We Chat with American Writer and Musician Th. (Thom) Metzger aka Leander Watts

Born in, and having spent his entire life in the creative hotbed that is Rochester, New York, USA – also home to Aither favourite Seth Faergolzia – Th. (Thom) Metzger is a writer and musician who has been active in the underground since the 1970s. Beginning with his activities in the experimental music scene. In bands such as Health & Beauty and solo under the name Blind Dudu Process. Before turning his attention to writing in the late 1980s. Authoring fiction and non-fiction, about topics such as heroin, the electric chair, Mormonism; and a hulking 7-foot female killer with the mind of a six-year-old, who is best friends with a possessed doll. [We will let you work out which is a fictional work.]
Showing a different side, to his literary persona, Th. also writes young-adult fiction under the pen name Leander Watts. Such as the acclaimed, glam-rock influenced ‘Meet Me in the Strange’ (2018, Meerkat Press).

Recently Th. has released his latest tome, ‘Strong Songs of the Dead’ (2024, Underworld Amusements). A non-fiction work about the esoteric Sacred Harp musical tradition and his connection to it. Such as his many yeas as a singer of sacred harp music himself!

A recent photo of Th. (tongue sticking out, third from left), with some of his fellow Sacred Harp singers.
From left to right: Rivkah Simcha, Harold Taddy, Th., and Steve Sherrill.

Wanting to learn more about him, we sent Th. some questions to answer over email.
Get to know the man, below…

Name and date of birth?
City, state, and country you currently call home?
City, state, and country you’re from?

Th. (Thom) Metzger, aka Leander Watts
Born: 9/2/56 in Rochester, New York, where I’ve lived my whole life and where I hope to have my ashes scattered on my ancestors’ graves some day. Unlike most Americans, my roots run deep into my natal soil. Five generations of Metzgers are buried here, in the heart of the Burnt Over District.

If you had to explain your creative endeavours to some recently crash-landed aliens…
What would you tell them?

I’ve published 17 books: three novels marketed as horror, five YA novels, one science fiction novel in the form of a hundred poems, a book of short fiction and anarcho-dada rants, four works of investigative history (about the Mormons, the electric chair, the birth of heroin, and an abortionist priest), and three memoirs (about my relationships to Hakim Bey, Dr. Rudy Kilowatt, and Sacred Harp singing.)

Three non fiction works by Th.
Namely: ‘Undercover Mormon’ (2014, Roadswell Editions), ‘Blood and Vaults’ (Underworld Amusements reissue – first published 1996 by Autonomedia), and ‘Birth of Heroin’ (1998, Breakout Productions Inc.)

What role did toys play in your childhood?
… and any favourites you remember?

I’m not sure about toys, but I can say that music itself (instruments and records) was crucial to me as a kid.
When I was ten years old, everyone in my class was given a pitch recognition test, which involved headphones and a clunky phonodisc machine. The tone-deaf kids were weeded out and channelled into pursuits other than music, mostly involving balls. Some of us got the nod and our parents were encouraged to buy us instruments.
This not-very-select group was ushered into a special room and shown a movie about a mysterious being named ‘Mr. B Natural.’ In 1956, the Conn Instrument Company had commissioned an instructional film to promote music in schools. Conn execs knew that dance bands were dying and they needed to develop a new consumer base: hence this push toward building up school bands.
By the time I saw this hokey sales pitch, it was scratchy, shaky, and missing footage here and there.
The film had all the stiff, awkward, absurdity of thousands of other such propaganda shown in schools. What set it apart from the other ludicrous films is the figure of Mr. B. Natural – played by dancer Betty Luster, a second-rate Doris Day. She was obviously and overtly female: wearing tights that to show off her shapely legs, and a snug tunic that does nothing to hide her charming nether-regions: fore and aft.
As a feeble nod in the direction of bizarre sex change hocus pocus, her blond hair was tucked up inside a Peter Pan style cap.
She told us that she was the “spirit of music,” living inside of everyone. Though a long way from the spirit of music out of which Nietzsche claimed tragedy emerged in ancient Greece, she was still a strange and unnerving figure, a suburban American pagan goddess.
Appearing on a giant music staff, at one point she lay on her back and did sexy sprightly scissoring with her legs. Later, she danced with various band instruments, lithe and female in all her movements. Yet the kid from whose unconscious mind she’d emerged always called her “Mister” and the narrator called her “he.”
Mr. B. Natural, he/she promised us, would upon release from our inner recesses, provide maximum musical “fun.” Flutes and clarinets were associated with girls, trumpets and trombones with boys. Mr. B. Natural could barely contain his/her excitement, conjuring up all the instruments that Conn had for sale.

