I wrote my first original post here three years ago this month after talking with a comrade at a prison strike support event. In part, that event commemorated the killing of George Jackson and the Attica uprising. During the event my memory went back to composers Steve Reich and Frederic Rzewski and their musical statements of solidarity with the Attica inmates and the defendants from the earlier Harlem “fruit stand” riot of 1964. In the course of our conversation I realized I’d outlined that post. See Attica: Coming Together.
This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of Jackson’s murder and the Attica revolt that followed.
Exactly a year ago my discussion with a comrade about music-compelled-by-struggle led to my first original post here, Attica: Coming Together. Last Friday, talking with this same friend caused me to create a list of musics that employ the spoken word—faith-based speech specifically. After jotting down a few titles I came across an extensive list posted for Easter 2013 by one Mr. Fab, a Los Angeles-based deejay and musician. He helpfully includes the name of each orator, which indicates the popularity of two in particular, R. W. Schambach and Gene Scott. My list nearly ended with Praga Khan’s setting of the former in 1991, but Fab provides twenty more years of titles.
My Friday conversation involved Brian Eno and David Byrne’s album My Life In the Bush of Ghosts for which they used the voice of Kathryn “I Believe In Miracles” Kuhlman. While her estate wouldn’t approve licensing, a 1980 UK bootleg of the intended track and others circulated apparently before the official album was released in early 1981.1Bush of Ghosts was completed in October of 1980 and Eno and Byrne must have scrambled to replace Kuhlman’s vocal: the substitute was an “unidentified exorcist” recorded the previous month in New York. Both these speakers are acts in their own right, with the exorcist commanding (below), healer Kuhlman exploring (at least initially).
On the bootleg (at 2:32) Kuhlman seems to introduce a guest, perhaps on her television show? Her phrasal pauses are electronically elongated in contrast to the musical pulses, turning prose into something this side of poetry.2
Sit down by my side. Tell me all about that wonderful experience when you were the possessorof that wonderful gift whereby you were enabled to see into the spirit world. This is what he saw…
This is what who saw? Inexplicably (the track does hiccough as if it’d been trimmed)—and murkily in the mix—Kuhlman turns to scripture: the story of Lot, King James Version (itself a poetical prose).
19 And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground; 2 And he said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, into your servant’s house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early, and go on your ways. And they said, Nay; but we will abide in the street all night. 3 And he pressed upon them greatly; and they turned in unto him, and entered into his house; and he made them a feast, and did bake unleavened bread, and they did eat.
At which point, of course the men of Sodom demand that the angels be flushed out, “that we might know them.”3 To which Lot generously offers his “two daughters which have not known man.” The tale goes even further downhill from there, but Kuhlman—via the X-acto blade of Eno and Byrne?—omits all of this, returning cheerfully to:
But he’d been given that wonderful gift, which enabled him to see into the spirit world. These were angels, angels with Lot, and angels are just as real in your life and just as real in my life as they were in the life of Lot. Only he was given a gift whereby he could see into the spirit world and he saw them.
Surely the men of Sodom also were given the gift, else how would they have known there were new men to be known?
And so Eno and Byrne, having been forced to excise Kuhlman, swapped in an exorcist with a demonic laugh, who declares that his exorcisee’s “husband is the head of her house.” Thus the track moved from house to house, from the spirit world to “The Jezebel Spirit,” its title on the album.4
Anthems and Albums
It’s been noted that Eno and Byrne’s vocals appropriations had an antecedent at least ten years earlier with composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen (Anthems, 1966–1967), which sourced national anthem recordings from several countries around the world. And in 1969 Holgar Czukay (German co-founder of Can) with Rolf Dammers created Canaxis 5 by taking a choral a cappella track from a Folkways album, Music of Viet Nam, and giving it a lush setting.5 On Bush of Ghosts Eno and Byrne would do the same with three tracks from the album Music in the World of Islam (a six-LP box set that I let slip through my fingers when I moved back to Colorado). In 1987 Czukay employed the (mostly sung) vocals of Pope John Paul II, below. “We were blessed by the appearance of His Holyness Popestar Wojtyla and His Swinging Nuns during the Easter ceremonies,” Czukay writes in the credits to the Virgin album Rome Remains Rome.
Touching, Funny, and Disturbing
As can be heard, Eno and Byrne’s careful craft is in contrast with Czukay’s nonchalance. The latter approach also is taken by John Adams in a 1973 composition, a recording of which was released by Eno on his Obscure label. Christian Zeal and Activity is the middle movement of Adams’s triptych American Standard. The ensemble performs a deconstructed “Onward Christian Soldiers” but without benefit of bar lines—and with or without a baton. (Eno would use a similar technique for his Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel.6) Adams’s ensemble is accompanied by the “extra material” of a radio talk show recording, which the composer called “touching,” “funny,” and “disturbing.”7This description actually could apply to all of the repurposed preachings in Mr. Jay’s list.
