Pete Brown
May. 20th, 2023 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynnegaPete Brown has died. Most famous for his Cream lyrics (he was the Brown in Bruce/Brown), he was also a wonderful poet and performer, and a kind, delightful man. I feel so lucky to have known him, though I wish we hadn't fallen out of touch in recent years. Here's something I wrote about him long ago, originally published in LOCA, and reprinted in Shuffle Boil in the early '00s. I recall sending Pete a copy of the latter magazine, and he replied by letter. I hope he knew, from what I wrote, how much he meant to me.
Tea with Cream
"Alone tired halfdrunk hopeful / I staggered into the bogs / at Green Park Station / and found 30 written on the wall / Appalled I lurched out / into the windy blaring neon Piccadilly night / thinking surely, / Surely there must be more of us than that..."--"Few," by Pete Brown
The day I first met Pete Brown, my throat was sore and I'd spent the morning with my friend Jennifer at the Tate Gallery, marveling at the works of William Blake and Gaudier-Brzeska. It was September 1985, my first trip to London. I was twenty, an aspiring poet/novelist, in the midst of getting my B.A. in English lit from UCLA, also sort of in the midst of a depression though I didn't know what to call it--but going to Europe with my boyfriend R. seemed to stave it off for awhile.
I was running a fever that day, and not too keen on going across town to meet some old musician I'd barely heard of. R. couldn't remember how he'd gotten Pete Brown's phone number, but when he called him, the guy said to come round, and gave directions. Riding there on the cigarette-choked top level of a double decker bus, R. filled me in: Pete Brown was the lyricist for Cream, the Brown in the famed Bruce/Brown songwriting team, the man who wrote the words to "Sunshine of Your Love," "White Room" and (my favorite) "Doin' That Scrapyard Thing" from Goodbye Cream. But that wasn't why R. liked him so much. R. was into his late sixties/early seventies work in bands like Piblokto! and the Battered Ornaments (with Chris Spedding), as well as an early jazz/poetry LP, The Not Forgotten Association. Doubtless R. had already played me some of these records, but he was always inundating me with music I'd never heard of from all over the world, and it was a lot to assimilate.
We came to the door of one of those typical London set-ups, two narrow housefronts smushed together, the front doors right next to each other. R. knocked at one, hoping it was the right door. We were greeted by a small man with a bristly close-cut beard, penetrating eyes, faded jeans, a quick smile. Thus began our friendship with Pete, as he let us in the house he shared with two cats (also a bunch of model trains and planes, a typically English preoccupation) and proceeded to feed us an afternoon snack. "If I'm going to have a snack around this time--as I often do--it might as well be something that won't kill me," he said. We sat on the carpet and devoured lemon and poppyseed cake, carrot cake, cherry tarts, tea with milk and honey that soothed my throat. He played us some of his new recordings, as well as a Screamin' Jay Hawkins record called "Constipation Blues"--I clearly recall the gleeful gleam in his eyes as we listened to Screamin' Jay. He showed us his collection of weird newspaper headlines ("Africa wants that old piano" was a favorite). He answered R.'s questions about Cream and the Battered Ornaments, and we began to hear Pete's stories about Graham Bond and Jack Bruce and all the English musicians and poets who were his friends.
Unlike many of his compatriots, Pete had quit the heavy drinking and drugs early on, and therefore remembered everything. I think it was that day that he told us one of my favorite stories, regarding a lyric from "Sunshine of Your Love." In the Cream version of the song, Jack Bruce sings "I'll bring you my dawn surprise" (i.e., the guy makes love to his girl at dawn) but his accent must've baffled everyone who covered the song, because everyone else ("Even Ella Fitzgerald!" Pete lamented) sang, "I'll bring you my dull surprise," certainly a more self-deprecating turn of phase. I also liked hearing how Pete wrote the words to "Doin' That Scrapyard Thing": the music was played to him over the phone from L.A. to London and he came up with the words on the spot.
