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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

A Tale of Two Tails (Or Almost That Long)

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Eddie “Little Count Dracula.” Photo by Kevin Lynch

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Chapter 1: Taking “the leap” with a little black cat who thinks he can Fly.

It was the best of times, with our two aging cats, slowly and uncertainly getting to know each other. Then, it was the worst of times, though Ann and I had the best of intentions, when we brought “Eddie” into the house.

It’s debatable whether, for me and my gal pal Ann Peterson, it was “the age of wisdom,” as Dickens once proclaimed, to begin a famous tale. When I moved in with Ann last year, we instantly became a three-cat household, deeply exacerbating the absurdity of me being a cat owner my whole adult life, while being allergic to cats. Before too long, my asthmatic wheezing started getting worse, despite Ann’s assiduous dusting and vacuuming.

But Taj, her big, crazy black cat, got sick about five months after we moved together and, as cats will do, he died quite soon afterwards. It was a great loss I’m sure for Ravi, her creamy-white semi-Siamese scaredy-cat, who had been housemates with Taj since Ravi’s kittenhood. 1

Ann Peterson with our first set of three cats (L-R) Chloe, Ravi (in background) and Taj (facing Ann), before the black cat passed away. Photo by Kevin Lynch

But it seemed an even greater loss for Ann, I think. First of all, Taj was unbelievably attached to her. A “pet psychic” she had once hired, did a phone “reading” long distance and declared of Taj: “That is the neediest cat I have ever encountered.” He was persistently jealous of any book she was reading and tried to horn in past the book, to stick his face into hers, especially when she was reading prone, in bed. Ann loved and hated Taj’s clinginess in seemingly equal measure, and his often hyper-goofiness entertained her no end, well, until the end.

However, she is also the most squishy-hearted, animal-centric person I’ve ever met (She claims her two sisters are “worse” and, indeed Cary and Jennifer both own more pets than we do). She actually had two cats and two dogs when I first met her although, by the time she moved to the east side from Wauwatosa, the two dogs had died.

So, she began to make up for those losses by volunteering to walk dogs at the Humane Society on Saturday mornings. Now, she daily checks on the current dogs on her cell phone, to see which ones might’ve been adopted overnight and, to her great chagrin, which end up being returned to the Humane Society for not quite fitting into the household.

“Oh, Capone is back!” she cried out yesterday. Of course, you wonder why the dog ended up with that name. “But he’s the sweetest guy, so polite,” she always says of most any returning dog who apparently violates parole. Yeah, sweet like crafty Capone was, just before he pulled his gun to waste an old crony who’d betrayed him.

Ann promised me she would never again try to bring a dog into her house, despite all her angst and strong affection for these mangy, sometimes handsome, and eager dogs. So, I was hardly surprised the day she suggested we look for a kitten who might begin to replace the playmate/pal role that Taj made in Ravi’s life. By then it had become clear that Ravi and my cat, Chloe, though now beginning to peaceably coexist, would unlikely ever be close buddies, as Chloe had been in a one-cat household for so long.

So, I agreed to the idea, somewhat warily, and sure enough, Ann quickly found a three or four-month- old black kitten in a foster home, waiting for just the right real home.

We went to visit the cat — a lean, wiry shorthaired little critter, unlike the fat and long-haired black Taj. He was just as charming and crazy as you would expect a kitten to be, so we were hooked.

Chapter Two: Life (and Fear and Loathing?) with Eddie “Little Count Dracula” the cat.

When we brought him home, almost instantly all hell broke loose. I only slightly use the term figuratively, as it wasn’t long before the cat, whom we named Eddie, took on the role of a satanic intruder. I thought Eddie was a fine name, not because it’s my middle name, but because he right away reminded me of Eddie Haskell, the smart-ass neighborhood troublemaker on Leave it to Beaver. He even talked a bit like Eddie, with sort of a whiny, scratchy voice, not at all like my Chloe’s almost lyrical meow.

