by Simon Warner
Very much a sort of disciple of Ginsberg in the sense, that young man. I don’t know how they met but I get the feeling he probably sought Allen out and connected with Ginsberg and was a kind of second generation Beat but also a disciple of Charles Olsen, with the idea that the poet is the historian and the preserver of a culture. Because a poet is the best equipped to deal with the language, he or she is the best equipped to preserve the best thought and to be the best social critic and be really the keeper of the flame of culture.
He saw himself in that kind of Promethean role, the bearer of the flame, particularly with his background in the Classics, particularly with his knowledge of the Greek historians and the Greek poets and the Greek moral philosophers. I see him in that light, let’s say, as in that lineage.
So then, when the Sixties thing starts to happen, the experimenting with music was one realm in a larger realm of experimentation – in dance and theatre and poetry and film-making. And all of those things that’re happening at the same time as the Civil Rights thing and free jazz and all of this ‘You can do it, you can do it’, you know. And I mean the story that Ed told was that he and Tuli [Kupferberg] were at the Dom on St. Mark’s Place which was the place to go because Stanley Tolkin was a local Polish bar owner and musician who, unlike his fellow expatriates, did not despise the young hipsters because he realised that he could sell them beer.
SW This is where Lou Reed and Warhol spent time?
ST All these guys went there, the young people who became the leading fashion designers of the period, the fashion designers, the theatre folk, the people who were studying the rag trade, the film-makers. They all hung out at Stanley Tolkin’s bar.
Stanley opens the Dom, and there’s a dance there. Ed said that there was a Robert Creeley poetry reading and they were all at the Dom after the reading, that had been at St. Mark’s, and they were down in the basement and the Beatles come on and everybody just started dancing and Ed said, ‘I looked at Tuli and said, you know, we could do this’ and there’s a sort of curious passage in this interview I did with Tuli that I think is in the book where he said, ‘Well I thought that the Beatles weren’t so good but that the music was great and we didn’t understand where they would later go with the lyrics and that there would be this kind of political edge to it and we didn’t realise that.’
But Ed, Social Democrat, Tuli an anarchist, as these committed people with backgrounds and political activism, and they saw everybody light up with this music and they looked at each other and they said we’re poets, we are going to have great lyrics, we can do this, let’s go. And that was the genesis of it. So it really was a sort of moment when the poets realise that they can make music again.
SW This would have been about 1965?
ST No, earlier than that. It was the winter of 1963 the Fugs got together; I believe the Fugs’ premiere gig was like January of 1964, something like that, at the Peace Eye Bookstore.
And of course, it was in the air. Ed said there was a five block area of a very dynamic kind of cultural and alternative arts and Peace Eye Bookstore became a kind of neighbourhood hangout. So you would have Warhol, Bill Burroughs, the fashion models of the day, the painters of the day, the film-makers of the day, coming in the bookstore to watch the Fugs bang on cardboard boxes. It was like the place to be. Norman Mailer, too. It went down like a who’s who at the Fugs’ first gig, it was like amazing. Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, you know, all of these really happening people.
SW When did you join the Fugs?
ST 1984. And that was as a result of Ginsberg. We crashed a rehearsal. The band, I believe, had broken up in 1967 and Ed had moved out of the city, fearing really for the safety of his family I think. He had started to see increasing crime which probably, almost undoubtedly, coincided with a large scale, US Government Vietnam heroin connection which sent a crime wave through New York City and they saw people getting hurt on the street. And they had a young daughter and thought let’s get out of here and so moved out.
So then, in 1970-something, I’d met Ed then and he’d seen me with Ginsberg but I hadn’t started working with him. Then one day I am walking around the Village and there was to be a benefit at the Mudd Club, maybe 1982, and I am walking around the West Village with Ginsberg and he says, ‘The Fugs are rehearsing, let’s go crash the rehearsal’, and I said ‘OK’. It wasn’t the Fugs, it was Mark Kramer who had a band called Shockabilly and who later became a very excellent and influential sort of underground record producer with a label called Shimmy-Disc. He’s a genius, a marvellous guy to work with and he had hooked up with Sanders.
