The Best Minds of My Generation

Kerouac’s early education in New York was with Seymour Wyse and Jerry Newman. When I first met Kerouac we used to go down to talk to Seymour and he would play us whatever was around, newly issued records of Charlie Parker or Lester Young. We had access to a lot of music, actually a whole record store back in 1944. To the extent that Kerouac’s biography is involved with music and bop and to the extent that Kerouac’s prose is a reflection of his study of Charlie Parker’s rhythms and breath, to the extent that Kerouac’s prose style is derived from that, Seymour Wyse would be the big influence. Wyse and Kerouac used to riff together, verbally, and sing along with a lot of the records that Wyse played in the store

ew people who took Charlie Parker music and simply took syllables and by following each note he made actual sentences, poetic sentences.

There’s some music I’d like to recommend also. Listen to Brahms’s Trio No. 1 and Brahms’s Sextet, Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 with the “Frère Jacques” theme, some forties music, Thelonious Monk’s “Round About Midnight,” one little tune and any of the early forties Thelonious Monk, some of the forties Dizzy Gillespie, like “Salt Peanuts,” “Opp Bop Sh’Bam.” They have those little funny bebop rhythm prosodies in them. “The Chase” by Dexter Gordon, and Wardell Gray. Lester Young of that era, “Lester Leaps In.” Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain,” “Fine and Mellow,” “I Cover the Waterfront,” and “Yesterdays.” If you get a chance at hearing some bass work by Slam Stewart and some of the mouthings, the bebop mouthings with words, by King Pleasure. And whatever early Lennie Tristano records you can find. Also a favorite inspirational tune that turned Cassady on to some ecstatic American mind, Charlie Barnet’s “Cherokee,” which is the thirties and then in the forties, The Honeydrippers and I think it was Louis Jordan’s version of “Open the Door, Richard.” And anything you find of Charlie Parker’s from the forties is fine

I am sure no priest would’ve condemned me for wearing the crucifix outside my shirt everywhere no matter where I went, even to have my picture taken by Mademoiselle. So you people don’t believe in God? So you’re all big smart know-it-all Marxists and Freudians, hey? Why don’t you come back in a million years and tell me all about it, angels?

In other words, black musicians were imitating speech cadences and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians’ breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech.

I’ll talk about Symphony Sid who was the disc jockey who played all the great early bop classics from midnight till morn. That will bring up the idea of the relation between speech and music, as in “Salt Peanuts, Salt Peanuts,” which is [from] a Dizzy Gillespie classic. The music for that was literally lifted from speech phrasings, “salt peanuts, salt peanuts,” and Kerouac took it back from da-ta-da to his own prose.

I always felt very timid about imposing my ideology on the universe. Nobody thought that ideas meant anything, quite rightly I think. Ideas were just formulations. To attempt to encounter or confront the vastness of all the shadows on every leaf on one single tree with some sentence of ideas is immeasurably stupid. The element of aggression, of ideological insistency, was considered unhip and by unhip I mean lacking in awareness.

The Beat Generation is primarily a spiritual movement and so what I have put together are specimens of spiritual breakthroughs, or epiphanous experience, or illuminated experience, or alterations of consciousness, or psychedelic insight, articulated by people who were there from the beginning, part of the original group.

trembled with joy and couldn’t get over it for days and wrote poems about how it is possible for the human spirit to win after all!20

Bunch of fools marching against the San Francisco Giants protesting baseball, as if (now) in my name and I, my childhood ambition to be a big league baseball star hitter like Ted Williams so that when Bobby Thomson hit that home run in 1951 I