Ron’s Adrift in a Boneyard Bouquet Emergency Fund
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A Story to Tell
I've got a story to tell. And, I probably don't have a real long time to do so, as I just turned 70. Relatedly, I’m facing a medical and fiscal emergency needing abatement before realizing my goal to complete an extensive multi-media memoir (with guest artist works to be announced) that I think of as my culminating creative achievement! I've been fortunate to know many notable, often famous , people. They have left me with many warm, tough, funny, insightful, unique, and astonishing stories to tell and share, ones I think readers will find fascinating. (Please see sample draft selections at the close of this text.)
I've hesitated drawing attention to my disability (however obvious) or personal need that has become a matter nearing emergency definition. I'm now, however, launching this GoFundMe funding proposal at the suggestion of family and friends. Your support is needed, from the smallest to largest donation, if possible, and sharing the request (with your encouragement of support) to as many friends, family, and colleagues as possible as well as on Facebook and other social media. The support will help me in physical recovery, medical assistance, fiscal survival, and the related accomplishment of completing my memoir, which I see as the coming-together project of my creative, professional, and emotional life.
I've had extraordinary experiences, including several near-death, some at the point of a gun. I've lived in a wide circle of the U.S., from East to West, and I've traveled extensively, chasing my dreams. I've held prominent positions in the arts, regionally and nationally. I am a widely published writer and photographer in the U.S. and abroad. America's first Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks said of me, "Ron Wray is one of our bravest voices." I've been loved and hated and the reverse. Aspasia Allison Russell, of the band/duo Birds of Chicago, told me, "I think you must be the most interesting man in the world." Ian Felice of The Felice Brothers said: "You’ve been blessed with so many amazing friends." In spite of a major disability, I've managed to develop a second career concentrating in music writing and photography, including a good bit of travel, often solo.
I'm flattered entirely by Allison's statement (above), though I realize it's not the actual case in a world of interesting people. However, I think my life has enough excitement and distinctive journeys both passionate and disparate to make for one of the most engaging and cathartic artistic projects I've ever attempted. It is coming together as one of my best "acts of literature," in my estimation, in both content and the writing itself. I plan to support it with other writers' work, artwork by myself and others (some well known), and my poetry, videos and photos.I am asking you for your support in pursuing this dream project: a memoir, Boneyard Bouquet. It would bring the many threads of "me" together in the textual environment of heaven and jungle I've always called my home, largely a "world within a world" of visual arts, literature, music, education, and the support and friendship of and for veterans and others with disabilities .
Book sketch by Ron Wray
The book’s full title is -
Boneyard Bouquet (White Chocolate, Caviar, and Rocky Mountain Oysters): Adrift in a Boneyard with the Famed, Infamous, and Anonymous across the U.S. and Beyond). It has ,thankfully, begun to feel like literature to me, that I've got the right take, the poetry-rich text I've been looking for, inching out of me, bit-by-bit, day-by-day, with hours of writing and rewriting.
To meet my goal, your support will, of necessity, first help me in recovery and aide for my disability and health, while meeting related fiscal uncertainties and emergencies. Your support will allow me to complete this, my artistic and writing career's culminating act, the memoir, while giving me the necessary, related means to survive and advance through my life's toughest challenges, both physically and fiscally.
Reading at the Hummingbird Café, Indianapolis (with Etheridge Knight) (1970’s)
Six-String Soldiers, Appaloosa Music Festival, Front Royal, Virginia (2018)
Survival Comes First
Your pledge of support would of necessity help me first and foremost in what has become, as I say, a matter of survival, both physical and fiscal. I'm in the midst of a period of deep struggle to maintain my health and my fiscal stability that has left me in a position jeopardizing my future as well as my ability to realize my writing and photography goals. I myself have now become seriously disabled, though I've struggled successfully to begin a new life meeting singular writing, photographic, and musical goals, often involving travel. My central disability is neuropathy, along with lymphedema, and cirrhosis. In addition, in recent years, I've had four unrelated major surgeries, ten hospitalizations, five seizures, requiring emergency rescue teams coming to my home and transporting me to hospital care, five 3-7 week stays in recuperative, transitional care facilities, and four months of in-home care. I've lost the ability to walk without a walker/rollater, not to mention no longer being able to run, ride a bicycle, hike, play basketball, and other much-loved activities. I'm continually at risk of loosing my balance and have a great difficulty getting out of chairs or bed. I now tend to drop things, and can only pick them up by working with a reacher/grabber.
I'm struggling to pay many medical bills, my federal educational loan, and other substantive financial obligations. I still share some of our household costs, but it's a strain on my family as well, because of all that I can't do. I owe two businesses locally who came to my aid hugely, and I need to repay other obligations that have piled around me. I had to cancel my supplementary Medicare insurance because I could not afford it.
All of this personal situation got much worse last year, when hitting at this time of extreme financial stress and tightwire position, a scammer caused me to lose $1,600. I deposited his certified check, that I thought was "good as gold" to pay for the recumbent bike I was selling him from Craig's List, and I then, at his request, used my account, to send a payment to a supposed vendor who would be moving my bike and some other items this guy said he'd bought. That stole my entire month's social security/income. It put a huge stress on myself, and perhaps even more so on my wife.
I'm existing on income of social security and a very modest retirement benefit from my last full-time gig as a middle school English teacher, after some 40 years as an arts administrator (and a few professor, cowboy, truck driver, city editor, etc., positions as well) in low or non-paying, as much as I love it (and I am grateful for the assignments I get).
Your Support as the Next Dawn Comes
While I may have "one foot in the grave" (like all of us) as the Kieran Kane/Rayna Gellert song says, I'm asking your support to get back on my feet with aid for health and disability care, healing, equipment and medication, and fiscal assistance, while, at the same time, helping me to achieve my life's culminating creative goals, primarily my multi-media memoir: Boneyard Bouquet.
Goal $40,000
Your gift would help me to realize my goals in the following ways:
Bill payments for businesses and services 8,600
Restore supplemental health care insurance 3,500
Medical, rescue, and hospital bills, medications, and to 8,000
acquire equipment for recovery (leg wraps, leg pumps,
treatments, etc. Also, equipment to help me drop some
of the unhealthy amount of weight I've put on since getting
neuropathy and lymphedema
Education loans payments 7,500
Memoir and Music Writing & Photography Travel 5,000
(Music festival, conference, and events coverage, a
writing retreat, revisiting memoir sites for details,
interviews, etc.)
Memoir production costs 5,500
Consultant Fees 600
Supplies and equipment 700
- including repair work on a used mobility scooter to
help me get around short distances
Blog and other On-line fees 600
MY PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY AND CULMINATION
Like Melville's sub-sub librarian in his researches on the whale, like Jefferson with his Bible, his own version - I have set out to create a personal mythology, not through established religion nor that other than a love of and interest in, a deep one, like that of a gardener, in these Americans and visitors and those who've stood in importance in relation to them - their interactions, and the stories that result - a diverse group from the known to those not and of all colors, shapes, and abilities. I've made from the "materials" of fact, imagination, and interaction that which is geography that everything else is on top of, from roots, dependent on, means. When I "legend" Americana and the world, roots are in the thought of, the imagined world, lived again, throughout, one foot in the grave, and beyond.
This is indeed a culmination. I've not been perfect, to put it exceedingly understated. However, to a large extent, mine has been a life always poised in the direction of doing things to benefit people. I've experienced traumatic near-death crimes. I've held low income positions within my arts administrative career, serving programs of service to minority, veteran, and disability communities. I've taught in low-income schools, with both (extremely) traumatic and (extremely) life-rewarding classroom experiences.
