He’s got the Beats (interview with Simon Warner)

On his frequently updated Substack newsletter, Rock and the Beat Generation, Simon Warner doggedly traces the connections inherent in his title, through interviews and correspondences, reviews, profiles, scrapheap-of-history sidebars. The newsletter is, in Warner’s own words, a “digital extension” of his 2013 book, Text and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture, and can take you just about anywhere where Beat and rock (and folk and jazz—but mostly rock) intersect. Whether pursuing the question of when John Lennon got his hands on a copy of “Howl” (still no definitive answer, it turns out), reviewing a Patti Smith biography, or mining connections to William S. Burroughs as seemingly far afield as the Pet Shop Boys (well, PSB via Bowie, so maybe it’s not that far afield), Warner’s sleuth work on the subject is both exhaustive and fascinating. (Nowhere in the exchange below is this more aptly demonstrated than in his mention of songs that name-check Kerouac and Neal Cassady—the sort of throwaway anecdote that can make your eyes pop out of your head.)

Back in the first phase of rockcritics.com, in the early 2000s, Warner conducted interviews with writer (not Sex Pistol) Steve Jones (about his then newly published tome, Pop Music and the Press), and the great British music critic Richard Williams. I recently forwarded Simon several questions about his newsletter and his work on the Beats in general.

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Let’s start with today: what is the last thing you listened to, read, and watched?
I feel as if my listening, reading and viewing habits have become quite promiscuous, fairly disordered and undirected, in recent times. I think the pandemic affected us all: I dip in, dip out, in the way I don’t think I did in earlier years. You have those times as a teenager or in your 20s when there is a strong sense you don’t want to miss anything. Later in life, I feel as if the scattergun approach to cultural consumption is not necessarily an improvement but there is not the same tension that something might slip your attention. Relax and engage—or disengage as much as you wish.

I tend to go to Amazon Music for my recommendations and playlists, and my listening in recent times, certainly over the last year, has continued to be eclectic to say the least. I’ve always liked the concept of pop music—that notion of the perfect sonic three minutes delivered in whatever format—alongside more substantial and serious stuff. In fact, I try not to make the distinction. When people claim that some artistic products are “better,” I return to that more academic line of thinking my partner has instilled in me: “Better for what?” For thinking? For moving? For mourning? For laughing? Keith Jarrett’s Sun Bear Concerts from 1976 could be the most significant music of the 20th century, but I’ve never yet headed for the dancefloor with it ringing in my ears!

One thing streaming services have done is link you up with artists you would never have even encountered in the past. There are three American acts I have really enjoyed of late—Lake Street Dive, Sara Bareilles, and the Tedeschi Trucks Band: blue-eyed soul, tender, touching singer-songwriting, and Southern boogie which brings to mind Delaney & Bonnie and the Allmans. The weird thing is, I don’t know whether they are rated, fashionable, hot-sellers, critically recognized. In other words the criteria that might have connected us with a singer or group in previous days, beyond the immediate sound, are no longer evident or relevant. You can listen in a happy vacuum; no media manipulation or peer pressure.

But I have also been enjoying Taylor Swift—I particularly like that 2020 track “Coney Island” she did with the National and a very recent piece “Anti-Hero”—Harry Styles, because his album won a Grammy and I had to know what that was about, Lizzo who is dexterous and amusing on the lyrical side, and the 1975, an outfit with not only a tenuous link to Beat culture but they also all went to my old north of England secondary school—long after me I should note. I’ve also been wallowing in some Wayne Shorter, recently dead of course, a complete and gentle giant who filled 60 extraordinary years with his vision and invention.

