I'll be 53 in three weeks. I read your thing in Craigslist and like so many other occurrences it hits this protective/seductive nerve.
there was a beat named Bob Kaufman
old as I am I was too young to know him in the days of his almost glory
but in the late 60's and early 70's if you were in North Beach around City Lights you could maybe see him on the street standing on the sidewalk just rolling it mind open rambling word after word after word coming from god knows where and who and no why but the doing because it felt good to him I know wired out of his diminishment and juiced on grappa and thick with his human excrescences i mean fairly grimed with it and it's not about all that but the actual words he delivered like long long full breath horn solo bop cliches only it had the light of that particular day and the sounds incorporated from the traffic and the noise of my own troubled twenty5 year old heart watching that freedom I was there yes and he was there we had eye contact me and Bob Kaufman and it was that thing you probly heard of Harry Smith by now? anyway other field recordings of real and people singing because of the song gatherers like Alan Lomax and others who went all round the country with little 2 grand Nagra tape recorders and caught the still air vibrating still there was this man in Houston in the 50's and he played these garbage cans and went the same as Bob K. just off and gone let it come let it come and never censor let it out true freedom and in to the real air of the real true freedom day mad but they are also those straitlaced others too and Bob Kaufman never looked back never gave up bent and twisted and I'm sure everyone who ever loved him felt burned or pushed away and he was a vermin I suppose but poetic angel and one time Allen Ginsberg came into my tent up in Oregon at this thing Kesey threw called a Hoo-Haw and Roland Kirk was there and I was the one they picked to walk him up the long stairs into the hall he was blind yeah? and we clicked and hit the groove from the moment he got out of the limo that's sort of who I am to send this to you to champion Bob Kaufman and the purge projectile ad lib of extemporaneous contemporary forward thrusting beat throb or try at this late date to hold not even recapture but hold from the penitent wounds of the twentieth century into the scar tissue of this year.
so deep in the future it feels like another world.

that was a very sweet letter you put there
that I have now responded to without expectation of any kind
msg

posted by Juke at 11:22 PM [edit]