by Simon Warner
SW But the Ramones, really ignited something?
ST Yeah, the Ramones – this is fabulous, that was great. And then I subsequently moved to New York City shortly after that.
SW You were living in New Jersey at the time?
ST I was living in New Jersey, going to school in New Jersey and left school in 1978, moved to New York City. I knew Richard, this is a funny paradox of my experience, I knew Richard Hell because he was my upstairs neighbour. But I never went to see the band.
SW You never saw Television or, indeed, the Voidoids at CBGBs?
ST I never went down to CBGBs. The only time I ever went down to CBGBs in the 1970s was when there was a benefit for the St. Mark’s Church held there. And that’s when I saw Elvis Costello for the first time playing with Richard and I sat in with a bunch of musicians and played the banjo.
So there is a funny kind of thing: you live in the neighbourhood, this thing is exploding and you have no clue. You stay at home, writing music – and playing the banjo at CBGBs on a one-nighter! So I sort of missed it all until quite late in the game. I dug it though but didn’t go out much but also was very busy making my living as a freelancer so not a person who liked to go to clubs a lot. But then I accidentally happened upon the False Prophets in 1988, and that’s when I kinda got it, got clued in, and realised the power of it and what it had been and what it was.
SW So it was ten years or more later before …
ST Ten years on before I got it.
SW … and you’d been in the eye of the storm.
ST Yeah, I did hang out a bit with a band called the Stimulators in New York City who included Denise Mercedes, who was Peter Orlovsky’s girlfriend but also a really good guitar player, who was also a friend of Mick Ronson and Bob Dylan.
Bob gave her a guitar and Mick gave her a Marshall amp and she went and played with Rat Scabies [of the Damned] for a while in England. And when she came back from England she had become a different musician and had become very powerful, probably from regular gigs in England and started this terrific band called the Stimulators with her nephew Harley Flanagan on drums who was at the time about 12 years old. He was a fabulous drummer who later became a notorious skinhead and I played with him once. It was like standing in front of a bunch of machine guns, I mean he was unbelievable and he became the Cro-Mags.
SW OK. So just to backtrack a little, you said you first met Ginsberg in 1976 but then you had been playing with some poets.
ST That was the beginning of it.
SW Which poets were you playing with?
ST Well I started with Allen.
SW You started with Allen?
ST Yeah. So I had been playing with like folk rock bands and solo stuff and very much thinking of myself as a singer. My father is a singer and singing is very much a kind of family business. Both sides of the family, my grandfathers had reputations as singers so I thought of myself as a singer and so doing that with the folk rock thing.
SW Singing your own and writing your own songs?
ST Some. Mostly covers and doing bar gigs and stuff like that, but then I’d been in school, wasn’t happy with it, met Ginsberg and started playing with him and through him very soon met Ed Sanders, of the Fugs, who at the time had been thinking about getting back into music.
At the time, actually, I became friends with Ed, he saw me with Ginsberg and the thing was that Ed had always wanted to have good vocals. With the Fugs, he had never had good vocals, he thought, ‘I want good vocals’.
He was obsessed with this vocal thing and he saw me singing with Allen and was impressed and he said, with my ability to ride the bucking bronco of Ginsberg’s enunciation, in other words to sing in sync with him, he liked that and wanted to hire me as a singer initially.
So I would go up to Woodstock and start working with Ed. And so, from working with Allen, very soon I was working with Ed Sanders and Anne Waldman and then when I was on tour with Allen, I would work with occasionally, very occasionally, with Andrei Voznesensky and a Japanese poet, once or twice, Kazuko Shiraishi – whoever was on the circuit who would like some company, I would sit in, travelling also.
In the party that I was travelling a lot with, in the early days, was, almost always, Peter Orlovsky. I worked with him and often Gregory Corso.
SW So why did Allen Ginsberg ask you to play guitar with him?
ST He had been in the habit of going around picking up guitar players. Wherever he’d go, he would go to a college and he would have a college gig and he would say ‘Is there a kid here who can play the guitar?’ and then he would have an accompanist. So he asked the English professor who had organised the reading at my college to find him a guitar player and I was the only guitar player he knew.
SW So in a sense, good fortune?
ST Accident, right. But then when I sat in and started to play with Allen, I started to sing and that had never happened before, that I could actually harmonise with what he was doing on the spur of the moment. It blew his mind. He started to tremble and his voice took off and he got very excited.
There is a recording of that at Stanford. I haven’t heard it. May 1976. And so he was like totally inspired by the singing. So then he said ‘Next week I have a session with John Hammond at CBS in New York’, because Hammond had started his own label with the idea of getting the stuff out of the vault and doing his own thing. Hammond originally recorded that Ginsberg session which I ended up playing on …
SW Yeah. Are these the ones on the 4 CD, Ginsberg box set?
ST Probably are now. I knew it as record called First Blues which was the second time they had used that title for a Ginsberg record. The first one was a folk recording by Harry Smith. But John Hammond liked the First Blues title and they used that, took it to Columbia and Columbia said ‘Ginsberg, when are you going to start shaking your ass around?’
Columbia didn’t want the record. That may have been part of the impetus why John Hammond started his own label. I don’t know whether his own label was in the works already or not.
So I went with Allen. He said, ‘Come to the rehearsal and meet the musicians’. So I went to the rehearsal and met the musicians. It was Jon Sholle, who’s a wonderful guitarist, who was then recording on an alternative folk label, I can’t remember, it was very well known. And also David Mansfield, who had been on Rolling Thunder and who played with the Byrds guys and Roger McGuinn. He had made a record with Roger McGuinn. He was a wonderful musician.
So I went to the rehearsal. So Mansfield and Sholle said, ‘Why don’t you sit in with us, why don’t you play the session?’ So my first time in a recording studio was with John Hammond. It was quite extraordinary! And saying, you know, ‘Move the microphone’. I got my first instructions on how to use a microphone from John Hammond.
SW The twentieth century’s greatest A&R man!
ST He was a wonderful, gentlemanly, gentle man. He was a beautiful man, very kind and I knew him a while. In fact he once asked me to come to his office because he wanted to check me out. He said, ‘Bring whatever you’ve got on tape and we’ll check it out and we’ll listen’. And you know this is the guy who signed Dylan and Billie Holliday. This is the guy that told Benny Goodman, ‘You should get a band’. He said, ‘You should bring your tapes’. So I bring my tapes and I am sitting there with my tape and John Hammond is listening and he says, ‘Very nice, very nice’. That was it.
SW Nothing further really happened?
ST Not at the time. I still have those great regrets. I wish I had had my act together as a songwriter at 21 that I did when I was 41.
SW So how many sides, how many tracks did you lay down in those sessions for that second First Blues collection?
ST It must have been just, I would say not much, not very many more than one would need for the album, so it would have been maybe 12 tracks. But I really couldn’t swear to it.
SW Quite a few of them do appear on that compilation collection because your name is on it.
ST Playing
incompetent flute!
SW You play flute?
ST I play terrible flute but I liked it. It’s a calypso tune and it was so sort of funky and primitive that they dug my flute-playing and kept it in the mix.
SW OK. But in terms of accompanying Allen Ginsberg over the next 20 years, how many gigs did you play with Ginsberg?
ST Hundreds. Literally hundreds.
SW Around the world?
ST Around Europe. I got as far as Israel, to the Far East is as far as I got with him. Mostly in Europe. The big numbers in terms of gigs, far more in Europe, because economically it made sense for me to travel with him in Europe, because we played five shows a week, 12 weeks at a time. Steady money, transport, a place to stay, so we would make money. In America, it made more sense for him to travel alone. It would be a one-off. He would fly to San Francisco for a gig to do it by himself. There was no reason for me to come out of college or stop what I was doing. They would have to come up with the money. So in the States, he tended to play by himself more often.
SW Sure. And obviously you would have spent many, many hours, many, many weeks and months talking to Ginsberg about everything. I’m interested in knowing what Allen Ginsberg really made of rock music. As you say he dug the Beatles, he introduced you to the Clash, did he really make sense of this music?
ST Yeah. I interviewed him. It was beautiful. I didn’t use much of it but I’ve got it. He said it was the return of the body, he said it was the revenge of Africa on the hyper-intellectual West that had removed the head from the body and it was the revenge of Africa making the white people shake their ass. And it was great joy. And he saw it as a … he kind of had a punk view in a sense.
You know, you think of punk as sort of a rock ’n’ roll purist in the sense that you see it as an alternative voice, a democratic voice, an opportunity for the underprivileged to speak. And he saw it that way too and he was much more articulate about it than I could ever be. So you know the opportunity for the young people to seize a voice and declare, seize a voice amidst the ruins of the capitalist culture, and declare a position. That kind of line.
SW Sure. So he was powerfully attached to this …
ST Yes. Primitive. A notion of a kind of neo-primitivism which he was interested in, where he would talk about, say the punk kids walking around with feathers in their ears, going back to a kind of native American sense or their understanding of neo-primitivist, anarchist politics and doing it, do it yourself, DIY. And which he connected, as I said in my book, to underground cinema of the 1950s and 1960s and to poetry, too. The idea that you don’t need to take on the whole culture.
If you want to be a film-maker you don’t need to go to Hollywood and take on the entire universe and get yourself a $40m budget. You can get yourself a wind up 16mm and shoot pictures of your friends and show it in coffee shops downtown. And that was this big explosion and it came out of independent cinema and it came out of what he called the oral poetry renaissance which started in San Francisco, the sort of signal event of which was the Six Gallery reading in 1955, which was the premiere of ‘Howl’.
And then that sort of coffee shop poetry reading moved to New York and he said that when the…it was so unusual for there to be poetry reading in the bars and coffee shops as opposed to ladies’ uptown literary evenings or ritzy salons or university literary lectures. To have it in the coffee shops and bars of downtown was so unusual that the New York Daily News ran a front page photograph of Jose Garcia and Peter Orlovsky, the poets who read in the coffee shops. How strange.
SW When was that, the early 60s?
ST Early 1960s, yes. There was a great book by Sally Banes called Greenwich Village 1963, where she takes just the Village, just in the year 1963, and says ‘This is what’s happening’. You know, alternative dance, people doing theatre performances in their apartments, you know, cheap little storefront galleries, it’s all just exploding. And performance, always performance.
SW Completely different question, Steven, but connected. Obviously you encountered William Burroughs in the last ten or 20 years of his life, really. He was a man who was dubbed the Godfather of Punk and who wrote a column Crawdaddy of the early 1970s. Burroughs really didn’t have much time for rock music did he?
ST I don’t think so. He was a very private man, and a committed writer and content to read and write and associate with a small circle of friends and feel protected. I think William was a sort of wounded person, very kind in his way, very generous and sort of old fashioned, gentlemanly manners, coming as he did from St. Louis, old family upper crust. Very sweet man. Which doesn’t come across in the public persona.
And I think the punk thing came from I would guess the sort of Wild Boys thing that he was describing. He was describing futuristic landscapes as in Bladerunner, his movie treatment Bladerunner, you know the crumbling buildings, the destroyed infra-structure, lack of government’s ability to control anything, the underground economy, Dr. Benway operating in a washroom in a subway, you know, the kind of whole underground alternative thing in which there are these wild boy characters and I think that punk must have latched on to that.
SW There is this kind of dystopian idea in what is later called cyberpunk, the William Gibson stuff, which grew out of, I suppose, Burroughs’ science fiction stuff. Just to ask you about your involvement with the False Prophets in the late 80s early 90s. How much did the Beats inform you or them by then? Was Beat still an everyday thing for you? You worked with Ginsberg, you were involved with Naropa by then. But how much was Beat still a philosophy on the table of discussion among those later punks who you played with?
ST Not much. Some, I mean like more literary characters like Richard Hell, of course, had a background as a poet and had an understanding that he was coming from the French Surrealists and the Beats to some extent. Deborah, who played guitar in the False Prophets, had a Master’s degree from the Columbia University Journalism School and was making a living as a writer, or as an editor when she couldn’t get writing work. She was actually ghost-writing business books for Simon and Schuster while she was playing in a rock band, so very literary, smart and actually knowing where it was coming from.
The others were sort of home-made, Brooklyn, newspaper readers, TV-based people. Some interest. One of the bass players, Anthony, had an interest in science fiction, so some sense of it, but not college people, not college graduates. So the American punk scene was not so literate, more TV babies I found.
SW So by then you feel as if the literate-ness had faded, at least among the community with whom you were playing music?
ST Yeah. And I don’t know if it ever was. I mean I know that the literature tends to say that the American proto-punk types tended to think of themselves as artists, but I think that they thought of themselves as artists, not in a sense of intellectuals who had done their homework, but artists in the sort of romantic American sense of it, and a do it yourself sense of it. So that, you know, Patti Smith had some education and had educated herself and had read the Beats and had read Genet and had made a lot of those connections but they were not artists in the sense of the European intellectual who’s in the medium and has read the background. You know, that kind of thing. I don’t think it ever was like that and I think that is characteristic of American culture.
SW I’d like to spend the last few minutes of this conversation talking about the Fugs. When I contacted Ed Sanders a month or so ago, he didn’t seem, he was quite modest, he said ‘I don’t feel as if the Fugs are really any kind of connection between Beat and rock’. Ed wants to play that down.
Was he right to play that down? Obviously you have played with the Fugs in more recent times so it is a little hard to go back to the 1960s when the Fugs were first making their mark, but how do they fit into this interesting history do you think?
ST Well, he’s huge. He’s doing two things, I would say. One is, he is being modest and the other is, he is guarding his data stash. Man, that guy is not going to give you a whole
lot, he has got a garage full of the history of the Sixties that is going to be dynamite of he ever gets it out. Ed is the guy, talk about do-it-yourself. He thinks he is going to write all the books, so he is not going to give you a whole lot, so it is partly modesty but it is partly protecting his research base. I am sure that is what it is. But I think the Fugs were a very important connection. This was a guy … OK, I keep going back to the Civil Rights Movement you know, I mean this is a guy who grew up in Missouri and who learned how to sing hymns with the Disciples of Christ. He turns on the radio: he’s got rhythm and blues and he’s got jazz, then all of a sudden he’s got Elvis.
He moves to New York City at the very beginning of the 1960s and he falls in with this whole bohemian culture, graduates from NYU with a degree in Classics. He’d started out wanting to do physics and wound up with a degree in Classics, joins the Civil Rights marches, swims out to the middle of the Connecticut river to board a nuclear submarine, gets himself arrested and starts to publish, because he publishes this poem from jail.