heaven

They’re Not the Grateful Dead

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Is it time to take a break from our sometimes intense presentations of poetry combined in some way with music? Well, here’s a little ditty about the lighter side of death, or rather the worship of dead rock stars.

My observation is that though there are still the occasional premature music casualties in the current environment, that the worship of “The Greats are Taken from Us Too Soon” variety is reduced among young people today. Perhaps that’s a healthy sign, or it could be secondary to the casualties not having the right mix of fame to burn brighter at the graveside. And in the past, the other half of this project’s concern, poetry, has not been immune to the praise of dead talent, particularly dead, young talent, either.

Sure, it can be a honorable thing to give respect to those who’ve gone, to carry their artistic flag further when they can’t, but there is another side, the romantic admiration for the risks and the access to excess that often precedes the early death of musicians, writers, and other artists. The first duty of an artist is to survive. Society is not generally on the artist’s side until they become successful commercially, and even when it grants them that success, it can withdraw it and their support quickly too. To add to that burden with one’s own self-medication and distractions seems like a compensation to that state, but it doesn’t always work that way.

Poet, songwriter, alternate voice, and frequent keyboard player here Dave Moore wrote a short poem about how an older person might view with a strange kind of envy the tentative fame and unbounded experiences that others in our musical/generational cohort enjoyed. Sex, drugs and Rock’n’Roll once seemed to be jobs on offer in the want ads in our youth, even if it turned out the positions were already filled and the items already sold. I adapted Dave’s words, added a verse of my own, and wrote music for my performance of “They’re Not the Grateful Dead”  some years back and thought you might enjoy it here. Oh, that “Grateful Dead” in the title? Translated folkie Jerry Garcia knew that this was a trad folk song trope where the dead magically and musically express some gratitude.

They're Not the Grateful Dead

Who’s who for any crate digger obsessives: Hopkins, Hendrix, Moon, Jaco, Saxon, and Thaxton are hereby linked.

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One thing I like about Dave’s lyric is that, outside of Jimi Hendrix he doesn’t pull in the big names, the Boomer rock’n’roll Shelleys and Byrons, the ones that are still featured faces in the rear-view mirrors looking at the music and times. Starting right off with Nicky Hopkins* is a bold move, but then Dave is  a keyboard player.

The song’s conclusion has a little fun with the sentimental “If there’s a rock’n’roll heaven, you know they’ve got a hell of a band” thing. Keats’ unheard music may be sweet, but it’s still hard to hear.

My performance of this has a few flubs, but it’s hard for me to get more recording in right now, so we’ll make do with this older recording as is. The player gadget is below for many of you, but if you don’t see it, this highlighted hyperlink will also play my performance of “They’re Not the Grateful Dead.”

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*Huh. Who? Those who didn’t ruin their eyesight fantasizing about debauched after-parties but by reading all the liner notes on every LP will know who Nicky Hopkins is.

Not for that City

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Let me introduce newcomers to one of this project’s “finds,” the little-known early 20th century English poet Charlotte Mew. Of course, I didn’t really find her, some of her English contemporaries did, and they waged an unsuccessful campaign to bring her work to greater attention. Among those who thought she deserved more attention: Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, and even Ezra Pound.

Her poetry touches on some different styles, but what unites it is a skeptical and iconoclastic attitude. She herself seems to have been something of a sui generis outsider, and her poetry reflects that, frequently focusing attention on outsider characters, and her poetry often makes unusual arguments or turns—and I suspect that’s the reason her poetry didn’t catch on. Even her era’s rebels like T. S. Eliot had a ready hook to grab attention: the trauma of WWI and the rise of a modern heterogeneous urban society and industrial economy were enough of a shock to the system that even the most high-brow and arcane poetic examinations had some access to the reading public’s attention. Particularly in America, there were a number of women poets who examined love and relationships* in sophisticated ways that were widely seen then as access to that mysterious creature of the era: “The New Woman.”

Mew didn’t really do the former much, and her take on love didn’t seem to always align with expectations, for she was noticeably androgynous as a person and as a poet.

So, what does today’s piece, Mew’s “Not for that City”  deal with instead? Glorious Heaven, and in language and imagery that would make for an ornate hymn about the rewards of same. Except it’s not saying that’s what some “we” really want.

The poem instead says that what “we” want is rest, not a surfeit of glory and splendor.

J M Studwich Angels
Yes it’s nice and all, but I could use some alone time.

 

 

Who’s the “we?” I’m not completely sure. Mew lived a somewhat weary life with long-running caretaker roles. Is she speaking of the poor and working classes, though she never names them as the “we” as such? Is this simply the testament of a religious skeptic? I can’t say for sure, but it works even if this isn’t determined.

