Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  Meltzer was a child performer who had sung on radio shows but his real musical development stemmed from a live encounter with Charlie Parker in the late 1940s at the Royal Roost on Broadway,18 helping to cultivate a lifelong devotion to jazz. Yet if jazz was a growing passion, poetry was not far behind. A poem he wrote as an eleven-years-old schoolboy commemorating a Manhattan anniversary was published – ‘it was free verse’, he says, ‘comparing the subway to the arteries of the human body’19 – and encouraged him to work at his writing skills, too. When his parents, both classical musicians, split up, he headed with his father to California where the new television industries beckoned, making Los Angeles his home from 1952. By the mid-1950s, he recalls seeing the first City Lights publications when he was working on a news-stand in LA ‘and then came “Howl” and On the Road’. Meltzer remarks: ‘As an experimental writer, Kerouac has not yet been acknowledged. With Kerouac there was this notion, that appeals to so many young people today, of men in flight, from women, from problems, from the domestic sphere, that was being so heavily re-defined – the nuclear family and so on.’20

  In 1956, with the promise of a job in a book warehouse, Meltzer headed north to San Francisco where the literary action seemed to be. He was not disappointed. ‘I began to hang out at North Beach, did some poetry readings at the Cellar. It was an Italian community with low rents. They had no problem with people who were artists. In other sectors of American society they’d have set the dogs on us!’ So whom did he meet in those early days? ‘Ginsberg, of course, Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso. You name any of those people – it’s like the rolling of the titles … Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer. As a kind of arts community, people may have been ideologically opposed in terms of the practice of poetry, but there was still a certain amount of socialising and community.’21 Did anyone make him feel, as a young man in an established grouping, at home? ‘There was a lot of generosity when I started working at the Cellar, where people like Kenneth Rexroth, who is a very significant figure by the way, whose role as a conduit for so much of this has become under-valued and overlooked through time, represented part of this tradition of radical arts and politics. He was a Catholic anarchist, very involved with other artists during the 1930s and 1940s, with the labour movement in San Francisco and the dock workers and general strikes.’22

  ‘There was a sudden escalation in media attention and so many of the younger poets Rexroth had chaperoned into the light were suddenly getting all the publicity. This older man was being ignored because he wasn’t young enough. It was an ego thing. Rexroth was like W. C. Fields; he could be a terrible blowhard yet he was a most generous man. But he was from a different period of history and a different politics.’ So how did leftist politics fit into the mix by this time? ‘Gary [Snyder], for example, came from the North West and his father had been involved with the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World. And Allen Ginsberg, his mother was a Communist. So, many of these people had come out of a background of class-consciousness. Yet none of the people outside Snyder were actually working class. Ginsberg came out of a professional middle class family and Burroughs, of course, came out of the mandarin classes. So much of my difficulty with Burroughs is not that he’s not brilliant at the writing but just that boredom was the impetus.’23

  How then does Meltzer feel that Kerouac, who spent time on the West Coast at various points in the 1950s and early 1960s and attended the Six Gallery in San Francisco reading where Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ was premiered, may have fitted into this meeting of literature and political doctrine? ‘Well, he was working class. He lived the life – he couldn’t have gone to Columbia, an upper and middle class university, unless he had been a football player. He got one of those token awards given to those work-horses with athletic achievement. But Kerouac’s bent was not athletics; it was literature and mysticism. He was a Catholic mystic, lamb-like in the Blakean sense, in the Christian sense, a sacrificial lamb in a sense. He was done in by success American-style. He killed himself systematically, drank himself to death. He was a victim, he had this martyrdom notion, but he was killed by society, by acceptance, a very cruel, parasitical notion of acceptance. Fame, especially in the USA, is manufactured by the whole concept of mass mediated, public relations-driven advertising. The rise of the advertising agency has been a major shaper of reality.’24

  But surely Kerouac, the freewheeling literary outlaw distanced from society by attitudes and lifestyle, could have evaded such a web? ‘He was involved with the myth of the writer as heroic individual’, Meltzer states, ‘which is a post-Romantic notion, where you get the whole idea of subjectivity. Suddenly, self is what you write about. You are no longer writing about the we, the us; it’s the I, the isolated, heroic individual of Shelley and Byron. So he was reading that material and identifying as a kind of working class, abject, excluded, ethnic presence in the community. And the escape was through the imaginary realm of literature and also how you imagine a writer to be – as a kind of grand person.’ So, was he unable to manage his own myth – or was it society that forced him, eventually, into that lonely and desperate corner? ‘Kerouac was very shy. He was a kind of sacrifice for a post-war, postmodern media culture that essentially re-combined and recreated him in a way that tormented him and ultimately led to his death by fame, exacerbated by drink’, he believes.25

