We just learned that New York street/performance poet Bingo Gazingo died on january 1st.
Bingo Gazingo (June 2, 1924 – January 1, 2010) was an elderly poet and former postal worker from New York City. Two versions, each also titled Bingo Gazingo, have been released of the only single-artist album ever released by WFMU — the first on cassette, the second on CD.
The album consists of Bingo’s reading his poems to an improvised musical accompaniment by WFMU DJs R. Stevie Moore, Bob Brainen, Dennis Diken, Dave Amels, Chris Bolger and Chris Butler, and engineered by Amels. Often, while performing live, the background music to his frantic, poetic incantations is nothing more than a cassette tape inserted into a cheap cigar-box tape recorder and miked.
Bingo’s poetry often contain hilarious rhyme schemes and crude language, with titles like “Up Your Jurassic Park” and “I Love You So Fucking Much I Can’t Shit”. In the past he has penned hyper-caffeinated odes to Madonna, Tupac Shakur, and Beavis and Butthead, and had his “Everything’s O.K. at the O.K. Corral” (a dreamy remniscence of the cowboy movie serials by an old nurse-attended man) featured on a 1996 CD produced by the famed Greenwich Village coffeehouse Fast Folk Cafe.
Born Murray Wachs in Queens in 1924, Bingo Gazingo wrote music for most of his life, struggling on the edge of obscurity. He continued to actively write, record and perform perverse, edgy music until the day he died at 85 years old, struck down by a cab on his way to perform at the Bowery Poetry Club in late 2009.
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