Allen Ginsberg's Uncle Sam Hat

[Allen Ginsberg on Central Park Bandstand, 5th Avenue Peace Demonstration to Stop The War in Vietnam. 1966 -Photograph by Fred W McDarrah  c. the Estate of Fred W McDarrah and Getty Images]

Fred W McDarrah's iconic shot of Allen wearing his Uncle Sam hat - (an image that became transformed into a poster, that, at one time, in the 'Sixties, was ubiquitous, hanging on seemingly every student's bedroom or dormitory wall).

He (Allen) tells the story (of the events of that day, March 26, 1966)  in the recently re-published National Security Archives interview:

"I remember specifically one time, there's a very famous photo of me in an American hat an Uncle Sam hat, that was for a march [in New York] that began at Bryant Park, near the Public Library on Forty-Second Street and went all the way up to the Bandshell in Central Park. And although it had been organized by Women Strike For Peace and  The War Resisters League and the Vietnam Veterans, it was invaded by a group of what looked to be extreme left radicals waving Viet Cong flags, getting up in front of the march, getting all the publicity, with all the newspapers collaborating, and then, whn we got to the bandstand, taking over the microphone and not letting the originators and the organizers of the march speak; until after a long long while, an hour of arguing, the police intervened, or the marchers intervened. So the folks who don't have that historical memory should remember that very important thing: the sabotage of the Government during the political conventions, during the large Be-Ins, during the antiwar marches, the deliberate sabotage of the left, which was more extensive than just on the street: it was like secret manipulations to discredit and make misinformation camapaigns about them."  

[Allen Ginsberg in Uncle Sam Hat (with The Fugs (Ed Sanders et al)  on the 5th Avenue Peace Demonstration to

Stop The War in Vietnam, 1966 - Photograph by David Spieler]  

from the Sotheby's catalog (at the auction of Allen's possessions, by the Ginsberg Estate, in 1997, following his death):

"Lot 94: A vintage "Uncle Sam" top hat with label inside printed "Knox Fifth Avenue, New York" and "The Halle Bros Co. Cleveland" Paper "Uncle Sam" top hat - Cotton and velour….Ginsberg did not save the original hat that he wore in the [McDarrah] photo but he received several hats as gifts after the famous photo debuted. Ginsberg was given [this particular] paper hat in the early 1970s and he and friends were photographed wearing it. He kept it on a closet shelf with a label saying, "Allen Ginsberg's Uncle Sam Hat". The nicely constructed vintage hat with pieces of the American flag sewn over an old top hat base was used in Ginsberg's video of  "The Ballad of the Skeletons" filmed by Gus Van Sant. The cotton and velour hat was given to Ginsberg by a young admirer."

[Allen Ginsberg from "The Ballad of The Skeletons" video (1997)"]

Here's (1995) the hat placed on the head of his guru (teacher) Gelek Rinpoche 

[Gelek Rinpoche - Tibetan Vajrayana teacher, visited to say goodbye at his stident Yael Crawford's house, Cleveland. I'd stayed over with Philip Glass for Jewel Heart Meditation Center benefits poetry and music. A friend gave me this cloth-sewn Uncle Sam hat, too small for Rinpoche's dome. He'd just gotten US citizenship and passport.Dalai Lama enshrined over mantel, March 20, 1995 (Allen Ginsberg's inscription)] 

                                               [A Papier-mâché "Uncle Sam"  hat c.1900 - not Allen's ]

William Burroughs - Star Me Kitten & The Priest They Called Him

[Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Michael Stipe (REM) and William Burroughs]

[William Burroughs and Kurt Cobain] 




More Burroughs for the weekend - collaborations with Michael Stipe and Kurt Cobain (REM and Nirvana) - "Star Me Kitten" and "The Priest They Called Him".

Beginning with "Star Me.." (yes, "Star Me" - the allusion is to the Rolling Stones' "Starfucker" ("Star Star"). The source, is the 1996 collection,  "Songs in the Key of X - Music From And Inspired By "The X-Files") 

Burroughs: "All right. Just something I picked up. A knack of going along with someone else's song, putting myself into it. It evolved from "Lili Marlene", Marlene Dietrich, not one of my favorite people but, that's where it came from"

"He's got three for the price of one./Nothing's free but guarenteed for a lifetime's use./ I've changed the locks/and you can't have one/You, you know the other two./The breaks have worn so thin that you could hear -/ I hear them screeching through the door from your driveway./ Hey love, look into your glove-box heart./What is there for me inside? This love is tired./ I've changed the locks. Have I misplaced you?/ Have we lost our minds?/ Will this never end?/It could depend on your take./You. Me. We used to be on fire/ If keys are all that stand between,/Can I throw in the ring?/No gasoline./Just fuck me kitten./You are wild and I'm in your possession/Nothing's free so, fuck me kitten/I'm in your possession/So fuck me kitten."

