Crazy rhythm: drinking wine, playing records and getting high on Jack Kerouac's Visions Of Cody

It says a lot about my commitment to reading and any notion of (ha ha) "self-education" that I only started ploughing through Jack Kerouac's Visions Of Cody because I was on a weekend trip and - shockingly - had forgotten to take a book with me. So, yeah, I picked up the only vaguely interesting looking book I could find in a charity shop. A whole £1 spent/squandered. Blimey, what a turn-up. Visions Of Cody is, I reckon, some kind of otherworldly literary creation. A genuinely brilliant cocktail, almost indescribably so (for me, anyway). It's a super-delirious blend of modernist experiment (Proust, Joyce etc) applied to the mid-20th-century American experience. Hence you get all kinds of Whitmanesque revery on la vita americana, with a million "quintessenial" US references - WC Fields, jazz and blues, street and poolroom hustler slang, and "voices" from the "pioneer" Western states or the Deep South, some of which seem to be channelling Mark Twain and William Faulkner. And then there's the scuzziness of a dropout's life - poverty-level food and housing ("coldwater apartments"), stealing, low-paid casual labour, prostitution and recreational (or addiction-based?) drug use. Shades of Alexander Trocchi and even the Warhol Factory scene of the sixties. Warhol's not a bad touchstone here because, rather fascinatingly, Kerouac seems to have experimented with tape-recording sprawling druggy conversations which are then worked into the book. Among other things, this becomes a 130-page section ("Frisco: the tape", about a quarter of the entire book) which appears to be a verbatim write-up of the late-night drug-music-and-chat sessions Kerouac had with a group of friends, notably Neal Cassady ("Cody Pomeray"). One (rather high-flown) Kerouac critic has described the great man's incorporation of the tape recording transcripts into his let-it-all-hang-out version of On The Road as the use of a tape recorder to "represent the attempt to generate noise, distortion, and static as a means of resistance, to an increasing social and cultural atmosphere of control". And yes, maybe. Anyway, interesting as all this is - and it genuinely is once you hook into Kerouac's wild style (or repertoire of styles) - this blog isn't, you'll be relieved to know, going to dwell on the literary qualities of Kerouac's mini-masterpiece (or out-and-out On The Road-beating masterpiece according to some). Nope, in time-honoured Niluccio fashion I'm gonna home in on just the book's music stuff. Here goes. 

*First off, the long taped music-listening section apparently captures the Kerouac crew conversing and rabble-rousing over several nights as they're very deliberately trying to get "high" on amphetamine ("Bennies") and marijuana ("tea", "roaches") while drinking wine and listening to a bunch of records. The records get various mentions. They include: Charlie Parker's Lover Man, Coleman Hawkins' After You've Gone and his Crazy Rhythm (seemingly played several times), Josh White's Bad Housing Blues, Stan Kenton's Artistry In Rhythm, Glenn Miller's Moonlight Serenade, Billie Holiday's Body And Soul as well as her Them There Eyes and Good Morning Heartache, Billy May & His Orchestra's Charmaine, Perez Parado's Mambo No5, Gene Krupa's Leave Us Leap (much enthused over), tunes (unnamed) by Dizzy Gillespie, Flip Phillips, Joe Williams, Artie Shaw and Lester Young, a Beethoven clarinet trio and other classic music (Cody at one point dances to some classical, apeing a ballet dancer), and other songs (without named performers) like Honeysuckle Rose (the Fats Waller version?), and - wait for it - I've Got a Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts. Quite the DJ set, no?  

*The taped sessions revolve around drugs and music in what appears to be a deliberate combining of the two. It seems that Kerouac saw this pairing as a route to some sort of spiritual high, possibly further enhanced if it involved people he greatly esteemed (Cody pre-eminent among these). Anyway, later in the book Kerouac refers to an episode he dubs "the jazz tea high", ranking it as one of his great "visions of Cody". For Kerouac, jazz music and chemical stimulation seem to be completely natural (indispenable?) bedfellows.

*In an interesting comment about musical preferences, at one point Kerouac says "I'd rather have the coloured guys play bop". He means compared to the mostly white-led swing-era big bands. So Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and not Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw. History has surely proven him right on this.  

*The records, apparently Cody's and played in real time as the conversation (philosophising, story-telling), boozing and banter go on and on, are evidently played on a record player ("phonograph"), as there's quite a lot of side-chat about how the styluses ("needles") owned by Cody are all ruined. Confusingly though, there's also mention of a "jukebox", but I'm assuming the term is being used figuratively and they don't actually have a massive real-life jukebox at their disposal. 

*At one point the messiness of the records is mentioned and the fact that they're being pulled out of a 50-strong box, so in fact not a massive selection. At another moment, Kerouac recalls how when he left New York to go into the merchant navy - "when I left to go to Liverpool" (which was in 1942, I think) - he arranged for two friends to go to his parents' house in Queens in New York to "get all my records". Evidently Kerouac's parents had never seen these two friends before, didn't know anything about the arrangement, but nevertheless trusted these strangers at their door and handed the records over. The anecdote (told around ten years later) seems to suggest the records were pretty meaningful to Kerouac.

