The Zapple Diaries

by Barry Miles

  Charles was lonely and not in good health; he lived alone, and because many people regarded him as unapproachable weeks would sometimes go by without him seeing anyone other than his immediate neighbours. He seemed happy to see us and did not mind our intrusion on his privacy; he could do no work while we were there because of the layout of the rooms. He told me that his work output had halved since his wife died twelve years before. The whole time we were there he received only one telephone call, from his daughter Katherine. He told me he was worried that he would not be able to leave her anything and was shocked when I suggested that the Ezra Pound letters and first editions were worth a great deal. In my sleeve notes I wrote:

  Charles had been in the same house so long that he had stopped seeing it. We talked about the various shipping channels into the harbour, and he talked at length about a large map of Gloucester Harbor that he had annotated extensively. He sat on the bed with the map pinned to the wall behind him, and became a little irritated that we couldn’t catch what he was saying. When he turned to look at the chart he realized it was blank. The sun had bleached it away forever, a sagging yellowing sheet, dust-marked and fly-spotted. How long was it since Charles had actually looked with interest and inquisitiveness around his own bedroom? He made a joke, but I could see deep down then he knew he was dying.

  The recordings were a success. They sounded as I had wanted them to, as if Charles had simply read them off with no preparation, in spontaneous performance. It was the only recording ‘for posterity’, as he put it, that Charles ever made. Other tapes exist, fortunately, but they are often marred by drink, drugs or the technical problems of live recordings in those days: breaks in the tape, faulty microphone connections. The record was Charles reading his poems as he wanted them read, and I felt enormously privileged to have produced it for him. We left after four days, and he gave me a copy of the hors commerce edition of Human Universe as a commemorative gift, with his annotations on some of the essays. I was very touched. Charles died a year later on 10 January 1970; he was only fifty-nine. A few months after his death I was staying on Allen Ginsberg’s farm in upstate New York when Allen came into my bedroom early in the morning having just opened that day’s post. He thrust a photograph in my face. It was a deathbed picture of Charles, looking peaceful in death. ‘Ha! That’ll get rid of your hard-on,’ chortled Allen. Ginsberg knew and loved Olson. This was his way of sharing our mutual sadness at his death.

  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.

  Allen Ginsberg in the kitchen of the Committee on Poetry farm in Cherry Valley, upstate New York. Allen bought the farm to serve as a haven for poets and friends. Many illustrious figures stayed there, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Bob Rosenthal and Barbara Rubin, among others.

  Chapter 8

  The Poetry Farm

  ALLEN GINSBERG HAD RECENTLY bought a farm in upstate New York and was spending his first winter there. It was at East Hill, six miles to the east of Cherry Valley, a small community of less than 1,000 people about eighty miles west of Albany, the state capital. The only way there, as I didn’t drive, was to take the 6 a.m. bus from the Port Authority; a six-hour trip. Allen’s boyfriend Peter Orlovsky was there to meet me when the bus pulled up in front of Crane’s drugstore, where we sat on stools and had a malted milk in a store straight out of a Saturday Evening Post cover. In fact, the whole village was like that: white picket fences and white clapboard buildings with porches out front, some with swing chairs, all covered in deep snow. Peter drove me to the farm in his ’56 Chevrolet, which of course fitted right in.

  I needed to discuss Allen’s proposed recording of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, about half of which he had set to music. I was familiar with the Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams settings, but I knew there were many more out there. The tape he sent me showed that he was not going for a ‘high art’ interpretation but something closer to the music that Blake himself composed and sang in the pubs of Soho.

  The Poetry Farm, as it was known, was in the middle of a hundred acres of meadowland surrounded by state forest, a two-storey, four-bedroom house with a separate wing off the kitchen where Peter and his new girlfriend, Denise, lived (Allen’s social arrangements were complicated). Next to the living-room stood a traditional red-and-white barn where the horse and Bessie the milk cow lived. Peter and Gordon Ball, the film-maker, now farm manager, had tried to insulate the bedrooms by installing wooden tongue-and-groove panelling in each one, but with no heating system they were still bitterly cold. However, the Aladdin oil lamps gave out a lot of heat as well as light, and downstairs there was an Ashley wood-stove.

