Beats entwined: How Jack Kerouac influenced The Grateful Dead
“The only truth is music,” Jack Kerouac once wrote, “music blends with the heartbeat universe and we forget the brain beat.” In many ways, his seminal masterpiece, On The Road, was the life of a touring music enthusiast—a proto-gonzo roadie adventure in his beloved world of jazz. Bob Dylan said, “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.” With it, the pop culture revolution hit the road and The Grateful Dead would soon join its magical mystery tour.
The novel came out in 1957 and helped to break through the stilted state of conservatism with life-giving prose that blazed through the malaise of static predestined existence. It burst into bloom a bright new bohemian future for a thousand-fold army of disenfranchised youth aiming to tackle things a little differently from their forbearers. Their mantra seemingly: if we are to fail, then so be it, at least we did it on our own wavering terms.
How, then, did his book prove so influential? Well, there are no doubt a myriad of reasons – the fickle fate of circumstance being one of them – but aside from that, what is obvious to observe is that it offered up the presentiment of a vibrant life beyond banality in a pretty monochrome world at the time.
Aside from the endless misreadings, the scoffs of cynics and the analysis of its place in literature, the simple brooding pleasure of On The Road resides in the joy of life in motion and all the technicolour tones that whiz by. In short, the eternal duck soup thrill of being out there, living and breathing.
As technology bellowed up, things got faster, and Kerouac thought that culture ought to keep the pace. Thus, he went out there and caught it on the wing. His story wasn’t just a personal tale, it encapsulated a whole movement. People like Jerry Garcia wanted to be part of it. As the frontman and founder said: “Kerouac became so much a part of me that it’s hard to measure.”
Continuing: “I can’t separate who I am now from what I got from Kerouac. I don’t know if I would ever have had the courage or the vision to do something outside with my life, or even suspected the possibilities existed, if it weren’t for Kerouac opening those doors.” Thus, it’s fair to say that a great deal of influence ran between them, but beyond that, circumstance would intrinsically link them too.
The very literal wheelman of On The Road is dubbed Dean Moriarty (a somewhat annoying character oft responsible for misreads), and in a twist of fate, he was literally based on Neal Cassidy. As it happens, Cassidy became an actual wheelman once the Acid Test’s got going with Tom Wolfe and Ken Kesey spawning gonzo journalist in a sort of On The Road live blog on the passing sights of a converted school bus. Cassidy drove their technicolour tour bus around the States.
The bus would stop at several gatherings where Kool-Aid containing acid was served up and the spun-out folks in attendance would take in a band bashing out rock ‘n’ roll. Their journey was the engine of counterculture and one of the central bands on the scene was The Grateful Dead. Their acid anthem ‘Black Peter’ is almost an ode to Kerouac’s living breathing protagonist and the highs and lows of life on the road after lyricist Robert Hunter accidentally drank apple juice containing a $50,000 crystal of LSD. It’s just as well that their sound engineer happened to brew the purest acid in human history.
