tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on May 28, 2011 6:03:27 GMT
I know for alot of folks, he is the guy who gets compartmentalized as the Revolution Will Not Be Televised guy, something that gets co opted too damn easy and ends up meaning something else, much as what has happened to much "classic" rock. The news is not particularly surprising knowing of his health problems in the past decade or so. Or as the guy who invented rap, to which, and I do take liberties with the exact quote, say something to the effect of, If I'm the Godfather of Rap the Godmother and I have to sit down and have a serious discussion about our son. In any case this guy meant more than a little to my heart, and do not mind saying I wept at the news. Sharing a few examples of him and what I believe is a very fitting eulogy in music from someone I know we both hold dear, John Coltrane. youtu.be/SOBVa6Gg6PAyoutu.be/drTjTE8MCBUyoutu.be/2VqGWfq0Btgyoutu.be/f1xe7FDsQWY I love you Gil. Goodbye to another great son of Chicago
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Post by steelmonkey on May 28, 2011 18:10:44 GMT
He smoked a lot of crack...a lot alot and didn't give a fuk who knew...very smart guy, true poet, ahead of his time, victim of drugs and all that went with it....vehement reagen-hater...maybe a little too honest and sensitive...really deteriorated of late and couldn't or wouldn't find the brakes on kissing the pipe
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tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on May 28, 2011 18:53:15 GMT
Well...not entirely true Bernie, Gil had been freed of that yoke for a good 4 years. And I can think of no one, performer or otherwise who I was as surprised and saddened to find had fallen prey to that so late in life, the guy who warned us against such behaviors long ago in pieces such as the Bottle. And as to your "deteriorated of late" observation, do take a few minutes to view this piece from 2007, post crack, such a demeaning way of remembering this man, and tell me if this is a deteriorated man. youtu.be/f3hCQcrfg28
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Post by steelmonkey on May 29, 2011 1:10:04 GMT
Glad to learn the flame flickered before it faded...I thought i read more recently than '07 he was back into the rock w/out roll...but it may have been 'old news' when i read it or it may feel like '07 was yesterday. he was in an SF studio ( Hyde St...you'd know that one) where a friend works and he said the runs to the corner for crack were fast and furious....can't place the exact date i heard that.
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tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on May 29, 2011 2:06:18 GMT
I would hardly be surprised, having seen my best friend since I was 10 go in his grave on March 7, in part due to his continued dalliances in that area that he was last beholden too on a full time basis 15 years ago or so, zombie, open sores, the whole lovely visage of a junkie. Just not how I would wish to remember Gil any more than how I would wish to remember Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker, John Lennon, Jerry Garcia or even that Coleridge guy who I believe conceived Kubla Khan in an opium haze. I can recall my friend Pat referred to the high as both like having 10000 orgasms at once or being back in your Mother's womb and would attach a romance to it that I found most unappealing, galling even. Sort of a you could not possibly know attitude, which indeed may be true, but would be countered by me with a why the f**k would you want to find out? I am pleased that that plant is here on the planet, but not as a cure for the woe is me day to day miseries of life, but for the unspeakable physical pain one may endure either from illness, or such as a soldier might encounter on a battlefield. Crack, heroin, eight balls all of it, I hate it, and the romance connected with it. It wants your life, your spirit, your family all of it, I despise it.
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Post by nonrabbit on May 29, 2011 12:25:36 GMT
"I hate it, and the romance connected with it..."
That story struck me and that comment particularly, Ray, I wrote a story about a young boy who died on a Saturday night in someone's room at someone's party, all of his friends sitting around him. They didn't realise till the morning that he had died. He was always out of it, only about 17/18 years old and always with a big smile on his face, although his eyes and mind were in another world. Never able to have an everyday conversation with him at any time. One sunny afternoon, a friend bumped into him in town and he was the cleanest they had ever seen him, both drug free and dressed - spotless white t shirt and new jeans - despite hanging around with him for a couple of years, this was the first normal conversation they had ever had with him -like meeting him for the first time. Point of the story is that certainly in the early 70's we stupidly romanticised about drug taking. It wasn't that easy to come by and it wasn't cheap and it still ruined lives.
