By Thomas Antonic
The European Tours
Between 1979 and 1983, Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), undoubtedly the most influential and famous American poet of the second half of the 20th century, who would celebrate his 100th birthday on June 3, 2026, toured several times through Europe. He was accompanied by his long-term partner and poet in his own right Peter Orlovsky (1933–2010), and the young musician and poet Steven Taylor (born 1955). In spring 1979 the trio performed in several cities in Italy, then it was on to Paris, London, Rotterdam. In October that same year, Ginsberg, Orlovsky and Taylor started their second tour and performed for three months in England, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Germany. In the Autumn of 1980 they returned to Europe for their third tour. This time, they performed in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.
In an interview I conducted with him, Taylor explained how such a tour came about:
Somebody—let’s say a university somewhere in Europe—would invite Allen for a performance. And so he would keep a file of all these invitations and when it made enough critical mass, we would arrange the tour. We would then buy round trip plane tickets, New York — Amsterdam. Then we would play around the Netherlands. A little bit in Belgium, maybe. Then we would do the tour and what would happen was, if you were bringing us to Graz, what you would need to do was pay 7,000 shillings and three train tickets from wherever we were. So if we were in Innsbruck the next day, the venue in Innsbruck would only have to pay for the train tickets from Graz to Innsbruck, a hotel room, and the cash for our performance. This made it financially possible for a lot of small institutions to bring us in as guests, because they didn’t have to pay the airfare. And so we did that three months at a time sometimes. Just traveling by train all over Europe, just the three of us, Allen, Peter, and myself. Peter handled the luggage and the heavy lifting, I was the secretary and the musician, and Allen was the rock star. It worked great. We had a big bag of books, a harmonium, a guitar, and Peter’s banjo. We would get to the train station. I would jump on the train and find the compartment and open the window. Peter would push the luggage through the window and then we were ready to go. Allen and Peter spent money so fast that I insisted on taking my 33 percent every day. So at the end of the tour I would go home with enough money to live on for almost a year. And Allen and Peter would have nothing. (laughter) That was the life.
The performance in Graz on November 10, 1980
While researching the performances of Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Taylor in Austria in 1980, I contacted the archives of the Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF, the Austrian National Broadcasting Corporation) because I wanted to learn whether there had been any coverage on public television or radio at the time. I was astonished to learn that the entire performance at the Forum Stadtpark Graz on November 10, 1980, had been recorded and that the audio recording was available in the archives. There were two audio tapes with a total length of almost two hours. When I listened to the tapes for the first time, I was also surprised by the amazing audio quality.
The quality of the performance itself is exceptional. Ginsberg and his two companions captivate the audience with a brilliant performance that pulls out all the stops. The show kicks off with three classics, also known from Ginsberg’s album First Blues (1983) and other recordings: “Gospel Noble Truths,” “The Tyger” penned by William Blake, and “Dope Fiend Blues.” What’s unique about the performance of “Gospel Noble Truths” is that Steven Taylor (who had learned a little German in high school) sang the German translation in the pauses between verses to make it easier for the German-speaking audience to understand. This is followed by a solo part by Ginsberg with more recent poems, including the powerful “Plutonian Ode,” at almost eleven minutes the longest work performed in this performance and certainly one of his strongest poems of that period, addressing the serious nuclear threats in times of Cold War.
Thereafter follows a lighthearted set of poems and songs by Peter Orlovsky, with classics such as “America, Give A Shit!” or “Feeding Them Raspberries To Grow,” which is divided into two parts with an interlude of two songs by Steven Taylor. After the block in which his two companions took center stage, and the anti-smoking song “Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don’t Smoke)”, Ginsberg goes back in time and reads from his earliest creative phase, “Pull My Daisy” (1949) and the rarely performed “The Shrouded Stranger” (1949–1951), which, unbeknownst to the poet, had been set to music by the Hungarian group Hobo Blues Band in a translation by Ottó Orbán as “Leples bitang” and had become a hit in Hungary shortly before Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Taylor performed at the Kossuth Klub in Budapest on November 4, 1980, one week before the gig in Graz. Ginsberg ends his second solo part with two of his best-known works from the 1950s, “America” and “Kaddish,” and concludes the evening with “Guru Blues” together with Orlovsky and Taylor.
