Pleased to have this poem up at International Times here.
Usually politically themed, and of late gate-crashed by Trump, I am pleased to say this is just for fun and includes an international surprise.
[Originally posted April 2012]
Apocalyptic Intro
This album was my apocalyptic, first introduction to The Fugs and it was only afterwards, some years in fact, that I heard their earlier, rawer material. This record still contains their incipient, trademark preoccupations, essentially from the puerile to poetry and the surreal, but it is overall a much more polished affair, the ‘band’ [with core members Ed Sanders, Ken Weaver and Tuli Kupferberg] having succumbed to and/or exploited a larger budget and the production values going with this.
It was a supply English teacher who introduced my 5th year class to The Fugs, using a study of poetry as an excuse to play Ah Sunflower, Weary of Time taken from their first album. He must have shown pictures of them as well and I was hooked immediately with the obvious appeal of hippies and poetry and music and, though not with this track, irreverence and rebellion. I won’t write in detail about him now, but this lanky, informal, eccentric, seemingly worldly-wise and charismatic teacher had a colossal impact on me at the time and opened up new and exciting horizons, musical and poetic, for which I will always be grateful.
The album has two distinct sides. Side 1 is very ‘musical’ – surprising and maybe even unwelcome for those preferring their earlier iconoclastic style – and Side 2 which is a whole side amalgam of songs, chants, poetry recitals, subliminal oddities, and spoken extracts. Crystal Liaison is the beautiful opener on side 1, written by Sanders and Weaver, and it echoes the psychedelic sound-swathes of The Electric Prunes’ Kyrie Eleison, no doubt intentionally, adding blaring horns, pumping bass and a rock lead guitar. It delivers both pastiche and poignancy. Ramses II Is Dead, My Love follows immediately with yodelling and an expansive choral accompaniment. Burial Waltz is even more mocking in its sweeping strings and light operatic additions, but for all this jesting with genres there is an underlying beauty to The Fugs’ production and performance on this album. The humour one would more readily expect comes with fourth track Wide Wide River, beginning River of Shit, River of Shit, Roll On, River of Shit, Right from my toes right up to my nose….I’ve been swimming in this river of shit more than twenty years and I’m getting tired of it which then moves on to the spoken narrative Who dealt this mess anyway – that’s an old card player’s term… and the song mixes its scatology and straight comedy with possible elements of political satire – it isn’t wholly easy to work out. Side 1 finishes with the plaintive Life Is Strange, by Tuli Kupferberg, with its eclectic mix of oriental tones, folk harmonies and jazz piano. The whole side is a rich concoction of musical motifs and lyrical adventure.
Side 2 is so much more wild and wicked. Opener Johnny Pissoff Meets The Red Angel begins with the redneck tirade of Johnny, his racist and homophobic rant as manic and real as it still is today: it is a dangerous parody because of this realism and I won’t actually repeat the words here. But it isn’t left unanswered. In another musically beautiful twist, Johnny’s angry persona is answered by the graceful Country Rock harmonies of the Red Angel who seeks to change Johnny’s ways with its wisdom and urgings for peace,
When The Red Angel comes and the TV is cold,
Will you pray in the dawn for the rest of your soul?
When you lie in the dour death coma,
Do you think you’re gonna go to heaven, oh Johnny,
With a violent heart? With a violent heart?
Are you ready Johnny? I’m the Red Angel.
Ahimsa, oh Johnny, ahimsa!
In the spinning confusion, ahimsa!
In the blood of life, death, and torture,
Ahimsa! Ahimsa! Ahimsa!
Ahimsa, is the seashell of Buddha.
Ahimsa, is the rose and the lamb.
When The Red Angel comes and the TV is cold
Will you pray in the dawn for the rest of your soul?
When you lie in the dour death coma,
Do you think you’re gonna go to heaven, oh Johnny,
With a violent heart? With a violent heart?
With a violent heart? With a violent heart?
