Richmond, Virginia is home to a slew of diverse and successful bands: Gwar, Avail, Lamb of God, The Ululating Mummies, Bio Ritmo, Alter Natives, Afro-Zen Allstars, Carbon Leaf, Alabama Thunderpussy, The Good Guys, Orthotonics, Always August, Paul Watson, James Saxmo Gates, Eighth Blackbird, Rattlemouth, Hotel X, No B.S. Brass Band, Awareness Art Ensemble…
My husband has played, and still plays bass in a number of local bands ranging from reggae to rock and roll, and world music influenced by the African grooves of Fela Kuti and the Éthiopiques to name a few. I’ve come to know many of the artists, some of whom are friends, or casual acquaintances that I speak with at the shows.
I started this interview series because of how intrigued I was with the artists. I wanted to learn more about their backgrounds and influences. It’s been a fascinating journey.
Spotlight: Barry Bless.
I have mostly known Barry Bless as an attendee and fan of his musical endeavors: The Professor and the Madwoman, Gourd Orchestra, The Happy Lucky Combo, The Ululating Mummies, and The Breakfast Cabaret.
Barry emanates an aura that implies there’s a depth to this person that I bet is fascinating.
A quote from our conversations that is particularly relevant: “There’s something called the oral tradition. Engaging in conversation is a way to strengthen this oral tradition. It’s an important part of anyone’s social life, and anyone’s intellectual life. Reading is fine, but, for me, if you can’t put it into dialogue, or a conversation with other people, it’s not as rich, it’s not as deep, it’s not as meaningful. It’s not as usable. It’s not as musical.”
Barry has mastered the oral tradition.
To watch Barry Bless play the accordion is a study in the art of blissful and meditative music making.
You can see him around town performing from his Wandering Cabaret.
Barry and I sat in the colorful, whimsical house where he has lived since 1972. His mother bought the house with the intention of making it a group home for elderly people. She asked Barry if he and artist friends would like to move in until that point. She died before realizing her dream. Barry, 66, says it might yet happen.
Barry has shared the home with over one hundred and twenty people throughout the years, including his wife and his four daughters.
Our interview:
Bless: My parents were wonderful people. They lost two children before me to cystic fibrosis. I was an only child. I was coddled, but I was given a long leash.
Barry laughs at this memory: I was fifteen years old. I asked my mother if I could hitchhike from Richmond to Florida to attend a rock festival. Mom told me she would discuss it with my father. She gave me permission to leave that night if I cleaned my room. My mother gave me a Mylar blanket, invented by NASA, to keep me warm. My father gave me a box of chia seeds, which he said sustained Indians on long trips. In a way those gifts characterized their personalities.
My father, Wally Bless opened Main Street Grill in Shockoe Bottom in 1968.
KV: Did your father cook?
Bless: Oh yeah. When I was a kid he was the parent that loved to cook the most. He was always into food. When he was a child he got sick a lot. When he was coming into the world from the farm there was a huge health food movement. Kellogg’s and Post were part of that health food movement during the turn of the century. Part of it was the historical period when people were being urbanized and when society was being industrialized. Health food was a response to that. Part of it was the nostalgia for farm life. People of my father’s generation—many of them grew up on a farm. There was a massive influx of people that became urbanized.
One thing the military found out when they started to draft people was that malnutrition was rampant all over the United States. That was part of the impetus for starting the school lunch programs. They wanted to keep young people healthy in case of war because they discovered the health of the nation was not great. In rural areas you imagine that they were healthier but they weren’t getting the broad spectrum of nutrients that people in urban areas were getting. They would be existing on a whole lot of cabbage or a whole lot of this—but they didn’t have a lot of access because of poverty.
My dad was born in a log cabin in a German-speaking town in Appalachia, in Kentucky. That’s where he grew up. He left the countryside at age fifteen and went into the city and discovered this whole health food movement. He had been sick a lot as a child. He attributes it to eating too much pork. I’m not sure what the scientific reasons were but he had pneumonia a lot as a child. He started to pay a lot of attention to his diet.
My great-great grandfather left Germany to avoid conscription into the military. They moved into a community that was Anglo Saxon. My father’s ancestors were farmers. They came into this really fertile land in Kentucky. They started to bring all these Germans over to this fertile land.”
I have a short article about the concerns the Anglo community had about the influx of German radicals and anarchists. The article is written to put the Anglos at ease. It said these are good, hard-working Germans. I joke that my family is proof that radicals and anarchists did come over.
A big part of my father’s identity was being a part of the land. Being a part of the farm. Being a farmer. You asked me if my father was a renaissance man. All farmers are renaissance men. He had to learn carpentry and animal husbandry. He had to learn about the soil and timbering and how to make lumber. He learned it from his family. I’ve seen the barn that my great-great grandfather built.
As my father moved into industrialized and urbanized society he felt a connection to farm life through healthy food. Whenever we would travel we always went to farmer’s markets. He bought jams. Things that people made on a farm. He felt a connection that these things had been made at a specific place with a specific set of hands. He had an affinity for that and learned to cook. My mother on the other hand came from an upper middle class German family. She was trained to play the piano. She was trained to have an education and dress well. She was not trained to cook because hopefully they would hire a cook. My father always cooked breakfast. My mother was not a great cook but she always managed to get supper on the table.
KV: How did your parents meet?
They met at a Lutheran church in Cincinnati. Dad moved to Cincinnati from Kentucky. Mom moved there from New York. It was largely a German town. When I was growing up I was always reminded that the United States almost became a German-speaking country. There was a vote about what would be the national language because there were so many Germans. I haven’t researched it but that’s the story.
I went through twelve grades and never read Goethe. Goethe is like Shakespeare. He was so seminal—so much was taken from him. If you study any German scholar—Nietzsche, Marx—they’ve all been heavily influenced by Goethe. So my father was like, ‘My son is growing up and has never read Goethe.’
My dad liked to cook. His food could be bland and bitter for food that’s supposed to be good for you. It was always interesting. He was always attentive to it. A lot of grains.
