Beat Soundtrack #36: Simon Warner

Music writer who followed Kerouac trail

Simon Warner is a researcher in Popular Music Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He has taken a particular interest in the relationship between popular music and literature with a specific focus on the influence of the Beat Generation on rock culture.

He is also Founding Editor of this website, Rock and the Beat Generation, which he launched in 2021. Warner’s books include Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture (Bloomsbury, 2013), Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack (Bloomsbury, 2018), as co-editor, and Howl for Now (Route, 2005), as editor.

Warner has conceived and produced a number of Beat-related events, among them Howl for Now (2005), Still Howling (2015), Kerouac on Screen (2019) and Kerouac Lives! (2022). A one-time music journalist – he was a live rock reviewer for the Guardian between 1992 and 1995 – he wrote the ‘Anglo Visions’ column for Pop Matters from 2000-2005 and has also contributed on connected topics to the BBC and other broadcast outlets over the years.

His 75th birthday tribute to British Beat Michael Horovitz, The Poetry Olympian, was broadcast by Radio 4 in 2010. He was, in addition, a founding curator of Louder Than Words, the Festival of Popular Music Writing, in Manchester in 2013 and 2014. Further, he has a chapter in the new title Rethinking Kerouac, published by Bloomsbury in early 2025.

What attracted you to the Beats? When did you first encounter them?

I think I was first drawn to the Beats in the early 1970s as a mid-teenager. I recall occasionally encountering the names of those writers, particularly Jack Kerouac, in the pages of the then flourishing British weekly music press, specifically New Musical Express, where a new wave of journalists had been recruited from the underground press – Oz, Frendz and International Times – after that subversive sector had been largely crushed by the UK law courts.

Writers like Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent and Mick Farren were hip to the various countercultural crosscurrents – music, films and literature, drugs and politics – and wove these threads into their coverage of the rock sounds of the day, so impressionable readers were lured into a world beyond the Top 40 and the latest LPs, exotic and thrilling spaces where Easy Rider met the Grateful Dead, LSD and Allen Ginsberg.

Those details were embedded into what were essentially popular music features, penned in first-person voices in a style influenced by the New Journalism of the US, introducing me and thousands of others to novels and poetry and movies and big issues like Civil Rights and Vietnam, feeding in background details and alternative reporting angles in pieces about Led Zeppelin or Lennon and the Stones, Iggy Pop or Sly Stone and Aretha Franklin, festivals and, a little further down the road, punk and the new wave.

So, in time, I went looking for the novelists who appeared to be affecting the consciousness of the American young and Kerouac's stories seem to best embody those dreams of escape and freedom and a rejection of the accepted norms. It would be a great deal later before most of us realised that those travelling tales had been carried out 10 and 20 years prior, a long time before that social revolution, that hippy eruption, had seen books like On the Road and The Dharma Bums adopted as pocket bibles, or manifestos at least, of the next generation and beyond.

Pictured above: Simon Warner

Strangely it wasn't actually Kerouac's own art that really fuelled my passion first but rather a book about Kerouac: Charters’ 1973 biography, which utterly gripped me. I was fascinated by the concept that across the novelist’s large body of fiction, the characters who peopled his tales were based on real individuals, other poets and novelists and artists. I had barely realised until then that life could become art so impressively, so enticingly, so excitingly.

Do you have a favourite text, novel or poetry?

The Kerouac I liked best was probably The Subterraneans though The Town and the City was magnificent in its way. Yet it is hard to see beyond Ginsberg's ‘Howl’ as the genuine masterpiece of the Beat Generation’s output. As for Burroughs, his Junky had a certain noir appeal, his experimental work less so. But let us not forget either John Clellon Holmes’ outstanding Go.

What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that literary scene and musical sound connect(ed)?

There is a powerful, potent connection between the Beats and music which evolves over half a century and more, in many layers and in several waves. Sometimes, the early writers are immersing themselves in the sounds of the day, drawing on their energy of Bird and Prez and Monk to make their own literature, with jazz, in its diversifying mid-century state, the most obvious example, as bebop inspires Kerouac and Ginsberg and Holmes to write, LeRoi Jones produces commentary on that musical form and Ferlinghetti and David Meltzer, Kenneth Rexroth, ruth weiss and others read live with bands and make spoken word recordings.

To follow, there are new rock and folk singers and songwriters and groups – Dylan and the Beatles as the most significant examples – who emerge around the mid-1960s who want to turn popular music into something increasingly edgy and challenging, more political, with solipsism and experiment displacing the moon in June simplicities of chart-aimed teen romance.

