Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  Lennon would later form a close relationship of his own with Ginsberg as the now ex-Beatle turned to politics, specifically the anti-Vietnam War campaign, and found a willing ally in the poet whose involvement with the peace push extended back to 1965. Such developments were trailed in 1969, when Lennon and Yoko Ono gathered a crowd of friends, musicians and other familiar faces in Montreal to record a track that would become a great anti-war anthem, ‘Give Peace a Chance’. Ginsberg was one of the featured voices on the live chorus alongside Timothy Leary, and the poet also earned a mention in the song itself.

  But how did other representative of the UK rock fraternity become embroiled with the Beat ethos? One band, Soft Machine, took their name from one of Burroughs’ other acclaimed novels of the early 1960s, an appellation chosen by their founding member guitarist, Australian émigré Daevid Allen. He lived in the famed Beat Hotel in Paris at the start of the decade, a location where Ginsberg, Corso and Burroughs also made a home between 1959 and 1962. Although Daevid Allen departed the group quite quickly – he would re-emerge in the early 1970s with another art rock band with a radical twist called Gong – the band he had conceived would become musicians central to the impending countercultural drama.

  In 1966, when International Times, later IT, the fortnightly newspaper of the UK underground conceived by Barry Miles, photographer John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, Jim Haynes and others, was unveiled at a launch at the Roundhouse in London on 14 October, Soft Machine along with Pink Floyd and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown were the principal performing attractions. It was an occasion that McCartney, alongside London’s assorted radicals, freaks, artists and celebrities, would attend. The next year, on 29 April 1967, there was a further fund-raiser for IT at Alexandra Palace, London, entitled The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream. Again, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown joined the musical stage alongside the Move, the Social Deviants and numerous other rock and blues acts. Poets were present, too – Michael Horovitz, Christopher Logue and Simon Vinkenoog, for example, who had all appeared at the International Poetry Incarnation two years previously. John Lennon and Yoko Ono – who presented a performance art piece of her own – also attended the event.

  Liverpool’s active poetic community would also join the musical upsurge with Roger McGough linking with McCartney’s brother Mike – he chose McGear80 as his stage name in a bid to jettison the inevitable Beatle-sibling tag – and actor-comic John Gorman in the Scaffold, a vocal pop group who blended singing, poetry and comedy in a short career that nonetheless earned them a series of Top 10 successes between 1966 and 1968 and many national television appearances. For the Liverpool Poets, as McGough, Henri and Patten would be collectively dubbed, 1967 proved a breakthrough year in the realm of poetry, too, as their joint collection, The Mersey Sound, became one Britain’s best-selling verse collections ever. The success of this poetry volume could be credited to various intersecting factors: the Beatles effect could certainly not be discounted, and the general rise of Liverpool as cultural force has to be considered, too, as many singers and bands from the city attained a national and international standing in the wake of the Fab Four’s emergence.81 But it is hard not to see some genuine synergy between the converging forces of popular culture in the fields of music and words – an accessible popular poetry, a form of oral performance that had been directly inspired by the Beats, convening with the sounds of rock and pop.

  There were other musical ventures, too, as Adrian Henri also became involved in projects that combined the poetic with performance, rock, blues and jazz. The Liverpool Scene, the name itself referencing, in part, Edward Lucie-Smith’s celebrated book on the Merseyside cultural boom of the time, ran from 1967–1970 and incorporated various versatile musicians including guitarist Andy Roberts, saxophonist and one-time Clayton Square Mike Evans and Mike Hart, an ex-member of the well-considered Merseybeat act the Roadrunners, once described by George Harrison as his favourite band. In 1971, there was a further significant development when members of the Scaffold, the Liverpool Scene and the Bonzo Dog Band merged to create Grimms, a name which was an acronym of the original group members’ names – John Gorman, Andy Roberts, Neil Innes, Mike McGear, Roger McGough and Vivian Stanshall. Combining music, poetry and comedy, Grimms would further expand into an eleven-piece, with Adrian Henri and Brian Patten adding their poetry skills and rock stalwarts like Michael Giles, who had played with King Crimson, much-travelled keyboardist Zoot Money and Ollie Halsall, guitarist with Kevin Ayers, contributing at various points in an ensemble that lasted in a series of moveable incarnations until 1976.