A convert, I listened to a tape of Pete's music on the Walkman on trains through the rest of our European trip. "Broken Magic" was my favorite; its tune haunted me. (Much later, in the mid-'90s, I kept noticing similarities between Pete's music and one of my favorite local bands, the Negro Problem. A certain mixture of late sixties psychedelia and songwriting reminiscent of Jimmy Webb and Bacharach, though Pete's bands always had plenty of jazz and blues influence, filtered through the British experience.)
Back in L.A., I digested The Not Forgotten Association LP (one of the best spoken word records of all time) and Pete Brown & Piblokto!'s Things May Come and Things May Go, But the Art School Dance Goes On Forever. At UCLA's rare book room, I pored over Pete's books, Few and Let 'Em Roll Kafka, which the librarian exhorted me to keep flat on the table when I kept leaning back in my chair in my enjoyment of such poems as "Money" ("Spend it like money / It is money") and "Way Out West" ("Herdin cows gits mighty / lonely / Enough to drive a man / crackers / Yeah that's an English word"). A British Beat poet before he became a lyricist and rock musician, Pete inspired me--the first non-academic poet I'd ever met, one who worked in a rock'n'roll/jazz milieu instead of the university (where I was learning a lot but felt, at times, uncomfortable as hell--when my friend Elise quoted X in a poetry workshop, Louise Gluck, our guest professor, looked like she'd smelled something bad). I often wistfully imagined the days when Pete toured England in the early '60s with his jazz/poetry group, New Departures. I wished I'd been there. In my final poetry workshop at UCLA, Robert Pinsky asked us all to make a small anthology of our favorite poems, and amid Blake and Yeats, Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov, June Jordan and Frank O'Hara, I included Pete: "Yes I discovered / poems all over / your face & body / Then I found out / it wasn't me / who'd written them" ("Poems").
R. and I kept in touch with Pete, who was always busy with a million projects, recording, producing, writing screenplays. In 1987, he came through L.A. and we set up a poetry reading for him at the System M Gallery in Long Beach. A packed room got to hear his spirited renditions of works like "Two Rooms": "They found him in a room / Anyone would think / I'd never been found / in a room before, he said".
The year we lived in England, visiting him was one of our biggest treats. A Jew, albeit one born on Christmas day, Pete helped assuage my feeling of Jewish isolation; he proudly served toasted bagels with our dinner one night. Always, Pete has been a positive force in my life. His sense of humor, his wit and tireless creativity, his kindness and generosity, as well as his talent, make him a real hero to me.
Tea with Cream
"Alone tired halfdrunk hopeful / I staggered into the bogs / at Green Park Station / and found 30 written on the wall / Appalled I lurched out / into the windy blaring neon Piccadilly night / thinking surely, / Surely there must be more of us than that..."--"Few," by Pete Brown
The day I first met Pete Brown, my throat was sore and I'd spent the morning with my friend Jennifer at the Tate Gallery, marveling at the works of William Blake and Gaudier-Brzeska. It was September 1985, my first trip to London. I was twenty, an aspiring poet/novelist, in the midst of getting my B.A. in English lit from UCLA, also sort of in the midst of a depression though I didn't know what to call it--but going to Europe with my boyfriend R. seemed to stave it off for awhile.
I was running a fever that day, and not too keen on going across town to meet some old musician I'd barely heard of. R. couldn't remember how he'd gotten Pete Brown's phone number, but when he called him, the guy said to come round, and gave directions. Riding there on the cigarette-choked top level of a double decker bus, R. filled me in: Pete Brown was the lyricist for Cream, the Brown in the famed Bruce/Brown songwriting team, the man who wrote the words to "Sunshine of Your Love," "White Room" and (my favorite) "Doin' That Scrapyard Thing" from Goodbye Cream. But that wasn't why R. liked him so much. R. was into his late sixties/early seventies work in bands like Piblokto! and the Battered Ornaments (with Chris Spedding), as well as an early jazz/poetry LP, The Not Forgotten Association. Doubtless R. had already played me some of these records, but he was always inundating me with music I'd never heard of from all over the world, and it was a lot to assimilate.
