ZOO-NUZ
My formative band was called the Zoo, and it was led by a fellow Rutgers student named Jon "Bug" Eilenberg. It was quite a combination, with dancing girls (the Zoo-luz), animal skin shirts, long(ish) hair, and the requisite bare feet while playing. I was rhythm guitarist and lead singer, and Bug was lead guitarist, brandishing a homemade instrument through a monstrous Silvertone stack. We performed on a college circuit stretching as far as Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, and played our fair share of mixers, fraternity parties, swim clubs, and county fairs. The band lasted from 1966 trough 1968, a period of intense change for rock, and we exemplified each evolve, from the Motown/james Brown covers mixed with the English Invasion which comprised our set list when we first started through sitting cross-legged on the floor raga-rocking "My Generation." Early in our incarnation I set up my father's Webcor tape recorder at Records Hall in Rutgers and captured our live set, which the kind folks at Norton Records convinced me to have released. It captures me in my first naivete of being in a band, and also contains both sides of my folk-protest solo record under the name of Link Cromwell, released in March of 1966 on Hollywood Records: "Crazy LIke A Fox" and "Shock Me." A slice of history in the making, it is available from yours truly at P.O. Box 407, Murray Hill Station, New York City, N.Y. 10156, for $12 domestic or $15 international, by check or money order made out to Lenny Kaye; paypal at [email protected]. If you fast forward through each song's introduction, you'll hear me say, in an inimitable quasi-southern accent, "We'd lahk to do a sowng...." over and over. And so we did, gratefully so...
Last December Bug passed on to this great garage band in the sky, and I send this out to him.
"Still Life": A JIM CARROLL Remembrance
We're driving through the old neighborhood. He's been here before, in poetry and prose and song and real-life, growing up and out, taking his world with him. "Sublime symmetry," he calls it, as we stop in front of the apartment building on Isham Street, a few blocks from where he first went one-on-one with the hoops, many-on-many with the words. Ball play. Finding meaning in that parabolic arc as the net swishes or the perfect sentence similes. Full circle.
In the summer of 2008, Jim moved home. He would walk out his front door and see the same statuary adorning the religious edifice across the street as he did as a pre-teen, imprinting its message of salvation through the confessional of sin: transindence. He wasn't sure returning to uppermost Manhattan was a good or bad thing, his old haunts and hauntings, the ghosts of his parents and running buddies and ever younger self passing him by on the street; but then Jim never cared much for moral stricture. He found delight in everything, retaining an innocence and humor and radiant enthusiasm that filled notebooks and embellished tall tales and and kept him working at his desk, even on the day he fell from its' grace, exhausted.
I was ever a fan of his work and persona at the Poetry Project in the early 1970s; and watched the fulfilling prophecy of his debut performance in front of a rock band a few years later, deputized as a replacement in San Diego when the opening act split. He liked the high, and who wouldn't? There are a few greater quaaludes than an amplifier approaching double digits, the back-feed and front of being a lead singer. From readings he knew how to enact his words; now he could spiral one step further, kneel on the proscenium while stage divers flung themselves into their pit o' mosh, like he used to launch himself from the top of the key to dunk the ball. He was at the cusp as punk-rock turned into hardcore, a balancing act Jim knew all too well. He wanted the words to be heard, but he did it in the context of a full-contact rock band, his intricate imagery made manifest by the clarity of his delivery, a belief in vulgate and te deum. He got communion, as he so famously exulted in Catholic Boy, french-kissing the rail, a la Rimbaud. He understood that ritual sacrifice is a founding credo of the R.C.church, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger. One night, doing "People Who Died" in Providence on the eve of Easter, along with the Bobby's and Billy's and Jimmy's, he hosanna'd "Christ died today... What more can I say?"
But there was always more to say, and Jim was surely prolific. His vast array of topic - from the Albigensian Heresy to beauteous nymphs who importune to the parsing of his great psychic mentors, Frank O'Hara and Ted Berrigan - was free-association that encompassed a universe; a range of mind that spoke to the breadth of the human neuron. He had the last laugh life has on us when the final toll is taken. "It's too soon," I hear the lines leap out at me when I listen to his Greatest Hits, "to ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb."
A poet's last words. The hardest ones to write, because they take a lifetime knowing, and then it's too late.
