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Teenage Jonathan and Boston's "Spiritual Sparkplug"
If you’re reading this, chances are you know how much I love and am interested in the overlap of the Velvet Underground and Jonathan Richman in Boston in the late 60′s. For the AW68 book, I interviewed Jonathan (slowly) via snail mail but have only recently met him; I’ll talk about that eventually when it’s time. If you need a refresher on the gist of what we’re talking about, just listen to J.R. recount the first time he met Lou Reed, randomly, as both were walking through Harvard Square; it’s an undeniable delight.
Last month, when a new interview with Richman appeared, I was really surprised to see something new about that time period included; it popped up when the interviewer asked him about meditation. His answer:
Yes, I have a meditation practice and this started when I was 17. As I was searching Boston’s music scene for an entryway into I knew not-exactly-what, the janitor and carpenter at the rock ballroom where the Velvet Underground played asked me if my parents would maybe permit me to come to a meditation group he was a part of. They did permit and I found a home in the world. I also found a silence-among the two dozen other souls each striving for peace inwardly – that was of a different sort from any sort I’d been a part of before. Even my earlier recorded music borrows some of this from that group.
This is interesting in itself, I think, but because I can fill in some of the blanks here which, for me, help paint a picture of the intersection of creativity and spirituality, both in Richman’s work and beyond. Firstly, the janitor he’s speaking about is Mitch Blake, the spiritual de facto fix-it man at the original Boston Tea Party, the fella who could really get Lou talking about occult topics backstage, and someone I interviewed with great interest for the book.
First Mitch, from AW68:
The fact that it’s Mitch Blake to whom Jonathan’s referencing here means the meditation group they both belonged to was Isabel Hickey’s. And Isabel Hickey is...very interesting. Both Blake and Rob Norris (a brief member of the last-gasp Yule-led Velvets) both spoke to me about enthusiastically attending astrologer and spiritual teacher Isabel Hickey’s “Friday Night Fix” meditation sessions. In Boston, Hickey was known as the “spiritual sparkplug” and her followers skewed towards the young side, despite already being in her mix-sixties at the time. Like Ram Dass, people noted the unusual quality of someone with such a “broad Bostonian accent” delivering such far-out wisdom (Watch Ram Dass comment on his accent here).
Hickey follower Brian Clark recalled, “Issie’s regular teachings and meditations on those Friday evenings were a boon to many who would come to hear about the ‘real self’ behind the personality, how we create our inner condition, and how, in order to change our life, we must change our attitude. These conscious-raising ideas appear simple now, many having been recycled into mindfulness exercises, but back then they mesmerized Issie’s audience.” Mitch Blake also spoke of how ahead of certain mainstream trends the Fix was: “Many of the musicians at that time were meditating a lot, becoming very spiritually oriented, and doing the kinds of things that have become mainstreamed now. It was pretty intense.”
Knowing that Richman was receiving this kind of messaging from Hickey on a weekly basis at such a young age goes a long way in explaining his initial blossoming as an artist and almost immediate, drastic reinvention of that artistry in which booming amplifiers and distortion were put away forever. I wrote about this change in the book, but just listen to Richman’s most recent recorded music to hear how he’s still pursuing this line of thought, arguably more explicitly than ever before:
“The heart's enough! That's it!
Where the heavens put me, that's good enough!
What shape they put my body in, that's good enough!
Where I am, that's where I'm supposed to be
Follow the heart!
If they want me to know it
If the heavens want me to know it then I'll know
I'll do no other thing
Do no other thing”
— And Do No Other Thing
In 2020, the BBC described Richman’s entire career as embodying something they called “radical positivity.”
“A lot of people ask where we are and what we ‘re doing and why?,” Mitch Blake explained to me back in 2017. “Which generally can be answered fairly simply but it's not an answer that most people are very satisfied with, so they keep looking. Everybody keeps looking.“ A few minutes later, he let me know what he believed the answer is:
“We're all in a one to one relationship with the rest of the entire universe. We all reflect each other. All we have to do is be thankful for where we are. Enjoy it. And express it.”
Isabel Hickey self-published books throughout the 1970′s including Astrology: A Cosmic Science and It is ALL Right, in which she imparted her knowledge about how to “gain inner peace,” “transmute negativity,” and “evolve beyond appearances.” She passed away at her home in New Hampshire—which she referred to as Harmony Hill—in the summer of 1980. (more Hickey info here)
It turns out Mitch Blake was going to open for Jonathan Richman at a concert this past summer in Nantucket, MA, where Blake has lived for many decades. Before becoming the Tea Party’s janitor, it turns out, Blake used to perform folk music at various Boston coffee houses. I kicked myself for having missed the chance to see that unique bill, but when I checked in with Mitch, he told me that at the last minute he decided that the night should be all about Jonathan. Who would give up an opening slot for Jonathan Richman?, I thought to myself. Then I got the sense that Blake’s life-defining beliefs that we all reflect one another, and expressing gratitude for simply being here, manifested themselves in every decision he made, including ceding the spotlight to an old friend who used to sit alongside him for their Friday Night Fix in Boston in another century.
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Difference between HDD and SSD.
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This sucks. It's hard enough to try keep a recording studio afloat without any robberies. Been a longtime John Vanderslice fan, and recently both his new music and interviews—like the one he did on The Best Show With Tom Scharpling a few weeks ago—have been truly inspiring and represent a new level of honesty and freedom on his part. I can't wait to see him live this Sunday night in Boston. Kick in a few bucks to this studio recovery fund if you can and wanna!
p.s. I had a very memorable day at this very studio. I was on the west coast leg of the AW68 book tour and legendary music writer Greil Marcus had gotten in touch wanting to know more about the lost Van Morrison Boston 1968 recording I wrote about in the book. This was before Van himself leaked it to the internet. So, I said, "Greil, you absolutely should and deserve to hear this. Let's meet up." At first the idea of a coffee shop was thrown around. I thought to myself, "Greil's gotta hear this loud and on good speakers." So, I shoot an email to John Vanderslice, asking if Greil Marcus and I could sit at Tiny Telephone and listen an ultra-rare Van Morrison bootleg super loud and within minutes he replied and was like, "100% yes." He was an amazing, larger-than-life host who didn't charge us a nickel for the use of the studio that day. That's what kind of guy JV is. Support your weirdo lifers dedicated to ideas and art, my friends!
Photo Caption: Did you have to put my meager donation right next to Jack White's, GoFundMe? Did ya?
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Both tonight in Boston:
-7PM. Newtonville Books. AW68 editor Ed Park brings his lauded new novel to town. Free. Go!
- Then the great Lydia Loveless is in Cambridge MA at the Middle East Club. She makes a show stopping appearance on DECK that we can't wait to share with you eventually. Go see her!
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