The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  The old thing—one guy ruined it for the rest.

  Now, if you notice, it has a date when it’s exhausted. Your nose? No. The inhaler. Smith, Klein and French.

  Now it’s sort of weird, you know. I put this, and you know, sniff it up there. But it’s about a year old, and it’s probably exhausted; so I don’t know if I just did that, or sticking things in my nose, you know? Or maybe I’m just hooked on smelling my pocket!

  Actually, is it lewd? That goes back to taste. You know that it’s just not good taste to blow your nose in public or put one of these in your nose in public. And I’ve never done it in front of anybody. But I just feel like I wanna do it tonight.

  For the first time, being recorded on tape, a man sticking a Smith Klein French inhaler in his nose!

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re here at Fax No. Two. A hush is going over the crowd. He’s reaching in his pocket. His neck is tightening. Some ladies sitting ringside, traumatically, are sweating. He’s taking it out, giggling nervously. Will he stick it up there? Nervous laughs emit from the crowd. He’s a degenerate. Two D.A.R. women are throwing up. There go the people from the Mystery Bus Tour.”

  ‘We want our $5.75 back!’

  “There he goes, folks, he’s sniffing!

  ‘Hi, Howard, hi! Zowie! We’re really high now, Howard.

  We certainly are. We’ve solved the world’s problems.’”

  And you’re only twelve months old, you little bugger!

  EXPLOITATION FILMS present: I WAS A TEEN-AGE REEFER-SMOKING pregnant YORTSITE candle. With Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood. See Sal Mineo as the trigger-happy Arty, the kid who knew but one thing—how to love, how to kill! And see Fatlay Good as Theresa, the girl who knew the other thing, tenderness, and love. And see Lyle Talbot as Gramps, who liked to watch. A picture with a message, and an original Hollywood theme—narcotics.

  The film opens as we find Nunzio locked in the bathroom with the stuff, the baccala, the marijuana. Cut to the exterior—Youngstown kitchen, there’s the wife, you know, the factory-worker wife, the whole bit. He comes home,

  WIFE [delighted]: Put me down, you big nut! Oh, tee hee . . .

  That scene, you know? Looking at her,

  HUSBAND [tenderly]: Where’s our son, where’s Ralph?

  WIFE [concerned]: He’s in the bathroom again. And I dunno whatsamatter with him. He’s nervous and listless, and he’s not bothering with any of his friends, and he’s falling off in his studies . . .

  HUSBAND: In the bathroom again, eh? Tsk Tsk. Hmmm . . .

  [knocks on the door] Rhere?

  RALPH [sucking in a big drag, then trying to hold it in as he answers]: Usta minud, I beyout in a minud.

  WIFE: He’s got asthma.

  HUSBAND: Will you stop with that, you nitwit! He’s on the stuff!

  O.K. Suddenly we hear a knock at the door, a whistle; and he takes the marijuana, throws it in the toilet, rushes to the door—there’s no one there! He’s thrown it away! It’s gone, it’s too late! Beads of perspiration are breaking out on his forehead.

  RALPH: It’s gone! There’s only one thing left to do—smoke the toilet!

  The Essential Lenny Bruce, 1967

  Mort Sahl

  (b. 1927)

  Mort Sahl was the first stand-up comic whose schtick was intellectual. Not goof intellectual like Irwin Corey, but the campus type with button-down, V-neck and newspaper. Sahl was a new type, a liberal middle-class hipster, riffing on politics. He was like a clean version of Lenny but then when JFK, for whom he’d written jokes, got assassinated Sahl went all out, reading the Warren Commission Report on stage and getting laughs. He got a lot, but he also brought down heat from the officious media and was marginalized as one of those conspiracy kooks, especially when he was deputized by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison. Sahl’s one-man Broadway show was canceled in 1967 on the eve of opening night, but he never backed down.

  The Billy Graham Rally

  All right.

  Now are there any groups

  Which we have not offended

  In some small way?

