Nearly every Sunday evening I like to get my calendar and my to do list for the week together. These chores usually also include getting a blog post together for Monday morning. While I was getting my act together and making sure my ducks were in a row for another productive week I checked-in on a Twitter notification before stumbling across a tweet from Arthur magazine founder Jay Babcock which included this amazing video featuring Captain Beefheart talking with Meatball Fulton on July 20, 1969 — the date of the U.S. moon landing. Meatball Fulton was the alias of Thomas Lopez, founder of ZBS Foundation and the producer of their surreal radio dramas which aired in the 1980s. In the 1960s Lopez worked with WUHY in Philadelphia when he wasn’t involved in any number of underground art capers. Here’s the Wiki…

In 1968, Lopez worked at WUHY, a Philadelphia public radio station. He had his own show Sunday night called Feed. He called himself Meatball Fulton, the Aunt Jemima of the underground. The name “started off as a joke,” but he “decided to create this character, just another character, but this time [Lopez] would play it.”[1] Lopez has conducted audio interviews featuring such talents as Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Don Van Vliet of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, Mel Blanc, Paul Bowles and Dinotopia’s James Gurney. He has recorded a music album with Abbie Hoffman, appeared in an experimental film directed by Yoko Ono and provided the sound tapestry for the Mabou Mines stage production of Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

Here’s Lopez’ fascinating chat with Beefheart…

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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…

Stay Awake!

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Petey Greene was a pioneer of shock radio and television who became the voice of his black community in Washington, DC from the 1960′s — the 1980′s. He achieved international fame for his hilarious, outspoken, outrageous rants and interviews and for his tireless activism for civil rights, poverty rights and the rights of prisoners.

Greene was raised by his grandmother and dropped out of high school before enlisting in the army and fighting in the Korean war. Greene found little opportunity when he came home from the war and he gradually drifted into crime and alcoholism. Greene was convicted of the armed robbery of a grocery store in 1960 and sentenced to ten years in penitentiary.

In a sense, going to jail was Greene’s big break: During his incarceration Greene became a prison DJ and vowed to change his life and never be in prison again. Greene became famous throughout the cell blocks for his hilarious broadcasts and he eventually won a parole when he convinced a fellow prisoner to climb to the top of a water tower so Greene could talk him down and “save his life.”

Greene struggled on the outside, but this time he persevered, becoming both a pillar of his community and the broadcast celebrity portrayed in the 2007 film Talk to Me, starring Don Cheadle.

Cheadle narrates this PBS Independent Lens special about the man and his mighty mouth: Adjust Your Color: The Truth of Petey Greene pictures our hero reveling being as potentially offending as he is positively affecting — keep your eyes peeled for Greene eating a watermelon, Howard Stern in blackface, and a parade of celebrities who built their own careers on Greene’s influence and generosity.

Adjust Your Color: The Truth of Petey Greene (2008) from GodsConnect2 on Vimeo.

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