STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, then DUNE and now, the major novel of love and terror at the end of time: DHALGREN, by Samuel Delany, four-time Nebula award winner (ilx book club #Y8554)

also funny to see shakey's post about moorcock above because just yesterday blogger (!) emailed me to tell me that i would no longer be receiving comment notifications for my blog "AN ALIEN HEAT" (which is started and abandoned in 2005)

It’s Heinlein at his most nakedly didactic. I havent gone back to it since high school, not sure what I would think of it now.

Also just want to reiterate how shitty Delany’s writing is, Heinlein’s no prose master but he never penned anything as awful as this:

"He mapped the folds that fell, wetly out, with his tongue; and the grisly nut in the folded vortex, and the soft granular trough behind it."

delany's writing can be rough

sometimes his writing is really good though

i think dhalgren is overrated and trition and (especially!) stars in my pocket are underrated

i think delany is at his worst when he tries to do transcendent ... he invents an art form called "micro theatre" in triton, and his attempts to describe how mind-blowing it is are ... not great

i find though that when delany writes about prosaic stuff in triton (like going out to dinner, or playing boardgames, or office politics) he's really great and entertaining

that's why i like "stars in my pocket" so much ... it's really a slice-of-life novel, just set in the future

similar dynamic at work in dhalgren for me, the part where the kid and denny and lanya are jamming out and playing musical poetry or whatever i remember particularly hating

There is some kind of jamming in Nova that bugged me as well.

haha yeah! i remember that bad-ness

the one novel where i thought the music/poetry thing was executed well was "the einstein intersection"

Babel-17 is a wonderful book, I think: a young man's book, probably, but full of verve and imagination and vibrant cleverness and ploymorphous sexual shenanigans.

^^^^ on this. My favorite Delany and the only one I've read more than once.

Just the other day re-read 'Aye, and Gomorrah' for the first time in many years, and it still struck me as one of the greatest of all science fiction short stories - says so much about difference, isolation, the alienation of desire in just a few pages, and its total effect is overwhelmingly sad.

I once read an interview with Delany where he said his initial project in SF was to 'do a Bester', or update Bester, or some such - and you can definitely see that in things like Nova, and the brilliant short story 'Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones' - that same kind of ceaseless invention and slam-bang narrative action combined with, yes, more 'prosaic', here-and-now material that is effective counterpoint to the out-there cosmic purple prose stuff.

As for Stranger In a Strange Land, I also read it many years ago and can remember next to nothing about it, just a vague sense that it really is anticipatory of free love hippiedom. Reading a fair bit of American New Wave SF recently - Ellison, Delany, Zelazny etc - I've been struck by how much stylistically these guys owed to the Beats, rather than Beckett, or Kafka, or 60s experimentalists like Coover, Gass, Pynchon etc. For better or worse, Stranger in a Strange Land isn't very 'beat' at all - it's a strange thing all of its own. But I would say that there are other, more entertaining Heinlein novels that aren't nearly so long, or so humourless.

first 25 pages in (i'm reading the Vintage ed)

"This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain." (p. 14) -- lovely

the heroic journey trinity (armor, weapon, Name) is evocative despite or esp bc of the anachronistic feeling it has (esp in this apocalyptic setting) and weirdly reminded me of the Dungeon Quest books. the chain was particularly confusing for me, lot of almost free floating lack of clarity about things, what they are (inc the protagonist, or who they are).

one thing i'm wondering about is who the "i" is that interjects occasionally. at some pts it seems like the protag thinking to himself such as when he finds the loaf of bread - "I'm not hungry." (p.15) but then in other places it seems like the I might be someone distinct the narrator going through something while retelling the story such as "From this play of night, light, and leather, can I let myself take identity? How can I recreate this roasted park in some meaningful matrix? Equipped with contradictory visions, an ugly hand caged in pretty metal, I observe a new mechanics. I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present." (p. 24) this could be the protag tho in what way is he obliged to "recreate this roasted park in some meaningful matrix" (a task more for an author i feel like), tho the concerns with taking an identity are germane to the protagonist. my impression is that the ugly hand caged in pretty metal is referring to the protag (his hand is badly damaged) so to use it as a sort of ersatz metaphor also confuses my impression of who is talking.

another relevant passage (these slippages into first person when otherwise the protagonist is depicted in third seem to sometimes be poetic + hermeneutical), "It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now. In the long country, cut with rain, somehow there is nowhere to begin." (p.10) More considerations vis-a-vis time and its lack of stability, "somehow there is nowhere to begin" also struck me as a concern of the author as the protag has already begun his "quest" but there is a sense of trying to establish a beginning to the story maybe.

