My shoes feel wet, loose, hard on my feet. My clothes all of a sudden don't fit. My hands are cold, the strings cut into my fingers, right to the bone. I'm up on the stairs above the stage, in the dark, looking out at the rowdy crowd, the place is going nuts, ready to blow, energy is climbing up my backbone, I have the butterflies, bad, like my guts are turning to water.
I want to run. Hit the alley. Drink beer with some winos out of a paper sack. But our manager, Danny is behind me there, on the landing. He knows I'm nervous, just says 'its gonna be great' I try to act like that helps. 'Yeah.' But half of me feels like I'm going to be executed, and the other half is trying to pretend that its all just good rockin fun.
Down the stairs and into the mouth of it. I feel weak, but am coming on bold. The crowd is cheering, Louie's behind his kit now, blam de blam, pish pish blop! Eddie's is a piledriver, I'm fiddling with my dials. Someone's calling out our names, kids looking up, lit by the stagelights, boys and girls, the mc yells 'Plimmmmmsoooouls!' and we're off into the first song, the lights come up and I go blind with the freight train bearing down on me...
A massive surge of pure electricity courses up my solar plexus, I'm so high all of a sudden, my breath is short and fast, knees weak, shit I'm singing fucking flat! My mouth is kissing the mike ball, I can smell its filth, my mouth is dry, pitching up and the music is fast white noise... I'm huge now, the world has vanished in the white haze, my body is immense, a house, but I'm trapped, can't get free, a piece of lightning metal sculpture, I'm caught by the nose, by the balls, by my whole life, I turn and wheel back to the drummer, then jerk to the mic where I keep up my leg backward as I sing, still bursting with stage fright, I'm doing anything I can to elude the spell, wilful mistakes to break the predictability. I'm in hell, shaken, trying to rock my way through it.
WE play the tag on Shaky City, and go into the second song while the audience happily, insanely, roars: drums rolling, tom toms and maracas, and I'm trying to get some quick beer... we all kick it in.
'Smashing rocks in the burning sun' my mouth is open and a stream of red neon comes out. A loud voice is screaming at me from a few feet away, and I'm lost in a tunnel of brilliant light, alone at center stage, I can't see nobody, just this pitch I'm tossing in, Louie's drums are all that holds me, though.. and while the spotlight roves I see the faces at my feet, kids, friends, eyes and mouths, fists, they love it, but they're all caught like I am.
My strength's returning, my voice is a strip of wet black rubber... and I dissappear into it, sending it out, it's bouncing all over the very back of the room, now to the kids on the stairway. The fear flows away, and I'm left with the size, I'm King Kong on top of the Empire, with the girl in my fist and snapping at planes, now on stiff legs like Frankenstein, colliding with Eddie back at the amps, screaming at the top of my lungs off mic at Davido who just looks over and laughs at me, then walks away.... the crowd is boiling, surging back and forth, people look up, out of control and calm eyes, somebody I haven't seen for ten years is in the front row wearing shades and grinning up at me. Elvis now, King Creole, its a laugh as Eddie solos... a roller coaster and we're riding it, slowly now, between songs, up at the top of the scaffold, about to drop.
Later, the room is a crowded subway train at rush hour. Everyones sloshes a drink, their arm around somebody, its a cocktail party and I'm the guest of honor, so I slip out, make down the hall, out the back and down the metal staircase, push through the exiting crowd in the lot, past the huge line of people waiting for the doors to open on our second show, but no one spies me as I cross the boulevard, enter the corner liquor store and score a quart of Micky's, then taking the green bottle out in a brown sack, I cross back over Santa Monica, and after a quick glance at the pre-show chaos, I traipse on past to the corner, a non descript building, an office something or other, where I cut in to an alley between it and the place behind, where several other dark forms are propped on the concrete, against the wall, hooded, working on bottles. I plop down, and unscrew my lid, the smell hits me first, like barf, but better... I take a deep drink.
