The bill that night was a handful of young bands playing a much faster, tougher variant of the sound mapped out by the music’s mid-’70s pioneers, a new style with a new name: hardcore punk. The headliner? A recently transplanted quartet from Washington, DC, that my buddies and I were only slightly familiar with—the Bad Brains.

If you never made it to the now-gone landmark, CBGB was a narrow, dark, dank sweatbox that stank of stale beer, urine, and marijuana resin. Its walls were encrusted with layer upon layer of stickers, gig flyers, and spray-painted and magic-markered graffiti. Its floors were sticky, its door people and bartenders non-smiling, unfeeling seen-it-alls who had absolutely zero time for peach-fuzzed corndogs like me and my companions. And it had the best sound system of any rock club in the city; towering, custom-built speaker stacks that pumped out tsunamis of bone-crushing decibels. I fell in love with the place.

After sets by three or four enjoyable but very much of-the-time bands, the crucial moment arrived. The Bad Brains’ guitarist, followed by the likewise dreadlocked drummer and bassist, walked on stage, plugged in, and tested his amp with one mighty, room-rattling E chord. I will never forget that chord. It told me that everything I thought about rock ‘n’ roll was about to change. Very soon.

The singer, a wiry, gap-toothed dude with the wildest dreads of the bunch sauntered on like a panther. The band eased into a jazzy flourish more like something from a hotel lounge than a punk club. Smiling and greeting his “friends,” he flopped like a rag doll into the audience, which passed him around and returned him gently to the bandstand.

Then it all stopped.

The drummer went into a tight roll on his snare, picking up speed like a coin falling on a concrete floor. He cut it off—cold. And, then, with no cue or count-in, the universe exploded.

A wave of frenetic, mountain-plowing locomotion engulfed me. Bodies were immediately flying everywhere, careening off the walls and each other as the monolithic roar dominated everything. And, in the middle of it all, the tornado in the eye of the hurricane, was the whirling, possessed vocalist, snarling, shrieking, and moaning, with the fiery eyes of a preacher. I have seen many great live rock ’n’ roll bands in the nearly 25 years since that night. But none of them have been able to touch 1980s Bad Brains. Not even close.

Besides being an all-black band in an overwhelmingly white scene, there have always been several other aspects setting the group apart: the superhuman velocity of their sound; the jaw-dropping precision of their musicianship; the way they pepper their raging sets with consoling reggae. But there’s also something else, something far bigger, at work. The Bad Brains are punk mystics. It’s one of those things that can be felt much easier than explained, but the deeply spiritual art of this quartet burns with an inner mounting flame more common to the music of Ravi Shankar, John Coltrane, or Native American elders than with rock ‘n’ roll.

Much of this magic fire can be linked directly to an unlikely source: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The book is an early self-help classic that the band—guitarist Dr. Know (aka Gary Miller), bassist Daryl Jenifer, drummer Earl Hudson, and vocalist H.R. (aka Paul Hudson, Earl’s brother; his initials have stood for both Huntin’ Rod and Human Rights)—took as its bible, substituting goals of artistic and personal success for the work’s stated aim of guiding readers to monetary wealth. Central to Hill’s teachings is the concept of Positive Mental Attitude—or PMA—a philosophy that has kept the band’s eyes on the prize through thick and thin throughout its nearly three decades.

“PMA has helped us maintain the conviction of what we intended to do when we started out,” says Jenifer. “Which was to be the greatest punk rock band of all.”

The Bad Brains began in 1977 as Mind Power, a group playing not punk, but jazz-funk fusion. Wasn’t such technique-centric lineage a no-no for back-to-basics punk rockers?

“Not to us,” says Jenifer. “We were blessed with the versatility. DC is the home of go-go music, which is what most people there expected a black band to be doin’. We liked that music, too, but we still wanted to be different. So it was a blessing and a curse to be in the middle of all that.”

A friend and early band member turned the others onto punk, playing them records by the Ramones, Sex Pistols, Dead Boys, and others. Taking its new name from a Ramones song, the group moved onto club dates but was shut out of nearly every local venue, thanks to the sometimes violent reactions of its audience. After discovering reggae via UK punks the Clash and the Slits, the four members converted to Rastafari and headed for New York in 1981.

There, they became the new prime movers of the nascent Big Apple hardcore scene, drawing well at CBGB and Irving Plaza and inspiring dozens of younger bands. In late ’81 the group released its galvanizing, self-titled debut and began touring relentlessly, catching the ear of The Cars’ Ric Ocasek, who produced the follow-up, 1983’s Rock for Light.

After the first of many hiatuses, the group reconvened in 1986 to record its masterpiece, I Against I. A thunderous, ground-shaking set melding punk with dub and hard rock, the album showcases H.R.’s chameleon-like vocal talents as he darts between a deep baritone, rapid-fire rap, and his signature otherworldly falsetto.

The album won the foursome heaps of critical praise and a new generation of fans. Major labels began sniffing around. But another piece of Bad Brains lore has it that commercial defeat will frequently be snatched from the jaws of victory. While he’s a riveting, shamanistic front man, cannons don’t come much looser than H.R., whose legendary instability has alienated many potential allies and helped quash several big-label deals.

“Like most genius artists, the Bad Brains are flawed when it comes to other [non-artistic] areas,” says Steve Blush, author of American Hardcore: A Tribal History and co-producer of the new documentary American Hardcore (Sony Classics), in which the band features heavily. “They have a history of constant business problems, of all the wrong things happening at the wrong times.” He points to H.R. famously walking out on a deal with Island records in 1985.

Jenifer moved his family to Woodstock in 1984. “The Great Spirit showed me I could get a nice, big place up here for what I was paying for my apartment in Brooklyn,” he says. “Even when I lived in the ‘hood, I always dug the woods.” Dr. Know followed him up the next year, while Earl went south to Atlanta. H.R. seems to be doing better now, but has struggled with mental health issues and frequently lived on the streets.

The Bad Brains are an acknowledged touchstone of platinum-harvesters like Rage Against the Machine, Living Color, and White Zombie. But does the band harbor any bitterness at those who have woven the threads of its sound into solid-gold success? “Nah,” says Jenifer with a smile and a shrug. “You know what they say: ‘Each one teach one.’”

The outfit’s combined soul is infinitely bigger than that of the individual players, and has always managed to corral them back together. Right now this spirit is manifesting itself in several fortuitous ways: a forthcoming album on Megaforce; a possible tour; the appearance in American Hardcore; a satellite radio show hosted by Jenifer; a DVD of 1982 CBGB performances; and three sold-out dates during the club’s final week.

