Interview #26: Mark Terrill

CALIFORNIA-born but based in Germany since the 1980s, the poet, memoirist and translator Mark Terrill has led several lives within his 71 year span. Born into a liberal and creative West Coast family in 1953, by his teenage years, in the later 1960s, he was familiar with the burgeoning culture of political protest and radical art and well aware of the psychedelic wave that was changing hearts and minds in a USA charged with a near-revolutionary fervour.

He met Ken Kesey as an adolescent before heading out on his own adventures across the globe, initially at sea as part of the merchant navy and then later in various corners of Africa and Europe, where he finally settled in the port city of Hamburg.

An early and avid consumer of the Beats, Terrill was inspired by Kerouac’s On the Road to lead his own peripatetic existence, always observing, often writing and, at one point, working under the wing of celebrated novelist Paul Bowles in Tangier. Terrill had early success as a writer – he has well over 20 collections of verse and prose, including Bread & Fish (2002) and Great Balls of Doubt (2020), and a considerable number of translations to his name – but pursued multiple careers on his winding journey.

Pictured above: Mark Terrill at the International Literature Festival, Berlin, 2008

His Wikipedia CV alone is remarkable – ‘dishwasher, woodcutter, gardener, bartender, taxi driver, gravedigger, sawmill worker, deckhand and welder’ – but he was also a member of the post-punk group Ugly Stick and worked as tour manager for leftfield rock bands such as American Music Club and the Mekons.

The great Lawrence Ferlinghetti commented of him: ‘Mark Terrill, the true poet and “forlorn observer” of the world he sees as essentially forlorn, if not absurd, if not entirely hopeless, and nothing on the end of his fork to really wax ecstatic about…But his poetry is far from hopeless. It is a hard light to alleviate the situation of the world as he sees it.’

During the summer MALCOLM PAUL, a regular interviewer for Rock and the Beat Generation, caught up with the always enticing, richly lucid and consistently honest Terrill, who shared a kaleidoscopic palette of stories, reflections and opinions, carrying the spirit of America’s revolutionary times, in literature and music, art and life, on into the new millennium and now on the opposite edge of the Atlantic…

Malcolm Paul: Mark, you were born in Berkeley, California, in 1953 and later moved to the ‘unincorporated mountain community of Sky Londa’. To many readers – especially Europeans – seeing ‘Berkeley, California’, ‘mountain community’ (I had to look up ‘unincorporated community’), it would be assumed that liberal anti-establishment alternative living/counterculture was in your DNA, perhaps even a psychedelic DNA! So the path you chose to follow throughout your life was, for want of a better word, pre-destined? A mix of nature and nurture? It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on that.

Mark Terrill: Well, no one just drops out of the sky and starts at zero. Preceding every birth is some kind of parental backstory. My parents met at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign around 1950. My mother was from Oak Park, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago), and my father was from Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. My mother was studying art and my father was studying philosophy and psychology.

In 1951 my parents got married and my father enlisted in the local National Guard, in the hope of avoiding being drafted into the Korean War. As fate would have it, his National Guard unit was called up for duty in Korea. My parents drove out Route 66 to Lompoc, California, where my father was due to undergo basic training at Camp Cooke before shipping out to Korea from San Francisco.

Prior to that they found an apartment for my mother, now pregnant with me, on Milvia Street in Berkeley. My father was attached to a MASH unit in Korea, and on July 1st, 1953, I was born, my mother driving herself to the hospital in their old second-hand Austin.

Shortly after my father returned from Korea we moved south to San Jose, where my father enrolled at San Jose State University, and shortly after that we moved to Palo Alto, where my father enrolled at Stanford to get his PhD. On August 18th, 1958, KPIX San Francisco broadcast a special TV documentary entitled The Fine Line, about LSD and current research that was being done at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, where my father was involved in the research program.

The producers had asked my father if he would be willing to be interviewed while on LSD as a feature of the documentary, to which he agreed. The show aired at 7:30pm, which for a five-year old kid like me, must have been past my bedtime but, for some reason, I was allowed to stay up and watch it with my parents.

