by Simon Warner
ii) Charting the Beats: Background and impact
So, that celebrated San Franciscan crossroads – Dylan on tour, dropping into the Bay Area as part of his end of year tour, and the city’s purveyors of the new prose and verse, radical re-workers of the post-war word, keen to meet and greet the musical Messiah – is an intriguing junction on a compelling musical journey, and Text and Drugs and Rock ’n’ roll aims to provide a wider guide through this odyssey of interaction and engagement. Its essays try to make sense of a number of themes and threads, alliances and collaborations, people and places: transgenerational connections which would inspire creativity on both sides of this fresh artistic contract, for the writers and the musicians. In fact, popular music in its post-Presley incarnation has, on both sides of the Atlantic, drawn quite richly, on the font of literature. Writers, poets and novelists as diverse as William Shakespeare and John Donne, William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, J. R. R. Tolkien and Graham Greene, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer and George Orwell, James Baldwin and Nelson Algren, Anthony Burgess and Nik Cohn, Hubert Selby Jr. and Ayn Rand,38 to cite only a few, have been referenced or seen their works called upon as points of inspiration. In addition, a host of fiction genres – from the folk tale and ancient myth to the gothic saga and sci-fi adventure – have provided sources for composers and bands in various ways.
Yet it is the Beat Generation that has provided quite possibly the most fertile and frequent literary nourishment for rock musicians, whether as a hook for band names, album or track titles, as a starting point for songs, as a trigger for subject matter, or as a catalyst for a particular approach to penning lyrics. Yet we might also suggest that it is the pervading spirit of Beat writing – its interests in freedom of the individual, in candour of expression, in the lure of the road and the adventures it may hold, in its hunger for stimulations of the mind and the body, in its range of campaigning issues in the fields of sexual identity, personal politics and the ecology – that has provided a general infusion to those musicians and songwriters who have followed. From the powerful attraction of the tour in rock culture – the enduring gig trail of one-nighters across countries and even continents, suggests an equation with the constant, yearning travels of so many of the Beats from the 1940s to the 1960s – to the many waves of confessional singers baring their own experiences, their own lives, in an autobiographical, singer-songwriter manner, it is hard not to see a potent echo of the Beat ethos, the Beat ideal, transcending the decades and still informing popular music’s mythology well into the twenty-first century, close to 70 years after these notions took root.
Various commentators at various points have commented on this association. Bruce Cook, as early as 1971, was speculating on the relationship between rock and the Beats. Suggesting that the jazz poetry experiments had never really delivered a satisfying marriage, he says that by the later 1950s and early 1960s ‘[j]azz had ceased to be sung, was no longer danced to, and could only be appreciated by those with a musical education. And that was where rock came in. It was the most accessible of music, offering a heavy beat to dance to and easy melodies to sing.’39 But he believes, at first, it was ‘so limited musically and emotionally’40 before gradually showing signs of maturity and improvement and among the influences that musicians began to incorporate were ‘the prose and poetry of the Beats’.41 Among the ingredients he felt were absorbed were the notions of ‘poetry as song’42 and ideas of poetry as a public utterance rather than a solemn, socially isolated, academic one. Cook adds: ‘It would not be too much to claim, then, that if the Beats had not given poetry a firm push in the direction they did […] then what many are now calling the rock poetry movement might never have happened. Beat, in this, was a necessary precondition to rock in its present form.’43
Steve Turner makes more general points about the connection between Beat writing and the emergence of a new musical culture. He says that ‘[o]ne of the achievements of Jack Kerouac and his Beat contemporaries was in making literature, whether spoken or printed, as ‘“sexy” as movies, jazz and rock ’n’ roll’.44 And, as he extrapolates this alchemical process, this social and artistic transformation, to the next two decades, he states: ‘Everything that the archetypal rock ’n’ roll star of the 1960s and 1970s experienced – marijuana, amphetamines, hallucinogenics, homosexual experimentation, orgies, alcoholism, drug busts, charges of obscenity, meditation, religious engagement – had already been experienced by the Beats during the previous two decades.’45 Choosing an enduring rock star as a potent example of just a few aspects of Beat’s engrained impact, Turner remarks: ‘Bruce Springsteen, who shared with Jack a working-class, East Coast, Catholic upbringing, also shared his love of fast cars and the open American landscape. It is hard to imagine Springsteen existing without Jack. Even his stage clothing of a check shirt and blue jeans – once unthinkable attire for a performer – are straight out of On the Road.’46
