September 16, 2008
Your Pathway To All Recent “The Jihadi Killer Hour” Shows:
10:15 A.M.
Wow, that was some crazy shit. I went to bed about 3 hours ago. Not still there, obviously. Not going anywhere from here, either. When dating, screwing, working and fighting are all the same thing, it’s, shit, I need coffee and aspirin. And food, yeah. Is everybody in? The massacre is about to begin.
10:30 A.M.
It has come to the point where there is truly nothing “cool” about the Left. Except beautiful young women. But even then, it’s obviously only skin deep, their cool factor. They are so uptight and they have just become about nothing more than rigid rules, and they have no purpose without hatred. That’s a bad thing to have as your foundation, the very thing on which everything is built. I gotta put up Breitbart’s new piece in a little bit. Something that’s popped into my mind a lot: That line about the Left in Hollywood from the article about him last week, is a line in which he is kind of breathlessly whispering a forbidden or illegal-to-speak truth, in which he’s not speaking in either hyperbole or metaphor, not loosely or sloppily or thoughtlessly, not the least bit viciously, just with the guileless awe of a child who’s just seen something shocking and portentious: “They’re really evil.” Yeah, he’s talking about the Left in Hollywood, and he says so many other things about them, but that line is really going to stick with me. It’s not that I haven’t heard it before or realized it myself, there was just something about seeing it, which is to really say seeing Andrew say it in my mind, knowing the hows and whys of his speech because he’s a pal, and knowing everything I said in my preamble to that line here, knowing that he really did mean it precisely down to some of the most famous and powerful people in the entertainment industry, that he was so sincere and really just shocked about what he’d learned about them, it’s the power of that sincerity along with the sickening truth of what he said, which will always give that line such power with me, such a vivid memory of it, as if I was standing there when he said it to the reporter, who I know must have pondered it a good bit after hearing it.
1:19 P.M.
I remember reading in some shrink publication years ago that the prevailing concensus among The Big Shrinks That Dictate The Rules was that a lack of empathy strong enough to allow someone to hurt others with no sense of remorse - and just about all behaviors listed as symptoms under the theories of psychopathy and sociopathy - could be caused strictly by environmental factors, not genetic ones, though genetic ones were most often the cause.
2:40 P.M.
I was having lunch with Debbie Harry in a Tuscon diner that looked like the only thing different about it since it opened in the 50’s was the effects of time. We were there making a movie about a short kid in his early twenties who stuffed his boots with crushed beer cans so he could look taller. He had his own place, where like a burgeoning Charlie Manson, he would fill it with wealthy high-school girls born troubled or just looking for trouble, and usually both. He’d have all these elaborate head games and cons running with this bevy of young ladies, that he felt he had to lose a few one after the other and started killing them, the first with help from two of the others. They stood and watched as he smashed the girl’s head in with a very large stone, and then helped him bury her. He killed at least one more, and then one of his girls ratted him out. They executed him. Manson cited him as his primary inspiration and model.
Towards the end of lunch I asked Debbie if she was keeping tabs on Jeffrey Lee Pierce, a rare and very original musical genius who she had been close with. Debbie in fact, “discovered” Jeffrey and his band “The Gun Club” and was sort of their sponsor, doing all she could to help this very unique artist reach as wide an audience as possible. A daunting task, because although they didn’t make “crap” and “noise” and “arty” stuff, it was nothing like anything heard before, and so very, very American. I don’t know what his politics were, but Jeffrey, a kind of 27 year-old intellectual meets Jim Morrison meets fat dude meets alcoholic, was probably the most knowledgable student and passionate revivalist of American roots music in the country, with a particular emphasis on the 19th century. He once said that his dream job was to be a clerk in the Library of Congress, listening to and cataloguing the ancient soundtrack of America that has come to be known as roots music. “But,” he said, “I can’t stop writing, so I don’t know when I could ever do that.”
