by Simon Warner
So, to move forward a little, how might we recognise a Beat shade, a Beat strain, in the women singers, songwriters and musicians who made their mark in the latter stages of the last century and beyond? There are a number of possible ways in which we might approach such a question and even attempt an informal assessment. But, let me stress, that accurate measurement is hardly the intention. Rather, the aim of this section of the chapter is to use a broad palette of evaluation and extrapolate across several time periods. This survey will try to describe some of the characteristics which defined the Beat writers’ artistic philosophy; touch upon a wider sense of what the Beat ethos may have expressed; and also offer an impressionistic view of the manner in which mores and codes, outlooks and even looks, may have been transgenerationally shared by the women we consider. This method may sometimes appear more suggestive than scientific, but I hope to argue that Beat traces survive in a number of significant women artists from the later 1960s to the present time.
Let us begin with some criteria, some benchmarks, for comparison. The Beats’ ‘New Vision’ of 1944 presents a useful codification of the ideas that sparked this writing community’s project, even if its formation pre-dated, by some four years, the naming of the Beat Generation itself. Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and their inner circle of associates framed a set of ideas that would drive them forward, certainly for the next decade and a half, even if not every proto-Beat or each subsequent member of this grouping signed up, in any formal sense, to this bold ideological statement of creative intent. Steven Watson summarises the principal tenets of this early thinking here:
1) Uncensored self-expression is the seed of creativity. 2) The artist’s consciousness is expanded through non-rational means: derangement of the senses, via drugs, dreams, hallucinatory states, and visions. 3) Art supersedes the dictates of conventional morality.8
We might underscore this with notions of experimentalism in life and art; a desire to challenge taboos; and interests in sexual adventure or libertarian behaviour. We could add further to our defining exemplars of a Beat ethos by referring to an almost existential inclination towards movement and travel; concerns with ideas of the spirit and the spiritual; and consider also later interests in ecological issues and political campaigning. Of course, not all Beats subscribed to all of these ideas but they offer a more than helpful sketch of some key concepts which bound many Beats together over a quarter of a century or so. Further we might draw attention to the sartorial style that the Beats passed on, intentionally or not: a bohemian chic adopted and adapted in various fashions – from berets, sunglasses and sandals to striped Breton fishermen’s shirts and duffel coats, black skirts and dresses, leg-ins and stockings and kohl eye-liner – more superficial a signifier conceivably but also a more obvious and blatant one. So, we have a range of signs we might use as guides to assess the presence of a Beat quotient in those women artists who have followed, whether in their behaviour, their statements or in their art – on record, on album sleeves, in photographs, on stage, or on screen.
That very creative material may hold clues of various kinds when we consider the extent to which those singer-performers are referencing what we may recognise as Beat themes or Beat practices or Beat style. This could potentially be revealed in a range of ways: the lyrical content; the lyrical form; the poetic qualities of the words the artist produces; and the extra curricular output beyond the framework of the rock song, such as stand-alone poetry, prose, novels, short stories and so on, which may be appear as extras on a singer’s résumé. That singer or songwriter may even stray into that hybrid field of spoken word where music and verse combine in a manner that is neither simply song nor mere oration but presents something of each. Then there may be more obvious connections: when singers work with Beat writers, credit Beat writers or name-check them as influences in credits, in performances or in magazine interviews. Let us initially consider a small number of suitable examples from different decades and then offer a longer list of candidates more briefly.
Joni Mitchell has been a constant presence since the middle of the 1960s, regarded widely, says Coupe, as ‘the most important female singer-songwriter’9 to emerge in that decade, occasionally announcing her intention to withdraw from music-making in more recent times but still active as a creative individual well past the Millennium. In fact, her art school roots and her lifelong dedication to painting have marked her as a woman of multiple talents, though it is for song-writing that she is has been best known, even if many of her album sleeves feature her own artworks. That detail alone immediately marks a Beat shade to the Mitchell oeuvre; the relationship between the visual arts and the Beats of the 1950s10 and the link between art colleges and rock music-making, particularly in the 1960s, immediately suggests more than a passing connection between these two worlds.
