Correspondence #43: David Amram

Great Beat composer opens up

Legendary Beat composer David Amram, a good friend of Jack Kerouac over many years, responds to recent stories at Rock and the Beat Generation about the writer Holly George-Warren, a woman with a Kerouac biography in the pipeline who also interviewed the veteran musician at a recent live event…

Email, November 9th, 2024

Dear Simon,

As always, this was a KILLER article with a lot of information that took me to school!!

I talked on the phone to Jerry Cimino of the Beat Museum about his more than 25  years of struggles and he has remained on his path throughout it all.

Holly George-Warren interviewed me here at a movie theater in nearby Saugerties, NY, a few weeks ago.

The little movie theater where we appeared not only has great popcorn but also shows fine movies and there was a screening of an 8 minute doc film made by the International Folk Alliance when they presented me with a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ and screened the bio.

It summarized all the areas I worked in. 

Then there was a screening of Pull My Daisy.

Holly was a terrific host and made it fun as well as informative. Her questions and comments were amazing!

She and her husband are beloved as musicians and people in the small town of Saugerties…

They are both  always warm-hearted and gracious to all and great ambassadors for all the arts.

I know she will be a knockout at he Beat Museum and wish I could be there to see her shine and make all young people FEEL AT HOME wth the ‘beauty’ part of our long-gone era of  the 50s.

The ‘maudlin psychotic part’ of Beat has been covered innumerable times since the renaissance of interest in our era after the Whitney Show in 1995 in NYC, but Holly understands that Jack’s wanderings and stumbling into the lives of anybody and everybody enabled him to document their legacies

His uncanny ability to tell stories about everyday people and places continue to make us aware of the spiritual side of all the people he encountered and celebrated.

He showed us, like Cervantes did in his descriptions in Don Quixote of the country of old Spain, the beauty that surrounds us all if we PAY ATTENTION!!!

Jack’s struggles to find an identity in a culture that rejects identity, ethnicity and community by rejecting  these simple values and replacing the need for them with fashion, wealth and celebrity was upsetting to him but also a motivation to keep searching.

And of course, sInce time keeps  marching on, all  generations are  replaced by the next, even when we don’t know much about our own history.. 

That's why Kerouac, Corso, Gary Snyder, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti all studied the classics.

They knew that these works all survived the test of time because they  were relevant then and still are NOW!!!

And many of  the  artists throughout history withstood criticism by those who were offended by what seemed to be  mundane, commonplace or depicting what appeared to be lower classes.

So it is really rewarding to see what Holly is doing, what you are doing and what more people than ever seem to be striving to do!! 

That’s our hope, so please keep up your fine work!!!

Accurate reportage is a fine art too, just as the Lascaux Cave paintings done 20.000 years ago remain reportage for us today..

Like our graffiti artists of today, they represent work showing what it was like back then and invite us to be part of it!!!

Big cheers always for YOUR reportage!!

By being online, you don't have to have an apartment in London, NYC, Rome, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Los Angeles or even Leeds or West Camp, NY.

We are all peeling that onion to find what it was that makes the whole Beat era so special.

I think we’re finding out it’s just the same as it has always been: A MYSTERY!!! But that’s no reason not to dig it!

And, as always, I thank you for sending me all the reports you assemble every few weeks!

Cheerio until our paths cross,

David

See also: ‘Twenty five years on for Beat/rock classic’, November 7th, 2024; ‘Jack, Janis & Holly’, November 3rd, 2024