Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness

 

Robert Elliot Fox

Department of English
Southern Illinois University
bfox@siu.edu

 

Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness. Ryko RCD, 1997.

 

The Beat Generation currently is enjoying what some might call a renaissance and others might think of as a resurrection–designations that could seem apt, given Jack Kerouac’s persistent and powerful sense of death always awaiting us at the end of our road. But, although Kerouac died in 1969 and Allen Ginsberg just passed away (April, 1997), several of the original figures (William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder) are still with us, and the key Beat literary/philosophical principles also remain influential; thus the Beat Generation’s legacy is not dead–never died, in fact (although there certainly was a period of eclipse in which their presence was overshadowed)–so that resurgence might be the best term to describe the upswing of the Beats at this moment in history, so close to the cusp of the millennium. If I can be forgiven what I believe to be an appropriate pun, things are very upbeat now with regard to a wider acknowledgement of the contributions of the Beat Generation to American literature and American culture more generally. Consider, for example, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition, “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-65,” or the extensive obituaries for Ginsberg which testify to his status as a trans-generational pop icon. Nostalgia may be a source of this renewed interest for those who remember firsthand the Beats’ original power and sway, while the desire to find a solution to the “X” that has been attached to the current generation of young people may explain the huge interest they appear to have in these “holdovers” from the forties and fifties. Commodity fetishism explains a lot, too–witness the images of Kerouac and Burroughs being used to promote jeans and sneakers. And indeed this marketability of the Beats poses a danger for the proper appreciation of their value. The “cool” image that is foregrounded today as a selling point may render them ultimately as shallow as the stereotyped “beatnik” image which was used by the media in the fifties to make fun of them. Lifestyle is the focus in both instances, and although the Beats certainly influenced the lifestyle of the succeeding counterculture of the sixties, it is their artistic contributions which get overlooked or underplayed in the celebration or condemnation of their lives and personalities.

 

When I first was turned on to the Beats in my early teens by some college students who put the first issues of Evergreen Review in my hands, I was blown away by the apparent freedom of these writers, their sheer exuberance, their daring (a word that now may have lost its meaning when everything is, so to speak, out of the closet, but I’m referring here to a time when Lenny Bruce was busted for saying “fuck” in a nightclub act and great literary works still had to endure prosecution in order to reach the American public–not just Ginsberg’s Howl or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer but D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to mention three celebrated examples). I was already in love with literature but it was mostly a rich ensemble of tradition, a “classical” art form; with the Beat writers, for the first time in my experience, literature was a living thing, an art in progress, informal and engaging. Yet–perhaps because of the formalism I had been reared on–at the same time that I was captivated and caught up in the rush of on-the-road energy and beatific inspiration and insight, I recognized a great unevenness in Beat writing and the collateral avant-garde–for example, abstract painting. (Jazz I didn’t understand at all then, although it intrigued me; and I guess in those days I thought you really weren’t supposed to understand it. I tried to “dig” it because the Beats did, but what really moved me in those days was rock-‘n’-roll.)

 

My original adulation of the Beats has been tempered a bit over the years, but my respect for them has deepened as well; I’m confirmed in my sense of the weaknesses in their work and the kinks in their characters, and I’m even more convinced of the greatness they achieved, which, to a degree, included a refusal to shrink from those kinks and a furious drive to go on despite all the risks of failure. Kerouac, after all, wrote a dozen works in half as many years with no real expectation that they would be published. This was the period in which he made his breakthrough from the more conventional Romanticism of Thomas Wolfe which characterized his first published novel The Town and the City to the “spontaneous bop prosody” of the original version of On the Road, of Visions of Cody, of The Subterraneans. Kerouac revolutionized American prose, and the fact that he did it in part by incorporating lessons from the expressive culture of an oppressed minority–specifically, borrowing from the improvisational strategies of jazz, a quintessentially African American form–ought to resonate significantly in this “age of multiculturalism.”

