by Simon Warner
And, within the context of the documentary itself, the songs lend an evocative texture to a fascinating, if somewhat bleak, chapter in the sweeping Duluoz saga.
Author’s note: Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard’s soundtrack to One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur is released in various formats – on CD and vinyl. It can also be purchased as part of a DVD and CD package in a number of editions.
Q&A 7
Chris T-T, British political singer-songwriter
Chris T-T has spent a decade and a half making fiercely independent and wryly personal music usually with a political edge. He played bass with indie band Magoo in the later 1990s but has been a solo artist for most of his working life. Described by the Sunday Times as ‘a modern-day Blake’, he also has a potent interest in the literary. He has released eight albums, the latest, Disobedience, a setting of the children’s poetry of Winnie the Pooh creator A.A. Milne which formed the basis of his Edinburgh Fringe Festival show in summer 2011.
How did you discover the Beats?
I can’t remember specifically but in my teens I loved two gateway cultures to the Beats: the drug-addled 1960s and then late-1980s and early 1990s alt-rock, as well as the (largely male) American literature of John Steinbeck, William Faulkner and J.D. Salinger.
Which Beat writers did you read and what texts?
I remember at school/sixth form reading Naked Lunch and Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America and The Abortion first, alongside discovering stuff like Ballard and all the Salingers except The Catcher in the Rye – I’ve still not read Catcher, in a wilfully perverse kind of way, though I’ve read everything else Salinger published. Then for a while I was primarily into Bukowski and read Post Office, Ordinary Madness, etc. and only then, starting college, I found Ginsberg’s Mind Breaths and Howl and Other Poems in their ‘proper’ City Lights editions quite cheap in the bookshop at the Royal Festival Hall. I then chased Corso and Ferlinghetti because of those – and I wonder now if I fell for their physical shape and conciseness as much as the content. But not – ever, really – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
From that point on, and to this day, Ginsberg most resonated with me. Later I remember reading Harold Norse’s Memoirs of a Bastard Angel which connected them all back to [Christopher] Isherwood.
What inspired you or excited you about their writing?
At first I was inspired by the crude, supremely honest, anti-establishment maleness of it – gritty. I guess these were the first books I’d read by people without comfortable lives ‘outside’ of their creativity. I loved how they were ‘all in’; it coincided for me with discovering American punk rock – bands like Sonic Youth, Fugazi, Husker Du, Dinosaur Jr, Black Flag and Yo La Tengo – just at the moment this broke through as grunge, so my musical heroes were also outsiders who travelled around in scuzzy vans, became addicts, got beaten up, and so on! All very pre-Britpop.
Long-term, Ginsberg and Brautigan continue to inspire me – I think of Ginsberg’s poetry as the greatest Beat work – that combination of hippy, gay, counterculture style with hardcore politics I love, alongside truly incandescent language. I’m not sure a lot of Beat writing is that brilliant, reading back, though maybe Burroughs is.
Did their influence feed into your own writing as a lyricist/songwriter? Was it direct or subliminal?
Broadly, literature influences my lyric-writing more than any other artform. The politics of Mind Breaths and ‘Howl’ fed directly into my early development as a lyricist and the travelling outsider narrative (real or myth) has hugely influenced how I see (and perhaps more relevantly how I narrate and mythologise) my life and career. I regret living so safely and statically the past few years but I have long blurred lines between lyric and life. Because/although I’m not capable of being a ‘bad’ male compared to some of the Beat writers, I have written violently bad perspectives a few times (such as employing violent imagery from morally ambiguous viewpoints). Meanwhile I guess my political lyrics (especially the invective) tend towards Ginsberg and away from Billy Bragg.
Despite big cultural differences I also connect the Beats with Bruce Chatwin (whose writing and lie-filled life I love), in terms of realised nomadic lives. Also, it’s always surprising how influential Brautigan is today, particularly in hipster lit and indie music, despite being lesser known to wider public – and perhaps too rural or gentle to be a true Beat? I once got a bit obsessed with a whole set-up lifted from Brautigan in a Haruki Murakami novel, then, amazingly, got the chance to ask Murakami himself. And he said yes, it was a conscious reference – and that he’s greatly influenced by Brautigan. In the very late 1990s, working in London, reading Brautigan’s short story about thrown-away Christmas trees and meeting Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was exceptionally powerful – like completing a circuit for me.
