Introduction:

Tale 1

Vishnu’s Pulse

‘Tales of Waring’, mj lorenzo’s second book, was released in supportive underground circles during the early part of November, 1981, purposely during those particular weeks; because they were the tenth anniversary of the time period in ‘71 when the young author's father had first begun releasing – also ‘underground’ (which meant handing out cheap photocopies on the streets of Philadelphia) – mj’s first nuclear (writing) bomb, The Remaking.

Like that idea, this second attempt at a book, Tales of Waring, was copied and re-photocopied until it spread like hotcakes and shocked a worldwide audience of fans and pundits; and not-such-fans, as well. And then it went on to draw reaction that was not merely wildly mixed, but even famously mixed up.

At first ‘Tales of Waring’ mixed up and shook up readers to such an extent in their most private and sensitive soul-corners that some of the author’s ardent leftist 60s-radical pundit followers abandoned him, astonishingly, screaming that his second book was a ‘terrorist attack on sanity’ and a ‘suicide-bomb of a book’; while at the opposite end of the spectrum the most fundamentally evangelical Christians, vehement mj lorenzo detractors until they discovered this book, promoted it, taking it for nothing less than a

‘...hitherto blindly liberal-leftist journalist’s beautifully enlightened defense of a legendary pillar of conservative Christian Republicanism, Fred Waring’.[1]

Regardless, however, of the many ways the world quibbled or fought for decades over the supposed ultimate political or ideological agenda of 'Tales of Waring' – calling it leftist; rightist; or NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE (as some said) – ALL PARTIES AGREED that the nightmarish event described in it was fundamentally

‘not normal’

.

And this, as mj’s pundit defenders realized starting around the year 2000, was a great unifier and to the author’s credit: for one of his goals in publishing it had been, they claimed, to remind humanity that (1) some very huge energy forces far beyond usual comprehension existed in our universe; and that (2) those enormous forces reached unusual or ‘not normal’ nodal concentrations at particular points in time and space; and that (3) the Blackburn living room – especially ‘since mj lorenzo was sitting in it’, as they said – on the night in question – had been one of those nodal points in time and space.

And by the way, added mj’s following: certain groups within humanity at large might come to interpret such a powerfully loaded event in many different ways some day; and that was fine: ‘free speech for all humanity’; BUT, they never would have any right to go to war over their finite and unavoidably limited understanding of that night. All groups should, rather, unite humbly in the recognition that each group – all of humanity – had felt the exact same incredible thing when they had read or heard about that night which mj had described in Tales of Waring, no matter how differently ideological groups had ended up describing or interpreting the night, after the fact.

And so it was a plus, as these mj lorenzo pundits stressed, and there was even hope for the survival of the human race in the fact, that: all observers could agree on one very important and basic thing, namely, that:

the night in question

had

‘not been a normal night’.

Dr. Lorenzo said year after year that even starting from his house, even before he had swallowed whatever crazy stuff he swallowed after he headed down the mountain in his little blue VW Bug with the two faded hippy-era flower stickers flapping from its rear, things had already been ‘not normal’.

And after that crazy concoction, of course, strange and unusual things had definitely kept on happening all night long, as readers of the book world-wide could not help but recognize.

Over subsequent decades thousands of theories were floated to explain the not-normal-ness of the night, and about two score stood out.

(1) Maybe the young Dr. Lorenzo was intoxicated by mind-altering substances that night. (nearly everyone believed this)

Strange energies popped up constantly and everywhere, all night; and some commentators tried to blame illegal street drugs, and/or alcohol, for the mess. Yet, as the author reminded repeatedly over the years, strange forces had been afoot even before he had gotten in the VW Bug, when he had not consumed a single mind-altering substance ‘for days’. Right in his driveway the apple blossoms on the ‘darn trees’ had not been normal, just to name one thing. They were two months late and out of season, yet heavy on their branches, a virtual impossibility in a ‘normal’ world.

(2) Or, maybe he was insane.

A few blamed mj lorenzo’s ‘less than perfect sanity’ for such ‘nonsense’ or ‘abnormality’, although fewer did so than had blamed insanity for the apparent (at first) ‘craziness’ of his first book, The Remaking.

Clearly mj lorenzo’s sanity was less in question by 1981 than it had been in 1971, and this was another plus, as his followers began stressing around 2000 when it finally dawned on them.[2]

(3) But then, maybe the whole human race was insane! they said. (most of Dr. Lorenzo’s millions of followers world-wide felt this way)

Over time, decrease in universal worry over Dr. Lorenzo’s sanity was another piece of evidence that the human race might be progressing toward a sanity of its own, said those same ardent followers of the author – even though humanity seemed in some ways closer to the brink of self-annihilation. Because the sanity of mj lorenzo had never been in question, as his most stubbornly ardent defenders insisted (and the author too, in fact) (and his mother; although his eventual ex-wife Dlune would come to call mj and his mother both ‘crazy’); but rather: the sanity of the whole human race among which he lived, ‘the mass mental health of the mass of people on the planet where he had been born’, as lorenzo devotees liked to put it.

The real question about that night, ‘the real issue’ regarding mj, as most of his followers said, was whether poor ol’ put-upon mj lorenzo (who seemed to his faithful pundit followers at times to have come from some exceptionally tranquil part of the universe with a kind of advanced or super-human power of insight) could handle the wild, rambunctious human mammalian forces manifesting in him and around him suddenly that night, ‘without flipping out one more time’.  

That was how the author himself put it, in fact, during a heavily attended symposium years later; meaning, of course, as his Remaking pundit devotees in the audience understood him to have put it as soon as the words were out of his mouth: whether young Dr. mj could handle that night ‘without seeming as crazy and out of control as he had looked in the spring of 1970’, when he had looked to be what even a few highly-regarded psychiatrists retro-diagnosed later as ‘psychotically manic’.

They all were referring to the spring of 1970 when he had talked to himself aloud on the streets of West Philadelphia in two distinctly different voices, had up and stolen and wrecked his father’s car, and had traveled very wildly – and widely – and even without wheels, and written out the first few notorious pages of that soon to be terribly infamous healing manual of his, The Remaking.

And so people of all kinds had gone right on calling poor ol’ mj lorenzo ‘crazy’ at times throughout the 70s, except that now, by ’82, they were using the term loosely, not whispering it in seriously concerned tones as they had done ten years before when his ‘Remaking’ had hit the streets.

Because: the real shocker in Tales of Waring was not mj’s craziness but rather his lack of craziness, they said, meaning the degree to which he seemed to have forgotten or gotten over his crazy past.

(4) Or maybe he had just forgotten all of the beautiful discoveries about maintaining sanity that he had recorded in his first book, The Remaking.

Even a few of his most ardent supporters were dismayed by the degree to which mj lorenzo, the heroic inventor of ‘The Remaking’, the brand new formula by which he had proposed that the human race and especially the Western world be ‘remade’, now, with the underground release of Tales of Waring, seemed to have backed away from or even forgotten that ‘far out healing notion’ of his, the degree to which, instead of leading them forward into the future with that very exciting new formula which he had discovered while writing ‘The Remaking’, that prescription of his for preserving the human race in one piece, he appeared instead, by the time he came to write ‘Tales of Waring’, to have developed an irrepressible longing to go back in time to ‘terribly old and dangerously outdated formulas’.

But, to shake off the apparent shocking change in the author, the reader of Tales of Waring ‘merely had to understand’, as some of mj’s pundit defenders told a TIME magazine reporter in ‘82, a year after underground publication, and ‘had to forgive’ the fact, that throughout that much-debated night of his interviewing the Blackburns, the night that had given him the material for the book, all night long, ‘mj had been feeling and acting something like a child’.

(5) Maybe he had gone back to childhood. (practically unanimous opinion)

The universe of children was ‘not normal’, as everyone knew.

Children lived in a charmed world of fantasy and fairy tale.

That was why this second famed book of mj lorenzo’s, they said, seemed initially, to some first-time readers of the author, ‘just as impossible to deal with’ as his first book had seemed to everyone else; although, it was ‘impossible’ in a very different way. The fact that he had been ‘feeling and acting something like a child’ was exactly why he had seemed ‘so childish’ at times, while interviewing the Blackburns, as his own book, Tales of Waring, revealed to anyone who read it.

