by Simon Warner
This was not necessarily welcomed by all – early popular music historians like Nik Cohn, with typically entertaining hyperbole, accused mid-1960s rock of ‘third-form poetics, fifth-hand philosophies, ninth-rate perceptions’.22 But Pichaske, much more content to use a term like rock poetry, says that ‘twentieth-century poets have had precious little to do with music – at least until Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and the Beats. Most modern poets have discarded the regularities of stanza and meter imposed on poetry by its early associations with music and virtually discarded all vestiges of poetry as an oral art […] Which just may explain why modern poetry has fared so poorly and rock so well, and which of the two is closer to traditional poetic art.’23
But to return to those earlier notions of changing cultural patterns and the onset of a series of increasingly fluid intersections, from above and below, which had been testing the once formidable barricades that had segregated high and low art practices for so long, we may well point to the blurring of those lines in the relationship between Beat and rock as a pertinent example of this phenomenon. In the mid-1960s, as high profile writers and widely recognised popular musicians appeared to identify common interests and a mutual benefit in sharing notes, was this not merely the latest sign of that enduring, but now embattled, artistic order under attack? If that is the case, how might we characterise the key features of this process, this two-way street? We might begin with this premise: that we are identifying the meeting of a recognised literary grouping – essentially well-read, college educated and primarily middle class – with an emerging wave of popular musicians – generally less literate, less educated and often from a lower levels of the class pyramid – and extrapolate to suggest that this is merely the latest symptom of that high-low cultural wall being threatened and even dismantled.
If that is the case, we could perhaps further interpret this phenomenon in two ways: the Beats, many of whom had been the beneficiaries of high-level US educations, often with Ivy League associations,24 and a serious interest in what we might define as elite literature,25 had actually managed to create a body of writing that had the potential to appeal beyond the upper echelons of the academy and the narrow confines of the avant garde. While the Beat writers as a community had a powerful motivation to espouse experiment, they were also committed to work that was either socially relevant, politically aware or explored matters of concern to a contemporary consciousness. In the meantime, emerging rock artists took advantage of the shifting ground in society – with class petrification beginning to melt, not to mention those previously embedded stratifications of religion and race – and their own attendant upward mobility, to make their music and messages more serious, more substantial, more intellectual. Let us not forget, either, that a number of the frontline rock musicians who would engage in these of acts of cultural co-operation had also experienced levels of education that their pre-war equivalents would never have done. For example, Dylan had briefly been a student at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis in 1959 before departing for New York, while Lou Reed attended Syracuse University, New York in 1960 and Jim Morrison studied on the UCLA campus from 1964. In the UK, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards,26 Ray Davies and Pete Townshend, all of whom would connect in various ways with the unwinding literary thread, had attended UK art schools at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the new decade. They would bring their own thoughts and theories – shaped by literary, film and art studies – to the new forum.
It may be proposed then, to put the idea in the most basic terms, that the Beats saw these informal alliances, these arrangements with the erupting rock culture, as an ideal opportunity to share their work with considerably bigger audiences than had enjoyed their output so far. Simultaneously, rock musicians looked upwards and aimed higher, employing the format, power and accessibility of a mass musical form but framing, within their work, serious ideas and even political comment. As the Beats reached out more widely and rock artists raised the bar of their ambition, a meeting of minds and possibilities ensued. For the novelists and poets this was no dumbing down or artistic compromise – their often experimental works of the late 1950s and early 1960s were not adapted or bowdlerised for an expanding readership; democratisation did not imply that this literary art had been watered down in any sense. Rather, rock’s endorsement of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac and others encouraged fans of the great singers and groups of the day to familiarise themselves with Beat literature. If you were listening to Blonde on Blonde or Revolver, you were most likely also intrigued to know what ‘Howl’, Naked Lunch and On the Road may offer by way of background.
The time was also ripe, in other ways, for such integrations to occur. College opportunities had grown in the US in the post-war period and even in the UK there was a gradual rise in university openings for those who came from less privileged backgrounds. A better-educated, young adult population, in that key late adolescent and twenties demographic, was hungry for cultural offerings that provided more heft than the pubescent, romantic doodlings of the singles-based Top 40. Thus notions that popular music may take a grown-up course and reflect that in its lyrics, its music and its broader manifesto – with politics and literate expression both featuring in that scheme – did not seem strange to the new youth and post-youth segment of Anglo-American society.
There were also important industrial and media signals that the change was happening – and quickly. By 1967, the long-playing album had begun to replace the 45rpm single as the principal commercial product of the music business, a sign that rock music had moved into a fresh phase and was aiming its output at new, older and more prosperous demographies. Further the period would see magazine launches responding to and reflecting these transformations. In the US, Crawdaddy27 (1966), Rolling Stone (1967) and Creem (1969) would report the dynamic, and often combustible, mix of new sounds and new ways – from political activism to the rising profile of the drug culture.
