Gregory Daurer is a US writer, journalist and songwriter who also operates under the stage name Gregory Ego. His links to the many worlds of Beat are extensive, from attending the legendary Jack Kerouac On the Road 25th anniversary conference in Boulder, CO in the summer of 1982 to, much more recently, reading a Charles Bukowski piece at the Neal Cassady ‘Birthday Bash’ in Denver in 2019.
He has interviewed such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, Kesey lieutenant Ken Babbs and novelist Tom Robbins and contributed to the William S. Burroughs film A Man Within. He recorded a self-composition titled ‘Cassady’ and, some years later, interviewed Cassady’s son Robert Hyatt for the alt-weekly publication Westword.
His feature work has appeared in many other outlets including Salon and Culture Magazine, High Times and Please Kill Me, and he has also penned a novel with Denver Beat themes called A Western Capitol Hill.
We are very pleased to add him to the list of our ‘Beat Soundtrack’ contributors…
What attracted you to the Beats? When did you first encounter them? Do you have a favourite text, novel or poetry?
As a kid, I was big on the Beatles, listening to the Fab Four's records, reading about them. Although apocryphal, it's hard not to encounter the supposed influence of that literary-charged word ‘Beat’ on the band's name. And then I'd find references to ‘Allen Ginsberg’ and ‘William S. Burroughs’ worked into books about the band.
As a counterculturally-minded teenager living on the outskirts of Denver, I read the ‘Holy Trinity’ while still in high school: On the Road, ‘Howl’ and Naked Lunch. Maybe it's cliché to say, but those titles still resonate the most with (could-be-better-read, perhaps!) me.
Literary things once happened here, I told my teenage self! Denver was a major stop in a major work of fiction – the late '40s of On the Road. Today, I live about a five minute walk from the Colburn Hotel, which is where Neal Cassady met his wife-to-be, Carolyn, in 1947.
And I'm still discovering other landmarks, thanks to Cassady's collected letters: About a block away from the nearby supermarket King Soopers (known locally as Queen Soopers) stands a house where slippery Neal had lived earlier in 1947 in the basement – writing to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg partially about affairs of the loins on a purloined typewriter.
Just after my high school graduation in 1982, I made the pilgrimage to Boulder to attend a few sessions of the Jack Kerouac Conference. Music plays a mighty role in my memory of the event: there was Allen Ginsberg singing some Eastern-inspired mantra or song, then Ken Kesey grabbing an electric guitar and announcing that he was now going to play a Western number as a sort of yin-yang counterbalance.
Thanks to Boulder's Naropa Institute – now Naropa University – I was able to witness quite a few of the original Beats and their cohorts over the course of summers: Herbert Huncke, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Amiri Baraka, Gary Snyder.
And, as a budding freelance writer, I grabbed the chance to interview Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs during their stays in Boulder. When I interviewed Ginsberg for High Times magazine, he'd just received prints of some of his photos in the mail. I photographed Allen while he was admiring his shot of Jack Kerouac taking a bummer trip on Timothy Leary-supplied DMT (Now, Escher-like, someone ought to photograph ME while I'm looking at my photo of Ginsberg looking at his photo of Kerouac!)
The Neal Cassady ‘Birthday Bash’ occurred annually in Denver for several years, bringing together estimable writers and musicians (Big round of applause to organizer Mark Bliesener, whose career in the music biz has included rock writing). And there have been other events from time to time in the region.
For instance, when the Denver Public Library displayed Kerouac's genuine On the Road scroll, Carolyn Cassady, her son John Allen (named after Kerouac and Ginsberg), and good friend Ed White (Tim Gray in the Kerouac novel) participated in the Kerouacian festivities. A family affair, practically.
What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that literary scene and musical sound connect(ed)?
Perhaps the idea of tying music to spoken word didn't originate with the Beats, but they ran (their mouths off) with the concept. Like Jack Kerouac reading along to David Amram's playing before unsuspecting, too-hip, black-garbed beatniks in a 1950s cafe. Or Steve Allen supporting Kerouac on piano on national TV.
