Two Legends: Weird Al Yankovic “Interviews” James Brown (1986)

in Comedy, Music | August 5th, 2014

Last week, America’s reign­ing bard of sil­ly par­o­dy songs, “Weird Al” Yankovic scored his first num­ber one album, Manda­to­ry Fun. His vast­ly improved take on Robin Thicke’s catchy, if deeply creepy, ear­worm Blurred Lines alone might just be worth the price of the album. This week­end saw the release of the James Brown biopic Get On Up, star­ring Chad­wick Bose­man, Octavia Spencer and Dan Aykroyd. So we thought you all might be inter­est­ed in watch­ing Weird Al’s inter­view of the God­fa­ther of Soul in 1986. You can watch it above.

Ok, so that inter­view didn’t actu­al­ly hap­pen. It was cob­bled togeth­er to make it look like Weird Al was pep­per­ing the music leg­end with bizarre and inane ques­tions. Exam­ple: “What was it like the very first time you sat in a buck­et full of warm oat­meal?” or “What can you do with a duck that you can’t do with an ele­phant?”

Back in the ‘80s and ear­ly ‘90s when MTV played videos and not end­less real­i­ty TV shows about the drunk and the vapid, Weird Al reg­u­lar­ly host­ed Al-TV, a par­o­dy of the music chan­nel. Boast­ing the tagline “putting the ‘vid’ in video and the ‘odd’ in audio,” Al-TV fea­tured skits, fake news reports and, of course, Weird Al’s trade­mark music video spoofs. It also fea­tured dada-esque “inter­views,” like the one with Brown. Below we have some more to check out, like this one where Weird Al ridicules that most dull and pompous of pop stars, Sting.

Weird Al’s inter­view with pop genius Prince is real­ly odd, and not just because of Weird Al’s dopey ques­tions — “What do you do when some­one on the street gives you a piece of cheese?” Per­haps it’s that know­ing smirk on Prince’s face.  Or maybe it’s because the inter­view hap­pens while sur­round­ed by his well-coiffed entourage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD4rYdK3y9A

And final­ly, Weird Al doesn’t have to do much with Avril Lav­i­gne. One sus­pects that the orig­i­nal inter­view would be pret­ty fun­ny even with­out the jokes. At one point, Yankovic asks, “Can you ram­ble inco­her­ent­ly for a while about some­thing that nobody cares about?”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

“Weird Al” Yankovic Releas­es “Word Crimes,” a Gram­mar Nerd Par­o­dy of “Blurred Lines”

Every Appear­ance James Brown Ever Made On Soul Train. So Nice, So Nice!

James Brown Blows Away the Rolling Stones in 18 Elec­tric Min­utes (1964)

James Brown Gives You Danc­ing Lessons: From The Funky Chick­en to The Booga­loo

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new pic­ture of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly. 

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A 17-Year-Old David Bowie Defends “Long-Haired Men” in His First TV Interview (1964)

in Music, Television | August 5th, 2014

Have you heard of the Soci­ety for the Pre­ven­tion of Cru­el­ty to Long-Haired Men? If not, you can’t say you know all of David Bowie’s groups. Fifty years ago, in his very first tele­vi­sion inter­view, Bowie appeared in the capac­i­ty of its spokesman, as well as that of “Pres­i­dent of the Inter­na­tion­al League for the Preser­va­tion of Ani­mal Fil­a­ment.” “I think we’re all fair­ly tol­er­ant,” says the 17-year-old then known as David (or even Dav­ey) Jones, “but for the last two years we’ve had com­ments like ‘Dar­ling!’ and ‘Can I car­ry your hand­bag?’ thrown at us, and I think it just has to stop now.” Cliff Michel­more, host of the BBC pro­gram Tonight where this all went down in Novem­ber 1964, asks if such behav­ior sur­pris­es him, because, “after all, you’ve got real­ly rather long hair, haven’t you?” “We have, yes,” replies the pro­to-Bowie Bowie. “I think we all like long hair, and we don’t see why oth­er peo­ple should per­se­cute us because of this.”