Taste, in my middle years, has become more of a moveable feast, quite random in its wandering. Those adolescent moments when we might have been seeking truth or authenticity or passion or something disrespectful to—or somehow questioning of—the status quo, fade. Yet, even then, I created my own independent feelings about music in my mid-teens: I utterly rejected that binary sense in a white middle-class school that you could either choose prog rock (serious, substantial, weighty) or soul music (black, fleeting, superficial, ephemeral). In fact, I definitely picked soul and also much preferred the roots-ier, more organic American West Coast scene—the confessional, human-scale singer songwriters, for example—to the mock grandeur of Pink Floyd or Emerson Lake and Palmer. However, fifty years on, I can listen to early Floyd and acknowledge, there’s something interesting going on here…

As for reading, I just finished two very engaging histories of Anglo-American rock journalism—A Hidden Landscape, edited by Mark Sinker [see rockcritics.com‘s interview with Mark Sinker], and Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall Of the Music Press by Paul Gorman. Also, quite a few musical biographies on Dylan and Nico, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, and Rickie Lee Jones, all of which have been reviewed at Rock and the Beat Generation. And indeed, catching up on some interesting literary histories: Jonah Raskin’s American Scream, Humphrey Carpenter’s The Angry Young Men and Charles Shuttleworth’s Desolation Peak.

We live, of course, in fertile screen times, though the cinema experience for me has been seriously jolted by the Covid years, largely put on hold. I’ve barely been to a movie theatre for a couple of years. My television favourites of the last couple of years have been Succession, Babylon Berlin, Dead to Me, Hacks, The Bridge, and maybe the finest TV thriller of the last three years or so—challenging even The Sopranos and Six Feet Under and Breaking Bad—Ozark. I have also been gripped by a string of attention-grabbing, independent-oriented women actors: Liv Lisa Fries (Babylon Berlin), Sofia Helin (The Bridge), Sidse Babett Knudsen (Borgen), Hannah Einbinder (Hacks), Julia Garner (Ozark) and the brilliant Greta Gerwig, as performer and director.

Along with authoring Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture and further tracking this subject on your personal Substack newsletter, Rock and the Beat Generation, you are a Visiting Research Fellow in Popular Music Studies at the University of Leeds. Is this also an extension of the same subject? Would love to hear about the academic part of your work.
I taught Popular Music Studies at the University of Leeds in the UK—an institution that hosted the Who’s Live at Leeds in 1970 and had musical alumni such as Gang of Four, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, Corinne Bailey Rae and alt-J—from the early 1990s to 2016. I had had the good fortune to take the world’s first-ever MA in popular music at Liverpool University, launched in 1990, just before I began teaching. Before that, I’d been the arts editor on a couple of regional evening newspapers. When I took on a lecturing role, I continued to be the northern rock reviewer of the Guardian and music editor of Yorkshire on Sunday. Over those years, I also wrote a web column called “Anglo Visions” for Pop Matters, between 2000 and 2005.

The campus opportunities were terrific—undergraduates wanted to study popular music and take modules in that subject. I covered topics such as history, politics and subcultures, scenes, gender, and the industry. There was also plenty of freedom to develop the curriculum in whatever way your skills could be applied. I ran probably the first classes covering the relationship between rock music and writing, journalism and literature. “Rock and the Written Word” was more general; “Joined at the Hip: Rock, Jazz and the Beat Generation” was more specific clearly. The sessions were all very well subscribed and well-received and they led, in due course, to the Bloomsbury books I produced: Text and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture (2013) and Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack (2018). The first was a monograph, the second was co-edited with Jim Sampas, now the Literary Executor of the Jack Kerouac Estate.

What was also very satisfying was that at certain stages students were able to take the themes of the literary in the widest sense, or the Beats in a more focused way, and write and perform their own material based on the reading and thinking and research they’d been doing. That was a really exciting part of the engagement for me and I think, for them. Theories given practical and dynamic shape.

These interactions also gave me the impetus and confidence to produce various live shows of my own which celebrated the interaction of rock, poetry and Beat culture: Howl for Now (2005), Still Howling (2015), Kerouac on Screen (2019) and Kerouac Lives! (2022). In addition, I was a founding curator of Louder Than Words, The Festival of Popular Music Writing, in its first two incarnations in Manchester in 2013 and 2014.

All of these things have fed into my Substack newsletter Rock and the Beat Generation, founded in 2021, which is really a digital extension of those classes, books and journalism, events and celebrations, and which now features in its archive some 250 articles, interviews, reviews and items of correspondence. As is so often the circularity of these things, it could mean those materials become a book at some point.

