This weekend I wrote a review of the new DVD release for Janis: Little Girl Blue. It’ll be out in The Contributor next week, and I’ll try to remember to drop it here later with some more info about the actual DVD &emdash; I had to watch an online screener as I didn’t get my review copy in time for my deadline. I watched some of it with my assistant, but she seemed to burnout quickly on what looked like yet another documentary about the 1960′s counterculture. It’s easy to feel like you’ve digested the radical left of mid-century America, and I feel that way too, sometimes. Other times I’m back in touch with the feelings, ideas, and inspirations that were sparked by the Beats and combusted by the Hippies, and Janis made me feel like that. I also discovered a great little Jefferson Airplane doc. The Airplane plays a big role in the Janis film. Janis was actually considered as a possible vocalist for the Airplane before they asked Grace Slick to join. What a different world it might have been, but not necessarily a better one.

In a year of huge losses of our musical heroes, Airplane guitarist and co-founder Paul Kantner’s passing away on January 28 is one that won’t be overlooked on this shimmering page. Here’s the 2004 documentary Jefferson Airplane: Fly Jefferson Airplane…

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This spring we mark 50 years since we lost Richard Fariña in a tragic motorcycle accident on April 30, 1966. The author of this great article at The Guardian assumes most readers will be familiar with Fariña as a literary figure who wrote the novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me which was published only weeks before Fariña’s death. The article looks at Fariña as a literary link between the Beats and the hippies.

Of course every songwriter in Nashville and I know that Fariña was a folk singer in the same Greenwich Village scene where Bob Dylan made his name, and that Fariña’s most memorable music can be found on the records he recorded with his wife, Joan Baez’ sister, Mimi.

I haven’t read Fariña’s novel, but it’s fun to find out something unexpected and new-to-you from an artist you already respect, isn’t it? Looking forward to reading that one. If you already have it on your shelf fill us in with a comment about the book. If you’re not familiar with Fariña’s music or if you just haven’t heard Richard and Mimi in awhile here they are killing it with Pete Seeger on his Rainbow Quest television show about two months before Richard’s death…

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Nowadays, it’s hard to remember a time when poetry really mattered. I still love to read poetry and write poetry, and I occasionally get out to read my words in a bar or a coffeehouse in Nashville where other poets gather to share their words, but it’s almost always a case of singing to the choir — nowadays the main audience for poetry is other poets.

But that’s not always how it was. 55 years ago, after World War II, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas began nearly five years of BBC appearances that found Thomas reading his verse, lecturing, interviewing and appearing on panels. Thomas was treated like a rock star and his busy touring schedule around Britain, across the Atlantic to America and back looks more like what we’d expect from a famous singer/songwriter.

Today, most of us think of poetry as something that is read in a book, but poetry has always been meant for speaking aloud and Thomas’s resonant voice and dramatic delivery captivated his radio and live audiences alike. He won and fostered a cult of personality, perpetuating a myth as the wild, drunken writer and eventually inspiring the Beats and The Beatles. Thomas supposedly drank himself to death in New York, consuming 18 straight whiskey’s in the White Horse tavern before slipping into a coma back at the Chelsea hotel. This version of the poet’s demise sounds perfectly punk rock. It’s also, almost surely, untrue.

Here’s a great Dylan Thomas biography from the BBC’s great Arena program…

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