Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  The original soundtrack to the piece has been broadly overseen by Sampas, after his years of close working with figures from the indie rock community. I asked him what listeners might expect from the accompanying album, which will carry the same title as the documentary. Sampas reveals that there are three songs from the CD that are actually employed in the film but there is extra material on the album. ‘There are 12 songs, mostly written by Jay Farrar and a couple by Ben Gibbard, but all are drawn on from Kerouac’s words from Big Sur. They use his prose verbatim to create the lyrics.’

  Our conversation – the Beat Generation and jazz, the Beat revival among younger followers, rock tributes to Kerouac and much more – continued as the three of us began the journey from the pair’s film studio base and headed for the place of Kerouac’s birth and resting place. We wended our way through the long, flat, rural highways that connect Rhode Island to its New England neighbour Massachusetts. It’s perhaps 90 minutes from Providence, the capital of the smallest US state, to Lowell, a one-time textile centre that went into dreadful industrial decline in the 1970s.

  In fact, I even recall the UK town of Halifax, West Yorkshire, which was experiencing similar downturns around the same time, forging alliances of common concern with its US counterpart in the testing years that followed the terminal decline of the once global and mighty Anglo-American woollen and cotton businesses. Now though, Lowell, where Jim Sampas like Kerouac also grew up, has a worn-in but more comfortable air. Many of the old brick-built mills and warehouses have taken on new, post-industrial uses – apartments and small businesses and the like.

  Some, almost quaint, cobbled streets remain and high street outlets include elegant restaurants, attractive bars and bohemian cafés. The old economic heartland of this place will never return but there seems to be a sense that the traumas of older shut-downs have at least been traversed, the commercial scars eventually healing if not yet disappeared.

  We meet Paul Marion, editor of Kerouac’s Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings, in a café that says Greenwich Village or North Beach, San Francisco, rather than small-town America and the wholefood is fantastic. Marion is a long-time friend of Jim Sampas and there is much talk about past Kerouac celebrations and ones to come in the town. The era when the writer, a reputation tarnished by late-life controversy, was temporarily etched out of Lowell’s history is long gone; today, in times when cultural tourism is a realm that has, at least partially, replaced the older, defunct blue-collar pursuits, Kerouac is a name that can draw regional, national and international visitors to this provincial yet appealing centre.

  Marion leaves after lunch for his post in the local university, but Worden, Sampas and I make tracks for the Commemorative garden, a small number of blocks away. In the quiet calm of a warm, humid afternoon, I encounter the charming young Lowell-ites playing in the park, raising thoughts about the town’s receding past and the potential energy of its multicultural present.

  We then head by car to, I suppose, the holiest of the remaining Kerouac shrines in Lowell, his gravestone. But we drive via the extraordinary candle-lit, religious grotto and the row of statues recording the saints and the Stations of the Cross – glass cabinets, wooden painted figures, all in remarkably good order. These were the icons that Kerouac found so affecting as a boy and which Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan are seen wandering past in the epic tour movie Renaldo and Clara, scenes shot during the Rolling Thunder Revue trek of 1975.

  When we do arrive at the vast Catholic cemetery, it is also hard not to forget Dylan and Ginsberg’s sun-streaked autumn visit to the grave itself. The light now is cloudier, the day is cooler, but with Jim Sampas’s assistance we track the inconspicuous tablet that records both Kerouac’s passing in 1969 and the death of wife Stella in 1990. It is a moving moment, the last physical evidence that Kerouac was ever of this world and there are numerous mementoes already scattered on the spot – a MetroCard ticket from the New York subway, an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a guitar pick carrying a peace emblem among them.

  Sampas says that fans leave similar items each and every week. We move the tokens, photograph the stone, and then restore the pieces as a simple tribute to the visitors who were keen to make some connection with the writer, long six feet under, 40 years since his premature death and the burial of a great writer in this unquestionably inauspicious plot.