I remember distinctly the following day pedaling around the block on my tricycle and asking all our neighbors, proudly, if they had seen my father on TV. And yes, some of them had. The entire 60-minute broadcast can be seen here, in two parts:

The Fine Line, Part I – Bay Area Television Archive (sfsu.edu)

The Fine Line, Part II – Bay Area Television Archive (sfsu.edu)

Later, probably at my insistence, my father took me to see his office at the Mental Research Institute, which was just a half a block away from where we lived. I was also shown the room where the subjects were given LSD, a low-ceilinged space furnished much like a living room, with a couch, coffee table, comfortable chairs, subdued lighting, wall-to-wall carpeting; a quiet, comfortable setting.

There were various items on the table like a kaleidoscope, puzzles, etc. There was also a stereo hi-fi system and a very eclectic collection of records, such as Indian music, classical music, sound effect records, African drumming, etc. Installed in the wall was a two-way mirror, so that the researchers in the adjacent room could observe the proceedings. The whole scenario made a huge and lasting impression on me.

Later I learned that it was that very room where Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky experienced their first LSD trip, administered by my father. Many years later, when I met Ginsberg and Orlovsky at one of Ken Kesey’s Perennial Hoo-Haws in Eugene, Oregon, I mentioned that episode to them and we had some humorous reminiscences about losing their LSD-virginity.

Around 1961 we moved to Sky Londa, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, southwest of Palo Alto. Two years later, Ken Kesey, who had also been involved in a similar drug research program at the Menlo Park Veteran’s Hospital, moved from his Perry Lane, Palo Alto, house to La Honda, just down the road from Sky Londa.

I used to see him going by in the ‘Furthur’ school bus with the Merry Pranksters, on their way to the Acid Tests and other events. That is basically the setting in which I grew up. Call it destiny or DNA or whatever; a certain propensity was certainly in the air.

MP: Did you come from a family/community that was free thinking and liberal/counterculture orientated? Were you exposed to the arts and culture at an early age? Perhaps at school you had liberated teachers. Your having ‘dropped out’ might suggest you didn’t feel you fitted in the education system – is that a fair assumption? Or even accurate?

MT: My mother was one of the most well-read people I have ever met, on totally familiar terms with the entire American, European, and Russian canon of literature. She was also extremely interested in art, magic, the occult, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, etc.

My father shared those interests but was also interested in the writings of C.G. Jung, P.D. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, Ramana Maharshi, etc., as well as Buddhism, philosophy, and psychology. Each house we lived in was full of books, with bookshelves from the floor to the ceiling, dispersed throughout the house.

My mother had ongoing subscriptions to all the major radical and left-wing publications at the time, such as The Catholic Worker, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, The Realist, Ramparts, The Oracle, The Berkeley Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press, etc. She eventually went back to school in the 60s and 70s, first at the San Francisco Art Institute, and then at Stanford, where she received a master’s degree in painting.

I hated school from the first day to the last. Once I had the learned the basics of reading, writing, and math, the rest seemed like an interminable waste of time. It just seemed like an endless indoctrination to me, being spoon-fed all these pre-digested ‘facts’ with no opportunity to question anything, or to experience anything empirically.

The teachers would be going on about the Magna Carta or about algebra or whatever and I would be staring out the window, watching the school custodian mowing the lawn, wondering about what kind of life he led, what his home-life was like, what he thought and felt.

I was insatiably curious about the world around me but that’s not what was being taught in school. I used to cut class and go to the library and read the Encyclopedia Britannica, to try and fill in what I felt to be the gaps in the school curriculum. Obviously, the California public school system was not for me.

MP: Did you read a lot as you were growing up? If so what kind of books? In all the interviews I’ve done recently, it has been the early teens that are the formative years, as far as reading and ideas were concerned (it certainly was for me). As you were in your teens in the sixties it must have been a time when you were exposed to a lot of the upheaval culturally/socially – ‘Summer of Love’, etc., especially in California. Can you share some of those memories? Were you very conscious of all the social upheaval going on around you growing up?

MT: What else to do in a house full of books but read? Reading was second nature to me, like breathing, eating, sleeping, or any other bodily function. Even now I read three to four books per week, usually reading several books simultaneously. I remember as a kid having my own set of bookshelves in my room, with my own personal library, but I don’t remember specific titles.