  There are other examples of the Beat-rock crossover in the UK we might identify, from Donovan to the Incredible String Band, the Rolling Stones and Van Morrison, Marianne Faithfull and Jethro Tull, David Bowie to King Crimson, all of whom either name-checked the Beats or wrote songs that drew upon the mythology of Beat or even attempted to bring the experimental Beat voice to that of the rock lyric. But most of these instances would come to the fore a little later, in the next decade or even after. Yet one poet, who had most certainly arisen from the British Beat scene and would establish himself as a significant contributor to rock’s cause in second part of the 1960s, should be highlighted. Pete Brown, friend of Michael Horovitz and member of the Live New Departures crew from its inception, would eventually work with some of the most important artists and, in a particular, one of the most high profile UK bands of that era – Cream. He became a key contributor of lyrics to some of the trio’s best-known songs – from ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ to ‘I Feel Free’ and ‘White Room’. Furthermore he would form and lead bands of his own – the Poetry Band with jazz rock guitarist John McLaughlin,82 before his Cream tour of duty and, post-Cream, with Pete Brown and His Battered Ornaments and Piblokto (a name borrowed from a Lawrence Ferlinghetti novel). He would also continue to work with Cream bassist Jack Bruce, even after the influential rock trio dissolved, and his poetic-musical excursions continue to this day. But his late 1960s work left its deepest and widest mark both in Britain and the US.

  In fact, Brown, still active in 2012, just like his long-time, spiritual brother in arms Horovitz,83 feels that he was one of the few individuals, maybe the only genuine example, who truly brought British Beat poetry and rock music together. Interviewed in 2009, he claimed: ‘Well there was just me. There may have been a touch of it in Ray Davies and Pete Townshend. It was really more of an American thing, the Doors, for example.’84 Interestingly, both Davies of the Kinks and Townshend of the Who, though they never pinned their colours to the Beat mast, would find literary grooves at a later stage – Davies published short stories under the title Waterloo Sunset (1998) and Townshend a similar collection, Horse’s Neck (1985), at a time when the Who front-man was also serving as an editor at prestigious publishers Faber, home to an extraordinary cast of poets, from T. S. Eliot to Stephen Spender and Ted Hughes. We may even see Davies and Townshend as inheritors of the British, post-AYM flame, followers of MacInnes possibly rather than the more staid figures in that loosely-cast line-up.

  In many ways, Brown, who had had an early love affair with the Beats and had had work published in the renowned US publication Evergreen Review as a very young writer, found as great a fascination with the way the English voice could find its own place in a rock context, especially as so much work by British acts had sought to recreate American sound and style, particularly through the lyrics they penned. He explained: ‘The Beatles and Syd Barrett85 fascinated me – they turned rock into something English, which was a huge breakthrough. They showed you could write rock songs that were English which really turned me on at the time. It was something I was trying to do.’86 Through Cream and his subsequent recording and touring work he managed to bring his own voice, even one inspired by the US Beats, as an English poet and lyricist, very successfully into play.

  One man who may well have seen his Beat association spread, had he survived, is Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones guitarist whose
life was cut short in 1969 within weeks of departing the group. The year before, he had overseen and produced recordings by the Master Musicians of Joujouka, a North African drumming ensemble based in Morocco. The connection had been initiated by Burroughs’ friend and collaborator, Brion Gysin, the mastermind of the cut-up method, to which he had introduced the novelist while they were both resident at the Beat Hotel in Paris at the end of the 1950s. Gysin had seen the Master Musicians of Joujouka with another associate of the Beats, novelist Paul Bowles, almost 20 years before, and he encouraged the Stone to hear then play. Jones recorded the ensemble in their home setting and then produced an album of their work. An early example, perhaps, of that rather later conception, World music, the 1971 release also included sleeve notes from William Burroughs among others.

