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Poet K. Curtis Lyle shows how music affect his poetry writing. He reads new works and there is a surprise at the end. Lyle is an important poet, and we are great full to document the poetry and the stories of K. Curtis Lyle.
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Poet K. Curtis Lyle shows how music affect his poetry writing. He reads new works and there is a surprise at the end. Lyle is an important poet, and we are great full to document the poetry and the stories of K. Curtis Lyle.
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Hey, welcome back to High Above Grand in the Killswitch Media Studio with producer RW Smith. I'm your host Brett Lars-Underwood and we're here today with St. Louis poet K. Curtis Lyle. We've talked about his experiences with the Watts Writers Project in Los Angeles before he moved to St. Louis and his experience with Julius Hemphill in St. Louis and his travels around with people like Quincy Troop. We're going to hear Curtis read a couple pieces. Okay, thanks for being here again Curtis. Thank you guys for having me. Right now I'm doing a lot of work with musicians, younger musicians in St. Louis to sort of, for lack of a better way of putting it, kind of help me resurrect my performance life. Yeah. Working with Damon Smith and Alex Cunningham, George Sams, who I've worked with for years anyway. But anyway, we've been having a good time and we've got some actual records coming out within a couple of months. Damon and myself, George and Alex. Damon has his Balance Point Acoustics label. He has his Balance Point Acoustics and we just finished a thing called 29 Birds You've Never Heard. And then we'll also be doing, these things have already been recorded and mocked up. Another one is called A Radio of the Body. Okay. And then I'm doing one with Alex called Quantum Nursery Rhymes of the Divine Horseman. All right. So a lot of stuff has been kind of happening for me. Sure. This is a piece I write in series. Okay. Long series. I call them rogue operas. Okay. Because I kind of try to get the grandioseness of a particular kind of either music or literature and also kind of transcendence creativity, not just the story but what the story might become. The thing about the story you can't see, like looking at a painting and put a radiograph on it, seeing what's underneath the paint. So this is the thing I got really hooked on, the British pop singer Amy Winehouse and her personality and her delivery, right? Okay. I didn't see it going there. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. You never know where it's going. All right. And so this is from a series of pieces called Amy Winehouse is the Man in Me. All right. A blind, drunken master takes the stage. Not like a thief in the night, but a whirling dervish of dementia lovecraft, cursing the congregation out of tempo, fallen to 4,000 fathom depths of albatross aroma, prophetic procreation soul, and they love it. A performance of ownership killing the promotion of the transparent self in a public Motown meltdown. Corporate consciousness in a mutual hug of self-destruction with unconscious ideation. The reasons she stations herself center stage are that she accepts responsibility for the enormous outpouring of love being generated from her third chakra and total karmic blowback from acolytes once they realize that their eyes fixed on the prize are about to be unceremoniously rubbed out by the music. She goes back to black instead of going to rehab. Her evil genius capsizes gravity. Amy Winehouse is the man in me. Is that published anywhere yet? Is that something you've been working on with Damon? No, this is something that we've been working on together. And so, like I say, it's a series of pieces with that title. You have a performance coming up, right? We're going to be performing July 13th at O'Connell's. It's at Jack's Joint? Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully, possibly not one of the last performances at Jack's Joint, but that'll be with Damon Smith. And we're here with K. Curtis Lyle. You're going to read something else, perhaps? Yeah, this is from that same group of pieces. It's called Dark is an Implication, Black is a Color. That absorbs every tome in the spectrum. I am a debt-free necrosis gambler, hauling one last deathless cell through the abyss, sweat lodge of the promised land, failed organs, dumb tissue, disease, conferee due to disinterred blood supply. The agreement stated that I could remain growing only underground, laughing stocks, humble gas-like, basal capture spread, that wingspan can sing, friction by mineral as the last piece that stabilizes net. Unified, feel theory to anti-material relativity, Amy Winehouse, Amy Winehouse, Amy Winehouse is the man in me, alternating episodes of shadow, stake-out, gravity, direction approaches, neural link, chip station, potency, ask, is an implant interface compatible with cosmetology? I need to look good, knocking on heaven's door. Thank you very