Allen Ginsberg on Bob Dylan: Excerpted from miscellaneous classroom lectures and interviews, 1974-1993
Allen Ginsberg on Bob Dylan
Excerpts from interviews and lectures 1974-1993
Transcribed and compiled for AG by Randy Roark, August 1993
Introductory Note:
In 1993, I transcribed 10 hours of interviews between Allen Ginsberg and Hal Willner, producer of the box-set “Holy Soul Jelly Roll.” I edited this down to 87 pages and submitted it and was told that Rhino wouldn’t even read anything longer than 58 pages, so I cut it down again. (I was puzzled by the specificity of 58 pages, but later when I worked in publishing we had rules of thumb. Eighty-seven pages reduced by one-third is fifty-eight. I’m guessing whatever anyone turned in they’d automatically ask for something one-third less. And they were right, actually. It was better shorter.)
My previous work with Allen had resulted in one of his Blake lectures being published in “The New Censorship” magazine in 1992, so whenever I transcribed I was told to look for anything that might turn up that Allen could turn into an essay or an article.
By 1993, I had transcribed all of Allen’s Naropa lectures from 1974 through 1981. (I would continue to transcribe his Naropa lectures until Allen’s death, at which point I had completed his 1983 lectures, all of his lectures on Blake (including Brooklyn College and China), and his recordings from China in 1991.
From the beginning of the transcription project in 1991, I would get calls from scholars redirected by Allen for unpublished information in the transcriptions. I soon realized it would be necessary to create a master index of every mention of a person, work of art, idea, whatever–so that, for example, when Burton Pollin, the Poe fanatic, contacted Allen for information on Allen and Poe, I just had to go to this index and type in “Poe” and every reference he’d made to Poe would pop up.
During the Willner interview, I had to cut a lot of Dylan stories that I thought would inform fans of Dylan and Ginsberg of some behind the scenes stuff–like how someone handed Dylan the long-lost manuscript of Ginsberg’s early poems.
When I was finished with the Willner project, I took those Dylan stories and went to the index and found every reference to Dylan thus far. I couldn’t see how to make it an essay but thought some Dylan mag might be interested in publishing what it was.
I continued transcribing for four years after 1993 and may find a more complete version of this collection, but this popped up when I was searching for references to Allen in a hard-drive with all of my extant writing for another project.
All of these transcriptions are available freely through the Stanford University Archives’ Ginsberg collection. Many of the original recordings have been released via Internet Archives, and most of the transcriptions have been “published” online by the Ginsberg estate. I don’t own any of this information–I just saved you from having to page through 28,000 pages to find the 28 about Dylan.
July 1974
“Open Secret”
Hosted by Duncan Campbell
KGNU FM
Boulder, Co.
In 1968, I wrote an essay about how the future poet should be able to get up on stage naked, dancing, chanting, improvising, and prophesying. There would be, finally, a merger of shamanistic naked dancing and music and spontaneous mind-poetry emerging like a shamanistic prophecy of the ideal future poet. It’s almost come true a little bit with Mick Jagger: the sort of dance nakedness and chanting. With Dylan, the spontaneous improvisation.
After meeting Chogyam [Trungpa], I worked with Dylan a
little bit, just on that, doing [improvised lyrics]. I was applying it by doing
it on stage without a text. [Peter] Orlovsky and I were giving a reading in
late 1971 at New York University, and Dylan came and sat in the back and hung
around. When he came in, we were in the middle of just making up whatever was
in our heads. Peter about not wanting to write anymore because it was just
cutting down trees, and therefore just chanting his poems in the air. Me
rhyming and doing more. Dylan was so amazed that we could do it off the top of
our heads because that’s the genuine ancient blues tradition, it turns out. It’s
an American tradition because the blues were all spontaneously improvised out
of a theme, or out of a line. Both calypso and blues were the strongest American
art forms that America produced, which invaded the whole world. The blues, or
jazz blues, [or] what became rock and roll and rhythm and blues. Rhythm and
blues were Kerouac’s and Cassady’s specialty. I began discovering that this was
the American tradition. The great tradition in America was improvisation, and
it was only the intellectual literary universe that didn’t recognize that as
poetry. Obviously, in a hundred years, the anthologies are going to be filled
with blues as examples of great American poetry, just as the English
anthologies are filled with anonymous Border Ballads and things like that.
“Meditation and Poetics” lecture
Naropa Institute
Boulder, CO.
4 August 1978
The problem with depending purely on melopoeia [the musical sense of words in poetry]—or the problem with teaching the basic of poetics as melopoeia—[is that] everybody’s got a pretty good ear alright, but they tend to imitate other people’s sounds with dull pictures, and usually re-use other people’s sounds. It’s not a firm or clear-enough base to get a toe-hold on the solidity. You can get away with too much.
And there are too many examples of senseless beauty in rock and roll lyrics or in Dylan, whose every fourth line is one of pictorial genius, with three other lines that are of pure sound melody to fill in the music in the early work. Later on, he wanted to fill in the holes and didn’t want any more of [melopoeia alone]. About 1968, he came to the conclusion that he wanted every line to be sensible.
There was a time once [when] Robert Creeley and I listened to, I think, “Blonde on Blonde,” and tried to figure out how many lines of genius there were in relation to how many lines of filler for the cycle or the melody, and we came to about one in four. But every fourth line was real genius.
[Dylan was] a genius in logopoeia: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” That’s logopoeia: the dance of the intellect among words. Witty, incisive, sharp, shrewd use of language. “To live outside the law you must be honest.” That’s good as logopoeia. And that’s something that everybody knows. There’s no picture there, except maybe “outside,” suggesting some space. It’s all generalization, but it’s generalization used so freshly and originally [and] the words recombine so curiously—I guess that would be the right word—that it does take on a fresh, incisive meaning that alters people’s minds and makes them get to another space or clarifies their confusion.
In
our modern [world], that’s the most brilliant and best-known example of
logopoeia, probably: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” I asked
Dylan what he thought his best line was, and that was the one he said. At the
time, I hadn’t noticed it and didn’t quite understand what it meant and was
ideologically obsessed with pictures, and I said, “Ah, you must have something
better than that” in a telephone conversation. He was disappointed that I didn’t
appreciate it. And I was disappointed later that I didn’t appreciate what he
was offering.
From “Mind, Mouth, and Page”
Naropa Institute
Boulder, CO.
