Come on Baby Light My Ire

In light of the recent death of Val Kilmer and the recent announcement that I will be appointed Santa Barbara Poet Laureate for 2025-2027 (with no guarantee poetry, the country, or you and me will be here for the full two years), I recalled an op-ed I wrote while I was a lecturer in the English Department at Penn State way back in 1991. Thanks to the internets, everything you've ever written can eventually surface. I was young(er) then, so excuse my impudent tone, but I think this holds up.

Groove to the Beat, But Don't Call Rock Stars Poets

originally published May 1, 1991

 Ah, for the days of yore, when exams smelled of fresh mimeograph fluid, and the end of the semester had, as it should, its own distinct stink. To recapture some of the magic of those long-gone days, I thought I'd give Collegian readers a pop exam.

Name three living poets.

I'm waiting.

One living poet?

OK, I heard somebody whisper Jim Morrison. One: He's not living. Two: He never was a poet, so even if he is alive on that island of the Dead and Famous, it doesn't matter. In fact, Oliver Stone and The Doors movie did more to misrepresent poetry than anything since Dead Poets Society, which proffered the mind-numbingly regular metrics of "O Captain, My Captain" as the peak of Whitman.

As for The Doors, believe it or not, most poets don't see Native American dancing about when they write. Most poets do not do enough drugs to make their hearts explode at 27. Most poets don't have naked honeys groove to their words (yeah, here I'm bitter, as a sometime poet myself.) Most important, most poets don't write endless drivel to their diddle; Morrison was as phallocentric as a Maypole.

Yet, it's not surprising a director as heavy-handed as the aptly named Stone would find Morrison a worthy successor to Blake and Byron. Stone, who in Platoon reduced Vietnam to a facile struggle between good and evil father figures, only to decide that "we have met the enemy, and he is us" (too bad we killed lots of Vietnamese to find out.) Stone, who in Wall Street reduced the greedy grabbing of the 1980s to a facile struggle between good and evil father figures, only to decide that "we have met the enemy, and he is us" (too bad trickle-down economics left more people poor than at any time since the Depression).

Stone is simple-minded, and Morrison is a poet for the simple. Sure, he was a Sure, he was a magnetic rock star, and the band helped open up rock music to the influences of jazz, but to call Morrison a poet is ridiculous. Such a claim makes lines like "we need great golden copulations," "death and my cock are the world," and "mute nostril agony" something they aren't.

And, no, I'm not just saying rock lyrics are hackwork and poetry is ethereal. Rock lyrics can deepen music, can create emotion and mood, can even sparkle. But it's enough to call them good lyrics; we don't need to elevate them to the haughty level of poetry to bestow greatness upon them. It's fine for Elvis Costello to do his thing, and for Wallace Stevens to do another. (Costello is much better singing about blue chairs than blue guitars, and as for Stevens . . . well, studies have shown no insurance salesman can rock out.) As a teacher of mine once said, "The term art merely means 'I like it a whole bunch.'"

But, as Raymond Chandler wrote, "All good art is entertainment and anyone who says differently is a stuffed shirt and juvenile at the art of living." Following Chandler, I want to suggest something much more revolutionary -- that poetry is entertainment. That living people write it. That it takes work to do and isn't the product of lightning bolts or chemical muses. That if more people read poetry, the world might be a better place.

While the violins warm up in the background, and I climb a soapbox taller than Mount Nittany, settle on in. I'm going to make a pitch for poetry.

Poetry attests to complexity; as Valery said, "All lofty thinking ends in a sigh." Poetry is honest exploration in a television world where the only question is How to get laid and the easy answer is Have the brightest smile and the driest underarms.

Poetry is difficult; that's why we run from it. It allows for lines like Bill Knott's, "Ancestor-silencing is difficult when you you're the one/ who forgot to patent the dodo." The syllables pile up so that we are forced to slow down, to halt our rush to evolution.

Poetry not only makes us re-think, but think. Instead of chowing down Pentagon-pushed myths of heroism, we get Jack Gilbert telling us "the abnormal is not courage: The marriage, not the month's rapture." Instead of the America first military mentality that makes football another form of ground war (of thee Whitney Houston lip-synchs), we get Rodney Jones dreaming up death as the ultimate fullback in the poem "Sweep," in which he writes, "I have been home three days, listening to an obituary."

Poetry is a mirror in which we see ourselves in the brightest light. In a poem about something as everyday as a radio request, Maria Flook writes: "It is difficult to humiliate desire;/ that in itself is important to note,/ if it is late at night/ and someone is saying, 'This is for that girl/ on the island, God bless her.'/ The sea is the same. I am the same. Fish swim/ to the false surface of the searchlight." Poetry lets Flook embrace pop music and all its pathos, while seeing through the bathos, lets her hold love up to hope, yet lament.

