Rev Otis Moon

I was born in a cowl, like a cat…a purple bag… like Picasso, on May 11, same as Irving Berlin and Taj Mahal. My Mother always told me I was born to be special. But my grandmother said I looked like a varmint, so I’ve always felt very good about myself and very bad. The doctor who urged me forth into the world urged my mother not to nurse me because it was out of fashion in 1944. So I screamed bloody murder… so loud (as I was starving to death) that the lady down the street responded with an open heart and an open blouse. I suckled like a ravenous piglet until I finally espoused a great sigh of satisfaction… enjoyed my first good burp and got on with my life. Needless to say, I’ve always enjoyed nursing the lady down the street-- which may explain my history of serial polygamy.
I have a sister and brother but I was the baby--and a sickly one at that-- so I was coddled and cuddled, handled and bundled, snuggled and tickled, tortured and nurtured and allowed to not bother growing up.
My first memories of music were diverse in the extreme. My family lived in the back rooms of our Drug Store in Gould, Oklahoma. Muddy, rutty Red clay and tumbleweeds washed and blew past, down Main Street’s empty sadness while the jukebox inside honked out the Hanks and Merles lamenting their plights for the drugstore cowboys hunched over their coffees. The first song I specifically remember was “Show me the way to go home” I had a little drink about an hour ago and its gone right to my head.
The great Caruso belting out Il Pagliacci in the back room (where we lived) was our father’s way of elevating the cultural ambiance of our less than privileged circumstance. The little family (after eating our fried potatoes, caned tomatoes and Spam) would huddle in around the family phonograph watching the cock-eared RCA dog spin round and round till we were dizzy and ready for bed. We would wake up the next morning to Allen Jones singing Donkey Serenade or march about to our very-very favorite: Parade of the Wooden Solders.
Us kids built tumbleweed igloos and ate red dirt mud pies until finally Rock and Roll was invented. First it was Hearts Made of Stone, then Rock Around The Clock and Rocket 88 that got my prepubescent essence gurgling … then along came little Richard and Little Elvis, little Eva and fats domino. I watched my cousin do the dirty bop in his family’s shack until it almost toppled right in to the canyon where it teetered precariously) assuming one’s mass and volume was a necessary structural component of a singer’s nomenclature.
Before my voice changed I tried singing like Ray Charles. I was ejected from more than one kitchen for drumming incessantly on the counter tops singing “What’d I Say” with a Lucky Strike bobbing a rebellious-dangle while Elvis-ing my puny pelvis. I was a died in the wool beatnik by thirteen and a wannabe thug and greaser buy fourteen, but beatnik was the best I could do considering my brief stature and cowardly inclinations.
Drums were my first instrument… marching band…four-foot-eleven…first chair…de-pants-ed on band-bus annually, seventh through twelfth…took up the guitar and went to college. Hitchhiked to NYC in sixty-three, SF in Sixty-four. Panhandled on Height street, freaked in Golden Gate park, puking purple and orange while insisting that the cop explain to me exactly how he managed to get his horse over the Bay bridge.
I mastered the art of brinkmanship living on day old peruskies while earning seven dollars a week selling “Berkley Barbs” once a week to supplement my income panhandling at which I was a general failure.
Out of the blue and without training I fell into the trades…house painting, handy-manning… and I squeezed in writing a song of two during this life- style experiment called the sixties. After seven tenths of a decade the winds of fate easily blew my eighty-eight pounds of sinew and sorrow back to the spawning ground of my youth. I began producing and reproducing in Ernest; writing dozens of songs, two musicals, designing restaurants, rest rooms, rest homes and the rest is history. I became an Okie Renaissance man. Married the prettiest junkie in town and settled into a lifestyle of perverse depravity while writing songs galore and gaining popular local pop star status.
After 10/10 of a decade, ensconced in the hopeless confines of Oklahoma City, I exploded onto the peripheral margins of the Austin Blues community the culmination of which was my designing the stage-set for Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Carnagie hall performance. After that I ricocheted from city to city, coast to coast, honing my skill as gigolo and chameleon, climbing to the pinnacle of the American food pyramid by marring the prettiest trust-fund baby in Santa Fe. I pooped out another bowl full of ditties during my tenure as a dilettante furniture designer and songwriter. The culmination of which was singing my swinging little anthem NEW MEXICO SWING for th