by Simon Warner
Television would play a curious and accidental role in opening up the musical channels. When TV’s foothold grew at the end of the 1940s, there was a widespread assumption that radio would go into quick decline – who would want to merely listen when images and sound were available in tandem? ‘Many experts,’ says Peterson, ‘reasoning that no one would listen to a box when they could listen to a box that also showed moving pictures, thought that TV would completely replace radio’.41 One result of this was that radio licences, previously highly prized, expensive and hard to obtain, were now off-loaded much more cheaply and easily in a bid to squeeze out a last gasp return before their value collapsed.42 The consequence was that many licences were issued to smaller, niche operators whose interest lay in playing fringe musical styles. This gave further impetus to the rise of genres that had previously been marginalised. Radio transmitters became more powerful, too. When Cleveland radio DJ Alan Freed – the man who claimed to have coined the term rock ’n’ roll in a musical context – presented his Moondog House show replete with R&B sounds, favourable weather conditions could carry the Ohio broadcast to New York listeners. Crucially, white teenagers could hear black records on air for the first time constructing a new market for sounds that had been previously enjoyed only in Negro parts of town. This novel interplay, this cross-cultural alchemy, would open avenues in the early to mid-1950s quite unthinkable in 1945.
So, in our bid to consider the environment in which Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, and ‘Rock Around the Clock’, too, made their initial impressions, we have contemplated, by way of summary, the social and the economic, the political and racial, the artistic, literary and theatrical, entertainment interests as represented by Hollywood, by radio and television, the poetical and the musical. We may have gone further, of course, and weighed up the role of matters as diverse as sex and sexuality, drugs and spirituality, for instance, in the shaping of a fresh consciousness, but the areas examined, I would argue, provide a useful framework of understanding. In what ways, then, can we draw lines between the poetic and musical texts under scrutiny and the broader setting outlined within this account? How did issues of black and white, middle-class affluence and consumer boom, Cold War stresses and political witch-hunts, the rise of television and a new wave of movie star rebels, teenage identity and adolescent spending power, have a bearing on what Ginsberg recited or Haley sang? In short, the poem and the song teased out many of the tensions, many of the concerns, many of the excitements that the new America was experiencing. Old certainties – racial groupings, political alliances, respect of the flag and authority and deference to age – were no longer so well-founded and these cultural landmarks suggested as much.
Bill Haley’s release reflected the move from the white ballad to a more rhythmic style propelled by an insistent backbeat. Those characteristics owed much to the R&B and jump jive traditions of the black community of the 1940s and early 1950s, but there had been a softening, a smoothing out of the Negro qualities: the earthier elements had been toned down. This was something that Haley had already engaged in on earlier recorded outings. When he took Big Joe Turner’s ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ in 1954, a track which shared similar musical and production ingredients to ‘Rock Around the Clock’, he had followed a familiar route by sanitising lyrics that were felt too sexually explicit in their original form. But the fact that these stylistic features or hints of innuendo could feature in a white artist’s repertoire, and then be propelled into the charts, were clear indicators of change. The message of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was certainly subversive. Stepping away from the debate around the word rock – did it mean dance or was there a sexual sub-text to that term? – the song expressed that adolescent ambition to escape the restrictions of the clock and curfew, home life and respectability. When the film The Blackboard Jungle utilised Haley’s song and live performance to personify the new concerns of American youth – a desire to knock over the old, an aspiration to independence, a keen-ness to create a distinct identity from the adult world – a platform for the song’s widespread exposure was well and truly built. Little Richard or Chuck Berry, already enjoying some success by this time, may have better represented this new youthful fervour but their blackness would have been too threatening for the Hollywood companies making the picture and the vast majority of the audience which came to view it. Haley, kiss-curled but far from youthful, leading a group which through its horns also featured unprovocative hints of a white swing act, became the conduit by which more potent representatives of the black/white crossover – like Berry, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis – could later raise their performing and recording profiles. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was a pervasive, accessible courier of a new spirit, heard by tens of millions, but it was more emblem than manifesto.