Why the weird gender-bending decades before it became fashionable?
Why associate the ancient Spirit of Music with sex role confusion and Peter Panic erotic stimulation?
The Conn men wanted to appeal to both boys and girls, just ripening into pubescence. Their goal was to move more trumpets and saxophones. So they brought forth Mr. B Natural (“be natural”): sexy, free, hopped-up on music and slightly unhinged.

My mother bought me a brand new B flat trumpet, and ever since I’ve been a Conn man. I learned to read music and the entire world became new, even if my primal energies had yet to be set free.

Like countless other boys in the mid-sixties, I also spent much time pondering the amazing image on the cover of ‘Whipped Cream and Other Delights.’ Though the Tijuana Brass sold many millions of albums, this was by far their most famous. No trick photography here – the woman on the cover is really naked and there really is whipped cream in her hair, smeared on her arm, barely covering her heavy, perfectly-shaped left breast, with a crest of white where her nipple lies almost hidden.
She’s gorgeous, enthroned in what we all thought to be the largest dollop of whipped cream in the world. She was the sexiest and most decadent thing that America (and I) could stand that year.
Playboy showed more skin, but didn’t envelope its nudies in a huge mound of glistening white goo.
Looking closer (and I spent a lot of time doing this) I saw that the girl is covered mostly in a fluffy white blanket, and that the whipped cream is only dabbed around the edges to create the illusion. In fact (I found out decades later) she was pregnant at the time of the photo shoot, which helps explain the ripe, female power in the picture. It also adds another layer of hallucinatory weirdness.
This is a junk-food mother we were all fixated on. Millions of boys gazed at this fertility goddess, huffing the oestrogen that wafted off the album cover.
Soon, I’d listen a thousand times to Herb Alpert’s “Magic Trumpet” and understand that musical instruments by their nature conjured something beyond this world. The Spirit of Music, foretold by Mr. B Natural in the year of my birth – especially making my own music – was to be the opener of the way.
As the years passed, music became my all but all-powerful agent of inner mutation, scrambling the secrets of my genetic code.

My new Conn trumpet had power and otherworldly strangeness. Smells, sights, textures – all of this sensory overload before I played a single note.
The grey pebbled case with two stainless steel catches. The smoothness of the soft blue pseudo-velvet lining. The smell of valve oil and slide grease. The sheen and coolness of pristine brass in my ten year old hands.

As a suburban trumpet boy in the middle sixties, I held Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass to be the height of hip. My young ears couldn’t differentiate all the influences that went into his recordings: mariachi, German oompa, spaghetti western soundtracks, show tunes, stripper music, dixieland jazz, basso-nova, La Vegas schmaltz, polka horns.
Eventually I moved on to Miles Davis (as my paragon of hip) and Siegfried (with his hunting horn and dragon-killing sword). But in junior high school, nobody was cooler than Herb Alpert.

Th’s 1989 fiction novel, ‘Big Gurl’ (Onyx).
Written in collaboration with Richard P. Scott.

Please describe some memories from your teenage years:

I came of age musically in the full flowering of glam rock. Bowie, Roxy, Sparks – I saw them all when they came to town, though I didn’t have the nerve to wear makeup, to dress in sparkles and satin.
I bought stacks of records, and spent my hours alone, listening and gazing at the bizarre creatures who had made the music. Still, my hair remained undyed and my fingernails unpainted. No drag for me, no gender-bendy heart-throbbing.

From glam rock I went in a dozen different directions, the more obscure the better. My record collection spilled over with secret strangeness: singers from the Bahamas and Trinidad, Japanese flute improvisations that took up an entire side of an album, Balkan brass bands, Allen Ginsberg singing the songs of William Blake, ska, dervish, klezmer, soca, rai, and raga, even the music of rainforest pygmies.

