Discover Top Posts Tagged with #punkpoet

Thursday jams... Patti Smith & Band in NYC 1977 by © Lynn Goldsmith.. 🙌 Our Patti Smith exhibition opens April 1st.. #becausethenight @lynngoldsmith @pattismithgroup @officialpattismith @bluesfestbyronbay ✌️❤️🎵 #pattismith #punkpoet #punk #pattismithgroup #rockandroll #lynngoldsmith #newyorkcity #styleicon #muse #style #inspiration #thursday #jams #easter #radioethiopia #horses #musicphotography #womeninrock #rocknroll #blendergallery (at Blender Gallery)

I’m pretty sure I died in South Dakota in the year 2010. On the way back from a West Coast tour with my old band the van broke down in Murdo. The truck stop mechanics wouldn’t work on the van but let us use their tools to try and fix the fuel pump. We replaced the fuel pump but that didn’t work. The van got towed to Pierre to get worked on. I stayed behind in Murdo to keep watch over the trailer with the bass player for the band we were sharing the van with. The rest of their band went to make sure it got fixed and the rest of my band went to catch a Grey Hound bus home. We slept on the floor of the truck stop and waited for the return of the van. The next morning the band returned early, the fuel pump relay had gone out, which meant we never needed to drain the tank and change out the fuel pumps. We hooked up the trailer and headed off onto the South Dakota highway with strong winds coming across the plains to blow us off the road. The trailer at one point came unhitched and dragged along the asphalt spitting sparks. We stopped and fixed the problem. I fell asleep on one of the back bench seats and awoke as we passed the broken down Grey Hound my bandmates were taking home. Soon after, we got pulled over by cops because we were technically a work van and didn’t stop at a weigh station. It probably didn’t help the trailer was covered in dirt and graffitied by our hands with messages like, “R.I.P” or a giant “Peace Frog” on one side and a Pentagram on the other. The driver narced on me for having weed brownies when the cops asked if we had any illegal substances. DON’T TALK TO COPS! They searched they entire van and trailer after that, unloading everything and searching with dogs. Then they made us load the trailer back up as they wrote me a ticket for possession of paraphernalia. We got back in the van and made it across the border to Minnesota and eventually back home but I’ll never be convinced I didn’t die at some point on the trip and now I’m eternally wandering Purgatory.

#Poetry #Poems #Poem #Literature #Travel #punkrocksavedandruinedmylife #punkpoet #jakesnider

Indie 5-0 with Stephen Jaymes

The Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter and punk poet Stephen Jaymes can only be described as Charles Bukowski ditching whiskey for psychedelic mushrooms while feverishly ingesting Rumi poetry and Phil Ochs records.

His newest single, the upbeat folk rock and punk infused single "Tokyo," is a rousing call to make the journey to a magical place that two people create together, even in the face of certain climate destruction. In a fun twist, "Tokyo" has nothing to do with the city.

We got to speak with Stephen Jaymes about his song, his career, and more!

What was the inspiration for your new song "Tokyo"? How did the idea for the song come about?

I do a lot of Dr. Seuss type singing with nonsense words and rhymes. Exercising the unconscious. I practice that kind of flow a lot, and I try to make a voice note of the best parts before they evaporate. I was in that kind of flow in my garden, thinking about the tiny gardens we make where we try to hide from what’s happening to the Earth. We failed at the big communal garden. That humanist dream is dying. So we retreat to our little gardens. The guitar riff popped into my head first, then the first line materialized and the lyrics kind of spontaneously coalesced into a story about improbable human love in a private garden against an apocalyptic backdrop. Tokyo might have been a temp word in the lyrics, but the word couldn’t be cut. It was the mysterious beating heart of the song’s rhythm, and it didn’t work without it. The song is about an emotional place, not the literal city, but if you can name your place Terebithia or any other made-up name, why can’t you can give it an existing name? The more I worked on it, the more a story developed in my mind about a future survivor who’s only heard the name from a world that existed before, so he appropriates it for a new one. Later I realized I also owe a debt to Joey Ramone, who liked to use Tokyo as a nonsense rhyme filler.

Folk, punk, and other genres seem to intersect in your music. How do you approach blending different musical styles, and what role do these combinations play in expressing your artistic voice?

