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Michael McClure & Ray Manzarek: Open the Doors of Perception |
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Monday, 30 January 2006 21:28 |
Michael McClure & Ray Manzarek
Open the Doors of Perception
By John Sinclair
On April 22nd, the birthday of the great Charles Mingus, a leading exponent of the jazz & poetry movement of the 1950s, Ann Arbor's fabled Club Heidelberg will host two concerts of music and verse featuring one of the most exciting combinations to emerge in recent years: the poetry of Michael McClure and the piano of Ray Manzarek.
The collaboration between Ray Manzarek, keyboardist/composer for the legendary Doors, and Michael McClure, one of the leading American poets of our time, dates to 1987, although the artists have been acquainted for almost 25 years. "Michael used to be seen occasionally at the Doors office back when Morrison was prowling the planet," Manzarek says. "Michael was a good friend of Jim's."
McClure, whose distinctive verse first drew the attention of his peers in the early 50s, delivered his first public performance at the mythic 1955 San Francisco reading at Gallery 6, where Allen Ginsberg introduced his magnificent work "Howl" while Jack Kerouac whooped encouragement from the floor.
McClure quickly became known in U.S. poetry circles for his fierce "mammal patriotism," his odes to unfettered human sexuality (Dark Brown) and the liberation of the spirit through total resistance to any form of repression:
-- A barricade -- a wall -- a stronghold, Sinister and joyous, of indigo and saffron -- To hurl myself against! To crush or To be a part of the wall... Splattered brains or the imprint of a violent foot -- To crumble loose some brilliant masonry Or knock it down -- To send pieces flying Like stars! --Michael McClure from "The Breech" (1954)
Unlike most of his compatriots in the Beat Generation who lit up the 1950s and then receded from public attention following the ascendancy of The Beatles and the dawning of the Psychedelic Age, Michael McClure --like Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassidy--continued to engage himself in the heat of the moment throughout the 60s, participating in San Francisco's mythic Human Be-In, performing his intense, bardic verse in the parks and ballrooms of the Bay Area to the accompaniment of his autoharp or appearing in front of long-haired rock bands.
Michael's play, The Beard, which chronicled a steamy imaginary romance between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow, became a cause celebre when it was busted by the thought police 14 nights in a row during a run in Los Angeles.
McClure's work and the utter abandon with which it was pursued served to inspire a striking young Southern California poet named Jim Morrison, who formed a band with keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robbie Kreiger and drummer John Densmore to develop contemporary musical settings for his poems, later brought the Doors' moment in the sun to a shuddering conclusion.
Since then Manzarek has remained active as a musician and record producer, cutting several solo LPs, producing four albums for the L.A. band X, collaborating with Philip Glass on a recording of Carmina Burana, and working with Echo & The Bunnymen on an up-dated version of "Love Is Strange" for the film Lost Boys. He has also produced two video compilations of Doors performances: Dance On Fire and Live at the Hollywood Bowl.
McClure has also continued to produce a steady output of up-to-date work in several media. His Selected Poems (New Directions) keeps his poetry available, and a sweet collection of essays, Scratching The Beat Surface, offers his sharp perspective on the years of intense creativity and public impact which began to alter the shape of modern life in the early 50s.
He's written 11 plays, including The Beard, General Gorgeous and Josephine the Mouse Singer, and has been featured in films like The Last Waltz, Peter Fonda's Hired Hand, Norman Mailer's Beyond The Law, and Ron Mann's Poetry In Motion.
The two artists progressed along their respective paths until the mid- 80s, when McClure happened into McCabe's Guitar Store in Santa Monica and found Ray Manzarek backing up fellow poet Michael Ford on piano. "That just triggered something I'd almost forgotten about," said McClure, and the two began exchanging ideas toward a possible collaboration.
An invitation to take part in the Hudson Valley Community College Poetry Forum in Troy, NY in April 1987 finally brought them together on stage with a carefully worked-out program of poetry and piano, and they've been combining their forces ever since.
"Ray and I have the same background," McClure says. "We sing the same music. We happen to be very compatible. I've never been so comfortable on stage--this has such a real physicality, it's almost like a symbiosis. His music is not below my words, it's a synthesis. We play off each other, partially set, partially extempore.
"What makes this unique is that Ray and I really work together. There's room for improvisation, and we shift to follow each other's moods, so it has that aspect of jazz. I hear things in there that sound like Scriabin, Miles Davis and, of course, the Doors."
