DiscoGlassy

Allen Ginsberg

Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs 1949-1993

1994

© GlassPages, 1998








Cover Picture

Box Cover (Geoff Gans, Coco Shinomiya)


References


Credits


Tracks


Notes

Introduction

The name Allen Ginsberg conjures up memories of a young beat poet who, along with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, began a fledgling movement in the late 1940s and early '50s that to this day remains relevant to literature, music, and counterculture. The fact is Allen Ginsberg is an outspoken dissident who helped shape our consciousness in the 1960s, whose "Howl" and "Kaddish" embody both the outspoken and tender sides of the Ginsberg persona. As a pacifist and gay rights activist, he has influenced our culture for five decades. Recently his image was used in a Gap clothing ad (he donated the proceeds to the Naropa Institute).

Some may not be aware of how prolific Allen is as an artist of spoken word and songs. This box set explores, in depth, a side of Allen that we heard in his 1992 recording The Lion For Real.

Simply put, the voice of Allen Ginsberg is both seductive and soothing; quite honestly, it is like no other I have ever heard. Early on, he sounded much like Jack Kerouac, but just like a gifted musician who imitates a mentor, Ginsberg soon developed his own voice. It became his musical instrument: the rise and fall of pitch, the timbre, the phrasing, exploring and eventually producing his own voice, and yes, one that sings. Indeed, Allen has explored all the facets of communication from the written word to song.

Holy Soul Jelly Roll -- Songs And Poems (1949-1993) is the culmination of four years of work, from the first time Allen suggested this box to me in a New York taxi to the final assembly and production by Hal Willner.

Hal's devotion to this project, out of his love for Allen, has already been my reward. Having produced several box sets of various genres, I can fully appreciate the amount of work Hal has put into this project. Sifting through hundreds of hours of Allen's recordings spanning 40-plus years has yielded this unique overview of a very significant body of work by an American literary icon. I consider Hal not just a friend but also an extraordinary producer who, along with Allen, has created a document that will be an important part of our culture for years to come.

I also want to acknowledge the tireless devotion by Bob Rosenthal to coordinating this project. Without him, this collection would not have been a reality.

--James Austin

Quotes

I have heard the Gettysburg Address and the Ginsberg Address, and Allen's voice has grown deeper and lusher over the years, tuning ever closer to Blakean celestial harmonies . . . The only voice with such timbre to compare with it in 20th-century poetry is Dylan Thomas' . . .The little spellbinder of them all . . . Allen is the greater spellbinder of them all . . . the greatest of our age . . . and it is shocking that he has never been offered a Pulitzer, a Nobel, or the Poet Laureate's post at the Library of Congress . . . Let them eat crumbs!

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Bastille Day, 1993


Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius, con man extraordinaire, and probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman.

--Bob Dylan, 1986


Allen Ginsberg grew up in the meat of century. Fresh between newly rusting New Jersey heartlands--caught between parents mild and crazed, starved to express love not yet defined as anything but perversion. He learned the tissues of reality from Naomi, his mother. Her paranoid hallucinations informed him with a truth he kept in check until he could transform it through the poetic processes bequeathed to him by his father, the poet Louis Ginsberg. Paranoia becomes Justice, Desire becomes Force, Perversion becomes Spirit. The poetry of Allen Ginsberg will last the ages, for it teaches us our minds, it bumps into us and stirs the muck around the brain stem. His inability to compromise with language, politics, or truth has created a giant body of work with remarkable consistency. Clear envisioning is the poetry road sign that bids you welcome. Could anyone enter the modern American city without the acrid smoke of steel mills and the rotting porches of poverty? At city center sits a muscle of tender heart--it looks like the Buddha. His language is the well-worn pavement of spoken words jammed between your eyes and ears like new old friends. His songs range through odd tunings and find their mark as part of the connection to poets of the ages. Listen to this voice that attracts nations to mistrust him, ideologues of all stamp to cock up an ear, lovers to breathe betwixt unwashed sheets, Joe Schmoes fleeing the poetry of capital P to notice--listen and you will hear the voice of the Bard and the song of the child, and you will be breathing eternity.

--Bob Rosenthal, 1994

Liner Notes By Hal Willner

In the late '80s I had the fortune of being able to work with Allen Ginsberg on the album The Lion For Real for Michael Minzer's Paris Productions. That album featured Allen reading his poetry accompanied by some of the most interesting composer/musicians on the new music scene. The project was a success on many levels; the combination of Allen's baritone voice and remarkable musicians exploring a body of poetry written over 35 years resulted in highly individual tracks, which in turn developed into an album that takes the listener on a fascinating journey. Personally, it was one of the most rewarding recording experiences that I'd ever had; plus, it opened up a whole new world for me, leading to other spoken-word projects, besides allowing me an in-depth knowledge of Allen's poetry. Over the years since then, Allen and I have stayed in touch; in 1992 when James Austin and Allen asked me to put together this box set concentrating on Allen's recorded works, I jumped at the chance.

The idea here was to concentrate on the work that Allen had previously recorded for commercial release, much of which had never been issued. Considering that many people have simply not had access to these recorded works (the importance of which cannot be overstated), we felt that it was essential for a sampling of this history to be brought to light. Allen's ideas for the set were quite simple: He suggested that it comprise his Howl album (Fantasy Records); his William Blake interpretations (there are two completed LPs, one previously released on MGM, the second unissued); First Blues (a double album that was the very first release on John Hammond's Hammond Records); the recordings he made with Harry Smith in the Chelsea Hotel in 1971 (later released on Folkways); selections from The Lion For Real; and various other recordings that would surface during the process.

Over the next few months, I spent many hours in Allen's apartment listening to the various recordings and tracking down rare finds. On two occasions, we ventured to the Ginsberg Deposit at Columbia University, where a treasure trove of memorabilia is stored, including a tape of Jack Kerouac whistling "A Foggy Day In London Town" and, in a plastic baggie, Allen's beard, which was shaved off in the early '70s. All through these months, each day offered new discoveries: obscure poetry compilation albums from the '60s, catalogs featuring limited-edition and forgotten recordings, and the existence of a 16-volume (!) set of Allen's complete works that Barry Miles put together in 1971, which was never released.

