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08 Jul 2010

Diary of a Billsticker – Lambertville, New Jersey and New Hope, Pennsylvania USA

By Phantom Billstickers

Concerning Those Statues in The Park

It’s been so hot here for over a week now that a few days ago I saw a redneck explode in the street.

Then, yesterday when I was on 202 out near Flemington, New Jersey, I saw a dude in a bright yellow Camaro doing 120mph plus whilst being trailed by four New Jersey State Troopers wearing Smokie the Bear hats and wide grins. That is to say that all five of them were wearing the grins and the air was alive. I think they were all playing music by Prince.

On this poster run, I topped up about 120 A3s that I had placed on lamp-posts two weeks before. I added about 60 A3s and it brought the total amount placed to 180. This is a reasonably good ‘showing’ in a town of 4000 people. I placed posters by Bill Manhire, Mariana Isara, Robert Creeley and Gerald Stern. The poem posters have been noticed and I get lots of comments and emails. Posters in the street are very real.

There are many theories as to how to do a perfect poster campaign. I always thought that you started in the outskirts of the city and you kept adding to the posters and bringing pressure to the centre of the city as the play date grew closer. You want to get to the areas where there is a high volume of foot traffic and at the end, you want your point to be inescapable.

My thinking about all of this comes from the time when neither radio nor television were playing much of the Kiwi bands I was promoting and newspaper advertising was very expensive and oftentimes not very effective. In Christchurch, for a long time, the Christchurch Star was a quite effective way for bands to advertise themselves whilst the Press was a bit more conservative and didn’t really appeal. But both newspapers had excellent columns on entertainment that appeared weekly and these really helped. The Christchurch Star’s column was written by Rob White (a great writer) and the Press by Nevin Topp. Of course there was always a lot of disagreement about what worked and people tried many things to promote their bands and this was all for the good. Many good acts came out of this time and climate. Original New Zealand music was thought to be brand new and it took on aspects of being a religious event. I tell you if you’ve seen Toerag at the Gladstone then you’ve seen something and the same goes for Peter Sweeney’s Smack Riflemen. If you’ve ever met Harry Sparkle then you ain’t never gonna forget. This is a man who escaped from jail where he was doing a cooling off period for a smash and grab on a bottle store (The Star & Garter – another great pub gig), and who went to Timaru dressed as a woman. Now that’s what I call creativity. Most people would have gone to Ashburton.

So I always get these posters on the lamp-posts in Lambertville/New Hope to cover the best possible viewing opportunities. I criss-cross the city energetically enabling the posters to be seen in many different locations. Upwards of sixty locations is a good number.

As I put the posters up, I imagine people walking down the street and the direction they would be coming from and then I place the posters accordingly. Because I want to get poetry read as much as I possibly can and I’m not going to go on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ to do so, then I have to reduce this whole thing to pure and utter simplicity. I think everyone knows that these American TV shows are hyped and probably cause obesity and no one really believes in them. But, ah… A poster in the street is very, very true and if you read a Brian Turner or a Michael Palma poem in Lambertville on an old wooden lamp-post, then you have been touched my friend.

So I often think of postering as simplicity with constant repetition. You take the kick-backs and you keep going. Aaaah, my thoughts, my feelings seeping through in truth.

I always think about Kiwi music on a poster run and I am always proud of it. This week I have been thinking about people who deserve statues in the park and my first would be, in my opinion, New Zealand’s greatest ever band manager. My vote would be for Charley Gray. Charley was a very direct guy who cut through a lot of stuff and made a mark. He was way ahead of his time and very honest and devoted to music.

Then I’d give Murray Cammick a statue in the park for his work at ‘Rip It Up.’ In my view, this was New Zealand’s best ever music magazine. It’s hard to say how such a magazine could ever be duplicated or how a website or a Facebook page could come close to matching it. Rip It Up made a clear point… These days the water tends to be murky in many ways.

Aaaah, simplicity and directness of purpose.

