The Boy Who Cried Freebird by Mitch Myers Read Free Book Online Page A

Allen’s career as a singer, Smith showed his colleague patience and understanding, supplying Ginsberg’s ritualistic display at the Chelsea with the dignity it deserved.
    â€œThe role of the documentarian is often restrictive because of the attention to detail, the mechanics, or just removing your own ego,” said historian Kubernik. “To help govern the person you are recording, you go into a secondary position. Harry was willing to do it. He put himself below the title to benefit the attraction.”
    According to Ginsberg, Harry Smith disagreed with some of the choices that Ann Charters made when compiling the album. Why Smith himself wasn’t able to complete the task of editing the album is yet another cause for deliberation.
    Harry’s relationship with Folkways honcho Moe Asch was perpetually strained, but Asch respected Smith’s archival efforts and used his understanding of art and ceremony to great effect. Like Smith, Ginsberg also had an appetite for collecting, and his own record collection reflected a deep love for music, especially the blues.
    â€œWhen you collect, you put disparate things together in relation with other things and you get new results from that,” said John Feins. “Harry loved to determine patterns in things. I think he derived meaning and insight from patterns that he saw in things that he collected or examined. Easter eggs, Indian rugs, paper airplanes, he would be interested in all the different forms and make great leaps of geniusthanks to the juxtaposition and understanding of patterns and synchronicity and the overlapping of things.”
    One thing is certain: We no longer ignore Smith’s role as a cosmic documentarian. His preternatural musical tastes and hyper-informed critical judgments made him a cultural Nostradamus whose anticipatory discoveries and polymath predictions are unfolding still.
    Harry’s earnest contextual framework fueled Allen’s gay vaudevillian prose attack, transforming poetic diatribes into semimelodic riddles, verbal instructions, joyous celebrations, and coherent protests, all captured in real time.
    So, First Blues is the meeting of two friends, one poet reborn and one great rememberer, who both found the ways and the means of making the extramusical musical.
    So much for nothing.

THE POWER OF TOWER
    I was strolling through Tower Records at Fourth and Broadway in Manhattan one night when the strangest thing happened. It was closing time and I was in search of a gift for my parents. I was the only one browsing the classical section and I guess the Tower employees were in a big hurry because before I could get out, they locked up the store and accidentally left me inside.
    Now, you’d imagine that being trapped overnight in such a store would be a dream come true for a music fanatic, but I was stuck in the classical section and couldn’t get anywhere near the stuff that I really liked.
    There I was, sitting on the floor, surrounded by thousands of CDs. But instead of digging around the vintage reggae or sampling the latest jazz, I was forced to amuse myself by examining the works of Bach and Chopin.
    Just as I was getting depressed and a little uncomfortable, I looked up at a wall display and couldn’t believe my eyes. There, in the classical section, was a Sonic Youth album that I had never seen before. The cover was psychedelic and the words Goodbye 20th Century peekedthrough a spiraling purple vortex. Upon closer examination, I saw that this double disc was on the band’s own SYR label.
    So, I snuggled up to one of the listening stations and put on the headphones. Then I closed my eyes and leaned back against a shelf filled with Beethoven’s Ninth. “Finally,” I thought. “Some rocking entertainment to help me make it through the night.”
    Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The music didn’t rock; as a matter of fact, it didn’t roll, either. It turned out