When Rock & Roll Came to Arkansas

Recently, it has become possible for man to chemically alter his mental state and thus alter his point of view. He can then restructure his thinking and change his language so that his thoughts bear more relation to his life and his problems, therefore approaching them more sanely. It is this quest for pure sanity that forms the basis of the songs on this album.

How simple things once seemed. When you got tp about 14, and began to realize how uptight and plastic your parents were, you just slouched around with a Dylan album under your arm and a sullen scowl on your face. Later you might discover a few books: Siddhartha, The Way of Zen, maybe even Leary�s exotic manual of inner-space exploration, The Psychedelic Experience (based on the even more exotic Tibetan Book of the Dead). After a while there were groups like the Airplane on the radio, telling us to feed our heads. It was such an obvious yet satisfyingly esoteric answer to the Great Question, and it seemed like we were all somehow in on a colossal secret. It had to be the start of something big.

But it was the end of something too: the end of an era for thousands of bands, formed out of high school and more or less making a living in bars, pizza parlors, roller rinks and weddings, reproducing hits by Paul Revere and the Raiders and the English groups. People didn�t want to hear �Louie, Louie� anymore, they wanted to hear something that sounded like those far-out San Francisco groups. Most of the pizza bands had trouble adjusting, and went on making records and performances in the old style for as long as they could (the Standells) or just faded into ordinary gas-station-type jobs.

But there were a few of those rock & roll fuzztone punks who took up acid mysticism with a passion, dropping at the drag races, staunchly advocating karma as the missing explanation for world problems their barely educated minds miscomprehended. The great thing about the acid punks was that, while their songs sported messages of cosmic brotherhood, they were still reworking the same old three-chord Count Five routines — even if they sometimes stretched them out to 20 minutes and added electric sitar riffs.

One group in particular had all. the others outclassed three ways from Haight Street. They came out of the badlands of south Texas, with a sound that combined .Buddy Holly and the Stones with a pure, driving grit. The quote at the beginning of this article is from the back of their first album, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators.

What an album! And what a mutation of some pretty earthy music was proselytized in those liner notes: ��Tried to Hide� was written about those people who for the sake of appearances take on the superficial aspects of the quest. The dismissal of such a person is expressed in �You�re Gonna Miss Me.� � Fantastic! There�s no psychic missionary like the psychedelic punk.

Yet their music never attained any degree of sophistication, and it could only have been their hoked-up occultism that kept them in demand in places like the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Their second album, Easter Everywhere, featured a painting of a Buddha chakras drawn in, and songs like Leave Your Body Behind,� whose lyrics included:

�I ended up bein� a mutant, said Dandy Jim. Each question was greeted as an opportunity to expound on homespun mystic philosophy.

In your wandering in search for this Only highest existence consciousness and bliss By feeling more love for y the sense world you are seeing You raise your sense income and your level of being... You leave.... leave, leave your body behind.

Eventually, with the collapse of the visionary fad, the Elevators went into the last psychedelic sub-basement, never rise again. Or did they? I thought so, until one day in 1971 I saw a group on some local TV show. They caught my attention immediately: they introduced each member according to his astrological sign, then proceeded to run amok. Their lead singer (dressed all in white, his shirt split to the waist, a big yellow star in his crotch) shimmied across the stage with his knees bent so low his long blond hair swept the floor as he tossed it about, all the time wriggling his pelvis and singing in a hoarse growl that owed as much to Wolfman Jack as Captain Beefheart�s did to Howlin� Wolf.

I thought of the old Elevators guy, how his voice projected an edge so rough it was almost abrasive, but when I dug out the record to * refresh my memory, I found that this new fellow had a deeper, less piercing, more sinister quality. Volume and arrogance were the only similar characteristics. At any rate, my eye was on this group — Black Oak Arkansas. They seem to be playing only three chords, But they were the right three.

Artists allegedly see things the way the masses won�t be able to for 50 years. Depending on the visionary ability of the artist and the artee (as it were) a given work of art can be ahead of its time to some and so far behind it�s funny to others.

Take David Peel. (Please!) I am assured by New Yorkers that he is taken seriously, actually has a constituency composed of people who believe �marijuana is the revolution,� and who wear buttons saying things like �No Hope Without Dope.�

It croggles me to realise such things are still going on. I mean, it�s 1973 for chrissakes.y What�s with this flower power malarkey? Two years ago it would have irritated me, but now, somehow, I love it. It�s like Sha Na Na or something. It�s camp nostalgia.

