by Simon Warner
SW In the late 1950s then when you first performed jazz poetry with Kerouac, am I right in thinking that the initial season that you did together in New York actually wasn’t that well received?
DA Oh people loved it. We used to do it before we even did the very first, what you might call an official reading at the Brata Art Gallery, on East 10th Street, in October of 1957 and I had the date wrong in my first book because I couldn’t remember that accurately, that particular date, and there was no hard evidence. But I did get some of the second one which was right up towards the end of December and the first one that we did, someone just put out some flyers right, never been able to get a copy and Philip Lamantia, Howard Hart, Jack and myself decided to actually to do it. I described all that in detail in Off Beat: Collaborating with Kerouac, how we went up to see Frank O’Hara at the Museum of Modern Art and the person didn’t even think Kerouac could have written this: he was sort of a crude truck driver and he couldn’t have written a book, that someone else wrote the book for him, because they didn’t like the way he dressed and spoke.
But before that, Jack and I used to do that at parties, on park benches, coffee houses, anytime we were together and a lot of other people did, some of whom would have an instrument. Someone would read a poem and somebody would accompany him and this has been going on since Homer did The Iliad and The Odyssey on a boat accompanied by a lyre player. And Langston Hughes told me they did that all the time during the Harlem Renaissance but they didn’t call it jazz poetry and they never gave a kind of an official New York jazz poetry reading.
Ours was just something we did for a bunch of friends because the art gallery thought it would be fun and it created such a stir, the Circle in the Square Theatre said, ‘Let’s do it there’, and fortunately I had the old poster, so that’s kind of the hard evidence, you know the paper trail that I guess historians need to show that it actually happened.
But when it was called the Jazz Poetry Trio, Jack and I used to call it music poetry/poetry music because it wasn’t exclusively jazz. It was music to fit the poem and, very often, I would just improvise and rhyme raps myself and Jack would do the same and I never knew whether he was reading something that he wrote or just something that he made up on the spot, or if it was something by Baudelaire or Céline or Gregory Corso or Langston Hughes or some of the other people whose work he loved and admired.
SW Am I right in thinking that once On The Road had been published, Kerouac’s fame was obviously on the rise and didn’t you do a short residency together at one of the Village jazz clubs …
DA No, there was a famous one that he did at the Vanguard for which I was not available and after that we played our jazz poetry reading at the Circle in the Square. But at the Vanguard he came in, the musicians had no idea who he was, what he was doing …
SW It was the Vanguard that didn’t work then …
DA And that was because he came in and the musicians, who Jack loved and knew about, didn’t really know who he was. There was a tiny dressing room about the size of a phone booth and Jack came in not dressed up and the jazz players would always get dressed up because they were conscious of the bad image that jazz had amongst so many people, so they figured that, if they would dress up to the nines, people would take them more seriously as artists. And Jack came in as he always did just looking as if he had come from working as a lumberjack for the day and he looked elegant in his own way but he wasn’t dressed up that way so people would look and say, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’, and he, being so sensitive, thought that perhaps these people who he admired and loved didn’t really want to do that with him. So he drank a lot as a result and felt insecure and I wasn’t there as a security blanket as someone who loved him.
Steve Allen came to one of those shows and Jack was reading finally by himself and Steve said, ‘You know, let me try and play some music for you’, so Bob Thiele, who made records, happened to be sitting in the audience and said to Steve, ‘Why don’t you guys make a recording’ so Jack as a result was able to make a recording with Steve. We were going to do a recording several times but we never got around to is except for the recording of the film Pull My Daisy and years later I did one for Rykodisc. Fifty years after Jack had narrated into a tape recorder, I added the music.
SW That was a fantastic, the work you did on the Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road CD. That epic section, about 18 minutes long, is it ‘Washington Blues’? That is magnificent.
DA Well, thank you. Actually I used that theme in the second movement of my flute concerto that I wrote for James Galway, which is dedicated to Kerouac, and I used that melody again as the principal theme, because I liked it so much I decided it should have a life of its own. Thank you.
SW It has so many colours, so much richness, so many styles.
DA Well interestingly enough, what I did for that one, I used two different groups and I orchestrated and wrote the whole thing as a 20-minute piece with two different groups so that I had to record them separately so one could fit into the other. That’s where I used my skills as a classical composer as if I was…
SW How was that edited?
DA It was very simple because I had it all figured out. I said this is the first piece, this is the third piece, this is the second piece, this is the eighth piece, just put them together. I had everything timed with a stopwatch so that one thing flowed into the other and it fit the poem perfectly.
But the second one that we did called ‘Orizaba 210 Blues’, I did it the opposite way. I wrote nothing down and I did everything improvised, one track after another, and created the whole track out of my head, like Jack often did when he typed and the nice thing is people listening to both of those can’t tell which is written and which is improvised – and the point being that what Jack tried to do was edit in his head, to plan and then to let it happen.
