Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  Whatever intellectual commentators of the day or subsequent critics made of the AYM-Beat relationship, perceptions of what Beat might mean to a more mainstream audience were reflected in reports in Britain’s sensationalist press. The People, a Sunday newspaper with a reputation for hard-hitting investigation, strove to expose the US Beat menace in a series of articles in summer 1960.40 The pieces, read by several million readers, followed an outbreak of violence that had marred a jazz festival at the Beaulieu, stately home of Lord Montagu, the previous week. Blamed for this incident, though none was present at the musical event, were ‘four strange men’ who had been preaching ‘a cult of despair’. The quartet in question were Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Corso, ‘beatnik “prophets” who do not themselves preach violence. But they do infect their followers with indifference or downright hostility to established codes of conduct’. The reporter Peter Forbes reveals that ‘hobos’ prophet’ Kerouac is ‘a talented writer’ who has unfortunately ‘devoted his great gifts to exalting the bums and jazz-maniacs of the New York jive cellars’; Burroughs, we learn, has ‘freely admitted to being a drug addict for 15 years’; ‘hate merchant’ Ginsberg is ‘a gifted poet’ whose attitudes have ‘infected some teenagers’; while Corso is dubbed ‘the crank poet’ who spreads his own messages of despair. In a feature peppered with stories of crime and violence, drugs and sex from the US Beat world, the writer concludes the report on a less threatening note. ‘Fortunately’, he comments, ‘there is no encouragement of beatnik behaviour by ordinary people in Britain.’

  Meanwhile, ordinary US citizens’ concerns had been centred on reds-under-the-bed entryists who, it was feared, would hex the American dream forever. Not long before, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s widely broadcast claims that the nation was being subverted by Soviet spies and infiltrators had brought into question the loyalty of government officials and prompted counter-claims of a witch-hunt. Britain’s evolution and relationship to ideas of the left had been in some contrast. Socialism had left its lasting mark on the mixed economy and, rather than pursue the duck and cover, head-in-the-sand-ism of the American classroom, the British liberal lobby, supported by students in some numbers, backed the newly formed Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), an activist, pacifist movement that preached negotiated compromise – calls for discussion as opposed to bellicose threats – rather than the anti-Soviet, devils-in-our-midst paranoia of Washington.

  In short, the literary responses of American Beats and British AYM were concocted and constructed in different places with different mind-sets, with contrasting economic backdrops and quite different class systems. So to lump them under one convenient book title of Protest was maybe a piece of oversimplified analysis too far. Ritchie is particularly critical of the cover of the 1960 paperback edition of the collection. He comments with a sardonic exasperation: ‘Writing by the AYM now appeared under a cover depicting a group of tight-jeaned, crotch-thrusting drop-outs gathered in a back alley.’41 This was hardly the métier of Osborne, Braine and all and he feels the combining of the two literary streams was ‘ill-advised’.42

  Yet, in the social realm, as we have hinted, those Beat influences – pro-peace, anti-war, refrains that permeated much of the US work – can hardly be separated from the emergence of CND, formed after a meeting at Oxford Town Hall in 1958 and led by a mixture of philosophers like Bertrand Russell, churchmen like Canon John Collins, progressive politicos such as Labour’s Michael Foot, novelist J.B. Priestley and a rump of young enthusiasts – from universities and colleges, trade unions and the organised political parties – augmented by emerging musicians and artists, writers and poets. At the end of the decade and the start of the next, significant factions in the UK rallied to this cause. A march was staged to Aldermaston,43 site of a nuclear weaponry facility 45 miles west of the capital, which cast a spotlight on the intense, and often secret, activity that was in progress to produce warheads to underpin the NATO strategy against the USSR and its satellite Warsaw Pact nations.

