"To Be, or Not ... to Bop" (1979): Dizzy Gillespie, present at the creation

Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) was the jazz Gabriel with the bent horn and horn-rimmed glasses who started a musical revolution. He was born in South Carolina, staking a case for the Carolina Piedmont as the birthplace of bop: the one-and-only Thelonious Monk was born in Rocky Mount, NC eleven days earlier.

 

His own book, To Be or Not ... to Bop was published by Doubleday in 1979, a rollicking and roughhouse story of jazz at it was lived in the TOBA circuit: "Tough on Black Artists" was the name given to the management style that required three-to-five shows a day. John Birks Gillespie, with a growing reputation for eccentric dancing on the bandstand, became a stand-out. "Where's that dizzy cat?" the musicians (and fans) began to ask, and the nickname stuck.

The book is told in the self-effacing style of one who is present at the creation, and who enjoys the stories and camaraderie of life on the road, as well as off the record. There are also reminiscences by companions and players who shared stages with Gillespie, recalling the times with genuine fondness and not a little awe. Here's drummer Kenny Clarke, remembering the hot-house moments of the New York jazz scene as it developed in the 1940s and '50's around Diz and Charlie Parker:

"I used to follow Diz around to all the jam sessions and hear him blow against other trumpet players. He was young and he was blowing. Everybody was asking me, 'What is Dizzy playing?' I was just telling them to 'Listen....' We were with Teddy Hill's band together, Ella Fitzgerald, Claude Hopkins, so we've been barnstorming, early, you know.

I noticed something unique about Dizzy's playing, that's why I was hanging out with him. His approach to modern harmonies, but rhythms mostly. He could take care of all that harmony, but his rhythms interested me real profoundly, and I just had to find out about that gift he had hidden in him, the gift of rhythm. It wasn't only his trumpet playing, he was doing a lotta other things that some people didn't see, but I saw the rhythmic aspect of it. The way he played and the way he would hum time and things like that. I knew it was avant-garde, ahead of time, so I just fell in line with what was going on ....

The most important characteristic of this new style of playing was camaraderie, that was first because everybody, each musician, just loved the other one, just loved them so much they just exchanged ideas and would do everything together. That's one characteristic about it I liked very much. Another word for that isunity. That's right, and I think that era of jazz had more enemies than any phase of jazz.

It was sort of esoteric from the beginning. Only a few people understood what was going on. Everybody knew it was good, but they couldn't figure out what it was. And when somebody doesn't understand a thing, he has a tendency to dislike. But I mean the music has been so strong and was strong, and is strong now .

 

Whew! Oh, yeah, we used to discuss it on the bandstand sometimes and write out little things. I would say, 'Hey, Diz, whaddayou think of this?', you know. I think when we left Teddy Hill, we definitely knew that was going to happen. We were pretty sure of it, and everybody worked toward the same goal. That's what made it happen."

(Photos of Dizzy Gillespie at a Washington, DC elementary school by Donna Wilcox, 1965. From theJazzWax website.)

Cheers, Keith! Keith Richards, born December 19, 1943

"I'm gonna booglarize you baby ... "

(Captain Beefheart, 1972)

As difficult as it is to believe in the 21st century, rock music was once a dangerous and provocative force in the booglarizing of America. The age from Elvis through the Rolling Stones were years and years of sheer terror for parents and politicians throughout the land, and even if the floor-shaking noises coming from the upstairs bedrooms of America were the sounds of a consumer-driven teenage market finding its voice (and its feet), the music was definitely something most of its listeners had never heard before.

And that was just the threat in the pounding, amplified beat -- the words were a whole new scare. The Beatles may have wanted to hold your hand, after all, when they could be understood above all that racket, but before that Jerry Lee Lewis was shouting about great balls of fire, and not necessarily about getting burned in the hellfire of damnation. And the Rolling Stones! Prancing about like ... like ... well, who knows like what, exactly, parents weren't sure, but inexplicably, obviously, bad-for-you, do you understand?

As it turns out, for the Rolling Stones time really is on their side after all. Determined to grow older -- if increasingly wrinkled -- with some dignity intact, Keith Richards' autobio, disarmingly titled Life, is filled with stories that somehow amaze with how different the world seemed back then. Now, when the only parental outrage Katy Perry can generate is her outfit on Sesame Street, tales of the Rolling Stones in America seem positively other-worldly.

