Shadowbahn(55)
ROUND MIDNIGHT
TO: JESSE G. PRESLEY
APRIL 4, 1974
You lunatic, What can we say to make you stop? The novelty of your appearance in our pages having worn off some years ago, your latest psychotic outburst (which we return herewith) well exhausts whatever once might have been considered amusing about your “aesthetic” posture. Surely by now any deranged following that your “work” attracted has moved on to more certifiable diversions. Moreover, were it common editorial practice to include 45 rpm singles as part of our review coverage, we likely would reserve such space and ink for releases that actually exist, which apparently—as established by inquiries to various recording companies and outlets—the subject of your new tirade does not. (Presumably this explains why you write nothing of the record’s music itself and refuse to offer the artist’s name.) No one, we might add, has heard of “Luna Recording.” Please allow us to pretend that you don’t exist either, and be advised that further missives in this vein may be turned over to the proper authorities. You have become a scary person.
Sincerely,
THE EDITORS
“O Souverain” / “Oh Shenandoah”
[recording artist’s name withheld]
(Luna Recording) Behold the Death Disc, motherf*ckers cocksuckers little darlins ladies & gents boys & girls whoever y’all motherf*ckers, by which I don’t mean just any disc but rather this one with its two-sided siren-seductions most peculiar and ruinous: because y’all know by now I am the God of the Black Yawp & Unholy Squall come to stare this doom square in its cyclopean central eye and set alight the fuse between the rest of us and said disc’s portal to hell. For years I’ve been warning you and now the fuliginous evidence is here in my grasp. In these final hours past midnight I scribble this in haste before sleep overtakes my poor self, given as how every slumber hurls me back atop a black tower in a time and country when and where I was never born, and given as how I never can be certain that every night that final leap will be into the gust that blows me to this whole other life altogether where I might almost believe I belong instead of him. Where I might almost believe I’m not the wrong one. So this is no mere critique. This is a manifesto, the last will and declaration of Jesse G. de Presley that I hereby shall scour this one nation under a groove to its most forsaken corners in order to search out and destroy every last copy extant of this damnable 45 recording. Who decided forty-five was the correct number of revolutions anyway, I do hereby propound? Why not sixty like the minutes or twenty-four like the hours? Why not 1,776 or 2,001 like the birth & death dates on a country’s tombstone? Who accepted forty-five as the speed at which we hear and fathom each other? Because I surely do not, you pussies cunts sodomites pighumpers cains & abels ahuras & ahrimans iras & charlies phils & dons brians & dennises rays & daves duanes & greggs williams & jims liams & noels jesses & elvises pussies, I hear everything at my own chosen speed, that is to say 0 (zero). I hear what the Death Disc sings when it’s not even spinning on the platter-player. Candy died for this, God damn it? I surely am certain y’all been highly amused these years, I’m altogether confident you’ve had your laugh these years at my various and tedious rube-hickeries that you peg me for. I spent a lifetime believing no song could be worthy of my wrath, no song could be big or intimate enough for my vengeance—that all songs are bound for whatever rubble to which the rest of us are duly destined, all the songs of Another Place and Time. But now I come for Everyone & Everything, you hear? Now I scavenge the shops and ravage the bins. I plunder the turntables for every last trace of every last copy that will be cast on a pyre or shattered in half, its sharpest, most jagged edge slitting the throat of every last traitor who opens to this his filthy ears. Every melody will run with blood tears blood to the Ocean of Noise, what with my brain a-flamin’ and burnin’ a hole where I lie and nothing to cool me so I might just turn to smoke. I will purify the airwaves, be they playing at 0 rpm or 2,001 or anything in between. See y’all at the f*cking inferno.
JGP
SUSPECT IN ’68 MURDER OF POL TIED TO ARSON
Washed-Up Warhol deviant on the loose
NEW YORK CITY, May 12—A “person of interest” in the slaying six years ago of a former United States senator and presidential candidate has been linked by authorities to a string of downtown firebombings in recent weeks.
Following the April 8 blaze that destroyed a Greenwich Village music store at Macdougal and 3rd Streets, half a dozen fires have gutted other local outlets as well as the “Church,” a legendary Columbia Records studio on 30th Street, whose April 19 inferno hit the industry hard.
Police refuse to name the suspect but according to sources ongoing investigation centers on Jesse G. Presley, age undetermined and of whom little else is known other than his involvement in the June 3, 1968, shooting of a onetime rising star in Democratic Party politics and Massachusetts scion of a former ambassador to the United Kingdom. The bizarre incident drew national attention and led to the closing of the notorious Factory, a Lower Manhattan “performance” and “art” venue on which premises the murder took place. (Subsequent inquiry suggested that Presley, who was not charged in the shooting, may have been the original target.)