I struggled long on the musical setting of this, completing two different sets of music, and then after choosing the music finally used, trying mightily to realize a full voiced, almost operatic singing line. That failed miserably, I just don’t have the voice or access to anyone else who does. The version you’ll hear with the player below is left with a track of my shabby talk-singing which is simply the best I can do to present this. I still think it’s worth hearing, and you can with the player gadget below. Full text for those who’d like to read along is here.

 

 

 

 

*We’ve presented some of them here: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Margaret Widdemer, Mina Loy and Elinor Wylie. Being seen as “love poets” probably helped them with general audiences that still existed in the early 20th century for poetry, but then caused them to fall off the literary map later in the century which increasingly admired and required either political and philosophical advocacy, or a devotion to “serious and universal topics”—which for some reason did not include women’s observations of sexual and romantic politics.

The Apotheosis of Harlan Ellison

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’m not a fully-qualified Science/Speculative Fiction fan, though I did read it when I ran into it as a young man. Dave Moore, whose voice, songs and keyboard playing you’ll hear from time to time here, read more of it. I’m not sure if Dave introduced me to Harlan Ellison’s work, but my memory is that he did loan me a copy of Dangerous Visions  back in the Sixties. In that 1967 anthology, Ellison made the case that SF was the heir to a Modernist tradition of fiction using outrageous and unique situations—he was claiming SF could be more Kafka than L. Sprague de Camp.

It’s unlikely he was the only person thinking along those lines, but he certainly helped to popularize the idea at a time when an aging generation of SF writers, steeped in pulp magazines and cents-per-word paychecks were in danger of losing touch with the younger post-WWII generation who were more likely to be college educated and experienced in some chemically enhanced inner-space traveling.

Dangerous Visions cover

Used copies may have slight foxing (or are they cannabis stains?)

 

Ellison was an any-world-class curmudgeon. His non-fiction writing is full of enthusiasms and invective, with almost no middle ground. At times he reminds me of another late 20th Century artist/social critic: Frank Zappa. Both of them liked to remark that “The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.” Over the course of his career Ellison seemed to transform from a US-born angry young man punching mostly up to a more generalized misanthropy, where at appearances he would sometimes riff like an insult comic. He once called my late wife who he had just met at an event, “Cathy Carbohydrate.”

These two things worked together. SF had always had a darker side, and the border between it and the gothic strain of fantasy or noir-ish mystery was crossed back and forth often. I believe a utopian, Transcendentalist wing of SF remains, but the terms SF and dystopia now seem to follow one another almost automatically.

Is this the artists’ fault or ours? A large question that.

Thursday night I read that Harlan Ellison had died. Friday I was booked to record with Dave. Friday morning, as I slept, I dreamed that Dave was showing me a binder full of typed manuscripts of stories he had written. As he flipped the pages I read parts of the stories. In style, they were the sort of thing a teenager just starting out would have written, so in the dream’s timeline they would have been written in the Sixties. In the dream, Dave, after learning of Ellison’s death, was telling me that Harlan Ellison had looked over these stories, and that Ellison didn’t like them very much, though he thought the last one had some promise. There was a short, encouraging note from Ellison scrawled in the margin on a page in the story. As I glanced up toward the middle of the page, I saw some dialog in which a character in the story was saying something. The character in this non-existent dream-story was named Octavia Butler.

Now I remind you: this is a dream. Dave never had Ellison critique any early stories he wrote. In the dream, these stories existed, in the waking world they don’t. But here’s the funny thing. I told you at the start that I’m not a fully-qualified SF fan. If you had mentioned Octavia Butler to me on Friday, the only impression I would have was that she was a writer. I wouldn’t have been able to name any of her work or have been able to place her in a genre. In the dream, I just thought it odd that Dave was using a writer’s name as a character in a story that the dream had had him writing 50 years ago. I was about to ask him why, when I woke up.

octavia-butler

Octavia Butler, before or after she was in my dream

 

I biked off for breakfast and hurriedly came back to write the piece you can listen to below.  Looking for info I might use in my song, I searched on Octavia Butler. In the Sixties, Butler was a young, unsure author, fearing that she was too “ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless.” While she was still in school, Harlan Ellison, this man with a reputation as a scouring critic, had told her she had promise and should go to the Clarion Conference and present her work there, a suggestion that lead to her first publication in 1971.

Nothing there I could use in the song as it turns out, but strangely this was also nothing I knew when I had dreamed that dream early in the morning. I did use one bit I found in my searching: an interview with my former co-worker John Rabe that revealed that Ellison was still using a typewriter as his writing machine in the 21st Century. I thought of those older generation pulp writers and their per-word paychecks.

That afternoon, Dave and I recorded “The Apotheosis of Harlan Ellison.”  It turned out that in the waking world, Dave had not heard yet that Ellison had died. The player gadget below will let you hear it—though not on your typewriter.