JOHN LYLE: THE THING ABOUT THE BLUES

Album Review of:

‘RANDOM CHANTS’ by JOHN LYLE

(Own Label, 2020)  www.johnlyle.bandcamp.com

direct from: 6488 Gale Ave, N Sechelt, BC, Canada VON3A5

John Lyle would only be different if he wasn’t the same. His bruised voice is a strange addiction. You take a hit, you need a regular fix. Even doing a sweet three minutes of tight group waltz-time he’s still a wry groan away from the shadow on a penitentiary wall. He’s a gasp away from asphyxiation off the grid. He’s a leaky dam, aggravating ripples in gravity where love dies in dishonesty. He emotes low-down tales as intimate as poems, as rich as diamonds, with kneejerk rhythms and a rattlesnake bite. Songs about the guy who swears he wrote “Chantilly Lace”… you KNOW what I like! Or the old buddy watching TV cop movies, in which he’s dragging the river for the body of his soul. He sings about a pocketful of ‘Bad Weed’, and running around in circles ever since he lost the Grateful Dead. He lets the words spill out, or pitchforks them in. Just don’t step on the “Heavy Is The Head” boogie backbeat. “The Thing About The Blues” nudges the MGs with Chris Nole’s Booker T organ, as John hits a smooth guitar groove, with nifty instrumental interplay around the reflective “The Rest Of Your Life”, or the solo “It Helps You Sleep” where infinity and eternity hang by a thread. Co-writer Diane Williams adds vocal harmony to “The Blood Of Someone New”. There’s also a hidden track (on the special edition) which reignites ancient loss and love beyond death. When John Lyle wraps up all your cares and woes he infiltrates them into the remnants of a song, with strength in its differences. He doesn’t necessarily know what he’s doing, but he’s doing it again.

BY ANDREW DARLINGTON

Andrew Darlington is a major poet and writer on music and culture. You can find more of his work at http://andrewdarlington.blogspot.com.

ANDREW DARLINGTON

BRYN FORTEY AND

THE DEATH OF BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON

Book Reviews of:

‘I GUESS THAT’S WHY THEY CALL IT THE BLUES’

& ‘WHEN I MENTIONED THE BEATS’
by BRYN FORTEY

(Outlaw Chapbook Press, January and February 2020)

Limited editions from: 212 Caerleon Road, Newport, South Wales NP19 7GQ

You need long-distance vision to see things up close. We are all our own stories. Poems just say things more effectively, considering every possible letter, making each pulse count. Bryn was never a joiner, now we’re all lost in a time of separations. When a writer becomes part of a movement, when that time goes cold, they get stranded with it, the Beats are beaten, the Mersey Poets run dry on ribs of mud, Rappers do TV-ads for casinos. They go from movement, to motionless. Bryn Fortey and me started out sketching poems like this one, I’ll not ask if you remember it, I don’t think either of us will ever forget it. Some of these poems go back to ‘Global Tapestry Journal’, ‘Quarry’ or Bryn’s own ‘Outlaw’, others are from now-sites such as ‘Ramingo’s Porch’ or ‘Bradlaugh’s Finger’.

His Blues poems cleave to narrative, lopped-off into concise lines, telling the Chet Baker life, or Sonny Stitt ‘playing second fiddle to heroin addiction’. Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup who lives in a packing case, Bo Diddley who is ‘the baddest cat in town’, haunted by juke-joint rhythms and forgotten photographs. The Beat poems tell tales in dialogue, although they cross-contaminate. In an argument with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Bryn sides with his wronged wife Hettie, in a gesture of left-handed solidarity. Or he posthumously threatens David Meltzer for steamrollering his own ‘cool but not cold’ poem about Lester Young with his huge weighty bio-tome, ‘keep out of dark alleyways’ he darkly warns David, ‘don’t think dying in 2016 will save you.’ Without Kerouac there’d perchance be no Bukowski, no Selby, no Carver… no me, no Bryn. That’s another ongoing discussion. It doesn’t necessarily require truth, just some soft painless lies. Not all poets make it big, some just get high on the smell of the blackest ink slinking across chapbook pages. That’s enough. Sure, there are what-if poems of other outcomes. Bryn sends postcards from other continuums too, he has the necessary long-distance vision. But we’ve had the loyalty card for some time, here are two more stamps to go in it. Let the rave-up never end.

