by Simon Warner
Bob Kealing, who is co-founder and board member of the Kerouac Project in Orlando, Florida, which works to celebrate the writer’s legacy in that part of the States, comments: ‘I suspect the recordings took place at Kerouac’s Orlando home in 1961–62. I know he did other recordings there as well. This was a very typical block home in a new Orlando suburb, Kingswood Manor. He recorded some other material for his then-girlfriend Lois Sorrells.’20
Jim Sampas, overseeing the album’s development with Lee Ranaldo, tends to concur. He believes that close listening to the recording reveals the sound of planes taking off or landing and he thinks that these could well have been from an airport near to Kerouac’s Orlando base. However, he opines that the recording in question may have been a little later than Kealing’s, commenting: ‘Kerouac also sounds a bit older to me. It could be even be the mid-1960s.’21
When Sampas came to consider how this song might feature on the album he was planning, he had a strong sense that the basic recording, while intriguing in its way, would need some extra work. He remarks: ‘We had the solo version with Jack Kerouac singing a cappella. But we wondered how interesting that would be. We felt it needed a little bit of something. It was an amazing song but it was out of time.’ It was at this stage that David Amram’s band members came to the assistance of the project. ‘What we decided was, we would record a backing at the studio in New York involving the David Amram Ensemble which included both guitarist Vic Juris and keyboard player John Medeski. They listened to it and then they took a stab. Vic Juris wrote the music. Vic and John played. They did a little bit of a practice run and then boom, they recorded it. They did it miraculously, a fantastic job.’
Guitarist Juris, who has also done work with Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso during his career, remembers the session, which took place on 24 and 26 October 1998, a little differently: ‘I became involved with the Kerouac project through composer David Amram who was a personal friend of Jack’s. They collaborated on the first jazz and poetry readings in the late 1950s. Jim Sampas discovered a few tapes and asked us to compose an accompaniment to Jack’s singing. John Medeski added his personal touch at a later recording session.’22
Yet the home recording of the early to mid-1960s, and the revived version of 1999, were only part of the story of the lyric that Kerouac placed at the centre of his ‘On the Road’ song. In fact, the lyric had made a much earlier appearance in the novel On the Road itself, when, well into the account, Sal Paradise sings the song to himself as he awaits a hitched ride.23 On this occasion the piece was only ten lines long, an abbreviated edition of the song. But Kerouac expanded the song lyric still further in a short story that would feature in the January 1958, Christmas special issue, of the magazine Playboy, a regular location, in its early years, for original fiction by the new writing talent of the day. In his tale ‘The rumbling, rambling blues’,24 the writer – in his usual role of narrator – encounters a hobo Negro singer in a café in Des Moines. The full lyric is transcribed there for the reader but this still raises the question, is this an actual blues song? Is this an actual incident? Did Kerouac witness this episode and hear the song or did he fabricate it as a literary device? Kerouac’s use of his own experiences, at least the basis of his experiences, for yarn-spinning is widely recognised, so it is not impossible that the novelist did sit in a café somewhere and indeed encounter a visiting blues troubadour. But has he dreamt up his own blues lyric for the purposes of effect?
There are, of course, tens of thousands of blues lyrics but Dave Moore, an independent scholar of reputation and a foremost expert on Kerouac not to mention a close follower of the blues and its history, expresses a useful view on this matter. He remarks: ‘I’ve heard a lot [of blues], including most of the old country blues songs. I have never come across those particular lyrics before. Kerouac had been exposed to blues recordings, both on record and live, in the 1940s and ‘50s, and was well aware of the format. It’s my guess that he composed something “in the idiom” which found its way into both pieces of his writing.’25
So we might assume that Kerouac had shaped his own blues narrative in these self-penned words, then included it in two different pieces of fiction – novel followed by short story – before committing it, in ad hoc fashion, to his own tape archive. But what of Tom Waits’ part in this story? How did he pick up the baton well over 30 years later? What brought him into this project and what did he now do with the lyric and the song that his novelist predecessor had conceived? First, perhaps, we should say something about Waits and his associations with Kerouac and the wider Beat ethos.
