It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed the road —
J. D. Salinger
The Catcher In The Rye
There is a war between the rich & poor
A war between the man & woman
There is war between the ones who say there is a war
And the ones who say that there isn’t
Leonard Cohen -
There Is A War
My favourite singer was Karen Dalton. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed. —
Bob Dylan
Karen Dalton -
Reason To Believe
The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows cold and rainy
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing
Bob Dylan -
Love Minus Zero/ No Limit
Take a good look at me. Now tell me, do you think I’m the sort of fellow who gives a fuck what happens once he’s dead?
Henry Miller
Tropic of Capricorn
📷 Johan Hagemeyer (1946)
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
Sylvia Plath reading her poem
Lady Lazarus for the
BBC December 1962.
📷G. Lameyer
But me I’m still on the road
Headed for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue
Happy 83rd Birthday Bob ! 🎂
Live from Boston Music Hall 1975 on the Rolling Thunder Revue album
We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.
- A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway (BOTD) and his first wife Hadley Richardson before they were married and moved to Paris in 1921.
📷E. Hemingway Collection
Neil Young -
The Needle And The Damage Done/ Journey Through The Past
Live on The Johnny Cash Show in 1971.
It’s crazy to me that Johnny Cash had his own tv show and Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Ray Charles etc. played on it. Incredible.
Shakespeare Never Did This
is an account of Charles Bukowski’s 1978 European trip where he drinks a lot of wine, does some publicity and visits his birthplace of Andernach , Germany. The photos by Michael Montfort are particularly good imo.
The Chet Baker biography Deep In A Dream by James Gavin is one of the best music bios I’ve read. Baker’s life story is incredibly riveting and harrowing and you do not have to be a jazz fanatic to enjoy it. imo. RIP.
I went downtown
It was just to ease my pain
I ended up out walking in the rain
I took my pistol and a hundred dollar bill
I took my pistol and a hundred dollar bill
I had everything I needed to get me killed
Steve Earle -
South Nashville Blues
Paintings are not like the internet. They’re not electronic friendly. You have to go see them. You have to stand in front of them. That’s the great thing about them.
- Julian Schnabel
Painting Without Mercy 1981
oil, plates and bondo on wood 10’ x 13’
Richie Havens opened Woodstock + played for over 3 hours.The other acts were delayed + he ran out of songs. So he began strumming the spiritual song Motherless Child and improvised his now famed Freedom in front of 500K people.
Richie Havens-
Freedom
Little kids shoot marbles where the branches break the sun into graceful shafts of light…. I just want to be pure.
— Jim Carroll
The Basketball Diaries
Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest
Than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance …
Jim Carroll reading his poem,
8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain
(1995)
Listen people I don’t know how you ever expect to stop a war if you can’t sing any better than that. There’s about 300,000 of you fuckers and I want you to start singing -
Country Joe McDonald
Fixin’ To Die Rag
at Woodstock August 16, 1969
BOTD Leonard Cohen
Give me back my broken night
My mirrored room
My secret life
It’s lonely here
There’s no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside baby
That’s an order
- The Future ( live 1993)
Well when you’re sitting back
In your rose pink Cadillac
Making bets on Kentucky Derby Day
I’ll be in my basement room
With a needle and a spoon
And another girl can take my pain away
Happy Kentucky Derby Day/ Dead Flowers Day one and all !!!
@pscottrussell
Hearing Farewell Transmission for the first time was a religious experience for me. I wrote out the lyrics in marker on a t-shirt. Front and back I barely fit them all.
It really is amusing
that for all the centuries of mankind
the problem has been how
to kill enough people
and now
it is how
not to kill them all
Frank O’Hara
From his poem FOU- RIRE
Portrait of Frank O’Hara by
Alice Neel (1960)
Charlie Parker and Miles Davis
Live at the Royal Roost, NYC
December 18, 1948
Miles Davis (tpt)
Charlie Parker (as, voc)
Al Haig ( p)
Ted Potter (b)
Max Roach ( d)
Don’t remember writing a long letter but if you got one, fine. Sometimes when there’s plenty of beer and cigars I go on and on, a little cracked, kind of hypnotic, and this too is good for what’s left of the soul -
Charles Bukowski
Screams From The Balcony
No matter all I do for you
Slipping in and out
That I hope you can see past
The troubles that we’ve had
You know I try so hard for you
Just to hear you say
It’ll be alright
It’ll be okay
Cuff The Duke -
Ballad of a Lonely Construction Worker
The Nausea has not left me and I don’t believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Nausea
Maurice de Vlaminck -
Fleurs, c. 1950
oil on canvas
In Paris Maurice de Vlaminck associated with the painters Henri Matisse and Andre Derain and was branded a “wild beast” and criticized for his unorthodox use of colour.
📷 K. MacKenzie @ W. A. G.
Every musician has one guy that he can play with better than anyone else. You only get one guy. My guy was Danny Whitten. -
Neil Young
Neil Young and Crazy Horse
Come On Baby Lets Go Downtown -
lead vocals Danny Whitten
The Rolling Stones -
Rocks Off
No reason for Rocks Off this morning. Nobody died or was born on this day. Just some great footage of The Stones in LA and NYC shot by Robert Frank on Super 8 in 1971.
Travelling now
On the low highway
Windows down
Listening
Wheels turn around
On the asphalt saying
Every sound
Is a prophecy
Steve Earle -
The Low Highway
Blaze Foley was a genius and a beautiful
loser -
Lucinda Williams
Drunken Angel is Lucinda Williams’ ode to the legendary singer songwriter Blaze Foley.
Townes Van Zandt—Rake
The documentary Be Here To Love Me is really fantastic for anyone interested in the life of arguably the greatest songwriter who ever lived.
I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On The Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional- Jack Kerouac
Neal Cassady died on this day in 1968.
Age 39.
📷 and captions by Allen Ginsberg
Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it’s what Yeats called the fascination with what’s difficult. I’m only trying to do what I can’t do — Lucian Freud