Bastard Out of Carolina
This is a repost from 2018. Dorothy Allison passed away November 6, 2024. … Bastard Out of Carolina is a much praised novel. Dorothy Allison wrote it. When I saw it at a used book sale, I hesitated. The lady taking the money said, “if you don’t want that book, I will take it.” I went ahead and gave the lady one dollar, and took home BOOC.
Bone is the illegitimate hero of BOOC. Her birth certificate has ILLEGITIMATE stamped across the bottom, in “oversized red-inked block letters.” Anney, the mother, makes repeated visits to the county courthouse, trying to get the certificate de-bastardized. Finally, when Bone is 12, Anney succeeds. By then it is too late.
The Boatwrights are a large family. They live in Greenville, South Carolina. BOOC is set in the fifties. PG was never really sure how many aunts and uncles Bone has. Maybe that is the idea.
The characters in BOOC are what some people would call white trash. Money is always a problem. The men drink and fight. The women do what they can. The kids are kids, until it is their turn to get locked up, or knocked up.
After Anney has two girls, she meets Glen Waddell. He is the villain of BOOC. An all around fuck up, Daddy Glen sexually abuses Bone. This is only spelled out in two episodes. The verbal/physical abuse is there all the time.
An Essential Novel About Poverty, Bigotry, and Sexual Abuse, Twenty-Five Years Later is an article that googled its way into this book report. Some urban writers are fascinated by racism. Dorothy Allison keeps racism in its place. There are no black characters in BOOC. The Boatwrights say n****r. The reader comes to learn that the Boatwrights would have been just as poor, just as drunk, and just as trashy in an all white county. Whiteness is part of the story, just like the muddy river flowing past Aunt Raylene’s house.
BOOC has a lot of details, and atmosphere. In a radio interview, Dorothy Allison says something. “Oh, I want that — you know what Nabokov called it, that sob in the spine, that where you’re reading and suddenly it just stops you, and you’re like ah! That’s what I want. I want you to take a deep breath, and if I’m really lucky, I want you to throw the book at the wall.” Paperbacks do less damage.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Russell Lee took the pictures in Missouri. The date was August, 1938.
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This is a repost from 2017. The events of the last seven years make “Tales of the City” look like Dick, Jane, and Sally … The plot lines in “Tales of the City” can be tough to figure out. The books have been *coming out* since 1978, which is several lifetimes ago. I read the first installment, Tales of the City, sometime in the eighties, thought it was fun, and went on about my way. At some point, I got copies of More Tales of the City and Further Tales of the City. Significant Others turned up at a yard sale, with the step grandson rescuing the step grandpa at a radical women’s retreat. Good clean fun.
Babycakes and Sure of You, the last two books of the original series, will be discussed today. It can be tough to make sense of the plot. Michael Tolliver goes from the “Whore of Babylon” to model HIV+ citizen. Mary Ann goes from the naive Ohio girl to a popular TV personality. Mrs. Madrigal is Mrs. Madrigal, and San Francisco is San Francisco.
I found Babycakes in a box of free books at a faerie gathering. Merry part, merry meat again. BC is set early in the Reagan Presidency. Michael’s bf, Jon, died of AIDS in 1982. Michael goes to England, and runs into an old friend, Mona. It is a complicated, and tough to believe, story. You have to put away your skepticism, and go with the story. It is a good story, and fun to read. This is why I read.
Sure of You was the last book of the original series that I was sure I had not read. The library had it. SOY is set in 1988, and this is a key part of the story. AIDS is running wild. Michael has a pill box with a beeper. Everywhere you turn, men are dead and dying. I lived my version of 1988 in Georgia.
There were some interviews with Armistead Maupin during this era. He is very angry, and into outing celebrities. The name Tom Selleck was prominently mentioned. This anger shows up in SOY. Michael goes to a black tie reception with Mary Ann. A famous designer, who might be Calvin Klein, hits on Michael. There is an angry lecture about being in the closet. The improbability of Calvin Klein hitting on a plant store owner is not mentioned.
On page 107, the designer’s wife says something to Mary Ann about Ivana Trump. The TV personality wants to know what Mrs. Trump is like in real life. Thirty seven later, the late Ivana Trump is the ex wife/kidsmomma of the President of the United States elect. Maybe those plots were not as far fetched as what really happens. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
The Day CS Lewis Died
It is a cold saturday before turkey day. Since I am too lazy to write fresh material, I will recycle. The product is a book report of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, by Thomas Eugene Robbins. When you read TER, you start to think, which can cause trouble in both Little China and Big Muddy. Just editing a book report from five years ago can have that effect.
A note on context. A load of laundry is in the machine, and will require a maintenance visit. The good news is that the device is working properly, and the drain is sending all the water to the county, without leaving any overflow on the floor. Somewhere between 19 and 39 minutes from now, the load will be done, and it will be time to hang it to dry in the back yard.
The music in the background is by JS Bach. The internet archive is chock full of high quality music by the gentleman. I can go back to listening to more recent music when the time is right.
In the text, the word arcana appears. It should not surprise anyone that a text about TER will have the word arcana, which rhymes with banana and Savannah … jfc, I hit the cntrl button instead of shift when spelling Savannah, and google docs had a hissy fit because it thought I wanted voice typing, and this device does not have a microphone … arcana is not recognized by spell check. The suggestions are canary, canard, narc, NASCAR.
So, the post is finished and posted. On a good day, it will get a viewer. I am posting almost exclusively for my own enjoyment. A Dick Cavett guest once said that reading and masturbation were the only solitary pleasures, but he never wrote a blog.
