Outer Spaceways Incorporated

In the late Eighties I was fortunate to catch Sun Ra & His Astro-Infinity Arkestra at a country & western club (!) in the San Fernando Valley called The Palomino. (Years later my band Trash Can School played there opening for The Laughing Hyenas, but that's another story). You'd never know it but Sun Ra, like any punk band, had a marvelous little merch stand going on. To this day I still have a cool t-shirt of The Great Master that I almost wore out.  I also scored a sweet concert program that was printed chapbook size and contained rare band photos, Ra's unique poetry, and excerpts of interviews where he espoused his philosophy on society, blacknuss, and the solar system. Here are a few excerpts I'm happy to share with you:

The very first Sun Ra album I ever owned was in 1972 and was a live album called "Nothing Is" on a record label every bit as mysterious as Mr. Ra, ESP-Disk. The cover showed Ra in his space outfit with a large flame covering most of his face and had the inscription, "At first nothing is..." and the back cover had a poem by him, "The Garden of Eatened". For a religious kid all these biblical undercurrents made a large impression on me and yet it all culminated in space travel.

The music inside was nothing short of a revelation: Ra playing his wild synthesizer and organ, and the three most intense saxophone players I ever heard this side of Kirk and Dolphy: Marshall Allen on alto, John Gilmore on tenor and Pat Patrick on baritone. I also liked the fact that the band loved to sing: "Sun Ra and his band from outer space will entertain you now"..."If you find life boring just the same old, same thing, come on sign up with outer spaceways incorporated"..."The next stop's Mars"..."This is the theme of tomorrow's land, a cosmic paradise"...I was hooked, and spent the next sumpteen years hunting down every Ra album I could find.



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The show at The Palomino was one of the most generous I've ever seen: Ra and his band played an eclectic mix of free jazz, space electronics, Tiki lounge music, vintage twenties big band jazz, wild hard-bop, and because they had recently contributed to an album of Disney movie tunes, even a few Disney movie covers. I think they did a song from "Peter Pan", and it was actually quite touching. Before you could shed a poignant tear they were off playing "Rocket Number Nine Take Off ToThe Planet Venus".

When the band played this ultra-eclectic mix I never thought that this was a show-off "we can play anything" orgy like so many other artists do. It merely highlighted the fact that Ra loved all kinds of music and even stated in his movie "Space Is The Place" that the greatest medicine for the ills of the galaxy was music.

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Hey! Hey! Hey! It's Black History Month

The first time I saw Rahsaan Roland Kirk he was performing at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan. I ran out and bought "Volunteered Slavery" when it first came out (in 1969) and three years later I was going to finally catch him in the wild, so to speak. He was a chunky guy with an even chunkier pair of sunglasses on. A very young guy helped him towards the center of the stage. Kirk wore a dashiki and had several horns and noisemakers, even the joke shop variety, hanging from his neck.

"I smoked so much pot on the way here I was blinder than a bat's asshole", Kirk joked, killing any guilt over paying to see a blind man perform. He then proceeded to play three saxes at once and blow whistles out of his incredibly huge gorilla nostrils. When he got winded on the raunch he'd filter down to sweet ballads in the Coltrane mode.

Five years later I hung out on the Long Beach boardwalk after a punk rock show, and I saw a familiar guy being lead by his assistant to a car in the distance - it was definitely Rahsaan Roland Kirk !(he must have been to The Lighthouse). He was so stoned he probably was blinder than a bat's asshole.



I saw Sun Ra's monstrous big band at Myron's Ballroom in downtown LA, then at The Palomino in North Hollywood (a Country & Western music bar), and finally at Slug's New York. Slug's was the smallest of the clubs Sun Ra performed at, but maybe the weirdest. At some point in his set he turned and smiled at me like he knew me from the other shows. (I stood in the back at those shows!)

The very first Sun Ra album I bought was "Nothing Is" on ESP-Disk, a label as mysterious and creepy as Mr. Ra-Mr. Ree-Mr. Mystery was. I bought the record in 1972 when I was at a crossroads in my life, trying to grow up and look for some guidance. Sun Ra and his messages of escaping the white darkness of Planet Earth was awe-inspiring to me.

Shortly before my brother-in-law passed away he told Rebecca of a dream he had where an old black man in furs and a cape dressed in gold met him in the desert and told him that he had nothing to fear. I said that he met Sun Ra. "It's the RA! It's Sun Ra!" This was 1996, and Ra had already departed the atmosphere three years earlier. When I told my in-laws it was Sun Ra they thought I was insane. Some people have trouble accepting the vision of Ra.



Jazz music is the only art form basically built by telepathy: the musicians completely communicate via their instruments and know precisely when to come in and when to stop without exchanging any words whatsoever. It's uncanny; a look is all it takes for the tempo to change or a small sound from a string bass and the key changes. There are no other art forms as telepathic as jazz.

Being a Jewish teenager in the Seventies was intense. Black people were finally making some serious money and moving into our neighborhood, making everyone nervous. School teachers and neighborhood leaders were telling me that black people were insane, wild beasts, which was ridiculous. My heroes at the time were guys like Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and Eric Dolphy, jazz geniuses who weren't even accepted by their own people because they were "so stretched out". But I didn't care: Their music offered me an escape from the bonds of my insane environment, and their personal philosophy was about elevating to a higher plane, not with drugs, but with an evangelical crusade of love for God via atonal music. The message was absolutely awesome.