Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  The Beats of the forties and fifties were the catalysts who precipitated the more widespread social rebellion of the sixties and seventies. As a small group of kindred spirits determined to practise absolute personal freedom within a society governed by stifling conservative attitudes, they set an example embraced by the next generation. The period of general upheaval we call ‘the sixties’ might well have taken place without the Beat Generation, but it would have certainly had a different flavour and moved at a different pace. When the Beats broke free from the status quo in life and art, they set the stage for the future.77

  Rock itself would, in time, take on some of the major issues of the day, harnessing its phenomenal power to call for peace at Woodstock in 1969, place the flood victims of Bangla Desh in the spotlight in 1971, back anti-racist policies through vehicles like Rock Against Racism in the later 1970s, bring environmental concerns to the fore by questioning the credibility of nuclear strategies through agencies like MUSE78 in 1979, drag the obscenity of world hunger up the diplomatic agenda via events such as Live Aid in 1985, help bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa via records and concerts during the 1980s, draw attention to issues of social injustice in territories like Tibet in the 1990s and contest the morality of the war in Iraq in the 2000s, for instance. In that sense, we might see a continuing narrative between the political consciousness of the Beats and the campaigning sensibility that rock would occasionally, and often with great impact, display over several decades.

  Yet to reiterate, I do believe that it was rather the power that the Beats granted to the individual that was most important to the flame of rock ’n’ roll: that power to choose a course that was not mapped out, petrified even, by the oppressive certainties of power, class, race, gender and sex, those certainties that had ossified society and drained the freedom of choice for men and women to plot a route that was unconventional, unexpected or resistant to the norm. As Pountain and Robins emphasise: ‘The Beats regarded jobs, families, security, indeed any form of deferred gratification as dull and conformist. They opted out of work and civic duties to pursue immediate pleasures, claiming to be chasing a higher truth through oriental philosophies and experimentation with mind-expanding drugs.’79 If that behaviour was indeed what we could characterise as transgression, then it was such an ideological inflection the Beats helped to bring to generations who followed in their wake. Whether it was the music-makers themselves or their subcultural followers – the hippies or the punks, the goths or the b-boys, the followers of grunge or the ravers – it was this sense of opportunity, of possibility, a freeing of the imagination, a releasing of the spirit – which, if it meant transgressing social codes or deviating from legal rules, then so be it – that the Beats most effectively passed on as their legacy. They gave permission to those who followed to step outside the confines of restriction and limited expectation and extend their scope of personal, artistic and creative aspiration. It is on that principal notion, I would assert, that the connection between Beat ideas and rock expressions most convincingly rests. But such a claim has strong hints of the impressionistic about it. How can we substantiate and demonstrate these links?

  iii) Beat and rock: A survey of association

  If we are to go looking for more specific evidence of rock’s engagement with Beat, or Beat’s engagement with rock indeed, what are the signs that might help us to establish that such connections exist? These signs may appear in a variety of forms: there may be actual artistic evidence of association on recordings or in collaborative performances; there may be examples of social interaction or informal mixing; or there could be fragments of information garnered from a range of other media sources – interviews, for instance, in which writers or musicians are mentioned as friends or influences, on-stage comments, videos or photographs. There may be references to Beat writers in songs; there may be references to rock artists in Beat poetry or prose. Further, there may be actual recorded tributes to the writers, celebrating their literary work in a musical setting. In this section I would like to explore some examples of the kind of evidence that could help us make these assessments and then proceed to offer an overview of some of the instances in which Beat and rock have joined hands in various complementary fashions. Let us initially use brief examples below, a number of which will be explored more fully in the chapters that follow.