  Meltzer sees television as a crucial factor in the socio-cultural melting pot that the 1950s and 1960s threw up and a catalyst for many of the stresses and strains that artists and radicals faced from then on. ‘From 1945, TV was inserted into the brain of the nation. It tripled, quadrupled, became a natural environment which could then, within a few months, neutralise any sort of social critique, whether it was the beatniks, the Black Power movement or the student politics of the Sixties. Ginsberg though was different. He was very comfortable with people. He was never being dishonest – that transparency, that was his great thing. Kerouac just wanted to write the books and feel the feelings, but Ginsberg understood TV at a time when no one really understood TV. He knew how to use it as a vehicle for his own presence and advancement and public de-stabilising tendencies.’26

  Meltzer wrote poetry – his first published verse appeared in a collection with Donald Schenker in 1957 – and read poetry and performed his work in a jazz setting, the fruits of which were well-exemplified in a much later CD release, Poet w/Jazz 1958, not issued until 2006. Recorded at Club Renaissance, Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, with Bob Dorough on piano, drummer Chris Harris, trumpeter Ernie Williams and bassist Larry Hornings, it echoes the experiments that Ferlinghetti and Kerouac had embarked on at a similar time, marrying spoken word with musical rhythms. Said Meltzer, of the ten pieces that made up the album, in a letter to producer Jim Dickson: ‘The poems on this record were written especially for presentation & interaction with a jazz group. They were written in a tentative language that would, when the music began, improvise & alter & revise and invent new words in dialogue with the music is (sic) sound & purpose. I’d bring a skeleton poem – a “head arrangement” of the words – & then would fill it in performance, improvising in the same spirit as the players.’27 The same year of the jazz poetry recording, Meltzer would marry Tina, and the pair would enjoy collaborative music and poetry projects in the next decade. In 1959 he published a poetry collection entitled Ragas, the following year The Clown, and these would be the preface to half a century and more of versifying, essay writing, novels and interview collections featuring other poets. The Journal for the Protection of All Beings, which made its first appearance in 1961 and saw Meltzer rub shoulders with well-established, fellow editors Ferlinghetti and McClure, featured an extraordinary gathering of talent between its covers: Snyder, Corso, Burroughs, Camus, Artaud and Bertrand Russell, Robert Duncan, Norman Mailer and Kenneth Patchen. Published by City Lights, the three editors penned a joint statement: ‘We hope we have here an open place where normally apolitical men may speak uncensored upon any subject they feel most hotly
& coolly about in a world which politics has made. We are not interested in protecting beings from themselves. We cannot help the deaths people give themselves, we are more concerned with the lives they do not allow themselves to live, and the deaths other people would give us, both of the body & spirit.’28

  Yet, although it would be as a poet, writer and editor that he would make his cultural mark, Meltzer was also a folk singer, friend of and collaborator with a number of the musicians who would go on to leave an indelible footprint on the rock scene of the 1960s. Among his associates were David Crosby, soon to join the Byrds then, later in the decade, form Crosby, Stills and Nash, Jerry Garcia, an imminent member of the Warlocks quite quickly transformed into a group called the Grateful Dead, and Dino Valente, a songwriter who shared similar rock aspirations and would feature, in time, in the group Quicksilver Messenger Service.

  But to step back to the early years of the decade, in spring 1962, almost three years prior to the Keenan Beat photographic session, when Meltzer first heard Dylan’s self-titled debut LP, he recalls that he was impressed by the singer’s initial recording. ‘I remember being knocked out by Dylan’s first album and really alerted by his second one. In response to them, I sent Dylan a couple of books of my poetry and wrote a cover letter praising the poetry I saw in his song lyrics.’29

  He describes the setting at the time: ‘Tina and I were part of the “folk revival” scene in San Francisco, mirrored in New York City and other urban centres like Chicago, Los Angeles. We performed either as a duo or with ad hoc string bands. During that time there was an influx of New York-based musicians like Eric Andersen, David Crosby, Dino Valente, Jesse Colin Young and Midwest blues people like Nick Gravenites, Charlie Musselwhite, Paul Butterfield, Michael Bloomfield and, from Port Arthur, Texas, came 20-year-old Janis Joplin.’30