In spite of disability, I somehow managed to cover eight music festivals last year, in various parts of Virginia and as far away as Kansas City; not to mention writing about and photographing/videoing a year-full of performances from here at home in the Norfolk/Hampton Roads area to throughout Virginia and in D.C.
 The Reverend Peyton, Appaloosa Music Festival (2018)
 Guild Books Reading with Friends, Chicago (1980s)
THE MEMOIR WILL ENCOMPASS (IN PART)
I love to experience, intimately interview, and write about music, musicians and other artists. My career includes this writing and photography (& video) in creative music journalism as well as my unique, humanitarian-based American-history-related poetry and prose, 1,000-page, work, Americans: An Odyssey: LaSalle & Native Peoples, Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, The Powder River War, Father Ravalli, Chelsea Hotel, and China Camp.
As I told my middle-school English students - Well carved lines of poetry create the shape and meaning of the song. The song, like the poem, exists within a framework of the music of words and the emotion of context, rhyme, and repetition.
I've been face-to-face in dressing rooms, studios, homes, ranches, and band busses with many of our great artists and performers from actor/comedian Bob Hope and singer/dancer/Beatles collaborator Billy Preston to composer/musician John Cage, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and playwright Eugene Ionesco to the bands Greensky Bluegrass and Government Mule to jazz artists The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Oliver Lake to rock, roots, and blues/gospel groups Judah and the Lion, Mipso, Langhorne Slim, and The Reverend Peyton and his Big Damn Band, to poets Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and Diane Wakoski, to icon columnist/critic/writer/radio host Studs Terkel, to playwright Steve Carter, and to visual artists Nancy Graves, Deborah Butterfield, Jeanne Quick-to-See Smith and Stephen Antonakos, to name but a few. Other artists include: experimental theater troupe Warsaw Mime Troupe from Poland, who went target shooting with me on a Michigan cliff, and Preservation Hall Jazz Band, who joined me in a local bar to visit old friends of theirs Martin, Bogan, and Armstrong.
My best friends have included the poets Etheridge Knight, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ed Dorn, Theodore Enslin, Larry Eigner, and Robert Bly, writer Paul Metcalf, biographer, jazz critic and "New York Post" columnist Stanley Crouch, painters Sam Gilliam and Ernie Pepion, jazz artist Joseph Jarman, and composer Donald Sur. Currently, probably my most regular and a much-appreciated correspondent and someone I like to think of as a friend is Ian Felice, of the rock band, The Felice Brothers, and also a fine painter. One of my favorite evenings recently was dinner (for the two of us) as guest of Langhorne Slim in Bristol, and I'm excited to say he's invited me for a personal tour of Nashville some day. My wife, Gayle Paul, is a visual artist and curator, and we've shared many experiences in the art world and travel.
Back in the day, I was selected as the Master of Ceremonies of The Beat Reunion in Chicago, with Ginsberg, Corso, and Burroughs (see selection below). As the list above affirms, many of my relationships have been within communities of people of color (largely African American) and have been a mix of the more experimental and the more "popular." The book will include stories of many of these individuals and other singular tales as told by them to me. These stories open the memoir subject matter to include Gustav Mahler, Nadia Boulanger, Martin Luther King, Charles Olson, and many others.
I've also written about and been a curator of a number of prestigious art exhibits, co-curating with my good friend, Sam Gilliam, of the famed Washington Color School and others, as well as acting as a judge and advisor for a number of music and literary competitions.
I've been the subject of articles on me in "The Washington Post," (several times), a full-page (plus) feature about me in "The Virginian Pilot," and other publications. I've made numerous television and radio performances on broadcast and public stations from Chicago to San Francisco, including being interviewed by Studs on "The Studs Terkel Show." (A friend and I also raided his liquor chest at his home once, getting caught by the gracious icon.) I've performed in hundreds of venues including Chicago's Preston Bradley Hall and The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (filling in for Robert Bly at his suggestion), Norfolk's Naro Theater, with Tim Siebles, numerous San Francisco Bay locations, The Missoula Museum of Art, The Indianapolis Airport, The Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and many others. These were often performed as collaborations with live dancers, Native American singers and dancers, singers/performers, and actors with whom I formed troupes in different cities.
My stories include those from starring theater and independent film roles (including being the only white in an African American Theater Company ), as well as being on the Purdue Exponent 60's writing staff when featured for its activism on the cover of Look magazine, while at the same time in a fraternity with four members of the NCAA championship basketball team and completing a minor in painting, while living part-time in an apartment above, and almost with, an older couple almost beyond description, with the man being the subject of Jesse Colin Young's )("Get Together")song of that era, "Doc Geiger" ("Old Doc Geiger was policin' the town. Old Doc Geiger's goin' to shoot him down!"). Sports are also a major part of my life, and I played full-court basketball with groups nation-wide, including players from the Washington Wizards, into my sixties.
All the while, I've been a writer, most of that time a photographer as well, from Jr. High, as we called it then, to now. I've taught and tutored (and was once hired as a literary conversationalist, from free schools to large City art museums to the living room of one of the world's richest heirs to one of America's largest companies. One time, I read for a group of elementary school students at a bookstore in Sheridan, Wyoming. My friend who owned the store said the kids were impressed by a poet showing up with the smell of horses on him. I had herded cattle on horseback that early morning.
National Institute of Art and Disabilities artists and Tony LaRussa, then manager of the Oakland A's, in Tony's office.
In my arts administrative role, I was executive director of the National Institute of Art and Disabilities, and I've taken poets and writers I hosted at other programs I've run into community centers, a women's prison, feminist women's centers, and public schools, especially, in minority and low-income communities, and I've often read my work in such settings.
I get very little revenue from my music writing (though I do need and greatly appreciate the payment I do receive!), It is done for the LOVE, and also in hopes that it enriches/helps both ends of the music community creative lasso/heart/lifeline; and I get the impression it does from the response I've gotten from fans of my writing and photos in venues from Coastal Virginia Magazine to the national Relix and Great Britain's Folk Radio UK, as well as the regional Veer. I judge that also, from the numerous times my work has been featured in No Depression, not an easy task, and one of my articles there, on Ian Felice, attracting almost 3,000 readers last I looked.
On the professional end, I've been recipient of The Washington D.C. Arts and Humanities Commission Literature Fellowship and The Illinois Poet Laureate Award, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center Fellowships, and Indiana Poet in Residence, among numerous other awards. My photos have also won national and regional recognition, including American West and Indiana Publisher. And, I've served on numerous regional, local, and national arts, music, literature, and disability boards and advisory panels. My arts administrative career included: Publications and Literary Arts Coordinator, City of Chicago; Executive Director, National Institute of Art and Disabilities, Director, The ODU-AWP International Writers Center in Virginia. and Director of the Ragdale International Artists' Retreat in Illinois. I also acted as an extra in a Martin Scorcesi movie with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise and was named one of Chicago's Most Eligible Bachelors, along with Michael Jordan (true!)by The Chicago Sun Times Today's Woman. I was City Editor of The Kendallville Daily News-Sun.
I've had near death experiences several times. Once, a guy held a gun to my temple and told his partner, nervously watching the door, "I'm going to kill him!" Another time, I was threatened with my life by the wife of a soon-to-be convicted murderer whose trial I was covering in Wyoming. You can't make this stuff up folks.
Some of my journalism has dealt with social and human issues and concerns, including cover stories in Hampton Roads' Portfolio on African American poverty on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and the heroic efforts and resulting plights of an unrelenting activist for pacifism and other causes in the Norfolk area.