  Bob Dylan’s connection to the Beats may be evidenced in a variety of ways: his autobiographical statements that he read work by these writers from the end of the 1950s; via information gleaned from biographical accounts and the informants who feed into those histories; from the social contacts he forged during the 1960s, with particular reference to his meeting with Allen Ginsberg in 1963 and his attendance at the Last Gathering of the Beats in 1965; and Dylan’s contribution to various Ginsberg recordings in the 1970s and 1980s. This is before we even consider the work that Dylan produced himself – at first centred on the traditional folk repertoire with some self-penned compositions in the style of his heroes like Woody Guthrie, then followed from 1963 by song-writing that was more political, and then, from 1965, by recordings that were more personal, poetic and even abstract, a mode which sees the artist leave behind the historical past and the political present to produce songs that no longer confront an everyday realism but begin to deal in more obscure lyrical avenues of the psychological and the unconscious, a major step away from the narrative accounts of folk and the romantic concerns of the popular song. Ginsberg’s simultaneous physical presence as these shifts occur – in the short film accompanying ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, at the filmed San Francisco press conference in December 1965, and in the movie Don’t Look Back – can hardly be discounted. Nor can we ignore the apparent, and regular, reference to Kerouac’s titles – such as Desolation Angels and Visions of Gerard – in Dylan’s output – ‘Desolation Row’, and ‘Visions of Johanna’, for example – in the performer’s key work of this mid-1960s period. In addition, Dylan’s own ambitions as a novelist, perhaps in the cut-up mode of Burroughs, are revealed when he belatedly issues his fictional work Tarantula in 1971.

  Ginsberg’s presence at various important junctures we have already mentioned but we might add further relevant fragments to this picture. The new poems he develops after 1965 when Dylan buys the poet an expensive tape recorder, allowing him to gather this thoughts on the move; the various references he makes to Dylan in his poems after the mid-1960s; his inclusion on the major Dylan tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue,80 from 1975–6 and, most particularly, when the poet joins the singer at the grave of Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts. There, the pair pay homage to the novelist in poetry and song, a scene that appears in the movie record of the tour Renaldo and Clara (1978). Let us also mention Ginsberg’s appearance in Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home (2005) when the poet is a central witness to the songwriter’s life and impact and, finally, the tribute that Dylan pays from the stage to Ginsberg shortly after his death in 1997.

  As for the Beats and the Beatles, we have strong suggestions that the group adopted the very spelling of their name as a result of a conversation between John Lennon and Liverpool Beat poet Royston Ellis. Before then, Lennon had produced a satirical newspaper in school titled The Daily Howl. The group would not meet Ginsberg until May 1965, after a Dylan concert at the Albert Hall, but Paul McCartney would quickly become a friend of the poet. Not only would Ginsberg visit the singer’s home in London, but by the later 1960s, McCartney, Ginsberg and their mutual associate Barry Miles had also agreed to create a spoken word record label called Zapple, a project echoing, and under the auspices of, the Beatles’ new record label Apple. In the mid-decade, too, with William Burroughs now living in London, McCartney was helpful to the writer and his associates who had various recording projects they hoped to develop at the time. As for Lennon, the songwriter would include Ginsberg in the chorus of his great anti-war anthem, ‘Give Peace a Chance’, in 1969 and, as the early 1970s unfolded and Lennon moved to New York, Ginsb
erg’s home city, the two would meet on a number of occasions as their various political concerns, particularly in relation to the on-going Vietnam War, coincided. But Ginsberg would also be a Lennon ally as the Beatle fought to gain a Green Card and permit him to stay in the US as the very real threat of deportation hung over him. In the mid-1990s, McCartney joined Ginsberg on one of his last recording ventures. ‘The Ballad of the Skeletons’ would include the Beatle on guitar, and musical contributions from Patti Smith Group member Lenny Kaye and composer Philip Glass.

