MY BOMBASTIC HOT TAKE ABOUT OPEN READINGS CIRCA 1989 -95

 

I stopped going to open readings about twelve years ago for a combination of reasons, lack of time foremost among them, but coming in a close second was the weariness of being subjected to a continuous stream of encrypted banality. 

Not to grind this axe too long or too loudly, what is most striking about the assembled grossness of these overreaching testaments is that no one seems to have had an interesting take on the muse-inspiring incident that happened to them. Too often, the epiphanic moment drives the earnest amateur deep into the Archive of the Already Said Too Often. This dampens my enthusiasm for the notion that an introduction to good poets and their work will, by default, improve and hone the attributes of a readership that would likewise enjoy contemplating existence in unique combinations of metaphor and simile.Rather than broadening the perspective, as one might hope, many become entrenched in bad ideas. It's like a cold one can't quite get rid of, I guess, finally going away after rest and a vacation from taking one's seriousness too seriously. But the bad taste also acts like a virus, incubating for quite a while and affecting the senses in ways that seem to produce an irreversible tendency toward grandiloquence, truism, bathos, and rugged individualism.Some of this is inevitable in the course of being human, with our conceit that we are sensitive creatures with something to say. God knows I am an insufferable jerk when it comes to the sanctity of my own poetry, which is, let us say, looking increasingly hokey as I get older. But if poetry is doing its job, the reader should have the sense that some fact, independent of the narrator's expectations, has been acknowledged, and that the speaker is ready to change their thinking.Yet another reason I gave up doing public readings as a matter of habit: my good poems are few, really, and repeating them bores the fuck out of me.The sort of tract many readers come across in airports and on the shelves of bookstore self-help sections resembles a poem less than it resembles knotted strings of refitted clichés, lacking irony or circumstantial variation.

These are things one says after an accompanying string of disasters and disappointments that work not to comprehend experience, and perhaps gain some perspective on why things don't go according to plan, but rather to rationalize and reinforce one's attitude and manner of moving through the world. When all is said and done, Frank Sinatra said the same thing, but with more style and less pop-psyche cant: “I did it my way.” Not that Sinatra's cratered croon makes this a desirable way to go through life.We are who we are, sure, but a large part of being human is our capacity to change our behavior based on experience. Existence is not something you experience passively, or an event that merely happens to you. It is something you participate in.One is powerless to control the final outcomes of events, but within the larger picture we can change our actions. We can change the way we think. We do, more often than not, influence the results.

Such poets come across as defeatists in a Hemingway ammo belt.Poetry is fun when it is good.This was not good.Those who write poems, I think, are obliged to write the poems they are able to write, whatever their style, and they ought not be surprised when they are criticized for using clichés and glittering generalities in place of real craft or inspiration. One's innermost thoughts, of themselves, are often not interesting as poetry. Whether the young poet admits it or not, they have a responsibility to express their inner lives in a fresh way that is interesting to readers in the outer world.Small thoughts are perfectly fine. One need only inspect Emily Dickinson, or the imagist poems of Pound or Williams, for examples.

Even the “less than earth-shaking” poem has a bar to reach; it should nonetheless be exquisitely expressed. Those who participate in their lives are not passive. They are engaged with them.Even the shy, weak, infirm, modest, and laconic among us take proactive roles in the directions we take and assume some responsibility for them.Most of all, there is the capacity to remain teachable, to learn from experience and change behavior and mindset. This is what keeps people interesting and useful to their fellows.Those who refuse to change their ways, who use experience merely as rationale for reinforcing ineffective methods of coping with existence, are dull and self-infatuated much of the time. It's safe to say that they are poor on social skills and social cues both. Not you nor your friends like being around these personalities, yet somehow they keep showing up at the readings and other occasions where only the proper people are in attendence. But that's the life were stuck with. Boring people, bad luck and a variety of bad meals served in pricy cafes are the the existence we have. Such is the material the best poetry is made of. 

THE BOTTOM LINE ON JIM MORRISON'S VALUE AS AN ARTIST

Sometimes I get asked this question, may because I'm an old guy now who remembers the midnight bull sessions appraising the worth of pop stars: Was Jim Morrison really all that?The Doors were a mixed bag for me; the first two albums are among the most important rock albums of all time, with the remainder alternating between the proverbial poles of brilliance and balderdash. As a band, they were simply sublime and unique, with the odd combination of blues, flamenco, classical, jazz, Artaud and epic theater being crafted in their hands to create a sound and feel that was singular and instantly identifiable. 

