Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  Poet-songwriter Jim Cohn, part of the gathering of contemporary versifiers who are linked to Ginsberg’s Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and self-identify as ‘Postbeats’ says this: ‘Patti Smith had strong affinities with Allen Ginsberg. After the death of her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, in 1994, her already established demotic and shamanic style took on a greater, generational significance, incorporating death, making death a meditation, bringing comfort to people, mainlining the essential energy of life. She was with Allen at the end of his life, with him when he died in 1997. Since then, she has performed with Philip Glass around the world, celebrating Allen’s life and spirit, and evolving a spontaneous trust in herself as a channel from the Spirit World. She has lived a bohemian life as avant garde poet/songwriter/performer in the manner laid down by the Beats and, like many rock and rollers who came of age in the 60s, her art was deeply informed by the Beats.’

  Rock journalist and biographer Lucy O’Brien has a particular interest in the place of women in popular music’s history. She reflects: ‘It is interesting that when she started out she presented herself as almost androgynous and asexual and most of her heroes (Camus, Dylan, Coltrane) were male. Probably a sensible move on a post-Beat scene that was still very male, viewing its women as muses or sex objects. Her feminism and sense of autonomy really stood out. She loved romantic poets like Rimbaud and William Blake, and took a Beat-inspired approach to her poetry – exuberant, spontaneous creativity with a cool swagger.’

  Q.2 To what degree do you perceive Beat influence on Smith’s work?

  Victor Bockris responds: ‘The point is that Patti Smith’s art and life relates to Beat culture in a friendly way. Her poetry is not Beat poetry. Her prose is not Beat prose, but when she sings, “the boy looked at Johnny”, she’s channelling Burroughs. She’s also advertising Burroughs. We need a new way to talk about these relationships. They don’t fit into the academic form of artistic influence, it’s more Warholian culture communication of signs and signals.’

  Noted rock ’n’ roll and spoken word historian Harvey Kubernik expresses this opinion: ‘I do think there is a link of the legacy of the Beat to Patti. Perhaps in terms of the printed page to the audio/recording world and then the subsequent stage performance of her material. The aspect of improv that informs her work and particularly her live repertoire. In 2011, I had a series of conversations with Dr. James Cushing, a Professor of English and Literature at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and a long-time DJ on radio station KCPR-FM. All through the late 1970s and well into the 1980s we attended several Los Angeles and Hollywood Patti Smith recitals and heard her early Arista record offerings.’

  He adds: ‘Cushing told me in 2011 that Just Kids is authentic belated Beat literature in the same sense as Dylan’s Chronicles or Ginsberg’s Death and Fame. Belated in the sense that these books do not document the beginning of a sensibility as On the Road or “Howl” did, but authentic in the sense that the values these later works assume are Beat values, articulated in ways most associated with Beats: resistance to middle-class conformity, trust of the spontaneous, pursuit of altered states of consciousness, preference for termite-art over elephant-art, and above all the spirit of Whitman and his urban embodiment of Transcendentalism.’

  Cohn remarks: ‘Her poetry incorporates elements of Surrealism, free association, surprising juxtapositions, political consciousness and heartfelt emotion – going back to Ezra Pound’s notion that “only emotion endures”. She was part of the great ’60s wave where rock and roll was seen, mostly as a result of Allen Ginsberg’s advocacy, as “high art”. One of Ginsberg’s sense of Beat “effects” was this very fact – that Beat language arts and cultural life affected the lyric quality, the openness, critical social eye, visionary epiphany, that became the content of works of popular art that have transcended the immediate period of their creation.’

  David Cope, another ‘Postbeat’ poet, says this: ‘She is, as a true artist, fiercely original while maintaining those connections to the lineages of which her work is a part — and the Beats are among those lineages, along with Rimbaud, Whitman, Dickinson and others. Her work has its own savage experimental quality that breaks bounds as the Beat writings did in the ’50s, but she is also part of a later generation that defined itself in terms of its own experiences, and, as a rocker, she has more in common with Bob Dylan, the MC5, Lou Reed or the Clash than with poet predecessors who dabbled in music rather than using it as the primary vehicle for the words.’

