Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  Ginsberg’s most significant poetic work may have been behind him by the mid-1960s yet, from this point, he assumed a status that actually transcended his reputation as notorious, alternative versifier, the writer who had faced in absentia the censorious scorn of the US courts in 1957 when ‘Howl’ was unsuccessfully tried for obscenity. In fact, his role as countercultural guru would be secured for several decades to come, adopted as an inspirational figure by several subsequent subcultural streams in the years that followed. Hishmeh sees the new close association with a renowned songwriter, a man whose stature as pre-eminent protest singer was firmly cemented by 1964, as crucial to this momentum: ‘Ginsberg’s friendship with Dylan provided the catalyst that facilitated his movement into mainstream recognition from a new generation of youth culture. His affiliation with Dylan allowed Ginsberg, with some acumen, to dabble in mediums beyond just poetry …’34

  In the meantime, as a fêted figurehead of the anti-war coalition – that energetic marriage of middle-class, white students, political liberals, social rebels and even committed revolutionaries – Ginsberg would be physically present at numerous flashpoints in the years that followed: early street clashes in Oakland in 1965, the Human Be-In in San Francisco in 1967 and in the heart of the Chicago Democrat Convention demos in 1968. Almost simultaneously, Dylan would be scheming an escape from the hullabaloo of the rising fire-storm, heading almost literally for the family kitchen to evade the rising political heat, domestically ensconced, from 1966, with his new wife and growing brood in the rustic back-water of Woodstock in upstate New York. Speaking of this volatile period, Dylan says:

  America was wrapped up in a blanket of rage. Students at universities were wrecking parked cars, smashing windows. The war in Vietnam was sending the country into deep depression. The cities were in flames, the bludgeons were coming down. Hard-hat union guys were beating kids with baseball bats […] Maoists, Marxists, Castroites – leftist kids who read Che Guevara instruction booklets were out to topple the economy. Kerouac had retired, and the organised press was stirring things up, fanning the flames of hysteria. If you saw the news, you’d think the whole nation was on fire […] Truth was I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on.35

  In what ways did the emerging Dylan-Ginsberg affiliation present itself then, if not in a directly political context? We might identify a number of events in 1965 that would reflect the shared admiration, in some senses overlapping agendas, of the pair. In March, Dylan’s fifth album Bringing It All Back Home, appeared and its cover paid lightly-veiled tribute to the Beats in the free-form, automatic writing of Dylan’s own sleeve notes36 plus to Ginsberg himself in one of the cover photographs, which showcased the poet in sartorial style: neck-tied and top-hatted. Paul Williams acclaims the collection and with specific reference to a trio of the album’s songs – ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘Gates of Eden’ – places his admiration of the pieces in a quite specific Beat context. He remarks: ‘It is as though all three songs came out of him in one breath, easily the greatest breath drawn by an American artist since Ginsberg and Kerouac exhaled “Howl” and On the Road a decade earlier.’37 According to Gray, Dylan, in these highly-productive, mid-decade years, was able to take the Beat spirit, the Beat idea, and ‘put it up on stage with a guitar. His greatness lies in the way he did that, the cohesive, individual voice with which he re-presented it and the brilliance of his timing in doing so.’38

  In May, there was more interaction to follow as Dylan and Ginsberg linked up in the UK. The poet’s appearance in England, after a sojourn in Europe and a widely reported expulsion from Czechoslovakia on grounds of his homosexuality, allowed him to make almost immediate contact with Dylan. On tour, the singer was playing live dates at London’s Albert Hall. Ginsberg attended and was not only able to catch up with Dylan after the concert but also meet the Beatles, who were present at an after-show gathering, for the first time.

  The tour was being filmed by the celebrated new documentary maker D.A. Pennebaker – a core member of a fledgling cinema verité movement in the US and France, exploiting the exciting possibilities that newly developed hand-held cameras were offering to innovative movie minds. When, around this very time, the cameraman recorded a promo piece to support Dylan’s forthcoming single ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, who should join the singer, in the alley down the side of the capital’s prestigious Savoy Hotel, as he peeled lyric sheets in nonchalant fashion, but Ginsberg himself plus another folk performer Bobby Neuwirth, the two figures placed in the background of this ground-breaking sequence. In fact, the trio of Dylan, Ginsberg and Neuwirth are credited with the actual creation of the hand-etched cue cards, the inspiration for many homages and lampoons in other short films, video and advertisements in subsequent years. The eye-catching promo would itself eventually form the opening section of Pennebaker’s feature-length account, Don’t Look Back,39 issued in 1967.