 Mommy Reynolds in Negril, Jamaica
Other stories included in Bouquet: Growing up in Indiana, Teaching from middle school to art school (fights to triumphs), Cultural history told to me by friends who lived it, Experiencing historic baseball stadiums and contemporary major-league locker rooms, historic performances like Chuck Berry opening for the then-brand-new Rolling Stones, Teepee camping at Blackfeet Indian Days with my native friend, including a meal and conversation with tribal medicine man and woman elders in their teepee, working round-ups, brandings, and being live-in ranch hand in Wyoming and Montana, Cape Cod summer camp counseling with the rich and (quite) famous young campers, camping with Smoke Jumper/Hot Shot friends in the high mountains of Montana and Wyoming, lama trekking, solo hikes in glacier/grizzly country, several cross-country moves (solo, another with 2 pets, & one with new wife) in big trucks, dates and relationships with near-famous, junkies, athletes, actresses, administrators,models, artists, multi-racial/international/disabilities, and other ladies), solo Western and Eastern, Canadian and Jamaican driving trips, living on Negril Beach in Jamaica with Toots' godmother, living in Big Brother and the Holding Company's former rehearsal studio, and on house boats on Marin County, first-hand stories (no names) of second-hand tales of long-ago murder and other scandals by the famed, seduction efforts on me (with invitation to move in with him) by famed priest living in Hyannis Port and Beacon Hill, stays as guest at NYC homes of New York Superior Court Judge, Provincetown Playhouse Founder/Director, Whitney Museum of American Art Chief Curator (on Fifth Avenue), and others, extensive experiences with clients and friends with disabilities (and now, I "are one."), living in Chicago, Indianapolis, Missoula, Buffalo, WY, Norfolk, San Rafael , Oakland, and other locations, and lots more!
With Your Support!!!
With your support, I will rise from this physical and fiscal sinkhole I'm now in, be able to return friends' and businesses' generosity, and give my work a rocket ship of sorts that will enable this version of myself in the Dr. Who-like fantasy of my dailyness to complete what I hope will be a work of art in the precious guise of autobiography, the memoir of my life, while continuing my music writing and photography.
Otherwise, (truthfully, not to be overly-dramatic) my major work and this unique, cultural, historic account will likely sink into obscurity, will, in fact, disappear as my life (with ongoing health and fiscal struggles) reaches its ultimate epiphany in the world's boneyard, sans bouquet.
My Thanks
My words, nor anything else, would be sufficient to express my thanks to you for any amount you contribute to my GoFundMe project. However, I do offer the following (subject to some change in the exact nature of the gifts):
$10,000 or more: Everything below, plus (all original) 1 photo block, one wooden photo block, photo coffee mug, photo shirt, and photo album, plus one written-to-order biography/book with photos of the donor or friends, family, company, club, team, or etc.
$5,000 - $9,999: 2 copies of Memoir, 1 recording of writing, poems and songs, live performance if feasible, guest artwork reproduction, all signed, ongoing videos sent to you
$2,000-$4,999: 1 Memoir copy, 1 recording, all signed, ongoing videos
$100-$1,999 1 Section of Memoir, signed, 5 videos
$1-$99 5 videos

SAMPLE SECTIONS from a draft of Boneyard Bouquet: (days identify decades, interspersed throughout the text, to keep the story in constant motion)
MY PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY
Like Melville's sub-sub librarian in his researches on the whale, like Jefferson with his Bible, his own version - I have set out to create a personal mythology, not through established religion nor that other than a love of and interest in, a deep one, like that of a gardener, in these Americans and visitors and those who've stood in importance in relation to them - their interactions, and the stories that result - a diverse group from the known to those not and of all colors, shapes, and abilities. I've made from the "materials" of fact, imagination, and interaction that which is geography that everything else is on top of, from roots, dependent on, means. When I "legend" Americana and the world, roots are in the thought of, the imagined world, lived again, throughout, one foot in the grave, and beyond.
GENESIS
I rounded the corner without noticing, concerned about story not direction. The sun was powerful, softening my face, taking time away. A car started, memories, I was by now living miles ago as mind made the slow walk to a corner.
SUNDAY (Terre Haute)
And though it was late Fall and quite cold, the sun showered drops of golden dust on my Davy Crockett hat, raccoon tail trailing on to my small, cocky shoulders, behind my tooth-gapped smile, back when my dad still had ownership of his wide open persona. Mom and dad framing me in the receding sunshine, still trees and cold, happy in the seeds of them.
They took me to Hulman Park in Terre Haute on weekends, in my bulky coat and gilded box of grin, will, a child’s start of ambition, dressed happily as Davy Crocket, the road Fess Parker made for my growing-up, reflective from ambition, Alamo heroes and explorers eager in someone else’s beautiful world.
The sun’s warmth, my parents' in their journey they’d begun with and for me. Dad got to be such a constant, sloppy, incapacitated drunk that love got lost in the confusion I considered mind in those still vulnerable spaces hovering over my shoulders. Jump ahead two frames, when I wondered, would they send a child to prison for patricide, thinking about that as I swung from the swing top and made Zippy, our English Sheppard mix, glad, with her loud barks of joy ringing throughout my morbid fantasies of murder.
But, the swing was there, act of joy, and the love of boy and bright black-white friend. Loved dad still, together in the paint fresh to stretchers anonymous in the cosmos of Crawfordsville in the days of movie matinees, butter-soaked popcorn, “girlie” magazines, and soda fountains full of lime phosphates and submarine sandwiches.
WEDNESDAY (Chicago)
You'd never know he was gone, and the young Jack at that, to listen to Gregory. Corso would sweep by me like air, throughout the large, yet cramped green room to the side of the stage. Greg, a sweet man, would raise his angel-pitched, Brooklyn-twanged voice to the musty air above, saying to all of us and to those above that "she loved me!" He would go on, repeating several times, "She loved me! She REALLY loved ME. She said she loved JACK (Kerouac), but she really loved me." He would then repeat again, and again. Allen (Ginsberg) softly said, "Yes, Gregory," and then again, "Yes, Gregory," and then "that's right!" Meanwhile, (William) Burroughs, mostly silent, seated upright in the middle of the room, looked back at his young men lovers on a dusty couch, laid down his roast beef sandwich, and said in a deep, raspy voice, "What kind of ghosts do you have in your house?"
TUESDAY (Muncie)
In late1970's, Muncie, a faculty member’s kitchen around a huge punch bowl of heavily-spiked punch. I was with Gary Snyder, soaking in talking proximity, others surrounding in a constant bath of post-reading chatter. Snyder asked if I was a professor, beat literature, due to knowledge of, detail of himself, friends, small, unlikely, beat nation, loud, long sound in the still-evolving tune of American literature, varied, evocative voice, that forever changed the whole.
I said not, a poet with interest that had burned such that I knew their history as my own. He walked some on the wild still, as we explored the dimensions of the punch bowl and memories of Jack, while he chain-smoked and I puffed on rich Latakia tobacco in a prized pipe, him in a t-shirt and long braided hair starting to gray and I, a signed, new John Prine T-shirt, already battered with wear. I monopolized him without regret.
I said “good-bye” to Snyder, and Alice drove us down the dark highway back to Indianapolis, fellow poets, curling softly on her shoulder, exploring the edges and thrust of roses and dusk. She said she'd thought, “This is the life!”
Memory is an odd, magical instrument, like its consonant, melody:
I remember only a few things:
1.The auditorium and where we were seated.
2. Gary Snyder center stage below us, indistinct, with brightness emanating.
3. Talking at the punch bowl, the kitchen, Snyder. No other details, nothing but Gary, beginning to show age, still with long braided hair, the smoking, our cherry-pink glasses of punch.
4. Calling me a beat professor?
5.The ride home, how dark the night was, exhaustion.
6. Head on Alice's shoulder
7. Her remarks remembering that night.
And, nothing else …
 Sons of Bill at The Broadberry, Richmond, 2018 (by Ron Wray)
SATURDAY (Washington, DC, and Richmond, VA)
Ian Felice, a thoughtful reader, eager mind, poet and painter, among the world's best songwriters. I’d followed The Felice Brothers from beginnings. The second night open of The Anthem on the Washington, D.C. waterfront. We were in a make-shift green room beneath the stage, bundled for cold echoing sub-zero outside. Band, crew, and friends didn’t seem to notice, used to playing in marginal environments. Ian, thin as a cocktail stick, often a thoughtful, slightly-interior grin dangling precariously under his mustached lip. Slightly grey, it reminded me that time has passed since these guys hit the scene. In those days, I had played "Frankie’s Gun" over and over again.
I'd first seen them in Richmond two years before. It was an incredible gig. I looked around at the dancing bodies, intense contemplation of heavy lyrics and complex arrangements, and a young man with long black hair leaping up-and-down to attempt matching the brothers’ almost cosmic intensity. That fan gave James a lighted candle in a glass holder to put on his trusty keyboard. Others, at one point, began throwing money on the stage, but not without a price tag. Some dollars came with song requests, while others were thanks for favorites already performed. Toward the end of the show, Ian leaned down and gathered their “take,” saying quietly, “People are throwing money?! Well, if anyone wants to throw money up here, we won’t discourage them.”
With a song choice nodding to the weather, bringing the storm inside, Ian began: “Plunder, plunder, rain and thunder. Lightning split my brain asunder./They say that only 80 men own more than half the world/I dreamed they spread it around/ended up in a mental ward” They got humor too, right? Satire underlies much of their lyrical work. To begin the night’s show, there were politics, humor and content that reflected the moment. Sweeping down from the North – Palenville, New Paltz, and thereabouts – in the Catskills – they took Richmond by storm, so to speak, much like Union soldiers had, but this time without the Confederates burning Shockoe Bottom, this time to welcome arms. That’s a pretty elaborate analogy, concert to Civil War, but the show was intense!
Reflecting on the meaningless proliferation of industrial excess and extreme profit limited to a precious few, the song, appropriately titled "Plunder," was rendered with great emotion. “Every time I try to organize./I turn around, and my captain dies./They got machines that make machines/ and those machines make more machines.” While he sings and plays, Ian stomps his right, booted foot to the stage, then again, lifts it higher, and his foot comes down louder. “Plunder, plunder, rain and thunder/Greed will split the world asunder” The foot again, higher, down, louder.
The young man near me in the direct front of Ian is already absorbed, beginning to leap to the beat. And, Ian, absorbed, concentrated, sucked into the stage’s floor with his beating boot and into the depths of his beat-up and distinctive-sounding electric guitar, sang on. His guitar, quite large and bronze-colored, appeared on its last legs, but sounded like orchestra, theatre, and bottomless pit.
Light from the Dark.
The concert, as it continues, is a bit like free-falling from an airplane. And, this was still only the beginning. Light coming out of the dark. The songs, many of them start dark and may continue that path. But then lightness, a bit of hope, often emerges, either literally, in the lyrics, or embedded in the feeling and/or overall meaning the song evokes. Or, light emerges from the jamming joy of the melody and the unabashed, wide-open playing of the music.
James related to me that a number of their friends they grew up with in their working class community went off to war, often with unpleasant results, perhaps explaining in part the anti-war sentiment of a number of their songs. He said of their new album’s title song, "Life in the Dark:" “The songs maybe start with a darkness. We are all walking around in the dark. And yet, we are searching for the light. Our brains are the avenues for it.” Our brains are the avenues for it.” Dig that. Is that an astonishing sentence?” These brothers are smarter than the average bear.
“He seems to fully experience it on stage,” I said to James, “each time he performs it." “He doesn’t fake it,” James replied. “And yet," I added, "in briefly meeting him after the show, I felt warmth and genuineness in the brief contact.” “He’s a sweet guy,” his brother replied.
The musically self-taught Felice Brothers’ body of work has long hung in my imagination as a thoroughly unique and fresh contribution to our musical culture. And, there's a dynamic, mind-blowing quality to their live performances. The Felice Brothers performed 21 songs and several encores, sending us all out into the continuing rain afterwards with, if I wax poetic, a dose of cosmic understanding and transforming joy.
(Portions first published in No Depression, 2016)
 The Felice Brothers at The Camel, Richmond, 2016 (Photo by Ron Wray)
THURSDAY (Montana and San Francisco)
The Metaphor that Spoke at St. Mary’s –
The Riddle of Doctor Ravalli
Father Ravalli cared about touches
Little things & mountains
Artifice & construction, bottle caps
He was kind-of like a contemporary Crow woman who, later,
Taking over tribal chairmanship, said:
I was content to raise my 13 children, 23 grandchildren,
And take care of my paraplegic brother. However,
The tribe had become so ineffective, it as about
To come to a suicidal end. We were in really bad shape.
It was not that kind of experience, but it was that sense of
Responsibility he assumed.
He dispensed medicine, built houses for worship,
Made friendly The Feathered Sun His crazy brief
History of knowing the, showing the Great Blue Yonder.
Building, building – boxes, chairs, slanted seats, book
Shelves, and Temples.
He built shrines to his God, one who became, who came to the Bitterroots, &
Then was theirs. The blue bruise of Spirituality. From the Natural
To the Jesuit. From sun to sun.
Creating a focus. Crating medicines in a box
Painted with the tail hairs of a Calico cat.
In bitterroot. In flaming shades of paintbrush. In the pale slant
Of a sapphire moon. The looming peaks, and the Indian graves stretched
Reluctantly into wooden crosses. The spirit that never stops to speak to
Strangers, like death, or Industry, or Genocide.
He is no longer here. He is an extension of earth. He is weeds & maggots in the
Dirt. He is the sun. He tries to be honest.
China Camp –
Something of the joy of carrying an
enthusiastic conviction to a logical extreme
-G. K. Chesterton
One worker forced the air through the mill
the air
by cranking the wheel
Another dropped the dried shrimp with its
loosened shells
Lighter weight shells were
Blown out the end.
Her hair was caught up in a bun. It was brown with golden shade.
She lay on the creaking bed in the one-room building atop the rise
Over the dock. You can see the conveyor belts on which they lay
The shrimp. The chimney smokes. A boat with its green
White and blue is rocking in a gentle wind. Tied tightly with a
Rope stretching in the dark distance to the pier.
Her poise loosens in the breeze. Her face becomes a half moon brightened by a smile.
Is that you. Is that you? In the picture? In the poster? Yes, long ago.
That is long, long ago.
He is a handsome young Chinese mending a shrimp net.
Darkened, sport shirt, elegant features. Chinese.
He is hosing off one of the shrimping boats remaining that only he works.
Other old-timers linger in the café. Others to escape the smoke talk
Non-smoking and fishing from a picnic table on the sand.
Over the north Bay, you can see billows of heavenly clouds against a white
Sky. This is what death looks like, I am sure. A brilliant white in the sky.
She has her hair up with a brown flouncy gather, the only loose thing
About her. People gather around her and slowly touch and dream. She
Smiles and kicks and speaks quietly, jokingly.
Her small room looks out at the bay at this vision of white death. At this
World of possibility.
Around the San Francisco and San Pedro bays, Chinese fishermen were
Fishing for shrimp by 1865. The discovery of huge amounts of shrimp
North of San Pedro Point in 1870 caused the industry to boom and reached
A peak by the 1890s. Chinese fishing villages such as China Camp were
Common along the bay shores in 1897, 26 or more camps. And Jack
London wrote about Chinese pirates in San Francisco Bay.
He will do things like this,
Under quite a different impulse.
