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Tribute to Johnny Coley
Special tributes to Johnny from close friends and collaborators ::: Autumn of 2025
First, here is a poem from Johnny that seems fitting for the moment:
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it’s time
so far and from now on - you thought -
but It’s time little brother.
you twist,
but not uncomfortably, easily.
like a water snake.
no more wishin’ and hopin’ amigo.
no more Hello Goodbye.
it’s time, little brother -
wintrier - wintry - outside, friend.
So ok it’s not literally time right now but
it’s that time of year - a time of year
associated with dying.
everything’s under something, damped down,
although there’s no snow.
then there’s snow
on a field, beyond a fence.
I have a strong feeling - I’m convinced -
that that’s what death is like -
an absence
of more, of more and more -
just a snowy field beyond a fence,
then the fence is gone but there is moonlight
on the field, on the snow.
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From Walker Yancey :
On abstraction without desire
On naked solitude
On the marches of death
I write your name
And for the want of a word
I renew my life
For I was born to know you
To name you
Liberté
- passage from "Liberté" by Paul Eduard (1942)
I am immensely grateful for the friendship I got to share with Johnny. Becoming quite close, we would talk pretty much about anything that came into our heads. Self-admitted ramblers, it is something I value deeply when it harmonizes between two people. I knew from my first visit to see him at Greenbriar that this was one of the most brilliant people I had ever met and I would like to spend as much time as I can with them. Even though it was only for a brief period of our eternities, I felt like we covered nearly all the bases, mostly. Lost loved ones, early 20’s breakdowns, troubled relationships with our parents, troubled relationships with the television, past live regressions as grasshoppers that may or may not have been praying mantises, falling in love with strangers, and hallucinating soldiers, the conversation never grew stale. Eventually one of us would tap out from exhaustion, and the conversation would pick up a few days later. Or that night through text. Always with coffee. Moments we shared and exchanges we had are quickly shaping up to be some of the most cherished I’ve ever gotten to have with someone. I also want to express just how prolific he was, and the extremely high quality of work he was doing from a hospital bed on the third floor of a medicare facility. Suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, he was going through something that many of us will never understand. He was in immense pain, and the second some one walked through the door he had the ability to transcend all of that, focus his attention on you and the interaction at hand, usually make you bust out laughing, and then have you mulling it over the rest of the day because it was one of the profoundest bits of wit you’d ever heard. He always had a poem he had written, a recording he had made, and a story to tell. He allowed me to share deeply personal things with him, and he allowed himself to share deeply personal things with me, with you and with anyone who puts on one of his albums, picks up one of his books, looks at one of his paintings, or reads one of his poems.
I look forward to the many many brilliant things he will continue to share through his incredible body of work. He didn’t hold back, he gave it everything he had, and took it all the way.
Thank you Johnny,
May you rest in peace
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When I think of Johnny, I am reminded of the many times I, along with many others, went over to his apartment to sit around and talk with him. His apartment was filled with paintings and books, plus a massive plant at the end of his bed. Johnny would usually sit in his small kitchen and talk to us about the endless number of fascinating things he was reading. These ranged from the politics of the day to aristocrats who required a haircut at each stop on their tours of Europe. He was also very curious about what we were doing with our lives and art. His home felt like a different world, a hidden space between the cracks that we could visit and dream possibilities. Time didn’t really matter there, and neither did the direction of the conversation.
Another memory is of performing with Johnny. Just like visiting him at his apartment, he had a similar style of conjuring words while we developed the music in the moment. He would listen closely and respond. Sounds and words would build and grow, carrying us in unknown directions that were joyful, hilarious, tragic, and painful. It always felt like we were at once completely free and also holding each other together.
Johnny was able to capture a very special perspective in southern experimentalism that was both vital and vibrant. He was part of the deep creativity that makes up the South, woven into the lives of so many people there.
For me, as a southerner who wandered away from home, he constantly reminded me of the love and creativity that shape the South and Alabama. I’m glad I got to be his friend and share so many happy moments with him.