  Of the other Stones and their circle, Jagger, introduced to Ginsberg by Miles in 1967, would take a more than passing interest in the Beat stream. Miles comments: ‘The Rolling Stones and their circle were familiar with the Beats, particularly Jagger who considered acting in Brion Gysin’s script for Naked Lunch in 1972. There are many references to Dr. Benway in Performance, 1969, too.’87

  A direct example of this cross-fertilisation occurred in 1967 in London, when Ginsberg was present at and participated in a historic Stones recording of the song ‘We Love You’, a session that also saw Lennon and McCartney involved. The song was recorded as a tribute to Jagger and Richard in the wake of recent drugs charges that had seen the pair briefly jailed then released on appeal. The recording also formed part of a studio session where the song ‘Dandelion’ was laid down. Says Schumacher: ‘Allen was delighted to be involved in a historic recording session involving members of the two most successful rock bands in the world.’88 Furthermore, we might mention someone who was a long-time member of the Stones’ entourage. Marianne Faithfull, whose first chart hit was a Jagger-Richard composition, ‘As Tears Go By’, in 1964 and who would enjoy a high profile relationship with Jagger up to 1969, later developed closer links with various Beat writers she had encountered during this phase. She became, for a time, a tutor at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets, in Boulder, Colorado, and taught alongside Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso.

  The intertwining of Beat culture and the powerful push of British rock from the mid-1960s was undoubtedly evident yet the output, the enduring legacy, of this synergy is harder to quantify. The fact that both John Lennon and Paul McCartney invested time and interest in the Beat writers – as readers, as friends, sometimes supportively and vice versa – is almost enough to demonstrate the complementary forces at play. Perhaps it was their admiration for Dylan and his enthusiastic espousing of the Beat cause that prompted them to follow such connections, yet we have examples of an earlier Beat affiliation – from something as potentially significant as the change of group name to something more ephemeral such as Lennon’s Daily Howl publication, a school project pre-dating the real rise to prominence of the band. As we have seen, McCartney’s links to Ginsberg and Burroughs saw him act as patron to their creative projects – providing recording facilities to the Soft Machine author and his associates in London in the mid-1960s and carving out other opportunities to spread the Beat word, even if Zapple, the most ambitious of these ventures, stumbled for reasons beyond that individual Beatle’s control. Down the line, Lennon would forge links with Ginsberg, particularly when his difficult US residency began, as he fought both the policies of the American government in Vietnam and then the immigration authorities to allow him to remain in New York City.

  But how can we characterise the impact the Beats had on the Beatles’ work? Were there discernible fruits of this high profile, transatlantic alliance? McCartney’s musical output seemed to be little affected by the engagement. Setting aside the superficially psychedelic experiment of Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, it is hard to pinpoint how Beat attitudes or influence changed or improved his work, a body of creativity based on a remarkable melodic sense and words in the balladic tradition. That said, Lennon’s key work on Sgt. Pepper, ‘A Day in the Life’, has something of an unconventional lyric style that owes more to memories re-evoked by poetry than a mere gathering of pop words, while the inventive and dramatic coda to the song speaks far more of the avant garde than Tin Pan Alley. Lennon’s association, too, with wordplay and his stream of consciousness jousting on a song like ‘I Am the Walrus’, from later in 1967, may have owed as much to the English nonsense poetry tradition as Beat verse. Yet it is hard to see how, without the progressive artistic environment cultivated by the middle of the decade – by Dylan, by drugs, by the Beats, indeed, by the Beatles themselves, and a social climate in which the rules of cultural engagement were being re-written – such a song would have been recorded and released.

