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Jack Kerouac: The World's First Rock N' Roll Star
Forget Elvis Presley, Jack Kerouac was the world's first rock n roll star. Obsessed with fast cars, sexual abandon and wild music, he was a weaver of dreams and imagination, an inspiration for a generation.
Kerouac's defining novel
He sounds like your old drinking buddy down the bar. He sounds like an existentialist philosopher. He was both of these things and more, but, more importantly, Jack Kerouac was the world’s first rock n roll star.
The history books will tell you that rock n roll properly exploded into the public consciousness when Elvis first swivelled his pelvis on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. The nation’s youth heard the wake up call and responded in kind, adopting the same outsider rebel stance that had beamed into their living rooms. A self-conscious sense of image had suddenly flowered in the hearts and minds of American youth. Before rock n roll, the sons and daughters of Uncle Sam all looked like miniature versions of their parents; pipes, side-partings and sensible cardies for the boys, twin set and pearls for the girls. After Elvis and his electrifying wake-up call blasted a canyon-sized gap in the generations, these model citizens in waiting were replaced overnight with a tribe of slick and sneering aliens who had seemingly crash landed from the Planet Bebop.
A year later, with impeccable timing, Kerouac’s “On The Road” was published – the bible of the self styled Beat Generation. Although seemingly riding on the back of the current adolescent obsessions for fast cars, sexual abandon and wild music, the lifestyle described in On The Road was a memoir of a life Kerouac had lived some ten years previously. By the time America had woken up to the idea of a nation’s white youth bopping to a back-beat born of black culture, Kerouac had already trail-blazed the width and length of the country several times over in search of personal epiphany, strung out on Charlie Parker jazz and Benzedrine.
“He sounds like your old drinking buddy down the bar. He sounds like an existentialist philosopher. He was both of these things and more, but, more importantly, Jack Kerouac was the world’s first rock n roll star.”
The early Beats were in many ways the first punks; buzzing off cheap amphetamines, forming their own communities, rejecting the conformity of their fathers and the conservatism of post-war America. Like the punks, the Beats celebrated the marginalised and the disaffected and imbued them with an heroic sense of style.
After celebrating the rock n roll lifestyle ten years in advance, Kerouac’s next book predicted the hippy movement. Instead of serving up more juvenile delinquent high jinks, “Dharma Bums” gazed into the crystal ball of the zeitgeist and offered a meditation on anti-materialism and Eastern Mysticism, visualising thousands of young Americans leaving behind the 1950’s consumer capitalist dream in favour of a simple life of self sufficient spirituality; that which the children of Timothy Leary later called “turning on, tuning in and dropping out”. A decade later it all came true, the term “hippy” being interchangeable with “beatnik”. Twelve months after that, the King of The Beats was dead, choking to death on a can of beer at the age of 47 whilst watching The Galloping Gourmet on his mother’s TV.
There have been over 250 songs that mention Kerouac, from artists as diverse as Tom Waits, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and The Beastie Boys. His freewheeling persona and romantic spiritual hobo image has wandered like a tattered ghost throughout the last forty years of rock n roll, influencing everyone from Bob Dylan to Pete Doherty. In the States, his brooding matinee idol looks are used to sell everything from postage stamps to jeans. Every year a new generation of artists setting out on the road of self-expression and self awareness picks up his pages and finds their blood stirred for ever by the transcendental power evoked through his writing. Jack Kerouac – visionary, mystic, proto-punk, madman, angel, romantic drunk; a weaver of dreams and imagination, an inspiration for a generation.
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COMMENTS
Good stuff Russ, though verging on hagiography. The fact is, apart from On The Road, Keroauc's writing was more hit than miss, with the notable exception of his short piece This Railroad Earth. But the parallels between Beats and Punks, and Keroauc as the prototype rock'n'roller, are spot on.
sorry, meant "more miss than hit"
Couldn't agree less, Mr H.
Big Sur and Desolation Angels are magnificent!, Sir.
Bill, I tend to agree with you, but I like his misses as well. I've come to sort of think of him as being a bit like The Aphex Twin, chuck everything out there and pick through the bones of it. Please forgive the dangerous veering towards hagiography - he was me first literary hero, along with Joe Strummer and Mohammed Ali.
Nice one Russ- I keep this quote in my diary: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved , desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn burn burn like fabulous Roman Candles exploding like spiders across the stars..." Jack Kerouac 'On the Road'
I don't like him, me.