-Joel Nelson
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It’s tough to write something about a great poet gone. Especially one who speaks your language. Your real language, the dialect of your home, your history. How do you capture someone like Johnny Coley with words ? Boring, empty, interchangeable words … Johnny always knew what to do with words. They belonged to Johnny and he to them. Orpheus had his lyre and Johnny had his language. As he spoke or wrote or painted the words, you were plucked out of yourself and gently dropped into somewhere else. Now Johnny has gone somewhere else ...
I only knew him for the last 10 years of his life. He spent most of that time in his one-bedroom apartment. Confined by illness, the poet lived alone and lived and lived and lived. The apartment was his stage, his theatre … If he was awake, you knew that you were welcome to drop by (but please pick up a pack of American Spirits on the way over). I loved talking to Johnny in his little apartment, drinking coffee, looking out his big windows …
His work radiates waking and dreaming life : conscious and unconscious in dialogue as the late great Davey Williams put it. Memories dance with dreams : a one-man marathon duet. From the first time I heard him speak, I felt this, was literally brought to tears by this quality of his voice. For my friends and I, Johnny’s poetry was actually music, real Birmingham Alabama music. When he recited it, we heard sounds that made us want to play along. The pure music of his voice is overwhelmingly affecting and transportive. It refreshed our inspiration to gather and collaborate and offered us something beyond ourselves that somehow felt like home ...
Johnny perfected his own kind of grace. He said that Buddhism helped him survive the death of his partner Steven and changed his relationship to suffering. Through his struggles with M.S., he never surrendered to the pain and isolation. But I know that he suffered terribly. He never stopped reading, writing, sharing, caring, asking you generous & thoughtful questions, listening, remembering & teasing you with his surreal imagination. In the last month of his life, Johnny started reading War & Peace. His hospital bed was a makeshift studio. In our fragile, stupid human world, this is heroic. Johnny Coley, you are in my heart forever and I will never stop remembering you and following your example and plucking the lyre until I see you somewhere else sometime.
Turner Williams Jr.
Marseille, 13 September 2025
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Johnny Coley, cherished long-time friend, amazing poet, wise, loving, so funny and witty, fantastic visual artist, raconteur, down to earth and pie (pi?) in the sky, beloved, devoted, loving, close to saintly in a humorous, forebearing way, colourful, and all good things… i miss you deeply already, Johnny! How we used to laugh and be very mournful almost simultaneously. You embraced contradiction and made enigmas into black holes spewing out words that spun off like chants....
Johnny was an urban guerilla in his own Johnny way. For instance, working at the library, he helped many marginalized people who came to the library to have a quiet, safe, climate controlled space as a respite. He was sincerely caring and recognised systemic violence instead of being patronizing. He also told stories about his library friends and I’m sure all of his friends and family in such a kind, amusing and bemused way, appreciating us and our roles in the world’s story.
During our last visit, in his self-deprecating way, Johnny told me how he got caught up with a group of French students who were occupying one of the universities (in May '68). He was going in the same direction as the crowd so he let himself by swept up by them, physically and energetically. He already spoke French well and agreed with their aims - he claimed it was a fortuitous accident.
Regarding Tippy (Johnny's Mother), she did support Hillary but she was also strong against the Vietnam “War”. Johnny, she and I went to hear Daniel Ellsberg when he was trying to get people to whistleblower against plans to bomb Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000’s. During audience discussion, Tippy thanked Ellsberg and explained that she used his material to tell her high school students in 1970s Mtn. Brook that Nixon was lying about the whole thing and bombing in Cambodia, massacring civilians and other crimes against humanity. She was a kind of guerilla too.
Johnny and I both went to what became bi-weekly demonstrations against the illegal attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11/2001. These still continue in 5 Points South but I moved in 2003 so don’t know when Johnny quit attending for health reasons. The demonstrations were started by Birmingham Pax Christi leaders, theologian, author and activist Jim Douglass and his wife Shelley, who ran the local Dorothy Day house and is also a huge activist, and Lexie Ambrose and her late husband Rick (Ambrose), both staunch, loving Catholics. Jim and Johnny shared a love of reading, philosophy, and scholarly discussion.
I loved Johnny so much and our friendship really took off after he started taking my yoga class in the 1990s. Afterwards, we started walking in nearby parks, sometimes with other students, having lunch etc. When I quit teaching at a small fitness studio, we still did yoga at his house and that developed into a small class for a handful of friends in his condo’s living room. Sometimes we would go to the condo pool afterwards or walk around the Highland Avenue Parks, eating at Rojo or another place on our route. The class was always full of gentle joking, conversations, etc. You know how Johnny brought people together without even seeming to.
