Bono

[Allen Ginsberg photographs Bono at the Cuirt International Festival of Literature in Galway in 1995 - Photograph by Joe O'Shaughnessy, copyright Joe O'Shaugnessy]

from the Vox Interview, (conducted at Slane Castle, Dublin)  July 8 1984: 

Bono: I just bought Woody Guthrie's Bound For Glory. I'm just a beginner when it comes to America. I mean, it's changed me. When you go to the US coming from this country, it's more than a different continent...

Van Morrison: It's shell-shock.

Bono: Yeah, coming from troubled Ireland, it's the real shell-shock! I'm just getting acquainted with American music and literature. Do you still see Allen Ginsberg?

Bob Dylan: I run across Allen from time to time, yeah, Gregory Corso's back now, he's doing some readings. I think he just published a new book.

Bono: I've just been reading this book Howl

Bob Dylan: Oh, that's very powerful. That's another book that changed me. Howl, On The Road, Dharma Bums..

Van Morrison (to Bono): Have you read On The Road?

Bono: Yes I have. I'm just starting that. You have a reference in one of your songs to John Donne, "Rave On John Donne". Have you read his poetry?

Van Morrison: I was reading it at the time

Bob Dylan (to Bono): You heard the songs - Brendan Behan songs?

Bono: Yeah

Bob Dylan: "Royal Canal".  You know the "Royal Canal"?  

Van Morrison: His brother wrote it. His name is Dominic 

Bob Dylan: Oh, Dominic wrote "Royal Canal"?

Bono: You know, Brendan's son hangs around here in Dublin. He's a good guy, I believe.


[Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, Brendan Behan & Beatrice ffrench-Salkeld, New York, September 28, 1960  - Photograph by Richard Avedon  c.The Richard Avedon Foundation]

Fast forward 20 years later, June 15, 2004, Dublin

Bono on Allen  (from his remarks on Jerry Aronson's The Life And Times of Allen Ginsberg DVD set)

I fell in love with Allen Ginsberg's poetry round about the time, I suppose that I fell in love with America, and, you know, it was such a new world for me - going to America and the band and U2, you know, we were, we were starting to have some success, you know, we were like twenty, twenty-one years old, and it seemed like this was just so different to Europe, and it made sense to me that, in the way that America needed a new music to describe it, like jazz, it also needed a new language to describe it, and I think Allen Ginsberg and the Beats created a necessary language to describe the place they lived in, not just the physical landscape but the sort of psychological one.

I started on a journey to discover America, not just he cities and the towns but the  writers, and I started to read Whitman and I started to read Ginsberg, you know. I discovered Howl. I read Jack Kerouac, I read On The Road, you know, all the classic Beat stuff, but "Howl" was more where I lived, you know, in terms of my own pilgrimage, if you like. And then (The) Fall of America was a real influence on me as I was writing the lyrics for The Joshua Tree. Again, The Joshua Tree was our kind of portrait of America, as, you know, the promised land - and the broken promises. And, coming from Ireland, I just knew that..   I just recognized that - a voice that saw the possibilities of America and howled at watching them squandered. 

I remember seeing a film of Bob Dylan ("Don't Look Back", I think it was called) and he starred in it for a minute, Allen Ginsberg, and, there was a lot of sneering in that film, and I felt he was kind of the hippie kind of guy in the middle of all of these punks, really, and I kind of related. I liked that about him. I mean he was.. he led Bob Dylan into that sort of dizzy, drunk, language of those, you know, incredible Bob Dylan songs from the 'Sixties (with) the sort of fractured language, the sense of seeing around objects, that's part of his, you know, getting inside the mind of the thought, as it's being expressed. That's got to have been influenced by (James) Joyce, not just Whitman (who always gets credit) and the jazz people who were, obvious, host to him and his talent. I think there is a Joycean aspect to Ginsberg's view of the world


[James Joyce (1882-1941)] 

I think he was a kind of a Muse, and it's a strange thing to be both artist and Muse, but I think.. One of his kicks was setting fire to people's imaginations, that he met along the way, whether they were his students, or whether they were people like Joe Strummer, from music, or Bob Dylan - or, indeed, me. I think that was his.. his kind of.. you know, he got kicks out of just setting fire to you, and just.. you saw the world differently after you spent some time with him.. and he just had this very..this still child-like view of the world, where everything was possible - if approached in love. So it's hard not to be around that and pick up on that.

