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FEATURED SITE: Legend of the Holy Ranger
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Harley-Davidson riders know him as a rugged individualist who serves as chief historian and archivist for the only motorcycle that matters. Academic types and members of the arts community respect him as a poet, a musician, and a philosopher. He is Martin Jack Rosenblum, AKA The Holy Ranger. To set the legend straight, friends and fans have created the "Official Holy Ranger" site to update fellow followers on the latest news from this multi-talented student of American history.


The Pan-head Poet

Meet the man who Harley-Davidson's hired to write motorcycle verse and keep a history on the 100-year-old company

By Terry Sullivan

He's what happens if you're allowed to reconstitute yourself as your own imaginary childhood friend. Which in his case was a guy he thought of as "The Holy Ranger," the lonesome stranger who rode in to fix what was wrong and maybe even things up a little. We all had one; Rosenblum became his.

Because Dave Snaker Ray told him a middle-class Jewish kid could sing the Blues. Because he got tired of teaching poetry to college students, or tired of being a university registrar, or spent a little too much time listening to rock-a-billy in his youth, or got nostalgic for a frontier he'd missed, or turned forty and bought a Harley.

Whatever, as the inarticulate say. The bare facts are that he was guy with a Ph.D. in the Objective Poets (think Pound and Williams as the dads), and a tenured slot at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. And one day he started writing about The Holy Ranger and it turned into a book, and he started writing lyrics and getting serious on his Gibson guitar, and before you could say "hop on," he was in leathers and had signed on as the official historian for the Harley-Davidson Company. Couple of beats later and he was recording jazzy/blues/country epistemological semi-talking funk with the drummer from the Violent Femmes—when he wasn't cruising Wisconsin back roads on his Harley Sportster.

Today he's the motorcycle historian with 20 books of poetry and a half-dozen albums, a wife of 33 years and two daughters, filling a one-man niche and happy as a chromed, V-Twin clam. His obsessions are single action Colt pistols, Gibson guitars, bikes that go "potato, potato, potato," and turning the odd mythopoetic phrase. His visions run from righteous white knights on electroglyde mounts telling the truth to whatever he conjures up under the influence of Mississippi John Hurt and Lightnin' Hopkins. On the side, he teaches the history of rock 'n' roll at UWM.

Never mind—just go to www.holyranger.com and see and listen for yourself. Here's a little preview, a story of that first Harley, the one he bought in the winter and had to park in the house until the Wisconsin thaw.

Evolution Amulet

the 30th Anniversary XLH sat in the dining room
during winter months & once after a late movie
when all slept & the first real snow landed
I got on it & turned the lights toward a
front window shining into the blanket
being tossed upon the birch tree
as winter's comfort & signaling
with yellow flashes reflecting
on an empty television screen:
the first spring rain bringing
this Sportster down the ramp
& across the lawn and sidewalk
to the garage where it
fires up once the carb
swallows ample passion
but the rain keeps any
travel in the alley to
just beads upon fresh
wax or upon the chrome my reflection
while I get down nearer the exhausts
to hear what winter kept in silence.

Terry Sullivan is a columnist for The Chicago Tribune.

Copyright 2003 Ralph Lauren Media, LLC

This POLO.COM on-line magazine article opened on 2 December 2003, and here is the address to view the photography that accompanies the above text: http://entertainment.polo.com/editorial/static/harley_history.asp


Saddle up the Softail and roar down the range
By DAVE TIANEN
dtianen@journalsentinel.com

Last Updated: Aug. 21, 2003

"I sure like those Springers
& a Low Rider has always been
my idea of a real motorcycle,

yet this 30th Anniversary Sportster
feels more like a quarter horse for
me with its vibrations instead of bucking:

but one morning I came out to the garage
to find horse (expletive) on the floor & would say
this is quite an official Harley accessory

that research & design got just right
for us who want things rustic & natural."

"The Sportster Accessory" by Martin Jack Rosenblum, a.k.a. The Holy Ranger

Horses deliver more tangible exhaust, but that may be one of the few distinctions separating the modern Harley rider from the ranger riders of the Old West.

As a poet and a talking bluesman who works for Harley-Davidson Motor Co. as a historian, Martin Jack Rosenblum has been exploring the mythic linkage between the Harley rider and the Old West cowboy for much of his adult life.

