“They Don’t Teach You This in School” (heh heh!)
So, I recently heard this song “What Did You Learn in School Today,” from around 1962 by Tom Paxton, though I think it was the Pete Seeger version, and it’s got fast clever biting political words but that very ‘white guy’ (from the waist up) kind of feel that always made Seeger so unconvincing for me, and so I imagine Bob Dylan hearing it as he first got on the ‘folk’ scene and scoped out its terrain, and how “A Hard Rain” and “With God on Our Side” kinda came out of that milieu. It also got me thinking of what seems like a big difference between then and now. The way mass culture at the time was a potentially more liberating force than the pieties of school, hell even Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” etc. The media moguls of course picked up on such youthful discontent and started incorporating it in its advertising (even as it kinda dropped out of the art itself).... Public schools, or what’s left of them in this country, are still a bastion of misinformation and repression, and the entertainment industry can prey on such discontent, but now it’s more in the spirit of “they don’t teach you this in school (heh heh).”
Nice to see Greg on the cover of the SF Weekly with a feature byJennifer Maerza few weeks back. Also cool to see that two songs she singles out, “Pretty Belladonna” and “Fisher King” are ones Greg had me play keyboards on.
“I’ve been livin’ in the city/ that swallows ‘fore it chews” – check out www.myspace.com/miriamjacobson.
Not to single this out; but check out his myspace page for more info (www.myspace.com/mandeepsethi).
One of the guys who comes around here by the warehouse who I’ve had the pleasure of jamming with lately. One of the best drummers I’ve worked with, plays with power and appreciates and is adept at a wide range of styles, came closest to the sound I hear ‘in my head’ in doing my songs, even better….
A new song! First heard on KPOO radio 89.5; Swamp Dogg specifically asked that this song be debuted on March 6th, 2007. Beautiful Stax Volt feel on the verses with passionate, righteous, but never cloying testimonial vocals before its more hip-hop chorus kicks in
So, who do you like better? Ed Sanders or Tuli Kupferberg?
A Bucharest poet someone sent me a link to, because he had written a kind of ‘fantasia’ or ‘answer songs’ to one of my poems.
Because sometimes you just have to…
So, when people talk about people known primarily as poets who tried their hand at musical collaboration, Anne Sexton is not generally talked about—partially because her performances and recordings with her late 1960s and early 1970s band have never been officially released. I discovered them back in 2001, when Rebecca Wolff and Caroline Crumpacker, who at the time were responsible for organizing events, and trying to change the somewhat staid image of The Poetry Society of America, asked me to form a recreation of this band for a tribute. Even 30 years later, the rock band still had a disturbing power for the Sexton-on-the-page purists, but it’s definitely worth a listen, and certainly no worse than much of Allen Ginsberg’s more known forays into musical collaboration. In fact, Sexton was going whole hog with it before Ginsberg was, and it’s possible (though I can’t prove it) than some of what Sexton did with her band could very well have been an unacknowledged influence on, say, Patti Smith among others.
