The Message from Nature: Four Seasons...

February 15, 2010

Dear Mr. X------,

The U.S. Post Office would like to apologize for the delay delivering this letter. We at the Post Office do everything in our power to ensure timely delivery of mail; however, certain events do transpire which prevent us from completing our solemn duty.

Three days ago we discovered this letter hidden in the home of one of our postal carriers. He has been stealing letters from his mail bag and secreting them in his home since late 1968. There are no obvious connections between the letters, but rest assured we are investigating the matter thoroughly. You letter was among the oldest in the house. We scanned the letter and attached it at the end of this email. The actual letter should be arriving in your mail box any day now.

We realize a 42-year delay is unacceptable. We can only hope you do not take this event as endemic of a breakdown in our services.

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April 15, 1968

Dear Mr. X--------,

You may not know me, but we are looking for relatives of Joseph Oliver to help us with settling his estate.

Mr. Oliver died last week. He worked as a janitor at Wimberly's Recreation Hall here in Savannah, Georgia, for thirty years. He’d resided at our family’s rooming house for the past twenty-five years. A private man with few visitors, he never mentioned family to us.

We found a notebook in his room, containing a rather curious story. On the cover is a picture of two cherries resting atop some sheet music, with the legend “The message from nature: four seasons create a rich nature” printed across the top. Someone has written, in a very shaky hand, “Perform this live” on the inside cover. We think this may be the last thing Mr. Oliver wrote.

None of us here know what to make of it. It seems to be a collection of notes and interviews about someone named (if you can believe it) Buck B. Randy. A local school teacher said this notebook might be an unfinished historiography; it reads like nonsense to me. Perhaps some of these names and events would have a better chance of resonating with you—a relative of Mr. Oliver—than with stranger.

Thank you for your time.

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Buck B. Randy was an ugly fuck; but a better bassist and linguist there was none. Who else but Buck could have has such influence on Donald “Duck” Dunn, Charlie Mingus, or Phineas Freak? Sure, he was ugly as sin, but it was Buck who strapped a couple power lines to his chest and disappeared in a scream and a flash. No one knows for sure why the world’s background level of eroticism rose following Buck’s suicide—“Correlation ain’t causation,” as one of my thieving managers loved to say—but it sure was one hell of a coincidence.

Buck was born April 2, 1908, and grew up on a farm in the great flatlands of Kansas. He had these huge ears from “straining to hear the music of the spheres,” or so his sister, Clearly, claimed.

But it was his teeth which grabbed your attention first: massive, malformed incisors jutting out at a 30-degree angle from the gums; gnarly in later years, molted brown and black by chewing tobacco and whisky; so long he couldn’t conceal them behind his lips, giving the impression of someone always on the verge of smiling. And damn it if he didn’t have the saddest eyes you ever did see.

Sadness and neglect scarred Buck’s childhood. He and his mother got struck by lightning while hugging out on the prairie during a thunder storm. The five-year-old Buck survived; the loving mother died. “My last memory of her,” Buck wrote, “was her head outlined in brilliant white light, her hair aflame, and a strange mixture of happiness and pain in her beautiful smile.” Miraculously, the boy walked away uninjured. Lots of us wondered if the electric surge caused the monstrous growth of his teeth. His mother’s untimely death left Buck and his two elder sisters in the care of their alcoholic father: “We worked in the field,” Buck’s sister, Constance Lee, wrote, “while Pa tipped cider in the pantry.”

Buck’s life took a turn for the better after his fifteenth birthday. Buck’s sisters had long noted their younger brother’s uncanny sensitivity to sound: “He’d cry in pain if a cricket got into the house but stand outside during windstorms to hear the whisperin’ o’ the land.” Both sisters married well and combined their financial resources to send the Buck to the Pattomoca Music and Renewal Conservatory in Chicago.

At the PMRC, Buck discovered his love for “fat-bottomed girls,” as he jokingly referred to the stand-up bass. He made his first professional orchestral appearance less than three years later.

Fellow musicians kept their eyes locked on the conductor or on their sheet music, but the audience had no such recourse. “It is the humble opinion of this music lover,” wrote one critic in June, 1926, “that the contrabassist—though wisely positioned in a convenient shadow at the back left wing of the orchestra—rendered the performance unlistenable as audience members ceaselessly whispered amongst themselves or shifted in their seats, vainly attempting to avoid sight of that sweaty, rapt- and rat-faced boy and his horrid teeth. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s duty to future music lovers is clear: fire Buck B. Randy.”

The conductor caved to public pressure and banned Buck from the orchestra, crushing Buck in the process. He spent several weeks petitioning to reenter the orchestra. And then, as a special performance of Japanese Kabuki at the University of Chicago, he thought he found the answer.

