Area man reads novel excerpt

So here’s a little bit of Pepperland, read on the evening of February 3, 2010 in Chicago at the Reading Under the Influence monthly session at the Sheffield.  If you’re anywhere close to Chicago, you oughta go sometime.

Pepperland is set in Chicago during the winter of 1974 and it’s about the intersection of rock ‘n roll, computer technology and love.  In this chunk, narrator Pepper Porter is returning from a failed rendezvous with his old girlfriend–the glamorous Sooz who went underground years earlier as a member of the Weather Underground.

Thanks to Outta State Plate’s crack bassman and sound engineer David Partrick for wrestling with the recording, making it reasonably presentable.

Pepperland excerpt

"The 151 bus runs north on Michigan Avenue..."

I wrote my band’s bio…and some of it is true…

The Story of the Outta State Plates

It was at a church picnic in the summer of 1965, on a foggy Sunday afternoon in the Haight district of San Francisco (Our Lady of the Perpetual Groove) that young guitarist, French horn player and theatre professional Giles Colahan and his friend from art school, trombonist, guitarist, voiceover guy and writer Barry Wightman, played their first big time gig as the Silvertones.  Because of the clammy fog, the crowd was sparse but that didn’t deter the two earnest young rock ‘n rollers as they played what were to become legendary local hits Beer Money, First I’ll Buy Some Beads and Are You Hung Up?.  In the audience along with Grace Slick, Jerry Garcia and George Harrison, was a young hippie rock chick singer just off a high-ballin’ freight train from Tulsa, Oklahoma—Jude Kinnear.  Having gone through the breakup of the legendary Raingutters and made a serious name for herself as Fred and Ethel, Jude (the Milwaukee Journal’s Dave Tianen says “she fills her songs with soul”)  was ready for a change.  She joined the Silvertones. But then they changed the name to the Outta State Plates.

The rest is Milwaukee music history.

Giles, Jude and Barry played taverns, sidewalk sales, snack bars, coffee houses, cafes, taco stands, parties, weddings, divorces, nudist camps, campfires and puppet shows across the country.  But it was on their world tour of Canada that they realized they needed a bass player of some note.  Fortunately for them, in the audience on that foggy night in Moosylvania, Saskatchewan, young David Partrick had brought his trusty Fender bass and already knew all their songs thanks to late night CBC and pirate radio broadcasts.  David promptly left the legendary Wafting Pantlegs, the Paul Curtis Band and Hot Toddy and joined the ‘Plates.

Then after twenty more years on the road, the ‘Plates felt the need for another singer, a new added vocal dimension.  While playing another church picnic in Milwaukee, young artist, trombonist, graphic designer, 15^th Century Italian bon vivant and man about town Tom Charney made his way onto the bandstand, grabbed a mic, sang the legendary Danke Schoen and all the girls swooned—the rest is Milwaukee music history.

But it wasn’t until many years later that the ‘Plates realized they needed a drummer.  Fortunately, Giles remembered the legendary Bobby Vinton national tour of 1962 when the legendary Robbs stole the show—he recalled how Bob Ellicson just rocked the old Surf Ballroom and after a few telexes and candygrams, Bob was convinced to leave Slappen Joe and Group Therapy and hook up with the Outta State Plates.

And along with the 7^th Plate and Side Dish, Sound Guy Stu “Eyebrows” Jacobs, the Outta State Plates are coming to your town to rock the joint, play some legendary tunes and spread laughter and cheer.

The novel “Pepperland” considered

So the review copy of Barry Wightman’s still unfinished novel of the intersection of rock ‘n roll, technology and love, Pepperland, showed up on my groaningly chaotic desk, tossed there by my boss who growled something like take a look at this thing would ya? He wandered away across the newsroom with a bottle of Wild Turkey, an old school bourbon and water, ice clinking in his glass. The man’s been insufferable lately, moaning about how all this new technology—blogs, digital text, the death of newspapers, plunging ad revenues and the demise of books, mere future kindling for the fire—how they are going to be the death of him.  I sighed and looked at the weird psychedelic cover of Pepperland, did a quick flip through and thought—oh, oh, here comes another self-indulgent and screwy tale of music, mayhem, magic and footnotes.   I was right.  So I found an old 8-track tape—Yes’ Close to the Edge—stuck it in the ancient stereo and read this endearing oddball novel.