At this early stage of the project, I was listening to poetry for about eight hours a day. Allen's initial suggestions for the box would take up eight CDs alone, and with the many new and often wonderful discoveries before me, the enormity of my task was overwhelming. I needed to find a constructive way to organize and edit it all. Fortunately, I hit upon the idea of letting each of four volumes represent a loosely structured time period in Allen's life, thematically centering each volume around a major work such as "Howl" or "Kaddish," or a grouping, such as his Blake material or collaborative efforts.

Vol. 1--The first one would feature Allen's early years and would naturally revolve around "Howl." Under Allen's bed in his East Village apartment was a box containing reel-to-reel tapes of different recordings of "Howl," including a 1956 tape from Berkeley of the very first time the whole poem was read aloud. The tape had a magical quality to it. Though Allen had not yet perfected his breath approach to reading the poem, listening to the tape transported me, and the excitement of what it must have been like hearing "Howl" at that time came through. "America" and "Sunflower Sutra" were also read at this performance. The historical importance of the 1956 recordings is undeniable, so we decided to use these newly discovered versions, as opposed to using the classic 1959 Fantasy LP reading of "Howl"(which is still in print and was recently featured on a box set about the Beat era produced by Sam and Ann Charters). In addition, there are some rare early recordings on this CD, including "A Mad Gleam," which was recorded at a party in John Clellon Holmes' apartment in 1949 and is probably the first known recording of Ginsberg. Also discovered were a number of tapes recorded in Neal Cassady's Denver home in 1954, of which a few are presented here. While looking at various catalogs and discographies, I noticed that Ginsberg, along with Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky, did a session at the Library of Congress in 1959. We were able to secure a copy, and the CD ends with an excerpt from this session, Allen reading "Death To Van Gogh's Ear."

Vol. 2--This volume focuses on "Kaddish." Besides it being one of Allen's best-known poems, I have always felt that this is one of the greatest pieces of writing ever. It takes slightly less than 65 minutes to read and has therefore rarely been recited by Allen in its entirety. This reading of the poem, at Brandeis University in 1964, was released by Atlantic Records shortly thereafter. It has long been out-of-print, and it was quite a task to find a suitable master tape. Other important pieces written in this era fill out the volume: "Guru" and "To Aunt Rose" from The Lion For Real, and a recording of the classic "Kral Majales" from an obscure compilation released in the Netherlands.

Vol. 3--Welcome to our "peace and love" volume, reflecting the highly visible period in Allen's history when posters of a bearded, long-haired Ginsberg dressed in flowing robes and beads adorned the walls of college dormitories, and many of his poems and activities reached the homes of middle America. The volume focuses on Allen's Blake interpretations, mantras, "acid" poetry, and other pieces representative of Allen's memorable influence on this explosive period in our history.

Vol. 4--This one brings us up to the present decade and deals mostly with the many musical collaborations Allen has done and continues to do today. Starting with his appearance with The Clash at Bonds in 1981 and moving on to performances with Elvin Jones, Bob Dylan, Stephen Taylor, The Gluons, Harry Smith, and others, these collaborations yield a variety of inspiring results.

Over the last year and a half, I've worked intensely on this project, leaving it then coming back to it a few months later. I could have kept this up for years, but final decisions had to be made. Limiting the wealth of material down to four volumes was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, for I know that this box set is only the beginning of what should be released on Allen. The previously mentioned 16-volume set compiled by Barry Miles and a complete double disc of all the William Blake would still only scratch the surface of what else is available, and "what else is available" is worth finding and listening to. This box set simply presents a smorgasbord of Allen's past recordings. At age 67, he is still incredibly active, having just returned from a four-month tour of Europe. There are plenty of new projects to be planned.

Thanks to all those involved with this project. This would include James Austin, Bob Rosenthal, Jacqueline Gens, Steven Taylor, Peter Hale, David Greenberg, Bob Fisher, Jonathan Horn, Susan Jacobs, John Strother, Kush, Brian, Vicki Stanbury, Randy Roark, Bill Morgan, and many others. And an extra thanks to Allen Ginsberg for his time and trust. I hope that this selection fulfills his wishes.

Each time I work with Allen, I come away with a fresh perspective and respect for him, and this experience has not been different. It's amazing that one man is capable of so much creativity and still has the time and energy to teach, travel, and extend a helping hand to his peers and the world. Allen is not one to sit back in an easy chair and play it safe. When it comes to his work, he "goes for it." This man has made change in the world a few times; I have learned and continue to learn much from him. I am proud to be associated with him.

I'll be seeing you.

--Hal Willner
Spring 1994

Notes on Selected Poetry Vocalized
by Allen Ginsberg

Vol. 1: Moloch!

"Walking At Night In Key West": I left New York Christmas 1953, hitchhiked down to Key West, and while I was walking the highway waiting for a ride, talking, singing to myself, I made up funny verses for "Saints"--I'd heard "The Saints Go Marching In" in high school and later New Orleans; I still sing it. I was on my way to Cuba & Yucatan before heading to the Bay Area to visit Neal Cassady. He had an old tape machine Kerouac had used earlier. I recorded a few poems in his wooden living room, an old frame house in San Jose.

"A Mad Gleam": John Clellon Holmes had an apartment in central Manhattan, mid-block 56th Street three flights up, facing Lexington Avenue. Kerouac and I and Neal Cassady and many others used to visit him, intelligent & hospitable. He had a little tape machine, wire or paper tape perhaps, and made a few recordings of Kerouac and myself during parties or after. "A Mad Gleam" was a free rendition of Kerouac's Dr. Sax and my own "Shrouded Stranger," but it pretended to be a symbolic presentation of a mystical experience, primordial historical mind going back to Egypt and the Greeks. My key phrase in those days 1947-1950 was "shadow changes into bone"; i.e., imagination (shadow) changes into reality (bone)--archaic literary symbolic language. But I 'd had a mystical experience of Blake's voice sounding like the Ancient of Days. "Mad" because I'd just come out of the bughouse, partly as a result of clinging to that visionary gleam.

Symphony Sid was background in Holmes' early recordings--an all-night radio show that played advanced bebop. The radio was on when he turned on his tape machine. It wasn't a deliberate attempt to put poetry and jazz together. Jazz was all around anyway, it was part of the ambient sound.

