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COFFEEHOUSE CULTURE -- Issue 2

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD -- INTRODUCTION

It is 1956 and grey is the colour that year. The grey rolling clouds of World War Two have cleared to reveal the grey incinerated soul of humanity. Grey, sad faces of long dead heroes and grey shades of long forgotten victims still fill the global mind. Depression is the mood of the year and suicides run high. War is over but the grey metallic shells cut through the morning mists in Korea and Malaya. A thin, chill miasma creeps westwards from the Soviet Union as it withdraws and restores. Ike is in the White House and Great Britain is governed by a crowd of jolly good chaps under the ultimate jolly good chap, Harold Macmillan. In the Home of the Free, grey gabardine is the fabric of choice and a shoulder holster is the accoutrement no G-man can be without.
.. If things seem bad it is because they are. Freedom is on the decline and repression is heading up the charts. The war they fought for freedom has left them raddled and cynical, disillusioned and dissipated. Minds are in retreat and thinking is banned. Oh, shit, it is a Terry Gillam movie. But, no, this is for real.
.. But, behind the long grey curtain of time, a cast of thousands is waiting in the wings. There, among the ravers, ramblers, rebels and hell raisers, ripples of energy are galvanising the chorus into action. As the orchestra strikes up and the curtain parts, we realise that the stage is set for a musical performance the like of which the world has never before seen.
.. Already pelvic anarchy is sweeping the apple pie homelands of middle-America but they ain’t seen nothin’ yet. In the intellectual badlands, where the crazy people come from, anarchy of a significantly higher order is about to break out.

.. If you want to trace the roots of this culture back into the veils of time, it is possible to do so. After all the history of consciousness goes back all the way. But, in truth, it is not necessary to look too far into the past to see where we came from and how we got here. Unlike most cultures, the genesis of ours can be pinned to just one event, just one point in time, from which all other events spin out in ever increasing intricacy. It is, however, a pivotal point rather than a beginning.
.. The publication, in 1957, of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel of sex, drugs, sore feet and modern jazz, ‘On the Road’ was a low-key literary event by any standards. The undisciplined tale of the travels of a group of young hipsters pursuing love, life and reefer across America received few accolades. Experimental writing? You know how it is. Nobody’s going to read it but someone has to write it, anyway.
.. However, ‘On the Road’ was the exception. For many did read it. Within the stream of consciousness ramblings of its hero, Dean Moriarty (stunningly played in real life by Neal Cassady), America’s disenfranchised saw reflections of their own psyches. In the artistic and intellectual communities based around San Francisco’s North Beach, Los Angeles’ Venice West and New York City’s Greenwich Village, ‘On the Road’ redefined a lifestyle that had previously been no more than bohemian.
.. The Beat Generation was born as a literary soundbite that became a social phenomenon.
.. It was not so much the lifestyle, which many were living anyway, but its identification and definition that produced the social reverberations we are still feeling from Kerouac’s classic. In drawing together the strands of the unconventional, bohemian way of life and redefining them as ‘beat’, Jack Kerouac provided the platform for the first truly alternative cultural event. As the aliens and alienated emerged from the woodwork and assumed with a new confidence their mantles of hipness, their immediate associations were with the other sub-cultures that existed outside of conventionality. It was with black, sub-criminal, sexual deviant and other ‘excluded’ cultures that the Beats shared a natural affinity. In aspiring to hipness, the Beats aped the vocabulary of the mainly black jazz musicians who inspired them, both musically and in their use of drugs.
.. And here, at last, we come to the pivotal factor that created the Beat Generation and all that followed — drugs.
.. Although the term ’beat’ had originally referred to the hard travelling that to many epitomised the ‘freedoms’ that defined the lifestyle, the term quickly took on a new and distinctly drug-related meaning expressing the ‘beatific’ level of spirituality associated with heightened awareness. Few, however, realised that. For them it defined an attitude, a philosophy. a social position in opposition to society’s main thrust. And, in their droves, the new adherents to Kerouac’s vision and terminology, lined up behind something that seemed like a social phenomenon.
.. There were a lot of people who did not want to emulate their heroes in the aimless wandering lifestyle they pursued. They were not refugees from the 1930s that had spawned Woody Guthrie and his accolades to unemployment, poverty and railway trains. The older ones had seen the devastating effects of war created by egomanic despots intent upon world domination. They had seen a half a generation perish on the sands of Jiwajima and in the trenches of Europe and they knew they did not want it again. And all the while the youngsters were being conditioned by that very same generation to be grateful that so many had died ‘so that they could be free.’ It was an innocent demand for acknowledgement of a generation’s sacrifice, a call to respect and honour the dead, but somehow it created an expectation that could only lead to trouble.
.. Freedom is a state of mind and there are many ways to express it. One of the easiest ways, however, is through the use of substances that society regards as anti-social. It was that easy. Or was it? For in giving the world a beat ethos, Kerouac seemed to provide a catayst for revolutionaries. It is interesting to note that for many beatniks, using drugs was just a harmless expression of a rebellion that had more sinister aspects. They were, indeed, almost to man anarchists and reactionaries, urban guerrillas and ‘freedom fighters’, with the emphasis on ‘fighters’. In those far off days when politics was still in the process of revealing itself as a gross and indecent misrepresentation of the honest and the true, there seemed to be something worth overthrowing.
.. And, of course, at the time of its publication, ‘On the Road’ was, indeed, a singularly anarchic treatise. But this was the anarchy of individual freedom. It was certainly no political manifesto. Yet, its political implications, as we will see, were profound and influential.
.. As influential as the book itself were the real-life characters involved in its creation and who appear in its pages. They were the new missionaries spread-ing the doctrine of hip. Among Kerouac’s circle of intimates were Allen Ginsberg, beat poet, emissary of consciousness, pot prophet; Neal Cassady, the real Dean Moriarty, a speed freak of prodigious habits who careered through the American sub-culture for over 30 years; William Burroughs, the original mackintosh man with delusions of insect infiltration; poets Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. And many ‘bit’ players who had not yet disgraced themselves enough to make it to the centre of the stage. (In 1961, a certain Timothy Leary has a ‘walk-on’ in the Kerouac story with a handful of psychedelics.)
.. Like a secret cabal machinating behind the throne of straight America, Kerouac’s coterie of unconscious conspirators took the fabric of the society they so despised and recut it into a suit that fitted a whole lot better. Through years of cultural expansion they provided a focal point for more vocal and more vigorous protagonists to the system as they networked outwards from their original narrow literary base. And on the way they took all the major figures and movements of the last few decades.
.. Although this is, essentially, a tale set in the second half of the 20th century, it does not start there. In the science lab of sociological change, the events we shall be describing constituted an explosive reaction created by simple elements combined in the right proportion. It was an explosion of such magnitude that it not only made the test tubes rattle but reached to the very foundations of society. It produced a social phenomenon like few others. But such events do not happen without some pretty powerful precipitants. It is no mere coincidence that Kerouac’s text inspired, galvanised and mobilised a whole generation. The conditions were right. And they were conditions that had been established decades before.
.. In the first parts of this series we look at the factors which created the backdrop against which our passion play is to be acted. It is a monochromatic story we have to tell, in shades of grey, with the sound of a lonely harmonica playing in the distance. But there will come a point -- trust us -- when, like in the Wizard of Oz, we will switch into glorious technicolor. And will follow the yellow brick road little realising what it is or where it leads.
.. And all along we’ll be hitching down Freedom Highway.