Was Bob Dylan influenced by Jack Kerouac?

[Will Dockery]

http://www.dharmabeat.com/kerouaccorner.html

Question - Was Bob Dylan influenced by Jack Kerouac?

Dave responds: Dylan has recently been more forthcoming about his early influences. In both his autobiography, Chronicles, and the documentary film No Direction Home, he talks about the effect that reading Kerouac had on him.

He says that On the Road "had been like a bible for me. I loved the breathless, dynamic bop poetry phrases that flowed from Jack's pen . . . I fell into that atmosphere of everything Kerouac was saying about the world being completely mad, and the only people for him that were interesting were the mad people, the mad ones, the ones who were mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn, all of those mad ones, and I felt like I fit right into that bunch."

But Dylan adds: "One guy gave me a book that Woody Guthrie wrote called Bound For Glory, and I read it. I identified with that book more than I even did with On the Road."

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at Kerouac's graveWhen Allen Ginsberg was travelling with Dylan during the Rolling Thunder Review tour of 1975 they visited Lowell, Massachusetts and stopped by Kerouac's gravestone at Edson Cemetery, where, in a scene which appeared in the movie Renaldo and Clara, they read choruses from Kerouac's Mexico City Blues. Ginsberg asked Dylan how he knew Kerouac's poetry and Dylan replied: "Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language." Dylan mentions Mexico City Blues in his song Something's Burning, Baby from the 1985 album Empire Burlesque.
Kerouac's influence can also be heard on Dylan's earlier album, Highway 61 Revisited. Two of the songs, Desolation Row and Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues include direct quotes from Kerouac's novel Desolation Angels, including the phrases "the perfect image of a priest," "her sin is her lifelessness," and "Housing Project Hill." It is also informative to compare the song title Desolation Row and the phrase "junkyard angel" (used in another of the songs on the album -- From A Buick 6) with the title of Kerouac's book.

Desolation Angels was published in May 1965, and Highway 61 Revisited recorded in August 1965. The book was the first major Kerouac work to appear after Dylan began writing songs in the early 1960s. Clearly, Dylan was sufficiently affected by Kerouac's book that he chose to write those phrases into his new songs.

[luisb...@aol.com]

And then it just stopped for the most part. Tell me that it isn't true! He threw it all away to be alone with you, Peggy Day. Then in the seventies he wrote albums to pay his debtors. Like Dostoevsky. Or so he says.

[Will Dockery]

Which followed the Kerouac pattern in a way.

[luisb...@aol.com]

Is that the American musical artist pattern? You start all avant-garde then slink off into jaded, blissful domesticity? But then I think about Miles or P-Funk and realize they went in the exact opposite direction...they got more progressive as they went along. Ditto Fela Kuti. Maybe it's more a white American thing. Start out all hard, then...unplug, baby.

[Will Dockery]

Lou Reed is one exception... and I am one of the few that recognizes that "LuLu" was his final masterpiece.

[Just Kidding]

Miles did get more progressive in the middle of his career but less so
at the end when he went kinda pop and mainstream.

[Will Dockery]

Not just music, of course... Orson Welles ends up making wine commercials and Muppet Movies.

[Will Dockery]

On Sunday, September 6, 2015 at 2:27:33 PM UTC-4, luisb...@aol.com wrote:
>

> Is that the American musical artist pattern? You start all avant-garde then slink off into jaded, blissful domesticity?

I can't say it has to do with specifically being "white" or American, artists of all kinds tend to burn out eventually, don't you think?

David Bowie's sudden and drastic decline after Let's Dance in 1983, which he's never fully recovered from.

Michael Jackson after Thriller, or maybe Bad?

Bruce Springsteen for album after album after pretty much Born In The USA?

U2 around the time of Rattle & Hum.

Back to Dylan, he at least manages one or two great albums for every decade since he began... the 1980s had Infidels and Oh Mercy, the 1990s had Time Out Of Mind... the 2000s had several: Love & Theft, Modern Times, Together Through Life.

I figure when he works out this Frank Sinatra thing he's into he'll have his battery recharged and we'll probably get another couple of great ones from him again.

Bob Dylan is like Pablo Picasso, he'll be creating his art until he's 99, give or take a year.

:D

[luisb...@aol.com]

I think Picasso in his later years stayed current and also set up confrontations with the past, like his confrontation with Velasquez's Las Meninas.

Frankly, rap sampling has always been more of a confrontation with the past than mainstream white rock-type music, with some notable exceptions that I'm aware of like the Twisted Willie record of the '90s, and Tom Waits, I guess. I'm sure I'm missing others.

It could be that the recording industry of yore kept people in their boxes--see Young's problems with Geffen over Trans--and that it's all because of them. The acts you mention are all mega-grossing, mainstream acts that were/are money machines for the corporations. But then again, those artists were full signatories to those contracts so they knew what they were signing up for.

I'm just not aware of a P-Funk Unplugged.


>
> :D

[Will Dockery]

Yeah, nothing is ever exactly the same, or happens they way we have in mind... but the pattern of youth vs. elderly basically follows, as I was just reading in this excellent write-up:

http://windolfcolumn.tumblr.com/post/78660516171/dylans-last-hit

"...He has lost the spark. And this is what happens to almost everybody. The rare ones... Dylan, Nick Lowe, Philip Roth, Tolstoy, to name four who come to mind... are able to guard the original impulse and coax out of themselves work, in their old age, that is worthy of their talent. Now and then a Zen master like Lowe will even find himself hitting some strange groove, some unexpected breakthrough, that has him creating stuff that is arguably better than what he created in the years of hunger and sexual display.

It seems to me that it's true - the main reasons people create art are (1) to attract sexual partners (or to impress or fully win over one desired person in particular); (2) to make a name for themselves in the world; and the second may be impossible to separate from the first. So it stands to reason that those who continue to make excellent work in their late years... they are up to something else altogether, most likely... and so this work merits special attention. Think of the serenity of Tolstoy's late-in-life "Hadji Murat," a strange and wonderful book that is, tellingly, short: the thunderousness of the ambition that created "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" he finds replaced with something gentler and interrogative. You might say the same thing about the Nick Lowe album "The Convincer" or Dylan's "Love and Theft." But I'll get to that.

It's not a smooth path even for those who are able to create great art late in life."

And... so it goes.