As seems to be typical with Wightman, Pepperland is a thinly veiled stylistic throwback to the writings of a few old hipster writers from mid-20^th century America, when writers were effortlessly subversive, dangerous and yet somehow hopeful amidst the, dare I say, entropy of the day. Thomas Pynchon and Jack Kerouac come to mind.  Like Pynchon, of whom Wightman is a mere imitative, plodding hack wannabe, his interests and plots are all over the map—music, technology, history and the shifting sands of generational politics.  Like Kerouac, his prose tries hard to be musical, rhythmic and melodic, carrying the reader along on impossibly long howling sentences that somehow do usually end up making some sort of sense—at least if we consider what we come to know of the mind of Pepperland’s narrator, the sweetly tempered yet oddly passive 24 year-old rock ‘n roller of 1974, Martin Alan “Pepper” Porter.  Sometimes though when the reader is immersed in the thickets of Wightman’s habitual and beloved dashes and lunatic long lines with no comforting periods in sight I found myself thinking maybe he could go further and lose some of those damn commas and semi-colons and like Kerouac or Ginsberg let the prose flow wild free and uninhibited with crazy exploding sentences like a deep American river flooding the black dirt bottomland and just go for it why not go furthur just like Kesey’s psychedelic school bus maybe it could work maybe it could I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know and yet I think we may be all bozos on this bus it’s still too early to tell.[1]

(Q: Do you think it could work?

A: Hey man, you gotta believe.”)

The tale is not a downer.  There is a perpetual hopefulness and some might say liberal optimism in the face of the dark days when the Sixties ended and a new, as yet unknown and undefined era began to slowly dawn.  Perhaps as yet another attempt to signal his card-carrying Boomer status, Wightman’s use of what some refer to as magical realism (pass the joint, man)—among other things talking crows and the weird recurring presence of the Dark Stranger, a spectral spirit who (I won’t spoil it here) may or may not be Pepper’s long-lost little brother, works mostly.  Readers will likely be charmed by Pepper’s voice and will buy into it and go along, though your mileage may vary—younger readers brought up on hard-core fictional realism may toss the book aside as yet another example of old-folks novelistic claptrap.

Though the plot is as broad and capacious as its setting in Chicago and the flat landscapes of the Midwest, it’s about as deep and flimsy as Dustbowl topsoil in 1935 Oklahoma.  Time and time again we want to go deeper into Pepper’s head, go further and find out what he’s really thinking about the glamorous and mysterious ex-radical girlfriend Sooz or we want him to go out and make something happen rather than him being a perpetual skinny and bent antenna that seems to be stuck in receive rather than in proactive transmit mode.  But then again, maybe Wightman is just as confused and wussy as Pepper Porter.  Maybe he too is still poring over the map of the strange terrain of Pepperland, still looking for clues, still looking for direction home.

"The 151 bus runs north on Michigan Avenue..."

---

[1] Ref: The Firesign Theatre’s album of hip comedy and social media commentary, I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus, 1974.

Personal dig

Sag Harbor
by Colson Whitehead

Aristotle, in the Poetics, said that the worst kind of plot was the episodic—the kind where not much happens, it’s just one damn thing after another.  I frankly don’t agree with the ancient Greek and am just fine with episodic plots (isn’t that the way life really is?) and I think there’s much to be admired in the one damn thing after another Sag Harbor in which the improbably-named veteran novelist Colson Whitehead (he’s black, but that name—how white can you get?…it’s as if almost Thurston Howell III…oh wait, a character in the novel claims to have ‘borrowed’ a Bentley invoking the spirit of Mr. Howell… never mind) writes a near-memoir first-person joke-riddled tale of a fifteen year-old black kid (a self-confessed ABBA-liking nerd) named Benji who spends the summer of 1985 scooping ice cream in a well-established upscale black community way out amongst the honkiness of eastern Long Island.  As Whitehead has said, Sag Harbor is about “not much” and set amidst the audio/visual pre-Internet thingness of “crappy 80s culture.”

