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By Root 430 0

’ Center. Mr. Charles Bukowski, America's greatest living poet, born in Andernach, Germany, around the time these recordings were made, the toast of France since he went on its version of the Dick Cavett show drunk, refused to wear his translator's headphones, asked a literary critic there if he could slobber all over her calves on national TV, and told the assembled frogmatik culture vultures that they should have dropped a hydrogen bomb on themselves the day in 1961 that Louis-Ferdinand Celine died inasmuch as they had not produced a single writer above Peugeot ad-copy level since; this man, author of 33 published books so far, including Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live With Beasts, Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an Eight-Story Window, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, Doing Time With Public Enemy Number One, Nut Ward Just East of Hollywood, A .45 to Pay the Rent, and Twelve Flying Monkeys Who Won’t Copulate Properly, now sat back in his worn swivel chair, relit his stogie, unpopped another Colt .45 and surveyed his audience. Dustbowl residence apparently did not do too much to encourage proliferation of barefoot boys with cheeks of tan. But that was all right; enough master races already. No, these sandlocked little lubbers looked positively bloodless, not unlike the specimens one may observe any day of the week buzzing, beeping, chirping, and peeping through the tubes traversing Greater Boston (if there is such a thing)— they don’t call ‘em WASPs for nothin’! But these were not wasps. These were chiggers. And at length one of them raised one of his bloodless yet febrile and oddly clawlike little hands:

“Mr. Bukowski?”

“Yes?”

“Um… we … uh, um… would you suggest writing as a career?”

That's your punch line. Just imagine asking Archie Shepp, “Would you suggest free jazz as a career?” Charles Bukowski worked in the Post Office, with unpaid overtime, for 14 straight years. Eventually he got desperate enough that one night he stopped off on the way home and bought a fifth of whiskey, two six-packs of beer, and two packs of cigarettes; as he himself put it later, “I wanted to be a writer and I was scared.” That night he got dead drunk and wrote 30 pages. The next night he got dead drunk and wrote 40. Most of what he found on the sofa in the morning, a good deal of which you may be sure he had no memory of composing, was not only usable but good. Literature, even. Many writers try to duplicate experiences like this, since they’ve bought the myth that to write well you must be a drunken wretch. I’m glad they bought it because most of them are terrible writers who will end up on skid row instead of bothering the rest of us in some capacity or other. Bukowski wrote a novel called Post Office in 21 nights. It has been in print for 10 years and gone through several editions. I’ve read it five times. It's not one of my favorite works of his. Charles Bukowski does not have a career.

You may wonder what all this could possibly have to do with the Comedian Harmonists. Aside from shared national/geographical origins, which is pure chance, and the fact that I suspect Bukowski would like this record very much, the point I am concerned with here is that there are certain types of creative productions: records, books, plays, monologues, jokes even, call them what you will, but one of the most significant things about them for me is that they fit into no genre. Why? Because they are too original. Or too prescient. Or just plain quirky.

But let me ask you a few questions. What is Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis and Gil Evans? Is it jazz, since Miles plays on it and even (gasp!) improvises? Is it classical, since it does include awesome renditions of works by the Spanish (all this arbitrary nomenclature is going quotes from here on out) “classical” composers Joaquin Rodrigo and Manuel de Falla? You haven’t a clue. Good. That's the way I like to see you. O.K., let's try something in rock, not too arcane—say, Astral Weeks, by Van Morrison. On it, Van plays acoustic guitar and sings