Another giant has fallen — another angel taken flight.
Carolyn Cassady has just left us to join Neal and Jack on that great road trip in the sky.
Her son John, the light of her life, was there by her side till the end. After a year’s refusal of entry into the U.K., just 3 months ago he was able to return to England to be with her.
She was her regular rockin self up through Sunday, woke up with a tummy ache Monday morning, had an infected appendix, and checked out by Friday.
We should all be so lucky. She was 90 years old and still drank her white wine and smoked her More menthol ciggies every day.
That is to say — she was living the life she chose, on her own terms, in her own house, until the very end.
Besides Neal’s love for her, it’s my considered opinion she was also the love of Jack Kerouac’s life — and they pledged to be together in the next one.
So there’s that.
Carolyn was spiritual, an intuitive channel, naturally smart, well educated, well read, independent, creative, curious as all get-out, strong … yet loved hugs, uncommonly forgiving while still holding a firm sense of right and wrong, and was a helluva gifted portrait painter. Sold hundreds of them.
She grew up in a library of a house, with a biochemist father and English teacher mother, and intellectual discourse and reading were the orders of the day.
She got her BA as one of the first students at the revolutionary Bennington College in Vermont, then earned her MA in Theater and Fine Arts at the University of Denver, where she was living when she met Neal.
Carolyn was the first of the then unnamed generation of Beats to move to San Francisco, and she was the reason Neal went there, which is why Jack went there … and so tumbled the dominoes of history.
I used to phone her at her cottage home in the forest around Windsor Castle every few months just to chat, and a little over a year ago she told me she didn’t expect to be here next year.
Since none of her three kids could get over there at that point, and I was sort of freed up for the first time with my mom just passing, I went and lived with her for 3 months, and boy did we have a time!
When we first started hanging out in the early ’90s, we were having so much fun, it made me realize I could be doing this with my own mom, who was about the same age. And for the next 15 years my mom and I took our adventure even further and were even better friends than we had been before — and it was thanks to Carolyn opening those doors wide so I could see how much possibility there was.
Carolyn was born a week after my mom in April, and died a week after her in September. I always wanted to get the two of them together but I guess we were always a week off. Talk about fabulous roman candles exploding across the stars — those two together woulda lit up the night sky till dawn!
And she wasn’t just a surrogate mother to me, but was the den mother to the entire Beat Generation, the only one in that whole crazy krewe who maintained a home with kids and a garden – and a Kerouac bivouac under the backyard tree. And she remained a mother figure until the end to hundreds of fans who would email her, and she’d write every one back, offering her advice and years of wisdom to help with any problem anyone else had.
She maintained a routine for at least the last decade of her life, where she would do emails in the morning, read from a stack of books beside her bed all afternoon, and by 5:00 it was okay to have a glass of wine and watch the local and then Beeb national news, then quiz shows or nature documentaries in the evenings.
She also had shelves full of Beat movies that I went through and had us systematically watch every damn one, and I could ask her any question and we’d hit pause and go off on crazy tangents and get another glass of wine and maybe watch another five minutes then something else would come up and it would take us about ten hours to get through one movie!
And she’d always say to whoever was talking in a documentary, “That isn’t how it was!” and be correcting the history as it’s being presented. And the funniest time was when she was yelling at the screen, “That’s completely wrong! You don’t know what you’re talking about!” and it was her being interviewed! 🙂
She is survived by her beloved son John Allen Cassady — named for Kerouac, Ginsberg and Neal — but she called him Johnny. As well as by her daughter Jami Cassady-Ratto, and her first-born Cathy Sylvia, as well as her grandchildren Jamie, Becky and Bill, and her great-grandchildren Jon, Ellie, David, Bradley, Elizabeth and . . . Cody. 😉
Carolyn rocked — but she also held down the Beat so others could solo.
Or here’s a book I wrote that she read part of and loved — “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” — but sadly wasn’t published until after she passed.
Allen & Lucien — I mean, Radcliffe & DeHaan — sharing a laugh at the premiere gala at TIFF, next to Michael C. Hall (Kammerer) and Jack Huston (Kerouac).
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Just home from “Kill Your Darlings” — the second of three movies based on Jack & the Beats being released within a few months of each other in this 2000-and-lucky-13.
The following goes into a lot of detail about the film. Even though the storyline is not a mystery, if you want to keep the film a mystery for yourself, you should skip this. On the other hand, there’s a lot of cool chit that’ll enhance your experience — or at least let you know what you’re in for.
This may be complicated — but to quote a memorable line from the movie: “I love complicated.”
The Setting:
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) — at the festival and the city’s premier venue, Roy Thompson Hall — a high-end 2,000-seat symphonic concert hall.
The deal with having your film at this schmacy space, I found out, is that it has to be sponsored. Mega-corps like (in this case) Audi, Visa & a corporate law firm, buy the venue including renting secondary rooms for VIP/client schmoozes — in fact, with full china sit-down table settings pre and post film for the suits ‘n’ manicures set.
Turns out — the only seats sold to the public are the balcony — in which I of course score front row.
So … playing in this huge ritzy showplace is a Beat movie about people who couldn’t afford a small bag of ($5) popcorn in the joint. And speaking of joints, it was a buzz to smell the righteous Canadian sweetleaf being sparked up as soon as the lights went out!
I talked to lots of people in line and in the theater and couldn’t find a single person coming because it was a Beat story — it was basically all Radcliffe fans — bringing serious flashbacks of the people swarming the On The Road premiere at TIFF a year ago this week for Kristen Stewart.
If they weren’t there for Radcliffe, most seemed to have come for some completely random reason, like they got a free ticket or it was the only movie they could get a ticket for.
And also bizarrely similar to OTR, the line-up outside was about a 70-30 majority of women over men. Seems weird — but this was true of both these films’ premieres at TIFF, and the London premiere of OTR. Except in this case, of the 30% who were male, about two-thirds were gay couples. Apparently this movie is sorta big in the gay community — it has gay main characters, a gay director and screenwriter, male movie stars kissing each other, and a naked gay sex scene.
So, there’s that.
Outside it was the now-modern-classic image of all these people standing in line with their heads down typing on their phones. I spotted four different people reading books — none of which were Beat related. One guy wrote a paper last year on Burroughs, and one girl heard about the Beats in her English course at the U of T, but those are the closest connects I found in talking to a score or more of people. .
The movie is an Allen’s-eye-view of meeting Lucien and discovering New York and his own identity. It’s so crazy sad that he couldn’t live to see this or Walter Salles’s On The Road. He would have loved both of them. At least he’s giggling safe in heaven’s theater.
This is not really a movie about the murder (as portrayed in the trailers and ads) — it’s the story of Allen growing from an insecure recent high school grad through his journey to college and writerhood.
I haven’t seen Big Sur, the third film in this 2013 trilogy of Beat dramatizations, but this does make for many interesting harmonics with On The Road. There’s the jazz club scene, the benzedrine scene, the small bohemian apartment scenes, the gay sex scene, the wild young buddies getting blissfully drunk together scene — many of the same adventures, but set a few years earlier in the same 1940s Manhattan — with Lucien in the role of Neal Cassady.
In Jack’s epic Duluoz Legend, this would come just before Road. (For the complete list of films chronicling The Duluoz Legend by date, see the Beat Movie Guide or the box at end.)
One difference between the two films: you should definitely experience On The Road on the big screen — for which both the auteur’s vision and the cinematographer’s lensing were very much designed. Kill Your Darlings could probably be just as well experienced on any home screen. Maybe this has to do with it being made by a first-time director and/or someone who grew up watching and living with smaller screens versus a director who’s made 20 films and has a big landscape vision, both for the screen and life.
Also like On The Road, this features tons of high-end actors in a low budget indi film — because most of them were fans of the subject, as were the screenwriter, director, and production and costume designers — Beat fans all. In fact, Michael C. Hall, famous as the eponymous lead in Showtime’s “Dexter,” who here plays the doomed David Kammerer, met Allen a couple times (being the oldest of the young gang of actors) and confessed to being awe-struck by the gentle living legend.
And that’s this generational transference that’s never stopped happening with the Beats. The screenwriter and director were college roommates 10 years ago when they were inspired by these writers and first hatched the idea as a theatrical play. And the TIFF Grand Pooh-bah introducing the film called the Beat Gen “the most pivotal artistic movement of the 20th century.”
So, there’s that, too.
And you should know this was a no-budget movie. It got made on less than a shoestring, shot entirely in 3 weeks, all on location (mostly upper Manhattan), and all on film (not digital – so I guess that’s where whatever money went). DeHaan and Radcliffe managed to squeeze in a total of 5 days of rehearsal beforehand.
The film does succeed in taking you back to New York circa the late war years, including a great soundtrack with “Sunny Side Of The Street” and lots of others. And there’s a cool use of a period Manhattan subway map to take the viewer around town.
Besides the overall capturing of the Beat milieu, this is also a classic bad-boy buddy-picture that fits comfortably in the same pranksterish cinematic school as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Blues Brothers and Rumble Fish. And that it was made by two real-life college buddies, about real-life college buddies, makes it all the more resonant and cool.
It also quite candidly and bravely explores a not-long-ago time when “hymies” and “queers” were routinely and acceptably stigmatized. The way the film deals with these terms and sentiments so casually yet impactfully is one of its real strengths.
And this Dane DeHaan who plays Lucien! Meet your new movie star! This guy has the charisma, looks, chops, brains (as revealed in interviews) and screen-presence of someone we’re gonna be seeing a lot of in the future.
Lucien was the New York catalytic Cassady, the guy who sparked the fire, who had the mind that could hold the attention and confidence of a some pretty smart and challenging writers. And DeHaan’s performance would make me follow this guy anywhere.
And Radcliffe . . . it’s so reminiscent of On The Road with this HUUGGEE megastar in the movie. Most of the public who paid to come, came for him; most of the fans at the red carpet were there for him; … and would the sponsors be throwing this gala if it wasn’t him in the role?
One interesting thing about this kid, I mean this versatile young actor, is something he confessed in an interview when the film was premiering at Sundance — “I’m in a very fortunate position where I don’t have to be on a set where I’m not completely enthused and passionate about what I’m doing. I can be selective enough that I only do things that I really believe in and think can be something special.”
And another interesting note – his acting career is based on playing a famous literary character — not some Home Alone kid or something — and one of the first roles he takes after that is to play another famous literary character. And Allen Ginsberg was quite the character!