So there I was, back at CB’s in early October for the first of those shows. Full circle. Shoehorned around me were kids holding blue-glowing cell phones, twenty-somethings who were nowhere near born that first time I came here. Still smelled the same, though. And the edificial PA was still kicking, resonating with chest-thumping dub classics. I was nervous and excited all over again. Would we catch lightning in a bottle once more?

Well, in a way. The band cooked as ferociously as ever, but H.R., wearing shades, a crash helmet, and a demented smile, was uncharacteristically immobile as he vocalized into a malfunctioning headphone mic. It wasn’t what I was hoping for, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

“H.R. ain’t no jukebox,” Jennifer says later. “The Bad Brains ain’t no philharmonic orchestra, son.

“I didn’t always get it, but I see what H.R. was doin’ now. He doesn’t wanna do the same thing every gig. He wants to make it more interesting for himself, more of a

challenge for the audience. Maybe that pisses some people off,” Jenifer pounds the bar top to punctuate his point. “But, hey, the man is punk rock. That’s how it is.”

To that end, while much of the glory-seeking audience is unsure what to make of the show, many in the room are bowled over by H.R.’s bemused, performance-art juxtaposition of Rasta benevolence against the group’s punk fury. And it’s clearly intentional, as all reports say the following two nights were classic, off-the-hook Bad Brains sets. “I wish you coulda caught the second night,” Jenifer says. “That was just perfect, man.”

So what was it, then, that the Bad Brains taught me about rock ’n’ roll? That’s easy, and it’s a lesson I took with me when I went onstage myself at CBGB, years after that first visit: Always go all out, always challenge yourself and your audience. But they also taught me some other things, things that have helped me in much bigger ways outside the finite sphere of rock: If one plan fails, try another; turn defeat into success. Always keep that PMA. And never, never give in, no matter what life brings.

I still have that jacket, by the way, hanging in my closet. It’s been through a lot and doesn’t fit me so well anymore. But somehow I couldn’t live without it. And I still like to take it out once in a while, if only to marvel at how well it was made.

From the shadows a giant steps forth. A towering, absolute bear of a man, a figure every inch the match of that huge, powerful voice. Lumbering onstage, he towers behind an upright bass and plucks out a thick, low-down, spine-throbbing line, while with his larynx he trades roars and growls with a saxophonist, belting out hot, angry blues in jagged, blood-flecked chunks, seething poetic couplets of a highly unsettling nature—something about smashing his hand with a hammer.

Meet Eric Mingus. He makes quite an impression.

Yes, Eric, 43, is indeed the son of legendary bassist and composer Charles Mingus. (His mother is the jazz giant’s third wife, Judith.) But in the presence of Eric’s own art—a powerfully moody, darkly cool, Beat-inspired combination of rock, blues, soul, jazz, and sung/spoken poetry, the family legacy is rendered a mere footnote. In an age when the descendents of too many jazz icons—Duke Ellington’s son, Mercer; Cab Calloway’s grandson, C. Calloway Brooks—contentedly earn a crust by milking their heritage in tribute shows, Eric has always done his own thing. Though it hasn’t always been easy.

“It was funny,” he recalls with a laugh. “When I was younger and decided I wanted to play the bass, [longtime Charles Mingus drummer] Danny Richmond said to me, ‘Man, do you realize how good you’re gonna have to be?’ That was pretty intimidating at first, but then it became more of a challenge. It got me to try to sound different, to come up with my own approach to the bass and to music. Yeah, my dad’s name has opened a lot of doors for me, which I’m really grateful for. But I try to stay conscious of that, and I always try to take as many other people with me as I can when I go through those doors.”

“You could say Eric’s blues are dyed deep in his marrow, and it’d be true,” writes music journalist Gene Santoro in the liner notes to the younger Mingus’s new album, Healin’ Howl (Intuition). “But his blues aren’t Charles’s blues, though there are some family resemblances. [Eric has] lived the blues, he’s given away his heart and had it smashed, but he’s never sold his soul. In that way, Eric is his father’s son.”

Eric was born in New York City, though the family moved upstate when he was eight. “Of course music was always very much around the house when I was kid, and I got to meet a lot of great musicians,” he says. But he quickly discovered poetry as well. “I also got turned onto Langston Hughes and T.S. Eliot. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Micheline were good friends of my dad, and they both were really encouraging to me when I was starting to write my own stuff.”

Another early love was boxing. “After my dad died [in 1979], I was pretty angry and was getting into a lot of fights at school,” Eric says. “I guess I have a fighter’s mentality, and boxing was the obvious way to channel that. So I ended up training with [late boxing legend] Floyd Patterson in New Paltz. It’s been years, but lately I’ve started to get back into training. To me, there’re really a lot of parallels between boxing and music. I mean, Muhammad Ali is like a jazz master, you know?”

In the mid-’80s, he moved to Boston to study voice and bass at the Berklee College of Music, but only lasted “a semester and a day,” Eric grumbles. “Everything was too by-the-book there. For one of my performance classes, I played a version of [jazz standard] ‘Misty,’ and I did it kind of ‘out,’ in free time. They told me it wasn’t good because people couldn’t dance to it. But what’s really funny is that, years later, they asked me to teach a couple of workshops there.”

The requisite move back to NYC came next. He read his work at gritty rock clubs (“I didn’t want to do the typical ‘jazz poetry’ scene like everyone else”) while holding down a gig as a martini mixer at the staid Old Granddad whiskey bar in midtown. In 1993, after he had toured as a vocalist with the bands of jazz pianists Carla Bley and her daughter, Karen Mantler (whose group has also featured Jonathan Sanborn, son of saxophonist David Sanborn), Eric was introduced to the Kinks’ Ray Davies, who was then directing Weird Nightmare, a documentary about Charles Mingus. The following year, Davies invited him to help work on the film in London, where Eric soon formed a duo with trumpeter Jim Dvorak (alas, no relation to the famed Czech composer). The two recorded an album, 1999’s This Isn’t Sex, but after he’d spent two years on the U.K. and European jazz circuit and taught vocal improvisation at London’s Community Music House, Eric ran into visa snags and left.

Of course, the prodigal son must always return. These days he lives in West Shokan, commuting here once a week to teach vocal techniques. “Everything’s come full circle,” Eric says. “I had to leave and come back to the area I grew up in to actually appreciate it.” He has released four albums as a leader since moving back to the States, occasionally sings with his organist neighbor Bruce Katz’s band, the Organiks, and sometimes performs at Levon Helm’s star-studded Midnight Ramble sessions. In addition to regularly headlining in the U.S. and Europe, lately he’s also toured with downtown guitarist Elliot Sharp’s avant-blues unit, Terraplane.

