by Simon Warner
118John Cale, ibid., p. 277.
119The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, their 1967 film, while distinctly English in content, seemed, in part, to pay tribute to the exuberant escapism of Kesey’s earlier American adventures.
120Neal Cassady had become famous among his Beat friends for his long, frenetic, effusive letters, uncensored and highly descriptive. The most celebrated of these, running to around 13,000 words in length, was sent to Kerouac in 1950 but it was later lost. A surviving section was published as Cassady’s The First Third (San Franciso: City Lights, 1971). See Barry Miles, 1998, pp. 147–8.
121Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside Story of the Grateful Dead (London: Bantam Press, 2002), p. 109.
122Relations between Cassady and Kerouac had soured, particularly as a result of the 1958 drug bust that had led to his two-year prison sentence. There were suggestions that Cassady’s reputation as the wild spirit Dean Moriarty had preceded him and actually contributed to particular police interest in his activities and his arrest and charge.
123McNally, 2002, pp. 110–11.
124Ibid., pp. 107–8.
125Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (London: Plexus, 1982), p. 12.
126Ibid., p. 17.
127Michael McClure quoted in interview with Frank Lisciandro, 1990, ‘Nile insect eyes: Talking on Jim Morrison’, Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary – Essays and Interviews, Michael McClure (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp. 237–56 (pp. 237–8).
128William Burroughs quoted in ‘Burroughs on punk rock’ in Victor Bockris, New York Babylon: From Beat to Punk (London: Omnibus, 1998), pp. 181–2 (p. 181).
129Burroughs in Bockris, New York Babylon, 1998, p. 182.
130Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (London: Viking, 1990), p. 492.
131Richard Hell, ‘My Burroughs: Postmortem notes’, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, edited by Holly George-Warren (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), pp. 216–19 (p. 216).
132Verlaine and Hell had published poetry jointly under the single name Theresa Stern. See Robert Palmer, Dancing the Street: A Rock & Roll History (London: BBC Books, 1996), p. 269.
133Originally the bar was called CBGB and OMFUG: Country, Blue Grass and Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandisers. See Palmer, 1996, p. 268.
134Bernard Gendron, ‘The Downtown music scene’, The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974–1984, edited by Marvin J. Taylor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 41–65 (p. 53).
135Robert Siegle, ‘Writing Downtown’, The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974–1984, edited by Marvin J. Taylor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 131–53 (p. 136).
136Miles, 1990, pp. 491–2.
137Lee Ranaldo, ‘Interview – Beat Generation questions’, Steve Appleford, 4 August 1998, Sonic Youth website, http://www.sonicyouth.com/symu/lee/2011/09/08/i-view-beat-generation-questions-1998/ [accessed 28 February 2012].
138Ibid.
139Peter Buck quoted in David Perry’s notes in the booklet accompanying CD box set The Jack Kerouac Collection (Rhino Records Word Beat, 1990).
140Ibid.
141Michael Stipe, Two Times Intro: On the Road with Patti Smith (New York: Ray Gun Press, 1998).
142Rob Buck quoted in David Perry, 1990.
143Shambhala Sun, ‘The late Allen Ginsberg and Beck in conversation: A Beat/Slacker transgenerational meeting of minds’, January 1997, http://shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&t ask=view&id=2050&Itemid=244 [accessed 27 February 2012].
144Beck quoted from The Life and Times and Allen Ginsberg, directed by Jerry Aronson, 2007.
145Henry Rollins, ‘You can’t dance to a book’, interview with Neddal Ayad, The Modern Word, 20 November 2005, http://www.themodernword.com/interviews/interview_rollins.html [accessed 28 February 2012].
146Charles Bukowski (1920–94) never fraternised with the Beats but his brand of gritty realism saw him often bracketed with the writers of that community.
147See Simon Warner, ‘Amiri Baraka in Manchester’, Beat Scene, No. 69, 2013.
148Mark Kemp, ‘Beat Generation in the generation of beats’, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, edited by Holly George-Warren (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), pp. 415–19 (p. 417).
149Stephen Ronan, Disks of the Gone World: An Annotated Discography of the Best Generation (Berkeley, CA: Ammunition Press, 1996). Note: This section draws extensively on Ronan’s detailed listings. Each recording (and variations) is catalogued by number but the book has no page numbers.
150Ibid., title page.
151Released on Dot, then Hanover. See Ronan, 1996, A-250.
