by Simon Warner
We have commented on Beat’s ability to rise above subcultural divides and the output of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs seemed just as capable of triggering empathetic feelings in the punk and new wave bands that rose to prominence from the mid-1970s. While many of those acts seemed determined to knock over the traces of the hippy era, its psychedelic legacy and its failed utopian promises, the new rock bands also appeared to have few reservations about aligning with the Beat writers themselves, even if that same literary movement had also offered inspiration to that earlier subculture, one most often linked with a peace and love credo. Burroughs, to an extent, as we have seen and certainly Ginsberg were capable of understanding, even reciprocation, in this re-ordered landscape, as punk actively and aggressively supplanted hippy as a revolutionary mouthpiece. When Victor Bockris asked Burroughs about his feelings toward punk rock, there was a certain ambivalence. He described it as ‘an important phenomenon’128 but he stressed that: ‘I am not a punk and I don’t know why anybody would consider me the Godfather of punk […] I think the so-called punk movement is a media creation. I have, however, sent a letter of support to the Sex Pistols in England because I’ve always said that the country doesn’t stand a chance until you have 20,000 people saying bugger to the Queen. And I support the Sex Pistols because this is a constructive, necessary criticism of a country which is bankrupt’.129 As for Ginsberg, Miles makes this point with particular reference to the poet’s talent to cross boundaries regardless of culture or age:
Again Allen was able to transcend the generation gap. He wrote ‘Howl’ just after rock ’n’ roll was invented, but a decade later was able to relate to Lennon, McCartney, Jagger, Dylan and the other Sixties musicians. Now there was a new wave of rock musicians, who saw the previous generation as boring, lifeless and irrelevant, yet they regarded Ginsberg as a source of inspiration and as someone who could understand exactly what they were doing – as he did.130
In the US, rock artists to be – from Patti Smith to Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell of Television – arrived in New York in late 1960s and early 1970s harbouring poetic aspirations with the French Symbolists and the American Beats among their role models. Hell, who would leave Television in 1975 and then form part of subsequent influential acts such as the Heartbreakers – with New York Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan – and the Voidoids, saw Burroughs as an heir, of sorts, to Arthur Rimbaud. Hell has argued that ‘Burroughs was the real Rimbaud, or at least the one who stayed the course.’131 However, by the time Smith and Verlaine and Hell132 made their most imposing mark, the punk scene had fermented and erupted and their main mode of expression had become not verse but rock in live hothouses such as CBGBs133 in the Bowery. In spring 1974, writes Bernard Gendron, the venue’s owner Hilly Kristal ‘agreed reluctantly to take in the fledgling band Television, led by the poets Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell […] But it was the Patti Smith group, already notorious in local rock and art circles, that really set the CBGBs scene in motion when they were paired with Television on a two-month residency in spring 1975.’134 Yet the broader, so-called Downtown Scene, that flourished in Manhattan from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, embracing music of many kinds, visual art of multiple varieties and eclectic modes of live perfomance, clearly had a continuing awareness of the Beat tradition. Of this period, Robert Siegle explains that ‘one quality that kept the Beats on the mental horizon […] was their problematic mixture of elements: women writing the body (Diane di Prima, Hettie Jones, among many others), issues of class and ethnicity (Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso), and the importance of race (Bob Kaufman, Amiri Baraka and Ted Joans). Politics was everywhere, as was the primacy of oral performance over the written page.’135
At a similar time in Britain, as punk assumed a highly politicised tone, the London-based Clash carried a particular punch, rising alongside the headlineseizing Sex Pistols but outlasting the latter’s briefly incandescent flare. The band proved to be not only the most credible and enduring bands of the initial UK punk eruption, but also one that forged a connection with Allen Ginsberg in the early 1980s. The group were making a live appearance at Bond’s International Casino in New York in June 1981, and Ginsberg engaged vocalist and songwriter Joe Strummer in a backstage conversation. When the poet expressed aspirations to collaborate with the band, Strummer proposed that he should join them on stage, which he did. The result was ‘Capitol Air’, a track that would appear on Ginsberg’s career-spanning compilation set Holy Soul and Jelly Roll in 1994. Commenting on the experience, Ginsberg later stated: ‘They’re all good musicians, [guitarist] Mick Jones particularly, and they’re very sensitive and very literate underneath all the album-cover roughneck appearance. I don’t know of any other band that would, in the middle of a big heavy concert, be willing to go on with a big middle-age goose like me, who might or might not be able to sing in tune, for all they know.’136 As a partial consequence of this impromptu live piece, Ginsberg joined the Clash in the recording studio the following January to lay down the track ‘Ghetto Defendant’, a piece which became a stand-out cut on the band’s 1982 album Combat Rock. Joe Strummer’s Beat adventure would be further expended when he lent his talents to the 1997 Kerouac tribute Kicks Joy Darkness (1997), overlaying his idiosyncratic rendition on the novelist’s own reading of his work ‘MacDougal Street Blues’.