More long-lived and in-depth was my fascination with operatic excess. I was – I will confess – a teenaged Wagnerite, listening to the entire Ring of the Nibelungen (sixteen hours of beautiful bombast) with the full orchestral score in my lap.
From there I took a zigzag path into Wildman jazz, riding the storm waves of furious black sax-men.

What about your 20s and 30s?

As a freshman in college, I made the decision to become a writer. To that end, I decided I would produce 1,000 words a day. I stuck with that for decades – about a third of a million words a year.
I wrote four or five pages a day, long hand, 95% of which went straight into the trash.

I started out doing fiction – short stories. From there I went to my first novel – which I wrote in the college library. I got to the end, and I thought, “that’s how many words will come out of a pen.” And the whole manuscript got thrown away.
I did another novel, about black jazz musicians in Berlin in the ‘20s. I got some positive response from agents, but the novel remained unpublished.

After college, I found a beat-up tenor sax in a garage sale, had it reconditioned to make it playable, and this silver-plated Conn New Wonder, now 101 years old, has been my main instrument ever since.
Fronting various low-grade noise-rock-jazz bands gave me a chance to howl and wail my own songs, such as “I’ll Never Eat Human Flesh Again,” “Who’s Been Raisin’ the Dead Since I Been Gone?”, “Dead Pope in the Road,” and my greatest hit, “Party With Hitler’s Dog.”

When and why did you first become interested in history, religion, music, and everything creative and esoteric?
… and any pivotal moments or influences?

A turning point for me was hearing Ed Sanders do a reading here in Rochester. He was a classical scholar, he’d written ‘The Family’ (the first book about the Manson family), and had been the front man of the folk-noise-spasm-band the Fugs.
He’d just published a slim volume called ‘Investigative Poetry‘, and this lit the fire for me.
Soon, I’d written the short prose-poem “Portent,” which wove together facts and fantasies about Godzilla, Shinola shoe shine (birthed here in Rochester), so-called race records, ear wax, and the etymological roots of the word “monster.”
Only a couple pages long, it was published in a small magazine in the early days of zine culture, but more important it became a performance piece. I would bellow and wail the entire thing like a mad preacher, and audiences would respond as though at a revival meeting.
More of these rant-sermon-poems followed, much of the material coming from my fascination with music: Sousa marches, hyperbolic opera, polkas, wild man jazz, hillbilly squawk, and then Sacred Harp.
Discovering this musical tradition, now over two hundred years old, I’d found the form best suited to my abilities and my desires. I could sing as loud as possible, for hours at a time, about ancient blood and veins, sin and mortal stains. No equipment to schlepp around, no cigarette smoke, no standing around on cold concrete floors, and I could be home before midnight.

You might say I came to Sacred Harp by accident, or you might put it this way: I was getting ready, for years, and when the time was right, the various forces came together and I was sucked into the maelstrom.

For those at home who may be unaware – How did you first come to discover the Sacred Harp musical tradition?

When I was a kid, I heard people speaking in tongues in church. It was supposedly the overflow of the Holy Spirit’s power that made worshippers gibber and twitch, babble and shake like holy drunkards. It was scary and it was fascinating, watching people lose control. The preacher said it was a way to reach unbelievers, miraculously speaking their language. But I never once heard any real words in any real languages, just repetitive jabbering.
Decades later, I heard a twisted echo of those glossolalic tongues. The voices rose from the grooves in an old Sacred Harp vinyl disc, a recording made in Alabama in 1942. I’d stumbled onto this record at the library, one of a long series capturing nearly-lost American folk music.
Bringing this treasure home, I placed the needle with great care onto the first cut and out came a strange throw-back sound.

My first taste of the sound – live and in person – had occurred in my own living room. My wife had been given some photocopied pages and invited a few friends to try them out. We didn’t have books yet. We didn’t even know ‘The Sacred Harp‘ was still in print.
Looking back, I’m sure it sounded weak and tepid compared to the real thing. But we divided up the parts and started in.
Once we got rolling, I heard the essence, the strong song of resurrection. And when a chunk of plaster fell off the ceiling, I knew I’d found the sound. Admittedly, the plaster was in need of some minor repair. Still, this was obvious confirmation that I needed to plunge in deeper.

