SOUNDTRACK: RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK-“Volunteered Slavery” (live March 1972).
I had never heard of Rahsaan Roland Kirk before reading this story. This surprises me since i rather like avant garde jazz. I looked him up and was blown away by this live recording from Paris.
The song starts with a catchy saxophone riff. The band (Ron Burton on piano, Henry Pearson on bass, Richie Goldberg on drums and Joe Texidor on percussion) interacts throughout the song–chatting, laughing. Then they sing the simple, catchy lyrics:
Volunteered slavery has got me on the run
Volunteered slavery is something we all know
Then at two minute the magic begins. He starts playing three horns at the same time. I can’t quite tell what they are from this video, but he puts all three in his mouth and is able to play melody and harmony on separate instruments. It’s amazing, if all too brief.
Then he starts playing a proper saxophone solo. It runs for the next seven or so minute with the main melody being fun and bouncy, a perfect representation of 60s/70s jazz.
The band is very into it–“you got it!” and lot of encouragement all around. The song ends with a cacophony of percussion and whistles. What a fun set. Wish I could have seen him live.
[READ: December 30, 2019] “Super Goat Man”
The end of the year issue is called the Cartoon Takeover: A Semi-Archival Issue. So there’s a lot of cartoons, but there’s also some old stories. Like this one.
This was originally published in the March 29, 2004 issue of the New Yorker. I don’t recall reading it then, so it was new to me.
When the narrator, Everett, was ten years old, Super Goat Man moved into the commune down the street from his house in Brooklyn. Super Goat Man had fallen out of the world of superhero comics because he spoke out against the war and now he was living in a commune.
On their street, he was a minor curiosity at best. The kids didn’t really care about him. They liked the big name heroes, not the mangoat with little horns who fought bad guys like Vest Man and False Dave [I would very much like to read these stories]. The drawings were cut rate too.
When the narrator was 13 he accompanied his parents to a potluck party at the commune. It was clear that they had gone many times before. The narrator walked around the place looking into rooms. He saw Super Goat Man in his room. Since he was thirteen and didn’t much care, he could ask Super Goat Man questions that other wouldn’t. Like his real name (Ralph Gersten) and that he had been a college teacher.
Years later, in 1981, when Everett was a junior at Corcoran College in New Hampshire, it was announced that Super Goat Man would fill the Walt Whitman Chair in the Humanities. Everett didn’t sit in on any of his lectures, but he saw him around campus.
Everett also attended a party where Super Goat man showed up. Super Goat Man brought his record player and put on an Ornette Coleman LP. While the album was playing Super Goat Man told the room that Everett—whom he had not formally acknowledged prior to this–that Everett’s dad had gotten him into Ornette Coleman and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
Mostly Everett wondered when his dad and Super Goat Man had time to talk about music (and play cards, apparently). More to the point if Ralph Gersten was a college teacher in the fifties, he was probably older than Everett’s dad. Just how old was he now?
As the semester ended, two drunken frat boys taunted Super Goat Man. They climbed to the top of a building and cried out for him to save them. The crowd got into it and formed bit of a mob to get Super Goat man to help.
As he climbed the building to rescue them (his bathrobe billowing like a cape), one of frat boys leaned over the building. He was holding a sculpture. He lost his balance and fell. Super Goat Man was able to grab the sculpture but not the boy. The boy did not die, but he was forever in wheel chair.
Everett graduated and forgot about Super Goat man for almost a decade.
In that time, Everett married an Italian woman, Angela. She was very smart and had studied around the world including a semester at Corcoran.
Everett had had a few teaching jobs but he was looking for something more permanent. When a position at Corcoran came up, he applied. He looked forward to going back to campus, as did Angela.
The interview went well and they set up a dinner for him with some of the faculty. When he met up with Angela she asked him about it and he told her the biggest surprise was that Super Goat Man was still there and that he wanted to attend the dinner. Angela was surprised and revealed that she had had a brief affair with Super Goat Man–obviously long before she knew him. But this still upset Everett more than he knew why.
When he sees Super Goat Man, Super Goat Man looks old and feeble, but Everett can’t contain his anger at the way this man has been a part of his life so much.
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