"He seemed very self effacing, especially as the individual who was the heart and soul of those amazing lyrical lines, slouching, a little voluptuous, even when shod in scuffed worn out shoes and sullen sideways looks. The music of the album that bore the strange title Either/Or-derived, I eventually learned, from a nineteenth century philosophical treatise written by Kierkegaard. And the lyrics, with their intense poetry, peppered with four letter words, that excited me the way James Joyce excited other people. I've never been a modernist, myself; was always far too sentimental and spiritually predisposed for that particular creed. With Elliott, I had found someone who gave voice to the outsider's way of looking at the world. Not looking past the sleaze, the meretriciousness, and the garbage, but looking INTO them and still finding little glimpses of beauty. Lines like "When they clean the street, I'll be the only shit that's left behind" made me realize, as I turned them round and round in my head, that here I had not just found an artist-I'd found a brother."Biography