But ‘all of this’, as extremist advocates of the author quickly added, ‘was more than acceptable’ because: “Where would the world be now without ‘Tales of Waring’?” (‘three exclamation points understood and presumably for that reason left out of the TIME article’, as a Harvard Divinity student mused in a letter to the editors of TIME a few weeks later, where she theologized that mj’s followers dismissed mj’s excessive childishness during that special night not just ‘with etiological excuses’ but ‘on teleological grounds as well’, and were thus ‘guilty of creating and practicing a New Age Religion around the figurehead of an imagined avatar they called “mj lorenzo”;’ a point the theology department of Notre Dame endorsed wholeheartedly, kicking off a movement of mj lorenzo pundits called ‘religionists’.)   

But avatar schmavatar, here was the real truth, explained mj lorenzo aficionados who were more mainstream in their interpretations: things had ‘not been normal’ since as much as two weeks before the interview, since the night, in other words, when mj and the Blackburns, Bill and Betty Ann, both, had agreed he should interview the two of them on tape so as to preserve word for word their unique version of a number of classic tales about their boss, Fred Waring, for publication in a book.

(6) Maybe he had listened to Fred Waring’s music too much. (almost everybody thought)

Things had not been normal since at least that night two weeks back, they said, because right after the three of them had agreed together on doing such an interview, Bill had handed mj – quite ceremoniously as it dawned on mj finally, many years later – a small stack of his and Betty Ann’s own collection of 33⅓ RPM Waring record albums, full of eternal Fred Waring hits.

The recordings were supposed to “Help our poor ol’ wannabe writer friend,” as Bill Blackburn explained to Variety several years after Tales was published (underground), “that great neighbor and rose-planting shrink, our own famous Monroe County Drug and Alcohol Treatment Coordinator, Dr. M. J. Lorenzo, beef up” – or feast, maybe Bill meant, or maybe banquet celestially – on Waring music by listening to hours and hours and hours of

so as “to help our buddy, Dr. mj, get ready for the interview.”

And as Bill and Betty Ann Blackburn avowed in a Billboard interview, and just as the rest of the world, too, could see, things were so definitely ‘not normal’ from the moment the records were in the interviewer’s hands, that mj actually had ‘slid suddenly sideways into a magical realm’ like that of his childhood; probably caused by nothing fancier than his having gone straight home that night and played the records right away, all night long, until it was time to brush his teeth for work; and had gone to work at the county’s Drug and Alcohol Program that morning without a wink of sleep.

He had told them he had done that, they said to Billboard.

Fred Waring’s magical music, as young Dr. mj would come to understand several years after the interview, must have been linked powerfully to a big important part of his nervous system somehow, ever since the 1940s when mj had been a little kid; or the music could never have carried him back to his magical childhood so completely when he played those records years later, in June of ’74.  Because: the music on the records seemed to have taken over the same brain centers again, almost at once; to the point that, by the Saturday night of the interview, midsummer's eve 1974, an ‘awful lot of things’, as he put it later in an interview with Shambhala Sun, simply ‘were not normal any more’.

Mortimer (as his father called him) John (or ‘Jacky’, as his mother called him) Lorenzo

age 8 in 1951

Florence Elementary School

Florence, New Jersey

(a year when Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians

were at absolute peak on TV)

photo used in Shambhala Sun article

(7) Or maybe he had been off-kilter since the day he had met Bill Blackburn in 1972.

‘No’, the Dr. qualified later still, after more thought: the feeling or sense of ‘magic’ in the air everywhere went back even further. It must have kicked in back in 1972, on the day two years back when Fred Waring’s promotions man, Bill Blackburn, had let his German shepherd run headlong into mj’s yard, barking and frothing, almost lunging ‘like Cerberus, the Greek monster dog from hell’. That must have been the day that the feeling of being in a fairy tale or dream had really kicked in, or so Dr. Lorenzo thought for many years.

(8) Or maybe he had been off-kilter since 1949 or earlier, thanks to Fred Waring.

But then, in fact, after he had thought about it all for several years more, and right up until the day of publication of the present ‘study’ of – or ‘look at’ – Tales of Waring, Dr. Lorenzo told his publishing helpers including Sammy Martinez that in reality his ‘whole life’ had ‘felt sort of magical’, at least since he was six in 1949 when television broadcasting had first hit the little Delaware River town of Florence in Burlington County, New Jersey, and his parents had taken him and his sister over to Doc Schisler’s living room every single Sunday night to enjoy mj’s favorite event of the week, the stupendous choral spectaculars on Sunday night television of

Fred Waring

and the Pennsylvanians.

gift to Fred Waring by the American cartoonist Mel Casson[3]

“Hear! Hear!” was a 1955 Broadway musical revue at the Ziegfeld Theatre

produced by Fred Waring

They were ‘innocent and natural days’, as the Dr. explained later, politically uncomplicated enough – unlike the anti-Vietnam-War era of the 60s and 70s, when war protestors publicly burned the Stars and Stripes – that you and your family were likely to offend and shock no one – in 1949 – if you showed that you felt good about being a U.S. American; or, ‘reveled in life’s banquet’ with family or friends for a few minutes while being serenaded by a classy, universally admired God-and-Country musical group like Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians.

And the magical music had made an impression on little boy mj that had never been lost, apparently. Even years later when Rock and Roll was in, and Waring was out, during college, when eighteen-year-old mj got depressed and began to doubt his upbringing, and after that, during medical school and his psychiatry internship when he finally rejected his extremist Christian roots almost completely and ranted against warmongering, expansionist U. S. Americanism, as documented in ‘horrifying’ and maybe even ‘vomitous’, as some said, detail in his book The Remaking; as well as during other dark and confused periods of his life; throughout his whole life, in other words, as he eventually realized and explained, all of the original ‘magic’ of Waring music must have been hanging around somewhere in the background of his nervous system, waiting to be remembered whenever he chose to ‘come back home’ to it.

In short, as a result of this eventually world-famous magical takeover of mj lorenzo’s nervous system in early childhood by Waring music: poor mj, the global icon mj lorenzo, throughout his life, forever had remained a hopelessly incurable victim of Waring musical charm, a shocking paradox which, when Tales of Waring was published and it came to light, dismayed and embarrassed his hitherto ardent supporters at first and tickled his heretofore ardent critics absolutely pink, given Dr. Lorenzo’s well-publicized politically radical-leftist tendencies (as practically everybody claimed - incorrectly) starting from the late 60s, and given Fred Waring’s lifelong conservative Republican God-Bless-America image (though Fred too had another side, and a big one, though, like mj lorenzo's, less well known).

(9) Or: maybe his psychological nervous system had been zapped into Hungarian noodle stew. (3 billion adherents worldwide agreed, nearly half the human race in 2018 – statistics confirmed by multiple websites, as gathered from 'background Google polling', 'accessible Twitter and Facebook data', and 'maybe some data hacked illegally by Russians – or Ukrainians – or Russians pretending to be Ukrainians – from U.S. government servers', as the websites, all of them, said)

But, regardless of global opinion based on 'statistics', the case was clear to Sammy Martinez, world's number one expert on mj lorenzo, and a certified Jungian psychoanalyst: "The irresistible charm of Waring’s music," wrote Sammy in a 'discussion room' on a Jungain website, "had seduced poor little mj at a tender and impressionable age, clearly, long before he had gained sound understanding of practical modern geopolitics." Most of his defenders agreed, especially of the psychiatric kind. This 'lovely, hypnotic, magical seduction' had happened without his awareness or permission, and it had occurred right around the time when his little boy-heart had been first trying to find sound footing in such overwhelming emotional quagmires as son-hood; father-worship; mother-adoration; father-envy; God-worship; country-love; Jesus-love and much more; with the result that his affection for Waring music had then gotten all mixed up with all of those quagmires ‘like quagmire goulash’, said a group of Remaking pundits who were psychiatrists: apparently correctly, as the New York Times editorial board Opinion-ized in March of ’82; so that the theory was ever thereafter called by mj lorenzo shrink-pundits, proudly, ‘The Quagmire Goulash Theory’; and was studied in depth for generation after generation at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Politics, in Columbia University's Journal of Politics and Society, and everywhere else too, as a ‘scientific’ and politically ‘acceptable’ explanation for how so many intelligent and otherwise ‘politically liberal’ Americans who ‘should have known better’ could have gotten so terribly mixed up nevertheless as to shoot their own leftist political cause in the foot ever and again by doing so many deplorably un-hip, unhelpful, and politically suicidal things, like loving Fred Waring music in public(!), just to name one bizarre one. (!)

