Terry Riley and the Beat Generation? Terry Riley and the San Francisco Renaissance? Yes, why not?

I recall my pilgrimages to San Francisco and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books in my earliest twenties, when my new friend Dellaree Gibson had left her shop assistant job at City Lights to move to Sweden via a short sojourn at New York City's Max's Kansas City on Park Avenue. I was a longhaired Swedish adventurer in white jeans coming in on a Greyhound twenty years after the major show-down (in the 1970s), springing into a world of life-deciding discoveries of poetry and prose, music and inter-continental love stories…

The world expanded around me at the speed of thought, at the speed of emotion, at the speed of consciousness. I traveled the trails of Jack Kerouac, I screamed with joy in nocturnal daredevil readings of Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL and cried in confusion inside Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s train-track-measured Assassination Raga towards two holes in the ground in Washington that they had dug in the 1960s, and I traveled backwards and forwards in time (talking with Petrarca and Tasso and some of the stingy gods at Mount Olympus) until I discovered the insignificance of time and I dropped time, lost time along the way, and I’m not lonesome for time.
My heart tolled in my body like a bell in a cathedral, and with the dying Goethe I cried for MORE LIGHT! (Karlheinz misunderstood this!)

When I traveled Terry Riley’s Persian Surgery Dervishes for the first time, and A Rainbow In Curved Air and Untitled Organ, the sensation was the same, that Beat feeling, Eastern spices and Western ingenuity, the will to give up and leave behind: to come home, come home! This was apparent in the Beat Generation; this was all clear in Terry Riley’s musical Revelations – and when he pulled Sri Camel down from the shaman realms and handed it out, justly intonated,, the purity of thought permeated the emotional Beat catharsis and lit it all up from within, in some kind of mind-shattering illumination… and this was and is what it’s all about; a deeper sense of Life As Is, a sudden realization that I’d asked all the wrong questions before: precipitous Enlightenment!

Now, when Michael McClure and Terry Riley bestows their new collaboration on us, it all comes together and blooms even stronger, in the involuntary amplification of Leonard Cohen lecturing on a DVD about the Bardo Thödol; the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

This handsome set of circumstances even brings in characters like Bob Dylan, because, like he said, he “got in on the tail end of it and it was magic… everyday was Sunday, it’s like it was waiting for me, it left all the rest of everything in the dust” – and he was talking about the effects of the San Francisco Renaissance on him; Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, all that… and later Dylan helped Ginsberg with his William Blake songs.

I know that Terry Riley has been pondering a recording of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues for a long time. There is a recording out there of Allen Ginsberg reciting the complete Mexico City Blues, and Riley was thinking about acquiring the rights to use those recordings for a Sri Moonshine release of Ginsberg’s readings set to his own music. I don’t know what will come of that, if anything, but it shows that Riley has been thinking of Beat poetry collaborations a long time.
Of course, I have to insert that Terry Riley already has scored parts of Mexico City Blues. There is a recording out with his piece June Buddhas, which is a setting of Choruses 204, 216 B and 224 from Mexico City Blues, for chorus and orchestra, from 1991. The style is very different from the Beat performance of I Like Your Eyes Liberty, and I’d suspect a coming complete rendering of Mexico City Blues would be more towards Beat.

The Beat Page carries basic information on Michael McClure. You can for example establish that he was one of the poets at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in 1955. Also visit Michael McClure's homepage. Visit Terry Riley's homepage, where you can buy his music.

This McClure/Riley collaboration is brilliant, though you have to adjust the settings of your playback system some before listening, because McClure’s voice is recorded so extremely close and with the staggering dynamics retained and uncompressed, which might even bust your speakers if you’re not prepared.