The Beat Generation writers have been long admired by Tom Waits. ‘They were like father figures to me’, he stated in a US National Public Radio interview in 2006 with broadcaster Robert Siegel. ‘Because you have to have someone you can really look up to. And they were like pirates, real buccaneers. They struck out on their own, made a name for themselves’. Waits was a fan of Kerouac – his ‘first true literary hero’,26 says Barney Hoskyns – and Ginsberg, Siegel knew, but did he also read Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the interviewer wondered. ‘Ferlinghetti, no question about that. Coney Island of the Mind, I was a big fan. I remember that book very well. I got it signed when I was a teenager. I took the train to San Francisco, went to the bookstore.27 And, you know, I went to a bar nearby where I heard that he hung out and I gave it to the bar tender and said, well if he comes in here, have him to sign it for me will you – and he did!’28 So the singer, born at the end of the 1940s and an itinerant child as his parents split when he was young, was, even as an adolescent, drawn to the work of the Beats, by their writings but also their attitudes and lifestyle.
As Cath Carroll comments: ‘As soon as biologically possible, Waits also began to cultivate a goatee […] At around the age of 18, he discovered Beat writers, absorbing the works of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, of Charles Bukowksi and of the poet Delmore Schwartz […] He found himself enthralled by the insidious musicality of the Beat poets’ bare words.’29 Says Waits himself: ‘I guess everybody reads Kerouac at some point in their life. Even though I was growing up in Southern California, he made a tremendous impression on me. It was 1968. I started wearing dark glasses and got myself a subscription to Down Beat…I was a little late, Kerouac died in 1969 in St. Petersburg, Florida, a bitter old man.’30
Drawn to the vision of Beat experience as literary mode and as a blueprint for an existence he could cultivate at the enticing, if somewhat frayed, margins, Waits lived a life as bohemian troubadour from the late 1960s and certainly for the next decade. Humphries states: ‘Waits boasted that he had “slept through the Sixties”. This wasn’t just irreverence, this was heresy. The icons and role models of the sixties stretched way into rock culture of the seventies and beyond, but Waits was typically out of step, determinedly harking back to earlier heroes.’31 Humphries adds: ‘Tom Waits soaked up Kerouac and got soused on Beat mythology. His favourite album of all time was Kerouac’s 1960 collection Blues and Haikus and at his own New York debut in the mid-1970s, Waits was proud to include in his band saxophonist Al Cohn who had played on the album.’32
The road itself, the highway, was also a pervasive emblem in Waits just as it had been in Kerouac. Corinne Kessel dubs the novel On the Road ‘an important thematic touchstone’33 for the singer. She says that ‘the lifestyles of Kerouac’s rubber tramp characters […] and his particular use of language have provided Waits with a framework for his own characters and language’.34 She adds, in a manner that would have chimed with Kerouac and must still with Waits:
Highways are symbolic of many different freedoms and liberations for every individual who encounters them, whether as part of a spirit-revitalizing journey or as a necessary escape from mercilessly fatiguing constraints […] Highways are highly conducive to the evanescent spirit of transients and vagabonds and are often places where lonely souls can be brought together for brief moments of interaction or crowded minds can be given space to refocus and meditat
e. Highways are places of movement; they are designed only to facilitate travel from one place to another and thus offer endless possibilities to the wanderer.35
In his repertoire of jazz and blues, in bar-room balladry, in his shabby, crumpled glory, Waits seemed to personify a surviving beatnik style and ethos, long after the tide of psychedelia and long-hair had appeared to supplant those earlier monochrome times. His on-stage persona at least, from whiskey-scarred and nicotine-roughened vocals to a crushed pork pie hat, embodied the bruised romanticism of the travelling performer. Yet his musical heroes were James Brown and Ray Charles and Jimmy Witherspoon and he initially became embroiled in the eccentric fringes with Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart as the 1960s fizzled out. By the early 1980s, as he married, forged a family and a song-writing partnership with his wife Kathleen Brennan, and settled down to some large degree, we might argue that his maintenance of the image of dishevelled vagrant, growling, groaning song-smith, is more mannered, less authentic maybe, than in the early days of his itinerant career. But the on-stage character has survived nonetheless.