I do not have a pretty voice. My wife used to say that I sound like a bassoon with a broken reed. This was no insult, as I like bassoons and I like instruments when they have an overblown, fractured and frantic tone.
With sinuses stuffed up for fifty years, there is a certain adenoidal buzz in my voice. Constant post nasal drip also contributes to my distinctive – if not attractive – sound.
In other words, finding Sacred Harp finally gave me a place where my voice would be welcome.
Some people joke that you either have the gene or don’t. Without it, shape note is at best an annoyance. I’ve seen looks of revulsion – and even fear – on the faces of people lacking the shape note genetic key. All the way to my chromosomes, I felt the pull.

I started writing about Sacred Harp shortly after discovering there was a monthly group meeting in Rochester. I was just getting over pneumonia and still I went three hours in an unheated room in January.
I bought a book, asked what were the top 40 tunes I must learn, and found out about bigger sings happening in New York State.

The piece I wrote about Sacred Harp was my first taste of weekly journalism. The local alt paper bought this short article and got me going on a new side career. I ended up writing a couple hundred pieces over the course of seven years: covering everything from nasty junk food to drag racing, pet cemeteries, evangelical balloon twisting (yes, this is a real phenomenon), a Luddite Congress, UFO sightings, Amish silo-wreckers, zines, and many obscure musical worlds.
This period overlaps exactly my initial immersion in Sacred Harp culture, my journeys from New England to Alabama in search of the lost and found sound. So, I owe to Sacred Harp the beginning of a new path for me as a writer.

I’d already done the first book about the invention of the electric chair and the first book about the invention of heroin, I’d written articles about forgotten (or forbidden) corners of history, but doing weekly journalism was a new experience.
This was writing about now and here, about real flesh and blood people.

I kept a journal of my experiences singing Sacred Harp. As it grew, I saw a book emerging. Like my memoirs of my friendships with Dr. Rudy Kilowatt and Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson), my book ‘Strong Songs of the Dead’ is both a repository of memory and a real-time chronicle. When I started these books, I had no idea where – or how – they would end.
In all three cases, some of the events are from decades past and some happened just the day before.
In all three cases, the actual events of my life were in a way shaped by the fact that the book was still in process.
My life, and the books, flowed back and forth in a feedback loop, output and input tangling together. I was both subject and object, a character of my own creation and the chronicler of that person’s life.

Th.’s new book about Sacred Harp, ‘Strong Songs of the Dead’ (2024, Underworld Amusements)

Who are some of your favourite artists, filmmakers, and musicians?
…and what is it about their works that so inspire and move you?

‘Chaos,’ by the Great and Mysterious Hakim Bey, loomed out of the shadows in 1985. Published by the Grim Reaper Press in Providence, it’s only 28 pages long. But line for line, phrase for phrase, no book has had as big an influence on me as a writer. Sometimes classified as a collection of rants, Chaos is much more than that: with a hundred times the gorgeous weirdness of countless other so-called Great Books.
Most of these short poetic pieces made their initial appearances in cheap xeroxed zines, floating like spectres through the mail. Just a few titles give some hint at what the writer was up: “Wild Children,” “Poetic Terrorism,” “Paganism,” “Art Sabotage,” “Chaos Myth,” “Sorcery.”
The language is beautiful; the subject matter is strange and at times distressing.

I read this book again and again.
The amazing images and ideas seeped into my brain. They’ve been leaking out in my work ever since.

Th’s copy of ‘Chaos’ by Hakim Bey (1985, Grim Reaper Press.)

Th.’s book about his friendship with Hakim Bey, ‘Hakim Bey Real and Unreal’ (2023, 127 House)

Please describe your last dream…

I’ve had many distressing dreams of Sacred Harp gatherings where people don’t obey the standard rules: sitting in a hollow square, taking turns leading, acapella, etc.
This dream was in a way like those, but instead of being wrong-headed and frustrating, the nonconformity was positive, a new level of experience…