30 July 1975
From a lecture on the poetry of Ezra Pound
Student: Would you agree with this statement, something I read in this Canadian journal three or four years ago. They made the statement that Dylan was the first to really bring Surrealism to American music effectively in his later albums.
AG: I think Surrealism in painting had already been absorbed by the advertising industry.
Student: I mean, he brought it into writing.
AG: Probably. I guess you could say so. Who else did?
Student: I think Henry Miller did somewhat.
AG: Yeah. But then Henry Miller never got to be that widespread until Dylan came … well, practically the same time. Early ‘60s, Miller was freed, and Dylan was singing. “The motorpsycho black madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen and her silver-studded phantom lover” from “Gates of Eden,” 1965, is straight out of “Howl,” straight out of Apollinaire, actually.
Student: Yeah, and anyway, all of a sudden, four or five lines from Dylan came into my head from “Desolation Row.”
AG: Yeah.
Student: “T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound fighting in the captain’s tower while gypsy singers laugh at them and fishermen wave flowers.” I got frustrated with Pound because I wasn’t understanding it. You know, that’s one of Dylan’s fucked-up lines, I’m afraid.
AG: Alas, because I love him as poet, but see, Eliot and Pound were friends; they weren’t fighting in the captain’s tower. “T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are fighting in the captain’s tower….” What was it? How does it continue?
Student: “While calypso singers laugh at them.”
AG: That might be because calypso singers in the early part of the 19th century were practicing an art form of improvisation using actual diction, street diction, and using spontaneous mind practices, which were the ultimate goal of Pound’s study of the minstrels and minnesingers. But Pound didn’t pick up on the fact that there were living minstrels and minnesingers and troubadours in America among the blacks. He didn’t quite understand [blues] as an art form. Picasso was smarter when he went back to African statuary directly for his modern spirit. But then Dylan goes on and fucks it all up with a real dull image like the “dim vales of peace.” [Editor’s note: quoting a line of poetry that Pound criticized for mixing a concrete image with an abstraction] What’s the next line? “While calypso singers laugh at them and fisherman hold flowers.”
Student: “Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow.”
AG: Dylan has to bring in his old tired lovely mermaids there. Dylan falls into exactly the trap that Pound was warning against. Where did he get those lovely mermaids at the windows of the sea? Fisherman holding flowers? That’s all out of his head from reading Ezra Pound or something. No, it’s all out of his head from reading Tennyson, probably, in high school—“mermaids of the sea,” my ass. I mean, he doesn’t know anything about mermaids of the sea. Dylan had not read, really, Pound. He’d read Eliot, but he hadn’t read Pound and, at that time, understood Pound. Later he told me that he’s ashamed of that line. He’s not ashamed, but he’s a little … he can’t sing it with the conviction that he wrote it because Pound was warning against that kind of dopey sentimentality.
Student: I always thought by that line that he was referring to this fascist state. Of Pound the fascist And this as the fascist Ship of State coming down. And anti-Semitism, as well.
AG: I don’t think so. I don’t think he had that in mind.
Student: That’s w.hat I got out of it.
AG: He thought they were too arty. While the calypso singers laugh at them. Maybe. Of course, unconsciously, he may have lovely mermaids there. Where did he get those lovely mermaids? It’s ignorance of Pound’s beauty. At that time, he had not yet read [Arthur] Rimbaud, the French Symbolist poet, 1854-1891, author of Season In Hell, Illuminations, and The Drunken Boat. Even much less Pound.
Student: It seems throughout all that song he’s comparing ideology with literature in certain … in one heavy way.
AG: I don’t think it’s the major thing. The major thing is about ego fascism. Dr. Filth and his nurse. He’s talking about an amphetamine scene — amphetamine fascism.
Student: I said the major thing is “Howl.”
AG: I don’t know how much of an influence, precisely, that was. Probably some. A little after that time, I started bringing Dylan books to read, and I brought him [Emily] Dickinson, Pound, [Walt] Whitman, [Percy Bysshe] Shelley, Rimbaud, Emily Bronte, [Antonin] Artaud, [William Carlos] Williams.
Student: He hadn’t read these people?
AG: Yeah, a little, in an anthology. [Christopher] Smart. He read [Smart] in an anthology like everybody does, but he hadn’t looked at the body of the work. His reaction to Rimbaud was great. He loved Rimbaud and said, “How can anybody write after Rimbaud?”
Student: It was just that I was trying to tie it in with that line of that Dylan song because I thought that was like what was coming through. I thought that it was just the general gut feeling that like if I open up Ezra Pound except for the last, you know, I’ve been opening some stuff that I hadn’t been open to before, I think maybe the last canto and the one about usury. There are a couple that I can get a little bit out of, but that’s just, for some reason, hard as hell for me. And T.S. Eliot also, in ways that other people are just not hard for me. Like if I hit William Blake, I hit this thing that there’s just an immediate [he slaps his hands together] and I think that’s what he was talking about because I know that when Dylan would go at blues and stuff, I’m sure that he was just getting into stuff that he grooved on, and that stuff just naturally wound up popping up all over his own music.
AG:
I would venture to say that there would have been no Bob Dylan without Ezra
Pound. If you understand the development of American poetry—how people’s minds
worked and how things changed—without the original research and invention that
Pound made, [and] that Williams used that turned me on, it would [not] have
been that kind of Dylan, see? That’s why it’s important to understand Pound. If
you want to understand the bones of the thing, if you want to understand how
everything developed historically, how attitudes and practices developed from
one person to another [as] a kind of transmitted lineage—personal transmissions
and over the radio and in Time magazine—you’d have to go back to Pound
and then, before Pound, you’d have to go back to Whitman. Then to understand
Whitman, you’d have to go to crazy [Edgar Allan] Poe. It’s all one long
beautiful unfoldment of people developing one upon another their ideas. It’s
really beautiful when you understand the development because otherwise, you [can]
make mistakes between [your] mind obsessions and gut feelings, which a lot of
Beatnik poets did.
“Basic
Poetics” lecture
Naropa Institute
Boulder, CO.
10 April 1980
I had lunch with Dylan’s mother. That was funny, initially. She was very plump. She lives in a house with wall-to-wall carpeting and plates on the wall and little gimmicks and geegaws and bowls that she picked up from her travels to Las Vegas, Scottsdale, Arizona, where her daughter is.
