2022
Still Rockin’ in the Beat World: How Kerouac Cool Continues to Fuel Popular Music Passions as Writer’s Centenary Is Reached s i m o n wa r n e r
I
n the Spring of 1978, I arrived in the Massachusetts town of Lowell, a one-time milltown of industrial importance, with textile production employing significant numbers of its population. But this young Englishman in New England was then largely unaware of its blue-collar past beyond its entanglements with an author who grew up there in the 1920s and ‘30s. Not that anyone in those anonymous afternoon streets had any real grasp or knowledge of its most famous son. My friend and I, recent college graduates who had spent the previous year labouring on construction sites to fund this transatlantic journey, were on a mission to track the trail of Jack Kerouac. But initial exchanges left us feeling despondent. Kerouac, already dead by almost a decade when we arrived in his boyhood streets, seemed to have made little impression on the ordinary men and women we met in shops or cafes or in bars as we played pool in a bid to fit in with the Main Street ambience. Had they heard of him? Did they know members of his family? Where was he buried? The responses were disappointingly unhelpful, even deliberately deflective. Either he was already forgotten, or locals were determined to blank this individual they saw as a runaway drunk, a man who had spent much of his errant life leaving Lowell, from their minds. The day was gray, and we were tired travellers, having quite recently arrived in New York City and then Greyhound bussed to Boston and on to this relative backwater. We were, in our small way, living out the highway-hopping dream of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty— the fictional names of Kerouac and his great friend Neal Cassady—in the ground-breaking 1957 novel On the Road, the figurehead account of that radical literary community known as the Beat Generation. But I suppose we lacked the sophistication, the confidence, the persistence, to turn our literary pilgrimage into a transformative homage. As the evening fell dark, we finally discovered Nick’s Bar, the pub where the brother of Kerouac’s third wife, Stella Sampas, held court. However, just as we arrived, we encountered a friendly reporter for the Lowell Sun. He was pleased to make our acquaintance—Anglos were less familiar in the American hinterland then—yet he was more concerned about our welfare, warning us that two outof-town longhairs were not likely to be that welcome in this brawling, bruising boozer. In 140
The Lowell Review
