VIA PRESS RELEASE | Allen Ginsberg—internationally renowned, visionary American Beat Poet—was a figurehead of the global youth movement in the late 1960s, a devoted teacher and scholar, inspiring generations of young poets. He was a racial activist, pacifist, one of the most politically engaged poets for decades, using his voice and international platform as a campaigner for human rights, gay liberation, ecology, and free speech. Nearly all his books remain in print to this day. In celebration of his legacy, Shimmy-Disc has announced a remixed and remastered reissue of Allen Ginsberg’s 1989 album of spoken-word pieces, entitled The Lion For Real, Re-born.
This forthcoming release, due November 3, finds Allen Ginsberg—the voice of a generation, fierce, gentle, profound and profane—paired with music created especially for his work, by some of the guiding lights of Jazz in the modern era: Mark Bingham, Bill Frisell, Arto Lindsay, Marc Ribot, and others. All masterfully coordinated and produced by the mad scientist of collaborations, Hal Willner.
First released as The Lion For Real in 1989, this time capsule surges forth into the now with 8 additional tracks never included on the original release. These are timeless works, a garden of eden on vinyl to wander through repeatedly, guided by the founding father of Beat Poetry. Graced by an irresistible coda co-written with Shimmy-Disc founder Kramer, his lyrical mantra of “Don’t Grow Old.” To introduce this historic re-release, Shimmy-Disc has additionally shared a brand new Ambient-Cinema video by Kramer for one of the pieces on the LP, “To Aunt Rose.”
As Allen Ginsberg wrote in the record’s original liner notes: “A memory flash 1958 Paris. My favorite Aunt Rose (1909-1940) took care of me weekends when my mother was ill – Books named are my late father Louis Ginsberg’s. It was a big event to publish a volume of poetry those days! Rose Gaidemak died of septicemia. Note delicate music box time travel invention by Marc Ribot.”
Marc Ribot additionally wrote: “In 1988 [?], I scored Ginsberg’s ‘Aunt Rose’ as Allen read his Aunt Rose: haunted by a creaking, repetitive warped record of memory…he, of her old apartment in Newark…shaded in loneliness and repression, and yet somehow the site of an inescapable tenderness. She haunted by Hitler/Stalin, the ‘War in Spain.’ I was born in Newark too…my Aunt’s name was Rhoda, but it could have been Rose. I love Allen’s refusal to hide anything in the closet: queerness, cranky old Jewish communist relatives. 1959, when the poem was written: before the words ‘Gay’ and ‘Pride’ had been publicly married, before the first ‘hippie,’ before the New Left was new (let alone old): but its tinted family mirror reflects the coming decades, as Allen chants his way out of mid-century’s dualisms and positivisms…the stale air of his Aunt’s apartment. The poem reads differently in 2023: are we still certain that ‘the war In Spain is over, Aunt Rose.’ Is it really? Who won?'”