  Beat commentator Holly George-Warren sees the influence ‘particularly on Horses and Radio Ethiopia’. She explains: ‘Burroughs’ cut-up technique can be seen in Smith’s lyrics; some of the homoeroticism of Ginsberg’s work is also reflected here. In her artwork, you can find hints of Brion Gysin and another Beat influence, Jean Cocteau. Her live performances have always included spoken word/poetry – hearkening back to Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery.’

  O’Brien states: ‘It’s very much there in her early work, particularly the album Horses, which combines jazz, rock and spoken word poetry. I interviewed her once about this, and she said that for the album she worked with a range of her poems, experimenting with words – “I was creating a sort of William Burroughs cut-up …” Smith described working with producer John Cale as like “having two crazy poets dealing with a shower of words”.’

  Taylor comments: ‘Broadly, the idea that you can get up and read your poems in public, and with music, affiliates her with the oral poetry renaissance of the ’50s. She’s in the lineage of that, from Langston Hughes reading to jazz in the ’20s, on down through Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, di Prima, Baraka. It’s a broad scene. I’m sure you could see connections by looking at her choice of words, her themes, her verse forms.’

  Q.3 Might we justifiably call Smith a post-Beat?

  Cohn says: ‘I do. Although key poets such as Anne Waldman as well as musicians like Dylan and Smith are often identified by their relation to the Beats, if one considers the mid-’50s as the apex of the Beat period, with 1956 as the defining moment – I’m speaking of the Six Gallery or Six Angels reading where Allen debuted “Howl” – Patti Smith was ten, Anne Waldman 11 and Dylan an elder at 15 years old.46 Clearly, they, like many younger people, were influenced. If one accepts the notion that these three artists were part of something generational, some kind of movement, it was something that would be more accurately described as after the Beats, based upon Beat influence, but ultimately, what I have argued is Postbeat.’

  Cope remarks: ‘All the outrider poets who came after the Beats were influenced by them, but the differences are just as significant. We “make it new”, in Pound’s words, but any poet worth his or her words knows that one builds a foundation out of the work of those who came before, as well as from the historical particulars and cultural influences from one’s own time. Patti and other “post-beats” are children of the atomic age cold war, of King and Kennedy, of television, the Beatles and the Stones, and all the horrors of Vietnam; the Beats, by contrast, came out of the Great Depression, the Second World War, radio, jazz and the McCarthy era. We may share common concerns as writers and thinkers, but there are also very different historical or cultural influences at work in each generation and, notably, in each individual artist. Thus, if one needs such labels, she would certainly be a “post-beat” poet.’

  Kubernik reflects: ‘She might be viewed as a current Beat because she still puts words and her voice with a musical instrument like a drum that beats to propel her long, hand-written lyrics and poems. Post-Beat? I like belated better than post. The Beat movement/moment is historical, approximately 1948–1961 (when did Maynard G. Krebs start up?), but these values go from Blake into the cyberfuture.’

  Taylor comments: ‘Not if that means turning against or in opposition to Beat. I saw her read a month ago. It could have been 1955. I think of the Beats as the last Romantics. She’s right there. “Post” can get you into trouble, academic squabbles. Even the design
ation “Beat” is a problem. Who’s in? Who’s out? It’s more fluid than that. These terms of convenience can get awfully stiff and fixed over time.’

  Q.4 To what extent might commentators critical of later musicians/artists associating themselves with earlier writers/movements have a valid case?

  Victor Bockris comments: ‘I think it’s great if musicians want to associate themselves with the Beats or other writers or movements. It’s natural, it’s recognition. Art is not pretentious; politics is, academia is, trying to be what is not. The greatest thing we had in 1977–82 in New York was cross-referencing between fields and generations. There was a wonderful openness and sharing. Today everybody is so scared they all stay in their own foxholes trying to not to be killed. No growth that way. I think Patti’s vital contribution to the global culture was that she travelled around lighting a fire of inspiration and wide open celebration of the key artistic spirits: the Beats, the British Invasion, Warhol, the Counterculture.’