The convergence of the Beats and rock and roll (+ jazz + folk etc.) is something you’ve written about extensively for several years now. How did Beat poetry and rock first came together for you as a subject worth exploring, as sort of kindred spirits. Was there a lightbulb-flash moment?
I would say the seeds were sown for me by the UK rock press, the rise of a fresh and contemporary version of NME in the early 1970s, a revamped publication which looked beyond the music and introduced its swelling readership to pulp fiction, cult cinema, and the work of writers like Kerouac, Burroughs and the New Journalists.

These themes, these names, were tantalisingly fed in to articles which were predominantly rock-inclined but wanted to spread the canvas quite a bit further. New Musical Express had recruited a number of smart and defiant underground writers—Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent and Mick Farren among them—from subterranean magazines which had either gone under or felt the force of British law at the start of that decade.

Thus, there was an available talent pool which some of the pop papers were able to tap into. This movement of labour changed the nature of several of the many music weeklies, the so-called inkies, and they moved beyond reviews of gigs and records to a more broadly-based agenda: subversively political in some ways, creatively adventurous in others. Whatever, it made for an interesting alternative education for their audiences.

If there was a lightbulb moment, it was my coming across a cut-price hardback copy of the first edition of Ann Charters’ eponymous 1974 biography of Kerouac. It was actually the first Beat book I ever read—I’d seen the name of its subject several times, wanted to know more, and this superb work joined up the dots: the friends and fellow writers, the adventures, the fame and decline. What was most intriguing was how [Kerouac] essentially adapted chunks of his own life, his own escapades, lightly disguised the dramatic cast made up of his close associates and turned these journal scratchings into thrilling fiction, “like Proust but on the run,” as the novelist himself once put it.

It was the classic and tragic tale of the genius who burns out for psychological or addictive reasons, so it’s very, I’m sad to say now, rock ‘n’ roll. In fact, Jack Kerouac considered calling his most famous novel Rock ‘n’ Roll Road—with marketing in mind as it would come out in 1957 as that musical craze burned so brightly—but the fact that his frenetic travels with his close friend Neal Cassady had been literally lived in the late 1940s made the possible title particularly inappropriate. And, anyway, while Kerouac loved jazz, even blues and country, the Broadway and Hollywood ballad as well, he wasn’t so taken with the arrival of Elvis & co. That said, he wrote, around the same time, “America’s new Trinity of love,” a tender and affirmative essay, warmly greeting the new male heroes of the mid-1950s, Dean, Brando and Presley himself. Ironically, it wouldn’t be long before some journalists were identifying Kerouac as a fourth corner to this handsome and era-defining trio.

Dean was quickly dead, of course, Presley speedily neutered by his controlling management. But Kerouac did ask Brando to appear in a movie version of his breakthrough novel On the Road. However, Marlon neither appeared nor even responded. It would actually take until 2012 before director Walter Salles took the writer’s most famous title to the big screen and then without great critical reception. The long wait for a cinematic realisation of this picaresque joyride ended up a disappointment for most after decades of intense speculation and anticipation.

As for my late teenage interest in this writer and his circle, I immersed myself in an amazing network of talent—groundbreakers like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and more—and this led me to make a Kerouacian trip of my own in 1978, criss-crossing the US with a close friend, funded by a post-university year labouring on a building site. The three-month American project did not let us down. Twelve weeks on a movie set, with our young and naïve lives at the heart of the drama. I even penned and airmailed a weekly column for my local newspaper the Wilmslow Advertiser—crossing the Atlantic was a much rarer feat back in the 1970s—and describing a version of our odyssey: pinball at Port Authority, the Kerouac family bar in Lowell, Ferlinghetti in San Francisco. When I got back, all my stories had been run!

