Tag Archives: Rich Mangelsdorff

Milwaukee radio music icon Bob Reitman is retiring but remains unforgotten

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Bob Reitman and his WUWM-FM co-host, son Bob Reitman III, celebrating his 49th anniversary on radio. He retired recently after 57 years as a radio host. Courtesy Shepherd Express

Bob Reitman was always too hip to be avuncular, and yet there was always a knowing and deeply-informed manner about his music presentation over the decades. We heard and felt the easy warmth of his delivery and his concise commentary, as if you were listening to someone you could relate to even if he wasn’t related.

So what was he? it’s not too much to call him the Oracle of Alternate Milwaukee Radio, arisen in the 1960s, the man of music and poetry which shaped my generation and so music of music that ensued.

So Reitman live on the air is gone, his vibrations, sagely crafted and often transporting, now swallowed into the sounds of silence and perhaps time’s regain, imprinted on our memories.

There should be recordings of his show online. And there are intimations of more things to come on the Facebook Page of his WUWM show, titled “It’s Allright Ma (It’s Only Music)”.

I listened to him not enough in his final years co-hosting on Thursdays with his son, Bob Reitman III, on WUWM-FM, the last music program the station allowed as it moved to a talk and news radio format. He commanded that much respect. Like others, I probably assumed subconsciously he’d go on forever. At least he’s still alive, unlike too many of his important cultural contemporaries.

After all, radio was the medium in which we first experienced the explosions and sublime adventures of a generation of musicians who seemed fearless, wild and charismatic in their creative fire. And the new culture was driven by a new power of mind and spirit-expanded possibility and of protest. Through those historic decades of transformation we always had Reitman on our side. He persisted on Milwaukee radio for more than a half century.

Reitman also co-founded Milwaukee’s original alternative “underground” newspaper Kaleidoscope, as a central figure in the citiy’s alternative culture. I don’t know how much actual writing he did for the newspaper, but I do see an interview he did with rock “genius” Frank Zappa in an online PDF of an early issue.

But if there was a music journalist with the sensibility closely akin to Reitman’s it was probably Rich Mangelsdorff. So I will let him, in a Kaleidoscope essay, define a bit of the music that both he and Reitman were exploring and promoting back in the day:

“Serious rock is a constant pushing forward of the shores of awareness, expanding the frontiers of sound and, as the liner notes to Jimi Hendrix’ album state: “put(ting) the heads of . . . listeners into some novel positions,” i.e. consciousness expansion. . . 

Bob Dylan’s decision to merge Woody Guthrie/Cisco Houston materials and sentiments with a rock sound (aided by blues-group musicians such as Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper) gave rise to the multi-level lyric style which is universally employed in serious rock. More tunes are direct referents to the psychedelic experience than anyone but an initiate could realize. Most can be interpreted two or three ways, easily. The best are like multi-faceted jewels allowing the mind limitless play with associations and meanings.” 

— Courtesy Mike Zetteler’s blog Zonyx Report 

So what Mangelsdorff dubbed “serious rock” or even “high rock” was Reitman’s bag, in spades, as much as poetic singer-songwriters. Spurred by the perhaps unprecedented spirit of cultural liberation the burgeoning Boomer generation had fed, the new rock drew on a rich array of American indigenous musics of African-Americans, as did jazz, the more self-consciously “serious” American music that I latched onto as a young aficionado and then as a music journalist.

For this reason I was personally somewhat closer to a man who paralleled Reitman’s career for a long time as a jazz disc jockey, Ron Cuzner (He later gave me a chance to succeed him when he departed from WLUM-FM). Both started at WUWM-FM  and Cuzner’s late-night program followed Reitman’s nine-to-midnight slot on WZMF and several other stations they both migrated to when their fairly pure artistic standards wore out their welcome, typically with a bottom line-minded change of station management.

And yet Reitman was who I listened to probably as much as Cuzner in those early years for being on at more amenable hours and for the rich diversity of his programming. For a while he hosted at both WUWM, on “It’s All Right, Ma (It’s Only Music),” a titular takeoff of a Bob Dylan song, and at WZMF, on “The Eleventh House.” He honed his craft on the former, a public radio show, then reached a wider audience on the commercial-but-alternative ZMF and ensuing stations, with listenership following him faithfully in his migration across the dial.

