Tim Mitchell: Sonic Transmission (Chapter 12 - Little Johnny Jewel)

Through July and August 1975, Television continued to play at CBGB and in August Patti Smith began recording ‘Horses’. Verlaine contributed guitar on one track, making only a brief appearance in the studio in the process (producer John Cale recalls having ‘zero interface with him – except via a fleeting Patti entourage’149).There was already more than enough confrontation in the studio, anyway, where the joint presence of Smith, Allen Lanier and Cale (‘I wasn’t sure if (Patti) wanted to bed me or have me record her,’149 Cale says) had already raised the emotional temperature to boiling point. On that song, ‘Break It Up’, Verlaine’s contribution is distinctive but far from definitive, with short, preparatory runs and then climactic surges that almost overload Smith’s vocals. His solo, too – unexceptional and slightly ragged – shows little sign of what was to come from his own recorded work. Once more, he seemed to be keeping his real capabilities under wraps.On the night of August 19th, Television were sitting around in Patti Smith’s rehearsal room, down the hall from the offices of her Wartoke management company, and Verlaine decided that it was time they they recorded their own single. Having saved up some money from their live appearances, they now had, for the first time, enough in hand to make the proposition economically viable. Verlaine had Smith’s recent ‘Piss Factory’ as a successful precedent, not to mention the recording of ‘Horses’ to spur him on – a reminder that, once again, his band were behind the pace.That night, six possible contenders were recorded, with each band member playing in a separate room (‘We’d hear each other through the walls,’ Fred Smith later recalled3), and Verlaine plugging his guitar directly into the four-track recorder they were using, which had been borrowed from Smith’s drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. The band recorded a couple of their older songs, ‘Hard on Love’ and ‘I Don’t Care’, the newer ‘Friction’, ‘Prove It’ and ‘Little Johnny Jewel’ (on which Verlaine overdubbed some piano and organ) and a version of ‘Fire Engine’.‘Fire Engine’, like ‘Psychotic Reaction’, the other cover version in their live show, was a garage-band song dealing with altered states of mind. Both these songs explore the effects of the kind of derangement of the senses that Rimbaud had espoused as a way of finding new truths. Mental dislocation was a subject that Verlaine had already dealt with in ‘Poor Circulation’ and also in ‘Double Exposure’, a dramatisation of what he was later to say was the root of insanity

Due to a publisher’s error, Sonic Transmission was printed without its twelfth chapter, ‘Little Johnny Jewel’

Theresa Stern: Mess with my face and see it split (1973)

Richard Hell

Tom Verlaine

Theresa Stern was born on October 27, 1949, of a German Jewish father and a Puerto Rican mother in Hoboken, N.J., directly across the Hudson from New York City. She still lives there, alone, where all the poems in this book were written over a four month period in the summer and fall of 1971. She has since devoted that of her time not spent in flipping coins to composing a love story, THIN SKIN. It describes the murder, in ten chapters fired by Theresa, of her closest friend.

WANNA GO OUT?
is a question often asked on the streets around the cheaper bars in New York and Hoboken.

First poem in Wanna Go Out?:
STARS I WAS
Stars, why did you describe me?
You could have had a tree for a tattoo.
Why did I have to be these colors?
It's an ulterior motive, this 3-D nothing.
I loved him so much
but I accidentally dropped an electric toothbrush
into my cunt
and fried his johnson.
My box of chocolates start singing "This Is My Father's World" and
I ram a tooth into the baritone nougat.

Last poem in Wanna Go Out?:
YOU STRANGER I'M TIGHT AND JUICY
The stranger and the moon are good buddies.
The stranger is a puddle
and the moon is the moon's reflection in the puddle.
This is as close as we poets can come to life.
I depend upon your mercy as a goose upon a cigar.
Close this book I scream and come look me up so we can fuck as long
as I don't have to talk.
I'm not about to pay any of my debts ever.
Gored by Beethoven, you should know what it's like to be built
inside a little bottle out of wood.
The stranger has a cigar and is observing geese
pass across the moon like an intricate model ship
or symphonic violins, and all I can do is dream of mud, oh mud, mud.
Via
Mary Harron interviews Theresa Stern (Punk #4)

My copy of 'Wanna Go Out?' is autographed by Richard Hell. I really should have taken it down to Hobart when I went to see Television there. I wonder what Tom Verlaine's reaction would have been?

Sherwood & Pinch - Gimme Some More (Tight Like That)

The Pop Group - We Are All Prostitutes (Live @Bowery Ballroom NYC 17/3/15)

Thanks Joly!

Soft Machine - Ce Soir On Danse (Paris 10/67

Kevin Ayers
Mike Ratledge
Robert Wyatt

Daevid Allen, Soft Machine & The New Statesman

For Val XXX

Robert Wyatt interviewed by George Galloway (RT Sputnik 20/2/15)

Start at 13:02 to avoid all the wank beforehand

Daevid Allen & Robert Wyatt as extras in ‘Playa de Formentor’ (1964)

Soft Machine - Poem For Hoppy (Live at UFO in 2/6/67)

This was the day after John Hopkins was sent down for 9 months. Arrested for cannabis possession, Hopkins elected for trial by jury. In court on 1 June 1967, Hopkins claimed that cannabis was harmless and that the law should be changed. The judge, describing him as "a pest to society", sentenced Hopkins to nine months in prison for keeping premises for the smoking of cannabis and possession of cannabis, although he served only six months. Hoppy started UFO with Joe Boyd whose voice is heard at the beginning saying to "cut the record"

The Unlikely Story of 'A Change Is Gonna Come'

WTF?

Skintologists ft Nyusta - Light To The Shadow

Terry Riley on Daevid Allen

...Daevid and I remained friends through that whole period in Paris. I got Daevid into tape loops. I played him this stuff I had done in San Francisco with Anna Halprin like “Mescaline Mix” and pieces like that. Daevid got really interested in that and started doing a lot of stuff with tape loops. We used to jam a lot together in Paris. I’d also hang out on his houseboat on the Seine. It was very funky. He probably got it for $50 or cheaper. It was tied up to a quai and was a very small, one-room space. He lived there the whole time I was in Paris. We had mutual friends down at The Beat Hotel in Paris. We’d go down there a lot. We’d meet people like Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs there. Our cultural life at the time involved going from the houseboat to The Beat Hotel. We ran into many interesting people.

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Picós: Colombian sound systems

At the end of the 60’s the afro population of the Colombian Atlantic Coast developed an alternative to enjoy, and in turn, locally spread their preferred music; they built hand-made sound systems capable of triggering a huge party. These sound systems are known in the Colombian Caribbean as Picós. These Colombian sound systems were known, among other things, for having their own name (El Timbalero, El Coreano, El Isleño) as well as for their over-the-top appearance, and for having audio components that magnified their sound power to the maximum.
The so-called Picós, as mobile stations, began in the 60’s to create the basis of an urban, popular and contemporary culture that expresses itself through these powerful sound machines. The sound systems became the center of social and economic networks of craftsmen DJs, owners, music sellers, producers and purchasers, which together, on a small scale, make up an informal economy generated specifically to build, transport and operate these "mobile cultural spaces" which were popularly baptized as Picós.
The PICÓ documentary aims to tell the story of the Maury family in Barranquilla, Colombia, who for 40 years have lived in a house in the La Magdalena neighborhood, which in turn they transformed into a place where people gather, known as "La isla del encanto (the Island of enchantment)."
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