After recording the performance, the Austrian broadcaster ORF decided not to broadcast it—possibly due to the frequent use of so-called “obscene words,” which in conservative Austria in 1980 were still considered too offensive and provocative. Forty-five years later, ORF kindly granted me permission to publish this historical document. In the meantime, I was also able to get in touch with Rüdiger Wischenbart, who organized the event in Graz as a 24-year-old German studies student at the time. “It happened through friends and acquaintances from the Munich photography scene,” Wischenbart reports in an email. “They had organized an event with Ginsberg at the university and asked me if I would like to do something similar in Graz. Before the internet, email, or fax, it was all a bit improvised, but it worked.” We also have Wischenbart to thank for the audio recording. In 1980, he was already working in the feature editorial department of ORF and had arranged for Franz Neubauer to record the performance, according to Wischenbart “one of the best sound engineers” working at the ORF’s regional studio in Graz at the time. “He thought it was great and really put his heart into it,” recalls Wischenbart, who also conducted a long interview with Ginsberg, parts of which appeared in the Austrian daily newspaper Die Presse.
Forum Stadtpark
The venue in Graz was the Forum Stadtpark, a former café in the city’s largest park in the center, which has been used by artists of all disciplines as a meeting place since 1960, hosting readings, concerts, exhibitions, etc. The venue also published its own literary magazine entitled manuskripte, which established itself in the 1960s as one of the most important mouthpieces for progressive literature throughout the German-speaking world and is still existing today. For a young author who made it into manuskripte, the chances of landing a deal with the biggest publishers were not bad. Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946) and Peter Handke (born 1942), Austria’s only two Nobel Prize winners for literature, grew up in the circle around Forum Stadtpark and manuskripte, as did Wolfgang Bauer (1941–2005), who was the most frequently performed Austrian playwright in the 1970s alongside Jelinek, Handke, and Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989). Like Jelinek, who experimented intensively with the cut-up method in her early work, Bauer was also a great admirer of the Beat Generation. In 1973, he visited the United States with the novelist Gerhard Roth (1942–2022) for the first time and paid a visit to Michael McClure in San Francisco.
None of these literary greats had any contact with Ginsberg, even though the sound poet Ernst Jandl (1925–2000), who also published regularly in manuskripte and performed at Forum Stadtpark, had already appeared with Ginsberg at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1965. The fact that in 1980 it was the young Rüdiger Wischenbart, who did not even write literature but was “only on the radio,” who brought the great Allen Ginsberg to Graz in this setting was perceived as a strange, even somewhat unbelievable situation. As mentioned, the contact with Ginsberg had been established far away from any Forum or literary contacts. Wischenbart put up posters around the city announcing the event as a poetry reading. The date and the names of the poets Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Taylor were written on the poster in felt-tip pen. He was often asked who would be reading Allen Ginsberg’s texts. And in the apartment he shared with other students, he had to impress upon his roommates: “If someone who speaks English calls and says he is Allen Ginsberg, it’s not a hoax, he really is.” The authors of Forum Stadtpark “only really understood what was going on at the event,” says Wischenbart, and that Allen Ginsberg and his companions were actually sitting on the stage of their small Forum Stadtpark with a harmonium, guitar, and banjo.
