The Beat Goes On
"I
dig rock and roll music/I could really get it on in that scene/I think I could
say something if you know what I mean/But if I really say it, the radio won't
play it/Unless I lay it between the lines"-- I Dig Rock and Roll
Music, Paul Stookey, Jim Mason, Dave
Dixon, 1967
Some mornings a song sneaks into your head
and just won't go away...
Today, that wicked melody come to bedevil me
would be "I Dig Rock and Roll Music", a slightly offbeat tune
recorded in 1967 by the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary. The group had been performing together for
roughly six years when they took the song into the studio. PPM was a put-together group, assembled by
Albert Grossman, a Chicago-born music act manager who went on to shepherd careers
for Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, and Janis Joplin...
 |
| Peter, Paul, and Mary |
Readers who've heard the song know that I Dig Rock and Roll Music is not rock
and roll and not really folk. It touches
the ear more as an homage to Beat Poets and the smoky jazz clubs these renegade
rhymers were alleged to frequent by their champions...
"Beatnik", of course, is the word
that comes to mind when we think Beat Movement.
The term was coined early in April 1958 by a San Francisco newspaper
columnist, Herb Caen, who also popularized "hippie" a decade or so
later when he tried to describe the practitioners of another Bay Area lifestyle
that aging squares like him couldn’t quite dig or wrap their heads around. Beats, incidentally, didn't like being called
beatniks. For them, it came across as sounding
pejorative...
 |
| The Hipster and The Square who "Gets It": Bob Dylan and Albert Grossman |
When Caen got around to marrying "beat" with "sputnik", the Beats had been around for a good decade. The writer Jack Kerouac used the phrase Beat Generation while talking to novelist John Clellon Holmes in 1948 as he searched for a quick way to describe the way he and his friends viewed the world. It was an odd comment-- "beat" in the slang of the late 1940s meant a shabby lowlife who didn't quiet make the grade as a serious criminal: a two-bit hustler, a strung out drug addict, a punk who smashes store windows and makes off with cheap display case merchandise...
 |
| San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen enjoys a visit with director Alfred Hitchcock during the filming of The Birds |
Jack Kerouac saw himself and his fellow Beats
as something else entirely. He wrote In
"Aftermath: The Philosophy of a Beat Generation" that he and they
were "characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were
solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead window of our civilization"...
It's an interesting literary reference for
Kerouac to make. Long before Franz
Kafka-- the solitary lawyer who worked for an insurance firm-- wrote melancholy
tales about men who turn into cockroaches and find themselves no longer
belonging to a world of normal men, Herman Melville penned his account of a
clerk employed by a Wall Street attorney who specializes in recording deeds and
mortgages. Bartleby at first seems an
ideal worker. Then, one day the
scrivener becomes less productive, eventually transforming into an almost
motionless fixture in the office where he once worked. Attempts to elicit explanations for this odd behavior
are met with a simple reply: "I
would prefer not to"...
 |
| Jack Kerouac: Beat Catholic Mesmerized by Buddhism |
Kerouac left this earthly plane in 1969 at
the age of 47, so we are unlikely to know just what he meant by the Bartleby
metaphor. On the surface, it is a
strange comparison. Bartleby seems more
amoeba than man, a depressive who fills his employer with both loathing and
pity. Jack Kerouac and pals had much more
personality than Mr Melville's lowly ledger-scribbler. The autobiographical On The Road fictionalizes Kerouac as Sal Paradise and friend Neal
Cassady as Dean Moriarty as they travel across America from East Coast to West
Coast. There's boozing, womanizing,
reefer smoking, gambling, and back alley fighting enough to last poor Bartleby
a dozen lifetimes...
The real Sal Paradise was born in Lowell,
Massachusetts, a town known for being the Cradle of the Industrial Revolution
in America, thanks to the textile mills surrounding it from the 1820s onward. Jack's dad was the son of a potato farmer who
descended from the minor French nobility.
This decline in status and family fortune was never lost on Kerouac who
was involuntarily-- but honorably discharged-- from the Army after a few weeks
of military service due to signs of schizophrenia. After that, he signed on to work as a
commercial sailor in the Merchant Marine...
 |
| Lowell, Massachusetts |
By the time Jack Kerouac came into the world
in 1922, his Lowell was knee deep in steep economic decline. Manufacturers tripped on their own feet,
almost trampling themselves, as they rushed across the Mason Dixon line to find
cheap labor and tax breaks down South.
The Great Depression had turned Lowell, according to a 1931 Harper's Magazine article, a "depressed
industrial desert"...
