the "inside dope" of outsiders was a one-way ticket to stupidity.

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When Ulysses S. Grant lay dying in 1885 in upstate New York, he was treated with injections of good brandy and morphine as well as cocaine. Down in New York City, his treatment was other people's pleasure. Opium to be smoked. Absinthe and laudanum to be drunk. Morphine to be drunk or shot. Cocaine to be shot, snorted, or drunk from bottles of infused Bordeaux or the vials of liquid cocaine extract that Parke-Davis manufactured. And, except for those Chinese opium dens, it was legal, all of it. Some indulged, many didn't. They called it freedom, and they called the bars dives. Now everything's illegal, and they call it freedom.

forget all this 'Pizza Connection' nonsense, all this 'Godfather' shit.

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His was a darker and more terrifying tale. The Vatican scandal, the Mafia executions, the multi million dollar wheelings and dealings, the strange deaths and disappearances - these were only the whitecaps, the stormy surface of his tale. Revelations of greater evil lay beneath - revelations of international terrorism, political blackmail, money laundering schemes beyond the grasp of any government agency, vendettas on the grandest, deadliest scale, and even secret nuclear technology deals that have invested the most dangerous and unlikely hands with the power to destroy the world.

'gimme some echo and some fuzz and some garbage can sound.'

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The great thing about the Pretty Things was that they didn't give two shits for blues purity, R&B purity, or any other kind of purity, except perhaps when it came to their drugs. They were therefore conceptually free to aesthetically amplify the physical uses to which distortion and proto power chord riffing could be put. Perhaps one downing the PTs was the Downliners Sect who indicated via their roughed up, impolite and impolitic take on the Chess label output that they did not give even a single shit for blues "purity." 

teenage motherhood: It’s like being grounded for eighteen years!

 

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I had no idea what any of these songs were referencing. What they really meant. How subversive they really were. I used the radio to disappear. To escape from my family. Enter another dimension. Melt inside a psychedelic sound stage which cascaded out through the airwaves filling my already fractured psyche with throbbing, slinky, funkified soul music, where soaring rhythms and strangled guitars took me out of myself and gave me goose bumps. “I break out … in a cold sweat” stimulated me in ways I could only express by shaking my ass, flapping my arms, and stomping my feet. Everybody was glued to the tube on Sunday nights. The Rolling Stones, The Animals, George Carlin — all penetrated my unformed psyche, courtesy of Mr. Sullivan. Music is the connective tissue between protest, rebellion, violence, sexual awareness, and community. The inner-city ghetto which I called home was brimming with hard-working people with attitude and conviction whose lust for life couldn’t be beaten out of them by piss-poor housing conditions, lousy pay, the police, or politicians. They taught me to keep the faith, and, when hoping for a better tomorrow isn’t enough, turn up the goddamn music and dance the blues away. I refused to allow them to strangle me by the ankles because even if I had to “Beg, Borrow, and Steal,” this “Lightning’s Girl” was going to be sure she was “Making Every Minute Count.” Just like the radio taught me.

singing that old Mississippi Sheiks song, “Pencil Won’t Write No More”

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Yet—often in error, never in doubt—the golem never forsook the arrogant delusion that they could predict and manipulate the consumption of the masses; and, no matter how wrong their own balance sheets proved them to be, the unseen bureaucracy seemed not to question this delusion. Those who bore the title of publisher or editor or both, who once had stood above the golem, were now pressed to serve them. Every book that they wanted to acquire and publish now had to be slutted to fit the paradigm of the golem’s delusion. It had to be presented as a product whose nature was of a tried and true formula of current marketability. It might be labelled “daring,” in the manner that detergents and oral-hygiene products may be labelled “new and improved” or even “revolutionary,” but, like those detergents and oral-hygiene products, regardless of label, it must be consumer-safe, with tested and approved artificial fragrances and colors. It may be “shocking,” “brutally honest,” “outrageous,” “wild,” or “nightmarish,” as these have become the acceptable flavors of mediocrity; but, while being “shocking,” “brutally honest,” “outrageous,” “wild,” or “nightmarish,” it must never be offensive or aberrant, nor must it venture in any way beyond the pale of the petting zoo of the accepted.

I felt shame for furthering what fools and evil men held to be holy

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We took a table and benches apart from the others who ate and drank. A few, mostly Roman soldiers, regarded us askance, but with little malice or pronounced disapproval. I could not tell if it was because he was a Jew, or because he was unwashed and disheveled, or both. We were told what was on offer. I took a portion of roasted baby pork, he a plate of deep-sea oysters and garum. Two fresh breads were brought to us, oyster-bread for him, bread of emmer for me, and wine.

“I am forbidden by the Book to eat such things,” he said, gesturing to the oysters.

I looked at him.

“All that have not fins and scales in the seas, they shall be an abomination unto you,” he said in a tone of mock gravity. Then in the tone that was his own: “So commands the Book.”

