Just a Shot Away: 1969 Revisited Part 2

Just a Shot Away

1969 Revisited part 2

Kris Needs

Published 2020

NEW HAVEN PUBLISHING LTD

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The rights of Kris Needs, as the author of this work, have been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Foreword by Pete Frame*

Chapter 2: Introduction by Kris Needs*

Chapter 3: July*

Chapter 4: August*

Chapter 5: September*

Chapter 6: October*

Chapter 7: November*

Chapter 8: December*

Chapter 9: Endgame/Epilogue*

Chapter 10: Acknowledgements *

Chapter 11: Sources & Bibliography*

About the Author

Chapter 1

*Foreword by Pete Frame*

The sixties are a bit of a blur to me now. Good job I made a few notes. For me, they started with Duane Eddy at the Trocadero, Elephant and Castle, and ended with Mott The Hoople at the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm. The 500 or so weeks in between, every single one of them, were stuffed with unimaginably amazing records, fabulously intoxicating gigs, little shops that turned out to be treasure caves, and extraordinary adventures.

Mind-blowing bands, books, magazines, drugs, clothes, people; beatniks, folkies, mods, rockers, weirdos, beatsters, bluesers, hippies, movers, shakers, questers of every stripe.

Colours, changes, ideas, innovations, experimentation, positivity, optimism, inspiration, friendship, brotherhood, fun, peace, love and understanding.

Trends and movements merged and bubbled, bringing constant surprise. For years, it never let up, not for a moment, day or night. Too much excitement to hold anyone with a dream to the straight and narrow. Nothing was impossible. Turn on, tune in and drop out. Do your own thing. A lot of us got wonky and never recovered.

Hippie dreamer that I was, I dumped a secure and respectable city career and with a bunch of friends started the UK’s first monthly rock magazine, Zigzag. To my surprise it was quickly embraced by the music business and during 1969, the first year of its existence, we met and interviewed Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Jeff Beck and Ray Davies, among others.

Sometime during that summer, David Stopps invited me to Friars, the club he had recently started in Aylesbury – a town my mates and I had often visited for memorable gigs by acts like Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames, Manfred Mann and the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

I drove over to Friars and found myself in a wonderland. It was like landing in the middle of a stage musical with a huge cast of interesting, colourful characters, many of whom were to become lifelong friends. Immediately, I decided to leave my home town, Luton – whose exotic coffee bars had been demolished for redevelopment schemes and whose throbbing Majestic Ballroom, which had once hosted bands like the Beatles and the Stones, had become a bingo hall – and move to the Aylesbury area. Stayed more than 30 years.

Among the eccentrics I met there was Kris Needs, with his bouncing walk and infectious grin. Perhaps he first impressed me when he played bongos in a duo with John Otway, his solo spot being a rambling monologue intoned in a voice borrowed from rugby commentator Eddie Waring.

I had been bonkers for years but for Kris the adventures were only just beginning.

Chapter 2

*Introduction by Kris Needs*

Welcome to Part Two of Just A Shot Away: 1969 Revisited. If you read Part One, you’ll know what to expect, except I’m getting a bit older and things are hotting up.

I’ve got to say how surprised but happy I was at the reaction to the first half of what was originally intended to be one big book, but writing these words in a very different world as COVID-19 sweeps the planet and plunges the world into lockdown. I got in there early with the self-isolation thing to protect my mum way before the inept government finally admitted something serious was going on. Now the virus has transformed the music business and obliterated many lifeblood elements, including record shops, gigs, clubs, recording together in cramped studios, promotional routines and so on.

Most of this book was written in 2018-19, when phrases like social distancing simply didn’t exist. Now everything has changed and even last October, when we launched Part One, seems to be joining the action in the book as a very different time. For the sake of continuity (and those who may not have read Part One), I’m going to rerun my introductory declaration of intent to set the scene and outline some essential points about this tome before we pick up the story in July ’69…

Let’s get one thing straight from the start. This is my 1969; as I remember it happening, over fifty years ago before all the retrospective rehashes that tell you one thing when it meant something a lot different if you actually lived it and, crucially, can remember it. The predictable route would have been to recycle again the hoary old theories about Manson murders and Altamont signalling the death of the 60s after Woodstock’s glimmer of optimism, all the retrospective cliches. But how could that have been when my own life voyage was just getting off the launch-pad and these things were happening on another continent? I started ’69 as a wide-eyed, somewhat nervous teenager staying in to paint my psychedelic posters and play my favourite records, but ended it entering the seismic coming decade as an idiot-dancing fifteen-year-old relishing a brave new world of regular gigs, astonishing music and untouchable heroes becoming in-the-flesh entities. The horizon now seemed as vast and exciting as it would soon become. And I had seen Jimi Hendrix.

