Authors: Glenn O'Brien
If Ginsberg was the link between Beat and hippie, Gregory Corso was the link between Beat and punk. He was the fourth wheel of the movement
—
Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac being the trinity Corso was younger and grew up rough out of Little Italy, an orphanage, and foster care. He was jailed at thirteen and spent most of his time inside until he was twenty-one, but he didn’t waste time served, educating himself and immersing himself in poetry After his release Corso met Ginsberg in a bar and was brought into the early inner circle. I met him at Burroughs’s seventieth birthday party, where he arrived handsome in a suede suit with new teeth. When the check went around at the end of the evening he withdrew $100 from the kitty.
Should I get married? Should I be good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It’s beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky—
When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where’s the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap—
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?
Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we’re losing a daughter
but we’re gaining a son—
And should I then ask Where’s the bathroom?
O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just wait to get at the drinks and food—
And the priest! he looking at me as if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She’s all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on—
Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bellboy knowing
Everybody knowing! I’d be almost inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climactic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I’d live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I’d sit there the Mad Honeymooner
devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy
a saint of divorce—
But I should get married I should be good
How nice it’d be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
God what a husband I’d make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! like sneaking into Mr Jones’ house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
When are you going to stop people killing whales!
And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust—
Yet if I should get married and it’s Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,
finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear nor Roman coin soup—
O what would that be like!
Surely I’d give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And built for its playpen a roofless Parthenon
No, I doubt I’d be that kind of father
not rural not snow no quiet window
but hot smelly tight New York City
seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman
And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
like those hag masses of the 18th century
all wanting to come in and watch TV
The landlord wants his rent
Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
Impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking—
No! I should not get married I should never get married!
But—imagine if I were married to a beautiful sophisticated woman
tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
holding a cigarette holder in one hand and a highball in the other
and we lived high up in a penthouse with a huge window
from which we could see all of New York and ever farther on clearer days
No, can’t imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream—
O but what about love? I forget love
not that I am incapable of love
it’s just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes—
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there’s maybe a girl now but she’s already married
And I don’t like men and—
but there’s got to be somebody!
Because what if I’m 60 years old and not married,
all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!
Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible—
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait—bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.
The Happy Birthday of Death
, 1960
Not just a poet but a
griot,
Bob Kaufman composed poems in his head and recited them from memory. What’s written here is the text of a poem made not to be read but spoken. He didn’t write his poems down; his wife did so that he could stay purely inside the sound, working in the rhythms of jazz, improvising like a musician, and creating poetry on the spot. Kaufman was a son of New Orleans, a scion of the melting pot: German Jewish Catholic African Hoodoo. A merchant sailor, he met Ginsberg and Kerouac at the New School. Kaufman said
he
coined the word “beatnik.” A Buddhist, he took a vow of silence to protest the Vietnam War and didn’t speak for ten years, breaking silence the day the war ended with the poem “All Those Ships That Never Sailed.”
Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind
Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/
Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings
People shouts/ boy alto dreams/ Tomorrow’s
Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times
Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization
Bronze fingers—brain extensions seeking trapped sounds
Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight
Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts
New York altar city/ black tears/ secret disciples
Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswinging gates
Culture gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes
Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions
Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground.
Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding
Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/ beauty speared into greedy ears
Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions
Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/
Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/
Death and indestructible existence
In that Jazz corner of life
Wrapped in a mist of sound
His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn
Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams
Inviting the nerveless to feel once more
That fierce dying of humans consumed
In raging fires of Love.
Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness
, 1959
Lester Young was a great reed man (tenor sax and clarinet) who emerged with the Count Basie Orchestra and became a huge influence on bop and cool jazz as well as a prototypical hipster A cool cat in a porkpie hat known as “Prez” as in President, a nickname he got from Billie Holiday (he returned the favor by calling her “Lady Day”), Young was a legendary neologist, a coiner of hipsterisms who spoke his own semi-private language. Drafted during World War II, he underwent a brutal year of barracks detention for smoking marijuana. His life was marked by alcohol problems and his playing often suffered. In the film
Round Midnight
Dexter Gordon plays a character based on Young and the similarly afflicted Bud Powell. Prez died in 1959 shortly after this interview was conducted, by French jazz critic François Postif.
Although he wasn’t free until five o’clock in the morning, I was determined to interview Lester. I knew he wasn’t very talkative, but he wanted the interview to be taped, and that encouraged me.
One afternoon at six o’clock I knocked at his door. Lester told me to come in: he had been waiting for me.
When he saw my tape recorder he shouted happily. He asked me: “Can I talk slang?” I agreed, and from then on he relaxed. I felt during the interview that he was pleased to be able to speak freely.
Y
OU
WEREN
’
T
really born in New Orleans?
Uh, uh. Should I really tell you? I could tell a lie. I was born in Woodville, Mississippi, because my mother went back to the family; so after I was straight, you know, everything was cool, she took me back to New Orleans and we lived in Algiers, which is across the river.
I left when I was ten. They had trucks going around town advertising
for all the dances, and this excited me, you know? So they gave me handbills and I was running all over the city until my tongue was hanging out. From there I went to Memphis and then to Minneapolis. I tried to go to school and all that . . . I wasn’t interested.
The only person I liked on those trucks in New Orleans was the drummer, you dig?
Drums now?
No eyes. I don’t want to see them. Everytime I’d be in a nice little place, and I’d meet a nice little chick, dig, her mother’d say, ‘Mary, come on, let’s go’. Damn, I’d be trying to pack these drums, because I wanted this little chick, dig? She’d called her once and twice, and I’m trying to get straight, so I just said, I’m through with drums. All those other boys got clarinet cases, trumpet cases, trombone cases and I’m wiggling around with all that s—t, and Lady Francis, I could really play those drums. I’d been playing them for a whole year.
How did you get started on tenor?
I was playing alto and they had this evil old cat with a nice, beautiful, background, you know, mother and father and a whole lot of bread and like that, you know, so everytime we’d get a job . . . this was in Salinas, Kansas, so everytime we’d go see him, we’d be waiting ninety years to get us to work while he fixed his face you know, so I told the bossman, his name was Art Bronson. So I said, ‘listen, why do we have to go through this? You go and buy me a tenor saxophone and I’ll play the m-f and we’d be straight then.’
So he worked with this music store, and we got straight, and we split. That was it for me. The first time I heard it. Because the alto was a little too high.
When did you learn to read music?
When I first came up in my father’s band I wasn’t reading music; I was faking it, but I was in the band. My father, he got me an alto out of the pawnshop, and I just picked the m-f up and started playing it. My father played all the instruments and he read, so I had to get close to my sister, you dig, to learn the parts.
One day my father finally said to me, Kansas, play your part, and he knew goddamn well I couldn’t read. So my sister played her part
and then he said, Lester play your part, and I couldn’t read a m-f note, not a damn note. He said get up and learn some scales. Now you know my heart was broke, you dig, and I went and cried my little teardrops, while they went on rehearsing. I went away and learned to read the music, and I came back in the band. All the time I was learning to read, I was playing the records and learning the music at the same time, so I could completely foul them up.
I don’t like to read music, just soul . . . there you are.
I got a man in New York writing music for me right now, so when I get back it’ll be for bass violin, two cellos, viola, French Horn and three rhythm. I’ll just take my time with it, if it don’t come out right, I’ll just say f—k it, no. This is the first time, and I always wanted to do that. Norman Granz would never let me make no records with no strings. Yardbird made millions of records with strings. When I was over here the last time I played with strings, the first winners, I think they were. Germans. Anyway I played with them, and they treated me nice and played nice for me.