Furthermore, Ted Gioia, in his survey of cool in the post-war decades, talks about the power of the spiritual in the Beat consciousness, from Catholicism to Buddhism and ‘the Edgar Cayce47-influenced spirituality of Neal Cassady’.48 He comments:
[I]f we jump ahead to 1969 (the year of Kerouac’s death at age forty-seven), we see how the spiritualised tone permeates the new youth culture, shaping a whole generation’s sense of what is cool and defining the emerging lifestyle – setting it apart from the typical varieties of licentiousness and rebellion. We find it in the unconventional opinion leaders of the post-Kerouac generation (who often acknowledged his influence), from the Beatles to the Doors, Bob Dylan to Simon and Garfunkel, Ken Kesey to Carlos Castaneda.49 Indeed almost every aspect of the new movement would take on a transcendental tone, following the cues set by Kerouac and his confreres: sex moves from the clinical detachment of Kinsey to the higher vibes of Summer of Love ecstasy; narcotics lose their social stigma and are now a pathway to opening the ‘doors of perception’; ecology morphs from Silent Spring50 alarmism to back-to-nature grooviness; social protest shifts from the strikes and labour conflicts of earlier decades, with their battlefield overtones, to sit-ins and love-ins, everyone mouthing the word peace, wearing its now ever-present symbol on shirts and patches, pendants and placards.51
Holly George-Warren expresses this view: ‘As a cultural phenomenon, the Beat Generation changed us more than any other twentieth-century movement; its effects are still being felt today. As a literary movement, the Beat Generation gave us a cacophony of fresh, new American voices; the common thread running through the work was this: to say what hadn’t been said in a language as unique as one’s own thumbprint.’52 Her comments were made as editor of The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, and the alliance revealed, in that very title, is most significant itself. Here was a magazine, founded at the height of a historic shift in 1967 in the city of San Francisco, most associated with a strident countercultural moment and with the sounds of a new and alternative rock music at its core, lending its name to a later collection that would celebrate and commemorate the Beats from a number of perspectives, but, importantly and frequently, through the lens of rock music and rock musicians. Patti Smith and Richard Hell, Graham Parker and Lee Ranaldo. Lou Reed and Eric Andersen are all among the cast of contributors, evidence in itself of the rich Beat-rock vein. George-Warren stresses the association when she comments that ‘the Beat filter has added texture to the recordings of numerous artists whose music gave the magazine its raison d’être: from the Beatles, Dylan and the Velvet Underground in the sixties, to David Bowie, Tom Waits and Patti Smith in the seventies, to Sonic Youth and Beck in recent years.’53 Her book, she asserts, ‘should make it clear how such a small group of individuals could affect us so powerfully – how one group could spawn both the Summer of Love and the Blank Generation’.54
Who then were the Beats? The core figures in this group initially met in 1943 in New York City when William Burro
ughs first made the acquaintance of two younger men, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who had moved to the city as university students. Burroughs, born in St. Louis in 1914, had graduated from Harvard in 1936, then spent time in Vienna studying medicine before the Second World War. But, by the early 1940s, his life had become a shiftless, peripatetic affair. Rejecting his patrician Midwest roots, he had done a number of drudge jobs, including time as a pest exterminator in Chicago, before arriving in New York. His interests in drugs and firearms led him to rub shoulders with the city’s criminal fringe as he survived on a monthly cheque from his wealthy family, a member of which, his uncle, had created great riches from the invention of the adding machine in the late nineteenth century. Jack Kerouac, born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, was a young student at Columbia University when the decade commenced, a good scholar whose additional sporting prowess had helped him to win a scholarship. But when a broken leg brought his college football career to an early close, he spent some time in the war-time merchant marine, before befriending and finding himself in the same apartment as Burroughs, and also Ginsberg.
