Speaking of bullets, one evening last October, I was leaving Brady's Publick House (a favorite drinking establishment where pints of Meister Brau only cost a dollar) when a kid with an orange ski mask over his head ran up to me with a pistol and screamed: "Sing 'Car Wash Hair' you son of a bitch!" I was shaking in my shoes, but I calmly explained that I didn't sing that song, that Jonathan sang it on the record. He pointed the gun at my head and screamed: "I don't give a rat's ass who sang it on the record, I want you to sing it!" I tried to remember the words and gave it my best shot, singing a few lines of the song. He walked right up to me, burped, then ran away laughing.
In the opening pages of Visions of Cody, Jack Kerouac wrote about Poughkeepsie's "silent backyards," "apple pie wives," "sugar cured sky" and "wash hung out as far as the eye could see." Most of this remains the same, but if you follow the clothes lines as far as you can see, you end up on the banks of the Hudson River. Down by the river, you can catch a glimpse of the giant old train tressel where hobos used to hop freight cars for points west and where our old friend John DeVries saw a guy jump several hundred feet into the river, only to climb out, smoke one last cigarette and then die. DeVries was the singer and guitarist in a great band called Agitpop. Their song "On The Hudson" is a beautiful tribute to the lost dreams of this era. He and drummer Mark LaFalce are local heroes and have a new band named Cellophane.
If you follow the train tracks north several miles up the river, you'll stumble upon the Rhinecliff Hotel, an old inn that provides musical entertainment seven days a week, 12 months a year. On any given night, incredibly strange sounds drift out over the train tracks and across the Hudson. Cellophane play the Rhinecliff quite a bit and pack the joint. Some of the other warped sounds coming from this place are provided by the herky-jerky klexmer groove of Wormwood, the hyperactive ephedrine rock of Hopewell, the quark music of Perfect Heller and the intense paralyzed voice of the Harmony Rockets. Local poet Jim Donnelly often cracks up the crowd with his touchingly honest readings, and white-suited heartthrob artist Joe Concra is getting his Space-Needle Orchestra together to play the 'cliff really soon. Some nights, Warhol cronie, Factory photographer and concrete poet Billy Name can be seen sneaking around, snapping people's pictures while mutteriing, "crink, crank, cronk." Sterling Morrison's teen angel daughter lives around here, too, but I guess she went away to college last fall.
One of the best landmarks in Poughkeepsie is the post office. The building is an old stone behemoth which houses some amazing huge paintings of Poughkeepsie that were done during the Forties. The paintings were commissioned by the FDR Administration and are quite a sight. This strange building doesn't always process the mail correctly though: At least 50 percent of the letters sent never seem to make it out of this place. (That is why Mercury Rev post office box is somewhere else.) Once we express mailed a package to someone in Europe, and it never made it there. When I inquired about the package to the postmaster, he replied: "Hey, we don't tell Europe how to deliver their mail. They don't tell us how to deliver ours!"
Couldn't argue with that.