My favorite scene in the Rolling Stones’ documentary, “Crossfire Hurricane” was set on a train, where the Stones are smoking and chatting around a table, and somebody asks them about their recent gigs in Georgia. Brian Jones looks up into the camera and stammers to the man with the microphone, “Everyone in Georgia is an idiot!”

That was the moment that I knew that things haven’t really changed that much in 48 years. It was almost embarrassing watching Andrew Loog Oldham snap his fingers and sway as Mick and Keith wrote “Tell Me” in their hotel room, because they could have been any band today or yesterday. I had seen it all before, and yet this had all happened before I had seen any of it, before I had seen anything at all. But were they really the blueprint? That’s how it all began? That’s it?

Part of the trouble for me with the Stones was their music. They were an R&B group from the UK. Scrawny, pale-faced Mick Jagger became famous because he could imitate singers like Howlin’ Wolf or Bo Diddley. How to reconcile this grand theft of Black America’s music by a group of English fairies? And yet the music is great. The Stones’ version of the 1963 Marvin Gaye tune “Hitch Hike” is better than the original, I think. It was this aptitude that canceled out the debate over the ownership of music. They could do it because they were British, but also because they were very good.

For me, all of these men are mythical characters, like Sinbad the Sailor or Ulysses. I read about Mick, Keith, Brian, Charlie, and Bill for the first time from the back of my father’s musty-smelling England’s Newest Hit Makers LP. Charlie was my favorite. I tried to convince my parents to acquire a drum kit, but settled for a pad and a pair of sticks. There were awkward attempts to play along with “Walking the Dog.” That LP got played and played. I would listen to it all night long, waking up to turn it over {because I had a Fisher Price record player}

My friend Kris Olsen — a spotty Norwegian kid who had promised to name his future son “Leif” — had superior audio equipment and was convinced that he had deciphered the main riff to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” on his out-of-tune electric guitar. “Listen, I can play it!” he would summon us to the practice room. It didn’t really sound much like “Flash,” but who had the courage to tell him otherwise? We listened to those cassettes and LPs over and over again. Kris had me convinced that Keith was playing the maracas in “She’s a Rainbow” by clenching them in his teeth and shaking his head back and forth while playing guitar. We didn’t know about multi-track recording back then. We thought it was all live.

I was born with one slightly deformed ear. It was the left one. It lacked an outer crease, which made it stick out through my bowl haircut like Dumbo. When I was nine years old, I had the good fortune to have plastic surgery. And when I was recovering, my friend’s mother asked what she could get me as a gift. I said, “The Rolling Stones.” She said, “Are you sure he wants that? Wouldn’t he like a video game instead.”

The tape I received was Through the Past, Darkly (Big Hits, Vol. II). Cassettes were a gift to young music listeners, because you had to listen all the way through, learning to appreciate songs you might have dismissed on first hearing. I came to love all of the songs on that tape. On the inside of the cassette booklet, there was an image of Brian Jones’ reflection in a mirror, and beneath it was written 1942-1969.

Wait a second? He’s dead?! How did he die? He was so young? A little math. Only 27. It was much later that I heard about the drugs and swimming pool and the five illegitimate children and the other fragments of the Legend of Brian. In the documentary, they make it seem like it was bound to happen. I have to say now, as a man, I feel a lot of empathy for Brian’s character. He seemed like he was stuck in something thick, something bad, something he couldn’t get out of. But there would be no course correction in Brian’s case. His course was fixed.

Anyway, why should I care about this? Why should I take my time to write about a documentary about some rock band? Why should I care about people I’ve never met from a long time ago? Think of how many musicians have died in similar circumstances since. But their lives and my lives — they overlap in some strange way. Before my head was filled with all this other information, there was this information. Their story is more than just a documentary to me, it’s a folk tale. Mick, Keith, Brian … they’re just like folk characters. Except that all of them are still alive. All of them, but one.

Work Schedule 1932-1933

COMMANDMENTS

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”

3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

4. Work according to the Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!

5. When you can’t create you can work.

6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.

7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.

8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.

9. Discard the Program when you feel like it — but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

DAILY PROGRAM

MORNINGS: If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus. If in fine fettle, write.

AFTERNOONS: Work on section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.

