The many sounds of On the Road
Kerouac's most famous book is obviously first and foremost a written text. But the refrains of music ripple through its rolling adventures and there are other songs and scores to consider
JACK KEROUAC was an obsessive writer, a driven witness to a life of adventure and exploration, romance and roistering, indulgence and meditation, great friendships and famous fallings-out, reporting on, even creating, a sequence of high-octane dramas that would feed the novelist’s hunger to re-create events on the pulsating page.
He was like the prose cinematographer of his own existence, scribbling energetically in pocket notebooks, rattling the keys of an Underwood with his phenomenal typing speed, chatting frenetically and self-reflectively to his own rapt party crowd until dawn arrived. And those around him noticed also his phenomenal recall. One of his best biographies, by Gerald Nicosia, was even titled Memory Babe.
In the process, he produced a body of fictionalised autobiography that he hoped would stand with, even exceed, the Parisian observations and obsessions of Marcel Proust. Ultimately, Kerouac did produce a sequence of self-portraits that did almost rival Remembrance of Things Past, even if, sadly, some sections of his voluminous and volatile life never quite made it to the Duluoz bookshelf.
Along the way, he tried every which way to make his picaresque stories more interesting, more groundbreaking, more challenging, to the literary conventions of the time. He had already committed, in 1944, via the New Vision, a blood-brotherly arrangement sealed with Ginsberg and Burroughs, to produce art that was fresh and novel.
For the 25 years after that unholy writ was signed in a shared, down-at-heel Manhattan apartment, Kerouac, to early death in 1969, was true to its experimental manifesto. As Steve Turner pointed out in another biography Angelheaded Hipster, the writer was inspired by the innovative extemporisations of saxophonist Charlie Parker and his stunning bebop bravado, the trance writing of Yeats and the action painting of Jackson Pollock.
Along the way there was stream of consciousness and automatic writing, spontaneous prose and sketching, sometimes linked to the influence of another accomplished saxman Lee Konitz. There was typing on a giant teletype roll so that his thoughts would not be interrupted by over-frequent paper changes. Plus there was the application of radical, multimedia methods as transcriptions of taped conversations were incorporated into the other version of On the Road, the posthumously published Visions of Cody.
And there were also the hundreds of verse choruses of Mexico City Blues which were meant to echo the breath expressions of a jazz horn solo, not to mention the entrancing, near mystical, attempts to capture the raw and urgent sounds of the sea in a series of short poems in Big Sur.
But if words were his principal medium, the backdrop of musical sound, as we can see from many of the examples above, was never far from his lived and artistic experience, often present in the stories he later relayed to us.
As a new edition of On the Road appears, a smart clothbound version issued to commemorate his imminent centenary, it got me wondering about the range of songs and symphonies, the hit tunes and the ballads, the backwoods country ditties and the Broadway boogie, which turn up in his signature 1957 classic.
Pictured above: The centenary edition of Kerouac’s On the Road, to be published by Penguin on March 3rd, 2022
A great place to start is an essay by veteran Beat commentator Jim Burns whose article ‘Jack Kerouac’s jazz scene’ first appeared in 1983 but was resurrected in the collection Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack from 2018.
British poet and editor Burns is a prolific writer on literature and art, but it is rare that his lifelong love of American jazz doesn’t flicker its presence in his measured histories and astute reviews. It is the sound of the 1940s and 1950s that really gripped his imagination as a young man and continues to inform his opinions and passions six decades down the road.
He tells us that the Kerouac novel makes references to records that jazz fans of the late Forties period would have been familiar with, ‘among them Billie Holiday’s “Lover Man”, Lionel Hampton’s “Central Avenue Breakdown’ and Red Norvo’s “Congo Blues”, the latter featuring Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.’
Other key citations involve Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray’s legendary tune ‘The Hunt’, which Dean Moriarty – Neal Cassady, of course – and Sal Paradise – Kerouac’s cipher – dance to on a visit to relatives in Virginia, the sighting of the sightless pianist George Shearing on their exuberant travels and the nightclub encounter when Slim Gaillard thrills the two buddies with his stage R&B renditions and his outrageous hip lingo.
But if the very pages of On the Road have significant connection with the sounds that Moriarty and Paradise hear on car radios and on jukeboxes, in clubs and concert venues, there are other kinds of score that provide a sonic dressing to this extraordinary and explosive tale of fraternal discovery.
When Walter Salles finally came to film the novel in 2012, the movie received some mixed responses: how could that erratic series of life-altering odysseys be effectively distilled into a couple of hours of celluloid? Yet the soundtrack, a combination of library music of the times and an original body of composition by the brilliant Gustavo Santaolalla, aided by Charlie Haden and Brian Blade, was, in my opinion, a triumph.
Pictured above: Walter Salles’ movie version of On the Road came out in 2012. It featured a score by the Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla
As I said in my own book Text and Drugs and Rock‘n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture in 2013, the year after the movie’s theatrical release, the soundtrack ‘is a production that eschews the predictable devices and skips the clichés: it could after all simply have drawn on the existing cues in the novel as its main template. Instead it uses some of those hooks but finds others and, if it doesn’t entirely respect historical accuracy at all times, that is perhaps a pedantic reflection we can rise above.
‘Ultimately, I feel this album melds its own impressionistic, indeed plausible, portrait of the excitements and temptations, the rigours and the regrets, of these restless travellers and in […] Santaolalla’s original score – an eclectic and engaging affair which draws on different tempos and textures and a sonic palette that is far from predictable – possesses a set of sensitive tone poems to which we can, and will, return.’
Then there is another kind sound accompaniment to the original novel: the song of the same name which Kerouac wrote and recorded in the early 1960s. This ghostly folkloric musing, drawing on a hobo lament in the book, later appeared in its bare bones on the CD Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road in 1999. But its pairing, by producer Jim Sampas, with a new swamp blues version of the same piece by Tom Waits and Primus – a throbbing, thrusting, indeed thrilling reinterpretation – was inspired.
So, there are various ways which we can think about the manner in which Kerouac’s always exploratory word games and vividly descriptive snapshots, arranged here as a full-length novel, have been given musical clothing. There is little doubt, let’s say no doubt, that the story he conceived between 1946 and 1950, wrote up in 1951 and finally published six years later has its own harmonies, melodies and rhythms built into a quest of visions pursued and freedoms sought that continues to have a powerful resonance, an enduring beat, almost 65 years after it was first published.