If you like your lyrics "smart, but not too smart," Milkman Lory Kohn may be your kind of writer. If you also like your prose smart, but not too smart," Lory Kohn may be your kind of writer. His prose writing has always fed into his song writing and vice versa; spending inordinate amounts of time on each genre individually over the course of five decades has elevated them both collectively.
Why include prose writing on a "band website?" Cause very few writers excel at both English composition and song composition. And the few writers who do rarely concern themselves with an imaginary competition to determine "The Best Combination Songwriter and Prose Writer on Planet Earth." Lory Kohn would be the exception to the rule. Since the recent passing of Leonard Cohen got him thinking about it in the first place, he's been laying the groundwork for a successful assault on the imaginary crown.
Despite pouring consider brainpower into what others might view as a quixotic quest, the prolific wordsmith remains more nonchalant than narcissistic about his prospects. As stated elsewhere on this site, "Lory Kohn is not necessarily the best songwriter on Earth, but every so often there are days when he might be; and Lory Kohn is not necessarily the best prose writer on Earth, but every so often there are days when he might be." Over the course of five decades, the "every so often ... he might be" days tend to add up. So, is Milkman Lory Kohn actually the best combined songwriter/prose writer on Earth? Especially now that top competitor Leonard Cohen has dropped (dead) out of the running?
That's for the world's harshest critic—you—to determine.
{Update 9/23/2019: direct comparisons coming soon!}.
We'll get the ball rolling with a few choice morsels from Lory's memoirs. DC Flashback looks back at a time when the 17 year old future milker was a sophomore at American University in Washington DC in the fall of 1969—quite possibly the craziest time to have ever been around the nation's capital. We'll follow that up with Naropa, in which Lory finds himself in the midst of a strange marriage between Beat poets and a cult of hedonistic Tibetan Buddhists in Boulder, Colorado, circa 1980.
There's plenty more to come, including detective novels and Lory's five cover stories for Electronic Musician magazine. Those of you who still love to read in the vast Twitterverse are in for a treat.
Themilkmen.space will put up the text version of DC Flashback shortly. For now, we'll point to the fully illustrated version available on Cannabis Commerce, Lory's "poteconomics" site that had been offline since 2014 -- when work on Songlab began in earnest—till, well, yesterday! Settle in for a good read and enjoy!
http://cannabiscommerce.org/2013/07/30/d-c-flashback/
For those of you who appreciate visuals more than words, here's a few Cannabis Commerce classics to liven up your day:
http://cannabiscommerce.org/2013/06/13/shots-of-life-after-prohibition/
http://cannabiscommerce.org/2013/06/19/postcards-from-paradise-found/
And of course you've already discovered Bovine Serenade, right? That's Milkmen mascot Bessie The Cow's "first bovine" account of the bittersweet milkmania period which lasted from 1980-1984. Rumor has it Lory may have ghost written Bessie's account—but the veracity of such claims remains shrouded in mystery.