[Staff. [http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=RO&p_theme=ro&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EAEA44034F9533A&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM "`I WAS THIS ROCK 'N' ROLL PERSON' BUT NOW BRUCE CONFORTH, THE 1ST CURATOR OF THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME, LIVES THE QUIET LIFE IN RADFORD"] , "The Roanoke Times", August 31, 1995. Accessed October 1, 2008.] and is presently a professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan. [http://141.211.177.75/ac/ac_detail/0,2416,13694%255Fpeople%255F65213,00.html] ]Early years
Conforth was born September 3, 1950 in Paterson, New Jersey, and grew up in New Jersey and New York City. [Plain Dealer 08 May, 1991, pg. 01 sec. A]
It seems as though Conforth was an artist and musician from a very early age. In 1966 he appeared on an album called "It's Happening Here" as the bass player for a band called The Nightwatch. The liner notes read as follows:
"'Too Long - The Nightwatch"Here is another composition from the repertoire of the talented Bob Carnevale-Roy Francia writing team. Bob sings lead vocal on this one and also does some interesting work on rhythm guitar. (Bob prefers an acoustic guitar with electric pickup for rhythm work, due to its original sound.) Roy, also a fine classical guitarist, does lead guitar and second vocal. Bassman for the Nightwatch is Bruce Conforth, who is also a prolific poet and artist. Skip Daly creates a good solid beat on the drums." [http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/03/365_days_85_its.html]
Evidently he was also an accomplished athlete in high school winning several letters and medals for his abilities as a long jumper and quarter-miler. [The Manchester Cavalier, 1967]
From various sources it appears he was part of the early 1960s folk scene in New York City's Greenwich Village and knew, and/or learned from, such luminaries as Dave Van Ronk, Happy and Artie Traum, Rory Block, Izzy Young, Reverend Gary Davis. and others. His life in Greenwich Village appears to have consisted of frequenting such now legendary places as Izzy Young's Folklore Center, Fretted Instruments music center, The Cafe Au Go Go, Cafe Wha? (where Jimi Hendrix performed as Jimi James and the Blue Flames [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cafe_Wha%3F] , The Balloon Farm in the East Village (which would become the Electric Circus), the 8th Street Bookstore (where he renewed his Paterson, New Jersey connection with Allen Ginsberg), and, of course, Washington Square Park.
During this time he also made the acquaintance of Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, and began his interest in altered states of consciousness. The Leary connection would be renewed in the 1990s.
He received a scholarship to art school after graduation from high school and while enrolled met the famous American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning with whom he spent one summer as an apprentice at the latter's Springs, New York studio. de Kooning was to be his biggest artistic influence. He had several shows of his work but then seems to have dropped painting to turn his attention to music. He played with several bands during this time, although their exact names are unknown (much time and speculation has been devoted to identifying the names of these bands).