A Canadian who moved to the US to become a darling of the Californian music boom of the later 1960s and early 1970s, her hippy style – long blonde hair, simple back-to-nature attire, a golden girl indeed of the musical community that settled in Laurel Canyon – also had a strong hint of the boho about it. But her appearance was quite secondary to the talent she possessed as vocalist, songwriter and guitarist. Her songs, from the start, set her apart from the standard folk fare, though she originally grew out of that musical scene. She added her remarkable singing range to a series of intriguing guitar tunings, both of which made her a special figure at a time when female singer-songwriters – from Judy Collins to Janis Ian and Judee Sill, Laura Nyro and Carole King to Carly Simon and others beside – were carving out a new space.
Her songs, however, quickly transcended the quotidian fare of the pop-folk setting. With ‘Woodstock’ (1970) she celebrated most famously the key gathering of the hippy tribes and arguably the apex of what the Beats had begun a decade and a half before, even if the horrendous traffic queues over that astonishing weekend prevented her from playing her scheduled set at the event. But she also brought the confessional manner of Beat expression to her love songs – ‘Willy’ and ‘My Old Man’ were tributes to her then partner Graham Nash, whose band Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young became one of the most potent political charges on the rock scene as one decade faded and another one began. Yet if her album Blue (1971) became almost a symbol for the time, featuring extraordinarily personal songs – the title track and ‘River’ among them – there was also a sense that she could tell a wider story in works like ‘California’. She could have, if she had desired, ploughed this furrow for years – yearning, fragile acoustic arrangements – but she quickly moved on, and several times. Court and Spark (1974) saw her link with jazz saxophonist Tom Scott and his band the LA Express and the work became bigger and deeper in scope. Then, The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), a supremely ambitious reflection of life in the West and the many worlds beyond, showcased ‘The Boho Dance’, a tender portrait of a gone land where she had begun her journey, in the basement haunts of the bohemian folk milieu. The following year, Mitchell’s appearance at the Band’s final concert at Winterland, San Francisco, which would become Martin Scorsese’s movie tribute The Last Waltz (1978), also marked her as part of that community of Beat-linked musical performers – from the act at the very heart of the farewell to guests like Van Morrison, poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure, of course, Bob Dylan, linking with his long-time accompanists.
On her album Hejira (1976), joined by fretless jazz bass wunderkind Jaco Pastorius, the theme of travel was visited with a keen eye and the material was infused by the roaming spirit – from ‘Refuge of the Roads’ to ‘Coyote’ and the title track, this collection seemed to embody the very urge to move, and move on, that had so obsessed Kerouac and Cassady 30 years before, a very rejection of the home-making domesticity towards which women were still guided. An outstanding effort again, she would re-group to make a sprawling double album, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977), which framed in its title the artist’s fervent female autonomy, and then a much less accessible record called Mi
ngus (1979), a sturdy and unsentimental paean to the recently deceased Charles Mingus, bebop upright bass player supreme and one of that very circle that the Beats had so fawned over in the New York of the 1940s and 1950s. The jazz twist was maintained into the early 1980s as guitarist Pat Metheny signed up and ex-Miles Davis saxophonist Wayne Shorter took time out of Weather Report (like Pastorius, who held his place in her later ensembles) to accompany Mitchell, amazing accolades to a non-jazz artist but an indication of how seriously the instrumental masters of that cerebral and essentially non-commercial field regarded this versatile, sometimes visionary, performer.
