In which Elvis and some dropouts cannibalize a park ranger on Mount Shasta, amidst a lost city in a hollow mountain with walls like polished jewels. And then a free jazz freaknik ritual breaks out…

Sun City Girls: Carnival Resurrection Folklore

The Great North American Tricksters is a live, field-recording style document from the Sun City Girls‘ seemingly endless back catalog. It’s a beguiling early-to-mid period artifact from 1990, the same year as their seminal Torch Of The Mystics, the 23rd installment on the band’s own Cloaven Cassettes imprint. It’s not music, per se, being comprised mainly of a lengthy spoken-word skit between Alan Bishop, Richard Bishop, and Charles Gocher, reportedly recorded in one take on June 27, 1990. The liner notes read simply, “Self-titled Sun City Girls performance recorded live on Mt. Shasta, June 27, 1990. The next day papers reported a “strange distant array of sounds” as being heard by several campers during the night and thereby relating it to the local Lemurian lore they’re so fond of in those parts.”

The Great North American Trickster starts off with a shaking rattle; pulsing, hypnotic percussion; nameless, formless chanting; an atonal horn blast. It seems to evoke the scene of a park ranger approaching a group of society dropouts, jawing about nothing, complaining about hippies, “talking about crystals and shit,” about some of the weird things they see there in the shadow of Mt. Shasta. It’s a scene entirely familiar to anyone familiar with small towns with nothing to do, endless afternoons bullshitting on the porch talking about nothing and nothing at all. Killin’ time. Except, this time, one of them is Elvis. And some of the nothing involves strange lights in the sky, cults, disappearing dogs, and small town politics.

The Great North American Tricksters is an hour-long journey cut into two halves. Half-way through, Elvis brandishes a stick and the park ranger meets a grisly end. The second half opens with the Ranger being roasted over the fire, with grisly jokes about eating one another.

North American Tricksters: Brer Rabbit

On The Great North American Tricksters, Carnival Folklore Resurrection and Old Weird American Folklore

Writing on the Sun City Girls, the label Sublime Frequencies co-run by the Bishop Brothers, and their “Carnival Folklore Resurrection” series, author Marcus Boon writes “

I’ve been writing about SF for a number of years, and in the back of my head there has always been this nagging fear that possibly Alan and Richard Bishop, those “cameo demons” .. that “box of chameleons” … those “great North American tricksters” to quote some old Sun City Girls titles, have actually been secretly cranking out the music of the entire Sublime Frequencies catalog themselves in a studio in Seattle, and making asses of people like me who believed that this music actually existed out there in the world! Now I know that at least some of it is true … and maybe that’s enough, because I think that’s an important part of what SF is about: throwing us into a situation where there are no guarantees, no experts to sort things out in advance, and where we have to make up our own minds about what we value, what we like or care about. And we have to keep our wits about us … I’d say that this is already what “carnival folklore resurrection”, this marvelous phrase that the SCGs coined for a series of reissues of some of their more obscure recordings, is about. No one goes to a carnival worrying about authenticity. You know there are all kinds of tricks, projections, illusions, fascinations and dangers at work, but you let yourself go a little, and you let yourself be taken in … and that is where what in America is called “fun” begins: monstrous, cruel, ecstatic, cheesy. But then … what if the whole world turned out to be a massive carnival like that? What would you do? Go home and get a PhD on carnivals … or take a ride?

n … and that is where what in America is called “fun” begins: monstrous, cruel, ecstatic, cheesy. But then … what if the whole world turned out to be a massive carnival like that? What would you do? Go home and get a PhD on carnivals … or take a ride?

Folk and “Sub” Cultures

I want to begin by talking about folk cultures. The German philosopher Johannes Herder coined the term “Volkslied” (“folk song”) in the eighteenth century and produced a two volume collection of folk song lyrics from around the world, but there have always been folk cultures, usually existing in the shadow of kings, churches, rulers of various kinds. The peasantry, out of necessity, out of the fact they owned little or nothing, found “unofficial” ways of making, distributing and sharing things – like songs for example, or recipes or spells. They developed particular collective techniques for producing these things – appropriating, cutting and pasting, transforming whatever came to hand, what anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called “the science of the concrete”. Then industrialization came along and with it new kinds of “official” distribution networks – the capitalist marketplace, copyright and intellectual property law, and the Romantic cult of the individual artist, who at the same time, sold his or her work in the marketplace like any other worker. At that time in Europe folk cultures apparently disappeared as autonomous entities. They were appropriated and represented as reified kitsch symbols of the nation-state. On the left such reified kitsch versions of “folk” were rightly seen as fascist manipulations, but the left also embraced industrialization and the transformation of the peasantry into the proletariat. Marx wrote dismissively of the “lumpenproletariat” – the hustlers, tricksters and others on the margins of industrial society who could not or would not work in the factories. If Mike Davis in his recent book Planet of Slums is to be believed, people in this situation now constitute a majority of the world’s citizens. Such communities of the marginalized or disaffected today appropriate industrial imagery and technology just as they did the official imagery of the church and crown back in Medieval days. Music, which is a peculiarly slippery and autonomous kind of human expression, is of great interest to such communities, and probably always has been, since it is very difficult to turn music, or more generally sound, into private property. The recording industry in the twentieth century was a sustained attempt to do this, but looking around today, one has to say that it has not entirely succeeded. And conversely, it is possible to make amazing music even if you have no property whatsoever.

