Lester Bangs: Dolphy didn’t MOVE you?
Captain Beefheart: Well, he moved me, but he didn’t move me as much as a goose…
Good news! Geese exist!
Great glorious gaggles of
geese! Most master blasting
jazz saxmen don’t move
me as much as a goose
dude! Like when one’s
honking on a pond
and his crazy cry
bangs the lid of the sky
and shivers through the others
who squawk in a raucous
chorus that lifts in a burst
off the water like a wing
and the pond’s glass face
is a flash of pure sky
and all those longthroated
blackfaced bellbodied
great gorgeous geese
are gone.
.
Metal Machine Music
Impression of a sound recording
by Lou Reed released in 1975:
A bandsaw shredding cadaverous
limbs on a berserk conveyorbelt
sizzling with boiling acid while a dry
ice police siren shrieks in a cement canyon
between endless huge anonymous buildings
with windows like insect eyes
.
by Lou Reed released in 1975:
A bandsaw shredding cadaverous
limbs on a berserk conveyorbelt
sizzling with boiling acid while a dry
ice police siren shrieks in a cement canyon
between endless huge anonymous buildings
with windows like insect eyes
.
Head Home
After work you almost get
a hard-on from greasy bikini
beer ads in a liquor store.
Oily olé! Buy a bag of
Unsalted Penis (PEANUTS!)
instead. Smile shyly at
a strangely unsleazy
middleaged Mediterranean
clerk who beams back
beneath boiling black
curls. Leave. Breathe.
Imagine an ocean
beyond the black asphalt.
Smell the sea salt
as the tide slides
to the sand’s end
and the sun bends
to the edge of the Earth.
Day’s done. Head home.
A car blurts a heralding horn.
.
a hard-on from greasy bikini
beer ads in a liquor store.
Oily olé! Buy a bag of
Unsalted Penis (PEANUTS!)
instead. Smile shyly at
a strangely unsleazy
middleaged Mediterranean
clerk who beams back
beneath boiling black
curls. Leave. Breathe.
Imagine an ocean
beyond the black asphalt.
Smell the sea salt
as the tide slides
to the sand’s end
and the sun bends
to the edge of the Earth.
Day’s done. Head home.
A car blurts a heralding horn.
.
A Blues for After the Orgy
I don’t tour anymore. The days of arenas crammed with razzed-up howlers horny for bludgeoning riffs and solos to dazzle them dizzy are gone forever. Kids don’t dig that now. They don’t respect dexterity. Their god is ingenuity. I’m a relic. An irrelevancy.
I still play though. Once a week I sit in with a blues band in a bar in the city. This is my heavy metal penance—after flying so high on the Wagnerian wings of hard rock, the dust of what’s left of me is cursed to regress into blues. And be rendered even more irrelevant. What could be further from today’s test tube curlicues than the bogtrotting muck of the blues? But this is my effluvium. Sometimes I feel like I’ve never played better than when I’m breathing that gloom through the gills and pouring it back in a flurry of notes that strike at what all of us seem to endure there in the free-floating murk of the bar. And it translates: people seem aware of it too, the musicians respond with a swell and the music lunges like something alive, with hisses leaking off its edges, an ooze in the curl of its glide.
One night a while back was a particularly good gig. The guitar felt like a dream version of itself in my hands. My every intention emerged instantly in a crisp burst of notes, a continuous cascade, one passage pouring into the next and the right choice for each gambit occurring to me in the instant I needed to choose it. (I’d been playing a lot of chess and maybe that helped.)
In the midst of this I noticed a kid—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—sitting at a table in front of the bandstand. The look in his eyes didn’t reach me at first, but eventually I could see that he had it in for me. There was something defiant and unblinking in the way he watched me, and his stare didn’t waver through the entire set. It irked me a little, but I was feeling too good to be bothered by some punk with a green streak staring me down. If I had to I’d deal with him after the set.
Then I saw it. Shadowed under his table was a guitar case. The kid wanted to sit in. Now, I’m of two minds about this. Thankfully it rarely happens, and I don’t encourage it, because this is my time to stretch out and I don’t want some egomaniac hack hemming me in. But there is also a spirit of generosity among musicians without which nothing magical ever happens. And playing as good as I was I couldn’t help feeling generous.
I left it up to him. When the set ended and the rest of the band left the stand to get drinks or use the john or make phonecalls or whatever the hell else musicians do during breaks I set my guitar down and fiddled around with my amp. My back was to the tables but I could still feel the kid’s gaze weighing on me. When I turned around there he was, standing at the edge of the bandstand, guitar case in hand.
