Artist	Song
Allen Ginsberg	Walking At Night In Key West (0:45)
Allen Ginsberg	The Green Automobile (8:54)
Allen Ginsberg	America (9:04)
Allen Ginsberg	Sunflower Sutra (6:23)
Allen Ginsberg	Footnote To Howl (3:33)
Allen Ginsberg	Kral Majales (King of May) (5:03)
Allen Ginsberg	Laughing Song (1:26)
Allen Ginsberg	The Sick Rose (1:41)
Allen Ginsberg	Pull My Daisy (1:38)
Allen Ginsberg	Wales Visitation (6:49)
Allen Ginsberg	The Fly (0:46)
Allen Ginsberg	Vomit Express (6:37)
Allen Ginsberg	Capitol Air (6:08)
Allen Ginsberg	Written In My Dreams By W.C. Williams (2:16)
Allen Ginsberg	Wichita Vortex Sutra Part 3 (7:43)
Allen Ginsberg	Hum Bom (2:59)
Allen Ginsberg	Airplane Blues (4:25)
Allen Ginsberg	After Lalon (3:26)

Comment:

You don't have to pay attention to this little mix if you don't want to. It's a (mostly) chronologically-ordered, single-disc favorites reduction of Allen Ginsberg's career-summarizing four-cd box set, Holy Soul Jelly Roll (recording dates, as well as lots of other useful information about the set, available here); I didn't do much beyond the track selection. But boy... I have to say, this mix really brings back the *joy* of the mix for me. I've been puzzling them out for so long, trying to figure out the right size spaces between tracks, the right relative volumes; now finally I can do a mix where I just slap a few tracks together and it works! (My only track edit was a fadein at the start of "Wichita Vortex Sutra Part 3".) I feel like a little kid putting tape tracks together to make his first mix tape again... I mean... I'm... just so... pleased!!(Oh, by the way, a few words about the subject: I decided to start listening to Allen Ginsberg again after traversing the prickly plains of the singer-songwriters of a more literary bent, like Richard Thompson and Tom Waits. On four tracks on this mix, "Walking At Night In Key West" (1954), "Vomit Express" (1971), "Capitol Air" (1981) and "Airplane Blues" (1993), Ginsberg is a singer-songwriter, enlisting Bob Dylan himself for musical accompaniment on the second and fourth. Three others, "Laughing Song", "The Sick Rose" (EDIT: not "Pull My Daisy") and "The Fly", are Ginsberg performing William Blake's poems... set to Allen's own music! And finally, "The Green Automobile", "Wales Visitation", "Written In My Dreams By W.C. Williams" and "Wichita Vortex Sutra Part 3" are helped immeasurably, for my money, by Ginsberg the reciter's interaction with the music backing him up. Only seven tracks here are Ginsberg the poet as one might expect him, spoken words over a great bare frame. Quite a mensch, that Ginsberg, I'd say: even when he transferred his art over from the freeform explorations of poetry into this business of music, he let himself go wherever he wanted, whatever the trends were. Maybe he didn't have a singing voice a rock manager would take note of; but by 1971's "Vomit Express" he was already quite the punk -- in his mid-forties, mind -- and for "Capitol Air" he actually went on stage with the Clash! I've been listening to this mix, and to Ginsberg in general, to get my simple songs away from the rock-business racket. Believe me, it does you good. Hail President Ginsberg!)

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