by Simon Warner
In 1971, by which time the original impetus of the band had dissipated and Reed would be starting to shape a solo career, he would give a high profile poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church alongside a rising star of the Downtown poetry scene, Jim Carroll. Bockris describes the scene: ‘In front of an avant garde audience of rock writers and poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Lou rose to the occasion, leading off with “Heroin” and going on to read “Sister Ray”, “Lady Godiva’s Operation” and “The Black Angel’s Death Song” to considerable acclaim.’115 So taken was Reed by the audience’s response that ‘he announced he’d never sing again, because he was now a poet’.116 He was not true to this claim: he would return to rock music and spend the next 40 years pursuing a largely musical route in various distinct fashions, up to and including a surprising and extraordinary collaboration with heavy metal band Metallica in 2011 on their joint venture Lulu. But the influence of poets and literature – the writer Delmore Schwartz was another of Reed’s notable inspirations – was ever there. When Ginsberg died in 1997, the Velvet Underground singer said: ‘His poetry was so American and so straightforward, so astute, and he had such a recognisable voice. Modern rock lyrics would be inconceivable without the work of Allen Ginsberg. It opened them up from the really mediocre thing they’d been to something more interesting and relevant. He was very brave and he was also very honest – a no-bullshit person.’117 John Cale, who would also contribute a piece called ‘The Moon’ to the Jack Kerouac tribute Kicks Joy Darkness the same year of Ginsberg’s passing, also emphasised the importance to him of the late poet: ‘Allen Ginsberg, John Cage and La Monte Young were the first three figures of the New York avant garde I met when I arrived in the city in 1963 […] Allen was the conscience of the underground/avant garde to whom we all deferred.’118
If the Beats had established their main beach-head in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, the West Coast of the US, and specifically San Francisco, would prove a new and fertile planting ground for this literary style, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s mould-breaking bookshop and publishing house City Lights and the drive of individuals like Kenneth Rexroth steering what would become known by the mid-1950s as the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. The Beats both fed into this and off it, with Ginsberg’s unveiling of ‘Howl’ in 1955, the obscenity trial that City Lights would face in 1957 after publishing Howl and Other Poems, and a number of Bay Area writers becoming linked to the movement. Poets like Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and David Meltzer and the novelist Richard Brautigan would all be seen as part of the broad community that comprised the Beat Generation. In the 1960s, just as New York’s radical music community began to make its mark, growing out of the creative innovation and bohemian mentality that the Beats had most helped to engender, so San Francisco’s music-makers began to make their voices heard as the new decade unfolded.
A fascinating link between the Beats of the later 1950s and the rock developments of the early to mid-1960s was a writer who felt he was too young to be an original Beat but too old to be one of the new hippy brigade. Yet the success of Ken Kesey as author – his debut 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had been one of the most acclaimed of the year and quickly became a Broadway theatre hit the following year – would provide a significant catalyst for a distinct Californian scene, engaged with new music, art and literature and outsider social codes, to arise. Kesey had been a writing student at Stanford in 1959 and had also worked as a medical orderly to fund his studies. The latter experiences were important raw material in conceiving the mental asylum at the heart of his novel, where Randle McMurphy, a rebel and criminal, finds himself after a brush with the law, which sees him deemed insane. The asylum and its chief nurse become a metaphor for authoritarian society, McMurphy the resistant force and an apparently deaf mute, native American Indian, the narrator and quiet conscience of the story.
But the power of this allegorical fable would be only a part of Kesey’s contribution to the new decade. While studying, he had also been paid to take part in CIA-backed medical experiments linked to the effects of psychedelic drugs. So intrigued was he by the impact of LSD that he strove to maintain these experiences outside the laboratory and shared samples with friends. The fact that powerful forces in the academic psychiatric world like Timothy Leary were concurrently being lured by the promise of psychedelic drugs and their revelation, and arguing that LSD could be a door to a positive social transformation, suggests that the Zeitgeist was guiding a number of influential individuals – in science and the arts – simultaneously and in different locations. Leary, sacked from his prestigious Harvard University post, would continue his campaign and Kesey would also pursue his intentions to spread the psychedelic gospel across the wider nation.