I do recall reading The Road to Agra by Aimée Sommerfelt, which was a sort of road-trip and an introduction to foreign, non-western culture, both of which piqued my interest. I read Jack London, later Joseph Conrad, Steinbeck, the short stories of Hemingway, etc. My parents also gave me books about science that were geared for children, about Konrad Lorenz, Ivan Pavlov, etc., which got me interested in animal (and human) behavior, conditioning, etc.

In my parents’ library I also came across a copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, by Paul Reps, which made a huge impression on me and was the beginning of a life-long interest in Zen Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. Also, my mother had a knack for slipping me the right book at the right time. I think I was in the 8th grade when she gave me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, which I totally related to.

Pictured above: Terrill on board, 1983. Seafaring was an important part of the poet’s development

Later, after I’d left home and had already traveled extensively throughout the Pacific Northwest, I returned to my parents’ for a brief spell while I had my wisdom teeth removed and while I was convalescing my mother gave me a copy of On the Road, which I related to immediately, having had so many similar experiences myself.

Yes, growing up in the San Franciso Bay Area in the 60s had a profound and lasting effect on me. I saw the Doors, the Seeds, Janis Joplin at Winterland, Country Joe & the Fish at the Avalon Ballroom, the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West, the Stones at Altamont, etc. There were also semi-regular be-ins at El Camino Park in Palo Alto, which I seldom missed.

My mother was attending the San Francisco Art Institute at that time, which was a pretty wild place back then, and I accompanied her there on many occasions. Once, at a party at Medway Forest (a commune in the Sky Londa vicinity), I happened to see Ken Kesey there. He was just there as another guest, standing there smoking a joint with a couple of other guests. As I moved in closer to bask in his celebrity-hipster-prankster glow, he turned and handed me the joint he’d been smoking. I was only about 14 or so and had never smoked pot or taken any drugs at that point, but in that situation, turning down his offer did not seem like a viable alternative.

That pretty much opened the door for me in terms of experimenting with drugs and consciousness-expansion. Later, together with some friends, we put together our own psychedelic light show which we put on at many concerts, including some parties at the San Francisco Art Institute.

While attending Pacific High School in the late 60s (an alternative school based partly on the principles of Summerhill School in the UK), we made frequent ‘field trips’ to take part in various anti-war demonstrations throughout the Bay Area. Once we took part in a sit-in at the Oakland Induction Center intended to block the busses full of draftees being sent off to Vietnam. The National Guard was there in full force, standing by with tear gas and shotguns. So, in retrospect, it was not just a matter of exposure but also participation. I felt like I was a part of that ‘social upheaval’.

MP: At what age did you first encounter the Beats? In poetry of their novels? You mentioned you’d read On the Road. What about ‘Howl’ and, if so, at what age? You are an established poet yourself. Did you read Beat poets and, if you did, which poems/poets/writers particularly inspired you? Online information seems to imply you didn’t start writing until you were 20+. Is that true? If not can you give us a true picture of when you started writing? And what kind of subjects appealed to you?

MT: I knew vaguely about the Beats from my parents and had been in North Beach and City Lights Books with my parents many times, but reading On the Road when I was around 20 or so was my first real encounter with Beat writing. I felt a very strong affinity for Kerouac and his ‘vision’ right away; his compassion, his ideas about ‘spontaneous prose’, his whole take on America.

But it wasn’t the Beats who sparked my interest in poetry, it was Charles Bukowski. Long before Bukowski became a household name, he used to write a column in the Los Angeles Free Press, entitled ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’. Whenever I passed the shelf in the living room of my parents’ house, where all the periodicals were laid out, I always looked first to see if the current Los Angeles Free Press had arrived, so I could read the newest instalment of his writing.

A few years later, while browsing a bookstore in Palo Alto, a horrific face on the cover of a book on a display shelf suddenly jumped out at me. It was Bukowski: his gnarly, pockmarked face gracing the cover of the newly released, 1972, City Lights edition of Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. I bought it and took it home and read it straight through.

Following that, City Lights published Notes of a Dirty Old Man, which collected most of the columns written for the Los Angeles Free Press and Open City. From there I went directly to his poetry, consuming everything I could get my hands on. Soon after that I obtained a second-had portable typewriter and began writing my first poems, which –as you can imagine – were very Bukowski-derivative, to say the least.

