Artist, poet, percussionist and composer Angus MacLise receives the first proper overview of his work in a series of events presented in New York City throughout May. MacLise has too often been mentioned merely as the original drummer for The Velvet Underground—he famously quit when informed that being in a rock band meant you had to stop playing—but anyone familiar with the history of American underground culture will know that there was a lot more to his life than this. Johan Kugelberg and Will Swofford Cameron are the curators of Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise, and this page has more detail about the events.
For those unable to get to NYC (that would be most of us) there’s always the indispensable Ubuweb where one may find a page of MacLise recordings, and also issue 9 of the amazing Aspen magazine, “the psychedelic issue”, edited by Angus MacLise and Hetty MacLise in 1971.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda
Spacemen 3 had a very cool disc called Dreamweapon. Hmm…
That word originates either with Angus MacLise or his friend and collaborator Ira Cohen who has a collection of poems under the same title. I’d guess it was MacLise’s since they’ve used it as the title for these events.
Ooooooh.
I’ve been looking for a full text, either online or in print, of MacLise’s “Year” poem. Have you ever seen that?
Hi Evan. I don’t recall seeing any of MacLise’s poetry but if you search for his name on Abe.com there’s a lot of titles listed. Interesting to see that one volume is called The Map of Dusk which is probably the origin of the name of a rare one-track composition Jon Hassell produced in 1987. Jon borrowed a line of Ira Cohen’s for an album title around the same time.
Weird Al Yankovic twittered that the Beatles really jumped the shark when Ringo joined the group, maybe the Velvets jumped the shark when they took on Mo Tucker as their drummer.