much. Okay, we'll sum it up, yeah. So like I said, this is a series of pieces. We might be doing them in August at the Black Box Theater. Tom Knoll and I have been working on something together. Oh, yeah. So all of these, the Amy Winehouse series, I have another thing called Jaguar Time Trials, Mayan Docking Strategies, all of these have come to me over the last few years because I got hooked on this whole idea of the grand opera with the narratives. I worked in the 90s in St. Louis doing a thing we called National Treasures, where we tried to do the same thing with the lives of important American musicians. But what I've been doing now is sort of moving past that into actually just some poems that are built on a sound. You know, say for instance, I might make an example and I won't spend a great deal of time on this. I've become fascinated and really intrigued, committed to the sound of Native American names in the Native American languages. And one of the reasons is because I have somewhat the Native American heritage. My father was born on the Choctaw Reservation in Mississippi. And so although he never played to that, he never played up, I've come to discover that there's a great linkage between some of the developments of jazz in the 40s and what people call bebop and Native American rhythms, especially Comanche. So I got into the names. One of the points I tried to make in the sound of names, say for instance, we go something like Sitting Bull. Sure. It was a... Tonka. Tonka. Yeah. So you hear the name itself and you realize that when it's translated into another language, it doesn't have the weight, doesn't have the power of Tonka or crazy horse, right? That's not even the right translation of his name. The real translation of his name is his horse is crazy. Oh, there you go. Meaning that which he rides is powerful, engaging, like the body, a train, a force in the world. There you go. More than a horse. It's translated as horse, but it means more than that. So I got really just touched by these names like the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers. And Coltrane was the one who brought me there first and Baraka because on Coltrane's album, which is called Crescent. Yeah. He has a famous ballad called Alabama, okay, which is written for the four girls who were killed in Alabama in 1963 in the church bombing, right? Yeah. So Baraka wrote the notes to that and right at the end of the notes, one of the most beautiful lines for me he's ever written, he said, Train made Alabama into a beautiful word again. Yeah. Alabama. And he repeats it a few times. And so I said to myself, I need to follow what they call the etymology. Where does that name come from? And it is a Choctaw word. And it's Al-ba-i-a-mul. Al-ba-i-a-mul. And it means to make a clearing or we make a clearing or the place that we clear to settle. So it completely changes the nature. Yeah. You know, so you go to all those beautiful names, the Native American names like Omaha. Yeah. You know, that's a name of a tribal group. And Omaha actually means those who go upstream or against the wind. You know, so all these incredible names, they give you fodder to make poetry, to create. Yeah. All those words, yeah. All those words. Nebraska. Yeah. It's actually Nebraska. You know, Nebraska. And you hear the names of the rivers and things like that. Well, you know, Americans call it the Snake River, right? So it just doesn't have the same weight. Yeah. You know what I mean? And I, you know, my wife is French, so I'm used to hearing another language in the house. And a lot of times, you know, I'll say something, I think I'm speaking French or something or doing the right pronunciation, and she'll look at me and go, snap her fingers, she has to know, Arthur Rimbaud. That's a whole lot different from Arthur Rimbaud. No. And that's kind of driven a lot of the underpinning. Yeah. Of the work and how it's developed over the years. I mean, the first time I heard Coltrane's name, I was 13. Had no idea, never heard of him. I was in Sam's Record Shop on West Adams in L.A., because you could go in in those days and actually listen to the records in a listening booth. Yeah. And then if you liked it, you'd go to the counter, and then you could buy the record, right? So I was going through the records with my cousin Kwaku, going through the records, and all of a sudden, I saw this album. You know, kind of muted cover, and it said, Soul Train. And the work was by John Coltrane, right? And I said, what a hit name. Yeah. I had never heard it before. I didn't even go in the listening booth. I just bought it. Yeah. You know, and I took it home, and the first tune is called Good Bait by Tad Dameron. And they had me. I mean, that was it. But it didn't matter, you know? So the way I got to it was just through sound, rather than through conventional naming. You know, and I've used that a lot of times as the template, you know, the ground for what I... I just got fascinated by Amy Winehouse's name. I mean, I know enough about her that, you