Ahimsa is a Sanskrit term meaning ‘peace’ and literally translates as ‘no violence’, or ‘no himsa’. For a teenager full of fear about this redneck mentality and also full of idealism for achieving world peace and love, this song’s double narrative spoke volumes. So much of the album’s themes and my attraction to these are wrapped up in the cultural concerns we shared – theirs real and mine at this time vicarious – and whilst this is in many ways obviously dated, it still resounds. Another example of this cultural context is the gorgeous and surely satirical second track, a Gregorian chant of synonyms for Marijuana, its title. As satire and protest it is beautiful. There are sixteen snippets and fuller songs on this side, and one of the more multi-faceted numbers is When The Mode of the Music Changes, again by Kupferberg, which is complex in its array of musical styles, ranging from beautifully sung balladry to militaristic beats, and back again to lush harmonies and orchestration, then into a funked-up groove, back to a military anthem, and finishing on the peace and calm of its pretty central melody. The songcraft is superb. The snippets and oddities that follow are primarily vaudeville and circus acts, performed as puerile titillations, what Frank Zappa labelled ‘smut rock’, and again as a teenager I thought it was hilarious – and still do. I learnt most of these by heart and sang them when drunk. It seemed cool at the time. Lines like whenever I see the moon on the shore….or see a piano leg touching the floor…..I get horny! [then sung as a rousing chorus]: horny horny horny horny! It is a recurring theme. Another favourite learnt ditty is the song Life Is Funny, sung in the most morose of tones, life is funny, life is free, got all of them goodies coming to me, it’s so funny I could cry, it’s so funny you could die, it’s so funny….. and I felt then and still do today that the elliptical existentialism of that ending has great meaning……
There are other jokes, for example The National Haiku Contest, the winning entry coming from a William Chain, a senior at South West High School in Kansas City, Missouri,
do not tell me I am source of you knock-up
the mud elephant wading through the sea
leaves no tracks
and it is juvenile certainly, but it is this mix of the absurd and silly and at times musically sublime that teases and delights and fulfils. It made the late 60s/early 70s cultural revolution seem like a lot of fun. The album finishes on a simple ‘peace’ chant with crashing cymbals, and we are reminded that within the smut and comedy there has been social observation and commentary. And above all there has been the unbridled joy of The Fugs’ creativity.
Levitating? Come on – strictly, it’s dancing,
not necessarily well, without much energy,
yet it takes two to get anywhere these days,
nail it as they say, and there is a sharing
with that delicate apilado which will possibly
please judges who are simply standing around
and do not object to oxymoron in a style.
Should this pair lose, there is an escape route
through the archway at the back, a corridor to
other tangos in the snow where whiteouts will
be complete as a natural part of the scenery.
Like here, these three steps out of the expected
sync, self-aware, but gliding to the bitter end
in a flourish of another kind of arch and bend.
[picture by artist and photographer Nick Dormand]
Taken today on the conservatory windows
Today
the egret is standing in a
flood plain of the Otter’s riverbank
flattened by rushing water from recent
rain, and browned dead by
cold.
Tomorrow
it will be invisible
if it is still and still standing there,
lost in the white of a promised
Siberian Arctic snow,
but we shall see.
Egret irony.
White or buff
and at dusk
just as visible.
This egret is over two hundred years old,
the same Coleridge observed as a boy
walking in this town of his birth,
archiving for later,
dreaming already of an albatross
he’ll never actually see.
Recently,
a great white migrated to Somerset, its
belated chase of Samuel to write his
Rime and Kubla there, opium moving
to nether regions,
deep in
fantasy.
#egret:
taking off
spreading wings
reflection
with snow
with other birds
elegant landing
awkward landing
catching food
female against egret wallpaper
Nuptial plumes
breeding demise,
but xeno-cano
will share
their calls,
little snowies of
sound –
those who haven’t survived
two centuries to sing now.
[Originally posted January 2013]
Lucky Latin
This is one of the earliest albums I owned, and one of the earliest truly psychedelic ones. Released in 1968, I will have certainly had a copy in 1969 for reasons I will explain shortly.
Its psychedelia is a perfect mirror of the genre at this time: there are childlike, playful songs mixed with progressive interpretations of classical music. Indeed, that latter penchant for such acts pilfering from the classical catalogue was the catalyst for me and many others my age to take a serious interest in classical music at a time when we had little reason to do so otherwise, and I certainly had no nurturing from family for this.
A typical playful song is second track Little Arabella with its lounge-organ sound, Beatlesesque horn arrangement, and silly lyrics to a bubbly silly tune. But what wonderful fun. Even opening track Daddy, Where Did I Come From taps into a youthful sense of rebellion [though hardly revolutionary: instead, a conventional birds and bees query] but the question asked is mocked by its melodramatic tone and the naff parental response to which the asker seems to be dying in agonised rejection of that naffness. There is the requisite use of the child’s voice too; with more to come. Third track Happy Feuds is equally pop-central with Keith Emerson’s Hammond organ as the pervading hint that something musically more dynamic is about to happen. Again, childlike vocals sing the essential nonsense of the lyrics, but within that nonsense about ‘knowing themselves’, it actually hooks into the adolescent questioning of personal identity, so I think it really did appeal at the time more deeply than it can – platitude alert – listening now.
It’s fourth track Intermezzo from the Karelia Suite, from Sibelius, where the ‘seriousness’ kicks in. It is a rousing tune in its own right, but the organ with pounding drums and bass of respectively Brian Davison and Ian Hague leading into the jazz organ solo announces its prog credentials with virtuoso skill and volume. It ends too on a psychedelic noise-jam leading back to the romp of its main melody which was genuinely adventurous for its time. Emerson’s L-100 huffs and puffs and swirls are stonking.