Why did we stop at the 4-Dice Restaurant in Fordyce, Arkansas, for lunch on Independence Day weekend? On any day? Despite everything I know from ten years of driving through the Bible Belt. Tiny town of Fordyce. Rolling Stones on the police menu across the United States. Every copper wanted to bust us by any means available, to get promoted and patriotically rid America of these little fairy Englishmen.

It was 1975, a time of brutality and confrontation. Open season on the Stones had been declared since our last tour, the tour of '72, known as the STP. The State Department had noted riots (true), civil disobedience (also true), illicit sex (whatever that is), and violence across the United States. All the fault of us, mere minstrels. We had been inciting youth to rebellion, we were corrupting America, and they had ruled never to let us travel in the United States again.

It had become, in the time of Nixon, a serious political matter. He had personally deployed his dogs and dirty tricks against John Lennon, who he thought might cost him an election. We, in turn, they told our lawyer officially, were the most dangerous rock-and-roll band in the world.

As much grief as aging boomers get about their increasingly passe memories, rock music remains, if not exactly a threat, at least a thread of connection between generations. The music of the not-quite-greatest generation can still thrill, even if the cultural meaning doesn't quite grab as it once did. The lessons are learned, and age has its privileges: every few years, there's talk of another tour, and the Stones rock machine gears up for another assault on the wallet -- and still (still!) remains the biggest rock show on earth.

The Stones, gentlemen all, are grandfathers these days, but they are attempting to go old gracefully without the albatross of a young man's "hope I die before I get old" lyric in their book. (As far back as 1978 Keith contemplated the wisdom in the words "I'm going to walk before they make me run.") Mick Jagger has always played at the continental charmer, and even Keith seems content to retire most of he bad-boy stories, at least for this (book) tour. Will Mick and Keith play on stage again? As long as there is a five-pound note in The Bank of England's vaults.

Keith-the-estate-gardener may have retired most of his well-told war stories, and in the book de-fuses many of the more outlandish tales, but not all of them. And then there's this, which should give hope to bookworms everywhere: "When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equalizer."

The rock star who played the Pirate King to Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow must maintain some wickedness, certainly, if even for press junkets: it seems he did actually snort some of the old man's cremated ashes that had fallen out on the coffee-table. Then again, Keith has given up drinking now, at the age of 66, and a man must surely be allowed at least one vice.

Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe, just '60s kids in the Village

"I was a dreamy somnambulent child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with my inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else. Where that somewhere was I cannot say, but it often landed me in the corner sitting on a high stool in full view of all in a conical paper hat." (Patti Smith)

The young, daydreaming wizard of southern New Jersey soon intuits that New York City is a more appropriate stage for her talents, and by the summer of 1967 Patti Smith is sleeping in Village doorways and living for art. Her bohemian dreams coincide with those already there and just as hungry. Robert Mapplethorpe is dropping LSD and already drawing his visions of the universe when they become friends, Dante and Beatrice on the Lower East Side.

Just Kids (Ecco/Harper) is a valentine to the blossoming relationship they shared and which deepened until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. The memoir is Patti being tough and tender, romantic in the way artists often remember their own struggle, and filled with the people who made music and art their passion in New York of the 1970s. Robert's drawing and photography develops its challenging reputation as Patti begins to sing her own music, and this became a common creative bond that propels them in their personal life as much as their careers. For Patti the book allows her to wrap her troubles in dreams, even as the threadbare bohemian life becomes a distant memory through rock and roll.

As she re-traces the past, the book's real charm comes in the personal glances at Robert's life and career. His death in 1989 from AIDS and a portfolio of controversial images has made him, still, a confounding figure to many art historians. Just Kids allows a look at the artist as a friend and a companion, with his own troubles and dreams: he meets John McKendry, married and the curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:"John's devotion to Robert's work spilled over to Robert himself. Robert accepted John's gifts and took advantage of opportunities that John opened up for him, but he was never interested in Robert as a romantic partner. John was sensitive, volatile, and physically fragile, qualities that would not attract Robert. He admired (John's wife) Maxime, who was strong and ambitious with an impeccable pedigree. Perhaps he may have been cavalier with John's feelings, for as time went on, he found himself entangled within a destructive romantic obsession."

