The Boy Who Cried Freebird

by Mitch Myers

  Born of the blues and birthing rock and roll, boogie can be found in R&B, hard rock, country music, rockabilly, jazz, and Texas swing. The Delmore Brothers performed “Hillbilly Boogie,” Ella Fitzgerald sang “Cow Cow Boogie,” and everyone from Louis Jordan to Asleep at the Wheel recorded “Choo Choo Cha Boogie.”

  In the 1970s, concerts by southern rock ensembles like Black Oak Arkansas and English groups like Foghat expanded the boogie concept to new, sometimes ridiculous heights. As the years went on, catchphrases like “Born to Boogie” and “Boogie Till You Puke” were transformed into song. Obviously, pop tunes like “Boogie Bands and One-Night Stands” and “Boogie Nights” had little in common with the original boogie style.

  And no requests for “The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy,” please.

  Revivalists like Alvin Lee, former guitarist and singer of Ten Years After—an archetypal British boogie band from the 1960s—have helped keep boogie alive. Just like Canned Heat, Ten Years After played at the original Woodstock festival, where Alvin boogied well beyond reason with his over-the-top performance of “I’m Going Home.”

  In the twenty-first century, Alvin made a CD called Alvin Lee in Tennessee, which featured the bedrock talents of Elvis Presley’s old Memphis sidemen, drummer DJ Fontana and guitarist Scotty Moore. For fans of those vintage railroad rhythms, Lee kicks things off with “Let’s Boogie” and closes out with a jumping remake of “I’m Going Home.”

  In short, Alvin Lee—much like Jerry Lee Lewis, John Lee Hooker, and all the other great boogiemen—unlocks the not-so-secret history of American roots music.

  That is, he boogies like it’s going out of style—which it never has and, apparently, never will.

  WHEN HARRY MET ALLEN

  Were prophecies evoked in 1965 when the Fugs sang the words, “Village Voice nothing, New Yorker nothing, Sing Out and Folkways nothing, Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg, nothing, nothing, nothing?”

  The Fugs were a lot of things back then—they were literary, politically active, antiwar poets who embraced comedic folk-rock and bridged the generation gap between the beatniks and the hippies. Involved in music, literature, journalism, theater, and films, they reigned shrewdly, crudely, and lewdly over the East Side of Greenwich Village—especially when it came to the free love and the drugs.

  The song “Nothing” was included on The Fugs First Album, which was produced by Harry Smith. That was nearly a decade before Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg combined their own talents for an impromptu (or was it planned?) recording session at the Chelsea Hotel, which resulted in the Allen Ginsberg album First Blues: Rags, Ballads & Harmonium Songs.

  So then, might First Blues be a representation of the existential nothing? Or is it really something?

  Allen first met Harry in 1959 at the Five Spot in Manhattan, where pianist Thelonious Monk was enjoying one of his residencies. Previously, Ginsberg had only heard about Smith, but recognized his presence immediately—Harry was sitting at a table transcribing Monk’s angular melodies into impressionistic drawings. Allen described his first vision of Smith as “slightly hunchback, short, magical-looking, in a funny way gnomish or dwarfish, same time dignified.”

  A chance meeting? Not necessarily, considering the synchronistic Weltanschauung when it comes to all things Harry Smith. And just how much empyrean nonsense is it to contend that these two opposites did indeed attract?

  Surely, the two men couldn’t have come from more contrasting orientations. One, a hermetic, neocelibate white-bread record collector/visual artist from Oregon with roots in freemasonry and an attraction to occultisms. The other, a free-loving Buddhist Jew queer from New Jersey who became reigning ambassador of the beat generation and a poet of Whitmanesque proportions.

  Ginsberg was an exhibitionistic showman who, to quote historian Harvey Kubernik, “was a tireless self-promoter that would show up for the opening of an envelope.”

  Smith, on the other hand, was a cultural obeah man who lived on Skid Row in small rooms stacked with books and kept dead animals stuck in the freezer.