Warmly,
Dorah
Pronouns: She/hers
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I have always tried to understand why and how it was so much fun, so mind-expanding to just talk with Johnny, and I am so thankful for the hours and hours that we spent just chatting in person or on the phone over many years. His conversations were filled with unpredictable humor, warmth, enjoyment, enlightening observations. I loved how he could so quickly and deftly move any conversation into unexpected and deeper territory than where it began, all with humor, love for people, and a Southern charm he was happy to tell you came from his being from Alex City, Alabama. Johnny had a phenomenal memory for conversations, their exact wording and tone of voice, even from more than 50 years ago, a sense of how people like to talk that is also so brilliant in his poetry. You leave such a hole in the world, Johnny Coley…
For most of the last ten or fifteen or more years Johnny and I had long conversations on the phone at least once a week and I always visited him practically daily during several trips a year to Birmingham. In the last year those conversations were shorter as he tired more quickly. Johnny had a wonderful memory for the exact wording and tone of voice of long-ago interactions with all kinds of people and he loved recounting those discussions. His contributions to any conversations were always deep, revealing, and he invariably quickly added surprising insights told with a wry sense of humor. We talked about everything, our families, our relationships, our successes and failures at all kinds of things, and we invariably talked about politics. Here are a couple of stories:
Johnny and I met in 1972 when I had been distributing flyers organizing a trip to the Republican Convention in Miami to protest the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign. Johnny called me up and walked down the short hill from the house on 16th Avenue where he’d been living to the communal house above 15th avenue where I lived and which we called Kudzu Kastle, and he told me he wanted to go with us. A bunch of us did drive there, got arrested for peacefully protesting, and after a couple of days in jail the authorities literally opened the doors and said, “Go away,” with no charges ever filed.
Before I moved to California in 1980 and throughout the 1970s, Johnny participated in all kinds of radical political campaigns. He always liked to remind me that he was not an organizer of those events, but he was always present. Johnny took part in every left, anti-racist, anti-war, political campaign that I also worked on in Birmingham during the 1970s. Campaigns for support of prison reform, picketing of stores in support of the United Farmworkers Union boycotts of grapes and lettuce, demonstrations for peace and against the Vietnam war, leafletting against racism. He became close friends of a small group of activists in that era in Birmingham: Steve Whitman and Teresa Perry (parents of the now important writer Imani Perry), Bob Lowe, Mafundi, and many others. Johnny traveled with me to Chicago for Steve’s memorial service about ten years ago.
It must have been in the late 1970s or early 80s when Johnny decided to apply at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa to some kind of special undergraduate degree program, one with unusual majors and cross-disciplinary programs. In the interview they asked him what he wanted to do in his life and he said quite seriously, “Become an urban guerilla.” Unsurprisingly he was not admitted.
The photo with Johnny’s cousin Renee wearing the Hillary tee shirt reminded me that although Johnny and his mom Tippy shared an incisive sense of progressive politics, Johnny often disagreed with his mom who was an avid Hillary supporter while Johnny supported Bernie Sanders and disliked Hillary. But they loved watching movies together and I always enjoyed visiting both and noting that each member of Johnny’s family seemed to own their own clever sense of humor.
During the Iraq war Johnny almost always went to the often very small what must have been weekly or biweekly demonstrations in Five Points South against that war. Johnny continued his political activism throughout his life. He was outspoken in life and in his writing in championing gay rights and he never shied away from speaking and writing of his own sexuality.
Johnny and I often played a conversational game in response to learning of some new American political outrage, asking each other, “What would Steve Whitman say?” We invariably agreed Steve would have said to anyone expressing shock about such events, “Oh, you must have just moved to this country.” Lately Dorah Rosen and I have been asking each other the similar question, “What would Johnny say?” And I am struck by a sudden and tremendous sense of loss because I could never predict Johnny’s profound and brilliantly humorous responses.
