Apart from a few stray months in the ‘60s, it's hard to imagine any period in which Allen Ginsberg's *First Blues *might have found commercial success, the present one included. But in a somewhat more liberated world, Omnivore's *Last Word on First Blues *box set makes more sense now than any time since the double LP's 1983 release on John Hammond's eponymous indie label. A radical in Ronald Reagan's ‘80s as much in Dwight Eisenhower's ‘50s, Allen Ginsberg's open, gleeful, and articulate queerness bursts through here as clear as ever, a poet dancing with all the legal freedoms earned when a California State Superior Judge declared that Ginsberg's groundbreaking 1956 poem “Howl” was of “redeeming social importance,” and therefore not obscene—freedoms Ginsberg had declared himself to possess long before. While the poet's wobbling voice remains a hard sell in the 21st century (ditto, to some listeners, his sexploits), producer Pat Thomas' loving Last Word on *First Blues *reissue reveals Ginsberg as a missing link in the East Village's musical pathways, a secret alt-folk hero hidden in relatively plain view.
Recorded over three sessions in 1971, 1976, and 1981, the new *First Blues *comes with a third disc of supplementary material, including appearances by Bob Dylan on bass and jazz hero Don Cherry on kazoo. It opens with the Dylan-abetted sing-alongs “Going to San Diego” and “Vomit Express,” both sounding as if Ginsberg had visited Big Pink for a session in the Basement. Amid the surreal-hootenanny atmosphere, in which Dylan jams alongside Arthur Russell, Ginsberg's voice finds a comfort zone. But, just as much as Dylan, First Blues carries forward the sloppy and joyous folk-rock of Ginsberg's East Village neighbors in the Holy Modal Rounders and the over-the-top poetry of his friends in The Fugs, whose co-founder Ed Sanders appears in *Last Word *session photos from 1971. At the heart of the later recordings, too, is Steven Taylor, Ginsberg's long-term musical partner, who fixes the poet's anarchic spirit and wandering melodic tendencies amid a solid folk-rock sparkle—and who would go on to join the The Fugs when that band reunited in 1984.
Though released as one album, *First Blues *also represents three separate slices of Ginsberg's musical career: sex-positive folk romps like “Jimmy Berman (Gay Lib Rag),” word-crammed investigative poetry anthems like “CIA Dope Calypso,” and less classifiable specimens of wise cosmic folk. The lines are blurry, but it is the latter category that is perhaps the most refreshing. Though Ginsberg isn't a singer by most traditional measures, he is a surprising and capable songwriter, finding charming melodies he can only get across in the broadest way, as on “Vomit Express” (from 1971), aided by big gang vocals on the chorus, and the Rounders-like “Old Pond” (from ten years later).
For all his legendary lack of inhibition, Ginsberg's singing is sometimes a bit (ahem) stiff, more a crooning poet than a singer-songwriter. The 1976 band is the most supportive, featuring David Mansfield on elegant pedal steel and Arthur Russell on cello, achieving an easy, swaying grace on “Gospel Novel Truths” and a cool existential swing on “Broken Bone Blues.” These songs and others seem primed for covering by a new generation of free weirdos, including the rambunctious “Guru Blues” (“I can't find anyone to fuck me in the ass”), the solemn “Father Death Blues.” It is on the demos disc, too, that the bed bugs and speed freaks of “NY Blues” provide a through-line to the hyper-local topicality of contemporary East Side songwriter Jeffrey Lewis, fitting in comfortably next to “Scowling Crackhead Ian” and other characters of Lewis' recent Manhattan.
Perhaps a more natural and capable freak-folker is Ginsberg's hubby, the poet Peter Orlovsky, who punctuates his ode “You Are My Dildo” with a game jug-band falsetto, and (on the bonus disc) delivers his fellatio-lovin’ “Penny's Farm” rewrite “Feeding Them Raspberries To Grow” in a convincingly olde-tyme warble. At their best, the players in the three different session bands featured here make a spot for Ginsberg and his voice to become one with the music, as on the 1976 outtake “Slack Key Guitar,” an anti-colonial nu-exotica lullaby that recalls a more chilled-out Van Dyke Parks.
For its numerous charms, Ginsberg's sexual openness continues to make *First Blues *an eyebrow-raising experience three-and-a-half decades after its recording. Nor is it without its complications. “Everybody's just a little bit homosexual whether they like it or not,” Ginsberg sings on the first line of the provocative and Fug-ly “Everybody Sing,” but “everybody” in the song's cosmology doesn't seem to include females. (Orlovsky is a bit more equal-opportunity.) As in his visionary poetry, all of Allen Ginsberg is on display during the the two-and-a-half hours of recordings, intentional and not, but always (and still) vital. As responsible for pop music's turn to poetry as anyone, Allen Ginsberg had more than a few songs of his own.