*Here and there the Kerouac party people turn on the radio - "KWBR" (in Utah?) is mentioned - and catch a few tunes that way. They hear snatches of Frank Sinatra (who they appear to like) among others and - rather memorably - the late-night tape sessions section closes out with a transcription of a radio broadcast described as a "Coloured Revival Meeting", containing amazing testifying stuff like this: "Preacher (screeching): We know how to pray! / People: Pray! / Preacher: Meanwhile he took chance about Je-sus one day / People: Oh oh! / A voice: Blest is the lord, wunnerful! / Preacher: After awhile they kept up on prayin / People: Yeah!! / Preacher: After awhile!! / People: After awhile!! / Jeeee-ee / People: Jee-ee! / Zus! I said after while!"

*As if all this wasn't enough, the record-playing sessions are also apparently supplemented by Jack Kerouac himself playing along to some of the songs on a saxophone. At least I think he does. We get regular mentions of "Jack flutes" in square brackets, as per stage directions. By the way, someone should make these 130 pages of Kerouac/tape machine into an avant-garde play. Jack's Last Tape? Radical theatre, man ...   

*The tape sessions also include some quite prolonged discussions of the music they're listening to as well as further chat and anecdotes triggered by particular bits of music. To my mind this is pretty unusual in a novel (if that's what Kerouac's pretty undefinable book actually is). 

*Throughout, the book is packed with "hip" subcultural slang which is itself very music-adjacent. We get language like: "he and I dug each other all the time real fine", "that's the gonest", "they're all hung up on this" (hung up is massively used), "she was a gas", "I could lay you down a hype make you wish you was dead and gone", "there was a house painter who was real square, see", "cool bop hepcat", "I'll flip my wig", "but later gater, I'm cuttin a caper, and hear me daddy", and so on. Did they pick up some of this jive talk from hanging out with black musicians? Or was it just "absorbed" from the people they spent time with in their various druggy and literary scenes? Dunno. Anyway, it's a big - and very enjoyable - aspect of reading Visions Of Cody. Kerouac's circle clearly liked goofing around and mimicking well-known voices (WC Fields is a particular fave) and there are taped passages where Kerouac and Cody are throwing around whole chunks of cod-Shakespearean and Homeric dialogue. I reckon it's perfectly possible that some of their hep talk is self-ironising (the insiders joking about the "scene"), but it's quite hard to tell. Probably there were a range of registers, from out and out mockery to unselfconscious language use. On top of this, Kerouac's book uses such a dizzying array of authorial voices that - aside from the taped passages - it's not always easy to discern who is supposed to be talking and what degree of irony (if any) is being intended. With the but later gater, I'm cuttin a caper, and hear me daddy phrase, for example, this comes from a section where the narrative voice appears to be a wild-and-woolly redneck persona, or a poolroom shark (pool playing and delinquency crop up a lot early in the book) or some other ripe "character". And then you've got the chunks of prose which play around with Blake, Thoreau, Melville ("Moby Dick is Dead and Had to Die ..."), Whitman and any number of titanic writers. Yeah, with Keoruac it's layer upon layer upon layer. But I'm hep, so lay it on me daddy.

Sitting around in cafes you'll never get any books written: Kerouac's Visions Of Cody

Anyway, there you have it, a few music snippets culled from Kerouac's monstrous and extremely out-there work. Having tried to read On The Road when I was (I think) in my twenties and experiencing - er - literary cartrouble from the very first pages, diving into Kerouac's Cody has been a revelation. And of course it's me that's changed as this is probably among some of Kerouac's strangest, most alienating writing (check out this piece from Malcolm Forbes for a useful breakdown of the various kinds of prose Kerouac tackled in his lifetime. Also, as a reminder that Kerouac wasn't always seen - as now - as some kind of uber-Beat, see this blog on the sociologist Ned Polsky's essay on the Beats). Anyway, weird and wayward though Visions Of Cody may be, I definitely think I like this stuff now. After all, who needs a story when you've got delirious mayhem like this? The sheer mindbending lyricism of some of the writing in Cody is virtually impossible to describe (you basically have to experience it) and I think the writing itself has plenty of musicality quite apart from the passages that actually talk about music. But for sure, music genuinely seems to have mattered to Kerouac. During the course of one of those long nights talking, drinking and pill-popping he recalls an occasion when he was a student at Columbia University and about to go out to football training (football of the American variety, naturally) and instead decided to stay in his room and play his Beethoven records. Ping! "I said to myself, 'Scrimmage my ass ... I'm gonna sit here in this room and dig Beethoven. I'm gonna write noble words', you know - that's how I quit football." Yeah, I can dig you Jack. Beethoven over football every time. And yes, I think I may have had my own Beethoven-type moment reading Visions Of Cody as I now rate Kerouac so highly that I'm going to give up any further interest in meat-and-potatoes writers (the scrimmagers) and stick to the speed-and-weed-fried delirium of stuff like this. One final Kerouac quote to end this blog. He's harking back to an earlier time in his life when he was hankering after buying a tape recorder so he could record - Warhol-like - the "mad" talk of his friends as they're busy getting drunk in the lairy downtown bars of 1940s New York City:

" ... then I could keep the most complete record in the world which in itself could be divided into twenty massive and pretty interesting volumes of tapes describing activities everywhere and excitements and thoughts of mad valuable me and it would really have a shape but a crazy big shape yet just as logical as a novel by Proust because I do keep harkening back though I might be nervous on the mike and even tell too much ...".