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social despair; try putting that in your piggy-bank. CBGBs charge for the use of their sound system, who's making the fucking sounds that they're drawing their fat pay-rolls on? The Roxy have made it a condition of playing that the music is recorded, so that they can put out a 'Live at the Roxy' album, the bands won't get a dime for their troubles. Who's selling who? Ah yes, they'll sit snug behind their cocktail glasses, jerking off to another generations sorrow.
Another generation sold out by it's own hope, burnt out by it's own idealism.
It sucks.
Truth is a ghetto.
Who shares what?
The Roxy charge one pound fifty entrance and the juice kills. CBGB have charged six dollars entrance and the juice kills. Iggy plays at the Roxy and drives away in his limousine, Smith plays at CBGBs and drives away in her limousine. They chew shit. There's audience out here that knows it. It's been a while now, the real colours are flying and they ain't red and black. If the first wave has failed, perhaps the second wave will succeed. The first wavers' vision was poked out by the earliest bank note that was passed their way, and it was'nt rolled and it was'nt coke. It ain't narcotic that kills, no way, it's dollar and sterling, pounds and pence. Let Keith Richards buy his own way out, let him fester alorg with the rest of that super-star generation, and let him be joined by those that would desire the same priviledged position. Oh yes, they talk of the system being the oppressor, well what fucking system are they part of? Leadbelly sung from the jail-house. Who ate his dinner? Van Gagh painted in the mad house. Who ate his dir~ner? They propped Bird against a trash-can and told him to play. Who ate his dinner? Genet wrote on shit-paper. Kerouac died behind a bottle. They love it. Love it. They fucking love it. Cash or crucifixion, either way they get you.

After the first two numbers the alchohol of four litres of good french wine, and one bad chinese, has fractured my skull. A blast of boiling sound. We're hotting up through the various layers. I connect with the rest of the band by some sinewy thread which, if it were'nt for the grass that floats awkwardly through Ignorant's and Andy's heads, would normally have meant an energetic and direct fire. We're in a temperate zone and the capsule ain't moving. The energies bounce uncontrolled. An escaped cage-bird burns its wings on the gas-ring. Enola Gay rights herself as the payload is released. Wham. I try to collect the fragments, they slide away from me angry snakes in the pit. Kyoto rivers that slide about our feet. I lumber up to the mike and push Ignorant aside.
"Come on you fuckers, I know we're shit, but I know that you're shit as well. Why can't we be shit together?
I crawl back to the drum kit and heave into it as much energy as I can muster. The sweet chinese red is locking ray my arms. The response is low. Death zone. Negative bull-shit. Ignorant droops like a drowned gold-fish.
"Do it fucker. Do it."
He can't the dope is strangling him.

That is right, isn't it? We are aren't we? Being? Knowing? That is our right, ain't it? Rich in the idle light of our dawn.

When I'd found Ignorant and Andy three hours earlier demolishing their third enormous joint and an otherwise fairly peaceiul apartment, I had known that this gig was going to be a hard one. Dope just ain't where it's at. Andy was very psyched up and had been terrorising people at bus stops, tired souls waiting for the hearse home. I did'nt like that either. It's a narrow line between confrontation and violation. Bad dope, bad alchohol can push it all the wrong way. I know Andy had overloaded, but that did'nt make me feel any better about it. It is a responsibility and I'm not about to see someone sit about and abuse it. We argue through our blocked heads. Useless. We play in three hours, there has to be some contact made.
"You don't need to frighten people Andy. They have their own pain, leave them to their orwn pain." He waves his list at me.
"Look you fucker, you play your game and I'll play mine. Right."
For me it is'nt right. At that time I'd consumed three bottles of wine and most of the inhibition, the fear, the hopeless self-conciousness had eroded with the grape, but that does'nt make me want to frighten people. The press does that. Media. The punk-suckers. They need their scapegoats and I know that it's cheap to conform to their concepts of how we are. We're not the hooligans in this game, they are, they set it all up, we're just the blotting paper for their puke. I don't care much for the world that those people at the bus stop, are representative of, but it is their world. I'd like them to see that there is something else, that there is some hope beyond the empirical structures that we have been told is reality. There is more. Always more, and in a a strange, paradoxical way I gently search out the routeways to it.

Punk philosophy, it's voice of anarchy, has been discredited by a press hostile to change. Society has a way of protecting itself. It's called free speech, which means that the ruling classes extend an illusion of openness to those below, who owns the

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