The savvy curator and the romantic bohemian are a good match: "John McKendry could not have given Robert a better gift than the tools he needed to devote himself to photography," Smith goes on. "Robert was thoroughly smitten, obsessed not only with the process, but also its place in the arts."

This is a carefully-written and nicely detailed memoir, more gracefully artful than gratuitously salacious, although there is ample opportunity to read between the well-phrased line. Patti writes of the first musician she knew: "I never knew if his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe."

For the girl who loved Motown and r & b, New York in the 1970s became the land of a thousand dances as she wanders in and out of the music and poetry scenes that are quickly developing. The names and locations are already familiar, from nights at the Chelsea Hotel to CBGBs. Robert is on his own trajectory, but together Patti and Robert became so entwined that Patti's marriage to Fred Smith, in 1979, sent an unexpected tremor of apprehension between the two of them. "What about us?" Robert asks. "My mother still thinks we're married." Patti hasn't considered that. "I guess you'll have to tell her we got a divorce." "I can't say that," Robert shoots back. "Catholics don't divorce."

And like the good Catholic boy who's being bad, Robert understood his work wasn't meant for everyone, and he went out of his way to show it. His first hard-core photos were in a portfolio, marked with an X, and placed in a glass case for viewing only to those over eighteen years of age. Once these images became public, he didn't hide from the eventual storm of protest and notoriety, although they formed a fraction of his work. 

Soon enough there were more important personal issues -- he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. The story is an old and eternal one: in Just Kids, passion, art, and love are redeemed by youth. If the outlines are familiar, the book is told with enough toughness to avoid being overly sentimental.

As Robert wanes, the operatic overtones of their artful romance are often leavened by Patti and Robert with wit and humor, even to the end. After his death, as his belongings are sold at auction, Patti can't make herself attend the sale, afraid she couldn't bear to watch. She recalls a phrase Robert used if he obsessed about something he couldn't have: "I'm a selfish bastard. If I can't have it I don't want anyone else to." Patti has given readers no small gift by sharing her continuing love and affection for Robert with the rest of us.

December 30 is Patti's birthday; in William Burroughs' rare admiring phrase, the poet/performer is still a "rock'n'roll shaman" at 67.

"You Can't Win" (Jack Black, 1926): winner take nothing

"Jack Black calls his book You Can't Win. Well, who can? Winner take nothing."
-- William Burroughs, 1988

This autobiography of the outlaw and convict Jack Black, which Burroughs recalls from memory as "the Good Red Book," is a real-life story of life lived against the grain. It came as a shock and a revelation when it was originally published in 1926, during F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age of The Great Gatsby -- and in some ways the scuffling figure of Jack Black was a carny-mirror reflection of Jay Gatz himself.

Originally published in serial form in The San Francisco Call, the book became a best-seller, going through five printings and gaining the attention of social reformers like Lincoln Steffens. Its success propelled Black into a brief literary career that included a play based on his experiences and then a film contract at MGM writing screenplays for $150 a week.
The easy picture of Black as a literary figure and upright citizen is too simple, though. Those who found the Folsom Prison ex-con extremely well-read probably didn't know he had used his prison years to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica three separate times learning "to play Society's game." Or that he got his 25-year sentence by shooting a man in a botched hold-up in Golden Gate Park in what one biographer calls "a one-man San Francisco reign of terror." His prison years were spent developing a network for survival, a patchwork of favors done for favors received, that extended years after his release. This underworld had its cast of prison"yeggs" and, just as important, people whom Black calls "the Johnsons" --those who are as good as their word, and keep their promises.

"Some of my debts had to be paid in kind, and no one could help me. I owe my life to a thief who risked his life to get me out of jail. He smuggled me saws to open my cell, then came in the night to cut the bars out of the window and lifted me through the hole when I was so weak from tuberculosis I could barely walk. ... Years afterward, when I had cured myself of the dope habit and served my sentence, won immunity from the law, and was just beginning to feel a little secure in my respectability, my telephone rang in the small hours of the night. A woman's voice asked if I was 'Mr. Black,' and said 'I have a message from Eddie ... of course, you know I can't give it over the phone. Hurry.' I didn't know what had happened but I knew another debt was due."

