JT Outtake: Drunk Chicken / America: lyrics, details

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chocky

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Sorry if this has already been mentioned, but I can reveal that the unreleased track "Drunk Chicken / America" is in fact Allen Ginsberg reciting his own poem "America" over an instrumental track called "Drunk Chicken".

Obviously the music was recorded in 1986 but there are suggestions that the vocal may have been recorded a few years later, perhaps in the early nineties.

These are the words to America:

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America 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 Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel
 
Ginsberg did this with The Clash using his poem Capital Air. He was also on The Clash song "Ghetto Defendant."
 
I love Ginsberg, and I love that poem, but he in no way goes with the spirit of the album. The version of Miami featuring him? Now that's terrific :drool:
 
I, too, hope this is not true, but check out this track listing from an online store in Australia:

Track Listing: Disk 1
1. Where The Streets Have No Name
2. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
3. With Or Without You
4. Bullet The Blue Sky
5. Running To Stand Still
6. Red Hill Mining Town
7. In God's Country
8. Trip Through Your Wires
9. One Tree Hill
10. Exit
11. Mothers Of The Disappeared
Disk 2
1. Luminous Times (Hold On To Love)
2. Walk To The Water
3. Spanish Eyes
4. Deep In The Heart
5. Silver & Gold
6. Sweetest Thing
7. Race Against Time
8. Where The Streets Have No Name (Single Edit)
9. Silver & Gold (Sun City Version) (U2, Keith Richards, Ron Wood & Steve Jordan)
10. Beautiful Ghost / Introduction To Songs Of Experience
11. Wave Of Sorrow (Birdland)
12. Desert Of Our Love
13. Rise Up
14. Drunk Chicken / America (U2 & Allen Ginsberg)
Disk 3
1. Dvd: Live From Paris - I Will Follow
2. Trip Through Your Wires
3. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
4. Mlk
5. Unforgettable Fire
6. Sunday Bloody Sunday
7. Exit
8. In God's Country
9. The Electric Co.
10. Bad
11. October
12. New Year's Day
13. Pride (In The Name Of Love)
14. Bullet The Blue Sky
15. Running To Stand Still
16. With Or Without You
17. Party Girl
18. "40"
19. Outside It's America (Documentary)
20. With Or Without You
21. Red Hill Mining Town

Here's the link:
http://www.play4me.com.au/product/joshua_tree_1623240_11028.html
 
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BonoVoxSupastar said:
If true, this is dissapointing...

How come? I actually think it could be interesting if the music suits the poem. I was just expecting a mindless throwaway track, so poetry's an improvement in my eyes. Hell, Beautiful Ghost is good and it's just Bono reciting a poem over appropriate instrumentation ...
 
Axver said:


How come? I actually think it could be interesting if the music suits the poem. I was just expecting a mindless throwaway track, so poetry's an improvement in my eyes. Hell, Beautiful Ghost is good and it's just Bono reciting a poem over appropriate instrumentation ...

That's part of the reason I find it disappointing, they already have one track like that. Plus it doesn't quite fit the theme of the album and time period, maybe more of the 90's but not then. We've heard this before with Miami, plus REM did something similar with Star Me Kitten...

I guess with a title like "drunk chicken" I was hoping for something a little humerous. It would have been interesting to see 1987 U2 cut up for a change...
 
BonoVoxSupastar said:
That's part of the reason I find it disappointing, they already have one track like that. Plus it doesn't quite fit the theme of the album and time period, maybe more of the 90's but not then. We've heard this before with Miami, plus REM did something similar with Star Me Kitten...

Fair enough. I just think it's an improvement over what first comes to mind when I think of a song called "Drunk Chicken". I was afraid of something like Pink Floyd's Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast: I played it once for its weirdness value and that's it.

I guess with a title like "drunk chicken" I was hoping for something a little humerous. It would have been interesting to see 1987 U2 cut up for a change...

I was perfectly happy with the JT re-release until you said that. Now I'm disappointed they didn't put some Dalton Brothers on the album to shatter the over-serious impression!
 
This is not surprising. I said before I doubt these demos are going to be anything significant. Throw aways and sketches of ideas they may have had. Most of the significant songs they recorded during this era were either made into B sides or used on later albums.

