TEARING DOWN THE SHRINE OF TRUTH & BEAUTY

John Sinclair & The Pinkeye Orchestra

Making these recordings with the Pinkeye orchestra was a magical experience for me. The whole project sprouted from a tiny seed and grew quickly under organic conditions into a splendid blossoming of music & verse in the finest Detroit tradition.

It started last spring [2008] when I met a guy named Jeff Howitt after dinner at Mexican Village one night. He followed up with an e-mail to tell me about this experimental improvisational orchestra called Pinkeye and invited me to join the ensemble one night the next time I was in Detroit. Maybe we could even record a couple of numbers together if it seemed like a good idea.

So it’s a Thursday night in the middle of July and my pal Hollywood & I are on our way to the Corktown Tavern on Michigan Avenue to meet Pinkeye and see what might happen. I love to collaborate with musicians of almost any sort and I always try to enter the room with an open mind, but I’d never heard the ensemble before I showed up and the musicians equally had little or no idea of what I might do.
The Corktown Tavern is right next door to Tiger Stadium and Tom, the owner, has locked the doors to the public, set out a spread of hot dogs & hamburgers for Pinkeye and its people, and turned the place over to the band for the night.

Pinkeye is a terrific bunch of talented and skilled young musicians from all around Detroit, most of them in their 20s, who play in other bands but get together as Pinkeye to make up the kind of experimental music they want to create together. They’re there for the music and they’re playing out of love and curiosity and they’re comfortable in their skins and, well, it’s immediately apparent that they’re my kind of people.
Coming up to the bar on Michigan Avenue and passing Tiger Stadium you could see where the City had begun the demolition of the former Shrine of Truth & Beauty at Michigan & Trumbull, knocking down the beautiful stadium walls and trucking everything out to be sold for scrap by the contractors.

This sight was tearing at my heart as memories of the hundreds of joyful trips I had made to Tiger Stadium to catch some games came flooding over me, and thoughts of the millions of Detroiters who had cheered and booed from the stands for a hundred years, and all the players who’d pitched and batted and fielded and coached within the cozy confines of the old ballpark, and the voices of Van Patrick and Paul Carey and the great Ernie Harwell beaming out with 50,000 watts of clear channel power over WJR radio to carry the play by play into the homes and cars and hearts and minds of countless millions of listeners throughout Michigan and the upper Midwest who hung on every pitch and every swing of the bat.

The new stadium downtown on Woodward Avenue is a nice place to see a ballgame, and it’s generating incredible millions of dollars in profits for the Illitch family and its concessioneers, but you would think there’d be considerable civic value in keeping and maintaining the old Tiger Stadium as a historical site and a place the City could always be proud of for generations to come. The former train station, a once-grand building now totally wrecked, still stands nearby with every window broken out on every floor while the marvelously intact ballpark is torn to shreds and toted away.

Inside the Corktown Tavern the outside world was blessedly absent and I enjoyed the feast and a few tokes with the fellas outside the back door in the very shadow of Tiger Stadium while the many band members drifted in and my daughters and granddaughter came to join me.
After awhile everybody climbed up to the 2nd floor and stationed themselves around the stage for the recording session. Scotty and Phil, the engineers, set me up facing the ensemble from behind a massive jerry-rigged audio barricade that would reduce the impact on my microphone from the sound assault the band would blast from the stage. The musicians would barely be able to hear me through the overhead speakers that would serve as monitors and, stuck out in front of the stage without any headphones, I could scarcely hear myself speak.

But when the ensemble kicked in we matched up at once and everything was lovely from beginning to end—the groove was deep and the music itself was astounding. The first piece they played for me was an original number that came in three sections, and I found a little suite of Monk poems to fit it: “bloomdido” > “ruby, my dear” > “humphf” from my elongated work in verse called always know: a book of monk. That went pretty well on the 2nd time through, and we took a break to go back outside for another smoke.

The musicians were talking about maybe doing another number and, looking up again at the walls of Tiger Stadium looming overhead, I was overcome with the desire to offer a prayer of thanks for everything this place had meant to me since I was a child of 9 watching the game with
my sweet little grandmother in Berkley on her tiny round 9-inch television screen while she taught me how to keep score.

One afternoon in 1985 I was at the game with the tenor saxophonist Peter Klaver and drummer Martin Gross and some other regulars in Section 44 of the upper right center-field bleachers watching the Tigers play the Toronto Blue Jays. They had Alfredo Griffin and Lloyd Moseby at the top of the lineup and we started riffing about Johnny Griffin and Hank Mobley.

I went back to my loft in Greektown and sat down to smoke a joint and relax after the game when this poem descended upon me from above, an account in verse of an imaginary baseball contest between the New York Tenors and the Bebop All Stars for the world championship. I had thought of a story I’d read in downbeat about a Sonny Rollins recording session where the writer said they were cutting a tune called “Rhythm Inning.” Of course it was instead the Thelonious Monk composition “Rhythm-A- Ning,” and that gave me the title and the musical setting for the poem.

