On the Road scroll manuscript
On the Road scroll close up
Why do they play such crazy stuff? The question often arises, especially from musicians: "But why on earth are they playing such crazy stuff? It's just noise! Why don't they play proper traditional rhythms that sound beautiful and well-organized, the way these instruments were intended to be used? Why can't they conform, like normal people?"
There's a deep answer to that.
The beatniks were fans of a serious intellectual and artistic movement known as the Beat Generation. They were rebelling against conformity and the suppression of artistic freedom. The Beats were experimenting to find radically new forms of the arts—abstractions and structures that required a higher level of engagement to understand. Below is an excellent short video by Philip Mershon summarizing this whole era.
Philip Mershon — Beat Generation vs Beatniks: The Selling of a Movement
Philip Mershon — Beat Generation vs Beatniks: The Selling of a Movement
Central Themes of the Beat Movement
This movement was centered in Greenwich Village, which became a kind of utopia for the Beat lifestyle. During the 1950s, the Village was the hub of Abstract Expressionism, home to Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, as well as the New York School of poets, who rubbed shoulders with artists and composers like John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg.
Its key founding figure was Jack Kerouac, the writer of On the Road. This seminal literary work’s first full draft was famously typed on a continuous scroll of paper in April 1951, single-spaced and without paragraph breaks—forcing the reader into a continuous stream of attention, a literary precursor to the Freeform bongo playing that would come to define the beatnik sound.
Neal Cassady was the real name of Dean Moriarty, the protagonist of On the Road. Jerry Garcia would later describe Neal as the only person he knew who was both an artist and the art—a living example of life as one long, continuous improvisation. Cassady ended up being a main influence on the Grateful Dead and their approach to participatory musical experience, around which the culture of Freeform music-making would evolve, starting with the Acid Tests in 1965.
Jack Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show (Nov 16, 1959) — reading from On the Road
Jack Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show (Nov 16, 1959) — reading from On the Road
Above, a nervous Jack Kerouac appears on the Steve Allen Show in 1959, reading from On the Road. He is backed by Steve Allen Improvising jazz piano.
Five years after The Way of Zen, Alan Watts sat on the floor with some friends and made this. Roger Somers — a self-taught Carpenter and drummer who'd built the bohemian enclave of Druid Heights up on Mount Tamalpais — drums and chants. William Loughborough plays congas and bass marimbas. Watts sings, growls, and howls. No arrangement, no repertoire, nothing anybody had to learn first. Watts kept a cabin at Druid Heights and founded the Society for Comparative Philosophy there the same year he recorded this, deep into his LSD years.
Watts could explain Zen in perfect English to anyone who asked. Here he stops explaining and just does…This is it. The bongo, a Hollywood prop and a rec room novelty, has become a way of getting somewhere rather than a way of describing it.
Five years later Watts Would share the stage at the Human Be-In with Allen Ginsberg — who had chanted under an elm in Tompkins Square Park a few months before that, at the first Hare Krishna kirtan held outside India. These weren't separate scenes that happened to overlap. By 1962 it was already the same few people, in the same rooms, playing the same drums.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzIdXz8M1TE&t=358s
Allen Ginsberg wrote the epic poem "Howl," which railed against the mechanization and commercialization of society. "Howl" was described by one critic as "a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit". This work was censored and banned, but the subsequent litigation ultimately led to victories in landmark free speech cases.