His whole aesthetic was to take this roots music, either borrowing it’s instruments and styles or actually remaking entire songs - and we’re talking appalachian folk, blues, bluegrass, cajun, country and western both from the 50-70’s golden years and backwards into it’s early incarnations - and marry it to music with much of the energy and literal sound of punk rock, which was approaching it’s peak in the 80’s. He was like the great lost voice of the American “white trash” underclass and it’s 150 year-long story, from tiny desert town to southern trailer park to Texas badlands to deep mysterious swampy Louisiana netherlands. His emotional and confrontational terrain was the world of the American lower and middle class’s darkest secrets and potentially deadly troubles, it’s daily struggles in a wild but settling, hard, brutal, beautiful, crowding but still wide open land. This was the only guy who at that time, basically pre-rap, could write lines like “I left a nigger lying dead by the river” and get away with it because it was there as the authentic voice of a dark and desperate first person narrative from an ancient time, akin to Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside Me”. But he was the strangest guy, - he’d stumble drunk onto the stage, give you all of the charisma of Jim Morrison, sing these either rousing and defiant songs of people struggling for love and money in a southern or western america, that you could just feel you were actually in, or these just truly desperate, desperate heart, body, spirit, mind and soul broken cries, wails, pleas, mournings and apologies, of a man who had made too many mistakes to ever put it back together again, and just had to sit in some small place in the New Mexico badlands and breath, smoke and drink all he could before the death and justice that hunted him were probably no more than a few sunsets away. The hours dwindled, he had nothing to do but drink and think, he stared at the door considering the moment it would be kicked in, and they wold stake their legitimate claim on the remains of a life he no longer lived but only endured. But like anyone, even knowing his death would be a mercy, his thoughts remained focused on how to fight it.
I heard Jeffrey was drinking way, way too much, which was the main reason I asked Debbie. She looked at me very intensely but curiously, with a kind of, “just how are you supposed to deliver bad news?” look, but also she looked fucking pissed. And then she exhales a signature cumulus of marlboro and says, a little less certain and more upset-sounding than I was expecting, but yup, pissed “I don’t know. He doesn’t return my calls much. He’s fucking drinking all the time and he’s just always…fucking, depressed. He’s just always depressed and I get sick of it. I’m like, “Jeffrey what are you depressed about? What do you have to be depressed about? What is so fucked up about your life that you have to be depressed to the point you can’t function…and always drinking? And he can’t answer me.”
And then, just like a rock star, she crushed her cigarette out right in the middle of the formica table, no ashtray, and got up like she really wanted to leave, and we did.
Jeffrey died a few years later, unable to afford medical care because the musician’s union wouldn’t pay his bills in the way they would for people who’d drunk themselves into the same hole but sold more records. There was big fight about this for a while, a petition drive all that, but whatever, fate is fate and Jeffrey would’ve been the first to say “Shut the fuck up I drank myself to death it ain’t nobobody else’s responsibility.” and he died one morning as a piece of his hardened and cracking yellow liver broke off, floated up his bloodstream and clogged his brain resulting an a fatal hemorrhage. He never made any excuses for basically killing himself like he did, he didn’t ask for pity, he apologized to many, but mostly, uncharacteristically, he was quiet in the last few remaining sunsets.
This is some homemade music video made by a fan of a song featured in “Young Americans” that’s clearly about dying - written and recorded long, long before he did - from the album “Miami” which was produced (pretty badly, actually, by Debbie’s husband. Their best album is their first album, a masterpiece called “Sex Beat”.) Johnny Cash could’ve covered this perfectly. There’s actually about ten great Gun Club songs amongst a mixed career bag that a group of serious musicians should cover to memorialize and preserve them. This one’s called “Mother of Earth”. Weirdly, whoever made it has something that sounds like car radio talking in the background, slightly but noticeably, at times.
“Oh Mother of Earth the wind is hot
I tried my best but I could not
And now my eyes fade from me
in this open country”
This is a live acousting version of part of the song by one the best white blues musicians of our time, Cypress Grove:
And here’s some apparently pretty famous but like, I don’t know man, sorta underground but serious kinda orchesta instrument combo hipster nerdy intellectual group that’s weird, doing a cover of it. Debbie actually used to perform this song herself a lot in the 90’s. And for such a strange but definitely country sounding song, she did a damn good job.:
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