by Simon Warner
She adds: ‘With a contemporary artist like Lady Gaga, for instance, it’s hard to pin that kind of influence on her because I don’t see her as being that original. Great artists steal, mediocre ones borrow – we all know that – but that “borrowing”, under the influence of post-modernism and all its discontents, has become fetishised. There’s a hopelessness now about being original’, Mesmer asserts. ‘There’s a hopelessness in general that has to be dealt with and transcended.’
David Meltzer has wandered most avenues where literature – poetry and prose, commentary and criticism – and popular music – from jazz to folk and rock – intersect. As a young arrival in San Francisco as the Poetry Renaissance unfolded in that city and the challenging rhythms of ‘Howl’ lent momentum to that community’s creative upturn, Meltzer wrote and read poetry, delivered his verse to a live jazz soundtrack in the late 1950s, and, as a song-writing guitarist in the 1960s, mixed with the West Coast folk revivalists like Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Janis Joplin and Quicksilver’s Dino Valente, before finally forming a psychedelic folk rock band called the Serpent Power, with his wife Tina, in 1967. Meltzer has always been an astute observer and critic of these scenes as well as participant. He produced a seminal set of interviews in San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (2001), edited Reading Jazz (1993) and Writing Jazz (1999) and issued a sweeping reflection on Beat history in his long poem Beat Thing (2004).
Meltzer has a particular take on the interface between women and Beat and rock music, as he explains: ‘Realistically, and in service of accurate history, women suffered the same delimiting in the 1950s as in the 1920s. Sex radicalism was always male-centred. And in dealing with the Beats, even more phallocentric. The mythos is invariably about sons and men fleeing the hearth, going on the road as guys bonded and bound to male fraternity, the female as mother/bride. I always felt idea of “the Women of the Beat Generation” was an attempt at revisionist history of the essentially all-male cast of characters. Typically, many of the women included were “wives of” A-list bards.’27
He continues: ‘Diane di Prima was and remains the lone female in the all-male pantheon. Bonnie Bremser’s memoir of life with Ray sets one narrative in place of poet as pimp. The two best histories of that period from a female perspective are Joyce Johnson’s aptly titled Minor Characters and Hettie Jones’ Becoming Hettie Jones. Di Prima’s memoirs – the one for Girodias28 and her recent first volume of her autobiography – nail it down. Lenore Kandel’s so-called “shocking” The Love Book is another statement challenging the male privilege so dominant in the Beat arena.’
He adds: ‘All the post-Beat songwriters you name may be the aftermath of that same mythos now skewed from a female perspective but still essentially doing the guy thing by honouring that movement. What was the Beat? Its virtues and complicities? How does, for instance, Nellie McKay fit into the neo Beat boogie? I always thought the Shangri-Las were emblematic of tough love and Mary Weiss, their lead singer, returned to the studios after decades and her album resonates with skewed romantic love glossolalia that Shadow Morton produced in their signature recordings.’
Meltzer has some other ideas to suggest in this debate about a continuing thread. ‘What about Annie Lennox? What about Ani DiFranco? Both address the inequities of the romantic fairytales of Beat guys who were subsumed in movies, pop records, at the time almost totally focused on romantic love, from the male purview. Pop culture and jazz culture were essentially male projections. What about my friend Janis Joplin who struggled and fought and submitted and died before realising how alive she was? Trying to negotiate the tightrope over Grand Canyon’s Identity theme park should be a fascinating adventure into either adding onto the myth or challenging it.’
Although the genealogical line from Beat women to the more intellectually adventurous and personally autonomous female rockers of more recent times is more crooked than straight, it seems that Waldman, Mesmer and Meltzer – three individuals from different time zones in the span of Beat expression – can see a relationship between the barely heralded efforts of the 1950s, when women tried to raise their heads above a parapet built and protected by men, to the later decades when female musicians were able to fight their corner, raise their profile and establish, in some cases, significant reputations in a rock ’n’ roll realm, still generally assumed to be the natural terrain of the male performer.
