The Beat Goes On
Jack Kerouac's Big Sur dreams and nightmares are memorialized in
an ambitious new DVD/CD.
By Stuart Thornton
October 15, 2009
After the success of On the Road made his mind all goopy with fame,
celebrity, Beat wannabe kids yakking, hangovers ringin' his head like
an empty bell, Jack Kerouac decided to dry out in Big Sur He got a
ride down Highway 1 past swishing seashores splish splashing and past
redwood trees quietly meditating to Bixby Canyon where a bridge was
stretched out like a spider web over a deep ravine In the canyon,
where a creek gurgled like an old man gargling and wrecks from the
road above sat in the vegetation like twisted puzzle pieces, the
so-called King of the Beats went lights-out crazy and wrote his 1962
novel Big Sur in the creepy crawly cabin that belonged to his friend
Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
--
A harrowing chronicle of alcoholism and self-doubt, Big Sur finds
Kerouac replacing his alter ego Sal Paradise from On the Road with
another troubled, thinly veiled stand-in, Jack Duluoz. Five years
after a New York Times review of On the Road compared the novel's
importance to that of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and
proclaimed Kerouac the "avatar" of the Beats, Big Sur received a
decidedly more mixed reception. The Times stayed behind Kerouac in
their review of the book, proclaiming it "certainly Kerouac's
grittiest novel to date and the one which will be read with most
respect by those skeptical of all the Beat business in the first
place." But Time magazine felt the work revealed Kerouac as a
"confirmed one-vein literary minor."
Two years ago, a reissue of On The Road marked the 50th anniversary
of its 1957 publication, earning renewed kudos. Now F-Stop/Atlantic
Records is honoring the 40th anniversary of his death on Oct. 21,
1969 while his legend lives on, living up to the legend proved
intolerably hard for the writer with the release of a 98-minute
documentary about Big Sur. An album featuring an unlikely
collaboration between alt country icon Jay Farrar (Uncle Tupelo, Son
Volt) and Ben Gibbard of the Grammy-nominated indie pop group Death
Cab for Cutie will accompany it. Directed by Curt Worden, the
documentary is a collage of passages from the book read by The
Sopranos' John Ventimiglia, images of the Big Sur coast (fog
dispersing into the sky like creamer clouding coffee, waves creating
a rind of whitewater on the shoreline) and a parade of talking heads:
some essential, some seemingly scattershot. The DVD and CD are both
titled One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur.
The film includes the necessary interviews with individuals who were
important characters in the book, including Ferlinghetti, the poet
and co-founder of San Francisco's City Lights Booksellers &
Publishers who lent Kerouac his Bixby Canyon cabin, which Kerouac
refers to as Raton Canyon in Big Sur.
In addition, the documentary captures revealing information about the
famed writer by getting collaborators and colleagues including jazz
artist David Amram, Beat poet Michael McClure and Carolyn Cassady,
the wife of Kerouac's dear friend Neal Cassady, to speak on film. But
there are also some unexpected contributors to the movie, like Amber
Tamblyn, who was the star of TV's Joan of Arcadia, and Donal Logue,
the scruffy Canadian actor from the 2000 film The Tao of Steve and
the former Fox sitcom Grounded For Life.
While some of the contributors lend more authority to the project
than others, there's a handful of scenes that truly illuminate the
book Big Sur and Kerouac's state at that time.
Early on, Tom Waits tosses out the gem that "Big Sur always reminded
me of a chronicle of a man being eaten by ants." Before delivering a
bebop influenced reading of Kerouac's drive down the Big Sur coast,
former Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter echoes Waits' sentiment
by enthusing that the 1962 novel "is an ugly, ugly book of ugly
places in the mind, of sordid places in the psyche." And it's poet
Aram Saroyan who nails the tone of Big Sur before Kerouac descends
into madness. He says: "It's like a goofy holy man's journal in this
wonderful place. The first 40 pages, or whatever it is, of the book
is just like a little kid exploring in nature."
