Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  After the reading was over we went to Nathan’s, one of those places that was in the Village, one of those fast-food places and had some fried, crankcase, oil-cooked food and then walked over to Allen’s place. We walked up the stairs, we opened up the door and right in the doorway, Allen had a guitar that he handed to Bob, who said, ‘Key of G, Bob, G’. And he took his harmonium out and played a note, which I think was a B, it wasn’t even a G anyway, and Dylan was looking non-plussed.

  So he took the guitar and played a G chord and then, snap I heard a sound. Allen already had a tape recorder set up in the hallway and Dylan said ‘Turn that fucking thing off!’ and that was the beginning of Allen’s musical career.

  So then we sat around in the living room and he said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do this.’ So we were there for about two hours and Allen was reading some of the things that he had written and pushing down his one note on his harmonium and croaking away, he had a natural beautiful voice and even though it wasn’t singing in the key that we were playing, and he’d never done that before, and it was still, it was interesting, and he was having such a good time.

  So, as we left, he said, ‘I’ve been trying to do this David for years.’ The next day he called up and Channel 13, PBS – it was then called WNET, I believe still – which was a local free broadcasting corporation station in New York. WNET had a programme called Free,2 I believe the name was, and Allen had already set up something with them ahead of time, just in case Dylan did come over and agree to do it. He had approached the show, so Allen had it all figured out, I guess, the minute I said I would try to bring Bob, get him to come over with me. About three weeks later, we did this television programme, that was really pretty scary and Dylan was standing there in the greenish suit looking really sour and playing the guitar …

  SW Did you play something yourself?

  DA I played French horn, piano, everything you know … and Dylan was looking really sour and saying, ‘How in God’s name did I ever get into this?!’ And suddenly, they had something shone upon the screen, an AP dispatch about Cambodia, Laos, exporting opium through Air America, which was owned by the CIA, and that this was a way to keep Communism spreading to those countries in exchange for us supporting their major drug dealers.

  So there was this news agency dispatch and Allen was kinda chanting it, with us playing music in the background. I look up at the television screen and I said ‘My gosh, watching this dispatch with someone reading it with music in the background was so effective, so much more effective than just reading it in the newspaper, hearing somebody saying it or reading it, and hearing someone say it without the music’.

  The three combined, regardless of what the level of the music was, which was pretty funky, still was really interesting and I thought that this could really open up the door for a lot of kids to say let’s get together with musicians and collaborate and poets and writers and maybe they could come up with something a whole lot better. They couldn’t have come up with something much worse!

  But that didn’t matter, because it was an idea and I said the idea’s more important than the quality or the why it was done, you know it was more than just a publicity stunt. In my opinion for Allen, he was making a point that people can collaborate, so we made some recordings which were so awful. I think John Hammond tried to put some of them out.

  SW Was that the album First Blues?3

  DA This was a long time ago.

  SW Yes.

  DA At the recordings, I said to Allen, ‘Why don’t you let Bob play at least four measures introduction?’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Well in music you don’t just have the one person singing wall to wall, non-stop with nothing else happening, you vary it.’ But Allen didn’t know about that cause he was more of a solo personality and didn’t basically pay attention to what was around him, which is okay cause that’s just the way Allen is, his loveable self, that the way he was.

  But you see Jack was completely the opposite. He was like, totally sensitive of everything that was happening and always tried to be responsive as a whole. Over the years Allen would do different programmes that ran out of money and I would come in. In 1981 when my daughter was born there was a place called ZBS Studios in Fort Edwards, New York – I was involved living at my father-in-law’s in his living room with my first baby, waiting for my wife to have her second child delivered and Allen called up.

  He was out of money and I went to the studio and played trap drums – you notice how I never played trap drums on a record! – and put on some French horn and flute parts, piano parts, too, and even sang a background part, over-dubbing stuff but it wasn’t finished and they didn’t know what to do with it. They’d run out of money and I kinda finished it for them, cause having all the experience of composing and writing and playing and everything, it wasn’t that hard to do and I had some really nice stuff on them, I had some nice things.

  Years later Hal Willner, went through all of those tapes and cut out about 80% of the stuff they played that was in a different key, with the wrong notes and everything else – and they sounded quite good. At the very end, Allen really started getting good with his singing, and the last time we played together in San Francisco, at the de Young Museum, I believe, when they had the travelling Beat exhibition, I said Allen, I said, ‘Yes, me and you are really getting that music together’. He said, ‘Well I think I’m getting closer, David’. He was really getting an idea – and Steven [Taylor] was an enormous help. He was always a terrific performer and always an amazing kinda personality, but he was really starting to sound wonderful, I was really proud of him.

  SW Was this in 1996 or 1995, not long before he died?

  DA Yeah, I think it was 1996. I believe it was the fall of ‘96 – we could look in the book – after the Whitney Museum show of ‘95, when Allen and I did a whole bunch of stuff together at NYU and in concert and had a great, great time. We even did a jazz poetry performance at the A&S [Abraham & Strauss] department store in Brooklyn. It was really, really fun.

