The Boy Who Cried Freebird (4 page)

BILL BENTLEY (INDUSTRY STALWART, MUSIC PUBLICIST)

“That's what it sounds like when you're trying to go to sleep and you can't. I was very close with a guy who was quite partial to Methedrine for a period there—that was his favorite record. I don't think [Lou] did it as a joke.”

GLENN BRANCA (SERIOUS COMPOSER)

“I think
Metal Machine Music
is one of the great classics of late-twentieth-century music. Certainly, if Lou Reed had decided to pursue a career as a serious composer he would probably be one of the best composers in the world today.”

DAVID THOMAS (SINGER, PERE UBU, SOLO ARTIST)

“I remember Peter Laughner liked this record a lot but I was never sure if it was for the noise or the attitude. I listened to one side and didn't see the point. It would be interesting to return to it years later, I suppose. My opinions should always be considered in light of my basic dogma: Music without vocals is utterly pointless.”

STEVE WYNN (MUSICIAN, DREAM SYNDICATE, SOLO ARTIST)

“I like side 3 the most.”

SYLVIA REED (LOU'S EX-WIFE)

“I first heard it at a party Lester Bangs gave where he drunkenly swore at everyone that it was the greatest album ever created. He drove everyone out of his apartment by putting it on right then and there. I had just met Lou and was head over heels in love with him and so I went and got my own copy. I intended to listen to it straight through. In spite of my affection, I could only make it through the first three sides before giving up. I still respect it as a great piece of concept art.”

KRAMER (MUSICIAN, PRODUCER, BONGWATER)

“In high school I worked in the record department of a large department store. I had the opportunity to steal anything I wanted. I took everything I possibly could out the back door. I liked just about everything with the exception of
Metal Machine Music
by Lou Reed. I thought it was shit stacked higher than the band he used to be in, the Velvet Underground. Cut to ten years later: I now understand those awful sounding records I used to hate, from the Velvets all the way to
MMM
. Pure white noise, pure cacophony, pure chaos. I understood, I had respect, but I didn't really like it. Cut to the present: I now own all Velvets' recordings on both LP and CD. I still have not found a way to start my day with
Metal Machine Music
. I still listen unconditionally. I do not think of how the recordings were made, or how they were released, or who signed them, I only wonder why.”

PENN JILLETTE (ILLUSIONIST, MEDIA PERSONALITY)

“Teller says ‘—————'”

PAUL WILLIAMS (WRITER, EDITOR OF
CRAWDADDY!
)

“With
MMM
, Lou definitely made one of the most memorable and effective conceptual art statements in rock recording since the Beatles and before, um, Laurie Anderson….”

LEE RANALDO (GUITARIST, SONIC YOUTH)

“I love the thing and it is a crucial record, both conceptually and in the history of seventies rock (a major label put this out! Did Lou have that much clout??). We used a loop of it as the background bed of a song off
Bad Moon Rising
(‘Society is a Hole'). I've always wondered exactly how the sounds were created (not that it matters)….”

PAUL SCHUTZE (ESOTERIC BRITISH MUSICIAN)

“I bought
MMM
as a teenager the week it came out. At the time I was a devoted Krautrock and electric jazz fan and not remotely interested in American rock music. I had never heard a Velvet Underground album. The relentless single-mindedness and clarity of this most minimal piece excited me in the same way that
Outside the Dream Syndicate
by Tony Conrad and Faust had a few years before. Rock had become more and more about timbre and less about melody and rhythm.
MMM
is pure sound. Rock reduced to its essence.”

“
Hey baby, you wanna boogie?
” According to Richard A. Spears's
Forbidden American English
, “to boogie is to copulate or have sex.” Spears goes on to say that there are “many other general slang senses, such as those having to do with dancing, partying, departing, etc.”
The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll
maintains that “the term [boogie] derives from the jazz-based ‘boogie-woogie,' which generally referred to a style of piano playing that featured a ‘hot' rhythm based on eight-to-the-bar figures with the left hand.”

