Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  Notes

  1Kerouac appeared on the television show Steve Allen on 16 November 1959. See Miles, 1998, p. 263.

  2Maynard G. Krebs was the resident beatnik on the 1959 TV sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. See Henry Cabot Beck, ‘From Beat to beatnik’, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, edited by Holly George-Warren (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), p. 95.

  3For example, ‘Kansas squares (Hutchinson, Kansas) vs. Coast beatniks (Venice, California)’, Life, 21 September 1959.

  4Caen claimed he didn’t mean the word ‘beatnik’ in the pejorative sense and attempted to defend it to Kerouac himself. See Ann Charters, Kerouac (London: André Deutsch, 1974), p. 268.

  5The shortening of the term popular ‘gave the word a lively informality but opened it, more easily, to a sense of the trivial’. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: HarperCollins, 1988), p. 238.

  6Note that in 1967, in a major BBC shake-up, the Light Programme would become Radio 2 and the new Radio 1, a response to the rise of pirate broadcasting in the offshore waters of Britain, would become the UK’s Top 40 station.

  7Public houses, more colloquially ‘pubs’, are licensed to serve alcoholic drinks only those over the age of 18.

  8In Soho, London, the 2i’s Coffee Bar played host to artists like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard at the end of the 1950s.

  9The Wild One was released in the US in 1953 but was banned in the UK by the British Board of Film Certification until 1968.

  10The term ‘Teddy’ was drawn from Edward, King Edward VII, who would succeed his mother Queen Victoria in 1902 and sit on the throne until his own death in 1910.

  11Melly, 1989, pp. 33–4.

  12Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’ entered the UK charts on 6 January 1956 and reached No. 8. It achieved the same heights in the US charts, entering on 31 March just weeks later.

  13The UK charts, as Donegan struck, were a relatively new innovation. The pop weekly New Musical Express had launched the first such listing, a Top 12 based on the best-selling singles of the week, as recently as 1952.

  14MacColl said: ‘Skiffle took over, and then the machine took over the skiffle movement, castrated it and robbed it of all its energy.’ See Robin Denselow, 1989, pp. 17–18.

  15R.J. Ellis, ‘From “The Beetles” to “The Beatles”: The British/Beat 1955–1965’, Symbiosis, 4.1, April 2000, pp. 67–98 (p. 76).

  16Seeger had to fight the possibility of a 10-year jail term after the HUAC subpoenaed him in 1955. See Denselow, 1989, p. 15.

  17Alan Lomax was the son of John A. Lomax who was also a significant folklorist.

  18The Empire Windrush was the vessel that brought the first influx of post-war Caribbean settlers to the UK in 1948. See Mike Phillips, ‘Windrush – the passengers’, BBC History, 3 October 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/windrush_01.shtml [accessed 19 February 2012].

  19It is, nonetheless, worth noting that the matter of race was not entirely absent from the British scene during this era. In London, the Notting Hill Riots of 1958 saw Caribbean arrivals in clashes with British protestors who claimed to fear the economic impact of the new intake, but there appeared to be more primal anxieties stirred by the skin colour of their neighbours.

  20Bob Wooler, DJ at the club the Cavern, proposed this, c. 1961, in the pages of the local popular music newspaper Mersey Beat, though Mike Brocken, Liverpool-based historian and university lecturer, commented in an email to the author 27 December 2010: ‘From my research the number is nowhere near that figure – lots of Battles of the Bands nights with groups adopting different names might have contributed to yet another Mersey urban myth!’

  21The track was on the Beatles’ LP debut, Please Please Me (1963).

  22A song on With the Beatles (1963).

  23Ibid.

  24A cover version appears on Beatles for Sale (1964).

  25Jonathon Green, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 41.

  26Ibid.

  27Writers such as John Wain and Kingsley Amis and poet Donald Davie were among the Movement’s order. American literary critic Leslie Fielder talked of the young British writer of this kind as ‘able to define himself against the class he replaces: against a blend of homosexual sensibility, upper-class aloofness, liberal politics, and avant-garde literary devices’. See Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (London: Athlone, 1997), p. 80.

