Here’s a treat – Allen Ginsberg and John Moran, paying tribute to Arthur Russell in 1993, playing Russell’s ‘Soon-To-Be-Innocent-Fun’, with vocals by Moran and Joyce Bowden
Here’s Arthur’s 1986 version (from The World of Echo) Here’s a 1965 live version
Here’s a 1965 live version
Here’s Philip Glass and David Byrne and Allen discussing Arthur
AG: “The amazing thing was he could reproduce my monochordal variations on different (William) Blake tunes that I had invented note for note, playing unison with my voice.”…”He kept saying that he wanted to write Buddhist bubble-gum music”….”He was also interested in the words, he consulted me a lot for phrasing, and I kept saying it should be more detailed, and he was saying no, the pop idiom was generalizations, he was looking for generalizations, which had a slightly erotic, or eccentric, overtones.” Wild Combination – Matt Wolf‘s critically-acclaimed 2008 documentary on Arthur can be viewed – here.
Here’s the trailer for the film:
Here’s unedited footage by Phill Niblock
Here’s Allen and Arthur playing on “Ballad of the Lights”
Here’s Allen giving Arthur Russell’s eulogy in 1992:
See our notice on Tim Lawrence’s Hold On To Your Dreams and Marcus Boon on Arthur Russell and Buddhism – here
Arthur Russell’s archives were acquired in 2016 by the New York Public Library – see Ben Ratliff’s article about the acquisition in the New York Times Do What I Want – Selections from the Arthur Russell Papers took place in the Spring of 2017 at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) Arthur’s legacy certainly continues on. Here‘s Marc Hogan at Pitchfork on a recently-released Arthur Russell demo-tape (“Russell, who reputedly left nearly 1.000 hours of unreleased tapes when he died of AIDS in 1992, at the age of 40, could be the patron saint of the demo”)