Patti Smith certainly took the concept to grittier levels in her earliest work. Hell, I've even played guitar while reading my own fiction, and I once improvised behind Zack Kopp, the author of The Denver Beat Scene, at an open mike reading he hosted at Denver's Mutiny Info Cafe. I also improvised on guitar while my late Boulder poet friend Frank Morris – who had actually studied at Naropa and had lived briefly, I believe, with Billy Burroughs – recited from his writings over the phone during his lengthy calls.
Now's a good time to mention my favorite band in high school: the Clash, who I got to see in New York City prior to moving from New Jersey to Colorado in 1979, and whom I saw again at Red Rocks amphitheater near Denver. Hey, Allen Ginsberg recorded with The Clash! Talk about tying my interests together.
And then there was Devo with William S. Burroughs in the music magazine Trouser Press, dialoguing together within (Devo's Jerry Casale tells Burroughs how, unlike David Bowie, Devo would use sonic warfare on paying customers and make them defecate in their drawers).
I once heard Duane Davis, the proprietor of the Denver record shop Wax Trax, reading his prose about once having been a social worker, just prior to Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky reciting their poetry in Boulder. Davis released Ginsberg's best recorded song, in my own humble (but opinionated) opinion: the 45 of Birdbrain backed by the local band Gluons (which I bought at Wax Trax, natch!)
As a writer and songwriter have you been shaped or influenced by Beat experiences?
Oh sure. They instilled in me the urge to travel, to have ‘novel experiences’ of my own. After my high school graduation at age 18, I flew to the Yucatan in Mexico, climbed the pyramid at Chichén Itzá, and slept in a hammock at a youth hostel on Isla Mujeres, where the jukebox provided me with my first real exposure to Bob Marley & the Wailers – a 45 of ‘Redemption Song’ b/w ‘Coming In From The Cold’. Talk about a warm, sand-ridden introduction to those songs, for sure. As I was wont to do during that early writing era of mine, I kept a journal all along the way.
Hard not to turn my own interest in the Beats into a tune. One of my recorded songs Cassady messes around with Neal's mythological status. One reviewer said the tune sounded as if ‘channeled through Nicolas Cage's character in Raising Arizona.’ Close! I actually had another character from a Coen Brothers movie somewhat in mind: the cowpoke ‘the Stranger’ from The Big Lebowski offering his take on Cowboy Neal:
‘Oh he died right there on the railroad track as he counted the ties away / And he barely wrote a book or penned any essays and his name was Neal Cassady...’
Several of the people I've interviewed have had some sort of connection to the Beats. Historian Michael R. Aldrich told me he was with Allen Ginsberg the night the poet first heard about the Stonewall Riots. Novelist T.C. Boyle wrote one of the most cutting satires on the Beats – a short story called, appropriately enough, ‘Beat’.
Author Tom Robbins related how he was reassured by Ginsberg at a LeMar marijuana protest in the early '60s, when undercover cops were photographing them: ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Robbins recalled Ginsberg saying. ‘In the long run, these fuzzy shots in some cop’s folder will do you more honor than the cover of Newsweek.’
In my novel A Western Capitol Hill I bring up the Beats' connections to Denver. The protagonist is reading On the Road, as his college roommate chides him for his drinking. He responds, ‘What can I say? Book makes me want to drink. And drive. But not at the same time.’
Which musical artists from whichever era appear to make links to the Beat Generation – and how?
The first Jim Carroll Band album spun on my turntable often enough while I was in high school. Although Carroll was younger than the Beats, he ran in the same New York City St. Mark's poetry circles as Ginsberg (And legendarily you can hear Carroll asking waitress Debbie Harry if she had a popular pill she could bestow on him in the background of the Velvet Underground's Live at Max's Kansas City recording). Must say I generally preferred Carroll's songs and prose to his poetry.
If you have an affinity for punk rock, chances are you feel aligned with the Beats, at least to some extent.