What links do you see between the Beats and rock culture – maybe the alternative, independent scene of which you are a part, or more generally.
It’s not there in aspirational gangsta R&B, or post-Simon Cowell TV reality pop but it’s there more than ever in the self-consciously destructive, and less professional than 10 years ago, alternative scenes. We were destroyed by, and are now rebuilding via, technology – and immediacy is a part of that. As MySpace and blogs grew, we switched from writing about ourselves in the third person, to directly communicating with fans in the first person. At which point the need to Beat up that narrative becomes vital.
We aren’t rich, we scrabble, we have stuff to say but nobody is listening. Now we thrive on adversity and outsiderness. I guess any part of touring music world can connect itself to Beats if it tries – even inside the global corporatised juggernaut that is the Rolling Stones, there’s a Keith Richards.
Do the Beats still touch you as an inspiration – for example, notions of artistic candour, ideas of the road?
Hugely. My last album, Love is Not the Rescue (2010), had a direct reference to the avoidance of responsibility and decision-making inherent in On the Road. But in more subtle ways the lyrical influence is constant and major.
Do the Beats still touch other younger generations of singer performers you encounter?
I don’t know how widely read the Beats are now beyond the two or three key texts. I don’t think Ginsberg is particularly influential. But if you include indirect influence and soaked-in mythology then they’re still very important because the affectations, style and myths of the Beats have outlasted mere trends and become a core part of the language and dress-code of young alternative music.
OBITUARY 3
Tuli Kupferberg, ‘Key figure in the US 1960s counterculture’
Tuli Kupferberg, who has died aged 86 after a long illness, was a key figure in the US countercultural campaign of the 1960s. As a publisher, poet, pacifist, singer and songwriter, he used his talents for writing and humour to attack the perceived repressions of his nation and its escalating military activities in South East Asia.
As part of that anti-war strategy, Kupferberg combined Beat writing sensibilities, folk whimsy and electric rock ’n’ roll in the Fugs, the band that he formed in 1964 with fellow activist Ed Sanders. The group took their name from the toned-down expletive that Norman Mailer had been forced to adopt in his 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead to sidestep the true language of the Pacific front.
Born in New York and later a student at the city’s Brooklyn College, Kupferberg got a job as a medical librarian, but submitted poetry and prose to publications including the Village Voice. He would go on to create poetry magazines of his own and one of them, Birth, founded in 1958, provided a home to work by numerous Beat writers of reputation – Diane di Prima and Allen Ginsberg included.
By then, Kupferberg had already been mythologised as part of the bohemian Greenwich Village community. He was the celebrated character, mentioned in Ginsberg’s long poem of 1956, ‘Howl’, who ‘jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten’.
At a time when youth
appeared to be ascribed a value above any material commodity, Kupferberg, who was already into his 40s, crept under the demographic radar to become a part of that frenetic scene which took on the establishment and its increasingly discredited politics. The Fugs provided a musical soundtrack to the forces of resistance as activists such as the Students for a Democratic Society took first to the soapbox, and then to the barricades, to be joined, in time, by more radical organisations such as the Yippies and the Black Panthers.
The band drew on satire and lampoon to ridicule their adversaries, in songs such as ‘Kill for Peace’, ‘Supergirl’ and ‘Slum Goddess’, often using language that drew controversy and censorship. But the band also paid tribute to their mystic hero William Blake in ‘Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time’ on their 1965 debut LP, The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction.
Kupferberg remained a poet, too, and his collaboration with Robert Bashlow, 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft, became his most famous work. It was a literal, if absurd, listing of actions that might save you from conscription to the army. ‘Say you’re crazy’, ‘Marry your mother’ and ‘Get elected to the Supreme Soviet’ were among the titbits of advice.
The Fugs were at the height of their powers in the later 1960s and released several albums, but faded from view, only to reform in 1985 with Kupferberg and Sanders still at the helm. Joined by Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist, among others, the band continued to make political capital that mixed caustic wit and street wisdom.
