by Simon Warner
You have always had a close interest in jazz, of course, and that was one of your passions that linked you to the Beat writers from the start. But what did the emergence of rock ’n’ roll in the late 1950s mean to you, the Beat writers and the wider culture. Did Elvis Presley and others shape your or their lives or art?
This harks me back to when I found myself an autonomous free spirit at Oxford from October 1954 through the rest of the 1950s, relishing my long-quested for, but first unfettered liberation from the heavy restrictions of family and school, coincident with my discoveries of jazz, rock, blues et al., which virtually replaced the ultra-orthodox Jewish indoctrinations family and pretty conventional English middle-class mores grammar school had tried to impose.
Elvis, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and their UK counterparts like Tommy Steele, Adam Faith and Cliff Richard were loud at parties and on café and pub jukeboxes, and so shaped my life and art developments in that they sound-tracked early sex and love interactions as well as cultural and intellectual interests.
But early rock ’n’ roll did less for my male and female buddies than, on one hand just about all forms of both live and recorded jazz, on the other the gradually spreading round Britain R&B, scat, gospel, soul and other mainly Afro-American wordsounds of so many eloquent bands, groups and singer-guitarist-songwriters – including, to name but a quorum, Jimmy Rushing, Wynonie Harris, John Lee Hooker, Nat King Cole, Slim Gaillard, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy, Josh White, Champion Jack Dupree, Jimmy Witherspoon, Leroy Carr, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Eartha Kitt, Aretha Franklin, Odetta, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Otis Redding, Ray Charles and Nina Simone, along with the great blues artists Alexis Korner and Chris Barber helped to bring over – Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
What the emergence of rock meant to the Beats could in some instances have been parallel. But remember that the Beat Generation was to some extent (as Barry Miles has suggested in his commentaries on Allen Ginsberg) willed into existence by Allen, who along with some of the others made various definitions of its/their aspirations – from ‘just a bunch of writers trying to get published’ (Ginsberg) to his more grandiose designations, as toward the close of Part I of ‘Howl’ canonising the madman, bum & angel, as his heroes, ‘beat in time’, etc.
And in On The Road and other Kerouac texts, which mainly predated Elvis et al., it’s Lionel Hampton, George Shearing, Lester Young, Slim Gaillard and bebop I recall being celebrated – as in (earlier) Ginsberg, it’s Ma Rainey, Thelonious Monk’s ‘loud key-bangs’ and Ray Charles; in Burroughs, the lovely evocation of Duke Ellington’s ‘East St Louis Toodle-oo’; in Corso, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Gerry Mulligan. One of the hugely refreshing inputs these writers, and then of course their black associates LeRoi Jones (more latterly Amiri Baraka), Ted Joans, Calvin Hernton, Jayne Cortez as well as West Coast jazz poetry pioneers Kenneth Patchen and [Kenneth] Rexroth, Jack Micheline and Ferlinghetti and later Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, was this growing embrace of oral and jazz an blues modes as at least as basic to both composition and performance of their rapidly evolving supra-literary innovations.
Then again, the open forms and ‘Projective Verse’ practices of Black Mountain College communards Charles Olson, Robert Creeley (who acknowledged his rhythmic masters as Alexander Pope and Miles Davis), Fielding Dawson, Jonathan Williams overlapped and inter-penetrated with the ‘spontaneous bop prosody’ hailed in Kerouac by Ginsberg – whose versification from ‘Howl’ on also drew intensively on Judaic liturgies, the ‘Hebraic barbaric yawp’ of Whitman and post-imagist documentary collages of his New Jersey neighbour and mentor William Carlos Williams. Allen in passing at the opening of ‘Kaddish’ (‘… I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph/the rhythm the rhythm…’) and continually improvised over implicit or explicit musical resonances including every emergent phase, later jamming with Joe Strummer – see the text of ‘Ghetto Defendant’ in the New Departures POP! [Poetry Olympics Party] Anthology of 2000, transcribing their duologue on the 1982 Clash LP Combat Rock. Ginsberg adored and even briefly toured and recorded with Bob Dylan (Rolling Thunder Revue) and McCartney (Albert Hall London 1995/’Ballad of the Skeletons’ CD). Various major collaborations with rockers got going later as with the evolutions of the Fugs, Doors, Dylan and associated formations, plus Patti Smith, Steven Taylor, Mike McClure with Ray Manzarek, Janis Joplin, et al.
