by Simon Warner
TEXT AND DRUGS AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL
The Beats and Rock Culture
Simon Warner
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013
© Simon Warner, 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Warner, Simon, 1956–
Text and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll : The Beats and Rock Culture / by Simon Warner.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8264-1664-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Music and literature. 2. Beat generation. 3. Rock music--20th century--History and criticism. 4. Authors, American--20th century. 5. American literature--20th century--History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3849.W288 2013
700.973'09045--dc23
2012037315
ISBN: 9781441171122
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Credits
Preface
Rock and rock ’n’ roll: A short note to the reader
INTRODUCTION
i) How the Beats met rock: Some history and some context
ii) Charting the Beats: Background and impact
iii) Beat and rock: A survey of association
iv) The Beats’ own recordings: A selective discography
1 SIFTING THE SHIFTING SANDS: ALLEN GINSBERG, ‘HOWL’ AND THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE IN THE 1950s
INTERLUDE A – LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: A SURVIVOR SURVEYS
INTERVIEW 1 – DAVID AMRAM, JAZZ MUSICIAN AND BEAT COMPOSER, INCLUDING THE PULL MY DAISY SOUNDTRACK
2 CHAINS OF FLASHING MEMORIES: BOB DYLAN AND THE BEATS, 1959–1975
INTERVIEW 2 – MICHAEL McCLURE, POET AND AUTHOR OF THE BEARD
3 MUSE, MOLL, MAID, MISTRESS? BEAT WOMEN AND THEIR ROCK ‘N’ ROLL LEGACY
4 RAISING THE CONSCIOUSNESS? RE-VISITING ALLEN GINSBERG’S 1965 TRIP TO LIVERPOOL
Q&A 1 – MICHAEL HOROVITZ, POET, PUBLISHER AND BRITISH BEAT
INTERVIEW 3 – LARRY KEENAN, PHOTOGRAPHER OF ‘THE LAST GATHERING OF THE BEATS’ IN SAN FRANCISCO IN 1965
OBITUARY 1 – PETER ORLOVSKY, ‘MEMBER OF THE BEAT GENERATION, POET AND LOVER OF ALLEN GINSBERG’
INTERLUDE B – ALL NEAL: CASSADY CELEBRATED IN DOWNTOWN DENVER
Q&A 2 – MARK BLIESENER, ROCK BAND MANAGER AND A FOUNDER OF NEAL CASSADY’S MEMORIAL DAY IN DENVER
5 THE BRITISH BEAT: ROCK, LITERATURE AND THE UK COUNTERCULTURE IN THE 1960s
INTERVIEW 4 – PETE BROWN, BRITISH POET AND ROCK LYRICIST FOR CREAM
Q&A 3 – JONAH RASKIN, GINSBERG BIOGRAPHER AND CULTURAL HISTORIAN
6 THE SOUND OF THE SUMMER OF LOVE? THE BEATLES AND SGT. PEPPER, THE HIPPIES AND HAIGHT-ASHBURY
Q&A 4 – LEVI ASHER, FOUNDER OF BEAT WEBSITE LITERARY KICKS
INTERVIEW 5 – RONALD NAMETH, BEAT FILM-MAKER AND DIRECTOR OF THE FILM OF THE EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE
7 THE MELTZER CHRONICLES: POET, NOVELIST, MUSICIAN AND HISTORIAN OF BEAT AMERICA
REVIEW 1 – BOOK: DAVID MELTZER, BEAT THING
INTERVIEW 6 – BILL NELSON, BRITISH ROCK GUITARIST AND BEAT FOLLOWER
Q&A 5 – JIM SAMPAS, BEAT RECORD PRODUCER INCLUDING KEROUAC: KICKS JOY DARKNESS
8 VERSIONS OF CODY: JACK KEROUAC, TOM WAITS AND THE SONG ‘ON THE ROAD’
9 FEELING THE BOHEMIAN PULSE: LOCATING PATTI SMITH WITHIN A POST-BEAT TRADITION
10 JIM CARROLL: POETRY PRODIGY, POST-BEAT AND ROCKER
OBITUARY 2 – JIM CARROLL, ‘POET AND PUNK MUSICIAN WHO DOCUMENTED HIS TEENAGE DRUG ADDICTION IN THE BASKETBALL DIARIES’
11 ALL CUT UP? WILLIAM BURROUGHS AND GENESIS P-ORRIDGE’S BEATNIK PAST
INTERVIEW 7 – STEVEN TAYLOR, GINSBERG’S GUITARIST AND MEMBER OF THE FUGS
12 STEVEN TAYLOR: A BEAT ENGLISHMAN IN NEW YORK
Q&A 6 – PETE MOLINARI, BRITISH SINGER-SONGWRITER WITH BEAT LEANINGS
13 RETURN TO LOWELL: A VISIT TO THE COMMEMORATIVE AND KEROUAC’S GRAVE
