First read it when I was about 14 yrs old (1972), really got me started on the path...re-examined it about 4 years ago and really thought it held up. If you haven't read it yet, check out "Captain Pimple Cream's Fiendish Plot," a hugely entertaining and informative (and very well-reported) study of Top 40 radio by one Harry Shearer -- must be the same guy, right? Also see "Underground Radio" by Tom Nolan, for another journalistically solid view of rock radio.
I've got two subseqent Eisen-edited anthologies, they're a lot more scattershot and stoned, full of Meltzerania (Lar Tush, Borneo Jimmy etc.) and White Panther propaganda. Search, with a grain of salt.
― m coleman (lovebug starski), Saturday, 9 April 2005 13:08 (twenty years ago)
one year passes...
from
The Age of Rock 2"BOB DYLAN INTERVIEW" by Nora Ephron & Susan Edmiston (1965)
I heard you used to play piano for Buddy Holly.
No. I used to play the rock and roll piano, but I don't want to say who it was for because the cat will try to get hold of me. I don't want to see the cat. He'll try to reclaim the friendship. I did it a long time ago, when I was seventeen years old. I used to play a country piano too.
This was before you became interested in folk music?
Yes. I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow. Obviously I'm not a hard working cat. I played the guitar, that was all I did. I thought it was great music. Cretainly I haven't turned my back on it or anything like that. There is -- and I'm sure nobody realizes this, all the authorities who write about what it is and what it should be, when they say keep things simple, they should be easily understood -- folk music is the only music where it isn't simple. It's never been simple. It's weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts. I've never written anything hard to understand, not in my head anyway, and nothing as far out as some of the old songs. They were out of sight.
Like what songs?
"Little Brown Dog." "I bought a little brown dog, its face is all gray. Now I'm going to Turkey flying on my bottle." And "Nottemum Town," that's like a herd of ghosts passing through on the way to Tangiers. "Lord Edward," "Barbara Allen," they're full of myth.
And contradictions?
Yeah, contradictions.
And chaos?
Chaos, watermelon, clocks, everything.
You wrote on one album, "I accept chaos but does chaos accept me."
Chaos is a friend of mine. It's like I accept him, does he accept me.
Do you see the world as chaos?
Truth is chaos. Maybe beauty is chaos.
Poets like Eliot and Yeats -
I haven't read Yeats.
They saw the world as chaos, accepted it as chaos and attempted to bring order from it. Are you trying to do that?
No. It exists and that's all there is to it. It's been here longer than I have. What can I do about it? I don't know what the songs I write are. That's all I can do is write songs, right? Write. I collect things too.
Monkey wrenches?
Where did you read about that? Has that been in print? I told this guy out on the coast that I collected monkey wrenches, all sizes and shapes of monkey wrenches, and he didn't believe me. I don't think you believe me either. And I collect the pictures too. Have you talked to Sonny and Cher?
No.
They're a drag. A cat gets kick out of a restaurant and he went home and wrote a song about it.
― m coleman (lovebug starski), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 13:37 (nineteen years ago)
"Have you talked to Sonny and Cher? They're a drag. A cat gets kick out of a restaurant and he went home and wrote a song about it."
Well, what the hell were they supposed to do? Sonny & Cher were the ones gettin' kicked out of the restaurant! At least Sonny, by himself, got a hit out of it ("Laugh At Me").
― Rev. Hoodoo (Rev. Hoodoo), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 01:02 (nineteen years ago)