Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  SW That’s an interesting point you’ve made but if we go back a little way and mention a name like Elvis Presley.

  MM I didn’t have anything to do with Elvis Presley.

  SW Why do you say that?

  MM I didn’t care for him.

  SW You didn’t like him?

  MM It’s not that I liked or didn’t like him. To me, Elvis Presley represented white kids trying to be free by imitating black music – and that wasn’t the only way to be free – and it caught on. It was a rage and it probably helped a lot, but I didn’t need that help and the people I knew didn’t need that help and we listened to others.

  SW OK, so the original rock ’n’ roll surge in the late 1950s?

  MM No, nothing doing.

  SW That’s extremely interesting, but once this British Invasion occurred, and obviously Bob Dylan was part of that, too …

  ST We formed a great kinship with the British Invasion. What I know about rock ’n’ roll … my meeting with rock ’n’ roll was in my house, I lived at 264, Downey Street in San Francisco, three blocks from Haight-Ashbury, a block and a half from where the Grateful Dead was living. Country Joe and the Fish moved in across the street from me. The Charlatans, which were my favourite group, local group, moved in half a block down the street and I’d been living in the neighbourhood for several years.

  I saw a really great and interesting community happening around me, but not just a community of musicians. It was a radical community, a radical, visionary, political community, of the kind that Marcuse talks about in his essay on liberation. It made a lot of foolish mistakes, had a lot of genius, had a lot of beauty, and a lot of meaningfulness came out of it. And rock ’n’ roll was simply a part of it. I found myself being talked to by young rock ’n’ rollers who wanted me to help them write songs.

  Consequently I had to learn to write songs to show them, or develop techniques. But the musicians were no more important than the sandal makers or the poets originally. It wasn’t until the musicians were thrust up on the stage and made into idols, which we all enjoyed because we loved dancing in the Fillmore and having them up on those stages play. That’s where I learned to dance. I didn’t learn to dance … I’d not had much interest in dance either. It was at the Fillmore that I learned to dance and at the Fillmore dances where you’d go dancing with one person looking like Billy the Kid and another one looks like Jean Harlow and another one looks like Florence Nightingale and another one’s the Princess of Araby, and you’re all dancing on the floor together making up your own dance. That’s an extraordinary experience.

  SW So you were saying a little earlier that you were living in Haight Ashbury from around 1960?

  MM 1961.

  SW And the arrival of the bands like the Grateful Dead, the Charlatans and so on …

  MM Also the Jefferson Airplane and let’s not forget the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

  SW And all of these bands were living in the Haight?

  MM Not necessarily were they living in the Haight but they would come there for their social life, rather than North Beach which had been the traditional social reservation. Although come to think about it, I think I could safely say, yes, that most of them were living within a mile of the Haight.

  SW So you had moved to the Haight from North Beach?

  MM No I hadn’t, I’d moved out of North Beach very early. North Beach became a tourist centre and they had buses driving up and down the street showing beatniks to the tour bus people. And the beatniks that they were looking at were people who were wearing rubber tyre sandals – like Mexican sandals were made in those days – wearing berets, had long beards, with spaghetti and were drinking warm wine and playing conga drums. These were not me or Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac, these were people wearing pirate costumes offering to write a poem for you for 25 cents.

  SW These were charlatans with a lower case ‘c’!

  MM You said it … They were the creations of the media. But a lot of interesting things were done by us and we still used North Beach for a centre to meet in because we were accustomed to meeting there. It’s the first place I lived when I came to San Francisco. And the Cellar was there where David [Meltzer] played for example. So there were legitimate things out there but it was a place to get out of pretty damn quick. So people got out into what’s called the Western Addition of Haight-Ashbury or over onto Fillmore Street or even into Marin across the Bay.

  SW Did the community of poets who were based in San Francisco feel a certain sense of intrusion when the new wave of musicians began to arrive in the Haight?

  MM No not at all. If you want to know about a sense of intrusion, America’s most famous academic poet Robert LowelI. I took Robert Lowell to hear rock ’n’ roll about 1967, ’68. He was grossly offended and intruded upon. But I wanted him here because I thought it was wonderful and beautiful and new.

  There’s not a competition between poetry and rock, not with my generation, but the following generation – I do know that a number of writers suffered severely by being over-awed by rock ’n’ roll and worshipping it, to the extent their poems suffered. I don’t know of any instances, aside from the formalist conservative poets of say the ilk of Lowell or people like that, who had anything against rock ’n’ roll, not while rock ’n’ roll was still in its revolutionary phase. We were for it, we were part of it.

  I had their posters all around me with me reading with the Grateful Dead and reading with different rock groups and when my play The Beard was done, the first major performance of it was done at the Fillmore Auditorium with a rock group. I considered it my milieu, but I didn’t consider rock ’n’ roll my milieu.

