And it’s knocking at your door.” It was embarrassing to people who love and worship the mighty Sun Ra. “The light was crucified on this planet, there’s nothing but darkness anyway. “I’m a sun god on a lonely planet,” Ra continued that night at Widney. Image In the vastness of the desert, there are so many ways to flyĮxperimental filmmaker and photographer Sophia Nahli Allison shows you what’s possible when you allow yourself to be led by spirit. Emergent from the cacophony is Ra’s peeved voice promising, “This planet needs me, I don’t need it, lights turned out on me ’cause lights turned out on the whole planet…" Some of Ra’s tirade is redacted by organ and amplifier reverb, and howling and stomping from the audience, which all begins to sound like an avant-garde high school cheerleader squad. When darkness descends on the auditorium, the instruments are still plugged in and the tape is still documenting. Distortions, squeals, fuzz and machine hum lurk within the music so that when the conflict arises it seems to have been brewing throughout the show. The hour-and-25-minute recording of the event was generated by a tape recorder placed center stage, and in the years since, it’s warped its way into a portentous aura. It’s rumored that it was the school custodian who stole the light because he wanted to go home and considered proctoring the concert a chore and not a privilege.
The band had just finished a rendition of “Walking on the Moon,” a song that admonishes, “If you wake up now, it won’t be too soon,” implying that it’s both too late and inevitable - the grand stupor of the human experience has been punctured by the brutal clarity of the space age. High School when someone had the misfortune of cutting the lights. He was performing with his band, the Sun Ra Arkestra, at J.P. On June 12, 1971, Sun Ra, jazz piano prodigy from Birmingham, Ala., by way of Saturn - a planet he insists he visited during an alien abduction when he was a child - put a curse on Los Angeles. This story is part of Image issue 12, “Commitment (The Woo Woo Issue),” where we explore why Los Angeles is the land of true believers. (Amarilis Rodriguez Gomez / For The Times Sun Ra photo: Frans Schellekens/Redferns/Getty Images)
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