Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  Warhol said of this time: ‘We all knew something revolutionary was happening. We just felt it. Things could not look this strange and new without some barrier being broken’.

  SW So Warhol’s show was clearly making waves and attracting high profile interest. How did the film project itself get off the ground?

  RN Warhol’s production then came to Chicago for a residency at Poor Richard’s. During one week of performances of the EPI in June 1966, I worked every night filming, to make a comprehensive recording of the event. Because the EPI environment is a multiple screen projection environment, the film utilised multiple level super-impositions of imagery that sometimes reaches a depth of five layers. The film works extensively with the experience of time through its changing rhythms of motion. The film material was the only extensive motion picture document of the EPI. This film material was to create several versions in order to present as complete a document as possible – one version was for single screen projection while another version was for a 4-screen video installation that recreates the spatial experience and environment of the EPI. A photographic exhibition was also created.

  SW What sort of reaction was generated by the Exploding Plastic Inevitable?

  RN There are various critical and academic responses worth re-visiting, I think. Kate Butlers, a journalist wrote about the EPI, saying: ‘The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, generated during the 1960s, has often been cited as the pioneering multimedia experience. Audiences were bombarded with floor to ceiling projections of Warhol films such as Vinyl. At centre stage, the Velvet Underground were transported with Warhol-directed lighting effects. Images filled the show that were disturbing and abrasive as Lou Reed’s songs. Collaboration between artists and musicians had never before, or since, proved so influential despite its short life span.’

  Later, Branden W. Joseph, the art historian at the University of California, wrote: ‘The Exploding Plastic Inevitable remains as the strongest and most developed example of intermedia art. Although (other) productions […] have since achieved greater technical dexterity on a visual plane, no one has yet managed to communicate a guiding spirit through the complex form as well as Warhol and the Underground.’

  SW How would you describe your own aesthetic approach to documenting this phenomenon?

  RN In filming the EPI, my intention was not to create a documentary, but instead to create a light/sound experience that would allow the viewer to experience, to some extent the actual event, without any verbal description. Since EPI was a multiple-screen, multi-sensory experience, and since I had only one screen (the film) I chose to use multiple levels of super-imposed imagery together, to come as close to the original experience as was possible.

  There were also a number of technical limitations that would affect the making of the film. First, no artificial light would be used, as this would have destroyed the environment of lights and projected imagery. Yet, at the same time, film in the Sixties was not particularly light-sensitive. To solve this problem, I operated the camera at one third the normal speed, thus allowing more light to reach the film surface. Normally, when film is projected at 8 frames a second, instead of the normal 24 frames a second, it results in a choppy, speeded-up effect.

  To avoid this, each frame of the recorded film was put into a device known as a contact printer, and each frame was then printed three times, thus creating 24 fames per second. This resulted in a kind of freeze-effect, in which normal motion is slightly frozen in a short space of time. This effect transformed ‘normal’ reality into a kind of other-worldly place – a slight warp of time and space. This time/space warp was then edited and super-imposed into a depth of five levels of imagery.

  The cinematic style of EPI, and in most of my films is quite impressionistic – there seems a strong sense of atmosphere over form, suggestion over narrative, the implicit over the explicit. Atmosphere, suggestion, non-narrative, and the implied – all these are forms which allow one to go beyond the logical, rational mind, into realms that cannot be accurately presented with words.

  When the technology of DVD discs became available, it was then possible to expand the original recordings of the EPI into a four-screen video environment, so that a space with multiple-screens could be created to provide a more intense experience of the original event.

  SW You have intentions to work on a film commemorating ‘Howl’ and its 50th anniversary. Could you describe how you might approach this project?

  RN For the planned production of the film to celebrate ‘Howl’’s 50th anniversary, the intention is to present a multi-faceted expression of the poem through the live performance Howl for Now. By presenting ‘Howl’ as a multi-faceted experience, via music, drama and monologue, the intention is to touch upon Ginsberg’s original experiences and mirror the reality he projected in his original poem.

  As with EPI, the Howl for Now production will work with multi-media and with a multi-disciplinary subject – spoken word, drama, music, imagery. Like EPI, it is intended to be in a single-screen form, as well as a multiple-screen video installation environment. Each of these forms will present ‘Howl’ in a way that is appropriate for that particular structure.

  A lot of contemplation has gone into how to approach this work. There is a clear sense of what needs to be film, and what needs to be captured. At the same time, it is impossible to plan entirely – as reality always provides surprises. So, much reflection and contemplation will also be given while in the editing process. It is here that the creative process continues, and one finds the threads that will create the reality of the film and the form for the multiple-screen video installation environment.

  Considerable thought has already been given to the form of the single-screen version. Several recordings are planned. The first will be of the live event, which sets the tone and mood for the dramatic aspect of the work, as the participants and performers will be in the space with a live audience.

  In a second recording session, I plan to physically move into the space onstage and work directly in the performance space so that I can interact directly with the performers. They will thus be able to perform directly into the eye of the camera.

