by Simon Warner
Thus, for Ginsberg, the December encounter had opened the door to a fresh vein of creative productivity. But how did these developments work in Dylan’s favour? Dylan realised, post-Newport, that his reputation with the die-hard folk crowd anyway, had been seriously damaged.77 Yet Hishmeh recognises, in his connection to Ginsberg, a device by which he could wriggle free of at least some of these demons. He believes that ‘Dylan was able to use this friendship to negotiate his transition from folk music hero to the poet-laureate of rock and roll. His bond with Ginsberg put Dylan’s folk purist dissenters in an awkward bind. While they could easily reject and disparage his decision to go electric, they would find it much more difficult to reject a rock icon who held court with poets and, through such allegiances, became a poet himself.’78
In July 1966, Dylan was the victim of a motorcycle accident and was laid low for a number of months. But he had already begun to withdraw from the whirlwind of publicity that chased his every move. Ginsberg nonetheless visited his injured friend in August, spending the afternoon with him and, reports Miles, ‘taking a pile of poetry for him to read: Rimbaud, Blake, Shelley, and Emily Dickinson’,79 although Shelton places the visit later in September, adding Brecht to the list of texts.80 The retreat to Woodstock by Dylan and his desire to commit himself to his domestic projects would not deter either fans or reporters. His next few years would be played out in a haze of a stalking media and a barrage of questions about his political position, particularly as the campaign against US involvement in the conflicts of South East Asia intensified. For Ginsberg, the escalation of protest prompted a quite different response: he joined many of the crucial moments where the forces of countercultural action – whether politicos, performers or writers – shared platforms, stages or even the streets.
On 14 January 1967 a significant joining of the forces of poetry and the new psychedelic rock culture occurred, once again in the city of San Francisco. The Human Be-In, staged in Golden Gate Park, was one of the biggest demonstrations to date against the war and in favour of a rising peace and love ethos that had trans-fixed much of the Bay Area, and particularly the city district of Haight-Ashbury. Anti-war sentiment, hallucinogenic drugs and a mass influx of young people from across the country were all underpinning a powerful stand against the military policies of the government. The Human Be-In brought together four of the figure-heads of the Beat world and three of the great acid rock bands beginning to make their mark. With Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder providing the poetic dimension, the Grateful Dead – who had already formed part of Kesey’s earlier live LSD-inspired projects – Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish and Quicksilver Messenger Service offered the musical component, and a crowd of some 20,000 celebrated communally in an event that is generally regarded as the catalyst for the Summer of Love that would follow just a few months later.
While Dylan continued to record and release regularly, his later 1960s output did not attract the same critical acclaim that his work between 1963 and 1966 had garnered. But he had other ventures in mind – one, a longer prose work that would develop into the stream of consciousness account entitled Tarantula, finally issued in 1971, and a sign that he had ambitions beyond the song, the concert hall and recording studio and wanted to be seen not just as a singer with poetic inclinations but as an artist with a literary voice of his own. The work had been gestating for some time and had actually been written as early as 1966, but the motorcycle accident that would sideline the singer would also postpone the launch of the project for several years. Oliver Trager comments: ‘In this collection of urban prose poems, Dylan echoes the wordplay and street-savvy rhythms of his mid-1960s songs and liner notes.’81 The book, he says, ‘found Dylan at a point in his artistic evolution when word games and spontaneously combusting ideas were as naturally to him as breathing’.82
Robert Shelton referred to Tarantula as ‘an enigma wrapped in a question mark’83 and dubbed it ‘difficult reading’. He said: “It is howlingly funny, at times very violent, but is original, inventive and challenging […] Play “Highway 61” a few times before you plunge in.’84 Gray saw it in these terms: ‘A singular item in, but an honourable part, of Bob Dylan’s work, Tarantula combines lengthy prose-poem sections broken up by shorter, more readily comprehensible passages in the form of comic letters written by, and addressed to, different sharply drawn, vividly recognisable kinds of contemporary people: mostly risibly shallow young ones.’85 But he also stressed the Beat qualities of the piece. ‘Both parts of the book draw heavily on upon the oeuvre of the Beats – the “letters” perhaps especially seeming to echo some of the work of Kenneth Patchen86 and Gregory Corso. But the long prose-poem sections are also awash in slick, playful allusions to, and puns upon, a vast range of books, films and other items sucked inside the knowing maw of Anglo-American culture, from the blues to nursery rhymes.’87 He considers the book to be ‘fitfully, exhilaratingly acute about greed, corruption, manipulation, ugliness and threats to the social fabric’88 and is surprised at how little the volume has registered with the wider Dylan community. ‘Granted that Tarantula comes from the very period in Dylan’s creative life that most people value most […] it’s remarkable how much his audience too has neglected this orphan.’89
By the stage Tarantula made its belated bow, Ginsberg had chanted his Buddhist mantras on the terrifying streets of Chicago in August 1968, joined by the French writer Jean Genet, the American new journalist Terry Southern – whose uncredited screenplay would form the narrative heart of the great independent movie hit of the following year, Easy Rider – and also William Burroughs, a most unlikely participant in a cutting-edge political fray, as the forces of law and order rained their blows on the countercultural alliance, determined to persuade the Democrats to choose an anti-Vietnam War presidential candidate in an election year, just weeks after Robert F. Kennedy, the expected frontrunner in this race, had been gunned down in Los Angeles in June. The following year, Ginsberg would also make links with the most politicised of the Beatles, too, as John Lennon included the poet in the choral crowd that would feature on the recording of his own anti-war anthem ‘Give Peace a Chance’ in Montreal in June 1969.
