“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-cuture 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)” ,,,,
Their version of the Sam Cooke classic
Nice to see Greg on the cover of the SFWeekly 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
When I first heard it, I thought it was John Prine, but Walker has a more friendly vocal warmth, a little less edgy and socio-politically significant perhaps, but definitely refreshing
I’m also going to say Randi Rhodes because I know there was a schism in the Air America organization, but I like both equally. When Jack Rabid writes that he doesn’t feel an anti-war, anti-Bush, groundswell among contemporary musicians, listening to Air America helps me feel it does exist, and is growing.
His 1975 country-hit rendering of this Steve Goodman tune shows his brilliant characteristic self-promoting chutzpah. After he breaks the song off with a spoken word moment of what makes a ‘classic country’ song, and then returns to a final verse that begins with “I was DRUNK the day my MOM got out of PRISON,” he ends up having it both ways, at once making one laugh at the convention, yet also honoring it and making one feel it. If such a song is not glorified with the title ‘poetry,’ that’s more the fault of poets in my opinion.
A new song! First heard on KPOO radio 89.5; Swamp Dog specifically asked that this song be debuted on March 6th, 2007. Beautiful Stax Volt feel on the verses with passionate righteous, but never clopying, testimonioal vocals before its more hip-hop chorus kicks in
to then give an award to Carrie Underwood.
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