Soon, I'm more relaxed, almost ready for the second, show, so I get up, nod a 'take it easy' to the guys and leg it back to the joint: now packed again, more packed than before, they got EVERYBODY in, I make up to the dressing room, now cleared out, 'where you been, man?' everybody yells at me, 'it's show time!' and this one set goes off crazier and smoother than ever.
Everybodies gone, I'm the the last to leave the dressing room. I'm going the same way I got there, sneaker power. With the ghetto blaster on my shoulder, the Miracles light the way.
What lonesome thoughts and dreams on this homeward roll? I can't say at all. Sad? I know, and angry, too, also a bit elevated from the night, but on the verge of weeping over whatever happened between me and who ever it was up there after the show. 'My Girl Is Gone,' 'Bad Girl,' 'The Love I Saw In You Was Just A Mirage'... somehow I walk right past my apartment building, and 'I'll Try Something New' is playing over and over again: Smokey knows. I'm walking aimlessly down Franklin Ave, by the brick on Cahuenga, in the tailights now, as I nearly fall down on a curb, the streets cobblestone, and for a second I forget where I am, I'm back in Buffalo, over by the train tracks, tears are in my eyes, I'm crying for Smokey, for me, for all my old friends, for all the ones who tried and went down... when a hood who's been following me comes up and pulls a knife, I can barely see through the blur, but I'm pissed, 'fuck off, motherfucker!' I wail at the top of what's left of my voice, and he vanishes, just like that.
I wake up on Saturday with an aching head. We're back at the Starwood tonight. I roll out of bed and put on some morning music.
Record of the year so far is Gil Scott-Heron's 'I'm New Here.' Also been digging his first album (picked it up on vinyl) 'Small Talk at 125th and Lennox.' A great poet with a feel for straight talk that'll light your mind up, and beautiful music.
Saw Phranc last night at McCabe's what a show! She's is one of the greats, truly an 'all-american.' She played songs from all stages of her career, the sold out audience went nuts, new songs were very moving... highlights for me? Anew one called 'Liberty Bell,' Miriam & Esther,' a song for her Grammas' old age... 'One Of The Girls' (a very moving song about a swim team...) She's a master songwriter, heartbreaking, inspiring, hilarious, in there with the best ever. And a master folksonger too, playing great guitar old-school, no pickup, just over the mic, like Woody or Baez, and it sounded amazing. Phranc!
BTW, opening the show was a surprise perfromance by Exene, playing rocking guitar herself, and accompanied by Dead Rock West's singer Cindy Wasserman. New songs sounded killer.
I dug the 'Health Care Summit.' I like to see Obama deal directly with the Repugs, he lays it right out. Who knows what'll happen, but I hope they get a bill after all this work. What a way to run a country, I mean our governmental procedures. Let's do away with the filibuster, guys ok?
Sure, Pete, anything you say.
Tried to watch Tarentino's abomination. Man, I hope that thing doesn't win any awards. A new level of embarrassment for our culture, if that's possible. The german actor Waltz is good, but the rest is rubbish, top to bottom. Cynical exploitation of peoples feelings history etc, a bald faced attempt at manipulating the Oscars. I had to take it off before the baseball bat scene got going. I was around something like that in real life once, (and tho' no one died) it makes me sick. The Human Image is Holy, such degradations are disgusting, no matter how 'righteous.' 'The devils' work,' indeed, QT. There more at stake here than entertainment for bored consumers!
Help us!!!! Mercy!!!
June 29 is the drop date... the working title is 'Wig!' but I'm not sure yet what the name is.
I'm very proud of this one, it rocks up a storm, but I dig the songs too, and there are a couple acoustic tracks on there too, you know, gotta keep the roads open for that stuff!
I'm playing electric guitar, 12 string, amplified harp, piano and electric bass... my first sessions on bass for decades!
So that's the story: watch here and at Yep Roc Records.com for news, downloads etc.
This one will be coming out on vinyl too (and you get a coupon to download the complete album with every lp purchase.) Vinyl, well I'm pretty into it again. maybe all the Nerves and Plimsouls etc re releases lately got me going in that direction in a big way.
Anyhow, that's the word. It's going in to the Yep Rocs, out of my hands, and I'm going through a little Buzz Aldrin, but everything's cool, at least as long as I wait patiently.