 As a vocalist, Jim Morrison was often as evocative as the greatest fans proclaim, and it fit the half-awake twilight that seemed to be his constant state of consciousness. As a poet, though, I thought he was simply awful, fragmented, crypto-mystic surrealism that, save for some striking and memorable lines, collapsed from its flimsy elisions and obtuse vagaries. In his posthumous collections,, the pieces read too often like the notebook jottings of an introspective 17-year-old. I say that as one who was an introspective 17 year and is now an introspective 65-year-old. But the front man's low baritone had a rumbling, mulled-over quality that made even the worst images he wrote sound urgent. 

 It wasn't an uncommon habit of young aspiring poets of the day to pour over album lyric sheets provided by bands in an effort to discern deeply embedded meanings. It was a search for knowledge, another ageless activity among the species, and one can offer from experience that curious and impatient teens wanted it revealed at once, right now, immediately. Morrison's stoned swagger and crooning mysticism seemed just the man to serve up to an impatient that was in a hurry to grow up, or, altenately, given the singer's ongoing fascination with death, didn't want to grow up at all. Apocalypse now, right? Morrison might have become the poet he wanted to be had he been able to write, edit, and finesse his work as he desired when he left for Paris. What I will say, though, is that being the vocalist in the Doors gave him the opportunity to go through his writings, his poems, and select many of the stronger passages for the band's more theatrical songs. The Doors, ironically seemed to be an institutional editor for Morrison's words, forcing the bard to decide which of his jottings was actually the most powerful, concise, emphatic.

CREAM WERE NOT JAZZ PLAYERS, BUT THEY JAM THE CRAP OUT OF TWO CHORDS

 

Tonight I was too hot and bored with the what the streaming services had online, a situation that often gives me a hankering for something loud ,distorted, tones that are full expressions of violently playful impulses. Do I have issues? Likely. But I am putting this version up because someone had to; what I like here isn't how much Cream replicates bluesor achieves some nuanced suggestion of emotion, but rather how these instrumentalists--a blues guitarist with no jazz technique whatsoever and two jazz musicians constantly battling it out for who play the busiest business in a live set--but rather how far they were able to stretch this two-chord song into a sixteen improvisation that is, on its own terms, brilliant.

It's about sound, interweaving of guitar, bass and drums, picking up rhythmic cues and tempo changes, at times leaving all resemblance of the song behind and achieving a sort of heaven of pentatonic riffing. Some find this repetitive, and so be it; it's my kind of repetition, like Fillmore Live Miles Davis. Alive, raw, exploratory, nasty, brutal and extended. Jack Bruce and Ginger, bass and drums of Cream, had fairly extensive jazz experience and , as it goes, had a better variety of improvisational approaches to extensive jamming than did Clapton, who was and remains a stylish blues guitarist with limited vocabulary. Bruce has said that he and Baker wanted Clapton to be their Ornette Coleman, and to say the least they challenged the guitarist to rise to the occasion by playing the tunes anywhich way but loose. Clapton never soared magically into jazzy excursions, but what's exciting is to listen to him push his style to the limits.

His playing was never as sharp, blazing or responsive to ideas being thrown at him since Cream broke up. Listening to these searing phrases, repetitive as they are against the rhythm riot perpetrated by Bruce and Baker, makes my senses dance. My issues, so called, are sweetly asleep for the night.

BLUE CHEER AND THE FEEDBACK THAT ENDED REALITY

 It's claimed more often than not that Black Sabbath created heavy metal, a not unreasonable assumption, but I would argue the honor belong's to San Francisco's Blue Cheer. BC's brand of amplified raunch first came on us in 1966 with the release of their initial album Vincebus Eruptum. BS's first release was later, in 1970, and later still in the U.S. Both bands were universally reviled when they respectively appeared, and it was a while later, in waves of reconsideration and nostalgia, that both bands are given more credit for what they did. Blue Cheer has been one of my guilty pleasures for years, fast, atonal, loud enough to be made to record at the end of a San Francisco pier , amps aimed at the Bay, or playing so loud at a free concert that a dog keeled over and died. Their folklore spoke volumes as loud as their first two records.