know, I'd go online and see who she is and the pop stuff, and I kind of tried to watch the movie and stuff like that. But then I heard her singing Body and Soul, you know? I said, well, damn. This little white girl is singing Body and Soul. I said, well, damn. I said, well, damn. This little white girl... I mean, I know a lot of white people like the... They were the Blue-Eyed Soul Brothers in the 80s. There were two guys who sang... What were they called? The Righteous Brothers. They just sang their ass off, you know? But still, that was a kind of acceptation. They didn't really talk like that. Yeah. Like, the Beatles didn't really... They didn't really twist and shout, put it like that. But something about her voice, and maybe it's been the separation in our ages. Like, I'm 80, and she's 20. Was she 20-something when she died? 25 or something like that? Yeah. 27, okay. Same as Hendrix. And Jesus Christ. And Cobain. And Cobain, right. Another one. Another one. See, I was not into Kurt Cobain. You can't be into everything. I admit it. I don't know everything. But after he died, I got The Box that just came out two years ago. Okay. And so I was listening to The Box, and I was saying, you know, this is pretty hip. Then I started listening to the lyrics. And you know what I heard in the lyrics? Screaming Jay Hawkins. Wow. I mean, you know who he is, of course. Oh, of course, yeah. But have you ever listened to... You know, he was actually trained as a classical singer. Yeah. But, you know, classical gigs, right? But I started going back over the lyrics, right? And I was saying, I don't know if they heard him or not, but their lyrics are strikingly similar to some of Screaming Jay's stuff, which is cool. Everybody is entitled to everything, as far as I'm concerned. Yes. You know, if you're sitting in Stockholm, you have a right to wear a Borsalino in the marketplace or whatever. You know what I'm saying? But something about her voice just got to me, man. There you go. It just got to me. And also she has that floating thing that I found, well, Coltrane has it, like in Lonnie's Lament and stuff like that, all through the more poignant, what I call the holy blues in his work, because he came from the church. But you know who else has it for me? Bob Dylan. Oh, yeah. He got that float, man, in a way like Nashville Skyline, a girl in the North Country, that thing he does with Johnny Cash, where they float above the tune. You know, he said, If you're going to the North Country, and you can just hear him floating above the music, right? I said, I like that. You know, I don't know how I'm going to do that with words and literature, but I'm going to try. Yeah. And so those are some of the things that I look for. Yeah. And even Monk has kind of a holy blues sometimes if you listen to the ballads, you know, like Blue Monk and stuff like that. He's doing it like a great Charles Coulthard. A death tempo, right? You know, yeah, right. But he's still like just kind of walking on a cloud. You know, and that's not something you hear, you don't hear critical references. You don't hear critical references. You don't hear critical references. You don't hear critical references. You don't hear critical references. You don't hear critical references. You hear the dissonance, of course, when people talk about his work, and you know, you talk about how weird he is and stuff like that, you know. But there's this incredible, melodic, almost ballad thing. Even he says in Robin Kelly's book, Round Midnight was going to be Monk's version of a hit ballad. He actually wrote that. He thought that was going to be his hit ballad, you know, Round Midnight, and it had some other name, probably with a woman's name in it or something like that. But, and you know, even Parker, he said, you know, they ask him about complexities and techniques and stuff like that. He said, well, what I try to do is play music that is beautiful. You know, music that's for the people. Well, I couldn't have said it better myself. We were talking about St. Louis and Julie Champil, and you did the recording, Collected Poems for Lyon Lemon Jefferson. You said you did that with Oliver Saint? We recorded it in his studio. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, at his house, yeah. And then you were talking about playing different venues with Julius and I'm assuming other people, other players around? Well, Julius is very close. Julius and I were, of course, very close. Sure. And you know, of course, I was friends for years with Oliver. I mean, still, Oliver Lake. David Murray was a student at Pomona. I mean, I'm older than David, you know, maybe by 11, 12 years, but he was a student at Pomona. James Newton was a student there. Mark Dresser. So I've always been around and their minds are wide. I mean, James and I have done stuff together, you know. So once I got to St. Louis, I got accustomed, I guess you'd say, to that as being my go-to kind of performance presentation. Then they all left and, you know, they went to Europe and then New