  Magazine journalist and rock critic Bart Bull remarks: ‘Patti Smith is the single biggest name-dropper in the history of rock ’n’ roll. Bar none. But because the names she tended to drop early on were Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Blake, Bowles, Gysin, Godard, Bresson … well, most of those she was talking to (or at, actually) didn’t have a clue, other than the weightiness of name-drop’s avoirdupois. You’d have to use a scale and a yardstick and a snow-shovel to see whether or not she was the single biggest name-dropper in the history of poetry, or whether that would be Allen Ginsberg.

  He continues: ‘But you’d definitely want to factor in Anne Waldman, who functioned as the Don-Doyenne of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and then of the Naropa Institute. These three all understood the accruable power that could come from fingering the rosary beads as loud as possible, that to publicly recite repeated litanies of the saints would serve to get you canonised yourself.’

  Cohn says: ‘Commentators can claim anything, but they would be hard pressed to explain Patti Smith’s emergence as a significant Beat artist in her own right. As is well known, the women poets of the Beat Generation did not break out as did their male counterparts. Only Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger and Janine Pommy Vega made it in the white male poetry world. The Beat women were perhaps the last generation of women having to face a male world of patriarchal convention without comprehensive feminist theory, which did not really hit the mainstream until 1963 when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Poets like Anne Waldman and Patti Smith were benefactors as much as agents of conventional change, implementers of feminist poetries, feministos. Their achievement really is at the heart of the realisation that times had changed and with them, new forces, forces of the Postbeat period, were at work.’

  Cope states: ‘I think those who try to cut themselves off from their predecessors in the name of some ephemeral “originality” are losing out on all those connections with elder brothers and sisters who came before. Allen’s work, for example, is loaded with references to earlier writers and movements, and even the wildly original Whitman occasionally sounded his “barbaric yawp” with a nod to those who preceded him. Barring works that are mere slavish imitations of an earlier style, commentators who find fault with a poet acknowledging or associating with her/his elders really don’t understand the nature of the art.’

  He adds: ‘Whitman and Dickinson can still speak to us as friends who bore their own struggles into words; all we have to do is read them aloud together, and they can instruct us as to how they made it through even as we learn to sing their songs. There’s also the fact that already-established poets have always helped younger geniuses find their way: Pound helped Eliot and the Objectivists Reznikoff, Rakosi and Oppen, just as Allen “distributed monies to poor poets & nourished imaginative genius of the land”, helping countless younger writers into print or with a helpful word that could sustain them as they grew. Thus, you could not have a Patti Smith without an Arthur Rimbaud or an Allen Ginsberg or a Bob Dylan to open the doors that made it possible for her to enter the next room and make it her own.’

  George-Warren comments: ‘Yes, Patti Smith lived the life of a Beat as a young artist, but has also retained her allegiance to the Beats and their heroes; her close relationships with Burroughs, Ginsberg (she was at his deathbed), and Gregory Corso reflect this. There’s a great portrait of Patti (wearing what looks like a black leotard) reclining and reading The Soft Machine, with a pair of shades next to her, that says it all. I think that artists who wear their influences on their sleeves – and while doing so, bring the work of their own influences to a new generation/ audience – serve an important role. Obviously, those artists who use earlier writers’ work as a jumping-off point, to create new work with a new vision/style/ voice, can create their own legacy, which can become just as important as those who came before them. Patti Smith has done this.’

  Novelist Joyce Pinchbeck (née Glassman, then Johnson) is the author of Minor Characters, a Beat memoir detailing a romance with Jack Kerouac, and the author of a forthcoming Kerouac biography.47 She says: ‘I admire her as a performer, of course, and I hear that she has written a fine memoir, which I intend to read. I have to say that I do have some uncomfortable feelings about her portrayal of herself as someone who has taken on the mantle of Ginsberg, and I have it on good authority that she did not really have as close a relationship with Allen as she suggests. Frankly, I wish she would stop publicly weeping at the graves of departed male poets.