Pinetop Smith hailed from Alabama but settled in Chicago, and for a time he lived in the same rooming house as two other boogie pianists, Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis. The three men drove cabs for a living, but they were all serious musicians. Sadly, Pinetop was gunned down at a dance hall before he was able to record a follow-up to his trademark boogie tune.

Some historians say that boogie-woogie echoed the railroad rhythm of the steam locomotives that beckoned plantation workers in the Mississippi Delta, promising a life found better elsewhere. Along those (railroad) lines, “Pinetop's Boogie-Woogie” by Clarence “Pinetop” Smith was an influential piano boogie recorded in 1928.

Two-fisted boogie-woogie was all the rage in the 1930s. By then, the unrivaled triumvirate of boogie pianists was Meade “Lux” Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Kansas City's own Pete Johnson. The jumping boogie piano style even made it into high society when those three, calling themselves the Boogie Woogie Trio, performed at Carnegie Hall for the now-famous “Spirituals to Swing” concert in 1938.

Those same boogie rhythms were the building blocks of early rock and roll. In
Hellfire
, Nick Tosches's fine biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, Tosches recounts a scene where young Jerry Lee is playing a Pentecostal hymn at a chapel service and, “the preacher shot him a glance of reproach, for he was playing it boogie-woogie style…and he beat the boogie so hard there was nothing left of the hymn, nothing but the sounds of the Holy Ghost that inspired it.”

The phrase boogie-woogie possibly came from “booger-rooger,” which meant a wild party or a musical good time—and was first coined by Blind Lemon Jefferson, a Texas bluesman who came to prominence in the 1920s. By the 1940s, “boogie” was used to describe a chugging guitar style, as illustrated by tunes like Albert Smith's “Guitar Boogie.”

Of course, the most famous boogieman of all time is John Lee Hooker, whose primal “Boogie Chillun” was a hit for the Modern record label in 1948. In “Boogie Chillun” Hooker sang these now-immortal words,

 

One night I was layin' down,
I heard mama 'n papa talkin'
I heard papa tell mama, let that boy boogie-woogie,
it's in him, and it got to come out

 

John Lee's fanatical one-chord stomps are classics of the boogie genre and his haunting, stream-of-consciousness boogies inspired musicians
like the Lovin' Spoonful, Van Morrison, and ZZ Top, to name a few.

The most notable boogie band of all is Canned Heat. Canned Heat was named after a brand of cooking fuel that came in small metal containers—from which desperate members of Skid Row would filter out the alcohol to drink.

Formed in 1966, Canned Heat featured heavyset singer Bob “The Bear” Hite and nearsighted Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson on guitar, harmonica, and vocals. With songs like “Let's Work Together,” “Goin' Up the Country,” and “On the Road Again,” the Heat were much loved and they boogied the world over, including an appearance at the original Woodstock festival, where they played (what else?) the “Woodstock Boogie.”

Canned Heat even made a couple of albums with Sir John Lee Hooker, thereby confirming their claim to the estimable boogie throne. Sadly, “The Bear” and “Blind Owl” died before their time and it fell to the band's drummer, Adolfo “Fito” De La Parra, to keep the Heat boogieing on down the road.

Born of the blues and birthing rock and roll, boogie can be found in R&B, hard rock, country music, rockabilly, jazz, and Texas swing. The Delmore Brothers performed “Hillbilly Boogie,” Ella Fitzgerald sang “Cow Cow Boogie,” and everyone from Louis Jordan to Asleep at the Wheel recorded “Choo Choo Cha Boogie.”

In the 1970s, concerts by southern rock ensembles like Black Oak Arkansas and English groups like Foghat expanded the boogie concept to new, sometimes ridiculous heights. As the years went on, catchphrases like “Born to Boogie” and “Boogie Till You Puke” were transformed into song. Obviously, pop tunes like “Boogie Bands and One-Night Stands” and “Boogie Nights” had little in common with the original boogie style.

And no requests for “The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy,” please.

Revivalists like Alvin Lee, former guitarist and singer of Ten Years After—an archetypal British boogie band from the 1960s—have helped keep boogie alive. Just like Canned Heat, Ten Years After played at the original Woodstock festival, where Alvin boogied well beyond reason with his over-the-top performance of “I'm Going Home.”

