Beat Soundtrack #8: Marc Eliot Stein
In which prominent Beat figures, writers and critics, historians and academics, fans and followers, talk about the relationship between that literary community and music
Marc Eliot Stein is a writer, software developer, podcaster, peace activist and father of three. He created the invaluable Litkicks.com in 1994, using the pen name Levi Asher to conceal his identity while working at a Wall Street bank, and eventually published, on Literary Kicks, a memoir of New York City's turbulent early web industry, ‘Ten Years in Silicon Alley’. His web projects over the years have included websites for Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan and Pearl Jam, his cartoonist father Eli Stein and his poet friends Eliot Katz and Simon Pettet. He's currently technology director at World Beyond War and hosts two podcasts, World Beyond War: A New Podcast and Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera.
What attracted you to the Beats? When did you first encounter them? Do you have a favourite text, novel or poetry?
I came of age in the late 1970s. I was in high school when disco and punk happened, and I did go to CBGB's and tried to dance like John Travolta during those years, but I mainly spent these years magnetised by and weirdly nostalgic for the amazing hippie generation that had come just before my own. I saw the hippie generation as a blur in my childhood's rearview mirror: Woodstock, Watergate, Martin Luther King, Gloria Steinem, Abbie Hoffman, Stonewall, Kent State, Bob Dylan, John and Yoko. This recent past seemed glorious to me, the spirit of idealistic protest and the explosions of colourful creativity generally remembered today as the ‘Summer of Love’, even though there was no such actual summer, and even though my late-blooming flower-child tendencies were already badly out of style in the late 1970s, as growing attitudes of reactionary conservatism began harshing everybody's mellow.
The Beat Generation was the parent generation to the flower children I wished in vain for my own generation to be. So here's how the Beat Generation snuck stealthily into my world: I had a wonderful social studies teacher named Mr. Arnold in ninth grade who threw away the curriculum to teach us about Buddhism, and he told us about a poet named Gary Synder and a book by Jack Kerouac called The Dharma Bums. I didn't read Synder or Kerouac when I was in ninth grade, but I tucked the names away in my head. I was too cool for Rolling Stone so I read Crawdaddy magazine, which had intriguingly bizarre and trangsressive columns by writers named William S. Burroughs and Paul Krassner. I tucked those names away in my head too. Bob Dylan's album Desire lived on my turntable, and the record cover included liner notes by somebody named Allen Ginsberg. Even with all these hints planted nicely in my head, I'm pretty sure I never read a word of Beat literature when I was in high school.
But I was a reader, and some of the great experimental books of the late-hippie 1970s were gateways to the Beats for me. I had to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance before I could comprehend On the Road. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test which introduced me to Ken Kesey as a character before I discovered him as a writer. This book introduced a character named Neal Cassady, too, and I would later meet him again as a character named Dean Moriarty. Maybe if I never read Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull I would never have found Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five was probably the first anti-war book I read. So all of these gateway books deserve a place on my favourites list, along with the core Beat texts by Kerouac and Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and Diane Di Prima and Bob Kaufman I would eventually come to love.
After throwing all these cool names around, I hate to be so obvious as to name ‘Howl’ and On the Road as my two very top favourite Beat texts. But sometimes we all have to be obvious when the time comes to tell the truth, and these two texts are undeniably my faves. I would also tell anyone who reads On the Road for the first time to read Carolyn Cassady's Off the Road right after, just for balance.
What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that literary scene and musical sound connect(ed)?
I'm so glad you ask me this, Simon, because years ago you were kind enough to ask me to write about Bob Dylan and the Beats for your excellent book Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll. What I wrote then is that the genius of Bob Dylan was born in the clamshell of the Beat Generation, and that everything wonderful Dylan has done in his long, epic career can be fairly traced back to that inspiration. Now, even though I wrote this for your book many years ago, I feel kind of stuck on this same idea, and I have to say it again. Of course there are so many more historical musical connections, including the deeply connected Grateful Dead, and all of this is chronicled in your book.
Do historical musical connections provide the only possible answer? I'm sure we could go beyond literal connections. The Beat Generation stood for joyous creative anarchy, and joyous creative anarchy is so conducive to all musical inspiration. Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X must be in the Beat Generation lineage somehow. So I don't want to be limiting when I answer your question by redelivering my old-faithful answer, Bob Dylan. But I feel like it's my job to fixate on this one name, because I am a Dylanologist and I know his work so well and the answer just fits like a glove. Every other possible answer is valid as well, but, when I think of the Beat spirit in music, I think of Bob.