That’s one of the ironies of the health food movement. Kellogg’s and Post were both grain oriented, unlike the Paleolithic diet. The agricultural revolution radically changed the kind of foods we were evolved to process. We evolved as hunters and gatherers. We were eating meat and plants, and then suddenly massive amounts of grains were introduced.
KV: It would be interesting to see if disease took off at that point.
Bless: Yeah, and what kinds of diseases. One thing we know is that it was necessary for the development of civilization, because it was concentrated calories. You could mass-produce and concentrate calories for a city. If you’re a hunter and gatherer, you’re spending a lot of time hunting and gathering.
The development of the whole agricultural revolution is an important part of human evolution. When people in the early 20th century were saying, we’ve got to get back to nature, the nature they’re getting back to isn’t nature—it’s back to the farm and the farm was hit heavily by the agricultural diet, which was heavily branded.
So my dad, he tried to do a lot of vegetables and fruits, but I just remember a lot of various forms of whole grains. He started to get into vitamins, too.
He was a life insurance salesman. It was an interesting culture. How do we win friends and Influence enemies? There was this whole sales culture.
My dad joined the Toastmasters. It’s a speaking club. A lot of salesmen and business people and political leaders joined Toastmasters and they learned how to give speeches. When I was growing up, he started the junior Toastmasters club gavel club. So I was brought up doing public speaking, and debating and thinking on your feet and being put in a really awkward situation.
I remember when my dad died, and people just started pouring over the house. One person remarked that he was able to take those skills, and then transfer them to the civil rights movement, and move them further. So he was able to take the skills that people were learning in sales and then use them to help the movement.
Insurance became more and more a part of big business finance. When I was growing up, he explained how insurance grew out of the Lutheran brotherhood, which was probably other denominations within the Lutheran Church, the congregation would pool their money. Whenever anyone was in need, they would take from that pool and help that person. Basically, what he was saying is that insurance is socialism. So he went through with that idea that he was helping people. And by selling insurance, it was part of this process of pooling common wealth.
At some point he realized that’s not what the insurance company had become. The bottom line had become profit. And he found himself in a business that didn’t jive with his values. And at this point, so we’re talking about ‘68 or ‘69, he bought a restaurant. But he knew he wanted to get out of the insurance business. My family, we started looking at different things. I remember we got together and we visited a group house, where it was like a halfway house. You didn’t adopt kids, but you took them in and took care of the family.
We went to Baskin Robbins and explored opening one up. Of course, my mom was in the shade—my mom was an amazing woman. It’s easy to talk about my dad because he was more colorful and had a bigger public profile but my mom made things happen.
KV: Did your mother work?
She was a church secretary. For many years, she worked for Presbyterian churches when I was growing up, then she worked for the Unitarian Church.
During the late sixties I came home from the Lutheran church. I was just starting to get confirmed. The minister came into our first confirmation class. He said, ‘You’re going to hear a lot of things in the world, and I want you to know that what I’m going to tell you and what you can learn here is the truth. It’s the absolute truth.’ Which I guess is some people’s definition of faith.
So, I went home. I was deeply offended partly because I knew the story of Martin Luther. He wasn’t going to accept the dogma of the Catholic Church. That was part of the story. Part of the narrative I grew up with. So how could this guy come in and say this was the absolute truth. Of course, Martin Luther—the history is a little more complicated than that. At that point my mom and I left the church.
After my grandmother died—she lived with us for six years of my life—she was religious to the point of being a fundamentalist. After she suddenly died, my mom went a little nuts. And suddenly, we had to pray at dinner every night. My mom had this little box to take a prayer. It all seemed so artificial.
Around that time, I started having doubts about the existence of God. I’d do this exercise where I had to try to convince myself that there’s a God. How could that truth be out there? And, for a fleeting second, I’d believe in God, and then it would go away.
I said, ‘Mom, I’m not sure I believe in God.’ She swiveled around in her chair, and she said, ‘Barry, I don’t know if I believe either.’ And that was just the way it was. And then she went on to become a pretty radical atheist.
KV: How old were you when you told your mother you didn’t believe in God?
Bless: Somewhere around nine, ten or eleven.
KV: That’s progressive for that age.
Bless: Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I was tortured. My dad stayed in the church. He loved arguing and talking to people. And when people would ask do you believe in God, he said, ‘I don’t have to, it’s all around me.’
So his was just kind of an existential life, I am what I am, that’s what I am. And what is, is what it is. So he didn’t feel a need to know. He just wanted to swim around in the pool of resistance.
And, for my mom, partly because I think, I don’t know if she would have articulated it this way, but it was part of a rebellion against patriarchy. To rebel against this patriarchy. So her atheism packed a punch. She was pissed off.
She started a group called the Atheist Corner at the Unitarian Church. I remember when they started, they invited one of the major ministers in town from a Baptist Church. He came to talk to the group. There were questions like was God a man or a woman and the minister said definitely God is a man. Then a question, Is God white? One of the people in the group said, ‘Well, we’re mostly agnostic here. Thanks for being open minded.’ My mom stood up and she said, ‘I’m no agnostic. When I listen to you talking about the Bible, I may as well be listening to some Martian coming down here and talking about some fantasy. What you’re saying makes absolutely no sense.’ She had edge to her.
I started hanging out at the Jewish Center. All of my friends were Jewish. I had an affinity, or my family had an affinity for Jews, for whatever reason. I think retrospectively, one of the reasons is, many of them are German, or Central European. There’s a cultural difference between Anglos and central Europeans and Germans. Part of it was that the Jews that I knew in town were more similar to Germans and Central Europeans than the Anglos. At some point, I made a list. What was it that I was attracted to in Jewish culture and, the list that was developed is world view, a sense of social justice, intellectual rigor, and a sense of humor.
As I mature, I’ve realized that it’s not those things I knew then when I made the list of those things that are unique to Jews. They’re stronger among people that have suffered, I think.
KV: My sister converted to Judaism. She likes that there is no original sin.