During the film, Ventimiglia's reading of selected passages from Big
Sur is like a narrative Highway 1 connecting wide-ranging themes and
scenes together. Except for a scene of Farrar playing that almost
seems like a detour into a music video, the acoustic blues riffs and
organ swells composed and recorded by Farrar and Gibbard course
naturally through One Fast Move or I'm Gone like Bixby Creek.
The CD, which blossomed from the recording of just a few songs for
the documentary's soundtrack, is now a 12-song set of original music
paired with lyrics adapted from Kerouac's Big Sur. "California
Zephyr" finds Gibbard who penned some of the songs for his band's
Billboard-topping album Narrow Stairs in the cabin that Kerouac
describes in Big Sur singing lyrics about the author's train ride
to California over acoustic guitar strums as wide open as the
American countryside that passed outside Kerouac's window. Others,
like "Low Life Kingdom" are typical Farrar country rock compositions
complete with dense verbiage delivered in his unmistakable molasses
drawl over steel guitar lines strung out like taffy. Some standouts
include "All in One," a more upbeat number that's as refreshing as a
blast of coastal air, and "Final Horrors," where the dark blues sound
of the music perfectly suits the lyrics describing the despairs ofalcoholism.
--
The dual releases of One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur are
the first ventures for Kerouac Films. The fledgling company began
when music producer Jim Sampas contacted veteran TV man and
documentary filmmaker Curt Worden about getting into the film
business two years ago. Worden's resume includes a decade long
stint as director of photography at ABC News in New York. Following
his time on staff at ABC News, Worden worked as a freelancer on 60
Minutes, 20/20, The Oprah Winfrey Show and PBS' NOVA. He also has
taken home two Emmy Awards for his work covering the first Gulf War
and for a project titled The Making of a Summit, which featured
President Bill Clinton and Ted Koppel.
Sampas also has quite a pedigree. First off, his aunt Stella married
Kerouac in his later years, so that makes him the writer's nephew,
even though Kerouac passed away when Sampas was just 4 years old. He
doesn't remember much about his famous uncle but jokes that, "one of
these days, I'll get a hypnotist to bring me back there."
After a try as a singer/songwriter, Sampas realized that his true
love was producing projects. In 1996, he created a Books on Tape
album where British rocker Graham Parker read Kerouac's novel Visions
of Cody with music by David Amram. That endeavor was followed up by
1997's Kerouac: kicks joy darkness, for which Sampas somehow wrangled
a diverse set of impressive talent, including Allen Ginsberg,
R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs,
Johnny Depp and comedian Richard Lewis, to read from the works of his uncle.
In 1998, Sampas was working with another uncle, John Sampas, the
executor of the Kerouac estate, sorting through the Kerouac archives
before handing over some material to the New York Public Library,
when he discovered a piece of treasure for Kerouac fans: an
until-then-unknown screenplay adaptation by the writer of his 1959
novel Dr. Sax. Sampas decided to turn the script into a radio drama
spanning two CDs and including the late Jim Carroll (The Basketball
Diaries), poet Robert Creeley, Robert Hunter and Ferlinghetti
providing the voices of the characters.
Sampas has produced several other tribute albums that have nothing to
do with his famous uncle. These ambitious projects include the 2000
CD Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska with
contributions from Johnny Cash, Los Lobos and Chrissie Hynde and
2005's This Bird Has Flown: A 40th Anniversary Tribute to the
Beatles' Rubber Soul, where The Fiery Furnaces and the Cowboy
Junkies, among others, contributed their interpretations of Rubber
Soul tracks.
Sampas says that the purpose of Kerouac Films which is run by
Worden and Sampas along with Gloria Bailen and Roger Yergeau from an
office in Rhode Island is to discover fascinating stories that
would make great films, even if they have nothing to do with Kerouac.
"The idea is to create artistically driven, culturally significant
projects that have meaning," he says.
Already, Kerouac Films is developing feature films of both Big Sur
and Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. (Currently, Francis Ford
Coppola owns the rights to Kerouac's masterwork, 1957's On the Road).