I don’t know if I’ve watched 10 minutes of all nine Harry Potter movies combined. Maybe others will, but I did not see the actor. I saw the character. To me he was a very believable Allen — frantic, frenetic, passionate, crazy, insecure, heart-broken, eager, curious, challenging. And not fer nuthin but Allen has sure gotten some great portrayals lately — James Franco, Tom Sturridge, and now Daniel Radcliffe. Two of whom are British! Go figure.
And Burroughs is just doppelganger dandy! First in the “trilogy” Wild Bill was personified brilliantly by Viggo Mortensen, and now here by Ben Foster, who (like Viggo) was a big Burroughs fan before he got offered the role. When the director first called him about maybe being involved, he answered the phone as Bill. And he pulls off the blinking, shifty eye movements and lip twitching toa T.
And then there’s Jack. Who, if you’re a fan of, is A) kind of written out of the story, and B) looks the least like, is played the least well, and has the least lines of any of the principals. What’s up with that? I have yet to see a cinematic portrayal of Jack that comports with the visual, audio and written accounts of the man. He had “classic” good looks — and was just about the only writer in history that a Jon Hamm or Rob Lowe or any of a million handsome up-and-comers could play and it wouldn’t be unrealistic. His wife Edie and others who knew him then summed him up simply with, “He was movie star handsome” — as any of his mid-40s thru mid-50s photographs attest. It’s weird and sad to think one may have to go back to John Heard in 1980’s “Heart Beat” for the closest thing to Jack on screen.
Even though this film was cooked up and populated by 20-somethings, it also has respected veteran actors like Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kyra Sedgwick and John Cullum joining this very independent unglorified college-film.
That Allen’s parents are played magnificently by Leigh and David Cross (who recently played Allen circa 1965 in the surreal Dylan film “I’m Not There“) shows the depth of casting, and the commitment to Allen and his story. Leigh, who to these eyes has never been less than mesmerizing in any role she’s taken, is yet again in a class of her own here as the Kaddish Queen.
Then there’s the story …
We already have Jack’s version of the events leading up to and following the Kammerer murder — 3 times! — The Town & the City, Vanity of Duluoz, and And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks.
We have Burroughs’ version in his chapters from Hippos.
We have Edie Kerouac’s wonderful telling — the most flushed out of any of them, spanning nearly a hundred pages — in her “You’ll Be Okay” posthumous autobiography.
And now we have this film of Allen’s version — drawing from his posthumous “The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice.”
In other words — we have many different first-hand accounts of the meeting of these minds and the unexpected extreme event that occurred in their midst. Ya gotta just be happy that at least one of them ever got made into a full-length motion picture.
The problem is — telling the Kammerer murder story from Allen’s point of view is sort of like telling On The Road from William Burroughs’s. Allen was the least involved and the last to find out. That this key moment in the birth of the Beat Generation should be portrayed as a trio that does not really involve Jack Kerouac is like making a movie about the birth of America without Thomas Jefferson.
Then there’s just so much they got factually wrong, at least compared to every account I’ve ever read — and they’ve been working on this thing for ten years.
In just this one viewing I noticed …
They have Lucien going to see Jack first after the murder, and then Bill, when it was kind ofimportantly the other way around (!)
That Lucien had a steady and traffic-stoppingly gorgeous girlfriend at the time, and that the two of them along with Jack & Edie were a regular dating foursome, and that these two robo-babes were living in the same apartment together while going out these two uber-dudes — who were the central ones involved — is completely absent.
And according to Jack, Lucien kept saying to him, “I’ll get thehot seat for this.” But in the script he says, “I’ll go to jail for the rest of my life.” This may seem small, but since Jack was the only one there to hear it, and reported it differently, repeatedly, and that the real line is so much more impactful and distressing, not to mention historically significant as he’s referring to the famous “Old Sparky” electric chair in Sing Sing just up the Hudson that was still in use at the time — how after ten years of rewrites would you not have this right?
Or they have Jack phoning his dad for bail money, and the character asks for $5,000 — not the $100 Jack actually asked for and needed (as documented in every account of his incarceration, including his own). And since his dad famously turns him down … $100 (the real amount) would have been so much more dramatic and to the point.
Or how they have Burroughs happily doing cut-ups more than a decade before scissors were ever a gleam in his eye.
Or, startling to any New Yorker … they portray the Hudson River shoreline in Riverside Park … as a sandy beach fer chrissake!
I’m no Allen scholar, but it sure makes you wonder how much about him they got wrong as well.
Then there’s my biggest beef by far — that Frankie Edie Kerouac Parker is portrayed as a shrew. This is so wrong, on so many levels. Edie was the catalyst, and for sure the coolest, most fun, most go-along simpatico chick Jack (and maybe any of them) ever hooked up with. Edie “got it.” Big time. Her apartment was the center of the gang’s activity — when not at their neighborhood clubhouse, the West End Bar. And she was cool with that. In fact, the crazy messy endless party scene bothered Jack more than her. She was the one who created it, and more often than not was the only one paying for it and anything else.
It was Edie who first met Lucien in her evening Columbia art class and introduced him to her boyfriend Jack — which led to Jack meeting both the movie’s protagonist Ginsberg, as well as Burroughs. It was Edie who made that pivotal connection — cuz she dug both these smart, wild-eyed happening guys. Not to mention that Burroughs met and then married her next cool apartment-mate Joan.
And if you don’t know, since the filmmakers didn’t seem to, Edie at the time was this gregarious buxom blond knockout who was always having a good time and attracting attention wherever she went. Jack described her as looking like Mamie van Doren. That she’s written and portrayed so completely 180 degrees opposite of who she was, really brings into doubt the integrity of this entire endeavor.
Then there are all these disconcerting overt implications — that Allen’s dad sent his mom to the insane asylum so he could have an affair; that Lucien was the one who first said, “First thought, best thought;” that Kammerer verbally asked to be stabbed and killed. When you think of the obvious well-known facts they got wrong … that they’re committing these implications to celluloid is something of a crime against real people’s reputations. I mean, the movie’s being sold as “A TRUE STORY!”
But in the end … the loving movie they made is an energetic passionate creative youthful super-college-film. Good for them for sticking with it and making it happen. What a dream-come-true for these young Beats to see this showcased at Sundance, TIFF and Venice. And they definitely captured Allen’s ride … with his parents, in his classrooms, with his friends, losing his virginity … and I assume most Allen fans are gonna love this.
But after it was over, some guy outside on a phone was telling his friend — “It was Harry Potter in a weird gay porn movie.”
Which may sum it up for the unBeat masses better than I ever could.
The Duluoz Legend sequence of films (so far) would be:
Kill Your Darlings — set in 1944 (released 2013) The Last Time I Committed Suicide — set in 1945 (released 1997) Heart Beat — set in 1946-66 (released 1980) On The Road — set in 1947-49 (released 2013) Beat — set in 1951 (released 2000) Pull My Daisy — set in 1955 (released 1959) Big Sur — set in 1960 (released 2013)
For a full Beat Movie Guide to all the dramatizations check my summery with links at — The Beat Movie Guide.
Lucien — knew Kammerer and Burroughs from St. Louis; met Jack thru Edie, who he met at an evening art class at Columbia that they both took; he met Allen when they were both freshmen living across the hall from each other in the dorms at Columbia.
Jack — met Lucien thru Edie; then via the Lucien revolution he met Allen, Burroughs & Kammerer.
Allen — met Lucien living across the hall from him at Columbia dorm; thru Lucien met Jack, Burroughs, Kammerer.
Burroughs — vaguely knew Lucien from St. Louis; through Lucien he met Kammerer, who introduced him to Jack; through these three he met Allen.
Whale, we had another Jackfest — dancing with Big Sur by the Sea, My Brothers! — this time in Jack’s wave-lapping hometown of Northport, the idyllic little living Rockwell harbortown where he went to dock near the darkness of the city but still remain a slip away.
I’m just back from the novel-performing road trip with Cassady, and his bottle’s still spinning on the table but not falling over as he’s dashed out the door to JFK to hop the bird back to Cali, so before the body gets cold and the news gets old lemme be so bold as to share some gold …
Sunday, July 22nd, 2001 began with a proclamation where the mayor gave Carolyn & John Cassady the keys to the city or some such thing at a very official ceremony. And as part of it, Carolyn read two revealing letters Jack wrote to her. One, from Oct. ’61, was just after he finished writing Big Sur, and describes the big bursting Cassady-Kerouac reunion scene in Ferling’s tiny cabin that, wildly, we were all going to read together later. Both letters were full of longing and heart-felt passion — and Carolyn’s just a beaming gem in a tender-heart treasure-chest. Jack and her were really close, and it’s so nice she was around for the whole weekend being open and accessible to anyone who wanted to talk.
It was Sunday morning in the Universe, and this being the crumbling Empire of New York, there were no liquor stores open! So, Big Tim Moran and I — he was Edie, Henri & Herbert’s friend — bolted back to our Chalet hideaway to collect the only bottle of cold white wine in town. It was a dizzy hounds of hair morning for more than just myself after a night of howling at the Jackmoon out on George Wallace’s back deck. We were bad. Clearly could have used some parental supervision.
So Tim and I follow the directions to where the all-day reading of the novel will be, and he looks back at the paper and says, “That’s it right there,” pointing to a sign that reads “Northport Police Station”!
He kept driving looking for a parking spot as I’m looking back over my shoulder, but still see the word “Police”, as I’m tryin to shake the picture clearer in my beer-soaked lab, but it still, “Looks like it said ‘Police Station’ back there.”
“Yeah,” Tim bursts out with a long-suppressed laugh. “That’s where it is.”
“Hmm,” I say, turning around, trying to count how many laws I was breaking at the moment. “First time we ever played a cop shop,” I Jaked to his Elwood.
We go up the stairs and on the right is the door directly into the precinct, and in the center are 2 glass doors leading to . . . a courtroom. Sure enough, we’re celebrating Jack’s judgement day novel in a court of law. There’s a poem in here somewhere. But we must have been acquitted cuz in the end (tho I don’t want to give it away) we were all let go on our own recognizance.
Levi Asher and others are sitting up in the judge’s bench area, there’s a big camera from the Metro Channel in the witness stand, and the room’s packed with rows of chairs that are all full in the early excitement. Maybe a hundred people, then a spilling overflow anti-chamber room just outside the courtroom by the glass doors where the pacers and racers had a space to zoom. Printed on the front of the table with the books and CDs for sale it says in big bold letters: “Defendants Stand Here” — as if we needed this reminder when we’re admitting our guilty pleasure!
Outside the doors, the front steps became the green room hang-out scene. You could just open the glass doors and hear the show from right there, and sorta pick whichever chapter or reader you wanted to catch, then take a break and hang with the cigarette smokers and surreal surfers.
