Dangerous Minds(Best Minds are Dangerous Minds too!) just recently held its Allen Ginsberg caption contest. The results are in. To this iconic photo (of Allen with Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of The Clash), of 84 entries - "Count 'em boys, 112 lines and not a goddam one of them rhymes. Now that is punk rock!", was deemed, (by popular consent), to be the winner.
Here's another contest/promotion (June 15's the deadline), sponsored by Daniel Maurer and the local, East Village, bureau of the New York Times - "tour Allen's old digs with his longtime-assistant", Bob Rosenthal, "hear tales of Ginsberg in the very rooms where they happened". Bob's extraordinary - and essential - memories were recently serialized on that blog, and if you haven't read them yet, we urge you to do so - right now! - Bob "will share more during an intimate chat in the poet's old living room" in the coming days. ("Naturally, borscht will be served!").
F Simon Grant provides an interesting piece - "What A Fiction Writer Can Learn From Allen Ginsberg - "the main technique that has influenced me", he writes, "is the viscerally resonant parataxis" - and - "Essentially, imagery (in Ginsberg) is treated in two ways - as a function of either versimilitude or symbolism - as either a depiction of what may realistically happen in a given situation or how it reflects a character or abstract concept beyond the image itself".
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.
"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
[Ballad of the Skeletons, Allen Ginsberg with Lenny Kaye, Philip Glass, Paul McCartney, Marc Ribot and David Mansfield, produced by Lenny Kaye, mixed by Hal Willner. Mercury/Mouth Almighty, 1996]
"While Ginsberg's considerable literary reputation has been chronicled and discussed for years, the media has never really documented (his) links to music, and his recording process, the actual collision of melody and words... I talked to him one late afternoon in Rhino Records' conference room in Westwood, California and later we concluded the extensive interview by phone from New York City... An abridged version of this interview appeared in 1996 in Hits Magazine and an edited version appeared in the Los Angeles Times Calendar, April 1997.