It wasn't hip at all to like Blue Cheer when their 1968 debut, Vincebus Eruptum, was released. It was the usual accusations as the established critics expressed their disgust: out of tune, unable to play their instruments, unbelievably bad imitations of Hendrix and Cream. Some of us liked what these three guys were doing, though. I liked them precisely for the reason that others hated them: for being atonal, loud, full of feedback, distorted in ways that had nothing to do with conventional ideas of texture and musical color and everything to do with making you aware of the nature of the sound, which was sheer electricity wielded by some angry and impatient men eager to make a noise where there had previously been stultifying silence. Blue Cheer was the perfect band for the coming age of speed freakery. The chemical essence wants to take things apart and then reassemble them rapidly, haphazardly, inspired and excited momentarily by new combinations of components to be had from that which was gutted. Like it or not, something new was occurring here, and it was something that could only happen if the players—Dickie Peterson, bass and vocals; Leigh Stephens, guitar; Paul Whaley, drums—had more than a competent grasp of their instruments.

I was introduced to the solar skronk and abrasive swing of Sun Ra at the time through many visits to the Grande Ballroom and developed a taste for the mind-fuckery of free jazz that came from Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Ayler, and Coleman. It helped that WABX, the FM underground station in Detroit, played some Black avant-garde music. So I found similarities between what Blue Cheer was doing and the esteemed Black musicians who may have influenced them. The band may well have had no idea of what they were doing conceptually, and the conceit is mine alone. Still, all the same, Blue Cheer handily deconstructed the entire power-trio format, pushing into its three- or four-chord limit with long jams that were groaning, grainy, belching, aggressive, nonlinear improvisations keyed to emotion alone.

They were to the power trio what Neal Cassady was to drive. I consider Dick Peterson an able, if not great, bassist. Still, unquestionably, he was one of the most terrific white-blues screamers of all time—his singing was rage, self-pity, and uncontrollable impulse fused in each frayed, corrosive syllable he spat out. His bandsaw-on-steel vocals, joined with guitarist Leigh Stephens' PULVERIZING ATONAL GUITAR SOLOS and drummer Paul Whaley's trash-can demolition, laid the groundwork for a generation of metal and punk bands to come: MC5, STOOGES, MOUNTAIN, LED ZEP, RAMONES, MOTORHEAD, DEAD BOYS. Even the Velvet Underground, with their feedback skronk, couldn't match Blue Cheer's steel-belted forays into electrified abandon; the Velvets merely taunted the strings of their guitars, while Blue Cheer sounded like they punched holes in oil tankers. And Peterson's vocalizations were the perfect match: screech, rasp, and banshee wail all rolled into one bag of verbal outrage, maintaining a punk's slouch. His was the rusty yowl that deserved to be praised and dreaded for the unflinching combination of fear and rage it represented.

Leigh Stephens' broadsides were genuinely beautiful cascades of dissonance, pulverizing atonal breaks, the emphasis on pulverizing. I saw these guys at the Grande as well. It seems to me, thinking about it decades later, that this was not a man of sub-competence flailing and noodling about the frets, but someone who knew what he wanted to sound like and could get the result he desired, and that he was someone who could duplicate that sound on command. Paul Whaley, in turn, had the most expansive, most enormous, most sledgehammer-like drumming style of the period. His sound was of every building and bridge that ever collapsed under its own weight. This is to say that I think the first two Blue Cheer albums need to be reconsidered.

WHAT IS TO be DONE?!?

 O

Well,what should a writer do?Well, you have to stop sometimes so you can appreciate what the senses have given you as you go your way through the world . You have to stop in order to write about the need to pursue the seductive logic of never stopping . But you have to stop before you go forward, as the brain absorbs only so much ; you stop , you breathe, you think, you connect what has happened recently with the narrative of a life already recorded.

 This engages you with the world, truly, this is where the poetry comes from, not gushing hot lava adjectives and verbs while writing that the world is made more real by moving forward, with out apology, without pause or reflection, following the string where ever it leads. But this is not poetry and it is not lyricism. The writer in those times they stop agitating the gravel and take pause to reflect, meditate, consider the thingness of the world they’ve blazed through a little too quickly, there arises the sense that one forgets that they are a writer, the self-appointed priest of making things happen on the fly; the writing becomes about the world , the people, the places, the things that occupy the same space as you, the same patch of land your visiting. It becomes less about the writer, the seeker of knowledge attempting to gain knowledge through velocity , the impatient explorer more concerned with inflaming their senses rather than being genuinely curious about and teachable within the world. 

You have to stop , take a breath, create a language, a poetry, a prose style that convinces the reader that they’ve actually encountered something extraordinary in their travels through hill and dale, river and inlet, village and burg, that they’ve actually learned something they didn’t know before. Otherwise , I believe, nothing is revealed because nothing was learned and, despite all manner of ranting and such protests defending one’s unique view, that view is forgotten and another opportunity is lost to move a reader in ways you might not have expected.