 

If what we might call the Beat Generation, Inc. doesn’t currently constitute big business, it certainly is doing good business. Kerouac’s works sell far better now than they did in his lifetime and there are more of them in print. It’s no surprise, therefore, that although Kerouac’s best-known novel, On the Road, is widely available, a fortieth anniversary edition is going to be released later this year. But if we are going to be in a position to appreciate the full range of Kerouac as a writer, what we really need is access to the work that hasn’t thus far appeared: his Buddhist book Some of the Dharma, for instance (which is supposed to be forthcoming), and more “selected” letters (also supposed to be in progress). In the meantime, a compact disc recently has been released which helps to fill in a few of the blanks. Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness (Ryko RCD 10329) is a compilation of lesser-known and previously unpublished material by Jack Kerouac performed by a wide variety of interpreters, including writers (JK himself, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti), musicians (Michael Stipe, Patti Smith, John Cale), and actors (Johnny Depp, Matt Dillon), among others. There are twenty-five tracks in all, and all of them are interesting, although they inevitably vary in importance and effectiveness of presentation.

 

At this point it is necessary to state that performance is one of the key elements of the art of the Beat Generation. I am not speaking here of the “drama” of the individual members of the Beat Generation on the roads and in the beat “pads” of America or of the authorial acts inscribed on the pages of their letters and books; rather, I want to emphasize oral performance, the function of voice in rendering palpable otherwise overlooked or misunderstood reaches and subtleties of Beat literary aesthetics. Much Beat writing, in short, demands a sensitive and attentive ear, not just an entranced eye.

 

This is evident, not only on the disc under review, but going back to the series of recordings Kerouac made following the success of On the Road: Poetry For the Beat Generation (1959), with Steve Allen on piano; Blues and Haikus (1959), featuring Al Cohn and Zoot Sims on saxophones; and Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (1960). Rare and long out of print, these were reissued by Rhino Records in 1990 as The Jack Kerouac Collection, and it’s a set well worth having.

 

The late fifties, by the way, seems to have been a good time for recordings combining words, voice, and music. Langston Hughes put out Weary Blues in 1958, which featured him reading his poems to the accompaniment of musicians like Charlie Mingus, Milt Hinton, and Horace Parlan. This, too, was reissued in 1990. Hughes, it is important to note, had pioneered poetry readings to jazz in the 1920s, along with Kenneth Rexroth.

 

Another album that came out in 1958 and which to the best of my knowledge hasn’t been reissued (but should be) is entitled Jazz Canto. It was a compilation clearly intended to capitalize on the recently emergent Beat(nik) phenomenon, but interestingly, of the seven poets represented, only three were arguably Beat: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, and Lawrence Lipton (author of The Holy Barbarians [1959], one of the first books to document the Beat experience); the others were Langston Hughes, Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams (who influenced Ginsberg early on), and Walt Whitman (a kind of nineteenth century proto-Beat), whose long free verse line, radical inclusiveness, and public bardic stance were all appropriated in our time by Ginsberg. One of the standout tracks on this disc is black actor Roy Glenn’s marvelous reading of Philip Whalen’s “Big High Song for Somebody” (backed by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet), which brings vividly to life a poem that (for me, at least) lies rather inertly on the page. It’s connected with what I said earlier in this piece with regard to the importance of the ear–that a good deal of this material was intended to be heard. (This is equally the case with a good deal of contemporary poetry: see, for example, the anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe [1994], ed. Miguel Algarin and Bob Holman. Holman is one of the people behind Mouth Almighty, a company dedicated to spoken word recordings, and the preservation and dissemination of a modern-day oral tradition.)

