The punk with a PhD
In the late 1980s, he set out on a new wave adventure, gigging across North America & Europe, before his doctorate became a first-hand account of a rocker on the barricades and a book to boot
REALLY QUITE recently, I was talking to an American journalist friend, a man immersed in writing and music, who told me that guitarist Steven Taylor was for him ‘like my Keith Richards’. In fact, he’d once said this to Taylor face-to-face and the musician found it mildly amusing but no doubt more than a little flattering.
It’s been a life, I guess, Taylor-made – even if there have been some happy accidents along the way. He’s enjoyed half a century pleasurably entangled in both the musical and literary worlds and spent a wonderful two decades adding a sonic backdrop to one of the era’s greatest poets.
So what do we have here: Ginsberg guitar man, long-time Fugs fixture, a member of the Boulder Beat teaching team at Naropa for some years, axeman with punk combo False Prophets and, as a by-product of that latter band engagement, a bona fide rock‘n’roll doctor no less!
I first encountered the fascinating twists and turns in the Steven Taylor CV when, in 2003, I was sent for review an intriguingly titled volume called False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground. And this was no mimeographed fanzine, no DIY ransom note cut-up, rather an accredited and bound edition from a respected academic imprint.
Pictured above: Taylor’s 2003 book. Headline image of the writer by Allen Ginsberg
Quickly I discovered that Taylor was an Englishman by birth, a Mancunian – a resident of the northern city of Manchester just like me – who had emigrated with his family to the States in the mid-1960s and then, a decade on, had a chance encounter with a visiting poet at his New Jersey teacher training college. When Allen Ginsberg heard the young man play he snaffled him as his accompanist for the next 20 years.
But, back to the punk underground. I’d had my ear-searing love affair with those angry and aggressive sounds of the mid-1970s and after and Taylor’s book struck me as the first authentic account of a musician who’d actually served on the new wave barricades, seriously engaging with and analysing astutely that white hot musical war zone from within: a kind of amplified entryism.
Pictured above: Ginsberg and Taylor in their early years as collaborators
Taylor had already become a member of Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg’s Fugs, that marauding flash mob blending rock and verse, anarchy and intelligence, in almost equal measure, as early as 1984 but, in the later 1980s, this electric gunslinger with rather more than a three-chord trick was recruited to False Prophets.
Although the New York five-piece had formed some time after the sonic grenades of CBGB and the Roxy, the snarling fury of this guerrilla style persisted and, as Taylor strapped on his Fender and set out on tours across the US and Western Europe, the visceral energies of an ever-edgy subculture submerged both performers and gig patrons.
Certainly, the story he told in his book was not a revelatory romp of groups and groupies or drugs and drink, not a kiss and tell crash course of the libidinous pleasures of the touring carousel, of material success carved from extravagant excess.
No, this was a serious, academic casebook on the realities of the day-to-day, month-to-month, grind at the concert coalface: the gnawing tensions between band members existing from hand-to-mouth and barely scratching a living and, not infrequently, feuds and fist-fights involving politically motivated fans – left and right – fuelled by the raw and volatile passions of punk.
In the early 1990s, Taylor said goodbye to that fraught and frenetic trail and, somewhat remarkably, transformed his rock adventures into a doctoral thesis at the prestigious Ivy League college Brown. That PhD study became his published book exactly 20 years ago and, elsewhere in the of Rock and the Beat Generation, we turn up my original review of that groundbreaking study.
Here, however, I interview the author today about those unforgettable escapades and the genesis of his well-earned educational upgrade…
What gave you the idea for the book project?
The idea came from two sources…
In 1968, when I was 13 years old, the film Paper Lion came out, starring Alan Alda as George Plimpton. The latter writer had, in 1963, arranged to join the training camp of the National Football League’s Detroit Lions, to try out for third-string quarterback. Team management had agreed, but Plimpton’s real purpose (as a journalist) was kept secret at first from the team.
Plimpton got several articles and a book out of the experiment. I remember being intrigued with the idea that one could infiltrate an organization to write about it. The title Paper Lion is echoed in the title of my book, False Prophet, since Lions was the name of the football team, and False Prophets was the name of the band.
I also liked the idea that as an ‘infiltrator’ of the band, I would be, in effect, a false False Prophet. This also hints at the so-called ‘crisis in ethnography’ that was much discussed in the 90s, when I was in graduate school for ethnomusicology. Unlike Plimpton, however, I did not keep my writing experiment a secret from my fellow players.
When I began working with Allen Ginsberg in 1976, he told me, ‘Write your own history; nobody’s going to do it for you.’ And I knew that Kerouac had made a career out of writing about his friends. This idea was reinforced when I got to know Ed Sanders, and later joined the Fugs, because Ed had published two books of stories, fictionalizing his adventures as a young man in New York’s East Village.
There was also the idea from Charles Olson that the poet is properly a historian: as keeper of the language, the poet is keeper of the culture. And the Fugs acted on that imperative, which Sanders described in his Investigative Poetry – the idea that just as lawyers who are trying an important case speak of ‘making law’, the poet can ‘make reality’. So all of these elements were in play.
Did you contemplate the on-the-ground material had potential even when you were gigging?