  The afternoon is fading and we eventually head away from Lowell. By early evening, we return to the handsome railway station in Providence where I say my goodbyes to Jim Sampas and Curt Worden to bring a fascinating, enriching and contemplative day to a conclusion. The Northeast Corridor train from Boston to New York City is ready to board, and I crumple into my seat. Penn Station and the dreaming spires of Manhattan, the birthplace of the Beats, awaits perhaps three and a half hours, some 180 miles, down the line.

  REVIEW 2 – FILM: ONE FAST MOVE OR I’M GONE: KEROUAC’S BIG SUR

  Director Curt Worden, DVD, Kerouac Films, 2009

  Movies with a Jack Kerouac theme crop up every few years though the most-talked-about, an adaptation of On the Road, still, we understand, in production by Francis Ford Coppola’s company under the direction of the cult Brazilian director Walter Salles, remains, at least to date, an elusive pipedream.1 But a new documentary based on a very different period in the writer’s life should whet the appetite of most Beat followers in the interim.

  One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur re-visits a time when the author had experienced the heady elation of published success followed by the deflation of his drink-ravaged new celebrity. In 1960, in a bid to escape the attentions of the New York party crowd and the demon bottle, Kerouac made plans to stay in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s canyon-side cabin perched on the Monterey, California coast.

  Intending to stay three weeks in solitude, an echo perhaps of his Desolation Angels mountain-top fire-watch summer of 1956, Kerouac hoped he could pull his disturbed psyche together, avoid alcohol, commune with nature and re-trigger his writing instincts in the thrilling isolation of a hidden, wooded glade above the crashing Pacific Ocean.

  As with many moments in the arc of Kerouac’s rarely straightforward life, these good intentions were quickly de-railed and, in more typical form, the sojourn on the West Coast was transformed into a sequence of chaotic incident: a short stay at the cabin, a return to the bars of San Francisco, a further time at the cabin, a series of social gatherings with poet friends – Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and Lew Welch – and eventually a re-union with his greatest hero Neal Cassady alongside his family.

  But, in the usual Kerouac manner, out of chaos – mental depression, fleeting sexual liaison and copious quantities of wine – came art and his extraordinary account of these episodes would form the heart of Big Sur, a book penned the following year and then published in 1962.

  As Robert Hunter, Grateful Dead lyricist, comments in the documentary: ‘As long as Jack is running, Jack is gonna live, and as long as Jack is living, Jack is gonna write. And we benefit from that hangover, those of us who love this particular book, this ugly, ugly book of ugly places in the mind, sordid places in the psyche. And Jack has to wring himself out like a greasy, wet dish-towel in this book, and he has to do it, he has to write this stuff …’

  A shattering antidote to the free-spirited optimisms of On the Road and The Dharma Bums, this volume is a classic of a different kind: an extended piece of heart-searching fiction, a forensic examination of a soul in extremis, with the stunning coda of the poem ‘Sea’, in which the writer faithfully records the sounds of the eternal, rolling waves.

  Film-maker Curt Worden recreates these frenetic short weeks in a powerful, 90-minute movie which employs the full arsenal of the creative documentary director and to most impressive effect: interviews with friends of Kerouac and surviving eye-witnesses to the Big Sur summer; archive black and white footage; an atmospheric soundtrack; and many lively and insightful reflections by biographers and contemporary writers, actors a
nd musicians.

  Ferlinghetti and McClure, Carolyn Cassady and Joyce Johnson make key contributions, playwright Sam Shepard and author S.E. Hinton are joined by Patti Smith, Tom Waits and the great Beat composer David Amram, and Sopranos actor John Ventimiglia, who narrates, also feature in a high-octane cast, lending anecdote and commentary in equal measure.

  The soundtrack of the film, composed by contemporary indie rock artists Jay Farrar – of Son Volt and Uncle Tupelo – and Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, adds an intriguing and evocative texture to the piece: rough and ready blues, dyed-in-the-roots grooves which draw on Kerouac’s Big Sur prose verbatim for their lyrical texts.