Here's a funny thing: when I answered this same question for your book years ago, I listed a bunch of Bob Dylan song titles that were obvious Jack Kerouac references: ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, ‘On the Road Again’, ‘Desolation Row’. Just after your book was published, I was listening to Blonde on Blonde and suddenly saw the title ‘Visions of Johanna’ and realised this was the best Kerouac nod as well – Visions of Gerard, Visions of Cody. How could I have missed this before! Staring me in the face on one of Dylan's best albums all along, yet I only realised it after your book was published! So, Simon, I am really happy that you are giving me this chance to add ‘Visions of Johanna’ to my list of Kerouac references in Bob Dylan song titles. If your book ever gets revised for a new printing, as would be well deserved, please sneak this one into the text for me if you can!
As a writer, editor and activist have you been shaped or influenced by Beat experiences?
Well, my Beat Generation website Literary Kicks is the reason I have any reputation as a Beat scholar (I use the term loosely – I am Beat, but I am no scholar). I created this website in the summer of 1994 when I was in my early 30s and, yes, finally reading Jack Kerouac for the first time. It took me that long to get to Kerouac. Launching Literary Kicks definitely changed my life, even though the Beats are just one of many literary movements I've been obsessed with. The site remains alive, though I am no longer using the pen name (‘Levi Asher’) with which I originally launched the site. For the past few years I've also been proud to work with the fine people who run AllenGinsberg.org, for which I am the designer and developer, though I don't write their excellent and substantial daily posts about poetry, and I've built websites for poet friends like Eliot Katz and Simon Pettet.
I am also more committed than ever lately as an antiwar activist. I'm the technology director for World Beyond War, a global grassroots activist organisation. Did my absorption in the Beats help transform me into an anti-war activist? Sure, though it was a thoroughly non-Beat writer named Nicholson Baker whose books probably flicked the switch in my brain that made me a committed pacifist for life. Either way, though, it was books that flicked this switch for me. Beats love books. I love books.
Who are your own favourite singers, musicians and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas or attitudes in their lives and art?
My music appreciation always happens in fits and starts. Several years ago, I found myself needing new music to put into my ears, because I listen to music for hours everyday as I work on websites, and I just can't keep listening to the same stuff. I turned purely for the sake of diversity to classic opera, a musical genre I knew nothing about, and which had the added benefit of providing background music with vocals that can't possibly interrupt my train of thought while I'm coding, because I don't understand Italian or German or French. I started listening to classic opera about six years ago, and quickly the background music turned into an obsession and I started attending operas at the Met. I then launched an experimental podcast about literary connections in opera, Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera.
Beat attitudes in other music? A recent episode I recorded with my friend Vicki Zunitch about Puccini's La Boheme is the best answer I can think of, and I hope anyone who wants to hear my answer will listen to this episode. As we explain in this podcast, La Boheme is about six people in 1830s Paris living out the same dreams and ambitions as the Beats in New York City and San Francisco 120 years later. How beat were the Paris bohemians? The four guys who starve and freeze in the garret of La Boheme are, respectively, a writer, a painter, a musician and a philosopher. I love the last of these four – a philosopher! This is Colline, the guy with the famous greatcoat, who keeps loose pages of his future book in the pockets of this coat, and in the final act sells the coat to try to help Mimi live. La Boheme is the Beat Generation in a nutshell. I'm sure Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs and Corso all knew this so deeply that it never needed to be said. Sal Paradise and his friends go to an opera in Denver in one scene of On the Road. I once saw Philip Glass running around onstage at Carnegie Hall at a Tibet House benefit with Allen Ginsberg and Patti Smith, and I can't think of anything more Beat than the opera Satyagraha by Philip Glass. Even though this opera doesn't feel like a Beat work at all. That's how we know it is one.
Note: Marc Eliot Stein would like to draw your attention to the following websites, which bear his skilled mark: bobdylan.com, pearljam.com, elisteincartoons.com, eliotkatzpoetry.com, simonpettet.com, worldbeyondwar.org
Lit Kicks is full of awesome. I've been a reader for many years but didn't really know Marc's backstory. Glad he shares a wide-mind about "what is beat" and the influences thereof. Used his article as a reference point in my "Meets the Beats" flashback about the 6 Poets at 6 Gallery reading: https://daveostory.com/film-vids-docs/social-culture/meet-the-beats/