Revisiting the 'Fresh Air' interview with poet Allen Ginsberg

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. We're remembering the Scottish-born actor David McCallum, who died Monday at the age of 90. He played the bow-tied medical examiner known as Ducky on the CBS series NCIS.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "NCIS")

DAVID MCCALLUM: (As Donald Mallard) I received a call from a man claiming to be a lawyer. He said he had information about a member of my family. I suggested that we meet at the coffee shop around the front there.

MARK HARMON: (As Leroy Jethro Gibbs) What kind of information?

MCCALLUM: (As Donald Mallard) Well, actually, he didn't have any. When it became quickly apparent that he was fishing for information from me, I left.

HARMON: (As Leroy Jethro Gibbs) And he followed you?

MCCALLUM: (As Donald Mallard) Yes. He tried to force me into that van. I struggled, and I was knocked unconscious. When I awoke, I was exactly as you found me, trussed up like a chicken.

MOSLEY: But it was his TV role nearly 60 years ago that made him famous and a heartthrob. He played a Russian spy on the tongue-in-cheek secret agent series, "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," which stood for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.")

MCCALLUM: (As Illya Kuryakin) I am Illya Kuryakin. I am also an enforcement agent. Like my friend Napoleon, I go and I do whatever I am told to by our chief.

MOSLEY: McCallum also performed in various roles in theater and film, most notably playing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in Central Park in 2000. He was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, though at one time he was expected to pursue a career in music. His father was the first violinist for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, and his mother was a cellist. Terry Gross spoke to David McCallum in 1992, when he was appearing in the British film "Hear My Song."

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS: David McCallum, I have to ask you about "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," the series that you co-starred in from 1964 to '68. And in asking you about it, I have to confess that I had a real crush on you (laughter). I was probably one of, like, millions of teenage girls. Was that annoying to you or fun or what, to know that there were all these teenage girls, like myself, out there who had crushes on you?

MCCALLUM: Well, you don't actually think about it that much at the time. You do, of course. But at the time I was doing "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," my main concern was the script and the part and the day and the day's work and getting to the studio and going into MGM. And there was a magical element as far as I was concerned, because I'd been brought up in Europe and brought up in London on the - you know, on Hollywood. And there I was driving a '57 Chevy down Sunset Boulevard with the top down in the sunshine and going to MGM to work. So I was quite overawed by what was happening to me, quite apart from what was happening to the show.

When the show began and there was this adulation, that was very wonderful for me and also for the show, 'cause again, they were concerned with ratings even in those days, and it was a great pleasure. Then after that, it became a bit dangerous because, like fans everywhere, there was an element of, I don't know, madness about it all. And occasionally, I couldn't go for a walk. I was rescued in Central Park by mounted policemen. And they destroyed two floors of Macy's. I think they did about $25,000 damage one day when I was there. So there was an element of things getting out of hand.

GROSS: I want to hear of what happened in Central Park.

MCCALLUM: Well, I was - I just went - I think we were staying at the Plaza Hotel, and I walked down towards - to look at the skaters. And I remember walking across the park, and it was no problem. And then somebody said, oh, look; there's Illya, or some such phrase, and came running over. And then some more did. And then, finally, there was a very large crowd of people around me. It just got to the point where I couldn't move. And mercifully, two of New York's finest came by on horses, and one of them actually picked me up, and I hung to - on the saddle, and he just eased me out and back to the plaza. But it was a moment that I hadn't really encountered up to that time of completely losing your private identity in that kind of situation.

GROSS: Well, this was the period, too, in the mid-'60s that the Beatles were very, very popular in the States. And teenage girls would go to their movies and their concerts and just scream. Were you exposed to that kind of screaming?

MCCALLUM: Yes, occasionally. I mean, it was all set up. MGM - Chuck Painter was the publicist. And he made a very definite, you know, schedule for us when we would go off and do various public appearances. And they would be announced ahead of time, and we'd be there, and they would scream. And that was all part of the job in many ways.

GROSS: What kind of stuff did the PR department crank out to satisfy your fans?

MCCALLUM: Well, it's fascinating because if you go back - I have interviews sometimes - you know, the Daily Telegraph in England recently did a piece on me, and she went back to the cuttings and got out this file. And it was fascinating because during that time, there were so many requests for interviews and so many requests for stories that Chuck and his minions - mainly Chuck himself - would actually sit down and write stories about Bob and about me, and those would go out verbatim, as if he'd actually interviewed us. And most of it is fact. But then an awful lot was made up.

GROSS: Like what?

