27 May London
It was that café. The one with the faces of musicians tacked on the wall, home cooking sign in the window. Black Swan was on from the album Nina Simone Live at Carnegie Hall. I hadn’t heard it in a long time and it gave me a strange feeling; it took me way back to 1963, sixteen years old, holding that album in my hand and weeping to that song, conscious of the miracle of Nina Simone. And she was very much alive, angry, and vibrant, and now she’s dead and I’m still here. I don’t know why that gave me such a chill. So many souls who were alive now are gone. Nina, William Burroughs, Bobby Neuwirth, Sam Sheperd, Robert Mapplethorpe…one dead friend after another, another mentor, another star. It was a momentary feeling, a kind of compressed sense of time.
I ordered black tea and a version of apple pie- a lot of cinnamon, which I love, but a bit doughy. In any event it was just something to justify me sitting there for as long as it would take to write this, and then return a few steps away to Premises Studio. An historic cluster of rooms for reasonably priced rehearsal space, where Nina Simone once played on their piano.
I am doing six dates with my trio, my son Jackson on guitar, Tony Shanahan on bass/ keyboards and English drummer Seb Rockford on drums. The fellows set up while I wrote. We’re trying some new things and dusting others off. Boy Cried Wolf. A song for the Children, the Led Zepplin song that found its way into The Melting and Don’t Say Nothing for the great poet/ activist Allen Ginsberg. That song was written by me and my drummer Jay dee Daugherty when Allen lay dying in his loft in the East Village during the garbage strike. I guess around 25 years ago. And I was thinking about Allen’s activism and how many things have happened that he would have stood against, so many things since his passing, that fall into numb/dumb silence. And I was just sitting there listening to Nina Simone, thinking of the 18 children in Texas, picked off with an automatic rifle by a teenage boy. And I imagined 18 swans, and a horrifying target practice originating from the belly of hell.
Tour Diary