* Another reason I'm unsure is that the protag does think in third person at times as well, eg, "He nodded, while his mind accelerated, trying to decide: him? her?" (p.25)

the text alternates between some really gorgeous prose sometimes with some really clunky and poor prose. sometimes it's hard to pin down what is happening even with lavish description (this is surely somewhat intentional and somewhat my fault reading when i'm tired). also some stuff is dated esp re gender + sex politics. "You show me a place where they tell women to stay out of at night because of all the nasty, evil men lurking there to do nasty, evil things; and you know what you'll find?" "Queers." (p.21), a brief description a few pages later: "A girl on a blanket, with no shirt and really nice breasts..." (p.24). - i'm imaging the depiction of women in this is going to continue to come up as an issue, already they mostly appear as victims or somewhat stock characters.

sorry if any of this is unclear (or dumb) i'm just trying to jot down some notes before i go to sleep. curious if we're following a schedule?

- to start in on Dhalgren on the bus this morning.

one thing i'm wondering about is who the "i" is that interjects occasionally

I think there might be one than one 'I'? Sometimes the kid, sometimes the author, sometimes...?. I see upthread that I banged on about the Bester-Delany connection, but this switching between first and third person couldn't help but remind me of Bester's 'Fondly Farenheit' - again, that's probably deliberate, this is a text that already seems of a piece w/ mainstream early 70s po-mo self-aware lit fic in the way it's obviously v. concerned w/ inter- and extra-textuality, referentiality, semiotic self-criticism, mythological symbolism, all that good stuff. It seems as close to Giles Goat Boy as it does to Stranger in a Strange Land.

Agree w/ Mordy about the clumsiness of the sex stuff, the language used ("nice breasts") - a common flaw in early 70s 'progressive' American SF, but a bit surprising coming from Delany, who was clearly not the regulation horny hetro SF daddy. And yes, some of the writing is clunky or downright poor, but I sort've like the way that that still roots Delany in pulp even while he's pulling off some pretty exciting, sophisticated metatextual whizbang.

So yes, I'm enjoying the first four chapters that I've read - picturesque surreal journey novel w/ all the post-apocalyptic trimmings - v much my kind of thing.

Interesting to read upthread about the Fred Pohl-Dhalgren connection, btw. Read Pohl's novel Man Plus not that long ago, published same sort of time as Dhalgren, and it also uses the narrative trick of suddenly switching to un-identified first person narrative (though Pohl reveals his workings at the end, something I'm p sure Delany isn't going to do...) Pohl, like Bester, definitely feels like a plausible source of inspiration for Delany (and Pohl's much anthologised and very clever short story 'Day Million' also has a grotesque use of the word 'queer' in its opening sentences...)

So much is left uncertain starting with the date that the events are set. When the Kid ("Kit?" she asked. "Kid." "K-y-d-d...?" (p.24) <-- lol yes the very common Kydd) first says he was born in 1948 and is 27 I quickly checked the date that the book was published -- 1975, which would match the Kid's description. He's instantly contradicted tho by the woman ("I was born in nineteen forty-seven. And I'm a good deal older than twenty-eight." (p.5)). And then later in the park the newspaper has been printed with the date 1995. which is maybe also false because "That's just Calkins... the dates are just his little joke." 1995 from the perspective of 1975 would make some sense considering this obviously happened in the "future" so it would be the proper science fiction date maybe, whereas 1975 is the real publishing date (and somehow the date the Kid is stuck to somehow) maybe developing this idea that the protag is shifting between the author / narrator and the Kid? Or just the general uncertainty that extends throughout (not just to the Kid's own personal history and name but also to things like which direction the sun rises from (p.36).