Best wishes,
Karl Schaffer
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Johnny became a dear friend to me during the last years of his life. I lived across the street from him in Highland Park and would go visit from time to time. He was a one in a million type of person, someone who led with silliness and loved to point out the absurdities in the world around him. Such a talented man who always had a way with words. And he was so funny… Even when he could barely speak, he was mustering the strength to crack a joke. And he really saw you, he really wanted to get to know you for who you are. It is such a privilege to have known someone like that. I’m grateful to have crossed paths, made music together, and been considered a friend to Johnny. May his light be ever shining through his art and spirit.
Dearly,
Lauren
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There are seeds sprouting everywhere as harvest season is upon us, and these planted through a brilliant life completely beyond my knowing, and growing into stories and memory unfurling from the soil, from all of these graceful people abound. My time was brief.
They nearly all knew Johnny better than I took the opportunity to, and I love them for that, for the seeds a-sproutin’. What a talent, what a lover of many things and a smile for ages. My last message from him is like a Koan flung so deeply true that I am convinced Johnny saw directly into many things, encompassing with joy the minds of others, having mastered his own, and peacefully. At the time I read it, wept, and concluded a long period of exile.
I love and thank him in another place, for saving me in this one. Lessons are not only for the living, but this one was.
"Nice to hear from you. You remember that strange expression “Talk your head off?” As in “he’ll talk your head off.” You’re riding in an open sled in you know Russian winter snow etc, standing. Where do you put the horses? These big animals are sweet but you feel embarrassed not to know them better. How can you get on an animal’s back in the snow and the cold, the white, and ride that animal if you’ve never really talked to that big strong beautiful animal? where will he put your head if he “talks your head off?” Or that big horse’s head full of love. He goddamn talked that horse’s head off."
-Jacquie Cotillard
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Drawing by Julianna Richey
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Johnny exists in my early memories as a vague figure sitting in clusters of chairs with the family's other adults, having conversations that bored me to tears. He was still there much later, when I was an adult sitting in the chairs with him. As we spoke, other people's children ran around, lingering long enough to realize that they, too, couldn't stand to listen to us. To this day, I have moments of introspection as I watch them wander off: Good lord, I've grown up and turned into one of the boring adults. I don't know if Johnny felt like that as he watched my tiny face crumple with displeasure. I just remember his unique, lilting voice as I left the room.
Long before I joined the boring adult conversations, I came out to my family. Because of our family's lack of queerphobia, it didn't occur to me to worry about their reaction. But another reason was that Johnny was right there, obviously gay and obviously beloved. My brother followed me out of the closet, but in a way, we were both following Johnny, the previous generation's proof that we were safe.
As my mental health deteriorated, my father, Johnny's cousin, told me stories about Johnny's struggles. "I got a call from his father. He said, 'Johnny was both obscene and profane towards his mother.' " I still think about that. Both obscene and profane. What a way to put it. Later, as an adult, I developed a pain condition and found a meditation that helped me manage it. I shared it with Johnny, and he taught me about the Buddhist concept of the second arrow, which helped him cope with his own pain.
Like me, Johnny was perhaps better-suited to creative pursuits than everyday reality, which is often baffling and irritating. Everything that lives in our heads is given profound weight; in reality, most of life consists of mundane, Sisyphean tasks like doing dishes and getting the mail. Mail in particular has bedeviled us. Years ago, I told my dad that I couldn't keep up with it. He sighed. "Just like Johnny," he said, and took over handling it for me, just as he did for Johnny. Again, I felt understood. Dad might never have told Johnny about that conversation, but whether or not Johnny knew about it, he knew the infuriating struggle. It felt like, no matter what was happening with me, Johnny was there too.
My partner lives abroad and never got the chance to meet him, so I showed her an article about him instead. She came away with an impression of the kind of larger-than-life artist you encounter in fiction. And I told her yes, that was accurate; the article captured him well. With his wit and the way he thought, he always seemed like a benevolent fae being, kindly and caring but with access to knowledge beyond most mortals' reach. At the same time, childishly, I was comforted by him. With his death, a shield I raised against aloneness since I was barely a teenager has been torn from my hand.