  I’ve gone into every field except theism.

  I do that on the next show.

  And I’ll tell you about

  The Billy Graham rally in New York.

  Which I went to in your interest.

  Kind of consumer’s test.

  And I did, I went to see him.

  And he’s pretty wild.

  And I thought it quite significant

  That his annual report is in the paper

  For the ’57 Crusade to Save Souls,

  And it didn’t get into the religious section

  On Saturday or Sunday

  But it’s on the financial page.

  Well, he did very well.

  There’s nothing wrong with, you know,

  Paying your way.

  So, at any rate . . . that isn’t what I meant!

  I thought I heard some bowling upstairs.

  So, at any rate . . .

  He does that all the time.

  You got the wrong connotation.

  I think too many of you are free-associating, you know.

  Graham does that all the time.

  He’s alway’s reading and looking up, you know.

  Which even people in the field will admit

  Is an assumption.

  We don’t know.

  I mean, we think it, right?

  He does that.

  And he always says to his audience,

  “Do you believe?”

  And the audiences always say—

  You know, they are very vociferous;

  They’re kind of a cross between

  The Bonus March and Jazz at the Philharmonic.

  Anyway, he always says to them,

  “Do you believe?”

  And the audience always lays it on him,

  You know, like, “YOU KNOW IT!”

  Sure.

  And then a couple of minutes later

  He’ll be into original sin or something,

  And all of a sudden he’ll stop—

  You know, like they never said it—

  And he’ll say, “Do you believe?”

  And then they lay it on him again.

  He does this all the time, you know.

  So he obviously is insecure in these areas.

  So I’ll have more to say about him later.

  I don’t want to give all this away.

  But it’s really weird.

  It was a very weird rally.

  And this rally,

  You read about this kook who went out,

  This kind of weird guy went out

  And started collecting money with the others.

  He’s not really an usher.

  And he’s putting money in the bag and everything.

  And nobody knew

  Because the sun was in back of him

  Forming a nimbus.

  And I was meanwhile

  Taking pictures of Graham like crazy

  Because I wanted to show something

  To the folks back home.

  And then later on I developed the roll

  And it was blank.

  Which is really weird.

  Anyway, so then this guy collected all the bread

  And he started to split with the money.

  And these two policemen caught him

  At the gate at the rally

  And they brought him

  To Billy Graham’s feet for salvation.

  And he said, “What are you doing with the money?”

  And he said, “I took the money

  In an effort to get closer to God. . . .”

  By eliminating the middleman, of course.

  The Future Lies Ahead, 1958;

  Breaking It Up!: The Best Routines of the Stand-Up Comics, 1975

  Bob Dylan

  (b. 1941)

  Folk singer. Unusual voice. Groovy vines. Thirty-five studio albums, tw
elve live. Probably greatest songwriter in English and maybe the hippest man alive. Has been since he got booed at Newport for using an electric guitar. Around that time (’65–’66) he was doing prose poetry too, in a surrealist vein, which when finally published in 1971 as Tarantula failed to have the impact of the songs. Dylan stayed away from the written word until 2004 when Chronicles: Volume One, a luminous memoir of Beat funky folky bohemia, was published to considerable acclaim. I couldn’t put it down. It wasn’t surprising that it was superbly written but it was amazing that he could remember it all.

