February 2007:
Words of the month: work, work, work, 'This Is England', Bunuel, 'Sour Tits', Ray Mears, A Badge Of Friendship, Daniel Johnston, cod liver oil and coconut milk, Dean Reed...
INTRO Hello and welcome to the website of me, Ben Myers, a writer. Here you can read about the latest news on my current book, music writing and fiction projects. More of a set of links than blog. The words and link were written by me, but it was all lovingly put together by a man called Kev who lives in East Yorkshire and likes vodka. We've never met. Tweet-tweet, my lovelies...
New Poetry Collection Good news I have a short chapbook of poems coming out shortly, available to download online only from the good people at Open Wide magazine. It's called Hammer The Keys Like Jerry Lee and is an ultra-short collection of ultra-short poems or, as I prefer to call them, fragments. Check www.openwidemagazine.com for details or mail me directly for your own copy: bigbenmyers@btinternet.com.
Rage Against Something This week (early February) I've written a cover story for Kerrang! magazine about the reformation of Rage Against The Machine. Seeing that band play throughout the 90s was truly mind-blowing so it was great piece to be asked to put together - and to re-visit a subject previously explored in my first book of journalism 'American Heretics: Rebel Voices In Music' (Codex, 2002). On sale now!
A Reflection on Richard Brautigan Richard Brautigan is one of my favourite writer and when Dogmatika recently mentioned they were running a series of pieces about him, I jumped at the chance to contibute Written in the style of his novel 'Trout Fishing In America', it can be read online at dogmatika. Or right here. Yeah, just move your eyes downwards
The Mayonnaise Moment: A Reflection Of Richard Brautigan by Ben Myers
"Expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word mayonnaise" - Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America.
I remember the time I saw Richard Brautigan.
It was in a second hand book shop on the wrong end of South London, one with an excellent selection but which involved
running the gauntlet of crack dealers to get to. Dodging blades and bullets really makes you appreciate poetry on an even deeper level.
He had been dead for fifteen years, this Richard Brautigan, and I had no idea who he was.
It was raining in the final days of the second documented millennium. I was living in a squat with no heating, a hole in the roof you could lower a tiger
through and had recently left my first - and thankfully only - job to make it as a writer, as if a writing career were just a
lump of clay to be hastily fashioned into something desirable.
It's a story as familiar as a faded Polaroid of yourself looking for crabs like big golden coins in the rock pools of your youth:
the poor, starving author. Boo hoo. You don't need to hear it again. Suffice to say I was rejected by the literary
establishment - and still am - but remained undeterred. I was also often highly delusional; the perfect frame of
mind for a writer fighting through the ranks for a shot at the title.
Then there he was, Richard Brautigan sitting on the shelf, chuckling quietly into his moustache like he couldn't believe that
young men still sit around in empty rooms tearing their hair out over money and women and making it. He shook his head, wondering why the
whole happiness situation had not yet been sorted out.
I lifted him from the shelf. He had the word TROUT emblazoned on his brow in courier new font, then down his neck and shoulder: FISHING IN AMERICA.
On his knuckles: by RICHARD BRAUTIGAN.
I lifted him from the shelf and looked into his eyes. His whites were as white as down-home mayonnaise.
His smile was seventeen steelheads leaping out of a creek simultaneously, each tooth a syllable of a poem waiting to be written.
His jacket was old and dusty and had fishing hooks hanging from its top pockets.
It also revealed that he was "streets ahead of Burroughs and Kerouac - The Times".
I wanted to take that journey down those streets and see what the view looked like, and maybe find out who this Kerouac-The Times guy was too.
What happened next, I've never told anyone about. I gave the man in the shop three metal coins and I
took TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA by RICHARD BRAUTIGAN home and I pan-fried him with a little farm-house butter and couple of twists of lemon. Salt and pepper.
When the jacket was going nice and crisp I slid him out of the pan and onto a plate, walked through to my living area and ate him with one eye on the roof for falling tigers.
Soon I was dining on Richard Brautigan every night. I worked my way through the entire selection of fresh-water Brautigan's,
devouring the entire school of variety in bite-sized increments. Some tasted like pulp detective novels, others like Mark Twain's
bunions or a 1950s cheeseburger and others still recalled the earthy top soil of a Gettysburg battle-field,
but all were highly satisfying and tasted quite like no other writer.
