Some great news! – Allen‘s 1989 album The Lion for Real is getting an expanded reissue this coming November (November 3) on Shimmy-Disc. The Lion For Real, Re-born was remixed and remastered by ace guitarist and producer (Mark) Kramer and features eight additional tracks not on the original album.
Here is the track listing:
The Lion For Real
**Bricklayer
Refrain
**Cosmopolitan Greeting
**Night Gleam
**Squeal
Cleveland, The Flats
Complaint of the Skeleton to Time
The Shrouded Stranger
Stanzas – Written at Night in Radio City
Guru
Gregory Corso’s Story
**Pull My Daisy
The End
**Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox
Xmas Gift
Sunset
To Aunt Rose
Scribble
Hum Bom!
Kral Majales
**Bai Juyi – Part 7
**Don’t Grow Old
C’mon Jack (X-Rated Version) [Digital Download Only]
C’mon Jack (Radio-Friendly Version) [Digital Download Only]
Ode to Failure [Digital Download Only]
**tracks not included in the original release
& here for your delight is a taster – “To Aunt Rose”
Allen noted at the time: “A memory flash 1958 Paris. My favorite Aunt Rose (1909-1940) took care of me weekends when my mother was ill – Books named are my late father Louis Ginsberg’s. It was a big event to publish a volume of poetry those days! Rose Gaidemak died of septicemia. Note delicate music box time travel invention by Marc Ribot.”
Ribot, looking back, from the vantage point of 2023, recalls: “In 1988 (?), I scored Ginsberg’s “Aunt Rose”’ as Allen read his “Aunt Rose” haunted by a creaking, repetitive warped record of memory…he, of her old apartment in Newark…shaded in loneliness and repression, and yet somehow the site of an inescapable tenderness. She’s haunted by Hitler/Stalin, the ‘War in Spain.’ I was born in Newark too…my Aunt’s name was Rhoda, but it could have been Rose.
I love Allen’s refusal to hide anything in the closet – queerness, cranky old Jewish communist relatives. 1959, when the poem was written (before the words ‘Gay’ and ‘Pride’ had been publicly married, before the first ‘hippie,’ before the New Left was new (let alone old)), but its tinted family mirror reflects the coming decades, as Allen chants his way out of mid-century’s dualisms and positivisms…the stale air of his Aunt’s apartment. The poem reads differently in 2023. Are we still certain that ‘the war In Spain is over, Aunt Rose.’? Is it really? Who won?’”
The Lion For Real, Re-born may be pre-ordered here