by Barry Miles
His album was to be called Paperback Records and was to consist of field recordings of his explorations of London with possibly some longer extracts from his books or new writing on the second side, but when Apple disintegrated so did his project. An interview in the Evening Standard in May 1969 reported, ‘He’s also here to make a record in a spoken-word series for Apple. But since their economy measures he’s found himself without an office or cooperation. He’s a little bitter about it, but he’s carrying on with making the tapes anyway. “I write a lot. I just haven’t written anything that pleases me for a long time. Nothing I’ve done communicates as well as tape does for me.” He’s a great Peter Pan of a fellow, quick-witted and very funny, and driving around London in his cowboy hat and wind-cheater he looks like some leftover from Bonanza.’
During Allen Klein’s mass firings later, all of Kesey’s tapes vanished, along with everything else that wasn’t nailed down. Maybe he had copies. I hope so. With the closure of Zapple, Kesey left the IBM at the front desk but took his portable and my Revox A77 with him. I can’t say that I blame him; he wanted to keep making tapes, and I doubt he had received an advance. In any case someone else would have probably stolen them if he had left them behind.
Ken Kesey had originally arrived at Apple in nothing but the clothes he wore, an unwashed tunic and large cowboy hat, jeans and boots – no luggage . . . As Bramwell wrote, ‘ With money no object, he soon got the knack of shopping. I can’t say I blame him. It was all free and Carnaby Street had some wonderful things to offer.’
Chapter 6
East Coast
IT WAS WITH SOME trepidation that I set off to record six albums for Zapple, given that my only experience had been to produce three spoken-word albums back in 1965, all recorded on a battered old hired Ferrograph operated by Ian Sommerville. I had some experience of tape editing from that time, and I had done a little more at the studio on Montagu Square. I had watched both Paul and Peter edit tapes at Wimpole Street, and they had shown me how to splice using a single-sided razor blade and a metal editing block. I had observed carefully during the times we had been allowed into the control room at Abbey Road to listen to playbacks and to watch George Martin at work on the mixing desk. I often talked to Peter Asher about record production and learned a lot from him about microphone techniques, how to avoid dry sounds, how to use equalization and so on, and I felt confident that I knew enough to make a few spoken-word records and even to add a few musical accompaniments or live recordings to make them more accessible to the general public. The studio technicians would do the miking up and would run the recorders; I just needed to know enough to be able to tell them what I wanted. Still, a certain amount of bluff was required.
Apple arranged my trip: an Air India 707, business class. I had been to New York two years before, in 1967, but the combination of modern technology and old-fashioned luxury travel still intrigued me: the stewards in white coats and the typed index card, reverently passed from row to row telling us what height and speed we were travelling at. I arrived at JFK amid flurries of snow. It was 29 January. I had arranged to stay with my friends Ken Weaver and Betsy Klein in Ken’s apartment at 719 East 9th Street between Avenues B and C, where I had stayed previously. They picked me up in a battered old Ford. Later I learned that Apple had sent a limo to meet me; no one told me, and I had not realized that it was normal in the record business for executives to be treated this way. The limo would have caused quite a stir on East 9th Street, because in those days that part of Alphabet City was notoriously dangerous, with burnt-out cars littering the sidewalks, overflowing garbage cans and frequent knife fights in the streets; I had witnessed one from Ken’s window the previous time I stayed there.
