BOOKS

BOOKS

BURTON'S BOOK OF THE BLUES Burton Wilson

Privately published — Austin, Texas 1972

Burton’s Book of the Blues is 66 photographs taken by Burton Wilson during the years 1966-72. The action occurs mostly in Austin, a town of about a quarter million souls, distinctive because it is the capital of Texas as well as the location of the main branch of the state university.

Time passed along quietly enough in Austin for years. The college built a reputation as a “party” school with a nationally-ranked football team and up to 35,000 students, all of whom looked alike. As 1966 dawned, however, there appeared more and more longhaired freaks of uncertain sexual derivation and braless women of more precise classification. Austin’s thousands of retired state officials, merchants, lobbyists, politicians and university functionaries weren’t ready. And the freaks gave the alumni fits when they came back to check on the old Alma Mater.

The following year found a cartel of freaks opening the city’s first rock parlor, the Vulcan Gas Company. The hippies had no heart at all; the structure was in the heart of downtown. Concerts soon began, featuring local bands like the Thirteenth Floor Elevator, Shiva’s Headband and the Conqueroo, along with national artists also proficient in rock and roll. Better, the promoters often presented split programs, with the rockers sharing the stage with their musical fathers — the bluesmen. Mance Lipscomb, Muddy Waters, Sleepy John Estes, Big Joe Williams, Robert Shaw, Otis Spann, Lightning Hopkins, Freddie King, Big Mama Thornton, James Cotton and others were presented to an audience which had never wavered (before) in believing that the Stones began the beat.

Burton Wilson was there to document most of the high spots. The black and white pictures he took are straightforward, available light snaps, mostly free from gimmickery. Wilson apparently feels technique should be secondary to subject matter. He limits himself to one double-exposure, a flashy negative image of Steve Miller and a high contrast job of Janis Joplin (who attended the university briefly).

Janis’ picture is back-to-back with one of Kenneth Threadgill, a jovial, lusty, rotund, silver-haired gent who sings Jimmy Rodgers songs like a reincarnation. The story goes that Janis asked Kris Kristofferson to record Threadgill, and Kris has produced a disc soon to be on the racks. It’s a good thing Threadgill wasn’t holding his breath, waiting to be discovered: he’s been a fixture about Austin for over 20 years. In fact, his combination gas station, tavern and store north of town was the site where the rednecks and “heads” first came together.

The book progresses chronologically: from Janis to Leo Kottke, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Taj Mahal and Earl Scruggs. Along the way you’ll also encounter Jimmy Reed, the Fugs, Fats Domino, Mother Earth, Johnny Winter, Doug Kershaw, Jerry Jeff Walker, Boz Scaggs, the New Riders and ZZ Top. Plus lesser-known but important local groups like the Conqueroo, whose guitarist, Charlie Prichard, now toils for Cat Mother. (Charlie, incidentally, is the model for UT-ex Gilbert Shelton’s Fat Freddy, of Furry Freak Bros, fame.) Longtime Austinite Powell St. John has performed with Mother Earth and the Angel band as well as writing songs for both those groups and Janis and the Thirteenth Floor Elevator.

A more recent arrival, Krackerjack, is also featured. Though the name may be unfamiliar, this band (since mutated in Rattlesnake) featured Tommy Shannon and John Turner, Johnny Winter’s first-time-around sidemen, along with John Staehele, who was soon to advance to Spirit when the original configuration of that group split.

One' of the currently hot local ensembles, Greezy Wheels, brings everything up to date. Greezy Wheels feature country rock, high-lighted by their fiddle-player, Mary, whose prowess equals Spencer Preskin’s, the more celebrated Shiva’s Headband violinist.

The photographs may not be crystal clear, and there isn’t much text (aside from a brief, excellent introduction by Chet Flippo). In a few of the shots, all of each band is not visible. Perhaps valid criticisms were this a fancy art book on flowers. Burton’s Book of the Blues, however, is a chronicle of a place and a time when mtisic seemed, if not the answer, then good enough to pass for the solution.