Allen Ginsberg’s epic work was more complex, more densely wrought, more fraught, more personal in tone and content. It eschewed the metaphorical, refused to side-step the unsayable, and confronted in a direct, not to say courageous, fashion the crisis facing the outsider in America. Ginsberg, as son of Socialist father and Communist mother and someone who had held earlier ambitions to become a labour lawyer, had sufficient leftist credentials to place himself, potentially, in McCarthy’s very firing line. If the poet had emerged five years earlier he would have very likely faced the wrath of the House Un-American Activities Committee and maybe suffered the kind of fate that the great, campaigning folk singer Pete Seeger endured during the 1950s – banned from the airwaves, banned from performing, facing the constant threat of imprisonment. But Ginsberg, in 1955, was more than just a political agitant, a potential speck of grit in the establishment’s eye. As a Jew and as a homosexual man – and ‘Howl’ is, among so many things, a baring of the poet’s sexual soul – Ginsberg was doubly, triply, cursed in the mainstream view of this WASP-dominated society. Yet, typically, Ginsberg does not pen a verse merely bemoaning his own dilemma – he includes himself in this drama, inspired by those very principles William Carlos Williams had discussed with him as he sought to break away from formal poetics and develop his own voice – but presents a universal appeal on behalf of the marginalised, disenfranchised, the dispossessed, the lost American, black or white, clinging by broken finger-nails to the last carriages of the affluence express. Yes, ‘Howl’ is also a celebration of that listless, anxious, wandering America which seeks new truths, fresh hope, through music, drugs, spirituality and travel, away from the threat of arrest, of surveillance, of banishment. The work is an eclectic gathering of the ancient and the modern, which gives a poem that was the height of contemporary commentary in 1955, a timeless durability. As Mottram states: ‘His measure is frequently a large inclusive line, reaching sometimes paragraphic proportions, a major inventive rhetoric of the time, and eminently suited to declamation. It incorporated Melville’s sentence structure […], Hebraic scripture, Blake’s long lines and Whitman’s chants.’43
How might we then sum up this meeting of two diverse artefacts of expression and the extraordinary period into which they were thrown? How can we measure their impact? There is no doubt both ‘Howl’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’ left a heavy thumbprint on that decade. The poem – its reading and publication, its obscenity trial and the subsequent acquittal – gave the Beat writers an opportunity to present and explain their philosophies nationally and globally. The impact of those ideas on cultural and sub-cultural life in the next 15 years were huge, informing the growing folk revival and Civil Rights movement, the rock revolution of the mid-1960s, the rise of the hippies and the anti-Vietnam War struggles. Ginsberg’s ideologies and his active presence formed a cornerstone to the counterculture in the US and in Europe. As for the song, it enjoyed transatlantic success and, as we have proposed, opened doors for more captivating, more charismatic, performers than Haley. It is hard to see how rock ’n’ roll would have won such a following, so quickly, without that artist and without that release. By extension, it is also difficult to see how figures of the stature of Bo
b Dylan and the Beatles could have emerged without the conjunctions of Beat verse and rock ’n’ roll music, without the 1955 successes of ‘Howl’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’. By the end of the 1950s, Dylan was as interested in Kerouac and Ginsberg as he was in Little Richard and Woody Guthrie; John Lennon was an art-school follower of both Beat writing and Gene Vincent. By the mid-1960s, Ginsberg was warmly welcomed into their near regal circles.
But, to step into the present, half a century or so later, does the distant pulse of those happenings still register on our cultural Geiger-counter? In these postmodern times, can we retrospectively see that poem and that song, as important contributors to our contemporary condition, our latterday frame of mind? For Jameson postmodernism’s existence rests on ‘the hypothesis of some radical break […] generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or he early 1960s. As the word [postmodernism] itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year old modern movement […] Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry […] all are now seen as the final extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them.’44 In the early twenty-first century, in an age when older understandings of cultural – and social – order have been rent asunder, certainly reshuffled almost beyond recognition, was the mid-1950s the time when those realignments were well and truly set in train?
Rock ’n’ roll, the marrying of white and black styles, country and blues, has been occasionally posited as a moment when popular music and the postmodern initially converged, ideas outlined by Strinati.45 Here were two separate threads – each borrowing from the other – and producing a collage of styles. Strinati suggests that rock ’n’ roll was ‘a novel and original fusion’ and therefore not postmodern but if we are to widen the scope of our analysis and put the stress, instead, on Jameson’s ‘radical break’, then the production and consumption of this new music, both of which side-stepped the long-standing racial boundaries, did represent a very significant break with older working traditions. The Beats, in a different way, could be regarded as precursors of the postmodern, too. Their radical approaches to literary content and form, their methods of presentation and dissemination, have contributed to the crumbling of the walls between high and low art. How did they do this? They celebrated the anecdotal and autobiographical; they favoured the candid and confessional; they rejected the formalism of the academy; they took their poetry to bars and cafés; and they self-published and spread their work through little magazines outside the publishing establishment. In short, they kicked over the traces of convention at every turn.
Ginsberg’s poetry, never unhappy to reflect on and include the symbols and signs of the everyday, has, in that sense, a relationship to the Pop artists, another creative community whose work has helped to shape the debate on the shift to postmodernity, as we have already mentioned. The mid and latter years of the 1950s were a time when American society was still repressed and rigid – the presence in the White House of Dwight Eisenhower, a military man with powerful links to the triumphs and traumas of the Second World War embodied this – but the artistic shifts, a series of potent undercurrents, were strongly suggesting the decade to follow would be somewhat different. ‘Howl’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’ were, undoubtedly, significant, early signs. So was Arthur Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe – the avatar of legitimate theatre marrying a screen goddess and, perhaps the popular icon of the era – and so were Miles Davis’ new takes on Joaquín Rodrigo and Manuel de Falla when the Sketches of Spain sessions began at the very end of the decade. The ancien regime of high-brow and low-brow, elite and popular, was gradually crumbling, a preface to a moment, not far off, when Ginsberg and Dylan could establish shared agendas and Andy Warhol would feel able to invite the Velvet Underground into his own palace of mysteries.
