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| The People (1960) |
If I were a young man on 7th August 1960 and
not already a jazz loving beatnik, the Sunday paper The People would’ve had me
scurrying to Dobell’s record shop for Mingus
Ah Um and searching backstreet bookshops for an under-the-counter copy of The Naked Lunch quicker than one could
say “Straight from the fridge, Dad”.
“Blame these 4 men for the Beatnik horror” exclaimed
Peter Forbes, as shocked Britain learnt how a great unwashed army of beatniks
had been driven to violence by a group of American writers and poets,
culminating in a riot at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival. Exciting stuff.
Organised by Lord Montagu and held on the lawns of his Palace
House in the New Forest, the Beaulieu Jazz Festival was in its fifth year when
it achieved notoriety due to the behaviour of fans from both ends of the jazz
spectrum: the traditionalists rooted in sounds of 1920’s Dixieland and the
modernists building on a bebop template. According to photographer David Redfern
both sides complained not enough of “their” type of jazz was being performed before
things came to a head when increasingly drunk youths pulled down lighting rigs,
set fire to a building and destroyed the stage. The BBC, broadcasting the event
live on television, abruptly ended their coverage ahead of schedule with a typically
understated comment, “Things are getting quite out of hand”.
The People told its readers, “The outbreak of violence
that wrecked Lord Montagu’s jazz festival at Beaulieu last week must be blamed
on the cult of despair preached by four strange men”. Those four strange men
identified like names on a wanted poster as Jack “The Hobos’ Prophet” Kerouac; Allen
“The Hate Merchant” Ginsberg; William “The Ex-Drug Addict” Burroughs and
Gregory “The Crank Poet” Corso.
“These four beatnik “prophets” do not themselves preach
violence. But they do infect their followers with indifference or outright
hostility to established codes of conduct. Nothing matters to the beatnik save
the “kicks” or thrills to be enjoyed by throwing off inhibitions. If you feel
any urge, no matter how outrageous, indulge in it. If the beat of jazz whips up
violent emotions, why not give way to them?”
That was the strength of the Beat Generation Quartet’s link
to Beaulieu but it gave the paper enough to feed into the moral panic surrounding
the nation’s latest youth menace and expand upon their exposé from a fortnight earlier;
a double-page spread “The Beatnik Horror” that warned how thousands of young
Americans hooked on this beat craze became “drug addicts and peddlers,
degenerates who specialize in obscene orgies… and outright thugs and hoodlums”.
To illustrate how this cult was manifesting itself on
Britain’s streets they visited Gambier Terrace in Liverpool to show a group of residents
sitting in “unbelievable squalor” with their friend who’d dropped by to “listen
to some jazz”. The property shown was shared at the time by John Lennon and
Stuart Sutcliffe, and the bearded chap in the photo was Allan Williams, owner
of local coffee bar The Jacaranda and manager of the then Silver Beatles, just
about to head to Hamburg for the first time.
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| Gambier Terrace, Liverpool (1960) |
It’s doubtful any of the “prophets” saw the article in a British
tabloid - I couldn’t find any reference in their correspondence or journals –
but it’s interesting to speculate on their differing reactions. Kerouac – likely
the only name some more enlightened readers may have vaguely been familiar with
- the People conceded, was a talented writer who unfortunately “devoted his
great gift to exalting the bums and jazz-maniacs of the New York jive cellars” but
he would’ve been hurt and upset as he frequently was in the backlash following
the success of On The Road when held
up as the avatar of, in his words, “beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks and bugniks”.
Kerouac copped much of the blame for the beatniks but they
were a media creation - step forward Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle -
which bastardised Kerouac’s experiences and vision of a spiritual beatific Beat
Generation into a cartoonish band of beret wearing poets and jive talking bongo
beaters. The American College Dictionary wrote to Jack in ’59 for his
definition. He wrote: “Beat Generation:
Members of the generation that came after World War II-Korean War who join in
relaxation of social and sexual tensions and espouse anti-regimentation,
mystic-disaffiliation and material-simplicity values, supposedly as a result of
Cold War disillusionment. Coined by Jack Kerouac”.
In 1958, only a year after On The Road’s publication, Jack already weary from the attention and
trivialization of his writing wrote to Ginsberg, “I don’t want no more frantic
nights, association with hepcats and queers and Village types, far less mad
trips to unholy Frisco, I just wanta stay home and write”. Whilst rampaging
youths at Beaulieu grabbed a microphone from the stage to demand “Free beer for
the working man!” Jack was attempting to kick his alcoholism by detoxing in
California. He failed but it did provide the material for one of his best books,
Big Sur.
Ginsberg however tended to welcome any publicity for himself
or his friends. He’d already seen his signature work Howl dragged screaming through the courts on obscenity charges yet
Burroughs’s Naked Lunch still had
that to come. In 1960 it had only recently been published in Paris by Olympia
Press who were known to intrepid travellers and customs officials as purveyors
of hard-core pornography and therefore all their titles were banned in the U.K.
Copies were smuggled into the country down the shirts of returning visitors and
placed in all the best bohemian pads where they were read aloud to fits of
stoned laughter. Counterculture activist and beat chronicler Barry Miles, who
acquired his copy that year, wrote in Naked
Lunch@50, “The Naked Lunch was
the hippest, coolest book ever written, and for a seventeen-year-old art
student, that was quite something to have on the shelf”. For all their
sensationalism The People were reasonably quick off the mark in Britain’s mainstream
press to give coverage to Burroughs and also Gregory Corso.
