“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to starry dynamo in the machinery of night…” These immortal lines begin the opening stanza of celebrated beat poet Allen Ginsberg's epic, groundbreaking, clarion-call poem ‘Howl’, whose publisher was cleared of obscenity charges regarding the piece at trial in San Francisco 61 years ago. Today this totemic work, first published in Howl And Other Poems, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books in 1956, is as visionary and inspirational in this current world gone wrong as it was back in those dull conformist post-war years, when the judge declared it as having ‘redeeming social importance’. And then some. Like his buddy Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg was all fired up by bebop and the pair would roam NY and SF jazz clubs digging Parker, Gillespie, Monk and Miles, who Ginsberg referred to as the beat writer's ‘secret heroes’. His stream of consciousness writing style was influenced by bebop's rhythms, cadences and improvised solos, what he called, “composing on the tongue”. He's quoted as saying about ‘Howl’: “Lester Young, actually is what I was thinking about. ‘Howl’ is all ‘Lester Leaps In’.” Now acclaimed as one of the most important pieces of modern American literature, Howl And Other Poems remains an unforgettable, utterly electrifying masterwork, but to hear Ginsberg himself reading it live in 1959 is another planet, akin to being up close at a Parker, Coltrane or Ayler gig. Thankfully the tapes were rolling at the Big Table Reading in Chicago and caught Ginsberg in full flow on ‘Howl’, ‘Sunflower Sutra’ and ‘Kaddish’. Other poems from the book were recorded a few months later at Fantasy studios to complete the album, Allan Ginsberg Reads Howl And Other Poems, which was released by Fantasy in 1959 on red vinyl, and nowadays is a rare collectable. The folks at Craft Recordings have not only produced a beautiful 180gm replica of the red vinyl and original sleeve in this deluxe box set, but added a facsimile reprint of the original Howl book, plus an eight-page LP sized photo booklet with essays by beat poetry scholars Ann Charters and Anne Waldman, a photo of Ginsberg from the 1950s and a replica of the invite to the first reading of ‘Howl’ at the City Lights book store in 1956. Time to listen, learn and howl out loud again.