And so I said, “So what do you think about your son’s conversion [to Christianity]?” She said, “He hasn’t announced publicly he’s converted. He sings about Jesus, but we came from a neighborhood where everybody talks about Jesus. I like Jesus, too.” Then she said, “Besides, I’m a mother, if I had to worry every time something was said about him or he said something in the newspaper I’d have had a heart attack 40,000 times. I just give up now. Whatever he does, I don’t ask him questions.” She’s a real….
Peter Orlovsky: “It’s just a show.”
AG: What?
Peter Orlovsky: She said, “It’s just a show.”
AG: Yeah. She said, “Besides, he prepares his shows. He’s very serious about preparing his shows and testing out what the public needs.” So she was seeing it as the latest page in that light of show business. Intelligent show business. Very careful, hardworking craftsmanship of show business.
Let’s see what else of poetic import she said.
Student: [indecipherable]
Yeah, but he’s got to confront her all the time. ‘Cause she’s just this big, short, plump, Jewish mother—totally. Remarried to another husband since his father died, who is in various small businesses like recycling paper bags, little land business. Some land investment and some other matters. So she’s preoccupied with her other children and their bar mitzvahs. [Dylan] came to the bar mitzvah of a cousin last time. The big picture of the whole family, all the children, looking cheerful.
But
it’s amazing that he has to confront her constantly, like we have to confront
our mothers and our fathers with all the embarrassment and shame and glory and
secret tears that they only know. It puts him in a funny human scale. Or in my
mind it did. That he was actually very generous to her all the time—you know,
call her up. She called him up and yells at him. But now she says she’s afraid
of him. She doesn’t ask him questions.
“Basic Poetics” lecture
Naropa Institute
Boulder, CO.
15 May 1980
From a discussion on Ezra Pound’s “Seafarer.”
Then, there are hendecasyllabics or some similar sound or something that comes through in a very rare 20th-century poem that [Jim] Cohn pointed out here: “William Zanzinger killed poorb Hattie Carroll.”
Student: Is this the “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”?
AG: Yes, sir. “William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll.”
Student: Who wrote this?
AG: Bob Dylan.
So this rhythm has gone from Aeolian Sappho, who played with plectrum or quill or harp, through the 20th century to Dylan.
[To Jim Cohn] What was your statement about that particular ballad? That was his first great …
Jim Cohn: Yeah.
AG: … narrative.
Jim Cohn: Yeah.
AG: What was your phrase? It wasn’t “ballad,” what did you say? Ballad?
Jim Cohn: Yeah. And precursor of “Hurricane Carter” too. I think.
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger
Hattie Carroll—ring finger. See, it’s the same … how he got it, I’ll never know. He got it some way.
Student: Picked out of the air.
AG: Well, there’s some archetype to the rhythm. The rhythm is archetypal to the body. To a certain breathing, a certain emotion, a certain pulsation. Dylan is very sensitive also to rhythm. He’s one of the most sensitive to rhythm—this kind of class he would really dig. Because you hear the bedrock of poetry now. Just the actual archetype that runs through thousands of years of different versions.
At the Baltimore Hotel Society gathering.
At a Baltimore Hotel Society gathering—well, that’s thirteen. Sounds like eleven, though.
Jim Cohn: It’s odd. I mean….
AG:
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
At the Baltimore Hotel Society gathering.
The cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder
But you who philosophize
But then it changes.
But you who philosophize and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears.
It’s almost like an equivalent to the “fluttering doves down,” or whatever: “Now ain’t the time for your tears” has relation to his earlier line, as a short Adonic line. That’s like Dylan’s
Adonic line. Are you following what I’m saying? The Adonic line is that little tail. So the tail line of his verse for William Zanzinger is “Now ain’t the time for your tears,” which is sort of a short form of the longer line. That is a short form. The Adon is a short form of the hendecasyllable.
Now, this business of dah-duh-duh-dah-dah. “William Zanzinger” being the same—Jim recognized that, I hadn’t thought of it, but we were just talking about it as a casual rhythmic acquaintance, he mentioned it, and it’s yes, of course. “William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll” … “William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll.”
Yes?
Student: I just have a sort of curiosity question. Dylan writes really in the vernacular and stuff.
AG: Yes. So did Sappho.
Student: I know. But when did this …
AG: Just like this.
From a lecture on “Sapphics”
Naropa Institute
Boulder, CO.
14 April 1981
AG: The hendecasyllable line is so built into English that everybody hears it whether they know it or not:
(singing) William Zanzinger who at twenty-four years
Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
You notice how close that is to Pound: “who provide and protect him”? The cadence, which is built-in, which Dylan didn’t know by name or know the history of probably, though he might have gotten it through ballads. The book which he had [on his bookshelf when I visited him in 1968, was the Child Ballads]. [The hendecasyllabic line] is so built into the poetry forms of English that it would evolve even through his nervous system.
And, oddly, see how close it is to the Pound spondee just in the sound of it—in “diamond ring finger”—“diamond ring fing—”—the spondaic. Those two vowels set side-by-side, for singing. There’s the dactyl in there, and there’s a spondee in there.
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the politics of Maryland,
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was a-
snarling,
In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain’t the time for tears.
It’s mostly dactylic, and you can hear some of the spondees, and you can see, oddly enough, weirdly, this relationship between the sound of Dylan and the sound of Pound.
So the point is that the sound of Pound is not so far off from what we [have] built into our pop ear. In some respects, maybe it’s Pound who’s the author, ultimately, of that kind of sound consciousness.
Excerpts from an interview with Hal Willner to compile material for a booklet to go along with Rhino Record’s release of Ginsberg’s “Holy Soul Jelly Roll” release.
New York City, NY
9 June 1993.
So there was a big era of good feeling between black and white poets and a big meeting of cultures where Leroi Jones would have parties with Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, Franz Kline, Frank O’Hara, Kerouac, myself, Corso, Langston Hughes. I met Langston Hughes once. Then there was a big reading at the Gaslight [Cafe] that got on the front page of the “Daily News”—the first big coffeeshop poetry reading that finally attracted Dylan to the Gaslight.
* * *
Earlier that year [1957], I had been to Ray Bremser’s apartment. Bremser’s a poet who’s full of jazz, and Dylan liked it. A spoken, speaking poet or a jazzy poet. Dylan mentions him on the back of one of his early album covers.
* * *
[Atlantic Record’s recording of Ginsberg’s poem “Kaddish”] moved Dylan when he heard it. He kept telling me that was the thing that turned him on to my poetry, inspired him.
* * *
What’s interesting is that having been kicked out of Czechoslovakia for suggesting that they invite the Beatles as a grand propaganda move to win the youth of the world, having been kicked out of Cuba for that and for criticizing Castro on gay issues in private, having been through Czechoslovakia and Russia and Poland and back through Czechoslovakia, and elected May King on May 1st and then expelled from the country on May 7th, by May 9th or so I was visiting with Dylan on the Thames Embankment where he was making “Don’t Look Back”—in that first scene of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—and within a few days was in a room with him, and escorting Marianne Faithfull to the Dylan concert at Albert Hall and then winding up alone in a room with the Beatles and Dylan. That was a very funny transition. I really was the King of May.
HW: Where was the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” filmed? That was in London?
AG: It was in London at the embankment of the Thames by the hotel they were staying in, which was the Croyden or something. I was talking about him with Victor Maimudes outside unless I’m mistaken. We were hanging in the background. We just wanted to be in the background as an audience for him.
HW: Walking across at the end.
* * *
“Many Loves” is a curious interlude in a larger recording session. The idea of this session with Dylan and [David] Amram and others was to improvise in the studio [in 1971]. The idea also was to have Apple Records put it out. We had an agreement between Dylan and John Lennon and myself that this would happen.
HW: So this was improvised, “Many Loves”?
AG: It was improvised on the spot. [Happy] Traum and Dylan were twiddling around, and we got that kind of interesting long run, and then I began vocally raising my voice in a tired way at one point or other, trying to think of something to say, embarrassed, you know, [and] embarrassingly began talking about real people. It’s a piece of real improvisation, and it has a little bit of rhyme. Trails off in a funny way, but it’s complete. I mixed it myself, but not very successfully.
HW: No, I had not heard your mix when we mixed it and ours wasn’t much different. You did a lot more with stereo separation. You used Peter’s voice in a different … one speaker to the next. So we do have a second [mix on this release].
I want to talk about how this session evolved. So you had made a deal to do an album for Apple Records?
AG: No, what happened was this. I had already sold the [recordings] of the sixteen volumes of [my] collected poetry assembled, plus an album I did out West, at Pacific High [Recorders Studio] of [William] Blake, Volume II, and had a contract with Fantasy [Records]. I got back to New York, and Peter and I had a reading at the Loeb Student Center at NYU. By this time, I was interested in music more because I’d had several albums behind me—the two Blake albums and had finished the 16-volume set—so I invited all the musicians I could think of to assemble at the Loeb Center, so we had about fifteen musicians. Friends. Jon Sholle among them, who had been playing with me for a long time and was on both of the Blake albums, who turned out to be a great friend and a great guitarist and very intelligent, very sensible and supportive. He was my main musician for many, many years. He was also on both Blake albums and the Dylan session, and later the [John] Hammond sessions [for Ginsberg’s 2LP set “First Blues”].
Dylan came to the reading at the Loeb Center with Dave Amram and stood in the back, so I didn’t know he was there. And Peter was beginning to do a lot of improvisation, and he had the idea that you shouldn’t write poetry down, you should sing it in the air because if you write it down, you have paper that cuts down trees. So he began a long improvisation on that, and then I picked up on it and we spent maybe a half an hour before this giant audience—this whole hall filled—making up words on the spot with the musicians. I didn’t have the form of the blues in mind, because I didn’t know how to do it, so it was just a freeform, rhyming, sometimes, extravaganza. Then the reading was over and we packed up and said goodbye to the musicians and thanked them and gave them a little money and then went home and then the phone rang. It was Dylan on the phone saying that he had come to hear the reading, and he was standing in the back with Amram, and he said [on the phone], “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.” And he said, “Oh, we ought to get together in a studio and do it. What are you doing now?” And I said, “Oh, I’m just here with Peter.” And he said, “Well, we’re coming over.” So he and Amram showed up. And I think Peter had a guitar or somebody had a guitar, or maybe they brought a guitar and they wanted to see what I could do, and he started playing something that later turned out to be “[Vomit Express],” which I later learned was the same chords as “Like a Rolling Stone.”
“Vomit Express” begins
I’m going down to Puerto Rico
I’m going down on the midnite plane
I’m going down on the Vomit Express
I’m going down with my suitcase pain
So we began improvising, and he enjoyed it and he saw that we were having a ball. At the same time, I was amazed because I didn’t get very often to see him, though we’d been a little closer maybe five years earlier in London. I’d seen him on and off. I’d visited him when he was laid up with his motorcycle accident and seen him in San Francisco in the mid-60s.
I had a harmonium in the other room, and I was showing him how I played certain mantras, but I only knew two chords at that time. He said, “Well, you know there are three chords.” So he began showing me a third chord.
* * *
I was writing [“Stanzas: Written at Night in Radio City”], which was a kind of renunciation of money, a caustic comment on sex, on the megalopolis, the stone buildings, on the disdain that people held art in, a funny put down of dope hippies.
The city’s hipper slickers shine,
Up in the attics with the bats.
I.e., they’re all crazy with their poppies, fame being a temptation and a line prophetic of Bob Dylan I always thought:
[“Stanzas: Written at Night in Radio City “] has an interesting history. It was from the [manuscript] called “The Gates of Wrath,” which I had given to Mark Van Doren’s son, and he took it to England, and it got lost for many years till after Howl had come out and one day talking to Dylan in around 1964, he said when he was in England someone had given him something that was supposed to be my poetry—the original manuscript, typescript of it, which I didn’t have. I had little fragments of it, but I didn’t have a complete typescript because, in those days naively thinking it might be published in England if not in America, I’d given it to Van Doren’s son who was going to England. So this manuscript, including this poem, was returned to me by Dylan.
HW: So this book [The Gates of Wrath] is your earliest poems. Five years that were all lost for awhile.
AG: Yes. Lost between ‘53 and ‘63.
HW: And you don’t know who [had them]? It just ended up in Dylan’s hands.
AG: Somebody gave it to Dylan, [and] said: “You’re a friend of Allen Ginsberg, alright, I got these nice poems you’ll want to see.” Dylan liked them, I think. Though it seemed to me they were so way far behind his updated song rhythms.
