Report from Santa Fe; Jack Loeffler

music Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Males and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Today we have an esteemed ethnomusicologist, author and editor, Jack Lefler. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much, Lorraine, for having me today. I'm honored. Well, you are an author of some books that I've always had my eye on. One is called Adventures with Ed about Edward Abbey, a portrait of Edward Abbey. An old-time friend of yours, right? My best friend. A great man. And then a newer one is called Thinking Like a Watershed with Your Daughter.

Yes, Celeste Lefler. Voices from the West. And kind of the reason we're doing this now, this beautiful book called Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest, edited by you, and it's going to be an exhibit opening at the New Mexico Museum of History on May 14th. Tell us all about it. Okay, first I want to say that my good friend Meredith Davidson helped enormously in the production of this book. But the exhibition itself is fabulous. I'm watching it evolve right before my very vision, but basically I was invited many months ago. Thank you, July of 2015, to be the co-curator of this exhibition, probably because I'm the oldest living beatnik surviving in New Mexico at this point. And so what we tried to do was really look at the entire span of counterculture beginning, at least from my perspective, in the mid-1950s in San Francisco, and extending into the present. And as you well know, there's a vast interplay of energy between the Bay Area and Los Angeles and Santa Fe, especially countercultural energy.

And so we've tried to factor as much of that into this exhibition as possible. And it's been beautifully designed by Carolina Juá, who's a fabulous designer at the museum, and who has outdone herself with presenting this entire history. Everything from a poetry reading where Alan Ginsburg first read Owl in 1955 to right now, but taking us through many of the communes in northern New Mexico and other cultures of practice. Let's put it that way, including the Chicano and including the Native American. Well, so the grand opening of the exhibit will be Sunday, May 14th, at 5, I believe. No, the exhibit opens at 1 p.m. And then at 5 p.m. at the Lenswick Performing Arts Center, another great old friend Gary Snyder is coming to be there with us to talk about his perspectives regarding the evolution of counterculture.

Seeing the Godfather of it as far as I'm concerned. And he being one of our greatest living poets, period. Absolutely. He got his Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Turtle Island. Yes, yes. So it's because both he and you can look at it from the long perspective, the influences, the beat generation, all that before, and then how the vestiges of the counterculture movement, the impulses, are still alive today. That's something that's so important. Well, this is a beautifully and well articulated piece of history. It is also guidance and an active influence on our lives even now. I don't want to end up with this, but I don't want to let us not have enough time to say, what are the continuing influences in our culture right now of the counterculture movement? There are many of them. But to me, one of the most important things that has come out of the counterculture movement is we know it, is the modern environmental movement, which is absolutely vital to today's world.

And to me, what happened there was, is that after all of these various civil injustices had been incurred on various racial groups around the United States, different kinds of people, women's liberation evolved out of it. The counterculture movement did something that nothing else did, which was to elevate the environment itself to the level of the human being in the context of our social understanding. So, instead of mankind and against the background, the environmental movement made habitat an equal factor in consciousness, the habitat, the environment and the person observing it. Absolutely, and in my modest imagination, I think that habitat itself should sit at the head of the table. Well, my doubt lasts this. It certainly will.

So, women's lived, the sexual revolution, a lot of the anti-war movement, and the arts as a vehicle for transformation, be it music, poetry, literature, I mean, it's always been important. But something happened in the 60s and the time of the peak of the counterculture, where it just exploded and changed advertising, changed television, changed music. But speaking of music, you are an ethno. Go ahead. I thought if I could only spell it. Well, I've done a lot of ethno musicology, although I'm not in any way degreeed that way, it's just something that captivated my interest. I'd started out as a jazz musician. And that's probably why I was sort of evolving within the context of the beat scene, because jazz was the music of taste back in those days. It'd be subsumed by rock and roll, which struck me deeply, but at any rate, really a lot of jazz musicians I know have turned to ethno musicology, because there's a huge understanding of the need for music.

Actually, as I've recorded many different cultures performing music, I've come to understand that music itself is an demonic device for hooking culture up to habitat. Shape's culture, and that is revealed in the music. This, to me, is very important. And so I've spent a lot of time. So I learned a new term oral historian, A-U-R-A-L, dealing with the sound and with hearing. So you were a trumpeter and a saxophonist. No, no saxophonist. Just a trumpet. And so in the army, you were in the army band. Yes, I was. And you had, you were, I witnessed one of the seminal events of American history. There you were in Nevada, playing your trumpet. Tell us what you experienced.