Lastly, I’d award a statue to Eddie Chin. Eddie Chin had a few nightclubs in Dunedin when I was growing up. When people mention Dunedin music, I always think of Eddie first. In the 1960s he had a club called ’77 Sunset Strip’ and some great bands played there. These bands sometimes tended to be quite commercial and had very compelling stage acts; this was before such a thing often became something to be sneered at. Eddie nurtured many fine acts and people.

One of my favourite all-time Kiwi Bands was The Fantasy. This was Craig Scott’s band in Dunedin in the late 1960s. Craig moved on and the band went through several line-up changes (no doubt ‘musical differences’). Anyway, some of my mates were in that band and went to play for Eddie in 1971. This is what one of them (Jeff Stribling) said:

“We arrived in Dunedin at midnight one night in 1971. We had caught the 6 PM railcar from Christchurch, Bill (Kearns), Ronnie (Harris), and myself. We couldn’t get a residency in Christchurch as ‘Ticket’ (now there was a band!) had Aubrey’s and Chapta was at Mojos. So we thought we’d try Dunedin. We stayed at a motor camp that night and the next day we went to see Eddie at his restaurant, the ‘Hong Kong’, in Rattray Street. We said we were broke, starving and needed a place to live and play. He found us a flat, fed us and gave us the keys to his club across the road. The club had been closed for a long time and he said that if we painted it he’d feed us every day and we could be his resident band. We worked for three weeks and opened it as “The Groovy Room.” We called ourselves “NZ Fantasy” and we packed the venue with 600 people and it stayed that way. Eddie came into the band room one night with a massive amount of cash and gave us a bonus. He said, “I had a very good night on the horses tonight.” He was a live wire; a very kind man… My lasting memory of him is that his face was always smiling.”

Dudes, that’s how we built New Zealand Music.

I’m away to Flemington now to find that guy in the yellow Camaro. I want to smile like that.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

 

Jim Wilson

32b

11 Jun 2010

Diary of a Billsticker – Lambertville, New Jersey, USA

By Phantom Billstickers

Woke Up This Morning and Got Myself a Broom

It is true that putting up posters will shift the dirty water off one’s chest. I have never come back from a poster run feeling worse (I’ve said this before), not even when my posters have been immediately covered by another posterer. This used to happen all the time in old Christchurch (and elsewhere) when sometimes twenty different people would go out pasting up for twenty different gigs on the same night. It’s a nice and interesting idea that people should ‘share’, but I always think their egos involved and sometimes egos can’t grasp even very simple concepts. Then, it’s not as if every ego in the world is working for a bank or finance company or even in politics. No, there are egos everywhere. Sometimes there are even egos in reverse.

Talking of egos, the most disturbing thing about America right now is the Oil Spill (yes, I meant to capitalise that because it is a huge disaster) in the Gulf. I hear there is another panel of ‘experts’ who are going to meet and discuss the matter later on in the week. The panel consists of Bono, Sting, Sean Penn and Elton John and their discussion will be screened on Entertainment Tonight. That’s how sad it all is. If only they would completely give away their fortunes to make it better. But they’ll never do that. The head guy from BP looks stunned and ineffectual and Mr Obama should front up and start cane-ing people. That’s the view of my ego.

So that’s why I like postering, because when you are putting up posters everything becomes perfectly clear and truthful (“The only thing that matters is the clear and simple truth” – Ernest Hemingway). It’s the activity of postering that unclogs the system and gets me moving and doing something that I enjoy a hell of a lot: putting up simple street posters for poets. That’s about the easiest thing to do and I do not like the theorising before and after the fact that one sees on television these days. Lewis Lapham once said something about television front people being the new car sales people of the media set and he’s right. So the Gulf Oil Spill is a tragedy on a number of fronts. The animals (human and otherwise) will suffer the most. I feel for them.

I did this run in Lambertville over three days and I put up posters by Jeffery McCaleb, Roy Smith, Brian Turner, Gerald Stern, Chris Knox, Robert Creeley, Michael Palma, Sam Hunt, Bill Manhire and Michele Leggott. Some of these are my favourites of course. I can stand back and look at them on a lamp-post and I feel good. I’m ‘put together’ again.

