Brianland

THE BIRTH OF A TRILOGY

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I never expected any of it.

A few years ago, a few people asked me on a Facebook group to tell them about a Kerouac gathering I was at back in 1982, and my response to the question became a book . . . in eleven days, it took.

A couple years later, original Merry Prankster George Walker and myself were batting around the idea of how the Beats begat the Pranksters, and it suddenly struck me, “This is a book — Do it as such” . . . and two weeks later we had the book for sale.

This past March, John Allen Cassady & I were talkin about doing some shows together — bringing his dad and Uncle Jack to life on stage — and suddenly it struck me I should write that book he and I joked about writing decades ago . . . and five months later to the day, I was proofing the first copy.

As Kerouac says, “My books are my children.”

And for me, not one of them were planned.

I had three accidents.  In a row.

All unexpected.  Not a single one had been in my mind the day before the birthing process began.  No “Great American Novel” contemplated.  No writing workshops or Go Fund Me’s.  Just a handful of Go Write Me’s.  And Bob’s your Hope — there they were — a stained glass triptych staring me in the face.

“Or no, wait.  There’s another word for it.  What is it?  Trifecta?  No.  Wait.  Trio?  No — that’s a musical combo.  Triad!  Or no — that’s a David Crosby song.  What the hell is it?  There’s some word for three books.  Trilogy!  That’s it!  Ha!”

Yes, yes — a trilogy!  Three connected books that all stand on their own as separate works, or can be experienced as an interconnected whole.  Yes!  Three books that have characters in common through multiple stories.  Yes!  Three books that are created around the same time, and especially if in sequence.  Yes!  Three books that are created with the same motivation, and done in the same style.  Yes!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!  Lord of the Rings!  The Nova Trilogy!  Oedipus!  Snopes!  Good company!

As unexpectedly as I stumbled into each of those individual births — I unexpectedly found out I’m the father of triplets!  🙂 

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You can get this one … .   … here.

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Or this one …..…… here.

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Or this one….. ….. here.

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Or here’s a great interview by British Beat & music writer Simon Warner about the creation of the book and writing prose like music.

Here’s what a bunch of people thought of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac.

Here’s what a bunch of other people including original Merry Pranksters and Beats thought of The Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Here’s a wee excerpt from the new On The Road with Cassadys book.

Here’s an excerpt from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac.

Here’s an excerpt from How The Beats Begat The Pranksters.

Here’s a bunch of recent interviews and press and stuff.

Here’s a ton of different live videos performing these various books and such.

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by Brian Hassett  —  karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

Or here’s my Facebook account if you wanna join in there — https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada

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Here are a few different print, radio & video interviews and stories and such . . .

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Here’s an interview about The Grateful Dead Movie when it was upscaled to 4K and shown in IMAX for the first time ever in August of 2025.  Speaking with Lowell Celebrates Kerouac president Mike Flynn, we also go into how Albert Maysles was one of the cameramen, the cameo by Ralph Gleason, the Wall of Sound & all sorts of other stuff — all set to visual enhancements.

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Here’s the President & CEO of the National Beat Poetry Foundation, Debbie Tosun Kilday, and myself in September 2024 shortly after being presented with their Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate Award.  As part of it, I read my Ode To Jack which was included in their 2024 “New Generation Beats” book.
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Here’s an impromptu July 2023 interview (wearing the Dead & Company Ralph Steadman Sphere shirt) jamming on happiness, creativity, productivity, beating depression, writer’s block, philosophy of life, inspiring others, buoying spirits and so on.

Tom Wolfe Made Me Cry 

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We’ve had a flood of famous & important people dying the last few years.  2016 was the recent one most think of as the mass kill-off year that had us all praying for it to end — which it did, sadly, in November, with democracy and decency being cremated before our eyes.

The last famous person’s death that really threw me — well, it was two in 2014 — Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams, both completely unexpected, and both inspirational teachers in my life.

But Tom Wolfe’s passing on May 14th brought me to unexpected tears several times that day.  And it was really because of one work — The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

That book changed my life as much or more than any other.  When I first read it at age 15 it blew open what was possible to this comfortable kid in Mayberry, Manitoba.  Acid Tests . . . the Grateful Dead . . . road trips in a bus . . . a new way of talking . . . a new way thinking . . . a new way of being.  A Prankster!  Playful & goofing, but productive & curious.  These weren’t people sitting around waiting to be entertained — everything about them was proactive, about doing, about making things happen.  And being funny!  I wanted to be one of them — and I became one of them by my own actions, in consort with others.  That book changed my approach on how to live, how to interact with others, how to be part of a collective, and I carried it with me into high-end concert production & low-level club shows, into life in a giant corporation & life within a tiny community.

As the years rolled on, I read a lot of other books — including Kerouac, who Wolfe in part hipped me to by writing about this Neal Cassady guy on the bus — and I began writing more and more seriously as the years went on.  I was influenced by Dr. Seuss and William Shakespeare, James Joyce and Hunter Thompson, Dave Barry and Eugene O’Neill, the Beats and the rock poets.  But as my writing and life evolved, I read less of the playwrights of my formative 20s, only occasionally dipped back into Dr. Seuss’s playful mastery, and retained the lessons of Joyce without rereading him too often.  But the one prose canvas, more than On The Road or Huckleberry Finn or Fear & Loathing that I kept returning to with jaw-dropped awe was Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

As Kerouac wrote in a piece for the Writer’s Digest titled “Are Writers Made or Born?” — “It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”  And Tom Wolfe applied that playfulness to his playful subject, so perfectly reflecting in prose the scatological waves the Pranksters thought and operated.  It’s the greatest, most effective long-form blend of prose and subject I’ve ever come across.

Kesey said to me in a “you gotta hand it to the guy” way, and also thankfully put it on the record in this 1989 interview with NPR — “Wolfe’s a genius.  He did a lot of that stuff, he was only around three weeks.  He picked up that amount of dialogue and verisimilitude without a tape recorder, without taking notes to any extent.  He just watches very carefully and remembers.”

Looking back on the oeuvres of literary masters of the 20th century, Wolfe joined a pretty esteemed group that included Jack Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey who wrote about that singular inspiration Neal Cassady — “smiling and rolling his shoulders this way and that and jerking his hands out to this side and the other side as if there’s a different drummer somewhere, different drummer, you understand …. “

When I was writing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac, every night that I went to bed still having the mind strength to read, it was Electric Kool-Aid that I’d open the pages of.  Not On The Road or Fear & Loathing, but rather the guy who stretched language even Furthur, who left me in awe with the rules he would break paragraph after paragraph, while still maintaining a clear, gripping, fact-rich narrative.  He was moving James Joyce up to the 1960s; he was breaking more rules than The Subterraneans; he was simultaneously being Pollock and Rembrandt.

Some people over the decades disparaged Wolfe, and Electric Kool-Aid in particular, and I think that caused me to not speak up for the book as much as I should have.  But when he died, I realized how that one work changed my life.  Twice.  First in its subject matter . . . and years later in the mastery of its prose.  And what brought me to tears was that I never told him that.  Or anyone, really.  I met and spent time with most of the authors I admired who were alive when I was.  Except Wolfe — even though we lived in the same city for a quarter century.

I regret not thanking him for changing my life.  I regret not defending his writing.  I regret not standing up for him, and not celebrating his book.  I regret letting other people silence me, or make me think I must be wrong in my take on that book.

With Wolfe’s passing, and my uncontrollable tears that day, I learned the tough lesson to never again be silenced by anyone else’s opinion of a work of art — especially writing!

I need to get in touch with Kinky Friedman and Aaron Sorkin and Matt Taibbi before its too late!

Love your inspirations.  And don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.  And if you can tell the creators while they’re still alive — do it.  Thoughts & prayers & platitudes aren’t going to cut it for you or them after it’s too late.

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(my original copy, bought at The Bay in Winnipeg in 1976)

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Here’s where you can get my book — How The Beats Begat the Pranksters.

Here’s a piece about meeting Ken Kesey — at the Kerouac summit in Boulder in 1982 — an excerpt from my book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac which you can get here.

Here’s meeting up with the 2014 Pranksters at Woodstock.

Here’s another piece about valuable life lessons — Love Is.

An excerpt from my upcoming book (Sept. 2018) — On The Road With Cassadys & Furthur Visions — 

This bit is about 2001’s 50th anniversary of Kerouac writing his On The Road scroll — and a show we put on for the occasion in L.A. on the day he finished it, April 22nd, after one held in NYC on the day he started it (also covered in the book).

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I arrived at the Short Stop speakeasy well before showtime and it was already a chaotic circus of crazy creatives carving up the scenery, led by the director of today’s movie, S.A. Griffin.

Amazingly, he’d had a shirt made emblazoned with the classic OTR line about “… the mad ones … DESIROUS of Everything AT THE SAME TIME …” written in creative font-smashing text covering his chest — broadcasting its meaningful message in a playful style, perfectly reflecting his prankster essence.

The club was already a buzzing hive full of L.A. actors and poets and show people decorating the large performance space with bodies and actions — a room that looked like a fancy Goodfellas’ lounge from the ’50s or ’60s with almost no lighting so the celebrities and gangsters and cops could discreetly entertain in deep red booths surrounding the open dance floor in the middle — the only lighting being flickering candles in large red-tinted translucent holders on every table as well as lining the perimeter of the stage.

In the middle of the dance floor lay a giant 3-foot-by-4-foot photo of the first part of The Scroll — and scattered all around it like fallen leafs were page leafs of On The Road that throughout the celebration people would pick up any random one and read it from the stage, a la Burroughs’ cut-up method, except whole pages to collage the poetry of the prose into a swirl of images and passages and dialog and details jumbled together proving how powerful and consistent the wordsmithing was that you could hear chapter 1 or 51 and it would still fit together like a matching set.

S.A. created something I’ve never experienced at any Jack show before or since — a massive mad celebratory krewe of joyous orgasmicly LOUD participatory audience–stage–melding dancing dingledodies — AND I mean, LOUD!  It was MAD high energy at 6PM on a Sunday like it was a midnight on Saturday night at Mardi Gras.

The room became more than packed.  The pages on the dance floor were soon blown up to the lip of the stage as it filled with men & women floor-dancing in floor-sitting crosslegged positions, and the doorways crammed with faces peering in.

And like the rock star he was, Cassady came strolling in just before showtime with his latest babe on his arm and perpetual smile on his face.  He was laughing and she was beaming and the party was screaming and I felt like I was dreaming.

From the moment S.A. stepped to the microphone to open it — and he’s one guy who doesn’t even need a microphone to fill a room with his booming performer’s voice — the souls he’d assembled soared and roared like an arena rock show.

I kicked it off with the beginning of the original Scroll text that I’d transcribed from the two photographs of it that had been published by 2001, and right from the first line people were Howling “Go!” and “Yeah!” and “Wow!” and laughing and cheering.  And the next readers began improvising off-script and working the room, the audience riffling in lines in harmony with Jack’s in a collective kaleidoscopic recreation of the creation of the Beats.  As loud and orgasmic as new life comes! with beaming faces and embracing hugs and love and sweat and knowing twinkles between bubbling souls.

There were no rehearsals, no memorized scripts, just the chaos of people running to the microphone with parts of the Scroll or part of the Book in what S.A. coined “Bop Bingo!”  And people were yelling “Go Go Go!” from the swirling booths, and S.A. copping “the mad ones” line in this mad hang-out as it blazed from his chest in case anyone missed the obvious.

Then one of his crazy Carma Bums co-conspirators, Scott Wannberg, stepped up to speed-read Jack at the tempo he probably typed, causing even faster “Go”s from all over the room.

Then Michael C. Ford drove into the spotlight all high-energy — the Grammy-nominated spoken-word artist who performed with Jim Morrison back in the L.A. day, and recorded with all the other Doors since — he took the wild Slim Gaillard club show part of On The Road out for a playful right-orooni ride, getting all Putti-Putti all-rooti, as the audience started laughing-orooni with all the be-bop-orooni a-la-vooni shim-sham jimmy-jam thank-you-man howdy-doody, all-rooti!  The room was howling and the stage raging and spirits dancing and Jack’s typewriter clacking a thousand miles an hour as the high-powered Ford fired on all cylinders to crack the code and break the barrier and spike the sound and remind us all that — “To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni!”

Then John and I took the stage, the Bebop Brothers flip the page, bringing back the driving sage, pinning needles on the gauge.

Johnny riffed on how his Dad was just a big grown up kid, and how he’d come home and be fun and funny as hell, often bringing strange gifts, like a little hollow wooden pig he brought back from Mexico that if you put a live fly inside it, would actually cause it to walk across the table. (!)

And how he loved his Dad, and even if other people claimed Neal was off having Adventures with them, it felt to John like his Dad was home all the time.  And how his Mom had to be the disciplinarian, and how he grew up with a fairly idyllic childhood — one parent providing the roof over head and meals on the table, and the other being a big playmate.

And we traded off On The Road readings, John partial to the jazz joint riffs, punctuating them with personalized details and comedic asides.  “Everybody was rocking and roaring.  Galatea and Marie with beer in hands were standing on their chairs, shaking and jumping.”  —  “What a party!  Where was I?!”

And every time Jack would quote his Dad yelling, “Whoo!” or “Go!” to the jazz, the audience would yell it back to John creating a call-and-response song out of a prose-and-participate book.

And sitting right in the front was a gorgeous cross-legged L.A. woman dancing from the waist up, arms flowing in hypnotic figure-eights, fingers snapping … then exploding like slow-motion fireworks, all in an above-waist interpretive dance — part sign language, part snake-charming seduction.

And Sugar Magnolia, as I took to calling Aurora, was half the time on the side of the stage, half the time against a wall in the light in our joyous view, and half the time at one of the tables taking notes.

And John & I hit The Road together — reading the Jack & Neal car-riding “IT” section from On The Road that George Walker & I would later appropriate and open every one of our 20 shows together 20 years later, but this was the first time either John or I ever duetted it, and he had the Neal rhythms down.  Naturally.

“… everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts — but IT!”

And speaking of tunes, the most musical of all the Cassadys, Johnny C. Goode, broke out his electric guitar and filled in the colors as I read the part of On The Road after his Dad dropped off Uncle Jack in the California sister city of San Francisco and he started to have hunger-induced hallucinations.  “I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm …” as Johnny accented the “wonderment” with his crystalline lines.

And with the Ken Burns’ Jazz series having just aired on PBS, we thought we’d offer up Jack’s own history of jazz in one of the OTR riffs that Kerouac’s principal musical collaborator David Amram remembered as one of Jack’s favorites that he liked to read aloud — the “children of the American bop night” paragraph that begins, “Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans …” where he lays out the whole evolutionary tale in one page that Ken Burns took 20 hours to tell.

And Johnny picked up on the Johnny B. Goode echoes when Jack wrote of “Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother’s woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days” and how that was captured so similarly by Maestro Chuck — “Way back up in the woods by the evergreens, There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood . . . He used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack, Go sit beneath the tree by the railroad track,” as John melted Bird and Berry into a single rockin Bebop-a-Lula, and oh boy that little country boy could play!

Ragtime became Swing became Big Band became Bop became Rock n Roll became the Acid Tests became Woodstock became a million bands that burned burned burned like fabulous roman candles across the land.

Then John & I took a trip “to see George Shearing at Birdland in the midst of the long, mad weekend,” as Jack opened another of his favorite On The Road passages that he read to Amram’s backup back in the day, now with a Cassady in on the tune, and Johnny warmed up, effortlessly pealing off riffs, “slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat … his combed hair dissolved and he began to sweat!”

The audience was now howling like a collective mad Moriarty yelling for us to “GO!!” as Cassady soared and the audience roared with every new chord that felt like a sword pulled from a stone!  Excalibur!

“There he is!  That’s him!  Oh God, Oh God, Cassady, Yes! Yes! Yes!”  And Johnny was conscious of the madmen in front of him, he could hear every one of their gasps and imprecations!

“That’s right!” they said.  “Yeesssssss!”

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Here’s an excerpt from another book — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac.

Here’s where you can get The Hitchhikers Guide …

Or here’s an excerpt from How The Beats Begat The Pranksters.

Here’s where you can get the Beats – Pranksters book.

Or here’s another live Jack show tale — the Northport Report — about Big Sur’s 40th.

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by Brian Hassett  —  karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

Or here’s my Facebook account if you wanna follow things there —

https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada

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The Grateful Dead were Jack manifested as music.

Their essence was born of the road and adventures.  They worked in improvisational music like spontaneous prose.

They broke every rule of showbiz … then broke every concert record there is — just as Kerouac broke every rule of grammar — then had over 50 books in print.

Like Jack . . . . the band had a prolific career whose output spanned multiple genres and decades, had many different co-conspirators, and found inspiration in the mythical characters of the West and the open Road.  And they both considered Neal Cassady their driving force — in fact he literally drove each of them On The Road.

Both the Beats & the band had a core member who drank himself to an early grave, and others who spent considerable time & effort exploring the benefits of psychotropic drugs.  Both groups were largely based out of San Francisco, and both had New York as their other home.  And in fact, it was the very same neighborhoods of both cities — North Beach and Greenwich Village — where each came of age before growing out into the rest of the city and world.

San Francisco has a centuries-old history of radicals, rebellion and reinvention.  From Jack London to John Muir, Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley, the Bay Area has nurtured iconoclasts and outcasts, fostering new paradigms since its founding, be they environmental or cyber, free love or free jazz, gay rights or immigrant’s plights.

Hence, when Carolyn Robinson first moved to the city and planted the flag that would beckon her future husband Neal Cassady years before Lawrence Ferlinghetti or any other Beats ever set foot in the place, it was a town that already personified everything the burgeoning movement was about.

It was an outsiders’ oasis, a North American version of a European masterpiece of architecture to inspire every walking breath, a multi-hilled town of innumerable little villages, each with a thousand stories pouring out of every 3-story Victorian house.

And Jack fell in love — not only with Carolyn and his life-brother Neal — and so much so that he actually moved there briefly with his mother in 1957 — but also with the mirror city spirit of his beloved New York — the jazz clubs, the neighborhood bars, the openness and effervescent ever-changing characters and concepts that sprung from every 5-cent coffee or 10-cent beer.

And just as the Beats’ work brought this open-minded life-embracing sense of Adventure to the rest of the world — so too did the music that manifested there in the mid-’60s.

Bob Dylan may have gone electric on the East Coast, but the real electricity of the kool-aid of cool rock n roll came from the West, young man.

The Dead were proud flag-waving Beats who were keeping the beat in a whole new way.

Just as Jack took a novel approach to novel construction, the Dead did the same with song structure.  Just as Jack soloed on the keys stretching his flow and ideas to places heretofore unseen, so did that other “J” — Jerry — play his lines into a whole new space unheard in music save for the best of Jack’s beloved Be-Bop.

The Dead were not only the natural progression of the music of the Beats — but also of the very city that was home to both.  In fact, Jack was so comfortable with each, he easily recast The Subterraneans events from New York to San Francisco in just three days of storytelling.

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Unlike most bands and authors, both the Grateful Dead and Kerouac’s popularity only grew after their primary heartbeat stopped — with the Dead’s 2015 Fare Thee Well shows in Chicago breaking TicketMaster, pay-per-view, and Soldier Field all-time records — and Kerouac having roughly four times as many books in print today as he did the day he died.  Not to mention the thousands of Dead-based bands playing around the world as you’re reading this, . . . or the hundreds of copies of On The Road that will be bought somewhere every day that you have this book in your hands.

Yet they both had inauspicious professional debuts (the Dead’s first album and Jack’s The Town and The City) — which, in most cases, would have presaged an undistinguished career — and certainly not be indicative of an artist who would end up changing their medium and worldwide culture.

And both had an unusually strong affinity for the other’s form. Garcia was a voracious reader of books, and few novelists lived a life with as strong a connection to music as Jack.  And the Grateful Dead were the only band that either Jack or Neal ever sat in with.

Really it was — as it always seems to be — Neal Cassady at the center of the whole damn thing.  No other rock band can claim anywhere near as close a connection to any one of the key Beats as the Grateful Dead can with their brother Neal.  He lived at their house, ate at their table, drove their bus, performed on stage with them, and directly inspired some of their most oft-performed songs — including ‘The Other One‘ and ‘Cassidy.’ Not to mention that ‘Truckin” is a musical On The Road, or ‘Wharf Rat’ is their Big Sur, or ‘Attics of My Life’ their Book of Dreams, or that ‘Mexicali Blues’ echoes Mexico City Blues, or ‘China Cat Sunflower’ could have been lifted from Old Angel Midnight, and on and on.

But Cassady . . . Cassady . . . Cassady . . . the guy Jack most wanted to impress, ditto Allen — the Mighty Muse — and just as with them, he was there from the beginning with the Dead — on the bill or on the stage at many of the original Acid Tests including their now-legendary first big-venue gig — The Trips Festival — at the Longshoreman’s Hall in good ol’ S.F. in January ’66.

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Then this goes on for many pages including lots of quotes by Garcia, Robert Hunter, John Perry Barlow, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Rock Scully, Dennis McNally & many others.

You can order the book here that also includes pieces the great Holly George-Warren, the British Beat scholar Simon Warner, film & record producer Jim Sampas, the British jazz scholar Jim Burns, the On The Road manuscript specialist Matt Theado, the longtime American music scholar Pat Thomas, and many many more.

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Here’s where you can order my previous book — How The Beats Begat The Pranksters & Other Adventure Tales.

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Or here’s where you can get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac about the historic On The Road super-summit in Boulder in 1982.

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Here’s a version of this Jerry & Jack riff — delivered at the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival in October 2017.

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by Brian Hassett  —  karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

Or here’s my Facebook account if you wanna follow things there —

https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada

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Just as when Gifford & Lee created Jack’s Book in the ’70s, and Allen Ginsberg did the Jack Summit in 1982 and all those documentaries were made — it was all because there were people alive who knew Jack well.

Now there are very few.

Here’s a list of Living People who either met Jack Kerouac or knew him well . . .

(to be added to and modified as we go)

David Amram – composer & jazz bandleader

Cliff Anderson – author and Jack’s friend in St. Petersburg

Nikita Angelakos – Lowell resident

GJ Apostolakos – Lowell resident

Ken Babbs – original Bus-riding Merry Prankster – Intrepid Traveler – author

Tommy Belkakis – Lowell resident

Ron Bevirt – original Bus-riding Prankster photographer

Paul Blake Jr. – son of Jack’s sister Nin

Helen Bone – knew Jack in Rocky Mount, NC

Gary Boyle – Lowell resident

Bonnie Bremser – author and wife of Ray Bremser

Nancy Bump – Lowell resident

Cappy’s Copper Kettle owner – bar owner in Lowell

Caleb Carr – son of Lucien Carr

Ethan Carr – son of Lucien Carr

Francesca “Cessa” Von Hartz Carr – wife of Lucien Carr

Simon Carr – son of Lucien Carr

Cathy Cassady – daughter of Neal & Carolyn Cassady

Jami Cassady – daughter of Neal & Carolyn Cassady

John Allen Cassady – son of Neal & Carolyn Cassady

Phil Chaput – Lowell resident

Ann Charters – biographer

Anthony Countey – Northport neighbor, band manager, event producer

Billy Drenas – Lowell resident

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott – songwriter / performer / storyteller / raconteur

Al Ellis (still alive?) – friend of Jack McClintock’s who visited Jack in St. Pete

Elliott Erwitt – photographer

Gretchen Fetchin – original Bus-riding Prankster

Brian Foye – author and Jack’s paperboy

Mary Frank – artist & Robert’s wife (1950-1969)

Eric Gibson – son of Gerd Stern & Jacky Gibson

Dana Godne – Bixby Canyon resident, owner of Alf the mule

Herb Gold – author

Nick Goumas – Lowell resident

Mike Hagen – original Bus-riding Prankster

Richard Hill (still alive?) – friend of Jack McClintock’s who visited Jack in St. Pete

Raymond Hinst – owner of Haslam Book store

Richard Howard – poet, mentioned in Desolation Angels

Joyce Johnson – author

Paul Kapetanopoulos – Lowell resident

Terry Kerouac Dewer – Jack’s cousin

Chuck Kesey – creamery founder & Ken’s brother

Dale Kesey – Ken’s cousin

Billy Koumantzelis‘s kids?

George Nicholas Koumantzelis – Lowell musician & record company owner

Sarah Langley – knew Jack in Rocky Mount, NC

Maria Livornese – a girlfriend of Jack’s in the ’40s

Peter Lownds – actor

Judy Machado – Mary Carney’s (Maggie Cassady’s) daughter

Jack McClintock – St. Petersburg Times reporter who interviewed Jack in Oct. 1969

Joanna McClure – poet and wife of Michael McClure

Locke McCorkle – Marin raconteur

Sita McCorkle (now Formosa) – Locke’s daughter (mentioned in Dharma Bums & Desolation Angels)

Tasha Mkee McCorkle – Locke’s other daughter

Rita McGrath – Lowell resident

Duncan McNaughton (still alive? He was as of Feb. 2017) – was at Jack’s Paris Review interview

Anne Murphy – Neal’s girlfriend, met Jack in Northport in ’63

Dale Nichols – Flamingo Bar owner in St. Pete, Florida

Lafcadio Orlovsky – Peter’s younger brother

Charlie Panagiotakos – Lowell resident

Charley Plymell – poet

Pam Plymell – publisher & designer

Betty Sampas – Jack’s sister-in-law

Jim Sampas – Jack’s nephew

Tony Sampas – Jack’s nephew

Ed Sanders – author and bandleader of  The Fugs

Alan Sansotta – a pool playing Pal of Jack’s in Florida

Aram Saroyan – author

Jenny Scott – Chloe Scott’s daughter

Richard Scott – Lowell resident

Gary Snyder – poet

Lois Sorrells – a girlfriend of Jack’s in late ’50s / early ’60s

Gerd Stern – poet and multi-media artist

Veryl Switzer – pro football player, gave Jack a ride in Kansas in 1952

Jamie Thompson (aka Abba Elethea) – Detroit & New York friend

Mark Vonnegut – Kurt’s son

George Walker – original Bus-riding Prankster & author

Wavy Gravy – Beat poet and Prankster clown supreme

(75)

Last updated — August 20th, 2024

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Corrections or additions welcomed in the comments —

or email — karmacoupon@gmail.com

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Here’s a rockin riff on the world’s usage of “beatnik” in the 21st century.

For a fun book on a bunch of the living Beats & Pranksters (circa 1982) check out — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac.

For some Adventure Tales connecting the Beats & Pranksters check out — How The Beats Begat The Pranksters.

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Or here’s another interesting list folks seem to like — Famous People Who Didn’t Have Kids.

Or this is another cool one — “Great Americans” Not Born In America.

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by Brian Hassett  —  karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

Or here’s my Facebook account if you wanna follow things there —

https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada

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Ten years ago this month BrianHassett.com was launched.

I’ve published at least one new story every month since it was birthed — except once! when I unexpectedly fell in love & went on tour in the same month (June of last year).  🙂 

One thing about writing — you never know what’s gonna connect with people.  Jerry Seinfeld recounted this very subject from his last conversation with George Carlin — how neither of them ever really knew what was going to work until they put it in front of an audience.

Over the decade, a bit to my surprise, the five most popular stories on the site have been, in order —

1.  Some Famous People Who Don’t Have Kids

2.  The Carolyn Cassady Tribute

3.  The Detroit Red Wings Lineup — Stanley Cup Final 2008

4.  Henri Cru — The Legend Turns 70

5.  Woodstock With The Pranksters

The most popular piece just started as a list of a few names created after someone I knew said to childless me something like, “People who don’t have children have no value.”  . . .

Oh yeah?

I’ve periodically returned to it over the years — like when a famous person’s obit mentions they had no kids — and it’s gradually grown to nearly 350 people you mighta heard of from philosophers to rock stars.

It’s now linked all over the internet, and I think it’s the top result if you Google the subject.  There hasn’t been a day glo by in years that a bunch of people haven’t read it.

Funny thing is — it started out as a response to one person’s one comment — and now tens of thousands have read it!  🙂 

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The Carolyn Cassady Tribute caused me to be contacted by the New York Times, the L.A. Times and all sorts of people.  It was the first announcement on the interwebs that she had passed.

Her son John was living with her, thank goodness, when she fell ill on a Sunday night, and by Friday she was gone.  John was sending out daily emails to about a half-dozen family members, of which I was gratefully considered one after spending so much time with both Carolyn and John.  I guesstimated that her kids would be too caught up in what was happening to also be writing a tribute to her.  And I loved that woman — despite us having our differences like any two people who love each other do.  So, during that week, as the news was not improving, I started a tribute to her just in case, and thus was able to post it within an hour or two of receiving John’s final fateful email that Friday.

Levi Asher published it on his LitKicks website, and told me it’s also one of the top five most-read stories on his site.

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The Detroit Red Wings 2008 playoff lineup page — I have no idea what’s behind this post’s popularity.  I mean, they were a GREAT team and all, and it’s a really well done detailed roster by position and everything, but jeez, I dunno why people keep coming to it.  But they do.  I think this story about sneaking on the Penguins’ bus is a much more fun hockey piece.  🙂 

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The Henri Cru story’s popularity also blows my mind.  I mean — how many people know who Henri Cru is?  Well, apparently a lot.  🙂

Henri was a good friend of Jack Kerouac’s, and then became a good friend of mine — another of Jack’s old pals, like Carolyn and Frankie Edie Kerouac Parker, who I came to really love.  As I say in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac describing Jack’s other friends I met at the historic Boulder ’82 On The Road summit — “There was this constant commonality among most of the people in ol’ JK’s life.  Odd ducks.  As a novelist, Jack magnetized to these people as fodder for his fiction.”

I first met Henri through Edie, who had been Henri’s girlfriend until he made the mistake of introducing her to Jack. 🙂

You know that TV show Hoarders?  Well, way before we got to look inside those people’s homes and learn about the disease, there was Henri Cru.  This was probably 1983 or ’84, and Edie and I had become friends, and she told me about Henri and how he was cleaning out his apartment at 116 MacDougal Street up above the Kettle of Fish and the old Gaslight Café.  When I got there to help the first time, I met a guy out front who told me, “When we get upstairs, just remember, we’ve been hauling stuff out of there for three weekends now.”

When we got up to the fourth floor of the walk-up and opened the door, that was about all you could do.  It was literally floor-to-ceiling stuff.  One person (me) would climb up on top of it into a little maybe 18-inch high crawl space along the ceiling (!) and would pass stuff out to a waiting person back in the doorway as we hacked our way down through the glacier.  It was like an archeological dig — including cuz we were looking for treasures, which he did have in there (like an unpublished manuscript by he and Kerouac, and a case of unopened Jack Daniels bottles from about 1963).  I remember digging and digging, until we would uncover the top of a door frame.  “Hey!  I just found another room!”

Henri had recently lost half a leg to diabetes and had to move to a building with an elevator, which, when he first moved in, was as pristine and empty as any new apartment would be.  By the time he died a few years later, it had come to look like MacDougal Street, but with a maze of poles crisscrossing the room like a spider web that he could hang stuff from.

At some point in the journey, Henri was turning 70, and wanted to do sumpthin special, and asked me to write a story about the night for him as a birthday present.  I did this, and somehow it survived all the years since, and there must have been a digi copy that didn’t get lost in all the various crashes and program updates and obsolescence that plagued the early computer years, and back in 2010 I republished it (after it ran in a couple different Kerouac/Beat magazines).

“Feature my surprise” (as Henri would say) — of the 200+ stories on the site, that his birthday night would be the 4th most-read of all-time!

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Woodstock With The Pranksters’ popularity I can more understand with both “Woodstock” and “Pranksters” in the title.  🙂

Plus, I like that it both captures an historic moment with Kesey’s Bus returning to Yasgur’s Farm for the first time since 1969, but also that it set in motion a series of events and friendships whose storylines are still being written.

There’s so many other pieces I woulda thought would have been more popular — the Walter Salles meet story, or the Sky–Bri meet story, or the John Lennon farewell story — but a writer never knows.

Ten years.  Phew!

I realize that visually it’s an old format, but ya’know?  I hate it when websites change.  You learn how one works . . . and then they change it.  Well, my site’s been functioning the same way for 10 years now 🙂 just with a few more categories and a shit-ton more material.  What the heck.

For all those who’ve been here before — I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride!

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Here’s where you can get the current book —

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Here’s original Merry Prankster George Walker talking about the creation of the book and our shows together . . .

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Or here’s where you can get the prior book —

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by Brian Hassett  —  karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

Or here’s my Facebook account if you wanna follow things there —

https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada

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Visiting . Vincent

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I got this invitation

To take a crazy trip down south

From a blazing young artist

Dripping colors from his mouth.

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So I got myself a ticket

On the Starry Night Express

Heading out of Holland

To the province of Excess.

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I’d never met the man

Who turned the Seine to yellow,

But he seemed like such a happy cat,

I had to meet this fellow.

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So I bought some wine in Arles,

And went looking for his house,

Knowing like I know artists,

He was probably a souse.

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I wandered past the bridges,

And the boats upon the shore,

Then to his yellow house did I

Come rapping on his door.

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“Oh Vincent, my good fellow,”

I called out, halfway nervous,

“I’ve come from Holland, I’ve got some wine,

My friend, I’m at your service.”

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Creaking up his tiny stairs,

The walls were streaked with paint,

All was quiet, holy, skill,

Like the cloister of a saint.

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With my heart a’clippin’ faster

Than the tracks of that Starry train,

I pushed his door and stepped beyond

The threshold of the sane.

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Upon his walls were sunflowers

Twisted and blazing yellow,

Not one I tell you, but rows of them,

In a most glorious welcoming “Hello.”

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I suddenly knew him so much more,

His art was so alive,

I thought he was in the room with me,

And it took minutes to derive,

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It was but his bed, his smock, his hat,

That made me feel his presence,

That, and the tingling joyous buzz

Of his dripping oil presents.

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Following a hunch,

I went to the Night Cafe,

Even though it was technically,

The middle of the day.

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I ordered up some absinthe,

And took a look around,

But no where in this swirling bar

Was my Vincent to be found.

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Then from a table against a wall

The woman of the house looked up,

“Madame Ginoux,” she said,

As she offered me a cup.

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In broken French I asked her

If she knew my painter friend,

She smiled a twinkle, said “Let me tell you,”

Then I thought it’d never end . . .

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The tales she spun of nights he’d spent

Arguing in a rage,

Ranting loudly, pounding tables,

But with the wisdom of a sage.

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“Roulin, come join us,” she suddenly called

To a portly passing postman,

Approaching came a bearded gent,

Much kindlier than most men.

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“Bonjour!” he boomed,

Sticking out his hand,

As Madame Ginoux described my plight,

I was blessed in Vincentland.

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He smiled as I explained

Why I’d come this far,

And what it was about Vincent’s art,

In the way he caught a star.

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Assured that I was true of heart

Roulin released the news,

He’d seen him on the road today,

Armed with easels and his muse.

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Wandering to’rd the wheatfields,

Roulin had seen him go,

“It’s his latest love, those glowing fields

That God Himself did sow.”