He must have been the thinnest human being I’d ever seen. He obviously didn’t spend much time outside—his skin was unnaturally white and his dishwater blond hair might have been spiky if it wasn’t so greasy. He didn’t seem to have any tattoos—a rarity among kids these days—but maybe there wasn’t enough room on him to fit them.
I just looked at him. He looked back at me with that keen level stare of his. Then he nodded slightly with an upturned tilt of his head. “Is it alright if I jam with you guys?” he said.
I just looked at him. A minuet of musicanly macho to make him doubt himself a little bit. Then I said “You know ‘The Barrelhouse?’”
He said he did. The other musicians were coming back to the bandstand. I told him to come on up and plug in.
“The Barrelhouse” isn’t easy to play. It has a skittering riff that runs up and down variations on a melody that has to be played deftly or else you’ll lag behind and muddle it up. The kind of piece that keeps the rookies humble, because it’s obvious and hard to recover if you flub. The kid would know where he stood as soon as we started it.
When everyone was ready I counted off slightly faster than usual. The kid met me note for note through the first chorus, staring at my guitar the entire time while we played. At the end of the second chorus we traded brief four-bar solos, just enough to make it interesting without any lingering.
I started off, let loose a low rumble that rose and spilled a quivering trickle at the top of the fretboard. The kid started with a quivering trickle and tumbled down to a rumble on his low E-string. Had wit, this kid. On the next run I flung a crackle of sparks high on the fretboard, then did an inverted echo of them down low, making the notes loose where they’d been tight up high, and quick and flickering where they’d been thicker and slow. The kid responded with a roiling hive of notes that swarmed narrow, then wide, like the flux of an hourglass. I churned out a sputtering cloud that hovered at the bottom of the fretboard like a gaggle of thunder. The kid supplied the lightning—slashing bursts up high, jolting at jagged angles.
This was fun. The kid was a rare bird, one that had done some real woodshedding in a shadowy room somewhere, the probable source of his platinum tan and monomaniacal eyes. But after a while I sensed that he was mocking me. Whenever I held out a long note he would mimic it on his own run, making it shimmy and stutter, and then he would bend any blue notes I’d made into a kind of weeping parody. I felt myself losing ground. He must have sensed it too, because then he started replicating my runs note-for-note, but speeded up, so that at the end of them he would whang out some wizardly flurries that said “I’ll do whatever you do and then some.”
Then he got bolder. On his next run he took two full choruses all for himself and it was as if he’d seized a livewire and was weaving it in wild arcs, snapping out jabs that splashed crackling ebbs in their wake, bending his phrases so they curled on themselves and then burst in a blur of bright notes.
He was looking right at me now. He must have thought he had me on the ropes, so I did a whipstitch jig with hopskip cross-steps stretched over two choruses, and then I played it all over again. It was a prosody, you see, and I knew he couldn’t repeat it.
But I knew he wasn’t beaten either. The crowd was responding to him more eagerly than to me, he was increasing with each turn he took, and he was the one who was raising the stakes, not me. I was definitely on the defensive, reacting to his runs, struggling to regain the ground he was stealing from me.
Then he unleashed a torrent of all the tricks he’d ever taught himself in his woodshed, piling flail upon zing in a whirling vortex, ushering hissing gusts that slithered from one edge of the whirlpool, only to be countered with a coil of staccato on the other side of the swirl. The band had become part of the air, rising to meet him at the peak of his jags, a thick chugging throb that widened the width of his grasp as he grabbed eeks and shurls from the air and steered each shriek of feedback into an intricate shape for chorus after chorus; the band was his, and while they wailed a great gutpit yowl of ecstasy sprung from the back of the bar.
I’d been dealt a deathblow. But I didn’t die. Instead I felt myself standing in a kind of breathing emptiness. I felt forgotten by gravity and weirdly free. They were expecting a surrender. Instead I hurled a last gasp across everything I could remember, chasing an unbroken line wherever it carried me and not retreating, however hard it got, however horrible, whatever faces found me in my memories, whatever shame I’d known, whatever failure, whatever pits of fear and weakness, I had to continue, unblinking, and forge toward wherever I was meant to arrive. I felt stillness, almost silence, as I played, and the gulf between me and everyone there, even the kid, seemed to open and pour into me.
