Richard Brautigan - Listening To Richard Brautigan Sealed Harvest Beatles Apple

$

199

Vinyl:  Sealed!!!  This is the original 1970 Pressing!  Brautigan's One and Only Record is a Treasure Trove of this Iconic Poet's best Narrative Poems!  Includes Poems from Trout Fishing In America, A Confederate General From Big Sur and Revenge of the Lawn, among Others!  Super Rare & Highly sought after LP and an infamous near-miss for The Beatles Apple Records which Almost issued the record on Zapple.   Beatles Completists:  Here is your missing Apple/Zapple!!!
Cover: NM- (see photos; Hole Punch; teeny, tiny tears of shrink on corners and front, middle, right; minimal ring wear; this LP has one of the rarest Beatles-related Hype stickers:  "Produced by Miles Associates and Richard Brautigan"...also a source of drama:  Barry Miles, of Miles Associates, producing for Apple records, was having an affair with Brautigan's Girlfriend, Valerie Estes, at the time of this recording...that's her on the Cover!  OOh-La-La!!!  If you couldn't care less about the sticker, I'll remove it without tearing the shrink and take $25 off the price of the LP  :)   )
Goldmine Standards.   See Review Below!

U.S. Shipping:  $4 Media Mail for up to 2 LP's.  Additional LP's .50 (double albums count for 2LP's).  On this Richard Brautigan LP, I will ship in the U.S. with insurance at my expense!  You only pay the Media Mail cost...I will only ship to Italy by Registered Mail.  Rest of World, ask for cost of shipping before bidding.  I only pass on to you my cost to get it to you.  Similarly, upgrades and insurance can be added on at Buyers' expense.  Feel free to ask any questions and happy bidding! 
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AllMusic Review by Lindsay Planer  [-]

Author, humorist and recording artist, Richard Brautigan's long-player, Listening to Richard Brautigan (1970), provides insight into his everyday life, world and written works. The San Francisco-based poet had already established himself as a hip, underground Bay Area fixture -- even occasionally supporting burgeoning rockers Mad River, turning up on their Paradise Bar & Grill (1969) album reciting "Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend." He'd also gained notoriety from his most renown prose and much of this disc is devoted to excerpts from Trout Fishing in America ("The Hunchback Trout"), A Confederate General From Big Sur ("The Rivets of Ecclesiastes"), In Watermelon Sugar ("The Watermelon Sun"), Revenge of the Lawn ("Revenge of the Lawn") that includes "Short Stories About California" with "A Short Story About Contemporary Life in California," "The Memory of a Girl," "The View From the Dog Tower" and "Pale Marble Movie" all taken from that collection.  Interspersed throughout are fly-on-the-wall sonic vérité excursions such as "The Telephone Door to Richard Brautigan," self-explanatory "Here Are the Sounds of My Life in San Francisco," "Here Are Some More Sounds of My Life" and the aforementioned "The Telephone Door That Leads Eventually to Some Love Poems" as it also contains dialogue about Brautigan's manipulation of the telephone -- or is it vice versa -- before commencing with pieces from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster anthology. Arguably the most interesting concept from the listener's point-of-reference is "Love Poem" -- a single-sentence composition as interpreted by Brautigan himself in addition to Bob Prescott, Valerie Estes, Michael McClure, Margot Patterson Doss, Bruce Conner, Michaela Blake-Grand, Donald M. Allen/David Schaff, Ianthe Brautigan, Imogen Cunningham, Herb Caen, Betty Kirkendall, Peter Berg, legendary DJ Alan Stone -- who reads his live on-the-air via KSAN-FM, Antonio, Donald M. Allen, Cynthia Harwood, and Price Dunn. 

The production of Listening to Richard Brautigan was fairly laborious and protracted. Originally the album was intended to be made for Zapple, the short-lived experimental subsidiary of the Beatles' Apple label. Zapple was run by Barry Miles, a respected author in his own right and a big part of the London '60s underground scene as a partner in the Indica Bookshop and publisher of the London paper International Times. It was Miles who proposed the project to Brautigan in late 1968, as part of a series of spoken-word albums he hoped to record by literary figures, including McClure, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anais Nin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Ezra Pound, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Gary Snyder.

As was the case with many projects cooked up by Apple in the late 1960s, little of these ambitious plans came to fruition. However, the Brautigan album almost did, with Miles coming to San Francisco in early 1969 to work on the production and recording. The sessions were recorded both in Brautigan's kitchen and at Golden State Recorders, a San Francisco recording studio. The album was considered enough of an impending release that Apple sent Brautigan an advance check, for a grand $200, in March 1969. However, although it reached the acetate stage and a sample sleeve had been done, Zapple, like Apple, was in serious organizational trouble. Only two albums (John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions and George Harrison's Electronic Music) were ever released on the label, which folded before Brautigan's LP was issued, although it had been scheduled to come out in late 1969. By this time relations between Brautigan and Miles were strained since, as candidly noted in Miles' memoir In the Sixties, the producer had started an affair with Brautigan's girlfriend, Valerie Estes. However, he did try in the early 1970s to place some of the material he had recorded for Zapple, with Brautigan and others, on different labels, and Harvest Records ended up putting out Listening to Richard Brautigan in 1970.