Lesson One going into the streets of Cleveland — as hipped by my poli-warzone-brother Mitch — If you hear fire crackers, don’t assume they’re fire crackers. Get behind cover.
Roger that.
Mitch and I met in 1983 thru him being a music reporter in Winnipeg and me managing to some success one of the local bands he loved. What usually happens with relationships is — they stay in the realm they were formed. He and I shared that rock n roll crazyworld … but gradually learned we were both history buffs … and hardcore politicos. We’ve spent a thousand hours talking and arguing politics in person and over the phone from Toronto to New York — and that was before the internet! I was calling him with payphoned reports from D.C. during Bill Clinton’s first inauguration — a quarter-century ago. Then we roomed together within eyesight of the Lincoln Memorial through the week of Obama’s inauguration — he making his newspaper deadlines, me making my email dispatches — which you can read here — and Michael Lang even used in his Woodstock book! — and now here we are together again — 30-something years after our first crazy Prankster Road Adventure began — with the perfect recent rainbow arc from the beginning of Obama to the end of the Republican party.
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This is one of the three great elections in my lifetime.
’92, ’08, and now ’16.
I first came of political age in the fall of ’83 . . . while running the NYU concerts … when one day outside the Loeb Student Center was a Gary Hart rally. I’d never cared for, or understood, American politics before, but suddenly here it was in front of me — cheering people, a star on stage, big production, camera crews — it was like the rock shows I was producing — except with a person who was going to potentially govern our land.
Suddenly I got it.
This is rock n roll — except about everything else I give a shit about. I love dancing and all that … but this is how government is decided. And I’ve been part of it ever since. Back in the ’80s and ’90s I was registering more people to vote than anybody I knew. And they were all like, “Why is this Canadian the one doing this?”
Eventually I got married, became an American, and proudly vote and participate in every election in both my countries.
DAY ONE IN CLEVELAND — Saturday — July 16th
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Somewhere in New York State on the drive down from Toronto I suddenly got passed at 80 mph by the local Toronto news crew CP-24!
A good sign that Le Grande Synch was already locked in. 😉
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And then damned if I don’t end up right next to my Toronto brothers again, zipping through the city! 😀
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BREAKING BOOZE! The hosers are in town!
I love this place. And have had nothing but a good time here since I first hit it with John Cassady to go to The Grateful Dead show at the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame . . .
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Here’s John at the exhibit listening to one of his dad’s raps from an Acid Test …
So this has always been my touchstone in town and the obvious first place I went to get grounded with the newly-landed landed gentry of Republican delegates.
With the minor modification of the streets being filled with police and skies filled with surveillance helicopters.
And there was something else you couldn’t miss circling in the sky all day . . .
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I started talking to a nice couple from Kentucky who’d just left the Rock Hall and were beaming in the beauty of it all. It was a soaring jam on the Beatles, Elvis, the Stones, and how great the museum was.
I just got back from a month in Greenwich Village and Woodstock, and before that nearly another month with the Merry Pranksters in Wonderland, and I’m quite used to strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand, as Robert Hunter put it. People who greet each other with a hug and not a handshake. People who get the Grand Prank of Life and are surfing the ripples of light. It’s the enlightened, as I see it, that one should soak in by the lifetime.
But suddenly this seemingly lovely Kentucky couple, obviously mistaking me for someone else, segue from Elvis on Ed Sullivan into, “Mike Pence is a great V.P. choice. (!) He adds a lot to the ticket. He’s got a lot of experience and has been fighting for all the important stuff for a long time.”
And suddenly I realize – “We’re not in Woodstock anymore.”
Kansas is in the house.
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But not many other people are!
On the Saturday leading into the convention — downtown was a ghost town.
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And this is right at the main Public Square in the center of town . . .
And these streets are not blocked off!
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And speaking of dead roads . . . this town is the freakin’ poster child for the decimation of the infrastructure in this country! With the Repugnant congress blocking anything that’s good for the country in hopes people will blame Obama, and a Repugnant Ohio Governor toady who goes along with their bullshit, a lot of sidestreets here are like driving through a war zone … right after the war. There are pot holes you could hide a keg in.
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And all the news crews are here to cover it . . .
Including my favorite —
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And CNN has certainly planted their flag loud and high . . .
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And in just about the best news from my first day’s recon — besides learning that my shuttlecraft bike is the way to get around town — is that the best single block in all of downtown Cleveland — Positively 4th Street — is just outside the security perimeter. (!) This one short narrow block has nothing but bars & restaurants, reminiscent of the French Quarter or Greenwich Village or North Beach.
And who should I find occupying it, of course, but my other favorite news network . . .
I can’t believe my favorite network has taken over my favorite street in Cleveland. 🙂
I wonder if ol’ MSNBC’s outside of the security perimeter, like me, because they were not credentialed for this auspicious embarrassment. 😀
I can tell this is going to be the block I’ll be spending some considerable time on. 😉
In other news — I talked to cops, state police, & secret service, and even in their buzz-shaved heads and starched-stiff uniforms they were as friendly to this longhaired biking freak as could be. Even told me I could ride on the sidewalks!
I don’t intend to be storming the Bastille or jumping any fences, because they’ve deputized an army of out-of-state cops and cleaned out their jails for miles around and are prolly just itching to fill the new vacancies. But all the ones I talked to were as friendly and helpful as a concierge in a 5-star disaster.
Mind you, the expected protestors haven’t really started to make their presence felt. In fact, these were the only ones I saw in a whole afternoon and early evening of biking the entire downtown . . .
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And here’s Willard Park, with its giant FREE rubber stamp, that’s expected to be one of the gathering spots, but as you can see, protesters seem to be holding their fire for now. 🙂
And here’s The Mall park, with the Fountain of Eternal Life, in front of the Key Tower (behind me) — the tallest building in Ohio that you see with its pointed top in every skyline photo — and it’s completely dead despite the name of its fountain.
The Key Tower
Then damned if I didn’t run into the CP-24 guys again! 🙂
Went up and talked to them and confirmed it was them blasting past me on I-90 and that they were indeed the only such vehicle covering the event. We said we knew we’d meet again. 🙂
And until we do, dear reader, it’s time for this cowboy to get back on the horse — my faithful bike, Ranger — and ride into the sunshine.
Day Two — Sunday — July 17th
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Even with the overlay of 3 more police officers being killed in Baton Rouge, the streets of Cleveland remain calm, controlled and festive. Locals are celebrating summer, delegates are being feted at the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, and the police are being applauded.
Positively 4th Street (where the above cop shot’s taken) is the obvious go-to strip — and may end up looking more like Mardi Gras by week’s end. But as the convention begins, it seems like there’s more journalists and police here than there are people to protect or report on.
I mean, they’re so desperate for anyone to talk to, they’re even talking to me!
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And a beautiful thing to these eyes is that all the protests I’ve seen so far are about Love — and would make John Lennon proud.
“Love can heal what hurt divides”
Or check out this billboard of Donald and Ted on one of the main streets downtown . . . 😀
And as crazy as it may seem to some of us, there are people here proudly out of the closet for Trump.
But me, I’m just digging on the people, the political buzz, and the architecture . . .
One hand on the new Key Tower, the other on the old Terminal Tower
At one time (the 1930s), that Terminal Tower (on the right) was the fourth tallest building in the world! And I heard tell there’s an observation deck at the top that you may see pictures from before this Adventure is over.
And check out the front of their gorgeous main library — complete with this brightly colored temporary art installation of various animals that’s over town . . . and Ranger my trusty steed hitched up to the front rail. 🙂
But besides the great architecture and city, there’s also all the best political reporters in the country. I was super stoked to get to spend some time talking about writing with one of the journalist pillars in American letters, The Washington Post’s Dan Balz. And like the natural consummate reporter he is, he ended up asking me more questions than I did him. 🙂
And here’s this bar/restaurant on 4th Street The Post has turned into their headquarters for the week. Wonder if they let in subscribers?
And here’s political hound dog Chris Matthews waiting to go on the air. I was definitely in the background of some of his broadcasts yesterday. 😉
You can see him on the right below.
And here’s a cool action shot of the anchor turnover — as Chris Hayes is coming in and Chris Matthews is checking out.
I even got to go for a little walk with the TV & radio host Michael Smerconish who I’ve long loved for his honest, logical, centerist, non-ideological way of thinking. I told him about Jon Anderson being on his show years ago. “The singer from Yes!” he exclaimed, brightening right up. And I mentioned how he riffed “Smerconish” into an improvised song that day, and Mike goes, “Boy, you’ve got a good memory!” 😀
Then there was the very last reporter of the day I talked to, Mitch Potter from The Toronto Star!
We finally got together about 9PM . . . and did nothing but power-riff politics until 2 in the morning. 🙂
“Put your good where it will do the most,” …….. as Ken Kesey said, and Wavy Gravy recounted in the luminous new documentary, Going Furthur.
This movie is really funny — and not in a you-had-to-be-there way. A huge part of the Merry Band of Pranksters’ essence (as Ken Babbs first dubbed them) was their playfulness and sense of humor. The Pranksters were pioneers in a lot of ways — and one of them was being the first people to not take Pranksters seriously.
Lord knows we’ve all seen lots of Merry Prankster documentaries of various stripes over the decades, and except for the actual Key-Z Productions coming out of Ken’s barn, none of them were made by bone fide Pranksters on The Bus. And yes — “bus” in relation to Furthur is always capitalized — because it’s the capital, the captain, the first Bus that inspired it all from Magical Mystery Tour to what’s filling festival parking lots all over America this summer.
This film crew didn’t just show up for a couple days and collect some footage. They lived on it for three months, start to finish, on the 50th anniversary tour in 2014, celebrating the historic Neal Cassady-driven trip across the country in 1964.
And something happens to you when you’re surrounded by Pranksters morning, noon and night. First of all, distinctions like morning and night stop being relevant. It’s recess all the time. It’s improv theater every waking hour. It’s play time whether your eyes are open or shut. And what a play it is!
This is a movie of a road trip worthy of Jack Kerouac, the author at the core of everything the Pranksters did. They went On The Road alright — embracing that wanderlust that Kerouac so passionately first captured — but taking it Furthur. And on boy, did they.
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Besides everything else — anyone who’s a fan of filmmaking is going to be dosed with several hits of Wow! watching this. The cinematography, the editing, the sound editing, the collages of images, the characters, the costumes, the soundtrack, the settings . . . this is as 21st century storytelling as you get.
This is the cinema vérité of madness that was captured and pioneered in America by the Maysles brothers and D.A. Pennebaker — but as edited by Darren Aronofsky on a Terry Gilliam adventure. This is not “chaos cinema” but it’s certainly cinema of chaos. It’s filmed improv with kooky characters a la Curb Your Enthusiasm or Christopher Guest movies — except it’s all on the road and with an even wilder storyline.
“Went fast because road is fast,” Kerouac wrote Cassady immediately upon finishing On The Road, and these two Canadian and one American filmmakers applied that same aesthetic to telling this Road story. Zoom! But it also wisely takes the uninitiated on a vivid ride through the backstory.
There’s vintage footage of Neal Cassady, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, the Acid Tests, The Trips Festival, prototype Grateful Dead, getting crazy at Kesey’s house in La Honda, and what psychedelic light shows were like when they were first being invented — all seamlessly blended in and out of current-day footage of Wavy Gravy, Ken Babbs, George Walker, Zane Kesey, Anonymous, Lee Quarnstrom, Alex Grey, Sam Cutler, Peter Shapiro, Furthur guitarist John Kadlecik, the Wizard of Wonder, and all in locations like the Woodstock reunion at Yasgur’s Farm, the Gathering of The Vibes, Phases of The Moon, the nation’s capital, Manhattan, and Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.
The unsuspecting viewer’s taken on a helluva trip — from Kesey’s first dose in Menlo Park to the Burning Man desert full of today’s raging rangers — from hand painting the first Bus with their hands to wiring the new Bus for bands — melting ’60s footage into contemporary scenes being goofed and pranked from New York to San Francisco. And boy does it work!
There’s George Walker expounding on the participatory philosophy behind the first Acid Tests.
There’s original Prankster Roy Sebern explaining how he first misspelled Furthur on the front of The Bus.
There’s Wavy Gravy talking about hanging with Neal Cassady — “The man is doing ten things at once and nothing twice.”
There’s Sam Cutler reminding us with a twinkle and thick British accent, “What’s the meaning of enlightenment? The ability to lighten up.”
There’s performance artist Alexander Polinsky sharing, “If you’re as open to playing as the Pranksters are, you’re gonna find that friends are everywhere.”
There’s the spirit of everything Ken & the gang were about ……. playing out ………in real time, in the present time.
And besides all the Prankster background and foreground — the film takes a trip through the “festival culture” that’s exploded in North America in the last few years. It’s not about simply going some place to hear a series of bands on a stage — but in direct lineage from the Pranksters — it’s about participation, and breaking down the barrier between performer and audience so both are one, as Kesey first scripted with the Acid Tests, and is now playing out every weekend in hundreds of locations by thousands of people from teenagers to octogenarians.