A seminal event for this listener was Reitman playing “East-West,” the transporting 13-minute-plus instrumental merging Eastern classical raga, John Coltrane and blues-rock, written by guitarist Mike Bloomfield and performed by the Butterfield Blues Band. I began to understand the broader and deeper implications of the new blues-rock, and its impulse to jam, but here with a marvelous sense of form, a relationship to jazz which I was concurrently delving deeper into. This was 1966, when the Butterfield album East-West was released, a year before the music from San Francisco emerged as “the summer of love” blossomed in a psychedelic array of colors and passion.

Of course, Reitman was also Milwaukee’s first public “Dylanologist” before the term was ever coined. Who knew Bob Dylan’s music better, or presented its most politically charged music, and the inner workings of his esoterically poetical lyrics?

This combination of qualities made Reitman must-listening in an era long before the Internet and relatively easy access to recordings online. We were blessed to have the music curated by someone so gifted and insightful.

By the late 1980s, however, perhaps in the spirit of that decade, Reitman set aside his easy self-seriousness for a hidden inner performer, and did a two-man comic banter show on WKTI with Gene Mueller. The duo gained unprecedented visibility for Reitman, “pulling ridiculous stunts, hosting unhinged television specials, and even appearing on an episode of Cheers.” as Milwaukee Record recently noted.

Yet there’s another major aspect of the Godfather of Milwaukee Rock. The music experience on the radio made a quantum leap when the music became a live performance with both local groups and touring groups hitting the city.. And here again was Reitman at the fore, as the emcee for the most important and compelling of rock shows.

Fans have doubtless many memories of Reitman at the stage microphone making introductions. “My name is Reitman…” — a tall. slender figure adorned in black jeans and T-shirt, and signature black leather vest. He was really never quite a hippie “flower child” sort. He was more, a la Lou Reed, an East Coast hipster. Reed’s bracingly naked confessional song “Heroin” recorded by The Velvet Underground was also a trademark Reitman offering, helping to define and challenge the sensibilities of the time. Reitman had something of Reed’s taut poetic sensibility, without the songwriter’s irritating personal foibles. He always sounded more like an older brother, whose record collection you loved to rifle through and play.

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Reitman also served as the figurehead host for two of the most pivotal music events in  Milwaukee rock music history, which I attended. First was the three-day Midwest Rock Fest at State Fair Park in July of 1969, less than a month before Woodstock, with paper flyers promoting the forthcoming rural New York event wafting through the crowd like weed smoke.

Reitman oversaw and introduced all three days of a powerhouse lineup that may still be unequalled in the city’s history, including the freshly-minted supergroup Blind Faith, with Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Stevie Winwood, playing one of their first live gigs; Led Zeppelin; Joe Cocker; Jeff Beck; Johnny Winter; Jethro Tull; Bob Seeger; Kenny Rogers and the Fifth Edition; Delaney and Bonnie & Friends; Buffy Sainte-Marie; John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers; Taste, with Irish guitar virtuoso Rory Gallagher; the proto-punk band the MC5, and others, including Milwaukee’s Ox, a derivative of Clapton’s previous supergroup Cream.

Future pop superstar Kenny Rogers, far right, leads the First Edition at Milwaukee’s  Midwest Rock Fest in August 1969.

Clapton, Zepplin’s Jimmy Page, and Beck constituted the triumvirate of British blues rock guitar heroes at the time, a coup not even Woodstock could claim. Add emerging virtuoso Johnny Winter and Irish guitarist Rory Gallagher (see below) and the guitar ante is upped further. However, Blind Faith frankly seemed to be feeling their their way through their new repertoire. Still, Winwood’s effortlessly soulful singing shone. And Led Zeppelin — with Robert Plant’s overgrown trellis of blond hair and primal-scream voice rising from Hades, and Jimmy Page’s searing, ridiculously low-slug Gibson Les Paul blues guitar, sometimes played with a violin bow, amid John Bonham’s thunder ‘n’ lightning drums — made the most lasting group impression.

Drummer Ginger Baker of Blind Faith (left) talks with journalists at the Midwest Rock Fest at State Fair Park. Photo by Marc Dulberger

Oh yes, Ginger Baker’s exploding red hair mop and four whirling limbs delivered the most virtuosic rhythms of the fest. Yet the fest’s dark-horse winner was definitely the nearly unknown Irish power trio Taste, with Gallagher’s raucous singing and blistering guitar work. I’d rank him up with the triumvirate.

The fast-rising power trio Taste, led by Rory Gallagher (right) was the dark-horse winner among the many talented acts at Midwest Rock Fest in 1969.