Bless: Have you ever read Freud’s take on that? One of the roots of anti-semitism is that the Jews can live with their own sin. Christians have to constantly be absolved, like children. So Jews remind Christians that everything is not black and white. And they are sinners. I mean, a Christian site will say, I’m a sinner. Lord, forgive me. Absolve me. Thank you. A Jewish site will say I’m a sinner. I have sinned. There’s no absolution. That’s what frightens Christians about Jews—that there is no absolution.
My social life from ages twelve to fourteen was immersed in the Jewish community. I wrote a song for the cantor of Temple Beth El about three years ago. It’s written in Eastern Turkish and oriental modes.
I’d go to the temple and listen to the cantor chant. And he’s chanting in Middle Eastern modes. I mean, they’re not Arabic, but they’re a similar idea. In klezmer, there are Arabic modes. To the untrained ear they just sound like a mishmash of the Eastern modes.
The cantor was as wide as he was tall. And he would start chanting. And I’d get chills up and down. That had a big influence on my music. I kept looking for and finding that same soulfulness in black music and Arabic music. I kept seeking it out, like, what kind of music has that level of depth?
KV: Name some of the music.
Greek music, the blues. Jazz, but, you know, starting in the late fifties and sixties, with the Birth of the Cool with Miles Davis, but also when they started to play modal music, which is music where the emphasis is not just on all these chord changes. Bebop was virtuosic. I love bebop. It was doing all these gymnastics with all these chord changes. And then suddenly, then you say, well, maybe we can reach deeper levels of feeling. So, you get Kind of Blue and Coltrane’s movement into modal music.
KV: Do you like free jazz?
Bless: Yeah. It’s not all that I like, but I listen to free jazz. Cecil Taylor. Sun Ra.
KV: Ornette?
Bless: Ornette. I don’t think Ornette is free jazz, but I guess it’s kind of free.
KV: Do you like classical music?
I love classical. Baroque. It would be tough but if I had one thing to listen to on a desert island it would be Bach.
KV: How did your father come to open Main Street Grill?
Bless: My mom was looking for things maybe my dad could do. I remember we went down to Shockoe Bottom. We’re talking 1968 or 1969. My dad’s really involved in the black liberation movement, slash civil rights movement.
KV: How big was that movement in Richmond?
Bless: Huge. The main organization my father was involved with was The Richmond Council on Human Relations. He was very active. There were lots of organizations. It was the sixties. Every black church was the center for political activity. Richmond, like everywhere in the United States, had a huge civil rights movement.
I preferred the black liberation movement because civil rights focuses on the rights of an individual to get a job, go wherever they want, do whatever they want. It protects the rights of this individual.
Black liberation, just like we’re having a discussion about reparations, looks at things more systemically and historically. So what happened to black people in the country didn’t happen to an amalgam of millions of individuals, it happened to a whole group of people. That’s why I prefer to call it black liberation because it’s easy to reduce the complexities of what happens in a society to individual rights. To me, it’s more than that.
Back to the restaurant. My parents and I go to Shockoe Bottom. A lot of people are leaving the city. It’s the flight of the whites. My family said, no, we’re gonna move more deeply into this. Shockoe Bottom was perfect. We went there one evening to check out the working class restaurant that was owned and run by white people. Across the street you had the railroad where a lot of indigent people were coming through. You had the farmer’s market. A lot of working class poor, mostly black. Six nip joints on that block. A Muslim butcher. Jewish-owned pawn shop.
We go into the restaurant. It’s pretty bleak. This waitress comes up. She finds out we’re interested in buying it. She comes over and whispers that there’s too many N-words around here. We looked at each other and said, ‘Sold.’ Dad set up shop.
KV: Did your father create the menu?
Bless: We inherited the menu. It had an old steam table for lunch. We kept all of the stuff. A lot of it was cool. Indigenous, meaning old Southern fare. Smoked sausage, salt herring, bologna burgers.
My dad introduced healthy food. He would talk to people about healthy food. Part of the mission he was on was to get the working class to eat healthy. For instance, he would grind his own grits and serve fresh-ground grits. We had a soda machine but it was also a beer joint. I could go on and on about what the restaurant offered me in terms of a cultural education. It was a black working-class restaurant during the morning and afternoon. Eventually, my friend Pippin and I opened it in the evenings. Part of the problem was no one wanted to go to that part of town after dark.
Next door was a gambling joint and a nip joint. The elderly white man that owned it was found bludgeoned to death. It was probably organized crime. A great big black man, over six feet tall, took it over and ran it. This man, who we were friends with, comes in the restaurant and stands in the door. He has a sawed-off shotgun. He looked at everybody and he said, ‘No, not here’ and he walked out of the door. That’s what we were up against at night in terms of getting people to come to Shockoe Bottom.
There was a lot of political activity at Main Street Grill. My father described it as a forum where anyone could come and talk about anything. I know the story second hand, but some of my friends were standing in front of the Main Street Grill, and students from the West End would come to Shockoe Bottom just because they were fascinated. My friend was a big, burly, Russian looking guy. He was of Russian descent. The students were saying, ‘We hear this place is so radical, they don’t even let democrats in here.’ My friend had been doing these sculptures made of apples, and then you let them shrivel up. They looked like shrunken heads. He got real serious and said, ‘This is the last Democrat that tried to step foot in Main Street Grill.’
Barry laughs: It wasn’t like that. It was always very open. I remember a black man saying, ‘Barry, Barry, come over here. Meet so and so.’ He’s a black Republican. Anybody was invited in. What I mean by anybody, is that the radical self was too. It was always loud. My dad, by his very nature, was a socialist.
When my dad retired, he traveled to the Soviet Union and to China. That’s a whole other thing is that the Newest China People’s Friendship Association—my dad started the chapter here in Richmond. When there was a big push to normalize relations with China, my dad was one of the first people to go to China after it opened up. That was in the eighties. He was very active.
Going back, buses would leave from Main Street Grill and go to marches. One of the earliest was the Poor People’s March. Martin Luther King was organizing it right before he was assassinated. That’s always been conjecture. He was assassinated in Memphis. There was a labor dispute. Martin Luther King was openly espousing socialist ideals. He was openly trying to organize poor black and white people across racial lines around issues of poverty. And then he gets shot.
