My brother accidentally stumbled into Ginsberg’s office in Boulder one time and was quite star struck. He would have just exploded if WSB happened to be in there, too. Love Howl, without it even being my generation. What did you ask about?? Cool story.
If you catch the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, you’ll see how cool Ginsberg was in real life. That is, Ginsberg’s stage time gets dramatically cut, and he spends the extra time helping moves amps and such. He and Peter basically become roadies. I’m humbled just thinking about it. That was long after Howl and subsequent fame.
Yes, I’ve seen Don’t Look Back more than twice. When I met Ginsberg and Burroughs they were seated on a couch at a happy hour like fish out of water and very few approached them, a few students, no staff. I told each of them that I had read several of their works (I had, I got to them via reading Kerouac) and I asked them if they ever edited their work–I had written a few stories and found that they needed editing but that it was difficult to do, I was too close to them. William sort of said “No” and returned to staring into his drink. Allen liked the question and walked me through a process whereby he tried not to edit, read the pieces over and over, and with difficulty at times edited them. He said that some edits were easy because literally they didn’t “sound right” or the section made another section have less impact. Some edits he really struggled over and he asked someone else to help him by reading and commenting and about half the time he was advised to edit and he generally would.
I met Ravi Shankar once, he was the cousin of my roommate Faizullah Guhr at Waterford Kamhlaba school in M’Babane, and he came to my very bunk shared with Faizullah to visit. The other two important famous persons I met–briefest of briefly, official functions, one an embassy visit the other a visit to my state school, both meetings in Addis Ababa–were Hubert Humphrey and Haile Selassie.
Met quite a few bands years ago when I drove a limo for the company that took care of the transportation needs of musicians that were booked by Feline Productions. Can’t say it really changed how I felt about their music one way or the other. But the two bands that stood out the most for being super friendly, were Def Leppard and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The members of both bands were down to earth, and fun to hang out with.
That’s awesome - I know a guy who’s a roadie for Metallica - he told me he worked a Def Leppard tour once and said pretty much the same thing about them