VIA PRESS RELEASE | “While most people tend to reflect the brightness of the era, Ginsberg didn’t shy away from the darkness. He writes the scene in all its complexity, the busts of excitements and Dionysian excesses as well as darker images, such as the sculpture of the hanged man. He forces us to recognize the children sleeping in the bed and the police cars parked outside, red lights revolving in the trees.” —Mickey Hart
Fall of America poems published by City Lights Books in San Francisco covers the years 1965-1971 when Ginsberg was crisscrossing the country, exploring a system of composition by narrating into the portable reel to reel Uher that Bob Dylan had gifted him.
“In 1965, Ginsberg began planning an ambitious project, a book of thematically connected poems, a collection that ‘discovered’ America in poetry similar to the way Kerouac’s On the Road had explored the country in prose. The Vietnam War would be a constant presence overhanging Ginsberg’s travel writings like a darkening shadow affecting daily life in the country.
It would be a study of contrasts: natural beauty slammed up against an ugliness that rose out of the tensions of violence. The public’s polarized dialogue over Vietnam and, earlier in the decade, the civil rights movement, convinced Ginsberg that America was teetering on the precipice of a fall.” —Michael Schumacher, from introduction to The Fall of America Journals 1965-1971
Vinyl Track Listing:
Side A:
1) Scanner – Elegy for Neal Cassidy
2) Shintaro Sakamoto – Manhattan Thirties Flash
3) Thurston Moore & Lee Ranaldo – Hum Bom
4) Ed Sanders (The Fugs) – Memory Gardens
5) Mickey Hart – Drones Du Jour (First Party at Ken Kesey’s)
6) Howie B with Gavin Friday – Death on All Fronts (America is Falling)
7) Disco Pusher – A Prophecy
Side B:
1) Angelique Kidjo – Uluru Song
2) Bill Frisell – Over Laramie
3) Andrew Bird – Easter Sunday
4) Devendra Banhart – Milarepa Taste
5) Yo La Tengo – Bayonne into NYC
6) Lang Lee – Pain on All Fronts
Pre-order here.