Once the verse started flowing I had to stop and construct the appropriate lineups for the contesting teams so I would know who went where and when in the action. I devised the roster for each team and selected the starting players and their positions in the batting order, then worked out a scorecard for the completed game, with Monk on the mound for the All Stars facing the great Tenors hurler Dexter Gordon (29-2 on the season).

The verse play-by-play began in the top of the 5th when Monk mowed down the meat of the Tenors’ batting order: center fielder Sonny Rollins, right fielder John Coltrane, and first baseman Coleman Hawkins. Monk had just gotten out of the inning when my phone rang and I started telling my caller about what I was writing. He wanted to know how the game came out and I had to say I didn’t know—it was only the bottom of the 5th inning.

Once completed, I performed this poem in many different settings with many different ensembles, probably most notably with Ed Moss & the Society Jazz Orchestra in the version that appeared on our CD, If I Could Be With You.

For three hapless years when the great Allen Trammell was struggling as manager of the Tigers, I offered this poem all over the western world as a prayer for his survival and the eventual success of the team.
Now I wanted to set this poem against whatever music the Pinkeye

ensemble could come up with that would fit and perform it with Tiger Stadium still standing outside in the very last days of its earthly existence. Jeff suggested the Mingus composition “Moanin’” from the Pinkeye repertoire and I thought it was perfectly appropriate.
We knocked it out in a single take and went home with big smiles, knowing that wherever we heard this recording in the future we would be able to see the Shrine of Truth & Beauty looming benevolently in the background.

The 2nd session with Pinkeye took place the following Wednesday night at another great location, the super funky Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit on Rosa Parks Blvd north of the Ford Freeway, kitty-corner across the Wayne State University football field from my old neighborhood by John C. Lodge & Warren.

They tore my neighborhood down in the late 1960s and built up some ugly housing units for married students along the service drive and a shopping mall on the corner of Warren, but when I lived there in 1964-67 the Detroit Artists Workshop and the Artists Workshop Press were in the building on the corner along with the 5th Estate newspaper and the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam. A bunch of us lived upstairs in the former dentist’s office, we took our meals with James Ford at Mona’s on the corner of Forest, and at one time we controlled six aged housing units between Warren & Hancock that we kept full of beatniks, poets, musicians, painters and dope fiends of various persuasions.

Fast forward 40 years and here I am again, in the same neighborhood with exactly the same sort of people I’d grown up with at the Workshop and doing the exact same thing! That I had both my daughters and my granddaughter with me at the CAID made it even sweeter—to share this creative reincarnation with my most loved ones as well as my new friends who were carrying on the struggle well into the 21st century. My daughter Sunny had spent her first year in this milieu but no one else on the set had ever been there—yet here it is again.

I felt this spirit the minute I entered the building, and it clearly informs the music we made that night. The first number from the CAID session set the band’s arrangement of two Fela songs, “No Agreement” and “Lady,” against the speech of Hugo Chavez to the United Nations which I had edited and set to verse after I first read the speech in September 2006.

I’d first wanted to perform this piece to Jimmy Cliff’s song “The Harder They Come,” but “No Agreement” was even better and the band plays the living hell out of Fela’s music. I love the final section of the speech when Chavez lays out his beautiful vision of the future as “a world of peace.” A little farther along that diagonal from the CAID to John Lodge & Warren and then across the expressway is the corner of 2nd & Forest where the ruins of the Forest Arms Apartments now stand. My first residence in Detroit was in the basement of the Forest Arms, before I settled in at 4821-25 John Lodge, and it was a key locus in my development as a poet, writer and arts activist over the next 44 years.
I’d composed the poem called “nutty” this past spring after the Forest Arts was destroyed by fire and had just recorded it with Lyman Woodard & the Blues Scholars for my Detroit Life album, but tonight I wanted to hear it again in the context of this extremely resonant cultural matrix and in this particular geographical setting that means so much to me.

It turned out that Jelly Roll Joel could pick out the Monk melody for “Nutty” on his electric guitar, and the orchestra took it from there to make an incredible musical setting for my ode to the bohemian life.
After final tokes in the funky garden outside and final goodbyes from all the characters in the band and their crew, I left the gallery filled with joy and a glowing feeling of emotional completion.

This chance meeting with Jeff Howitt at Mexican Village had turned into a thing of great beauty—a tremendous artistic experience deeply rooted in my own personal geography and brought to bloom through the robust energy and intelligence of these young musicians out of the old bohemian tradition.

Thanks, everybody! They can tear down the shit around us, but they can’t destroy the life we have inside of us, and they can’t stop us from passing it on.

—Amsterdam August 19-20 >
London August 24 > Amsterdam September 22-23, 2008