a lot of this reminds me of Fallen London and i wonder if alexis kennedy has read dhalgen. "But what do you do if it gets light in a different place tomorrow?" -- not lovecraftian but just kinda the terror of nature acting uncertainly something we can certainly relate to even if not quite as dramatically as the sun rising from the wrong direction.

the uncertainty of the very architecture of the city: "The whole city shifts, turns, rearranges itself. All the time. And rearranges us..." (p.36) of course cities/urbanity have been rearranging us (and being rearranged by us) for all of history. the insinuation here is that it's happening unguided by human hands but isn't that how it feels for us too? i work in a construction related field and despite having hands on close experiences of being involved with changes in a city they're so tiny and my perspective is so small that the way a city becomes rearranged is totally hidden to me it might as well be unguided by human hands for how overdetermined it is.

"'Dad was a little ballsy, blue-eyed Georgia Methodist ---' that memory's vividness surprised him too --" (p.38) ok understandable he is so vague about so much of his own life and existence that i get why he is surprised. what i'm wondering if who else is surprised? "too" me? the author? probably not Tak. it could be a delaney stylistic thing tho -- i thought maybe to read it as "surprised him in addition to the previous thing that surprised him," but couldn't find any likely contender and then just two pages later "That sounded funny, too; so he laughed." again no clear other funny thing to 'rhyme' this one with. it's disorienting and i wonder he's using it to try to create a sense of repetition.

"Rhythm is the only thing secure. In this darkness, rising, I recall the Pacific stars. This ritual ascendance goes on in a city that has erased them and blurred its sun out altogether. Iron Wolf has something. I want it without the bother of definitions. The dangerous illumination, the light in the exploding eye, is not for this other city." (p.40) -- he thinks of Tak by the name he doesn't prefer, maybe because Tak's preferred names "Red Wolf" + "Fire Wolf" have evocations of light and this is a place of darkness? What is it that he feels Tak has that he wants without the bother of definitions? Could be so much; community, knowledge, an identity? Maybe just being fixed in some way and not untethered. What is the dangerous illumination - what is the other city? The real city that Delaney is sitting in writing this book?

Tak had a swastika tattoo removed and his walls are covered with photos of adolescent youths with "huge" bared genitalia. uh oh. He also owns a lot of books about motorcycles, Keats, and some sci fi. The Kid is judgey about the motorcycle books. Weekend in Hell, a TRue Story of the Angels as Told by Millicent Brash -- he read the first paragraph of ill-lined type, shook his head, and put it down." or maybe just the typeface was hard to read? hard to tell.

"At the pungence of thyme and fennel, the space beneath his tongue flooded." (p.44)

"trying to pick the next date for the Times could be the Bellona equivalent to playing the numbers." (p.46 lol so apparently Calkins dates really cannot be trusted or maybe he's just noting the rapidly shifting time?

"Jesus Christ, man! What's the matter with you -- that stuff all over your dick!" [...] "That's not dandruff. I was with a woman. Just before I met you. Only I didn't get a chance to wash." "Was she sick?" (p.49) O_O

not totally sure what the Kid discovers about Tak "Without white or pupil, the balls were completely crimson." red eyes? some kind of cybernetics? "With darkness in his eyes, the red memory was worse than the discovery." (p.52)

"he felt the frown, from inside; a twisting in his facial flesh he could not control" - feelings of disassociation that echo Tak's non-human eyes maybe? then a little later, "Tears were on his cheek" -- he experiences dissociation from his very real body parts exposing a kind of deficiency in his response to Tak's eyes I feel like the text is suggesting. assuming Tak's eye is a cybernetic sitch or at least I think it definitely suggests something augmented or Other than natural eyes but here that kind of distinction is collapsed even the natural things about natural eyes can still feel external / uncontrollable / alienated.

"The street sign on the corner lamppost said Broadway." (p.53) but we know Bellona isn't NY bc he discusses NY with the girls who give him the orchid earlier.

Wow, that post is almost as long as Dhalgren itself.

Sorry, couldn’t resist

Mordy, is this your first time reading Dhalgren?

I picked it up and started a distracted rereading today and caught a detail I'd missed before — the first appearance of the red eyes is in Muriel the dog (Bantam edition, p. 18). The "stuff all over your dick" line has always bugged me -- I can't imagine having sex and not giving my dick at least a cursory wipe afterward.

my first time yeah

“Rather what we know as real is burned away at invisible heat. What we are concerned with is more insubstantial.”