I’m guessing that this particular territory is something you’ve staked out on your own. Obviously, other people have tackled connections between rock and Beat culture in various ways (and in turn, part of what you do is to shine a light on those discoveries), but no one, at least as far as I’m aware of, has done so to the extent that you have. Is what I’m positing here accurate? Which other voices (writers, artists, etc.) have made significant contributions to this exploration?
It’s a good question, Scott, and it’s hard to be absolutely definitive, but perhaps I did carve out this territory in terms of higher education and academic study, certainly in the UK, but there are other important voices who saw the synergy, the revolt into style, of the Beats and rock innovators like Dylan, the Beatles, the Doors and David Bowie, Van Morrison and Tom Waits. The punks, too, were early adopters—Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, Joe Strummer and Patti Smith dug the poetry of the Beats and were fired up by its transgressive energy, tapped into it lyrically, politically, artistically.

One thing that is very interesting about interest in the Beat Generation, is that it seems to vault, avoid even, the sort of subcultural conflicts that arose between hippies and those youth groupings who came in their wake. Although those communities had major ideological differences—bucolic dreamers v. urban dystopians—they were still able to fit positive notions of Beat into their visions of the world. Even rappers paid attention to the black traditions in Beat: Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans, and Bob Kaufman were seen as African-American trailblazers.

As for my fellow travellers, whether critics or journalists or professors, Steve Turner wrote an important Kerouac biography called Angelheaded Hipster (1996) which really homed in on the literary-musical intersection. Dennis McNally’s rather earlier Desolate Angel (1978) contemplated the wider cultural placement of Kerouac and Beat, too. Victor Bockris penned a 2000 collection called Beat Punks. And Holly George-Warren, currently engaged on a new life story of Kerouac herself, was a key figure, editing the wonderful Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, a 1999 anthology that truly synthesized musical pathfinders and literary beacons, songwriters convening with poets, amplified popsters in bed with Beat visionaries, or even ‘hip writers meeting hot rockers’ to slightly adapt the tagline of my own Substack publication.

We should point out also, Casey Rae’s much more recent book, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll, from 2019. And also those terrific historians of Dylan—from Robert Shelton onwards—and the counterculture more generally, like Barry Miles, who have been shining a light on these intersections over many decades. Brian Hassett, Stephen Ronan, John Leland, Laurence Coupe, Daniel Kane, Gerald Nicosia are other names to credit. And then there is the question of jazz, a whole wonderful world of its own. There is quite a gallery of writers who have examined the ways in which that music and the Beats have enjoyed a crucial overlap. But that is less my terrain.

Which artists from the rock side of the divide have been the funnest or the most compelling figures to follow through your research on the subject?
It’s been good to interview and write about a wider range of musicians—from guitar ace Bill Nelson, once of Be-Bop Deluxe, Pete Brown, the poet turned wordsmith for Cream [recently deceased; see Simon’s obituary], Larry Beckett, who provided some key lyrics for Tim Buckley, and Steven Taylor, Allen Ginsberg’s guitarist for two decades, and a member of the Fugs for much longer, not to mention guitarist with False Prophets, the punk act whose tours became the subject of Taylor’s PhD thesis!

It’s also been terrific to get to know some of those members of the original Beat circle. Meeting Carolyn Cassady and getting to know her three children and Fug Tuli Kupferberg’s daughter Samara. Photographer Larry Keenan’s daughter Chelsea. Befriending the poet David Meltzer. Visiting Kerouac’s old pal, the great jazz and film composer David Amram in upstate New York. Making links with poet Sharon Mesmer and rock band manager Mark Bliesener. And possibly, most bizarrely, reconnecting with a mid-1960s family neighbour 40 years on when Genesis P-Orridge, who was a great admirer of William Burroughs, welcomed me to his Brooklyn home.

Looking through Rock and the Beat Generation, I enjoyed the (previously-unknown-to-me) “Me” by Adrian Henri, and also your “personal homage,” “Me 2.” Given your obvious interest in the subject, I do have to ask: have you written much poetry of your own?
Barely! I did write the piece that introduced and closed the Ginsberg tribute, Howl for Now, in Leeds in 2005. I also wrote short poems which reflected on the birth and death of Kerouac around the time of his Centenary in 2022. They both appear on the Rock and the Beat Generation site. But yes, I’ve always admired that small group of British poets who became associated with the Beats—like Michael Horovitz, who became a good friend, Adrian Mitchell, Pete Brown, and the Liverpool Poets: Roger McGough, Brian Patten, and Adrian Henri.