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| William Burroughs, The Beat Hotel, Paris by Duffy (1960) |
Already ancient at 46, Burroughs was far from a crazy beatnik
– none of the original beats, except maybe Ginsberg, much fitted the profile –
but he had at least one important similarity as far as the People were
concerned: they were all filthy soap dodgers. The paper relished partially quoting
Burroughs on the effect his junk habit had on his personal hygiene. “I had not
taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes [or removed them] except to stick
a needle [every hour] in the fibrous grey wooded flesh [of heroin addiction]”.
It was a recurring theme in the media regarding beatniks.
The film Beat Girl in cinemas at that
year followed coffee bar and jazz club dwelling Jenny; described as “the mad
one” by a fellow St Martin’s art student for being a beatnik. When Jenny’s
stepmother pressed the student to elaborate, she’s told, “It’s a craze from
America. Hopeless and soapless”. Even the left-leaning Observer reported the rarefied
grounds of Palace House were “packed solidly with unkempt humanity” and quoted
a hotelkeeper as saying “I wouldn’t mind so much if they washed now and then”.
The paper agreed, “Certainly one could see his point as the jazz fans turned up
in their standard uniform of rumpled jeans and T-shirts, sandals and haircuts
that must have wrung the hearts of the two former Irish Guards sergeants who
were running the campsite behind the car park”.
On the same bank holiday weekend as Beaulieu (held in
those days on the first Monday in August), Alan Whicker reported for the BBC’s
Tonight programme. Councillors in Newquay had written to all shopkeepers, café
owners and bar managers urging them not to serve beatniks visiting the Cornish
town over the summer and for restaurateurs and hoteliers to refuse them jobs as
washer-uppers. Their hair and beards were just about tolerated but their stink
was more than the council could stand. “A man owes it to society to keep
himself clean,” according to one pub landlord. Such claims were refuted by local
long-hair Eric who told Whicker he washed at least every two days.
When Gregory Corso read his poem “Bomb” (the text
cleverly arranged to form the shape of an atomic mushroom cloud) to New
College, Oxford in 1958 members of CND present were not amused. Rather than an
easy Ban The Bomb message, Corso’s poem humourlessly accepts of the inescapable
presence of the bomb and that we’re all going to die anyway. Ginsberg attempted
to explain his friend’s meaning and pacify the hecklers but that didn’t work so,
after dodging shoes thrown at them, he summoned all his poetic powers and reportedly
called them assholes before sheepishly leaving. It’s not too surprising the
gathered campaigners had trouble comprehending the lengthy poem on first
hearing but a little ironic two members of the Beat Generation faced such
hostility a bunch of peaceniks.
What the People didn’t make clear is which side of the
trad/modern divide the rioting beatniks were on. Jack Kerouac’s writing style
(and some of Ginsberg’s) was directly shaped in the 40s and 50s by the new
rhythms of bebop, of Lester Young, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, of the
modern jazz they were hearing as they discovered and created their own artistic
voice. It would therefore follow British beatniks, like their American
counterparts, would also adopt this music yet large swathes of them backed the
wrong horse and used trad (and folk music) as their soundtrack. As the
duffle-coated, sandal wearing, middle-class, beatnik brigade marched to
Aldermaston in bowler hats with the CND symbol taped to the front in honour of
Acker Bilk it was to the accompaniment of trad bands (in fairness, it was a far
easier music to play whilst marching).
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| Beaulieu Jazz Riot by David Redfern (1960) |
Bilk, whose set at Beaulieu was wrapped up in the ensuing
chaos, thought, “They were phoney imitation beatniks. Real ones may be weird,
untidy and excitable but they're not hooligans”. Duncan Heining’s book Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free
Fusioneers: British Jazz 1960-1975 provides much fascinating sociological
context and suggests although the division between jazz fans was real (worse
trouble occurred along similar lines in Hackney’s Victoria Park that summer),
some attendees claim the trouble was primarily the work of local Teddy Boy
hooligans rather than an ideological riot over jazz (which is rather
disappointing).
The unnamed narrator in Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners (1959) believed
anyone over 20 didn’t “give a lump of cat’s shit for the bomb” and gives
wonderful descriptions of his associates Dean Swift and the Misery Kid, who didn’t
like to mix in public on account of Dean being “a sharp modern jazz creation”
and the Kid having “horrible leanings to the trad thing”. The forward-thinking
modernists, with their sharp European and Ivy League styling, were quick to
pour scorn on Misery Kid for admiring backdated “groups that play what is
supposed to be the authentic music of New Orleans, i.e. combos of
booking-office clerks and quantity-surveyors’ assistants who’ve been handed
their cards, and dedicated themselves to blowing what they believe to be the
same note as the wonderful Creoles who invented the whole thing, when it all
long ago began”.
To the likes of Barry Miles, the Beats and modern jazz
went together. He wrote how The Naked
Lunch was difficult to get hold of in the early 60s and “was a shorthand
way of saying you were cool, which in those days meant you listened to Cecil
Taylor, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk; you
appreciated the work of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning,
Francis Bacon, and Mark Rothko; you smoked marijuana and hash when you could
get it; you read Beat Generation writers”.
From here it’s only a short step from modernist to mod.
In my profile on this page I’ve always described myself, slightly
tongue-in-cheek, as a Beatnik Modernist. I did receive one testy response
telling me it was a contradiction in terms but I’m not sure it is. I like this
quote from an original mod, Steve Sparks, in Jonathan Green’s Days In The Life, “Mod has been much
misunderstood… Mod before it was commercialized was essentially an extension of
the beatniks. It comes from “modernist”, it was to do with modern jazz and to
do with Sartre. It was to do with existentialism, the working-class reaction to
existentialism”.
For a little evidence how some of Britain's sharpest Mod Faces of the mid-60s came from a beatnik background, take a close look at this CND badge wearing, guitar carrying, shaggy haired fella from North London making his way to the last Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1961. I give you, Rod The Beatnik Mod.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm_fswB3QrE
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