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Post by nonrabbit on May 29, 2011 14:33:59 GMT
Sorry highjacked the thread a bit there ^^ Knew I would listen to those vids today Ray and I am! Listening at the moment to Pieces of a Man Never heard Gil before but whoo what a voice! Think I've mentioned before that I never really listened to much jazz although maybe Steely qualified - well a bit?? ;D damn he's brilliant RIP and using a quote from youtube.. Say not in grief 'he is no more' but live in thankfulness that he was. Just discovered that his father was the first black player for Glasgow Celtic !! quote from a Glasgow newspaper - yesterday At a book launch in Glasgow, Scott-Heron once said: "Two things Scots love the most music and football and they got one representative from each from my family." It became a tradition among Scott-Heron fans to show up at his Glasgow shows in Celtic tops. At one concert, he joked: "There you go again once again overshadowed by a parent." www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/2011/05/29/tributes-flood-in-after-rap-pioneer-dies-at-62-86908-23164913/i51.images obliterated by tinypic/2ldf0xu.jpg[/IMG] Gil Heron Celtic 1951-53 and here's a lovely article from the Times on visiting Gil shortly after the death of his father at 87 years old in 2008 entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article5298520.ece
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Post by steelmonkey on May 29, 2011 15:59:47 GMT
The irony of the kind of people who become enslaved by drug addiction, beating their chests and declaring themselves 'free' in any, way, shape or form is not lost on me...amazing how the 'you can't tell me what to do' rebels turn into total automotons when it's time to feed the habit and still think they are romantic figures living on the margins...drink, opiates, crack, cigs-----all forms of slavery. Ray, you never freebased? Crack is just instant freebase...you just put it in a glass pipe, heat to sublimation ( it goes from solid to gas...so does heroin, but heroin is liquid for a degree or two, thus the rolling on the foil, thus chasing the dragon)..hold the milky white smoke till you see the bleeding feet of jesus...and you get a huge, explosive, orgasmic, 30-300 second rush in your head as all the natural 'happy' drugs in your brain are activated at once and dumped in your bloodstream. it wears off in minutes and your thoughts turn to more....each 'hit' a little lower top altitude than the one before till you run out of crack and feel like $h1t for up to 3 days as your body has shut down the natural happy drug factory having gotten the message from your mission control that there is, in fact, an overload in your body....after a few days of hell, when your body has restarted it's own balancing act, crack starts to seem like a good idea....the memory of the rush cancels the memory of the hell after...you can skip the whole cycle of abuse, withdrawl, craving but just not stopping...then you end up in a weird twilight crack zone indefinitley, a circle of dante's hell for sure. Crack is the worst.....you can taper heroin and find a way to design maintainenece alcohol use...but crack is all or nothing everytime. Each 'run' from the first hit, guaranteed to hold you in it's grip till total exhaustion of funds or absolute inability to keep trying to duplicate the first hits....sheer hell. I smoked crack for thrills in conjunction with chiva...crack the diving board, heroin the swimming pool...so instead of withdrawl, my crack episodes throttled down into a heroin nod....yeah, i thought i was a pretty cool guy, but i see a lost asshole in the rearview mirror ( I hope that object is not closer than it appears !)
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tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on May 29, 2011 17:55:39 GMT
Damn sure never free based Bernie. Having been a sociable character and working at what literally was ground zero for cocaine in Chicago in the financial markets, yeah, I did coke probably 25 times in and around those years, never paid for it, never did more than a line which would send me on an adrenaline rush that alcohol did only a little to quell. Part of the reason I despise cocaine is and am less enthralled with the beginnings of Saturday Night Live is I can mark to 1975 when the tenor of this enormous tribe I operated within began to change as it suddenly became essential to watch this program which I just never thought was quite that funny (at least not until Phil Hartman and a few of his cohorts got there years later)and groups would retire to bedrooms behind closed doors to snort that stuff, which I believe changed the tenor of our relationship. Certainly I recall being cornered by people that I had not found that interesting in the first place, who would be jacked to the gills on that stuff, and would relate to me stories of questionable truth, say about their great uncle or something, with their jaws moving from side to side, truly a hideous sight, and there would be no suitable break in the performance for long periods of time when one could make a graceful escape. I can't say there was no upside or that I did not occasionally enjoy it myself. I can remember one guy from the options floor, stock market stuff, who was intense and interesting in his way in normal times. When he would get coked up things in general would take on quite fantastic importance, and one night it was essential that he got me down in the basement to show how well disciplined his dogs were. So I went down there, again, the guy was pretty funny to begin with, and there were his 2 dogs in cages, wild eyed with fury who were without question the least obedient dogs I have ever seen, poor things, barking up a storm . Nearly all of my own positive memories of the drug concern baseball, and a couple friends of mine who did share this obsession, and having intense arguments concerning baseball minutae, say, some obscure player from the mid sixties, that on one or two occasions nearly resulted in fistfights. Absurd, certainly, funny, well yeah it actually was. Additionally I can mark specifically to cocaine a generational mindset, that saw Jethro Tull, or music that might require a greater depth of attention, become so out of fashion so as to be an embarrassment, while punk and disco fairly barged thru the door. But no, while I am not happy I did cocaine, in the right circumstances, to be honest, I would do a line now, or at least I think it would, but I'm pretty sure everyone I know who once did it and would give me some has stopped long long ago, and again, I never once paid for it. And any of its relatives such as crack, or shooting any drug at no point in my life would I have given the smallest consideration.