A devout Catholic from his childhood until
his death, Kerouac offered other comments about what Beat really meant. He told an audience at Hunter College in New
York in 1958 that "I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world
that He gave His only begotten Son to it."
Jack's search for deeper meanings weren’t confined to the faith of his
youth-- a personal dialogue with Buddhism peeked briefly through his remarks as
he went on to speculate "the universe... is one vast sea of compassion,
the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty". On another occasion, Kerouac complained
critics didn't "get" On The
Road was actually the story of two Catholic guys in search of God who found
Him "in the sky and on Market Street San Francisco" and understood
"the Godhood of God is forever Established and must really never be talked
about"...
 |
| Signet Paperback edition of Kerouac's masterpiece |
Buddhist thought heavily influenced other
Beats, Allen Ginsberg being one of the most prominent...
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New
Jersey, in 1926 on the third day of June.
His father, Louis, taught in public high schools and labeled himself a
poet. His mother, Naomi, suffered from a
never properly diagnosed psychological issue and labeled herself a Communist. Young Allen labeled himself an atheist by
the time he turned 14 but was never able to fully distance himself from his Hebraic
roots. When Naomi died in 1956, there
were fewer than ten adult Jewish males in attendance at her funeral and the Kaddish
prayer was not recited due to the lack of a minyan. This bothered Ginsberg greatly and his poem Kaddish (written between 1957 and 1959)
became, at one and the same time, a memorial to his troubled mother, a
manifesto of his estrangement from his heritage, and a masterpiece of Beat
literature...
 |
| Allen Ginsberg, Beat Jew mesmerized by Buddhism, reads from Howl to fans who were in diapers when he wrote the poem |
Ginsberg ultimately embraced Buddhism, perhaps
attracted by its teaching that there is no individual self or soul independent
of the rest of the Universe. Or the
Eightfold Path may have been a useful guide for navigating the challenges of
this lifetime. We find the beginning of
wisdom in viewing reality as it is, Lord Buddha taught us, and not seeing it as
it appears to be...
[Another part of Allen Ginsberg's spiritual
quest was a journey into Hindu thought, most particularly a cult associated
with the Lord Krishna who is an incarnation of Vishnu, the Preserver, the highest
aspect of God and the essence of all things created. Common to both Hinduism and Buddhism is the
concept of Maya, or Illusion. For those
consumed by a search for higher truth, the goal becomes to see beyond Maya and
to understand there is no distinction between individual self and the Universe,
that consciousness and physical matter are one reality.]
 |
| Albert Grossman's wife, Sally, languidly shares an album cover with her husband's rebellious young client |
Esoteric concepts rarely make for best-sellers
nor do they generally appeal to the mass market movie-maker. When the Beat Movement found its way into
bookstores and theaters, the public got Beatniks who smoked dope, indulged in
casual sex, listened to jazz played by black musicians, stood on stages as they
muttered incoherent poetry to other stoned beatniks who snapped fingers to keep
time with the bass player thumping away behind the alleged poet. Beatniks wore berets and turtleneck sweaters or
striped shirts and raggedy jeans (male) or tights (female)...
Similar misperceptions distorted the hippie
movement which blossomed from the middle 1960s into the early 1970s. Hippies endured another plague: young people
who wanted to look cool without actually being cool...
 |
| Beatniks listening to jazz music in their smoke-filled lair |
Moviemakers churned out hippie exploitation
flicks with titles like The Trip, Hallucination Generation, and Love-Ins to cash in on the money cow. Long-haired lads, high on marijuana and LSD,
hopped from bed to bed, sharing them with willing nymphomaniacs, whenever they
weren't plotting a federal courthouse bombing...
The counterculture played along with the mainstream
culture's stereotypes by gobbling up underground "comix" that
emphasized sex, drugs, and rock and roll...
[The undergrounds were generally depressingly
misogynous and presented women as not much more than willing or
uncooperative receptacles for sperm.