Those groundbreaking acts frequently turn to the Beats as useful models and credible figureheads because the way poets present themselves is radical, streetwise yet still accessible, in a language that is familiar and immediate, operating outside the mainstream but absolutely swimming in imagination and emotion and unstoppable energy.

Then individuals with vision like Ginsberg and Michael McClure want a piece of that rock action, that mass audience, and they themselves befriend the likes of Dylan and McCartney and Jim Morrison and Garcia.

The trend continues through punk and new wave, as the Velvet Underground and Television and Patti Smith acknowledge these poetic forebears, with Burroughs most often cited as a key factor in their development as the Downtown Manhattan scene around CBGB explodes.

The experiment continues as the century plays out with Sonic Youth and Death Cab for Cutie once more referencing the Beat circle. Twenty five years into the new millennium, artists like Hurray for the Riff Raff, Hiss Golden Messenger, the Americans and the Low Anthem sustain connections across time – directly, or less directly, in style and attitude – to those extraordinarily creative Greenwich Village and North Beach artistic communities of the 1940s and 1950s.

In terms chains of continuity, there is that wonderful story, told by John Leland in the terrific Hip: The History, of saxophonist Lester Young introducing the young Kerouac to marijuana, Kerouac turning on the outsider journalist Al Aronowitz to the drug, Aronowitz passing the narcotic torch to Dylan and then Dylan completing this transgressive cycle by sharing illicit roll-ups with the Beatles in New York City. This linking between 1940 and 1964 is a clear sign that jazz, the Beats, folk and rock shared a rich common lineage.

Pictured above: Two of Warner’s Beat publications

As an explorer of the cultural impact of the Beat Generation, have your own investigations or style been shaped or influenced by Beat experiences?

I suppose they have and the best example is perhaps how my life unfolded after I completed my academic studies. Once I had caught the Beat bug, I read all the Kerouac I could lay my hands on and, by 1977, I set out on a trajectory that would allow me to replicate some of his adventures, some of his experiences, in his native landscape.

I completed a Modern History BA at Sheffield University, then spent a year toiling as a labourer on a building site, saving for a three-month trek across the US with a good friend, someone similarly enchanted by the fantasy of the wild American dream, in the summer of 1978. We headed there in May and stayed until the end of July.

I even sent home a weekly news report for my local Cheshire paper the Wilmslow Advertiser. The idea of transatlantic travel was still sufficiently novel to most Britons for a local editor – thank you, John Tither – to print regular accounts of my escapades for a good couple of months while I was away. The US had changed, of course, in the 30 years since Kerouac and Cassady had been on these trails, but there was still plenty of excitement – and even occasional danger – to negotiate.

On the very first night in Manhattan, we were naively picked up by gay Colombian called German, who took us on a brain-spinning tour of the subterranean city but was crestfallen when these two unworldly visitors politely rejected his sexual advances. It could’ve ended badly. Waking up on the tiled floors of a bustling Port Authority was, in the end, the worst we had to survive.

A few days later, we were virtually driven out of Kerouac’s home town of Lowell when a reporter for the city’s Sun suggested two English longhairs might face a rowdy, even unfriendly, reception at Nicky’s Bar and we’d be wise to leave. We should have taken our chances! The local journalist gave us a ride to an all-night bus stop and we headed north to the border.

On our three-month odyssey, we took in Canada and Mexico, spent time in Ginsberg’s Boulder, met Ferlinghetti in San Francisco, chased girls on a long thrilling detour into Idaho and Montana, and tasted Memphis and El Paso, Chicago and New Orleans, Nashville and Miami, along the way, with the Greyhound Bus our principal transport and often our overnight accommodation, too.

Much later, my interests in, my passions for, both popular music and the literature of the Beats were brought on to university campuses where I was employed, devising the first classes in the UK on the crossover between those novelists and poets and the culture of rock, writing numerous articles and various books on the interaction of the written word and the sonic creativity, and, in 2021, conceiving and unveiling a website, Rock and the Beat Generation, dedicated to this relationship.

As part of these personal meanderings, I obtained the world's first MA Popular Music Studies from the University of Liverpool at the start of the 1990s, and also made various return trips to the States to meet and interview some of the key surviving Beats – Michael McClure, David Amram and David Meltzer, for example – and their successors such as Ginsberg guitarist Steven Taylor and Jim Sampas, of the Kerouac Estate, spawning conversations that would form important material in the books that would later follow.

Which musical artists from whichever era appear to make links to the Beat Generation – and how?

