Jack Kerouac - The Beat Generation Lyrics

Lyrics The Beat Generation - Jack Kerouac



Now it's jazz, the place is roaring, all beautiful girls in there,
One mad brunette at the bar drunk with her boys.
One strange chick I remember from somewhere, wearing a simple skirt with pockets, her hands in there, short haircut, slouched, talking to everybody.
Up and down the stairs they come.
The bartenders are the regular band of Jack,
And the heavenly drummer who looks up in the sky with blue eyes,
With a beard, is wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming on the cash register and everything is going to the beat.
It's the beat generation, it's beat, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, i
T's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown
And like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat
And servants spinning pottery to a beat.
The faces!
There's no face to compare with Jack Minger's who's up on the bandstand now with a colored trumpeter who outblows him wild and Dizzy but Jack's face overlooking all the heads and smoke.
He has a face that looks like everybody you've ever known and seen on the street in your generation; a sweet face.
Hard to describe, sad eyes, cruel lips, expectant gleam, swaying to the beat, tall, majestical waiting in front of the drugstore.
A face like Hunke's in New York
(Hunke whom you'll see on Times Square, somnolent and alert, sadsweet, dark, beat, just out of jail, martyred, tortured by sidewalks, starved for sex and companionship, open to anything, ready to introduce new worlds with a shrug).
The colored big tenor with the big tone would like to be blowing Sunny Stitts clear out of Kansas City roadhouses, clear, heavy, somewhat dull and unmusical ideas which nevertheless never leave the music, always there, far out, the harmony too complicated for the motley bums (of music-understanding) in there.
The drummer is a sensational 12-year-old Negro boy who's not allowed to drink but can play, tremendous, a little lithe childlike Miles Davis kid, like early Fats Navarro fans you used to see in Espan Harlem, hep, small he thunders at the drums with a beat which is described to me by a near-standing connoisseur with beret as a "fabulous beat". On piano is Blondey Bill, good enough to drive any group. Jack Minger blows out and over his head with these angels from Fillmore, I dig him now it's terrific. I just stand in the outside hall against the wall, no beer necessary, with collections of in-and-out listeners, with Verne, and now here returns Bob Berman (who is a colored kid from West Indies who barged into my party six months earlier high with Dean and the gang and I had a Chet Baker record on and we hoofed at each other in the room, tremendous, the perfect grace of his dancing, casual, like Joe Louis casually hoofing). He comes now in dancing like that, glad. Everybody looks everywhere, it's a jazz-joint and beat generation madtrick, you see someone, "Hi," then you look away elsewhere, for something someone else, it's all insane, then you look back, you look away, around, everything is coming in from everywhere in the sound of the jazz. "Hi", "Hey". Bang, the little drummer takes a solo, reaching his young hands all over traps and kettles and cymbals and foot-peddle BOOM in a fantastic crash of sound 12 years old but what will happen?



Writer(s): Larry John Mcnally


Jack Kerouac - Great Audio Moments, Vol. 22: Jack Kerouac & The Beat Generation (Deluxe Edition)

1 October In The Railroad Earth
2 Deadbelly
3 Charlie Parker
4 The Sounds of the Universe Coming Through My Window
5 One Mother
6 Goofing At The Table
7 Bowery Blues
8 Abraham
9 Dave Brubeck
10 I Had A Slouch Hat Too One Time
11 The Wheel Of The Quivering Meat Conception
12 MacDougal Street Blues
13 The Moon Her Majesty
14 I'd Rather Be Thin Than Famous
15 American Haikus
16 Hard Hearted Old Farmer
17 The Last Hotel & Some of the Dharma
18 Poems from the Unpublished (Book of Blues)
19 The Beat Generation
20 Poems (Fragments)
21 Lucien Midnight the Sounds of the Universe in My Window Pt. I
22 Lucien Midnight the Sounds of the Universe in my Window Pt.II
23 Fantasy: The Early History Of Bop
24 Excerpts From "The Subterraneans"
25 Visions of Neal and the Three Stooges Pt.I
26 Visions of Neal and the Three Stooges, Pt. II
27 Readings from 'On the Road & 'Visions of Cody'




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