I tried to mix in the different sentiments with these posters too; some go really well in couplings with another poet. Sam is good with anyone. Robert Creeley is the man and will bring light to any lamp-post. Michael Palma goes really well with Chris Knox (he the musician and Michael the dude talking about Ray Charles). Roy Smith’s poem is just funky and smells of sand and diesel and Jeffery McCaleb just has this big heart, which I hope continues to serve him well.

And so on and so forth.

So you can see it’s not just about stapling a few posters to lampposts, it’s about ‘feeling’ and ‘being’ and it beats talking to lawyers and accountants and watching that Oil Spill. It also whips the endless and vapid smiles of television presenters. I’m sure all this is the cause of obesity.

You can quite easily see why people wake up and get themselves a broom. A broom is the best friend of a billsticker. A broom is what a billsticker usually uses to put up posters. Billsticking happens in every major city in the world. People will go out and express themselves. They’ve done this since before the beginning of recorded time. We’ve got a guy at Phantom Billstickers in Christchurch right now who is the fastest guy I have ever seen with a broom. I won’t mention his name because that may cause embarrassment.

I have learnt the noble art of billsticking from some of New Zealand’s best ever promoters. Here I am going to mention some names: Hugh Lynn, Robert Raymond, Harry M. Miller, Joe Brown, Oz Armstrong, Mark Cassin and Benny Levin.

We used to do ‘airport runs’ and this is where a billsticker would go out and poster the road in from the airport just before the date and time of the arrival of the ‘star’ or ‘stars’. Then you’d poster all around the hotel at which the promoter would tell you the act was staying. To use a sentence from “The Thin Red Line” this ‘bucks the men up’. The stars feel better and spirits are lifted. 90% of the value of a concert of any kind is that everyone arrives and leaves happy. The stars included.

Benny Levin would always ‘walk the town’ and ‘talk the act up’. I am privileged enough to be able to say that I did this with him a few times. He’d snaffle down a couple of ginseng and we’d put some posters under our wings and go from shop to shop putting up posters for the gig. This would be a few days before the play date and the important thing wasn’t so much the putting up the posters (although this was still critically important), but the talking to the shopkeepers and getting a gauge of how the concert would sell… Getting people interested.  If two hundred people told you in one day that they loved the act and were going to be at the gig, then this gave you a really good indication of how that concert would go. I don’t like to disparage anyone or anything really, but this kind of thing will still give you a better indicator of the popularity of an act than Facebook or the internet will ever be able to do. This is real people talking to real people. So, even though we may want to freshen up the simple street poster with technology, there is no doubt that it (the simple street poster) is a very powerful instrument and it feels real. I’ve said it.

Real is what the world needs of course. Getting face to face with people and making contact is the most powerful force in the world.

I was going to write about Eddie Chin on this posting. In my opinion, Eddie was one of New Zealand’s finest ever promoters and did one hellacious amount for the NZ music industry. I actually had some intake from people who played for Eddie back in the 1970s to write something, but this will have to wait.

I grew up watching how Eddie’s clubs bought Dunedin alive and I was very much influenced by what he did. I’m going to write about him on my next posting, because right now I hear a lamppost and a broom calling to me.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

31a 31b

26 May 2010

Diary of a Billsticker – Trenton, New Jersey, USA Poster Run

By Phantom Billstickers

The Ballad of Phantom Billstickers (Part Two)

R.I.P. Beaver.

In Trenton, I was carrying posters by seven poets: Robert Pinsky, Joe Treceno, Marcie Sims, Jay Clarkson, Michele Leggott, Stephen Oliver and Tusiata Avia. This was to be a true urban poster run and I rode my newly purchased second-hand Schwinn pushbike which cost me $40. I was carrying the posters under my wing. I felt like Ignatius J. Reilly and my hunting cap fell down over my eyes several times. I was the thinking man’s oaf.

Trenton is the state capital of New Jersey and has one of the highest crime rates in America. It is also where George Washington gave the British a damn good dusting during the War of Revolution and sent them packing. A nation was then formed that is (I chose the present tense on purpose) dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

In Trenton there are monitoring devices in the streets which detect the sound of gunshots and can also track the direction from which those gunshots came. Say it isn’t so. This is what life has become.