What makes it work?  It’s the jokes. It’s the terribly funny presentation of the very small matters of life that loom so large to the inhabitants of teenage summers—we’ve all been there and we all understand and can appreciate the hilariously trifling but necessary comparing and contrasting of Stouffers frozen dinners or the detailed discussion of the syntax and grammatical acrobatics of the artful black teenage insult—it is the intense self-scrutiny described by Benji that elevate these events and decisions to epic level.  With your monkey ass.

But it’s not only the charm and humor of a Huck Finn view of the world from the teenage cheap seats.  Whitehead can shift levels of diction with the speed and precision of a clever kid twirling the radio dials from AM Lite to FM Cool.  Passages like:

“Waking up early in that house was science fiction stuff.  The sky over the wetlands was a fine, simmering blue, slowly boiling up morning.  Before you lay the dead, misty surface of the bay, an imperturbable line of dark gray, a slab of ancient stone come out from under the earth.  A reversal there: the sky was liquid, the water a solid screen….a mute primordial theatre.”

This is an older, wiser Benji talking here, Whitehead’s words more than Benji’s.  And it is with these lovely passages of lyrical beauty that Whitehead succeeds in elevating the novel above and beyond that of a simple and fun tale of adolescent outsider angst and moves it to the deeper, long-buried layers of a more personal archaeological dig.

Personal burgers.

Buck up…

Jesus, you’re such a sap.

So said an old buddy, whose opinion I hold in very high esteem, when I confessed that a new Christmassy tune and video by songwriter Ray Davies (you know, the Kinks, Swinging London, Lola and all that), Postcard from London (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZbLHTmmPGY) makes me tear up every time I watch it.  It’s a lovely tune.  Shamelessly nostalgic.

And here’s red Christmas-scarfed Ray teaming up with his still glamorous ex-paramour Chrissie Hynde, (Pretenders, et al) making like Bing Crosby crooning with special guest Dinah Shore or Rosemary Clooney on the set of some hokey old Christmas TV special while ancient black and white clips of long ago winter days in old London Town play in the background.  And here’s Ray affectionately flipping through old postcards from friends, his crooked smile angled across his face—he’s older now, like all of us—wistfully remembering things past, pining for a vanished age of innocence when our parents knew exactly what to do and we went sledding on Hampstead Heath.  Or that park district hill in Chicago.

I am a sap. And I suspect Ray is too.  I’m a sucker for melodies that are draped across vanished times and places sung by people I care about.  Or even by people I don’t really care about—like arias in certain operas—like the final trio in Der Rosenkavalier.  Holy smoke, the goosebumps and tears can start to flow.  And the completely sapless, thoroughly rational wife checks her watch—when will this be over?

And I secretly liked the Carpenters.  And ABBA.  Now it can be told.

Another thing. This novel of mine, still-in-progress, Pepperland.  Every time I read certain of parts of it—like the episode where  the old radical girlfriend Sooz reappears unexpectedly in a very strange place—it can happen then.  I get a little shaky. Certainly happened when I wrote it.

It’s a character defect, a flaw of mine.  I need to work on it.  Buck up.  Don’t be such a sap.  Sniff.

Exiles in Prague

Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll

Rock ‘n’ roll music isn’t important anymore.  I mean—it’s not really important.  It’s nearly irrelevant.  Download a song, a bunch of ones and zeroes for a buck.  (Do people know the names of the tunes or just the playlist number? ‘Play number five!’) It isn’t changing the world; wars are not stopping, cultures are not shifting seismically, freedom isn’t expanding, lives are not being changed and revolutions are not happening because of music—not like they did back in the day.  At least not like the way we like to think it all did.

So.  Anyone for a play about the Czech experience between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989?  Here’s a play that it is tightly woven with the threads of the music—played at concert level volumes no less—of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys, the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa and a nonconformist Czech rock group that was at the centre of Czech society—the Plastic People of the Universe.  Here’s literature that counts, a play that pokes and prods the comfortable and callow in the West—saying, wake up!  This music can change the world and like that Beatle song said—you don’t know how lucky you are.