If you were like about a million other kids in the summer of 1967, you packed your Love Generation poster and followed Scott MacKenzie to San Francisco, the Sunset Strip, or the Lower East Side or whatever local scene satisfied you. Your turned on for the first time, maybe dropped some acid, saw the colors and the patterns, got into Ravi Shankar and the Grateful Dead, subscribed to EVO or the Oracle, wore your love beads, waved your freak flag high, dreamed of the fabled day you�d get so high you�d �never come down.�

What better fodder for nostalgia? It�s all gonna happen one of these days. The hippie will be glorified and satirized in memory just as the JD punk of somebody else�s youth is today.

Some of today�s bands will be right on top of things — if they can survive that long. Who do you think will provide the music at Bill Graham�s love-in revivals? The Jefferson Airplane? David Peel & the Lower East Side? Sure!

Whether Black Oak Arkansas will be able to pass themselves off as psychedelic. punks at such events or have to wait for the Jesus Freak Revival (circa 1985) only time will tell. But one thing is certain: they�re more of the past and the future than the present. Not only do they know who they are and what they�re doing, they�re trying to convert you too — just like the hippies when they figured out the meaning of life. I defy you to come up with more than a handful of contemporary groups with such* conviction. Black Oak Arkansas stand out among the current depression, resignation and self-pity like clowns at an undertakers� convention.

Toying with the idea of a �punk rock tradition� is fun, but in the end Black Oak fail to stand up under the weight of such theories. In reality, they�re just six simple country boys whose music has a certain amount of grease and enough exhortatory vigor to remind one of the psychedelic revolutionaries of yesteryear. On closer inspection it turps out they�re not plugging chemical rebirth as much as they�re acting out the evangelical fundamentalism with Which they were raised in that small Southern town.

On their first album lead singer Jim Dandy Mangrum reached a peak of sorts in �When Electricity Came to Arkansas,� where he came off as a Bible Belt pulpit pounder right out of Elmer Gantry. The introduction, intoned over a church organ, goes something like this:

Now there�s something I�d like to talk to you about at this particular moment, and that�s about the one thing we won�t be able to do together unless we all become as one, and if we all become as one, then we can all walk through it together. That�s this place called the Halls of Karma, and when you go into the Halls of Karma the way I did [sound of echoing footsteps]... I felt the presence of the two energies, the positive and the negative, or God and the Devil, however you want to say.

From there he went into a spiel about how God ended up taking his mind, leaving his body to the Devil. He had the knack, both in this song and in conversation, of repeating key phrases until his speech became a drone, returning constantly to themes of good, evil, sin, and redemption. He would�ve made a great Holy Roller.

Somewhere in all of this lies the subtle but crucial difference between Black Oak Arkansas and the 13th Floor Elevators and their peers. It�s a difference which will probably keep BjOA from going down in history as one of the great outrages of rock.

It�s like they�ve taken all the stuff about karma and energies, and pasted it over a form of Oral Roberts� morality that transcends kitsch in its deadly vapidity. They�ve made it more appealing by throwing in hedonist stuff and injecting their live show with more vitality than most of us are used to, but in the end their success will depend on the depth of the iceberg whose tip we see in the Jesus movement.

Look at their second album cover: a shelf of books — Holy Bible, Zen, Teachings of Buddha, Siddhartha, Bhagavad Gita — and fatter than all of 'them, Keep the Faith, the Teachings of Black Oak Arkansas. Almost every song on the album is a sermon: �We Live On Day to Day,� �Don�t Confuse What You Don�t Know,� etc.

Black Oak is a small town, so small that not only does everybody know everybody else, but they know all the people in nearby towns as� well. Like anywhere else there were some boys the other kids were warned not to play with: rowdies, loners. These six came together to form a sort of informal gang; nobody liked them — except the girls, they say — and they kept to themselves. Their folks were simple farmers, and they felt destined to be farmers, too. But, at that time, big corporations started buying out the small farms and their sharecropper parents fell on hard days.

Black Oak reacted by becoming more wild. They let their hair grow almost to their shoulders, greasing it back in DA�s for school. They began a career in burglary, culminating in "being caught lifting musical equipment from a school, for which they were nearly run out of town. BOA had been playing together since about 1963, doing local gigs. They describe the music as Dylan/Byrds with a strong Buddy Holly/hard rock influence^

They left Black Oak and went to New Orleans, where they replaced Satan and His Disciples at a bar in the French Quarter, playing 18 hours a day for drunken businessmen. The name of the group was. then Knowbody Else, and they cut an album (in 1966) for Stax. Feeling ambitious, they headed for California, met with no success and returned to New Orleans broke.