"T0 FRD WARING - WHO MAKES MAGIC WITH HIS MUSIC"
personal gift to Fred Waring from the American cartoonist Vic Cantone

preserved in the Fred Waring’s America Collection at Pennsylvania State University[4]

(10) And/or: maybe he was perfectly balanced (billions of adherents worldwide) despite all the many who did not think so

Meanwhile a large bloc of mainstream mj lorenzo followers protested loudly in as many kinds of media as they could find that more correctly the ‘quagmire goulash principle’ illustrated nothing more than the all-important fact that mj lorenzo was ‘perfectly mixed up and perfectly stirred up, and thoroughly integrated and balanced’, politically and emotionally speaking, between the U.S. American right and the U.S. American left, as well as the global geopolitical right and left; as thoroughly and perfectly blended as a delicious goulash; and that this rare and finely tuned and self-healing balance, purposely sought, discovered and achieved successfully during his 1970-71 Remaking year, was THE thing that had given his writing thereafter such political force and universal, global healing power.

THE WRITER MJ LORENZO WAS NOT A LEFTIST, in other words, they said; OR A RIGHTIST: HE WAS A BALANCER, BALANCED PERFECTLY IN THE MIDDLE, TRYING TO GET THE TWO EXTREMES TO WORK TOGETHER.

The author himself favored this explanation.

As did most of his family, including his mother, though quietly they held their doubts in reserve; for they knew he was not as conservative as they were, but could not decide how far left he had gone; for, excepting his mother who always saw the best in him, anything lefter than themselves tended to disable their rationality.

In any case, and for whatever reasons the future might uncover as to why it was so, it was most essential for a first-time reader of Tales of Waring, as the mj lorenzo devotees and pundits always said, to understand that the whole world agreed that: things were indeed

‘not normal’

on the mentally and emotionally complicated night of the interview, not even at the normal-looking moment so early in the evening when mj was still in their kitchen at Spring Lake, kissing Dlune on the lips, and then walked out the door of their comfy little hillside house and up the drive beneath tree after tree laden so terribly heavily with white apple blossoms constantly dropping their pink and white petals like petal snow, so as to get to his faded blue Volkswagen Bug.

(11) Maybe he was hallucinating, visually and auditorially, both. (billions)

But: ‘not normal’ was one thing, and ‘far out’ or ‘psychedelic’ was quite another, observed a large and vocal arm of the critical press, who liked to comment on mj and his writing with a kind of wry journalistic humor that at times was less than pleasant. For, on top of the hypnotizing atmosphere of magical fairy tale charm which the revival of Fred Waring music had evoked in mj recently, the author now, ‘for some asinine reason’, as the critical press put it, had to go and add an extra dimension of ‘improbability and crazy suspense’: by stopping his Bug halfway ‘down the mountain’. That was how Pocono locals always referred to that drive that went ever downward mile after mile toward the Delaware River, down, down off the Pocono plateau toward Minisink and the river. Going ‘down the mountain’ he had to go and pull off the road and park in dayglo-psychedelic bright green grass and a few of rolling lush Pennsylvania’s magical, legendary, almost ubiquitous dayglo-psychedelic brightly shimmering orange and yellow day lilies. And he admitted to his cousin, Barack Obama[5] right on mike in front of TV cameras when he received his Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 that, “Day lilies and apple blossoms should never have bloomed simultaneously, not even during the same month of the year; EVER; not normally, anyway – BUT: What can I say? I’m sorry, Mr. President!! That’s how I remember it!”

‘Anti-Drug’ (?) Psychiatrist

Hallucinates Book

(On Drugs?!)

They Blame His ‘Hyper-Religious’ Childhood

said the Sunday New York Times Book Review in 1982

using this picture

(lent them by his mother, Jo Lorenzo)

"the author, mj lorenzo, in 1949 age 6"
said The Times

"the year he discovered and fell in love with

Fred Waring and his magical music"

And he had to go and extract from the glove compartment a little plastic baggy of what appeared to be parts of some dried plant or plants, which, without reflection, he put in his mouth and chewed on endlessly, as it seemed to him; for it all tasted bitterly alkaline, and refused to go down any better than a darn piece of chewed wood.

And furthermore, and just as ‘not normal’: all this time heading down the mountain he had been hearing the music, even though, technically speaking, of course, the music was not playing. He had been hearing the music the whole two weeks since first listening to Bill and Betty Ann’s Waring LP’s. Even at work: for the music had taken over in some way. He was under its spell by now, and even when not listening to Waring music physically on a record would walk around in a daze, dazzled by the music in his head, dizzy and drunk on it, listening to that music in his head, which was, for all practical purposes, the very same music he had heard on records, the same impeccable yet passionate, exquisitely emotional choral sound that Fred Waring had dreamt up practically since birth, or at least since age 18 in 1918 when he and his best friend from birth, Poley McClintock, had formed their first singing banjo band together and the four boys from the little nowhere burg of Tyrone, Pa., had sung ‘Bye Bye Blues’ in four-part harmony in Thomas Edison’s living room, hoping to record it on Edison’s record label.

(12) Maybe he was just living a fairy tale. (billions)

It was like a fairy tale; or no, rather: it was a fairy tale, as Dr. Lorenzo would say many times over the years, always tongue in cheek and grinning mischievously; for he knew that those words meant so many different things at once, to people who really knew his book, Tales of Waring, and knew it well.

“We were living a fairy tale,” he would still say years later, “Bill and Betty Ann and Dlune and I.”

Maybe most U.S. Americans had forgotten all about their once celebrated Fred Waring after he had quit doing choral TV extravaganzas in 1954. But some of Fred’s countrymen who knew choral music could still remember and aver, even as late and as far into the Rock era as 1974, that Fred Waring, though never trained in music, let alone fine classical music, was still, now at age 74, in 1974, something very close to the world’s greatest master conductor EVER, of impeccably blended, exquisitely expressed, choral sound.

Even the great Robert Shaw came close to that analysis years later, and he was, after Waring, America’s number one choral conductor of fine music for decades.[6]

And the celebrated conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, once asked Fred to come ‘lead his orchestra’, when he heard from Toscanini that Fred was ‘a wonderful conductor’.[7]

Don't take it from me, Dr. Lorenzo would say to his audiences. Take it from Ormandy, Toscanini and Georg Solti, three of the greatest classical music conductors the world has ever known, who were fans of Waring's choral music.
 

(13) Or maybe mj lorenzo just knew good music. (billions)

By 1974, two years after meeting Bill Blackburn and hearing his tales about Waring, mj lorenzo, raised in a huge extended Anglo-German American family whose every member was obsessed with music, and especially choral Christian church and ‘gospel’ music, remained one of those few who remembered Fred Waring’s music: he knew that in ‘74 Fred still, though largely shelved and erased from history by the mainstream media and the entertainment industry, nonetheless remained, in a few backwash quarters, a living musical and entertainment legend. Decade after decade he had managed to stay standing as a kingpin of twentieth century U.S.A. entertainment. All over the country, still in 1974, in hundreds of down-home podunks of measurable size like Danville, Illinois, or Macon, Georgia, and especially in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania where Fred still lived and worked, he was still in 1974 revered virtually like a god; even as grossly ancient and polytheistically pagan as such an attitude should have felt and sounded to all those worshipers of Fred Waring who at the same time considered themselves to be the best representative citizens in all human history of a ‘fully matured nation that was properly monotheistic and God-based’.

personal gift to Fred Waring from American cartoonist Bob Dunn[8]

(14) Maybe mj lorenzo was just a sucker for celebrity aristocrats. (150,000, mostly in the USA)

Or, if ‘like a god’ seemed an exaggeration, no one could deny that Fred was locally (in the Poconos/Stroudsburg area) adored and feared and pampered and propertied like aristocracy, no matter how out of date and reactionary that notion of aristocracy likewise should have felt, to reasonable, sensible American people, for the same reason, including – and even ‘especially’, as some said – to mj lorenzo. 

