The Zapple Diaries
Page 14
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mitten grabben.
Ist easy schnappen der springen werk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken.
Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
Allen’s time-keeping was unconventional and changed from line to line according to the meaning of the text. A traditional rhythm section was therefore out of the question, which is why there were no drums on most of the tracks. The time-keeping duties fell to the keyboards or bass who could drop in or out whenever needed but could also be used to strengthen Allen’s voice. Much of the charm of Allen’s renditions of Blake’s songs came from his untrained, somewhat uncertain singing, although I hoped we could correct some of the more out-of-tune notes with overdubs and double tracking. A number of other devices were used to strengthen his voice: a bass following the vocal line instead of keeping time, an organ swell to distract from a flat note, a trill or sweetener to balance a certain dryness. This was Allen’s first musical outing on record, and I still feel that the songs get closer to how Blake would have sung them in Soho pubs and friends’ houses than any of the ‘serious’ classical musical settings of them.
Next four images: Miles, Ginsberg and the team work on the recording of Ginsberg’s rendition of Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake.
Bob Dorough, Miles, Allen Ginsberg and Janet Zeitz.
Allen adds his vocal to the track.
Allen during recording is aided by Peter Orlovsky.
Janet Zeitz, Miles and Allen with arranger and keyboard player Bob Dorough discuss an arrangement.
Allen with the harmonium he bought in India.
Allen adding vocals at Apostolic Studios.
Allen displays the music he composed to accompany William Blake’s lyrics.
Herman Wright made a major contribution to the recordings. On ‘The Echoing Green’ he compensated for the weakness in Allen’s voice by playing the vocal line in a lower register when Allen sang high notes and emphasized the depth of voice and feeling at the end of the song. His plucked bass and Bob Dorough’s piano were used to keep the tune jolly before its slightly sinister ending.
Allen always sang ‘The Lamb’ as a duet with Peter Orlovsky, so to make Peter’s amphetamine vocals more acceptable we aimed for a medieval street-fair sound with Janet Zeitz on flute, Bob Dorough on organ and Cyril Caster on guitar. I sat Allen and Peter cross-legged on the studio floor to keep them in microphone range. Don Cherry joined the sessions and played various forms of percussion on five of the tracks. Everyone played on ‘The Laughing Song’: Cyril Caster on trumpet and French horn, Janet Zeitz on flute and amplified flute; Bob Dorough kept the beat steady with the harpsichord, with Don Cherry providing percussion. Everyone in the studio joined in the chorus including Michael Aldrich, the editor of Marijuana Review, and Matt Hoffman, the studio manager. The ending was put on a tape loop and then faded into infinity. Allen’s vocalizing on ‘The Garden of Love’ suggested a country-and-western treatment, since that was how he was already phrasing it on the demo tapes. The guitar, bass and drums were all overdubbed by John Sholle. This track inspired the poet and Fug vocalist Ed Sanders, who was at the session, to record several country-and-western albums at Apostolic including the memorable Beercans on the Moon.
The most exciting track to work on for me was ‘The Grey Monk’ because Allen managed to get Elvin Jones to play on it. Jones was in the John Coltrane Quartet and played on many of my favourite albums including My Favorite Things, Africa Brass and A Love Supreme, so it was an honour to meet him. His tiny Japanese wife Keiko came in first, carrying a huge drum kit, followed by Elvin in shades. She produced a hammer and nails and fixed the kit to the studio floor. The staff were somewhat aghast but said nothing. After one run-through we recorded the track in just two takes. Both times Elvin was perfect, ending the track with a terrific drum roll. He collected his $500 and left. (Years later he and Allen taught together in a progressive school in Florida.)
We wanted the album to reach the youth market, not just literary types, so I commissioned Michael McInnerney to design the sleeve. Mike was an old friend of mine and had recently done the sleeve for Tommy by the Who. Back in Britain I went up to Cambridge and spent a day in the Fitzwilliam Museum, selecting William Blake images to use on the cover. I narrowed it down to six of his coloured illustrations to his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and, after Allen’s approval, Mike began work. The album was issued as a gate-fold, with an extra page tipped in to enable Allen to write a lengthy text about Blake, the poems and his interpretation of them. This was the first album suggested for Zapple and the last to be recorded. Without the Beatles it would never have happened because they provided the initial impetus, but thanks to Peter Asher and Ron Kass it did finally get made.
One event that did not seem significant at the time, but which later became known as an important turning point in our culture, came on 28 June. We had just finished recording for the day. It was about 4 a.m., and Allen suggested that we walk along to the Stonewall Inn, on Christopher Street, to see what was happening. The previous night there had been a riot there. The anti-homosexual law in New York specified that men were not allowed to dance with each other, which naturally gave the police the chance to raid homosexual clubs and often meant that gay clubs and bars were making heavy payments to the police to stay open. In the hot, humid weather of late June in New York some routine police harassment at the Stonewall Inn had resulted in, instead of the usual passivity and intimidation, the gays swarming out of the club and smashing the police-car window.