While feminism in its various forms – the second wave that began as women’s liberation at the end of the 1960s and the third wave of the later 1980s, sometimes regarded as post-feminist, which saw female writers and musicians attain a confidence that maybe even superseded the efforts of their activist predecessors and found expression in post-punk derivatives like riot grrrl – was plainly a bridge, a catalyst, for women to secure their status within the patriarchy, it would be a mistake not to credit those pre-liberation writers, those female Beats who were only belatedly given recognition for their output, who were in essence, we might argue, the underground of the underground. If the male Beats could regard themselves as subterranean, operating in the underbelly of the mainstream, the women novelists and poets who formed a fringe part of their circle, were buried deeper still in the subcultural sediment, constructing their own whispering revolution that would only find its full voice when re-discovered in the feminist glare of the later twentieth century and, as importantly, in a delayed artistic personification, through the creative brilliance of figures like Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith and other members of their bold sorority.
Notes
1Diane di Prima published her first poetry collection, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards (New York: Totem Press), in 1958.
2Ann Charters, ‘Foreword’, Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, edited by Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), pp. ix–x.
3Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 feminist history was entitled The Second Sex (London: Vintage, 1997).
4Parker’s volume, You’ll Be Okay: My Life with Jack Kerouac (San Francisco, CA: City Lights), appeared in 2007; Haverty’s memoir, Nobody’s Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of Beats (Berkley, CA: Creative Arts Book Company), was published in 2000; Helen Weaver’s The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties (San Francisco, CA: City Lights) was issued in 2009.
5Waldman was assistant director from the project’s commencement in 1966. Two years later she became director and held this position for the next ten years.
6Brenda Knight, ‘Sisters, saints and sybils: Women and the Beat’, Women of the Beat Generation, edited by Brenda Knight (Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 1996), p. 3.
7Anne Waldman, ‘Foreword’, Women of the Beat Generation, edited by Brenda Knight (Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 1996), pp. ix–xii (pp. x–xi).
8Steven Watson, 1995, p. 40.
9Laurence Coupe, Beat Sound, Beat Vision: The Beat Spirit and the Popular Song (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 174.
10The New York Abstract Expressionists of the mid-century inhabited many of the same Village social scenes as the Beats, while Larry Rivers emerged as one painter with particularly strong Beat associations. Rivers appeared in the Kerouac-penned film Pull My Daisy in 1959.
11Lucy O’Brien, She Bop II: The Definitive History of Women in Pop, Rock and Soul (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 182.
12Coupe, 2007, p. 174.
13The reclaimed version of the term has been re-conceptualised as ‘nigga’, a subverted form of resistance rather than a symbol of subordination, best exemplified in the name of late-1980s rap group NWA (Niggaz With Attitude).
14Carrie Havranek, Women Icons of Popular Music: The Rebels, Rockers and Renegades, Volume I (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009), p. 420.
15Mick Farren, ‘Rickie Lee Jones’, New Musical Express, 9 June 1979, Rock’s Backpages, http://0-www.rocksbackpages.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/article.html?ArticleID=1554 [accessed 25 November 2011].
16Jones quoted in Timothy White, ‘Rickie Lee
Jones: The Great Disconnected’s leading lady flirts with happiness’, Rolling Stone, 6 August 1981.
17Ibid.
18Founded as Righteous Records in 1989, it was re-named Righteous Babe Records in 1994.
19Ani DiFranco quoted in O’Brien, 2002, p. 402.
20Havranek, 2009, p. 86.
21Ibid.
22Jason Ankeny, ‘Ani DiFranco – Biography’, All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/ani-difranco-p38383/biography [accessed 28 February 2012].
23Anne Waldman, personal communication, email, 28 September 2011.
24David Hajdu, Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (London: Bloomsbury, 2001).
25Sharon Mesmer, personal communication, email, 31 October 2011.
26Lisa Robinson was a key member of the staff of magazine Hit Parader in the 1970s and also wrote about music for the New York Post. She has been contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1999. Lillian Roxon was the creator of rock’s first encyclopedia, which carried her name, published in 1969. She died, aged 41, in 1973.
27David Meltzer, personal communication, email, 16 February 2009.
