The Fort Worth connection is interesting… Ed Bass financed Biosphere 2 but before that, he was one of the people behind Caravan of Dreams. (Self-aggrandizement: I wrote started the article.) Ornette Coleman, William S. Burroughs, and Brion Gysin attended Caravan’s opening (as seen in the film Ornette:Made in America). Which gives us the following relationship diagram:
Burroughs and Gysin have their misogynist sides, to be sure, but reading their work is a hell of a lot more entertaining than reading or thinking about Bannon.
ETA:
Here’s a second-hand anecdote; take it for what it’s worth.
I was slightly too young to have enjoyed the Caravan of Dreams in its early heyday. Some years later, when I had read both Burroughs and Gysin and was getting into Ornette’s music, I found out that they’d all been in Ft. Worth to christen the place. I had a friend who was old enough to have been there for the whole thing.
He told me about attending a party in one of the Bass towers in downtown Ft. Worth. Bill Laswell was there. The guy who was tending bar was wearing a pair of google-eye goggles, where the eyeballs are suspended from coiled springs. My friend asked someone about the character tending bar, and was told “That’s Ed Bass” (whose family built the towers).
I wondered how a big venue like Caravan managed to stay open in Ft. Worth while bringing in talent like Ornette, Ronald Shannon Jackson, James Blood Ulmer etc. (because they had stopped booking acts like those by the time I was familiar with the place). According to my friend, the Caravan was very ambitious and lost money year after year. After a while, the IRS looks at such enterprises as hobbies instead of businesses, meaning that gross profit = net profit and the tax is much higher. (Again, that was his explanation. I only know enough to fill out my 1040.) Faced with this, they switched to more mainstream acts.
Caravan also ran a record label, and I picked up a few cassettes that they still had in their gift shop in the early '90s. (The gift shop was more like a head shop, minus any actual smoking paraphernalia, and a year or so later had turned into a TCBY while Caravan remained open a few more years.) My friend had amassed a big collection of their vinyl LPs; he found them all at a flea market. He asked the vendor how they’d gotten so many and the vendor claimed to have found them all in a dumpster (directly behind Caravan, if I remember the story correctly).