REVIEW 2 – FILM: ONE FAST MOVE OR I’M GONE: KEROUAC’S BIG SUR
REVIEW 3 – CD: ONE FAST MOVE OR I’M GONE: KEROUAC’S BIG SUR
Q&A 7 – CHRIS T-T, BRITISH POLITICAL SINGER-SONGWRITER
OBITUARY 3 – TULI KUPFERBERG, ‘KEY FIGURE IN THE US 1960S COUNTERCULTURE’
Q&A 8 – KEVIN RING, EDITOR OF THE MAGAZINE BEAT SCENE
REVIEW 4 – CD: ON THE ROAD: ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK
Appendix – Kerouac and Cassady on record
Bibliography, discography, filmography, broadcasts, personal communication and interviews
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some sections of this book have appeared elsewhere in different forms. The publishers would like to credit the original sources and thank them for permission to use this material:
‘Sifting the shifting sands: Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” and the American landscape in the 1950s’, Howl for Now: A Celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s epic protest poem, edited by Simon Warner (Pontefract: Route, 2005), pp. 25–52.
‘Filming “Howl”: A cinematic visualisng of the text – Ronald Nameth’, Howl for Now: A Celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s epic protest poem, edited by Simon Warner (Pontefract: Route, 2005), pp. 73–85.
‘A soundtrack to “Howl”: First thought, best thought – Bill Nelson’, Howl for Now: A Celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s epic protest poem, edited by Simon Warner (Pontefract: Route, 2005), pp. 103–115.
‘Raising the consciousness: Re-visiting Allen Ginsberg’s 1965 trip to Liverpool’, Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant Garde, edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Robert Knifton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), pp. 95–108.
‘The Sound of the Summer of Love? The Beatles and Sgt. Pepper, the hippies and Haight-Ashbury’, Summer of Love: The Beatles, Art and Culture in the Sixties, edited by Joerg Helbig and Simon Warner (Trier: WVT, 2008), pp. 5–21.
‘Tuli Kupferberg’, obituary, The Guardian, 26 July 2010.
‘Peter Orlovsky’, obituary, The Guardian, 4 July 2010.
‘Jim Carroll’, obituary, The Guardian, 22 September 2009.
‘Steven Taylor: A Beat Englishman in New York’, Beat Scene, No. 58, 2009.
‘Return to Lowell: A visit to the Commemorative and Kerouac’s grave’, Beat Scene, No. 60, 2009.
One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, DVD review, Beat Scene, No. 60, 2009.
‘Jim Carroll: Poetry prodigy, post-Beat and punk rocker’, obituary, Beat Scene, No. 61, 2009.
One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, CD review, Beat Scene, No. 61, 2009.
CREDITS
I would like to thank the following for their help in making this volume possible. My partner Jayne Sheridan; my father Lionel and late mother Joyce for their decades of support; my long-time friend Paul Morgan and my first travelling companio
n in the US, Nigel Haddon; Dave Moore for his helpful input; Simon Morrison, for his work on the index, and Jed Skinner and Charlie Heslop for their assistance; colleagues Derek Scott and Kevin Dawe and former colleague Allan Greenwood for their encouragement; students on my Beat and rock course at the University of Leeds for their enthusiasm; my editor at Bloomsbury, David Barker, for providing this opportunity, and also members of his team, Ally Jane Grossan and Kaitlin Fontana, for their efforts along the way. Last, but not least, I pay tribute to the input of the press production house, particularly copy editor Dawn Booth and project manager Kim Storry at Fakenham Prepress Solutions, for their diligent contribution to this project.