  A third recording session is envisioned, in which the performers are moved from the stage, into the outside world – into streets and alleyways, again performing directly for the camera. Additional imagery will be gathered and edited into these recordings. This imagery will be indicative of the period of the Fifties and mirror the depth of experience in ‘Howl’.

  In film and video recording process, one works sequentially, first to gather together all the various elements necessary to the piece. One could perhaps compare it to the cooking of a meal. First, one must have all the necessary ingredients. When everything necessary is available; then comes the work of mixing everything. With traditional editing, conscious decisions are made to structure the material. One can also involve the use of chance operations (such as those of Burroughs or of Cage), so that the rational, logical, ego-mind is set aside in this process and thus allow unexpected combinations and juxtapositions to occur.

  The single-screen version is most often shown in the context of a film projection environment, which means that people sit in chairs and watch the screen from beginning to end. That is, if they don’t fall asleep of boredom or leave in exasperation or desperation! So, this aspect has to be taken into consideration.

  The multiple-screen video installation environment offers a very different environment compared to traditional single-screen film viewing, since the viewer is free to walk freely in the space, and choose their own experience of how they wish to experience the space. This is similar to the act of viewing a painting in a gallery, or simply moving about in one’s daily life. Here, there is no suspension of reality, as in the traditional film presentation. Instead, one is free in time and space to move and select one’s own experience of the work.

  In an environment with multiple screens, the use of a traditional visual language is not vital
or necessary – one is free to allow juxtapositions of image, form and movement that would not work in a single-screen situation. Here, chance has a greater opportunity to play, and to allow the viewer to become the participant in the experience of the space. With the possibility of creating two very different experiences of Ginsberg’s poem as presented in Howl for Now, the intention is to provide a multi-faceted, in-depth and varied experience of that will reveal the depth of Ginsberg’s vision, and mirror the reality he experienced.

  Author’s note: Howl for Now was presented on 7 October 2005 at the Clothworkers’ Centenary Concert Hall, School of Music, University of Leeds. The event, which took place half a century later to the night of Ginsberg’s first reading of ‘Howl’ at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, featured a reading of the poem and six new musical works composed in tribute to the verse work. Although a DVD record of the occasion was produced, Ronald Nameth’s scheme to adapt the material for a more ambitious, multi-screen production remains on the drawing board.

  7 THE MELTZER CHRONICLES: POET, NOVELIST, MUSICIAN AND HISTORIAN OF BEAT AMERICA

  In 1995–96, a major exhibition was mounted in the US, celebrating the Beat Generation and its legacy, showcasing among other prized artefacts, the vast paper roll on which Jack Kerouac had typed the original draft of his hugely influential 1957 novel On the Road. The exhibition, Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965, opened in New York in late 1995, then visited Minneapolis and San Francisco during 1996 and spawned a substantial and impressive hardback catalogue,1 gathering images and essays reflecting on that moment in American letters when literature reached out to embrace art, cinema, music, theatre and life itself.

  An early pair of photographs in the exhibition guide capture the social fracture of the times – the consumer-driven materialism of the nuclear family and the resistance of a new social formation. In the first, a brushed and gleaming Mom and Pop are framed with kids and dog in front of a brilliant, whitewood home; in the second, in a San Francisco alley, two hipsters in existential black are joined by their small son and an assortment of multi-racial street kids.2 The pictures are potent enough, juxtaposing mainstream and marginalised America, the sunny hopes of consumerist materialism and the shadowy lives of the refuseniks, but the fact that the young man in the Beat shot, taken by Viennese documentary cameraman Harry Redl in 1957, was a rising poet called David Meltzer is more interesting still.

  David Meltzer was around the age of 20 when the picture was taken, newly arrived in the Bay Area from the East Coast, starting to make the acquaintance of the giants of the Beat world and their precursors – Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth and so on – and appearing at the poetry bars and cafés in North Beach which were beginning to proliferate, as part of what became dubbed the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. In the period that would follow, Meltzer’s life as poet, then musician, would take its picaresque shape, performing and publishing, an active contributor to the subversive dramas of a new and rebellious America.

  Some years on from the Redl sessions, in December 1965, Meltzer would appear in a more famous photograph – Larry Keenan’s documenting of the Beat clan outside City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, featuring Ginsberg, the shop-owner Ferlinghetti, novelist Richard Brautigan, poet and playwright Michael McClure, and many other prominent names from this literary family. Often described as the ‘Last Gathering of the Beat Generation’,3 Keenan’s much-published image was taken as Bob Dylan visited the city on tour, an event that has been touched upon elsewhere in this collection. The pictures of the Beat group and those memorable images of Dylan with guitarist Robbie Robertson and Ginsberg and McClure, in what was much later re-named Jack Kerouac Street,4 would become iconic portraits of a fascinating artistic encounter, between two generations who challenged the social establishment in distinctive fashions – through the spoken word, then through music.