  This would not be the only important reunion that Dylan and Ginsberg would enjoy in 1965 and we shall return to another resonant occasion quite shortly. But the mention of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ raises some other relevant issues linked to various Kerouac influences becoming evident in Dylan’s output around this time. There are a number that can be identified during this formative period as the singer moved from being an acoustic player (even if Bringing It All Back Home, the March 1965 album, had featured some electric performances) to an artist committed to adding amplification to his sound, with the July 1965 Newport Folk Festival show the most high-profile and controversial attempt to share this news with his fans in a live situation. Nat Hentoff says of of Dylan’s decision that he was ‘after the biggest possible audience he could get, and he saw where rock was going and he too wanted to be part of it’.40 While he felt by the standards of a folk stalwart like Peter Seeger this may have been regarded as a sell-out, Hentoff believes Dylan’s ‘music did get better’.41 Ginsberg backs Dylan still further, according to Sukenik, ‘praising his changes as a paradigm of fluidity in contrast to the crippling ideological rigidity of the old radical left’.42 The poet later argued that selling out is:

  … one of those cornball ideas that people who didn’t have anything to do got hung up on. I wouldn’t have minded doing it if I could find what to sell out to. Geniuses don’t sell out, in the sense that genius bursts the bounds of either selling out or not selling out. When somebody has real inspiration like Dylan, the move to electric is just simply the expansion of his genius into more forms, wilder forms. He’s got that sense of negative capability being able to go all the way in, without necessarily losing himself. Committing himself at the same time, doing it like a poet, landing like the cat with nine lives.43

  Steve Turner believes that ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ can be connected, by way of titular inspiration alone, to Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Subterraneans (about his love affair with a black woman) and cites further examples: the epic song ‘Desolation Row’ referencing Kerouac’s Desolation Angels (his 1965 book which offers an account of his fire-watching brief in the Rockies in the mid-1950s) and the composition ‘Visions of Johanna’ borrowing from Visions of Gerard (the tribute that Kerouac penned to his older brother who died as a child). Turner adds: ‘Dylan was the first songwriter to attach the language and interests of the Beats to the power and influence of rock ’n’ roll and, by following his example, many who loved both Elvis Presley and Jack Kerouac, Little Richard and Allen Ginsberg or Chuck Berry and William Burroughs were able to conceive a reconciliation of their passions.’44

  Further, if we consider the actual texts from which Dylan drew influence, British independent Beat scholar Dave Moore pinpoints some quite specific examples.45 Says Moore in the online publication Dharma Beat: ‘Two of the songs,46 “Desolation Row” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” include direct quotes from Kerouac’s novel Desolation Angels, including the
phrases “the perfect image of a priest”,47 “her sin is her lifelessness”,48 and “Housing Project Hill”.’49 Additionally, he mentions other examples of this trend.50 Dylan’s ‘with his memories in a trunk’ in ‘Desolation Row’ compares to Kerouac’s Desolation Angels phrase ‘with cabinets with memories in them’51 and Dylan’s ‘mama’s in the factory, she ain’t got no shoes’ in ‘Tombstone Blues’ – from Highway 61 Revisited – has a resonance with ‘my mother … skiving in shoe factories’,52 again from Kerouac’s Desolation Angels. We might note, as well, the song title ‘Desolation Row’ and a further phrase in another Highway 61 Revisited song ‘From a Buick 6’ – ‘junkyard angel’ – which together spawn the book title Desolation Angels. In addition, we might add the song ‘On the Road Again’ from Bringing It All Back Home (1965) as a very likely nod to Kerouac’s On the Road.

