How exhibition revived Beat fortunes
Twenty five years after touring show we revisit rock's place in the upturn
BACK IN 2012, I had recently been commissioned to write a new title in a series about important places in the history of rock music. I was going to contribute to this ‘Scenes’ collection with a volume on the CBGBs community in Manhattan.
New York, New Wave was intended to explore that extraordinary period between the Mercer Arts Center and the Mudd Club, when that pulsating city was truly at the heart of an explosive moment in our post-war cultural life.
The book was going to trail a potent history that ran from the New York Dolls to Sonic Youth, with Patti Smith, the Ramones, Television, Blondie and Talking Heads in between, and the signature styles they brought to Downtown and the febrile streets of the Bowery, reacting viscerally, sometimes violently, to the fading peace and love years of the hippies.
The jagged spines of punk’s searing attack, the paranoid intensity of the words, were at serious odds with the serene sounds of California which had largely dominated American popular music since the mid-1960s. Dystopia appeared to have drowned the Sunshine State in its rising surf.
But talking of swelling tides, one of the reasons my book never rose from the drawing board was the incredible storm that struck New York City just at the time I was meant to conduct an initial research trip. In the October of my planned visit, Hurricane Sandy washed away my relatively unimportant hopes, not to say the homes and businesses of thousands of city dwellers. And with that calamity disappeared the prospects of New York, New Wave.
I was thinking about these matters because one of the figures I had hoped to contact during my trip was the journalist Glenn O’Brien, a fixture in the various scenes that prospered around New York from the 1970s onwards. He had responded to my request for an interview and my aim was to meet up with him while I was in Manhattan. It never came to pass and, sad to say, it wasn’t so long afterwards, in 2017, that he died. So our paths never crossed.
However, he left a significant legacy of writing on popular culture. An essay of his that caught my eye was the one he contributed on music to a wonderful exhibition catalogue that accompanied an outstanding gallery show called ‘Beat Culture and the New America 1950-1965’ which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art just over 25 years ago before heading to two other venues in the US, in Minneapolis and San Francisco, during 1996.
At the time, the influence and aura of the Beat Generation was perceived to have declined – Kerouac was, of course, long dead and somewhat discredited because of his views in later life, while Ginsberg and Burroughs were ageing icons, their lives entering the final phase, their artistic well, perhaps inevitably, running dry.
But the touring exhibition, one I sadly enjoyed only via the handsome hardback guide (see below) rather than in the flesh, is now regarded as a landmark moment in a Beat resurgence. The pieces on display touched upon writing, naturally, but also the visual arts, photography, cinema and the key soundtracks of the era.
Further, the show appreciated the movement’s entanglement with the wider cultural changes that arose during that decade and half, a crucial and broad contextualisation of that subculture’s effect and achievement. It led to both greater understanding of and interest in that groundbreaking milieu: the novelists and poets and the wider circle who shaped those electric years.
But it is pleasing to discover, in the words of the late O’Brien, the extraordinarily eclectic span of music-makers he connects to the Beat impulse and who would carry the spirit of the literary movement way past mid-century and on into the new millennium: Dylan and Thelonious Monk, the Fugs and Q Tip, Mac Rebennack and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ornette Coleman and Bootsy Collins, Keith Richards and Kurt Cobain, Van Morrison and Sade, and a mind-spinning host of others.
Plus those very proto-punks and new wavers Glenn and I might well have discussed if our face-to-face hook-up had ever happened: Lou Reed, John Cale, Iggy Pop, David Johansen, Lydia Lunch, the Lounge Lizards, John Lurie among them. The beat, to paraphrase the title of his catalogue chapter, certainly went on.