When I was a kid I read for hours in the local bookstores, working my way through the Hardy Boys detective series, then moving on to Ian Fleming’s secret service novels. I didn’t understand anything about detectives or spies, so it was strictly fill-in-the-blanks, piecing together a picture of the world from bookrack to bookrack, unguided, racing through the set-ups to the death-defying sex scenes.
I loved the nearest branch of the public library too, ever since the Friday night when I was six, in 1960: My pal Pete Damon and I had our first sleepover and brought five or six picture books about bugs back to the house to study by flashlight, all night in bed. That’s still one of the best times I ever had in my life, it was so much fun, reading about walking sticks, and praying mantises, sharing the pictures of anthills and beehives. Life seemed huge, friendly, ancient, inexhaustible.
But the reading experience at Ulbrich’s Books at the local suburban plaza, was different. They had popular titles, the latest things, like The Sport Of Judo by Kiyoshi Kobayashi and Harold Sharp. Me and Pete poured over that and eventually brought it home, learning to throw each other all over the yard, using Advanced Foot Sweeps, and the Major Outer Rear Drop Throw. That was 1965, when I was 10. I still have my copy of that summertime obsession.
Another big bookstore discovery, perhaps the most important, was in February, 1966, when a Dell paperback called Folk-Rock: the Bob Dylan Story, by Sy and Barbara Ribakove, appeared one day on the same rack that held James Bond and Mike Hammer. “The First! The one and only!” shouted the cover in a red balloon. I purchased a copy for 50 cents. The book began with a list of all the times Dylan ran away from home, and told the story of his first flight, to Chicago, when he was ten.
“Destiny appeared in the form of a weathered Negro street singer strumming a guitar. Bob, awed, couldn’t pull himself away. ‘I went up to him and began accompanying him on spoons—I used to play the spoons when I was little.’ …Before the police corralled him and took him home to his parents, Bob spent three months tagging after the street player and his friends, one of whom gave him the priceless gift of an old guitar.” Man, that’s better than Pinocchio.
As I got into my teenage years, I found and read Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, a book that still carries a message for me. Norman Mailer’s Why Are We In Vietnam? amazed me because the story was of a teenage genius named DJ, along on his father’s demented hunting expedition to Alaska. The novels that spoke to me the most were Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey. It seemed like you could base your whole life on those. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island Of the Mind, and Leonard Cohen’s TheSpice-box Of Earth inspired me to make my own poetry. William Blake became important to my survival, and as life got more psychedelic, I had my portable copy. All of these eye-opening texts came my way at Ulbrich’s Books. I spent hours perusing books in the store, but the owners were patient, and never once threw me out.
I grew up, said goodbye to my pals, and got out of that town a few years later. I remember reading Ed Sanders’ book The Family, before I split. It was a terrifying vision of California, and Charles Manson. At the time,The Greening Of America was a sensation as well, though I never bought it, just glanced into it. And Future Shock. Well, everybody was living that one.
Despite Sanders’ warnings, I landed in San Francisco at 18 years old and began living a precarious existence as a wandering street singer for several years, no doubt inspired by my reading about Bob Dylan’s nonexistent friend.
My bookstore of choice in San Francisco was City Lights, an iconic landmark even then. I knew it was Ferlinghetti’s shop, and had read much of the poetry he’d published by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and others. I’d see him coming and going about his business, as I played on the busy corner across the street.
During the day, if traffic was too slow on the sidewalks to bother playing, or if it was cold or raining, I’d go into City Lights, downstairs into the basement, pick a book out from the shelves, pull up a chair, and read for hours. The Travels of Marco Polo introduced my imagination to the magic, mystery and beauty of the East—what a story! Charles Dickens, and his street characters in Oliver Twist captivated me, with tales of running away into city-wide adventure. I bought Hunter Thompson’s satire of ’70s America, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and read it straight through, sitting all night at the counter in Hunt’s Donuts at Mission and 20th.
My next trip back to City Lights, I climbed the stairway above the front counter cash register and in the quiet room up there, devoured Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. But my bible at the time was Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. The tales of Doc the marine biologist, and Mack, the king of the bums, mythically reflected the adventures I was having in San Francisco. All of these books were spellbinders, opening up in vivid ways ideas of life beyond the world I knew.
