The solution came from Adam, the band’s piano player who lived at Panarchy. The former fraternity house had shed its Greek identity to become what author Michael Lowenthal, then a Barbary Coast trumpet player, described as “a refuge for students too weird to fit in at our tight-assed WASPy school.”
Panarchy residents enthusiastically agreed to host the unconventional musicians. They hauled up mattresses and cleared detritus from dusty couches. Adam’s girlfriend Angela commandeered the kitchen, churning out hundreds of dumplings for dinner.
The visit was part of Barbary Coast’s annual winter tradition. Each year, director Don invited a guest musician to teach students for a week and guide them in a Saturday performance. Previous guests had included Max Roach, Slide Hampton and Lester Bowie - but none had needed help finding somewhere to sleep.
Sun Ra, who would have been around 75 at the time, presented a striking figure to the Dartmouth students. Lowenthal recalled finding his bandmates sitting cross-legged on the floor, gazing up at the musician enthroned in an armchair. The artist’s goatee was dyed an “uncanny shade of orange,” and his bulk appeared “almost weightless” beneath a floor-length poncho.
“Get the planet ready for space beings,” Sun Ra told the assembled students in what Lowenthal described as “lispy, whispered bursts.” “People need to be tuned up. They’re out of tune with the universe. That’s why they have to hear my songs: cosmos songs.”
The musician claimed credit for recent world events, telling students: “My music is power-ful. Few months back, we played some gigs behind the Iron Curtain. And? What happened? Y’all saw: the Wall came down!”
This marked Sun Ra’s first college residency, particularly unusual at a conventional institution like Dartmouth. Even at the countercultural Panarchy, Lowenthal sensed an “instant culture clash,” comparing Sun Ra’s comfort level to “a parrot in the Arctic.”
Born Herman Blount, Sun Ra had played with famed big-band leader Fletcher Henderson in the 1940s before his cosmic transformation in the 1950s. After claiming an out-of-body experience in space, he became Le Sony’r Ra and began creating “music of the spheres.” A pioneer in rhythm machines and synthesizers, he had released roughly 200 albums by 1990.
Director Don had prepared his students for the unconventional visit, describing Sun Ra’s philosophy as “a kind of cosmological cult” mixing “science fiction with ancient lore, Egyptology.” When students questioned the Saturn origin story’s veracity, Don offered context about a “dreamy Black boy” growing up under Jim Crow segregation in 1920s and ’30s Birmingham, Alabama.
“That boy - Herman - looked around, saw that there was literally no place in that world for him, and decided he was ‘not of this earth,’” Don explained.