1969 might represent the death of the 60s dream to some hack scouring his Beatles and Stones tomes, but Altamont and Manson happening on the other side of the planet had little effect on what was happening in London, my Aylesbury home town or my own teenage world at the time. Appallingly senseless as it obviously was, the same went for Vietnam. At the time, it was a flickering horror on the black-and-white TV while real life in post-war Britain was turning to full-blast technicolour, as another well-cycled saying goes.

John Peel, the newly-launched Zigzag magazine and our local club Friars Aylesbury were my lifelines. It already felt like the truly great music was being made by untouchable gods and goddesses that I could only worship from afar as Jimi, the Stones, Tim Buckley, Captain Beefheart, John Fahey, Pearls Before Swine, the Doors, Moondog, Marianne Faithfull, Graham Bond, the Fugs and countless others swarmed around my overcrowded young brain. Trout Mask Replica can be dissected to death from the usual angle that it’s always been there but there was a time when it didn’t exist. Obviously there could be no nostalgia market then; no retrospective boxsets, magazines retracing previous decades, internet making all the music you ever wanted to hear accessible at the click of a mouse or tap on a smart-phone.

In ’69, there was no future beyond tomorrow or next week’s gig. The weekly music papers dictated everything, although rarely in depth. If you wanted to hear a new album you bought it, borrowed it off a mate or hoped to hear it on Peel. You had to work to feed your obsession, whether travelling two hours to the imports shop or cajoling a blast in the local record emporium’s listening booth. If the album was bought with hard-earned cash and turned out to be great, the feeling of joy and triumph could be overwhelming. After being a music journalist for forty-seven years, it seems weird that, in the space of one day, I can be sent more music than I could afford to buy in the whole of ’69.

The monumental turning point after I started writing this book in February 2018 came when I lost my beloved soul-mate Helen Donlon to cancer a few months later. An esteemed writer and respected figure in publishing, she loved this somewhat wild idea from the start, encouraged it and helped me write the proposal. As Helen’s condition deteriorated and I struggled to care for her at the same time as writing, we became oblivious to the world outside. After she left us, gracefully and without fuss, life turned into a high-wire shoestring of grief, which made writing impossible and ended with a total meltdown and hospital stretch after Helen’s brother-in-law Andy found me collapsed in the front room of our cottage. Three months later, I returned to the book, still coping with grief but with a different attitude. Now it should be even more of a precious memoir, drawn from a life that can be cut short too easily. From our coming together in 2013, I always wrote with Helen in mind anyway; would it pass her stringent literary requirements, does it make sense or interesting reading and, most importantly, will she like it? I still do that, even when it feels like I’m hanging by the thinnest of threads. Grief is the strangest trip I’ve ever been on: a roller coaster of devastating sadness and loss, wilful numbing through outside diversions (most recently replacing my entire wardrobe!), vivid fever dreams. With the love and support from family and those who turned out to be my real friends (see Acknowledgements), I got through the worst, and can even feel the joy that I was so fortunate to spend just five years with this beautiful, remarkable woman and experience a rare love many never even know. Life is still a high-wire to be plunged from at any time, triggered by the smallest thing. Thankfully, I have a relentless life support system in Jack, the extraordinary little dog Helen raised from a tiny puppy when she lived on Ibiza. Helen’s love child, he saved my life, a constant source of unconditional love and fun who was at my side all those endless hours it took to write this book. The strangest twist has been moving back into the family home in Aylesbury, where I grew up and was living when I experienced everything recounted. My dear mum, now 93, is still downstairs and here I am sitting in my old bedroom playing the same records I loved fifty years ago. And my mum’s still telling me to turn down my Stones records!

This book went through several incarnations after starting as an epic that could have filled a thousand pages had I tried to cover everything that went down musically, politically, culturally and socially in ’69. Helen always stressed that, to bring anything new to the creaking table, I had to write from my own perspective, of how the year actually felt at the time, rather than retrace ground so well-trodden it’s impossible not to slip on its smoothed-down surface. The death of Brian Jones on my fifteenth birthday or Altamont might have helped behead the original 60s jolly green giant but ultimately ’69 heralded the start of the 70s, when all the groundwork bore fruit amidst its excesses, trends and troubles. If anything killed off the 60s, it was Ziggy Stardust.