Whilst Ginsberg drew on and celebrated many of the main rock ground-breakers: ‘Portland Coliseum’ from 1965, a spot-on exhilarated and exhilarating evocation of a massive Beatles concert in Oregon, is included in The POM! Anthology of 2001, and among other poems dedicated to his most beloved superstars is one addressed to Dylan I first read in The Listener – which begins by avowing and demonstrating Allen’s adoption of Dylan’s shorter lines – ‘On Reading Dylan’s Writings’ from 1973 – Dylan in turn drew on various aspects of Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s innovations in his song-writing, performances and recordings, as well as his published prose writings.
When Pete Brown and I met by chance at Beaulieu Jazz Festival in summer 1960, he had dug New Departures No. 1, and I’d been delighted by his punchy short poems in Evergreen Review. We immediately hitchhiked to Edinburgh Festival, improvising both soundpoems and jazzpoems en route, including an extended sequence of chase choruses (à la Wardell Gray/Dexter Gordon, Zoot Sims/Al Cohn and Jazz at the Phil, and also touched by Patchen, early Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Kerouac’s jazz-cadenced sequence Mexico City Blues), which grew and grew into ‘Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead’.
As well as substantial chunks of my editorial ‘Afterwords’ to the 1969 Penguin Children of Albion Anthology accounting for the various live/New Departures developments of the previous decade, there’s a detailed account of our earliest phases in the ‘Jazz Poetry’ issue of New Departures (No. 4, 1962) including some of this extended jazzpoem’s closing choruses. Like most of our and some of our closest comrades’ road-running round Britain (Christopher Logue, Adrian Mitchell, Spike Hawkins, Libby Houston, [Roger] McGough and [Brian] Patten), these and parallel experiments in oral and performance poetry drew delightedly and constantly on jazz (from New Orleans to bebop and beyond) and blues rather than rock. Brown and I regularly improvised and declaimed to the inspired accompaniments of Dudley Moore, Ronnie Scott, Stan Tracey, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Jeff Clyne, Laurie Morgan, Bobby Wellins, John Mumford, Ian Carr, Ginger Baker, Graham Bond, Bruce Turner, Joe Harriott, Shake Keane, Coleridge Goode, Don Rendell, Jack Bruce, Pete Lemer, Barry Fantoni, Ron Geesin, R.D. Laing, Lol Coxhill, Jeff Nuttall, Simon Wallace et al., as well as fellow poet-musos Roy Fisher, Tom McGrath, Neil Sparkes and John Hegley.
I also collaborated with Emanuel Acquaye aka El Spedo (the Nigerian conga drummer beloved of Kenny Graham’s Afro-Cubists and Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames), the original Soft Machine (Daevid Allen, Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper – and gave them their first gig at the original Marquee Club in Oxford St in 1963), Ginger Johnson’s drum bands, Guyanese flautist Keith Waithe, and with folk guitar virtuosi Davey Graham and John Renbourn. We also enjoyed hanging out, working and playing with some of the developing blues-into-skiffle-into-rock-into-reggae artists including Pete Townshend, Alexis Korner, Barbara Thompson, Peter Gabriel, John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Warren Ellis, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Valerie Bloom, Jean Breeze, Mervyn Africa and the various Ken Colyer, Cyril Davies and inter-genre groups like Nucleus, Colosseum and Paraphernalia.
But straight ahead commercial rock we tended to regard as threatening and pillaging the purer acoustic jazz continuum. I have, however, included over the years many artists who straddle diverse styles and sects, including one-offs such as Cornelius Cardew, Moondog, Fran Landesman, Kylie Minogue, the Waterson/ Carthy families, Shusha Guppy, Patti Smith, Attila the Stockbroker, John Cooper Clarke, Damon Albar
n, Gwyneth Herbert and Ayanna Witter-Johnson, and Blakean pop stars who also write poetry like Paul Weller, Nick Cave, Ray Davies and Jah Wobble, and folksinger-writer-musos like Martin Carthy, Julie Felix and Tymon Dogg, in Poetry Olympics and Jazz Poetry SuperJams.
The arrival of the Beatles gave British popular music a place on the global map. How did that affect what you did and what you wrote? Were they influential on you and other poets like Pete Brown and Adrian Mitchell?
