Here, writing has turned acoustic and the instruments include a Vox keyboard, sitar, clarinet electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and voice. I’m open to hearing from you on this no matter what you have to say.
In a poetry recital at The Peter White Public Library in Marquettee, Michigan Russ Thorburn read his poem, “The Fox.” My part was to keep a beat with drum(s) to his words, so I put several small squares of wax paper under the wire bridge on the bottom of the snare drum to separate the snare-wires from the batter-head. This allowed for a snare sound, but not an overpowering blast, more like raindrops on a tin roof. I played the snare with chopsticks to the rhythm of Thorburn’s reading.
The sound from those chopsticks – stepping lightly – clicked to the rhythm of Thorburn’s stealthy fox. It never left me, and our collaboration continued over the years with lots of crazy things. Some of them failed, some of them failed worse. But through it all we developed lives marked by craft and grace, meeting all the moments with acceptance. Sometimes, we’d share a dram of whiskey in Marquette too, and even if we drank it from a cup, it was always: crafty, graceful, randomly graceful, and even glorious.
Both Russ Thorburn and Jesus show up in this first song, along with a shadowy wolf-psychology, and a blues-singing bus driver. We see all of them in our reflection, I think. Sometimes, we all have the blues, and Edward Hopper’s lyrics are stamped on our souls. All those yellow lines we cross over in our sleep. This is how we drive past road rage, head-on into night and with winter’s disguise.
Thorburn writes: Here is Greg Ormson singing a Jesus song; picture the musician riding a bus across the Upper Peninsula with his guitar, using a handheld mike to record the Jesus song … kind’a. He departs from Jesus to read a poem entitled “Hour of the Wolf,” a homage to Ingmar Bergman and the vampire film he made with his former love Liv Ullman, who happened to be pregnant with his child. But the cabin singer returns to the “pilot” and those late-night scenes moving through winter on a bus.
“Hour of the Wolf – Pilot Me,” written by me and arranged for guitar by Greg Ormson, was recorded mono track by Greg on an Apple iPhone in August 2019 at a small cabin in the Midwest. The recording’s ethos is intimate. Hear the singer dig deep for breath. It’s late, and his eyelids droop; the whiskey bottle is next to the phone on the table in front of him, and so is the memory of Jesus and bus rides in the hour of the wolf.
I (Greg Ormson) read Russ Thorburn’s “Hour of the Wolf” from The Drunken Piano, one of his poetry books, shortly after its publication in 2009. I knew what it was to see my reflection in a bus window at 3:00 am. It had happened a couple of times, most notably, freezing my ass off when riding a dog (Greyhound) air-conditioned like the freezer. Traveling back to Wisconsin from New York, I saw myself in his poem and its psychological “Hour of the Wolf.” I also heard the bus driver singing a blues song alone, late at night, driving his life away. I too felt what it was to be mid-twenties, a bit displaced, anxious, edgy, and more than a little angry.
I wanted to give the poem a melody – maybe a divinity – to accompany that lonely hour, and I came up with the song by borrowing from Edward Hopper’s Hymn, “Jesus Savior Pilot Me” as a floating refrain from the incessant and noisy wheels of the bus. I saw Thorburn and the bus passengers next to me, we were all related by anxiety, desperate disciples in a boat on a stormy sea. The many people in that cold bus around me, are just like you and just like me, anxious about something we can’t see. Who needs a blues singer?
Writing about The Drunken Piano, David Dodd Lee said, “Read this book for the way it shatters the boundaries of “story” by creating an original and necessary human noise that is the thing we remember when we put the book down.”
That’s probably what I heard when first encountering Thorburn’s wolf hour in a bus … shattering me with an “original and necessary noise” that I was part of whether I wanted to be or not. We had both ridden desperate busses, we had both been displaced, we both knew the power of the wolf alone at night in the bare hours of a bus seat.
