Celebrating National Poetry Month, here’s a rad radio production of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell which was published 145 years ago this year. Even though it might not be immediately evident Arthur Rimbaud had a lot in common with William Blake: both saw the benefits of altered states on literary vision and both were natural born rebels who couldn’t seem to help but attack the mores and codes of their contemporaneous cultures. Both poets were also visionaries whose words went on to influence the rock ‘n’ roll music of the 1960s and 70s. Bands like The Doors and artssts like Bob Dylan and Patti Smith quoted and name-checked both of these poets, and quotes like “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (Blake), and ““A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses” (Rimbaud), seem as if they emerged from the American postwar underground.

Started in London in April 1873, and finished in France that August.
It draws on his stifling – often violent – relationship with Verlaine, and
his discovery that poetry was not enough. He was the great poet of
the age, and he didn’t have a pot to p*ss in. He wanted more.

Listen to A Season in Hell here…

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I once read an essay by music critic Simon Reynolds where he pointed out that the fundamental difference between punk music and the new wave and no wave music that followed it is that new wave and no wave bands were formed by art school kids, but punk music was always rooted in literary inspirations — Patti Smith was a poet before she was a rocker, and Tom Verlaine took his pseudonym directly from another verse-slinger.

Now there’s a new book about the influence the New York Poets of the 1960′s had on the punk kids. Here’s PBS with the word…

“Patti Smith, Richard Hell, these people we know as musicians came to New York to be poets,” said Kane. “And they came with relatively old-fashioned notions about what constitutes poetry. These poets gave them alternative ways of thinking about poetry.”

In many ways, Kane shows, these musicians had a love-hate relationship with the New York School poets because of those differences. While these poets were insistent on not taking poetry too seriously (poet Ed Sanders, for example, published a magazine at the time called “F*** You: a magazine of the arts”), these musicians had come to New York with the closely-held ideas that an artist was meant to convey high emotion and speak from a position of authority — ideas taken from earlier poets like the British romantics, and reiterated by beat poets like Allen Ginsberg.

“[New York School poet] Ted Berrigan would say, ‘poetry can be fun, it can be light-hearted,’” said Kane. “He questioned the authority people were investing in figures like Ginsberg. And meanwhile Lou Reed and Patti Smith were enamored of the arguably hyberbolic lyrics of a poem like [Ginsberg’s] ‘Howl.’”

But while musicians like Smith were in some ways resistant to the poets of the day, Kane shows how they were also influenced by them, including by the air of indifference they projected, and even their silliness.

On Smith’s 1975 album “Horses,” for example, she allowed herself to be funny, something she mostly set aside in her later music. “I think that deep, intelligent, rich humor was inspired partly by the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church,” Kane said. St. Marks is also the place Smith first performed.

Here’s Smith and her band live on Swedish television in 1976…

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Earlier this evening I had just finished a yummy dinner of homemade soup with Japanese noodles, miso/lime broth, chicken, carrots, seaweed, and some hot red peppers I bought at the farmers market on Friday evening. I had a great workout this morning and then proceeded to knock the hell out of a to-do list full of tasks, and I even found time to finally unload some winter clothes from my truck at my storage space and sort through a bunch of cold weather clothes before taking a big load to the Salvation Army down the street. The sunset was lovely and the soup was tasty and filling — a nice ending to a productive good day. That’s when I saw a headline on my phone informing me that Sam Shepard had died.

Shepard, his plays, his prose, his films and his persona as an American artist all loom large in my pantheon of creative heroes. I actually admire and enjoy the work of lots of writers, actors and directors, but Shepard is way up on that mountain for me. Shepard is right up there with the Beat Generation which inspired him, and Patti Smith his one time lover and collaborator. Shepard is on that mountain next to other great anti-leading-man actors from the 1980s like Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts at their very best. Among the rocks you can see Shepard sharing a handful of mushroom buttons with Eugene O’Neill and rolling another smoke with Nina Simone whom Shepard saw performing while he was a busboy at the Village Gate when he first moved to New York City. He plays his beloved drums on an outcropping with Jimmy Dean and Brando — they both loved to play the drums and what if Shepard had had the chance to put them on his stage with his words in their mouths?