In Europe and America in recent decades, we call such folk cultures “subcultures” or, in Spivak’s phrase “subaltern cultures”, but these are unfortunate words since, although such cultures may be subordinate to the dominant system, be it feudal or capitalist, they have their own value systems, their own way of doing things. The great graffiti artist Rammellzee lamented the fact that in the early 1980s, graffiti crews, who established their sovereignty over the city of New York by writing burners across entire subway trains, traded this sovereignty for “subculture” and a chance to participate in the international art market. Of course, the sovereignty of graffiti crews is a complex issue.

Today, “subcultures” including “indie”, “alternative” and “hip-hop” have allowed themselves to be appropriated into mainstream consumer culture to a point of almost total co-optation, and I think there’s good reason to resist that kind of label and the politics that goes with it. Instead maybe we could talk about Industrial folk cultures, a phrase I take from Ian Penman who, in a review of Public Image Limited’s Metal Box in 1980, observed that Public Image were making a kind of industrial folk music. In the 1970s Kraftwerk also claimed that they were playing “industrielle volksmusik”, providing one of the links to what is now known as industrial music, as well as perfect beats for Afrika Bambaataa. Henry Flynt’s vision of an invigorated “American ethnic music” in which hillbillies appropriate tricks from high culture to add to the power of their own music, or The Fall’s “prole art threat” are also part of this. A certain aesthetics of failure, indifference, idealism or perversity in relation to the official marketplace is one of the characteristics of the participants in such cultures – “the curse of the Fall” and the rest of us too. There’s nothing too pure about any of this: it’s not about authenticity or benevolence – participants in folk cultures steal other people’s styles and incorporate them. They are suspicious of art, and often see themselves as workers for hire, even when this work requires a high degree of aesthetic or technical sophistication. And they’re often tangled up with gangs, mafias, grey markets, who are pretty ruthless about the bottom lines of power and money. But so long as the current economic system exists, so will the particular forms of activity of industrial folk cultures too.

The Old, Weird America photo: @dockKIDsmoke

The Old, Weird America

The phrase “the old, weird America,” comes from Greil Marcus‘ seminal work on Bob Dylan and his Basement Tapes, and the world from which they sprang The Old Weird America, originally titled Invisible Republic. “

Once the poet Kenneth Rexroth was looking for a phrase to describe the country he thought lay behind Carl Sandburg’s work—the poems and folk songs, the Lincoln books and the clean face framed by straight white hair—whatever it was that, say, led Bob Dylan to knock on the old man’s door one day in 1964, looking for a blessing or a legacy. Rexroth came up with “the old free America.”

When I first ran across those words they almost made me dizzy. “The old free America”—the idea, the words themselves, seemed all but natural, coded in the inevitable betrayals that stem from the infinite idealism of American democracy. I don’t hear any irony in those words. But while I respond helplessly to them, I also recoil—because those words cast Americans out of their own history.

They cut Americans off from any need to measure themselves against the idealism—the utopianism, the Puritans’ errand into the wilderness or the pioneer’s demand for a new world with every wish for change—Americans have inherited. By fixing the free America, the true America, in the past, those words excuse the betrayals of those Americans who might hear them. There’s an alluring, nearly irresistible pull in the phrase—at least there is for me—and I almost took it to name the territory that opens up out of the Anthology of American Folk Music, but instead I only stole the cadence; as I listened to Smith’s assemblage with the basement tapes playing before or after, the phrase rolled over. The old, weird America is what one finds here—not Rexroth’s rebuke to his readers, but an inheritance Smith’s listeners might prefer to claim had reached them by mistake.”

Marcus goes on to write “An imaginary home and a real exile: those might be the borders of the imagined America in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.”

An imaginary home. A real exile. Not a yearning for an America that was but for one that has never been. And will always be.

In a different essay on folk music and Bob Dylan, folk music, and The Old Weird America, author Rivka Mailish speaks of an “uncanny America.” “The quest to uncover American folklore represents a cultural and intellectual movement based on repossessing a hidden, repressed, uncanny American past. Neither modernist nor anti-modern, this cultural and intellectual tradition valued imagination and poetry over science, prized mystery over naturalism, and embraced a radical anti-historicist philosophy of history. Many of the early folklorists were women, Jews, African-Americans, Native-Americans, or others excluded from academic social sciences or from full citizenship in American society. They used this rich repository of hidden and unsettling stories about America to dissent from the dominant political culture, and they used the methods and tools of social science not to clarify, but to make the United States and American history more mysterious, more chaotic. Their work insisted on the existence of an alternative America where they could discover themselves.”

It is as Marcus Boon commented on people’s tendencies to reclaim culture by any means necessary.