Another frequent collaborator is Woodstock saxophonist Erik Lawrence, whose father is the late post-bop sax king Arnie Lawrence. “Eric is by far one of the most intense performers I’ve ever worked with,” he says. “Before he goes onstage, he goes into this incredibly deep, almost meditative state. And then he just totally bares his soul when he performs.”

In May 2007, Eric met Irish-born saxophonist Catherine Sikora at a memorial event for drummer Lance Carter. The symbiosis was instant, and the two decided to form a duo, Clockwork Mercury, which takes its name from a line in “Silverfish,” a piece by poet Bernard O’Donoghue. “Right away, we really clicked,” Eric says. “Playing with Catherine has really reinvigorated what I do. In fact, it doesn’t feel like I’ve ever notplayed with her.”

“Playing with Eric is [an experience of] pure sound,” agrees Sikora—a like-minded boxer and poetry lover. “It’s the purest, most focused concentration on sound and melody. I always feel like I’m all ears when we play together, which is the pinnacle of playing, really.” The unsigned twosome has a haunting, addictively atmospheric debut in the can and recently toured Italy with an expanded lineup in support of Eric’s own Healin’ Howl.

All this activity can leave someone somewhat torn. “Sometimes I wish I could just dive right into the poetry full time, but it’s really hard for me to separate the two,” Eric says. “I just can’t imagine other people reading my stuff. I don’t write it with that in mind. When I write something it always feels like I’m singing it.”

The Clockwork Mercury track “Blue Steel,” for example, makes it easy to see his point. A slithering, diabolical ode to a beloved handgun, the half-sung/half-spoken piece would lose much of its menacing impact were it to appear only in cold print, devoid of Sikora’s smoky sax and Eric’s nimble bass—not to mention his jittery, serial-killer vocal tics at the close.

A devoted and focused artist, Eric has no plans to settle down and start a family anytime soon. “No, I couldn’t have kids. I’m on the road too much,” he says. Should he ever change his mind, though, those kids would find themselves in a tough place. With a dad like him, they’d have a lot to live up to.

There was too much going on with the Gun Club’s music for me then. It was scary: Just the spooky, Southern voodoo imagery of that first LP’s cover alone was enough to give this pre-pube wet nap a year of nightmares. This was music that spoke of the deepest, blackest recesses of the heart, of the dark mind’s murky, uncharted nether regions. Shakespeare. Brecht. Cormac McCarthy. Ingmar Bergman. Erskine Caldwell. Baudelaire. Orson Welles. Cheating women. Cheating on women. Guilt. Death. Desperation. Things that I, being a pampered and cuddly young pup, had yet to experience.

And so it wouldn’t be until a few years later, after I’d done some livin’ on my own—and discovered the blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Elmore James—that Pierce’s music would really register. And when it did, oh boy did it. Like a brick house in a tornado. Not only did the profound breadth and boundless depth of the Gun Club’s music become so overpoweringly apparent and hopelessly transfixing, but for me Jeffrey Lee became an almost mythic figure, the gate-keeping mystic of Route 666 itself. I was obsessed. Had to have everything the man did.

I saw the Gun Club four times, once in Cincinnati when I lived there, twice in Boston when I was in college, and once in New York after I’d moved there and the Cranks were starting to happen. In keeping with the group’s legend, to say those gigs were inconsistent would be an understatement. But it was the unpredictability—plus my constant spinning of the records at home—that somehow kept me coming back for more. At one gig at the Rat in Boston the obviously tripping Pierce had to be literally installed in front of the mic, Syd Barrett-style, before the band could start the show—which lasted about three songs before guitarist Kid Congo Powers and bassist Patricia Morrison sat down on the drum riser and gave up. A few months later, however, and the quartet was back in town during the tour for The Las Vegas Story, churning through a white-hot set that saw a detached, spectral Pierce conjuring the epic Americana-gone-wrong of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. The difference between the two performances was startling, to say the least.

At the1995 show at Wetlands in New York I finally got to meet the man, who was recently clean and, I had heard, even on a macrobiotic diet. I gave him a copy of “Darkroom,” our second single, which had just come out, and told him about the profound influence the Gun Club had had on the Cranks’ sound. He was friendly and well spoken and seemed genuinely touched—and promptly dropped the record on the floor as he tried to juggle it with some guitar cords and other stuff he was carrying at the time. Even then I thought that this was hilarious and somehow poetically perfect: A long-awaited brush with greatness ends on a sticky nightclub floor.

Not long after that I got to know and become friends with Kid Congo Powers, one of the sweetest and most talented musicians ever, and one who would eventually do the Cranks the honor of playing “Jack on Fire” with us at one of our Manhattan dates. One evening I ran into him on the street and he told me that Pierce was moving to New York and had asked him to put together a new lineup of the Gun Club there to record an album and do some gigs. He then asked me if I’d like to be in the band. I just about fell on the sidewalk. It didn’t take me long to say yes, and I pretty much floated above the city for what seemed like weeks. Unfortunately Pierce died not long before he was to come to New York, and of course his passing was a sad and tragic loss to the entire music-loving universe, not just my own. But just being asked to be in the Gun Club ranks as one of the true high points of my life, and I’ll always cherish the invitation.

The intervening years have been hugely vindicating for Pierce’s later albums with the Gun Club and as a solo artist, gems like Mother Juno, Wildweed, and Pastoral Hide & Seek, which at the time were mistaken for mere artistic groping and pigeonhole-bucking but now with each listening reveal endless layers of richly rewarding creative maturity. But then what else should we expect? It’s just Jeffrey Lee Pierce, still ahead of the curve and having the last laugh. A darkly sinister laugh, of course.

—Peter Aaron, Saugerties, New York, 2009.

“People twist that around a bit,” says Reich, who both the New York Times and the Village Voice have called America’s greatest living composer. “I started out as a drummer myself, from when I was 14. When I was at Mills College studying under Luciano Berio, I wondered, ‘Where is there music that uses percussion as its dominant voice?’ His answer was ‘Africa and Bali,’ and I made a note of that, read about African drumming and listened to that and Balinese gamelan music. So later, when Stockhausen and Cage were using electronics to go beyond traditional classical instrumentation, and I’d already done the phasing works for tapes, violin, piano, and so on, I wanted to try something else. Yes, I did go to Ghana in the summer of 1970 to study. But [Drumming] isn’t directly based on [African or Balinese] styles, even though they did inspire me to write music for rich-sounding, acoustic percussion instruments only.”

