Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll
Page 3
During this very period surrounding the end of the war in 1945, the young men, who would in time comprise the core of the Beat fraternity, were meeting and shaping their literary hopes in New York City. Musically, these tyros were drawn to a new and exciting brand of jazz – the sound of bebop, a style sufficiently radical to resist easy incorporation by the mass media. Its cerebral density, its rejection of accessible melody and standard rhythms, set it apart from jazz’s earlier incarnations – forms such as ragtime and tailgate, then swing – which had, by the 1930s, been gradually adopted and integrated into mainstream popular culture and, as importantly, appropriated and, some would argue, diluted by a generation of white musicians. The big band with its jazz-inspired syncopated tempos provided dance-hall accompaniments and many of the larger ensembles had white leaders, such as Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.
The revolutionary complexity of bebop was a music more of the concentrating mind than the romantic soft shuffle and proved a potent drug to the young Beats; as they shaped their own evolving aesthetic in cafés, bars and late-night conversations,4 they dreamed of producing literary work that was both as thrilling and intellectually stimulating as this mentally invigorating style of jazz, now beginning to attract an admiring, if essentially underground, crowd. Thus the nascent, rebellious words of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs – gestating in their heads, gradually appearing in draft – were comparable, in some ways, to the angular notes, the furious solos, the instrumental duels, that Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk were propagating at venues such as Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem5 during the first half of the 1940s and which the proto-Beats were devouring, with great relish, as listeners. Later writers have compared Parker, Gillespie and Monk to the Beat triumvirate of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Certainly all were large and original talents who pursued their experimental expressions with a rare fervour; two of them died young; four of them became addicts of various kinds – only Gillespie and Ginsberg appeared to escape a period of reliance on drugs or alcohol. Critic Richard Meltzer saw Kerouac as Parker, ‘the meteoric alpha soloist […] blowing chorus after chorus of personal asymmetries into art that was neither happy nor sad’; Ginsberg as Gillespie, ‘self-promoter […] deceptively brilliant under the showman’s spiel’; and Burroughs as Monk, ‘sphinxlike […] deconstructing paragraphs rather than chords’.6 That said, whatever apparent congruencies this pair of creative triangles may have shared, the contrasting power relation between the two sets of trios was unavoidable. While these white university students, graduates and drop-outs, and would-be writers, were lured by the frenetic excitements of black life and, specifically, the energy of a new black art, bebop was at the heart of a marginalised music scene still infused and infected with the pressures, stresses and alienations of pre-Civil Rights days, some two decades before Martin Luther King’s campaigns for equality made its first dents in the superstructure of institutionalised prejudice. Socially, politically and economically disenfranchised, radical black artists like the beboppers used new approaches to music-making to not only make their creative mark but also challenge the codes and expectations of orthodox society. The sounds they made were both personal statements but also provided a critical, if oblique, commentary on the state of the US racial order. As Nat Hentoff commented:
Jazz, after all, is a medium for urgent self-expression, and the young insurgents of the 1940s could no longer feel – let alone speak – in the language of [Louis] Armstrong. Aside from musical needs, the young Negro jazzmen, who at first formed the majority of the modernists, felt more assertively combative about many issues apart from music than did Armstrong and most other Negro jazzmen of earlier generations; and this change in attitude to their social context came out in their music.7
Thus, no matter how intriguing Parker and his fellow instrumentalists were as innovators, they remained caught in the net of an often legalised ostracism based on skin colour. The emerging Beats, meanwhile, were free to taste the exotic fruits of black New York, romanticise them, even over-romanticise them, and then return to the safe haven of white normality. They could, we might argue, choose the deprivations of a bohemian hand-to-mouth existence; their black jazz heroes had many fewer options. It would take essentially until the mid-1950s, around a decade later, for the Beats to see their literary ideas made published flesh and for the novelist and critic Norman Mailer to address some of these racial tensions and social contradictions in his 1957 essay ‘The White Negro’,8 originally published in Dissent, in which the attractions of black subcultural life to the white hipster were investigated.9 In that sense, the Beats were precursors of a later and longer revolution that would see white music fans drawn to subsequent black musical genres such as R&B and soul, funk and hip hop, and the language and lifestyles linked to them, in the decades to come.
