Esperanza: Songs From Jack Kerouac's 'Tristessa' Liner Notes

Esperanza

2 TREMBLING AND CHASTE: THE LONG SADNESS OF THE MEXICO CITY NIGHT SIMON WARNER Jack Kerouac, the leading light of that maverick pack of 1950s writers who forged the so-called Beat Generation and sparked a social and cultural revolution in the process, is best known for his exhilarating lust for life, expressed in a series of high-octane novels that distilled his adventures and his hopes. In books like On the Road, The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, he transformed his own picaresque autobiography into thrilling, foot-to-the-floor fiction.

Yet if Kerouac’s image as freewheeling spirit, unfettered hobo, hitchhiking hero of the open road, has been enduring, his motivations, his obsessions, were far more complex. For every vivacious celebration of everyday wonder, he was drawn also to the darker recesses of experience: the plight of the human soul, the early realisation that ‘we’re all going to die’.

His concerns were tied intimately to his early Catholic upbringing, religious foundations that would both inspire and taunt him for every day of his short 47 years. Through the church he was touched and tainted by God, by the saints, by the Virgin Mary, and threatened constantly by the bony tendrils of his own festering mortality.

There are few examples in his large body writing that better represent the dolorous yin to the effervescent yang of the novelist’s worldview than his 1960 novella Tristessa, a story which actually reflects on experiences he had endured around half a decade before in the seething cauldron of Mexico City, a burgeoning mid-century metropolis on the cusp of the primitive and the modern, a chaotic termite hill of the devotional and the damned.

Tristessa is a morphine-addicted prostitute with whom he falls in love. Kerouac’s narrator is first hopelessly drawn to this frail and exotic angel of the streets, then returns a year on to discover she has gone into inevitable decline. Few accounts of love can be so haunted by the shadow of approaching tragedy and the writer, we can assume, only escapes the ultimate conclusion to this fated affair by moving on, his usual default when things became just too difficult to manage.

Yet the relating of this shadowy romance is touched with a terrible beauty. Kerouac’s prose is jagged, brittle and broken, staccato phrases punctured by long dashes, a spontaneous combustion of compassion and terror. Amid this Boschian nightmare of rainy alleys, disease and squalor, the novelist still weaves a tapestry that almost pre-empts the wonders and mysteries of Latin American magical realism.

There are many recognisable features, too: Kerouac’s Franciscan affection for animals is a regular motif – the cat, the dove, the chicken earn tender mentions – and the magnetic pull of the mystical,

whether Christian or Buddhist, infuses the account, too.

Further, another notable figure from the writer’s gallery of real-life associates drift in and out of the Mexican night, but the individual called Bull is based not on Kerouac’s long-time friend William Burroughs but rather another exiled addict, William Garver. Here dubbed Old Bull Gaines, he is a key protagonist in the curious love triangle as the drama unfolds.

Tristessa is an important, and truthful, part of the myth of Duluoz, the name the writer often adopted for the central character in this cycle of confession. This particular tale is harsh but it is vivid; it has both the brilliant and garish colours of neon midnight and the sepia tones of eternal sadness. But if it is frequently bleak, it is honest and moving, and for all its bitter tears, fundamentally humane.

Now, on this remarkable album, sixteen artists and bands, working in a range of genres, respond to the novella – taking on its themes as inspiration, adopting its very words as a lyrical source. Almost 60 years after Kerouac’s doomed tryst in ‘the Nirvana glare of Saturday night’, these songs offer a contemporary take on a less celebrated, but no less rich, slice of the writer’s kaleidoscopic canon.

3 1. WILLIAM FITZSIMMONS WITH TIM & ADAM First Page of Tristessa (Tim & Adam/Jack Kerouac) 2. TIM & ADAM Billie Holiday Eyes (Tim & Adam/Jack Kerouac) 3. GREGORY ALAN ISOKOV O City Lights (Gregory Alan Isokov) 4. PETER BRADLEY ADAMS She Has To Come Down (Peter Bradley Adams) 5. ALELA DIANE We Are Nothing (Alela Diane/Jack Kerouac) 6. WINTERSLEEP Father Time (Wintersleep) 7. MARISSA NADLER Tristessa’s Song (Marissa Nadler) 8. JOSHUA JAMES Esperanza (Spanish Version) (Joshua James) 9. LEE RANALDO Middle Page of Kerouac’s Tristessa (Jack Kerouac) 10. HEY ROSETTA! Sad Animals (Hey Rosetta!)