Wish I knew what you were talking about, frankly he couldn`t have been that good, never heard of him. ELVIS Lives on forever.
What utter nonsense! Robbie Burns, William Blake, George Gordon, (AKA, lord Byron) Samuel Taylor Coleridge: these guys were just a few "rock & roll stars" who existed long before your precious black American influenced white coolism. Christ you white middle class yanks really do get off on being "rebellious" don't you! Nothing could be more uncool.
hahah what a nasty attitude you have koosdelerey, as it happens, I am a middle class English. Get a life, don`t be so "Rebellious" hahaha LMAO
kerouac wasnt any of those things!! as he repeatedly stated when he was alive, he was an observer and chronicler of other peoples madness, be that Neal Cassady in On the Road, Gary Snyder in Dharma Bums, or Ginsberg etc in his other books, he wasnt the instigator in anything, in fact prefering his own company most of the time!! most of his books are autobiographical eg maggie cassady, dr sax, desolation angels, big sur etc and they focus on the characters around him not himself most of the time. the acrhetypal rock no roller wasnt kerouac it was Neal Cassady- the living link between the beat generation and the hippy counter culture movement because he was in the The Merry Pranksters with Ken Kesey etc. Kerouac was a copier in most things he did, he copied Herbert Hunke and used his term 'beat', he copied the drug use of his pears, be that dope from ginsberg or benzedrine from hunke and william burroughs, he copied the buddhism of snyder and ginsberg too- his originality came in his literary techniques and his development of 'bop-prosidy'.. ..kerouac wasnt rock n roll in the slightest- his later years were spent in a drunken stupor watching TV.he hated the limelight, what he had helped create in the hippy movement and was actually very conservative in his political outlook. yet another badly researched article based on the reading of a couple of an authors books that dont tell the whole story, this type of article will become more common the closer the film release gets. (btw i did my uni dissertation on the beat generation- i know what i am talking about!)
if you want to find out what kerouac was really like read his ex lovers book -Carolyn Cassady- Off the Road and angelheaded hipster- both shows kerouac to be a conservative,quiet, lonely mothers boy who couldnt raise hell on his own if he tried, he was nervous in public and with the ladies too.
Hello JR Kerouac was indeed a copier, but more importantly, as you rightly observe, he was a chronicler. This is what I was trying to get across in the piece; that, and the lasting legacy of his popular image. Kerouac was indeed a middle class republican conformist who rode the shirt tails of others, but he was the one who wrote it all down. And I'm sorry you considered the article to be badly researched. I've read every single one of Kerouac's books and own most of his recorded output too ... for what it's worth.
The best book on Kerouac is Memory Babe by Gerald Nicosia. In my humble opinion of course.
@Russ: he wasnt the only chronicler though during that era. ferlinghettis(sp?) book on the beats is a great chronicle of the time, as are ginsbergs poems and other novels by lesser known beat authors eg philipp lamntia, michael mcclure, gary snyder etc- i often wonder why Kerouac is held up as the poster boy for this generation of writers ( something he would have loathed to have been in his life time!)??? what do you think Russ? am with you on Memory Babe though, fantastic book and one i plundered greatly for my dissertation!!
btw: IMHO Tristessa is his best book by far, a wonderful character observation and poem to lost love, alebit near totally unreadable. i think thats the point in a lot of kearouacs work though, it was written to be read out loud, so the rhythms and nuances of the structure and language can be heard- like jazz. i dont like the way kerouacs advances in form and structure arent highlighted more- it wasnt all about sex, drugs and music!
JR - I think Bukowski had it right when he said Kerouac was a writer who got famous because he looked like a Rodeo Rider. He looked like a movie star and his breakthrough book was by far the most commercial of the stuff put out by his Beat contemporaries. Ginsberg and Burroughs were too controversial for the times due to the homosexuality and hard drug angles. Kerouac was more accessible and marketable. Even his name sounds like a Hollywood star. It was this angle I was exploring in the article. I've written other stuff for academic papers highlighting his beatific aesthetic (as opposed to "beatnik), but I don't think Sabotage Times is the forum for that type of heavy literary analysis. I may be wrong though. My favourite book is Satori In Paris, which is probably his worst one. I just love the naked honesty of it, that state of cold eyed zen lucidity that comes with being completely pissed 24 hours a day.
Completely pissed 24 hours a day you say? I'm warming to him.