It became obvious that we needed a proper dressing room, so I brought out a nice chair for St. Carolyn By The Sea, and that pretty much evened out the Universe — except that we didn’t have a corkscrew! We thought of going in the police station to see if they’d confiscated one recently but instead John & Big Tim went across the street to the old brick house that was the Northport Hysterical Society with two old ladies behind glass-top counters containing artifacts and tiny labels like, “Hammer – circa 1850” or “Mabel – circa 1925”
“Uh, do you have a corkscrew by any chance?” asks our dangerous duo. “No, I should say not!” Then Ambassador John turns on the charm and they get to talkin’ and he says, “It’s for me mum, she’s the co-chair at your event across the street.”
“Oh, who’s she?” asks the inquisitive matron. John looks down at the countertop and there’s a picture of her & Jack & John’s two sisters. “That’s her right there.” And the motherly one behind the counter smiles and says, “Just a minute,” and goes and unlocks one of the glass cabinets and takes out this large bone handle corkscrew that Walt Whitman used or something and goes, “Here, maybe this’ll work.”
So we popped open the bottle, and oh yeah, we’d brought one crystal goblet from the sweet suite, and got Carolyn perched on a throne sitting at the top of this grand staircase like Abe Lincoln, holding a glass of wine and holding court, surrounded by her coterie of boys as different people would come by to visit her. Most would squat down to be close to her, and each would have some story they wanted to share, always including the line, “I first read On The Road in 19whatever and it changed my life . . .”. Eventually I snuck out a few more chairs and smuggled over some Heinekens from my secret iced 2-4 stash in the trunk and it evolved into a full-blown, feet-up, room-with-a-view backstage party — on the front steps of the Main Street police station at high noon on a Sunday!
Inside the reading, Dave Amram’s set up in the corner with his 7,000 instruments strewn all over the place, with drummer Kevin Twigg workin the brushes on a full kit, and bearded John Dewitt thrummin’ the upright bass. There’s about 5 different little digi cameras rollin, and it looks like a two-camera shoot from The Metro Channel. There’s musician-poet Casey Cyr, painter-poet Susan Bennett, installation artist China Blue, filmmakers and actors Michelle Esrick and Peter Gerety, architect and photographer Larry Smith, poet George Dickerson, and on and on.
And if this wasn’t already enough of a Surreal Circus — in between some readers there were these — belly-dancers! Ya’huh. Jingling little-bell-tingling colorfully costumed barefoot belly-dancers weaving to Amram’s best Middle-Eastern snake-charmer, and yer goin’, “Okay, which one’a you Pranksters slipped the acid in my joe?”
Within this belly-dancing 3-ring courtroom, some readers really rose to the occasion — like Levi Asher on chapter 9 who was understated and funny and riveting reading Jack’s first sea-me breakdown. And then this actor John Ventimiglia who’s in The Sopranos among other things, plays Artie the restaurant owner, he’s way into Jack (had just played him in Joyce Johnson’s play Door Wide Open) and as John smiled later, “He sounded more like Jack than Jack does.” And Carolyn said, “When I closed my eyes I thought I was listening to Jack.” So he was pretty good. He read chapters 10 and 11 including Jack’s great description of Lew Welch & Phil Whalen’s S.F. Zen-East House crashpad.
And then this local woman Kate Kelly came up for 12 and kicked the thing into another gear being really passionate and playful and strong and forceful and funny, all done with a smile as Jack rages thru his confusion. Then, with Amram on piano, John Cassady read chapter 13 — and John’s funny cuz he throws in all these little asides and commentary on the text as it’s passing. “’… in the old photo …’ Hey who took that? ‘… throwing tires all over the place …’ Oh this is so accurate, it’s great,” he says, laughing along to a quick memory movie. He picked chapter 13 cuz it’s about their life in Los Gatos, and he’s tossing off comments to his mom who’s keeping a running commentary right back in a smile sharing across a half-a-stage and half-a-century of them playing together.
After John read, we had a break until the three of us were on for our chapter 23 group jam, so we drifted down Main Street and popped in Gunther’s Tap Room, Jack’s old drinking hole, and you can see why — nuthin but a bar and a pool table. Except today there’s just tons of people sitting around with orange & black Big Sur paperbacks in front of them. So we shambled off like dingledodies down the sidewalk like we’ve been doing all our lives until we found a front window booth in some joint who’s motto was: “If you want service, serve yourself.” No sooner did we sit down than Levi and his sister Sharon come along (who was into the Beats before Levi was, we learned this weekend) and they stand there looking at the outside menu as we’d done seconds earlier and make the same call we did. And then Regina Weinreich … and now there’s a whole whack of us Beats munchin the Big Cereal recovery brunchfast. But this is also how ya miss part of the show, you understand.
So of course I get us back to the gig about 5 minutes before we’re supposed to go on, as Carolyn’s proclaiming with a raised I-told-you-so finger, “Brian gets things done!” followed by a big smile and laugh. She’s been riffing that refrain since we first started hanging together and by now it’s a running joke.
For my reading, even before we knew they were coming to Northport, I’d picked chapter 23 about the Cassadys arriving at the cabin and surprising Jack and McClure. I wanted to do it justice if they weren’t gonna be here to do it themselves (it is a courtroom after all) — then Lo and Behold! The Angels! They showed! So we weaved it into having John do the Neal & “Timmy” parts, Carolyn doing her parts, and me playing narrator Jack. We’d read together in Amsterdam — the first time John & Carolyn ever performed together thanks to High Times and the Cannabis Cup of all things. Then John and I just did a duet in L.A. at the Jack scroll-writing celebration that S.A. Griffin & I put together for Jack-finishing-On The Road-Day April 22nd, so we were already old hams at this.
And it was funny cuz everybody else was reading solo and suddenly we’re a trio with god knows what kind of improv winginess, and I’m sure ol’ producer George Wallace was kinda, “Oh jeez, what are these guys gonna do?!” ‘Course, we had no idea either. We’d gotten together the afternoon before and attempted to block off paragraphs and passages, but we were all just seeing each other for the first time in ages and much more gushy gooey gabby than rehearsey.
And it was funny — I wuz tryin to funnel some paragraphs or passages to Carolyn cuz she didn’t have too many “lines”, and each time I’d pass over something she’d scan down it and then go, “Aaa-no.” She loves the writing but it’s too close to home and some pretty graphic details about Cody’s lovelife. But it also has the stuff about Carolyn having two husbands for a while, which she loves, so we just go, “Ah, wheel wing it. No potholes on this golden road.”
So we get to the courtroom and Amram’s just taken off for soundcheck at his evening concert, but our “song” was gonna be so chaotically theatric we’d be more than making our own music! So we start off, bouncing back & forth, and John takes the McClure dialogue so we get to perform the cabin rap in two voices, and then he also rides the “Boom!” Cassady-bursting-in-the-door scene. When Jack lists the kids’ character names John starts laughing at his sister Jami’s Jackname ‘Gaby’. “See, that’s so perfect for her cuz she used to get up on his knee and just gab-gab-gab-gab-gab.”
And John takes off on the Neal raps, channeling Pop, rollin fast like the road, with animated hand gestures, laughin’, goofin’, playin’. Carolyn yells out “Grape” when Cody’s tryin to think of his new jeep’s color. At Jack’s comical adage for Neal, “He Lived, He Sweated”, John cracks up and starts doing this classic Cassady Sweating Shuffle dance at the podium, laughin and hemmin ‘n’ hawin and ah-shucksin’ and ya-had-to-be-therein’, then laughs again and says, “Ah man, that’s the best line in the book. I’m only serious.”
At Carolyn’s dialogue we all get it about half right which of course makes it even funnier and everybody’s laughin but it’s workin and there’s Carolyn gentle and petit and lady-like laughing away and gamely trying to hit her mark and it was a sweet tender family-beaming moment in Beatport.
After the reading we went off on a wild adventure to two of Jack’s three houses in town. The first one at 34 Gilbert was Really Nice! Couldn’t believe it. He bought it for $14,000 in March ’58 on a one-afternoon road trip with Robert Frank and Joyce Glassman (Johnson) just after On The Road splashed down. It’s a large Victorian, 50 years old when he bought it, with brown shingle siding, a big front porch, high front hedge, massive tree in backyard, and a big old double garage for both the cars he couldn’t drive. The house has three floors, with an attic garret for his writing zone, and as Levi kept commenting on, this beautiful stained-glass window in the front, looked like a reclining cubist nude, maybe 3′ wide, 18″ high. “You’d think this would have made it into the fiction somewhere,” Levi says.
So we take a buncha snaps with Levi and John and China Blue and Anthony who booked us in Amsterdam and who grew up right behind Jack’s house here as he tells us about Memere inviting them in for cocoa in the winter and disheveled Jack shuffling around in his terrycloth bathrobe and bedroom slippers.
All weekend there were different people with different memories of Jack. The artist Stanley Twardowicz was softly sharing stories of their drinking exploits, and Larry Smith who took their pictures remembering the mix of solemness and revelry, and all these other locals with little anecdotes about him. He really did live in Northport a long time — April ’58 to September ’64, minus a few excursions to Orlando.
Stanley was a great guy, by the way. Very friendly and open and sensitively remembering his old friend. Larry Smith had a few photos he’s never had published that were haunting. One of them from ’64 just gave Carolyn the willies. “It’s all in there. It’s all in those eyes,” she’d say emphatically pointing and shivering all over.
Then we went to his second house at 49 Earl Avenue after getting lost for about 500 hours. This was the “secret hideaway” he moved to after he sold Gilbert Street and their plans to build a house in Florida fell through — and where he was living when he took the Big Sur trip. He bought it in part for the finished basement he envisioned as his study, but later insulated the attic and put in a little electric fireplace to warm his crow’s-nest. It looks smaller than Gilbert, and did indeed have “the six-foot fence I’d built around my yard for privacy,” as he describes in Big Sur — a high old stockade style that you couldn’t see thru or get over. In fact Jack climaxes Big Sur right here on Earl with, “— The corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new fragrant shrine making my home even more homelike somehow — On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars — Something good will come out of all things yet —” And sitting on the front step of the house watching us watch the house was this big warm friendly calico cat, who never laid down or ran scaredy-cat away, but rather held there, saying, “Hello. Yes. I’m here.”
We never did find 7 Judyann Court, but wheel be back cuz we were all fully stoked about this fairy tale of a town with its salty harbor and sultry air. I mean gorgeous — quaint old-world Main Street with windy tree-covered sideroads, surrounded by hills ‘n’ sails, and nooks ‘n’ grannies. “Why didn’t Jack write more about this place?” Carolyn kept asking. The beauty of the town was really the surprise hit of the weekend for all of us. We were fully bummed we didn’t catch more of the readers, but it was such a gorgeous day and there were seven or eight Adventure Cards on deck. Had t’play ’em.