Ken was one of the people I hoped to record. His fellow Fug, Tuli Kupferberg, had released a spoken-word album, No Deposit, No Return, an album of ‘found’ poetry, on ESP-Disk in 1966, so I thought there must be a market for Ken’s Tex-speak aphorisms. He was a Texan born on Galveston Island and had grown up in El Campo, a railroad camp set up to ship cows from the four big local cattle ranches. When I visited him he used to subscribe to the bi-weekly local El Campo Leader-News and would sit in his chair, surrounded by crushed beer cans, chuckling over the accidents, suicides and car wrecks of his home town. It really was the kind of newspaper that had headlines like ‘Brewster’s old sow got caught in the fence again last week’. Ken looked like a Hells Angel and indeed had a set of colours and later a Harley Davidson to go with them, but his appearance in 1969 was almost that of a rock star. The Fugs had spent several months, September and October 1968, touring Europe and were becoming quite well known. Bob Dylan claimed in an interview that they were his favourite group. Ken’s hair fell in waves over his shoulders, he had a massive black beard that he liked to stroke thoughtfully and for street wear he wore a large leather cowboy hat and hand-tooled cowboy boots. He looked unbelievably fierce when he frowned, which was usually enough to scare people and stop trouble; he was capable of enjoying a good bar fight, but mostly this was a carapace covering a gentle soul. He was a brilliant raconteur, and I wanted to record an album with him of bar conversation and humour in a Texan accent that was to be called Tex-speak.
East 9th Street in Alphabet City, then dangerous territory.
Ken Weaver, drummer with the Fugs, preparing to be recorded. The Fugs were named after a euphemism for ‘fuck’ in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. The band originally comprised Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg and Ken, although throughout the years they were joined by others.
I spent a couple of days recovering from jet lag, talking about the proposed album with Ken and trying to contact Charles Olson in Gloucester, Massachusetts, whom I also hoped to record before continuing my trip on to the West Coast. On Monday I made an appointment and went to see Allen Klein at ABKCO Industries, 1700 Broadway on West 54th Street – an anonymous, cheap-looking glass tower five blocks from Central Park. ABKCO was near the top, but the signage in the lobby was just bits of paper taped to a board, and at first I got off on the wrong floor to find myself in an undeveloped expanse of concrete and cables; the building wasn’t even finished. The elevator rattled and shook and some of the secretaries at ABKCO were really scared of using it, never leaving the building except to go home. Despite his aggressive assurance that he was ‘waiting for me’, I never did get to see Klein on this trip. His doorkeeper was Iris Keitel, a stony-faced, aggressive woman who was both his personal assistant and mistress. Although the company was called ABKCO (the Allen and Betty Klein Corporation), Klein in fact lived with Keitel. For the first time in my life I actually had to shout at someone in an office; it was the only way to get through to Keitel that I had come all this way to make albums and had been assured by all four Beatles, as well as Klein, that there would be money and facilities waiting for me.
Only when I threatened to telegram the Beatles to complain about the reception I had received did she very begrudgingly hand over the money I needed, which had been there all along. Klein had only recently managed to insinuate himself into Apple, and although he was already acting as the Beatles’ representative he was not, in fact, officially appointed as their ‘adviser’ until 8 February, so it was not really surprising that no one knew who was doing what and what role they should play. I have never been in an office where the atmosphere was so depressing and negative. Klein’s relatives were all over the place, pawing at the secretaries, and Keitel sat like Cerberus outside Klein’s locked door. A few days later, now that I had authorization, I was able to collect the portable Nagra I had requested before I left London from Capitol Records’s studio. Ken and I recorded hours of his conversation at East 9th Street. It proved impossible to stop street noise leaking on to the tape, and looking back it would have been better to have accepted it and exploited it to lend atmosphere. Although the album was not released, much of the material appeared in written form in his 1984 book, Texas Crude: The How-To on Talkin’ Texan, which was illustrated by his old friend Ro
bert Crumb.
Ken’s girlfriend, Betsy Klein. Betsy performed as a backing vocalist on the Fugs’ recordings and was an early supporter of the band.
Ken’s hair fell in waves over his shoulders, he had a massive black beard that he liked to stroke thoughtfully . . . He looked unbelievably fierce when he frowned, which was usually enough to scare people and stop trouble; he was capable of enjoying a good bar fight, but mostly this was a carapace covering a gentle soul.
Charles Olson reading at Berkeley. Olson was to have a profound influence on a generation of poets, including Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley.