It is now 2315, roughly 14 hours after I started this. I originally thought I would write and write and write, but now the get up and go has done got up and went. Maybe it was when I got in from hanging the laundry out to dry. I decided to go for my morning walk, and put a bottle of water in my bag. Unfortunately, the cap on the bottle wasn’t shut all the way, and about half the bottle wound up in my bag. I had to empty the bag, set half of the contents out to dry, and take the bag out to the clothes line to dry. That was the high point of the day.
@The_Kyle_Mann Everyone remembers where they were the day CS Lewis died @chamblee54 I was in fourth grade. What really tore me up was Aldous Huxley. … Aldous Huxley was tripping on acid when he met his maker. JFK was dreaming about having a quickie with this girl he was going to meet after lunch, while Jackie was getting her pillbox hat retooled. As for CS Lewis, it was really an allegory for Jesus getting offed on the cross. Some people just know how to have a good time.
Maybe a few notes more about HAIFP are in order. The first time I read HAIFP was early 1996. I was taking a break from smoking pot, and wondering if I was going to make it. After six weeks of misery, I was reading HAIFP one night. One character said, in the house of your mind, the pictures are all upside down. I walked over to a poster of Grace Jones, pulled the push pins out, and put it upside down. At that point, I realized that marijuana detox was going to work, but not until I finished my peanut butter and raw garlic sandwich. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas Part Two
This is a repost from 2019, before the world went into a spiral. … Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas finished it’s performance in front of my glasses. Like most Tom Robbins books, HASP does not have a satisfying ending. The author/auteur creates characters, throws them into troubling situations, and makes word jokes about their plight. Unfortunately, books come to an end, and what serves as a plot should have a termination. For this wordsmith, the journey is so much fun that the destination is reduced to an ad in the travel guide. (Author and auteur both come to us through “Middle English auctour, from Anglo-French auctor, autor, from Latin auctor promoter, originator, author, from augēre to increase.”) Neither noun is as important as it used to be.
The best way to approach HAFP is to forget the plot God, and go directly to the details, where she can be found. Like page 333, which is half of 666, but with a fraction of the opprobrium. There is this exchange, between Gwen Mati and Larry Diamond. They are the *star crossed lovers* in HAFP. “Wait a minute. You have to get the government’s permission to get an enema?” “This may be the land of the free, sweetheart, but you’re deluding yourself if you think your ass is your own.”
Larry Diamond is probably the stand in for Tom Robbins. He is full of conspiracies, hypotheses, feces, and other aromatic arcana. Considering that HAFP was published in 1994, and presumably written before then, the reader wonders what was in his crystal ball. Consider this item on page 315: “If global warming melts the polar ice caps, as some predict, we will have little choice in our resumption of an aquatic life style.” LD talks about frogs a lot in HASP, but very has little to say about pajamas. Do you say pa JAH muz, or pa JAM muz?
HAFP is full of semi-plausible conjecture projection. Consider the part on page 318, about magic mushroom spores coming to earth, from the star Sirius. Fair enough, but how did the extraterrestrial spores find their way to cowpies? The star Sirius is a key player in the morpho-mythology of HASP. How much is true, and how much was created in the mental compost of the Robbins mind? When I read HAFP in 1996, I could only wonder. On the 2019 reading, Google is ready when you are.
The tale LD weaves involves the Dogon people of ancient Timbuktu. Here is what one source says: “The Dogon stories explain that also. According to their oral traditions, a race people from the Sirius system called the Nommos visited Earth thousands of years ago. The Nommos were ugly, amphibious beings that resembled mermen and mermaids. … The Egyptian G-ddess Isis, who is sometimes depicted as a mermaid, is linked with the star Sirius.”
Isis has a PR problem these days. For some reason, an armed terrorist/freedom fighter group is killing people in the middle east. Depending on the day, and campaign contributions, ISIS is seen as an enemy of the American people. What does this have to do with a Goddess? Will a rebel army be named for Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, or Inanna?
“The Nommos, according to the Dogon legend, lived on a planet that orbits another star in the Sirius system. They landed on Earth in an “ark” that made a spinning decent to the ground with great noise and wind. It was the Nommos that gave the Dogon the knowledge about Sirius B. The legend goes on to say the Nommos also furnished the Dogon’s with some interesting information about our own solar system: That the planet Jupiter has four major moons, that Saturn has rings and that the planets orbit the sun. These were all facts discovered by Westerners only after Galileo invented the telescope.”
“The system is also known to the Bozo, who call Sirius sima kayne (literally: sitting trouser) and its satellite tono nalema (literally: eye star).” Lately another Kayne has become popular. He is hardly a sitting trouser. Has the Kardashian husband been gifted to us from a distant solar system?
At some point in HAFP, Larry Diamond makes plans to go to Timbuktu. He will lick the belly of the toad, and take a magic carpet ride. Gwen Mati was grossed out. “It sounds like a drug.” “Its a hallucinogenic bufotoxin. Aspirin is a drug.”
“Bufotoxin, a moderately potent poison secreted in the skin of many anuran amphibians, especially the typical toads (genus Bufo.) The milky fluid contains several identifiable components: bufagin, with effects on the heart similar to those of digitalis; bufotenine, a hallucinogen; and serotonin, a vasoconstrictor. The composition of the poison varies with the species of toad. Taken internally, the poison causes severe, even fatal reaction in many predators, but some animals (e.g., hognosed snakes) are not affected. The poison does not normally affect human skin, but it does irritate the eyes and mucous membranes.” There was no word on spores from outer space.
This is enough fun for one day. Part one of this series is available at an internet near you. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
Tibetan Peach Pie Part One
This is a repost from 2015. Tom Robbins is still alive after 92 years on the planet. … There is a quote on page sixty nine of Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life, by Tom Robbins. Yes, that magic number, representing mutual oral gratification when it is not the product of twenty three skiddoo times three. The line is from a poem, “Fruits and Vegetables,” by Erica Jong. Before we get much further, maybe we should hear the line. If a woman wants to be a poet, she must dwell in the house of the tomato.
