Tributes

The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has died. We've written about Achebe on Litkicks before: Juliana Harris wrote a brief biography, and I had a chance to hear him read at a PEN World Voices festival in 2006.

An old Litkicks friend, Clay "Lightning Rod" January of Texas, died of cancer this week. If you hung around this website during our message board years, there's no doubt that you remember Clay. He was one of the best writers on the website, the owner of a sly and subversive voice.

I interacted often with Clay, especially on the Action Poetry boards, where I would often yell at him to stop posting too often, but he had such a good sense of humor about it that I could never be mad at him long. We met in person several times for poetry readings in Virginia, Washington DC, Maryland and New York, and he was awesome and fun to hang out with. He was an old and very skinny man with long graying hair, and it was clear from his poems that he had done some hard travelling in his years, and had carried a few monkeys on his back.

He liked to call himself Lightning Rod (as a poet and a musician) but insisted to me that Clay January was his real name. I never believed him, but I always believed the truths behind the tall tales he told. He carried himself with a youthful, pixie-ish energy, he never let go of his wide smile, and he gathered friends easily wherever he went. I'm happy to have been one of the friends he gathered.

I once had a chance to play a sitar for a few minutes. To a guitar player, a sitar feels like a crazy contraption, a transformed beast. There are strings and frets, but the frets are curved, arching up high from the neck so that the strings can be bent not up or down, as with a guitar, but in and out, leading to a warped, spacy effect. Then there is a second set of strings under the raised strings, which are never touched at all. These are the sympathetic strings, which drone in sympathy with the melody. There is no such thing on a guitar. No wonder sitar masters like Ravi Shankar inspired so much awe when they entered the popular music scene in the 1960s.

Ravi Shankar has died at the age of 92. During one peak of his amazing long career, he collaborated on several projects and concerts with George Harrison of the Beatles, who saw in the subtle, spidery complexity of the sitar's sound a new way to advance the art of pop/rock lead guitar. Promoted to sudden celebrity status by Harrison and others, Ravi Shankar used his fame in the west to serve as as a cultural ambassador for India, for Bengali culture, and for Hindu traditions. He was invited to perform at the most epic rock concerts of his age, including Monterey Pop in 1967 and Woodstock in 1969. In 1971, Shankar and Harrison created together the Concert for Bangladesh, the first large-scale charity rock concert, which featured Leon Russell, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. Here's his opening number from that concert (as always, when playing for western audiences, Shankar would have to begin by explaining that the sounds the band just played had not been the first song; it is customary for classical Indian musicians to tune up onstage, often producing a hypnotic cacaphony that sounds like strange music).

"I'm looking to see if there's a guy who looks like Lew Welch in this audience," says poet Gary Snyder at a San Francisco tribute to Welch, the complex Beat poet who was represented as the soulful, restless Dave Wain in Jack Kerouac's novel Big Sur.

It's a cutting thought, because Gary Snyder was among the last to see Lew Welch alive before the troubled poet wandered into the forest surrounding Gary Snyder's home to kill himself. Welch left a suicide note, but his body was never found.

City Lights has recently published Ring of Bone, the most comprehensive collection of Welch's life's work (we recently reviewed the book, and you can read more about it at HTMLGiant). Many notable old friends of Welch gathered last month to celebrate the book. Videos of short tributes by Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, Peter Coyote and others can be found at the City Lights blog.