerine Dream, Todd Rundgren, the golden eras of music, or the many other pop culture references I can muster check my archives of The Obsessive Collector, where I go off the planet to relive retrospectives musically and hopefully entertain the masses, or at least one lonely person in need of a smile!

Long day at the office on Wednesday or perhaps school was a drag. Drink too much coffee or not enough or no proper meals? Is your wife, husband, boyfriend or girlfriend, lover or acquaintances displeased with you as a person? Did the dog chase the cat unto the keyboards again, only this time erased pictures of your favorite Suicide Girls? Did you buy tickets to see Von Iva at The Mod Club in Toronto only to learn it was last month? Out of soap, toothpaste or time? You last pair of pantyhose has a run, forget them, it’s too hot to wear them anyway and if gas prices are too high for you, ride a bicycle, take a hike or just stay home and read. If you read this entire post your reward is a Lizard Treat at the very end!

Whatever the reasons today doesn’t seemed to go your way there is always tomorrow. Ignore your dopy horoscopes promising the good, the bad and the indifferent. Time to give your neurons much needed entertainment, a bit of surrealism and explore the world of obsessive collecting as only the collector himself can provide. Before your journey into Dadadadadadadada, allow Vangelis the opportunity to soothe your nerves, massage your back and teach you some science with the title track from his 1976 LP, Albedo 0.39. Thanks to the world wide ether and YouTube for saving me from recording my LPs, uploading and downloading and getting another migraine with embedded codes!

Maximum distance from the sun: 94 million 537 thousand miles
Minimum distance from the sun: 91 million 377 thousand miles
Mean distance from the sun: 92 million 957 thousand and 200 miles
Mean Orbital velocity: 66,000 miles per hour
0rbital eccentricity: 0.017
Obliquity of the ecliptic: 23 degrees 27 minutes 8.26 seconds
Length of the tropical year: equinox to equinox 365.24 days
Length of the sidereal year: fixed star to fixed star 365.26 days
Length of the mean solar day: 24 hours, 3 minutes, 56.5555 seconds at mean solar time
Length of the mean sidereal day: 23 hours and 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds at mean sidereal time
Mass: 6 thousand 600 million million million tons
Equatorial diameter: 7,927 miles
Polar diameter: 7,900 miles
Oblateness: 1/298th
Density: 5.41
Mean surface gravitational acceleration of the rotating earth: 32.174 feet per second per second
Escape velocity: 7 miles per second

Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39

In 1976, I purchased Albedo: 0.39, my first album by Greek composer Ευάγγελος Οδυσσέας Παπαθανασίου (Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou) better known to the world as Vangelis and I have been a fan and collector since. It started with late night weekend radio broadcasts on KAAY Little Rock, Arkansas The Mighty 1090 with Beaker Street. Intro-ed with a spacey tripped out version of “The House of the Rising Sun,” that wonderful cover song by Eric Burdon and The Animals, they played full length albums and had the most eclectic line up one could imagine, especially for AM.

In my dorm room in 1972-74 I would have to keep a note pad handy because the deejays often sounded so stoned it was difficult to understand who and what they were playing. Thanks to Carl Sagan’s 1980 PBS Series, Cosmos I finally realized Création du Monde was a track from L’Apocalypse des animaux, a score for documentary film maker Frédéric Rossif’s 1973 TV series and I knew I’d heard it years before, but: “That was Vangelis? Wow!” Probably the most romantic track on that great LP is La Petite Fille de la mer, which still to this day can evoke horripilation, tears, a sense of awe and make one want to make love immediately.

Well, to me anyway.

Don’t believe me? Listen and judge for yourself

If you thought that was weirdly beautiful….

What you didn’t listen? Go back and click the link, surely by now you know you can open more than one window at a time. I’ll wait.

