From Eig Features Page 1 - Nordine

In the early 1960s, the Fuller Paint Company asked Ken Nordine to record a series of commercials. They told him to be creative and do whatever hewanted, so long as he mentioned the name of the company. It turned out the people at Fuller were talking a big chance, because telling Ken Nordine to be creative was like telling Jerry Garcia to enjoy himself. He did not need encouragement.

So Nordine wrote: "The Fuller Paint Company invites you to stare with your ears at lavender." Then, with groovy music playing in the background, he read in his famously resonant voice: "Lavender, keeper of dark colors and black, blue blood, lady of the soft edges, tell us all--or tell me --where day goes with night and what they do there and what it means. The question falls on your lavender lap and your answer is a lavender laugh..."

These commercials, in 10 different colors, were aired on radio stations around the country. The ads were so popular, in fact, that radio stations received requests to play them. Nordine, giddy with delight, went back to the studio and recorded a couple dozen more, including "Ecru," "Puce," "Russet" and "Sepia." Some of his songs, such as "Muddy" and "Flesh," were not technically colors, but nobody noticed, it being the '60s and all.

"Some people think the only color flesh should be is the color their flesh happens to be," Nordine wrote. "But you and I know that the proper color flesh should be is the color that it is." The whole weird affair might have been long ago forgotten, except that a couple of Nordine's colorful spots appeared on a recent CD collection called "Incredibly Strange Music, Volume II." College radio stations picked up on the colors and a small following grew. Soon, Asphodel Records decided to re-release all 34 shades. Reviewers, pardon the pun, were purple with praise; and sales, it really should go without saying, were rosey.

Today, after 50 years in the business, Nordine is being recognized as an American original. His new rainbow coalition of fans has helped expand his audience from minuscule to merely small. Old fans like Studs Terkel and Ed Paschke have paid tribute. Jerry Garcia had him on stage to perform with the Grateful Dead and asked him to record on the Dead's label. The Museum of Television and Radio in New York is collecting and cataloging his tapes. The Knitting Factory, one of New York's hottest jazz clubs, has scheduled a rare live performance, which will likely result in a recording. All in all, Nordine says, it's a pretty good time to be a minor, invisible legend.

Nordine refers to his home as a "big old yesterday house," and the description is apt. It is three stories tall, 94 years old and very brown. It squats in a block of bland apartments in a working-class section of Edgewater. The front porch reveals a slate of mailboxes and buzzers with all the names removed save two: Ken Nordine and Beryl Vaughan, husband and wife of 50 years. When they were younger, they rented off some of the big old yesterday house to bring in extra money. But Nordine has done well for himself over the years and now the house, all 17 rooms of it, is theirs alone.

He began his radio career in the 1940s, and in the 1950s he began reciting his playful poetry over jazz grooves. At the same time, he paid the rent doing commercial voice-overs. The Nordine voice, which would not sound at all out of place speaking to Moses from a burning bush, has been used for so many television and radio commercials that no one has been able to keep track. Blue jeans, beer, deodorant, table wax, automobiles, gasoline, paint, antacids, exterminators and banks. The list goes on. If America has made it or done it, at one time or another, Nordine has helped sell it. At the same time, he has maintained a kind of alter ego. Like the buttoned-up banker who puts on tight leather pants at night, Nordine has thrived after hours as a jazz hipster. For decades, jazz aficionados have collected his hard-to-find albums and tuned to his weekly radio show, which is recorded in Chicago at WBEZ and beamed around the world by satellite.

He has invented a genre called word jazz, and he is the undisputed poet laureate of the form. To some ears, word jazz is the point at which musical and poetic improvisation meet and begin to dance. To others, it might better be described as the sound of Ken Nordine speaking in tongues to himself. In either case, it makes for an obscure exercise in creative wordplay. He once described it this way: ""It's a way of saying yes when you mean yes, a way of saying no when you mean no, and a way of saying yes when you mean no and no when you mean yes. It's also a way of belonging to something larger than yourself without leaving yourself out. It's also just a name for something, same way love is just a name for something, and also hate. And it's a letting yourself go, a kind of free association; the only associations that swing are the free ones. Then, too, it's a dead seriousness combined with an alive comicness. Oxymoron. More important, word jazz is a freedom within limitations."

A sample, in which Nordine speaks and his own voice, electronically altered, answers, might sound like this:

Ever thought of writing a book?
Oh sure
Well, I've been thinking about it, too.
Lot of times
About what it would be about. That would be a good name for a book.
What?
About what it's about, by whatsit.
Who?
But if I knew what it was going to be about...
Would you do it?
I mean, before I were going to write it...
I bet you wouldn't
I wouldn't want to write it.
And so it goes, without a station break or reality check, for a solid 30 minutes. Nordine is like an avant-garde saxophonist without a saxophone. He is a conversation between Ornette Coleman, Sigmund Freud and T.S. Elliot. Charlie Parker's rapid-firing synapses were an early inspiration. Nordine improvises confidently and according to the rules of a unique universe not because he likes to hear himself talk but because he loves to
juggle words and think aloud. Whether anyone understands it is not so much a concern.

Yet there is ample evidence that Nordine is understood. Serious music lovers across the country reserve a special place in their hearts and in their CD carousels for word jazz. In the late 1950s, his records on the Dot label (the same label that recorded Pat Boone) were big hits. "He is a fascinating individual," says Kenneth Mueller, manager of the radio department at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York. "His style is unique. It sort of transcends the Beats and the contemporary poetry that's out there.""He's still very relevant," Mueller says. "Jerry Garcia was a big fan. Tom Waits has really been a big fan of his work. While he was a contemporary of the Beats, I think he was way ahead of his time. He's really more relevant to the majority of poets reciting in coffee houses today."

