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71.
An open reel tape of Max Finstein reading a short prose piece and more than 30 poems.
Quarter inch tape on a 7-inch plastic spool. Duration 23.40; 7.5 ips. Part of the series “Poets on Tape” produced by Intersound Recordings, an audiotape tape label created by John and Helen Cassidy and Fred Hunter in London in the mid-sixties.
It’s not known exactly when or where the recording was made (at one point, Finstein refers to being in New Mexico, where he co-founded the New Buffalo commune in 1966, one of the most famous communes in Taos), but likely to be London, c. 1966/67.
There are at least two other known audio recordings of Finstein reading, both of them (unlike this one) in front of a live audience. One of them was made at Max’s Kansas City in January 1970, where he is introduced by Joel Oppenheimer (who is generally credited with giving the venue its name, Kansas City, and - possibly - adding Finstein’s forename to jazz it up).
Together with Oppenheimer and others, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ray Bremser, Irving Rosenthal, Ed Dorn and Frank O’Hara, Finstein was part of a group known as the “Yugen crowd”, an affiliation of Beat, Black Mountain and New York School poets who gathered for readings, discussions and drinking at LeRoi Jones’s apartment in New York in the late 50s and early 60s, often accompanied by Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Archie Shepp.
Finstein, a former jazz alto sax player himself, died in a road accident in 1982 (his friend Robert Creeley wrote “Oh Max” in memoriam to him).
Tape digitised and transferred to CD. The (worn) lid of the tape box is stamped ‘Intersound Recordings’ and titled in ink - “American Poets: Ed Dorn” [sic].
Provenance: The Fred Hunter Archive.
