Wednesday, September 25, 2013
It Can't Happen Here!
To continue about the sale of my original "Freak Out!" album, the unautographed 2-disc set that had arrived in a sturdy cardboard mailer to me from the offices of KPFK ...
Damn!
"It Can't Happen Here" was my favorite piece, because Frank and my family would watch the old movie on Huey Long (the one where John Ireland played Huey's political manager) which we probably saw on the Los Angeles RKO movie channel, and I'd go to the library and get a copy of Sinclair Lewis "It Can't Happen Here" and we would compare story lines.
Did I tell you?
Frank's sister Candy was right when she said "Beatniks are conformist" because by then I had met "Larry" (as he was known) at the City Lights Book Store.
The bankers got "A Coney Island of the Mind" (we'd have poetry readings from that .... Frank liked "Johnny Noland Has a Patch On His Ass" and I liked "elephantangelchildren")
And I didn't mind the bankers got the small 4x5 issue of "Howl!" because Allen Ginsberg was everywhere now, like he was the only beatnik who ever wrote poetry and he was the superstar, and all words streamed from him as the spokesman, which is just the way the media is shaped and presented in America, so screw Allen Ginsberg, I said to myself as I threw the book on the pile of beatnik stuff for the clerk to sort through. Shit. There goes Jakob Riis, too. And John Dos Passos. And ... ). (Although I should have thrown it straight in the face of a banker)
I didn't mind getting rid of that. Ginsberg was quoted as saying he was kind of sorry he wrote Howl, because there were so many imitators and they were all angry young men. (Well, what the fuck did you expect, Allen? Here I was selling your goddamn book of pauper poetry for a few bob to feed a banker! Do you think I was chipper that day?)
And it kind of didn't matter to me. I lived in a small cottage anyway, and the melic poets were beginning to take up alot of room on the book shelf, as was Aeschylus (and man, those ran volumes and volumes all across the shelf, with a little Plautus here, and Patronious over there, here a Homer, there a Homer ...
you get it.
Anyway, in 1967 one of my friends had a record out and we used to talk about surf music and laugh about the Johnson Presidential family and how they were hogging up the media to show they were as cool as the Kennedys (they weren't). He used to go to Studio Z, I think, because he liked surf music and the studio was in use to cut some surf tracks there in Cucamonga. Quite a bit North of the vineyards where sacramental grapes were raised.
¶ 9/25/2013 10:15:00 AM
Damn!
"It Can't Happen Here" was my favorite piece, because Frank and my family would watch the old movie on Huey Long (the one where John Ireland played Huey's political manager) which we probably saw on the Los Angeles RKO movie channel, and I'd go to the library and get a copy of Sinclair Lewis "It Can't Happen Here" and we would compare story lines.
Did I tell you?
Frank's sister Candy was right when she said "Beatniks are conformist" because by then I had met "Larry" (as he was known) at the City Lights Book Store.
The bankers got "A Coney Island of the Mind" (we'd have poetry readings from that .... Frank liked "Johnny Noland Has a Patch On His Ass" and I liked "elephantangelchildren")
And I didn't mind the bankers got the small 4x5 issue of "Howl!" because Allen Ginsberg was everywhere now, like he was the only beatnik who ever wrote poetry and he was the superstar, and all words streamed from him as the spokesman, which is just the way the media is shaped and presented in America, so screw Allen Ginsberg, I said to myself as I threw the book on the pile of beatnik stuff for the clerk to sort through. Shit. There goes Jakob Riis, too. And John Dos Passos. And ... ). (Although I should have thrown it straight in the face of a banker)
I didn't mind getting rid of that. Ginsberg was quoted as saying he was kind of sorry he wrote Howl, because there were so many imitators and they were all angry young men. (Well, what the fuck did you expect, Allen? Here I was selling your goddamn book of pauper poetry for a few bob to feed a banker! Do you think I was chipper that day?)
And it kind of didn't matter to me. I lived in a small cottage anyway, and the melic poets were beginning to take up alot of room on the book shelf, as was Aeschylus (and man, those ran volumes and volumes all across the shelf, with a little Plautus here, and Patronious over there, here a Homer, there a Homer ...
you get it.
Anyway, in 1967 one of my friends had a record out and we used to talk about surf music and laugh about the Johnson Presidential family and how they were hogging up the media to show they were as cool as the Kennedys (they weren't). He used to go to Studio Z, I think, because he liked surf music and the studio was in use to cut some surf tracks there in Cucamonga. Quite a bit North of the vineyards where sacramental grapes were raised.
¶ 9/25/2013 10:15:00 AM
