The Worst Beat Poet? Hear him read "Taste My Jazz" with Jackson Reed on Bassoon and Rick Pigeon on Trombone. He was found behind some furniture after 30 years, in North Beach, San Francisco. In his pocket, an envelope with a cassette tape of his last reading. On the envelope was written: March 1988 / Invocation -- "Taste My Jazz" improvised w/ trombone, bassoon & conga drum. rhetoric by Lem Om, Rick Pigeon -- tromboner, Jackson Reed - -bassoon. aka The Jazz Reservoir. The tape was brought to Kurt Flint, archivist and chief computermaster at Oracular Laboratory who thought the instrumental work had merit: "Face it, there aren't many opportunities to hear voice and bassoon & trombone. Reed and Pigeon go back a long way. One lived for two years in the desert in Australia. The NorthWestern Aboriginies called him 'pigeon' and taught him didgeridoo, and all that circular breathing got plowed into trombone technique. Reed was a classical player; for a while he kind of looked like a bassoon. Then he grew a beard, wore birkenstocks and a rain hat. That made him fierce, but brought out his sweet side too. Lem was never on time. But he was usually somewhere on Green Street, maybe Gino & Carlo's. He sort of stumbled into where Reed and Pigeon were rehearsing one day in a back room with faded fleur de lys wallpaper on one wall. He had a slightly feral, anonymous look, like a police composite sketch. 'Hey man, let's throw the dice' were the first words out of his mouth in that back room. Well, any excuse would do for those guys. They'd gig at the drop of a hat. The bartender told me at first only a few showed up for the readings but soon no one came at all. That's why it was thought to get it on tape, otherwise it would be like it never happened. There were two recorded readings, but I'm going to feature the earliest because on the occassion of the second apparently Lem had too much laughing gas, and giggled though passages of his own reading. As a matter of fact I was looking at the cassette envelope just yesterday. That pocket of Lem's was a time capsule, full of interstellar dust, broken cigarettes, ancient corn chip debris, an expired Worker's Party card in someone else's name; the only thing we didn't find was Nixon's boogers. He was a hanger-on with ideas of his own. If he sounds as if he's a courier from another planet, or floating in a pack of far lonely asteroids, we've fulfilled our mission: to deliver the voice to the public ear."
Make it Stop