"The Green Automobile": There's an audible difference in my intonation & poetic style between the 1949 Holmes session and 1954 at Neal's house. By then I'd absorbed Kerouac's notion of more spontaneous writing. I'd also sent Empty Mirror to W. C. Williams and picked up his sense of "American idiom" for a vernacular practical poetry. I'd made a shift from rhymed metaphysical verse to Imagist-Objectivist modern diction and rhythm, "intense fragments of ordinary speech." The voice changes from the singsong crooning style of academic poetry to a more lively style of conversation, but still has an overlay of weltschmerz and literary slow-down, not as quick as regular speech. I'm head-trip musing to myself in only two or three tones, not yet with full range of vernacular pitch, actual talk, developed by the late '50s or early '60s.

"The Green Automobile" was an imaginative blueprint. I invented an auto, put it on the roads of America, and took off in a nostalgic recapitulation of On The Road. I'd read that in Rome homosexual prostitutes wore green--so green was my gay love color then, not pink. The poem mythologizes the Neal Cassady-Dean Moriarty-Cody Pomeroy figure that Kerouac had twice memorialized in On The Road and Visions Of Cody and carries it one step further in my direction toward Eros affection. It predicts fame, supernatural illumination, great art learned in desolation, "and we beat apart after six decades . . ." Actually it turned out to be only two and a half, I thought Neal'd live longer.

"A Supermarket In California": Written 1956 in Berkeley cottage, now torn down--I read all through Leaves Of Grass on pallet on cottage floor that season, investigating his use of a long verse line. I was amazed by his spiritual expansion and discovered Whitman brooding over my own Calamus longings in later America. Federico García Lorca comes in the supermarket through his ode "Not for one moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman/have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies/nor your corduroy shoulders worn down by the moon."

"Howl (for Carl Solomon)": I'd written "Dream Record," a visit with the late Joan Burroughs. She asked me what'd happened to Bill, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr, and Kerouac. Dreaming, I realized she was dead and asked, "What do you remember of the living?" and saw a sudden "jump cut" vision of an old crooked-branched tree rising above her tombstone. That gave me the idea of a quick shift from one visual image to another. Burroughs was already doing it in Naked Lunch: routines, juxtaposing one image on another without explanation. I wanted a surrealist shorthand adaptation from Williams' naturalistic description & Whitman's catalogs, syntactically condensed to get phrases like "hydrogen jukebox" or "winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain." The gap between "hydrogen" and "jukebox" is filled in by the mind interpreting a sense to it. The breath in these poems is an extension of Williams' vernacular breath, his was set in triadic "ladders." This breath was longer--Hebraic bardic rather than short breath-stop'd conversational.

The first celebrated reading of "Howl," Part I only, at 6 Gallery, October 7, 1955, wasn't taped. Prof. Tom Parkinson, member of Rexroth's old Buddhist anarchist circle, organized another reading at Berkeley's little Town Hall Theater festooned with Chinese ink brush orgy drawings by Robert LaVigne--a couple hundred people crowded in, a mixture of artists from San Francisco, poetry aficionados, friends of Robert Duncan, ladies from the Potrero District, North Beach bohemians, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Cassady, Ann Charters, and an amazing group of poets onstage, including Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, with Kenneth Rexroth as Master of Ceremonies. Five months after the 6 Gallery reading, I'd finished Parts II and III of "Howl." This added a huge dimension, extending the power of the poem into the Moloch section and beyond. And this was the first time I'd read "Howl" all the way through aloud, beginning to end, as well as "Sunflower Sutra," "A Strange New Cottage In Berkeley," and "America," further experiments with the long breath'd verse line.

The audience was a little off-center because of the celebrity of one earlier 6 Gallery reading; many in the audience had been there. Some thought it was a hoot party, which it was, but they didn't get the non-wine sublimity or aesthetic seriousness. They wanted to encourage but were a little too familiar, too "knowing," not yet aware of the power of Parts II and III. So the beginning of the reading is quite muted. I'm not stable on my feet, and I'm worried I'm going to be interrupted if they laugh too much at the curiosity of the lines, because the phrasing is humorous, meant to be appreciated, maybe with response, but not such as would interrupt the flow of the poem. However, the reading goes on, it mounts in intensity and clarity, people begin settling in and realizing what's happening, it's musical as well as intellectual, it should be listened to. By the end of Part I it approaches a tearfulness or emotional power, and when the proclamation launches into Moloch and "I'm with you in Rockland," I'm in possession of my breath and reading properly, though still somewhat in one or two tones. I still hadn't broken out of the classical Dylan Thomas monotone, maybe appropriate for an ecstatic, mechanical revelation where the divine machine revs up over and over until it takes off.

Fortunately, several people brought tape recorders: Prof. Parkinson, photographer Harry Redl, and graduate student friend Walter Lehrman. Parkinson's tape was incomplete, Redl's onstage was overloaded, Lehrman's in mid-audience had best balance. Bay Area poetry reading tape archivist enthusiast Steven Kushner (aka "Kush"), who helped curate many of these recordings, located the Lehrman tape almost four decades later and lovingly worked toward re-creation of this ur-reading of "Howl" entire.

"Footnote To Howl": Rexroth's connection in Los Angeles was Lawrence Lipton, who later wrote a book that upset Kerouac, The Holy Barbarians, labeling us "barbarians," excessively romantic and holy at the same time. He put a political Marxian protest style on it which Kerouac didn't like; he thought it diverted his Blakean spiritual Lamb to political aggression, as he said ten years later, "inventing new reasons for spitefulness," a radical spin diluting the Buddhist anarchism of Rexroth and Snyder. This lessened poetic impact by substituting media stereotypes of "rebellion against society" and anti-conformity as the "beatnik" essence, rather than the spiritual breakthrough and creation of a New Vision we were interested in--a new consciousness, not a new ideology. Lipton had a student circle and was coming on as poetry guru so I felt a little shy about his scene. Anaïs Nin was present at this reading, seated in a beautiful high overstuffed chair-throne, maybe 50 people in chairs or seated on the floor around her in a large living room. The hosts were old-fashioned radicals and thought we were undisciplined but vigorous--not as sophisticated or as literate as they were, and a few were alcoholic. One red-haired guy began interrupting Gregory, repeating, "What are you guys trying to prove?" Which was really, I thought, out of line. So I stupidly answered him, "Nakedness." And he said, "What do you mean, 'Nakedness'?" I was nonplussed because I'd opened my mouth and put my foot in it, so I stripped completely for a minute while Anaïs Nin laughed, and everybody responded with a mixture of shock and applause. That was the only time I ever took my clothes off at a reading.

"Footnote" is funny. I thought I'd continue "Howl," bring it to greater climax, and wrote Part IV. Rexroth said, "The poem's long enough already, you've got a completely perfect thing, what do you want more for?" But I did want more--I wanted that flourish of "Holy Holies," like the triumphant conclusion of Handel's "Messiah." But the Moloch section has a grander climax. Still, I am happy with the Buddha mind conclusion, "extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul."

"America": I didn't think "America" was much of a poem, nor did Kerouac. It's one-liners in different voices, sardonic schizophrenic, the tone influenced by Tzara's Dada manifestos. I didn't read in 1956 with the same quickness I do now to get subtle changes of temper. After a few lines the audience began laughing, particularly on "Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb," which was unusual, so to speak, to be saying in a poem in that decade. This first reading sounds like a stand-up comedy routine, and the audience response frames a cultural profile of the mid '50s. I'm a little ashamed of milking the gags when I hear this debut, except that I'd read my main work that night, the first complete "Howl" as well as "Sunflower Sutra," and this was dessert.

"Sunflower Sutra": "What about poem with rhythmic buildup power equal to 'Howl' without use of repeated base to sustain it? 'The Sunflower Sutra' (composition time 20 minutes, me at desk scribbling, Kerouac at cottage door waiting for me to finish so we could go off somewhere party) did that, it surprised me, one long Who" (liner notes, Howl & Other Poems, Fantasy Records, Berkeley, 1959).

Same Berkeley reading, I got through "Sunflower Sutra" without too much trouble, the voice is firm in mechanistic America at the beginning of cold blood war horror in Indochina. Here Whitmanic self-acceptance, tearful recognition of private feeling, breaks through self-rejection, the psychological tone of the era's public demeanor, McCarthyite demagogic nationalist harsh conformism.

"Green Valentine Blues": In Mexico I'd lived on a cacao plantation for three months in Chiapas rain forest, solitary wondering where I'd ever find love, amid insect-eating blossoms and giant palms, caoba (mahogany) trees and one plant with a huge heart-shaped leaf. "Green Valentine" echoes some old Tin Pan Alley, music hall barbershop, almost vaudeville number, sentimental like "My Yiddishe Mama," the kind of thing you sing to yourself in bed. Same tape session as before in Cassady's house.

"Death To Van Gogh's Ear": Randall Jarrell, Poetry Consultant, put us on to the Librarian of Congress. We'd been a year and a half abroad, relatively sophisticated by this time, making interesting critical statements about America, differing from the official Time magazine CIA party-line. We sat at a table in the research room of the archiving and record section in the basement with a clunky big machine. The recording engineer knew what he was doing, voices are clear and fresh. Gregory and I were constantly jousting with each other for insight or attention, Peter piping up with judicious intelligence.

"Death To Van Gogh's Ear" was an early long political rant. I was taking the news of the day and making hyperbole of it. In Blake's French Revolution, he took the political details of the Court of Louis XVI and magnified roles into cosmo-demonic figures--counselors in flowing robes, fire coming out of their sleeves with burning babies' heads trailing along after them in the corridors of the Louvre. Again, the method exaggerates details, turning Whitmanic glimpses into surrealist images, talking prophetically using newspaper information, so truth breaks through.

This reading of "Death To Van Gogh's Ear" came straight from raw journal pages, before final editing for Kaddish book. We've edited this tape, switching lines or sections around to approximate the published text, but included some verses never printed.

Vol. 2: Caw Caw

"Kaddish (for Naomi Ginsberg 1894-1956)": The first notations for "Kaddish" were made in Paris 1958. The rest was written in a single sitting two years later from 5 a.m. Saturday morning through Sunday afternoon in New York City. It was exhausting, with a little methamphetamine to keep energy sustained, a little morphine to calm that down, a lot of coffee, and a tiny bit of LSD to give it an edge of metaphysical expansiveness. Peter Orlovsky brought me food and kept guard at my bedroom door where I was working, handwriting in pen. A few days earlier I'd been across the Hudson to Ray Bremser's Hoboken apartment listening to Ray Charles records, "Georgia On My Mind" and "I Got A Woman" with big crescendos. Later in Greenwich Village a friend, Zev Putterman, read me "Kaddish" aloud; I'd never heard it before. The rhythms of davening, often with head swaying back and forth, stuck with me. So the cadence all through the poem's based on davening rabbis do to move the spirit and body when chanting the mourner's Kaddish, somehow connected with the near-Aramaic cantillation of Ray Charles. It's the continuous extended breath, a Herculean rhythmic surge that pulses through and comes to climaxes over and over again. And I filled the continuous extended breath with information. First I tried to sum up my relationship with my mother, then realized I hadn't given the story, only a series of discontinuous nonlinear images, in the Proem. So Part II went back and narrated the story proper. Part III is like "Oy oy vay iz mir!" groaning & mourning, same cadence. Part IV extended the litany forms of "Howl." The idea of Part V was as a fugue. I had call-and-response litany ending "Howl" and ended "Kaddish" with two different anaphoric trumpet calls--"Caw, caw" and "Lord, Lord," the litany interweaved in the last line as one bipolar scream: "Caw, caw, caw, Lord, Lord, Lord, caw, caw, caw." I couldn't figure out whether I should end with "Caw" or with "Lord." Later I decided that "caw" would be better. This reading ends with the "Lord" but that's too sentimental, because "caw" is the nontheist reality. There are crows but I don't think there's a Lord.

I'd never read "Kaddish" complete in public before 1964 because it was so long. The beginning of the reading's tentative, like the first reading of "Howl," but after a while the rhythm asserts itself, and I get with it. This was in a crowded hall at Brandeis, a Jewish school, and this was a paean with Jewish themes, so I thought here the poem would be understood.