He was Sanders’ main musical guy and they had a band called the Fred McMurrays and it was Coby Batty, Mark Kramer, somebody else and Ed. So they were rehearsing. Coby Batty was a guy who had a career as a singer as a child, he was a marvellous, marvellous singer, he was then playing drums with the band.
We walked in and they were singing a William Blake tune and Coby was harmonising it and I put on the third harmony, put on the tenor line. Once again the voice or the ability to harmonise and sync up and be in tune and it sounded like a magical moment. At that point the old manager of the Fugs had been Charlie Rothschild who had also been Judy Collins’ manager, also worked with the Byrds and also with Odetta, and was Ginsberg’s manager, and Charlie was there and Charlie said, ‘You guys have got to work together.’ So then we played the Mudd Club and a lot of people came out, Tuli Kupferberg was on the bill and Ed was on the bill, as separate acts, and a lot of people came out thinking that it was going to be the Fugs and we packed the house and we played our set and it was a big hit. That was when Ed decided to get the Fugs back together again.
So by the time it came around and we got it together and booked the gigs, it was 1984 and we played at the Bottom Line, a funny ensemble because the drummer was a French horn player, the bass player was a keyboardist, and I was a classical guitarist with not much experience of an electrical guitar, a little bit, doing this power trio bit, which was terrifying and wonderful but we had good vocals because Ed has a beautiful voice and now we had these two guys who could sing and so the Fugs have been doing that since 1984 now.
SW Well, Steven, thank you very much for those answers.
12 STEVEN TAYLOR: A BEAT ENGLISHMAN IN NEW YORK
When the Original Scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was officially unveiled to British audiences for the first time early in December 2008, a new choral work, especially commissioned for the occasion, lent an appropriate musical note to a celebration that had the world’s most valuable literary manuscript as its centrepiece.
In the concert hall of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, a gallery based on the campus of Birmingham University where the scroll would go on show for the next two months, this choral piece drew on a range of Kerouac texts – from both his prose and poetry – and featured a score by an English composer whose whole adult life has been closely entangled with that of the Beat Generation.
In front of an audience that included Carolyn Cassady and British Beat bard Michael Horovitz, the Birmingham University Singers performed a world premiere of a song cycle which drew on On the Road, Mexico City Blues and Some of the Dharma. The composer Steven Taylor was thrilled to have his piece presented at such a significant moment. ‘To have 25 people working with your music is wonderful. It did feel great’, he said.
Steven Taylor has lived in the USA since the mid-1960s when he left the shores of Britain as a ten-year-old boy. Within a little over a decade of taking up this new life with his immigrant family, he had met Allen Ginsberg and, from that initial connection, launched a professional association that would last until the poet’s death in 1997.
For just over 20 years, Taylor was guitar-playing accompanist to Ginsberg, touring the US and Europe and beyond, contributing to recording sessions, and establishing creative links across a wide front. Along the way the pair developed a close friendship that would also see this transatlantic émigré play a key role in the poet’
s educational venture, the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, over an extended period, too.
Now back in New York City after a lengthy residency in Boulder, Steven Taylor is currently penning a memoir of his time with Ginsberg and continues an active life as a musician, composer, writer and performer. In 2005, he devised a choral work to accompany fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the poet’s most famous work ‘Howl’. His setting of ‘Footnote to Howl’ was performed in the Big Apple’s Tompkins Square by the Juilliard Choral Union.
The work that Taylor produced for that New York event – both the rehearsals and the actual performance – will eventually be included in a new documentary film on Ginsberg and ‘Howl’, presently in production under the direction of Rob Epstein, the film-maker behind the critically acclaimed 1984 movie The Times of Harvey Milk, the story of the man who would become San Francisco’s first openly gay elected official and his ultimate murder.