MCCALLUM: I remember there was - one article appeared, I think, in the National Enquirer, when Katherine and I were very first married, about me coming home into the apartment and flinging my lean frame down into a chair and demanding my usual scotch and soda, which Katherine brought to me, wearing her skimpy bikini and all this. And, you know, you can't do anything about those stories. And in a way - there was another one in - not in the same publication - about me going down to the garage, selecting from my eight cars and describing each one. And these things, of course, after a while get picked up by other places, and all of this misinformation finally ends up in the most wonderful stories. And it's very amusing.

GROSS: How did you get the part on "The Man From U.N.C.L.E."?

MCCALLUM: Well, I came over to this country when Britain went socialist. I decided that I did not wish to live in a country where socialism does all the things that it does to people's incomes and earning power. And here I was. I burned my boats. I had no home in London. Jill came with me. And there we were. We took a little house at the - arranged by Paul Kohner. And when I finished doing the job that I came over for, which was to do "The Greatest Story Ever Told," playing Judas Iscariot of all people, I decided that it was the right thing to do and we were going to stay and for a while did nothing. Then I got one or two jobs. The case of the, I think, the ten millionth Frenchman episode of Perry Mason and then various other things playing redcoats, of course, 'cause I was very British, and there, I would play redcoats.

And then I was one day at the - we were very friendly with Charles Bronson, still are. And Charlie took me down to the commissary at MGM. And Norman Felton, who was British and who had done a number of series at that time running "Dr. Kildare" was looking for somebody to play Bob Vaughn' sidekick in this thing at that moment known as Mr. Solo. And there were a couple of lines in the pilot. And Illya Kuryakin had some jazz records under his bed. That's the only thing I remember about it. And I agreed to do it. And the same day, I was offered a series playing Judas Iscariot and another one doing Alexander the Great, which was fascinating because I didn't realize that these sort of things came always on the same day.

GROSS: Weren't you a Russian defector in "The Man From U.N.C.L.E."?

MCCALLUM: No. I was a Russian working for, well, NBC, basically. There was no real discussion as to whether he defected or not. It was an organization that allowed people to work who were Russian and who were American, which was a unique idea in itself. But there was no question of defection. There was one line in it about my education being at the University of Georgia, which I left because I thought it was - you know, it was a sufficiently enigmatic.

But his background and - actually, what happened is what Look magazine called a climate of negatives, I think it was. But what I did in the beginning was - because I wasn't sure about what he was or where he came from. When anybody wrote in a script a specific about a marriage, about a son, about a child, about a job, I would take it out. Or I would quote Shelley or Keats in order to avoid the question. So in all hundred shows or whatever we did of Illya Kuryakin, there is nothing anywhere that pins him down to anything specific.

GROSS: That's interesting. Did you feel like the show helped promote the Cold War (laughter)?

MCCALLUM: I think because the Vietnam War at that time was causing terrible anguish in this country, and it was when the newsreels were beginning to become less censored - and there was the sort of whole violent reaction to it, particularly among the young people, particularly among people in college and in school - that this was, in a strange way, a relief. It was like saying it's possible for Russians and Americans to work together. It's possible for there to be no Cold War. And I think that had partly to do with its success.

I think, you know, it's always - timing is always very important. And I think the show coming out at that time - Vietnam definitely had a bearing on it because an awful lot of people that come to me now and say, you know, I grew up with you, I went through college with you, that's the line I hear more. And particularly policemen and undercover agents, they say the reason I joined this profession was because of you.

GROSS: Really?

MCCALLUM: So I think the formative years of that time, it had an effect on a whole group of people.

GROSS: What was it like for you after the series ended when you tried to get other roles on TV or in films?

MCCALLUM: Well, it was difficult. It was a very difficult situation, very difficult time and a problem. And I didn't know quite how to deal with it. My reaction was to say, well, I've now become so well-known as Illya Kuryakin that if I go away from it and stay away from it, it'll go away. And so I just decided to not do television. And I moved to New York, and I did a lot of theater. And I worked back in England.

And I would do the odd Hallmark or the odd special, but I basically stayed out of television. It was completely the wrong thing to do in many ways because I think if I'd stayed in Los Angeles and stayed in Hollywood, I would have gone on to do a great deal more television and had a different career. In a way, I prefer the one I've got, but it's interesting to surmise what might have happened.

MOSLEY: Actor David McCallum talking to Terry Gross in 1992. We'll hear more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JERRY GOLDSMITH'S "THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1992 interview with actor David McCallum, best known for his roles as Ducky, the eccentric medical examiner on the CBS series "NCIS," and earlier in his career for Russian agent Illya Kuryakin in the TV series "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." McCallum died Monday at the age of 90.

GROSS: Now, you were a child actor on the BBC. Your television career dates back that far?

MCCALLUM: Yes, I think I joined Equity in 1946, so I'd be about 12.

GROSS: Well, how did you get into TV at such a young age?

