This is the music film for Bob Dylan's great song, "Subterranean Homesick Blues," from the great Bringing It All Back Home album (the one that has the cover of the young lady in red stretched out on the couch, behind Dylan).
If you watch the video, you probably will mostly focus on Dylan holding the cue cards, but the guy on the left, who can be seen gesturing and talking, and who walks across the scene with his cane at the end, is Allen Ginsberg, the famous poet.
In his book Coincidance, Robert Anton Wilson writes about Ginsberg in the piece "The Poet As Defense Early Warning Radar System." RAW refers to Ginsberg as "our major living American poet."
Ginsberg is best known for his poem "Howl," and (in the comments) Van Scott mentioned in yesterday's post reading in April Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems.
Rasa is his days as a local star on NPR radio in Massachusetts.
Rasa writes with some news about the Hilaritas Press podcast:
"I just updated the Hilaritas Press Podcast page. Zach West hosted a podcast in the past, and we are working on a new one for him to host that Mike thought would be cool for Zach to cover. More on that soon!
"Meanwhile, I added Zach to the sidebar info on our podcast page as a Guest Host. I also added some info for me. I removed the notes for our previous engineer, Ryan Reeves. He did a wonderful job for us during the first two years of the podcast, but got a new job that didn’t leave him time to continue. I’ve taken over the editing role for both audio and video presentations of the podcast. [I also notice that Eric Wagner is now listed on the page as a "guest host" -- Tom.]
"Just as a bit of humor, the photo of me on the page is from my first audio job fresh out of college, working as a board operator at an NPR affiliate, WFCR, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Starting out there, I first was given the worst shift, turning on the station at 5am, and running the station's first 8 hours of programming. I soon got promoted to a better shift, and then I became a producer of short features that ran during our local portion of the network's broadcast of All Things Considered. At one point I created a children’s program, that was hosted by talented 12 to 14 year olds from the community. The program was called KidsWord. It was pretty cool and innovative at the time. This was in the 1980s.
"At one point I was the newscaster for local news during the All Things Considered broadcast. Because of that exposure, I was amused that people who heard me talking at the grocery store or at a cafe, would recognize my voice. The station covered all of Western New England, and a couple times in Hartford, Connecticut, people heard me somewhere and said, 'Hey, don’t you do the news on WFCR?' That was fun and surprising to have some local minor fame!
"A while back I found an old tape of an interview I did with Allen Ginsberg and put it up on YouTube… That was exciting. Allen was really nice. He requested I send him a copy of the feature on cassette after it aired, and in return, I got a really nice note of thanks from him. [Note that in Coincidance, Robert Anton Wilson calls Ginsberg "our major living American poet -- Tom.]
"BTW, my name at the time was Rick Casreen. Casreen was a name my wife at the time and I made up for our married name. That name got me in a little bit of trouble when I was still using that name and I traveled to Israel for a job I had later for Hampshire College doing PR work for the college. In Amsterdam, before I got on my flight to Tel Aviv, I was pulled into a room with Israeli security and questioned about the purpose of my visit to Israel. They were suspicious, it turned out, because 'Casreen' sounded just like the name of a city in Tunisia (Kasserine) that was famous during WWII for a battle where allied troops didn’t fair well. After a good half hour of grilling, they figured out I was not a threat!"
YouTube video for Allen Ginsberg at the Iron Horse Cafe – 1986 Northampton, Massachusetts March 21, 1986
Rasa once interviewed famed poet Allen Ginsberg for National Public Radio, although in those days Rasa wasn't "Rasa."
Rasa explains, "I worked for the National Public Radio affiliate for Western New England, WFCR, as a program producer. In 1986, Allen Ginsberg came to the popular Iron Horse Cafe, and I recorded his performance and interviewed him in the green room afterwards.
"After the interview, he asked that I send him a copy of the interview once it was edited and aired. I did, and soon after I got a very nice letter from him – some nice words about the feature, and a general bit of well-wishing.
"Notes:
"– My name in 1986 was Rick Casreen – currently it's Richard Rasa.
"– This video is not monetized, the graphics are all borrowed from the good Lord Google.
"– I digitized the audio from a deteriorated old cassette, and tried to fix up the sound as well as possible. I'm guessing the feature is owned by WFCR, but I suspect my old cassette was the only existing copy. We produced a LOT of short features to accompany our news programs, and everything was recorded on expensive 1/2 inch audio tape. Because WFCR was a non-commercial station, with a public radio budget, we would routinely erase tapes once programs aired. Us producers saved our features on cassettes... not the best medium for long term storage."
The RAW connection is explained in Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson (still available as a cheap Kindle you can keep as a reference on your phone): "Wilson wrote an article about Ginsberg in Coincidance and Ginsberg makes a cameo at the 1968 C.E. Democratic convention in Illuminatus!"
The blog post is an excerpt from a new book by Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll. The book claims that Burroughs' cut-up prose technique influenced Dylan's lyrics, and that the "Brother Bill" mentioned in the Dylan song "Tombstone Blues" is a reference to Burroughs.