Moving in the background, Buck adjusting props and setting the stage, were people dressed all in black, with their faces hidden behind black veils. Buck asked around and found they were called kuroko and, though clearly visible, were understood to be invisible, and so could be ignored. Stares and giggles greeted Buck as he arrived at orchestral practice a few days later, dressed in the black costume of a kuroko. Of course the conductor refused to let him join, claiming the costume to be an even bigger distraction. Faced with poverty and barred from the supposedly “blind” world of classical music, Buck contacted me about a gig.

“He wrote me a letter around that time,” said his sister, Constance Lee, told a local newspaper some years later. “He begged me to forgive him for choosing to play ‘nigger music,’ as he called it. Of course I understood: he needed money. I remember his words very clearly: ‘Playing this jazz, this nigger music, they love so much here allows me to survive. That is all. Do not think less of me. Though such close association with these people disturbs me, I will not squander my gifts.’ His determination made us so proud.”

Well, we niggers didn’t have a problem with this white boy wearing his little black veil; especially not once he told us that kuro meant “black” and ko meant “child.” We called him “our little tar baby” and kept his name off the playbills and marquees. Buck didn’t mind. He’d other plans to claw his way up out of poverty. Music, it turned out, was not his only gift.

He played jazz by night and studied languages by day. At the conservatory, in the orchestras and the clubs, Buck met people from all over the world. He absorbed languages. By the age of twenty-one, he spoke fluent Spanish, German, French and Creole. I guess he planned to become a translator, but here too his teeth and ears worked against him. No one wanted their words to come out of such an ugly face. After some early rejections, he turned to translating books. I was lucky enough to get my hands on a few of these. Only two had passages underlined.

The first is by Heisenberg, titled The Physical Principles of Constructive and Destructive Harmonics. Buck underlined this passage: “The concepts of wave amplitude, electric and magnetic field strengths, energy, density, etc., were originally derived from primitive experiences of daily life. These concepts are also widely applicable to light and even, as we now know, to matter waves. The results have been stranger than we expected. As is well known, there is always a small but finite probability of finding an electron at a great distance (say 1 cm) from the center of the atom. The potential energy of the electron is very great at such a point. However, we cannot measure this energy without changing the position of the electron in question, and thus altering its potential energy. Given this, we can understand that the bound energy of any body at rest is always much greater than that which can be calculated, and merely needs a certain harmonic key to release it. The Compton effect is one such key. The Compton effect has as its consequence that the electron is caused to jump from a state, say n=1000, to some other state for which n is, say, greater than 950 and less than 1050—and can never be calculated in advance.”

The second is Dirac’s linguistic analysis of the atonal framework of certain Mongolian throat-singing exercises. Buck underlined this passage: “As a result of carrying out the exercises, the singer at once realizes that the arbitrary functions of the time signatures must mean that he is using a musical framework containing arbitrary features. As a result of this arbitrariness in the musical framework, the dynamical variables at future times are not completely determined by the initial dynamical variables, and this shows itself up through arbitrary functions appearing in the performance.”

Intrigued, Buck took up throat-singing.

“There can be no other explanation,” claimed Buck’s vocal coach. “The coincidence of the peculiar dental arrangement and his acute audio sensitivity must be the key to understanding his extraordinarily rapid attainment of virtuosity. He could create harmonics unheard until the invention of synthesizers. To hear him sing was awe-inspiring. To see him sing…well, you can imagine those huge ears red with exertion and his face glistening with sweat as he strained through the complex breaths. And those teeth…you’d swear you could see them vibrating. It was awful. Maybe that was it: a mix of awe and awful, that juxtaposition of a horrid figure emitting almost inhumanely beautiful vocalizations, that convinced me that Mr. Randy alone was capable of singing a lament to God.” Two recordings of these early efforts (catalog numbers E3A2D0G4 and E3A2D0G3) gather dust on the archive shelves at the Library of Congress.

In the last months of 1929, Buck translated Heisenberg’s formulations of constructive and destructive complimentary waveform interference into a pentatonic series of rising arpeggios. Buck reports that when he first played this series on the contrabass in duet with an interweaving throat-sung melody it produced an escalating series of periodic, standing waves in a glass of water twenty feet away. Unsure where this could lead, but nonetheless encouraged by his success, he continued the experiments. Consumed by a passion for sound and what it could do, he ceased to go outside.