Thus we might mark Mitchell as an important songwriter and lyric poet within a popular music setting. But she was more than that: her guitar-based, singer-songwriter categorisation did not exempt her from experiment, incorporating a wide range of styles, from jazz rock and bebop, including composing, arranging and collaboration, to global music styles exemplified by the Burundi drums employed on ‘The Jungle Line’ and the Latin percussion details of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Nor have her writing themes been confined to the realm of romance: her commentaries extended broadly across social, cultural and political reflection, and her concern with that existential lure of movement certainly sets her in a Beat framework. As Lucy O’Brien states: ‘Working in minor keys as much as major, experimenting with cadence and inflection, layering her songs with deft touches of jazz, rock and folk, Mitchell thrives on difference, on the unpredictable.’11 A remarkable homage to the singer’s output emphasised the respect of the jazz establishment when Herbie Hancock, a keyboardist who connects the cool school of Miles Davis to the age of jazz rock, unveiled River: The Joni Letters in 2007.
Furthermore, her paintings, an increasingly significant part of her output as the century turned, confirm her determination not to be confined by the limitations of the music industry and align her with a more general artistic sensibility, while her determinedly bohemian/hippy style, from the oft-worn beret to the long dresses and the constant cigarette, little changed over half a century, places her in that historical continuum. We should not ignore her ecological flavour either as one of her earlier and most recognised pieces, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ (1970), was a prophetic, green treatise on the over-use and abuse of the planet’s natural resources, a song that convincingly interweaves notions of rustic destruction under the heel of urban spread with the spiky fading of a love affair. Coupe connects Mitchell’s efforts, too, to the Beat poet Gary Snyder who has both commitments to Zen spirituality and eco-centred ideas. He says that Mitchell, like Snyder, is ‘interesting for her attempt to maintain Beat values in the midst of the widespread dilution and/or distortion of them in the name of the “counterculture” ’.12
Patti Smith is another woman who carries Beat credentials and, arguably, in a more explicit way. An artist with many faces, she was actor and painter in her early years in New York City at the end of the 1960s. But it was as a poet that she made her first significant splash in Manhattan, debuting her poems live at St. Mark’s Church on the Lower East Side in 1971, an opportunity afforded by a later Beat poet Anne Waldman, who had directed the hugely influential poetry project at the venue since 1968 and offers a crucial connection between the literary and musical periods. Smith’s debt to the Beat impulse runs deep even if she privileges a host of other artistic talents who have shaped her work, first as a writer and subsequently as one of the most important rock artists, regardless of gender, of the final quarter of the last century. The French Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud, the Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and the musicians James Brown, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones are often cited as shaping forces in her life, which saw her transform her talent as versifier into fully blown rock talent with the release of her debut album Horses in 1975.
But her interest in, and debt to, some of the major Beat names is undeniable. She met Ginsberg when she was struggling and striving, living with her friend and lover Robert Mapplethorpe, in something close to cold-water poverty. The poet bought her a sandwich, a tiny but not insignificant moment in Smith’s ascent, more emblematic than substantial perhaps, it nonetheless prefaced closer associations with both Burroughs and Gregory Corso when she and the now rising photographic star Mapplethorpe moved to the Chelsea Hotel in 1971. There she became part of one of the most eccentric and dynamic collectives of the era, befriending musicologist Harry Smith, meeting Dylan sideman Bobby Neuwirth, finally graduating to the fringes of Andy Warhol’s febrile crowd and, ultimately, forging a powerful identity of her own with a full electric band.