Then the film trips through the power of psychedelics, which is very timely with all the new scientific research coming out on the positive effects that people like Kesey knew about a half-century ago. Ken also used to carry around a giant ball of hemp to public appearances — often saying, “The first state that legalizes it will have a huge jump on the rest of the country” — as the state budget directors in Colorado, Washington and Oregon are learning just how right he was. I wonder how much longer until governments catch up with psychedelics and what millions of people have known for decades?
“Jack writ The Road — but this is The Road writ large.”
This movie is not just a Jack & Neal road trip buddy picture. This is a huge ensemble cast of disparate people each having their own personal breakthroughs. You can take acid, or go to a Tony Robbins weekend, or have a child. There are a lot of paths to new self-awareness. But throwing yourself onto a psychedelic Bus with a bunch of strangers under madhouse conditions visiting crazy festivals is — as proven in this film — a sure-fire baptism by fire. No one in this movie came out the other side the same person. And the tears shed and hugs long held upon departure showed the heart of this scene.
Just as Kesey’s first Bus inspired generations to have wild collective Road Adventures — this film will carry the torch Furthur still, and light the way for those who could use a flash to spark their flame. As Kesey said, “I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.” And the light he’s been pulling towards him for 50 years is shining out through this movie screen and illuminating a very colorful and beautiful world we are currently living in.
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Going Furthur will be on the festival circuit and featured in special screenings around the world throughout 2016. Check the GoingFurthur.com website for screening details.
Somewhere in the Universe, Pranksters are gathering.
It’s fireworks, calliopes and clowns, And everybody’s dancin’ . . .
On fifty acres through country woods, with ponds and trails and fields and split-rail fences and immaculate stables and barns in fresh but classic rusty red . . .
Now designed for 2-legged wild wooly wanderers,
in a cluster of buildings with labyrinths of interconnected rooms that you can never really figure out how they tick-tocked jam-rocked together . . .
Offices and bedrooms and kitchens and lounges with stages and spaces with nothing but lights and screens and projections and bands and dancers to fill the air.
Characters in masks … Jackson Pollock splattered costumes … faces in flowing colors . . .
Days and nights and daze and knights, and strangers stopping strangers just to hug them tight.
As more and more Pranksters fall into the scene,
From wherever they’ve been — A communal gene.
Twanging & twinkling — tootling & toasting —
30 people put on a play.
30 musicians play all day.
30 buses from far away.
And 30 photos in this tray. 😉
As a Prankster drone captures an uncapturable krewe . . .
With women pirates capturing the island.
“Our women pirates are the finest to ever sail the seven seas,” sez the Wizard of Wonder with authority.
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As a UFO comes in for a landing . . .
And there’s a micro-bus that could fit inside the first bus’s pocket . . .
And there’s a Wizard behind it all — and that’s all you need know.
There’s Canadians . . . Jacksters . . . Dawgz . . . & cats from Lewis Carroll to Shakespeare’s acts.
Doctors and lawyers and chefs and sculptors . . .
Cooking with gas in their midnight threads . . .
Smiling faces in swirling spreads . . .
Colored lights casting circles of rainbows . . .
And jammin till dawn in the Gathering Room with rock players, bluegrass, country, and blues . . . Sculpting in air with many a muse . . .
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A 30-second walk though hallways and doorways of the mystical labyrinth into . . . a big barn jam! With top-of-the-rock bandleaders, becoming one band, and taking a trip without leavin’ the land.
And there’s that UFO again!
There’s that girl you met at the Bernie rally. There’s that dude you met in Chicago. There’s that ongoing conversation about the greatest movies ever made. There’s the kitchen krewe with more mouthfuls of magic, As more beer & ice tumble in coolers.
Around the corner, back out to the tent, Off in the distance, who knows where we went.
There’s buses galore, and RVs and Airstreams . . .
There’s Jerry above us in the hovering dreams . . .
. . . now a cat . . . and a rabbit . . .
and you know where you’ve fallen . . .
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As another new ensemble rips up the stage . . . one more one time lineup . . . with a sax wailing in the jewel eye center . . . then 3 drummers take off on a cascading riff … as the room rides the rapids in a stage-front shift . . . into a jammin’ 10-minute 10-piece Shakedown Street that shakes down the house at 3AM . . .
And there’s the filmmakers from tour … premiering their vision . . .
and the Oregon light show twisting the noodles . . .
as the psychedelic string artist spiderwebs up the landscape . . .
“There’s a whole lot goin’ on that I don’t know anything about,” I remember thinkin’ slurpin’ Slurpees flippin’ thru Rolling Stones back at the 7-11 in Winterpeg in the mid-’70s. And here it is. That world come true. That family gathering of like-minded Adventurers . . . The ones who don’t fit where the pace is slow . . . The ones Jack described as “Go Go Go” Who live by the hug, the only greeting they know.
Blissful adults channeling joyous children . . . “The hardest working hippies in show-biz . . .” Evolved players evolving evolution . . . Dancing bears in peaceful revolution . . . Nothing as expected around any corner . . .
Surreal is real. Surprises status quo.
A box becomes a boat. A stage becomes a movie. A dancer becomes a butterfly.
Now suddenly it’s a barn stage peak — People kickin’ up dust, raising up Spirits. One More Saturday Night. Chaos. Perfect lose-mind-ness.
Transportation provided. Gone. Boom! Done. Into that other world. Not this one. The Other One With Cowboy Neal at the wheel Dancing in Never-ever Land.
It all started waking up on New York et al election day in Ken Morris’s house in Cleveland the day after we pre-scouted the city for the upcoming Republican Implosion. I mean, Repugnant Convention. There were 3 different messages in my in-box about a just-announced Bernie rally tomorrow in Bloomington — where I just happen to be heading for a major Merry Prankster reunion.
A month ago I had hipped the Wizard of Wonder, who was hosting these blooming festivities, that a Bernie rally might happen when we’re all together, as Indiana was the only state on the primary calendar that week. Sure enough. Boom! It’s the one day before we all decamp to the site of the 3 day Acid Test. {story on that forthcoming 😀 }
Merry Pranksters are pretty much all Berners, and I tell them when I arrive that tomorrow will basically be — just get-up-and-go. Doors open at 5PM, and it’s in this smallish but gorgeous old 3,000-seat theater. We’ve all seen Bernie’s arenas-full of supporters, and Bloomington is a giant Greenwich Village, an Austin, an S.F., a packed and passionate town of progressives on the prowl. So this venue’s gonna be way too small and this thing’s gonna get crazy. Gotta be there first thing.
True to my woird, I jingle-jangle in the morning maniac music, believe me, but then the ol’ Gets Things Done brain kicks in and I get the hell out of Wonderland and over to said site.
And as I arrive near it around 11AM, the car in front of me is from Missouri. Then a car cuts in at an intersection from Florida . . . and we’re all in this super-slow line to the only parking lot on the Indiana University campus — and I’m thinkin, this does not look good.
But The Spirits are with me, and I bolt around the parking lot that I got to know when I was here with John Cassady and Walter Salles for the Mid-Western premiere of On The Road, and sure enough there’s an open spot right in the key corner closest to where I’m going. Boom!
Outta the car quick-as-a-bunny, and power walk to The Auditorium, which I also knew cuz it’s the building right in front of the theater where On The Road was screened. And this morning there’s all this steel fencing for the incoming crowds, and it’s actually two lines, one going each direction away from the front of the building.
Everybody who arrived, starting with the first person at 7AM (!) had lined up on one side, and there’s maybe 50 people in it as I’m arriving at around 11:15. But the remarkable thing is, there’s about 6 people just starting to sit down at the front of the other empty fenced-in line. These two hip chicks, Taylor and Allie (known for the most beautiful eyes this side of Zooey Deschanel) have figured out that this line is equal to the other line, except nobody’s sitting in it yet! I come right up just as they’re plunkin’ down, and they gimme the lowdown how this gate’s gonna open at the same time as the other — ‘cept there’s nobody here but us! Boom! Done! I’m the 7th person in line for Bernie in Bloomington!
Then a few other people arrive on our side, and pretty soon we got a pretty cool little crew in this 8-foot wide steel-fenced pen, and we’ve got the whole front of it to ourselves. Of course I start talking to these friendly Berners, and I’m tellin’ ol’ 21-year-Zac beside me how I’m in town hanging with the Merry Pranksters, and how they helped form The Grateful Dead, and how I’m expecting a bunch of them to come to the rally in full costume. But he’s never heard of them, or Ken Kesey or anything. Super smart guy, computer programmer or sumpthin, I think he called it Informatics, but I might as well have been tellin’ him Civil War tales.
But then all of a sudden these two 19-year-old babicious freshmen, say, “You talkin’ about The Grateful Dead?! We like them.” And then one of them holds up Bob Dylan’s Chronicles! Like — she’s got it with her in line! And she’s taking a course in Bob Dylan. Which is coming right on the heals of her “History of Rock” class! Kids these days! And her friend is sitting there reading Naked Lunch!! I pull out a couple copies of my book to show them, and they freak out. And while they’re sitting there reading them, the Chronicles girl gets on her phone and I figure I’ve sort of lost her attention pretty quick, but then a bit later when she gets up to hand me the book back, she says, “I just ordered it on Amazon.” 🙂
And then at some point, me and Jim Canary get together — the guy who preserves Jack’s original On The Road scroll — and he tells me about this huge exhibit happening in Paris later this year and that I really must go to. Here we were together again riffin’ Jack at the very place we first met — the world-famous Lilly Library as it was co-hosting the On The Road premiere.
And then somewhere in here the freakin’ Secret Service show up. Word probably got out that Hassett & Canary were in the same place at the same time.
Or maybe it was that Presidential candidate — cuz the next thing you know they’re hauling in metal detectors.
And ol’ Zac sez — “They can’t be very secret if it says secret service right on their clothes.”
And in this rainy, stormy weather these bastards later confiscated everyone’s umbrellas as we entered! — like the Secret Service couldn’t handle a freakin’ umbrella attack.
And all this other stuff was goin’ on, including these college kids playing cards. I mean, physical 52-card card cards. They asked me if I knew how to play Euchre. (!) They’re all digitally wired and haven’t watched a TV show on a TV in their lives and have phone screens the size of bread loaves — but were sitting there playing with playing cards! Two different groups of them!
And then there were the light-saber kids fighting around the fountain . . .
. . . and this official Bernie merch tent was set up out front . . .
with unquestionably the coolest political buttons and shirts that have ever appeared on the campaign trail . . .
And they set up a big screen and speakers for the overflow crowd outside — with the coolest slogan —
. . .using the postal abbreviation for Indiana . . .
. . . as the line continued to form, all around the fountain square, then all the way down the street, then around the far corner, and down the hill, and back up the far side, then around the tennis courts, and people were still arriving! I’m guessing maybe a tenth? of these people got in?
And I’d keep goin’ off on my observational roamabouts . . .
and circle back and hang some more with our killer crews at the front of the line …
That’s brother Zac with the yellow top holding his new merch score with a bunch of his krewe . . .
And here’s Eliza the Dylanhead, with her two besties, front of the line, top of the day.
And on a deeper level, we’re having this debate about what’s gonna happen to all the energy Bernie’s mustered should he not get the nomination. Will they stay inspired and mobilized and work to elect like-minded Democrats to the House and Senate and continue to steer the party to its proper place on the left? . . . or will they Bern out and fade away. I’m concerned it’s going to be the latter, and I challenge all of them to not make it so. But sad proof that I may be right was when the Bernie volunteer coordinators came by, like this woman with this super-cool shirt —
trying to recruit volunteers from the hardest of the hardcores at the front of the line, and not a single person ever responded to two separate appeals for help. Mind you, it was finals time on campus.
And then there were the proudly beaming faces of the white supremacists. I mean, Trumpsters.
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
After nearly six hours of having the most sidewalk fun I’d had since hanging outside Abbey Road for an afternoon, they finally opened the gates and we dashed up the stairs to the indoor security phalanx — the whole airport security empty-the-pockets / metal detectors / magnetometers wand-scanning routine, including making you hold any buttons you were wearing in your hand to show them (?!), and then as soon as you’re thru that, it was this kind of crazy “festival seating” rush of democracy-loving kids that flashed me back to KISS concerts in the mid-’70s — where as soon as we had our ticket torn at the door — ahh, simpler times — we ran like hell for the front of the stage. But here we are doing it for a Presidential candidate!
I love life. 🙂
Eliza and her two friends had come through one of the metal detector shoots right at the same time I did, and “Oh, Great! Hey! Ya made it!” as we’re laughing in giddy joy and running to the promised land. Apparently the ushers had been sending the first arrivees into the theater off to the far side aisles, and as I came in I could see there was absolutely NO ONE down at the front of the stage yet. (!)
