Obituary #4: Jay Jeff Jones

Writer & editor with wide Beat & music tastes

JAY JEFF Jones, a one-time Californian-based actor transplanted to the UK in the 1960s and a man who took a close interest in Beat Generation matters and the politics of the wider counterculture, has died aged 77.

As a poet, essayist, journalist and editor his focus spanned the Atlantic, with a particular fascination with Jim Morrison and the Doors and the output of Jeff Nuttall, British artist and historian of the underground, and plenty in-between.

I first came across him in the mid-1980s when I was the arts editor of a West Yorkshire daily paper the Halifax Evening Courier covering the area’s culture beat. Jones, by then, was living in Heptonstall, the historic hilltop village where Sylvia Plath is famously buried. He had penned an intriguing play with the entwined themes of rock, fame and death.

Entitled The Lizard King, it concerned the final 36 hours of the controversial Doors lead singer, whose lyrics secured him a reputation as poet and Beat follower, who would die in Paris in 1971. Premiered in New York, Jones’ dramatic work would appear elsewhere with stagings in London and LA.

Pictured above: Jay Jeff Jones

Around 10 years on from our initial encounter, our paths crossed again in 1997 when Kevin Ring, editor of UK Beat Generation magazine Beat Scene, commissioned the two of us to interview and contribute features on a pair of visiting American poets who were on a short, joint reading tour of the North of England.

Jay Jones – he adopted the longer style to distinguish himself from another writer of the same name – looked after Jack Hirschman while I was allocated David Meltzer. It sealed a continuing link between us and confirmed our shared passions for the wider Beat world.

Later he edited the quarterly New Yorkshire Writing and co-curated the exhibition ‘OffBeat: Jeff Nuttall and the International Underground’ at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, which drew over 100,000 visitors, in 2016 and 2017.

Pictured above: The 2018 re-release of Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, co-edited by Jay Jones and Douglas Field

The Nuttall theme was sustained when Jones co-edited a new edition of the poet-artist’s most famous published text Bomb Culture, a remarkable and insightful portrait of the dangerous political tensions and innovative cultural breakthroughs of the Anglo-American 1960s, re-visited and re-issued in 2018.

I also worked with Jones on two specific Beat collaborations in the late 2010s. He wrote a chapter on Jim Morrison for Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack, a 2018 book I co-edited, and the following year was a panellist at Kerouac on Screen, a Yorkshire movie festival I curated, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the US novelist’s death.

Pictured above: Simon Warner, musician and poet Heath Common and Jay Jones at the Kerouac on Screen event in 2019

Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he was born 1946, Jones would study and work with the legendary acting group the Mime Troupe in San Francisco at the height of the Haight-Ashbury boom. While his move to England saw him change tack, the appeal of the artistic life, in all sorts of ways, never dimmed as a worker, promoter and practitioner.

He published his own verse plus essays, reviews and fiction in many magazines and anthologies. Furthermore, he extended his activities into the field of film, recording a series of interviews with Allan Moore, Michael Moorcock and Sara Maitland, the latter with my own partner Jayne Sheridan, plus a screen biog of Colin Wilson.

Douglas Field, who lectures in Twentieth Century American Literature at the University of Manchester, was his long-time friend and the colleague with whom he combined on the Nuttall exhibition and publication. He paid this tribute :

‘Softly spoken and quick to smile, Jay wore his erudition lightly. It was a great privilege to collaborate with him on several Jeff Nuttall projects, including an exhibition, an edited volume of his fiction and the 50th anniversary edition of Bomb Culture.

‘While Jay was friends with mavericks from the transatlantic Underground scene, including Nuttall, Jack Hirschman, Heathcote William and Charles Plymell, these were connections about which he was as knowledgeable as he was humble.

‘A talented critic, poet, and literary historian, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the counterculture of the 1960s. Jay himself was beautiful combination of gentleman and iconoclast, reader and poet. He will be missed deeply by those who knew him.’

Jay Jones leaves Fran, his wife of 60 years, and a son Wes.

Note: There are other obituaries in the pages of Rock and the Beat Generation – ‘Pete Brown: Superstar poet and Cream of the crop’, May 20th, 2023; ‘Beat, Beetles, Beatles: Royston Ellis, dead at 82’, April 1st, 2023; and Michael Horovitz – ‘Farewell child of Albion’, July 8th, 2021