Getting Beat: Chelsea's two shots on target
After I re-connected with the late Larry Keenan's daughter, organising a major new show of her photographer father's work, I became a small part of the story
WHEN YOU spend much of your time exploring a somewhat esoteric world in which rock stars become credible poets and novelists emerge as figureheads of street cool, it’s satisfying to occasionally become a small part of the story.
The revelation that a new exhibition of pictures by the sadly late Larry Keenan would be unveiled in California led to a couple of pieces of exposure for this very author.
I’ve got to know the charming Chelsea Keenan, Larry’s daughter, a little over the last decade after she helped me to utilise a famous image by her father on one of my books.
Somewhat earlier, I’d had the great pleasure of meeting Keenan, Sr, at his Emeryville home, near San Francisco, in 2004. In the late 1990s I had made the acquaintance of poet David Meltzer, a rather undersung member of the wider Beat family, when he was visiting the UK for a series of readings.
Pictured: A promotional image for the new Larry Keenan exhibition
He kindly opened doors to his good friends Michael McClure and Larry Keenan, and both would subsequently be interviewed for the volume Text and Drugs and Rock‘n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture.
McClure, who greeted me at his home in the hills above the Bay Area, was tricky – spiky and somewhat adversarial. Keenan was delightfully welcoming, even though the onset of early Parkinson’s had left him vocally indistinct.
He talked, I taped, and, some time later, we managed to decode his by-then somewhat slurred expression and include our lively exchange in the book as planned.
Fast forward to 2012, the year of Keenan’s death, and I hoped to secure a celebrated image called Bad Company for the cover of the collection of essays and conversations which Bloomsbury were on the point of publishing.
It was Chelsea to whom I spoke and we happily negotiated the use of the requested frame: Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg flanked by McClure and Band member Robbie Robertson in jocular form, caught in the passage next to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore.
That side street, later designated as Jack Kerouac Alley, would be the setting that afternoon for a number of iconic shots to emerge from that out-of-doors, December 1965 shoot.
Dylan and Robertson, in town to play a gig across the water in Berkeley, was still feeling the shellshock of a world tour in which Bob’s electric turn alienated half of his followers and transformed the gruelling transatlantic trek into a phoney war of high-volume playing and restless boos in the stalls.
In San Francisco, the reverberations of ‘Judas!’, the nagging rumble of mild PTSD, had been largely forgotten: Dylan was among poet friends and the plan was that, away from stage commitments, a photo session would take place at City Lights with a view to producing potential cover images for the new Blonde on Blonde double album, due the following year.
In fact, the session would never spawn an album sleeve and, instead, became better known as ‘the Last Gathering of Beats’, a symbolic moment when the Beats passed the baton of social rebellion of the 1950s to that coming generation of rock masters – the Beatles, Stones, the Doors and the Grateful Dead – who would dominate screens and airwaves from the mid-1960s onwards.
The images that recorded this remarkable summit – Dylan was also joined by Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan, David Meltzer, those other Beat headliners and a cluster of further writing luminaries – are part of the Iconic Photography of the Beat Generation presentation at the Lansing Street Gallery in Mendocino until the end of 2021.
And what else should be taking its place among the glowing selection of classic monochrome prints by Keenan but a copy of my own Text and Drugs, a slightly self-reflexive tribute generously choreographed by Chelsea herself.
Further, what should Chelsea Keenan, a highly talented professional photographer in her own right, also do but share a picture with me of my own follow-up publication Kerouac Record: A Literary Soundtrack, published in 2018, on the current shelves of City Lights itself!
Pictured: Kerouac on Record, co-edited by Simon Warner & Jim Sampas, photographed on the City Lights shelves by Chelsea King
So, in a timely fashion, my book sits wedged in-shop between Joyce Johnson’s Beat memoir Minor Characters and the Kerouac-Ginsberg correspondence, a little like Dylan, all those years ago, squeezed excitingly between two historic countercultural moments.
The great singer was, on that long-lost winter day, standing on a cusp, at a crossroads linking the recent past of literary revolutionaries, of coffeehouses, Cold War politics and acoustic guitars of an earlier black-and-white time and an extraordinary future as a period of psychedelic dreams and acid days, folk rock and country roads, anti-war demos and the Technicolor tribes of Woodstock beckoned.
Oh how they take themselves too seriously;peaceniks ranting on over Cold War ethos and juicing up on Robbie
Robertson keeping in mind that not only we are going to be treated to ‘Fourth
Time Around’ and ‘Visions of Johanna’, back to back. Dylan kills!