I think he was also very aware of lineage, you know, and the people that had influenced him, and the people who he might influence, and I think he put himself out of his way to be a tutor, and.. I mean, I certainly needed one. I never went to college, and I never.. I was, you know, self-educated and I learned everything out of books and a lot out of his books. I think he kind of knew that, tho' he never patronized me, and he encouraged me.



He turned up in the studio once in Dublin and we made a drum-loop from "Bullet The Blue Sky", our song about Central America, from the 'Eighties, and he rapped "Hum Bom!" over it. (I don't know where these things.. I don't know if they ever came out (I'd love to see them!) but I know they exist - somewhere). He was a rapper in the end, you know, and it was the way..not just the way the words described the world, but how they actually rubbed up against the world, and bumped into the world, and nutted the world, and kicked the world, and kissed the world. That was really..that was..that was what he wanted out of art. He didn't like art in a box. He didn't like.. He liked art to stray out of its boundaries into real life, and, you know, he was.. I think he was saying, you know - poetry is.. is the private thoughts made public, there where you are when you're asleep and your head is moving through waves of different thoughts that crash into each other. This is.. it's the language of the unconscious about to be made conscious and I love those ideas.

When he died, I remember Sotheby's (I think it was Sotheby's or Christie's?) [editor's note it was Sotheby's] sold all his belongings. Some of his friends were appalled - "Oh my God, they're selling everything belonging to Allen, they're selling his pens, his ties, his suits!" - "how shocking!" - and I thought it wasn't. I thought it made perfect sense, because, I'd been in his apartment before he died, and he put everything, packed everything, away, he was meticulous about recording, every photograph he'd taken, every shoe-lace!, every shoe was in a box, marked. So I think he would have been well up for being auctioned off in pieces. And I went through the catalog and I said, "Wow, I think I'd like this copy of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windemere's Fan. I thought I used to have a copy of that. I think I lost it somewhere. I'm going to get it back. Wouldn't it be sweet if I could buy it out of his..out of his library, out of Ginsberg's library. So I bid for it - and I got it!  Thrilled to get it, it arrived in the post and I went ,"Wow! I got this back, from Allen Ginsberg", and I opened it up,  and written it in was "to Allen from Bono". And I then realized that I had given him the book that I was then buying back! - I could hear him laughing at that.

[Allen reading "Miami" on the set of the U2 video shoot - from the MTV documentary U2- A Year In Pop - see here]

I think the last time I met Allen was in New York City. It was snowing. We were staying in a hotel (Soho Grand, down in the Village), and we were filming something or other, related to "Zoo TV", and Allen started to..reading "Miami" (no, it was from the "Pop" album), a song called "Miami", he started reading the lyrics. And then we said, "Do you want to be in the film?". He said, "Yeah, of course I do, I'll be in the film"..and (you know, he was such a ham!) and so he sat, he put himself, in one of the deck-chairs, outside on the balcony in the snow, got a blanket, like one of those old-age-pensioners that you'd see in Miami, and recited "Miami, my Mammy, Miami", and turning these..turning these words into poetry, actually. This was a great gift to me.

What made America great in the twenty-first century was started in the twentieth century by risky people, risky lives, Beat Generation inspired, West Coast, lateral thinkers. At the very top of that tree has got to have been Allen Ginsberg. Allen gave me a way of seeing America, a language to describe America that felt as sexy as the place was, as dizzy as the place was, as high on itself as the place was, and he was to words what Charlie Parker was to music and the twentieth century needed those characters to describe itself.