MP: If you wrote poetry at an early age – teens – were you more likely to be influenced by a poet like Whitman than say Frost, Crane, or Lowell? A book like Lowell’s Life Studies, Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, Plath’s Ariel changed the way I/we wrote: we were influenced by the ‘confessional’ poets, both in America and England. Did they influence your poetry in any way?

MT: I didn’t get into any of those poets until much, much later, and by then it was way too late. None of those poets influenced me in any way. I wasn’t into confessing, I was into telling it like it is, with Bukowski and Kerouac as my primary role models. Later I was quite influenced by the so-called New American Poetry, the New York School (O’Hara, Ashbery, Schuyler, Koch, etc.), as well as the second-generation New York School (Padgett, Gallup, Berrigan, etc.), and then by the Angel Hair/Bolinas poets (Tom Clark, Lewis Warsh, Anne Waldman, Joanne Kyger, Alice Notely, Bernadette Mayer, Harris Schiff, etc.). Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Bob Kaufman, John Wieners, and Greogory Corso were also influences, as well as Gertrude Stein and Jack Spicer.

MP: You ‘dropped out’ of school (as we said), took on an itinerant lifestyle, supporting yourself by taking on often menial labour (something we also have in common). Your decision to follow this path and live a freewheeling lifestyle –rejecting the normal American way of doing things – living and achieving, having status. How much was in you already and how much one could say was Beat/ counterculture inspired? Or how much was it down to your own restless, rebellious searching? What I’m asking is how strong was the Beat influence in your life?

MT: To be honest, I don’t think the Beats were any more significant than any other of the many influences I was exposed to growing up in California in the 60s and 70s. I anyway wouldn’t say that it was the Beats as a group that influenced me, but rather individual poets, many of them who happened to be included under the Beat rubric.

When you consider the differences between William Burroughs and Gary Snyder, or Philip Whalen and Gergory Corso, it shows you just how loosely defined and ambivalent the Beat moniker actually is. On the other hand, I find it dismaying to see how swiftly the Beats are dismissed these days, as though they were nothing more than a passing trend.

That probably has more to do with the way they were portrayed and marketed by the media. But one shouldn’t forget just how conservative and straight-laced America was back then, and what risks the Beats were taking in order to liberate expression and break down barriers, and the fact that both Ginsberg and Burroughs were censored and had to fight for their rights and freedom of speech.

And Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs have all written works that are now part of the canon of American literature, and thus still relevant. But I think I would have chosen the path I did in life even without the influence of the Beats. Basically, for me, they were just another station of the cross.

MP: You eventually got your seaman’s ticket (as we call it in England) and went to sea. Were you aware Kerouac was in the merchant marine. If so, did that influence you? Or was it just a means to an end? Did you enjoy your time away at sea? Did you get to see a lot of the world?

MT: Yes, I was aware that Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder and others were in the merchant marine, at one time or another, but I don’t think that influenced my decision to go to sea. I think that goes back to my reading Joseph Conrad, Jack London, etc.

After failing to finish high school or college, I was anxious to make up for lost time, but I had no aspirations or ambitions for the usual route of college, career, family, etc. Combining work and travel seemed like the most sensible way to go for me. At first I quite enjoyed shipping out, especially the travel aspect, which enabled me to visit the Philippines, Japan, Pakistan Singapore, Hong Kong, Alaska, Hawaii, the east and west coasts of the USA, the Panama Canal, the Virgin Islands, the Azores, and eventually Europe.

Sailing in and out of foreign ports, being at sea for long stretches of time surrounded by nothing but water, wind, waves, dolphins, whales, seabirds, accompanied by incredible sunrises and sunsets; all that was an incredible boon. But the negative flipside of all that was the unbelievable displays of revolting human behavior, be it severe alcoholism, violence, racism, sexism, corruption, dishonesty, manipulation, and all kinds of sheer brutality and cruelty, be it physical or psychological. Eventually it became obvious that there was no future for me in the US merchant marine.