  CND challenged the notion that the world’s future should be allowed to totter on a knife edge, a belief that balanced nuclear war-chests, aimed menacingly at their ideological foes, would be the most likely way to maintain the peace. The campaign, aside from its gathering of largely middle-class radicals, also drew folk and trad jazz fans, and that smaller fringe of followers, now becoming aware of the Beats in the US, who adopted longer hair, grew beards and wore heavy duffel coats in the winter, open-toed sandals in the summer, and gravitated towards the newer forms of jazz like bebop. Ginsberg’s barbed rhetoric in ‘Howl’ had already hinted at the American culture of paranoia, the undernote of social terror and the new environment of surveillance which appeared to echo the tensions of Cold War psychology. CND’s ethos would then feed back into the Beat corpus with Corso’s celebrated poem ‘Bomb’ – laid out on the page in the shape of a mushroom cloud – inspired, he said, by that very ‘Ban the Bomb’ movement CND had implemented and promoted. Not that alliances were simply sealed. When Ginsberg and Corso read in Oxford in Oxford in 1958, some local CND activists attacked ‘Bomb’’s frivolous character.44

  Dick Ellis draws attention, too, to the differing situation in the UK and the delays in Beat messages reaching the UK. If On the Road had finally arrived in the UK in 1958, the year following its US debut, few in Britain were aware of the ongoing Beat developments over the water. He points out that the time-frames in Britain were quite different to those in New York and San Francisco:

  Interest [in the UK] before 1958 was limited primarily to word-of-mouth supporting [the] contention that the beginning of the British/Beat is linked to On the Road’s success in 1958/9 – even though ‘Howl’’s censorship troubles or sheer chance had led to some earlier ‘pioneer’ encounters […] The late 1950s lift-off gives the British/Beat a different chronology to its American counterpart: the British/Beat had little contact with the first wave of Beat activity (roughly) 1945–1955.45

  British individuals who would begin to absorb and share the American Beat impulse included the artist and jazz trumpeter Jeff Nuttall. Later a key contributor to the countercultural drama, he was author of the acclaimed text Bomb Culture, which would appear in 1968. The book would reflect both on the CND campaign and then on the subsequent rise of the UK underground, and gradually overground, frontline which would take the struggle forward on a variety of fronts – from anti-Vietnam demos to assaults on the drug laws. Another was poet Michael Horovitz, an Oxford graduate in English Literature of 1958, who initially pursued postgraduate study on his great hero William Blake then shifted to the then little-known Samuel Beckett – the reluctant Irish dramatist even wrote to him in a bid to dissuade him from undertaking such an academic enquiry – before abandoning those pursuits, too, in favour of ambitious, and realised, plans to create his own publication.

  Horovitz’s aim was to share both the new literary word – from Britain and the US and mainland Europe, too – but also, ultimately, forge fresh ways of marrying a literary, artistic and musical experience in a performance setting. At first he found his platform through the magazine he launched in 1959, New Departures. It was notable on several fronts, drawing attention to major avant garde figures from the UK and the continent who were still yet little known outside narrow educated and experimental circles. But, most pertinently here, it would also introduce various of the Beat writers to a British readership. Horovitz, who had made connections with Beat insiders as a result of Ginsberg and Corso’s Oxford visit in 1958, was initially critical of the Beat writers but he would be won over to their cause quite quickly.46 Through that Oxford visit and his spreading chain of contacts – Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William Burroughs, for example – he was able to generate a wide range of high grade work for his magazine, most of it subterranean and some way beyond the antennae of the transatlantic literary mainstream. The premiere issue would feature work by Kerouac and Burroughs, Beckett and musical avant gardist Cornelius Cardew.

  Horovitz wa
s more than just publisher though; he had his own poetry ambitions, as well. When he met up with itinerant London poet Pete Brown at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival of 1960, they planned and realised a long poem inspired by their peripatetic lifestyles – hitching, readings, crashing on friendly floors. Entitled ‘Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead’, this was an exchange poem in which each writer devised calls and responses to the other, an echo of the friendly and competitive duels of lead jazz instrumentalists on, for example, Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray’s 1948 tune ‘The Hunt’, a work referred to by Kerouac in On the Road. This verse duetting emphasised both Horovitz and Brown’s strong musical allegiance – to jazz and the blues – and their interest in poetry as a dynamic performing medium, rather than one frozen on the printed page. Says Brown: ‘Mike and I were not instant friends, but from the beginning there was a creative chemistry between us that would last. We were in some way opposites – Mike had powerful academic credentials and I had none – but we both loved jazz, we were both Jewish and both had an ear for language and rhythm.’47