  Meltzer continues: ‘Young banjo player, Jerry Garcia, came to the Coffee Gallery from Palo Alto. My playing mate, Jim Gurley, came out of a professional stunt-car racing background working for his father. He and I used to do experimental acoustic guitar improvisations at the Coffee Gallery before he, like many of us, went electric and became lead guitar for Big Brother. Janis, before electricity, used to sing at Coffee Gallery hootenannies; some of us backed her up while she stood still as a statue, hands clenched into fists stuck to her side and belted out Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith blues.’31

  Having heard Dylan’s premiere long player, Meltzer picks up the story and reveals what happened next. ‘About a year later, when he came to San Francisco for his first tour, for which there was no entourage and virtually no audience, he was in some motel in some tacky area of the town and I was brought over by Dino Valente.’32 Valente would go on to write a classic song of the period entitled ‘Let’s Get Together’ for the Youngbloods, prior to finally joining one of the great Bay Area rock bands in Quicksilver in 1969 after lengthy delays involving a jail sentence linked to a marijuana bust mid-decade. Meltzer explains:

  As an ‘outside’ guitarist, I used to play behind Dino and he liked what I did. He also knew that I was a poet, which really intrigued him. A powerful presence, a forceful performer and heroic consumer of cannabis. Tina and I visited him at County Jail when he got busted. He sold all rights to ‘Come on Everybody Let’s Get Together’ to Frank Werber, the manager of the Kingston Trio, to get bailed out. Dino was a colleague of Dylan’s. When Dylan did his first SF concert, Dino took me to meet him at a cheesy motel off Van Ness Avenue. Dino introduced me as ‘the guitarist’ and Dylan murmured oblique greetings – but then my name lit up another sequence of correspondences and he asked me if I was the poet. Though I wanted to be the guitarist, I had to admit I was the poet. ‘Yeah, man, I dug your books’, Dylan said.33

  He continues: ‘A couple of days later, after his final concert, many folkies and marginals congregated at a dimly lit flat off Fillmore where Dylan previewed “Masters of War”. When he finished, we talked some more. I was touched by the power and immediacy of the song and told him, “You song writers have the power now”, or something equally and generously dramatic. “Oh no,” he said, “you poets do” .’34

  Meltzer also recalls his attempts to spread the word on this fresh talent to other friends and contacts. ‘I remember saying later to Michael McClure, “You should listen to this guy Dylan”, and he said, “Oh, I don’t know!” .’35 He adds: ‘I remember pushing Dylan’s first two LPs to Michael. Michael had some success with The Beard and Ferlinghetti was a “best-selling” poet, a “star” just like Ginsberg was. At first McClure dismissed the recordings. But as “stars”, they were smart enough to realise the potential of “the new thing” and wanted to affiliate with it.’36

  He says: ‘I think I was the conduit for Ginsberg and McClure to get in touch with Dylan. I suppose at that point I was the instrument. Ferlinghetti, McClure and Ginsberg wanted the cultural power of the music. They had that power to a point, but the music added to those possibilities. For Dylan, too, at that stage in his career, it was also expedient to be identified with them. It created this extended community.’37

  Meltzer adds that ‘years later, when the Band did their final concert’ – the 1976 event at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco was captured on celluloid in the Martin Scorsese movie The Last Waltz – one of the event organisers ‘Emmet Grogan called me and asked me to be one of the poets in between acts. I said “No”. It was the music they were there for, not the middle-aged guys reciting verse. That time was done with, just as the Beats stomped out the formalist academic poetry of the post-war. Grogan said, “C’mon, man, it’s a big event, a meeting of the tribes” .’38 But the poet resisted his overtures though both Ferlinghetti and McClure did appear on the Winterland stage, joining a stellar bill of rock performers from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton and Neil Young, Muddy Waters and Van Morrison, Ronnie Hawkins and the Staples Singers, Neil Diamond and Dr. John, Paul Butterfield and Ronnie Wood, Ringo Starr and Stephen Stills, in paying a farewell tribute to the group. McClure read the introduction to The Canterbury Tales in Chaucerian dialect; Ferlinghetti read his own ‘Loud Prayer’.