I don’t know how the hell it went down exactly in the flash of the moment — but I noticed the direction lady usher at the top of the center aisle got momentarily distracted, and I just blew right past her and ZOOMED straight down that muthrpuckin aisle, Dead center, just like I did at Radio City when I snuck into my 2nd ever Grateful dance in 1980. BOOM! And Eliza’s keepin’ right up with me, and her two too, and ZOOM! We make it! Front row center! I grab the aisle seat, as is my wont, and they fall in right beside me, and voila! Front Row for the The Revolution!
And now it’s the whole pre-show hang . . . in a comfy-seat in a poor-man’s Radio City, but they’re tryin’. And over the PA they blast Neil Young’s “Keep On Rockin In The Free World” — not once, but twice! And this fellow Winnipeg Kelvinite is fist-pumping the air to the Beat, knowing that everyone behind me looking at the stage can see this energetic arm punching out the rock that is the core of this revolution.
They also play Simon & Garfunkel’s “America” … twice, refraining the great visual ad from earlier in the campaign; and Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again” which always evokes Jack to this booksmith, as Eliza’s telling me about seeing Willie and the now late-great Merle Haggard together in this very venue just a few months ago.
Then somebody texts her that they just saw her on CNN, which, since we were fairly inseparable, might mean I just had my 5 seconds of fame right there and I missed it. 😀
On one of my many walkabouts, I checked out the media row along the mid-house horizontal aisle — and, I know it was the day after his devastating New York loss, but still . . .
there were a lot of empty seats where there shoulda been a reporter.
Shortly before showtime, they brought in 5 rows of people to fill the bleachers behind Bernie’s podium. I’d seen the bunch of them gathered in the lobby on one of my surveillance scoutings,
and they told me they’d simply been picked out of the crowd as they came through the lobby. I was there when they were taken through the back door into the theater, and there was absolutely no arranging of them according to age or race or gender. It was just in whatever way they filed through the door, with no manipulation of who sat in the front row, or right behind Bernie, or in what pattern of faces.
And while on one of these reconnaissance missions, a middle-aged woman came walking down the aisle toward me, looking at me kinda strange, and said, “Are you one of the Merry Pranksters?” (!)
I don’t know how in the hell this world works, but it sure works fast!
Showtime — on the rail
There were only two warm-up speakers — the main student organizer; and the head of the Dems in Indiana, who was a middle-aged black near-Baptist-preacher who did a riff on how he wasn’t into Bernie at first. But then he looked into his history of fighting for the little guy, “And I started to feel the Bern,” [big cheer], then I learned about his position on banking reform, “And then I was definitely feeling the Bern,” [bigger cheer]. And he does about ten variations on this, and then “I saw him winning 17 states and having the longest line for any event in I.U. history, I now I’m feelin’ the Bern all over!” he says as he shivers n shimmies [crazy cheering].
And finally, about 9 hours after I left the house this morning on this mission, The Man appears! White hair and all!
No teleprompter, just a variation on a campaign speech he’s been givng daily for the last year. The only time he’d look down at his notes was, for instance, sharing the specific stats and names of businesses from Indiana that’ve moved to China or Mexico since certain trade deals.
I keep thinking of and referring to his “speech” as “a performance” or “a show” because it really was one. Including a lot of audience participation. “27 dollars!” He had the place in the palm of his hand from the standing ovation when he first walked on stage.
The guy has it down. There was either a laugh or an applause line roughly every minute of the nearly 90 he talked for.
And I have to say it wasa helluva speech — a colorful articulation of pretty much every Progressive position. And in most cases, I’d like every one of them to be the Democratic platform. Sure wish I could have seen a Hillary speech right after this to compare & contrast.
And speaking of Hillary, at the first and every subsequent mention of her name, a loud boo instantly arose from the assembled. 😀 By about the 5th time, it had become a joke, and people were booing and laughing at the same time at our goofing on our cue.
Bernie’s got the timing and delivery of a professional comedian, and has a lot of sure-fire laugh lines that have prolly worked in every city he’s appeared. Of Hillary not releasing her quarter-million-dollar speech transcripts — “Getting paid that much, that must be a pretty fantastic speech! That must solve all of America’s problems.” (laughter) “That must be some Shakespearean prose!” (bigger laughter)
“And then there’s my good friend Donald Trump,” (laughter). “My wife and I were never invited to his wedding.” (bigger laughter)
“Trump has come up with a whole new way to deny climate change. He thinks it’s a hoax . . . created by the Chinese. (laughter) I would have thought he’d think it was caused by Muslims or Mexicans.” (bigger laughter)
“I have a major announcement to make here tonight. I am now going to release the transcripts of all my Wall Street speeches. Here they are,” as he dramatically throws an armful of nothing in the air. (big laughter) “They never offered me $225,000 for a speech. I’ve got my cell phone on. I’m just waiting for a call from them.” (bigger laughter)
Bernie throwing nothing in the air
But this also kind of manifests one of the problems with his speech / campaign. Members of Congress are prohibited from accepting money for speeches or any kind of appearance. He keeps saying it like he’s some pure guy — but since he left Vermont, for the last quarter century he’s held a job that prohibited him from giving paid speeches. There was this and a lot of other holes in many of his two-paragraph-long diagnoses of our ills and how we would fix them. That’s definitely a downside I can see his non-supporters seeing.
On the other hand — he rattled off more real and important things that need to be changed — and at least someideas of how to fix them — than any other candidate I’ve heard over the last year: including passing a law that if a corporation needs a bailout, the CEO is prohibited from getting bonuses; and that marijuana should be reclassified as a schedule 2 drug, and not in the same class as heroin. (big applause on campus 🙂 )
Purchased at the official Bernie merch table
And he talked powerfully about our incarceration problem — and how we have the most imprisoned people of any nation on Earth — spending $80 billion a year to keep 2 million Americans behind bars. “Criminal injustice is a crime in America,” he Ginsbergianly put it. And of course this gets another standing ovation.
He talked about how we’re the only industrialized country to not guarantee healthcare for all its citizens, and how seniors are having to split their pills in half because they can’t afford them, and this whole very real plight of the uninsured elderly brings Eliza beside me to tears.
Women are making .77 cents on the dollar that men are . . . public colleges should be free like they were when he went to them in the ’50s and ’60s . . . we have money for wars but not inner cities . . . immigration reform must also include Native Americans . . . we need to live with nature and not destroy it — because it will destroy us . . . (and at this point I can hear Kaiya, Eliza’s friend, sobbing her eyes out) . . . we should be making solar panels mandatory on all government buildings . . . and every one of these points got a separate standing ovation, anywhere from 10–100% of the audience.
At one point during a smidge of silence, what sounded like a 5-year-old girl, squeaked out, “I love you, Bernie!” that got a huge laugh and more applause.
And the whole thing built to this sermonistic climax — “Families looking out for each other always trumps greed. Love trumps hate.” —> into a jumping-up standing ovation.
This was John Lennon as a politician.
Which I never realized until I sat in front of him for a whole sermon on the trail. What a religious experience. Certainly delivered, received and perceived like a prophet.
Even by me — a political pragmatist. This guy’s special. I really haven’t seen this before. He’s got Jesse Jackson or Obama’s oratory skills, albeit in a completely different style; combined with a Lloyd Benson or Joe Biden maturity; a Ralph Nader or Jerry Brown philosophical approach; an early Howard Dean or Gary Hart fervor; an essential Paul Tsongas or Bob Kerry sense of humor; and a Bill Bradley or Dennis Kucinich appeal to college students.
It’s quite a blend. And I love a good blend.
see, also: Dead, Grateful
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The speech is over, and people flood the front of the stage because he walks forward and not to the wings. And I’m right there, “on the rail” as my live concert practitioners say — and the whole front-of-stage area becomes packed with people who rushed in to feel the Bern, not unlike the joyous sardine end of any great rock concert.
Bernie comes down into the orchestra pit and walks the wooden rope-line barrier, and I actually get to shake his hand at a nice slow long pace, giving him the double hand wrap around his one, and looking right through his glasses into his eyes, telling him, “Thank you, brother.”
And right after he passes, and heads back up the stairs and waves a final farewell, the guy we were hanging with in our front row foursome is suddenly bawling his eyes out! Apparently Bernie not only shook his hand but gave him a bit of a hug, and the guy’s totally losing it, sitting and shaking face-in-hands on the orchestra pit divider, with his girlfriend consoling him, and I’m kinda like, Whoa!
That made it all three out of the three people sitting next to me being overcome with emotion to the point of tears.
It really was that good. I wonder if three out of three people next to me at a Hillary rally would be moved to tears?
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And in the It’s-Not-A-Real-Adventure-If-You-Don’t-Get-Chased Dept.:
As I’m looking at my three new BFFs in their hyper-dramatic state, this security woman I’d interacted with earlier, and had been standing along the side wall with the other various types of cops, was suddenly leaning over the orchestra barrier into the open space of the pit about 15 feet from me, with two tall white uniforms behind her.
“Excuse me, sir,” she says, leaning out into the open pit to catch my eye and pointing full-arm directly right at me.
These were the last words I’d ever heard anyone say to me for quite a while . . . . . and they’re still echoing.
I’d had my eye on the wall-hanging Blue Meanies who had their eye on me as I was, clandestine as I could, shooting the hell out of the show with my you’re-not-supposed-to-use-it camera. I knew there was every chance they were gonna come for me at the end . . . and at minimum erase the pictures — or maybe worse.
But there was no way I was gonna let this night end badly!
Without saying a word of goodbye to my linemates, I grabbed my coat from the seat, and booked it up the aisle, with a kinda slight crouch to make myself smaller. I got half-way up and hit the back end of the exiting crowd that were snail-inching their way out. I lingered and pretended like I was just gonna hang there in the line for a while . . . feeling their surveilling eyes and approach behind me; and as I know so well — do not turn around and look behind you. Pretend like you don’t know they’re after you. Then after a few seconds fake-out delay in this aisle, I cut over thru an empty row to the next aisle to the left, and snail along with those people for a few seconds, again acting that I’m just naturally slowly leaving, not running or anything, suddenly stuck in the cattle-call crowd. Then I break and cut thru another empty row, now getting to the nearly last aisle, which is fairly open, and speed-walk it to the top of the audience bowl, and Boom! — spot the lower hidden exit in the dark, zip down those steps cuz now I’m in an unobservable tunnel, thru the next doors, into the lobby with hundreds of other departing Berners. Again — don’t look back to any other exit where they might be coming towards me, but power-walk thru the lobby to the nearest exit to the outer lobby, and finally see the nighttime darkened glass doors, with one last line of black uniformed Secret Service staring us down as we leave. I listen for walkie-talkies’ going off — “Stop that long-haired guy in the jean jacket!” — but I hear / see / feel nothing, and just blast past the bullet-proof jest — into the blooming raining Bloomington night, heart racing a thousand miles an hour, and heart beating even faster for democracy.
Restoring my Faith in Democracy at The Democrats Abroad Toronto Debate-Watch Party, April 2016
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Attending the Democrats Abroad debate-watch party in Toronto this week reminded me how we are so much better than the memes and mean comments I see on social media or news opinions every day.
“Democracy isn’t something we have — it’s something we do,” as the great Granny D put it.
In a couple roomfuls of a hundred or more American Democrats here in Toronto — which was split about 2-to-1 for Bernie supporters — we just had a helluva party.
There was no animus, no hatred, no division. Yet it was like a sporting event with supporters of both teams in the room. I never heard a “boo” all night — but I did hear applauding and cheering for both, and in fact saw Bernie supporters applauding Hillary comments, and Hillary supporters applauding Bernie’s answers. It was a bright-eyed manifestation of how I see and experience politics.
Maybe it’s the anonymity of being online, of being isolated in one’s own world, that’s a factor in some of the unfortunate things that are said and passed around.
But it was my experience, being in a room full of Democrats from all over America, that we actually got along. Quite well.
I engaged in I-don’t-know-how-many wonderful conversations and mid-debate joke riffs with Democrats strongly in favor of one candidate or the other. There wasn’t a bad word exchanged by any of us all night during nonstop back-and-forths between people 100% committed to one side or the other.
It was the greatest thing I could ever hope to experience. I mean, in a Democratic primary sorta way. 🙂
The smiles, the joy, the energy, the engagement, the understanding, the knowledge that these people have — it’s like legend tells us Congress once was — people of different philosophies respectfully debating the issues before them. Imagine!
I just saw it play out among Democrats one border removed.
I started talkin to this couple, and a first question often is, “So, where’re you from?” And they answer Chicago. Apropos of little, I say, “Oh! I was just there for the Dead shows!” And they light right up!! And as we riff along the tune, eventually the guy tells me he was at Winterland for the shows they shot the The Grateful Dead Movie at. (What!) Of course he bought a copy of my book and now weir all besties for life.
And there was another brilliant moment where I was sitting in front of this guy who looked a helluva lot like Bernie and was supporting him, next to a woman who didn’t look unlike Hillary … and was supporting her. 🙂
And I just listened in awe to the two of them riff the light fandango — smart as hell — SUPER friendly rapid-fire back-&-forth. I never understood that Carville–Matalin marriage — but here I was watching it play out live in front of me. With Love. And Respect.
What I’m saying is — for all the family-feud in-fighting I see so unfortunately playing out on television, Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere — to quote Bernie Sanders, “Hillary Clinton on her worst day is a hundred times better than any of the Republicans.”
In a hastily-called gathering in Toronto, with Americans from California to Florida to New York to Kansas, we celebrated the hell out of the candidates. It was all real and randomly assembled Democrats — Bernie and Hillary supporters — taking over multiple rooms of a former mansion in maybe the coolest bar in downtown Toronto — and it was a love-in! We applauded, cheered, fist-pumped, toasted, laughed, high-fived — and the room was totally split. And it was the most contentious debate of them all!
We Dems Abroad have the same energy at Presidential debates in the fall — but to see us all doing it April in the thick of a close primary — so … together — it was a beautiful thing.
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CTV News was there witha camera crew covering it, and the bartender and I were laughing about how hardly anybody in this massive establishment was watching the hockey playoffs or baseball games on the other TVs — and the cable news channel was causing the loudest cheers and thickest crowds in the joint. 🙂
Democracy isn’t something you have — it’s something you do.
And boy — were we doin’ it up in T.O.!
These kinds of engagements are happening all over America, and all over the world.
Connect with any Dem / Bern / Hill group of your choice — but get out and join them.
Live this.
This is the 9th Presidential campaign I’ve been involved in — and it’s the most wild crazy unpredictable beyond-fiction one ever.
Get out and have as many public experiences of this as you can. Get involved. All the way through the Inauguration.
I love being a Deadhead. I love being a Prankster. I love being a Beat. And I love being a Democrat.
Give me your befuddled masses, Your rejection slips, pink slips, verbal slips, all; Knock down the gates, throw open the bars, The artists are havin a ball.
Teach me, show me, let me in; Challenge me, push me, help me win.
Athletes have their team And suits can wear the firm, But making art keeps you home alone, And the tavern’s the place you turn.
Solo suffering totally blows, So into the sea you dive, Searching for soles who swim like you And act at least vaguely alive.
With deep sea wails you plunge the depths, With freshwater poets you school, With coral reefers you spark the sea, Drinking in dreams from the pool.
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Out of the one grow many, and out of many grows the One. The “It.” The Ahhh. The ah-ha! The Unspoken Thing. And from this desire for oneness, togetherness, the artists from the Beat poets to the Pranksters to the Lilith songwriters have collaborated, cajoled and consoled each other into movements and generations.
The Beat Generation may never have had a single unified voice any more than Generation X does, but their range of harmonies ended up blending into a pretty inspiring choir.
The term was coined by Jack Kerouac, expounded upon by John Clellon Holmes in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and endlessly championed by Allen Ginsberg, partly because the prior “generation” of disaffected visionary American writers had come up with the convenient “Lost Generation,” thanks to Mama Stein. Hemingway — another pretty shrewd self-promoter — dropped her phrase as an epigraph to his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and suddenly F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings and et al were no longer a bunch of struggling writers, but a generation. “Yeah, that’s it, we’re a generation!” We’re talkin’ ’bout my g-g-generation. Suddenly lone 1950s authors joined a team, and instead of remaining disparate spindly voices drowned out by a raging torrent of daily fads and fixations, each of their challenging visions became buoyed by the others.
And in this supportive spirit, a loosely defined Beat community became a very interdisciplinary affair as they freely mingled and collaborated with Abstract Expressionist painters, jazz musicians, Living Theater actors, playwrights, photographers, cartoonists, dancers, mystics and poets from other New York Schools. In smokin’ Greenwich Village joints like the Cedar Tavern, the San Remo and the Artists Club, something more than ideas were being exchanged.
“We were sharing the holy light,” said composer David Amram, Kerouac’s principal musical collaborator. “The Artist’s Club was a beautiful get-together run by artists for artists, with talking, philosophy, arguments and discussions by the hour by serious and brilliant people. Then afterwards we’d all go over to the Cedar Tavern and continue the rap. It was like a floating university.”
The Cedar Tavern, now woven vibrantly into the quilt of New York City history, was the collective comfort zone for Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, various art critics, and the Beats as they emerged on the scene. Located originally on 8th Street & University Place, it was a tiny tavern with no jukebox or anything else, deep in the heart of the Village when it still was one.
“We had a lot of love and a gigantic extended family of friends,” Amram says of the Cedar scene. “You could sit at any table and hear the most inspiring conversations about art, theater, music, baseball, everyday living. It was an oasis, a mecca.
“There was a communal sense; we all helped each other rejoice in the struggle rather than despairing, by always encouraging and paying attention to each other, and trying to give that love and respect and interest, and also honest opinions and criticisms.”
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Nowhere is this more visually animated than in the 1959 film Pull My Daisy, the single most illuminating Beat collaboration. Narrated by Kerouac’s best 28 minutes on tape, captured in early cinema verité by evocative still photographer Robert Frank, playfully scored by the classically trained David Amram who also appears as the friendly French hornist Mezz McGillicuddy, and starring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky as themselves, this Lower East Side home movie is the only existing footage of the Beats in their prime other than a few scattered TV clips. Co-produced by painter Alfred Leslie and shot in his canvas-filled loft, featuring painter Larry Rivers in the role of Neal Cassady (who was sadly imprisoned in San Quentin at the time), with art dealer Richard Bellamy as the bishop antagonist, and financed by Wall Street libertine painter Walter Gutman, it’s a film made by painters about poets narrated by a novelist.
Another inspired collective on the path were the writers and artists of the Black Mountain College of North Carolina, an experimental Appalachian art school whose faculty included poets Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Flourishing between 1950 and 1957 (when the school went bankrupt), their manifesto was Olson’s 1950 essay “Projected Verse” which emphasized the transferral of energy between a poem’s creator and reader. Their influential Black Mountain Review was one of the first regularly published collections of the wide-ranging free-verse voices of the new American poetry movement, with Creeley, William Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov appearing alongside Ginsberg, Kerouac and Gary Snyder. In 1952 the Black Mountaineers produced Theater Piece 1 — America’s first “happening” — which teamed Olson’s unfettered poetry with the work of artist Robert Rauschenberg, avant-garde musician John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.
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Also dancing in the klieg lights of collective freedom was the Living Theater, the iconoclastic company founded by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, who began their playful, interdisciplinary association in Greenwich Village in the late ’40s. In their first years of production (1951-1952), they staged plays by such diverse contemporary artists as Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Rexroth and John Ashbery. Rather than acting within the confines of conventional theater, they practiced street theater, confrontational theater, interactive theater, wholly living theater. As longtime member Steve Ben Israel described their method: “When you’re an actor, you’re waiting for a playwright to get an idea, or a director to do a play, or a producer to produce a play. And here we were, actors creating all of that — producing, directing, writing and acting it together with our specific message.”
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This same blessing of community has been felt by artists ranging from the High Renaissance in Florence to the also fairly high Poetry Renaissance in San Francisco. Most of the resident groundbreaking geniuses of Florence circa 1500 belonged to some regimented guild or patron’s stable, so, many of the artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo, Filippo Lippi and Rustici, along with architects, storytellers and poets, would also gather in their own mock confraternities. In one of the more wacky images in art history, picture several of these blazing masters meeting as they did in their Company of the Cauldron, for lively drunken dinners around a giant cooking pot in one of their sculpture studios where they’d begin creating murals not with paint but with the chicken legs, sausages, cheese and jelly. Even though their quarrels were nearly as colorful as their art — never has a generation of artists advanced their media so quickly. “Hi! I’d like you to meet my friend, David.”
In San Francisco in the 1950s a community of poets began a similarly inspired coffeehouse collective, meeting and reading in the nooks and bookstores of North Beach. Embracing the Platonic adage, “To good men’s parties good men flock unasked,” the cultural outlaws from around the nation who’d gathered in this traditionally liberal port city were starting to notice the same faces on the same stages night after night. Poets like Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Kenneths Patchen and Rexroth, assemblage artists like Bruce Conner and Wallace Berman, and filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and Harry Smith all began enthusiastic crossover interdisciplinary collaborations that were breaking society’s birdbrained habit of pigeonholing artists. A lush flower garden had burst into bloom and it wasn’t long before the psychedelic paisley ran wild.
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In a sunshower of Day-Glo paint, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had a great notion to take the collective to an even higher level. Incubating in pools of acid on the edge of Stanford University, Kesey was forming an ever-expanding coterie of authors and intellectuals that would eventually encompass Neal Cassady, the Grateful Dead and electric KoolAid. As Intrepid Traveler Ken Babbs put it, “The Pranksters are a collective of that American spirit that’s been passed on from the founding fathers through Melville, transcendentalism, Whitman, Faulkner, the Beats and zoom into the Pranksters where it took a wild turn of spontaneity in tribal dance, uninhibited jazz, nonsensical word raps and any other unfettered reaching of the spirit toward newfound freedoms.”
A healthy dose of this Prankster ethic came from the pranksterish Dadaists who were trying to overthrow not only the rigidity of the fine arts in the 1910s and ’20s, but civilization itself. By staging pranks in public places like cathedrals in the middle of a service, this gang of offbeat artists and authors had a collective effect on history rather than simply getting arrested as solo psychos.
And out of their inspired playfulness grew the more serious subconscious exploration of the Surrealists. Founded by the psychologist and poet André Breton, and including Salvador Dali, Joan Miró and René Magritte, the Surrealists strove to fuse our dreamscapes with reality, creating “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Blending psychology, poetry and painting into a collage of the subconscious, the Surrealists were on a dedicated search for the meaning of life in the mysteries of the mind that Freud had only recently begun to unveil. Their direct channeling of the subconscious through trance-like states and automatic writing appealed to many artists of the time. Painter, occasional William Burroughs collaborator and regular cut-up Brion Gysin joined the Surrealists in Paris, as did future Beat poet Philip Lamantia in New York, who also helped edit their magazine View. But joining this group had a disturbing caveat: Namely, you could actually get expelled from it by Breton — as both Dali and Gysin were — for hanging with the wrong people or changing your mind, which is a curious condition for a mind-based movement.
But along the way, the group had a lot of fun poking a carrot in the eye of the snobby Parisian art world as they painted green apples on faces, and eyes in the middle of baked hams. Now picture Monty Python’s cartoons of a head popping out of a foot, or a naked man playing an organ in a field. The Surrealists expanded on the illogical juxtaposition of thought earlier espoused by the French poets Apollinaire and Lautréamont and the line of their legacy is still being doodled.
And that’s the great thing: As much as these cool collectives were happening in the recent past, many are thriving today. From communal artists’ hearths like New York’s Nuyorican Poets Cafe and The Knitting Factory to attention-getting rock fests like Lilith Fair and the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, groups of likeminded people are still working together for the collective better.
“It’s good for the soul, for one thing,” Sheryl Crow told me of joining the Lilith tour. “I mean, it’s what religion’s based on — that commune, the community, the solace and the fellowship of people who have a kindred spirit.”
Whether it’s painting the walls with dinner in Florence, or breakfast in bed for 400,000 at Woodstock, coming together stretches the horizon beyond the sun of its parts. And you don’t have to be half-a-million strong. As George Harrison put it of his much smaller group, “That was the good thing about being four together. Not like Elvis, you know. I always felt sorry for him later ’cause he was on his own. He had his guys with him, but there was only one Elvis and nobody else knew what he felt like. But for us, we all shared the experience.”
Being together counts. Even a collective of two. Supporting someone who is supporting you is the seed of a generation.
Fire lights and smoking nights And splashes of dripping paint; Jazz explosions and constant commotions “Leave It To Beaver” this ain’t.
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It was the halftime show of the century! 1945 to 1955. “We’re gonna rock the rock in the second half.” Or we’re all gonna die.
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Life was pretty uncertain after two world wars and two atomic bombs in too little time. By 1945, it could go either way and everybody knew it. Edward R. Murrow had been on the wireless delivering graphic nightly accounts of the bombing of Europe. Centuries-old nations were tumbling by the month. Blackouts, rationing and depression were a way of life. The end was surely near. But leaning forward into this tension wind were some courageous artists transforming their media into gloriously honest expressions of the furthest and sometimes most beautiful reaches of our mind.
Through a door opened by Freud and into a room lit by Jung, Reich, Stanislavsky, Breton and others, the expression of the subconscious self, the center, the soul, the truth, became the new goal of artists all over the world, some who happened to be drinking together, and others who were drinking alone.
During the same years that Jack Kerouac was blowing apart the novel and Allen Ginsberg the poem, Jackson Pollock was exploding canvases on Long Island, Charlie Parker was breaking the sound barrier on 52nd Street, and Marlon Brando was ripping his chest open on Broadway. In nextdoor Midtown, it was television’s “Golden Age” with Your Show of Shows inventing live sketch comedy, and Kraft Television Theater live weekly drama. Surfing the last of the vanishing vaudeville nightspots, Lord Buckley and Lenny Bruce were cutting their teeth before cutting the edge of stand-up comedy. And several new publications began appearing, from the Village Voice to Playboy, all bringing the edge to the middle of the country.
