Continuing our excerpts from Erik Mortenson’s Allen Ginsberg in Context
Steven Taylor Allen’s long-time accompanist, has long been an astute and informed witness and interpreter of all-things Ginsberg, all-things musical Ginsberg.
Among his published observations – see here, here, here and here,
and, more recently, for the Ginsberg Centennial – here
and on the crucial Ginsberg-Blake connection – see here and here
“First Blues” – Music in the Life and Work of Allen Ginsberg”, his contribution to Allen Ginsberg in Context, begins with a quote from Lou Reed – “Modern rock lyrics would be inconceivable without the work of Allen Ginsberg. It opened them up from the really mediocre thing they’d been to something more interesting and relevant.”
The essay continues: “It’s not difficult to see how Reed’s view held true for his own work, songs like “Heroin” (1967) and “Take A Walk on the Wild Side” (1972) are set on the same streets and in the same idiom as “Howl”. At the same time The Fugs, conceived in 1964 by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg tuned Blake, Swinburne and Arnold as well as their own lyrics, and recorded an up-tempo hillbilly “Howl”. But it is possible to support Reed’s premise beyond the 1960s New York underground because of the influence of Ginsberg and the Beats on rock’s second and subsequent generations as well as the broader culture
In May of 1976 an English professor of my acquaintance introduced me to Allen Ginsberg, handed me his car keys, and said, “go get your axe” That afternoon, Allen and I sat on stage at there student union and sang his songs. He played a harmonium he had acquired in India in 1962. I watched his and on the keyboard to follow the chord changes, and sang harmony on the refrains. We subsequently worked together for twenty years.
In a 1981 essay, Ginsberg cited among the Beats’ effects on mass culture, “The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other popular musicians influenced in the late fifties and sixties by Beat Generation poets’ and writers’ work”. I want to impart my understanding of this claim, and of Ginsberg’s view of the poet’s place in the world, with reference to the singer-songwriters whom he saw as the inheritors of the bardic mission he had taken for his poetic lineage: Blake for societal balance via creative imagination, Shelley, for the poet as legislator, Rimbaud for the poet as seer, Whitman for demotic spirit and exuberance, and William Carlos Williams for “Poetry is a rival government always in opposition to its cruder replicas”
I think of Allen as the last Romantic. He believed that art could transform reality. He told me, “A new poem is a new mind, and a new mind in a new world”. Essential to his mission as an artist and activist was poetry “on the tongue”, on the breath, as it was in ancient times, as mantra, prayer, and oratory, and joined with dance in the dithyramb.He taught that the poet’s original, vital social function as shaman and prophet was lost when poetry was removed from the body in performance to the private experience of the silent reader.He spoke of a twentieth-century “democratization of the culture”, part of which was the”aural renaissance” in which he played a role, and which, he believed, had culminated in the work of singer-songwriters who, through a synthesis of Beat-inspired poetics and African-American musical elements. transformed popular consciousness and culture in the 1960’s.”
The essay continues through seven sequentially-derived sections:
” Talk and Music” – (“In “Kaddish” Allen writes that Naomi “taught me talk and music”)
“All Blues” – (“I grew up on all blues, Ma Rainey and Lead Belly. I listened to them live on radio station WNYC, back in the late ’30s or early ’40s”) –
“Jazz and The New Vision” – (“Howl” is all “Lester Leaps In”. And I got that from Kerouac” –
(“I heard Allen perform “Howl” many times, Stephen writes, “and it struck me early on that the poem is a sax solo: it takes a tenor man’s lungs to blow it”)
“Copping The Changes” – ( The historical shift – “The Beats grew up during the transition of the US from a patchwork of regional cultures to a more unified popular culture shaped by electronic media. Ginsberg’s first two decades saw a series of changes that set the stage for the singer-songwriters who would shape mass culture in the 1960s…..Pop music had been jazz for a decade, though it was mostly the Black style, not the players, that drove the market. The racial mix began to change with r&b and bebop which featured African-American artists. This is the music culture in which Ginsberg came of age.”)
“Enter the DJ” – (“Allen often cited the radio announcer “Symphony Sid” (Sydney Tarnopol) who began broadcasting in 1937″, Steven notes,”Sid styled himself as a hep cat, bantering in a Harlem-inflected idiom. He likely provided a model for the hybrid hipster English that Ginsberg and his cohorts passed to my hippie generation” – and then later, re “free jazz” – (quoting Allen- “I couldn’t cut the mustard with free jazz“) – Steven surmises – “Song forms had remained basic to bebop but the new style moved away from traditional structures. Allen told me that jazz was Black speech, so perhaps when the sax line no longer had the phrasing and inflection of the spoken word, he lost interest..”
“The Folk Revival” – (“At a Thelonious Monk show at the Five Spot in 1958, Allen met Harry Smith, who, in 1952 had compiled a collection of eighty-four tracks from the brief efflorescence of folk and blues recordings before the Depression rendered them scrap lacquer for war munitions…The anthology fed the movement that made folk and blues inflected rock into pop’s next thing”.. Like Kerouac’s novels, the folk revival invoked an idealized America symbolized by a reincarnated Romantic hero, the itinerant poet. The mythic biography Robert Zimmerman spun upon changing his name to Bob Dylan could have come straight out of On The Road“)
“Liverpool is The Center of the Human Universe” (the title echoing Allen’s 1965 declaration – “Liverpool is at the present moment the centre of the consciousness of the human universe”) ( “Dylan and The Beatles ushered in a new era in popular music, Allen would say a new era in popular consciousness. Ginsberg’s poetry had unprecedented reach. Aural poetry had bypassed the seminar rooms and gone to the cafes and clubs, and to all manner of countercultural contexts, promoting the “new type of existence”that Dylan had seen in the Beats’ work in 1961. Ginsberg had taken his mission global and now Dylan and The Beatles had made it ubiquitous..”
“Music in the life and work of Allen Ginsberg” – an ethnomusicologist and a decades-long accompanist, no one is more informed on this particular “context” than Steven.
Search out this piece.