There is a scourge in Trenton and its name is Heroin. The latest street brand of Smack is called “Obama’s Rescue Package” and is sold by those who want to take advantage of the dream of America. They have not joined in the spirit of the revolution. In Mexico, in less than four years, 23,000 have been killed during the “Drug War” and so it goes, (right?).

On to more pleasant subjects:

I am often asked about the old days of billsticking in New Zealand. One doesn’t want to choose favourites, but I have worked with a number of very good poster put-‘er-uppers. The name Harry Sparkle comes to mind first. Harry did the posters for the Hillsborough and Gladstone Taverns in Christchurch during the late 70s to the mid 80s when New Zealand music made all the ground it did. At the time, New Zealand music was like a religious movement and radio stations just did not play it and ‘cover bands’ pulled far more people than original music. I cannot tell you how Spandau Ballet songs made Christchurch swing and what haircuts became during this period of time. This part was appalling.

But, paradoxically, all this made original Kiwi music better as there was a point to be proven. The good bands won out. They are still heard. These bands were very prepared to be honest. At this time, going on the road was dangerous because the public bar clientele may well chase you down the main street for no reason at all and the only food on the menu for touring bands was Hawaiian Ham Steaks. Now that’s what I call dangerous. One took one’s life into one’s own hands to be playing Palmerston North during these years.

To digress, I would also want to give credit to Gerald Dwyer as a paste dude in Wellington, a giant Totara indeed. Then Lee Hubber and Johne Leach also did good work in the capital city. Doug Nuttall was invaluable in Dunedin for getting across the point of New Zealand music and John Greenfield gave his all in the garden city during the 80s and early 90s. Trevor King pasted up the streets of Christchurch in the 1950s and 1960s for Johnny Devlin and Max Merritt and so we must be thankful. You will remember that New Zealand was a closed shop during these years and the Beatles once famously said that they came to New Zealand but it was closed. Many people said this in different ways.

Harry Sparkle? Harry was a punk and during punk we all knew no limits and the walls of repression were being blasted down quicker than you could say “more government please.” Harry’s band was called “The Baby Eaters” and often crashed the stage at the Hillsborough during a touring band’s break. They cavalierly just picked up the headlining band’s instruments without permission and started playing Iggy Pop’s “Cock in my Pocket.” Several punks crowded around the mixing desk as another mate turned the volume Right Up. Pogo-ing was a thing.

Oh what a breath of fresh air.

The touring band’s roadies (often up to nine in total – what did they all do?) would come running and a fist fight would ensue. That’s the price for taking yourself too seriously. The Hillsborough had one of the two best publicans I have ever met, John Harrington (the other was Ray Newman at the Gladstone). And a good laugh was had by all eventually.

I have many Harry Sparkle stories I could relate, not all of them decent.

But I will tell you I saw him paste up the side of a parked bus in Cathedral Square one day for The Terrorways until the driver came running. Yes Harry could make a point.

I also saw Harry flat on his back on another occasion in the Shades Mall with his glue pot upended, posters everywhere and a dozen packets of panadeine cast about in the shape of a cross. For my sins, Harry.

But when a poster needed to go up you called Harry and he went to the maximum for New Zealand music which quite clearly needed to be heard and now has a very real place in the world.

The two other members of The Baby Eaters (Reuben and Johnny) are dead now as far as I know, as are many of the memories of punk. The grandmaster, Malcolm McLaren, died about a month ago.

I think New Zealand Music Month to be a truly great thing (but not universally great), but more than that, I like to see posters coming through for new and vital bands. But I’m going to finish with a joke because none of us should take ourselves too seriously:

This is what English comedian Ken Dodd once said:

“The man who invented cat’s eyes got the idea when he saw a cat facing him in the road. If the cat had been facing the other way, he’d have invented the pencil sharpener.”

The poster run in Trenton was highly enjoyable and I really tried to interact with local people. It worked.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

29a 29b 29c 29e

05 May 2010

Diary of a Billsticker – Atlantic City, USA

By Phantom Billstickers

We drove an old MK1 Land Rover on a hot New Jersey night toward Atlantic City (‘AC’). I bet Southside Johnny has driven this route many times and could do so in his sleep. We had the Carolina Chocolate Drops playing loud on the stereo and were ebullient to be doing a clean poster run again and to have found ‘open ground’. We were happy to be running free and to be expanding as human beings. It was good.

