Playing for: Alan Ginsburg

The evening of the event, April 8, 1967, the band I was a part of at the time, the Nashville Blues Group, started playing our usual raucous set starting at 7:00 pm. After a while, we saw Ginsburg arrive with his partner in tow. We knew he was on the Vanderbilt campus for the “Impact Symposium” but it was still exciting to see him walk into our gig. He was wearing what appeared to be a buckskin shirt and trousers with tiny bells attached to his shoes, so each step he took produced a small tinkling sound. He listened for a bit and then, when we took a break, he came jingling up the aisle at Neely Auditorium.

Ginsburg introduced himself and then commented, "That was very good, but next time you should try playing some soft body music." Needless to say our second set was just as loud as the first - but Ginsburg was by then long gone.

Years later in San Francisco, I went to the famous City Lights bookstore owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a Beat poet contemporary of Ginsburg, and marveled that I had a singular opportunity to meet an icon of the 1950s and 60's Beat literary movement.