Soundtrack Saturday

Jack Kerouac's On The Road was finally turned into a film in 2012 by Walter Salles (who had previously made The Motorcycle Diaries, an account of a youthful Che Guevara based on Che's book about travelling round South America). Other people had shown an interest in making a film out of On The Road- Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights back in 1979 and attempted to start shooting in 1995 but abandoned it. Before that Kerouac himself wrote to Marlon Brando to do it. Brando never replied. There was interest from Gus van Sant with Ethan Hawke and Brad Pitt lined up to play the main roles but nothing got off the ground. 

Coppola eventually hired Salles and Salles started shooting in 2010 with Sam Riley as Sal Paradise/ Jack Kerouac and Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty/ Neal Cassady. Riley had played Ian Curtis in Control, the Joy Division film. Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen, Steve Buscemi, Kirsten Dunst and Elizabeth Moss were all singed up, so it's an all star 2010s cast. The film looks good, the cinematography is good, the world of late 1940s USA and Mexico looks authentic, the attention to period detail is spot on. It feels like the 1940s, you can almost smell the cigarettes and the sweat, the grease of the engines, the tarmac, the streets of Denver, Jack's boots...

Much of filming was down on the run, on location, Salles in a car with a handheld camera alongside the car with Sal/ Sam and Dean/ Garrett inside. Hedlund described it as 'guerrilla filming' which sounds like it should be exactly what On The Road needs on the big screen. Despite this, there's something at the heart of the film that never quite connects, it never catches fire in the way it should. Hedlund is great as Dean as is Kristen Stewart as Marylou. Sam Riley's Sal/ Jack is decent if too much on the sidelines at times, not involved enough. As a film it looks good and some of the scenes work but overall it's too polite and doesn't capture the energy of the novel. Still, I liked it enough when it came out- I went on my own to a daytime screening at the Cornerhouse and have seen it at least once since then on DVD. 

On The Road is probably unfilmable really- the narrative, such as it is, doesn't really fit the standard three act arc and a version of On The Road that was entirely Kerouacian would be an impressionistic arthouse blur of road, poetry and jazz. 

The soundtrack though is very enjoyable, nineteen tracks that work really well as a whole piece- which is the sign of a good soundtrack. There are some period pieces (Slim Gaillard, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Son House), some instrumentals by soundtrack composer Gustavo Santaolalla and two minutes of Kerouac reading, mumbling, from the novel. 

Sweet Sixteen is fifty seconds that opens the soundtrack, the cast singing in a car, the sound of rubber tyres on tarmac and engine noise, a scene setter for the album. 

Sweet Sixteen

Roman Candles is  one minute twenty two seconds of rattling percussion and jazz piano from Gustavo Santaolalla, named for Kerouac's famous description in the novel- 

'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'

Roman Candles

Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker made Salt Peanuts in 1941, a bebop tune written by Gillespie with the vocal interjection of the title surrounded by trumpet, piano, double bass and Parker's alto sax. Charlie Parker was one of the key inspirations for Kerouac's writing, the reason he got the legendary roll of paper to feed into the typewriter so he could type without having to stop. 

Salt Peanuts

Son House's Death Letter Blues is a postcard from the distant past, Delta blues sung and played by one who lived it. Heavy. 

Death Letter Blues

'I don't think anyone can hear me, can you hear me now?', Kerouac mutters at the start of this, before finding his rhythm, 'New York, 1949...' and starts narrating the road trip and the search for Dean's father which is what Dean/ Neal is looking for all the time- an absent alcoholic father- and the perpetual motion that is at the heart of the novel. As a result the two minutes of Kerouac reading from On The Road on the soundtrack are an affecting and effective way to end it. 

Jack Kerouac Reads On The Road

The film and the novel both end with the unfinished search and Jack's reflection, back in New Jersey...

