I’m about to bombard all my Facebook peeps and Twitter followers with a breadcrumb path of links to Jeff Buckley videos. No apologies folks. Jeffy would have been 48 on Monday, November 17 (my mom’s birthday…she’s wherever Jeff may be now).
If you know Jeff’s work, then you’ll enjoy some of the choice clips I’m posting. If you don’t enjoy Jeff, watch them anyway, cuz this is a problem you need to resolve. The dude could sing, play, perform, and compose like no other (‘cept maybe Jimi).
And if you don’t really know Buckley, or if you’ve kind of just wondered, well, there’s eight short videos coming at you over the next 36 hours.
And let me note, this is not stupid fan-boy idolatry. I’m a musician and a singer. Music has been a huge part of my life. The dude was a fucking genius. The fact that we lost him at the age of 30 should haunt every one of us forever. He gets a super special cameo spot in my novel, Beyond the Will of God, because of the strange loss to music and the arts his passing meant. Pay attention to what he says in the interview I’m posting on Sunday evening. There’s some interesting stuff about the mystery of creativity and the power of music.
Happy Birthday, Jeff. Happy Birthday to Jeff’s mom, Mary Guibert, too. And a big Mmwaah birthday kiss to my mom, Ellen Horgan, as well.
I published a tribute to Galway Kinnell over at Medium.com last week. Kinnell, certainly one of this country’s most important poets of the last fifty year, died on October 28. Read the beginning of the piece here, then check out the rest at Medium.com.
The Mortal Sounds of Galway Kinnell: Some Last Lines, Medium.com
“what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that
poetry, by which I lived?”
last lines of “The Bear,” from Body Rags (1965)
Galway Kinnell’s poetry is responsible in part for keeping me going in the early days of trying to take myself seriously as a writer. Kinnell died about a week ago at the age of 87 after a battle with leukemia. Whenever I am struck low by something big, or even something that won’t let me escape, like some ludicrous over-the-top rapture (these days I really love Taylor Swift and what the Hunger Games novels say about girl power … seriously!), I turn to collections of this great Irish American poet’s work — Body Rags, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, What a Kingdom It Was, or The Book of Nightmares. I don’t read his poems to lift me up or calm me down so much as to screw me all the way back in again. Life is hard. Pain is part of beauty. Death has immense meaning. Perhaps our fear of it should not be met with anger or rage so much as sorrow and love. Galway Kinnell had an acute ability to go into the tenderness of life’s most hardcore realities and light things up just the right way.
My college poetry professor, Gary Miranda, introduced me to Kinnell’s work. Gary would finish our Tuesday night classes reading us his favorite Go Here to Read the Rest
My fall “Talking Indies” column, “Three Money Lessons for Starry Eyed Authors,” comes out today at TW. It summarizes three important lessons I’ve learned since I dove full-time into the publishing and writing world in 2012. The column is intended to be slightly provocative and amusing as well as heuristic with respect to self-publishing. It deals, essentially, with key economic/business elements that all writers need to understand — supply and demand in the writing world is not something to gloss over if you’re an indie author.
These three lessons are not unique to self-publishing. They are true for all the arts, and not just for indie artists, but for everyone in the world of creativity.
1. There’s a shitload of other work out there, i.e., you have more competition than you can possibly imagine (supply)
2. Unless you’re The Beatles or Picasso — or Derek Jeter — no one cares what you just put onto the market (demand)
3. The digital world makes product availability infinitely perpetual (leap frogging the supply and demand problem)
All three points are obvious and essential to understand for success in the modern world where half of what we do, think, Continue reading →
Today marks the 44th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death. He left this world when he was just 27. Thanks to my good friend Derrick Baldwin for reminding me of this. Derrick is one helluva keyboardist and I love it when his band gets him to sing.
Some people think you’re pathetic if you gush even just a smidge about Jimi. Those people don’t know shit and probably think people on “America’s Got Talent” are artists to follow for life. There’s more to art, though, than standing on stage and having yourself electrified into people’s homes.
Watch the video below and listen to what Jimi says about practicing. What separates Continue reading →
All people are poets. Only some of us know this, but it’s true. Each person has these secret bones in them. This is pan-human. You need to know about these bones, though, to look for them, or you won’t know they’re there.
Text Bones are pulsing white aching things. When words come out of that special place that feels like something from the outside is coming in first, they lodge inside your Text Bones, which are everywhere. After a few moments, they can leave Continue reading →
Even in death some don’t find peace (Photo credit: Gulfu)
I’m working on ten separate book projects these days — four novels, two memoirs, two collections of related stories, and two titillatingly weird erotic chronicles about masturbation in the modern world. These last I intend to publish under pseudonyms. 90% of the work I do is on my laptop, a rather trustworthy MacBook now seven (7) years old.
In addition to the ten big projects I’m working on I have over fifty short stories in various stages of undress that always seem to be shivering on the white screen I look at every day. Some of these stories are just notes and scraps of dialog, but the majority are nearly finished drafts or, perhaps, completed first drafts that I am not so happy with.