My formative band was called the Zoo, and it was led by a fellow Rutgers student named Jon "Bug" Eilenberg. It was quite a combination, with dancing girls (the Zoo-luz), animal skin shirts, long(ish) hair, and the requisite bare feet while playing. I was rhythm guitarist and lead singer, and Bug was lead guitarist, brandishing a homemade instrument through a monstrous Silvertone stack. We performed on a college circuit stretching as far as Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, and played our fair share of mixers, fraternity parties, swim clubs, and county fairs. The band lasted from 1966 trough 1968, a period of intense change for rock, and we exemplified each evolve, from the Motown/james Brown covers mixed with the English Invasion which comprised our set list when we first started through sitting cross-legged on the floor raga-rocking "My Generation." Early in our incarnation I set up my father's Webcor tape recorder at Records Hall in Rutgers and captured our live set, which the kind folks at Norton Records convinced me to have released. It captures me in my first naivete of being in a band, and also contains both sides of my folk-protest solo record under the name of Link Cromwell, released in March of 1966 on Hollywood Records: "Crazy LIke A Fox" and "Shock Me." A slice of history in the making, it is available from yours truly at P.O. Box 407, Murray Hill Station, New York City, N.Y. 10156, for $12 domestic or $15 international, by check or money order made out to Lenny Kaye; paypal at [email protected]. If you fast forward through each song's introduction, you'll hear me say, in an inimitable quasi-southern accent, "We'd lahk to do a sowng...." over and over. And so we did, gratefully so...
Last December Bug passed on to this great garage band in the sky, and I send this out to him.
"Still Life": A JIM CARROLL Remembrance
We're driving through the old neighborhood. He's been here before, in poetry and prose and song and real-life, growing up and out, taking his world with him. "Sublime symmetry," he calls it, as we stop in front of the apartment building on Isham Street, a few blocks from where he first went one-on-one with the hoops, many-on-many with the words. Ball play. Finding meaning in that parabolic arc as the net swishes or the perfect sentence similes. Full circle.
In the summer of 2008, Jim moved home. He would walk out his front door and see the same statuary adorning the religious edifice across the street as he did as a pre-teen, imprinting its message of salvation through the confessional of sin: transindence. He wasn't sure returning to uppermost Manhattan was a good or bad thing, his old haunts and hauntings, the ghosts of his parents and running buddies and ever younger self passing him by on the street; but then Jim never cared much for moral stricture. He found delight in everything, retaining an innocence and humor and radiant enthusiasm that filled notebooks and embellished tall tales and and kept him working at his desk, even on the day he fell from its' grace, exhausted.
I was ever a fan of his work and persona at the Poetry Project in the early 1970s; and watched the fulfilling prophecy of his debut performance in front of a rock band a few years later, deputized as a replacement in San Diego when the opening act split. He liked the high, and who wouldn't? There are a few greater quaaludes than an amplifier approaching double digits, the back-feed and front of being a lead singer. From readings he knew how to enact his words; now he could spiral one step further, kneel on the proscenium while stage divers flung themselves into their pit o' mosh, like he used to launch himself from the top of the key to dunk the ball. He was at the cusp as punk-rock turned into hardcore, a balancing act Jim knew all too well. He wanted the words to be heard, but he did it in the context of a full-contact rock band, his intricate imagery made manifest by the clarity of his delivery, a belief in vulgate and te deum. He got communion, as he so famously exulted in Catholic Boy, french-kissing the rail, a la Rimbaud. He understood that ritual sacrifice is a founding credo of the R.C.church, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger. One night, doing "People Who Died" in Providence on the eve of Easter, along with the Bobby's and Billy's and Jimmy's, he hosanna'd "Christ died today... What more can I say?"
But there was always more to say, and Jim was surely prolific. His vast array of topic - from the Albigensian Heresy to beauteous nymphs who importune to the parsing of his great psychic mentors, Frank O'Hara and Ted Berrigan - was free-association that encompassed a universe; a range of mind that spoke to the breadth of the human neuron. He had the last laugh life has on us when the final toll is taken. "It's too soon," I hear the lines leap out at me when I listen to his Greatest Hits, "to ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb."
A poet's last words. The hardest ones to write, because they take a lifetime knowing, and then it's too late.