Last Gathering at 60: Making meaning

How misnomer sparked artistic launchpad

LAST GATHERING? This term to categorise the December 1965 assembly of poets and novelists, painters, musicians and actors, was the subject of dispute before the fixative on the photographic film that framed this carnival crowd outside City Lights in San Francisco had even dried.

Young photographer Larry Keenan, who famously hurried to the scene alongside his student friend and fellow lensman Dale Smith encouraged by their supporter and mentor Michael McClure, promptly claimed – and why should this young man make it up? – that Lawrence Ferlinghetti the poet and bookshop owner, MC of the occasion, had somehow declared this moment ‘the Last Gathering of the Beats’.

Yet there was a almost immediate disagreement because Ferlinghetti quite speedily claimed he hadn’t said such a thing. It could have been part of a Dadaist/Surrealist jaunt that he and other poets entered into that day – think of the store proprietor himself garbed in North African dress and publisher Andrew Hoyem arriving uninjured on a hospital gurney – so maybe off-the-cuff descriptions were just part of the chaotic fun.

Plus there are other arguments to put: how could this be such a Last Gathering when, even if a quorum Beat writers had shown up, it could hardly be designated as such if Kerouac and Burroughs and Cassady and Corso were nowhere to be seen. The numbers were quite impressive but they were still depleted in terms of count and star power.

So, Last Gathering could be a misnomer, deliberately misleading, irritatingly disorientating. Especially if you take into account the longer sweep of history, for we might easily consider a number of other ticks in the subsequent dateline challenging the notion of what remains a disputed naming on the forecourt of City Lights 60 years ago.

Of what am I thinking? Well, the 1982 Boulder Kerouac conference. Or the congregation in Lawrence, KS, in 1987. Or the 1994 ‘Beats and Other Rebel Angels’ summer session at Naropa in Boulder. Or the group who turned out for the opening of the major Beat exhibition at the Whitney in New York in 1995, a touring show which hit two further prestigious museum venues and which arguably helped cross-nation to restore those writers’ slightly slipping reputations just a couple of years before Ginsberg and Burroughs both died.

However, whatever happened on that rainy Sunday on Columbus, that late 1965 winter’s day, whatever we call the occasion, I would certainly argue that this was a pivotal moment in the way subterranean art and the new popular music cross-fertilised, embodied by the radical poets, of course, and the presence of rock’s newly anointed godhead.

Dylan was in the Bay Area for his controversial electric concerts not yet a half a year on from his Newport showdown with the folk establishment. Mixing with this brotherhood of dangerous versifiers was merely adding to his outlaw kudos – though, as we know, he didn’t go so far as to join the three-deep literary ranks outside the bookshop for the photographic record for reasons we will explore.

Nonetheless, it does feel as if a symbolic pact was forged: the countercultural baton was past from the writers of the ‘50s to a fresh, transatlantic wave of intelligent rockers, those artists resisting the prissy moon-in-June pleasantries of the Top 40 ballad and substituting a style that was personal, provocative and political, who would dominate for the rest of the decade and very much beyond.

One thing Dylan was planning to do was utilise images from this hipster parade for the cover of his next record release – Blonde on Blonde, the first rock double album – which would come out to great acclaim during the subsequent year of 1966. In the end, that pictorial approach was nixed and a quite separate portrait by Jim Marshall, also present at the Last Gathering event, would provide the main image on a groundbreaking song collection.

But enough description and speculation from me. Rock and the Beat Generation has invited an entertaining and insightful battalion of writers, critics and commentators to share their views, in a variety of voices, on the Last Gathering Beats and its importance – or otherwise – to its main protagonists, most specifically to Ginsberg and his immediate circle and Dylan in his role of ascending figurehead of a sonic and societal renaissance…

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Kurt Hemmer, secretary of the Beat Studies Association and co-creator with Tom Knoff of the film Keenan

I suspect the meeting between Dylan and the Beats was not as big a deal as we now view it. In hindsight we can see it as symbolically passing the torch of cultural influence from the poets to the musicians, which then and later would include the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground, and many others. Dylan claimed that he felt he fit right in with the Beats, and I see his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature as the great affirmation of the Beat Movement.

I don’t see this event as a kind of epitaph for the poets, several of whom that were present continued to produce work into the 1990s and beyond, but as a celebration of literary influence – the first avant-garde movement to morph into a pop phenomenon.

My understanding is that Dylan did not participate in the group shot because he did not expect the event to get so big with multiple uninvited photographers. Dylan is a much more private person than most celebrities, especially the camera-hungry, fame-hungry media stars of today.

I don’t think the event had any particular influence on Dylan. The event did make it clear to Dylan fans where one of his sources came from.

I think the Beat writers, particularly Ginsberg, were happy to have Dylan in their ranks. To some degree Dylan became Ginsberg’s new favorite poet for a time, replacing Kerouac and Corso. Gregory Corso was jealous of the attention Ginsberg gave to Dylan. For Corso, the pop musicians who were heirs of the Beats were the Golden Calves.

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A. Robert ‘Bob’ Lee, author of The Beats: Authorships, Legacies

That December 1965 image, the standing and sitting crowd in front of City Lights, is by now indeed a kind of icon.

You know probably better than anyone how Dylan/Robertson/the Band and Beat overlap and inter-act.

But the group shot has always struck me as a kind of West Coast literary conclave, San Francisco’s we-are-here as against all the other 1960s avant-guard/countercultural groupings – Black Mountain, the New York poets, the Confessional line, etc.

With Ginsberg, despite his NJ/NY credentials, the kapelmeister Ferlinghetti as publisher impresario, and the likes of Orlovsky, McClure, Kaufman, Brautigan, etc as stalwarts. Don’t know what this all did to or for Dylan.

But I think it gave added confidence that Ginsberg and co,. were indeed part of a shared larger US literary-cultural seam, a creative resistance army as it were with City Lights (backdrop and store) its literal as well as figurative signage. So methinks.

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Charles Plymell, poet and author of Over the Stage of Kansas: New and Selected Poems, 1966-2023

The photo of several in front of C.L. was pre-Dylan in 1963. Ginsberg didn’t know of him until I played Ginsberg Dylan’s 1st album at our flat on Gough St. He was unaware of D’s fame then & listened to his copied Woody Guthrie voice without much comment.

In one of the Scorsese docus, Allen said Plymell turned him on to Dylan, but he said that was at Karen’s house in Bolinas. That’s incorrect. We did go her her house later with Neal driving.

When Dylan came to town, Allen said he was going to Clty Lights, etc. because that photographer (I forget his name) was taking photos. I told him I didn’t wan’t to go if Dylan was there & I had no interest in Dylan.

Part of that came from Allen & my et. al. visit with Joan Baez at her Carmel Ranchero talking about Vietnam protests. Dylan had no draft card to burn.

One of the C.L. photos was taken by me if it had my girlfriend Ann Buchannan in it. If I’m in it Ann took it.

She joined the Warhol Factory when I took her to NYC & is on YouTube in Warhol’s ‘Ten Most Beautiful Screen Test’. She later went with Malanga & Miles et al (that was just the ‘M’s’).I have those two group photos in front of C.L. somewhere.

Another group photo at Allen’s farm in Cherry Valley is in publication at 25 Gallery in Cherry Valley. There is another photo of large crowd in front of C.L. taken before I got there. It has my Wichita friend, Bob Branaman it. His grandson Adian might have it. It wasn’t a ‘Last Gathering’ though.

I have zero interest in creep Dylan; he stole my Nobel.

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Steven Taylor, writer, musician and Allen Ginsberg’s long-time guitarist

– What did this meeting of Dylan, Robbie Robertson and the Beats represent?

I think that at the time, the gathering represented the culmination of a series of events surrounding the five shows Dylan played in Berkeley that first week of December ‘65.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg had the idea to arrange a ‘reunion’ of two dozen friends who had participated in the 1950s North Beach scene that had launched the Beats. Ferlinghetti envisioned recreating old photos from the 1920s of the Paris Surrealists similarly gathered, and he told people to dress colorfully.

He posed in profile in a Moroccan hoodie, one guy posed on an ambulance cot, another attempted to arrive on horseback but was kept away by city traffic. Someone pulled an alarm and summoned the fire brigade – Dada affects!

Dylan had arrived in town on December 3rd for a series of concerts and Allen saw him every day. He gave Allen 30 tickets for his concert of Saturday, December 4th at the Berkeley Community Theater, and Allen invited Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Ken Kesey and others, including some Hells Angels.

Afterward, there was a party with Dylan, Joan Baez, and members of the Hawks (afterward the Band) at painter Robert LaVigne’s studio.

According to McClure, at the party, he, Ginsberg and Dylan had the idea to do a photo shoot for Dylan’s forthcoming Blonde on Blonde album, to coincide with the next day’s gathering at City Lights. McClure was then teaching at the California College of the Arts, so maybe it was he who arranged for students Larry Keenan and Dale Smith to photograph the group.

– Was it a kind of epitaph to the poets?

‘The Last Gathering of the Beats’ was the title Larry Keenan gave to his big group photograph but, as Ferlinghetti later pointed out, it was hardly the last gathering. They were all still relatively young, with many gatherings to come, and some key figures – Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac – were absent.

Also, many, if not most, of the writers present (including Ferlinghetti) would not have identified as ‘Beats’. Strictly speaking, Ginsberg may have been the only Beat in attendance. However, Ferlinghetti did later note that the occasion represented the end of an era.

The idea that the event represented a changing of the guard from the poets to the rockers is of course retrospective, since it wasn’t until the following year that the Haight-Ashbury scene and psychedelic rock began to signal a shift in the culture.

– Why do you think Dylan declined to be part of the famous group shot outside the shop?

He was besieged by fans and had to flee. McClure recalls that he, Robbie Robertson, and Dylan hid in the shop’s basement, ‘and when the people started to break the door down we climbed out a window and ran down the alley’, where Ginsberg, McClure, Dylan and Robertson posed for the smaller group photo that finally appeared in the booklet of the CD set Bob Dylan Live 1966, The Royal Albert Hall Concert.

– What impact did the event have on Dylan?

I imagine it must have been a bust for him. He had encountered the Beats as a student. Decades later, he told Bono that Howl and Other Poems ‘was a book that changed me’. In his Chronicles, he says that in ’61, as he was preparing his first album, the radio was sadly void of the new life envisioned by Ginsberg and Corso.

He thinks of himself as a poet, so the opportunity for an album cover photo to locate him in the Beat and Surrealist lineage must have been very appealing and the fan hysteria ruining the occasion must have been disappointing.

– What impact did it have on the Beat writers?

Well, if Allen’s later recollections of befriending Dylan were accurate, Allen had already decided that Dylan was the inheritor of the Beat mantle. Dylan was the new songster who would take the Beat vision to the masses. Quite apart from his work, the writers must have been impressed with the level of Dylan’s fame.

We must remember what an odd and powerful phenomenon he was in those days. He changed the whole field. I would add that Allen was always attracted to and fascinated by fame, and when the fab famous happened to be attractive young men, he was a goner.

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Tosh Berman, writer and memoirist, author Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World

– What did this meeting of Dylan, Robbie Robertson and the Beats represent?

At the time, Robbie Robertson wasn’t a key person in this world.
Perhaps to Dylan, but I can’t imagine to the Beats. Beyond that, I
think it is the first time a pop star, who is also a poet, or has
poetic qualities, and famous, is connected to a literary group of
writers. I feel the Beats’ meetings with Paul Bowles, Celine, and Ezra
Pound are way more important than for them to meet Dylan. But for the
general rock’n’roll fan, it was probably a good introduction to the
Beat era generation.

– Why do you think Dylan declined to be part of the famous group shot
outside the shop?

– What impact did the event have on Dylan?

I don’t think it had an impact on him. I think him meeting Woody had a
significant impact on him, or even meeting Johnny Cash, or Liberace –
but the Beats, no. I think he admired them, but beyond that they did not a huge
impact on him or his music.

– What impact did it have on the Beat writers?

Being connected to someone great, and younger, with a teen audience at
the time, I’m sure that was impressive for Allen or Michael. For
example, Michael’s friendship and support for Jim Morrison – a
wonderful rock performer and writer, but poet?? Allen went out of
his way to locate younger poets or musicians – for example, the Clash.
And I think the Clash romanticized the Beats, more than Dylan did.

I didn’t know the City Lights photo was going to be on Blonde on
Blonde. That’s very interesting, but also makes sense. I think Dylan
wanted to be, with respect to the Beats, a safe distance from them.

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Steve Turner, journalist and author of Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster

– What did this meeting of Dylan, Robbie Robertson and the Beats represent?

Symbolically it looked like a handover from poets to rock musicians but it wasn’t planned as such.

– Was it a kind of epitaph to the poets?

I believe the get together was happening anyway and Dylan decided to show up.

– Why do you think Dylan declined to be part of the famous group shot outside the shop?

I’m sure he realised that the symbolic value of him standing with the greats of Beat poetry was powerful whereas it would be diluted if he was just one among a group. In ‘63 and ‘64 he benefitted from being seen (and photographed) with Ginsberg but later it became more beneficial for Ginsberg to be spotted with Dylan.

– What impact did the event have on Dylan?

Not much but in the eyes of fans and commentators it might have given him some legitimacy to be seen associating with celebrated printed word poets.

– What impact did it have on the Beat writers?

I know McClure said that around this time he realised that Dylan was serious competition. If the event hadn’t been photographed, it would hardly be talked about, but seeing the old guard and the new guard in the same frame produced a powerful image. Larry Keenan spoke to me about the day and he was asked to take shots that might be appropriate for Dylan’s forthcoming album. As it happened none of that day’s shots were used for Blonde on Blonde and he shot new photos with Jerry Schatzberg in NYC in 1966. Perhaps Dylan was already realising that the Beats needed him more than he needed them.

I think Dylan was weary of being part of a group or movement, and also,
when Dylan became famous, the Beats had been around since the 1950s. I
think he felt if anything he was part of something new, and the Beats
were not new at that time.

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Jonah Raskin, author of American Scream and R&BG Chief Book Reviewer

Definitely a good idea for a story. The Six Gallery isn’t the only big Beat event!

My hunch about Dylan is he didn’t want to be associated so directly with the Beats and City Lights. Being photographed with them wouldn’t have helped him or his career. He was willing to be affiliated with Ginsberg and he did go to Kerouac’s grave but aligning himself with the bookstore doesn’t sound like him. Not to me. He would have been lost in the crowd.

What I would like to know is how did this event come about, what was said at the gathering. I wouldn’t call it an epitaph. It was probably meant to show they were still alive and kicking, but I don’t know if that message got across. They had to do something

I noticed that Gary Snyder is absent and so are the two Philips, Lamantia and Whalen and the group is very male heavy, no Nancy Peters and not Joanne Kyger who went to Asia with Ginsberg and Snyder. So this is a photo with a lot of hangers-on, groupies of a sort. Would be useful to say where some of the principal figures went after the shoot…

Also no Bob Kaufman or Ted Joans, so a very white male club…

Ginsberg is at the center of the photo. He was at the center of the Beat thing. But, of course, there’s no Kerouac and no Burroughs.

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Jim Cohn, post-Beat poet and author of Treasures for Heaven: Collected Poems, 1976-2021

– What did this meeting of Dylan, Robbie Robertson and the Beats represent?

A real cultural and literary connection. Dylan wrote in Chronicles that culture is more essential to freedom than the law. These songwriting poets had already taken off by the time the ‘Last Gathering’ photo was shot.

– Was it a kind of epitaph to the poets?

In Michael Schumacher’s excellent work bringing out Allen Ginsberg’s Iron Curtain Journals, Allen talks about taking records by the Beatles, Dylan, and Ray Charles behind the Iron Curtain.

He also talks about a kind of lamentation over the fact that Beat-influenced artists with younger audiences knew all the words to popular songs while theymaybe only knew the first line of ‘Howl’ by heart.

I think most Beat poets realized the rise of popular music culture as some form of a threat to their own performance and book sales.

– Why do you think Dylan declined to be part of the famous group shot outside the shop?

Because the Beats were announcing their own end. Dylan was there to suggest that what comes next is him.

– What impact did the event have on Dylan?

Gave rise to a shooting star. This was a golden PR moment for Dylan. Kids made the connections between the old and new guard.

– What impact did it have on the Beat writers?

I can only imagine if one’s promo suggests a ‘Last Gathering’, then you’re looking back, not forward or to the present.

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David Cope, post-Beat poet and author of Moonlight Rose in Blue: Collected Poems 1971-2024

I was 17 in 1965, collecting Dylan’s records, as yet unaware or Robbie, though, as you may recall, I believe that Robbie had a stellar career as a composer and especially as a lyricist, his role as band leader in the Last Waltz and the first four of his solo albums among my favorites.

All of Dylan’s contribution to the Band’s Basement Tapes were excellent, too. I have all these recordings on USB stick, playing in regular rotation in my car.

As you may know. the only bands I follow religiously are the Stones and Beatles – Paul has emerged recently as a guest artist with many others, including the Stones on their latest album.

When Marianne Faithfull was at Naropa Institute in the 70s, Allen Ginsberg asked her how Jagger composed his songs (he was apparently unaware of Keith’s part in composition), so he was interested in their composition techniques, and of course Paul played bass on Allen’s ‘Ballad of the Skeletons’.

As for ‘the Last Gathering of the Beats’, I have always thought that happened in ‘The Beats and Other Rebel Angels’ summer session at Naropa in Boulder in 1994!

All the surviving Beat poets showed up at that conference, and the place was overrun with an enormous gathering of devotees, yet the air among the poets was palpably the awareness that this was their last time together.

Their performances were stellar – Burroughs, Snyder, Ed Sanders and Ginsberg were as good as I’ve ever seen them, and even Gregory Corso – notorious for his antics on stage – proved at last that he was that generation’s Shelley.

Among the younger poets, I was the only one to have a show reading and I counted myself as lucky in that respect, as there were others who should certainly have joined me..

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Ryan Mathews, Beat essayist who wrote the article ‘Go West, young Beats’ for Beatdom 24: The West Coast Issue:

– What did this meeting of Dylan, Robbie Robertson and the Beats represent?

It represented literally nothing beyond the power of publicity.

Larry Keenan, a 22 year photographer and former student of Michael McClure’s, showed up that day to take pictures of Dylan who was in town to play a concert that night. The shoot was set up through Allen Ginsberg.

Keenan thought he was only taking pictures of Bob, Allen, and Michael McClure. But somehow word of the shoot spread like COVID across North Beach and soon the alley was crowded with poets and other characters.

How did the word spread? Great question. I’ve got no definitive answer. Some believe Ferlinghetti spread it himself. Others credit/blame Allen. Could have been both, or neither. The streets have their own communication system after all.

– Was it a kind of epitaph to the poets?

Absolutely not. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve interviewed two people who were assisting Keenan that day.

One of them, Dale Smith, told me, ‘It sure didn’t feel like we were at the end of anything, but more like in the middle of something, something changing. Ferlinghetti was none too happy that Larry hung that title on his photograph. Larry was just trying to come up with a catchy phrase to promote his photograph, but it really wasn’t the end of anything.’

Therese Chudy was also on the shoot that day. ‘I didn’t think of that as a “Last Gathering” at all. I think Larry might have come up with that title as an afterthought ... it sounds so dramatic. I’m well aware that it didn’t sit well with Ginsberg in particular.’

– Why do you think Dylan declined to be part of the famous group shot outside the shop?

Who can say, besides Bob? My guess is that as the crowd got larger and larger Dylan got less and less interested. He went there to get some pictures with Allen and Michael and all of a sudden he found himself in the middle of a Beat version of a flash mob. According to the people I interviewed, Robbie Robertson really didn’t want to be in the shot either.

– What impact did the event have on Dylan?

I certainly don’t pretend to be a Dylan scholar so I can’t say. I assume he was appalled and just wanted to get away from the crowd. On a visual level, it bonded him to the Beats, where he probably doesn’t belong but which would have made Ginsberg happy. Remember the photo was taken before the Summer of Love so the whole San Francisco countercultural scene was in some pretty dramatic flux.

– What impact did it have on the Beat writers?

Again, I don’t think they thought about it much at all except for Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg who were apparently not happy ‘burying’, a movement they were both profiting from. I mean why would Allen or City Lights have any interest in saying the Beat scene was over?

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K.G. Miles, author of Bob Dylan in the Big Apple, Bob Dylan in London, Bob Dylan in Minnesota

The Beats/Dylan journey and crossover is vitally important to the cultural development of the US.

If anything he Last Gathering of the Beats was a symbolic ending for those particular poets. The energy had gone from the movement and in many ways Ginsberg was handing over the banner to Dylan.

By the time the mid-70s came round and the Rolling Thunder Revue, Ginsberg was no longer a major artist but rather Dylan’s lovestruck fool and as Ginsberg remarks. ‘Important poets such as Peter Orlovsky are merely roadies to rock’n’roll.’

Why would Dylan not take part in the group pic at City Lights? Well, by 1965, he had reached the very end of his interest in being a pinup for the press. His default camera pose had become a perma glare and it remains so to this day.

What did it mean to Dylan? The end of another stepping stone on his rise. Use and discard, repeat.

See also: ‘The Last Gathering of the Beats’, December 2nd, 2025