MP: In 1982 you travelled to Morocco and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts Writing Workshop with Paul Bowles. You in your thirties by then. What was going through your mind at the time? Did you feel that your writing would benefit from working with established writers like Paul Bowles? Was it a successful venture? Bowles had a reputation for being difficult to get on with, and was very keen on smoking ‘kif’ all day. Is there any truth in that account?*

MT: I had been an admirer of the writings and translations of Paul Bowles for many years. My extensive travels had piqued my interest in non-western cultures, to the point that I was considering leaving America to live somewhere else, perhaps Asia or some other totally foreign culture.

Bowles had been living in Tangier for decades and had totally immersed himself in all things North African, which had a profound effect on his writing. I had already attended some writing workshops in San Francisco and, actually, I was quite skeptical about their utility, but the opportunity to go to Tangier and study with Bowles seemed too good to miss out on. As to whether or not it was a ‘successful venture’, I guess that depends on your criteria.

Pictured above: The poet with novelist Paul Bowles, a connection Terrill has written about

As I said in my mini-memoir about my time in Tangier with Paul Bowles, Here to Learn, I didn’t necessarily learn how to write, but I did learn a lot about what it means to be a an expatriate writer, increasing that knowledge with many successive visits to Tangier over the years. In the Wikipedia page about Paul Bowles, in the section about his teaching the writing workshops in Tangier, it says:

‘In the summers of 1980 and 1982, Bowles conducted writing workshops in Morocco, at the American School of Tangier (under the auspices of the School of Visual Arts in New York). These were considered successful. Among several students who have become successful authors are Rodrigo Rey Rosa,^[34] the 2004 Winner of the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature, and Mark Terrill.^[35] Bowles designated Rey Rosa as the literary heir of his and Jane Bowles’ estates.^[36]’

Now I don’t know who considered the workshops to be ‘successful’, nor do I know what criteria they used to conclude that Rodrigo Rey Rosa and I are ‘successful authors’. I don’t know about Rodrigo, but I certainly could not live from what I earned as a writer/translator. But all in all it was a very rewarding experience and I’m glad I went.

I found Bowles quite easy to get along with. His quirky humor and existential humility seemed to mask an erudite wisdom. Yes, he did like his kif, and so did I.

MP: If you don’t mind me saying so, it strikes me that up until you moved to, and settled in, Hamburg in 1984 you were a very restless person who perhaps needed a direction. Would it be true to say that about yourself? Why did you ‘jump ship’ (literally or metaphorically) when you got to Germany? Can you talk about that a bit. It seems on the evidence to have been an excellent life choice to have made. Writing and publishing, it’s as if the floodgates opened. Prior to moving to Germany your bibliography has a publishing gap between 1978 and 1998. Why the gap?

MT: There was no lack of direction. There were too many directions. And after switching over from shipping out to tour managing with bands, I continued to travel extensively up till about 1994. Hamburg became my home base because that’s where I met my wife, while travelling through Europe with a Eurail Pass after the writing workshop in Tangier with Paul Bowles in 1982. I’d also become very interested in the films of Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Werner Herzog, as well as the writings of Peter Handke (Brinkmann and Fauser came much later). So Germany was already looking quite interesting to me.

The publishing gap is easy to explain. When I first started writing poetry I also started looking around at the various small press publications and ‘little’ magazines that were coming out then, of which there were many. I was mainly looking at the publications where Bukowski was publishing his poetry, which introduced me to a whole new array of writers, poets, and publishers.

There was Marvin Malone’s Wormwood Review, John Bennett’s Vagabond and countless others. It so happened that John Bennett’s wife, Cindy, was studying painting in the same graduate program at Stanford as my mother, and when she had a party once at her studio, Cindy came with her husband John, and of course we spent a lot of time talking about poetry, the small press, Bukowski, and so on.

I mentioned that I was writing poetry myself and John suggested that I send him some work. I’d only written a handful of poems at that point and had not sent out anything, but, encouraged by John, I sent him five poems. Much to my surprise, he wrote me back saying that he would be taking all five poems for upcoming issues of Vagabond. I was thrilled, to say the least.

My first submission of poetry, all five poems accepted, and due to appear in the same magazine with Charles Bukowski, Doug Blazek, Al Masarik, and other popular ‘underground’ poets of the time. Emboldened by that bit of luck, I wrote more poems and sent them out to other magazines, but then began to experience what all beginning poets experience, the dreaded rejection slip.