* * *
On those early readings [of Ginsberg reading from the late 1940s], the voice sounds harsh like Kerouac’s voice during those years, which is not so much the dreamy and poetical and sort of in a trance. Certainly not updated to vernacular jocundity and vivacity, which is something that I learned from both Kerouac later and Dylan, but mostly William Carlos Williams.
* * *
[Barry] Miles had done some stuff with Apple money. [He] had recorded Charles Olson and a few other people to put out on Apple Records. Miles was going to do [Apple’s] spoken-word series, and was capable of doing it and did historically important recordings of Olson. [Our record] was part of that larger thing, and Peter Asher was part of the encouraging group. [This] was also around the time of the Dylan sessions, and that was definitely for Apple because [of the] Dylan [connection]. Dylan had talked with Lennon, and Lennon had definitely said yes. Years later, I learned from Lennon what happened. I’d been in touch with Lennon and Yoko Ono during that “Give Peace a Chance” time, you know he used my name. Strom Thurmond, the senator, had started a vendetta against Lennon, trying to get him kicked out of the country. Yoko Ono called me up as sort of a political advisor, [asking me] what to do, and I went to see Allen Klein [and] talked to him about it and recommended lawyers in Washington that I worked with—[William] Kuntsler and other people, because I’d had some legal dealings. I had succeeded in beating the State Department to go to Cuba in 1965 by threatening a suit. So I thought Ed Degrazia, the Grove Press lawyer who defended Naked Lunch and Henry Miller and gotten me my visa to Cuba, would be able to help, plus other people.
So it was arranged that Apple would put out this Ginsberg-Dylan combo. But what Lennon told me later was that he wanted to quit with Klein and he had to do it in a cut-throat way like Klein, so they had to, very secretly, make all these preparations, make all the legal moves secretly and get other lawyers and all that and get everything ready to pull the trap on Klein, so he was not able to tell anyone, including me.
Meanwhile, I had invested about $15,000 in the Record Plant sessions. In fact, I wasn’t able to pay for it all. It took me another three of four years to raise the money to pay for that. I owed them. And they were giving it to me on credit because Dylan was there. I gave them $5,000, Dylan was there, and Dylan said it was for Apple, so they thought it was all in the bag. They weren’t worried about getting their money and it was a total disillusionment. But I think it was a good thing because I don’t think at the time that we got a full album [recorded] that was good enough.
HW: So then [in 1971] you had recorded “A Dream” and “Spring,” so we just used the versions that were done. How did Dylan respond to the [William] Blake songs?
AG: He played along.
HW: He’s laughing a lot through “Spring.”
AG:
Yeah, because “Spring” and some of the Blake were among the few things that I
had a definite idea what I wanted. I didn’t know how to do it properly, and I
wished he’d taken over and sort of been the session leader. But he was giving
me too much head, sort of, too much liberty in a way, and the whole recording
session was chaotic because millions of people were pouring into the studio at
the idea of Dylan playing. [Andrei] Voznessensky was there and [John] Coltrane’s
wife [Alice], and Gregory [Corso] jumping in the middle. At least I had the
tunes and the words ready for that. But the idea on these sessions [was] to go
in without tunes and words and to improvise something. I was a little
over-eager to get him to play Blake and to get him to do some mantras. He
balked on the mantras quite a bit because I think he thought it was a mind-trap
of some sort.
From an interview with Hal Willner for Rhino Records’ “Holy Soul Jelly Roll”
Allen Ginsberg’s apartment
NYC, NY
26 June 1993,
Barbara [Rubin] was a girlfriend of mine and was one of the early enthusiasts for the Beatles. One of the earliest of the American Beatle fans. When they played at the Paramount for the first time, she went and put out handbills.
HW: They played the Paramount in Brooklyn? Or the Paramount in Broadway?
AG: No, the Broadway. And she’s also visible on the back of the Bob Dylan album in a striped sweatshirt giving him a scalp massage.
HW: The “Bringing It All Back Home” record?
AG: I guess so. Yeah. The one where I’m in a tophat. She was my girlfriend at the time. So we were all in London [at] the time of “Don’t Look Back,” and Dylan’s concert at Albert Hall and got inspired to organize a big poetry reading.
* * *
The method of composition [for the poems in Fall of America: I had an Uher [tape recorder], which Bob Dylan had given me money for around that time in San Francisco [1965]. Dylan had come to town and given a bunch of concerts in Berkeley and San Francisco, and we negotiated with the anti-war people to have Dylan lead an anti-war march. He said, yeah, he would do it if they would cooperate with his aesthetics, which was to have a giant assembly of people and he would provide trucks and posters of giant oranges, lemons, bananas, and they would carry those around and not make any speeches, and assemble thousands [of] people, and that would clog San Francisco. Jerry Rubin didn’t understand it and thought this wasn’t political enough. So they left [and] failed to pick up on Dylan’s extraordinary insight.
At that time, I was seeing a lot of him, and he gave me a whole bunch of tickets to invite the Hell’s Angels to his concert and all the poets in San Francisco, and he also gave me $150.00 to buy an Uher tape machine, which I still have. The first use of which was to tape his concert in an auditorium. Sixty-five. Joan Baez was visiting at the time, also.
* * *
My idea with the section [of “Wichita Vortex Sutra”], which climaxes with “I hereby declare the end of the war,” is echoed earlier. [President Lyndon] Johnson was broadcasting for the moment and I was broadcasting for a longer time in my poetry. They were making public statements that would be vanished or obsolete within a year or two and I was speaking for long-ranges—for hundreds of years. That the war was, to begin with, never declared until it was illegal, so it was just a whim of the governors. But we were the people and I was one of the people and as a citizen, I had my whims, too, or my direction of will different from theirs, so if they had the chutzpah or nerve to conduct a war that they didn’t legally declare, I had the nerve and the will to say, “I undeclare it.” And actually John Lennon and Yoko Ono did something very similar later, with this giant billboard over Times Square, “The War Is Over, If You Want It.”
At the time and later I’ve seen criticism of this, that [it’s] fatuous romanticism: “He declares the end of the war and the war doesn’t end.” Well, naturally, it doesn’t end. Diane di Prima says, “The Great War is the war on the imagination.” Who controls the language, who controls the U.S. imagination?