So many important singers and bands do relate to the Beats in a multitude of fashions. I’ve written about how the Beatles changed their name from the Beetles in 1960 after a British poet called Royston Ellis suggested the switch. Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, the Grateful Dead, Country Joe, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, the Band, David Bowie, Jimmy Page, Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, the Clash, 10,000 Maniacs, REM, U2, They Might Be Giants, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Jeff Buckley, Michael Franti, Primus, the Hold Steady, Uncle Tupelo…a long sequence of major soloists and groups have identified their debt to these writers, through their work, through their lives.

They have referenced the poets’ words, drawn on their creative style, tapped into the political nature of their art, been shaped by spiritual philosophies expounded, encouraged to undertake excursions into mind-expanding experience, been touched upon and inspired by their social radicalism in areas of racial equality and sexual expression.

With the Beat breeze in their sails, these musical acts have charted original courses, approached strangers and the planet itself in a receptive and tolerant, peaceful and open-minded, fashion. And travel, movement, the alluring energy of the highway, the insistent attraction of the next town to come, is as encoded in the rock psyche as it was in the restless hearts of Kerouac and Cassady and Ginsberg.

These composers and performers, heirs to the multivalent Beat ideology in a manner of ways, appear to have ridden a river of ideas about concepts of individuality and notions of liberty, resisting conformity, and learnt a great deal from their literary antecedents who presented their left field beliefs in a national and international setting when conservatism ruled the transatlantic roost.

It could certainly be claimed that these musicians have matured and developed in a much more liberal and progressive environment than the one the Beats experienced in their nascent years around the end of the Second World War. It might even be argued that it is because of the efforts of that writing fraternity (sometimes including sisters, too) a more liberal, a more accepting, environment became possible at all.

Who are your own favourite singers, musicians and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas or attitudes in their lives and art?

I could produce a string of favourite artists – Keith Jarrett, David Sanborn, Steely Dan, Dylan, Prince, the Clash, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Tom Waits, the Isley Bros, Little Feat, Elvis Costello, Weather Report, Rickie Lee Jones, Gang of Four, Pat Metheny, Tom Robinson, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Chaka Khan, Prefab Sprout, Loose Tubes, the Pet Shop Boys, the Blue Nile, Television, Yo La Tengo, Karla Bonoff, the Divine Comedy, ani difranco, They Might Be Giants, Ute Lemper, Spearhead, the New Pornographers, Todd Rundgren, Esperanza Spalding, Daft Punk, Robert Roth, Mercury Rev, Chris T-T, Rufus Wainwright, Robert Glasper, White Denim, Julia Holter, St Vincent, Amy Winehouse, Arcade Fire, Paloma Faith – and only some of them reveal a Beat component in their musical style or creative aesthetic.

Certain of the names mentioned make a more obvious reference – Steely Dan, of course, took their distinctive name from a sex toy in a Burroughs novel, punk giant Joe Strummer made an appearance on one of the best Kerouac tribute albums and Spearhead’s Michael Franti worked with Burroughs while a member of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, while They Might Be Giants once penned an affectionate lampoon of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’.

But many of these artists listed do have an allegiance to that bohemian jazz fringe even the bop scene by association, or to that kind of glowing pop literacy – penning lyrical narratives that transcend the simplicities of Top 40 fare – typified by the Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon or Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout and Neil Tennant in the Pet Shop Boys, for instance, the sort of composers quick to confess the affection they have for the written word.

There are plainly more blatant examples of the Beat/rock overlap – Dylan, particularly in his early years, couldn't get enough of the influence of Kerouac and Corso and Ferlinghetti; Tom Waits has never grown out the boho troubadour persona which seems to step straight out of a period North Beach or Venice  setting; and Patti Smith has always tipped her hat to Burroughs and Ginsberg in her life and recordings.

But I'm just as interested, in some ways, in trying to work out why some of the singers I most enjoy are actually fairly coy about their Beat affections, even though they possess a storytelling manner plus some picaresque lived experiences which could have been grown out of the very soil that those earlier novelists and poets originally laid down.

I'm thinking particularly of two great American artists: Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen. The former often displayed a tendency to stay on the move, in life and in art, attaching her personal hopes to journeys in works like ‘All I Want’ and ‘Coyote’ or commemorating past settings evoking the Beat ideal in pieces like ‘The Boho Dance’, while the latter romanticised the urban heat with the gutter poetry of ‘It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City’ or spat his tumbling torrents of street verse in ‘Blinded by the Light’.

In 2018, I co-edited, with my friend Jim Sampas, a book entitled Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack, a single volume consideration of the novelist’s entanglements with music, whether his own varied jazz influences or the inspirational impact he had on rock artists who followed in his wake. The two singers I mention proved a slightly slippery catch for the two fine writers who took on these individuals who were bidding to identify Beat evidence as they profiled the pair in their respective chapters.