28Maurice Girodias was a Paris-based publisher who founded the Olympia Press and also issued work by Henry Miller, Willam Burroughs and Vladimir Nabokov. Di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik was published by him in 1969.
4 RAISING THE CONSCIOUSNESS?: RE-VISITING ALLEN GINSBERG’S 1965 TRIP TO LIVERPOOL
In the very heart of the Swinging Sixties, a decade the influence of which has continued to vibrate luminously through the last years of one Millennium and into the first years of the next, a high-profile poet and campaigning activist of Jewish-Russian-American background came to Liverpool, a place where the ley lines seemed to hum most loudly and warmly in the late spring and early summer of 1965. At the end of that May, Allen Ginsberg, Beat-politico-Buddhist-performer-poet, extended his ongoing and impromptu world tour – Cuba, Russia, Eastern Europe and on to the UK – to take in a northern English city that had, only quite recently, unleashed on the world nothing short of a musical sensation. Yet the visitor had more to praise than just an all-conquering quartet who had left such an indelible impression across the Atlantic and beyond. But more of that later.
The Beatles, following their arrival in New York in February 1964, had sparked little less than a cultural revolution. Until then, British pop had been a virtual irrelevance to the US, the most powerful and lucrative marketplace of all. But the group’s spearheading of the British Invasion would, in the next few years, leave a lasting brand on the American rump. The Fab Four seized the keys to the rock ’n’ roll citadel and opened gates that would eventually admit home-grown artists from Herman’s Hermits to the Rolling Stones, the Dave Clark Five to the Who, the Animals to the Kinks, Led Zeppelin and Van Morrison, Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie and Elton John, the punks and the New Romantics.
So, the Beatles were one convincingly powerful reason for such outside interest in their home city at the mid-point of a momentous decade. But what would prompt Allen Ginsberg, the voluble guru of the Cold War silence and the garrulous precursor of the hippy generation, to not only spend a near week in Liverpool but also coin an iconoclastic phrase that would both delight – and maybe even haunt – the city for the next four decades. For Ginsberg concluded during that amiable and frenetic stay – in box-rooms and bars, in bookshops and basements – that Liverpool was ‘at the present moment the centre of the consciousness of the human universe’.1 Although Edward Lucie-Smith, whose 1967 volume The Liverpool Scene would become a broadside for the city’s new vibrancy, was later reported to be the recipient of that comment,2 it seems much more likely that he said it, during his stay, to fellow writer Adrian Henri, one of a community of poets who would provide another appealing lure for Ginsberg to spend some time by the banks of the Mersey.
In this chapter I aim to contemplate that 1965 visit from a number of positions, attempting to historically re-describe the Ginsberg stay from personal and reported accounts, drawing on interviews, histories and biographies. I want to try and establish what Ginsberg made of Liverpool and attempt a reading of what the Liverpool Poets and the wider community made of this exotic guest. And, perhaps crucially, I would like to try, through more recent responses by critics and commentators, to make sense of the poet’s widely remembered and oft-quoted remark, one that continues to resonate through the recent Merseyside mindset and offers ongoing succour and encouragement to the city’s artists, its enduring bohemian quarter, even its officially sanctioned arts sector.
But first: who was Allen Ginsberg and why did he count? From the late 1940s through the early 1950s, Ginsberg was a central figure in a dynamic sub-cultural grouping, self-dubbed the Beat Generation – beaten down but also beatific, aspiring to saintliness – which had forged literary, artistic and musical cells in Greenwich Village, in North Beach, San Francisco and Venice Beach, LA. Yet it would take Ginsberg’s live debut, in 1955, of his long poem ‘Howl’, and the subsequent acclaim then furore, raised by obscenity charges eventually dismissed, to propel the Beats into a national then international phenomenon, becoming ‘familiar to hundreds and thousands of readers around the globe in the months and years to follow’.3 Before that decade had ended, further members of this creative clan – novelists Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, poets Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and others – would see their writings appear in print as the Beat phalanx, for a period, surrounded the literary establishment.