  There was no electricity, but there was a telephone. By law the telephone company had been compelled to install a line, albeit a party line. The phone was just inside the kitchen door on the windowsill, and Allen for some reason sat in a tiny child’s chair next to it, furiously dialling the New York Times, his publishers, his editors, his booking agents for readings, hours at a time and the other party-liners could never get through. Allen originally bought the place to get Peter away from his amphetamine dealers into a healthy outdoor atmosphere and also hoped that Jack Kerouac might move there to dry out, but Kerouac would never leave his mother and died of drink later that year.

  Allen was on crutches, the result of a car crash in early December after delivering Lawrence Ferlinghetti to the airport. He had been hospitalized with a fractured hip and four broken ribs, but now, a month later, he managed to show me around. The snow prevented him from showing me his pride and joy, the gravity pump that provided water to the farmhouse. Down the hill from the house was a well, at the bottom of which was a spring and a gravity pump. The pump gathered water until the weight was enough to shoot a cupful up the hill to a tank buried above the house, seventy times an hour. The weight of the spring water alone was the driving force.

  Allen could still get up the stairs to his room, which looked like something out of the nineteenth century: a desk lit by a pair of oil lamps, wooden coat rack behind the door, a big seven-drawer chest, a large wooden-framed bed with a woven Indian blanket and a portrait of Walt Whitman on the wall. Downstairs the living-room had a very comfortable feel with a big busted couch and colourful rugs bought at local barn sales. By the window hung a Tibetan thanka, brought back from India by Allen in 1963, the only one not stolen by Lower East Side junkies. There was an old-fashioned wooden pump organ, originally from a church, now used by Allen in the composition of his music. Lee Crabtree from the Fugs had taught Allen the basics of musical notation and a series of simple chords. This was what I had come for, and all through the afternoon and evening Allen sent halting windy notes whistling into the rundown old room to accompany his deep basso voice, the pedals making a terrible racket as he pumped furiously with his feet. It grew dark early, and the oil lamp on the organ was lit. A solitary moth circled its glass shaft. In the sleeve notes for the album Allen explained how he wrote the music:

  The songs were first composed on tape recorder, improvised on pump organ in farmhouse upstate NY in two nights after returning from Democratic Convention 1968 Tear Gas Chicago . . . The purpose in putting them to music was to articulate the significance of each holy and magic syllable of his poems; as if each syllable had intention. These are perfect verses, with no noise lost or extra accents for nothing. I tried to hear meanings of each line spoken intentionally and interestedly, and follow natural voice tones up or down according to different emphasis and emotions vocalized as in daily intimate speech.

  He played all through the afternoon and continued after a break for dinner. The tootling, wheezing organ was perfect for Allen’s hesitant playing and ‘folk’ approach to the music. Peter Orlovsky, recovering from amphetamine addiction, still had his ‘leper’s voice’ as he cal
led it (after the wails of the lepers he encountered when he and Allen lived in India), and his wildly out-of-tune enthusiastic duets were clearly going to pose a problem on some of the songs. But I figured we could deal with that in the studio. I loved what Allen had created; it would be a challenge to record, although one I looked forward to. We decided to record it in the summer, but first we needed a professional arranger, because many of the songs lent themselves to multi-instrumentation, and space for rehearsals in the city. However, there was plenty of time, and I left Cherry Valley satisfied that the Zapple project was now well under way.

  This was what I had come for, and all through the afternoon and evening Allen sent halting windy notes whistling into the run-down old room to accompany his deep basso voice, the pedals making a terrible racket as he pumped furiously with his feet. It grew dark early, and the oil lamp on the organ was lit. A solitary moth circled its glass shaft.

  Apple had offices in the famous Capitol Tower just north of the Hollywood and Vine intersection.