It was, in part, because of this ‘Howl’ production that, when I was working on a 2007 commemoration of the half-centenary of Kerouac’s On the Road, I invited the composer to repeat the feat and bring his skills to bear on a collection of texts by Ginsberg’s great friend. Taylor proceeded to produce the piece but then disaster struck. I suffered a significant office fire just weeks before the event, sabotaging the celebration, and the plan was temporarily scuppered.
Thankfully, a year on, with the scroll arriving in Britain for the very first time, there was a further chance to premiere the choral work, now recognising the half-century since Kerouac’s classic account first appeared in the bookshops of the UK in 1958. With that, Taylor was able to say that he had now penned substantial musical tributes to two of the Beat Generation’s principal players.
Yet this is only part of what he does. When we spoke at the end of last year, he was able to report on a quite different project that had kept him musically active in recent months. Taylor has, since the early 1980s, been a member of the Fugs, that ground-breaking poetry and rock ’n’ roll band who formed a key bridge between the world of Beat and rock culture and have often paid homage to that earlier community of writers.
Taylor, alongside founding members Ed Sanders – who famously joined Kerouac in a TV debate on the hippies in 1968 – and Tuli Kupferberg, has been hard at work on the Fugs’ latest record, provisionally, and with typical tongue-in-cheek wit, entitled The Fugs’ Final CD, Part II. Recorded in a studio in the Catskills, close to Woodstock in upstate New York, the new album gathers fresh material by all of the group’s present line-up.
‘We’ve laid down 14 songs so far but with more to be done’, says Taylor. Has everyone been involved? ‘Tuli, whose now 85, was sick for a while. He’d contracted pneumonia, so Ed recorded his vocals at home a capella.’ Kupferberg’s vocals were then incorporated into the recording sessions proper.
There will be at least two songs in the set by Taylor. His ‘Hungry Blues’ is a powerful political account. Is it a standard blues structure? ‘Yes’, he says, ‘it’s a traditional blues, with the first couple of lines repeated and so on. I reckoned, here I am, this 53-year-old, white Englishman, I think I’ve probably just about paid my dues!’
The song has a poetic inspiration and a serious message. ‘I thought of Allen as I was writing this. I loved his rubato vocal style, his simple blues, funny and clever. He had a real devotion to the blues.’ So where does this particular song’s theme come from? ‘It’s actually a personal lament. In the 1990s, 100 million starved to death. You could have saved all those people for the amount of money the military, globally, spends every two days!’
His second song for the new Fugs set, for which a release date is still to be agreed, is ambitious but draws on the band’s previous form. ‘They’ve used Greek poetry before, classical texts, Blake adapted for rock ’n’ roll. So I’ve taken Homer, Alexander Pope’s translation of The Iliad, and condensed the first two books into a six-minute pop song.’
Taylor now intends to dedicate some time to an autobiographical account of the Ginsberg years. His initial forays have already seen some material from the proposed volume appear within the alternative culture webzine Reality Sandwich.
So how did this remarkable adventure begin? How did this individual who spent his early years in Manchester with a bus-driving dad end up as a sideman to one of the most significant literary figures of the century? What was the trigger to this enduring friendship?
He initially met Ginsberg in the spring of 1976 when, as a 21-year-old student, Taylor was nearing the end of a teacher-training course at a college in New Jersey. His plan was to qualify as a high school music teacher and, for his working class, British parents, this seemed like the ultimate achievement.
‘For my mother and father, this was a great step up. I don’t think there was another profession that would have occurred to them. As for me, I did not like the training at all and I really felt as if I had no one I could speak to about this either’, he recalls.
Ginsberg paid a visit to Glassboro State College, New Jersey, an institution that Patti Smith had also attended in the 1960s when she studied art. ‘Allen toured, gave classes, performed. That’s how he made a living’, Taylor explains, ‘and he came to the college to give a reading.’