In the twenty-first century, Alvin made a CD called
Alvin Lee in Tennessee
, which featured the bedrock talents of Elvis Presley's old Memphis sidemen, drummer DJ Fontana and guitarist Scotty Moore. For fans of those vintage railroad rhythms, Lee kicks things off with “Let's Boogie” and closes out with a jumping remake of “I'm Going Home.”

In short, Alvin Lee—much like Jerry Lee Lewis, John Lee Hooker, and all the other great boogiemen—unlocks the not-so-secret history of American roots music.

That is, he boogies like it's going out of style—which it never has and, apparently, never will.

Were prophecies evoked in 1965 when the Fugs sang the words, “
Village Voice
nothing,
New Yorker
nothing,
Sing Out
and
Folkways
nothing,
Harry Smith
and
Allen Ginsberg
, nothing, nothing, nothing?”

The Fugs were a lot of things back then—they were literary, politically active, antiwar poets who embraced comedic folk-rock and bridged the generation gap between the beatniks and the hippies. Involved in music, literature, journalism, theater, and films, they reigned shrewdly, crudely, and lewdly over the East Side of Greenwich Village—especially when it came to the free love and the drugs.

The song “Nothing” was included on
The Fugs First Album
, which was produced by Harry Smith. That was nearly a decade before Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg combined their own talents for an impromptu (or was it planned?) recording session at the Chelsea Hotel, which resulted in the Allen Ginsberg album
First Blues
:
Rags, Ballads & Harmonium Songs.

So then, might
First Blues
be a representation of the existential nothing? Or is it really something?

Allen first met Harry in 1959 at the Five Spot in Manhattan, where pianist Thelonious Monk was enjoying one of his residencies.
Previously, Ginsberg had only heard about Smith, but recognized his presence immediately—Harry was sitting at a table transcribing Monk's angular melodies into impressionistic drawings. Allen described his first vision of Smith as “slightly hunchback, short, magical-looking, in a funny way gnomish or dwarfish, same time dignified.”

A chance meeting? Not necessarily, considering the synchronistic Weltanschauung when it comes to all things Harry Smith. And just how much empyrean nonsense is it to contend that these two opposites did indeed attract?

Surely, the two men couldn't have come from more contrasting orientations. One, a hermetic, neocelibate white-bread record collector/visual artist from Oregon with roots in freemasonry and an attraction to occultisms. The other, a free-loving Buddhist Jew queer from New Jersey who became reigning ambassador of the beat generation and a poet of Whitmanesque proportions.

Ginsberg was an exhibitionistic showman who, to quote historian Harvey Kubernik, “was a tireless self-promoter that would show up for the opening of an envelope.”

Smith, on the other hand, was a cultural obeah man who lived on Skid Row in small rooms stacked with books and kept dead animals stuck in the freezer.

Their talents differed, but Harry and Allen both had an impact on the expanding of consciousness in the twentieth century. Ginsberg's epic poems, “Howl” and “Kaddish,” fueled the imaginations of many. Along with Messrs. Kerouac and Burroughs, he contributed to a generative unshackling of prose and poetry. His libertine lifestyle ran against the grain of the intellectual establishment and his countercultural stance encompassed drug and sexual experimentation, political dissidence, gay rights activism, and antiwar protests.

For his part, Harry Smith enriched the realms of film, visual art,
and cultural anthropology. Most notably, his annotated compendium of rural song traditions,
The Anthology of American Folk Music
(first released in 1952), has had a lasting influence on music appreciation in the (post) modern world.

The album these two men created together,
First Blues
, is a folk-form cryptogram of sorts, with connections, implications, and historical significance that defy simple assessment.
First Blues
was compiled by beat biographer Ann Charters and was released on Moe Asch's Folkways label. Compounding the mystique, confusion, and interconnectivity of these beat/archival coincidences is the fact that there are actually two
First Blues
albums credited to Allen Ginsberg. Both albums were recorded in the '70s, and both remained unreleased until the early '80s.