  As for Ginsberg’s interest in the Beatles, it seems plain that he was caught up in the same musical excitement that gripped the world from 1964 but desired a taste of it that went beyond merely hearing their records; he craved a first-hand experience of what had created this extraordinary phenomenon. Not only did Ginsberg become an early convert to their sound, once Beatlemania had spread like wildfire across the US, he was also sufficiently interested in the band’s background to visit their home city of Liverpool in 1965. His engagement with the Mersey poets and musicians and his celebrated praise of the city, dubbing it ‘at the present moment the centre of the consciousness of the human universe’81 were clear evidence of the poet’s excitement at this regional cultural eruption. While the Beatles had well and truly put Merseyside on the global map by this time, Ginsberg’s appearance in person in the city was not an insignificant factor in drawing attention to Liverpool’s other creative voices such as Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten, Beat-linked Britons, whose anthology The Mersey Sound would create a huge new – and young – readership for contemporary poetry when it was published in 1967. Very shortly after his Mersey sojourn, Ginsberg would appear at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in London, in June 1965, when more than 7,000 attended a reading also featuring Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and a number of new British poetry voices such as Michael Horovitz, Adrian Mitchell, Spike Hawkins and Pete Brown, an event often considered the birthing pool of the UK underground.

  So the case for Ginsberg’s connection to the rock scene and the countercultural flow, even if we only outline his links to Dylan and the Beatles, the two major acts, after all, to come to the fore in the mid-1960s, is hard to dispute. Nor can we dismiss the proactive efforts of the singer and the group to trigger and strengthen their links with the poet over many years. Ginsberg’s death prompted tributes from both rock critics and artists. Gilmore believed that ‘“Howl” was one of the most incandescent events in post-World War II literary history or popular culture, and its arrival later insured the Beats their place on the map of modern time’.82 Yoko Ono added that Ginsberg ‘was intelligent in a way that influenced a whole generation’.83 Bono commented: ‘Allen was extraordinary. There’s a much more minimal style, sort of post-[Raymond] Carver sense for literature right now. But that drunk language still survives. If you think about it, the headiness of the Sixties and the dizziness of it all, I think his position is safe.’84

  We might also point to some of the tributes that have been paid to Ginsberg by artists as diverse as They Might Be Giants – their 1994 song ‘I Should Be Allowed to Think’ refers to ‘Howl’ and gently lampoons it; Rage Against the Machine, whose live version of the poem ‘Hadda be Playing on the Jukebox’ formed part of the CD single ‘Bulls on Parade’ in 1996; Patti Smith and her 1997 work ‘Spell’ is based on ‘Footnote to Howl’; and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s ‘Howl’, from the 2005 album of the same name, considered to be a reference to both the Beat Generation and their home city of San Francisco, where the poem was first presented. So, these are useful examples of Ginsberg’s presence in this muso-literary setting. But in what other ways can we pinpoint this intersection and this interaction? How else did Beat touch rock and how did rock impact on Beat?

  While Kerouac was distanced from many of the social transformations that arose in the last decade of his life – he would die in 1969 – and was actually highly critical of the countercultural forces of the 1960s which he regarded as fundamentally anti-American, his personal position had little effect on his status as iconic hero for that immediate rock generation and subsequent ones beside. Lester Bangs wrote on his passing: ‘Jack was in so many ways a spiritual father of us all, as much as Lenny Bruce or Dylan […] He was among the first artists to broadcast to the world this new sensibility aborning these last two decades, a sensibility that first began to take shape about the time many of us were born.’85 He adds: ‘The first hipsters were a far cry from the affected zombielike “cool” stance that came to predominate later. Like the best aspects of the Sixties’ hip movement and Kerouac himself, they represented the apotheosis of American individualism and rascally exuberance …’86

  Kerouac would become the subject of many dozens of namings in songs, that would follow his demise, by artists spanning many rock genres – from Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band’s ‘Kerouac’ (1976) to Tom Waits’ ‘Jack & Neal’ (1977), King Crimson’s ‘Neal and Jack and Me’ (1982) to the Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Burnin’ for You’ (1982), Graham Parker’s ‘Sounds Like Chains’ (1983) to the Smiths’ ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ (1984), 10,000 Maniacs’ ‘Hey Jack Kerouac’ (1987) to Steve Earle’s ‘The Other Kind’ (1990), Weezer’s ‘Holiday’ (1994) to Guided by Voices’ ‘Kerouac Never Drove, So He Never Drove Alone’ (2002), the Go-Betweens’ ‘The House that Jack Built’ (2004) to Sage Francis’ ‘Escape Artist’ (2005), the Hold Steady’s ‘Stuck Between Stations’ (2006) to Frank Turner’s ‘Poetry and the Deed’ (2009), to name only a small selection. In addition, Kerouac’s travelling companion Neal Cassady has also made many appearances including in songs by the Grateful Dead, the Washington Squares, Fatboy Slim and the Maple State.