Back downstairs, in the philosophy section, I was reading Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, which left me dumbfounded. What the hell? I would have loved to go beyond that duality, but I didn’t get it. I was struggling, but enjoyed the aphorisms anyway. Martin Buber’s I & Thou—which I was led to believe by a writer named Stephen Pickering had been one of Dylan’s favorites—was about the quest for God. I reached, tried to understand, didn’t get so far. But it was fascinating. I was willing to know more, and that was a start. Not “getting it” was sometimes a major piece of my bookstore education, as I tried to come to terms with concepts that were beyond me. Anyway, I spent a lot of time in there, sometimes even nodded off, but the City Lights staff never pushed me out.
After joining a rock and roll band, I moved to Los Angeles in ’76. My favorite bookstore down there eventually became Dutton’s, where I became friends with a poet, the late Scott Wannberg, and once again spent a lot of afternoons hanging out reading, and talking, though I didn’t quite have the time for that I’d had before.
I’m back in San Francisco now, after years of living in Southern California, and I’m happy to report that City Lights is booming. With online book sales and high rents shutting down bookstores almost daily, that is quite an accomplishment. I still make a pilgrimage there, going up to the poetry room, which is, without wanting to get too saccharine about it, like a visit to a sanctuary, a peaceful spot where life can be appreciated and contemplated, and important and beautiful voices can be heard.
I went there for the 60th anniversary of the store, walked upstairs, and there was the man himself, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 94 years old, pouring champagne for well-wishers and enjoying the day. I had a copy of his new book Time Of Useful Consciousness and I asked him if he would please autograph it. I took the opportunity to thank him for the poetry, as well as the store, for allowing me to read my way through it, in the ’70s.
“I used to go up in that room above the front door, and read. I was homeless at the time, and I want to thank you for your hospitality. Sometimes I’d even fall asleep up there. You and the staff were always so kind. I feel like I got a lot of my education here.”
“Ah yes” he replied, “That was the science fiction room.”
The complications in any discussion of The Birth of Tragedy are overwhelming at this point. I’ve been looking at the companion piece he wrote later, An Attempt At Self- Criticism. Have you folks seen that?
He’s opposed the idea of the Christian with Dionysian. He thinks Christianity is anti-art, anti-life, the desire for a “sabbath of sabbaths.” I agree that the Christian message has at its root a disgust with the ways of the world. But there’s more to it. It’s also about seeing all with the eyes of love.
As usual, what is desirable is not black and white thinking , but a mixing of the viewpoints.
Christianity versus Art! Apollonian versus Dionysian! And a genius philosopher who went mad. But there is something to his probes into these phenomena and their effect on culture.
Live in Cleveland. 1981! The great Motown/Marvin Gaye hit “One More Heartache” from the live LP “One Night In America.” Later that same night the legendary “Swingo’s Incident!” Yipes!
The Frozen Chosen were playing every night on the corner of Broadway and Columbus, across from City Lights books, and Allen Ginsberg started coming out. We spotted him walking across the street towards us, he stepped right up and said “Hey guys, I’m Allen. Mind if I sit in?” We knew who he was, and said “sure.” He said “Can you play some country blues?” And we said yeah and went into a blues, and he started making up a song right there on the corner, singing to the people passing by. It was sailors and hookers and tourists and kids and nobody ever stopped but he made up these incredible songs. They’d go on and on, and were funny and moving, goofy and angry at the same time. The best one had a refrain of “Stay Away From The White House” and it was a commentary on the Nixon scandals, barbed, surrealistic and hilarious. And he was out there performing with the guys on the bottom of the musical totem pole in San Francisco at the time, the Frozen Chosen, probably the least respected group in a fifty mile radius. But he hung with us and was a huge inspiration.
Me and Danny were ambling across town the next day after that first session and he pulled up in his VW van, driven by his partner Peter Orlovsky. We said “Hi we were going to the Goodwill” and he said “Hop in,” and they drove us over.
He turned around and asked, “So what do you guys do out there to keep your voices together on the street”
“Whiskey helps” said Danny. Allen said “Dylan told me he uses a mix of honey and lemon when he gets raspy.”