Worden says that the screenplay for the feature film version of Big
Sur is completed and being passed around to some directors in Los
Angeles. "It's definitely going to be a motion picture," he says.
Before embarking on creating a feature film together, Worden and
Sampas decided to put their newfound collaboration to the test by
doing a documentary film. Surprisingly, they easily settled on Big
Sur, a challenging read depicting Kerouac's downward spiral into
madness and alcoholism.
"Here's a book that unlike all the others he was creating something
that was really about him," Sampas says. "Certainly in Visions of
Gerard and Dr. Sax and On the Road and these other books, you know
there's Jack Duluoz or Sal Paradise or whatever name he's going by,
but the focus is not that person. Whereas this book, he's really
laying it all out, everything that he's thinking at that moment. It's
quite personal, and, frankly, it can be quite dark, but there's some
soul searching there that we found very intriguing."
Sampas says the diverse set of musicians, writers, poets, actors,
historians and Beat figures in the documentary were chosen to
represent a range of ages and groups, but they also had to fit the
feel of the film. "I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't think
we'd interview Barry Manilow," he says. "I'm sure it would be great
to interview Barry Manilow for something but not for this."
One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur was shot over the spring
and summer of 2007 in New York City, San Francisco, Carmel Beach and
Big Sur's Bixby Canyon, where the cabin Kerouac stayed in is located.
Over an almost weeklong period in June of 2007, Worden and his
20-person crew shot the documentary's Big Sur segments.
The veteran cameraman says he employed a philosophy for shooting the
film that allowed the words spoken in the film to stand out as One
Fast Move or I'm Gone's primary attraction. "I intentionally chose to
keep the shots very, very simple," he says. "There's not a whole lot
of camera movement. There's none of this dolly and zooming in. It
wasn't a ton of camera motion. I mean there are some beautiful shots.
They were hand selected so that they worked for what they were
supposed to work for, but they didn't overpower Jack Kerouac's prose."
A few minutes later, Worden continues on about why he decided to keep
fancy camera moves to a minimum. "It's all about Jack," he says.
Meanwhile, Sampas was creating the film's soundtrack, with some input
from his partners at Kerouac Films. "Although there is just a bit of
jazz in the film, we wanted to stay away from the whole jazz thing,
because we thought that it might be too predictable for a Beat poet,"
he says. "Keep the bongos away, so to speak."
Rather than utilizing the sort of bebop jazz that Beat writers
gravitated towards, the music producer saw a parallel between the
themes of Kerouac's works and that of the Americana/alt country
genre. Having worked with Farrar on the Badlands tribute, Sampas
realized the songwriter might be an ideal choice for the soundtrack.
"I had researched and found that he was a big admirer of Jack's and
that his writing style had been influenced by the spontaneous prose
method that Jack 'invented,'" he says.
Knowing that Gibbard was also a fan of Kerouac's work his "Bixby
Canyon Bridge" from Death Cab for Cutie's Grammy nominated Narrow
Stairs seems to describe the musician searching for the soul of
Kerouac in Bixby Canyon Sampas invited the alt rock bandleader to
collaborate with Farrar. "One of the reasons we picked Ben, I think,
is because we wanted something left of center," he says. "We wanted
to put something in the mix that wasn't so predictable."
Farrar and Gibbard had never met until the night before the
soundtrack's first recording session, when the two got together for
drinks. Inside San Francisco's Hyde Street Studios, where classic
albums including Santana's Abraxas and The Grateful Dead's American
Beauty were recorded, Sampas was bowled over by Farrar and Gibbard's
musicianship. "It was striking," he says. "How natural it all felt
was unbelievable. It was one of the most incredible sessions I've
ever witnessed."
