by Simon Warner
SW Well that’s an interesting way of putting it.
MM After the Six Gallery reading when he heard Allen Ginsberg read ‘Howl’, he heard me read, Rexroth’s introduction to us, which was beautiful and appreciative of what was really going on, and so forth. He didn’t go away and write the story of Allen Ginsberg, he went away and wrote darker poems, because it’s revolutionary to go out into nature, and it’s revolutionary to take another viewpoint on society from that standpoint. Jack was a great, great man, great, great writer, too, and I’ve got to say also a great, great, great Buddhist visionary.
SW Could I ask where the figure of Bob Dylan fits into this? Clearly he was someone you had much to do with.
MM First of all David Meltzer had given me Dylan’s, probably first, album and I took it home and said, ‘Oh God! I grew up listening to these people in high school’, particularly people who would come down from the University of Chicago while I was in high school, singing fucking Appalachian folk songs – ‘It’s shit!’ I said, this is a nice kid, but I’ve heard all this stuff till I’m ready to gag it up.
The next time I heard Dylan, Larry Keenan4 came by my house, and this was when I was living in the Haight-Ashbury, and I had a record player in my hallway and he put on that song that goes: ‘At dawn my lover comes to me/And tells me of her dreams/With no attempts to shovel the glimpse/Into the ditch of what each one means’.5 And he didn’t tell me what he had put on and I said, ‘That’s William Blake’. I thought it was William Blake singing and it was coming out of the walls. And he said, ‘No, no, no – that’s Bob Dylan’.
SW So you had a sort of transcendental moment?
MM Yeah, and then the next thing I know, Allen Ginsberg, to do Dylan a favour, has invited a bunch of people to his first concert – no it wasn’t his first concert, it was his first electric concert – in San Francisco at the Masonic Auditorium6 in 1965 and I was invited along with a bunch of Hell’s Angels and Joan Baez, a couple of poets.
We were all sitting in the front row listening to Bob and I thought it was like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin; I loved him. I think he’s great. I think his songs … I believed in his poetry, his work rides above song-writing, in the same way somebody like Bob Hunter’s work. I don’t belittle song-writing, I like song-writing, I like to do it, I like songs – but it isn’t poetry usually, and there are a few mighty, strange and wonderful exceptions.
We got to become pretty good friends. He gave me an autoharp and I learned to play that autoharp. I wrote a bunch of songs, including ‘Mercedes Benz’, and I wrote them at the same time as I was writing the autobiography of my Hell’s Angel’s brother, Freewheelin’ Frank, secretary of the Angels, who I met at the Bob Dylan concert and who was a big Bob Dylan/Joan Baez fan.
SW So there are other connections, but if I was to play devil’s advocate again …
MM I don’t like devil’s advocate.
SW Well sometimes devil’s advocate needs to be in the room to stimulate the kind of commentary we’re making, I mean I’m not here to provoke you Michael. I’m here because I am very interested in your view.
MM It just makes me realise what a world of shit that’s been created out there when I hear you say this stuff.
SW Well I’m here to challenge some of those perceptions. If I do play that advocate and say, Bob Dylan came along in 1965 and hi-jacked some of the cultural capital that the Beat writers had.
MM Nonsense, what did he hi-jack? He came along and he was a superb poet, who didn’t hi-jack, didn’t take anything from me. That inspires me! My friends inspire me. Ginsberg inspired me, he didn’t fucking take something from my cradle. Gary Snyder, because he writes about nature, didn’t take nature away from me; Philip Whalen because he writes about Zen didn’t take Zen away from me. These people are feeding me – it’s wonderful. And suddenly poetry just had another dimension that it’s had many times, many times in human history.
SW Well what happens when a poet like Dylan does sell huge numbers of CDs or records as they were at the time? What happens to poetry at that moment? Is there still this problem that poetry is becoming commodified? Is it a triumph of advertising, as you suggested?
MM No. Not in this case because he doesn’t lend himself to it strongly. He doesn’t beg for it. I know all of his tricks and games.
SW So there are some artists who are able to transcend that?
MM Well they’re able to transcend it by keeping their teeth. They don’t say, ‘Can I suck your cock now that you’re putting out my records in a million copies?’
SW And few artists have got the courage to resist that?
MM They love it. It’s what they want. And then hip-hop learned how to do it from the way rock ’n’ roll did it – and they did it even faster. They were smarter than the white boys. Because it took those fucking white boys about six months to learn how to sell out and all it took hip hop was about three.
SW OK, so Dylan was able to rise above the …
MM He didn’t sell out. He didn’t sell out. If he’s that popular, it’s a miracle, a fucking miracle and he played the game a little bit. I would have played the game that much. I’m not talking about Puritan, let’s draw the line, and put people on one side of the line and give medals to people on the other. Everyone slides back and forth. But Dylan didn’t slide back and forth very much – he stayed right out there.
SW Do you still listen to his work?
