by Simon Warner
2On the album notes the song is credited to Sammy Kahn.
3On the album the song title is rendered as ‘Come Rain or Shine’.
4The sleeve notes credit the more formal version of lyricist’s name, John H. Mercer.
5Establishing the date of this song, even identifying that this is the song described, has not been straightforward. Kerouac’s loose extemporisation has proved hard to pin down with absolute certainty.
6Douglas Brinkley, CD sleeve notes, Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road (Rykodisc, 1999).
7Dave Moore, personal communication, email, 28 May 2012, points out that there are also ‘separate, identifiable sections from Visions of Cody’ drawn upon in this particular version.
8Jan Kerouac would meet her father eventually and emerge as a novelist herself – Baby Driver (1981) and Trainsong (1998) were among her fiction publications – but she would die, following surgery, aged 44, in 1996.
9Brinkley, CD sleeve notes, 1999.
10Jack Kerouac, ‘Introduction’, The Americans by Robert Frank, in Kerouac, Good Blonde & Others (San Francisco, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1994), pp. 19–20.
11Dave Moore, personal communication, email, 28 May 2012, believes that ‘the Robert Frank photo was not planned for an On the Road book cover, but for an On the Road LP cover. Kerouac recorded three LPs’ worth of material for Norman Granz in March 1958, for release by Verve Records. Only one was issued at the time – Readings on the Beat Generation. Another was to be called On the Road but has never appeared.’ In The Kerouac Connection, No.19, Spring 1990, record producer Bill Randle recalled: ‘Robert Frank the photographer was the most real and dedicated of the people who hung around those sessions. We used a great picture of his for the On the Road album … that straight ending Western road at night pic … powerful.’ Adds Moore: ‘So Kerouac’s “Jazz of the Beat Generation” recording was made in New York, March 1958, and was evidently intended to be part of that original On the Road album.’
12The Original Scroll Edition was Kerouac’s first draft, written on a continuous teletype roll, for On the Road.
13Frank Olinsky, album sleeve designer, personal communication, email, 8 December 2008.
14David Amram, Offbeat: Celebrating with Kerouac (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001), p. 194.
15Amram, pp. 192–3.
16Ibid., p. 192.
17Ibid.
18The Original Scroll was displayed at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham University from 3 December 2008–28 January 2009, its first exhibition in the UK.
19Brinkley, sleeve notes, 1999.
20Bob Kealing, Kerouac Project, Orlando, Florida, personal communication, email, 27 November 2008. Dave Moore, personal communication, email, 28 May 2012, remarks: ‘I tend to agree with Bob Kealing that those recordings by Jack were from the same period as the other recordings he made for Lois Sorrells. I would suggest, though, that the location was Jack’s home in Northport, Long Island, rather than Orlando, since poet LeRoi Jones was present for at least one session, and I don’t believe that Jones ever visited Kerouac in Florida.’
21Jim Sampas, producer of Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road, personal communication, email, 24 November 2008.
22Vic Juris, guitarist, personal communication, email, 24 November 2008.
23Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 240.
24The story would be re-published in the 1993 Kerouac collection, Good Blonde & Others (San Francisco, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1998), pp. 40–4.
25Dave Moore, personal communication, email, 3 December 2008.
26Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits (London: Faber, 2009), p. 478.
27Lawrence Ferlinghetti was not only poet and publisher but was also proprietor of City Lights, a city landmark and one of the most famous independent bookshops in the world.
28Tom Waits quoted from ‘Tom Waits: The whiskey voice returns’, interview with Robert Siegel, All Things Considered, NPR, 21 November 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6519647 [accessed 29 November 2008].
29Cath Carroll, Tom Waits (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p. 9.
30Patrick Humphries, Small Change: A Life of Tom Waits (London: Omnibus, 1989), p. 15.
31Humphries, 1989, p. 17.
32Ibid.
33Corinne Kessel, The Words and Music of Tom Waits (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009), p. 65.
34Kessel, 2009, p. 65.
35Ibid.
36Hoskyns, 2009, p. 68. Note that the reference is to Venice Beach, Los Angeles.
