Jack Sheedy Jazz Band
 Bert Pearl, Bill Dart, Jack Minger, Paul Miller, Pat Patton and Jack Sheedy.

San Francisco Scene (The Beat Generation)
By Jack Kerouac

Now it’s jazz, the place is roaring, all beautiful girls in there, one mad brunette at the bar drunk with her boys. One strange chick I remember from somewhere, wearing a simple skirt with pockets, her hands in there, short haircut, slouched, talking to everybody. Up and down the stairs they come. The bartenders are the regular band of Jack, and the heavenly drummer who looks up in the sky with blue eyes, with a beard, is wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming on the cash register and everything is going to the beat. It’s the beat generation, it’s beat, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart, it’s being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat.

The faces! There’s no face to compare with Jack Minger’s who’s up on the bandstand now with a colored trumpeter who outblows him wild and Dizzy but Jack’s face overlooking all the heads and smoke. He has a face that looks like everybody you’ve ever known and seen on the street in your generation, a sweet face. Hard to describe, sad eyes, cruel lips, expectant gleam, swaying to the beat, tall, majestical – waiting in front of the drugstore. A face like Huck’s in New York (Huck whom you’ll see on Times Square, somnolent and alert, sadsweet, dark, beat, just out of jail, martyred, tortured by sidewalks, starved for sex and companionship, open to anything, ready to introduce new worlds with a shrug). The colored big tenor with the big tone would like to be blowing Sunny Stitts clear out of Kansas City roadhouses, clear, heavy, somewhat dull and unmusical ideas which nevertheless never leave the music, always there, far out, the harmony too complicated for the motley bums (of music-understanding) in there.

The drummer is a sensational 12-year-old Negro boy who’s not allowed to drink but can play, tremendous, a little lithe childlike Miles Davis kid, like early Fats Navarro fans you used to see in Espan Harlem, hep, small – he thunders at the drums with a beat which is described to me by a near-standing Negro connoisseur with beret as a “fabulous beat”. On piano is Blondey Bill, good enough to drive any group. Jack Minger blows out and over his head with these angels from Fillmore, I dig him – now it’s terrific. I just stand in the outside hall against the wall, no beer necessary, with collections of in-and-out listeners, with Sliv, and now here returns Chuck Berman (who is a colored kid from West Indies who barged into my party six months earlier high with Cody and the gang and I had a Chet Baker record on and we hoofed at each other in the room, tremendous, the perfect grace of his dancing, casual, like Joe Louis casually hoofing). He comes now in dancing like that, glad. Everybody looks everywhere, it’s a jazz-joint and beat generation madtrick, you see someone, “Hi,” then you look away elsewhere, for something someone else, it’s all insane, then you look back, you look away, around, everything is coming in from everywhere in the sound of the jazz. “Hi”, “Hey”. Bang, the little drummer takes a solo, reaching his young hands all over traps and kettles and cymbals and foot-peddle BOOM in a fantastic crash of sound – 12 years old – but what will happen?

One of the most famous sentences ever penned by Kerouac is “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 yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” This quote from On the Road demonstrates what Kerouac called his original technique of “spontaneous prose.”

His style is similar to the “stream of consciousness” technique. His motto was “First thought=best thought,” and thus many of his books, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans, were written in a matter of weeks, instead of years like his some of his contemporaries. Kerouac claimed that this style was greatly influenced by the exploding jazz era of his time. More specifically, it was the effect of the bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others that gave feeling and mood to much of Kerouac’s writings.

Kerouac’s writing centered around the idea of breath (borrowed from jazz and from Buddhist meditation). Connected to this idea also came a disdain for the full stop or period, instead he would much rather use a long dash that he felt gave his writings a sense of connectedness. This prolific use of dashes caused his works, when read aloud, to sound as if they had their own unique rhythm. Thus his works were compared to the lyrics and music of jazz.

Unlike many writers who liked to keep their methods and ideas secret, Kerouac never tired of talking about his inspiration and his style. Often influenced by drugs and alcohol, Kerouac could talk to anyone for hours about how he wrote and why he wrote. These indiscretions were frowned upon by Ginsberg, who felt that Kerouac’s drunken openness would make it more difficult for him to sell his work to a publisher. Nevertheless, Kerouac decided to write down his method for anyone who wanted to know how write like him. The most specific directions he gave on his spontaneous prose can be found in [“Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.”

Although Kerouac made a name for himself during his lifetime, he had many critics. Among them were Truman Capote, who described Kerouac’s quick writing ability by saying, “That’s not writing, it’s typewriting.”

It is a fact, however, that although his initial draft may have been spontaneous, he did spend days perfecting many of his writings. This is most likely attributed to the fact that Kerouac was constantly trying to get his work published during the 1950s and thus trying to adjust to various publishers’ standards. Kerouac documented his struggles, his revisions, and his disappointments in a vast number of letters he wrote that were also written in his Spontaneous Prose style.

Source: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Jack_Kerouac

[mp3j track=”kerouac.mp3″]

Link back the Poetry Wednesday tour on Laurita’s page

San Francisco Scene (The Beat – Jack Kerouac

delete reply starfishred wrote on Oct 26, ’09 this is so good thanks laurita

delete reply madisonpooface wrote on Oct 26, ’09 Now that was fantastic.

delete reply nemo4sun wrote on Oct 26, ’09 🙂

edit delete reply lauritasita wrote on Oct 26, ’09 Can you dig it?

delete reply nemo4sun wrote on Oct 26, ’09 yes i can 🙂

edit delete reply lauritasita wrote on Oct 26, ’09 nemo4sun said yes i can I knew that you could!

delete reply nemo4sun wrote on Oct 26, ’09 a stone solid groove hep cat 🙂

delete reply kwika wrote on Oct 26, ’09 Cool.

delete reply parsonsblvd wrote on Oct 26, ’09 I love this one, thanks.  Fred

delete reply pestep55 wrote on Oct 27, ’09 Groovy – feeling like I’m in a coffee house /:-)

delete reply forgetmenot525 wrote on Oct 30, ’09 love this guys voice, listening to the words is so much nicer than reading them……..somehow reminds me of old Richard Burton movies………..great post LAURITA