152Released on Hanover. See Ronan, 1996, A-256.
153Released by Verve. See sleeve notes, The Jack Kerouac Collection (Rhino Records Word Beat, 1990), p. 27.
154Released on Rhino Records. See Ronan, 1996, A-276.
155The film can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYtfNu9O3dc [accessed 12 February 2012].
156Released by Rykodisc, 1997.
157Released by Rykodisc, 1999.
158Released by Fantasy Records. See Ronan, 1996, A-118a.
159Released in the Atlantic Verbum Series. See Ronan, 1996, A-128a.
160Released by MGM/Verve Forecast. See Ronan, 1996, A-141a.
161Released by Folkways Records. See Ronan, A-170a.
162Released by John Hammond Records. See Ronan, 1996, A-184.
163Released by Great Jones/Island Records. See Ronan, 1996, A-201.
164Released by Rhino Word Beat. See Ronan, 1996, A-218b.
165Released by Mercury Records. See GlassPages, Philip Glass on the Web, http://www.glasspages.org/skeleton.html [accessed 12 February 2012].
166Released by The English Bookshop, Paris. See Ronan, 1996, A-6a.
167Released by Giorno Poetry Systems Records. See Ronan, 1996, A-20.
168Ibid., see Ronan, 1996, A-26.
169Released by T.K. Records. See Ronan, 1996,A-46a.
170Released by Island Records. See Ronan, 1996, A-64.
171Released by Tim Kerr Records. See Ronan,1996, A-75.
172Released by Island Records. See Ronan, 1996, A-76a.
173Ibid., see Ronan, 1996, A-79.
174Released by Sub Rosa. See Ronan, 1996, A-85.
175Released by Triloka Records, 1999.
176Released by Fantasy Records. See Ronan, 1996, A-103a.
177Released by Rykodisc, 1999.
178Released by Synergy, 2005.
179New York Art Quintet (ESP-Disk, 1966). See Ronan, 1996, A-238a.
180Released by Red Hot/Wax Trax. See Ronan,1996, A-221.
181Released by Living Music Records. See Ronan, 1996, A-319.
182Released by Sanachie. See Ronan, 1996, A-285.
183Released by Koch Records, 2002.
184Released by Sierra Records, 2005.
185Released by Rhino Records. See Ronan, 1996, A-1a.
186Released by Fantasy. See Ronan, 1996, A-234.
1 SIFTING THE SHIFTING SANDS: ‘HOWL’ AND THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE IN THE 1950s
On 7 October 1955 in the Six Gallery in downtown San Francisco, an emerging but little known poet called Allen Ginsberg stood to deliver a new, long poem he had been working on over the previous months. ‘Howl’, read to a small, if packed, crowd of friends and supporters, would-be novelists and ambitious young poets, was an immediate sensation. The listeners greeted the piece, an impassioned statement touching upon issues as broad as the Cold War, homosexuality, Buddhism and jazz, drugs, the supernatural and suicide, with a huge and enthusiastic ovation. Said Jonah Raskin in his book American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation: ‘[T]he audience was transformed […] indifferent spectators becoming energetic participants […] No one had been to a poetry reading that was so emotional and so cathartic’.1
Several of the writers in attendance would actually go away and write their own first-hand account of what had gone on that evening – Jack Kerouac would fictionalise the occasion in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, for example – a suggestion in itself that there was a strong sense a piece of history, a memorable literary moment, had been played out on that autumn night. ‘In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before’, wrote another poet Michael McClure after the reading. ‘We had gone beyond a point of no return – and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void – to the land without poetry – to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.’2 An underground gathering of subterranean scribes and street philosophers, the so-called Beat Generation, had raised its head above the parapet.3
With ‘Howl’, Ginsberg marked his arrival as a writer of profile and status. His previous decade, and more, of uncertain progress – acceptance then expulsion from the Ivy League campus of Columbia in New York, his involvement with the under-classes of Manhattan and his fringe contributions to their criminal activities, a period under the scrutiny of the asylum, his visionary episodes in which he believed he had heard the voice of William Blake, and his time as an employee of the Madison Avenue advertising industry – was behind him; his life as poet had commenced. The day after the Six Gallery reading, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the proprietor of City Lights bookshop and its emerging publishing operation, would acknowledge Ginsberg’s achievement with scant delay. Ferlinghetti, referencing words that Ralph Waldo Emerson had penned to Walt Whitman in praise of Leaves of Grass in 1855, exactly 100 years before, wrote to Ginsberg: ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?’4
While this new era would not be without its accompanying difficulties – the acclaimed piece would indeed be published by City Lights the following year, as Howl and Other Poems, only to face obscenity charges and a high profile court case within months – the breakthrough that ‘Howl’ represented was enormous, not only for the writer of the poem but also those in Ginsberg’s circle. His friends Kerouac and William Burroughs would gain immensely from the poet’s national, then international, recognition. Ginsberg had been and remained a tireless promoter of his fellow writers’ novels. He had helped Burroughs to publish his debut book, Junkie, in 1953, and would continue to push his much more difficult, experimental works like The Naked Lunch as the 1950s turned into the 1960s. For Kerouac, ‘Howl’ was like the fanfare before the curtain rose and the stage illuminated, for Ginsberg made mention of his friend’s numerous unpublished novels in the preface to the poem and included him among several dedicatees. In 1957, On the Road, the major novel of this tight-knit gathering of writers, would appear and cause a sensation. The Beats, a community known essentially to its core members only before the mid-1950s, would swiftly become a literary grouping familiar to hundreds and thousands of readers around the globe in the months and years that would follow.