After the tour, we all went out for this enormous steak dinner following a tip from a local actor Cassady’d dubbed John Goodman — and we took over the place. It was your jumbo grill here’s-the-beef kinda joint where we could only get a big table in the non-smoking section, so we’d keep leaving our spread completely empty like a Dine ‘n’ Dash and huddle in the smoking corner while our sad plates sat there silently steaming.
We finally headed to Amram’s show late as hell, got lost, and when we finally found the park in the dark there’s this flood of people leaving with lawn chairs and blankets, and we’re like, “Whoops!” Carolyn and John were supposed to read some Jack with Dave’s band. So we wag up with our tails between our legs — but thank gawd he’s just takin a break and there’s a whole second set!
I spotted Jason Eisenberg, the crazy Lord Buckley channel who read chapter 18 and was probably great but we missed him when we went for that surreal recovery brunch, so he & I snuck away for a comical confab in the holy gazebo in the back of the park and riffed on the Universe as Dave wailed away on Ellington and Monk down the dark treed hill below us.
Then Carolyn came out and read the part of OTR where Jack’s “on the rooftop of America,” at The Great Divide, yelling across the plains to an old man with white hair walking toward him with “the Word”. And then John came out and knocked it out of the Harry Chapin Park — probably his best reading ever. Like a blues player he sang, “I’ll be seeing old Denver at last.” By this time I’d wound down with Levi and his parents & sister on a blanket right at the foot of the stage, and he leaned in and whispered, “He’s channeling Neal.”
Then John Ventimiglia did the ‘Hearing Shearing’ riff from On The Road with Dave’s sextet stepping into the role of Shearing’s band. Killer jazz-jam rendition. And local hero George Wallace closed the show with the classic last paragraph of OTR, just praised by the New York Times’ Editorial Page earlier this year. He read with this quiet sadness that almost made me cry, and it sounded like he was going to break down himself and could barely choke out the words, “I think of Dean Moriarty.”
So, there it is. I believe there may have been some drinking involved. Some folks are real straight and some folks are nine-bottles-later. It was pretty funny. But everyone was golden and glistening. It was really … small town niceness. The locals are livin’ near enough to New York City that there’s still a healthy voltage surging thru them, and they’re passionate about words & self-expression and being yourself — all the while living in a Norman Rockwell painting — just really good people … with a penchant for partying in police stations.
{An early version of this story first appeared in Beat Scene magazine.}
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For a video version of this and other Carolyn–&–John Adventures, check out these Beat video stories.
For an excerpt from my book about the ’82 Kerouac Conference in Boulder — check out Meeting Your Heroes.
Speak truth to Power.
Or at least ask it questions.
Since I came of mindful age after JFK & RFK and during the Nixon administration, it was near impossible to have anything resembling a hero in the world of American politics. But one of the first people who made me both interested in and unafraid of politics was this small but powerful woman in the front row of every White House press conference who used to fire an arrow from point-blank range right into the heart of bullshit.
I understood her questions and jumped out of my seat at her directness. “You can do that?!?!” I blurted out, wondering why others didn’t.
She was the Susan B. Anthony of the press core, the Hillary Clinton of unapologetic bluntness, the matriarch of Woodward & Bernstein.
She went face-to-face challenging every President from JFK to Obama — and no other reporter has ever or will ever ask questions of 10 Presidents.
They don’t even need to put up a sculpture of her because she’s already forever carved into the American landscape.
So … oh man … I took a nap that afternoon and lived a dream where I stayed home and didn’t go to this show and regretted it later … then woke up to find it was only 3:30 in the afternoon! Insane. Follow your dreams, baby. God works in mysterious ways.
It’s Toronto Jazz Fest. After doin’ N’awlins Fess to the elevens last year, but then spending the entire summer with one elder Cassady, there’ve been no more Fests for me since.
And Damo — last seen on the sneak-back-and-meet-Walter-Salles Adventure — has been assuring me for years that this headliner scene at Nathan Phillips Square is an easy-breezy prankster special. But me caregivin’ mom and doin’ gawd knows what, the tumblers never lined up — including in the subconscious dream just moments before. But THEN God brings it home … I’d just hit 50 gazillion targets in a row for the last 4 months on the Kerouac Adventure book and fer one frickin’ moment I technically wasn’t on a short-term deadline and damn-it I needed to remember why I do this and am alive so I treated myself to a night of music. I mean … it was Dr. John … a Spirit Force of the universe … one’a my bloods. Jerry’s gone, Johnny Ace is gone, as are so many of the sacred giants either by nature’s toll or man-made interventions — there just ain’t much left when it comes to the magic-conjurers of eternity.
But here was the good Doctor in town on a night I could rationalize a trip to the mystic gardens.
So I go, and it’s this whole scene … in the courtyard of city hall here in T.O. — which is a hugely cultural city with as many musically options as my beloved New York — but there’s this bizarre problem here with … audiences … the people … you won’t believe me, but music attendees in this city, no matter what the frickin’ show, just stand (or sit) there like they’re waiting for a bus. It’s the most unresponsive music town I’ve ever been in. For my American brothers (and can I just use that meaning sisters, too?) you wouldn’t believe it — just like there’s no way to explain to Americans what hockey means to Canadians — but music audiences in the two countries are a starker contrast than comparing beers!
After seeing Dr. John play with both Springsteen and The Meters as well as his own Lower 911 krewe in New Orleans exactly a year ago, I heard he had a whole new band, so I knew this was going to be interesting — and all the stars and the June SuperMoon were lined up.
Mavis Staples was opening — making it sort of a double bill in a downtown piazza in this giant rectangle white tent that holds about a thousand people. The stage is set up in the middle with the tent sides rolled up so they can sell out the seats at $50-60 a pop, but have this open plaza beyond where low-budget music lovers can listen and see in and dig the show. It’s beautifully egalitarian — and another difference between the two countries. If they were sellin’ chit in America they’re damn sure not to let anyone get it for free. But us Canadian socialists devised a system where you can pay to sit in front of the stage — or dance in the distance for free. And as I was saying’ to some brothers dancin’ back there — the distance between us and the performers would still put us in the front 5% of the crowd at the main stages at the New Orleans Jazz Fest.
So, Mavis happens — and among many things she does this killer The Weight. She takes the first and last verse, and has these passionate vocalists doing the others, including an old man for Pops’ verse. It was totally cool, and when it was over she went into a whole rap about Levon, quite overtly crediting him with writing the beautiful lyrics and not the guy who stole all the songwriting credits in that Band.
And I’m good with hanging out here on this plaza with dancing room — where, in Toronto, I may have seen as many as 3 people also shakin’ it — but there was lotsa space and totally clear views into the tent — and they’re selling local Canadian micro-brewery beer and Niagara region wines and all is good in the universe.
But after she ends with a gospel dancin’ I’ll Take You There it’s … are we gonna sneak in for Dr. John or what?
Damo, Master of All Things, and a perfect road partner, we …. Now see the problem is here, if I tell ya what we do then anybody and everybody including the event producers will know. But think Huck and Tom. Buy me a beer sometime and I’ll tell ya. But the next thing you know, we’re in the tent. And every seat is full, but there’s this VIP section up front … and knowing show production … I do some stealth reconnaissance … and, well, the long and the short of it is, within a about 5 minutes of us sneaking into the tent we’re sitting second row center, just along the row from that wise old music writer Rob Bowman.
And there he is, The Good Doctor. Seen the guy a hundred times, including right up close before, but never where his keys were on the lip of the stage and there was no separation between my tapping feet and his. If I fell over I woulda hit him.
And so … the madness ensues … he opens with Iko Iko! Of course. And he’s in fine form. 72 years old — just inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame — just won a Grammy in February for his latest disc “Locked Down” — and this guy is the opposite of an artist in decline.
“A few years ago a few of us in the band had the pleasure of catching Count Basie and his Orchestra. The core of the band was a quartet that had been together for 45 or 50 years — and they swung like angels. It was such a treat to watch those hoary heads rocking up and down. Then a couple weeks later we learned that the Count had gone home and put his feet up and quietly checked out. And to a man we all thought to ourselves, ‘Yes. That’s what I want to do.'”
And this is what music, and the pursuit of the arts — the striving for creation in whatever form that takes for each of us — teaches us about life. Keep doing what you love, whatever it is, and keep getting better at it till your last gig. There ain’t nuthin else.
And there’s the Doctor … resplendent in his mystic madness, spinning his web a hundred inches from my eyes and ears. I’m audience left so I can look up into his hands on the grand, and right in front of him when he switches to the guitar, close enough to see which finger was hit by a bullet back in the day.
And this whole new band is insane, to a man and a woman — and it’s this young white chick who’s the frickin’ band leader — and you’re like, what? I remember her from his Lower 911 band — Sarah Morrow, she’s great, but … the trombonist? This is Dr. John … and the other players are these heavy funky black cats, and it makes no sense … but she’s runnin’ the show … and has this band in her hand … and it’s super joyful … and you can tell it’s young and fresh … which is probably just what The Doctor ordered. Change it up. And for the first time he’s got somebody else playing a Hammond B3. Maybe some musicologist will correct me, but rarely if ever has The Doctor of Sound needed or wanted somebody else playing the church organ.
If you don’t know, in recent years he’d taken to having both the grand and the B3 at the front of the stage, and he’d just spin around on his special cushioned bench and play one or the other. And THEN the maestro would play BOTH — right hand on the organ chords and left hand on the high clear notes of the grand — which reminded me of seeing Miles Davis do this in a small club in New York — chording a keyboard with his left hand while soloing on the trumpet with his right.
But now Doc has this whole other cat wailin’ the B3 full-time … with this bass player to die for, but the whole deal was the drummer! This guy was beaming from the pocket from the first Beat.
A lot of drummers are really skilled but don’t exude their joy to the audience — it’s more about them. Ziggy Modeliste and this Reggie Jackson are the opposite. Like Keith Moon — another Master who transmitted the energy from himself thru his drums to the entire audience. It’s about the conveyance of joy — transmissions, man. And that’s what he was doing.
And I noticed that he, being the beating engine, had the piano keyboard directly in front of him so from his kit he could look straight down that line of 88s and follow the boss. It was amazing to watch. This kid on the kit was just joyous and plugged right in … as the bass player thrummed the Beat and the church organ wailed and there was a master electric guitarist for all those peak parts — it’s an orchestra and it’s jazz and it’s rock and it’s gospel and it’s soul and it’s gumbo and yer just exploding in your second row seat.