Although after Drumming Reich largely bid adieu to phasing, the approach continues to stand as one of his trademarks. The technique calls for two main players (or one player and a recording) to repeat a single pattern in unison, usually on identical instruments; one musician changes the tempo slightly while the other remains constant. Eventually the two players will be out of sync with each other, sometimes by several beats, creating the phased effect. Depending on the piece, the musicians either continue or phase the music even further.

After La Monte Young and Terry Riley, Reich, who was born in New York and raised there and in California, is considered the third pioneer of minimalism. Following his tutelage by Berio and Darius Milhaud and work with the pivotal California Tape Center, Reich shook the avant-garde with his use of phased tape loops on such compositions as It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). His later key efforts include the self-explanatory Clapping Music (1972); his most seminal work, Music for 18 Musicians (1974); and the Grammy-winning Different Trains (1988). Among Reich’s numerous awards is a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Double Sextet (2007).

Formed in 1971, the four-member NEXUS has performed around the world and has a repertoire ranging from 1920s ragtime to works by Reich and John Cage. The Brooklyn-based quartet So Percussion began in 1999 and features rock-reared players. Reich calls the troupes “two of the greatest percussion ensembles on Earth.” Seeing them in action along with the minimalist master will bring maximum thrills.

Steve Reich, NEXUS, and So Percussion will perform to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Drumming at Maverick Hall in West Hurley on July 31 at 8pm. The perfromance is a benefit for the Woodstock/Byrdcliffe Guild. Tickets are $100 for the first three rows, including a pre-concert dinner with musicians; $60/reserved seating; $20 general admission under the tent.

“In the ’70s, when I was growing up, it was already pretty economically depressed there,” says Merchant, whose mother, a secretary, and father, a jazz musician, divorced when she was very young; her stepfather was a college professor, a writer, and an artist. “What was great, though, were the outdoor concerts they had at [nearby historic education/performance center] the Chautauqua Institution. My mom was single for most of the seventies and didn’t have a lot of money, but she loved music and the arts. So in the summers she’d sneak me and my sister and two brothers under the fence there to hear the symphony and see people like Nuryev, Barishnikov, Art Tatum, Beverly Sills. But the furniture industry had long moved south, before, I guess, moving again to China. The other big export was automatic voting machines, and now those are being phased out. So there were all of these empty factories.”

One such factory was Broadhead Worsted Mills. A former textile plant, it was taken over by artists and became the site of early gigs by Still Life, the band that would rename itself 10,000 Maniacs not long after Merchant joined in 1981, when she was 17. “I was already in college as part of an advanced placement program,” she recalls. “I’d studied piano and sang in school for fun, but I’d never been in a band before. The plan was to go to art school; I’d been accepted to the School of Visual Arts in New York. But that didn’t quite end up happening.”

Not quite. But, then, what may have been the visual arts world’s loss has certainly been the music world’s gain. Spearheaded by Merchant’s plaintive but full-bodied voice and gift for graceful pop songwriting, 10,000 Maniacs’ ubiquitous modern folk rock pretty much defined college radio’s late-’80s arc into mainstream alt-rock. After scoring a hit in the UK with “My Mother the War,” off its 1983 sophomore indie album Secrets of the I-Ching (Christian Burial Music), the quintet signed to Elektra and released a string of albums, The Wishing Chair (1985), In My Tribe (1987), Blind Man’s Zoo (1989), and Our Time in Eden (1992), all of which rode the charts for weeks on end, carried along by hit singles like “What’s the Matter Here?,” “These Are Days,” and “Candy Everybody Wants.” With the Maniacs, Merchant visited Europe for the first time when she was 19, for a while lived in London, and even performed at President Clinton’s inaugural ball in 1993.

But eventually it was time for a change. Merchant left 10,000 Maniacs after the release of 1993’s live MTV Unplugged (also Elektra). “By then I’d been in the band for 12 years, and since I was so much younger than the other members I’d always felt like the little sister or something,” the singer says. “I needed to mature, to emancipate myself. The group and I didn’t always agree on everything and I really had to be able to speak for myself, not for everyone else.”

To say her departure paid off would be the mother of all understatements. The very same day she left the group Merchant began writing the material for Tigerlily (Elektra Records), her 1995 solo debut. Home to an incredible three hit singles—“Carnival,” a Top 10 smash; “Wonder” and “Jealousy,” both Top 40—the album sold a staggering five million copies and right away made her one of the decade’s leading solo artists. “[The album’s instant success] shocked everybody at the label—and me, too,” Merchant says. “As far as major-label records go it wasn’t really a big production, and the band I had put together was all really young players. So it was very gratifying.”

Her newfound cachet at Elektra enabled her to record 1998’s ambitious follow-up, Ophelia, a lavish conceptual album with symphonic arrangements by British composer Gavin Bryars and guest work by smooth jazz trumpeter Chris Botti and other star players. The disc went platinum as she co-headlined that year’s colossal Lilith Fair tour with Sarah McLachlan, and she capped the tour off with a run of her own shows at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theater, which were taped for 1999’s Live in Concert (Elektra). In 2000 she revisited 10,000 Maniacs’ folk influences, doing a tour performing traditional material backed by revisionist band the Horse Flies, and with Wilco, the tour’s opening act, and Billy Bragg, appearing on Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II (Elektra), the second such project to set unearthed Woody Guthrie lyrics to music. She made one more album for Elektra, 2001’s stripped-down, T-Bone Burnett-produced Motherland, which was supported by arena shows with Chris Isaak, before leaving the label and starting her own Myth America imprint to release 2003’s acclaimed The House Carpenter’s Daughter, a record that saw her digging even deeper into the folk canon. And then…silence.

Until April 6, 2010, when Merchant released Leave Your Sleep, her first album in seven years and her debut for Nonesuch Records. Why the long wait? Two solid reasons. The first is the raising of her daughter, now six, something any young mother will no doubt relate to. The second can only become obvious upon hearing the album. Available as either a deluxe two-CD package or an abridged single disc, Leave Your Sleep has Merchant taking on the Herculean exercise of setting 26 poems by as many poets to original music played by a cast of over 130 musicians, a lineup that includes Medeski, Martin & Wood, the Wynton Marsalis Quintet, Hazmat Modine, the Klezmatics, the Chinese Music Ensemble of New York, and others. Musically it plays like a voyage around the world, stopping at exotic ports to take in everything from blues to sea chanteys, Dixieland to Celtic folk, reggae to bluegrass, rock to chamber and early music, plus a boatload of other sounds. (Outtake tracks will be available for download on iTunes.)