Yet, if writers and poets of a fresh vein were beginning to make their mark at this moment, there were other significant forces at play on a shifting American landscape. By the time Ginsberg premiered his soon-to-be published poem, a significant record was coming to the end of a six-month stay in the Top 40, the American Billboard chart which had become the standard weekly sales listing for pop songs from 1940. Bill Haley and His Comets’ single ‘(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock’ – also widely described in its shortened version of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ – had entered the chart on 15 April 1955 and would remain in that list for the next 24 weeks.5 During its stay it would also enjoy eight weeks in the number one position, a significant indicator that this record had entered and remained part of the national psyche for some considerable time.
Why was this of importance? This was not Haley’s first chart entry: Palmer credits his 1953 release ‘Crazy Man Crazy’ as ‘the first white rock and roll hit’6 and, at the end of 1954, Ward states that ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’, a bowdlerised version of a Big Joe Turner hit, ‘shot up the Top Ten – not only in the United States but also in England, where teenagers were apparently awaiting this blast of new music just as avidly as Americans were’.7 But ‘(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock’ left a deeper imprint because, not only was it heard on record players and radios, but had also been featured in an acclaimed and widely-seen movie of 1955, The Blackboard Jungle, a school-based drama starring Glenn Ford which had utilised music – jazz versus rock ’n’ roll – as a metaphor for the generation gap. The film, based on a novel by Evan Hunter concerned ‘a new teacher at a high school in a “bad” section of town [who] is taunted and abused by a group of his students (including a black one played by Sidney Poitier)’.8 A fellow teacher also endures the ignominy of having his jazz records smashed by members of his class.9
Why though should we attempt to elide these two works, ‘Howl’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’, a piece of poetry and a song? Why should a connection be made between an un-minted poem, known to but a dedicated few, and a hugely successful pop record, familiar to millions across the States? This chapter will argue that both of these expressions were symptomatic of an America that was undergoing a period of dramatic transition. While Ginsberg’s verse and Haley’s song were coming from different intellectual places, and appealing to different sections of society, they were symbols of that metamorphosis. These two distinct tributaries in America’s cultural stream gushed freely, and largely independently, during the latter 1950s and early 1960s yet, by the middle of the 1960s, appeared to find confluence. By then, the jump and jive innocence of rock ’n’ roll had matured into the earnest exhorting of a new rock, no longer merely concerned with the boy-meets-girl obsessions of adolescent-oriented pop, but now spreading its creative net to embrace sex and psychosis, politics and pot, as the Beatles and Bob Dylan replaced the early heroes of rock’s pantheon. And, with that transformation, some of the key Beats would take the view that rock was something they could feed into and bounce off; the musicians and the poets could and would discover common ground. But that coming-together is a tale for another place in this volume. Here we will examine the US context in which Beat literature, with ‘Howl’ as its unravelling and uncompromising standard, and original rock ’n’ roll, both symptom of, and cure for, post-war teen neurosis perhaps, were initially recognised.