“All of the luminaries of the cities would come to these readings. The literature professors and so on, would all go to these,” says Taylor in my interview with him about the tour performances, and in fact it’s documented that Wolfgang Bauer, Gerhard Roth, manuskripte editor Alfred Kolleritsch (1931–2020), and Polaroid and film artist Claus Schöner (1951–1999) were in the audience in Graz, as well as aspiring author Günter Eichberger (born 1959), who sent me his memories back in 2018, which he later published under the title “Eine Frage der Ehre” (A Matter of Honor) in the anthology Austrian Beat (edited by Elias Schneitter and Helmuth Schönauer). Among other things, he told me that “they sang beautiful songs such as ‘You Are My Dildo’ to the guitar accompaniment of Steven Taylor. Wolfgang Bauer sat next to me and had good reason to suspect that I didn’t know what a dildo was. He explained it to me. Since then, I’ve been in the know.” He also recalled that the guets from New York went to the Hofkeller restaurant after the performance, joined by all the aforementioned “luminaries” of Graz.
Media reviews
There was hardly any media coverage after the performance in Graz. At least Austria’s largest daily newspaper, the conservative Kronen Zeitung, reported that the “father of the hippie movement and guru of a defeated ‘Vietnam generation’” thrilled the audience in the packed Forum Stadtpark with “powerful interpretations of his poems and songs, ranging from irony to longing. His poems,” according to critic Mathias Grilj,
are incantations and bitterly precise observations of everyday life, bound in rhythmic litanies that gain particular physicality and urgency through Ginsberg’s interpretation. […] Ginsberg howls, roars, whispers, moans, and conjures; his entire body—not just his vocal cords—is taken over by the poems he ‘gives birth to’ on stage, as it were. Here, a living monument is erected to his impetuous and expansive mindset. This ‘poetic act’ is contagious (and seduces the critic into enthusiasm). Much applause also for the poet Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s long-time companion and lover, who provoked bursts of laughter with his great mimicry.
The performance in Vienna, on November 11, was ignored by the media, apart from Wischenbart’s aforementioned interview with Ginsberg, which was printed in Die Presse, and one review in Arbeiterzeitung by a misguided critic, who mistook the whole performance by the “American prophet and apostle of the counterculture” as a “parody” which was only perforated by the “pathos” of “Kaddish.” For the performance at Forum für aktuelle Kunst (aka Forum am Adolf Pichler-Platz) in Innsbruck on November 13, the reviews were positive. The Neue Tiroler Zeitung reported that Ginsberg’s integration of musical elements into his work led to a “reduction in the distance between performers and audience: the (almost customary) elitism at poetry readings was largely eliminated. […] The content of his poems may provoke and elicit controversial opinions, but his recitation, sometimes restrained, sometimes agitated to the point of extreme emotion, always fascinated.”
A shorter review was published in the Tiroler Tageszeitung. Critic Peter Angerer begins by explaining that the Beat Generation can be summed up by the keywords “marijuana, bebop, bars, and lack of money.” It was “useless as a model for authors and only served the literary industry as a sales label, as a slogan for a counterculture that […] increasingly merged with mass culture”—a criticism that the Beats often had to put up with. Ginsberg, however, “never accepted the narrow field of protest as his only theme,” but was more multifaceted. When the poet played music together with Taylor on guitar and Orlovsky on banjo, “the scene is reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s Renaldo & Clara.” Ginsberg and Orlovsky actually accompanied Dylan on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour 1975/76, as readers also learn from Angerer. In the end, the critic even goes so far as to concede that the performance was “perfect” and sees the form of the performance as a new way of communicating literature: “Poets spread their texts orally and with music, encourage the audience to sing along, and thus create a community. That was also the experience of the evening.” It is almost as if Angerer could anticipate the Nobel Prize for Literature 45 years ahead for Dylan, whose songwriting was partially inspired by the poetry of his friend Ginsberg and other Beat poets from the start.
Ginsberg’s Journal
There is no written account about the performances by Ginsberg himself. In his unpublished journal, archived in the Allen Ginsberg Papers at Stanford University, the poet notes a dream on November 10, 1980, in which he is walking through Boulder, Colorado, when suddenly the sky darkens as if during a total solar eclipse. But the dreamer knows that it is a “black radioactive cloud,” the “consequence of some awful event at the nuclear factory far far away. I jerked forward,” Ginsberg writes, “found myself in bed in Graz lying on my left arm, which was asleep. 10 a.m. This dream a few days after Reagan was elected president—Much discussion in Austria and Hungary, what will he do? Arms build-up? Beginning of nuclear escalation? Neutron bombs?”
