Barry Cameron Lauesen (1947-2018): From Socal to the South Valley, He Blazed a Foot Hopping, Happy Musical Trail
Barry Lauesen was a musician, surfer, literature scholar, bookseller, small farmer, chef, sports fan, art lover, and family man. Remembered by his friends and members of his great extended family as warm, compassionate and scholarly in a down-to-earth way, he was a venerable, volunteer deejay at KUNM who made an enduring contribution to the station as well as the musical culture of New Mexico and beyond. Together with his bosom buddy Karl Stalnaker, Lauesen founded the Home of Happy Feet (HHF), now entering its 46th year as a Tuesday evening staple of KUNM.
“He was soft-spoken, whimsical, had a great sense of humor,” Stalknaker said of Lauesen. Although the HHF’s departed co-host was a quiet man, “anyone who talked to him would realize the guy was deep,” Stalnanker added.
Originally from Santa Monica, California, Lauesen was of Hollywood lineage. His mom, Jean Menzies Lauesen, was the daughter of Oscar-winning production designer and film director William Cameron Menzies (1896-1957).
From the 1920s to the 1950s, Barry’s granddaddy had a hand in many historic Hollywood films, including the Thief of Baghdad and Gone with the Wind, in which he was responsible for the scene of the burning of Atlanta during the U.S. Civil War.
As a boy and a young man, Barry participated in little league baseball, took in UCLA football games with his family and became an “avid surfer” nicknamed “the Silent Reef,” according to loved ones.
Learning to play the guitar at a young age, he was born into a home where a marimba and a piano graced the living room and diverse culture was part of the family fare.
“We were taken to museums and art shows and the ballet and theater. Daddy, being a music major at UCLA, tried to teach us to read music, so it became a contest to see who could learn fastest..,” Barry’s older sister, Pam Lauesen, said in an interview.
In the late 1960s, Barry’s story shifts to Santa Barbara, the sunny, beach-blessed city northwest of the City of Angels. It was at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) where Barry met the Scarberry sisters, Susan and her younger sister Janet. Married in 1969, both Barry and Susan received undergraduate degrees in English from UCSB.
“We had a mutual love of language and literature and folk music, especially folk music,” Barry’s former wife, now named Susan Scarberry-Garcia, remembered many years later.
Separately, the two young people had been exposed to the thriving folk scene of the era by attending shows at the legendary Ash Grove club (1958-73) in Los Angeles; another commonality uniting the couple was classical music training, Scarberry-Garcia said.
Janet Nura Scarberry Stone, who prefers her nickname Nura, was happy that her big sister married Barry. A life-long musician herself, Nura played cello or piano while Barry handled the guitar in informal duets the two performed. “Early folk improvising” was how Nura described their music. Exploring another medium, Nura and Barry created cartoons, trading off the roles of writer and artist.
When Barry, Susan and Nura were undergraduates, Santa Barbara was a “happening place,” in the lingo of the day. Protests against racism and the Vietnam War erupted, and a counterculture took shape, especially in the student-populated Isla Vista district. The great folk music boom of the 1960s was still alive, and the seaside city even boasted a folk club called the Fish Bowl.
Susan and Nura’s circle of friends included fellow students such as flamenco-playing Robby Krieger, who later rose to fame as the rock guitarist for Jim Morrison and the Doors, and future Hollywood actor Michael Douglas.
The UCSB students of Barry’s generation were exposed to faculty minds like Basil Bunting, the noted British modernist poet who was a collaborator of Ezra Pound, and Kenneth Rexroth, the poet who is regarded by some as the key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1940s (the prelude to the Beat Generation) and is buried on a Santa Barbara cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Rexroth was also a pioneering figure in community radio, collaborating with the Pacifica network’s flagship station KPFA in Berkeley after its founding in 1949.