With each meal my brain capacity and imagination grew in tandem with my appetite for this strange new dish,
the Richard Brautigan. Baked, fried, poached, grilled, stewed or in a soup - mmm. The words of Richard Brautigan
falling from my mouth, crumbs of poetry all over the kitchen floor, one-liners hanging from my chin,
a smear of a metaphor on the cupboard door under the sink. It was as if the steady diet of Richard Brautigans was making me stronger, pushing me on, building me up.
It actually got a bit embarrassing.
I'd walk into family restaurants and declare "Bring me a plate of Brautigan and don't spare the seasoning"!
Soon I was writing again though, not caring what came out, but just letting it come out.
Thoughts leapt sideways like a pike that's grounded itself. The banks of the imagination burst and a hard rain fell
but I didn't care down there in a clear blue pool of my own making, the torrent of words and ideas gushing out,
heavy and murky with silt at first, but then clearer and purer and cooler, then a slow meditative trickle, then
finally it turned into a novel in my hands, and it's published and I'm smiling.
I belch, yawn, rub my eyes and it is eight years after the book shop. I'm by a slow,
heavy river - the silent type - somewhere in northern England. I'm surrounded by green fields that sway
like hula girls, their grass skirts a roar of silence, and beyond them woodlands made of trees like gentleman
bowing, and the sun is on my neck. It must be the present day.
Along the bank is my friend Davey James.
He has a rod in his hands. I do too. We're fishermen!
Not only that but we're idiots, and furthermore we're idiots who are writing about our uneducated fishing escapes,
and this is our latest living instalment, a story waiting to be written. That much we know.
I sit in silence, staring at the river and the halo of flies that hover above it. Soon time slips away
and puts me in that trance that is so addictive to the fisherman; that narco-haze of a lazy summer's
afternoon fishing, that extended moment when everything suddenly settles down, no breeze, no noise,
but definite discernible life beneath the shining levels of the surface.
There's a tug at my line and the float disappears beneath the vast, moving meniscus with a plop.
"I've got one..." I say to Davey James.
He looks over, puts his rod down and tentatively asks:
"A Brautigan?"
"Absolutely."
I reel it in, carefully remove the blood-worm fly hook and place him gently in a holding net in the river. His body flexes and he looks up at me.
It's my old friend Richard Brautigan, returning,
PS - I know it's him because his eyes are the colour of mayonnaise.
Axl Rose and the return of 'Nocturnal Emissions' I've resumed writing my semi-regular 'Nocturnal Emissions column for the newly-relaunched arts/literary/music site 3AM Magazine. The latest one takes a long hard look at my favourite subject Axl Rose and likes what it sees. The piece can be read in its original context here → 3am and I've also posted it below.
Nocturnal Emissions column #4, Jan 2007: 'Chinese Democracy or How Axl Rose Re-Wrote Beckett or maybe just Axl In Exile: Rock Star Perfection'
Recently I've found thoughts returning to the same subject: Axl Rose. A lot. Almost an unhealthy amount in fact,
and at various times throughout the day - and for random reasons. Like, I'll have a gang of kids accosting me
on the street for wearing the wrong shoes and all I'll be able to do is think is: what would Axl do?
Bills to pay, damaged religious salesmen banging at the door every day, neighbours MC-ing badly at 4am... what would Axl do?
Just how is it that a rock star who hasn't released an album in 14 years and a decent album in two decades can occupy a mind so frequently?
There are many reasons. One is the fact that Guns N' Roses changed my life and millions of others like me (slavish dreamers, hedonists, bedroom-bound outlaws, geeks)
when it was ripe for changing. At fourteen their singer Axl Rose showed us that sex and danger and common-or-garden profanity were healthy pursuits, and that,
in the right hands, cheesy-cocked old rock 'n' roll could still encapsulate inexpressible feelings of rage, subversion and wanton fucknuttery,
and that our energy and dreams were not yet not fully mediated by government-approved corporations. Naive perhaps, but the feelings were real.