The “we” to which he refers com­pris­es all the equal­ly mop-topped young dudes flank­ing him. Togeth­er, they would lat­er appear on anoth­er BBC pro­gram, Gad­zooks! It’s All Hap­pen­ing, as the group — this time musi­cal — the Man­ish Boys, per­form­ing their big num­ber, a cov­er of Bob­by Bland­’s “I Pity the Fool.” But accord­ing to the David Bowie FAQ, pro­duc­er Bar­ry Lang­ford had, for that appear­ance, pre­vi­ous­ly “insist­ed that David cut his 17” long hair,” result­ing in the brief for­ma­tion of the Soci­ety for the Pre­ven­tion of Cru­el­ty to Long-Haired Men and, con­se­quent­ly, “numer­ous news­pa­per reports… of course it was all a scam for some free pub­lic­i­ty.” What­ev­er his style — and he’s had a few — Bowie has clear­ly always known how to work the ever-reengi­neered pub­lic­i­ty machine. Some­times he’s done it by going with the flow, but only par­tial­ly, as we see here, where he and the Man­ish Boys sport rough­ly nine-inch hair rather than cuts to the harsh ear­ly-1960s stan­dard. Bowie, nev­er one of rock­’s ded­i­cat­ed long­hairs, can’t have found this too ter­ri­bly oppres­sive in real­i­ty, although when he returned to the BBC 35 years lat­er for a chat with the more stri­dent Jere­my Pax­man, he did so with a look that might have done the old Soci­ety proud.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie and Cher Sing Duet of “Young Amer­i­cans” and Oth­er Songs on 1975 Vari­ety Show

David Bowie Sings ‘I Got You Babe’ with Mar­i­anne Faith­full in His Last Per­for­mance As Zig­gy Star­dust

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Expe­ri­ence of Invent­ing the Char­ac­ter Zig­gy Star­dust (1977)

David Bowie Talks and Sings on The Dick Cavett Show (1974)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Farmer Serenades Cows by Playing Lorde’s “Royals” on the Trombone

in Music | August 5th, 2014

Farm­ers like Derek Klin­gen­berg know that you can enchant cows with music. Above, watch him start play­ing Lorde’s “Roy­als” on the trom­bone and the cows come a run­nin’.

If you’ve been an OC read­er long enough, you won’t be sur­prised by this scene. Ear­li­er this year, we fea­tured A Playlist of Music Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-Proven to Increase Cows’ Milk Pro­duc­tion — a playlist that includes tunes by REM, Aretha Franklin, Simon & Gar­funkel, and Lou Reed. And, before that, we’ve shown you cows groov­ing to some New Orleans-style jazz. Music isn’t just “the uni­ver­sal lan­guage of mankind,” as Hen­ry Wadsworth Longfel­low once said. It belongs clear­ly to our bovine friends too…

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sir Patrick Stew­art Demon­strates How Cows Moo in Dif­fer­ent Eng­lish Accents

Jazz for Cows

A Playlist of Music Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-Proven to Increase Cows’ Milk Pro­duc­tion: REM, Lou Reed & More

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James Brown Blows Away the Rolling Stones in 18 Electric Minutes (1964)

in Music | August 1st, 2014

On a recent road trip through the Deep South, I made a pil­grim­age to sev­er­al sacred shrines of Amer­i­can music, includ­ing oblig­a­tory stops in Mem­phis at the gar­ish Grace­land and unas­sum­ing Sun Stu­dios. But the high­light of the tour had to be that city’s Stax Muse­um of Amer­i­can Soul Music (“noth­ing against the Lou­vre, but you can’t dance to Da Vin­ci”). Housed in a re-cre­ation of the orig­i­nal Stax Records, the muse­um main­ly con­sists of aisles of glass cas­es, in which sit instru­ments, cos­tumes, and oth­er mem­o­ra­bil­ia from artists like Book­er T. and the MGs, Sam & Dave, The Sta­ples Singers, and Isaac Hayes. One par­tic­u­lar rel­ic caught my atten­tion for its radi­at­ing aura of authenticity—a bat­tered first press­ing of James Brown’s 1956 “Please, Please, Please,” the song that built the house of Brown and his back­ing singer/dancers the Famous Flames—a song, wrote Philip Goure­vitch, that “doesn’t tell a sto­ry so much as express a con­di­tion.”

