August 29, it’s Charlie Parker‘s birthday. We continue our jazz salutes.
Steve Silberman: Yeah, and that poem (Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues) [not to mention, your own work]) was very much influenced by Charlie Parker who you knew, or saw.
Allen Ginsberg: I saw him a number of times, yeah. In those days – meaning the early ’50s and early ’60s – the musicians, though, they were barred from playing in the clubs under the cabaret licensing laws, which were quite fascist. Anybody who had been busted couldn’t play in a cabaret, and if you couldn’t play in a cabaret, you couldn’t make money in New York, simple as that. So they had to play wherever they could – in lofts, in scenes. There was a place on Sunday, The Open Door, some impresario – no alcohol. You’d contribute what you could, and Charlie Parker played. I used to go Saturday or Sunday afternoons..”
Allen G must have meant to say that he saw Bird in the forties and fifties not in the fifties and sixties because Bird died in 1955. And no one ,not even Allen Ginsberg,can get that high.