"and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder"

A few years ago I read the book "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac and I really enjoyed it. The book chronicles Kerouac's seemingly spontaneous cross country road trips with his friend Neal Cassady. The book uses fake names (Sal Paradise for himself, Dean Moriarty for Cassady), but it's no secret that all of the other characters in the book were also based on people he knew in his own life.

In case you were unaware, Kerouac hung around with quite the crew. He and his friends, many of whom were also writers, were the inspiration for what has come to be known as "the Beat Generation." The beats are often associated with their rejection of materialism and their experimentation with psychadelic drugs and alternate forms of sexuality (thanks Wikipedia). Their experiences (in the 50's and early 60's) helped spawn the counter culture movement of the 1960's and later the hippie movement of the late 60's and 70's. The most famous of Kerouac's beatnik friends was Allen Ginsberg, who enjoyed more hotdogs than a cross between Kobayashi and Lance Bass. His famous poem "Howl", with the famous opening line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," was the subject of a highly publicized obscenity case that upheld our First Ammendment right to free speech.

I've always been interested in the Beat Generation because they went against the grain and history couldn't ignore them. Even if it's only a quick paragraph in a Social Studies textbook or a fleeting mention by a college professor, it shows that what this group of people stood for actually meant something.

Now if you just read my quick copy and paste from Wikipedia (it actually may be word for word) you might think that the beats were a bunch of people that messed around with drugs and then dabbled with bisexuality. This, however, was not the case. This group was highly educated (most went to Ivy League schools), abundantly talented, and primed for very successful careers. However, instead of accepting the path that society had created for them, they rejected the monotony of the status quo and freed themselves to do as they saw fit. To put it simply, they decided to just live for a while and not burden themselves with any societal restraints. And to sum it up even more simply, they were incredibly creative non-conformists.

I was driven to read "On the Road" not only because of Kerouac's connection to "the Beat Generation", but also because he is largley miscredited as the author of this quote.

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

..which is best known as the copy to one of the best advertisements of all time...



Before reading "On the Road", I had heard that this text was in the book, so I picked myself up a copy and anxiously anticipated how it would be used in context, but it never appeared. In fact, I still don't know who wrote, or said, those words, but people confuse that quote with this passage which does appear in "On the Road".

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

Either way, I read the book and really liked it. Ever since I have been even more conscious of learning little tidbits about Kerouac. To me, he just seems like he was a very interesting person (and let the record show that he never really went for the whole bisexual thing). For example, he wrote the now famous novel in just three weeks on one continuous scroll. Truman Capote, who was about as flamboyant as Perez Hilton, famously said of Kerouac's work, "That's not writing. That's typing." Also, Kerouac was an absolute bozebag. He died at age 47 of internal hemorrhaging, which was caused by cirrhosis of the liver.

So I tell you all of this because last week on a Pop Culture blog that I read, I came across this:

Here are my Top Five Songs That May or May Not Be Based on Jack Kerouac's Novels:

1.) Modest Mouse- The World at Large -- You could take just about any line from this song and it would feel like it came out of a Kerouac novel. My favorite line (that I think sums up why people like Kerouac in the first place): "I like songs about drifters -- books about the same; they both seem to make me feel a little less insane."

2.) Third Eye Blind- Burning Man -- The band actually acknowledged that this song is based on Sal Paradise's line in On the Road: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"

3.) The Hold Steady- Stuck Between Stations -- There are a few lines in this song that Kerouac may have wrote himself, but name-dropping Sal Paradise in the opening line was a dead giveaway: "There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right, boys and girls in America have such a sad time together."

4.) Weezer- Holiday -- I had been listening to this Weezer album for years before one day my headphones were a little too loud and I caught Rivers Cuomo talk-singing this line in the background: "On the road with Kerouac, sheltered in his Bivouac, on this road we'll never die." Rivers is a smart guy; I have no idea what a Bivouac is.

5.) Death Cab for Cutie- Bixby Canyon Bridge -- Ben Gibbard is a well-documented Kerouac junkie and has performed several songs that were influenced by him. I think this is his best, and I couldn't get this song out of my head the entire time I was reading Big Sur.

The only song of the five that I knew before reading that entry was "Burning Man", so I listened to the other four and enjoyed them all. I suggest that you all do the same and see what you think. Also, bonus points if you read "Howl" or Google (I love how this is a verb) the title of this post and read the poem that it appears in, which was written by a man who was responsible for publishing much of the literature written by "the Beat Generation."