Motel Chronicles will always be one of my favorite books, and I’ll never forget the Lobster Man from “Cowboy Mouth,” and I’ll never forget Shepard as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff appearing out of the red flames and black smoke from his wrecked plane putting one foot in front of the other crossing the desert walking straight at the camera; not speaking or crying or screaming or yelling, just walking, right into his own legend.

Adios, Sam. Here’s the man himself looking back on his big screen breakthrough in Terence Mallick’s Days of Heaven…

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So I found an interesting article at Please Kill Me yesterday. It seems that poet/rocker Patti Smith may have bought the childhood home of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Along with Jim Morrison and William S. Burroughs, Rimbaud is one of Smith’s great heroes — her song “Land” from her classic album, Horses, features the singalong lines “Go, Rimbaud!” Here’s the word about Smith’s recent purchase, and the neverending allure of Arthur Rimbaud…

Perhaps no performer in rock music has been more influenced by Rimbaud than Patti Smith – early on with her own poem “Rimbaud Dead” from “Babel” (1978), and in her music – the song “Land” on her first album “Horses” (1975) – her incandescent chanting of “Go Rimbaud”…

In 1976, Smith told Rolling Stone, “I saw the cover of ‘Illuminations’ with Rimbaud’s face, y’know, he looked so cool, just like Bob Dylan. So Rimbaud became my favorite poet.”

In an interview with Thurston Moore in BOMB Magazine in 1996, Smith talked about her youthful influences: “I had devoted so much of my girlish daydreams to Rimbaud. Rimbaud was like my boyfriend.”

It came as no surprise then, when I read in Architectural Digest that Patti Smith recently purchased “a reassembled version” of Arthur Rimbaud’s childhood home in Roche, a small French village near the Belgian border. Like Bob Dylan (who famously went on a public tour of John Lennon’s boyhood home and in 2008, showed up by himself at Neil Young’s childhood home in Winnipeg, asking to see Neil’s old bedroom), Patti Smith has an affinity for visiting the important places of the heroes and inspirational figures in her life. It was at his farmhouse in Roche where Rimbaud spent much of his childhood at age 19, wrote his most famous work, “A Season In Hell.”

The farmhouse has a long history. According to the 1987 biography “Rimbaud” by Pierre Petitfil, the farmhouse was acquired in 1789 by the poet’s great-grandfather. In 1918, it was destroyed by the Germans in World War I. It was rebuilt in 1933, only to be destroyed again in 1940, during World War II. The current farmhouse is said to be in a state of reconstruction.

Celebrating National Poetry Month, here’s Smith talking about Rimbaud’s last written work, and offering a recitation of her own “People Have the Power”…

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Performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson was one of the only women inside of William Burrough’s clique of friends and collaborators during the 1970′s, while some critics were pointing to what they saw as misogyny in Burrougs’ writings and statements to the press, women like Anderson and punk priestess Patti Smith befriended WSB, and were praised by the writer who trusted in their mutual friendship and praised them as artists.

Hear Anderson’s remembering of Burroughs in this remarkable portrait on BBC radio…

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I’ve been seeing a lot of old David Lynch posts popping up as Facebook “Memories” lately, and I was reminded that we’re still celebrating the 30th anniversary of that strange, sad, scary and sensational film, Blue Velvet. It looks like we’ll be getting a new doc about Lynch and his visual art practice soon, but now’s a great time to re-watch Blue Velvet. As a teaser here’s a great little conversation about the film, the Twin Peaks series, and Pussy Riot between Lynch and Patti Smith…

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I already posted about Patti Smith’s debut album, Horses, turning 40 this year. I noted that I hadn’t seen much news about it, but notices have recently started popping up, and I’m glad to see that the year won’t pass without more light being held up to this seminal song cycle which begins with the words “Jesus died for someone’s sins, but not mine…” Here’s Uproxx with their take on Patti’s premiere, and that infamous first line…

It’s one of the most jarring album-opening lyrics of all-time, and the fact that Patti Smith chose to begin her career with it is a prime example of just how audacious she was. When her debut album, Horses, which turns 40 this week, begins with that line, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is not messing around.

