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In high school, there was one class that was my favorite, one that managed to transcend both poles within its title and its tools: Poetry And Rock. The poet/gentleman who taught it, Paul Grillo, not only had a wide-breadth definition of what “rock” was (Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s The Return of the 5,000 Lb. Man and its centerpiece, “Theme for the Eulipians,” still my favorite of the saxophonist’s). Grillo let you have your own wide-breadth notion of what rock was and of what poetry was. Plus, he knew Patti Smith – a poetess in and out of the Philly/Jersey corridor who’d written several small press books of poetry and theater pieces and recorded a 45 up until the time of Horses.

So while I might’ve once thought that another teacher, a Dept. of English professor from England’s University of Leicester (and an author of such books as Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination), getting in on garage-punk’s first true lyrical classic of the ‘70s would be handled in overly genteel fashion, I had to take that back when I heard Philip Shaw’s band Alberteen (on MySpace) and also read how Shaw’s got his own things to deal with concerning God, love, dreams and duality. And the fun and frenetics of rock’s true raw rebellion, at its best, never forget that —just like Smith did in 1973/74/75. Smith and Shaw may be poets of the highest order. But they both understand the primal scream – literal and figurative – that garage rock once was.

Shaw eschews (mostly) the notion that the bop-a-long “Redondo Beach” was just a lesbian love/death match, and he chucks part of the continuation of the whole Bowie/Reed (the latter in particular) androgyny going around. He then proceeds to pit further Smith moments (her poem “Oath”) as part of the long line of Warholian characters – one whose innate primitivism (John Cale of the Velvets) and flat tones made Horses blare. Along with ducking back through Smith’s literary body of work (Witt, Seventh Heaven) and finding the Rimbaud-like decay-fuck fury, Shaw captures the holy rolling spirits and the tender truculence of its questions, from the exhortations of “Gloria” to the pining of “Elegie,” without wallowing. Nicely done, Shaw. A.D. AMOROSI