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The legendary Beat writer Allen Ginsberg was first introduced to Bob Dylan by the New York Post journalist Al Aronowitz in 1963. This act of social chemistry combined the worlds of folk music and pop writing, and it made for some truly inspiring art from both parties thereafter. Dylan had been aware of Ginsberg and his fellow Beat Generation writers long before they met in person, and this had been one of the magnets that attracted the aspiring troubadour to New York City in 1961.

“I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected,” Dylan told The New Yorker in 1985. “It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti… I got in at the tail end of that, and it was magic… it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.”

Dylan had been inspired by Beat literature since his late teens. After discovering Woody Guthrie and making his first foray into the folk scene, he applied this revolutionary wordplay to his early songwriting. However, after meeting Ginsberg in 1963, his work became increasingly abstract and pioneering.

“I didn’t start writing poetry until I was out of high school,” Dylan would recall. “I was eighteen or so when I first discovered Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Frank O’Hara and those guys.”

Ginsberg was 15 years Dylan’s senior, but that didn’t mean the channels of inspiration couldn’t flow both ways. Through the 1960s, the pair established a solid friendship and regularly shared creative ideas with each other. As with any discerning artistic partnership, symbiosis was elementary.

“I first met Bob at a party at the Eighth Street Book Shop, and he invited me to go on tour with him,” Ginsberg once recalled per Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. “I ended up not going, but, boy, if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have gone like a flash. He’d probably have put me onstage with him.”

“His image was undercurrent, underground, unconscious in people … something a little more mysterious, poetic, a little more Dada, more where people’s hearts and heads actually were rather than where they ‘should be’ according to some ideological angry theory,” he added.

As well as influencing Ginsberg’s words, Dylan inspired him to use his voice to project his writing. “He turned me on to actually singing,” Ginsberg once told journalist Harvey Kubernik. “I remember the moment. It was a concert with [folk singer] Happy Traum that I saw in Greenwich Village. I suddenly started to write my own lyrics.”

“Dylan’s words were so beautiful,” he continued, praising his protégé. “The first time I heard them, I wept. Dylan [was] singing ‘Masters of War’ from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and I actually burst into tears. It was a sense that the torch had been passed to another generation.”

Dylan and Ginsberg collaborated on several occasions, including an unreleased album titled Holy Soul Jelly Roll, which only exists in bootleg format. Listen to ‘Vomit Express’, a track from this album, below.



https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/b...llen-ginsberg-tears/

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