The Poor People’s March in 1968 was addressing poverty. I don’t remember any speeches. I remember experiencing the whole event. Resurrection City was tents and shacks on the mall until the United States addressed the issue of poverty. The way I remember it, and I’d have to go back and check my history, is that King was assassinated before the march.
KV: What was the national reaction to King’s assassination. Was there an overall sense of utter tragedy?
Bless tears up: Yeah.
KV: Was there a gathering in DC after King’s assassination?
Bless: The night he was assassinated my father and I went to the Byrd Park spring to get spring water. The town was completely silent. My father was really connected with the community in Richmond. Everyone was talking about what’s going to happen in other cities. Why did we go get spring water that night? I think my dad wanted to get out into the city, and just feel the city that night. We were down by the spring. I think a lot of people stayed home because they were afraid. The city was unusually quiet. We were wondering if it was the calm before the storm. Instead of running errands around the city, the city as a whole was experiencing this momentous, historic event. But, there were no riots.
When I was fourteen, I’d get up every morning and go to the prison and demonstrate for the prison strike. Later, I got to meet a prisoner and he told me he wanted to thank me for marching to support the prisoners. I say that just as another way to emphasize how deeply I was involved.
I grew up thinking there’s going to be truly radical change. Even under Obama, wealth disparity increased. Income and wealth. The wealthy have steadily become more powerful over the past thirty years. The very nature of capitalism is to concentrate wealth. Its very nature is that it cannot survive without profit.
When King was killed, I lost a lot of hope. King was an important leader. He wasn’t just fighting for civil rights. He started articulating against capitalism. He was evolving into a leader that was a threat to the system. Then Reagan got elected and my hope diminished more.
The problem with capitalism is that it’s unsustainable.
I feel connected to the revolution of Cuba, and the Soviet Union, and Libya. I feel connected to what’s happening in Venezuela. People say socialism failed. Capitalism is global, so you cannot have one country say we’re going to be socialists. What happens is, the capitalists come in and do everything they can to make that not work.
I’m a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. We, as an organization, endorsed Bernie about six months ago. I don’t want to get involved in a presidential campaign. It’s about building a movement. I’m debating about whether to get involved.
Most people that I know that are radical got to that point from their life experiences and getting deeply involved in some issue. For politics to become unrelated to collective activity is toxic.
The avant-garde jazz artist, Cecil Taylor, played at the Smithsonian Institute in 1973. They had a lecture demonstration and then a concert in the evening. We talked to Pippin, the drummer for the Ululating Mummies.
Pippin was a young drummer. Andrew Cyrille was Pippin’s favorite drummer and one of the most respected drummers on the scene at the time. Pippin had the nerve to ask Andrew Cyrille for a lesson. Andrew Cyrille told Pippin to play for him. Pippin was young and playing drums for his idol.
Cecil Taylor did most of the talking at the lecture. All he wanted to talk about was culture, politics, the black liberation movement, and all these things that had meaning for him. And people were getting antsy. Because they’re expecting an entertainer to speak about his songs. And, at one point, somebody raised their hand and they were saying why don’t you play us a tune? Or why don’t you talk about music? He got pissed, and said what I’m talking about influences my music.
It made me think—here we are talking about politics, you know? It wouldn’t make much sense if I spoke Chinese while you were speaking English, right? And it’s similar, this is not an exact analogy, but it’s similar with music. There’s a lot of connection to language in there and we’re not talking about a separate world. But again, just in conversation, just us talking about politics is much like music. If I was talking to you about music, it would be once removed, if that makes any sense at all. The two of us having a dialogue is a lot like music.
KV: Is it like show don’t tell?
Bless: Yes. We have common interests in what’s going on in the world today. So we’re sitting here conversing. That’s a lot like music.
KV: You are such an intellect. Did you like school?
Bless: I took off Monday and Fridays for long weekends. And as needed, my parents would write a note. I loved to go to school just to argue and discuss things. Busing had just happened in tenth or eleventh grade. Suddenly, all these black kids were coming into school and I was making friends with a whole new group of people. We had what we called a human relations club, where we got together and discussed issues of race. And that was an exciting time. Suddenly, we had black teachers when we didn’t have black teachers before.
KV: How did people responded to that?
Bless: TJ was the premier public high school for years and years. An upper middle class family would say, should we send our kids to private school or to TJ, they’re both really good schools. College brown kids went to TJ. Suddenly the school transformed. Kids from public housing were attending the school. My counselor told me, because we had a close relationship, that any chance the principal had to expel a kid from public housing, he would do it just to get rid of the kid. My counselor was pissed.
There was one incident in eleventh grade with a history teacher. She taught American history. She was from a blue blood family in Canada. She’d been the wife of a governor or attorney general. One story she often told was about spending an hour with the queen back in the fifties, or something. But, she was racist. I remember she would call the Native Americans savages. At one point, there was a picture of a man in a book and she said that is the ugliest white man I’ve ever seen.
I would challenge her. The next year, senior year, I’m in a sociology class, and she walked into the class. She was sitting in the class, and she caught my eye. She stopped in front of the class. She looked at the sociology teacher, and she said, watch out for him. So that’s why I went to school, just to argue.
Another conversation that happened back then was with a black sociology teacher. We had these free for all conversations about race and class. At one point, I talked about cultural differences between my black friends and my white friends. The teacher gets up. He says, Oh, Barry thinks his black friends listen to James Brown, and all his white friends are listening to Bach. And, then my black friends came in to defend me.
There was this desert time where people didn’t talk about race or class. They didn’t talk about radical social change. There was a long period of that. I’m glad we’re back to discussing it.
The prize for people like me is to build a coalition between working class people of color and working class whites. I’ve seen the Democratic Party alienate working class white folks, especially worldwide. I was on a so-called progressive democratic site the other day, and they were making fun of the way people spell. Basically, it’s this whole thing that these Trump supporters are ignorant, they’re losing their teeth, they, you know, it’s all the stereotypes about country folks, rednecks, hillbillies.
