Allen Ginsberg - The Lion For Real - Cassette
Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic seal
Island Records

A long way from the cliched tableau of the coffeehouse beat poet shouting spontaneous verses to the accompaniment of bongos, THE LION FOR REAL pairs one of contemporary poetry's most iconic figures with some leading lights in experimental and improvisational music. Released in 1989 (eight years before Allen Ginsberg's death), THE LION FOR REAL highlights the parallels between instrumental and verbal music, framing the sharp, clipped rhythms of Ginsberg's work via sympathetic and intense jazz accompaniment.

The personnel assembled here are mightily impressive, including Bill Frisell, Arto Lindsay, Marc Ribot, Steve Swallow, and G.E. Smith. These musicians selected poems of Ginsberg's they felt particularly drawn to, then composed charts to accompany Ginsbergs readings of those poems. The music falls somewhere between avant-jazz and film music, modifying and accentuating the tone and mood of each piece.

Track Listing
1. Scribble
2. Complaint Of The Skeleton To Time
3. Xmas Gift
4. To Aunt Rose
5. Lion For Real, The
6. Refrain
7. Shrouded Stranger, The
8. Gregory Corso's Story
9. Cleveland, The Flats
10. End, The
11. Stanzas: Written At Night In Radio City
12. Sunset
13. Hum Bom!
14. Kral Majales
15. Guru
16. Ode To Failure
17. C'mon Jack

Allen Ginsberg's groundbreaking poem Howl began with the words, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix..." As a student at Columbia University in New York in the 1950s, Ginsberg fell in with rebel writers such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. He travelled to San Francisco, where his 1955 public reading of Howl launched the poem as a counterculture hit, helped along by the publicity over an obscenity charge against Ginsberg, a homosexual. During the 1960s Ginsberg became one of the more prominent figures in the American anti-war movement, as he also joined love-ins, took LSD, and generally grabbed every opportunity to harass the authorities. Still, his anger and rebellion were perceived as generally good-natured, and in 1974 he won the National Book Award for The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971. in his later years he served as a kind of Grand Old Man of pop counterculture, even appearing in a video for MTV in 1996.