(15) Or maybe mj was just a stereotypical Aquarian ‘New Age’ hippie, even way back when, maybe long before it became popular to be so. (millions of Americans, mostly burnt out late-60s ex-hippies and their sympathetic families and friends: all of this clan agreed on the point)

For, as objectionable or outdated as such a world might have seemed to some readers new to mj lorenzo’s world – such a world of awkward and anachronistic juxtapositions where Fred Waring and mj lorenzo began bumping elbows in 1972, much more intimately than ever before – no true and admiring student of Dr. Lorenzo’s first book, The Remaking, ever found so much talk in his second book, Tales of Waring, about old fashioned ‘magic’ and ‘charm’ and ‘fairy tale’ all rolled together with New Age hallucinogenic plants and mj’s apparent hallucinations during the interview, the least bit surprising or objectionable when Tales first hit underground circulation in 1981. And this was not simply because oddball traits like showing an interest in fairy tales and myths, and shocking habits like mj’s questionably timed (apparent) drug-ingestion on the night of the interview, all lumped together with ‘a lot of other associated far out hippie-dippie nuttiness’ were all – taken as a package – considered by public opinion entirely stereotypical. Granted, they were just to be expected of that whole pathetic far-out wing of the crazy generation of young (still; in 1974) U.S. Americans who fell roughly into what later came to be called the ‘hippie’-‘dropout’-‘commune’ or ‘Aquarian’ or ‘New Age’ 'Woodstock' generation. They were the very ornery ‘late-60s’ generation which had spent their adolescence protesting the Vietnam War in the 60s and early 70s, even violently in the streets sometimes, but then had settled down a bit by the mid-70s to ‘crazily’ follow Indian and other kinds of gurus. They were that ‘far-out’ motley generation or group with which mj had ‘identified’ more than any other.

(Although time would show that it was merely the first of several such generations of ‘funny’ if not ‘bizarre’ or ‘crazy’ Americans to grow up after the Second World War, as Dr. Lorenzo would say often; as if all young U.S. Americans after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been touched somehow by gene-altering fallout in utero).

No, not just because the ‘hippie generation’ was ‘like that’, mixing together old fashioned calico charm with drug-altered mind-trip in their communes and art, did ‘Tales of Waring’ NOT blindside serious students of mj lorenzo, but also because, as all Remaking pundits always agreed, and as the more critical general reading public recognized too, from their knowledge of The Remaking: mj, poor kid, had been at least a little ‘different’ long before the 60’s ever were dreamt of, way before he and his ‘hippie generation’ grew into adulthood and began to believe what everyone was telling them, that what they might be, more than anything, supposedly, was just a bunch of spectacularly ‘teched and messed up’ but maybe at least creative, so-called ‘hippies’ or ’ex-hippies’.

Mj lorenzo’s first book, The Remaking, in other words, should have provided the world with more than enough indication of his tastes and tendencies to inure future generations of readers to the practically inevitable likelihood that in any subsequent book he wrote, any incongruous, seeming hodge podge of circumstances, no matter how ‘darn unimaginable and impossible to digest’, as Cleveland’s Plain Dealer put it, might have to be juggled and swallowed – ‘pork, beans, spaghetti, AND soufflé’ – all at once by a reader.

And as for drugs? Mj was not averse to using various ‘abnormal’, socially unacceptable and even illegal drugs, if the reasons were good enough, said most pundits who had studied him and his writing. He had helped launch the most important trip and book of his life, the year-long Remaking trip and book of 70-71, by using a little bit of illegal pot and a tractor-trailer truckload of illegal speed; and now, why should anyone be surprised? He was ‘simply’ launching ‘the second most important project of his writing career’, as some pundits called Tales of Waring, by ingesting a presumably hallucinogenic, vision-inducing herbal concoction prepared for him especially for this occasion and sent him in the U.S. mail by his friend, Joey Rosenblatt.

Such behavior was not surprising in someone like mj lorenzo, they said, who, although a public figure, a doctor, a husband and soon-to-be father, was not the type who was ever likely to live his life based on how other public figures, doctors, husbands and expectant fathers lived theirs. What was typical – for example – about an M.D. doctor creating an addiction treatment program? How many M.D. doctors did such a thing? Vey few, if any. And yet young Dr. Lorenzo indeed HAD done such a weird thing.

The purpose of the concoction, as explained later by its creator, Joey Rosenblatt, in a letter to High Times, had been to help his doctoring writer friend, mj lorenzo, somehow capitalize on the special moment of the incredibly lucky opportunity of the interview, and grab the monstrous ‘golden’ Waring fairy tale ‘by the tale’ and walk off with that golden monster dragon of a tale in one golden piece, ready to slam it ‘by the tale’ into a book for publishing and for getting his friend mj rich quick. Joey had wanted mj to spend the rest of his days enjoying art and writing instead of having to work as a half-baked psychiatrist in a methadone program, pushing synthetic heroin-substitute to New York City heroin addicts who had run to the Poconos to escape the drug on the street and recover from heroin addiction. These pathetic and miserable, whining creatures had found their way into Dr. Lorenzo’s treatment program and had gotten on his own, mj’s, personal nerves, and Joey had wanted to help his friend when he had heard about it; he had wanted to help mj ‘find a way out of the grind of everyday office work and psychiatry career’ so he could write full time.

(16) Maybe mj lorenzo was irresponsible. (300,000 said so, mostly in the USA)

But ‘being an M.D. was just one more reason’, said the same vocal and not so wry-humored critics, that mj lorenzo should have ‘known better’ than to ‘experiment with hallucinogens’ on ‘one of the biggest nights of his life’: he was a highly educated, publicly respected M.D. with a sworn commitment to society. He ‘should have known’ that the drug could drive him over the edge, that it could ruin the interview and keep him from walking away with the ‘great golden tale of Waring’.

Wasn’t such a ‘cavalier’ and ‘careless’ and ‘irresponsible’ approach much more likely to reduce wisdom in the world than to increase wisdom? asked apparently sensible people everywhere after the bizarre nightmarish book escaped from underground to be read by normal, average people around the globe. What if the Blackburns, for example, should find out during the interview that the good friend they had trusted so much as to bare their hearts to, so intimately in an interview, was sitting there on the couch 'dropped out' and listening to them hardly at all, because he was on some kind of spectacular mind trip produced by a mind-altering drug that ‘turned him on’ and ‘tuned him in’ to a ‘different universe’?

And what if the police should find out?!!!!

Local Drug and Alcohol Chief

Arrested on Drug Charges

That’s what!!

BUT:... earnest mj pundits who had rallied around mj’s The Remaking starting in ’72, and had even let it restructure their lives, retorted: BUT, BUT, BUT.....

(17) Maybe he was ‘just experimenting’. (so thought millions of intelligent and careful users of illegal drugs worldwide)

A significant reflective core of mj’s ‘ilk and generation’, including mj lorenzo himself, had always suffered from time to time a very noble conviction that they had been born into the world to help find ultimate solutions for their poor, practically doomed and miserable, Nuclear Age world; and very many of them thought that ‘mind-altering substances’ might help them find the solutions faster. And so they had nobly turned themselves into sacrificial guinea pigs and become experimenters. They had run experiments on themselves, no joking around, as the earnest ones put it, ‘serious fu*king experiments’, as one Beat poet put it once, although if it gave them a little enjoyment they didn’t complain; even though everyone knew it was technically ‘altogether illegal’ to use the substances they did use, starting right from that very first heady and trippy drug generation, the crazy tribe of Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg, right on down.

And mj and Joey had conferred at length by phone and thought that a ‘concoction’ was the way to go, so as to help mj ‘open his mind’ and be ready to ‘catch’ the golden Loch Ness monster of a fairy tale waiting for him in the Blackburn living room, the monstrous ‘golden’ tale of Waring, the ultimate Waring story, the Waring tale to beat all Waring tales, which he felt a compulsion to share with the world.

This experimental approach which they had come up with, that of using a hallucinogenic ‘concoction’, was not exactly a rational approach, admittedly, as to method or result either one, as its end would prove, once the interview was over and everyone’s mind had cleared enough to evaluate outcome.

