Simon A. Morrison is a writer and academic who leads the Music Journalism degree at the University of Chester in the UK. As a music journalist, he reported on music scenes everywhere from Beijing to Brazil, from Moscow to Marrakech, for his column in DJ magazine, ‘Dispatches from the Wrong Side’. The best of these were published by Headpress in 2010, in his collection Discombobulated: Dispatches from the Wrong Side.
Moving into academia, his research interests continued to involve the intersection of words and music. That enquiry has involved contributions to books such as DJ Culture in the Mix and Kerouac on Record and journals including Popular Music.
He has also published Dancefloor-Driven Literature: The Rave Scene in Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2020), co-edited the Routledge Handbook to Pink Floyd (Routledge, 2022) and 2025 will see the publication by Reaktion of his co-authored Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Dance Music, from World War II to the Millennium.
Morrison has presented this research at conferences in the UK, Portugal and Holland, Germany and Australia. Now he talks to Rock and the Beat Generation about that place where the musical and the literary overlap…
What attracted you to the Beats? When did you first encounter them? Do you have a favourite text, novel or poetry?
It was the perfect confluence of time and circumstance. I was indeed ‘on the road’, during a gap year between school and university. I was travelling around Australia in a beaten up 1971 VW Kombi Van that kept threatening to fall to pieces (and then did). I lived in that van for a few months, travelling 2,000 miles from Sydney, up the coast to Cairns in Queensland. A school friend was also over there and, when we met, he gave me a paperback of a book to read called On the Road.
So I opened it up and read it and had an experience quite unlike any other I had had with a book. Of course it spoke to me because I was also a young man on the road. It was a different country and a different era…but that feeling of being young and free, and infused with that spirit, is perennial.
And then there was the loose, wild, uncontained energy of the prose…it almost sucks you into the page like some kind of Beat black hole. I had never read anything like it. I think I was just in the right place – travelling – and the right time – young.
I hoovered up everything I could about the Beats after that – the books, initially, but then cassettes of them reading. I recall that moment I first heard Kerouac’s voice, on cassette, in the age before the internet put everything at your doorstep, at your fingertips. It was like a message from God.
By the time I got to university to study English and American Literature I was already totally immersed in everything Beat. To the extent that when we got to our first tutorial on the Beats, the lecturer invited me to chair it. It’s interesting that their reputation was somewhat tarnished at that point. Some female colleagues were certainly not keen, I recall.
When I started to earn money, thankfully by writing, I started collecting first editions and I now have all sorts of Kerouacs, Ginsbergs and others from the extended family. Beyond the books, I have a limited edition print of Ken Regan shot from the Rolling Thunder Revue – the moment Ginsberg and Dylan went to Kerouac’s grave in Lowell. I saw it in the window of a Manchester gallery and the first person I noticed was Ginsberg…then Dylan…then the name on a very simple grave.
I hadn’t been aware of that moment taking place until I saw that image. I also picked up a lovely image of Kerouac, printed on fruit board, by an artist called Pietro Psaier, a colleague, it is alleged, of Warhol, although there is some contention there.
Eventually I did go slightly ‘fanboy’ and I now have tattoos of cover images from two paperback editions I have of The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, one on each upper arm. Two protective, guardian spirits. I was happy as a young man to make my feelings permanent and am not unhappy with that decision now, as a middle-aged man.
What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that literary scene and musical sound connect(ed)?
My two loves, culturally, are music and writing, so anything that combines those two seems to have it all, to have won. My interests in that very magical intersection between literature and music led to my PhD in that area…it’s a magical intersection…a junction we might recognise from the blues, I guess, as ‘The Crossroads’, and in academic terms, in a slightly less magical way, as musico-literary intermediality. How do you mix two media forms…and why would you do that? Why do people write about music and music scenes? How does the reader turn up the volume on descriptions of music in a silent text? And why would someone like Kerouac want to write musically?
I found that both fascinating and compelling, and, as someone who has spent his life with words and music, I wanted to see if it remained true with electronic dance music and authors who focussed on that subcultural mire and milieu for their fictions – people like Irvine Welsh, Jeff Noon and Nicholas Blincoe. The club scene, after all, was also all about the beat. I was lucky enough to interview all of those writers for my research as I was very keen to find out how they did that, even why they did that.
I asked each of them whether some inspiration for looking to cross the streams of music and literature was the Beats and, in different ways, they acknowledged some influence. Whether a focus on a musical scene, a concern with the subcultural, subterranean world, or indeed looking to write musically, and with a musical sensibility, much of this can be traced back to the Beats. That project became my book Dancefloor-Driven Literature.
As a popular music writer and critic have you been shaped or influenced by Beat experiences?
