Hanging out with the man from Saturn

I stumbled across this great blog entry; some great pics and the story gets better after the jump.

Hanging out with the man from Saturn

Several people have asked me to tell the story of my encounters with Sun Ra.

Over a span of about six or seven years, I caught Sun Ra and his Arkestra in Boston at least eleven times. While that’s not a lot by Deadhead standards, it’s probably more than I’ve seen any other musician live, with the exception of the great khyal singer Bhimsen Joshi.

To an alienated, jazz-obsessed teenager in Boston’s western suburbs, the knowledge that there was a bandleading madman who claimed to be from outer space was incredibly welcome. My high school library maintained subscriptions to a wide variety of periodicals — the usual suspects (Time, Newsweek, Life), some slightly more unconventional choices (The New Yorker, Ms.), and a few that were pretty bizarre. Of these last, there were three that made a huge impression on me: The Village Voice (where I first read about conceptual art, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman), Source: Music of the Avant-Garde (where I first heard of Cornelius Cardew, Christo, Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier), and Downbeat (where I kept up to date on all the latest jazz happenings, and where I first learned of the existence of Sun Ra).

It was during my junior year in high school that I found out Sun Ra and the Arkestra would be performing for a solid week of gigs at Paul’s Mall in downtown Boston. Of course I was completely ineligible to go and spend hours in a jazz bar; I was fifteen. But I went anyway, and got to the club at least an hour before showtime. I was the first audience member to arrive, and somehow managed to talk my way through the bouncer. I’d brought my camera, a noisy Miranda SLR loaded with Tri-X black & white film which I “pushed” to ASA 1600 (wow! archaic darkroom talk!).

The first night I took pictures; two or three rolls’ worth. The following day I developed them at school (and went into Boston to hear the Arkestra again), and the day after that I printed them and took a sheaf of prints into Paul’s Mall, where I showed them to the musicians. Sun Ra was pleased, and autographed one of the photographs with a ball-point pen: “Space Age Greetings from Sun Ra,” with the date. Alas, the ink has faded on the photograph and can no longer be read.

The band was promoting their releases on Impulse!, particularly “Space is the Place.” There was quite a bit of that material presented at Paul’s Mall. Some elements were the same from night to night; they always played “Shadow World,” and there was always some sort of extended synthesizer solo from Sun Ra. And there was a lot of great soloing. Having the entire band crowded onto the tiny stage at Paul’s Mall was a triumph of space management.

After that? Not much Sun Ra for a few years, although I continued to buy records and had quite a good collection by the time I moved into Somerville to share an apartment with two friends in 1977. Which was the year that Sun Ra’s Arkestra played the Cyclorama, a huge circular hall in Boston’s South End that was a superb venue for their brand of outer-space theater.

I persuaded about four or five of my hippie friends to come, and we bought tickets for the second of two sets. Which was the right thing to do: the first set lasted two hours. The second set lasted four, and concluded in the wee hours of the morning with a massive drumming session that featured a number of dancers and a fire-eater who blew huge spheres of flame into the air while the band roared and pounded. One of my roommates had ingested a powerful psychoactive substance which was at the peak of its influence at this point; I turned to look at him and was rewarded by a facial expression: mouth gaping in amazement, eyes wide open with pupils the size of quarters.

I didn’t meet Sun Ra that time. We went home, completely blown away.

Ahhh, but the next time Sun Ra came to town, I was ready.

(Continue reading at Warren Senders' blog)