The World Didn't Owe Him Nothin'

David 'Honeyboy' Edwards

Rest In Peace

"David 'Honeyboy' Edwards, the son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave, performed with the founders of the art form, Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Son House, Tommy McLennan, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Big Joe Williams. He was the last of the bluesmen from his generation." ... Story continues here: David 'Honeyboy' Edwards Dies At 96 (LA Times)

Download: "Eyes Full Of Tears"

Download: "You're Gonna Miss Me"

Quote Of The Week

"The language of friendship is not words but meanings."

A Tree Dies In Brooklyn

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2011

Searchin' No More

Jerry Leiber

Rest In Peace

"Jerry Leiber, who with longtime partner Mike Stoller wrote "Hound Dog," ''Jailhouse Rock," ''Yakety Yak" and other hit songs that came to define early rock'n'roll, died Monday." ... Story continues here: Jerry Leiber, Rock'N'Roll Songwriter, Dies At 78 (NY Times)

Buy: The Daisy/Tiger Records Story (CD)

Buy: Hound Dog: Leiber and Stoller Collection (CD)

Buy: Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography (book)

Read: Lieber & Stoller interview (Blue Railroad)

Quote Of The Week

"Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. No man is free who cannot control himself."

Rain

As the falling rain
trickles among the stones
memories come bubbling out.
It's as if the rain
had pierced my temples.
Streaming
streaming chaotically
come memories:
the reedy voice
of the servant
telling me tales
of ghosts.
They sat beside me
the ghosts
and the bed creaked
that purple-dark afternoon
when I learned you were leaving forever,
a gleaming pebble
from constant rubbing
becomes a comet.
Rain is falling
falling
and memories keep flooding by
they show me a senseless
world
a voracious
world—abyss
ambush
whirlwind
spur
but I keep loving it
because I do
because of my five senses
because of my amazement
because every morning,
because forever, I have loved it
without knowing why.  

From Casting Off by Claribel Alegría

Dog Daze Of Summer

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2011

Quote Of The Week

"Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day."

45 Revolutions: Lester Bangs

The "Let It Blurt" b/w "Live" 45 was rock journalist extraordinaire Lester Bangs' debut recording, released in 1979 by John Cale's short-lived Spy Records Ltd. On the two tracks — produced by Patti Smith Group drummer J.D. Daugherty and mixed by Cale — Lester is backed-up by members of the Voidoids, Raybeats, and Patti Smith Group, and the result is a really great two-sider of damaged art-punk, along the lines of the aforementioned Voidoids and Pere Ubu, with Lester's admittedly not-for-everyone vocals raging on-top.

Download: "Let It Blurt" b/w "Live"

Dig: The Right To Be Wrong (by Richard Hell)

Dig: Mentor. Editor. Lester (by Jeffrey Morgan)

Buy: Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung (book)

Buy: Let It Blurt: The Life And Times of Lester Bangs (book)

Quote Of The Week

"A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed — and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!"

Away From The Numbers

"In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations."

From Existentialism Is Humanism, 1946

A.I.T.A. Hall Of Fame: Cockney Rejects

"Quintessentially British in the best possible ways... If The Clash had pretty well invented the terrace anthem take on punk-rock with their first album, the Rejects were the real deal — match lads who were in love with rock'n'roll and football — an east London answer to the Westway wonders... Listen to the Rejects and you are in a world of boxing clubs, smoky pubs, piss-stained terraces where you could stand up, good times and community." -Louder Than War

Download: "I'm Not A Fool" (live at Hollywood Studios, 1980)

Buy: Cockney Reject: My Life of Music, Football And Blood (book)

Buy: Join the Rejects: The Zonophone Years '79 - '81 (boxset)
Download: "England I Miss You Now" (demo) *

* Paul Weller's solo demo for a track eventually recorded

by the Cockney Rejects with Weller and Pete Way from UFO.

Quote Of The Week

"Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest."