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the Best in Kerouac & the Beats, Adventure, Politics, Music, Movies, Poetry & other Lifejoys

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Entries Tagged as 'Kerouac and The Beats'

Taylor Swift, the Grateful Dead and The Beat Generation

November 30th, 2023 · 28 Comments · Grateful Dead, Kerouac and The Beats, Music

. Why this Deadhead Beatnik Beatlemaniac loves Pop’s Princess   I’ve been into Taylor Swift since a New York Times profile in 2008 talked about her confessional songwriting and use of social media — at the time, MySpace.  (!)  Her second album Fearless was set to come out (and would go on to win Album […]

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Jack on Film: Take 2 and Lowell Celebrates Kerouac (LCK) 2023 videos

October 31st, 2023 · 11 Comments · Brian on YouTube etc., Hitchhiker's Guide to Jack Kerouac, Interviews, Kerouac and The Beats, Movies

Jack on Film: Take 2 at Lowell Celebrates Kerouac . Here’s a YouTube playlist with great video of the entire Jack on Film show — . =========================================== Here’s a riffing interview with WCAP in Lowell about all things Kerouac — and the new “Jack on Film: Take 2” show — with nearly a hundred photos […]

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Writing “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac”

February 20th, 2023 · 13 Comments · Hitchhiker's Guide to Jack Kerouac, Kerouac and The Beats, Weird Things About Me

You wake up one day and your whole life changes just by the chance seeing of a picture. Much the way it might with a chance spotting of a poster on a bookstore wall. As Jack says, “My books are my children.”  And as Mama always preached — pregnancy can happen in an instant. Unlike […]

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David Amram & Brian Hassett On-Stage Collaborations

November 30th, 2022 · 6 Comments · Brian on YouTube etc., Kerouac and The Beats, Real-life Adventure Tales

David Amram and I have been performing together since we first started hanging in 1994 after an introduction by Teri McLuhan, Marshall’s daughter.  It was the big NYU Beat conference — I write about it in Blissfully Ravaged in Democracy — I first saw him unloading his congas from his Farm Aid jeep on opening night, […]

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Lowell Celebrates Kerouac (LCK) – Videos, Stories & Photos – 2015–2022

October 30th, 2022 · 7 Comments · Kerouac and The Beats, Real-life Adventure Tales

  Stories, videos and photos from the annual Kerouac hometown festival over the last several years I’ve been going. Edie Parker-Kerouac called and told me about the the initial commemorative dedication in July 1988 — which birthed LCK — saying that she, Henri Cru and “Big Tim” Moran were driving up for it, and that […]

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“Jack on Film” sample

September 29th, 2022 · 5 Comments · Kerouac and The Beats, Movies

Here’s a little taste . . . My “script” notes for the first dramatic portrayal of Jack . . . . Pull My Daisy (released Nov. 1959) One of the Big Five to focus on MY THESIS HOW THIS IS THE GREATEST BEAT GEN CREATION. Filmed in their prime . . . . Kerouac’s best […]

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The Making of “Jack on Film”

August 28th, 2022 · 13 Comments · Kerouac and The Beats, Movies

The Making of “Jack on Film” . . Believe it or not this whole thing started when I got a call on January 12th, 2021 — six days after the Capitol insurrection (!) and still deep in the pandemic lockdown daze.  A musician friend I’ve known since 1976, Will Hodgson, was home with his kids […]

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First Live Shows After the Pandemic Lockdown

July 31st, 2022 · 1 Comment · Brian on YouTube etc., Kerouac and The Beats, Poetry

The Magic Genie’s Happy Place —  Saturday July 9th, 2022 . The matinee show (4PM) stemmed from a massive reorganization of all my performance pieces — many dating back to New York in the 1980s and ’90s.  A bunch of them still held up — and since nobody’s heard me do them in 20 or […]

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Kerouac in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” Podcast

May 31st, 2022 · 1 Comment · Interviews, Kerouac and The Beats

Billy Joel Interview Story   . I was contacted by this Since The World’s Been Turning podcast production out of New Zealand to talk about Kerouac. Ever since Peter Jackson’s masterful recreation of The Beatles: Get Back, and watching a thousand interviews with him with his New Zealand accent and sensibilities, I developed a real […]

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Kerouac’s 100th birthday celebration in Lowell

March 20th, 2022 · 25 Comments · Kerouac and The Beats, Real-life Adventure Tales

. Everybody’s known for ages that Jack Kerouac’s 100th birthday was coming up on March 12th, 2022, but it was still the dark Covid times, and I hadn’t been On The Road in over two years — not since the New Hampshire Democratic primaries in February 2020 — plus I was really in no mood […]

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