Merchant’s co-producer on the album was the Brazilian-born Andres Levin, who worked on the successful Red Hot album series; with David Byrne, k.d. lang, and Tina Turner; and with Caetano Veloso and other high-profile Latin acts. “It was a huge project—there was an endless stream of people coming in an out of the place,” says Levin of the sessions that took place at Rhinebeck’s Clubhouse studio. “It was challenging to keep the flow, but watching it come to life was great. Working with Natalie was wonderful. She’d done a lot of pre-production, and she always has a very clear idea of what she wants.”

The program’s genius is in how Merchant pairs the poems with just the right accompaniment: Albert Bigelow Paine’s “The Dancing Bear” works perfectly as a sly klezmer tune; Jack Prelutsky’s “Bleezer’s Ice Cream” becomes a Randy Newman-esque New Orleans R&B stroll. Writing and arranging music that adequately evokes the feel of someone else’s words would seem no easy art, but on Leave Your Sleep Merchant somehow visits the brains of her de facto lyricists, most of whom are long dead, and gets them to tell her exactly what they’d like to hear. “Actually, I find it far easier than writing a song from scratch,” says Merchant. “Having to write melodies and chord progressions and then trying to come up with words that fit is almost a form of tyranny to me. By doing it the other way around—getting the mood of a poem and then using the structure as a skeleton makes me the tyrant; a tyrant informed by the lyrics.”

But while her fascination with roots music is obviously well documented, her love of poetry hasn’t been. Did she read a lot of poetry growing up? Merchant shakes her head. “No, I came late to poetry,” she says. “I was pretty much just a magazine/newspaper article reader, someone who mainly read for information, not entertainment. But I became friends with Allen Ginsberg before he died, so I got into his work, and he also turned me onto Anne Waldman and other poets. And then, about seven or eight year ago, I had this epiphany that became a fervor, especially for the Victorian poets. That’s why there are so many of them on the album. [The two-disc version features works by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Lear, Christina Rossetti, and several of their contemporaries.] It just really resonated with me, that even though these people lived so long ago the themes and emotions they were dealing with have never gone away.”

An outspoken progressive, the 46-year-old Merchant is known almost as much for her activism as her music, and frequently performs at benefit events. “Yeah, I guess I’m pretty ‘causey,’” she says with a smirk. “But that’s always been part of what I do. Even back in the 10,000 Maniacs days we’d have people from Greenpeace set up tables at our shows to collect signatures and donations. The first show that that band ever played was a Hirsohima Remembrance Day concert. But these days I like to do it in quieter, more under-the-radar ways. For instance, a few years back I was taking Pilates in [Kingston neighborhood] the Rondout and I noticed the playground equipment at the school there was falling apart. I made some calls, found out how much it would cost to replace it, and then donated the money from a show I did. It feels good to do those things.” Among the worldwide and area causes Merchant cites as favorites are Doctors Without Borders, Scenic Hudson, Family of Woodstock, Clearwater, Riverkeeper, and the local Head Start and Planned Parenthood chapters. She was recently appointed by Governor David Patterson to serve a five-year term as a member of the New York State Council on the Arts.

Also an avid painter and gardener, Merchant has been a Hudson Valley resident since 1990. “It looks really similar to the Jamestown area, actually. There’s more snow there, but the Catskills remind me of the Alleghenies,” she says. “I really love that this area is just far enough from New York and still so culturally rich. Everyone I know here is here because they want to be here, and they’re doing really interesting work.”

When asked about her return to the limelight and the state of the contemporary music industry, Merchant likens herself to another famous Catskillian. “I feel like Rip Van Winkle, waking up to a totally different world,” she says, visibly overwhelmed. “When I left Elektra in 2002 the record people were just beginning to run around like the sky was falling, because it was becoming clear that with the Internet artists would no longer be powerless without them. Things really hit home when The House Carpenter’s Daughter was released online—the same day my daughter was born—and it sold 75,000 copies with no touring or press interviews at all. Since then I’ve launched a new website, and it’s very exciting as an artist to see the way the old business model is being replaced.”

As the determined Merchant arises from her lengthy hibernation, the lines of one of Leave Your Sleep’s standout tracks, her adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Land of Nod,” come floating into view:

All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do—
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams

Yes, it’s true: After nearly five decades of protest, poetry, and provocation, it seems that rock’s original underground band is coming to a close. It’s not for lack of inspiration, though, since there’s no shortage of social injustices to rant about, and the shelves are still filled with the same great literature that has fueled many of the group’s songs. Unfortunately, though, the Fugs are winding down due to the tenuous health of their other founding vocalist and lyricist, Tuli Kupferberg, who at 86 is dealing with the aftereffects of a recent stroke and the blindness that resulted from a bout of pneumonia in 2005.

“Tuli’s clinging on,” reports Sanders, a Woodstock fixture since the 1970s. “Thankfully, he has enough money to pay for nursing and he’s under 24-hour care, still viewing the world with humor.” And somehow, even after all Kupferberg has endured, it’s not so surprising that his sense of wit is intact. After all, comedy, the ironic and irreverent kind in particular, has always been central to his band’s makeup.

The Fugs, who took their name from a censorship-enforced euphemism for the word “fuck” in Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead, were formed in 1964 around the activity at Sanders’s Peace Eye bookstore in New York’s Lower East Side. The initial core of Sanders, Kupferberg, and drummer-vocalist Ken Weaver, all veterans of the beat literary scene, decided after one particularly bacchanalian poetry reading to start a band that blended literature and political satire with the then relatively new music called rock ’n’ roll. They formed a loose collective that also included the Holy Modal Rounders’ Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber and other renegade folk and jug band musicians, and began playing downtown galleries and theaters. After winning both accolades and outright hatred for its willfully shambolic music, absurdist stage antics, envelope-pushing profanity, and taboo-shattering lyrical topics, the outfit debuted on Folkways Records with 1965’s The Village Fugs and soon moved on to ESP-Disk for ’66’s self-titled follow-up and ’67’s Virgin Fugs.

