Let’s Work Together
by Gerry Fialka
Together we’ll stand, divided we’ll fall
Come on now people, let’s get on the ball and work together
Come on, come on let’s work together, now, now people . . .
These classic lyrics evoke the spirit of Venice. “Let’s Stick Together” was written by Wilbert “Kansas City” Harrison in 1962. Three years later, Canned Heat began their mission to boogie forever. They did the most remembered version in 1970 and renamed it, “Let’s Work Together.” With integrity and authenticity, they righteously claim their title “the kings of the boogie” with more classics like “On the Road Again”, and “Going Up the Country.” Earthy and otherworldly!
On Saturday October 7, 2023, the Venice Heritage Museum (aka VHM) hosted their second annual Film Festival. Kudos to Kristina von Hoffmann, Mike Murphy, and the VHM crew for an amazing community gathering at their new location. I was fortunate to world premiere my new short film “Sponto Gallery, Venice CA.” We will be screening a revised version at the 21st annual Venice Film Fest on Jan20, 2024 online at Laughtears.com
Also – Celebrate Venice with the VHM on Dec9 from 6 to 9pm at 228 Main Street https://www.veniceheritagemuseum.org/
Mike got some old rare silent footage of Venice neighborhoods. He decided to play Canned Heat music recorded at the Fox Venice Theater for the soundtrack. I suggested we ask Stanley “The Blues Baron” Behrens to blow some live harp along with the recorded track. Stanley infused the film with his magical musings. Another super treat was Natan Goransky showing up unannounced with never-before-seen films of late 60’s and early 70’s Venice that his Dad shot. Mike smartly screened it as the pre-show. Natan will be returning from his home of Argentina early next year, and needs a room to rent. He’ll be making a feature on Venice. So please contact me if you can help: Gerry Fialka pfsuzy@aol.com.
Venetian Lance Miccio made the cool 2009 documentary called “Living the Blues: the Story of Canned Heat.” When we screened it at Sponto Gallery years ago, I interviewed the drummer Fito de la Parra. His outrageous book is a must read, Living the Blues: Canned Heat’s Story of Music, Drugs, Death, Sex and Survival. They play Venice West on Jan13, and also do not miss Stinkfoot Orchestra there on Feb25, playing the music of Frank Zappa, with one of the very best Zappa vocalist/players, Napoleon Murphy Brock.
Here’s some local music heroes recalling their Canned Heat stories:
Venice musician supreme Brad Kay was asked by Canned Heat to go to Woodstock with them. His parents said, “No!” From Brad Kay: Here’s what I know about Canned Heat. I met Richard Hite, the younger brother of Bob “The Bear” Hite, in late 1968. I was on the quest for early jazz 78s, especially by Bix Beiderbecke, and was having trouble meeting anyone who even knew what I was talking about. Then I met Richard, who seemed to have the keys to the vault! He came to my house with a carry-box FULL of original OKehs, Gennetts, Paramounts and Vocalions!
So I became Richard’s sidekick, and remained so till he left for Memphis Tennessee, in 1975. By hanging out with Richard, I learned all about records, Auctions, and the importance of keeping time. We played together a little on piano and bass, and he ended up exploding, “BRAD KAY, you have the WORST sense of time of any musician I ever played with!!” This didn’t break us up. Richard and I made frequent excursions to Topanga Canyon, to the “treehouse” at 704, his brother’s home. I grokked immediately that Bob was the real source, the Big Bopper of 78 collecting, and I revelled in his wondrous archives – five thousand 78s, ten thousand 45s! Bob’s house was where I discovered R. Crumb comix, and marijuana!!
Brad Kay and Kurt Nauck , 78RPM
Shortly before he died in 1981, I was an involuntary guest for 24 hours at Bob’s house. I came to trade records, and due to his mean junk-yard dog, who would bite me in the ass if I left the house, I stayed the night. So I observed Bob’s daily routine. He weighed about three hundred pounds, and would rise in the morning like a steam locomotive firing up, taking hours before the drivers kicked in. His taste in music started after breakfast with ‘20s jazz and novelty stuff – he had the original Vitaphone Disc of Will Hays introducing talking pictures – then he’d get into jump blues, like Louis Jordan and Johnny Otis, by sundown it was John Lee Hooker and Charley Patton. A new member of Canned Heat dropped by after dark, by which time Bob was rollin’ and he delivered to this unsuspecting guy, an impassioned speech – a pep talk, really – about how the Blues were EVERYTHING to him – that he didn’t know one note from another, but goddammit, he KNEW the blues, and how to make it MOVE. I think I spent a day and a half with him, because I had to wait until ten pm, when “Buster” had his dinner, and I could safely leave!!