  I considered that revolutionary community my milieu and rock ’n’ roll was an important and delightful and pleasurable part of it, for the music, which I didn’t like listening to as much as I liked dancing to. I pretty much began to lose interest in rock ’n’ roll when the dances were turned into sit down affairs, when people sat down and listened to it.

  SW So this would have been after 1968 or something like that?

  MM Yes and also when it commercialised itself. You’d be sitting in a restaurant and the scouts would be there from New York and London wanting to know if you were a part of a rock ’n’ roll group, because I had my hair down to my shoulders, and, if not, who did I know who was. And they had almost blank contracts getting names signed at the bottom of it.

  SW So I suppose, in a sense, if I had been a poet I may have been concerned …

  MM You do have a pretty weird opinion if you think that poets were competition, or if you think that poets weren’t political and music was. Those are two places you are the most far out of anybody I’ve ever heard in my life.

  SW OK, I mean this is a hypothesis …

  MM Well your hypothesis is bizarre.

  SW … which requires challenge. This is how a piece of research develops. I think there are these stereotypes drawn by some readers, writers, commentators who have seen the Beats as a group of poets and writers who were partially interested in disengagement rather than engagement.

  MM That’s quite wrong!

  SW If you read someone like Kenneth Rexroth …

  MM Rexroth was just pissed off.

  SW This is one of the things I’m driving at because if someone like Rexroth who talked about disengagement this is one of the premises I’m interested in talking through or challenging.

  MM Well Rexroth, there’s personal issues involved here. You’ve got to understand that I knew Rexroth during this crisis that he was having. He often visited the community we were living in, the commune. You could say we were living in because it was only about two and a half blocks from his house.

  Kenneth was going through a terrible crisis. Because a poet of the same age group as the Beats, and a friend of the Beats, but from the East Coast had run off with his wife and taken the two children and he had nearly a nervous breakdown as many people might do in an insta
nce like that. Quite a bit of hallucinating, a very sensitive and brilliant man, but very far over the edge. Kenneth went very far over the edge and he decided that Jack Kerouac, and then he decided that the Beats, had something to do with it. And he denounced the Beats from then on. What he left behind him were four or five articles denouncing the Beats. I remember in one of them he talked about me, running around making all the money I could, off of readings for colleges and making big money at the college circuit. We were extremely poor! And our feelings were hurt very badly by that kind of stuff, which was just plain laughable, depending on where it appeared.

  I would thank Kenneth for being one of the patriarchs, as you have patriarchs in Zen, and warn you that he had a crazy streak and that accounts for all the bad things that he said about us, and he continues to hold his bad feelings, and yet we are the ones who still, today, are honouring him. I just wrote a piece called ‘Seven Things about Kenneth Rexroth’1 which I delivered at the celebration of his collective poems. We have all been lamenting the fact that his poems were disappearing. That takes care of Rex, who else said that we were politically disengaged?

  SW I think in some ways, Michael, I’m thinking about two different kinds of politics.

  MM I have a very hard time forgiving the rock ’n’ roll groups who were really part of that revolutionary beginning for just giving it up completely and giving themselves over to wish wash and never mentioning another political thing in their existence. Now that does not include the Doors, that does not include the Grateful Dead, that does not include Jefferson Airplane or Country Joe. But for most of the rock ’n’ roll groups, that either continued to have a revolutionary basis or were created by scouts from large corporations after the revolutionary period, I really feel some contempt for them, for selling their asses out.

  SW So I suppose in some ways then we’ve got an issue of perception here because the Beats decided not to engage with some of the traditional political processes, you weren’t very interested in the party systems, for instance you didn’t care if it was the Democrats or Republicans.

  MM That’s because we were anarchists, communists, socialists, who did not believe in the system. We didn’t disengage from it; we proposed another system and we still do to this day. Don’t think of the Beats as something that’s gone away. The Beats are still here as a presence, and a much stronger presence politically, generally speaking, than the disappointment of popular music. You’ve got it really twisted around.

  SW Michael, I haven’t got it twisted around. I’m trying to find a way through some of the perceptions that have arisen in recent times because the rock groups in the 1960s appeared to create a mass revolution; they appeared to create a change in mass consciousness because they were able to sell millions of records, they were able to reach millions of listeners around the world, whereas something like poetry it doesn’t do that.

  MM That isn’t the function of poetry.

  SW So if that isn’t the function of poetry …

  MM At least not in the short term, not in a short period of time. But what it is you’re talking about, you’re talking about the triumph of advertising, you’re talking about the triumph of commodification and the triumph of commercialisation. You’re not talking about politics, you’re talking about slavery, you’re fucking talking slavery and many of those people enslave themselves. These are people I greatly admired and loved as fellow artists and many of them, the ones who remained true to something, I still do.

