A fascinating message from one Patrick Joseph O’Connor, friend of poet Charles Plymell, a very recent interviewee in the pages of Rock and the Beat Generation, and a man with a keen interest himself in the roots of American vernacular musical style.
Just over 50 years ago he was pursuing a rock career of his own recording a couple of demos in London, including one with the legendary session guitarist Chris Spedding, a man who would also act as producer on early Sex Pistols recordings. However, O’Connor fell foul of British labour laws and was all too quickly dispatched back to the US.
Pictured above: Patrick Joseph O’Connor
Today, former lecturer and Kansas resident O’Connor is about to release a new title entitled Wichita Blues: Music in the African American Community, which will appear through University of Mississippi Press in September. He writes to us with news of that interesting past and his continued connection to near-neighbour Plymell…
Email, July 6th, 2024
Hello Simon,
Very good show with Charles [Plymell] interview. I have known him since the 1990s and congratulate the interviewer on not stepping on too many of his toes. I live in Wichita. I well remember Charles and his son Billy coming through in 1993 (researching his ill-fated Kansas travel book) and, of course, the Burroughs Symposium in 1996 at which he was reconciled with Allen Ginsberg.
I spent 1971-72 in London and Sussex, trying to break into the music trade. I was hampered from the start by the Home Office (Americans with Irish surnames were under suspicion at that time) and, after a successful audition for the Mike Raven Blues Show (permission denied by the Home Office) and making a couple of demos for Blackhill Enterprises – one with Chris Spedding – I was arrested for pressing pants in a drying cleaners (!) and returned to the US. I have a book-length manuscript concerning this foray, with foreword by Charles himself.
Also, I attempted to obtain an honorary doctorate for Charles a few years back at Wichita State University (I am a former lecturer) but failed. My late good friend Dr Schuyler Jones, CBE, of the Pitt Rivers Museum, tried the same thing with a colleague at Oxford but failed. He reported that such action had to be of greater benefit to the institution than the awardee in order for it to happen.
Thank you for your advances in rock and Beat scholarship.
Patrick Joseph O'Connor, Associate Fellow Royal Historical Society
Hi Dave – I don’t know anything about the fine details of Charley Plymell’s honorary degree and the fact it failed to materialise, but, having been involved very occasionally with this kind of process (great artist Peter Blake received such an award from the University of Leeds), it can bring mutual benefits. An offshoot of the Blake arrangement was that our School Of Music had, for a dozen years, a standing exhibition of all his album artwork, including a signed, artist proof example of the Sgt Pepper sleeve.
Academic institutions, on the whole, are evil-backslapping, backstabbing dens of iniquity. Not surprising that Charles Plymell was denied an honorary degree. But one wonderful sidelight that emerges from Mr. O'Conner's most welcome piece is how someone told him the truth about honorary degrees -they're only granted when the award benefits the institution more than the grantee...Mr O'Connor's struggles with authority bring back to my mind a time -during the Sixties naturally- when going to college was more than a little shameful - a symptom of bourgeois aspiration in an age of aggressive transformation. "College was for suckers" so many people I knew, believed back then,as I did. "Beatdom" and institutionalized, academically acceptable counter-culturalism will ,i think, always manifest the shadow of the inherent contradictions between the drive for recognition & the imperatives of rebellion . And that's healthy...Degrees are most often a sign of defeat. Charles Plymell being denied an honorary degree says more about the narrow-mindedness and cultural timidity of the institution than it says about Charles Plymell -whose work and life stand as exemplary rebukes to the whole meaningless edifice of respectability.