I saw my first play by British playwright Tom Stoppard (Jumpers) in Washington DC in the winter of 1974—the winter of the beginning Watergate’s final denouement when revelations of presidential plumbers in dark and inappropriate locations where coming hard and fast—an American president was about to resign in disgrace. There were long lines of cars waiting for expensive gas, inflation was rampant and the economy stunk.  Grim times. And on top of all that, an ever present and low-level sense of doom was draped over us thanks to Soviet ICBMs aimed at the invisible targets painted on our young longhaired heads.  There was a sense of things running down—fear, loathing and deterioration—entropy. Love that word.

Tom Stoppard--rock 'n' roll star

And just as it’s true that rock ‘n’ roll always sounds best played in a dump of a joint, the music in those dark times was sounding good; rock ‘n’ roll music was at the center of American culture—it was kicking holes in the bland beige walls of what had been a comfortable dumbed-down society and new records were like letters from the front lines of the avant garde.

Stoppard’s latest is Rock ‘n’ Roll and I saw it at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago a few months back.  Like all of his work, it is an explosion of ideas, wordplay, puns, allusions to history, literature and obscure bits of philosophy–you gotta be on your toes.  Loosely based on the experiences of various Czech dissidents of the time—Vaclav Havel included—the play traces the lives of a young Czech student, Jan, studying at Cambridge in 1968 and the family of a beleaguered English Marxist professor who’s as Red as Red Square who says things like, “I’m down to one belief, that between theory and practice there’s a decent fit—not perfect but decent: ideology and a sensible fair society, it’s my double helix and I won’t be talked out of it or done out of it or shamed out of it.  We just have to be better.”

But young Jan is the focus—he goes back to Prague in 1968 after the Soviets crushed the reforms of the Dubcek government, he goes back to look after his mother.  He’s a lovable longhaired kid who pores over his vast collection of albums and studies and quotes them as thoroughly as Max quotes Marx.  Later, in 1969 says:

“You can’t face life without a guarantee. So you convince yourself everything’s going to end badly.  But look—when the Russians invaded, you would have bet on mass arrests, the government in jail, everything banned, reformers thrown out of jobs, out of the universities, the whole Soviet thing, with accordion bands playing Beatle songs.  I thought the same thing.  I came back to save rock ‘n’ roll, and my mother actually.  But none of it happened.  My mum’s okay, and there’s equipment held together with spit.  I was in the Music F Club where they had this amateur rock competition.  The Plastic People of the Universe played ‘Venus in Furs’ from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay.”

As the play ends in August 1990, as Jan and Esme—the beautiful and now grown-up rock ‘n’ roll nymph of ’68—go to a free Rolling Stones concert in Prague, following the bloodless Velvet Revolution overthrowing the Communist regime, Jan is happy yet gently laments the loss of his old world, replaced by a new one where the central question is “Who will be famous?  Who will be rich?”   Esme says, “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.”

And the stage goes black as Keith Richards and Charlie Watts kick off the thunderous and exhilarating guitar and drum driven opening to You Got Me Rocking—it reaches down to your spine and you shudder to the yes of rock ‘n’ roll and know that the music is important.

Keef rips this joint in Prague

Air

Yeah, all those new Beatle reissues have been out on the street for a while now.  I bought some.  And I’ve been asked what differences there were with these new discs.  Like a lot of folks, I’m pretty skeptical when I hear those people with golden ears talk about how this instrument or that amplifier breathes so much more or has so much chime and shimmer in the upper mids or something like that.  You know, like audiophiles used to do with high-end stereo gear.  Remember the guy with the biggest stereo, those monster speakers?  Yeah.  Anyway, I’m not one of those guys but I do hear things in these new Beatle remasters that, for me, make it all worthwhile.  And I think it has to do with air.

It’s like they took the sound of a given record and expanded it, stretched it out, allowing more space for each instrument…and yes, giving it room to breathe the air of the Abbey Road studio and I think you can hear it.  You can hear the pluck of a guitar string as it emerges from one of those old dusty Vox or Fender amps or the air around the thump of a drum and the scrape of the horsehair of some string player’s bow over a cello string.  And the vocals are there, like a faint scrim has been lifted.  And then there’s the packaging.  First rate, along with new notes/pics etc accompanying each album.  Each one is like a little well-made book.