  from Chronicles: Volume One

  WHEN I wasn’t staying at Van Ronk’s, I’d usually stay at Ray’s place, get back sometime before dawn, mount the dark stairs and carefully close the door behind me. I shoved off into the sofa bed like entering a vault. Ray was not a guy who had nothing on his mind. He knew what he thought and he knew how to express it, didn’t make room in his life for mistakes. The mundane things in life didn’t register with him. He seemed to have some golden grip on reality, didn’t sweat the small stuff, quoted Psalms and slept with a pistol near his bed. At times he could say things that had way too much edge. Once he said that President Kennedy wouldn’t last out his term because he was a Catholic. When he said it, it made me think about my grandmother, who said to me that the Pope is the king of the Jews. She lived back in Duluth on the top floor of a duplex on 5th street. From a window in the back room you could see Lake Superior, ominous and foreboding, iron bulk freighters and barges off in the distance, the sound of foghorns to the right and left. My grandmother had only one leg and had been a seamstress. Sometimes on weekends my parents would drive down from the Iron Range to Duluth and drop me off at her place for a couple of days. She was a dark lady, smoked a pipe. The other side of my family was more light-skinned and fair. My grandmother’s voice possessed a haunting accent—face always set in a half-despairing expression. Life for her hadn’t been easy. She’d come to America from Odessa, a seaport town in southern Russia. It was a town not unlike Duluth, the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right on the edge of a big body of water.

  Originally, she’d come from Turkey, sailed from Trabzon, a port town, across the Black Sea—the sea that the ancient Greeks called the Euxine—the one that Lord Byron wrote about in Don Juan. Her family was from Kagizman, a town in Turkey near the Armenian border, and the family name had been Kirghiz. My grandfather’s parents had also come from that same area, where they had been mostly shoemakers and leatherworkers.

  My grandmother’s ancestors had been from Constantinople. As a teenager, I used to sing the Ritchie Valens song “In a Turkish Town” with the lines in it about the “mystery Turks and the stars above,” and it seemed to suit me more than “La Bamba,” the song of Ritchie’s that everybody else sang and I never knew why. My mother even had a friend named Nellie Turk and I’d grown up with her always around.

  There were no Ritchie Valens records up at Ray’s place, “Turkish Town” or otherwise. Mostly, it was classical music and jazz bands. Ray had bought his entire record collection from a shyster lawyer who was getting divorced. There were Bach fugues and Berlioz symphonies— Handel’s Messiah and Chopin’s A-Major Polonaise. Madrigals and religious pieces, Darius Milhaud violin concertos—symphonic poems by virtuoso pianists, string serenades with themes that sound like polka dances. Polka dances always got my blood pumping. That was the first type of loud, live music I’d ever heard. On Saturday nights the taverns were filled with polka bands. I also liked the Franz Liszt records—liked the way one piano could sound like a whole orchestra. Once I put on Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata—it was melodic, but then again, it sounded like a lot of burping and belching and other bodily functions. It was funny—sounded almost like a cartoon. Reading the record jacket, I learned that Beethoven had been a child prodigy and he’d been exploited by his father and that Beethoven distrusted all people for the rest of his life. Even so, it didn’t stop him from writing symphonies.

  I’d listen to a lot of jazz and bebop records, too. Records by George Russell or Johnny Coles, Red Garland, Don Byas, Roland Kirk, Gil Evans—Evans had recorded a rendition of “Ella Speed,” the Leadbelly song. I tried to discern melodies and structures. There were a lot of similarities between some kinds of jazz and folk music. “Tattoo Bride,” “A Drum Is a Woman,” “Tourist Point of View” and “Jump for Joy”—all by Duke Ellington—they sounded like sophisticated folk music. The music world was getting bigger every day. There were records by Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Art Farmer and amazing ones by Charlie Christian and Benny Goodman. If I needed to wake up real quick, I’d put on “Swing Low Sweet Cadillac” or “Umbrella Man” by Dizzy Gillespie. “Hot House” by Charlie Parker was a good record to wake up to. There were a few souls around who had heard and seen Parker play and it seemed like he had transmitted some secret essence of life to them. “Ruby, My Dear” by Monk was another one. Monk played at the Blue Note on 3rd Street with John Ore on bass and the drummer Frankie Dunlop.

  Sometimes he’d be in there in the afternoon sitting at the piano all alone playing stuff that sounded like Ivory Joe Hunter—a big half-eaten sandwich left on top of his piano. I dropped in there once in the afternoon, just to listen—told him that I played folk music up the street. “We all play folk music,” he said. Monk was in his own dynamic universe even when he dawdled around. Even then, he summoned magic shadows into being.

