by Simon Warner
SW And, do you feel as if the characters who were the poets, the Beats, were they different people to the rock artists?
LK They all wanted to be rockers! I remember McClure saying that he and Bruce Conner wanted to be singing on the radio at midnight. That was great. I wish I’d seen that, too.
SW So there was this desire of the poets to be part of this scene?
LK Oh, sure. Someone told me that there were these tapes, Dylan was with Bruce Conner, amazing tapes, incredible tapes.
SW And obviously Bruce Conner is the artist. Where was the musical element in that?
LK Bruce Conner had this amazing tape recorder.
SW And did they do some musical things together?
LK Yeah, McClure would sing a song. Like a poem. They’d do poetry together. He wrote lines and lines and lines, you know? That was great, Conner was a great man. They made a tape together. There’s one that I love that starts with these two, three beats, and they’re reading a poem back and forth together. It was just amazing stuff. I love that stuff man, it’s just amazing stuff.
SW This stuff has never really surfaced in a commercial sense?
LK I don’t know, might have been. I don’t know where they are. It should have been. Even then, it’s just powerful stuff.
SW Because of course in recent times, you’ll know very well that Michael has been working with Ray Manzarek and so on. So, do you think to some degree he has fulfilled some of his musical ambitions?
LK Oh, certainly.
SW Through Manzarek?
LK And other artists, you know. ‘Mercedes Benz’, the Janis Joplin song, he wrote that himself, you know. So he’s been doing it a long time, writing songs and doing songs and working with others.
SW When you say that the rock artists were different people, were they just younger, did they have different values?
LK Oh, yeah, yeah. They had different values, for sure. They were into making it. The Beats were into just surviving and doing the best job they could. These guys were into making it. And they were more ruthless and more organised, with fights and stuff, you know. It was different. It was like rock ’n’ roll was just different from poetry, for sure. One guy described me as being really soft-focused on hanging with the Beats, but he was hanging with the rockers, so it was different, different personalities. That’s why I hung with them.
SW So there was a different attitude, people were more interested in commercial success?
LK The rockers were, that’s for sure. I got told by one rocker that they just wanted to get laid, get some drugs and get some money. That’s was the whole point. That was rock ’n’ roll. That’s what it was all about.
SW So even those characters like the Grateful Dead, and the guys who were linked to – they seemed to be heirs to the Beats. You think they had a different take on life?
LK The Dead?
SW I mean, maybe the Dead were different, were they? I don’t know …
LK The Dead were different from anybody else. The Dead were more of a group thing, they were much more of a group hanging around. I saw them in some concerts. There were just so many bad concerts, I couldn’t take it anymore. It was terrible stuff. It was terrible stuff. They had too many free concerts, too many drugs, too much shit that was going down. We stopped going to Dead concerts for quite a while. They got better. It did get better. They were really bad, for sure, but they’re really good now.
SW I mean, this drug element that you mention – you were talking about the fear of drug busts, and so on – obviously the Beats and the rock musicians used drugs, but did they use drugs for similar reasons? How would you read that?
LK The Beats were different. I didn’t do any drugs with the Beats at all. I was clean, I was under-age, about 20, 21. No drugs hanging with the Beats. Drugs came in hanging with the rockers, who always had drugs around. It was always soft stuff, cocaine and pot. No needles or any of that stuff at all. I had friends who were Hell’s Angels who had problems with needles and stuff. That’s another story, another book probably.
Notes
1Larry Keenan died after a long illness on 12 August 2012. See Simon Warner, ‘Photographer who captured Dylan, Ginsberg and the Sixties counter-culture’, The Independent, 28 August 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/larry-keenan-photographer-who-captured-dylan-ginsberg-and-the-sixties-counterculture-8082405.html [Accessed 16 December 2012].
OBITUARY 1
Peter Orlovsky, ‘Member of the Beat Generation, poet and lover of Allen Ginsberg’
The writer Peter Orlovsky, who has died aged 76 of lung cancer, spent more than four decades as the companion of Allen Ginsberg, arguably the highest profile US poet of the postwar years. Orlovsky’s own literary legacy was modest in scale – his best-known collection was Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs, published in 1978 – and inevitably overshadowed by his lover’s lofty stature and prolific output. But he still carved out a reputation that allowed him to be regarded as an active member of the Beat Generation, that community of experimental novelists and artists which emerged from Greenwich Village, New York, and North Beach, San Francisco, in the 1950s, to leave their creative influence on the counterculture of the psychedelic 1960s.
Orlovsky had experienced his own youthful dramas even before he encountered Ginsberg for the first time in San Francisco in 1954. He was born in New York’s Lower East Side, to a Russian immigrant father, as the tentacles of the Depression squeezed the life from industrial America. His father’s printing business failed, then his parents’ marriage, and Peter, his mother, three brothers and a sister, moved to Queens, enduring several years of poverty.
When he was 17, his mother insisted he leave school and find work; she could no longer support him. His occupation as an orderly in a mental health institution was physically taxing and emotionally harrowing. The experience was a maturing one for this late adolescent but it would pre-empt a powerful and affecting strain in his future life: his brother Julius suffered psychological instability and Orlovsky would play a role in supporting his younger sibling long into adulthood.