So, yeah.  If you’ve got a favorite old Beatle album, go buy the new one and I think you’ll like it.  Great stuff.

Studio 1 at Abbey Road

A strange black light…

Sway by Zachary Lazar

It’s just that demon life has got you in its sway. (M. Jagger/K. Richards, 1971)

It’s become conventional wisdom to accept the notion that the 60’s officially ended at Altamont—the free concert near San Francisco in December of 1969 that resulted in the deaths of at least four people. In Zachary Lazar’s wildly creative novel Sway, any bright flowering of peace, love and positive creativity hardly happened; the Beatles, not mentioned by name, are just “a band from Liverpool, of all places.”

Lazar has twisted (woven is probably not the right word) three tales in a dark braid, threads sometimes intersecting but mostly not; a purely fictional, speculative narration of the early days through the zenith of the Rolling Stones; a tale of Bobby Beausoleil, a young man fatally under the influence of Charles Manson in the brown grassy hills of southern California; and the tormented underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Lazar has found a way to shine a strange, new black light on this decade, a still festering contemporary heart of darkness (or light, depending on your point of view) that won’t go away. With little and non-descript dialogue, minimal plot and not much characterization, it is the novel’s visuality; its attention to the sensual details of the depiction of music in both its creation and its performance, and the novel’s strong sense of place that make Sway a remarkable success.

The early Stones, like any garage band, have an endearing clunkiness, making it up as they go. Lazar shows an image that is a far cry from fan club hagiography. This is no guitar hero;

“Onstage, they are all awkward, all except Brian. His face is almost feminine, pale and wide-lipped, but his hands are large, blocklike, and they handle the guitar like a shovel. He attacks the strings with wide up and down sweeps of the wrist, forms the chords with wide stretched fingers, making his playing look more difficult than it is.”

Guitar players have always been interested in making it look difficult—girls are impressed. But the Stones seem to have to fight there way out of every gig, tough joints in working class England.

The song Sympathy for the Devil , Lucifer making his pitch, is one of the novel’s central motifs. Recorded in early June 1968, just as Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, the description of its transformation from a few simple chords to finished masterpiece;

“It would take them three nights to put the song into its finished form. In those three nights, it would change from a folk song to a psychedelic song to a soul song, and then emerge something raw and percussive, like the voodoo music of Haiti….It would start with a yelp, a monkey screech, and a flat patter of bongos, a resonant thud of conga drums, a locust-like hiss of maracas. It would become a wild celebration of everything it had started out lamenting.”

The song predates MTV, of course. And it is a tune one may have heard hundreds of times, perhaps even performed it, but Lazar’s account of its percussive hoots, hollers, screeches and voodoo-hoodoo drives a mental picture that is indelible.

Rock and roll is visceral in nature, its thumping of a bass in the gut felt even in the cheap seats of Madison Square Garden. Lazar nails it;

“It was a series of vibrations amplified through electric circuits, a current of sound the crowd could feel on the skin beneath their hair, in the cavities of their chests, in their rectums and their groins. It registered in their bodies, in the pulse of the blood, but also in their minds, the part that was always changing as senseless and illogical as a dream.”

The sensual, visual choice of words—cavities, chests, rectums, groins and blood—strong, uncomfortable and sexual—are hardwired in this music, this voodoo gumbo of rock and roll—enough to make any parent uneasy.

Lazar makes economic but effective use of poetic devices. His alliterative word selections are worthy of Cavafy and his Alexandria, presenting a vivid image of Marrakech—earth, eggshell, electric, souks, scraped, sand and city, burned, busier and bright;

“He had lost Tom Keylock somewhere in the fabric souks a few hours ago and now he was looking through the window of the cab, at the dense wedges of building, earth-colored or eggshell-colored, which appeared as if they’d been scraped together out of sand. A few electric lights burned like flares along the busier streets, bright orange or neon green. They made the city of Marrakech look more and not less ancient.”