So I’m setting up a daydream to counter the daydream of the governors or the nightmare of the governors that will inspire other people to realize that they are free to declare the end of the war as far as their personal part is concerned and they don’t have to be intimidated in supporting the war effort, because the war is wrong. And that in a democracy, the opinion of the individual and the actual citizen is equal to the opinion of the president, according to Whitman and Dylan: “Even the President of the United States must someday stand naked”; and Whitman saying, “I wear my hat indoors as well as out, and as an individual, I’m just as equal to any pompous politicians.”
* * *
AG: It turns out [Harry Smith] was a musicologist, and then he showed me this set of American Folk Music—six records, [a] three-box set he put out way back in 1952, which was …
HW: Folkways.
AG: … on Folkways. He [did] ethnomusicology studies here in America. He went all over the South buying up old records and collecting these blues, and apparently this box set was an historic bomb in American folk music because it turned on Peter, Paul and Mary, turned on the whole folk music world at that time, including Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and everyone else, because it was this treasure of American blues [and] mountain musics. Happy Traum, everybody, including Dylan, [were] affected by it up to Jerry Garcia, who learned blues from Harry Smith’s records, according to Garcia.
* * *
I guess I was inspired to music, as I said, by first mantra chanting, then setting Blake, then Dylan put his hand in and got me interested.
* * *
I don’t know where I first met Hammond. Through Dylan [maybe]. And I’m not quite sure how all that started. But I knew of him before and he knew of me, maybe, more through political Left Black Liberation and stuff, or maybe I met him at an NAACP dinner that I was taken to by Jerry Wexler in the ‘60s. And then, of course, he was historically connected with Dylan, and I had written a lot of tunes in ‘71 and then I was on the road in [Dylan’s Rolling] Thunder tour, and I must have met him again through there. I’m trying to remember, but I really don’t, where it began. But I remember I started going up to see him, maybe with the Blake record originally—the second Blake album—or, oh, I know, I must have gone up to see him originally with the Dylan tapes that I’d done in 1971. And also with my unissued Blake album. So this may have been before Rolling Thunder tour or right after. We got together more intensively, and I used to visit him every once in a while and he was interested and made time to talk to me, actually.
* * *
At least I could carry a tune, and I could sing, and I had my words straight and the musicians seemed to know what they were doing [during my recordings for John Hammond]. I think [Hammond] might have even been surprised that I had it that much together, because I don’t think there were too many poets who did have it together like that. But obviously Leonard Cohen and Dylan. By that time they’d really had it together. I was just sort of coming in late.
* * *
Even though I was frustrated and couldn’t get Volume II of Blake out and never was able to put out the Dylan tapes—I never was able to get help from Albert Grossman to do anything—and maybe it wasn’t worth it at the time, I persisted.
* * *
AG: I had the old Dylan sessions to deal with so [John Hammond and I] decided to make a double album, include three of the cuts from the early Dylan, ‘71, our choice of the Hammond material, which is forty minutes or so, and then what I produced at ZBS with Jon Sholle as a session leader.
HW: It came out as “First Blues.”
AG: And selected as “First Blues.” Very luxuriously done with a newspaper inside giving all the chording notes and the essays and a little statement and a little essay by me and the words. A little newspaper like a tabloid, plus interior and exterior photography, arrangement by Robert Frank, who did it very expensively. It got some really nice reviews and then sank into oblivion.
* * *
AG: I can be said to be John Hammond’s last discovery among blues singers. I was lucky.
HW: When did he pass away?
AG: Oh, I stayed in touch with him till his deathbed, actually. I don’t know when it was, but last time I saw him was about a month before he died. I went to visit him in his house on 57th Street, and I’d just seen Dylan, so maybe it was … I don’t know. [Hammond died in 1987.] It wouldn’t have been ‘82, would it? I don’t know. And I’d been listening to a lot of blues—probably around ‘85-’86—and Dylan had said Robert Johnson’s the only one. I said, “What about Charlie Patton?” He said, “Charlie Patton is very great. They’re all great. But Robert Johnson is the one.” So then I went to see Hammond and repeated the conversation and said that Dylan said that Robert Johnson is the one, the greatest. And he said, “He’s right.” So they had some kind of secret understanding of music.
* * *
HW: “Vomit Express” was another one of the improvised songs, right?
AG: Well, actually [Dylan] was at the reading, and then he came over to the house, and I had that [phrase] “Vomit Express.” [“Vomit Express” is] actually a phrase I got from my friend Lucien Carr, who talked about going to Puerto Rico quite often, and we were planning to go. It was my first trip down there with him, but he spoke of it as the “Vomit Express.” That’s his phrase, because people took it at night for cheap fares. And it’s all these poor Puerto Ricans who are not used to being in airplanes and throwing up and airsick.
And I remember when he came to my house, we started some kind of a tune. People later told me that it’s some variant of “Like A Rolling Stone,” those chords.
* * *
So, [Dylan] came over the house with David Amram, and we’re jamming on something, and I began inventing something about “Vomit Express”—going down—but hadn’t finished it. But by the time we got to the studio, I’d written out some words, and I finished the words in the studio, the idea being to go into the studio and improvise—to make it up in the studio. I had assumed that Apple was going to pay for all this experimental blathering around. But this is the one where Dylan actually put in his hand with Happy Traum and did the arrangement and told people when to do choruses and when to take breaks and actually directed….
HW: Yeah, we had to listen to the tape. He actually suggested cutting a few endings on their own to be spliced in maybe.
AG: Yes.
HW: So “September on Jessore Road,” then. That’s the one with … we redid the poem and the recording of it.
AG: Well, Dylan had then said that “anytime you want me to be your back-up, I’ll be there.” Which was great, and I was very flattered because I really admired him and was bowled over by his genius as a poet-prophet and musician and blues singer and by his patronage of me. So during these Record Plant sessions, I had the ambition to write something that was actually worthy of his genius.
Then I think [within] a few days I wrote down an account of a recent trip I’d had to India. And I had in mind Blake’s form of a rhymed [verse from “On Another’s Sorrow”]:
Can I see anothers woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see anothers grief,
And not seek for kind relief….
No no never can it be.
Never never can it be.
Which I recorded on the second Blake album. The rhyme scheme is the same. The first line is a little longer. I whipped it out—stayed up all night, practically, but I only had two chords from the “Om Ah Hum Varja Guru Padma Siddhi Hum” [mantra]—they’re the same chords—B flat major and I’ve forgotten what they are now. I’ll find it. And so I think I asked someone, I’ve forgotten who, maybe Arthur Russell then, what would be a third chord that would fit with those? Because I didn’t know anything about music, and he suggested the third chord. It grew out of the lamentation, the sadness of that “Om Ah Hum Varja Guru Padma Siddhi Hum”—the basis of the melody is there. The chords are the same. So it grows out of the sacred chord, sacred mantra, and deals with India, also.