And he plays everything you want him to … Professor Longhair, Right Place, Wrong Time, St. James Infirmary,Revolution from the new album, and this guy behind me keeps yelling for Such A Night, and after about the fiftieth time I turn around and tell him to chill — he’ll play it as the encore, which of course he does.
And by the climax the place had gotten pretty loosey-goosey — formerly largely full of those Torontonians waiting for a bus, but by the time the show was running into the midnight hour they’d faded away and the real energy folks started coming down front, and I did this old trick I don’t mind sharing, which is you take the chairs and stack them up like you’re putting them away for the night. Every one you stack creates more dance space — and this is what I did — and for the last few songs we had a whole boogie bayou scene boppin’ up front.
So it’s this whole dancing orgy close enough to the bandleader you could touch him, and there’s Deadheads there with Jerry shirts, and NOLA Jazz Festers, and some old friends, and a sacred artist singing the sacred artform.
And as is always the case — the concert ends … and you have to make the music yourself.
So Damo and I started right up.
And after the drummer comes out and I shake my new best friend’s hand and thank him for beaming the Beat, brother Damo, Master Of All Things, leads me to nextdoor Osgood Hall, this famous law building from the 1830s in downtown T.O. with this 12 foot wrought iron fence surrounding a gorgeous old-growth park, and of course he knows the one gate that’s open, and suddenly we’re in this private oasis like Gramercy in New York, except way more trees and foliage-dense, and suddenly we’ve got a heaven to debrief — the most essential thing go do after a magic moment — let the overtones ring and the resonance sing and the reflections bring it all back to life.
The moments following a profound experience must be carefully managed to retain absorpsion of your gift and control of your space, inner and outer. After great concerts — here’s another tip I can share without breaking any secret sacred covenants — don’t leave your seat. See, this is what everybody does and you’re crunched into this cattle mash of nattering nonsense. What you do is stay right the puck where the goal was scored and soak it in. Eventually somebody will shoo you on, but by then the whole world is cleared out and you’ve grounded yourself forever in what just happened.
And Damo and I did just that . . .
but THEN we also had near an hour in this heaven of a park to drink cold beers still in our packs and pace about and talk a mile a minute and share everything about everything that just happened — like how during Right Place, Wrong Time you could hear about a dozen people spread all throughout the audience who got the mid-song “woo” moment which is so funny and joyous a part of it, and how in New York or New Orleans the whole audience “woos” in unison but here it was so distinctive because only about twelve people caught the cue. And about Mavis’s voice versus Mac’s — and whether people will be going to hear Selena Gomez or Justin Beiber when they’re 70 — and the whole Dr. John / Grateful Dead crossover, how he played Iko Iko and Wang Dang Doodle just like The Boys might on any given night, and how the spiritual improvisational essence of what he was creating was exactly the same good-energy voodoo Dr. Jerry was practicing. And how people in the front of the house, the pit, must respect their role as conductors to the audience and cue the masses behind with above-the-head clapping, standing ovations and overt dancing when it’s called for.
And of course weir both getting text messages of different hotspots to hit for the late set — and I’ve got this lead to some jazzy Winnipeg brothers in an outfit called Rockalypso at a club called Mezzrow’s that I want to go to even if just to find out if they named it after The Mighty Mezz — but Damo’s got this message pleading with us to come to the nearby Rex where the band is SMOKIN’ — and since that’s about a block away on the Extremely Happening Queen Street we break from our reverie in the green tree silent night heaven park and rejoin the post-show world of celebratory Saturday night Toronto.
When we got to the historic music venue, I looked in the streetside windows and there’s Dr. John’s whole band groovin’ at a table! Boom! In we go, and as defined, the band was this jazz-funk-rock-fusion super-group of progressive cats called New York Rudder with players from Steely Dan, Sting, the SNL band, Rod Stewart etc. making up a killer quartet, and not only is Dr. John’s band catchin’ them, but Roseanne Cash’s as well! It’s the late set musicians’ special with ear-popping audio coffee till 2AM. And the whole time I’m stealin’ glances at my new heroes, the Doctor’s new band, who are goin’ weirdly by the old name the Nite Trippers, but there’s my blood, the Zigaboo drummer diggin’ the late-night Toronto music scene, and I’m thinkin’, YEAH!
So, the show ends, and I’m like, “I gotta talk to those guys.” But right away all these people start movin’ in, comin’ outta nowhere, glad-handing the table, and my guys are jibber-jabbering away with ’em, and I’m thinkin’ all is lost.
But as some patrons begin to leave, there’s these two lugs just sluggin’ a jug in the space right beside drummer brother. So, with empty options around, I ask large lug #1 if he’d move over a spot and I pulled up right next to the happiest Beat-man in the world!
And Boom — we were just Off. Man! His name’s Reggie and he’s from Columbus Ohio — where I was just adventuring with “On The Road” director Walter Salles and that sonofa beat John Cassady — and I’m wearing the very “On The Road” button Walter gave me, which by some divine intervention I put on just before leaving the house — and man we’re jammin’ on that rich man/poor man crazytown Columbus — and he mentions something about “blessings” and right away I ask him about his religion and he’s a Christian and seems SO devote I ask him if it bothers him I’m drinking a beer but he’s waycool. In fact, he’s divine. He gets it. The cosmic giggle. The same grand prank that Kesey twinkled and Aretha harmonized and Martin preached is surgin’ through him, with an unstoppable prankster ear-to-ear grin goin’ all the time, just beaming joy, and so we’re right out in the open and it’s all clear sailing, anything goes, and we talk about church, and how he fell into the gospels at a young age, but also dug Mozart and Stevie Wonder, and how he’s heard of Kerouac but never read him, and I tell him about my drum invention — the improvised kit built around my computer to play between the beats of writing — and he’s like, “You need to film that!!”
And I ask him about his keyboard sight-line and he confirmed that’s the intentional way they set the stage. And I show him my New Orleans Musicians For Obama cap and he’s beamin’ at the sight-line of that, too! But mostly we keep talkin’ about The Spirit — and how that’s what moves ol’ Mac, the doctor — how that’s what it’s all about. And I’m thinking of every great black singer from Aretha to Whitney and how they came up in the churches, and the bands they had, and that’s how cats like those in this new band survived. The musical breeding ground.
And then Bobby the B3 player fell in and we started riffing about words and music and how they blend together and words can be music and music can be words — how prose contains rhythm and music contains poetry — and how he’s 59 and I’m 52 and we’re both having the best years of our lives — and we’re all locked down in the groove.
And then, ya know, as always happens, the gig ends. And we’re all hugs n magic and beaming and beauty and we say goodbye in the holy night of it, as Jack might say. And in that empty-bar silence after all the rappin’ riffs I suddenly remembered this amazing thing — Reggie’s drum solo! — how he brought it down to the tiniest quietest Beat that most people thought was the end, but he was just seeing how quiet he could take it while still playing the beat — and this drummer in the second row was keepin’ right with it even as premature applause broke out all around, but it was this inside fake-out that was just so cool — and remembering it, I had to tell him cuz he’s never gonna get the feedback — so I ran out and managed to catch him still in musician time on the sidewalk out front, and gave him the blessing in front of his whole band, and they were all just beaming like shit — Somebody noticed! It was this great beautiful moment of giving a gift back to him after all he’d given me. Lots of final group hugs with giddy grins and I bid them a safe tour and went back in to Damo and our crew which was just breaking up, and after what seemed like a long time before they went one way and I the other, I went back out of the club, and damned if the band had only made it about 50 feet down the street and were all taking pictures of The Condom Shack store!
“What are ya, a buncha tourists?!”
And so Boom we’re all back together again, headin’ the same way in more ways than one, and finally I can talk to the bandleader, this 20 or maybe 30-something young chick, and I’d been wondering all along what the vibe could possibly be between her and the older black cats, and boy, they were A Band. In the early Beatles sense. There wasn’t a resentment but a love, a playfulness, a protectiveness. It’s that whole yin that we yangers need, that other voice and mind and gender, that counterpoint, that comedic partner. It wasn’t that it caused imbalance, but rather she balanced the ballast.
So we shambled off like dingleberries dancing down the street and I wove into the jam like I’ve been doing all my life with people who interest me — musicians and players and pranksters and poets and parents and people of all professions who practice perpetual playfulness.
It’s the game of life. And it’s all about how you play the game.
I guess I haven’t mentioned who all was here yet . . .
This was the biggest gathering of Beats and their various spiritual progeny ever assembled in one place — before or since:
Allen Ginsberg (and his brother Eugene), Jane Faigao, the tai chi instructor at Naropa who was the main make-it-happen organizing producer following Allen’s lead, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, Gregory Corso (and his daughter Miranda), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Carolyn Cassady, Jan Kerouac, Edie Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, Robert Creeley, Robert Frank, Robert LaVigne, Diane di Prima, David Amram, Peter Orlovsky, Carl Solomon, Ray Bremser, Joanna McClure, Joanne Kyger, Joyce Johnson, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Al Aronowitz, Jack Micheline, Andy Clausen (and his son Jesse), Larry Fagin, Michael Brownstein, John Steinbeck Jr., early Kerouac biographer Charles Jarvis’s son Paul, who was I think the only person from Lowell to make it, Maria Livornese, Jeff Nightbyrd, David Cope, Randy Roark, Jay McHale, Kush, the funny-cool Naropan Judy Lief who some people said the conference was her idea, Bill McKeever, Todd Colby, Patricia Donegan, Eliot Katz, Dan Shot, Joan Dobbie up at the Chautauqua lodge . . .
As well as the leaders of the generation that followed, Kens Kesey & Babbs, Abbie Hoffman and his “running mate” Johanna Lawrenson, Timothy Leary, Paul Krassner, Pranksters George Walker and Jane Burton . . .
And then loads of scholars like Ann & Sam Charters, Lawrence Lee, Dennis McNally, John Tytell & Mellon, Gerry Nicosia, Joy Walsh, Tom Clark, Tim Hunt, Clark Coolidge, Jay & Fran Landesman the ex-pats who flew back from England, Nanda Pivano from Italy, Arthur & Kit Knight as you know by now, organizer Jane Fiagao’s husband Bataan, Henry Allen, Regina Weinreich, Ronna Johnson, Albert Huerta, Warren Tallman who’s the only other person I know of to come from Canada, Jaap Van Der Bent from Holland, James Grauerholz, Jose Arguelles, Dan Barth, Sam Kashner, Henry MacWilliams, environmental activist Peter Warshall, radio alchemist Len Barron . . .