  A further venture, reflecting these passions, would soon spring up alongside the ongoing magazine project. Live New Departures, which ran during the early years of the 1960s, became a platform for words, music, art and other performance styles. Within this creative framework, jazz poetry, with a distinctly British flavour, was a central ingredient. The live tours which saw Horovitz and Brown joined by poet Adrian Mitchell and a group of leading jazz musicians – pianist Stan Tracey, Bobby Wellins on sax, drummer Laurie Morgan, trumpeter Les Condon and bassist Jeff Clyne who formed the New Departures Quintet48 – of the period were close in spirit and form to the kind of US experimentations that had occurred between Beat and Beat-linked poets and jazz players in the 1950s and even earlier. Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, ruth weiss, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Meltzer and Jack Kerouac had all presented performances where their written words were accompanied by jazz sounds on stage – and some had been committed to record, too. The New Departures Quintet backed Horovitz and Brown when ‘Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead’ was aired live for the first time. Horovitz also draws attention to ‘the first large-scale informal poetry show in the North [of England]’ when he and Brown and another poet Spike Hawkins performed at the Crane Theatre in Liverpool in 1960, accompanied by saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith and Art Reid’s band.49

  Live New Departures, based in London, travelled across England, to Wales and to Scotland – including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where there were several residencies – and established a reputation for lively innovation: an eclectic montage of art, politics and humour, experiment and avant garde activity. In Liverpool, where the beat music boom was gaining momentum, Horovitz and Brown would find a gaggle of kindred spirits. Liverpudlians Adrian Henri and Roger McGough and their younger friend Brian Patten were gaining a profile on the poetry café front, centred on a venue called Streate’s. Henri, an artist and lecturer at Liverpool College of Art, had been among the first to bring the notion of ‘the happening’ to the UK and the city, inspired by the multi-media productions that Allan Kaprow had staged in the US at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. McGough, an English Literature graduate of Hull University and teacher, was reading his own poetry. So was Patten, a 16-year-old trainee journalist on the local weekly newspaper the Bootle Times, who had already unveiled his own little poetry magazine called Underdog by 1963. Joining this key trio were other poets and writers like Spike Hawkins and Johnny Byrne. McGough describes the scene:

  Streate’s Coffee Bar on Mount Pleasant, a candlelit, white-washed basement that wore a duffel coat and echoed to the sounds of modern jazz, was to poetry what the Cavern was to rock ’n’ roll […] Johnny Byrne, novelist and screenwriter, was then a mischievous young Dubliner with an encyclopedic knowledge of the American Beats who took up semi-residence there and began to organise regular poetry readings featuring Pete Brown and Spike Hawkins, a wild, charismatic southerner with an ambition to be an eccentric genius.50

  The international ascendancy of the Beatles coupled to Ginsberg’s 1965 visit to Liverpool would draw wider attention to this active grouping and see its national profile rise. The publication of The Mersey Sound in 1967 – a pocket volume in the Penguin Modern Poets series, showcasing Henri, McGough and Patten – would also be central in the spreading of this poetry gospel, while Edward Lucie-Smith’s edited compendium of Mersey-based writing, The Liverpool Scene, from the same year, lent authority and identity to this new poetry world and also added to the sense of community and creative coherence in the city.

  Alongside them, Horovitz and Brown, Mitchell, Hawkins and Byrne, Henri, McGough and Patten were others, like photographer John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins and recent art school student Barry Miles, who would be further key catalysts in the unfolding of a British Beat version in the opening half of the 1960s. All were familiar with the American scene, and drew enthusiastically on it, but in the UK there were different approaches and different outcomes, connected in part, we may argue, to the different time-frames unfolding on each side of the Atlantic but also to the contrasting social, political and cultural positions that separated the British and US experience in quite fundamental ways.