In Vienna, he merely notes the names of a few local authors (including Jelinek, Liesl Ujvary, and Jandl’s partner Friederike Mayröcker), who were presumably recommended to him by Ernst Jandl. In any case, the note “Meet Jandl” before the list indicates this. For Innsbruck, only the address and telephone number of the venue are noted. The unpublished photos from Ginsberg’s camera which are archived at Stanford (in the form of contact sheets and developed negative film rolls) show the touring trio in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the heart of Vienna and in front of a statue of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe near the State Opera House (photographed by an unknown hand, probably a passersby). Neither the stay in Graz nor that in Innsbruck are documented photographically. After Vienna, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Taylor can already be seen on the contact sheets in front of Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, most likely on their way from Innsbruck to Munich.
Christian Loidl, Incorporating Beat
The impact of Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Taylor’s performances during their 1980 tour of Central Europe can be traced in further reports relating to the performances in Vienna and Innsbruck. For one member of the audience at the University of Vienna on November 11, Ginsberg’s appearance had dramatic consequences and shaped his future career. The 23-year-old Christian Loidl (1957–2001) had already read the Beats as a teenager and published his first poems in the late 1970s. “Ginsberg’s performance,” Loidl wrote in 1990, “was a key experience for me in terms of working with the voice. I witnessed how the voice resonates through the body into the room and how Ginsberg enjoys it—probably more than Jandl enjoyed it, who was also a great sound artist in his own way. At that moment, I finally realized: this is mine. I have to develop a language that is at home in the body and flies from there.” It is almost impossible to define the term Beat Generation, because the writers subsumed under this moniker are extremely diverse. But one common determinator of Beat poets is certainly that they “inaugurated the new wave of poetry vocalized,” as Ginsberg described it, “before an audience, rather than just read on the page , not just for scholars and not just imitating the older literary style.”
In the years that followed, Loidl developed into an exceptional sound poet whose work focused on performance and oral recitation, working with the voice and the resonance of the body. In 1988 he took part in the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, led by Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. He attended classes taught by Ginsberg, Waldman, Harry Smith, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and others, and had long conversations with teachers, especially Ginsberg. Fortunately for us, Loidl had a cassette recorder with him and, with some foresight, recorded these conversations. Today they are archived in the Christian Loidl Papers in Linz. Previously unpublished poetological discussions with Ginsberg in particular are of great interest. A transcript of one of these conversations was recently published in a German translation in the essay collection Die Stimmen des Dichters: Christian Loidl intermedial (edited by Thomas Antonic and Helmut Neundlinger, Klever 2025), the original conversation in English will be published in an upcoming “Allen Ginsberg Centenary Special” issue of the journal Beatdom (expected publication date: June 2026).
Impressed by his intense experience at the Jack Kerouac School, Loidl founded the “Salon” in Vienna in 1988 together with fellow poets Bernhard Widder and Rainer Vesely and architect Fritz Schmidmair, which is still running today as a venue for unconventional poetry and other forms of art, with a refined taste that does not serve mainstream preferences. Loidl returned in 1990 to Colorado and took part in the Summer Writing Program for a second time. This time he was accompanied by his fellow poet Christian Ide Hintze (1953–2012), who was no less enthusiastic. Based on the model of the Jack Kerouac School, Loidl and Hintze, with the help of several other colleagues, founded the Vienna Poetry School (in German “Schule für Dichtung”) in 1992, which quickly developed into an internationally renowned institution. Not only did many Beat poets teach here over the years, but also luminaries such as Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld. Anne Waldman, who described the Vienna Poetry School in 2012 as a “sister organization” of the Jack Kerouac School, took part in the inauguration in 1992. Ginsberg and Waldman taught at the school in 1993 for two weeks. In addition, the two gave press conferences that helped make Central European media receptive to the aesthetics and worldview of the Beats, and performances that once again thrilled audiences. That was also the last time Allen Ginsberg visited Austria. Waldman, who had also performed at the “Salon”, has been a guest teacher at the Vienna Poetry School ten times to date.