This is synchronicity in living color. Tom Robbins and Erica Jong have been two of my favorite authors for thirty seven plus years. They both gave readings in a converted auto dealership on Pharr Road in the early nineties. I was at both, even if all I saw of Mr. Robbins was the author sitting down autographing books. The thought that these two confirmed heterosexuals might have performed reproductive acts sends literary gossipmongers into zipless fits. And to have this quote dropping on page 69, about a red juicy fruit/vegetable/berry… it just takes the pizza pie prize.
The humble tomato is a much written about food product . A disagreement over pronunciation provides lyrics for a hit song. It is dandy for throwing. Some say it is easy to grow. (I have tall trees surrounding my backyard, and no luck at all with ‘maters.)
The structure of the word… to, as in direction, ma, as in mother, another two letter to… tomato has a symmetry unknown to chocolate or pineapple. The oh sound at the end makes tomato easy to rhyme. Tomato spelled backwards is otamot, which is total nonsense. Whatever it’s other virtues, tomato is neither a palindrome nor a weapon of mass destruction.
When I saw the tomato quote, he asked Mr. Google for more information. One of the results was a page by Jason Webley. This is a musician, who used to write about oddities on his web page. Mr. Webley is currently on tour in Europe, which might not be the comfortable thing to do at this very moment. His commentary was instructional.
“The tomato does have a funny history. It, like many of the vegetables we eat is a New World plant. Somehow the Itallians made do without tomato paste until realtively recently (likewise with the Irish and their potatos.) When the plant was first discovered by Europeans in South America is was believed to be deadly (a member of the Nightshade family) but pretty. Rumor has it, the tomato was believed to be the apple of forbidden knowledge from the Garden of Eden. It was brought back to Europe purely as a decorative plant and actually made it all the way around the Mediteranean and back across the Atlantic to North America before people got up the courage to eat the thing.”
Mr. Webley is full of arcane knowledge, From him we learn: Lahnaphobia: Fear of vegetables. (spell check suggestion:Islamophobia) ~ The difference between a fruit and a vegetable: In accordance with a US Supreme Court ruling in 1893, the difference between a fruit and a vegetable is as follows: ‘Any plant or part thereof eaten during the main dish is a vegetable. If it is eaten at any other part of the meal, it is a fruit.’ ~ Have you ever noticed that the Bible is full of references to corn? Doesn’t this seem a bit unusual, considering that corn is a new world grain developed in the region now known as Guatemala and was completely unknown to Europe and the Middle East until at least 500 years ago? Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
Joni Mitchell
Tuesday is Joni Mitchell’s 81st birthday. Roberta Joan Anderson was born November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta. For this birthday tribute we will revisit four previous posts. one two three four Pictures are from The Library of Congress. … A facebook friend went on a Joni Mitchell kick. First it was a link to an interview. Then it was a quote from The Last Time I Saw Richard. A lady said Blue was her favorite album all all time, and a man enthusiastically agreed.
Given the apples and oranges quality of her catalog, it would be tough to pick one album as a favorite. I soon realized that fbf was going to be thirty soon. I am sixty. These are two different perspectives on the craft of Joni Mitchell. One has driven through the storm, not knowing what was next. The other is presented with an almost complete body of recorded work.
I have known about Joni since high school, and been a devoted fan since 1976. Joni’s most popular album, Court And Spark, came out in 1974, eleven years before fbf was born. Who would be the equivalent female musical force from 1943, when I was minus eleven? The answer is nobody. (Coincidentally Roberta Joan Anderson was born on November 7, 1943.)
After the comment about Blue, I listened to For The Roses. Joni’s craft is like a cluster bomb … there are lines that you never fully felt, bomblets waiting to explode in your gut. Let The Wind Carry Me has one of those hidden threats. Mama thinks she spoilt me, Papa knows somehow he set me free, Mama thinks she spoilt me rotten, She blames herself, But papa he blesses me.
The first thing I heard by Joni was Big Yellow Taxi. It was on The Big Ball, a 1970 mail order sampler from Warner Brothers. This was when Joni shacked up with Graham Nash. The next year saw Blue, followed by For The Roses, and Court And Spark. I always thought Joni was someone he should like, but somehow didn’t. It wasn’t until 1976 that I broke through the barrier, and became a Joni Mitchell fan. Seeing her in concert did not hurt.
On February 3, 1976, I took a study break. (I scored 100 on the test the next day) Joni Mitchell was playing at the UGA coliseum a few blocks away, and the door was not watched after the show started. I found a place to stand, on the first level of the stands. The LA express was her band that night, and created a tight, jazzy sound, even in the UGA coliseum. Tom Scott pointed at Joni, said she was crazy, and drew circles around his left ear. The one line I remember is “chicken scratching my way to immortality” from Hejira.
The Hissing of Summer Lawns might not be her best album, but it is certainly her bravest. Court And Spark was a commercial success. Instead of producing a bestselling followup, Joni took a ninety degree turn. Summer Lawns, for all its eccentric sparkle, confused the record buying public. The gravy train took off in another direction.
In those days, 96rock played a new album at midnight, which people would tape. On the night of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash, the album was Hejira. This was followed by Mingus, another curve ball. Finally, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter appeared, and did not make a good impression.
The eighties, nineties, and aughts appeared. Joni and I lived our lives. 1996 saw a frightening interview in Details magazine. It was startling to see that for all her granola glory, Joni Mitchell might not be a very nice person. In a pot and kettle moment, David Crosby said “Joni’s about as humble as Mussolini.” Music is a tough way to make easy money.