I realized then that what I needed to do was get out into the world and gather as much experience as possible, as varied as possible, in order to have a cache of empirical knowledge from which I could distill the necessary ingredients for my writing. I wasn’t interested in making things up. I was still interested in ‘telling it like it is’, except how can you know how it is unless you’ve been there to see for yourself? So after that initial chapbook published by Triton Press, I basically stopped writing and started taking notes, while working and travelling for the next 20 years or so.

MP: If the Beats were looking for ‘satori’ on the road did you find yours in Hamburg?

MT: No satori in Hamburg. Just my wife. Equally important if not more so.

MP: Do you have a spiritual side? Some of the authors who were active in the Beat era/counterculture have become Zen Buddhists in later years. Are/were you tempted in that direction? The back of back of your poetry collection, Great Balls of Doubt, has some interesting endorsements. You are described by Anne Waldman as ‘An ally of the Zen wing of the New American Poetry…….of observation and witness.’ So is there a Zen connection?

MT: Like I said, reading Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, the anthology edited by Paul Reps, when I was still just a teenager had a big effect on me, and I have been interested in Zen Buddhism ever since, my interest expanding over the years to include other schools of Buddhism (Madhyamika, Yogacara, etc.) and classical Buddhist philosophy.

Over the last ten years I’ve become increasingly interested in phenomenology and the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, Sarte, and Merleau-Ponty. There are many correlations between Buddhist philosophy, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind. Studying and fleshing out those correlations is pretty much my chief interest these days.

In August I will be attending another session of Summer School in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind at the University of Copenhagen. It will be my third year. Anne Waldman’s engagement with Buddhism is well known, and obviously she picked up on those aspects in my writing.       

MP: Do you think Ferlinghetti summed up you and your poetry well in his oft-repeated comment about your being ‘the true poet’ and ‘forlorn observer’ of the world’?

MT: I guess so. The ‘observation’/‘observer’ is something they both picked up on.

MP: The Beats were well known for their love of jazz. It’s almost the soundtrack to the movement. Certainly blaring out in Dean’s car as he drives across America with Sal, as stated below:

‘The narrative takes place in the years 1947 to 1950, is full of Americana, and marks a specific era in jazz history, somewhere between its Charlie Parker ‘Ornithology’ period and another period that began with Miles Davis’

Were you influenced in your early years by the Beats’ favourite musicians? The bebop players, John Coltrane, Bird, Miles Davis, Monk? Did you listen to those musicians growing up and did it make any impression on you? Or perhaps you were a listener to West Coast jazz…

MT: I’ve never been able to connect with jazz music in any form. That’s not a criticism – I just don’t think my brain was wired to be receptive to that kind of music.

MP: Later on music played a different role in your life. You were, according to one publisher, ‘The lead guitarist in a post-punk/anti-rock band Ugly Stick’. That definitely doesn’t sound like finger-clicking/bongo-bashing jazz loved by the Beats. How did you become involved in a band as a lead guitarist?

MT: Ugly Stick was an idea I had in reaction to the burgeoning punk and post-punk scene in San Francisco in the late 70s, early 80s. A lot of what was going on then was just abominable, and I felt a strong urge to react, in an almost Dadaesque way.

MP: Did the band get you to write the lyrics as well? Writers often try their hand at lyrics. Several have confessed to be being bad Dylan imitators.

MT: I wrote one single song for Ugly Stick and it was an instrumental. We anyway had two brilliant songwriters: Tim Vaughn and Wayne Newcome. I would not recommend imitating Dylan to anyone – you can only fail.

MP: Did you have Bob Dylan as an influence in your life in anyway? If yes, in what way?

MT: No Dylan influence whatsoever, despite all his brilliance.

MP: Later on when you moved to Germany and, according to Wikipedia, you became the tour manager of two bands, the Mekons and Mark Eitzel’s band, American Music Club. I must confess I was surprised to see your name linked with the Mekons. In the late 1970s I used to travel to Leeds in Yorkshire to visit a friend of mine who was training to be a doctor at Jimmy’s, the big teaching hospital there. When he wasn’t studying, we would hang around the pubs where bands like the Mekons, Gang of Four and Delta Five hung out. It was not unusual to sit with the bands and talk politics and music. I’m sure you had an interesting experience with the Mekons. Mark Eitzel I don’t know much about, but I like his music with the band.)

