Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  These pieces are among a range of intriguing fragments from the Kerouac archive, which were re-discovered, long after the novelist’s death in 1969, by representatives of the writer’s estate in unmarked boxes. Among the other items that would make an appearance on the 1999 CD release was a long section from On the Road – his most famous novel, issued in 1957 – a sequence entitled ‘Jazz of the Beat Generation’,7 one of the most celebrated sections from Kerouac’s voluminous body of published writing, a brilliantly descriptive account that had first seen the light of day in copy of the literary magazine New World Writing in April 1955, merely carrying the signature Jean Louis, a passing nod to Kerouac’s deep French, more accurately Canuck, roots. It was also thought to be an attempt to hide his true identity at a time when a paternity suit was being laid against him by his second wife Joan Haverty who had borne a daughter called Jan8 in 1951 but whose existence, or at least her blood relation to him, was virtually denied by her absent father.

  ‘Jazz of the Beat Generation’ is a dazzling tour de force – a frenetic, yet beautifully detailed and observed, rap on jazz musicians and their art, a torrent of roaring, spontaneous prose, a high octane prayer to the musical soundtrack that kept Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and his compadre Dean Moriarty – a lightly veiled portrait of his great friend and inveterate adventurer Neal Cassady – up and ready during their criss-crossing tours of the US at the end of the 1940s. Yet this ground-breaking work that would trail the experimental vernacular from which Kerouac built a whole book, was not the only piece of 24-carat genius to find its way into that very special edition of New World Writing. Alongside pieces by Dylan Thomas – dead from the effects of drink by 1953 – and a poem by the rising critic A. Alvarez, work by the British poet Thom Gunn and a contribution from the German novelist Heinrich Böll, was part of a developing story called Catch-18 by an unknown American wordsmith called Joseph Heller. By the turn of the next decade, Kerouac’s On the Road and Heller’s anti-war satire, by now re-named Catch-22, were among the most venerated examples of a new, post-Second World War, American literature.

  The Kerouac reading then would form the core ingredient on the 1999 recorded collection, but there was more besides. Douglas Brinkley’s sleeve notes capture the variety present on the disc when he states: ‘This album […] is a nine-track showcase for the writer as romantic crooner, lonely vagabond, prose stylist, Tin Pan Alley cut-up, hobo poet and scat innovator’.9 Further, Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road would also pay tribute to another artist linked to the Beat movement of the 1950s – the photographer Robert Frank, whose images would be utilised as part of the sleeve design. In 1959, Frank had produced a photographic collection called The Americans, a set of striking, and atmospheric, black and white images that captured something of the spirit of the ordinary, everyday USA from that period – the everyman and everywoman, children, too, framed by Frank, destined to become one of the legendary cameramen of the later century. If Frank’s pictures distilled the spirit of the worker, the hobo, the frayed fringes of American society, they also seemed to embrace something of the spirit of Kerouac’s writings of the time and there was a certain logic that the novelist should be asked to pen the introductory section to a book that, apart from that essay, relied merely on its pictorial essay to tell its story. Kerouac with typical energy and a passionate enthusiasm responded to Frank’s work:

  The humour, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness of these pictures! Tall thin cowboy rolling butt outside Madison Square Garden New York for rodeo season, sad, spindly, unbelievable – Long shot of night road arrowing forlorn into immensities and flat of impossible-to-believe America in New Mexico under the prisoner’s moon – under the whang whang guitar star – Haggard old frowsy dames of Los Angeles leaning peering out the right front window of Old Paw’s car on a Sunday gawking and criticising to explain old Amerikay to little children in the spattered back seat – tattooed guy sleeping on grass in park in Cleveland …10

  Forty years later, as Jim Sampas worked on the tribute album, he invited a well-regarded album sleeve designer to concoct the packaging. Frank Olinsky had worked on various Sonic Youth-linked graphic commissions including the band’s A Thousand Leaves (1998) and another for member Thurston Moore, Psychic Hearts, in 1995. The fact that band guitarist Lee Ranaldo was joining Sampas as producer on the Kerouac disc was not irrelevant. The front cover showcased a Robert Frank image of Kerouac studying a jukebox, the back cover an evocative shot of the highway receding inexorably into a rain-filled sky. Explains Olinsky:

  Jim got permission for the Robert Frank photos. Someone told me the back cover photo of the highway was his choice for the original cover for On The Road book.11 I was not allowed to crop the Frank photos so that was one of the factors that influenced my design. I love the detail photos of the tape reels with Kerouac’s little drawings of fish, heart and so on, and encouraged their use. It was my idea to run Douglas Brinkley’s liner notes vertically and set in a typewriter font as an homage to the original On The Road manuscript scroll.12 I also came up with the concept of the CD label covered with the pattern of typewritten words that aligns with the inside tray card.13

  Another key player in this project was David Amram, who would emerge as a noted musician, composer and arranger from mid-century, and had been a friend of Kerouac’s since before the release of his headline novel. Together they had informally conceived their own version of jazz poetry as performance art, Amram accompanying Kerouac’s words on the various instruments he played – from French horn to piano and percussion. By the time On the Road had turned Kerouac’s name into one of the hottest tickets in New York City, the pair had presented their act, in late 1957, at the Brata Art Gallery on East 10th Street and the Village’s Circle in the Square Theatre. Later Kerouac linked with other jazz players at the Village Vanguard but the reviews were poor. Kerouac was already drinking too much and his nervous demeanour rendered his on-stage projection a blend of the wooden and the slapdash. However, the writer’s association with Amram remained close – they would collaborate on the Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie movie Pull My Daisy in 1959 when Kerouac penned the screenplay and narrated while his erstwhile musical partner conceived the soundtrack. But their jazz poetry link-up itself never quite achieved what the duo believed was possible, nor was it documented via recording, so we will never know for sure how good this partnership was, nor how this on-stage relationship might have played out, in time, with more tender understanding and encouragement from the critics.

  When the producer of the project, Jim Sampas, a nephew of the novelist by marriage, realised he had access to extended sections of his late uncle reading his own prose poems, he invited Amram, by now a veteran of many bands and orchestras, a sideman to Leonard Bernstein, Machito and Dizzy Gillespie over many years and a creator of symphonic, chamber and soundtrack works in his own right, to compose the musical accompaniment to these recordings. He proceeded to devise some outstanding arrangements that lent colour and depth to Kerouac’s disembodied voice-track. ‘Orizaba 210 Blues’ and ‘Washington DC Blues’ are a pair of remarkable and extended work-outs in which Amram and his own jazz ensemble breathe life into reels that had been gathering dust for around 40 years. The settings – which integrate jazz and world, classical and baroque elements – fit the poetry like a glove, a strange experience when the oral and melodic components had been divided by so many decades.

  Amram recalls the process: ‘Jim [Sampas] sent me a copy of “Washington DC Blues” and a cassette of Jack [Kerouac] reading it. Jack sounded at his best. I felt like I was hanging out with him again.’ He adds: ‘As I listened […] I remembered the gentle way Jack had of expressing himself. He was usually out-shouted by most of his friends, so he never blew out his vocal cords trying to out-shout them. His speaking voice was beautiful and he was a surprisingly good singer. When he wasn’t reading aloud, scat singing, bashing at the piano, or hammering on the bongos, he would sit quietly in the middle of the pandemonium.’14


  For the recording sessions, Amram devised a group with a neo-classical sound – including viola, bassoon, oboe and English horn – to approach the ‘Washington DC Blues’ account. It was the same orchestration style he had employed for the scored segments of Pull My Daisy. Remarkably he managed to gather the same instrumentalists who had played on the 1959 film soundtrack.15 For ‘Orizaba 210 Blues’, he took a different approach. He explains that here he was looking for a ‘jazz-Latin-World sound’.16 The conga player he engaged for the recording provided another link to Kerouac’s past – Candido had played with Dizzy Gillespie’s band, an ensemble the novelist had seen in person.17

