Book review #30: Bop Apocalypse

Negro streets, angry fixes, best minds?

Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats & Drugs by Martin Torgoff (Da Capo Press, 2017)

AS SOMEONE whose experience of intoxicants extends really little further than student bar-room booze-ups and very occasional doses of strong painkiller, I have sometimes speculated on the physical stresses that the mid-century Beats put their bodies through in their quest for a chemically, or organically, induced Nirvana.

Such thoughts returned to my mind as I absorbed the quite gripping text of a book that first appeared in 2017 but one that has lost none of its power as forensic examination of the on-the-edge lives of those liberated novelists and poets, with particular reference to their fevered jazz interests and attraction to a then essentially underground black culture which they encountered first hand in the seething anthill of New York City in the 1940s and the 1950s.

Martin Torgoff’s Bop Apocalypse – the title itself tapping into one of the more dazzling linguistic constructions that Allen Ginsberg coined in his masterpiece ‘Howl’ – is subtitled Jazz, Race, the Beats and Drugs and those four corners of urban subterraneana are diligently explored with a piercing historical spotlight and an acute, detective-like, eye.

Nor, in this real-life, occasionally true crime, thriller, is detective an inappropriate term to apply. Much of Torgoff’s analysis of this tangled socio-cultural setting is tainted by questions of the law and matters of infringement as radical musicians and outsider writers run the gauntlet of the federal and city authorities, officials engaged in a struggle against drug-connected felony and the perceived dangers of racial miscegenation, a particularly unsettling spectre to so many in the white mainstream at the time.

There is neither the space nor necessity to regurgitate the often jaw-dropping anecdotes related here involving a battalion of twentieth-century creative giants – from Louis Armstrong to Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington to Lester Young, Miles Davis to John Coltrane and more – so let us return to where this review began and think about the impact that a pharmacy shelf of narcotics had on a group of radical and ambitious scribes who took root in the super bustle of Manhattan as a global military conflict erupted.

This unlikely clan of writerly operatives – the rather older and quite well-fixed WASP Burroughs, his rapt apprentices the Franco-Catholic Kerouac and the Jewish socialist Ginsberg, the brilliant but addictive Joan Vollmer and devilishly dashing Lucien Carr – were all keen to pursue a ‘New Vision’, forge an artistic manifesto, a programme of louche experiment, echoing the dangerous nineteenth-century Parisian worlds of Rimbaud and Baudelaire.

Yet, as this visionary fervour takes hold, the older Burroughs, nearing 30, is already hooked on harder stuff and rolling drunks to feed his pricier tastes, Kerouac, only just past 20, is moving from the athletic fields of Columbia to physical wreck as dope, benzedrine and beer leave him utterly debilitated and on the point of collapse, while their junkie friend Herbert Huncke, a window into the gritty Times Square scene of nocturnal diners and narcotic deals, is untrustworthy and parasitic, a crude warning for the future perhaps.

In the midst of this life on the fringes, a year of ‘low, evil decadence’ as Kerouac himself dubs it, Ginsberg, not yet out of his teens, is shrewder. He later recalls: ‘When I watched Burroughs get his habit, I realised that it was quite mechanical and cumulative, really. If you took dope every day several times a day over a period of weeks you could get quite a habit; so, consequently, I just didn’t do that.’ Yet he adds: ‘I saw straightaway that there were most definitely intelligent choices to be made about drug use.’

The major poet to be was certainly convinced of the benefits of marijuana. ‘We looked at it as a legitimate and valuable tool, and here was this great government plot to suppress it and make it seem as if it was something diabolic, satanic, full of hatred and fiendishness and madness.’ Explaining that overarching tension is one of the aims at the heart of this title’s mission.

Bop Apocalypse commences with some fascinating reminiscences by none other than a young Terry Southern, a Southern boy by name and history, who, in the 1930s, recalls the stunning potency of a rampant weed called red-dirt marijuana, a spreading, sprouting bush that could fell a fully grown cow with its brain-frying toxicity.

