Beat Soundtrack #10: Mark Bliesener
In which prominent Beat figures, writers and critics, historians and academics, fans and followers, talk about the relationship between that literary community and music
Mark Bliesener is a fifty-year veteran of the music business who has received dozens of Gold and Platinum record awards from artists whose careers he has managed including Alan Parsons, Lyle Lovett, Big Head Todd and the Monsters and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. He coined the band name Dead Kennedys, is the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting a Band and the organiser of Denver’s annual Neal Cassady Birthday Bash. He also contributed a chapter, ‘Driver: Neal Cassady’s musical trip’, to the essay collection Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack (2018).
What attracted you to the Beats? When did you first encounter them? Are you drawn to a particular text, novel or poetry?
It was television rather than Ginsberg or McClure that brought Beat to the US heartland. My personal and the nation's earliest mass exposure to a somewhat convoluted notion of ‘Beat’ was Maynard G. Krebs the jive talking, dopey, parody-beatnik sidekick on popular TV sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Maynard introduced the notion, vernacular and slang of the beatniks to prime time television viewers across the country.
Written by Max Shulman and starring Dwayne Hickman as ‘Dobie’, the programme aired weekly on CBS-TV from 1959 to 1963. Dobie’s sidekick and best friend was America’s first ‘beatnik’ Maynard G. Krebs - portrayed by Bob Denver – who would later find wider fame as a star of TV’s Gilligan’s Island. An enthusiastic fan of jazz (with a strong distaste for the music of Lawrence Welk), Maynard bangs the bongos, avoids romance, authority figures and notably work, yelping ‘Work?!’ every time he hears the word.
Maynard was massive, national and weekly, while Kerouac struggled to draw a crowd reading on NBC TV’s The Steve Allen Show. All things Beat from bongos to Burroughs began to slowly stir itself into the American cultural stew and I like many others was ‘hooked’. We identified with Maynard’s buffoon Beat ethos (especially the notion of doing something with your life beyond ‘work’), and several years later it was a short leap to the genuine Beatdom discovered by purchasing copies of On the Road, A Coney Island of the Mind and Howl and Other Poems. But first and foremost was OTR.
The initial lure of reading On the Road was its justification for the hitchhiking then favoured as the primary mode of transportation by me and other teenage adventurers. Decried as dangerous and déclassé by our elders back in those ‘safer’ times, Kerouac's romanticised notion of hitchhiking accounted for the launch of thousands of road trips. In a real sense, this appealing wanderlust of the Beats is rooted in the notion of an American ‘birthright’ to mobility and independence. Prior to the emergence of the Beats, this was best represented by the cowboy and later the ‘hobos’ glorified by Woody Guthrie and the emerging biker culture hinted at by Marlon Brando in The Wild One.
With a move to Denver in the mid-70s, I became enthralled with local hero Neal Cassady and my adopted Western hometown’s role in the emergence of all things Beat.
What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that literary scene and musical sound connect(ed)?
By kicking down the doors of American literature, the Beat writers ensured that future generations of songwriters would never have to endure the restraints previously imposed.
In the process, they helped define a liberated, more in-your-face and, ultimately more American, style of writing than anything which had preceded it. This sea change occurred simultaneously with the emergence of rock’n’roll, the igniting of Civil Rights and anti-war and movements and the first stirrings of a burgeoning counterculture deeply rooted, like the Beats, in anti-authoritarian resistance.
The Beats’ timing was good. America was growing lazy and fat for perhaps the first time. The 1960s youth quake and the rock songwriting explosion which was to follow could not have taken place without their direct and subliminal influence. In our post smart phone/streaming world, the Beats’ influence and caché is simultaneously both perceived, through its absorption into a pop culture nostalgia myth, and very real, in the contemporary and global truncated use of language.
There exists a natural affinity in Beat literature between the bop solo and the cars and girls-centric songwriting of early rock. Also, the capacity to shorten thought – ‘first thought, best thought’ – and verbiage of Kerouac’s writing shares an immediacy with that of rock writers. A wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom!
As a writer, musician and band manager have you been shaped or influenced by Beat experiences?
Via my early OTR inspired hitchhiking adventures, I discovered a simplified, romantic no-expectations lifestyle based on personal freedom and living in the moment, because you never really knew geographically or spiritually where that next ride would take you.
In the process I learned a lesson or two about creativity and interpersonal relationships which would help me to understand my bandmates – and later my management clients.
Also the idealised freedom and lure of being ‘on the road’, so key to the troubadour musician lifestyle, were initially justified by reading Kerouac.
Even more impactful was Neal Cassady and his collaboration with Ken Kesey in the development and propagation of the Acid Tests. I would wager that Neal's involvement in assisting the introduction of LSD to the American masses is of far greater influence on future musicians and songwriters than any of his most visionary letters. The Beats’ exposure to and embrace of drug use and actual illustration of personal freedom cannot be understated during this period when the panacea of mind expansion was so seductive, immediate and important.
The Beats, and Neal Cassady in particular, virtually invented the notion of the non-stop, 24-hour, ‘sex and drugs and rock’n'roll’ lifestyle, though they may have substituted jazz or classical for the musical component here.
Long before the coinage of the often misused term ‘rock star’, Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs, Ginsberg and others were such forces. Via their non-conforming outsider stance, drug use, sexual liberation and rejection of the existing status quo, they conceptualised an image of the stand-alone, outsider rebel or indeed rock star, offering a dangerously flamboyant and visionary roadmap to the more psychedelic, even apocalyptic, times ahead.
Which musical artists from whichever era appear to make links with the Beat Generation – and how?
The Beats’ shattering of the late 40s early 50s dream of a Disney America had a vital and profound effect on virtually all musical forms to follow.
The post war ‘American Dream’ myth of a two car, two kids, happy family was in full bloom thanks in part to the concurrent accent of TV and its evil twin advertising. Patti Smith, Robert Zimmerman, John Lennon and others all shared similar, safe suburban environments growing up, spaces most unwelcoming to ‘weirdos’ like them, desperately seeking a way out. Later, in rougher but equally ‘mind-numbing’ surroundings, Gil Scott-Heron, Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Chuck D also hitched a similar ride away from home. The inspiration the Beats drew from jazz is monumental, but their ultimate impact on the style and expression of rock and hip hop was more significant and impactful.
The Beats provided radical relief by painting vivid pictures of another reality existing just beyond hometown borders. Musicians would discover a cadence and freedom of language which illuminated the way to a much more American lexicon which would serve their songs well. Songwriters were now freed from the stale old world they were chained to. The Beats contributed to and certainly have a place in the continuum of American music – that broad expanse of sounds and influences they were so moved by.
Who are your own favourite singers, musicians and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas or attitudes in their lives and art?
Although I appreciate and listen to many genres of music, I gravitate toward vocalists rather than instrumentalists. It’s the vocals that truly ‘sell’ a song.
My favourites don’t really have what is conventionally thought of as ‘good’ singing voice. By placing their emphasis on the lyrics rather than the melody (think Sonny Bono or Leonard Cohen), these vocalists may exhibit a more verbal Beat influence.
Standouts for me include: Muddy Waters, Louis Prima and Ian Hunter, vocalists who emote and explain, rather than ‘sing’ their songs.
In the process they become pure story tellers, able to conjure concise, complete narratives within the structure and confines of a three-minute song.
Though these vocalists are not necessarily ranked as great technicians, they use their voices to deliver perfectly targeted shots to the heart.
See also: ‘Mark made by music manager’, Rock and the Beat Generation, June 28th, 2021, and ‘Covid spikes Cassady “Bash”’, January 9th, 2022