In 1973 he was the editor of a short-lived literary magazine called Slowglass whose contributors included Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, and John Lennon. [http://www.biblio.com/books/44742227.html]
In 1977 he appeared as "Josh Hawkins" (part of the duet Bates and Hawkins) on an album called "Ragtime, Blues and Jive" and performed under that name around the East Coast and at the Middletown Folk Festival in Middletown, New Jersey. [http://groovytunesday.com/blues.html]
The 1980s
In 1980 he began attending graduate school at Indiana University, where he majored in folklore, ethnomusicology, and American Studies. [https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/2022/1796/1/15(2)+227-228.pdf] He married the former Jeanne Harrah and they combined their last names. For the next decade he was known as Bruce Harrah-Conforth. While at Indiana University he worked at the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music, contributing a number of articles to their newsletter "Resound". [http://www.indiana.edu/~libarchm/resound.html] More importantly it was through his work at the Archives that he became involved with the still relatively unknown collection of African-American folk recordings of Lawrence Gellert. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Gellert] He produced two albums of songs from this collection. The first in 1982 was on Rounder Records -"Cap'n You're So mean" (RR#4013 [http://www.wirz.de/music/gellefrm.htm] ) that was recognized by the Library of Congress as one of that year's most outstanding folk recordings [http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8715(198601%2F03)99%3A391%3C102%3ATAFCSL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R] . The second, "Nobody Knows My Name" was issued by the English company Heritage Records (HT304 [http://www.wirz.de/music/gellefrm.htm] ) in 1984. Following is a description of the albums written for The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 99, No. 391 (Jan. - Mar., 1986), pp. 102-117 by Norm Cohen
Cap'n You're So Mean: Negro Songs of Protest, Vol. 2 (Rounder 4013). Twenty-four previously unpublished field recordings mostly of protest songs, collected in the southern states in the 1920s and 1930s by Lawrence Gellert. Two have guitar accompaniment; a few are sung by leader with chorus; most are unaccompanied solo renditions. Edited and jacket notes by Bruce Conforth. Gellert's field collecting in the south, which resulted in some remarkably candid protest material (the genuineness of which was at one time questioned) has been neglected too long. (An album he prepared for publication in the 1940s was not issued until 40 years later-Rounder 4004, Vol. 1 of this set). If ever an album required and deserved extensive documentation, this is it-and not because we still doubt its authenticity. Happily, Conforth has now found Gellert's original fieldnotes. The hastily written jacket notes, with many unfair or unfounded generalizations, should have been discarded in favor of the proper documentation that Conforth has the wherewithal to provide. (Another, much better-presented package of Gellert collectanea, also edited by Conforth, is nonprotest material, Nobody Knows My Name (Heritage HT 304). [http://www.jstor.org/stable/540868?seq=6]
Conforth wrote his 1984 Master's thesis on the collection: "Laughing Just to Keep from Crying: Afro-American Folksong and the Field Recordings of Lawrence Gellert" [Indiana University 1984]
In 1986 he was appointed Director of the Indiana University Archives, a post he held until 1991 when he left to become the first curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[ His PhD had been completed the preceding year. His doctoral thesis was titled "The Rise and Fall of a Modern Folk Community: Haight-Ashbury 1965-1967." It contains many interviews with the founding musicians of the "San Francisco Sound" lending some credence to the idea that he might have been involved with them at an earlier time. [http://ezone.org/ez/e4/articles/griffin/tibet.html] ]Altered States of Consciousness Research
At some point during the 1980s Harrah-Conforth became involved in researching the use of light and sound stimulation in inducing altered states of consciousness in humans. He produced an apparently ground-breaking work titled "Accessing Alternity" that described the history of man;s quest into this area. [http://www.mindmodulations.com/resources/General-AccessingAlternity.pdf] His research into this field is often cited as a hallmark of its kind as the following quote from "A History of Light and Sound" by Michael Hutchison illustrates:
"In 1990 Bruce Harrah-Conforth, Ph.D., of Indiana University completed a controlled study of one of the computerized sound and light machines (the MindsEye Plus) the result of over two years of research into the field of brain entrainment, and found that compared to the control group, which listened to pink noise with eyes closed, the group receiving sound and light stimulation showed dramatic alterationsin their EEG patterns responding to the frequency of the sound and light device, and also showed evidence of hemispheric synchronization. Participants in the study were asked to describe their experiences. According to Dr. Harrah-Conforth, "the subjects' comments were such typical descriptions as 'I lost all sense of my body,' 'I felt like Iwas flying,' 'I was deeply relaxed,' 'I felt like I was out of my body,' etc."The report by Harrah-Conforth suggests that sound and light devices may cause simultaneous ergotropic arousal, or arousal of the sympathetic nervous system and the cerebral cortex, associated with "creative" and "ecstatic experiences," and trophotropic arousal, or the arousal of the parasympathetic system, associated with deep relaxation and "the timeless, 'oceanic' mode of the mystic experience." In humans, Dr. Harrah-Conforth concludes, "these two states may be interpreted as hyper- and hypo- arousal, or ecstasy and samadhi."