Track 1. “Evil. The color of evil is clearly translucent… […] Compassion is born sixty times a second… […] It is not easy being eyes, ears, nose, mouth, tongue and a mind-shape so close to continuous practice…”

Riley provides a lively, quite percussive scenario, full of the colors red and gold and metallic gray, into which McClure steps, likewise lively, chewing his wise-guy words, gesturing, tilting his hat, walking about on stage with a wry smile hidden in the corner of his mouth, the glaring light of a sharp intellect leaving his eyes in showers of white-blue needles that hurt like acupuncture.
Riley manages to sound like a whole little ensemble of post-Cage percussion with a smidgen of Spike Jones and a Partch hobo…
We welcome Beat into the 21st century, brought on by these aging inventors!

Track 2. “Beat. The beat moves on, right into life after life… before birth can flash lightning and turquoise, the dream collapses into the river…”

Here Riley hits it off in a Cage preparedness mimicry, soon emptying bucket after bucket of little blue rubber balls that roll across the table, fall onto the floor, bouncing this way, bouncing that!
As McClure persuades me with his chaggadagga rhythms of speech, Riley gets beboppy, his fingers dancing in smoky club measures across the keyboard, crazily but still in withheld control.

And in the poetry: Dharma rising! (Riley running a prayer bead of Harp of New Albion Circle of Wolves through his hands)

Track 3. “Fog. Fog around rainbows. Rainbow in clear light. Horse heads like eagles…”

And a trickle out of the piano; Riley letting go of the hull och the ship, the body of the instrument, tones trickling through the cracks of disintegration; felt hammers bouncing against strings…

“Eagles like horse heads… zooooooming through stOOOrms!”

McClure speech grinding the words, molding short sentences, verse by verse – FREE speech… caressed and carried by the blue breathables out of the finger dance across ebony, ivory: Snow flurries round the huddling houses of a North Dakota farm… a lone keyboard walk far inside a mood of measures and pitches, fingers, hands – a body, two bodies, and the piano body – hearts tolling inside anatomies like bells in cathedrals…

And in this careful nonchalance: an intense presence, a roaring stillness of here and now: Fog – McClure – Riley. Here. Now. As I listen… and the inertia of listening making its way comfortably into the dreams of sleep, the quilt pulled up under my chin; the sound of a turbo-prop finding its way down through a crack in the heavens, stirring my night with motion and direction… stars above my roof in the northern night…

Track 4. “Each. Each dust speck turning in sunlight is a movie… Caves in the movie reach to the tiny ends of infinity…”

This is the longest piece on the CD, McClure talking in well-measured progressions; hanging bridges across the torrents of a natural chaos, chiseling shapes and figures out of a static granite slab of slumbering phonemes and morphemes, lighting nerve ends in my brain like spirit lighting the sky with stars; my skull is full of stars – God roars in there; time is flowing between the turnstiles; the strings are vibrating light into existence, the strings of theory and the strings of the piano, Terry Riley’s piano; this queen of instruments with her Eastern origins.

Track 5. This tune opens with a yell and a whistle and continues with bouncing percussion, Chinese style…

“Doorways are… Entrance ways are…”

and McClure gets stuuuuuuuuck on a long muddy note, pushing air past his vocal cord, molding the column of fluidity through his oral cavity, brown dust wheezing out on the force of the exhalation which lasts so looooong!

Riley plays his synthesizer percussively, like he once did in Songs for the Ten Voices of the Two Prophets.

McClure swirls and lassos his voice around these percussive groups that march about like intoxicated Romans at arms, shields protecting the quadrants of moving flesh, spears tilted out of the motion, dust rising over the plains. Yes, Michael McClure throws his vocals like boomerangs, and they sail in wide, oval trajectories through the soundscape, returning to the breath from whence they came.