Bono's introduction to Allen in 1995 (at the Cuirt International Festival of Literature), more early-expressed enthusiasm, may be found here.

Spontaneous Poetics - 105 - The Blues Intro - 3 ( & Come All Ye's)

         ["Crazy Blues" - Mamie Smith, (1920) - "the first recording of an African-America singing the blues"]

AG: Well it was the dream, it was the possibility of actually saying what I thought. Well, in any kind of poetry, like in "Howl", or "Kaddish", or later poems, but also in the Blues form. since, especially since, there’s a tradition with songs like that, of expressing your most private feelings with humor and melancholy – so that kind of song has always been a vehicle for some kind of outlaw feeling - and there’s also a genre of ballads, which are Outlaw Ballads, which you’ve heard about, where there’s a public announcement that you’re going to make a statement that’s not in television, or the newspapers, or in the King's records, or in Court language…

So there’s another genre that I began picking up on, of older ballads, 0f the "Come All Ye" – "Come All Ye Merry Gentlemen and Listen To My Tale / I’ll Not Detain You Long and Yet I Will, Forthwith, Wail", or something.. 
 [to a Student] - You have your hand up?

Student: Do you think the Blues is essentially a sexist form?

AG: Sexist form? Not necessarily. It could be political. But what do you mean by sex-ist?

Student: In a sense that, you would say, there were defined strict roles for men and women with womens' being based on satisfying men’s desires, and...

AG: I don't think so. There were certain stereotypes, dealt with sometimes, humorously - but, actually (no, it was) non-sexist, in the sense that a lot of the great Blues singers were women.

Student; But they could still be perpetuating (the stereotypes and..)

AG: Well, I think it would vary a great deal..I don't think you could.. there is an element of phony sexism, in the sense of ironic sexism, but it's so.. sharp and so intelligent that, by sometimes stereotyping those, it's protesting against it. Actually, (in) the ones (the Blues) I was playing (will be playing), by Ma Rainey, she was putting down her man.. finally. She was saying, “If you did not want me, you had no right to lie”- “I’m gonna buy me a pistol just as long as I am tall/ lord lord lord, you’re my man and cannon ball/ If you don’t have me you won’t have no gal at all. That's the sort of opposite of the macho dominant.

Student: (But) that's very common to in...

AG: Yeah. So.. Among the.. one of the early “Come listen to me” - "Ye gallants so free – all (that) you got – "And I will tell you of a bold outlaw that lived in Nottinghamshire" - "that lived in Nottinghamshire.."  So, it was all about Robin Hood at the beginning... (well, this was "Come listen to me" not "Come all ye", but…)

I like the "Come All Ye" form, it’s a.. apparently it was.. I had.. there was a little book on Ballads [Living With Ballads]  that has some transcriptions from a local pub balladeer by Willa Muir, Edwin Muir’s wife, English poet’s wife – “Come all ye, listen to me and I’m gonna sing you a sang/ and if you all detention pay, I’ll not detain ye lang/ Like a fool I married a wife/ my fortune for to try/ 'Twas the cause of all my strife /'Cause she was the real McCoy" – Her commentary here is: “Both Harry and Sandy’s songs were products of oral tradition. Neither of them had ever possessed a song book, nor was it likely that they ever would. Sandy’s song was in the patter of “Come All Ye’s” brought to Scotland by Irish harvest labourers..”

And in this little Penguin Book of Ballads I just got hold of, there are a couple of samples: 

“Come all ye young fellows that follow the gun
 Beware of going shooting by the late setting sun
 It might happen to anyone as it happened to me
To shoot your own true love in under a tree 

She was going to her uncles when the shower it came on
She went under a bush the rain for to shun
With her apron all around her I took her for a swan
and I levelled my gun and I shot Molly Baun

I ran to her uncle in haste and great fear,
Saying , "Uncle, dear uncle, I've shot Molly dear
With her apron all around her I took her for a swan
But oh, alas, it was my own Molly Baun