MT: I worked for both bands for many, many years. I also worked as a tour manager for some booking agencies here in Germany and freelanced as well, for a total of about ten years. I toured with all different kinds of bands, including Public Enemy, the Triffids, Primal Scream, Tav Falco, the Dead Milkmen, the Gun Club (as driver and stage manager/guitar tech), and many others. It was an interesting time but in no way a sustainable lifestyle. Basically it was an extension of the work/travel routine from my time as a merchant seaman.

Both American Music Club and the Mekons are still very good friends of mine. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been a part of what they were doing for all those years, and had the opportunity to witness so many fine concerts all across Europe and the USA.

MP: Anything more about the role of music in your life and any influence it might have had on your writing?

MT: I can’t say that music had any real influence on my writing.

MP: I wonder if I knocked on your door now what you would be listening to?

MT: Probably Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry or King Tubby or Niney the Observer or some other kind of dub music, of which I am a huge fan. You might just as well catch me listening to Sidi Touré, the Incredible String Band, Jimi Hendrix, or Motörhead. I’ve been listening to the newest John Cale CD, POPticalillusion, but I’m having a hard time getting into it. It’s like he’s trying to be ingratiatingly hip and artistically oblique at the same time. Okay, that’s what he’s always done, but it seems like he’s taken that concept even farther with this new work.

MP: Do you listen to music when you are writing/working? Do your many cats mind?

MT: Yes, but then only instrumental music – dub, Brian Eno, classical Indian music, Steve Reich, etc. The cats have been weaned on all of the above.

MP: Did you listen to what the Brits call ‘krautrock’ (I don’t call it that), Can, Amon Düül, Faust, etc? Kosmische rock sounds better than that other ridiculous name tag, though I’m told German bands don’t care. Faust’s onetime road manager told me that – but he was English.

MT: Krautrock is great and I still listen to it.

MP: Drugs and booze? Did you manage to avoid that path?

MT: I think it’s pretty obvious from my background that some kind of encounter with drugs and booze was inevitable. After smoking that initial joint with Ken Kesey I embarked on a veritable expedition in the realm of chemically-fueled consciousness-expansion that lasted many years.

I think I tried and consumed just about everything that was available, which was quite a smorgasbord in the SF Bay Area in the 1960s, but my preferences remained with the psychoactive, mind-expanding stuff, like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, etc. Uppers and downers didn’t seem to get me where I needed to go, they were really just diversions.

Fortunately there were no dependency problems, no bad trips, no trouble with the law, and, in retrospect, I greatly value all the experience gained as a result of my psychedelic-Argonautic-expeditionary ventures.

MP: As I said I have travelled a lot in Germany all my life, as recently as a month ago, in fact, but never lived there. I did however live and work in Switzerland, in Luzern, a German-speaking part so I kinda see a bit of an oxymoron here in say ‘Swiss Beat’ or ‘German Beat’. It’s almost as if the American sense of abandon – disorientation – restless travelling, disorder, runs contra to certainly a society like the Swiss. So I wonder if German Beats are a bit of that contradiction… Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Jorg Fauser… any thoughts?

MT: Yeah, the European Beats and the American Beats – that’s an interesting distinction. Although much of what was going on in America as the Beats were forming were primarily endemic social/cultural issues, like McCarthyism, the Free Speech Movement, the racial segregation in the South, the rapid development of the US Military Industrial Complex, etc., behind all those issues were also the greater, global humanistic issues of free expression, the Cold War, non-conformism, spirituality, etc.

So while American culture as a whole was essential to the nurturing of the Beats in the US, the deeper issues were universal in nature. Of course it would have been hard to write On the Road as a Swiss citizen growing up in Switzerland, or to write ‘Howl’ in a German attic/studio, but that’s a moot point.

What is interesting is how strong the influence of the Beats actually was in Europe and the rest of the world, which opened the way for German writers such as Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Jörg Fauser, etc., who took many of the Beat values and ideals and applied them to their own writing and artistic vision, without misappropriating them or being strictly derivative. That’s a tough feat, but I think they pulled it off, and without jeopardizing their integrity. It’s not like Eric Clapton trying to sing the Delta blues.