There were other disturbing qualities in these subterranean funnies:
graphic depictions of dismemberment and mutilations and an irrational hatred for authority in any form. In many ways, the Comix were a marriage of the grisly 1950s EC Comics and the 1930s Tijuana Bibles, eight-page
comics banned in most states their explicit depictions of sex. Readers without experience in reading underground comix probably shouldn't feel cheated.]
 |
| Woodstock: Trying to find The Garden |
American pop culture still reverberates with
echoes of the Hippie era: the Woodstock music festival, the critically
acclaimed film Easy Rider, the
musical Hair celebrating the dawning
of the Age of Aquarius. This is the way
we, as a culture, want to remember psychedelic days and the rock scene...
 |
| Nugget, a quality publication for gentlemen, introduced its readers to bottomless beatnik Dione Garret in April, 1960 |
 |
| The title of Mr Geis' novel says it all |
Hippie values (or at least the perception of
them) crept into other entertainment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sex was usually the selling point. The avant-garde revue, Oh! Calcutta!, examined changing sexual values but failed to gather
love from critics at newspapers like the New
York Times. A rough draft for one of
Calcutta's sketches came courtesy of
the pen of Beatle John Lennon. Another
who gave his talents to the revue included playwright Samuel Beckett of Waiting for Godot fame. Arbiters of public taste found Calcutta's humor sophomoric but said its
oft nude cast was quite attractive. In
my view, despite my personal desire to be contrary and automatically disagree
with critics, this is probably a fairly accurate description...
Hippies took their name from black slang--
"hip" meaning to be up-to-date and in-the-know. Some linguists trace hip to hepikat, a word
from West Africa's Wolof language that translates to "one who has his eyes
open". Hepikat eventually became
the jazz world's hepcat (or hipster) who communicated through slang, enjoyed
cannabis now and then, didn't take the world seriously (except when it came to
his music), made sarcastic wisecracks, and enjoyed his sex without being
chained to a wedding ring...
 |
| Publicity photo from Oh! Calcutta! |
It probably comes as no surprise that the
beginnings of the Hippie Movement reflect a certain continuity with the Beat
Movement. Allen Ginsberg and Neal
Cassady played important roles in transferring a generational authority from
Beats to Hippies. In fact, Cassady was
one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, a communal living troupe which traveled
cross-country in a psychedelic-painted school bus, spreading the joys of LSD
into the communities of America's hinterlands as they rolled along...
[Kesey may be known to some readers as the
author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest,
a 1962 novel set in a mental hospital.
This story of ill-fated and rebellious Randle McMurphy formed the basis
of a 1975 movie of the same name which won all "Big Five" Oscars--
Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best (Adapted)
Screenplay. Kesey based the tale on his
experiences as a night shift attendant at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital
where he participated voluntarily in experiments involving hallucinogenic
drugs.]
 |
| Ken Kesey, Merry Pranksters, and a Psychedelic Schoolbus |
Like Beats, Hippies found themselves
influenced by Eastern thought. They were
part of that 1960s Trinity of Counterculture Headaches that bedeviled the
uptight Establishment and its middle-class conformity-- the New Left and the
Civil Rights movement, being the other threats to Decency and Good Order. Married simultaneously to peace, love (both
physically and generically spiritual), expanded consciousness (often via
drugs), Hippies celebrated Flower Power and formed the vanguard for anti-war
movements challenging US involvement in Vietnam...
Critics and philosophers occasionally ponder
the dialectic between the counterculture and the established way of doing
business. Media historians analyze the
relationship between mass media and misperceptions of subcultures among the
greater society. I suspect a
"square" culture of conformists needs its "hip"
counterculture more than the latter needs the former if only for a vicarious
life of bad behavior...
 |
| Official Beatniks Of America Beatnik Beret: Real snazzy, Man, and made of quality wool by real Frenchmen |
That being said, a brief essay on a blog
fails miserable to capture the complexity of any counterculture movement like
that of the Hippies. The failure is even
greater when one has personal memories which cannot be captured with words or
pictures. But it doesn't matter if a
blogger grows old or if his beard is long gray...
The Beat goes on...
 |
| Ernie Bushmiller's Sluggo has an epiphany |
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CREDITS
Note:
Information for this essay is taken primarily from readily available sources
such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and almanacs. When other sources are employed they are
credited either in the text or as follows:
None. All photographs are taken from Wikipedia or Google Images without
source or authorship credits available, except as noted: Peter Paul and Mary
from nosurfmusic.com; Bob Dylan
and Albert Grossman from johannasvision.com; Bob Dylan album cover with Sally
Grossman from CBS Records; Jack Kerouac with cigarette from mibba.com; On The Road cover from Signet Books; Herb Caen and
Alfred Hitchcock from The San Francisco Chronicle; Beatniks in their Lair from
tucsoncitizen.com; Beatnik Beret advertisement from freerepublic.com; Allen
Ginsberg reads from Howl from
futureofthebook.org; Bottomless beatnik Dione Garret from Nugget Magazine,
April, 1960
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