Ozzy Osbourne
PG read I Am Ozzy, the autobiography of Ozzy Osbourne. (The copyright is given to “Ozzy Osbourne”.) The ghostwriter is Chris Ayers, who PG suspects did the majority of the writing. John Michael Osbourne is dyslexic, among other things. Honestly doctor, I thought the bottle said six pills every hour, and now you say it was one pill every six hours.
This is quite a story. John grew up poor in Aston, England. When he was through with school at 15, he faced a life of manual labor, or prison. The first few jobs he had were horrible, and a stretch behind bars made an impression on him. He put an ad up, saying he wanted to be a vocalist, and was about to give up when Tony Iommi (spell check suggestions:Mommie, Commie) came knocking on his door.
Mr. Iommi was well known in Aston as a musician, but he had to keep a day job. Before he left the factory to become a star, an accident cut off the ends of some of his fingers. He had to change his style, and developed his own, unique way of playing guitar.
The original name of the band was the Polka Tulk Blues Band. They were named after a brand of cheap talcum powder Mrs. Osbourne used. They would load their gear into a vehicle, and hang out by arenas where famous bands played, in case the headliner didn’t show up. One night, Jethro Tull’s truck broke down, and Earth (as the band was then known) played the gig.
Soon, the band…Osbourne, Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward… settled into the business of playing heavy music, with satanic themes. They never took the black magic business seriously, but the combination of a good gimmick and ….their music….clicked, and they began to make buckets of money.
Or rather, somebody was making buckets of money. There was the management, which were typical rock and roll crooks. A few cocaine merchants got some of the revenue, as well as liquor merchants. Ozzy was off on a forty year bender, taking every substance in sight. Supposedly he is clean today.
So Black Sabbath fired Ozzy, and he started a solo career. Ozzy divorced his first wife, and married the daughter of a management heavyweight, Sharon. The alcoholic escapades got more and more bizarre. One night, someone handed him something that looked like a plastic bird. Ozzy bit the head off, and went into rock and roll infamy. (Leviticus 11:13 And these ye shall have in detestation among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are a detestable thing: … 19 and the stork, and the heron after its kinds, and the hoopoe, and the bat,)
The stories come one right after another. After a while your bs detector sends out a warning, but the stories are so much fun to read. Besides, many of these stories were headlines, and can be easily verified. How many people would claim to be arrested for pissing on the Alamo, while wearing his wife’s nightgown? Before long, he is starring in his own reality TV show.
A lot of the credit for this book goes to Chris Ayers, and whoever helped him. Mr. Ayers has a keen ear for British slang, and keeps the action zipping along. Once you get started with these stories, they are tough to put down.
When PG was young enough, he didn’t think it was cool to like Black Sabbath. He was able to ignore them for a while, until that night in 1980 when PG stood outside a stadium in Seattle WA, and listened to Sabbath (with Ronnie James Dio) play inside. Two years later, he pulled up to the triangle building in Century Center. 96 rock was in this building, and a man was standing outside giving away something. By the time PG got to him, he had run out of free tickets to the Black Sabbath concert, at the Omni. The next encounter with the band was at a job. There was an eight track tape player, and a copy of Paranoid. PG played the tape , and a salesman immediately left the building. This is a repost.
How Am I Doing Mama?
November 17, 1963, Liza Minnelli was on “The Judy Garland Show”. The former Frances Gumm was looking rusty from years of hard living. Five days later, President Kennedy made a trip to Dallas. Six years later, Judy Garland left the building. Liza Minelli is still with us, fifty years later. She has been every bit as wild as her mother, but lived to see another day. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
The Last Night Of Judy Garland
In march of 1969, Judy married her fifth husband, Mickey Devinko, better known as Mickey Deans, a gay night-club promoter. Judy had an unfortunate habit of marrying gay men. They lived together in a tiny mews house in Chelsea, London. The evening of Saturday June 21 1969, Judy and Mickey were watching a documentary, The Royal Family, on television, when they had an argument. Judy ran out the door screaming into the street, waking the neighbors.
