Meet Thursday afternoon, run through the set for a couple of hours. Hand out poems as scores; accept quizzical musician glances, no problem. That evening a wonderful crowd assembles. Luminaries Elvis Costello, T-Bone Burnett, Sam Phillips, Michael Lally, Merilene M. Murphy et alia, are treated to a non-stop perfpo show, improvisational ear tattoos, recorded like air in a cyclotron and -- stop me if you’ve heard this one before -- totally poetry. The vibe is recording studio work session crossed with kicked out jams arena. “The greatest live poetry show we’ve ever heard!” -- Stanley and Elyse Grinstein.
Take a day off to plan suicide.
On Saturday record from 1 till 1, having fun battles in fabbo Village Studio, site of many gold and platinum discs. The band spends an hour sampling the whole history of music, trying to remember every possible “Forgotten Melody” in order to deconstruct music into memory’s poem. Each riff must be slightly off to avoid clearance problems. Become the Rolling Stones at various points in their career. Bond.
Take a few weeks to listen. Hal says let’s mix at Prairie Sun, in Sonoma County, a reformed chicken farm that records with real space, and tubes. Mooka, the main man at Prairie Sun, is a poetry lover; Tom Waits records there. Hal and I are roomies in the house down the hill, so we never ever lose the groove. Also, my dear friend Kathy Ryan was fighting leukemia in San Francisco, and I could spend some time with her.
The Mix. Hal’s box of magic arrives, streamers of reel-to-reel, crates of 78s, CDs sans jewel boxes, a low fashion show of audio media. We work and sleep and eat with mix engineer Tim Gennert. The studio is sound chambers, not chips. Slow and deep, the velvet air of Sonoma seeps into the vacuum. Creating beauty’s laugh in a lab designed for technology’s ripcord to the brain. By this point, the album is no longer The Death of Poetry but Bob Holman. The mix of live, improv, sampling, and studio takes on its own life, its own sound, the way poems come together to form a book. I am becoming a CD.... (For some reason you cannot name a book of poems eponymously. Don’t ask me why. That’s why I say Good-bye.)
Hal Willner has cued up the studio tape on the big 2” reel-to-reel, some sound fx on the flappy quarter-inch, a scratchy 78 on the turntable, and 6 CDs. He’s looking for a note, any note, the perfect note. Could be a tango or a Buddhist chant, a song he heard as a child, a Japanese court shakahuchi, a mariachi. Samples are flitting around like bats.
Let’s make a paradigm of “Forgotten Melody.” We’ve got an hour of studio music quotes, remember, and we begin to log them in. I will do the vocal later. Hal’s eyes close. He is walking the ceiling. It is rote work till the spring thaw, just noting: Wayne “Purple Haze” to Chris “Waterloo Sunset” to Bobby “Bobby McGee.” That’s the first minute. Only 59 more to go. Then, pop. “I’ve been trying to use this for awhile,” Hal says, throwing “The Poet and Peasant Overture” on the turntable, an old scratched-up 78 recovered from the dustbin of history. As the first notes emerge, Hal says, “This is going to work” and calls for the DAT from the Kampo session of the 80-year-old. Unbelievably, we locate said DAT and lay it over the cartoony overture. The poem anticipates and reacts to music shifts so subtly it had to have been all planned, thousands of years ago, in the common DNA pool of an exquisite corpse. Poem length and Overture length is exactly the same almost (10 seconds). Then Tim starts it five seconds in, a tweak that adjusts the gyres. It now is perfection. And simple. And finished.
Hal says that is allowed to happen once every CD or two.