Something occurred to me then. After the orgy. When I was touring and recording years ago, the tide of the times, the zeitgeist, was pouring through me, as if I were an artery, on its way to its next transformation, to inhabit the next generation, and the next, and eventually this kid’s. It had abandoned me as it abandons everybody eventually and this song of loss was my blues, something I’d lived through, something larger than me that had nothing to do with fast fingers or arsenals of technique and was complete and couldn’t be defeated. A tickertape of dry fireworks thinned to thrum on my low E-string.
Maybe the kid couldn’t understand all this, but I saw something gentle, even admiring, in his eyes. The battle was over. He smiled slightly, nodded with a brief duck of his head, and we went back to trading short four-bar runs.
It was like playing catch with a breath of air, drawing it in, letting it spread inside us and then breathing it out again with a spin different than the one just flung at us. At the end of the set we shook hands. The crowd was loud. I asked him if he had a band. He told me no. I announced his name to the crowd.
He packed his guitar and told me he’d see me around. Watching people giving him high fives and peace signs and slapping his back as he left I wondered what awaited this weirdo, this freakshow geek, this virtuoso who’d grown in the shadow of the end of the world. Was his orgy only lonely? Would some boolean thread of the zeitgeist ever bless him with its kiss?
.
I still play though. Once a week I sit in with a blues band in a bar in the city. This is my heavy metal penance—after flying so high on the Wagnerian wings of hard rock, the dust of what’s left of me is cursed to regress into blues. And be rendered even more irrelevant. What could be further from today’s test tube curlicues than the bogtrotting muck of the blues? But this is my effluvium. Sometimes I feel like I’ve never played better than when I’m breathing that gloom through the gills and pouring it back in a flurry of notes that strike at what all of us seem to endure there in the free-floating murk of the bar. And it translates: people seem aware of it too, the musicians respond with a swell and the music lunges like something alive, with hisses leaking off its edges, an ooze in the curl of its glide.
One night a while back was a particularly good gig. The guitar felt like a dream version of itself in my hands. My every intention emerged instantly in a crisp burst of notes, a continuous cascade, one passage pouring into the next and the right choice for each gambit occurring to me in the instant I needed to choose it. (I’d been playing a lot of chess and maybe that helped.)
In the midst of this I noticed a kid—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—sitting at a table in front of the bandstand. The look in his eyes didn’t reach me at first, but eventually I could see that he had it in for me. There was something defiant and unblinking in the way he watched me, and his stare didn’t waver through the entire set. It irked me a little, but I was feeling too good to be bothered by some punk with a green streak staring me down. If I had to I’d deal with him after the set.
Then I saw it. Shadowed under his table was a guitar case. The kid wanted to sit in. Now, I’m of two minds about this. Thankfully it rarely happens, and I don’t encourage it, because this is my time to stretch out and I don’t want some egomaniac hack hemming me in. But there is also a spirit of generosity among musicians without which nothing magical ever happens. And playing as good as I was I couldn’t help feeling generous.
I left it up to him. When the set ended and the rest of the band left the stand to get drinks or use the john or make phonecalls or whatever the hell else musicians do during breaks I set my guitar down and fiddled around with my amp. My back was to the tables but I could still feel the kid’s gaze weighing on me. When I turned around there he was, standing at the edge of the bandstand, guitar case in hand.
He must have been the thinnest human being I’d ever seen. He obviously didn’t spend much time outside—his skin was unnaturally white and his dishwater blond hair might have been spiky if it wasn’t so greasy. He didn’t seem to have any tattoos—a rarity among kids these days—but maybe there wasn’t enough room on him to fit them.
I just looked at him. He looked back at me with that keen level stare of his. Then he nodded slightly with an upturned tilt of his head. “Is it alright if I jam with you guys?” he said.
I just looked at him. A minuet of musicanly macho to make him doubt himself a little bit. Then I said “You know ‘The Barrelhouse?’”
He said he did. The other musicians were coming back to the bandstand. I told him to come on up and plug in.
“The Barrelhouse” isn’t easy to play. It has a skittering riff that runs up and down variations on a melody that has to be played deftly or else you’ll lag behind and muddle it up. The kind of piece that keeps the rookies humble, because it’s obvious and hard to recover if you flub. The kid would know where he stood as soon as we started it.
When everyone was ready I counted off slightly faster than usual. The kid met me note for note through the first chorus, staring at my guitar the entire time while we played. At the end of the second chorus we traded brief four-bar solos, just enough to make it interesting without any lingering.
