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The Kerouac of Kitsch has died: Rod McKuen R.I.P.
01.30.2015
07:46 am
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Rod McKuen died Thursday. He was 81. Cause of death was pneumonia.

Rod McKuen was to Jack Kerouac what vending machine coffee is to espresso. He was a safe suburbanite version of a beatnik, Maynard G. Krebs with a slightly better work ethic. McKuen’s pasteurized prose was more suited to a Holiday Inn lounge than a North Beach jazz joint. And while McKuen wrote prolifically and read in a husky Chianti-stained voice that oozed consonants and vowels like candle wax no one would mistake his louche slackery for good poetry. But there was something soothing and pleasantly sunny in his style that evoked a certain Southern California grooviness easily mistaken for Zen wisdom. If you read a line slowly enough and pause periodically for dramatic effect almost anything can sound profound. McKuen mistook vagueness for mysticism and evoked the erotic with all of the sexuality of a stuffed chihuahua. Fifty shades of beige.

McKuen was syringed into that moment in the sixties when Timothy Leary’s acidity and Hugh Hefner’s cum-drenched Playboy philosophy refluxed into an uncomfortable mix of free love, drugs and very expensive architecture. If Malibu Beach had a poet laureate it would have been Rod. Imagine a love child born of the interspecial mating of Lee Hazlewood and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. With his windswept blonde hair and Jesus spats, McKuen was a lachrymose beach bum that Serge Gainsbourg would have gladly beaten to a suntanned pulp.
 

Bob McFadden & Dor “The Beat Generation” (composed and arranged by Rod McKuen, 1959)
 
McKuen possessed a weird kind of kitschy goodness, a Hallmark Greeting card version of hipness that was as heartwarming as one of Margaret Keane’s big-eyed orphans. He was too nice of a guy to get riled up about even when his bad poetry was selling millions of copies of books while a cat like Bukowski was working in a post office.

If Rod McKuen had been a rock song he would have been Friend And Lover’s “Reach Out Of The Darkness.” And that’s kind of a cool song - hard to hate, hard to get a bead on, just slipping under the threshold where things can turn from something innocuous into something that can drive a man to homicide.
 

 
Here’s Rod McKuen reading his poem “A Cat Named Sloopy” on The Mike Douglas Show in 1969.

Every night she’d sit in the window among the avocado plants waiting for me to come home (my arms full of canned liver and love).

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.30.2015
07:46 am
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The experimental noise music of Rod McKuen
06.14.2010
01:00 pm
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Although it sounds like a string of non-sequiters, America’s favorite poet, under the hilarious pseudonym Heins Hoffman-Richter, was behind this 1974 quasi-experimental music record. And y’know what ? It’s not half bad as far as quasi-experimental music goes !
via Weirdo records:

Subtitled: Symphony for Tape Delay, IBM Instruction Manual, & Ohm Septet. Rod McKuen‘s label Stanyan put out this exploito/fake avant-classical record, and since Stanyan basically was McKuen, you can bet your bottom dollar that Rod himself did the cut & pasting here. Big chunks of samples from Raymond Scott’s ‘Soothing Sounds For Baby’, feedback, tape echo, sound effects from the local beach, etc. Liner notes & track titles just scream of Rod’s writing.

Posted by Brad Laner
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06.14.2010
01:00 pm
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