More recently, there was a long interview on Canadian television. She is not mellowing with age. The cigarettes have not killed her, even if her voice is not what it once was. The recent albums that I have heard are strong. There seem to be more on the way. Maybe the facebook friend will have have the “what is she going to do next” experience after all.
A few weeks ago, I was at the library. I had a story to take home, before going over to the biography section. There I found Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. At least with fiction, you know you are dealing with a made up story. With biography, you have to use judgment.
It is a familiar story. Joni was born in the frozen north, was a rebellious girl, and got pregnant. She gave up the daughter for adoption, only to be reunited many years later. Joan Anderson gets married to, and divorces, Chuck Mitchell. Joni sings, writes, tunes her guitar funny, becomes a star, gets too weird to be popular, makes and loses money, smokes millions of cigarettes, and becomes an angry old lady. There is a bit more to the story than that. Reckless Daughter fills in a few of the blank spots.
Millions of cigarettes might be an exaggeration. Joni started smoking when she was nine. When she was a star, she was almost as well known for her constant puffing as her pretty songs. When Joni was in a Reagan era slump, she was going through four packs a day. Just for the sake of statistics, lets call it two packs, or forty fags, a day. Multiply forty by 365 and you get 14,600. If she started at 9, and had her aneurysm at 72, that gives you 63 years of nicotine abuse. If you assume that there were forty fags a day for 63 years, that gives you 919,800 smokes. IOW, while seven figures is not out of reach, it is rather unlikely that Joni smoked more than 2,000,000 cancer sticks.
The author of Reckless Daughter, David Yaffe, is a problem. He talks about the mood of America in 1969, four years before he was born. Mr. Yaffe goes to great lengths to show us that he knows about making music. Some readers will be impressed. There are mini-essays on Joni songs from her golden years, the time between “Ladies of the Canyon” and “Hejira.” And gossip, gossip, and more gossip. Joni is well known for her celebrity lovers.
We should make the point that I enjoyed Reckless Daughter. The inside stories are fun, and pages turn over without too much head scratching. Maybe this is a statement about the career of Joni Mitchell. You enjoy the music for many years, and then complain about the details. Reckless Daughter follows the trajectory of other celebrity biographies. The star is born, takes up a craft, gets a break, becomes successful, goes over the mountaintop into a long decline. With Joni, nothing after “Mingus” was well received. The chanteuse was broker, and angrier, by the minute.
On page 13, Joni hears Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Sergei Rachmaninoff. This is the piece that makes her want to be a musician. One page 129, we learn the story of A&M studios in Hollywood. At one time, The Carpenters were in studio A, while Carole King was recording “Tapestry” in studio B. Joni was recording “Blue” in studio C, which had a magic piano. One time, Carole King learned of a break in the studio C booking, and ran in. Three hours later, “I feel the earth move” was recorded.
A few years later, Joni was on the Rolling Thunder tour with Bob Dylan. One of the concepts was support for Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, whose story can be found elsewhere. Joni became disillusioned with Mr. Carter. When Joan Baez asked Joni to speak at a benefit concert, Joni said she would say that Mr. Carter was a jive ass N-person, who never would have been champion of the world. Joni later got in SJW trouble for posing in blackface, for the cover to “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.”
On page 251, we learn that Bob Dylan does not dance. Other items include “Free man in Paris” being written about David Geffen, and Jackson Browne writing “Fountain of Sorrow” about Joni. Mr. Browne is a not-well-thought-of ex of Joni. As for Mr. Geffen…. Joni stayed at his house for a while, at a time when Mr. Geffen was in, and out, of the closet. Did they make sweet music together?
So this book report comes to an end. Joni is recovering from a brain aneurysm, and will probably not produce anything else. The book is going back to the library, and I will move on.
Joni Mitchell has product to promote. She gave an interview to New York magazine, where she smoked a few cigarettes and expressed a few opinions. There were enough attention getting comments to make the news.
“When I see black men sitting, I have a tendency to go — like I nod like I’m a brother. I really feel an affinity because I have experienced being a black guy on several occasions.” She proceeds to tell a story about dressing like a down and out black man as a way of dealing with an obnoxious photographer. “I just stood there till they noticed me. I walked really showily, going, Heh heh heh. It was a great revenge. That was all to get his ass. To freak him out. I had to keep him on the defensive.”
Gay-mafia-made-man David Geffen was a target. “I ask her about a painting, visible in a vestibule, on the way to her laundry room, of a curly-haired man with a banana lodged vertically in his mouth; turns out it’s Geffen, and she painted it. “Before he came out. He’s never seen it,” she says, before explaining: “He was using me as a beard. We were living together, and he’d go cruising at night. He was very ambitious to be big and powerful, and he didn’t think he would be [if he was openly gay].” By 1994, the two had fallen out over her insistence that he didn’t pay her enough in royalties.”
The product is a four cd boxed set, Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced. There was a single one star comment about the joniproduct. Al Norman Seems like a collection of Joni’s forgettable tunes February 3, 2015 ~ “My wife loves Joni Mitchell, and never listens to this set. Seems like a collection of Joni’s forgettable tunes.” This comment was sponsored by Head and Shoulders. “100% flake free hair & A GREAT SCENT”
You just can’t get away from capitalism. Ms. Mitchell heard “… on the radio, a record executive “saying quite confidently, ‘We’re no longer looking for talent. We’re looking for a look and a willingness to cooperate.” As interviewer Carl Swanson notes, “For now, she’s hoping that people buy her boxed set, with her self-portrait on the cover. To that end, she gives me a Joni Mitchell tote bag with one of her paintings on it to carry my things home in. Get the word out.”