Lauesen and the Scarberrys lived in Santa Barbara during two of the emblematic events of the late sixties and early seventies: the massive January 1969 oil slick in the Pacific Ocean that gave impetus to the modern environmental movement and the February 1970 burning of the Bank of America’s Isla Vista branch by protesters who targeted the financial institution as a nerve center of war, capitalism and exploitation.
After oil gushed into the ocean from a blowout at a Union Oil platform off Santa Barbara, Scarberry-Garcia encountered black gobs on the beach and oil-laden sea gulls. “It was horrific. You could smell it, it was sickening. It was another sign of the times,” she said.
“Santa Barbara was a very radical place,” Nura affirmed. “I was caught in the middle of it.” The young UC student witnessed the Bank of America go up in flames while she was leaving class. “I stood there. I couldn’t believe it,” she said. Arriving back in Santa Barbara at the very moment of the Bank of America attack, sister Susan encountered tear gas and police running about the area.
“It was a time of great concern and anxiety for all who lived there, regardless of what the politics were,” Scarberry-Garcia reflected. “Santa Barbara was a hub for both artistic activity and political activity, engagement, and those threads ran through everything,”
Scarberry-Garcia clarified that neither she nor Barry were political activists, yet “by the same token, we were very influenced by all these matters..,”
In 1971 Barry and Susan moved to Albuquerque, where both successfully pursued master’s degrees in English at UNM. According to Nura, who also relocated to the Land of Enchantment, the previous visits of the Scarberry sisters to New Mexico, reinforced by Nura’s summers at a music camp in Taos, weighed significantly on the decisions of the trio to relocate to the state.
“We had no family members here, so it was really carving out a new path for all of us,” Nura said.
In due time, however, the threesome would acquire a New Mexican family far bigger than they ever could have imagined.
Enter young Karl Stalnaker, who was originally from Kansas but arrived in Albuquerque’s South Valley in 1971 via a long U.S. journey. Stalnaker remembers first meeting Barry the same year he came to town or in early 1972, via UNM’s art department where the newcomer studied and through the introduction of Frank Rolla, the onetime host of a HHF predecessor show that also aired on KUNM Tuesday evenings called Folk Stream.
“It was like instant camaraderie there, and we started jamming music together and we lived only about a block apart,” Stalnaker said. Barry strummed the guitar while Karl plucked the banjo. The two friends played together in a short-lived band or simply let loose their music on the street for passerby to enjoy.
What kind of tunes did the two young men play? “If you heard the HHF that would give you a clue,” Stalnaker replied.
A knowledgeable folkie, Susan Scarberry was invited by Frank Rolla to take over the Tuesday evening slot on KUNM, which she renamed Sweet Zephyr Tickle and hosted during 1973 and 1974.
Before departing to Boulder, Colorado, in pursuit of an English doctorate, Scarberry invited Karl and Barry to take over her KUNM show, which the two friends promptly did with station management’s approval. The budding deejays then renamed their show the Home of Happy Feet.
Barry and Susan divorced but remained “good friends,” according to his ex-wife.
The new HHF duo was later joined by biologist Marilyn Altenbach, who became the behind-the-scenes person critical to the Tuesday night program and Lauesen’s second wife. Ultimately, Marilyn also became a “cherished member” of Susan Scarberry-Garcia’s larger family, the English scholar said.
Prior to the HHF Stalnaker said his experience with radio was limited, consisting of a live performance and sitting in on an interview Frank Rolla did with Earl Scruggs on another occasion.
Stalnaker credited former KUNMer Annette Griswold for breaking in HHF’s novices. “She showed us how to cue and play a record,” the musician and artist said. “We kind of had a smooth transition from Frank’s show to Susie’s show to our show, because we were all interested in folk music.” Moreover, “Susie was interested in international music, which Barry and I were too.”
Barry´s enthusiasm for international sounds rubbed off on others who crossed his path. At one point he was introduced to Paul Butterfield through a family connection and presented the Chicago bluesman with an anthology of Bulgarian music. “Paul Butterfield was totally enthralled,” Scarberry-Garcia said.