….there is always Greek actress Irene Papas having an orgasm while chanting “I was, I am, I am to come” repeatedly during the song ∞ (infinity) on 666 by Aphrodite’s Child. This 1972 LP, which took much searching to find again, after I lost it in a break-up with a girlfriend eons ago, along with Phos, another AC LP, was a niced bit of Vangelis psychedelia. The record label was none to pleased but I loved it and whenever I watch The Guns of Navarone (1961) I get a warm feeling whenever Maria Pappadimos (Pappas) is on-screen.

In a bit of off-track reminiscence, as if I haven’t already derailed, and which is better suited for my El Cine Entree, in our break-up, I also lost my picture of me with my cousin, Emily and Sidney (Chesswick in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) Lassick from our meeting in 1977. He was friends with my cousin and her husband, Ben, who I visited for my Southern Miss graduation gift from Aunt Gin and Tonic (Virginia) Bridgewater who offered the four nephews $1,000, which they took and I didn’t. All younger and more interested in possessions: JJ bought a Rolex, Delmar and Floyd invested and lost in the stock market and I took a trip to visit my mother’s relatives in Los Angeles and my dad’s side of the family in New York City.

Sidney, who died some time back, was a very nice fellow and somewhere, unless Dorma got it too, is my cassette interview with him that may well be lost in the myriad of miasma that is my swamp of a home.

We sat at the house at the corner of Pico and Rimpau, at the end of the busline, playing cards while I recounted my love and knowledge of movies and how Sidney should have won an Oscar, and then he offered to take me on a “tour” of MGM Studios. “I know everyone there,” he told me.

He did.

I knew my trip was better than a watch or investing in stock; years later, I found out I wasn’t good at investments so there! Not only did I get to go onto a movie set - there is something cool about walking up to a guard standing by a sign that says CLOSED SET, near the famous red light that meant they were filming inside, who says “Hello, Sidney. Who’s your friend?”

I would later get a a job offer as a runner, well gopher, that was circumvented by my parents in Alabama. “You’re not staying in Hollywood! You’re not an actor.”

“Gee, but ma…” Actually, I said something like “I’m staying here and there isn’t a fucking thing you can do to make me come home.” That went over well.

Once the light went off we went inside. Sidney knew every tech guy and we had a wonderful time especially when we stepped onto the set of The Goodbye Girl and I stood mere feet from Richard Dreyfuss and Quinn Cummings (the sweet little girl), who winked at me, during a break from filming. I stood quietly, and while I wasn’t going to ask for an autograph - which I would have lost, anyway - I enjoyed having the fantasy of movie-making deconstructed before my eyes. I also enjoyed watching Dreyfuss, who made me feel tall, while he gave grief to the assistant director. The director, Herbert Ross, was not there. Quinn just leaned against the kitchen table, looking bored, while she waited for the disagreement to be resolved, which when I finally left the set to almost fall to my death in a darkened carvernous room full of fake computers, was still ongoing.

As an avid movie lover, who dreamed of working in films, not as an actor because my high school Thespian days proved I was more suited for pulling open the curtain for my “talented” school mates in The Crucible than portraying Thomas Puttman. I would never return to the Bama Theater, where, as usher and assistant manager, I once stood on a ladder to put up the letters on the marque for movies like Walking Tall, The Mack or Deliverance to see Starring Henry B. Rosenbush in a Martin Scorsese Film.

Actually, I wanted to play the judge so I could say, “God damns all liars,” but that went to a black football player instead, who while he wasn’t bad he only wanted to say god damn in a school play. The school administration made us delete “Fart on you, Thomas Puttman,” which after the first showing - we had three more - was returned to the glorious applause of our school mates who all made farting sounds in the audience! Aaaah, off-off-way-off Broadway!

Whew. Take a breath.
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WARNING: Language and themes will be offensive and inappropriate for some readers and gratuitous for all others! Special thanks to Paul DaliHouse Dorsey

By Henry B. Rosenbush

I have been a collector the vinyl long playing records since the 1950s, a passion that began when my father played Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade on a set of 7-inch 45s. It would be the early sixties before I learned Шехерезада was actually a symphonic suite in four movements rather than a collection of shorter works; such was the limitations of the 45 format.