Henri’s poem “Me” is a witty and entertaining self-portrait, erudite and serious yet fun and appealing to the popular spirit, breaking down the high-low culture wall. I tried to at least approximate that poet’s mission in my own version. It’s hard to find heroes who scan or rhyme or half-rhyme, I can tell you! But it’s an entertaining exercise: a stroll through your favourites and influences in verse. I’m glad you enjoyed the concept. You should try it yourself.

I was thrilled to see the Pet Shop Boys mentioned in “Me 2”—along with Homer Simpson, Gil Scott Heron, Ute Lemper and so many others. And this leads me to your piece, “Shop Pet Boys: Cutting-up Bowie.” I’ll link to the piece to let readers see how one gets from William Burroughs to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, but are the Pet Shop Boys an important band for you? At their peak, they were as important to me as any pop group has ever been. I’m sort of teeing off a non-question here… Just say something or anything about the Pet Shop Boys, please.
Yes, the Pet Shop Boys mean plenty to me. I mean “West End Girls” could be the greatest 45 ever. I wouldn’t say that the sort of electro-pop which arose in the early 1980s was my thing per se, but Tennant and Lowe were simply the best at that genre. They wrote great songs, smart lyrics, and seemed to transcend the robotic, that automata style that the new technology appeared to cultivate. Their songs had an emotional depth and truth; they weren’t merely detached, glassy-eyed and formulaic.

I also enjoyed the fact of Tennant having been a pop journalist and had moved from applying his insight and intelligence in music criticism to music making, quite a trick to pull off. And the fact that the duo have sustained this project for 40 years, over so many hits and so many albums—and I’m not even mentioning the whole question of videos and art and style which are a crucial part of the package—is almost a miracle.

A kind of niche genre which briefly bloomed during the so-called period of the new pop in the UK didn’t last that long, but the Pet Shop Boys have had enough ideas—melodic, lyrical and visual—to put many different spins on the format. David Bowie was always interested in William Burroughs and when I discovered, a little belatedly, that Tennant and Lowe had conceived a cut-up version of “Hallo Space Boy,” I could hardly resist writing about it. I’ve no sense the figures at the core of this two-hander have any interest specifically in the Beat Generation, but both of them bring a literate intelligence to their compositions and their staging: they wrap a magnificent artistic gloss around three-minute works that are perfect Top 40-aimed capsules, mysterious, moody, often alienated but not bloodless, thoroughly modern.

One thing that’s always surprised me a little about the American Beats at least is that, during the ’50s, when “Beat” as an art and as a way of life rose to prominence, there was little evidence of kinship between its most celebrated and notorious figures (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs) and ’50s rock and rollers. It’s well known of course how attuned the Beats were with be-bop, and yes, Ginsberg does cite Ray Charles in “Kaddish” (1961), but Charles is not really a ’50s rock and roller in the same way. I’m referring to rockers like Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Elvis. Are there deep (or even fleeting) connections I’m unaware of? Was it age that prevented some kind of conspiratorial co-existence? Rock’s unavoidable consumerist ambitions?
These points, these apparent paradoxes, certainly interest me, as well. I wrote an article some years ago about the world that Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” entered when it was first premiered on stage in San Francisco in October 1955. One of the biggest hits of the previous spring and summer had been “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets. It was still on the charts, after 24 weeks, when Ginsberg stood up to read. Both the song and the poem have become seminal markers in the musical and literary history of that century.

The relationship between the white Haley and the Jewish Ginsberg with the US culture of the time is full of nuances. Haley’s group had previously taken a song by Big Joe Turner and bowdlerised the lyrics to make a sexually-charged black song acceptable to mainstream radio. Ginsberg, Jewish second-generation Russian immigrant with leftist sympathies and a homosexual beside, referred in the opening lines to how “the best minds of my generation” had been “dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” In their own distinct ways those elements reflected on the schizophrenia of mid-20th-century America.

