NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL A TOUR BUS

I've not been able to find out anything about this photograph but I guess it speaks for itself.

POETRY PICKS #2: THE BLUEBIRD by CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If you only think of Buk as a boozing, gambling, potty mouthed womaniser, this might come as a surprise. I include it below not just on its merit but to show this beautiful 2009 animation by Monika Umba from the Cambridge School of Art.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.


there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.

then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

The Bluebird by Charles Bukowski is published in The Last Night of the Earth Poems and The Pleasure of The Damned.

JANUARY PLAYLIST

Some favourites this month.

1. Henry “The Hipster” Gibson – “Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs Murphy’s Ovaltine?” (1944)
Mrs Murphy liked a cup of Ovaltine at night to help her sleep, until one night somebody spiked it with Benzedrine. Things were never quite the same again.

2. Screaming Gospel Chordettes – “I Can’t Believe It” (1958)
The Screaming Gospel Chordettes hurtle along chasing an organ accompaniment and surveying the troubles, wars, bloodshed and even sputniks around them.

3. The Alan Bown Set – “Jeu De Massacre” (1967)
Write a bunch of songs for a soundtrack album and then stich them together to make a single instead. The result is suitably madcap not least for the playground gun-shot sounds.

4. The Lloyd Alexander Real Estate – “Watcha’ Gonna Do (When Your Baby Leaves You)” (1967)
Swinging club soul from the Far East: Hackney.

5. Grahame Bond – “Moving Towards The Light” (1968)
By 1968 Graham had taken an E and in his music was all sunshine and flowers, make love not war. His Love Is The Law album is hippy Age of Aquarius claptrap from start to finish yet curiously engaging.

6. Felt – “I Will Die With My Head In Flames” (1986)
Felt’s ten albums neatly straddle the whole of the 80s; not that I was listening. Now, I hear the past and the future in them.

7. Morrissey – “I’ve Changed My Plea To Guilty” (1991)
When the Queen famously accused Morrissey of not being able to sing in 1986 he replied “that’s nothing, you should hear me play piano”. Unbelievers may scoff at the very thought, but here Moz – just backed with a piano – gives the vocal of his life.

8. The Pink Mountaintops – “The Gayest of Sunbeams” (2009)
When I was at school I was accused of making up bands. Whaddya mean you’ve never heard of the Direct Hits? This looks like I’ve made up the band and the song title.

9. Lumerians – “Burning Mirror” (2010)
Hold on tightly, we’re going for a white-knuckle lysergic ride.

10. The Electric Stars – “Between The Streets and The Stars” (2012)
How you view The Electric Stars will depend almost entirely on how you view the Brit-Pop era. “Between The Streets and The Stars” may have got lost in the scrum back then but now it's so out of step it almost sounds subversive. The chorus has most definitely infiltrated my brain.

GOODNIGHT MISS PEACHES

To mark the sad passing of Etta James yesterday, here's a lovely picture of her with Muhammad Ali in Zaire during the days before the "Rumble In The Jungle" fight of 1974.
Picture by AP/Horst Faas.

THE BUDDHA BAR by JOSEPH RIDGWELL

Regular readers will know I like Joe Ridgwell’s work. If I had a friend down the pub who wrote stories and poems, I’d like to think they’d be like Joe’s. This isn’t to say he writes like a gibbering lunatic, just that he writes like a perceptive mate with a bunch of escapades to tell rather than someone who wants to talk about literature all night; and who’d want to be stuck with them?

I finished The Buddha Bar a couple of weeks back but it was only yesterday when reading Jack Kerouac’s recently published The Sea Is My Brother that it properly fell into place. Joe hits the same theme in 2011 as Jack did in 1943. In Jack’s book Bill Everhart meets Wesley Martin on a drunken night out and the next day, on a complete whim, leaves his job as a college lecturer and hitchhikes to catch a ship and become a merchant seaman. “Look what twenty four hours and a moment of determination can do!” he exclaimed. “I think I realize now why the pioneer spirit always guided me in my thinking – it’s because he’s free, Wes, free!”