There is another chain of connection we might add: an entertaining, perhaps apocryphal story, in which there appears to have been an impressively direct, chronological line joining several phases in the subterranean world of New York City over two decades: Lester Young, the great jazz tenor-man, is said to have turned Kerouac onto marijuana in the 1940s; Kerouac, it is alleged, did the same for a rising, young Manhattan journalist for the New York Post called Al Aronowitz in the 1950s;10 Aronowitz, we are led to believe, did the same favour for Bob Dylan in the early 1960s; and Dylan, soon after in 1964, shared his herbal bounty with a group called the Beatles. In that genealogical track, traced through the New York underground, we see dope – both stimulant of a rising alternative society and badge of social transgression – move, in around 20 years, from the cellars of Harlem to the poets of the Village to the clued-up newspaper folk of mid-town, to the folk singers of Washington Square and on to an upper storey suite of the luxury Hotel Delmonico (today called Trump Park Avenue), a narrative with extraordinary racial, cultural and social mobility at its core, if ever there was one.11
But, to move forward, the link between the Beats and jazz is a subject, quite probably an extended volume, in itself, and this book, while acknowledging the deep importance of that musical style to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and others, is about those other brands of popular musical expression that take hold after the mid-1950s and reach a potent point in their development around ten years on. Jazz, as we have suggested, is an umbrella term covering a multitude of forms – from the Broadway ballad to New Orleans tailgate, the sound of white swing bands to the compelling rhythms of the Latin scene – and bebop, the music forged by Parker, Gillespie and their kin, had a somewhat complicated connection to that generic centre. Bebop was a cerebral mode of expression from the outset, and, arguably the antithesis of a standard mass entertainment model, an outlet sharing more in common with twentieth-century modernism and the contemporaneous, canvas outpourings of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the period – Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman – than a mainstream record-buying, concert-going audience.12 When the Beats chose bebop as a key soundtrack to their personal and artistic lives, they were, in part, attracted by its thrilling contemporaneity, drawn to the flame by its very rejection of convention, elements they hoped that they may, eventually, be able to distil into the lines of an essay, the paragraphs of a novel the stanzas of a work of verse.
The relation of the Beats to the popular musical voices that would rise to a crescendo from the mid-1950s onwards was rather different: in the 1940s, those novelists and poets-to-be sought out jazz and its new breed of inventive purveyors; in the mid-1960s, and in the years that followed, the process would, in the main, be reversed – practitioners of the new rock sounds would tend to seek out the Beats, even if Ginsberg was a frequent catalyst and willing bridge. Jack Kerouac may have reflected on the emergence of a new kind of male star in his 1957 essay ‘America’s new trinity of love: Dean, Brando, Presley’13 and he may even have briefly considered calling his imminent novel Rock ’n’ roll Road14 instead of On the Road, but the Beats would not convene with rock, in any sub
stantial sense, for around a decade, by which time the dance-oriented stylings of the original rock ’n’ roll, a largely teen-targeted music led by Elvis Presley and Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Bill Haley, had been supplanted, certainly from around 1965, by a more mature, socially and politically conscious version, penned and performed most notably by Dylan in the US and the Beatles in the UK, and then scores of others who would aim to follow their lead and join this transatlantic trend.