York and Art Ensemble and people like that became prominent. And so the music took on a kind of, I'll call it, performance, huge grandness, operaticness. Sure. One time I was talking to Lester, a boy in Chicago. I think I had actually gotten a gig to interview Lester. We were behind, I think Braxton had been playing, so we were backstage. So Braxton was backstage talking about mathematics and physics and stuff like that. I had no idea what he was talking about. So Lester was standing there in his hospital coat looking at me like this. And so I turned to Lester. I said, well, say, man, do you want to get in on this? And he said, what does that mean? And I said, well, you know, we're just talking about the legacy and what you want to leave behind and what you want people to remember about you. He said, I want to be remembered as the first black musician who bought a Lexus for cash. And there you go. Lester Bowie said that. I said, wait a minute, I'm going to write that down. I'm going to keep that line. I don't care who takes it after me. I'm going to keep that line. So my point is, of course, is that I'm not going to rag on the people who don't do this, like the conventional, going back to the 40s and 50s, people wearing suits and Marcellus Group and stuff like that. That's just as legitimate as anything else. But what I'm talking about is this huge enlarging of the music, what Don Cherry did. Of course, Ornette. Ornette is, in a way, for me, he's sort of like a spiritual elfin. He's like a blues man who went to the cosmos. And everybody's trying to say, how did he do that? I can't figure out how he did that. How did he do that? Because I've heard him and been around him. One time I kind of figured out what he was doing. It was at Sonny Rollins' 80th birthday party. It was a tape of it. And I was watching it online. And so Sonny Rollins comes to the microphone, and he says, they tell me that there's somebody here, maybe he's backstage, who would like to come out and say happy birthday to me, right? And so everybody knows what he's talking about. So they go into Sonny Moon for two, right? And Ornette comes walking from backstage in his Ornette-ness in his dress and his hat and stuff like that. And he's playing Sonny Moon for two. Well, he steals the show, not because he's trying to steal the show, and not because there's any competition between him and Sonny. Because his Ornette-ness is greater than, I'm just sorry to say it, but his Ornette-ness is greater than Sonny's Sonny-ness right at that time. And that's the thing about him. His Ornette-ness is more powerful than anybody else's whatever it is. The only time I've seen anybody equal it was at Coltrane's funeral when him and Albert Eilert played the funeral. You know? And I said to myself, I see why Trane walked off the stage one night, not in disgust. He asked Albert to sit in, and Albert came up on the stage, and they started in, and Trane looked up to the right, and he raised his hand like this, and he just waved, and he said, y'all got it. Y'all got it. I'm gonna go sit down. So that's the thing for me. And this is way outside of the music and stuff like that. Although the system that he developed for thinking in music and communicating is very, very original, right? But it's his Ornette-ness. That's what it is. It's just more profound than anybody else's, whatever they have. And so that's what I finally accepted, because I was trying to figure it out, meaning everything from the sound, what is it called? Sound something, a really beautiful, melodic thing he does. And they tried to make a joke of him on, I think it was one of those TV shows, I don't know if Johnny Carson was alive, or one of those guys who does the late night shows, Conan or somebody like that, when he won the Pulitzer Prize. And so they were saying, well, this is the music that won the Pulitzer Prize. And so they put on an excerpt of Ornette's music. And you could see people going like... Yeah, confused, studio-oriented. Well, confused, but also like, is this a joke? Again, are we on candid camera? Is this the end of the world? Was this the annunciation of the apocalypse? But the thing was that it didn't matter. Because Ornette is just Ornette. You know what I mean? And that's the thing about him that's so profound to me. One of those things about him that... Josh Weinstein did that interview with him in his apartment in New York for the sound episode of 52nd City. Absolutely. And yeah, I can't do his voice, but he's like... Well, he has that kind of sound. What is it? That kind of soft southern... Sun Ra has a little... They're from different places, but... And Josh told me when he was going up there, before he decided to try to contact Ornette, he said, how should I do it? Should I just... You think I can just call him up? I said, man, that's the one famous person in the world that you can go up and knock on his door and he will answer it. Of course, he's like that too in the sense that he's the only person I've ever known in my life who will never not