He will do these things when he is in love.
I've got a story to tell. And, I probably don't have a real long time to do so, as I just turned 70. Relatedly, I’m facing a medical and fiscal emergency needing abatement before realizing my goal to complete an extensive multi-media memoir (with guest artist works to be announced) that I think of as my culminating creative achievement! I've been fortunate to know many notable, often famous , people. They have left me with many warm, tough, funny, insightful, unique, and astonishing stories to tell and share, ones I think readers will find fascinating. (Please see sample draft selections at the close of this text.)
I've hesitated drawing attention to my disability (however obvious) or personal need that has become a matter nearing emergency definition. I'm now, however, launching this GoFundMe funding proposal at the suggestion of family and friends. Your support is needed, from the smallest to largest donation, if possible, and sharing the request (with your encouragement of support) to as many friends, family, and colleagues as possible as well as on Facebook and other social media. The support will help me in physical recovery, medical assistance, fiscal survival, and the related accomplishment of completing my memoir, which I see as the coming-together project of my creative, professional, and emotional life.
I've had extraordinary experiences, including several near-death, some at the point of a gun. I've lived in a wide circle of the U.S., from East to West, and I've traveled extensively, chasing my dreams. I've held prominent positions in the arts, regionally and nationally. I am a widely published writer and photographer in the U.S. and abroad. America's first Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks said of me, "Ron Wray is one of our bravest voices." I've been loved and hated and the reverse. Aspasia Allison Russell, of the band/duo Birds of Chicago, told me, "I think you must be the most interesting man in the world." Ian Felice of The Felice Brothers said: "You’ve been blessed with so many amazing friends." In spite of a major disability, I've managed to develop a second career concentrating in music writing and photography, including a good bit of travel, often solo.
I'm flattered entirely by Allison's statement (above), though I realize it's not the actual case in a world of interesting people. However, I think my life has enough excitement and distinctive journeys both passionate and disparate to make for one of the most engaging and cathartic artistic projects I've ever attempted. It is coming together as one of my best "acts of literature," in my estimation, in both content and the writing itself. I plan to support it with other writers' work, artwork by myself and others (some well known), and my poetry, videos and photos.I am asking you for your support in pursuing this dream project: a memoir, Boneyard Bouquet. It would bring the many threads of "me" together in the textual environment of heaven and jungle I've always called my home, largely a "world within a world" of visual arts, literature, music, education, and the support and friendship of and for veterans and others with disabilities .
Book sketch by Ron WrayThe book’s full title is -
Boneyard Bouquet (White Chocolate, Caviar, and Rocky Mountain Oysters): Adrift in a Boneyard with the Famed, Infamous, and Anonymous across the U.S. and Beyond). It has ,thankfully, begun to feel like literature to me, that I've got the right take, the poetry-rich text I've been looking for, inching out of me, bit-by-bit, day-by-day, with hours of writing and rewriting.
To meet my goal, your support will, of necessity, first help me in recovery and aide for my disability and health, while meeting related fiscal uncertainties and emergencies. Your support will allow me to complete this, my artistic and writing career's culminating act, the memoir, while giving me the necessary, related means to survive and advance through my life's toughest challenges, both physically and fiscally.
Reading at the Hummingbird Café, Indianapolis (with Etheridge Knight) (1970’s) Six-String Soldiers, Appaloosa Music Festival, Front Royal, Virginia (2018)Survival Comes First
Your pledge of support would of necessity help me first and foremost in what has become, as I say, a matter of survival, both physical and fiscal. I'm in the midst of a period of deep struggle to maintain my health and my fiscal stability that has left me in a position jeopardizing my future as well as my ability to realize my writing and photography goals. I myself have now become seriously disabled, though I've struggled successfully to begin a new life meeting singular writing, photographic, and musical goals, often involving travel. My central disability is neuropathy, along with lymphedema, and cirrhosis. In addition, in recent years, I've had four unrelated major surgeries, ten hospitalizations, five seizures, requiring emergency rescue teams coming to my home and transporting me to hospital care, five 3-7 week stays in recuperative, transitional care facilities, and four months of in-home care. I've lost the ability to walk without a walker/rollater, not to mention no longer being able to run, ride a bicycle, hike, play basketball, and other much-loved activities. I'm continually at risk of loosing my balance and have a great difficulty getting out of chairs or bed. I now tend to drop things, and can only pick them up by working with a reacher/grabber.
I'm struggling to pay many medical bills, my federal educational loan, and other substantive financial obligations. I still share some of our household costs, but it's a strain on my family as well, because of all that I can't do. I owe two businesses locally who came to my aid hugely, and I need to repay other obligations that have piled around me. I had to cancel my supplementary Medicare insurance because I could not afford it.
All of this personal situation got much worse last year, when hitting at this time of extreme financial stress and tightwire position, a scammer caused me to lose $1,600. I deposited his certified check, that I thought was "good as gold" to pay for the recumbent bike I was selling him from Craig's List, and I then, at his request, used my account, to send a payment to a supposed vendor who would be moving my bike and some other items this guy said he'd bought. That stole my entire month's social security/income. It put a huge stress on myself, and perhaps even more so on my wife.
I'm existing on income of social security and a very modest retirement benefit from my last full-time gig as a middle school English teacher, after some 40 years as an arts administrator (and a few professor, cowboy, truck driver, city editor, etc., positions as well) in low or non-paying, as much as I love it (and I am grateful for the assignments I get).
Your Support as the Next Dawn Comes
While I may have "one foot in the grave" (like all of us) as the Kieran Kane/Rayna Gellert song says, I'm asking your support to get back on my feet with aid for health and disability care, healing, equipment and medication, and fiscal assistance, while, at the same time, helping me to achieve my life's culminating creative goals, primarily my multi-media memoir: Boneyard Bouquet.
Goal $40,000
Your gift would help me to realize my goals in the following ways:
Bill payments for businesses and services 8,600
Restore supplemental health care insurance 3,500
Medical, rescue, and hospital bills, medications, and to 8,000
acquire equipment for recovery (leg wraps, leg pumps,
treatments, etc. Also, equipment to help me drop some
of the unhealthy amount of weight I've put on since getting
neuropathy and lymphedema
Education loans payments 7,500
Memoir and Music Writing & Photography Travel 5,000
(Music festival, conference, and events coverage, a
writing retreat, revisiting memoir sites for details,
interviews, etc.)
Memoir production costs 5,500
Consultant Fees 600
Supplies and equipment 700
- including repair work on a used mobility scooter to
help me get around short distances
Blog and other On-line fees 600
MY PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY AND CULMINATION
Like Melville's sub-sub librarian in his researches on the whale, like Jefferson with his Bible, his own version - I have set out to create a personal mythology, not through established religion nor that other than a love of and interest in, a deep one, like that of a gardener, in these Americans and visitors and those who've stood in importance in relation to them - their interactions, and the stories that result - a diverse group from the known to those not and of all colors, shapes, and abilities. I've made from the "materials" of fact, imagination, and interaction that which is geography that everything else is on top of, from roots, dependent on, means. When I "legend" Americana and the world, roots are in the thought of, the imagined world, lived again, throughout, one foot in the grave, and beyond.
This is indeed a culmination. I've not been perfect, to put it exceedingly understated. However, to a large extent, mine has been a life always poised in the direction of doing things to benefit people. I've experienced traumatic near-death crimes. I've held low income positions within my arts administrative career, serving programs of service to minority, veteran, and disability communities. I've taught in low-income schools, with both (extremely) traumatic and (extremely) life-rewarding classroom experiences.
In spite of disability, I somehow managed to cover eight music festivals last year, in various parts of Virginia and as far away as Kansas City; not to mention writing about and photographing/videoing a year-full of performances from here at home in the Norfolk/Hampton Roads area to throughout Virginia and in D.C.