Manzarek continues: "I think this is the beginning of a new organic revival--not in the sense of getting away from electricity, but getting away from the kind of mass entertainment that's all programmed and controlled. Now we can sit down quietly for a second, and let someone just talk and create an atmosphere, and let things develop in a more relaxed way.....
This isn't some kind of hippie folk music that we're doing. It can be absolutely savage--you can get into some Dionysian revelry, and still be creating something organic. No sir, this may be a blend of the past and present, but our eyes are on the future."
* * * * *
Poetry and music in combination is a well-known concept in these parts. Southeastern Michigan, in point of fact, is now a world center of performance poetry, where such eminently musical bards as Ron Allen, Mick Vranich, Trino Sanchez, Melba Boyd, Sadiq Muhammad, Gloria House, Aaron Ibn-Pori Pitts, Nubia Kai (now in Washington, DC), Mark Grafe, Larry Gabriel, Kim Hunter, Faruq Z. Bey, Glen Armstrong, M.L. Liebler, Roberto Warren, Jim Gustafson, Mark Taras, Arwulf Arwulf, this writer and others frequently present their verse in collaboration with guitarists, drummers, pianists, trumpet players, bassists, percussionists, and saxophonists of every description.
Now, according to a recent report in Billboard magazine, performance poetry is starting to catch on all over the nation. Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Robert Creeley, Ishmael Reed, Jim Carroll, Tony Seymour and Bob Holman have made highly effective recordings of their verse with simpatico musical accompaniment of divers idioms, and San Francisco poet Don Paul has recently produced two LPs by his own poetry band, the Range Riders, plus a hot cassette called Rebel Poets--featuring recitations by Rochelle Owens, Ethridge Knight, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and a dozen others in fresh, complementary musical settings --which has been enjoying considerable college radio airplay across the U.S. and Canada.
While rhymed verse with a big musical beat--commonly known as rap--has broken the pop music industry wide open during the past 10 years, it's taken almost four decades for the more sophisticated, less catchy sound of unrhymed projective verse backed by jazz and folk forms to gain a fraction of the attention of the contemporary ear.
An outgrowth of the cross-cultural fellowship between bebop intellectuals and street-level modern poets following World War II, "jazz & poetry" performances began to be heard in New York and San Francisco in the early 1950s.
Langston Hughes and Jack Kerouac in the East recorded with Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims and other in the mid- 50s, while Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen and associated West Coast bards appeared on record with members of the cooler school of jazz out there.
Mention must also be made of the great masters of vocalese who worked entirely inside the modern jazz idiom: Eddie Jefferson, Babs Gonzales, Jon Hendricks, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Clarence "King Pleasure" Beeks, who composed in the 1940s and 50s elaborately rhymed verse matched to the compositions and solos of jazz saxophonists like Charlie Parker, James Moody, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young.
The 60s brought significant changes in the "jazz & poetry" movement as in every other cultural sphere. In New York City, LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) appeared with avant-garde jazzmen like the New York Art Quartet; Allen Ginsberg added accompaniment by harmonium, guitar, folk-rock bands and harmonica players to his verse performances; poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg formed a scandalous group called the Fugs, known then as the "underground Rolling Stones," which delivered sexually explicit, scatalogical, and anti-war poetry with a raggedy rock beat.
In Detroit, poets Jim Semark, Jerry Younkins and this writer experimented with avant-jazz and blues-band backing at the Artists Workshop, Wayne State University and the Grande Ballroom. In Chicago, poet/saxophonist Joseph Jarman (soon to be a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago) and poet David Moore performed their verse in musico-theatrical settings in and around the University of Chicago on the city's south side.
Then rock music took over the public imagination in the most complete possible way, leaving jazz and poetry to suck up its exhaust for the next 20 years. Baraka and Ginsberg continued to meld verse with music in a big way, and people like Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, Jayne Cortez and Jessica Hagedorn offered their own twists on the concept, but it wasn't until the 80s that the movement could begin to celebrate its own rebirth in a big way.
Now the poetry and music are flowing forth like never before, and local lovers of the form have a rare opportunity to enjoy two of its finest practitioners when Michael McClure and Ray Manzarek come steaming into Ann Arbor April 22nd.
That government is best which governs least.
Let me be free of ligaments and tendencies to change
myself into a shape that's less than spirit.
Let me be a wolf, a caterpillar, a salmon or an otter,
sailing in the silver water beneath a rosy sky.
Were I moth or condor, you'd see me fly.
--Michael McClure (1987)
--Detroit
1990
(C) 1990, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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