Marrakech is foreign, alien and indeed ancient—far from Keith Richards’ mental map of America. For him, America was foreign, but familiar, young and romantic. He studied an actual map as a kid, memorizing “the shaded areas of their mountain ranges, the pale blue contours of their shorelines and lakes…He knew it was out there, a physical reality, not a dream. He had the maps, the names, the border and geography.” He was in love with a place he’d never seen. So he and his friend Mick internalize that map, synthesize the music of the records they find, painstakingly move the needles back and forth over the black grooves and produce Sympathy For the Devil, a song that becomes one of the symbols of their coming-of-age decade. “The decade will pass, forty years will pass, and maybe you’ll hear a snatch of it through a car window, the sound of it still a surprise over a stranger’s radio, the old song sent around the planet in waves that never end.”

That time still has us in its sway. And Sway makes us see it.

Dizzy, Bird and Jack

Third set at the Onyx Club on 52nd street, two in the morning on a winter’s night in New York, 1947 or maybe ‘48. It’s a little smoky jazz club and to some there, the music is chaotic, bewildering—stuff that sounds nothing like swing, the music of the Thirties or the War. But the hipsters remain, drinking, smoking, listening—something new is going on. A tune called A Night in Tunisia is blowing off the little bandstand, played by well-dressed musicians—the leader, a trumpeter named John Birks Gillespie blows hard and fast and wears a black beret. He smiles a lot and his cheeks balloon with every furious run of notes from his horn—unconventional, rule breaking, risk taking. Unlike conventional jazz musicians, Gillespie though cool, gives his music a driving, hot physicality.

 

Dizzy, 1948

 

The tune has vague Latin percussive elements—the drummer, in order to keep up with the unusual speed of the music, has adopted a new style—playing a high-hat cymbal pattern on the ride (top) cymbal and he doesn’t play the bass drum on every beat as do most other jazz drummers of the time. He plays a combination of off beat punctuations on the bass and snare drums—dropping ‘bombs’, physical, percussive beats in unexpected places, like a heart murmur that somehow made new sense—or a poet slipping in an anapest in a string of iambs.

Dizzy blows long sheets of notes and then steps back allowing a saxophonist named Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker to step forward and unleash an unbroken improvised, risky stream of sixteenth notes; furious and stunning, breathing only at the end of lines, like a line of verse, a natural break end-stopped with a comma, a breath mark; he hits accents at the top of long phrases, going off the fast beat and coming back just in time to touch the downbeat, back in the chorus with Dizzy, another solo, chorus and then out. Later, Bird would say he’d “never be able to make that break again.” Despite being a junkie, hooked on heroin, horse, he did make that break again, and again.

Dizzy Gillespie said, “We played a lot of original tunes that didn’t have titles…I’d say ‘Dee-da-pa-n-de-bop’…and we’d go into it. People, when they’d wanna ask for one of those numbers and didn’t know the name, would ask for bebop.” To most mainstream listeners in the mid to late ‘40s, bebop was chaotic—odd harmonies, ‘wrong’ notes, weird, bewilderingly fast music with a core of drive energy, undeniably rhythmic; a kind of prosodic jazz.

A young Jack Kerouac, a good-looking kid from Lowell, Massachusetts might have sat down at the bar of the Onyx Club that night, one of the many jazz joints then on 52nd street. Kerouac had been in New York City a few years, hanging out with a strange crowd orbiting in and around Columbia University, dropping off the football team, taking courses, writing. He’d first heard A Night in Tunisia a few years earlier on a radio broadcast. Allen Ginsberg said, “Kerouac learned his line from—directly from Charlie Parker and Gillespie and Monk. He was listening in ’43 to Symphony Sid and listening to “Night in Tunisia” and all the bird-flight-noted things which he then adapted to prose line.” Kerouac’s joual world, his New England-French Canadian line of words had intersected with a different kind of language.

Sitting in jazz joints or listening to the radio Jack Kerouac perceived, at a gut level, a certain poetic language of the ear, music, that he wished to transfer to his writing, something new, not grey-faced or hide-bound. His goal was to inspire a physical reaction in his reader, not just a placid pleasurable sense. It was the “sound of the mind” that he was after—an intersection of mediums—words and music.