11. WILL DAILEY Broke No Calm (Will Dailey/Jack Kerouac) 12. WILLY MASON I Have Known Love (Willy Mason/Jack Kerouac) 13. MATT COSTA Shadows of Autumn (Matt Costa/Jack Kerouac) 14. THE LOW ANTHEM Numbers In Nirvana (The Low Anthem/Jack Kerouac) 15. NEAL MCCARTHY with BARBARA KESSLER Esperanza (English Version) (Joshua James/Jack Kerouac/Jim Sampas) 16. TONY DEKKER with HANNE HUKKELBERG Last Page of Kerouac’s Tristessa (Jack Kerouac)

Esperanza: Songs of Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa

CREDITS Producer Jim Sampas Co-Producers David Greenberg

SYNOPSIS FOR A FILM BASED ON JACK KEROUAC’S TRISTESSA NATE BARLOW A cab speeds past the man heading into the city, splashing him as it does. The man, JACK KEROUAC, turns to watch it disappear into the slums, his face emotionless.

Jack and TRISTESSA--beautiful, coming off a high from morphine, and obviously a prostitute--sit in the back of the cab. She says how she is “seek” (sick), she needs “a shot”--more?!-- They go back to her poor and ramshackle apartment... Jack simply stares, with a look that could be love or lust. He reaches toward her, stops himself. They run through the streets to her apartment--Tristessa catches people’s eyes even now.

Though disheveled Tristessa’s apartment is, it is a place of peace, beautiful in its own way, with a statue of the Virgin Mary. EL INDIO, Tristessa’s morphine supplier, and CRUZ, her “sister”, are already there. As his companions take their morphine, Jack’s attention is consumed with the various animals and a picture of his friend Dave, Tristessa’s now dead husband, leading into a flashback of how Jack met Tristessa through Dave.

El Indio eventually leaves. Tristessa sits on the bed, removes her stockings, driving Jack wild--she obviously knows he wants her--but having taken a vow of celibacy, he holds himself back. El Indio returns, back to the morphine...Jack, depressed, leaves.

Jack ventures through the slums of Mexico City, observing the good, the bad, alone in the multitudes.

Jack arrives home but can’t get into his room, missing the front door key, so he goes to the room of his friend and neighbor OLD BULL, Jack’s mentor, or at least window, into the junkie culture, explaining their world, and the dangers of goofballs, a vial of which he has himself. Jack tries to sleep, but Old Bull’s activities are too distracting, until Bull takes the very goofballs he warns against.

When morning breaks, Jack returns to his own room

4 and falls asleep. He dreams of Tristessa in all her purity, his wanting her. The dream morphs into reality, as Tristessa has come to visit him in his room. His own thoughts to so impure, Jack can’t stand to look at her. Tristessa talks about what friends do for each other, with pantomined sexual motions, would he be her friend? Jack fights every urge-she is his for the taking--he again refrains. She decides to leave, he summons her a cab.

Jack revisits the locations of his night time odyssey, this time during day, working on his writing and art.

Two weeks later, Jack visits Old Bull, who tells Jack something is wrong with Tristessa-too many goofballs. Old Bull brings her over, she is a complete mess and flies off the handle, destroying everything in sight and attacking Jack and Bull. Eventually she and Bull take their shots and Tristessa calms down. Jack tells her that he loves her, but no response, and when Old Bull returns from the next room she tells him that Jack propositioned her. Old Bull does not believe such nonsense, so Tristessa declares she is going to find El Indio for more morphine. Jack hesitantly follows, but too late--she has disappeared.

Jack enters upon his second venture into the Mexico City underworld, ending up in a den of questionable repute where he loses his work and his money--and is rescued by Tristessa and Cruz. They traverse the city together, Jack shivering. Tristessa kisses Jack gently, then starts laughing at him, mocking his movements, but the mocking becomes convulsing and she falls, cracking her head on the ground. Jack thinks that she has died as unconcerned citizens calmly step over the dead prostitute.

Jack laments that he could have saved Tristessa if he had only shown his love.