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Honored with this sacred tip,

I followed the Golden Path,

It felt like I’d been baptized

In a champion’s Champaign bath.

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Past cypress trees and orchards,

I wandered sun-drenched lanes,

Yielding power with each new step,

The Gods’ hands upon the reigns.

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The wheatfields blew like ocean waves,

Then I spotted something bobbing,

An easel’s peak, like a sail,

Of a tiny ship a’lobbing.

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My heart was pounding, I took a step

Into Vincent’s sacred earth,

It came alive, my God I swear,

Just broaching his flaming hearth.

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There was Vincent! Brush in hand!

Raging against the night,

There was Vincent fighting off

The dying of the light.

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Palette weaving, body soaring,

I felt myself in air,

Vincent swirling, never knowing,

That I was even there.

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But the sun was growing ever larger

Engulfing the fading sky,

Into a giant wash of color

I felt my body fly.

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I lost my mind, lost regret,

Like Icarus I soared,

Wings be-damned, with Vincent’s heart,

Through the sky I roared,

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Into a world he knew so well,

His beaming light a’glow,

All the artists lived up here,

Hey, there’s Michelangelo!

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Through purples and yellows and orange and green,

Heaven’s alive in you know what I mean.

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It’s there on the wall, it’s in the “seeing,”

It’s in the eyes of every being.

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And then I fell into a field — and Vincent now was gone,

But I never did come back from that trip that I was on.

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Through purples and yellows and orange and green,

Through Vincent’s eyes I’ve seen what he’s seen.

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Through exploding yellow and cascading light,

In Vincent’s world I’ve lived my life.

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Here’s a piece about the excellent Loving Vincent movie.

Here’s a real-life Adventure Poem about the Dalai Lama in Central Park.

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by Brian Hassett  —  karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

Or here’s my Facebook account if you wanna follow things there —

https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada

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Al Franken is a great writer of our times.  When you read even just the first chapter of this book — “Why I’m A Democrat” — it’ll make you wanna throw every one of his sanctimonious accusatory quasi-republican Democrats off a cliff — not under a bus, like they did him.

I really enjoyed his Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, and his equally precise Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, as well as Oh, The Things I Know!: A Guide to Success, or, Failing That, Happiness — and to my knowledge this is the first time he’s written anything resembling an autobiography.

Al was one of a small group first hired to launch a new experimental TV show called Saturday Night Live back in 1975, along with his comedy duo partner Tom Davis.  And he was hired as a writer — which he expanded into multiple characters and books and screenplays by the time he left.

Maybe there’s somebody else who was a writer by profession when he was elected a United States Senator, but I can’t think of one.

Reading this made me realize Al Franken may be my favorite living writer.  He is SO smart . . . and funny . . . still — in his mid-60s.

I’ve read several books on the creation and operation of SNL (including his partner Tom Davis’s great 39 Years of Short-Term Memory Loss), and now finally after all these books and years, we get Al’s take on it through three of the first chapters.  It you haven’t read about what happened at 30 Rock, you’ll certainly learn a lot here.  If you are well familiar with how that show works, you’ll love this take by one of their primary political writers, who for 15 years laid the foundation for the satire we’ve all been enjoying during the national nightmare of the last couple seasons.

But what no one has read is a clever professional writer’s account of a 57-year-old running for political office for the first time — and getting elected to the U.S. Senate by 312 votes (out of 3 million!)

If you thought you were a fighter — wait’ll you read the tale of a real warrior.  Not only has this guy been on the front lines of every battle of our lifetime, he was still doing it up until the day Kirsten Gillibrand and a handful of other meanly-mouthed democrats stabbed him in the back over a rub on the backside.

Thank God he wrote this while he was still kicking ass and naming names in the Judiciary, Health, and Energy Committees, oftentimes being the most articulate and effective opposition on any given panel.

This book is SO well written … and I’m pretty particular about that kind of thing.  You don’t hear me saying that very often.  At times he sounds like Dave Barry with running jokes and faux officiality, and other times like Obama’s self-depreciating confessional honesty in Dreams From My Father.  And if you liked Dylan’s Chronicles, it’s got shades of that, too.

All of it is crisp and “punched up” as he would say.  It’s playful, elaborate, intricate, comedic word sculpting.

The book is funny, evolved, thoughtful, goofy, fast-paced, quirky, twisted — and it’s gonna make you love footnotes!

It’s the first book I’ve picked up that I couldn’t put down in ages.

It’s such a beautiful work of art, at times I was brought to tears — so grateful to be reading something so exquisitely done — at such a timely moment.

And it also works as an excellent primer for anyone not in politics to run for office.  There’s a funny and smart (like everything in this book) description of his quandary about using humor or not in the course of his job.  I mean, this guy is the Merry Prankster of politics, for sure.  And he’s a Deadhead to boot!  😀  He even makes Congressional hearings and writing legislation funny!

The book also includes a beautiful touching you-won’t-forget-it tribute to the late great Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota Senator whose seat Al fought for and now holds, who died tragically in a small plane crash in 2002.

And there’s even a fast-paced and entertaining recap of our political times from Bill Clinton to Obama . . . and ultimately into the current nightmare we’re living.

For this reader, there may have been a smidge too much detail on the initial Coleman campaign in ’08 that first got him elected, but even that was funny, insightful, dramatic, sometimes nail-biting (re: the recount) and sometimes touching (re: his wife since college, Franni).

What we need in life — especially now — is inspiration.  These are dark times.  And there aren’t a whole lotta people shining a whole lotta light.  Despite what the Democratic Party did to one of their own, his voice and vision are alive in print, and I assume he’s about to begin a whole 3rd Act in American public life.

He was a pinpoint precise observer and satirist of the political process before he ever became a functioning part of it.  And this book proves (as do all of his, really) where his ethics and ethos lie.

He’s been playing the game and working the machine the last eight years — and now he’s unencumbered from holding his tongue — which he was never much good at anyway.