answer the phone. There you go. You know what I mean? I never answer my phone. I don't answer my phone. I try not to. I learned that from you guys who are a generation younger than me. They don't even know what a phone is. I text people, because I'm a writer, right? I'll text people some long stuff like, and so on, so on, so on, so on, and so on, so on, can we do this or we'll meet you there, and so on, and the answer will be, okay. Or as Brett did to me the other night, he said, hello? I didn't know where you were going with that. I didn't either. I was lost. Huh? That's fine. Well, there you go. There's the musical word from right there, but it's kind of abrupt, percussive maybe. Well, that, and humming, and all those things, yeah. We haven't talked much about what you did in St. Louis. Well, you know, when I first got here, I talked about Julius. Emilio Cruz was the artist in residence at BAG, so he and I became big buddies for a little while, because as BAG was breaking up, that would be the last, he was the last remaining person because he actually lived in the building. Yeah, that's the Black Artist Group building. The Black Artist Group building, and he didn't have, he was a New Yorker. He didn't drive. Yeah. So, I had a car, you know, so I'd go and pick him up every day, because it was summer in those days, because I was teaching. I had the whole summer off. Yeah. So, we just had a lot, I had never had a chance to talk to him because there were so many people in front of us, you know, before I got to Emilio, I had to go to Julius, I had to go to Oliver, I had to go to Lester, not go through them, but, you know, I'd be there with him first. And he and I became friends just sitting down talking one day, and so I'd pick him up every day, and we'd go to a pool hall, you know, in the neighborhood, and we'd shoot pool. Right. And that's how we became buddies. He was the first person I knew who was interested in stuff like the Kabbalah, we'd read tarot cards together. I didn't know anybody who was interested in that, right? Yeah. From my own generation or environment. Yeah. So we became buddies just doing things like that, and then, you know, Shirley and I became friends later. Sure. You know, she wasn't really doing poetry right at that time. And then Michael Castro, when I came back, because I'm a little bit older than Michael, maybe three or four years, when I came back in the early 80s, he and I became very close friends. So then I became part of that poetry scene, you know, the Duff's poetry scene. Sure, yeah. Duff had a national reputation because they brought in people from both coasts. Oh, sure, yeah. From, you know, the upper north, from Texas, whatever. Did you get to go see Burroughs when he was there? I did not see Burroughs because I had met Burroughs in New York. Yeah, right. One night, kind of a strange night where he and that coterie of people, they were staying in a place in Gramercy Park. Yeah. So, you know, man, these dudes is way, they're just, I'm in the food chain, I wasn't even. Well, I know. I wasn't residue in that food chain, but they were cool. They invited us in, but the, see, black weirdness and white weirdness is two completely different things, right? Especially at that point in my life. Now, I have no problem with any kind of weirdness. I mean, strangeness, weirdness, genderness. Yeah. I met a woman at my sister's, my sister, one of my sisters died some years back. We went to her memorial and a woman came after me at the end of memorial and she said, Oh, I was a good friend of Jan's and so on. So I said, Oh, I'm very glad to meet you. And she said, but back in those days, my name was Herman. Then I thought about my sister. I said, cool. You know what I mean? Of course you would be one of Jan's friends, right? Yeah, no problem. You know what I mean? So, but at that time, also the, the whole drug thing, especially the use of heroin, it was very kind of, I'll use a kind of an academic word here, it was kind of anathema to me because I had several friends from my youth. Oh yeah. I mean, iconic people in the environment that I grew up in LA who had OD'd as young men who were actually role models. Yeah. And you don't know what happened to them. Sure. You say like, well, he had a scholarship to UCLA. What happened to him? Yeah. Or he was the first person I knew who had a PhD in film criticism. Yeah. How could he go from that to like ODing on crack? This was in the 80s and stuff like that. Sure. That's not heroin, but that's a different thing. Yeah. But so, the kind of cavalier use of drugs then, Oh yeah. was kind of, I had a little problem with it in terms of what I'd seen fall before me, especially people in the family. Yeah, that was a tough. But you know, but no, but I mean, I heard an interview with Burroughs the other day and he said, he was saying, he was extolling, he was extolling the benefits of heroin and I think he was on the Tonight Show or one of those places like that and you could see people on the panel with him, they were saying, they