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Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Arkestra
It Is Forbidden
at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival in Exile 1974
Alive/Total Energy Records
By John Sinclair
The people at the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation, producers of the 1972 and 1973 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals, were feeling their collective oats as 1974 came over the horizon.
The 1973 Festival, headlined by Ray Charles & the Raelettes, Jimmy Reed, Luther Allison, Freddie King and Sun Ra & his mighty Intergalactic Discipline Arkestra, had been a smashing success; the two-LP Atlantic set of music from the 1972 Festival was in release and receiving rave reviews; and virtually all the music played at the 1973 Festival had been recorded and videotaped by Rainbow's own production team, who were now auditing the tapes and assembling a series of albums from the audio masters.
Rainbow Multi-Media was going great guns with its other endeavors as well: There was the 16-track mobile recording unit, the concert-size professional sound system, the artists management division with its several bands, the concert production arm specializing in blues, jazz and rock shows in all kinds of venues, the talent coordination wing that supervised the bookings for various clubs and concert halls. And there were the Rainbow Press and the Rainbow Agency to provide printing, advertising and promotional support for all these activities and more.
Beyond the non-profit Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation and its productive divisions there was the Rainbow People's Party, a left-wing commune of 35 dope-crazed hippies and rock & roll beatniks who had once been known as the White Panther Party. The Rainbow people lived in two big adjacent houses on Hill Street, in the heart of Fraternity Row, and provided much of the leadership and staff of the Rainbow Multi-Media Corporation.
Party members were everywhere in Rainbow Multi-Media: running the print shop like Sam Smith, managing the sound system like Craig Blazier, buying and selling ads like Anne Hoover and Kathy Kelly, art directing and making flyers and posters like Gary Grimshaw, managing bands and supervising event productions like David Sinclair and myself. The RPP also published a weekly newspaper, the Ann Arbor Sun, headed by Party members David Fenton and Linda Ross; several more members made up the band called the Up and its road crew.
The Rainbow People's Party was also active as one of the three equally-sized factions of liberals, radicals and revolutionaries which made up the more than 300 registered members of Human Rights Party, a left-wing coalition that competed with the Republicans and Democrats to control seats on the local City Council. Two Human Rights Party members, Nancy Wechsler and Jerry deGrieck, had been elected to Council in 1972, denying either established party a majority in the seven-member governing body and forcing them to approve legislation like the $5.00 fine for possession of marijuana in exchange for providing enough votes to pass the Democrats operating budgets and other measures.
So there was no way to know in the spring of 1974 that all would be in disarray by the end of the year: Rainbow Multi-Media would go out of business, the RPP would disband and the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival would disappear for almost 20 years. There was a terrible split in the Human Rights Party, precipitated by the mass walkout of the RPP faction, and an early alarm was sounded when the City Council dragged its heels on the routine matter of issuing a permit to Rainbow Multi-Media for that year's Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival.
Confident that the permit would be forthcoming, RMM went ahead with its ambitious plans for the 1974 Festival, confirming bookings with B.B. King, Cecil Taylor, John Lee Hooker, the Gil Evans Orchestra, Sunnyland Slim, the Persuasions, perennial favorites Sun Ra & His Arkestra, and The Amazing Mr. Please, Please, Please The Hardest Working Man in Show Business The Godfather of Soul & Mr. James Brown!
But the City Council finally issued judgment in July: With less than two months left before the Festival's scheduled September 6th opening, the City of Ann Arbor denied Rainbow Multi-Media's application for a permit to hold the internationally-recognized musical extravaganza in its place of birth, citing RMM's failure to clean up the site immediately following the 1973 Festival as reason enough to cancel the event.
The clean-up problem was troubling. The Festival had hired scores of young people from the community to prepare the site, an empty field next to Huron High School which we had dubbed Otis Spann Memorial Field, to staff the festival grounds during the three-day event, and to clean up the site after the festivities had concluded. These workers effectively went on strike after the Festival ended without any of them getting paid and refused to do any more work, thus postponing the clean-up until enough volunteers could be organized to remove the debris.
Two decades later it would come to light that the man RMM had contracted to supervise the Festival's field operations had invested the payroll money advanced to him for the crew something like $20,000 into a multi-ton marijuana deal that, unhappily for all, failed to come off. The supervisor vanished, and the crew began a protracted muttering campaign against Rainbow Multi-Media that resulted eventually in the cancellation of the next year's event.
It is forbidden, the City of Ann Arbor ruled in July, and pandemonium reigned for several days until the festival organizers were invited to bring the banned event across the Detroit River and into the lovely outdoor amphitheater at St. Clair College in Windsor, Ontario & Canada. Radio powerhouse CKLW-AM agreed to serve as sponsor of the event, pledging lots of free ad spots, and the Canadians waxed enthusiastic in their professions of support for the orphaned music festival.