  28Richard Hoggart, a key witness at the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial of 1960 as he defended the literary value of the book, became the first director of CCCS. The innovative institution would continue its work until its closure in 2002.

  29Granada Television in Manchester would transmit a live TV version of Osborne’s play in 1956. In doing so, the elite confines of the theatre’s proscenium arch, the province of the well-to-do, were dismantled. Such mass experience of a dramatic work would lay the ground for small-screen, kitchen sink productions like the soap opera Coronation Street, launched in 1960 and still running over 50 years on.

  30In 1986, MacInnes’ novel would be brought to the big screen by director Julien Temple.

  31Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (eds), ‘Introduction’, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men (London: Panther, 1960), pp. 9–17 (p. 10).

  32Ibid., p. 13.

  33Ibid.

  34Ibid.

  35Ibid.

  36The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a British organisation established in 1958, to lobby against nuclear weapons.

  37Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War 1945–60 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1981), p. 183.

  38Harry Ritchie, Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950–1959 (London: Faber, 1988), p. 51.

  39Ritchie, 1986, p. 51.

  40Peter Forbes, ‘Blame these 4 men for the Beatnik horror’, The People, 7 August 1960. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/29873672@N02/6897934379/sizes/o/in/photostream/ [accessed 22 February 2012].

  41Ritchie, 1986, p. 51.

  42Ibid.

  43Later marches travelled from Aldermaston itself to a massed Easter Monday rally in the heart of London – Trafalgar Square.

  44Green, 1999, p. 36.

  45Ellis, 2000, pp. 70–1.

  46Green, 1999, p. 37.

  47Pete Brown, White Rooms and Imaginary Westerns: On the Road with Ginsberg, Writing for Clapton and Cream – An Anarchic Odyssey (London: JR Books, 2010), p. 43.

  48‘A group of Britain’s most adventurous modernists’, said Michael Horovitz in his edited collection Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 331.

  49Ibid., p. 328.

  50Roger McGough, Said and Done: The Autobiography (London: Arrow Books, 2006), p. 149.

  51Ellis, 2000, p. 67.

  52Jonathan Clarke, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America (London: Portrait, 2007), p. 50.

  53Philip Norman, Shout! (London: Elm Tree, 1981), p. 52, quoted in Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art Into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 84.

  54Sean Wilentz, 2010, p. 69.

  55See Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (London: Viking, 1990), pp. 369–70.

  56While it is more usual to see the term hippie used to describe the subculture or an individual member of that community, I have tried, as far as possible, to apply some grammatical logic here and use hippy for the subculture or an individual member of the group and hippies for the plural.

  57Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 170.

  58Miles, 2003, p. 76.

  59Ibid.

  60Green, 1999, p. 129.

  61Says Michael Horovitz: ‘Miles became very closely allied to Ginsberg, who, at first, as was often the case, had, I think fancied him […] [He] was very effective and became
a sort of acolyte and representative of Ginsberg and Burroughs.’ See Jonathon Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961–1971 (London: Pimlico, 1998), p. 44.

  62See also Chapter 4.

  63See Bowen, 1999, p. 64.

  64The Scot Trocchi (1925–84) had been an early disciple of the darker ravages of Beat culture. Although he would produce several novels, his heroin addiction was virtually a life-long accompaniment.

  65Quoted in Green, 1999, p. 139.

  66Green, 1999, p. 139.

  67See Green, 1999, pp. 140–1.

  68See John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, From the Hip: Photographs 1960–1966 (Bologna: Damiani Editore, 2008), p. 102.

  69Richard Neville, Playpower (London: Paladin, 1971), p. 25.

  70Barry Miles, personal communication, email, 11 December 2009.

  71Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (London: Secker & Warburg, 1997), p. 234.

  72Miles, 1993), pp. 175–6.

  73Nuttall, 1970, p. 123.