“Please, Please, Please” was not a Stax release, but the muse­um right­ly claims it as a sem­i­nal “pre­cur­sor to soul.” Brown bequeathed to six­ties soul much more than his over-the-top impas­sioned delivery—he brought to increas­ing­ly kinet­ic R&B music a the­atri­cal­i­ty and show­man­ship that dozens of artists would strive to emu­late. But no group could work a stage like Brown and his band, with their machine-like pre­ci­sion break­downs and elab­o­rate dance rou­tines. And while it seems like Chad­wick Bose­man does an admirable impres­sion of the God­fa­ther of Soul in the upcom­ing Brown biopic Get on Up, there’s no sub­sti­tute for the real thing, nor will there ever be anoth­er. By 1964, Brown and the Flames had worked for almost a decade to hone their act, espe­cial­ly the cen­ter­piece ren­di­tion of “Please, Please, Please.” And in the ’64 per­for­mance above at the T.A.M.I.—or Teenage Awards Music International—at the San­ta Mon­i­ca Civic Audi­to­ri­um, you can see Brown and crew for the first time do the so-called “cape act” (around 7:50) dur­ing that sig­na­ture num­ber. David Rem­nick describes it in his New York­er piece on this per­for­mance:

…in the midst of his own self-induced hys­te­ria, his fit of long­ing and desire, he drops to his knees, seem­ing­ly unable to go on any longer, at the point of col­lapse, or worse. His back­up singers, the Flames, move near, ten­der­ly, as if to revive him, and an off­stage aide, Dan­ny Ray, comes on, drap­ing a cape over the great man’s shoul­ders. Over and over again, Brown recov­ers, throws off the cape, defies his near-death col­lapse, goes back into the song, back into the dance, this absolute aban­don­ment to pas­sion.

It’s an act Brown dis­tilled from both charis­mat­ic Bap­tist church ser­vices and pro­fes­sion­al wrestling, and it’s a hell of a per­for­mance, one he pulled out, with all his oth­er shim­my­ing, strut­ting, moon­walk­ing stops, in order to best the night’s line­up of big names like the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Mar­vin Gaye, the Supremes, and the Rolling Stones, who had the mis­for­tune of hav­ing to fol­low Brown’s act. Kei­th Richards lat­er called it the biggest mis­take of their career. You can see why. Though the Stones put on a decent show (below), next to Brown and the Flames, writes Rem­nick, they looked bland and compromising—“Unitarians mak­ing nice.”

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every Appear­ance James Brown Ever Made On Soul Train. So Nice, So Nice!

James Brown Saves Boston After MLK’s Assas­si­na­tion, Calls for Peace Across Amer­i­ca (1968)

James Brown Gives You Danc­ing Lessons: From The Funky Chick­en to The Booga­loo

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Playing an Instrument Is a Great Workout For Your Brain: New Animation Explains Why

in Animation, Biology, Health, Music, Science | August 1st, 2014

Get me a piano teacher, stat!

When I was a child, my father, enchant­ed by the notion that I might some­day pro­vide live piano accom­pa­ni­ment to his evening cock­tails, signed me up for lessons with a mild-man­nered wid­ow who—if mem­o­ry serves—charged 50¢ an hour.

Had I only been forced to prac­tice more reg­u­lar­ly, I’d have no trou­ble remem­ber­ing the exact price of these lessons. My mem­o­ry would be a supreme­ly robust thing of beau­ty. Dit­to my math skills, my cog­ni­tive func­tion, my abil­i­ty to mul­ti­task.

Instead, my dad even­tu­al­ly con­ced­ed that I was not cut out to be a musi­cian (or a bal­le­ri­na, or a ten­nis whiz…) and Mrs. Arnold was out a pupil.

Would that I stuck with it beyond my halt­ing ver­sions of “The Enter­tain­er” and “Für Elise.” Accord­ing to the TED-Ed video above, play­ing an instru­ment is one of the very best things you can do for your brain. Tal­ent does­n’t mat­ter in this con­text, just ongo­ing prac­tice.

Neu­ro­sci­en­tists using fMRI (Func­tion­al Mag­net­ic Res­o­nance Imag­ing) and PET (Positron Emis­sion Tomog­ra­phy) tech­nol­o­gy to mon­i­tor the brain activ­i­ty of sub­jects lis­ten­ing to music saw engage­ment in many areas, but when the sub­jects trad­ed in head­phones for actu­al instru­ments, this activ­i­ty mor­phed into a grand fire­works dis­play.

(The ani­mat­ed expla­na­tion of the inter­play between var­i­ous musi­cal­ly engaged areas of the brain sug­gests the New York City sub­way map, a metaphor I find more apt.)