Meanwhile, Chicago tore itself apart. The Great Crash had destroyed so many peoples’ lives (mine included), and with the population of Chicago having exploded but now with no jobs, unrest spread. The cops and city leaders dealt with it in the old way: beatings and lynchings of blacks resumed. Gangs fought for turf and unionists fought for humanity.

When Buck stepped out of his room half a year later, he entered a world beaten into submission, chained down by depression, and silent with fear. Buck had no way of knowing, but in his notes he carried a much-needed salve.

Buck contacted me and I got him a solo gig at a speakeasy up town. I knew those guys—the mayor, the chief of police, a few bankers, and a nice, little multicultural stew of prostitutes—were always on the lookout for some novelty at their monthly shindig. What they got, no one could have expected.

On August 26, 1967, a 62 year-old Mrs. Whitlow gave an interview to a Chicago PBS affiliate. The subject had been her days as a “call girl” during the last years of Prohibition. Her interview remains the only first-hand account of the effect of one of Buck’s performances. There’s no way of knowing which of Buck’s shows she experienced, but I think it was an early one, because the effects she describes are relatively minor.

“We all laughed, didn’t we? When a queer little man dressed all in black takes the stage and starts in on a solo jazz number…well, he’s just inviting laughter, isn’t he? But the jeering stopped as the tune changed. Us girls began to feel something strange. He was singing, but without words, and the sound seemed to melt into the bass line. That’s when every one of us girls felt like we’d been sat down in a pool of warm honey, and every nerve started tingling, and we all started crossing and recrossing our legs or squirming in our seats, or maybe rubbing up against the knees of the men whose laps we were sitting on. And through the thick clouds of cigar smoke and sweet scent of moonshine thrummed that weird music. Soon the air was filled with moans and the even thicker musk of two dozen young women writhing and wriggling against customers or against one another.”

Here Mrs. Whitlow paused, a smile on her lips.

"I’m not sure what the men felt; not that I ever cared. All I wanted was to love, to rub, to feel with someone—anyone. I tell you: my only regret in life has been leaving Chicago soon after that party, because now I know I will probably die without feeling that incredible sensation again.”

No doubt Mrs. Whitlow’s prediction came true: despite pages of musical scare and three audio recordings, the ability to reproduce these erotic resonances seems to have disappeared with Buck’s teeth.

It wasn’t long before you’d hear some rich man at a speakeasy call out: “Let’s get Randy here.” You might even see the same man leer at a young woman and claim, “I’m Randy.” Why anyone would want to be seen as monstrously buck-toothed, Dumbo-eared, skinny, sweaty white boy I could never understand. Rich, old men and their shriveled willies paid through the teeth for one more romp with a nubile, young filly, and the Depression dragged on.

Buck, however, grew more desperate and withdrawn.

What people tend to forget is that beneath his teeth, his ears, and his incredible musical and linguistic gifts lay an unrelenting sex drive. Here was a singularly repulsive young man suddenly discovering he has the power to produce the most intense, erotic desires in women. Buck had probably already visited dozens of prostitutes, so it wasn’t simple sexual gratification he sought. Buck needed to be desired—and this music teased him with a chance at that.

Surprised, confused, but now with a glimmer of hope, Buck rushed home with a singular purpose: record this music so he’d be free to join in the fun.

In this, Buck was well and truly fucked. Recording equipment of that time could never reproduce an accurate (or even audible) bass tone. That’s why our other bass player, Bill Johnson, started the slap style: just to be heard on recordings. Buck recorded E4A0D1G4, E4A0D1G5, and E4A0D2G0 in his apartment, and then tested all three at a speakeasy. The disappointment and backlash were violent, forcing Buck to pick up his bass and sing his song to soothe the angry beast.

Goaded by failure and sexual desperation, Buck sank even deeper into his experiments. He’d had to watch too often from behind a black veil as city fathers groped at the bits of panty peeking out from under the skirts of the city’s daughters, had to watch young girls offering themselves to old men—and here was Buck, the cause of all these orgies, alone and horny. He had to succeed. He continued to play the speakeasys at night while searching for an effective means of reproduction by day.

Whether he knew it or not: he was being watched.

“Sometimes his veil would puff out a bit, and then, if you were lucky, you’d catch a flash of those teeth. Horrific, but exciting nonetheless. A hint was tantalizing, titillating even, and it made you want to watch even closer in the hope you’d catch another peek. How strange. If he’d been sitting across the table from you, without the veil, you’d do your best to not look at the teeth—to be polite. You might even grow accustomed to them. Yes: A peek excited; but a stare, undistorted, would have revolted. The veil was love.”