He savored the oysters and garum, tore off a piece of bread, ate it, washed it down with wine.

“And the swine,” he said, returning to his tone of mock gravity, “though he be cloven-footed, he cheweth not the cud, and thus he is unclean to you.”

I cut off a piece of the charred suckling pig, placed it with my knife on his plate. His eyes closed with pleasure as he ate it.

“It seems to me that your Book denies you much,” I said.

“It denies me nothing. It denies to my people any delight in this world which their God is supposed to have created.”

women with meat on their bones and long green in their pocketbooks

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The true meaning of Spo-Dee-O-Dee! The relation of breast size to talent! What happens to guys who spend all their money on wine! Why a black man named Doc Sausage will never be elected president of the United States! Mafia a Go-Go! Who got Annie pregnant! How Louis Prima got that way! How to pick up Keely Smith! Why Elvis was a day late and a dollar short! Pills that can change the color of your skin! The price of the first TV Dinner, and of fame! Why Johnny Ace blew his brains out! How Hank Williams stood off Josef Stalin! Why Joe Turner didn't give a fuck about flattening his stomach! How heroin can harm your complexion! How to increase the size of your Cadillac! How to go from stardom to a park bench! And sometimes back! And much, much more! In this, the only book about rock 'n' roll that knows what it's talking about!

amplified guitars and lyrics of sex and whiskey

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"After half an hour of this, the singing came to an end. Also the instrument strummers, worn out, dropped out one by one, leaving only the piano player and a tambourine whacker, whom I could not see, to carry on the steady and almost terrifying rhythmic noise. Terrifying because it impressed me as being the production of the wild, sub-conscious human animal, one which we seldom come upon in such frightfully selfregimented herds. But the extreme mesmeric orgies of such primitive groups have been often enough described. And after all, my purpose is simply to make clear how the indigenous song merges into the hypnotic rhythmizing used in this indigenous type of religious practice.''

I WAS A MUTANT FOR ROGER CORMAN

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For starters, there were airheads like I could not believe. I'm not talking laid back, slow on the draw - I'm talking bubbleskulls, insensates. Any gathering of five-six people would invariably include at least one raging dodo cum oaf, either (I at first assumed) because Angelenos were flexible, "tolerant," less rule-governed in respect to wiggy abstractions like human thought, or (a better working premise, one I tried hard to repress) because sun-and-fun might ultimately cook anyone's brain until full-service mentation became a tricky and functionally meaningless calisthenic, one less vital (on a regular basis) than signaling a lane change. On my second day as a resident a new acquaintance labeled me, semi-derisively, an "intellectual," as if the breed were as rare, freakish - and locally unwelcome - as an anti in New York. I had split the Seriousness Capital of the World, it was quickly becoming evident, for the Dummdumm Capital of Same.

& bonus press kit pdf

the first decadent show-biz rocker

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This is the way it should have been. "We use Country and Western instruments," Haley was quoted as saying in a 1955 collection of sheet music, "play rhythm and blues tunes and the result is" - hold your breath - "pop music." He didn't even know what to call it, for the love of Christ. But the fact remains, Bill Haley was there first and he helped to set the stage for Elvis and all that came in his wake. For that, Bill Haley, who walks among us at the age of fifty-five, deserves, as all things hep, to be honored. Just don't go overboard, y'hear?

howling about how big-legged women better keep their dresses down

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On this tour Jerry Lee saw that something strange was going on. Boys were dressing funny - not in the familiar teddy boy clothes, but in stripes and polka dots and silly little caps. And the girls, too: white boots and skirts that barely covered the source of all sorrow. And they all, all of them, boys and girls together, had the same hair - not true fine long hair like his own, but hair so straight that it seemed to be steam ironed, and clipped across the brow in bangs, like dobbin ponies. And everywhere that music - that goddamn, motherfucking music. He had figured that those Beatle boys, whom he had met on his last trip, would be gone by now, gone. But not only were they not gone, they were bigger than ever; and there were whole new bunches of them, like those Rolling Stone boys, duded up like nigger faggots on the last night of Mardi Gras - and getting rich, all of them, every last motherfucking one of them. And there he was, Jerry Lee Lewis, better than all of them, all of them put together, and he could not even get him a hit, not one stray hit.

Stained Panties and Coarse Metaphors

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“Due to the profanity and distasteful lyrics we have been receiving on records by name artists, WWVA has initiated the following policy. WWVA AM/FM will not air suggestive or profane lyrics. We will delete questionable words and phrases before we play a record. Should the title fail to pass our code of ethics, or if an edit is impossible, the record will not be aired. Frankly, we are tired of receiving letters from parents, asking us to explain ‘one night stands,’ etc. to their children. ‘Hell’ and ‘damn’ have become old hat and the sensationalism being used to sell records today has gone too far. It is not our policy to be moral crusaders, but we will not jeopardize our standing in the community. We feel that country music and modern country music stations are the last oasis in the industry. We will not ignore our responsibility to you.”

