Michael McClure DEAD, Wrote Groundbreaking Play, THE BEARD(The Cops Arrested the Actors)

“Michael McClure, one of the famed Beat poets of San Francisco whose career as a poet eclipsed many others in popular culture, has died. He was 87.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that McClure died Tuesday in Oakland, California, after suffering a stroke last year.

On 7 October 1955, a then 22-year-old McClure helped organize the famous Six Gallery beat poetry reading and later read at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park that launched the Summer of Love in 1967 and at The Band’s “Last Waltz” concert at Winterland in 1976.

“Without the roar of McClure, there would have been no 60s,” actor Dennis Hopper once said.

In McClure’s 1982 nonfiction account of the Six Gallery reading, Scratching the Beat Surface, he set the stage for the revolution that was to follow in the mid-1950s: “The world that we tremblingly stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one,” he wrote. “We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead – killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life.”

His first reading in 1955 was overshadowed by the introduction of Howl, by Allen Ginsberg. But McClure outlasted all of the Beats in a career that spanned more than 60 years, publishing more than 30 books of poetry, plays and anthologies until 2017. ….the guardian”

This Blogger cannot say he knew Michael McClure well; this Blogger can’t say he liked Mr. McClure’s poetry.

This Blogger can testify that he loved and loves Mr. McClure’s play, THE BEARD; and this Blogger can testify he was in the audience when the San Francisco Police Department came to the play to arrest the actors(male and female).

This Blogger thinks it is fair to say that Mr. McClure's true desire was to be stood against a wall and shot for his artistic brilliance. In a way, he was disappointed that he was not living in 1930s Stalinist Russia.

On December 13, 2016, this Blogger published: How Gerry Maxey Discovered History Watching THE BEARD:Michael McClure, Billy The Kid, Jean Harlow.

https://themaxeychronicles.blogspot.com/2016/12/how-gerry-maxey-discovered-history.html

The following is excerpted from that Blog:

“History?

Is it just a collection of random collisions of people, facts ,ice ages, trilobites, asteroids?

Or is it, if not pre-planned, or pre-ordained, at  least pre-drafted? Perhaps so pre-drafted that a strange little man in 16th Century France ( Michel de Nostradamus) could figure it out?

This Blogger’s personal path to answering the History Question  began when he was invited by J, an University of Oregon coed, to a play. J was the most promiscuous woman in the history of mankind, and that includes Messalina, and Julia The Elder. Julia was full bodied, ripe with flowing auburn tresses, and great legs, honed by bicycle riding all over Eugene, Oregon.

The play was THE BEARD by Michael McClure. The play was set in some Jean Paul Sartre NO EXIT type of Hell, with two people sharing that small piece of hell, BILLY THE KID, the ghost of the famed 1880s gunfighter, shot in the back, and JEAN HARLOW, the 1930s Marilyn Monroe, before there was a Marilyn Monroe, whose impotent husband had committed suicide.

This Blogger saw it at the FILLMORE. 

"McClure's play The Beard debuted at the Actor’s Workshop Theatre in San Francisco ...A second performance followed at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium....With the Fillmore’s high profile, the play attracted an audience of 700. After success at the Fillmore, the following month the play opened at The Committee, a theatre nightclub in the North Beach area of the city, where it was hoped it would enjoy a lengthy run.
Now aware of the play’s subject matter, the San Francisco Police Department secretly tape-recorded the first two performances and secretly filmed the third performance. Having failed in their attempts to successfully censor Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the performances of Lenny Bruce and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the police department was intent to succeed this time.
At the end of that third performance ...—only the fifth time the play had been performed in public—the SFPD raided the venue and arrested actors Billie Dixon (Jean) and Richard Bright (Billy). ”

Both characters wore paper beards; J said it was some Greek theatrical manifestation.
Both J and this Blogger were awestruck; she because of the boldness of the play, myself because of what McClure had accomplished.

His Two-hander,( as two-person plays are nicknamed in the trade)  had cracked the code, on all of history. There is no reasonable reason that BILLY THE KID and JEAN HARLOW should be paired together in hell. It makes no sense, no sense at all. The juxtaposition and conjunction of BILLY THE KID and JEAN HARLOW makes less sense that the characters in WAITING FOR GODOT.

McClure cracked the code; the absolute absurdity of BILLY THE KID and JEAN HARLOW conjoined highlights the absurdity of the facts of history. History is so absurd than it CANNOT  be random; if history was random it would not be absurd. Absurdity is not random; it is a product of design.

Absurd History is destined History; irrational history is pre-ordained history; it is the absurdity  of history which allows the prediction of the future. For if history was random it could not be predicted; but history is absurd, so history is not random, therefore it is predictable.

McClure cracked the code….THE MAXEY CHRONICLES.”

On the basis of pure talent, this Blogger cannot claim that the talent of my youth was more talented than the talent of 2020; what this Blogger can say is that the talent of my youth was neither  mundane nor pedestrian.  Mundane and Pedestrian, two afflictions common among the talent of 2020.

Mr. McClure was 87.

SIDEBAR

J had an unholy crush on Oklahoma University All-American football player, Joe Don Looney. When Joe Don went to India or somewhere to tend elephants and find gurus; she followed. She disappeared into the midst of memory; which was fitting, her favorite writer was the vanished Ambrose Bierce.

 From Left to Right, Michael McClure, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg.(One of them is a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature, and it is not the playwright nor the famous Beat poet).