Notes
1Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation (London: University of California Press, 2004), p. 18.
2Michael McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1982), p. 13.
3Joining Ginsberg and McClure as poets who read that night were Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, in an event introduced by Kenneth Rexroth. See Raskin, 2004, pp. 15–16.
4Ferlinghetti quoted in Raskin, 2004, p. 19.
5Joel Whitburn, The Billboard Book of US Top 40 Hits – 1955 to Present (New York: Billboard Publications, 1983), p. 129.
6Palmer, 1996, p. 25.
7Ed Ward, ‘The Fifties and before: Streetcorner symphony’, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll edited by Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 83–97 (pp. 89–90).
8Ibid., p. 106.
9Ibid.
10Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern American Novel, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Opus, 1992), p. 159.
11Bruce Wetterau (ed.), Concise Dictionary of World History (London: Robert Hale, 1984), p. 419.
12Norman Davies, Europe: A History (London: Pimlico, 1997), pp. 1062–3.
13Ibid., p. 1067.
14Wetterau, 1984, p. 678.
15Neil A. Hamilton, The ABC-CLIO Companion to the 1960s Counterculture in America (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997), p. 58.
16W.T. Lhamon, Jr, Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), p. 7.
17Wetterau, 1984, p. 540.
18Lhamon, p. xii.
19James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 92.
20Raskin, 2004, pp. 10–11.
21Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 72.
22Irving Wardle, ‘American Theatre since 1945’, American Literature Since 1900, edited by Marcus Cunliffe (London: Sphere, 1988), pp. 205–36 (p. 210).
23Bradbury, 1992, p. 159.
24Ibid., p. 164.
25Ibid., p. 165.
26Marcus Cunliffe, The Literature of the United States, 4th edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 401.
27Bradbury, 1992, p. 180.
28Ibid.
29Cunliffe, 1986, p. 392.
30Ibid., pp. 413–14.
31Ibid., p. 419.
32Eric Mottram, ‘American Poetry, Poetics and Poetic Movements’, American Literature Since 1900, edited by Marcus Cunliffe (London: Sphere, 1988), pp. 237–82 (pp. 242–3).
33Ibid., p. 243.
34Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being (London: Laurence King, 2000), p. 86.
35John Storey, ‘Postmodernism and popular culture’, The Icon Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, edited by Stuart Sim (Cambridge: Icon, 1998), pp. 147–57 (pp. 147–8).
36Fineberg, 1940, p. 176.
37Ralph Ellison quoted in Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (London: Picador, 1997), p. 1.
38Palmer, 1996, pp. 16–17.
39Ibid., p. 136.
40Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (London: Souvenir, 1987), pp. 67–118.
41Richard A. Peterson, ‘Why 1955? Explaining the advent of rock music’, Popular Music, 9/1, 1990, pp. 97–116 (p. 102).
42Ibid.
43Mottram, 1988, p. 270.
44Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 1–2.
45Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 233–5.
INTERLUDE A
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A survivor surveys
The poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was deservedly the subject of a ninetieth birthday profile on BBC Radio 4 on 15 March 2009. Deservedly? Because here is a man whose long life spans most of the vast arc of the twentieth-century and his ac
hievement is large: as writer but also as catalyst. It is hard to see how American letters would have developed in the closing decades of the last Millennium without his input and insight.
He is a significant survivor because he was both senior to and has out-lived so many of that generation of US penmen who called themselves Beat, yet, without his contribution, they would, for sure, have been a much more minor footnote in recent literary history rather than key players in a celebrated writing movement that both reflected, but also helped to instigate, a psychological insurrection, a rejection of the mediocrities and mundanities of the mainstream.
I only met Ferlinghetti once, back in early summer 1978, not long after I had arrived in San Francisco for the first time. It was glimmering day, the northern Californian sun golden on the street, the sidewalk cast in the cool overhang of charcoal shadow. I’d just visited City Lights bookshop, Ferlinghetti’s place of business. As I left and wandered down Columbus, I spotted him coming towards me and said hello. I asked him to sign the very item I’d just purchased – a postcard from the shop.
He smiled graciously, modestly and wrote his name in a broad-nibbed felt pen. I only wish I’d had more wherewithal to chat longer. Or invite him for a drink in that marvellous corner bar called Vesuvio’s, next door to the store. But youth is all too often awestruck and unable to tap into the luck of the moment. I ambled downhill, he back uphill and we never spoke again. But I do still have the autograph, somewhere.