Having completed his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey planned a US tour, funded by his substantial earnings from his first book. Its scheme was to take the novelist and a small group of his friends on an LSD-fuelled adventure across the continent to New York City, all aboard a pre-war school bus they dubbed Furthur and decorated in eye-catchingly luminous, proto-psychedelic colours. The drug was not illegal – it would not be banned in the US until 1966 – so Kesey’s bold experiment was not outside the law as it stood. The trek was fully documented – photographs were taken and sound recordings and a filmed record were created – with the intention that the odyssey would be turned into a feature-length documentary. In fact, it would take more than 40 years for a version of the account to appear, in the 2011 movie production Magic Trip. But the trip – both geographically and chemically – that Kesey and friends undertook in 1964 would have an impressive bearing on the counterculture’s evolution. It was a potent emblem of personal liberation, played out not in the subterranean environs of downtown but via a psychedelic carnival in the full glare of the summer highway, that seemed to distil, in its transgressive open-ness the spirit of a new time, a new consciousness arriving.119
The notion of travel and the road, powerfully embodying those themes of freedom and excitement which had so engaged many of the Beat Generation and its followers, was regenerated in Kesey’s journey and the thread connecting his escapade to those that the earlier novelists and poets from that writing community had undertaken, in the previous decade and a half, could hardly have been better founded. While the travelling party, dubbed the Merry Pranksters, would embrace artists, photographers and film-makers, it would also include a living literary legend. That legend was Neal Cassady, not famous for his own writing, at least his own published writing,120 still a young man, but already immortalised in the pages of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as the fictional adventurer Dean Moriarty and a Beat icon in his own right. Dennis McNally discusses his link to Kesey and his crew, recalling that Cassady had spent time in San Quentin jail after a 1958 drug bust saw him incarcerated for two years. Shortly after his release, McNally states: ‘Neal turned up at Kesey’s home […] He’d read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and felt a spiritual kinship with Randle Patrick McMurphy, the novel’s protagonist and indeed there was a bond. “Speed Limit” became his nickname, and he formed an integral part of Kesey’s circle.’121 When the school bus set out on its trans-continental route, Cassady was at the wheel and, to add to the Beat associations, when the Merry Pranksters arrived in Manhattan with a celebratory party in mind, Jack Kerouac was among those who would be invited to join the revelries. However, the novelist, now distanced from his friends and former lifestyle and deeply sceptical of developments in US society, seemed in no mood to condone the liberal attitudes and freewheeling behaviour of Kesey and his cohorts, even if his one-time great friend Cassady was present.122 When Kerouac arrived and was invited to take a seat on a sofa, overlain with the Stars and Stripes, he picked up the flag and carefully folded it before sitting, a clear symbol of the tensions that existed between the new wave of roisterers and a man whom they would have considered a definite role model.
Returning to California, a series of parties would evol
ve from summer 1965 at Kesey’s La Honda property and at other venues in the locale, including the Santa Cruz home of his friend Ken Babbs,123 that would see further experimental LSD gatherings occur – what became dubbed the ‘Acid Tests’. Not only were Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky attenders on occasion, a rising journalist called Hunter S. Thompson and even members of the local Hell’s Angels chapter, but a musical crowd, too, who were friends of Kesey’s, a band formerly known as the Warlocks, a combination of jug-band folkies and John Coltrane addicts with a dash of conservatoire expertise, who would become a key part of many of these celebrations, contributing extraordinary free-form soundtracks – embracing rock and country, blues and jazz – to accompany these radical social experiments. By now, playing as the Grateful Dead, guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, drummer Bill Kreutzmann and keyboard player Bill ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, would become a further strand entwining the Beat culture of Cassady, the new literary counterculture of Ken Kesey and the nascent stirrings of hippy life in the city of San Francisco, soon to blossom brilliantly, and briefly, as the utopian centre of 1967’s Summer of Love, with a recently coined rock ’n’ roll offshoot – acid rock – at the heart of the new experience.
The Dead would be particularly drawn to Cassady, a tragic casualty by 1968, and works like ‘That’s it For the Other One’ on Anthem of the Sun (1968) and ‘Cassidy’ – recorded by Bob Weir on his solo album Ace (1972) – and by the group themselves on 1981’s Reckoning, would celebrate their hero. Says McNally: ‘Disguised as a loony, mad-rapping speed freak, Neal Cassady was very possibly the most highly evolved personality [the band] would ever meet, and was certainly among their most profound life influences other than the psychedelic experience itself.’124 In January 1967, at the Human Be-In, there was an intriguing collusion between those musical groups leading the acid rock charge – the Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service – and the Beat poets – Ginsberg and Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder – when all shared a stage in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
Furthermore, if the catalyst of Kesey, and the revolutionary cultural milieu he manufactured and largely stage-managed, would prove to be an important springboard in the extended career of the Grateful Dead and a distinguished chapter in the history of rock music, we should not ignore the verdant conditions he stimulated and that helped to spawn an extraordinary body of literature as well. Although Kesey himself never produced sustained work on the scale of his first two novels, others created accounts of these episodes, these scenes, in remarkable number. Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966) was an early example of what would be described as a non-fiction novel and would also come to be associated with the new journalism, a brand of writing that would see the reporter – previously assumed to be an impartial, arm’s length observer of news or trends – become a more engaged player in the drama, jettisoning the long-standing divisions between objective and subjective approaches to reportage. Another writer linked to the new journalism phenomenon, Tom Wolfe, would pen The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, an acclaimed – if outsider – description of the Kesey/Acid Test moment which appeared in 1968. Allen Ginsberg’s celebrated 1965 poem ‘First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels’ was an eye-witness reflection of this eclectic countercultural nexus, while Freewheelin’ Frank: The True Story of a Hell’s Angel by a Hell’s Angel (1969) was an autobiographical volume recounting the story of Frank Reynolds, a project on which Michael McClure closely collaborated.