 The Reverend Peyton, Appaloosa Music Festival (2018) Guild Books Reading with Friends, Chicago (1980s)THE MEMOIR WILL ENCOMPASS (IN PART)
I love to experience, intimately interview, and write about music, musicians and other artists. My career includes this writing and photography (& video) in creative music journalism as well as my unique, humanitarian-based American-history-related poetry and prose, 1,000-page, work, Americans: An Odyssey: LaSalle & Native Peoples, Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, The Powder River War, Father Ravalli, Chelsea Hotel, and China Camp.
As I told my middle-school English students - Well carved lines of poetry create the shape and meaning of the song. The song, like the poem, exists within a framework of the music of words and the emotion of context, rhyme, and repetition.
I've been face-to-face in dressing rooms, studios, homes, ranches, and band busses with many of our great artists and performers from actor/comedian Bob Hope and singer/dancer/Beatles collaborator Billy Preston to composer/musician John Cage, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and playwright Eugene Ionesco to the bands Greensky Bluegrass and Government Mule to jazz artists The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Oliver Lake to rock, roots, and blues/gospel groups Judah and the Lion, Mipso, Langhorne Slim, and The Reverend Peyton and his Big Damn Band, to poets Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and Diane Wakoski, to icon columnist/critic/writer/radio host Studs Terkel, to playwright Steve Carter, and to visual artists Nancy Graves, Deborah Butterfield, Jeanne Quick-to-See Smith and Stephen Antonakos, to name but a few. Other artists include: experimental theater troupe Warsaw Mime Troupe from Poland, who went target shooting with me on a Michigan cliff, and Preservation Hall Jazz Band, who joined me in a local bar to visit old friends of theirs Martin, Bogan, and Armstrong.
My best friends have included the poets Etheridge Knight, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ed Dorn, Theodore Enslin, Larry Eigner, and Robert Bly, writer Paul Metcalf, biographer, jazz critic and "New York Post" columnist Stanley Crouch, painters Sam Gilliam and Ernie Pepion, jazz artist Joseph Jarman, and composer Donald Sur. Currently, probably my most regular and a much-appreciated correspondent and someone I like to think of as a friend is Ian Felice, of the rock band, The Felice Brothers, and also a fine painter. One of my favorite evenings recently was dinner (for the two of us) as guest of Langhorne Slim in Bristol, and I'm excited to say he's invited me for a personal tour of Nashville some day. My wife, Gayle Paul, is a visual artist and curator, and we've shared many experiences in the art world and travel.
Back in the day, I was selected as the Master of Ceremonies of The Beat Reunion in Chicago, with Ginsberg, Corso, and Burroughs (see selection below). As the list above affirms, many of my relationships have been within communities of people of color (largely African American) and have been a mix of the more experimental and the more "popular." The book will include stories of many of these individuals and other singular tales as told by them to me. These stories open the memoir subject matter to include Gustav Mahler, Nadia Boulanger, Martin Luther King, Charles Olson, and many others.
I've also written about and been a curator of a number of prestigious art exhibits, co-curating with my good friend, Sam Gilliam, of the famed Washington Color School and others, as well as acting as a judge and advisor for a number of music and literary competitions.
I've been the subject of articles on me in "The Washington Post," (several times), a full-page (plus) feature about me in "The Virginian Pilot," and other publications. I've made numerous television and radio performances on broadcast and public stations from Chicago to San Francisco, including being interviewed by Studs on "The Studs Terkel Show." (A friend and I also raided his liquor chest at his home once, getting caught by the gracious icon.) I've performed in hundreds of venues including Chicago's Preston Bradley Hall and The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (filling in for Robert Bly at his suggestion), Norfolk's Naro Theater, with Tim Siebles, numerous San Francisco Bay locations, The Missoula Museum of Art, The Indianapolis Airport, The Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and many others. These were often performed as collaborations with live dancers, Native American singers and dancers, singers/performers, and actors with whom I formed troupes in different cities.
My stories include those from starring theater and independent film roles (including being the only white in an African American Theater Company ), as well as being on the Purdue Exponent 60's writing staff when featured for its activism on the cover of Look magazine, while at the same time in a fraternity with four members of the NCAA championship basketball team and completing a minor in painting, while living part-time in an apartment above, and almost with, an older couple almost beyond description, with the man being the subject of Jesse Colin Young's )("Get Together")song of that era, "Doc Geiger" ("Old Doc Geiger was policin' the town. Old Doc Geiger's goin' to shoot him down!"). Sports are also a major part of my life, and I played full-court basketball with groups nation-wide, including players from the Washington Wizards, into my sixties.
All the while, I've been a writer, most of that time a photographer as well, from Jr. High, as we called it then, to now. I've taught and tutored (and was once hired as a literary conversationalist, from free schools to large City art museums to the living room of one of the world's richest heirs to one of America's largest companies. One time, I read for a group of elementary school students at a bookstore in Sheridan, Wyoming. My friend who owned the store said the kids were impressed by a poet showing up with the smell of horses on him. I had herded cattle on horseback that early morning.
National Institute of Art and Disabilities artists and Tony LaRussa, then manager of the Oakland A's, in Tony's office.In my arts administrative role, I was executive director of the National Institute of Art and Disabilities, and I've taken poets and writers I hosted at other programs I've run into community centers, a women's prison, feminist women's centers, and public schools, especially, in minority and low-income communities, and I've often read my work in such settings.
I get very little revenue from my music writing (though I do need and greatly appreciate the payment I do receive!), It is done for the LOVE, and also in hopes that it enriches/helps both ends of the music community creative lasso/heart/lifeline; and I get the impression it does from the response I've gotten from fans of my writing and photos in venues from Coastal Virginia Magazine to the national Relix and Great Britain's Folk Radio UK, as well as the regional Veer. I judge that also, from the numerous times my work has been featured in No Depression, not an easy task, and one of my articles there, on Ian Felice, attracting almost 3,000 readers last I looked.
On the professional end, I've been recipient of The Washington D.C. Arts and Humanities Commission Literature Fellowship and The Illinois Poet Laureate Award, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center Fellowships, and Indiana Poet in Residence, among numerous other awards. My photos have also won national and regional recognition, including American West and Indiana Publisher. And, I've served on numerous regional, local, and national arts, music, literature, and disability boards and advisory panels. My arts administrative career included: Publications and Literary Arts Coordinator, City of Chicago; Executive Director, National Institute of Art and Disabilities, Director, The ODU-AWP International Writers Center in Virginia. and Director of the Ragdale International Artists' Retreat in Illinois. I also acted as an extra in a Martin Scorcesi movie with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise and was named one of Chicago's Most Eligible Bachelors, along with Michael Jordan (true!)by The Chicago Sun Times Today's Woman. I was City Editor of The Kendallville Daily News-Sun.
I've had near death experiences several times. Once, a guy held a gun to my temple and told his partner, nervously watching the door, "I'm going to kill him!" Another time, I was threatened with my life by the wife of a soon-to-be convicted murderer whose trial I was covering in Wyoming. You can't make this stuff up folks.
Some of my journalism has dealt with social and human issues and concerns, including cover stories in Hampton Roads' Portfolio on African American poverty on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and the heroic efforts and resulting plights of an unrelenting activist for pacifism and other causes in the Norfolk area.
