Hit the Tracks Jack

THAT S NOT writing, that s typing.
One wonders what Truman Capote, the man who minted that (in)famous put down of On The Road, might ve made of the age of the word processor.
Still, TC had a point, if a somewhat sniffy one: Kerouac s locomotive prose was forged of a flagrant disregard for the traditional grind of the rewriting process, a bravado that would ve put the heart across even immediate predecessors like Joyce, Miller and Celine.
But then, Kerouac s disgorgings were meant to be speed-read; as a penslinger, he shot first and you asked questions later. But the important point is that you always did go back and ask those questions, a factor which always undermines Truman s pithy quip.
So, if On The Road was a novel that celebrated a post-war America where the automobile unchained Mailer s white negro a specimen perpetually bombed out of his mind on dope, speed, Miles, Lester, Dizzy and Bird then its impetuous buzz was made for the medium of spoken word. Thus, the inestimable value of a new CD, the self-explanatory Jack Kerouac Ready On The Road, now available on the Rykodisc label.
The centrepiece of this Lee Renaldo/Jim Sampas-produced collection is a 28-minute chunk of On The Road entitled Jazz Of The Beat Generation , a recently remastered reading by the author which was lost for decades amongst mislabeled acetates. Out we jumped in the warm, mad night, hearing a wild tenorman s bawling horn across the way going, EEE-YAH! Kerouac kick-starts, and there s nothing to do only roll with his mantric jazz-rap, a spray-painted portrait of beatniks, bums, swains, trains, automobiles, legendarily holy madmen, players reclaiming their instruments from hock, and the mother of all saloon jams, with Dean Moriarty putting his face in the bell of a soloist s horn, inspiring a long hee-hawed laugh from the behatted musician.
If these racy, vivid, 3D routines establish anything, it s perhaps that Kerouac was one of the better music writers of the last 50 years. His vocal evocations of players melting into their own improvisations, of a white hipster fairy sitting in with buttery brushes on a jump number, are electrifying made even more real by a firm grasp of the black/white vernacular. Not many had the balls to try and capture a Charlie Parker solo in mere words, but like Finnegan s Wake, Kerouac s texts become songs when they are spoken.
So, bearing that in mind, check out the previously unpublished 17-minute Washington DC Blues , replete with a smokey jazz-piano/classical/Latino score from veteran JK-collaborator David Amram, a piece which dices native American, Jewish, Catholic and Arcadian elements and ranks with the best of Hal Willner s meditations on Mingus, or even the Burroughs classic Dead City Radio.
What is less than celebrated is that Kerouac, like Joyce, was a capable crooner, and no bad musician and songwriter. His renderings of When A Woman Loves A Man , Leavin Town and Come Rain Or Shine are dropped-standards, torch tunes with dirt on their boots, pitched somewhere between beatified Billie and drunken Deano.
His own On The Road however, is the real beauty, a melancholic ramble which seems to have formed the template for Tom Waits own mid-70s bohobo routines with Bones Howe; a rain-drenched, lonesome mumble in which you can just sense the protagonist, collar turned up, po boy cap pulled down, bent under the drizzle, waiting on a late Greyhound. Uncle Tom himself, backed by Primus, reprises the song at the end of this record, and makes a fine fist of it, but even he can t recreate the original s sepia sadness.
Messrs Dineen and Kelly exempted, you probably won t hear Jack Kerouac Reads On The Road on the car-radio anytime soon, and that s a pity, because it was made for the wireless. Even in the stasis of your own domocile though, it s a hell of a trip. n