There are other seminal American bands of the later 1960s who also found overlapping associations with the Beats. The Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison would particularly acknowledge interests in poetry and the influence of the Beats. His family moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco in autumn 1957 when he was a teenager and he paid visits to City Lights in those adolescent years, once briefly engaging with Lawrence Ferlinghetti himself. As biographers Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman recall: ‘Ferlinghetti was one of Jim’s favourites, along with Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg […] also fascinated by Dean Moriarty.’125 They add that he ‘read the great French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose style would influence the form of Jim’s short prose poems. He read everything Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Michael McClure, Gregory Corso and all the other Beat writers published.’126
Morrison would share a friendship with McClure after meeting in 1968. The Beat poet said, in a 1990 interview, that he ‘liked Jim […] I liked his intelligence. I liked his style. I liked the way his mind moved and I like the way he moved. He was a pretty well integrated human being, both physically adept and mentally adept, the whole individual working in one direction. You could sense the poet there. You’ve got to remember that at this point I was not interested in rock ’n’ roll. I had already been through it. So Jim being in the Doors meant just about nothing to me. I mean, it certainly wouldn’t have been in his favour. It was through the artistry of [keyboardist] Ray Manzarek and Jim that I became interested in music again.’127 Morrison produced his own published poetry, too. Two collections, The Lords and the New Creatures (1969) and An American Prayer (1970), would appear before his death in 1971. Later McClure would join forces with Manzarek for a long-running project featuring recordings and live performances. Love Lion (1991) captured McClure and Manzarek collaboratively on both CD and video and the film The Third Mind (1997) explored the two men’s artistic interaction. McClure would feature, too, alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti, when the Band, Dylan’s principal collaborators at the end of the 1960s and after, announced their decision to separate in the mid-1970s and gave a valedictory performance alongside a vast and impressive cast of friends and supporters, in November 1976. Their on-stage farewell celebration at Winterland, San Francisco, filmed by Martin Scorsese, would be released as The Last Waltz, one of the most celebrated of all in-concert rock movies, in 1978.
Nor was the impact of Beat literature limited to the musical artists of the US: there was a transatlantic effect, too. In the UK, a diverse range of performers and songwriters drank from the Beat cup. As we have mentioned, David Bowie’s early 1970s experiments saw him tap into the cut-up methods of William Burroughs to shape his lyrical texts, but there were others significant acts from a range of styles and genres who would include reference to the Beat writers in their work. Van Morrison’s 1982 song ‘Cleaning Windows’ name-checked Kerouac and so did 1993’s ‘On Hyndford Street’, while Mike Heron, once of the Incredible String Band, wrote ‘Mexican Girl’ (1979), a reference to a Kerouac love interest in On the Road, and ‘Jack of Hearts’ (2005), a song inspired by the autobiography of Kerouac’s first wife Edie Parker. Progressive rockers Jethro Tull referred to Kerouac also in the song ‘From a Dead Beat to a Greaser’ (1976) while King Crimson went further still by releasing an album-length work dedicated to the literary brotherhood, Beat, in 1982. The latter was a 25th anniversary celebration of the publication of On the Road and included various references to the main Beat protagonists – ‘Neal and Jack and Me’, ‘Heartbeat’ (a nod to Carolyn Cassady’s early memoir Heart Beat (1980)), ‘Sartori [sic] in Tangier’ (a tribute that managed to merge both elements of Kerouac’s novel Satori in Paris (1966) and Burroughs’ North African bolt-hole of the mid- to late 1950s), ‘The Howler’ (with Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ its hook) and ‘Neurotica’, a comment on the Beat magazine of the same name.
Notable singer-songwriters from the mid-1960s who were attracted by the notion of Beat included the Canadian Leonard Cohen, at first a poet and novelist who then turned to music with his debut album in 1967. His poetry collections The Spice-Box of the Earth (1961) and Flowers for Hitler (1964) were supplemented by his novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), but it was when he turned to recording his words in a musical setting with his LP The Songs Of Leonard Cohen that his reputation as a melancholic and lyrical song-smith spread. Richard Fariña, whose post-Be
at novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966) emerged in the year of his premature death, was originally a folk-singer in Greenwich Village. He married two women from that circle: Carolyn Hester, whose 1961 album featured Bob Dylan on harmonica, and Mimi Baez, sister to Joan. As Richard and Mimi Fariña they made their first live appearance at the Big Sur Folk Festival in 1964 and recorded and released three albums. Joan’s then relationship with Dylan, and Fariña’s association with her sister, saw the foursome develop close friendships between 1963 and 1966. Tragically, however, two days after the publication of his debut novel, Fariña was a passenger fatally injured in a motorcycle accident. The Scottish-born performer Donovan, whose Dylan-like work won him widespread acclaim – a link cemented by his appearance in the Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, based on the American’s UK tour of 1965 – would later release the album Beat Café in 2004, the title track of which would pay warm tribute to the Beat era and its atmosphere.