In his collection "The Holy Ranger: Harley-Davidson Poems," Rosenblum appears on the cover in the persona of the Holy Ranger - long Rider coat, beard, vest and a badge on his chest. He's both Harley rider and mythic range rider, and it's a connection that came early in life.

"When I was a kid, that's what got going in my head," he said in an interview. "I went right from the Saturday morning Westerns over to Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Just right through it.

"There's so much that's similar," he continued. "The whole cowboy mentality and sensibility and being 'out on the range' and this whole sense of going some place you can't get unless you've got a horse or a Harley. The similarities are remarkable."

The connection is hardly unique to Rosenblum.

"Bikers are the legitimate offspring of the American cowboy," said Bob Boze Bell, a former motorcycle racer who is now executive editor of True West Magazine, a national publication.

Bell argues that the Harley rider and the cowboy share more than a common mythology of freedom and independence, of the lone rider silhouetted against a vast horizon. They also share a kind of mystique. Put 20 Harley riders on the road, and they begin to resemble an Old West posse.

"I got on the plane the other day, and there was a Hell's Angel in front of me. I gave him about three more steps than I would if he was carrying a briefcase. That was interesting. He was probably a grandfather. He was an older guy.

"I know the president of the Hell's Angels here, and I've interviewed Sonny Barger," Bell said, referring to a well-known Hell's Angel. "The nicest guys, you know . . . but there's a mystique there that you know, don't mess with those guys. I think the cowboy had that, also."

The motorcycle as steed is a linkage that comes easily to Rosenblum.

"It's the gallop," he said. " . . ."Of course, a motorcycle is going to be more like a horse than a car, but it's also the gallop of the engine, the fueling, the pulse, the galloping sound. It's a natural transference that everybody makes. Roy Rogers was a dyed-in-the-wool Harley-Davidson rider, and so was William Boyd, Hopalong Cassidy."

In his music, the Holy Ranger has sometimes linked the biker and the range rider.

"I wrote a song about Cole Younger called 'Worth the Cost.' I didn't directly associate him with riding a Harley-Davidson, but there's a sensibility. I also wrote another song called 'Missouri Stranger' where Jesse James comes back and does ride a Harley."

Bell has no trouble visualizing the James-Younger gang in biker terms.

"If they were around today, Cole Younger would be on a full dresser, and Jesse would probably be on a Sportster, and they would feud all the time about which bike was better."

From the Aug. 22, 2003 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


Shepherd Express
March 6-12, 2003
"Boris & Doris on the Town"

Victor DeLorenzo of the Violent Femmes and son Malachi and singer/guitar and harmonica player DR. MARTIN JACK ROSENBLUM just completed a CD called NAVIGATOR.

Website Note: The album NAVIGATOR is being released by the band 'MVM' (Martin Jack, Victor, Malachi) through www.holyranger.com --- meanwhile, after completing NAVIGATOR, Martin Jack is presently recording a new solo album entitled SWAMP RIVER. After the completion of the new collaborative MVM album Martin Jack immediately began the solo CD now in progress. The above entry from gossip columnists Boris & Doris has been condensed and is the first signal regarding completon of Martin Jack's new band album, NAVIGATOR.



Martin Jack Opens For Leo Kottke

"An Evening with Leo Kottke"
Popular guitarist Leo Kottke will be presenting an exclusive 90-minute concert in the University Theatre. Kottke is one of the most creative and rhythmically powerful fingerstyle acoustic guitarists of the twentieth century.

Opening for Leo Kottke is Violent Femmes' delightfully unpredictable, Victor DeLorenzo, with the dynamic 'Ash Can School'. Special guest appearance by Martin Jack.

Proceeds to benefit the New Beginnings Scholarship. This scholarship was established by area resident, Linda K. Lindquist and helps UWWC students who have overcome adversity in their personal or professional lives.


Shepherd Express
August 8-14, 2002
Grooves
By David Luhrssen

MARTIN JACK ROSENBLUM
SPIRIT FUGITIVE

If you've only begun to discover Martin Jack Rosenblum (of Holy Ranger fame), SPIRIT FUGITIVE is not the place to begin. If you've been a fan, however, you'll want it to complete the thematic trilogy that includes two of his strongest albums, NO FREEDOM, HONEY and PLACES TO GO.

