Some artists I admire most coincidentally supplied promoters with the best bios.
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Sam Larkin milked the cow morning and evening when he was six years old. And continued at that till he was over twelve. His little girlfriend at school told him, “You smell like a cow.” Sam was shattered and went home and wrote a song. He was seven at the time. And has never stopped writing them. He has been playing harp since the age of three, and guitar since the age of 9. Everything he has ever written in his life has been well-received. Often with great cheering.
Because he did not grow up with television, and has never owned a television, he missed many pieces of popular culture. This unintentional withdrawal from that world has had the effect of rendering his view of the world unique. He often has the experience of not realizing what he has said till well after he has written it.
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Sun Ra
I’m really not a man, I’m an angel. If I was a man I couldn’t do anything, because man always fails, he’s limited, he doesn’t have the right to do things to make a better world. Angels are not under the same code as a man. As an angel I can do a lot of things, I move into the world of Celestial communication. I don’t have French connections, I have Celestial connections. I prove to the world that this is an exit out of their problems, I supply the exit and I use it in my music and my music is a sound bridge more than psychic more than spiritual. I call it spirit sound.
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Joseph Beuys
Had it not been for the Tartars I would not be alive today. They were the nomads of the Crimea, in what was then no man’s land between the Russian and German fronts, and favoured neither side. I had already struck up a good relationship with them, and often wandered off to sit with them. ‘Du nix njemcky’ they would say, ‘du Tartar,’ and try to persuade me to join their clan. Their nomadic ways attracted me of course, although by that time their movements had been restricted. Yet, it was they who discovered me in the snow after the crash, when the German search parties had given up. I was still unconscious then and only came round completely after twelve days or so, and by then I was back in a German field hospital. So the memories I have of that time are images that penetrated my consciousness. The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground. Luckily I was not strapped in – I always preferred free movement to safety belts… My friend was strapped in and he was atomized on impact – there was almost nothing to be found of him afterwards. But I must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though I had bad skull and jaw injuries. Then the tail flipped over and I was completely buried in the snow. That’s how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying ‘Voda’ (Water), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in.