Once he got out of prison Black seems determined never to go back, and this is where You Can't Win develops its themes of reform and resurrection. Though he found a respectable life full of "too much hypocrisy" and said he never cared for it, for a short time Black became a police reporter and then circulation manager of The San Francisco Bulletin. He was befriended by members of the Progressive movement who urged him to write about his hardscrabble life and prison experiences in order to promote prison reform, and You Can't Win -- first serialized as Breaking the Shackles -- was the result, a modern pilgrim's progress of crime and punishment -- and redemption.

"I am sure but of one thing -- I failed as a thief and I am luckier than most of them. I quit with my health and liberty. What price larceny, burglary and robbery? Half my thirty years in the underworld was spent in prison. Say I handled $50,000 in the fifteen years I spent outside; that's about nine dollars a day... 'what chance have you now?' I would ask any young man, 'with shotgun squads, strong-arm squads, and crime-crushers cruising the highways and byways; with the deadly fingerprinting, central identification bureau, and telephotoing of pictures; and soon every police station broadcasting ahead of you your description and record?' Then consider the accidents and snitches -- what chance have you? Figure it out yourself. I can't."

"I was fascinated," Burroughs writes in his foreword to the 2000 reissue of You Can't Win, "by this glimpse of an underworld of seedy rooming-houses, pool-parlors, cat-houses and opium dens, of bull pens and cat burglars and hobo jungles." The book made such an impression on Burroughs that he used some of Black's characters like Salt Chunk Mary, and even his language word for word. "When you can remember a passage of prose after fifty years it has to be good," he writes. Here's a passage from Burroughs's late novel Place of Dead Roads:

"A two-story red-brick house down by the tracks in Junction City, Idaho. Salt Chunk Mary, mother of the Johnson Family ... train whistles cross a distant sky. Mary keeps a pot of pork and beans and a blue porcelain coffee pot always on the stove. You eat first, then you talk business, rings and watches slopped out on the kitchen table. She names a price. She doesn't name another. Mary could say "No" quicker than any woman Kim ever knew, and none of her no's ever meant yes. She kept the money in a cookie jar, but nobody thought about that. Her cold gray eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next lay. John Law just happens by, or John Citizen comes up with a load of double-zero into your soft and tenders."

The fame, and the money, was fleeting. Jack gave his talks on crime and prisons under the auspices of the League to Abolish Capital Punishment, which Clarence Darrow had started. Only his lecture fees were "keeping him out of the soup kitchens and breadlines," he wrote. His pride, or something like it, would not let him seek the charity that was becoming part of the Depression of the 1930s. Speaking engagements became fewer, and the royalties from You Can't Win dried up.

He had once told friends that if life got too grim he would tie weights to his feet, row into New York Harbor and drop overboard. This seems to be precisely what he did in 1932: Black vanished. His watch was found in a pawnshop pledged for eight dollars; it had been his prize possession, a gift from an ex-con he had helped. For his friends this became definite proof that he had been as good as his word to the end.

"Chinaberry Sidewalks," Rodney Crowell: the real lovesick blues

It's not really fair to call Rodney Crowell just a singer-songwriter. His 35-year career has been part of country and rock music in a way that few can match. His credits include writing songs for performers from EmmyLou Harris to Bob Seger, producing albums for his wife Rosanne Cash, and his own performing career includes thirteen albums.

But before all that, Crowell was a Texas kid whose life was "folksy but complicated," as one reviewer of Chinaberry Sidewalks, his 2011 autobiography, put it. Crowell had a set of parents who provided him with much of the material for a lifetime of country songs. His funny but achingly-told tales have an edge that can't disguise a young man's confusion and hurt. Addie Cauzette and J.W. Crowell's relationship was wild and got wilder, in one of Crowell's own phrases, "from the git-go."

In an early mix of Hollywood matinee-bravery and undeniable scene-stealing at the age of five, Rodney grabbed a gun to break up one alcohol-fueled party -- New Years 1955 be damned. The young gunslinger may not have had the mechanics of marksmanship down but he knew how to make an entrance. As any musician can tell you, that counts for one hell of an impression. Here's an excerpt:

...My decision to fish the .22 from the closet wasn't made lightly. To retrieve the gun meant entering the room alone, a chilling prospect even in broad daylight. But sensing the storm gathering behind the rising levels of alcohol, I figured those dark corners were no match for what would happen if the adults out there started screwing each other.

