At 82, Dorothy Moskowitz returns to the haunting electronics of The United States Of America, in our APRIL 2023 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.
When the pioneering experimental rock group The United States Of America split acrimoniously in the spring of 1968, they had only been going for a year – but such was their impact, those 12 months would come to define the life of the band’s singer Dorothy Moskowitz. “We probably would have lasted another two or three years,” says Moskowitz, a sharp and sassy 82, over Zoom from her home in Piedmont, California. “There was new music coming and we knew how to put it out there. We’d all gotten more charismatic on stage as well. When we first started we were quite stiff – artsy-fartsy students from UCLA – but we’d loosened up a lot.”
Moskowitz’s partner at the time, the guitarist and Fluxus associate Joseph Byrd, was the driving force in The United States Of America, whose sole self-titled album, released through Columbia in March 1968, paired the couple’s avant-garde leanings with flower-powered rock’n’roll to create far-out psych-pop. In their short time together, the six-piece survived a drug bust at a show in Orange County – “No-one did any time,” shrugs Moskowitz – and brushed off criticism of Byrd’s Communist Party (CP) membership, which manifested in a song dedicated to Che Guevara.
“Oh, Joe was a clear-cut, card-carrying communist,” confirms Moskowitz. “He would drag me to these Du Bois Club meetings, which were the junior league of the CP. But what you have to remember is that in LA at the time, the CP was like little old ladies in tennis shoes, and the big agenda for them was getting free parking for everybody. It was not the radical left.”
Having split just after the record came out – “we went back in the studio and Joseph presumed I had something going on with the producer, which was not true” – The United States Of America’s legacy remains untarnished, and the album’s innovative electronic production invites comparison with other late-’60s fantasia such as White Noise’s An Electrical Storm and Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach.
But Moskowitz admits her reputation “sank like a stone” after the band broke up. “I wanted to be in the mainstream, but it couldn’t happen so I worked a day job.” In the ’70s she joined Country Joe McDonald’s All-Star Band and played with gypsy rockers Steamin’ Freeman as well as her own Out Of Hand Band. She also helped devise and provided the voiceover for an animated Sesame Street short called Cracks – about cracks in walls coming to life – which ran for four years. In the ’80s, with two daughters, she moved into children’s education, teaching music and composing songs.
It’s only natural that someone who studied with John Cage and Morton Feldman in New York and partied with David Tudor in LA – and who played on an LP of Indian ragas for Folkways in 1965 – is drawn to wild ideas. So when an Italian composer called Francesco Paladino contacted her on Facebook last year and proposed a collaboration, she thought, why not? Over his ambient drones and haunting electronics, Moskowitz sing-speaks poetic lyrics originally written in English by another Italian, Luca Ferrari. The result – an album made entirely online called Under An Endless Sky, credited to Dorothy Moskowitz & The United States Of Alchemy – is enchanting and bewildering.
“Both Francesco and Luca said they fell in love with me when they were teenagers,” she says. “Francesco sent me a photo of himself with every album I’d ever been involved with spread out on the floor.” Moskowitz considers this new record a natural extension, 55 years later, of The USA’s freewheeling approach. “I am proud of the music,” she says, smiling. “And I am delighted to be getting all of this attention!”
Under An Endless Sky is released by Tompkins Square on March 17.