In 1945, Jackson Pollock moved away from the nightly Village bar scene — with Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Frank O’Hara and roomfuls of other boozehounds — and out to the seclusion of a farmhouse in Springs, Long Island, to begin his dripping live action paintings. Where he came up with the idea is anybody’s guess since the tormented alcoholic abstractionist was notoriously uncommunicative about his process. His sculptor-friend Constantine Nivola could at least explain the lead-up: “It was the Surrealists, such as Breton, who had the idea of releasing the tension in painting without any preconceived notions, letting the spontaneity do the actual painting.” Pollock just took the idea to outer space. Or inner space. If you stand in front of one of his dripping paintings and stare into it for a while you can take a long strange trip without ever leaving the gallery. Somehow in the subconscious rhythms of Pollock’s trance dance he created a mirror of our mind, patterns out of chaos, and motion out of stillness.
“It was great drama,” filmmaker Hans Namuth said of watching him work. “The flame of explosion when the paint hit the canvas; the dancelike movement; the eyes tormented before knowing where to strike next; the tension; then the explosion again.”
“When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I’m doing,” Pollock once said. When another brilliant Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffmann asked him about the use of nature in his work, he answered — “I am nature.”
It was this firm belief in the natural flow of self that was propelling so many of these daring young artists in their flying seat pants. And remember — this was when gray was the national color, vanilla the flavor, conformity the goal, and McCarthyism the disease of the era. The slightest deviation in hair length or hemline meant you were a communist to many in this newly military-trained generation.
In November 1945, the same month that Pollock moved into the barn on Long Island, Charlie Parker moved into the WOR Studios in Midtown Manhattan to lay down some abstract expression of his own in what Savoy Records not unjustly called, “The greatest recording session in modern jazz.” The first session ever under Parker’s own name featured a little combo including Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis on trumpets and Max Roach on drums.
What Monk, Parker, Dizz, Miles and others had been working on the last few years of Monday night jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem and the clubs along 52nd Street was the first big break in jazz since Louis Armstrong stretched the solo in his Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions in 1926. By improvising a new melody line based on the existing chords of 32-bar popular songs like “I’ve Got Rhythm,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and “How High The Moon,” and often playing at double the tempo of the rhythm section, these bop-blazers created an unprecedented “skidilibee-bee you, —oo—ee, bop sh’bam,” as Doctor Kerouac so accurately diagnosed it in “The Beginning of Bop.”
Considered “almost telepathic” even by reserved jazz journals, Bird’s frenetic speed carried him into the unknown every night, relying on the same subconscious instinctual current that Pollock was channeling. And this complete commitment to intuition was about to revolutionize American theater.
Get this: When Chekhov’s first play The Seagull had its original production, it bombed so badly he vowed to never write another play. Then a young director named Konstantin Stanislavsky came along with some wacky new idea about actors improvising from their own experience to fully convey the psychology of the characters, and he begs Chekhov for the rights to re-stage the play. This pivotal production heralds the birth of both the Moscow Art Theater and the Stanislavsky “Method,” and gives the playwright Anton Chekhov the encouragement to go on and write a few more plays you may have heard of.
Flip ahead to December 1947, New York City, and A Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando is opening on Broadway. This pivotal production by Elia Kazan heralds the birth of both the Actors Studio and the Method in American theater, and gives the playwright Tennessee Williams the encouragement to go on and write a few more plays you also may have heard of.
Stella Adler described Streetcar’s lead and Greenwich Village resident Brando as “the perfect marriage of intuition and intelligence,” but she could have been talking about any of these ice-breakers of the American art-ic.
Stanislavsky’s tenet was: “You must live the part every moment you are playing it.” Like Bird, Jackson and Jack. Rather than perfect diction or posture, actors were encouraged to channel the center of their soul. The frame of dialogue was only a canvas to fill in from the actor’s own experience.
And this same self-reliant philosophy was taking hold all over New York City. In 1950, with network television barely five years old, Sid Caesar and a few friends came up with this wild idea to do a funny 90-minute skit-driven comedy show on Saturday night live on NBC. For the next four years, televised sketch comedy was being pioneered on Your Show of Shows, with writers like Woody Allen, Neil Simon and Mel Brooks first getting their pens wet.
That same year, Lord Buckley, the wailinest Beat comedian there ever was, was getting ready to hit the road after five years of developing his improvisational hipster style in New York’s dives and dying vaudeville halls. Telling stories in his hipsemantic rap he’d “recast incidents from history and mythology into a patois that blended scat-singing, black jive, and the King’s English,” as biographer Oliver Trager summed it.
“Lord Buckley’s a secret thing you pass under the table,” Ken Kesey once explained of Buckley’s lack of name recognition, even though his influence ranges from George Carlin to Jerry Garcia.
“Lord Buckley and Grateful Dead philosophy merge in a certain irony of viewpoint,” Garcia told Trager. “The way he did his show was very dramatic. It would start off like a regular stand-up routine, but it really turned into kind of a primal experience. A very powerful style with a lot of magic. You can’t act it. You have to think of yourself as ‘Lord Buckley.'”
In December of the same year (1950) Kerouac received “The Letter” — Neal Cassady’s famous 13,000-word Joan Anderson/Cherry Mary epic (brought jazzily to the screen in 1997 as The Last Time I Committed Suicide) — which would change Jack’s approach to writing. “I have renounced fiction and fear,” he wrote Cassady right back. “There is nothing to do but write the truth.” And within a few months he’d finished On The Road in a single twenty-day stretch on a single roll of tracing paper in a single paragraph.
To describe where his technique was coming from, Jack honored his friend Allen’s request to write his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief & Technique For Modern Prose”:
“Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, ‘blowing’ (as per jazz musician) on subject of image. . . . Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at ‘moment’ of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion. . . . Write ‘without consciousness’ in semi-trance (as Yeats’ later ‘trance writing’). . . . Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better.”
And speaking of seeing better — that same year the revered Brave New World author, Aldous Huxley, first took mescaline and wrote a vivid and valuable account of it in The Doors of Perception. Louis Armstrong was an old teahead of time, Bird a heroin addict, Jack, Jackson and Tennessee hard liquor drinkers, but this was a whole new trip. Huxley’s detailed and “inexpressibly wonderful” account of exploring the amplified mind opened The Doors for the psychedelic revolution that was shimmering just around a corner on Haight Street.
In 1953 yet another scholarly study appeared that would spark an even better revolution — Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — whispering in science that a quarter of all married women had extramarital affairs and most women had multiple premarital partners. (!) Ozzie was aghast and Harriet blushed, but the secret was out. Sex was happening. As part of his research, Kinsey even met with Tennessee Williams, went to see Streetcar, and studied the actors’ sexual backgrounds. He also interviewed the Beats’ number one hustler Herbert Huncke, and in fact used him to round up subjects. Too bad Cassady lived in San Francisco.
In 1954, a 19-year-old Elvis Presley passed through the doors of Sun Studios, and the whole world snuck in behind him. Brando won the Oscar for On The Waterfront the same year he was appearing in theaters all over the country as the leather-clad leader of a motorcycle gang called The Beetles in The Wild One. The possibilities of what was commercially acceptable were changing forever.
By ’55 the rockets of the renaissance began going off like fireworks —
James Dean’s disaffected hipster goes drag-racing with trouble in Rebel Without A Cause; Rod Serling’s “Patterns” wins an Emmy as he begins tweaking the summit of our imagination; the Village Voice and a new journalism appears; Chuck Berry goes cruisin’ with Maybellene;” Little Richard lets everybody know he’s Tutti Frutti all rootti — and Billboard begins tracking its first “Pop” chart; Marilyn’s white dress goes whoosh in The Seven Year Itch and the first birth-control pills start being sold; Jack writes Mexico City Blues in a month, giving it the inscription, “I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday;” Burroughs starts nibbling on his Naked Lunch, Ferlinghetti snaps a few Pictures of The Gone World, Ginsberg begins to Howl at the Six Gallery reading — and the On The Road fame train is still two years away.
From Pollock’s swirling strokes to splashing color screen-savers — from Brando reaching New York audiences with A Streetcar Named Desire to Bravo reaching nationwide living rooms with Inside The Actors Studio — from Jack’s punctuation-liberated prose to the abbreviated brevity of online language — from Ginsberg freely howling to Richie Havens howling Freedom — the commitment to spontaneous subconscious expression during this pivotal mid-century decade intuited our new millennial lives in ways still being improvised.
Originally published in Interchange Magazine, and TransForum Magazine, Jan. and Feb. 1993.
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“We march to the music of our time.” ……………………………………….Bill Clinton at his Inauguration
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Little DorothyWashington slowly snuck up to the Iron Curtain of Oz, and peaked behind the screen. Her eyes popped when she discovered only a hungry old woman hunched over on a stool, pulling what levers were left of The Evil Empire. It was kind of embarrassing. You spend half a century and all your money preparing for battle, only to find your enemy’s a broken down old matron.
And Dorothy was pissed. Four-Star Ike, Dick the Magic Dragon, John Wayne Raygun, and Stormin’ Norman George suddenly looked worse than silly. There was no “there” there, and the paying customers were talkin’ refund. There were riots, poverty, and incurable diseases at home, while they’d sat spellbound at the feet of the their elected monarchs listening to tales of tigers in the jungle.
You should have seen the look on their tiny faces when the curtain peeled back and they discovered they’d been sitting out in the cold (war) for decades while last year’s losers were all in school attending class.
“Those damn foreigners were sitting around getting smart again while I was listening to Bonzo’s bedtime stories. Am I ever stupid!” Dorothy whined, hitting herself upside the head with a ballot box.
The Grand Pendulum reached its apex during the hundred hour ground war in Kuwait, and the recess bell clanged for change. Dorothy was picking at a daisy, wondering, “Uhmmm, if Iraq has the third biggest army in the world and can’t even last longer than a long weekend, what are we doing this for?”
Enter: the swing era, the sea-change, electricity, spring in the step, new life, blinding fireworks, cascading karma, oh my god — Elvis is in the White House!
“What a weird dream!” Dorothy says, waking up.
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Those crazy Americans have done it again. They couldn’t be content with a Paul Tsongas or a Bob Kerrey or some other respectable guy in a suit. No. They had to pick a pot smoking sax player from a state most of the country couldn’t find on a map.
As an expatriated Winnipeger who’s been caught in the gears of America for years, I decided to rent a van, convert it into a jack-proof mobile fort, and drive to Washington to witness the passing of the spliff.
The nugget of the whole week was the concert at the Lincoln Memorial on the Sunday before the swearing-in. It was televised on HBO, so check local listings. (It cost them a bundle — they’ll repeat it a lot.) It had the first all-star performance of “We Are The World” since Live Aid eight years ago, including Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Aretha, and a cast of many who I think just sort of wandered out there.
But it was the spirit of this very black and white audience that transcended. Kids, grand-couples, middle class families on blankets — and everybody in a really good mood. And no idiots. When was the last time you were in a crowd of half-a-million people and there were no screaming idiots?
So there you are, and there’s these giant TV screens, and there’s James Earl Jones reading Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to the point where, when he reaches the climactic line, singing America in his rich baritone, and stressing the words “the people,” half the crowd is just bawling their eyes out:
“That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from this earth.”
Then Jack Nicholson strolls out and the crowd starts howling and laughing and falling over. His hair is blowing straight up off his head like his toe’s stuck in a socket, and he’s reading Lincoln all serious-like but the whole field is just roaring and laughing along with His Freakness.
Then Aretha Franklin comes out, the queen of living soul, and man, can she still hit it. She sings “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” and the whole time you’re going, “Yeah, this is cool, but I wish she’d sing ‘Respect.‘ Not quite the gig, though.” Then Boom! She does it! Aretha’s honking on “Respect,” and the whole crowd of America starts shaking its collective black ass under a clear winter sky. It was so funky you forgot you were at an historic event.
Then, whoops, Dylan appears out of nowhere! And by his reaction, it’s even a surprise to Clinton. He wasn’t even rumored. You can see Bill on the giant screen just bopping in his seat like a little kid, and he’s hitting Al Gore, going, “Hey Al! Right on! It’s Bob! Haw-haw. Did you set this up?! Pi-i-i-ig whiskers!” And Dylan’s up there massacring “Chimes Of Freedom.” Brilliant song choice, Bob. Too bad no one could understand a fucking word you mumbled. The screens that were showing the large text print of what was being said/sang, started scrolling ahead, and then back, trying line up some syllable they could identify.
Jack. Aretha. Dylan. These are the artists that the President of the United States identifies with!? Jack “Here’s Johnny” Nicholson? Aretha? The touring soul goddess of love? Dylan? The poet laureate of the music of revolution? The guy didn’t even show up at Woodstock, and here he is inaugurating a President? You think the times have changed? I mean, is this possible? I don’t think so..
