Читать книгу The Last Poets - Christine Otten - Страница 14

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EAST ORANGE, NEW JERSEY, SEPTEMBER 2001

Recollections of Grand Mixer DXT, Greenpoint Studio, Brooklyn, 1991

‘There was an abattoir next door to the studio. Every morning, really early, a truck full of chickens drove up, and when the tailgate opened you heard their screeching and wailing. “I don’t wanna go. I don’t wanna go.” Like they knew where they were headed. That high-pitched wail. It always woke me up. And the stench, weekends. On Sunday you smelled the bitter, rancid odor of chicken shit and clotted blood. But we got used to it, right? Once I met the guy who did the slaughtering. Huge guy. He had a sharp knife, and he chopped those chickens’ heads off, one by one, and hung them up on hooks. He was merciless. He didn’t say a prayer or anything. Just wham, head off, that’s it, next. Sometimes I miss the studio—don’t you, Umar? We were family: you, me, Anton the drummer, and Lane—remember Lane? Young guy. Wonder whatever happened to him. I had lost my house in Los Angeles to the earthquake. Bill Laswell said I could come live above his studio. How’d I know you’d be sleeping there too. Remember the Chinese place across the street? That was really good, the restaurant next door to McDonald’s. We didn’t have a kitchen. Only a sink and cold water. A shower on the third floor. And a huge wooden table where we sat talking at night. In the winter you had to let the water run or it’d freeze. Later I found an apartment in Harlem, but actually I’d have preferred to stay in Greenpoint. I rode my mountain bike from 132nd St. all the way back to Brooklyn. That studio had something. You know what I mean? You once said I wasted too much time on a beat. Came downstairs at night, muttering that I’d woken you up. But I was totally absorbed in that beat. The rest happened by itself, the sounds, the colors, the dialogues, the chord progressions. I converted it to music. We all had our own rituals. You too. Sometimes you’d vanish all of a sudden, and show up again three days later. Was Bill pissed! You remember? “Go upstairs, go sleep it off.” And then you’d start writing again … ’