After the two-day session, where the two recorded the basic tracks
for seven of the songs, Farrar and Gibbard were inspired to create a
whole album's worth of material together. Over the course of the last
two years, they completed recording the project in St. Louis,
Missouri and Los Angeles. In an August article in Paste Magazine,
Farrar describes why the two decided to keep collaborating. "We were
the last ones standing," he says. "We both believed in the spirit of
Kerouac enough to know that we had to see the project through."
The unlikely collaboration has piqued the curiosity of music fans and
led to articles detailing the release of the One Fast Move or I'm
Gone soundtrack on Billboard.com and Pitchfork.com.
Next Friday, Farrar and Gibbard will embark on a six-stop tour where
they will perform songs from One Fast Move or I'm Gone and "other
surprise material." (The closest they will get to Monterey County,
alas, is an Oct. 24 performance at San Francisco's Bimbo's 365 Club.)
On May 9, 2008, One Fast Move or I'm Gone made its film festival
debut at the opening night of the Santa Cruz International Film
Festival. Since then, it's been shown at the 2008 Lone Star
International Film Festival in Fort Worth, Texas and at this year's
Litquake, a weeklong literary event in the Bay Area.
With the documentary screening at more film festivals and gaining a
higher profile due to the release of the accompanying CD, Kerouac's
overlooked novel may undergo a critical reappraisal. "I really hope
that people watch the documentary and decide that they have to read
the book," Worden says.
Already, the director inadvertently turned a handful of folks onto
the book while filming the segments of his documentary on location in
Big Sur. "I think most of the crew knew who Jack Kerouac was but they
had not read Big Sur," he says. "And then you start interviewing
these really cool people, and they start talking about the story.
After two days of shooting, every crew member had a copy of Big Sur
in their back pocket, and they were reading it every chance they get."
--
On Oct. 20, the DVD and CD will be available at
http://kerouacmovie.hasawebstore.com in different formats including a
digital album ($9.99), a standard CD ($12.99), a CD/DVD combo package
($19.99) and a limited edition box set ($49.99) with CD, DVD, a 24
page book of unpublished photos of Jack Kerouac and a paperback copy
of Kerouac's Big Sur. Further information:
http://www.onefastmove.com/about_the film
--------
Letters from a Legend
Death, critics and the making of Big Sur.
By Staff
October 15, 2009
(Kerouac writes Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1960, thanking the poet for
the use of his cabin.)
Okay, I'll be out there in time for July 22… What I need now is a
rest, is sleeping in my bag under the stars again, is quiet
meditative cookings of supper, reading by oil lamp, singing, sitting
by beach with note book and occasional wine… I wd. like to spend a
summer in that cabin, sleeping outdoors, visited only by you… This is
no idle talk on my part, this can save my life, at least my sanity…
When I get there I can hitchhike to Monterrey actually take train
number 78 the Del Monte to Monterrey and buy a carton of necessary
groceries and get a cab to drive me out presumably up the dirt road
up Bixby canyon from Bixby bridge Because I'll also have full
rucksack with sleepbag, poncho, pots, etc. etc. on my back But once
there with rucksack and carton of groceries I don't have to come out
but once a week maybe and hitch into Monterrey or south to state
store for extrys
And I wanted to tell you: when yr letter came offering me that cabin
for a few months I felt like it was what I was waiting for, just a
night before I'd despaired in nightmares and said, "O my God, I need
outside help now" and you sent it.
Adios, Jack
(Ferliinghetti writes Time magazine in 1962 about their pan of the novel.)
Your snide, sneering, condescending, semi-literate, semi-dishnonest,
spiteful attack on Jack Kerouac and his latest book, BIG SUR, is
disgusting. The fact that you've concentrated on Kerouac himself more
than on his book makes your review particularly despicable. Since
TIME is the Protestant bible to millions of Americans who receive
your so-called literary criticism as from a godhead, don't you think
you should at least try to consider authors as human beings rather
than as fodder for your advertising men and copywriters?… Your cruel,
oh-so-clever annihilation of him only brings Death that much closer
to him, and to us, and to America.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
--
Source: Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1957-1969, edited by Ann
Charters (Viking Press)
.
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