In death as in life

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Ya know, since Lou Reed died I’m hearing the Velvet Underground everywhere non-stop, but only the nice stuff. “Jesus” is suddenly everyone’s favorite song, and it’s all about the third album or that mellow live 1969. I mean I like those too but come on, if that’s all there was you wouldn’t even remember who they were. Just another sweet folkie band. You know the Velvet Underground because of Heroin and European Son and Sister Ray. It was all that crazy noise that set them apart. Noise and heavy, ugly lyrics. Heroin is not a pretty song. New York’s not a pretty place.
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I think that when someone dies and you only show his sweet, sensitive side you’re insulting him. In death as in life, I say.
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Turn it up.
Just like Sister Ray said.

Just like Sister Ray said.

Circle Game

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(2013)

Celebration At Big Sur…I saw that movie. Think I was in high school. It was mondo hippie, that flick, all incense and folk music and babies spinning prayer wheels. I remember Stephen Stills sucker punched a communist. Then he said the answer is to love everybody. You love everybody then you don’t sucker punch communists. Those were complicated times. Joan sang a Dylan tune, and Joni sang where she’d never been, and Judy sang a Circle Game. Oh Happy Day went round and round and round.

celebration-at-big-sur cropped

Somebody asked me about the baby in the picture with Judy, Joni, Joan and Cass. I had no idea. I hadn’t even noticed there was a baby. But Stewart Brand tells me–well, the Stewart Brand hologram, since he is no longer with us–told me the baby was the product of all four of them. It was a group conception at a Love In and they named her Aquarius and everyone shared in its nurturing and caring and loving and diapering and she is now 44 years old and owns a high tech company that has an app that can turn GMO’s into pure love and save the planet and the whales and walk around naked at Burning Man and recite the Whole Earth Catalog from memory and made the Stewart Brand hologram that told me that the baby was a group conception at a Love In and they named her Aquarius and everyone shared in its nurturing and caring and loving and diapering and she is now 44 years old and owns a high tech company that has an app that can turn GMO’s into pure love and save the planet and the whales and walk around naked at Burning Man and recite the Whole Earth Catalog from memory and made the Stewart Brand hologram that told me that the baby was a group conception at a Love In and they named her Aquarius and everyone shared in its nurturing and caring and loving and diapering and she is now 44 years old and owns a high tech company that has an app that can turn GMO’s into pure love and save the planet and the whales and walk around naked at Burning Man and recite the Whole Earth Catalog from memory and made the Stewart Brand hologram that told me this.

Dude, I said, Escher. Way Escher.

Stewart looked at me without blinking.

Celebration At Big Sur…I saw that movie. Think I was in high school. It was mondo hippie, that flick, all incense and folk music and babies spinning  prayer wheels. I remember Stephen Stills sucker punched a communist. Then said the answer is to love everybody. You love everybody then you don’t sucker punch communists. Those were complicated times. Joan sang a Dylan tune, and Joni sang where she’d never been, and Judy sang a Circle Game. Oh Happy Day went round and round and round.

Brian Eno

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Not sure why but the only Brian Eno thing I’ve ever owned is that old compilation record No New York. Still got it, too, all old and battered and vinyl. He was the producer and didn’t play anything on it, but he made Mars sound like the weirdest band in the world. And listening to it now, they still do.

I bring this up only because I’ve seen about three hundred posts today wishing him a happy birthday. Apparently Brian Eno makes people feel all warm and fuzzy inside and they just have to wish him a happy birthday. When “Baby’s On Fire” was on regular rotation on KNAC way back when–it was a hit on that station at least–the last thing that I thought of was wishing him a happy birthday. I just thought wow, weird, and jacked up the volume. But my friends have gotten so soft and squeezable in their dotage. All sweet memories and gabba gabba hey. But I love them anyway. And I like Brian Eno. I just don’t understand the Facebook thing where everyone wishes people they don’t actually know a Happy Birthday. It seems weird to me, but they’re all terribly sincere about it. Happy Birthday famous person! they say. And all their Facebook friends chime in. Happy Birthday! Ten years ago this would seem really weird. Now it’s obligatory. I never wish people I don’t know a Happy Birthday. It’s silly and meaningless and, well, weird. Odd at least. Though if I ever met Brian Eno I’d probably wish him a happy birthday. Especially if it wasn’t anywhere near his birthday.

Sigh…..I’m sorry an essay entitled Brian Eno isn’t really about Brian Eno. I mean I like Brian Eno. But I get caught up in tangents, like riptides they yank a narrative right out of my hands and sweep it along who knows where. No free will at all. Just the free flowing rush of random connections and puns that appear out of nothing at all. Writing as Brownian motion. Sometimes I think the only time I speak is in incomprehensible proverbs  But any idiot would know that.

Lowell George

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I gotta say I’ve driven from Tucson to Tucumcari and Tehachapi to Tonopah, but never on weed, whites and wine. Well, not on whites, anyway.

Like that time, so long ago, and we were driving somewhere in the vastness of the Great Basin and there was a zillion stars overhead and no other traffic, no nobody. I had the windows down and the desert air was so dry and pure, and “Willin'” came crackling off the radio and I was singing along and Lowell George’s words made more sense, just then, then any other song in the world. The bowl came my way and I drew deep and the night grew even blacker, the stars brighter, and I exhaled just in time to join in on the chorus. “Driven every kind of rig that has ever been made….” which was a lie, I was in a brand new Chevrolet Celebrity, and had always been in a Chevy, for years. No matter, I was on the back roads and no one was weighing anybody. Give me weed, whites and wine….but we had no wine, and coffee instead of whites, but I drew deeply on the weed again, and I saw a sign, all shot up, warning of flash floods, but not tonite, not with all these stars. and right then I was willing to drive around the desert all night, with nothing but the road and us and the keening coyotes and the crackling trucker songs coming all the way from Gallup, where the announcer said everything in Navajo like it was when there was no radio here at all, and we drove and drove till sleep caught up with us near Winslow, Arizona and we bedded down for the night.

There’s a meteor crater out there, you know, big and terrifying, and ghostly Indian cities deep in canyons, still and silent but for the wind. Up north they pull dinosaurs from red sandstone. But just then it was pitch dark and the bed was soft and we sank into it and slept deeply, and if there were dreams they were forgotten by the morning.

Mitch Mitchell

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(Found this posted on both Just Another Blog From L.A. and MetalJazz.com. Both are great blogs, btw. I assume I’d written it as an email. 2008)

RIP Mitch Mitchell. Jimi Hendrix’s drummer. The dude wailed like nobody. Tiny little English bastard doing his best Elvin Jones. Cool. And man could he get up a shambolic shuffle. Listen to “Hey Baby”…the one from “Rainbow Bridge”. Hip hippie jazzness at it’s best. Wasn’t another rock drummer that could play just like that. Dropping in Max Roach snare snaps and rim smacks and riffling popping toms, some heavy tom shit like Joe Morello in “Take Five” (remember that one? Mitchell apparently dug Morello’s thunder rolls) and all that Elvin that Jimi wanted–like when they come out at Monterey and light into “Killing Floor” and Mitch’s rolls are so all over and so in there (or close enough) and man, it’s frigging glorious. Crazy crazy rock’n’roll, man. Just like god intended it to be, if god smoked a lot of dope and didn’t worry too much about meter….

Did he and Keith Moon ever play together? Can you imagine?

Nice guy, too. It was a dinner party somewhere in Silver Lake, eons ago. All these miserable guitar players wanted to play “Red House” with him, like he hadn’t been there and done that like sooooooooooooooo much better…. Incredibly, he smiled and put up with them all. They raise ’em polite over there in England, apparently. When at last freed from his throne there was a dinner party inside. Someone put on Mingus. Two, three notes into it and Mitchell flipped. I love this!!! Who put this on!!!!!! Outside some guitar players were brutalizing Red House, and inside Mitch Mitchell is hovering over the phonograph, hearing nothing but Mingus. Yeah, alright. They can’t live forever.

Mitch Mitchell wailing on the snare.

Kern River

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This clip blew my mind.

Lots of time when people ask me about writing prose, I’ll simply tell them to listen to “Kern River”. Merle Haggard was a huge influence on me. Still is.

Listen to how spare it is, how bare boned. He has pared this thing down to the point that editing out one word might bring the whole ediface crashing down. Listen to how many stories he tells. How much information he imparts, the scenes he describes and how vividly you picture them as you listen.  He does it all so simply, with so few words, a whole short story in a handful of lines.

It is some of the finest use of the English language, and of language itself, I have ever heard. I’ve listened to this song a couple hundred times over the years, and it nails me every time still.

Here he plays it on TV and the damn thing hadn’t even come out yet. It’s so brand new the words seem to glisten.

Jimi Hendrix at the Hollywood Bowl, 1968

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Is it love, baby, or is it just ablution?

Soon afterward they filled in the reflecting pool with tables and rich people. Once I was sitting right about where that guy is standing arms outstretched. He was tripping his hippie brains out, I was drinking two buck chuck and trying to hide the bottle. Our realities began to merge in vivid dreamy hallucinations. A whole herd of  gorgeous wild women wearing nothing but feathers were dancing around me in an endless circle, shaking everything shakeable. Pinch me, I said to my wife, I must be dreaming. She hit me. The vision passed as suddenly as it began and the girls disappeared stage right. The band was still there, shitty as before. I hated the band. They were bumming my trip. Suddenly the vision returned, the women walking across what once was water, glittering, swaying, undulating, their boas like trails that lingered pink and gold. The men at their feet were about as chakra’d as a man can be in mixed company. Then the vision passed again, stage left, for good.  The shitty band remained making their shitty music and totally ruining my trip. No Hendrix for us. That is where me and the wet hippie with the outstretched arms parted. He got an encore, maybe two, and then Wild Thing. I got Never Gonna Let You Go.

Well, as Jack Benny once said. Well.

Nick Cave

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(2012)

Spent a weird hour once at the Wiltern utterly bored by Nick Cave while in every direction around me women had orgasms. He would sing about death and drunkenness and being naked and they would squeal and gasp and want him. He pounded a piano and groaned and recited bad poetry and they squirmed in their seats and wanted him. He looked like a weathered old junkie in a nice suit and they ignored their boyfriends and wanted him. He sang about negroes and blues and corruption and love gone horribly, tragically bad. Knives and guns and Stagger Lee and the gallows. Death and despair and doom and damnation. Beautiful dames who’d plunge a knife right in your back. Still, they wanted him. They quivered. They gasped. They ran their fingers through their hair. He would sing about murder and they could discuss Jacques Derrida and oh how they wanted him. I fled to the lobby and waited for the after party. It was dull. Outside the fans lined up along the driveway to the underground garage. A black limo emerged, and they squealed.

Miley Cyrus

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(Written whenever it was Miley Cyrus outraged America.)

So looking at the Miley Cyrus video that every grown woman I know is posting on Facebook this morning, with commentary, I’ve made several observations.

1) Miley Cyrus could hold a fork with that tongue but it would be hard to eat anything.

2) You can’t hear the song with the volume down so I just pretended it was “Achey Breaky Heart”.

c) Women will not bend over like that if you are just a writer. I’ve asked.

d) I have no idea who Miley Cyrus is other than the picture of her pumping gas at a gas station and it wasn’t all that, as all that goes, unless all that goes is all went already and where have I been.

5) I only watched this because I thought Robin Thicke was that Canadian guy who tells jokes and plays hockey with the Hanson Brothers.

6) Doesn’t VMA stand for the Virginia Military Academy? Except the Virginia Military Academy doesn’t have teddy bears, at least not huge scary ones.

There was a seventh point but I left it out because it was more sad than funny.

All that being said, however, I will hold back on any personal opinion until I read what the intellectuals have to say in the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. Because they will. Over and over and over. Smart people being what they are today.

Thank you.
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(I was very disappointed, later, to see that neither The Atlantic nor the New Yorker wrote about the greater meaning of Miley Cyrus. No Beyoncé she, that Miley Cyrus.)

A picture of John Altman and Peter Green

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The two are definitely on the same wavelength here. I really like this photo. They had a band then, quite jazzy, Peter getting modal, Bitches Brew, out there, groovy, John on every reed and woodwind he could get his hands on. Hippie brilliance. He was so good, that Peter Green, and the horizon was limitless, such were the times. 1970. Jimi lived, the Beatles still were. Miles was a rock star and blues, rock, jazz and eastern sounds swirled together in a perfect ever changing mix. Musicians siphoned that mix into their own sound, their own bands. This was another of those bands, with Peter Green and John Altman and other outstanding London musicians. I wish I could find the names (although that is English bluesman Duster Bennett on harp, and vocalist Danny Da Costa left his story in the comments below), but there’s nowhere to look that I can find. It was an ephemeral moment, lost but for a photo and memories four decades old. There were so many of those throw together bands then. There’s stories, there’s legends. The ultimate, you’ll remember, was Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis together. That was the ultimate band, the dream band, the jazz rock band of all jazz rock bands. And that band never even existed. Miles sent the music over to Jimi. Jimi couldn’t read music. That ended that. Peter Green’s jazz rock band–the name, if they had one, escapes me–did play one storied gig at a packed London club. This might be a photo of that gig. If not, there’s another I’ve seen, Peter with a soloist’s concentration, John waiting his turn, two or three saxophones and a clarinet hung round his neck. That’s all I know, though, a couple photos, John Altman’s stories and an anecdote or two by audience members who commented on John’s Facebook page.  No audio, no video, just a couple photos and memories. And then Peter met some strange Germans, took a chemical trip to Valhalla, and that was that. 1970 was a rotten year for rock ‘n roll, full of dead and wounded and the missing in action. A rock star Viet Nam.

Look again at the photo. I have no idea who took it, but  it’s one of those perfect shots, so vivid, and with such great composition, that it goes beyond the visual and you can almost hear the music and follow the action and catch the vibe of the moment. That’s a rare thing, those shots. You can look through a mess of  Facebook galleries and a pile of photo albums and not see one. I don’t think a person gets more than a couple of shots like this in a life time. One that people can see generations later and think wow, that’s what it was like. But music fans look at a photo like this and they sigh. They wonder what might have been, and they sigh.

John Altman and Peter Green

Peter Green and John Altman in 1970. Duster Bennett in the background..