EVENINGS: See friends. Read in cafes. Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry. Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program. Paint if empty or tired. Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.

Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafes and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.

“That’s not writing, that’s typing” — that’s the famous quip about Kerouac’s writing style by Truman Capote. Capote’s ideal writer was someone who selected each word in his sentence, mulling over paragraphs and pages with the trained and careful eye of the jeweler. Reading some of Kerouac’s experimental writing today, one does get the impression of a man just writing down whatever came into his head. Kerouac boasted that he finished On the Road in three weeks, with caffeine as his sole stimulant. While “spontaneous prose” is real, we should remember that Kerouac wrote a plotted novel, The Town and the City (1950), before “discovering” the his freer, jazzier style. He labored for years to produce the novel, under the spell of Thomas Wolfe, his hero, but was dismayed by its poor sales and reception. Still, I think that he knew very well how to write plotted novels, and this knowledge informed his later works of “spontaneous prose.” It reminds me in a way of those jazz players who gave the impression of playing whatever came into their heads, but underneath were well rehearsed, well trained musicians, who could play traditional jazz if they wanted to. They, like Kerouac, simply got bored of sticking with the format, and decided to do it a different way. You know the rest.

And then, at the end, after all of that solitude and madness on a mountain in Washington State, after prostitutes in Mexico and Tangiers, and hipsters in New York and Paris,  after consumption of narcotics, and from-the-bottom-of-my heart chats with/about God and the nature of eternity and the universe, our faithful Beat Master Kerouac returns to his mother, “Mémère,” who makes him breakfast and does his laundry and makes his bed up with “clean sheets.” Just the mention that Adult Man Jack is doing anything unusual sets him off [“But wretched leering thieves of life say no, ‘If a man lives with his mother, he’s frustrated’“] and then more cozy remembrances of how she mends his bloody shirt with the silent grace of a martyred holy woman [“And I’m just sitting there enjoying and in-joying the sweet silly peace of my mother”].

This reminds me of Kerouac’s ill-fated affair with Mardou Fox in The Subterraneans, where he tries to give Mardou and Mémère equal doses of affection and attention, and fails, and his relationship fails, as all of his relationships with the opposite sex fail, because who needs a woman [“Who’d left me because I complained!”] when you can have Mémère mending your socks, and making you coffee, and making up your bed with clean sheets?

As Joyce Johnson notes in,  The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, lonesome traveler Kerouac had several opportunities to set up some kind of symbiotic relationship with a woman other than his [clean sheets!] Mémère, such as with Bea Franco, that Mexican girl he shacks up with in On the Road, before he inevitably leaves her because, once safely back on Long Island [fresh coffee!] with Ma, he sees very clearly that it will never work out.

Besides, to do that would have meant betraying his father Leo, who, as he lay dying (at age 57, after years of alcoholism, of cancer, in 1946), made Pious Filial Catholic Jack promise to take care of his Mémère, which he did, ’til the end of his tragic and toxic days.

Man, Desolation Angels is getting under my skin. These days I just want to grab a backpack and walk outside and keep on walking and scour the earth in search of adventure and enlightenment. There is Kerouac in me. That perpetual outsider status. The oddball-goofball friends that somehow seem to be better anchored in this world (“Julien,” “Irwin”) yet still retain alien-like qualities, as if the old bum Kerouac was the last real human among us. His time and place differ. In Jack’s books, you meet an old and content Henry Miller and an old and content Salvadore Dali, and Jack is the one wandering around while they eat their grapefruits and drink their wine and seem just fine with everything, the great struggle of adjusting to life, the artist’s struggle, digested and defecated from their bowels in the form of paintings and writings and renown. But Kerouac never got there. His alcoholism killed him. Or he killed himself. What do you do when so many of your heroes had miserable endings?

I’m not sure how or when I got it into my head that Allen Ginsberg was a titan of 20th Century American Literature who had moved mountains with his “Howl” (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving  hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry  fix”). The way it is put to us, he is an icon, end of story. But when “Irwin Garden” walks into Desolation Angels in “Passing Through: Mexico,” and starts babbling on about Samsara, I just want to grab him by the necktie and tell him to shut the hell up, I’m more interested in junky Old Bull Gaines’ junky cough (ke-he) or little dark eyed Tristessa’s “luvv.” Duluoz likes Garden, sure, he’s an interesting character in a postwar world of “crewcuts and sullen faces in Pontiacs,” but all of Ginsberg’s Samsara, Dionysus blah blah blah — it hasn’t aged well. I keep coming back to what Keith Richards called Ginsberg in Life — “a pontificating windbag.” Ha! There’s some real poetry. Anyway, it’s not that I don’t like you, Ginsberg (“Stop the machine!” You can’t stop the machine”) It’s that I don’t believe you.

