Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  ‘When Bob arrived, we had already begun to put down “Airplane Blues”. He said it was too slow, and in the wrong key. We started again, with Bob on bass, and the whole thing changed into a very cool reggae-like feel. Slightly a shambles, like a Dylan jam, which is what it was.’

  Yet if teaching, in the conventional sense, had necessarily been jettisoned, education of a more radical from would eventually weave its way into the Taylor tapestry. Attending his first summer school as Ginsberg’s assistant at Naropa in summer 1979, he returned there every year after that. ‘I found a niche. As a trained musician I taught the poets music history’, he says.

  His journey was varied. When Ginsberg wasn’t tapping into his talents, other musical projects took up his time and energy. Already part of the Fugs circle from the early 1980s, in 1988 he became a core member of the New York post-punk band False Prophets, trekked across America, and brought the group over here, too. ‘We did those long European tours, playing 60 shows in 65 days, sort of thing. You get really good doing that’, he remembers.

  A band with a strong political ethos and a keen commitment to indie rock values and its communal codes, they made a mark on stage and on record but running a touring show on such egalitarian principles proved a massive strain on the group’s personal relationships. Without the backing of a corporate major, False Prophets eventually succumbed to the strain of economic realities in the early 1990s.

  Yet Taylor would reap a somewhat surprising reward from these experiences. Embarking finally on postgraduate study at Brown University as the band crumbled, he took ethnomusicology – a discipline centred on work in the field, close engagement with your subjects and often linked with, for example, the study of ethnic or tribal cultures – and produced a successful doctoral thesis that became a book.

  False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground was published in 2004 and confirmed his academic credentials. Not that such confirmation was really required. In 1995, poet Anne Waldman, a Naropa stalwart herself, had offered Taylor a year’s work. He took it and then continued at the Buddhist-inspired institute, home to the Ginsberg-founded Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

  He remained at Naropa as a full-time staff member until 2008 when his wife Judy Hussie, a curator of dance and performance, secured work in New York and the family – including their son Eamonn, 12 – decided to head back to the city where Taylor had spent many of his most productive years, as Ginsberg’s guitar man, friend and muse, as rocker, writer and poet.

  He is now looking forward to Rob Epstein’s Ginsberg documentary to which he contributes an interview. He also points out that the artist Eric Drooker – who provided illustrations for his own False Prophet volume – has been asked to contribute an animated sequence to the ‘Howl’ cinematic celebration. Drooker’s style recalls German Expressionist woodcuts and should offer a fascinating extra commentary on that epic verse work.

  Meanwhile, the memoir recounting his personal experience with the poet is gradually taking shape and will eventually add a further layer to the Beat literature as Taylor, who despite his long sojourn in the US remains a British citizen, plans to capture some of the detail and spirit of that two decade association.

  So what are his enduring memories of the Ginsberg years? ‘My favourite poem is “Song” from Howl and Other Poems. Allen told me that was [William Carlos] Williams’ favourite poem, too. My take, finally, was that he was my best friend. He says, somewhere in a poem, “I refuse to say who my best friend is”; I take that as permission to say he was mine. He would probably have said Peter [Orlovsky] was his.

  ‘There hasn’t been another man in whom I can confide as I did with him. He was brilliant, very generous, and very patient with me, though not with some others. He was a beautiful human being. We had a lot of adventures, played a lot of music. He taught me many things. I think in a way he saved my life, because I was fairly unhappy as a young person.

  ‘He just pulled me out of nowhere and took me to Rome to meet Luciano Berio, that sort of thing. One minute I’m wondering how I’m going to get out of this nowhere college in the New Jersey swamps, and the next minute I’m on stage at Carnegie Hall!’

