Allen Ginsberg‘s 1989 album The Lion for Real — which features some of the poet’s works set to music, and was produced by Hal Willner, featuring performances by Arto Lindsay, Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell, Mark Bingham, Ralph Carney, and others — is getting an expanded reissue on November 3 via Shimmy-Disc. The Lion For Real, Re-born was remixed and remastered by Kramer and features eight additional tracks not on the original album. Pre-order it here and check out the tracklist below.
Along with the announcement comes a video for “To Aunt Rose,” which was scored by Marc Ribot. Ginsberg wrote at the time, “A memory flash 1958 Paris. My favorite Aunt Rose (1909-1940) took care of me weekends when my mother was ill – Books named are my late father Louis Ginsberg’s. It was a big event to publish a volume of poetry those days! Rose Gaidemak died of septicemia. Note delicate music box time travel invention by Marc Ribot.”
Marc shared some memories of working on the track: “In 1988 [?], I scored Ginsberg’s ‘Aunt Rose’ as Allen read his Aunt Rose: haunted by a creaking, repetitive warped record of memory…he, of her old apartment in Newark…shaded in loneliness and repression, and yet somehow the site of an inescapable tenderness. She’s haunted by Hitler/Stalin, the ‘War in Spain.’ I was born in Newark too…my Aunt’s name was Rhoda, but it could have been Rose. I love Allen’s refusal to hide anything in the closet: queerness, cranky old Jewish communist relatives. 1959, when the poem was written: before the words ‘Gay’ and ‘Pride’ had been publicly married, before the first ‘hippie,’ before the New Left was new (let alone old): but its tinted family mirror reflects the coming decades, as Allen chants his way out of mid-century’s dualisms and positivisms…the stale air of his Aunt’s apartment. The poem reads differently in 2023: are we still certain that ‘the war In Spain is over, Aunt Rose.’ Is it really? Who won?'”
The video premieres in this post and you can watch below.
The Lion For Real, Re-born:
01. The Lion For Real
02. **Bricklayer
03. Refrain
04. **Cosmopolitan Greeting
05. **Night Gleam
06. **Squeal
07. Cleveland, The Flats
08. Complaint of the Skeleton to Time
09. The Shrouded Stranger
10. Stanzas – Written at Night in Radio City
11. Guru
12. Gregory Corso’s Story
13. **Pull My Daisy
14. The End
15. **Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox
16. Xmas Gift
17. Sunset
18. To Aunt Rose
19. Scribble
20. Hum Bom!
21. Kral Majales
22. **Bai Juyi – Part 7
23. **Don’t Grow Old
24. C’mon Jack (X-Rated Version) [Digital Download Only]
25. C’mon Jack (Radio-Friendly Version) [Digital Download Only]
26. Ode to Failure [Digital Download Only]
** 8 tracks not included in the original release