Ginsberg, younger still and born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926, had also attended Columbia with aspirations to eventually be a labour lawyer. Expelled after an expletive-fuelled row with his anti-Semitic dorm cleaner, he would also be drawn to the same accommodation as Burroughs and Kerouac and begin a lifelong association with his two senior associates. Early on in their friendship they shared long conversations about life and art, and both Kerouac, a would-be novelist, and Ginsberg, drawn to writing poetry, shared their literary hopes and ambitions. Burroughs’ writing vision was less clear but together they drew up a creative manifesto called the ‘New Vision’, a radical statement of artistic intent which praised experiment, discounted conventional morality and, at heart, responded to the psychic crisis of a world torn by conflict.
Other individuals would form part of this circle, including an aspiring journalist Lucien Carr, another writer John Clellon Holmes, a Times Square hustler called Herbert Huncke and Joan Vollmer, who had embarked on a relationship with Burroughs, despite the man’s avowed homosexuality, and would live with three principals in the same property. In 1944, Carr became embroiled in a fatal incident in which a predatory older man called David Kammerer, who had been making homosexual advances to him for some years, was stabbed and murdered. Carr would be jailed for this act of manslaughter; Kerouac would become entangled as an accessory as he had disposed of the knife. The killing would have a marked effect on various members of the group: it exposed the sexual tensions that were present in this circle in which heterosexuals like Carr and Kerouac rubbed shoulders with homosexuals like Burroughs and Ginsberg. But it also gave a dark lustre to their lives and provided material experience that some would use in their later writing. A contemporaneous novel written by Burroughs and Kerouac, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, not officially published until 2008, drew, in part, on this drama.
In 1946, another important player in the story would enter the room. Neal Cassady, son of a hobo, a compulsive car thief and an occasional railway brakeman from Denver, turned up in New York, keen to meet Kerouac and his crew after hearing about them from Hal Chase, a mutual friend. Cassady’s handsome gait and freewheeling personality brought a new spark to the Manhattan clique. Kerouac found his stories and style inspirational; Ginsberg was sexually drawn to this physically rapacious wanderer. By 1947, Kerouac and Cassady had embarked on the first of several of their journeys across North America which would form the basis for important sections of his later fiction, including On the Road. In 1948, while Kerouac was back in New York, Clellon Homes and he discussed the nature of the world and the relation of this band of young writers to it. Drawing on a term that Huncke had taught them – ‘beat’55 – the pair conceived themselves part of a Beat Generation, the phrase echoing, to an extent, the Lost Generation of the inter-war years. After this, the loosely gathered set of friends gradually began to describe themselves as members of the Beat Generation, although the appellation was quite casual in some ways and certain members never felt entirely comfortable with the name. Kerouac would see his first novel, The Town and the City – an epic family saga inspired by Thomas Wolfe – published in 1950 but it would be Clellon Holmes’ book Go, which appeared two years later, that would be considered the first Beat novel, a recounting of some of the unorthodox adventures and philosophical attitudes of their literary crowd with many of the real participants present in the fiction, each in loosely veiled disguise. His article for the New York Times on 16 November 1952, entitled ‘This is the Beat Generation’, would spread the news of these new socio-literary developments to a wider public.
During these early years, Allen Ginsberg had continued to pen poetry, but verse of a more traditional kind. However, a number of matters would change his approach to his art. In 1948, he claimed the long dead English mystic William Blake had addressed him while in a quasi-hallucinatory state. This auditory visitation would be followed by a meeting with William Carlos Williams, an established poet from his home town of Paterson, whose style rejected the formal parameters of the poetic and, instead, described the world he saw in a more informal, almost conversational tone. He encouraged the younger poet to try this, too. As significantly, Ginsberg’s involvement with Huncke and his criminal associates led to his arrest for holding stolen property in his home. Tried for this crime by implication, he was sentenced, in 1949, a stay in a psychiatric hospital in the hope that both his homosexual tendencies could be stemmed and his attraction to the underworld exorcised. While in hospital, Ginsberg would meet Carl Solomon, another inmate with literary talents, who would further inspire his creative cause.