That’s side 1 on the LP, and side 2 is the prog rock suite Ars Longa Vita Brevis which translates to ‘Art is long, life is short’, a suitably grand maxim for a band of the time and inclination, and again adolescent aspirations to being creative. Its five movements contain another requisite of the time – the drum solo – and there is also a full orchestra used for some parts. Emerson indulges himself in some piano virtuosity as well in 2nd Movement – Realisation before returning to full orchestra and Hammond for the 3rd Movement – Acceptance ‘Brandenburger’ where the jazzy appropriation of J S Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 3 is brilliant, and quite beautiful. The classics made cool for this 15/16 year old at least.
The Latin maxim of the album’s title and the side 2 suite formed the basis for my English ‘O’ Level creative writing exam in 1969. I don’t now recall how I was able to use this and its named movements – Awakening, Realisation, Acceptance, Denial – but I did, relishing the conscious manipulation to sound knowledgeable and informed. I do vaguely remember really enjoying what I wrote and how I incorporated the gist of the aphorism in some youthful declaration of creative intent. Pretentious? Hell yes. And of course I did well, but as an eventual English teacher I never lost sight of the fortuity of the examination process this had presented me and thus its many flaws, though in this case I was able to make positive use of the opportunity.
So for many reasons this album is important both musically and as significant memory and deserves its place in my Top Fifty.
It’s a long time ago thus I can’t remember precisely, but school had already started, so it will have been late September but quite likely October of 1967 that I first came to England, living in Ipswich and going to Chantry Secondary Modern School for the cultural shock of my life.
It was either ’68 or ’69 when I had the poster above hanging on my bedroom wall with many others, my Dylan the full red/orange colour, as I recall, and a shiny gloss surface.
I mention because you can – as I currently am – download the entire Oz Magazine collection here.
[for Trevor]
I am as much as anything
that something which gave me
so many connected
with what could fire
a sunlight characteristic
if quieter this time:
the shortening days
and some savage asides,
but today brings
yet more books
and just as the real summer
we look ahead for better.
I try to find somewhere
of honest appraisal
in the emergence of these days,
so little to utter
without a bit of warmth
yet I am glad
to have this intellectual
independence more reminiscent
of somewhere there was no doubt
and I believe in fully.
It must have been
in the genes
this dappled characteristic
as we will now call it.
[Originally posted January 2013]
Darting and Running
Yesterday I was listening to Pharoah Sanders’ John Coltrane tribute album Crescent With Love and it got me thinking about the first time I heard Coltrane. It was on an LP I got when I was about 15/16 years old, John Coltrane On West 42nd Street, and it was well played at the time so is a little rough if put on the turntable today. I’ve never been able to find a cd copy, and in that ever turning learning curve I now know this is because it isn’t strictly speaking a John Coltrane album – it is a vinyl only collection put out under his name to cash in on his then emerging popularity.
Taken from 1957 recordings with the Wilbur Harden [fluegelhorn] quintet, including on the tracks on the album Tommy Flanagan [piano], Doug Watkins [bass] and Lois Hayes [drums], the record includes the following songs in this order: Side One – Wells Fargo, West 42nd Street, E.F.P.H. [sic]; Side Two – Snuffy, Rhodomagnetics. I am writing this as these and other tracks [19 in all] can be found on cd on the Coltrane Mainstream 1958 Sessions where, for any nerd interest, there is an extra ‘F’ on its third track E.F.F.P.H. [compared with album liner notes, though on the album itself there are both ‘Fs’], and the Side Two tracks on the vinyl are inverted as well as becoming respectively in that inversion tracks four and nine [and you’d have to be intense to want to follow that].
All five tracks are quite conventional and there isn’t an outstanding melody/song, compared with, for example and unfairly, My Favorite Things. Each player gets a solo set and this too is quite formulaic. But I do recall simply loving each Coltrane solo as I still do, inevitably mixing that nostalgic sense of first discovery with the continued appreciation of today. I’m not incisive enough to really discern differences in absolute quality of playing – though it’s hard to make a bass solo soar like Harden’s flugelhorn – but Coltrane’s tenor sax solos do always seem that little bit more adventurous than the others; more on the edge of breaking from the formula and routine. Yet that could be the wishful thinking/hearing of my original joy and the occasional nostalgic revisiting – though listening as I write to final track Snuffy, Coltrane’s solo following Hayes’ piano really does dart out of the starting gate and run much more wildly and entertainingly.
It makes my Top Fifty for all the obvious and right reasons as I hope I have outlined here. As well as my first introduction to Coltrane, it consolidated an incipient interest in jazz, and a fairly traditional form of jazz as well. Whilst I moved on to the more adventurous and avant-garde, I think I had my fix of that already from the prog rock representation of the time.
So delighted to have my List Poem up now at Burning House Press here.
Big thanks to current guest editor Florence for such warm enthusiasm about this and care for presentation, with creative work by Alexandre Cesa [I have kept the image small here so you check out the site – please – to see the larger version].
In addition to that genuine appreciation, I am also pleased because I have always championed list poems: to read from others, to write over the years, and to use in my teaching of creative writing – especially for regular National Poetry Day ideas/resources. I’ve had the pleasure over those years to read so many wonderful list poems from students.
This one is my dedication to its art.
gravyfromthegazebo 