-Libby Swift
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I came to Johnny's work with the release of Antique Sadness on Sweet Wreath in 2021. I was working on an album design for Henry Birdsey's Old Saw project and when I sent him my first draft, he said the cover bore a bit too much resemblance to the Johnny Coley record that just came out. I checked it out and from there I was hooked. That summer I couldn't stop listening to Antique Sadness - I showed it to everyone I knew. Johnny's words echoed through my days. Striking and bold tenderness; his writing displayed to me someone standing in direct confrontation with what was in front of him. As if he was just in some perpetual conversation with life and these little songs or poems were just snapshots. How the person(s) both real and imagined in his world became appendages for touching experience,
Immortal Creatures, Immortal Field. He wrote a lot about the body. His body, the bodies of lovers, the bodies of strangers, the bodies of the natural world. He made whichever body he was describing so sensitive and open that you couldn't help but position yourself in direct contact with it.
It was a blessing to release his record Mister Sweet Whisper with Mississippi Records. I wasn't sure how it was going to be received, wondering if fans of the label would scratch their head at a record described as "southern nightmare jazz and spoken word poetry". Nonetheless, I was pleased as Johnny's work (and the work of the Sweet Wreath crew around him) became a bit more widely recognized and elevated. The work of Jasper, Joel and others has been an inspiration to me and finds deep resonance with the work of Mississippi - helping provide ever so subtle a platform for true, deep, curious humans to transmit their voice from whatever pocket of the world they find themselves.
Thank you to Jasper and all who cared for Johnny and helped guide his work. Thank you to Johnny for being an open spirit and sharing himself with others - it's not an easy thing to do in this life.
- Sam Wenc
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Johnny would often text his newest poems to his friends. This is how I would read most of his poems during this past year. His humor was present in almost every exchange. Here's a recent favorite poem from June...one of his last...with some memorable text exchanges shared between Walker & Johnny: _________________________________________________ so little to know … so little known, so little to know, but, that tiny bit, can I say it? no. so no, so, no. no. can’t say it. can’t play it on any machine. what we gon do? might as well give up and stop whatever we’re doing here. … so I’ve got my old tight wool sport coat on, I pull my overcoat on - it’s cold out here, out here or inside I’m old - I might forget where I started out to go, this late in my life. the sun down - that sun your love. I could describe myself as dead but you do that then who’s talking? the one reading? I survived all these years to read a novel? a mystery? who’m I talking to? another goose like me left behind, left behind, looks up from a book. where’s everybody? I’ve forgotten where I started out to go. the sun’s gone down. A river nearby. I’m just another goose left behind. how bad my situation is isn’t immediately apparent. goose! My mother’s saying. goose! of course I’m a goose, I say. I was born a goose. you’re a goose. keep talking like that - disrespectful to your mother - I’ll break your wings, my father says, he’s a goose too of course. ________________________________________ Walker: Beautiful Johnny! Thank you. Keep it up and you might just write something good like the Bible or the Epic of Gilgamesh or something like that. Johnny: Thanks amigo. I don’t think I could write anything that wasn’t funny or didn’t have, at least, the intention to be funny. Books like you’re talking about can’t be funny. Walker: I’m just goofin.....You’re one of the greats in my book. Johnny: I want to see your book in every bookstore window. My roommate is watching “Braveheart,” in Spanish on his television. He’s seen it twice. In English. He doesn’t understand Spanish. ![]() (And earlier, on May 22) : Walker (sending Johnny a picture of Jimmy Griffin playing music with us): Last seen playing maracas in the Womb Room. Currently his whereabouts are unknown...every step of the way he has evaded authorities and made it out unscathed. But we're close on his tail Sarge. I promise we'll catch 'em, book 'em and lock him away for good, or my name isn't Skip Tracey. Johnny: You'll never put a hand on Griffin, Tracey. Even if you "catch" him, that special "invisible skin," Griffin bought and had applied in Roanoke, Alabama, would prevent anybody, particularly law enforcement achieving any kind of grip, your fringers inevitably slip slip slippin' away. The only way to put him out of business is to prevent his having any access to vinyl. Walker: With some Convalescent Funk and No World Blues we might be able to lead him to one fateful appraisal he just couldn't resist...might have to bring out the Re-Coagulator on this one...