And a bunch of the Denver crew, probably the #3 city in Beat history after New York & S.F., including Justin Brierly (the catalytic source of the Denver – Columbia connection, and who sounded exactly like Walter Cronkite when he talked), journalist Ivan Goldman, Ed “Sketching” White and Jim “Poolshark” Holmes, as well as a crew from the Denver Union of Street Poets including Les Reed, Padraic Cooper and Carolyn Reed . . .
Plus the actors Paul Gleason (The Breakfast Club, Trading Places) who hung with Kerouac in Florida in the early ’60s and decided to become an actor only after seeing Splendor In The Grass with Jack in a theater, and longtime Beat Max Gail (Barney Miller‘s Wojo, and Chief Bromden in various productions of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest), invisible but ever-present photographer Chris Felver, and lots of filmmakers besides Robert Frank, like Janet Forman, John Antonelli, Richard Lerner & Lewis MacAdams, and Doug & Judi Sharples running around capturing it all, and Jerry Aronson who came up with his concept for The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg at the conference.
Oh and a little rock group you may have heard of, The Grateful Dead, were playing just down the road at Red Rocks for three nights, and roving ambassadors like John Perry Barlow and Mountain Girl were scouting Camp Kerouac and asking questions of the masters just like all the other students.
It was every major Beat figure alive at the time, except Gary Snyder who was officially off building a zendo (a Buddhist meditation hall) in California, but history tells us he’s long avoided these attention-getting Beatnik gatherings, and interviews reveal he never saw Jack again after their Dharma adventure ended in May of ’56. But with his regrets he sent a nice letter to Allen saying, “Jack Kerouac was the wandering scholar troubador storyteller youngest son of the Jack tales in us all. … The voice of the water going over the edge of the waterfall itself.”
And the other thing to remember is — they were all so fuckin’ young then. But look who’s talkin’! Other than 30 year old Jan, the youngest of them was still more than twice my age!! Babbs & Tytell were 43, Abbie & Ann Charters 45, Kesey & Joyce Johnson 47, McClure 49, Gregory 52, Allen 56 … not that many of this crowd would ever live long enough to be doddering old folks, but they were what we now know of as in their mid-life prime. And while they weren’t necessarily producing their early ground-breaking poetry and prose, they had adopted the Cassady and then Kesey concept that your life is your art. They were, to a man and a woman, better people than they were in their explosive youth. Better performers, better teachers, better organizers, better tempered, better conveyors of their inner vision. And at this event, thanks to the Bill Graham of the Beats, Allen Ginsberg, they were collectively staging the biggest Woodstock of Jack since he first played the Cavern in ’57.
We were out there at Sands Point, Long Island, shooting a Steve Winwood video in one of those Great Gatsby mansions, hanging at this round banquet table with just Steve and the prop guy and a couple others, and he was talking in his gentle British accent which seemed so perfect for this estate we were on since it was originally built as a replica of an English castle — and somebody at the table was complaining about the new Bob Dylan album, and Steve, who’s a very reserved guy, like an elder royal himself, and after this slagging of Bob goes on for a while, finally Sir Winwood speaks up in his soft tone and says, “For me, he can do no wrong,” and that pretty much put an end to the Slag Bob conversation. “In fact, when he was in England on that first electric tour in ’66 we met up and went exploring places like this out in the English countryside. Very curious was Bob.”
As usual on these shoots there’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait downtime, and besides listening to the sound of the Traffic, I started exploring this huge castle, and these things are so stupidly big you can get lost in them — hallways that go on forever, and rooms beget rooms beget rooms. This particular mansion has been a set for loads of movies and TV shows and such and so all different sections of it were decorated like different sets — there were futuristic rooms, psychedelic rooms, 1800s rooms, royal rooms, billiard rooms, dining rooms, and half of them have giant fireplaces imported from Europe that you could park a truck in — so I’m just prankstering about hell-bent on exploring every inch of it, and after I get a fair handle on its architecture, I go check back in with the shoot, and they’re mucking around with these Ferraris out front and I start talkin’ to the prop guy again who’s out there and actually lives on the Island, and he’s saying, “Yeah-man, these Japanese guys are precision-guided maestros,” nodding to the collective of cinematographers. They’re all speaking Japanese and nobody else knows what the hell’s going on, but it’s a glorious day and no one cares. And I look at the mansion from the outside, which I hadn’t really done seen since we arrived when it was still dark, and notice for the first time there’s a giant turret at one end that I somehow missed. And I’m like, “Who-boy, this is some kinda house, eh?!”
And there’s a long pause as he sizes me up anew. “Yeah, sure is, … Canadian. … You never been here before?” he asks as I though I should have been, and maybe he’s right.
And I’m, “What’s with that turret? Can you get up in that thing?”
And he’s, “Yeah, of course.” Then another long pause. … “You wanna smoke a joint?”
And I’m, “Hmm, lemme think about it for a minu… — yeah.”
And he flashes the eyebrow high-beams, a slight nod towards the front door, and, “Let’s do some location scouting.”
And off we go. He’s got the walkie-talkie-thingie and we can hear people squawkin’ away, and he’s, “We’re done with the interiors, I’m basically off for the day.” And since I’m the producer’s assistant who seems to have forgotten I’m here, off we go, up the grand staircase with carved heads on the corners of the banister, and down the dark hall past supplies left behind from various shoots and stray furniture that made it look like you were at some mansion in the middle of moving day. And at the very end of the hall he goes, “This was the master bedroom,” as we walk into this massive room with stained glass windows on three sides and another ornate fireplace the size of a garage and enough floor space to drive around in circles.
And Rick, that’s his name, walks straight into the corner of this paneled wall like he’s going to disappear into it but pulls a little hidden handle right outta the wall and this big wooden panel opens up and there’s a dark spiral staircase! In we prank, and up we go, creakin’ ancient wood that was clearly not part of any restoration plan, until we open a door and Boom! There’s the Atlantic Ocean! Actually, Rick corrects me, “It’s Long Island Sound,” but it’s still the ocean saltwater, and you still can’t see land on the other side, so I’m stickin’ with “ocean.”
And we’re on the top of this big round turret with battlement teeth for the archers to hide behind, and although it was perfectly calm down on the grounds, there was a healthy summer’s breeze up there, so we spark the fattie behind a rampart, and he starts telling me how he grew up on the Island. “Yeah-man, I’ve seen these things change so much over the years. Half of these old mansions are falling down, and the other half … found me stumblin’ around drunk on Burgundy wine,” he starts singing from “Wharf Rat!”
“You’re a Deadhead?!” I blurt in surprise.
And he smiles mid-puff and somehow knew that I was already.
And after he holds in the smoke a couple of beats and blows it out, “Yeah-man, since Englishtown ’77. You?”
“Seattle 1980. … But Radio City were my 2nd through 7th shows.”
“There ya go. … That was the best New York run ever.”
“I snuck into my second show there,” and I tell him that helluva story, and weir riffin’ and the walkie-talkie’s squawkin’ at the seagulls, and the blue sky is lookin’ bluer, and the day just keeps getting better.
“Yeah, we used to sneak into a these old mansions when we were kids.”
“No WAY! We did that in Winnipeg! … But of course the mansion was the size of the gatehouse at this place, but still!”
And he’s, “Yeah-man, they’d have them fenced off, but … we were kids, right?” and he winks and I know and we laugh. And out of the blue sky he says, “If this thing wraps early, and it looks like it might, there’s a benefit dinner just down the road that my buddy’s doin’ sound for. We should stop in. You wanna see a real castle?” and he does that prankster nod, like, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, kid.”
So, we go back to the front grounds and the mid-afternoon Ferrari exteriors were the last scene of the day, and my producer pal was beaming with how everything had gone especially since Winwood was being so agreeable, happily sittin’ or standin’ or walkin’ or doin’ whatever they asked him to. He’d said at the table, “I have no idea what they’re doing. I just make the music. They can take whatever pictures they want.” And finally you hear those magic words on every shoot, “Okay, that’s a wrap for today, folks. Tomorrow morning 5AM, Wall Street” — and it’s like “Action” was just called for the hundred or so fairly stationary crew people who all snap to and start breaking down gear.
I go over to the producer. “How YOU doin’?!” and she smiles a huge, “Oh yeah!”
“Okay, I’m gonna help the prop guy pack up,”
“Good,” she says, already lost in her next-step production thoughts.
“And I think I’m gonna catch a ride back to the city with him. You cool for the rest of the day?”
A long pause, “Yeah. I’ll see you at 5 tomorrow at Wall & Hanover. Get some sleep,” she says.
Woo-hoo! I’m off!
And I spot Rick already driving his van around the car-wide walkway to the parking-lot-sized terrace overlooking the Sound, and we load up candelabras and ornate music stands and a cello and giant framed paintings and all this weird stuff that appeared in the shoot somewhere, and he looks at the time. “The benefit starts at six, we should be good.”
On the drive there he starts telling the whole backstory of the Gold Coast scene to this wayward Canuck. “Yeah-man, these things were all built around the turn of the century before there was income tax — the megarich industrialists and bankers and shit —Vanderbilts, Morgans, Guggenheims, Woolworths … all those guys who made more money than they could spend — so they built these castles to show off and entertain their friends — Great Gatsby land, ya know? — except they actually shot that in Rhode Island, the bastards. Course, that was before my time anyway.”
And suddenly we hit the town of “Manhasset”!! — “NO WAY! That’s my name!!”
“Yer kiddin’, really? Funny. Maybe your ancestors were here. Maybe one of these mansions is yours. Never know.” And I’m half-way believing him and spend the rest of the trip craning my neck for “Hassett House.”
And after a while weir drivin’ along a road past a tall vine-covered fence and he points with his thumb, “This is it.”
“What, Hassett House?”
“No,” he laughs, “Where the benefit is.” But we still keep driving what seems like about an hour before we get to the gate, and of course there’s rent-a-cops and guys with clipboards and headsets, and Rick pulls right up to the giant gatehouse, “We’re Magnum Sound.” And the guy starts flippin’ through pages, and he says, “Okay,” but then, “Wait — there’s only one vehicle,” meaning only one truck cleared to get in, and it’s already there. And Rick goes, “Yeah, that’s Marco. He just called and the patch cords are fried,” and he points behind in the van like we’ve got the new ones. And the doorman nods, then motions to the gatekeeper, who swings open the black gate and suddenly weir driving past the guards into this private park of a front yard with a canopy of trees like The Mall in Central Park except the road weaves and winds until we come out at this castle about three times the size of the last one!
There’s a bunch of production trucks and another guy with a clipboard and a headset. Rick: “We’re sound.”
“You have to load in?”