Among those post-punk performers emerging in the 1980s, who would continue to engage with the Beat cause were Sonic Youth, also later graduates of the febrile Downtown Scene. During a career stretching to three decades, they dedicated songs to Ginsberg – ‘Hits of Sunshine (for Allen Ginsberg)’ (1998) – and Corso – ‘Leaky Lifeboat (for Gregory Corso)’ (2009). In addition, individual members Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo would also play roles in the Kicks Joy Darkness homage. Moore would contribute to the track ‘The Last Hotel’ with Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye; Ranaldo would act as the album’s associate producer and contribute to two of the cuts – ‘Letter to John Clellon Holmes’ with Morphine saxophonist Dana Colley and ‘Woman’ with Jim Carroll and Lenny Kaye. Ranaldo, who would take a production credit on the subsequent tribute album Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road, would also issue a series of Beat-like books – prose, stories and journals, including Bookstore and Others (1995), JRNLS80S (1998), Road Movies (2004) and Against Refusing (2010) – alongside his 1993 solo recording Scriptures of the Golden Eternity, the title echoing Kerouac’s 1960 prose poem collection The Scripture of the Golden Eternity.
Ranaldo talked about his relationship with the Beats at the Sonic Youth website in 1998. He says that ‘ever since reading On The Road in ‘74, just out of college and on my first road trip, NY to California, at the time, the Beat writers have had a strong influence on me. I just loved the way Kerouac in particular wrote, the muscular energy and enthusiasm for life and love and travel. Ginsberg and Burroughs, Snyder, etc. came later as more acquired tastes, but Kerouac was so easy to read and so simple to identify with’.137 As for the Beats’ impact on alternative culture in a general sense, he remarks: ‘I think the influence they had is immense. Kerouac and the “rucksack revolution”, popularising (not inventing) the notion of travel and freedom; Burroughs bringing in more transgressive and sinister, heady elements; Ginsberg most influential in the long run though, or most effective proselytiser, espousing way back in the ‘50s ideas of a transcendant drug culture and later being ahead of the curve on Eastern religious exploration, and political activism, homosexual freedom, etc. His life really had a great impact on so many aspects of youth culture, from the ‘50s right through to ‘80s–90s. The more I explore his biography, the more apparent it becomes.’138
There are other rock artists we might mention who have included Beat references in their output or found common spirit with the writers’ philosophical or artistic approaches. REM were inspired by Kerouac’s spirit, well reflected in guitarist Peter Buck’s remarks on the matter. ‘I’m probably one of the few people who’s read everything the guy wrote’,139 he explains. The group felt an affinity with
the lure of movement as they toured in their early days. ‘It’s like On the Road’, says Buck. ‘We all read it when we were 14 or 15. It was a real thing, where you could spot the heart of America. The heart wasn’t in a constitution or a government- type thing, but it was in a collection of people. And that’s what we found.’140 REM would collaborate with Burroughs on the 1996 track ‘Star Me Kitten’, while the group’s vocalist Michael Stipe contributed a track – ‘My Gang’ – to Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness (1997). Stipe also took a Beat-like cue in his photographic collection Two Times Intro: On the Road with Patti Smith141 (1998), when he joined his fellow singer on tour in 1995 and featured, among the images he shot, a concentrated gathering of artists who have been linked to Smith herself and this wider literary circle, from Ginsberg to Lenny Kaye, Tom Verlaine, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, the monochrome document even hinting at Robert Frank and his 1959 account The Americans. Rob Buck – no relation to REM’s Peter – was part of 10,000 Maniacs, whose song ‘Hey Jack Kerouac’ became one of their best-loved numbers, expressed similar sentiments to his namesake. ‘When I was 18, I read On the Road and The Dharma Bums and I went out to try and imitate [Kerouac’s] experience. He wrote like a lot of music influenced him – he always sounded like the bebop players he loved. To me, his writing was an extension of that music. It was very improvised yet very together.’142
