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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Complete 20 tracks and liner notes booklet with poems.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America: A 50th Anniversary Musical Tribute via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 7 days
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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    The track listing for the vinyl is as follows:

    Side A
    1) Scanner - Elegy for Neal Cassady
    2) Shintaro Sakamoto - Manhattan Thirties Flash
    3) Thurston Moore & Lee Ranaldo - Hum Bom
    4) Ed Sanders (The Fugs) - Memory Gardens
    5) Mickey Hart - First Party at Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels (Drones Du Jour)
    6) Howie B with Gavin Friday - Death On All Fronts (America is Falling)
    7) Disco Pusher - A Prophecy

    Side B
    1) Angélique Kidjo - Uluru Song
    2) Bill Frisell - Over Laramie
    3) Andrew Bird - Easter Sunday
    4) Devendra Banhart - Milarepa Taste
    5) Yo La Tengo - Bayonne Entering N.Y.C.
    6) Lang Lee - Pain on All Fronts

    Includes unlimited streaming of Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America: A 50th Anniversary Musical Tribute via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ... more
    ships out within 7 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $19.98 USD or more 

     

about

I knew Allen well beginning in the early 1960s, and worked with him on various projects, including The Committee to Legalize Marijuana, and on the Exorcism of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s grave in Wisconsin in 1968. We were in Chicago together during the 1968 demonstrations at the Democratic Convention. Later Allen was in the audience when I was on the William Buckley show on PBS with Jack Kerouac and sociologist Lewis Yablonsky. I reviewed The Fall of America when it was published in 1972. I was particularly struck by his elegy for Kerouac, “Memory Gardens.” I recall Jack passing by my Peace Eye Bookstore on East 10th Street in 1965 and 1966, on his way to visit Allen, who lived just up the street.during those years. When invited to write a musical setting from The Fall of America, I chose the powerful final 16 lines of “Memory Gardens,” adding some explanatory text at the beginning to make it more vivid.

Ahh Allen, Ahh Jack!

-- Ed Sanders Woodstock, N.Y

lyrics

from Memory Gardens:

...
“I threw a kissed handful of damp earth
down on the stone lid
& sighed
looking in Creeley’s one eye,
Peter sweet holding a flower
Gregory toothless bending his
knuckle to Cinema machine— and that’s the end of the drabble tongued
Poet who sounded his Kock-rup
throughout the Northwest Passage.
Blue dusk over Saybrook, Holmes
sits down to dine Victorian—
& Time has a ten-page spread on
Homosexual Fairies!

Well, while I’m here I’ll
do the work—
and what’s the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow."

October 22–29, 1969

credits

from Allen Ginsberg​’​s The Fall of America: A 50th Anniversary Musical Tribute, released February 5, 2021
Ed Sanders - Voice & Strum Stick
Mastering - Scott Petito at Scott Petito Productions

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Allen Ginsberg New York, New York

Renowned poet, world traveler, spiritual seeker, founding member of a major literary movement, champion of human and civil rights, photographer and songwriter, political gadfly, teacher and co-founder of a poetics school. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) defied simple classification.

Ginsberg parlayed his fame and network of connections into a modestly successful career in music.
... more

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