Because the other reason thoughts return to Axl is that Axl is a nuttah. Properly mad. The very fact that the rock business
is still interested in this tyrannical little despot with hair plugs tells us that the planet remains devoid of any
rock stars of true worth or interest or that much-loved social commodity: eccentricity.
Go through the list: there are none.
Or least none who are selling records in huge amounts, or not touching children - because rock stars are fairly boring
if they're not in a position to drop ten mill on crazy stuff like rollercoasters in their back gardens or marble fountains
tinkling with their own golden piss, or MacCauley Culkin's kid nephew..
And while we're on the subject, when we refer back to that redundant epithet 'rock star', we can assume we are referring to the
thin wedged high-end of the multi-million selling high-spending, lawless, morally questionable drinking, drugging, delusional,
messiah-like ego-inflated pricks we all secretly wish we could be. The type of spun-out recluses who makes house-guests sign confidentiality contracts.
After all, are we really content to graze languidly on the bland nothingness of Coldplay,
the inaudible, wonky-hatted rasp of failed potential of Pete Doherty or the anorak anonymity of the
Arctic Monkeys when we can dream of a man who once crushed his balls against his grand piano overshooting his
Harley driving - yes driving - across the stage to play a solo on some pompous epic rock song?
Are we so nullified we could settle for the kindergarten abstractions of
"I wrote a song for you / And all the things you do / And it was called yellow"
over the poetic heart palpitations of "With your bitch slap rappin' and your cocaine
tongue / You get nuthin' done"? No. This is for thoughtless arseholes that like their
music how they like food, their clothes, their movies, their entire culture sold back
to them by aggressive little trend-setting cokeheads in Soho and Manhattan, Kensington and Hollywood.
Axl is far from thoughtless. He's spent entire years dwelling on this shit.
Now, twenty years on from the twelve slabs of musical awesomeness (and I never use that word) of
Appetite For Destruction and I find myself writing for the world's biggest hard rock magazine,
Kerrang! It's a role that is at direct odds with my other life as a writer of poetry,
and indeed many of my opinions on the roles of large publishing houses, music and
the nefarious music industry at large, but I like it that way
(besides, poetry never lead to meeting Axl's arch nemesis, the Ming to his Flash Gordon, the yin to his yang: Slash).
Every January the magazine previews the big albums of the coming twelve months and every year Kerrang!
is told on good authority that Axl's long-awaited Chinese Democracy album is in the bag and on the way and a
preview piece is subsequently penned. But it never arrives. It's the Waiting for Godot of the hard rock world,
an endless act played across the stage of the gossip columns and rock rag new round-up's, where our
anticipation of this unseen entity far exceeds its actual arrival. Maybe it will never arrive.
Maybe we'll be left stranded at the road-side like the two tramps Didi and Gogo, forever
waiting and grumbling then, as the void left in place of 'Chinese Democracy' opens wider still,
proselytising about worthier issues such as the meaninglessness of life, work, money and culture.
But maybe Axl isn't cast in the role of Godot, and is even way more Machiavellian than we already suspect he is.
Maybe Axl is Beckett, the puppet-master pulling the strings and asking more pertinent questions of his audience;
maybe he's toying with us, forcing we, the slaves and peasant-minded congregation, to reach deeper. Maybe this is all a
carefully orchestrated plan to make us really consider what is we want from our culture, how long we're prepared to
wait for it in these accelerated times of disposability, how much mental anguish we must endure before we're sated,
and, perhaps most importantly, what the role of the 'rock star' has become. Maybe Axl Rose is merely using rock music - still
one of the great American propaganda machines' most durable tools - to adapt Beckett's existentialist ideas into a new age.
Maybe he's run out of ideas and this waiting game has been the ultimate in absurdist
theatre played out really slowly through all the usual rock channels. In casting himself as the messiah,
perhaps, as with Beckett's Godot character, Axl, by his very absence, is essentially telling us that God no longer exists:
I'm done, he says. There's nothing to see here. More fool you for falling for one more false prophet.
He's laughing at us, basically.
But do we laugh with him?