Lots of opinions voiced about the Zimmerman verdict, some outrage, some head scratching, plenty of talk about American racism against its African-descended population, in which a ‘white Hispanic’ (Zimmerman) shot and killed a black man (Martin) and was found not guilty in the former Confederate state of Florida. Hmm. The story was always framed in US national news media in two tones, white and black. Zimmerman was our white, Martin was our black. But Zimmerman isn’t really “white,” he’s half-Peruvian, identifies as “Hispanic,” and phenotypically isn’t that far from Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales. All of these terms we throw around here, “white Hispanic,” “Hispanic,” “and “Peruvian,” don’t actually get to the core of the matter, which is that George Zimmerman is Amerindian. He is, at least in part, an indigenous person of the Western hemisphere, an “Indian” as Hollywood and Columbus called them. And no American news network would ever describe him as such. How is that possible? Because of American myth making that portrayed aboriginal Americans as a proud, but vanishing race, one that had died out, or was in the process of dying out. It was one of many ways that the original real estate owners of the Americas were outflanked — devastated by wars and disease, many Amerindian people took as partners people of a race other than themselves, Europeans and Africans. Their offspring were no longer considered Indian. They had native heritage — if they could document it and prove it beyond a reasonable doubt — but in many cases they could no longer claim to be something that society had decided no longer existed. Such individuals no longer had the ability to claim land as their own, or to refer to treaties that had been concluded with their ancestors, because that proud race had vanished, and all that were left were some “mixed bloods.”

Like George Zimmerman, who now, somehow, represents white American racism.

I have been plowing forward through Angels, but Jack is still up on that mountain and I am not sure how much more I can take. I tried to get back into EIMI, but that wasn’t sticking either, which is a shame, because I really liked EIMI before I set it down before we went to Bali. It was too thick to drag along for the trip. For Whom the Bell Tolls is eyeing me curiously from the drawer. Can Hemingway hold my attention?

The last book I finished was called The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler. I enjoyed it. My friend’s always going on about Chandler, and I know he influenced Haruki Murakami {and Kerouac influenced him, too, though such influences are not always apparent}. In a way, Murakami is spoofing Chandler. Their worlds and stories are so different. But the narrator’s voice in a lot of Murakami books {A Wild Sheep Chase comes to mind} reminds me a lot of Marlowe’s.

My own writing is pained. I’m not happy with what I am producing. I feel like it’s not important enough or significant enough. Then I think of how Kerouac filled a fat book called Desolation Angels with his unimportant, insignificant thoughts at the top of a mountain. Aha.

Desolation Angels is a book I’ve heard plenty about … I bought my copy in a book store in Penn Station (I think it’s called Penn Books, I’ve purchased many train-ride’s worth of novels in that establishment). Angels is supposedly one of Kerouac’s best books, but as someone who loves Kerouac, I’ve had a rather hard time getting into it. Part of the Beat Mystique is that something happened in the mid-20th century, something that changed American culture and literature for-ev-er. If only we could have been there at that momentous, stupendous, earth-ratting, cosmos-vibrating, yab-yumming time to .. spend a few days … alone … with Kerouac … on a mountain.

Yeah, that’s why I always put Angels down. It opens with Kerouac alone on a mountain. I’m sure other wonderful things happen while he faces up to his own personal void, but Big Sur had him getting drunk in San Francisco in the first scene, and, say what you want, On the Road goes somewhere, naturally … Dean shows up, he leaves, things happen. And then there’s Angels. Kerouac. Alone. On a mountain. I know Kerouac’s a great writer but he’s still just some guy from Massachusetts.

Today, I dug through a pile of other books, and there was Mr. Solitude looking back at me from half a century ago. I decided to give Angels another spin. Maybe I’ll finish it.