Written by: Dave Cantrell
Spend long enough time on this mad mad mad mad – or often not quite mad enough, really – carousel most commonly known – if a bit vaguely – as ‘rock’ (or ‘alt’ or ‘modern’, or…) music and a certain subtle bedazzlement will often obtain to a handful of names over the years, enough so that said names become triggers of sorts, prompting as they do reflexive reactions predicated on our ever-growing exposure to their work. That said, it’s the inclusion of a name from outside those loosely defined parameters, one that has rocked your senses from an entirely separate discipline to a degree that matches – and meshes with – those none-more-keen moments of thrill that music at its most explosively sublime has brought you that really really tweaks your curiosity in exactly ‘that’ avid way that, though rarely, has, well, rocked your world, as they say. For this writer, Bay Area-raised in the latent San Francisco shadow and influence of the Beats and their almost incomparable impact on the subculture – to find oneself at the age of 21 hanging out at Vesuvio’s across what’s now the renamed Kerouac Alley from City Lights bookstore just does something to ya – seeing the name ‘Gregory Corso’ attached to the name ‘Kramer’ a couple months ago rather floored me in that rare way that also elevated my senses to a degree that’s too often been missing for decades.
Following up on SEM’s previous preview from this essentially historic, Hal Willner-produced album – it would be Corso’s final recorded statement from his complicated heart as he would pass away mere days past Die On Me‘s recording – the therefore poignantly-titled “A Bed’s Lament,” in its mere forty-four seconds, with couplets that arc from a place of remembered strength to one far more fragile (“Once, a long time ago, I held the royal couple / I was straight, I was strong” the piece begins before evolving without missing a contextual beat towards “Now I stand in a dank room with shaky legs and sunken back“), sketches with undoubted clarity the almost desperate inevitability of the human condition, expressed with a vulnerability that, death be damned, echoes the very courage required to make it through to the end of whatever poem each of us is living our way through. This snippet, crucially accompanied as it is with another of Kramer’s essential slices of ambient cinema, could not better reflect that most fateful lesson of our existence: It’s our only shot and therefore, to the extent possible, live it to its fullest full. [pre-order Die On Me here]