How does Smith carry the Beat torch? We might catalogue a series of signs that appear to link her to that earlier brotherhood. A determined experimentalist who has worked across an impressive span of activities – poetry, the stage, on record, in the visual arts, on film – she has been informed by that modernist, avant garde imperative to stretch the bounds of art, oral, sonic and visual, and, in that sense, we can see a close alliance with the New Vision of the original Beats. We might also point to ideas of uncensored self-expression: her poetry and spoken word canon, generally linked to amplified music after 1975, has been taboo-breaking and a challenge to conventional mores. Her debut single featured the song ‘Piss Factory’, its title immediately inflammatory, and its contents, highly autobiographical in the Beat tradition, were full of candour and confession – shots at organised religion, a strong odour of adolescent sex musking the track, and a high charge of recollected teen anger and frustration present. ‘Horses’, the title piece on her first LP, was a more confusing collage of heightened sense and obscure revelation, a cut-up with Burroughsian nuances, the subject matter a hallucinatory ode to sex and derangement, violence and mortality. Still more unnerving was the later ‘Rock ’n’ roll Nigger’, a taboo-busting song which still, decades after release, has the coiled power to unsettle and shock. Smith attacks the sacred cow of propriety, of acceptable language, with a bludgeon and, echoing earlier speculations about the so-called ‘white Negro’, classifies Christ, Pollock, herself, even Hendrix, most bizarrely it might be claimed, as ‘niggers’, a term that in 2012 continues to be one of the most contested, combustible, and jagged shards of slang in English, packed with a racist history which now needs unpacking all over again after the pejorative word’s recent reclamation by sections of the African-American community.13 In 1978, its power to offend was greater still and its subversion by a white woman, already breaking boundaries as an all-out, unrepressed female rock ’n’ roller, added to the cultural confusion as much as ‘Howl’ might have done in 1955.
The fact that Smith has lauded Dylan – the great link in many ways between Beat and rock sensibilities, once he had assumed his electric persona and, before that even, when his acoustic guitar was still his main weapon of choice – worn the garb of a timeless bohemian – black, white and striped T-shirts, and inevitably androgynous – and also penned poems and sung tributes to the Beats, further adds to this aura of connection. Her verses to Burroughs and Ginsberg, her recorded homage to ‘Howl’ on the latter’s death on Peace and Noise (1997) and her appearance on the tribute album of the same year, Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness, also suggest this ongoing affection for the Beat family and its philosophies. Her sympathies for this grouping have not occurred without criticism in some quarters and the section in this book dedicated to Patti Smith as a post-Beat figure explores that subject in more detail. But, says Carrie Havranek: ‘More than any other artist of her generation, [she] embodies a downtown New York City aesthetic sensibility. She is artist/singer as poet, one whose integrity is unquestioned and whose ambitious, unconventional approach to music took her through various phases, genres and sounds.’14 Although the distorting effects of powerful narcotics have not been part of Smith’s artistic strategy, her eclectic and inventive résumé charts a course that appears to chime resonantly with the Beats’ own New Vision.
Rickie Lee Jones, whose star burnt most brightly at the end of the 1970s and at the start of t
he 1980s but sustains a credible career into the new century, cultivated a boho appearance and twilight lifestyle that placed her very quickly in the post-Beat bracket. Her eponymous 1979 debut album was marked by its themes and threads of the urban night, notions of movement and travel and peopled by a cast of characters, real and imagined, who seemed to step straight out of the bohemian milieu – in bars and cafés, on gas stations, on the street and at the roadside. ‘Chuck E.’s in Love’, a jaunty folk rock ballad, touched upon a genuine figure in her circle, while another mutual friend of both singer and subject, Tom Waits, would form part of Jones’ scene and particularly tag her as a Beat woman by association. As Mick Farren wrote at the time Jones emerged: ‘The similarities between Ms Jones and the aforementioned Waits are more than a little marked. Both have a basis in Forties jazz nostalgia, both seem to be trying to turn themselves into characters from some beat-generation/Damon Runyon world where Nick the Greek slips through the shadows and Jack Kerouac could show up any moment in a beat-up Hudson. The resemblance doesn’t even stop there. On stage, in a beat-up cocktail dress, pink beret pulled down over one eye and a Sherman brown cigarillo hanging out of the corner of her mouth, Rickie Lee slugs back drinks with the confidence of someone who believes she has a cast-iron liver. Just to complete the Waits connection, she even hung round with the same LA bohemian street crowd, in the bars of Hollywood and Venice.’15