I started off, let loose a low rumble that rose and spilled a quivering trickle at the top of the fretboard. The kid started with a quivering trickle and tumbled down to a rumble on his low E-string. Had wit, this kid. On the next run I flung a crackle of sparks high on the fretboard, then did an inverted echo of them down low, making the notes loose where they’d been tight up high, and quick and flickering where they’d been thicker and slow. The kid responded with a roiling hive of notes that swarmed narrow, then wide, like the flux of an hourglass. I churned out a sputtering cloud that hovered at the bottom of the fretboard like a gaggle of thunder. The kid supplied the lightning—slashing bursts up high, jolting at jagged angles.
This was fun. The kid was a rare bird, one that had done some real woodshedding in a shadowy room somewhere, the probable source of his platinum tan and monomaniacal eyes. But after a while I sensed that he was mocking me. Whenever I held out a long note he would mimic it on his own run, making it shimmy and stutter, and then he would bend any blue notes I’d made into a kind of weeping parody. I felt myself losing ground. He must have sensed it too, because then he started replicating my runs note-for-note, but speeded up, so that at the end of them he would whang out some wizardly flurries that said “I’ll do whatever you do and then some.”
Then he got bolder. On his next run he took two full choruses all for himself and it was as if he’d seized a livewire and was weaving it in wild arcs, snapping out jabs that splashed crackling ebbs in their wake, bending his phrases so they curled on themselves and then burst in a blur of bright notes.
He was looking right at me now. He must have thought he had me on the ropes, so I did a whipstitch jig with hopskip cross-steps stretched over two choruses, and then I played it all over again. It was a prosody, you see, and I knew he couldn’t repeat it.
But I knew he wasn’t beaten either. The crowd was responding to him more eagerly than to me, he was increasing with each turn he took, and he was the one who was raising the stakes, not me. I was definitely on the defensive, reacting to his runs, struggling to regain the ground he was stealing from me.
Then he unleashed a torrent of all the tricks he’d ever taught himself in his woodshed, piling flail upon zing in a whirling vortex, ushering hissing gusts that slithered from one edge of the whirlpool, only to be countered with a coil of staccato on the other side of the swirl. The band had become part of the air, rising to meet him at the peak of his jags, a thick chugging throb that widened the width of his grasp as he grabbed eeks and shurls from the air and steered each shriek of feedback into an intricate shape for chorus after chorus; the band was his, and while they wailed a great gutpit yowl of ecstasy sprung from the back of the bar.
I’d been dealt a deathblow. But I didn’t die. Instead I felt myself standing in a kind of breathing emptiness. I felt forgotten by gravity and weirdly free. They were expecting a surrender. Instead I hurled a last gasp across everything I could remember, chasing an unbroken line wherever it carried me and not retreating, however hard it got, however horrible, whatever faces found me in my memories, whatever shame I’d known, whatever failure, whatever pits of fear and weakness, I had to continue, unblinking, and forge toward wherever I was meant to arrive. I felt stillness, almost silence, as I played, and the gulf between me and everyone there, even the kid, seemed to open and pour into me.
Something occurred to me then. After the orgy. When I was touring and recording years ago, the tide of the times, the zeitgeist, was pouring through me, as if I were an artery, on its way to its next transformation, to inhabit the next generation, and the next, and eventually this kid’s. It had abandoned me as it abandons everybody eventually and this song of loss was my blues, something I’d lived through, something larger than me that had nothing to do with fast fingers or arsenals of technique and was complete and couldn’t be defeated. A tickertape of dry fireworks thinned to thrum on my low E-string.
Maybe the kid couldn’t understand all this, but I saw something gentle, even admiring, in his eyes. The battle was over. He smiled slightly, nodded with a brief duck of his head, and we went back to trading short four-bar runs.
It was like playing catch with a breath of air, drawing it in, letting it spread inside us and then breathing it out again with a spin different than the one just flung at us. At the end of the set we shook hands. The crowd was loud. I asked him if he had a band. He told me no. I announced his name to the crowd.
He packed his guitar and told me he’d see me around. Watching people giving him high fives and peace signs and slapping his back as he left I wondered what awaited this weirdo, this freakshow geek, this virtuoso who’d grown in the shadow of the end of the world. Was his orgy only lonely? Would some boolean thread of the zeitgeist ever bless him with its kiss?
.
Moonshine
4 big armed boys
in a big black truck
chug
chug
through the dark
to a far
off grove
and what's that
chug
chug
in the back?
Not some
coal kissin
cork screw
jeeeeeew york
laaaaawwyer
and
rope!
Nope! just
some home
brew
to
chug
chug
in the moon
shine: cool
white
eye
staring down
from the crown
of our sky.
Nuthins
secret. Alls
sacred. All
chug
chug
haw hee
haw haw!