In the back seat was a Les Paul Gold Top in an old Epiphone case. This case had been dropped so many times you wondered about the previous owners. It was bound in so many loving luggage tags that you would have thought Jordan Luck had owned it. A good loving. A real good loving such as the world needs. Aaaah, poetry. Woodbury’s favourite son is Jordan luck.

The luggage tags showed the time honoured rock n’ roll route: Scottsdale, Arizona – Austin, Texas – New Orleans, Louisiana – Macon, Georgia – Muscle Shoals, Alabama – Detroit, Michigan – Nashville, Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee – Seattle, Washington. The Betty Ford Centre – Promises – The Stone Pony, Ashbury Park – Chick’s Hotel – The Gluepot – Ranfurly – Whangarei on a cold Monday night – The Whitehouse, Invercargill. Yes, we know them all well. Yes, we earned it together and forever it is ours. Let’s not have it all slip away and poetry keeps it there.

We were carrying poem posters by four Kiwis and two Americans: Brian Turner, Michele Leggott, Stephen Oliver, Tusiata Avia, Joe Treceno and Robert Pinsky. These are all fine and thoughtful poets who make a difference in the world each time they are read.

We stayed in nearby Egg Harbour and went into AC to poster each day. We ate salt water taffy until it was running down our chins and this whilst the Carolina Chocolate Drops were still playing loud in our heads. The air was fresh and it was good to see a beach again. You have to cherish the sea. A seashore in Aotearoa is the most beautiful in the world, but I am here. And here is mighty good and enthralling.

We mostly postered up and down the famous Boardwalk, adding also a few choice spots in the surrounding areas. I think the most satisfying experiences I have postering with poems is when I see people stop and read the words. I saw a woman jogger on the Boardwalk stop to read Michele Leggott’s poem ‘Wonderful to Relate’. This woman combed through it line by line and was tracing with her forefinger. For me, it was like time had stopped as I waited for a reaction. I got one, the woman was obviously moved and maybe it’s my imagination, but she seemed to jog away in a much more coordinated manner and like her breathing had changed. I think it had. Mine did. We had made a difference. That’s what we came for.

Here’s what Pablo Neruda said about poetry:

“On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.”

Yes, that’s why we do it. Little steps to change.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

 

28a

31 Mar 2010

Diary of a Billsticker – Mississippi Delta, USA

By Phantom Billstickers

The Kid Was From Shake Rag

This was a nice, clean run lasting several days whilst driving through the Mississippi Delta in an old Plymouth Fury procured from a rent-a-junk in Nut Bush, Tennessee. As we got closer to the end, Clarksdale, Mississippi, things became very clear. They ended up being clear as a country creek (Truman Capote).

We (Reggie-John and I) always fly Delta Airlines. We caught a flight from Philadelphia in the morning and were in Memphis, Tennessee, by late afternoon. Americans don’t like to go too far from the house without adequate servings of pizza. I think the plane had extra supplies strapped to the roof. Luckily, a health care bill was going through Congress at the time. There was a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina and I saw many Americans checking that the pizza was still on that roof. Anxiety is a funny old thing. Americans are good people.

There has been quite a bit of debate on the news here lately about how the carry-on baggage situation on airlines has gotten out of hand. Then, a couple of prominent Americans have been offloaded from their flights because they were too fat for their seats. This doesn’t happen in Nigeria.

You can always tell when you cross over the Mason-Dixon Line and into the American South. The very air seems brighter and the energy is completely different. Things that are taken far too seriously in the North are ignored here. It is also as if the Southerners have already found something that people in the North are desperately looking for. We all hope they find it soon before they drive everyone nuts.

I guess the Ukraine is different from Chechnya as well. Then, I think in life, everyone wants to secede from something. Though it’ll sometimes bring a ton of misery on yourself if you try.

