It’s time for an Allen Ginsberg revival!
Allen Ginsberg, 1965
It’s beyond time to rediscover Newark-born poet Allen Ginsberg [1926-1997]. The Clash loved him so much they did a live duet with him once on “Ghetto Defendant” from their Combat Rock album. Most American ‘60s stars were down with his epic 1955 poem “Howl.”
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves though the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…”
Then came the accolades from Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. His 1973 book The Fall of America was made into an album earlier this year with members of Grateful Dead, The Fugs, Sonic Youth, The Handsome Family, Virgin Prunes, Yo La Tengo, Devendra Banhart, Bill Frisell, Andrew Bird and Angelique Kidjo.
There he is in the 1967 Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, then again in the 2019 film, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese that chronicled the 1976 Dylan carnival of a tour. When Phil Spector produced Leonard Cohen’s The Death Of A Ladies Man, he got Ginsberg and Dylan to sing harmony on “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On.” Ginsberg’s “Bayonne into NYC” poem evokes the mean streets of Jersey just as much as any Bruce song.
It’s time for an Allen Ginsberg revival!