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TIMELESS RECORDING SOCIETY'S MEMORIBILIA ARCHIVE SAN FRANCISCO--Sandy Bull is back and, yes, he's been down so long it looks like up to him. Back five years ago, Sandy Bull was eclecticism personified. His music, represented by two albums on Vanguard, covered classical, jazz, folk, Middle Eastern, electronic, and Chuck Berry fields, all fused together through his banjo, his electric Fender, and his 11-string Arabic oud. Sandy Bull was far ahead of his time; an acclaimed musical genius at age 24. He was also a smack shooter. Five years into his career, in 1965, his down-hill trip began, and by 1967, his act was so out of control that he had it down pat: Doped out of his head, he'd show up at his gig late. On stage, he'd stumble around around hazily between his instruments and the elaborate electronic consoles that provided the vibrato, fuzz-tone, bass-boost and other effects to his sound. One example was the 1967 San Francisco State Folk Festival where, after a half hour of tuning up and mumbling to himself, he played for, he recalled, "about ten minutes and split." "Two years ago," he recalled, "I played the Committee Theatre, and after that, I got a review that said in the headline: 'Goodbye, Sandy Bull.' And the critic wrote all about how long I took to set up, and said he'd rather stay home and listen to my records than go to any of my concerts. "It was good that he did it," said Bull, smiling. "I needed some kind of indication that I was fucking up." Bull, a tanned, lanky figure who hides his almost Oriental eyes behind a pair if tinted wire-rim glasses, pulled up his right sleeve, up past the elbow. He really was fucked up. "There was even a death rumor going around when Richard Farina died," he said. "It was crazy. I was killed in a motorcycle accident in Turkey. I had OD'd somewhere. I was dead in Vietnam. Every college I played, people'd come up and say, 'Hey, I thought you were dead.' And it came just at the worst time. I was staring death in the face every day, and that made me wake up." Bull went to Mendocino State Hospital, two counties north of San Francisco, last winter, where he went through a two-month drug rehabilitation program. There, he played 'games'--"Synanon-type things, encounter sessions with the people in my program. But I didn't let too much of myself out, so all they could pick on was my hair. Then they gave me a collegiate cut (for talking to an inmate who wasn't in the drug unit), and I was down to about an inch all around. Then they found out that I'd smoked some grass, and I was afraid they'd get me completely bald, and that's when I split." During his last weeks at Mendocino, Bull began playing his oud again. "But when I went up there, I didn't even want to touch an instrument--I was so demoralized. I knew I was incapable of doing anything at that time." Bull returned to his San Francisco flat in December and began to re-assemble his equipment. Two weeks ago, he returned to the stage, to the Matrix, the club where so many bands were being born in 1966 while he'd been so close to dying. Playing mostly tunes from his three albums (Fantasias, Inventions, and a March 1969 release, E Pluribus Unum), Bull was in pre-smack form, spitting out a spacey tribute to Chuck Berry with "Memphis, Tennessee," then a reverberated double-bow, in "Gavotte," to Bach , and to the blues. On his fretless oud, he picked out "Manha de Carnival," using his old technique of self-accompaniment with a tape track. On other numbers, he backed himself of foot cymbal while he played guitar. The audiences, good, solid crowds of friends and recollectors all four nights, gave him warm applause. It's the same old Sandy Bull--more perfectionist than showman, meticulously adjusting control knobs on his amps and on his Fender, which looked like it'd undergone open-heart surgery, tuning his oud before every number, playing introspectively through every set. The difference is, nowadays, Bull is straight. "I finally realized that being stoned in front of an audience gives vibes to them that you don't care. You know you care if you're sweating when playing. I'm sweating now." Bull, the pioneer blender of musical idiom, has revamped and streamlined his electronic equipment, but has no plans for major changes or extensions in his undefinable music repertoire. I don't plan to use the Moog," he said, "because I don't play keyboard. Anyway there's a point where electronics just take over and you lose a certain human feeling in your music. But I might try playing a guitar through a Moog." Bull also experimented with the wah-wah pedal at the Matrix--"but it's got to be used very sparingly. A lot of the interest in my playing is in small details." Bull is 29 now. He was born in New York City and was part of the early Greenwich Village folk scene, playing and singing on MacDougal Street across from the Cafe Wha and young Bobby Dylan. Before that he was in the Boston/Cambridge folk circle, while in college, playing in coffee houses and occationally backing Joan Baez. By 1961, he'd recorded with groups like The Samplers and the Washington Square Singers, playing banjo, a major instrument on his first solo album. And everything fitted together. "I am an easily influenced person," he said by way of explanation. "I sang in choruses in college--which meant singing old music." After recording "Fantasias," he met Hamza El Din, the Nubian musician that inspired Sandy to get serious with the oud. "It was like a re-fucking-freshing musical experience," said Bull. "It's hard to talk about, but it's like...something that makes you want to do better." Bull also tried the sarod, but stuck with the oud. "There's something about Arab instruments, their simplicity. Like the flute is just a piece of bamboo. But it seems to be just as hard to make something simple sound good as it is to make a complex, modern instrument sound good." In 1967, after the SF State festival debacle, Bull settled down in San Francisco. He played a gig at the Fillmore, with the Chambers Brothers and Quicksilver Messenger Service. "That was the last of me and Bill Graham," he said. "He didn't like the way I was late." For his active re-entry into the scene, Bull will probably stay solo, a man, a foot cymbal, and a maze of electronic boxes. "Playing with people is exhilarating," he said, "but there's always that ego thing." Then, too, almost each of his numbers requires a totally different background--or no backing at all. Still contracted to Vanguard for two more LPs, Bull says he won't record again until he's found enough new material, but he hopes to begin extensive college and concert tours soon. "The Matrix," he said, "is sort of a start." |