Dreaming of the Masters

If you listened to last week's A Fireside Chat With Lucifer all the way through, and then let the Bandcamp gadget continue to play, it would have gone back to Track 1 of the LP, Nuclear War, which over the years has become one of Sun Ra's most famous songs despite its decidedly salty language.  

In his 2014 book, The Execution of Sun Ra, Thomas Stanley observes, "Throughout his life [Sun Ra] was consistent in his opposition to war and his art reflected this, perhaps most sharply in the space chant Nuclear War." Over a deceptively sparkly chromatic piano line, played at a steady walking rhythm, Sun Ra and trombonist Tyrone Hill, joined by June Tyson, sing, "It's a motherfucker, don't you know?" Stanley writes, "It is worth noting that this spicy chunk of language is the only use of profanity that this author is aware of in Sonny's vast recorded song repertory."

This 1982 recording also appears on the Sun Ra album Celestial Love and an EP titled Nuclear War.  A listener unaware that Nuclear War was a Sun Ra composition could be forgiven for thinking it was a parody of a punk rock anthem.  Nuclear War is punk jazz.

We were fortunate enough to have seen Sun Ra perform many times during the '70s and '80s and even into the early 90s. The first and only time we heard him perform Nuclear War was during a memorable 1984 performance at the former Moonshadow Tavern in Atlanta, an erstwhile rock club in an unassuming strip mall.  A fine-art print of a photo from that session, titled The Sun At the Moon, can be purchased at pixels.com.  

The Moon Shadow Tavern today.  It was no less glamorous in 1984.

Many, many years, literally decades, passed between hearing Nuclear War live in 1984 and finally hearing a recorded version of the song.  While we were shocked to hear Sun Ra singing "motherfucker" live on stage, in the artistic context of the performance and its protest of nuclear war, it wasn't inappropriate.  But in our memory, that most fallible of faculties, we distinctly remembered him calling out "those motherfuckers" to a repeated response, a direct challenge to the nuclear powers, rather than the less personal confrontational "it's a motherfucker."  We also recall Sun Ra improvising on the lyrics, saying at one point something to the effect that you'd be upset if someone pointed a gun at you, so why aren't you upset that they have nuclear bombs aimed at you?

Tell 'em about it, Tyrone!