Yet lamenting poetry is what this column must do. Now, only poets read poetry; everybody else reads Kitty Kelley. Somewhere in too many minds hides the ghost of a high school English teacher who was nearly a ghost himself, reciting Verse in a trebly voice. (He's the same guy who taught you the five paragraph theme -- hunt him down and kill him.) And read some recent poetry; it might be a moment like this one described by Denis Johnson: "As the record falls and the snake-band chords begin/ to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones."

Way Back Machine: "Reed It and Weep" (Nov. 2, 2006)

 

One from the vaults: This originally appeared on an old blog, and I like it enough to republish and share, especially since it's the 10th anniversary of Lou's passing. (Ten years already!) As for the image, that's from a compilation disc that turned me on to Lou and the Velvets when I was a freshman in college and I was busy growing my ears. To be honest, as much as the music, I was thrilled by the wonderful Ellen Willis-penned liner notes, which got me into her as a writer, too. 

Heading into last night's Lou Reed show right here in Santa Barbara, instead of having a Reed or Velvet's tune in my head, I just kept running that Pixies' lyrics, "'I want to be a singer like Lou Reed,' 'I like Lou Reed,' she says, sticking her tongue in my ear." Perverse, I know, but what better thing to be to prepare myself for Lou, the man who sang about how heroin was his life and his wife the very same year the Beatles got by with a little help from their friends, the man who would deign to play a brittly-sweet version of "Femme Fatale" at this very show, only to hold off singing the title words until the very very last run through the chorus, the man who got the line "she never lost her head even when she was giving head" onto the radio in what is the only song of his ever really to be played on the radio in a 40 year career. 

Sure enough, the show was perverse, too. Reed's touring with longtime band-mate Fernando Saunders and Rob Wasserman, thereby kicking out the drums for a double bass approach that suits many of his songs quite well (even ones he never played--would have loved to hear "Doing the Things that They Want To" or "Perfect Day" or "Kill Your Sons" with one bassist sawing and one plucking, but that's just a way to say Reed has too many good songs and most of them create rock art, and I flip the words very intentionally). They opened with a noise-strumental that functioned as sound-check, which was a good thing since Wasserman's bass originally was mixed so as to move the audience's viscera. Then they set the tone for the evening with an odd lope through "What's Good" and while Wasserman and Saunders pushed the song with its nifty lifting little bass hook, Reed seemed indifferent to the guitar riff, toying with it and the lyrics, too. The tension kind of worked, as the song itself is all about oxymorons like "life's like Sanskrit read to a pony" and "what good is seeing eye chocolate." Reed's great theme all along has been thanatos v. eros, and how much we can love death and kill love. It's not accidental that his Robert Wilson collaboration, which he played a bunch of songs from, is The Raven. 

So the show was far from perfect, but nobody looks to Reed for that (you want perfect go fall asleep to Celine Dion or somebody). He played two cuts from Songs for Drella, the terrific work he and John Cale created for their mentor Warhol, and instead of blasting through "Forever Changed," which would have really rocked with the double-bass-bottom, he did the talksong with wind effects "The Dream," which Cale does on the recording, as if to reclaim that cut and prove he is and was and will always be the genius (while reveling in the lines about how Andy thinks he's a jerk--despite his immense talent, Lou's one of those assholes who likes to walk around saying, "Yep, I'm an asshole"). I mean, when the show opened and he got a partial standing O just for coming out on stage he did this little hands palmed-out at his sides Jesus blessing like we could all lick his stigmata or something. Then after "The Dream" he revamped "Faces and Names," one of those songs that makes it seem as if his favorite lyric-writing trick is to repeat phrases till they turn noise. 

But then there was a you-got-your-money's worth "Sword of Damocles," too. The synth riff from the recorded version got turned into a bowed bass part, and Reed was even generous enough to let Saunders play one amazing solo on some bassthingy he had on a stand. It was so hot that Saunders just tossed his bow mid-run, as it cramped the free flow of the picking. This song also features some classic Reed lines like, "There are things we can't know/maybe there's something over there/Some other world we don't know about/I know you hate that mystic shit," which is good for a goof, bad for scansion, and very much like something he might have actually said to a dying friend. Even when he's full of it, that's who he truly is. 

When "Damocles" started I thought it was "Street Hassle," but then they did close the full set with that epic of the demimonde. Why not, when you've got a mini-string section? Even after decades of rap music, the lyrics still kind of shock ("when someone turns that blue it's a universal truth and you know that bitch will never fuck again"), and the music was pretty relentless--neither bassman ever relieved the "do-dum-do-dum-dum" with the "bum-boo-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum" rising part on the recorded version--so it was sort of "Street Hassle" on its way to "Sister Ray," but that's Lou for you. He giveth, and he taketh away. Someone from the crowd at one point yelled "We love you, Lou," and he replied, "I love you, too...it's been a long time, I guess you could call this a relationship." that might sound heartwarming, but he did write and sing "Street Hassle," so there's no rest in a relationship with Reed. Then again, here's a guy who you know is always thinking--cause he says it in almost every song--that we're all gonna die anyway.