  Their talents differed, but Harry and Allen both had an impact on the expanding of consciousness in the twentieth century. Ginsberg’s epic poems, “Howl” and “Kaddish,” fueled the imaginations of many. Along with Messrs. Kerouac and Burroughs, he contributed to a generative unshackling of prose and poetry. His libertine lifestyle ran against the grain of the intellectual establishment and his countercultural stance encompassed drug and sexual experimentation, political dissidence, gay rights activism, and antiwar protests.

  For his part, Harry Smith enriched the realms of film, visual art, and cultural anthropology. Most notably, his annotated compendium of rural song traditions, The Anthology of American Folk Music (first released in 1952), has had a lasting influence on music appreciation in the (post) modern world.

  The album these two men created together, First Blues, is a folk-form cryptogram of sorts, with connections, implications, and historical significance that defy simple assessment. First Blues was compiled by beat biographer Ann Charters and was released on Moe Asch’s Folkways label. Compounding the mystique, confusion, and interconnectivity of these beat/archival coincidences is the fact that there are actually two First Blues albums credited to Allen Ginsberg. Both albums were recorded in the ’70s, and both remained unreleased until the early ’80s.

  Columbia Records impresario John Hammond produced the other First Blues. But because Columbia considered Allen’s works too brazen, Hammond was compelled to release the double album on his own (short-lived) JHR label.

  Unlike the solo recording produced by Harry Smith at the Chelsea, Hammond’s production features Allen singing with group accompaniment. Musicians like David Amram and Happy Traum performed on the Hammond sessions, as did Allen’s lover Peter Orlovsky, and Allen’s dear friend Bob Dylan.

  Although some of the same songs appear on both First Blues albums, the two recording sessions were quite different—as different, we might say, as Harry Smith and John Hammond.

  When I discussed the Smith-Ginsberg First Blues with Hal Wilner (who produced the Ginsberg CD anthology, Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs, 1949–1993), he wondered, “Was it a conscious decision to record in Harry’s room at the Chelsea for environment as opposed to Allen’s? [There is] kind of a tense atmosphere and Allen doesn’t sound all that relaxed.”

  Wilner’s observation seems accurate—singing his “blues” while playing a small harmonium from Benares, India, Allen Ginsberg struggled through those Chelsea performances, mostly bereft of conventional musicality.

  But if Ginsberg was really the sole performer, the lonesome entertainer, the solo-ballad-blues disciple, why does Harry Smith loom so large in the proceedings?

  Practically speaking, Smith’s documentation of Ginsberg at the Chelsea is no different from any other anthropological fieldwork, just like Smith’s 1965 recording of peyote rituals by the Kiowa Indians in rural Oklahoma (see Conrad Rooks’s film Chappaqua for additional clues).

  And what of the eternal Bob Dylan? Allen loved Bob and was eager to impress him. “I don’t think I would have been singing if it wasn’t for younger Dylan,” Ginsberg told Harvey Kubernik. “He turned me on to actual singing. Dylan’s words were so beautiful. The first time I heard them I wept.”

  Not only did Dylan inspire Ginsberg with his words, but Bob also showed Allen the three chords he needed to write a folk or blues tune—insisting that it was Allen’s time to sing out rather than recite his prose. So, while Smith may have been Ginsberg’s twin tower of aesthetic strength at the Chelsea, Dylan figured into their First Blues as a more subliminal conspirator.

  While Dylan repaid artistic debts to Ginsberg (and Kerouac) by encouraging the poet to sing, there’s a less obvious connection between Bob Dylan and Harry Smith. That is, Dylan’s first album (produced by John Hammond) contains songs drawn from The Anthology of American Folk Music. And surely as Dylan gained insight into America’s folk/blues evolution by listening to the Anthol
ogy in the early ’60s, Bob made his circuitous back-payment to Mr. Smith via First Blues.

  Dylan wasn’t present during the Chelsea recording session, but he played on the “other” First Blues, thereby further illuminating the extended relatedness between himself and gurus Ginsberg, Smith, and Hammond.

  What does all of this say about Harry recording Allen at the Chelsea? Merely that Ginsberg’s eccentric performances would have been forgotten were it not for Smith’s predilection for recording folk art and documenting everyday life.

