WE MIGHT WELL have to display a little patience in some instances, but Beat Generation followers and popular music fans who crave a sprinkling of hip literature in their rock diets have something close to a book bonanza on the way in the next year or two, with three items by men and three by women in this preview of forthcoming publications.
First out of the traps will be DON ARMSTRONG’s much-heralded biography of the great US journalist Ralph J. Gleason, originally a star writer on the San Francisco Chronicle and a stalwart of Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone from its launch in 1967. The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason: Dispatches from the Front will appear in hardback imminently with a paperback version out in the summer.
Armstrong, a well-established scholar of popular music journalism, will publish his portrait of Gleason, a man who took a huge interest in jazz, the rise of the new Bay Area rock as the Summer of Love bloomed and the ways in which the Beat writers became engaged with those key cultural trends, through Bloomsbury next month.
Pictured above: Don Armstrong’s new Gleason biography
As the author explains: ‘Gleason not only reported on but influenced the trajectory of popular music. He alone chronicled the unparalleled evolution of popular music from the 1930s into the 1970s, and while doing so, interviewed and befriended many trailblazers such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Bob Dylan and the Beatles. A true iconoclast, he dismantled the barriers between popular and highbrow music, and barriers separating the musical genres.’
Armstrong adds: ‘Gleason was a voracious reader and occasionally reviewed novels for the Chronicle. Because of his dissident views about society and his support for non-conformity, he was naturally attracted to writers like Jack Kerouac and Nelson Algren, who wrote about marginalized characters.
‘When the San Francisco Beats began collaborating with jazz musicians, Gleason checked it out and became involved in the Poetry Readings in the Cellar recording. He and the local Beats dug the same bop musicians like Brew Moore. Gleason's empathy for the Beats led to his intense role in the 60s counterculture.’
Already slated for a June release, a new Joni Mitchell biography, in the wake of her recent 80th birthday, will not only offer fresh angles on the singer-songwriter’s life but will give consideration to the part that Beat women such as Joyce Johnson and Diane di Prima played in shaping the artist’s approach.
Written by ANN POWERS, arguably the foremost woman rock critic in the US and the pop voice of respected American broadcaster NPR, has titled her book Travelling, a reference in itself perhaps to the picaresque code many of the Beat fraternity. As pre-publicity trails state, Powers ‘seeks to understand the paradox of Mitchell – at once both elusive and inviting – through her myriad journeys.’
Pictured above: Powers on Mitchell, due in June 2024
Mitchell’s relationship to the Beats has been something of a moot point. While the singer’s concerns with personal candour, poetic expression, the visual arts and jazz might mark her as an obvious heir to that generation’s creative ethos, she has largely distanced herself from those literary roots.
Academic Nancy Grace, in the 2018 essay collection Kerouac on Record, applied Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ theory to explain Mitchell’s reticence to link her output to the 1950s poets, yet Powers’ new account, to be published by HarperCollins, seems set to return to this subject and present some novel takes on the debate.
Next to the bookshops could be CASEY RAE, the US journalist and academic behind 2019’s William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock’n’Roll, who is currently working on – ‘halfway through’, he tells R&BG – a study of the Grateful Dead and the multiple strands – Neal Cassady, the drug culture and the burgeoning new philosophies of the 60s – with which the band became associated.
Rae comments: ‘My current project for Oxford University Press, which is tentatively titled Dead Dharma: The Grateful Dead & the American Pursuit of Enlightenment. It touches on a dizzying number of intersections and histories, and encompasses a broad range of philosophical-spiritual-social views and practices.’
He adds: ‘In some ways, it’s the flip side to my Burroughs book, as it explores the Beat phenomenon from a left-coast, Buddhistic perspective, and how these aspects inform the “almost tantric” praxis of the Dead in their milieu and beyond.’ This intriguing survey might emerge before 2024 is out.
Further down the line, American author HOLLY GEORGE-WARREN is hard at work shaping the new, and already much-discussed, biography of Jack Kerouac for Viking Penguin. She made her name as a rock journalist, another Rolling Stone alumna, and headed Wenner’s successful book publishing operation Straight Arrow during the 1990s.
George-Warren in recent years has become a vaunted popular music biographer – Gene Autry, Alex Chilton, Janis Joplin and Dolly Parton have been among her subjects – yet she has maintained a close relationship with Beat culture.
Her edited collection The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, a grand 25 years old in 2024, remains an authoritative touchstone, a ground-breaking gathering of interviews and articles always ready to celebrate the intersection of the writers, the musicians and bands plus the countercultural setting, whether poetry-led or guitar-driven.
Of the gestating Kerouac portrait, the writer concedes in a recent R&BG interview that publication is still a little way off. ‘Anyone familiar with writing biographies understands that these massive projects cannot be rushed. My publisher Viking and the Kerouac Estate certainly understand that. I take the time I need to conduct very thorough research and write a manuscript to the highest standard possible. I'm nonetheless flattered that folks are impatiently awaiting my book's publication. The date will be announced some 9-12 months in advance of publication.’
Also in preparation is a book dedicated to Kerouac’s fascinating relationship with jazz, a subject often touched upon but never handled, so far at least, in a full-length text. The Edinburgh-based Canadian academic MARIAN JAGO has been commissioned by Bloomsbury to produce this title, a volume that will be as much about the social setting in which a vibrant form of African-American culture met a radical branch of a predominantly white literature as Kerouac as the key vessel of a so-called spontaneous prose.
Jago has, I believe, some important insights to share. For a number of years she was a friend and associate of Lee Konitz, a saxophonist she identifies as a seminal figure in Kerouac’s quest to bring the extemporising energy of the jazz horn to his own writing. A sax player herself, she rehearsed with Konitz and wrote about these cross-cultural exchanges between the music and Beat in the book Kerouac on Record. Once more, an actual release date for this new title is still to be confirmed.
Finally, we draw attention to a volume that will be of huge interest to many of you even though it remains in the early stages of production. The London-based STEVE TURNER, one-time scribe for the great British music magazines Melody Maker and New Musical Express and also a biographer of Van Morrison and the Beatles, is best known in Beat circles as the author of the 1996 release Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster.
His latest magnum opus is complete but currently seeks a publishing house. Hydrogen Jukebox: The Influence of the Beat Generation on Rock Music is without doubt a work of ambition and substance which will surely find the right outlet soon. The book, which takes its main title from a line in Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, could be available for us to plunge into as early as 2025, joining a small rush of titles in the pipeline that tick all the right boxes here at Rock and the Beat Generation.
Editor’s note: We plan to carry updates on the progress of these titles and also interviews with the authors involved at an appropriate time
See also: ‘Biographical Details #3: William S. Burroughs and Casey Rae’, January 9th, 2024; ‘Biography delay? Author explains Kerouac wait’, December 4th, 2023