(Regarding the image used for the following stream of a 1973 performance…8)
At the time of Adams’s success with his opera Nixon In China (1987), but before that work’s release on record in 1988, Nonesuch issued an Adams sampler, demonstrating that the composer already had a portfolio. For that album, in November of ’86 Edo de Waart conducted (or did he?) members of the San Francisco Symphony in the stand-alone Christian Zeal and Activity, this time with the “extra material” of an uncredited 1976 text-sound piece, Sermon.9
Brother Walter Reigns
Perhaps the most famous stand-alone text-sound creation in history is Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, featuring the voice of “a young black Pentecostal preacher who called himself Brother Walter.” He was recorded in San Francisco’s Union Square; the piece was “composed” there in January of 1965.10
It’s Gonna Rain was incorporated along with other Reich works (including Come Out, which I discuss in my post from a year ago) into Megamix, released by Nonesuch in 1999.
Megamix was crafted by Michael Kandel, aka Tranquility Bass, whose early collaborations under that moniker with Tom Chasteen employ found vocals, such as the Apollo 11 line in 1991’s “They Came In Peace” (a later “Sea of Tranquility” mix echoes Reich), and the South Asian/Latin stylings of ’93’s “Cantamilla.” As far as proselytizing goes, a relatively soft sell is contained within the duo’s 1993 “Mya Yadana (Kin Kin)” (named after the restaurant the two frequented in Bagan, Burma in 1988 and their server Kin Kin).
Power and Poison
Less restrained are the appeals of R. W. Schambach on the first of John Oswald’s famous mashups, “Power” (1975), which aligns the preacher’s calls with Led Zeppelin’s power chords.11
In the 47-page booklet that accompanies Oswald’s Plunderphonics compilation (pictured above), the artist explains:
This is a track which i made while i was working on the « burrows »
—both he and John Adams were taken by the cut-up method (and results) of William S. Burroughs12—
and at the time i somewhat astigmatically decided that the repeating sample idea was not a direction i wanted to go in, and i put it in the closet. Five or six years later i heard that Bush of Ghosts record, which featured electroquoted preachers over rhythm tracks, and the thought crossed my competitive mind that i had already done this, better.
But Oswald explains further:
The basic premise of « power » was a long-standing one for me which dated back at least to my first hearing of Brother J. C. Crawford’s exhortations on the MC5’s Kick out the Jams. Before i knew much about Jerry Lee Lewis’ background, this seemed like the devil’s music. Rock, was eminently suited to be juxtaposed with ranting evangelistic rhetoric, and its brethren in the political arena, exemplified by guys like Adolf Hitler.
J. C. Crawford‘s resemblance to the latter-day Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping notwithstanding—
—Oswald denies these juxtapositions are ironic.
Rock fans were uncomfortable listening to talk about god and jesus. God and jesus fans were known to be uncomfortable about rock. So, even early on i was striving for my music to be unpopular.13
As I noted up top, preacher R. W. Schambach was a popular subject of electroquotation, to use Oswald’s term. In 1985 the British group :zoviet*france: included its song “Ram” from ’84 on a multi-artist audiocassette compilation, Ritual: Land’s End, issued by Touch. The track actually overlaps the preceding track, “Greater Faith Cathedral broadcast, rec by S/Z,” which is an otherwise unaccompanied exposé by Schambach of the truth behind the 1978 Jonestown Massacre. “Ram” appeared also in 1985 on the group’s own audiocassette album, Popular Soviet Songs and Youth Music, issued by Singing Ringing/Red Rhino, but it omits Schambach’s speech. A 1992 re-release of “Ram” on the group’s own compilation-from-compilations, Collusion (The Grey Area of Mute Records), resurrects the Schambach, perhaps because of the line that had been made famous the year before by Praga Khan.14 But before we get to those tracks, listen to the beginning of “Norsch Baelmaen,” recorded in 1982 and released in 1983 on the Red Rhino EP Norsch, which features another preacher.
And the backwards version…
“Ram” is the first track on Collusion by :zoviet*france:…
…from which Praga Khan borrows key bits, making his own message, calling for an abandonment of the old modus.
And since we’re on the subject: “Jim Jones” by the L.A. band Party Boys, from the 1984 LP No Aggro issued on Independent Records. No electroquotation here but rather the band’s recitation of Jones’s words.
A somewhat sour note to leave you on, but in Part 2 I look at Ralph Swickard’s Sermons of Saint Francis, Pierre Henry’s take on John the Evangelist, Cabaret Voltaire on Gene Scott, and more.
What follows is the recollection and reflection of a remarkable musical work, and my work experience around it.
The prison strike of late summer 2018 was in part a commemoration of the killing of prison organizer and author George Jackson on August 21, 1971 as well as the uprising his death sparked (in part) at Attica nineteen days later on September 9. Having just turned 16 at the time, although I was involved in antiwar activity in Boulder, Jackson and Attica were two coastlines away and easy enough for me to ignore. Two years later I was reacquainted with those struggles—through music.