I shot my own true love, alas, I'm undone
While she was in the shade by the setting of the sun
If I thought she was there I would caress her tenderly
And soon I'd get married to my own dear Molly

My curses to you, Toby, that lent me your gun
To go out a -shooting by the late setting sun
I rubbed her fair temples, and found she was dead
A fountain of tears for my Molly I shed

Up comes my father and his locks they were grey
"Stay in your own country and don't run away
Stay in your own country till your trial comes on
And I'll set you free by the laws of the Land"

All the maids of this country, they will all be very glad
When they hear the sad news that my Molly is dead
Take them all in their hundreds, set them all in a row
Molly Baun she shone above them like a mountain of snow.






And there's "The Buffalo Skinners" - which is probably American - "Come all you jolly cowboys and listen to my song/There are not many verses, it will not detain you long./ It's concerning some young fellows who did agree to go/And spend one summer pleasantly onthe range of the buffalo/ It happened in Jacksboro in the spring of seventy-three/ A man by the name of Crego came stepping up to me,/Saying "How do you do young felllow, and how would you like to go/And spend one summer pleasantly on the range of the buffalo?".. and so forth 

And there's a modern imitation by Oliver St John Gogarty who was the "stately plump Buck Mulligan" of the first line of Joyce's Ulysses, a doctor man - "Come all ye bold Free-Staters now and listen to my lay/And play close attention please to what I got to say/For 'tis thetale of a Winter's night, when last December drear/When Oliver St John Gogarty swam down the Salmon Weir".. That was the beginning of that. It's about.. It's.. 

Student: Allen, that poem is not by Gogarty, it's by.. William Dawson

AG: Oh yes, you’re right, by William Dawson, right on, true enough, (well (in mitigation) I just bought the book ten minutes ago! 
I had a.. there's "the wild Australian boy" - "Come all ye wild Australian boys, and listen to my song". I did a version of that – "New York Youth Call Annunciation" -  “Come all ye Jewish boyfriends, that live here in New York.." - which I’ll play. My voice is somewhat strained in this but I think you can hear the words.  [AG plays an audio recording of his own  "Come All Ye"] - "When God stiffens your spine/Only emotion remains" - That's a goof, the last line. I was paraphrasing (Ezra) Pound, Pound's line - "Only emotion endures" 
   

So, what you have there is totally personal and private sentiment in somewhat.. in either a sexual prophetic strain, or erotic prophetic strain, or ecological prophetic strain, with.. beginning, ”Come all ye”.

So it’s really in a.. in some respects, very similar to the Australian Aborigine motif of the shaman, or bard, or some songman, assembling the multitudes to make a social pronouncement, that comes from the unconscious of the tribe, or comes from the past experience of the tribe, or “purifies the dialect” of the tribe (a line of  (T.S.) Eliot, actually! - “since our concern was speech, and speech impelled  us/ To purify the dialect of the tribe/ And force the mind to aftersight and foresight”

Student: What was the origins of the "Come All Ye"?

AG: God, I don't know how far back it goes. In Willa Muir’s book, brought over to Scotland by Irish harvesters, so it was a village…actually a village agrarian cultural song where you’d have a..minstrel, probably.. (it) may have come from the earlier bardic peregrinazione [Allen intentionally Italianizes pronunciation] in Wales, or anywhere in England, where the Bards went from town to town, when there were no newspapers and no radio, and served as the gossip-mongers, or proclaimers of war news, or state news.. (They) might have come to town and started a song, “Come All Ye, Local Villagers/ And Now I Will Ye Tell/ What To Our Dear George The Third Most Happily Haply Fell", or something – “America declared itself Independent This Year/And Not One Mighty Englishman Would Care To Shed A Tear”  - So, it would be a.. there would be a.. the bards.. the Welsh bards would go from town to town, on what they called peregrinaziones (or visitaziones, which is kind of nice - a visitation - by the bard to pronounce the news (actually, to tell who got married to who, or what battles were won and lost). And (so) the "Come all ye"? might just have been just a simple functional "Come all ye" - "Come listen to my song and I won't be long" - I imagine it would grow out of that kind of situation. Not much different in a way from the Dylan-esque bardic role., where, say, in the Hurricane Carter song (or any other song that had some social content), he.. The tone is “Come All Ye" – "and I’ll tell you now this secret story that nobody really knows, that wasn’t in the newspaper, although it’s.. the secret shows”  - But (And) that function can be done with ballad. But (and) then, what happens when you got a giant modern state with newspapers, magazines?, then you still, you still have the songman’s function in some form or other