Me and Danny just looked at each other. This guy knows Dylan, just dropped his name. We thought that was pretty cool.
Danny decided to stay around, see where the Ginsberg thing went. I decided to make a trip up to Portland, Oregon. I just wanted a change of scene.
Anton
I got out on highway 101 the morning after jamming with Ginsberg, and start trying to hitch a ride.
The first car that went by was a hippie in a Valiant. It stopped and I jumped in. He took me quite a couple hours North. I was happy and relieved to be moving, anticipating the trip, with no idea of what to expect.
He stopped and let me out at the first Ukiah exit and headed into the town, as I crossed over the highway to the ramp and stuck my thumb out again at the approaching cars.
This time I was stuck out there for hours. There was plenty of traffic but nobody wanted to stop. Some even rolled down the car windows and shouted at me, others flipped the bird. Finally a car pulled over, but as I ran up to get in, it drove off as the passengers in the rear seats laughed at me. After a while, a carload of high schoolers even drove by blasting a full moon at me out their backseat window.
I was starting to get the creeps from Ukiah. Hours passed, my paranoia started to run, and I began to consider my options. I wasn’t excited about walking into town, but sitting out there on the shoulder wasn’t getting me anywhere. I felt stuck.
The sunlight was hot and shining, in the high afternoon, and the air tickled my nasal passages, with that Northern California bouquet of pine sap, gully dust, and the faint trace of marijuana scent—not so much a smell as a bite up the nose—accompanied by a windy sort of high.
I was about to give up and admit I was stranded, when a yellow Mercedes pulled over on the shoulder. The driver was a fair and long haired, attractive woman in her early 30’s.In the passenger seat sat a fairly large, middle aged, bald headed man with a goatee, looking to be conservatively dressed, with an intense expression about his face and eyes.
The guy rolled down the window and asked me where I was going.
“Portland,” I told him, and he said, “Hop in. We’ll take you all the way.”
What luck. I jumped in the backseat, throwing my guitar and duffel onto the seat next to me, and we took off.
The car got up to speed. We rode along for a few minutes, then the man twisted around towards me. “I have a little game I like to play, when I’m first getting to know people. Do you mind if I read your palm?”
I offered up my hand, and he pulled it to him.
“Hmmm… hmmm” A few moments passed. “When you were young, you seem to have had an encounter of some sort with a very poisonous snake.”
“I didn’t.”
“Funny, the lines are very clear. I think you did.”
“No, nothing of that sort at all. I guess your clairvoyance has let you down,” I cheeked.
After that, I watched out the window and kept my mouth shut. I was glad I’d finally gotten a ride, and right to where I was going.
We pulled over in a grove overlooking the sea from a slight bluff, and all got out of the car for a smoke and stretch break. I lit up one of mine and leaned against the car by the back passenger side door. The sun was sinking and we still had a longway to go. We hadn’t even crossed into Oregon yet.
The man and woman had been discussing the object of their trip, but I couldn’t make much sense of it or even follow the conversation, but there seemed to be some sort of tension between them.
The man walked around the front of the car and stepped back towards me.
He stood right in front of me, and asked “Have you ever seen me before?”
I looked up. He seemed amused.
He was just a couple feet away, looking into my eyes. “Do you recognize me?”
Huh? I didn’t know what he was talking about. “No”
“Shall we tell him who I am?” he asked the woman, slightly turning his head towards her but keeping his eyes on me.
She didn’t say anything but stood away to the side, a few feet behind him.
The air was nearly still, fog smoked up from the blackbark pines, and I looked him in the face again.
“No. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“Well my name is Anton Levay” he said. “I’m the author of the Satanic Bible, and founder of the Church of Satan.”
“Never heard of you,” I lied, feigning indifference. I felt a jolt of adrenaline, and my back began to hurt, my heart raced.
He smiled for a moment then turned and walked around to the driver’s side ofthe car. He opened the door and slipped in behind the wheel. The woman took the other side, and I looked off into the distance for a second, then got in. We were a long way from anywhere. What else could I do?
I’d just seen his picture that week on the racks by the register at City Lights Books, in a creepy, purplish, goofy star trek-esque photo on the cover of his mad book. It had given me the chills: the shaved bald head, the pointed ears and goatee, the arch expression. In person the effect was different, but no less creepy.