Way Back Machine: I Want Me to Want Me (never published)

 

One from the vaults: There was some anthology called Pop 101 that I almost had a piece in, but either it never came out or they dropped me from it and I didn't get the note. But here's that essay from 1997 about 1979--oh, nice symmetry--that will tell you more than you need to know about young me. And maybe young some-of-yous, too.

I WANT ME TO WANT ME 

 I want me to want me. 

Living all the subtraction of adolescence in New Jersey suburbia, hanging out in each other’s basements. An innocent age, the 1970s, and we ached with crushes we thought were love. Of course, we just wanted to get our rocks off. 

Add up all that wanting, multiply by all that not getting, and infinity plus one seems like an actual possibility. The mall didn’t cut it. Anthony Matarazzo’s 440 Plymouth Road Runner didn’t cut it. Even Saturday Night Live, back when it was good, didn’t cut it. As for the rest of TV, we somehow knew Lauren Tewes, who played Julie, ship’s social director of many of our dreams, however perkily lustable, would be a washed up druggie by 1985. That Love Boat always ended up back in port where it started.

Which gets me to Cheap Trick, who, for a couple of years there, me and millions of teenagers loved. A perfect image for male teendom: the band is half beautiful boys and half unlovable losers. And as for the girls: just the name Robin Zander could make damp many a nubile’s sweet underthings. Or so us boys thought. This boy, though, was no Zander. Instead Huntz Hall look-alike Rick Nielsen seemed more like me, nerdy even with, or perhaps because of, that lead guitar prowess (read technique). Why else would he play three guitars at once? It was a hope that he could ward off geekiness with his many magic wands. 

 But what happens when the geek lurks inside? 

 I could play no instrument, but I was a charter member of the fraternity of air guitarists, and that’s pre-TC, even (Tom Cruise in Risky Business). No, I wasn’t that guy who, instead of dancing at each high school dance, would maniacally windmill air guitar like Pete Townshend when the DJ played “Won’t Get Fooled Again”—come to think of it, that was Anthony Matarazzo. But in private I would stroke away, yes indeedy. 

Now, don’t hear any slumming puns, for Cheap Trick, despite that drummer who smoked while he played and seemed as if he lured tykes into his backseat with candy bars, even despite his image, was slight, light, Midwest, sweet. C’mon, “I Want You to Want Me,” has the sexual heat of Kathie Lee Gifford. Its big hit version was recorded live in front of people who didn’t even know English. 

 Cheap Trick is just evidence that we can not only endure but prevail, over darn near everything: the 1970s, adolescence, parents, Catholic high school, the evils of rock ’n’ roll. I saw them back on the Dream Police tour, 1979, when they packed Madison Square Garden and hoked it up and rocked it out and blew opening band the Romantics, decked in red leather new wave jackets, out of the arena and it seemed to matter and maybe I screamed the words or more likely I sat there quietly beaming, projecting like mad that I—-a non-musical, non-dating, soon to be goddam valedictorian--was all four guys, long-haired posterboy rockers (and a matching set, at that, one blond, one brunette) on vocals and bass plus the two wise-guy axe-wielding, drum-bashing, dare-to-be-proud nerds. 

As the band themselves put it: I surrendered, I didn’t give myself away. Lost in the lift of loud, noise bristled away my sins of being young and there I was: Me. I took the train back to Jersey, and, like any good rocker, went to school the next day on four hours sleep to ace my AP history exam with a best you can get 5.

Way Back Machine: "No Corn, No Sop, No Tatters, No Depression: Wilco at the Bowl, 9/7/97"

 

One from the vaults: Having had the great fortune to just see Son Volt in town, and knowing Wilco are on their way (even if I'm not going this time), it made me wonder how an Independent story I wrote way back in 1997 still read. Now you can see how it still reads, too, from a time so long ago when newspapers weren't on the internet (so were still a semi-going concern).

Bipolar thinking can get you in a whole heap of trouble, if it’s fair to call stupidity trouble. Let’s just take the 1970s; yeah, them again. It’s mighty easy to reduce ’70s music into opposing camps — disco versus punk, say, or singer-songwriters versus arena rock. But such lines exist merely because critics, eager to fill column inches easily, need ways to show they can make distinctions. (Note most can make only two.) Take Fleetwood Mac. At what point do they cross from a band of three singer-songwriters into arena rock: When Rumors moved its 4 millionth unit? And yes, yes, I know, they were once a blues band and later something for the Clintons and Gores to bop around to as a way to prove they are hip, god help us. (Further evidence the Democrats are just Republican Lite.) 

