Remembering Jerry Duncan / Jerry Anomie

One of constant courage

Oct 12 2025

Days are long and busy this month. This past week hours of particular attention have gone to preparing a Two-Hour Special about ROGER LEWIS that will air tomorrow on MARYSE’s ‘Jazz from Jax Brewery’ show over WWOZ, 5:00 to 7:00 Central Daylight Time USA.

Lots of good listening and pleasurable editing from Roger’s career and times and influences, from the 1940s unto NOW!

I do, however, want to begin today the serial posting of a Bood-in-Progress that will be done and whole by last November, Thanksgiving-time in the USA.

The title of this book is THANKS and PRAISES, Portraits and Songs, Book One, and its second subject is my effectual Brother-in-Law, JERRY DUNCAN / JERRY ANOMIE.

Here goes, then, with a Remembrance of dear Jerry, first written for a Celebration of him in Laytonville, California, the town nearest his and Jane’s base in Evergreen and Redwood mountains for growing Cannabis

JERRY with his and JANE’s daughter, DREAMA.

JERRY interviewed by the journalist and champion of Punk, GINGER COYOTE.

Remembering Jerry Duncan / Jerry Anomie for a Celebration of his Life, Laytonville, California, May of 2019

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I knew Jerry Anomie / Jerry Duncan over 33 years—from window-seats and Guerrero Street in San Francisco’s Inner Mission, 1986, to Laytonville and Mountain homes and these Redwoods, 2019.

Jerry was a constant soul. Jerry was a steady flame. Jerry was one who would dance on one leg, forever, if that meant some light thrown on the suffering and villainy which he wanted to expose. Jerry’s compassion and indignation never ceased, even as pain from that terribly botched operation on his spine more and more constricted him.

Jerry famously founded the first Punk Rock band in Texas, Legionaires’ Disease. The New York Dolls’ playing Houston particularly inspired that band. Jerry’s and friends’ band’s name became Legionaires’ Disease after first outbreak of the highly fatal disease in one Hotel of an American Legion convention in Philadelphia during Summer of 1976. 28 of 182 patients died from the sudden onslaught of what was then named: Legionaire’s Disease.

The disease typically arises from lack of care for water supplies. That a band took such a name—with all its hardcore warnings and implications—spoke for that band’s nerve. So too did songs such as “Who Killed Martha Mitchell?” speak for their questioning of realities beneath Networks’ News.

Who else cared about Martha Mitchell? Who else saw Martha as victim?

Who else danced naked on stage for near the band’s whole set? Who else had the stamina and will to dance on one leg for a song or two or more to show wounded soldiers’ plight?

That band had balls to match the Astrodome.

“Jer-ry!” “Jer-ere-ree!”

Jerry and Jane came to California to leave the Texas South’s character-world. Then they left San Francisco, about five years later, for northern California Redwoods, for Laytonville and the Mountains here.

Wherever they were, they attracted family by blood or by affinities and vulnerabilties. Jerry and Jane were ‘way too hip to pass judgements on wounds. Dreama arrived when they thought they’d never be blessed with a child.

Soon after we met, through Sydney there in that second-floor apartment between 17th and 18th Streets along Guerrero, Jerry and Jane got involved in working for homeless people’s rights. There were good rallies. There were good parties. Jerry became principal in a play sponsored by Catherine Hearst and wrote and performed his “Zone to City”, a scathing and true tirade electric with its demands against hyprocisy and for justice

“Zone to City” with backing by Suspect Many musicians became a Track on the first Rebel Poets’ compilation, a Cassette with 37 Tracks, Worlds Made Flesh. Dreama was by 1989 already a bouncing dancer in that Mission courtyard, behind Guerrero Street, and in the woods above Laytonville

Jerry’s and my next project was an EP in tribute to the rebellion across downtown Los Angeles and then across the United States due to “the Rodney King verdict”. You may remember the acquittal in

April 1992 of Los Angeles Police Department Officers who beat with their clubs and kicked with their boots for many minutes the prone and helpless Black suspect, Rodney King, the year before.

“News (Where Are The Tears?)” and “(I’d Love A) Revolution” were Jerry’s two Tacks of the five on that release that a distributor named Abbey buried in a warehouse. “Suck” and “Riot” by the Crack EmCee and “Insurrection” by poet Jack Hirschman completed the Havin’ A Riot EP.

In 1993 Jerry and I drove through L. A.’s South Central in search of record-stores that might carry Havin’ A Riot. There in that grid of neat lawns in and around “the 60s” we asked three Young Black Males—examples of Hillary Clinton’s “super-predators”—where we could find a Record-Store,

or any kind of Store that might handle the EP. All three Young Black Males walked to a street-corner and pointed and talked us toward “what might be a good one.”

Jerry shook his head with wonder a moment afterward. “That’s the problem with Black people,” he said. “They’re too damned nice.”

“Jer-ry!” “Jer-ere-ree!”

We met in Los Angeles over the next decade. Jerry was recording. Jerry was doing comedy. Jerry was helping to document enormous holes in the Official Story for September 11, 2001. And then Jerry and Jane and Dream and Garrett and were traveling each year to stay with a family of hemp-growers in Lebanon.

Jerry was still fighting, in short, far into the 21st century.

We saw each other much less after I moved to New Orleans in 2006. We kept in touch through Facebook. There I saw Jerry often active. He was father to Garrett in Laytonville. He was life-of-the-party among expats in groups in Costa Rica. He was steadily the reference and focus of Dreama. Janey’s still looked at him with the glow of a skeptical but adoring lover and mother at party tables.

And so—and Ah!—we’ll miss Jerry! Jerry was and is one of those who reach out and jump out past fear.

Houston welcomed him back. It was very, very good to see the Texas city lift guitars and arms for the Jerry the Prodigal’s return. He still could dance! He was still smiling and palling around and giving oppressors righteous Hell.

“Jer-ry!” “Jer-ere-ree!”

He was a Grand-Dad, too. From December 2017 onward he had that blessing to cradle—he and Dreama and Bobby had their Phoenix Mikael up on the Mountain, among these Redwoods, at tables Jane stocked, after something and/or someone brought “wildfire”, so neat and precise, to their Santa Rosa home on a street of coveted Real Estate.

Home is wherever people can gather with love, like here and now in Laytonville, for this celebration of Jerry Duncan / Jerry Anomie. Where there are people, there’s power, Fred Hampton liked to tell us. So, here and now, there’s a Plenty of Power, to celebrate that guy whom we can feel still smiling, still rocking, still dancing on one leg and ripping

up devils for those who loved him.

“Jer-ry!” “Jer-ere-ree!”