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What Were Once Motifs Are Now Symbols, to update the Doobies. Saxophones — and shades. Okay, who wears sunglasses? Hip people, right? “Symbol of,” anyway. And where did that come from? The ’50s Beats — used to cover up stoned red eyes. “Originally employed as a drug aid — now handy as a presidential metaphor.”
And the saxophone. Not the clarinet. Not the bass. Not the grand piano. The guy has to wail on the saxophone — Charlie Parker’s engine. The rock horn. The horn that was too wild for big band jazz. The human soul pipe.
Let’s review: The sax. Shades. Jack. Aretha. Dylan.
Open discussion question: What type of person has these five things on the back of their baseball card?
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Then out on The Mall, there’s two days of open tent free concerts featuring Bob Weir of The Grateful Dead and thousands of twirling Deadheads at the foot of the Capital building. Then, Los Lobos. Little Feat. Michelle Shocked. All officially invited mind you — playing on the Great Field of America, surrounded by Smithsonian museums, and literally in the shadow of the Washington Monument. Wynton Marsalis. Robert Cray. McCoy Tyner. Four on-going sound stages. For two days, besides the Lincoln concert. Taj Mahal. Linda Ronstadt. Blues Traveler. Food stands from 50 states. It was Folklorama, Yankee style. And these are the official functions.
Back in the alleys of D.C. lay copious dens of iniquity and schmoozing that were churning in overdrive. Refurbished warehouses, old banks turned into decadent lounges, TV screens everywhere, CNN, C-SPAN, open bars, here a schmooze, there a schmooze, everywhere the camera’s snap.
It’s out of control, of course, but there’s 12 years of pent-up frustration just bursting to get out. Or maybe it’s 30 years, or longer. The children of the Ozzie and Eisenhower Conformity Generation, who briefly blossomed during Kennedy’s spring of freedom, have finally grasped the reigns of power they had only dreamt of in the adolescence of the sixties.
The psychological spirit of America was born in 1945. That second world war victory established them as a true empire, greater than the old ones of Europe who were unable to curtail their own cancer within.
It was awoken by a splash of Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist painting, trumpeted by Charlie Parker’s be-bop musical revolution, and its journey narrated by Jack Kerouac singing Whitman’s song in the modern age. The young nation flowered, dreaming in the immensity of it. It was the Age of Aquarius. The Summer of Love. The Woodstock Nation.
But as a few of its heroes dropped, the optimism of youth disintegrated into cocaine-dosed debauchery of the ’70s. The country got sucked into the great temptation pit, like Adam, Achilles, Macbeth and Milkin. “Make me Big. Bigger.” Schwarzenegger. Schwarzkopf. “Bigger, Bigger. Kill. Kill.” Transfixed by its own muscles and glued to the mirror, it belched, “I love myself.”
America has rounded the corner of middle age, and put away its childish things. The hopeful intentions of the songs sung from the stage of Woodstock in 1969 were echoed from the stage of the Lincoln Memorial in 1993. America came home from the wars last year, and found that her family had split up while she was off becoming champion of the world.
A country rooted in Jefferson, Lincoln, Whitman and Thoreau, had somehow degenerated into Nixon, Quayle, Trump and Tyson. Not even America liked what it saw. So it changed. No matter how dramatic and funky and symbolic this Aquarian Coronation was, it’s only a reflection of a much bigger change that’s taken place in the mind and body of America.
David Amram, Jami Cassady, Al Hinkle holding the book,
Levi Asher and the author after the Cassady Family panel
at the Beat Shindig in San Francisco .
This is an excellent book about Uncle Jack, and also a heartfelt outpouring of love for Mom and Dad, and the Grateful Dead, too. I just got done reading the section about Mom. Very touching — made me miss her. Thank you for writing this.
Jami Cassady Neal & Carolyn’s youngest daughter
Brian Hassett… Your book rocks. I read it in spurts so everything has a chance to sink in … it really is good, you know!!!!
I am lovin’ it … it’s written to hold a reader’s attention. Thank You.
And p.s. — You were quite popular during the conversations at the Prankster reunion!!
Anonymous (original Merry Prankster)
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Mountain Girl — just after she’d been given the book
at the Prankster reunion
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I’m reading your book and enjoying it immensely. Surprised and enlightened.
I am still laughing from what I read last night. Laughter is the best medicine, and you gave me some big howls. ‘Harpo’ Orlovsky got the biggest one, and the altercation with Gregory Corso. I really liked him.
The repartee is so well rendered, and your Ken Babbs descriptions are right on. And very funny. The general mayhem aspect is also spot on.
Thanks for the rerun! I was there for part of it, with Barlow.
Congratulations on creating an awesome read.
And thanks for the blast of light! You rock!
Grinning, MG
If you have read Kerouac, and are interested in his life and work, and the movement he and his friends inspired, and the effect it has had on our lives since, I suggest reading Brian’s fine book. If you have not read Kerouac, I suggest you do so.
George Walker, premier Merry Prankster, and the guy who prolly put in more miles on the road with Neal Cassady than anybody else
“All the details were perfectly right on — which is so rare and admirable — and appreciated by people like me who are irritated by mistakes. Almost universally writers get one thing or another ‘off’ or backwards or off to one side. I’ll put a book down if I find one or more — but I read yours non-stop right to the end as soon as I started it. It was quite the book!”
Roy Sebern, original Merry Prankster (who first painted “Furthur” on the front of The Bus)
A tremendous author. The writing in this book is fantastic. This is a phenomenal work. If you’re wanting to expand your consciousness and you’re trying to become more enlightened, I can’t recommend a better book.
Here’s another cool interview I did recently with that big Blues site out of Greece that goes into everything from the meaning of life to the meaning of Beat. 🙂
This past June I took a copy of author Brian Hassett’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” for a three month road trip with Brian and his cast of characters. By starting at the start of summer I knew I’d have time to enjoy it at a leisurely pace, and I kept the book in my knapsack for three months. Many had spoken of the work with praise so I knew I was in for a bit of a ride.
I found myself savoring it like a comic book when I was a kid — saving the reading of it for when the time was best, because it was that special.
For anyone who’s into the Beats, Bohemia and all things hip — this is a must-read. With the energy of youth, Hassett has gone on the road to enlightenment and cool. Basically, a book about a literary conference in 1982 has morphed into a commentary of who we are now and how we got here.
With thirty years to reflect on the experience, the author has composed a road-wise and all-encompassing picture of that trip along with a wealth of archival information on the Beats, the hippies of San Fran that grew out of them, and the culture they catalyzed.
His chapters can be read individually, and that’s how I chose to experience it. I had to lay the book aside a number of times because the insights provided sent me on tangents that took days or weeks to explore and absorb. If I look at my google search history it will follow this book like a sub-map. I was under the surface like a fiend, looking up every little thing and nuance of interest to me.
One great example was the chapter and sections on the Grateful Dead, whose Farewell concerts occurred as I was reading the book. I could segue for a week in any direction before returning, including reading, listening to music, absorbing documentaries, and watching the most-watched Pay-Per-View concert of all time with millions of others, while the author was in Chicago saying Farewell from right in front of the stage. Then I would come back to the book, ready for another hit.
And the hits kept coming.Subject matter ranges from synchronicity — a concept that this book has rekindled in me — to the final chapter-in-verse that Jack would have dug the most. In between, it’s a sensitive, deep and educated look at the Beats and the culture they spawned, by a true scholar.
The whole Meeting Your Heroes thing is so real — especially with Holmes and Huncke. I’ve always thought of them as being warm people, and this vividly confirmed that. By the time he takes us to the Chautauqua Lodge porch I’d lost track of time and felt the stories were current. I found myself thinking in the present of 1982, as the writer must have while writing the book.
Then there’s the San Francisco adventure that sounds like it’s told by the long lost son of Bill Graham, the lover of the hip, the hippies and the hippest. There’s City Lights bookstore where I took my ten-year-old son and had a similar experience in that shrine. Then the historical reverence of Vesuvio’s, and that alley in between where so many giants of the counterculture roamed.
It is fitting that it closes with the chapter Song of The Road I Sing. Storytelling poetry. It’s a style all its own — sort-of classical rap — tasteful words with meaning, chosen wisely, wistfully and willfully — all with a Beat —the words strokes on the canvas of the mind’s eye.
For the finish — the “Dessert” — the chef in me loved that way of describing not an Appendix but a digestive. Something to help you process what has been consumed. Scotch, Cognac, Brandy …… Books, Films, Where Are They Now ….
All of these final tidbits helped this hitchhiker find the next road. Just the five documentaries shot there are going to keep me busy for some time. It provides an excellent path from the book to many other interesting places.
The whole thing is both an easygoing guide for the uninitiated, and a rich text of new insight for long-timers.
For a writer to take on the title “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” requires some bravadowhen it comes to guiding us to the true king of the Beats and the Road. And the goods are delivered.Hassett has the credentials and the balls for the task. The author has fully researched and archived the works of Kerouac in a way that informs and excites the reader to open other books, see other videos and truly appreciate the blossoming of the Beats that has occurred since this gathering happened.
Probably most refreshing is Hassett’s choice of grammar, syntax and structure. He plays the words and versing to create art which can’t escape from getting laughs and “oh wows” along the way. From the first paragraph riffing on Kesey’s work to the last paragraph of poetic prose — playing with words and touching the soul at the same time — this book is a creative force to behold.
Good art can stand on its own, just by the rite of its own beauty. This work goes beyond even that. It inspired me to hit the road, to connect with my heroes, and to open new doors. Great art — like this — can do that.
Brian Humniski.
John Allen Cassady — photo by author on one of their adventures
cited in the book
I just finished from first to last page of your Hitchhiker’s Guide. It’s a remarkable tale of getting yourself going to goneward. Made me laugh, and overstand your estimations of the so manys I’ve known, crossed paths with, smoked and drank and listened to or reasoned with and agreed or dis on who or what they are-were. Some of I wished was there and others not, but you was, and that counts on the real when-then.
Very glad you got it in print and I have it in hand.
Gerd Stern Poet and multi-media artist, who did NOT lose the Joan Anderson letter
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KUDOS
Loved Brian’s new book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac“ — a Kerouacian account of his experiences attending the On the Road Conference in Boulder in 1982. It’s a mighty river of reminiscence, taking the reader along like Huck and Jim on a raft down the Mississippi of his mind.
How did you do it, Brian? I know you’ve always been a notebook jotter, like Kerouac, and you had your cassette tapes and all the subsequent published records — but still, after thirty years to plunge us willy-nilly into these vivid moments of that distant time stream!
We are there! We live this immersion in history-in-the-making, this turbulent Gulf Stream of personalities that live on the page: that first encounter with Ginsberg on the stairs; Kesey in freeze motion; that stroll with McClure; that actor you bump into in Vesuvio’s in San Francisco ….
Everyone is a soulmate on the same journey — this heartfelt hitchhike we call life.
I especially liked his own rich thumbed journey across this massive country, and his magnificent rendering of a Grateful Dead concert.
This is the book Brian was born to write. It has all the color and verve and excitement and passion and wonder of a young kid discovering life, told in the hushed innocent voice of that young kid.
When Brian and I huddled over a pitcher of golden beer in the Grassroots Tavern on St. Mark’s Place thirty years ago, not long after he had had these experiences, I had no idea what an epic lay dormant in the convolutions of his brain!
It’s all fireworks, my lad, all fireworks to the last sparkler.
Prof. Carl Patrick
More than a writer, you are a worldwise, lifewise storyteller of the highest order. The Hitchhiker’s Guide rocks with diamond halos, and rolls with musical glee. A Beat bridge between then and now, and now and then. You are indisputably a genuine part of Beat history my friend. You carry the torch forward and see to it that it burns brightly. A living link. Honored to be on the road with you; mad to write, mad to live. We read your book, and everyone goes awwwwww ….
S.A. Griffin Beat Poet Laureate and Senior Raconteur of Los Angeles
This is great writing! You really captured it. We musta crossed paths somewhere during the conference. I love the two days of Dead tripping — then waking up and realizing you were running the projector for Kesey and Babbs. Really funny and good. I enjoyed the hell out of the whole trip, in fact. There are no slow songs. And the road poem as the coda really worked for me. Great job.
Dan Barth Poet Laureate, Mendocino County
Another Prankster gets his wings. I mean, his book.
Cap’n Babbs, with Denise “Mary Microgram” Kaufman and Roy Seybern.
Brian is the horse of a different color you’ve heard so much about!
The WizardofWonder
You are one of those very unique people in this world who is truly “free,” not held back by all the many restraints and pressures most of us endure.
Your take on this event is authentic with that wonderful sense of humor and insights. This is a real treat and a true education.
Deanna Waters, actress and teacher
Brian, I am loving the book! It is bringing back memories of the event, and it’s almost like being back there.
I’ve described Allen exactly like you have! It’s weird! If it hadn’t been for him, the Beat movement would have been much less significant than it is.
The bit about Trungpa is exactly as I remember it. He was drunk out of his mind and I don’t recall him ever showing up on campus again, although I did see Allen ministering to him over at the Naropa building on Pearl Street.
