Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  The weekend radio show was entitled A Reluctant Beat, reflecting on Ferlinghetti’s arm’s length relationship with that community of poets and novelists who emerged from the mid-1940s in New York City and spread their gospel to the Bay Area by the mid-1950s, led principally by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs but joined by a string of other friends and fellow travellers as the years unfolded and their ideas spread.

  Why was Ferlinghetti significant? And why was he reluctant? He was crucial because it was he who heard Ginsberg read an unpublished poem called ‘Howl’ in October 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco and quickly offered to publish the writer in his Pocket Poets series, thus providing the Beats with a platform to attain a national, then international, profile. But the publisher felt too closely tied to longer, older socio-political traditions – the left, the unions, anarchism – to fully embrace the newer gathering, activists in their way but less interested in the notions of organised action and more concerned, arguably, with an existential individualism.

  Eventually, in fact not so long after, Ferlinghetti was forced to fight an obscenity battle over ‘Howl’, a long verse that addressed far too many taboos – sex, drugs, race, religion and more – to avoid the attention and then interrogation of the authorities, still numbed by a paranoia inculcated by McCarthy’s recent witch-hunts.

  Ginsberg’s résumé – Jewish, homosexual, second generation Russian immigrant with a Communist mother and a Socialist father – was probably enough to set the establishment alarm bells ringing even before he shared his intense opinions in print. But, in the end, the courts declared that the poem possessed sufficient artistic merit to evade the censor’s knife and Ferlinghetti’s independent publishing house had won a notable victory in the struggle for freedom of expression.

  But Ferlinghetti was, and is, a poet, too, and his collections – A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World – became celebrated in their own right. Nor was he a sycophant of the Beat circle. He turned down Kerouac’s manuscript for Mexico City Blues, when the author of On the Road was at the peak of his earning potential, because he didn’t consider his spontaneous sketches to be poetry at all.

  Ferlinghetti, who has always been a fan of jazz and an innovator in the field of jazz poetry, made musically-accompanied recordings of both of his most recognised verse collections when Dana Colley, saxophonist with Morphine, joined him on A Coney Island of the Mind in 1999, and, in 2005, when the poet linked with a long-time ally of the Beat community, the jazz musician David Amram on Pictures of the Gone World. Both recordings were produced by Jim Sampas, whose Beat recording CV is long. Sampas also included the City Lights man’s contribution to Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness, the 1997 CD tribute to the novelist.

  As Ferlinghetti enters his tenth decade, many of the giants of the Beat era have gone – Kerouac in 1969, Ginsberg and Burroughs in 1997 – but City Lights, the first such shop in the US dedicated to paperbacks alone, continues despite the prediction of another renowned, and sadly late, seer of the San Francisco literary scene, Kenneth Rexroth, that Ferlinghetti’s plan to avoid traditional hardbacks was doomed to commercial failure. The proprietor of, quite conceivably the world’s most famous bookstore, still, I am sure, finds that little detail something to smile about.

  INTERVIEW 1

  David Amram, jazz musician and Beat composer, including the Pull My Daisy soundtrack

  David Amram, is a jazz musician, orchestral composer and arranger, who has been associated with the Beats for more than half a century. Born in 1930 in Philadelphia, he is a French horn player, pianist and multi-instrumentalist who has worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Leonard Bernstein and many other giants of US music. He also lends his name to a number of significant movie soundtracks including Splendor in the Grass (1961) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962). He first met and befriended Jack Kerouac in 1956, then joined him on his earliest live jazz poetry ventures. In 1959, he penned the music to the legendary Beat film Pull My Daisy. Later he worked with Allen Ginsberg in the recording studio, joining sessions which also included Bob Dylan in 1971 and 1981. In 1999, he was one of the principal contributors to the album Jack Kerouac Reads on the Road, arranging scores to accompany taped work by the novelist that had been discovered decades after his death. In 2004, he accompanied Lawrence Ferlinghetti on a musical setting of his poem Pictures of the Gone World. His books include three volumes of autobiography – Vibrations: The Adventures and Musical Times of David Amram (2001), Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac (2003) and Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat (2007). I met Amram at his upstate New York home in the rural Putman Valley in summer 2004.

  SW I know that you have been involved in music all your life and rock music hasn’t been at the centre of what you’ve done, but I would like to get some sort of sense of the way you feel, first of all how music fitted into these experiences in the 1950s – you were very much part of that – and I’d like to try and get your views on rock ’n’ roll, for example. Was it affecting you or was it being rejected by people like you and your literary colleagues. Let me first of all ask the wide question, how do you feel music and Beat literature connected in the 1950s and why did they make a connection?