I still think its cool they included them though. Maybe there will be one that is interesting. Beautiful Ghost is an obvious throw away to me and I think the rest will be also for the most part.
 
Why are people disappointed??

First off, if you're disappointed because it doesn't fit with the album----well, golly gee! I wonder why they cut it off and didn't put it on the original! :der:

If you really think that it doesn't fit with the album, I'd ask you to look again. Sure, it almost certainly won't fit musically or stylistically with WOWY, etc. But thematically it fits perfectly with the original intention of making JT an assessment of the "two Americas"--the love/hate potential the band saw between the idealism and the ideology of the country. With that aim, the poem fits perfectly; few would be better to address the topic than Ginsberg.

If the double album were originally made, and if they continued on with the "Two Americas" theme, I could see this track fitting perfectly on there. Sure, it'll be long, it'll be rambling. But that's why double albums suck ass. And that's why bonus tracks from 20 years ago are fun as interesting kernels of history, yet shouldn't be expected to be gifts from God.
 
Utoo said:
Why are people disappointed??

First off, if you're disappointed because it doesn't fit with the album----well, golly gee! I wonder why they cut it off and didn't put it on the original! :der:

Thank you for this post. :lol:

That said, Disc 2 looks awesome. I might pick this up with Christmas money just for that.
 
Utoo said:
----well, golly gee!


:lmao:


Seriously though, good post Utoo :up:
It amazes me when poeple want something, then find something about it to compalin over!!! :tsk:

I :heart: EYKIW
 
Actually, I'm somewhat relieved by this news. I thought there might of been a chance that we'd hear an actual drunk chicken running on the streets of America. :wink:
 
If this truly came out of the Joshua Tree era, then great. But if Ginsberg's narration was recorded during the 90s, as has been hypothesized, then it has no place on this collection. They could have incorporated it into the inevitable Achtung Baby 20th Anniversary Edition. :)
 
I'm still hoping those 4 new (er, unreleased) songs are something more developed than Beautiful ghost.
 
morgan1098 said:
If this truly came out of the Joshua Tree era, then great. But if Ginsberg's narration was recorded during the 90s, as has been hypothesized, then it has no place on this collection.

Quoted for truth...
 
chocky said:
Sorry if this has already been mentioned, but I can reveal that the unreleased track "Drunk Chicken / America" is in fact Allen Ginsberg reciting his own poem "America" over an instrumental track called "Drunk Chicken".

Obviously the music was recorded in 1986 but there are suggestions that the vocal may have been recorded a few years later, perhaps in the early nineties.

"there are suggestions"?

I'll ask again, source?
 
BonoVoxSupastar said:


Quoted for truth...

In U2 by U2 Bono talks about how he was reading books by all of these people during the recording of the Joshua Tree... Ginsberg, Bukowski, etc. If Ginsberg had actually been invited into the studio to collaborate with the band during the album sessions, even if the song was never used, I would think he would have mentioned that. I didn't think the band actually met people like Ginsberg until well into the Achtung Baby era, or at least during their extended stay in L.A. working on Rattle and Hum.
 
Good point! But that brings back the question of which Ginsberg recordings were available in 86 when the Joshua Tree was being recorded. As long as this Drunk Chicken/America experiment is truly something U2 was working on in 86, whether directly with Ginsberg or with a recording, that's great. But if the Ginsberg recording ends up being from the 90s, it doesn't fit with this release.

We'll find out soon enough. Only 16 days to go until November 20th!
 
morgan1098 said:
If this truly came out of the Joshua Tree era, then great. But if Ginsberg's narration was recorded during the 90s, as has been hypothesized, then it has no place on this collection. They could have incorporated it into the inevitable Achtung Baby 20th Anniversary Edition. :)


Should they also leave off Beautiful Ghost? It's been argued that Bono's voice-over on that track was recorded in at least the 90s, if not later. :shrug:


I think people simply don't like the poem and are finding ways to argue that the song's crap or doesn't fit just because of that-----without even hearing it first, mind you.
 
Utoo said:

I think people simply don't like the poem and are finding ways to argue that the song's crap or doesn't fit just because of that-----without even hearing it first, mind you.

I actually like the poem.
 
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