Anyone that grew up (as your correspondent did) in the Bay Area during the 60s-slash-70s that also happened to be possessed of an artist consciousness or, more pointedly, that of an aspiring writer, could not escape the fevered backyard presence of the ‘Beat Generation’ and the fearless iconoclastic fervor that served as their eternal legacy. Not that their influence was confined to that particular West Coast Babylon – the nation as a whole was in its grip for a brief if everlasting moment in the late 50s (witness Kerouac intoning naked jazz riffs of the cerebral godhead kind on Steve Allen’s primetime variety hour) – but the City by the Bay, serving as a kind of de facto headquarters via Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, was the place where the original energy metastasized and became the guiding light it’s continued to be for burgeoning writers in the late teen, early twenties clutches of doomed American romanticism. And while not himself a San Francisco son (Jersey, baby, Jersey), no one commanded more of a transcendent perch inside that entire mythos than Allen Ginsberg.  Unapologetically both gay and openly spiritual in a way that unavoidably made nearly all of straight vanillan America squirm with … Continue reading STEREO EMBERS EXCLUSIVE VIDEO/TRACK PREMIERE – “The End” from the Shimmy-Disc Reissue of Allen Ginsberg’s 1989 ‘The Lion For Real’ LP