THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
874) Tina & David Meltzer — “Hungry”
Yesterday I featured a lovely song off of Serpent Power’s sole LP, and today we turn to Tina & David’s solo LP, not 69’s Poet Song, but rather the one that stayed in the can for decades. “Hungry” is a rollicking romp about being hungry . . . . “all your life”. As Eileen Hack says, it is a “[w]ry, raga-infused track from Green Morning, an album recorded in 1969 which was never released. Gentle, bittersweet psychedelic-tinged folk-rock tunes.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SwXMyHVTk4)
“I’m standing before the supermarket drooling on my shoe . . . .”
Patrick Lundborg adds:
An obscure follow-up to the Serpent Power LP by the main duo . . . . is an unreleased album from the Meltzers . . . recorded at substantial cost for Capitol in 1970, but due to producer Vic Briggs getting fired shortly after, it never went beyond the acetate stage. Green Morning continues the path from Poet Song, but favors the rock music over David’s poetry readings . . . . Clearly superior to Poet Song, [it] must rank as one of the best unreleased albums cut by anyone in 1970, and will dazzle any fan of the Meltzers’ earlier album.
The Acid Archives: The Second Edition
John McMurtrie wrote of David Meltzer upon his death that:
Fellow Bay Area Beat poet Diane di Prima called Mr. Meltzer “one of the secret treasures on our planet. Great poet, musician, comic; mystic unsurpassed, performer with few peers.” His friends Greg and Keiko Levasseur wrote . . . that “We have lost a great poet, scholar, musician, and jazz historian.[“]… Mr. Meltzer wrote more than 40 volumes of poetry . . . . Lawrence Ferlinghetti . . . wrote that Mr. Meltzer was “one of the greats of post-World War II San Francisco poets and musicians. He brought music to poetry and poetry to music!”
Raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Mr. Meltzer got an early start as an artist; he entered a competition at age 11 with a poem about the New York subway system. “I owe my own fluency with language to Brooklyn,” Mr. Meltzer said . . . . “Everyone talked about everything, from the Dodgers to the revolution.” . . . Pushed into exile in California,” as he put it, living “as an alienated teen in L.A.,” Mr. Meltzer met artists who fueled his creativity. By age 20, he was recording poetry with jazz musicians in Los Angeles…. [He] was the youngest poet to be featured in Donald Allen’s anthology “The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.” He also wrote fiction. “I wrote 10 novels for a company run by gangsters,” Mr. Meltzer told The Chronicle. “The books were pornographic and political, too. I call them ‘agit-smut.’ … From 1977 to 2007, he taught in the Humanities and Graduate Poetics programs at the New College of California in San Francisco.
https://www.chron.com/books/article/David-Meltzer-Beat-Generation-poet-and-musician-10830409.php
Pay to Play! The Off the Charts Spotify Playlist! + Brace for the Obscure 60s Rock Merchandise
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