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tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on May 29, 2011 18:53:59 GMT
"I hate it, and the romance connected with it..." That story struck me and that comment particularly, Ray, I wrote a story about a young boy who died on a Saturday night in someone's room at someone's party, all of his friends sitting around him. They didn't realise till the morning that he had died. He was always out of it, only about 17/18 years old and always with a big smile on his face, although his eyes and mind were in another world. Never able to have an everyday conversation with him at any time. One sunny afternoon, a friend bumped into him in town and he was the cleanest they had ever seen him, both drug free and dressed - spotless white t shirt and new jeans - despite hanging around with him for a couple of years, this was the first normal conversation they had ever had with him -like meeting him for the first time. Point of the story is that certainly in the early 70's we stupidly romanticised about drug taking. It wasn't that easy to come by and it wasn't cheap and it still ruined lives. I have such mixed feelings about "drugs" Patti as I believe there is a signifigant line separating all the psychedelics and marijuana from alcohol, cocaine, heroin, angel dust and its relatives. In the case of psychedelics certainly at least 90 per cent of the people injesting them never should have been, what I think I have referred to before as the downside of Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, as nothing opened the door to what can easily be described as a sacred substance so much as that album, which, regardless of intent and its overall beauty, this was the Beatles we were talking about, and millions of people figured they had the key which at that moment concerned LSD, and the creation of characters that I am quite sure were what Zappa was referring to with "Suzy Creamcheese" and the entire album of "We're Only In It For The Money", the ultimate parody album of history, a parody of Sgt Peppers and the Haight Ashbury, circa 67. I will always defend the Haight between 64 and 66, when so many great minds really were paving a new destination, but once the hundreds of thousands of Suzy Creamcheeses and her buddies found out about it, the cat was out of the bag. Basically, as ever, most people are just there for the party. However, as I may have mentioned here before, I am firstly reminded of a show PBS did on the then fledgling internet about 15 years ago, and the very first thing mentioned was the Grateful Dead, and their relatives, people like Stewart Brand, a main player and member of the "Diggers" in the original Haight, also behind the Whole Earth Catalogue. So many people came out of that psychedelic experience which left us with much people forget as being connected to it, like knowledge of a healthier way of eating, re health foods, knowledge of other forms of discipline such as yoga, in bold letter environmental awareness can be directly traced to that time, awareness of disparate forms of music became enlivened in that time, questioning of our country's involvement in other people's business, and other aspects I won't trouble my brain at the moment to remember. None of those other drugs can make any positive claim's whatsoever I would contend. Additionally we would never have seen the likes of the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix as anything other than a bitchin blues guitar player in the village, Pink Floyd, Sgt Peppers and to a large extent Jethro Tull. Re I cannot speak with specificity to other countries, but I know damn sure the same thing was going on, and those TAAB thru War Child shows, and doubtless prior, included an audience that, speaking conservatively, over half were tripping their balls off. Without that I seriously doubt the likes of TAAB, Passion Play or Dark Side of the Moon would have reached anywhere near so enormous an audience to where there freaking number one albums, all of that would have remained underground if indeed it existed at all without psychedelics and the climate it engendered. I have my own regrets I suppose as I do not doubt without acid and its relatives I likely would have a masters degree in something, and certainly would have kept on playing ball as opposed to hitch hiking around the USA. Home factors at the time had some hand in that as well. On the other hand, with probably around 250 of those experiences under my belt, most between 72 and 75, some few were of so profound a nature that in its moment I knew I was being made privy to things one is not supposed to be able to see in this world, truly humbling beauty, visions of an afterlife of unspeakable love, and feeling like I was being allowed to see the world thru the eyes of the likes of Einstein. Was it a fitting trade? Of that I cannot be certain. I also believe, in that 90 percentile to which I refer who likely should not have been tripping, to those who actually "freaked out" I suspect a high amount of unwillingness to let go, behind very potent psychedelics such as Owsley produced, and trust God basically, and they never got out. But I believe those constitute less than one percent. I probably have recommended it before but I will do so again as it is one of the most profound books I have ever read, and in a well stocked city library it is probably available, Storming Heaven, LSD and the American Dream, by Jay Stephens.
