Jim Carroll on Reading Raymond Chandler: Issa's Sunday Service, #21

Sadly, today's edition of Issa's Sunday Service caps off a week of tribute posts for Jim Carroll. Happily, we still have his work, as long as we're alive, to turn to for solace, instruction, and enjoyment. This week's LitRock song is by the Jim Carroll Band: "Three Sisters:"

But she just wants to lay in bed all night
Reading Raymond Chandler.

I've been thinking about another of the song's featured on the blog this week, "It's Too Late." I remember Jim and the band appearing live on one of the nationally syndicated late night television shows, possibly Saturday Night Live, and performing it. He performed an alternative version of these opening lines:

It's too late
To fall in love with Sharon Tate
But it's too soon
To ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb

It's probably hard to imagine today that the reference to Sharon Tate, one the victims slaughtered by the Manson family, was powerful and shocking, but, indeed, it was, particularly in a "pop" song, one being performed before millions of people on television. Here is the alternate opening as I remember it:

It's too late
To fall in love with Sharon Tate
But it's too soon
To trace the path of the bullet in the brain of Reverend Moon

I say "as I remember it" because I can't find any reference to it anywhere. There are some live performance videos of the song from a show called Fridays, but it doesn't have the alternate reading. I wonder if anybody out there remembers that performance because those alternate lines about Reverend Moon dealt in poetic prophecy, not realized, and were every bit as shocking, if not more so, in the context of the place and time than the Tate lines.

This week's featured poem is from Lilliput Review #29, February 1992. As elegy's go, it's a fit way to close:

last will and testament

make a wind chime
from my bones,

hang it
where the poets speak.

let me be a part
of the conversation,
life.

Charlie Mehrhoff

Sumiyoshi's lamps
die out again...
autumn wind

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

PS: ✔ out 21 weeks of LitRock songs @ LitRock From Issa's Sunday Service.

Jim Carroll 5

Here is one of three poems printed and distributed at the funeral for Jim Carroll:

Poem

Alright
Buddha gets
A backstage pass

But his friends have to pay

Jim Carroll

As some of you may have guessed, I'm having a bit of a hard time with the passing of Jim Carroll. I only met him once, briefly, and he was very kind to a book store clerk helping to set up an offsite signing. The reading itself was full of humor, pathos, and an unflinching look into the great maw of Being.

It is a comfort to know that his words and music live on.

Fires
Burn in my heart.
No smoke rises.
No one knows.

Kenneth Rexroth from The Morning Star

my province--
even the smoke
an ancient thing

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don