Burroughs led an unsettled life in the late 1940s. He became involved with various business propositions, one with his common law wife Joan Vollmer, in 1947: a marijuana farm in the lost wilds of Texas. But the project was a conspicuous failure. In late 1949, they eventually headed to Mexico to avoid the attention of the law. But in 1951, in Mexico City, Burroughs, while attempting a drunken William Tell act with Vollmer and a spirit glass, shot his partner in the head. The killing had a devastating impact on Burroughs. Although he managed to escape the grip of the Mexican police authorities, he was deeply haunted by this accident in the years that followed. While he had written some fiction prior to this incident – a co-penned novel with Kerouac and some of the material which would appear much later as Queer (1985) – he has claimed that it was Vollmer’s death that would be a crucial trigger to his life as a novelist. It would force him, he has said, to write his way out of the depression that befell him. In 1953, with Ginsberg’s connections and support, he published his first novel Junkie, a pulp-like account based on his links to the drug and crime worlds.
For Kerouac the first half the 1950s saw him travel and write almost constantly. The relative failure of his debut work to make a mark had left him demoralised. Yet he was not undeterred as a novelist. In spring 1951, back in New York, he produced a manuscript in three weeks of round-the-clock typing, a fictionalised account inspired by his travels with Cassady at the end of the 1940s, that would form the basis for On the Road. But publisher interest was limited and it would be six years before a version of the text was issued. Ginsberg had a similar fallow period. He moved to California where he took a conventional job in the growing market research sector and even had relationships with women. In 1954, however, he met Peter Orlovsky, who would become his life partner, and commit himself to a homosexual route. The next year was more significant still when, on 7 October 1955, he gave a first pubic reading to a lengthy and hard-hitting poem called ‘Howl’. The event, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, was a key moment in the dissemination of the Beat project. Four other poets would take part, including Michael McClure and Gary Snyder,56 each linked to the city’s ongoing Poetry Renaissance, a revival that had been steered by the man who would MC at the event, Kenneth Rexroth. All readers at the gathering would also then secure an associatio
n with a West Coast expansion of the Beat idea. Vital to this was the poet-publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose bookshop City Lights had been founded in the city in 1953. Hearing Ginsberg recite at the gallery – an occasion that also saw Kerouac in the audience – he speedily invited the poet to publish the work in the Pocket Poets series he had launched. Howl and Other Poems would emerge in 1956. A year later it would face obscenity charges but the court threw out of the claims arguing the poem had redeeming social value. The judicial proceedings would bring national and global publicity to the poem and widespread recognition of Ginsberg and his Beat fraternity.
In 1957 also, Kerouac would secure his major breakthrough, too, when On the Road appeared, gaining critical acclaim and enjoying a spell as a best-selling title. The success would open the door to publication of a string of manuscripts that had been in preparation for several years. The Dharma Bums (1958), a story based on Kerouac’s friendship with Gary Snyder, an important Buddhist Beat, The Subterraneans (1958) and the poem cycle Mexico City Blues (1959) were notable arrivals. Burroughs meanwhile had left the US for North Africa and the liberal city of Tangiers. Drawn by the prospect of rent boys and severely drug-addicted, he nonetheless continued his writing efforts. When Kerouac, Ginsberg and Orlovsky visited him in 1957, they found his room littered with hundreds of sheets of typing, chaotically distributed. Ginsberg’s energetic dedication saw the pages assembled in a presentable form and, in 1959, Burroughs’ taboo-testing narrative, a parade of sexual perversity and rampant narcotic habit, was published in Paris as The Naked Lunch. By then, the author was living in the French capital at the so-called Beat Hotel,57 with Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, a poet who had become part of the Beat community in 1951 after meeting Ginsberg, and who, in 1958, produced his own collections Bomb and Gasoline.