.
in a big black truck
chug
chug
through the dark
to a far
off grove
and what's that
chug
chug
in the back?
Not some
coal kissin
cork screw
jeeeeeew york
laaaaawwyer
and
rope!
Nope! just
some home
brew
to
chug
chug
in the moon
shine: cool
white
eye
staring down
from the crown
of our sky.
Nuthins
secret. Alls
sacred. All
chug
chug
haw hee
haw haw!
.
Flashes
We are here
to get it right
one last time
Release this bird
into the sky—
let it fly
You’re just a husk:
a vessel at best
for God
An afternoon
of gazing at faces
in the sky
For conversation
he recites
the noise in his brain
The closest we come
to utopia may be
a great night in a dance hall
The sky
through the wires
so blue
*
A middle-aged man
on a bus after work
reads the biography of a tycoon
Twirt! Twirt!
chirps the traffic
cross-signal
A gang of cops board the bus
and make passengers show
proof of payment
*
Weather
like a hovering
pregnancy
On her black shoes
white-winged
hearts
Kerouac to an audience: “You’re not listening!”
(If you were you’d be cheering!
For human hope and salvation!)
*
as if there is
nothing sacred
The look
of someone
genuinely gentle
How often
we forget
we’re breathing
Everyone here
is equally
present
The air
is thick
with souls
Who got sucked
down another
bad path
I just need
to breathe
among you
*
A sip
of water and a breath
of air
Summer afternoon:
long shaking shadow of a tree,
breeze on a glowing lawn
Trying to
remember a bad
dream
He stalked
out of the office
in a gale of expletives
Every damned place we’ve lived
was made without a thought
for our lives
*
Watching Las Vegas
from an airplane at night:
a forest of lights
Nice nipples
on that
mannequin
Latin trumpet blare:
raucous, raw
and sad
The kee-TOK kee-TOK
kee-TOK syncopation
of a pingpong ball in play
*
A bird
like a bee—
tiny whirling blur
Summer’s start:
each day less
snow on the mountain
Heaven
in the scent
of wild strawberries
A face
muscular
from smiling
Long eucalyptus leaves
shivering
in cold wind
Made up face
gazing
at a magazine
Mechanical wind
from an underground
train
Shopping mall:
alone
among products
An integrity down to
what you do
with your eyes
Happiness is
a full-time, all-the-time, lifetime
job
*
Almost always
the answer
is you
That child
can go in so
many directions
These rotten old
husks of houses
—like toothaches
On the dunes
two human silhouettes
against an orange sky
*
A wide-winged hawk
gliding
on the wind
Salt clouds
in churned
sea water
A morning spent
gazing
at captive animals
Slim young mom
with metallic
nasal voice
Youngsters
streaking by
on skateboards
I asked myself
does grass
mind being walked on?
Swirling clouds
of slim silver
anchovies
A child’s
apocalyptic
tantrum
Some freak daisy
lies down
with the lions
After the meeting
I felt like I had
a hangover
*
Christmas: crushed
candy cane on the floor
of a bus
Cold burning
dry ice shriek
of police sirens
His white head droops
like a broken bloom
when he remembers what he said
An old apple tree
rotting on the frozen lawn
of an old mansion
Vision is revealed
to us gradually,
in glints and flashes
Days when
not one face
holds any gentleness
Willowy delicate
girl with heaving
pregnant belly
*
City:
not a tree
in sight
We all fall
like leaves
soon
A bird circles
over low rows
of white waves
Our lives
speed by—
enjoy the ride!
A blue fish
with a face
of a puppy
Gate after
gate after
gate
*
Stranded
in the middle
of the street
I killed a fly
when I waved it
outside
We all wore plastic
identification tags
at our waists and necks
Humiliating your reality
with an ideality
dreamed in art
The calm beyond
that first flash of flesh,
the hum behind the noise
*
Dead flesh on your plate
inconveniencing you
with its bones
A cat
a rose
of an animal
Every one at the party
acting
like a television set
Breathing
with flittering birds
over a trickling stream
This sad business,
he thought,
and parked the car
Gossips jitter right
out of him;
he’s like a glass of ice
*
The Great Human Party!
(his eyes smiled)
You Are Invited!