Thus preparations for the Festival went ahead with even greater zeal. With six weeks to go until opening night, RMM set itself upon the daunting task of convincing American music lovers to cross a fiercely-guarded international border with the insane hope of enjoying themselves en masse as they had in the liberated zone of Otis Spann Memorial Field, where the producers felt free to guarantee festival attendees A Rainbow of Music & A Real Good Time.
There would be a rainbow of music, as promised, but the Windsor gendarmes and their big brothers in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would do everything within their considerable power to keep people from having the real good time they were seeking at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival in Exile.
Advance ticket sales were light, with people seeming to take a wait-and-see attitude toward the thorny issue of crossing the Canadian border, and their worst fears were realized when Canadian border authorities turned back legions of would-be festival-goers on any grounds they could dredge up.
At the festival site, a sparse crowd was harassed by local authorities who flooded the backstage area and trooped down into the amphitheater itself to snatch up marijuana offenders and other undesirables. The musicians were getting nervous themselves as they looked out at the slim audience and visualized their paychecks floating off into the darkening gloom.
To make matters even worse, this writer Creative Director of the Festival was singled out and deported back to Detroit while trying to shepherd Sun Ra and his Arkestra through Canadian customs. The Arkestra went ahead, but I was turned back on the basis of a marijuana conviction 10 years earlier and never got to witness first-hand the debacle that ensued in Windsor nor the implementation of my Dream Show of All Time when Sun Ra & His Arkestra were followed onstage Friday night by James Brown and his fabulous revue.
I went back to my room in the Shelby Hotel Friday afternoon and watched myself talk to a television news reporter who had covered the impromptu deportation proceedings. As I witnessed the farthest-out group of characters I had ever seen in America Sun Ra & his Arkestra! -- being allowed entry into Canada while I was turned back as too far out, I was struck hard with the realization that my public persona as dope fiend, ex-convict and virulent revolutionary agitator had now cut me off from participating in the most important event in my career as a music promoter.
This marked a major turning point in my life. Watching myself sputter at the reporter on-screen, I muttered out loud: You've gone too far. It's time to turn back now. That Fall I retired from political activism and artist management to take up less grueling pursuits, working as an alternative journalist and editor for a couple of years and then opening a small arts consulting business focused on providing program development and grant-writing services to indigenous jazz artists and community arts organizations.
Meanwhile, in Windsor, Sun Ra & the Arkestra took the stage at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival in Exile following an introduction by Bobby Bass of WJZZ-FM and as the evidence on this disc indicates turned the place upside down. A long passage of introductory music improvised by Ra and the ensemble is followed by a seamless program of some of the Arkestra's greatest hits Discipline 27 and 27-II, Love in Outer Space, The Shadow World, Space Is The Place, Second Stop Jupiter, What Planet Is This, Images, Watusi and the closing Sun Ra and His Band From Outer Space plus one number which is thought to have previously been unrecorded, the daring anthem titled It Is Forbidden.
The ranks of the Arkestra included Ra's greatest reed section ever, with Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Eloe Omoe, Danny Davis, James Jacson and Danny Pekoe Thompson, plus Kwame Hadi and Akh Tal Ebah on trumpets, Dale Williams on electric guitar, Detroit's own Reginald Shoo-Be-Doo Fields on bass, Clifford Jarvis at the drums and Stanley Atakatune Morgan on congas. June Tyson and the Space Ethnic Voices, Judith Holton and Cheryl Banks, strutted and crooned out in front of the band, framing the mind-boggling keyboard improvisations and fierce chanted philosophy of their undisputed leader, the great Sun Ra.
The multi-track master tapes of the Arkestra's performance were quite reasonably withheld by recordist Chuck Buchanan when it became clear that he could not be paid for his work, and they ve never been seen again. What remains is the cassette tape recorded from the board mix during the performance, now transferred into the digital realm and available right here on CD at last. Please enjoy it while you can.
Amsterdam, December 6, 2000 /
New Orleans, February 9, 2001
The producer would like to offer special thanks to Peter M. Andrews, David Sinclair, Robert Bass, Darlene Pond, Frank & Peggy Bach, Gary Grimshaw, Jay Ross, John Chinner Mitchell, Chuck Buchanan, John Ryan, Cy Fruchter, Sun Ra & His Arkestra, the late Alton Abraham, my dear departed mother Elsie Sinclair, my daughters Celia, Sunny and Chonita, Patrick Boissel and Suzy Shaw, Jerry Brock & Barry Smith at the Louisiana Music Factory, Pete Gershon at Signal To Noise, Chris Trent, Peter Gold, and to my wife Penny for her patience and understanding.
(c) 2001, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved. |
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