Joni Mitchell gave am interview recently to a Canadian Broadcaster. She is famously Canadian. The chat was in her California living room, which is littered with her paintings. Many of the paintings are things like Saskatchewan at forty below. Mrs. Mitchell alternates between painting and music, which tend to balance her cigarette fueled mind.
The CBC interview is paired with a more formal chat in Toronto. She could not smoke during the Toronto interview. The Toronto interviewer is just a bit smarter than Jian Ghomeshi, who endured the second hand smoke in California. Mr. Ghomeshi said things like “The song “Woodstock” defined a generation.” Mrs. Mitchell was in a New York City hotel room that famous weekend.(Spell check suggestion for Jian Ghomeshi: Joan Shoeshine)
There are some juicy quotes. Art is short for artificial. When listening to Joni songs, you should look at yourself, and not at her. Free love was just a gimmick for the men to get laid. False modesty is pointless. Sylvia Plath was a liar, or maybe it was Anne Sexton. (James Dickey said that Sylvia Plath was the Judy Garland of American letters.)
A fearsome foursome gets in the game. Someone screamed, on a live album. “Joni, you have more flash than Mick Jagger, Richard Nixon, or Gomer Pyle combined!.” Years later, the fan introduced himself to Mrs. Mitchell.
The conversation mentioned Bob Dylan. He is from Northern Minnesota, and not quite Canadian. Apparently, Mrs. Mitchell kicked up a fuss with some comments in 2010. ” Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I. … Grace [Slick] and Janis Joplin were [sleeping with] their whole bands and falling down drunk, and nobody came after them!”
Did Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell ever tune up together? Joan Baez, a similarly named contemporary, is well known for dating Mr. Zimmerman. Ms. Baez did sing at Woodstock.
Mrs. Mitchell doesn’t exactly take back her comments about Bob Dylan. ““I like a lot of Bob’s songs, though musically he’s not very gifted. He’s borrowed his voice from old hillbillies. He’s got a lot of borrowed things. He’s not a great guitar player. He’s invented a character to deliver his songs. Sometimes I wish that I could have that character — because you can do things with that character. It’s a mask of sorts.”
In a kill the messenger moment, Mrs. Mitchell lashed out at the interviewer from the 2010 piece. It is odd, since he didn’t ask any trick questions. Black and white transcripts are tough to deny. “The interviewer was an asshole.” (The body part is bleeped.) “I hate doing interviews with stupid people, and this guy’s a moron” “His IQ is somewhere between his shoe size and (unintelligible)”.
The troublesome 2010 interview was conducted with John Kelly, a Joni Mitchell tribute artist. “JK: Drag does have a power, though — that netherworld of a thing you can’t quite know, which makes people nervous. JM: Drag wasn’t always counterculture. In his memoirs, Nixon talked about the Harvard and Yale men in power who would put on these plays where they dress like women, and Milton Berle did a kind of “hairy drag.” Becoming a gay thing made drag go underground.” Did Mick Jagger and Gomer Pyle ever do drag with Richard Nixon?
Outside Looking In
Outside Looking In is a 2019 novel by T.Coraghessan Boyle, usually known as TC. It is the story of Fitz Loney, a grad student at Harvard in 1962. He, and his wife Joanie, start attending “sessions” conducted by Tim Leary. The psycho-experimentation always has ups and downs. Soon, the Loneys, and their son Corey, spend an idyllic summer in Mexico, before moving back to cold Boston. Around this time, Dr. Leary finagles an estate in upstate New York. The Loneys move in.
Like other Boyle novels, utopia turns to shit. At the end of OLI, the Loneys are essentially separated, and Fitz has made a mess of his life. Since Fitz is a fictional character, we have no way of knowing what happened. Sometimes things are best left to the imagination.
The story is fun to read. Boyle is a master storyteller. Detail is pinned onto de-donkey. After about 250 pages, all you want to do is read more … even knowing that it would be over all too soon. If you apply your logical mind, you might find a few plot inconsistencies. That is for scholars and critics. If you just want to be entertained, OLI more than fills the bill.
OLI was the transition book for me during cataract surgery. When I got it from the library, I had scheduled the procedure. The first part, I read with the old eyes and glasses. Then, the right eye was de-cataracted. For an agonizing week, there was one renovated eye, with various levels of reading glasses. First, the left eye lens was covered with tape, then just ignored. It was with relief that the left eye was re-done, to match the right.
Finding the best reading glasses is a work in progress. Usually, 1.5x is a good fit, except for sitting at a table, where 2.5x seem to be best. There is work to be done here. You can make a lot of mistakes at the dollar store. The arrival of two matching eyes came at about the time when OLI started to catch fire.
Towards the end of OLI, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters came to call on Tim. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the bus goes to Millbrook, and finds out that Tim is on an important trip, and cannot be disturbed. That is more or less what happens in OLI, except some of the other players enjoy the Pranksters. A few pages before this, someone is talking about a new novel by Ken Kesey. Very few other novelists are mentioned in OLI. It seems a bit odd that the Leary devotees would be talking about Ken Kesey. This is one of the head scratchers in the plot.
The Library of Congress supplied the historic pictures today. This is a repost.
I Slept With Joey Ramone
This is a repost from 2018. Mickey Leigh is still alive. He recently filed a lawsuit against Linda Cummings-Ramone, Johnny Ramone’s widow. … I Slept with Joey Ramone is the story of a six foot five geek, who was only good for singing gabba gabba hey. Jeffrey Ross Hyman had issues. Aside from his goofy appearance, Jeff had severe OCD. He would injure his foot bad enough to require several hospitalizations. Somehow, Jeff got to play in some bands, going glitter as Jeff Starship. Eventually, Jeff Hyman, John Cummins, Douglas Colvin, and Tommy Erdelyi became Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy Ramone. Music was never the same.