Columbia Records impresario John Hammond produced the other
First Blues
. But because Columbia considered Allen's works too brazen, Hammond was compelled to release the double album on his own (short-lived) JHR label.

Unlike the solo recording produced by Harry Smith at the Chelsea, Hammond's production features Allen singing with group accompaniment. Musicians like David Amram and Happy Traum performed on the Hammond sessions, as did Allen's lover Peter Orlovsky, and Allen's dear friend Bob Dylan.

Although some of the same songs appear on both
First Blues
albums, the two recording sessions were quite different—as different, we might say, as Harry Smith and John Hammond.

When I discussed the Smith-Ginsberg
First Blues
with Hal Wilner (who produced the Ginsberg CD anthology,
Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs, 1949–1993
), he wondered, “Was it a conscious decision to record in Harry's room at the Chelsea for environment as opposed to Allen's? [There is] kind of a tense atmosphere and Allen doesn't sound all that relaxed.”

Wilner's observation seems accurate—singing his “blues” while playing a small harmonium from Benares, India, Allen Ginsberg struggled through those Chelsea performances, mostly bereft of conventional musicality.

But if Ginsberg was really the sole performer, the lonesome entertainer, the solo-ballad-blues disciple, why does Harry Smith loom so large in the proceedings?

Practically speaking, Smith's documentation of Ginsberg at the Chelsea is no different from any other anthropological fieldwork, just like Smith's 1965 recording of peyote rituals by the Kiowa Indians in rural Oklahoma (see Conrad Rooks's film
Chappaqua
for additional clues).

And what of the eternal Bob Dylan? Allen loved Bob and was eager to impress him. “I don't think I would have been singing if it wasn't for younger Dylan,” Ginsberg told Harvey Kubernik. “He turned me on to actual singing. Dylan's words were so beautiful. The first time I heard them I wept.”

Not only did Dylan inspire Ginsberg with his words, but Bob also showed Allen the three chords he needed to write a folk or blues tune—insisting that it was Allen's time to sing out rather than recite his prose. So, while Smith may have been Ginsberg's twin tower of aesthetic strength at the Chelsea, Dylan figured into their
First Blues
as a more subliminal conspirator.

While Dylan repaid artistic debts to Ginsberg (and Kerouac) by encouraging the poet to sing, there's a less obvious connection between Bob Dylan and Harry Smith. That is, Dylan's first album (produced by John Hammond) contains songs drawn from
The Anthology of American Folk Music
. And surely as Dylan gained insight into America's folk/blues evolution by listening to the
Anthology
in the early '60s, Bob made his circuitous back-payment to Mr. Smith via
First Blues
.

Dylan wasn't present during the Chelsea recording session, but he played on the “other”
First Blues
, thereby further illuminating the extended relatedness between himself and gurus Ginsberg, Smith,
and
Hammond.

What does all of this say about Harry recording Allen at the Chelsea? Merely that Ginsberg's eccentric performances would have been forgotten were it not for Smith's predilection for recording folk art and documenting everyday life.

“It was just another example of field anthropology in a post-modern mode,” said Ed Sanders of the Fugs. “Allen always rose to the occasion of spontaneity, this was one short slice of twentieth-century existence. Two geniuses colliding at the Chelsea Hotel in 1973.”

Fug Tuli Kupferberg maintained a more speculative assessment of the Smith-Ginsberg Chelsea encounter: “When two geniuses get together, you've got to expect something great!…Is there music on it?”

A fair question, it was only after this particularly raw phase of his singing career that Ginsberg began working in more sophisticated musical environs, ones that departed from his raggedy voice plus harmonium expositions at the Chelsea.

Guitarist Steven Taylor worked with the Fugs, and he was also Ginsberg's accompanist for years, even playing on Hammond's
First Blues
sessions. Taylor reflected on Ginsberg's “blue” period of the early '70s. “Blues is a particular genre within a larger history of African American folk music,” said Taylor. “One of Allen's main inspirations was Leadbelly, who was on the radio when he was a kid. Leadbelly is generally considered to be a songster, not a bluesman. Blues could be part of his repertoire, but the songster is a larger tradition. Allen was more of a songster than a bluesman—a historian in song, a singer of ballad narratives, and a singer of topical material.”