Several versions of what happened next exist, but the fact remains that a phone call for Judy woke him at 10:40 the next morning, and she was not sleeping in the bed. He searched for her, only to find the bathroom door locked. After no response, he climbed outside to the bathroom window and entered to find Judy, sitting on the toilet. Rigor Mortis had set in. Judy Garland was dead at the age of 47.
The press was already aware of the news before the body could be removed. In an effort to prevent pictures being taken of the corpse, she was apparently draped over someone’s arm like a folded coat, covered with a blanket, and removed from the house with the photographers left none the wiser.
The day Judy died there was a tornado in Kansas…. in Saline County,KS, a rather large F3 tornado (injuring 60, but causing no deaths) did hit at 10:40 pm on June 21st, that would be 4:40 am, June 22nd, London time, the morning she died. I know the time of death has never been firmly established, but since Rigor Mortis had already set in, I think this tornado may very much be in the ballpark in terms of coinciding with time of death…. Other news articles suggest the tornado struck Salina “late at night” which could certainly also mean after midnight on June 22, or roughly 6:00 am London time.
The Toledo Blade for June 24th, also in an article located right next to a picture of Garland, in a write-up on the Salina tornado noted that “Late Saturday [June 21] and early Sunday [June 22, another batch of tornadoes struck in central Kansas.” So it seems the legend seems confirmed.
The text for this story comes from Findadeath. You can spend hours at this site. Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost.
The Death Of Jimi Hendrix
The current episode of WTF podcast features Marshall Crenshaw, who is a Jimi Hendrix fan. He discusses reports that Mr. Hendrix was murdered by Michael Jeffrey, his manager.
“The rock legend Jimi Hendrix was murdered by his manager, who stood to collect millions of dollars on the star’s life insurance policy, a former roadie has claimed in a new book. James “Tappy” Wright says that Hendrix’s manager, Michael Jeffrey, drunkenly confessed to killing him by stuffing pills into his mouth and washing them down with several bottles of red wine because he feared Hendrix intended to dump him for a new manager, according to a report in the Mail on Sunday. In his book, Rock Roadie, Mr Wright says Jeffrey told him in 1971 that Hendrix had been “worth more to him dead than alive” as he had taken out a life insurance policy on the musician worth $2m (about £1.2m at the time), with himself as the beneficiary. Two years later, Jeffrey was killed in a plane crash.
These rumors have been around for years. Whenever someone famous dies under mysterious circumstances, people wonder why. If you google the phrase “was Jimi Hendrix…” the suggested searches are left handed, a hippie, black, and murdered.
Mr. Wright’s story is denied by Bob Levine, the United States manager of Mr. Hendrix. He says Mr. Wright waited until 2009 to tell this tale, and he did it to increase book sales. Mr. Levine is legally blind after suffering a stroke. There seems to be a bit of conflict between Bob Levine and Tappy Wright.
“The Orlando-based Wright says the ex-manager (Levine) “wanted me to baby-sit him” because Levine’s alienated his family and staff. “Levine used to say, ‘If you don’t come through, I’m going to slag your book,'” claims Wright, who adds that he has a “signed and notarized” statement from Levine saying that “it’s about time somebody wrote the truth about Jimi’s death. He also did a video interview.” Levine denies Wright’s claims. Levine says he is legally blind from his stroke but has “people taking care of me.” Levine adds that he didn’t discuss Hendrix’s death in the video and has no recollection of signing the notarized statement. Asked why he chose to speak out about the book now, Levine says: “Tappy dared me. He said, ‘There’s no one left to challenge me.'” Adds Wright, “I’m just correcting the story.”
There is a story from an physician who was at the hospital when Jimi Hendrix was brought in.
“John Bannister the on-call registrar at the now closed St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington, said in an interview that the patient seemed to have “drowned” in a large amount of red wine.” The last paragraph of the Telegraph story is an amusing post script. “Bannister now lives in Sydney and worked as a doctor until 1992 when he was deregistered for fraudulent conduct.”