"Guru": Hypnogogic reverie, written after a dusk nap on sacred Primrose Hill, an old Druid holy place looking down across London's skyline. Kind of a mysterious poem, it's indefinite who or what the Guru is except the sound of a bell in one of London's towers. Consciousness awakening itself in the vastness of London, picking out little details, including shoes and the bell.

"Kral Majales (King Of May)": This first-ever reading of "Kral Majales" was done within weeks of writing the poem for a small audience at Better Books, a shop near Charing Cross, London, that specialized in American literature, managed by Miles. I'd been kicked out of Cuba for private criticism of Castro's gay-persecution policies and landed in Prague for a month. I'd gone on to Russia and Poland and on my way back home stopped in Czechoslovakia. There accidentally I was elected the King of May on May Day then expelled by Czech police a week later. By May 9, while visiting with Dylan on the Thames embankment, he filmed Don't Look Back, and thereafter I found myself in a hotel room with him and The Beatles. I really was the King of May.

"To Aunt Rose": Aunt Rose died in 1940, so this poem goes back to my fourteenth year. She was a sweet strong woman, my father's sister, the great gifted lady of the family who'd foster-mothered me when my mother was in the hospital. Politically active; her husband Sam, refugee from the Czar's army, was a pharmacist Communist. She had one leg shorter than the other and a big shoe made up the difference, but it still klunked as she leaned to one side hurrying forward to answer the door happily with a big smile when we came visiting. This studio reading of "Aunt Rose" was the best I ever gave--I discovered how to say "the war in Spain has ended long ago/Aunt Rose," with a slight rise of the voice, almost going into, not tears, but the intimacy of addressing her directly with inquiring tenderness.

VOL. 3 AH!

"Wales Visitation": "Wales Visitation" was written on the sixth or so hour of an acid trip in Wales at the house of my English publisher. The word "visitation" comes from the peregrinations of the Welsh bards, who went once from village to village rhyming their news and gossip. The poem uses two thirds of the notes made at that time, stitched together later. I was interested in making an artwork comprehensible to people not high on acid, an artifact that could point others' attention to microscopic details of the scene. They wouldn't necessarily know the poem was written on acid, but with an extraordinarily magnified visionary appreciation of the vastness of the motif in its "minute particulars," it might transfer the high consciousness of LSD to somebody with ordinary mind. By focusing the poem's eye outside of my thoughts onto external pictures, details of the phenomenal world, I was able to maintain a center and balance, continuing from beginning to end in an intelligible sequence, focusing on awareness of breath. It was coherent enough to publish in The New Yorker, whose editors eliminated the note about acid.

Underneath the voice, Hal Willner put a track of the "Ah" mantra that he found on a plastic disc put out by Pequod Records. During the 1968 Democratic Convention I did a lot of chanting of "Om" to calm myself, police, and crowds, and sometimes it worked. But in 1971 during a near-riot (over U.S. Indochinese Bombing Crisis) in Boulder I asked Chögyam Trungpa, "Is there any mantra that can calm people down?" And he said, "Why don't you try 'Ah'?" So I sped downstairs to Pearl Street & Broadway and got in the middle of the group who were going off to blockade a highway and started chanting "Ah" after asking them to chant with me. Everybody sat down, then we discussed strategy calmly rather than as a hysterical mob. "Om" closes at the end but "Ah" leaves the mouth open, breath goes out. On the 4th of July you see the fireworks and say "Ah," or you recognize something and say "Ah!" When Trungpa said, "Why don't you try 'Ah'?" he joined an American sound with Himalayan wisdom, and I've used it ever since. "Ah" for recognition, appreciation, the intelligence of speech joining body and mind.

"The End": This poem's the after-effect of an Amazon vine potion, Yage, which rouses a four-hour psychedelic trip. I'd brought a gallon jug through customs to New York. I think "The End" is probably wrong-headed; it assumes some grand, divine, terrible, wrathful, Jehovaic spirit external to the universe, one central consciousness that accepts or rejects you. "Old Nobodaddy," Blake says.

"I Am A Victim Of Telephone": Returned from India in 1963, I settled in New York. At that time protests against Vietnam War began, with ripening of Black Liberation. Poet LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) was set up for arrest, Lenny Bruce put on trial, there was riot in Harlem, people were busted for drugs or OD'd. The poem describes the phone calls of one day. Fame and the excitement of the new culture were a kind of heavy weight bearing down on "Beat" poets.

"The Echoing Green," "The Lamb," "(A) Little Boy Lost (B) Little Boy Found," "Laughing Song": On the bus coming from Carolyn Cassady's, same visit written about in "On Neal's Ashes," I kept hearing a line of Blake in my ear: "Fayette, Fayette, thou art bought and sold/and sold is the happy morrow/thou gavest the tears of pity away/in exchange for the tears of sorrow." I began hearing it as music for the first time. When I got to San Francisco I read "The Grey Monk" and imagined a tiny, piping, sweet, angelic voice singing, "Vain the sword and vain the bow/they never can work war's overthrow." After the Democratic Convention I went to a farm in Cherry Valley, New York, in state of shock having seen the bare skull of Police State. The only thing that made any sense was transcending war horror and snakepit politics with Blake's "Vain the sword and vain the bow." I stayed up three nights setting two dozen Blake songs to one group, starting with "I'm an old man now" and ending "stop for tea & gas." It's the heart of "Wichita Vortex Sutra;" the rhetorically exciting part starts quietly, builds up to a big climax, and ends letting the air out of the whole ecstatic rhetorical balloon with "gas." It gives me a chance to do operatic rhetorical declamation and gives Glass a ground to build melodrama.

He spent a long time in India, studied Indian music, and some of what I'm doing is like mantra. In the heart or climax of this section, "I make mantra of American language now." "Mantra" meaning "mind protection spell." This first collaboration was the seed from which the later Hydrogen Jukebox opera (Elektra/Nonsuch Records, 1993) grew. In Philip's music and in mantra one principle is to take a simple theme and repeat it over and over with variations, deepening concentration and devotional attention until you enter into it completely or the mantra enters into you, you become one with the sound. For some yogis "Shabda," Sound, is an ultimate yoga: Follow sound to its source and you'll come to empty silence, the origin of the universe.