The problem with SPIRIT FUGITIVE, despite brilliant moments, is its appearance of being an EP padded out. It includes two versions of a fascinating epic of gnawing, middle-age doubt, "(I Was) Only A Pilgrim," two versions of a lovely instrumental and one prickly blues rocker, "(I Can't Get Going) Because I'm Already Gone," which aptly describes the barstool disgust of a narrator unhappy with the low road of contemporary pop culture. Wisdom and poetry abound on SPIRIT FUGITIVE. I just want more!



Martin Jack Rosenblum
Places To Go
It isn't billed as a "Best of," but the latest by the Milwaukee poet and sometime bandleader is comprised of four tracks from Down on the Spirit Farm, four from Freehand, four outtakes and four brand-new selections. Regardless of their provenance, the lyrics are imbued with the grain of life experience and the kind of mystic consciousness that has nothing to do with fake Indian flutes and crystal boutiques; the music achieves the Platonic ideal of a garage band, perfect in its hard, unvarnished simplicity. -D.L.

Return of the Holy Ranger

Harley historian Martin Jack Rosenblum forges poetry and rock'n'roll from American iron

A cowboy hat and motorcycle boots, long gray beard, a thoughtful face circled with professorial spectacles: Even in appearance, Martin Jack Ronsenblum poses an image that the media still find paradoxical. The intellectual biker? Sure, Marlon Brando didn't spout Sartre as he tore up the town in The Wild One, and the Hells Angels weren't thinking about Nietzche as they clubbed down the crowd at Altamont, but let's not forget Peter Fonda in Easy Rider. No violence-crazed dummy there.

And what about the axiom that the media, and the movies and TV generally, miss whole reams of reality, entire realms of experience? Their rule is simplify and codify. With bikers, as with other subcultures, the media tend to identify only the worst elements, not the majority of men and women whose love for motorcycles and all things Harley has nothing whatever remotely to do with criminality or stupidity.

These are the people who, Rosenblum once said, represent nothing less than "the only hope for American civilization, at least the kind of American civilization I want to live in."

As for Rosenblum, let's not forget that any enduring cultural force, whether it's rock'n'roll or rap, baseball or Harley-Davidson motorcycles, will find its voice through individuals gifted enough and thoughtful enough to articulate what it all means-or at least create a compelling vision from the raw material at hand.

In Rosenblum, the Harley-Davidson Motor Company's official historian since 1993 (and its unofficial poet laureate since the publication of his book The Holy Ranger: Harley-Davidson Poems in 1989), the lure of scorching the open road-wind in the hair like a knight errant or cowboy of earlier epochs, leaving a trail of heavy-metal thunder instead of pounding hoofs-has found its oracle and its chronicler, its poet and its explicator.

Rosenblum is the guy who can speak to the larger significance of riding those noisy, two-wheeled beasts-in lectures and articles to be sure, but also in rock'n'roll that sets the poetry of experience ("with the sun straight as the road there is a wind tattoo upon my bare hands," as he writes in "Motorcycle Noon") to blood-stirring songs as a performer and recording artist.

Although Ranger Rosenblum hasn't gigged much lately (his work in the Harley-Davidson archives keeps him busy), he recently released his first CD in five years, No Freedom Honey and already is working on a follow-up. He has been asked by Gibson to endorse one of its guitars. Performing in his guise as the Holy Ranger, a folk hero of his own creation, he will also play with Eric Burdon & the New Animals at this year's Annual H.O.G. (Harley Owners Group) Rally, Thursday, June 22 at the Midwest Express Center. It's all part of his job as spokesman and living embodiment of something called "Harley culture." Unlike all too many people in our society of alienation, Rosenblum loves his work.

Biker Poet

Even among bikers who pride themselves on what they call nonconformity, Rosenblum stands out. He's the genuine article: a character of good character. "My interest through my entire life has been motorcycles and motorcycle history-the communality of it, the code of it, the aesthetic of it," he says.

The wiry, compactly built figure with a rabbinical gray beard and a cowboy's sartorial sense stalks through the halls of Harley's Juneau Avenue plant and corporate headquarters, near the site where the company built its first model (which resembled a motorized bicycle) in 1903-an unmovable shrine for a firm whose made-in-America image would deflate like a pricked balloon if it ever moved its factory to Malaysia. He's a hog-riding beatnik among the big-armed, barrel-chested workers lugging their metal lunch boxes to the break room. The building's walls are a riveted reminder of the Industrial Age technology extolled here. Harley-Davidson's ethos is pre-digital, grounded in a time when blast furnaces lit the imagination of entrepreneurs and mechanics (the company's namesakes among them), when workers actually built tangible things, wielding heavy metal tools in their bare hands.