Everyone in this story is either dead or sketchy. Michael Jeffrey seems to have been a nasty piece of work. He was a former intelligence agent for Britain’s MI6 agency. There are reports of stolen money, numbered bank accounts, and gangster business tactics. Reportedly, Mr. Hendrix was busy getting new management. The last paragraph of the blog critics story is perhaps the most intriguing.
“Michael Jeffery reportedly perished in a plane crash over France in 1973. But his remains were never found. Eric Burdon, Noel Redding, and others believe he may have checked luggage but slipped away during the boarding process. Jeffery was due in London court the very next day to defend himself in several huge lawsuits relating to his embezzlement, money laundering, and fraud.”
Steve Martin
There is a form letter floating through the intercourse now. It is a letter that Steve Martin used to send to his fans. (The letter was recently immortalized at Letters of Note.)
He …that is Stephen Glenn “Steve” Martin (born August 14, 1945) … has moved up in correspondence with his adoring fans. Mr. Martin now gives out business cards, with the message “This card certifies that the holder had met Steve Martin and found him genuinely friendly”. What a wild and crazy guy!
This is becoming one of those really really modern days here. Listening to a djmix with a Lady Gaga song, drinking coffee out of a Mcdonalds plastic cup, and writing a tribute to Steve Martin. What a day! Oh, before we forget, there is the story about the drive in theater on I85 that was showing “Father of the Bride”. One day, the h fell off the marquee, and the title of the movie became “Fater of the Bride”. Good times.
The story of Steve Martin and PG began one night at the Great Southeast Music Hall. PG got tired of hearing how great the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was, and decided to see a show. The show started when some guy in a white suit came out with a banjo. John McEuen stood next to him, and kept falling into the microphone stand and saying “this guy cracks me up”.
Steve Martin, the white suit guy, said that he paid somebody five thousand dollars for a joke. He then took this arrow, with a coat hanger wire attached to it, with a shape for his head to fit in, and put it on. That got a laugh, but not worth five thousand dollars. There was another gag…”do you mind if i smoke, no do you mind if i fart”. That got a slightly bigger laugh.
In those days, you could not sell alcohol in public on sunday night in Georgia. To compensate, the Music Hall sold children’s tickets for the sunday night shows. Mr. Martin was not used to having children in the audience. “Hey kid I gotta joke for you. There were these two lesbians…”
The show went over well with the Nitty Gritty crowd. However, it is doubtful that anyone thought, this is the beloved entertainer of our generation.
Mr. Martin was not through for the night. At one point, the NGDB moved to the back of the stage, and a smarmy lounge lizard, in a white suit, came on stage. While the band played “The girl from Ipanema”, Mr. Martin sang about the girl with diarrhea.
This was one of the last shows that Steve Martin did as an opening act. (He did return to the Great Southeast Music Hall. Once, he did a week with Martin Mull, called the Steve Martin Mull Revue.) Within two years, he was a guest host on Saturday Night Live, and a certified wild and crazy guy. A couple of years later, he was famous again as “The Jerk”. Steve Martin had arrived.
The pictures today are from Gwinnett County. The animated dentures are from chattering teeth. The check is in the mail. This is a repost.
The Great Southeast Music Hall
The Great Southeast Music Hall was an important part of life in Atlanta during the seventies. It was located in the elbow of a shopping center, Broadview Plaza. A bowling alley was downstairs, a two level K mart next door, and Atlanta’s first hispanic neighborhood across the street. Like almost everything else here, Broadview Plaza was torn down, and replaced by a more uppity set of stores.
When you went into the lobby of the Music Hall, you noticed the walls. Performers were given a magic marker, and encouraged to leave a message. John Mayall found the ladies room, and said he likes to be near the ladies. The late Phil Ochs said “Impeach Nixon and Agnew”. What happened to those boards is a good question.
The auditorium held about 500 people. The stage was only three feet or so above the floor. There was an empty space in front of the stage, and a few rows of bench backs behind that. When the place opened, there were lots of pillows on this floor, with the Music Hall logo. The carpet in this front area was fresh when the place opened, and got progressively grosser as the years went by. Beer was served in aluminum buckets, and inevitably some wound up on the carpet.