0 pages in and so far it's less impenetrable than advertised. Ok it starts with an encounter with a naked woman who has sex with our hero then turns into a tree, but nothing too challenging happens after that. When he sees the dragons and scorpions in the park I thought the city might be something like the Zone, altered by ineffable alien presence; when he finds out they are holograms his disappointment echoed mine. People and dogs with red eyes though...

The textbook containing the novel itself seemed too easy, maybe hinting at the same thing as the end of The Man in the High Castle, but there it seems profound and well earned after what has gone before, here it seems like a throwaway gimmick.

The 3rd/1st person perspective shifts, while maybe somewhat postmodern in intent, don't seem to be in danger of destabilising the narrative.

All that said, I'm enjoying it! It's just not (yet?) as weird as i expected.

(Mordy wrote:)
"The street sign on the corner lamppost said Broadway." (p.53) but we know Bellona isn't NY bc he discusses NY with the girls who give him the orchid earlier.

Earlier on Tak tells the kid "the street becomes Broadway as soon as it leaves the waterfront". There can't be only one Broadway in the US?

Minor pedantic details:
There's maybe a thousand left out of a city of two million: only one out of a hundred homes should be occupied.

This doesn't really compute; maybe Tak isn't good with numbers but that doesn't square with his profession/interests.

Thyme, fennel seeds, rosemary and garlic: pretty fancy seasoning for a breakfast of ham eggs and bread.

0 pages in make that 80.

All that said, I'm enjoying it! It's just not (yet?) as weird as i expected.
Wasn’t one of the original objections that it wasn’t sf enough, or so I seem to recall

(not sure if i'm allowed to interject as i'm not actually rereading it right now myself but bellona is often identified as oakland -- which also has a broadway -- tho i don't recall if SRD himself has sanctioned this identification)

xp i wasn't expecting spaceships (since the introduction in my edition said "you'll wait in vain for the spaceships") but was expecting more cryptic writing. Oh, one thing it says in my introduction re: the less than progressive gender politics:

Delany who makes a point of transforming his own life into art, made certain decisions when it came to the final cut, and it seems he chose to present his younger self as he was: unreconstructed, a rebel without a cause [...] The Kid doesn't want to identify himself politically as Gay he just wants to get laid.

Always get confused between Bellona and Belladonna and then think of the Only Ones song "Deadly NIghtshade."

less impenetrable than advertised.

just a lack of clarity and lots of questions left open -- who was the woman? what was her deal at the end of their interaction? why did she send him into the cave? what was the deal with the chains he found? etc. and the questions keep piling up but it's not really posed like a mystery there's no hook to find out what it all really means so i can why ppl would be repelled by all the uncertainty and intentional confusion.

it's not difficult to decipher at all on a syntactical level if that's what u mean by impenetrable it's no finnegan's wake

There are definitely paragraphs that I can't immediately make sense of when they occur in the narrative (they might become clearer later) and which seem to exist mainly for poetic or atmospheric effect - eg this one right at the start of the second section:

Here I am and am no I. This circle in all, this change changing in winterless, a dawn circle with an image of, an autumn change with a change of mist. Mistake two pictures, one and another. No. Only in seasons of short-light, only on dead afternoons. I will not be sick again. I will not. You are here.

That's true but they're not frequent or long enough to be off-putting - that may change. And yes there are those unanswered questions, I suppose at the beginning it's easy to assume that answers will be forthcoming and not worry about it. That too may change.

I appreciate this thread, I think I read this at the right time in my life and have been afraid to re-read (in case it doesn't hold up and I tarnish the memory). But I was thinking about it a lot as a favorable comparison when reading that new Marlon James.

xpost
William Gibson's quote about Dhalgren - "A riddle that was never meant to be solved" - makes me think answers (within the text) might never be forthcoming. And that's OK.

After 6 or 7 readings, I'm most interested in the references to Greco-Roman mythology and theology, despite Delany's caution not to get too hung up on them. I never studied any mythologies in school, so I didn't get any of the references until I found an expansion of the book's Wiki page that provided a partial key. I won't link to it unless asked because SPOILERS. But having that extra textual level available made my most recent reading hella fun.

