Ralph Alfonso has lived in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Oakville. He's a beatnik poet, musician, writer, designer, photographer, illustrator, record label owner and more. For over 10 years, he lovingly hand printed a monthly zine (RALPH, Coffee Jazz and Poetry) on a 1940s Gestetner mimeograph machine (now collected in two books). Currently in Montreal, Ralph is still all over the pop culture map and hopefully he can reconcile many of his loves here.
As we approach Christmas 2010, here are some daily holiday thoughts collated together from various disparate sources, some of which originally appeared on my http://www.Myspace.com/ralphalfonso/blog and some from my two books. The MySpace blog contains some wonderful experiments but there is no search mechanism and scrolling back through past posts is very cumbersome so I'm assembling most of my Christmas canon (I know) here.
C'EST JOLIE NOEL - CHRISTMAS IS NICE
c'est jolie Noel
et te baiser
si belle
s'il y a un Dieu dans ma vie
c'est grace a toi ici
et c'est neige et soleil
le matin quand je me reveille
ce fut toujours comme ca
quand c'est toi qui est la
this is our very first Noel
we woke to see the
snow that fell
and Sunday choirs
Christmas bells
I'm grateful for these
winter sounds and
laughter, kindness
with you around
one last Montreal poem in December
one last cigarette (from November)
one last coffee resting beside some toast
quiet little diner
seat in the corner
paper's missing the sports section
but there's a good view of the snow
and the christmas lights
and the black spiraling staircases
every house has got one
and who doesn't love
December
in Montreal
ralph alfonso
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BEAT FOR THE HOLIDAYS
the fireplace
warm
and you and i
together
maybe there's snow
or maybe not
flames on the candles
melting wax
night time
stars are out
and
scratchy records
(real music will never wear out)
drink hot coffee
from a bottomless cup
it's nothing
but it's everything
if it makes you smile
ralph alfonso
Monday, November 29, 2010
This is a poem I wrote sitting on the side of the stage at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, waiting for my turn to perform and knowing that I would be backed by the David Amram Trio. The words were inspired by the famous photo of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Larry Rivers and David Amram himself (top right) hanging out after shooting the film, Pull My Daisy.
New York is a magical place in December and this is just a little love letter.
There is video footage of the performance and we'll eventually get it on here but for now, please enjoy.
One nice note - this couple in the audience liked the poem so much, they asked for a copy so I copied them by hand since this is not available in my books.
This is a short story that originally ran in my zine,
RALPH Coffee Jazz and Poetry, #52, 1999.
It is a work of fiction but the sentiment is not.
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We Will Never Forget You, Gene Vincent
by Ralph Alfonso
In 1971, I was working the night shift at a Los Angeles FM station.
This was pretty well the end of the line for my career. I was 34 years old.
FM radio was sort of a new thing then and nobody listened to it except for hippies and people that would probably hate me if they ever met me.
Back in the late 50s, I was one of the first DJs to play rock’n’roll.
It was like a new way of living had fallen out of the sky. It was a fantastic time.
And then, one day, it was all gone and I was reading traffic reports for a living.
When The Beatles and all those British groups gave our own music back to us,
I had a real job again.
But, just like before, it was all over, and the world was a different place.
I was washed up and I wasn’t even 30 years old.
I guess I had started drinking a little bit by the time I got this job.
It was a new kind of music now, but I didn’t care anymore. I had rent to pay.
I liked working by myself at night. I didn’t have to talk to anyone else at the station.
I didn’t even answer the phone.
Except for that night.
My cousin at the hospital called me up and said Gene Vincent had died.
I couldn’t believe it.
I went looking everywhere in that goddamn building and I couldn’t find any of his music!
The long-hairs that ran the station had put all the old 50s music in the comedy section
of the library. Well, I’d give them a few laughs that night.
I pulled the needle off the record that was on the air. It made an ugly scraping sound.
