Above photo by my dad.This is the first in a hopefully weekly series of blog posts by my dad. I grew up in a house filled with 12,000 records and innumerable cassettes, reel-to-reels,etc; My insatiable appetite for music is directly related to my dad, who made sure we always had something on the stereo even when we didn't have much to eat. Because of him I have been to a reggae-loving Havasupai reservation in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, been held by Bob Marley as a baby, partyed at Timothy Leary's house and have a member of The Firesign Theatre as my godfather. Whenever I talk to my dad, I always learn something new about him or the world. I think it's time to pass the knowledge on.In the words of my dad:"Fela Kuti is the only person I ever interviewed for our cable tv show, who appeared wearing only a pair of purple bikini briefs. When I asked him to blow something on his sax, he stood up abruptly, and the camera had to snap upward quickly as the briefs began to slide downward. Though this historic exposure was avoided, nevertheless his recounting of his recent 18 month imprisonment on trumped-up currency charges set the record straight. But I was most amused when I suggested that he must have been so happy to see his 27 wives again, he demurred, "Oh, when I got out of prison I divorced them all." "Why?" I asked, incredulous. "Ahhh," he sighed, "marriage is too confining."Fela was once busted for alleged possession of hash, which the cops insisted he had swallowed, so they placed him in solitary confinement until he had to defecate. He avoided this function for several days, and when finally he did, they could find nothing, and they had to release him. So naturally he went right to his studio and made a song about it, the explosive "Expensive Shit."Another song of shivering impact is "Kalakuta Show." Fela declared a portion of his poor section of Lagos to be extra-territorial, and named it "The Kalakuta Republic." When the Nigerian Army raided his headquarters, Fela's band and their associates held them off in a stalemated gun battle. The Army returned in greater numbers, and during the riotous seige that ensued, soldiers threw Fela's mother (the Betsy Ross of the Nigerian Independence movement) out a second-story window. Fela put her body into a plain wooden box, and laid it at the entrance to the Army's headquarters. ''You killed her," he shouted, "You bury her!"This is take-no-prisoners music, a spit in the face of ugly authority, and not young punk posturing. It is the sound of hellfire rebellion itself."
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