The show the Music Hall is most famous for is the US debut of the Sex Pistols. PG didn’t make it that night, but has heard from a few who did. The performance was said to be horrible. There are stories of Sid Vicious wandering through the apartments around Broadview trying to find heroin. Years later, PG was reading about that night in Please Kill Me, when the train he was riding pulled into the Lindberg Marta station. This is across the street from the Broadview Plaza, still standing at the time.
These days, the intersection of Lindbergh Drive and Piedmont Road (about a mile north of the park) is next to Hiway 400. When the Music Hall was in it’s prime, the land for the Highway was owned by the State of Georgia, which was fighting legal battles over the highway. The land had a network of dirt roads, one of which connected Buford Hiway to Lindbergh Drive. When you went from Chamblee to the Music Hall, the most direct route was over this dirt road. This dirt road is where Sidney Marcus Boulevard is today.
Eventually, the business model for the Music Hall did not work, and the facility moved to Cherokee Plaza. This Music Hall was in a movie theater. The Cherokee Plaza Theater was the scene for the world premiere of Son of Dracula . This move did not work, for a number of reasons. The parking lot was too small, and people who wanted a loaf of bread from the A&P were blocked out during shows. Cherokee Plaza is just outside the city limits, on Peachtree Road. In the late seventies, DeKalb county was aggressively fighting drunk driving, and had roadblocks. Many of these roadblocks were outside the Music Hall, which kept many people from attending. Before long, this Music Hall closed.
Many years later, PG bought a second hand typewriter, and needed a ribbon. (Younger readers should ask an older person about this.) He went into an office supply store in Broadview Plaza, and soon realized that he was standing on the site of the Music Hall. He asked the clerk if he could have a bucket of beer, and got a very strange look in return.
One industrious afternoon during this era, PG made a list of shows he saw at the Music Hall. The memory cells are already protesting, but we are going to try and remember as much as possible about these shows. A big thank you to Wikipedia for help with spelling and names.
New York Rock Ensemble – PG walked into the auditorium during the last part of the first show, as the band played “A whiter shade of pale”. The bass player wore lace up boots, with the pants legs tucked into them. Before long, the second show came on stage. Keyboard player Michael Kamen was the central focus, acting out the lyrics to “Anaconda”.
Silverman Deborah McColl fronted this drummerless band
Al Kooper PG has written about an unfortunate incident involving Al Kooper during this show. This would have never happened in “The Catcher in the Rye”…the kids always knew what time it was in that story. Mr. Kooper did a solo show, including “Sam Stone” by John Prine.
Ellen McIlwaine/ James Cotton Blues Band Ms. McIlwaine was pregnant, and played slide guitar. Mr. Cotton played harmonica. One of his players started to fan him with a towel, because he was hot.
Breakfast Special/ Doc and Merle Watson Breakfast Special was a local bluegrass crew, who did “The coming down song”. The Watsons did ” Deep River Blues” and “Thats All”, among other things. PG had a copy of their latest LP, and asked Merle to autograph it. He wrote his name on one side, turned it over, and signed Doc’s name on the other side.
Mason/Atlanta Rythym Section This show was the night Led Zeppelin played Atlanta Stadium.
New Riders of the Purple Sage When the Music Hall opened, a performer would typically play from Tuesday to Sunday. NRPS was a one night show. They worked well in the packed hall, and shined on “Glenville Train”. The next year, they did a tour with Commander Cody and The Lost Planet Airmen. Commander Cody opened, and raised hell. NRPS followed with a mellow rock show, and before long people were getting bored and leaving.
David Buskin / Loudon Wainwright III Chamblee 54 has written about this show before. Mr. Buskin talked about doing a show at Max’s Kansas City, the person sitting next to PG said “Gross”.
Steve Martin / Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Chamblee54 has written about the show by Mr. Martin . This was his last tour as an opening act. Nitty Gritty was a sight to behold. John McEuen played fiddle, and recited a poem about life.
