Holly and the i/v*: Biographer's RBP spotlight

One of America's leading rock journalists is interrogated by the world's premier pop journalism archive and Kerouac's own back pages are inevitably part of the *interview

I GOT A nice mention in the latest Rock’s Backpages podcast, a lively weekly rap connected to the British music journalism database featuring almost 50,000 articles and audio files, in which the splendid Holly George-Warren, talented writer and skilled raconteur, was the latest special guest.

George-Warren is both a legendary and highly productive US rock journalist, with many book titles to her name and a comprehensive Janis Joplin biography the most recent acclaimed account to be added to her lengthy bibliography.

But, fascinatingly for Jack Kerouac followers, she is the latest individual to take on a full-scale biography of the novelist and the first to have full access to all the files and documents held by the official overseers of the novelist’s large archive.

Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director of RBP, a well-established rock historian in his own right and author of a well-received Tom Waits volume, asked his guest, zooming in from upstate New York, whether this was ‘the official Kerouac biography countenanced by the Estate’.

Holly George-Warren was keen to stress this was actually not the case and explained her position, not dissimilar at all to arrangements that applied for her Gene Autry and Joplin life stories. ‘We have,’ she told Hoskyns, ‘a collaboration agreement in which they give me total access to all the personal archives.’

‘I get to go rifle through the files and I’m allowed to quote anything I want to. But they have absolutely no control over what I write; there are no editorial approvals granted. I have complete autonomy. So, you know, they trust me. It’s a great deal.’

George-Warren, who in the 1990s headed up the Rolling Stone book division under Jann Wenner, also appeared in my most recent collection Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack, actually writing about Joplin and the Beats, and my co-editor Jim Sampas and I each got an RBP podcast plug during the conversation.

In fact, Sampas, Literary Executor of the Kerouac Estate, read the 2019 Joplin biography Janis: Her Life and Music and was particularly drawn to the fact the singer had read On the Road and had been inspired to hitchhike as an early Texan beatnik. A negotiation followed, a proposal was submitted and a contract signed.

The fit was further compounded by the fact that George-Warren had also been editor of the brilliant Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, published in 1999, definitely one of the inspirations behind my own book Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture which came out some 14 years later.

Rock and the Beat Generation plans to interview Holly George-Warren in more detail early in 2022. In the meantime, you can find the relevant Rock’s Backpages podcast, free to access, at the web address below and the exchanges about Kerouac and the forthcoming biography begin at 19’30.

Visit: https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Podcast/Episode/e117