Dennis Murphy et al, 1962
Bernard Pyron

When my wife Gail and I were living on Middleton Beach Road at
the west end of Lake Mendota near
Madison, Wisconsin, Dennis Murphy was one of her music major friends.
Dennis used to visit us there and I remember Murphy and I used her piano
to do prepared piano pieces. That was in 1959.

In 1959 I visited Dennis in his apartment on Bassett Street in
Madison, which was almost across the street from what later became the
Mifflin Street Coop. At that time Dennis was living with roommates
who were art majors and Jim Quigley in Art History. As early as 1959
there was a sort of art bohemian group there in a neighborhood which
later in the sixties became a hippie area.

Dennis Murphy was the leader of a group of art and music majors who
met regularly at our house at 5710 Bittersweet Place in Madison's
Crestwood, a few blocks north of Frank Lloyd Wright's prefab house of
about 1956. We improvised on oriental, renaissance, medieval and
American folk music. Clayton Bailey, a pottery student then, and I
were not musicians, but Dennis taught us to play the mouth bow and
Jew's harp. The mouth bows we made were constructed from two inch
wide hardwood strips of wood, with one or two piano strings at the
upper end of the scale secured with tuning pegs.

The regulars of the group were Dennis Murphy, Raleigh Williams, a math
teacher, musician, singer and instrument maker, Monona Rossol, who was
a pottery student like Clayton Bailey and myself, and she was also a
classical singer. My wife Gail, a piano major, and I were also
regulars. Thomas J. Banta, then an assistant professor of psychology
at Wisconsin, became a regular also though he did not participate in
the music making. The exceptional Wisconsin social life that brought
art and music majors together in small groups was not that evident
among the professors and grad students of the psychology department.
This is perhaps partly why Tom Banta became part of our group. Tom
Banta is the announcer at the beginning of the piece The Prelem Party, May
1962 now on Gcast.  See the link below.

.There were some others such as Gloria Welniak,
another potter, and an art major I called Old Dick Gong.

One time in May of 1962 we met at Clayton Bailey's place out in the
country south of Madison. We built up a good sized camp fire which
can be heard burning on the audio we made that night. Dennis
Murphy was playing on his sitar, Monona Rossol was wailing or
vocalizing, Clayton Bailey was blowing his blatting ceramic horn he
had made by rolling a slab of clay and firing it, and I was pounding
on my Chinese tom-tom. Had
someone nearby heard all that, they would never have known that three
of those performers were to become well known - Dennis Murphy,
Clayton Bailey and Monona Rossol.

Here are a few links to Dennis Murphy, including a wikipedia article on him:

http://www.kalvos.org/murphyd.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Murphy_(musician)

http://www.yhttp:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv_T5mfoubQoutube.com/watch?v=Fv_T5mfoubQ

http://www.fyreandlightning.org/Pages/bios.html

On          http://www.kalvos.org/murphyd.html   above there is a good photo of
Dennis Murphy.

Clayton Bailey attained to some image as a sculptor on the West Coast.
Bailey has been written up in numerous art
journals and newspaper and magazine articles and has many links on the
Internet. He turned seventy this year. Dennis Murphy is now 75.
Monona Rossol is an authority in New York City on the toxic aspects of
art materials and has written several books. She also has many links to her on
the Internet.

I have audio cassette copies of most of the old reel to reel tapes I
made of our improvised music sessions of 1960 to 1962. I now have two
audio files from our 1960-1962 group on the Internet at the link
below. "The Real Music of 5710 Bittersweet Place is a mouth bow piece
by myself and Clayton Bailey and Raleigh Williams playing together.
Bailey
is on the Jew's harp and Williams on the guitar. The link is:

http://www.gcast.com/u/bernardpyron/main

I have eleven minutes from the May 20, 1962 session at Clayton
Bailey's place in the country south of Madison on this audio site.
Its the same address as given above, and is called The Prelem Party,
May 20, 1962. Unfortunately the sound is not as good a quality as the
mouth bow and Jew' s Harp-guitar piece.

If someone has a comment or question about the Dennis Murphy group in
Madison, Wisconsin during the early sixties, my E Mail is:

bernardpyron@gmail.com

Bernard Pyron