By the early 1960s, the US, and by implication the wider world, was entering a period of tremorous drama. As the American Civil Rights movement battled for racial equality, the tensions between political blocs in the West and East intensified. First a 1962 diplomatic crisis saw Soviet attempts to site missiles on Cuba leaving President John F. Kennedy’s finger hovering over the nuclear button. Then Kennedy’s killing in Dallas in 1963 prefaced a new war in South East Asia that would set the capitalism of America against the Communist aspirations of North Vietnam, the following year.
Against this extraordinary backdrop, Ginsberg became a dynamic link between the Beats of the 1950s and the emerging hippies of the 1960s. By 1965, Ginsberg’s prescient messages of freedom and individualism – an anti-war manifesto underpinned by Eastern spirituality – chimed roundly with the Zeitgeist. He would meet and befriend Bob Dylan then John Lennon and Paul McCartney – he was ‘welcomed into their near regal circles’4 – and an informal alliance of folk singer, rock group and Beat poet would take shape. In time, Ginsberg would perform and record with them all.5
In the weeks before he came to Liverpool he had been briefly based in middle Europe, famously spending time in Czechoslovakia still, at this point, a satellite and puppet state of the Soviet regime. Here he was ritually crowned King of May by the students of Prague. But the authorities were less impressed, disturbed by Ginsberg’s infectious notions of self-determination not to say his unconventional sexual mores, and he was expelled from the country.6
Ginsberg headed for London, in time to catch the first of two performances by Dylan at the Albert Hall on 9 May, meeting the Beatles in the singer’s hotel suite after the first show.7 Shortly afterwards the poet left London for a re-charging English odyssey, determined to celebrate his thirty-ninth birthday in the company again, he hoped, of the Beatles, back in the capital, on 3 June. His train trip, at the start of the last week of May, carried him northwards to Lime Street railway station,8 where a figure representing another vital stream in Liverpool’s reviving cultural life – poetry – would greet him. Brian Patten was the youngest member of a trio of poets who would later be gathered in The Mersey Sound, that much celebrated volume, published in 1967, in the Penguin Modern Poets series.
On the day of Ginsberg’s arrival in the city ‘it was so cold that [Patten] lent him a multi-coloured jumper his grandmother had knitted him long before the coming of flowerpower’, Bowen reports.9 According to the same acco
unt, Patten had no room for the visitor to stay but he said in a 2006 interview that the visitor did reside in his flat for the first days of the trip. ‘He stayed with me at 32, Canning Street in Toxteth, Liverpool 8, in an attic room I shared with a student called Tim Dawson. Allen would sit in the box room with a skylight, sing his Buddhist chants and say his Buddhist mantras. He was a bit of a showman. Tim and I were great fans but we were more fans of “Howl” than all his chanting and bell-tinkling!’10
How had the Ginsberg visit to Liverpool come about? Patten explains the background: ‘The American poet Robert – Bob – Creeley, had been up to Liverpool to do some readings. He enjoyed Liverpool and mentioned to Allen that the city had a great buzz. Bob had been published in the poetry magazine I was running, Underdog. In fact, we had published both Ginsberg and Creeley. Bob came to the city some months before; it may have been late 1964. He did two appearances – one at Sampson & Barlow’s in a London Road cellar where I used to do readings and at the university. At the university, Creeley had maybe four or five people there; university people weren’t interested – they were into the Movement poets. But at the other reading at Sampson & Barlow’s, the place was buzzing and full of people.’11
Certainly Creeley’s crowded reception augured well for Ginsberg’s subsequent visit: there was an audience for US poets and poetry which remained, in Britain at least, at the avant garde fringe. But Ginsberg’s time in Liverpool appears to have been more of a social whirl than a performing occasion. He seems to have desired a taste of the sights and the sounds rather than a platform for himself and his poetry. He did, however, perform once during his six-day stay, at ‘Parry’s Bookshop […] next to the Philharmonic Hotel’ according to Bowen.12 But Patten recalls differently: ‘Allen did a small reading in a bookshop called Wilson’s at the bottom of Hardman Street, it was a kind of family-run bookshop. It was a very crowded reading in a very small space with about 50 people packed in. It was not really well publicised but Allen was quite happy to do a little reading.’13