Although no record could be found of Angus MacLise having met Salvador Dalí, it is very well possible the two actually met in the New York underground scene of the sixties. Percussionist, poet, actor, and publisher MacLise played an active part in the New York multimedia underground, and Dalí, at that time at the height of his fame, was a regular guest at all sorts of
events in New York.
From the early sixties on MacLise travelled extensively and integrated Asian instruments and styles in his percussion works. In the same period he played bongos with La Monte Young's The Theatre of Eternal Music Ensemble, which combined avant-garde compositions with Asian drones and percussion rhythms. In that ensemble he met John Cale, who introduced him to Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, and soon after that MacLise found himself the first drummer of The Velvet Underground. By the time The Velvet Underground gained recognition through the efforts of Andy Warhol, MacLise, however, had already left the band to devote his time to non-commercial music, poetry, publishing, multimedia productions, and even more travels.
Andy Warhol shot two screen tests of Salvador Dalí in the mid-sixties, and it is through these short films that MacLise's music and images of Dalí accidentally met. The Dalí films were included in Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events, in which The Velvet Underground played live while a number of Warhol films were projected on a screen behind them. When in 1966 Lou Reed fell il, John Cale asked MacLise to rejoin The Velvet Underground temporarily for The Exploding Plastic Incredible events in Chicago. But apart from this accidental collaboration through Andy Warhol, MacLise and Dalí never joined forces.
Dalí's voice and MacLise's percussion are combined on the track The Delirious Rock. Dalí's hallucinatory English has been slightly adjusted to match the rolls of MacLise's percussion.
The Delirious Rock
(Salvador Dalí & Angus MacLise)
Could you define the word paranoiac?
Could you define it in more detail?
The name is paranoiac critical method
One spontaneous method
Based in the instantaneous association of delirious material
My method instantaneously creates miracle
My kind of imagination is the same consistency
Que one rock of this country
Mediterranéen landscape
Grecque antiquity and my monstruositites
Is the same kind of solid rock shape
My delirium is injected and sublimate in this rocks
And in this geology
This also is well clear in my moustache
Because my moustache is le contrary of the moustache of Fiederich Nietzsch
Fiederich Nietzsch is le depressive moustache
Plenty of musique and fog and romanticism
And the Dalí moustache is exactly the same que two erected scissors
Completely metallic
The same que le rocks of this country
The Cabo Creus, only twenty minutes of here,
Is one fantastic delirium of rocks, again
And these rocks is formed in two completely contrary kind of structure
One is le soft rocks
Is the same que lava
You know, the same que emailli
Soft watches
And the other very dry
Very erected, almost gothica,
Incisive
Alors, between these two,
The soft and the stiff
Dalí work constantly
Through the medium of the geology, the landscape, and the rocks
Penetrate the kind of paranoic imagination of Salvador Dalí.
The Delirious Rock has been composed of Salvador Dalí talking to David Bryson (1963) and part of a solo on barrel conga and bongos by Angus MacLise (1968).
The Salvador Dalí interview was published on the CD Surrealism Reviewed, LTM Compact Disc, LTMCD 2343.
Angus MacLise's percussion solo can be found on the CD Brain Damage in Oklahoma City, Quakebasket/Siltbreeze SB-81