Later one of the pack of New Journalists in the 1960s, author of Candy and a contributing plotter to the Easy Rider screenplay, Southern personally experienced the head-twisting effects of this mysterious plant when it was introduced to him by a black agricultural worker on his father’s farm.

That memory opens the door on the pre-war rise of the drug, weaves in the connection to those ethnic groups – the black population and Mexicans – most associated with this common or garden high and speedily moves on to the part of Harry Anslinger, a fervent anti-marijuana campaigner who headed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for decades and waged an almost evangelical fight against trips of all kinds.

Pictured above: Author Martin Torgoff

Anslinger also developed a labyrinth of myths – most plain and simple falsehoods – to establish sensationalised links between illicit substances and the crimes perpetrated by non-white sections of US society. His propaganda was cynical, headline-grabbing and discouraging to all on the straight and narrow, yet perversely alluring to those seeking an existence outside the corral of convention.

Torgoff’s snappy and lucid survey shifts smartly to the jazz scene and the integral association between principally black musicians and the spread of marijuana as a drug de jour and a symbol of cool among both band members and the fans who attended their gigs and bought their records.

The fact that Prohibition, the nationwide ban on alcohol, was in force for most of the interwar years was hardly a coincidence: smoking weed, in certain social and cultural circles denied the pleasures of the hop and vine, became almost ubiquitous. Later, and not without mob manipulation, heroin, with its more savage ravages, would feed into the ecosystem.

Meanwhile, white outsiders, drawn by the cachet of swing music then bebop, would initiate their own transgressive clique, the not-yet-named Beat Generation, drawn moth-like to the lights of Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem or 52nd Street where the new musical sounds prospered as the 1940s unfolded.

The author not only divulges some intriguing, though sometimes painfully tragic, stories about the artistic and personal lives of the innovative jazz stars of the day but also skilfully interleaves his account with vividly captured experiences of the as-yet-unheralded novelists and poets. Almost metronomic in its reliability, the writer deftly moves the drama forward, from musical beats to literary Beats, without missing a narrative cue.

Further, the author has a facility of expression, a flair for description,, that makes Bop Apocalypse a highly readable and richly illuminating history of a period when the United States was experiencing immense economic disruption and societal trauma, from the Great Depression to the World War to follow, with fermenting racial tensions adding increasingly to the general uncertainty.

But, in this compelling account, the actual health of its central heroes is frequently in doubt. The Fed Anslinger may be a duplicitous zealot but there are, for sure, numerous high profile victims of drug reliance. Bird and Lady Day perish young and so many of their performing peers have careers seriously disrupted, ruined even, by difficult habits.

The Beats, too, suffer similar fates. While Ginsberg and Burroughs, the latter against all the odds, survive to reasonable ages, the two mercurial catalysts of this powerful subcultural upsurge, Kerouac and his best friend Neal Cassady, are lost to us before they even reach their half-century, each death linked to over-indulgences of various kinds.

And I suppose these tropes are doomed to be repeated. Acts of self-harm by these extraordinary figures are proxies for our own timidity. Or maybe for our own rational restraint. As listeners or readers, we like the idea of risk-taking, the blast-the-doors-off recklessness of young men – just occasionally women – in a hurry to distort, even explode, the mundane certainties of conformity. Voyeurism is easy when you don’t have to take the bedevilled journey yourself from security to revelation to madness and even worse.

Bop Apocalypse is a gripping reminder that the excesses that fuelled artistic experiment and invention were not without their fatal outcomes and that later losses on the rock battlefield had, in many ways, been pre-empted in the earlier speakeasies and cold water flats where jazz instrumentalists and would-be scribblers sought artificial stimulation to ease their psychological pain or discover new creative channels of expression.

If the author makes very fleeting mistakes – Dylan didn’t meet the Beatles at the Plaza Hotel in 1964 but rather the Hotel Delmonico and Ginsberg did not premiere ‘Howl’ on October 13th, 1955 but six days earlier – the overall impact of this impressively realised slice of hip anthropology is simply undeniable. It remains a key volume, I think, well worth re-visiting even some time after its original debut.