Only those whose
lives are lies
laugh like that
From finished product
to work-in-progress
in a crash of a flash
Stern faces
waiting for a train
to take them to work
A mother-to-be
self-importantly
wielding her pregnancy
A guy
who closed his eyes
among us and breathed
*
The sad
planet of his
head
Black cat
huddled like a
shadow on the floor
A car
a rolling
bubble
Lush white
bird on a wet
black branch
Breathing with the
awareness of being
surrounded by gases
Poor people
turned into billboards
by free clothing
Her brilliant
healthy snow white
moon tan
Trees snowing white
petals on the green
park lawn
*
Ellipses
in parentheses:
"me"
Youth: an anxious constant
preparing for something
that doesn't exactly arrive
A gull
combing the wind
with its wings
His face
before he was born
is the sky
Their old ways,
their distances
measured in days
The train’s steel wheels
scrape steel rails
like screaming skeletons
Just another person
going through her day
buying more milk and toilet paper
A cat
purring like
a teapot
To through
yoga know
cosmic consciousness
All the old truths apply:
Stand up straight!
Suck in your gut!
A jetplane chasing
the sinking red sun
across a massive continent
Message of soul:
life is sad
but that's all right
A cat
vigilant
with its ears
A graveyard
bathed in early
morning sunlight
The breathing tide
of a distant
highway
More complications
= more possible
soul
*
Sprawl of a city
at night: flowering
field of light
Almost getting a
hard-on from greasy bikini
beer ads in the liquor store
Evening sky:
grey death
with a wisp of rose
City:
the sadness of
a million lives
The tide sliding
on the floor of the shore,
reaching the weeds at the sand's end
The goal the need the dream:
to recognize that sad aching nerve
at the soul of everything
*
A cat
like a drop
of ink on a stoop
The wind wanes:
a STOP sign
stops shaking
A lonely woman's
pregnant belly:
sad progress of the world
Ah,
life:
berries
The chingle chingle chingle
of keys
in a jogger’s pocket
Whisky:
proof that life
is tragic
The blurred wall
of another train
passing your passing train
The incomprehensible
architecture of a lighted
superhighway at night
A television newscaster’s
mywholelifeisalie
voice
A little white sprinting red
tongue panting dog with
splashing tassle tail
The sour powdery
smell of an old
person
Sushi:
food
jewelry
Here the clocks
have gears:
are mechanical
The sting of the
sun on your skin
by the sea
The newly built
buildings block
the mountains
People’s hateful appraisals
of other people’s
clothes
Roses like an election:
hollering red faces splayed
in different directions
Thinking
through scraps of a
beer-bombed brain
The wet hiss
of rubber wheels
on asphalt
The hollering
sex of a
flower
Wind
like a wall
of water
Mafia wives
chained
in gold
The cat sits
like a fact
on the couch
Shlapping
around in the rain
in sandals
He grins through
a jagged fence
of tombstone teeth
A twilit
sky of
flaming foil
Air Force:
fill the sky with
grinding noise
I stood
and stared
at a star
These thoughts are
just a hum
behind my eyes
A loose power wire
wags in the wind
at head height
His eyes
like a leering
lion’s
A thermal-suited
dude on the beach
thumbing a digital device
.
Bob Dylan's Angel
Author’s note: In April of 2004, Bob Dylan appeared in a television advertisement for Victoria’s Secret lingerie. A song of his called “Lovesick” served as the soundtrack.
I know you are angry at me for leering at an angel in a lingerie ad. But you don’t understand me. You mistake me for someone righteous. Some of my best songs are righteous, but I have never really been righteous. Mostly I was just pissed off. I hated injustice. I hated that so many people who didn’t deserve it were forced to suffer while so many others who caused them to suffer were allowed to live like lords. Knowing that someone who wasn’t anything but lucky could toddle whistling to work while someone else groaned in an alley alone, this scorched my guts with rage, and I howled with rage like no other songwriter before me.
I’d never had a hard life, materially speaking. But I knew that misery was real. And seeing people drift through the horrors of life in cloud of stupid unearned affluence made me want to shove their faces in the fire of what was really happening, to show them what their ignorance denied, and make them feel ashamed. My songs were acts of revenge. I made Queen Jane walk the plank, with flames of failure and humiliation lapping all around her—or at least I taunted her with terrors her arrogance was intent on forgetting, with truths she aloofly insulted with the blatant lie of her style.
But even if Queen Jane had walked the plank it wouldn’t have been good enough for me. I would have let her roast in her loneliness and sneer How does it feeeel? like I did to Mr. Jones or the intellectuals who wept for Hattie Carroll. I sided with the underdog, but mostly to make the smug ones squirm. I paraded the castoffs of Desolation Row past their faces, showed them the botched, the mangled, the wretched, the torn—the people for whom the world doesn’t work—and portrayed these misfits with enough dignity to make them glow with poetry.
