We Ain't Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain

Charles Bukowski spent fifty years writing about the underside of Los Angeles — the racetrack, the post office, the bars, the small moments of grace available to people living outside of ordinary respectability. His spoken word recordings give the prose and poetry a different dimension: the voice as rough as the material.

This recording — Bukowski reading over minimal backing, his voice full of whiskey and earned weariness — captures the quality that makes his best work transcendent: the honesty about failure, the refusal of self-pity while being completely open about difficulty. Rain is free. That's the whole philosophy.

Bukowski's reputation has its complications — the misogyny in some of the work is real and worth acknowledging — but the best of it has a clarity and directness that most literature doesn't achieve.