Lost Ginsberg recording resurrected

European gig re-emerges as new double album

A LONG FORGOTTEN recording of a 1980 European tour performance featuring Allen Ginsberg has been re-discovered by an Austrian researcher and has now been made available to the public for the first time as a vinyl double album.

In the early winter of that year, Ginsberg, his poet and partner Peter Orlovsky and musician Steven Taylor were in the midst of a continental tour, their third recent odyssey as a trio, which took them to Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Yugoslavia and Austria.

Taylor, the one survivor of the line-up, recalls the pack drill: ‘We did […] three months at a time sometimes. Just travelling by train all over Europe, just the three of us, Allen, Peter and myself. Peter handled the luggage and the heavy lifting, I was the secretary and the musician, and Allen was the rock star.’

The group arrived in the Austrian city of Graz on November 10th for a live show that was to be recorded for later transmission by radio station ORF, the Austrian Broadcasting Service.

The stage performance featured work – poems, music and songs – by all the participants, with Ginsberg on vocals and percussion, Orlovsky on vocals, banjo and percussion and Taylor on vocals and guitar. The taping of the show provided a fascinating and high-grade account of this now well-honed travelling triumvirate.

However, in the end, the recording of the set, presented at Forum Stadtpark, was never transmitted by the station and simply shelved. The suggestion was that the ‘obscene’ language used within the show had been deemed unsuitable for an audience in a highly conservative Austria of the time.

The lost recording was only unearthed after University of Vienna professor Thomas Antonic, conducting a long term project into the transnational relationship between the Beat movement and Austrian literature, went delving in the ORF archives and came across the audio document.

With Antonic, a stalwart of the European Beat Studies Network, as producer, the virtually unheard recording has now been revived for wider consumption and will be released this month under the title America, Give a Shit!, a reference to the Orlovsky poem of that name which appears in the Graz set list.

The repertoire on the 94-minute album also includes Ginsberg’s ‘Dope Fiend Blues’, ‘Punk Rock Your My Baby’, ‘Father Death Blues’, ‘Plutonium Ode’, ‘America’, ‘Pull My Daisy’ and parts of Kaddish plus Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, Orlovsky’s ‘Your Are My Dildo’ and ‘Feeding Them Raspberries to Grow’ alongside original early songs by Taylor.

Antonic, remarking on the captured material, comments: ‘The quality of the performance itself is exceptional. Ginsberg and his two companions captivate the audience.’ The academic catalyst of this project has also penned voluminous and valuable liner notes which include an interview with Taylor and descriptions of contemporary media reception of the Graz date.

Pictured above: Thomas Antonic, Beat scholar and record producer who also made the 2021 ruth weiss documentary One More Step West is the Sea

With a limited issue on 180gm violet vinyl, the album, available from May 15th, will emerge as a joint venture between Unrequited Records in California and Vienna’s Absurdia label. Kramer. sound engineer and bassist with the Fugs – also Steven Taylor’s group, too, since 1982 – has mastered the work.

Unrequited’s Tate Swindell and Antonic himself have been touring various venues in central Europe during April and May promoting the new release and commemorating Allen Ginsberg’s forthcoming centenary next month.

Editor’s note: For more information about the album visit the Unrequited Records website