David Nereson, who hosted KUNM’s Blues Show and worked as the station’s chief announcer from 1972 to 1976, met Barry when HHF was in its infancy. Even at that tender stage, the show made an impression on KUNM’s former “chief jock.”
“(Barry) was very shy, soft spoken and low key. I really admired his musicianship,” Nereson said in an interview from his Colorado home. “Home of Happy Feet had a real wide knowledge of regional and roots folk music.”
Nereson added: ”We jammed together a few times at parties in the 70’s — mostly traditional bluegrass, folk and honky-tonk tunes, genres in which Barry knew his stuff. He was very reticent, soft-spoken, and considerate..”
Pam Lausen and her husband George visited Barry and the crew in the early Albuquerque years, recalling the time when her brother and the Scarberry sisters surprised the couple by boarding their east bound train at the Gallup station with jackets pulled over their heads almost like train robbers.
“I couldn’t believe it. They were hiding their heads because they thought George and I would see them from inside the train,” Pam reminisced. “I was astounded that they had it together to get up that early and take a (west bound) train.”
Barry Lauesen’s story can’t be told without mention of his affinities for stuffed animals and food. For instance, the adventures of Barky, a stuffed prairie dog who “had a way of talking and a whole philosophy of life,” according to Pam.
The merry band dressed up Barky as Mick Jagger when the Rolling Stones performed their historic 1972 concert in Albuquerque, she recalled. Her little brother, she stressed, had stuffed animals as a child and quite easily “fell into the whole Barky thing.”
In the “day job” business, Stalnaker remembered Barry delivering pizzas for Carraro’s, an iconic UNM Student Ghetto pizzeria and watering hole founded by former New Mexico state Senator Joseph Carraro.
On an Albuquerque visit, Pam Lauesen teamed up with Marilyn Altenbach for dinner at a restaurant where Barry was working as a chef only to encounter her brother rushing out of the eatery headed for the hospital with a cut finger and a towel wrapped around his hand.
“’I guess we should go off with him,’” Pam remembered Marilyn saying. “Nah,” retorted Barry’s big sis, insisting that “Barry would want us to eat.”
More in line with his studies at UCSB and UNM, Barry was later employed at the Book Stop store in Nob Hill from the late 1980s until its closing in 1997. As a side benefit, the job enriched Barry’s musical collection (and KUNM listeners) since the store was located near Natural Sounds, a legendary Duke City record shop of yore, easily allowing HHF’s co-host a stroll over to the outlet during lunch time so he could snag a few cool sounds for the public’s pleasure, Stalnaker said.
Both talented musicians, Barry and Marilyn Altenbach performed with the Stucco Sisters band. As the only male member of the group, Barry earned the title of the “Stucco Stud.”
Expanding on its initial KUNM broadcasts, the HHF evolved to encompass old jazz, soul and international music of all kinds, creating a unique soundscape that might be called international or global folk. Crackling 78 records ranked- and rank- prominently on the playlists. As the public voices and primary music selectors of the show, Lauesen and Stalnaker developed an on-air, rhythmic groove that allowed their songs and sets to flow together in an almost “telepathic” fashion, according to Stalnaker.
Barry and Karl in the later years
“(Barry) liked old ballads and singers who had an imaginative flair to their words, people like Michael Hurley and Peter Stampfel (Holy Modal Rounders). He really liked Scottish singers like Dick Gaughan,” Stalnaker detailed.
For the HHF’s surviving original host, Lauesen had a keen eye and open mind for both music and letters.
“He’d be happy reading a whole (lot of) different types of literature, but in modern literature he liked a lot of different writers. He liked Phillip Dick,” Stalnaker continued. “It was Marilyn’s dream that he start writing novels. He had everything, you know, the imagination. He was a very good writer.”
