HITCHHIKING SONGS

"Sweet Hitchhiker" by Creedence Clearwater Revival

If you've ever hitchhiked any distance you've done a lot of standing by the road singing songs. Rides are few and far between, so you entertain yourself. Some people live on the road--drifters, hobos, dharma bums and outriders--and they explore the Great American Highway. They've got wanderlust. Maybe they can't make it in straight society, maybe they're modern day gypsies. Road trips were once seen as rites of passage, important coming-of-age experiences like Indian vision quests, but nowadays it seems that most young people forgo the Kerouac bug for the lock-step of security, career, and life in the Comfort Zone. It's all about viewpoint. If you grow up believing what you're told, you have no reason to "go out there and see for myself." On the other hand...

"Hitchin' a Ride" by Vanity Fare

...some people have the bug. I did. Unimpressive by true vagabond standards, I've still got my bonafides, logging some long runs up and down the West Coast several times, and thumbing through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, California and down into Mexico. I hitched around upstate New York when the leaves were turning. I'm not fooling myself--I'm snug in the Comfort Zone, too, and surprised I was ever foolhardy enough to hitchhike around the country. People say it's too dangerous now, but it was always dangerous. On the road, you surrender to chance, fate, luck, the elements. You have no choice. I got robbed once, got into some bad spots, slept under a bridge when there was snow on the ground. I got thrown into jail in Circleville, Utah, home of the famous Butch Cassady. I like to think we were both in the same jailhouse--at different times, of course. The old bunker jailhouse certainly seemed old enough for the Hole in the Wall Gang.

An old map of the Outlaw Trail

The Wild West is long gone. Nowadays, I want comfort when I travel. I want cozy beds and honey-roasted peanuts and a mini-bar full of expensive Snickers and tiny bottles of good booze. Still, I wouldn't give up my hitching days for anything. Sure it was senseless and foolhardy--you can't put it on a resume, and it doesn't translate well to the status seekers and stay-at-home types, but it provided me with an advanced degree of the spirit. If you want to know your country--your world--you need to get out there and see it firsthand. Hitchhiking is a way to do it on the cheap.

A night in jail in Butch Cassady's hometown. Priceless.

You'll meet some real characters. You might share snacks or travel tips ("If you ever go to Houston..."). Some people never forget their fraternity brothers or army buddies, but I'll never forget Julie with the patchwork jacket from San Diego and Black Bart ("like the outlaw") from Montana, and the crazy Kahlua drinking dude who had just got a divorce and kept singing "Miss You" until we told him to shut the hell up. Or the Navajos in the green Camaro going to the all-Indian rodeo in Tuba City. Or the county sheriff who bought us a stack of pancakes and eggs because the law requires you to feed prisoners. Or "El Cougare," the modern day gunfighter who fought in electronic quick-draws for prize money. Or the country club golfer who bought me a cold beer in the desert outside Page, Arizona, because you had to be a club member to buy a drink at the Pro Shop and it was over a hundred degrees in the shade. Thanks.

"Ridin' Thumb" by King Curtis & the Kingpins

Years later, when you're buried in polite society and you've forgotten most of what you ever learned, you will come across somebody who knows, you can see it in their eyes, and before you know it you're trading old road stories. A song might grab you, too, trigger a memory so it all comes back in a great disorderly rush and you get a flash of the University Avenue onramp in Berkeley, say, or snow falling in the Siskyous and taillights fading in the dusk. You have to laugh. Squeeze your eyes shut and you're back in the wind, bundled up in a pile-lined denim jacket, climbing into a long-haul rig just outside Salt Lake City. Diesel fumes, air brakes, static on the radio.

"How far ya going?"

"Me and Bobby McGee" by Kris Kristofferson

A BEATNIK SIT-COM

"Pull My Daisy" (1959) is truly beat cinema. The film is based on the third act of a Jack Kerouac play, Beat Generation, and features an all-star lineup of 1950s hipsters, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and artists Larry Rivers and Alice Neel. The film was directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. Kerouac narrates.

The Beats put their stock in spontaneity and distrusted post-inspiration tampering. They believed art and poetry should spring from the mind fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Sometimes this method delivered inspired work, and other times it produced a half-baked shambling mess. This falls somewhere between the two, but is worth a look.

The story originally came from Neil Cassady, and is supposedly based on an actual event though it sounds more like an episode of a situation comedy. A railway brakemen entertains a respectable bishop. The brakeman's weirdo friends come spilling in the door, ruining everything. You know the type--mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, never saying a commonplace thing. In other words, trouble. I keep expecting Fred and Ethel to drop by with a jug of wine and some bongos. Go, man, go!

quiet on the set: orlovsky, corso, and ginsberg

NEW BOOK BY KEROUAC AND BURROUGHS

pictured above: Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, 1944

Crazy Beatnik Killers! That would be the title of the 1950s Hollywood cheapo exploitation film, anyway. No surprise that an even better title was cooked up by co-writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. "The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks", a new novel co-written by the two giants of the Beat Generation, is set to be published. The book was written over sixty years ago, was inspired by a murder that led to their arrests, the 1944 stabbing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, a friend of the writers and another Beat.

Carr served two years after pleading guilty to manslaughter, claiming Kammerer had been obsessed with him and had become a violent stalker.

After the killing, Carr confessed to Kerouac and Burroughs, who helped him dispose of the knife but did not go to police. Kerouac was arrested as an accessory to the killing in 1944 and was put in a Bronx jail but he was freed after his girlfriend, Edie Parker, posted bail. Burroughs was also arrested, but escaped incarceration.

The book is an early work, and probably not very good since neither writer was eager to see it published. Of course, Kerouac and Burroughs went on to worldwide fame with the publication of their later works, "On the Road," and "Naked Lunch," respectively. Penguin Classics will publish the new book in November.

Hear Kerouac recite "The Moon in Her Majesty" by clicking here.

HIT THE ROAD, JACK

Like a man possessed, Jack Kerouac wrote "On The Road" on one continuous 120-foot scroll, a furious feat fueled by pharmaceuticals and possibly angels. Like Athena springing fully-formed from the head of Zeus, "Road" was born in one momentous rush, and this is now the stuff of legend. It may be popular in certain circles to dismiss the work as overheated youthful exuberance, but man you just know those cats are too square to swing with it. You dig?

This year, the scroll begins a 13-stop, four year tour. To commemorate "Road" hitting the road, I made a short film combining footage of Jack in the heady days of the Beats with a low-fi recording of him singing a sweet little song called "On The Road."