Lead Belly "Relax Your Mind"
Thinking through stress then and now
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been interviewing people in or affiliated with The (Un)Holy Modal Rounders, Jeffrey Frederick and the Clamtones, and Michael Hurley, the three acts that came together to make Have Moicy! I keep hearing about the absurd shenanigans these groups got into. Case in point: in 1976, the Rounders (sans Stampfel, aka the West Coast Rounders) and the Clamtones toured the country for nearly a year straight in a 1957 Greyhound bus on what became known as the Bicentennial Boogie.
If you’ve heard the music, you know this is a rowdy bunch, and details of the tour do not disappoint. In Auburn, Alabama, the bands performed inside an all-white bar opening for the all black act The Coasters. Tensions were already high when Jeffrey, the instigator he was, insisted on playing “Let Me Down,” a song about Jesus watching Frederick kill himself, all the while Jesus and god bicker back-and-forth. The audience did not like that one, and a bottle-throwing brawl ensued, culminating in a police escort out of the state.
In Oklahoma, the bands de-bussed and crashed at a friends house, while Robin Remaily stayed behind to guard the greyhound. Famished, he walked across the road to a 24-hour Denny’s. Meanwhile, his dog, held captive in the bus, ran amok, knocking over a space heater. Robin rushed back to the old converted mobile home as he saw flames bursting from the windows. He managed to save the dog, but the bus burned to a crisp. As the ash settled, the Rounders were left with nothing but a metal skeleton.
With all their belongings destroyed, the Rounders and Clamtones spent two winter months in Tahlequah, Oklahoma — the capital of the Cherokee Nation. While there, they fished and foraged, played the occasional gig, and subsisted on near nothing. Fed up with their dire state, Remaily hitchhiked to town to apply for food stamps. After several failed attempts at attracting attention, a federal employee finally drove out to where everyone had made their makeshift commune to see if government support was truly in order. Peering into their fridge inside the burnt-out bus, the food stamps man found only a jar of mustard. Meanwhile, Frederick had just returned to camp with an owl he had found dead on the side of the road. Although he intended to merely pluck its feathers (bad luck according to the Cherokee), Frederick, reading the situation he’d just walked into, threw the owl down on the ground and declared, “We’re eating good tonight!” They got their food stamps.
Hearing stories like these, I can hardly comprehend how people survived. In the interviews, I’ve found myself asking, “Weren’t you scared? Weren’t you stressed? Didn’t you want out?” All I get are aural shrugs. As long as they had sleeping bags and booze, life was alright. Running out of money was regular, scrounging for food commonplace.
Chalk it up to the rock & roll lifestyle, ‘60s chill. I find myself wondering if the stress I know is a modern invention, if I’m choosing to code everything in terms of anxiety. So I put on one of the few old songs explicitly about stress that I know: Lead Belly’s “Relax Your Mind.”
If only it was so simple: “one time you got to relax your mind, and then you always feel fine.”
Recorded by Frederic Ramsey Jr. as part of the famous Last Sessions (Ramsey, using the same recorder, taped Michael Hurley’s First Songs, and one has to wonder about the continuity between the titles of each project).
Lead Belly sounds like a New Age guru the way he champions de-stressing, the whole moral couched in terms of distracted driving — and I ought to trust him. After all, he’s driven the Lomaxes (Alan and John) all across the country without running over a single chicken. I don’t know what you call it, the way Lead Belly (imagine, could I refer to him as “Belly?”) pushes his voice into the front of his mouth as he sings “Gas-o-line” or “Fine as wine,” slipping each syllable in at the last possible moment, but whatever he’s doing, it shows off his powerful restraint as a singer. He’s got all the oomph of any Delta bluesman, but his delivery tends toward something gentler, the sing-a-long charm of Pete Seeger.
Keep your eyes where you’re going, he suggests, forget the riffraff only there to distract. Seems a bit future-oriented to be truly New Age — what would Ram Dass and Be Here Now say? But by locating stress in automobiles, Lead Belly identifies anxiety in modernity. He was born in 1888, twenty years before the Model T. Imagine what he’d say about smartphones.
In the Rounders photo Roger North is misidentified as Richard.