The Great Conjunction: A Fireside Chat With Lucifer
Birmingham’s favorite musical son, the late Hermon Poole Blount, aka- Sun Ra.
The Great Conjunction: A Fireside Chat With Lucifer
If you travel the intergalactic spaceways long enough, every once in a while the planets line up just right to bring together the perfect confluence of people, places, and things, conjuring up just enough tangible magic in your life to make you believe that there may be some sort of order after all to all of the universe’s unruly chaos. In fact, it’s just that kind of cosmic tension that Birmingham native Herman Poole Blount— better known by his afro-futurist moniker of Sun Ra— liked to evoke with his idiosyncratic sounds, styles, and music, constantly threading the needle between compositional structure and free-wheeling improvisation, and relentlessly criss-crossing the space-time continuum in search of the primordial rhythms, chords, and notes that he thought might resonate with the stars. A master of controlled anarchy, or what longtime Arkestra acolyte and fellow Southern iconoclast Col. Bruce Hampton used to call “collapsing into place,” when Ra’s music was at it’s best was in those moments when out of the morass of the infinite and eternal, everything seemed to come together in what can only be described as sublime human concurrence, resolving itself in a kind of omni-directional harmony whose path was unknown until the very moment it occurred. It was one of the hallmarks of his performances and recordings, and general attitude towards life and art, and also a great metaphor for the seeming madness and synchronicity of cratedigging, and our very human attempts to find deeper meaning in our everyday lives and interactions, even in something as mundane as randomly pulling a long sought after LP from a musty and disorganized pile of records in someone’s attic or basement. It’s a moment every diehard record collector lives for, and is part of the buzz, and an odd mixture of fortune and indeterminacy— and trying to make sense of it all— that always keeps us coming back for more, when hours of plodding away in the nothingness of a dark storage space or estate sale ultimately yields a veritable pot of gold made of cardboard and wax.
Which begs the existential question: Do records find us? Or do we find records?
It’s one of the great mysteries of music my old friend Jimmy Griffin, a local record store guru here in town, likens to karma, except rather than a destiny for your soul, it’s for vinyl (or whatever medium of your choice might be) and the objects that speak to you on some deeper level. And if you have good record karma, as any true cratedigger and music fan knows, we don’t so much “find” records as meet one another along the way, due to a combination of happenstance, good luck, perseverance and will, and maybe even a little bit of divine providence. Accidentally discovering each other at just the right moment, so as to seem as if it was always meant to be by some great cosmic coincidence as part of the ever-expanding soundtrack to our lives, it’s a quasi-mystical phenomenon that I’ve always loved to believe in, even if my rational mind questioned it’s own overly-romantic logic. Whether it is or not is in the eye— or ear— of the beholder, and the synchronicities they see or don’t see around them in everyday existence, but I would be lying if I said that it doesn’t damn sure feel possible. And I’ve definitely had far too many experiences where I felt like I came across something— in this case records— at the exact right time, and knew it was somehow part of a greater life story, and one whose significance would only grow with age.
Sound silly? Probably so. It is, after all, a mixed-up, muddled-up universe we live in, and whose to say whether it means anything at all. But if we’re allowed to dream, and believe in a higher plane and purpose to our existence, as many of us often want to do— even against mountains of evidence to the contrary— then why the hell shouldn’t it be true? Sometimes it’s just better to at least try and believe in the idea of fate, even if you never truly know what that is exactly until much later. And maybe that’s all just part of the existential fun anyways. But if I had a dollar for every time a piece of art or music changed my life, I would be a very rich man indeed.
Which brings me to an incredible artifact I finally got to bring home with me the other day after a long and circuitous route from the collection of a widow of a local jazz musician here in Birmingham, and through the hands and good cratedigging juju of the guys/gals at Seasick Records, and ultimately into my own. Discovered about a year-and-a-half ago in a non-descript haul of 300 records, it’s a really rare copy of Sun Ra’s 1983 A Fireside Chat With Lucifer LP, from Ra’s own Saturn Research label, featuring vibrant, hand-colored cover art by either someone in the Arkestra or possibly even Ra himself. These things don’t pop up in the wild very often, especially here in the Magic City, and was actually the only time the Seasick crew had ever found an original Sun Ra record on one of their many vinyl expeditions around the city and state. Stoked about their discovery after realizing what they had, rather than keep it for themselves, they had wanted it to go to a good home and someone who would take care of both it and its history, and hopefully keep it out of the hands of someone just looking to flip it for extra cash. Intrigued after seeing a post on social media about their find, I contacted them about it and went to check it out on my own, and couldn’t believe their luck, and talked to them about possibly taking it off their hands. And although I really wanted it, at the time I wasn’t sure if I could afford it, and went home to marinate on it a couple of nights before returning to look at it again a few days later to talk about purchasing it.