  As for the inclusion of Dylan in Charters’ Portable Beat Reader, Meltzer has this to say: ‘By the time the anthology appeared, Dylan had appeared in a zillion photographs with Ginsberg, Burroughs and company. Though considerably younger, that is, nowhere near that “generation”, in the public mind, he is seen as somehow part of it. When I met Allen, Ferlinghetti, Rexroth, Snyder in SF and Kerouac, via the mail, I was 20 and they were in their 30s. They were, gulp, “middle-aged” – not of my generation. Dylan was. All of this is neither here nor there. Ann’s anthology is much more valuable in its range than Waldman’s 1996 version39 and is, academically, very serviceable […] So, yes, why not Dylan in the anthology? Especially the lyrics which, to my mind, link him to Kerouac’s overlooked identifying with 1930s proletarian literature in much the same way young Zimmerman identified with Guthrie’s Popular Front songs.’40

  Meltzer’s own musical trail would continue through the 1960s, eventually leaving behind jug bands, acoustic and folk music, to form, with his wife Tina, the amplified rock band the Serpent Power,41 who released a single, eponymous album in 1967,42 taking his poetry and placing it in a musical setting. Spotted by Ed Denton, manager of Country Joe and the Fish, at their first ever gig, a benefit for the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center in November 1966,43 they were signed to Country Joe’s label Vanguard Records. Reminiscent of the Great Society, Grace Slick’s pre-Jefferson Airplane band, the group found a vogue-ish blend of folk-rock with psychedelic tinges. The debut LP featured Meltzer himself on guitar, harmonica and vocals, Tina Meltzer on vocals, Denny Ellis on rhythm guitar, David Stenson on bass, John Payne on organ and drummer Clark Coolidge,44 plus an electric banjo player named J.P. Pickens who appeared only on the record’s final track, ‘a raga-rock epic’45 entitled ‘Endless Tunnel’.46 A second album, credited to Tina and David Meltzer, called Poet Song would be issued in 1969. By the start of the
1970s, however, Meltzer the guitarist had largely returned to writing and his collection of interviews, The San Francisco Poets,47 at the start of the new decade, was a clear attempt to place much of what had happened in that city’s writing scene over the previous 15 years or so into a context and gave Meltzer a role as historian in the narrative, a place he has continued to occupy with authority.

  Speaking in our original interview in 1997, Meltzer was neither nostalgic for the poetic past nor particularly happy about the fashion for re-shaping and re-making the history to create a mythology in more recent times. ‘I’ve moved past it. I was there but I’ve moved past it. I’m not there, I’m here! Many people are still there and that’s the level of my critique. I can’t stand the idea of my peers making a career out of being there; it’s grotesque. They are no longer that; they are old people ready for social security.’48 Meanwhile, he has been re-inventing himself constantly, it appears, re-evaluating the Beat legacy, its heroes and its tragedies, but also broadening his widely-stretched canvas to incorporate every branch of post-war theorising from critical theory to feminism, radical politics to gender studies, movies and advertising, postmodernism to the riot grrrls, punk to hip hop.

  Of Beat, he says: ‘The legacy is hugely durable as it has become re-commodified to accommodate a youth market that, in a sense, is interested in the radicality of its grandparents. Invariably a younger generation finds the grandparents infinitely more interesting than the parents. That is part of that rebellion and that growth process.’49 But if the legacy has endured, he is not convinced that the myth-building that has gone on alongside it is such a positive development. ‘As it is turned into a commodity, it becomes a flight from the complex history so many of the Beat writers inhabited and were in resistance to, and were expressing their critique of.’50 He recalls the Whitney Museum exhibition in New York, which would later arrive in San Francisco, too. ‘I and some of the other survivors were wheeled out on our walkers,’ he says mischievously, ‘to bear witness. But I think that the catalogue is indicative of the kind of iconic way in which the subject is being dealt with. In fact, it is slightly distressing. As someone who was slightly younger than Kerouac and Ginsberg when I started, I find it bad history. There is this mytho-poetisising tendency.’ In essence, Meltzer seems concerned about the dangers of turning Beat into a heroic side-show; transforming the movement into a commercial proposition is fraught with danger. He worries that ‘it’s not the books that matter, it’s the looks. What essentially is being sold is not only the books but also a kitsch version of the Beats with the ubiquitous sunglasses, the berets, goatees, the bongos, all of that.’51