 

Kerouac reads...

Rip this joint…

In 1972, the Rolling Stones, about to begin a larger than life, full-blown rock and roll journey across America, released what became one of their most important records—Exile on Main Street.  A mythic American landscape unreels in the music, like a deafening low-flying crop duster veering from one end of the continent to the other, a classic road trip worthy of Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty; one song alone referring to nine locations—points on Mick Jagger’s and Keith Richard’s romantic mental map of the country.  Documenting the tour, along for a photographic ride on an always out-of-control tour jet, was an older man, eastern European in appearance, Robert Frank.  In 1956, he had published an important book of black and white photographs of an America few had seen in the placid postwar 1950s—The Americans.  Jack Kerouac wrote that book’s introduction.  He described Frank as “Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand, he sucked a sad poem right out of America and on to film…to Robert Frank, I now give this message: You got eyes.”   Kerouac is the subterranean taproot between these two strange, savage trips through America.

Torn and frayed

Kerouac’s novel, On the Road was, like Frank’s book, a sad poem and his spontaneous prose, a rhythmic “bop prosody” that is, like the best poetry, sound captured on the page. He told his Viking Press editor and early champion Malcolm Cowley, “If it isn’t spontaneous, right in the very sound of the mind, it can only be crafty and revised…the requirements for prose and verse are the same i.e. blow…let the writer open his mouth & Yap it like Shakespeare and get said what is only irrecoverably said once in time the way it comes, for time is of the essence.”  He took a lot of heat on spontaneous prose.  Truman Capote called it “typing, not writing.”  And indeed, a continuous pouring out of words and sounds, the conviction that “you’re always a genius” has its risks.

But by using simple, sturdy words, athletic and free-flowing, Kerouac produced passages like the following, that but for the insertion of line-endings, is aural, visionary excellence:

“We wheeled through the sultry old light of Algiers, back on the ferry, back toward the mud-splashed, crabbed old ships across the river, back on Canal, and out; on a two-lane highway to Baton Rouge in purple darkness; swung west there, crossed the Mississippi at a place called Port Allen. Port Allen—where the river’s all rain and roses in a misty pinpoint darkness and where we swung around a circular drive in yellow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a bridge and crossed eternity again. What is the Mississippi River?—a washed clod in the rainy night, a soft plopping tide down the eternal waterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees, down along, down along by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, and Port Orleans and Port of the Deltas, by Potash, Venice, and the Night’s Great Gulf, and out.”

That paragraph would not have been out of place during the first public reading of his friend Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.  The percussive riffing; Port Allen, Port Allen, the alliterative river’s rain roses, down along, down along and the incantation of towns and cities, strung out like train stations on a beat up map, echoes forward to the Stones’ dope and tequila-sunrise fueled tune, a five hundred mile-an-hour race through the American continent, Rip This Joint.

Improvisational speed is another aspect of Kerouac’s sound.  Like the sad, beat Hudson driven by Dean Moriarty, Kerouac’s prose feels improvisational where involuntary thoughts, start-stop crazy notes, urgent gut-reactions form into velocity-driven sheets of word-sound:

“Now, man, that alto man last night had IT—he held it once he found it: I’ve never seen a guy who could hold so long” I wanted to know what “IT” meant.  “Ah well”—Dean laughed—“now you’re asking me impon-de-rables-ahem! Here’s a guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind…and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it.  All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it—everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries.  Time stops.”  Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it.”

Kerouac stood at the top of that passage’s slope and skied the steep mogul-strewn path he heard in his head without poles, fast, new thoughts and impulses appearing like big bumps in the snow. But he sacrificed a standard “grey-faced” narrative strategy when he turned up the volume of his jazz-driven improvisations.  Narrative causality took a back seat in the Hudson as plot progressions are limited to mood changes, tension and release and the ups and downs of narrator Sal Paradise. 

Other than east, west, north and south, plot direction was of little importance.  Sound, and the search for an authentic new unconstrained hipster voice were what mattered. As Dean Moriarty said, “Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”  “Where we going, man?  “I don’t know, but we gotta go.”

You got eyes.