At the start of the new decade, even though Dylan was in a continuing personal and artistic trough, he reunited with Ginsberg on a musical project which would see the duo enter the recording studio and produce some of the poet’s first songs with a band. When the opportunity came to spend time in the studio with Dylan, he seized the chance to lay down his own poetry and his songs with musicians. The offer and opportunity arose out of a Ginsberg reading which Dylan attended at the Loeb Centre at New York University at the end of September 1971 and, at which, the poet had impressively improvised some verse. So taken was the singer by the poet’s ability to extemporise, he telephoned Ginsberg, after the show, to congratulate him on this talent. Says Schumacher: ‘Dylan had always wanted that feeling of spontaneity in his recorded music and he had gone to some lengths to assume a rough-edged, made-up-on-the-spot feeling on his albums. Ginsberg had taken it a step further. By improvising his poetry onstage, he was, in essence, working without a net.’90 Dylan proposed they make an immediate attempt to record some tracks built on such an approach and they gathered later that same evening. Dylan had co-opted long-time Kerouac friend and collaborator David Amram, who had also attended the New York reading, to join the informal session. The rehearsal featured Dylan on a guitar borrowed from Peter Orlovsky’s girlfriend91 and Amram played his French horn.
Schumacher adds: ‘Allen played harmonium and improvised lyrics […] After Dylan taught him several new chord changes he found that he could play and improvise in a standard twelve-bar blues structure.’92 Says Stephen Scobie, at the acclaimed Dylan website Expecting Rain, of the affair: ‘If Ginsberg had been, to some extent, Dylan’s teacher in the field of poetry, here the roles were reversed; Ginsberg regarded Dylan as his musical “guru”, and deferred to him for advice and assistance.�
�93 At the end of the next month, on 30 October, Ginsberg and Dylan, backing on guitar, first performed together in a filmed item for Freetime, a show screened on a PBS-TV station shortly afterwards. Orlovsky and Warhol Factory lynchpin Gerard Malanga were also involved.94
Days later, in early November, they entered the studio,95 New York City’s Record Plant, joined by another raft of supporting musicians – folk artist Happy Traum and respected guitarist Jon Sholle among them – and kindred spirits, including Gregory Corso and Anne Waldman. Over two sessions, they laid down Ginsberg songs, including ‘Vomit Express’ and ‘September on Jessore Road’ plus an extended William Blake jam. Traum, who played banjo on ‘Vomit Express’, said: ‘The Record Plant was packed with musicians, poets and friends of musicians and poets (many of them beatnik legends from my youth) in a scene of socialising hubbub, cacophonous tuning-up, excited conversation, musical anarchy, and occasional flashes of brilliance.’96 Unfortunately, the results would have patchy exposure and it would not be until the much later, four CD Ginsberg retrospective Holy Soul and Jelly Roll, issued in 1994 and overseen by Hal Willner, that some of the tracks would be experienced by a wider audience.97
It would be some while before Dylan and Ginsberg made their next and perhaps greatest connection when singer asked poet to join the Rolling Thunder Revue, an extraordinary gathering of musicians and performers, friends and hangers-on, who would set out like a roaming caravan in the autumn of 1975 to take Dylan’s music and an eclectic range of supporting entertainment to smaller theatres across the US. The early 1970s, post-Woodstock, had seen the rise of the mega-concert: stadium gigs and festivals played out in front of tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, as rock moved from the teen pop single experience of the earlier 1960s to an album-oriented, multi-billion dollar global business. Dylan himself had joined the Band on a tour of such magnitude in 1974, a trek that would visit Madison Square Garden, Los Angeles Forum and other large venues, and spawn an uneven live double album Before the Flood. So, Rolling Thunder, perhaps most for its figurehead, Dylan himself, was a return to roots, not actually to bars, but to mid-scale venues which could accommodate many hundreds or low thousands of attendees. Says Richard Williams of the timing of the plan: ‘There was an energy around: the young bands that were appearing didn’t want to sound like Led Zeppelin or the Eagles. There was a new kind of radicalism in the air, a reaction against the way rock and roll had been commodified, turned into an industry. Dylan was from the older generation, but that was how he saw it, too. His answer was to put together a touring outfit that stood a chance of reproducing the spirit that music had possessed before every successful musician was presented with three roadies and a couple of tax shelters.’98