In recent years, Kupferberg’s health faltered and his activity with the band declined, yet he continued to experiment with words, posting his punning aphorisms – he dubbed them ‘perverbs’ – online. A stroke in 2009 left him blind; a second, more recently, accelerated the end.
Ed Sanders praised his abilities with a melody: ‘His songs were very nuanced and subtle, yet bold and daring at the same time, a genius in the footsteps of Stephen Foster and other major tunesmiths’. Steven Taylor also paid tribute to his band-mate: ‘He was a friend, comrade, older brother, funny uncle, extra dad, all in one. All the Fugs loved him dearly’. Counterculture historian Jonah Raskin commented: ‘Tuli was suave, a kind of sybarite. He was funny too; surviving the bridge fall had given him a way of viewing life comically, not tragically, a gift to us who followed him.’
He is survived by his wife, Sylvia Topp, his sons, Joe and Noah, and a daughter, Samara.
Naphtali ‘Tuli’ Kupferberg, poet and songwriter, born 28 September 1923; died 12 July 2010.
Q&A 8
Kevin Ring, editor of the magazine Beat Scene
In Beat Scene, the UK-based Beat Generation magazine he founded in 1988, Kevin Ring has assiduously charted the history and culture of this literary movement in over 60 regular issues of the publication over nearly a quarter of a century.
What do you feel rock music has taken from Beat culture over the decades?
Perhaps in the 1950s, or maybe even sooner, a sense of the outlaw, living outside society and those conventions. Instead of Pat Boone, it was Gene Vincent. They may also have taken the DIY ethic that appeared with the Beats in the 1950s, publishing themselves and bypassing the usual corporate avenues of getting a voice heard. All the little magazines, Yugen and so on. Of course, the punk era threw up a lot of little magazines – did they get that from the Beats?
Is there a lyrical connection there, a musical one or was it merely a railing against authority?
Well, if you listen to Bob Dylan or Michael McClure, they would cite the techniques of Jack Kerouac in, say Mexico City Blues. I think it is well documented that Bob Dylan felt that book spoke his language. And certainly well documented that Dylan took from Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, those extended lines. If you look at that Rykodisc CD, Kicks Joy Darkness, the reworking of Kerouac’s words by musicians such as Patti Smith, Warren Zevon, Michael Stipe, Tom Waits and many others – I thought that was a most successful album. Good words are good words and combining those with imaginative interpretations made for something special.
In the case of Tom Waits, he made that move into the ‘confessional’ way of writing; his life and the characters he created became his myth. He made up words like Kerouac.
Where do you see Beat influence in the rock music of the last half century?
They helped ditch the ‘moon in June’ approach to rock music. Musicians read books, they even name their bands after writers and books, don’t they? They see the rhythms that someone like Kerouac or Kenneth Patchen or Ginsberg create and they see the often open-hearted writing style and they copy it. How many confessional singer songwriters are there today! Possibly far too many.
But those Beats paved the way for them to write about their own lives and create art out of the everyday. Myth and legend out of the mundane. Just like some of the Beats did. And jazz and the Beats combined to create a whole new vocabulary. Think of Slim Gaillard.
Because of the Beats, San Francisco became this ‘other’ place, another country almost, where poetry thrived and it became a haven for the musicians who made the place famous. Obviously the writers and musicians mixed socially way back, Brautigan, McClure, even Snyder, Ginsberg. Jim Morrison couldn’t make his mind up whether he was a musician or a poet. And, of course, SF was – and is – home to so many other musicians and poets, too many to list.
Do you think that the idea of the road that Kerouac and Cassady mythologised has been influential on musicians?
Oh yes. Such a powerful vision, an overused word I know when talking the Beats, but it truly was a vision. Someone like Chuck Berry picked up on that. It wasn’t just Kerouac and Cassady of course: Chuck Berry was drawing on the blues, the travelling man, constantly going down to the station with a suitcase in his hand, his woman having left him. Or he was going to meet her?