"Nurse's Song (Innocence)": This is a wonderful version, with Steven singing rounds and Peter yodeling. It's a way to say goodbye, and it's also a sing-along. I'd started musically in 1963 with mantra, perfecting one chord, and then began setting Blake to one chord, then two. I saw Blake also as sacred music. Finally I got the Blake together with mantric chorus at the end. This version was recorded by Dutch Radio in the Kosmos, a spiritual vegetarian youth club in Amsterdam. We'd sung it for years, different each time. Here Peter's yodeling's at its cheerful sublime best, Steven Taylor's musicianship sure and his voice pure, my own voice centered OK in a balanced spontaneous structure.

"Pull My Daisy": I'd written a little poem, later published in Neurotica magazine:

Pull my daisy
tip my cup
Cut my thoughts
for coconuts.

Kerouac thought that was funny, took the manuscript home, and came back a week later with this ditty in his notebook:

Pull my daisy
tip my cup
all my doors are open.

He'd added a nursery rhyme tail to the first two lines, so that set the form. We played with all sorts of archaic imagery, including puns like "Hop my heart on." One night visiting Neal Cassady in his parking lot at 34th Street, New York City, I saluted him, saying, "Stop the hoax!" Jack said, "What's the hex, where's the wake?" So Neal replied, "How's the hicks?" The poem served as the title for Robert Frank's 1959 movie, in which it was tuned by David Amram, sung by Anita Ellis.

Vol. 4 Ashes & Blues

"Capitol Air": 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 Salvador and Central America but the kids are throwing eggs and tomatoes at 'im. Would you like to try?" I said, "I don't know about making a speech, but I've got a punk song about that." Simple chords, we rehearsed it five minutes and got it together. They led me onstage at the beginning of their second set, and we launched right into the guitar clang. It's punk in ethos and rhythmic style for abrupt pogo-dancing, jumping up and down, but elegant in the sense of having specific political details. First stanza drags a little, but there's one point where we all get together for two verses, an anthemlike punk song. Only one tape exists, taken off the board. They gave me a copy and it's been sitting around all these years like a little toy. Later we worked together, and I sang a bit on their Combat Rock; also tinkered with Strummer's lyrics.

"Written In My Dreams By W.C. Williams": While traveling in China, Williams' shade appeared in a dream and gave me instructions for poetry. Waking, I wrote down what I remembered--maybe the first four-to-six verses--then in hypnogogic half-sleep, using forms similar to Williams' early five-or-six syllable couplets, continued writing till the sense was complete. I read it somewhat in his voice, with variations in pitch from very high to low. The listener might dig that in spoken poetry and open form verse you can pay attention to enunciation of consonants. The variation in pitch in the spoken word can be equivalent to the emotional tone of phrase. In Williams you hear a particularly intelligent, delicate, ordinary voice with a great deal of sentiment, as if someone were talking seriously to his mother or best friend, not talking poetry but talking talk.

"CIA Dope Calypso": "CIA Dope Calypso" was based on a lot of research I did in '71. I'd gotten into the Time magazine morgue and read informal dispatches talking about illegal CIA dope dealings, then went down to Washington to the Institute for Policy Studies and spent several weeks doing research on CIA involvement in dope trafficking from Indochina, starting with Meo tribesman at our air base at Long Cheng, which was a CIA secret. I interviewed veterans, congressional investigative-committee aides, the head of CIA even, etc. Results contributed to The Politics Of Heroin (Alfred McCoy, 1971, reprinted by Lawrence Hill Books, Brooklyn, 1991).

John Hammond let us (John Sholle and David Mansfield) more or less run the recording sessions. Supervising with a very light touch, he'd go in the control room, and if he liked something he'd say, "There. We got it," and we'd go on to the next song. An album was supposed to be released by Columbia but they wouldn't put it out, saying it was too dirty, though Hammond fought for it. Six years later Hammond brought those sessions together with others I'd made on my own for a double album, First Blues, on his own label, distributed by Columbia. It got some elegant reviews, then sank into distributor's oblivion, shredded before I could rescue copies from the warehouse. But I can be said to be Hammond's last blues discovery.

"Vomit Express": These 1971 sessions came about because Dylan had come to hear a poetry reading at NYU's Loeb Auditorium, standing in the back of the crowded hall with David Amram. We were on stage with a gang of musician friends, and Peter improvised, singing, "You shouldn't write poetry down but carol it in the air, because to use paper you have to cut down trees." I picked up on that, and we spent a half an hour making up tuneful words on the spot. I didn't know 12-bar blues, it was just a free-form rhyming extravaganza. We packed up, said goodbye to the musicians, thanked them and gave them a little money, went home, and then the phone rang.

It was Dylan asking, "Do you always improvise like that?" And I said, "Not always, but I can. I used to do that with Kerouac under the Brooklyn Bridge all the time." He came to our apartment with Amram and a guitar, we began inventing something about "Vomit Express," jamming for quite awhile, but didn't finish it. He said, "Oh, we ought to get together in a studio and do it," then showed me the three-chord blues pattern on my pump organ. A week later in the studio Dylan actually did the arrangement, told people when to do choruses and when to take breaks, and suggested the musicians cut a few endings on their own to be spliced in.

"Vomit Express" was a phrase I got from my friend Lucien Carr, who talked about going to Puerto Rico, went often, and we were planning to take an overnight plane a couple of weeks later, my first trip there. He spoke of it as the "vomit express"--poor people flying at night for cheap fares, not used to airplanes, throwing up airsick.

"Please Master": This was recorded at Rotterdam's venerable International Poetry Festival. I wrote "Please Master" soon after Neal Cassady's death; in a certain sense it's an amazing piece of necrophilia. I'm interested in those conditions where you get to the bottom of your psyche and express what's reserved and hidden but always there as a ground of feeling, a glimpse sufficiently recurrent to be characteristic of your heart. It's a poem that's hard to read, and I don't read it often: The difficulty is, if I'm embarrassed, there's an edge of nervousness that spoils the poem. Or if I read it aggressively or boastfully, it spoils the poem. So how to reach an intimate personal emotional ground that's real? Fortunately, I was scared of making a mess at this distinguished festival so I read it straightforwardly and simply, gathering a certain amount of heart-tone, proportion, and proper voice with no edge of hysteria or challenge. It's more an intimate, actual reverie and, in that sense, unalterable, invulnerable on moral or theatrical grounds. I'm happy that it's going to be released and heard because this poem really touches common ground, emotionally.