I'll be writing songs, the book, getting the band together for the road... plenty to do.
And that's the story today.
'MAKE IT NEW!'
In the early days of rock and roll, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, and Fats Domino all worked the same genre, used the same three chords, played most of their songs in the same time signature, and reached a teenage audience. Each of them were so unique that respective styles were named after them.
'WRONG IS RIGHT!'
On Sun Records in the 50's, a similar originality was developed under the supervision of producer Sam Phillips. Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash each created a unique approach using similar materials.
'Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can't even imagine in advance' -Picasso
You've gotta be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for? -Bernadette Peters
'Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.' -Picasso
Utter originality is, of course, out of the question -Ezra Pound
'What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough'. -Eugene Delacroix
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. -Herman Melville
The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships. -Leo Burnett, Pioneer American advertising executive, 1891-1971
"Mr. Rauschenberg, talking apropos of doing what other people have already done... "out of respect I decided I wouldn't paint like Rothko or Franz Kline because I'd be in their way and they in mine. That was also John Cage's attitude. John always said, there's enough room in the world so that nobody has to be that close to another person."( -Robert Rauschenburg (1925-), American artist.
'The chief impression when reading Homer is freshness. This is the classic quality: 3000 years old and still FRESH. -Ezra Pound
'I do not seek. I find.' -Picasso
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. -Thomas Carlyle
"All profound original art looks ugly at first.' -Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), American art critic.
Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself. -James Stephens
Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with. -Thomas Carlyle
'For a long time I couldn't think what to write about, but then thought "Oh yeah. Writing about something is what you do to pass time while you're waiting for a real song to come." They land like eagles on your budgie perch. You know them by the way the branch snaps.' -Robert Hunter
' ...I know the Beatles DO! [care about repetition, care about a hook, or melody.] LADY MADONNA was a hit SONG. They didn't write that for an emotional experience, and you don't have to put things into these songs- they're right there- blah! We must have more SONGS.' -record producer Phil Spector, (once upon a time)
' I'll sit with a guitar and I'll be noodling: doing riffs, doing chord changes, whatever, to get a good rhythm or a good something.Since I'm a rock and roll guy, I try to connect a song with a riff, and therefore an arrangement. Because I know I'm going to ultimately make a record.
I used to describe to describe a great record as being four things, in this order: title, the sound, the words, and then the last thing- and all the great rock and roll records have it- is a really great guitar riff. So it might sound like I start backwards by coming up with a riff first.
But that's what gets me started. AndI think about the title. Because when you hear a song on the radio, it must have a good title. Like 'Bad Moon Rising.' That's a good title. And I've got a book of titles I've been keeping for a long time.'
'What makes a title good? It should just sound cool.' -John Fogarty
'A hit song? ...a man going crazy over a woman!' -Willie Dixon 'You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.' -Gertrude Stein
'The things that you used to just get by come back as art, to help us survive the endless stretching of our heart.' - Marshall McLuhan
'Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of the precision that creates movement.' -e.e. cummings, when asked why he bacame a poet.
'To do it, you had to have power and domain over the spirits.' -Bob Dylan on his 60's work.
'What ever you are saying, you are saying in a ricky-tick way. There's never time to reflect. You stitched and pressed and packed and drove, is what you did. -B.D., on the same 60's work
'He slept music, he ate it, he lived it.' B.D. on an associate.
' ... the most uplifting and powerful records ever made... The artists were singing for their lives and sounded like they were coming from the most mysterious place on the planet. No justice for them. They were so strong, could send you up a wall.' - B.D on Sun Records
- Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others. -Marianne Moore
...The secret of writing poetry, is to find a subject that draws words out from your inner mind. And since your inner mind is at bottom your child mind, it is no surprise that a poets words and subjects and secrets are often childhood ones as well. ' - Philip Larkin
'I cant tell you why other people write, but I write in order to keep from going insane.' -BD in a letter to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, 1964
'Write Like Mad'
'The kind of peace most people want is just another kind of war.' -Walker Percy
' The way I think about the blues comes from what I learned from Big Joe Williams. The blues is more than something to sit home and arrange.What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all of the problems they had; but at the same time they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat. Whats depressing today is that many young singers are trying to get inside the blues, forgetting that those older singers used them to get outside their troubles.'
