Ginsberg and Dylan, Seekers
The Friendship of the Legendary Beat Poet and Timeless Music Man
May 13, 2008
I’m Not There, the critically-acclaimed 2007 movie “inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan”, has introduced a new generation to the friendship between the musician and the legendary poet, author of Howl, Allen Ginsberg. What was the nature of his personal and artistic relationship with Dylan, which spanned more than 40 years until Ginsberg’s death in 1997?
The links between the two artists seem to have been based not only on music and poetry, but also around issues of religion and identity.
The Music of Poetry and The Poetry of Music
It seems unusual in this era of rap, but Dylan was evidently very impressed by Ginsberg’s ability to improvise poetry, which Ginsberg said he had developed when he and poet Jack Kerouac would go on walks together. For his part, Ginsberg was keen to develop his musical side. According to Michael Schumacher (Dharma Lion, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), Ginsberg wanted to reach people with his work and “believed in the viability of the minstrel tradition.” Dylan taught the poet a few chords and he was able to make a start.
Schumacher reports that Ginsberg’s singing and songwriting efforts drew a “strongly mixed response from friends, critics and poetry enthusiasts”, as his singing voice was “average”. Nevertheless, the poet’s foray into accompanied poetry seemed a logical extension of the sound poetry of the “beat poets”.
In 1975, Ginsberg accompanied Dylan and a huge musical entourage on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of north-east America. In an interview with P.B. Chowka in the David Carter-edited collection Allen Ginsberg: Spontaneous Mind (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), Ginsberg would describe this as “almost like a travelling rock-family-commune.” Schumacher describes the Revue as in the tradition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Kerouac’s On the Road, a quest by the artists to find their place, with live performances generally closing with Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land.
During the tour Ginsberg read his classic elegy Kaddish and sang William Blake poems set to his own music.
An Intepretation of “I’m Not There”
Dylan's hugely ambitious film Renaldo and Clara, released in 1978 – also to a “mixed” response – was shot during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. The scene in I’m Not There in which Ginsberg and Dylan are apparently acting the fools near a statue of Christ was evidently inspired by footage shot for the film.
According to the Chowka interview, the filming took place in the town where Kerouac is buried, Lowell. One of the things Dylan and Ginsberg had in common was that both were held to be prophets because of their work. Dylan at least has seemed never to be comfortable with the role. Ginsberg was quoted as saying that, in being filmed near the Christ statue, Dylan was “humorously playing with the dreadful potential of his own mythological imagery…trying to deal with it in a sensible way.”
The issue of identity, and its connection with religious/spiritual questions, was important to both artists. Schumacher observes that during the Rolling Thunder Tour, musicians would sometimes turn up in disguises, Dylan for example painting his face white.
Ginsberg was a Buddhist and credited Dylan with saying “some very beautiful, Buddhist-like things”, including that he did what he did without thinking of pleasure. However when Ginsberg said he no longer believed in God, Dylan told him that if he believed, he would write better poetry.
Chowka in his interview with Ginsberg at one point begins asking about Dylan with the comment: “knowing him as well as you do”. This draws the response from Ginsberg: “I don’t know him because I don’t think there is any him. I don’t think he’s got a self.” In the context of Ginsberg’s beliefs and Dylan’s spiritual seeking, it’s a comment that would likely have been intended as a compliment.
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