37Kessel, 2009, p. 3.
38Jim Sampas, producer, interview with author, 20 November 2008.
39John A. Lomax (1867–1948) and his son Alan (1915–2002) were important folklorists, who gathered examples of the US’s folk music heritage over much of the twentieth-century.
40Brinkley, CD sleeve notes, 1999.
41Kessel, 2009, p. 50.
42Hoskyns, 2009, p. 479.
43Ibid.
44Steven Taylor, personal communication, email, 1 December 2008.
45The film was directed by Curt Worden and produced by Jim Sampas.
46Tom Waits, quoted in One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur (Kerouac Films, 2009).
9 FEELING THE BOHEMIAN PULSE: LOCATING PATTI SMITH WITHIN A POST-BEAT TRADITION
Patti Smith’s multiple identities as musician and actor, artist, author and poet, have fascinated fans and critics, fellow performers, and the broader world of the left-field avant garde, in almost equal measure, since her artistic emergence at the beginning of the 1970s. Her ability to move through a range of creative practices and negotiate the evolving demands of her domestic life – marriage, motherhood and the loss of key significants – has seen her interweave her professional and personal résumés in a wide range of creative settings: candid, essentially autobiographical reflections presented in a number of fashions and formats over more than four decades – on record, in theatres, in interviews, on film and on the page.
We should also reflect on the fact that maturing, the onset of age, less usually considered in the realm of male practitioners, has also been addressed and managed with remarkable and admirable aplomb. When I witnessed a live appearance on her UK tour of spring 2007 in Sheffield, England,1 I was struck by the extraordinarily youthful vivacity of the woman, impressed by the on-stage energy of a, by then, 60-year-old, one-time punk provocateur. It was hard not to believe I was witnessing a performance by a player at the height of her powers. She patently transcended any preconceptions that rock ’n’ roll was no place for a middle-aged singer-songwriter to roam.
Perhaps Smith has pulled off the ultimate sleight of hand: the androgynous pose of her early career seems preserved in aspic. The unconventional, ambivalent appearance, frozen, for example, in photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1975 cover shot for her debut album Horses, has, we might argue, worn much better than the peroxided glamour of that other, and rather different, CBGBs goddess Deborah Harry. This is not to deride the attraction and appeal of the Blondie frontwoman, rather to argue that Smith’s original persona has provided a more serviceable vehicle for this veritable Patti Pan: there is no sense that Smith’s enduring kudos in the early twenty-first century is premised on nostalgia or revival, a rare feat of longevity in a musical terrain usually fixated on youth.
Smith’s ideological position seems broadly wed to the bohemian impulse – that abiding spirit of subversive creativity that stretches from 1830s Paris to the Downtown traditions of New York City in the latter decades of the twentieth century and beyond. She cites guiding beacons as diverse as Arthur Rimbaud, Lotte Lenya and Jackson Pollock, reflecting this historical and geographical sweep. But her interest in the Beat Generation writers, the celebrated Greenwich Village bohemians of the 1940s and 1950s, is frequently evidenced.2 Their confessional mode shaped Smith’s poems and her lyrics to an extent that we might consider her an heir, in various ways, to Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. T
his paper will explore Smith’s status as Beat or, indeed, post-Beat, an appellation her life and work has sometimes attracted. It will attempt to understand in what ways the term post-Beat has been applied and to what degree Smith can be identified as part of that later tradition or leaning. Further, it will reflect on the values and dangers of such association and absorb and test criticisms that such forms of appropriation lack substance and that name-dropping illustrious antecedents is a modus operandi that is not always positively acknowledged.
This chapter will draw on two principal sources: the main biographical texts by Bockris and Johnstone, Shaw and Tarr, and a body of newly collected primary materials, for which the author has drawn on ethnographic techniques, approaching a number of informants with insight into Smith and, particularly, her overlap with Beat culture. The latter includes interviews with surviving Beats and post-Beats (writers Anne Waldman, Joyce Pinchbeck and Steven Taylor, among them) exchanges with biographers (Victor Bockris and Philip Shaw, for instance), journalists and cultural historians (Holly George-Warren, Harvey Kubernik and Bart Bull), academics (Sheila Whiteley and Lucy O’Brien), and poets (Jim Cohn and David Cope), which explore the notion of transgenerational influence and also attempt to locate Patti Smith within this fluid field of activity, this matrix of interpersonal connection. What the essay will not attempt, for reasons of space, is a close examination of Smith’s poetic and rock output in relation to Beat effect: this piece is about traces in her style and life and to what extent these traces are exaggerated or over-played, by her or by others.