Track 6. The poet comes across like an old wise guru in an ashram, pronouncing the words in utter over-statements, golden roofs shining in the wind, white houses on the shores of the lake, houseboats in Srinigar and steam rising from boiling vegetable stews.
The words turn into leaves of grass swaying in the wind, and into resin slowly melting down the bark of coniferous forests, mighty with untold stories and amnesia.
There is tea to drink, thoughts to be thought and transparent feelings to be felt. The sentiments spill over from former lives into future ones, through the Bardo of this, the Bardo of this…
Riley’s music become spatial here, soaring about, in and out of phase, shifting like the winds of change and the atmospheric pressure, like the sensation of passing through a series of tunnels in a fast train, mouths open to even out the pressure, lights pounding by.
McClure recites two of his Ghost Tantras in this piece; numbers 50 and 51:

Now this is a way of writing that I haven’t seen anywhere else but perhaps in John Cage; intelligible speech inching sideways into the realm of speaking tongues, into the shaman realms of rites and formulas and a language turning on itself, deconstructing and reconstructing itself in a manner that seems to come to McClure with the ease of intuition, with the flow of unspeakables that nonetheless are formulated, albeit in secret syllables! Now this CD is really getting somewhere, into serious downright lingual excitement! The pull is strong, the torque tongue-twisting, as McClure travels into the Cage-land of I Ching Empty Words in his own linguistic vehicle, a soaring mouthful of equal utterances, conceivable or not, clothed in recognizables or unrecognizables – a new way of utilizing sound poetic tools, right there in the meandering thoughtfulness of Riley’s light blue rain, which the sun shines through, creating rainbows of beauty inside the speech, reaching from one side of the mouth to the other inside the dome of the oral cavity, way below the blinding headlights of the eyes that spay across these human circumstances…

Track 7. Riley displays a glaring starshine of overtones, like a carillon, a floating, hovering Glockenspiel, Buddha-blinding, shining from inside everything, like Einstein determinates that everything shines from inside in unfathomable energy: flowers, leaves of grass, grains of sand. SHINING from inside – and McClure speaks from inside this glary, metallic bliss out of matter, out of spirit; words sliding down spheres of shiny metal: thought-spheres, mind-spheres, here-and-now-spheres!

“knowing where everything grows, by rubbing together”

Track 8. McClure picks up the concluding verses of track 6 again, his voice a column of dust in West Texas, swaying across the plains without music for a while:
“I LOVE TO THINK OF THE RED PURPLE ROSE
IN THE DARKNESS COOLED BY THE NIGHT.
We are served by machines making satins
of sounds.”

He continues into other Ghost Tantras, while Riley spreads a relaxed sonorous veil of benign night club atmospheres, smoky, laid-back, beverages in hands, conversations soothing, silk, shiny shoes, a refinement of the business world – very peculiar within earshot of Michael McClure’s morphemes that sign in and sign out of the English language, visiting pre-lingual realms ever so often, no one at the tables noticing as reality takes on a strange hue of otherworldliness – and that which isn’t eternal isn’t very real… while Riley, with imperceptible musical phase shifts slowly brings the whole situation into another aspect of existence, like waking up into a dream… as the harmonies out of his synthesizer take on a shade of near-human vocal properties, spiraling a mantra round and around as it passes through heaven after Swedenborg heaven… and then, the Ghost Tantra that gave the CD is name, number 67:

Track 9. Deep rumbles (the piano), but low like leaves rustling – and McClure completely settled now in a language beyond – or before – language, Riley beginning to hammer a New Albion rhythm in simultaneous beat with Hare Krishna tingles, the music louder than the speech for the first time, bent Eastern percussion smashing and shining, the music picking up intensity, almost falling apart but staying helplessly together in a big slab of stumbling audio inside which McClure offers his ritual smoke-speech, like an Indian medicine-man, a Northern Plains shaman inside his tepee under roaring stars.

A wondrous collection of poems set to music, or musical pieces set to poetry: a stunning merger of the arts! Michael McClure published his first book of verse - Passage - in 1956, and he's just as prolific today, fifty years later, as is Terry Riley, who broke onto the hip scene of the avant-garde in the early 1960s.

I Like Your Eyes Liberty has given me other Michael McClure eyes and ears, other Terry Riley ears and eyes – and certainly a new way of perceiving. This is a very exciting collaboration. This is to soar, to listen, to travel the language, to journey the music – and to be inspired to create, to mold something from that light that shines out of everything, out of everyone!