Martin Mull / Melissa Manchester PG went to see Mr. Mull, who opened the show with a three piece band. (After the show, Mr. Mull said the name of the band was the (your name) (draws a blank with his fingers) orchestra.) The headliner was Ms. Manchester, little known at the time. She was a knockout. While standup comedy has it’s place, for emotional impact there is nothing like a singer.
Texas Gary Bennett / Weather Report Mr. Bennett played acoustic guitar, and sang, as an opener for a packed house of jazz rockers. It did not go well. At one point, trying to get some rapport with the crowd, he said ” has anyone here been busted at the Omni?” ( The authorities had begun arresting people for smoking pot at the major concerts.)
Weather Report was amazing. Josef Zawinul had the loud keyboard sound, Wayne Shorter played his leads on soprano sax, and there was a drummer and percussion player. There was tons of rythym, to go with the electronic jazz sounds. When it was over, PG went up to Mr. Zawinul, shook his hand and, and said thank you. He was pouring a glass of beer from a pitcher, and looked a bit startled.
David Pomerance / Rahsaan Roland Kirk Chamblee54 has written about this show before. Mr. Kirk was a force of nature, the modern miracle of the tenor saxophone. He did not suffer from false modesty. This was the night Richard Nixon resigned, which pleased Mr. Kirk no end. The blind Rahsaan said that he did not want to see his audience, because we were too ugly. At one point, his band had been jamming for about ten minutes, when PG realized that Mr. Kirk had been holding a single note the entire time. The three saxophones at one time thing was a visual shocker, but he got sounds that way that you cannot get from a single instrument. At one point, Mr. Kirk pulled his sunglasses off, and made a face at the crowd. It was an amazing evening.
Chic Corea / Return to Forever This was a disappointment. Tickets were $4.50, which may be the most PG ever paid at the Music Hall. The band only played about an hour. It was all electric, ignoring the acoustic instruments set up on stage. RTF was a four piece, all star band. They had Chic Corea on keyboards, Stanley Clarke on bass, Al Demeola on guitar, and Lenny White on drums. That sounds like a great show, but it turned out to be four solo artists jamming. There was no cohesion, and the overall sound was less than the sum of the individual parts. Corea leaned over his keyboard, twisted knobs, and made faces, as if to say “look at how intense this is”. It wasn’t.
Mccoy Tyner The former Coltrane sideman played a very nice show. He had a percussion man, with several tables covered in exotic instruments. PG took a break after to first show to hang out at a neighborhood disco. When he got back, there was no doorman checking tickets, and anyone could walk in for free. PG took advantage of this discovery many times over the next few years.
Bill Crystal / Jean Luc Ponty Former Frank Zappa player Jean Luc Ponty played at the Music Hall, with a bass player who was a fellow Zappa alumni. The surprise of the evening was then-unknown Bill Crystal. A few weeks after this show, “Soap” would premiere, and make him a star. Mr. Crystal did a killer impersonation of a gila monster.
Between shows, Mr. Crystal had been entertained by a local musician. During the second show, he held his finger to his nose, made a snorting sound, and said thank you. PG heard this, and yelled “Locker Room”, the name of a “deooderizer” that some liked to get a buzz sniffing. Mr. Crystal said “Locker room. Jeez, I need to get the hecklers rosetta stone to know what he means”. Good times.
Keith Jarrett This is another show that might have been better than PG’s enjoyment. At one point early in the show, PG moved over to the front of the stage, to look at Mr. Jarrett’s hands. After the show, people told PG that the player had been giving him dirty looks when he did that. PG asked Mr. Jarrett about it, and he said that PG had interfered with his concentration.
This show featured a quartet, instead of a solo piano. The bass player was Charley Haden, who seemed a bit puffy faced. PG later learned that he had been addicted to heroin at the time.
Melissa Manchester Ms. Manchester came back for another week at the Music Hall, about a year after her first appearance. At one point, she asked the band if they were ready to do a new song, and then performed “I got eyes” for the first time in public. This was later the b side to “Midnight Blue”. One of the players in her band was a man named James Newton Howard. Part of the deal for touring with her was that he could play a solo number on piano, called “Newton’s Ego”. He later played with Elton John, and became wealthy writing film scores.