Chapter 7
The Big O
NOW I HAD THE Nagra tape-recorder – at a massive rental of $200 a week – but I still could not contact Charles Olson on the telephone. I sent cables and finally, at about 3 a.m., Olson called, waking everyone up. He said he could record the next day. I got up early, and Betsy Klein and I flew to Boston with the Nagra and a suitcase filled with tape. At the airport we encountered American bureaucracy: no one would rent us a car because I was paying but Betsy was driving, so in the end we took a cab to Gloucester, now best known as the setting for Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. February is not the best time to visit Massachusetts. The streets of Gloucester were filled with snow, with only the main road being ploughed, and we had to walk the last few blocks to Fort Square, a spit of land projecting out into the harbour with about a dozen low white-painted wooden clapboard houses. The sea looked grey and very cold, and I had never before seen snow on the beach. Olson’s apartment was on the top floor of a two-storey building at 28 Fort Square, reached by an outside wooden stair. His kitchen windows looked out over the rooftops to the harbour: a low mansard roof, electricity and telephone cables slicing the view. Olson was not in when we arrived, but he had left a note taped to the windowpane of the back door to say he would be back soon. It was written on the back of a threatening letter from a hospital about an unpaid bill. I was shocked; it always came as a surprise to remember that America did not have a national health system like we did at home. The white buildings were almost invisible under the deep snow. All sounds were muffled, the silence broken only by the occasional crunch of a passing delivery truck compressing the snow. Charles soon arrived carrying a large paper sack of groceries and let us in.
It was a railroad flat, with each room leading to the other. Every room was filled with books. Olson had been the rector of the famous Black Mountain College, and as a poet he is classed as a ‘Black Mountain Poet’ along with Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn, both of whom studied with him at Black Mountain. I first got to know him in London in 1967 when he was staying with Panna Grady in her enormous house overlooking Regent’s Park. Olson worked best at night, or, rather, he did not notice the passage of time like most other people. His classes at Black Mountain often started at 11 p.m. and sometimes ran through until the next afternoon. He was a brilliant teacher. At Panna’s house guests would arrive around eight in the evening and wait for him to get up. He would talk all through his breakfast – three or four eggs, a huge pile of bacon and toast – and they would leave around one or two in the morning. By then Charles’s brain was going flat out and he would settle in for a long night’s work. I wanted to record him because, unlike many of his contemporaries, he had no spoken-word records out and was approaching sixty – he was born in 1910. His poetry is more difficult to read than most, so I suggested some of the more accessible ones, but ultimately it was up to Charles what he read. In fact he stuck close to my suggestions: poems from his new collection, Maximus IV, V, VI1 and a bit from one of my favourite books, The Mayan Letters,2 which mixes archaeology, history and poetry in one slim volume; he read letters 13, 7 and 5. You can get an idea of Olson’s work from his 1956 essay ‘A Foot Is to Kick With’ about trying to find the ending for a poem: ‘You wave the first word. And the whole thing follows. But — You follow it. With a dog at your heels, a crocodile about to eat you at the end, and you with your pack on your back trying to catch a butterfly.’
Olson’s Maximus poems, which Miles was keen to feature on the record. He started to write the collection in the 1940s and continued to revise it until his death. This volume was published in 1968, with a posthumous edition being published in 1975. However, drafts found after his death indicate that the epic remained unfinished.
Charles was a big man, tall (six feet eight inches), although now a little stooped and broad in chest, but not at all overweight. His hair and two-day growth of stubble was white. His friends called him ‘the Big O’. He told me, ‘The first time I realized that I was larger than the ordinary was once when I was running down a hill in Boston to catch a bus, and as I passed, a little black boy said, “My God, there goes Goliath!”’ and he roared with laughter, a shout that came rumbling up from deep in his chest. His conversations were filled with these laughs. I described the apartment in the sleeve notes to the Folkways3 release of the recording in 1975:
Charles used to hold forth, propped against the huge refrigerator. Everything was in the most almighty muddle, papers, books, dishes, jars and boxes, even a storage jar of dried peyote mushrooms, all mixed up together. The window frames had pencil notes of lists of ships and cargoes, forgotten ships’ captains and first mates and the customs duties they paid – long lists fading in the thin winter sun, obscured by a thin film of dust. The walls, too, had notes in Charles’s thin, illegible handwriting, details of Dogtown and who built which house where.