Student: (You need amplification)

AG: Well, if you wanna do it on the mass-media, yeah. You've got to get it so. If you want to do it on mass-media so it can be heard clearly on juke-boxes, on car-radios and in little cassette machines  you have to have very  strong thump bass, keeping the rhythm, which means you have to build a very.. you have to lay down a rhythm track, which is the string bass (or electric bass) and drum, to keep a steady rhythm that can penetrate through the bones of the automobile, or through a bar-room full of crowded screaming talk (actually, that’s the technical key to pop – body-penetration) - But, I don’t think, since Dylan and The Beatles, that the.. well, actually I don’t think that..  Richard "Rabbit" Brown, the music is exquisite, but the words are equally exquisite. And in Dylan, the language became predominant, and the words were built around the language (I mean, the music was built around the language!) Naturally, you get good musicians.. You need good musicians because, with..a..with good black musicians.. genius musicians, or genius white pop musicians, every rendition of the song will be different, metrically, so it’ll be different phrasing, because the song will be interpreted differently each time. So that, for instance, Dylan never sings the same song twice in exactly the same way, and he has to have musicians who are alert and listening to him and following his intonations and hesitancies. So it’s not just cut-and-dried music, where they know their parts and they know their harmonies and they play them, they actually have to, each time, be on their toes, walking a tight-rope, listening, because he changes the time, he slows the time down. He might begin in different kinds of time, he might even begin in a different key sometimes – and they never know.. in advance –  and so they’re trained to do it as old-time improvising jazz musicians (or they train themselves), which is why I found it useful to use his musicians, because my time is so bad! – that they were used to paying attention to the words and finding out what the words (meant) (meaning), and making intonations in their instruments to follow that. 

[Audio for the above disquisition may be found here, starting, approximately twenty-nine-and-a-half minutes in, and through to the end of the tape]  

Friday's Weekly Round-Up 63

Philip Glass, Patti Smith & the spirit of Allen Ginsberg, last week at the Park Avenue Armory, New York ]

The winners of 2011 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards will read their winning poems at a poetry reading and award ceremony on Saturday, March 10, 2012, at the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, Paterson, New Jersey. First prize this year went to Christopher Bursk and the aptly-named Charlotte Muse. The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, "honoring Allen Ginsberg’s contributions to American Literature", are given annually to poets, "both established and emerging". Poems are judged anonymously with first prize winning $1,000, second prize, $200, and third prize, $100.

Last week's Philip Glass-Patti Smith hommage to Allen was a grand succès. Long-time companions and collaborators, this was the first time they'd played New York City together. Here's Steven Thrasher's report for the Village Voice

and here's Joe Winkler's account of the previous evening's "Kaddish" event -

Here's an intriguing article on Booktryst by Steven J Gertz - "When Ginsberg and Burroughs Met Samuel Beckett - a three-pronged perspective on the September 1976 visit by Allen and William and.. Susan Sontag - "Allen said, "What was it like to be with (James) Joyce? I understand Joyce had a beautiful voice and that he liked to sing?". Allen did some kind of "OM" and Beckett said, "Yes, indeed, he had a beautiful voice".

And finally, the release of Walter Salles' much-anticipated On The Road movie (Tom Sturridge plays Allen) looms ever-closer. The image that we first glimpsed here has been up-dated and can now be seen, in its most recent manifestation, here.