I was an artist, but I also wanted to be famous and rich and get laid. By the time you’d heard about me I had already sold out. I had troops of fat suited gross men battling for proper product placement in record stores and hustling for the highest price for my performances on television. I was heralded as an avatar, a phenomenon. Artistically I was the leader. The toppermost of the poppermost admired me as a genius. Everybody covered me, but I was the best performer of my own songs. I was proclaimed the voice of my generation, and at the height of my hype I squeezed out a double album that nearly everyone hailed as a masterpiece. But it was really only exhaustion amplified into urgency by amphetamine, husks and shadows of songs crammed with some of the clumsiest rhymes of my career, like the one about the shattered little rich girl who takes/makes/aches just like a woman, who was just too pitiful to be hated like Queen Jane or the girl on Fourth Street who I positively loathed.
I wrote that song to get laid. I’ve never tried to disguise how much I needed women. I needed women so much I avenged myself against my dependence on them again and again in my songs. I had a furious envy of their elegance. It seemed in the end we could never agree on anything. Whenever I was in love I was always afraid I’d wind up peeking through a keyhole down upon my knees. And I was always in love. That’s why I chased fame so voraciously. Being admired so widely allowed me to be big enough to love on a scale impossible for someone of smaller stature. Being seen by so many allowed me to be seen by a few who could really see me. Those were the ones I loved and who loved me. The scope of my embrace was amazing. I can never adequately describe how hugely loved I felt sometimes. This filled me with a force that fueled so many songs I would never have otherwise written. It’s one thing to be talented; it’s quite another to have a river of power flowing through you as easy as breathing.
Women were my muse in the most classical sense. Even after a crackup that caused me to realize I was being eaten alive by the machinery of celebrity, I always chased the angel. Any bitterness I expressed toward women was that of a man who could never be free of them. And it is impossible not to be bitter when you know you are trapped by fame as badly as Elvis. When you see that you are not seen by a public that celebrates you for something you can no longer sustain and which was only a fraction of what you were in the first place. When you repeatedly realize that so many women you’d hoped you could love could only see you in the shadow of an idol that has nothing to do with you.
This is a loneliness with which no ordinary person can sympathize. And this alienated me even more. I still dredged up some righteousness in later songs, but now my martyrs were bigger fish: a railroaded middleweight prizefighter, a rouge millionaire, a gunned down Mafioso, Lenny Bruce. I vilified political leaders like a watcher of television news. Gradually I retired toward the periphery, where a role was conceived for me: moral murmur in the shadows of the cultural unconscious, grizzled hippie snarling in the fringes of a world gone wrong.
I’ve seen this all from a vantage where few ever stand. And now I doubt that it makes any difference in the end. I’m stranded. I even agreed to entertain at a catered corporate party during the dot com boom. And when a posh lingerie company called me one day to offer to buy one of my songs for a commercial I knew it didn’t matter. I said yes. Then they raised the stakes: would I appear in the ad? With a beautiful young model in nothing but underwear? I know what it is to be pornography—I performed in a sparkling Elvis outfit a quarter century ago and I knew what I was doing. I said yes. Hell, a free trip to Italy, a nice party, a few hours’ work, a big paycheck—maybe I’d even get laid. I went. It was easy; the producers made everything smooth. I didn’t even look at the playbacks when we were done. I didn’t get laid. When I left it was easy to forget.
But I know you won’t forget it. You’re obsessed with the evidence. But the evidence is a lie. When you see me leering at that doe-eyed nymph in the angel’s wings and blue bra, you don’t notice that I’m really glaring with bright mean eyes. You don’t know that I wasn’t even watching her when my close-up was shot. And when you look at her you don’t see what I see: an exotic animal who would crumble under my stare if we ever really looked at each other. She is an empty, lovely fawn. I don’t need her. I need the angel.
.
I know you are angry at me for leering at an angel in a lingerie ad. But you don’t understand me. You mistake me for someone righteous. Some of my best songs are righteous, but I have never really been righteous. Mostly I was just pissed off. I hated injustice. I hated that so many people who didn’t deserve it were forced to suffer while so many others who caused them to suffer were allowed to live like lords. Knowing that someone who wasn’t anything but lucky could toddle whistling to work while someone else groaned in an alley alone, this scorched my guts with rage, and I howled with rage like no other songwriter before me.