Obviously there will be perspectives and knowledge gained from over fifty years reading, writing and investigating, often drawn from my later interviews, even becoming friends with central characters. Mental snapshots and memories live forever in my brain on eternal rewind as a year when everything changed as I grew up fast. Happily, while bullying teachers, school meatheads and cold early girlfriends long ago slipped into realms I rarely choose to rerun on my cerebral projector, many emotions and passions forged and solidified in ’69 are still so strong and pivotal they remain in sharp focus; witnessing Hendrix for the first and only time, Mott The Hoople discovering their wild stage mojo and taking me into their corner, the tragic genius of Graham Bond and stellar gigs by the Third Ear Band, East Of Eden, Edgar Broughton and Van der Graaf Generator at our local Friars Aylesbury. Meanwhile whole tracts of memory from the more recent 70s and 80s have melted into a mix of snapshots, blurry vignettes and indelibly vivid scenes that can seem like surreal dream sequences from someone else’s film. Did I really sit in a hotel suite with Keith Richards for long nights which saw him pick up an acoustic guitar and play ‘Wild Horses’, blast his music hall comedian tapes and order shepherd’s pie on room service? Or perch next to David Bowie in a dressing room after he’d just unveiled Ziggy Stardust to the world, spend a riotously surreal afternoon with Captain Beefheart, get a blow-by-blow account of Woodstock from MC Chip Monck or hang with the Last Poets and George Clinton? Or even spend last year’s post-Helen plummet sharing intimate phone calls and e-mails with Marianne Faithfull, my ultimate teenage crush, now a dearest friend.

Punk was already happening in my head so I’m not going to dwell much on any act that didn’t send a direct lightning bolt to my heart back then. These accounts and essays spill all over the place, like my teenage brain at the time, falling backwards and forwards wherever the music and perpetrators take me. One mission is to get these memories down of a time when everything felt just a kiss away before they fade forever. Who cared about any supposed loss of innocence? I was too busy trying to lose mine in every way imaginable. I’d been loving music too long to stop now, every molecule in my young, teeming brain tempered with bristling frustration that I’d been too young to join the party earlier. All that was soon to change, and not a minute too soon.

Chapter 3

*July*

KILLING THE FIRST STONE; HELIOCENTRIC WORLDS OF SUN RA; THE DOORS ARE OPEN; MOONAGE DAYDREAMS - SPACE ODDITY LANDS, ZIGGY STARDUST TAKES OFF, SILVER APPLES DROP; MILES AHEAD; OUT DEMONS OUT; MAD RIVER

July 3 is my fifteenth birthday.

At this age, I still get excited, exacerbated by the full-pelt rush to stack up more years. Bounding downstairs like a spring hare celebrating approaching manhood, I shudder to an incredulous halt at the newspaper headline screaming from the front page.

Brian Jones Dead.

The Stones founder’s lifeless form had been fished out of his swimming pool at home, mystery still surrounding the exact circumstances.

Even if he’s no longer in the band, we’ve lost a Rolling Stone, perishing in water like Otis Redding. But Brian’s death feels much closer to home. An untouchable hero for the last six years, he was our exotic, charismatic dandy and visionary musician who formed and elevated the Stones. Now he seems to have been destroyed by the things I was still itching to do (which, of course, is how it’s painted by the gleeful media). This then-alien sense of loss hits me hard. It also makes that ’68 NME Pollwinners show I witnessed Brian’s last big Stones gig. The cold truth is I will never see him again.

At this point, having lost no immediate family members or friends, death is a stranger. Now, of course, I know its cruel grip all too well and soon Brian will be joined by more heroes, including Jimi and Jim. My beloved Hendrix will depart when I’ve just turned sixteen and, heaping horror upon horror, Morrison will die in the tub on my seventeenth! By then, I’d left school, started college, and started trying out some of Brian’s hobbies. But, two years earlier, the death of a Rolling Stone was a tough one to handle.

I wasn’t totally surprised but I was quite shocked really, says Brian’s old school friend Robin Pike. The last time I saw him was at the Rock and Roll Circus and he looked fine. He didn’t look any different to the rest of the Stones, Marianne or anybody.