During one of my trips to Mexico I met by chance the late Johnny Strike, the singer and guitarist for the early San Francisco punk band CRIME. You can hear him mix together spoken word and musical atmospherics on the CRIME track ‘Emergency Music Ward’, and again later with his band Naked Beast as he reads from his short story ‘Crazy Carl's Thing’ (collected within his short story compilation A Loud Humming Sound Came From Above).
Strike's Ports of Hell – a Burroughsian novel if ever there was one – also includes a favorable blurb from Burroughs on the back cover: ‘...these are real maps of real places’. When we met, Strike and I discovered we'd both interviewed William S. Burroughs. We re-combined our interviews (talk about initiating that Burroughs-Gysin concept of the Third Mind!) for the UK journal Headpress.
At the 2019 Neal Cassady ‘Birthday Bash’ in Denver, I read a piece by Charles Bukowski (certainly no Beat himself) about his hairy experience with Neal Cassady's driving. In addition to the musician, composer and Beat associate David Amram being present at the same event, Jello Biafra was also on the bill.
And there were two additional folks from the early San Francisco punk scene in the audience: Fritz Fox of the Mutants, a band experiencing a revival of interest lately, who appeared on the bill the same day the Cramps played at Napa State Mental Hospital; and a onetime neighbor on my block in Denver, Jeff Raphael, whose ferocious drumming stands out within the Nuns (love his work on the song ‘World War III’). Jeff is also a talented collage artist, as well as being extremely well-read.
Who are your own favourite singers, musicians and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas or attitudes in their lives and art?
One of the first jazz players whose work grabbed – and has held me – was Thelonious Monk. I like my art to be slightly akilter. Monk certainly had his connection to Ginsberg (Same goes for Bob Dylan and Kinky Friedman).
I became smitten with cult songwriter and cartoonist Michael Hurley back in the early 2010s (I want his song ‘Open Up’ to be played at my funeral). It turns out he's performed the poem ‘Rock Song’ by Jack Micheline live.
Recently in Portland, I looked up novelist, critic, lyricist Richard Meltzer, who's certainly studied and written about Beat lit. He'll discuss local Reed College's famed students Philip Whalen, Lew Welch and Gary Snyder. And he's ready, willing, and able to offer his own hot takes: for instance, Meltzer thinks Joanne Kyger's poetry is better than her ex-husband Gary Snyder's.
Meltzer wrote lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and he briefly fronted punk band Vom, whose songs ‘Electrocute Your Cock’ and ‘I'm in Love with Your Mom’ are anthems for the ages. Or check out his humorous lyrics and delivery on the song ‘Kerouac’ by Spielgusher (featuring bassist Mike Watt of the Minutemen – a band who blew me away when I saw them).
I don't know much about David Anderson's music, but this spoken-word song by him, ‘Recollections of Neal Cassady’, is worth checking out. It certainly ought to be included up there within the Neal Cassady pantheon of tunes, spanning selections from the Grateful Dead and Morrissey (to me, Gregory Ego!)
I think Wayne Kramer's solo work is largely overlooked. I particularly like his album Citizen Wayne. I met and interviewed ‘Brother Wayne’ a few times, considered him a mentor of the spirit, of righteousness. The recently-deceased guitarist initially made his mark with the radical band MC5, whose poet-manager John Sinclair was part of marijuana legalization group LeMar with Allen Ginsberg and who also co-founded the White Panthers.
While watching the video of a 1988 reading of Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues poems, I was struck by the late Barbara Barg's section. I hadn't been aware of her poetry or her music. And, regrettably, I still don't think many people are aware of Barg. I especially like this song ‘Zoom Golly’ by her all-female group Homer Erotic.
Oh, and I ought not forget to mention Lou Reed, Television, Henry Rollins (I helped put on a couple of his spoken word shows in '87 and '88), John and Exene of X, Iggy Pop, Mishka Shubaly (look him up), Richard Hell and whoever the hell else I may have forgotten...
See also: ‘The scores are in: Every “Beat Soundtrack” so far’, January 30th, 2024