Five hundred and counting...

R&BG library hits a noteworthy number

By Simon Warner, Founding Editor

JUST FOUR YEARS in, Rock and the Beat Generation scores a notable landmark with 500 articles now published and available in our expanding archive.

If you’ve been following our tale, you’ll know this website uniquely stalks that waterfront where Beat writing meets popular music making, ‘where hip writers meet hot rockers’ to quote our own strapline.

So yes, Jack Kerouac combines with Bob Dylan, the Beatles convene with Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith rubs shoulders with William Burroughs and Neal Cassady and the Grateful Dead head out together on the same eternal highway. Nor is jazz so far away via the likes of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and David Meltzer, ruth weiss and Amiri Baraka.

And we cover this exciting beat in a string of expected but also original ways – news stories and interviews, reviews and features, profiles and correspondence, obits and tributes, alongside well-received series like ‘Beat Soundtrack’ and ‘Beat Meetings’, ‘Biographical Details’ and ‘Rock Stories’.

Further, we have attracted many kinds of contributor – novelists and poets, journalists and historians, musicians and academics – to our digital pages not to mention below-the-line input from you the readers. All appreciated!

Pictured above: A recent screen grab from the R&BG homepage

Plus, we’ve included members of the surviving Beat family in our coverage and conversation – important figures like composer David Amram and poet Anne Waldman, Kerouac estate chief Jim Sampas, writer Charley Plymell and long-time Ginsberg guitarist Steven Taylor, plus Cassady offspring Cathy and John Allen.

A new generation of post-Beat poets has also joined us on the trail – Jim Cohn and David Cope, Eliot Katz and Sharon Mesmer, Wang Ping and Larry Beckett, Ron Whitehead and Marc Zegans, Mimi German and Andy Clausen, Danny Shot, Joe Kidd and Alice Notley – plus a fine contingent of UK versifiers, from Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown, Roger McGough and Brian Patten to John Cooper Clarke, Jay Jeff Jones and Heath Common, have all been featured.

From the musical end of this cross-fertilisation we’ve given space to the Rolling Stones and Charlie Parker, the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth, Tom Waits and the Smiths, Miles and the MC5, the Doors and Rickie Lee Jones, Bowie and Joni Mitchell, the Band and the 1975, Janis Joplin and the Doobie Brothers, Jack Elliott and Philip Glass, the Fugs and David Crosby, Blondie and Billy Bragg, Steely Dan and Tim Buckley, Zappa and Nirvana, to namecheck only some.

There has been, too, a stream of leading international writers on the Beat Generation feeding into the ongoing debate: Jonah Raskin, David S. Wills, Barry Miles, Steve Turner, Nancy M. Grace, Brian Hassett, Marc Eliot Stein, Ann Charters, Dennis McNally, Oliver Harris, Tim Hunt, Douglas Field, Nicola Bardola, Steven Belletto, A. Robert Lee, Casey Rae, Jaap van der Bent, Erik Mortenson, Kurt Hemmer, Matias Carnevale, Tomasz Sawczuk, Pat Thomas, Charles Shuttleworth, Thomas Antonic and Jim Burns to identify a number.

Further, a star-studded galaxy of Anglo-American journalists with an interest in the Beats, music and the countercultural crossover has taken part in our project: Holly George-Warren, Allan Jones, Don Armstrong, David Browne, Michael Goldberg, Elijah Wald, Peter Everett, Simon A. Morrison, Alex Harvey, Steve Silberman and David Holzer. Nor should we forget the monstrously rich memoirs of Antonio Pineda or our key interviewers Malcolm Paul and Leon Horton.

Oh…and here’s to the 500 pieces to follow, articles paying attention to those junctures where free-form stanzas and radical rants, cut-up texts, spontaneous prose and fictional autobiography meet rock and folk, punk and country, bop and trad, rap and scat, psychedelia, Americana and club culture, hippies and Teds, Angry Young Men and mods, b-boys and ravers. Do take a trip with us on to the next stage. And tell your friends – or at least text ‘em!