It’s easy, he thought, to put sounds with either white (maybe the pure tone of an audio generator; and the other, its opposite, that was called white noise), black (large gongs, larger bells), or the primary colors (the variety of the orchestra). Pale grey is silence.

Classic synaesthesia.

"It does not offer me any protection, this mist; rather a refracting grid through which to view the violent machine, explore the technocracy of the eye itself, spelunk the semi-circular canal. "

Maybe the city is his mind, his damaged psyche, which he is exploring to (re) discover his identity. Echoing an earlier passage when he's describing his mental illness to Tak:

But the real mind is invisible: you’re less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you see … until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it. Because it hurts …

He's mentioned discovering the source of the smoke that blankets the city, this could be the trauma that cost his memory.

Delany, of course, is The Kid, grown up. So it's his mind, his memories. The notebook just is the novel, simultaneously complete and a work in progress.

Just a thought.

I've been thinking along similar lines, ledge - and also that Delany is not just Kidd, but Bellona too - the author as city, an impossible space of constant, disordered, shifting invention and fancy - architecture of mind and place, etc.

Yes, definitely.

Another minor detail I forgot: so he goes over in fine detail how the orchid was on his hand after leaving Tak's even though he absolutely did not stop to pick it up; later on there's something similar that passes without mention - he is definitely holding the notebook, then a page later Lanya gives it to him.

Happy 77th birthday to SRD today.

Newboy is a bit of a bore.

This is fine, not very avant garde as thomp says above. There are puzzles - what's up with The Kid, what's the deal with the chains, the red eyes - but it doesn't seem as purposefully cryptic as e.g. The Book of The New Sun, where it seemed the real themes only became apparent if you solved the puzzles. Here the themes are pretty obvious.

so I didn't get any of the references until I found an expansion of the book's Wiki page that provided a partial key

Will be interested to see this when I'm done though.

Newboy is a bit of a bore.

Heh, I am in the section with his long monologues just now - can't tell if his boorishness is deliberate, or if he's yet another SRD alter-ego (this time as 'major poet'). The preceding George Harrison monologue about rape and female desire was - surprise - even more problematic, though some of the implicit feminist critique embedded in it feels extremely #metoo relevant, even prescient.

This comment upthread from late great has definitely resonated with me while reading Dhalgren -

i find though that when delany writes about prosaic stuff in triton (like going out to dinner, or playing boardgames, or office politics) he's really great and entertaining

Like, I really enjoyed the long sequence at the Richards' dinner table, where routine domestic chat is undercut by all sorts of familial strife.

Also enjoying the curiously (post-sixties) benign vision of apocalyptic living. Bellona is smouldering, in crisis, but money, employment and status are no longer very important (the Richards clinging to the prestige of a good job and a nice home are clearly delusional/hysterical), and almost everyone that Kid encounters (apart from some of the scorpions, maybe, and even then...) offers to share food, living spaces, bodies, wisdom etc with him. This kind of relaxed communal vibe comes at the expense of fast narrative momentum, but I can live with that - it's a trip, as they say.

The preceding George Harrison monologue about rape and female desire was - surprise - even more problematic, though some of the implicit feminist critique embedded in it feels extremely #metoo relevant, even prescient.

I got that vibe, but there's a danger of course of thinking this is the first time in history when our eyes are truly open to the reality of sexual assault. Either way it definitely swings wildly between 'right on' and 'er, nope...'. (Also, curious name to pick for the guy.)

Also enjoying the curiously (post-sixties) benign vision of apocalyptic living

Yes, I see it as the revolution realised/explored through the lens of post apocalyptic fiction. The traditional power structures (The Man) have disappeared, The Kids have moved into the gap and it's the squares (the Richards) who now seem out of joint with the times. It's not exactly the dawning of the age of aquarius, it's less optimistic/more realistic than that, but they're doing ok.

(Also, curious name to pick for the guy.)

In The Einstein Intersection, The Beatles have become the stuff of myth and legend (Ringo especially!) - fab four definitely one of SRD's obsessions.

Almost exactly halfway through now, and my main question is - what's a Dhalgren?