Thanks to riotous, confrontational tracks like “Kill For Peace,” “Frenzy,” “Boobs a Lot,” “I Couldn’t Get High,” “Coca Cola Douche,” and “CIA Man,” the act was a hit on the hippie scene, influenced the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa, and is now hailed as the fundamental proto-punk band and a touchstone of today’s freak-folk movement. In addition to setting the words of Blake, Swinburne, Pound, and other poets to music, the group cut four more LPs for Reprise Records before splitting in 1970. After two solo albums Sanders returned to writing full-time and penned The Family, a bestseller about the Manson murders, and continues to author acclaimed books of poetry and prose (currently he’s working on a memoir of his days with the band).

But, alas, the Fugs weren’t finished. In the Orwellian year of 1984, Sanders and Kupferberg decided to regroup to defile the status quo once again. They assembled a new lineup with guitarist-keyboardist Steve Taylor, drummer-vocalist Coby Batty, and bassist Scott Petito to record the live Refuse to Be Burnt-Out and the studio No More Slavery (both 1985, Big Beat Records). “[Playing in the Fugs] is great, very familial,” says Petito, who runs Catskill’s NRS Studios, where the reunited group has mostly recorded. “The music is always interesting. Since most of us are busy with other projects, we take long breaks.” After one such break—18 years—the band released 2003’s The Fugs Final CD (Part 1) (Rykodisc) not long before Kupferberg’s health began its downturn. (A January 2010 benefit to offset his medical bills featured Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Laurie Anderson, Phillip Glass, John Zorn, and others.)

Yet while the appearance of two retrospective box sets, 2003’s Electromagnetic Steamboat (Rhino Records) and 2008’s Don’t Stop! Don’t Stop! (Ace Records), kept the buzz going, the dauntless new Fugs were determined to make another record despite Kupferberg’s handicaps. Petito set up recording gear in Kupferberg’s East Village loft and spent months recording the latter’s parts there, to be mixed onto instrumental tracks cut at NRS. The result is the new and bittersweetly titled Be Free! The Fugs Final CD (Part 2) (Fugs Records), which is highlighted by the Sanders-sung title rocker and Kupferberg’s uproarious, pop-music baiting “This is a Hit Song” and his vivid, moving elegy to the now-gone world that shaped him and his band, “Greenwich Village of My Dreams.”

So is this really it for the Fugs? “Well, we can’t say for sure—we’ve said it was before,” offers an audibly wistful Sanders. “It’s really looking that way, though. Without Tuli it wouldn’t be the Fugs. Our legacy is the 300 or so songs we wrote, the boundaries we broke in regard to censorship, and that we were poets who became a band. But, then again, you never know. Tuli’s still at it, still writing. When it’s his time, he’ll definitely go out in a burst of humor.”

Naturally. And one couldn’t ask for a more poetic coda for one of history’s most important musical acts.

But Joe Magnarelli has persistence. Lots of it. Joe, or Mags, as the trumpeter is often called, has been playing his horn for nearly 40 years. And for more than half of those years he’s been doing it professionally, both as a leader and in the bands of Lionel Hampton, Brother Jack McDuff, Harry Connick, Jr., Toshiko Akioshi, Jon Hendricks, and Ray Barretto, as well as in the Glenn Miller and Carnegie Hall Jazz orchestras. Joe is also a teacher, serving as an adjunct professor at the New School of Social Research in Manhattan and New Jersey City University in Jersey City and conducting clinics and master classes outside of these schools. And, having been a stellar student himself under James Moody, Tommy Turrentine, and others, Joe certainly has a lot of knowledge and experience to pass on. But in addition to the notes-and-bars music-theory material he covers, one lesson he imparts to his students is that of maintaining their resolve despite the tests and trials of learning and playing music—in other words, persistence. “Sometimes you do have to give the kids a pep talk,” Joe says. “You know, that idea of ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’” And, indeed, all tenured musicians know the value of emotional strength, both on and off the bandstand.

Since 1994 Joe has been making acclaimed albums as a leader and co-leader, but this is his first for Reservoir Music. (He played as a sideman on Gary Smulyan’s exemplary 2003 Reservoir release, The Real Deal.) “Being on Reservoir is a really good situation for me,” says Joe. “Mark Feldman has the right sensitivity as a producer. During the sessions he pretty much just let [the musicians] do our thing, but when he did offer input it was right on the mark. And I’d already known [engineer] Jim Anderson from some big band and small combo dates I’d played on, so it was all very easy, very relaxed.” It definitely comes across: One of the hallmarks of Persistence is its overall relaxed, free-flowing feel. It’s not hard to believe him when Joe mentions that the tunes were “pretty much all done in one or two takes.”

Of course, the absolutely killer band Joe put together for the session enters into the equation, too. Check this lineup, jazz fans, and just try not to salivate: Mags on trumpet, Gary Smulyan on baritone, David Hazeltine on piano, Peter Washington on bass, and Kenny “The Jazz Maniac” Washington on drums. A veritable all-star team of New York’s world-class straight-ahead scene. “They’re some amazing cats, alright,” beams Joe. “We’d all worked with each other separately before, so we were all familiar with each other. They could all sense what I wanted play, right from the first note.”

Joe wrote “Persist” during his tenure with the late conga king Ray Barretto. “The tune was originally called ‘Persist Until You Succeed’ and had lyrics written by Sue Giles (printed here), and then I just started calling it ‘Persist,” Joe explains. “But Ray didn’t like that title and renamed it ‘Mags,’ after me.” As “Mags,” the piece was done in a Latin arrangement for Barretto’s Grammy-nominated 2005 release, Time Was—Time Is. Reworked into a 4/4 swing-time adaptation, “Persist” opens this album and provides the inspiration for its title. The track kicks off with an ensemble flourish and a strong pronouncement by Kenny Washington, and features a wonderfully scrambled recurring horn vamp and colorful and blustery solos by the leader and Smulyan.

“The Village,” with its effortless, light bossa nova groove, recalls the music of Joe’s time with Barretto as well as the lively culture of Greenwich Village, where the trumpeter was living when he composed the tune. Hazeltine takes a great, sparkling turn here, staying clear of any predictable Latin keyboard clichés, and Joe contributes a fine, bubbly solo.

The band next reprises the standard “I Had the Craziest Dream,” giving the Harry Warren/Mack Gordon chestnut a smooth and buoyant but relentlessly swinging treatment. While Joe delivers the tune’s gorgeous melody with measurably heartfelt tenderness, it’s the (non-related) Washingtons that almost steal the show here. “A trumpet player hardly ever gets to play a beautiful standard with a rhythm section like that,” says Joe. “It was too much fun, playing that tune with those cats.” Peter Washington’s strutting bravado drives the performance, and the riveting breaks that he and Kenny Washington contribute are likewise highlights.

