"THE WIDE WEIRD WORLD OF HENRY JACOBS" (CD/DVD Set)
Includes "The Fine Art Of Goofing Off" (DVD)
Autographed Collectors' Edition
UNEARTHING SOUND |
Hello
Cigarette Yoga *
Dead Air
Dean Marlon Group Demonstration ^
Inbetween A
Vortex
Wilder Service %
Guitar Lesson +
Lowdown on the New Line $
For the Residents of Texas ^
Alleluia
Love You !
Audio Collage
Reflexive Sound Therapy
Time Compression Tests
Telephone Therapy +
Squares ^
ID
Sounds for Radio
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Interlude
Monotone
Made in California
For the Sick ^
Offbeat
Every Drop
Scarekicks w/ Woody Leafer
His Story of Jazz
Non-Ethnic Humor
Inbetween B
Beatniks, Bohemians, and Business Failures ^
Fluidoodle
Robin Birds *
Hula Lesson
False Start
Love Burrow
Emergency Use Only ^
Drumhead Jones
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* with Ken Nordine (c.1954-5)
^ from The Laughing String
% with George Leite
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+ from The Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein
$ with Chuck Levy
! from This is IT! |
| Restored, sequenced, and mastered by Jack Dangers at Tape Lab (www.tapelab.org) with input from Henry Jacobs and Alex Artaud. |
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Several summers ago, I got a call from Jack Dangers. An acquaintance had just purchased a house in Mill Valley, CA and had found a large collection of tapes and records beneath the house covered in dirt. "It might be Henry Jacobs' old place," he said. Jack had come across Jacobs' recordings during his many sessions of record hunting and the artist's unique, free-form style had made a deep impression. I grabbed my reel-to-reel deck and headed over.
We arrived to find a mess of roughly eighty tapes plus an assortment of 45s scattered in the corner of a room and covered in grime. Much of the tapes looked unplayable, some in battered boxes, others without. Scattered through the debris were radio programs, nightclub recordings, ether trips, goof conversations, and more. On the back of one record titled 'Laughing String' read the credit "Engineering: HENRY JACOBS".
We packed the car and headed back to Jack's studio. Picking a tape at random, we cleaned it, threaded the tape on a Revox two-track and pressed play. The tape hissed to life: "Your reporter Bruce Wilkinson on the microphone..." For the next three days, we listened to material covering a ten-year period, the discarded archive a wild time capsule of audio silliness and innovation.
MEETING JACOBS
Actually finding Jacobs wasn't too difficult. We called filmmaker Jordan Belson, who collaborated with him in the late '50s and still lived in San Francisco. He told us that Jacobs was living in West Marin in a small town an hour north of San Francisco, and passed along the phone number. In the spring of 2000 we got up the nerve to call him. A now-familiar voice came over the line. Telling him we were fans, we said we'd love to meet him. He was delighted and set up a time.
Jacobs greeted us with a big smile and said we could call him Henry or his nickname 'Sandy' if we prefer. He shared stories of his travels, of moving to West Marin in the 1970s, and of losing most of his master recordings in a devastating forest fire that consumed his home in 1995. We coyly asked him if he'd remembered leaving anything behind in the Mill Valley house about 30 years earlier. Before he had a chance to recall, we hauled out a large plastic box filled with his now cleaned-up tapes. "I believe these belong to you," said Jack. He wasn't sure what he was looking at, until he read the titles on the tape boxes. "Oh, yeah, these were in the old house," Sandy remembered. "Where did you find them?"
Alex Artaud
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Concerning the Henry Jacobs' archival tapes, the several of them found underneath Henrys' old house in Mill Valley, you should know that Sandy has tapes hidden away in many places, usually along long stretches of inaccessible beaches, hence his nickname. The fact that this set of tapes was found under one of his houses and not along a long beach is a deviation from the norm, one that history will thank you for.
Ken Nordine
Father of Word Jazz
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"THE FINE ART OF GOOFING OFF" (DVD)
Telecine Transfer Services - Jim Deloy
DVD Authoring - Ben Stokes
Special Thanks to Bob McClay for saving these films!
In 1972, San Francisco public television station KQED aired the first of three half-hour programs devoted to leisure titled The Fine Art of Goofing Off. Combining various animation techniques & stop-action photography, claymation, collage, cut-outs, and continuous drawing, this unique series celebrated pointless activity, dancing between the silly and the philosophical with free-associative abandon. With influences including Sesame Street and The Great American Dream Machine, it has a hand-made quality that no other medium provides in our digital assembly age. Purposely funky but assembled painstakingly frame-by-frame.
"The pursuit of happiness can be extremely tiring so sit still and let happiness pursue you for a while."
With few if any creative limits set by the station, the films reveal a fresh, imaginative collaboration between animator Bob McClay, Henry Jacobs, and producer Chris Koch. One of the few guidelines was that sound would inspire image for the first episode, image would generate sound in the second, and the third was little of both. Included are contributions from theologian Alan Watts, author George Leonard, psychedelic poster artist Victor Moscoso, filmmaker Jordan Belson, humorist Woody Leafer, as well as members of the legendary San Francisco troupe and Second City antecedent, The Committee. Amazingly, these three films were rescued by McClay on their way to the dumpster about 30 years ago!
An aimlessly irresistible collection of animated fun.
Terrence O'Flaherty.
San Francisco Chronicle.
"THE WIDE WEIRD WORLD OF HENRY JACOBS"
Autographed Collectors' Edition
(CD/DVD Set)
Price : $25.00
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DOMESTIC:
Packages are shipped by PRIORITY MAIL. We charge $4 shipping and handling. |
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OVERSEAS:
Packages are shipped by GLOBAL MAIL. We charge $9.00 shipping/handling. Overseas customers can place orders by E-mail. |