This summer of ’69 was the brief, shining moment of the short-lived Golden Era of Rock Fests, with the dark clouds of Altamont in December looming on the horizon.

Reitman emceed another historic concert I saw: Bruce Springsteen, in 1975, when he was young and still relatively unknown enough to play a venue as small as Milwaukee’s Uptown, mainly a movie theater in the middle of Milwaukee. This was shortly after Springsteen’s album The Wild, The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle and before the release of Born to Run.

Emcee Bob Reitman, right, with Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Van Zandt (center) on Oct. 2, 1975, at Milwaukee’s Uptown Theater. Springsteen speaks to the crowd after a bomb threat was called in, forcing an evacuation and temporary suspension of the show. Photo courtesy Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

About a half hour into the show, Reitman had to come back onstage — to stop Bruce and his Street Band flying in fourth gear (how often did that ever happen?) — and announce that a bomb scare had been reported. We looked at each other, uncomprehending the impossible. We felt suspended in a heavy, humid atmosphere of collective bodily energy permeating the packed theater. But everyone had to evacuate it. Still, Reitman said, if everything proved safe and secure, the concert would continue at midnight. Springsteen promised a full show. We all dispersed to various locales and waited with a mix of horrified angst and itchy anticipation.

Who knows how the word of “all clear” got out (maybe on Reitman’s radio station) but most of us returned with, well, only blind faith.

By midnight, the place was completely packed again, and Springsteen, with a huge “where-ya-all-been” grin, and a “one-two-three-four!” relit his band’s own fiery fuse. With big saxophone honker Clarence Clemons riding shotgun, Bruce and the boys rolled down Thunder Road for at least another 190 minutes, into the wee small hours of the morning! Springsteen had hit another crest in the breaking dawn of legend. I doubt very many of his concert-goers slept much that night.

Bruce Springsteen (by then rather intoxicated according to a bandmember) performing after midnight at the Uptown when the bomb threat had been cleared. Photo by Robert Cavallo 

That seems a long time ago, but the weird and then exultant vibes of that night remain etched in my memory. And Reitman was our cultural conduit, as he has remained, though increasingly as a sort of Boomer nostalgia act, to be honest. Yet, there’s still power and value in that deep, vibrating thread of American history.

Thanks, Bob.

For a fine, concise biographic sketch of Reitman, check out Shepherd Express‘s Dave Luhrssen: https://shepherdexpress.com/news/community-news/bob-reitman-retires-from-milwaukee-radio/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=What+was+Bob+Reitman+s+influence+on+Milwaukee+radio%3F&utm_campaign=Daily+News+Friday+April+19%2C+2024

Reflecting on Rich Mangelsdorff and Lake Michigan waves of “raised consciousness”

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Back cover of “The Collected Essays of Rich Mangelsdorff,” Dustbooks, 1977. Courtesy Harvey Taylor

“I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more…” – Herman Melville, in a letter to a friend, critic-editor Edward Duyckinck, March 3, 1849, three years before the publication of Moby-Dick.

 

Until I visited him in the hospital a few days ago, long-time Milwaukee arts journalist, essayist and poet Rich Mangelsdorff had faded somewhat in my memory, but not my consciousness. I think he would readily appreciate the distinction. Despite his comparative absence from the scene in recent years, part of my sense and critical understanding of the city’s cultural scene is formed by Mangelsdorff.

He wrote insightfully about the importance of “raised consciousness” in his substantial book Collected Essays of Rich Mangelsdorff published in 1977.

Mangelsdorff always cut an imposing intellectual as well as physical figure, as a tall, large-framed man with a high forehead and a fulsome black beard. He spoke deliberately and sometimes with pointed pungency. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Yet, as I describe him in my forthcoming book Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy, a high-pitched giggle incongruously emitted from his hulking frame, disarming some who might’ve been otherwise intimidated. This man’s character and personality intrigued and attracted me.

Today he remains – even lying in a hospital bed after surgery to diminish his serious bladder cancer – keenly attuned to the idea of comedy. As we talked, he brought up the  acerbic, machine-gun-mouth social-critic comic Lenny Bruce. I’d asked him about what sort of perspective might have been lost from the days when he was writing his essays in the 1970s.

