Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  Who would you identify as the key rock musicians who have drawn on the Beat legacy?

  Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen (though many would hesitate to call Cohen a rock musician), Laurie Anderson. Tom Russell, he’s hardly a household name, but to me he’s drawn on Kerouac and Charles Bukowski to a great extent. Many musicians flirt with ideas from the Beats.

  Are there any particular tracks you feel represent this spirit?

  Well, there is that Tom Waits track on his wonderful Foreign Affairs album, ‘Jack and Neal/California Here I Come’. It isn’t the best track on the album but it is a kind of homage to Jack and Neal. I always liked Canned Heat’s ‘On the Road Again’, track from 1968. That sense of travelling light. And the B-side to Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco’ – the lovely song that it is too cool for anyone to admit to liking. It’s called ‘What’s the Difference’. A beautiful little song about just moving on, being young: ‘Who’s gonna miss us in a year or so/Nobody knows us or the dreams we’ve been dreamin’/So what’s the difference if we go?’1 I love it. That to me is a young Kerouac and Snyder.

  A number of Beats – Ginsberg and Burroughs, Ferlinghetti and McClure among them – have made recordings with a rock flavour. What do you make of those experiments?

  I’m particularly fond of Michael McClure’s recordings. I find his ‘beast language’ experiments as baffling as the next person, though I think I can sense what he’s trying to do there, just that it is a dead end, a little like the cut-ups of Burroughs. McClure works well with Ray Manzarek, they’ve made a number of albums together and they have it honed to a fine art.

  Burroughs with Kurt Cobain, it does nothing for me, a squall of noise with Burroughs battling to be heard above the din. That’s just a punk celebrity collaboration. Let’s annoy the neighbours. Two outcasts against the world, the sentiments are fine, but would you have that on your jukebox? Ginsberg really wanted to be a rock musician didn’t he?! Desperate. He took poetry with jazz along the way.

  David Meltzer has also done some clever things, way back with his Serpent Power in the 1960s and more recently poetry with added music. Interesting. And while I can’t get too deeply into his work, Brion Gysin has produced some unique recordings, playing around with sounds, investigating wordplay. I wish he’d done more. One of my favourites is Kenneth Patchen with the Alan Neill Quartet, but that’s jazz I guess.

  When rock has expressed itself politically in the last half century has it owed something to the original idealism or activism of the Beats?

  That happens so little today. Wasn’t there a point where a certain generation, say between 1966 and 1971, thought that music was a key component for social change? A song could be so moving, so anthemic, it would get across the message, it would unite, cross borders and boundaries.

  Music is so fragmented now. Thirty or 40 years ago there were just a few camps. A musician who had a name could champion a cause – Joan Baez is almost as well recalled for her social campaigning as her music. I’m thinking the last real political stuff from musicians might have been the Specials and ‘Free Nelson Mandela’. It seems a long way from Rock Against Racism. Because there are so many sub-divisions in music, it is almost impossible for a musician to crossover to a big enough audience in a political way.

  But certainly if you reflect back and see how poets like Richard Brautigan, McClure, Snyder even, mixed with rock musicians freely at festivals, concerts and broadsides were hammered out, protesting this or that. Think of Ed Sanders and the Fugs, the archetypal rockers with a message. How has their legacy filtered down the ages?

  Is there a sense that the Beat spirit survives in rock music of today?

  Interesting question. Does rock music survive today even? I watched Lou Reed and Metallica play together on television recently. It was certainly a defiant idea of rock music, an absolute blitzkrieg of the senses. There was rebellion in it, nihilism. But they didn’t get it from the Beats. Long ago and far away the Beats might have influenced why people made rock music.

  Notes

  1See lyrics, Scott Mackenzie, ‘What’s the Difference’ (1967), http://www.scottmckenzie.info/difference.html [accessed 23 December 2011].

