Sunday, March 2, 2014

Spider Spider on the Wall - John Bennett




            Spider Spider on the Wall

                All the
                world-wide
                web has
                done for
                me is
                create the
                illusion that
                someone is
                listening.


                         - John Bennett 

     


As always, Issa's Untidy Hut & Lilliput friend and poet, John Bennett, deals out the necessary corrective for when things threaten to come off the rails due to an all too heady optimism. Between all the brouhaha over NSA, net neutrality, and whose picking your pocket and selling you back what they took, Spider, Spider is as timely and truthful as a Grimm's fairy tale with the original ending firmly intact. 

-----------------

I've spent the better part of the last couple of weeks revisiting the music of the Minneapolis country blues, rags and hollers old timey group Koerner, Ray, and Glover. Putting together this post brought "Spider John Koerner to mind, so here is a little number known as "Rattlesnake," followed by Master Issa's take on the original worldwide web:
 
 
 
-----------------
 
 
 
 
on the moonlit spider web
an evening
cicada
Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue




best,
Don

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2 comments:

Lyle Daggett said...

Having lived in Minneapolis most of my life, I've definitely listened to music of Koerner, Ray and Glover, and various combinations of them, from time to time.

I haven't spent a huge amount of time going to hear live music peformances -- I've tended to give a lot of my going-out-in-the-evening time to poetry readings by various poets over the years. On one occasion, though, some years back, I went with friends one warm summer Saturday evening to hear Dave Ray and Tony Glover play together at a bar in northeast Minneapolis, which at the time was still one of the older more industrial parts of the city.

It was a good evening of solid knockdown drag-out electric guitar big city blues.

One of the enduring bits of local folklore here in Minneapolis is that back in the early '60's, whenever it was exactly that the Beatles came to Minneapolis to do a live concert, when they arrived at the airport supposedly the first thing they asked was "Where can we go to hear Dave Ray and Tony Glover?"

Folklore being what it is, it may be hard to run that one to ground. But so the story goes.

Issa's Untidy Hut said...

Hey, Lyle:

Thanks so much - good to hear from someone who knows Koerner, Ray and Glover.

Coincidentally, as I was reading your comment, an album I just bought by KRG, "Live at First Avenue," came on the CD player.

"First Avenue" wouldn't happen to be the bar you were referring to? This album, with all three guys, was recorded in January 2002.

By the way, I'm thinking the story isn't so apocryphal - I ran into these three Beatle/Koerner, Ray and Glover items searching:

The Beatles Rarity

and

Proof of Influence

and from (look in the yellow box)

All the Songs: the Story Behind Every Beatles Release

In addition, the opening line of Oxford's "Encyclopedia of Popular Music" entry on KRG states: "This US trio, who were a pivotal influence on the Beatles", which may be a tad hyperbolic but there you go.

Don