I also wanted to do reportage—that is, an actual, factual report on exactly what I’d seen—“Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts,” “celluloid purse”—real details. My ambition was to write something long and beautiful like “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” but totally naturalistic and at the same time spiritual—something that would astonish Dylan and make him weep. Like real classic poetry. So when I gave [Dylan] the text, he took it home and then he came back the next day and said he had cried, actually.
So then it was a little long, so we decided to cut ten verses or so and we recorded it. And I kept telling Dylan that it was a blues, and he couldn’t figure out how to play that as a blues because the shape had no blues in it. I wasn’t singing it like a blues, and quite frankly, I didn’t know what a 12-bar blues was or a 16-bar blues at the time, and I hardly knew the three chords to that. Like “Going Down to Puerto Rico”—however many chords there are [in] “Vomit Express”—I was just going along by ear, not by knowing that there were chord changes. Because I still hadn’t mastered the very simple blues changes by 1971, though Dylan had tried to show me at my house a third chord. I was used to two, like “All the hills echoed” [from William Blake’s “The Nurse’s Song”] or “Spring.”
So we sat down. I think I was in an isolation booth. Dylan tried to play it but also he couldn’t get his [guitar in tune] because we tried to do it with my harmonium. My harmonium being out of pitch, a half-step up or down, he had to restring or retune his guitar but they never got quite in tune. So he played the background and we really worked at it and took 20-30 rounds of that same thing and he had to vary it a little bit and his hand was aching when he was done with it. So I couldn’t ask him to do it over again, or I didn’t feel I could ask him to do it over again, and I felt helpless. I tried to overdub or sing along to his guitar and the timing was not quite right because I didn’t really say exactly what I wanted, I didn’t know how to say it, didn’t know how to direct it exactly, and so the whole thing is hurried and breathless and out-of-tune.
But what we did have there, I think, was we may have laid down a basic track of bass, because Jon Sholle understood my ignorance and knew how to support me, having had so many years of work with me, by that time—’69 to ‘71….
HW: And Dylan put that piano….
AG: Then, after Jon did that and I think maybe Arthur Russell put in….
HW: A few cello parts.
AG: A few cello parts.
HW: Amram with French Horn.
AG: And David Amram put [on the] French Horn, and then Dylan went in and he put in an organ part. I didn’t realize the charm of that. But then he went in, and he started dropping these piano bombs, and it was like little percussive punctuations and underlinings of different phrases or interpolations and syncopations of different phrasings that I did, and that was really amazing. That I remember as being the highpoint of the recording—Dylan getting in there and coming down with all ten fingers occasionally, intermittently at the right place, according to his hearing. And that was, I thought, a piece of genius, that piano, at the time.
But then when I went to mix the thing, it was an abortion because I was out-of-tune, one guitar was out-of-tune. So if I mixed my voice with a better guitar … I’m not sure I even knew there was another guitar on there.
So I tried to rerecord it with another musician—Gary Getz—who did the guitar tracks. We had some spare tracks. But that didn’t work out. Getz had originally gone out with me a few months earlier in 1971 to a Free John Sinclair Rally in Detroit, headed by John Lennon, and I had opened the concert with a mantra to John Lennon—Prajnaparamita—and then the entire “[September on] Jessore Road.”. But Lennon wasn’t out of his dressing room by then, or out of his hotel, so he missed it. So the group got together in his hotel after, and he asked me what I had done and Gary Getz, my musician of that day, who lived nearby [and] who was a member of the Catholic Workers, who I met at the Catholic Worker, played it for [Lennon] with me singing in his hotel room and his comment then was “What I would do was treat it like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and get it with a string quartet.” That was 1971 or so.
By 1982, in Amsterdam, the people that organized One World Poetry—[including] Ben Posset—offered me and Steven [Taylor] any kind of recording facilities that we wanted, because they wanted to put out a Dutch-American record. So did we want a symphony orchestra or what? We decided it was time and possible to do “Jessore Road.” Steven [Taylor] wrote out the parts for a string quartet and a guitar, and we recorded at the Milky Way—the Melk Weg, a hash bar… [And it was] finally released [in] 1992—ten years later. So what began as an idea by Lennon took twenty years to accomplish. What began as a recording with Dylan took twenty years to get straight.
What we had done also is we did a free time one-hour TV Channel 13 special, improvised. I had a structure, a few songs I brought. Dylan was willing to come along as long as it wasn’t announced. David Amram, Happy Traum. It was in-between the several recording sessions we did at Record Plant. Philip Whalen was in town so we featured him and his poetry. I think maybe the Living Theatre—[Julian] Beck and [Judith] Molina were there and a couple of other musicians. This drummer Moruga, whom I didn’t know, showed up also, but invaded all the sound areas with bells and tinkles and drowned out the other instruments.
And we did a long, slow, beautiful version of [“September on Jessore Road” with Dylan]. I think we may have it somewhere. It’s very slow, like an Indian raga; it maybe builds and becomes martial [or] march-like toward the end, but it begins very slowly and ends very slowly. So it’s more like a raga. The version that I did with Dylan is more in time, and the version that we did with the string quartet was more in time, and if I did it alone with Jon Sholle or with Steven, I generally do it much slower and much more varied intonations. Maybe too long, I don’t know.
So this [performance was] sort of a structure between Blake, Vajrayana Buddhists, Padma Sambhava meditation and mantra chords, and Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” I guess I meant it to be more or less the same speed as “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” which is rather slow-moving. Thoughtful. Sad.
HW: And we mixed all the versions together in ‘93.
AG: So, now, how did you do that? I mixed it and got this abortion. And the problem was some copies of that got out in England, maybe through Miles, and from then on for people who had heard it I read that I was a good poet but I couldn’t carry a tune, and my reputation was blackened.
HW: Bootleg.
AG: Bootleg. Which was valuable just to see what we were doing, but not anything to judge anybody by, because it was my fault as a musician not knowing how to tell people what to do. Well, I was learning. So I really had the reputation in England of not being able to carry the tune. So now, years later, when you found the original 16-track, was it?