  Q&A 6

  Pete Molinari, British singer-songwriter with Beat leanings

  Pete Molinari is a UK singer-songwriter who has toured extensively in Britain and the US, has released three well-received albums – Walking Off the Map (2006), A Virtual Landslide (2008) and A Train Bound for Glory (2010) – and has acknowledged the impact Jack Kerouac has had on his work. Described by the magazine Mojo as ‘one of the distinctive voices of his generation’, he has also attracted high profile fans including Bruce Springsteen who, when asked by Ed Norton at the Toronto Film Festival what music he was listening to, he said, ‘Pete Molinari – and if you don’t know anything about him, he’s great!’

  You clearly have an enormous range of influences on your work, from the country and folk greats of the past, from Bob Dylan to Phil Ochs and so on, which you draw on to great effect.Tell me about your Beat interests and which writers have inspired you. Is it just Kerouac? Is it On the Road? Or are there others from that literary world who have also caught your attention?

  I do I guess draw on a range of influences like you say and like any artist does. I don’t believe much in scenes and try and look beyond them. I can see the need for them. For them to maybe label something and call it this or that but really I just either like a work and view it and judge it in a way that if it relates to me and has substance and content and comes alive in my mind and the atoms are still vibrant then I’m drawn to it. I guess Kerouac’s On the Road and Guthrie’s Bound For Glory were such books, as a child, that appealed to me because of the sense of freedom in them and I was an idealistic child. Still am to some degree, I guess, but see a little more through the illusion now. I like Steinbeck’s works very much and something from most of those writers like Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. Whitman I think was like early Beat. But there is so much spirit in his work. So much freedom.

  How have you used that influence? Was it about inspiring you to become an itinerant troubadour? Are you drawn to the romantic notion of the travelling artist?

  I guess I am drawn to it, yes. The word troubadour again is another label, though, for people to use. I guess I’ve always thought of myself as somewhat of a gypsy in the travelling and free sense of the word. My father too is from Egypt and it was only recently that I found out that the word gypsy originated from there. I guess we are all looking for something and are drawn to something romantic. It brings it alive, gives it glamour and colour. But there’s is always illusion with these things so I try and get beyond them with music, literature, poetry, film, whatever … I like to see the substance shine through. I love Chaplin and Keaton, early Marlon Brando pictures, etc. … the theatre (when it’s good). Most of all you have to let yourself shine through in your own work, to realise that you are not Kerouac or Guthrie. Maybe another link in a chain and perhaps we are all one if we want to look at the big picture spiritually and esoterically but let’s just talk on a human level…we are our own unique personality. I’m from Chatham, Rochester in Kent and was brought up in a different surrounding with different influences and a different environment. But we are all the same in that we are human and have our love, anger, loneliness, joy and so on to express. We are all alone in that way but it is these things that bring us together. We are born alone and we die alone, but birth and death also brings us together. So as much as being inspired by other tales and other worlds I have to realise I have my own world. My own vision and my own path. My own voice.

  Or is there some direct link between the art of Kerouac and the Beats which actually feeds into your work?

  I don’t think direct link but maybe a link. There always are links in a chain and it is these links that bring us together, as I said before. I like works of art or writing that show that we are vulnerable and human but I also like to see something that’s beyond the intellect like
William Blake or works from [Helena] Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society and the Arcane School and connected movements. I’m always searching. Searching myself and looking for answers. The answers are all there in the self and beyond the self. It would be great just to get a sense of what you have devoured, absorbed and how that material has triggered your creativity!Its all in the creative eye and spirit. To some degree they all have triggered something in me and I’m sure many others. Be it Tennessee Williams or Kerouac, [Billy] Childish, Wilde, Chaplin, but none so more than my own environment. The circles my soul moves in. The experiences we encounter everyday should be the biggest inspiration. Essentially that’s what the Pre-Raphaelites, the Aesthetic movement, the Beats, punk, rock ’n’ roll, folk, blues movements and many others do. It’s the self that has to come through with art. It’s not going to bring enlightenment. That has to be beyond the self.