“Hour of the Wolf ” The late hour of a man looking at himself in the reflection of a bus window at three A.,M., as he travels through the heart back to her in spite of returning terror. Snow pounds the bus as he recalls the mouth of Liv Ullmann watching her husband Max von Sydow, drive crazily around a canvas with a knife. Snow scrapes the windshield faster than the wipers can clear madness away, and Lake Michigan lies frozen and smiling between trees at the travelers, as the bus driver sings a blues song. The young traveler pictures a pregnant Liv Ullmann with her dramatic cheekbones. He sees his own wife alone with their child, the man but twenty-five feeling tightened by his wire-rims and anxious, hoping he won’t lose everything. A middle-aged woman asks for his destination. He closes his eyes afraid to sleep because of the weathered barns with veins, motels peeled down to vacancy signs, all the yellow lines we cross over in our sleep.
Thorburn: Ormson rips snow-driven chords hard on his Taylor acoustic, in Gummersound’s Marquette garage. The stove is heating up like his vocals, as a Dylan Thomas’ lower baritone jumps into the fray to describe a dog with a cigarette … humor for the pub. A step outside the side door, winter is all smelly socks. Mrs. Henderson is there, and she’s willing to wash Dylan’s dirty soxs and his alcoholic body at her cottage in Cornwall. She lights the fire too, warming him from the deep cold of his past, the Welsh poet celebrated in this song. The track concludes with notes that ripple like an open flame as the heat rises in the stove pipe, Prometheus bound, white, and tight.
I say, turn it up for these bawdy chords strummed with power; because they announce that ‘The Dylan,’ the writer one, has sat his ass down to write. As such, I stood up to sing in the deep D and G chord, calling on the thunder arm and velvet hand. Mrs. Henderson appears with a pair of new shoes and sox for Dylan, and she takes the time to wipe his nose.
I sang the song and followed a couple of lines Thorburn had sketched on the paper and it was as the kids say today, “all good.” Multiply X fingers on strings and a couple of dutiful chords to fire this song of shoes, socks, and a nose full of snot. Mrs. Henderson is there too, after all, every song begs for someone graceful to come along and light the fire, maybe even wash the socks. We’re all damn glad she did.
Thorburtn: When it’s time to record in that Marquette garage, Mr. Gummerson asks “Greg, are you ready?” He doesn’t answer, just empties the acoustic Taylor and pours its very soul into those big chords. It’s three Ds and a G. Ormson says, and distracted, drops an expensive mic on cement; Gummerson calls party foul and gives him the ‘stink eye,’ but he’s forgiven because Gummerson and everyone there knows that he made love to that Taylor and sang his ass off.
Poem, Russ Thorburn, tape mix @ Gummersound, Marquette, Michigan. Greg Ormson guitar, vocals, and shifting words to fit rhyme.
“Send Dylan to the Country”
In the Midwest, yes I shot animals, and I have my scars. It’s in spilled beer and hurting bodies, a certain killing of insects and other things in our path, it’s broken whiskey bottles in the alley at night, and stray cats – easy pickings for teens. And yet we embrace all paths, bloody or not, like a skyscraper stretching through the night, or a lightning bolt emerging from a white star.
A rainy afternoon at a window, a reedy heeeeaaaahhhh from a bagpipe in our ears, and at Gummerson’s garage studio, looking out the window, Thorburn fingers his Nord Keyboard to record a song entitled “8 Track.” The original lyrics were taken from two poems and two different parts of his life—one was a runaway nineteen-year-old and the other a twenty-three-year-old in love with an older woman. Derrell Syria visited Gummersound and laid down guitar throughout the song’s three suites. Ormson, in his words, bared his soul to emerge as a lightning bolt from a white star.
“Lightning Bolts and Scars”
Winter weather is the northern hammer we embrace, its point a fracking spear most foul. Standing in an ice storm while the bloody maw of raw polar air tears at my face, I earn my wrinkles and empathize with the anvil. I abhor cold, so I must ask why I pine about Michigan when I am in Hawaii? I ask the question to Thorburn in correspondence, and a day later he returned a poem to me, indexing the gritty gestalt of those northern woods, lakes, and people buried in massive overcoats.