Anyway, just wanted to let you know how much I love the book! You did a great job!
Lance Gurwell, photographer, Boulder ’82
What does “Beat Generation” mean today, 60 years after Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder & Michael McClure rocked a San Francisco crowd with a world-changing poetry reading, and 46 years after Jack Kerouac’s wan and befuddled death in St. Petersburg, Florida?
All I know is that the the legacy of Beat literature feels like a continuum. Many young people are still drawn to the legacy today, not because it belongs to the past but because this particular past is still connected to our present and our future. There was a low-point when Beat literature seemed cold and dead during Reagan’s ’80s — yet it was during those very years that I first wandered curiously into a midtown Manhattan auditorium to hear Allen Ginsberg read and sing some poems. It was a knockout performance (for a tiny crowd).
Brian Hassett’s rollicking, delightful memoir The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouactakes us back to those lost years of the 1980s — 1982 to be precise — when the hippie movement was replaced by disco and new wave, and we were all supposed to get excited about stock market booms and MTV. The author, a 21-year old former junior roadie for the Rolling Stones and Yes who is looking for his life’s next turn, wanders into a bookstore and spots a poster promoting a “Jack Kerouac Conference” in Boulder, Colorado. He heads in that direction, and that’s what this book is about.
Hassett showed me an early draft of this book, and I’m extremely proud to have been one of the first to say to him, “Hey, Brian, this book really works.” The challenge of a road trip memoir is to capture the elation of an unpredictable adventure in all its raw ecstasy, and Hassett pulls this off with humor, honest emotion, and bursts of wonky literary information. It happened that the Jack Kerouac Conference he wandered towards was an absolutely epic gathering, allowing his book to tell stories about William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Jan Kerouac, Diane DiPrima, Ken Kesey, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner and (playing some concerts at nearby Red Rocks) the Grateful Dead.
The conclusion after all these people and all these events is — the inspiration is still all around us, still inside us, always evolving, always alive.
Levi Asher — LitKicks
At the Shindig at The Beat Museum in San Francisco.
It was with great anticipation and pounding heart that I tore open the latest shipment from state side, knowing my copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouacwas in the box of boat parts and other wonders sent from America. I am sitting on my boat, Furthur, named after the magic bus, cruising in the Philippines. I have been “on the road … or seas” for the last six years. As I blasted through the pages I was transported to the times and events that shaped my life — putting me where I am today. That long strange trip was spawned from my older cousin passing On the Road and the Dharma Bums to me when I was fourteen years old.
Now reading the account of the famed conference — the players in the genesis, the primal ooze of our culture — rang a bell in my old hippie soul.
Reading this was akin to reading a firsthand account of the Last Supper or the writing of the U.S. Constitution. The account transcended history and moved into the realm of the sacred. This was the wellspring of life, the source. Brian captures not only the events but also the writing style and the linguistic twists and jumps of the Beat authors he is witness to. This is not an accounting made by a nonpartisan observer. Brian is a believer, a squire immersed in awe and reverence. He did his homework and journalistic duty all while being awe struck. That is not an easy task, but he got the job done, and done in a way that pays homage to the greats.
Capt. Brian Calvert, M/V Furthur
To everyone.
Anything you heard good about Brian’s book.
It’s True!
It’s amazing.
It’s adventurous.
It’s historical.
It’s reflective.
It’s philosophical.
It’s fun.
It’s a masterpiece.
For reals.
And I don’t like much.
For example, I hate the Grateful Dead.
Brian Hassett?
Have to quote Kerouac.
Crazy Madcap Saint of the Mind.
— TKG – LitKicks.
In the summer of 1978, I made a Jack Kerouac-like trip across the U.S. and back, even spending a few days in the mountain town of Boulder, Colorado. I only mention this, because just four short years after my visit, it played host to a remarkable event — a 25th anniversary conference cum festival celebrating the publication of Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road, a get-together I would truly have loved to attend.
This magnificent birthday bash attracted virtually all of the Beat Generation writers (only Gary Snyder of the surviving inner circle failed to make the bill) and also drew a much younger admirer, an aspiring penman by the name of Brian Hassett, a hyper-energetic college kid with an impressive track record as an organizer of live events and even as a manager of rock tours, who found out about the Boulder hoedown and immediately offered his services as a general runaround for those trying to make the occasion run smoothly.
His offer of assistance accepted, Hassett spent the next couple weeks rubbing shoulders with his literary and musical heroes, for the Grateful Dead not only provided financial backing for the celebration but also played gigs close by during the event.
The junior Hassett gathered enough experiences, garnered enough adventures, to turn it into a book and, an extraordinary 30 years later, he has finally pulled together all his memories, all his interviews, all his encounters, from that remarkable time to produce an account that vividly recaptures a golden moment in the Kerouac chronology.
Written with a frenetic pace and utter passion, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Jack Kerouac, is a Beat-inspired odyssey, its words, its sentences, its paragraphs, a rolling cascade of highway incidents, late-night conversations, offbeat meditations, woven together in a quite intoxicating mix, as Hassett heads out from his homeland of Canada for the American West following his heroes Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, the fictional figureheads of Kerouac’s greatest novel, by sticking out his thumb and absorbing every moment of the rollercoaster that follows, whether meeting strangers who give him a ride from state to state or the poetic stars – Ginsberg, Kesey, Corso, Burroughs and many others – who are the headliners at the countercultural convocation.
If you haven’t read a book by Kerouac or the hip penslingers who were his friends in the 1950s, why not start by picking up Brian Hassett’s picaresque jamboree to give you a unique flavour of the Beat scene?
If you have read Kerouac, then this Hitchhiker’s Guide will give you a fresh and furious, flip and funny, feisty yet always philosophical take on why that late novelist still counts and why Boulder in 1982 was such a blockbusting, book-minded buzz, a beatific blast that put Jack and his extraordinary legacy back on the map.
Simon Warner, author of “Text, Drugs and Rock & Roll”
Just about read your whole Hitchhiker’s Guide To Jack Kerouac in one SWELL FOOP! Writ on a roll, heavy on the details, light as a feather in joy, deep in your voice, poetry in motion. Buoyant! Bravo my frang!
Jason Eisenberg, Lord Buckley channel
Brian Hassett is the Dan Brown of the Beats! With this new book, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” he takes us back to the Beat Round Table in 1982, capturing the time when the most Beat Knights and Maidens would congregate around the legend of Jack Kerouac.
He painstakingly lays out for us the Beat Rose Line, or should I say the Road Line (Beat Royale), that long yellow stripe that cuts across the North American Continent. In the United States we can trace this evolution back to at least the transcendentalist of Emerson and Thoreau. Brian takes us along on his own personal grail quest, the treasure hunt for the Beat Code where we find Neal Cassady as the American Jesus Zen man, Carolyn Cassady as Mary Magdalene, the disciples of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Huncke, Kesey, Burroughs and Corso. This Road Line continues when Excalibur is passed on to the Grateful Dead, Dylan, the Merry Pranksters, Deadheads and the many other descendants.
My first Dead show was in 1984 and unfortunately I didn’t get to the Beats until much later. However, I always had a tacit understanding that I was traveling along a road made up of much more. This road is our personal mythology, the vibrant infrastructure that informs our life whether we are aware of it or not.
Brian has helped me become aware of my personal collective origins. When I walked into Warby Parker for the Beatnik Shindig pre-party on Hayes Street in San Francisco, I half drunkenly pointed a knowing finger at Brian and he flashed back a quizzical “Don’t I know you?” smile. We didn’t know each other but at that moment we did.
“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” 1841
Philip E. Thomas
Horst Spandler, Germany’s foremost Beat scholar.
Your book has been on the road with me around Denmark and Italy, and we’re travelling together to the Canary Islands next week.
Per DeVille
WOW… what a wild ride!
I just finished this book, and it far exceeded my expectations. I enjoyed it immensely, and it is now etched in stone as a part of Beat scholarship.
There are only a handful of people with Beat and Prankster cred walking around, and Brian Hassett is one of them.
This book, like the trip it describes, just keeps getting better and better as it rolls along through the American counter-culture mindscape. Hassett takes us on a wonderful, easy drive that puts the reader in the shotgun seat of a slew of hitchhiking adventures, and backstage at the very important 1982 Kerouac conference in Boulder Colorado, then lets the reader unwind with him at the homes of Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs, two icons whom Hassett, like Kerouac, finds and paints the inner beauty and human side of. Bravo to the author for realizing the importance of these events and recording them, and then taking his time to embroider it into a beautiful tapestry when the time was right.
Richard Marsh
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With the book on a scroll in Brianland
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This book was amazing!!! Brian better keep writing because I’ll sure keep reading!!!! He has an amazing way of telling this adventure story while teaching you so much about the Beats and the hippies!!!
This book makes you want to get out there and meet people, meet your heroes, get On The Road and keep going Furthur!!! I will be reading this book again and again!!! Keep them coming Brian!! I love your style!!!
Albert Hoffman
A brilliant read, brother. Jack would have been mighty proud of the influence he had on you.
From one Beat to another — you completely understand what they were all about and why it is still very important today. Without the Beats we would not be who we are today. Keep writing, please!!!
Mark Smith
A fun ride that’s well worth the trip!
5 stars
Holy smokes – what a ride! Reading Brian’s book is like reading a modern day Alice In Wonderland. Not only does it explore the Jack Kerouac Conference in Boulder, but it also explores the culture of the Beats and the hippies, and if one doesn’t know of the connection and the extent of the influences, this book is a great way of seeing how it’s all connected.
How — as Brian puts it in quite lovely fashion — it is one massive family, spanning generations. I thought I was caught up on that schooling, but I still had to have my pen out, writing names and titles down from time to time.
The language of the book reflects this culture — there’s references of lyrics borrowed from familiar artists that get you (me) nodding your head smiling, and it flows with the theme and the reader’s pace. The language is friendly, excited and fun.
Reading it is similar to Brian sitting beside you, beer in hand and verbally explaining his adventure to you. Kerouac would have loved such a form of telling and so would many of the other Beats as well. But this book is for more than fans of the Beats — there’s a lot here for fans of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, to the The Grateful Dead, to the wonderful art of hitchhiking.
But to me, an aspect I truly enjoyed of the book was Brian’s own observations from his experiences. He has added his own perspective, experience and personality to an already library full of works, and he fits in with all of them. This book can also stand on its own, of course, as a tale about a dedicated fan who got to get up close and work with his heroes. This special opportunity is rare, especially with someone who can acutely describe the experience and the knowledge gained in such simple yet mind-blowing fashion.
So sit back, open the book to page one and go along for the ride, like a hitchhiker with a thumb in the air and a big wide smile and hair against the wild wind.
Jason Henderson
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with Furthur’s John Kadlecik at Bear’s Picnic
My fellow Pranksters — There is a must read book out there — Brian Hassett‘s Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac. I’m marginally well read when it comes to the loosely defined “Beat” genre, but after reading this book I am more enlightened to this art form. I thoroughly enjoyed it (and am reading it again).
The book is really well structured. Brian encapsulates the personalities and character of the authors he was able hang out with and interview during a once-in-a-lifetime gathering for a Kerouac writers conference in 1980’s Boulder, CO. Please get yourself a copy!
Deven Brinton
Everyone “On the Bus” or “On the Road” needs to read this book.
It brings to life so many of the characters that helped create our counter culture, and reads like an enthusiastic road trip through the heart of Beat literature with a side trip to a Grateful Dead concert!
Gubba Topham
After reading this great book, it continues to pop up in thought. Much like “On The Road” did back in the day. I felt like I took that journey with you. You are the real deal, Brian, as a writer and a person. You conveyed that in your book beautifully … now I tell everyone I know to buy your book and rekindle the love of Beats and fine writers.
Spike Smith
I finished your book an hour ago and am still trippin’. I do sound and stage manage shows and would love to include your most excellent voice. You really light it up.
Richard Grace
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Well, why shouldn’t Brian Hassett’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac [The Adventure of the Boulder ’82 On The Road Conference — Finding Kerouac, Kesey and The Grateful Dead Alive & Rockin’ in the Rockies; introduction by John Allen Cassady; published by Get Things Done Publishing, USA, 2015] read like a breathless telephone call or letter, a cassette-tape transcription, an inventory, itinerary, annotated bibliography, since it’s all of these — a fifty-four-year-old catching up on his own twenty-one-year-old’s [on-the-] road trip, a teen & twenty out of rock ‘n roll, and his reader, such as I am here on the cusp of seventy, happily hooked on the spirals of my own life story, and always knew it as story, even my first pages from 1963 of manuscript so grateful I haven’t lost entitled JOURNEY as ‘writing’ seemed to transcend ‘autobiography’ — thus my fellow-feeling for the young guy, Brian Hassett, forever younger, unembarrassed by the notion of heroes & hero worship, the Beats his hearth gods & goddesses, his pantheon, thus another way into history, what I call intersections —
utterly at home with his thinking aloud, reportage, fast & free, as I cant or won’t let myself completely be, devoted to British English’s musicality, both street talk & literature, its textured ear, the more so as it collides with one’s parallel love, the American colloquial, particularly the post-literary, the journalistic, the epistolary & journal-ism — except that I conjure a ‘literary’ which swallows it all, spitting it out, compelled to truth, thus clarity however close to blurting’s effluvium, adjacent to effulgence, humorous, true however knowingly comic, without spoiling or obscuring the candid, naked, generous moment!