When I compose I sit there, sometimes all day, working on one measure but at the very end what I decide to use is something that is correct but also sounds effortless. So you have to work real hard to sound effortless. Kerouac did that too, that is one of the big secrets. And by being spontaneous and being formal, that’s the magic of his work and that is why his work towers above everyone else of the so-called Beat Generation. Because he really had that ability to combine that jazz philosophy.
Now I think in the rock world, Jim Morrison was the heir to that, certainly with the Doors, and the Last Poets, of course, who were fantastic and those are people in rock that we all love. Certainly, Jack appreciated, before he died, as we all did, Carlos Santana, who was extraordinary and still is today, and a lot of Jim Webb, the great songwriter also we appreciated. Jack loved a lot of the country artists, too, because they were so sincere, beautiful and musical and honest.
SW Were there any particular country heroes Kerouac ever mentioned to you?
DA They weren’t heroes, but we all loved Jimmie Rogers and Patsy Kline, of course, and Hank Williams who we used to say was the Texas haiku master because his miniatures said everything. Willie Nelson, way back then, we were aware of through the grapevine, even though he was an obscure songwriter.
SW He wrote ‘Crazy’ didn’t he?
DA Yes, and Willie also, of course, had that jazz inflection in everything that he ever did. Jazz musician Miles Davis loved Willie. There was always this connection between the different people who were coming from a truly soulful place.
SW Yes, there is a tendency isn’t there in music, certainly in popular music, to pigeonhole and say, ‘Miles Davis does this, Willie Nelson does this’, and you feel as if the barriers are more divisive than useful?
DA Oh, of course. We were interested in the music. Jack was revolted by what became the rock ’n’ roll industry, combining the promulgation of young people getting stoned out on drugs, not reading books, not writing, nor being creative, not having respect for anyone else, not studying and not being more open and inclusive, but just being blasted out and saying that was a revolutionary move, being irresponsible
and despising the country that had offered us so much.
Jack had an immigrant sense of appreciation for America because it had offered himself and his family a better opportunity. He saw the beauty part of all the people in this extraordinary country who make such an unpredictable, wild, crazy place, and like all musicians who travel like we do, we are all patriotic in the sense that we appreciate that beauty and the unsung heroes and heroines of our culture and the early rock ’n’ rollers who led that same nomadic life of being on the road.
When rock ’n’ roll became an industrial phenomenon and was taken over by substance-abusing, criminal type people who were looking for some fast money, it changed the feeling of it because the people in charge, unlike in the world of jazz, were not the musicians and the fans who loved them, but other people who were using the powers of corporate America to manipulate people into buying something that they themselves didn’t appreciate and respect.
So they say that the tree dies at the top, so if somebody is controlled by a bunch of philistine ignoramuses, the chances are the artist will find a way to make it beautiful anyway! Just as Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel – it took him four years – where he was being screamed at every week, ‘Hurry Mike you’re behind schedule’. He managed it anyway.
But in the case of a lot of rock ’n’ roll, it was so tainted by the people who ran it that they used these poor young musicians really in the way that purveyors do and pimps do when they take a 15-year-old off of a bus coming from the Midwest and turn her into a prostitute and then when they are 21 years old, discard them because they are no longer commercially viable.
SW Do you think this had happened before the 1960s were over or was this was a post-1960s phenomenon – had this already happened in the 1960s?
DA No, this happened in the 1960s when the record companies had drug abusers and opportunists who saw progressive politics, because of the devastation of the Vietnam War, as a way of tapping into the youth dollar. All that, together with a highly inflated economy, handed the country over to the right wing where it still is today. It was irresponsible on the part of a lot of people and a lot of the icons who were created themselves became victims as a result of that.
SW Hendrix, Joplin and so on.
DA Yes and fortunately the music of Janis Joplin and the Band, and some of the other great early rockers, still survives and is appreciated more than ever by younger rockers because it has integrity and substance and quality and creativity and imagination. Songwriters like Fred Neil, the extraordinary work that they have done and …
SW Yes, you were making this very interesting point about the rock industry exploiting young musicians and you made this parallel with prostitution or whatever. But do you feel as if there was some kind of continuity between what Beat had been and what rock became after the mid-1960s?
DA No.
SW OK.
DA How’s that for a short answer? I think there were some people … Allen [Ginsberg] was very attracted to rock because of the gigantic audience that it reached and some people tried to attach themselves to the rock industry just to get the exposure that rock offered. The famous statement was that the head of Columbia Records told Miles Davis that by using that machinery, if he would change his attitude and what he did to an extent, he could make him into a pop star. And Miles, who had spent his whole life making all this magnificent music for little record companies that probably gave him a thousandth the level of appreciation for what he did, went along with it and he became a rock star.