“When I Get Back,” he wrote. I added a line or two, a word or two; subtracted a few, and came up with this melody on my Taylor tuned in DADGAD. Thorburn found Mike Bjella, a professional clarinetist from Montreal who came into Gummersound and laid down a track after listening to the song just twice. Russ, Mike, Pete and my big Taylor set forth a memory, once again, of Marquette. It’s a place called ‘The Queen City’ and a trek to Marquette is a trek to and for my soul.
“The Ore boats will load up the coal /the captain digging deep in his soul. /Around and around in the snow, like a hobo AM I, no place to go/Just another town in this world, a place I go, for my soul.”
“When I Get Back to Marquette”
BoomdayBoomsdayABoomingDayAWhatABloomer-Bloomdandy-A-DayA– Bloomerday,BoomerANG . . . and a musical triptych to John Lennon.
Poem lyrics are all Russ Thorburn’s. Music and word arrangement Greg Ormson.
I massaged the words in Thorburn’s poem and arranged them for chant and song into this music triptych to Lennon: It’s John Lennon hating the sea and bloodying his hands by rowing; John singing in Thorburn’s back yard or at the Marquette, Inn, and it’s John and Mai sitting on the beach together. She wants to stay in the California sand, he wants to go back to New York. To the Dakota. She was right, they should have stayed in the sand.
These songs, along with Thorburn’s one-act play, “An Extra Bowl of Chili,” highlight Thorburn’s brilliant work turned to a deliciously Joycian, blooming/booming sound.
“Sound breathed out from his lungs, his boyhood as Winston, that boy Mimi looked after with her scalpel voice. His fingers grasped mine now. Dorinish waited for Lennon in the mizzle, cold, unforgettable waves washing over the dock where he had moored his rowboat.” from Thorburn.
“Photographs Are All We Have”
Thorburn: The words for “Silver Beatle” came from a series of poems written with John Lennon in mind—and working with Greg I saw the potential for a song. We all want John Lennon to visit us in our backyard these days. We want him to sing and tell us in his usual sardonic voice that we just might make it through the night and through the pandemic.
According to the story, it was Thorburn in 1970, after high school, hitchhiking out to Berkeley. Not a damn dime in is pocket, I’m sure. He says it was at Winterland in October when it was announced during Quicksilver Messenger Service’s set that Janis Joplin had died in Hollywood. That night was October 4.
Thorburn writes: I had spent my last three dollars and ten cents for that concert (I take it back, Thorburn had three bucks), which opened with Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead followed. Returning to the Detroit area I formed a garage band, worked odd jobs, and barely escaped the draft. There was a lot of death going on in Viet Nam. Here, there was a lot of love going on, and the Beatles, with John on guitar and Paul screaming, caught the drift, “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road.”
“Silver Beatle Come Back”
Thorburn: There is nostalgia, but it is the kind that, instead of sadness at the passage of time, brings forth wonderment at what has been possible to experience. It may be hard to see or IMAGINE, but John was tender in some ways, as when he sang of his son Sean. John missed him when out on the sea rowing, his nose down rowing in the wind. And when it came time to row back one last time to Dornish, he missed Sean deeply, and when bloody blisters formed on his hands, he just said fuck it. Sell the place, Sean won’t even come here.
“John Lennon Rows to Dornish”
And have you seen the AppleTV hit series, Severance? It’s wholly maddening, moving along at a snail’s pace, all formulaic and shit, driving me crazy. And I keep watching because I think something big will happen, but dammit, when? Is there a point or not? Is the Mescalero Territory track with Ormson banging on his sitar anything that will arrange any maps in anyone’s head or do anything at all? It is that way with sitar, just sitar. Here, no tanpura, no tabla, no teentaal rag, just steel bending and waiting for a poem to conclude.
It is that way with Severance, it is that way in Mescalero Territory, it is that way with Thorburn and his blue-insistent voice that seems like an ongoing track in Severance. It’s whitewashed, and long hallways, and brain surgery, and nobody is anyone who they seem to be, and there may be a crooked Sheriff, and there is the fact that everything seems wired and weird.