  In a connected sense, too, we can also see Ginsberg and Dylan cross-referencing each other with various name-checks of the other in work of this time. Ginsberg first includes Dylan’s name in a poem in ‘Beginning of a Poem of These States’ in September 1965, and refers to the song ‘Can You Please Crawl out Your Window?’, stating then ‘first time heard’.53 Dylan appears again towards the end of this piece, too, in which Ginsberg seems to reference, if misquote, a line from ‘Positively Fourth Street’ – ‘you’d see what a drag you are’.54 Dylan turns up, too, in passing in ‘Hiway Poesy: LA-Albuquerque-Texas-Wichita’55 which is dated January 1966. The following month, reference is made to Dylan and his song ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ in ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’.56 Later in ‘Crossing Nation’,57 from June 1968, the poet appears to chide his protégé – ‘Dylan silent on politics, & safe’ – at the height of the political street conflict, and he also rates a fleeting mention in ‘Ecologue’58 from Fall, 1970. As for reciprocity, Ginsberg’s name appears in a throwaway Big Pink recording of summer 1967 with the Band entitled ‘See You Later Allen Ginsberg’ which Clinton Heylin says ‘is more of a rhyme than a song’. He adds that it is ‘a little piece of spontaneous wordplay around the idea of “See You Later Alligator”, changed to “See you later croco-gator” before they give the nod to the basement boys’ mutual friend, Allen Ginsberg, who had recently shared a stage with the Band in New York.’59 Greil Marcus dubbed it ‘a longtime hit in Ginsberg’s office’.60

  But to return to the closing months of 1965, Ginsberg was in California,61 linking up with Ken Kesey, successful novelist with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and by now probably best-known as the architect of the Acid Tests which had seen the writer travel by bus, from 1964, with his friends around the US spreading the gospel of LSD, a drug which would actually remain legal in the States until 1966. In October 1965 the Free Speech Movement, associated with rising anti-Vietnam feeling, was taking shape on the university campus at Berkeley. A march was organised from Berkeley to Oakland, the industrial, working class port close to San Francisco. ‘Their target was the Oakland Army Terminal’, says Doggett, ‘where new recruits were inducted into the service.’62 But the demo was blocked by the police and marked by the intimidating threat of intervention by local Hell’s Angels.

  The following month a further march was planned and Kesey and Ginsberg63 became engaged in tense negotiations as there had been further strong suggestions that the Hell’s Angels would protect, what the bikers saw as, patriotic American honour by physically attacking the demonstrators. But Kesey, who had developed relationships with some of the Angels and their chapters, hoped he could persuade them not to carry out their threats. Ginsberg’s involvement and his utter commitment to non-violent methods added an extra ingredient to the scenario. The poet describes a difficult meeting at the home of Angel Sonny Barger to discuss the demo and the wider ramifications:

  [Neal] Cassady, myself, Kesey and several of Kesey’s Prankster friends gathered together with about 20 Hell’s Angels at Barger’s house with his wife, in Oakland […] I was scared but they were all gung-ho for it. I brought along my harmonium and everybody was in a relatively excited state […] We finally did get into a discussion of what to do about the march and I was trying to discourage Barger from attacking; so was Kesey, very manfully, trying to talk sense to Barger. He told Barger that it wasn’t really a communist plot, the main thing that he kept telling him was that it wasn’t just communists. The Angels’ argument was we gotta fight ‘em here or over there.64

  In the end, Ginsberg embarked on an audacious strategy, encouraging a Buddhist chant to which all gathered eventually contributed. He feels that this communal act played a crucial part in defusing the stand-off. ‘I was absolutely astounded. I knew it was history being made. It was the first time in a tense, tight situation that I relied totally on pure, mantric vocalisation, breath-chant, to alleviate my own paranoia and anxiety, resolve it through breathing out long breaths’, he states.65 Ultimately, the Hell’s Angels responded to Ginsberg and Kesey’s coaxing, announcing, several days later, that they would not mount an assault as ‘it would demean them to attack the filthy marchers’.66

  A potential head-to-head battle on the streets of Oakland had been averted and the Angels had saved face. Ginsberg comments, ‘That “happy ending” came mostly from Ken Kesey’s statesmanship and common sense, because he’d been the one enlightened person on the scene – he wasn’t on the left or the right. Instead of banning and denouncing the “outlaw” Angels, he socialised with them and let a little light into their scene’.67 A little later, Kesey strengthened his links to the infamously violent bikers by inviting members to a house party at his home at La Honda. The occasion was celebrated in one of Ginsberg’s best known poems of the period, ‘Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels’.