I figured he was a psycho, and it was bad luck being stuck on the outskirts of Nowhere with him. As he drove, they argued, and then he began to speak to me, making eye contact in the rearview mirror. They were going to Vancouver to capture a dead man’s spirit that was haunting or possessing a friend there. Once they caught the spirit, he said they were going to set it on someone they didn’t like.The process involved spells and other necromantic action, and I couldn’t really follow the story. It was too outrageous.
In a seacoast town on the California/Oregon border, we pulled up at a little rickety, waterfront bar, on a boardwalk overlooking a small boat harbor. Anton parked and jumped out of the car, saying he was going in for cigarettes, he’d be right back. As soon as he was out of sight the woman turned to me. She was crying.
“I’m so afraid of him!” she blurted. “Something terrible is going to happen.”
“Why don’t we just leave him?” I said in a rush. “Look! He left the keys in the car. Let’s just ditch him here and go!”
“He’d track us down! He’d get me!”
“C’mon!”
“No!!”
The door of the bar opened and Anton came back down the walk tamping his new pack of smokes. He got back into the now perfectly quiet Mercedes, lit one up, and we continued on our journey.
The sun went down and the world grew even darker. The road climbed into a mountainous wooded area, extremely remote.
Anton drove and spoke to neither of us in particular:
“If something were to happen to someone up here, they wouldn’t find the bodies for weeks.”
I opened up the Barlow pocket knife that I kept in my pocket and stuck a folded up match book in there to use as a handle, in case I had to open the blade up fast.
The road was winding and climbing, the land was pitch-black, and I was anxious as shit. In the dark of the backseat I pretended to be asleep and silently wigged.
I had to open my eyes as I felt the car slowing.Anton pulled off the road at a bend, and stopped on the wideshoulder.
What’s this?
He left the car running, got out in a hurry and walked up the highway in the dark. A minute later I saw headlights coming from the opposite direction. A car came around the turn and drove straight over on to the shoulder and stopped facing us. Anton approached the car and after a short, hushed conversation with the driver, he turned and started back towards us.
I was sweating with fear. I thought I”d had it. I was going to be tortured and killed, gutted and used as an offering to the Necromancer.
Anton just got back in and we drove away. Maybe the other car just wanted directions.
In the early hours of the morning, the woman fell asleep, and Levay himself looked very tired. He began to talk in a weary voice about his concerns for his son, who had grown up around orgies and rites and other insanities, and who he hoped would grow up to be strong and true. The Black Pope began to seem like any other old fuddy middle-aged father, worn from responsibility.
I stayed awake the whole time. We entered Portland and they dropped me off by the school, and drove off into the night to save one life and destroy another. I never saw either of them again.
Barry Rose, the music director at the local rock ‘n’ roll radio station KBOP, happened to live in Joey’s building. Every so often he and his wife came out to the pool and Joey’d smoke a joint with them in the Jacuzzi. Joey got to know him a bit, so after we had the record finished and had an acetate, we decided to give Barry a preview.
Joey set it up for the next night at 7pm, in Joey’s apartment. We’d all be there, the writer’s, Joey, Chris, and me. Supplies were ready, all the Gold, Ludes, Courvosier, Heinikens, and whatever else Joey figured Barry might need to get in the mood to listen.
Barry came to the door a half hour late. He had long, straight black hair, and wore mirrored aviator shades and a leather jacket and pants. He was all in black, and slurring his words already. After offering a little of this and a sniff or two of that, we positioned him in a chair at the center of the room between the stereo speakers. He was leaning back in the chair with one booted foot up on the table. When everything was ready, we set the volume of the record player to “Hollywood Bowl” and dropped the needle on the disc. Barry started nodding his head in time to the music and rocking the chair a bit. As the record hit the chorus he smiled and shouted something no one could hear. We all just shouted and nodded back.
“Yeah!”
He was really getting into it. I was too, kind of excited to be listening through his ears. The record sounded great, and kept building and building. Barry was rocking harder now, sweating a bit and rolling his head strangely from side to side. At the start of the guitar solo he looked like an electric shock hit him, and he started sort of writhing in the rocked-back chair, pushing farther and farther back, just diggin’ the whole thing like crazy.
