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ALLEN GINSBERG
so I got 'em mixed up and began humming a tune in my heart on
the bus. Then when I got home I started working with a harmonium
and making a tune for both poems, "The Grey Monk" and the
poem that begins
«Let the Brothels of Paris be opened
To the beautiful queen of France"
which has a line about "Fayette, Fayette, thou art bought and sold
and sold
is
the happy morrow"
Thou gavest the tears of pity away
In exchange for the tears of sor-row
r
I
so it developed from that seed, then finished with working with,
improvising with Daniel Moore of the Tibetan Floating Lotus Opera
Company, who's a good musician and poet.... So we made a couple
of tapes together with him on horns and Don Cherry and Cyril
\
Hefter on trumpets and singing with it. So I worked out a melody
for that one song and went from there home and sort of thought
about it awhile, and then, at the Democratic Convention in '68
in
Chicago, sang that song in Lincoln Park on Sunday of convention
week with John Sinclair as M.C. for like a rock-political concert. So
I was laying down "vain the Sword
&
vain the Bow / They never
can work War's overthrow" and then sat under the trees and sang it
to Phil Ochs also, who was there also at the time. Then when I got
home from the convention after the police-state-shock / raw planet
nerves exposed . . . upstate to a farm where I had a large organ,
pump organ, nineteenth-century keyboard, foot pedal pump, no
electric....
INT:
Church organ.
GINSBERG:
Yeah, I'd already had about five years experience singing
monochordal- with one chord - C chord mostly, or c minor, uh,
mantra
-
mantra
chanting, with Hari Krishna
mantra
and with a
lot of others. Tibetan ones. So I hadn't gone beyond one chord, but
I'd gotten good at variation within one chord. So I began holding the
chord and putting -like "The Grey Monk" is C-seventh, I found
out later. So I began experimenting with other chords besides the C
and improvising tunes on a Uher tape recorder that I had. I was
holding the chord down and then improvising melodies for more of
the Blake. I think the second one I did was "Piping down the Valley
Wild," the introduction, one night. And then I began thinking in
terms of trying to write 'em down but I didn't know how. So Lee
Crabtree, who was one of the early Fugs musicians, came up and