MCCALLUM: Well, I suppose it goes back to the relationship that a child has with his father and mother. And my father being a musician, he was with Sir Thomas Beecham at the time in the London Philharmonic Orchestra. And he was always away. And I didn't really have a definitive father figure in that we went to ball games and knocked about in the back garden. My mother was of the belief that you leave a child to do exactly what he wants to do. Give him total support and structure, but just let him get on with it. And so I was looking for an identity.

And one day, I went onto a stage as an amateur actor and gave a performance, and everybody applauded. And I realized that I'd found something that was, you know, like a home to come back to. And so I pursued that, and I've never done anything else ever since. At the same way - at the same time, my father was working at the BBC a great deal. And he introduced me to Laidman Browne, who was an actor with the BBC Repertory Company. And they needed boy voices, and specifically they needed boy voices who could also do accents. And I could do most of the Scottish accents at that time, and quite a lot of English ones, too. And so I worked on radio, and that's really my first professional engagement.

GROSS: I think, in the United States, a lot of actors who were child stars are now in therapy. Did any of the child acting have a bad effect on you? Or did it not have the kind of exposure and pressure that would lead to despair in later life?

MCCALLUM: No, the only despair was my headmaster at University College School in London because he felt that I was - my mind was really over in the thespian world and not in Latin and Greek, where he preferred it be. And so my report card would always make comments about this, could do - does well, but could do better, and the reason is probably because of his acting. But other than that - he eventually ended up hanging himself in his study and rather dramatically. And I went on to act. We did have one or two confrontations on the subject of the interpretation of Shakespeare, and I think he lost those two. But other than that, no, I don't think it had any real bearing.

GROSS: Now, I've read about you that you also directed theater in the British Army.

MCCALLUM: Yes. You see; you've been in the cutting book. You're dredging up those way-back things. Yes, I did. I was a very bad soldier. I was very happy to be in the army because it taught me how to be a soldier any time I had to do it as an actor. And I learned a great deal about the British colonial empire because I went to what is now Ghana when it was Gold Coast. And I joined the C company of the third battalion of the Gold Coast Regiment. And I had a silver sword, and I had feathers in my hat. And I had a boy who was about 45, I think, Tamale Kenjaga (ph), who looked after me.

And as a young subaltern, I marched up and down the Gold Coast, you know, pretending I was, you know - I don't know - a representative of the British Empire and all that. But anyway, during that time, Gold Coast became Ghana. And there was a whole - political upheavals with Kwame Nkrumah and all of that handing over. And it was very exciting and very interesting.

But because I wasn't a very good soldier, there were various jobs that you did in the officer's mess. I'm sure it's the same in the British army now. Somebody took out and looked after the wine. Somebody did all the dinners and the cooking in the mess. Somebody else did the bar. Somebody else did the band. There was always one person assigned to do all these tedious chores that nobody wanted to do. So I went to the commanding officer and said, listen. Can I do all of those jobs and not, you know, parade around and be a soldier? And he was so relieved to find somebody who was willing to do them that I became a sort of glorified maitre d' of the regiment.

GROSS: (Laughter).

MCCALLUM: And one of the things that they did, they had various dances. And so I would take a large airplane hangar and fill it with palm fronds and drape bougainvillea from the ceiling and just turn it into a - sort of an enchanted chanting sort of fairyland. And this caught on. And then the next thing was - there were the various productions that the army did. The Medical Corps did some, the Signal Corps. And they would call me in to direct, and I would direct plays with, you know, soldiers and soldiers' wives. And it was a great pleasure and a great learning experience.

GROSS: So do you think that helped your theater training?

MCCALLUM: Oh, very much so - very much so. Just going off into the bush and doing things with - you know, there were 147 Africans, and then there was Captain Linley and myself, and that was it - oh, and a color sergeant whose name was Bullet (ph). I have no idea where he is now. Sergeant Coast (ph) - that's right - who had a - he looked like - I don't know - looked like something out of "Wagon Train" and was quite wonderful - quite wonderful. And we had the experiences all through that time all up into the - to - towards - where was it? - towards Koforidua we went.

GROSS: Now, your father was a violinist. He was concertmaster for a while at the London Philharmonic.

MCCALLUM: Yes, and then worked with the BBC during the war. And then after the war, when they - they reformed the Royal Philharmonic for Sir Thomas Beecham. And they asked our father to lead it. And he came along, and he stayed with the Royal Philharmonic right through until just before Beecham retired in - I suppose that's the '60s, early '60s. And then he became Mantovani's soloist and leader and traveled all over the world with the Mantovani band.

GROSS: Yeah. So Mantovani was the king of middle-of-the-road music.