  SW Who do you consider to be those people, who stayed true to those principles?

  MM The Grateful Dead, Country Joe, the Jefferson – whatever they are now – the Starship and Big Brother, who were almost driven out of existence by another great act of commercialisation … erm, what was his name? He was also Dylan’s agent. I liked him, too. He wheedled Janis away from Big Brother and the Holding Company.

  But if you want to see something revolutionary, you go back to the Monterey Pop Festival and you look at the extravagant mind-breaking event of Big Brother and the Holding Company dancing while they performed with Janis Joplin – there’s a piece of revolution.

  And then to hire Janis away and commodify her into trillions of little fucking round, skinny flat records that people could listen to and get light-hearted kicks out of is not fucking revolutionary or fucking politics, and let me say that this all started because you said, ‘What are the groups that you still believe in?’

  I would believe in Big Brother and the Holding Company, if anybody ever saw them anymore, but because Janis got ripped off from them, and gave into whatever depths in her psyche caused her to do, they hardly exist anymore. But the ones that do are pretty fucking great and they were also so revolutionary that they used no lyrics but were moving people in a very intense way with their music, which was the most difficult thing for me to get around. But I admire them greatly, even more greatly, in retrospect, people like Quicksilver Messenger Service.

  I saw a real revolution and I saw real politics and I saw real politics taking place as a community and I see, looking back, I hate to tell you how goddamn important it was. Because it astonishes, and it’s pathetic, but so much has come of that community of artists and thinkers and philosophers, dunderheads, astrologers, deep thinking, deep feeling, deep drugging people that it’s one of the primary influences on society today. So that’s where the politics is …

  SW I completely agree.

  MM … not with some fucking rock ’n’ roller, who says Iraq once on the entire side of an album and people say ‘That’s so exciting, they’re so political’. That’s shit, that’s shit. It’s commercialisation, it’s commodification, it’s a further lowering of human consciousness to think that that’s something, to be so half assed, that you’re so simple minded that you go ga ga over discs pressed and sold for vast amounts of money. Hey, I’ve made some albums and I know what it costs to make them. And I know how much advertising goes into it to sell them. Furthermore, I’ve done a lot of writing for the Rolling Stone, I know people at the Rolling Stone or I used to, I know that inside and out too.

  As a matter of fact I remember the day when Michael Lydon came to my door when I was living over on Fillmore Street and said, ‘Michael I want to show you’ – he was working for Newsweek back then – and he said, ‘I want to show you something I just did. It’s a rock ’n’ roll newspaper’. And he showed me the first Rolling Stone. I said: ‘Why the fuck does anybody want a newspaper about rock ’n’ roll?’ I mean, I couldn’t understand why rock ’n’ roll would be splintered off from the other magazines of cultural revolution going on, like the Berkeley Barb, which had enormous amounts of rock ’n’ roll in it, too.

  But here’s Jann,2 takes it over and you can sell records, the record companies can sell your magazines and you can all sell each other. It’s a big fucking commercial endeavour. So it’s not political, it is not revolutionary.

  There was a revolution; the revolution still continues spread out through society and, once in a while, you can find it in music, sometimes you can find it in painting. Like here, out of all these people who are painters in New York and sculptors in New York, who are making vast amounts of money, which is something I don’t care about. But look at that – that’s the back cover of The Nation paid for and drawn by Richard Serra.3 I’d be a lot happier if I saw a lot more people who were in the arts doing that, whether they’re in music or whether they’re in sculpture or painting. That means something, and if you think that I wasn’t in politics, you’re fucking wrong.

  Like all my plays were politics, they were politics that accompanied the Vietnam War; they absolutely broached the subject that this society is just fucking cuckoo. And if you think that Gary Snyder wasn’t political or you think Allen Ginsberg wasn’t political or you think Joanne Kyger wasn’t political or you think Diane di Prima wasn’t political, it’s because you never read a fucking word of them

  SW But what if I said William Burroughs or Jack Kerouac?

  MM They’r
e unfortunates. William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac – let me say a) they’re friends; b) they’re both brilliant writers. I admire them both enormously and they are, unfortunately, apolitical. And that may be one of the reasons why both are best known today, so they can be pointed to, is the fact that they are apolitical. Essentially they are harmless.

  Burroughs has all this talk about viruses against our society and so on. That’s science fiction. Kerouac’s On the Road sells cars; it sells camping equipment to high school kids. Good. That’s why they’re popular. But do you want to know who Jack Kerouac wanted to be like? Jack Kerouac wanted to be like Gary Snyder.