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| Thank you to Karl Schaffer for the images from the 70s |
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A Fireside Chat with J.C. ::: December 20, 2024
The following questions were sent by Jimmy Cajoleas from the Southwest Review for a potential column about Johnny's writing and literary influences. The editors liked the interview so much they sent writer Meaghan Garvey to talk with Johnny further, which turned into a feature essay, Johnny's Dream, published by the Southwest Review in July 2025. Read that story here. Here is the unused initial interview, recorded by Jasper while visiting Johnny at the Greenbriar building:
Tell us a little about your background. Where were you born, and where did you grow up? Were you a reader and a musician from an early age? What first got you into this whole world of poetry and music?
Well, you know, I can remember as a child sitting in a big swivel chair that my parents had and picking up the collected poetry of Robert Frost. And the first poem was "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", and the next poem was something about being in the desert...something growing in the desert that had its inner light. And I loved "Stopping by Woods," but the next one totally lost me, and I just closed the book, you know. But my mother loved poetry, and she did performances on the radio in Alexander City. And I think I grew up with the sense that that was something that people did, you know...that was something you could do. And I don't think you necessarily would...growing up in a normal house in Alabama. I don't think you would necessarily think, "well, I'm going to do some kind of performance around poetry." You know? I just don't think that would occur to many people. But because of my mother, it did occur to me. I remember that poem, The Highwayman. It's a kind of a famous poem and it has a real strong rhythm, and I think that kind of inspired me. And I think that I found that poetry was a kind of special speech that was unusually beautiful and concise. But I don't think I had any reason to think that what I did was like that.
You’ve been publishing poetry since the ’70s with the chapbooks Good Luck (1975), No (’76), and Peasant Attitudes Towards Art (’84). Tell us about those books, and what that process was like. When did you decide to turn towards music and making records?
Well, I didn't write those books in the sense of sitting down and writing a book. What happened was, I wrote those poems, which then became books. I think those books are the most unusual because the poems in those books were written kind of quickly and they weren't meant to be books. They were just poems. I think a lot of people would say they're the best ones, but I'm not sure about that. Because now I like long poems with long lines. And those poems typically are short and have short lines.
I started performing with Davey [Williams] and LaDonna [Smith] probably in the late 70s? And I had one strange experience where Davey and LaDonna were looking at each other, standing next to each other and completely ignoring me. Just completely....it was like I wasn't there. And they were so involved with each other musically and not with me. And that annoyed the hell out of me. So I just kind of busted in real loud with something kind of abrupt, you know, and that tickled Davey. He was amused by that. And so then they kind of included me...
Davey was kind of my hero. He just seemed so cool and so smart to me. And so...I don't know what the word is...so balanced, you know, and so kind of flat and level headed. That amazing music that he created, which only Davey could really play, or would play...that's an interesting thing where that comes from. Because in person, he's, like I say, he's level and calm. And then this torrent of music comes out of that...and I think that people value that music because Davey created it, but they didn't really appreciate it, because it's hard to appreciate. You have to really listen to hear the changes, you know. You have to really listen or you miss it...cause it's so fast and so loud. And I just find it amazing....it's not angry, but it's insistent. It's like "I'm going to do this whether you like it or not." So anyway, I really thought Davey was the coolest person I had ever known.
And I think he felt free when he was working with me to do whatever, you know. It's a strange thing for two grown men to be doing, you know...and often to audiences which included our own mothers. I tell you, it's hard to explain why anybody would do that, except for the amazing feeling of freedom it gives you. It gives you a real feeling of freedom where you're just kind of sailing away and there's no limit. There's no kind of convention. Like...it has four lines and then another four, you know... there's nothing like that. It's just sailing away. And it just feels good to do it, and I think it feels good because of the freedom of it.
Do you have any books or writers that you turn to time and time again? All time personal classics, sacred texts, books like that?
I'm reading Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma probably for the fifth time, because I love him, you know? And Balzac...I've been through periods of reading Balzac more than once. I think I have a thing about reading stuff in French...and why that would be so I don't know...but I think some part of me thinks that's just a cool thing to do. Though somebody else could say, "no, it's not!" you know? (laughs).
Jasper:
Do you think it comes from when you were in France for a while, learning the language?
