The Stilled Voice That Drove Beat Generation Is Heard Again

Jan Kerouac only met her father twice. The last time, in 1967, she was an adolescent; he was an alcoholic. She was longing to live; he was waiting to die.

“I wish I had known him better,” said Kerouac, now 38. “He could spout all kinds of things on paper, but in person, he was non-communicative. He was drinking out of a bottle of whiskey when I saw him, and he showed me artwork on his wall. He didn’t know what else to say.”

Two years later, her father--and the father of the Beat Generation, writer Jack Kerouac, only 47, drank himself to death. Jan Kerouac would know the legend, the books, the anecdotes--never the man. Until today.

“It’s almost like he’s talking to me,” said Jan Kerouac about the three-record Jack Kerouac Collection, distributed by Rhino Records on its new spoken-word label, Word Beat, and released in late June. “All these years later, I’m meeting him.”

The reunion was arranged by James Austin, Rhino’s associate artists and recording director, who spent two often discouraging years hunting for the lost Kerouac recordings, and then acquiring ownership. The recordings, based on Kerouac’s books and poetry, were made in 1958 and 1959, but very few copies were made. With the help of Kerouac contemporaries, such as poets Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure, and Kerouac fans, such as record producer Harvey Kubernik, Austin put together a package revealing the writer’s inexhaustible zest for all life experiences.

In print, such exuberance was best manifested in “On the Road,” the journey of Kerouac and his best friend, Neal Cassady, who drifted from city to city in search of life’s heartbeat. On record, backed up by his favorite music, jazz and blues, Kerouac’s words roll out with a thundering urgency, with passion and fire, as if there is no guarantee of tomorrow.

“I’d read this stuff,” said the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, whose comments appear in a booklet accompanying the collection, “but I hadn’t heard it--the cadences, the flow, the kind of endlessness of the prose, the way it just poured off. It was really stunning to me. His way of perceiving the music and the road, the romance of the American highway, it struck me. It struck a primal chord.”

The Kerouac influence has been well documented. Bob Dylan credits Kerouac with turning him on to poetry. Ray Manzarek, The Doors’ keyboardist, says the band would never have formed if not for the father of the Beat Generation. “We were fellow Beatniks,” said Manzarek. “We wanted to live the life of freedom and credibility that he represented. Morrison and I talked about him a lot.”

After Kerouac’s death in 1969, his torch didn’t pass automatically to future generations. He had stayed away from the political and social changes of the 1960s, which he had helped foster, and died almost in obscurity. Still, there were die-hards who kept the flame flickering, reading his works, discussing his message. Kubernik, who was producing other spoken-word albums in the late 1970s, recalls that the questions about Kerouac never went away.

“People wanted to know if Kerouac had made an album,” Kubernik said. “I knew there was a market out there for this.”

Record executives didn’t agree. When Kubernik, who was director of artists and recording for MCA Records, first pitched the idea of a Kerouac release in 1979, he was told a spoken-word album would have no marketability. “It was always dismissed as some sort of Harvey hobby. I had to educate people as to who this guy was.”

Periodically, for almost a decade, Kubernik, after leaving MCA, approached independent labels to see if there was any interest, but nobody made any offers. At the same time, Austin experienced his own frustrations. In 1975 he found that Kerouac had recorded albums, but couldn’t locate any. “Everyone had tapes, but no one had the original albums.”

He joined Rhino Records in 1987, and, after launching other projects such as the Roy Orbison anthology, he made his first bid for the Kerouac release. He suggested a boxed set; Rhino executives agreed to one record. “At least they wanted to do something.”

Austin contacted Kubernik, head of BarkKubCo, a music and spoken-word production house, and together, they began lining up Kerouac friends and supporters. Austin was convinced that there was a market for the readings, and soon got Rhino to agree to the three-record release. “The fact that everything he wrote was still in print gave us the indication there was an audience out there for him.”

Still, he couldn’t locate the original recordings, released by Hanover Records, which had gone out of business. Eventually he discovered that Roulette Records had possession of all Hanover material.

“I thought I had found the Holy Grail,” Austin said. “All this time, there was this cloud, and then it was suddenly lifted.”

By coincidence, Rhino had just entered into negotiations to acquire the rights to Roulette’s non-jazz catalogue, which included the Kerouac collection; they soon got it. Austin had secured the rights to two Kerouac albums, and got the third from PolyGram.

Other Kerouac highlights, previously unreleased, such as his speech about the Beat Generation at Brandeis University and his appearance on “The Steve Allen Plymouth Show,” were soon added to the three-record package. The set will cost $49.98 on CD, and $39.98 on record and cassette. Rhino is issuing 3,000 copies on CD, and 6,000 on both record and cassette.

Kerouac friends and followers believe the writer would be pleased with the new release.

“He’d love it,” said McClure. “He was truly one of the great readers. I don’t want to discount the page, but Jack lifted poetry from the page. It’s the same thing that happens with rock ‘n’ roll. You now have a dialogue between the artist and the audience, and people can answer you back. He enjoyed the interaction with the audience.”

Gerald Nicosia, who wrote a Kerouac biography, “Memory Babe,” said Kerouac always predicted that he would become more famous after his death.

“I don’t think he’d want to be at the publicity party,” said Nicosia, “and if he was, he’d be drunk at it.”

Nicosia said Kerouac’s life was full of contradictions; he showed people the endless possibilities of adventure, of the ongoing search for answers on America’s highways, and yet, he endured so many years of misery.

“After 1957, there was almost no happiness in his life,” Nicosia said, alluding to Kerouac’s life of failed expectations. “He wanted to be seen as a voice of America, but instead was seen as a voice of juvenile delinquents, and that hurt him a lot. He was so angry and bitter, he wanted to die. He couldn’t take the easy way, a bullet, because he was a Catholic. But he rationalized that it wasn’t a sin if he drank himself to death.”

Still, Nicosia added, the Kerouac spirit that inspired so many youths in the 1950s and 1960s to chart new, exciting courses in their lives can have as much relevance today. “It’s a message that always needs to be heard, and that’s why it’s great that this set has been released. Life is to be experienced, and you can’t just get it out of books or listen to what a teacher tells you.”

Jan Kerouac certainly followed in her father’s footsteps. She has spent much of her life trailblazing across America and writing about it. She said that she has probably traveled more than 10 times as many miles as her father. “I have the same bug,” she said. “I couldn’t stop it.” Her father’s last words to her in 1967 still ring clearly.

“I was 15, and pregnant, and on my way to Mexico,” she said, “and he said, ‘You go to Mexico, and write a book about it, and you can use my name,’ and that’s what I did. It was called ‘Baby Driver.’ That was the closest he ever came to acknowledging that I was his daughter.”