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B.H. of Vancouver, teenage veteran of touring with Yes, The Rolling Stones, Cheap Trick etc, gets himself a gig back in ’82 with the staging of the first Jack Kerouac Conference — could say, gets the gig for the rest of his life. Of course he’s already a reader — Ken Kesey one of his stars, & Kerouac . . .
Hilarious story of the frustrations of trying to find a copy of On The Roadto inspire his girlfriend’s sister, finally locating it at a store which has — “this giant [Kerouac conference] poster on the wall and there in large print — ‘KEN KESEY’ And in tiny print at the bottom — ‘partially funded by The Grateful Dead.’ !!! Right away I got on the phone before I got On The Road. The conference cost about $200 or something, which is like two million today, so I told them I was a show person and could help them stage it from a production standpoint, and the coordinator said, ‘Yeah, we could use you. Come on down.'”
Having hitchhiked from Canada to Colorado — and how familiar his description is to anyone who’s stuck out a thumb, hoping, praying, cursing — though he’s the lucky one, scoring rides with like-minded drivers — and upon arriving he falls among friends, Kit & Arthur Knight for example, lends his ear to J.C. Holmes, Michael McClure, Herbert Huncke et al, clicks with one & all, and immediately starts scribbling in his own, let’s say it, holy notebooks, which were lost or hidden or unattended for all the years until the day in 2013 when he sat down to write a remembrance of the conference, which grew like Topsy —
listed in the book as Some of the ingredients in the kitchen, to wit, “Two different road notebooks from the trip; three hitchhiking logs; typed post-trip Log Notes; multiple cassette recordings made at the conference and on the road/; an inch-thick folder of papers from the conference including schedules and newspaper clippings and to-do lists; other Beat folders full of gems; my 1982 datebook; my Grateful Dead set lists and show notes; photo albums; Cliff Miller’s photos and memories; letters and postcards home; letters to friends during and after it; recent conversations and emails with fellow attendees.”
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Welcome to the Fan-ily! A comment from Neal & Carolyn’s son John Cassady says it all: “For some reason, Brian ended up in the middle of our family, and we were never sure why, but maybe he reminded us of someone who was always part of it.” And the fan from NYU & rock & roll promotion, who aggregates the intel, surrogate chronicler, quasi historian — fan as devotee, implicitly democratic therefore as to how & where his interest falls, affectionate to main & bit players equally — undergrowth as fascinating & instructive as the grand stand, the nub of local history, indeed the invigorating factor of history per se, the proximity that makes it bearable, demystified because tangible, present.
Kris Hemensley – Collected Works Bookshop, Australia
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with Dead keyboardist Jeff Chimenti
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As much as I have written about and read Kerouac, I had not at all connected him to the Dead, so I have that big revelation for which to thank you!! (“long backseat nap in the sky” a great phrase, by the way)
I had great fun reading this. Your style is perfect for the telling of the tale; great imagery, colorful and engaging… Took me there… and I wish I had been!
Your word choices were aswirl with the energy and real zeal of the tale, and you really do have a great tale to tell and your voice is perfect for it!
It was nothing less than revelatory for me to think of the connection between Jack and the Dead… of course, I’ve seen films and read about Cassady driving Furthur … but I just somehow never thought of Kerouac as part of the scene … him being so ill and anti-hippie (in that long, rambling awful interview from the Wm. F. Buckley show, which I know you’ve seen) … but your wit and your language surely did captivate and win me over. Keep on truckin!
Definitely born to be “on the bus,” so hope Weir keeps driving it Furthur!!! Like many others, I’m betting, I must be a Deadhead who just doesn’t know it yet…
June King
It felt like I was whisked away to the actual event! This is all written so clearly and participatively (is that a word?!) that’s how I read it so quickly — it felt so much like I was there that I couldn’t close the book ….
The Kansas Kid
I was there in ’82. What a trip! Thanks for taking us back. I love that you have the gift to keep the history of these things alive. … an ancient tradition.
Andrew Endre Szanto
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Swapping tales of the book with Paul Kantner at Caffe Trieste in S.F.
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Man I’m sitting hear wiping a tear away from my cheek as I just finished your book. Your voice is soft and clear. Truly wonderful. I enjoyed the ride all the way. I feel dizzy. So much of myself in there (which I am sure you have heard from others), including my dreams. I feel such an affinity with you, my brother.
Phil Thomas
Beatitudes — your book says it like it is . . . so smoothly.
Philippo the Mexican artist
Just finished Brian Hassett‘s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac.” Loved it! Left me agog.
This book is great stuff for a Beat addict. Thank you for sharing your memories!
Born in 1964, in a small town in Belgium, I sadly missed the Beat Generation decade and the sixties. Neal drove the bus “furthur” into NY two days before I was born. When I was 5 years old, a “Belgian Woodstock” took place 7 miles from our home (Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa & Gong among the artists) …
Back then, in 1982, at the time of the “Boulder ’82 On The Road Conference,” I was 19 years old (about the same age and as the handsome boy on the cover). I read a translation of Howl from the local library (by Simon Vinkenoog, the Dutch translator and friend of Ginsberg) and bought Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. So that was a pretty good start for mind travel. Could have been worse.
The interest in the Beats never waned, but slumbered. A few years ago, the sparks became a raging fire. So I read everything I could find about them.
Until this book appeared, I was more or less ignorant of the “Woodstock of the Beats” that took place in Boulder. No doubt about it — this author was very happy to meet all those Beat heroes. Luckily, he has a great heart and wanted to share it all with us.
What you find is a treasure of facts, anecdotes, and passionate stories.
Well documented and accurate (the dialogues came right down from tapes he recorded) and written in the frantic spontaneous prose Beat style.
Read all about them — all those great beat figures, the Grateful Dead, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, side stories about Van Morrison or Alan Watts . . . The Beat Generation decade and the sixties come alive again.
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” is great stuff for a Beat Generation addict such as myself, and a must-read for everyone who wants to know more about Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Beware: after reading, “a Beat addiction” may not be far away!
Johan Deruyck
Johan Deruyck with the book in Belgium
This book really changed my outlook on the Beat Generation and how much they have affected our scene today. After reading it I became a Beat freak. Brian really opened my eyes to all they did. Thanks for this!!! Much Love!!!!
Daniel Morse
I absolutely love this book! The author certainly lived the life many of us wish we had led.
I’ve been a huge fan of Kerouac’s since 1960. Reading Brian’s book was a special treat for me, as it would be for any lover of the Beats, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and Ken Kesey. And to think Brian actually was a friend of Kesey’s, knew Ginsberg, Burroughs, and most of the Beats, and has a background soaked in the culture that helped give the U.S. its soul at a time when we needed it most. Without any hesitation, I recommend Brian’s wonderful book! Heartfelt, humorous, and enlightening — it’s a complete winner!
Larry Shaw
“You know our love will not fade away” — what a grand finale last night in Chicago! During the intermissions of the simulcast I read your book with Grateful Dead music in the background.
Oh man! You’re not a good writer …. you’re a GREAT writer — and you made me feel like I was in the car with you during your hitchhiking adventure!! Bravo amigo, bravo!!
Alex Nantes
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Jami Cassady recommended I check out your book after I told her I had been underwhelmed by the last few Dead/Kerouac books I’d read. I thumbed through yours and read a few passages and was pretty sure it would be better .…
Which, of course, it is! Great job! I thoroughly enjoyed it — really cool stories and memorable word-for-word discussions, and just fun to read. And I totally appreciate the constant weaving of Kerouac and Dead allusions and quotes into the writing, like a jammin’ musician. It all comes off like someone writing from a seat on the bus ….
Props to you on a life well-lived … and still going furthur, of course…!
Jeff Zittrain
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Reading the comments in the beginning I’m starting to trust myself because so many of these are things I’ve said to you already ….
Lovin it so far … just Great!!! The way it reads is perfect for the “non-reader.” 🙂 Thanks, Mr. B.
Megan Reese
Love the writing style — takes me back to the psychedelic days. Lots of colors, patterns, rhythms.
Marc Spilka
If you like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead, etc. this book is a must-read. Brian’s writing takes you on the journey — it feels as though you are listening to a once-in-a-lifetime adventure from a dear friend that is visiting. Kudos to this amazing Beat writer.
Mary Jo Hicks-Sullivan
I want to be you when I grow up.
Joe Reed
Or there’s a whole lot of audience reaction is this video . . .
Opening the Prankster’s Family Reunion in 2016 . . .
Who all was there … of which John Clellon Holmes said, “More of us were together than had ever been in one place at one time before.” And it never happened again.
Here’s a whole bunch of clips in one YouTube Playlist in the sequence they appear in the book . . . 🙂
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Here’s a great group piece with Jami Cassady, Levi Asher & Prof. Walter Raubicheck at the book release party at The Kettle of Fish — the bar that’s on the front cover of the book where Jack famously stood by the BAR sign — 🙂
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Here’s the full (and funny) “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack” talk at The Beat Museum’s Beat Shindig in San Francisco in 2015 . . .
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Talking about how the book came to be written . . .
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Here’s part of the opening Chapter . . .
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Here’s the start of the “Meeting Your Heroes 101” (ch. 4) with David Amram on keyboards and Kevin Twigg on drums at the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festival October 2016 . . .
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Here’s the next part from “Meeting Your Heroes” with Jack Micheline and Andy Clausen . . .
The Professor In The Park scene (chapter 9) —
at Lowell Celebrates Kerouac — Saturday, October 10th, 2015 — with The LCK All-Stars at The Worthen — the oldest tavern in Lowell
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The same Professor In The Park scene — at Jack’s gravesite the day before — October 9th, 2015 — Lowell, MA — video by Philip Thomas
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Or here it is in 2016 from Brother George’s stage-side camera . . .
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Here’s hanging with Herbert Huncke on the Chautauqua porch (ch. 12) . . .
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“This was the Super Bowl of the Beats — and the Grateful Dead were playing the half-time show.”
Here’s the Dead at Red Rocks scene (ch. 14) — in a Red Room and ad hoc improvised in chaos like an Acid Test with a rock band.
with The Mark T Band at the Crimson Room in Toronto, and special guest Raina — Oct 23rd & Nov 13th, 2015.
And here’s a killer, wild-ranging radio interview with Jake Feinberg — Saturday, Nov. 14th, 2015 — the day after the above performance … and the host opens raving about that very Dead show!
Here’s the funny Al Aronowitz – Allen Ginsberg showdown from the final night of the conference (ch. 24) . . .
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Here’s a hitchhiking part — leaving Colorado for San Francisco (ch. 25) —
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And here’s the same hitchhiking trip — arriving in Marin (ch. 25) —
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Here’s the first time I set foot on Kesey’s Furthur Bus at his farm in Oregon (ch. 30) . . .
Filmed at the opening of the Merry Prankster / Twanger Plunkers Family Reunion — April 29th, 2016 . . .
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The first time the book appeared on stage — at The Pranksters in Wonderland — Saturday, May 2nd, 2015 — The “meeting the original Bus” scene at Kesey’s (ch. 30) . . .
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The final chapter — “A Song of The Road I Sing” — at Pranksters In Wonderland — Sunday, May 3rd, 2015 — with Jojo Stella — video by Jeremy Hogan
(The Beat Shindig in S.F., photo by Jim Musselman)
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Or here’s some Jack himself . . .
The “San Francisco epiphany” part of On The Road — with Kerouac’s principal musical collaborator David Amram — at Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! — Sunday, October 11th, 2015 —
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Or here’s a pretty in-the-zone version of the “Hearing Shearing” part of On The Road with the Still Hand String Band — wildally improvised an hour after I arrived on Friday night at Bear’s Picnic in PA, August 7th, 2015 — video by Prankster Ollie
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Or here’s a riffing story-telling tribute to Carolyn Cassady that seemed to come out pretty well . . . 🙂
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Or here’s a crazy moment — first time I ever stepped on stage with The Mark T Band — at the Crimson Room in Toronto — doing Jerry Garcia’s tribute to Kerouac —> Jack’s “Hearing Shearing” from On The Road — August 21st, 2015 — video by Trevor Cape
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Coming soon . . .
The Beat Shindig in San Francisco — The largest gathering of the Beats in 20 years — put on by The Beat Museum — June 28th, 2015
Lone Star Dead Radio interview with Eric Schwartz — on the air since 1983 — the longest continually-running Grateful Dead radio show in the world — aired live June 12th, 2015
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For a more complete collection of various Brian videos, go here.
For reactions to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac, check this out.
For a whole second round of readers’ reactions to the book, check out these!
