Allen Ginsberg Punk Rocker (part two)

Allen Ginsberg and Joe Strummer, backstage Pier 84,  New York, September 2, 1982 – photo c. Hank O’Neal.

Note: These posts – “Allen Ginsberg Punk Rocker” (parts one and two) first appeared on The Allen Ginsberg Project on June 23, 2011, and, due to technical problems, are now being re-posted

As Allen recounts it: ” (In 1981) I was listening to a lot of punk, and I’d heard about The Clash from Steven Taylor. I went backstage once at their 17-night gig at Bonds Club on Times Square and Joe Strummer said, “We’ve had somebody say a few words about Nicaragua and (El) Salvador and Central America [they were promoting their album Sandinista

– and again: “So, we rehearsed it for about five minutes during the intermission break and then they took me out on stage. “Allen Ginsberg is going to sing”. And so we improvised it. I gave them the chord changes.”..”It gets kind of Clash-like, good anthem-like music about the middle. but (then) they trail off again. The guy, who was my friend (Charlie Martin?) on the soundboard, mixed my voice real loud so the kids could hear, and so there was a nice reaction, because they could hear common sense being said in the song. You can hear the cheers on the record…”Capitol Air” was written (in 1980) coming back from Yugoslavia, oddly enough, from a tour of Eastern Europe, realizing that police bureaucracies in America and in Eastern Europe were the same, mirror images of each other finally. The climactic stanza – “No Hope Communism, No Hope Capitalism, Yeah. Everybody is lying on both sides..” We didn’t play the whole cut because we didn’t have enough time, but they built up a kind of crescendo, which was nice, when the whole band came in”.

Joe Strummer: “Yeah, we have something never before seen – and never likely to again either. May I welcome President Ginsberg, come on (out) Ginsberg!”

This recording appeared, a decade and more later, on the 1993 CD box-set, Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs 1949-1993, and can be listened to here

The upshot of this Bonds gig was further involvement with The Clash. When the band came back through New York six months later, Allen visited them in the studio and was invited to tighten up the lyrics, and indeed to perform, on one of the tracks, Ghetto Defendant, (subsequently included on their fifth studio album, 1982’s Combat Rock)

Yes, listen carefully, at the end, that is Allen – gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi, svaha -voicing the Heart Sutra

3 comments

  1. The Clash was by far, my favorite band, at this time. The only band that mattered. By 1983, I had one of my own Poetry Books published, and had had poems in 6 different Texas Anthologies. I loved the live poetry readings. It felt electric, and like legitimate bonds were formed with the audience. I had always loved the Beat Poets works. Jack Kerouac was my favorite author, Ginsburg, my favorite poet. So when I heard his voice, on the Clash record, I was elated. “Addict of Metropolis. Slam Dance to Acropolis.” It was a great profound, implosion, explosion. A perfect storm of genre-bending art. What a wonderful blended mix of 2 things no one would have attempted to stir up. Yet it stirred all of us involved.

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