This is a continuation of a six-part series presenting the songs - and a lost manuscript - of a musician friend named Zak Jourek.
The
first section gives a more in-depth introduction to Zak and can be found
here.
The first two of his songs posted can be found here:
I met Zak while working in a dining hall at a small
university in Iowa and then we both ended up in Boulder, Colorado at the end of
the nineties. I got a package in the mail last January from one of his old
girlfriends with an old manuscript of his and a demo cassette tape of his songs.
As far as I can tell, he disappeared without a trace about thirteen years ago. Did
he wander up into the Rockies? Is he homeless and mumbling, going through dumpsters
in Portland? Did he become a juniper in the desert, charred by lightning? I
have no clue.
His background: Zak was originally from Philadelphia.
In the early nineties, he signed with EMI and was immediately dumped when
everyone who’d been involved in signing him were fired. Unfortunately, the
corporation owned the rights to all his songs up to that point and he was left
with nothing. It was a hideous contract, but not out of the ordinary. Or so he
said. The signing could be true. It’s possible that it’s not. It was sometimes
hard to sort out the fact from fiction with Zak. He spent the nineties as an
itinerant musician, working unskilled labor jobs, living sometimes as a vagrant,
sleeping where he fell.
I leave you with section two of his manuscript. And two more of his songs:
Hieronymous Bosch and Rain (for 19 days). Remember, these have been remastered from cassette demos, so the guitar sounds a bit sour.
2. Lost in the Land of Irony
After our gig in Memphis, we went to Graceland. It was
Liv’s idea. There was a five year old boy on the bus that shuttled us up the
drive from the ticket office who had his hair done up like 50’s Elvis. He kept
mugging like a trained monkey for everyone – singing lines from ‘Love Me
Tender’ and ‘Don’t Be Cruel’. Everyone on the bus thought he was the cutest little
thing, couldn’t stop cooing over him. Those moments on that bus were probably
the closest that kid would ever get to his fifteen minutes of fame.
Graceland is the sanctification of kitsch. No surprise
there. There was a room where the walls were shag rug. It looked like someone
had hired an interior decorator perpetually drunk on peanut butter banana
daiquiris. Liv loved it. She thinks that you can raise kitsch to the level of
art just by infusing it with irony. I didn’t want to spoil the joke. I’d once thought
I was in on the joke myself.
I’d been to Graceland before, during the summer of
’90, right before the first Gulf War. Bush Number One was drawing a line in the
sand and the media was jumping on the band wagon, furiously beating the war
drums. Any fuckwit could see it was about oil, but apparently there’s not that
many fuckwits in this country. I was on a tour of all the crap bars in the
country with a band called “Raised by Cats” and, because we were in Memphis, we
decided to make pilgrimage to the holy music industry shrine. Our inside joke
was “You got to pay to play.” How little we understood the truth.
Some things don’t change: The US is shit-deep in a war
in the Mideast again (maybe it’s the same war) and, once again, I’m on a tour of crap bars across
the country. One thing has changed – Aunt Delta is dead. She died back in ’93.
Forty thousand years ago, in what is now central
France, a cave painter sat in the flickering glow of a smoldering torch, night
after dark night, day after dark day, until the shape and shadows of the cave
wall revealed something: a bison, a horse, a woolly rhino. I like to believe
that lyrics are like the bison hiding in the contours of rock. The words are
already there, you just have to keep humming the melody over and over, use
nonsense vowels, consonants, garbled syllables, until eventually something
coherent pops out. Soon, you’ve got a whole sentence, then entire verses. It
can sometimes take years for two or three lines to come. They’re usually good
lines.
Driving away from Graceland, I told Liv she was right,
it was time to fuck off the 'tour.' What was the point? Time to go get drunk on
some Florida beach.
(end of part 2)
(click on title
to hear song)
A bouquet of
flowers in an opened ass
People riding
fish-balloons
Temptation in
the form of gaping mouths
Giant fanged
jaws leaning into
Groins and
penitent faces
While
pig-knights in attendance leer, laughing
"Congratulations!"