MCCALLUM: Absolutely. Yes. You cringe, but you know, I - still in the car, I'm sitting there and I hear "Softly As You Leave Me," or whatever, or "Fiddler On The Roof," and it's Father playing away. And he did a great deal of freelance work. He worked with the Beatles, which my children discovered and thought was quite wonderful.

GROSS: Wasn't Mantovani the 1,001 strings or 101 strings?

MCCALLUM: That's right.

GROSS: Or however many strings.

MCCALLUM: That sort of glissando divisi...

GROSS: Yeah.

MCCALLUM: ...Section work.

GROSS: So did he like the music, or was it just a good gig?

MCCALLUM: Well, he - my father was, you know, one of the boys. He would go down, and he'd sit there and play the music, pick up the check and come home. And no matter what he did, he was happy. He'd go and do film music. He would do, you know, commercials, anything that came along. And oddly enough, one of the things that he did - there were a couple of what they called bookers or fixers who would get the band together. And one of them was a man called Phil Green, and he put together a band for a lot of singers.

And when I heard I was going to do "Hear My Song," I got out the tapes of Josef Locke, as he is the subject of the film, and played them. And I thought, now, wait a minute. I recognize that violin - because having - you know, my father's violin playing is like his voice. I can pick it out almost anywhere. And I looked at the tape, and surely enough, the bands were all by the - you know, Phil Green and various people that Father worked for. And when I met Joe Locke I said, was that my father? And he said, absolutely. My father did most of my recordings, and I remember him well.

GROSS: That's really interesting.

MCCALLUM: Small world.

GROSS: Is your father still living?

MCCALLUM: No. He died in '72.

GROSS: I bet he would have really liked the idea of you doing this movie.

MCCALLUM: This movie, and also "Mother Love," because when I was conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London in the Westminster Hall and - so a lot of the musicians knew Father. And the principal violin said, what do you think? And I said, well, he's definitely here. He's definitely listening.

GROSS: Are you hoping that your role in "Hear My Song" is going to give you a new direction in the kind of movies that you're cast in?

MCCALLUM: Yes. I would like to think so, simply because, you know, before I did "U.N.C.L.E.," I was a character actor in pictures. That was my job. And, you know, it's a form of acting where you do any part that you're called on to do. So you alter what you do. When I did a play in London called "Run For Your Wife," which was a farce, people would come along and say, I didn't know you could do comedy. And then people see "Hear My Song" and say, I didn't expect you, you know, to play that kind of part. This is really unusual for you, isn't it? But it wasn't in the beginning. I mean, in the beginning, that was what I did. I did what came along. And in a way, it would be really nice to go back and become an actor in motion pictures, playing character parts, no matter how small, because I think that's what I enjoy the most.

GROSS: Well, I wish you the best, and I thank you a lot for talking with us. It's really been interesting to hear your story.

MCCALLUM: It's a great pleasure. Thank you.

MOSLEY: David McCallum speaking to Terry Gross in 1992. He died Monday at the age of 90. In the 1960s, David McCallum released a couple of albums of instrumental renditions of pop hits, which he conducted. Here's a track from it. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAVID MCCALLUM'S "THE 'IN' CROWD")
TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ALLEN GINSBERG: (Reading) I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix.

MOSLEY: That's Allen Ginsberg giving his first complete reading of his now-classic poem "Howl," recorded at Berkeley's Town Hall Theater in 1956. Allen Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry. He made poetry an essential part of beat culture and then hippie culture. And he later became a father figure to many performance poets. Over the years, he received the National Book Award, the Robert Frost Medal for Distinguished Poetic Achievement and an American Book Award for Contributions to Literary Excellence. Ginsberg died in 1997. Next week a new tribute album to Ginsberg will be released titled "The Fall Of America II." It features musical interpretations of his poems from 1965 to 1971 by Philip Glass, Miho Hatori, Thurston Moore and others and this one by Seb Taylor for the poem "Denver Again" (ph).

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OVER DENVER AGAIN")

SEB TAYLOR: These dates over Denver. Gray clouds blot sun glare. Mountains float west, planes softly roaring over Denver. Neal dead a year. Clean suburb yards. Fit boarding house for the homosexual messenger's alleyway Lila four decades back before the atom bomb. Denver without Neal, eh?

MOSLEY: Terry Gross spoke to Allen Ginsberg in 1994. At the time, a box set of recordings of his poems and songs titled "Holy Soul Jelly Roll" had been released. She asked him about his poem "Howl," which was partly inspired by his mother, who had been in a mental hospital.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

GINSBERG: She had been there for several years, and I had put her there after a breakthrough of some very violent behavior toward her sister and a cousin she was staying with. And then I had gone out to San Francisco, but the grief was very much on my mind. I had a friend, Carl Solomon, with whom I had been in a mental hospital six years before, and he was back also in Pilgrim State, too. So I addressed the poem ostensibly to him, but the emotions were, I think, directed toward my mother, both grief and a sense of solidarity.