  Chapter 9

  The First Trip: LA – Bukowski

  I FLEW INTO LAX on a Friday evening, too late to see anyone at the Capitol Tower, where Apple had an office. I had not forewarned anyone I was coming, so from the airport I telephoned the local underground newspapers. Art Kunkin, the editor of the Los Angeles Free Press, was out and no one seemed particularly friendly, even though they had published quite a bit of my work, so I phoned the newer Open City, where I had also published but knew no one. They were delighted to hear from someone from International Times and said to come straight on over. They were on Melrose in what looked like a converted body shop. There was a huge psychedelic mural covering the whole of the back wall, but there was something too crude, something unconvincing about it. John Bryan, the editor, laughed at my puzzled expression. The building had been used as the set for an underground newspaper in a cheap Hollywood exploitation movie about hippies, and now it was being used by a real underground paper – a brilliant Hollywood reversal. The Open City staff were wonderfully friendly, and I was immediately offered a place to stay and every kind of hospitality. I finished up with Mike Hodell, over in Silver Lake. It helped that I was in Los Angeles to record Charles Bukowski who had a regular column called ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’ in Open City. I had only been in California a few hours, but it seemed very foreign. I loved the climate and the palm trees and the laid-back attitude everyone had: a far cry from the speedy New Yorkers in their snow-covered streets I had left just a few hours before. I found the six hundred miles of freeways extraordinary; there seemed to be no centre to the city, and I soon found out that it was not regarded as unusual to drive fifty miles to see a concert. I spent the weekend with the Open City folks and on Monday presented myself at the Capitol Tower at Hollywood and Vine. I loved the building; it looked like a stack of singles on an autochange: twelve floors, the bottom one ready to be whisked away and played.

  Apple had a large office there, but no one from London had yet been over to see them, and they were desperate for news and information. Sadly I was not able to help them much as, aside from Peter Asher, Ron Kass, Derek Taylor and the Beatles themselves, I didn’t know the other staff very well as I never had to deal with them. None the less, the American staff did everything they could to help me, hiring studio time in San Francisco, arranging car rental there, renting a portable tape-recorder for my Bukowski album. Just like the London office, ever since Paul and John had gone on American television saying they wanted to help people get a contract the American Apple office had been inundated with tapes. There were huge cupboards full that no one knew what to do with. I suggested they weed them out and send the more promising ones to Peter in London, as no one in Los Angeles could make decisions about them. I had a meeting with Jim Mahoney, Apple’s West Coast publicist. He had sent out a press release on 3 February, a couple of weeks before I arrived, introducing the Zapple label. It read:

  Beatles to introduce Zapple, new label and recording concept.

  On May 1, just two weeks short of the first anniversary of the formation of Apple Corps Ltd and its Apple Records division, the Beatles company will introduce a new label and recording concept.

  The label will be called Zapple and it will emphasize a series of ‘spoken-word’ albums and some music releases of a more wide-ranging and esoteric nature. Price of the Zapple albums will generally be $1.98 or $4.98, depending on the type of release.

  Zapple will be a division of Apple Records, which is headed by Ron Kass, who is also chief executive for all Apple music activities. Supervising the Zapple program will be Barry Miles, a British writer-intellectual in his late twenties.

  The first three releases on the Zapple label are now being pressed and include:

  1. A new John Lennon-Yoko Ono album entitled Unfinished Music No. 2 – Life with the Lions

  2. A George Harrison composed-produced electronic music album which was recorded with a Moog

  3. A spoken-word album recorded by poet-writer Richard Brautigan

  Other well-known writer-poets already committed to Zapple releases include: Lawrence Ferlinghetti – America’s best-selling ‘serious’ poet; poet-playwright Michael McClure; veteran literary figures Kenneth Patchen and Charles Olson; and poet-essayist Allen Ginsberg. Additionally, Zapple will release one of the late Lenny Bruce’s last concerts as an album.

  It is the hope of Apple Corps Ltd that the new label will help pioneer a new area for the recording industry equivalent to what the paperback revolution did to book publishing.