Now, I didn’t much care for rock ‘n’ roll, because I already was hooked on ragtime, jazz and early blues, and Rock seemed out of proportion and crude. But Canned Heat held my ear, because, unlike every other Rock band, they drew their inspiration directly from Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and the other Mississippi Delta singers; John Lee Hooker, and others. The Heat sounded authentic, especially when “Blind Owl” Alan Wilson was involved. Their biggest hit, “Goin’ Up the Country” was taken verbatim from a 1928 record by Henry Thomas, “Bull Doze Blues.” I respected them for that!
I never made the Venice connection with Canned Heat. The closest I came was in 1976, when my band played on Windward Avenue, at the Windward Cafe, in the space that later became Danny’s Deli. Richard attended, and didn’t like what he heard! He said our band, “The Majestic Dance Orchestra” wasn’t solid enough, and of course, couldn’t keep time! I guess Richard and Bob’s biggest influence on me musically was about keeping rock solid, copasetic time. It’s taken me only about fifty years to get with it. I’ll tell you more, I’ll even undergo hypnosis, but that’s substantially it.
From Steve F’dor: I knew the original members of Canned Heat, traded records with them and even played one of their gigs in 1980, prior to Bob Hite’s death. Fito is the only surviving member, though their original drummer was Frank Cook, who lived in Venice prior to his death a couple of years ago. I also know the members of the current group and saw them at Venice West when they played there a few months ago I recall they played at the Fox Venice. They also played at Boomer’s on Lincoln in the mid-70s, which had previously been known as “The Attic” and eventually became “The Blue Lagune Saloon”, where I encountered and jammed with Stevie Ray Vaughn. Also “Casablanca”, the restaurant that’s the subject of one of the films at the VHM Film Festival, had previously been a country & western honky-tonk called the “HaystackSaloon”. My friend Jack Cochran used to play there. Jack made rockabilly records in the 50s and had a bit part in the Marilyn Monroe flick “Let’s Make Love”.
From Leon Rubenhold:
“Here’s a little something regarding Canned Heat from somebody that was there 5 plus decades ago. Back in the mid 1960’s at the legendary folk club the Ashgrove; Canned Heat, The Outlaw Blues Band (my group) Pacific Gas and Electric, The Ice House Blues Band with James Harman, Taj Mahal and other local blues band would congregate and hang out together on a consistent basis. I watched many a set of Canned Heat there with drummer Frank Cook who later went on to play with Pacific Gas and Electric. “Blind Owl” Al Wilson on harp and 2nd guitar a serious blues student played very unanimated on stage but let his playing do the moving and talking and his singing was very reminiscent of Skip James. Lead singer Bob the “Bear” Hite prowled the stage with his massive figure, long hair and beard. Larry “the Mole” Taylor played a relentless bass line while bobbing his head in time to the groove and stinging his way to the top on lead guitar was Henry “the Sunflower” Vestine. Sadly all those guys are gone but the band lives on with its current line up holding down the traditional groove established over five plus decades ago.
Angelic Addendum: PEACE PEACE PERFECTPEACE . . .
The Marshall McLuhan-FINNEGANS WAKE Reading Club has received world-wide press and radio coverage since we spent 28 years to read the book aloud with a group of people in Venice California. We began reading it again in November, 2023. It is a cyclical book, with the last sentence ending mid-sentence and continuing at the beginning. This mobius strip of mosaic writing, FINNEGANS WAKE, is the “the greatest guide to the media ever devised on this planet, and is a tremendous study of the action of all media upon the human psyche and sensorium.” – Marshall McLuhan. Wake up all you non-Finnegan readers. James Joyce’s clarion call is addressed to everyone, so “WAKE UP!”