were saying, they looked like, how did he get on this show? Yeah. Who let him on here, right? Yeah. Because you know, he got that voice, that WCVO's voice, very serious. He said, well, what they don't know is that the use of heroin is quite beneficial for the artist. Yeah. But he was saying it in a way where he wasn't, he wasn't trying to start an argument. This was not a debating society. Yeah. He was just saying, it was good to me Yeah. and I'm here to say that especially when you can get the good kind, like I'm getting, right? Yeah. So, that's away from the thing of meeting them. Yeah, I was only touching on it because I knew he read it, so I was kind of, kind of, Yeah, isn't he a St. Louis? He is, but he came through in 82 with John Giorno at that point and I was just touching on it because I knew that he was there, maybe that, yeah. I mean, I had encountered him. Yeah. I had encountered him. Oh, for sure, but they were good guys and they were also very generous. Yeah. Well, I was just touching up on that. I was kind of getting back to the, like, River Styx and you mentioned at one point you played in other venues with Judas and other people, like, so what was going on? Then, I went to New York in 79 Yeah. and we did, and he was there, too, and so we did quite a few, we did some things together. He did this big band record and then by that time, the World Saxophones, so a quartet, had become, kind of, I guess you'd say, a global phenomenon. Oh, yeah. They were successful. Yeah. You know, and so he had done the big band record and then he and I had a gig at the public theater, Joe Papp's public theater, Okay. which was pretty successful in the sense that it was entirely us and we got paid. Oh, yeah. So, at the public theater, that was a big deal. Yeah. It's a big deal now. He carried a lot of, his life had changed because he also, had a companion, Ursula Offens, who very much looked out for him and also showed him how to navigate the world, you know. Okay. He had, you know, he had his leg amputated in 82, I think. Okay. But, Julius, and this is another thing about art and artists and music, is that the most, what seems like egregious, kind of, kind of, kind of, way of living, like, when Julius had his leg amputated, the doctor told him, I was there, the doctor was with him, he said, if you have one more drink, you will die. Yeah. Now, how do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? 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How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? How do you turn that into art? So that's how you turn nonsense into art. So what happened in St. Louis? Like, you were gone for a while and you came back. I was just trying to get a sense for the scene. I left it in the mid-70s, went back to L.A. Then I came back in 82, because I got a job. I'm 80. No, I'm sorry. 88. Because I got a job at Lindenwood. Oh, yeah. So that's when Michael and I became really close. He had the show on KDHX. I don't know if it was called that then. Poetry Beat. Poetry Beat. And then Janie and Annie called it Literature for the Halibut. Yes. So it was a great show. I mean, it gave a lot of exposure to people. Oh, yeah. And high-quality stuff. And so, you know, Michael and I became very close. And I became kind of part of the St. Louis, I would say, poetry scene, but also part of the, you know, people always confuse and say, well, are you from St. Louis? Are you a part of BAG? And I have to be very careful about that, because I was not a member of the black artist group. I came here in 69 when they formed the year before. I knew everybody there. I was close to them. I performed with a lot of them. I knew Vincent Turrell and all the people who worked in the theater workshop, but I was never an official member of BAG. I was always from the Watchwriters Workshop. But I consider myself a St. Louis artist, right? Privy to all. You know, Floyd and I were friends. Floyd and I performed together at the Art Museum. We have recordings of that. And then in the 90s, I formed the group called the Warrior Poets. And for two years at the Wabash Triangle Cafe, that was the beginning of this grand opera idea, where we did these national treasures, the lives of Parker, Coltrane, Hendrix. The best one for me was the Hendrix one, the one I'm still using. We called it Cherokee Delta Science Fiction Electric Blues or something like that. But to me, that's the only way you kind of explain him. And then I had lived in Seattle for a year when he was very much unknown. It may have been the year he left. It may have been the year before he left. So I went there in 68 and stayed there until the middle of 69. So Seattle was no way. Oh, man. Seattle was like not quite the boondocks but a very, very attractive boondocks. Yeah. Really beautiful, man. You could have a whole house for like $100 a month and stuff like that. Ocean views and things. So then I stayed there for a while. I was there actually the year before I came to St. Louis. So I've been in St. Louis off and on for all those years. Been out a little bit. Lived in the Bay Area for a while. 