The Original Sins, Skeletons in the Garage, CD booklet
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Kramer, The Brill Building, Book One, front cover; photograph by Michael Macioce.
NOTHING IS LOST
Around the same time The Fugs were putting the final Swiftian touches on such timeless classics as Saran Wrap and CocaCola Douche in some dank Lower East Side hovel, Carole King and Gerry Goffin were huddled in a tiny room deep in the bowels of the greatest songwriting Mecca of the western world – The Brill Building – writing He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss), a song just as subversive and dangerous as anything bellowing forth from the jowls of their proto-Beat brethren downtown. It was a brutal love song made all the more brutal by Phil Spector’s cinematic production. That man knew how to tell a story. Always at his best when evil was loitering nearby, he took a desolate voice (unmovable in the conviction that the man who’d beaten her up had done nothing wrong) and wrapped it in a shimmering shroud of isolation. It was painfully beautiful. Spector’s netherworld genius was in full bloom here. Since early adolescence this song had been drawing me down and deep inside, where the silvery lines of Love and Right and Wrong recklessly criss-crossed like razors on a Saul Bass movie poster, momentarily dangling at the edges before racing down, down into the dark. Only a great song can open such an abyss. Only a great song can make us want to fall in. And I wanted it bad.
Fast-forwarding to 1984, I find myself onstage with The Fugs (“The 1984 Fugs”, in fact – their first performance in 15 years) at the terrifyingly filthy Bottom Line Cabaret in NYC. Every known species of vermin called this place home. Backstage before the show, in a dressing room sardine-packed with artists and Beat heroes and groupie-cum-novelists, it seemed like half the cockroaches north of the equator were drag racing across the walls. The 60′s had spilled out onto the floor like syrup and no one dared move an inch. At times it seemed as though Everyone was there. Most of them are long gone now. There was Julian Beck looking like death, Burroughs looking like a statue made of ash, Corso looking like a clown, Gysin looking oh so stoned, beautiful Tuli under his Morning Morning glow, Abbie Hoffman under a halo of paranoia… Everyone. The whole wrecking crew and all the bit players. The counter-culture trenches had been gloriously re-opened for one last group-grope, and all the once-and-future ghosts rushed in. The famous ones, the infamous ones, and the unsung great ones for whom fame proved ever elusive. All of them, equal now.
I sat in my corner, silent amongst the demi-gods, watching, listening, listening. The room sounded like a Firesign Theater record. The cockroaches had invaded the potato chips and pretzel bowls. “They gotta eat, too!”, he said. Then a strange face appeared at the threshold, dark and sullen. Not a beautiful face, but there was something oddly beautiful in its sadness. It’s funny how sadness has the power to beautify, i thought to myself, as a silence fell hard on the room. Men stood up and offered their chairs. Women averted their eyes. Like a Queen she floated about as if on wheels, and like the tail of a long white wedding gown on a rainy day, she dragged her silences behind her in the mud as the guests looked on in pity. Soon someone was whispering to me in a tone deep with reverence; “Kramer, I’d like you to meet Jan Kerouac”.
American literary royalty. Not a Queen at all, but the Princess herself. We chatted mindlessly for a few minutes. Nice to meet you. How are you. I’ve been traveling. How long have you known Tuli. Isn’t he the greatest. I don’t stay in any one place too long. It makes me nervous. Are you doing any more shows after tonight. I like the road. It’s comforting, I guess. How’s the food here. Four shows in two nights. Wow. Wow. Well, I have to go now. Nice to meet you. Oh, I already said that. OK. Bye.
And at that moment, as though she had intuitively felt that I could stand it no more, she moved on. That dense pit of sorrow in her eyes, buried so deep, yet swimming so joyously on the surface. She was a salmon on her way upstream, to that shallow place where everything happens all at once. I saw the whole thing playing out in my head. It was like a screw in the center of my gut, tightening, tightening. I’d let my mind run away with it all, and I was hopelessly screwed into it. There I was, staring down into that same abyss, again. That song… He Hit Me. Poor Jan. But it wasn’t some lover who’d beaten her down. Life itself had punched her lights out. That song was written on her face. I tried not to think about it, but my brain got stuck there like a fog. It wasn’t going anywhere. Then the fog lifted up and above the room, and when the cloudy fingers were done brushing the dark chords away, she was gone.
Ginsberg leaned toward me and cleared his throat as once more the room fell into reverence. “You know, The 60′s always held the most violent and lasting creative and social upheavals, in government, in the arts, in everything. No matter which century you were studying. The 1760′s, the 1860′s, the 1960′s. Just look it up!”, he howled. Or was it Tuli Kupferberg who said that? No, it was definitely Allen. Damn. I wish I could be sure. It was so very long ago. So blurry now. How terribly I miss Tuli and his tome-home on Avenue of the Americas. All those cobwebs of books, and not a single one unread! Thousands upon thousands of them, stacked over 50 years high and holding up the ceilings! Rockets of words, shattering the heavens like Pirsig’s bloody arc, screaming across the sky! Pioneers! O Pioneers! All those books…Who is reading them now!
But, I digress.
Each of these ten immortal songs was originally released between 1960 and 1966 – a golden, hermetically sealed pinpoint in time, sandwiched by the end of the witch hunts of the 50′s and the psychedelic dawn of the Summer Of Love, 1967 – when deep inside a nondescript office building on Broadway just gutters away from the pimps and pushers and peepshows, a handful of very special people wrote some very special music that will never ever die, and the cultural monuments they created there will far outlast the building they wrote them in.
1960-1966. A lot happened to the world in those seven years, and a lot happened to me in the seven years it took to complete this LP. Everything Changes. Nothing is Lost.
—Kramer, May 2012
Nobody who lived through the ’50s ever thought the ’60s could’ve even existed. So there’s always hope. —Tuli Kupferberg
Tuli and Kramer in the Book Cave; photograph by Valerie Zars.
Liner knotes from The Brill Building, Book One by Kramer; reprinted with permission from Kramer. LP is due out September 2012 on John Zorn’s Tzadik label.
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Listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but it always extends farther than I can hear, and that makes it interesting to listen to the musical process again. That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons, is it. —Steve Reich “Music as a Gradual Process”, 1968.
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William Parker, Double Sunrise Over Neptune, CD Booklet
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“Third Rail”, 6, 1984
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spring, sprang, sprung, billy conde goldman
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As it applies to the guitar, harmolodics can have melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic transpositions or modulations. If you’re a horn player, you’re automatically closer to it. Horn players always think of transposition. There are so many possibilities—it’s like taking rules you’ve learned and bending them, reapplying them. Ornette would joke around and say, ‘If anyone ever asks you what the changes are, just reach into your pocket and rattle some change, or it they ask you what’s the key, you pull out your keys.’ The harmolodic method is not a cut and dried method; it’s more like a philosophical inquiry into the nature of music, or the metaphysical properties of music. It’s very open-ended. —Bern Nix
With the harmolodic concept, a musician no longer worries about chord changes, stylistic constraint, or conforming to the rigid arithmetical tyranny of the bar line. Diatonic tendencies can be occasionally indulged, but they must by and large be eschewed. Players are encouraged to see that one note can go in any number of directions. That one note also represents other possibilities. For example, if a guitarist plays F, he should be aware that D and E flat are also the same note, when thinking in terms of transposition. All players are simultaneously soloists, as well as accompanists. The idea is to create spontaneous music that is compositional, as well as orchestral in scope. The intriguing thing about the harmolodic theory is that you constantly confront one metaphysical problem after another in trying to ascertain what it really is. —Bern Nix
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