  Very shortly afterwards, at the start of December, Dylan’s current tour reached Berkeley Community Theater.68 Ginsberg, who remained in San Francisco, recalls ‘I saw a lot of him, and he gave me 30 or 40 tickets for opening night. A fantastic assemblage occupied the first few rows of Dylan’s concert: a dozen poets, myself, Peter [Orvlosky], Ferlinghetti, Neal, and I think Kesey, Michael McClure; several Buddhists; a whole corps of Hell’s Angels led by Sonny Barger […]; and then came Jerry Rubin69 with a bunch of peace protestors. Fantastic.’70

  Ginsberg and Dylan spent extra time together both appearing at the singer’s press conference on 3 December 1965 then convening to forge an intriguing allegory for the joining of these two scenes – poetry and rock – when musicians and writers rubbed shoulders outside City Lights bookshop on 5 December for a series of photographs, framing what became dubbed the Last Gathering of the Beats. Why did this happen? Well, there were reasons of fraternity and solidarity as Dylan and his guitarist Robbie Robertson, Ginsberg and McClure, to name some of the notables, stood together for these shots, some of which were taken in Adler Alley, the passage adjacent to the bookstore, dividing City Lights from Vesuvio’s bar on the next corner, a thoroughfare later re-christened Jack Kerouac Street in 198871 and eventually restored as Jack Kerouac Alley in 2007.72

  Dylan had in mind that these images could well be used as sleeve illustrations for his next album, Blonde on Blonde. So there was both an artistic and a commercial imperative for this session. Yet Dylan was not completely exploitative of the circumstances. There were many more Bay Area writers present as part of this informal convention: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights, Peter Orlovsky, poet David Meltzer, novelist Richard Brautigan and others. When Dylan was invited to join the larger group outside the North Beach store, the exercise a tribute to an earlier shot of jazz musicians in New York City, he declined. Whether this was out of respect for the elder statesman, whether it was modesty, whether it was because he was happy to be with the hippest of the crew in Ginsberg and McClure and not, maybe, with the less current crowd, we will never know. But the collection of images became iconic, a powerful suggestion that the powers of a preceding countercultural wave in literature had been passed to a literate songwriter and rising rock star. In the end, the pictures were not used a
s the feature spread on Blonde on Blonde anyway, but they still became a memorable record and a historical document – a monochrome fusing of two generations of artistic mavericks.

  For Ginsberg, the days shared with Dylan were not just a useful rallying point, a morale-boosting sharing of ideas, a regenerative West Coast parley. The poet also asked the singer if he might buy him a state-of-the-art tape recorder, an expensive, industry standard machine of the day used by radio broadcasters. Miles comments: ‘Feeling generous, Dylan gave Allen $600 to buy himself a top-of-the-line portable reel-to-reel Uher tape recorder, which would run for 10 hours on batteries and could be plugged into a socket to recharge. Dylan also bought an amplifier for Peter [Orvlovsky] and an autoharp for Michael McClure.’73 For McClure the gift opened up the possibility of adding music to his lyrics,74 and he reciprocated by giving the singer ‘one of the 600 privately printed copies of his long howl of outrage against the Vietnam War, “Poisoned Wheat”’;75 for Ginsberg, Dylan’s gesture opened up a new and fertile period as he conceived stream of consciousness travelogues, such as ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’, that would form part of the wider collection The Fall of America (1973), which he began to record on tape. Explains Alex Houen: ‘Wired for sound, the stage was thus set for the poet to try and loop automation and lyrical biography into a new circuit. On 15 December 1965, Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Peter’s brother Julius, and their friend Steven Bornstein left San Francisco to commence a series of road trips around the US. With Peter driving, Ginsberg experimented with dictating into the tape recorder. So began Ginsberg’s foray into what he called “auto poetry” – flashes of lyrical observation spoken spontaneously and sporadically into the Uher while travelling.’76