Let us consider the national setting that applied in the middle of the 1950s and the kind of America that felt the psychological tremors that Ginsberg’s vociferous assault sent scurrying across the nation, first among the literati, then the media, then the courts and, with remarkable speed, among ordinary men and women in the street. What had been happening socially and politically prior this to thought-quake; what had been unfolding in the worlds of literature and popular music, art and art music? The decade after the end of the Second World War, concluded first in Europe then devastatingly under atomic clouds in the Far East, was a time of extraordinary contrast for the US. On the one hand, the economic troubles, that had so scarred the 1930s, troubles that had only been exorcised by a combination of Roosevelt’s Keynesian plans to rebuild America and the arrival of the war which had galvanised industry and seen off the last remnants of Depression, evaporated and by the early 1950s economic boom was bringing prosperity to large portions of the nation: the white middle classes, particularly, saw standards of living rise and the home become a haven for an abundance of newly available consumer goods – fridges and other kitchen appliances, radios and televisions. There was a sense, certainly among the advantaged sections of American society that the cruelty of war had at least been followed by the balm of material comfort, the cooling breeze of financial security. As Bradbury writes: ‘[R]eal incomes doubled, the rewards of a mass consumer society spread even further and America became a land of unprecedented affluence, an example to others
.’ But, he counsels, ‘the age of affluence was also an age of materialism and conformity’.10
However, we should be cautious of these broad brush-strokes; the picture was far from rosy in all aspects. The Civil War, that traumatic scarification of the American soul, was not yet a hundred years past and the promises the bloody conflict had intended to deliver – emancipation of the American Negro from the yoke of brutalised slavery, in particular – had only been partially fulfilled. If the barbarisms of plantation enslavement had legally ended with the war’s conclusion, even by the 1950s the lot of most black men and women was only marginally improved. Mass Negro emigration to the northern states from the 1930s and into the 1940s had seen cities like Chicago and Detroit, cradles of the US industrial recovery, employ large numbers of black workers on their production lines. In this sense there were economic prospects – jobs and homes in cities on the rise – for those who left the south even if their social position remained on the lowest reaches of the ladder. However, in the southern states, where the wounds of the Civil War had barely healed even after the Second World War, the emancipated classes remained third class citizens, bound in a straitjacket of so-called Jim Crow laws.11 Voting rights and educational opportunities existed in theory but, in practice, the discriminatory attitudes that persisted in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and other members of the former Confederacy meant that blacks had little chance of genuine advancement.
Not that the whites, enjoying the fruits of consumer overflow, had lives of complete security and contentment. The peace won after VE Day and VJ Day had been built on curious alliances which would quickly strain, then burst, at the seams. The enforced entente with Soviet Russia to combat Nazi Germany in Europe was rapidly revealed to be a marriage of convenience. Stalin’s bootprint remained firmly planted in most of the Eastern European states that had been the battleground in the closing years of the war, the tide of Communism now spread across half the continent.12 Meanwhile, the US retained a powerful military presence in the West of that continent. Germany was split, four ways between the principal Allies and the old capital Berlin, the microcosm which echoed that broader arrangement, soon emerged as the cracking point in this diplomatic stand-off. The USSR’s blockade of the German capital in 1948 led to the famous air-lift to relieve those West Berliners under the administration of the Americans, French and British.13 And, of course, this was just a symptom of a wider malaise: an ideological divide between libertarian capitalism and authoritarian socialism which would become the setting for a protracted contretemps during the whole of the 1950s. Once the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, had passed US nuclear secrets to the Soviets, in a bid to balance the military arsenals on each side of the split,14 the American populace spent at least a decade fearing that atomic weapons, used with such devastating event on Japan, would be targeted at them at some early stage. Nor was this fear merely a metaphorical one, simply haunting the inner psyches of America. The claims of the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy appeared to go a long way to justifying these anxieties. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which pre-dated the rise of McCarthy investigations but shared a similar agenda, suggested that Communist sympathisers were secreted in every avenue of everyday life – from politics to business, trade unions to the entertainment industry – and that these earmarked individuals were, in essence, traitors whose plotting would leave the US backdoor open and allow the Soviets to infiltrate, bringing the capitalist citadel to its knees, either through entryist stealth or invading missiles. ‘Fears about communism’, says Hamilton, ‘encouraged people to distrust reformers while the emergence of the prosperous suburbs, where every house looked the same, everyone watched identical television shows, and everyone dressed alike, solidified conformist views’.15