“As railhead towns feel the steel mills rust water froze/In the generation/Clear as winter ice/This is your paradise,” are the lyrices of “Straight to Hell.” They certainly describe the current state of things.
When O’Neal came to the recording session to take pictures, he found Joe Strummer sick. Band members were sitting around the mixing console thumbing through books that Ginsberg had given them, engaged in a quiet discussion. O’Neal, who worked for many years with pioneering record producer John Hammond, was immediately taken with Strummer. “I had produced a record with Earl Hines,” O’Neal says. “And Strummer knew all about Hines (Hines is considered a massive influence on modern jazz piano).” At the session a young Tymon Dogg performed piano on “Death Is a Star.” Strummer encouraged O’Neal to record Dogg, who later became a key performer in Strummer’s solo act, the Mescaleros. As a person attuned to culture, Ginsberg liked getting into activities outside his field. “He would absorb what he could from people like celebrated photographers Berenice Abbott and Robert Frank,” O’Neal tells me. “He wanted to be a photographer, a folksinger, a musician. He looked at Strummer and the Clash as in line with Robert Frank and Bob Dylan.”
Longtime Allen Ginsberg guitarist Steven Taylor performing “Ghetto Defendant” for the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
Ginsberg perceived the Clash as a key part of a distinct historical moment excitedly coming to life. There was a cross-fertilization between music and the visual arts. “You can trace the punk, DIY movement back to the film movement and Maya Deren,” Taylor says. “A lot of punk people in the U.S. punk scene were visual artists like Patti Smith and Richard Hell.” Ginsberg was motivated and inspired by this exchange. It’s what always moved him. The mix of sounds, images, and words offered a unique window onto the world. The goal was to show the shadows of the living coexisting with the shadows of the dead. It’s the essence of creative response: superseding time, constructing a free space.
The Clash achieved a special kind of popular poetics on Combat Rock, particularly with the tunes “Know Your Rights,” “Straight to Hell,” and “Death Is a Star.” Taylor explains that Ginsberg thought “Death Is a Star” was powerful poetry and was especially moved by the closing: “smoking in the dark cinema/see the bad go down again.” “They were getting to that most sacred, deepest place,” Taylor says. “Their work revealed that and people connected to that. It’s a source of poetry and that’s where global citizenship comes from.” Taylor and Ginsberg believed that the Clash were defying consumerism and the commodification of the individual. People were becoming increasingly isolated and trying to connect through consumerism rather than civic involvement. Ginsberg thought that punk was a cry against the dominance of a stifling culture. “They were saying you were something more.” Taylor says. “It’s ‘Rising Sun Art,’ with the creative impulse as a form of love, kindness, and compassion.” It was a place that creates community in a society that destroys community, offering anyone an opportunity to get involved. “Speaking from the pulpit conscious of history as my role as a poet,” Ginsberg explained. Combat Rock—the music and the album title—supported Ginsberg’s belief in defending the free world against “aggressive hypocrisy that damages the planet’s chance of survival.”
Ginsberg possessed a unique quality, placing himself in the middle of whatever the cultural zeitgeist was. As one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated poets, he had the cachet to slip in and out of spaces that very few could without calling into doubt their sincerity and authenticity. “When he was a kid,” Taylor says, “he knew Lester Young and Charles Mingus.” In Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson stumbles upon Ginsberg at a party in the Bay Area filled with the San Francisco chapter of the Hell’s Angels. “This was Ginsberg’s first encounter with the Angels and he quickly became an aficionado,” Thompson wrote. Afterward, the police stopped and questioned Thompson and Ginsberg: “For several moments there is no talk at all—only the sound of Ginsberg humming a Near Eastern raga, backed up now and then by the spastic crackling of the voice from headquarters.” The hum was the sound of God, as Strummer later described Ginsberg’s voice. Listen.