As has been endlessly documented, within the Stones circle the combination of being diminished within the band he’d formed and vicious establishment bust campaign had long been taking their toll. Marianne remembers the NME gig: I was there with Anita, trying to be nice to Brian. We felt sorry for Brian.

I asked Keith Richards about him in 1980 (only eleven years after this fifteenth birthday!). Sitting in the Stones office that afternoon of the hair-raising driving experience, his mood had been warm, relaxed and defiant that he was still here after beating heroin. When Brian’s name came up, a noticeable cloud descended on his buoyant mood.

He was getting in a real mess towards the end, started Keith in low, considered tones as he swigged Jack Daniel’s from the bottle. "That was the main reason he eventually left the band. He was just no longer in touch with anything. Although he was real strong in lots of ways, he just found his weakness that night, whatever happened. I still take all the stories from with a pinch of salt.

Industrial accidents… I dunno. In my own head, I think about it and reach the same conclusion as last time or I start to think about it again and get another idea on it. If you’re not actually there when those things go down you can never say. I don’t know what really went on that night at Brian’s place. I know there was a lot of people there and suddenly there wasn’t and that’s about it. Instead of trying to help the guy they think of their own skins and run.

In the immediate wake of Brian’s death, the Stones announce the Hyde Park free concert two days later will be in his memory. If Keith was putting up a comfortably numb brave front, Mick resurrected a song the Stones had already laid down in early form called ‘(Can’t Seem To) Get A Line On You’, his lyrics about Brian’s worsening addictions and detachment from the band: Saw you stretched out in room ten-o-nine/with a smile on your face and a tear right in your eye/Oh, couldn’t seem to get a line on you/My sweet honey love.

When Leon Russell records his self-titled debut album at Olympic this coming October, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman play and Jagger sings on a couple of tracks, including ‘Get A Line On You’ (which’ll be held over until the album’s ’93 reissue). By ’71’s Exile On Main Street sessions, the track has become shimmering gospel ballad ‘Shine A Light’.

The day after Brian’s death, the Stones release ‘Honky Tonk Women’/‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, that double-headed twinning of barroom grind with country honk origins and transcendent gospel epic that shoots straight to number one.

Press reactions to Brian’s death vary. I’m particularly taken by Greil Marcus’s insightful piece for Rolling Stone, in which he compares Brian’s death with the shooting of Sam Cooke - not spectacular, but sordid - and questions his departure from the band: "How does one come down from the status of a Rolling Stone? The news of Jones’ death seemed as inevitable as a body count. There was no way to deal with it. It was not dealt with at all…Jones was perhaps more of a Rolling Stone than any of the others. What the Stones as a group sang about, what Jagger and Richard wrote about, Jones did, and he did it right out in public, and he got caught, and he looked the part. Paternity suits even in the early days, dope busts, pink suits, chartreuse suits, the bell of yellow hair and the impish grin…A true rake. He wasn’t acting out the Stones’ music, he just happened to be the Stones’ music, and that was one reason why you know the Stones always mean it, why you know they aren’t sitting around thinking up clever ideas that might make a good song - it was always valid and Jones was the reason, part of the reason, why ‘the red round your eyes shows that you ain’t a child’ wasn’t an idea, wasn’t ‘hey, let’s write a song about methedrine,’ but was fact, rough fact, rake’s fact."

He concludes, You can’t come down from being a Rolling Stone. No way down, and one way out.

There’s been so much more written about Brian over the years, but that said it all, really. Soon he’ll be held up as rock ’n’ roll’s tragically lost 60s poster boy and beautiful damned hedonist. Of course, there have been so many endless conspiracy theories in books and movies, even reports of death-bed confessions; nobody needs go there now as it’s all been said. Ultimately, what a waste of a supernaturally precocious talent. There are excellent books out there too that delve deep into Brian’s life, legend and death, notably Paul Trynka’s Sympathy For The Devil. For this newly fifteen-year-old at the time it happened, his loss left a huge hole, along with some sense of innocence dashed and new awareness that things could go horribly wrong, at any time. And they would, that’s for sure.

