The writers of the Beat Generation engaged passionately in the reading of their words aloud, in a room or in the open air, and so recordings are in no short supply. Die on Me is a collection of readings and discussions from the youngest Beat giant, the undercelebrated Gregory Corso. Produced by Hal Willner and Marianne Faithfull and originally released on CD in 2002, the set has been reissued, slightly reordered, and remastered with bonus tracks by Kramer on his label Shimmy Disc, where it makes its vinyl debut. It’s an essential acquisition for anyone who loves the elevated thought spillage of prime Beat poetics.
The pool of writers that shaped the Beat Generation isn’t especially large. There was an older generation of writers and publishers (William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, James Laughlin) that heard something crucial in this defiant mid-20th-century impulse and encouraged it. But Beats, they were not.
Additionally, there were numerous simultaneous and sometimes overlapping scenes (the New York Poets, the Black Mountain College writers, the West Coast/San Francisco scenes), alongside the many writers and muses that orbited around the core Beats like satellites.
The size and shape of the Beat Generation can expand or contract, given the situation. It should be established that if a controversial figure, Norman Mailer, was not a Beat writer. Nor were the notorious and often-banned Henry Miller and the young and hip Terry Southern. Charles Bukowski wasn’t Beat, either, as he often went to pains to impolitely make clear in his writings.
Those core Beats included Herbert Huncke (Huncke’s Journal), Michael McClure (Hymns to St. Geryon and Other Poems), Philip Whalen (Memoirs of an Interglacial Age), Gary Snyder (Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems), and of course, the big four: Jack Kerouac (On the Road, The Dharma Bums), Allen Ginsberg (Howl, Kaddish), William S. Burroughs (Junky, Queer, The Naked Lunch), and yes indeed, Gregory Corso (Gasoline, The Happy Birthday of Death).
There are a few other relevant figures, such as John Clellon Holmes (Go, The Horn), Carl Soloman (Mishaps, Perhaps), Bob Kaufman (The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978), Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) (Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note), Peter Orlovsky (Clean asshole poems & smiling vegetable songs), Ray Bremser (Drive Suite: An Essay on Composition, Materials, References, Etc), and Diane Di Prima (Dinners and Nightmares).
In terms of appreciation, Gregory Corso is too often placed in general proximity to this last group of Beats rather than in the prime spot where he belongs. This is staggeringly unfair treatment, as Corso was the second of the big four to see publication. Kerouac was first published in 1950, but with The Town and the City, a formative and atypical novel. The Vestal Lady on Brattle, published in 1955, likewise isn’t considered prime Corso.
Die on Me focuses on later works, either of Corso’s choosing or selected for recitation by producer Faithfull. Smartly, the readings aren’t chronological, beginning with “For Homer” from 2001, read just 12 days prior to Corso’s death, his voice aged but still appropriately emphatic.
“Ode to Coit Tower” dates from 1959, but the span of time is a seamless transition, both due to Corso’s booming syllabic gush and Willner’s musical bedrock. The producer’s contributions are quite consistent here (this isn’t always the case with Willner) and are particularly strong during the noirish atmosphere lent to Corso’s reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”
And Willner knows when to get out of the way, specifically laying out during the three-way conversation between Studs Terkel, Allen Ginsberg, and Corso in “Hair,” only adding a Procol Harum-esque background during the reading portion. The works with Faithfull date from the January 2001 session, their inclusion bringing Die on Me a sense of totality and closure. The saucy talk during “The Truth,” a 1994 convo with Ginsberg, is a particular highlight.
Due to the vivid power of Beat poetry read by the Beat poet who wrote it and Willner’s thoughtful additives, Die on Me is a spoken word recording of historical import that stands up to repeated listening.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