But that idea of an almost endless road with infinite possibilities holds a sway over many musicians and, indeed, filmmakers. Think of Easy Rider in 1969: it revolutionised the way films were made. And that soundtrack as they travelled around America. It would be interesting to discover just how many impressionable young musicians and filmmakers left the cinema with their minds burning with ideas after that film.
That idea, or memory, Kerouac planted in the minds of so many was so evident later and while Kerouac would’ve protested the lifestyles of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in the movie, he was a pivotal force in that development. Whether he liked it or not. Well, he resented it, didn’t he? But given time and reflection he might have embraced all that. He liked Ed Sanders.
Looking back, and this is straying a little, it seems Kerouac’s happiest time was as a ‘Dharma Bum’ with Gary Snyder. Without Kerouac there might not have been a 1960s as we recall it; his books and the life they evoked, real or myth, filtered through to the 1960s, opened a few minds to possibilities.
How do you feel the Beats felt about early rock ’n’ roll?
There is a famous photo of Neal Cassady hunched over a jukebox in a café or bar somewhere. Putting his nickels in to play a tune. He looks relatively young in the photo, so I’m guessing it is early to mid-1950s. I wonder what he’s playing? Is it jazz, or more likely, being America, country and western? No, it couldn’t be. Maybe some Louis Jordan or Big Joe Turner to get the place jumping. Kerouac hardly mentions Elvis does he? Ginsberg talks jazz.
What drew Dylan to Ginsberg – and Ginsberg to Dylan?
In many ways, I think Bob Dylan saw Ginsberg as a connector to Jack Kerouac. He loved Mexico City Blues apparently. I think Michael McClure extolled the virtues of that book to Dylan when they met in 1965. It was unlikely that Dylan and Kerouac would have met up but Dylan, I’m sure, would’ve loved to. My limited knowledge of him tells me that he was always looking for mentor-like figures back then, Ramblin’ Jack, Woody Guthrie et al. Ginsberg was another. Ginsberg could tell Dylan all about the real Kerouac. Sure he would have enjoyed that. Though you would hardly know, given that I can’t recall Dylan ever smiling. I think it
has emerged just how much Allen liked that rock-style life to an extent. Being with Dylan was a big kick for him. He possibly saw him as a young bardic musician in a long line from Blake, Whitman and a few others. A fellow poet.
Do you feel that the work of the Beats benefitted from their association with rock music and musicians?
You know I always liked Kerouac with Steve Allen. Everybody thinks Allen was so straight and corny and conservative and uncool. Just what was Kerouac doing with him, they ask? But Kerouac was straight and conservative in many ways, we’ve come to discover in the last thirty years. That tinkling Allen piano on the album, with Kerouac reading on Allen’s TV show, it was so sympathetic, a word Kerouac used to telling effect on that very show. Whenever I read those lines of Kerouac’s, I hear Allen’s piano in the background. It fits like a glove.
Well, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs benefited greatly from associations with Dylan, Patti Smith and the whole host of rock bands and punk bands they connected with for whatever reasons. David Meltzer and Clark Coolidge seemed to have been helped by their time in the band Serpent Power.
Although Burroughs seemed to have little affinity with rock music, he was adopted as a guru from the early 1970s? What do you think drew musicians into his orbit?
He was from the dark side. The Darth Vader of literature. Certain musicians would be heavily drawn to such a persona. I get the feeling that was heavily orchestrated as well. David Bowie, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Frank Zappa et al., all come to the Bunker in NYC that was home for Burroughs back in the late 1970s & 1980s. To me it was a celebrity thing, possibly brought about by those around Burroughs; James Grauerholz, Victor Bockris maybe. Nothing sinister in it, just getting Burroughs a little press and raising his profile.
History tells us he really took off in a commercial sense at that point. But, of course, Bowie, Patti Smith, were reading his books and sensing things in Burroughs that filtered through into what they did. Bowie never lifted lines from Burroughs – or did he? – but his fascination with space and alien life mirrored that of Burroughs. That implacable image of Burroughs, his deadpan look, had a hold over these guys possibly. They could see his disdain for almost everything. A lot of the time it was just people posing with Burroughs, quite cynical really. Early celebrity nonsense.