Yes. I had been keeping a diary for years, and, when I met Allen, that took on the sense of recording history. Meeting the Prophets was an eye-opener for me. The press at the time was portraying punks as violent delinquents (an old refrain – remember critics complaining about knife-fighting delinquents in reviews of On the Road? There aren’t any weapons or fights in Kerouac’s books).
I remember a photo in the paper of kids moshing. It looked like dangerous madness. I had grown up playing coffee houses, as a folkie, and in school, I was doing classical guitar. The first time I performed at CBGB, I played banjo on an off-night. But my first Prophets show, which was at CB’s, was a major light-bulb moment. This is big fun. This is what music is for.
At the time, folklorist Harry Smith was more or less interviewing me about my activities, and I took him to a Prophets’ show. He said, ‘That was the most ecstatic dance I have ever witnessed!’ So all of that together encouraged me to document the band and its milieu. I joked with the band that I was an anthropologist, secretly writing about them. They were cool with that. Debbie, the other guitarist, had studied journalism at Columbia.
How did you make the PhD happen?
The PhD studies came about more or less by accident. I had never contemplated graduate school, because I assumed that would mean dedicating my life to the classical guitar, to music history, or to theory. None of those things appealed as life sentences. Three years into my time with the Prophets, I was living with the poet Lee Ann Brown. She had graduated from Brown University, and after a couple of years in the city, was going back to do the MFA in poetry.
She suggested I apply for that program, but in spite of publishing poetry and being in that scene all the time, I always felt a bit of an impostor. Poethood is a kind of monasticism, and I was thought of as a musician, and one who had not made the final vows. (And – full disclosure – I can’t stand most poetry readings.) Lee Ann went to Brown, and I began visiting her on weekends.
Who took on the role of your supervisor? Were they quite surprised by the notion of an actual punk rocker pursuing a doctorate?!
The scene at Brown was very cool, I liked the town, I missed Lee Ann, and New England had always been my go-to refuge; then I happened to read the music department’s section in the university catalog. Ethnomusicology? I spoke to the program head, Jeff Todd Titon.
He asked me what I wanted to concentrate on. I said, ‘punk rock’. He said, ‘Right on time.’ That’s a big part of where the luck came in, meeting Jeff. He is a scholar of what they used to call American vernacular music, specializing in Blues, Old Time, and Gospel. His work on Old Time Regular Baptists still thrills. He suggested I take the entrance exam.
Meanwhile the Prophets thing was breaking down. I was broke. (Never be the only punk with a credit card.) And in spite of tours, the occasional record, and the thrill of the wattage, it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I remember returning a busted rental van after a miserable, freezing road trip, standing at a pay phone on the docks and checking my telephone messages. I called the music department back and they said, ‘We’ve decided to offer you our fellowship.’
It is over 30 years since you were on the False Prophets odyssey. It must feel as if that was a different world: so many changes since to the music industry, the death of the CD, the utter disruption of the live scene during the pandemic. How do you look back on that period now? Is there any nostalgia for it?
My times on stage with the Prophets were the most exhilarating experiences of my life. When it’s working, it’s just nuts. The guitar is so loud, it plays itself. It’s like surfing, you just hang on and scream. I tried to capture that in the book, but you can’t. And I’m partly deaf now, of course.
Would you say there was some connection between the Beat ethos and the notion of a band on the road? Does the rock tour become a living metaphor for those searches Kerouac and associates pursued – the quest for movement, escape, freedom, identity, an ever-changing horizon?
Wow. Big question. Let’s say this. As a teenage boy in America, you read Kerouac. The things that affected him are still in place – the Romance of America (the nostalgia for the never-was), the myths of identity, the freedom to move, to ‘Go!’, the bohemian dream of the penniless artist with a different kind of treasure. ‘The whole boatload of sensitive bullshit,’ to quote AG. I love it still. Beatnik to the end.
What opportunities did the PhD open up for you? Had you embarked on your studies before Allen Ginsberg died? Was he encouraging? We know that he had quite an ambivalent relationship with universities – 'who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the window of the skull'. What would he have made of all of this do you think?
He loved it. He’d been worried about me. Jeff Titon told me Ginsberg’s recommendation letter was amazing, shame they had to shred it. I wouldn’t quite describe Allen’s relationship with universities as ambivalent. That undergraduate who got expelled for a time from Columbia for writing obscene phrases on his dormitory window went on to earn most of his living from visiting universities, and ended up at Brooklyn College where, at long last, he finally gained a decent wage, health insurance, and a pension.
However, I must say that he never fully reconciled with the world of ‘academic poets’ who had attacked his ‘Howl’ in the Fifties. I was just looking at what John Hollander wrote about ‘Howl’, around ’57, and Allen’s thirty-odd page reply to that review. In that letter, he set up academic poet-critics as more or less clueless to deal with the new poetry. Now it’s astonishing how many dissertations there are on his work.
As for the PhD, I am of course glad to have done that course of study. Those teachers changed my life. On top of that, I got paid to write the book, and the degree got me gigs over the years. The first job, at Naropa right out of grad school, was also the last full-time professorship. I left there to return to New York and have been part-timing it ever since. But I don’t think I would have thrived in the kinds of places my fellow Brunonians wound up at.
See also: ‘Book review #15: False Prophet’, March 27th, 2023