97 to, ooh, I came back. 97 to 2001. I came back to St. Louis in 2001. Again, it must be the place I'm supposed to be because I was on my way to Amsterdam. There you go. I was literally on my way to Amsterdam. Stopped in St. Louis in July to see friends. I was going to stay with them for two months. I had sent off to New Orleans, I think, is where you was the government center where they renewed the passports. I had done all the work waiting for my passport to come from New Orleans. On September the 11th, I was laying in my little hostel in the Central West End, and the radio came in and said that somebody had flown some airplanes into the World Trade Center. That's how we snagged you. And, Curtis, you are not going anywhere, brother. Wow. That's how I ended up in St. Louis. Wow. I can't even say that out loud. I don't mean a blessed event, but it was the thing that kept me here. This is where I was supposed to be. I was not supposed to be in Amsterdam. St. Louis has always been kind of like this strange golden triangle for me, without the poppy seeds and all that. You know what I mean? It's just the place I'm supposed to be. I've always done well here. I've always met people who are incredibly creative. L.A. is my clan ground, but L.A. is way too crazy for me, man. It's just like I might as well be living in Mexico City and not being able to speak Spanish, or living in Tokyo and not being able to speak Japanese. L.A. is, to me, all people from L.A. who hear this, or if you hear it, nothing personal. I still have all my family there, but it's just way too nutty for me, man. Yeah. It's not the intensity. It's not spiritual intensity up and down. It's that horizontal stuff. I went to get my car washed one day, and there was a five-hour long line to get a car wash. That's how I learned to wash my own car. Well, there's definitely some advantages to St. Louis over L.A. Also, now that I'm retired, my wife and I travel all over the world. I live in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico for three months of the year, from December to early March. I'm going to New Zealand this October. I've been to France, Peru, Bhutan, China. Yeah. I travel all over the world. I can do it living in St. Louis because I don't have to give up everything I have to live here. I have a house that's paid for. I have a garden like Matisse, another one of my idols. I can't do that in L.A. and New York. I wouldn't live that kind of life. The life I've always wanted to live has been this kind of rural life where you can get to the city instantly. People say St. Louis is a dying city. Not for me. No. It's more alive at this moment right now that I'm 80 years old this year. I've had my 80th birthday. My stuff has never been so alive. Yeah. It's like my friend in Mexico. His name is Georg Hoffman, my performing partner. He said, you're 80 years old. We have to look out for you. I said, I'll outlive you, man. Because I have no stress. All my stuff is taken care of. You're so lucky, man. That's great. But you got there. Well, I mean, it just doesn't show up. I said luck first, and then I was like, no. Yeah, you do the work. Let's call it fortune. Yeah, fortune is cool. You got another piece you would like to share with us, Curtis? Well, I will kind of end here with what I call my signature. And this is a kind of poem that was written, believe it or not, in the winter of 1969. I was a very young man when I first came to St. Louis. The first years away from home in a real way as an adult, as a grown man. And it's from the collected poem for Blind Lemon Jefferson. And it's kind of like what you call the cap poem. And it's called Lemon's Last Ditch Harmonized My Black Mule Blues. From his book Electric Church? It's from the book Electric Church. And it goes like this. Is that right? Harmonize my black mule, baby. Harmonize my black mule, baby. With a prayer. Like a soothed sailor. Like a sweet potato. From the piney woods. Harmonize my mind, baby. With a heart in your left hand hung low down. Like a finished woman comes complete. Like a free will. Like the southeast wind. Standing in the back door, wailing long. Musketeer pushing palm like the earth opens up. Like when you went into the black mountain and dragged my rag doll home. Harmonize me, baby. Harmonize my body, baby. Like your right hand weeping. Like a crack in your face mended in catfish blood. My body, baby. Like a water trout. Like a water saint. Stomping a submarine in the mud. My body, baby. Like a man learned to love you. Ride you when he calls your name. Like when you're starving for a reason, you're eating just the same. Like when you're raging. Tumbling through the world, you're still staking out your claim. Screaming. Harmonize me, baby. Harmonize. Thank you very much. Hey, Curtis Lyle here in the Killswitch Media Studio. Let's produce R.W. Smith. I'm your host, Brett Lars-Underwood. Thanks for listening. Catch us on Spotify and other major platforms. Catch you next time.