ISWJR was written by Mitchel Lee Hyman, Jeff’s younger brother. His stage name was Mickey Leigh. Mickey was the first roadie for the Ramones, and will always be in his brother’s shadow. The two had an intense relationship. Jeff and Mitch went from being best friends to mortal enemies. This sibling rivalry is a key part of the story. The book, despite the commercial title, is about Mickey as much as Joey. The subtitle is “A punk rock family memoir.”
The co-author is Legs McNeil, who assembled Please Kill Me. ISWJR is told through Mickey’s eyes. It is uncertain what role Mr. McNeil played. Some say that Mickey Leigh could not type a page of text if his life depended on it.
Please Kill Me was an “oral history of punk rock,” meaning they taped a bunch of people talking. Mickey was one of the talkers, and Joey was not happy with what Mickey said. Another voice tells about Dee Dee Ramone falling on the sidewalk outside CBGB. Dee Dee said it was not a good idea to get hit in the head when you were drinking… it might cause brain damage. That is not an exact quote. Dee Dee Ramone did not “just say no.”
The Ramones had their fifteen minutes last for twenty years. They went down to the Bowery, and found this bar called CBGB’s. The owner kept his dog inside, and dog shit was everywhere. The Ramones got a following, a record contract, did tours, recorded albums, became sort of famous, started a movement (other than the bar dog’s bowels,) but never had a hit record. This lack of commercial success was highly annoying.
The first taste of big money was Budweiser using “Blitzkrieg Bop” in a commercial. Mickey played an uncredited part in the song. When the Budweiser money started to roll in, Mickey was struggling to pay the rent. Mickey tried to get some money out of the band, which refused. This caused many years of Joey and Mickey not speaking.
For a while the boys in the band (pun intended, at least for Dee Dee) were pals. Then Joey had a girlfriend, Linda. Johnny stole Linda from Joey. Johnny and Joey hated each other from then on. Johnny was always a bit of an asshole, as was Joey. At some point, Tommy had enough, and was replaced by Marky. He drank his way out of the job, and was replaced by Richie.
In 1983, The Ramones played at the Agora Ballroom in Atlanta. I was in the audience. By this time, the Ramones had been going on for nine years. They were not the next big thing anymore. Somebody played a tape of cheesy Coney Island music, and the band came on stage. Joey hunched over the microphone, tapped himself on the head with a baseball bat, and the band did “Beat on the brat.” The band went through the motions, playing another show, probably identical to every other Ramones show ever played. Punk rock just was not trendy anymore.
It was an all ages show. If you wanted to drink, you had to go up to the balcony. You were on your own going down the stairs. Downstairs was full of young people, many is costume, having a hot time. The balcony was the same rock and roll drunks that were at every show ever produced.
ISWJR does not have a happy ending. Joey had health problems throughout his life. Being a drunken-coke-freak rock star did not help. He came down with Lymphoma, and was starting to do ok. Then, Joey fell and broke his hip, and they had to adjust his medication. Soon, the cancer was back with a vengeance. Joey and Mickey called a truce to their squabbling before Joey died April 15, 2001. Dee Dee and Johnny quickly followed. The Ramones would have been a great oldies band, if only.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
On The Road Part Three
This is a repost from 2019. … In the last installment of this On The Road slackathon, Dean Moriarty (Neal Leon Cassady) and Sal Paradise (Jean-Louis Kérouac, aka Jack) were being obnoxious in Frisco. 71 years later, the Family Barber Shop was closing. In the next 13 days, MAD magazine announced plans to cease publication, and the thirteen star flag became a symbol of racism. The world is without redeeming social value. One answer is to go back 71 years, and see where the road takes us.
In chapter 3 of part 3, Dean and Sal are about to go to New York. First they are going to have 2 days of kicks in Frisco. Before this happens, a lady needs to tell Dean off. “Your have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is what’s hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and then you just through them aside. Not only that but you’re silly about it.”
Chapter 4 is wasted on a trip to jazz nightclubs in seedy neighborhoods. “Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.” Chapter 5 is where the story picks up again. A travel bureau helps D&S get a ride in a “fag Plymouth.” I read that line in amazement … that was something he remembered from reading OTR in 1984. The Orwellian synchronicity of it all. 1984 was just another year. Ronnie Reagan won a landslide re-election over its-his-turn Walter Mondale. America tottered on. I settled into a slack lifestyle. What I did in 1984 had little to do with a dystopian book … a book that everybody talks about, but few have read. One thing I did in 1984 was read OTR, and remember almost none of it 35 years later.
D&S are careening across the deserts and mountain passes into Denver. Along the way, they scared the fag Plymouth driver into prophylactic pansexuality. “At one point the driver said, “For God’s sakes, you’re rocking the boat back there.” Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.” After a while, FPD hits on Dean, but can’t afford him.
“It was with a great deal of silly relief that these people let us off the car at the corner of 27th and Federal. Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” Once in Denver, D&S go looking for kicks, Dean’s father, and whatever else gone thing is the IT of the day. Cousin Itt shakes his head. Dean does connect with a beloved cousin, who has gotten religion. Beloved cousin no longer wants to associate with Dean.
Before moving on with OTR, this narrative has been interrupted for a youtube euthanasia emergency. Eighteen years after Dean/Neal went chasing kicks in the sky, bf Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx in OTR) wrote a poem about Allen’s butthole. This ode to shipping and receiving was recently indentured by a Tennessee entertainer. While looking for the text, google supplied a link to an Urban Dictionary definition of Allen Ginsberg. This UD page features an ad for Joe Biden.