This mas­sive full brain work­out is avail­able to any­one will­ing to put in the time with an instru­ment. Read­ing the score, fig­ur­ing out tim­ing and fin­ger­ing, and pour­ing one’s soul into cre­ative inter­pre­ta­tion results in an interof­fice cere­bral com­mu­ni­ca­tion that strength­ens the cor­pus calos­sum and exec­u­tive func­tion.

 Vin­di­ca­tion for drum­mers at last!

Though to bring up the specter of anoth­er stereo­type, stay away from the hard stuff, guys…don’t fry those beau­ti­ful minds.

If you’d like to know more about the sci­en­tif­ic impli­ca­tions of music lessons, WBUR’s series “Brain Mat­ters” has a good overview here. And good luck break­ing the good news to your chil­dren.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a New Music Video Shot Entire­ly With­in an MRI Machine

TED-Ed Brings the Edgi­ness of TED to Learn­ing

“Hum­ming­bird,” A New Form of Music Nota­tion That’s Eas­i­er to Learn and Faster to Read

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, home­school­er, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Brian Eno’s Take on the Gaza Conflict Appears on David Byrne’s Web Site

in Current Affairs, Music | August 1st, 2014

Brian_Eno_2008

On his web site, for­mer Talk­ing Heads front­man David Byrne writes:

I received this email last Fri­day morn­ing from my friend, Bri­an Eno. I shared it with my office and we all felt a great respon­si­bil­i­ty to pub­lish Bri­an’s heavy, wor­thy note. In response, Bri­an’s friend, Peter Schwartz, replied with an eye-open­ing his­tor­i­cal expla­na­tion of how we got here. What’s clear is that no one has the moral high ground.

First comes Eno’s clear­ly heart­felt con­dem­na­tion of civil­ian deaths in Gaza (par­tic­u­lar­ly the death of chil­dren) and Amer­i­ca’s appar­ent indif­fer­ence to what’s hap­pen­ing there:

Today I saw a pic­ture of a weep­ing Pales­tin­ian man hold­ing a plas­tic car­ri­er bag of meat. It was his son. He’d been shred­ded (the hos­pi­tal’s word) by an Israeli mis­sile attack — appar­ent­ly using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You prob­a­bly know what those are — hun­dreds of small steel darts packed around explo­sive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Kha­laf al-Nawas­ra. He was 4 years old.

I sud­den­ly found myself think­ing that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than any­thing has for a long time.

Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they want­ed to launch a com­mis­sion into that. Amer­i­ca won’t sign up to it.

What is going on in Amer­i­ca? I know from my own expe­ri­ence how slant­ed your news is, and how lit­tle you get to hear about the oth­er side of this sto­ry. But — for Christ’s sake! — it’s not that hard to find out. Why does Amer­i­ca con­tin­ue its blind sup­port of this one-sided exer­cise in eth­nic cleans­ing? WHY?

What fol­lows is part of futur­ist Peter Schwartz’s response, which, rich in his­tor­i­cal detail, splits the blame some­where down the mid­dle. Echo­ing Byrne’s sense that the two sides have lost their moral posi­tions, Schwartz notes:

Even though I have no sup­port for the Israeli posi­tion I find the oppo­si­tion to Israel ques­tion­able in its fail­ure to be sim­i­lar­ly out­raged by a vast num­ber of oth­er moral hor­rors in the recent past and cur­rent­ly active. Just to name a few; Cam­bo­dia, Tibet, Sudan, Soma­lia, Nicaragua, Mex­i­co, Argenti­na, Liberia, Cen­tral African Repub­lic, Ugan­da, North Korea, Bosnia, Koso­vo, Venezuela, Syr­ia, Egypt, Libya, Zim­bab­we and espe­cial­ly right now Nige­ria. The Arab Spring, which has become a dark win­ter for most Arabs and the large scale slaugh­ter now under­way along the bor­ders of Iraq and Syr­ia are good exam­ples of what they do to them­selves. And our nations, the US, the Brits, the Dutch, the Rus­sians and the French have all played their parts in these oth­er moral out­rages. The grue­some body count and social destruc­tion left behind dwarfs any­thing that the Israelis have done. The only dif­fer­ence with the Israeli’s is their claim to a moral high ground, which they long ago left behind in the refugee camps of Lebanon. They are now just a nation, like any oth­er, try­ing to sur­vive in a hos­tile sea of hate.