Adrian [Mitchell] gave and published the first ever interview with the Beatles a bit before they hit bingo. He had always been a big music lover and his – and my – earliest blues/rock heroes and influences included Joe Turner & James Brown – the New Departures POM! [Poetry Olympics Marathon] Anthology of 2001 features Adrian’s celebration of James Brown, as well as both song-lyrics and poems by Paul McCartney and Hank Wangford among others. All three of us – Adrian, Pete [Brown] and I – befriended the three Liverpool poets who were to become so mega-promoted and ubiquitous early on, and each of us would frequently perform and collaborate with them up north, whilst Adrian Henri, Brian [Patten] and Roger [McGough] would hook up with us down south. The introduction into our pieces on both stages & pages of more commercial song-like/chanter-crooner techniques helped break down the uptight barriers which had kept contemporary literature imprisoned in game-reserves of jealousy guarded by esoteric elites brandishing exclusion orders – ‘No Trespassers unapproved by the official neo-academic marketing board’! These (r)evolutions naturally widened the appeal to ever more heterodox audiences and readerships, many of whose members might never have thought of paying any attention to poetry since leaving school – as well as appealing to plenty of children, students and teachers who in turn passed on the new musical poetry boogies.
The fact of the new British pop music, and just about equally of the gradual absorption of transatlantic and European experimental arts, especially Parisian and US Beat Generation activities, becoming much more widespread throughout the 1960s, of course affected each of us poets in different ways – Adrian [Mitchell] got more & more involved with many forms of (musical) theatre and song-writing (his play about William Blake, Tyger, for example, remains a continuing landmark of counterculture-into mainstream replenishment); Pete, more and more a highly original rock ’n’ roller/singer/bandleader/producer; I, more and more publisher/ performer/impresario and much more still, latterly, musician via the duo with Stan Tracey and the William Blake Klezmatrix (with Pete Lemer, Annie Whitehead and Madeline Solomon) going from strength to strength. So, although none of us actually 100% embraced UK pop, its prevalence and commercial impact meant that the larger public was more open to emanations around its various fringes and overlaps such as our respective ones.
Adrian [Mitchell] became particular pals with Macca, toured with him occasionally and edited Blackbird Singing, McCartney’s selected lyrics and poems, published in 2001.
I first met Lennon & McCartney at a London ICA [Institute of Contemporary Arts] do hosted by Colin MacInnes in around 1964; it was close to the time of Lennon’s In His Own Write. They were matey and merry; then at Ginsy’s thirty-ninth birthday party John and George and Cynthia [Lennon] and Pattie Boyd, they briefly chatted. I gradually befriended Macca more over subsequent years and presented him, at Queen’s Theatre, London in October 2001, as part of the POM! Festival.
Quite a bit of influence came from the other side, as witness at Liverpool Art College Lennon produced The Daily Howl, and when in London in the later 60s Macca was living with Jane Asher’s family he mingled with and picked up tips from all manner of experimental writers and artists, etc.
Could the Mersey poetry scene have arisen without the Beatles?
Pretty hypothetical/Rumsfeld area – unknown unknowns, etc.! The commercial apotheosis of Liverpool from the early 1960s on inevitably bestowed a marketing halo upon everyone and everything exploiting a Merseyside connection. McGough was writing poems before big Beatle things. Patten probably would have done too – he told me he was first most inspired to write and perform by the first jazz poetry he attended in his school cap, which Brown and I brought to the Crane Theatre in 1960 with Dick Heckstall-Smith some Scouse musos including drummer Ron Parry. We had also jammed with in the Edinburgh Cellars under the bus station in Live New Departures in August/Sept 1960/61, where Roger [McGough], Libby Houston, Alan Jackson, Jerry Rothenberg and Alan Brownjohn also read. Adrian Henri told me at the party after another early Live New Departures by Brown and myself, ‘H’m, think I’ll have a go at this poetry lark’ – and he proceeded to push away at it, and, to adapt Christopher Logue’s famous little poem, he flew …
What was the relationship between the UK underground and the popular music of the mid-1960s? Was the Albert Hall event linked to a surge in the British pop arts or did it have a momentum of its own?