I also want to pass on my appreciation to a number of key individuals who lent me their time and thoughts as I researched, prepared and wrote this book: David Amram, Michael Anderson, Levi Asher, Michael Beasley, Mark Bliesener, Victor Bockris, Michael Brocken, Pete Brown, Bart Bull, Jim Burns, Bill Byford, Mike Chapple, Jim Cohn, David Cope, Ian Daley, Dick Ellis, Royston Ellis, Christopher George, Holly George-Warren, David Greenberg, Christoph Grunenberg, Peter Hale, Joerg Helbig, Clinton Heylin, Michael Horovitz, Barney Hoskyns, Vic Juris, Bob Kealing, Larry Keenan, Harvey Kubernik, Chris Lee, Edward Lucie-Smith, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Sharon Mesmer, Barry Miles, Pete Molinari, Ronald Nameth, Bill Nelson, Lucy O’Brien, Frank Olinsky, Brian Patten, Joyce Pinchbeck, Genesis P-Orridge, Jonah Raskin, Kevin Ring, George Rodosthenous, Jim Sampas, Philip Shaw, Pete Smith, Steven Taylor, Chris T-T, Anne Waldman, Sheila Whiteley and David Sanjek (1952–2011).
Dedicated to the memory of an old friend and colleague
Geraldine Connor (1952–2011)
… and also to a young friend
Tom Arnold (1984–2012)
PREFACE
Texts and Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll is a book which considers the ways in which two different artistic worlds found common ground in the final third of the last century. The rock musicians who came to the fore at the heart of the 1960s and a radical community of writers, who had originally made their mark in the 1950s, forged friendships and alliances that would challenge the traditional divide between that mass cultural form called popular music and the realm of the literary, a world that would have, conventionally, aimed its output at an elite rather than a mainstream readership. The fact that a maturing brand of rock music was, from around 1965, able to build connections with various Beat Generation novelists and poets suggests that, in a time of great change, this was another symbol of fluidity and transformation, an era when barriers were being broken and the long-established cultural model, constructed on notions of high and low art, was being re-visited, re-ordered and understood anew. Nor would this be merely an esoteric sideshow to the main event we now recall as the Swinging Sixties. On the contrary, the period would witness the two greatest musical acts of the day – the Beatles in the UK and Bob Dylan in the US – developing associations with various leading names from the Beat community: initially with its most voluble figurehead Allen Ginsberg and later with novelist William Burroughs, poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure and others. Ginsberg would befriend Dylan then Paul McCartney and John Lennon; McCartney would become linked to Burroughs; Dylan would build connections with Ferlinghetti and McClure; and there were other Beats and other musicians who would form relationships as the years went by. Of the principal Beats, Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road and perhaps the movement’s key text, was the only significant absentee from this network of interaction. He took a quite different view of the social, cultural and political trends that would unfold during the decade and felt little, if any, affinity with them. Yet, even as he largely withdrew from view, occasionally to re-appear to comment negatively on the mindset of the new decade and the actions of its young people, his inspirational presence to the maturing rock culture and the hippies, in many senses the post-Beat heirs, who attached themselves to it was, nonetheless, plainly evident. Kerouac may have tried to un-link himself from the changing times, but the times would not disconnect themselves from his powerful influence and the ideas he had shared in his many novels over the previous ten years.
For many of the other Beats the notion of cooperation held more appeal and these ambitions appeared mutual, too. Rockers courted poets and poets convened with rockers, and this development would be more than just a fleeting gesture. On the contrary, the links between the Beats and rock musicians would be sustained in the decades that followed. A host of key acts who would emerge in the later 1960s and beyond – from the Doors to the Velvet Underground, David Bowie to Patti Smith, the Clash to Tom Waits, U2 to Nirvana – would follow in the footsteps of Lennon, McCartney and Dylan and demonstrate a similar inclination to acknowledge and maintain a connection to this literary community, and a number of the Beat writers would also continue to participate in this relationship with enthusiasm. This volume will trace that pattern of inter-relationship, identify numerous key examples of the trend, endeavour to understand why this connection was sealed, and how it managed to survive the vicissitudes of cultural – and sub-cultural – change at a time when society’s motors appeared to accelerate at an extraordinary pace.