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”

Death Letter, Hot Water

We are into day 5 of enforced Victorian living- come and film us Channel 4. Our boiler stopped working on Sunday- no central heating or hot water all day. It is not easy to fill a bath with the kettle and a few pans. The boilerman came on Monday and said our expander unit had popped causing the system to trip out. He's ordered a new one but no sign of it yet. We have two portable radiators and an electric fan heater Mrs Swiss had when I first met her (and it wasn't new then). On Sunday night we bathed at friends. Boilerman did a temporary fix for us, emptying the kitchen radiator to act as an expander unit. This has, since Monday evening, provided intermittent heat and some hot water. Some as in not enough. I got those faulty boiler blues.

Son House's blues song Death Letter plays in the film of On The Road and hearing it on the big screen last week reminded me of its power and beauty. Two clips for you...

This one, undated, but I'm guessing 1950s (?)



And this one from 1970...



And without wanting to come across as one of those authenticity blues bores, they just go to show that lights, staging, films and projections, heck, even having a guitar that's in tune, are all a little superfluous at times.

On The Road Again

I went to see On The Road the day before yesterday, on my own in the afternoon. I dunno if this is the best way to go to the cinema or just a bit sad. The day before I took the 9 year old daughter to see Ice Age 4. I think On The Road shaded it. I enjoyed it, despite what the critics have said. It is a tad overlong and there is a coffee table element to the jazz and the clothes and the good looking cast and there is also a little truth in the reviews that said watching people drink, take drugs and have sex is pretty boring but even so I thought it was a good effort and better than I'd been led to believe. The film looks good, the scenery frequently stunning, the period details spot on, the cinematography beautiful. Sam Riley is good as Sal Paradise, the eternal observer looking for stuff to write about and on a search for kicks, but I half expected him to turn into Ian Curtis at any moment and start doing the jerky dance. Tom Sturridge (Carlo Marx/Allen Ginsberg) steals most of the scenes he's in despite some clunky scripting and the female leads of Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst are excellent. Mostly though, for a film based on a book that has narrative but no real plot, no three act formula, no twist, no denouement, none of the things that 'make' a film, I thought it worked. It was watchable, funny, absorbing in parts, and to me (no film critic admittedly) Walter Salles made a decent job of a book long considered unfilmable.

Ice Age 4 tells the continuing story of three animated prehistoric friends- a sabre toothed tiger called Diego,a woolly mammoth called Manny and a sloth called Sid. The continents are drifting apart leading to all kinds of japes and capers, plus there's a crew of animal pirates and a teenage mammoth called Peaches learning about friendship.

Friday Afternoon In The Universe

The Only People For Me Are The Mad Ones

I first read On The Road in the summer of 1989, aged 19. I loved it. It didn't get me hitch-hiking across North America but I went on to read loads of other Kerouac novels, biographies, and then onwards into Burroughs, Ginsberg and the rest. Kerouac's work is full of contradictions- some of it is almost unreadable (Dr Sax say), some of it just has to be read for the writing rather than any sense of narrative. He famously typed On The Road in a three week Benzadrine fuelled binge on a non-stop roll of paper. It had to be widely edited to make any narrative sense. For all the wanderlust and adventures and search for kicks, he spent his life with the apron strings to his mother firmly uncut. He tried to balance the booze, partying and excitement with a spiritual quest, settling for Buddhism and his own version of Zen. When fame hit him, ten years after writing the book, he soon found he couldn't cope. Held up by the hippies as the King of the Beats he criticised, even loathed, the 60s counter culture and died an alcoholic in front of the TV in Florida. But the sense of freedom in his best writing, the lyrical nature of the verse, the attempt to 'write jazz', the trip to Mexico in On The Road, The Dharma Bums, parts of Desolation Angels, are all beautiful and romantic and inspiring.

Long considered unfilmable, Walter Salles, has had a go at it (starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst and Viggo Mortensen). The trailer below looks right but you just can't tell from a trailer how good a film is going to be. It got mixed reviews at Cannes in the summer. I'm kind of looking forward to it when it gets released this December.



Kerouac recorded several albums, sometimes reading his work alone, sometimes reading it accompanied by jazz musicians.

Jack Kerouac Reading On The Road