And when it’s time for chow he schmoozes me with intense body rubbings against my legs, just like Eddie Haskell would schmooze Beaver’s mom — “Good-afternoon, Mrs. Cleaver, you’re looking especially lovely today” — and might get rewarded with a piece of cake, despite having just dunked her son’s face in a mud puddle in the backyard. Otherwise, Eddie the cat often runs away from me because I’ve begun to become sort of the “bad cop” in our disciplinary efforts. Of course, that mad dash is at least as much his manic energy at work, as cat toys of all sorts bounce and skitter around the floor.

Ann and I quickly got dizzy watching Eddie zoom back-and-forth through our Riverwest flat, but that was laced with anxiety because Eddie was often chasing either my Chloe, or Ann’s Ravi, and usually tackling and roughing up the victim a bit. If it were football he would be repeatedly charged with a personal foul for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Eddie soon was creating chaos for all of us while, of course, charming us with his kittenish playfulness and goofiness. It’s as if he had memorized the book a cat is reading in a New Yorker cartoon: How to Be Very Annoying and Cute. Part of the problem and the charm is that Eddie seems to be an extremely smart cat, which is saying something giving the superior intelligence of the species in general. So, he’s crafty, stealthy, cunning, and seemingly, at times, cold-blooded. In other words, he’s an unrepentant scoundrel.

Okay, here’s a cute example of his smarts. He invented a game with one of the little sparkly squishy balls he and the other cats play with. When an empty laundry basket is on the kitchen floor, Eddie will toss the ball into the basket, and then tip the basket over sideways. So now the ball is caught in the side webbing of the basket. But rather than simply pull the ball out again, Eddie delights in the fact that it is “in jail,” perhaps like he should be. So, he starts pushing the tipped basket around and it rotates across the floor on a circular axis, with the squishy ball dancing around along its sides. Neither I nor Ann, another lifelong cat-owner, have ever seen a cat do such a thing.

Watch Eddie in action: Eddie and the rolling basket

On the downside, at the most, shall I say, existential level for me, my asthma was once again getting worse, with three cats and Eddie often infiltrating our bed at night. Oh joy.

So, for my health and Ann’s relative nightly peace, we’re trying to keep Eddie out of the bedroom at night, another challenging “game” the elusive rascal’s too good at. Even when we successfully get him out of the room, our early morning slumber is often roused by the unnerving sound of Eddie jiggling the doorknob, trying to open it. If he had opposable thumbs, I would readily imagine him, already up on his hind legs, marching in upright, putting his paws on his hips and staring at us indignantly.

Ann wasn’t blind to the ever-complicating situation and a couple of times even broke down in tears, declaring her notion of finding a new playmate for fraidy-cat Ravi “was all a bad idea.”

Let’s step back just slightly. This story’s title comes from perhaps Eddie’s most distinguishing physical trait, which may also have symbolic value. As you’ll see in the top photograph, he has what Ann admits to being “a ridiculously long tail,” nearly two tails long. It does make you wonder, and I’ve begun to think of Pinocchio and his mythical nose, which would grow longer every time he told a lie. Perhaps Eddie’s tail grows just a tad longer every time he commits a household transgression, which is quite often. After apparently learning his lesson, Pinocchio, the wooden marionette, one day turned into a real boy, his fondest wish. If Eddie the real cat one day turned into a wooden marionette, someone’s fondest wish might come true, and things would be quieter and, um, “safer” around here, with no strings attached.

If one of these days his tail tip begins to grow a satanical spear-blade tip, we’ll know something is, um, following him and maybe us. Should I have honored Poe, not Dickens, in this tail of two black cats? Or perhaps Dr. Seuss, given the scene illustrated below? Taj’s bushy black tail actually had a crooked kink in it. By contrast, my calico cat’s black -and-brown-speckled tail has a lily-white tip, a signifier or not (Of course, Ravi can attest, Chloe has proven no angel in this house).