To my horror, I wasn’t allowed to accept Robin Pike’s offer of a lift to the Hyde Park free concert, supposedly the biggest gathering of people in the UK since the Chartist protests centuries before and a very peaceful occasion. My frustration was made worse by my best mate getting to go, so I had to hear how the Third Ear Band opened in their customary style before King Crimson cemented their growing reputation with tumultuous blasts through ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’ and ‘Mars’ from The Planets, followed by restlessly-greeted sets from Screw, Alexis Korner’s New Church, Family and the Battered Ornaments.

For the Stones, I made do with Granada’s Stones In The Park TV special. Although surreal but good seeing them back, they looked different in so many ways, noticeably rusty after Jagger delivered his Shelley poem for Brian accompanied by butterflies symbolically fluttering to their own deaths. The African drummers and witchdoctor figure during ‘Sympathy For the Devil’ was Uncle Tom racial stereotyping that reduced the song to pantomime. There was Marianne, looking like a ghost.

The guitarist was obviously different, recalls Robin Pike. "It was such a huge mass of people it was all about the occasion, really; the biggest gig at that time in England. Mick was wearing this white skirt thing and the visual side was quite different to how I’d seen them before. There was a totally different feel. The last time I’d seen them, at the NME concert, people were still going wild; certainly at Exeter, when they had to run off the stage to a car, and you probably had two or three people hanging on to it as it drove away."

It was great from where I was, Keith told Record Mirror. After two years, it was hard to believe we were actually doing a live show again. It took me a while to get into it, but when I did, I really enjoyed it. In England, we’ve never had that size concert. Then he adds, with some foresight, I never thought the whole thing would erupt, because everybody was obviously having a good time, but I couldn’t visualise what would happen if we did it in the States. All I read about is young kids getting beaten up. I know we’re going back there, but the dates haven’t been decided yet.

Jagger might have regretted telling International Times’ Mark Williams, asked how it felt watching ’68’s Grosvenor Square riot, I enjoyed it! That kind of violence gives me a really nice buzz!…You can express violence if you FEEL it, in many ways. You feel it when you’re showing off, which to me is being onstage.

I guess everything the Stones uttered earlier that year would take on some other greater resonance after what happened six months later. Two days after Hyde Park, Jagger and Marianne flew to Australia, where he was filming the unfortunate Ned Kelly. Marianne said she saw Brian’s face in a mirror and spent several days in hospital after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Wild horses couldn’t drag me away, she murmured after coming round. Mick remembered that, and so the Stones carried on.

Half a century after that dark day, as has been said so many times before, don’t judge Brian too harshly.

Prepare for the Journey to Other Worlds

Unknown to me then, my fifteenth birthday also coincided with Sun Ra and his Arkestra playing ‘The Shadow World’, ‘Prepare For The Journey To Other Worlds’, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Watusa’ and other cosmic classics at the the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. I know this because I managed to get that set on CD at some point during a life spent trying to track down every Ra recording available to humans, whether original pressing, one of countless reissues or previously-unreleased sets that have flooded the market in the 21st century. Ten years ago, bootleg imprint Transparency sneaked out a double CD presenting an insane ’68 Ra set from New York’s Electric Circus and the Newport extravaganza that captured what audiences would receive at a ’69 Sun Ra show. The vastly-expanded band are on spectacularly ferocious form, reinventing their repertoire in their apocalyptic Mardi Gras style of the time. Ra’s roaring keyboard resembles John Cale torturing his organ on ‘Sister Ray’ as space chants submit to saxophone terror-blasts before they tear into a swing classic from decades earlier. It’s easy to see how the Arkestra could have divided mainstream jazz crowds but this was madder or further out than any rock band, making anything flying as progressive rock sound as polite as a vicar’s tea party. Listen to my pristine classical organ run while I masturbate over this photo of Rick Wakeman pretending to be Richard Clayderman, then who’s up for some buggery in the tuck shop? One dirty blast from Ra’s keyboard was all music needed to trample such precious nonsense and progress beyond the furthest galaxy. And he looked dead cool in his exotic, glittering robes.

Like I’ve said, I pinpoint summer ’69 as when I got into jazz as the real progressive music, and not through the jazz-rock front door either. It was that infatuation with ESP-Disk that led to all sorts of out-there shit, including the freewheeling skronk onslaughts of Albert Ayler and, of course, Sun Ra. Now, the 21st century is awash with Ra releases, along with long overdue recognition of the man from Saturn as the true pioneer of all things other-worldly and futuristic. Fifty years ago, he was an occasional footnote in the Melody Maker jazz columns that now took a back seat to Jethro Tull’s one-legged tootling, an intriguing exotic curio little heard about anywhere else.