Hoskyns writes: ‘Waits gave vent to the influence of Beat writings and spoken word jazz verse in an early version of “Diamonds on My Windshield” that he read in a little storefront on the main business street in Venice.’36 The lyric, which distilled much of the verveful spirit of Kerouac’s road, would find a way onto his second album, Heart of Saturday Night in 1974, wrapped in a melancholic bebop-like keyboard dressing. Eventually, he would not only maintain this evident Beat allegiance but also include Kerouac and Cassady and their ilk in his own songs, most pertinently in the composition ‘Jack and Neal’ (1977) and also ‘Bad Liver and a Broken Heart (in Lowell)’ (1976), the latter paying tribute not just to the later, ailing days of the novelist but also the Massachusetts town where he would grow up and finally be buried.
Kessel, discussing Waits’ 1975 live album Nighthawks at the Diner, says that the record saw ‘the further development of Waits’ drunken bohemian after-hours persona, which was an amalgamation of beatnik, vaudevillian and crooner qualities’.37 Rather later, too, Waits would extend his active Beat participation when he worked on the William Burroughs project The Black Rider, a 1993 album linked to theatre director Robert Wilson’s expressionist stage production in Hamburg, Germany.
So, in short, Waits’ credentials to form a key ingredient in the Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road venture were hardly in doubt and Jim Sampas, who had also produced an earlier and acclaimed spoken word tribute to the writer in his 1997 release Kerouac: Kicks, Joy, Darkness, was keen to bring the singer into the ring for this new production. Sampas states: ‘[Waits] was definitely interested, he was definitely fascinated. He was also unsure because of the influence Jack Kerouac had had on him and his admiration for Jack Kerouac was profound.’ He sensed that Waits was striking a note of reticence even if he was drawn to the idea of adapting ‘On the Road’, the song, in his own manner. ‘He wanted to be very careful. He was aware of the idea that if you screwed up it was not a good thing. He was very cautious. We had conversations. I sent the song to him and he listened to it. He called me back. Then I found a source for the lyrics. I sent them over to him. After a while he felt okay with it. He was wholeheartedly into it.’ As for Waits’ decision to include Primus on the session, hosted by Prairie Sun Recording Studios in Northern California, Sampas was, for his part, relaxed on this point. He comments: ‘They were working together at the time. Primus bassist Les Claypool had worked with Tom on the Waits’ album Bone Machine in 1992. My feeling was whoever Tom Waits wants to put on the Jack Kerouac song, he’s going to have it. I was happy to give him artistic discretion.’38
The result could hardly have been more different to Kerouac’s spare, late-night melodising even if it had now been annotated with some blues colourings by Juris and Medeski. Waits and Primus, in a vigorous swamp blues fashion, lent heft and drama to the piece, more rock than country, with the singer’s gravelly tones forefronted, complemented with great atmosphere by muscular bass lines and a slide guitar line that suggested both a contemporary, rasping grind but hinted at the primitive sounds that the Lomaxes39 might have tracked in the backwoods South as they gathered field recordings of, often ageing, musicians in the 1930s and 1940s. In short, Waits and Primus had created a concoction that spoke of the present and the past, a fine way to approach this most unusual of tasks: resurrecting a deeply private soliloquy in an electric band setting for public consumption. As Brinkley remarked on the sleeve: ‘The producers hoped Waits would perform the song, and he jumped at the notion. [He] added a little melody and a few words of his own and recorded a moody, Bowery-tinged version of the song that exactly captures the rainy, subterranean ashcan essence of Kerouac’s homeless lament.’40 Kessel says this of the Waits take: ‘[Kerouac’s] words pay homage to highway life and are layered overtop of the twang of the banjo, rollicking bass, scorching electric guitar, and amplified gritty harmonica’.41
Waits reflected on this exercise in musical revival in Hoskyns’ 2009 biography, even if the various interpretations and how Kerouac came to lay down the original were a little awry, with suggestions that the novelist’s original version had been written and recorded as long ago as 1949. Waits comments: ‘I guess Jack was at a party somewhere and snuck off into a closet and started singing into a reel-to-reel tape deck. Like, “I left New York in 1949, drove across the country …” I wound up turning it into a song.’42 Further, says Hoskyns, Kerouac’s namecheck for El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego, a city the singer had grown up near, perhaps brought the lyric close to home for Waits, and 1949 was also his birthyear, ‘so there were places where I connected with that’, the singer pointed out.43 The father figure who haunts the song must also have had poignant echoes for Waits who had, at earlier stages in his life, conducted searches for that missing player in his own personal drama, a scenario that had clear reverberations of the track Neal Cassady had worn, yearning to re-connect with his own dad in the streets of Denver, episodes that became an integral part of On the Road’s fiction.