  13 RETURN TO LOWELL: A VISIT TO THE COMMEMORATIVE AND KEROUAC’S GRAVE

  It is July of 2009. In a peaceful, public park in the heart of Lowell, Massachusetts, four early teenagers gather to chat and joke, one boy on a skateboard, three girls just sitting on one of the stone benches which form an integral part of the so-called Kerouac Commemorative. I enquire where they’re from – or at least from originally. Three say Cambodia, one says India. Yet this quartet are patently all-American in this tranquil corner, shaded by trees, dedicated to a true all-American.

  Unveiled in 1988, the Commemorative is the work of the artist Ben Woitena, a memorial to the life, death and work of Jack Kerouac, the local boy made good who returned, of course, to spend his last years in the town. The memorial features a series of triangular, granite pillars, replete with blocks of silver text from various Kerouac works – The Town and the City and Doctor Sax, Mexico City Blues and Book of Dreams among them. There is a striking simplicity to the arrangement which is unquestionably affecting.

  I ask the group of teens if they know who Kerouac is. One girl, clearly amazed to hear an English voice, enthusiastically requests a high five before we talk further. They then reveal that they know something about the man remembered here.

  ‘Isn’t he a writer?’ one says. ‘Is he dead?’ another asks. When I tell them that a Kerouac relative is in our midst, they are further intrigued. And the novelist’s nephew Jim Sampas, just arrived from parking his car, speaks to them and reveals that he went to the same high school they will attend from this autumn, the adolescents are thrilled by this news. ‘You went to our school?’ one girl mouths, briefly wide-eyed at this information.

  It is a fascinating moment in the continuing Kerouac saga – the immigrant, French-speaking, Canuck incomer who made the town his home with his family, took the place and made it in the setting – at least the opening sections – of his debut novel, is now recalled by a much later wave of arrivals: the children of a new generation of residents who have, at least, a vague sense of the man who has become Lowell’s most famous son.

  Not that it was always so. When I had last been in Lowell, more than 30 years before, few residents seemed to be even aware of Kerouac’s existence. When we asked locals about him on that occasion, there were few hints of recognition at all. As that particular, late spring day wore into a darkening evening, a journalist from the Lowell Sun warned me and my travelling friend – both of us carrying shoulder-length hair, Stateside virgins paying our picaresque homage to the On the Road writer – not to visit Nick’s Bar, the Sampas pub where Kerouac had drunk some of his final years away. ‘It’s too dangerous’, the reporter advised. ‘They won’t welcome a couple of young hippies on Jack’s trail’. Instead, he gave us a lift to a rural Greyhound stop and we took an overnight bus into Canada and escaped to further trans-America adventures.

  Decades on, Jim Sampas, whose aunt Stella became Kerouac’s third wife in 1966, agrees with the journalist’s assessment of the time. He has few doubts that, then, the arrival of some unconventional visitors to his uncle Nick’s pub would not have been greeted in a positive spirit. ‘It was quite a tough place’, he says. Today, Sampas, who actually met his uncle Jack Kerouac as a toddler, is an established record producer turned film producer. Jim, 43, began his career as a singer-songwriter and even made a debut album that also featured the great British vocalist Graham Parker, a figure who emerged where pub rock met the new wave and also became a high profile acolyte of the Beat legacy.

  But Sampas largely said farewell the world of the performer to become, instead, the man behind the studio glass and, with rare access to the Kerouac archives – his blood uncle John largely oversees the author’s inheritance – he has worked on several projects that have placed the great Beat pen-man in a musical setting.

  In 1997 he was the producer, with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo’s support, of the album Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness, a splendid compilation of tributes to the author by a diverse range of Beat, rock, punk and folk figures – Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Burroughs, Patti Smith, Joe Strummer and Jeff Buckley, wordsmiths Hunter S. Thompson and Robert Hunter, and even cult movie stars such as Matt Dillon and Johnny Depp, each adding their take to the recording.

  Two years later he was in charge again – this time Ranaldo took a co-producing role – as Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road provided an opportunity to hear long-lost Kerouac readings of his most famous volume plus unheard examples of the man himself singing a number of jazz standards. Tom Waits and Primus – who created a new song entitled ‘On the Road’ for the collection – and the great Beat composer and accompanist David Amram completed a rich and varied selection.

