Jack Kerouac - Reads on the Road
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CD Details
Artist: Jack KerouacEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1999-09-14
Music Label: Rykodisc
Soundtracks:
- Ain't We Got Fun
- On The Road (Jazz Of The Beat Generation)
- On The Road (Song)
- Come Rain Or Shine
- Orizaba 210 Blues
- When A Woman Loves A Man
- Leavin' Town
- Washington D.C. Blues
- On The Road
Music reviews of Reads on the Road
Music Review: No one reads Kerouac like Kerouac.
Rating: 4 Stars
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Track 1: 'Ain't We Got Fun' 2:31
Imagine if you will a small dimly lit club on the lower east side - not far from the docks. It's drizzling outside, a dark winters night. We're inside, with or without our lady friends, there's a chink of glasses, but no murmur of conversation as there aren't many of us in that night. A four piece group on stage: sax, piano, bass, and drums have just eased up from playing a slow improvised blues. A cop car wails outside in the night and a girl at the bar is about to tell her feller what she'd said to her brother that day.
The pianist rises from his stool and beckons Jack Kerouac to come up on stage and join them for a couple numbers. The barman, the club manager, and one or two customers recognise Jack as the newly published author but generally it's a low key introduction, no applause, and Jack needs encouragement from the small group of friends he's with to get up there. He says something to the musicians, leans his backside against the high stool, feet apart and square on the ground, reaches out, takes the microphone from it's stand and announces: "Jack Kerouac is dedicating this number to lovely, beautiful, skinny, shapely, Sue Evans - with the beautiful box!"
The pianist has left his piano and introduces the number on a jaunty xylophone. "In The Evening ain't we got fun " start's Jack. He's had a couple to overcome his stage nerves and after straining the first few words, he improvises and cracks some good humoured jokes to "Sue Evans" allowing himself to relax a little and settle into the groove of the song. The straying from the lyric and frequent flat-notes strangely make it more appealing as though through it all it's evident that Jack loves this kind of night club jazz and the effort and soul are there if the slick professionalism is not. His mind has been formed by digging this music for the past twenty years, so he sings no other. It's Buddy Greco meets Billy Holiday. (My mother said, on hearing Billy Holiday - this is how women sing when they're drunk). Jack sings jazz like you'd sing jazz if you forgot yourself for a moment.
He sings jazz like Fred Flintstone sings jazz only with a single-malt smoothed talking, singing voice: 'They're having troubles in old London Town, Oh eee .. Cold roast beef and Worcester Sauce", Jack is such a universalist, eventually he makes it all his own: "Da boppajah de baby... Wop a do be do do do"
Beautiful sweet rhythm playing by the quartet gets the customers clapping along to the swing. By the end of the tune it's jumping.
Track 2: "On the Road" (Jazz of the Beat Generation) 28:40
Now Jack's home alone much later that same night, Sue Evans droped him off in her car as she's got work the following morning, as it is she won't get much sleep, it must be 3am already. Jack settles down with a final drink by the dying embers of a fire, takes up a proof copy of a soon to be published book, turns on his tape recorder and keeping his voice down so as not to wake Memere upstairs, starts to read:
"Out we jumped in the warm mad night, hearing a wild ten nerman's balling horn across the way going eee-ya eee-ya and hands clapping" Jack starts a little nervously, finding his voice, which as we noticed in the club earlier - is beautiful, not guttural-beat as you might imagine but with a lightness to it like a young preacher telling you - 'yes, there is a thing called love...', there becomes an urgency to it.
He's describing a "sawdust saloon" and we're back in the 'fifties, on wooden floorboards, beer stains all over, piss stains in the 'jon', bent bottle tops lying around. It's a wonderful 'down home' scene that Sal (the narrator), Dean Moriarty (his friend) and their girlfriends Galatia and Alice have hit to ball the night away. And of course Jack describes it brilliantly: "strange floppy women wandering around" does that mean fat women sloppily dressed in loose frocks? I ask myself. Where,in a poem somewhere (on another C.D.) Jack says: "and the flop comes on" does he mean evening falls and everybody relaxes and lets it all hang out? It's an American thing.
But we're back circa 1947 maybe in that barn of a pub with Sal, Dean and the girls digging the jazz band and chasing it around. Wonderful descriptions of the band playing and the place jumping with seemingly not a person in the audience undescribed until your heads spinning and you're there with them. Jack building the scene in words so that that venue in 1949 exists here in 1999! (or should I say here in the new Millennium). And Jack, bent over in the chair now, tape wheels turning, hot embers in front and cold night steeling in behind him unnoticed as now he's lost in warm summer evening '49 as his warm honeyed tones toast that night with the rhythm and flow that Jacks writing, unique in the world, has.
There's remarkably good characterisation in Jack's reading voice effortlessly changing from the parlance of the black singer "Freddy" to the white fan "Dean", a wonderful ear for dialect and ethnic mannerism. I love it when describing Freddy as being dressed "like a pimp in Mecca" he checks himself realising that Mecca is a holy city and not wishing to offend Muslims out of plain courtesy he adds: "where there are no pimps".
It's not just description, but like a great painter he includes his impression of what he see's with an original honest eye. Also displaying the aforementioned ceaseless flow and rhythm so without even catching his breath Jack sends the words cascading and swirling down into the black hole which is all our hearts. But we're not finished yet as Sal and Dean abandoned by the girls join some of the musicians in jumping in a car to ball it clear across San Francisco to another jumping club, with great in-car conversations and Jack becomes the master actor and proves that nobody reads Kerouac like Kerouac!
So what kind of a C.D. is "Jack Kerouac reads On The Road"? Well, you remember how back in 1960 after Buddy Holly died they released on album of the singers rough cuts and demo's with backings dubbed on by (I think) The Crickets. How at first, & when you read the reviews you thought: "This won't be no good" yet when you finally heard the record, Holly's genius shone through the scratchy under produced tracks like "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" and you new even this L.P. consisting of sweepings from the studio floor would in time become a classic, and it did.
Well "Kerouac reads On The Road" is that kind of a disc: something of a curates egg (good in parts). I find I have to be in the mood to appreciate it, but as a late-night mood complimentor it's up there with the best. You have to be able to let your mind go with it & by the time I got to "Leaving Town" (track 7) my mind had wandered off it, (but that was at 11 o'clock in the morning!). Apparently these tracks were lifted from some acetate discs that Jack had cut privately back in the early sixties. The half-hour (track 2) reading of "On the Road" being fabled but overlooked for some thirty years because it was wrongly labelled "Charlie Parker"! But the C.D has a terrific extensive sleeve note by Douglas Brinkley which explains this and a whole lot more. On the C.D. there are four tracks of Jack singing night-club style backed by an unknown jazz combo (and they're good). Up to now I'd been suspicious of David Amrarns' talents (one fan's jealousy of another?) but here he provides dubbed on musical backings to Jack reading two poems which are highly sensitive to the themes and stand as beautiful melodies in there own right. The C.D is produced by Jim Sampas and Lee Ranaldo, and they've done us a great service.
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