The Kurt Cobain and William Burroughs connection is given, in some detail, here (and also here) - "The Priest They Called Him". Cobain, apparently, contacted his hero, Burroughs, in 1992, and sounded him out about the possibility of them, perhaps, doing something together. Burroughs sent him a tape of a reading he'd done of a short story, originally published in the early (19)70's in the collection, Exterminator. Cobain added some guitar backing, (based, loosely, on "Silent Night" and "To Anacreon in Heaven") and the piece was released (as a limited-edition 1o-inch EP picture disc - it was subsequently re-released on CD and 10-inch vinyl).



At the time of the collaboration, the two had not met. They met in October 1993, in Lawrence, Kansas, during the first week of Nirvana's "In Utero" tour. Burroughs describes the meeting: "I waited and Kurt got out with another man. Cobain was very shy, very polite and obviously enjoyed the fact that I wasn't awestruck at meeting him. There was something about him fragile and engagingly lost. He smoked cigarettes but didn't drink. There were no drugs. I never showed him my gun collection". 
In Charles Cross's biography of Cobain, Heavier than Heaven, there's a further revealing note concerning this brief encounter - "They chatted for several hours…As Kurt drove away, Burroughs remarked to his assistant (James Grauerholz), "There's something wrong with that boy; he frowns for no good reason". 

and here, as an extra, as a bonus, William S Burroughs and Gus Van Sant   

A Thanksgiving Prayer

 

Time once again for an old favorite - Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! 
ok - tell it like it is, William!  (with film footage/juxtaposition by Gus Van Sant) 

"Thanksgiving Day November 28 1986"
 

Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shat out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison. 

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.
For nigger-killin' lawmen,
feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for
Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
War Against Drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind his
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories-- all right, let's see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams. 

and here's Robert Covington's more literal version

The Ballad of The Skeletons #ASV 25

To repeat the relevant paragraphs in our recently re-published Harvey Kubernik interview.

Allen: “I had a gig at Albert Hall in London. A reading. I had been talking quite a bit to (Paul) McCartney, visiting him and bringing him poetry and haiku, and looking at Linda McCartney's photographs and giving him some photos I'd taken of them. So, McCartney liked it and filmed me doing "(The Ballad of The) Skeletons" in a little 8 millimeter home thing. And then I had this reading at (the) Albert Hall, and I asked (him) if he could recommend a young guitarist who was a quick study. So he gave me a few names but (then) he said, "If you're not fixed up with a guitarist, why don't you try me? I love the poem". So I said, "It's a date".

It was last November [November 1995]. We went to Paul's house and spent an afternoon rehearsing. He came to the sound check and we did a little rehearsal there, again. And then he went up to his box with his family. It was a benefit for literary things. There were 15 other poets (on the bill). We didn't tell anybody that McCartney was going to play. And we (had) developed that riff really nicely. In fact, Linda (had) made a little tape of our rehearsal. So then, we went on stage and knocked it out. There's a photo of us on the CD. It was a very lively and he was into it"

Harvey Kubernik: What did Paul McCartney add to your recording of "..Skeletons"?

Allen: He reacts to the words in an intelligent way. You can hear it on the tape. Like, if I say on the recording, "What's cooking", all of a sudden he brings in the maracas to get that really funny excitement. When I say, "Blow Nancy Blow", he blows on the Hammond organ. He added a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of interpretation. And sometimes when I made a flub, he covered it. He left his lead sheet in his guitar case, so we had to share my lead sheet (at the gig), which was fun.

Then I did the poem at Carnegie Hall (in New York at a benefit) for the Tibet House, that followed the Albert Hall show. And... Danny Goldberg, (President of Mercury Records), was in the audience at Carnegie Hall, (and he) called up my office.. 'cause he heard it and liked it and said, "Do you want to record it?" I got together Marc Ribot, who I had played it with first, Lenny (Kaye) and David Mansfield. And Lenny was the session-maker...