  74Allen Ginsberg, ‘Yes, I remember it well’, 20th anniversary celebration of Beatles appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Rolling Stone, 16 February 1984.

  75Ginsberg was referring to the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

  76Ginsberg, ‘CBC broadcast on mantra’, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995 (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 151.

  77Quoted in Miles, 2002, p. 247.

  78Miles, 2002, p. 247.

  79Ibid. p. 278.

  80McGear chose a fabricated name from ‘gear’ a popular Merseyside expression of approval of the day. He had also considered ‘fab’ but ultimately decided against the style McFab.

  81Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Searchers, the Merseybeats, Billy Fury, Cilla Black and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas were among a number of the Merseyside acts who enjoyed UK and overseas success in the period 1963–6.

  82Yorkshire-born McLaughlin would become one of the world’s great jazz guitarists, engaged by Miles Davis on his late 1960s jazz-rock experiemnets and later leader of the supergroup the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

  83Michael Horovitz continues to perform as poet and act as a organiser for numerous events where poetry and music combine. In 2010, Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz adapted part of one of Horovitz’s verse works for the track ‘Stylo’ on their album Plastic Beach. In 2011, Albarn and Horovitz collaborated on a song supporting the cause of the Notting Hill Carnival, an event which faced possible sanction in the wake of the summer riots in London that year.

  84Pete Brown, personal communication, email, 6 December 2009.

  85Barrett was a key early member of Pink Floyd who departed the group for his own solo projects in 1969.

  86Brown, personal communication, email, 6 December 2009.

  87Miles, personal communication, email, 29 November 2009.

  88Michael Schumacher, 1992, p. 485.

  89Michael Horovitz was the subject of a 75th birthday tribute, The Poetry Olympian, BBC Radio 4, 4 April 2010, presented by the author.

  90Adrian Mitchell died, aged 76, in 2008.

  91Adrian Henri died, aged 68, in 2000.

  92The full title of the 1967 event was the ‘Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation for the Demystification of Human Violence in All Its Forms’. See the website, Dialectics of Liberation, http://www.dialecticsofliberation.com/ [accessed 1 March 2012].

  93The later anniversary event was titled ‘Dialektikon 2012 Violence and Liberation’.

  INTERVIEW 4

  Pete Brown, British poet and rock lyricist for Cream

  Pete Brown has lived a number of lives as poet, lyricist and rock performer. His poetry appeared in Evergreen Review when he was still a teenager, but when he befriended another poet Michael Horovitz in 1960, they began an enduring and fruitful friendship. They wrote a long, Kerouac and jazz-inspired verse work called ‘Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead’ and toured together with Live New Departures, a stage version of Horovitz’s poetry and art journal. He also participated in the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in 1965. But it was when he linked with Jack Bruce and Cream in the mid-1960s to provide the lyrics to the band’s signature songs, ‘I Feel Free’, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ and ‘White Room’, his career moved into a higher gear. He then led Pete Brown and His Battered Ornaments and Piblokto! – a name taken from a Lawrence Ferlinghetti work – and has continued a varied career as singer, musician and producer ever since. I spoke to Brown by telephone at his London home in December 2009.

  SW How do you see the relationship between poetry and music?

  PB Those poets of the 1950s – we can perhaps see them as jazz fans who all aspired to be musicians. Leonard Cohen was one. I was one of the other ones who became part of a band in the late 1950s. I liked jazz, blues and soul, swing, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, bebop, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins – and I’m still in love with this music. In the 1950s a lot of the people we were listening to were a lot older. What Michael [Horovitz] and I were trying to do was some of what we saw as the techniques of jazz instrumentalists and composers. We wrote pretty collectively. ‘Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead’ was like a musical chase following the soloist and his theme.

  Jack Kerouac had an interest, a love of jazz, but how superficial it was, I don’t know. Bebop was a complex form of music, and not everyone could understand it. Some were superficially turned on to it. Bebop was an artist’s music. It was the first time black musicians were not playing commodified music, not just playing for entertainment.