My daughters all have an interest in politics, some more than others. Isadora has the most interesting politics. Isadora and her twin sister, Odessa went to London to study ballet. My wife Jennifer went with them. I decided I couldn’t afford to go. They said, ‘What can we bring you back?’ I said, ‘I want you to go on the Marx tour.’ Because Marx did most of his writing in London and his grave is in London. They said okay.
They did the tour, and it really stuck with them. My wife, who is a liberal democrat, lit a candle and placed it on his grave. She’s not as radical as I am, but she got a feel for the breadth of the movement. The movement is bigger than Marx. He was what I would call a concentrated intellect. Most concentrated intellects get co-opted and bought off by wealth. Marx was concentrated in a life that said, No, I’m not going to do that. The fact that I’ve read the Bible many times and read Shakespeare many times and Goethe in eight different languages – I’m not going to be bought off. I’m going to use this intellect as a gift to help the working class. And by the working class, I mean, the class that’s working for the betterment of all humanity. That’s how, for me, Marx and now Marxism is just a school of thought with lots of branches and lots of argumentz. But I find when people hear Marx, they think of a very strict doctrine. I find more diversity in people who are familiar with Marx than I do with people who haven’t been introduced to Marx. He’s kind of a wild thing.
Marx wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln letting him know that the London organization in which he was an officer, was in support of the Civil War, and explaining the reasons why they were supportive. He saw enslaved Africans and black Americans as being in the vanguard of the world revolution. He studied what was going on in China and India. Engels – they were a cotton family – they owned cotton mills. They were German, but the big cotton industry was in England. Engles, through his father’s business, had access to all this information about trade and the cotton industry. They were called the blue books, which are these accounting books. The cotton industry was global. Engles was brilliant, a hard worker, and a great intellect. Engles and Marx created a partnership. Engles was constantly giving Marx information about the cotton industry and the world economy. Marx was writing about what he saw as the global economy at the time.
Marx is really a member of the movement. The British author Christopher Hitchens is Marxist in a lot of his views. A lot of us fell out with Hitchens because he supported the Iraq war. He’s a great intellect. One of Hitchens’ descriptions of Marx is that he was a necessary man. In the later part of his life, Hitchens would call it racist. He adopted the view that if you’re Islamic, you’re a religious fundamentalist. If you’re from an Islamic country and embrace Islam, you’re a religious fundamentalist. We Westerners need to enlighten you. Maybe the Iraq war will help wake you up.
Hitchens was also part of the new atheists which I’m not a fan of. I’m an atheist, but I’m not a fan of the new atheists. It’s what I call reductionist thinking.
KV: Do you read a lot?
Bless: My wife calls me a pseudo-intellectual. I’m not a pseudo-intellectual. I’m just semi-intelligent. I have this commitment, or this desire, to engage in intellectual activity. A friend of mine went away to college. I didn’t go to college. He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, I’m reading Plato right now. He said, ‘Oh, you probably shouldn’t do that without a professor. You might misunderstand Plato. I never felt prey to that logic.”
I see so many people get frightened out of it, because they’re afraid they’re going to make mistakes. They’re afraid they’re going to be judged. They’re afraid they don’t have enough education. I read. I’m a slow reader. My dad said to me, Barry, two of the greatest men in the world never wrote anything down. Those men are Jesus and Socrates.
I later met my father’s high school teacher. She was in her nineties. She looked at me, and she said, Barry, you know how you learn things? You learn things like you and me right now, having this conversation. That’s what I was taught all my life. There’s something called the old tradition. Engaging in conversation is a way to strengthen this oral tradition. That it’s an important part of anyone’s social life, and anyone’s intellectual life. Reading is fine, but if you can’t put it into a dialogue, or a conversation with other people, it’s not as rich, it’s not as deep, it’s not as meaningful. It’s not as usable.
Reading, just like music, is a lower form of conversation. Like recorded music is a lower form of live music. I try to carry on the oral tradition musically as well. If you go to Crossroads Coffee shop there’s a sign that says, Keeping Their Own Tradition Alive through Social Intercourse. I wrote that.
When the owner first opened that shop I said I’ve got your byline. This has got to be it. The owner painted the byline on the building in the fan district. A guy from the City comes in, and he says, ‘some of us are concerned about what you’ve written on the building.’ The owner says, ‘I don’t know where your mind is, but among my friends, social intercourse is just socializing.’ So the guy backed off.
KV: How did you get interested in playing accordion?
Bless: I was in my thirties. I had been playing piano. I backed off from playing music publicly. There was a band – we all lived in this house together. We had a steady gig at JW Rails, a bar that was located in the fan. When that band broke up, it was around the same time that the Richmond Artists Workshop started. I became more interested, as this conversation has demonstrated, in politics. I got really involved in political issues. I had a grand piano here, and I continued to bang away on the piano. Right, and I’ve always just played. It’s always been a part of my life.
I started to get interested and play with other people again. I didn’t leave the jazz world behind, but I became more interested in world music. I heard more and more recordings of world music and I thought it was really interesting. The accordion is all over the world. The reason is because sailors and missionaries took it with them whenever a country was colonized. Then you had this phenomena where the colonizers brought this instrument, and then the indigenous people picked up the instrument and used it to make their own music. There is all this really interesting music all over the world where people approached the accordion in different ways. Then you had all the different kinds of accordions. For instance, the bandoneon was from Germany to Argentina, and in the rest of Germany and the rest of Europe, people stopped playing the bandoneon. It was like the Galapagos Islands, right? This accordion had made it to Argentina, and it never changed. Tango was written and all of the music was done on the bandoneon, whereas the Germans think it’s really awkward. They want to get rid of it and make other kinds of accordions. I saw a button accordion at a thrift store button. Fifty bucks. I still have it. I just started playing it. Then I got together with my friend and sax player, Danny Finney in his kitchen.