Something of the brawny bravura of that age at its most romantic (never mind the 12-hour workday) clings to the products Harley-Davidson makes today, the objects of Rosenblum's affection, the totems of his culture.

The smell of grease, the slightly sulfurous aura of smoking-chimney industry, is part of the mythology Rosenblum invokes. Riding a Harley is nothing like surfing the Net. It's not about watching an experience on a screen, clicking and dragging its components. It's about experience holding you in a half-nelson as cyberspace threatens to eclipse the real deal.

Although Rosenblum may have been interested in motorcycles his entire life, they weren't his only fascination. If they had been, he would not have been equipped to become the eloquent voice of the Harley-Davidson mythos. Knowing your way around an internal combustion engine is one thing. Pronouncing on the motorcycle's place in the American imagination is something else again. It has become Rosenblum's responsibility to place Harley in a continuum with Tom Sawyer, the westerns of Louis L'Amour, and John Ford and Frederick Jackson Turner's essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," whose thesis that America steeled its character by taming a continent and winning the wilderness has been widely challenged in recent years (it's not an American Dream that includes Indians) but remains in our national folklore.

In Rosenblum's eyes, the biker is the final frontiersman, crossing between civilization and the wilderness of dreams, half-wild like the buckskin-clad pioneers of the past.

Literary studies gave Rosenblum his apprenticeship as Harley-Davidson historian as much as riding the hogs. Avidly, he read William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and William Blake, writers who articulated his innate sense that an object-a motorcycle, say-can be a sign for values and heightened states of grace. "I rely upon experience that has a mystical quality to provide depth beyond surface detail," he once wrote.

In the '60s he played folk-blues in coffee houses. He saw no contradiction between great literature and the counterculture's music. He still doesn't. "If Chaucer were alive today, he'd do a boxed CD set," Rosenblum says, letting off a howling laugh.

Rosenblum got kicked out of high school in Appleton, Wis. for being a "Harely"-'50s slang for juvenile delinquent-but went on to UW-Madison in the '60s and eventually earned a Ph.D. in English with a specialty in American studies. He's often referred to as "Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum" in Harley literature. He taught English briefly at UW-Milwaukee but soon became an admissions counselor, a job he felt had greater social value, given the increasingly obscurantist values of academia.

All the while he published poems, editing a 1972 anthology of Milwaukee poetry called Brewing and reading his own work as far away as European colleges. He tried fusing his words with the music of Milwaukee jazz guitarist Jack Grassel on the cassette Music Lingo (soon to be reissued on CD). In 1990 he turned to rock'n'roll rooted in the Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochrane singles he listened to in high school and the coffee houses he played in college, and recorded the album Free Hand (still available from Rounder Records).

Four years later, he followed it up with a second CD, Down on the Spirit Farm. Along the way, his Holy Ranger book became "an official licensed product" sold by Harley dealers along with eagle badges, iron shield T-shirts, baroquely logoed belt buckles and the entire line of paraphernalia.

Disillusioned with academia, Rosenblum was looking for something new. The Holy Ranger book helped bring him to Harley's attention. He became the company historian, organizer and keeper of an archive whose mission is to collect a copy of everything the company ever produced: every bike, brochure and thread of clothing. Much of this material will cycle through the Harley-Davidson Museum, scheduled to open March 2002 in a contemporary Harley's Industrial Age plant, in Schlitz Park.

No Freedom Honey

Rosenblum, 53, has owned Harleys since he was a teenager in Appleton. "My dear, sweet grandmother allowed me to hide the motorcycles on her property," he says, laughing about the level of parental disapproval he met from his immigrant Jewish father. "My father only found out I owned a Harley after the Holy Ranger book came out and he saw an article about me in The Milwaukee Journal."

Listening to his new CD, No Freedom Honey, is to hear the roaring machines in the marrow of his poetry, in the DNA of his consciousness. He recorded it under the name the Holy Ranger, which he describes as a "mythopoetic entity" he created as a kid. Compounded from his spiritual heritage and western movies, images of the Holy Ranger haunted such poems as "The Assumption" (1970) and his book The Werewolf Sequence (1974) as "the archetypal American person."

"I never planned on becoming the character I created ,but it's become my nickname and I'm honored," Rosenblum says.