TERRY GROSS: Yeah, you know, and part one begins with one of your most famous lines.

GINSBERG: Yeah.

GROSS: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.

GINSBERG: Starving, hysterical, naked. The original phrase was starving, mystical, naked. But I figured that was a little bit too simple-minded because the problem was not all the problem of society. It was also the neurosis of the people. So there's a certain ironic edge to it, which I don't think critics at the time realized. I said starving, hysterical, naked. So it wasn't just a one-dimensional protest for the safety of madmen. It was also like trying to give quick sketches of a series of cases that I drew from real life.

GROSS: Now, I want to move on to another poem, "America."

GINSBERG: Yeah.

GROSS: It was read the same night as "Howl."

GINSBERG: Yes.

GROSS: It was at the same reading.

GINSBERG: Yes, and that's the very first unveiling of that poem. It's really funny. The text in the recording differs a little from the final text that I wound up with. There are a few extra and some very funny, lines, actually.

GROSS: It really is very funny. And you get a lot of laughs from the audience.

GINSBERG: Well, it sounds like a stand-up comedy routine. That's the era, actually, of Lenny Bruce around San Francisco. He was playing, I think, at The Purple Onion. And I went down to see him and watch his act, actually. But I hadn't expected that kind of reaction, and I didn't think the poem was that good. Nor did Kerouac. It was just sort of like a joke, you know, like, a takeoff sendup of America, very lighthearted. But it's done with many different voices in a kind of schizophrenic persona. You know, one minute serious, one minute f*****y, one minute desperate, one minute religious, one minute patriotic. One minute, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

GROSS: Why don't we hear the beginning of "America" as you read it in 1956 at Town Hall in Berkeley?

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GINSBERG: (Reading) America, I've given you all, and now I'm nothing. America, $2.27, January 17, 1956. America, I can't stand my own mind. America, when will we end the human war? Go [expletive] yourself with your atom I don't feel good. Don't bother me. I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.

(LAUGHTER)

GINSBERG: (Reading) When will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Christs? America, why are your libraries full of tears? America, when will you send your eggs to India?

(LAUGHTER)

GINSBERG: (Reading) I'm sick of your insane demands. When will you reinvent the heart? When will you manufacture lands? When will your cowboys read Spengler? When will your dams release the flood of Eastern tears? When will your technicians get drunk and abolish money? When will you institute religions of perception in your legislatures? When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

(LAUGHTER)

GINSBERG: (Reading) America, after all, it is you and I who are perfect, not the next world. Your machinery is too much for me. I don't want to work for a living.

(LAUGHTER)

GINSBERG: (Reading) You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument.

GROSS: Allen Ginsberg, recorded in 1956. That's one one of the recordings featured on his new box set, "Holy Soul Jelly Roll." You must have seen yourself as a provocateur, in a way, at a very young age. I'm thinking, you know, that you were just coming from a place that was not average. You know, your mother was mentally ill. Your mother had been a communist. You were gay. You were an intellectual. You loved poetry.

GINSBERG: But also...

GROSS: I mean, just everything about your life kind of set you apart.

GINSBERG: But you've got to realize, by this time I had already known William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac 12 years. This is not, you know, some sudden...

GROSS: Right.

GINSBERG: ...Discovery of a community or ideas. We had had a long period of privacy and silence to ripen our art, to know each other and to amuse each other and to understand each other's language and intelligence and sort of enlarge our own consciousness with the experience of others. Also, I'd already had some sort of natural religious experience. And we had all, by this time, tried out some of the psychedelic drugs in addition, on top of a natural religious experience that was without drugs, and already had traveled a bit. And so we were - I was a young kid then. I was 28 years old. You know, it was quite a ripe time.

GROSS: Was it surprising to you to find people like Burroughs and Kerouac, who you felt this kind of friendship and aesthetic closeness with?

GINSBERG: No, it was just some sort of natural kinship that we felt almost instantly on meeting.

GROSS: But did you expect you'd ever find that?

GINSBERG: Not exactly, but I hadn't even conceived of such a thing. I conceived of friends. And I'd had friends in high school, but I was still in the closet. Kerouac was the first person I was able to come out of the closet to and tell him about it. And I actually slept with him once or twice, though he was primarily straight.

But he was very tender toward me. And he saw that I was in solitary and in a great deal of confusion and anguish, and he took a sort of kindly view. Burroughs was always out front and clear and lucid and intelligent. So I was lucky when I was 17 that I met people whose genius sort of ignited my own talents to - and sort of upgraded, I think, my own natural intelligence. But I'm really a student of Kerouac and a Burroughs, and in some respects an imitator.