We made a basic track - and McCartney had said, "If you record it, I'd like to work on it. It would be fun". So we did a 24-hour overnight-mail to him, and he got it, and listened to it, after a few days. He spent a day on it. He put on maracas, drums, (which was unexpected, which we needed), and organ, Hammond organ, trying to sound like Al Kooper. And guitar, which was very strong. Then the day it arrived, Philip Glass was in town, and he volunteered because he thought it was my hit, so he wanted to do something with it. He added on piano, very much in his style, and fitting perfectly onto the rest of the tape. Then Hal Willner wound up mixing it and brought out McCartney's role and the structure that McCartney had given to it, 'cause he gave it a very nice, dramatic structure. I had planned that after "Blow Nancy Blow" you would have four consecutive choruses of instrumentals. McCartney and I had planned the breaks the first time, and varied it a little..

The Danny Goldberg-commissioned recording was released on Mercury's subsidiary, Mouth Almighty Records.

Here's Daniel Browne's review for allmusic.

And here's Goldberg with a little more, further, background:

"Since I was the latest connection Allen had to rock n roll, he would call, like any other artist, exalted about opportunities to promote his music and expand his audience. When Tom Freston, the CEO of MTV bought five of Allen's photos, Ginsberg promptly called me, not too subtly implying that, if Mercury would fund production of a video, we might be able to get on MTV. Allen had an unerring instinct of how to mobilize his mystique for those who were interested. He regaled Freston with stories of the Beatniks one night at our house, which made it almost impossible for MTV to reject his video despite the fact that he was decades older than typical MTV artists and audience members. A political satire of both generations, "..Skeltons" received highly-publicized and much-coveted "buzz-bin" rotation on the week's before the..election - to the consternation of other record companies who were submitting artists with more conventional credentials. This made Allen the only 70-year-old besides Tony Bennett to ever be played on MTV.."

Not that Freston should even think of rejection, since the video was a short four-minute masterpiece made by famed Hollywood director, Gus Van Sant. The film (video) begins with Allen in close-up ("Uncle Sam" hat and all) speaking, forcefully, directly into the camera. His reading is "blue-screened" and dissolved against archival film and video clips (of a decidedly - and intentional - political slant - contemporaneous (from the Dole/Clinton presidential campaign), but also, more iconic earlier imagery from the Civil Rights movement).

Here's a third "..Skeletons" performance, this time with Steven Taylor and Eliot Greenspan on guitars (and Guy Cohen on bass), recorded at the Fox Theater, Boulder, Colorado

Some More YouTube Gems

Our friend, poet Simon Pettet (Hearth), has been scouring the web this last few weeks and tracked down some things we had no idea existed, others we'd forgotten.

First off is "The Ballad of the Skeletons," directed by Gus Van Sant, from 1996. This aired on MTVs buzz chart through the month of October during the last days Clinton/Dole presidential race. Tom Freston was wanting more politically engaged content for the days leading up to the election and had suggested Allen do a video for his Ballad of the Skeletons track he'd recorded with Paul McCartney, Lenny Kaye and Philip Glass. Allen enlisted Van Sant and this was the result:



We couldn't post the last without including Van Sant's great Burroughs collaboration "Thanksgiving Prayer" (a week late on this!)



Next up, a segment of Peter Whitehead's film Wholly Communion, the whole of which was floating online but has apparently been yanked. Something that desperately needs to be reissued, this documented the reading at Royal Albert Hall, London in June 1965. It included Harry Fainlight, Gregory Corso, Ernst Jandl, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anselm Hollo, Andrei Voznesensky and many more. So, we're left with this tiny teaser of Allen reading "The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express." Unfortunately it comes in at the 13th Stanza of part II "Allen Ginsberg Says this: I am/a mass of sores and worms/&baldness & belly & smell/I am false Name the prey/of Yamantaka Devourer of/Strange Dreams, etc.."



And if you needed reminding you were looking at computer screen...



Oh, and heck, while were at it, why not listen to a little bit of Kerouac singing "Ain't We Got Fun"

Vocals: Jack Kerouac
Musicians: unknown
Recorded and mixed by Jerry Newman at Stereo Sound, circa late 1950’s.
Digitally transferred from original tapes by Sean Slade at Fort Apache.