I grew up listening to the first wave of punk and New Wave, while at the same time listening to 60s folk records from the family crate. I found a lot in common between the two musical worlds, especially in the defiant attitude toward power structures and the representation of disenfranchised voices. Woody Guthrie was a total punk at heart, and so was Phil Ochs (who actually inspired a number of seminal punk bands). I think most of the artistically successful genre blenders are operating unconsciously. You have to trust that the right inspiration for the next chord or lyric will come like a remembered bird call, and that it will be authentic to your style. For me those bird calls could be The Boomtown Rats or Gordon Lightfoot. The critical, magical thing is that only the songwriter knows the bird calls they’re using. Once you mix them, they sound like something new. I recently saw a clip of Dave Grohl talking about how his Nirvana drumming was influenced by disco fills. That makes a lot of sense to me. We didn’t hear them that way at the time, because they blended with punk to help put the radio shine on grunge, and grunge was a mix of styles that sounded new.

What drew you to write music for a living? How would you describe your style?

I once thought I was an actor at heart, later I thought I was a psychiatrist, still later a novelist. It was a roundabout path and I had to wait a long time to figure myself out. I was always writing songs, but I believed absolutely that it was an internal game, like crosswords or golf (neither of which hook me like they do lots of people). It didn’t occur to me to share them for a long time. When it’s something you can’t stop doing, you don’t really have a choice in the matter. I’m a vicious critic of my own work, which is a curse and a blessing. A curse was I probably toiled in solitude for too long. One of the blessings of being such a sharp self-critic was noticing that I could procrastinate with production and mixing indefinitely to escape the writing work. For awhile I was trying to do it all, like Prince or Jeff Lynne. That’s how I do it now, but I couldn’t at first. So years ago I decided I wouldn’t record anything more than one vocal and one instrument (usually guitar, sometimes piano), and that forced me to do the harder work. Only in the last years have I gone back to full arrangements and multi-instrument production. I finally feel like I can create the sounds I want to without getting lost in the orchestration or making the songwriting suffer - without losing the personal style that’s evident in the stripped down version of the song.

If you could collaborate with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be and why?

Oh man. It’s hard to give one answer. I’ll cheat and give two. For alive people, I think it would have to be Questlove. His work with D’Angelo blows my mind. It does for my brain what ASMR does for others. He’s a skilled and wildly experienced collaborator. I don’t know what it would sound like, but I know it would be rare and it would challenge every reluctant part of me. As for my dead heroes, it would have to be Harry Nilsson, before he worked with Lennon and ruptured his vocal cords. The Nilsson who wrote Good Old Desk. I sing along to my favorite songs, and I think our voices blend nicely. I also have a fantasy that I could have kept him more on track. I definitely would have warned him of the harrowing disappointment awaiting anyone trying to reform gun laws in America, as he tried to do after Lennon was shot. Harry needed a medication that wasn’t alcohol and I would have liked to help him find it.

Do you have messages that you like to get across in your music, if so please tell us about them?

I guess I do, but I don’t think about the message when I’m writing a song. I can’t see the forest for the trees when I’m writing, but if I find the heart of the song each time, the trees always make up a healthy forest when I come up and look from a distance. As to what that forest looks like, I’m not in touch with that when I’m writing a song. I’m never thinking about getting across a message. Each time it feels a lot more like, what message is this song getting across to me? How can I not obscure it? I look at my songs together and notice the trends after the fact. My songs talk about the predicament of having to know yourself in a world where really knowing yourself is very rare and uncomfortable. I think they promote the idea that truly loving another human being is the only way out of that predicament and the only way to find freedom. Chief Inspector, my first single of the summer, was very Jungian, an introspective mystery. Tokyo looks outward, inviting the listener to dance and find love even when everything is disintegrating. My next single, Virus Vaccine, is an exploration of how that dance can still go wrong even with the best intentions. Maybe the overall message is keep your eyes open - you are witnessing something as terrifying as the face of God and it’s occurring in your own lifetime. You have to ask why. Turning away is not an option.

#music #indie #interview #folk rock #punkpoet #Stephen Jaymes

#bardofsalford #punkpoet #comedian #portrait #acrylicpainting #profileillustration #sketchbookspecials #editorialillustration #magazineillustration #magazinecover #illo #hollywoood #pencildrawing #lineandwash #artistsoninstagram #aiisnotart https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn1k2_9MR73/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=