Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  Which other recordings and artists might we include in this brief survey? We should mention Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry Recordings in the Cellar with the Cellar Jazz Quintet176 (1958), a work which co-credits Kenneth Rexroth. Much later, in 1999, Ferlinghetti would record A Coney Island of the Mind177 with Morphine’s saxophonist Dana Colley and then, in 2005, Pictures of the Gone World178 with David Amram. Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka would record versions of his poem ‘Black Dada Nihilismus’ on the New York Art Quintet’s eponymously-titled album179 of 1966 and, 20 years later, with Paul Miller/DJ Spooky on Off Beat/A Red Hot Sound Trip.180 Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island181 (1991) was realised as a poetry-with-music work accompanied by the Paul Winter Consort. Michael McClure’s collaboration with former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek is represented by the 1993 album Love Lion.182 Gregory Corso’s Die On Me183 from 2002 sees him joined by Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Marianne Faithfull on a final recording released a year after his death. David Meltzer’s Poet w/Jazz 1958184 is a further work which was not released until 2005. In addition, there are a number of further recorded examples by Beat or Beat-linked writers gathered by Ronan’s Disks of the Gone World, among them two compilations: The Beat Generation185 (1992) and Howls, Raps and Roars186 (1993). The first is a three CD set, the second a four CD collection. Both bring together elements of the poetic and the musical and feature many of the principal Beats alongside rarities and curiosities. The first covers a wide expanse of ground from the Rod McKuen-penned song ‘The Beat Generation’ to Kenneth Patchen and Lord Buckley alongside both popular and jazz musical examples. The second is more poetry-inclined but does include work by Lenny Bruce and re-issues Ferlinghetti and Rexroth’s jazz poetry recordings in San Francisco’s Cellar.

  Notes

  1 It is worth noting that while the Last Gathering of the Beats featured a remarkable convention of talents, several of the key players – Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Neal Cassady among them – were not involved in this cameo.

  2 Some of the pictures from the session would be utilised on the much later 5 LP/3 CD Dylan retrospective Biograph released on Columbia in 1985.

  3 On 25 July 1965, Dylan has surprised many fans by including an electric set in his appearance at that summer’s Newport Folk Festival.

  4 Around 1944, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and their friend Lucien Carr compiled a shared manifesto which they called the ‘New Vision’, a statement which expressed a commitment to experimental art, approved of the derangements that drugs might stimulate and rejected both censorship and conventional morality as barriers to the creative impulse. See Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels and Hipsters, 1944–1960 (New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 40.

  5Kerouac, as a Columbia undergraduate, had an apartment at 118th Street close to Minton’s at this time.

  6Richard Meltzer quoted in John Leland, Hip: The History (New York: Ecco, 2004), p. 137.

  7Nat Hentoff quoted in Leon Ostransky, Understanding Jazz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977), p. 201.

  8Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro: Superficial reflections on the hipster’, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, edited by Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (London: Panther, 1960), pp. 288–306.

  9There were, of course, eventually black Beats, too, but some would have a complicated affiliation to the literary community. Leroi Jones, the most prominent African-American to be identified as Beat, detached himself from the scene when he became Amiri Baraka and turned his energies to radical black politics in the mid-1960s.

  10Aronowitz interviewed Kerouac in 1959.

  11Some of these links are more verifiable than others. Sam Charters refers to the Young and Kerouac connection in the 1940s in his lecture ‘Jack Kerouac and jazz’, ‘On the Road, 25th Anniversary Conference’, Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado, 1982, http://www.archive.org/details/On_the_road__The_Jack_ Kerouac_conference_82P261 [accessed 28 February 2012]. Al Aronowitz certainly met Kerouac in the 1950s and also interviewed Neal Cassady in jail in 1960; Aronowitz introduced Ginsberg to Dylan in 1963; and he was present at the Dylan and Beatles meeting in 1964. See also Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and the Beatles: The Best of the Blacklisted Journalist, Vol. 1 (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2004).