We should also note that the song ‘On the Road’ would make a further appearance, a different take it would seem from the Prairie Sun sessions, on Waits’ triple album set of 2006, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards. Further, Waits would include, on the same sprawling compilation gathering songs from various periods, another version of the song, this time entitled ‘Home I’ll Never Be’, a pared down, solo arrangement with the singer accompanied on piano only.
This song, this interpretation, would feature in another important Beat setting when Hal Willner directed a tribute to the recently deceased Allen Ginsberg in Los Angeles in 1997. Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s long-time guitarist who was present, recalls the occasion: ‘I was there. It was a memorial for Allen. I was under the impression that it was organised by Allen’s cousin Oscar Janiger. Willner would have rounded up the musicians. Janiger was Allen’s main Hollywood connection, and we usually stayed at his place in Santa Monica when we were in town. The actor Kevin Spacey read “White Shroud” to the accompaniment of a string quartet I had scored some years earlier for the poem. Johnny Depp made an appearance, and seemed to be “in character” for the role he played in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which he must have been filming at the time. I remember Waits at the piano.’44
Thus, we witness Waits’ varied engagement with the Beats – all of the great triumvirate of Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg, not to mention Ferlinghetti – and evidenced in a number of ways. But it does seem that it is in the restless, probing, on-the-move compulsion of Jack that provides, for the singer, his most endearing and enduring template, and, in the song ‘On the Road’, Waits had the perfect opportunity to make a post-grave connection with his hero, an intimate link with the writer’s desires and fears, some of which had close parity with those of the musician himself. Speaking some years later, as a contributor to the 2009 documentary One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur,45 Waits made some sympathetic remarks
on the increasingly chaotic condition of his hero as, by the start of the 1960s, he sank into a mire of desperate, eventually morbid, alcoholic indulgence, spurred by the pressures of celebrity that his signature novel had generated. The 1962 novel Big Sur would be the acrid and scarred record of that psychological, then physical, decline as the bottle took its hold. Waits speaks warmly, if wryly. ‘Well sometimes I read him and get sad. And I think, aaaww, man. Because nowadays we would just give you some Ritalin or something. Straighten your ass right out. Send you to AA, Jack. You’ll be fine, man. You’ll never write another word’, he says breaking into a slightly bemused grin, ‘But you‘ll be fine …’46
Notes
1Dave Moore, personal communication, email, 28 May 2012, comments: ‘Kerouac mentioned, in his letters and journal entries during 1957, various rock ’n’ roll singers he admired, including Elvis Presley, Jackie Wilson, Frankie Lymon, and Screaming Jay Hawkins.’ Moore also draws attention to an item in The Kerouac Connection, No. 22, Autumn 1991: ‘Kerouac was also very fond of Frank Sinatra’s music. On tapes recorded at home in Northport, 1960-1, for his girlfriend of the time, Lois Sorrells, Jack can be heard reading from Doctor Sax, Old Angel Midnight and San Francisco Blues, all with the Sinatra LPs, No One Cares and In the Wee Small Hours, playing in the background. At one point Jack stops reading and joins in singing with Sinatra for several numbers.’