I’d never had a hard life, materially speaking. But I knew that misery was real. And seeing people drift through the horrors of life in cloud of stupid unearned affluence made me want to shove their faces in the fire of what was really happening, to show them what their ignorance denied, and make them feel ashamed. My songs were acts of revenge. I made Queen Jane walk the plank, with flames of failure and humiliation lapping all around her—or at least I taunted her with terrors her arrogance was intent on forgetting, with truths she aloofly insulted with the blatant lie of her style.
But even if Queen Jane had walked the plank it wouldn’t have been good enough for me. I would have let her roast in her loneliness and sneer How does it feeeel? like I did to Mr. Jones or the intellectuals who wept for Hattie Carroll. I sided with the underdog, but mostly to make the smug ones squirm. I paraded the castoffs of Desolation Row past their faces, showed them the botched, the mangled, the wretched, the torn—the people for whom the world doesn’t work—and portrayed these misfits with enough dignity to make them glow with poetry.
I was an artist, but I also wanted to be famous and rich and get laid. By the time you’d heard about me I had already sold out. I had troops of fat suited gross men battling for proper product placement in record stores and hustling for the highest price for my performances on television. I was heralded as an avatar, a phenomenon. Artistically I was the leader. The toppermost of the poppermost admired me as a genius. Everybody covered me, but I was the best performer of my own songs. I was proclaimed the voice of my generation, and at the height of my hype I squeezed out a double album that nearly everyone hailed as a masterpiece. But it was really only exhaustion amplified into urgency by amphetamine, husks and shadows of songs crammed with some of the clumsiest rhymes of my career, like the one about the shattered little rich girl who takes/makes/aches just like a woman, who was just too pitiful to be hated like Queen Jane or the girl on Fourth Street who I positively loathed.
I wrote that song to get laid. I’ve never tried to disguise how much I needed women. I needed women so much I avenged myself against my dependence on them again and again in my songs. I had a furious envy of their elegance. It seemed in the end we could never agree on anything. Whenever I was in love I was always afraid I’d wind up peeking through a keyhole down upon my knees. And I was always in love. That’s why I chased fame so voraciously. Being admired so widely allowed me to be big enough to love on a scale impossible for someone of smaller stature. Being seen by so many allowed me to be seen by a few who could really see me. Those were the ones I loved and who loved me. The scope of my embrace was amazing. I can never adequately describe how hugely loved I felt sometimes. This filled me with a force that fueled so many songs I would never have otherwise written. It’s one thing to be talented; it’s quite another to have a river of power flowing through you as easy as breathing.
Women were my muse in the most classical sense. Even after a crackup that caused me to realize I was being eaten alive by the machinery of celebrity, I always chased the angel. Any bitterness I expressed toward women was that of a man who could never be free of them. And it is impossible not to be bitter when you know you are trapped by fame as badly as Elvis. When you see that you are not seen by a public that celebrates you for something you can no longer sustain and which was only a fraction of what you were in the first place. When you repeatedly realize that so many women you’d hoped you could love could only see you in the shadow of an idol that has nothing to do with you.
This is a loneliness with which no ordinary person can sympathize. And this alienated me even more. I still dredged up some righteousness in later songs, but now my martyrs were bigger fish: a railroaded middleweight prizefighter, a rouge millionaire, a gunned down Mafioso, Lenny Bruce. I vilified political leaders like a watcher of television news. Gradually I retired toward the periphery, where a role was conceived for me: moral murmur in the shadows of the cultural unconscious, grizzled hippie snarling in the fringes of a world gone wrong.
I’ve seen this all from a vantage where few ever stand. And now I doubt that it makes any difference in the end. I’m stranded. I even agreed to entertain at a catered corporate party during the dot com boom. And when a posh lingerie company called me one day to offer to buy one of my songs for a commercial I knew it didn’t matter. I said yes. Then they raised the stakes: would I appear in the ad? With a beautiful young model in nothing but underwear? I know what it is to be pornography—I performed in a sparkling Elvis outfit a quarter century ago and I knew what I was doing. I said yes. Hell, a free trip to Italy, a nice party, a few hours’ work, a big paycheck—maybe I’d even get laid. I went. It was easy; the producers made everything smooth. I didn’t even look at the playbacks when we were done. I didn’t get laid. When I left it was easy to forget.
But I know you won’t forget it. You’re obsessed with the evidence. But the evidence is a lie. When you see me leering at that doe-eyed nymph in the angel’s wings and blue bra, you don’t notice that I’m really glaring with bright mean eyes. You don’t know that I wasn’t even watching her when my close-up was shot. And when you look at her you don’t see what I see: an exotic animal who would crumble under my stare if we ever really looked at each other. She is an empty, lovely fawn. I don’t need her. I need the angel.
.
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