"The Little Fish Devours The Big Fish": Elvin Jones and I were teaching together in Florida and stopped at a small recording studio to experiment. I'd written this estimate of the U.S.-backed Contra war at the bar of the big Nicaraguan hotel as a rhyme that requires a strong steady beat to rap against. The amazing thing about Elvin is he's a very powerful-looking guy and a drummer of tremendous power, gigantic and scary in a way, but on the other hand he's a being of great delicacy and understanding. He describes his job as building a ground floor to support the solo. I felt like a four-eyed intellectual professor with him but he was very respectful and amused by what I was laying down. At the end he got into what he spoke of as a traditional spiritual church rhythm.

"Prayer Blues": Ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, painter, alchemist Harry Smith actually recorded every single song I wrote up until that date several times, until we got versions he liked--a small part of his vast "Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture In The Lower East Side." He was a genius with the microphone and his Wallensack in a drab room in the Hotel Chelsea. He'd done the first Fugs album, same technique. Harry left all the tapes with Moe Asch at Folkways. Years later Asch approached Ann and Sam Charters to put together an album, issued in 1981 as Allen Ginsberg Singing And Accompanying Himself On The Benares Harmonium, including an alternate take on "Prayer Blues" (Allen Ginsberg First Blues: Rags Ballads And Harmonium Songs, The Smithsonian Institute, Folkways Cassette Series 37560). Harry always insisted this was the better version. I started off on the wrong key, and he had to stop and correct me. I was tapping my foot and he said, "Do that heavier." Now it sounds like some old funny geezer folksinger who'd been doing this thing for 50 years, like specimens on Harry's celebrated 1952 Anthology Of American Folk Music that helped catalyze the later '50s folk blues revival.

"Birdbrain": Going through customs in Yugoslavia I got a taste of soul bureaucracy, which underneath is completely nuts; I began digging the mess of Communism, in fact the World Mess. That hot night I woke up in Dubrovnik and started rearranging my sheets in bed and thought "I am birdbrain," and wrote the whole poem down except one line. To balance out U.S. and Red birdbrains, I asked Andrei Voznesensky for a verse, his "Birdbrain, chief bureaucrat of Russia, yawning."

A 1980s equivalent of the 1956 poem "America," same form, it compresses journalistic information into aphoristic statement. The Gluons with Mike Chapelle were part of a true literary rock 'n' roll culture in Denver, a heavy garage band named for the smallest particle of matter. Chapelle and his group figured out an ingenious way of framing the irregular-length verse inside a 16-bar time-space. It's a Sgt. Pepper's-like mix with megaphone echoes, big crowd sound effects, airplanes roaring, an intelligent montage. The studio cost $15 an hour to make this fun 45, which aired a lot on college radios from Berkeley to Harvard and sold 3,000 copies before the master wore out.

"Gospel Noble Truths": I had the idea of making a country & western or gospel song out of Buddhist Dharma. I'd sung it any number of times already, with Sholle, with Arthur Russell, and I'd rehearsed it with David Mansfield on the Dylan "Rolling Thunder" tour bus.

It's an outline of Three Marks of Existence: suffering, change, and no permanent soul; then the Four Noble Truths: that existence contains suffering, suffering is caused by ignorance, there is an end to ignorance, and the medicine for all that--the fourth truth--is the eight-fold path. The latter is right views ("Look at the view," etc.), right aspirations, right speech, right action, right labor, right energy, right mindfulness, right meditation, and right samadhi or right state of being. Followed by instructions in sitting, standing, and lying down meditation; followed by a review of the six senses: sight ("Look where you look," etc.), sound, smell, taste, touch, and mind (Think what you think"). Then instructions in dying.

The only thing I wonder is "Die when you die." Some Buddhists believe in reincarnation. But you still have to die to get there. So it's a short-form summary review of the nut of Buddhism, a little Dharma in pop form.

"Hum Bom": Part I codifies a longer improvisation in a Southern church at an antiwar rally marking U.S. carpet-bombing North Vietnam, early '70s. Performing this percussive bummer with me at Folk City a decade later, Don Cherry laid down his trumpet and protested squealing "We don't wanna bomb!?" so Part II evolved to alchemize the aggressive energy into something positive. I thought that I was finished with the poem but the bombing of Iraq prompted another seven stanzas' blacktop analysis. Part III's an attempt to lob a word bomb, an explosion of mantric sound, into the middle of what seems by hindsight one of the most successful coups of government brainwash in the history of American mass-media. The fossil fuel-addicted West helped fortify Saddam Hussein; the age of the Iraqi populace averaged 16, the war was child abuse. This was a live reading for poetry heads crowded into St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. Gog and Magog are mirror-image mad puppets of war, prophesied to appear before world's final destruction, Biblical Armageddon, (see Ezekiel and Revelation).

"Airplane Blues": The climactic verse: "I'm alone in the sky where there's nothing to lose/The sun's not eternal, that's why there's the blues" seems to join philosophic poetry with essential blues idiom, classic in words and tune. I was happy Dylan was still willing to back me up when I needed musicians, something he'd offered a decade earlier. The quality of the current Ampex tape at this session at his Santa Monica studio was quite bad. Within 11 years the plastic had begun flaking and Willner had to bake the tapes wrapped in aluminum before they could remix the eight tracks first engineered by Arthur Rosato, who'd also played drums. Happy also to see music companion Steven Taylor at last playing with Dylan, reunited with David Mansfield as well, Orlovsky present.

"On Neal's Ashes": I went down to Los Gatos to visit Carolyn Cassady, who'd received Neal's ashes in a little bag in a wooden box from Mexico City where there'd been autopsy and cremation. I opened the box, looked inside the bag, and touched my finger to black and white cinders with a little rough stuff in it, pieces of bone burnt, blackened. "So that's what happened to Neal Cassady." It seemed magical he'd disappeared and transformed into a little tiny pile of gritty ashes. But it was definitive as his death, I realized that all his brilliant muscle had become these cinders.