  Amram undoubtedly brought an eclectic flavour to his updated takes on Kerouac’s words and the results had much to recommend them. However, it is hard not to argue that the most interesting song on the album is one that reveals Kerouac as not only vocalist manqué, a prose and poetry stylist supreme, but also a man capable of writing an original song himself. The song ‘On the Road’ not only has a fascinating genesis, but is the subject, too, of a second version on the CD. Here, Beat aficionado Tom Waits and the Californian funk rock band Primus concoct a fresh take on Kerouac’s self-composed blues. In this section, I would like to offer an archaeological trawl through a song-cum-poem that appears in numerous versions – both as a versatile vehicle for Kerouac’s creative expression but also as a platform of various kinds for Waits as well.

  The notion of versions, interestingly, has become part of the Kerouac legend as the writer was known not only to produce different editions of stories he wrote, but also extensively revise those variations. In fact, On the Road, definitively released by Viking Press, was actually just one incarnation of the same picaresque tale and one that the novelist himself was less than satisfied with. His earliest attempt to capture the spirit and energy of Sal and Dean’s transcontinental journeys, was produced on a continuous teletype roll over three weeks in 1951. But this freeform rush of thought and deed, lacking even paragraph breaks, would be rejected early on in the commissioning process. Kerouac returned to the exercise several times in the period that followed and it would be actually six years later before a recognisable book – and one that the publishers would sign off – emerged. While the edition on the bookshop shelves would bring Kerouac significant sales, not a little cash and fame aplenty, it was never the book he had wanted to issue. The different versions that did exist would not see the light before the writer’s alcohol-soaked death in 1969. Eventually, with the backing of his ever-supportive friend Allen Ginsberg, a posthumously published title called Visions of Cody was released in 1973. This was a highly experimental telling of the saga, one in which Dean Moriarty had now been renamed Cody Pomeray.

  The re-cast edition not only featured long passages of spontaneous text, barely touched by the hand of an editor, the very approach that the radical artist in Kerouac found most appealing, but also transcripts of taped conversations that he and Cassady had shared, recollecting various aspects of their wanderings. What can be said is that the 1973 version, while a favourite among committed followers of the Kerouac canon, would not have seen the public light of day without the exciting reputation that the novelist had carved out through a dozen issued works and several volumes of poetry, too, in the interim. If Visions of Cody had been given the green light in 1957, its left-field format, its lack of respect for basic laws of syntax, would have been unlikely to garner the glowing review that Gilbert Millstein penned in the New York Times, on 5 September 1957, when he produced the key, breakthrough notice of On the Road, and nor would the public – that young, dynamic, and principally male, readership hungering for a story of freedom-seeking exuberance and one with a readable style and a conventional narrative – have been so easily recruited to what would rapidly become a significant Kerouac cult by the later 1950s and early 1960s.

  Later, much later, in 2007, the Original Scroll edition of On the Road, that legendary version penned on the continuous roll, unfettered by many of the traditional niceties of written text – paragraph breaks, particularly, as we have mentioned – would finally become available to a general readership. The physical scroll had already become an object of general note following the purchase of the item for a world record figure by Jim Irsay, the super-wealthy owner of the National Football League franchise Indianapolis Colts, who acquired the document for $2.43m in 2001. A Kerouac fan, a rock music follower and plainly a committed sports backer, Irsay sent the scroll on a national, then international, tour, attracting crowds of visitors in museums around the world. The scroll narrative was not only unconventional in its style of expression; it also restored the genuine names of the novel’s protagonists – Cassady, Ginsberg and so on – something that Kerouac had hoped would happen in the first place. But the legal offices of his publisher were nervous of stories that appeared to cross a line between fact and fiction, between factional recollections and genuinely actionable anecdotes, and it was inevitable that the players would need to be re-christened for the novel.