The white populace feared miscegenation as represented by rock ‘n’ roll, a white version of rhythm and blues; a progressive, if secular, Jew like Ginsberg is aligning himself and his friends with the societal fringes, declaiming on behalf of those at the margins, racially or sexually: he wants an equality and an integration in a highly divided society. Like members of so many ethnic minorities, he feels like an outsider.

But to answer your question in a different way, I tried to get some direct responses to this issue from someone who was at the eye of this extraordinary storm. I sat down for a lengthy interview with the Beat poet Michael McClure in San Francisco in 2004 and asked him if Elvis Presley had had any meaning for him. He said he hadn’t and the premise on which I had opened the conversation—that rock ‘n’ roll might have been a useful, auxiliary battalion, the youth wing if you like, in the Beat campaign—led to a somewhat tense, sometimes torrid, exchange. On the specific point, McClure said to me, “Elvis Presley represented white kids trying to be free by imitating black music… That caught on. It was a rage… But I didn’t need that help.”

I think, in short, at a time when the tectonic plates of Western society were starting to shift—popular music and the broader popular culture were beginning to push at the seams of the social fabric—the Beats, who were largely well-educated radicals, could perhaps only goes as far as to favour the authentic black music of blues and jazz, particularly bebop. In Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Buddy Holly, they perhaps felt this was just a commercial project to sell product to 16-year-olds. And they couldn’t sign up to that.

In the ’60s, what I suggest above starts to change. Dylan of course, and the Beatles—though not immediately, correct? Was there a breaking point as far as you’re concerned or was it just a long road with a bunch of detours that eventually leads to things like Willam S. Burroughs in Dub (2014).
NOTE: I haven’t heard of the WSB album to which you refer!*

However, 10 years later the tables were turned, the power relations had been recalibrated and that musical heir to 1950s rock ‘n’ roll—the new rock of Dylan and the Band, the Beatles and the Dead, the Doors the Byrds and the Stones—was now in the vanguard: they were young, smart and sophisticated, mischievous and rebellious. Now many leading Beats wanted to pin their colours to the larger political bandwagon, blow the trumpets of the psychedelic revolution, and rock was truly a way-in to spread fresh ideas to a significant and receptive crowd.

Ginsberg and McClure and Neal Cassady, even Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder, Ken Kesey too, befriended and collaborated with this electric aristocracy, at festivals, on tour and in recording studios. That said, other frontline Beats either rejected outright or stepped back from these new alliances between the young rockers and the older poets. Kerouac thought that the hippies and the anti-war demonstrations were treasonous and that LSD was a Soviet plot to pollute the minds of the American young. Burroughs, never a joiner, hated the ‘peace and love’ ethos of these communities and their gatherings and largely went his own, quite eccentric, way.

*It does indeed exist, I finally listened to it, and…it’s just ok. —Ed

Can you talk a little about the American-British divide in your work? Do you give equal weight to artists from both countries, and if so is it by design?
The balance is definitely in favour of North America, mostly US, with some interesting and important Canadian names: Leonard Cohen, of course, Robbie Robertson through Bob Dylan and, in Kerouac on Record, Nancy Grace wrote a very good essay on Joni Mitchell and why she might have rejected, or at least distanced herself from, the Beat legacy, a kind of analysis in reverse.

I carry in both of my principal Beat books a list all of those popular songs which have celebrated or name-checked Jack Kerouac and his travelling companion Neal Cassady over 70 years. There are well over 400 on the list, I perhaps should do an analysis what the divide is between the UK and the US.

It’s gratifying to see post-millennium acts still taking notice of these characters in that literary movement—current groups like Hiss [OK] Golden Messenger, Fences, Hurray for the Riff Raff, the Americans, and the Low Anthem, for instance, keeping the spirit alive, the Beat flame alight.