This dream took place in a church basement or fellowship hall.
Breaking with tradition, the group (about fifty people) opened up the hollow square, unfolded the four sides into one long line. A soloist faced us, sitting under a table, and he sang a song with all the others joining in as accompaniment, quiet and subdued.
Hal, an old friend, was there and said that the song had been off by “two cents” (that is, two percent of one musical half step.)
I was amused by Hal’s scientific precision, and told him that it was okay, that the song had to be different every time.
Next, a woman was going to do a solo. I tried, not very hard, to fit into the line of singers, but had to stand behind because there was no room for me. Then the perspective shifted and the line of singers was on the far side of the room, facing toward where they’d been before.
I separated myself from the group and lay down on the linoleum floor, feet toward them, and went into a trance.
The woman and the group sang, but I didn’t hear anything. I was out, gone, as though in an underground chamber, very close, almost claustrophobic. The song made a kind of pressure on me, but not unpleasant. The fact that I didn’t hear any of the song was fine – though if it was the source or the effect of the trance, I don’t know.
I was deep inside something, the earth or some substance made of sound.
I woke from the trance as though from death to rebirth. The singing event was breaking up and all the people were leaving. Some of them, going past me, said they were concerned about me. I had lain on the floor for two whole minutes after the song ended and only then rose.
My wife said we had to get going too, but her words were garbled. I responded and what I said at first was (to use the phrase I said in the dream) “word salad.”
She was afraid, very worried about my mental state. She thought I was really gone into madness. But the strange sounds were positive, an opening out.
I told her to say another word. She said something like “nine” or “nein.” I couldn’t understand her, though she was standing close to me.
Soon though the garbled words came into focus, making more sense, and then hearing and speech returned to normal.
Still very worried, she said we had to leave and went out a door to the outside, into darkness and snow.
I said, “No. No. I know the way.” She didn’t believe me but I insisted.
I led the way out of the building and woke up.

Though I was sure I hadn’t heard the song in the dream, on waking I had a fragment of the melody in my head. It was like a sea chantey, though soft and calm. It reminded me of “Lowlands,” but when I picked up the guitar and very quietly picked out the tune, it was somewhat different: CEFGA FED

Looking now at the pitches, I’m wondering if these are utterances like my earlier word salad.
Or perhaps a name.

Why did you pick the name Leander Watts as a pseudonym for your young adult (YA) novels?
… and we were wondering – do you have any thought on the recent media circus surrounding the YA genre?

At the time I finished my first young adult novel, my agent suggested using a name other than Th. Metzger, to separate the writer responsible for ‘Big Gurl’, ‘Blood and Volts’, and ‘The Birth of Heroin’ from the writer of books aimed at kids. So, Leander Watts appeared.
The name comes from the Sacred Harp. Isaac Watts wrote much of the poetry in the book and the song called “Leander” is on page 71. I also liked the gender slipperiness of the name. It means “Lion man,” but some people think Leander is female.

My last YA novel had a gender-non-specific narrator, not because it was the trendy flavour of the month, but because the book is about glam rock, which many people have conveniently forgotten brought androgyny (the term used then) into the lives of millions of kids, over fifty years ago.
That being said, I have totally avoided being sucked into the gender / sensitivity wars. Ideological agendas always make for smug, wearisome, predictable, forgettable fiction, whatever the intended audience.

2 young adult books by Th., released under his Leander Watts penname.
Namely: ‘Meet Me in the Strange’ (2018, Meerkat Press) and ‘Beautiful City of the Dead’ (2007, Clarion Books.)

If you had to sum up your home-country, America in one object – What would it be?
Why did you choose it?
… and how does it represent America to you?

On a good day, I’d say that what represents the U.S. would be an album by Miles Davis. Maybe ‘Bitches Brew‘ or ‘Big Fun‘, which I’ve been listening to for fifty years and which still sound alien, weird and hot as a freshly-fallen meteor.
The hiss and the slither of ancient reeds, crawling king snake double bass, the rattle of dried seeds and the hiss of ditch weeds in the midnight wind. Dubby reverberation, far-off cry of the snake charmer soprano sax. Weird Brazilian percussion, reptilian sitar, and electric guitar as hoodoo rattle-stick, tablas, congas: the dark heart of America unveiled by the mad wah-wah pedal weeping prophet.