Knowbody Lise had gone through some changes. They remember their music as having been loud, vengeful and �overdone.� From there they got into psychedelic music, �freaking out on stage.� Apparently, they were .trying to come to terms with th^ir own righteousness and reach an understanding of the world and its ways. They must have sounded as pretentious as anything recorded in 1967.

Gradually, their songs improved. The Arkansas outlook changed from belligerance to a kind of worldly wisdom, learned on the seamiest streets of New Orleans at the age of 17 or so; aided by Siddhartha and some other mystic stuff, filtered through their Baptist roots. They returned to Los Angeles, played free in the park for a lot of peoples� gatherings, and eventually built up a following. Casting about for a new moniker, they returned to^ the only roots they had, and came up with Black Oak Arkansas. The rest is recent history.

The hotel room was crowded with the band, their managers, equipment men and �family.� Everyone was hospitable but Jim Mangrum did all the talking. The rest just nodded from time to time, indicating total unity among the group in all matters of thought.

One of the first things I asked Jim was if he�d ever felt' inclined to be a preacher, commenting on the tone of his act.

�That ain�t just my act, brother, it�s my family. I got three preachers in my family, and I was supposed to be a preacher or a gospel singer, but I wasn�t neither one and I ended up bein� a mutant.� There followed a discussion of the Baptist church, and where he differed from it. �The Baptist way of preachin�, it�s just words they put on it, but all it is is theories that work, it�s just talking, communicating with people, handed down through the generations.�

It was the most unusual interview I�d ever conducted. Each question was greeted as an opportunity to expound on some aspect of homespun mystic religion. It�s hard to get a straight answer out of them because there are few specifics in the thoughts of Black Oak Arkansas: their feelings about anything in particular are inseparable from their grand theory of the universe, which they seem to fell must be explained every time.

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My reaction was a kind of awe at the conviction of these people, their intense loyalty and dedication to each other and their way of life. They see the world�s problems as best solved by a return to the basics, people getting back to the land, letting their hair grow long, and proud (�the measure of our spirits,� said Jim Dandy), scraggly beards sprouting where they can, standing barechested on their own ground, with their families. Above all, being honest and forthright with all their brothers and sisters. Black Oak is almost talking about a return to Puritanism, taken to a less Bible-based and more organic level, with room for sex and animal nature. So long as it�s righteous.

. Beyond that they have little to say.

It�s frustrating to talk to a group qf people with so little awareness of the the world; they didn�t understand words context in which they make music. Black Oak aren�t the brightest guys in like �analytical� and �buffoon,� and they seemed to think that the environment could be cleaned up by increased use of electricity (one of the few occasions on which they did get down to specifics). But they seem to have found an outlook on life which satisfies them: sharing it with others through their music gives them a sense of value. Black Oak claim to receive mountains of mail from people inspired by their songs. I believe that, too.

Still, they�re not what I�d have hoped. As a group of dope-crazed psychedelic madmen, full of comicbook astrology and hippy-dippy corniness, BOA might have been just the vehicle to fulfill my bored yearnings for a band that would stir up the old stuff and be good for some real yucks while they lasted. But they�re not a product of faddism, not a bunch of deluded phonies. Their beliefs run deeper than that I�d feel guilty about laughing at them.

�We�re just happy, no matter what, just to do what we�re doing. Some people might think we�re foolish for being happy,� Jim said, �but there ain�t no sense in lookin� at anything but in a positive way.� Fine sentiments. Norman Vincent Peale said the same thing, thing.

Since I spoke to them, their �back to the land� dream has come true; they now own a big spread in Arkansas called �Heaven on Earth.� Deeds to random square inches of that property have been given out to thousands of people, and you can probably still get one by writing to the address on their latest album, Raunch �h Roll, the longpromised live set.

For their sake, I�m glad they got their land while they could; they still don�t seem to be taking off nationally, and I�m wondering if they�re likely to get another chance. They do have a fine grasp of rock �n� roll, if only the�d get their heads out of the sky and back down to earth. One song like �We All Help Each Other� could have sufficed to get their message across. One verse, in fact:

They call us rough gaudy and crude Ain�t got no edicate (sic) ain�t got no couth We got our own way to see the truth We help each other to find the truth We help each other and you can too.

With four albums full of songs like that, I�m surprised anyone�s still listening. As Alan Watts once said of LSD: �When you get the message, you hang up the phone.� Black Oak Arkansas, good as they undeniably are, had better think of something new to say if they don�t want to wind up holding a dead line. _