maybe the best music story i know: some musical anthropologists are down studying ugandan court drumming, the nature of which is apparently these dense layers of polyrhythms, and the anthropologists want to know how the players go about creating these syncopations upon syncopations and they interview each drummer in turn and they ask them 'who's on the beat' and eveyone of them answers 'me'.
caught some of scorsese's blues show. the bobby rush episode with bee bee and that roscoe on piano who up and died immediately after filming. i have to admit i didn't know the boy either but he stole the show. in a record store: "they won't have me in here and in europe i'd have a whole section." (amen brother i'm dreaming holland). on beale street: "it's like they got angry and turned it into parking lots." i enjoyed meeting roscoe and seeing some of the old pictures, but mostly the show was sort of sad. sam phillips drooling into his beard. bee bee looking like somebody's beat up old grandma from playing that horrible vegas shit he plays. they make bobby rush drive all night to have some whoring country preacher show up his stuff. it was embarrasing. preacher has this great big pimp ring on. you don't have to be evangelical when you're a satanist because the ministers of jesus are sufficiently obviously frauds. yuck. ike turner looked good. but he's still moaning about how white boys stole his stuff. he didn't have no title on it. if ike 's missing something he had title on i'm guessing ike turner should look up his fucking nose but that's just a guess.
i remember when tina told about how bad ike was and everybody else was like "ooh that ike turner he a bad motherfucker' and i'm like "yeah and you hadn't already heard that? y'all motherfuckers must have ears of cloth for sure.." but then tina does that vanity fair interview and she says that when she first played the acid queen she had no idea 'acid' was lsd and i'm like: "you're a lying whore, tina turner, in 1969 you didn't know acid meant lsd? ike didn't let you look at magazines when you're getting your hair worked on? you didn't watch the t.v. a single time ike was off talent scouting? no news, no dragnet? and you playing fillmore west about once a month? you didn't know acid meant lsd?" vanity fair, however professed to believe her. the interviewer calls ike. ike says: "i didn't beat on tina anymore than your boyfriend beat on you." i found this terribly amusing but what was being called "political correctness" was still latest dogma among the suitgirls who do publishing.
i was working at michael's that year and seeing a lot of them suitgirls. i remember one telling me "this was such a wonderful lunch" (sigh). she was sitting at a rotten table under a reprint of a lame jasper johns and had just paid 20+ dollars for chicken and fries and water. the thing about suits is that they would be perfectly happy in jail if you just convince them it's a fucking career move. and the thing about dumb ass negroes and crackers and spicks is that they will volunter to kill in order to make college money in order to live their dream of being suits.
"be all that you can be
go straight to the penetentiary."
give em bologna sandwiches and prayer groups and exercise on a golf course once a week john ashcroft and all his ilk would not likely realize they were in jail for their schools look like jails and their offices look like jails and their houses look like jails and their dreams are for jails and their god is judge and jailor.
i want to go downtown like downtown was. i want to go to beale street like beale street was. i see the old pictures and they all run together in my head and i imagine these pick up boozy hopped up late night big bands of piano and sax and three guitars, two acoustic, one electric, and two harps and a washboard and a broom. and behind em a skinny little black girl with bobby sox and saddle shoes and horseshoe taps aclogging like an ebony mermaid jackhammer her panties winking at you in the swirl of her skirt. let that baby set my beat.
we can put all them suits off in prison where they can be happy and then we can get down to pursuing pleasure.
"all men are created equal and they should be able to pursue their happiness" . we wrote that a long time ago but just as dumbass negro preachers apparently cannot read the bible and so adorn themselves with pimp rings americans are such losers they can't read their own history. god died. maybe he was tinkerbell and died because people sat on their hands but for whatever reason it happened before i got here. now the pursuit of happiness is only the pusuit of pleasure. that's what high culture tells us. rich kids pay a lot of money to study that and here i give it to you free.
roscoe tells us that parking lots and loud guitars destroyed beale street. i believe him. you watch how people are these days, you look at that lame audience bee bee plays for. they stand when the song is over. these are useless pleasure seekers. when the song is finished that's when you're supposed to sit down you dumb bopless motherfuckers.
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