“Hey man, I just wanted to interrupt this crap music and say that Gene Vincent died tonight. I know that a lot of you are too stoned or stupid to even care, but I got this one album here and I’m gonna play it all night...”
I spun that scratchy old LP over and over. I was fired the next day.
I drifted around after that, I guess, cities you never heard of. I finally stopped drinking, and now I’m the voice you hear on those stations where everything is pre-recorded.
But every October 12, I come down here to Gene’s grave and say a little prayer, you know.
Sometimes there’s other people here, usually not.
We’ll never forget.
And I hope, if you love rock’n’roll, you never will, too.
This story (along with the poem "Goodbye Jack. Kerouac.") is also available in the book, Faces In The Crowd, published in Japan. It is an anthology of worldwide writings.
A book about Gene Vincent that I enjoyed reading many years ago was written by Britt Hagarty, a Vancouver author and rockabilly cat who, sadly, died a tragic death himself. It is The Day The World Turned Blue. I only met Britt once and very very briefly in the 80s during a press tour - I was going into a radio station with an artist to do an interview and he was coming out and we chatted in the corridor.
In June and July of 2002, I thought it would be a good idea to get a residency at the Cafe Montmarte in Vancouver (I was living there at the time) and jam out new material for my fifth album and so every Wednesday became Cabaret Contraire where various permutations of the RALPH band went through two sets of mostly new sonic experiments, each week taking the new works down different paths until we had lived in a song's skin and figured out its voice.
We were fortunate to have had all these jams recorded professionally by legendary Vancouver psych pioneer Don Xaliman (Melodic Energy Commission) and that September, we performed the best of these new songs in a blistering set on the main stage at Word On The Street Vancouver (with Veda Hille sitting in on keyboards).
However, the album never got recorded and the songs disappeared into the ether. In August of that year, my mother passed away and I could no longer relate to the lyrics and writings and questioned in many ways the why and what for of everything I was doing. One or two of these lost songs did re-surface eventually and it has only been lately that i've found some of the handwritten lyrics still scratched up and words crossed out and words added during that two month run.... and begun the process of moving forward again into something new.
This is one that I could never find the gravity for and I maybe I still haven't but I've recently rewritten it from scratch knowing what I know now and staying true to the original heart of it, especially now that I am back in Montreal and the glorious snow of my youth.
Angel In The Snow
Some people are superstitious about the 13th floor
But I can see the Cross
the big giant cross on the mountain
all lit up and beaming its light
and all the icicles sparkling and swaying on the power lines
winter chimes
silent
except for the wind whistling
through them and up
and around me
here, 3am
the perfect time
the time when every street is
a still picture, painted from memory
everything winter white
like the wings of angels
soaring through heaven
The 10th floor
is where I can see the neon of
my favourite diner
two eggs, sunny side up, brown toast
coffee, juice, and rice pudding for dessert
I can see the cook starting his shift
A stocky man with burly arms
at 5:30am he will open the door
and the taxi drivers will rush in for breakfast
The 7th floor
is level with the windows of the artist loft
sometimes his model will lean out the window
at mid-afternoon
wrapped in a towel
and smoking a cigarette
looking out at the cobblestone streets
oblivious to the whirlwind of
bodies below
sometimes
noticing me spying on her
sometimes not
The 6th floor is
parallel to the bookstore roof
In the summer, the owner and his wife
sit up there in the evenings
with a bottle of wine and books and smokes
everyone still smokes
don't listen to what everybody says
they're all liars
and who knows what they're thinking
I don't
or what books
But I am past the 5th floor now
This is where I used to live in this building
I had to give up my apartment after you left
but
I got lucky
there was a smaller one a lot cheaper on the top floor
It was tough without furniture for a while
but I figured it out
The 3rd floor is where the landlord lives
A friendly guy
Always there
Not really sure if he's married or what
A different woman seems to answer the door
everytime I've gone there, or maybe
it's the same woman
with a wig
but I doubt it
maybe it's him dressed up
they weren't very good looking now that
I think about it more
The 3rd floor means the 2nd floor
and I don't want that one to be a blur
because the psychic woman lives on the 2nd floor
and
she's always wrong about everything
she's ever tried to predict for me
But it would be great if she saw me
right now
so that in the morning
she can take all the credit
and let everyone know
That sound that woke everyone up
That was me
On my way to heaven
But right now
I'm just an angel in the snow
I've just published a fantastic book, Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History Of Punk In Toronto And Beyond. Author Liz Worth has done a herculean job tracking down almost all of the key players in the 1977 punk world of Toronto/Hamilton/London and expertly intertwining all the different voices into a very poignant narrative. 1977 was in many ways maybe a pivotal year for many of us; suddenly all the years you thought maybe you were alone and different culminated in a big bang - everyone all over the planet was thrown together and all the walls came down at once and there was a way forward, a united hammer to the world that wanted nothing to do with us. I know in Toronto, that was my experience, a glorious summer that would shape the way I'd live the rest of my life.
