Thomas Breen
Pedersen reads Ginsberg at Wilbur Cross.
Allen Ginsberg and Jimi Hendrix turned up at the polls Tuesday —in the form of two local 14-year-old musicians, who channeled their midcentury American counterculture icons to temporarily transform the Wilbur Cross High School parking lot into a sort of Election Day Gaslight Cafe.
The two teenage performers were Alec Pedersen and James Wyrtzen.
Pedersen and Wyrtzen.
Both attend the Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) on Audubon Street. Pedersen lives in East Rock, and is a 9th grader at Wilbur Cross. Wyrtzen lives in Whitneyville, and is a 9th grader at Hamden High.
Outside of the East Rock high school’s polling place Tuesday morning, Pedersen and Wyrtzen stood six feet apart, guitars in hand, and performed a mix of blues standards, Bob Dylan staples, and even a few originals.
The centerpiece of their half-hour Election Day concert was a performance of Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “America,” with Pedersen reading the words of the Beatnik bard as Wyrtzen played “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the style of Hendrix.
“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing,” Pedersen read as Wyrtzen soaked the American anthem in psychedelic reverb.
“America two dollars and twentyseven 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?”
A motorcyclist with an American flag and a Black Lives Matter flag rolls by during the show.
Pedersen said he wanted to read the Ginsberg poem because of how resonant some of its lines still are then 64 years later.
He pointed to the line, “I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of / underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light / of five hundred suns” as one such example.
“The statements he makes about America are definitely very accurate,” Pedersen said. “I think that’s still very true, that they’re kind of sweeping things under the rug and not apologizing.”
Wyrtzen agreed, and said he’s been looking to Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72” as a sort of field guide for understanding American national politics in 2020.
“Trump reminds me a lot of Richard Nixon,” he said, “and George McGovern reminds me a lot of Joe Biden. … Hopefully what happened in 1972 does not happen now,” with McGovern losing in a landslide to a Republican president who would be impeached and would resign two years later after Watergate.
In addition to the Ginsberg-Hendrix mashup, the two played Dylan’s “Tambourine Man” and the blues standard “Poor Boy Blues.”
They also played a Pedersen original, called “Ode to New Haven,” which turned the performers’ musical eye a bit closer to home.
“Way back when on Oak Street,” Pedersen sang,
“There used to be a bakery.
There used to be bustling sidewalks
Where all the people could walk free.
But they bulldozed Oak Street,
And they wrecking balled the bakery
To make some confusing highways
And make the whole town look pretty.”
Click on the video below to watch Pedersen and Wyrtzen perform “America,” and a few other songs on Election Day.