The solo was climbing, the whole thing was cranking, we were all rocking, Joey was playing air guitar, and so was Barry, who looked like he was levitating in his chair. As the solo hits its last and highest screaming peak, Barry seemed to have some sort of a conniption, and the chair tipped back and went completely over, dumping him on his back on the floor. We didn’t know what to do. He was just laying there. We hoped he wasn’t hurt, but didn’t want to stop the record and ruin the effect. So we left him on the floor, and he stayed down for the rest of the song, but you could sorta tell, he was still rocking.
When it was over we shouted “Barry are you okay?” and he just looked up and said “Wow.”
He liked the record, and said the station would go on it immediately. Then, a few minutes later, he got me in the corner and in a rambling way, told me that of course we’d need to hire him on as a consultant, that would really help. I told him we didn’t have any money, but, yeah, man, we’d sure look into it.
This song was recorded by a band we had that never really got off the ground, the Drawing Blanks. It was me, Eddie Munoz, Tony Marsico, and the late Michael Bannister. We made some demos, and it didn’t go anywhere. But I always loved this one.
The Case Files (2011)
Anything resurfaced on Torn Again, slightly re-written, and this version came out on the compilation, The Case Files, released on Alive/Naturalsound records as a cd, or vinyl.
I needed some dough bad, so I told our manager Danny Hollyway I was ready to do a publishing deal. He set a meeting up with the wigs over at A&M Publishing. I wasn’t too keen on going, but Danny told me I better if I wanted to do the business, so I said okay.
It was a morning meeting, and I wasn’t in the greatest shape. I was psychedelically hungover. I had an urge to cancel the meeting, but instead, I tried to pull myself together. I got up and put my shades on, and went outside to wait for Danny to show up. We always rode to these things in his car, and I was in no condition to drive.
In the meeting I shook hands with a couple guys. One, a serious man in an elegant suit, youngish looking, but with well-cut grey hair, seemed to be in charge. As we were introduced, I felt nervous and started to have an almost out-of-body anxiety experience, a real existential crisis that I was trying to keep a lid on. The old short term memory was out of order or something, so the names were gone from my mind the moment were introduced, as if they’d been written on the air in disappearing ink. I could hardly sit still to follow the conversation. This was how it was at most of the band’s business meetings during this time: I had difficulty getting my head around it.
I don’t know why but somehow the conversation got on to Chuck Berry. This got my attention and I jumped in: “Chuck Berry got ripped off man. What the fuck was ALAN FREED doin’ with his name on “Maybelline”? That’s bullshit, man! Payola! Rockola! Freed ripped Berry’s royalties in exchange for radio play. That’s a federal offence, but does anybody give a shit?!” I just raved on and on: I loved Chuck Berry, saw him as a great lyrical genius, and this thing galled me. “Freed ain’t no songwriter. I don’t buy that whole thing about him. ‘Father Of Rock n Roll.’ He didn’t invent that term. He was a dj that put his name on people’s tunes; he shoulda been ashamed. Alan Freed was a parasite!” I finally ran out of gas and went silent. I was a little out of breath, riled up. The other men all sat there motionless. I could hear traffic out on the street. The man with the brush-cut grey hair looked up at me and spoke. “Alan Freed was my father.”
Maybe I wasn’t hearing right. I looked down at the name plate on his desk. It said “Lance Freed.”
I can’t remember what was said next, it’s like someone turned the volume off, and we were all just looking at each other. But me and Hollyway got out of there quick, and to this day I’ve never made a publishing deal. It just never works out, so I’ve kept my publishing. Not that I couldn’t have used the dough!
ztsche never wore an umpire’s suit”
Allen
I was about to give up and admit I was stranded, when a yellow Mercedes pulled over on the shoulder. The driver was a fair and long haired, attractive woman in her early 30’s.In the passenger seat sat a fairly large, middle aged, bald headed man with a goatee, looking to be conservatively dressed, with an intense expression about his face and eyes.
roll radio station KBOP, happened to live in Joey’s building. Every so often he and his wife came out to the pool and Joey’d smoke a joint with them in the Jacuzzi. Joey got to know him a bit, so after we had the record finished and had an acetate, we decided to give Barry a preview.