Nordine answers the door slowly. He is hobbling with a bad back, and the first thing you notice is that he is wearing giant red slippers that look big enough and fluffy enough to have kept Neil Armstrong's feet warm on the moon. They are decidedly not cool. But then again, it would not be difficult to imagine some of the other surviving members of the Beat generation, say Allen Ginsberg or William S. Burroughs, wearing worse. Nordine is 75. He is tall and strong, with giant hands, an ample belly and a full, fleshy face. If his long white hair were not thinning, he might resemble George Washington. "You're hip to cataract operations?" he asks me as he leads a tour of the house.

On an overcast day, with Lake Michigan frozen chunky white, the Nordine home is dark and mysterious. Furnishings are random, at best. Several original paintings, sort of in the Paschke school, decorate the walls; some of them are properly hung; some sit on the floor ("I would paint nudes, but only in X-ray," Nordine says). He's got a print made by Muhammad Ali and an original painting of the Oswald shooting that he made the day after it occurred. Upstairs, there's a portrait of Nordine drawn by Jerry Garcia, as well as a photo of the two men together ("He was very shy," Nordine says of Garcia. "I think he was a sideman who lightning struck into leadership"). His recording studio, like most else in the house, is dark. It is packed tight with computers, stereo speakers, keyboards and a 26-inch Macintosh screen. He has a Grateful Dead mouse pad, and above his desk is a toy parrot with a pillow round its neck. The pillow is stitched with the message "Genius at Work."

Nordine goes to work on his computer, summoning to the screen poems he has written and images he has created. He says he is working on a book of poems that would come not in the form of a book but in crumpled pieces of paper stuffed in a can. The book would be called "Crumpled," and he reads a sample poem:
Maybe the moment
Whatever it means
Is under a pile of old magazines
That I can re-read
Whenever I choose
To find myself lost
In yesterday's news.

He has stacks of these poems, most of them beginning with the same first line, "Maybe the moment." It's an exercise he uses to help fall asleep at night. He lies in bed rhyming.
Maybe the moment
Curves up and around
And heads for the hills
Where eyebrows are found
You feel that you're safe
But something is wet
Looks like your eyebrows
Are leaking sweat

Maybe the moment has you thinking Ken Nordine is a fellow with too much time on his hands, but this does not appear to be the case. In fact, his phone never stops ringing. He is already offered more commercial work than
he knows what to do with. He can be heard as the voice behind commercials for Levi-Strauss, the Chicago Blackhawks ("Cold Steel on Ice"), Pacific Bell, Friendly's Ice Cream and Las Vegas. "The commercials have enabled me to do writing, and I love to write," he says. Some of Nordine's friends who are full-time musicians have wondered why Nordine didn't devote himself full-time to music. They wonder how he manages to straddle the worlds of commerce and art.

"The Bible says you can serve God and mammon," he says. "Mammon probably refers to the commerce of everyday life. The truth is, people miss commercials if they're not on. And fortunately, they're harmless. They won't hurt anybody now that they've taken cigarette ads off. I love commercials. When you think about it, you've got committees of lawyers and writers all trying to persuade and not alienate, which is a difficult course. The commercial is an art form. You try to persuade people to your point of view and do it differently each time."
If he sounds as if he's justifying, don't be misled. Nordine takes this kind of fresh, naive view on almost every subject.

He sees the world differently, as if he were seeing almost everything for the first time. "Everything is incredibly strange, when you think about it," he says. "Mother Theresa and Hitler were born on the same day. That doesn't make astrology look very good." Nordine was born in Iowa and grew up in Chicago. He has three sons and nine grandchildren. At 75, he shows no signs of slowing down. His computer is jammed with unfinished projects. Even a quick glance at the menu provokes curiosity, with files named Beauty is in the Behearing, Alka
Seltzer Transfer and Where's the Plumber ("The plumber was supposed to come that day," he explains). His is a fountain that frequently overflows, sometimes on the radio, sometimes on recordings, sometimes into thin air, which is perhaps for the best.

"I had this idea for politics," he says. "You know, they make all these speeches and sometimes you don't know if they're telling the truth. Well, if doctors can install pacemakers in your heart, what if you had a lie-detector small enough that it could be installed, and if you said something that wasn't exactly true and you said it in just such a way, it would make your eyes blink funny and we'd all see, and we'd say, `Could it be he's not telling the truth?'" "Or what about a jolly pill. You'd take this pill and you'd be jolly all the time. The only thing you'd have to watch out for is if you went to a wake. You can't be too jolly."

In the middle of this jollity, Beryl enters. This is the woman who once threw her husband a party and invited a roomful of guests all of whom were named John. Beryl makes a habit of reminding interviewers that her husband is a genius, because she knows he will never toot his own horn loud enough. But Nordine is not convinced. Even with the critical accolades, the endorsement from Jerry Garcia and a new generation of listeners, he remains unsure of precisely what it is he has accomplished. He wonders how his career would have turned out had he stuck with his first musical instrument -- the violin.

As much as he loves words, he is quick to point out that his written words would never have received so much notice if they were not given life by so rich a voice. "That's an awful truth," he says, shaking his head and gently smiling. And then, as if from nowhere, or perhaps to illustrate the point, or maybe in tribute to Beryl, he offers a poem: "Testosterone comes along in a stormy heat/and finds itself worshiping at estrogen's feet." "He's a genius," Beryl says again.

"And you're a national treasure," he tells his wife.

By Jonathan Eig © 1996