Live review #8: David Amram

Hanging out with a Beat legend

David Amram, Counterculture Museum, San Francisco, October 26th, 2025

By Jonah Raskin

FOR ALL THESE many years, going back to the late 1950s, I have not counted myself a David Amram fan. Bad on me. But I recently became enthusiastic about him and his work and wondered why it has taken me so long to appreciate him. There’s probably nothing to match a live performance to tip the scales in favor of a creative artist who has previously not fully registered on one’s radar.

On a blustery Saturday night, at the Counterculture Museum in San Francisco, before a packed house that included long-time fans, Amram held their rapt attention. With gusto he played an Irish penny whistle and a hulusi, as strange and as wonderful an instrument as I have ever seen and heard. A traditional Chinese woodwind, the hulusi is made from gourds and from bamboo which is used for the pipes. The sound is unearthly and at the same time curiously grounded.

The evening felt like a gathering of the Beat tribe. Estelle Cimino, who came up with the idea for the Counterculture Museum, greeted people with a smile when they arrived. Her husband Jerry, who has been for decades the maestro at the Beat Museum, introduced himself and then turned to Amram and introduced him. Then the next two hours belonged to Amram. At 94, his voice isn’t as vibrant as it once was and his memory is a tad fuzzy at the edges but he still puts his heart and soul into a performance. His daughter was on hand to help when he needed it most.

Perhaps most impressively, he played the keyboards and sang, with genuine feeling, the lyrics to the Woody Guthrie classic ‘Pastures of Plenty’, as timely and as topical today as any protest song from the 1930s and 1940s. Amram seemed to know what the audience had to hear.

Pictured above: David Amram speaks at the Counterculture Museum at the weekend

‘Pastures’ includes the harrowing, haunted lines, ‘It’s a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed/My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road/Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled’. Amram gave the piece a sharp inflection and made it sound as contemporary as any jazz performance today.

As most readers of Rock and the Beat Generation will know, the lives of undocumented field workers in the US are as precarious now as they were in Guthrie’s day, when Mexican laborers without papers were rounded up and transported across the border, without a hearing or a trial. Sadly, much the same happens in Trump’s America.

Fans of Guthrie know that the Depression-era singer-songwriter also memorialized the tragic saga of Mexican immigrants in the tune ‘Deportee’, which describes the crash of an airplane and the death of the field workers on board who were passengers and whose names were not provided in any newspaper account. Guthrie honored their lives and gave them the dignity they deserved.

In a relaxed and convivial manner – he seemed to be enjoying himself and the lively crowd – Amram introduced Robert Frank’s and Alfred Leslie’s 1959 masterpiece Pull My Daisy, the film that features Ginsberg, Corso, Orlovsky, along with the artists Alice Neel and Larry Rivers plus the actress Delphine Seyrig, the Lebanese-born French actress who starred in Last Year in Marienbad and films by Truffaut and Marguerite Duras. In Pull My Daisy she’s only 27 and radiantly beautiful. Casting her was a stroke of genius.

Thanks to Amram’s candid introduction I felt like I was watching the movie with fresh eyes and for the first time though I had viewed it half-a-dozen times. If you haven’t seen it, see it now; if you have seen it, see it again. It’s available on YouTube. Amram explained to the audience at the Counterculure Museum that Ginsberg had already published ‘Howl’, thanks to City Lights’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti who then won the obscenity trial against him.

Frank and Leslie wisely included women and children in their cast. Pablo Frank, Robert’s young son, plays himself. Ginsberg, Corso and Orlovsky play themselves. They don’t seem to be acting though they do ham it up. Amram himself takes the role of Mezz McGillicuddy. He wears several hats.

Kerouac wrote the script, which nods toward Buddhism, baseball, the sacred and ‘secret scatological thought’. ‘You don’t have to go one way or another,’ Kerouac advises. The author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums also provided the improvised narration for Pull My Daisy. The film runs 30-minutes and takes place in a New York apartment during a single winter day.

The place might look ‘dumpy’, Amram explained, but in fact it was ‘an ideal crash pad’. The film begins in the morning and ends in linear fashion later the same day at sunset and with lots of Beat goofiness in-between. Amram provided the memorable soundtrack for the film and played the piano. His quartet contributed some of the music.

In Beat circles today Amram is perhaps best known as Kerouac’s buddy; they performed jazz and poetry together in New York in the 1950s when jazz and poetry were rarely linked. They were ahead of the curve. In his introduction to Pull My Daisy, Amram called it a homemade movie and insisted that it ought not to be regarded as an avant garde work of art.

I think that he protested too much, though his intention seemed to be to democratize filmmaking and to suggest that just about anyone using an iPhone today could make an entertaining and informative half hour movie. Perhaps that’s so, but probably not. Still, what Amram wanted was for younger generations not to be intimidated by the past but rather to carry on the legacy of Kerouac and company.

The two moviemakers filmed the goofy, playful Beats, but they were not goofy or playful themselves. The camera angles, the over the shoulder shots, the close-ups, the editing, the rhythm of the images on the screen and the pacing of the narrative all make it clear that they knew precisely what they were doing and why.

It took real artistry to make a film that seems to be improvised, much as it took Kerouac’s artistry to write novels that seemed to arrive spontaneously on the page. A pair of scenes, which Armam didn’t mention in his remarks, struck me as enigmatic. In one of them, a man makes his hand into the shape of a gun, points it at the forehead of another individual and pretends to pull the trigger. In another, a woman slaps the face of a man, seemingly without provocation. A subtext of violence informs the film. So there’s a bit of noir and mystery on the screen.

Born in Philadelphia in 1930, the same year as poet Gary Snyder, Amram studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, George Washington University and the Manhattan School of Music. He was formally trained but he doesn’t boast his academic credentials or trot out his extensive resume which lists the many stellar musicians with whom he has performed, including Bob Dylan, Thelonious Monk, Patti Smith and others.

‘I’ve learned much of what I know by hanging out,’ he told the crowd at the Counterculture Museum. And we learned a lot by hanging out with him on a Sunday night in October.

Hanging out, or ‘deep hanging out’ as it has come to be known, distinguished the Beats in the conservative, button-down days of the Cold War. Famously, Ginsberg wrote of the ‘angelheaded hipsters’ who ‘poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking/ in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities/ contemplating jazz’.

Surely, David Amram was one of them. He remains an angelheaded hipster and probably deserving of a Pultizer or a Nobel for his achievements as a singer, composer, arranger and conductor of ‘orchestral, chamber, and choral works, many with jazz flavorings’ to quote from his Wikipedia page. Amazingly, well into his nineties, he’s still on the road.