Beck’s interest in Ginsberg was confirmed in their 1997 conversation for the Buddhist online publication Shambhala Sun.143 He also revealed an affection for the Beats in Jerry Aronson’s film portrait of Ginsberg, commenting that he likes ‘their idea of America; it’s kind of romantic. There’s a certain romanticism about the lifestyle that they led: travelling, going wherever life took them, in search of relationship, connection, interaction with people and finding some piece of America that still has individuality and humanity in it’.144 One figure who has been less positive towards the Beat tradition, even if his spoken word forays would suggest a stylistic connection, is Henry Rollins, one-time frontman of Black Flag. Although he has admitted affection for Ginsberg’s output and has praised ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, he has less time for Burroughs and Kerouac. He told website The Modern Word in 2005: ‘I remember reading On the Road by Kerouac in ’82 and the only thing that occurred to me was, “Kerouac, what a pussy”, because it was so nothing like what I was enduring on the road. I was watching people get stabbed and I was seeing some pretty rough stuff.’145
Other acts, too, have referenced the Beats or worked with them, been inspired by their writings, drawn on their artistic devices or even adapted their work, from American artists such as the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, Iggy Pop and the Blue Oyster Cult, Laurie Anderson, the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra and Red Hot Chili Peppers, Loudon Wainwright, Tom Russell and David Dondero to British performers like Mott the Hoople, Al Stewart and Marillion, Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, the Fall, Joy Division and Radiohead, not forgetting Australia’s Go-Betweens. We may add further the tributes bands have paid to Beat associates, like Mercury Rev’s 1993 musical setting of Robert Creeley’s ‘So There’, and homages to Charles Bukowski,146 whose name has been revered and celebrated by the Manic Street Preachers, the Boo Radleys and Modest Mouse among others.
Nor does this summary take account of that remarkable stream of cultural activity that has poured forth from the African-American community over the last 75 years and more and with specific reference to the hip hop and rap styles which emerged from the 1970s and owed such a debt to the spoken word tradition, stretching back to poet-songwriters such as Gil Scott-Heron, groups such as the Watts Prophets and the Last Poets, and further still those significant black voices who made their mark within the Beat community – most pertinently Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka,147 but also Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman. There are fuller histories to be related which forensically connect the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the jazz poetry of Langston Hughes to the ongoing Nuyorican Poets of the new century, via the black voices of the Beat Generation and hip hop stars like Chuck D and KRS-One, Michael Franti, Mos Def and DJ Spooky. Mark Kemp states that ‘the looping rhythms of hip-hop contain the very core of the “Beat” in Beat Generation: More than any popular youth counterculture since the 1960s […] hip-hop’s cut-and-paste interpretation of modern life can be directly traced to Burroughs. Moreover, the swinging, bopping cadence of its words juxtaposed against the thump-thump-thump of the music have kept alive the spirit of Kerouac’s reading backed by jazz musicians.’148 In the subsequent club culture, too, there are fragments worth mentioning – from the slick acid jazz of UFO’s 1991 cut ‘Poetry and All That Jazz’ to Bomb the Bass’ florid Beat celebration ‘Bug Powder Dust’ from 1994.
iv) The Beats’ own recordings: A selective discography
While rock artists have paid many tributes, in a variety of contexts, to the Beat Generation novelists and poets in their songs and albums, it is also worth noting that there is a substantial body of recordings made by the Beat writers themselves, often involving musicians. Some of these projects have emerged in the public domain but much has not. In fact, there is a significant body of spoken word material, sometimes accompanied, that was laid down, which has never been made commercially available. Stephen Ronan’s 1996 volume149 was the most impressive attempt to collate this work and he included ‘selected unreleased recordings’150 in his survey, a rare document in itself which only appeared in a print run of 60. Since then, of course, the output has grown, swollen by recordings made by the Beats themselves and also those other acts who have paid homage to those writers. In this short section, I would like to list key recordings made by the Beats or paying specific tribute to them and released in an official form, alongside principal compilations. I stress again that this is a selective process and that Ronan’s rare edition lists hundreds of recordings, both mainstream issues and much more obscure tapes which have never been formally released.