  Dylan’s association with the poets and writers of the Beat Generation has been much commented on, including in this volume. Dylan was included in Ann Charters’ substantial anthology The Portable Beat Reader (1992) to confirm his status as a Beat icon. Robert Shelton, the New York Times journalist credited with penning the earliest and most important reviews of this rising talent, wrote the acclaimed Dylan biography No Direction Home (1986). It provides a colourful and engaging overview of Dylan’s Beat engagement and the effect of the movement’s work on his own song-writing.

  Yet the detail of Dylan’s initial first-hand entanglement with the members of this literary school has not been widely reported. We know about his consumption of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Kerouac’s On the Road in Minnesota coffee houses in 1960,5 all the way to the extraordinary scenes of the singer and Ginsberg perched at Kerouac’s graveside in 1975 on the Rolling Thunder tour, material later utilised in the sprawling semi-fictional documentary Renaldo and Clara,6 but when did he first meet a member of the Beat circle? When was he first on speaking terms with a poet who we can regard as a resident of the Beat enclave? When did Dylan turn from being a reader of, a fan of, the Beat word and make personal contact with one of its purveyors and thus join the fringes of that literary coterie? This chapter aims to cast some further light on this matter.

  Dylan biographers Anthony Scaduto, and the aforementioned Shelton and Williams7 don’t actually describe Dylan’s first encounter with Ginsberg, for instance. However, Barry Miles and Michael Schumacher, approaching the topic from the Ginsberg angle in their biographies of the poet, make a more specific attempt to do so. Miles says that Ginsberg returned with Peter Orlovsky to New York in December 1963, after an extended time away, and would then, soon afterwards, stay at the home of his friend and business associate Ted Wilentz. ‘One of their first visitors’, Miles says, ‘was the journalist Al Aronowitz, who showed up one day with his friend Bob Dylan.’8 The date is hard to ascertain – a week on? a month after? – though clearly not long after that that December return to Manhattan. Schumacher suggests that the Dylan-Ginsberg meeting took place ‘[o]ne day in early 1964’ when Aronowitz ‘who had written the series about the Beat Generation for the New York Post stopped by Wilentz’s apartment for a visit’ with his friend Dylan in tow.9 Wilentz’s son Sean would provide a clearer insight in his 2010 volume Bob Dylan in America, when the date of the meeting was placed as 26 December 1963.10

  But what of earlier encounters than this between Dylan and the Beats? This is where we should return to the part that David Meltzer would play in this important chain of events and his meeting with the singer that would pre-date, by some way, the more high profile liaisons we have touched upon. In late 1997, I was commissioned by the UK Beat Generation magazine Beat Scene to profile Meltzer as he set out a short tour of readings around the North of England. When we met, we talked about many things, about poetry, about Ginsberg, about Kerouac, about jazz, but when I asked him about the Larry Keenan photo sessions of 1965 he revealed some intriguing extra background about his early associations with Dylan.11 Later he annotated these remarks in a correspondence with the author,12 prefacing his expanded description of events with this comment: ‘Much of the encounter I’ve kept under my hat; have tried to keep a low profile over the decades while mythographers and mythomaniacs concoct their epic narrative of “the good old days” .’13 The account that follows draws heavily on both the 1998 interview and the 1999 annotations.

  Unlike Dylan, Meltzer did not make it into Charters’ Portable Beat Reader though she later expressed her regret at his non-inclusion in the UK Beat magazine Beat Scene, where she commented: ‘I did forget good people. I forgot David Meltzer.’14 So who was this ‘good person’ absent from that omnibus? We have already described the young Meltzer’s arrival in San Francisco around 1957 and his poetry began to appear soon after in small press editions, and later through acclaimed imprints such as Black Sparrow Press. He also, in 1961, became joint editor, with McClure and Ferlinghetti, of The Journal for the Protection of All Beings, ‘the era’s most interesting periodical’,
15 which was a collection noted not only for its writing but also its eco-consciousness, a prescient manifesto to be preaching over 50 years ago.

  Meltzer was born in New York in 1937 to artistic parents and grew up in a post-Depression city that seethed with political and social tensions. Although the physical tremors of the Second World War were oceans away, the after-shocks of the Nazi death camps and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki left their psychological brand on young and old. He comments: ‘From 1945 the world changed. The war was very important in terms of formulating a lot of my work. With the Atomic bomb and the Holocaust, there was a kind of rupture. Teenagers felt they had no future. Culture up to that point had been predicated on progress. When you don’t have that as a social glue, other things happen.’16

  Nonetheless, New York proved a highly educational experience for him. The quarter he grew up in – his family moved to Brooklyn in 1941 – was a rich mixture of ‘working class immigrants, Jewish European immigrants, Italian Catholic immigrants. It was an interesting community of old world people and their progeny with their families. So you had the power of the old world with their religions but you also had the Communist Party in its US version, with second and third generations dealing with issues that were brought up by the Depression, the whole question of the Popular Front, the Cold War. On Friday nights, you either had the option of going to the synagogue or going to the CP meetings where all these people in blue shirts, chambray, might bring on an authentic Negro to represent the idea of race relations.’17