(18) But maybe he was being instinctually intuitive and therefore super-magically-right about what was needed ‘to save humanity’. (his core following worldwide said)

It was not ‘rational’ at all, in fact: the ‘decision’ to use such a concoction, though cautiously deliberated, had been largely instinctual, properly speaking, as the ‘early Remaking pundits’ pointed out eventually. Something in their crazy Nuclear Age guts told people like mj lorenzo and Joey Rosenblatt periodically to go ahead and do such seemingly wacky and ‘fucked up’ things; and yet, as mj’s Remaking pundits had always said, right from the early seventies: the results of mj lorenzo’s ‘apparently crazy’, ‘instinctual’, or ‘intuitive’, ‘fucked up and wacky’ notions and behaviors were not always necessarily bad. In fact, a number of those pundits insisted in the face of much apparent good public reasoning which argued to the contrary, that mj’s ‘crazy, fucked up experiments’, including chewing whatever he chewed while sitting in his faded blue VW bug in a dayglo patch of radiantly bright yellow and orange day lilies caught in the backlight of solstice sunset, while on his way to this first Blackburn interview, and all the phantasmagoria that followed during that long night in the Blackburn living room, possibly as a result of that chewing, were the very kind of things that could and would save humanity from frying itself to a crisp.

Considering all the criticism of mj’s use of drugs, maybe public opinion regarding the poor boy should have improved much more than it did, a couple of years later, then, when Joey Rosenblatt came forward and ‘confessed’ that the ‘concoction’ which mj and his reading public had all thought until now to have been some kind of mix of peyote and/or psilocybin mushrooms and/or cannabis ('pot'), had actually been ‘a dud’, as Joey called it, ‘nothing but a bunch of oregano leaves and stems from a spice cabinet’ in the Washington D.C. ashram of Joey’s Indian guru where burnt-out Joey had been staying to recover from the enervating late 60s at the time, mixed together with some chopped and dried prickly pear cactus fruit from the guru’s health food store down the street, a purchase for which Joey still had the handwritten receipt dated June 16, 1974, which called the item ‘Mexican tuna (nopal cactus fruit), dried’.

(19) Maybe mj lorenzo truly was a visionary. (his core pundit supporters said)

Certain pundits, of course, were extremely excited at first by this revelation contained in Joey’s second planet-rocking letter to High Times, especially those ‘early Remaking pundits’ who had been among the first to discover mj’s first work, The Remaking, and the first to have felt the quality of their lives suddenly knocked higher so many notches by applying its principles, to such a degree that they had often suffered the urge to see its author as an ‘avatar’ or ‘culture hero’. Suddenly now, with the release of Tales of Waring underground in ‘81, it seemed to them likely, once again, just as during the 70-71 Remaking year, that mj lorenzo on that magical night of interviewing the Blackburns in ’74 must have been seeing visions of his own engendering, not visions ‘caused’ or ‘created externally or artificially’ by drugs possessing hallucinogenic properties; although objectors to this kind of public ‘hysteria’ that mj lorenzo might be ‘some kind of prophet or saint for such a reason’ responded quickly in several respectable journals which addressed religious subjects, that the ‘exact cause’ of a vision was a moot point, for ‘a vision was a vision was a vision’, drug-induced or not, and what mattered was ‘the vision itself and how its wisdom ought to be applied’.

“If it contained any wisdom AT ALL,” rebutted the critics.

Unfortunately, most Tales of Waring and mj lorenzo critics in general who heard about the later confession of Mr. Rosenblatt’s were convinced it was a ‘false confession’, a lie, in other words, aimed not at finding higher truth, but merely at reducing damage done to Dr. Lorenzo’s professional reputation, very likely, by his having absentmindedly revealed publicly in a book about his own ‘crazy ass existence’ (as a Jesus-freak preacher in Southern California put it), that he had stupidly used illegal, potentially severely mind-altering DRUGS while employed by Monroe County, Pennsylvania, as the chief of its public DRUG ABUSE TREATMENT PROGRAM, and worse yet might have gone to work in that very DRUG PROGRAM only a little more than twenty four hours after ingesting HALLUCINOGENIC DRUGS himself, to ‘counsel’ heroin addicts while still hallucinating, DRUGGED, no doubt, from the DRUG or DRUGS that ‘he himself was abusing!!!!’

Many of the reading – and especially non-reading – public, in other words, backed themselves into such a hysterical corner about this widely suspected ‘professional faux pas’ as to miss the crucial point others saw and kept on seeing plainly and calmly: that if mj lorenzo, whoever he was, and from whatever part of the universe, had continued since The Remaking to experience ‘visions’ every bit as huge and relevant to his people as those he had presented to the world in The Remaking, followed by Tales of Waring, and if indeed he had been doing so without the aid of hallucinogens, then maybe the ‘culture hero pundits’ had been right all along, that mj lorenzo had been and still was the bearer of an exceedingly important, even ‘humanity-saving’, message to his people and ‘all the people of the planet’. 

But enough...

and:...

anyway,....:

In ANY case, by the time mj had turned the Bug onto the road again and gotten down the mountain – which until now had been very arboreal and quietly friendly – and gone as far as dishearteningly truck-noisy two-lane Route 209, and had waited and waited there in all that unearthly industrial TRUCK NOISE AND COMMOTION for exactly the right moment to turn left, then had floored it and cut out into that unnatural, ‘inhuman’ traffic, as he bitterly described it later, and had hung in there with the extraordinarily heavy U.S.highway truck traffic for a half mile or so, and then had escaped off to the right onto the little, quiet back country road to Minisink and its Blackburn cottage:[9] enough things of an ‘extraordinary’ nature had piled up so as to cause a perennial skeptic regarding ‘extraordinary psychic events’ to, in this extreme case, postpone judgment at the very least.

First of all there had been (hadn’t there?) something terribly unusual about the way he had shot that normally very powerless Bug right out into truck traffic between two fast-moving tractor trailers and had managed to accelerate and turn the normally pep-less little machine properly enough to hold tight between two giant tractor trailers with only inches to spare, just as if those three vehicles had been three coupled boxcars on a moving train.

And then, secondly, when the turnoff to Minisink had soon come up on the right, he had somehow SHOT the Bug OUT from that dangerous motor-age ‘train’ of killer trucks with such amazing precision and ease that he had still felt relaxed enough to notice a sign he had never seen or noticed before, though it must have been there for eons, as beaten as it was, a very faded white sign that said in faded, peeling black letters, ‘Fred Waring’s Shawnee Inn and Golf Course straight ahead one mile’.    

Fred Waring’s

Shawnee Inn and Golf Course

Straight Ahead

One Mile

That wasn’t normal, was it??? Mj lorenzo’s ‘seeing’ that sign for the first time ever, on this night of all nights, was ‘remarkable’, conceded some ‘non-ordinary reality pundits’, most of whom were Carlos Castaneda nuts or aficionados. Eventually they would have a field day with the sign and with a good many other such ‘uncanny’ occurrences in Tales of Waring too.

And also, one must remember, the whole time coming down the mountain, even while stopped and chewing devotedly on the concoction, mj had been singing aloud to the music that kept playing in his head without letup. It was a song from those Waring records that Bill and Betty Ann had given him so ceremoniously. It was the one song that for some reason had stayed with him the whole two weeks leading up to the interview, more than any other song,

I’ll be with you in apple-blossom time,

I’ll be with you to change your name to mine...[10]

originally a World War I song – as mj lorenzo imagined –  a song that seemingly a soldier had written and sung to his promised in spring, who then, in response to the song, was to expect and await his hopeful return from the super-deadly First World War exactly one year later in spring, when they would marry in spades, a song that now triggered such a massive attack of nostalgia and regret in mj, inexplicably, that if the song had not been so inexpressibly lovely and choric-ly beautiful in the flawless Waring 1930s movie-chorus style, and if it hadn’t swept him up so thoroughly in its happy, hopeful romantic theme, he might have choked more than once trying to sing the words in the Bug, he was that close to something like tears; ‘whatever that was all about’, as he put it in later years. He could NOT explain ‘tears’ to himself or anyone else afterward; or so he said at first.

For then, of course, the great and famous mj lorenzo tried to explain the tears anyway, because it was his nature to analyze everything, even things impossible to analyze clearheadedly, like close friends and family, or his own out-of-nowhere emotions, not to mention his own self, and existence, and the meaning of that spectacular existence of his. Such a hard to explain emotional reaction to Waring songs as this, was part of the reason mj lorenzo studied the great Fred Waring for so many years, in fact. Why should that song – though – granted – it was indescribably beautiful in its harmony, impeccably crafted not merely as to composition and arrangement but most of all as to delivery and audience emotional reception and comprehension, so perfectly conductor-controlled, in other words, to the last lilt and semiquaver, and yet so nineteen thirties or forties, so pathetically old-fashioned and passé in its pop-music style: why should it have made him so happy and sad and messed up on hearing it in 1974, on this particular night, as to feel ‘close to tears’? – ??? – ?!