We might see this study as an indication not just of recent historical shifts but also academic ones, too. The academy is rarely an early adopter of new trends: they may be ephemeral and pass too quickly to be of substance, so scholarly departments are cautious and bide their time. Yet universities in the West have, in the last half century or so, begun to acknowledge two things: that popular culture is not outside nor beneath its consideration and also that the long-standing structure of subjects and disciplines within the traditional academy is not as immoveable as may once have been thought. In terms of the status of popular culture, the post-Second World War years have witnessed areas of creative production from film, from around the 1950s, to television and radio, from around the 1960s, enter the academic realm. It has taken longer for popular music to join this elevated pantheon but, over the last 30 years, the subject has increasingly made its mark, either as part of media studies or communication studies or black studies courses or, particularly in the UK, as a field of study in its own right. We might see also, within the terrain of Popular Music Studies, an example of that movement away from an older disciplinary rigidity. For this subject is, in essence, a gathering of disciplines or sub-disciplines rather than a unified topic of enquiry. Thus musicology and sociology, anthropology and history, business and cultural studies are just some of the approaches employed to make sense of this network of aesthetic, social and industrial ideas that criss crosses the field of exploration. The consideration of music and literature as an inter-disciplinary project is a newer concept still – at least for popular music scholars. In art music, there has been a gradual trend in the later twentieth century towards an examination of the relationship between orchestral or symphonic sounds and signs of a specific musical period and the literary ones – novels, poetry, plays – that may display a connection in style or spirit or a commonality in some other fashion.1 The argument proposes that we can learn more by looking at such artistic practices in association rather than in isolation. Such associations have been considered less, at least to date, in terms of popular music and the literary. This volume hopes to help that process of investigation along by asking how musical expressions and written ones, in tandem, might share a relationship within a historical period. How does one area of practice stimulate, inspire or even change the other? The case of rock music and the Beats seems to be a promising instance in which such questions can be examined further.
In this collection, these associations will be considered in a variety of different ways. A number of longer essays will reflect on the ways in which Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs share links to this history. It will reflect on how Kerouac’s broad rejection of the cultural scene of the 1960s did not mean he avoided his own adoption as an influential icon by the rock culture that followed; it will contemplate how Ginsberg became a guru
of the post-Beat counterculture, befriended many of its principals and emerged as both spokesman and activist in an era of political ferment; and how Burroughs, despite his distinct lack of empathy with the hippies and their ethos, would later emerge as a hero of punk and new wave in the 1970s. There are extended accounts of the manner in which seminal rock stars have involved themselves with the Beat community: Dylan’s crucial connections to the Beat chronology will be addressed; the Beatles’ relationship to the hippies of Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love will be considered; Tom Waits’ passion for Kerouac will be explored, as will the impact that the Beat scene has had on Patti Smith’s career.
There are sections on the place of Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ in mid-1950s America as rock ’n’ roll initially erupted, on Ginsberg’s trip to Liverpool in 1965, and on recordings and cinematic tributes that have paid homage to Kerouac. There is also a chapter considering the place of women in the Beat Generation and how the seeds they sowed in the 1950s may have helped to create opportunities for women in rock in subsequent decades, and an overview of the way musicians and poets in the UK responded to the primarily American phenomenon of Beat. Furthermore there are portraits of some of significant yet less celebrated players in the Beat-rock story, such as poet David Meltzer – the first Beat to meet Dylan – Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist and Fugs member for decades, poet rocker Jim Carroll and the British musician and artist Genesis P-Orridge, who enjoyed a long-term association with Burroughs.
In addition there are a number of other ways in which this history is reviewed – extended interviews with some seminal Beat characters, including poet Michael McClure, musician and composer David Amram, and an important photographer of this scene, Larry Keenan; obituaries of poet Peter Orlovsky and musician Tuli Kupferberg; shorter sketches of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Neal Cassady; conversations with experimental film-maker Ronald Nameth, rock guitarist Bill Nelson and Cream lyricist Pete Brown; and a series of Q&As with a string of individuals with close connections to the Beat-rock crossover, as academics and magazine editors, record producers and rock band managers, poets and songwriters, offer some personal reflections and original insights on the ways in which this literary form and that musical style find common ground.
