Jack, Janis & Holly

Lit rock lives in Beat Museum bash

LEADING ROCK journalist and acclaimed biographer Holly George-Warren will make an appearance at San Francisco’s Beat Museum on Sunday, November 10th, when she will combine two of her principal interests as she discusses both a literary figurehead and a music icon.

In ‘Jack & Janis’, George-Warren will focus on Jack Kerouac and Janis Joplin, two legendary individuals both of whom have connections to Beat culture, Kerouac as a founding father, of course, of that creative community and Joplin as a singer inspired by the books he wrote.

For George-Warren, each of these artists have loomed large in her writing life in recent times. In 2019, she published Janis: Her Life and Music, a well-received biography of Joplin, and, over several years, she has been working on a new and much-anticipated book covering Kerouac’s life.

In fact, both threads came together in a 2018 book entitled Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack and edited by Simon Warner and Jim Sampas. Her essay ‘Light is faster than sound: Texans, the Beats and the San Francisco counterculture’ considered how the influence of novels like On the Road had driven musicians like Joplin from the South to the West Coast.

It is worth pointing out, too, that George-Warren is no newcomer to the interweaving trails of rock and Beat. A quarter of a century ago she was the driving force behind the Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, a pivotal collection which established multiple connections between the popular music scene and the literature of that influential gathering of novelists and poets.

With that in mind, look out soon for our 25th anniversary celebration of that important title, which first emerged in 1999, when Rock and the Beat Generation exclusively interviews George-Warren, the book’s editor, about a significant volume in the coverage, indeed recognition, of this intriguing artistic crossover.

The event ‘Jack & Janis: An Evening with Holly George-Warren’ begins at the Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, SF, at 7pm.