“So much of it has to do with the use of computers and smartphones.” Mangelsdorff said, referencing recent research showing how excessive use of smart phones may negatively impact cognitive and literacy abilities. Ironically, Rich now struggles to speak, due to medications and cancer’s ravages, but his brain remains vise-like. “But also, years ago we had somebody like Lenny Bruce,” he says. “He wouldn’t be listened to now, but I saw him at a Milwaukee club in April of 1966 or 1967, and one woman stood up and called him an asshole. Then there was Mort Sahl, who paved the way for Lenny Bruce and others.”

These comics fearlessly spoke truth to power, as harpooners of squirming hypocrites. Bruce fought the law and the law won – the battle, but not the war.

Front and back cover of Lenny Bruce album, “What I was Arrested For,” Douglas Records,  1971.

A brief Lenny Bruce bit from “What I was Arrested For,”  which punctures conventions of perception based on skin color:

And here’s a more provocative and funny Bruce bit: “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties” from the album Buyer Beware:

To me, Rich Mangelsdorff, even now, hooked to an oxygen respirator, is like a great, graying Buddha. Perhaps, the laughing Buddha, but also one who, back then, in his trademark black leather jacket, could as readily fall into meditative silence, sometimes stewing about injustice, corruption or unheard prophets.

As for the rise of Donald Trump, Mangelsdorff says those who voted for him and continue to support him reflect, aside from delusion, “a malignancy of spirit. People actually choose the path of division rather than the path of unity. People think that Hillary might’ve had an easier time, but I don’t know.  It’s like we’re constantly dealing with an old, drunken, ranting white man.”

As for my aforementioned Mangelsdorff “consciousness” factor: He was my counterpart as jazz critic for The Milwaukee Sentinel in the 1980s, while I was covering jazz for The Milwaukee Journal. I often had the advantage of seeing Mangelsorff’s review of what I was writing about. The morning Sentinel’s first edition circulated The Journal newsroom to the few people still at work late at night, while I wrote my review, which would run in the afternoon.

I never mimicked his insights, but they helped refract my own perspective on what I had just experienced. You can see for yourself our parallel critical commentary in the journalism anthology Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984, published in its second edition last year, and available at Boswell Books and Woodland Pattern, as well as online.  Mangelsdorff had to shoot from the hip, with tough-minded, vivid accuracy.

I still picture him on his tight, morning newspaper deadline — a dark, furrowed brow, harrumphing softly to himself, as an insight or phrase came to mind.

But to see how he thinks about jazz, here’s an example from when he wasn’t on such a tough deadline. It’s from his book Selected Essays, and notice his unassumingly deft comparative plumbing of the creative webs that entwine jazz and poetry:

“I’d personally like to see more poets take off in that direction – not the jive it could easily degenerate into, or the slavish imitation of some favored ethnic rap, but rather, synthesis in the direction of something loosely brilliant, like Elvin Jones or Billy Higgins playing drums (and how many poets with big ears has jazz loosened up, speaking of latter-day influences?).” 1

Or check out this long, powerful riff by Mangelsdorff, which marks the dynamic immediacy of the era’s contemporary jazz and presages the ascendance and profound impact of rap and hip-hop music in 1972: 

“I’d always felt this gap between the means and language of poetry in the kind of swift, mental-energy exchanges that black people could get down on rapping in the street, that comics like Lenny Bruce communicate & that they’re spritzing back room precursors, by-passing explanational trappings, could communicate even more truly, that jazz musicians (and Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Shepp and the All-Star Blue Note lineups of Hancock, Davis, Williams, Hutcherson, Hubbard, et. al. were fueling my head like butane in those days) evidenced with grippingly articulate abandon and/or snake charming wiliness.” 2.

How many people of any stripe have seen such connections, taken these sorts of double-dip deep dives, back then?

Rich and I were mutually respectful competing journalistic colleagues, but also friends, especially as two of the closest compadres of the late but unforgettable Jim Glynn. Despite being paraplegic from a Jeep crash while serving in Europe during the Vietnam War, Glynn possessed uncanny dynamism and charisma, especially as a high-flying culture vulture, a vision of inspiration lifting his disabled body improbably along to the hippest or most important music event in town.