Yet through these encounters, Ginsberg, with mind wide open, gleaned valuable insights about the world. They made him better as an artist and even more engaged as a citizen. He recalls that after meeting the Angels he was asked to help organize a peace march in the Bay Area against the Vietnam War. The Angels intended to stop the march, which they saw as an action in support of communism. Meeting with the Angels and their leader Sonny Barger led to a discovery: the parade as peaceable health, the reverse of fighting back blindly. A light clicked on when Ginsberg took Barger to meet Bob Dylan after a show. Dylan asked Barger, “What’s your act? If you want to extend yourselves, you can’t make it by hanging around Oakland beating up on your image.” Whether they were stunned or stoned, Ginsberg remembers, “they realized that they had nothing to say, or else if they did, they hadn’t found the right theater.” Ginsberg writes: “And we had the same realization: our march had to get its theater together, just as the police and the government did. I think that was the beginning of our realization that national politics was theater on a vast scale, with scripts, timing, and sound systems. Whose theater would attract the most customers, whose was a theater of ideas that could be gotten across?” In Ginsberg’s view, Strummer and the Clash had found the right theater: a popular culture spectacle let loose with the intent of never compromising. Only those who look in their heart and speak frankly can claim to prophesy, Ginsberg believed. He wanted to play a role.
It’s likely that Strummer read Thompson’s Hell’s Angels. Ginsberg’s surreal dealings with both ends of pop theater’s players (the cops and robbers) helped him pen the anticensorship tune “Rock the Casbah.” “Now the king told the boogie men/You have to let that raga drop.” Let the raga drop! It was a phrase borrowed from the mouth of God, floating above the incessant chaos in search of a fragile peace. And like an apparition Ginsberg appeared fifteen years after the moment with Thompson and the Angels, inserting a new raga into “Ghetto Defendant,” delighting the band. At the end of the song, Ginsberg slipped in the mantra “The Heart Sutra” (Heart of the Perfection of the Transcendent Wisdom), one of the most popular of all Buddhist scriptures. “It was the voice of God,” Strummer said. The God that Strummer believed in anyway.
When the Clash and Ginsberg collaborated, they fused their aesthetic objectives in one moment. Interest. Identify. Immersion. The Clash’s history included Ginsberg and the Beats, of course, but now Ginsberg’s history included the Clash. “The fifth meaning of the phrase Beat generation is the influence of the literary and artistic achievements of poets, filmmakers, painters, writers, novelists,” Ginsberg wrote. “Liberation of the Word from censorship. Return to appreciation of idiosyncrasy as against the state regimentation.” Empathy. Engage. Equanimity. It all flows together and becomes one acute cultural guide. Whatever his motivation was, whether he wanted to touch the famous or convert the infamous, Ginsberg managed to squeeze himself in and then into creative partnerships with fascinating results.
A precursor to his work with the Clash, Ginsberg recorded an album that featured musician Bob Dylan and poet Anne Waldman, and was produced by John Hammond. With stripped down vocals, Ginsberg’s First Blues (1983) is cultural anthropology stitched together as a poetic documentary. Ginsberg’s raw honesty and thoughtful beauty are held together by his natural charisma and disarming irascibility. Ginsberg always heard the truth behind the images he saw around him, always saw the reality underneath the language spoken to him. Later Ginsberg recorded William Blake poems set to music (Songs of Innocence and Experience) as well as Allen Ginsberg Reads Kaddish: A 20th Century American Ecstatic Narrative Poem, and The Lion for Real. With composer Philip Glass, he recorded a theatrical production of “Wichita Vortex Sutra” called Hydrogen Jukebox and after with Glass and Paul McCartney on the antiwar “Dance of the Skeletons.” Gi
nsberg also worked with celebrated jazz musicians Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot.