There was a deep silence; the snow seemed to suspend time, and it was almost a shock to look through the snow-flecked windows over the white rooftops and see boats arriving at Gloucester Harbor under the white sky. The living-room bookcases were full to overflowing, jammed with coffee-ringed first editions. One book I pulled from a shelf had a letter from Ezra Pound used as a bookmark with several manuscript poems included. Magazines and journals were piled on the floor to table height and used as such. Charles’s typewriter was balanced precariously in a little nest amid all the papers over by the window. I continued my description:
The bedroom had a strange feeling of lack of use, stale air, sun warmed dust. The air outside in late January so cold we couldn’t open a window. Strange in the warm rooms to feel the windowpanes ice-cold. In the total silence, broken only by the fridge thermostat and our own voices, so clear and loud without traffic noise or transistor rock to hide and dull them. There was so much to say. On our first night we did nothing but talk over a Chinese takeaway. The Nagra remained in its travelling case. Charles must rank along with Wilde and Strachey as a great conversationalist.
His talk ranged from geologic time to the importance of a sense of place. The trade between England and New England in the eighteenth century – he enjoyed the fact I came from Gloucestershire and here we were in Gloucester, Massachusetts – and gossip about Allen Ginsberg, Tim Leary and other mutual friends. He discussed Truman and Melville, the Fugs, Janis Joplin – whom he loved – and Origin magazine. The next day I searched for the best place to record. Although all the books tended to absorb some of the edge, our voices were clear.
Eventually I set up shop in his bedroom where the fridge couldn’t get itself on tape. Charles sat in an upright chair, which creaked alarmingly but was the only possible one for him to use, so he said. In the dead of night we were sometimes disturbed by the muffled roar and crunch of snow as a truck slowly passed by. The room contained a long trestle table stacked two deep in maritime books, arranged spine up; hundreds of books, making the table sag, and to which I added a directional microphone. I arranged it as close as I dared to avoid Charles’s gesticulations as he read and the fading as he looked away or down at the page. I sat on the floor by the door with my headphones and followed the text. Betsy sat in the living-room reading. The first thing Charles found was that his speaking voice was not at all how he had imagined it to be. He had never listened carefully to a recording of it before and found it terribly lifeless, dry and boring. For a while I thought he w
as going to back out of the project altogether. The room’s acoustics did make it drier than usual, but I explained that we could fix this to a certain extent in the mixing. Fortunately he decided to work with it and took care to read at the best possible speed with inflections and emphasis in the right places and careful pronunciation of unusual words, just as he took infinite care to arrange the words of his poems on the page in just the right places. Sometimes, even in the later recordings, he would catch his voice becoming dry and deep and would laugh out loud at himself. I have left one such false start at the beginning of the poem ‘I Am the Gold Machine’, a poem which gave us a lot of trouble and of which we did more than a dozen recordings.
Previous image and above: Photographs taken by Miles during the recording of Charles Olson’s Maximus IV, V, VI at Fort Square, overlooking the harbour in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Olson would work only at night.
We did a lot of takes that first day, and by the end of the session his voice was gone. Charles listened carefully to each one, head cocked to one side, attentive. To help his reading I marked up the books with musical notation marks for ‘speed up’ and ‘slow down’, used in this case to indicate volume, and underlined passages for greater emphasis and words that he normally slurred when reading. I conducted him by waving my arms about and pursing my lips to get him to give certain words more stress or raise his voice. After a night’s work he got the hang of it and we knew how we were going to do it. He insisted, however, that we erase the tapes, which I did, and so the next day we started afresh. We mostly recorded poems from his new book Maximus IV, V, VI, which, luckily, I had brought with me as he had not yet received his copies from the publisher Cape Goliard in London because of a British postal strike. The three Mayan Letters were my request, although by the time he was through making asides and verbal annotations he had certainly made them his own again. In the following two nights we sailed through everything I was hoping to record, getting most things in one or two takes.