Where I Come From by Rich Ferguson shoots from the hip - By N.L. Belardes

A smashed CD arrives in the mail with CD inside intact like a pristine poet moment...

If you think you’re not into spoken word, or if you think someone reading poetry sounds like a boring afternoon of nothing better than Gilligan’s Island reruns, think again. They’re not all boring. If you showed up for Noveltown’s “Stories from Dust” event, you experienced T.Z. Hernandez. His poetry is a musical experience.

He sang to you.

It was spoken word.

In comes Rich Ferguson’s album, Where I Come From, a spoken word masterpiece that blasts at you like a Robbie Robertson/Velvet Underground counterculture shotgun ripped from the hip.

Blam!

Only this is 2006 and the music is a fusion of LA sounds that represent the poetry and alt/trip hop music core of today’s nouveau Southland artists.


Some wayward post office machine went postal on this package...

Ferguson resembles a Johnny Depp Hollywood breeze wafted right in to the transcendent world of poetry meets tough talk. Johnny Depp? Yes, ladies. He even wrote to me about being told in a Hollywood grocery store, “I do get the Johnny Depp thing every so often. In fact, I was once standing in line at a Wild Oats Market in Santa Monica with my hat and shades on and some other guy leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘I just love all your movies...especially Pirates of the Caribbean.’

As for me, I'd been in a phase around that time where it was happening every so often, so I was doing my best to not laugh my head off. Eventually, the guy figured out that I wasn't JD. He began apologizing profusely. Me, I was like: ‘Dude, don't apologize. If you told me that I looked like Marty Feldman, well that would be another story. But we're talking Johnny Depp here. Don't worry.’"


Not Johnny Depp but a poet with a word vengeance for you to inhale

Where I Come From is a great lyrical journey from a man who studied with beat generation Howl king, Allen Ginsberg. He takes the LA area and mystifies it into an experience as if you’re there walking the 3rd St. Promenade, West Hollywood Streets, or right behind some asshole actor who needs his heels kicked from under him. Ferguson does it with his bantering trip-hop talk poetry beat.

It’s that tough.

Put up your dukes you poetry sissy muses. Ferguson is going to blindside you.

Ferguson rests his shotgun voice between your eyes, taking you from trip-hop vocal sounds to alt screeching guitars, always with his voice taking you on a tour through life and LA thoughts as if he’s kicking your ass while serenading you.

Now a tour of some of the songs:

“All The Times” is a spoken word diatribe from the album that quantifies the human experience by both de-humanizing and humanizing at the same time. The song is really a lengthy poem of quantified instances of human experience. “All the times I murdered strangers in my thoughts: 541, family members: 3,567…” It’s probably the most intense song on the album, though intensity in Ferguson’s vocals lingers throughout.

His next song made me think that sometimes we don’t realize we’re all the same in that we’re humans made from carbon tissue. Deep down inside we’re just bones, right? That’s what grows and gets left over unless you fell in an Irish bog 5000 years ago. Bad trip. Does our inner self lie to us daily? Ferguson sings in “Bones”: “Sometimes I feel like I’m filled with bones… it was only because of these bones… these bones are wanted in 14 states, there are X-Rays of me all over America…” We guilt-ridden Americans who still go on beating each other and ourselves with our questionable actions. If we’d only listen to our bones. Unless they lie to us… it’s not our consciousness after all. It’s our DNA that’s the problem.

“Every Now Is Everything” sounds like a modern day urban Western theme song set in Hollywood that whispers and talks to us about our common city plight. Ferguson’s voice talks twisters in logic and thought. Yet the song is a swagger, a confident step through a spoken word tough attitude melody of pulling bass lines. It’s the drill of surreal reality jack-hammered from a city street of thoughts… dig it.

“With This Kiss” takes ambient guitar work in a non-apologetic treatise about acceptance. We are who we are, even if we are denizens, loveless and occasionally loved on Hollywood streets. “With this kiss there are revelations tattooed on our lips… I am beginning to see we are slowly, slowly becoming…”

One of my favorite songs on the CD is “L.A. Book Of The Dead”, a song about becoming the undead king of the LA social network by simply being dignified enough to stay alive. Ferguson questions the paths that people take in an LA scene of community conscience that is often confronted with violent dead-end lives. This “Day of the Dead” piece is as shaky, scary and celebratory as a Day of the Dead march through a Hollywood cemetery. “Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Promenade is really Dante’s Inferno…” Oh yes, “The only way to escape LA is to be LA…” he quotes and discusses minorities in a rich cityscape that caters to gangbangers and elitists. His intensity carries the song while the music rifles us into the barrel of his shotgun talk.