In a separate letter to MEGABRAIN REPORT, Harrah-Conforth writes: "I have little doubt that brain entrainment technology is a highly effective means of inducing changes in consciousness." He continues, "Brain entrainment, at least within my own research, has shown itself to be virtually foolproof and does indeed facilitate whole brain experiences." While pointing out that our current understanding of brain entrainment technology is only in its infancy, he writes "there seems to be little doubt that this technology has a remarkable future. The evidence, my own and others, clearly indicates that brain-wave entrainment is produced by these machines. EMG tests have also made it quite clear that one of the byproducts of this entrainment can be the relaxation response. And subjective reports range from heightened creativity,to beautiful visual trips, to increased alertness, and many other states." He concludes that "the early indications are strong that this now-developing technology will profoundly revolutionize both our concepts of, and interaction with, our consciousness. . . .
The evolution of human consciousness is a tangibly manipulable process. We can control our destiny. It would appear as though brainentrainment will be among the technologies leading the way."" [http://www.electronichealing.co.uk/articles/light_and_sound_history.htm]
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
In May 1991 he assumed the duties of the curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. [Plain Dealer 08 May, 1991, pg. 01 sec. A] His initial duties were to create the collections for the Museum. Among the artists he worked with were The Allman Brothers, The Grateful Dead, Yoko Ono and Ringo Starr, U2, Eric Clapton, Ray Charles, B.B. King, The Everly Brothers, The Kinks, Jeff Beck, Tom Petty, The Yardbirds, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Eric Burdon, Dire Straits, Neil Young, Aretha Franklin, Johnny Cash, The Beach Boys, The Doors, James Brown, Carl Perkins, members of The Eagles, and many others. There is some reason to believe that he may have known some of these artists from his own performing days. Evidently the early years of the Rock Hall were "rocky" to say the least with considerable friction between the two boards of directors: one in Cleveland made of of local businessmen, and one in New York City (location of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation) populated by industry moguls such as Ahmet Ertegun (of Atlantic Records) and Jann Wenner (of Rolling Stone Magazine). After a few years with the construction of the building almost complete Conforth left the job. He was alleged to have written a tell-all book called "Don't Rock the Hall" but the work has never been published. [http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,298679_2,00.html]
The 1990s: The Himalayas, Tibetan Buddhism, and Castalia II
After leaving the Museum he was appointed one of five "founding faculty" designated to create the programs for a "New College of Global Studies" being created by Radford University in Radford, Virginia. [http://www.msualumcommunity.com/ng/cgi-any/notes2_dll_detail/tabid/16484/default.aspx?bid=&id=379] While there he worked with noted neuro-psychologist Dr. Karl Pribram [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Pribram] at his Center for Brain Research. In 1995 Conforth took his first trip to Nepal and immediately developed a deep interest in the region and Tibetan Buddhism. For the following five years he worked as a trekking guide in that area. The New College eventually fell to the budget ax of then Virginia Governor George Allen (it was alleged that Allen was opposed to the "one-world" nature of the program and eliminated it to appeal to Virginia's conservative right).
In 1996 Conforth founded, with his second wife Cynthia Swartz (since divorced), Castalia II, an organization dedicated to the exploration of consciousness. Board members included Dr. Timothy Leary, Dr. Charles Tart, Dr. John Beresford (of the Albert Hofmann Foundation), physicist Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, and other "psychedelic" notables.
In 2000 Conforth was appointed Director of the Jewel Heart Center for Tibetan Buddhism and Culture (Ann Arbor) that had been founded by his principal Buddhist teacher, Gelek Rinpoche. [http://www.crazywisdom.net/interviewpdf/calendar%20articles/rinpoche.pdf] Conforth soon began teaching part-time at the University of Michigan and after the 9/11 tragedy, with charitable donations drying up, he left Jewel Heart in 2004 and became a full-time member of their Program in American Culture.
The New Millenium
Conforth still teaches at the University of Michigan and is, apparently, a popular teacher, or so one would assume from his RateMyProfessors page. [http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=602218]
References
