Beat Meetings #12: Simon Warner & David Amram
A marvellous afternoon with a musical master
Simon Warner taught Popular Music Studies in English universities for over 20 years. He published the book Text and Drugs and Rock‘n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture in 2013 and co-edited, with Jim Sampas, the essay collection Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack in 2018. In 2021, he was the Founding Editor of Rock and the Beat Generation. We might describe David Amram (b. 1930) as the Beat Generation’s ‘Composer in Residence’. A good friend of Kerouac, he has been a prolific composer of jazz suites, orchestral symphonies and film soundtracks for close to 70 years. He even penned the score for the Beat film classic Pull My Daisy in 1959. Next month, Routledge will issue a new tribute to the man and his work, The Many Worlds of David Amram: Renaissance Man of American Music, edited by Dean Birkenkamp.
Who did you meet?
David Amram
Where did you meet him?
At his rural upstate New York home
When did you meet him?
July 19th, 2004. I remember it well because it was actually my birthday! My brother Giles called me from the UK to pass on his best wishes halfway through our conversation.
How did this meeting come about?
I was in the US on a research trip with my partner the fashion writer Jayne Sheridan. I was working on a new book about the Beats and rock. We had been to the West Coast for a number of days and I conducted some interviews in San Francisco and Oakland. After that we headed to that Beat enclave of Boulder, Colorado. Finally we hit the East Coast in New York. I had various meetings planned in the city, but it was a genuine pleasure to head to the rural quarters of the state.
That involved a train from Grand Central Station and our host meeting us in his car at a railway station. I can’t remember exactly how David and I had made contact. It’s just possible that the wonderful and sadly now late poet David Meltzer had helped ease some of the connections.
What did you discuss/talk about?
I wanted to get a sense from someone as close to the action as David Amram – he had been in Manhattan among the original Beats in the 1950s and was certainly a close friend of Kerouac himself – about the relationship between the writers and music. Amram is, of course, one of the great composers of the post-war decades – orchestral music, film music, spoken word– so he was really tuned-in to this world of crossover.
He has always loved music of so many kinds: symphonic, jazz, world, folk, Latin. He truly is one of the cleverest synthesisers of different genres and styles and he has brought so many of those genres to his own music, indeed to the work of Kerouac and Ginsberg among many. Let's not forget that when Kerouac embarked on his first readings to music in 1957 in the wake of the publication and success of On the Road, it was Amram who provided the accompaniment.
What were your impressions of the Beat you met?
It was a magical, brilliant day. The sun was aglow. David invited us into his home and a deer was nuzzling through the overgrowth in the wild back garden. The sun’s rays caught its glorious coat. It felt like a Nirvana. Amram was – I now discover – as he always is: an absolute wealth of information, an extraordinary bundle of nervous and intellectual energy. So many ideas, so many angles on so many things – culture, literature, obviously music, the political and so on and so forth.
We spoke for comfortably two hours about Kerouac and Dylan and Ginsberg, Dizzy Gillespie, the ethnic music scene in New York and on and on. It was a fascinating and educating exchange. But the meeting showed another side to the man. He was dressed in the garb of a farmer – heavy blue serge – and had some important physical work to do that afternoon.
He had, he explained, to whack the weeds that had gathered in one of his fields. And he proceeded to spend at least half an hour on that task, a huge rake in hand, while our conversation continued. I was amazed, a little in awe. Remember that David Amram at the time was in his early 70s and I was just astonished at how a figure of senior years was able to put so much effort into chatting, working in that heat and so on. Today, a figure in his early 90s, he maintains that record of effort, excitement and commitment in his writing and performance, in short, his commemoration of life.
In the years since, has that meeting left any particular memories with you?
Our afternoon meeting didn’t end there. After he had talked to me about the Beats and rock music, the culture of black America, Elvis Presley and Woody Guthrie and so many other topics, he had further business to pursue. He was attending that evening a red carpet reception in Manhattan for a movie, a re-make of The Manchurian Candidate starring Will Smith. It was all very apt because Amram had produced some new work for the fresh re-boot of the picture more than 40 years after he had created the score for the original release starring Laurence Harvey.
In short, Amram drove Jayne and me back into the city really rather rapidly, engaged half the time with us and the other in cell phone conversations with friends and family as the car sped on. It felt almost like a journey with a latterday Neal Cassady, a man Amram also knew. We got back into New York, we took photographs and said our fond farewells.
It had been very intense, very engaging, very productive three or four hours together. The interview I taped was subsequently transcribed in Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture. It was a splendid addition to a book which would eventually come out in 2013.
Are there any other thoughts you would like to share – e.g. were you already aware of this individual, have you read their work and, if so, what?
A couple of thoughts come to mind, in that I then read Amram's very good memoirs Offbeat and Vibrations, where he proved to be as good a teller of tales on the page as he was verbally. He also introduced me to a good friend of his Jim Sampas – Amram had written some wonderful pieces for the album Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road, produced by Sampas – and he and I would eventually make some excellent links, some years before he became the Literary Executor of the Jack Kerouac Estate.
I am also pleased to report that David Amram and I have remained in contact over the two decades that have followed. He continues to operate like a man half his age and thrill audiences on record and on stage.
See also: ‘“Towering talent” Amram turns 91’, November 16th, 2021, and ‘Beat bastion and musical maestro’, June 30th, 2021. David Amram has also been a regular correspondent with Rock and the Beat Generation. You can find a number of his letters in the R&BG archive.