PEOPLE WHO DIED: JIM CARROLL

Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance

Pills and powders only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift

Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese whiz and guns

Whose triggers are shaped tenderly into a false lust
In timeless illusion

Jim Carroll, poet, punk rocker, all-city basketball player, former hustler and drug addict died Friday in New York City. Famous for writing "The Basketball Diaries," Carroll was part of the New York art and punk scene in the 1970s, and a friend of Patti Smith, Warhol, Larry Rivers and Robert Mapplethorpe.

“I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,” the singer Patti Smith said in a telephone interview with the New York Times on Sunday. “The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.”


The guitar claws kept tightening, I guess on your heart stem.
The loops of feedback and distortion, threaded right thru
Lucifer's wisdom teeth, and never stopped their reverbrating
In your mind

And from the stage
All the faces out front seemed so hungry
With an unbearably wholesome misunderstanding

From where they sat, you seemed so far up there
High and live and diving

And instead you were swamp crawling
Down, deeper
Until you tasted the Earth's own blood
And chatted with the Buzzing-eyed insects that heroin breeds


The Jim Carroll Band perform "People Who Died"

Jim Carroll, with Patti Smith, back in the day

"Catholic Boy" by the Jim Carroll Band. Push the button.


Jim Carroll interview 1/18/91 Cleveland Ohio



You should have talked more with the monkey
He's always willing to negotiate I'm still paying him off...
The greater the money and fame
The slower the Pendulum of fortune swings

Your will could have sped it up...
But you left that in a plane
Because it wouldn't pass customs and immigration

If only you hadn't swallowed yourself into a coma in Roma...
You could have gone to Florence
And looked into the eyes of Bellinni or Rafael's Portraits

Perhaps inside them
You could have found a threshold back to beauty's arms
Where it all began...

No matter that you felt betrayed by her

That is always the cost
As Frank said,
Of a young artist's remorseless passion

Which starts out as a kiss
And follows like a curse


--excerpts from "8 fragments for kurt cobain" by jim carroll


On Dennis Miller, 1992

BOB'S BUMBERSHOOT PICK: THE VIVIAN GIRLS

The Vivian Girls. Bumbershoot, at 6PM Sunday on the Broadstreet Stage


Vivian Girls meet The Real Housewives

Okay, music fans. It's Labor Day Weekend, otherwise known as Bumbershoot, a time when myriad bands from all over the world (as well as comics and artists and dancers and filmmakers) converge on Seattle to shimmy in the shade of the Space Needle. How do you pick? We're going to see the Vivian Girls. You've heard them on the radio (and maybe on my mixtapes) and you love them, too.

"Where Do You Run To" by the Vivian Girls

The Vivian Girls--named after oddball artist Henry Darger's girl warriors--are Brooklyn garage girls that play dreamy pop, write great songs that hearken back to the Girl Groups of the early sixties as well as punk rock of the seventies, with a little Olympia, Washington thrown in for good measure. They're playing this weekend at Bumbershoot, at 6PM Sunday on the Broadstreet Stage. Don't miss them.

NEVER MIND THE BUTTER

Johnny Rotten's Country Life commercial. Punk is still dead. Somebody please kill me.


"Your future dream is a shopping scheme..."

THE CLAMPDOWN

The Clash, the greatest punk rock band of all time, sings about the Clampdown. London, 1980. They turned righteous rage into music that mattered. It still does. We just saw the brilliant documentary, The Future is Unwritten, about Joe Strummer. See it, by all means.


The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get runnin'
It's the best years of your life they want to steal

But, you grow up and you calm down and
You're working for the clampdown
You start wearing the blue and brown and
You're working for the clampdown
So you got someone to boss around
It makes you feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
You made your first kill now

--from The Clampdown, by The Clash

WAITING FOR THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD

Here's old punk rocker Billy Bragg live in Seattle at the Triple Door. This song is political folk and like the man says, it ain't American Bloody Idol.

LIBERAL is only a dirty word to the greedy creeps who've screwed things up so badly, maybe people will start using the word again proudly.