For the majority of people, the book is a revelation. That an entire musical subculture flourished and upended the cultural landscape and then just as quickly crumble and be covered over by the ruins of succeeding movements and mythologies in a country (Canada) that never looks back. I've always had a chip on my shoulder when the punk era is ignored by the various books and retrospectives that sprout up occassionally over the years; dismissed as an interesting artifact, good for some fun with band names and old band pictures and that's all.
Treat Me Like Dirt unravels like a grand opera; the noble king, the happy land, the turncoat prince, the mob at the gates, the descent into hell and the wind that scatters all remnants into the final ether. In the end it is the plagues of indifference and neglect that brings about their demise... but a what journey. The Diodes, The Viletones and Teenage Head are covered in incredible depth and one gets a very eye-opening insight into the obstacles they faced and helped break down.
The pitfalls to be learned are universal (greed, jealousy, addiction, stupidity, ego, etc - all sinners know them). The inspiration also universal (perseverence, belief, vision). For me personally, as engrossing as the band histories are, they all mostly tow their respective party lines as is to be expected; so that's why I find the stories and the interlocking sub-plots of what I call the "peripheral people" (girlfriends, drug dealers, managers, dubious acquaintances and the rest) to be the most fascinating and the ones to grind the myth-making into a grittier reality.
It's a book with something for everyone and would read as a fantastic novel if you didn't know this world actually existed.
Certainly, as in all oral histories, everyone is positioning for the last word, the last kick at a past grievance, the last chance to set the record straight.
The proof that you existed.
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choking on the dust
(ralph alfonso)
welcome spotlight
at last
you're here
my speech has been ready
30 years
i unfold the papers
choke on the dust
peer at the faded ink
no matter
the world has spun
but i remain
stoic
in my anger
gnarly fist clenched
at windmills long gone
voice raised
echoing in the empty
theatre
the last word
mine
Sometimes you have to trade one life for another Early morning slip out the back door, gun the car out the highway Let somebody else worry about the mystery of your existence analyze the clues, poke over the remains of a life interrupted, figure out the hole in the corner you had to crawl out of
I'm busy pumping gas complaining about the coffee and joking with the waitress i'll be sleeping on her couch later dreaming about which wrong road to take now
One life for another the prize door or the jail door with the cop car in your mirror, broken tail light where's your license better fix that better move on can't stop to worry about the cards collapsing
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Red or green... hard to figure out when you're colour blind at life's intersection, i guess
Saturday, November 14, 2009
The original RALPH group back in 1995 in the back alley of the now defunct Starfish Room, originally shot for the long gone Soundproof cable show, Vancouver. That is Ron Radar Stelting on bongos and hair, Ralph on vocals and hair, Tom Harrison on bg vocals and goatee, and Mike Rummen on guitar and hair (plus hair). This particular song has expanded and metamorphosed quite bit since its original incarnation witnessed here.