A lot of people moved into Oregon Hill in the seventies. There was a migration of artists from Northern Virginia to Richmond because rent was cheap. I moved to Oregon Hill in seventy-two. My house cost thirty-five dollars a month. Then a health food coop started there.
A lot of people living in Oregon Hill were interested in politics. My dad’s restaurant was another place where people could discuss politics. The people moving to Oregon Hill were interested in various forms of anarchism and decentralized communities. A lot of cultural and political activity was going on in Oregon Hill. Largely informed by low rent. People were not pursuing careers that make money. They were pursuing art and political activism in an affordable way.
I started playing with Danny. We worked through songs. Danny said he was going to organize a benefit for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua for medical supplies. There was a war and the United States was trying to overthrow the Sandinistas. We did a fundraiser with a bunch of different people. We put together a band with John Hunter, Coby Batty and Danny and myself. We did a few songs for that. We did another concert after that. We were so well received. We said, well, let’s just keep on with this Ululating Mummies thing.
KV: How did the Ululating Mummies name come to be?
Bless: I had an album. I still have it. It has some important music on it. It’s from Panama. Panama, I believe it had been a British colony. And, just like the accordion and other things, the British had come there. So they had the tradition of mummery, which is a Christmas tradition in England where they’re called mummers.
You have the mummers parade now in Philadelphia. There’s this tradition of mummering which is performing on the street, this kind of multimedia thing where you have costumes and theater and music all together. Street performers. I wanted the Mummies to be like that. Danny does costuming and visual art and sculptures. I liked the whole idea of having a group that was doing performance art, doing costumes, doing music all in one room and with some political message Anyway, back to the album. Instead of declaring that they are the mummers, they declared we are the mummies. We are the mummies, and we’ve come here to entertain. I thought, yes. yes. The mummies. That’s right. But, it’s got to be the screaming mummies, or the wailing mummies. There’s got to be some kind of sound.
I was listening to the radio. My Word. Do you remember My Word? It was these mostly English dudes that are doing word plays and definitions. You’re given a word, and one person has the real meaning and the others have fake meanings, and you have to guess which one is real. The word was ululating. To howl or wail.
KV: You mentioned that the cold war influenced your music?
Bless: Odessa and I were just laughing about it last night. Odessa told her teacher at school, ‘my dad’s a communist.’ Which for the most part is true. But see, I grew up in a time that if people think you’re a communist you may as well be a child molester. Your career and credibility is gone. You’re foaming at the mouth -threatened. And so I said, ‘Whoa, you’re telling people at your school that I’m a communist? Why don’t you say I’m a socialist?’ She said, ‘Dad, you’re a communist.’ I said, ‘Okay. We’ll go with that.’ Isadora, who shares my politics, had friends come up to her and say, I’m ready to have to talk. She said, ‘What talk is that?’
‘The communist talk.’ Apparently, they had been talking to their parents and that led to a discussion.
Communism is internationalism. What it sees the world doing is creating a global community into the culture. Trotskyism is very radical in that regard. Trotsky left the Soviet Union in the nineteen thirties and said Russian Communism was over. Russia can be part of the larger global communist culture and economic movement. You cannot have communism in one country. So he left and said it’s over. Then, Stalin had him killed in Mexico. An agent got into his military-style fortress and killed him with an icepick.
My interest in music is the emergence or the evolution of a global culture. Also, the roots of where all the influences come from that informed this global culture. You have two things happening simultaneously. You’re really interested, just like with agriculture, you’re really interested in preserving the roots. And you’re really interested in what happens when you do hybrids and crossbreeding. Both are really important and interesting. What’s emerging is a global culture. Just like when we went to the moon, we looked back and we saw that we were out of a hole. We’re becoming a whole culture as well.
The Cold War. This is an interesting bit of information. The CIA funded Jackson Pollock shows. Because Jackson Pollock was your stereotypical rugged individual, non-conformist, male. He toured his work around Europe with other people in that School of Art, because one thing emerging in Europe was collectivist art—the dada, the surrealists—they were emphasizing the collective aspects of art. And they wanted to feature the United States as the place where these creative, almost exclusively male, rugged individualists, were transforming the world.
What was happening was all of the communist parties were being violent or just being undermined by some of the violence. As soon as the war was won the United States wanted to try to suppress and undermine all the communist parties that were all over Europe. It was particularly violent in Greece.
The Cold War had a cultural aspect as well. Both the Soviet Union and the United States were trying to win the hearts and minds.
KV: Did you experiment with drugs?
Bless: Oh yeah. My daughter is fascinated with psychedelics. She hasn’t taken them. I pulled out my bible, Alan Watt’s Joyous Cosmology. It’s all torn up.
KV: I haven’t read that book. I read Carlos Castaneda. Are you familiar with him?
Bless: I read A Separate Reality. I found it really inspiring. I’ve read critiques of it, even from the time that it’s fiction and cultural appropriation. Introducing a popular Western idea of the lone individual, whereas those Indian communities were organizing to deal with their own set of social injustices. That doesn’t even make it in the book. It’s like this lone individual can transcend his social circumstances and achieve enlightenment, whereas a more collectivist approach, especially in Indian cultures, is to collectively achieve enlightenment. Still, I got a lot out of the book. We do have separate realities.
I was reading three books simultaneously. Have you heard of Primal Scream?
KV: No, I haven’t.
Bless: It was this psychotherapy that believed that birth is a traumatic experience. And, followed by that are a number of other traumatic experiences. You can actually deepen your memory to remember those by screaming. I think for an adolescent just the idea, that if I can just scream I could loosen up and release all this tension, all this anxiety. That would be an enlightenment all in itself.
I was also reading None Dare Call It Conspiracy, which was a right wing conspiracy book that you would get at the right wing bookstore here in town. The John Birch society had bookstores back then. I understood at the time that it was right wing, but at the same time, he was talking a lot about these global organizations, which I understood were Capitalist organizations, but he thought they were communist organizations, I don’t know why. Like, the Council on Foreign Relations, and these big organizations that the ruling class use to kind of work in sync even though they’re always at each other’s throats in a competitive kind of way. They still want to keep their class because they know they have to work together. Yeah, so Separate Reality, Primal Scream, and None Dare Call It Conspiracy made for interesting reading.