Coda
Although Ginsberg kept playing with Taylor for 21 years, they put an end to their big European tours as a trio after only four years, which means that the recording from Graz 1980 is actually a unique historical document preserving a formation in action that was only active for a short period of time. There were just a few other recordings made during these tours, for example parts of two performances in Munich on December 6 and 7, 1979, were released by the label “Loft” in 1980 under the title Gate: Two Evenings with Allen Ginsberg, Vol. 1: Songs. (A “Volume 2”, probably with all the poems read from these two evening, was never released to my knowledge and according to the database Discogs.) A recording of the show in Wuppertal, Germany, on December 11, 1980, was released as audio cassette tape in 1982 as A Little Bit of Awareness by “S Press Tapes”. Ginsberg himself recorded parts of the performances in Budapest and Vienna in November 1980 with his own tape recorder. The audio quality on these tapes, which are archived in the Allen Ginsberg Papers at Stanford University, is, naturally, much poorer than the recording from the mixing desk done by a sound engineer of the ORF. Nevertheless, it is interesting to compare the content of the different performances and how the setlist changed. Even the same songs, for example “Gospel Noble Truths” in Graz and Vienna are performed quite differently, with Ginsberg singing more melodic and uplifting in Vienna. Also of interest—at least to the scholar of Transnational Beat Studies—is the introduction at the beginning of the evening in Vienna by poet and sociologist Rolf Schwendter (1939–2013), who encourages Ginsberg to return soon because, as he puts it, “sleepy Vienna needs guests like you.”
The recording from Graz will be released on vinyl as a double album in May 2026 by the record label Unrequited Records, based in San Francisco. This essay is the abridged version of the extensive liner notes that will come along with the album in form of a booklet. The research on the background of Ginsberg’s performances with Orlovsky and Taylor in Austria 1980 are part of a bigger project dedicated to the study all sojourns of the poet in Austria (1957, 1980, 1993) and was supported by a BIAAS Grant in 2023.
The first edition of the double album, limited to 200 copies of 180 gram violet vinyl, can be pre-ordered here. Three excerpts from the album, “Gospel Noble Truths,“ Ginsberg’s famous 1950s poem “America,” as well as Orlovsky’s “Feeding Them Raspberries To Grow,” can be streamed and listened to via the player below:
A first round of album launch events in Europe will happen in late April and early May:
April 27: Rave Up Records, Vienna
April 28: Café Jedermann, Budapest
April 29: Salon Praterstrasse 17, Vienna
April 30: Unijazz Club, Prague
May 4: Forum Stadtpark, Graz
More events in the US and Europe will follow in the second half of 2026.
Sources:
Personal conversations and email correspondence by the author with Steven Taylor, Rüdiger Wischenbart, Günter Eichberger, Alfred Kolleritsch, Bernhard Widder.
Peter Angerer, “Waffenbrüder des Wortes im Kulturzentrum.” Tiroler Tageszeitung, Nov. 15, 1980.
Allen Ginsberg Papers, Sign. No. M0733, Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California.
Mathias Grilj, “Ginsberg was here!” Kronen Zeitung (Styrian edition), Nov. 12, 1980.
Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. New York: Penguin 2006
Peter Olbrich, “Zwei Helden im Wandel der Zeit.“ Neue Tiroler Zeitung, Nov. 19, 1980..
Anne Waldman. “Laudatio: 20 Years of the Schule für Dichtung,” 20 Years Vienna Poetry School. Anniversary Texts. Vienna: Schule für Dichtung.
N.N., “Weltumarmer, Weltzermalmer.” Arbeiterzeitung, Nov. 13, 1980.
