Kicks Joy Darkness: The making of a Kerouac classic

Label manager lifts the lid

LATE LAST year, Rock and the Beat Generation celebrated the 25th anniversary of the release of an acclaimed CD tribute and an important addition to the spoken word canon. Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness, issued originally in 1997, not only attracted substantial critical enthusiasm but also became one of the best-selling recordings the genre had ever known.

Produced by Jim Sampas, now Literary Executor of the Jack Kerouac Estate, and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, it combined a compelling collection of writings from the author with a powerful gathering of music makers, poets and actors – from Patti Smith and Joe Strummer to Robert Hunter, John Cale and William Burroughs to Thurston Moore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Johnny Depp – paying their own dues to a novelist all of them so revered.

We interviewed Sampas in these very pages about the project’s birthday – the piece actually became one of the most popular posts on our website – but there are other background stories about this memorable concept which deserve further attention.

David Greenberg, the label manager who brought the idea to his employers Rykodisc and added his own creative spirit to the venture, has some fascinating extra angles on the twists and turns that took Kicks Joy Darkness from the drawing board to its realisation, release and commercial success. We are delighted to publish his personal account below…

‘Details from a Beat journey: The long haul to a tribute’

By David Greenberg

To start, I didn’t remember why Jim Sampas came to Rykodisc with this project. I do know that Geffen Records had brushed Jim off. As you can wonder now, after seeing the list of tracks Jim was able to compile and think what idiots. All the better for Rykodisc, but still, Geffen passed on this?!

Jim is, well he WAS, an unassuming guy then and full of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ punctuating his speech as he was trying to find the words to explain what this tribute was all about. He did have the backing of the Kerouac Estate as he was working with his uncle, John Sampas, the executor at the time. Kerouac’s wife when he died was John’s sister, and Jim’s aunt, Stella. 

Sampas had an incredible list of artists already on board, though not recorded, maybe some were, but I don’t think I heard anything when I was being pitched the idea, and an even more incredible list of potential artists he had planned to connect with. Perhaps Geffen added it all up and thought: ‘This is too incredible, never gonna happen, never gonna get all those names, yes it’s Kerouac, but just Jack’s words as the content, famous fans speaking, yes, but this expensive proposition by Jim, the-nephew-with-the-big-ideas, well, most likely we will never make back the investment. Right? All agreed? Pass.’

What I almost kinda seem to remember leading Jim to us was our relationship with the Boston-based trio of Morphine (bass, drums, saxophone) led by bassist Mark Sandman. Through the urging of legendary producer and writer Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, James Booker, Incredible String Band, Maria Muldaur and author of the celebrated memoir White Bicycles), Rykodisc had picked up the first Morphine album, Good, that Bostonian Russ Gershon had initially released on his homegrown indie label Accurate Distortion.

Pictured above: David Greenberg at Tin Drum's Kagami, a virtual Ryuchi Sakamoto concert presented by Factory International at Versa Studios for the Manchester International Festival, 2023. Greenberg was the Voices series label manager for  Rykodisc when Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness was released in 1997.

We then released the next album that was in the can, Cure For Pain, which, deservedly, through Rykodisc’s hard work with radio and in the press, found an incredibly wide audience. After giving the world a steady diet of the re-released hits of Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Yoko Ono and Elvis Costello, Rykodisc had broken a band.

The label became a cooler label for musicians to place their new albums in our care. By this time, when Jim sat down with me, in ‘94/’95, Sandman and Colley and Conway, with Koderie producing, were on their way to delivering Yes. Which was to be our last album with them, but that’s another story that Rykodisc’s Director of A&R, Jeff Rougvie, will hopefully tell in the book he’s publishing ever-so-soon, or maybe later.

I could tell it, but by that time and the time of Yes, I was out of the Morphine product managing process, so all I can give you on that is hearsay and innuendo and some descriptive words about the bad taste it left in our mouths, but ultimately it was a business deal with Dreamworks which Morphine saw as a future full of big-league money and fame and fortune.

Or, I then thought, Jim came to us as we were a record label in the neighborhood. The Estate was based in Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, MA, and we were just south of that in Salem in the same state. Jim was working the night shift in Boston and plugging away at his music while part-time with the Kerouac organisation.

As I noted, Jim was not your music biz kind of dude, that polished, blather-filled guy, but he had a rough idea of a genius project, and he was sent down to me, the spoken word guy, label managing our Voices series. I was also the guy who worked with Yoko on the onobox, and the guy who figured out how to get all the old masters we bought for the Tradition label out to the public, sounding clean and spiffy and vital.

Also, I was the guy who was granted the management of all the releases no one there knew quite how to market. And did special packaging, minidiscs, the Zappa You Can’t Do That On Stage Any More live box for the whole multi-CD set, and all sorts of unrelated projects that needed someone to figure out, budget, cajole unsuspecting third parties to help, rattle the Rykodisc apparatus to focus on the music, and get done and out the door. And the first product manager for Morphine. That’s the shortlist, by the way.

But, a few weeks ago, I was able to ask Jim directly…

None of the above. It was actually Dennis McNally! 

For all of you in the audience who are not fanatical Dead Heads, Dennis was the publicist for the Dead, as well as side projects, like Mickey Hart and his Planet Drum project, his Endangered Music Project, The World Series, and on. Hart had found a home at Rykodisc way before I got there, and I was a fan of many of the albums he produced under The World label as a member of the record-buying public. We had re-released other Dead side projects through the years, and so Dennis was well versed in all things Rykodisc, as I am sure Don, one of the founders and the President, kept him current with freebies of all our promotional CDs.

We had re-released other Dead side projects and so Dennis was well versed in all things Rykodisc, as I am sure Don, one of the founders and the President, kept him current with freebies of the most recent promotional CDs. 

There is much out there about how the Beats influenced the next generation of artists, musicians, and on. Simon Warner, here, could fill a book on that or two, and has quite a bibliography already. One even with Jim. Dennis meanwhile was in the there and the then of the intersection of the Haight, America in the Sixties and the Beats, gathering it up into Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. He and the Sampases went way back. And we were the place Dennis knew could move Jack forward.

Jim had a pretty complete idea of who he could get onto the disc, and it was most of the ones you see on the final track listing of both the domestic release and the special deluxe edition we released in Japan. I added a few names and contacts from my Rolodex. Though, I had more than a bit of work to get the A&R people on board, as this was a large budget for an album of spoken word.

This genre only sold well when the speaker was incredibly well-known, like a President or a felon, or a comedian cracking jokes about felon Presidents. We had the potential for the incredibly well-known, the famous, and the near-famous: Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Lewis, Patti Smith! That’s just the tip of the thing. It goes deep. It goes wide.

Pictured above: The Kerouac CD collection which became a spoken word classic

And…there was to be unpublished material to be found on the release. I imagined all the Kerouacians out there buying this release, all those who needed to fill their minds with the Kerouac no one had heard, much less read, just yet. And some of those Kerouacians were teachers, radio DJ’s, writers, book store owners. If it was as good as what we expected, there would be even more word-of-mouth to stir up sales. Also, a sliver of the fans of the famous few who were listed on the soundtrack would be tempted to get their own copy. That potential audience added up to a shit-ton, in my estimation.

I also figured this album would get another shit-ton of publicity. It was music, it was words. Talking about crossover! We could hit up the radio stations and get played, as well as connect with the bookstores that were still alive and kicking, like Borders. I knew the advance was justified. Though over the year or so it took Jim, and his associate producer Lee Ranaldo, to corral all the tracks, I had to push off those Rykoites who wanted us to release it in an unfinished form.

I don’t remember any fights, or arguments, just their discomfort at my pushing back. They wondered if Jim was able to really complete the project, pull off all the famous connections, to get it together, to deliver what he needed to fulfill our grand expectations. 

He was not the kind of guy to bullshit, and so his explanations then were long, and circular, and not inspiring, rah, rah, spooge. I understood it completely as that was my kind of discussion. I had to talk the rah, rah, and shake the pom-poms of marketing. All the stuff above, but without my usual extra ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’, and none of the cul-de-sacs my conversations could get stuck within. 

I saw the worth of this when it was finished. The business number crunchers had a schedule to fill, and this was late, then the release became later than late. It was impressed upon me more than once Rykodisc needed to start making money on the advance we had sent out to the Estate.

I am sure this foot-dragging of mine to allow Jim to finish did not put me in good stead with the others. That may have been the year I did not get a raise, which could have also been the year of the Tradition label being behind in releases due to mastering problems, and indecision (not mine) about the program of releases, among other bits and bobs so out of my control. However, as label manager, I wore the dark responsibility of it all. 

And I will leave that there.

PS…

Allen Ginsberg was recorded reading ‘Brooklyn Bridge Blues’ at an event Jim produced at New York’s Town Hall, though, as you hear on the album, he let it be known to the audience that the last chorus of that ‘pome’ didn’t fax on through. Since it was not recorded, and not recorded by Jim with anyone else during the production of the release, there was to be a mystery of how that one would end up lingering in the minds of the listener. 

That is until Eric Andersen called me one day and wanted in on the recording. If you don’t know, Eric was of that early generation of singer/songwriters who burst from Greenwich Village, young enough to be directly influenced by the Beats: Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil, Bob Dylan, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and on. Eric hopped on freight trains, rode the rails, and busked on the streets. He was no present-day wannabe, he was the real deal.

Eric told me was in New York and had his DAT Recorder ready to read anything. I told him we were overfilled. By then, Jim and I were discussing which tracks to cut and which we would push, sadly, over to be bonus tracks for a deluxe Japan-only release. But then I remembered we had ‘The Brooklyn Bridge Blues’ cut short without an end. Sampas got Eric Chorus 10, and he headed to the bridge and read the last bit of Kerouac's blues as the traffic rumbled and the East River flowed underneath.

And there it is. Last on the track listing.

Now, go and check out all the rest of the tracks on that release. And the booklet! While Kerouac was the draw for all the readers, Jim did an incredible job pulling it all together, including the archival photographs by Allen Ginsberg. 

This tribute should have, at least, been nominated for a Best Spoken Word album Grammy, but back then there were only five slots available. The Grammy voters were not going to consider anything less than a full-on reading of a book and that’s how the nominations went: Maya Angelou for Even the Stars Look Lonesome, Jimmy Carter for Living Faith, Walter Cronkite for A Reporter's Life and Jodie Foster for Contact, with Charles Kuralt winning with his Charles Kuralt's Spring.

Kicks Joy Darkness was one of those unplaceable releases. That it can't be one thing or another was a strong connection for the audiences we were marketing this toward, but not for any of the movers and shakers who voted for the Grammys. Not fully a music album, not all spoken word, and not even all Kerouac, as Mark Sandman and Morphine handed Jim a tape with ‘Kerouac’, a song with the only Kerouacian text in it being Jack’s family name.

We launched the release of this thing in Los Angeles as Jim finagled Mr. Depp, and his partner, Sal Jenco, to let him have a night at the Viper Room with readings and music. Mr. Depp, though, declined to participate on stage. For my part, I tried to get some of the cast from the television show Friends to read, as I knew the producer, Kevin Bright, through his fandom of FZ. He did ask. One was kinda interested but busy. Another questioned, “Who’s Kerouac?” All said no.

I did get the wonderful Edie Adams to do a reading and, ever the comedienne and in the true wackiness that endeared her to Ernie Kovacs and America in the 1950s, she showed up, jumping up on stage in the attire highlighted across the country in the nightly news earlier that year: black jumpsuits and black-and-white Nike Decade sneakers. Of course, if you weren’t around back in the late ‘90s, you wouldn’t know that was the uniform the Heaven’s Gate cult wore to greet the Hale-Bopp comet through their mass suicide.

What does that have to do with Kerouac? Absolutely nothing. Edie was a treasure, and her late husband, Ernie, had lived the dangerous, adventurous spirit of the Beats; she did too, and they put that into visuals of the early television age. You can buy DVDs on Amazon. Though not the Muriel cigars, Edie, breathless and beautiful, sexed up the commercials for those oblong and smoking objects. How did those ads ever get by the censors?

Also, I had no way to end this with anything more from the party, and my memory is hazy as to what transpired. I was not lucky enough to go out to El-Ay and hob-nob with the famous, and famous adjacent. I was hoping to head out there for the Grammys and the parties for the nominees, and hob-nob with the music elite and elite adjacent, but you know how that went.

See also: ‘Kerouac spoken word classic hits 25’, December 29th, 2022