How may we perceive that rock music was becoming deeper and more serious? In the hands of some of the key, cutting-edge artists, the music was assuming added weight and scope, something that had been quite unexpected of the form when it had initially made its mark in the heart of the 1950s. A decade on, the Beatles and the Beach Boys, both of whom had been willing, just a handful of years before, to replicate the quite primitive sounds and structures of early rock ’n’ roll, started to exploit new studio technologies and production techniques – from stereo to multi-tracking, sound effects to unfamiliar instruments – to create work that moved the popular song into a new and elevated realm and also made the assumption, in part, that the wider palette of their music would be aimed at the album format rather than the singles market, with the extra implication that their audiences would be older and with tastes that were more developed than mainstream radio and the Top 40 could accommodate. In landmark collections such as the Beatles’ Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966) the stakes were raised – there was a hardly concealed, if amicable, contest between the main protagonists, Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson for instance, to out-do the other in this intense, creative head-to-head struggle. Their two groups had that rare ability to move from the commercial – complex, experimental productions such as ‘Good Vibrations’ (1966) and Lennon and McCartney’s double A-sided 45 ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ (1967) were huge popular hits – to longer, sustained compositions on the albums that ran alongside them and asked different questions of the listener. Bob Dylan was embroiled in different strategies – his controversial experiments of 1965, when he moved from acoustic to amplified recordings and performances, never saw him abandon the rough and ready rawness of folk, country or, indeed, rock ’n’ roll. Dylan had stated from the start that his tastes were wide – from Woody Guthrie to Little Richard and Hank Williams – but his desire to produce a sound that communicated authentic emotions rested more on his voice, simple instrumentation and basic arrangements rather than the new tricks of the recording engineer, the swelling arsenal of studio devices and the gloss that technical breakthroughs could add to the process of record-making.
Yet the sound of the new music was not all the audience would hear. Lyrics, too, were gaining in purpose and sophistication – and words, of course, were the same essential raw material of the novelist and the poet as they were of the song-writer. It was on this plane that the literary voices of the Beats and the lyrical spokesman of rock had their most obvious opportunity to share a dialogue. Dylan had been amazing his followers with songs that spilled words, told tales and cast opinions with glorious facility, insight and wit since his earliest recording forays – from ‘Talkin’ New York’ (1962) to ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ (1963), ‘Masters of War’ (1963) to ‘With God on Our Side’ (1964) – and his amplified phase saw few signs that plugging-in would mean he abandoned the central role of the lyric in his work, as ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ (all from 1965) signalled a fresh style, a less direct narrative approach, but no compromise on that alchemic fusing of both musical and lyrical elements. The Beatles, and Lennon for sure, seemed most affected by Dylan’s output as wordsmith. Two pieces principally credited to Lennon, ‘In My Life’ and ‘Norwegian Wood’ (both 1965), are often regarded as early attempts to apply Dylan’s approach to heartfelt slices of autobiography. McCartney’s more objective song-writing mode – frequently adopting the voices of characters other than himself – may have been in contrast to his composing partner’s more earnest pursuit of self-exposure. But it is hard to see how important pieces like the McCartney-conceived ‘Eleanor Rigby’ (1966) could have occurred without Dylan’s adventurous and literate push towards words that transcended common themes of plain and simple love and romance and delved instead into darker, more dramatic and sometimes disturbing places for their inspiration.
Yet if the words of rock songs were being transformed in the middle of this decade – affected by the politics of the day, the loosening stays of sexual liberation or the impact of mind-altering of drugs, for example – it was a gesture by the Beatles, as they released Sgt. Pepper, that changed the playing field crucially. By including a full transcript of the album’s lyrics on the LP sleeve, the group gave their words special and expanded status: no longer were the stanzas and verses mere embroidery to the main tapestry of the musical soundtrack. Instead, they were accorded a stature as a stand-alone text. We might argue that it was at that moment that the lyric-as-poetry debate, one that Dylan had already triggered, was propelled forward significantly. Before that, Dylan had included his own Beat-like prose on several of his sleeves but had eschewed the notion – before and after Sgt. Pepper, in fact – that his words would be displayed in a verbatim way on the album sleeve.15 Yet the Beatles’ decision to do so was hugely influential. Richard Goldstein’s book The Poetry of Rock16 even bracketed an earlier hero of the wordsmith’s art Chuck Berry and Allen Ginsberg together. ‘Berry’, Goldstein said, ‘was sex, speed and see-you-later-Alligator jive. While Ginsberg howled, he rocked. Remembering them both in the cultural hereafter, we will probably dig Ginsberg and dance to Berry’.17 But his volume principally celebrated the latest generation of rock lyrics as legitimate examples of verse in their own right, showcasing work by Jim Morrison and Van Morrison, John Sebastian and Grace Slick, Donovan and Paul Simon, alongside Dylan and the Beatles, their lines and stanzas imprinted on the paperback page to be clearly read, not only listened to. Certainly the collection confirmed a trend and a late 1960s rush of confessional singer-songwriters, largely collected under a new hybrid which had grown out of folk rock, simultaneously assumed the roles of latterday lyric poets, at least in the eyes of those listeners who flocked to devour their work.