The tour would include a core backing band, essentially musicians who had been involved in the rehearsal and recording sessions for Dylan’s latest album Desire, laid down that summer, but then expanded by numerous Dylan associates, including Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Joan Baez, Bobby Neuwirth, David Blue and many others, including wife Sara and various offspring of the participants. While the playwright Sam Shepard was engaged to provide a written account of the event, Ginsberg – as well as Peter Orlovsky and Anne Waldman – became part of the live jamboree. It should also be remembered that this remarkable convention was also the raw material of a movie – part documentary, part fictionalised commemoration, part surreal drama – that would eventually appear as the epic, near four-hour Renaldo and Clara in 1978.
The Rolling Thunder odyssey commenced at the end October and played its opening two shows at the War Memorial Auditorium in Plymouth, Massachusetts. But it was the fourth show, on 2 November, and events the day after, that are of particular pertinence here. The live performance was staged at the Technical University in Lowell, also Massachusetts, a key location in Kerouac’s life story – his boyhood town, mythologised specifically in Doctor Sax but also a setting for other semi-autobiographical novels in, for instance, The Town and the City, and the place where he had been buried in 1969. For Dylan as long-term Kerouac enthusiast and Ginsberg as close friend for around 25 years up to his death, Lowell had special resonance.
The gig at the university saw Dylan, Baez, Neuwirth, Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson and others join the near two-hour set. Alan Bershaw, writing at Wolfgang’s Vault, says that events that would occur the next day have been widely reported but comments: ‘What, up until now, has not been known is just what a fantastic performance the Lowell show actually was.99 It goes without saying that hometown hero Jack Kerouac was certainly on the mind of all concerned this night, so it’s no surprise that the performance leaned heavily toward an On the Road theme. In terms of Bob Dylan, the Lowell show stands out as being one of his most exuberant performances ever, and thanks to this particularly crisp and dynamic recording, every nuance can now clearly be heard.’100 He adds: ‘Dylan’s choice of material, much like the album Desire, has a distinctive unity. The songs that Dylan chose to perform and the way he chose to perform them on this tour displays one of his greatest strengths – a beautiful disregard for professional songwriter polish. This elasticity in his approach to his material is what makes these performances so immediately engaging, not only for the audience, but for Dylan himself.’101
The day that followed would see one of the most significant junctures in the Dylan story, certainly a key occurrence in the Dylan-Ginsberg relationship, when both men, joined by Orlovsky, paid a touching, autumnal, noon visit to the simple grave of Kerouac in one of Lowell’s vast Catholic cemeteries. The episode would be filmed and form part of the Renaldo and Clara saga in due course. But the sight of poet and singer forming a brief, if symbolic, triumvirate with a late hero and friend, was compelling evidence that the power of the Beat movement remained an enduring inspiration to Dylan. Ginsberg’s presence at this quiet homage made the occasion special indeed for both men. Writes Nat Hentoff in Rolling Stone: ‘Ginsberg had brought along a copy of Mexico City Blues and Dylan read a poem from it. The three sat on a grave, Dylan picking up Ginsberg’s harmonium and making up a tune. When Dylan pulled out his guitar, Ginsberg began to improvise a long, slow, 12-bar blues about Kerouac sitting up in the clouds looking down on these kindly wanderers putting music to his grave. Dylan is much moved, much involved, closely captured by the camera crew that has also come along.’102 Sam Shepard, the scribe of this tour and of this moment, reflects, too, on the scene: ‘I try to look at them both head-on, with no special ideas of who or what they are but just try to see them there in front of me. They emerge as simple men with a secret aim in mind. Each of them opposite but still in harmony. Alive and singing to the dead and living. Sitting flat on the earth, above bones, beneath trees and hearing what they hear.’103