  An arguably even more ambitious project saw Sampas produce a further musical collection in 2003, Doctor Sax and The Great World Snake, a new setting of Kerouac’s phantasmagorical boyhood fiction, joined by an impressive musical and literary cast including Jim Carroll, Graham Parker, Robert Hunter and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  But Sampas has, in recent times, moved into a fresh and exciting phase in his professional life. In 2005 he was recruited by Tango Pix, a company formed by an established film-maker Curt Worden, with a view to developing movie topics with a Beat inflection. Later this year, in autumn 2009, the first cinematic fruits of this collaboration will be released in the US and the UK. One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur is a fully fledged documentary on a scale that will justify a modest theatrical release before it is issued as a DVD. And, joining this hour and half account of one of the most dramatic but darkest periods in the Kerouac odyssey, will be a CD soundtrack inspired by both the book and the new film and concocted by two of the hippest young music-makers presently operating in the US.

  Ben Gibbard, front-man of the band Death Cab for Cutie – a name taken from a song that Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band members Neil Innes and Vivian Stanshall perform in the Beatles’ 1967 flick Magical Mystery Tour and then again from a fictional title that British literary critic Richard Hoggart conceived in his major 1957 study The Uses of Literacy – and Jay Farrar, of the groups Son Volt and Tupelo Honey, have produced a body of songs that brings elements of the Kerouac legend into the twenty-first-century and lends these episodes in the writer’s story a contemporary indie rock cachet.

  The DVD and CD will be issued through one of the most famous names in American music-making, Atlantic Records, part of the wider Warner Music group, and both Sampas and Worden are delighted that this labour of love, conceived over several years, will have some serious promotional muscle behind it when the material is finally unveiled.

  Curt Worden, 59, who reveals that the film will have a premiere in 30 US cities in October, has long experience as a cameraman in the contrasting worlds of commerce and conflict. He filmed war-zones in Africa and the Middle East for NBC News at the end of the 1980s, before setting up a business that produced corporate films over the next decade or so. But his desire to bring his long-term experience and creative talents to the cinematic table, has been answered in this powerful Big Sur-inspired piece. The documentary involves the contributions of dozens of iconic Beat individ
uals and important commentators on this literary world.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Carolyn Cassady, Michael McClure and Sam Shepard are joined by Tom Waits, Patti Smith and the aforementioned Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar, by Joyce Johnson, David Amram and narrator John Ventimiglia, Beat fan and one of the most in-demand character actors, a key player as Artie Bucco in the acclaimed TV series The Sopranos. And that is merely a selection of the faces and voices showcased in One Fast Move or I’m Gone.

  The project has taken Sampas and Worden across the US several times, seeking locations and conducting many interviews. Worden is pleased with the outcome, a pleasing marriage of artistic and atmospheric images – from Bayside panoramas to the sheer canyons of Monterey, from stunning seascapes and forests to evocative details of the street, the bar, the road.

  Over the summer, both Sampas and Worden agreed to meet up at their Rhode Island headquarters to discuss their collaborative venture. Jim, in fact, had generously promised some months previously that if I was in that part of the world any time, he would be pleased to take me to Lowell and show me the Kerouac-linked sites, including a visit to the author’s grave, a landmark I’d signally failed to find on my first visit in 1978. First though we chatted about the documentary.

  I asked why they had chosen Big Sur as their initial subject, a dramatic chapter indeed in the Kerouac odyssey but surely one of the most downbeat periods in the writer’s resume, the once free-wheeling, life-loving hitchhiker cast to the psychological depths by a nightmarish cocktail of alcoholic dependency and delirium tremens? Explains Worden: ‘We chose Big Sur, an evocative account of a time in Jack’s life when he’d come undone, both emotionally and spiritually, because, fundamentally, it is a compelling story that has affected and inspired generations of readers. There were many voices to be heard, voices that just had to tell this amazing story.’