We came to the door of one of those typical London set-ups, two narrow housefronts smushed together, the front doors right next to each other. R. knocked at one, hoping it was the right door. We were greeted by a small man with a bristly close-cut beard, penetrating eyes, faded jeans, a quick smile. Thus began our friendship with Pete, as he let us in the house he shared with two cats (also a bunch of model trains and planes, a typically English preoccupation) and proceeded to feed us an afternoon snack. "If I'm going to have a snack around this time--as I often do--it might as well be something that won't kill me," he said. We sat on the carpet and devoured lemon and poppyseed cake, carrot cake, cherry tarts, tea with milk and honey that soothed my throat. He played us some of his new recordings, as well as a Screamin' Jay Hawkins record called "Constipation Blues"--I clearly recall the gleeful gleam in his eyes as we listened to Screamin' Jay. He showed us his collection of weird newspaper headlines ("Africa wants that old piano" was a favorite). He answered R.'s questions about Cream and the Battered Ornaments, and we began to hear Pete's stories about Graham Bond and Jack Bruce and all the English musicians and poets who were his friends.
Unlike many of his compatriots, Pete had quit the heavy drinking and drugs early on, and therefore remembered everything. I think it was that day that he told us one of my favorite stories, regarding a lyric from "Sunshine of Your Love." In the Cream version of the song, Jack Bruce sings "I'll bring you my dawn surprise" (i.e., the guy makes love to his girl at dawn) but his accent must've baffled everyone who covered the song, because everyone else ("Even Ella Fitzgerald!" Pete lamented) sang, "I'll bring you my dull surprise," certainly a more self-deprecating turn of phase. I also liked hearing how Pete wrote the words to "Doin' That Scrapyard Thing": the music was played to him over the phone from L.A. to London and he came up with the words on the spot.
A convert, I listened to a tape of Pete's music on the Walkman on trains through the rest of our European trip. "Broken Magic" was my favorite; its tune haunted me. (Much later, in the mid-'90s, I kept noticing similarities between Pete's music and one of my favorite local bands, the Negro Problem. A certain mixture of late sixties psychedelia and songwriting reminiscent of Jimmy Webb and Bacharach, though Pete's bands always had plenty of jazz and blues influence, filtered through the British experience.)
Back in L.A., I digested The Not Forgotten Association LP (one of the best spoken word records of all time) and Pete Brown & Piblokto!'s Things May Come and Things May Go, But the Art School Dance Goes On Forever. At UCLA's rare book room, I pored over Pete's books, Few and Let 'Em Roll Kafka, which the librarian exhorted me to keep flat on the table when I kept leaning back in my chair in my enjoyment of such poems as "Money" ("Spend it like money / It is money") and "Way Out West" ("Herdin cows gits mighty / lonely / Enough to drive a man / crackers / Yeah that's an English word"). A British Beat poet before he became a lyricist and rock musician, Pete inspired me--the first non-academic poet I'd ever met, one who worked in a rock'n'roll/jazz milieu instead of the university (where I was learning a lot but felt, at times, uncomfortable as hell--when my friend Elise quoted X in a poetry workshop, Louise Gluck, our guest professor, looked like she'd smelled something bad). I often wistfully imagined the days when Pete toured England in the early '60s with his jazz/poetry group, New Departures. I wished I'd been there. In my final poetry workshop at UCLA, Robert Pinsky asked us all to make a small anthology of our favorite poems, and amid Blake and Yeats, Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov, June Jordan and Frank O'Hara, I included Pete: "Yes I discovered / poems all over / your face & body / Then I found out / it wasn't me / who'd written them" ("Poems").
R. and I kept in touch with Pete, who was always busy with a million projects, recording, producing, writing screenplays. In 1987, he came through L.A. and we set up a poetry reading for him at the System M Gallery in Long Beach. A packed room got to hear his spirited renditions of works like "Two Rooms": "They found him in a room / Anyone would think / I'd never been found / in a room before, he said".
The year we lived in England, visiting him was one of our biggest treats. A Jew, albeit one born on Christmas day, Pete helped assuage my feeling of Jewish isolation; he proudly served toasted bagels with our dinner one night. Always, Pete has been a positive force in my life. His sense of humor, his wit and tireless creativity, his kindness and generosity, as well as his talent, make him a real hero to me.