Martinique Dancers; Counterculture Folklore

Sun City Girls as Tricksters; and Freak Folklore

In her book on Tricksters, Writing Tricksters, author Jeannie Rosie Smith, writes “Traditionally, the Chippewa trickster Nanabozho is “the master of life—the source and impersonation of the lives of all sentient things, human, faunal, and floral. . . . He was regarded as the master of ruses but also possessed great wisdom in the prolonging of life” (Densmore 97). As the “master of ruses,” Nanabozho wields as his chief weapon the power of transformation. Nanabozho could “assume at will . . . a new form, shape, and existence”; he “could be a man, and change to a pebble in the next instant. He could be a puff of wind, a cloud fragment, a flower, a toad” (Johnston 19–20). Using his transformational powers to escape from difficult situations and attack his enemies, Nanabozho’s transformational ability implies control over his physical boundaries. It is the trickster’s questioning of physical boundaries that is central to Erdrich’s vision of identity based on connections to myth and community.”

As to why this is important, Jacob Devaney writes for the website CultureCollective.org, “

The distinction between clown and trickster is subjective; however, generally, tricksters are considered more mythic and archetypal, whereas clowns are their more worldly counterparts. Thus, the trickster comes in many forms, including clowns, merry-makers, buffoons, and jesters – they can be playful, mischievous, disrespectful, backward, paradoxical, or even obscene. This archetypal energy can play out through various circumstances in our lives, and make us feel like we are the butt of a cosmic joke.

Tricksters cross boundaries in society, playfully disrupting normal life. This bending of the rules usually appears in the form of tricks or thievery. Tricksters openly mock authority, and can be both cunning and foolish. They break rules, boast, and play tricks on those around them.”

Crossing boundaries. Disrupting normal life. Breaking the rules. Mocking authority. All of this describes Sun City Girls to a T.

“They are shapeshifters, imitators, bringing these weirdo freakniks to life like Old Man Coyote making humanity out of clay.

The Bishop Brothers and Charles Glocher aren’t lionizing the weird societal dropouts you’d find on Mt. Shasta in 1990 as much as inhabiting them, changing from people to a pebble in an instant, as Jeanne Smith noted earlier. They are shapeshifters, imitators, bringing these weirdo freakniks to life like Old Man Coyote making humanity out of clay.

Crossing boundaries. Disrupting normal life. Breaking the rules. Mocking authority. All of this describes Sun City Girls to a T.

The hippy counterculture was born from the seeds and fruits of the folk movement. It is a music by, for, and about the people, and the lands on which they live. The definition of folklore, we must remember, is “the expressive body of culture shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. These include oral traditions such as tales, proverbs and jokes.”

This entails far more than just Appalachian mountain music and Children’s Nursery Rhymes by the time Sun City Girls were making this racket in 1990. Folk culture had expanded to include the original folk music; the homespun Arts & Crafts movement of the ’70s; cheap Sci-Fi TV; Star-Wars; old musty folk records; private press albums; Fortean magazines; recreational drugs; National Geographic; Punk Rock.

Folk culture had expanded to include the original folk music; the homespun Arts & Crafts movement of the ’70s; cheap Sci-Fi TV; Star-Wars; old musty folk records; private press albums; Fortean magazines; recreational drugs; National Geographic; Punk Rock.

Author Mike McConigal describes Sun City Girl’s Torch of the Mystics, released the same year as The Great North American Tricksters, “It’s an album of twisted psychedelic world music that’s wholly original and beautiful, like music the Meat Puppets and Acid Mothers Temple might make while smoking kief in a Moroccan jail cell.” It imagines what it would be like if the ’60s counterculture had started with Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music and continued on to binge listen to the entirety of the world’s recorded music – scratched old 78s from Siam, lost Thai Pop, field recordings of birds and frogs, weepy Iranian Santour ballads. That’s sort of what Sun City Girls sounds like.

The Great North American Tricksters conjures a lost, forgotten America, of roadside attractions and local TV – bargain bin record stores and too much free time. Of wide open skies scratched by aerial antennae, pulling out High Weirdness from the aether. This comes at a time when all is threatened to be sucked into the simulacrum. When every object will have its own QR code and continually belch out data into the Internet of Things. Instead, Sun City Girls speak to long, wasted afternoons digging through thrift store record shelves; of bad, weird daytime TV; of fantasy Americana, where a lost brontosaurus could be living right over the next hill. Where a race of enlightened Tibetan masters live inside a hollow mountain in Northern California. These things need to not be forgotten. We can still be the free America, for one and for all. Folklore is a thread to guide us back to more wide open meadows.

It’s the sound of the New Old Weird America, the New Free America, long may she live, long may she reign.

Sun City Girls The Great North American Tricksters

@ discogs

@ rateyourmusic.com

Book Sources:

Marcus, G. (2011). The old, weird America: the world of Bob Dylans basement tapes. New York: Picador.

Smith, J. R. (1997). Writing tricksters: mythic gambols in American ethnic literature. Berkeley: University of California Press.

J Simpson tracks and traces horror, folklore, magick, the supernatural, and the occult throughout culture, wherever they may be found. He is the founder of Forestpunk: A Journal of the Dark Arts and Co-Founder of the Emerald Tablet Collective. You can follow him @ @for3stpunk on Twitter and Instagram.

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