I can’t prove it, yet I am sure Buck was the first person in music to apply electric distortion: first to his bass and then to his voice. This primitive distortion system was little more than a microphone, an amplifier, and an old set of mattress box springs. The sound was pretty awful, and it didn’t free Buck from playing, but it did intensify the vibrations and their erotic effect. To my own frustration, Buck’s notes indicate that the most effective frequencies came about by the nearly random convergence of distinct elements.

Over the next few months, Buck refined his methods until he both men and women were driven insane with lust. In speakeasy Bacchanals, desire turned to lust and then to insatiable hunger. Girls got beaten, strangled, cut. Violence got kept nice and quiet, the men who’d committed these crimes safe behind their veils of power.

On the back of some last musical notations Buck wrote: “During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the sequel of my labor, and my eyes shut to the horror of the proceedings. But now I go to it restless, nervous, and filled with foreboding. When I play, I sit with my eyes fixed on the stage, fearing to raise them lest they should encounter the scene which I so loathe to behold. One time more I will go, though the thought sickens me.”

Buck focused all his energies on amplifying the intensity. Reasoning that the effect could only be produced by him, in his person, he decided to amplify the source: his body.

There is only one description of Buck’s last public performance; an accident report filed by a well-intentioned but naïve rookie cop, containing the story of an unnamed woman who disappeared from the hospital some days later.

“He came on to the stage just as he’d done before: dressed head to foot in black, lugging all that equipment. We waited, breathless with anticipation—like a congregation eager to receive a blessing. The room echoed with his slightest movement; each lock coming open on his instrument case rang out like a gun shot. But tonight he did something different.

“He sat down on the stool and took off his shirt. Then he clipped two wires from the amplifier to his nipples; his muscles started to jerk and twitch from the juice. For a long time he just sat there with his bass straddled between his knees. As the silence stretched on—the veil quivering with his ragged breath—we got the sense that he was afraid to begin. Someone’s nerve cracked and a giggle sounded near the back of the room. He struck the first not and his voice shot out. The world went white.”

“I woke in the hospital on Monday, covered in scratches and bruises. The doctors said I’d been raped repeatedly. Someone chewed off my middle finger.”

What happened to Buck after that speakeasy is anyone’s guess, so I’ll give it a try.

Think of the laboratory scene from the old black-and-white movie Frankenstein: that’s Buck’s apartment.

He rushes in, slamming the door shut behind him, a manic look in his deeply shadowed eyes. He goes to the window and checks to see if he’s been followed. He sees no one. His gaze drifts to the power lines running just below, and inspiration strikes him. He goes to his workbench and puts on a pair of electrician’s gloves and grabs his heavy-duty wire cutters.

Now let your mind’s eye move outside the apartment, as a shower of sparks falls to the street below, and the building is slammed into darkness.

People on the sidewalk stop, their gazes drawn upwards by the explosion of sparks, but see nothing. A few car horns sound as the traffic lights go dead. Surprised by the sudden dark, a cat yowls.

Then: the windows of that twelfth-floor apartment flash with light inside. A high-pitched scream sings out and then transforms into the descending note of the opening of an aria or of the incoming of a missile as Buck sees his mother’s face, outlined in white, her hair aflame, and her smile, one final time.

Windows explode from their frames up and down the street as the shockwave and a sound beyond hearing burst from Buck’s apartment.

Caught in the shockwave, every person capable of erotic reverie grabs the nearest partner, man or woman, and loses themselves in wordless communion of skin on skin, of touch, of kiss, of comfort and console.

The shockwave travels over the world, reverberating, echoing, resonating throughout the lands, raising the background level of eroticism across the globe in what we now understand was the only conflict-free day in human history.

Of course the investigators found no trace of Buck’s body in the wreckage of his apartment. “It is clear that the body burned entirely in the high voltage,” one detective told the Chicago Sun. “What we had here was nothing more than a very desperate suicide.” This was the same detective who’d been a regular at Buck’s performances. Some sounds have a way of being unheard. Some wait only for the right key or chance harmony to release them.

Postscript

Piecing together the events leading to Buck B. Randy’s dissemination has cost me years of desperate poverty. Once I was a respected musician, but since then I have endured years of condescension and ridicule being a school janitor, just so I’d have the time to collect together all these notes and try to fit them into lines like so much musical score, attempting to recreate Buck’s music. I have failed. Even as I write these lines, I feel Death’s hand reaching up behind. My only hope is that Buck’ll be at the Pearly Gates waiting for me; then I can punch him in those horrid teeth for all he has cost me. With that happy thought I set down my pen, my work unfinished. I am tired. Like Buck’s body, the answer seems everywhere and nowhere, an echo resonating around the world, tantalizingly elusive. May God grant me His mercy and forgiveness.