Aside from enhancing the gravity of my announcement that it was time to go home, I had no intention of using the gun. Based loosely on the Saturday matinees I'd seen at the Navaway Theater, where the good guy got the bad guy's attention by wielding a six-shooter full of silver bullets, my plan required the gun as a prop.

Hank Williams was singing "Lovesick Blues" when I stepped into the living room armed with my father's rifle. Dorothy Lawrence was the first to notice my arrival. "My Lord, he's got a gun!" she called out, a bit less dramatically than I'd have liked but compelling nonetheless. The focus of attention shifted instantly in my direction, and having all eyes on me sent a surge of power through my nervous system that left my mind a small blank canvas. From there, the script unraveled.

It was lack of preparation for this pivotal moment that provoked two serious blunders: one, inadvertently disengaging the thumb-activated safety on the rifle; two, pointing it at my father and pulling the trigger. The bullet exploded into the linoleum floor less than a foot from where Dorothy stood. "Lovesick Blues" came to a screeching halt, and my father pounced on me like he was Batman on pep pills. Sensing his first impulse was to beat me with the butt of the rifle, I braced myself for the worst. Instead, he hugged me so close to his heart that even through the ringing in my ears I could hear it pounding. Being squeezed so hard that I could barely breathe gave me a feeling of comfort. My peacekeeping mission was complete. There would be no fighting that night.

Shocking people sober and sending them home thankful to be alive is one way to break up a party. Although visibly shaken, my parents' friends showed no ill feelings. Cookie Chastain said she knew I was "a good boy and wouldn't hurt a flea." Pete Conn reckoned I "knew not to play with no more loaded guns." Doc Lawrence went as far as making a joke about my aim being so bad that I was "lucky not to have shot [my] dang pecker off." Hushed exits, however, told the story of how they really felt. ...

25 non-fiction LGBT reads to overcome summer brain-freeze

Admit it: it's still summertime and your mind just can't take another "summer read" -- not another beach book, or picture-perfect book about barbeque, or breathless celebrity tell-all brain-freeze. Besides, you have to save something nap-inducing for the long, lazy Labor Day weekend, still a month away. What to read now?

Tyler Coates, online at Flavorwire, offers a smart list of 25 essential non-fiction books -- some serious, some humorous, ranging from gimlet-eyed memoir to astute history -- with lesbian / bi / gay / transgender authors and subjects. Several recommended titles qualify as classics (Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant, Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On), and there are more recent books of lives led in- or out-of-the-closet. 

As with any online list, readers have responded with their own additions. The genderbending A Low Life in High Heels by Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn would be a good, entertaining extra. Coates makes the point that the broad selection, with topics from gender politics to AIDS to literary outlaws, isn't meant to be complete. At the very least, The Life of Roman Novarro (André Soares) qualifies as both a Hollywood bio and a beach read that could make it to the waterside before before Labor Day. An excerpt from the list and Coates' comments:

The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America by Charles Kaiser. Kaiser’s historical look at how gay men informed the culture of America’s urban areas — particularly New York City — spans 56 years from the periods of silent acceptance, the tumultuous pre-Stonewall years, the empowering ’70s, and the AIDS crisis of the ’80s.

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. This collection of speeches and essays from the influential and outspoken Audre Lorde touches on racism, sexism, and homophobia without losing a sense of hope for positive results in the face of class struggles. 

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring. A contemporary of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Samuel Steward lived an extraordinary secret sexual life which he chronicled in great detail in a collection of journals.  

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Alison Bechdel’s gorgeous and heartbreaking graphic memoir follows the artist as she grapples with both her own sexuality and the revelation that her cold, distant father led a secret life as a gay man. 

Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas. The internationally renowned poet shares his life story, from his adolescence spent fighting for the Castro regime to his imprisonment for his sexuality to his flight from Cuba to his deathbed in New York City. 

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein. Legendary transgender activist and writer Kate Bornstein details her transition from a heterosexual man to a lesbian woman in this modern classic about challenging gender and cultural norms. 