Well, imagine yourself in pre-dawn Nevada. It's about 430 or 5 in the morning. You're dressed like Frank Buck and Bermuda Schwartz with a pith helmet playing a John Philip Susan march from memory. And there, seven miles away, all of a sudden, an atomic bomb is detonated. And within seconds, I was looking up to the top of the bomb at that angle. A good 60, 70 degree angle to the bomb, to the top of the bomb. And you and I mentioned this earlier where we were talking about your friend, Terry Tempest Williams, who was on your show recently, who's a great friend as well. She and I were at either end of that bomb. I watched it be detonated and it landed on their car as they were driving back to their home. And boy, when Terry and I discovered that, each of us was just totally moved. And the man that has done so much, Stuart Udall worked so hard for the downwinders, and you had a connection to his wife Lee in terms of one of her projects.

Well, Lee and Stuart were dear, they were like family. And I actually was with Stuart three days before he passed away. We had our great last conversation. But Lee hired me back in 1968 to be the curator of a traveling exhibition, focusing on Navajo history, but from the Navajo point of view, rather than the normal history point of view. And we became dear friends, actually I've known all of those kids, all of them, the kids. Tom was almost 70 now, but at any rate I've known him since he, I went to his college graduation in Prescott College. And it's great in watching them all evolve and doing what they're doing, but Lee was an amazing fellow human, one of the great friends again in my lifetime, as was Stuart. I regard him as the greatest of our secretaries of the interior. I realized that he was looking at conflicting absolutes that can only be seen

by somebody who is really a conscious and conscientious secretary of the interior. And we've had many, many conversations, much of which I've recorded, which appear in other books. And I just have nothing but the highest regard for that entire family. So you recordings, I'm going to give you a little cred, street cred here. You got the 2008 Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, because they loved your decades-long efforts to preserve and promote the music and culture of Northern New Mexico. You got the Hewitt Award for Outstanding Public Service from the New Mexico Historical Society. You, I'm happy to hear this, I propose Stuart Udall, the 2011 Stuart Udall Award for Conservation, and your Santa Fe living treasure. But how did you, you came here in the early 60s, after being in San Francisco for the beat generation? What did you hear in the voices, the languages, and the music of Northern New Mexico that pricked up your ears?

Well, everything about it. That's really one of the two or three huge reasons for having moved here, was the cultural diversity. I really have always been fascinated by cultural diversity, and have been in love with the notion of the American Indian, ever since I was a little kid back in Ohio and West Virginia. But when I came here, I was the only jazz musician that I knew of, North of Route 66, and that's it. And so a little by little, I acquired a tape recorder and started recording some of the Hispano folk songs that I had become privy to, pardon me. And I was able to afford a really good recorder. I recorded about 3,500 Hispano folk songs. I received a whole array of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Folk Heart Division. And then I stopped applying. I didn't feel right about getting anymore,

but it just became something that I would become addicted to. And subsequently, I had a radio program, entitled La Musica de Los Vietos, that went on for three years, over different stations, both public and private, public and commercial radio stations. And it was a joy. And I have made incredibly dear friends. We had my buddy, Enrique Lambert Reed, recently retired, as a chair of the Department of Spanish town at UNM. And I produced a total of 20 concerts over the years for the Museum International Folk Heart, and 16 at the Lensik. And we finally had to retire it as of 2016. And we went out on a high note, because New Mexico PBS did a beautiful 90-minute video of it. And so it's good. It's forever, it's a more than that. It's there, it's immortalized, yes. You radio shows, you have 300 episodes of The Lore of the Land series.

And tell us about your website. People who are going to hear this are going to want to hear you talk, are going to want to hear your work. So tell us about your website, and how people can find out, how people can listen to some of these. Well, our website is www.LoreoftheLand.org. And there's a funny story. It's not so funny, it's poignant. I inherited a 501-C3 from Lee Udall. Stuart and I were driving Lee from Tucson back up to Santa Fe. And she knew that she had the malaise that would carry her away. And she said, Jack, I want to leave you the 501-C3, which was known then as the Native American Art Scholarship Fund. And so a dear friend, Suzanne Jamison, who has the soul of an artist, she's a saint, but she also knows how to manipulate within the bureaucracy and was able to turn the 501-C3 into the Lore of the Land. And subsequently, our main purpose has been to try to fund ways

of training people of indigenous persuasions in how to record their own oral history. And so I've trained many, many Native American people from the Southwest all the way down into Syrian-dened country in the use of recording devices and how to log it and all of that sort of thing. Even train them in how to edit on pro-tools and on a magnetized computer, which is interesting. Well, we're speaking today with Jack Gleffler about his work as an ethnomusicologist, but we're going to go back to the museum exhibit in this beautiful book that you had voices of counterculture in the Southwest. First of all, I love this photograph. Lee Salon took it. Lee Salon took it. And so this is many chapters with some wonderful people. I particularly love Peter Coyote's chapter in here. But describe the people who participated and what they wrote about in general. What will you find in this book? Well, you'll find the perspectives of people