Nonetheless, “(Barry’s) love of music wasn’t necessarily tied up to his love of reading and English. He was capable of seeing the big picture on a lot of things,” Stalnaker added.
“I think of him as a character out of a Charles Dickens novel,” offered Scarberry-Garcia, picturing her ex-husband “a man of the people” climbing up a ladder in a book shop looking for “an old dusty bound volume.”
Although Barry had a veritable musical library at his fingertips, he was a great “procrastinator” when it came to preparing for HHF. “He needed the deadline to actually brass tacks, to get down to business,” Stalnaker chuckled. “’Don’t you think you should start listening to some music?’” he recalled Marilyn gently ribbing her husband a couple of days before the show.
Barry and Marilyn settled into a beautiful South Valley home, growing gardens, raising animals, devoting themselves to music and raising Marilyn’s son Chris Altenbach, who followed in his family’s footsteps and also became a musician and farmer. In his free time, Lauesen enjoyed reading and viewing television dramas, PBS programs and educational shows. Stalnaker’s dear friend and KUNM co-host was “totally into” watching tennis matches and his beloved L.A. Dodgers and L.A. Lakers.
Attorney Rachel Higgins and her husband Thell Thomas first heard the HHF before the turn of the 21st century, coming across a “charming, kooky” radio show, “a diamond in the rough,” on the dial that only could survive for so long as it did because of Albuquerque public radio, Higgins contended. Little did the couple realize that they would soon be neighbors of two-thirds of HHF’s trio of minstrels.
In search of affordable housing, Higgins and hubby landed in the South Valley- coincidentally next door to Marilyn and Barry. A gate led from the Higgins-Thomas home to a world where solar panels, fruit trees and a greenhouse stood. Ducks, chickens and noisy jungle fowl enlivened the yard, while harvests of chard, tomatoes, squash and more kept the garden baskets flowing. Wild fennel attracted a unique species of butterfly.
“Sometimes I would see these little hobbit figures moving through their garden harvesting what they needed that day,” Higgins recalled. A great friendship ensued between Barry and Marilyn and Higgins and Thomas, who also cultivated big gardens. “Invariably” the two operations would keep each supplied. As if San Ysidro (the patron saint of farmers and workers of the land) was watching over them, whenever Barry and Marilyn came up short on a crop, their neighbors would come through and vice versa, the Albuquerque lawyer said.
Higgins remembered how Marilyn, a professional biologist and environmentalist who had an astute appreciation of life cycles and the interdependence of species, named the pigs (and other animals) that she and Barry tended but eventually transformed the creatures into bacon or the ingredients of tamales, posole and other edibles. “Everyone” got eaten in due time, Higgins chuckled.
“(Marilyn) made fabulous red chile with the pigs she raised,” she opined.
Then there was the music that drifted in from the ranchito of Barry and Marilyn, settling “in our yard.” Every now and then, Marilyn announced that she and Barry would be having a “little gathering,” which turned out to include “hundreds” of guests and “eight to ten bands,” Higgins laughed.
Barry and Marilyn figured prominently in the life of a growing family. KUNM’s creative couple turned their neighbors on to a long-haired German Shepherd pup who was christened Nelson, wandered back and forth between the two homes and lived a dozen years.
After the Higgins’ son James Asher Thomas was born, the HHF deejays played “St. James Infirmary” in honor of the new child. And when James was very young, he would always find an oatmeal cookie and friendly chatter at the home next door. Marilyn Altenbach’s passing in 2014 was her son’s first real introduction to the Grim Reaper, Higgins added sadly.
After about a dozen years living next to Barry and Marilyn, Rachel Higgins and her family reluctantly moved on to another residence. “The hardest part of that decision was leaving our neighbors..” she recalled. “It was traumatic moving away from them.”
In 2013, the HHF celebrated the show’s 40th anniversary on KUNM with a bash at Marilyn and Barry’s warm nest in the Rio Grande Valley. Station veteran Dave Nereson was among the attendees. “There were bands playing that, gosh, I hadn’t seen since the seventies,” the Colorado resident said. “Everybody danced.”