In my years as a music journalist – principally with DJ magazine – I really tried (at least tried!) to bring some of those ideas into my writing. You can draw a straight line from Jack Kerouac to Hunter S. Thompson (Truman Capote would certainly concur there) and Thompson was someone else I loved, principally for managing to contain that same nuclear energy in fixed symbols, in words.
Pictured above: Going going Gonzo…Simon Morrison channels his inner Hunter S. Thompson at an event commemorating the writer’s death in 2005
I was lucky enough that DJ magazine gave me two pages – sometimes more – to do what I wanted. So immediately I created a column called ‘Dispatches From The Wrong Side’, a Gonzo romp through the finest nightclubs and gutters of the planet. I wanted to see, in the 1990s and 2000s, if I could pen a column that leant on Gonzo tendencies, but shone a light on the dancefloor and the energy of electronic dance music. And of course the various powders and potions that powered that scene.
And whether it was gatecrashing Kylie Minogue’s birthday party, getting deported from Russia, having a gun held to my head by celebrity gangster Dave Courtney or going raving in Ibiza with TV presenter Judith Chalmers, there was always enough chaos to keep me busy in that quest. In fact, when Hunter S. Thompson died, we actually tried to recreate a Gonzo night in his name, with a big car full of friends and boot full of chaos. Only, because of our location in the north, our Fear & Loathing took place just outside Manchester in Stalybridge. Or StalyVegas, as the locals call it.
I now lecture on Gonzo and New Journalism but advise my students that you need to step carefully into that murky, muddy terrain. Done well, it can lead to electric, invigorating prose. But done badly it can seem self-aggrandising and dismissive of small, perhaps frustrating, journalistic details – like the story! But it always makes me smile when I open a student assessment and see that they have, indeed, stepped there.
I’m satisfied I managed to get some of my ‘Dispatches’ into a collection that Headpress put out in 2010 titled Discombobulated. But, in terms of actual music criticism, any attempts I ever made to extend those tendencies into reviews has been a disaster. Music criticism is almost an entirely different discipline, requiring a different approach and a clear head.
Which musical artists from whichever era appear to make links to the Beat Generation – and how?
I’m a huge fan of jazz but because I love the Beats it has to be bebop. I love to play vinyl and a lot of the stuff I buy now is albums by the likes of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus and Thelonious Monk…all of those wonderful artists. To put on a vinyl record of Kind of Blue or A Love Supreme is to be transported back to those smoky Harlem clubs. Music is wonderful like that. My son is called Miles, partly after Miles Davis. I would play Miles Davis albums in the background in the house, in an attempt to subliminally influence his mum that that was the right name for him.
But I also think literature works in the same way. Hunter S. Thompson, channelling William Faulkner, said ‘the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism… and the best journalists have always know this’. I absolutely agree with that. Newspapers, magazines, most media is ephemeral. But novels endure and it is in those pages that those moments are truly captured and preserved in literary amber. So if you want to find out about America in the 1950s…the roads and the cars, You the open country and the urbane jazz clubs, open up a Kerouac novel. It’s all still in there.
We live in an age of fake news, and now AI. Who knows what’s true anymore? So it’s all about that friction between fact and fiction. And I trust Kerouac’s reportage of that time, and that music more than anything else, that I continue to read and enjoy.
Of course, as contemporaries, the Beats and bebop artists have much in common. But that countercultural thread extends to the rock scene of the late 60s, where the same heady formulation of music, literature and intoxication presented itself. And, I would argue, extends to the electronic dance music scene: different drugs, different literature. But of course what remains, and endures, is the Beat underneath it all.
Who are your own favourite singers, musicians and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas or attitudes in their lives and art?
My tastes are as elastic as they are eclectic…everything from bebop through to rock through to electronic music. There are bands and artists who have Beat sensibilities – Dylan, of course, through to Tom Waits and even the Beatles (thinking of Lennon’s school comic Daily Howl).
But I think rather than directly referencing the Beats, or mentioning them in lyrics (which takes in everyone from Adam Ant to Billy Joel, who don’t seem particularly Beat), the artists that do, for me, link to the Beats do so more because of an essential approach that underlies their music – an edge – and a life view that is more attuned to the fringes (the ‘Wrong Side’ of the tracks, in terms I co-opted) rather than anything that might flow down the societal centre. I guess it’s those artists and creatives more drawn to the grimy reality of the gutter than the purity of a perceived mainstream.
In contemporary terms you can still see that Beat sensibility in bands like Yard Act, and their spoken word delivery and concern for the low-slung realities of likes of Blackpool illuminations. And Poundland.
I feel like the same essential connectivity when I listen to some contemporary spoken word, and hip hop. From bebop to hip hop, it’s not hard to draw that line, to connect those dots. Just put on the Miles Davis album Doo-Bop. It’s all there.
See also: ‘The scores are in: Every “Beat Soundtrack” so far’, January 30th, 2024