who have actually lived various aspects of the counterculture movement going all the way back to the very beginning. Actually, I think it begins with, at least part of my part of it begins with an interview I conducted, or an excerpted interview that had conducted with Philip Whalen, who was one of the five poets who read at the Sixth Gallery in October 1955, along with Gary Snyder, Mike McClure, Philip Lamontia, and Alan Ginsberg. I wasn't forget Alan. But Peter Coyote was great that you mentioned him. He was very influential in the whole, hate-ashberry episode, so to speak. It's curious to me that the Trips Festival, which took place in Longshoreman's Hall in 1966, which was produced by Stuart Brand, Ken Keese, and Ramon Barrione Cender, was the bridge between the Beats scene and the hippie scene. And whereas much of the Beats scene took place

in North Beach, the hippie scene took place just immediately east of Golden Gate Park in the hate-ashberry, which has been immortalized as a neighborhood. And I think it was 1967. Peter Coyote, Emmett Grogon, and a few other people moved from the Lower East Side of New York. And they established the Diggers, which was an amazing organization that established a free store for everything. Food, drink, clothes, books, everything. Absolutely everything. And Peter describes a lot of this. And he actually, Peter is a fine writer. He's an excellent writer. He's just really stunning writer. In this chapter he talks about sociological threads that led to the hippies and how they got there and then where they went and what we can learn from them. It's really a profound. It's a fabulous chapter. And then we go into Yvonne Bond,

who was the archetypal hippie lady who hitchhiked around all the way to Mexico, lived with Indians in Hualtla and took the magic mushrooms down there. But she's now living in Las Vegas, New Mexico. And she really describes her adventures beautifully. Lisa Law has a beautiful chapter. Lisa being the fantastic photodocumentarian. I think of it as the celebrity hippie scene. She got portraits of people like Bob Dylan and Alan Ginsberg and others. And Lisa did a beautiful chapter as well. And she has many photographs in this book. And I propose that. Seth Rothman, who was the editor-in-chief of the Greenfire Times, also has a bunch of photographs in this book, which are excellent. We have Peter Rowan, a wonderful folk musician, an old friend from 50 years ago who wrote about his sense of the music of the time. We have Artico Pecki, who lived up at New Buffalo

for seven years, and really turned it into an operating dairy and alfalfa-producing place. Cedique Von Breason, who was just a fabulous fellow human, who was now retired from St. John's College. He's been a tutor up there for 30 years. But he wrote about his sense of llama, his sister Barbara Durkey, now known as Aysha Greer. She and her husband Steve Durkey, actually founded llama with Jonathan Altman back in 1967. And Cedique writes something of this. He also mentions the fact that Rondas was very much involved in this. I knew him as Dick Albert, even before he became Rondas. But he actually did B here now, which is one of the most celebrated hippie books of all time. One of my favorite books. It's a great book, and it's an honest book. And Sylvia Rodriguez, who's a fabulous scholar in her own right, has books out on the Assequia formula.

She's just now recently a marital from UNM, did a fabulous chapter on her life as a young taker of psychedelics. And then, Andrique Lombardred talks beautifully about the evolution of Chicano culture, the genesis of La Academia de la Nueva Rasa. And then Leroy Romero, Levi Romero, has a great poem essay in there about low writers, Lucura. It's great. And my old friend Gary Paul Nabhan talks about the greening of it all. And he was a founder of Native Seedser. She's got over 30 books out himself, a fabulous thinker. He's actually one of the best thinkers I've ever met. And boy, I would love to introduce the two of you. I'd love to interview him. I've always had my eye on him. He's great. Really, the voice of the new agriculture. He really is. And then I have to say this. My dear and great friend,

Reena Swenzal, wrote one of the most beautiful chapters in the book, as far as I'm concerned. And I had asked Reena. She's been a dear friend for decades. I asked Reena if she could write the chapter. She wrote the chapter in six days later. She died. And boy, what a moving moment that was. But she had the perseverance and the clarity of spirit to finish it in beauty. Yeah. When I hear all these threads, and I've read the book, they come together beautifully. But it was so extraordinary, because in Northern New Mexico, the ancient Hispanic culture, and the Assycheus and their agriculture, and all of that, and their low writers. And then the Native American, the Towspeble of Navajo influences, all of this. They all came together. And I don't think it could have happened anywhere else on Earth the way it did here. This is amazing. It's a nexus. It really is. Yeah. On many different levels. I mean, neglected to mention Bill Steen, who is the husband of Athena Swenzal,