Ginsberg was always looking for the right word—right to the bone. Poet Ed Sanders of the Fugs described his writings as “emblems of conduct.” Ginsberg spent a lifetime in search and service of this liberating literary quest. And that’s what Ginsberg achieved in the opening of “Ghetto Defendant,” less the “American Sentences” he presented in 1994’s Cosmopolitan Greetings and more a swift slice of syllables through the air and into our psyche. Along with “Death Is a Star” and “Straight to Hell,” the core of Combat Rock remains “Ghetto Defendant.” Ultimately, Ginsberg’s contribution to the song is an early exploration of “American Sentences,” the term the poet used to describe this form of his poetry. “Allen never went for the haiku,” poets Bob Holman and Margery Snyder explain. “In talking with him, he spoke of how the seventeen characters of this Japanese form just don’t cut it as seventeen syllables of English, and that divvying them up in 5-7-5 syllable lines makes the whole thing an exercise in counting, not feeling, and too arbitrary to be poetry.” Ginsberg’s solution was “American Sentences”: one sentence, seventeen syllables, nothing else.
Ginsberg was the unique citizen-artist who could both suggest and insist while performing as court jester and troublemaker. You can see this in his contribution to “Ghetto Defendant,” showing Ginsberg as “American sentient”:
“Ghetto Defendant” lyric sheet with notations by Joe Strummer and Allen Ginsberg, New York City, December 19, 1981. (Photo by Hank O’Neal.)
starved in metropolis
hooked on necropolis
addict of metropolis
do the worm on the acropolis
slamdance the cosmopolis
enlighten the populace
Enlighten the populace. Off we go into the wormhole, sliding down through the song as quantum realities appear. The defendants are many: “Walled out of the city/Clubbed down from uptown.” The ghettos are everywhere: “Forced to watch at the feast/Then sweep up the night.” Ginsberg brought decades of courageous sensitivity and paired it with the fantastic energy of the Clash, unleashing words that live and breathe, giving voice to people squashed down and ready to explode. Ginsberg always broke down human interaction to its basic ingredient: the word. His taste for discovery allowed him to go farther than just capture life and spit it back to us. With his imagination and dreams, Ginsberg sparked the urge to dig deeper. “Life is valuable—when completed by the imagination,” poet William Carlos Williams wrote. “And then only.” Ginsberg saw himself as a liaison for discourse, concerned with the past and the present only if it points the way to the future. Joining together with the Clash, Ginsberg secured the magic only cultural insurgents possess: to listen, to synthesize, and then to act.
Allen Ginsberg with Joe Strummer and Mick Jones during the recording session for “Ghetto Defendant,” New York City, December 19, 1981. (Photo by Hank O’Neal.)
The spirit of Combat Rock is best illustrated by a line from another film Strummer had become obsessed with, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. “What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin?” Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, says. “A lie. A lie and we have to be merciful.” Mercy granted to those who train their sights on us with bogus dreams of wealth and power while we do the killing for them. Then we wait our turn, next in line. The assassins accuse the assassin. With Reagan and Thatcher riding high in the West and the ideas and awareness that shaped Sandinista! still fresh in their heads, Strummer and Ginsberg, while piecing together “Ghetto Defendant,” focused on preventing the further plunge down the mountain into a dystopian politics where at the bottom citizens were drowning in consumer culture and cynicism. It’s a lie and we have to be merciful.
Humanity and compassion traded in for a can of Coke and a cheap toaster. “It ain’t Coca-Cola it’s rice/There ain’t no need for ya/Go straight to hell boys.” Strummer’s questioning of Vietnam and the chaos it unleashed in the United States—and the world—meshed well with Ginsberg’s experience. The poet offered Strummer a first-person narrative of a citizen-artist living out loud in the middle of a century splitting apart. “U.S. intervention in Vietnam is a mistake because the motives were wrong from the very beginning,” Ginsberg wrote. “The consequences of our actions have compounded the original miscalculations to such a tangle that no one in his right mind or wrong mind could follow all the threads anymore.” Ginsberg encountered Thompson again while the former was protesting at and the latter was covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As the Chicago police surged out of control brutalizing the protestors, Ginsberg, Thompson, and French activist-artist Jean Genet found themselves trapped together. Ginsberg later wrote that 1968 was the year that “the youth movement not only came out on the streets not only in New York, Chicago, San Francisco but also in Singapore, Budapest, Belgrade, Paris, London, in cities on both sides of the Iron Curtain.” Thompson described it as the moment of violent clarity: “what I learned, in Chicago, was that the police arm of the United States government was capable of hiring vengeful thugs to break the very rules we all thought they were operating under . . . There was no point in appealing to any higher authority, because they were the people who were paying those swine to fuck me around. It was LBJ’s party and I was an unwelcome guest, barely tolerated.”