To consider first Jack Kerouac, who recorded and released three principal albums in his life-time. With pianist Steve Allen he made Poetry for the Beat Generation151 (1959) and, with the saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, Blues and Haikus152 (1959). Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation153 (1960) is a production that sees the author read prose and poetry. These albums were later gathered in The Jack Kerouac Collection154 (1990) on three CDs. We might also add the soundtrack to the short movie Pull My Daisy155 (1959) with Kerouac’s narration and David Amram’s score. In the 1990s, two albums that paid tribute to Kerouac were issued: Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness156 (1997) and Jack Kerouac Reads on the Road157 (1999). The first was a series of homages to and musical settings of Kerouac’s prose and poetry by artists drawn from a range of popular music genres, from folk to punk, indie to grunge and more, alongside key figures from the Beat circle: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Ferlinghetti. The second had, at its core, a series of re-discovered Kerouac recordings – examples of the writer reading his own prose and recordings of song standards the novelist made himself. In addition, two poems were given new musical arrangements by David Amram. Finally two versions of a song called ‘On the Road’ were presented: a home-recorded version by Kerouac, who was the actual composer of the piece, and a new version by Tom Waits with the band Primus.
Allen Ginsberg’s recordings include his 1959 release Allen Ginsberg Reads Howl and Other Poems,158 a 1966 edition Allen Ginsberg Reads Kaddish,159 and Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake160 from 1969, on which he is joined by Peter Orlovsky on vocals, guitarist Jon Sholle, trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Elvin Jones, among other musicians. On the album First Blues: Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs161 from 1981, Ginsberg accompanies himself on harmonium. A further recording from 1983 carries a similar, though abbreviated, title, First Blues,162 but features a much wider gathering of players – from Bob Dylan to Jon Sholle, violinist David Mansfield, Steven Taylor on guitar and Arthur Russell on cello. The Lion for Real163 from 1989 sees Ginsberg joined by guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Steve Swallow, guitar
ist Marc Ribot and composer Arto Lindsay and several others, including Todd Rundgren in a subsidiary role. In 1994, a four CD compilation of the poet’s work appeared as Holy Soul, Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs 1949–1993.164 Two years later, in 1996, Ginsberg issued his last important collaborative work when he made the single ‘The Ballad of the Skeletons’165 with Paul McCartney on guitar and drums, Lenny Kaye on bass and Philip Glass on keyboards plus, on guitars, Marc Ribot and David Mansfield.
William Burroughs’ recorded output has been more extensive even than that of Kerouac and Ginsberg, with Call Me Burroughs166 in 1965 an early gathering of the writer reading his work. Ten years later William S. Burroughs/John Giorno167 was a similar collection of readings, as poet Giorno and founder of the label Giorno Poetry System Records joined Burroughs as a co-contributor. The Nova Convention,168 a double LP, appeared in 1979 and was a document based on the Burroughs celebration – a conference cum seminars and live performances – of the previous year in New York City, with Frank Zappa, Patti Smith, Ed Sanders, John Cage, Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg and Laurie Anderson all participating. The Elvis of Letters169 (1985) was a joint venture with film-maker Gus van Sant, who added a musical accompaniment to readings by Burroughs. In 1990, Dead City Radio170 combined the novelist’s spoken word contributions with musical arrangements by a diverse range of music-makers: Sonic Youth, John Cale, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Blondie’s Chris Stein all featured in the credits. Three years later, Burroughs joined forces with Nirvana frontman and grunge icon Kurt Cobain to release a track entitled ‘The “Priest” They Called Him’,171 although neither writer nor guitarist worked in the studio together, each creating their spoken and musical tracks separately. In 1993, also, Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales172 saw the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy add a soundtrack to Burroughs’ words. A prolific year would see The Black Rider,173 too, issued, an album which brought together the creative skills of playwright/director Robert Wilson, Burroughs as librettist and Tom Waits as musician, a recording based on a music theatre piece first staged in Hamburg in 1990. In 1996, 10% File Under Burroughs174 was a homage album to both Burroughs and Brion Gysin, with an eclectic array of contributors – from Marianne Faithfull, Herbert Huncke and Chuck Prophet to Bomb the Bass, the Master Musicians of Joujouka and Material. Material would also release a Burroughs-centred album, The Road to the Western Lands,175 in 1999, with the novelist’s words and narration showcased.