  I always had it, and he used to come and sit in with my band and play the finger cymbals cause he was able to do that. He had a good rhythmical sense and he used to have so much fun. I would introduce him as one if my favourite finger cymbal players and he used to come and sit in with the band and bash away and have a ball. And I was like, you know, to see him enjoying himself and when he was in that situation he really had fun, loved to be with musicians.

  I think that, sometimes, he really didn’t necessarily spend time with the level of musicians that he could artistically because he wasn’t really that concerned about that. It was more a way of getting visibility to survive and that’s certainly understandable. But he had improved, I think, once he started working with Steven and I think I did things I could to encourage him, too, to improve artistically as well in combining words and music, cause it is a responsibility when you are out there to try and inspire young people to aspire to excellence.

  Not just to be a celebrity but to be out there inspiring a search for excellence and respect for your fellow artists and a lot of rock ’n’ roll has nothing to do with that. It is all cynical and jaded and the idea that it is all just supposed to be a joke and that everything sucks.

  That’s fine for people who feel that way and I respect that feeling, that particular adolescent rage, but when you get a little older you have a responsibility to society and to art and to history and to your own work and to all those who came before you, to try to put out excellence. And that’s not being a snob, that’s being for real and that’s what Jack talked about, about Beat being beatitude, trying to really be soulful and beautiful in everything that you do, whether you are playing in a prison, a street corner or at the White House.

  SW Do you think Bob Dylan was a Beat or at least a carrier of the Beat?

  DA No. No, Bob Dylan was himself. He was a kid from Hibbing who used to listen to radio late at night. I’ve been in Hibbing, his home town, and he had the same Jewish background I d
id and he dreamt of doing something more than he was told he could do, and to be something different than he was told that he could or should be.

  And he went on a search, which I think he’s still on, on those road trips that he takes, looking for some kind of a higher meaning. Becoming a world famous figure in his early twenties and being able to survive that is in itself extraordinary and to be out there now in his 60s still making people feel good and playing music and still writing and being creative is a wonderful thing. And I always had a great time with him, playing with him and certainly he helped to upgrade the standards, in many respects of popular music, and bring it to another whole other level.

  I was with him the night that he was inducted in the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. There’s a great picture of us and he was kind of non-plussed. All these great old songwriters like Sammy Cahn and people who were smoking cigars and the old Tin Pan Alley songwriters inviting Bob Dylan into the Hall of Fame was very, very touching.

  He has made a tremendous contribution and I always felt he had an enormous respect and appreciation for Jack Kerouac. I think that’s the closest probably he could come to him, because he was too young to have known Jack and Jack wasn’t in New York that much by the early 1960s – he was away – was probably to know Allen and to know me.

  So I think because of that, he probably had an interest in both of us but I think, I always had the feeling, that his true love of the period were the works of Jack Kerouac and that, like I say, is probably 95% of everyone else who is interested in the word Beat. Not to denigrate everyone else, but the fact that it was really about Jack that all of this happened, and is happening today.

  Those of us who were blessed to know him were fortunate just as those of us who knew Charlie Parker and Dizzy and the painters Franz Kline and Joan Mitchell and the other wonderful writers of that period Norman Mailer, John Updike, who loved Jack’s work, who Jack loved, who never mentioned the word Beat, but were there and are still here, writing up a storm and Kurt Vonnegut. There is a great picture of Kurt and me at George Plimpton’s place.

  It turned into a kind of memorial for The Paris Review where we were talking and Kurt said he was the same age as Jack would have been, and Ferlinghetti, if he was still here. All these people were such wonderful artists, who still go out and inspire people.

  I was at Dizzy Gillespie’s seventieth birthday party about four in the morning and he said to me, ‘I was on The Cosby Show a bunch of times and The Tonight Show. America can see who I am because of my being able to transcend the ghetto that they tried to put all the jazz musicians into regardless of our achievements.’ Then he looked very sad which he very seldom did and he said, ‘Most of the other cats never had that chance.’ He was here long enough.

  Chuck Berry, B.B. King and Ronnie Spector, so many of the great gospel artists and blues artists, Little Richard, are still here to be able to receive the acknowledgement that they were due and some of the jazz artists, like the great pianist Hank Jones, Barry Harris, Billy Taylor, these magnificent people, some of these great, great people, are still with us and are now getting the appreciation that they deserve. Many people didn’t.

  Jack passed away way too young. Allen and Gregory both lived long enough to get a little bit of that and I mention that because there is an obligation to bear witness to others not just to yourself and they say in the Bible, ‘By your words ye shall be known.’ My hope is not only that my music, which is now getting played and recorded all over the world, the flute concerto I wrote for James Galway, the first movement in memory of Charlie Parker, who I met in 1952, the second movement in memory of Jack Kerouac who I met in 1956, and the third for Dizzy who I met in 1951.

  I played with all three of them, they all knew each other. Each movement of the piece reflects a genre of music that was an area that they worked in. Every note was written out but it sounds, sometimes, as if the musicians are actually improvising or jamming.

  So I combined the formal and the spontaneous into something that very much was what Jack was about and what I had been about and Jack and I both got that from jazz artists, painters, poets, playwrights and everyday people who were part of that wonderful hidden world that Jack wrote about.