Allen and I arrived to find the club still open but a line of police barricades surrounding it. There had been another riot earlier that night, with about a thousand people there, some with banners, blocking the street and many police cars, their red lights revolving. Allen approached the police line, with me in tow, and the first cop he reached asked for his autograph. The actual riot was over, but there was still sporadic shouting of insults and a tense atmosphere. This friendly act seemed to calm things down. Allen shook his hand, and after a lot of conversation with various members of the crowd joining in we went into the club. There were only about half a dozen people there; most were outside. I had a beer at the bar while Allen danced with one of the regulars. ‘Like a galleon in full sail’, as Allen later described himself to me. Scuffles and the occasional shouting match continued for several more nights, but essentially the victory was with the gay community and the law was repealed. The Stonewall riots marked the beginning of a movement for gay recognition that continues today.
Allen’s album received respectful reviews, including a good one from Rolling Stone. The Blake Newsletter liked it, saying that it sounded more authentic than the high-art classical settings of Blake’s songs. As this book was being written, a mention appeared online suggesting that the album has not been completely forgotten:
When we think of sixties-defining albums, we think of Blonde on Blonde, Are You Experienced?, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, that sort of thing, and rightly so, but a project like Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, Tuned by Allen Ginsberg speaks just as much to what became possible in that artistic Cambrian explosion of an era.1
The cover art from the album Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, tuned by Allen Ginsberg.
Album details include the following:
Arrangements by Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dorough, Cyril Caster,
Lee Crabtree and Jonathan Sholle
Produced by Miles Associates for Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky
Engineer: Dave Baker
Recorded at Apostolic Studios, New York City, June and July 1969
Artwork: Front cover background by Michael McInnerney, illustrations by William Blake. The Blake reproductions are by kind permissi
on of the
Trustees of the Fitzwilliam Museum. Cambridge, England.
Music © May King Poetry Music
A new edition of the album was released by Ginsberg Recordings on Record Store Day, 16 April 2016.
Ron Kass, Peter Asher and I stood in Ron’s palatial office, with its Picasso prints, and looked out over a livid orange-and-red Los Angeles sunset, touched glasses and laughed. It did seem a whole lot better than the bickering and backbiting at Savile Row.
‘And in the end . . .’ George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, 9 April 1969. The autographs above were signed on the flyleaf of a 1968 copy of Hunter Davis’s The Beatles. Apple Scruff Carol Bedford got all four Beatles to sign the book in person. George Harrison signed it at his home for her at Easter 1969. John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr signed it on the steps of the EMI Studios on Abbey Road while the group was recording the Abbey Road album in the summer of 1969. Courtesy of the Mark Naboshek Collection.
Chapter 18
Meanwhile Back in the USA
I DID MAKE ONE final trip that year. First to New York, back to the Hotel Chelsea, then to Los Angeles, to deliver the album sleeve artwork to Peter Asher at MGM. Valerie came to stay with me at Frank Zappa’s house.
I regretted the fact that Zapple didn’t work out. The Beatles regretted the fact that Apple didn’t work out. John Lennon told me:
John: Apple was a manifestation of Beatle naïvety, collective naïvety, and we said we’re going to do this and help everybody and all that. And we got conned just on the subtlest and the most grossest level. We didn’t really get approached by the best artists, or any of the recording thing, we got all the bums from everywhere – they’d been thrown out from everywhere else. And the other people who were really groovy wouldn’t approach us because they’re too proud.
Miles: Or maybe they don’t like hustling.
John: They don’t like hustling, of course. I couldn’t hustle.
Miles: But the only way to reach you people is to hustle.
John: Right, and that’s why it didn’t work. And then we have to quickly build up another wall round us to protect us from all the beggars and lepers in Britain and America that came up to us, and the vibes are getting insane. And I tried, when we were at Wigmore Street, to see everyone, like we said, ‘You don’t have to get down on your knees’ – I saw everyone day in day out and there wasn’t anybody with anything to offer to society or me or anything. There was just ‘I want, I want’ and why not? Terrible scenes going on in the office with different spades and hippies and all different people getting very wild with me. Even the peace campaign – we had a lot of that too, but once you’ve opened the door it’s hard, you know. That’s all it is. It’s just different.1
It was worse for them. They had a staff and buildings and companies to deal with, and it took years to wind down. As far as John, George and Ringo were concerned, it also cost them millions of pounds to extricate themselves from the lupine grip of Klein – Paul had wisely refused to sign a management contract with him. Klein finally got his dues: in 1979 he went to jail for two months for tax evasion after stealing the proceeds from the sale of promotional copies of the Concert for Bangladesh charity album and delaying the release of funds from the concert for years.
