Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg in conversation continuing from – here
AG: So I got this record, which what they did is..the musicians are all real literate – Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, Gary Windo (W-I-N-D-O), Lenny Pickett…. a whole bunch of guys. So we all got together in a studio and I handed them my Collected Poems. They took it home and read it, chose what they wanted to set as composers and I went in the studio and I read for four or five hours like a.. everything on everybody’s list, including the producer Hal Willner and… you know Willner at all?
GC: No.
AG: You haven’t met him yet?
GC: No.
AG: He’s like Jerry Newman, remember Jerry Newman?
GC: Yeah.
AG: He’s great, like Newman..
GC: Well this guy comes from Detroit or something?
AG: No, he’s.. I think.. I don’t know where he’s from. I think he’s a New York boy
GC: And he wanted to do one with me, didn’t he, a record?
AG: Yes, you’re on the… It’s the same thing..
GC: He gave me two thousand.. he gave me two thousand five hundred..
AG: You’re next, you’re next.
GC: That’s the guy, yeah, I know, I know him.
AG So. He’s doing Burroughs with strings now.
GC: Good.
AG: That’s the next, that’s going to come out a month after (me).
GC: Yeah, I would do that. I wouldn’t do mine with jazz. I’d have mine like.. Berlioz’ Requiem
AG: Well, if you’ve got any ideas, feed it in.
GC: Yeah, Berlioz Requiem
AG: Yeah well you have to have your own music, got to have your own music… or something.. or .. what is it? You could do “Clown”” with old out-takes from Spike Jones?
GC: I could do that, or I could use Charlie Chaplin music, or Fellini, Federico Fellini, he had good music with clowns
AG: Charlie Chaplin music, Spike Jones.
GC: Okay what else are you doing?
AG: So…no, I just wanted to finish about the record. It’s..What they did was.. then they took my tapes home and they made compositions, unlike San Francisco free jazz, these were composed for the tones and the pronunciation and the intonation and the mood and the intellect of the poems. So that actually it’s a real composition to the poetry and is not the poetry trying to make it along with the music or trying to improvise along with the music, its music is supporting the poetry rather than the poetry getting lost in the music. So I think it’s that much of an improvement over the old “Fifties poetry-and-jazz
GC: Ok
to be continued