  12In New York in the 1940s and into the 1950s, the musicians, painters and writers engaged in new creative approaches often gathered in the same bars and cafés, such as the White Horse and the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. Another, the San Remo, was a social haunt of Pollock, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, composer John Cage, artist Larry Rivers, Kerouac and many others. See Bill Morgan, The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1997), p. 89.

  13Richard Lewis reads the essay on the tribute CD, Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness (Rykodisc, 1997).

  14Douglas Brinkley, ‘The American journey of Jack Kerouac’, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, edited by Holly George-Warren (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), p. 115.

  15Dylan in a long career, spanning 35 studio albums, has very occasionally shared his lyrics on the sleeve – for example, Empire Burlesque (1985) and Under the Red Sky (1990).

  16Richard Goldstein, The Poetry of Rock (New York: Bantam, 1969).

  17Ibid., p. 15.

  18Geoffrey Stokes, ‘Trimming the sails’, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll, edited by Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 447–63 (p. 452).

  19Janet Maslin, ‘Singer songwriters’, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, edited by Jim Miller (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 312.

  20Respected academics such as Christopher Ricks, a Briton at Boston University, has been one such advocate for Dylan’s words. See the entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, edited by Michael Gray (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 571–4.

  21Bob Dylan’s Writings and Drawings (London: Panther) would first appear in the first of several editions in 1973, collecting his lyrics in one substantial paperback. Other later examples include The Lyrics of John Lennon (London: Omnibus, 1997), whose author had already seen his humorous verse published while still a Beatle, Paul McCartney’s Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics 1965–1999 (London: Faber and Faber, 2001) and Joni Mitchell: The Complete Poems and Lyrics (New York: Crown Publishing, 1997).

  22Cohn quoted in David Pichaske, The Poetry of Rock: The Golden Years (Peoria, IL: The Ellis Press, 1981), p. 3.

  23Pichaske, pp. 4–5.

  24Kerouac had attended Columbia even if he did not graduate; Ginsberg did graduate from Columbia, despite twice having experienced expulsion; Burroughs had earlier graduated from Harvard; Ferlinghetti graduated from Columbia and later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris.

  25The proto-Beats of the 1940s who clustered in New York had reading lists that ranged from Shakespeare to the Romantic poets, Dostoyevsky to the Symbolists, Proust to Joyce, Melville to Genet, Céline to Spengler.

  26Keith Richards adopted the name-style Richard from the early 1960s to the early 1970s.

  27Founder Paul Williams claimed in the first issue he produced that ‘you are looking at the first issue of a magazine of rock and roll criticism’. See Ulf Lindberg, Gester Gudmundsson, Morten Michelsen and Hans Weisethaunet, Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers and Cool-Headed Cruisers (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), p. 106.

  28Lindberg et al., p. 133.

  29Ibid.

  30Simon Frith, Sound Effects (New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 171.

  31Ronald Sukenick, Down and In: Life in the Underground (New York: Collier Books, 1987), pp. 168–9.

  32Lindberg et al., Rock Criticism from the Beginning, p. 197.

  33Case, joined by fellow NME contributors Roy Carr and Fred Dellar, would later collaborate on a book-length account of this scene in The Hip: Hipsters, Jazz and the Beat Generation (London: Faber, 1986).

  34See Ed Sanders, Fug You:
An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (Boston, MA: Da Capo, 2011).

  35See Barry Miles, In the Sixties (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002).

  36Ginsberg would be present at the Oakland anti-war demos in late 1965, the Human Be-In in San Francisco in early 1967 and the Chicago Democratic Convention riots of the summer of 1968. Burroughs, alongside French writer Jean Genet and US new journalist Terry Southern, would join the latter event.

  37Cassady’s involvement with Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests when he became a driver of the Merry Pranksters’ bus saw him engaged directly in a countercultural project.

