Save Our Sound Tour

May 2, Los Angeles

ginna — Mon, 02 May 2005 15:58:14 +0000

Home at Last, We finally arrived home last Thursday a.m. and have almost decompressed from hurling our bodies at 70 mph for the last month. We learned so much about the power of the archives and how important it is to promote it as an educational resource to those beyond our listening signal. It's [...]

April 26, En Route to Moab, Utah

ginna — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 12:59:12 +0000

At KVNF we made a special on-air appearance to play some excerpts from the 1962 Bob Dylan performance, promote the Archives and explain the educational value of our collection.

KVNF has invited us back to Paonia to help with the Harvest Festival fund drive in late October!

Now we’re on our way to Moab and community station KZMU. We just passed a “Dairy King“! Tonight we’ll camp in the same spot as we did on our last trip to Moab.

April 25, From Boulder to Paonia, CO

ginna — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 12:50:50 +0000

Leaving Boulder, we drove through beautiful McClure Pass in the Rockies, on our way to Paonia. (Legend has it that Paonia was named for the peony, but misspelled.)

We were welcomed at community station KVNF by general manager Sally Kane and staff members Skip Naft, Robin Boone and Thomas.

Sally treated us to a visit to her ranch in Crawford, complete with an evening by the campfire and elk flautas for dinner. Sally’s husband, Tony, is a ranger for Black Elk Wilderness. Their two kids — Tara (15) and Darby (17) — listened to us talk about the Archives and soon became PRA supporters. Darby has already placed his order for the Ché Guevara program.

April 24, Naropa University

ginna — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 12:33:48 +0000

We went to Naropa University, accompanied by Sonali Kolhatkar who had flown out to join us. She gave a very moving speech.

We made a presentation about the work of the archives, played our S.O.S. Tour film, and donated to Naropa some tapes from our poetry collection.

Journalist George Merritt covered the story for The Denver Post.

We collaborated with KGNU on planting a Geocache in Boulder. (We’ll reveal coordinates in May.)

April 23, Enjoying Colorado

ginna — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:15:42 +0000

We took a beautiful hike near Golden, Colorado and planted a Geocache at a location to be named later (sometime in May; stay tuned). The CD was “Women & the Environment,” featuring Helen Caldicott, Chee Yoke Lee, Winona LaDuke and others.

Back at KGNU, we joined the on-air fund drive from 6:00 to 8:00 PM, and raised over $3,000 for the station!

Update: From The Daily Camera, a local Boulder newspaper

Naropa will receive literary recordings
Collection includes first recording of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’

By Elizabeth Mattern Clark, Camera Staff Writer
April 23, 2005

Boulder’s Naropa University this weekend will receive copies of recordings by historic literary figures including Allen Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Aldous Huxley and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The nonprofit Pacifica Radio Archives in Los Angeles is donating the works as part of an effort to get them before a broader scholarly audience, said Pacifica spokeswoman Karen Pomer.

The rarest item in the collection is a digitized copy of the first recording of Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl.” Howl was the subject of censorship trials and became one of the most widely read poems of the century.

“The ensuing trial victory for free speech helped break the back of literary censorship in America,” said Steven Taylor, director of the Naropa Audio Archive.

Naropa preserves thousands of recordings made at the university since it began as a summer institute in 1974. Performers the first summer included Beat poet Ginsberg, who co-founded Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Naropa archivist Tim Hawkins said Pacifica’s gift “provides invaluable early supporting materials to our existing collection of Allen Ginsberg spoken-word recordings.”

April 22, Kansas to Colorado

ginna — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 12:10:29 +0000

We drove through Kansas and arrived in Boulder, where we were greeted by KGNU station manager Marty Durlin, who will be hosting us for the next three days: real beds, and real home-cooked meals!

We went on-air at KGNU to help with their fund drive, and pitched two Archives premiums:

A newly discovered recording of Bob Dylan in 1962: his first broadcast performance, introduced by Pete Seeger.
Our “Say It Loud” CD

You can tune into KGNU at 88.5 FM in Boulder, 1390 AM in Denver, 93.7 FM in Ward, and 89.1 FM in Fort Collins.

April 21, Oklahoma!

ginna — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 11:47:49 +0000

We visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial at the site of the 1995 bombing. Then we continued on toward Kansas and spent the night in strong wind and heavy rain at a rest area outside of Wichita.

April 20, Arkansas

ginna — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 15:12:48 +0000

Shawn and Mark have gone to find the Geocache hidden at the Russellville, Arkansas train station, which is in the shadow of the Russellville nuclear reactor.

We picked a special CD for this Geocache plant: “Accidents Will Happen,” a documentary about the disaster at Three-Mile Island in 1979, produced by Alan Snitow and Aileen Alfenderry.

Brian

April 19, Bucksnort, Nashville & Graceland

ginna — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:00:59 +0000

Going west on I-40 we stopped at Bucksnort, Tennessee, where I ate the worst licorice I’ve ever had. It was supposed to be watermelon-flavored, but that’s not what it tasted like.

Passing through Memphis, of course we had to stop at Graceland, a place we weren’t particularly interested in but which we ended up loving. It was surprisingly powerful to see how Elvis evolved in his career, and the costumes and scenery were spectacular.

Next we traveled to the Lorraine Hotel — now the Civil Rights Museum — to plant another Geocache nearby. This one was a CD of Martin Luther King speaking outside of Santa Rita prison after visiting Joan Baez, who was imprisoned for protesting against the Vietnam War draft.

We crossed into Arkansas and set up camp at Lake Dardanelle State Park in Russellville. Once again, we were shocked when we saw our view: another nuclear vista, this one the Russellville Nuclear One Reactor, on the other side of the lake. We asked our neighboring campers what they thought about the surroundings, but they didn’t seem to mind. We gave them one of our bandanas.

Brian

April 18, North Carolina & Tennessee

ginna — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:50:19 +0000

Today we went west into North Carolina — through Raleigh-Durham, Winston-Salem, Hickory and Asheville — and on into Tennessee. We stopped for 15 minutes at the Pilot Gas Station in Knoxville, to see my cousins Cheryl, Mike and Ray. I sang at Cheryl’s wedding about 12 years ago.

We spent the night in Crossville, Tennessee, at a KOA on a farm where we were surrounded by cattle and pastoral scenery. The owner gave us some 7-year-old hickory for our barbeque and I made hobo camp dinners: burgers stacked with all kinds of vegies, wrapped in foil and shoved into the coals to steam.

Brian