It’s not hard to guess where the title of “D Train Bugaloo” came from. “I was on the D train heading downtown to a gig at Birdland when I wrote it,” recalls Joe. “Before every record date I force myself to write one tune just for that particular session. The pressure helps me get focused for the date, and ‘D Train Bugaloo’ is the one I wrote for this album.”

Persistence also boasts a pair of ageless standards by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. Joe picked up “Haunted Heart” just a few years ago, while he was playing with Barretto. “I didn’t realize that Dietz and Schwartz had written the tune, but I’d always loved it,” Joe says. “[Barretto’s band] had done an arrangement of it, and Barretto liked what I was playing on it. He said, ‘Man, you should always play that tune.’ I love it.” And no doubt listeners will love this version, with its warm, deep Smulyan solo and the lyrical musings of the leader. “You and the Night and the Music,” on the other hand, was an unplanned inclusion. “That was the last tune we cut. We were just about to wrap the session up because [Hazeltine] had to leave to make a gig, and someone called the tune—so we did it,” Joe remembers. “There wasn’t any arrangement, we just blew.” And blow they do, especially Smulyan and Kenny Washington during an early, fiery exchange that proves one of the set’s high points.

The tellingly named ballad “Barretto” is an homage to Joe’s former mentor, who died in 2006. “I started writing it pretty soon after he passed,” says Joe. “I’d work on it every morning, adding to it little by little.” It would seem the tune’s namesake would’ve been deeply touched by the tender tribute, which is graced by the trumpeter’s gorgeous lines and Smulyan’s simpatico comping behind them, as well as a spare, exquisite passage by Hazeltine.

Joe had some fun with the title of the last tune, “Soul Sister.” “It’s basically ‘Body and Soul’ redone as a waltz,” he says. “I like to write on top of a standard once in a while. It’s fun to do.” The track’s loping, easy, pendulum-like groove offers an excellent backdrop for the lithe intervals of Peter Washington and the leader’s occasional Coltrane-esque trills. After such a satisfying ride, it’s the perfect performance to bring the album in for a smooth landing. And Mags and the band make it all sound so easy.

But of course it isn’t easy. Oh, it gets easier as the years roll on. But only after the players have already poured years of dedication and sweat into their craft. Which is a fruitful and never-ending process for Joe Magnarelli. And one jazz lovers will never tire of listening to. If there’s one lesson that this music illustrates, it’s that persistence pays off.

“Life can be very demanding, but you can’t let the tough times get you down,” offers Joe. “Every day when you wake up it’s a chance to start fresh.”

Lording over this vast, beautiful mess is shop owner Dan Seward, a gangly, long-haired slacker whose downward gaze and quiet demeanor have led more than a few to mistake him for a curmudgeon. He’s not. The moment you engage him, you find that he’s happy to offer what he knows about certain items or to make small talk about the weather or the town. “I came to Hudson about five years ago,” he says. “The store used to be across the street, in a basement that I rented for $200 a month. Before I ended up here I had a shop in Pawling for a while, then one in Tivoli, another in Rosendale. Retail’s in my blood, man. And recession or no recession, I’ve never seen so many people buying records—it’s crazy. So it’s going really well.” Apparently it is, as he recently opened an annex down the block and with his partners has plans to open another location, John Doe Jr., in Greenfield, Massachusetts. But retail isn’t all that Seward does. He also fronts a band: the Bunnybrains.

In a pivotal scene of Hesse’s Steppenwolf, the protagonist Harry Haller, in the persona of the title character, is out for a walk when he stumbles upon the Magic Theater, its neon sign bearing the enigmatic legend NOT FOR EVERYBODY. The Bunnybrains are not for everybody. A loose-knit cooperative with Seward as the only constant (its website lists an incredible 65 past and present members) that began in his home state of Connecticut in 1988, the band is a kind of nose-thumbing, willfully tuneless, acid-damaged, psychedelic noise unit very much akin to early Butthole Surfers or San Francisco’s legendary Flipper—not something likely to make the playlist of your local Clear Channel franchise, to be mild. And as portends another enticing sign outside the Magic Theater, one that reads ANARCHIST EVENING ENTERTAINMENT, the Bunnybrains’ squalling, brain-bashing shows are heavy on spectacle—unhinged, shambolic performance art that usually finds the bearded Seward in makeup and a dress and the other members holding forth in animal or wrestler’s costumes, the stage adorned with bizarre props and flashing strobes. Seward, whose stage name is Dan Bunny, has absolutely zip in the way of musical training. “I play guitar or keyboards on some of the songs but I don’t know what I’m doing at all,” explains the 45-year-old. “If someone asked me what a G chord was, I’d have no idea. Most of what we do is made up on the spot, but if I do have some kind of melody or riff I’m thinking of I just kind of hum it to the rest of the band and we work it out. Sure, it’d be great to be more competent, and I guess if I really wanted to learn to play, like, 12-bar blues or some kind of Woodstocky world music, I could. But why? Those bands are fine, but there’s already enough of them around.”

Seward grew up in Danbury, Connecticut, where he learned his day trade by working in record stores and opened for local hardcore bands in the guise of performance artist Eg the Poet, whose act with “musical” accompanist Malcolm Tent proved too punk for the punks. “The scene in Connecticut at that time was all of these really militant straight-edge kids, and they absolutely hated me,” recalls the soft-spoken, dry-humored Seward. “I’d read my poems and throw eggs at them, smear jelly and jam all over myself, pull spaghetti out of my underwear, [pretend to] fuck pizzas and frozen chickens on stage. I thought I invented what I was doing; then I found out about [pioneering performance artists] Karen Finley, Joanna Went, people like that. Years later, I learned that a lot of the kids secretly respected me for being different, but when I was on these bills with [hardcore crew] Youth of Today or whoever, most of the audience just wanted to kill me.”

Nevertheless, at the time Seward actually did have his fans, two of whom were SUNY Purchase students Bob Barrett (aka Bobby Bunny) and Elisa Flynn of garage-synth duo Invaders from Sears. The pair had by then already concocted the Bunnybrains as the name for a theatrical noise/improv side project and invited Seward and Tent to join in time for a gig at Brandeis University in 1988. Before long, the group was playing the Northeast underground circuit and cranking out self-released cassettes and vinyl with individually handmade sleeves in editions of 300 copies or less. A few of these raw scraps of DIY rumpus made their way to the turntable of then Matador Records tastemaker Johan Kugelberg. “I really liked the unpretentious energy of the singles, and I started passing them around the office,” recalls Kugelberg, who has since worked for American Recordings and today writes for garage rock zine Ugly Things.

