Long before Crass was formed, when Penny Rimbaud was still a young man, he traveled across the United States in “a quest for the spirit of my two literary heroes, Whitman and Kerouac.”

Above: From Dominic Thackray’s short film Girlfriend in a Kimono

Long before Crass was formed, when Penny Rimbaud was still a young man, he traveled across the United States in “a quest for the spirit of my two literary heroes, Whitman and Kerouac.” Instead of discovering beatniks doing it for themselves, all he found was a humiliated America obsessed with their loss in Vietnam and the shame of Watergate. The result was a book of poetry Pen wrote under the name J.J. Ratter called The Diamond Signature: & Death of the Imagination. The trip may have been the roots of Crass’ whole “Don’t follow us” thing. They made Christ: The Album as a way of mocking their popularity and discouraging the hero worship all the anarcho punks were lavishing on them at the time. Most didn’t get it. After playing the album live, a punk kid approached Penny and asked him to autograph his Christ album. Instead of taking the marker, Pen grasped the kid’s hand and made it write the kid’s name in huge letters across the top of the album.

Rimbaud still lives at Dial House, a squat he started 40 years ago and the headquarters for the band throughout their entire discography. He’s still in a constant battle to prevent development on the land that surrounds the farm and hasn’t stopped yelling at people on a microphone. Instead of rehashing old Crass songs however, Penny has moved to poetry and performs with a saxophone or a flute and nothing else. His newest release To Touch is Which to Hold will be out shortly on Dial House’s own record label.

I’ve heard the CD and my favorite track on it is a look back at his old hero, Jack Kerouac. Jack not only let down the beatniks, who were stupid enough to follow his lead, he also let down himself. By the end of his life Jack was a fat, drunk, racist wreck living with his mummy and accusing the Jews of trying to use him to control the American youth. He was also a Born Again who hated fags. He died of booze at 47. Penny is 66.

The track is a 15-minute piss-take on beatnik culture and possibly the only audio recording of a saxophone being sarcastic. It’s called “Ti Jean,” a pet name Kerouac’s French Canadian mother called him.

Here are two selections…

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TI JEAN
by Penny Rimbaud
Hey, you, you, you lumber-necked, trunk-armed,
Timber-legged poet in the park, you charmed me.
You chopper, Ti Jean
Train-hopper, Ti Jean
With your ballpoint, bullnose, babbling,
And your dreamy dharmic dabbling
In beer-splashed paddywhacks
And rock’n’rolling Cadillacs
Hitting the highways,
Byways and sigh-ways,
Living it your way,
Thisaway and thataway,
Like old man river singing his song
You just kept keeping on, Ti Jean,
You just kept keeping on…
Mmmm, you did it your way.

And later on…

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Ti Jean, maybe you did touch those depths,
But could you ever find your feet again?
And why if you couldn’t,
Which of course you didn’t
Should that really matter to me? Why the pain?

In God’s image? Fuck you.

Related posts:

1. CRASS WEEK: STEVE IGNORANT’S WOOD CARVINGS
2. CRASS WEEK: THE ART OF GEE VAUCHER
3. CRASS CLOTHES
4. POETRY SLAMS!
5. STREET POETRY IS AWESOME!