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tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on May 29, 2011 18:56:19 GMT
"I hate it, and the romance connected with it..." That story struck me and that comment particularly, Ray, I wrote a story about a young boy who died on a Saturday night in someone's room at someone's party, all of his friends sitting around him. They didn't realise till the morning that he had died. He was always out of it, only about 17/18 years old and always with a big smile on his face, although his eyes and mind were in another world. Never able to have an everyday conversation with him at any time. One sunny afternoon, a friend bumped into him in town and he was the cleanest they had ever seen him, both drug free and dressed - spotless white t shirt and new jeans - despite hanging around with him for a couple of years, this was the first normal conversation they had ever had with him -like meeting him for the first time. Point of the story is that certainly in the early 70's we stupidly romanticised about drug taking. It wasn't that easy to come by and it wasn't cheap and it still ruined lives. Christ, I just had a very long response to this that the ethers ate, I will have to leave it rest. May I say simply please read Storming Heaven, LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stephens.
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tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on May 29, 2011 19:02:47 GMT
O cool, it done showed up anyway. Funny old ethers.
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tullist
Master Craftsman
Posts: 478
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Post by tullist on May 29, 2011 19:14:26 GMT
Sure appreciate that Graham, got me pretty choked up, Gil is the spitting image of his Dad. His appeal, not unlike Ian, is for reasons extra musical, he was just a charming guy, so good at putting an audience, often mostly white, at ease. A case in point I think is one of the videos I posted, a reinterpretation of Marvin Gaye's Inner City Blues, certainly the nastiest "rap" I have ever heard, just so on time. But I can see where alot of people, particularly white people, might have a problem with it, as it seems to glorify the story of a guy named Mark Essex, well worth googling, apparently a very gentle soul, who after years of being used as a whipping boy on several levels by white people, finally snapped and "took to the rooftops while all the crackers ran wild", murdering several before his own demise. Certainly cannot forgive that but I believe being apprised of the entire story at least puts it in a different light, and it is brilliant spoken word, that part of the piece I recall is named the Siege of New Orleans. It's quite jaw dropping by my estimation. Steely Dan? You're right Graham, I do not like them. However I understand they are the doorway to which many have come to the real thing so I like that. I do know one of their pieces, I think Ricky don't Lose that number, and the opening piano figure is directly lifted, note for note and tempo, from Horace Silver's Song For My Father. I don't hate the song or Steely Dan they just never registered with me at all, I think most of the people of my age liked them a little or alot, including people who like jazz very much.
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Post by nonrabbit on May 29, 2011 20:26:10 GMT
maybe one fitting tribute to him is the new song and the new album "I'm New Here"
" No matter how far gone you've gone you can always turn around"
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Post by nonrabbit on Jun 28, 2011 9:11:54 GMT
Watched a BBC Four documentary last night made before his death which concentrated on his music and walked around Harlem with him. It was good but I would have liked a bit more about his personal life. They mentioned a link between Heron's music/poetry and modern day hip hop or rap - I don't really see it as I would call Gil a brilliant jazz poet and more importantly they couldn't possibly match his skill in putting politics /emotion and passion succintly into so few words.
It's not on iplayer maybe restrictions apply?
"I'm on my way home I left three days ago, but noone seems to know i'm gone"
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Post by nonrabbit on Jun 28, 2011 9:33:58 GMT
"I hate it, and the romance connected with it..." That story struck me and that comment particularly, Ray, I wrote a story about a young boy who died on a Saturday night in someone's room at someone's party, all of his friends sitting around him. They didn't realise till the morning that he had died. He was always out of it, only about 17/18 years old and always with a big smile on his face, although his eyes and mind were in another world. Never able to have an everyday conversation with him at any time. One sunny afternoon, a friend bumped into him in town and he was the cleanest they had ever seen him, both drug free and dressed - spotless white t shirt and new jeans - despite hanging around with him for a couple of years, this was the first normal conversation they had ever had with him -like meeting him for the first time. Point of the story is that certainly in the early 70's we stupidly romanticised about drug taking. It wasn't that easy to come by and it wasn't cheap and it still ruined lives. Christ, I just had a very long response to this that the ethers ate, I will have to leave it rest. May I say simply please read Storming Heaven, LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stephens. ordered it on Amazon
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