as much a tribute to the spirit of collaboration as an artful, affecting presentation of Ginsberg's work.
The Lion for Real is a virtual Ginsberg primer, touching on all his major themes: pacifism, tolerance, the interfusion of the physical and the spiritual, the grappling with death. The intensity of these poems – drawn from the whole of Ginsberg's career – is consistently heightened by the musical accompaniment. "The Shrouded Stranger," already a frenetic, nightmarish poem, is made more frightening by the railroad rhythms of Marc Ribot's composition. "Kral Majales," a 1965 poem about Ginsberg's expulsion from Czechoslovakia, becomes, with the music of Mark Bingham and Ralph Camey's reeds, a bardic freedom cry. In the cheerful "Ode to Failure," Michael Blair's syncopated arrangement matches Ginsberg's undaunted, confessional catalog: "I have not yet stopped the Armies of entire Mankind in their march toward World War III/I never got to Heaven, Nirvana, X, Whatchamacallit, I never left Earth/I never learned to die."
Beyond those pleasing correspondences, The Lion for Real allows collaboration of a deeper sort, that of the older Ginsberg with his younger self. As read by the mature poet, "Refrain" (1948), "Complaint of the Skeleton to Time" (1949) and the elegiac "To Aunt Rose" (1958) – all playing on the theme of mortality – are different poems than they were when written. "The Lion for Real" (1958), about a mystical vision Ginsberg had when he was twenty-two, resonates eerily from his perspective now at age sixty-four. "Eat me or die!" the young poet cries to the half-worshiped, half-dreaded Divine Lion who has taken over his apartment. The lion, in exiting, "pushed the door open and said in a gravelly voice, 'Not this time Baby – but will be back again.'"
On The Lion for Real, Ginsberg fortunately took the advice Marianne Faithfull once gave him – "Maybe you shouldn't sing." He leaves the music to "the honorable musicians" and shows off instead his talents for survival and recitation. The result is a riveting blend of spoken word and progressive sound. (RS 573)
MARTHA BUSTIN