For one thing, the children run by, calling Grendal Grendal Grendal Grendal

Thanks dow, don't think I've got to that bit yet - but one thing I'm noticing more and more is how Delany's storytelling mirrors the idea of the shifting city, as experienced by someone with memory loss and a history of mental illness; the book is deliberately repetitive, contradictory, opaque, circular, without event, filled with acres and acres of slangy, discursive, abbreviated, random chatter, so the overall effect is of a 'story' where narrative detail/coherence, the order (never mind meaning) of events constantly slip through yr reading mind - if you can even be sure that 'story' is happening at all. Parts of it are very bad just at the level of the sentence - yes, most ruinously in the many sexual encounters in the book - but the overall effect is - something. It really isn't like any other novel I've read, for good and bad, and as you go on there is this very powerful, cumulative feeling that things are happening deep in the book's subtextual undergrowth - and as of page 430 we haven't even gone underground in Bellona yet. I like what Henry James said about reading Proust - “inconceivable boredom associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine”.

I'm going to have to start marking up my copy with sticky tabs or something -- I looked for a crucial scene that addresses Ward's question last night for 20 minutes but the damn thing is so long I couldn't find it. Kid's haywireness with time is forced onto the reader -- the last time I read the book in full, I was especially keen on getting to a particular scene, which I remembered being about halfway through. Turns out it was in the last 60 pages.

Hah this morning I'd reached page 549 and was feeling p good abt myself for doing so, when I moved from left to right page and found that approx the next 50 pages were simply missing from my copy of this UK paperback edition:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR9-ihoHrdYO6ryjaqkY9sr-Ffp3xF1Mj-cKVmSyUeN3DkGrlEtNQ

At first, without noticing the page numbers, I genuinely thought Delany had just abruptly time-shifted between one segment and another, but no, this was a printing error, an extreme example of the editorial carelessness which seems to attend a lot of these mammoth modernist novels - it's perhaps Dhalgren's strongest link to Ulysses.

For me, reading these huge things is all about momentum - no stopping! - so this evening I bought a replacement copy of the most recent UK edition. It's bigger, and better presented on the page, but I really hate the cover on this one:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51-80RbzT9L._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

The Right Rev. T-Bone Burnett! Looking resentful, as usual. How the Hell did the artist make this connection?

uggghhhh, every single one of those Gollancz SF Masterworks covers is a crime against their author.

imo

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/ac/Dhalgren-bantam-cover.jpg/220px-Dhalgren-bantam-cover.jpg

or gtfo

I'm still surprised at how readable this book is; aside from the odd bad sentence ('bare breasts joggling jingling links' is currently my favourite), and the sex scenes (pretty matter-of-fact but way too long), the prose is very easygoing, and even though it's not exactly narratively compelling there's something pulling me along. And every now and then there'll be something startlingly quotidian and human, even amusing, like the bit i've just read where Lanya visits The Kid's new nest and lightheartedly tells him what a shithole it is, then Bunny turns up and does an amazing camp turn.

It also reminds me of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. Stylistically they're completely different, but both are about someone with a memory problem entering a strange city with dreamlike shifts in space and time, on some kind of quest or mission that's never defined, where they seem to get pulled along by events out of their control.

what if synaesthesia but too much

Heard a vintage KSAN (San Francisco) radio ad the other day that mentioned concert tickets being on sale at Roger Calkins' Music Store, and remembered that the book was partially written in SF.

How did you happen to hear that ad, and how other the day? Recently?

I read this book for the first time at age 13; I found it in a spinner rack somewhere, a drugstore most likely. It's hard to overstate the impression it made on me then; as much as the story itself, the structure (or lack of structure) of the book itself, the anarchic possibilities it opened up, I had never so much as considered before. I reread it maybe 10 years ago, and thought it had very much held up. One thing that struck me was its echo of Gravity's Rainbow, particularly in the scene where the Kid discovers that Someone is manufacturing and supplying the weapons, holograms, chains, etc. that are the recurring images/items in the book.

(I am referring to the scene at the "Maitland Systems Engineering Warehouse," btw)

@dow, via the excellent https://psychedelicized.com "radio" station, which puts just the right amount of late 60s radio spots in amongst the songs. This was a Tom Donahue spot for some upcoming concert and where to get tickets, iirc.