It must have had something to do with (1) Fred Waring’s impeccability as an artist, he was sure, after thinking about it for years; and maybe with (2) nostalgia for his, mj lorenzo’s, childhood; mixed with (3) an awakened sense of having used up at least half his blinking lifetime already; or maybe it had to do with (4) some surprisingly deep affection for the long-gone youth of his aging father and mother, who had been born into the world only five and ten years after Fred Waring, respectively, and had grown up during that first world war and had loved and adored Fred’s music from the nineteen twenties on. And certainly those feelings of un-nameable sadness and beautiful loveliness that were evoked in him by the song must have had something to do with (5) nostalgia for the good ole days when things had been ‘simpler’ and ‘more innocent’, as it seemed looking back, in the once grand old U.S.A., than they were now, after the trauma of the revolutionary and riotous sixties had finally abated and things had calmed down enough to realize you would never feel anywhere near the same about anything again, least of all about your once truly heroic and once seemingly faultless country.

Or maybe his feeling all that emotion on hearing such a song came from the fact that the ‘great golden tale’ he was wanting to capture on tape this night was (6) the tale of the Blackburn romance and courtship, the funny fairy tale Bill and Betty Ann liked to tell about their own falling in love, which had been melodramatically complicated to the nth degree by Fred; the tale they told about their triumphant funny wedding, their marriage ceremony in none other than Fred’s own living room in 1972; and would always tell about – thanks to Fred’s crazy doing again – their ‘great’, as Dr. Lorenzo said to Sammy later, as if having run out of exciting qualifiers, their great Punch-and-Judy clown comedy honeymoon to Washington, D.C., with Fred and the Pennsylvanians for no less a reason than to perform the White House Christmas Concert for crazy Dick Nixon and his not-so-crazy First Lady, Pat.[11]  

And it was that love that Betty Ann and Bill had felt for each other that had gotten them through the Waring farce, past every half-assed shenanigan Fred Waring himself had dreamt up, trying to throw ice on the fire of their love. And that song, I’ll be with you in apple-blossom time, fittingly for the occasion of the interview – it should be remembered – happened to sing of such a real and heartfelt love, and a profound change in a person caused by a love so great it could actually change your name, just as the song proclaimed, and just as that love had changed Betty Ann’s famous stage name to Bill’s unheard of name; and to that love of theirs mj and Dlune, as their former next door neighbors and still close friends, had been constant witness. And maybe the emotion of hearing the song had to do, too, with (7) their very own little fairy tale romance, mj and Dlune’s family thing, maybe even with a first baby coming in September, all this quietly happening ‘up there’ under the year-round apple blossoms ‘on the mountain’ at Spring Lake, where Bill and Betty Ann had lived right next door to mj and Dlune before moving down the mountain to Minisink.

The song had to do with life’s greatest essentials, in other words, said pundits who were expert in ‘all things Dionysian’. It had to do with romantic and sexual love, the source of human life itself, a man and a woman coming together; and the all out celebration of your own amazing human life with friends and family, with people you loved, in a great big wedding; the celebration of a human life fully lived; a life full of love; a life fully and naturally human that revered and celebrated the natural forces in and around it, not just forces often considered ‘religious’ or ‘divine’, but even apple blossoms, for example, the simpler little things that seemed too lovely not to be ‘divine’, regardless of whether your theology considered such a possibility ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural’; and so on: ‘all things Dionysian’ as those pundits reminded the world again and again.

Tales of Waring, accordingly, was seen by several generations of mj lorenzo pundits after its publication as ‘mj lorenzo’s second major attempt at finding a unifying artistic vision grand and comprehensive and coherent enough to describe all the life he was experiencing at that very moment when he wrote it’.

To those who asked, not surprisingly, why his first and ‘greatest’ work, The Remaking, should not have been sufficient to cover the deed, he himself gave the simple explanation that, despite having experienced and passed on to others that seemingly all-encompassing vision, The Remaking, in ‘word-mandala’ form: nevertheless, when Bill Blackburn then came along with his tales of Fred Waring, he, mj, was so dizzied by his own reaction to them he was forced to ‘redefine’ and ‘fine-tune’ his ‘mandala’ until he could make some sense of his reaction.

Maybe he had just forgotten some lessons he had learned during his Remaking year, he suggested to Oprah Winfrey during a special 2018 TV interview, without trying to pin down an explanation absolutely, not just yet; and/or, maybe he needed to learn those lessons over again now, with this book, via a new format. Or maybe he had failed to give certain important forces in his universe sufficient space to express their energies in the mandala of his Remaking, and that was why those forces were apparently demanding more of his attention a few years later in 1974. One of the biggest reasons he had written the book, Tales of Waring, in other words, and then re-written it thousands of times over the years, had simply been to help himself discover and understand why he had felt such a compulsion to see it written – and written right! 

And Oprah understood this explanation ‘completely’, she said to audience applause. She endorsed him wholeheartedly and encouraged him to publish mainstream so she would never again have to carry hundreds of photocopied manuscript pages all over the country on airplanes. “Let’s get him a REAL book,” she shouted to applause.

An all-encompassing artistic vision worthy of attention in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Dr. Lorenzo maintained in later years, during international lecture circuit talks,TV talk show interviews and elsewhere, would have to provide, among other things, an answer to the question of whether sufficient space, resources and understanding existed on the planet so that all persons born could celebrate life fully in the way they chose. Such an artistic vision would have to provide an answer, in other words, to the question so many were asking: whether fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians, polytheists and monotheists, no-theist Buddhists and animists and God-is-dead-ers could all live together on the planet peaceably and cooperatively, rather than cause a cataclysm disagreeing among themselves.

If the world had to have religions and anti-religions, as, indeed, it did seem that it did have to have, then it had to have religions and anti-religions that were tolerant, he insisted: any belief system or ‘religion’ that advanced its cause and ‘gained converts’ ‘by the sword’ could not possibly benefit the human race at this fragile point in human history. Any religion or system of beliefs truly worth its salt would attract converts of their own free conscious will naturally; without resort to force or deceit or subterfuge or insidious takeover of peoples or nations or governments; but rather, simply by the sheer perceivable strength of its merits. The force that propelled a sword-advanced belief system was ego, not truth; for real truth required no sword or subterfuge to gain adherents, he maintained, but could be recognized with the simple inner antennae of natural human intuition.

Mere natural, human-mammalian animal intuition and instinct for well-being, as Dr. Lorenzo reiterated endlessly in later years; nothing fancy-schmancy, in other words; nothing extravagantly metaphysical or scientific or theological, or politically philosophical, and least of all anything forced at gunpoint or curve-ball nuclear sword-thrust; just healthy, natural, human-animal intuition and instinct: was all that was needed to survive and live well in this world and the next.

And since that was the case, as the Dr. would say in his later years, it should have come as no surprise to any reader that: during the three nights of the three interviews with the Blackburns, interviews he later turned into three separate books in which he expressed himself artistically; on those three special nights more than on all the many comparatively ordinary nights of his life: many of the world’s belief systems, past and present, varied as they were, had vied for his conscious attention all night long, driving him almost crazy.

Why? Because, as he told Sammy Martinez once years later in private, with a smirk, all of the world’s religions and ideologies had ‘heard’: that the pundits, in 1974, were thinking about declaring ‘young mj lorenzo’ a ‘culture hero’; and that – thanks to a synchronicity[12] – mj was out looking for the religious or thought system or systems that would best help him and his people attain their fondest dreams of love, peace and brotherhood.

And ultimate truth.

And because, he said, less facetiously, “A serious artist, or visionary, or ‘culture hero’, or anybody out on a hunt for a comprehensive vision had to formulate a political position on the various kinds of problems and/or solutions being offered humanity currently by all of its major religions and philosophies, especially by its militant ones.”

All of the world’s militant ideologies, including the USA’s, required thorough understanding by anyone who hoped their own children and grandchildren would live in peace, or even live at all.

