Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout Archive presents the following historical excerpt from a marathon rap session that took place in 1976 at a Trader Vic’s in Toronto.
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Jeffrey Morgan: I hope you don’t expect me to tell you how great Rock And Roll Heart is, ’cause I haven’t got a copy.
Lou Reed: You know I couldn’t expect anyone to compliment me. You know how disappointed I’d be.
Morgan: Well, any man who can write a line like “I see my life before me like a seamstress sees her pins” has to have something.
Reed: Now where did you ever get to see that? How did you get to see that?
Morgan: “We Are the People.”
Reed: How did you get to see that?
Morgan: “A Very Pure and Old-Fashioned Christmas.”
Reed: How in hell’s name did you ever get to see any of those?
Morgan: Are there any copies of “We Are the People” around?
Reed: It’s gone. I don’t have a copy. Like, I was gonna have a book published and I was looking around for that poem and I couldn’t find it. That’s when Bob Summers had Fusion. That was a great poem. That was terrific. But I don’t have a copy of it. Oh, that poem “We Are the People,” that’s such a great poem. Y’know, I can’t remember it all.
Morgan: There’s a lot of Walt Whitman in it.
Reed: I’m honestly not that familiar with Walt Whitman.
Morgan: The two styles are very similar. They’re the kind of poems that need to be read out loud.
Reed: Oh, like see, I do that all the time with Anne Waldman, y’know. The St. Lawrence Church on the Bowery. Anne had a thing called Another World. She used to edit it. She’s had books of poetry and single-handedly created that whole thing. Y’know, poetry workshops. That wasn’t always there. And every year there’s a reading. The last one was like, last January. I was there and John was there. I mean, everybody was there. We were doing that with Anne before anybody was anybody. If Anne hadn’t gotten in touch with me to be in it, I’d’ve been really hurt.
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Next week: MB111
Jeffrey Morgan is a freelance writer. Send comments to letters@metrotimes.com
This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2007.