It’s that same restless spirit and search for freedom that dominates The Buddha Bar: the need to explore and to experience, even if those experiences aren’t always positive. Similar to his debut The Last Days of The Cross, we find a wandering Joe boozing, birding and becoming infatuated with the type of woman your mother maybe warned you about. When the opportunity of investing in a small bar in Thailand is put to him by some crazy local he has the hots for, and has just met, he doesn’t need much persuading in handing over the last of his money. “If you don’t take it you will regret it for the rest of your life. Fuck it, I thought,” and the dream of being a big shot bar owner puffing on a cigar takes shape. Things of course don’t work out the way of dreams, they never do, but there are funny times, sad times, scary times and dreary times, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. And from that, there's no escape.

The Buddha Bar by Joseph Ridgwell is published as a limited edition by Blackheath Books.
The Sea Is My Brother by Jack Kerouac is published by Penguin.

CAB CALLOWAY - "KICKIN' THE GONG AROUND" (1932)

This performance is taken from the 1932 film The Big Broadcast. It’s an amazing song. Watch out for some nifty (now familiar) dance moves around the 2:25 mark.

HYPE & SOUL – BEHIND THE SCENES AT MOTOWN by AL ABRAMS

“In view of the national publicity being received by the Detroit sound – may I again request that we register ‘The Detroit Sound’ as a trademark before some 2 bit label does and this humiliates us”. So wrote Al Abrams on a Quicki-Note in the early 60s and stuck it on Berry Gordy’s desk.

That national publicity was due, in part, to the records coming out of Gordy’s Motown factory being pushed by the tireless efforts of Abrams. As an eighteen year old from Detroit, Al became Gordy’s first employee after he impressed by securing radio play for a “god-awful” pre-Motown release in 1959 ("Teenage Sweetheart" by Mike Power if you fancy looking it up). From then until 1966 he worked as a record promoter and publicist for Berry Gordy Jr. Enterprises.

Al diligently kept everything from his time at Hitsville, as can be seen in his recent book Hype & Soul: from his Quicki-Notes; to correspondence with radio and television companies; to press cuttings; photographs; ticket stubs; and exchanges of ideas with his boss. When Berry wrote that the company needed to increase its promotion of Smokey Robinson, it was Al who came up with the famous quote that’s been attributed to Bob Dylan: “Smokey Robinson is America’s greatest living poet”. When Al ran that line past Dylan’s friend and biographer Al Aronowitz asking for permission to use it, Aronowitz reasoned “If Bob sees it in print, he’ll think he said it,” which says as much about Dylan as Smokey, although I’m disappointed it isn’t quite kosher.

That Abrams was a white Jewish kid isn’t significant by today’s standards, nor was it an issue within Motown who used the best people for the job, but reading the old press cuttings race and religion were very much factors back then when newspapers felt the need to end articles with “The administrative staff is about half white and half Negro. Almost all artists are Negro”. One artist who wasn’t Negro was Tommy Good and one of Al’s more audacious publicity stunts involved having Tommy’s placard-carrying friends and family “protest” outside Hitsville demanding the release of a record by Good, in a similar fashion to the on-going civil rights marches; a risky strategy but one which earned the requisite (good humoured) column inches. Race relations and the civil rights struggle are a dominant theme running throughout the book.

Temple Street Publishing have done a beautiful job in presenting Hype & Soul as immaculately as The Temptations stepping out at the Apollo. With nearly 300 glossy colour pages of Al’s memories and memorabilia, it gives a different slant on life within 2648 Grand West Boulevard with loads of new discoveries for even the most well-read Motown fan to enjoy.

Hype & Soul by Al Abrams is published by Temple Street. To order visit http://hypeandsoul.blogspot.com/