Of Rolling Stone, Lindberg et al. comment that ‘with its in-depth articles, substantial interviews and reviews, had succeeded in becoming the authoritative voice on popular music for most of the Western world’.28 Yet, there were quickly interesting tensions about the ideological status of the magazine, most relevant at a time when the counterculture was challenging most establishment positions, and the cultural fluidity of rock’s intertwining with literature was providing an example of radical interaction that tested standard notions of social expectation. ‘The mainstream media and probably part of its readership viewed RS as an underground magazine, but in reality it was planned and has always functioned as a commercial venture’, Lindberg et al. suggest.29
It would take a little longer for the British popular music media to catch up but, by 1968, Melody Maker had trumpeted intentions to add serious coverage of developments in rock music – particularly the emerging progressive rock – to its first-rate treatment of folk and jazz. Says Frith of MM: ‘Its features got longer, the interviews more serious; the core of the paper became the album and concert reviews.’30 In 1973, the New Musical Express, an out-and-out pop paper in the 1960s with few perspectives beyond the singles chart, would shift also and begin a new and successful phase as a commentator on broader socio-cultural happenings – from films to literature – alongside its main focus on rock, with its earlier obsession with pop and the courting of a younger teenage following now shelved. Thus, as the texts covering rock music became more discursive and sophisticated, literate voices, and literature itself as a concept, could be more easily accommodated in the pages of these print outlets but also, therefore, in the minds and imaginations of their consumers.
Alongside more mainstream titles, the underground press in both countries would also play its part in reporting a cultural moment that was able to accept the elision of rock and politics, drugs and literature within its remit, with the Beats enjoying significant recognition, seen as important pieces in the jigsaw of the counterculture. In the US, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts emerged as early
as 1962 while The East Village Other and Berkeley Barb were both founded in 1965. By the mid-decade, Sukenick states, the underground culture was starting to attract a big popular audience. ‘The underground press […] were starting to define a large hip audience. By the end of the sixties, one of the radical underground press-syndication services alone served an audience of twenty million.’31 In the UK, International Times, which became IT after a dispute with the owners of the name of the daily London-published newspaper the Times, premiered in 1966 to be followed by Oz the next year and then Friends, later Frendz, in 1969. Comments Lindberg et al.: ‘The British underground press was, like its American counterpart, passionately devoted to provocation, alternative living and “revolution” in a broad sense.’32
Out of these conjunctions, various significant interactions arose which helped confirm a connection between cutting-edge popular music and accompanying literary forces, with the Beats a regular and prominent factor. Magazines such as Rolling Stone and Creem would provide platforms for journalists with Beat interests like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs and publish emerging writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, as novel and vivid brands of subjective reportage earned the epithets gonzo and new journalism. The British underground press would provide seeding grounds for writers such as Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray and Mick Farren, who would all see rock as part of a wider social and cultural context, and become the banner names of the revitalised New Musical Express. Other scribes on the magazine – like jazz writer Brian Case and punk evangelist Tony Parsons – would show a particular interest in the Beat realm.33 In the US, Ed Sanders’ Fuck You would become a vital and controversial link between the Beats and the new cultural explosion – he would publish Beat writers, promote the new arts and eventually form his own band the Fugs, whose style would be an amalgam of electric rock and polemic folk, subversive politics and radical poetry.34 Barry Miles would play a similar role as connective tissue in the UK. A founding editor of IT, friend of Ginsberg and McCartney and later NME journalist, he would be an energetic promotional fulcrum for a scene where rock music joined forces with a bigger, bolder gathering of ideas and ideology. Miles played a central role in creating the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in London in June 1965 when Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso joined a line-up of British poets – Michael Horovitz, Adrian Mitchell, Pete Brown and others – and an international contingent of readers. He would later commission pieces by Burroughs and Ginsberg for IT and helped to make amicable links between the Beat writers and the British rock aristocracy, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones most notably.35
So, for Ginsberg, McClure and other Beats who joined a caravan that linked rock and literature and identified areas of common interest and purpose, there seemed to be various possibilities at stake: a credibility by association with Dylan, Lennon, McCartney and others and the promise that doors would be open to bigger, younger audiences of listeners and readers. By linking in this manner, the Beats, whose literary output was often quotidian in content and frequently concerned with the experience of the common man, opened up the possibilities of their serious ideas reaching a readership that may otherwise have barely been aware of their existence. Meanwhile, as rock musicians moved above and beyond the traditional materials of the popular song – primarily, the joys and angst of young romance – and into the realm of social and political commentary, raising questions about war, freedom and equality, they were able to feel the validation of poets who had long experience of challenging society’s conventions. This not only provided confidence to songwriters like Dylan and Lennon, then Jim Morrison and Patti Smith, but also dressed their work in a reflected gravity and intellectual respectability. In addition, by connecting with the Beats, Dylan, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, the Doors and others who made their great mark in the mid- to later 1960s, there was the strong sense that these musicians and songwriters were joining forces with or paying tribute to their literary heroes, writers who had inspired them as adolescents in the later 1950s and early 1960s. Dylan’s link to McClure, McCartney’s ties to Burroughs, Jerry Garcia’s connection to Cassady, for example, enabled this younger generation of music-makers to acquire artistic status and a vein of seriousness that popular music alone could not invest in isolation. As we have stated, popular music from the mid-1960s was increasingly a dollar-drenched business as lucrative album sales superseded the far less profitable singles market. However, alliances and friendships with Beat poets brought a benefit that a magnified royalty cheque and a healthy chart position could not confer – cultural capital.