who also wrote about the Straubale houses, which is also a huge aspect of evolving counterculture in this moment. And so what we tried to do, this to me was very important to do, is to gather the voices of those who had actually lived various components of it, and put it together in some sort of a compendium that would be appropriate for everybody to read, who wanted to know, as much as we could possibly muster about the nature of counterculture, especially, is it happened in the Southwest? Well, and it's easy to think that it is just taking the telescope and looking far away to the 60s and how it was. But let's go back to the influences of the counterculture today, because people think, oh, hippies, they were all stone, nothing ever happened. But the fact is they had such a profound influence on things that are happening right now. So you've mentioned the Environmental Movement and that Habitat took a priority

instead of being the background. And climate change, a lot of the work with climate change, they were way ahead of that without having the science, but having the comprehension. Actually, my friend, Bill de Buies, really nailed it big time in his book, A Great Errorness. He wrote that came out four or five years ago, and Bill, I regard, is who moved here in 1972. He had a long hair, and he and his friend, Alex Harris, purchased a piece of land up in the Northern hinterland, so to speak, where he is still ranching and farming, and writing books. But his perspective is really interesting to proceed, because here's an historian, who sought from both within and without, and who is living it, in every sense of them. And you can't imagine that somebody doing it, he was a back to the lander, Parex Alance, you know, with horses and cattle, and growing alfalfa, and the whole situation. But the back to the land was a huge aspect of this, and what I'm thinking about right now,

and one of the things that I want to talk with Gary Snyder about, is what was this urge that we all felt back in the 1950s, to that was calling us back to the land. Gary moved from the Bay Area up into his place, up on the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. He lives in a forest, and all of us, or many of us, were compelled to not stay in an urban environment, but rather to re-acquaint ourselves with habitat. And thus, to me, one of the greatest, a huge thing that emerged from that whole milieu, was the whole notion of bio-regionalism, and came along with that, came the notion of the necessity for decentralization of governance. In other words, it has to be, in the words of Eleanor Ostrom, who got a 2009 Nobel Prize for her book, Governing the Commons. It should be, governance should be polycentric. It should include the top, but it should also include, very much,

the grassroots, and then various levels, and be twist and between. And that, to me, is one of the most profound things that he has emerged out of the counter-culture movement. And really, honoring what Monahan said, all politics is local. You know, it just has to start there. And part of the back to the land movement that we still see right now, is the sustainability. And energy conservation and the use of solar. And so their buildings were built using solar gain, and they had wind energy. And they were used as a curiosity then, and yet people took those threads, and they have developed them really profoundly, as energy sources for us now. Absolutely, my friend Reno Mayerson, who does not appear in the book, but certainly appears in my radio series, Voices of Counter-Culture, talks about this enormously, about how there is very little in modern life that doesn't have some aspect of the counter-culture in it.

And when you think you're not old enough to think back that far, but I share am. I remember immediately after World War II, it became sort of a gray zone. It was a golden age that flipped into a gray zone. And by the end of the Korean conflict, it was all about economics and consumerism. And boy, aesthetically, everything had gone right down the tubes and so on. But at any rate. I want to have you tell our audience about the radio series. Okay. Well, anywhere in the state, you'll be able to hear this. Yes, you will. And ultimately, all over the country, it'll be nationally distributed, starting maybe Monday, nationally through public radio exchange. Radio stations can pick it up all over the country. But it's currently being broadcast or will be throughout New Mexico and southern Colorado. It's an eight program series. Each program is 28 minutes and 50 seconds long. And each has,

it follows somewhat chronologically as does the book through the history of counterculture. And we try to go from, well, you hear Alan Reading Howell, which is a great thing. And you hear Philip Whalen talking about the genesis of the beat generation and how Jack Kerawak dubbed it so in 1947. But it goes all the way into modern times. Actually, there's a lovely excerpt of an interview I did with Roxanne Swenzhal, Rina's daughter, who is internationally regarded as a sculptorist, but is profoundly, oh boy, the word went right out of my head. Permaculture. Yes, yes, yes. Permaculture, which is, that began as a concept about 35 years ago. And she took it, she worked at it all these years. One thing that is not to permit is our time. Ah, yes.

Last, we have run out by any chance, will this radio series be available on Lord of the Land later? Yes, it'll be, it'll be downloadable from the Lord of the Land. I'm delighted. There's so much to talk about. I'm sorry we've run out of time. I want everyone to come to the Museum of History in Santa Fe and see this exhibit or look at this beautiful book, Voices of the Counterculture in the Southwest. Our guest today, Jack Leffler. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much, Laurie. It's a pleasure. Thank you. And I'm Lorraine Mills. I'd like to thank your audience for being with us today on Report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Past archival programs of Report from Santa Fe are available at the website, reportfromsatafe.com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at reportfromsatafe.com. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals

who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico. Music plays.