However, I would like to begin this enquiry with some recent comments that have fired a number of critical arrows at Patti Smith, questioning her motivations for pinning her colours, so often and so enthusiastically, to the ethos of the Beat community and its output. These remarks will be utilised as a starting point for contextualisation, a platform from which established commentators are later able to provide their own readings and insights into Smith’s status and behaviour, particularly in respect of the perceived homage that she has paid to this earlier gathering of writers.
Three web reviewers, considering Curt Worden’s documentary One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, all felt uncharitably disposed to Patti Smith’s presence as an interview subject, a talking head, in this 2009 production, a feature which considered the circumstances surrounding Jack Kerouac’s 1960 stay at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Californian hillside cabin as he bid to escape his deepening alcoholism and, additionally, the novel called Big Sur that followed, a work which endeavoured to capture the asphyxiatingly depressing impact of the writer’s, ultimately fatal, addiction during this period.
In Slant magazine, Joseph Jon Lanthier commented on the film-work:
[…] a sincere, dumbstruck passion for Kerouac’s rhythmic confessions pervades the majority of the interviews and, despite some spacey misinterpretations (who keeps inviting Patti Smith to these Beat docs?), the on-screen readers persuasively remind us of how the syntactical spell of Big Sur managed to hypnotize our impressionable, undergraduate selves in the first place.3
Lydia Kiesling, writing in The Millions about the same documentary, remarked: ‘Patti Smith, whom I suspect [was] brought in because [she is] perceived as having a never-ending fund of “cred” .’4 Just over a year on, Bill Morris, also in The Millions, concurred with Kiesling about Smith’s appearance in the production. ‘That must be it’, he said. ‘It can’t possibly be that anyone still cares that she used to have a crush on William S. Burroughs.’5
Why should three reviewers, two men and one woman, feel the need to be critical of the inclusion of Patti Smith in this film? Each had slightly different takes on the subject – Lanthier was rather dismissive of her reading of Kerouac’s words; Kiesling was somewhat dubious about her inclusion as an example of token credibility in the piece; while Morris insinuated that Smith’s addition to the cast was merely because she had expressed feelings of affection towards Burroughs. But their comments, in all cases, framed a somewhat jaundiced view of Smith’s presence in Beat scenarios. There was a real sense that these online writers felt uncomfortable with Smith’s involvement in a celluloid celebration that looked back on a key moment in Kerouac’s alcohol-soaked early 1960s, post-fame life through a documentary lens. I do not want to make direct comment on the trio’s positions: journalists, particularly critics, are driven by many motivations, professional and personal. These individuals may not be fans of Smith; they may have felt a vocational need to find fault with the artistic project and justify that reservation; they may have wished to make small waves in their circle or within their readership. But the gathering of these comments made me wonder further about the Smith-Beat nexus and contemplate more general ideas about artists constructing an aspect of their own cachet on the attainments of the past. Is name-checking mere tribute, the valid gesture of a new generation tipping its hat to an older milieu, or can it be cloying, even exploitative?