“No, already did. We’re tech.”
“Okay, follow this around to the right and there’s parking in back.”
And Rick doesn’t say a word, just nods like he’s done this a million times, and I bet he has.
Then Boom we’re walking into this giant shiny modern kitchen in this old Versailles of a palace, with men and women completely dressed in white cooking up a storm and it’s loud and everyone’s moving fast and Rick and I just swim through the rapids and whoosh out the far door into some other anteroom leading into a giant high-ceilinged banquet room with about 50 chairs along each side of a single long table with all these men and women dressed completely in black putting the last touches on the table and placing covered trays of food around on side tables, and Rick & I just saunter through like we live there, then through another anti-room and into a giant ornate ballroom! with a two story high ceiling and huge oak beams and arched corners with a twinkling galaxy of stars painted on the ceiling between the beams. And there’s a black temporary stage and P.A. at one end, and sound mixer at the other. And Rick calls across the empty echoing room, “Marco!” And without missing a Beat, the figure behind the board starts speaking through the PA.
“Call in the clowns. I need all clowns stage left. . . . Jokers, you’re up next.”
“Hey, brother!” and they hug a quick one. “We just got off the Winwood shoot. This is Brian — Deadhead from Canada.”
“Canada!” Marco bellows. “Copps Coliseum! 1990. Best Hey Jude / Fantasy I ever heard,” he says without looking up from his board that he’s adjusting even though there’s no sound.
“The Boys doin’ Steve Winwood,” I add.
“Good one,” they both smile.
“So, what’s on tonight?” Rick asks.
“Sheryl Crow.”
“WHAT?!” I scream in my head but don’t say a thing to keep my cool, and look out across the ballroom floor to the stage and realize this is gonna be a private home performance by one of my favorite performers ever!
And the guys start talkin’ shop but I’m flashing back on all the times I’ve seen her — opening for Dylan at Roseland, the Irving Plaza show, Woodstock ’94 — and I’m also flashin’ on that 5AM call on Wall Street, and realize it’s gonna be one of those sleep-when-I’m-Dead routines.
And Marco looks at the clock on his board and goes, “Okay, they’re gonna be arriving in a couple minutes, have you seen this place yet?” and he takes us on a private tour of this private castle.
One crazy thing is … every room had another room in between. Like, you never just walked from one room into another, there was always some little sitting room or storage room or bathroom room or something in between every other room. And suddenly weir in this big library with floor-to-ceiling books behind leaded glass doors with big reading chairs you could picture Sherlock Holmes sitting in and of course another one of those giant marble fireplaces and it’s all dark except for bridge lamps leaning over each of the plushy chairs.
Then we wandered through this sunken indoor garden with a fountain in the middle and skylights for a ceiling, and everywhere there’s walls of windows that look like a church, and I’d lost count of how many fireplaces we’d walked past.
And we get out to the grand foyer that’s about the size of a cathedral with tall arching columns and these little chapel-like rooms that extend off the sides and the whole space has been turned into a giant bar for the night. Or multiple bars, such as it was, with more gorgeous women and men all in black, and apparently patrons had already started to arrive, and the room was alive, and everything echoes in these places so it sounds like a really loud party already. And there’s a guy in a red-&-white striped costume at an upright piano by the front door playing ragtime, and ol’ Marco goes, “You want a beer, Canadian?” The guy delivered everything totally deadpan. Never cracked a smile but was always sayin’ sumpthin twisted.
And we get to the bar and it’s nothing but bucketfuls of micro-breweries from Europe that I’ve never heard of. I get some Belgium white, and we make the rounds, but it’s obvious we’re not dressed for the occasion, so Marco’s like, “Let’s go check out the cliffs,” and Rick nods, and I’m like, “Cliffs?!”
And weir out the back door, and where the last mansion had a back yard, this place had a statue-filled fountain garden. And as weir walkin’ through it Marco starts explaining, “It’s some world hunger benefit. It’s ten grand a plate in there,” as we walk past reflecting pools with spouting putti and marble basins. And sure enough at the far end are these rockin’ hundred-foot cliffs with the sea crashing below, and Rick pulls out another stick o’ dynamite, and mid-conversation runs it through his mouth to dampen the paper so it’ll burn as slow as the fresh weed, and three old warriors get right with the muta to the crashing waves in the eternity of it.
And I’m flashing on Gatsby and his friends along these same cliffs at these same parties, and how even then I would not have been the guy in a suit, but the guy in the band or some other prankster in the play not wearing a uniform, as we riff on history with these Long Islanders from long before there was a hockey team or a Billy Joel, telling stories about Halloween parties on acid and seeing Springsteen in ’73 at My Father’s Place, the Island’s legendary music joint.
And after losing all sense of time with our feet dangling over the cliff, we all moan to get up, and mosey back to the palace, and enter through that same kitchen but this time it’s even crazier and louder and smells ever better, and we cut back to the grand foyer party which is now full, and the lights seem dimmer and it’s much crazier and rich people are letting loose, and I realize it’s sort of a rock n roll / film crowd — not Wall Street rich, this was crazy rich, and with the lights low and the crowd thick and the dress funky, suddenly weir sorta blending in, and I go back to the front door where there seems to be excitement, and people are comin’ in and having their picture taken, and they all look like movie stars, but I’m so not on that beat I don’t know if they are or not, except then somebody comes in and suddenly I see Tom Cruise come climbing over the top of the ragtime piano like a monkey, calling out to the people arriving while laughing his head off, and I’m thinkin, “Geez, this guy really is a climber!” as he comes down over the front end stepping on the keys and jumping into the arms of his friends.
And then there’s another fluster at the giant door and these two old ladies come in very slowly, and right behind them is Steven Spielberg! I think one of them was his mother, and flashbulbs are goin’ off, and there might have been applause or something, and I’m realizing this is gonna be some night! And also, who the heck else is here?!
So, I head back and score an unpronounceable German beer, and meanwhile Marco and Rick have disappeared, and I suddenly notice these people all know each other, and a solo prankster in workaday shorts ain’t gonna be making time with these cover girls, and I also realize it’s definitely true that rich gentlemen prefer blonds, and skinny ones, and young ones, and so before I get busted for staring I’m thinkin’ its time for a smoke on the sacred grounds and go out and join the welcoming crew on the white gravel driveway in front, and there’s a line-up of limos and cool vintage cars stretching back along that long and winding road we drove in on, and I fall in with the valets who didn’t have much to do that night, but here were the modern-day Neal Cassadys, paid to park cars. And like Neal, a lot of them were on the make for connections or chicks or whatever, but one of them was standing there just digging on the simple glory of the night, and he and I riffed back and forth about cars and luxury and celebrities, and just then a black Rolls door opens and Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins get out! And I get a flash of that art imitating life last scene in “The Player” when the executive arrives home at his mansion driveway and kisses his blond wife.
And pretty soon all the beautiful people go into the beautiful banquet hall for their beautiful meal, and I scootch in while they’re packing up the bar and snag a fresh Dutch frosty to go with the fresh Dutch tobacco, and schlep around back to find Marco and Rick lounging at a table on the terrace. “Hey! We were wonderin’ where you were!” And after a few minutes of ketchup and jam, without any of us saying a thing, a couple girls from the kitchen must have seen us out the window and brought out three plates, and we had fresh salmon and veggies in the green garden with the sea air and the silver silverware. “So, … this is about 30 grand we’re eating right here?”
And I mine ‘ol Ricky for details on Englishtown, and he mines me for details on Wayne Gretzky, and Marco didn’t mind any of it.
And then Boom! I suddenly remember Sheryl Crow’s gonna be playing!! What?!?
And after a fine after-dinner Dutch cigar we head in and now everybody’s drunk and gettin’ drunker. And weir back in the ballroom but it’s full of people and the lights are low except for a subtle illumination of the stars above, and Sheryl and her band come out to a roomfulla friends and play it as such and have a grand ballroom time.
So of course I go right up front and it’s just a little three foot stage that I coulda just jumped up on and hugged her, which I certainly wanted to do, but instead just danced at her feet.
She opened with the perfect “It’s Hard To Make A Stand” for everyone who was there doing that with their presence. Into “Redemption Day” and I was getting the feeling this whole set was gonna be thematically linked, and boy did that turn out to be right, and I bet she does a lot of these benefit gigs that nobody ever hears about. “I’ve wept for those who suffer long, But how I weep for those who’ve gone,” and I gotta admit I totally lost it — for those I’ve lost and we’ve lost and the beauty of fate and life that put me in this place at this time. Then if that wasn’t enough she goes into the beautiful tear-inducing ballad “Angels” and this has become some kinda gospel show — “When you’re pulled from the wreckage, You’re in the arms of an angel, May you find some comfort here.” And it’s weird because you gotta sorta hold it together when you’re in a room full of people, but I wasn’t doing a very good job.
And then thank gawd she left the tear-jerkers behind and went into a rockin “Love Is A Good Thing,” with the lyrics about “buying a gun at Wal-Mart stores” that got her album banned at all their shit stores in the world. Then she went into the challenging “Strong Enough” from her first album — every song about empowerment in one way or another. And then into a thrashing “A Change Will Do You Good” and I looked over and there was Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon dancing like teenagers, and Tim was like me with my girlfriends in that he’d dance away and film some partygoers or Sheryl with this little hand-held he had and then go dancing back to Susan, and everybody’s havin’ a grand time, just fans of the Dance. Then I couldn’t believe it — she did Dylan’s “Mississippi” — a song of his she recorded before he did. And again I’m half-way losin’ it standing five feet from Sheryl singing Bob in this private ballroom with no thought a few hours ago that anything like this was gonna happen. And there may have been a few other songs in there but she ended with my bar-none favorite live song she does, the Keith Richards-channeled “There Goes The Neighborhood” and just rips the roof of the place. “Hey! Let’s party! Let’s get down!” And I remember this song winning the Grammy for best female vocal performance and MAN you can hear why!
And when it’s over I’m just a ball of sweat and a beaming sun, almost frickin’ shaking, and on wobbly knees make it back to the soundboard and there’s Ricky smiling. “Enjoy yourself?”
And the wonderful thing is, it was over by about 10:00 or sumpthin and Rick’s, “We gotta go.” Old pro that he is, it’s a 5AM call. And Boom! Long story short, we pull off the drop off, and I next see him but a few hours later, reunited in this same evening’s darkness for the next scene on a silent empty Wall Street in downtown New York City.
The Adventure of the Boulder ’82 On The Road Conference —
Finding Kerouac, Kesey and The Grateful Dead
Alive & Rockin’ in the Rockies
.