 Mommy Reynolds in Negril, JamaicaOther stories included in Bouquet: Growing up in Indiana, Teaching from middle school to art school (fights to triumphs), Cultural history told to me by friends who lived it, Experiencing historic baseball stadiums and contemporary major-league locker rooms, historic performances like Chuck Berry opening for the then-brand-new Rolling Stones, Teepee camping at Blackfeet Indian Days with my native friend, including a meal and conversation with tribal medicine man and woman elders in their teepee, working round-ups, brandings, and being live-in ranch hand in Wyoming and Montana, Cape Cod summer camp counseling with the rich and (quite) famous young campers, camping with Smoke Jumper/Hot Shot friends in the high mountains of Montana and Wyoming, lama trekking, solo hikes in glacier/grizzly country, several cross-country moves (solo, another with 2 pets, & one with new wife) in big trucks, dates and relationships with near-famous, junkies, athletes, actresses, administrators,models, artists, multi-racial/international/disabilities, and other ladies), solo Western and Eastern, Canadian and Jamaican driving trips, living on Negril Beach in Jamaica with Toots' godmother, living in Big Brother and the Holding Company's former rehearsal studio, and on house boats on Marin County, first-hand stories (no names) of second-hand tales of long-ago murder and other scandals by the famed, seduction efforts on me (with invitation to move in with him) by famed priest living in Hyannis Port and Beacon Hill, stays as guest at NYC homes of New York Superior Court Judge, Provincetown Playhouse Founder/Director, Whitney Museum of American Art Chief Curator (on Fifth Avenue), and others, extensive experiences with clients and friends with disabilities (and now, I "are one."), living in Chicago, Indianapolis, Missoula, Buffalo, WY, Norfolk, San Rafael , Oakland, and other locations, and lots more!
With Your Support!!!
With your support, I will rise from this physical and fiscal sinkhole I'm now in, be able to return friends' and businesses' generosity, and give my work a rocket ship of sorts that will enable this version of myself in the Dr. Who-like fantasy of my dailyness to complete what I hope will be a work of art in the precious guise of autobiography, the memoir of my life, while continuing my music writing and photography.
Otherwise, (truthfully, not to be overly-dramatic) my major work and this unique, cultural, historic account will likely sink into obscurity, will, in fact, disappear as my life (with ongoing health and fiscal struggles) reaches its ultimate epiphany in the world's boneyard, sans bouquet.
My Thanks
My words, nor anything else, would be sufficient to express my thanks to you for any amount you contribute to my GoFundMe project. However, I do offer the following (subject to some change in the exact nature of the gifts):
$10,000 or more: Everything below, plus (all original) 1 photo block, one wooden photo block, photo coffee mug, photo shirt, and photo album, plus one written-to-order biography/book with photos of the donor or friends, family, company, club, team, or etc.
$5,000 - $9,999: 2 copies of Memoir, 1 recording of writing, poems and songs, live performance if feasible, guest artwork reproduction, all signed, ongoing videos sent to you
$2,000-$4,999: 1 Memoir copy, 1 recording, all signed, ongoing videos
$100-$1,999 1 Section of Memoir, signed, 5 videos
$1-$99 5 videos
SAMPLE SECTIONS from a draft of Boneyard Bouquet: (days identify decades, interspersed throughout the text, to keep the story in constant motion)
MY PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY
Like Melville's sub-sub librarian in his researches on the whale, like Jefferson with his Bible, his own version - I have set out to create a personal mythology, not through established religion nor that other than a love of and interest in, a deep one, like that of a gardener, in these Americans and visitors and those who've stood in importance in relation to them - their interactions, and the stories that result - a diverse group from the known to those not and of all colors, shapes, and abilities. I've made from the "materials" of fact, imagination, and interaction that which is geography that everything else is on top of, from roots, dependent on, means. When I "legend" Americana and the world, roots are in the thought of, the imagined world, lived again, throughout, one foot in the grave, and beyond.
GENESIS
I rounded the corner without noticing, concerned about story not direction. The sun was powerful, softening my face, taking time away. A car started, memories, I was by now living miles ago as mind made the slow walk to a corner.
SUNDAY (Terre Haute)
And though it was late Fall and quite cold, the sun showered drops of golden dust on my Davy Crockett hat, raccoon tail trailing on to my small, cocky shoulders, behind my tooth-gapped smile, back when my dad still had ownership of his wide open persona. Mom and dad framing me in the receding sunshine, still trees and cold, happy in the seeds of them.
They took me to Hulman Park in Terre Haute on weekends, in my bulky coat and gilded box of grin, will, a child’s start of ambition, dressed happily as Davy Crocket, the road Fess Parker made for my growing-up, reflective from ambition, Alamo heroes and explorers eager in someone else’s beautiful world.
The sun’s warmth, my parents' in their journey they’d begun with and for me. Dad got to be such a constant, sloppy, incapacitated drunk that love got lost in the confusion I considered mind in those still vulnerable spaces hovering over my shoulders. Jump ahead two frames, when I wondered, would they send a child to prison for patricide, thinking about that as I swung from the swing top and made Zippy, our English Sheppard mix, glad, with her loud barks of joy ringing throughout my morbid fantasies of murder.
But, the swing was there, act of joy, and the love of boy and bright black-white friend. Loved dad still, together in the paint fresh to stretchers anonymous in the cosmos of Crawfordsville in the days of movie matinees, butter-soaked popcorn, “girlie” magazines, and soda fountains full of lime phosphates and submarine sandwiches.
WEDNESDAY (Chicago)
You'd never know he was gone, and the young Jack at that, to listen to Gregory. Corso would sweep by me like air, throughout the large, yet cramped green room to the side of the stage. Greg, a sweet man, would raise his angel-pitched, Brooklyn-twanged voice to the musty air above, saying to all of us and to those above that "she loved me!" He would go on, repeating several times, "She loved me! She REALLY loved ME. She said she loved JACK (Kerouac), but she really loved me." He would then repeat again, and again. Allen (Ginsberg) softly said, "Yes, Gregory," and then again, "Yes, Gregory," and then "that's right!" Meanwhile, (William) Burroughs, mostly silent, seated upright in the middle of the room, looked back at his young men lovers on a dusty couch, laid down his roast beef sandwich, and said in a deep, raspy voice, "What kind of ghosts do you have in your house?"
TUESDAY (Muncie)
In late1970's, Muncie, a faculty member’s kitchen around a huge punch bowl of heavily-spiked punch. I was with Gary Snyder, soaking in talking proximity, others surrounding in a constant bath of post-reading chatter. Snyder asked if I was a professor, beat literature, due to knowledge of, detail of himself, friends, small, unlikely, beat nation, loud, long sound in the still-evolving tune of American literature, varied, evocative voice, that forever changed the whole.
I said not, a poet with interest that had burned such that I knew their history as my own. He walked some on the wild still, as we explored the dimensions of the punch bowl and memories of Jack, while he chain-smoked and I puffed on rich Latakia tobacco in a prized pipe, him in a t-shirt and long braided hair starting to gray and I, a signed, new John Prine T-shirt, already battered with wear. I monopolized him without regret.
I said “good-bye” to Snyder, and Alice drove us down the dark highway back to Indianapolis, fellow poets, curling softly on her shoulder, exploring the edges and thrust of roses and dusk. She said she'd thought, “This is the life!”
Memory is an odd, magical instrument, like its consonant, melody:
I remember only a few things:
1.The auditorium and where we were seated.
2. Gary Snyder center stage below us, indistinct, with brightness emanating.
3. Talking at the punch bowl, the kitchen, Snyder. No other details, nothing but Gary, beginning to show age, still with long braided hair, the smoking, our cherry-pink glasses of punch.
4. Calling me a beat professor?
5.The ride home, how dark the night was, exhaustion.