As much as we may like Colbert and Stewart and Kimmel and Meyers and SNL‘s comedic takes on the horrors of drumpf, there’s now a new force entering the public arena who may be able to inspire even more people to rise up — and how to go about it — than he was ever able to do as a sitting senator.

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My first attempt at a selfie — during the Repugnant Convention in Cleveland. 🙂

Here’s where you can get my political Adventure book — Blissfully Ravaged in Democracy:  Adventures in Democracy 1980–2020 — including a few stories about Al.  😉 

Here’s a story of the first time I met Al — during a fracas at a Howard Dean rally in New Hampshire in ’04 that he actually references a couple times in the book!

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Here’s his brilliant final speech on the Senate floor —

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Here’s the first book in my Beat Trilogy — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac.

Here’s the second one — How The Beats Begat The Pranksters.

And here’s the third — On The Road with Cassadys & Furthur Visions.

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by Brian Hassett  —  karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

Or here’s my Facebook account if you wanna follow things there —

https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada

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I love Loving Vincent.

I’ve loved Van Gogh since the big Metropolitan Museum of Art show “Van Gogh in Arles” in 1984 and the “Saint-Remy and Auvers” show in 1986, and reading his Dear Theo book of letters to his brother around the same time.  Those shows and that book changed my life by showing me first the dedication a serious artist has to his work, and what a body of work could look like, and secondly how it could change a room and a person’s life.  Which was also connected to another artist I identified with, Jack Kerouac, who similarly created one vast body of work, that when taken in totality, is knee-buckling in its vastness and awe-inspiring in its beauty.

If you haven’t heard, this movie is largely hand-painted with oils in Van Gogh’s style.

It’s like the “Red Roses, Green Gold” musical I saw last month in New York with my same two Art Adventure-mates Sky and George Walker in that it takes existing works (songs in that case, paintings in this) and builds a story around them.

In Loving Vincent, they’ve tapped into a 2011 Van Gogh biography that explores whether he in fact committed suicide or perhaps it was something else.  Whether that book and its conspiracy-theory propheteering nonsense contains a shred of fact is beside the point here — because it makes for a fun dramatic mystery that the narrative of the movie is based around.

I also likened this movie to On The Road — the 2012 adaptation of the Kerouac classic.  When first seeing that movie, it was fun in that as each new scene would open, you’d realize, “Oh, it’s THAT scene,” and then settle in and enjoy the visual dramatization of some moment you’d only read on a page.  Similarly, here we go from one Van Gogh masterpiece to another without any idea of what’s coming next.

If you’ve spent any time at all appreciating Van Gogh’s works — particularly his last years in Arles, Saint-Remy and Auvers — you’ll recognize every scene and work — which suddenly come to life.  Crows leaping out of corn fields, trains chugging by in the distance, candle lights flickering their illumination, smoke wafting up in the face of colorful storytellers, and faces that were once static coming to life with voices and mannerisms we could only imagine while standing in a museum or flipping pages of an expensive art book.

The movie also uses flashbacks to convey the backstory, which are shot in live-action with actors, then run through a filter that makes them look like black-&-white/ sepia Van Goghs from his early “Potato Eaters” phase.  [EDIT: see first comment below.]  This has the effect of not only telling the story and giving faces to young Vincent and his brother Theo etc. but also gives the viewer a respite from the blazing colors of the moving canvases, not unlike the white walls of a museum give your eyes a rest before you move to the next eye-popping landscape or portrait.

The movie is sadly missing Madame Ginoux (one of whose portraits is on permanent display at the Met) but Dr. Gachet coming to life in brilliant blazing blue with facial expressions in oils to rival the most subtle actor is a cinematic explosion to rival Star Wars — except in Van Gogh’s explosive oils.

The fading transitions back & forth from the sepia to the full-color action makes you feel like the acid is just kicking in every time.  Suddenly a black & white world is swirling in dizzying colors and people become moving paintings and colors appear where there were no colors before.

Artists like to control their work.  They have visions and work hard to execute them exactly as they see them.  That’s where discipline and practice and trial-&-error come into any effective artist’s work.  And painters have the blessing of not having rote copyeditors or album “producers” or ego-maniacal studio heads messing with their work.

But once their bodies have stopped ticking and their hands stopped creating … the life’s work is done.

I think in 2017, a century after old Vinnie bit it in a wheat field with crows, he would be happy to see the “Loving” repurposing of his work in this way, just as I believe Jerry Garcia would get a kick out of his songs being reenvisioned as a musical, or Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady would appreciate how George Walker & I are bringing their words to life on a stage.

There are those rare artists in history who transcend their medium and their era to become something that is the world’s, that is bigger and even more transcendent than the works they first created.  If you can create a painting that can become a movie, or songs that can tell a grand unified story, or create characters on a page that can become alive on a stage, you have left the world a rich fluid palette more valuable than any single “masterpiece.”  Few artists create such lasting multi-medium works, but we are lucky to be living through a time when innovation and reflection allow us to experience some of the greatest works of the past in entirely new ways while still truly reflecting the original vision.

I like to think of Vincent, Jerry and Jack sitting back and rejoicing in a corner booth at a cafe/bar in heaven, looking from on high as us mortals still dab their wet palettes, still expand the songs they left behind, still bring their characters to life.

I think that’s what any artist wants to bestow to this world.  Not just what they got finished before they checked out, but to know that all their hard work with accompanying depressions and addictions and rejections actually produced the inspiration for others to build upon their constructions.

Creating great somethings out of vast nothings is hard enough to generate appreciation in others.  But when your work can become new work, you have become a Great Creator, a God, a deity of art, turned water into wine, paint into people, air into emotions, and hard work into eternity.

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Here’s the official trailer . . .

Here’s some background on how they did it —

Or here’s sumore . . .

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And here’s a bunch of other movie reviews.

And here’s a fun storytelling Vincent poem.

And here’s my new book on art forms crossing generations — How The Beats Begat The Pranksters.

And here’s a killer list with links to over 500 of the greatest movies ever made.  😉 

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by Brian Hassett  —  karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

Or here’s my Facebook account if you wanna follow things there —

https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada