Live review #4: Holly George-Warren

Kerouac meets Joplin in museum gathering

Holly George-Warren, Beat Museum, San Francisco, November 10th, 2024

By Jonah Raskin

‘TAYLOR SWIFT probably wouldn’t do what Janis did – go on the road as a hitchhiker,’ Holly George-Warren said at the Beat Museum in San Francisco on a Sunday night in November, just five days after Donald Trump was elected president of the US.

She was of course talking about Janis Joplin, not Janis Ian who arrived on the music scene soon after Joplin died of a heroin overdose in Los Angeles at the age of 27. George-Warren probably knows as much if not more than anyone else in America about the rock’n’roller from Port Arthur, Texas, who took the world by storm with her booming voice and her ability to sing the blues as though they were her birthright.

Born in 1957, the year On the Road was published and the same year of the infamous ‘Howl’ trial, George-Warren noted in an email to me, ‘I guess I was a Beat wannabe and a hippie wannabe. I was politically very lefty, too, though I don’t really like being labeled. I guess I now consider myself a boho. I'm proud to be featured in Ann Powers’ book Weird Like Us, and I’m proud to have co-written The Road to Woodstock with Woodstock promoter Michael Lang.’

She’s also proud of her own work, which has brought her international acclaim, notably as the author of Janis: Her Life and Music, the editor of the Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, a contributor to Kerouac on Record and the author of books about the blues, punk and country and western.

George-Warren is currently on the road herself conducting research for a biography of Jack Kerouac. ‘I’m crawling along,’ she told the audience at the Beat Museum. The working title for her biography is ‘Jack Kerouac: An Artist’s Life’, which suggests that she doesn’t think of the author as ‘an angel-headed hipster’, a ‘desolation angel’ or the ‘King of the Beats’. The time seems right to think of Kerouac as an artist, not as a ‘lonesome traveler’, as he called himself.

Pictured above: Author Holly George-Warren at the Beat Museum event. Image, Jonah Raskin

George-Warren’s talk was billed as ‘Jack and Janis’, not an odd couple but rather a couple of like-minded Americans. She devoted the first third of her talk to Janis, the second third to Jack, and the final third to a comparison of the two creative giants. ‘Janis found herself in San Francisco,’ George-Warren said. ‘Kerouac had a love/hate relationship with the city. They both had terrible addictions and they were both slammed by the media.’

Of course, Janis read Jack and was moved by his work profoundly and deeply enough to go on the road in search of roots music and adventures.

‘I wish I could write my Kerouac biography in three weeks,’ George-Warren said. ‘But it will likely take me as much time as it really took Jack to write On the Road and with as many drafts and different versions.’ She added that it will be ‘tricky’ to write her biography of Kerouac, though she also admitted that she feels at home and comfortable writing biography.

‘Jack is so complicated,’  she explained. ‘He had sex with men, but covered it up. Also, he’s so negative about the beauty of Big Sur, and at the end of his life he reverted to the conservatism of his father. He became reactionary.’ George-Warren described Kerouac as ‘a terrible father’ but added that he encouraged his daughter Jan ‘to explore the world’ and that he pushed Joyce Johnson, one of his lovers in the 1950s, to break free of ‘the repressive atmosphere around her and to become a free thinker.’

Both Jack and Janis grew up in tyrannical cultures, George-Warren explained: Joplin in Texas and Kerouac in Catholic working class Massachusetts. They both liberated themselves. George-Warren’s message or take away to the audience seemed to be that if Jack and Janis could free themselves from the restrictive environments in which they were born and raised, American citizens in the twenty-first-century could find ways to be creative despite the cold cultural climate in the age of Donald Trump.

Pictured above: Beat Museum co-founder Jerry Cimino and Holly George-Warren

George-Warren seems to have advantages that other Kerouac biographers didn’t enjoy. For one thing, she has the full cooperation of Jim Sampas, Literary Executor at the Kerouac Estate, and with the understanding that she has the freedom to say whatever she has to say without interference or censorship. Also, she will have access to material that other biographers have not seen. 

She said that she plans to write extensively about Kerouac’s French-Canadian roots and to explore the possibility that Jack suffered from head injuries sustained while playing football that might have shaped his dark state of mind. Also, she wants to reach young people in their teens and twenties – some of them Swifties – who are just beginning to discover Kerouac’s work and his Beat brothers and sisters..

The majority of Kerouac’s biographer and critics – Ellis Amburn, Jim Christy, Tom Clark, Barry Gifford, Lawrence Lee, Tim Hunt, Dennis McNally, John Montgomery, Gerry Nicosia, John Leland, Paul Maher, Matt Theado and Steve Turner – have been men. Isn't it time for a woman with a track record as a stellar biographer and with a rich background in music to join the crowded field of guys and to expand the field of vision?   

Jerry Cimino, who founded the Beat Museum with his wife Estelle in 2003, played host and introduced George-Warren to a lively audience who rocked the house. At the cash register, Brandon Loberg sold copies of Janis and the Rolling Stones Book of the Beats.

City Lights Bookstore, which is catty-corner to the Beat Museum, still identifies itself as a home of the Beat Generation writers, but the publishing arm of the store now puts into print a wide variety of authors from around the world and from under-represented groups in the USA. The Beat Museum has become the go-to destination for fans of the Beats and a landmark cultural institution in the city.

Cimino gifted George-Warren with two historic posters and explained that he and the Beat Museum planned to open a counterculture museum in San Francisco. There’s no better place in the USA for that kind of museum, except perhaps the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of the birthplaces of the hippies who were the children of the Beats and the parents of the punks. ‘There’s a real continuum,’ Cimino said. He had only to look out at the faces in the audience to appreciate the truth of his own remark.

See also: ‘Twenty five years on for Beat/rock classic’, November 7th, 2024