US academic Nancy Grace played super sleuth in the case of Mitchell, of course one of the titans of the field, a wordsmith supreme and a founding mother of the confessional mode of singer-songwriting. Here was deeply independent woman with an art school background, a passion for painting alongside her music and a fan of and collaborator with jazz musicians. Surely she was someone who might at least acknowledge Beat awareness.

For Springsteen, British lecturer and one-time club culture journalist Simon Morrison went on the trail to see if the Boss – a mythifier of roads and cars and girls and plenty more beside – had a few Beat bones in his hard rocking skeleton.

Mitchell seemed to deliberately disconnect from the Beat brotherhood (was it a gender thing?), and Grace concluded that it was potentially driven by a piece of literary theory conceived by Harold Bloom – the so-called ‘anxiety of influence’, in which a new generation of artmakers want to jettison traces of the big hitters of the past – which saw this boho heroine avoid sharing any credit-by-association with that 1950s writing revolution.

Morrison, meanwhile, recognised there was a Bruce zone in which a powerful fraternity (a Beat sign?) operated and one in which a certain Steve Van Zandt did, on occasions, declare his Beat affiliation through his famed DJ alter ego, but that was hardly enough to confidently pin the badge to the chest of Asbury Park's most famous son.

I recall over 40 years ago being somewhat disappointed when Bruce was asked about his favourite novel. I half expected On the Road or something very similar to be on his nightstand, but, no, his number one piece of fiction the time was Peter Benchley's Jaws, a best-selling airport thriller and true blue-collar choice. No artificial intellectualising going on there, no posing: here was the choice of the expected Everyman to whom so many could instantly relate.

Of course, both Grace and Morrison went well beyond this superficial scratch at the surface we briefly share in this particular account account and their chapters in Kerouac on Record are worth checking out in full, if you have the chance. Both sections proffer clues and certain dead-ends but explore their topics in a serious and entertaining fashion.

One group I have admired decades who seemed to distil, embody even, the hippy dream of the late 1960s – and eventually exemplify the nightmare in many ways, too – were Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the West Coast act forged at the end of that notable decade from two Americans, a Canadian and a Brit and built from three earlier hit outfits: the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and the Hollies.

Here were four alpha males, young and, very quickly, astonishingly successful men, launched into an era of album boom, mega festivals and stadium extravaganzas, butting horns for space in the ultimate supergroup, all of them working once more in that confessional mode – much like the Beats – where psychological revelation, sometimes hurtful sniping, about life and lovers and each other, might well feed into their frequently charged material.

If the hippies were the heirs to the Beats then the subculture’s most high profile band would surely carry some Beat residue. And amid the acclaim, the drugs and the rising tide of cash, there was also the politics, feeding into songs that seized the urgency of the times: ‘Long Time Gone’, about Robert Kennedy's assassination; 'Chicago', concerning the contemporary demos and racial turmoil in that city; and perhaps most famously ‘Ohio’, arguably the greatest of the anti-Vietnam War declamations.

All of those songs would have deeply interested Allen Ginsberg, much less so Kerouac – by that time on his last legs – or Burroughs, who was rarely engaged by the blood and guts spilt in the fields of social disruption or the mechanics of radical change. But we might see the songs as part of the continuing echo of social critique set in train in the mid-1950s by those Beat figureheads and their followers.

I did hear, around 25 years ago, from the poet David Meltzer that he had been a friend of Crosby – and Garcia, and Joplin and Dino Valenti – on the early 1960s San Francisco folk scene, so there was some small overlap but nothing much to get that excited about.

However, I was so thrilled to both read, and then also re-publish in Rock and the Beat Generation, a piece about Crosby by prominent US science journalist Steve Silberman, who actually became a good friend of the singer in his latter years. Silberman had also been a former assistant to Allen Ginsberg and a committed follower of a genuinely Beat–fuelled group called the Grateful Dead, so he certainly knew about these connecting topics on several levels.

In short, Silberman in his warm and deeply moving, one-year-on tribute to Crosby, following his death in early 2023, delivered more insight into the songwriter's interest in Ginsberg and ‘Howl’ and things Beat than I had ever encountered before. So, it was a deep thrill to have a close contact of the man himself writing a testimonial and interweaving further elements of rock and Beat into a wonderful extended obituary. Sadly Silberman’s own passing would be recorded in 2024.

See also: ‘Déjà vu: Crosby and Ginsberg recalled’, January 24th, 2024; ‘Back Beats #8: Greyhound tracks', April 1st, 2022 PLUS 'He's got the Beats: Simon Warner Interview', Rock Critics, June 7th, 2023; ‘Simon Warner: Heartbeat of the Beats', Blues.Gr, February 4th, 2016