Reggie-John and I set up in Oxford, Mississippi as a base camp. This town is about seventy miles from Memphis. I’d dreamed for years of going to Oxford. The University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) is there. I’d often read about Square Books and how it was reputed to be one of the best bookstores in America (it is). The owner (Richard Howorth) was Mayor of Oxford for a while (maybe still is) and that’s got to be a good thing. I mean a bookstore owner as Mayor – I can dig it. It’s kind of like when Vaclav Havel was President of the Czech Republic. A poet as President – I can dig that too. Literature is incredibly important to any community.

I also knew that William Faulkner lived in Oxford and is buried there; but what attracted me most to Oxford were two particular writers, two of my personal favourites, Larry Brown and Barry Hannah. They are both dead now, both unhorsed due to heart attacks. Barry Hannah died only three weeks ago. In their writing, which was always full of intense energy, they were both bull goose loonies. And that’s high praise. To paraphrase Truman Capote again, they ‘walked the plank.’ They took real risks. Someone once described Barry Hannah’s writing as ‘accelerating incoherence’ – it’s that good.

Barry Hannah taught creative writing at Ole Miss and he was famous for other things apart from his writing. One of them being that he once drove a troublesome student home and put a gun to his head. He then told the student to behave himself in class.

Me and Reggie-John stayed at Chester’s Hillbilly Haven and ate breakfast at Big Bad Breakfast. That old Plymouth started every morning and we were carrying poem posters by five or six poets. However, we concentrated mainly on the two new poems by Tusiata Avia “Nafanua, the Samoan War Goddess, talks about going to Washington, DC” and Stephen Oliver’s “The Great Repression.” I never go far without Janet Frame’s “The End” poetry poster being in my kit. That’s what I call company.

Tusiata’s and Stephen’s poems are worded particularly strongly and perhaps they should be. Both are striking works of art and come alive on a wall. There is a beauty there. These are words carved out.

Setting out from Oxford each day, we covered the area around Highway 61 (yes, that Highway 61!) and included Indianola, Yazoo City, Pontotoc, Tupelo, Parchman (where the Mississippi State Penitentiary is headquartered) and then deep into Clarksdale.

The American South is an extraordinary place for music and literature. Clarksdale is among the most extraordinary places of all. The city’s inhabitants have had an immense influence on American culture. In fact, they have affected the world. Among the citizens have been Sam Cooke, Tennessee Williams, Muddy Waters, Son House, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin’s grandfather, Ike Turner, and Jimbo Mathus. Morgan Freeman owns a blues club in Clarksdale. The city is about the size of Timaru. It is probably smaller.

A few short miles away is Tupelo, Mississippi. There was a kid here who loved his mother and who recorded his first song for her. When he was young, his daddy, Vernon, went to jail and they lost the house. He picked up a guitar for the first time at about ten years of age. By this time, he was already hanging around a black area called ‘Shake Rag.’ He was a pretty cool kid (from all accounts) and he listened to the blues and gospel songs and soon he learned to move. He also walked the plank by wearing clothing that he saw black people wearing. They have always known what “cool” was. In high school he wore brothel creepers and lime green socks. Now that was a risk in the early 1950s, but people could relate. And he could turn out a song like no one else.

You cannot listen to the type of music that grows in this area (blues/gospel/spiritual) and not be swayed. Not now, not then. Myself, I’d gone to Mississippi listening to Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and I came back listening to Blind Willie McTell. These things happen. You could call it spiritual.

When he was thirteen, Elvis Presley and his family lit out for Memphis and better luck. It changed the world.

We would be absolutely nowhere on this planet were it not for music’s (and poetry’s) ability to connect people. Music and literature transform us. The two make us better people.

So I always take it as the deepest privilege to be driving around America putting up poetry posters by some of NZ’s finest poets. I am always clearer headed for having done so.

Phantom has a new launch of poem posters in Auckland on April 28th. Included in this next round is a fine piece of work by Chris Knox. Also featured are Stephen Oliver, Tusiata Avia, Bill Manhire and others. The job has just begun.

We are always privileged and grateful.

 

Keep the Faith,

 

Jim Wilson

25c         25e

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