GROSS: But when you talk about being a student of Kerouac's, I've never been able to tell how much your style of reading influenced him and how much his style of reading influenced you.

GINSBERG: Oh, I think his style influenced me. It was way back in '47, '48, I heard him read Shakespeare aloud. And it was such an interesting intonation that he put into a soliloquy of "Hamlet," I think, where Hamlet is sitting down on the steps saying, what am I - you know, what am I doing? Am I nothing but a John-a-dreams (laughter)? And the way Kerouac said a John-a-dreams, it was like his mind went off into a little dream in that phrase.

So I began seeing that there were intonations, differences of pitch possible. You know, most poetry was - still is pronounced in a monotone or a dual-tone where, you know - it's like I'm talking now in a sort of monotone. But there are possibilities in conversation where you go from, you know, a little high when you're talking to a little baby, to down to your serious heart tones when you're talking to your grandmother on her last days on Earth.

GROSS: Of course, with your readings, I always felt that there was a certain Hebraic intonation, even though I know that, you know, Buddhism was probably an even greater influence on you. And you certainly hear that in your voice, too. But there is that kind of Hebraic sound.

GINSBERG: The Hebraic thing is very real. My grandfathers were rabbis. And one of the most strong musical influence I ever had was hearing a recording of Sophie Breslau, a great operatic singer, singing "Eli, Eli," with a kind of melisma, I guess you'd call it, sort of a very beautiful way of bending the notes that's characteristic of Hebrew melody.

GROSS: Now, when did that start to enter your reading style?

GINSBERG: Well, certainly with "Kaddish" because I was imitating the davening motion of Kaddish, you know, the sound of, (speaking Aramaic). Da, da, da. Da, da, da. Da, da, da. Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed. That is - the whole rhythm of the poem has a kind of combination of Ray Charles, "I Got A Woman" - yes, indeed, yes, indeed, yes, indeed - and which I had been hearing the morning before I wrote the poem, and a rhythm of the original Hebrew Kaddish that was still running through my mind and body. First time I'd heard it, actually, a Jewish friend played it to me and Dawn Light the morning that I started writing the poem.

GROSS: And the Kaddish is the Hebrew prayer for the dead.

GINSBERG: Yes, it's kind of a Mass or prayer for the dead in the synagogue, when you have minyan or a group of elders that are - can get together to help you mourn for the dead.

GROSS: So I guess you didn't say the prayer when your mother died.

GINSBERG: Well, I didn't know it as well, but I did try and do it. Actually, I wandered around San Francisco with Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen. And we went into various synagogues, but there was no minyan, so we couldn't do it. So this is a way of making up about a year - a couple of years later.

GROSS: And this is a couple of years after your mother, Naomi, died.

GINSBERG: Yeah, my mother died in '55. Incidentally, you know, I sent her the original - a copy of the original manuscript of "Howl," which she received about a week before she died. And she wrote me a letter which was postmarked the day she died, which is quoted in Kaddish, in which she said she got my poems. She can't tell whether it's good or bad. My father should judge because he's a poet. But judging from the bit - she'd read it, obviously. She said, get married, Allen. Don't take drugs. And she said, I have the key. The key is in the window. The key is in the sunlight in the window. And then she died of stroke, I think, perhaps hours or within 24 hours of writing the letter. So I received that letter after I had heard that she died, so it was like a message from the land of the dead, so to speak.

MOSLEY: Allen Ginsberg speaking with Terry Gross in 1994. We'll hear more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THELONIOUS MONK'S "FUNCTIONAL (TAKE 1)")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1994 interview with poet Allen Ginsberg. Next week a new tribute album of musical interpretations of Ginsberg's poems will be released. It's titled "The Fall Of America II."

GROSS: Now, if you had grandfathers - who were rabbis, did you say?

GINSBERG: Well, scholars, you know, guys with big, black hats and long-bearded - long, gray beards who died of cancer from smoking, actually.

GROSS: But how did...

GINSBERG: New York in the '30s.

GROSS: How did you get to be in your 20s before you heard the prayer for the dead?

GINSBERG: Well, we didn't. My mother was communist, and my father was socialist.

GROSS: So you didn't go to synagogue.

GINSBERG: So I did go to synagogue, and I went to - what? - Sunday school or - what do you call it? - the shul to learn Hebrew and the traditional - prepare for a bar mitzvah. But I somehow I asked questions that were resented by the rabbi. And I got kicked out when I was about 8 years old or 9. And I never did understand it because I thought I was just sort of talking intelligently to him and inquiring. But there must have been an age of skepticism to it. But there was no tolerance for that at all. My questions weren't answered, and I was just told to get out. So I've never had very much of a classical Hebrew education.