Tristessa does awaken, and Jack follows her to Old Bulls, but she departs shortly after with Cruz, leaving Old Bull and Jack at a loss. The essentially stand vigil for several days, joined by El Indio, who eventually leaves. And then, finally, a knock at the window-Tristessa has returned, still a bloody mess, but she has no interest in Jack, only Bull.

The three go to a nearby bar. The conversation, like so many more, drifts to morphine, and Jack realizes his only road to Tristessa is to join them. He begs for a shot, which they provide, likewise taking shots themselves. Once on the junk, Tristessa cleans up, becomes alive. Bull, too, thrives on the junk, but Jack feels low, sick, his mind wanders.

Jack reminds Tristessa of her kiss the night before, repeats it in reverse, but that moment is past. Old Bull tells him how only junkies know junkies and Jack realizes that his chance with Tristessa is gone and that she and Bull will marry.

Since no one has any money, Tristessa says that she will walk home. Jack says she can sleep in his bed, “no moleste”, calm, resolute, understanding--free. Jack takes them up to his room. Tristessa and Bull prep their morphine and Jack leaves for the road.

Jack watches the cab vanish into the slums of Mexico City. He turns his back on the city and resumes his journey, out of the rain and into day.

OTHER ALBUMS FROM REIMAGINE MUSIC SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES: A TRIBUTE TO BOB DYLAN’S BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME 1. PETER MOREN (of Peter Bjorn & John) Subterranean Homesick Blues 2. ANE BRUN She Belongs To Me 3. CASTANETS Maggie’s Farm 4. MIRAH Love Minus Zero 5. THE MORNING BENDERS Outlaw Blues 6. JULIE DOIRON On The Road Again 7. ASOBI SEKSU Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream 8. HELIO SEQUENCE Mr. Tambourine Man 9. DM STITH Gates Of Eden 10. FRANZ NICOLAY (formerly of the Hold Steady) It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) 11. SHOLI It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue bonus tracks 12. J. TILLMAN (of Fleet Foxes) If You’ve Gotta Go, Go Now 13. SEA WOLF Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence 14. DENISON WITMER I’ll Keep It With Mine 15.

LAURA VEIRS Mama, You Been On My Mind 16. WILLIAM FITZSIMMONS Farewell Angelina Produced by Jim Sampas PAINT IT BLACK: AN ALT COUNTRY TRIBUTE TO THE ROLLING STONES 1. GREAT LAKE SWIMMERS Before They Make Me Run 2. MATTHEW RYAN Streets of Love 3. COWBOY JUNKIES Moonlight Mile 4. HEM You Can’t Always Get What You Want 5. EVEREST Sweet Virginia 6. THE BITTERSWEETS Loving Cup 7. GIANT SAND Jumpin’ Jack Flash 8. LEE HARVEY OSMOND & MARY GAUTHIER Dear Doctor 9. OVER THE RHINE Waiting On A Friend 10. THE HANDSOME FAMILY Faraway Eyes 11. BLUE MOUNTAIN Torn and Frayed 12. BRIAN RITCHEY Paint It Black 13. NEIL MCCARTHY & IVO MATOS Wild Horses 14. BARBARA KESSLER You Got The Silver 15. ANDERS PARKER Coming Down Again Produced by Jim Sampas COME AS YOU ARE: A 20TH ANNIVERSARY TRIBUTE TO NIRVANA’S NEVERMIND 1. THE DUTCH MASTERS (featuring Brent and Courtney of The Dandy Warhols) Smells Like Teen Spirit 2.

MEWITHOUTYOU In Bloom 3. CIVIL TWILIGHT Come As You Are 4.

STORY OF THE YEAR Breed 5. HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS Lithium 6.

FINGER ELEVEN Polly 7. WILL DAILEY Territorial P*****gs 8. MAPS AND ATLASES Drain You 9. MURDER BY DEATH Lounge Act 10. PITTY Stay Away 11. THE ALBUM LEAF On A Plain 12. MARGOT AND THE NUCLEAR SO AND SO’S Something In the Way 13. ANTHONY RANERI (of Bayside) About A Girl Produced by Jim Sampas mp2013 Reimagine Music. All Rights Reserved. www.reimaginemusic.com