After browsing through the incredible, ofttimes oddball,
Waxidermy site, I found myself wandering aimlessly all over the internet. Good luck following the long-winded tangents that follow. (It starts with a nutty song, passes through alien abducted artist, past a pot smoking ball-player and back to vintage rock n' roll roots.) If you want to skip to the MP3 links, they're at the bottom of the post.
It started at Waxidermy, where I found a few song-poems. For the uninitiated, song-poems are songs created around poems or lyrics that people would send in with a fee and in return receive a recording of their work made into a song by complete strangers, usually musicians trying to eek out a living making music by whatever means necessary.
The particular song-poem that wound me up was "
Space Scene," a song so brilliantly naive that it might as well be performed verbatim on Saturday Night Live. Sample lyric: "
I'm a spaceman, zippin' and-a zappin, here and there, dancin' my life away." (Even if you're not into oddball stuff, consider throwing your friend into a pool of confusion by sticking it in the middle of a mix CD.) This is where I should have stopped, but I didn't.
Next stop:
The Spaceman of Ocean Beach. In searching for a generic spaceman picture to accompany the Space Scene link, I ran into a whole YouTube page dedicated to Clint Cary, better known as the Spaceman of Ocean Beach, and his friend Bob Oaks. Spaceman, a painter, came to Ocean Beach (in San Diego) in the early sixties. He claimed to have met aliens from a planet called Rillispore, and that they essentially gave him the responsibility of assigning seats for a mankind-saving journey back to their planet.
If you ever met Spaceman, you were likely to be assigned a mysterious number, given to ensure passage on the flight to Rillispore. XIB/2 was Spaceman's number, and others were doled out in numerical order. (XIB/1, in case you're wondering, was some higher power's number. Why a higher power would require a ride on a spaceship is anyone's guess.)
Bob Oaks, also in the clips, was one of his best friends, a jazz musician who lived his last 30-odd years in the big cottage on the north side of the OB pier. Oaks met Spaceman when, as a favor for a friend, he picked him up from the airport upon his first arrival. They remained close friends until Spaceman's death in 1993.
Oaks is credited with tempering the community's view of Spaceman, preventing him from being seen as a
total crackpot. While Spaceman's life was at times disfunctional, and his stories
literally unbelievable, he was smart, well spoken and harmless (at least in his later years).
If you've spent much time in O.B., the Spaceman/Oaks footage on YouTube should be considered required viewing as it provides some insight into the orgins of Ocean Beach's "anything goes" reputation. And taken as a whole, the clips paint a wonderful picture of friendship between two aging artistic eccentrics. (Here's another little blurb, from
Citybeat's site.)
Next stop:
Bill "Spaceman" Lee. Still needing an image of a spaceman,
any spaceman, I happened upon a site for a documentary about Bill "Spaceman" Lee, a former Red Sox pitcher who was, in his day, the best known pothead in baseball. He's always been one of my favorite ball players. (I have a penchant for the oddballs,
especially in baseball.) His observations about baseball, and life in general, went way beyond those of a normal ball player. At times insightful, often out there and almost always hilarious. The guy had brainy
swagger.
"I think about the cosmic snowball theory. A few million years from now the sun will burn out and lose its gravitational pull. The earth will turn into a giant snowball and be hurled through space. When that happens it won't matter if I get this guy out." - Bill Lee
As it turns out, after being pretty much blackballed from the major leagues, Lee became a baseball mercenary, playing anywhere in any league that would hire him, including Russia and Cuba. You can view the trailer of the documentary
here, read an interview
here, and read more about him
here. And don't miss the
excellent quotes at Baseball Almanac.
SNAP! Shit, now I have one weird spaceman song, two unrelated spaceman sites and zero images. Again I search, this time for song poems...
anything but spaceman. Now I end up on the
American Song-Poem Music Archives, an exhaustivelly annotated overview of the genre.
Here comes the crafty seque back to MP3 blogs: The American Song-Poem Music Archives site is run by Phil Milstein, the same guy that does the highly recommended
Probe is Turning-On the People. His latest post there (Session 157) is great, ten-plus downloads of songs that inspired early rock n' roll artists. Plus, there's keepers all over the site.
If you actually read all of that, my hat's off to you. Thanks for indulging me. I was just too stoked to find sites about two of my favorite square pegs to not go off.
.
(Photo above is the Ocean Beach version of Spaceman in the mid-sixties. I gave up on the generic image)