It was then, upon closer inspection, that I noticed something was amiss, and that the wrong record was in the inner sleeve, and was actually a copy of Celestial Love— also released on Ra’s private press in 1984— mistakenly residing inside the Lucifer cover. Realizing that I was going to have to pop our collective bubble and excitement in what felt like a space jazz/hipster outtake from Antiques Roadshow, I looked up and told them that there was, unfortunately, both “good news” and “bad news.” The bad news was that they had the wrong slab of wax to go along with the incredible avant-folk sleeve art of the Lucifer LP; but the good news was that it meant that they may very well have the other record and the corresponding sleeve to Celestial Love mixed in with the other stuff they had bought in the collection and needed to see if they could locate it. We were all pretty bummed, but also excited about the possibility that there was a further mystery to solve, and over the course of the next few weeks they looked through their stuff and also reached out to another fellow record collector here in town who they knew had been through a collection belonging to a relative of the same woman a couple of years before them and told him what had happened and what they were looking for. And miraculously enough, he actually happened to have the Lucifer record from his own previous dig in a separate plain sleeve, and graciously traded it in to them for some other records he had been looking for himself, as all good cratediggers do when wanting to pass good mojo on for the sake of the game.
Needless to say, it was a really amazing convergence of some great local record sleuthing— and a huge dose of serendipity— and one that helped to reunite the albums after being separated from each other for so many years. And although the cover for Celestial Love was never located and appears lost, we were able to put the Lucifer LP back with its original cover art, and when Tim Kerr from Austin punk legends Big Boys/Poison 13 happened to come through town earlier this year, yet another layer of fate and circumstance was added to the mix. An amazing visual artist in his own right, Kerr had previously done an incredible urban mural on the side of the Firehouse Community Arts Center in 2017 (which at the time was primarily a DIY music venue), featuring portraits of local arts and civil rights icons Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Angela Davis, Spider Martin, and Ra himself, and had returned to Birmingham to do another outdoor piece this past March but was unfortunately rained out, and just happened to stop by the new Seasick Records location in Avondale to kill time with Blake Williamson from Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires, along with Blake’s wife Ann Sydney. Stuck in town with nothing to do and nothing to paint, after milling around the shop for a bit, Seasick’s owner Daniel Drinkard suggested he do another Sun Ra mural in the store itself while he was there, which Kerr agreed to, and happily set out to provide the new space with its signature piece of artwork by the front door. Bringing the cosmic journey/coincidence full circle by gifting Tim with the copy of Celestial Love as part of payment/gratitude for his services, it was a fitting moment, as Tim is a big Sun Ra fan, and was told the story of how it came to be in his possession by complete chance, and seemed like the type of harmonic convergence only someone like Ra could engender in his own hometown.
And now, months later, after slowly chipping away at it over the past year and just paying a little bit here and there when I could, I finally got to bring home the Lucifer LP for my birthday this past week, which was one of the great eureka moments of my record collecting career, and the end of my own search for one of my personal Holy Grails. They gave me a really great deal on it, and were wonderful to work with as always, and it just felt like a really great Birmingham music moment— and all strangely happening during the Great Conjunction last week between Jupiter and Ra’s “home” planet of Saturn— and seemed like it was all meant to be in some weird, esoteric way. And maybe it was. Or maybe it’s all just an illusion of the mind, just like the Great Conjunction itself. But for me personally, I’d still like to chalk it up to good record karma for everyone involved. Guess we’ll never know for sure, but as Ra protege Pharoah Sanders liked to say, “The Creator has a master plan,” and sometimes it’s hard to argue that he/she maybe doesn’t when things seem to line up just right in the world around you.
Kind of like the Christmas Star. Only its vinyl, collapsing into place at just the right moment, with the devil in all the details.
Hand-drawn front cover art for the A Fireside Chat With Lucifer LP.
A-side record label for A Fireside Chat With Lucifer LP.
B-side record label for A Fireside Chat With Lucifer LP.
Sharp “Confidential VIP’s Only” tag found inside the original record sleeve from A Fireside Chat With Lucifer LP.
Tim Kerr’s “Know Your History” mural outside the Firehouse Community Arts Center in Birmingham, AL.
Tim Kerr in front of his Sun Ra mural at Seasick Records in Birmingham, AL.
A-side record label from Tim Kerr’s copy of Sun Ra’s 1984 LP, Celestial Love.
Cover art to Big Boys’ 1983 LP, Lullabies Help The Brain Grow.
the author in front of Tim Kerr’s Sun Ra mural at Seasick Records with the A Fireside Chat With Lucifer LP.