down the silver river with one shoe off (2 Viewers)

Another oddity from Cave 4, November 1973. What do you think?

down-the-silver-river.jpg
 
It looks like the British spelling of Morning, but in the US, Mourning means something very different from Morning (not sure about other places). It is not like Color/Colour...

This was a mag out of NZ, right?

Bill
 
I love those surreal, absurd wild ones. I guess this one is uncollected?
"sit down/give up/quit/chew dead bacon/bomb the moon/eat flowers...."

"Get sick, get well/Hang
around an ink well/Ring bell, hard to tell/If anything is goin' to sell"
"You better chew gum/The pump don't work/'Cause the vandals took the handles"

OK, guess who?
I sometimes hear a connection between these two, although it seems Buk wasn't too fond of him...
 
More Dylanesque rolling non-stop non-sequitur absurdity (or Bukowski absurdity in Dylan) in "the shoelace": "the sink's stopped-up, the landlord's drunk,/the president doesn't care and the governor's crazy." Compare Dylan "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "Johnny's in the basement/Mixing up the medicine/I'm on the pavement/Thinking about the government/The man in the trench coat/Badge off, laid off/Says he's got a bad cough/Wants to get it paid off".
 
It looks like the British spelling of Morning, but in the US, Mourning means something very different from Morning (not sure about other places). It is not like Color/Colour...

British morning is the same as US morning. And you spell mourning the same way we do too. Copycats.
 
(or Bukowski absurdity in Dylan)
I get what you're doing, but if we draw a venn diagram of Bukowski and Dylan, the area where those circles intersect is very tiny. Very, very tiny.

Dylan was not a poet (as the hippies gasp, stagger and clutch their ancient chests!) and Bukowski was not a songwriter. Despite the youth of today's seemingly insatiable drive to set his poetry to bad music.

down the silver river with one shoe off feels like a drunken toss-off to me. End of the night gobbledegook that should have never made it to the mailbox.

Not that I don't appreciate seeing it, of course I do.
 
Agreed, no intention to equate them by any means. But it's interesting that they both got into this oblique, weird, "absurd surreal" (or whatever you want to call it) odd, zany way of looking at things. Dylan I believe claims to have read Kerouac. I would guess the common source for Bukowski and Dylan is surrealist/ [Buk's "chew dead bacon/bomb the moon"] absurd literature, but they both give their lyricism a particularly brilliant, American, comic, edgy, quick, forward-moving mad intelligence. I remember at age 13 or 14 or whenever the "Subterranean" 45 came out playing it over and over thinking "this is very funny stuff." Sort of like Mad Magazine. Yeah, Dylan, Buk and Mad Magazine. Everything off a bit in a very funny way.
 
down the silver river with one shoe off feels like a drunken toss-off to me. End of the night gobbledegook that should have never made it to the mailbox.

My first hunch was also that Buk was on his second glass
of his third bottle of cheap red wine.
A few good words in the poem but not enough.
 
I bet on mooring or morning...
As David, I see a succession of surrealistic exquisite cadavers.
I would not compare Dylan and Bukowski as a rule, but they both used that style at times.
And I like that.
 
Just watched again the Dylan documentary "No Direction Home" and was struck by "I am a man of constant sorrow" and then at the very end one of the greatest songs I've ever heard, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune." I don't usually cry listening to music, but these two triggered something. Maybe bringing back that period of the early Sixties but also obviously the perfect beauty of the lyrics and the absolute clear directness of his voice and the perfectly controlled and subtle guitar playing. I'm no Dylan expert, but he apparently within a very short time grew from a rather average fellow into a musician of genius.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top