From James Taylor to Joni Mitchell and Carole King, Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen, Jackson Browne to Randy Newman, not to mention all four individual members of early supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, from Van Morrison to Cat Stevens and Elton John (even if his words were penned by Bernie Taupin) and many more besides, these singers privileged the popular lyric in a way that it had not been positioned before Sgt. Pepper’s eye-catching packaging, words and all, changed the rules of the game. Folk, in the first half of the 1960s, may have valued the messages of its words, but the crowd of new singer-songwriters possessed an appeal, a sensitivity, a directness, that transcended the earnest broadside style of their socially conscious, acoustic predecessors. Stokes explains the term singer-songwriter: ‘The term is something of a catch-all, designed to include anyone who in an earlier era would likely have been called a folkie […] write his or her own songs, and perform them in a way that implied the lyrics were more important than (certainly) the beat and (maybe) the melody.’18 But Maslin personalised and humanised this phenomenon. ‘What was most important […] was presenting one’s musical persona with a persuasive semblance of straightforwardness and simplicity’ often employing ‘the sheer allure of personality’.19
The words these songwriters conjured were no longer regarded as detached celebrations of or commentaries on love or loss but, rather, fragments of an artist’s private life laid bare. Whether it was James Taylor’s stay in rehab – hinted at in ‘Fire and Rain’ (1970); Joni Mitchell’s passion for Graham Nash – in ‘Willy’ (1970); Stephen Stills’ mourning for lost love Judy Collins – in ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ (1969); or David Crosby’s tragic hymn to the assassinated Robert F. Kenned
y – ‘Long Time Gone’ (1969) – there was a powerful sense that the stories being related were an open window into the crises, the crushes and concerns of these composer-performers. Whether these were always personal exposés, or not, barely mattered; it was the perception that counted. Such understandings and interpretations echoed themes at the heart of the Beats’ own revelations, so often based on actual experience and all the more credible and convincing for that. We might argue that in the hands of Kerouac, Ginsberg and their fellow travellers, the novel and the poem distanced themselves from what we had, previously, described as fiction; the new singer-songwriters distanced their songs from fiction, too, cladding their melodic stories in more than a layer of felt life.
So, in the wake of the Beatles’ decision to include a lyric sheet, the printed words became a central part of the album experience with that strong suggestion that the words had value in themselves, could be enjoyed separately from the music they accompanied, and had, by clear implication, poetic qualities of their own. Whether this was true or not – and Dylan would long continue to attract serious analysts who saw poetry in his lyrical art20 – rock’s words were regarded as far superior to the bubblegum banter of assembly-line crafted pop songs. And in time, many of the acclaimed artists’ words would be promoted further, appearing in anthologised book-form, much like poetry collections in fact.21 This foregrounding of popular music’s words was a further sign of rock’s claim to share messages, even manifestos, which went well beyond the tittle tattle of adolescent courtship. By doing so, rock marked out its territory as a serious and substantial form, and one with literate intentions. Many of the Beats found this development appealing because they admired the aims of the project – the dissemination of often challenging ideas through an innovative medium to large audiences – and could see ways in which their poetry – personal, political and often proselytising – might benefit from a friendly association with the potent momentum of rock and its leading lights. It is perhaps not without irony that as the rock lyric escaped its musical bonds, a number of the Beat writers, in the years that would follow, would see their poetry, even their prose, enveloped in a musical wrapping. As rock moved closer poetry, so would literature move closer to rock.