Beat junkies will celebrate the night Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan jammed
Legendary poet also had musical ambitions and new box set showcases his singer-songwriter years
A jam session between Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan in New York’s East Village may sound like the apex of Beat Generation romanticism – the Howl poet and Like a Rolling Stone bard draped over one microphone, riffing incendiary ideas and counterculture wordplay. However, the reality of it, in the fall of 1971, was less a bohemian summit and more like a hostage negotiation.
“Bob told me that Allen and Gregory Corso were reading their poetry at NYU, and invited me to come along,” recalls David Amram, 85, a prolific classical/jazz composer and mutual friend. “We went backstage during intermission and Allen told me: ‘My god, I’ve been trying for 10 years to get Dylan to do something musical with me. Will you bring him over to my place tonight, please, please?’ All the years I’d known him, I’d never seen him like that.”
Amram dutifully delivered the semi-retired Dylan to Ginsberg’s apartment near Tompkins Square Park, where Ginsberg opened the door with a guitar in hand. “He handed it to Dylan and said, ‘Key of G, Bob’,” says Amram. “Allen played the one note he could play on the harmonium, and suddenly, he had this whole tape recorder set up on the table. Dylan looked over and yelled, “Turn that ‘expletive’ thing off!”
Despite that tetchy start, Ginsberg did tease out several new folk tunes that evening. Those efforts – topical, surreal, blithely shambolic – can be heard on The Last Word on First Blues, the first box set to chronicle Ginsberg’s most fruitful singer-songwriter years, which spanned that session through the early 1980s. It includes a reissue of Ginsberg’s previously out-of-print 1983 album First Blues, which included a handful of tracks from those Dylan sessions, as well as a disc of previously unreleased tracks culled by Pat Thomas, a historian who specialises in 1960s counterculture .
“Ginsberg is obviously an iconic, legendary poet and we all know him as that. Very few people know him as a singer, and even less people like him as a singer,” Thomas admits. He first proposed a box set to the Allen Ginsberg Estate in 2012, 15 years after the poet died from liver cancer at age 70. “If I’d contacted them and asked to go through Allen’s poems, they’d say, ‘Go away, we have 100 people already doing that.’ I was the only guy who was crazy enough to want to go through the music – and the thing about Allen Ginsberg’s music is, you either dig it or you go running in the opposite direction.”
The Last Word on First Blues is indeed polarising, true to its creator, whose provocative epic Howl (1955) inspired Dylan and many more counterculture artists of the ‘60s. Despite Ginsberg’s enduring fame as a poet and the reluctant centre of Howl’s ensuing obscenity trial – in which his homosexuality and anti-conformist stances were equally prodded – by the ‘70s, he had already hoped to pivot his career toward music.