Relationships and interplays existed from the start, and particularly burgeoned after the 1965 Albert Hall Internationale and its continuing reverberations, especially via Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion movie which captured selected highspots. In an interview Joe Strummer gave the Los Angeles LiveDaily on 14 August 2001, 16 months before his death aged 50, answering the question ‘Was there something that dictated the direction his album Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros’ Global A Go-Go – which he kindly dedicated to myself and Nina Simone! – would go in’, Joe referred the interviewer to our first International Poetry Incarnation 1965 in the Albert Hall as: ‘… where you can mark the beginning of the British underground scene of the 1960s – it started on that particular night. Michael [Horovitz] still puts on something called the Poetry Olympics, and we played on one (The POP! [Poetry Olympics Party] Festival at London’s Royal Festival Hall on my 65th birthday in 2000), and that gave me the vibe, because Pablo Cook and I went there stripped down, with just congas and acoustics. It was a kind of beatnik evening – there weren’t any road managers or that kind of stuff. That really gave me the feeling of THIS IS THE WAY TO GO, let’s relax. Sometimes you get tired of the big guitars and walloping drums and all that stuff, it can get boring. I was looking for a break in the weather, ways to change things up, and doing that beatnik Poetry Olympics evening gave us the feeling to go on to this record and try a bit of grooving around, whether we kept to it or not …’
Joe of course became a pretty active protagonist of Poetry Olympics, notably in 2000 with his and Cook’s inventive set at the Royal Festival Hall on 4 April 2000 (including an updated version of the Clash’s ‘London Calling’ rewritten as a tribute to my achievements), and, in the autumn of 2000, with an equally open-spirited jam with Pablo, Tymon Dogg, Martin Carthy and Keith and Lily Allen at the London Astoria.
INTERVIEW 3
Larry Keenan, photographer of ‘The Last Gathering of the Beats’ in San Francisco in 1965
Larry Keenan was a photographer of international reputation based in the San Francisco Bay Area whose work is held by museums and private collections around the world. In 1964, while studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts, he became involved in a college project in association with one of his teachers, the poet Michael McClure. The project allowed him access to many of the city’s poets and artists, friends of McClure, including Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey and others. These links were instrumental in his invitation to shoot the so-called Last Gathering of the Beats at City Lights bookshop in San Francisco at the end of 1965. The shoot saw many of the Beat writers convene – Ginsberg, McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti among them – and the appearance of Bob Dylan, on tour at the time, and his guitarist Robbie Robertson gave the occasion a special meaning. Keenan’s images of the gathered Beats and a smaller group featuring Dylan and Ginsberg, McClure and Robertson have become a celebrated record of this moment. He established a significant career after his 1967 graduation, photographing the Beats frequently, rock bands and producing his own photographic artworks over many decades. Keenan spoke to me at his Emeryville home in July 2004.1
SW Tell me where are we, Larry?
LK Emeryville, California. Right by the bay. It’s beautiful out here, God’s country in a way, isn’t it? It’s beautiful, I love the water, it’s wonderful.
SW So is this part of Oakland?
LK No, it’s Emeryville, right next to Oakland. Between Oakland and Berkeley. It used to be a little tiny town built by one guy. Now, there’s an IKEA, a lot of stores. Quite a lot of people who live in the city live here in this Watergate complex, a man-made marina with flats and offices that opened in the 1970s.
SW And you’re going to live here for a little while longer?
LK Just a month. Then I either have to move out to a new place, or whoever buys could keep me as a tenant, possibly. Or I’ll move somewhere else if isn’t too far.
SW Will you need the space to store all your gear and so on?
LW I’ll need space just as big as this place actually, could get a bit smaller that’s for sure. I’ll sell my archive, and give that to I dunno …
SW Sell your archive?
LK Yeah. I need the money.
SW I’m sure that a museum would be interested in acquiring your archive.
LK Hopefully for a lot of money. Let’s hope so!
SW Let’s hope so! Absolutely. Well, let me just tell you, Larry, what I’m trying to do. I’m interested in investigating the relationship between the Beats, who weren’t just San Franciscan, of course, but many certainly, in the 1950s and 60s, made their homes here. And I want to try and make some sort of assessment of how far there was a continuity between the Beats and, really, that more kind of serious rock artist that emerged after sort of 1965, 1966. I think this photograph, or this series of photographs, that you took at the end of 1965 outside City Lights bookshop, seems to be almost the sort of crossroads of this moment.