Happy Birthday Michael McClure

Michael McClure (ever-youthful) is four-score-and-one years old today! Happy Birthday, Michael!

For a detailed webography and links to some of his extraordinary achievements see here

Next month sees the republication by City Lights of his classic long-out-of-print Ghost Tantras. We’ll be forgiven, we hope, if we once again, show this extraordinary footage:

Houston Donham at HTML Giant provides an advance review of Ghost Tantras and some observations on Michael’s continuing relevance – here 

Looking back on vintage Michael, there was, of course, his famously-controversial stage-play, from 1965, The Beard  (and an excerpt from it – Richard Bright plays Billy the Kid, Billie Dixon plays Jean Harlow – is happily preserved in Lions Love, the 1968 movie by noted French director, Agnes Varda)

Rock star, Jim Morrison can be seen fleetingly, briefly, in the audience, in Varda’s movie. Can you spot him?  He had plans to perhaps play the role of Billy the Kid in a film. That didn’t materialize. Neither, sadly, did another collaborative venture with Michael, a film adaptation of his novel, The Adept (for more on that curious story, see here).

He did, however, get to extensively collaborate with Doors keyboard-player, Ray Manzarek  (who, sadly, passed away earlier this year).

His recent (September 2013) collaboration, at the Sweetwater Music Hall, Mill Valley, with Rob Wasserman and Jay Lane may be glimpsed here:

More from that concert (with the addition of ex-Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, and Jason Crosby on violin) – some excerpts from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues –  here

– and further footage of the band together here.

Balthazar Getty plays Michael in the upcoming movie of Kerouac’s Big Sur