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Nick Cave is no fan of Charles Bukowski fan. Or at least not anymore.

Cave opened up about his years of drug addiction in an answer to a fan who asked if he has ever reached the highs while sober that he did while taking substances. While Cave said he was not sure if sobriety has ever brought him to the same highs as drugs used to, he countered that while sober he has avoided a number of lows that were brought on due to his addiction.

The musician and author, best known as the leader of the bands Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, said his sober self has never “reached the kind of lows that eventually came with taking those ‘lovely substances’— bashed up in police stations, dehumanised in rehabs, near-death experiences, suicidal thoughts, routine overdoses, reduced motivation, broken bones, being ripped off, liking Charles Bukowski, social and physical anhedonia, herd mentality, dead friends, fucked up relationships, abscesses, car accidents, psychosis, reading The Hobbit, malnutrition, creative impotence, epic time-wasting, singing flat (still working on that), talking shit (still working on that too), life-threatening diseases, and not ringing my mother on her birthday.”

Ouch.

Related: Mickey Rourke Says Bukowski “Was Okay for a Drunk”

Cave’s feelings on Bukowski shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has heard the song “We Call Upon the Author,” from the album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! in which he dismisses Buk and praises poet John Berryman, with the lines:

Bukowski was a jerk!

Berryman was best!

He wrote like wet papier-mâché

But he went the Hemming-way

Weirdly on wings and with maximum pain

We call upon the author to explain

Speaking of his admitted tendency to talk shit, Cave also once famously dissed the Red Hot Chili Peppers, saying, “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always: the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

The Chili Peppers, for their part, once included a Bukowski namedrop in one of their songs, but it was much more flattering than when he showed up on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! It comes in the song “Mellowship Slinky in B Major,” from the seminal album Blood Sugar Sex Magik, in which Anthony Kiedis sings:

I’m on the porch ’cause I lost my house key

Pick up my book, I read Bukowski

But perhaps the most famous instance of Bukowski showing up in a song is another less than flattering representation, which sits somewhere in the middle of the outright diss from Cave and the props from the Chili Peppers.

That particular instance comes courtesy of Modest Mouse in their song “Bukowski,” from 2004’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News, in which frontman Isaac Brock sings:

Woke up this morning and it seemed to me

That every night turns out to be

A little more like Bukowski

And yeah, I know, he’s a pretty good read

But God who’d want to be

God who’d want to be such an asshole?













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