  Lennon’s relationship to the Beat spirit achieved an impetus later, too, and we could certainly make connections between the political campaigning of Ginsberg and the politicisation of Lennon as he entered the American phase of his life with Yoko Ono, herself a key member of the Fluxus art group in Manhattan before she married the rock star. Ono was an important catalyst for Lennon’s avant gardism after 1968; Ginsberg was an influence, too, among a group of other hippy activists – Ed Sanders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were among others – who would inform the Beatle’s idealistic, yet often dangerous, strategies as he mounted high-profile, anti-Vietnam campaigns and eventually took on the might of the US government. The fact though that Lennon raised his head above the parapet and took the battle to the streets of America, drawing the negative ire of the FBI along the way, has a potent irony when set against the near apoliticism of Ginsberg’s other high profile rock partner, Bob Dylan, as the 1960s as historical period and utopian dream faded.

  As for others who were drawn to the Beat flame, there were a number, some major, some bit part players, who would reference this scene or tap into its energies. We have mentioned the Rolling Stones – Jagger, Jones and Faithfull – and Pete Brown’s contributions to Cream. It is hard not to argue that the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Cream were the three major British bands of that immediate time, so their close associations with the Beat community are important for that fact alone. Pink Floyd, a rising force who would become an enormous player on the scene in the early 1970s, were another act who clung to the coat-tails of a Beat aura, through their central links with the London underground, a movement which had International Times and Beat-linked figures like Barry Miles, Jeff Nuttall and ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins at its core, with the UFO club as its stage.

  The poets attached to the British Beat scene never became the powerful cult heroes that Kerouac, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, Corso and Ginsberg were, and continue to be, to the UK underground. Brown, through his Cream associations, attracted an international reputation but it was for his lyrics rather than his poetry that his status was earned. Michael Horovitz,89 Adrian Mitchell,90 Spike Hawkins, Johnny Byrne and the Liverpool Poets – Adrian Henri,91 Roger McGough and Brian Patten – busily ploughed quieter furrows, spent decades building smaller empires, publishing regularly and performing almost constantly, but once the extraordinary cultural tornado of the 1960s had subsided, they were never foregrounded in the way their 1950s American counterparts were. Yet it could be argued, I feel sure, that the reflected glory of British rock’s extraordinary global splash helped to give stature and longevity to those subterranean scribes in the UK in the decades that followed. While Brown had sealed an impressive reputation with writing credits on several of rock’s greatest tracks, and the poets of the Mersey, as we have described, found numerous opportunities, as well, to pursue pop and rock options on into the 1970s and beyond, an always energetic figure like Horovitz took the chance to build other long-running schemes, like his remarkable Poetry Olympics. Launched in 1980, this project would continue to bring poets of many cultures and popular musicians of the highest reputation – from Ray Davies and Paul McCartney to Paul Weller and Damon Albarn – into the same orbit, on stage, in anthologies and on
recordings, deep into the opening decade of the next century. Without the momentum of the 1960s, when popular musicians and poets shared energies and ambitions in various ways, it is hard to see how those later alliances would have flourished in the way they have, and for so long.

  That energy, cultural and radical, has enjoyed a longevity in a variety of ways but one pertinent example suggests a continuum. In July 1967, Allen Ginsberg attended an international congress in London on the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’92 which attracted politicos, philosophers and artists from both sides of the Atlantic, including Julian Beck of the Living Theatre, Emmett Grogan of the San Francisco Diggers, noted commentator Paul Goodman, Black Panther Stokely Carmichael and psychiatrist R. D. Laing. The occasion, staged at the Roundhouse, where International Times had been launched the year before, appeared to concentrate much of the multi-faceted dynamism of the new thinking and confirm the city as a centre of visionary debate. In February 2012, some of the same voices – Laing’s colleagues Joseph Berke and Leon Redler, for example – gathered in the capital once more for ‘Dialektikon’,93 a 45th anniversary return to the issues explored all those years before, in an event described as ‘a re-birth of the congress’ that was part conference, part theatre, part performance. Many of the key protagonists were no longer alive, their parts taken by actors, including Ginsberg himself. But Michael Horovitz, described as jazz troubadour, was present in person, sustaining the Beat flame in person in a bill that promised poetry and song, an echo of those very collaborations that Beats, both American and British, had helped engineer at the height of the 1960s.