Pages 5 and 6
social despair; try putting that in your piggy-bank.
CBGBs charge for the use of their sound system, who's
making the fucking sounds that they're drawing their
fat pay-rolls on? The Roxy have made it a condition
of playing that the music is recorded, so that they can
put out a 'Live at the Roxy' album, the bands won't get
a dime for their troubles. Who's selling who? Ah yes,
they'll sit snug behind their cocktail glasses, jerking
off to another generations sorrow.
After the first two numbers the alchohol of four
litres of good french wine, and one bad chinese, has
fractured my skull. A blast of boiling sound. We're
hotting up through the various layers. I connect with
the rest of the band by some sinewy thread which, if it
were'nt for the grass that floats awkwardly through
Ignorant's and Andy's heads, would normally have meant
an energetic and direct fire. We're in a temperate zone
and the capsule ain't moving. The energies bounce uncontrolled.
An escaped cage-bird burns its wings on the gas-ring. Enola Gay
rights herself as the payload is released.
Wham.
I try to collect the fragments, they slide away from me
angry snakes in the pit. Kyoto rivers that slide about
our feet. I lumber up to the mike and push Ignorant
aside.
That is right, isn't it? We are aren't we? Being?
Knowing? That is our right, ain't it?
Rich in the idle light of our dawn.
When I'd found Ignorant and Andy three hours
earlier demolishing their third enormous joint
and an otherwise fairly peaceiul apartment, I had
known that this gig was going to be a hard one. Dope just
ain't where it's at. Andy was very psyched up and had been
terrorising people at bus stops, tired souls waiting for the
hearse home. I did'nt like that either. It's a narrow line
between confrontation and violation. Bad dope, bad alchohol can
push it all the wrong way. I know Andy had overloaded, but that
did'nt make me feel any better about it. It is a responsibility
and I'm not about to see someone sit about
and abuse it. We argue through our blocked
heads. Useless. We play in three hours,
there has to be some contact made.
Punk philosophy, it's voice of anarchy, has been discredited
by a press hostile to change. Society has a
way of protecting itself. It's called free speech,
which means that the ruling classes extend an
illusion of openness to those below, who owns the
continued on the next page (page 7)
Another generation sold out by it's own hope, burnt out
by it's own idealism.
It sucks.
Truth is a ghetto.
Who shares what?
"Come on you fuckers, I know we're shit, but I know
that you're shit as well. Why can't we be shit together?
I crawl back to the drum kit and heave into it as
much energy as I can muster. The sweet chinese
red is locking ray my arms. The response is low.
Death zone. Negative bull-shit. Ignorant droops like a drowned gold-fish.
"Do it fucker. Do it."
He can't the dope is strangling him.
"You don't need to frighten people Andy. They have their own
pain, leave them to their orwn pain." He waves his list at
me.
"Look you fucker, you play your game and
I'll play mine. Right."
For me it is'nt right. At that time I'd consumed
three bottles of wine and most of the
inhibition, the fear, the hopeless self-conciousness
had eroded with the grape, but that does'nt make me
want to frighten people. The press does that. Media.
The punk-suckers. They need their scapegoats and I
know that it's cheap to conform to their concepts of
how we are. We're not the hooligans in this game, they
are, they set it all up, we're just the blotting paper
for their puke. I don't care much for the world that
those people at the bus stop, are representative of,
but it is their world. I'd like them to see that there
is something else, that there is some hope beyond the
empirical structures that we have been told is
reality. There is more. Always more, and in a a strange,
paradoxical way I gently search out the routeways to
it.
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