Nobody in the fight racket gave a fuck about the suckers in the seats

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Before the first drumbeat comes down, the voice of James Brown: All aboard! Night Train!

He just was what he fucking was: Charles L. Liston, mightiest of men, sharpest of dressers. He had more pasts than most people had socks. Go on, pick a past. They were all the same to him: sand slough and alleys, bar-rooms and prison cells, fancy ass big bad gangster men and bent-down cotton pickers. All the same. Working for halves here, Boss, working for halves ... With his dangerous ways and his dangerous airs and his love of that rhythm and blues that the white man held to be dangerous, too, Sonny was to become the new hero of a different, younger minority, that minority of black street punks, and white street punks, who could not afford the ticket price to have their own voices heard at the fights when Sonny was booed and execrated. If Sonny is to be regarded as the first rock 'n' roll champ, Clay should be regarded as the first made for TV boxing idol. As he danced and cavorted in acceptable and inoffensive outrageousness before the masses and the cameras and the microphones of mediocrity, so mediocrity embraced him.

Just kids out looking for kicks, and not worried about how hip they look

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‘‘I’d always wanted to dig the song, but I never permitted myself to because I thought there was a real distinction between rock ’n’ roll artists, musical workmen, and these fly-by-nights like the Count Five and the groups that played at the dances I went to. Eventually I realized that everybody steals their material and is heavily influenced by just about everybody else, and my tastes began to change radically. I suddenly found it an effort to listen to the more ‘arty’ rock (Beatles, Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplane) and that I much preferred the hard crude sound of groups like the Seeds, the Fugs, the Who, etc. And when I would go to dances and hear local teenagers, school friends of mine even—non-heads even!—turn around in the middle of ‘I’m a Man’ and roll off on a thirty-minute electric raga, plasticizing the beat, crouching in front of their amps for feedback, and knocking me out, really turning me on more than anything on record, that was when I finally was enlightened.’’

The doctor said, "Big Bill, I think I’ll have to give you monkey glands."

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These comical personifications of preacherly hypocrisy, having endured from the nineteenth century to the dawn of rock 'n' roll, were exiled from Elvis Presley's 1954 recording of "Good Rockin' Tonight." As with the line, "You may get religion, baby," that was expurgated from Presley's 1955 version of Arthur Gunter's 1954 R&B record "Baby Let's Play House," any hint of irreverence toward religion was deemed too controversial for the great mediocrator of rock 'n' roll, Presley, the mediocrator who made of the fine crude bread of real rock 'n' roll a sterile and insipid Wonder Bread for the masses. That was the tradition, more so than the rock 'n' roll tradition, of which Presley truly was born.

rhyming speedfreak who introduced every song as 'The Greasy Chicken'

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When looking at an album of music you know nothing about, song titles can help—for example: “She’s My Witch,” “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby,” “Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut,” and “Evil” are all good song titles, and they are all great songs ... Places with a higher murder or insanity rate usually produced a lot of good music, Memphis and Detroit being two fine examples. Same goes for places with a lot of drunks, like New Orleans and Texas. Eventually you may learn to recognize what gentlemen with beards call “regional styles.” For example, black guitar players from Memphis played too loud through broken speakers; this was good. Drummers from New Orleans were usually drunk and fucked up, so if they couldn’t find the beat they’d just play a march and call it “second line.” ... Pittsburgh’s WAMO boasted the legendary Porky Chadwick—“the daddio of the raddio, a head snapper and dapper rapper, a porkulatin’ platter pushin’ poppa.” He wasn’t “Cary Grant but can do what he can’t” and got his “PhD in insanity at the University of Spinner Sanctum” where he always had a grape in his ear “to make my head ferment.”

literacy as she now stood, or, more like it, as she now lay in the gutter

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I still couldn't get used to the television sets in these joints. News, baseball, commercials for dick-stiffeners and hair-sprouters. Half a dozen customers and three satellite television sets going. Some of the guys in these joints would rather stare at a soap opera than drink alone and face themselves and their drinks and the screaming emptiness and desperation inside them. It was as if they had forgotten how to talk, even if it was to talk only the nonsense of their shambled brains. Only when there was enough booze in them did they give voice to the empty, desperate screaming inside them. And still the television sets droned on.

In the carny you don’t ask nothing. And you’ll get told no lies.

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Gresham’s novel is a tale of many things: the folly of faith and the cunning of those who peddle it; alcoholism and the destructive terror of delirium tremens; the playing deck of fate, which allots its death-bound destines without rhyme and without reason. What it is not is a tale of crime and punishment, sin and retribution. To see it as such is to misread it. What we consider to be crime and sin pervade this alley, but the punishment and retribution here seem more the wages of life itself.-Nick Tosches