The best minds of your generation
| November 1st, 2008
Gregory Corso has always been—and for whatever reason, will always be—the belabored and underappreciated poet way out on the fringe of what once was the Beat mainstream. The simple fact that he was never acknowledged as being important isn’t likely to change, even after reading this first-person narrative by Oscar Back taken from the long and gone, gone, gone Eat it Alive:
I guess in the Sixties they called them happenings. As it happened, a friend of mine, Charlie Ross, managed to get the Blue Note to open its doors on a Sunday night, July 12, 1981. The scheduled event was a reading by Gregory Corso, with Allen Ginsberg and the Shambala Glass Chicken Rock and Roll Band. What did happen was the result of the fashionably tardy half-hour delay, a crowd left to warp in the rain, and several poets in search of an audience.
Charlie met my friend Tom and I at 6:30 P.M. so we’d have time to set things up before 8:00, when the doors were scheduled to open. Advance tickets had been selling for $2 apiece, and by the time of the show about a hundred were sold according to a last minute phone tally. In the alley behind the club we pounded on the steel door. Tom, a Michigander versed in cloud augury declared, “Looks like rain.” The manager, dressed in contractual black and white, opened the door and apologized to us for not having the lights on. The switch was thrown and the manager enlightened Charlie as to how the club would handle the gate, absolutely no one under 21 would be admitted, refunds for advance holders would be given out of the till, don’t wreck anything. Charlie, nodding like a foreigner being given directions to Bisbee, Arizona, assented with a final, “Okay. Whatever you say.” He then appointed me Technical Advisor in Charge of Crowd Placement. “You’re the boss,” I said as I took the chairs down from the table tops.
”Not quite, big fella,” admonished the manager. “I’m the boss.”
The Best Minds of My G-g-g-g-generation: An Evening with Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg [International Forum for Literature and Art]