Drafted in 1953, at the time of the Korean War, Orlovsky was marked out as a potential subversive by his communist-inclined reading matter. He was sent to California to work in an army hospital, where he was befriended by a rising Bay Area artist, Robert LaVigne, who seduced him. When Ginsberg visited LaVigne’s studio and saw a painting of a Pan-like boy, the artist told him that it was Orlovsky. Their relationship blossomed shortly afterwards and would last until Ginsberg’s death in 1997.
But the association was far from straightforward. Ginsberg had, by now, abandoned any heterosexual pretence and, with his long poem ‘Howl’ in 1955, made an explicit attack on American values while also celebrating his own homosexuality. Orlovsky continued to express his attraction to women throughout their decades together. This tension would leave a mark on their friendship and there would be times when the two would separate, later to reunite.
In the early 1960s, with Ginsberg at the height of his powers and creative reputation, Orlovsky joined him on journeys to India, north Africa and Europe. As the US counterculture took shape, Ginsberg was a guru, guiding these forces for racial, political and sexual change. Orlovsky was usually by his side, writing, giving readings, and mixing with the movers and shakers of the day: Timothy Leary, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
In 1969, Orlovsky collaborated with the photographer Robert Frank on a film entitled Me and My Brother, documenting Julius’s mental illness. He contributed, too, to activities at Ginsberg’s farm project at Cherry Valley in upstate New York (bought in part to wean Orlovsky off a methedrine addiction). Orlovsky later taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and joined Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue concert tour. As the 1970s drew to a close, Orlovsky published his key verse collection, issued, suitably, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights publishers, which had put out Howl and Oth
er Poems more than two decades previously. In 1980 he produced a book with Ginsberg, Straight Hearts’ Delight: Love Poems and Selected Letters.
After Ginsberg’s death, Orlovsky’s health gradually deteriorated. Chuck Lief, in latter years his guardian, says that: ‘Peter was devoted to Allen for decades, but continued to struggle with his own demons. When Allen died, the removal of that anchor and reference point led Peter to become somewhat groundless.’
Peter Orlovsky, poet, born 8 July 1933; died 30 May 2010.
INTERLUDE B
All Neal: Cassady celebrated in downtown Denver
In 2007, I planned a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It was due to take place in the city of Leeds, where I work, and in the university’s School of Music where I am based, a commemoration, in words and images, music and performance, of the arrival of this ground-breaking novel.
Among those who were slated to take part was the timeless and tireless Carolyn Cassady, a legendary figure herself in the story of the American Beat writers. But then I revealed to her that an unreleased movie simply titled Neal Cassady, a dramatic portrait of her husband, was to also form part of the programme.
Carolyn was very far from happy. In fact, she was quite disparaging of the new bio-pic, suggesting that if that screening remained in the schedule, she would have to seriously consider withdrawing from the event. For me, as organiser, the Sword of Damocles was briefly poised over my head.
Whatever the ins and outs of the matter – and, significantly, my event was frustratingly scuppered by a fire that ravaged my office just weeks before the celebration was due – there is no question that Neal Cassady remains a controversial and contested figure in the discourse of Beat history.
The reaction of his long-time partner was indicative that there is certainly no unanimity in the way we should make sense of this mercurial individual who, from his young life on the streets of Denver to his curious death by the tracks of a Mexican railroad, led an existence that was rich in experience, riddled with paradox, concluded in tragedy.
Lothario and tea-head, car-thief and raconteur, faithful friend and unfaithful partner, orphan and father, speed-king and spiritualist, literary inspiration and would-be novelist himself, Cassady is hero and villain, saint and sinner, toiling brakeman and reckless bum.
The fact that his fame – or infamy – stretched across some 20 years in the rise of the post-war cultural revolution and he was a principal player in the theatre of both Beat and hippy, from the late 1940s to the end of the 60s, made him an iconic figure, a symbol of liberation in a world that was only just wriggling from the straitjacket of social conformity and sexual repression.
Cast as Dean Moriarty in On the Road, Cassady appeared on the page as a fast-talking, jazz-loving, ever-optimistic magician of the roads, a supreme master of the steering wheel, his childlike wonder at the possibilities before them balanced by his rapacious sexual marauding.
By the time the writer Ken Kesey employed him to be the driver of his travelling troupe on the day-glo decorated bus dubbed Furthur, the line where the fictional character ended and the actual man began had been largely eroded by the mind-shaking effects of psychedelics and the harsh realities of jail after a set-up drugs bust when the law ensnared a larger-than-life individual whose escapades had been magnified by Kerouac’s extraordinary prose.
Thus Cassady became a star of the emerging Beat fiction, as Kerouac immortalised him as free-wheeling wanderer and one of Norman Mailer’s ‘white Negroes’, and then a hero to the hippies and a fellow traveller in their LSD adventures, episodes recounted by new journalist Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, a book published in 1968, the same year that Neal met his end.