‘There was a talk, then a question and answer session and then later he gave a performance. Allen had the habit of picking up guitarists to sit in with him. Half way through, in came the professor who was hosting the event and said to me, “Go get your guitar”. ’
‘Allen had his harmonium. I was able to watch his hands and get the changes. It was going quite well. Towards the end of the performance, I started singing. He’d never had that happen before. He got all inspired!’
‘After the reading he said, “Don’t leave.” I rode back to the hotel with him. Two boys from the English department were the official escort. We sat in the back of the car and smoked pot. I got quite dizzy, and he talked me down. Then Ginsberg gave me his phone number and said that if I was ever in town I should give him a call’, he recalls.
Not long after this, Ginsberg was going to record an album, eventually issued as First Blues, with the legendary Columbia A&R man John Hammond producing, and he asked Taylor if he wanted to join them in New York City. ‘He thought I may like to come along and he invited me to the rehearsal. The band set up and then said, “Why don’t you participate, too?” ’
‘Next day, I found myself in the recording studio with John Hammond!’ Taylor still remembers with some excitement. Hammond had a track record second to none – he’d discovered a galaxy of popular music talent, from Count Basie and Billie Holiday to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. ‘I was’, Taylor confesses, ‘blown away. Hammond was amazing and very nice. He said to me, “You have a wonderful voice. What’s your name?” ’
The singing had clearly made an impression on both Ginsberg and Hammond. I asked him how he had had the confidence to vocalise at the college session when he had first played with the poet. What had prompted that? ‘I come from that place where everybody sang. My English family elders, they were always singing. My father was a pub singer. He was approached in the early 1950s with a contract to record and tour. He was a crooner like Bing Crosby. He sang Irving Berlin and the Gershwins. But my mother said that if he signed the contract she wouldn’t marry him, so he gave it up. My mother’s father also had a reputation as a singer.’
But did he know who Ginsberg was when he encountered him on that day? ‘Yes, I did. My father had given me a book of poetry he’d got where he worked as a warehouseman at Dell Publishing in Jersey. It was a book called Poets’ Choice. I’ve still got it. There was a piece in it from ‘Howl’. Each poet contributed a poem and then there was an essay on each one.’
‘So, I’d read some “Howl”. I’d been reading a lot of Kerouac and had recently read Timothy Leary’s book High Priest. Also Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Richard Alpert’s Be Here Now. But I’d been playing constantly in bands and I had much more knowledge of pop mu
sic than Beat poetry,’ he explains.
Taylor continues: ‘I wanted Allen to notice me. I was actually desperate, I was upset. I did not want to be a high school teacher. I went to the Q&A session and I asked lots of questions. Then we played together. I knew Blake. We sort of hit it off.’
Unquestionably, the meeting had an extraordinary impact on the arc of Taylor’s life. A period of musical engagement commenced that would carry the guitarist into maturity, leaving far behind him those parental aspirations that he become a teacher.
‘We probably did more than 200 shows in Europe alone, figuring four or five tours of up to three months at a time, playing five shows a week. We actually played more shows in Europe than in the US, because the European shows came in concentrated bunches, while his engagements over here tended to come one or two at a time’, he points out.
Then there were the recording commitments with which he became involved. He features, for instance, on numerous of the tracks on the celebrated Ginsberg boxed set Holy Soul Jelly Roll including the cut ‘Airplane Blues’ taped in LA in 1981 with Taylor on guitar and Bob Dylan on bass. So how was that? ‘Dylan is a man of few words. It was all business. He knew what he wanted in the studio, much to the engineer’s dismay at times. He wanted to put Allen in the bathroom for the vocals, but the engineer said the plumbing was too noisy.’
‘There was little in the way of sound separation in the studio. We all played in the same room, and there were sheets of Plexiglas duct-taped to the ceiling beams, if I remember correctly, and hanging down in front of the amps, makeshift.’