  REVIEW 4 – CD: ON THE ROAD: ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK

  Original Score and Songs by Gustavo Santaolalla

  Original Score featuring performances by Gustavo Santaolalla, Charlie Haden and Brian Blade

  Released on CD by Universal, May 2012

  On 23 May 2012 after a wait extending to well over half a century, a movie version of On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of picaresque adventure, was finally unveiled for the world to see – at least, that is, the insider crowd of the Cannes Film Festival – with a global general release to follow in the months to follow.1

  So often has speculation about such a production arisen – ever since Kerouac himself made a vain bid, by letter, to attract Marlon Brando to such a film project within weeks of the book’s 1957 publication – that there has been an air of excitement mingling paradoxically with a mild whiff of ennui, a sense of ‘at last’, but also a strong feeling of ‘what took them so long?’

  Francis Ford Coppola, one of the great directors and Oscar winner for both of the first two Godfather movies, has been in the box seat – or so it has appeared – for most of the last three decades, critically holding the rights to the text and determined to bring the most high-profile and widely consumed of the Beat Generation works to the big screen.

  I think it would be fair to suggest that most Kerouac followers – and perhaps cineastes, too – have had a certain faith in Coppola’s project. Here is a San Francisco-based film-maker of scope and ambition whose place in that revered pantheon of independent movie directors, which broke the standard Hollywood studio mould as the 1960s expired, is secure. His Bay Area roots allowed him, too, to trump the glittering vacuum of LA.

  Coppola’s blend of maverick invention and aesthetic vision coupled to an ability to attain mainstream success, appeared to provide a most suitable combination to bring such a high risk venture to satisfying fruition: one that would be respectful to the spirit of the novel but also spread the word about On the Road to an audience beyond the committed and converted.

  Yet the road, and we ought not perhaps labour this particular metaphor for too long, has been interminable, the subject of multiple diversions and heavily pot-holed at almost every turn. In fact, few movie concepts have lain so long on the drawing board, occasionally animated by briefly fevered newspaper hints that a start is to be made, casting is underway, and locations are being scouted. But the titbits have been just that, the scent usually cold within weeks of a report, the mirage of a sighting.

  There is a bizarre, yet appealing, legend that when Leonardo painted The Last Supper he found an energetic and glowing young man to pose as Christ. Some while later, as the painter tracked his Judas, the same individual, now dissolute and marked by several years of over-indulgence, was sufficiently worn and torn to now suitably portray the part of Jesus’ dark betrayer as well.

  Ripe with speculation, the casting process for On the Road has felt a bit like that – the handsome Adonis of 1988 would be the life-lined middle-ager a decade on, the chiselled shoo-ins for the twentysomething travellers in 2000 would just be a fraction jaded as the clocked ticked forward and the plans remained ever on ice.

  Thus names as high profile as Brad Pitt, Jim Carrey and Johnny Depp have all, at various moments, been hot hints for possible frontline roles in this film, with Sal Paradise – Kerouac’s alter ego – and Dean Moriarty, the character based on his friend Neal Cassady, the most coveted, but with key parts as the fictionalised Ginsberg and Burroughs and the women in the principal protagonists’ lives also up for grabs.

  Yet time has inexorably moved on and a new wave of celluloid talent has edged into view, hoping that eventually and ultimately, On the Road might actually be on the screen. And now, it truly is, with British actor Sam Riley securing the Paradise position,
Garrett Hedlund cast as Moriarty and Kristen Stewart in place as Marylou, the flighty, sexy teenager who joins the two men on their journey.

  Riley has secured a reputation for performances as rock singer Ian Curtis of Joy Division in the post-punk biopic Control (2007) and as Pinkie in a stylish re-make of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (2010). Garrett Hedlund made both an acting and a musical contribution to the 2011 country music drama Country Strong, while Kristen Stewart is current darling of the vampire movie cycle Twilight.

  Other key roles are taken by Tom Sturridge as Carlo Marx – based on Ginsberg – Viggo Mortenson as Old Blue Lee, Burroughs’ cipher in the story, and Kirsten Dunst as Camille, an on-screen representation of Carolyn Cassady, Neal’s wife.