  DA There were two people, in my opinion who were central to what we would call Beat today: the two people who coined that expression, John Clellon Holmes, whose book The Horn, which we all felt had even more insight, as its own entity, than anything that has been written and, of course, Jack Kerouac, whose descriptions of jazz are unparalleled. There was also someone who’s left out of the Beat pantheon who was just as important, someone we all read, Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man, which we all considered to be a masterpiece, even though I’ve never seen, to my knowledge, anybody saying that in print. Jack certainly felt that way and I did and every musician I knew, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Monk, everyone read Ralph Ellison, not because he was a black author, but because he was a great author who was black, who wrote about all this so beautifully and was a musician himself. Also Langston Hughes, who had extraordinary poetry and essays about jazz and history. Langston Hughes wrote so beautifully about that and influenced us, as well.

  There was another writer, of equal importance, Seymour Krim, whose collection of essays, Views of a Near-Sighted Canoneer, had some amazing insight into Harlem of the 1940s and early 1950s, and the fact that so much of this great music came out of these terrible, oppressive experiences. And he realised, as a white person there, he could not only enjoy the spirituality and the beauty of the music, but he also had to understand the pain and suffering and chaos it came out of. He said you should not to allow yourself to be in a false state of ecstasy about something that came out of such a terrible situation – and it was about music of overcoming. But basically, the people that we would associate with the word Beat, Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes, had a real understanding; John, sociologically, intellectually and humanistically, could see what that life was like for those musicians and through the dreariness and the horror, the neglect and the wretched working conditions, some great music was being played.

  Lord Buckley, another key figure of our time, who Kerouac and I loved, another who has also been virtually ignored until recently, was himself of course the great jazz poet improviser. But Kerouac, above all, not only could write about the music, he could play it and he could sing it, so when we did our collaborations, it was like being with a wonderful jazz musician and a singer as well as a brilliant writer.We also both knew, certainly Jack knew and I knew, that this music was about overcoming, about improvising, about yea-saying, about celebrating life and about dealing with catastrophes and turning them around into positive situations. So, understanding that jazz also came so much from the African-American church experience, from field hollers, from all kinds of other music – it was something that was easy for us to relate to, those other musics, that were the source of jazz.

  The case in point being that Stravinsky and Bartók, as much as any
rock ’n’ roll, were two central figures that Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Monk, always spoke about, that Jack always spoke about, that I was interested in. And, in addition to Stravinsky and Bartók, we also had the wonderful blues singers, starting with Bessie Smith and Lead Belly and harmonica players like Little Walter, people like that who came later on, all the way up to the great South Side Chicago blues players, who were themselves the foundations of rock ’n’ roll. And we were aware, although I know it certainly hasn’t been written about that much, I know I was certainly aware, of Screaming Jay Hawkins, the Platters, the Flamingos, the Coasters, Little Richard. These were tremendous players of music.

  Interestingly enough, when I saw Charlie Parker play, and I told Jack about it, in 1952, when I met Charlie Parker, he was on the bill with the Clovers – and the Clovers had a guitarist named Bill Harris who arranged their music who also played unaccompanied Bach on the guitar in 1952. So when they talk about rock ’n’ roll, we usually begin that discussion with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the opening acts for these giants. When Charlie Parker played at the Apollo Theatre, rather in Washington DC at the Howard Theatre, which I described in my book Vibrations, he said to me ‘Listen to the Clovers!’, in addition to telling me to listen to Bartók and Stravinsky and Delius, Frederick Delius, he also said, ‘Listen to The Clovers and if you don’t understand what I am doing, hear what the Clovers are doing!’

  The point being that early rock ’n’ roll, the seminal rock and roll, came out of the same sources as jazz. Chuck Berry was a tremendous jazz fan. The blues are the blues regardless of who plays them and to the credit of the English musicians of the 1960s, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Burdon, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker and so on, had much more knowledge of and respect for these old blues players and seminal fathers of rock ’n’ roll than most people in the United States did. And in England, as everyone knows, the Beatles and the Stones were often opening acts for these people, who in the United States worked what was called the Chitlin Circuit, named after the chitlins which is a dish made out of old parts of the pig and all cooked up and fried up, which was a very popular dish among African-Americans and white people who lived in the South that ate the same food as well.

  But the Chitlin Circuit was where most of these people worked. Many of them had day jobs and just played on weekends and to the credit of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, those groups mentioned these great old players so often that they jump-started their careers in the United States, as a result of the Beatles and the Stones taking this music and re-energising it, repackaging it and re-doing it for their own expression, their own pleasure. Now all of this was alike to jazz but in the 1960s when the rock ’n’ roll industry was truly born, and suddenly there was a fortune being made from this music, not only jazz was put on the back-burner, but most of the people who were the creators of rock ’n’ roll didn’t get credit until the 1990s.

  Little Richard and Chuck Berry and a few of the survivors who lived long enough, are now considered to be icons and one of the wonderful things was seeing the Chuck Berry tribute where they had some of the great players like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, who loved Chuck Berry, playing with Chuck Berry and you could just see in their expressions on their faces the homage that they held for these people. Well Chuck Berry himself and these rockers were very close to people in jazz and all of us had a kind of communal respect and appreciation for one another’s music.

  SW So in the 1950s there wasn’t a snobbery among jazz players and rock ’n’ roll players?