Understand, poor Ravi was an almost neurotically meek and fearful cat since the first time I met him, although Ann claims he improbably would initiate wrestling matches with Taj. Since his “black bro” has passed, and since Eddie arrived, Ravi has taken on the “clinging cat” role, and to a whole new level – from Taj’s in-Ann’s-face to on-her-head, that is, starting each nap or evening bedtime by laying literally on her head, and often kneading her hair into a rat’s nest, though I suspect Ravi might run away if he saw a small furry marsupial scampering around the house.

Ann prefers not to have her picture taken but, one day, realizing the situation’s ludicrousness, she wryly took a selfie, of her and Ravi (see below). Now she has finally begun to protest to minimize the hair kneading.

“The Cat as a Hat”: Ann (holding back a giggle) and Ravi, in bed. Photo by Ann Peterson

I think these photographs speak for themselves, worth the proverbial thousand words. So, as this little story has exceeded a thousand words already, I need to close. Things are getting a bit better around here, though I know any number of new owners would have by now deemed Eddie as severely violating his parole, and shipped him back to the Humane Society. I’ve never wanted to do that, while biting my lip when “Little Count Dracula” bites Ann’s neck or elsewhere, yet again. She has tearfully admitted she could never return him, despite the household strife. His high zaniness quotient does keep all four of us entertained, each in our ways.

We can only hope, somewhere over the horizon and a lucky rainbow, the worst of times around here come closer to the best of times.

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  1. Culture Note: Despite Ann’s doubts of how much I liked her first two cats, I had been predisposed to do so partly because of their names. Her daughter Teresa had named Ravi after the great Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar who of, course, turned George Harrison and the Beatles onto Indian classical music and its spiritual implications. Shankar also influenced guitarist-composer Mike Bloomfield, who witnessed the sitarist’s Western star-making performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1966, and then wrote the title tune of the Butterfield Blues Band’s profoundly influential second album East-West. Though Ann doesn’t recall the genesis of Taj’s name, I prefer to think that a name-giver in her family really liked the music of Taj Mahal, the marvelously eclectic blues musician.

 

NPR American Masters question: What single work of art changed your life?