  Futhermore, if the cast is fresh, so has the managing group evolved, with Roman Coppola, son to Francis, furnishing the producing muscle and the experienced Brazilian director, Walter Salles, a man with a reputation for cultish excellence in pictures like The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), the creative brain behind the movie moves that will aim to bring this odyssey to believable life for us within the darkened womb of the cinema.

  But as the coos of Cannes slowly die away and with the appearance of the movie beyond the Riviera’s golden mile some small way off, let us think instead of the film’s soundtrack. How has music been utilised to transport this saga of the printed page to the realm of the movie theatre? And the question is particularly pertinent, we might claim, as music is such a vein of silver in the original book.

  Sounds, songs, music, accompany the wayward adventurers both on the sun-drenched highway and in their nocturnal stop-overs as Paradise and Cassady head west and west, and further beyond, looking for something to feed their appetites, their imaginations, in the great open trail that is mid-century America.

  Radios waft tunes in their direction, jukeboxes blare hits of the day and in the bars where they park up or head out, remarkable real-life talents gild their ears, as blind pianist George Shearing sends Dean into raptures in a Denver club and arch showman Slim Gaillard delivers his delicious jump jive in downtown San Francisco.

  In fact, between the book covers, there is a parade of recognisable names from the jazz world and a stream of popular ballads of the day, embroidering the trek and few examples better illustrate the driven urgency of two friends caught in a competitive search for kicks, for romance, for salvation, than Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray’s instrumental piece ‘The Hunt’, as two great tenormen duel their way through solo after challenging solo.

  But there is no sign of Gordon and Gray locking metaphorical – or indeed literal – horns on the 2012 CD edition of On the Road’s Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, a shame and a missed opportunity we might well think, as both allegory and entertainment. Nor does Shearing show; accompanying these many miles, there’s no Miles; Prez is definitely not present; Perez Prado’s Latin mambo is quite absent; and Hampton chimes no times at all.

  So how does Salles hope to add melodic and rhythmic verisimilitude to his contemporary staging of the On the Road myth? Well, he is mainly in the hands of the much-vaunted Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla who has brought sufficient atmosphere to the soundscapes of Brokeback Mountain in 2005 and Babel in 2006 to hold two Oscars of his own for those earlier contributions, a feat of some rarity in itself and a most impressive calling card.

  It is his incidental music that mostly fills the disc and it does possess sufficient warmth and shade, groove and lilt, a pulse of authentic life, to propose that the film itself is not going to be short of moments embellished by Santaolalla’s colourful and coolly assertive musical manners. But let us consider what does actually feature on the soundtrack recording.

  Kerouac’s songs have been heard in certain contexts – generally private recordings unearthed long after his death – and the album opens with a short fragment of one of the novelist’s own compositions, ‘Sweet Sixteen’. Greg Kramer plays Mississippi Gene, one of the hobos whom Paradise meets on a flatboard truck heading to LA in the company of a number other hitchhikers. An upbeat, lightly romantic country blues, it features Gene’s cracked and road-weary voice briefly joined by a small travelling chorus.

  Coati Mundi, one-time member of Kid Creole and the Coconuts, a vibraphone player with multiple other instrumental skills, has a tricky furrow to hoe, cast as the mercurial and eccentric Slim Gaillard. Yet he carries off Slim’s own tune ‘Yep Roc Heresy’ with huge flair and authority, a fine tribute to one of the great R&B originals.

  ‘Roman Candles’ is an elegant interplay, rhythmically taut, between Santaolalla’s piano and Charlie Haden’s strident bass-line, a jazz cameo – wordless, as all the principal composer’s pieces on the CD are – responding to arguably the most quoted passage from the book: ‘… burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars’.

  Dinah Washington’s ‘Mean and Evil Blues’ is a brash R&B ballad arranged for big band, wrapped around a fluent saxophone solo, its vocal delivered with a brightly dismissive tone, the strong woman scolding the erring man. Yet the fact that the recording dates from 1953 and falls outside the late 1940s years when the On the Road journeys occurred raises the first question about the chronological credibility of the compiler’s choices.

