Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?

Subject: Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?
From: GUEST,John E
Date: 27 Dec 09 - 06:16 AM

Can Anyone Help? A (non-Folkie) friend has given me a few words and asked if I know the song - and I don't. It seems to be based on Alan Ginsburg's poem "Howl". The words he can remember are something like; "Carl Solomon, I"m with you there in Rockland, I'm with you there in Maine" - then a gap - then "I'm with you there again". Can Anyone help?

Subject: RE: Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?
From: NormanD
Date: 27 Dec 09 - 06:59 AM

The Fugs actually recorded a version of "Howl". Not the whole poem, of course. A bit of a shouty / punky / explosive tune:
"I saw
The best minds
Of my generation
Destroyedbymadness....." etc etc

Fabulous.

There is also an album by Mudboy & The Neutrons called "Negro Streets At Dawn".

I think the words you quoted are from Ginsberg.

Subject: RE: Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?
From: GUEST,woodsie
Date: 27 Dec 09 - 08:32 AM

It's on the Fugs second album "Virgin Fugs" which I used to own years ago! It obviously is not the complete HOWL just a shortened extract put to music and entitled "I Saw The Best Minds Of My Generation Rot"

Subject: RE: Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?
From: M.Ted
Date: 27 Dec 09 - 11:33 AM

For your edification and enjoymentHowl, read by the poet himself

Subject: RE: Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 27 Dec 09 - 11:51 AM

Can someone correct the spelling to Allen Ginsberg?

Subject: RE: Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?
From: GUEST,999
Date: 27 Dec 09 - 01:25 PM

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel strange

I'm with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humour

I'm with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

I'm with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free

I'm with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Subject: RE: Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?
From: GUEST,999
Date: 27 Dec 09 - 01:31 PM

That's from Howl. Cannot find lyrics based on the info given. I will look, but without more info it will be difficult. (No offence.)

Subject: RE: Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?
From: bobad
Date: 27 Dec 09 - 06:39 PM

I can send you an mp3 of the Fugs' song if you provide an email address.

Subject: RE: Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?
From: M.Ted
Date: 27 Dec 09 - 07:58 PM

I've seen an a cappella piece for SATB, entitled "I' with you there in Rockland" by Michael White, based on the "Howl" text, referred to a couple places, but haven't found any info on it at all--could this be what you're looking for?

Subject: RE: Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?
From: GUEST,TJ in San Diego
Date: 28 Dec 09 - 12:23 PM

Wow. How many in the audience remember the "Beat Generation," "Beat poets" or "Beatniks?" When I was a young lad, San Francisco's North Beach coffee houses were full of them, before the "great folk scare" replaced poets with musicians. On the east coast, Greenwich Village had its own version. We were being exposed to beat poetry in my high school english classes in the late 1950's. Here's Wikipedia's take on it - not too far off:

The Beat Generation is a term used to describe a group of American writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, and the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired (later sometimes called "beatniks"). Central elements of "Beat" culture include a rejection of mainstream American values, experimentation with drugs and alternate forms of sexuality, and an interest in Eastern spirituality.

The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957).[1] Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize what could be published in the United States. On the Road transformed Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady into a youth-culture hero. The members of the Beat Generation quickly developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.

The original "Beat Generation" writers met in New York. Later, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs) ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s where they met and became friends with figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. During the 1960s, the rapidly expanding Beat culture underwent a transformation: the Beat Generation gave way to the Sixties Counterculture, which was accompanied by a shift in public terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie."

Subject: RE: Song Based on Alan Ginsburg's Howl?
From: GUEST,John E
Date: 02 Jan 10 - 12:01 PM

Thanks for all these contributions.
Guest 999; Thanks for trying in spite of the difficulty - I'm going to print this lot off and see if it helps my enquiring friend to remember anything more. If so I'll add later.
Guest TJ in San Diego; I'm afraid remembering the Beat Generation probably dates us both - it certainly does me!

Thanks again,

John E, Shropshire, England