6. Head on Alice's shoulder
7. Her remarks remembering that night.
And, nothing else …
 Sons of Bill at The Broadberry, Richmond, 2018 (by Ron Wray)SATURDAY (Washington, DC, and Richmond, VA)
Ian Felice, a thoughtful reader, eager mind, poet and painter, among the world's best songwriters. I’d followed The Felice Brothers from beginnings. The second night open of The Anthem on the Washington, D.C. waterfront. We were in a make-shift green room beneath the stage, bundled for cold echoing sub-zero outside. Band, crew, and friends didn’t seem to notice, used to playing in marginal environments. Ian, thin as a cocktail stick, often a thoughtful, slightly-interior grin dangling precariously under his mustached lip. Slightly grey, it reminded me that time has passed since these guys hit the scene. In those days, I had played "Frankie’s Gun" over and over again.
I'd first seen them in Richmond two years before. It was an incredible gig. I looked around at the dancing bodies, intense contemplation of heavy lyrics and complex arrangements, and a young man with long black hair leaping up-and-down to attempt matching the brothers’ almost cosmic intensity. That fan gave James a lighted candle in a glass holder to put on his trusty keyboard. Others, at one point, began throwing money on the stage, but not without a price tag. Some dollars came with song requests, while others were thanks for favorites already performed. Toward the end of the show, Ian leaned down and gathered their “take,” saying quietly, “People are throwing money?! Well, if anyone wants to throw money up here, we won’t discourage them.”
With a song choice nodding to the weather, bringing the storm inside, Ian began: “Plunder, plunder, rain and thunder. Lightning split my brain asunder./They say that only 80 men own more than half the world/I dreamed they spread it around/ended up in a mental ward” They got humor too, right? Satire underlies much of their lyrical work. To begin the night’s show, there were politics, humor and content that reflected the moment. Sweeping down from the North – Palenville, New Paltz, and thereabouts – in the Catskills – they took Richmond by storm, so to speak, much like Union soldiers had, but this time without the Confederates burning Shockoe Bottom, this time to welcome arms. That’s a pretty elaborate analogy, concert to Civil War, but the show was intense!
Reflecting on the meaningless proliferation of industrial excess and extreme profit limited to a precious few, the song, appropriately titled "Plunder," was rendered with great emotion. “Every time I try to organize./I turn around, and my captain dies./They got machines that make machines/ and those machines make more machines.” While he sings and plays, Ian stomps his right, booted foot to the stage, then again, lifts it higher, and his foot comes down louder. “Plunder, plunder, rain and thunder/Greed will split the world asunder” The foot again, higher, down, louder.
The young man near me in the direct front of Ian is already absorbed, beginning to leap to the beat. And, Ian, absorbed, concentrated, sucked into the stage’s floor with his beating boot and into the depths of his beat-up and distinctive-sounding electric guitar, sang on. His guitar, quite large and bronze-colored, appeared on its last legs, but sounded like orchestra, theatre, and bottomless pit.
Light from the Dark.
The concert, as it continues, is a bit like free-falling from an airplane. And, this was still only the beginning. Light coming out of the dark. The songs, many of them start dark and may continue that path. But then lightness, a bit of hope, often emerges, either literally, in the lyrics, or embedded in the feeling and/or overall meaning the song evokes. Or, light emerges from the jamming joy of the melody and the unabashed, wide-open playing of the music.
James related to me that a number of their friends they grew up with in their working class community went off to war, often with unpleasant results, perhaps explaining in part the anti-war sentiment of a number of their songs. He said of their new album’s title song, "Life in the Dark:" “The songs maybe start with a darkness. We are all walking around in the dark. And yet, we are searching for the light. Our brains are the avenues for it.” Our brains are the avenues for it.” Dig that. Is that an astonishing sentence?” These brothers are smarter than the average bear.
“He seems to fully experience it on stage,” I said to James, “each time he performs it." “He doesn’t fake it,” James replied. “And yet," I added, "in briefly meeting him after the show, I felt warmth and genuineness in the brief contact.” “He’s a sweet guy,” his brother replied.
The musically self-taught Felice Brothers’ body of work has long hung in my imagination as a thoroughly unique and fresh contribution to our musical culture. And, there's a dynamic, mind-blowing quality to their live performances. The Felice Brothers performed 21 songs and several encores, sending us all out into the continuing rain afterwards with, if I wax poetic, a dose of cosmic understanding and transforming joy.
(Portions first published in No Depression, 2016)
 The Felice Brothers at The Camel, Richmond, 2016 (Photo by Ron Wray)THURSDAY (Montana and San Francisco)
The Metaphor that Spoke at St. Mary’s –
The Riddle of Doctor Ravalli
Father Ravalli cared about touches
Little things & mountains
Artifice & construction, bottle caps
He was kind-of like a contemporary Crow woman who, later,
Taking over tribal chairmanship, said:
I was content to raise my 13 children, 23 grandchildren,
And take care of my paraplegic brother. However,
The tribe had become so ineffective, it as about
To come to a suicidal end. We were in really bad shape.
It was not that kind of experience, but it was that sense of
Responsibility he assumed.
He dispensed medicine, built houses for worship,
Made friendly The Feathered Sun His crazy brief
History of knowing the, showing the Great Blue Yonder.
Building, building – boxes, chairs, slanted seats, book
Shelves, and Temples.
He built shrines to his God, one who became, who came to the Bitterroots, &
Then was theirs. The blue bruise of Spirituality. From the Natural
To the Jesuit. From sun to sun.
Creating a focus. Crating medicines in a box
Painted with the tail hairs of a Calico cat.
In bitterroot. In flaming shades of paintbrush. In the pale slant
Of a sapphire moon. The looming peaks, and the Indian graves stretched
Reluctantly into wooden crosses. The spirit that never stops to speak to
Strangers, like death, or Industry, or Genocide.
He is no longer here. He is an extension of earth. He is weeds & maggots in the
Dirt. He is the sun. He tries to be honest.
China Camp –
Something of the joy of carrying an
enthusiastic conviction to a logical extreme
-G. K. Chesterton
One worker forced the air through the mill
the air
by cranking the wheel
Another dropped the dried shrimp with its
loosened shells
Lighter weight shells were
Blown out the end.
Her hair was caught up in a bun. It was brown with golden shade.
She lay on the creaking bed in the one-room building atop the rise
Over the dock. You can see the conveyor belts on which they lay
The shrimp. The chimney smokes. A boat with its green
White and blue is rocking in a gentle wind. Tied tightly with a
Rope stretching in the dark distance to the pier.
Her poise loosens in the breeze. Her face becomes a half moon brightened by a smile.
Is that you. Is that you? In the picture? In the poster? Yes, long ago.
That is long, long ago.
He is a handsome young Chinese mending a shrimp net.
Darkened, sport shirt, elegant features. Chinese.
He is hosing off one of the shrimping boats remaining that only he works.
Other old-timers linger in the café. Others to escape the smoke talk
Non-smoking and fishing from a picnic table on the sand.
Over the north Bay, you can see billows of heavenly clouds against a white
Sky. This is what death looks like, I am sure. A brilliant white in the sky.
She has her hair up with a brown flouncy gather, the only loose thing
About her. People gather around her and slowly touch and dream. She
Smiles and kicks and speaks quietly, jokingly.
Her small room looks out at the bay at this vision of white death. At this
World of possibility.
Around the San Francisco and San Pedro bays, Chinese fishermen were
Fishing for shrimp by 1865. The discovery of huge amounts of shrimp
North of San Pedro Point in 1870 caused the industry to boom and reached
A peak by the 1890s. Chinese fishing villages such as China Camp were
Common along the bay shores in 1897, 26 or more camps. And Jack
London wrote about Chinese pirates in San Francisco Bay.
He will do things like this,
Under quite a different impulse.
He will do these things when he is in love.
Organizer
Ron Wray
Organizer
Norfolk, VA