Many songs will be familiar to fans of his earlier albums, Free Hand and Down on the Spirit Farm. A good part of No Freedom Honey consists of alternate takes, not scraps from the cutting-room floor but credible versions of songs passed over the first time. There also are a couple of new tracks, a bridge to his CD of new material, Places to Go, scheduled for release this summer. No Freedom Honey is like a greatest-hits album from a parallel universe, a great place to survey Rosenblum's present-day troubadour music.

His range is wide and he rides it astride a Harley. The relentlessly upbeat "Give Me More" tells about the biker lifestyle at its most obvious level: a gateway to freedom from an office cubicle that swings open Friday night and slams shut before Monday dawns. It stars Rosenblum's wife of 30 years, Maureen, riding on back of "this holy machine," dry under leather through a rainy Saturday ride. It's simple and catchy, but not all of No Freedom Honey is so basic. On "First Tune in Phoenix," the metaphors grow as long and thick as in T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland." The terrain is fraught with peril and possibility, traversed by steel steeds but haunted by Satan, who wants to make a deal. Written in the late '80s as his career as the Holy Ranger burgeoned, Rosenblum wrestled with the temptation to put life on the road-in the showbiz sense-ahead of his wife and daughters.

"It felt like a Faustian thing. The bargain is to cut off family contact," Rosenblum explains. "The song is saying that no devil can cut a deal with me, but there's a slight doubt there, like at the end of Goethe's Faust, where he's redeemed, but is he? I'm saying 'screw-you, devil!' but in the end it's, well ...?"

The country-rocker "Coming Off the Prairie" starts with an image of hardy riders and becomes a meditation on violence (Rosenblum has been described as an armed pacifist) and concludes: "If our backs are against the wall, we'll look at you in the eye and answer this call ... men should fight that way if at all." It's an evocation of a code, the shared sense of conduct that, Rosenblum insists, exists among most Harley riders-those spirited descendants of John Ford's cowboys.

The album's title number, a finger-style guitar-laced love ballad whose imagery suggests Leonard Cohen ("jagged lady in snow") if he rode a motorcycle ("There comes a time when the highway turns blond and old"). The blues-rocker "To the Bone," its angst run up the flag pole of a heavy Albert King guitar riff, references Bertolt Brecht with its image of a mysterious black ship docking at dawn: Its enigmatic lyrics suggest danger and adventure ("There are enemies out there who will cut you to the bone") on the ebbing, flowing ocean of life.

If rock'n'roll was the music post-World War II, freedom-thirsty bikers searched for, Rosenblum recalls his first exposure to those new sounds in the almost Appalachian folky "Get Ready Ricky." Rick Nelson is seldom honored by rock historians, but like many children of the '50s, Rosenblum found something inspiring in this vision of a middle-class teenager, a star of the closest thing to "real-TV" in those years, aspiring to crack the glass wall of television and lead a rock'n'roll band.

No Freedom Honey was recorded with some top-drawer Milwaukee musicians, including Victor DeLorenzo, Jim Eannelli, Susan Jeske-Dermody, Scott Finch and Don Nelson. It is being marketed by local blues musician Steve Cohen, who runs a roots music distribution company.

Serious Shaman

The history of Harley-Davidson, its embrace in America as the chopper of choice and around the world as a symbol of America, the last superpower standing, is fraught with curious asides. It was not, during its first several decades, the only American-made motorcycle. Marlon Brando, whose film The Wild One brought the phenomenon of the biker as antisocial outlaw to public attention, roared on screen aboard a Triumph Speed Twin, a product of British ingenuity from the same company whose Spitfire planes stopped the Luftwaffe in World War II.

Harley advertising in the '40s depicts nothing resembling the leather-jacketed, bandanna-wearing figure who would penetrate popular imagination in the wake of The Wild One and other Hollywood flicks. Instead, we see happy couples, the men in ties and button-down shirts, ready for good, clean, middle-class fun in the open air.

In 1960, Harley-Davidson joined with an Italian company to produce the lightweight motorcycles that lend charm to period films set in Europe.

From 1969-1981, Harley endured a kind of Babylonian captivity as a component of a company called AMF. During those years, Japanese bikes became so popular (and the quality of Harley so inconsistent) that American motorcycles became an endangered species, like the bald eagle itself.

"The Harley-Davidson Motor Company got out of the control of AMF through a team of employees with the guts to risk their personal financial security. They came up with the dough to buy it back," Rosenblum says. "Then the company put quality back and put the focus on the customer."