The other powers at Matador were similarly smitten, and soon the label that has also been home to such influential acts as Pavement, Liz Phair, the John Spencer Blues Explosion, Guided By Voices, and Cat Power was offering the Bunnybrains a deal. “We did one [self-titled 1995 vinyl-only] album with Matador, which came in this pink plastic envelope cover that was really expensive for the label to make, and no one bought it,” Seward says. “[The band was] very much anti-CD back then because we grew up with vinyl and thought ‘these new CD things’ were elitist, so Matador indulged us by doing vinyl only—which now I see as being really stupid because it meant we never got any airplay or reviews. [The label] didn’t ask us to do another record after that, and I don’t really blame them.”

The band continued with an occasionally augmented cast, gigging regionally and releasing more singles on under-the-radar labels until 2002, when Tent, Flynn, and Barrett left the fold, the latter citing the band’s “sell- out” into musical orthodoxy—i.e., playing the odd actual song instead of only freeform noise—as his main reason for quitting (the three later reunited as BunnyBrains 88 and now play under the moniker Ultrabunny). But Seward disputes such accusations and has continued to fly the freak flag, leading varying Bunnybrains lineups (the latest includes co-lead vocalist Jamie Mohr, bassist Jason “Wolfman” Martin, guitarist and keyboardist Ross Goldstein, guitarist Mikey Corcoran, and drummer Joe Terry) and building the band’s underground stature via limited releases of new studio material, as well as “official bootlegs” like 2006’s three-CD Triple Live Mayhem on Belgium’s Audiobot imprint.

What really cemented the group’s legendary indie status, however, were two events: the release of 2004’s career overview Box the Bunny (Narnack Records), a monolithic boxed set containing four CDs and a bonus live DVD that racked up rave coverage in the indie press, and a 2005 national tour supporting freak folk golden boy and devout fan Devendra Banhart. “That tour was really weird, but really cool, too,” says Seward. “Here we were, this band none of Devendra’s fans had ever heard of, looking all crazy and making this really fucked-up noise in front of audiences full of college hippie girls. And we’re sharing Devendra’s big Snoop Dog tour bus. But we actually went over pretty well, which was amazing. I had kids come up to me after we played and thank me, saying, ‘Wow, man, I just came [to the concert] from my really shitty job and the release of seeing you guys really helped me feel better.’”

Besides Banhart, another of the Bunnybrains’ famous fans is acclaimed pop singer and bassist Me’Shell Ndegeocello, who as of late has been collaborating with Seward on a soundscape project. “Being around Dan is experiential and insightful,” she says. “The Bunnybrains are a mind-child that opened the door to my courage.”

This month sees the release of What Makes You Think You Can Save Yourself (from yourself) (Independent), the first full-length CD of new Bunnybrains material in 10 years. Kicking off with the snot-nosed garage anthem “It’ll Be Alright,” the self-financed disc moves to a hilariously whacked reading of the Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace” before descending into the usual mind-bending chaos via cuts like “Your Dream Ass Is Mine,” “Suicide,” and “Baby Likes to Rock (in the Country).” “The new album cost us less than $500 to make,” says Seward, beaming. “And it took us about as long to record as it takes to listen to, which I think is perfect, really.” The band has lined up a few shows to promote the album, though this time out Seward’s commitment to his stores precludes any lengthy touring. In addition to opening the Greenfield shop, with the help of investors Seward plans to convert the service station location into a combination farmers market/cafe/jazz club this year while moving all of John Doe’s Hudson operations into its Warren Street annex. It seems that, as in the case of his band, with his business Seward has created a model that against all odds has managed to find success in its own way.

The Bunnybrains, like Steppenwolf’s Magic Theater, hold up a funhouse mirror and invite us to jump inside and be liberated. To quote the book further, “True humor begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously.”

Although he already had a name as a session player and on the London blues scene as a member of the unsigned Tridents, Beck took the world stage by storm in early 1965 when he replaced Eric Clapton in the Yardbirds. His revolutionary use of soaring, fuzz-laden notes and screaming, pyrotechnic distortion—two years prior to Jimi Hendrix’s first album—on Yardbirds tracks like “Train Kept A-Rollin’,” “I’m a Man,” and “Over Under Sideways Down” launched a million garage bands, while his use of Middle Eastern modes and searing avant-garde lines on singles like “Heart Full of Soul” and “Shapes of Things” pioneered psychedelia.

Beck left the Yardbirds in late 1966 but by the following year was back on the scene with the Jeff Beck Group, which featured future Faces and Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood on bass and a then little-known singer named Rod Stewart. The band cut two critically acclaimed LPs of blues-based proto-heavy metal for Epic Records, 1968’s Truth and 1969’s Beck-Ola, which sold poorly but were influential nonetheless. The outfit eventually broke up in 1970 but, after Beck had recovered from car-crash injuries, reunited with a new lineup for two more albums before splitting again. The guitarist next formed Beck, Bogert & Appice with ex-Vanilla Fudge/Cactus members Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, but that group also proved short-lived and Beck entered the first of many self-enforced time-outs.

When he reappeared with 1975’s Blow by Blow and 1976’s Wired (both Epic), Beck once again stunned the music world, this time with a new all-instrumental approach that added elements of funk and hard rock, as well as his own blues roots, to jazz fusion. Although in the ’80s and ’90s Beck did more tinkering around in the garage with his vintage sports cars than in the studio or on the stage, he did release albums sporadically; 1985’s Flash (Epic) boasts a Grammy-winning version of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” sung by Rod Stewart, while the title track of 1989’s Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop (Epic) brought a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental. Beck supported Guitar Shop on a co-headlining tour with one of his most outspoken disciples, the late Stevie Ray Vaughn. His newest disc is Emotion and Commotion (2010, Rhino Records).

Perhaps surprisingly to some, for all of Beck’s exploratory ambition he’s never lost his love of the down-home rockabilly that originally inspired him. Crazy Legs (Epic, 1993) paid tribute to Gene Vincent guitarist Cliff Gallup, and he recently performed with neo-rockabilly queen Imelda May. But then, that’s textbook Beck—ever passionate, never predictable.

Jeff Beck will play at the Ulster Performing Arts Center in Kingston on June 17 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $70, $75, and $85. (845) 339-6088. www.bardavon.org.