But it’s also worth saying that there is a powerful line of British artists who have expressed an affection for the Beat Generation writers or acknowledged some kind of influence that has fed into their work in some way. I’m thinking of Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Van Morrison, the Incredible String Band, Jimmy Page, Bill Nelson, Joe Strummer, King Crimson, all Psychic TV, Cabaret Voltaire, the Smiths, the Waterboys. A pretty strong list, I would say.

One name I’m a little surprised to not see more of in your work (at least on your Substack) is Lester Bangs. Does he figure into your world in any meaningful sort of way?
Lester Bangs is certainly an intriguing figure in this wider story. He was happy to credit Kerouac’s influence on his own writing and actually wrote the obituary to the man in Rolling Stone when he died in 1969. I’m happy to report that we do acknowledge this connection: in my edited collection Kerouac on Record, rock journalist Jim Sullivan interviews Bangs’ biographer Jim DeRogatis with the subject of the Beats a more than relevant ingredient in the conversation.

Perhaps worth mentioning, too, that critic and novelist Michael Goldberg interviews Richard Meltzer in the same book about Kerouac and Beat topics, and I talked to major UK music historian Barney Hoskyns about his biography of Tom Waits and that musician’s lifelong commitment to the Beat ethos. Furthermore, as we discuss rock journalists and the Beats, we should reiterate the name of legendary Holly George-Warren. In Kerouac on Record, she wrote about Janis Joplin and, to repeat, her new biography on Kerouac is not too far away. I think Greil Marcus might have an interest in the Beat/rock crossover, though we have never conversed about it.

You interviewed Richard Williams for rockcritics.com 21 years ago. Have you continued to follow his work since?
My extended interview with Richard Williams has run and run! A couple of years ago it enjoyed something of a revival as a book called A Hidden Landscape, a history of the British pop press from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s edited by Mark Sinker, included that vintage online conversation within its pages. Thanks to RockCritics for running that piece all those years ago. I said hello to Richard when the book was launched in London. After he largely left music journalism behind, he became a leading writer of sports features for the Guardian. Oh, and his terrific blog, called The Blue Moment, continues to thrive.

I want to ask you about your experience at Substack? Has the platform worked for you, or met your expectations, in ways that you hoped? Are there any limitations you might warn budding Substackers about?
Substack has brought benefits to writers in terms of audience recognition: it’s a brand that has become widely known quite quickly and transatlantically, too. If you say these days that you have a Substack Newsletter (I don’t like the name that’s applied, by the way), many people involved in the media at least know what you are talking about, which is a good start. Plus the organization has provided credible tools to produce quality, good looking web-based publications.

Sometimes the operation centrally alters the format or the template in ways that I would prefer they did not. But I can see that in a fast-moving internet ecosystem these kinds of company have to be nimble and respond to change. Substack also provides some good and prompt support to its member writers, which is valuable.

Has it solved the central problem of most writers in the 21st-century: how do you reliably turn your words into income?

Speaking personally, some of my subscribers voluntarily pay for my articles, which is gratifying. I still lack the true confidence that, if I put up a paywall, it would do me much good at all. But I should test the theory.

I remain still somewhat confounded and not a little frustrated that my journalistic and critical ideas which pre-2000 would have been valuable—would literally have had a monetary value—are now barely legal tender at all. I have many thousands of visits and hits each week to the considerable body of original work available now or in the swelling archive that’s been growing since 2021.

In short, the only time in this field of activity I made cash on which I could actually live was when I was working full-time in print newspapers. I remember contributing to the early years of a pretty successful webzine, Pop Matters, and I also recall the moment when the editor/owner revealed that the publication would be carrying ads for the first time. My assumption—crazy as it turned out—was that I would now begin to get paid for the five years’ toil I had put in. Wrong!

Also, writing on a regular basis for Substack vs. authoring books on the subject: is the former your way of extending your work as a published author? Testing ground for new ideas?
I really do believe that Rock and the Beat Generation has a potential life beyond its online iteration—it could, yes, be the basis of a book. I’ve been toying with how to move this forward: is material that has appeared online dead as far as the publishing houses are concerned or does the delicious accessibility of the book format—contents–page number–in!—mean that readers are happy to purchase a hard copy. A difficult call. Watch this space!