“It was at 8th and Agony. There was blood in the streets… the rain coming down in words of a suicide note… could have been some hallelujah dog gone hungry…could have been the way you told her with your eyes you had nothing for her…” Yes, “8th and Agony” is a painful song, a telephone call from a dark LA phone booth, a phone call from a lust-filled apartment, a phone call from a cell phone—lover to lover on midnight LA streets… this song almost turns punk though it does turn angry, intense, confused, and rattles talk so fast that I’m amazed anyone can remember so many words about… a goodbye.

The final song/poem is a destructive story from LA and Las Vegas: the mad city of lights… a slot machine moment across from the old Peppermill funk bar/coffee shop and Vegas streets and motel rooms. There’s an explosive theme that reminds me of a scene from my novel, Thick White Crust:

It’s a popular song, Jorgen Byrd thought as he suddenly stopped humming. ‘Slot Machines Bursting In Air’ could be the chorus. Now, what was that song?

Jorgen lay between two video slot rows: the latest Konami inventions of interactive money-sucking glee. Here, poker reality-games put you right in Hollywood with mega-stars who put their money down right next to yours in a Las Vegas style holographic manipulation of the senses. Jorgen ignored the games. He could see slot reels spinning in mid-air, and coins shooting from those straight through clouds of fire and debris, slot machine debris, as well as carpets, walls, people; their arms, legs, torsos, purses and sun dresses attached and detached in an explosive death of bursting bulbs and brand new red-white-and-blue attire—with people in them of course, staff workers and tourists, limp in their instant fire-and-money reflecting stares.

There was a sense of patriotism in this fiery moment that Jorgen noticed: like the immediate burst when a sparkler begins to emit its spherical shower of sparks. More than that, it was just then he’d realized that on this Fourth of July he should have been with his grandkids at the park in the 115 degree heat and tossing Frisbees and flipping burgers, complaining about the heat, that he shouldn’t have been in the casino where he’d spent so much of his life lecturing about Mobs, propaganda, and the casino industry; where within his endless joking, he regarded pit bosses as aristocrats, and floozy drink-girls in their Betsy Ross skirts that bared their entire G-stringed asses as ‘freedom-fighters’ for the hospitality industry.

At the moment of the explosion Jorgen had instinctively ducked to the ground. He fell onto a young girl blasted into a fetal position. She fell beneath him from God-knows-where as the explosion rent the mega-casino in two, ripped a gaping hole down the center of the casino floor, toppled one entire wing of its high rise North Tower rooms, which then crashed downward and inward in a cement-cracking, cement-dust broken-body-and-ash-filled explosion of fire and steel that sent one of the Mt. Rushmore heads off the facade of the 1776 Mirkan Resorts Casino directly over Las Vegas Boulevard. There it flew, as intended, by the militant soon-to-be called ‘terrorist American S.O.B.’ who watched via a telescope from the Excalibur Hotel-casino, with his scar-eye pressed sweaty against the eyepiece as Roosevelt and Jefferson’s plaster-and-steel framed heads went sailing over the perfect white nose of the Sphinx and smashed through the Luxor pyramid’s glass exterior and into its many casino hotel rooms.

There were no signs of the other Presidents’ heads.

So this is how the old cowboy ends? With his boots on even—that’s more American than capitalism itself. These were the thoughts of Jorgen, who in his pants-pissing moment wasn’t even sure he was talking or thinking or pissing as he was not purposely doing either. Comments that his mouth or mind blurted forth were according to his favorite Cowboy Pete movies that he hadn’t stopped watching since the onset of the Korean War propaganda films starring the red-haired, six-foot-tall John Kaboon, a.k.a Cowboy Pete: “Whoo-ee! That’s how you gotta die, May Belle. You see this hole in me? Clean it with whiskey. Spit in it if’n ya gotta. But I’m keeping my boots on in case I go—and don’t you dare take my goddam boots off if I get delirious!”

What was the name of that song: Was our flag still there? Jorgen wondered. The room continued to burst—and the power didn’t go out. Bells rang and neon burst and flames licked, and money: coins red hot disks like spaceships seared the air of the room and left their impressions on panicking faces, arms and legs of everyone lucky enough to be in the explosion of capitalism that froze and rent their tourist smiles.


Cover art by Andrei

Buy the CD. Listen to the storytelling, the poet-speak screams like a movie soundtrack. The imagery is lush and Ferguson’s voice and lyrics, commanding…

*NOTE: Rich Ferguson is also a regular writer on thenervousbreakdown.com

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Thursday, September 21, 2006. You can leave your response.