Over the years I was fortunate enough to explore every new technology from Victrola to Hi-Fi for Small Fry, as they called record players for children, and then stereo. When stereo first arrived, much like the transition from black and white television to color in 1964, Beta to VHS or the most recent change from analog to high definition, there were few true examples of stereo recordings. One could play a stereo on a Hi-Fi record player but without the ability to have two channels or multiple speakers it was difficult to enjoy on the intended level.

Our first stereo system was a huge clunky affair; a long enclosed set up with record player, AM-FM radio and two moderately sized speakers. Naturally, you could play Hi-Fi recordings, 45s, 78s (many children’s records were 78s as well as jazz recordings) 33 1/3rd the standard 12-inch discs and 16, which could be practical in school for slide shows and film strips but less practical at home unless you had instructional manuals to investigate.

It would be the combined work – separately – of three men that led to the disc records that dominated the music industry until compact discs appeared in the 1980s effectively ending the gramophone record. French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott, would design in 1857, the phonautograph, which basically allowed a depiction of the visual characteristics of sound but not for playback purposes until Thomas Edison developed the phonograph in 1877, which could play back recordings but was primarily used for dictation and further developed by Edward Guilliard, who would spend the next quarter of century fighting for credit since Edison incorporated Guilliard’s innovations into his own patent.

The phonograph cylinder dominated the market starting in 1880 but as lateral-cut discs, created by Emile Berliner in 1888, began to appear musical recording began to change. Edison produced his own version, the Blue Amberol Record, in 1912, to compete with the Berliner Gramaphone label offering recordings as long as 4 minutes! By 1918, patents for lateral-cut discs expired and the market was open to countless manufacturers and by the twenties, the Amberol cylinders became merely a memory.

Our Victrola was a right-sized hand cranked device which used steel needles and there were two small doors on the front that by opening and closing ‘controlled’ volume, pitch, treble and bass! Naturally, there was no such thing as control: you cranked the cylinder beneath the platter for speed, which was generally enough for one side of a record before it s l o w e d d o w n and s t o p p e d…

The needles were designed to be used once - I had to special order stainless steel needles from New York in the 1980s because record store employees, usually college-aged students, had no idea what the hell a Victrola was never mind “steel needles!” Imagine sitting on your front porch in 1926 listening to Mario Lanza or Al Jolson for the first time. We take for granted today not only the experience but sheer volume of availability of product. In the beginning, the earth was unformed and so was the music industry.

Thanks to dad, I was more aware of Glenn Miller, the Dorsey Brothers (Tommy & Jimmy), Benny Goodman, the Ink Spots, Mills Brothers and classical music before I was introduced to Elvis Pressley! My aunt Virginia took me to see the Swan Lake Ballet and the opera, La Traviata, in the late 1950s so even Tchaikovsky and Verdi preceded my knowledge of rock ‘n roll (1954-63).

Like most children, I had albums and 78s by The Flintstones, Quickdraw McGraw - and sidekick Baba Looey, Peter Churchmouse (I only have one of the two LPs left and no cover - sigh), The Gingerbread Man and my first acquisition, the original soundtrack recording of the first motion picture I ever saw, at age three, Michael Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Boy did I grow up with a crush on redheads thanks to Shirley McLaine! Purchased in 1961 at a yardsale of a woman who lived next to my aunt and grandmother, Rosa, in Homewood, Alabama, it was the beginning of a collection that would eventually climb into the thousands!

When Southern humorist Brother Dave Gardner played the University of Alabama in 1963 I was fortunate that one of our tenants at The Henry Apartments left behind the album of his concert and my collecting days began in earnest as I began searching for his other recordings and even got to see him in a Birmingham nightclub in 1971…that’s another story for another time, however.

By 1967, when I bought The Bee Gees “First,” their great ballad-driven album, which was acquired thanks to Virginia: “What do you want for your birthday?”

“The Bee Gees first album.”

She gave me the necessary $7.98 and I went to the record store and now knew the experience of wanting a particular record; I mainly wanted it for the song, Turn of the Century, but soon learned every song was worthwhile.
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