One of the first and forever impressions I had was — being on the inside hanging with Allenand his loopy longtime lover Peter and Beat badboy Gregory Corsoand cigarette-chaining novelist John Clellon Holmes in their little homes, just watching these guys, these old friends who’d been brothers of the night and the light since they were the age I was as I was meeting them, and now here they were much older, full-grown adult MEN, who were still pranksterish, still plotting cool adventures, still finishing each other’s sentences, still knowing what the other meant by just a gesture or a silence, and making each other laugh, constantly, but all within the context of business, productivity, doing things, writing things, working things out. They weren’t sitting around talking about sports or half-baked pontifications about politics or trying to prove they were up on the latest band like so many people my age. No. They’d been playing this poetry productivity game forever and probably never even noodled in those foolish things but were talking about philosophy and spirituality and writing and writers and quoting themselves and quoting others and talking over each other and as excited in the moment as little kids.
Allen was definitely the professorial boss, the accepted (but not to say unchallenged) ringleader. He was always carrying around this cloth sorta Guatemalan over-the-shoulder bag full of papers and schedules and books and god knows what, and usually wore some stray suit jacket a couple sizes too big for him with some tie a couple sizes too small. He was gentle, but vibrant; soulful, but lascivious; clipboard following, but constantly poetically improvising. He was sort of the one and only father figure keeping an eye on everything, yet was always fun to be around. He had no problem correcting or admonishing someone, but did so with love and a tender demeanor.
He was like a referee in a pick-up game — making sure we played by the rules, but knowing the whole game wasn’t too serious.
Gregory seemed to always have on this black leather vest looking like a slightly older Dylanfrom “Street Legal,” like a hot happening sexy dude, with a full head of bushy black hair. He would definitely have been the (and probably only) lady’s-man of the group. He didn’t give a damn about the outcome of the game, he just wanted to score. He was definitely the Puck, the imp, the joker, and the one most likely to be called to the principal’s office. And thank god he was in with the principal or he woulda been expelled fer sure!
And a neat thing I loved — the long-form novel writer John Clellon Holmes had a slower cadence than the rest, and a softer voice, and when he’d solo on his Horn, the rest of the band laid low. There was an unspoken respect — perhaps still stemming from him being the first of any of these soon-to-be-famous young men to have a Beat book published — his gone novel “Go,” in 1952.
He wouldn’t speak too often — whereas Allen and Gregory were like Dizz and Bird, constantly playing off and over top of each other — but John would come in like the organ and lay down these thick slow chords that would then totally alter the next round of soloing. He was Zeppo, the thoughtful straight Marx Brother who didn’t really fit in with the others, yet was one of them, and there was nothing he could do about it.
What was extraordinary was that they were exactly like I dreamed and imagined they would be — and as they conveyed themselves from the ’50s. Close friends just hanging out, but always up to sumpthin.
And I thought back to seeing that poster that made me embark on this trip, and the karma / fate of that, and how it was the phrase “Partially funded by The Grateful Dead” that tipped the scales from “I should” to “I’m going” — but whatever the hell it was, I’d somehow made my way here and was now studying Hangoutology with my heroes. And unlike hanging with rock stars, writing was my art form of choice and practice. Instead of being in private circles of master musicians, I was now sitting among the masters whose music I played.
And another guy who blew me away early and often was Herbert Huncke. I’m not much one for these junkie guys, but Huncke was a trip. He was SO nice, so friendly — the most personable people-loving people-person you could ever meet. But it was the guy’s cadence, how he spoke — it’s no wonder Jack & Allen & Company totally dug this guy. Whereas I tried to talk to mumbly Burroughs a few times, but he was as freakin’ weird and misanthropic as he comes across. The adding machine magnate’s grandson in the grey flannel suit may have been a Queer and a Junkie, but other than that he sure didn’t seem to have much in common with the other Beats I knew and loved — not the same celebration of life, joy, optimism and gushing compassion in his heart.
Although Huncke may have shared some of Bill’s proclivities, he was personable and gentle and open in his own peculiar way. Just a few degrees shy of being locked in a federal pen, he was a total character — and that was this constant commonality to most of the people in ol’ J.K.’s life. Odd ducks. As a novelist, Jack magnetized to these people as fodder for his fiction. Whereas Allen was sort of a businessman, a promoter, a former market research man, and Gregory was a bit of an aggressive hustler and loose cannon, Huncke was absolutely “one of us,” not intimidating in stature or demeanor, just a guy you could sit with for hours who’d engagingly listen to whatever your story was, and then share some wild ones of his own. If anybody in this whole batch of aspiring Buddhists was living in the calm sea of nirvana … it was Herbert Huncke.
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I, like others, was whisked away by the Gallatin genie just as I was about to drown in the requirements of my previous school. If NYU hadn’t had a school-without-walls, I wouldn’t have graduated, if you want a soundbite about it. The trade-off they offered was that I had to read a whole bunch of great books — which seemed like the point of life anyway — in exchange for taking whatever classes I wanted. It was rough, but what the heck.
As a recently transplanted Canadian “Beat,” I was striving to understand everything that drove that particular subculture of America. Although I missed the fifties (and the sixties now that I think of it) it seemed to me that the most exciting period in 20th century America was that explosive window just after the Second World War, when the winds of change shattered a pane and in blew Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and … well, you get the idea.
So there I was, completely beaten, trounced by the system and ready to get drunk at The Kettle of Fish, when in through my window flew Walter Raubicheck, the Gallatin advisor assigned to guide my light. I still had to take a few classes, of course, but what changed my tune were the Independent Studies he and I developed.
Each week we would meet at Bobst Library for our private sessions. Living on Washington Square North, I had to walk through the park every day in order to get to school (which probably did more to hamper my grade-point-average than any other excuse I’ve come up with). In that park I could see what made America great in the first place. People were going for it, and didn’t care what the neighbors thought. There were frisbee dancers and guitar players. There was book reading, soap box philosophizing, and a capella singing. There were clowns, saxophones, wandering salesmen, and young girls sitting on benches reading books. There were back-slapping brothers, and homeless poets who would recite a dream for silver. But more than anything, there were the songs that filled the air.
I heard many Dylan tunes for the first time in the very park where he wrote them. I heard the verses of freedom from Woody Guthrie to Tracy Chapman, and tossed back beer between the harmonies. There was something about that park in the youth of my America that I hope is still there for today’s huddled masses. It was the collective celebration of a sunny day, a guttural desire to not let this one slip away. America! Pow! The stomping down of the foot and hollering I’m going to do what I want, right here, right now. “I AM WHAT I AM!”
This was another planet, you understand, to this frostbitten Canuck.
It was one of those sunny summer Saturdays after passing through this festival that the curtain of my enlightenment rose. My advisor and I would try to get one of those little study closets on the seventh floor of Bobst to conduct our skull sessions in, but as it happened on this day, some fellow crammer with excellent hearing objected to our discourse and Walter suggested we adjourn to the outer hallway that encircled the atrium. I followed him out to the balcony where he promptly dropped to the carpet cross-legged and began reciting poetry.
My frostbite was tingling again.
That week we were focusing on Kerouac’s legacy, and Walter cited Bob Dylan as one of his leading apostles. I’d always had trouble with Dylan’s seemingly intentional obliqueness, so, having recently read a book dedicated “to Bob Dylan for Mister Tambourine Man,” I thought I’d challenge the professor to plug this into The Beat Picture.
He began reciting the verses from memory as a brilliant afternoon sun overtook the wall of windows behind him, backing him like the light beyond Saint Peter. Sitting on that suspended walkway with seven flights of space below and as many above, there was the oddest sensation of floating.
Right from the opening verse, as he quoted, the “… evening’s empire has returned into sand, … left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping,” my personal nightly explorations of the ancient empty streets of New York were suddenly coming to life. My own actions and emotions, which I’d previously been told were wrong and bad, were suddenly being recited in a library by a professor.
In joining Gallatin, I’d been searching for someone to “take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship” of language and art. That afternoon, its advisor issued me the passage that had somehow eluded 14 years of classrooms and English lessons.
I discovered that the gangsters and pranksters who peopled my park were the same “ragged clowns” who were “laughing, spinning, swinging madly across the sun.” Soon afterward he showed me how they were also singing songs of themselves, and songs of innocence and experience.
As I sat transfixed, Walter peeled off one line after another, my body tingling with each new image. The wall of blinding sunlight began to obliterate the narrator, and pretty soon all I could see was the light.
As he recounted, “And but for the sky there are no fences facing,” somehow he, or Dylan, had finally voiced the boundless optimism I’d been struggling to pinpoint ever since my arrival in the land of the free.
When he prefaced the last stanza with, “I think this is one of the great romantic verses of all time,” I felt a wave of enchanted images crest and then break over me. That an English teacher would steer someone toward rock ‘n’ roll, and not away from it, transformed my perception of what education could be. It was no longer us against them, but a teamwork of understanding. An authority figure wasn’t dishing out dated discipline, but rather enhancing the world I lived in. William Blake was suddenly in the park. I could hear Walt Whitman on the radio. Thoreau made the evening news. What was once alien was now internal. Maybe I had to go all the way up to 1965 in order to understand Blake’s 1785, but it took this advisor to articulate the connection.
So take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind, Mr. Tambourine Professor, down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, the haunted frightened trees, out to the windy beach of free expression. As he held my future in his recitation, he taught me in no uncertain terms, “To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.” And I’ve been dancing ever since.
From playing hockey with homegrown pucks,
To riding in the back of pick-up trucks,
Under cloudless, beating prairie skies,
Chasing the girls with the prettiest eyes,
Riding the roads from farm to boomtown,
Working the land from Rose to Sundown.
From schoolhouses built for all one grade,
To backyard hockey rinks — family made,
Through cold wars and winters, holding true,
Moving from the land and life you knew,
Until during the summer of sixty-one,
Fate and mom bore you a son.
Innocence playing out in the snow,
Helping me build, helping me grow,
Crossing the mountains by railroad track,
Driving to practice with skates in back,
Shovelling walks from street to lane,
Then two days later it would snow again.
From Dominion City where our food is grown,
To foreign New York to pursue the unknown,
I’ve carried our branch, and tended it well,
In the fertile garden of the Liberty Bell.
A lot has gone down,
Since I let my hometown,
And at many a time, whatever I do,
I see you in me, and see how I grew.
It’s in my face and down in my hands,
The boys who grew from Northern Lands.
There’s so many ways you’ve made me glad,
I just have to stop and thank you Dad,
For bright eyes, hope, and the big city chance,
For the red race car, and the keys to the dance.
So I’m just slowing down to nod a thanks to you,
For starting this project, then seeing it through.