For this fifteen-year-old, Sun Ra became a reality one sunny afternoon when me and a couple of mates experienced The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra Volume Two, recorded and released on ESP-Disk in ’65 but Ra’s first UK release through the label’s deal with Fontana in ’69. My friend Simon possessed several good reasons for me walking half an hour to his house: a good stereo wired up so speakers were on either side of the best chair in his bedroom, a saucy sister who kept inviting me into her bedroom, and parents who tolerated blasting records and even the racket when Simon got a Fender Precision bass and soprano sax which, inspired by the Third Ear Band’s Glen Sweeney, I accompanied on bongos bought from a local music store.

Heliocentric Worlds’ unearthly intergalactic onslaught turned my teenage cerebral receptacles into dancing globules of meteor-storm gravy granules, making Pink Floyd’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ sound as far out as a hot-air balloon blowing over the white cliffs of Dover. Over three tracks, the Arkestra unfurled space chord blowouts, chamber space jazz and lonely planet serenades from a solo bowed bass that sounded like being stranded on the moon, ankle-deep in lunar dust, while others were what it must’ve been like being swallowed by a black hole then spewed out of the devil’s rectum on a disintegrating death star light years in the future. Reining the mind back to Earth, Ra’s tumbling, ethereal future-jazz could also evoke images of his exotic robed messengers hunched over or dancing around their instruments in dark New York cellars at five in the morning. Another world, another planet.

From that day, I loved Sun Ra with a passion, launched like a rocket from ground control into an obsession that never went away. I spent decades burrowing in the world’s record emporiums or scouring the streets of New York for Sun Ra records, helped by the knowledge these impossibly-rare albums could manifest on the sidewalk for a dollar. Predictably, interest in him skyrocketed after his May ’93 death and what was once a hard-to-find trickle swelled into an otherworldly torrent as elaborate new reissues or sophisticated compilations seemed to land every month. This seems almost inconceivable to this fan of fifty years but, even with the iceberg emerging from under its tip, Ra’s colossal catalogue is still impossibly colossal, his discography encompassing hundreds of titles with hundreds of musicians in countless configurations spanning six decades. Pioneering independent labels, he started his El Saturn imprint to operate outside of the music industry, releasing limited pressings in hand-made sleeves. Albums could be released with different titles, mixing up tracks from different periods with random names.

Thankfully, there have been authoritative works on Ra’s music, including John F. Szwed’s Space is The Place and Hartmut Geerken and Chris Trent’s Omniverse: Sun Ra discography. I have hundreds of CDs and records but, compared to these guys, still feel like a beginner. I did get to compile my own Sun Ra boxset in 2012: the three-CD Sun Ra, A Space Odyssey; From Birmingham To The Big Apple; The Quest Begins for Fantastic Voyage; mainly early stuff I felt needed annotating in accessible earthly form. It was a blast spending months of all-night sessions trying to put together both tribute and beginners’ guide to one of the greatest musical minds and innovators of the last century (all validated and made worthwhile when Andrew Weatherall told me how much he liked it; managing to turn on this colossal inspiration of my last thirty years was a major buzz).

For our purposes, it’s necessary to lob the brain, like a basketball made of old underpants, back to a time before the internet, CDs and all mod cons when Sun Ra was on a unique mission that could see a full Arkestra play for four hours in a near-empty club, parade through New York’s East Village in their intergalactic finery and take any chance that arose to record or rehearse in public. Sun Ra was the ultimate outsider artist, fearlessly following his own path to fantastic worlds of his own creation, the first musician to declare that space was the place then striving to create tone paintings of what it was like. He was the first to encourage collective improvisation within a big band setting, use an electronic keyboard in jazz, and predated psychedelia and Afrocentricism by decades, using dancers, exotic costumes and multi-media effects to illustrate his other-worldly concepts.

In the hallucinogenic 60s, Sun Ra seemed to have beamed in on a bolt of flying saucer light, embraced by white hippie audiences as further out than Hendrix, who could have been his prodigal heir in terms of pure vision. Although adopted as a kindred spirit by anarchic pockets such as John Sinclair’s Translove operation in Detroit, Sun Ra could sail over the heads of jazz buffs homaging the more accessible Miles and Coltrane. He was a proper bandleader, telling his Arkestra to abandon formal