MICK JAGGER: Rock music was a completely new musical form. It hadn’t been 
around for ten years when we started doing it. Now it’s forty years old.
JAN S. WENNER: What about your own staying power?
MICK JAGGER: I have a lot of energy, so I don’t see it as an immediate problem.
JAN S. WENNER: How’s your hearing?
MICK JAGGER: My hearing’s all right. Sometimes I use earplugs because it gets 
too loud on my left ear.
JAN S. WENNER: Why your left ear?
MICK JAGGER: Because Keith’s standing on my left.


THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE: Are You Experienced?

“Like being driven over by a truck”
was how Pete Townshend described the effect
of the wah-wah on “I Don’t Live Today.”

This predated by some months the pedal
Clapton used on “Tales of Brave Ulysses”
And I’m taken aback (jolt upon jolt)
to think that Hendrix did it all “by hand.”

To think, moreover, that he used four-track
one-inch tape has (jolt upon jolt) evoked
the long, long view from the Senior Study
through the smoke, yes sir, the smoke of battle
on the fields of Laois, yes sir, and Laos.

Then there was the wah-wah on “Voodoo Child
(Slight Return)” from Electric Ladyland.


CREAM: Disraeli Gears

As I labored over the “Georgiks and Bukolikis”
I soon learned to tell thunder from dynamite.


THE BEATLES: The Beatles

Though that was the winter when late each night
I’d put away Cicero or Caesar
and pour new milk into an old saucer
for the hedgehog which, when it showed up right

on cue, would set its nose down like that flight
back from the U.S. . . . back from the, yes sir . . .
back from the . . . back from the U.S.S.R. . . .
I’d never noticed the play on “album” and “white.”


THE ROLLING STONES: Beggar’s Banquet

Thanks to Miss Latimore,
I was “coming along nicely” at piano

while, compared to the whoops and wild halloos
of the local urchins,

my diction
was im-pecc-a-ble.

In next to no time I would be lost
to the milk bars

and luncheonettes
of smoky Belfast,

where a troubadour
such as the frontman of Them

had long since traded in the lute
for bass and blues harmonica.


VAN MORRISON: Astral Weeks

Not only had I lived on Fitzroy Avenue,
I’d lived there with Madame Georgie Hyde Lees,
to whom I would rather shortly be wed.

Georgie would lose out to The George and El Vino’s
when I “ran away to the BBC”
as poets did, so Dylan Thomas said.


ERIC CLAPTON: 461 Ocean Boulevard

It’s the house in all its whited sepulchritude
(not the palm tree against which dogs piddle
as they make their way back from wherever
it was they were all night) that’s really at a list.

Through the open shutters his music, scatty, skewed,
skids and skites from the neck of a bottle
that might turn on him, might turn and sever
an artery, the big one that runs through his wrist.


ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS: My Aim is True

Even the reductio ad absurdum
of the quid pro quo or “tit for tat”
killing (For “Eilis” read “Alison”)

that now took over from the street riot
was not without an old-fashioned
sense of decorum, an unseemly seemliness.


WARREN ZEVON: Excitable Boy

Somewhere between Ocean Boulevard and Slowhand
I seem to have misplaced my wedding band
and taken up with waitresses and usherettes
who drank straight gins and smoked crooked cheroots.

Since those were still they days when more meant less
Georgie was herself playing fast and loose
with the werewolf who, not so very long before,
had come how-howling round our kitchen door

and introduced me to Warren Zevon, whose hymns
to booty, to beasts, to bimbos, boom boom,
are inextricably part of the warp and woof 
of the wild poems in Quoof.


DIRE STRAITS: Dire Straits

There was that time the archangel ran his thumb along the shelf
and anointed, it seemed, his own brow with soot.


BLONDIE: Parallel Lines

It had taken all morning to rehearse
a tracking shot

with an Arrifllex
mounted on a gurney.

The dream of rain
on the face of a well.

“Ready when you are Mr. Demilledoon.”
Another small crowd

on the horizon.
We should have rented a Steadicam.


BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: The River

So it was I gave up the Oona for the Susquehanna,
the Shannon for the Shenandoah.


LLOYD COLE AND THE COMMOTIONS: Easy Pieces

Though not before I’d done my stint on the Cam.
The ceilings taller than the horizon.

The in-crowd
on the out with the likes of Milton

and Spenser while Cromwell
still walked through the pouring rain.

In graveyards from Urney
to Ardglass, my countrymen laying down some Lex

talionis: “Only the guy who’s shot
gets to ride in the back of the hearse.”


TALKING HEADS: True Stories

You can take the man out of Armagh but, you ask yourself,
can you take the Armagh out of the man in the big Armani suit?


U2: The Joshua Tree

When I went to hear them in Giants Stadium
a year or two ago, the whiff
of kef
brought back the night we drove all night from Palm

Springs to Blythe. No Irish lad and his lass
were so happy as we who roared
and soared
through yucca-scented air. Dawn brought a sense of loss,

faint at first, that would deepen and expand
as our own golden chariot
was showered
with Zippo spears from the upper tiers of the stands.


PINK FLOYD: A Momentary Lapse of Reason

We stopped at a roadhouse on the way back from Lyonesse
and ordered a Tom Collins and an Old Fashioned.
As we remounted the chariot

the poplar’s synthesized alamo-alamo-eleison
was counterpointed by a red-headed woodpecker’s rat-a-tat
on a snare, a kettledrum’s de dum de dum.


PAUL SIMON: Negotiations and Love Songs

Little did I think as I knelt by a pothole
to water my elephant with the other elephant drivers,
little did I think as I chewed on some betel

that I might one day be following the river
down the West Side Highway in his smoke-glassed
limo complete with bodyguard-cum-chauffeur

and telling him that his lyrics must surely last:
little did I think as I chewed and chewed
that my own teeth and tongue would be eaten by rust.


LEONARD COHEN: I’m Your Man

When I turn up the rickety old gramophone
the wow and flutter from a scratched LP
summons up white walls, the table, the single bed

where Lydia Languish will meet her Le Fanu:
his songs have meant far more to me
than most of the so-called poems I’ve read.


NIRVANA: Bleach

I went there, too, with Mona, or Monica.
Another shot of Absolut.

“The Wild Rover” or some folk anthem
on the jukebox. Some dour

bartender. I, too, have been held fast
by those snares and nets

off the Zinc Coast, the coast of Zanzibar,
                                                lost

                              able
                                   addiction

                      “chin-chins”
                                                loos,

“And it’s no,
nay, never, no nay never no more . . .”

BOB DYLAN: Oh Mercy

All great artists are their own greatest threat,
as when they aim the industrial laser
at themselves and cut themselves back to the root

so that, with spring, we can never ever be sure
if they shake from head to foot
from an orgasm, you see, sir, or a seizure..


R.E.M: Automatic for the People

Like the grasping for air by al almighty mite
who’s suffering from a bad case of the colic.


THE ROLLING STONES: Voodoo Lounge

Giants Stadium again . . . Again the scent of drugs
struggling through rain so heavy some young Turks
would feel obliged to butt-hole
surf across those vast puddles 

on the field. Some might have burned damp faggots
on a night like this, others faked
the ho-ho-hosannas and the hallelujahs
with their “Tout passe, toot case, tout lasse.”

The Stones, of course, have always found the way
of setting a burning brand
to a petrol-soaked stack of hay

and making a “Thou Shalt”
of a “Though Shalt Not.” The sky over the Meadowlands
was still aglow as I drove home to my wife and child.