Innovator
T-Bone Williams was the first
to use the
double-D harmonica &
he employed some lyrics that
seemed compatible —
this was way before Bobby
Dylan
sometime in the late ‘40s when
he did his 12-string
guitar experiments
But T-Bone was never signed to
a label,
instead he was assigned to
the streets
The last time I heard him play was
down on the corner of
Pico & Hoover
where he was trying out some new
jazz using
large bottles of Thunderbird
against 4-sheets of hard wind
_____
. . . And it Comes with Rain and Jazz
A lady-friend recently said
I needed to go out to the East Coast
to get a different perspective,
that I really should sell my
surfboard,
shit-can the tanning lotion and go
to where life is lived in
the raw jazzed-up nights of
Harlem and Brooklyn
have cocktails on The Hudson
ride the subways and don’t forget
the ‘Village where Dylan sang
My lady-friend said she’d buy me a
one-way ticket . . .
Stay at least three years, maybe five,
take in the museums,
See what Salinger was telling us in
The ‘Catcher . . .
AND you can walk right into the editors’
offices and toss your poems right there
on the desks –
won ’t have to wait a year for your
rejection slips!
The more she yapped,
the more I wanted to cling to the coastlines of
California, Oregon, and Washington
The more she squawked,
the more I wanted to introduce her to the
underground jazz-band in the
San Francisco Bay
_____
Mike Faran lives in Ventura, Ca. as a retired lobster trap builder. He is the author of We Go To A Fire (Penury Press) and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has been published in Atlanta Review, Rattle, The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and Slant.
