Dear Gary and Masa,
After triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe – Genoa, Milan, Spoleto, Paris, Manchester, Cambridge, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam – we’re dragging our weary tongues o’er the sea to Newcastle to visit [Basil] Bunting and last reading there. Thence to London and New York arriving Boulder June 20 – and zap back to Rome June 29th for two days…We brought Steven Taylor to guitar and sing and all turned out funny and energetic like a folkie tour.
14th June 1979
The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder.
i
It is the weekend of the of the October 2015 Still Howling celebration - 60 years since Allen Ginsberg first performed his influential and controversial poem Howl, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, to an audience including Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg's guitarist Steven Taylor and Peter Hale (director of the Allen Ginsberg Trust), have flown over to Manchester from New York as guests of Simon Warner and myself, specially for the event.
We are standing outside the recently renovated, distinctively circular, Manchester Library.
I don’t remember this at all! says Steven, glancing around St Peter's Square.
I’m showing Peter and Steven around Manchester and in particular the venue he played in as Allen Ginsberg’s guitarist, on 5th June 1979. Or, at least, the site of that venue, as the Library Theatre, originally under the library, has now gone, in the modernising redesign of the building. Steven Taylor was born on 19th February 1955 and brought up in Gorton on the east side of Manchester. His family moved out to the States when he was ten. He met Allen Ginsberg in May 1976 at a university reading, when Ginsberg requested someone to play guitar as a backing for his poetic singing.
I ask Steven about the Manchester reading, which he does remember.
My uncle and his family came to the show from Morecambe. Given the family presence, Allen asked me to choose the poems and songs for the night. As you may imagine, this was a relief. I was in England with Allen perhaps five or six times. Mostly London. I recall Liverpool, Cambridge, Oxford, Newcastle. Whenever he was in England between 1979 and the late 1980s, I would have been with him. We stayed at my uncle's house in Morecambe once, very memorable, after visiting Wordsworth's cottage.
The visit to Wordsworth's Dove Cottage, with Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Peter Orlovsky, Arthur Callard and his friend Anne Lewis was just after the Manchester Library reading. Arthur Callard was a writer living in Hebden Bridge who reviewed the gig for The New Manchester Review and went on to write biographies of Evelyn Scott and Anna Kavan.
Earlier in the year I had written to Steven regarding organising the event, and he responded letting me know he wanted to re-visit his childhood and family roots. He responded,
I don't know what sort of events you will be having, but please include Peter and me on panels and so on. I could give a talk if that seems useful. I'm the only person alive who heard him read a thousand times. Also heard his confession. And I want to visit St. James, Gorton, the church and school, to weep there. Last False Prophets tour, when playing Manchester, I took the van out to look for the old neighbourhood but they'd put in a highway and I got lost. That was just too sad.
The False Prophets were the punk band, whom Steven was a member of, who toured Europe and actually played in Manchester, at The Swinging Sporran, on Sackville Street, in May 1989 - ten years after the Ginsberg, Library Theatre gig.
In a 1996 interview with Harvey Kubernik, Allen Ginsberg said of Taylor:
He can play funky blues and can improvise. He was born in England. . .and came to America when he was 10. I invited him to the Hammond sessions in 1976. We toured Europe together with Peter Orlovsky, and in 1982, we ended up in Dylan’s studio in California with David Mansfield. We played together at Woodstock around 1980. Ed Sanders saw us and said, “You’ve got a fantastic accompanist. Get yourself a band and go around the world.” He’s very supportive. Two years ago, he dropped out of The False Prophets to go to Brown University to get his PhD in Ethnomusicology, influenced by the great ethnomusicologist, Harry Smith who he is very close to.
I get the impression as we stand on the steps, between the stone pillars, that the library holds less emotional resonance for Steven than for me. For him it was one of a crazy stream of many events. For me this is a moving moment. I’m with the man who travelled thousands of miles, played hundreds of gigs with one of the most famous and influential poets of the last century. He knew him very well indeed. I’m curious about his enigmatic comment in his earlier email where he states he also heard his confession. Steven clarifies:
The first time I stayed at his place, we sat up late talking. He said we should promise to tell each other all our secrets. So we became confidants, one another's confessor if you like. Some of my fondest memories are of those conversations, walking around the village after midnight and then sitting up until dawn talking of our secrets.
