Some people never go crazy.
Me, sometimes I’ll lie down behind the couch
for 3 or 4 days.
They’ll find me there.
It’s Cherub, they’ll say, and
they pour wine down my throat
rub my chest
sprinkle me with oils.

Then, I’ll rise with a roar,
rant, rage -
curse them and the universe
as I send them scattering over the
lawn.
I’ll feel much better,
sit down to toast and eggs,
hum a little tune,
suddenly become as lovable as a
pink
overfed whale.

Some people never go crazy.
What truly horrible lives
they must lead.

- Charles Bukowski, b. 8/16/1920

“For years I never used a pedal board — between David Yow and the audience, I couldn’t. We had to adopt a three-second rule, like in basketball, just to deal with stage-diving: Do your thing and get off the stage. You had exactly three seconds, or one of us was going to get you.”

— Duane Denison, guitarist, The Jesus Lizard, Decible Magazine (March 2011)

And in case you’re wondering what he means by “…one of us was going to get you,” here’s an example…

(I’m well aware this is the second consecutive post in regarding The Jesus Lizard, and I’ve only posted twice this month. I’ll try to branch out more.)

“Too much respect for your elders is, historically, almost always a bad thing. I want my daughter to love me. I don’t necessarily want her to share my taste for Irish ale or Hawaiian bud.”

— Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Can you walk us through the songwriting and recording process for your solo efforts?

Plug in and go. It’s all very spontaneous. I don’t make demos/scratch tracks, so what you hear is of the moment, but finishing a tune is a long listening process. The tune will always tell you what it needs and what it doesn’t. That’s the hardest aspect of creating shit solo: no one to bounce ideas off of. Gotta make sure you listen to your initial instincts and follow your gut.

— Tommy Guerrero, The Hundreds’ Chronicles

“I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.”

— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America

Photo: AV Club

“The bands that get adopted by the tools of commerce as soundtrack music, they are not being used for their cultural importance. They are just being used because they are recognizable music.

You hear Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’ being used by Carnival Cruise Lines and that’s a song about heroin and butt-fucking in Berlin and it’s been turned into the family-friendly shuffle board music. It’s beyond ironic. It’s kind of the dulling effect of time on something that was once shocking.”

— Steve Albini, The Daily Swarm

CNN: You write that jazz leaves room for individual creativity, but you have to listen and allow the other musicians to participate equally. So what’s the lesson for the nation?

MARSALIS: We have to have an overall cultural objective, which we don’t have. … We then fight under the flag of a position, the left or the right, black or white, old or young. It’s very simplistic. We don’t know our cultural history, we don’t know we are together, and because we don’t know we are together we can’t act in that way. And that’s the main thing our music, and the history of our music, can teach us as a nation.

The one concept that has to be at the heart of the American experiment is integrity. The integrity of the process is very important. If you come up on the bandstand you have to be at least trying to swing. If you don’t really want to swing or play with the musicians, there’s nothing they can do, because you have the freedom to destroy it.

— Wynton Marsalis, CNN.com

“Keeping in touch with the things that help us feel alive – music, books, movies, even the theatre, if, mysteriously, you are that way inclined – becomes a battle, and one that many of us lose, as we get older; I don’t think enough of our cultural pundits, people who write about that stuff for a living, fully understand this. It’s one thing to have an opinion on Little Boots remixes if you earn your living hanging about in cyberspace; quite another if you’re a full-time teacher with three kids.”

— Nick Hornby, author, writing for the Guardian UK.