  By the time the Original Scroll became available as a softback in 2007, virtually all the central dramatis personae were dead – Cassady by 1968, Kerouac a year later, Ginsberg and William Burroughs in 1997 – although, when I attended the opening of the Original Scroll exhibition in Birmingham, England, in December 2008,18 there was at least one of the stars of the story present: the indefatigable Carolyn Cassady, Neal’s wife, who was pleased to be present as one of the guests of honour at the unveiling, the first time that this totemic work had been on view in the UK. Carolyn Cassady, 85 at the time, has tended to play down the veneration of the Beats and subscribed to little of the mythology surrounding them, debunking some of their generational aura in her 1990 memoir Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg.

  As for the naming of actual names in the revised published text, the anxious concerns of mid-1950s publishers’ lawyers were probably over-developed: the core cast of On the Road were hardly likely to turn litigious as their good friend secured publication of a saga that had been on ice for so long and was merely celebrating the diversely eccentric, often risqué, escapades that the Beats had indulged in, in Manhattan, in Denver, the deep South and Mexico and elsewhere, from the early 1940s to the end of that decade. That said, the inferences of drug use and abuse, sexual shenanigans and even homosexual diversions, would hardly have made for comfortable reading for those stiff-collared professionals with half an eye on the possibility of a libel suit.

  So, when I refer to ‘Versions of Cody’ in the title of this chapter, you might perhaps excuse the wordplay – Kerouac’s career, as we have shown, was peppered by such debates (during his lifetime and since) about what the definitive or favoured incarnation of a particular text may have been. There are other examples of books with different content to the edition that was published. Big Sur, for example, Kerouac’s terrible, yet dazzling, delirium tremens-tinged confession, has sections that have never been seen outside the confines of the official archive.

  Now though, I want to consider the blues work ‘On the Road’ as a Kerouac original and also as the subject of Waits’ re-interpretation. I have identified at least seven versions of this composition, some that exist only in a literary sense, several that have a musical dimension, too, some attached to the original author-composer, others to Waits himself. Let us look initially at this poem-cum-song from Kerouac’s perspective. To begin with the edition that was unearthed from the writer’s archive, here was a home recording Kerouac had made, we have to assume, with his high fidelity microphone and tape recorder. Taking a lyric that rather mournfully commemorates a life of hobo-like travel, he sings the song in a manner that is full of atmosphere but short on tunefulness and lacking rhythmic discipline. In short, the performance reveals none of the confident jauntiness that he was able to display on his recordings of the romantic standards to which we have earlier referred. Why is this? Several reasons may be put forward. Firstly, it seems likely that the earlier recordings, wh
ile amateurish and playful, did appear to benefit in some way from Jerry Newman’s engineering skills. The recording of ‘On the Road’ instead appears much closer to a late night, almost certainly drunken, slice of melancholy: alcohol and self-pity both appear to be influencing factors in the version that is laid down. As Douglas Brinkley comments: ‘Then there is the short lyric “On the Road” – a poem really – that Kerouac sings with a heart-wrenching melancholia, a sense of being lost in Thomas Wolfe’s raw, vast America, that rootless land where salvation is always hovering around the next corner like a forgotten shroud. The listener can’t miss the tender whisper in Kerouac’s voice, as if offering confession to a Catholic priest, anxious for penance.’19

  It seems likely, too, that the standards were committed to tape in the late 1950s when Kerouac’s mood was much lighter. While the initial pleasures and then growing pains of fame were beginning to alter his life, his reliance on alcohol was less marked. By the start of the next decade though, when the song version of ‘On the Road’ was most likely recorded, drink was becoming a more central feature in the novelist’s life. So when and where was the song recorded to tape? There seems strong evidence that Kerouac recorded this nocturnal ramble at his home in Florida around 1962. His life was always peripatetic: if he was not on the move as part of his roaming spirit, he was changing house on a very regular basis, decisions based around his mother’s needs and wider family calls. Kerouac’s base would range from New England to New York, Denver to Florida, as he followed – sometimes led – his surviving parent and sister to new properties across the US.