Title: Text and Drugs and Rock 'N' Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture
Abstract: Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: The and Rock Culture Simon Warner (London: Bloomsbury, 2013)A comprehensive account of the many connections between the Beat Generation and rock music is long overdue, and the expansive nature of the topic is clear from the very fact that Simon Warner's new book spins out more than five-hundred pages without exhausting its possibilities. True, the volume acquires some of its heft from multiple iterations of various facts, descriptions, references, and citations that come around on the guitar again and again, to paraphrase the immortal Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie. Generally speaking, though, Text and Drugs and Rock 'n 'Roll: The and Rock Culture gallops through the territory at a lively clip, drawing on a large, if incomplete, storehouse of existing books, articles, broadcasts, interviews, and e-mails. It isn't exhaustive or exhausting, but in both departments it comes close.Warner's fundamental idea is that the original Beat writers, first prominent in the 1950s, and the musicians of the British invasion and acid rock, most prominent in the 1960s, were connected in ways that both symbolized and facilitated the breakdown of constraining boundaries between high and low culture, which had needlessly divided audiences, critics, and academics into divergent camps of mutually uncomprehending partisans. The key year in this development was 1965, the key location was San Francisco, and the key event was the so-called Last Gathering of the Beats at the City Lights Bookstore, which brought Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Michael McClure, and a few other literati together with Bob Dylan, then making his transition from progressive folk musician to dynamic rocker. Those present were famously photographed by Larry Keenan, although as Warner notes in one of the book's many historical ironies, the image later seen most widely-of sundry and fellow travelers hobnobbing outside the bookstore-does not include Dylan.In his opening pages, Warner posits the importance ofthat occasion through a string of questions that the rest of the book addresses in a semi-organized series of essays, interviews, reviews, and obituaries. The following provides a good example of Warner's questions and style:What could an older generation of writers, all close to, or well past, that age that baby-boomer rock 'n' rollers appeared to fear most - the onset of the dreaded 30 - impart to this open-minded, loose-limbed, long-haired superstar who had caught the attention of a billion disciples. What could the crusty, curling leaves of a book of verse, the thumb-eased, dog-eared pages of a well-turned novel, teach this freewheeling, folk-strumming general at the head of much younger battalions raised on the television's magic eye, the arrival of the space age and the mesmerizing cacophony of a new music that promised dreams of love, of life, of liberty. How could the grey 1950s, broadcast in monochrome and cowering in the Cold War shadows, lend any energising spark to the glowing 1960s, shot in Technicolor and screened in Cinemascope?1 (3)The breathless, near-logorrheic prose is typical of Warner's writing, as is the casual way with punctuation, question marks included. Matters of orthography are details, but details are the heart and soul of this book, which makes up in teeming minutiae what it lacks in big-picture analysis.Like many historians of the and their context, Warner opens with an overview of the American sociocultural landscape in the years after World War II, pointing out its strengths-a booming economy, a flood of new technologies and conveniences-along with its weaknesses, from racism and materialism to conformity, consumerism, and cold-war paranoia. Bebop, abstract-expressionist painting, William Carlos Williams's revolutionary verse, and J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye are among the touchstones in Warner's account. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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