How Jack Kerouac inspired a rejected Nirvana track
Jack Kerouac’s On The Road has had an enormous influence on popular culture. The 1957 novel was adopted as a manifesto by Greenwich Village folkies like Bob Dylan, while its author – a purveyor of the post-war bohemian lifestyle – became the model of a new kind of young American.
Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty’s incessant urge to wander the road less travelled greatly influenced the hippie movement of the 1960s, and the book remains a touchstone for almost every young man (it is, in a variety of fairly problematic ways, a very male book) who has the good fortune of reading it at the right age. For Kurt Cobain, however, On The Road was merely a gateway drug. The book that really inspired the Nirvana frontman was a lesser-known and much shorter novella called The Dharma Bums.
‘Beans’ was salvaged from a four-track home cassette dated between 1986 and 1988. Cobain clearly thought the song had a certain something because he re-wrote and re-recorded it a few times, with the most famous version being the pitch-shifted recording you can hear below. The track – recorded at Cobain’s home – was originally intended for Nirvana’s debut album Bleach. Sadly, Sub-Pop refused to put it on the album, and it was later released on the 2004 Nirvana box set With the Lights Out.
The Dharma Bums had a couple of interesting effects on Cobain’s life. Not only did it inspire this early track, but Nirvana frequently opened for a Portland-based garage band of the same name. In fact, it was during one of The Dharma Bums concerts that Cobain met his future wife, Hole frontwoman Courtney Love. The novel was published the year after On The Road, by which time Kerouac was one of the most recognised writers of his generation. The beat writer’s new-found celebrity status changed everything. Previously rejected manuscripts were suddenly being fought over by publishers, and Kerouac could barely walk down the street without being recognised or attacked.
The Dharma Bums is a semi-autobiographical account of Kerouac’s experiences with Buddhism and his adventures with other writers from the San Francisco area. The book’s main protagonist is Raymond Smith, a disillusioned 30-something looking to escape his suffocating middle-class American existence. After meeting kindred-spirit Japhy Ryder, the pair decide to escape the city life and explore what would come to be known as North Cascades National Park. Rich with the transcendentalism of American writers like John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, The Dharma Bums explores the duality of human experience while framing post-war America as a place of emptiness and desolation salvageable only through communion with the rugged landscapes of America’s lost past.
Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums at the same furious pace he’d written On The Road six years earlier: using one ten-foot scroll of teleprinter paper to avoid the need for paper changes and thus preserve his flow-of-consciousness prose style. Cobain brings Kerouac’s torrential writing style to ‘Beans’, which is perhaps why SubPop were a little taken aback by the track: “Beans, beans, beans,” Cobain sings, “Japhy had some beans / He was happy, happy, happy / That he ate some beans.”
You can check out the ‘Beans’ demo below.