For Schumacher, the visit to the grave and the nearby grotto with various haunting statues of religious figures, was important because it seemed to offer opportunities to reflect on the motivations that lay behind the Dylan-Ginsberg association. During the tour, Dylan expressed feelings about the burden of myth and image that haunted him wherever he went. Schumacher believes that their friendship, which had attracted detractors, ‘extended beyond their mutual artistic influence. Dylan admired Ginsberg’s ability to handle his celebrity […] Conversely, Ginsberg admired Dylan’s ability to guard his privacy. Dylan had been a public figure for more than a decade […] but he was always keen to keep a portion of his life for himself. Through his music, he had given a fragment of his life to the public, but not so much that he would pay Kerouac’s dear price for celebrity.’104
Yet Hishmeh takes a less idealised, we might claim less sentimental, view of the Kerouac grave set-piece and harks back to the idea at the heart of his thesis that there was a strong and knowing marketing project underlying this tender tribute, its choreography carefully schemed and its impact, as a media event, quite intended. He draws attention to Shepard’s own observation ‘that on that particular day a red Galaxy driven by a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine followed Dylan’s car’.1
05 Hishmeh comments further on this: ‘Although made in passing, this remark importantly signals that the day’s activities in Lowell, Massachusetts were premeditated, unspontaneous and destined for public display. Yet, Shepard’s descriptions and photos of Ginsberg and Dylan at the gravesite of Kerouac in this section seemingly elide the twin narratives of premeditation and publicity. The event appears so spontaneous, so natural and authentic, that any accusation suggesting artifice would fall on deaf ears.’106
That said, while Hishmeh’s comments may dispel that most fanciful of notions that the Dylan-Ginsberg link up in the cemetery was somehow forged in heaven, the more cynical, maybe worldly, reading of the occasion merely confirms what most of us already knew: that rock culture by the 1970s was increasingly part of a sophisticated public relations machine and that nothing, or virtually nothing, was being left the chance. If Dylan was not engaging a high-powered publicist to orchestrate this sequence, the singer himself was canny enough to know the synergy that such a combination of people and places would fire. Yet the grave visit could have been schemed in a more calculating way still. Shelton points out that ‘some of the most affecting moments of the autumn tour were visible only to the camera crew’107 – and we must presume Rolling Stone.108 Dylan could have turned the occasion into a bigger press scramble and invited the world’s media to the graveside. Further, he could have turned it into a solo Dylan visit, though the absence of Ginsberg, with his obvious and moving connection to the proceedings, would have surely lessened the impact, the poignancy, of the plan. Whatever, it seems that Dylan recognised the significance of this spiritual sojourn, this brief detour from the rock ’n’ roll road, and wanted it to figure as an important episode in the movie he was creating and, indeed, it would form a section in the released version of the production.
Ginsberg would continue with the Rolling Thunder Revue after Lowell but the prominent place he may have envisaged for himself in the real-life drama, the celluloid drama, too, was never really cemented: for the poet, the re-connection with Kerouac and with Lowell must have been the most warming experience of the whole jaunt. Shepard’s part as day-to-day documenter, in prose and verse, snapshots and sketches, may have been a role that Ginsberg would have relished. As Scobie remarks: ‘Perhaps because his contributions to the concerts were so limited, Ginsberg flung himself with even greater enthusiasm into the improvisational atmosphere of the making of the film. He was certainly much more at home in the free-floating, slightly crazy process of improvisation than was the more script-oriented Sam Shepard.’109 But the tour itself was also much more about the music and the extraordinary gallery of stars who would take to the stage. In 1976, the package would enjoy a second lease of life without Ginsberg but, by now, the original ethos of the autumn edition – smaller venues, secret gigs – had been displaced by a harder-headed, commercial outlook and the following spring expedition would be booked into larger halls and even stadiums with the admirable, founding idea undermined by the cost, the sheer scale, of taking dozens on the road.