HW: Um-hmm.
AG: How did you manage to go through all that and find out what was in there?
HW: Well, one, remember, we had you redo some of the vocal, speaking a lot of it because it was very long.
AG: What gave you the idea to have me speak it? Because it was too long?
HW: Well, no, it’s a very long poem and with everybody playing as freely as they’re playing, but speaking most of it would center it.
AG: Yeah.
HW: You can get away with doing that. And in mixing it, this is a jigsaw puzzle. There are a million things in there. There are a million ways to go about it. You can mix it classically, with just French Horns, cellos, and strings; you can mix it like “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” just acoustic guitars, there’s Dylan’s guitar, so we … it’s like what? It’s almost ten minutes. So we took you through a journey of it.
AG: But what I’m amazed is how you had, twenty years later, the time, patience and the ear and the discernment to hear everything that was on all the sixteen tracks and separate it out and figure out what was there.
HW: I thought it was worth it at the time we were going through things for this box-set. It was like we didn’t think that was something that should be on, and then while doing other projects, traveling, a few people asked me if I would get them a copy of “September of Jessore Road” with you from the Dylan session. Some people really seemed to be interested in it.
AG: Well, it’s listed among the discographies.
HW: The discographies, especially this musician singer-songwriter Dylan-freak, John Wesley Harding, who went on about it. Then we talked about it at Naropa and you mentioned Dylan’s piano, so I listened again, and the piano blew me away—it was like Terry Adams from NRBQ or Monk …
AG: Yeah.
HW: … it’s wild playing.
* * *
HW: You’re in the studio with Dylan at least for your own sessions once more in Santa Monica in ‘80.
AG: Yeah.
HW: Using “Airplane Blues” [for the box-set] and considering “Do the Meditation.”
AG: Yeah. By then, I’d a couple [of new songs]. I wasn’t writing too many new songs actually. I had that one period when I wrote a lot—’69 or ‘71 or so—and then a couple more toward the end of the ‘70s. Maybe I got discouraged by the fact that I’d spent all the money and was not getting any of it recorded. But I noticed I haven’t written as much, though I sing a lot still.
I like the “Airplane Blues” [recorded with Dylan] because it’s got a really classic essential blues verse—the climactic one: “I’m alone in the sky where there’s nothing to lose/The sun’s not eternal; that’s why there’s the blues.” That seems to me like a complete union of classic philosophical poetry and vernacular rhythm and a classic blues sound. I can just hear that old almost-vaudeville echo: “That’s why there’s the blues.” It seems like just that one stanza at least is worth it. In the original, there’s a lot [of] extra political comment which is ephemeral, but most of it’s good, especially when “My mother has perished, my father’s long gone.” Good descriptive stuff.
I was there, I guess, to play at some college and was traveling with Peter and Steven Taylor, and I had made arrangements to meet Dylan to do some work with him. He said he had a studio of his own in Santa Monica. And his girlfriend was there. It was the girl that sings with him. And the idea was to record not only me but also record Peter, because he’d taken a shine to Peter’s banjo on the Rolling Thunder tour. I’d actually filmed Peter in the snow trying to play his banjo. It’s a good scene which got dropped out of the film, but it’s quite a little classic scene with Peter with his banjo in the snow in New England winter or up around Estes Park in Colorado. I forgot.
So this was to record me and Peter. And there is a recording of Peter’s “All Around the Garden,” but Peter was a little nervous and kept going on and on and didn’t conclude it.
* * *
AG: In this case there was Mansfield again, who was in town, so I had a really crack team—Mansfield, [and] Steven Taylor, who since he met Mansfield in the studio with Hammond in ‘76—this is now six-seven years later—had been traveling in Europe and recording all over and [we’d been] playing maybe hundreds of concerts together. And he’d also notated a lot of my music for Harper and Row books [for] Collected Poems. Because I was really in love with Steven as a musician, I was glad to deliver him to the studio with Dylan, where he’d have a chance to play with Dylan, which I imagine is almost any pop musician’s ideal. For Dylan or Lennon, to actually learn how to play with him or have the experience or have that high point as a musician.
And I was happy that Dylan was still faithful to his vow to be with me when I needed help. I didn’t have to pay for the studio this time; I had to pay Rosato and the cost of the tapes, I think. Arthur Rosato was a drummer or was a studio engineer there, and that was the engineer. I think the tape of that time apparently was quite bad, as quality. Ampex tape I heard. I think you told me.
HW: Actually we had them bake it, so we [were able to] mix it.
AG: That’s within ten years, no, eleven years, the tape began flaking when you first put it on.
HW: Yeah.
AG: That’s the original. Which tape is that? The two-track?
HW: No, it was 8-track.
AG: The 8-track tape. You remixed that?
HW: Hm-hmm. And “Do the Meditation.”
AG: Uh-huh. That’s right. Well, if we don’t use “Do the Meditation” here, it’ll come out next time somebody asks for compilations.
HW: But you wrote “Do the Meditation” around that time—“Airplane Blues” and “Do the Meditation” in 1981. I remember hearing you do “Do the Meditation” in a Fugs reading at the Mudd Club.
AG: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’d written “Do the Meditation” I don’t know when. I don’t remember. I think maybe ‘79 or ‘80; it was [from the influence of Chogyam Trungpa] around that time. I’m a qualified meditation teacher in the Trungpa tradition for Shamata Vipassana. So actually what I was trying to do was codify meditation instructions in a pop form so that anybody could pick up on that if they actually listened to the words or memorized the words, they’d actually have the complete instructions for sitting practice, with some humor. Or wouldn’t have to take it so seriously. And it was the first time that I finally … people kept telling me, “You’ve got to have a chorus, you gotta have a chorus.” Well, I don’t have hardly any choruses in any of these amateur songs, so finally I got around to having a chorus.
HW: Surfer type, Beach Boys type of melody.
AG: Um-hmm. Actually it’s a take-off on “I fought the Dharma and the Dharma won, I fought the Dharma and the Dharma won, I fought the Dharma and the Dharma won.”
HW: That’s, “I Fought the Law.”
AG: Yeah, the Clash record.
HW: Well.
AG: Who wrote that?
HW: Bobby Fuller of the Bobby Fuller Four. He’s dead now.
AG: I mean, is that something I owe somebody?
HW: No, it’s not. I don’t think that’s his original chord structure.
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