Mangelsdorff’s Selected Essays remain paramount in his still-underserved literary legacy. Read insightful literary criticism of the iconoclastic poet Charles Bukowski and others influenced by him, like Doug Blazek, T.L. Kryss and Bill Wantling. In another essay, he holds up to light the period’s best contemporary experimental fiction: “Its exterior is complex, even baffling, to anyone not sufficiently high to get into it. Yes, that’s what I said. Raised consciousness. That’s what she’s all about. Read people like Wildman, Chambers, Sukenick: they’re talking to a new and different fictive sensibility, even if, as was the case with Joyce and his Dublin (and Dubliners), it is one which has already generalized itself through our lives and times.” 3

Note his vernacular use of the female pronoun. Mangelsdorff sounded a unifying, if challenging, clarion for all sensate beings, right from his first-ever piece of criticism for Kaleidoscope, the pioneering alternative newspaper in Milwaukee in the 1960s:

“Serious rock (music) is a constant pushing forward of the shores of awareness, expanding the frontiers of sound and, as the liner notes to Jimi Hendrix’s album state: put(ting) the heads of…listeners into some novel positions,’ i.e. consciousness expansion…” 4

In that Kaleidoscope essay Mangelsdorff also underscores specifically the “psychedelic experience,” as an empowering medium which may yet provide incalculable potential for humanity. It’s easy to poo-poo such notions today, when we assume most of our power lies in a click under our finger, a mouse that potentially roars. That click can also sound like a solitary cricket — meandering, lost, easily manipulated. Surely we need fresh, diverse ways to tackle the intransigence of our political and social institutions. 4

Mangelsdorff’s writing still carries a load, as America grapples with marijuana legalization, with the herb’s great medical value, and reputation, anecdotally and deeply researched, for expanding consciousness, to frontiers far beyond the shores of reactionary stumbling blocks.

He long foreshadowed rock songwriters as Nobel winners, how various American artistic vernaculars generate “novel” intellectual and spiritual positions, which lead to enlightened action. Could we still imagine alt-music and culture growing against the craggy crevasses of “malignancy,” like a healing, marching cry along “the path of unity”? Might the culture yet form diverse yet converging paths, rising in rough-but-ready harmony, powered by a sum greater than their individual massed strengths?

Steve Cohen, the renowned blues-jazz harmonica-guitar virtuoso, is among many local musicians who hold this writer in high esteem. “When he was in full swing, I thought Rich was the best music critic in town,” Cohen says. “When my band Leroy Airmaster made an album, I wanted to him to do the liner notes and he did a great job. He would also visit my radio program on WMSE in the 1980s and offer his insights, which I thought were as great as any in the world.”

As Mangelsdorff sits now in his seventh floor hospital room, he can see the classic North Avenue light tower, standing over Lake Michigan’s vast horizon of darkly brooding clouds, like a sentinel. We talked for nearly two hours, so I suspect he was exhausted, although he was happy and urged me to come again.

North Avenue Water tower, Milwaukee. Courtesy cpd.typepad.com

I suspect he soon fell asleep, but I’d prefer to think such a mind – long immersed in cutting-edge literature and culture – might have rechanneled its consciousness, maybe alighted upon the great rhetorical pondering of Philip K. Dick: “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” That, of course, was the original title of the Dick novel that became the pioneering noir sci-fi film Blade Runner. The novel, published in 1968, is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco. Planet Earth, ravaged by nuclear global war, is invaded by android aliens who may – or may not – threaten human survival. Most animal species are endangered or extinct from extreme radiation poisoning, and owning an animal, an “electric sheep” is now a sign of status and empathy.

That attitude brings myriad intelligent species on a path closer to survival, like a new Noah’s ark at a wary dawn, where perhaps little remains of Milwaukee’s magnificent shore, but that sentinel tower on North Avenue.

Rich also would likely know that “The Sentinel” was the original name of Arthur C. Clarke’s story, upon which was born the mind-expanding film 2001: A Space Odyssey. No matter where Rich Mangelsdorff’s consciousness soon ends up, the arrow in his well-stocked quiver will aim for the stratosphere.

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1, Rich Mangelsdorff, “Towards Understanding How We Sound,” from The Selected Essays of Rich Mangelsdorff, Dustbooks Press, The “American Dust” Series,” Vol. 8, 1972, 13

2. Mangelsdorff, “I Still Think About Ole Magazine,” Selected Essays, 31

3. Mangelsdorff, “Consideration of Panache Magazine,” Selected Essays, 17

4. Rich Mangelsdorff, from www.zonyx.net: Rich Mangelsdorff’s debut rock criticism (on Jimi Hendrix) in “Kaleidoscope” newspaper.  On this link, scroll down a ways in Mike Zettler’s lead article “The Oral Freedom League..Kaleidoscope Revisited,” for the Mangelsdorff quote.

This article was originally published in shorter form at The Shepherd Express at Paying Tribute to Milwaukee’s Rich Mangelsdorff