  ‘She also of course keeps invoking Kerouac with whom she had no relationship at all. In the liner notes that accompany the DVD of the documentary Big Sur, in which she appears, she expresses her admiration for Jack as a writer who “simply spewed his words on paper”. I can assure you that he did not spew, and that if he had, we would not be reading his works today. This is the kind of wrongheaded opinion that obscures Kerouac’s artistic achievement. She also indicated that she herself has not read Kerouac, and that the reactions of her male friends were enough for her to go by. Really!! I throw up my hands! Such careless statements would have horrified Allen. But of course identifying with the Beats has been an excellent career move for Patti Smith. I am also troubled by the fact that Smith shows no interest in female artists, apart from herself. Apart from all these objections, she’s obviously a very gifted woman.’

  Taylor adds: ‘To say that any artist doesn’t have a right to draw upon or declare an ancestry is pure dummheit. That’s how art happens. Artistic lineages don’t come with a state-issued (or academic/critic sanctioned) licence. They’re organic. It’s a matter of personal commitments, influences, and who’s around the neigh-bourhood. I mean, if Charlie Watts thinks he’s channelling Gene Krupa, you going to tell him he’s wrong?’

  Some conclusions

  I have attempted to contextualise Patti Smith’s relationship with the Beat Generation writers and their cultural legacy by various means: reporting some recent critical commentary which has appeared online culture magazines; through a survey of a number of key biographical accounts; and via some newly generated interviews, primary materials in which contemporary opinion on the artist’s status and stature has been invited. This provides us with both historical and current reflections on the links that join Smith and her Beat antecedents. There may, of course, be other ways in such a piece of analysis could be conducted – for example, close textual reading and interpretation of her poetic, musical and lyrical output. We would certainly find themes of the autobiographical and the confessional, work of candour, the search for spiritual and sexual truths, and a tendency to reference influential names, strains recognisable in the Beat ethos. But this particular exercise has been beyond the scope of a chapter of this length.

  In terms of the conclusions we might draw from the information that has been presented, there seems little doubt that the Beats have had a bearing on Smith as a poet and rock musician, yet it is also important to stress that there are individuals – from the worlds of literature, art and music – who may be regarded as
more significant still in shaping Smith’s artistic vision, from Rimbaud to Dylan, Brian Jones to Jim Morrison, for example. If some recent web voices have been suspicious of Smith’s willingness to attach her own creativity to the Beats and perhaps other writers, musicians and singers of the past, the voices of authority – from academics to journalists to other poets – seem to feel, in general terms, that there is little surprising, or dubious, about this artist’s desire to see herself as part of a continuum, a carrier of a flame, a latterday vessel who may frequently cite her muses but one also capable of shaping fresh visions from that amalgam of influences. Whether Smith might be regarded as a Beat, a belated Beat, a current Beat or a post-Beat – all terms connected to her at points in this account – is a potential topic for a longer, more detailed work of lexicographical archaeology.

  One thing we can perhaps say is that if Smith has shown, at times, a desire to link herself to that earlier era, a previous literary movement, it is surely not merely premised on efforts to attain fame by association. If we go back to her earliest steps – hesitant, uncertain, unfocused, if we can take her Just Kids recollections at face value – at the end of the 1960s, we can hardly identify an artist with a cynical or manipulative vision or strategy, a player with a clear career plan, determinedly scrambling up the ladder to recognition and success. Her progress as an actor or poet, as the 1970s commenced, seems to have been shaped, to a significant extent, by a series of accidents, perhaps most notably the connections she achieved in the Chelsea Hotel which allowed to her to interact with a network of emerging – and existing – underground talents. Chelsea residents with established reputations from Dylan associate Bobby Neuwirth to musicologist Harry Smith, poet Gregory Corso to Burroughs himself, found her engaging and encouraged her at a time when her intentions were still evolving. Her interest in art and writing was evident but the idea that she might sing, or use rock music as a vehicle, had barely germinated at this stage.