GROSS: Your mother was institutionalized several times.

GINSBERG: Many, many times. All during my childhood, I had to go out to visit her in Greystone Hospital.

GROSS: Were you frightened by her madness?

GINSBERG: Sometimes, sometimes sorrowed, sometimes frightened, sometimes stuck with a responsibility I couldn't carry out as a kid. Going out alone to see her in a mental hospital when I was 12, 13, 14 - it was - or having to stay home and take care of her while my father was in school teaching. And getting into crisis situations with her that I couldn't handle actually kind of broke my brain in a way, broke my spirit to some extent.

GROSS: Now, when you started doing hallucinogenics like LSD, did your hallucinations ever scare you because you'd seen your mother have hallucinations and delusions because of her mental illness?

GINSBERG: Well, no, not really. I realized that if everybody began disagreeing with me, I'd better look around twice...

GROSS: (Laughter).

GINSBERG: ...And think three times and be pretty sure I knew what I was doing. And so I've been able to be in situations where everybody disagreed but, at the same time, maintain my sanity, so to speak, by simply following my heart, really. I have as much a tendency to paranoia as anybody in the United States at this point, but at least I can see it's paranoia. And most people don't see their own paranoia.

GROSS: Where were you in your performance style in 1964, the year that the recording of "Kaddish" was made?

GINSBERG: I hadn't ever tried to read anything as long as "Kaddish" complete. And so - and I had drunk a little bit - not very much. So I wasn't really drunk, but I was sort of a little keyed up with alcohol. So I was able to loosen my feelings quite a bit. So the only problem there is maintaining control of feelings and not breaking up and crying in the middle of the more moving passages.

GROSS: Is there a particular section of "Kaddish" that you've had the most problem with controlling your emotion?

GINSBERG: Yeah. There's a section that begins when I'm visiting my mother in the mental hospital for the last time. And I walk in, and I see she's had a stroke. And then suddenly there's a break in the poem, and there's a kind of lyrical rhapsody. Communist beauty, sit here married in the summer among daisies, promised. happiness at hand - it's the section that ends, oh, beautiful Garbo of my karma. It's really a nice, exquisite, poetic passage, but it's also full of feeling. And it's like a flashback in the midst of tragedy to a happier day. And so there's a lot of emotion buried there from childhood. Also, at the very end, the section, oh, mother, what have I left out? Oh, Mother, what have I forgotten, with your eyes, with your eyes, with your death full of flowers? That has a sort of cumulative emotional buildup that's quite great.

GROSS: Why don't I play an excerpt of "Kaddish"? And you wrote this in the late 1950s. The recording we're going to hear from your new box set was made at Brandeis University in 1964.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GINSBERG: (Reading) With your eyes running naked out of the apartment, screaming into the hall, with your eyes being led away by policemen to an ambulance, with your eyes strapped down on an operating table, with your eyes with the pancreas removed, with your eyes of appendix operation, with your eyes of abortion, with your eyes of ovaries removed, with your eyes of shock, with your eyes of lobotomy, with your eyes of divorce, with your eyes of stroke, with your eyes alone, with your eyes, with your eyes, with your death full of flowers.

MOSLEY: Terry Gross spoke to Allen Ginsberg in 1994. The tribute album "The Fall Of America II" will be released October 6 digitally and on CD and vinyl. Proceeds benefit PEN America. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new futuristic thriller "The Creator." This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BILL FRISELL'S "ACROSS THE UNIVERSE")
TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Artificial intelligence is everywhere these days, and it's at the center of a new futuristic action thriller, "The Creator," which opens in theaters this week. Set during an epic war between humans and robots, the movie stars John David Washington as a former Special Forces agent enlisted to help destroy an AI superweapon. The cast includes Allison Janney, Gemma Chan and Ken Watanabe. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.

JUSTIN CHANG, BYLINE: The use of AI in Hollywood has been one of the most contentious issues in the writers and actors strikes, and the industry's anxiety about the subject isn't going away anytime soon. Some of that anxiety has already started to register on screen. A mysterious robotic entity was the big villain in the most recent "Mission Impossible" film, and AI is also central to the ambitious but muddled new science fiction drama "The Creator." Set decades into the future, the movie begins with a prologue charting the rise of artificial intelligence. Here, it's represented as a race of humanoid robots that in time become powerful enough to detonate a nuclear weapon and wipe out the entire city of Los Angeles.

