Space is the place, baby. Space is the place.

Driving home tonight. It's around 6 pm Saturday night, and the sun is in my eyes, cars bumper to bumper. I wondering if I applied enough sunblock to make it through this traffic jam, tonight, our dinner groceries melting in the trunk.

So, I flip on KCRW (89.9) to hear THE WEIRDEST SONG, EVER.

Then, another. Then, another. ( Clearly, I did not inherit the "rock music critic" gene.)

And that was all part of the intro of what was, apparently, an entire show devoted to Sun Ra.




Get home.

Tell Pete, "Hey, I heard the strangest thing on KCRW, tonight. It really surprised me, because it wasn't like the other stuff you usually hear this early in the day. It wasn't even midnight, or anything. It was more like bizarre college radio."

I'm unloading groceries and trying to explain who the announcer was and how trippy the sounds were -- and Pete interrupts me.

"Wait, this is Henry Rollins? He's doing a whole show about Sun Ra? Too funny. That's great. His brain just goes a mile a minute and he can barely keep up with himself. Seriously, I love him. He's been one of my favorites for a long, long time. I'm sorry I missed his show tonight. So, he's doing it, I guess, because of the moon walk?"

This is the kind of thing that happens a lot around here. I say "Weird stuff happened today" and Pete is able to just rattle off precisely what that meant, where it happened, why, and the annotation in the encyclopedia edition which references it.

I was working on "Oh, all this time on the 405 and the ice cream bars didn't melt?" However, I do not complain, for this is precisely the kind of balance we have that makes our marriage work, too. I throw random things into the mix; Pete makes sense of it. True love.


However, flash forward, now, it's been a few hours and, yet, I still can't get the funky sound of June Tyson's voice in the Sun Ra song "Space is the place" out of my head. It all reminds me of something and I feel I need to explore what that is...

So, I turn to the magic "Sea of Holes," that is the internet, to explore my curiosity about this further.

Here's what I found.

Link to a site where you can hear June Tyson sing the title song from Space Is The Place (Original Soundtrack) by Sun Ra

Perhaps Beck wasn't the first musical genius to think we arrived from outer space?

Behold the video below: Sun Ra, who is clearly a Brother From Another Planet with Big Talent & even Bigger Shoes.



And, of course, below's a link to Rollin's on his show tonight when I first heard Sun Ra while being blinded by the sun.

KCRW Broadcast 20 - Henry Rollins on KCRW

And, hey, if you're a big Rollins fan, like my husband is, you gotta read my husband's profile on the dude.


Henry Rollins: Punk Rock Renaissance Man
, by Peter Larsen
http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/sections/life/life/article_337177.php


....And then there's that other song I can't quite get out of my head...The one "Space is the place" reminded me of:

Andy Kaufman singing "I trusted you" on The Midnight Special.



-- The seventies. A great time for music.


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