BILLY RANCHER AND THE UNREAL GODS

If you were into punk rock in Portland back in the day, you remember Billy Rancher. He started the Malchicks in the late 70s, and on weekends if you crowded into the cavern under the Long Goodbye with every weirdo and deviant who ever crawled out of Naked Lunch you could see them play. This was PDX punk. After the Malchicks fell apart, Rancher formed the Unreal Gods around 1980. They mixed punk and ska with a little sloppy Stones, and played what they called Boom Chuck Rock. You might have seen them at Louis La Bamba or maybe out at Lung Fung's Dragon Room on 82nd, a huge Chinese hangar where the drinks were strong.

Billy was cool, man. He was funny and charismatic and he really got the crowd rocking. He was all set to "make it big," and it was just a matter of time. The planets were aligned, it seemed. He was opening for a lot of big acts when they came to town. Sadly, in his mid-20s, Billy was diagnosed with lymphoma. He died in 1986 and is still missed.

I was surprised to come across this live clip from a Portland show. It's a souvenir. It reminds me of all those great nights. Try to imagine a time before blogs and YouTube...you're jammed into a small club with all the freaks, and you've had a few drinks, maybe you smoked a joint in the parking lot, and things are going weird, but the Unreal Gods kick into boom chuck rock and you are pulled in and you can't stop dancing. When you hit the streets afterward you're icey with sweat and you can't hear anymore, but it doesn't matter because you saw--experienced--this amazing show, and you'll still be talking about it nearly thirty years later!

Now that's something for the time capsule--another fly trapped in amber. I heard Billy's old Strat turned up a while ago on Craig's List.

So it goes.

Thanks, Billy. And thanks to Jack Bog for reminding me of some of those great shows.

THE RAMONES, BLITZKRIEG BOP

The Ramones come in at #18 on the Rolling Stone 100 Greatest Guitar Songs. I interviewed these bad boys in 1978, mostly out of curiosity -- at first I thought they were just plain dumb, and then once they unleashed the Ramones' energy I thoroughly enjoyed myself . They were proudly at odds with the overproduced pop songs of the day (Fleetwood Mac's Rumours? The Eagles Greatest Hits?) and defiantly carried on the tradition of American garage music typified by the primitive proto-punk of "Surfin' Bird" by the Trashmen, "Dirty Water" by the Standells, and "I Fought the Law" by the Bobby Fuller Four. In concert, they were young, dumb, and fun. Good summer music. Hey, ho! Let's go!

MAN OUT OF TIME

Here's a good clip of Declan Patrick MacManus, otherwise known as Elvis Costello. There are great clips of him everyone has seen, such as the SNL performance where a skinny Elvis stops a song, switches gears, and launches into a blistering "Radio, Radio," but I wanted to find something from a few years later, and came across this great live clip from 1982, off the album Imperial Bedroom.


This is a more sophisticated Elvis than his 1977 punky debut, with a fuller, almost lush back-up, and nearly Beatle-esque production values. The lyrics are Costello at his best, a soul crushed under the wheel, broken but still full of venom, nasty literate and schoolboy clever.

Cause the high heel he used to be has been ground down
And he listens for the footsteps that would follow him around

To murder my love is a crime
But will you still love
A man out of time

THE TIME IS NOW!

People say you never forget your first crush (sure you do). People say lots of things. I interviewed Patti Smith for an underground rag when I was just twenty-two and she was this young punk rocker poet. The backstage area was filled with parasites, and the stage manager was all coked up and cranky, but Patti was sharp and funny and maybe I was a little smitten. Remember, this was before "punk" became such a marketing ploy (Green Day, anyone?) and long before Patti was coronated Queen Grandma of Punk, Emeritus, and the scene was still pretty fresh. At that point, there was still room for experimentation and beat zen poetry as well as Fender guitars, at least in small shitty clubs that stank of beer. Most people didn't get it, and it would be years before they claimed they did. It came as a shocking, healthy reaction to all the overproduced stadium rawk clogging the arteries of America with Fleetwood Mac-and-cheese, and Eagles Easy Listening, at a time when the spark and rebellion of rock and roll had turned into formulaic poses for unadventurous sheep. To appreciate it, you must first wash all that out of your hair, and throw away decades of MTV crap, Ramones T-shirts at the Gap, yuppies with timid gel spikes in their hair playing air guitar in the boardroom. Give it a good toss. Turn back the hands of time, time, time. People say time is on your side. People say lots of things.

Dedicated to my cousin Gerard Rizza, a young New York poet who was crazy about Patti Smith and a great many other things.