By the end of 2014 I hope I’ve got a publishing deal or two for a few of the books I Continue reading →
The Jimi Hendrix Experience performs for Dutch television show Fenklup in 1967 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Anyone who’s watched video of Jimi Hendrix (or was lucky enough to see him in person) knows that his LIVE, improvisational guitar performances are unparalleled. His early reputation of wild child shaman boogie man was something many of us not only revered, but we saw that persona as an ultimate expression of who we thought we might want to be (us guys anyway).
As much as Jimi was the epitome of masculine style for us hippie-heads back in the day (gotta admit I was 9 – 12 when he was peaking) his stage presence with all its cosmic force and roaring witch doctor invention was what truly made you want to “Be Like Jimi.”
Here’s the interesting thing, though: musically, as brilliant and inspiring as his creative stage performances could be, it was his work in the studio crafting, creating, and massaging songs that was his true brilliance. The video below provides a good example of this genius and its effect.
Jimi wrote “The Wind Cries Mary” one night after arriving in England, and the next day The Experience recorded it on the fly during the last 20-minutes of studio time they’d paid for that day.
Watch the short video below for words from the cats who were there. It was just supposed to be a first-run demo kind of thing. Jimi kept figuring out new things he wanted to do with the guitar as they went along, so they kept dubbing these inventions in as fast as they could. I’m putting a link to the song at the end of this piece, too, so you can see the final product performed live just a few months later.
Note here what Eddie Kramer points out about Jimi playing the song’s chords softly while he sings the vocals. Jimi was very insecure about his voice. He needed to hug a guitar to his chest in order to sing the lyrics of one of the most beautiful songs that came out of the psychedelic era, something he’d written not 24-hours earlier. It’s such a treat for us 47 years later to have Kramer break down that moment.
The studio-Jimi, the composer-Jimi, and the techno-Jimi were the secret geniuses that we don’t think about enough. Go back and listen to those first albums (Are You Experienced?,Axis Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland). His genius is still steaming in the air after nearly 50 years if you listen carefully enough.
What I want to know, though, is how he was able to be so gosh darned endlessly creative. I mean, we’re talking floating out above the heavens with his energy and musical soul all the time, every waking hour of every day. Yeah, it was the pinnacle moment in his life. Many gifted artists have their most prolific years from about 22 to 28 or so. Young synapses fire constantly. I remember so many of my friends when we were at that age (in the late ’70s and early ’80s), so many ideas, so much nascent art and political thinking percolating out of every orifice we had. But what we were doing obviously wasn’t as profound or freaking playfully connected to Infinity the way Jimi’s work was.
Maybe his creativity was partly more a function of all the people who were around him, along with being part of a moment in recording history when new tricks and gadgets were part of everyday music engineering for the first time ever. Obviously, there were more than a few insanely important artists roaming the world back then, bumping into each other, influencing one another and competing. And maybe, too, all the people around Jimi everyday, plus all the fans (and in those days we all knew good music when we heard it), inspired a palpable confidence in him, which in turn amped up the creative output, which in turn meant further acceptance and confidence, etc.
No one has come along since then with that level of fearless genius. No one. There’s a lot of talent out there, but no one comes close to that kind of creative force…in my opinion.
This is the second installment in a series on real people’s thoughts about Jimi and what he meant to them…and to modern music. Listen to the song:
For the next few months I am going to periodically offer commentary on video clips by famous artists on what it was like to meet Jimi Hendrix and what he meant to them. You can find most of these clips easily enough on YouTube, but there are special ones I want to highlight here at my website because of the special insights they give us into the creative process. Great artists speaking about other great artists provides us with unguarded insights into the life of the creative spirit.
Cover of Joni Mitchell
Below is the first clip I want to offer. It starts out with a Joni Mitchell interview and ends with a weird video rendition of “Voodoo Chile.” Note how “Mitch” appears to know Italian. That’s impressive as hell.
Joni and Jimi were both on the rise in the late 1960s when they met. We all know how much Jimi revered the Beatles and Bob Dylan. It’s likely he respected a lot of the other innovators of that era as well. And there were many. Certainly by the time Jimi and Joni met, it was clear that Joni’s ability to mix complex melodies with real poetry (not just lyrics) was worthy of Hendrix’s attention.
Joni says that Jimi recorded her concert using a big reel-to-reel tape recorder and Continue reading →
Logistic Center Amazon in Bad Hersfeld industrial park “Blaue Liede” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Amazon’s truly living up to her name. She’s a Big Badass Woman in the jungle. She thinks she’s learned a lot watching Walmart beat the crap out of their suppliers so she’s doing the same thing.
If you pay attention even a little to the publishing world, you probably know that I’m talking about Amazon’s harsh tactics directed at publishing conglomerate Hachette. Hachette doesn’t want to use the pricing and marketing scheme Amazon is offering. Amazon wants to have ultimate control Continue reading →
