Oldtimers will remember thinking it something of a breakthrough when George Harrison used the word "rectify" in "If I Needed Someone" on the Rubber Soul album.
#I WAS STAYING AT THE MARRIOTT WITH JESUS AND JOHN WAYNE FREE#
Or think of it this way: if Muldoon's poetry wasn't allowing him quite enough room to give free play to that component of outlandishness, why not really set it loose by putting together electric guitars, keyboards, drums, and amps, words and music, for a clear shot at the heart and head of a listener who might yawn at the idea of poetry on the page? Eliot on Desolation Row," I wrote, "Meltzer can put Teilhard de Chardin in bed with 'What's New, Pussycat?' and then mate 'Too Much Tequila' with William James." Far-fetched? You bet. In a review long, long ago I described the way rock writer Richard Meltzer liked to sling together the most far-fetched associations as if to show that his writing could be as wantonly eclectic as the music was: "If Bob Dylan can put Ezra Pound and T. What Eliot and Muldoon are getting at has a lot in common with that massively inclusive realm called rock. In reference to his own poetry, Muldoon has been quoted as saying that he's interested in what happens when you take "outlandish ideas and put them together in far-fetched comparisons." That line came to mind when I encountered prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon's lyrics for the "3-car-garage" rock band he fronts with his colleague at Princeton University, Nigel Smith, who knows a thing or two about the metaphysical poets. Eliot on the "sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things" characteristic of the so-called metaphysical poets, John Donne in particular. Or are people so locked into their various castes that their jaws drop when a poet of serious stature shows up on a bandstand with an elecrtic guitar around his neck? Or when a Renaissance scholar of some repute playing and singing and bouncing around the stage like an enchanted Muppet while a grad student into Henry James strokes his guitar in an ecstasy and a student of Early Music blows blues harmonica and sings up a storm? The joy of Rackett is that these two almost laughably opposite entities - literary academia and the 3-car garage band - can not only coexist but can do so uninhibitedly, shamelessly. If you were watching and listening to Rackett at the Berlind Theatre last Friday, and if you could hear what was happening (enlightened lyrics with nasty guitar licks) in spite of the problematic acoustics, you were witness to one more death blow to the caste system of culture. Rackett: Standing Room Only in a 3-Car GarageStuart MitchnerNote: I should admit upfront that this is actually a sneak preview in the guise of a review of the first Rackett CD, which may be called Standing Room Only when it's released, possibly in time to coincide with a late March concert at Richardson. "Rackett: Standing Room Only in a 3-Car Garage"
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