'I ain't that good yet. I don't carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin' Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they're older people. I sometimes am able to do it, but it happenss, when it happens, unconsciously. You see, in time, with these older singers, music was a tool- a way to live more, a way to make themselves feel better at certain points.' -Bob Dylan, 1963, 'Freewheelin' liner notes
Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others. -Marianne Moore
'What ever you are saying, you are saying in a ricky-tick way. There's never time to reflect. You stitched and pressed and packed and drove, is what you did. -B.D., on his 60's work
'There are certain qualities we demand from the music. A sense of immediacy, of personal involvement, a sense of tradition as well as appreciation for that which carries things to a point where they can go no further ... a rejection of compromise ... an obsession ... with the song material and a sense of an event with every performance.' -John Cohen,(of the New Lost City Ramblers)
'There are no limits to masculine egotism in ordinary life. In order to change the conditions of life we must learn to see them through the eyes of women.
...almost any Beatles' song can serve as an example. Let's take a quick look at "I Want To Hold Your Hand," the song that introduced young people in the USA to the British appropriation of rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues. It is the same song that evoked Roger McGuinn to say: "The words weren't so meaningful but the chord changes really had magic in them" (Muni, Somach & Somach, 1989: 168). Bob Dylan reacted in a similar way, by remarking: "They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid ..." (Scaduto, 1973: 203-204).
'In those days it was a matter of the dollar, all of us could write those blues a dime a dozen. [ Lester] Melrose would talk to me tonight and tomorrow I would have him six tunes, and the very next day knowing that we wouldn't get any royalties we forgot about them and would write six more. Those were the days.' - Victoria Spivey
'As Scrapper describes it, the making of these blues resembled cultivated poet craft rather than the usual folk composition: they would sit for hours at a big dining room table, adding and taking out verses, crossing out and changing, getting the rhymes correct ("if you can't rhyme yourself, get a rhyming dictionary"), and finally, giving each blues a title.' -Rosenbaum, 1961, on Scrapper Blackwell and Leroy Carr
"My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket," says Waits. "My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane."
'Love makes the blues' -Robert Pete Williams
'The blues kept me on the road, it was always leading me somewhere. That's what the blues is, it's a leading thing, something on your mind that keeps you moving.' -David 'Honeyboy' Edwards
What Unworldly Love...
"Can you name what you desire? I took one key -from one line in Williams "Unworldly love, that has no hope of the world, and cannot change the world to it's delight."
"So what eternal spring of feeling do you have in you, that you feel sure of, or that you feel unsure of, but returns over and over again, in dreams, and in waking moments of longing? What object of love, or what desire, or what delight, returns over and over despite the appearances, despite discouragement, and despite all rational calculation-even trying to repress it, it still comes through. What freshness of feeling, and what freshness of perception, comes through anyway, even despite blocking it, even despite, either the condition of not noticing it, or thinking you better not do it (you better go straight, you better get a job)-what comes through anyway? What unworldly love, that has no hope of the world, and cannot change its world to its delight,persists, and breaks through always, if only in dreams? because in dreams you get these great baths of eroticism or liberation or recognition. You know, your mother recognizes you, Kissinger recognizes you." -Allen Ginsberg, quoted by Anne Waldman, in "Howl, Fifty Years Later"
Ricks noted there are many kinds of genius. Jack Nicholson is an actor who plays essentially the same kind of character very well in many different kinds of films, he said. There are great musicians who go their entire lives doing the same music. Then there are actors like Laurence Olivier, whose Othello is a different world, said Ricks. He puts Dylan in Oliviers camp. On Dylans songwriting, Ricks said its good to have instinct, but one can also think too much. You must program your brain not to think too much, he said. Youve got to keep your brain under control. Otherwise there will be too much conscious control. Dylan, he said, has struck the correct balance between the two.