The move at Harley coincided with a wave of nationalism that swept America in the '80s, linked through some curious transmogrification with the fantasies of freedom beloved by the '60s counterculture, those opponents of American nationalism. "Culturally things began to change," Rosenblum adds. "The authenticity of Harley-Davidson became more in demand as the Harley way of life moved from blue-collar workers only, to embrace lawyers and dentists. If you look at the malls and the Back Street Boys, they're manufactured things. There is nothing genuine or authentic there. Harley-Davidson is an icon for being unique."

If one thing makes Rosenblum mad, it's the suggestion that there may be something elitist about purchasing an American Dream in the form of an expensive, fossil-fuel-fired, two-wheeled vehicle. "No! It isn't like that!" he insists. "It's not a matter of putting 15 grand down and becoming a member of the Harley culture. Sometimes there are people who put their money down and don't become part of the culture."

As in the theological concept of the visible and invisible church, some who ride the chrome beasts are poseurs, hypocrites, while others who as yet go by foot or car are already redeemed by their values and attitude.

"The sense of personal freedom was attached to Harley-Davidson for reasons that are poetic," Rosenblum maintains. "It's like a Colt Peacemaker pistol or a Gibson Les Paul guitar. They mean things to people and the thing itself changes you. It's a serious shamanistic process."

(The above article was taken from Shephard Express Metro, Milwaukee's Weekly Newspaper, June 15, 2000)

For photographs taken to accompany this article go to Page 6 in the Photo Page section of this Website.


Martin Jack was the guest artist with Eric Burdon and the New Animals at the B.B. King House Of Blues in Los Angeles the weekend of November 12, 1999, and was featured at the annual Love Ride concert on the same weekend in California.
Robert Blake, the star of the finest motorcycle movie ever made, Electra Glide In Blue, and well known for his Baretta TV series, spent time after the Love Ride at his home in Studio City, California with Martin Jack explaining exactly how Electra Glide In Blue was made and, more importantly, how it should have turned out after it was written, directed and filmed by Blake but then changed by the studio bigshots.


Martin Jack and Robert Blake
14 November 1999 Los Angeles


"After the Milwaukee, Bruce Springsteen concert the week of November 8th, 1999, Miami Steve Van Zandt ("Little Steven"), Springsteen's E-Street Band lead guitar-player, hooked up with an old acquaintance, Harley-Davidson historian Martin Jack Rosenblum,
for a look at the abundant Harley archives."
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Tuesday, November 16, 1999

Note: Martin Jack was invited to the soundcheck the night of the concert and had dinner with Miami Steve Van Zandt before the show. The next day was when they got together at the Harley-Davidson Archives at Juneau Avenue.



The Holy Ranger
(a.k.a. Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum)

This is a photograph of Martin Jack performing at the Harley Owners Group Thursday, 22 June 2000 Opening Ceremony Concert for the National Rally in Milwaukee for an enthusiastic audience of over five thousand at the Milwaukee Arena. (This was the first time Martin Jack sang and played since the Harley-Davidson 90th Anniversary and the HOG 10th Anniversary in 1993.) The audience response was outstanding!! ( We hope all you HOG members were there for this historic performance!!) Martin Jack also did two acoustic concerts, and lectures on Harley-Davidson history and culture, and was available each day at the Archive exhibit to talk to during the Rally week.

To see more photos from the 2000 HOG Rally performace visit Page 7 in the
Photo Album section of this website.

You must have been a member of Harley Owners Group to attend this concert that Martin Jack Rosenblum was a guest artist at with Eric Burdon and The New Animals.


In the vintage book section of amazon.com, The Werewolf Sequence by Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum is being offered for sale; this is a critically acclaimed and rare publication from the seventies, and one of Martin Jack's most famous texts. --You can get a complete bibliography that runs right up to the Ranger canon for Martin Jack in the Contemporary Authors Series, Volume Eleven (Gale Research), which also contains his autobiography.
By going to www.bookfinder.com and www.bibliofind.com and putting in "martin j rosenblum" and "martin jack rosenblum" you can presently locate numerous books that Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum has written in the past. These books are out-of-print and rare, and both websites offer a decent selection of Martin Jack's published texts in the areas of poetry and literary philosophy.
Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum is now officially sponsored by Gibson Guitars, Montana Division.