On Tuesday evenings, the HHF kept cranking out show after show. In the course of five decades, technological advances in radio kept bringing the voices of Barry, Karl and sometimes even Marilyn to ever greater numbers of people. KUNM’s audience increased from a limited Albuquerque radius when the station broadcast from UNM’s Student Union Building to a statewide one after its signal was transmitted from Sandia Crest beginning in 1976, a leap further extended by the addition of translator signals in north-central New Mexico. Later, the new Internet zapped the HHF all over the United States and world.
The HHF became part of life’s soundtrack for dedicated fans like Jessamyn Young. “All I can say about the Home of Happy Feet is that it has been the background of every Tuesday night for me for the past 43 years and they never got tired of playing “Waltzing Matilda” for me,” the Albuquerque area resident said. “When I lived in Mexico from 91-93, the single thing I missed most was KUNM. It’s closer to me than a lot of family.”
Decades after the show first aired, Pam Lauesen was pleased that she could listen to the KUNM program live on the Internet from her Southern California home. “Oh, it was so good to hear Barry’s voice on a regular basis, and Karl,” she added.
Like inseparable twins, Barry and Karl continued hosting their weekly shindig together until only three days prior to Barry’s passing on August 10, 2018. Taking a cue from his beloved wife Marilyn, Lauesen was steadfastly devoted to KUNM and its listeners until the very end.
As fate would have it, Barry’s last show came on August 7, 2018. He began the Home of Happy Feet with his slow and deliberate delivery, informing KUNM radioland that three hours of music were to follow. What really transpired was a journey into the cultural rhythms of the human experience.
As Barry and Karl were accustomed to doing, the two life-long friends split sets.
From the snazzy control board on the third floor of aging Oñate Hall, the sounds of flamenco, blues, African vocalizations, New Orleans brass, huapango, musica tropical, Yaqui violin and harp, and classic jazz streamed seamlessly into the ears, mind and soul. Buddy Holly, Celia Cruz and Richie Valens all made guest appearances.
Upholding Home of Happy Feet’s public service side, Karl dutifully informed listeners of upcoming live, local musical performances.
Barry’s last words ever on KUNM came about 9:30 in the evening. They were simple and direct, nearly eternal: “And you’re listening to KUNM, 89.9 FM Albuquerque-Santa Fe and we’re here broadcasting live on the third floor of Onate Hall at the University of New Mexico.”
The ailing deejay then announced the next tune, struggled a couple of seconds with the sometimes unpredictable CD players and proceeded to deliver a rousing selection of bagpipes, not unlike the sounds that sometimes emanate from the fire station just down Girard Blvd. from KUNM.
For two weeks after Barry’s death, KUNM ran reruns of the Home of Happy Feet. On August 28, Barry’s good friend and fellow KUNM deejay Harry Norton guest hosted the program.
“I’d just like to say that’s I’ve always been a fan of the Home of Happy Feet since the 1970s and it’s what inspired me to become a deejay later in the eighties,” Norton told the audience.
“And when I became a freeform disc jockey in 1987, I became friends with Barry, Karl and Marilyn, not just because we were deejays but because we appreciated the same kind of music and I learned so much from listening to their shows. Even before I even knew Barry I could tell that his knowledge and appreciation of music was through a real love for that music. His gentle demeanor served him well. It was represented in the music he played…”
In November 2018, Norton moved from his longtime Friday afternoon Freeform shift and began co-hosting the HHF with Karl. “I’m so glad they’re doing that, that Karl and Harry are carrying on,” Pam Lauesen commented.
Barry Lauesen’s public memorial was held on a breezy but bright November day at the Albuquerque Press Club, a grand old building crowning Highland Park near Interstate 25. Gold, yellow, orange and satin leaves emblazoned trees across the Duke City, their branches shedding crunchy leaves as the caws of big black birds punctuated the sky. It was The Time of the Crows.