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio. Bayard Rush was responsible for teaching the principles of non-violent protest to Martin Luther King, Jr., yet his status as an openly gay man in the midst of the civil rights movement kept him from being recognized for the efforts and activism he accomplished. 

Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro by André Soares. This biography tells the story of the first Latin American movie star, whose death was one of the most shocking scandals of the early days of Hollywood. 

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 by George Chauncy. Chauncy’s history of gay life in New York decades before the impact of the Stonewall riots is a surprising account that defies the notion that homosexuality was hidden out of view until the 1960s.

Hiding from the heat with some summer books

It's August hot. Here are some titles published in the past year that have been reviewed in BellemeadeBooks. Order right here through the Amazon.com search box. Then relax, turn up the air conditioning, and pour yourself some iced tea. 

Above: Drainspotting, Remo Camerota (Mark Batty Publishers) is a brick-sized photo collection of customized storm-drain covers, created in Japan for municipal waterworks. These unique artworks are presented in a less-than-coffeetable size format (six-by-six inches) that weighs considerably less than the originals. Besides being an unexpected and attractive art, the result has been a beneficial civic program, a great example of how the demands of politics, the needs of communities, and the aesthetics of art can combine -- and a reminder how rarely they do, too.

Just Kids (Ecco/Harper) is a valentine to the blossoming relationship Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe shared until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. The memoir, newly published in a paperback edition, is Patti being tough and tender, romantic in the way artists often remember their own struggle, and filled with the people who made music and art their passion in New York of the 1970s. Robert's drawing and photography develops its challenging reputation as Patti begins to sing her own music, and this became a common creative bond that propels them in their personal life as much as their careers. For Patti the book allows her to wrap her troubles in dreams, even as the threadbare bohemian life becomes a distant memory through rock and roll.

Label 228, compiled by Camden Noir (Soft Skull Press) One man's stickable art is another's graffiti; it's a toss-up if these labels by Mecro, Zoso, Kegr, Robots Will Kill! and others are permanent treasures. The disposable nature of a label suggests they're not meant to be -- the viewer's appreciation here depends on the images' inclusion in book format, away from the ephemeral encounter at street level. If the irony of this is lost on the artist, to the viewer looking through Label 228 it's an irony that assumes its own art form.

The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson (Random House) Wilkerson's approach to the story of her move back South (from Chicago to Atlanta) is a tale inspired less by Studs Terkel than Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath figures as a writing model, focusing on the stories of three main characters around which larger ideas are woven. In a nod to the book's cinematic scope Wilkinson also name-checks the director Robert Altman as a reference point of interwoven characters and their stories.

The Book of Frank (WAVE Books) CAConrad's one-man tent show of poetry is not for the faint of heart, the weak of mind, or who fear leaps of imagination. Each of his books is a high-wire act of love and transformation performed without a net -- Jonathan Williams' perceptive axiom reading makes hair grow in your palms and makes you blind seems just as good a review of CAConrad's work as any, and just as pertinent to The Book of Frank, in a new and expanded edition just published by WAVE Books.

Life, Keith Richards (Little, Brown Publishers) As it turns out, for the Rolling Stones time really is on their side after all. Determined to grow older -- if increasingly wrinkled -- with some dignity intact, Keith Richards has been wandering around the bookstores and TV talk shows with a new book in tow, disarmingly titled Life, filled with stories that somehow amaze with how different the world seemed back then. Now, when the only parental outrage Katy Perry can generate is her outfit on Sesame Street, tales of the Stones in 1960s/1970s America seem positively other-worldly.

Inventing the 60s: an excerpt from "Fug You," Ed Sanders

Calling Ed Sanders a "lion in winter" these days (he's 73 now) would probably solicit more a laugh than a growl from the one-time publisher of a review called "Fuck You / a Magazine of the Arts." But then he liked to add a gleam of mischief to his creative mix of ideas even in the heady 1960s. 

Musician, writer, bookstore-owner, publisher -- and, occasionally, all at the same time -- Ed's still out swinging the hammer as the online publisher of The Woodstock Journal: "working for an organic food supply, safe air, nonpolluted water, a total end to poverty, national health care, personal freedom and fun." America needs his voice as much as ever (and maybe more: his recorded projects include Thirsting for Peace, 2005, and Poems for New Orleans, 2007). These days boutiques, high-rises, chain caffeine and furniture stores have replaced the storefront mimeograph-revolution barricades. Ed's 1991 self-produced "Yiddish Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side" is a poetic retelling of an even older East Side history -- New York isn't what it used to be, either. 