Yet oddly, as Severance ends with a marching band, it comes as a sublime relief … So why do I want more ?
! More !
Mescalo Territory!
More Severance!
More reading about rats and barns and Billy the Kid and Paulita Maxwell’s body!
More sitar!
And yet, still, again, and again, Thorburn keeps trotting out his story until the rats eating the grain in the barn turn to bloody Billy the Kid. We hear Thorburn’s voice, leading the rats up “the Kid’s” sleeves, accompanying gun fights, and torturing our imaginations with insinuations of Paulita. It has to be sitar to accompany such un-severanced stuff as this.
Mescalero Territory reminds me of my year as a Pastoral Intern at a Black Lutheran Church in Milwaukee. That was a bit of severance on Sunday mornings in dark pews. There were no long-severed hallways in which to hide, and the full-throated gritty lifting of every voice filled all space. It was the weight of the world in heavy notes emanating from the deep interstices of Black Lutherans that slayed me. Alcohol on the breath, pain in the soul; volcanoes and oceans from the eyes that coaxed out my voice with an en-spiritism I could not ignore.
I added my voice, a hummingbird in a choir of bears. In tune and rhythm rising deep from the drums of Africa, marking earthly steps in the consistency of Sunday morning God-time, we sang, “Sing our song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, sing our song full of the hope that the present has brought us.” These years later, what I’d give to sing just one song in hope-full and hope-filled voice with Rhiannon Giddens.
I heard her sing and play in Marquette, Michigan once. I sat on the ground right, there, ten, feet,away, watching and listening. My mouth agape, and ears drunk with the power blasting from her body, her banjo, her SOUL as the Carolina Chocolate Drops laid it on me. I didn’t know pain like the pain she was singin’ I didn’t know hope born of a dark and bitter past; but I was learning, and the music in those stories leveled me like an agate beat up in a rock tumbler.
A whole new stratosphere powers Rhiannon in her new album. What Did The Blackbird Say to the Crow. Yes, it sounds weird, but the birds talk & they always tell the truth. Rhiannon was listening, and they told her something important: that it’s an unforgivable sin to waste water in the desert and no ethical code can justify it.
But the crow also said all birds are welcome to lift their voices; Robinson and Giddens say it too in feather-rich song titles: “Marching Jailbird,” “Duck’s Eyeball,” “Rain Crow,” and “Fly Away My Pretty Little Miss.” My hummingbird was, and is, welcome in the cloud, where blackbirds and crows talk back and forth in rhythm and rhyme.
I joined my brothers and sisters in that Milwaukee church, adding my wing to the flock, singing James Weldon Johnson’s words. “We will march on till victory is won.” The song and singers were bathed in the blues, and I believed it. This combination that scares Anglos: the blues, plus the red wine – blood of Jesus in the body, plus banjo, multiplied by melodies of liberation and triumph. I am not afraid, and I want to sing in that choir, to stand and unfold myself in a weathered accounting framed in grace.
You may ask, as I do, how the hell did Thorburn come up with something like Mescalero Territory, after all, what does Michigan – where the poet has lived all his life – have to do with the Land of Enchantment’s big patchy patch of prickly land. Mescalero territory, humph. I’ll ask, but I’ll also ask what do banjos have to do with birds and melodies of enchantment.
“Mescalero Territory”
Thorburn: This song is art and love, a clarinet melody from a friend; Greg’s vocals ride above these moonstruck notes tinged with nostalgia, haunted by regrets. His Taylor guitar booms as the words I wrote for an old flame keep pace with the big chords and star-saturated runs of the clarinet. We kissed in that borrowed car, our nights sliding under the tires like a Chagall, the violin tuned to a blue we painted inside out.
Then the goat floating from under our bed, its horns pricking a shined-up moon, in that lower harbor room. Driving out of town in a borrowed car, there were always ghosts crossing the road, like a Marc Chagall drawing of a peasant couple walking hand in hand, or a farmhouse with glowing windows. She said to keep to the left as if the white line were a child. Mike Bjella, clarinet.
“I Was Afraid To Lose Her Face”
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