"Ladies After MIdnight"
Leningrad and Barcelona, September 1989
January 27, 2024.
16 days ago I fell off my bicycle, Thursday evening dark here during rush-hour, so to speak, in outer Algiers of New Orleans, and broke my left hip on the grass-and-earth median of MacArther Drive and Herald Street. Six strangers stopped to help as I lay in the cold there—Sage, Don, Erin, two ladies driving SUVs, and Officer “Big Mike” Reynolds of the NOPD, who turned on his flashers. Everything since has been optimal toward recovery. Total hip-replacement for the multiple fracture by Surgeon Welsey Clark and his team that includes assistant John Kepler was smooth as glass two weeks ago. Help from Day and Night Nurses at West Jeff Hospital—Emergency and In-Patient—was steadily superb till Discharge on MLK Day. Home-Care from Omni and especially from therapist Dion Liurett, a Houma Choctaw and a flautist who always proceeds from his heart and years of expertise, has moved me back into capacities exponentially. Maryse is—every. day—a champion and most encouraging and witty companion.
What the fall and subsequent days have imparted is the need for me to GET BUSY with urgencies of 2024 (such as World Economic Forum nonsensical, would be tyrannies—and with work from years past that needs “a record”.
So here is a song that came to me in Spain, September 9, 1989, ‘late night;, as the notebook entry says, after a week-plus in the Soviet Union’s Leningrad and then Barcelona on travel and work sponsored. by Athletes United for Peace. (Thank you forever, Guy Benjamin!) Women who worked in the Chaika, next to Nevsky Prospect, and in bars and streets of the Ramblas, haunted my dreams, vivid as some women were for Picasso.
Here’s a recording of “Ladies …” from one week ago. I hope that they touch you too.
"Ladies After Midnight"
Ladies after midnight
Are showing in their skirts
Stockings over sores
Lipstick where it hurts
Businessmen are scouting
Upright in their suits
Outside Sex Shops scan mouthfuls
Like they eat picked fruits
La-Da-Dah Da-Da-Dah ….
Carmen works the Ramblas
Down where seamen used to dive
Galina in the Chaika
Tricks for Soviet Mafia
Carmen in her spike heels
Stamps after toreadors
Galina under powder
Wants more for her daughter
La-Da-Dah Da-Da-Dah ….
These women called for cheating
Pay cost of love that's lost
Legs round backs of johns
They see smiles and stares like stone
They think of skipping stones.
First, hand-written in Notebook, Spain. September 9, 1989
Written with music from my melody by DHYANI DHARMA and recorded with THE SUSPECT MANY (John Baker accordion, GEORGE CREMASCHI fretless bass, DHYANI DHARMA guitar, BABATUNDE LEA drums-set) in December 1989 at Olde West studio in San Francisco for our Album WE COULD USE THE RAIN.
Wonders of the Internet—someone unknown to me, STEVEN K, has posted on YouTube this Track, “FINE AS YOU ARE”, from WE COULD USE THE RAIN. It features LEWIS JORDAN on Alto Saxophone and JOHN KARR on Midi Guitar.