  38See Simon Warner, ‘Culture shock: The arts in rock’, Rockspeak!: The Language of Rock and Pop (London: Blandford, 1996), pp. 73–133.

  39Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), p. 222.

  40Ibid., p. 223.

  41Ibid.

  42Ibid.

  43Ibid., pp. 225–6.

  44Steve Turner, Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 19.

  45Ibid., p. 21.

  46Ibid.

  47Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) was a US Christian whose alleged psychic powers drew followers to his philosophies including Cassady.

  48Ted Gioia, The Birth and Death of the Cool (Golden, CO: Speck Press, 2009), p. 122.

  49Anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, who died in 1998, wrote a series of books, commencing with The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968. Their interest in shamanism, sorcery and the out of body experiences prompted by drug use chimed with the hippy interests of the period.

  50Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) was an early and influential call to manage the global environment.

  51Ibid., pp. 122–3.

  52Holly George-Warren, ‘Introduction’, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, edited by Holly George-Warren (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), p. ix.

  53Ibid., p. x.

  54Ibid.

  55Beat was defined in a number of ways. It was used to mean ‘down and out, poor and exhausted’ by jazz musicians such as Mezz Mezzrow, who also coined dead beat or beat-up. See Ann Charters (ed.), The Penguin Book of the Beats (London: Penguin, 1993), p. xvii. Ginsberg, interpreting hustler Herbert Huncke’s street usage, said beat meant ‘exhausted, at the bottom of the world, rejected by society, streetwise’ (ibid., p. xviii). Kerouac later stressed Beat’s beatific, saint-like sense in his June 1959 essay ‘The Origins of the Beat Generation’ in Playboy. See: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug00/lambert/ontheroad/response.html [accessed 9 November 2012].

  56Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia would be the other contributors.

  57The Beat Hotel was at 9, rue Git-le-Coeur, a basic rooming house on Paris’ bohemian Left Bank. See Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958–1963 (New York: Grove Press, 2000).

  58Gregory Corso, born in New York City in 1930, lived until 2001.

  59Bill Morgan, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation (New York: Free Press, 2010), p. xvii.

  60Steve Turner, 1996), p. 13.

  61Barry Miles, Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats (London: Virgin, 1998), p. xii.

  62Jack Kerouac, On the Road (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 11.

  63Roy Carr, Brian Case and Fred Dellar, The Hip, p. 105.

  64John Leland, Hip: The History (New York: Ecco, 2004), p. 262.

  65Quoted in Tommy Udo, ‘He was a great advertisement for doing everything you shouldn’t do’, New Musical Express, 16 August 1997.

  66Jed Birmingham, ‘William Burroughs and Norman Mailer’, 14 October 2009, Reality Studio, http://realitystu.dio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-burroughs-and-norman-mailer/ [accessed 16 October 2011].

  67Graham Caveney, The ‘Priest’, They Call Him: The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 189.

  68Barry Miles, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (London: Virgin, 1993), p. 5.

  69Mikal Gilmore, ‘Allen Ginsberg, 1926–1997’, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, edited by Holly George-Warren (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), pp. 227–40 (p. 228).

  70Gilmore, ibid.

  71Ginsberg quoted in Sukenick, 1987, pp. 81–2.

  72Quoted in Sukenick, 1987, p. 94.

  73Ibid., p. 95.

  74Ibid., p. 96.

  75From Allen Ginsberg, ‘America’, Collected Poems, 1947–1997 (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 154–6 (p. 154).

  76Leland, 2004, p. 148.

  77Bill Morgan, 2010, p. 247.

  78Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) was formed by musicians Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and others, in part as a response to the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in March of that year.

  79Dick Pountain and David Robins, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 67.

  80Sukenick writes: ‘Some of Ginsberg’s friends say that in some ways he always wanted to be a rock star […] Once he told me with a sense of awe that he’s recently read a poem to twenty – or was it forty? – thousand people. Anne Waldman says it was with the Rolling Thunder Revue, and Bob Dylan let him read to the outdoor crowd because it was raining’ (1987, p. 82).