MM Not so much. What happened with Dylan was his popularity became so enormous that he now has imitators of imitators of imitators. It’s become a milieu. We’re going to have to wait for the milieu to go away to really hear Dylan. Now, he’s been whited out by his imitators and the children of his imitators. It’s unfortunate, because what he has to say is so great.
I listened to that new album a couple of years ago when he actually changed his style; that was very interesting. I listened to that carefully. He went from using imagery to using figures of speech – very, very strange. My fantasy of it was that he was trying to shake the people running after him, imitating him, by making a total change from the kind of poetry he was writing to poetry composed of figures of speech. You know, John Ashbery writes his poetry composed almost entirely from figures of speech, too.
SW So Dylan, an important figure about whom you’ve said some significant things. Jim Morrison, with whom you also had a close friendship, a young man cut down in his prime.
MM I wouldn’t say cut down … dead!
SW OK, dead in his prime. How does he fit into this process? He was influenced by Beat poetry to a degree; he was influenced by earlier writers as well. Was he a figure who resisted commodification or was he someone who was doomed to this terrible early end anyway? What is the Morrison link to this world we are discussing?
MM Well, if we talk about commodification, I don’t think the Doors … the Doors were a kind of high-up-the-heap success. But I don’t believe commodification happened until after Morrison’s death. I believe that they probably…it’s entirely possible that the Doors sold far more albums now than they did when Jim was alive. He certainly didn’t do anything to lend himself to commodification. He was outrageous!
SW But is he almost a symbol of what you needed to do to not fall into that trap?
MM There isn’t anything you need to do to fall into that trap – just don’t fall into it in your own way. Just be you and not fall into it; there’s no trick. Different people have different temptations, sometimes temptation comes in the form of Al Grossman, which must be very hard to deal with.
SW Well Albert Grossman had a reputation. Thanks for those comments on Jim Morrison. Did rock culture have any influence on your own work, do you think? Do you think it made you different in any way as a writer?
MM Oh yes, but I don’t think rock culture is the right word.
SW Rock music or rock lyrics, maybe …
MM The revolutionary milieu of the early days of the Haight-Ashbury and the development into rock ’n�
� roll as a high art is one of the most influential things in my life. But included in that is the drug culture of the Haight-Ashbury, and my own drug culture long before the Haight-Ashbury, and the dances, the fucking dances, at the Avalon and the Fillmore, and the clothing, and the open-ness of sexuality and body freedom.
SW So you enjoyed the viscerality that rock culture brought. There was a cerebral dimension but you enjoyed the visceral almost …
MM Yes. I had come in by way of jazz. I was listening to jazz and I was listening to Monteverdi and I was listening to Vivaldi, and I was listening to Miles Davis, especially Thelonious Monk. I appreciated that music cerebrally as well as physically.
SW The beat of rock set your body free, did it?
MM But that’s it, you see. You’re trying to attribute it too much to rock. It wasn’t rock culture – it was counterculture with rock as the figurehead. Did it influence me? Did it look like it? I had my hair down to here.
SW So would you say, probably, Ginsberg and yourself were the most moved, most attracted by this new cultural moment when rock emerged, as you say, as the figurehead in the counter culture? Did you feel as though Ginsberg and yourself were drawn into this new moment?
MM Of the Beats, yes.
SW And some other Beats felt that this wasn’t such a great development?
MM No I wouldn’t say that.
SW Kerouac certainly didn’t, did he?
MM I’ve got to tell you – I’ve got to separate off Kerouac. You very rightfully pointed to the apoliticality of Jack and Burroughs. But I point to the fact that the reason they’re known, and it can be used to point at them, is because of their commodification. Jack certainly didn’t seek the commodification. Burroughs didn’t avoid it. They were a little older than me. Jack was ten years older than me. Allen was seven years older. Burroughs must have been fifteen. The rest of us were pretty much between Ginsberg and myself. If you include [David] Meltzer in, which is only fair, he would be the youngest.
SW Yes, there’s this curious turnaround which happens in the 1970s when punk arises and Burroughs is then dubbed the godfather, there are some strange twists. What did you make of that, that post-hippy moment when punk came along. Is that relevant, or irrelevant, to the story you’ve been mapping out?
MM Well I wasn’t interested in that many punk groups. I liked Black Flag and some people like that. But they were really out there. They were putting their beliefs out there. But, in general, I sympathised with punk because it was a grail quest, and I sympathise with anybody who is on a grail quest, but it doesn’t mean I have to be interested in them and there just weren’t that many punk rockers of interest to me.
Notes
1Michael McClure’s piece, ‘Seven Things about Kenneth Rexroth’, Big Bridge, http://www.bigbridge.org/issue10/elegymmcclure.htm [Accessed 22 December 2011].
2Jann Wenner was the founder, publisher and editor of Rolling Stone in San Francisco in 1967.
3The back cover of the magazine The Nation on 5 July 2004 featured a Serra artwork which formed part of a campaign that was critical of George W. Bush and encouraged individuals to use their voting power.
4Larry Keenan was a student of McClure’s and would-be photographer.
5From Bob Dylan’s ‘Gates of Eden’ (Columbia, 1965).