We should be clear, that giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty, the Arabs would dri­ve the Jews into the sea and that was true from day one. There was no way back from war once a reli­gious state was declared. So Israel, once com­mit­ted to a nation state in that loca­tion and grant­ed that right by oth­er nations have had no choice but to fight. In my view there­fore, nei­ther side has any shred of moral stand­ing left, nor have the nations that sup­port­ed both sides…

I don’t think there is any hon­or to go around here. Israel has lost its way and com­mits hor­rors in the inter­est of their own sur­vival. And the Arabs and Per­sians per­pet­u­ate a con­flict rid­den neigh­bor­hood with almost no excep­tions, fight­ing against each oth­er and with hate of Israel the only thing that they share.

To read the com­plete exchange, head over to Byrne’s site and read Gaza and the Loss of Civ­i­liza­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Byrne and Bri­an Eno Make Music Togeth­er: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Lis­ten to “Bri­an Eno Day,” a 12-Hour Radio Show Spent With Eno & His Music (Record­ed in 1988)

Jump Start Your Cre­ative Process with Bri­an Eno’s “Oblique Strate­gies”

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

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Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

in Jazz, Literature, Music, Writing | July 31st, 2014

Any seri­ous read­er of Haru­ki Muraka­mi — and even most of the casu­al ones — will have picked up on the fact that, apart from the work that has made him quite pos­si­bly the world’s most beloved liv­ing nov­el­ist, the man has two pas­sions: run­ning and jazz. In his mem­oir What I Talk About When I Talk About Run­ning, he tells the sto­ry of how he became a run­ner, which he sees as inex­tri­ca­bly bound up with how he became a writer. Both per­son­al trans­for­ma­tions occurred in his ear­ly thir­ties, after he sold Peter Cat, the Tokyo jazz bar he spent most of the 1970s oper­at­ing. Yet he hard­ly put the music behind him, con­tin­u­ing to main­tain a siz­able per­son­al record library, weave jazz ref­er­ences into his fic­tion, and even to write the essay col­lec­tions Por­trait in Jazz and Por­trait in Jazz 2.

Murakami Short

Image comes from Ilana Simons’ ani­mat­ed intro­duc­tion to Muraka­mi

“I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15,” Muraka­mi writes in the New York Times. “Art Blakey and the Jazz Mes­sen­gers per­formed in Kobe in Jan­u­ary that year, and I got a tick­et for a birth­day present. This was the first time I real­ly lis­tened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thun­der­struck.” Though unskilled in music him­self, he often felt that, in his head, “some­thing like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I won­dered if it might be pos­si­ble for me to trans­fer that music into writ­ing. That was how my style got start­ed.”


He found writ­ing and jazz sim­i­lar endeav­ors, in that both need “a good, nat­ur­al, steady rhythm,” a melody, “which, in lit­er­a­ture, means the appro­pri­ate arrange­ment of the words to match the rhythm,” har­mo­ny, “the inter­nal men­tal sounds that sup­port the words,” and free impro­vi­sa­tion, where­in, “through some spe­cial chan­nel, the sto­ry comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow.”

With Peter Cat long gone, fans have nowhere to go to get into the flow of Murakami’s per­son­al  jazz selec­tions. Still, at the top of the post, you can lis­ten to a playlist of songs men­tioned in Por­trait in Jazz, fea­tur­ing Chet Bak­er, Char­lie Park­er, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, and Miles Davis. (You can find anoth­er extend­ed playlist of 56 songs here.) Should you make the trip out to Tokyo, you can also pay a vis­it to Cafe Roku­ji­gen, pro­filed in the short video just above, where Muraka­mi read­ers con­gre­gate to read their favorite author’s books while lis­ten­ing to the music that, in his words, taught him every­thing he need­ed to know to write them. And else­where on the very same sub­way line, you can also vis­it the old site of Peter Cat: just fol­low in the foot­steps tak­en by A Geek in Japan author Héc­tor Gar­cía, who set out to find it after read­ing Murakami’s rem­i­nis­cences in What I Talk About When I Talk About Run­ning. And what plays in the great emi­nence-out­sider of Japan­ese let­ters’ ear­buds while he runs? “I love lis­ten­ing to the Lovin’ Spoon­ful,” he writes. Hey, you can’t spin to Thelo­nious Monk all the time.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Muraka­mi, Japan’s Jazz and Base­ball-Lov­ing Post­mod­ern Nov­el­ist

A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

In Search of Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Japan’s Great Post­mod­ernist Nov­el­ist

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Trans­lates The Great Gats­by, the Nov­el That Influ­enced Him Most

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Allen Ginsberg & The Clash Perform the Punk Poem “Capitol Air,” Live Onstage in Times Square (1981)

in Music, Poetry | July 31st, 2014

The Clash had been called sell­outs ever since they signed with CBS and made their 1977 debut, so the charge was pret­ty stale when cer­tain crit­ics lobbed it at their turn to dis­co-fla­vored new wave and “are­na rock” in 1982’s pop­u­lar Com­bat Rock. As All­mu­sic writes of the record, “if this album is, as it has often been claimed, the Clash’s sell­out effort, it’s a very strange way to sell out.” Com­bat Rock’s hits—“Rock the Cas­bah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go”—are catchy and anthemic, respec­tive­ly, but this hard­ly breaks new styl­is­tic ground, though the sounds are clean­er and the influ­ences more dif­fuse. But the true stand­outs for my mon­ey—“Straight to Hell” and “Ghet­to Defen­dant”—per­fect the strain of reg­gae-punk The Clash had made their career-long exper­i­ment.

The lat­ter track, a midtem­po dub take on the pathos of hero­in addic­tion and under­class angst, fea­tures a cameo spo­ken-word vocal from Allen Gins­berg, who co-wrote the song with Joe Strum­mer. Far from sim­ply lend­ing the song Beat cred—as Bur­roughs would for a string of artists, to vary­ing degrees of artis­tic success—the Gins­berg appear­ance feels pos­i­tive­ly essen­tial, such that the poet joined the band on stage dur­ing the New York leg of their tour in sup­port of the album.

But before “Ghet­to Defen­dant,” there was “Capi­tol Air,” a com­po­si­tion of Ginsberg’s own that he per­formed impromp­tu with the band in New York in 1981. As Gins­berg tells it, he joined the band back­stage dur­ing one of their 17 shows at Bonds Club in Times Square dur­ing the San­din­ista tour. Strum­mer invit­ed the poet onstage to riff on Cen­tral Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, and Gins­berg instead taught the band his very own punk song, which after 5 min­utes of rehearsal, they took to the stage and played.

Just above, hear that one­time live per­for­mance of “Capi­tol Air,” one of those anti-author­i­tar­i­an rants Gins­berg turned into an art form all its own—ripping cap­i­tal­ists, com­mu­nists, bureau­crats, and the police state—as the band backs him up with a chug­ging three-chord jam. Gins­berg wrote the song, accord­ing to the Allen Gins­berg Project, in 1980, after return­ing from Yugoslavia and “real­iz­ing that police bureau­cra­cies in Amer­i­ca and in East­ern Europe were the same, mir­ror images of each oth­er final­ly,” a feel­ing cap­tured in the lines “No Hope Com­mu­nism, No Hope Cap­i­tal­ism, Yeah. Every­body is lying on both sides.” Many of these same themes worked their way into “Ghet­to Defen­dant,” writ­ten and record­ed six months lat­er.

Here you can hear the Com­bat Rock album ver­sion of “Ghet­to Defen­dant.” (The track appeared in longer form on the record’s first, unre­leased, incar­na­tion, Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg). Ginsberg’s con­tri­bu­tions to the track, which he intones as “the voice of God,” match his free-asso­cia­tive dark humor against Strummer’s nar­ra­tive con­crete­ness. Off the wall hip­ster lines like “Hooked on necrop­o­lis,” “Do the worm on the acrop­o­lis” and “Slam­dance the cos­mopo­lis” become ellip­ti­cal ref­er­ences to Arthur Rim­baud, Sal­vado­ri­an death squads, and Afghanistan before Gins­berg launch­es into the Bud­dhist heart sutra over Strummer’s final cho­rus. The effect is com­ic, hyp­not­ic, and dis­ori­ent­ing, rem­i­nis­cent of the sam­ple-based elec­tron­ic col­lages groups like Cabaret Voltaire and Throb­bing Gris­tle con­struct­ed around the same time. It’s such a per­fect sym­bio­sis that the song los­es much of its impact with­out Ginsberg’s nut­ty offer­ings, I think, though you can judge for your­self in the live, Gins­berg-less ver­sion below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Live Footage Doc­u­ments The Clash From Their Raw Debut to the Career-Defin­ing Lon­don Call­ing

The First Record­ing of Allen Gins­berg Read­ing “Howl” (1956)

William S. Bur­roughs “Sings” R.E.M. and The Doors, Backed by the Orig­i­nal Bands

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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