For: in an unprecedented age when the weapons of militant belief of one kind or another could destroy the entire human race within minutes, literally, someone had to discover a way, quick, that the world’s religions and belief systems could co-thrive peacefully and healthily, or the human race would be charred nacho tostitos, lined up in dead rows.

One possible solution, as mj suggested on several occasions, might be that the United Nations develop a plan for curbing belief-system militancy of any kind worldwide. Violent groups propelled by militant belief systems and/or religions had to be outlawed and curbed, or at the very least placed on probation and monitored very closely, lest they do in the human race entire.

Each individual in each country had to be allowed the right to explore and be mesmerized by whatever belief or whatever aspect of supposedly ‘divine’ energy or ‘higher power’ his own intuition told him was right for him to explore and experience at that moment, just as ‘young Dr. mj’ had done throughout his three interviews with the Blackburns. That was the definition of ‘tolerance’.

And if the nations of the world – meaning the world’s geopoliticians, religious or secular – could not find a way to come together and tolerate such a freedom, then the planet’s artists would have to solve the problem, he said, the planet’s intuitive thinkers, doers and creators. Maybe, for example, he suggested, not altogether facetiously, all religions should be combined and co-experienced simultaneously, as had apparently happened inside him during his three nights of interviewing the Blackburns.[13]

And so: especially demanding of the young mj lorenzo's attention from the beginning of this eventually famous first evening of interview, and lasting almost all that whole night long, the Dr. said later, agreeing with most of his own devotee-pundits, especially demanding had been the powerful energies of human spirit and flesh the Western world had always called ‘Dionysian’, those ‘religious’ impulses that carried earthy, ‘chthonic’, even sexual and reproductive undertones and overtones, those reverent energies that got themselves expressed whenever one abandoned oneself to excess, to intoxication, and to ecstasy, and to ‘actual identification with the divine’.

No matter to what extent some ‘silly’ and maybe even ‘seriously sick’ Christians, as he put it, might try foolishly to ‘deny the flesh’ and its importance to life, preferring to defer to ‘spirit’ and the ‘spiritual’ side of man, those silly or sick Christians would never be able to get around the fact that ‘spirit’, during the physical earthly lifetime of a human being, could be expressed in no way but through ‘flesh’. With the result that: celebrating and showing reverence for life and the source of life, therefore, meant celebrating flesh at least as much as celebrating spirit, and maybe more, in fact; since for human beings ‘spirit’ needed ‘flesh‘ and bone one hundred percent in order to express itself.

And Fred Waring seemed to have remembered and respected this semi-secret and not very Christian-sounding inevitability that went with living in a human body, said Dr. Lorenzo after studying for many years the way in which Waring put together a live show, a live concert of songs. Waring, even if many urbane hipsters were right in considering him an asshole at times, clearly appreciated his physical and spiritual life at a deeper level such as this, thought the Dr., and such an appreciation must have helped his popularity endure so many decades of drastic, fast-paced twentieth-century U.S.A. cultural change, just as it must have helped explain the lasting impression Waring’s music had made on Mortimer Jack Lorenzo as a little boy; and again as an adult, despite Fred’s drastic drop, meantime, in popularity.

Though outwardly Fred Waring had always managed to more than appease the conservative churchgoing element in 20th century U.S. America (a thing not easy to do, of course), including even mj’s own extremist-Protestant Calvinist-Methodist parents, by always choosing the right music and programming, for example, among other tricks: he somehow at the same time had pulled off the most amazing trick of all, always subtly and with good taste, that of provoking the earthy Dionysian side of his audience too, the ‘darker’, ‘earthier’ forces tucked away deeply inside them which Protestant American tradition had disparaged, condemned and suppressed, especially their sexual side. Waring’s trick, whatever it was, had worked well enough during radio and TV broadcasts too, of course; but no broadcast or recording could ever compare with the gut experience of a live concert, when Fred’s actual physical, debonair, white dinner-jacketed presence and his deep bass announcer’s voice before and after songs, that famous and inimitable voice which sounded so exceedingly confident, slippery and paternal all at once, even ‘godlike’, as some said, would dominate a concert hall’s all-pervading sound system with his constant comments and intros now irreligiously ironic ‘bad-boy’, now sincerely respectfully reverent, or preacher-like, in tone and content.

As for the songs themselves, Fred controlled with his own bare conductor’s hands, down to every single semi-bent finger joint, every surprising nuance and syllable of every line in every song, with the overall result that his powerful personal and god-like presence was felt intensively by the audience every millisecond of the concert, even throughout the very lines of the songs, even when his back was turned to the audience to conduct on stage. More than any other famous twentieth century choirmaster of his day (except – maybe, maybe (?) – Robert Shaw), Fred Waring knew how to pick and train and mastermind a glee-club choir so that this small body of singers became just as much a tool of his own personal expression and momentary emotional interpretation of a song, a reflection of his own mood, in other words, note by note, and phrase by phrase, as musical instruments could be for highly expressive artists who had mastered their instruments. The choir was Fred’s instrument for expressing his emotion of the moment, the emotion a given song evoked in him tonight, at this very moment, just as a piano was a good classical or jazz pianist’s instrument for doing the same.

A classical pianist could play a Chopin nocturne one way tonight, for example, after having just made love, and another way tomorrow night, just as heartfully, maybe, yet very differently, after having just learned that Artur Rubinstein had died; and that was the way in which musical artist Fred Waring ‘played’ his chorus of highly trained and incredibly responsive singers from night to night, during those months when the Pennsylvanians were on the road, for example, touring the US and Canada by bus, and giving a concert every single night, each night in a large auditorium in a different town or city.[14]

And then to add an additional dimension to the audience’s already complete sense of ubiquitous, even omnipresent Fred-ness, Fred might sometimes coach his singers before a concert to change lines of well-known songs in such a drastic way as to inevitably surprise his always very staunchly conservative audience. He thrived emotionally on extracting shocked and shocking shrieks from staid, white-haired Sunday School teachers sitting in front rows. He loved to provoke a helpless gut reaction, to some infinitesimally subtle sexual overtone he had intended, and he especially loved to educe it from women, live women in a live audience. In the 20s he was a sensation in New York and Paris, but by the 1970s his real and only following was to be found in what President Nixon called the voters who elected him, ‘Middle America’, and what Arnold Toynbee would have called the ‘dominant minority’.[15]

Such suggestive tidbits in his 1970s road concerts were the kind of sexual allusions that would have seemed corny and pre-adolescent to a sophisticated, urbane Jewish audience in New York, Boston or L.A., by contrast, or to an already very earthy Italian audience in South Philly; but such demographics did not contribute to Fred’s typical live audience. His ‘people’, as he called them – ‘my people’ – were college-educated banker Baptists and Presbyterians in Sheboygan, Fresno and Stroudsburg, in Wilkes-Barre and Macon; and so, when Fred’s Pennsylvanians sang ‘In Dem Old Cottonfields Back Home’ in such towns, for example (for this was an innocent and sexless traditional ‘folk song’ that Fred’s generation of small-town and suburban Anglo audiences knew by heart), and when instead of ‘It was down in Louisiana just about a mile from Texarkana’ they sang the words ‘It was down in Venezuela about a mile from Elizabeth Taylor’,[16] that stupid trick worked, amazingly. Dignified white-haired women in the audience screamed on hearing such unexpected lyrics, and the screams sent a shiver of sexual charge and guffaws through the staid audience in turn, and through Fred’s vital plexus too, ratcheting up the atmosphere and adding to Fred’s ever calm and debonair, even ministerial, omnipresent, and ever more palpable, white-haired, white-guy, God-like power.

Throughout his live concerts Fred Waring, even still in his seventies, by means of his still seductive and hypnotizing voice at the conductor’s mike, his masterful conducting and a thousand other study-able stage artist tricks, from classical magic to vaudeville and sawdust evangelist, would hold his audience in the palm of his hand and lead them by the caring hand, as it were, quickly and smoothly through field and forest, daisy to daisy, genre to genre, waltzing arm in arm with them, as it were, right through folk, jazz, rock, pop, traditional, patriotic and even religious and classical-schmassical songs. He would have the Pennsylvanians sing their festive heartfelt way, song by song, right from a drunken-brawl Saturday night fraternity party and/or barn dance straight into a reverent Sunday morning hymn-singing church service without a wink of shut-eye, then follow up church immediately with a sober 4^th of July Sunday afternoon flag-waving band-marching picnic, all the time pushing and propelling and guiding his audience through this compressed, comprehensive multi-staged celebration of life, theirs and his, via the mike, by using his own self-confidence, his own jokes and high jinks, his own mercurially silver voice filling the hall smoothly again and again, as if pouring down from Olympian realms above, and roaring up from chthonic underground depths, and all of this on top of his own creatively unique and exquisitely emotionally expressive Fred Waring interpretations of his nation’s people’s most beloved SONGS, WORD BY WORD, and note by note.