KV: When did you first take psychedelics?
Bless: I was fifteen. Remember the story I told you about hitchhiking to a rock festival in Florida? I still have the sketch book and the notebook from my first LSD experience, because it was important to me. We arrived that night at the festival. It was dark. There’s people selling various kinds of LSD. Yellow Sunshine. Purple Haze. Two Dollars. Five Dollars. I forget what we took but it was quite an experience.
KV: Did you hallucinate?
Bless: I’ve never hallucinated on LSD where I confused reality with an object. Like, suddenly it’s an unreal object. You’re transcending. You’re looking at what’s there with transcendent eyes. There’s trails and various kinds of enhancements. A tree would become a woman. But it was still a tree. Like an object that had multiple layers of meaning and multiple layers of association. When I’m listening to people who are cocksure about their opinions, I think to myself, You didn’t take enough LSD?
One thing that I was able to take away from it was how subjective all of our experiences are. And again, that ties to a separate reality. The whole experience of a highly subjective experience, where reality becomes—you construct a reality in your daily life that you’re comfortable with and it becomes habitual. You perceive things habitually. Then you have this experience where suddenly all your habitual perceptions fall apart. You realize how subjective your reality is—how separate your reality can be. Beyond that, we construct back. I guess I’m an incorrigible communist. We construct realities collectively.
Spotlight: Jeff Bunn
Jeff Bunn, bass player extraordinaire, moved to Richmond, Virginia in the Nineties. He’s played with The Brides of Funkenstein and Parliament Funkadelic, Maceo Parker .
Bunn continues to serve as “on call” bassist for George Clinton as well as sharing the bass chair at the Second Baptist Church in Richmond, VA for over ten years.
Our interview:
Jeff Bunn: P-Funk is an old and fluid organization. It’s almost like a revolving door, you know?
I first came out with the Bride of Funkenstein. Bootsy Collins did the record and I replaced him on the tour. That was a dream come true.
Kathy Varner: Did you ever hang out with Bootsy Collins?
Bunn: Not so much. The last time I was out with George Clinton we were at the Apollo. We got together. It’s funny. When you’re in the family it’s like you don’t really need to be talking to each other a lot. Whenever we’re together we’re great because each of us is like, ‘Okay, it’s great to see you. See you later.‘
Yeah, but it’s interesting. With the guys I get to be, to be the kid. You know, it’s like I’m still young.
KV: You were young when you played with P-Funk, right?
Bunn: Yeah, I was seventeen.
KV: You were born and raised in Baltimore. When did you move to Richmond?
Bunn: Nineties. My wife’s mother was ill. We were commuting back and forth. We decided to move here to be closer to my mother in-law.
I tend to be an open book about everything and not have any particular agenda. And what I’ve learned is—I learned it from George Clinton—he’s going to always call it back to himself, and the music and the project, right?
It’s interesting being at this age and learning so many different things about the business, which is a pain in the butt. But, I’ve rediscovered my love of music which is just so joyous. But, the music business—should I use the word weaponized? You know, I was listening to some NPR this morning. They were doing mostly Latino Mexican music. They were talking to this one band and the first thing that jumped out at me was longevity. They got together as a band twenty-four years ago out of Mexico. And you just don’t hear of that anymore in the music industry.
My first question came across Facebook. What was the first concert you ever saw? That made me think about it. I was on my dad’s shoulders and it was late at night. He took me to this club. We’re in this club and it’s nothing but joy. In the back of the room is a band. The club says to my father, ‘You can’t bring that baby in here.’ I remember the vibe, the spirit of the moment. It was just love. It was pure, pure joy.
Later, I asked my father who the band was. He said it was Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
My parents were really powerful, powerful people. My father had issues. He was an alcoholic. Let me tell you about this guy. He ran away from home when he was fifteen to go into the Korean War. So that tells you what was going on at home. As a consequence, he was an alcoholic. Alcoholics are abusive. But he was a hell of a guy. I mean, he was self-employed as an electrician and he had his own TV repair shop and took care of two families. He never missed a birthday. Never missed a holiday. I give him his props.
I think back to the seventies and eighties. We used to make copies of cassettes. And each time you made a copy it became worse. I think that’s how we are as a species. I think we become weaker and just more corrupt through each generation. The things my dad withstood, I was like dude…
The guy that hired me to play for my church, Craig Matthew, this guy’s out of Detroit and the absolute cream of the crop minister of music. He and I were talking one day and he said, ‘JB, I tried to cut my grass the other day and I couldn’t finish it.’ He was saying he started to think about the generation that came up before him and what they were able to endure.
Like James Brown. You know, these guys, George Clinton. You know, those guys are on a different level. I mean, robust is not even a word to describe it. The last time I was out with George in 2010 with Funkadelic I had two goals. It was so physically taxing. It was hard with no rules. George called up, ‘Hey, you’re going to be going out this weekend, right?’ Well, you may not know when, how or where you’re going. No idea when you’re going to return. So you’re sitting at home waiting for travel information. And then next thing you know, somebody’s at the front door to pick you up—c‘mon, we’re going to Australia.
We went to Australia. We left out of Newark, New Jersey. There was a problem with the plane. It wouldn’t start. So now we’re all scared—do we get off the plane? No. They’re going to fix the plane and we’re going to take it to Australia. We went to LA and we missed the connection. The next day we played on the west coast of Australia. Now, we were playing catch up. By the time we got to Australia, which is a seventeen hour flight, we’ve got to fly another three, or four more hours to the West Coast and play that night. So, that’s how that tour started. When we got back to the states and got back to Newark I’m thinking great, we’re done. I’m going home to see my kid. Oh no I’m not. I’m going to San Antonio, Texas to play South by Southwest. Get in the back of the van. Not a tour bus. That’s what we got from Newark to Texas after twenty-four hours of flying. That’s just one example. And, it’s nothing for these guys. They’ve been doing this for thirty years.
