Poetry Review : A Sonic, a Phonic and a ‘60s’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Chronic

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  Transcendence and intergenerational commingling were the main themes of the music-and-spoken-words doubleheader Thursday night at the Coach House.

Michael McClure, the Beat poet who emerged in San Francisco in the ‘50s, led off with interpretive piano support from his partner on the spoken-word circuit, Doors alumnus and ‘60s classic-rock icon Ray Manzarek. They won cheers, especially for Manzarek’s commanding performance, which included some crowd-pleasing Doors quotations and gave needed emotional colors and shapes, along with a bit of humor, to McClure’s dramatically rendered but excessively abstract poetry.

Lee Ranaldo, the Sonic Youth singer-guitarist who deserves much of the praise or blame for putting the noise into rock’s noisy ‘90s, cleared most of the 150 or so occupied seats as he read his prose and verse against a maelstrom of echo effects and highly amplified electronics and guitar dissonance. But against that abrasive backdrop, his readings provided poignant personal reflections and a fascinating angle on some of the key thematic notions underlying one of modern rock’s most influential bands.

Sonic Youth’s clangorous guitar thrusting often has seemed like an attempt to break on through to another side--to some zone of wonder and energy beyond what normal life allows. It was illuminating and moving to hear the Manhattan-based Ranaldo grapple in his readings with the deadening, wearying aspects of everydayness.

While he played and read (in a raised but non-theatrical voice), filmmaker Leah Singer projected her still photographs onto a screen behind him. Most of the images--starting with strands of rusty-brown color that looked like lab specimens of bloodstains--were ominous or desolate; there were lots of empty windows and doors and barren landscapes, rural as well as urban.

Singer, whose projection techniques enabled her to manipulate the stills into motion, seized upon moods and imagery in Ranaldo’s narratives. The most striking backdrop was the surrealistic, floating image during the opening number of the receiver of an old-fashioned rotary telephone. Connected to its cradle by a thin umbilical cord, it evoked a fetus in the womb or a space-walking astronaut.

In “One False Move,” Ranaldo depicted a day-in-the-life drenched by a storm of unwanted communication--some of it impersonal and manipulative, and some of it all too personal and guilt-inducing. In the piece, he waxed ironic about his public persona as a rock star, “talking about myself, feeding some bland new images to the world” as part of the selling of Sonic Youth. His own participation in that game hardly eased his disgust at being doused with advertising and other commercial come-ons.

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As the piece went on, a portrait emerged of an ambitious man, full of creative projects he wants to tackle but chastened by family demands. Ranaldo’s small son calls and urges daddy (presumably divorced) to take time so they can do “baseball, baseball.” Then it’s Ranaldo’s mother on the line, just as insistent and conscience-stabbing: “‘I guess you haven’t had time to think of us; it’s been three weeks. I guess we just don’t rate anymore.”’

This recitation of problems didn’t come off as a privileged rocker’s whining but as a straightforward accounting of the frazzling pressures of a life not altogether atypical in its modern complications.

Not surprisingly, a few pieces later, as Ranaldo described a deadening road trip (much of his writing records the fleeting observation of passing life taken in from a tour-bus window; “Road Movies” is the title of a pocket-sized book he published last year), he mused, “I’d like to take off into these woods and just get lost for a while.”

Not even rocking out offers certain release. One piece touched on Ranaldo’s disgust as fans in Toronto tore a necklace from him as he leaned over a stage apron during a Sonic Youth show, and on his chagrin at their desperation to have some sort of mind-blotting energy poured into “their pointy little heads.”

At one point, Ranaldo stepped in front of a blank, full-moon image and played a probing, Sonic Youth-style guitar passage, suggesting the restless search for transcendent energy that motivates much of the band’s work. The 50-minute set subsided with the wistful “Wish Fulfillment,” a ballad, drawn from Sonic Youth’s album “Dirty,” about a relationship beset by literal and figurative distances but also sustained by strong feeling. He ended with “In the Field,” in which he rides across empty plains so desolate that even billboards--the sort of commercial intrusions he previously disdained--seem like magical signs of human contact.

McClure also could be heard striving after--and exhorting listeners toward--transcendence in imagery that ranged from the microscopic to the galactic.

He celebrated mystical notions such as “Agnosia,” which he translated as “knowing without knowing.” Oddly, he dedicated this highfalutin piece to Willie Dixon, who might have found a more earthy way to express the poem’s core idea, which seemed to have something to do with the belief that there is greater reality in imaginative and spiritual realms than in the seeming realities of the concrete world.

McClure’s best mode was ironic. He lashed out at the wastefulness of the California good life in “Maybe Mama Lion,” noting the ecological consequences of conspicuous consumption. The 17-minute closer, “Paragon of Danger,” alternated passages of alarm about impending disasters with the blustery-voiced declarations of an egotist whose dangerous motto is “hey--no fear.”

Manzarek didn’t dabble in improvised responses to McClure’s poems but played composed accompaniments (several pieces in the hourlong set were drawn from their album together, “Love Lion”). The ex-Door’s playing was accomplished and straightforwardly attuned to the sense of the words. The epic “Paragon of Danger” featured a bright, heraldic marching theme for the satiric portions about human arrogance.

A McClure ode to Jim Morrison as a paragon of pure creativity was framed by the “Riders on the Storm” theme, and “Maybe Mama Lion” got a rolling and tumbling R&B; piano framework not unlike the Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues.” Manzarek also came through with delicate pastoral moods when required. (McClure was at his most specific when talking about flora and fauna.)

Between songs, the personable Manzarek gave a couple of workshop-style insights into how the collaboration operates. He described how McClure’s image of a cowboy in one piece led to its ambling, “Happy Trails”-like musical setting, and how in another piece he had disguised the chord progression to “Light My Fire” by changing the time signature and adding syncopation.