6Dylan performed at the Masonic Memorial Auditorium in San Francisco on 5 December 1965. He returned to the same venue on 11 December. See Clinton Heylin, A Life in Stolen Moments – Day by Day: 1941–1995 (London: Omnibus, 1996), p. 87.
3 MUSE, MOLL, MAID, MISTRESS? BEAT WOMEN AND THEIR ROCK LEGACY
Quite recently, I had a female student, who was investigating the social upheavals of the 1960s, comment, with some surprise, that such a tumultuous era, for all its promise of liberation, seemed to be a time during which women remained essentially under the thumb. Freedom may have been an appealing target for a number of groups of that noted period of transformation – white, middle-class students attacking the military industrial complex, blacks struggling for Civil Rights, gays calling for legal recognition of their own after centuries of ostracism, not to mention ethnic communities of all kinds resisting the global hand of colonialism. Yet women participants, though often present in these campaigns, were generally assumed to be outside the vanguard of change. These huge cultural, racial and political tussles were usually perceived as men’s work: involved females were there not to mount the barricades or theorise the revolution but merely to tend the psychologically – and even physically – wounded, but hardly lead the way.
In fact, even when headway was made, there was scant sense that the bounty of these hard-fought efforts was equally available to both men and women anyway. Hippy chicks or black girlfriends were not necessarily seen as the natural heirs to anything; they remained, in most cases, the hand-maidens of the patriarchy, at the demo or the festival, in the church or on the street. Yet, if the 1960s was a period when such imbalance was still broadly taken as a given, it was also a decade when women began to slowly, then vociferously, challenge such casual assumptions. American writers such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and, a little later, Kate Millet and the UK-based, Australian feminist Germaine Greer would start to express their dissatisfactions with the undemocratic rebellion that was raging in Washington and Chicago, Paris and London, and demand that women’s rights be also part of the radical agenda for change and progress, improvement and justice.
Step back ten years further and the place of female players in the dramas of the day was still more diminuated. In the US, the 1950s represented an epoch in which many of the seeds that would flower in the decade to follow would take root. Yet it was a time when the nation’s economic comfort – cars, televisions, fridges and transistor radios became the norm, for large swathes of the white population at least – was in sharp relief to the country’s psyche, haunted by fears of Communist entryism and nuclear wipe-out. Such schizophrenia was played out alongside a soundtrack of rock ’n’ roll – itself a symbol of racial miscegenation, as black blues met white country, and a deeply worrying one to conservative forces – and against a backdrop of general unease, generated by signs that the Negro would no longer accept the restrictions of his manacled role, nor would leftist artists, socialist folkies and liberal intellectuals simply condone this absurd truce between fiscal boom and Cold War paranoia as a complacent excuse for contentment.
J. D. Salinger in his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye and Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay ‘The White Negro’, for example, distilled some of these tensions – the outsider adolescent and the white desire to ape black codes – in their writings. On the folk front, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger pleaded the cause of the worker when unionism was attracting profound suspicion and judicial harassment from the authorities. Movies reflected the generational divide as older teenagers left their parents at home watching TV to catch Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the real political melodramas of the day were mirrored by thinly-veiled dramatic satires like Arthur Miller’s powerful stage-play The Crucible (1953).
Then, a more integrated group of writers, the Beats, rocked the boat still further, preaching escape from norms, from respectability, by abandoning traditional work for the pleasures of creativity, replacing the suffocating demands of domestic aspiration with the joys of the road, the exotic pleasures of the ghetto, mind-altering odysseys on drink and drugs, and the passions of passing, soon forgotten, girls, all to the pulse of bebop. The men who made this mark – and they did avidly record their adventures in a flood of poems and novels – had scant regard for the part that women might actually contribute to this narrative of rebellion. Jack Kerouac, for all his roistering, constantly felt the tug of his mother’s apron-strings and disowned a daughter for many years; William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg were homosexual with competing inclinations; Neal Cassady was an inveterate womaniser who married several and slept with hundreds of others. But none was encouraging of the female a
s artist, as writer. When women did appear, in the lives or lines of these individuals, they were for sex or soup or temporary escape from the thrills and the spills, the self-generated insanity of the search.
The small number of women remembered – perhaps the poet Diane di Prima1 alone was able to establish an autonomous literary standing in the wake of the initial Beat upsurge – were part of that life support system which permitted the men to booze, to brawl, to ball, and still find something warm, both in the oven and in bed – and space to write when the inspiration came. Yet, in the last couple of decades or so, we have seen a swelling, retrospective literature penned by female figures who were not at the very core of what went on but have important memories to share of both the Beats they knew but also their part of the history that unfolded; how they, as women, fitted into these unreformed times. Some were lovers even wives, some muses, some little more than servants; even if they had talents, they were submerged by notions that they were merely bit-part players, hand-maidens to those male characters doing the real toil which would lead to the genuine art. Some of these accounts are recent arrivals; others have been resurrected after decades in the shadows, blotted out by the dominating power of men’s poetry and men’s novels of that period. As Ann Charters states:
