FEW PEOPLE personify the crossover of rock music interests and Beat Generation passions better than Denver’s Mark Bliesener, a man who has been energetically vaulting those imaginary barricades for some decades now.
In Beat circles today, he is probably best known as one of the key organisers of the annual ‘Birthday Bash’, an always lively knees-up which commemorates the birth, on February 8th, 1926, of Neal Cassady, one of the Mile High City’s most famous associates, perhaps Jack Kerouac’s greatest friend and the individual who became the model for his legendary Dean Moriarty character in the novel On the Road.
The ‘Birthday Bash’ has been staged in the Colorado capital since 2009 and has run every year subsequently, 2021 excepted when everything everywhere was, of course, on hold. The occasion features readings, spoken word and music and among those who have taken star billing over the years are the renowned jazz musician and composer David Amram and the poet and politico John Sinclair.
John Sinclair, a White Panther and Beat sympathiser, was one of the most controversial figures in the countercultural upsurge of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In fact, he became sufficiently notorious after a jail sentence following a small-scale drug bust, that John Lennon wrote a song in his name on the album Some Time in New York City.
That said, Sinclair was probably best known at the time as the manager of the proto-metal band the MC5, one of Detroit’s angriest and loudest acts of the day, and it is in this respect that he shares a career overlap with Mark Bliesener.
Bliesener has not only been a working musician – he served time as a drummer in a number of groups but perhaps most interestingly with US garage legends ? and the Mysterians – and also operated as a rock critic but, for many years, he has been a band manager, too. For a significant period he looked after the interests of country star Lyle Lovett, prog rock producer Alan Parsons and numerous other performing outfits.
I first met Bliesener at a Kerouac conference I had co-organised in Birmingham, England, in 2008. The event ‘Back On the Road’ was an academic convention commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first UK publication of On the Road in 1958.
The conference had particular impact because it was linked to the first British exhibition of the extraordinary Scroll, a massive roll of teletext paper, on which the author typed his great work of fiction in an astonishing continuous single stream. When the display was unveiled, Neal Cassady’s wife Carolyn and London Beat poet Michael Horovitz joined the throng on campus.
Some time later, I was co-editing the book Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack with Jim Sampas, the literary executor of the author’s estate, and Bliesener contributed a fine essay ‘Driver: Neal Cassady’s Musical Trip’, a piece contemplating the man’s tastes in jazz, country, R&B and so on. The volume was published in 2018.
My friend was in touch from the States in recent days as he hosted a visit from Cassady’s daughter Jami and her husband Randy Ratto. The couple are on tour presenting examples of Neal’s work – his long-awaited book The Joan Anderson Letter was finally published in 2020 – and other pieces from the family archive.
Jami even has her father’s hammer, one he famously practised his physical fitness routines during the 1960s, particularly while connected with Ken Kesey’s travelling Merry Pranksters during that tumultuous decade. Note the picture below, taken in the Munity Cafe and Bookstore in Denver with Bliesener (right) holding this venerated item, alongside his visitors.
Is it the original? Is it the only one? Says Bliesener: ‘Jami said there were a couple of hammers. This one was given to her by Prankster George Walker several years back.’
Why was a junior wing of the Cassady clan in town? He explains: ‘Knowing there's always a warm welcome waiting for them here in Mile High City, they have packed their pick up truck with their dog, books, merch for sale and folders filled with interesting bits of Carolyn's archives for display and set up appearances at various local bookstores.’
On June 28th, Jami and Randy Ratto will be presenting an afternoon and evening session commemorating Neal and Carolyn at the celebrated Beat Bookshop in Boulder, the town above Denver long-linked to the world of the Beat writers.
There’s actually a town above, Mile High City?