  DA There was a lack of snobbery to the point where Charlie Parker did one of his famous gigs and during intermission he disappeared and people said, ‘Oh my gosh, is he out partying and forgot to come back, or did he have to pawn his horn, or did he have to get his own saxophone out of the pawn shop, or did a friend get him into conversation and he got so interested that he forgot to come back to play!?’

  So finally they were looking and walking all around the streets and someone walked across the street where there was a polka band playing and Charlie Parker was sitting with the polka band during intermission and he had such a good time playing polkas that he forgot to come back to his job!

  So, there was an appreciation. I mean how would Charlie Parker in 1952 get a 21-year-old kid like me, or Dizzy Gillespie, in 1951, come with his band and crash in my basement apartment and give me a whole lesson for life on how they tried to live if they didn’t have appreciation for other people. Our whole era was based on mutual respect, open-ness, egalitarianism and warmth.

  SW What happened when Elvis Presley came along in the mid-1950s? He was providing the big headline, ‘White man singing like a black man’. How did Kerouac, how did you feel about someone like Presley, did Kerouac ever say anything about Elvis?

  DA No, we all enjoyed his singing; he was a wonderful singer. He was coming right out of that Southern tradition where white people and black people were brought up together. When I lived in Washington, which was officially segregated, I lived in what was called a checkerboard neighbourhood. That meant that even though there was segregation, black and white people lived in the same block, we hung out with each other, played with each other’s kids, played music together and had a closer relationship than a lot of people do today, where there is no awareness of the cultural commonality, that every human being on Earth shares with every other human being, because of the changing times and the fact there is not that cultural tie.

  What’s happened now is that rap has become so predominant that now a lot of white kids are trying to imitate rappers. But that doesn’t really get you into the culture by pretending to be something that you are not born into. What gets you into another culture is living together, playing music together, collaborating together, eating together, hanging out together, arguing with one another, playing sports with one another, and this was something that was very much of the 1950s world, it was part of a whole community.

  SW Yes, but wasn’t there still a divide in America that you were sort of changing? It would be idealised, wouldn’t it, to say that there was this wonderful melting pot? You were at the forefront of the change in some ways.

  DA Well we never thought of it as a melting pot; that was a sociologist’s idea to reduce everything to one big fast food, disgusting bowl of slop with no identity. We were celebrating, certainly Jack was and I was, I don’t think Allen [Ginsberg], Burroughs was, or indeed a lot of the other people, but certainly Jack and myself, and every musician I knew, and almost all the painters that I knew, were celebrating the treasures of European culture and the treasures of the New World which included American Indian art, painting, music, philosophy, and Latin American music, Afro-Cuban music with Machito and Mario Bauza, the great arranger, and Tito Puente, the young percussionist who got people to learn about the mambo and had a whole extraordinary excitement created around the Afro-Cuban sound and the music of Puerto Rico, all of which became combined with jazz as a cousin, just as rock ’n’ roll was a cousin of jazz.

  All of this was happening at the same time. It was a time of collaboration and, as far as saying, in my opinion, we were stretching the envelope, what we were doing was trying to survive harmoniously and be creative in a very oppressive situation. So we were not interested in trying to oppress other people or trying to jam some fake, quasi-political rhetoric down other people’s throats with a manifesto of The Ten Days that Shook the World, or being like the Trilateral Commission, or official founding fathers of the Beat Generation. That famous picture of Allen, Gregory Corso, Kerouac, myself and the painter Larry Rivers, when we were all sitting round. And now we’re on the covers of all these books now.

  SW I saw it in Boulder, Colorado, only yesterday. Peters, the book shop there, had a signed edition.

  DA When that picture was taken, we were making the film Pull My Daisy. The one thing that is interesting is, first of all, we were all smiling and having fun, which doesn’t fit into the Beat, gloomy, negative, sour picture of,
like, a bunch of angry rock ’n’ rollers because their stock portfolio failed! We weren’t into that because we didn’t have any money, number one, and, number two, we were having fun being with each other and, number three, all of us looked and dressed completely differently, none of us looked like beatniks and none of us were in uniform because we didn’t do that. And Jack and Larry and myself had been in the service so we had already been in uniform previously; we had already done that.

  But the thing, I think, that is one of the distinguishing factors is that there was not that snobbism and we were trying to bring everyone to be welcome at the table and hoping that we would be allowed. I used to talk to Jack about that wonderful scene in the great Dickens novel, Great Expectations, that was made into such a wonderful movie where the little boy is sitting at a dinner table with all these wealthy people he’s been adopted by. And the father is standing outside in the snow looking through the window, wishing that he could be part of it. And we almost felt that we wished we could be sitting at that table and welcome everyone to our table.

  That’s what made the times so wonderful, that was the energy that Jack Kerouac wrote about and reported about, because he was really a reporter. And without Jack Kerouac there would have been no so-called Beat Generation. He was the engine that pulled the train. It was the phenomenal success of On the Road that made all the other people, now considered to be of the Beat Generation, even rise above the level of obscurity. Otherwise, in my opinion, no one would have ever heard of them today. And Carolyn Cassady would concur with that.