Not So Sweet Lorraine: Issa's Sunday Service, #40

The album Electric Music for the Mind and Body by Country Joe and the Fish is probably one of the 10 best albums of genuine 60's West Coast psychedelic rock. And we are talking some pretty heavy company: Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Love, Moby Grape, The Doors, The Byrds, Steppenwolf and on and on. "Not So Sweet Lorraine", this week's featured track at Issa's Sunday Service, is probably one the strangest and more salient pieces of spot-on satiric psych rock of that era. One might trace the history of songs about goth girls from the moment of this song's inception. For those who think that the 60's was all flowers and light, think again:

The joy of life she dresses in black
With celestial secrets engraved in her back
And her face keeps flashing that she's got the knack,
But you know when you look into her eyes
All she's learned she's had to memorize
And the only way you'll ever get her high
Is to let her do her thing and then watch you die,
Sweet Lorraine, ah, sweet Lorraine.

The joy of life, indeed. But if you want to really find joy, as in "Now I've just found joy", look no further than Nat King Cole, Ray Brown, Oscar Peterson, Ray Ellis, and the incomparable Coleman Hawkins for the one and only original "Sweet Lorraine."





And, ya know, sometimes it just all comes together, as in this issue of Nick Fury, Agent of Shield, with CJ & the Fish singing the verse from "Not So Sweet Lorraine" that got it LitRock status, with its reference to one of the greatest books of any culture, The I Ching:


Nick, uh, didn't like 'em so much. Nuff said.


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This week's feature, two poems from Lilliput Review, #64, December 1994. Enjoy.

Who Is To Be Master

Time to let
the husky words you wrestle
pin you down.

Tom Riley

Calculated Risk

Some poems never get written:
living them through was enough.

Kate Stewart

And, in the same spirit, a gentle reminder from Issa:

words
are a waste of time...
poppies

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Richard Brautigan: Two Poems

Today is the anniversary of the birthday of one of the most original, reviled, inventive, maligned, loving, oft summarily dismissed, American poets of, well, all time: Richard Brautigan. Here are two poems from his late volume, June 30th, June 30th, a poetic journal of his first trip to Japan.

Japan

Japan begins and ends
----with Japan.

Nobody else knows the
----story.

. . . Japanese dust
in the Milky Way.

Tokyo
May 18, 1976

Homage to the Japanese Haiku Poet Issa

Drunk in a Japanese
----bar
----I'm
----OK

Tokyo
May 18, 1976

All these years later, we still miss you, Mister B.


And two birthday poems for Richard by Master Issa

paying no heed
to Buddha's birthday...
wildflowers



Buddha amid birthday flowers--
even the moon
deigns to rise

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don