Beat poet helped create early hippie movement Michael McClure, an original Beat poet living in California's rustic Oakland Hills, is 78 years old. This week, he declared his fiery passion for writing to be as strong as ever.
"It gets brighter," he said with a laugh. On Tuesday and Wednesday, McClure makes his first public appearances in Victoria, hosted by Ekstasis Editions. One of his multitudinous claims to fame is having been one of five poets who read at the San Francisco's Six Gallery in October of 1955. This reading is regarded as seminal in the launch of the Beat literary movement. That night, Allen Ginsberg delivered an excerpt from his new (and immediately notorious) poem, Howl. McClure read For the Death of 100 Whales, inspired by a report of American soldiers who, feeling bored, shot an entire pod of killer whales while stationed in Iceland. The Gallery Six event was McClure's first public reading. He recalls it as a foggy fall night in San Francisco. The audience was diverse: an elderly college prof, young anarchists, conscientious objectors, avantgarde painters, poets. "Jack Kerouac was yelling 'Go, go go!' in the audience," McClure said. "He was running out to get gallons of wine from a winemaker who made it in his garage, two blocks away." The boho Beat writers were, among other things, precursors to the hippie movement. In the name of art and joie de vivre, they gleefully smashed through the restrictive Ozzie and Harriet conventions of the 1950s. Upstanding citizens were scandalized; obscenity trials abounded. I always wonder whether participants in such history-making events instantly realize their significance. McClure says, in the case of the Gallery Six reading, he did. "We had all decided to put our toe on the line and stand for it. We knew that something had happened. There was no doubt." When it comes to hip happenings of the 1950s and beyond, McClure's seeming omnipresence rivals that of Forrest Gump. He wrote the song Mercedes Benz, made famous by Janis Joplin. He became a key figure in San Francisco's 1960s counterculture. He was buddies with Kerouac, Dennis Hopper, Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan (Dylan gave McClure the autoharp he used to compose Mercedes Benz). He was at Ken Kesey's famous party with the Hell's Angels, later written about by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In fact, McClure helped a Hell's Angel -Freewheelin' Frank -write a book about his life. In the 1978 concert film The Last Waltz, McClure is on stage reciting Chaucer. Today, McClure is as busy as ever writing and reciting. He occasionally delivers his poetry backed by keyboardist Ray Manzarek of The Doors. On Tuesday, at Merlin's Sun Theatre, he'll screen a documentary about his life, Abstract Alchemist of Flesh, as well as a film about Haight-Ashbury in the '60s. The event starts 7: 30 p.m. at 1983 Fairfield Rd. (seating is limited). On Wednesday at 7: 30 p.m. at Hermann's Jazz Club, McClure reads from his most recent books. Tickets for each event are $20 at the door and $15 in advance, obtainable from www.ekstasiseditions.com. In Abstract Alchemist of the Flesh, McClure relates the story behind Mercedes Benz. He used to sing it as a lark with friends. These included actor Peter Coyote and Emmett Grogan, founder of the radical street theatre troupe The Diggers. One day Coyote and Grogan, shooting pool with Janis Joplin in New York, merrily launched into Mercedes Benz. Joplin liked it. Grogan then informed McClure that the singer planned to perform the song. "I said, 'All right.' I don't care," McClure told me on the phone. Sure enough, Joplin contacted him to ask if this was OK. McClure asked her to sing it for him over the telephone, which she did. Then he played his version, sitting on the his stairwell and accompanying himself on autoharp. "She said, 'I like my version more.' I said, 'Well, I like my version.' " McClure didn't think much about it until the release of the posthumous release of Joplin's Pearl in 1971. The album (which also co-credits Joplin and Bob Neuwirth as the song's composers) includes her now-famous a cappella version of Mercedes Benz. McClure figures it was included as a sort of throwaway, an after thought. And does he like the recording? "Oh sure," he said, chuckling. "Who wouldn't?" One senses McClure could weave yarns for weeks. He knew Kerouac well -so well, in fact, that McClure appears as the character Pat McClear in Kerouac's Big Sur. The 1962 novel is a thinly veiled account of Kerouac's welllubricated antics with Beat buddies such as Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder. "I had very deep feeling about Jack from the first time I saw him," McClure said. "Jack was extremely handsome. Probably the only one I'd met at that time who was even more self-conscious than myself." Time for one more tale? How about the time McClure first met Jim Morrison of The Doors. They encountered one another in a New York bar. It was not friendship at first sight. "We disliked each other enormously at first. We both had long hair to our shoulders and leather pants on. And then we started drinking Johnnie Walker and talking about poetry. We become very deep friends." - - - On Feb. 11, Michael McClure will make two appearances in Vancouver. The first is for a 2 p.m. screening of Abstract Alchemist of Flesh at WAC Bennett Library, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby. At 8 p.m., McClure will read at Simon Fraser University's downtown campus, Room 1700, 515 West Hastings St. [email protected] © Copyright (c) The Victoria Times Colonist -- http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Beat+poet+helped+create+early+hippie+movement/4232616/story.html Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. 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