  “It was just another example of field anthropology in a post-modern mode,” said Ed Sanders of the Fugs. “Allen always rose to the occasion of spontaneity, this was one short slice of twentieth-century existence. Two geniuses colliding at the Chelsea Hotel in 1973.”

  Fug Tuli Kupferberg maintained a more speculative assessment of the Smith-Ginsberg Chelsea encounter: “When two geniuses get together, you’ve got to expect something great!…Is there music on it?”

  A fair question, it was only after this particularly raw phase of his singing career that Ginsberg began working in more sophisticated musical environs, ones that departed from his raggedy voice plus harmonium expositions at the Chelsea.

  Guitarist Steven Taylor worked with the Fugs, and he was also Ginsberg’s accompanist for years, even playing on Hammond’s First Blues sessions. Taylor reflected on Ginsberg’s “blue” period of the early ’70s. “Blues is a particular genre within a larger history of African American folk music,” said Taylor. “One of Allen’s main inspirations was Leadbelly, who was on the radio when he was a kid. Leadbelly is generally considered to be a songster, not a bluesman. Blues could be part of his repertoire, but the songster is a larger tradition. Allen was more of a songster than a bluesman—a historian in song, a singer of ballad narratives, and a singer of topical material.”

  “Blues are a funny thing,” said Fug Ed Sanders. “They are supposed to make you sad but they make you triumph, too. Allen’s diaries are strangely filled with the down mode. The poor guy was so publicly joyous and exalted, but in his private moments he was quite sad and dejected. He was drawn to the blues. He had been a fan of Ma Rainey and ‘CC Rider’ was the final music, the last tune he listened to before he died.”

  And what of the implicit connectivity that Harry Smith brought to the sessions at the Chelsea Hotel? Does it serve the same creative function that Smith unleashed when he first traced the paths of interrelated folk and blues idioms with the Anthology of American Folk Music?

  John Feins studied under both Harry and Allen at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He thought that Smith’s efforts to document life and sound were informed by a deep empathy for humankind. “What’s great is that Harry wasn’t an elitist, he recorded everybody,” said Feins. “Harry felt that every occasion of sound was a recordable event and it had not just artistic merit and meaning, but anthropological meaning. If a human being opened his mouth up for song, Harry treasured and honored it as an archivist and a scholar and an anthropologist. He captured it when he could.”

  Just how does First Blues sound? Noted Ginsberg authority Bob Rosenthal is tough but fair. “I’ll be frank with you. I couldn’t listen to this record,” he said. “I just wrote it off as caterwauling. I was so skeptical when I heard someone was going to reissue this. I’ll confess I’m much more interested in it now than I was at the time when it came out. Allen saw the possibility of helping to change people’s consciousness. And so did Harry, although they were total opposites in methodology.”

  Hal Wilner felt that First Blues was more than just an archival curiosity, and he included some of the Chelsea sessions on his Ginsberg anthology. “I’ll admit when I first was slated to produce an album with Allen I was holding my ears,” said Wilner. “Yet, it’s amazing how this stuff holds up and just gets better. I felt I needed it for the historical aspect—here’s Harry Smith producing Allen Ginsberg. But when I went back to those tapes, I couldn’t believe how strong it was.”

  Were Ginsberg and Smith blue when they made these recordings? Were they stoned? Whatever the mood, Harry allowed himself to be subsumed by Allen’s Rags, Ballads & Harmonium Songs. As a witness to the (painful) birthing of Allen’s career as a singer, Smith showed his colleague patience and understanding, supplying Ginsberg’s ritualistic display at the Chelsea with the dignity it deserved.

  “The role of the documentarian is often restrictive because of the attention to detail, the mechanics, or just removing your own ego,” said historian Kubernik. “To help govern the person you are recording, you go into a secondary position. Harry was willing to do it. He put himself below the title to benefit the attraction.”

  According to Ginsberg, Harry Smith disagreed with some of the choices that Ann Charters made when compiling the album. Why Smith himself wasn’t able to complete the task of editing the album is yet another cause for deliberation.