Friends, relatives and colleagues from a lifetime gathered to pay tribute to a man who was respected, admired and loved by so many. Food and drink were consumed and poems and memories shared. On hand were many of the musicians that formed part of Barry’s huge circle of life- Bonnie Bluhm, the reunited Adobe Brothers, Wagogo’s Armando Ortega and others. On display were photos of Barry as a child, as a young adult breaking the waves and as a mature man. A smiling picture showed his grandfather William Cameron Menzies alongside the famous actress Vivian Leigh. Wherever he was, Barry Cameron Lauesen must have been flashing a big and happy smile and tapping his feet, too.
Captain Barry at the Controls
KUNM’s beloved volunteer was survived by his sister Pam Lauesen, his brother in law, George Goad, his stepson Chris Altenbach and wife Kim Ward, and grandchildren Scott and Eliza Altenbach and Wren Cameron Ward, who was born on July 8, 2018, only weeks before Barry’s death.
Said Rachel Higgins, “I think Barry’s legacy is having a life-long collection of truly diverse vinyl records. If he liked it, he played it… that created an opportunity for his audience to stumble across something completely different.”
For Susan Scarberry Garcia, her former husband and lifelong friend carved out a comfy and special space on the airwaves.
“He had an utterly unique voice and it was so important to have it on the air. It was the antithesis of a commercial radio voice,” she said. Together with Marilyn and Karl, Barry gave the Home of Happy Feet a uniquely New Mexican flavor, conveying “the touch of home.. you could smell the chile roasting in their program. It was so visual, auditory,” the former KUNM folk music deejay said.
In a way, she offered, Barry and his HHF partners succeeded in building a “counter-institution of creativity” within an institution. Lauesen achieved an “imaginative synthesis” culled from a cultured upbringing, a diverse record collection compiled from countless shopping forays, exposure to music of all stripes, the study of British classic and American literature, his own musicianship, and even working the land, Scarberry-Garcia concluded.
Barry, mulled Stalnaker, joined with him in conceptualizing HHF as a show that wouldn’t be “totally limited in one box” and not confined to any particular musical dogma, keeping the sound fresh.
In an interview before his death, Lauesen himself quickly dispelled any notion that he was stuck on a particular genre- whether old or new. Asked what kept him going with the HHF all these years, he answered: “Just the music…finding old stuff and new music.”
“As a person he was so dependable, just in a totally solid way,” Stalnaker summed up his partner. Eschewing self-promotion and personal glory, Barry Cameron Lauesen was remembered by his co-conspirator as possessing a no-nonsense attitude of “just let me do my job.”
For more on the Home of Happy Feet, please read Marilyn Altenbach’s bio on this same site. Also be sure to check out the poem dedicated to Barry written by KUNM jazz deejay and poet Mark Weber that is posted below the information sources.
Information: Karl Stalnacker, Susan Scarberry-Garcia, Janet Nura Scarberry Stone, Pam Lauesen, Dave Nereson, Jessamyn Young, Harry Norton, Rachel Higgins, Albuquerque Journal, August 19, 2018. KUNM, August 7 and 28, 2018.
https://www.dur.ac.uk/basil-bunting-poetry.centre/basic.chronology/
http://www.ashgrovefilm.com/media
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/kenneth-rexroth
https://thinkprogress.org/how-a-massive-oil-spill-in-1969-changed-everything-c4da7ecd5038/
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-santa-barbara-oil-spill-1969-20150520-htmlstory.html
Isla Vista: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFy-4clIKqs
MEMORIAL FOR A FELLOW RECORD COLLECTOR
To Be Read at Barry Lauesen’s Memorial Gathering at Albuquerque Press Club
November 3, 2018
The clarinet master Kenny Davern used to get so riled when
anybody referred to the music he liked to play as “old-timey music”
or that it was repertoire music,
he’d bark “THIS IS NOT OLD-TIME MUSIC! This is a living music!”