Ultimately we can only speculate as to which will come first - and which will be more important:
Chinese Democracy or actual democracy in China? And speculate is what I, another idiot slave,
have been doing far too much lately. Of course, the best thing Axl could do is keep us waiting.
Ensconced in his ivory Hollywood towers, holding court amongst his therapists, psychics, lawyers,
accountants and, for all we know, a bunch of pre-pubescent dancing boys mail-ordered from Tangiers
and a pile of some great, neat new drug the rest of is are too uncool to be privy too, he would
remain all the more mysterious; unobtainable, untouchable, snake hips forever freeze-framed in the 'Paradise City' video.
The perfect rock star in exile, insatiable appetite for his own (self) destruction finally filled as he but finds
solace in his role as the only true rock star left on the planet. A flame-haired effigy cast in wrist bangles and cracked leather.
Somewhere in Hollywood he lights a cigar, cracks a grin...
It has reached the point where the only way I can get Axl out of my system is to embark on what
may prove to be my least commercially successful literary endeavour yet: a 'poetic re-imagining' of the last
fifteen years, entitled Axl Rose: The Lost Years or maybe to stick in the craw of the man himself,
I'll simply call it Chinese Democracy. I can't help but feel it will fill a gap in the market.
Below are three short extracts. No tight white cycling shorts were worn during the writing of this.
ISSUES
In school
everyone pushed me around
the teachers
the jocks
the counsellors
the cops
my asshole stepfather
until
finally you just go
fuck it
you know?
fuck it fuck you
and fuck
Indiana too
I'm going
West to
Los Angeles to become
a rock star
I hope you die
a slow death while
my song
plays in the background
you fucks
my therapist
said I had
"overwhelming anger issues"
dating back
to early adolescence
so I said
fuck you too, Jack
and hired someone
who agrees
with everything
I say
and things
feel much
better now -
I barely think
about the past
at all.
People Who've Been In This Fucking Band
Well now.
Lemme see
there was...
Izzy Stradlin
Duff MacKagen
Slash and
Steven Adler
That bit is easy.
Then details get
kinda fuzzy...
Tracii Guns
Gilby Clarke
Dizzy Reed
Matt Sorum
Robin Finck
Tommy Stinson
(he was in The Replacements,
who pretty much ruled)
Ole Beich
Rob Gardner
Brian 'Brain' Mantia
Chris Pitman
Ron Thal
Richard Fortus
Josh Freese
that dude Buckethead
Ron 'Bumblefoot' Thal
Sebastian Bach, kinda
Paul Tobias
Frank Ferrer
Teddy 'Zig Zag' Andreadis
and some other guys
Oh and me, Axl
- it's my fucking band.
I bought the rights.
In The Studio
"You know if they dropped
the fucking bomb on the planet
and just levelled the place
and you were, like, the only survivor
and you'd be walking along
and at first you'd just see your basic destruction,
like collapsed houses and sparking electrical cables
and shit, but as you keep on walking
you'd see, like bodies, scattered here and there,
and maybe they don't look superficially damaged
but they're dead alright, and you keep walking
and you see smoking shoes lying in the street,
and bodies, all bald and burnt and shit,
like charred down one side or something,
and everything would be
quiet except for the low whistle of a warm
nuclear wind blowing in from the east,
and then you start seeing more bodies,
piles of them, flesh ripped from their bones,
eyeballs incinerated in their sockets,
their hands twisted into burned claws, skulls
grimacing, frozen rictus, the strangely sweet smell
of burning flesh everywhere, blackened stumps,
the sky dashed with red hues, no birds,
everything dead and useless,
gone and hollow, and you just stand there,
grabbing at your face, screaming, screaming
screaming into a void of nothingness.
OK? Well, that's exactly how I want your
drum fill to sound, bro."
THE BRUTALISTS 3AM has also been covering The Brutalist writers. They/we are showcasing some of our work right here → 3amfuckyou GALLOWS And finally... I've also written a biography for the finest and most menacing new rock band in the UK, Gallows. They tour the UK And US over the coming six months. Go see/hear them!: www.myspace.com/burnthegallows THE END That's it for February 2007. If you see Axl say hi. Or if you have anything to say: bigbenmyers@btinternet.com