  Harry’s relationship with Folkways honcho Moe Asch was perpetually strained, but Asch respected Smith’s archival efforts and used his understanding of art and ceremony to great effect. Like Smith, Ginsberg also had an appetite for collecting, and his own record collection reflected a deep love for music, especially the blues.

  “When you collect, you put disparate things together in relation with other things and you get new results from that,” said John Feins. “Harry loved to determine patterns in things. I think he derived meaning and insight from patterns that he saw in things that he collected or examined. Easter eggs, Indian rugs, paper airplanes, he would be interested in all the different forms and make great leaps of genius thanks to the juxtaposition and understanding of patterns and synchronicity and the overlapping of things.”

  One thing is certain: We no longer ignore Smith’s role as a cosmic documentarian. His preternatural musical tastes and hyper-informed critical judgments made him a cultural Nostradamus whose anticipatory discoveries and polymath predictions are unfolding still.

  Harry’s earnest contextual framework fueled Allen’s gay vaudevillian prose attack, transforming poetic diatribes into semimelodic riddles, verbal instructions, joyous celebrations, and coherent protests, all captured in real time.

  So, First Blues is the meeting of two friends, one poet reborn and one great rememberer, who both found the ways and the means of making the extramusical musical.

  So much for nothing.

  THE POWER OF TOWER

  I was strolling through Tower Records at Fourth and Broadway in Manhattan one night when the strangest thing happened. It was closing time and I was in search of a gift for my parents. I was the only one browsing the classical section and I guess the Tower employees were in a big hurry because before I could get out, they locked up the store and accidentally left me inside.

  Now, you’d imagine that being trapped overnight in such a store would be a dream come true for a music fanatic, but I was stuck in the classical section and couldn’t get anywhere near the stuff that I really liked.

  There I was, sitting on the floor, surrounded by thousands of CDs. But instead of digging around the vintage reggae or sampling the latest jazz, I was forced to amuse myself by examining the works of Bach and Chopin.

  Just as I was getting depressed and a little uncomfortable, I looked up at a wall display and couldn’t believe my eyes. There, in the classical section, was a Sonic Youth album that I had never seen before. The cover was psychedelic and the words Goodbye 20th Century peeked through a spiraling purple vortex. Upon closer examination, I saw that this double disc was on the band’s own SYR label.

  So, I snuggled up to one of the listening stations and put on the headphones. Then I closed my eyes and leaned back against a shelf filled with Beethoven’s Ninth. “Finally,” I thought. “Some rocking entertainment to help me make it through the night.”

  Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The music didn’t rock; as a matter of fact, it didn’t roll, either. It turned out that Sonic Youth were paying tribute to the conceptualist avant-garde, and most
of the tunes were “composed” during the 1960s.

  I say “composed” because there’s a lot of noise involved, and if not for the electric guitars, you wouldn’t even know it was a rock band playing. Still, the night was passing slowly and I couldn’t sleep, so I listened to the (misguided) Youth perform compositions by eccentric artists like John Cage and Yoko Ono.

  Now here’s the thing. Sonic Youth display a succinct understanding of the abstract artistry that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century, and while the music doesn’t have a real backbeat, it does contain some interesting textures and effects.

  Using sampling, discordant guitar riffs, tape loops, and other electronic noises, Sonic Youth embrace the groundbreaking reconsiderations of the ’60s avant-garde by way of intangible atmospherics, repetition-of-sound-as-art, atonal colorings, and white-noise-as-entertainment.

  So, by the time Tower Records opened the following morning, I was a changed man.

  You can imagine the staff ’s surprise when their first customer of the day emerged from the classical section rather than the street. But there I was, standing at the checkout counter with a batch of CDs by composers like Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, Steve Reich, and James Tenney.

  Now, don’t tell anyone, but I kept a copy of Goodbye 20th Century in my pocket when I left the store. I mean, you’ve got to be a little bit of a rebel in this world, don’t you?

  WHO WILL SAVE THE WORLD?

  It wasn’t just another terrorist threat; this one had the country completely in its clutches. Aliens indistinguishable from humans were unleashing deadly clones into the population. The White House had reverted to a shadow government, sequestered in bunkers and communicating to the nation from undisclosed locations.