  So what became Beat in my opinion was actually Jack’s reporting of some extraordinary collaborations and some extraordinary people who otherwise would never have been documented. Also Atop an Underwood,4 a wonderful book of his early writing, shows he would have been just as great a writer if he had never come to New York.

  All of us who knew him in New York were blessed to know him and he can be considered to be one of our great writers of our English language without even using the word Beat, because his work transcends all that and God knows, I know, I believe mine does as well.

  Notes

  1Author’s note: It seems most likely the reading occurred in September 1971.

  2The show was actually called Freetime.

  3First Blues was a 1983 double album gathering tracks from Ginsberg recording sessions in 1971, 1976 and 1981 and produced by John Hammond. This should not be confused with a mid-1970s Chelsea Hotel recording entitled First Blues, Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs, produced by Ann Charters, although the two releases share some song titles in common. See items A-170 and A-184 in Stephen Ronan, 1996.

  4Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings, edited by Paul Marion (New York: Viking, 1991).

  2 CHAINS OF FLASHING MEMORIES: BOB DYLAN AND THE BEATS, 1959–1975

  Allen Ginsberg is the only writer I know […] I know just two holy people. Allen Ginsberg is one1

  BOB DYLAN

  Dylan really does belong in a rack with Kerouac2

  DAVE VAN RONK

  There is no question that Bob Dylan’s evolution as one of the most important singer-songwriters in the popular music firmament was marked, particularly in its early phases, by a connection with the writers of the Beat Generation. Between the very end of the 1950s and the mid-1970s, Dylan had various influential encounters with this literary cell – either as a close and enthusiastic reader of their texts as a college student or, a little later, as a friend of (and sometime collaborator with) various members of this writing community. The friendship was best defined, perhaps, by his association with Allen Ginsberg, with whom he would have an enduring connection, but his interest in Jack Kerouac’s writing style was perhaps just as important to his development as an artist. There would be others in the Beat circle who would make links with Dylan – among them Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and David Meltzer – and William Burroughs would have an impact on the musician’s voice as a novelist when he published his own work of prose fiction at the start of the 1970s. It maybe goes without saying that Dylan himself would have a reciprocal effect on many of the writers with whom he found empathy. Says Michael Gray of the Beats: ‘It was an artistic storm that Dylan […] seemed so avant garde in visiting upon a mass market and a new generation. The Dylan of 1965–66 swims in a milieu taken from these men and their contemporaries.’3 In this chapter I want to explore some of the key intersections in the Beat-Dylan odyssey, with particular reference to the singer’s initial discovery of this radical trend in literature in the coffee houses of Dinkytown close to the University of Minnesota through to the visit by the songwriter and Ginsberg to Kerouac’s grave during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975–76.

  There are various ways in which this relationship is identified and described. Dylan, in particular, has been the subject of numerous biographical accounts, of course, by writers in the US and the UK – Anthony Scaduto and Robert Shelton, Clinton Heylin Richard Williams, to mention only a few. He has also offered himself, in more recent times, the first part of an autobiographical account. All of these volumes have drawn attention, to various degrees, to the impact of the Beats on this performer and his creative progression. While Kerouac’s effect is widely referenced as an inspirational, yet almost ethereal, force by those commentators offering life stori
es and critical surveys of the singer, Ginsberg’s tangible role, as friend and sounding board to the artist, has been more straightforward to chart. Of all the Beats, the poet’s personal links to Dylan are most evident and the most subject to scrutiny. A 2006 essay by Richard E. Hishmeh, ‘Marketing genius: The friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan’, is a most useful insight into the connected lives of these two individuals, and a piece that conveys a potent notion through its title alone. We will return to various of those sources as we consider this engaging overlap of artistic output – song and music, prose and poetry – and the transgenerational issues raised by this interplay, as older artists and a younger one, in the case of Dylan, identified value in sharing energies and outlook.

  The Beats are an amorphous crowd – from their debut steps in the early-1940s to their self-naming in the latter years of that decade to their first national trumpeting in a New York Times Sunday magazine of 1952, this so-called generation of writers has provided a loosely-knit net for individuals cast across the US, based in Europe and even further afield. Kerouac baulked when the Beats became linked to ideas of the beatnik and a particular brand of subcultural cool or antisocial delinquency; Ginsberg went as far as to state that there was no such thing as a Beat Generation. And Gregory Corso remarked that ‘three writers does not a generation make’.4 But, even if the principals of the Beat Generation felt contained and constrained by the their bracketing within a specific clan and wanted to resist such pigeon-holing, for the cultural historians and literary critics of the second half of the twentieth century, there was a discernible gathering of poets and novelists, generally men with rare exceptions only, who shared a certain brotherhood, one linked more closely perhaps to ideology – concerns about personal freedom, expressive honesty and artistic candour – than to a common creative style. So if we accept there is a Beat community, then we can also accept that there are those who follow in their wake. The term post-Beat, by no means a universal denomination, has gained some retroactive stature, as we look back at the recent era of social change and progress in the arts and culture.