“Blues are a funny thing,” said Fug Ed Sanders. “They are supposed
to make you sad but they make you triumph, too. Allen's diaries are strangely filled with the down mode. The poor guy was so publicly joyous and exalted, but in his private moments he was quite sad and dejected. He was drawn to the blues. He had been a fan of Ma Rainey and ‘CC Rider' was the final music, the last tune he listened to before he died.”

And what of the implicit connectivity that Harry Smith brought to the sessions at the Chelsea Hotel? Does it serve the same creative function that Smith unleashed when he first traced the paths of interrelated folk and blues idioms with the
Anthology of American Folk Music
?

John Feins studied under both Harry and Allen at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He thought that Smith's efforts to document life and sound were informed by a deep empathy for humankind. “What's great is that Harry wasn't an elitist, he recorded everybody,” said Feins. “Harry felt that every occasion of sound was a recordable event and it had not just artistic merit and meaning, but anthropological meaning. If a human being opened his mouth up for song, Harry treasured and honored it as an archivist and a scholar and an anthropologist. He captured it when he could.”

Just how does
First Blues
sound? Noted Ginsberg authority Bob Rosenthal is tough but fair. “I'll be frank with you. I couldn't listen to this record,” he said. “I just wrote it off as caterwauling. I was so skeptical when I heard someone was going to reissue this. I'll confess I'm much more interested in it now than I was at the time when it came out. Allen saw the possibility of helping to change people's consciousness. And so did Harry, although they were total opposites in methodology.”

Hal Wilner felt that
First Blues
was more than just an archival curiosity, and he included some of the Chelsea sessions on his Ginsberg anthology. “I'll admit when I first was slated to produce an album with
Allen I was holding my ears,” said Wilner. “Yet, it's amazing how this stuff holds up and just gets better. I felt I needed it for the historical aspect—here's Harry Smith producing Allen Ginsberg. But when I went back to those tapes, I couldn't believe how strong it was.”

Were Ginsberg and Smith blue when they made these recordings? Were they stoned? Whatever the mood, Harry allowed himself to be subsumed by Allen's
Rags, Ballads & Harmonium Songs
. As a witness to the (painful) birthing of Allen's career as a singer, Smith showed his colleague patience and understanding, supplying Ginsberg's ritualistic display at the Chelsea with the dignity it deserved.

“The role of the documentarian is often restrictive because of the attention to detail, the mechanics, or just removing your own ego,” said historian Kubernik. “To help govern the person you are recording, you go into a secondary position. Harry was willing to do it. He put himself below the title to benefit the attraction.”

According to Ginsberg, Harry Smith disagreed with some of the choices that Ann Charters made when compiling the album. Why Smith himself wasn't able to complete the task of editing the album is yet another cause for deliberation.

Harry's relationship with Folkways honcho Moe Asch was perpetually strained, but Asch respected Smith's archival efforts and used his understanding of art and ceremony to great effect. Like Smith, Ginsberg also had an appetite for collecting, and his own record collection reflected a deep love for music, especially the blues.

“When you collect, you put disparate things together in relation with other things and you get new results from that,” said John Feins. “Harry loved to determine patterns in things. I think he derived meaning and insight from patterns that he saw in things that he collected or examined. Easter eggs, Indian rugs, paper airplanes, he would be interested in all the different forms and make great leaps of genius
thanks to the juxtaposition and understanding of patterns and synchronicity and the overlapping of things.”

One thing is certain: We no longer ignore Smith's role as a cosmic documentarian. His preternatural musical tastes and hyper-informed critical judgments made him a cultural Nostradamus whose anticipatory discoveries and polymath predictions are unfolding still.

Harry's earnest contextual framework fueled Allen's gay vaudevillian prose attack, transforming poetic diatribes into semimelodic riddles, verbal instructions, joyous celebrations, and coherent protests, all captured in real time.

So,
First Blues
is the meeting of two friends, one poet reborn and one great rememberer, who both found the ways and the means of making the extramusical musical.

So much for nothing.