And after the end of such a ‘concert’ of ‘sung song’, as he called it, fittingly and perfectly interpreted; and when you walked out the door finally into the starry night, having been carpet-bombed for two and a half hours STRAIGHT with a mind-blowing blitz of two-bit vaudeville gags and high class godly patriotic reverence all jammed together: you felt like you had been given a lube job of the highest order, been blown apart, oiled and greased and reconstructed in a newly human way that made every tiny thing in the world radiate with so much life that for at least a few minutes and in many cases much longer, every little thing in God’s universe seemed holy and reverence-worthy, not just church and 4^th of July, but even a riot-prone South American country, and even a scandalous Hollywood actress, not forgetting booze intoxication and sex either.

And that was how mj lorenzo described it. And no one ever proved him wrong. His critics on this point might have been disgusted with his ‘antiquarian musical taste’ over the years, but they never said he was wrong about Fred Waring and his music.

Extremist Christians of the kind that loved Fred Waring, as Dr. Lorenzo harped in later years, including his own parents and family, because so many of them were so deluged so frequently with so much otherworldly, conceptually far-fetched and unrealistic theological baloney, were left thirsting for an experience of a thoroughly human and down-to-earth soul-reaming, and needed such an experience desperately now and then like any human being of any belief or religion, so as to have and keep the best kind of human mental health – just as roosters needed to crow, and dogs needed to bark like crazy for no good reason except to truly feel like dogs and maintain good dog mental health.

Many of the people in Fred’s audiences had lost the ability, however, as Dr. Lorenzo would explain, to bark crazily on their own behalf any more by the 1970s; they had forgotten how to do it, and that was where Fred Waring came in: he took them back to when they were younger and feistier and got them doing their thing all over again. The feeling of having lived life fully, of having been reamed and revamped psychologically by Fred, was convincing enough after one of Fred Waring’s live shows, it felt as if you had been to some new kind of religious service, one that was full of sporting fun while still real and serious. And this, as Dr. Lorenzo said in later years, explained why to such people as his own rational, disciplined, hard-working and super-seriously religious parents, Fred seemed super-human in retrospect, a super-artist.

personal gift from cartoonist Gregory d’Alessio to Fred Waring, June 1950[17]

The fact was, as Dr. Lorenzo put it after having reflected for a near-lifetime on his own experience of Fred Waring concerts, a person who sat through a live concert of Fred and the Pennsylvanians, had actually taken part in a kind of reverential extravaganza as old as the hills, at least as old, to be specific, as the community-wide Dionysian religious festivals of ancient Greece – which always included lots and lots of high-quality earthy music, it should be remembered.[18] [19]

And that Dionysian aspect of things, too, helped explain, as the Dr. clarified years later in detail, why a single Waring song could stay with ‘the young mj’ at this point in the evening and keep repeating and building in momentum in his internal concert hall. Everything about such a song was ‘right for the moment’: the fact that (8) it was a war love song ‘fit’ with the fact that the whole planet for decades had been teetering on the brink of civilization-ending world war, twice plummeting right into such all-out world war, simply because people were selfish and craved more power than they really needed, and refused to make very much effort to understand and appreciate other people who were very different from themselves, let alone accept the difference and leave those different others be; and that was certainly more than enough to bring you to tears, wasn’t it?

The world-famous child of Rev and Jo Lorenzo, for one, was super-sensitive to such things.

Mj lorenzo in 1970 had become practically psychotic over Nixon’s !!secret!! bombing of Cambodia, which had senselessly killed a hundred thousand innocent (!!!) rice-farming peasants in the name of the American people including his very own mj lorenzo American self.[20]

Nixon was actually killing hundreds of thousands of innocent

RICE-PLANTING WOMEN, MEN AND CHILDREN

diabolically

dementedly

in the name of mj lorenzo

and his people!!!

DIABOLICALLY DEMENTED
MASS SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS

BY A U.S. PRESIDENT

so what’s 3 or 4 U.S. school children

or Jews or Christians

mowed down diabolically

by an AK-47 or something similar

while sitting sweetly in spelling class

or worshiping The Eternal One in synagogue or church

right?

so maybe

that’s why we do nothing about mass slaughter
in our schools and so many places

guilty consciences[21]

Mj had run off from his internship and written the ‘crazy’ ‘Remaking’ partly in reaction to that event, when the press discovered Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia and made it known. So he still knew well in 1974, four years later, that personal and national arrogance, even his own country’s, or its president’s, could lead to tyranny, to war, to sorrow, and to vast bloodbath and the death of innocents, sometimes millions at a go, and sometimes the death of your own lover or friend or mother or son; or, prospective soldier-husband, as the song implied.

And the fact that (9) this sad and lovely war love song was a song of spring, ‘fit’ perfectly with the fact that it was still spring in the Poconos, more or less, unless you wanted to argue the fine point that right this very night the summer solstice was occurring.

And what was ‘normal’ about that?

Everything in the universe related to everything else; and the country road winding down between glowing green fields and fir forests in slowly growing dusk, ever falling further downward, downhill, ‘down the mountain’ to Minisink and the River, and all the ancient Appalachian wooden shacks falling down, and all the birds singing their ritual evensong along with his, all of it was just enough to melt mj’s poor, fracturable heart, for some inexplicable – probably Dionysian – reason, said the pundits: who insisted that it was essential to appreciate the nearly constant ‘Dionysian’ pull in almost all of mj lorenzo’s writing, so as to ‘get his full and real and very important Dionysian and humanity-saving message to the world’.

And then, just before the little dark shady nowhere two-horse three-house white clapboard vale burg of Minisink Hills, mj saw another sign he’d never seen – or noticed – before; though he’d made the trip down the mountain from Spring Lake any number of times to visit, since that sad and dreary day many months back when the Blackburns had moved away from the lake and the Lorenzos. It was a standard, official-government, keystone-shaped blue and yellow State of Pennsylvania sign on an official Highway Department metal pole, announcing a Pennsylvania ‘village’,

The Village

of

Minisink Hills

in this case.

But it was leaning way sadly over into high green rural Pennsylvania weeds, and was shot through with many rusted Pennsylvania bullet holes, implying that ‘Minisink Hills’ might be more correctly a hick outpost, not a proper village, though perhaps a sweet, rustic and beautiful hick outpost because now: there was the big expanse of the recently bought Blackburn ranchito bungalow on the left, its huge oak tree right there in front, and its vast green lawn front and back, and its tumbling little Minisink Creek way back behind everything, carrying spring runoff down the mountain to the Delaware River peacefully.

Mj rolled left into Bill and Betty Ann's long dirt drive, slowed, stopped, turned off the rattly rattletrap, and noticed the backcountry stillness.

No: the faint but definite backcountry music.

Real music played by real cicadas, chirp-chirrup-chirrup-ing, filling the woods with their ringing, buzzing sound; vibrating him and the trees and poison ivy down by the creek with sweet cicada noise like a sitar drone: steady; round-the-clock; unrelenting; undying as... as what?  He sat and thought about it: as undying as...

Jesus’…

Whatever, no…

Vishnu's…

Pulse!

God! What a groove! Things were uncanny already!

He reached for the Sears shopping bag with its brand new Sears recorder and Sears tapes, stepped out onto the deep green lawn and took in the brilliant – practically dayglo – buttercup yellow and deep friendly sky-blue that he and Dlune had helped paint that happy white newlywed bungalow, painting it in two dazzling colors until Bill and Betty Ann’s previously New-England white bungalow glowed now, like a brand new, never-washed, unfaded, psychedelic yellow and blue Swedish flag.

And then, as always when visiting, he forgot (oh darn) and slammed the VW Bug car door. (!)

Kuh..-.....lunk!!!