Sound Is In Your City

It’s a massive historical oversight that 1969's Harlem Cultural Festival has never gotten its due... Until now. (The list of performers who played the multi-weekend fest is pretty mind-blowing: Nina Simone, B.B. King, Sly  & The Family Stone, David Ruffin, Mongo Satamaria, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, The 5th Dimension, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Stevie Wonder, and Mahalia Jackson, to name a handful.)

Ecstacy In Slow Motion

Playing The Bass With Three Hands is one of the best new memoirs I’ve read in ages; Will Caruthers is a hell of a storyteller, his voice lifting off the pages and flowing into your mind's eye with crystalline clarity. His tale is dark, laugh out loud  funny, insightful, inspirational, druggy, and brutally honest. It's also nearly impossible to put down.

There’s really no need to be a fan of any of Cartuthers’ bands to enjoy the book — though it’s a must-read for Spacemen 3 fans, if only for the brilliant and hysterical chapter on the Dreamweapon concert, aka “A Night Of Contemporary Sitar Music” — as it’s much more than just a look back at a “career” in music. Anyone who grew up in a go-nowhere town craving escape, be it via chemicals, music or otherwise, will be enthralled, as well as anyone who spent any time working a shit job (there’s one particularly horrifying chapter on that). The book also works as a perfect primer on the grim realities of how commerce corrupts art, and how unglamorous life on the road in a band on a limited budget can be.  

Rating: Three thumbs up.

No Forgive Action

If you’re of a certain age and grew up in NYC you know the thrill of seeing a fully painted train car pulling into the subway station. There’s nothing else like it. FUTURA 2000 was taking things to another level well before graffiti was in any way respected as true art — or commodified by companies looking for street-cred — rocking this classic top-to-bottom full-car back in 1980. He went on to do stellar work for The Clash and others, and produced the stone-classic Phillies Blunt shirts (with SHARP, if I’m not mistaken). To see a corporation which attempts to portray itself as a “street” brand ripping him off (and writing off his legacy), is disgraceful.

Spread the word: boycott The North Face and all affiliated brands (Vans, Supreme, etc.) until they do the right thing and pay the man. And fuck ‘em, boycott them after that too.

Photograph: Martha Cooper

Happy Time

Tim Buckley season is here. This cut is taken from the newly issued archival release from Owsley "Bear" Stanley's vaults, and it's pretty damn glorious. I love that there's still sonic documents like this out there just waiting to be found and released.

A Tale Of Two Cities

"I cherish my memories of those first few days of freedom in NY [in 1943], especially my sense of liberation from not having to submit to any authority, and knowing that I could go anyplace and do anything at any time. One night I went to Washington Square and got drunk for the first time. I fell asleep on the sidewalk and nobody bothered me. It was ecstasy sleeping on the sidewalk realizing I had no commitment to anything or anyone." -Marlon Brando

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Over the last few weeks the police have been clearing Washington Square Park of regular people for doing little more than enjoying the park as it was intended. A few blocks away in the East Village, the privelleged transplants (bros and woo woo girls) can act the drunken loud fool to their hearts' content.

Anyone who grew up in New York City, or is a student of the city's history, knows Washington Square Park has always been a destination, a cultural center, and a hub for activism (way back in 1834 the city's stonecutters rioted in the park in protest of NYU's use of prison labor). It is the people’s park.

Photograph: The Face Of The Village by Weegee, circa 1955

Shelter Within

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones..."

Words: Haruki Murakami, 2002

Photograph: Lee Greenfeld © 2021