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This is the colorized cover of the Kindle edition of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” as illustrated by Rockwell Kent for the 1930 edition, but with the author’s name added. (see below) 
Well, I gotta right to sing the blues, Or to sing praises, like a fool, to the earthly heavens where art might come from. And if it is the blues, it’s the kind that inspires you rather than keeps your head just above water.
You see, my song sort of went on and on (by Facebook comment standards), spilling over the 12-bar blues form like water in a sinking ship. But the editors at PBS American Masters Facebook page didn’t jettison any of my load of responses to the provocative question: What single work of art changed your life?
They’ve received 247 responses and counting. Here’s my response. I couldn’t quite help myself. I have even expanded on it here, with a bit more text and imagery.
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As a long-time generalist arts journalist, I’ve encountered so much extraordinary art in all its forms. How to pick one? I might say seeing Picasso’s “Guernica,” but it was an oddly truncated experience, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed before I could see all of it. I’d literally been stopped in my tracks on the staircase for long minutes because the center of Guernica filled the doorway view at the top. Then the doors closed, as the museum was closing for the day. I didn’t have time to return before flying back home. The great work moved to Spain a short time later, in 1981. So, I live with a reproduction of it, and that oddly but profoundly unfulfilled experience. 1
Imagine seeing, through a doorway, the middle of this astonishing political mural by Picasso, being stopped in your tracks by it on a museum staircase — and then the gallery doors closing on you at 5 p.m. That’s my sadly truncated but unforgettable experience of seeing the mighty “Guernica.” Courtesy Magazine Artsper
“Guernica,” of course was named for the Spanish town bombed in 1937 by Nazi planes, complicit with Fascist dictator Franco  — the first act of modern war terrorism on a civilian population of nascent World War II.
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And then, seeing Arshile Gorky’s often-gorgeous metamorphosis from surrealism to abstract-expressionism — closely reflecting my own artistic sensibilities — at the Guggenheim Museum of Art is another life-changing moment.
The plow and the song - Digital Remastered Edition Painting by Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky’s 1946 painting “The Plow and the Song,” (above) lyrically transmutes his memories of homeland Armenia to the modernist present. The memories were rooted in his long, desperate childhood escape, by foot, with his sister Vartoosh and mother, from the Armenian holocaust conducted by the Ottoman Empire. Their mother, Sushan der Marderosian pictured below — in this wrenchingly poignant Gorky painting from about 1926, with the artist at the age of their exodus — died of starvation in 1918. (Courtesy pixels.)
Pleased with my Milwaukee Journal review of the Guggenheim show, Gorky’s nephew Karlen Mooradian contacted me. I was fortunate enough to obtain an in-person interview with him and Gorky’s sister Vartoosh Adoian Mooradian (Gorky’s original name was Vosdanig Adoian) in Chicago, but I was never able to publish anything from the interview. I did glean great insight from Mooradian’s 1980 book The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky, about his artist uncle, who committed suicide in 1948. He profoundly influenced many abstract expressionists, none more than Willem de Kooning. 2
The Artist and His Mother, 1926 - 1936 - Arshile Gorky - WikiArt.org
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Then, music vibrates on and on in my life, where the single transforming moment could be the Butterfield Blues Band’s ground-breaking East-West album, or first hearing John Coltrane’s achingly eloquent and exalting A Love Supreme suite, or his searing Live at Birdland, and imaging being there, in that fire.
John Coltrane “Live at Birdland.” Courtesy deep groove mono
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Or, by contrast to such earnest passion, the lacerating sneer of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” which helped pinpoint the existential waywardness of the freedom my generation declared from bourgeois convention and responsibility. Or, by another contrast, Dylan’s affirmatively flashing “Chimes of Freedom,” poetry aflame in music
Or, hearing Beethoven or Mahler in fearless, heaving performances, in Milwaukee and Madison. Grammy-winning conductor John DeMain especially unlocked much of Mahler’s glorious might with the Madison Symphony Orchestra, in a full Mahler symphonic cycle in the 1990s and 2000s.
In theater, a darkly, full-chested staging of Macbeth at American Platers Theater, and a thunderbolt-raging King Lear at UW-Milwaukee. So, yes, the commonality here seems an appetite for grand gestures, of many sorts.
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That’s why I finally must land on the experience of reading Moby-Dick for the first time (as some readers of this blog might’ve guessed). I was already in my ‘40s and, knowing its reputation and having seen Huston’s movie version, I remained unprepared for how inexorably the book swept me away, even though many readers understandably turn back to the shore. And yet, there’s so much you’d miss. Even the cetology I gobbled up like so much krill going down a cavernous throat.
Yet the haunting had begun several decades earlier when I found a copy of the 1930 Random House edition which brought the book to widespread readership.
My plastic-covered copy of the 1930 Random House edition of Moby-Dick, what I still believe is the definitive version of an illustrated edition of the book, with art by Rockwell Kent. Photo by Kevin Lynch
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The visual artist in me responded to this powerfully. I knew then, my day of reckoning with the book loomed somewhere in the future. There have been many illustrated editions of this book since, and some are steeped in their own fiery inspiration. But none so eloquently captures the spirit of the book as it manifest itself in the Depression era, as does that 1930 edition.
Rockwell Kent, in his way, approaches Melville’s genius in his 228 woodblock prints. The black and white Deco-influenced imagery is proto-noir, capturing the sense of lost-at-sea and impending doom and, in deft knife strokes, the essence of characters lurking inside their ravaged, or mortally infected, souls. 3
Infected by what? The blood-lust fervor of Ahab, akin to a demagogue manufacturing an enemy, in the whale that took his leg. The expansively stentorian Ahab, recalling Lear, captivates the whole crew in his questing rage — except for first mate Starbuck and, to a degree, Ishmael, who remains somewhat remote, and “aloft.”
Alas, Random House jumped on their perceived marketing coup with the new edition so strongly that they failed to put Melville’s name anywhere on the cover, only including “Illustrated by Rockwell Kent” on the spine. It was yet another of countless insults to the great and long-forsaken writer, right at the emergence of his genius to broader acceptance. The current Kindle version (at top), at least, corrects that “oversight” with the original cover (colorized though it is).
Captain Ahab — Rockwell Kent – Biblioklept
Here’s a brooding but burning portrait of Captain Ahab, by Rockwell Kent. 
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So, back to Melville’s text:
The extraordinarily antiphonal voices of Ishmael and Ahab echoed through my head and psyche, across the oceanic expanses of poetic writing, gritty details, and surprising humor, which might make some virtually sea-sick, but hang onto the horizon as the crow’s nest sways!
It was indeed postmodern in 1851, in how Melville strangely constructed it, and summed up his own creation as well as anyone: “It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.”
“Thar she blows!” from “Moby Dick,” 1930, illustrated by Kent. Courtesy “History of Art: Masterpieces of World Literature: Herman Melville.”
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Yet it persists, remaining afloat as a metaphor and allegory for America, in the tall, creaking bones of The Pequod, manned by people from many races. And what else did it all mean? Defying fate? Or God? Or nature? Or Nature? Hubris as delusion, or the destiny of grace embraced, one storyteller’s backward glance into timelessness?
Rockwell Kent Ishmael Going Abroad Giclee Art Print | Etsy
Here, Pequod first harpoonist Queequeg, who deeply befriends Ishmael early in the novel, remains vigilant for the White Whale, even while down in the forecastle where the crew bunks. Illustration by Kent. Courtesy Etsy.
From childhood, oceanic depths had always scared me. In time, Melville’s mounting whorl of words, and his own extraordinary life story, compelled me to begin writing a novel about its author.
These days, people critique the book’s scarcity of women characters. Yet, as Sascha Morrell comments. “On the other hand, the novel makes numerous appeals to the maternal forces of nature. It also breaks down gender norms and boundaries, from Ishmael’s surrender to Queequeg’s ‘bridegroom clasp,’ to Ahab’s boasting of his ‘queenly personality’ to the ambiguous mingling of ‘milk and sperm’ in the infamously erotic chapter ‘A Squeeze of the Hand.’”
Another she doesn’t mention is one of my favorite chapters, the stunning awe of gigantic maternal nursing in “The Grand Armada.” For that matter, tell (the late) Elizabeth Hardwick, author of a brilliantly concise and empathetic Melville biography, how much it lacks for a human female presence. Or Laurie Robertson-Lorant, author of a comprehensive Melville biography. Or Elizabeth Schultz, the doyenne of visual art about “The Great American Novel.”
Moby Dick breaches like a god reaching for the stars, (or to “kiss the sky,” as Jimi Hendrix would exult in the 1960s). in this image by Kent from 1930.
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On the other hand, one could quote any number of astute observers on the book’s magnificence: Hardwick, F. O. Matthiessen, Harold Bloom, Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, and Lewis Mumford all come to mind, worth looking up. Most recently, I revisited D.H. Lawrence on Moby-Dick and he says: “A wonderful, wonderful voyage. And a beauty that is so surpassing only because of the author’s awful flounderings in mystical waters. He wanted to get metaphysically deep. And he got deeper than metaphysics. It is a surpassingly beautiful book, with an awful meaning, and bad jolts.” Read his essay in Studies in Classic American Literature for more. 4
So, living on the Heartland edge of a Great Lake, I remain haunted by this and more, by Saint Elmo’s Fire and the diabolical blood ritual, by Pip seeing God’s foot on the treadle of the loom, by the Catskill Eagle emerging from the woe that is madness, by Ahab’s burning obsession, by the massive will and long, mysterious memory – is it consciousness? — of the white whale and, of course, by Queequeg’s coffin, a miraculous, sacred offering from a brotherly friend, somehow rising, just free of the hellish vortex.
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf…”
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1 Picasso was adamant that Guernica remain at the Met until Spain re-established a democratic republic. It would not be until 1981, after both the artist’s and Franco’s deaths, that Spanish negotiators were finally able to bring the mural home.
2 Mooradian’s The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky includes 70 illustrations, a Q& A interview with Willem DeKooning about Gorky, as well as interviews with Alexander Calder, Lee Krasner Pollock, Malcolm Cowley, Reuben Nakian, Barnett Newman, Peter Blume, Meyer Schapiro, Saul Steinberg and other important figures in modern art and criticism.
3 The edition of Moby-Dick with Kent’s illustrations remains in print. I recommend the version with an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick, published by The Modern Library, in paperback 2000.
4. Studies in Classic American Literature, DH Lawrence, Penguin, 1923, 1977, 159