I ask Steven about whether he visited Gorton when he was in town with Allen. No, we didn't. He looks away from the Library. There are a few people wandering across the public square, traversing a small space in a brief time that they probably won’t remember. Most people won’t know that Ginsberg once walked the very same pavement. It occurs to me, most people might not even know, or even care, who Ginsberg was at all. Steven voices his train of thought:
I wonder why we didn't go to Gorton to see the old neighbourhood. We must have been too busy. He generated a tremendous amount of activity. He was incapable of doing nothing. I recall on a trip to London, he kept asking me what I wanted to do on our day off, and when the day came, and I wanted to sleep late, he came roaring into my room earlyish - ‘GET UP! GET UP! You have all eternity to sleep!’
ii
It’s the day after The Still Howling celebration at the Wonder Inn. (See my previous post Roundhouse Reincarnation - section ii). I think Steven has enjoyed the event and his performances both with Michael Horovitz and his solo slot went down well. I’m still hearing the echoes of his four-part harmony setting of the final section of Ginsberg’s Footnote to Howl:
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
All sung like angels with desire. I’m also recalling an image of Steven playing Ginsberg’s harmonium, which he had brought with him and ask him about it.
Allen had several harmoniums, all bought in (I think) Varanasi in early 60s. The one I have is the only one I remember him using, although Bob Rosenthal told me it's in such good shape because, as the largest and heaviest of them, he often left it at home and travelled with a smaller model. Perhaps he did that in the U.S., when touring without his donkey. One of them sold at auction after he died. His wish was to sell everything and distribute the proceeds among the beneficiaries. Bob kept the best harmonium and Anne Waldman passed it to me on a kind of permanent loan basis.
Picking up on Steven's sadness about having not visited his family patch on previous visits to Manchester, I offered to drive him out to the East side of the city. We stand in the dip of Sunny Brow Park, Gorton. Steven is looking wistful, emotional and reflective.
My mother and father met in this park aged fifteen and fourteen. She was one of nine children and lived in one of those corner houses up there on Park Avenue.
We linger under the trees, in the shade. Trees maybe saplings when Steven’s parents started to know they would grow tall together. The tarmac pathway curves upwards to the open sky.
We locate the original stone pillars of the gates to the park. On one of the pillars is a semi-vandalized plaque commemorating the April 1905 opening of the park. Someone has spray-painted white over the elegant art deco blue lettering. The surrounding sandstone is untouched. I’m baffled by the intention and wonder if it is a half-hearted attempt to repaint the sign.
Carfax Street, a modest row of terraced housing. Steven is taking in the fact his old home is up or sale.
I could ring the estate agent I say, only half joking, get a look inside.
Steven is content to soak up the street and have a brief chat with the neighbours who are hanging out in the sunshine. We walk around the playing field nearby. Steven goofs in the net-less goal posts for a photo. A man engages us; rare to see tourists in Gorton, offers to take our photo. I hesitate, decide he’s trustworthy and we have a memento of us under the cycle-path signpost for St James’ School.
That’s the old Labour Club! Steven points out a brown paint peeling building, now a carpet warehouse on the edge of Ashkirk Street: Moon Carpets. That would be a great name for a band.
My mother worked in here to raise money for the move to the States.
He poses against the steel security doors sealing what was once the main arched entrance.
I made my first public performance in there when I was ten. I played “I Wanna Hold your Hand” by the Beatles and won a prize, a book about pop stars.
So, your family encouraged your music? I ask.
Yes, my father was a musician but my mother didn’t want him to travel so he worked at Peacocks as a crane driver.
But your father’s desire to play music found its way out through you in the end!
Yes! But the irony is that he eventually became a long-distance lorry driver and was away from home quite a bit anyway!
And of course you have travelled a lot with Ginsberg and the Fugs.
A lot of travel. I was in Italy on tour with the Fugs when Ginsberg died.
That must have been sad.
I didn’t feel so much grief as Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders because I had a consciousness expanding experience when I heard the news – like the top of my head coming off.
And you played with Patti Smith once?
Yeah. It was a benefit for Gelek Rimpoche. She asked me again once but by then I had a son and it was school time so I couldn’t do it. Likewise when Ginsberg had a gig at the Albert Hall in 1995. I couldn’t make it but Allen asked me to send the sheet music for The Ballad of the Skeletons for a mystery guest guitarist. Turned out it was Paul McCartney.
iii
A few weeks after Still Howling, I received a moving email from Steven. In it is a poem he has just written. It touches me with a perfect sadness.
In Brooklyn the trees are late letting go their leaves
this is lovely and alarming
the whirl of falling things
England came unexpectedly
Hello England
I always loved you best
Upon returning to Amiland
I showed my mother photos
of her childhood home
O, she said, you were in Manchester
Then she died
____________________________________________________________________________
Lovely piece. Very moving at the end.