On the other hand, Dizzy Gillespie, with whom I played up until he passed away, continued on his chosen path. Doesn’t mean one’s better than the other. There is no question of what anyone should do or how people should conduct their lives, but ultimately the music and literature and art and painting have to come from a very private place, and I have always admired people like Willie Nelson and Dizzy and Eubie Blake, who finally got famous when he was 80 years old, and Picasso and people who stayed their course and whatever phases they went through they never tried to be something that they weren’t publicly.
They were always open to doing many, many different things, but everything was done with integrity, with love, with devotion, with humility and it wasn’t done in public: no one was charged to buy a painting, commission a symphony, commission an opera, see a jazz concert, see anything, if people were merely experimenting. The idea of experimental art is you experiment at home. When you are out there playing for people you are creating something.
[Charles] Mingus said: ‘Man, you practise at home. When you come on the gig you come to create.’ He also said, ‘We were playing in this really funky bar where the guy behind the bar, who was also a part-manager, he would come out and beat up the customers if he didn’t like their attitude.’ Mingus remarked: ‘It doesn’t matter how ratty these joint are, every night with me is Carnegie Hall.’ The first time I heard that expression.
Basically what all these artists and musicians and the early rockers did was to create wonderful music, wonderful art, wonderful entertainment, wonderful oral history through music, of their life experiences in sometimes the most wretched conditions and when they finally got to an exalted condition, they still did it and still do it to this day.
So Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Ray Charles, until he passed away, and Willie Nelson still, people who are in their 70s, are a lifetime of continuity, of excellence and warmth and inclusiveness. And Kerouac was very much like that and that’s the way that I try to be. Ultimately, the people who really last come not because of their image, or because they are hot just for a moment, but because what they did has enduring value and we were interested, certainly Jack and myself, in enduring value. We both knew, just as Carlos Santana knows and the great early rockers know, that there are no short cuts.
SW So would you be critical of Ginsberg for pinning his colours to that rock flag in the 1960s?
DA No, because he felt that was the thing to do and he was struggling as an American poet, to try to get poets to feel they could go out to read their work, that they could be taken seriously, that they could be popular, that they could make money, that they could have celebrity.
Allen opened up the doors for a lot of other people to think that they could write poetry and go out and read it and that’s why I played on all those recordings that he asked me to because I said regardless of what they are like it is a good thing to open up the door for a young songwriter to say, ‘Gee, Allen Ginsberg is supposed to be a famous poet and he’s trying to get out there and sing what he wrote, maybe as a songwriter, I can consider myself to be a poet too.’
Conversely for a lot of musicians like [Ginsberg guitarist] Steven Taylor, who is a brilliant accompanist, just as brilliant as they get. He could show other musicians that you can play with someone who is a reader, you can play sensitively and softly, to honour the music that is already in the poetry and the words.
To be an accompanist is the highest level of artistic achievement and to be an ensemble player and to reinforce those basic principles of art which is so important in an ego-driven world, instead of everyone blasting each other off the stage and to be sensitive and musical and giving. Steven was great at that and when he and Allen played together it was terrific. And I always enjoyed it, and I was the one who got Bob Dylan …
SW I wanted to ask you a little more about Bob Dylan …
DA Well I was asked recently to work on that Masked and Anonymous movie. Jeff Rosen [Dylan’s manager] called me up and Dylan and Larry Charles, the director, wanted me to do the score similar to the one I had done for The Manchurian Candidate, back in 1962. I felt that seemed to show that sometimes when something has value, it will retain the value. In Dylan’s case, what he did so long ago still is resonant to people because it has intrinsic value and beauty to it. Quite some time ago, Dylan called me up and we went to a poetry reading at NYU with Gregory Corso and Allen reading.
SW When was this then, David?
DA
I think it was 1971 but it might have been 1970, I have the dates confused, but it was in the fall of either 1970 or 1971 and it was in all the books, sometimes October, sometimes November.1 I’m pretty sure it was October and it’s in my own book, but I can’t remember whether it was ‘70 or ‘71, but it’s one of those two dates. I was living on Sixth Avenue, 11th Street. Dylan said, ‘Let’s go hear, Allen and Gregory’, because Dylan loved Gregory’s poetry, as we all did, and Ginsberg himself said, ‘The poet I like more than my own work is Gregory.’
We all were crazy about Gregory’s work and it’s always great to see Allen, cause he was so much fun and so argumentative and so interesting to be with and you never knew what he was going to do, say, what phase he was in, so it was always enjoyable to be with him, especially then. And he was always full of life and he was in his guru phase, where he was all dressed up in the white robes.
During intermission, Bob and I went back, Allen took me to one side. He said, ‘Please man, get Dylan to come over tonight, come and see me, I’ve been trying for ten years to get him to do something with me musically. Please David, I beg you, please, please.’ I said, ‘Well sure, I’ll ask him.’ So I said to Dylan, ‘I’m free, I’m just writing some music, I can take the time off and just hang out.’ So I said to Dylan, ‘Yeah, why not?’