D&S cavorted for a few days in Denver, and got out before they were, justifiably, arrested. “As the cab honked outside and the kids cried and the dogs barked and Dean danced with Frankie I yelled every conceivable curse I could think over that phone and added all kinds of new ones, and in my drunken frenzy I told everybody over the phone to go to hell and slammed it down and went out to get drunk.” Soon, they had a ride to Chicago. Through cruel fate, Dean was allowed to drive. “We had come from Denver to Chicago via Ed Wall’s ranch, 1180 miles, in exactly 17 hours, not counting the two hours in the ditch and three at the ranch and two with the police in Newton, Iowa, for a mean average of seventy miles per hour across the land, with one driver. Which is a kind of crazy record.” There should be a video game. Sit terrified in the backseat of a 1940’s Cadillac, while Dean Moriarty drives a hundred miles per hour, on the wrong side of the road, getting back on the right side of the road just in time to avoid a head on collision with a truckload of cattle. The telekinetic essence of the Frisco jazzmen can be recruited to provide the soundtrack. The death defying cattle will be played by Charlie Parker. Dean’s play by play filled in by Gene Krupa. “Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.” “Where we going, man?” “I don’t know but we gotta go.”
“Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; … sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world.” … Later the idea would be to jazz the rock world, before hip hop levels the playing field once again. … “Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother’s woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the rest — Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonius Monk and madder Gillespie — Charlie Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked around in a circle while playing.”
Thelonius Monk … thank g-d for copy/paste … lived longer than most of the players in this tale. I first heard of TM on the loudspeaker at Atlanta Stadium, when the announcer told of a Jazz Festival coming to the newfangled stadium. In his later life, Mr. Monk got as weird as his first name. Al McKibbon tells this tale: “He was also the bassist on Monk’s last album, made in 1971. At that time the two men toured with the Giants of Jazz, and McKibbon experienced more of the pianist’s eccentricities: “In Tokyo we were having suits made, because they do it so fast and all that. Monk had his measured lying in bed. He wouldn’t get up for them. … On that tour Monk said about two words. I mean literally maybe two words. He didn’t say ‘Good morning’, ‘Goodnight’, ‘What time?’ Nothing. Why, I don’t know. He sent word back after the tour was over that the reason he couldn’t communicate or play was that Art Blakey and I were so ugly.”
“Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes.” D&S delivered the vehicle to its owner. “It was now time to return the Caldillac to the owner, who lived on Lake Shore Drive, in a swank apartment with an enormous garage underneath manged by oil-scarred Negroes. We drove out and swung the muddy heap into its berth. The mechanic did not recognize the Cadillac. We handed the papers over. He scratched his head at the sight of it. We had to get out fast.”
After a visit to Detroit, D&S made their way to New York. Sal’s aunt said Dean could only stay for a little while, and then he would have to go. Dean needed to behave himself for a while. “Not only that, but a few months later Camille gave birth to Dean’s second baby, the result of a few nights’ rapport early in the year. And another matter of months and Inez had a baby. With one illegitimate child in the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones and not a cent, and was all troubles and ecstasy and speed as ever. So we didn’t go to Italy.”
Part three of OTR ends here. Pictures are from The Library of Congress. The complete series has been published. part one part two part three part four part six part seven
On The Road Part Two
One moment in the integration of On The Road into my Mcmansionville life in was the washing machine incident. I was doing the clothes. When the machine gets to the spin dry cycle, the clothes settle unevenly in the spin basket. The machine starts to rock on its feet, and make machine noise music of Lou Reed proportions. I will rest my butt against the side of the machine, and read OTR.
Meanwhile, OTR is sitting there, patiently waiting on the slack blogger to write yet another chapter. Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) is back in Frisco. As soon as Dean (Neal Cassady) gets there, he takes off in search of pussy. … “‘Oh I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!’ He spat out the window; he groaned; he clutched his head. Great beads of sweat fell from his forehead from pure excitement and exhaustion.”… Marylou, the Dean-babe they went cross country with, has run off with some rich people she knows. Sal is broke, starving, and dreaming of food. “There were places where hamburgs sizzled on grills and coffee was just a nickel.” Sal was in the pre-beatnik San Francisco of 1948, 71 years before I rode the washing machine in summertime Brookhaven. The culture may be internet processed, but the fridge has food, and the clothes are going to be clean in a little while.
Part Two of OTR starts with Sal back in New Jersey. He takes his aunt down to Virginia for a family holiday. Who should show up but Dean Moriarty, first wife Marylou, and Ed Dunkel … “ready to do anything Dean asked him, and at this time Dean was too busy for scruples.” Sal’s aunt has furniture to take back to New Jersey, which Dean winds up taking in his ’49 Hudson. There is an extended New Years Eve party in New York. Before long, Dean needs to get back to Frisco, and he talks Sal into going along. … “… but now the bug as one me again, and the bug’s name was Dean Moriarty and I was off on another spurt around the road.” … They go through Washington as Harry Truman is being sworn in for a full term as POTUS. Around that time, they got a costly speeding ticket in Virginia. They paid that off, leaving them very little money to get to California. (Ed Dunkel, aka Al Hinkle, was the “sole survivor” of the OTR characters. He died December 26, 2018.)
The first stop is New Orleans. Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs) is there, along with Galatea, the wife of Ed Dunkel. The cadaverous OBL is leading the opiated life described in Junky. Galatea is one of the more curious side stories of OTR. Ed meets her out west. “These two mindless cads decided to bring the girl along to the east and have her foot the bill … By the time they got to Tucson she was broke. Dean and Ed gave her the slip in a hotel lobby and resumed the voyage alone …”
Galatea made it to New Orleans, and Old Bull Lee. Galatea was reunited with Ed, and began their life together. 46 years later, Galatea … whose real name was Helen … was still with Al Hinkle. Here is the honeymoon story. Better Homes and Gardens chose not to publish this tale.