"September On Jessore Road": In between Record Plant sessions I wanted to write something worthy of Dylan's attention, a poem long and beautiful like "Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands," but W. C. Williams-like natural reportage, and spiritual--something to astonish Dylan to tears. I wrote an account of exactly what I'd seen on a recent trip to India, words and music simultaneous on my Indian harmonium. I'd based the music on the two chords of Vajra Guru Mantra, and the rhyme form echoed Blake's "On Another's Sorrow." Dylan took the pages home, and when he came back next day said he'd wept. But he couldn't get his guitar in accord with my harmonium, which was a half-step off Western tuning. Also I misdirected him calling this song a blues--a form he'd tried teaching me weeks before. He restrung or retuned his guitar but it never quite got in pitch. He took two or three rounds till his hand ached while I did vocals simultaneously. Then he went over and put in another guitar and organ part and then started dropping piano bombs, percussive punctuations underlining different phrases. That was the high point of the recording--Dylan coming down with all ten genius fingers intermittently at the right places. Later in 1971 I opened a "Free John Sinclair" rally in Detroit, organized by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, playing the entire "Jessore Road" with guitarist Gary Getz. Lennon was in his dressing room so he missed it. When the group got together in his hotel afterward, Gary and I played it for him, and his comment was, "You ought to treat it like 'Eleanor Rigby,' with a string quartet." Later, in 1982, impresario Benn Posset offered Steven and me musicians and recording facilities in Amsterdam for a One World Poetry record. Steven wrote out parts for string quartet and guitar, and we recorded at the Milky Way theater. That stayed in the can for another ten years, then came out in small edition on CD.

For this collection Willner took the time, patience, ear, and discernment to hear everything that was on the Record Plant's 16 tracks, separate it all out, fade Dylan's first guitar, and redub my vocal in proper pitch, speech-song style. So what began as a recording with Dylan and an idea by Lennon took 20 years to complete.

I'd been disappointed that my magnum opus, which I thought as good as anything I'd written since "Kaddish," though in a more classic rhymed form, hadn't resulted in fame, fortune, beauty, sublimity, and public proclamation. But I was overambitious, actually, and vain. Dylan had said, "Well, save the songs to sing to your friends."

"Father Death Blues": "Father Death Blues" was written within 20 hours of hearing of my father's passing. A message from my Tibetan meditation teacher the Ven. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, said: "I extend my thought that your father enter Dharmakaya. Please let him go, and continue your celebration." I was on the plane home with my harmonium on my lap and wrote it word for word, note for note, like "Jessore Road." One of the rare occasions when both words and music--the vowels and their tones and pitch--were conceived simultaneously in the depth of feeling, realization of death. The voice on it is a voice located in the heart area, that is, it resonates in the breast. That's the quality of voice that I heard in the Blake vision back in 1948. I never consciously actualized that voice in poem or song of my own until "Father Death Blues." Physical energy diminishes as you get older, but supposedly there's a deepening of wisdom. It seems to me "Father Death Blues" has as much weight and will be as lasting as anything I've done. This recording is '81, after five years' experience singing it with Steven Taylor.

"Do The Meditation Rock": I'd had meditation teacher training in the late '70s, when Trungpa Rinpoche OK'd me to show basic meditation in his tradition to classrooms or groups at poetry readings. I tried to codify meditation instructions in pop form, inspired by the annual New Year's Day Marathon at St. Mark's Poetry Project, knock all the poets out with sugarcoated Dharma. Christmas Eve, I stopped in the middle of the block at a stoop and wrote the words down, notebook on my knee. I figured that if anyone listened to the words, they'd find complete instructions for classical sitting practice, Samatha-Vipassana ("Quieting the mind and clear seeing"). Some humor in the form; it doesn't have to be taken overseriously, yet it's precise. It's the first time I got around to putting a chorus in a song, a take-off on "I Fought The Law": "I fought the Dharma and the Dharma won." Kush was there at the 1989 Burroughs' Reunion to record this performance with Steven Taylor; we'd also sung this song lots of times through Europe and America.

"After Lalon": Sunil Ganguly, Bengali poet, sent me a translation of Lalon Shah (1774-1890), Indian Baul minstrel. In Northern Bengal I'd met such Mystics dressed in patchwork clothes with one-string Ektar who wailed devotional praises to Krishna, Allah, Buddha, Christ, asses, donkeys, the Howrah Bridge over the Hoogley River in Calcutta, themselves, and crazy love, in paradoxic stanzas ("The elephant is caught in the spider web/and the ant burst out laughing" [Obscure Religious Cults, Shashibusan Das Gupta, Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta, 1969]) that end by naming the singer, as traditional in Indian saint poetry.

Gyaneswar drank to his fill the water of pearls:
Nvrittinath caught in his hands the freshness of the clouds;
Sopana decorated himself with the garland of fragrance,
Muktabai fed herself on cooked diamonds; the
Secret of all four has come to my hands--Says Changdeva.

(Sufis, Mystics And Yogis Of India, Bankey Behari, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1982)

I read Lalon's book in one night, turned out the bed lamp to doze, but repeatedly woke musing on old age in similar mode, so wrote six short poems in a notebook, intermittently dreaming before falling asleep. This take is from a gala reading with Galway Kinnell, again in the nave of St. Mark's Church.

Those who disown the prophet and are rank disbelievers
Will easily follow the primrose path of damnation
Will they be granted redemption?
The mendicant Lalon Shah trembles at his own future.

(Songs Of Lalon Shah, translation Abu Rushd, Bangla Academy, Dhaka, 1991)


Pictures

Please click inside a picture to view it in its full size.

Box Cover (Geoff Gans, Coco Shinomiya)

Booklet Cover (Geoff Gans, Coco Shinomiya) Booklet Back Cover (Geoff Gans, Coco Shinomiya)

CD Cover (Geoff Gans, Coco Shinomiya) CD Back Cover (Geoff Gans, Coco Shinomiya)





GlassPages - Philip Glass on the Web

[ ]

http://www.glasspages.org/