 ANDREW DARLINGTON

ANDREW DARLINGTON

A Letter to the Editor Hello Bruce,
time is a strange thing, sometimes Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones. I turned on BBC2 to watch ‘Mock The Week’ without realizing it was a repeat. It gradually became apparent that it was from last December, before Xmas, before the election, in a bizarrely disorientating sense of timeshift. It seemed like an eternity ago, although in fact it’s just a little over six weeks ago. We did a postal vote because we were going down to Colliers Wood to stay over with my son Stephen and his family. I stayed up long enough to see the exit polls. The following morning Stephen came in at breakfast and said ‘Wakefield has a Conservative MP!’ I assumed he was joking. I was wrong to think that. It already feels like forever ago. Fast-forward to now, I went into Wakefield this weekend to the ‘Jackanory’ Lit-event. There were sketches and artwork on the walls from classes held in the venue during the week. Some of them were quite good. Others not so good. Nick Toczek was reading. It was good to see him again. He seemed really pleased that I’d turned up to see him. It was a relaxed informal reading. After the event we went for a coffee – he’s doing a ‘dry’ January so we didn’t go near alcohol! And we did a lot of catching up. He was wearing a Ramones T-shirt. I said ‘I see your Ramones T-shirt, and raise you...’, I was wearing a Thirteenth-Floor Elevators T-shirt. So we instantly began trading music stories, almost as if we’d been doing it yesterday and forever. More timeshifts, when I first met Nick, in an Art Gallery as I recall, we both had long hair. No more. We’ve done joint readings since, published each other and appeared in the same magazines – ‘Little Word Machine’, ‘Wool City Rocker’, and in fact we still do, we both write for ‘R’N’R: Rock ‘n’ Reel’ today. He got to see Allen Ginsberg. I never saw Allen Ginsberg. But I got to see William Burroughs. He never saw William Burroughs. We both got to see the Ramones, albeit separately. We compare tinnitus-levels, ‘it’s always there, even in the quietest silence.’ And when he tells about eating fried-scorpion in Thailand, I call him out about his vegetarian phase. I remember him doing a thing about turning veggie, yet being tempted by the aroma of burgers from McDonald’s. And bacon. Always bacon. Now he says black pudding too, which is hard-core even for carnivores. I was never tempted that way. The one thing I missed, the one thing I used to enjoy, was Sweet-&-Sour chicken. But the ‘Pagoda’ in Wakefield do a great Sweet-&-Sour tofu instead. Another timeshift, three of us once turned up for what we assumed was a Poetry Booking in a Wakefield Alternative Cabaret, only to see the poster outside the venue announcing us as ‘Three Comedians’! Which was not exactly what we had in mind. I simply drop all my serious poems and just do the humorous ones. Nick did a long rambling thing about haemorrhoids. It was a kind of X-Factor with a prize for the most popular voted set. The third person onstage was a lady poet from Horbury who had stacked the audience with her friends, work-colleagues and family with the intention of swaying the vote. Which made it all the sweeter when Nick actually won. Then we talk about those we’ve lost on the way. Steve Sneyd. And Richard Mason. Nick says the Wakefield cabaret was one of Richard’s promotions. I don’t think it was. But he could be right. Richard blasted into the Leeds poetry scene, took it and shook it by the scruff of the neck, an activist who set up readings and Alternative Cabarets. We did lots of wild events together, me and Rich, including stoned trips down to Dorset. Then he vanished. Nick told me he’d retreated back to Cowling, and died five years ago. I didn’t even know. Until that moment. As we part, Nick gives me a CD he’s done. I give him a copy of my ‘Tweak Vision’. With all manner of vague promises to do more. But time is a strange thing, considering... I was going to write more, and different, but I got sidetracked… next time, maybe
Cin Cin
-Andy-