Material Wealth by Allen Ginsberg (Heyday Again, 2024)
IF YOU WERE ever interested in the relationship between the Beat writers and popular music, the connection between the spoken word and audio accompaniment, there were several key recordings you had to have on your shelf to begin to understand this frequently exciting association.
As someone who has been obsessing somewhat about the links that tie Kerouac and Ginsberg, Burroughs and Ferlinghetti and the others, to the world of sound, musical and ambient, for close to half a century, the delicious box set that emerged in 1994, entitled Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Songs & Poems 1949-1993, was one of the vital collections to help make sense of a heady intersection, a dynamic experiment in artistic crossover.
On four discs and covering 40 years of Ginsberg’s activities on stage and in the studio, as performing poet or improvised vocalist, this weighty set aggregated by the compiler’s compiler Hal Willner, this jewel of a thing, filled in lots of gaps in the writer’s sonic trajectory: his sometimes playful, also serious, collaborations with folk giants, jazz masters, rock colossi and punk ranters.
Pictured above: The Material Wealth CD
Sadly, Holy Soul Jelly Roll has been unavailable for some time but fortunately one of the most active figures on the current scene, when it comes to re-releases, anthologies and compilations in the wider record business, is also gripped by Ginsberg and his fellow travellers.
In fact, Pat Thomas, the LA-based counterculture historian, regular penman of liner notes, negotiator of re-issues deals for outstanding and often unjustifiably forgotten pop purveyors, has, for considerable time, been delving into the world of Ginsberg with both huge enthusiasm and great care, helped by a most qualified lieutenant in Peter Hale, one of the key players in the management of the late poet’s literary estate.
In short, Thomas has produced a compelling Ginsberg ‘best of’, a significant shrink of the voluminous boxed collection to a single compact disc but one that now could be described as the portable version of the poet’s most interesting recorded output, much like those easy-to-carry greatest hits of texts by Kerouac or the Beats more generally, edited and overseen by figures like the venerable Ann Charters.
Pictured above: Pat Thomas at the Leeds launch of both CD and book
Further, the one-album model, entitled Material Wealth, is a fine supporting act to the book of the same name which Thomas, alongside Hale again, released late last year, a kind of soundtrack to the print edition, a meaty coffee table tome, which focuses on the multiple fragments of visual ephemera – photographs, tickets, posters, letters, notes and much more – which Ginsberg carefully collected and collated over his 70 years on the planet. A little bizarrely, both book and aural companion take their title from a Dylan quote in which he stated that this poet ‘didn’t care about material wealth or political power’.
But what is gathered on the Material Wealth CD? Long-time followers of this fairly rarefied world will know quite a bit on it – a 1964 take on a section of Kaddish, a spirited 1981 hook-up on ‘Birdbrain’ with quirky new wavers the Gluons, a famed 1996 link-up with McCartney on ‘The Ballad of the Skeletons’ and some historic early 1970s Manhattan sessions with Bob Dylan and David Amram which spawned classics like ‘Going to San Diego’.
But there is some very obscure stuff included, too: a 1983 reading of ‘Howl’ in Stockholm, only ever issued in Sweden, a 1971 single ‘Prayer for John Sinclair’, showcasing both Ginsberg and partner Peter Orlovsky (particularly poignant in the light of the MC5 manager’s recent demise), an alternate 1969 go at Blake’s ‘Grey Monk’, an unreleased stab at ‘Hum Bom’, stripped back and starkly powerful, with drummer Elvin Jones at the helm from 1984, plus a new live version of the wonderful Ken Kesey acid party poem from New York’s Knitting Factory in 1995.
So, if a certain familiarity breeds content, there is enough fresh fare here to draw us in and hold an audience, cuts and off-cuts from the hidden corners of the Ginsberg archive that remind us of the verve, the spirit, the range, of this ever-inventive ringmaster, always keen to blend his art, his work, with open-minded, even visionary, musicians and find novel ways in which to express his abundant creative energies.
The material on Material Wealth has been lovingly chosen and skilfully curated by Thomas and this shiny little gem – with its heavily-detailed booklet – reiterates that, in an age of streamed music where so much sound strikes our ears without any true context, the physical CD and the crucial metatext that still comes with such an object – the explanatory essay, the painstaking notes, the essential credits, the pertinent images – will be lost to discerning listeners at their peril. That authoritative background is a valuable ingredient in this admirably crafted document.
See also: ‘Book review #20: Material Wealth’, December 15th, 2023