I personally felt a great responsibility towards all the people I had recorded and also, naturally, wanted to see my work released. I found ways to release most of their albums, the first being Listening to Richard Brautigan which came out on EMI-Harvest in 1970, which was the label that would have distributed Zapple in the USA had it survived. I met with Moe Ashe, and he agreed to release Charles Olson’s Maximus IV, V, VI on Folkways; it appeared two years later. Ferlinghetti’s tapes appeared on a number of different Fantasy albums, but unfortunately the original album, as envisaged, never came into being. The Bukowski tapes were not released until 1998, by which time albums had been replaced by CDs. At Terror Street and Agony Way came out as a double disc from King Mob. The Ken Weaver and Michael McClure tapes were never finished and were not properly edited. The dream was over.
How to end the story? This is the last press release issued by Derek Taylor, typed by Mavis Smith, after Klein closed down the Apple press office and gave the job to an agency:
10 April 1970 Spring is here and Leeds play Chelsea tomorrow, and Ringo and John and George and Paul are alive and well and full of hope.
The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops – that’ll be the time to worry. Not before.
Until then, the Beatles are alive and well, and the Beat goes on, the Beat goes on.
The Artists
Bibliography of works by the poets and writers recorded for Zapple up until February 1969:
Richard Brautigan
The Return of the Rivers, San Francisco, Inferno Press, 1957 (free distribution)
The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, San Francisco, White Rabbit Press, 1958
Lay the Marble Tea, San Francisco, Carp Press, 1959
The Octopus Frontier, San Francisco, Carp Press, 1960
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, San Francisco, Communication Company, 1967 (free distribution)
Please Plant This Book, San Francisco, self-published, 1968 (eight seed packets in folder, each with a poem printed on it) (free distribution)
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, San Francisco, Four Seasons Foundation, 1968 A
Confederate General from Big Sur, New York, Grove Press, 1964
Trout Fishing in America, San Francisco, Four Seasons Foundation, 1967
In Watermelon Sugar, San Francisco, Four Seasons Foundation, 1968
Charles Bukowski
Flower, Fist and Bestial Wall, Eureka, CA, Hearse Press, 1959
Longshot Pomes for Broke Players, New York, 7 Poets Press, 1962
Run with the Hunted, Chicago, Midwest Poetry Chapbooks, 1962
Poems and Drawings, Crescent City, FL, Epos, a Quarterly of Poetry, 1962 (entire issue)
It Catches My Heart in Its Hand, New Orleans, Loujon Press, 1963
Grip the Walls, Storrs, CT, Wormwood Review 16, 1964 (special eight-page section bound in)
Crucifix in a Deathhand, New Orleans, Loujon Press, 1965
Cold Dogs in the Courtyard, Chicago, Literary Times-Cyfoeth, 1965
Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts, Bensonville, IL, Open Skull Press, 1965
All the Assholes in the World and Mine, Bensonville, IL, Open Skull Press, 1966
True Story, Santa Rosa, CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1966
On Going Out to Get the Mail, Santa Rosa, CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1966
To Kiss the Worms Goodnight, Santa Rosa, CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1966
The Girls, Santa Rosa, CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1966
The Flower Lover, Santa Rosa, CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1966
Night’s Work, Stockton, CA, Wormwood Review Press, 1966
2 by Bukowski, Santa Rosa, CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1967
The Curtains Are Waving, Santa Rosa, CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1967
At Terror Street and Agony Way, Santa Rosa, CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1968
Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8-Story Window, Salt Lake City, UT, Litmus, Poetry X/Change, 1968
Notes of a Dirty Old Man, North Hollywood, CA, Essex House, 1969
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Pictures of the Gone World, San Francisco, City Lights, 1955
A Coney Island of the Mind, New York, New Directions, 1958
Tentative Description of a Dinner Given to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower, San Francisco, Golden Mountain Press, 1958 (broadside)
Her, New York, New Directions, 1960
Berlin, San Francisco, Golden Mountain Press, 1961 (broadside)
One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro, San Francisco, City Lights, 1961 (broadside)
Starting from San Francisco, New York, New Directions, 1961
U
nfair Arguments with Existence, New York, New Directions, 1963 (short plays)
Thoughts of a Concerto of Telemann, San Francisco, Four Seasons Foundation, 1963
Where is Vietnam? San Francisco, Golden Mountain Press, 1963 (broadside); City Lights Books, 1965
Routines, New York, New Directions, 1964 (plays)
To Fuck Is to Love Again (Kyrie Eleison Kerista); or, The Situation in the West, Followed by a Holy Proposal, New York, Fuck You Press, 1965
Christ Climbed Down, Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1965
Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes, San Francisco, City Lights, 1968
An Eye on the World: Selected Poems, London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1967
Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow, San Francisco, Beach Books, 1967
After the Cries of the Birds, San Francisco, Dave Haselwood Books, 1967
Fuclock, London, Fire Publications, 1968
Reverie Smoking Grass, Milano, East 128, 1968
The Secret Meaning of Things, New York, New Directions, 1969
Tyrannus Nix?, New York, New Directions, 1969
Allen Ginsberg
Howl for Carl Solomon, San Francisco, self-published, 1956