Musing about Michael (Bloomfield), gone too soon, like so many

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I’m in a reflective mood and just ran across my favorite photograph of the tragic guitar great Michael Bloomfield, a man who’s always spoken to me for various reasons. Well, this photo is a close number one ahead of the famous shot (below) of Bloomfield playing and jivin’ with Bob Dylan when he infamously went electric at The Newport Folk Festival in 1965.  Bloomfield and Dylan cranked up the electric venom on “Maggie’s Farm” and, after that shock treatment, folk music was never the same again. A hoary but sometimes beautiful new creature was born: folk-rock.

(Musicians left to right) Michael Bloomfield, Sam Lay, Jerome Arnold, Bob Dylan. Pinterest

As for the revealing and, for me. rather moving Jim Marshall photo at top, it was taken at the famous Super Session recording with bassist Harvey Brooks affectionately needling Michael.

Bloomfield’s utterly chilled, prone position speaks volumes about the man: enduring extreme, chronic insomnia and drug addiction in the making. It also speaks to the man’s creativity and profound love for the music, especially the blues.

I would think Michael Bloomfield – the Jewish boy from Chicago, as much as any white man – bled blue.

The story continues to unfold: Michael lies amid the maze of wires, with a faraway gaze, a cigarette put out, or simply dropped, in the pool of spilled coffee on the floor. What are his eyes fixed on? What sort of vision hovers, almost taunting him with its distant guitar utopia? It would be fascinating to hear what he was actually playing at that moment, and what those phrases had to say. The man was clearly suffering, but persevering, for the time being, channeling his pain into the music, transforming it into something vibrant and redemptive, the essence of the blues.

Bloomfield played as well as he ever has that day, but could not even complete a whole recording session. Not long after this photo was shot, he informed singer-organist Al Kooper that he couldn’t continue, and Stephen Stills had to be called, finish what would become side two of Super Session.

It’s worth noting why this was to be called Super Session. Kooper, Bloomfield and Brooks had all achieved fame by recording Bob Dylan”s Highway 61 Revisited album, and the song that carved a mountain in the middle of the highway of rock music, called “Like a Rollling Stone.”

Soon afterward, Bloomfield became a freshly-crowned guitar god with the Butterfield Blues Band, which I’ll get to shortly. Although he started with Dylan and Butterfield playing the edgier Fender telecaster guitar (see photo with Dylan) it was with Les Paul’s Gibson guitar that Bloomfield found his true voice, in what he himself termed “sweet blues,” the sound for which you wanted most to be known. A biographical film is titled Sweet Blues: A Film About Michael Bloomfield. Kooper had formed pioneering jazz-rock bands, The Blues Project and Blood, Sweat and Tears, though he left the latter group early on.

The Les Paul guitar’s comparatively clean, singing tone replicated somewhat that of Bloomfield’s idol, B.B. King, who played a different sort of Gibson guitar. Waukeshan Les Paul’s gorgeously-sculpted physical creation allowed for a sonic vividness that captivated most leading rock guitarists at the time, who could all be seen playing the Les Paul shortly after Bloomfield took it up.

Another favorite Bloomfield shot reveals the man’s brilliant blues passion, at a rock fest with the Electric Flag in Santa Rosa, California.

The superbly produced Super Session is a great example of the guitar’s voice in the extraordinarily simpatico hands of Bloomfield.

How good was Bloomfield? Bob Dylan called him the best guitarist he’d ever hear. Or let’s hear Miles Davis, in his float-like-a-butterfly, sting-like-a-bee bluntness: “You could put Michael Bloomfield with James Brown and he’d be a motherfucker.”