As a longtime LA resident who's seen his city destroyed in countless films before this one, I couldn't help but watch this latest cataclysm with a chuckle and a shrug. It's just part of the setup in a story that patches together numerous ideas from earlier, better movies. After the destruction of LA, we learn, the U.S. declared war on AI and hunted the robots to near extinction. The few that still remain are hiding out in what is now known as New Asia. The director, Gareth Edwards, who wrote the script with Chris Weitz, has cited "Blade Runner" and "Apocalypse Now" as major influences. And, indeed, there's something queasy and heavy-handed about the way Edwards evokes the Vietnam War, with images of American soldiers terrorizing the poor Asian villagers whom they suspect of sheltering robots.

The protagonist is a world-weary ex-Special Forces operative named Joshua Taylor, played by John David Washington. He's reluctantly joined the mission to help destroy an AI superweapon said to be capable of wiping out humanity for good. Amid the battle that ensues, Joshua manages to track down the weapon, which, in a twist that echoes earlier sci-fi classics like "Akira" and "A.I.," turns out to be a pensive, young, robot child played by the excellent newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles. In this scene, Joshua relays his discovery to his superior, played by Allison Janney, and tells her that another member of their team has been badly wounded.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE CREATOR")

ALLISON JANNEY: (As Jean Howell) Shipley? It's Howell. Answer the phone. Shipley, I know you're there...

JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON: (As Joshua Taylor) Colonel.

JANNEY: (As Jean Howell) Taylor. Where's Shipley?

WASHINGTON: (As Joshua Taylor) I'm with him right now. He's in pretty bad shape.

JANNEY: (As Jean Howell) All right. Listen to me. Did you locate the weapon?

WASHINGTON: (As Joshua Taylor) Yeah. It's here. I'm with it.

JANNEY: (As Jean Howell) Describe it.

WASHINGTON: (As Joshua Taylor) It's a kid. It's a kid. They made it into some kind of kid. That's the weapon.

JANNEY: (As Jean Howell) What?

WASHINGTON: (As Joshua Taylor) Colonel, look.

JANNEY: (As Jean Howell) I can't reach you. You have to bring it to me. Do you understand?

WASHINGTON: (As Joshua Taylor) No. Shipley can't move. I mean, he's not looking good at all. Police are everywhere. I don't know how I'm getting out right now. I don't even have an exit strategy right now.

JANNEY: (As Jean Howell) Then you know what you have to do. Kill it.

CHANG: Joshua doesn't kill it. Instead, he goes rogue and on the run with the child whom he calls Alpha or Alphie. Washington doesn't have much range or screen presence, but he and Voyles do generate enough chemistry to make you forget you're watching yet another man tag-teaming with a young girl, a trope familiar from movies as different as "Paper Moon" and "Leon: The Professional." Joshua's betrayal is partly motivated by his grief over his long lost love, a human woman named Maya who allied herself with the robots. She's played by an underused Gemma Chan. One of the more bothersome aspects of "The Creator" is the way it reflexively equates Asians with advanced technology. It's the latest troubling example of techno-orientalism, a cultural concept that has spurred a million "Blade Runner" term papers.

In recycling so many spare parts, Edwards, best known for directing the "Star Wars" prequel, "Rogue One," is clearly trying to tap into our memories of great Hollywood spectacles past. To his credit, he wants to give us the kind of philosophically weighty, visually immersive, science-fiction blockbuster that the studios rarely attempt anymore. The most impressive aspect of "The Creator" is its world building. Much of the movie was shot on location in different Asian countries, and its mix of real places and futuristic design elements feels more plausible and grounded than it would have if it had been rendered exclusively in CGI. But even the most strikingly beautiful images, like the one of high-tech laser beams shimmering over a beach at sunset, are tethered to a story and characters that never take on a life of their own.

Not even the great Ken Watanabe can breathe much life into his role as a stern robo warrior who does his part to help Joshua and Alphie on their journey. In the end, Edwards mounts a sincere but soggy plea for human-robot harmony, arguing that AI isn't quite the malicious threat it might seem. That's a sweet enough sentiment, though it's also one of many reasons I left "The Creator" asking myself, did an AI write this?

MOSLEY: Justin Chang is film critic for the LA Times. He reviewed the new film "The Creator," now in theaters. On Monday's show, electronic music producer and DJ Jennifer Lee, better known as TOKiMONSTA. She's considered a pioneer in electronic music as the first female Asian American producer to garner a Grammy nomination for best dance electronic album. She talks with us about her musical path and the near-death experience that changed the course of her life. I hope you can join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF AI WEIWEI, ALIAH ROSENTHAL AND O FUTURE SONG, "HUM BOM!")

MOSLEY: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld and Al Banks. I'm Tonya Mosley.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HUM BOM!")

AI WEIWEI: Hum bom, bom, bom, bom, bom. One. Whom bomb? We bombed them. Whom bomb? We bombed them. Whom bomb?

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.