By the mid-1960s, then, the descending horizon of an earlier writing community and the ascending perspective of a new musical grouping had become aligned in a fine example of the Zeitgeist. There were various catalysts required for this experiment to proceed apace: the face-to-face meeting of Dylan and Ginsberg at a house party in New York City in December 1963 was one; Ginsberg’s backstage meeting with the Beatles at a Dylan gig in London in May 1965 was another. But the clearest public sign that this alliance had been made flesh was, as we have described, the Last Gathering of the Beats on that December day in San Francisco in 1965 when singer mingled with poets and novelists in the north Californian rain.
Not all Beats, as we have stated, would identify with this merging of energies and interests – Kerouac would reject the whole premise of the 1960s counter-culture, while Burroughs would be particularly unsympathetic to the peace and love postures of that hippy subculture most connected to the developments in rock music at this time, just as these cross-cultural connections were being forged. But this would not stop rock and its subcultural followings, from then on, identifying with and appropriating Beat ideologies from its figurehead authors. If Ginsberg quickly became a leading countercultural guru, present in person at many of the historical events that marked the testing course of the later 1960s,36 if Cassady became embroiled personally, too, in high profile ways with the social revolution,37 those writers who had attempted to distance themselves from these changes could not disconnect their reputations from the movement’s forward momentum. The spirit of Kerouac, as traveller and seeker after truth, and Burroughs, as a living embodiment of narcotic adventure, would still be adopted as guides and heroes by musicians and their fans alike, even if they, as writers, could find little of value in these alliances and transformations.
We have been discussing, then, a continuing process by which art forms or practitioners from different rungs of the cultural ladder have found common purpose, grounds for agreement or collaboration, in the modern period. What would once have been regarded previously as a strictly high art form – the novel, the poem, maybe the play, the stuff of intellectual fibre – with what has generally been considered a standard bearer of the low arts – the song, the lyric, the tune, and escapist and light entertainment. We might also characterise this binary opposition in other ways – as the cerebral versus the visceral, the mental versus the physical. We have, in addition, invoked issues of education and class to explain the division that had existed between these two particular worlds for much of their development and how, in this instance, that separation between literature and popular music, Beat and rock, had begun to establish a form of resolution by the mid-1960s.
But, then again, we should stress that this specific entente was by no means a one-off in the mid-twentieth century and after. We need to point as well to the rise of a general relativism that infused cultural interpretation in the post-Second World War era, a trend that saw the status of modernism – a radical and experimental period in the visual arts and architecture which stretched from around 1880 to 1970 but was arguably at its height between 1914 and 1950, one that might be further described as the epoch in which the avant garde dominated – gradually eroded by a condition dubbed postmodernity, a development that recognises the decline, the dissolution perhaps, of the high-low divide. This new philosophical critique tended to abandon the old terms of judgement: the regimented idea of good
art or bad art – with the practices of the cultural elite generally linked to the former and the activities of the ordinary and lower tiers of society usually associated with the latter – became passé and discredited. No cultural movement played a bigger role in establishing the postmodern drift – its ideas have hardly become the consensus even half a century and more later – than the style known as Pop Art.
From the mid-1950s in the UK and a little later in the US, a new wave of painters rejected the abstraction that had become the ultimate statement of the modernist creed by the end of the 1940s and decided instead to return to the representational, but not in the conventional pre-photographic sense. Rather, British painters such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake and David Hockney and Americans like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein adopted and adapted the objects of mass manufacture and entertainment – cartoons and comic books, movie stars and pop singers, magazine advertisements and the products of the supermarket shelf – and re-utilised them in paintings and collages, sculptures and silkscreen prints, presenting them as totems, mirrors perhaps, of the contemporary world but also offering them as the very material of a new fine art, displacing the dense, existential abstraction of Pollock and his brotherhood with symbols that were familiar to all. This sleight of hand, shocking at first, was speedily accepted by the galleries and dealers of the establishment and this latest acclaimed school, either celebration of or assault on the booming consumer society, was praised for its bold wit and inherent irony. Thus, rock ’n’ roll’s negotiated marriage with the land of letters, a mass art joining forces with an elite one, may quite possibly be considered another example, alongside Pop Art, of that same postmodern impulse.