Of course, jazz comes from the deep springs of black American culture. Only a fool or a racist would argue otherwise. But as is the case with everything worthwhile in our creative psyche, it is a syncretism, a wild tangle of various influences, some obvious, some subterranean.
Black, White, Asian, European, African, South American: there’s no point in making a claim for authenticity or ownership. Ideological purity is itself poison, a toxic notion that produces nothing of value.
Clinging to purity leaves us music that is preserved like taxidermy specimens, desiccated turds behind museum glass.

What are the top 3 items you own?
… and what is it about each of them that you so love?

My 101 year old tenor sax.

The list of all the books I’ve read (I began this list at age 15 and have kept it up for over half a century).

My collection of vinyl albums, some over 50 years old, many in perfect condition, still in the cellophane.

Why?
Because, as a very wise man once said, “The past is where they keep all the treasure.”

If people wanted to check out your stuff, work with you, or buy some of your wares –
Where should they visit and how should they get in touch?

My website: https://thommetzger.wixsite.com/thommetzger
Link to Amazon to buy my new book on Sacred Harp music: https://www.amazon.com/Strong-Songs-Dead-Pagan-Sacred/dp/B0CZZHYCW9
My email: thommetzger@gmail.com

May I ask why you aren’t on social media at all?

Sure, feel free to ask about my absence from social media. But the answer will be long, complex, and incomplete…
Yes, of course I use various technologies: from the toothbrush to sophisticated medical equipment. And yes, if it weren’t for the ‘net, this conversation wouldn’t be happening and you never would have run your piece on me.
As Trevor Blake says, “Wonderful, wonderful, terrible, terrible.”

I am an unrepentant Luddite. My definition is simple: all new technologies are guilty until proven innocent.
Hakim Bey’s was somewhat more complex. He exhorted his readers to use only technology that would not injure the communality, nothing that replaces human contact and connection. In one of his letters, written in a beautiful calligraphic hand, he told me that our mission should be to exclude as much high tech and mediated reality as possible – to become idyllic pastoral temporary neolithic conservatives – to actually occupy nature.

I attended three Luddite congresses in rural southern Ohio, enjoying the company of other big-hearted nay-sayers. I subscribed to, and wrote for, ‘Plain: The Magazine of Life, Land, and Spirit’, a magazine (typeset by hand) that gave gentle voice to the resistance.
I refused to own a TV, microwave oven, and cell phone, though with great sadness I capitulated and went with internet at home in order to keep my job. The day I signed up for my first email account I flopped on the bed, and wept hot copious tears of shame.

Hakim Bey was the last person I knew who kept up the good fight again cyber-slavery, never learning to use a computer – let alone own one. Now and then he ruminated on the time period in which he’d have prefered to spend his life. The year 1911 came up most often. Film, Victrolas, iceboxes, and phones were available then, but only the most exotic and elegant cars. No radio, no TV, no sea of microwaves churning around our brains, no hyper-real technopathocracy.

As you may be aware, the U.S. is descending into what some call the New Dark Ages.
This would not be the case without the ‘net.

That being said, I enjoy getting emails from actual humans, I do two Zoom calls a week with distant friends and I use the tech to get my work into the hands of far-flung readers. I truly appreciate that others have helped me out by schlagging through the great quagmire of the net to aid in my efforts.
Kevin at Underground Amusements has done a mountain of work, and people like you, and the folks at 96th of October, have allowed me to reach far beyond the limits of my actual body. But there are cognitive consequences that I don’t want to suffer. Attention is crucial to my work. Read Stolen Focus for a genuinely distressing look at what’s behind Facebook etc.

I started out in the zine world – paper and ground mail. And I have recently been in more contact with a small cadre of like-minded writers and thinkers who don’t want to be sucked into the great yawning maw of AI.

As with so many new technologies (nuclear power for instance) Global Capital offers toys and gew-gaws and then pours an ocean of poison into the human world.

Any news, upcoming projects, or releases to share?

I’m currently working on ‘Occult Traveling Music: Secret Journeys Through the Burnt Over District’, which is both a journal of my private psychogeography and a guide to my numinous home territory.
From the Mormon ground zero holy hill to a creepy Victorian psychic village, from the Iroquois Torture Tree to the Spiritualist Memorial Obelisk, from little country churches seared by evangelical passion to the Church of the Hypercube, the Burnt-Over District is rich with once and future spiritual power.