Johnny:
Yeah, I think it does. I bought a huge number of books while I was studying in France in 1968...paperbacks...and mailed them to myself. And that was a powerful thing. All of those books. I read some Balzac and I read Stendhal and I read Paul Valéry's L'idée fixe.
What was the writing and recording process for Mister Sweet Whisper? It’s an album that is so strange and mysterious and utterly compelling, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything like it. How did you capture a feeling like that?
I think that it happened pretty fast and I think it's typical of me in that I'm imagining something and presenting it as real. Like that number "Club Roma." I'm talking about Rome and these clubs and that's all completely made up and anybody who had been to Rome would know that.
But I don't really know what inspired it except that desire to make up something different. To make up something that didn't exist and speak of it as if it existed. That's a strong impulse I have. And I think you can see that on that record, you know. And people like that record. I got a kick out of it. And it's always changing. It has a wider audience, partly because it's made up and sometimes when you make something up, it catches more than just itself.
The one about the Flesh Vehicle is, to me, very interesting. Because it starts out about being in the bed and kind of half waking up and then it sort of turns into a thing about this white figure, which I think actually exists in England...in English folklore. You know, it's this big figure that people see off in the distance...And then the speaker is with a woman and the woman is saying, "what if the car was alive?" And that's a pretty strange story in itself. But, you know, something I've noticed is despite being gay, I'm always implying a thing with women. The speaker is with a woman. And I find that really strange. But it just comes out that way. It's like being with a woman who is your partner in crime? A woman who is involved with you in this kind of sorcery...and kind of making these things happen. I've always had close friends who were women. And I think it's basically kind of true that I was looking for people like me, you know. Like it says in that song [They're Dreaming Me].
Are there any books that inspired Mister Sweet Whisper?
Not particularly. But there was a period when I was very into surrealism and Paul Éluard. I just love his poetry. It's so cool and clear. It doesn't seem to strive for effect. It seems to be these simple sentences, which somehow are open to the sky, you know? I mean, they're just fantastic. I really think he's just a wonderful poet, and I love that picture of him with his hand like that (holds up hand with his palm facing out). Have you seen that?
I think that writing for me is a matter of repeating improvisation. Until it sounds right...and I think that I write and improvise in the same way. But when I'm improvising, I don't have but one shot. And when I'm writing, theoretically, I could just keep on forever, you know?
But in order to start, I have to have a phrase or even a sentence that produces a double take...like something where you kind of go, What? But it has to work. It has to catch your imagination.
Are there any books about music or musicians that you love or recommend?
Well, you know, I love Otis Redding. I mean, I love Otis. I cannot tell you how much I love him.
And I like the Rolling Stones. That was the music that was coming out when I was really young. I always liked the Rolling Stones better than The Beatles because they seemed a little more cynical you know...a little rougher. And The Beatles were like...these sort of nice guys, you know? When I was working in a grocery store in Gadsden I bought "Aftermath." And that was when records were all there were, you know... I also like to listen to this one Youtube video of Lukas Ligeti & Gary Lucas at The Stone....I've listened to it maybe five times. I just love it.
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Poem from Johnny:
Jan 25, 2025
poem the first part in french
on a chante’ presque trop
(We sang almost too much.)
on a dance’ juste assez.
(We danced just enough.)
then we sat on the floor and admired, very
sincerely, as if we were looking at great
paintings,
as if we were looking at Gauguins,
each others clothes.
I remember thinking, very sincerely,
“that little blue hat is perfect.
Where did she find that little blue hat?”
We made plans to play tennis the next
afternoon.
Then we actually did play tennis the next
afternoon.
It was a little scary how perfect everything
was.
The source of that perfection was her little
blue hat
which she left on the floor where she’d been
sitting
on purpose.
“Sometimes I wonder if it’s still there,” she
said at my funeral.
I was the first one to die.
“He was always the lucky one,” MaryEllen
said.
My funeral was perfect.
I was buried wearing a very charming
jacket.
A very charming jacket I just happened to
have on when I died.
“He was always the lucky one,” MaryEllen
said.
“I’ve been looking for a nice casual jacket
like that I could wear to little casual
outdoor parties and to my funeral all
my life
but Johnny just had one.
Probably somebody left it in his car.
He was so lucky it doesn’t even make sense.
But it’s true. He really was that lucky.”
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