  Meanwhile, at the start of the decade, the Beatles were striving to make a mark in the crowded room of their home city – so many acts were battling to be heard – and it would not be long before they took their expanding, American-heavy repertoire to the German port of Hamburg. Here, amid the sailors and prostitutes, drinkers and club-goers, the nocturnal roisterers of this lively waterfront scene, the group would hone their live performing skills and quickly become one of the hardest-working and most proficient acts in the city. By now, the group had, it appears, conceived their own tribute to the rising Beat tide, re-naming themselves in honour of this American literary uprising when, in 1960, the Liverpool-based Beat poet Royston Ellis proposed to John Lennon that a spelling change from Beetles to Beatles was in order and the alteration was agreed.51 Lennon was aware of Ginsberg and ‘Howl’ at this point. His final schooldays, prior to entering Liverpool Art College in late 1957, had seen him produce a satirical, hand-drawn newspaper called The Daily Howl, which his headmaster had confiscated,52 evidence enough, perhaps, that Beat inspiration had already struck him as a late teenage student and the name change for the Beatles seemed to further underline this interest. There was evidence, too, that the Beats had a presence in many college conversations between Lennon, the group’s then bass player Stuart Sutcliffe and Bill Harry, a fellow student who would later found the magazine Mersey Beat. Frith and Horne report that they would sit for hours in a student pub ‘discussing Henry Miller and Kerouac and the Beat poets, Corso and Ferlinghetti’.53 Before long, Lennon would bring some of these influences to bear on his own art, his own writing, mainly through his music but also his lyrics and poetry. As the 1950s faded, the Beatles were on the cusp of a greatness that none of the group’s members could possibly have anticipated.

  Certainly, as the 1960s commenced, the British popular music scene was about to burst forth, regionally and nationally. The Beatles, returning to their home city from Germany, had secured a residency at the Cavern, a small but well-patronised cellar club in the heart of city in Mathew Street. Not long after, local businessman Brian Epstein, who owned the NEMS music store nearby, watched a lunch-time gig and asked if he could manage the four-piece. Within a short time, Epstein had helped clinch a recording contract with EMI subsidiary Parlophone and, in 1962, their first single ‘Love Me Do’ was released, hitting the lower reaches of the Top 20. This gentle start was a misleading augury – a nationwide and global splash was imminent. Within months, as 1963 unfolded, Beatlemania exploded across the UK, with number one singles and a debut album to follow. The eruption focused significant interest on Liverpool and the city’s other musicians, writers and performers benefited from the slipstream of the Fab Four’s momentum.

  In February 1964, the Beatles made their first trip to the US, an extraordinary s
uccess and a move that would trigger the so-called British Invasion as UK pop and rock knocked down the metaphorical barricades and gained large-scale US attention as the decade accelerated. If British music had been deeply unfashionable and dated before the Beatles’ rise, afterwards sounds that emanated from the UK became apparent passports to stardom, huge sales and a swelling fan base. The Dave Clark Five and the Rolling Stones from London, the Animals from Newcastle, and Herman’s Hermits from Manchester were among the early beneficiaries of the astonishing post-Beatles effect. Others would soon follow: the Who, the Kinks, the Troggs and the Yardbirds to be succeeded by Cream and Led Zeppelin. The British Invasion’s impact would barely decline for the next two decades as the new heavy rock bands – Black Sabbath and Deep Purple – then the progressive rockers – Pink Floyd, Yes, ELP and Genesis – the folk rockers – Jethro Tull, the Incredible String Band – singer-songwriters such as Donovan, Elton John and Cat Stevens, glam rockers – David Bowie and T. Rex – punks – the Clash and the Sex Pistols – and the New Romantics – Culture Club to Duran Duran – became successive kings of the American court, primarily because the Beatles had made British pop and rock credible and desirable in a manner no one could possibly have predicted at the 1950s.

  But how did the newly powerful popular music of the early 1960s make closer associations with Beat culture? In the US, Bob Dylan’s meeting with Allen Ginsberg,54 at the close of 1963 was crucial to the launch of this new dialogue. Dylan’s befriending of the poet would be followed by the singer’s first meeting with the Beatles in summer 1964. Then, in May 1965, Dylan would bring Ginsberg and the Beatles together, inviting them all to join him in his hotel suite after an Albert Hall gig in London.55 Thus, within a year and a half, the leading players in an increasingly influential generation of popular musicians would cross existing artistic boundaries to make positive contact with the most dynamic and high profile member of the Beat fraternity.