"If you write about a dance, about cars or political situations, sooner or later your material sounds passe, dated. But love always has its significance, it never goes out of style and ANYTHING might inspire me. I might see something on television, or be driving down the street and see a road sign, or you might say something to me, and I'd say 'Wow, that'll be a great song'... You know, and if it's a hit I'll give you a credit!", he adds jokingly."I look upon it as a gift, because I'm not one of those songwriters who's moody and has to go off to the mountains or the desert and take two months off where I do nothing but write! I'm not like that, I write all the time - probably most days of my lfie I write at least a part of a song, and it just comes, just there. It's just in the air. Everybody has a gift, it's just that some people never discover theirs because they don't pursue it." -Smokey Robinson
Remember, Kid
" Remember above all things, Kid, that to write is not difficult, not painful, that it comes out of you with ease, that you can whip up a little tale in no time, that when you are sincere about it, that when you want to impress a truth, it is not difficult , not painful, but easy, graceful, full of smooth power, as if you were a writing machine with a store of literature that is boundless , enormous, endless & rich. For it is true: this is so. Do not forget it in your gloomier moments. Make your stuff warm, drive it home American-wise, don't mind critics. don't mind the stuffy academic theses of scholars. they don't know what they're talking about, they're way off the track, they're cold; you're warm, you're redhot, you can write all day, you know what you know..."- Jack Kerouac
"I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as the time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world. Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerful in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say".[3]
RIMBAUD: "For I is another. If brass wakes up a bugle, it is not its own doing. This is clear to me: I'm a witness at the flowering of my own thought. I watch it and listen to it. I draw a stroke of the bow, and the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes upon the stage in a leap."
As fine as the PLIMSOULS studio records are, theyve always been overshadowed by the bands rep as a live act indeed, the word legendary often gets tossed around in reference to the L.A. quartets vintage live shows. Recorded at the Whiskey a Go Go on Halloween in 1981, Live: Beg, Borrow & Steal affirms that legend, as PETER CASE, EDDIE MUNOZ, DAVID PAHOA and LOU RAMIREZ rip through a set of turbocharged power pop, stripped-down R&B and blazing rock & roll with the skill of veterans and the enthusiasm of teenagers. Mixing tracks from the quartets self-titled debut LP and the then as-yet-unrecorded Everywhere at Once with covers of everyone from LARRY WILLIAMS to the EASYBEATS to LITTLE RICHARD to BO DIDDLEY, the Plimsouls easily validate the hyperbole in which their champions have indulged since the group split in the mid-80s. Everyday Things, Ill Get Lucky, Inch By Inch and Now fairly leap out of the speakers and dance you around the room; by the time the band gets to New Orleans and Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!, on which its joined by the Fleshtones, the energy level threatens to shake the walls to dust. And while it may come as a surprise to fans of his more recent folk work, Case proves himself quite possibly the best rock & roll singer of his era. Whether you want to get a concentrated shot of Plimsouls goodness or the right platter to rock the party, Live: Beg, Borrow & Steal is an excellent dose of caffeinated adrenaline.
This song has defied most commentators to make any sense of it. Otherwise articulate writers like Michael Grey have had to punt when it comes to Visions, most just say 'great images...what a song... Dylan's finest' and try to get out of the room quick. Of course they all play it over and over and bathe in its ambience. But this piece really nails parts of it. Lots of it. Or comes close anyway. You have to get beyond the tone of the piece at times, the writers insistence on 'prostitute' and 'whore' are crass, banal, non- Dylan-esque even ('the miss-titled prostitute' sang Dylan in Chimes Of Freedom.) In fact, there is no reason in the song why Louise is to be seen as a prostitute, and it's not really necessary to the interpretation. Anyhow, for any real Dylan fans out there, it's definitely worth checking out at length.
I think he misses the obvious about 'jewels and binoculors hang from the head of the mule' by getting into the bit about prospecting, but overall... it's the most right on thing I've heard on this subject.
http://www.rockademia-u.com/
from Patti Smith: an unauthorized biography by Victor Bockris and Roberta Bayley