Artist Backgrounder: Bob Reitman

With the release of 12th House, Bob Reitman brings it all back home, returning to and recombining his love of music and poetry.

As the most influential FM deejay in ‘70s Milwaukee, Reitman introduced the city to Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith and exposed audiences to Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. His nightly show, The Eleventh House, included carefully curated playlists focused on a theme that connected the songs throughout the program.

Reitman was also a poet whose radio career began in 1966 with a poetry program Sense Waves on WUWM, then a student-run station on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. He wrote poems throughout the ‘60s, reciting them at the Avant-Garde Coffee House, the focal point of bohemian counterculture on Milwaukee’s East Side. In 1972, he brought a batch of his poems into a recording studio with more than a dozen Milwaukee musicians, releasing an LP called The Eleventh House.

Fifty-four years later, Reitman returns with a collection of 16 poems, entitled 12th House. Spanning several decades of his life as a writer, the LP opens with a newer meditation called “Death,” evokes the past with “When Martin’s Soul Flew Up” (composed shortly after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination) and concludes with the first piece he ever penned, the 1958 rhyme “The First One.”

His adult poems ranged freely across subjects that all of us have considered at one moment or another: birth, the mystery of inspiration, time’s passage, accepting life’s changes while keeping hold of “the non-changing truths.” He reflects on music, pop culture and politics, turning fleeting thoughts into sharp free verse.

12th House is produced by Reitman’s contemporary, Milwaukee musician and sound engineer Gary Tanin. Like its predecessor, the new LP is a spoken word record with musical accompaniment. Tanin plays keyboards and drums and brought longtime collaborators Sam Llanas for guitar and wordless vocals and Jack Spann on additional keyboards. Tanin also recruited fellow producer John Hoier, a member of the popular 1960s Milwaukee band, The Messengers.

Hoier contributed music from his catalog of recently recorded material, songs that aligned perfectly with the mood of Reitman’s poems, edited to become backing tracks on many readings heard on 12th House.

Several generations of Milwaukeeans were shaped by Bob Reitman on the radio. On 12th House, his voice may sound older and wiser but Reitman remains much the same — a much-needed voice of good humor, curiosity and gratitude.

Gary Tanin | Daystorm Music
12th House album producer
garytanin@gmail.com