  I liked modern jazz a lot, liked to listen to it in the clubs . . . but I didn’t follow it and I wasn’t caught up in it. There weren’t any ordinary words with specific meanings, and I needed to hear things plain and simple in the King’s English, and folk songs are what spoke to me most directly. Tony Bennett sang in the King’s English and one of his records was laying around—the one called Hit Songs of Tony Bennett, which had “In the Middle of an Island,” “Rags to Riches” and the Hank Williams song “Cold, Cold Heart.”

  The first time I heard Hank he was singing on the Grand Ole Opry, a Saturday night radio show broadcast out of Nashville. Roy Acuff, who MC’d the program, was referred to by the announcer as “The King of Country Music.” Someone would always be introduced as “the next governor of Tennessee” and the show advertised dog food and sold plans for old-age pensions. Hank sang “Move It On Over,” a song about living in the doghouse and it struck me really funny. He also sang spirituals like “When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels” and “Are You Walking and a-Talking for the Lord.” The sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod and I managed to get a hold of a few of his 78s—“Baby, We’re Really in Love” and “Honky Tonkin’” and “Lost Highway”—and I played them endlessly.

  They called him a “hillbilly singer,” but I didn’t know what that was. Homer and Jethro were more like what I thought a hillbilly was. Hank was no burr head. There was nothing clownish about him. Even at a young age, I identified fully with him. I didn’t have to experience anything that Hank did to know what he was singing about. I’d never seen a robin weep, but could imagine it and it made me sad. When he sang “the news is out all over town,” I knew what news that was, even though I didn’t know. The first chance I got, I was going to go to the dance and wear out my shoes, too. I’d learn later that Hank had died in the backseat of a car on New Year’s Day, kept my fingers crossed, hoped it wasn’t true. But it was true. It was like a great tree had fallen. Hearing about Hank’s death caught me squarely on the shoulder. The silence of outer space never seemed so loud. Intuitively I knew, though, that his voice would never drop out of sight or fade away—a voice like a beautiful horn.

  Much later, I’d discover that Hank had been in tremendous pain all his life, suffered from severe spinal problems—that the pain must have been torturous. In light of that, it’s all the more astonishing to hear his records. It’s almost like he defied the laws of gravity. The Luke the Drifter record, I just about wore out. That’s the one where he sings and recites parables, like the Beatitudes. I could listen to the
Luke the Drifter record all day and drift away from myself, become totally convinced in the goodness of man. When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems sacrilege.

  In time, I became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars and they had to be there. Even his words—all of his syllables are divided up so they make perfect mathematical sense. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records, and I listened to them a lot and had them internalized. In a few years’ time, Robert Shelton, the folk and jazz critic for the New York Times, would review one of my performances and would say something like, “resembling a cross between a choirboy and a beatnik . . . he breaks all the rules in songwriting, except that of having something to say.” The rules, whether Shelton knew it or not, were Hank’s rules, but it wasn’t like I ever meant to break them. It’s just that what I was trying to express was beyond the circle.

  ONE NIGHT, Albert Grossman, the manager of Odetta and Bob Gibson, came into the Gaslight to talk to Van Ronk. Whenever he came in, you couldn’t help but notice him. He looked like Sidney Greenstreet from The Maltese Falcon, had an enormous presence, dressed always in a conventional suit and tie, and he sat at a corner table. Usually when he talked, his voice was loud, like the booming of war drums. He didn’t talk so much as growl. Grossman was from Chicago, had a non-show business background but didn’t let that stand in his way. Not your usual shopkeeper, he had owned a nightclub in the Windy City and had to deal with district bosses and various fixes and ordinances and carried a .45. Grossman was no hayseed. Van Ronk told me later that Grossman had discussed with him the possibility of Dave playing in a new super folk group that he was putting together. Grossman had no illusions or doubts that the group was going to go straight to the top, be immensely popular.