Subduing the
Demons in America
An Interview with John Giorno

By Bill DeNoyelles

Part 6

Dial A Poem
“When I got back from Morocco in 1966 Rob Raushenberg and I were lovers. In September-October 1966 he did a piece called EAT– Experiments in Art and Technology. I was the camera man, I wasn’t a performer or artist. During this whole extended period of EAT there was this short little, round straight guy coming around. Bob said to me ‘You should really get to know this guy, he’s invented this incredible gadget.’ Which was the Synthesizer. It was Bob Moog.

“As a poet I was experimenting with these sound pieces I had done with Brion. Moog lived up near Ithaca in a place called Trumansburg. I took a Greyhound bus up there. I had recorded a poem and brought it up there. He had 2 store fronts in one those 19th century buildings. They were immaculately clean and this was his factory where he and half a dozen other people manufactured these things called Moog Sythesizers. At that point nobody was using them. This was around 1967. I went up twice a year for the next year or two. In ’67 I seem to remember the Rolling Stones had bought one and were playing with it in the studio, not knowing how to use it. By the time ’68 came everyone had it on their record.

“The last time I went up to Trumansburg, Bob Moog was hugely famous, hugely rich. I spent time at his house. He and his wife were fighting. A month later they were separated. A year after that he had sold his company to some big corporation. By 1970 he was out!

“Those were the steps–from Brion Gysin to Bob Raushenberg who was working with artists and technology to Bob Moog and the synthesizer. It changed every year from working with Brion to Bob Moog. Every time I worked with Bob Moog I’d see what I did right, take that into a different direction and drop off what didn’t really work.

“I then discovered that there was an electronics commune in upstate New York called ZBS outside Saratoga. It was an old farmhouse. I would go up to do endless, elaborately complicated sound compositions using my words and performance. We’d spend weeks on them. I’d also master the [Dial-A-Poem] records up there at the same time.

“What happened was that Dial-A-Poem became hugely successful. The idea of an LP was a natural progression, keeping in mind the concept of a new audience for poetry. I couldn’t get anyone to produce it. In those years the record companies were dumping money out of their offices, giving it to anybody who wanted to produce a record. Even though I was sort of famous I couldn’t convince any of them to do poetry. It was not rock n’ roll. One day I get a phone call from a guy named John Hart, who was the vice president of the Record Club of America, saying ‘We would like you to make a selection for one of our months.’ I couldn’t believe it! I had already given up on the idea. That became the first record that came out in 1972.

“The sound poems in 1965 were the first real major things I had done. It was also happening at a time when other friends of mine were musicians like Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass. People who used tapes and tape loops. They were all young and nobody was famous yet. They were part of this extended art and poetry scene. I had my eye on them since I was working with loops. I was looking at what they were doing in comparison even though it was a totally different world than mine.

“I just went step by step and started doing these [poetry] records. The idea being that there’s nothing in the cliché that poetry is boring. Poetry isn’t boring. There were endless venues. Everything you did everyday of your life was a possible venue for poetry. The telephone was a venue and that’s what started . All we ever did then was listen to rock n’ roll records on the phonograph in our living rooms. That was the impetus as a venue. The venue being a living room and the audience 2 or 5 people listening to a phonograph.

“We did these records and knew enough to send them out to college radio stations. There were three or four hundred stations out across the country. Places like San Francisco, Iowa City and Ann Arbor, Michigan. What happened was that people were playing the cuts they liked like a pop record. If they liked William Burroughs they’d put that on or whoever they liked. They would not put everybody on. We’d get the play lists and see that we were in heavy rotation for some cuts. In 1973 and ’74 there were hundreds of thousands of people listening. In Ann Arbor the college audience was twenty to twenty five thousand people. In the Bay Area with KPFA the audience was hundreds of thousands. A million people began listening to poetry.

“There were 40 records in that time period. Every year we put out 2 or 3 records. Some were double records. I also figured out how to put cuts together. Juxtaposing soft/loud, bitter/sweet, hard/soft to make it really attractive. You could take something that was not too high energy but a great poem and put it between two different kinds of poems. People would listen to it because it was coming out of something quite strong thus making it noticeable. I would play around for years and years on how to construct these albums and make them more like performance. In the early seventies I thought of poetry as serious. It was not entertainment in my mind. Entertainment was about a superficial quality like pop records. Poetry was about wisdom. I was using the venues of the pop culture but it was not entertainment, it was really wisdom. I realized in 1976 I was part of the entertainment industry and I suddenly relaxed. I was entertaining people, making them relax and have a good time. When one is relaxed one is able to receive the wisdom of the poet.

“I kept taking it in different directions. By 1981 I seemed to have done every possible permutation, every possible thing I had wanted to do. I felt I didn’t want to do it anymore, so I put my first band together. I pulled together some friends. At one time Lenny Kaye [Patti Smith Group] was in the band and CP Roth. I ended it in 1989. I loved performing but it was too complicated. There were 5 guys with a band leader who was a keyboard player so there were always at least 3 synthesizers. Every time we’d travel there would be all this equipment. We got paid well not being rock n’ roll stars but by the time I paid everyone I was either broke or breaking even. After doing that for seven years I thought ‘ENOUGH!’ I now do
solo performances.

“That long breath and breath control thing I use didn’t initially come from Buddhism or sitting. It didn’t arise out of meditation. The breathing evolved another way because I had been a performer for many years. I realized, through the nature of performing, that if you took a deep breath, held it in the lower part of the stomach and pushed it down you made a big bellows. The air down there creates heat. Then you work the air to the top part of the lungs. You’re holding air down low and letting it out slowly. I didn’t know what I was doing. In performing for so many years I developed a little technique of generating heat with the power of the words coming with the breath, letting it all out and swaying. I developed all these little subtleties, all non-verbal. I never talked about it to anyone or acknowledged it myself.

“As a Tibetan Buddhist in the late seventies I learned there are many meditations in Tantric or Vajrayana Buddhism and one of them is Tummo. You generate your own heat. Like yogis who can sit in the snow with just a little cotton thing on sweating. This is similar to what I had stumbled upon with taking the deep breath and holding it at the bottom of the lungs creating heat.

“When I was in retreat doing Phowa practice I realized I had stumbled upon this by accident. I realized ‘This is very similar.’ It’s a basic Buddhist tenet that the mind is already enlightened. You just have to bring it back to its original nature. Doing non-taught practice, which I do not recommend, I stumbled across these things out of desperation. I discovered these things that were basic to our mind, basic to our nature. They are inherent in one’s body and mind so that one may stumble upon them. I just sort of took it from there, perfected my performance style and developed myself a little more skillfully.

“My performance movements are not choreographed. The spastic quality came about from the energy just coursing through my body. I created this energy through my body by the breathing exercises. In performance it exploded. I didn’t particularly care if I had control over my body or not.

“Joe Cocker really is spastic. I became spastic through the madness of my performing. It was spontaneous.

“People like me and Patti Smith were just poets who performed. Then it became an art form called Performance Art– which was OK. Performance Art has vanished, it doesn’t exist anymore. It dissolved itself. Some of it was great, I guess.”

Part 1: Subduing the Demons in America
Part 2: Money, School and Drug
Part 3: Balling Buddha
Part 4: Up Against the Wall
Part 5: The Process
Part 6: Dial A Poem
Part 7: Grasping At Emptiness
Part 8: Kissing, Intimacy and Affection

Pornographic Poem/John Giorno