Martin Jack has played Gibson acoustics since the late fifties, and when the Gibson Guitar Company was located in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he was actually their unofficial historian. The fine tradition of Gibson acoustics is still being sustained today in the Bozeman, Montana facility.

Martin Jack has numerous vintage Gibson acoustic guitars, and now also plays a one-of-a-kind J-185, made especially for him, an L-140 and a J-185-12 string, all recently crafted by the artisans in Montana.

There is a new album from Martin Jack Rosenblum that has been released, entitled Places To Go. It is Volume II of the other new album, entitled No Freedom, Honey, and the Gibson guitars from Montana are featured instruments.
Places To Go contains much new material, including the epic song, "Out On The Flatland." Having been written and recorded at the end of 2000 is a newly released album that contains another epic song, "(I Was Only A) Pilgrim." This album, entitled Spirit Fugitive, which is Volume III of the trilogy, was released in 2002. The Gibson guitars from Montana are the featured instruments on all three albums.

Martin Jack is proud to endorse Gibson acoustic guitars, made with traditional Gibson expertise in Montana.


The 26 June 2000 issue of Fortune Magazine carries a story that relates to Martin Jack Rosenblum's music, and the music of Harley-Davidson employees who play Rock and Roll, discussing The Holy Ranger album, No Freedom, Honey. Rock and Roll Culture has a relationship with Harley-Davidson Culture that Martin Jack has described in detail as the liner notes for the Harley-Davidson Licensed Product CD's, Road Songs Vol. 2 and Country Road Songs.
RECORDING NEWS AT THE CLOSE OF
2001 AND INTO 2002:
At the end of 2001, a very limited edition CD entitled "Spirit Fugitive" was issued as the third album in the Trilogy that began with "No Freedom, Honey" and "Places To Go." In 2002, Spirit Fugitive has been issued in the readlily available trade edition. A limited Bootleg edition of the album "Down On The Spirit Farm" has been issued as 2001 comes to a close, and as 2002 opens a new album is being recorded that is presently called "Winter Of The Ghost."  With Victor DeLorenzo producing, Martin Jack is in the studio --with no plan yet for any release date-- with his "Ghost."  The songs are to exorcise what haunts authentic American music.
"SPIRIT FUGITIVE" NOW AVAILABLE: Volume I is NO FREEDOM, HONEY. Volume II is PLACES TO GO. Volume III is entitled SPIRIT FUGITIVE and all three albums are available from HolyRanger.com. SPIRIT FUGITIVE completes the Trilogy. Work is presently ongoing for a new album in the future, and with this Trilogy Martin Jack has brought the past crashing into the present. SPIRIT FUGITIVE contains guitar instrumentals, epic songs --music taking poetry too far-- and a pulsabilly rocker. This is all brand new material in 2002.

Martin Jack is working on two new albums at once at the end of June, 2002.... The first (working titles have been "UnSeen Rider" and "Winter Of The Ghost," but no final title exists) is a conceptual CD with an extensive booklet of writings and artwork being recorded with Victor DeLorenzo. Little Steven and Nico Bolas have involvement as well, as does Brian Ritchie. The second (whose final title is SNAKE RIVER) is being produced by Michael Hoffmann. The former is an interconnected song series. The latter is not, but rather a series of tracks that are more of a 'singles' style collection. The "Snake River" CD will contain all new material as will the yet-untitled album. Both are being recorded simultaneously but in different studios. Watch holyranger.com for their availability in 2003 or 2004.
Martin Jack recently has been recording with Victor DeLorenzo for his new solo album, and with Michael Hoffmann on "The Orange Project" album for which there is a Link at this Website. On the latter, there is a cover of one of Martin Jack's songs and Martin Jack plays electric lead guitar, acoustic fingerstyle guitar, harmonica, autoharp, dulcimer and contributes a cranky backup vocal. With the re-release of the famous Violent Femmes first album, it is unknown as to when DeLorenzo's latest solo album will be available. Thus far in the recording process, Martin Jack plays lead and melody fingerstyle guitars and harmonica.
A biography of Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum has been started by a well-known author. There is no deadline for its release, but if you have comments you want to make about The Holy Ranger that might be culled for the book, please go to the Guest Book Page at this Website.

Please note that the final titles of the albums discussed above were changed upon release in 2003. 'UnSeen Rider' became NAVIGATOR. 'Snake River' became SWAMP RIVER. NAVIGATOR is a studio, band album; SWAMP RIVER is a live, solo album.



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