The city where Cassady grew up will pay tribute to one of its more interesting sons, when the premiere Annual Neal Cassady Birthday Bash takes place in Denver, Colorado, on Sunday, 7 February 2010, close to, just one day before, the man of the moment would have chalked up his eighty-fourth year.
The occasion, staged in a well-loved and historic drinking haunt called My Brother’s Bar, at 15th and Platte, promises an entertaining mixture of songs and readings and even attendance by members of the Cassady family, including, it is hoped, an in-person appearance by the matriarch of the clan.
Resident in London for many years, Carolyn, whose own autobiographical take on these lives and times was provided by her acclaimed 1990 memoir Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg, plans to join the festivities.
The bar even has clear evidence that Neal Cassady had at least an occasional beer there: a prized and framed note, written from the state reformatory, which asks a friend if he’ll cover a drinks tab he had built up there, is on display. ‘I believe I owe them 3 or 4 dollars … please drop in and pay it, will you’, it pleads.
Cassady lived life to the full – his hobo instincts delivered extraordinary adventures and also the carnage of relationships de-railed by that constant urge to seek more – and usually somewhere else. Even he and Kerouac had fall-outs and the powerful kinship they felt in the late 1940s was tarnished by the early 1960s, not unconnected to the jail term he served, at least in part, as fall-out from his literary reputation.
But Kerouac believed that Cassady was more than just an untameable livewire and irresponsible hedonist. He saw great qualities in his writing style and claimed to learn from his expression in letters, as electric and loose-limbed as his speech. But little survived the peripatetic rampaging and only The First Third,1 an autobiographical novella published in 1971 after the author’s death, has really seen the light of the day, apart from his Collected Letters.2
However, the legacy of this larger-than-life figure will be considered and applauded when My Brother’s Bar unveils what promises to be merely the first of a yearly acknowledgement of Cassady’s idiosyncratic contribution to a period of great change in the artistic and political consciousness of the USA.
Notes
1Cassady, 1971.
2Dave Moore (ed.), Neal Cassady Collected Letters, 1944–1967 (London: Penguin, 2005).
Q&A 2
Mark Bliesener, rock band manager and a founder of Neal Cassady’s memorial day in Denver
Mark Bliesener is a US rock band manager who has played a role in inaugurating and organising the Neal Cassady Annual Birthday Bash in Denver since its launch in 2010. Based in the city, he is director of BandGuru Management and Consulting. He has more than 40 years of daily experience in the music business: as a performer (1966–1976), music critic (1976–1978), publicist (1978-1988) and personal manager since 1989. Bliesener has received 16 Gold and Platinum record awards from artists whose careers he has managed including Alan Parsons, Lyle Lovett, Big Head Todd and the Monsters and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. He is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Band (2004).
What do you see connecting the spirit of the Beats with the rock culture that has followed?
In a real sense the spirit common to both the Beats and rock culture is rooted in the notion of an American ‘birthright’ to mobility and independence. Prior to the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, this was best represented by the cowboy and later the hobos, glorified by Woody Guthrie, and the emerging biker culture, hinted at by Marlon Brando in The Wild One. The living link however was Neal Cassady – through his collaboration with Ken Kesey in the development and propagation of the Acid Tests. Cassady’s involvement in assisting the introduction of LSD to the American masses is of far greater influence on the rock generation(s) of songwriters than any of his most visionary early letters or literary works.
Neal’s wide open, Western ‘let ‘er rip’ lifestyle dovetailed with the hippy ‘do your own thing’ ethos in manner that was somehow foreign to the more educated, analytical East Coast Beats like Ginsberg and Kerouac. Neal lived both Beat and hippy lifestyles, though most likely he couldn’t spot the differences. It was more a continuum. Yes, Allen Ginsberg ultimately attended
more demonstrations and recording sessions than Neal, but Ginsberg spent most of his time watching. Never the observer, Cassady’s life long quest for a spontaneous sort of knowledge – also called kicks – ensured that he was constantly in the moment. As well as in the driver’s seat. Neal’s maniacal embrace of life, and knowledge of all things cerebral and sensual, provided the bridge from Beat to hippy.
Do you feel there something in the art of the Beats that inspires artists like Dylan and Lennon, Waits and Patti Smith?
Yes. For Dylan, Waits, Smith and others, it was the Beats’ shattering of the post-war myth of a ‘Disney’ America that was most profound. The ‘American Dream’ of a two kids, two car, happy family was in full bloom thanks in part to the concurrent accent of TV and its evil twin advertising. It was a sterile, safe place for Robert, Patti, Tom and their ilk to grow up in, a place most unwelcoming to weirdos or any deviation from the norm, a place they desperately wanted to escape from. The Beats provided the ride away from home for these teenage song-writing runaways. Books like On the Road and Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind provided radical relief by painting vivid pictures of another reality existing just beyond suburban borders. Via this exposure to the real grit of life, these songwriters not only created a leaner more romantic lifestyle for themselves, but also discovered a cadence and freedom which illuminated the way to a much more American lexicon which would serve them well. No longer was pop music dominated by the Brill Building writers and the last vestiges of Tin Pan Alley which still, excluding R&B, dominated American popular music.