In a purely technical sense, the song that line is attached to is a cover of Them’s garage-rock classic “Gloria,” which itself began Van Morrison’s illustrious career. But really, Smith makes the song all her own, both with the lyrics she brings to it and the sheer energy. Really, Morrison laid down the template, and Smith ran roughshod with it, to the point that it really feels like an original.

Here is a great doc about Patti and her music…

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Following up on my last Patti Smith post, I realized the other night that 2015 is the 40th anniversary of Smith’s debut classic, Horses. I’ve seen lots of notices in the news this year about the 40th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run which also came out in 1975, but I don’t think I’ve heard a word about Horses.

Of course, Smith doesn’t make a commercial breakthrough until her third album, Easter, which features “Because the Night” which the singer co-wrote with Springsteen. They’re both from New Jersey, after all. Nonetheless, in 1975 Horses was a cannon blast of a kind of poetic rock not heard since the best days of The Doors along with one of Smith’s heroes, Jim Morrison. Smith covers Morrison covering Them with the album’s opener, “Gloria.” Add the sublime “Redondo Beach” and the homoerotic poetics of “Horses” and you’ve got a debut album lots of folks will remember four decades on.

Here’s a bit from a Rolling Stone interview with Smith. Check out all the odd coincidences surrounding the release of the record and the life of another Smith hero, French poet Arthur Rimbaud…

“The exact date is November 10th, and I want to celebrate it in New York in a special way,” Smith tells Rolling Stone. “We have things we’ll be doing in Paris and London, everywhere, because it’s a true milestone. I’m proud to have a milestone like that.”

The significance of putting the album out on November 10th is something that still makes Smith laugh. Originally, she had planned to put Horses out on October 20th, what would have been 19th century French poet – and major Patti Smith inspiration – Arthur Rimbaud’s 121st birthday.

“Something happened because of the gas shortage – they didn’t have enough vinyl – and it was postponed and I was really upset,” she recalls. “Then [Arista Records founder] Clive Davis told me, ‘Really sorry, it’s going to be November 10th. There’s nothing we can do that.’ And I just laughed and said, ‘Well, that’s the anniversary of Rimbaud’s death.’ It was still magical.”

The singer says she’s looking forward to commemorating the record, which contained the single “Gloria” and many songs that have become concert staples like “Redondo Beach” and “Free Money.” “I think we continue to deliver all of these songs sometimes stronger than when I was young,” the 67-year-old says. “So I’m going to be happy to celebrate it, to perform the album with happiness, not with any kind of cynicism or a cashing-in thing. It will be a true, proud celebration, so the answer is yes.”

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I usually don’t go out on Friday nights, but this past Friday night Antonia and I went to OZ to see Patti Smith read from her impressionistic new memoir, M Train. It was a real hot ticket last week and we were lucky that Antonia had grabbed them immediately when the event was first announced. I’d seen Smith play live twice before, but never heard her do a straight book reading. It turns out we got a little bit of both: Smith read several sections from her book while making fun of her own outfit and making some hilarious asides about her book. When she was done she brought up Tony Shanahan to play acoustic guitar on a cool little acoustic set which included a dedication to Paris and a bombastic “People Have the Power” to close.

I haven’t started reading the book yet, but it sounded great on Friday night. Patti also sounded good back in 1979 when she played the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ…

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In the 1970′s few women were allowed in William Burroughs’ clique of male friends and colleagues. I’ve seen lots of lovely pictures of Burroughs with Patti Smith and I’ve read that she had a crush on the writer. According to this new BBC program, another woman who had access to The Bunker – as Burroughs’ NYC basement apartment in a former YMCA was called – was experimental composer and performer Laurie Anderson. Listen to Anderson profiling Burroughs here with Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted here…

As a bonus, here’s Anderson performing at the Nova Convention honoring William S. Burroughs in 1996…

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