Important exclusions like Sir Douglas, Bobby Bland, Townes Van Zandt, Albert Collins, Clifton Chenier and John Clay will be in the sequel, which Wilson is currently preparing.

Burton’s Book of the Blues costs $5 (less than 8 cents a picture). It is paperbound, 8” by 9” and can be acquired from the author, c/o P.O. Box 5203, Austin, Tx. 78763. It’s a fine, fine book, easily worth the price of another new album and something you’ll be leafing through long after you’ve grown to loathe most of your records.

John Lomax

TROPICAL DETECTIVE STORY Raymond Mungo E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.

Raymond Mungo is dead, I’m sorry to report. He of the sparkling prose, wry wit and devastatingly cockeyed view of this country perished about threequarters of the way through his new novel, Tropical Detective Story. Mungo died at the hands of a Lymanish figure named Zagg, who lured poor little Ray into his New York den, fed him acid and in twenty-four hours killed the ego that went by the name of Raymond Mungo. Zagg filled the remaining human shell with the Lyman sermon — “evil” is “live,” to live you must die and that whole oatmeal-brained rot.

Now Mungo is alone (which is really “All one” — get it?) and is engaged in “Company work,” which seems to be mainly hastening the apocalypse, becoming an Extra-Terrestrial and fleeing this globe (been listening to too much Starship brand of limp fantasizing, I’ll wager), and loving the human race “too much to see it continue.”

To backtrack a little, Tropical Detective Story is supposed to be a novel (peopled with many thinlydisguised characters you’ll recognize) and Mungo as central character and narrator is here known as Dennis Lunar, Astral Traveler.

A slim plot (this is a novel) traces Dennis Lunar’s various travels to Europe and Florida and Central America and his experiences at a certain New England farm and serves mainly as a framework for Lunar’s discoveries about himself: 1) He hates hippies; 2) He is gay; 3) His ego must ‘die so that he can live. The plot (this is a detective story) includes Lunar’s crime (he dared to love), his apprehending and sentencing himself for the crime, and the punishment: death. Not mortal death, rather the acid-tinged lobotomy peculiar to followers of Manson (Man’s Son, get it?) and Lyman (Ly-man: Wolf-man?). All becomes one, one becomes all, God is evil, you are Satan, we are cosmic, let’s visit the galaxies this weekend my dear if it doesn’t rain. If it does, we’ll just keep struggling here in God’s eternal movie. (Hey, that brings* to mind the Jesus ireaxs at Jbxplo, the Jesus festival in Dallas that they themselves dubbed “God’s Forever Family Reunion.” Maybe somebody should introduce Billy Graham to Mel Lyman ... ).

.1 don’t know. That’s glossing over the most important thing: Mungo is one helluva good writer. It’s just that it bothers the hell out of me that one of his talent and insight (and, it must be admitted, emotional confusion) could be sucked into the Lyman vortex.

There’s really no point in summarizing the book (novel) because all it really is, is a series of Lunar’s/Mungo’s progressions to the Company’s point of view, at the core of which is the denial of all free will. That in itself isn’t as bad as what that denial works out to be in practice: anyone above you in the Company heirarchy, anyone psychically stronger than you, can decide for you what you are ordained to do, what you must do since the Forces demand it. Any two-bit fundamentalist preacher knows that and makes it work for him, as does any spiritual con-man. It’s only recently that the con-men have discovered the walking wounded of the hip generation and have found out just how vulnerable these plump little rabbits are.

There’s one excellent, albeit tawdry, example of the fledgling Company mentality at work in Tropical Detective Story: a fellow named Will (a thin pseudonym for a certain rock writer and founder of a well-known rock magazine) moves into an apartment in New York where Lunar is staying with two women. Will decides that he wants to make love to one of the women. He pursues her, sleeps on the couch near her bed. She ignores him. He persists, saying that he wanted her love and that she couldn’t deny him since he wanted it so strongly. She finally became hysterical and threw him out. It didn’t occur to him that she didn’t want him.

Chet Flippo