Peter Case shares two new releases for Bandcamp Friday

Singer/songwriter Peter Case is releasing two new recordings including some spoken word material and a few demos. 

Writes Peter Case...

Two new releases on Bandcamp Friday! "Bomblight Prayer Vigil," a spoken/word/ country-blues songcycle (check it out here), and “I Didn’t Build This World, But I Sure Can Tear It Down,” 15 tracks of demos and unreleased songs (have a look here). 

"Most of these tracks for I Didn't Build This World, But I Sure Can Tear It Down" were recorded as demos in the early to mid 2000s at Stan Ridgway’s legendary but short lived Lumberyard Studio, on Pico Blvd in LA. But in any event, the songs point toward "WIG!" and the Grammy-nominated "Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John" album. As usual I’m obsessed here with country blues, singing a cover of Honey Boy Edwards, and Stacker Lee, the way my mentor Michael Wilhelm showed it to me back in 1974. Let me add that “First Light” was recorded live at McCabe’s in 2004."When the Catfish is in Bloom" was recorded mid-2000’s by Kevin Jarvis for a John Fahey tribute album. And extra mention and super THANKS to Greg Smith aka Blind Pig Press for the artwork!"

Adds artist Greg Smith "Hey folks—the six-colour linoblock that i did way back in 2017 depicting Peter Case is now the cover for one of a pair of new releases out today! The print is entitled ‘Peter Case Sees a Broken and Troubled America and Tries to Heal it with Song.’ I’m not sure anyone can heal America, but after seeing him in March, i know he’s trying! I added the type for the cover (the font is my own and taken from the picket signs when we were last on strike not long after the print was finished).

Watch Peter perform "Beyond The Blues" with Sid Griffin and "Entella Hotel" solo, a Tea With Tosh segment from way back in 1987 and some memories of busking with Allen Ginsberg outside of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco just because. 

Allen Ginsberg's personal archive revealed in new book, Material Wealth

Material Wealth, compiled by Pat Thomas, offers a peek at the many photos (that's Robert Frank), flyers, postcards and other items collected by Allen Ginsberg.  

Here's the scoop...

A prolific poet, raconteur, activist, and thinker, Allen Ginsberg was also a prolific collector, meticulously saving letters, postcards, draft notes and manuscripts, photographs and snapshots, appearance bills and rally broadsheets, not only featuring him personally, but also his fellow poets, singers, lovers, writers, journey companions, friends, and agitators. Gathered here publicly for the first time is his personal archive of events and experiences documenting his life as a young man, breakaway poet, expansive spirit, curious intellectual traveler, and relentless enthusiast of the provocative and the profane.

There are hundreds of thousands of items carefully stored and archived at Stanford University’s Allen Ginsberg collection. Counterculture historian Pat Thomas, with the full cooperation of the Allen Ginsberg Estate's Peter Hale, has compiled and annotated a remarkable volume of material, unearthing in the process one astounding find after another. 

The result is a tome of previously unpublished historical paperwork and vintage graphics and photographs and ephemera that promises an unprecedented look inside one of the most prolific poets and agitators of cultural mores of the 20th century.

A poster for Patti Smith’s first-ever poetry reading. Correspondence from Allen’s stint as literary agent for William S. Burroughs and Herbert Huncke. Yippie manifestos from Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and John Sinclair of the MC5. A ticket for a 1974 concert by Bob Dylan & The Band (with Yoko Ono’s phone number scribbled on the back). 

Posters documenting early Beat Generation readings in 1950s San Francisco as well as later ones capturing the 1960s Haight-Ashbury Hippie era.

Allen’s own remarkable journey is here, too: agreements for BBC Radio appearances, schedules of lecture tours, notes for his iconic Kaddish poem. A parody of Howl as ‘Towel’ by Terry Southern. Obsessive letters from fans he never met.

Though this project is so much more than a book of Allen’s photography, the featured images can’t go unmentioned: Allen’s lens finds not only Kerouac, Corso, Burroughs, and other Beats, but also Lou Reed, Van Morrison, Philip Glass, Norman Mailer, Marianne Faithful, Anne Waldman, Iggy Pop, Don Cherry, Robert Frank, and Patti Smith. You’ll find he often scribbled his affection for the subject right on the photo itself.

Packed with ephemera you’ve never seen, Material Wealth is a smorgasbord of things that most of us would have tossed away decades ago: notes to oneself, accounting statements, letters of intent, fan and media crushes, criticisms and critiques, posters of events now considered historical and cultural canon, political manifestos, et al.

These are just a few of the most intriguing items folded between the pages of the one Ginsberg book that has never been—and needed to be done: a visual annotated compendium that reveals one of the unparalleled minds of his generation.

Get a copy of Material Wealth – Mining The Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg by Pat Thomas, published by powerHouse Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster right here. 

R.I.P. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1919-2021

Sadly, literary icon Lawrence Ferlinghetti has died at 101. He reflects on six decades in SF here.

LINKS

L.A. Times – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and titan of the Beat era, dies at 101

Bloomberg – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Beat Poet and Howl publisher, Dies at 101

Peter Case, Paul Luc @ The Dakota Tavern, Thursday

If you don't see Peter Case perform, you miss the amazing stories he tells between his great songs.