One for Friday: Yo La Tengo and Daniel Johnston, “Speeding Motorcycle” The band had included a version of the song on the 1990 album Fakebook, which was largely comprised of covers. In February of that year, Yo La Tengo was appearing on legendary New Jersey community radio station WMFU-FM as part of the anniversary edition of a show called “The Live Music Faucet.” The program’s host had taken advantage of recent, unexpected contact with Johnston to organize an on-air collaboration between the somewhat reclusive singer-songwriter and the band that had recently covered him in memorable fashion. With Yo La Tengo in the studio and Johnston on the telephone, and tape thankfully rolling, the performance ensued. Though it is orchestrated more than it may have seemed when I first read about it and then heard it, what distinguishes the track is the sense of freedom and spontaneity. As pop music was steadily, noticeably moving away from the reckless freedom of earlier years, when it truly seemed that merit could occasionally win the day over of the various prefabricated, plug-and-play idols and voices that have always been part of the recording industry playbook, something as loose and warmly wooly as this already seemed like an elusive pleasure. There’s just something about the charmingly clunky beginning–Johnston cheerfully sidestepping formal introductions by chirping, “Okay, hi band!” and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan insisting that a countdown wasn’t needed before Johnston jumped into the lyrics–that makes the melding of the distant collaborators all the more wondrous.

Here’s the story, in Allen Ginsberg’s own words: Vomit Express: These 1971 sessions came about because Dylan had come to hear a poetry reading at NYU’s Loeb Auditorium, standing in the back of the crowded hall with David Amram. We were on stage with a gang of musician friends, and Peter improvised, singing, You shouldn’t write poetry down but carol it in the air, because to use paper you have to cut down trees. I picked up on that, and we spent a half an hour making up tuneful words on the spot. I didn’t know 12-bar blues, it was just a free-form rhyming extravaganza. We packed up, said goodbye to the musicians, thanked them and gave them a little money, went home, and then the phone rang. It was Dylan asking, Do you always improvise like that? And I said, Not always, but I can. I used to do that with Kerouac under the Brooklyn Bridge all the time. He came to our apartment with Amram and a guitar, we began inventing something about Vomit Express, jamming for quite awhile, but didn’t finish it. He said, Oh, we ought to get together in a studio and do it, then showed me the three-chord blues pattern on my pump organ. A week later in the studio Dylan actually did the arrangement, told people when to do choruses and when to take breaks, and suggested the musicians cut a few endings on their own to be spliced in. Vomit Express was a phrase I got from my friend Lucien Carr, who talked about going to Puerto Rico, went often, and we were planning to take an overnight plane a couple of weeks later, my first trip there. He spoke of it as the vomit express poor people flying at night for cheap fares, not used to airplanes, throwing up airsick.