  Yet the most concentrated tributes arise in two albums which appeared in the late 1990s. Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness from 1997 was a wide-ranging homage to the writer in words and music and gathered a major line-up of singers who wished to pay tribute to his life and work. Two years later, Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road, had a different context and a contrasting texture, featuring much more of Kerouac’s own voice as reader and singer, but did contain significant new work by jazz composer and arranger David Amram – settings of the novelist’s re-discovered poems – and by long-time Kerouac follower Tom Waits who, joined by Californian funk rock band Primus, provided his own version of a Kerouac song, named in honour of his breakthrough novel, ‘On the Road’.

  Yet it was Kicks Joy Darkness, taking its adapted title from Kerouac’s oft-quoted On the Road passage, ‘At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver coloured section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night’,87 that would provide the most engaging and multi-faceted survey of the writer’s output, re-interpreted by singers and bands operating in many different rock modes – indie bands, grunge artists, dance acts, folk performers, hippies, punks and new wavers among them – a clear reflection of the way that Kerouac, and Beat writers more generally, have been able to cut across the divisions that have so often separated singers and bands by genre and subculture in the popular music world. The appeal of these writers appears to have transcended the historical rock camps, which have been regularly seen to be in competition or in binary opposition, for example, the hippies and the punks.

  Among those who participated in the project, produced by Jim Sampas with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo as associate producer, were Michael Stipe of REM, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, Joe Strummer of the Clash, the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, Rob Buck of 10,000 Maniacs, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, the group Morphine and Patti Smith. They were further joined by actors Johnny Depp and Matt Dillon, comic Richard Lewis, Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, the writer Hunter S. Thompson, Lydia Lunch, Lenny Kaye, Warren Zevon, Jeff Buckley, Juliana Hatfield and surviving Beat originals Allen Ginsberg, William Burroug
hs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The album release appeared also in a double CD version in Japan, adding four pieces to the original set, with acid jazz act UFO (United Future Organization) and Graham Parker joining the line-up in the expanded edition.

  Commenting on the collection, Robert Elliot Fox says: ‘There are twenty-five tracks in all, and all of them are interesting, although they inevitably vary in importance and effectiveness of presentation.’88 He adds, however, that ‘while the associated music on Kicks Joy Darkness often does provide an interesting counterpoint to the spoken text, there are times when the music overwhelms the words or distracts us unnecessarily from the tonalities of voice as an instrument in itself. This is true, for example, where Kerouac is reading from “MacDougal Street Blues”. The dubbed-in rock music by Joe Strummer of the British band the Clash doesn’t add anything to the performance and in fact makes it harder to hear what Kerouac is doing vocally; at the very least, the instrumental track should have been less prominent in the mix. For a much more successful amalgamation, compare the way Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler’s background vocal is handled on his reading of “Dream: ‘Us kids swim off a gray pier’”, or how Kerouac quietly scats in the background while Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter reads from Visions of Cody.’89

  More recently, there have been film projects that have seen artists engaged to write music for Kerouac-centred productions. In 2009, Jay Farrar, formerly of Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt, and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie combined to create and perform the accompanying soundtrack to the documentary One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur. The film, which was released to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of Kerouac’s death, featured an ingredient that was unusual. While Gibbard and Farrar devised a score that drew heavily on indie rock and alt.country, the lyrics they utilised were drawn verbatim from Kerouac’s own 1962 novel Big Sur. Gibbard has had a long-standing attraction to Kerouac’s work and Death Cab for Cutie have included songs referencing the writer on earlier albums. ‘Lowell, MA’ and ‘Title Track’ from the band’s 2000 album We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes and ‘Bixby Canyon Bridge’ from the 2008 album Narrow Stairs provide examples of this interest.