Flora Purim /Airto Moreira On PG’s 23rd birthday, Flora Purim played at the Music Hall. At the time, PG had a profound appreciation of her albums. The band had a nice sound, and was the equal of her records. The Chic Corea tune “Light as a Feather” was a standout. Her husband, Airto Moreira ( eye, ear, toe) fronted the band on some of the numbers, and had some funny routines. Ms. Purim held two microphones throughout the show, with one connected to some audio filters. PG found holding two microphones to be visually distracting. PG had known of the Jewish ancestry of Ms. Purim, but had not thought much about it. Then he saw her live, and realized that she does, indeed, look Jewish.
Hot Tuna Hot Tuna is a dependable, though not spectacular, band. On a previous show in Atlanta, they went on stage at 10:55, and played without a break until 2:50. This night, a fried of a friend was working at the Music Hall, and PG got in before the crowds, to get a prime spot, in the first row of benchbacks. At one point, PG was rocking back and forth against the benchback, and a neighbor asked him to quit.
Shakti This was an acoustic, Hindu oriented band fronted by guitar superman John McLaughlin. The numbers seemed to go on forever.
David Manion / Mark Almond This was a long awaited Atlanta performance by Mark Almond. (This is a jazz/blues band, totally different from the Soft Cell vocalist with a similar name.) They played two sets, which were only an hour or so long. This was disappointing to the people who could not wait for the second show. In the second show, they “took the shackles off” saxophone player Johnny Almond, and he played a wild solo during “The city”.
The incident we are about to describe may or may not have involved David Manion. What happened was, a small portable radio was playing on the edge of the stage. The spotlight was on the radio, which sounded like gibberish to most of the audience. Gradually, the chattering audience got quiet, and tried to listen to the radio. After a few minutes, a man came out, and stood in darkness behind the radio. The PA speaker announced “The new force of rock in Atlanta”. The man then dropped a large piece of granite on the radio, smashing it into bits.
Laurie Chapman / Stomu Yamashta Laurie Chapman was a singer/piano player, with some good stories. She told of a trucker, driving beside her and talking to her on a cb radio. ” You better get that drink out from between your legs before it gets too hot to handle”.
Stomu Yamashta is somewhat of a star in Japan. The show here was filmed for showing on TV there. His band, Go, was an all star collection, including Ava Cherry. She was a backup vocalist, and girlfriend, with David Bowie. After the show, PG was introduced to Spencer Davis in the lobby.
The next few shows were at Cherokee Plaza.
Martin Mull Mr. Mull was a solo star this time. He did a song about doing nothing, adding that dead people can do it too. The parking lot was packed, which was a major problem at the new location.
The week before the Super Bowl in 1994, Mr. Mull filmed a Comedy Central show in Woodruff Park. The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders were kicking field goals. After the filming PG stood a few feet away from Mr. Mull, but could not think of anything to say.
Sun Ra PG went to a wedding, and a bunch of people from there to see Sun Ra. This was an entertaining spectacle, with a big band and dancers. After the show, PG asked Sun Ra how he could afford to take a band like that on the road. He said he was doing it for beauty.
David Bromberg This was another big band production. PG showed within a few minutes of the gateman leaving his post, and saw about 45 minutes without buying a ticket.
Lester Flatt/John Hartford One boring Saturday night, PG walked up to the Music Hall, and saw the two fiddle players jamming. A few weeks later, Lester Flatt passed away. This is a repost.
Hank Chinaski Lives
In the next quarter century, the surplus grew, thanks to Bukowski’s nearly graphomaniacal fecundity. “I usually write ten or fifteen [poems] at once,” he said, and he imagined the act of writing as a kind of entranced combat with the typewriter, as in his poem “cool black air”: “now I sit down to it and I bang it, I don’t use the light / touch, I bang it.”
As could have been predicted, it started with a post at Dangerous Minds. The feature was about the late Charles Bukowski, who was called Hank by those who knew him. The writer/drunk had always been a bit of a fascination to PG. Out of the millions of useless drunks feeding the urinals of planet earth, at least one will turn out to have had literary merit.