“… the Burroughses weren’t all too happy to have had Helen ‘dumped’ on them. As a matter of fact, when Helen first got there, Bill wasn’t happy and began writing letters to Allen (Ginsberg) in New York telling him to tell me to come and get her out of his house, it’s not a hotel! When we finally got to their house, which was actually in Algiers, LA (across the Mississippi River from New Orleans), Bill and Joan welcomed us. Helen had made herself indispensible in the three weeks she had been there, caring for both the Burroughs children (Joan’s three year old daughter Julie and William Jr., who was an infant at that time); she bathed them, fed them, and generally kept them out of their parents’ way. Bill and Joan actually asked Helen and I if we would stay with them – he had a room all ready to fix up for us! But Helen wanted out – she couldn’t believe how they lived, how little care they took of their children; never mind the house, which was dirty, with lizards running around everywhere.”
Helen was appalled by Joan’s use of the Benzedrine inhalers – she would open them up and swallow the cotton. Joan would send Helen to buy an inhaler almost every day. Once Helen mentioned to Joan that the pharmacist told her he would happily sell her ten inhalers at a time because he knew she was not the type to abuse them, to which Joan replied, “So, where are they?” And Helen never figured out that Bill was using heroin – she just thought he was stoned on marijuana all the time (which he was, on top of the heroin). It was all just a little too crazy for Helen, and she was glad when we turned down their offer of a room and found ourselves a room in New Orleans, where we stayed for about six weeks. It was a low-budget adventure, but we did get our honeymoon and we enjoyed it immensely.”
Sal and OBL went to the racetrack. Sal had a vision about his father, and told OBL to bet on a horse because of it. OBL ignored Sal. The horse won, and paid fifty to one. Soon after that, OBL kicked the bunch out. They headed to Frisco without any money. They stole food and gasoline. They picked up hitchhikers, who promised money from a rich aunt down the road, who sometimes existed. Dean cut off the gas while going downhill and coasted. Sal did not like to drive … “I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” … took up space and grooved on the goneness of it all.” … “And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy I had always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move one, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiances shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven.”
After much hunger and grooviness, Dean, Sal, and Marylou made it to Frisco. Dean promptly dumped Marylou to take up with kids-mama Camille. “You see what a bastard he is?… Dean will leave you out in the cold anytime it’s in his interest.” Sal wanders the city dreaming of food, until he gets his GI bill money, and decides to go back to New Jersey. “What I accomplished by going to Frisco I don’t know. Camille wanted me to leave; Dean didn’t care one way or the other. I bought a loaf of bread and meats and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country with again; they were all going to go rotten on me by the time I got to Dakota. … We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care.” The beatnik lifestyle had a downside.
The first draft of this piece is done. I get more coffee, and goes to work on another project. He is producing a sticker picture based on Lizard (No. 56) by M.C. Escher. Today is the day to start cutting out lizards. These pieces are larger, and more complicated, than what I usually cut out. The Grateful Dead is goofing on “China Cat Sunflower” in the background. Jerry would have made a lousy headlight on a northbound train.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost from 2019. The chamblee54 On The Road series is complete. part one part two part three part four part five part six part seven
Author Insults
25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound “A village explainer.
Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
24. Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley “All raw, uncooked, protesting.”
23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw “An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
22. Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence “Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”
21. Lord Byron on John Keats (1820) “Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”
20. Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”
19. Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling “Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”
18. Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen “Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”
17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes “Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”
16. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864) “I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”
15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
13. Gore Vidal on Truman Capote “He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
12. Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope “There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
11. Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway (1972) “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
10. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe (1876) “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
09. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
08. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger “I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”
07. D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923) “Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’…. One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”
06. W. H. Auden on Robert Browning “I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”
05. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948) “I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
04. Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898) “I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
03. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce “the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
02. William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922) “A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”
01. D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce (1928) “My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”
Bonus. Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”
Bonus Two, from Flannery O’Connor “I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”
These author insults were borrowed from flavorwire. HT to Andrew Sullivan. The pictures are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost.
Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia was in bad shape. At a sound check, he disappeared for 45 minutes. When he came back, there was a plastic shower cap on his head. When smoking heroin, Jerry wore the cap to keep his hair from falling into the fire. This time, he forgot to take the cap off.
This is from the epilogue to Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia. DSAOBOJG was curated by Robert Greenfield, who put together a lovely story about The Rolling Stones 1972 tour. This book later became a podcast series.
Jerry saw his father drown, when Jerry was very young. Clifford “Tiff” Garcia, Jerry’s older brother, cut off one of Jerry’s fingers. Jerry made a living giving guitar lessons in Palo Alto. Somehow this evolved into playing in a Jug Band, which became the Grateful Dead. At this point the story is well known, and a part of sixties lore.
To this reader, the turning point is when Pigpen dies in 1973. The band kept playing. The ouroboros grew and festered. Again, this is familiar to anyone with access to a deadhead. What was not public knowledge was Jerry’s junkie problem. Jerry never shot heroin, but rather smoked it off aluminum foil, aka chasing the dragon.
I first heard about Heroin Jerry in 1986, after he had a diabetic coma. I appreciate athletic substance use in rockandroll, but never did quite imagine Jerry as a junkie. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention when he was busted freebasing cocaine in Golden Gate park. Aside from the heroin, Jerry was severely diabetic, and yet ate sweets and junk food. It is a miracle that he made it to 1995.
Jerry had other issues. He treated the women in his life horribly. He was married either three of four times, and had a collection of daughters. The book has interviews with many of the ladies, and much more detail. There are a many other counterculture metaphors metastasizing. I just want to put this book on the shelf, and move on. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
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