Luang Prabang (i)

from singer Patrick Sky and songwriter Dave Van Ronk

That’s Patrick Sky in the white suit, at right, heading right. Well, his stage left. That is also Pat on the stool at far left, well his stage right.

When I came back from Luang Prabang I didn't have a thing where my balls used to hang but I got a wooden medal and a fine harangue and now I'm a fucking hero.

The caricature shows him performing as a featured act at a folk club, pop music of the middle years of the 1960s, mainstream and right wing as you might not think. Pat told me he was taking home 50 thousand cash those years.

Mourn your dead land of the free! If you want to be a hero follow me.

Mourn your dead land of the free! If you want to be a hero follow me.

You’d play a set, then the emcee, a comic, would entertain, then you would do another set. Audience of 1 hundred give or take 25 paying 5 or 10 or 15 dollars, matinees and evenings, 3 or 5 or 7 days a week split 3 ways with the club and comic.

And now the boys all envy me I fought for Christian democracy with nothing but air where my balls used to be but now I'm a fucking hero.

Something like that. Enterprise for individual talent. Rock and roll took over by acquiring the artist’s publishing rights with an advance on royalties you never enjoyed because most of it went to promotion especially to clubs who started selling beer not art to an audience who paid cheap or free rather than good value.

Mourn your dead land of the free! If you want to be a hero follow me.

Mourn your dead land of the free! If you want to be a hero follow me.

Bullshit. Now we miss that industry, but it was a confidence game. So we see the grey Pat of the right exiting stage left in a white Tom Wolfe suit vomiting a flood of green bile.

One and twenty cannon thunder into the bloody wild blue yonder for a patriotic ball-less wonder now I'm a fucking hero.

A crew-cut white t-shirt walks out with him and 2 old-time Americans from artist Hudson Armstrong’s Saratoga Springs follow, one in crinoline and the other in a frock coat dragging a Victorian child. A black man and a woman both in naturals stride in from the left behind a white women’s libber and grandma with her apple pie to assault the jerk on the stool.

Mourn your dead land of the free! If you want to be a hero follow me.

Mourn your dead land of the free! If you want to be a hero follow me.

They weren’t wrong. That Pat is not on the left of the consensus on government we enjoyed from 1945 to about the year of Songs that Made America Famous. The first album by Pat’s contemporaries George Cromarty and Ed Rush, their playlist on the folk scene, shown at right on my desk, had arrived in 1961 as a collection of light, quietist satire.

In Luang Prabang there is a spot where the corpses of your brothers rot and every corpse is a patriot and every corpse is a hero.

The two records are the same in that George and Ed make wicked fun of their folk music as Pat’s album makes fun of women’s liberation, the Vatican, and child molesting. Ed and George even have their own song about our government's work in Laos. They make fun of that gosh-darn foreign aid.

Mourn your dead land of the free! If you want to be a hero follow me.

Mourn your dead land of the free! If you want to be a hero follow me.

In 1971 Pat reached to another artist to point up his anger, his rejection, and revulsion at the United States of America. He had lined up Dave Van Ronk to sing his Luang Prabang with Pat on the album but it didn’t work out. Should you ever wish to know what I really think about that god-damned war find the bootleg of Pat and Dave’s fine harangue on the interweb.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.