His memoir Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, The Fugs, and the Counterculture in the Lower East Side (DaCapo Press) is a freewheeling history of a creative era that has pretty much disappeared into legend and myth. Here's an excerpt.

The Founding of My Magazine

I founded Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts in February 1962 after a bunch of us, mostly friends from the Catholic Worker, went to see Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees at the Charles Theater on Avenue B. I was there mainly because the ad for the film in the Village Voice stated that my hero Allen Ginsberg was in it. For years I had avidly read Jonas Mekas’s weekly Voice column, “Movie Journal,” which mainly focused on the struggles and delights of the world of underground films.

I sensed from reading Mekas’s weekly columns that he was a person of great generosity and communality of spirit. That is, it wasn’t all Me! Me! Me! as in so much of the avant-garde. I thought he had a genuine will to help other filmmakers thrive and survive. I later learned that Mekas had paid for the printing of Jack Smith’s filmFlaming Creatures.

Mekas had just founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and lived nearby on Twelfth Street, although I didn’t know that while I was watching Guns of the Trees. The Lower East Side in those years was a Do-It-Now zone, and you knew maybe only a snippet of someone’s history or scene, if anything at all. All I knew is that the first thing I read each week in the Voice was “Movie Journal.”

I was particularly fascinated by the appearance of Allen Ginsberg as a narrator in the film. I had not yet met Ginsberg, although I had memorized “Howl” when I was still in Missouri in 1957, and I had seen him at Beat/New York School readings, such as one in November 1959 where he read at the Living Theater with Frank O’Hara. Wow. As I sat fascinated in the Charles Theater that February night with my pals, I never could have dreamed that the author of “Howl” and “Kaddish” would become a close friend.

At one point in Guns of the Trees Ginsberg chanted one of his poems with the sentence “I dreamt that J. Edgar Hoover groped me in a silent hall of the Capitol.” It was a fragment that opened up such huge vistas of possibility in my mind! I transformed the fragment into the dedication for my soon-to-be-published magazine.

Jonas and Adolfas Mekas and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative

Just as Allen Ginsberg was born in New Jersey in 1926 (and not near the Dniester River in Russia) because the pogroms in the Russian Pale, first in the 1880s and later around the time of the Kishinev pogrom of 1904, drove his mother’s and father’s families to the American Dream, so, too, were Jonas Mekas and his brother, Adolfas, driven from Lithuania to the United States, this time in their case by the Nazis. In the early 1940s Jonas and Adolfas put out a mimeographed anti-Nazi newspaper, cutting stencils on a typewriter in a woodshed behind their house in Semeniskiai in Lithuania. Later they escaped from a German slave labor camp.

In 1949 they arrived in the United States, where both of them became filmmakers. In 1955 Jonas founded the magazine Film Culture. In the fall of 1958 he began his very influential weekly column, “Movie Journal,” in the Village Voice. In the summer of 1960 the Mekas brothers purchased some out-of-date film stock and began their feature-length film Guns of the Trees. Jonas wrote the script.

Mekas formed the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in early 1962 after another film distribution operation refused to screen a film by Stan Brakhage, Anticipation of the Night. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative practiced no censorship at all, and 75 percent of the rental fees for showing a film went directly to the filmmaker. And so in early 1962 the Charles Theater on Avenue B near Twelfth Street began showing underground films. Some of us from nearby streets eagerly attended.

Across the street was Stanley’s, a packed bar frequented by poets, civil rights activists, filmmakers, painters, and oodles of others from the nearby rent-controlled buildings. After Guns of the Trees my friends and I adjourned to Stanley’s for conversation and fun. Inspired by the film, I announced that evening that I was beginning a magazine and I solicited manuscripts. The name I tossed out among the revelers made them laugh. It had been in my mind a number of years.

Excerpted from "Chapter 1: The Glories of the Early ‘60s" in Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side, by Ed Sanders. The book is published by DaCapo Press.