  Perhaps the most compelling ingredient of all though is the imposing geography against which all these dramas unfolded: the city panoramas, seascapes and forest vistas that potently capture the physical flavour of the world that briefly became this author’s bolt-hole as he found himself at rock bottom, post-On the Road acclaim, post-new found fame, taunted by an unwanted level of attention, bedevilled by the terrors of delirium tremens.

  ‘One fast move or I’m gone’ is a haunting phrase from Big Sur itself, a statement that summed up Kerouac’s personal crisis, his state of mind, his state of health. He felt that unless he did something drastic about his condition, his lifestyle, his speeding deterioration, he would indeed soon be a goner.

  The fact that his 3,000-mile train journey west did not, ultimately, exorcise his demons and is now best known for spawning the dark, confessional novel that followed is maybe not that surprising: solitude and cold turkey were plainly not the solutions to the deepening Kerouac catastrophe.

  Author’s note: One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur had a limited cinema premiere in the US and the UK during autumn 2009. It is available on DVD, accompanied by a separate CD soundtrack, both released through Atlantic. See a trail at http://www.kerouacfilms.com

  Notes

  1Note that the Walter Salles movie adaptation of Kerouac’s On the Road was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 23 May 2012.

  REVIEW 3 – CD: ONE FAST MOVE OR I’M GONE: KEROUAC’S BIG SUR

  Music by Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard

  Executive producer: Jim Sampas

  Released on CD by Atlantic Records, 20 October 2009

  There has been a long and noble history of rock artists turning to the Beats for inspiration. Through several phases of popular music’s post-Presley development, singers, songwriters and bands have found something compelling, alchemic even, about that group of writers and the approach they took to their art.

  Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Paul McCartney lead this hierarchy of talent, but when we add the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Tom Waits, the Doors and Van Morrison, then punks and new wavers from Patti Smith to Joe Strummer and Kurt Cobain, Sonic Youth, U2 and REM, there is a pattern of association with this literary culture which is quite impossible to ignore.

  So, to move into the early years a new millennium and discover that the same wheels continue to turn is not perhaps so great a shock. It may be half a century or more since Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs made their extraordinary mark on US culture but the tremors from that radical eruption are still being felt and rock seems particularly responsive to its vibrations.

  The latest rock musicians to pin their colours to this mast are two darlings of the US indie scene. Jay Farrar, once of Uncle Tupelo and now Son Volt, and Ben Gibbard, frontman of the hugely rated Death Cab for Cutie, have added their weight to a major project centred on Jack Kerouac and linked to the fortieth anniversary of the writer’s death in October 2009.

  Farrar and Gibbard are the featured creators of the soundtrack to the new documentary One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, a 90-minute film which tells the remarkable story of the author’s attempts to escape the spotlight of celebrity by fleeing to a remote Monterey cabin, high above the Pacific, owned by City Lights bookshop proprietor Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  The film offers a gripping account, marrying impressive interview footage, including eye-witness memories of the time, with stunning footage of the Bay Area, the Pacific coast and eye-catching coverage of the trails – and trials – that carried Kerouac from New York City to this extraordinary West Coast wilderness in the summer of 1960.

  The music to this cinematic odyssey is available in two versions – as incidental and illustrative music in the DVD itself, of course, but also as a stand-alone, 12-track CD. It is also being released in a range of combinations – with the film, with the novel and also a collection of previously unseen Kerouac photographs – and in a spread of editions – including as a vinyl album.

  The album, which carries the same title as the documentary – culled from a desperate phrase that Kerouac utilises in the book to characterise his alcohol-soaked condition and psychological frailty as the success of On the Road turned into an extended and destructive hangover – was pulled together by Jim Sampas, well-established record producer and a member of the wider Kerouac clan.

  Sampas, Kerouac’s nephew by marriage – his aunt was Stella and Jack’s third and final wife – did meet his fading uncle as a toddler in the late 60s. For the last decade and more, though, he has become a key figure behind a series of albums that have celebrated the writer’s talents in a musical context.