A trip to Google city is made, and quotes from the bard are found, along with the wikipedia page. All of this leads to a New Yorker piece about the gentleman. After nine paragraphs, and two poems, there is the phrase that set off PG…graphomaniacal fecundity.(spell check suggestion:nymphomaniac)
As best as we can figure, g.f. means that Hank wrote a lot of stuff. This is a good thing. PG operates on the notion that if you keep your quantity up, the quality will take care of itself. Hank seems to agree, spitting out product “like hot turds the morning after a good beer drunk.” He seemed to take pride in doing what Truman Capote said about Jack Kerouac…he doesn’t write, he types.
If you google the phrase graphomaniacal fecundity, you can choose from 71 results. The top six apparently quote the article in New Yorker. A blogspot facility called poemanias quotes the paragraph from the New Yorker, with the title “On Bukowski’s afterlife”, while Fourhourhardon reprints the entire thing. Neither provide a link back to the original.
Goliath and Petey Luvs Blog take the same copy-paste approach. The first tries to get you to pay for more reading material. This forum also does the control A-C-V approach, but yields this comment : “He was a contemporary of the Beats, but not quite one of them because he was darker and not as willing to smoke a joint and sing Phil Ochs songs on the lower east side.” The truth is, Hank hated marijuana, and had the classic alcoholic attitude about it. So it goes. Keep and share copies the complete New Yorker feature, but has some other thumbsuckers about Mr. Bukowski.
It is a truism that new media borrows content from old media. Stories, told orally from genration to generation, are compiled into books, which are then made into movies. Plastic panels try to look like wood. The newest new media that old fogey PG knows about is twitter. People tell little stories in 140 characters or less, which go around the world in seconds. With this abundance of media, there are not always enough messages to feed the beast.
On twitter, there are people producing twitter feeds from dead authors. Maybe these wordmongers went to a place with internet access. Kurt Vonnegut (three hours ago) “Busy, busy, busy”. Mark Twain (three hours ago) “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint”. Brautigan’s Ghost (twenty two hours ago) “I cannot say to the one I love, “Hi, flower-wonderful bird-love sweet.”
The deceased content maker best suited to twitter might be Conway Twitty. One slow day two years ago, Yahoo asked peeps Do you think Conway Twitty would have used Twitter? ~ He gave them the idea ~ I think Twitty would tweet, Twitter would be Conway’s, way of of communicating to the world, Twitty would be tweeting his little Twitty head off, ~ I better send out a Twitty Tweet ~ Cute, but a serious answer, probably. A media hound, he’d want to get his name plastered everywhere. ~ If he did that would have made him a ‘Twitty Twitter” ~ Who cares, he’s a twit anyway”.
There are four Twitty Twitter feeds. @ConwayTwitty (Oct. 21,2009) “The Conway Twitty Musical is getting great reviews in Branson!!! . @TwittyTweats (January 12, 2012) “In Twitty City, it never snows. All the men wear gold medallions and blazers. And the women never cry. Unless you hold them.” @Conway_Twitty (February 20, 2012) “My cock is an amphibious assault vehicle” @conwaytwittier (April 28, 2012). “@JasonIsbell How’s the English weather treating your hair? I had the hardest time keeping my pompadour in tiptop shape there.” @twittybirdmoda is written in Japanese.
The original concept for this post was to spotlight twitter feeds borrowing material from Charles Bukowski. Hank is the beer bard of Los Angeles. He is a hero to many. Out of the millions of worthless drunks populating bars, at least one could write poems. It gives you hope for mankind.
The front page of a google search for “charles bukowski on twitter” yields eight feeds. The original plan was to ignore any that were not updated in 2012. An exception will be for @hank_bukowski (Yeah it’s good to be back). (January 25, 2009) “Yesterday I met Adolf H. in hell. He is fuckin stupid.” “too lazzy these days, too drunk to twitter”.