  81Allen Ginsberg quoted in Edward Lucie-Smith (ed.), The Liverpool Scene (London: Donald Carroll, 1967), p. 15.

  82Mikal Gilmore, ‘Allen Ginsberg: 1926–1997’, obituary, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, 1999, pp. 227–40 (pp. 233–5).

  83Yoko Ono, ‘Memories of Allen’, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, pp. 275–83 (p. 278).

  84Bono, ibid., p. 276.

  85Lester Bangs, ‘Elegy for a Desolation Angel’, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, pp. 140–3 (p. 140).

  86Ibid., pp. 140–2.

  87Jack Kerouac, On the Road, p. 169.

  88Robert Elliot Fox, ‘Review essay: Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness’, Postmodern Culture, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1997, sourced at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v007/7.3r_fox.html [accessed 2 January, 2011].

  89Ibid.

  90See Craig Copetas, ‘Beat godfather meets glitter mainman: Burroughs and David Bowie’, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, edited by Holly George-Warren (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), pp. 193–202.

  91David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie – The Definitive Story (London: Virgin, 2005), p. 24.

  92Ibid., p. 184.

  93Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (London: Bodley Head, 1991), p. 547.

  94A double-album recording of the event was released by Giorno Poetry Systems in 1979. See: http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/related/The_Nova_Convention.html and visit ‘The Dial-A-Poem Poets: The Nova Convention’, http://www.ubu.com/sound/nova.html [accessed 30 January 2012].

  95See Genesis P-Orridge, ‘“Thee Films”: An account by Genesis P-Orridge’, Naked Lens: Beat Cinema edited by Jack Sargeant (London: Creation, 1997), pp. 184–96 (p. 187).

  96Charles R. Cross, Heavier than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain (London: Sceptre, 2002), p. 271.

  97Stephen Dalton, ‘Bill’s excellent adventure’, William Burroughs obituary, New Musical Express, 16 August 1997.

  98Lewis MacAdams, ‘William S. Burroughs (1914–1997)’, obituary, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, edited by Holly George-Warren (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), pp. 171–3 (p. 171).

  99Quoted in Tommy Udo, 1997.

  100DJ Spooky, ‘All consuming images: DJ Burroughs and me’, Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays (Carbondale, IL: South Illinois University Press, 2009), pp. 233–7 (p. 237).

  101Cook, 1971, p. 224.

  102For more information and images see ‘Ed Sanders and the Fuck You Press’, Verdant Press,
http://www.verdantpress.com/fuckyou.html [accessed 4 January] and Jed Birmingham, ‘Fuck You press archive’, Reality Studio, http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/fuck-you-press-archive/ [accessed 4 January 2012].

  103The album’s full, original title was The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views (sic), and General Dissatisfaction (Folkways). It was then re-issued as The Fugs First Album (sic) on ESP-Disk in 1966.

  104Ed Sanders quoted in Sukenick, 1987, p. 166.

  105Cook, ibid., p. 225.

  106Sanders quoted in Cook, ibid.

  107Barry Miles, The Hippies (London: Cassell Illustrated, 2003), p. 68.

  108Ibid., p. 158.

  109Edward Sanders, ‘Afterword’, The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg (London: Scribner, 2002), pp. 239–40.

  110Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003), p. 251.

  111Ibid.

  112Watson, p. 252.

  113Ginsberg quoted in Watson, ibid.

  114Lewis MacAdams comments that ‘Heroin’ was ‘probably the most powerful and moving drug song ever written’, Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop and the American Avant-Garde (New York: The Free Press, 2001), p. 244.

  115Victor Bockris, Lou Reed: The Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1994), p. 207.

  116Ibid.

  117Lou Reed, ‘Memories of Allen’, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, edited by Holly George-Warren (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), p. 278.