  In 1997 he oversaw, with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness, a well-received homage to the novelist, featuring a blend of high profile rockers – Patti Smith and Jeff Buckley among them – iconic movie stars – Matt Dillon and Johnny Depp – and surviving Beats, including Ginsberg, Burroughs and Ferlinghetti.

  Two years on, he made the album Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road, with Ranaldo again on board and with Waits, Primus and the great Beat composer David Amram among the cast. In 2003, he was joined by poet Jim Carroll and the British singer Graham Parker for a dramatised account of Doctor Sax and the Great White Snake, a project combining spoken word and music.

  Now working in close alliance with his colleague Curt Worden, the director of the documentary, in their joint venture Kerouac Films, based in Rhode Island, he was keen to ensure there was a strong music component when they first began discussions about the making of a Big Sur-based picture.

  He’d worked with Jay Farrar previously on a Bruce Springsteen tribute CD entitled Badlands, so he had a good idea what the singer-songwriter would bring to the table. Most intriguing was the working method that Farrar would lend to this new collection of Big Sur-inspired originals, essentially a re-visiting of the old Beat principle of ‘first thought, best thought’, one which Kerouac particularly advocated.

  As executive producer Sampas explains: ‘I was fascinated by Jay’s methodology, the way he worked in a spontaneous manner, a quick-shot style. He felt that the best songs he wrote were those he wrote quickly using a spontaneous prose approach.’

  Farrar confirms the power that Kerouac has held over his creative ethos. ‘He gave great rules to follow. Go with your first thought, stream of consciousness writing. Get your ideas down. He helps all those who are writing to get a style down that is ultimately more individualistic. Over all, his work resonates with the wanderlust and quest for self discovery that exists in all of us.’

  He wrote all but one – the title track, penned by his musical collaborator Gibbard – of the songs on One Fast Move … but both players share a strong affiliation with Kerouac and his achievement even though the duo had never met before their San Francisco recording dates.

  Comments Gibbard: ‘I came across Kerouac at a really pivotal time in my life. I didn’t know where I was going or what I wanted out of life. His work put me on a path in my life that I’m still very much on. I’ve translated his influence and world-view into the music I make. He’ll always be one of my top three musical influences even though he’s not a songwriter.’

  Most interesting to Kerouac readers is that Farrar has taken actual lines, verbatim prose, from Big Sur to produce his lyrical texts. He
tells the story in a broadly chronological way by choosing fragments from the story and then shaping them into song-words. Gibbard’s title tune is more impressionistic, an artistic response to the novel and its dark threads.

  Sampas and film-maker Worden were keen to avoid the usual musical reflections that are linked to Kerouac and his era – jazz and bebop specifically – to bring the legend of the writer and his work into a more contemporary context. Yet the songs that Farrar, mainly, and Gibbard have composed and perform here will not jolt the listener with more traditional notions of what Beat originally meant.

  Blending folk and blues, roots and country – guitars, pianos, even steel guitar, well to the fore – this album brings to mind different nuances of the days when Kerouac was at the height of his powers, as traveller, observer and documenter of the four corners of North America.

  Even though the songs are reminiscent of both the Californian songwriter fraternity of the late 1960s and early 1970s – Neil Young and Gram Parsons, perhaps – there are also flavours of later new country sounds – Steve Earle and Ryan Adams – which often reference the romance of the road. We can, too, within the new set, locate a loose continuity that stretches back to Dylan, Seeger and Guthrie and the traditions of the roaming troubadour. For sure, the current Americana scene happily tips its hat to many precursors.

  The best tracks here are the title piece, ‘California Zephyr’ – an account of the train that Kerouac took West as he headed for Big Sur – ‘Breathe our Iodine’ – an insistent, bass-driven blues – and ‘Final Horrors’, a stark, sparse evocation of Kerouac’s descending state in that fateful summer built on a simple, spidery guitar riff and a potent moan of a vocal.

  While this CD is unlikely to draw mainstream audiences or attract the close attention of the chart-compilers, the ideas that like behind Farrar and Gibbard’s collection will have, I think, for Kerouac followers more than mere curio value.