The social upheavals and the Vietnam disaster in the 1960s left the threads of democracy frayed at one end and knotted tight at the other end. “Now, years later, I still have trouble when I think about Chicago ’68,” Thompson explained. “That week at the Convention changed everything I’d ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it . . . Every time I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying, and it took me years to understand why . . . Chicago was the End of the Sixties, for me.” This is what shaped and colored much of how Strummer saw society shifting under the political leadership of Reagan and Thatcher; what ended in the 1960s was the possibility of not only America but also democracy. It spilled over from the songs on Sandinista! splattering the new music on Combat Rock. “Don’t you know what happened down there?” Strummer asked on “Washington Bullets” in Sandinista! He was still searching for the answer with Allen Ginsberg in Electric Lady Studios. When the Clash returned to New York in September 1982 touring in support of Combat Rock, Ginsberg went to the concert at Pier 84 to greet the band, O’Neal remembers. Strummer met the poet outfitted with a Mohawk and fatigues, an international hit against censorship dangling from his belt like a baton. Twenty-five years later, Mos Def, in his own creative response anthem “Hop-Hop,” summed up the feeling Strummer and Ginsberg aimed to transmit: “Speech is my hammer, bang the world into shape, now let it fall . . . huh!” For the band and the poet, it was all or nothing. They drew a line in the sand and dared those they took issue with—Reagan’s revolution and Thatcher’s social deconstruction—to cross it.
“The weary Ambassador waits relatives late at the supper table.” This is my favorite of Ginsberg’s “American Sentences.” Stop. Read it more than once. And then read it again. It possesses that kind of majesty. Stop. Think. Act. When I first read it I pictured Ginsberg, Strummer, and Jones huddled together in the studio, absorbed in the exchange of ideas about the world. Each at once the ambassador and the relatives, just as all of us at one time or another serve as the ambassador and the relatives. A back-and-forth between “one” and “many,” linked together by what increasingly has moved from the obvious to the oblivious. “All we have to work with from now on is the vast empty quiet space of our own consciousness,” Ginsberg lamented. “AH! AH! AH!” In his heart, Ginsberg could never be so defeated, so scornful. No way. I remember meeting him in front of St. Mark’s Church on New York’s Lower East Side sometime in 1995 or 1996. I had often seen him walking around the neighborhood. We struck up a conversation as if we’d known each other for years and made plans to meet again. I wanted to hear more about his experiences living through the rare histo
ric compression that was the second half of the twentieth century. Ginsberg was always at the front of the front lines, fighting the will to crush anything that defies the status quo. We never met again; Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997. I see him in my dreams as I write these words.
I remember him telling me something like morality in art means no compromise and that true popular media has the impulse for people to take care of each other embedded within it. A scorched earth attack cannot destroy it because the roots wait underneath, ready to sprout once again. My belief in world citizenship was cemented that day speaking with Ginsberg outside St. Mark’s Church. We are a world of immigrants, but bureaucrats refuse to come to terms with that. Good for us. That’s our opening. “Aware Aware/wherever you are/No Fear,” recited Ginsberg on “Capitol Air” thirty years ago. Ginsberg is the resolute symbol of the artist as troublemaker, starting from scratch to demolish accepted norms and rebuild a new world. “Trust your heart/Don’t ride your Paranoia dear.” He smashed the status quo, forever on the cusp of the vanguard and with the touch of the ethereal. “Breathe together with an ordinary mind.” He refused to walk backward. He moved forward, peering ahead to envision the future. “Armed with Humor Feed & Help Enlighten Woe Mankind.” Just listen to him one more time with the Clash, always suggesting and insisting while the raga drops.
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