You can laugh that we took 28 years to read one novel, but please note that James Joyce took 28 languages to say one word to the world: “Peace.”
On the eve of war in 1939, Joyce called for peace and repeated the word peace in 14 pairs in 28 languages. Síocháin is Irish for peace, just like salaam and shalom is peace in Arabic and Hebrew. And Joyce wrote in both Ukrainian and Russian, too, calling on each for “mir” and “myr.” Joyce knew then what we know now, the world needs peace.
See page 271 of Finnegans Wake, or take my word as one of his unhurried readers: Joyce wrote a powerful call for peace. Sure, he gave his twist, his Joyce touch, rendering it “Mirra! Myrha! Solyma! Salemita!” But he caps this 28-word play on the words of peace with a prayer of reverent clarity: “O Peace!”
Joyce mashed up two words “please’ and “peace” on page 278 to form “Plece.” James A. W. Heffernan wrote: “Against the threat of war and annihilation, Joyce proclaims – in his own inimitable way – the power to re-create language, to ridicule dictatorship, and to rise again – like Finnegan.”
Author of the book The Ethics of Love, Dr. Benjamin Boysen wrote “From all accounts, Joyce is said to have claimed that World War II need never have happened if Europeans had read his last book, FINNEGANS WAKE.”
James Joyce said, “Now they’re bombing Spain. Isn’t it better to make a joke instead, as I have done?” That reminds me of Zappa saying, “I’m very serious about being not serious.” Embrace contradictions? Another key WAKE word is “Laughtears.” We laugh and we cry, the human condition. We fall, then we get backup. There’s dark and light. It is both simple and complex, as in the book title: “The Media Simplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos” by Donald F. Theall. Dream awake in satirizing of information overload with another WAKE word mash-up: “chaosmos,” that is combining “chaos” and “cosmos,” evoking the cyclic dance of creation. The constant universal and complementary movement between chaos and cosmos, between disorder and order, between harmony and dissonance.
On my Youtube podcast “I’m Probably Wrong About Everything” I asked Sam Slote, who co-edited the landmark book “How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake”, “how has studying Joyce shaped your behavior?” He said, “I try to be more tolerant,but I probably don’t always succeed.” Sam emphasizes these words from the WAKE: “First we feel, then we fall.” Joyce’s 1939 book Finnegans Wake probes peace over military in resolving conflict. Today, we still resort to military. What’s up with that? Is no one awake? In the Venice tradition of promoting peace, Joyce’s response to the nightmarish history of warfare is exactly stressed in three words on page 364 “peace peace perfectpeace!”
Philippe Sollers famously pronounced that the novel is the most formidably anti-fascist work produced between the two World Wars. Benjamin Boysen stresses: “Joyce’s self-declared war on language in the Wake effectively fuses the poetic with a hilarious socio-ideological critique. Joyce’s new language thus paves the way – through its linguistic ridicule and deconstruction of the established, repressive power-ideologies – for an opening up of the new: a dynamic potentiality stressing freedom, love, and solidarity.”
Let us resonant with “stressing freedom, love, and solidarity.” That sounds like pure, uncut VENICE, CALIFORNIA.
How do we keep our governments from going to war? How does reading aloud a book with a group of people cause community, empathy, tranquility, patience, respect, compassion, kindness, self-control, courage, moderation, forgiveness, equanimity, and the ability to see the big picture?
Learn more. Google “Finnegans Wake Venice Fialka” and read the articles in the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years
and The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/16/finnegans-wake-book-club-california/
Visit the YouTube channel “Gerry Fialka Archives GFA” for more on radio and TV, like NPR, CBS Evening News.
https://www.youtube.com/@gfa1930/videos
McLuhan archivist Robert Dobbs declares that the WAKE is “rock’n’roll in print.” It is like a group of vibrant people singing The Kingsmen’s version of “Louie, Louie” with the Richard Berry lyrics in front of them. When John Lennon read a chapter of FINNEGANS WAKE, he said, “It’s GREAT and I dug it and I felt like – here’s an old friend.” Since 1969, we continue to sing aloud, “Give Peace A Chance.” PEACE PEACE PERFECT PEACE, PLEASE.
Thank you, I welcome your input, Gerry Fialka pfsuzy@aol.com Laughtears.com