To answer more personally, I now must refer backwards, to what would become his career masterpiece, the long instrumental piece “East-West,” which Bloomfield composed in 1966, as the title tune of the Butterfield Blues Band’s second album.

I have discussed the tune in a previous blog about the anthology box set Michael Bloomfield: From the Heart to the Head to the Hand. But what I wanted to say now, in light of the photograph above, is that he may have realized that “East-West,” composed while he was still in his 20s, was the pinnacle of his career. He would go on to play plenty, including Super Session, and great live follow-up albums for Columbia Records with Kooper, Taj Mahal and others.

He then formed the jazz-rock-R&B band The Electric Flag, but he was poorly suited as a long-term bandleader. So he embarked on a substantial solo career, as a scholarly maven of blues, of virtually all stripes. But because he intuitively fled from the personal spotlight like a heart-of-gold blues vampire (ergo the frequent nocturnal existence?),  he remains underappreciated to this day.

But the masterful blend of Ravi Shankar’s Eastern classical music, rock and John Coltrane’s modal music that became “East-West” also reveals something of the man in the photo above. The composition was famously created in a sleepless all-night jam and composing session, and one can imagine Bloomfield, in the wee hours, on the floor with his Les Paul again. Something mysterious arose that night. I believe Elvin Bishop, who brilliantly shares lead guitar duties on the piece, in a much grittier style, has related how the piece welled up out of Michael as well as becoming a courageous labor of stylistic synthesis:

“We listened to Ravi Shankar and Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. Everything, you know? So yeah, it was cool,” Bishop recalled.

“But I’ll tell you the honest truth: the only person in the band who had any kind of clue about Indian music was Bloomfield, and his knowledge was …you know, you don’t really get into Indian music; it takes years and years. But the groove of the thing was based on a common blues thing in Chicago. A lot of times there would be a little revue happening, with a basic band and two or three different front guys; one of them would have a good name. And there was always what they called a “shake dancer,” a girl doing exotic dancing somewhere in the mix. The groove that starts out ‘East-West’ came from that. They would play an ‘exotic’ groove, something similar to ‘Caravan.” 1

For its diverse and unassuming roots, the piece is superbly realized as an extended composition. At times, it blazes like a house of blues afire, dueling with sun gods. Yet what always gets me is the quiet passages of the piece, which is miked so closely by producer Paul Rothschild that you can almost hear hear Bloomfield breathe, as he’s hunched over his Les Paul, in his typical manner. He played with tenderness, a balance of reverence and abandon, and assurance in the face of his personal abyss, and the sunburst of musical possibilities.

He had unlocked the doors of perception, between two great cultural traditions, and turned vernacular musics into high, revelatory art. “East-West” influenced countless musicians, and the nether blooming directions of creative popular music. Contextualized further, there had been no instrumental works as ambitious as this in American vernacular music in 1966. Few comparable works since have been as artistically successful.

Here it is. I recommend a hearty volume to get the full impact of the music’s wide dynamic range:

(L-R) Bassist Harvey Brooks, guitarist-singer-bandleader Michael Bloomfield, and singer Nick Gravenites of the newly-formed Electric Flag, probably shortly before they performed at the iconic Monterey Pop Festival in 1966. Facebook: Not Necessarily Stoned, but Beautiful: Hippies of the 60s and Beyond

I also just came across a third photo, which I decided to include because it is perhaps more upbeat, yet still complex. It shows Bloomfield with Brooks and singer-songwriter Nick Gravenites (who is credited with co-composing “East-West.”), about the time they had formed The Electric Flag, following all the music previously discussed. It was a marvelous group, bursting with grimy soul and ingenious jazzy finesse, but all too-short-lived. You can see the weight of life bearing down on Bloomfield, as a still-young man in his 30s. He was far from finished, but perhaps his fate was sealed.

He died in in his car, alone on a San Francisco street, of a drug overdose at age 37.

“Heroin, be the death of me.” — Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground

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  1. Elvin Bishop: Still Struttin’ His Stuff at 78 (part 2 of 2)