  SW How did you link up with musicians initially? And how did the Cream connection arise?

  PB I became a member of a working band, just wrote for them. I became a singer myself. I think of myself as a musician – I do play drums, percussion.

  I always wanted to have my own band. I had one with [guitarist] John McLaughlin. I realised these guys were too good. I was not in their league. I wanted to get a band which was not quite as proficient. I would get more from working with people who were not better than me.

  I always say that getting to see the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night was important to me, cause I had been in Liverpool a lot. I had rubbed shoulders with the Beatles and they had reached a vast audience. When the Cream chance came along, I grabbed it with both hands. I did not want to be a drunken poet who died in some sort of cheerful obscurity!

  The Cream thing opened a lot of doors. I was a very minor celebrity on the party scene though I had done some quite big shows like the Albert Hall. When I got asked to write for Cream, it opened up opportunities, particularly in the US.

  Ginger Baker had done some jazz/poetry gigs. I had been a poet for a long time. I had quite a lot of technique I could bring to writing 200 drafts of a song. On the first couple of things I was working with Jack. He had a broad musical language – Charles Mingus, classical training. The Mingus thing we had in common. His concepts were like poetic concepts, they were about creating atmosphere.

  SW After Cream you formed Pete Brown and His Battered Ornaments but that didn’t end happily. Weren’t you sacked from your own band? What happened?

  PB First, the guitarist Chris Spedding wanted to take over. Second, they were getting embarrassed by my lack of musical talent. The band’s saxophonist George Kahn admitted later that they made a terrible mistake. I got more control of what I was doing. It was a kind of wake up call.

  SW How did the Beats shape your experience as a poet?

  PB I was not that familiar at first with Allen Ginsberg, but came through the traditions of blues poetry, Mingus and Ellington. I was better at lyrics than being a musician. I was not trying to do poetry. Some of the time I was using poetic forms found in blues and jazz.

  I was a Beat poet, but I was totally in love with Mose Allison, Slim Galliard, Victoria Spivey, Wynonie Harris. Songs like Harris’ ‘Don’t Roll Your Bloodshot Eyes’ – they were just as interesting to me.

  Michael Horovitz and I were the people who learned from Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg’s work
yet they were less important than the earlier people like [Robert] Creeley. And Corso, too. Lawrence Ferlinghetti – his British counterpart was Adrian Mitchell. Ferlinghetti put his money where his mouth was. Ginsberg was self-aggrandising and selfish. Ferlinghetti was 100% real. The band name Piblokto came from his novel called Her.

  I initially encountered an environment where poets were not even allowed to read their own work. Actors used to do it for the BBC. Horovitz and me tried to promote the idea that poets could read, they could use their own voices. Spike Hawkins was another trying to do this.

  SW What is the association between poetry and lyrics? Are they the same thing for you?

  PB I don’t set out to write poetry when I am writing a song. I am conscious of trying to get the song right. If the music is there first I almost act as a translator. Sometimes I would come up with something, a concept you might call poetry, write something very intense and use the tools of poetry. But for a long, long time I did not write any poetry. I have been writing poetry again for the last five years.

  I write millions of lyrics, and also worked as a producer supplying lyrics. I am constantly doing things like that. I try to put together words that work but I would not call it poetry; I’d call it lyric-writing. Yet lyric-writing drove me back into the arms of poetry. It’s a circular thing.

  SW You were part of the oral tradition of the poetry reading. What did you feel about that scene?

  PB Poetry readings – I really enjoy doing them. But that older literary scene does not exist. Mike [Horovitz] and I have never been accepted into any part of the mainstream. We are mavericks, discredited. Andrew Motion and all that shit – nothing to do with us! We have found our own little niche. But a bit of recognition in the UK would be nice. Awards in Germany, US and Japan but not Britain. I don’t really give a fuck. But we should get a lot more recognition. I am an old socialist, left wing anarchist, like Michael.