Geoff Muldaur tells the hilarious story, when he was a young man
on his mad search through 2nd-hand Salvation Army stores
around Cambridge/Boston with his fellow collector, Joe Boyd’s brother John, [John Warwick Boyd, lawyer in Albuq]
like an archeology dig, digging through piles of 78s,
and the sort of luck John would have, “Hey, look at this: McKinney’s
Cotton Pickers, this could be good” and Geoff would wince and grit his teeth
As he flipped through yet another Patti Page 78
I still have my Dad’s 78 of “Sugar Blues” by Clyde McCoy [1935 on Decca]
It’s a small club, this brotherhood of the 78
Those of us walking amongst you like strangers, who
listen to the rarified sounds of real people making music
embossed on those old shellacs
No overdubs, no “processing,” no punch-ins or re-dos, no fakery, no pitch correction,
just regular people in front of a single mic making music
We’re not going to take over the world anytime soon
Karl played a Gene Autry 78 a couple weeks ago
that I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was blown away
that he wasn’t always so cowboy
One thing I noticed whenever I had occasion to
pop into the control room during Home of Happy Feet —and
there is a lesson here for all disk jockeys: Is how little chatter
there was between Karl, Barry, & Marilyn, as they worked, it
was a reverence for the sounds of the past
12-inch vinyl Long Play records didn’t get here till 1955, which is now, also,
receding into the past, emanating dust and clouds,
our turntables rotating like Ferris Wheels, a calliope and a kiosk
and cotton candy, Hoagy singing Skylark, have you seen a valley green with spring?
Bix playing through the summer at a lake resort out on the butterfly Prairie
Frankie Trumbauer taking a loop, James P Johnson cartwheels the Charleston, Willard
Robison writes a song about a Civil War veteran named Old Folks, it’s picked up
by the Balfa family down in Louisiana, Charlie Patton has a mail-order guitar
and a pony, the pueblos of New Mexico harvest dance, circular world, a mazurka, slack key Hawaiian guitar,
concentric, super-imposed, intrinsic,
cataclysmic, these songs to keep a true heart, and
to keep the bad guys from taking over, spinning,
spinning off these flat black platters
Didn’t they send a Blind Willie Johnson’s record of “Dark Was the Night, Cold
Was the Ground” into outer space? A message of who we are down here
on this 3rd Rock from the Sun, Jimi and his
guitar made of fire and wood and ghosts ——
That’s what Home of Happy Feet is, and my radio show, too: Ghosts
This living music turning on axis,
Pivotal, tangential, Treemonisha crossing the street
Ghosts all shadow and memory
All remembrance and clouds
Ant hills
Cave bears
River crossings
Model T clackety clack around the corner
Mississippi River stevedores carrying the load, singing always singing
Piney woods turpentine
Thunder & lightning out on the Great Plains
Wave flows and crawdads
Ike Turner burning an old tire to get to get the wire out of it to string up a piano
Abraham Lincoln always floating overhead
Huckleberry Finn & Jim missing that turn on that foggy night
Rafting on the Home of Happy Feet
Where is that space ship now with Blind Willie?
It’s a big universe coming off those 78s
I bet Barry was one of those kids who liked to watch the disks
turn on the plattenspieler
Dylan says that when he was a child and his family moved into their
home in Hibbing, that there was a record player already in the house
and that a 78 of “Drifting Too Far From Shore” was on the turntable
[*Charles Ernest Moody, 1923]
which had mystical over tones for him, and
thought, later, was prophetic, being that he
became a historian of this music, what he calls a Musical Expeditionary
That’s what Barry was: a Musical Expeditionary
I asked trumpeter Bobby Bradford what all this preoccupation with
music is all about, and he quite sensibly answer’d: It’s not a bad
way to spend your life
-Mark Weber