So, firstly, what have biographers said about Patti Smith’s Beat Generation tastes and affiliations? Victor Bockris’ biography of Smith, which simply carries the artist’s name, appeared in 1998. It is interesting to note how Bockris’ account begins by stressing the presence and potency of poetry in Manhattan at the time that Smith was beginning to make a mark among New York City’s radical subterraneans at the very start of the 1970s:
In the early seventies in New York a poet was one of the coolest things you could be. You can’t imagine how many people who are successful people now started their lives as New York poets – something that is almost unimaginable today. In those days the St. Mark’s Poetry Project was on a par with Warhol’s Factory, Mickey Ruskin’s Max’s Kansas City6 and the Gotham Book Mart as a bastion of the influential underground art movements that were the emotional engines of New York, just as the city was on the verge of becoming the cultural capital of the world.7
So poetry, an obvious connection with many Beat writers (Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and Kerouac, too, though one not generally made with Burroughs, interestingly8), is at the core of Smith’s surge from her life as a novice harlequin painter-actor-journalist at the end of the previous decade to an existence as a rising versifier and spoken word practitioner. Her celebrated debut at the St. Mark’s venue, arranged by project director Anne Waldman on 10 February 1971, when she first read her poetry live as a support to Warhol scenester Gerard Malanga, remained an oft-cited event by those present for decades afterwards. But its nervy verve and spiky power, nonchalant confidence and irreverent humour, was finally confirmed for a general listenership when it was eventually released on CD in 2006.9
Yet, in the midst of this ‘obvious connection’ with the Beat idiom, we should beware the dangers of building a seamless narrative history retrospectively: what we see, with the benefit of hindsight, is not always as continuous when we examine the contemporaneous details that are later shaped as a smooth, undisrupted stream of activity. Nonetheless, it appears that Smith had been impressed by an essay of the time by another poet Andrew Wylie,10 published in the Philadelphia magazine Telegrams. Explains Bockris:
[…] Wylie was direct and forceful in summing up where he stood on the poetry field […] he could no longer relate to long works like Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ or Pound’s Cantos. Living, he felt, in an extremely violent, fragile time, he was drawn to short, almost amputated works. The essay went on to express an intellectual’s interpretations of the current vibrations he felt surrounded by, concluding that just to be alive in these times was an act of violence. The essay, which Patti received a copy of, most likely impressed her, as Wylie did, for its sense of urgency about making it now, about doing something now.11
But if Wylie may have deterred Smith to an extent from looking back to, say, an epic and masterful work like ‘Howl’, the tremors of which were still present on the US arts radar a decade and a half after its 1955 performed premiere, how can we identify ways in which the Beat
legacy impacted on a newly recognised talent, the young woman who had made a mark at her St. Mark’s reading?
One of the more intriguing clues that appear not long after are ideas she expresses to Bockris in an exchange he describes as ‘her first in-depth interview’12 as she published her verse collection Seventh Heaven in 1972. She makes reference here to Ginsberg, Beat follower Bob Dylan and Beat associate Frank O’Hara, plain evidence that they were on her radar, affecting her thinking as an artist. She remarks:
I’m not a fame fucker, but I am a hero worshipper. I’ve been in love with heroes, that’s what seduced me into art… But poets have become simps. There’s this new thing: the poet is a simp, the sensitive young man always away in the attic, but it wasn’t always like that. It used to be that the poet was a performer and I think the energy of Frank O’Hara started to re-inspire that. I mean, in the sixties there was all that happening stuff. Then Frank O’Hara died and it sort of petered out and then Dylan and Allen Ginsberg re-vitalised it, but then it got all fucked up again because instead of people learning from Dylan and Allen Ginsberg and realising that a poet was a performer they thought a poet was a social protestor. So it got fucked up. I ain’t into social protesting.13
Smith’s position here is expressed revealingly as she confesses a near-spiritual allegiance to certain figures of the past but she is keen to deflect allegations that it is merely the cup of fame she drinks of. Instead she appears to bow at the altar of some (she only hints at whom these may be14) and certainly acknowledges that Ginsberg and Dylan, perhaps the two most powerful figures in the original Beat then less defined post-Beat moments, are names she reveres. It is notable that ‘social protestor’ is a tag she rejects, especially as Dylan wrestled with similar tweaks of conscience in the mid-1960s as he moved from youthful Civil Rights troubadour to world-weary rock ’n’ roller within months in 1965. Yet Ginsberg would surely have no problems with the epithet: he spent more than 40 years, to his death in 1997, on the political soapbox. Non-doctrinaire, perhaps anti-doctrinaire, the Beat guru fought issues with words – campaigns against the war, struggles against discrimination of all kinds – with a sustained vigour for most of his adult life.