Hieronymus
Bosch
Hell looked
more fun than Heaven
ever did
Goats, pigs and
sheep on patrol
Where naked
couples never touch
Smiling and
writhing and groping air
They mime and
ape a sacred lust
Fire and smoke
light up the dead
Waiting in line
just to jump into the arms
Of
satisfaction (meat-grinder satisfaction)
Hieronymus
Bosch
Hell looked
more fun than Heaven
ever did
White reptile
pied piper
He plays the
nose-flute while he jigs
While townsfolk
of mice and cats
Run alongside
with forks and picks
And the town
elder, that fat authority
Sits on the
sidelines
Calmly drinking
tea
Hieronymus
Bosch
Hell looked
more fun than Heaven
ever did
Monkey-men
climbing turrets of stone
Well fortified
with grim reapers
Who wait hungry
to torture souls
Who writhe with
anticipation
And in the
distance a gallows is nailed
Secure wood
waiting to strangle sinners
But doomed to
fail
Hieronymus
Bosch
Hell looked
more fun than Heaven
ever did
(End fade with
poem "Song for Ishtar"
by Denise
Levertov*)
Background:
I remember when
Zak wrote this song. I had introduced him to the work of Hieronymus Bosch. I
loaned him a couple of books with Bosch prints and he took them home and
returned with this song. At the time, I was finishing my first book, On the Side of the Crow, and there's a
long section at the end that compares people on the bus heading home from work
with the faces found in some Bosch paintings. I don't remember if my work
influenced Zak or if Zak's song influenced my writing. Probably a little of
both. I was the one who introduced him to the poetry of Denise Levertov. For
the most part, he didn't like her work (he was very into James Wright), but there
were a few poems that really sang to him. "Song for Ishtar" was among
them. He thought it a bit Boschean, so he threw it in at the end.
(click on title
to hear the song)
Rain, for nineteen
days
Rain, for
nineteen days
And the refugee
down the hall
Stares at his
razor blades
Says nothing at
all
Rain
for the drunk mouths of sailors
Riding
the gutter stream
Pain, for
nineteen days
Pain, for
nineteen days
And the refugee
down the hall
He stares into
the rain
Says nothing at
all
Rain
to flush worms
From
the roots of trees
Gone, she's
gone away
Gone, she's
gone away
And the refugee
down the hall
He disappears
into the rain
Says nothing at
all
Rain
to grease the killer's smile
Rain
to wash the victim's surprised face
Rain
to blind the eyes of the desert fathers
Rain
to filter down into broken veins
Rain
for the parched green coils of whispering snakes
Rain
to bloat the soil
Rain
to weep the grass
Rain
to choke the rivers
Rain
to crush against the soaked ears
Of
the floating city
Background:
This
song was written by Zak at the height of the great flood of '93 in Des Moines, Iowa. It
rained for almost nine months straight and then, in June of that year, The Raccoon River
flooded and destroyed the city waterworks. It kept raining, but there was no water in the city
pipes for almost two months. There were
thousands of volunteers sandbagging around the water works day and night, helicopters
always in the air. Drinking water was shipped in by National Guard. The Guard set up
bivouacs in the parking lots of grocery stores and people lined up with jugs. Here's
an image from that time: a man and his daughter out in the yard of the
apartment house across the street shampooing their hair in a downpour. Zak wrote this song during
those two months where no water was running through the pipes, but all of
heaven was coming down from the sky. He was living in a neighborhood with quite
a few Bosnian refugees at the time. I wrote the introduction prose poem to On the Side of the Crow at around the same time, called “Mandala
depicting the Secret Life of Worms,” where I imagined worms being
sucked up into the sky and riding the rain cycle – all heavily influenced by
the constant deluge.
Many thanks to Richard
Thomas
(aka Rikki Lixx, former lead guitarist of
Rev Theory and Operator)
who kindly re-mastered Zak's cassette
tapes.
Next Week:
Part 3
of Zak's manuscript
&
2 More Songs
*Denise Levertov's
Song for Ishtar
The moon is a sow
and grunts in my throat
Her great shining shines through me
so the mud of my hollow gleams
and breaks in silver bubbles
She is a sow
and I a pig and a poet
When she opens her white
lips to devour me I bite back
and laughter rocks the moon
In the black of desire
we rock and grunt, grunt and
shine
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