  Santaolalla’s ‘Lovin’ IT’ – inspired by the ineffable, ephemeral ‘it’ that Paradise and Moriarty hope to find in transit – is a slow period piece for jazz quartet, the longest of the composer’s works in the soundtrack collection. Terry Harrington’s saxophone provides an evocative core to the item and makes a fluent nod to Lester Young.

  Next is ‘The Open Road’, Santaolalla’s painterly tale for trio – bass and drums, yes, but led here by the composer’s own dulcimer and santur, a surprising and transfixing combination, as those stringed instruments, the latter of Middle Eastern origin, add an exotic flavour of World music to the mix.

  Billie Holiday delivers a 1939 version of ‘A Sailboat in the Moonlight’, already around a decade old by the time the characters are journeying, and this pre-war recording lends an extra layer of nostalgia to the proceedings. As Paradise and Moriarty motor, the bebop revolution already established, this older tune suggests a lost past, receding, disappearing, in the rear-view mirror.

  As for bebop, Charlie Parker’s seminal ‘Ko-Ko’, a 1945 set-piece with Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Curley Russell on bass and Max Roach on drums, offers a perfect example. Laid down for Savoy Records in New York City, the instrumental became a cornerstone of the new musical wave and its verve fits comfortably here.

  ‘Memories’/’Up to Speed’ begins wistfully with Santaolalla employing a toy clarinet (shades of Ornette’s plastic sax), as he has earlier on a fleeting passage called ‘Reminiscence’. But this section takes on more muscular shape as frenetic percussion, including drummer Brian Blade, beefs up the canvas.

  Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’ takes a Harold Arlen song and delivers it with a smooth sophistication, a lush arrangement from 1950 that would surely have appealed to the sentimental side of Kerouac, then ‘That’s IT’ follows, intimating the Perez Prado latin jazz stylings referenced in the novel, with pianist Mike Lang and Brad Dutz on percussion notably lighting the blue touch paper here on Santaolalla’s capable pastiche.

  On ‘Keep it Rollin’’, Santaolalla joins forces once more with drummer Blade and Haden on bass in a somewhat shapeless piece dominated by the upright and the leader’s kora, a fragile embellishment usually, is hard to identify. Much more familiar is ‘Salt Peanuts’, from the 1945 Savoy session as Parker and Gillespie lead the team on a Dizzy and Kenny Clarke-penned romp, a cut heard to best effect, perhaps, on ‘the greatest jazz concert ever’ live 1953 recording in Toronto, Jazz at Massey Hall.

  Then Slim Gaillard, this time in person, introduces from the concert stage a typically witty frolic as ‘Groove Juice Special’ but the track is credited in the sleeve notes as ‘Hit that Jive Jack’ from Opera in Vout (Groove Juice Symphon
y). Built on some tough bass plucking and staccato guitar chords and a bout of comic scatting, this 1945 performance is delivered with expected pizzazz.

  Santaolalla’s ‘God is Pooh Bear’ and ‘I Think of Dean’ each tip their hat to phrases that have left an indelible mark in the novel’s coda. First the composer combines church-like organ and African drumming patterns in a slightly jarring juxtaposition. The second piece is introspective, atmospheric, meditative: a glass harmonica wheezes the breeze before toy clarinet toots a winsome refrain. Dividing them is, ‘Death Letter Blues’, a grinding, growling, mournful, bottleneck hymn with Son House at the controls on this 1940 work-out, both dark and deep.

  The album ends with a curiosity, not unfamiliar to close Kerouac followers but in a new version. The writer’s own song, ‘On the Road’, self-recorded at home in the early 1960s, was re-imagined on the 1999 album Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road as his ghostly voice was accompanied by Vic Juris guitar and John Medeski on organ, released 30 years after the novelist’s death.

  Here the same thin and haunted – and haunting – Kerouac vocal is the centre-piece but Santaolalla’s guitar is barely discernible, lightly sustained chords as understated as they can possibly be, spectral echoes to the tired whisper of the lyrics, more spoken word than sung, an anguished litany to the harsh lure of the highway, a sombre but touching sign-off to the album.