Kerouac'n'roll! Book birthday at the double
Two print collections which gave attention to the Beat Generation's alliance with popular music each enjoy an anniversary this spring
ONE OF THE more exciting days of my all-too-many decades came in New York City in the summer of 2004. I had arrived in the US in that sun-soaked season for a fortnight’s round of interviews for a research project which took me coast-to-coast. But it was in the pulsating heart of Manhattan, towards the end of that two-week sojourn, that I ticked a significant box in a list of life ambitions.
I had been invited to lunch with David Barker, then heading up a vibrant independent operation called Continuum Books. An Englishman like me, Barker had been in New York for a year or three by then. And it was a huge thrill indeed to be having food and drink with a bona fide publisher and a serious editor in the greatest city in the Western world.
Barker had become aware that I’d spoken at the first Experience Music Project conference in Seattle a couple of years before, when I’d given a paper on the interconnections between the Beat writers and the dangerously dynamic rock scene that had emerged in Anglo-America from the mid-1960s. Even Christgau crept in at the back to join the crowd.
Not long after, Barker was in touch suggesting we consider a book-length title on the subject. I was delighted, of course, and this midtown reconnaissance between him and me on the isle of dreams, in the air-conditioned chill of a sleek restaurant with the sweltering streets shimmering beyond the plate glass walls, was tantamount to the sealing of the deal.
The fact that we were dining in some hip eatery that July day was actually a dream-like bonus prize after a string of stirring excitements from sea to shining sea, a series of meetings with a gallery of Beat legends from San Francisco to Oakland then via Colorado and eventually on to the five boroughs.
In the glorious hills above the Bay Area, I’d convened with Michael McClure before hooking up with photographer Larry Keenan just outside San Fran. A trip to Oakland saw me fail to connect with David Meltzer, despite a prearranged date, before heading off to Ginsberg’s Boulder campus where musician Steven Taylor was ready to greet me.
Pictured above: Companion editions…Larry Keenan provided the cover image for Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll (2013) and Allen Ginsberg’s famed shot of Kerouac appeared on the front of Kerouac on Record (2018). The picture of the writer’s grave in Lowell, including peace plectrum, was taken by Simon Warner
Finally, in the day or two before that contract-clinching bite with Barker, I’d found composer David Amram in the rustic wilds of upstate New York and rocker extraordinaire Genesis P-Orridge in the somewhat grittier climes of urban Brooklyn.
But that, in some ways, was just the beginning of a stretched-out adventure. Barker and Continuum would be quite quickly taken over by one of the world’s biggest book companies Bloomsbury – the J.K. Rowling boom was at its delirious heights – and my trail towards the finishing tape was more dogged half-marathon than pacy canter.
I even returned to the US in 2009 to conduct further investigations: Jim Sampas of the Jack Kerouac Estate took me to the writer’s Lowell grave, I met Kerouac scholar Paul Marion from the city’s university and also filmmaker Curt Worden – who had just completed the outstanding documentary One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur – and it would, ultimately, be a year or two on before the manuscript was ready to submit.
However, in 2013, 10 years ago this very spring, the long-gestating volume Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture finally made its official, hardback debut, sporting a wonderful photograph by Larry Keenan – Dylan, Ginsberg and McClure plus Robbie Robertson of the Band outside City Lights Bookstore in 1965.
Pictured above: Simon Warner, author and Founding Editor, Rock and the Beat Generation
With essays on Ginsberg, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti, sections on Dylan and the Beatles, Patti Smith and Tom Waits, interviews with Amram and Taylor, chats with UK poets Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown, a tribute to the women of Beat, obituaries of Peter Orlovsky, Tuli Kupferberg and Jim Carroll alongside a series of lively Q&As with Levi Asher of LitKicks, Beat Scene editor Kevin Ring, counterculture historian Jonah Raskin and band manager Mark Bliesener, it approached the crossovers of rock and the written word from a broad range of perspectives.
British magazine The Wire said the book was ‘fascinating and impeccably researched…a massive contribution to the literary and musical legacy of the Beat Generation’. And, I’m pleased to report, the title would go on to become one of the best-selling items in the Bloomsbury academic catalogue that year.
In 2018, a sister volume to Text and Drugs emerged, a gathering of essays entitled Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack, completed under the co-editorship of Jim Sampas and myself, which was originally issued by Bloomsbury once more in March exactly five years ago this month.
With a string of fine contributions on jazz – by Jim Burns, A. Robert Lee and Marian Jago, Jonah Raskin and Larry Beckett – and rock – Michael Goldberg on Bob Dylan, Peter Mills on Van Morrison, Jay Jeff Jones on Jim Morrison, Brian Hassett on the Grateful Dead, Douglas Field on Tom Waits, Holly George-Warren on Janis Joplin and Simon Morrison on Bruce Springsteen, Matt Theado on country music and James Sullivan on punk, Ronna Johnson on Patti Smith plus new interviews by Pat Thomas with David Amram and Graham Parker – the Kerouac musical cavalcade, as listener to bebop or as influence on subsequent generations of singers and bands, was diversely explored.
Said US Beat academic Erik Mortenson: ‘Warner and Sampas’ collection of essays provides an indispensable and long-overdue account of the music that shaped Kerouac and his writing, as well as analysis of how a generation of musicians like Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Patti Smith were influenced by [him].’
Anniversaries are the hook on which we shape, even build, our lives, and both of these books were landmarks in my own trek as journalist, historian and teacher: a decade on, Text and Drugs still feels like a special moment for me, a coming together of interests and ideas that had been formulated over an extended period, and, five years on from Kerouac on Record, that later compendium of original opinions and angles extends the journey, framing so many extra links between a great writer and the sonic tributaries that fed into his intriguing life or eventually flowed from him.
Whether it was Jack Kerouac drinking from the horns of plenty on 52nd Street, enraptured by songs on the car radio or the bar jukebox, humming the hits of Hollywood or the lullabies of Broadway, rapping his own spoken words to live musicians or in the studio, there was always sound, there was always music, in his head.
And that gripping legacy has been carried forward by those talented creatives who have followed in his wake: singers and saxophonists, drummers and guitarists, solo artists and groups, travelling the same routes, living that picaresque existence, on the rock’n’roll road and booked onto the band bus for a never-ending tour.