What about Harry Barch riding the freights as a hobo across America?Ending up in California and creating his own musical scale.Building beautiful American junkyard instruments to perform his outsider tunes on.Reciting eight graffiti inscriptions off a Barstow highway railing.Harry Barch.I am Harry Barch, a composer.My compositions, a few of which are here recorded,employ a scale, instruments, and manner of performancethat are not necessarily the same.Different from that of current musical practice.I must go back a little ways.I think it was perhaps worse in the early 1920s than it is now,although perhaps not.That is the use of English in what is called serious music.It's a kind of English that is totally,impossibly of communication in any place in the British Isles that I know,any place in this country, Canada or Australia.It's a refined and particularly stylized English speech,which distressed and appalled me.I had been studying, and when I was a hobo,I began studying hobo speech.I had been studying the speech around me,and this is what I wanted to make it,the speech around me,not this strange language that was sung by people in operaand on the concert stage.What about Jack Kerouac,wandering through the streets of San Franciscoin search of work as a railroad switchman?Drunk on cheap port wine,digging the sounds in the last old burlesque and alley jazz joints,because the only truth was music.It's a jam session Sunday afternoon in a San Francisco jazz cellar.The joint is roaring.It's the beat generation, the beat to keep,the beat of the heart.It's being beat and down and out in the world.And now here's Jack Kerouac,reading October and the Railroad Earth,Steve Allen on piano.piano plays softlypiano plays softlyThere was a little alley in San Francisco,back of the Southern Pacific Station at 3rd and Townsend,in red brick of drowsy, lazy afternoons,with everybody at work and offices.In the air you feel the impending rush of their commuter frenzy.As soon they'll be charging en masse for marketand Sansom buildings on foot and in busesand all well-dressed through working man Frisco of walk-up truck drivers.And even the poor grime be marked 3rd Street of lost bums,even Negroes so hopeless and long left Eastand meanings of responsibility and try.And now all they do is stand there spitting in the broken glass,sometimes 50,in one afternoon against one wall at 3rd and Howard.Here's all these Millbrae and San Carlos neat necktied producersand commuters of America and steel civilizationrushing by with San Francisco Chronicles and green-called bulletins,not even enough time to be disdainful.They've got to catch 130, 132, 134, 136,all the way up to 146till the time of evening supper in homes of the Railroad Earth,when high in the sky the magic stars ride above the following hot...Chuck-freight trains.Finally, what about Lenny Bruce?Savaging American hypocrisy and religion,only to be hounded to death by the American legal system,the cops, the Catholic Church.Lenny Bruce,the man Dick Gregory called the eighth wonder of the world.Dick said you'd have to go back as far as Mark Twain,to find anything like Lenny.That is, if they don't kill him or throw him in jail.Then Lenny was busted, deported from Britain,busted again in L.A., Chicago, New York, San Francisco,where he was finally declared a legally bankrupt pauper in 1964.Lenny was hassled not so much for dirty wordsas what he said between the words.Here's Lenny Bruce.When people say to me,how come you're divorced,I always make up a lie.I say, my mother-in-law broke up my marriage.They say, well, how'd that happen?I say, one day my wife came home early from workand she found us in bed together.She's an old woman, but firm.I don't know if there's any losers sitting out here,but when you, you know, you break upwith your old lady, you get divorced.The places that you go together,and when you go in alone,they always say, where is,I don't know if it's the market or the laundromat,they'll say, where's your wife?They say, undivorced.There's always an embarrassed silence.You don't know what to do.You should get together, you know.A lovely couple.They don't know what the hell,they don't even know you, but they...So we used to go to a Chinese restauranton this trip a lot, you know.And last time, just for years, we went there together.So when I go in alone,the way this is to me,well, that's more.Mama, how come you don't bring Mama anymore?Such a beautiful girl,the wrong red hair, but like her.Here's some cookies.Bring Mama home some cookies.I said, I'm divorced.She said, oh, you better off.