Simply put, the “everything is one thing or the other” theory merely means everything not one or the other doesn’t exist. There are many musical 1970s out there vanished to us, as if hidden in hangars in Roswell, or something. A cult of believers might insist that a Big Star or a Cleveland punk scene existed, but most people, in pod-like serenity, go on believing only what radio dishes up for their ears, to mix both UFO references and metaphors. 

But the boys in Wilco aren’t most people, and that’s why you need to go see them on the Sheryl Crow bill this Sunday at the Bowl. They named themselves after an old radio for a reason, given they receive transmissions from across the eras. And to put those transmissions in context, it’s necessary for you to sit yourself down and listen to a bit of musical history. 

Wilco exists because Uncle Tupelo doesn’t, but I can tell I probably already lost too many of you. Which is sad, ’cause Uncle Tupelo was one of the best bands of the early ’90s that never got heard given too many people had flannel in their ears and teen spirit in their noses, but nevermind that, that’s a different story. Tupelo knew punk meant, at its very black heart, being uncool, and in 1990, that meant liking, or I should say likin’, country. And that’s real country: Uncle Tupelo’s first album is called No Depression after a Carter Family tune and now No Depression is the name for all like-minded musicians, such is the UT legacy. That Tupelo could like country and still like Black Flag and Neil Young only sounded on paper like a way to clear rooms or break rental agreements. On record, and even moreso live, it was the music that bar sawdust would sing if it had a voice (not to mention amps and fiddles and pedal steel and heart and brains). 

The Uncle Tupelo story ends in 1993 with their fourth album, Anodyne, when Jay Farrar, or so it’s rumored, given the group has never made completely public the causes of their split, said it was all over. Maybe he knew that they could never top Anodyne, an album that whistles round the river’s bend (“Acuff-Rose,” “New Madrid”) and then rocks back up the other bank (“The Long Cut,” “We’ve Been Had”) stopping mid-river for an anthem about the Civil War, maybe, or maybe just love and its uncivil wars (“Chickamauga”). Fans could only fear that the end would mean what the end of the Replacements or the Beatles meant—yet more once-talented people doddering on as if they could even touch the hem of the musical garments they themselves once wore. How sad to once be someone, to once have had talent, if only (and only can mean most nearly everything) the talent that came from the spark and rub of others. 

Maybe not having even Mats-sized success saved Tupelo, though. For now it’s time to risk, once again, bipolar thinking. UT split into two, Son Volt led by Jay Farrar, and Wilco, led by Jeff Tweedy. Most Tupelo fans, if they were betting sorts, put their money on Son Volt, given Farrar always seemed the soul of Tupelo, while Tweedy seemed the engaging cut-up; sure enough the first cut of the first Wilco album is “I Must Be High.” Turned out, though, that the old bipolar thinking trap swallowed whole any bettors, for if Farrar took the better voice (one person has said he sounds as if he’s lived three lifetimes, already) to Son Volt, Tweedy got to take the rest of Uncle Tupelo to Wilco. And by Anodyne that really meant something; the rest of the band could flat out play, seemingly any sort of music. And they did, and do, on two albums, now — A.M. and Being There. 

This is modestly ambitious music. It cops, more than a hook or a line, a vibe, a feeling that time is such a silly thing we’ve shackled ourselves to. Real music is outside time, which might be why it moves us so — not just a recording of a tune but the tune itself seems out there, somewhere, floating, waiting, like A.M. radio waves bouncing about the planet. The subject matter of Being There is almost incessantly music itself; it’s as if Tweedy wants to define self-reflexivity to those put-off by postmodern theory. So he sings about life on the road, insists this sounds like “Someone Else’s Song,” and croons a mash note to the lamé-wearing Elvis. 

It’s not country, really, not by a long shot, given the first song sounds like a less in need of Prozac version of Big Star’s Third (talk about your albums left in Roswell) and drops lines from Peter Laughner, co-founder of Pere Ubu and one of the first punk martyrs. Referencing Laughner so early might be a clue, though. After all, Laughner, who was so punk he beat Sid Vicious to OD-ing, loved Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson, and Richard Thompson, while writing “Life Stinks,” “Amphetamine,” and the scabrous ditty “Ain’t It Fun,” whose best lines we can’t print in this paper. 

There’s a lot of music out there. And if you play it like you know it, which has something to do with (and so help me I’m writing this) soul, and you sing it like you mean it (which is knowing the power of the pulled punch), well, you end up a lot like Wilco. Given so few bands do the first two, and so few have the smarts to know and the heart to love so many musics, there’s only one Wilco. Don’t miss your chance.