Weird Music: Bingo Gazingo

Before anyone who knows the work of Bingo Gazingo and thinks he's simply a poet, think again. His stream-of-conscience "poetry" was lyrical, and often accompanied by music played on an old cassette player, with a microphone pointed at the speaker. People have over-laid music to his rantings, and the they work as spoken word songs. So to pigeon-hole Bingo Gazingo was simply a poet is an understatement of his deserved place as a key figure in what is often referred to as outsider music.  

Born as Murray Wachs in 1924, Bingo Gazingo died in 2010 when he was run down by a taxi cab in New York City on his way to the Bowery Poetry Club on the 28th of December 2009, dying on New Year's Day. He had performed at the Bowery Poetry Club for years, every Monday night. Where audiences would get a chance to hear his crude rambling, often perverse yet profound poetic proficiency, with such classics as  "I Love You So Fucking Much I Can't Shit". 

He never claimed to be a poet, but insisted he was a musician and song writer. And despite his status as an icon of outsider art and music, he openly sort was fame and fortune. He always insisted he was a singer, not a poet, and throughout his life wrote songs that he hoped would be picked-up and recorded by others. It a quote from the New York Times he said he wrote "ballads, novelties, show tunes, country-and-western songs, anything he thought would sell, and left them at stage doors at the Roxy, the Paramount and the Strand, in a time-honored tradition." 

Though it has been suggested, in a clever move by the wily old man, that calling all his output songs rather than poems meant he could claim publishing rights and royalties on his work. Whether that's true or not, Bingo Gazingo goes down in the annals of outsider artists that have had an impact they never would have imagined before the dawn of the Internet. Perhaps he knew what was coming, when he penned  "You're Out of the Computer".