Klipschutz, Songsmith and Poet
Once when I was playing on some tracks for this actress, I told her Klipschutz was my favorite poet. Later when she mentioned it to him, he turned and asked me who my second favorite poet was. I couldn’t think of one. Uh … Smokey Robinson? I first met klipschutz (pen name of Kurt Lipschutz) in the early ’90s at the Albion (pictured above). He was an “offstage member” of Bone Cootes & The Living Wrecks. They had something going on. Fast forward and he got a few co-writes on my second record.
Since then we’ve written a lot more, with a 10-year interruption when we had a falling out over “creative differences.” I’d always wanted to have a falling out over “creative differences,” and it was everything I hoped it would be. A while back, klip was very much unemployed and we ran into each other. A year later, we’d written Temple Beautiful. He doesn’t like having his picture taken.
I’m not exactly a tech head, but I feel like one around klip. He doesn’t have a cell phone (but borrows mine), is not on Facebook or Twitter, doesn’t have a laptop. Still and all, even though Steve Jobs said he often wished he’d been a poet in Paris, klipschutz actually is one, in our own little Paris of California: San Francisco.
Klip has books. You can find them if you look, hard. (Don’t talk me about rock and the underground. Try poetry sometime; you’ll need a shovel.) His first one,The Erection Of Scaffolding For The Re-Painting Of Heaven By The Lowest Bidder is a true collector’s item (100 copies).
You can read his stuff in magazines here: Evergreen Review, Fogged Clarity andPedestal.
In 2006, klip started Luddite Kingdom Press and folded every page in 150 copies of All Roads…But This One. You have to see it to believe it. Unfortunately, klip was fighting an illness for the last six months and the website disappeared. But wait, he just called and said it’s back up, thanks to a hero in Colorado named Jeff Bahr. (Now he says he’s joining Facebook.) Apparently, the PayPal button on the site is broken.
Video after the jump.