They called me and asked me to do a gig in Tennessee. They flew me to Knoxville and I’m thinking this is pretty sexy—fly me out and fly me home. So, they picked me up at the airport and went straight to the venue to do a quick sound check. Do the show. I’m going back to the room to go back home. Nooooo. Get on the bus. You’re going to Denver.
KV: How did you feel about that?
Bunn: It doesn’t matter how I felt about it. This is the job. It’s a mafia thing. This is the business we’re in.
KV: What’s it’s like hanging out with George Clinton?
Bunn: George and I go back to when I was a kid. Seventeen. I knew George in the heyday. I’ve known George in the hard days. The nineties. He’s been over to my house. Our relationship has grown and changed. My thing has always been relationships regardless of what the business is doing and we may fight and we may not like whatever. But, I’m still going to maintain a healthy loving relationship with you. Right now, there’s a lot of angst within the situation. People feel like they got slighted.
It’s the problem with George Clinton and the music business at large. This is where I get into conversations with my Funkadelic family. They say George ripped me off for this and that. And, they say they hate George. I say I can hate him too but if it wasn’t for George I wouldn’t have you.
There are quite a few tunes that I have contributed musically to that I haven’t received the credit rights. He doesn’t legally have to give me writer’s credit. This is a work for hire. It’s a legal clause in the copyright law. I don’t think it’s fair. My personal perception is because I grew up in a time when people wrote lyrics and music and both of you got credit. My perception is that I should get credit for writing the music even though it’s not pen and paper. Hopefully, some things will get fixed before I die.
KV: What songs?
Bunn: Freak of the Week. Mother May I. I’m Holding You Responsible. Michelle.
KV: I love Freak of the Week. How did you connect with Funkadelic?
Bunn: A fellow musician in Baltimore hooked me up with the band in 1978. Two years with Funkadelic. Things were crazy. I joined the air force. I was going to do thirty years. God had other plans. I came out of the air force after four years. Came to Richmond in ninety-four. Went back out with George for two years. It was crazy and I said that’s enough of that.
KV: Can you elaborate about crazy? Heavy drugs?
Bunn: For George In the seventies it was a lot of cocaine. It was sex, drugs and rock and roll. In the nineties it was coke and free-basing crack. I remember when I quit in the seventies. Sheila, one of the Brides of Funkenstein, called me and said Cherokee, you can’t quit now, we just got Sly. I said I’m not fooling with y’all. Come to find out Sly was smoking crack too. It was crazy.
Fortunately for me, I think God has given me an immune system to where I see that stuff, and it’s like, you know, you can’t do that stuff.
KV: Tell me about Parlet.
Bunn: We had two girl bands. Parlet is the female version of Parliament. The Brides of Funkenstein is the female version of Funkadelic. I was the bass player for the Brides of Dr. Funkenstein. We released two albums. The live album from the Howard Theatre is slamming. You should hear that.
My dream was to play for Bootsy since I was a kid. I took Bootsy’s place with the Horny Horns. I played with the Rubber Band. Maceo. All the Bootsy folks. So my dream had come true.
KV: I love Maceo.
Bunn: We have Prince to thank for Maceo still being with us. Maceo had gotten very ill and Prince paid all of his medical expenses and got him healthy again.
I’ve got a great Prince story. We were out in the nineties. We had just got back from Europe. Looking back on it now I wonder why I didn’t connect the dots. I got a Fed-Ex from Paisley Park. I wondered, what is this? I didn’t know what’s going on. We flew to Minneapolis. On the tour we had a gig to do in Minneapolis. I’m thinking we’re going to go to Minneapolis to do a gig. When we got to the airport, uncharacteristic of Funkadelic, we had someone there to meet us. They said okay, all of y’all go this way. We got in a van and they started driving and we thought, okay, we’re going to the hotel, right? No, they took us to Paisley Park. Oh, wow. Whoa, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait, what are we doing?
We don’t know what’s going on. I’m sitting there putting all this makeup on. So, what are we doing? What song are we doing? Okay, let’s go. Let’s go to the stage. Anyway, what happened was we were there to soundstage and we’re doing this cut that I’ve never heard of. Next thing you know some really hot chick comes up to me and sticks a mic in my face and says who are you? I’m kind of shy. I said, leave me alone, I’m working. And you know, she came to me. She says, have you seen Prince? I say, leave me alone. You’re scaring me. I looked over to George like you wanna fix this?
We got to the hotel. Lo and behold Prince is having a fall special called the Ryde Dyvine. And we were part of that. So, someone says, ‘Hey I saw you on TV with Prince.’
Yeah, I love that guy. He was scary-great. And I think he was taken from us much too soon. The first time I saw Prince was in 1979. We were playing the LA Coliseum. It was us, Rick James. I don’t know who else. Keep in mind I’m nineteen so I’m kind of overwhelmed. We’re headed down to the stage and I see this cat who looks like a Funkadelic and he’s being escorted off the stage. It’s him and this big, big white guy. After years passed, I realized that it was Prince being escorted off the stage. They didn’t want anybody on the stage when we went on. He had cut-offs on. He was looking really funky.
I’m backstage and I’m really awestruck. Then I saw Larry Graham. Turns out all the Graham Central Station guys are backstage. Our guitar player, Michael Hampton, is talking to Hershall Kennedy. On the floor are all of our gold records for Uncle Jam wants you. I said, wow, there’s my gold record. I should take my gold records. Then I thought to myself, no, don’t take the records. Let them present it to you. I never got it. I saw it but I didn’t get it. Things went south with the record company so we didn’t get the record.
When I left Georgia in 2014, a guy came over to the house and asked me if I wanted the gold record. I said, what are you talking about? I had the blues. I was depressed. Then I got the record.
When you think something is done and you’re going to move on to the next phase in your life but you’re not done. I thought I was going to be in the Air Force for thirty years but here I am still playing for Funkadelic. But, I’m thankful. Very, very, thankful.
I have an eight year old son. His birthday is Tuesday. I love him more than chocolate cake. Life is good.