  The company is now studying new market ideas for the label, which it hopes to eventually retail in outlets where paperback books and magazines are sold; university and college outlets will also be emphasized in Zapple’s distribution plans.

  Discussions are now in progress with several world figures, as well as leaders in the various arts and sciences to record their works and thoughts for the label. The Beatles plan to tape several discussion sessions amongst themselves as an album release – probably for the fall. It is assumed that Zapple will have little difficulty attracting those people who might not normally record albums because of the general educational tone of the project.

  There were two secretaries at Apple in the Capitol Tower with literally nothing to do, so they were delighted to have some work. I asked them to show me around town. The music clubs welcomed us with open arms, moving people from their seats to give us the best tables, proffering free drinks and all of them asking about ‘the boys’. I said the boys were doing all right. One of the secretaries, Pat Slattery, drove me to see Bukowski in her green Mustang.

  Charles Bukowski (‘Buk’) lived at 5126¼ De Longpre Avenue in East Hollywood, between Normandie and Kingsley. Sunset Boulevard was one block to the north, and the hazy view from Normandie looking north was of Griffith Park and the Observatory. The buildings were mostly single storey, low, with some old-style courts. There were rows of dusty, untended palm trees, chain-link fences tangled with weeds, and strands of plastic and torn supermarket bags, guarded waste lots filled with broken bottles, crushed cigarette packs and yellow palm tree fronds. Walls were topped with razor wire and twisted barbed wire. Crumbling concrete garages, peeling billboards and stucco houses lined a street made from huge cracked concrete slabs, chipped at the edges and with utility cables and tall scruffy palms, some of which had died and rotted. It was the seedy side of Hollywood, and it was just as I had expected and hoped it would be.

  Charles Bukowski poses on his neighbour’s doorstep during a photograph session to accompany the recording of his album.

  Bukowski photographed by Miles in his home and garden.

  This photograph, taken by photographer Sam Cherry, was staged at Bukowski’s home; Sam and Buk were good friends and shared a similar sense of humour – the juxtaposition of the beer crates and the doll made them laugh.

  Another iconic image of Bukowski taken by Sam Cherry. Here Buk stands on the pavement in the Skid Row neighbourhood of downtown L
os Angeles. Sam photographed Bukowski many times, and Bukowski once cited Cherry’s tough character as an influential component in his creation of his own tough-guy persona and protagonists. Cherry’s son, poet Neeli Cherkovski, and Bukowski became lifelong friends, eventually starting their own literary magazine.

  Bukowski’s house was a single-storey stucco building with an open porch in a row of four identical houses set back off the street with a similar row opposite. A rusting ’57 Plymouth was parked next to the house on a patch of hardened earth that might once have been a lawn and which housed a large trash bin overflowing with beer cans. The front door was glass, divided into sixteen panes, with a further eight panes on either side, a design echoed by the front window. The screen door opened directly into his living-room, about twenty feet long and twelve feet wide; the shades were drawn. To the left was an old sofa with the stuffing sticking out, next to which was a rickety bookcase made from wooden shelves supported by stacks of red bricks and cinder blocks salvaged from the street; it was filled with books, magazines – mostly small literary magazines – racing forms and newspapers. A pile of car tyres took over one corner – obviously inside to stop them being stolen; these were filled with empty crushed beer cans. There was a fireplace on the right and a dusty old rug. On the short back wall across from the front door was Buk’s big wooden desk. Over the desk was a rack of pigeon-holes, a big wooden structure with ten compartments in each row containing various types of stationery, presumably thrown out of the post office (where he worked) at some point and salvaged by Buk. Next to the door, on its own office desk sat Buk’s legendary ‘typer’, a pre-war, battered, sit-up-and-beg, black cast-iron Remington; dusty but for the carriage and keys which were polished by use. It was surrounded by cigar butts and ash, crumpled paper and more crushed beer cans. Thousands of poems and letters had emerged from this powerful machine: his columns for Open City, as well as stories and poems sent out to every little mimeo magazine that asked for work, from San Francisco to Germany and Japan.