Once I stood on a rock in Manhattan’s night with everything to come and death out of sight, listening to the terrifying music of Venus in Furs, the biting satire of William Burroughs reading “Thanksgiving Prayer” to 10,000,000 people on T.V. And I recall Muhammad Ali asking me, “To take my message to the white
I WILLL NOT GO TO WAR (TODAY TOMORROW OR EVER FOR YOUR LOST MIND MR. PRE-SIDENT) You want me to lay on the hard tarmac my head split open my eyebrows on fire my jaw dislocated my children pulling off my shoes for their teacher me screaming, how much money do you get my father?
ROOTS OF THE PUNK BEAT PUNK GENERATION – PART TWO Read More »
In 1948 Allen Ginsberg wrote Jack Kerouac “Don’t you see we both suffer. That’s really the basis of our friendship.” The Beats brought suffering to the surface. In the 1970s we were a people defined and united by our pain. The more you suffered the cooler you were, like those kids in high school who
ROOTS OF THE BEAT PUNK GENERATION, PART ONE Read More »
At the end of 1977I flew to London to join the Ramones for their New Year’s Eve Concert at the Rainbow Theatre. I had not been to London since 1974. When the Ramones and their manager, Danny Fields, invited me to join them at the Marble Arch Holiday Inn and review their New Year’s Eve
THE RAMONES NEW YEARS EVE CONCERT THE RAINBOW THEATRE LONDON 1977 Read More »
Sweet Maryjane how she rambles and rains/ down from the rooftops dropping her pain/ she looks like a photograph/ she looks like a photograph/ she looks like a photograph again BACK IN 1977 when all the headbanging began for me, New York was a city of rooms: The Factory, the Bunker, The Punk Dump, Mickey