With the 2012-only rule in effect, we are left with three Bukowski thieves. @BukowskiDiz (May 1) “Curiosidades sobre Charles Bukowski http://migre.me/8UhRf“. @bukquotes (May 8) “all the mules and drunken ladies gone the bad novels march…”. ~ “I always read when I shit and the worse the book the better the bowel movement.” @bukowski_lives (one hour ago) “Basically, that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.”
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This is a double repost.
Leave It To Beiber
does beiber sound like itself?
like smash bash
swish or slash
zappa might sound like itself
if it were alive
pictures are from
Gwinnett County
which does not sound
like a traffic jam
Controversy
Number five on the yahoo home page news items is “David Bowie Controversy”. The old boi has some product for sale, and it must not be moving fast enough. The video has some religious imagery, including a scantily glad lady with a gushing stigmata. In the end, there is a tableau, with Ziggy ascending into the ceiling. The bathrobe he wears is more appropriate for a senior citizen than his thin white duke getup.
When PG was in high school, he took Spanish. The teacher was a fundamentalist Catholic named Mrs. DiPaola. Religion and politics were more fun than verbs and nouns, and she was easy to distract. One day she was talking about an uncle of hers, a truly righteous man. When he died, these bloody spots appeared on his hands. It was the stigmata, the wounds of Jesus.
When the Romans put someone on a cross, the spike went through the wrists. There is a space between bones, and the giant nail went through without breaking one. If the nail was in the hand, the weight of the body would tear it off. The Romans were pros. Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
Super Hero
Robert Allen Zimmerman
Arrived in Duluth Minnesota May 24 1941
Eight days later he was edited
Two wars later he became Bob Dylan
And slept with Joan Baez
He sold out by playing electric guitar
Blonde On Blonde
The aptly named Dangerousminds has a link to a story about the recording of Blond on Blond, by Bob Dylan. It only happened once.
Bob Dylan was 24 years old, newly married, and had “sold out” i.e. started to play electric guitar. A bunch of Canadians known as The Hawks (later The Band) was touring with him. Barely a month after the release of “Highway 61 Revisited”, sessions started at a New York studio.
The New York sessions did not work, so a decision was made to go to Nashville. Al Kooper played organ, and served as a music director. A crew of Nashville players was recruited. A bass player named Joseph Souter, Jr. would become famous a few years later using the name Joe South. Kris Kristofferson was the janitor at the studio.
Most studios have bafflers, or sound proof room dividers, splitting the studio into cubicles. For these sessions, the bafflers were taken down, and the band played together as a unit.
The second session in Nashville started at 6pm and lasted until 530 the next morning. Mr. Dylan was working on the lyrics to “Sad eyed lady of the lowlands”, and the recording could not start until he was ready. The musicians played ping pong and waited. At 4am, the song was ready, and the record was finished in two takes.
PG had marginal encounters with two players on this album. He met a lady once, who worked in an insurance office. One customers was Joe South. The file on his driving was an inch thick.
Al Kooper had a prosperous career after his association with Bob Dylan. The former Alan Peter Kuperschmidt produced the first three Lynyrd Skynyrd albums, and sold that contract for a profit. (Spell check suggestion for Lynyrd Skynyrd: Lyndy Skyward)
One night, Mr. Kooper was playing a show at the Great Southeast Music Hall, and PG sat in front of the stage. During a break between songs, PG asked his friend “what time is it?”. Mr. Kooper heard him on stage, and said it was 11:30.
Pictures for this feature are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost.
Richie Havens
Richie Havens died this morning. He was 72 years old. In 1969, he was the first performer at Woodstock. Mr. Havens was featured in the movie, and became very popular. The promoters asked him to play longer, while the backstage chaos played out. “Freedom” was mostly improvised to fill this need.
In 1974, PG had the privilege of seeing Richie Havens. He was playing at Richards, a club on Monroe Drive. It was the 2am show, on a weeknight. There was not a large crowd. What crowd there was kept yelling for “Freedom”, as if Mr. Havens had an obligation to play it.
Mr. Havens played a Guild guitar. He strummed it hard, with his pick dragging down over the body past the air hole. It looked like a guitar would only last a show, or two, before he would wear scratch marks in the body. Indeed, he did change guitars in mid show that night.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
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