 

Kicks Joy Darkness starts off with a piece by the Boston band Morphine that isn’t by Kerouac but about Kerouac. It’s a moody opener, but the title of the disc itself is moody, though it zeroes in on the multivalence of the Beat experience and the Beat ethos, which was far more than simple hedonism or frantic motion for its own sake. “What kicks!” Dean Moriarty, the raw hero of On the Road, exclaims, and getting your kicks was one thing, taking your kicks was another. The Beats felt both. (Remember that “beat” originally meant “beaten down,” “exhausted,” as well as referring to a generation that felt the beat, that sought beatitude, trying to beat a path to salvation through the midcentury American doldrums.) The second index, “joy,” is unalloyed–“a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy” is the way Sal Paradise, narrator of On the Road, puts it, and it’s one of the truest expressions of the driving force behind Kerouac’s own chronicle and of Beat ardor in general. And as far as the third term, “darkness,” is concerned, it, too, is ambiguous: “the nighttime is the right time” (a soul music quote, but applicably beat; in On the Road, it’s “boogie-woogie in the American night”), but it’s also the “sad night,” the dark night of the soul, “the unconditional night of Universal death” that Kerouac refers to in Vanity of Duluoz (1968), the last work he published before his untimely passing.

 

The second track is an excerpt from “Bowery Blues” done by Lydia Lunch. It’s significant that the first of Kerouac’s own words to be performed on this disc are heard from a woman. If the relative position of the women of the Beat generation was prone or in the chorus, it’s clear that women in the post-Beat era are much more forward in every sense. Lunch’s reading is evocative, but check out performance artist Maggie Estep’s over-the-top presentation of “Skid Row Wine” (track 6). Estep has appeared on MTV, and she brings a hard rock raunchiness to her rendition of Kerouac’s poem. It’s one of the most gripping cuts on the album.

 

Gerald Nicosia (author of the splendid Kerouac biography Memory Babe [1983]) argues that the “musicality of Kerouac’s art” is best exemplified by the Readings album, which he recorded without any accompaniment (“Kerouac as Musician,” in the companion booklet to The Kerouac Collection, p. 9). And while the associated music on Kicks Joy Darkness often does provide an interesting counterpoint to the spoken text, there are times when the music overwhelms the words or distracts us unnecessarily from the tonalities of voice as an instrument in itself. This is true, for example, on track 9, where Kerouac is reading from Macdougal Street Blues. The dubbed-in rock music by Joe Strummer of the British band The Clash doesn’t add anything to the performance and in fact makes it harder to hear what Kerouac is doing vocally; at the very least, the instrumental track should have been less prominent in the mix. For a much more successful amalgamation, compare the way Aerosmith singer Steve Tyler’s background vocal is handled on his reading of “Dream: ‘Us kids swim off a gray pier . . .'” (track 4), or how Kerouac quietly scats in the background while Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter reads from Visions of Cody (track 16).

 

Allen Ginsberg prefaces his typically Ginsbergian reading of choruses 1-9 of Kerouac’s “The Brooklyn Bridge Blues” (track 10) with the statement that, at the last minute, they couldn’t find the last chorus. This turns out to be fortuitous, because American troubador Eric Andersen’s reading of “Chorus 10,” which concludes Kicks Joy Darkness, is one of the best pieces on the disc. This piece was recorded on the Brooklyn Bridge, and there’s no music, unless you want to call the sounds of cars and people the natural music of the streets. One gets a powerful evocation of the ambience from which Kerouac’s poem sprang; it’s almost as if we’re transported back to the very site and moment of composition.

 

Lee Ranaldo’s reading (track 17) of a section from a 1955 letter to John Clellon Holmes (author of Go [1952], the first Beat novel, which, in fact, was originally to have been entitled The Beat Generation) describing Kerouac’s wild ride with a girl in a convertible needs to be compared to the version of this incident to be found in chapter two of The Dharma Bums, which Kerouac later revisited at greater length in the story “Good Blonde,” originally published in Playboy. For my money, the version in the Holmes letter is by far the best–an excellent example of the way Kerouac was able to “blow,” using the American idiom as his instrument, a supercharged spontaneous breathless narrative. Compare this sort of writing, produced in the mid-fifties, with any other storytelling style you can think of from that time, and you’ll have a sense of the power of Kerouac’s contribution. And yet you’ll look for him in vain in the major anthologies. The canon wars involving issues of gender and ethnicity may have caused us to overlook the fact that, when it comes to the acknowledging the full range of achievement in American literature, there are still some important aesthetic scores to settle.