“Dylan recalled that after reading Kerouac and Ginsberg, he realized that there were people like himself somewhere in the land”-

A few months ago my friend & I found a book called Stories Done, Writings on the 1960′s and It’s Discontents, by Mikal Gilmore. We decided to buy & share it, just to have. I’ve accumulated lots of coffee table books that I flip open to for photo reference or a random fun fact. Stories Done is a bunch of essays on the music, literature & youth culture of the 60′s (generously incorporating credit to it’s predecessors, as well as influence on it’s followers). Although the 60′s is glamorized years after, I like this book because Gilmore doesn’t shy away from the radical truths, the downfalls- the riots, civil rights, the drug use that brought our legends to death, the internal turmoil, the external spread of communism. He blatantly explains the struggle & darkness within the heavy minds of Rock & Roll artists, rebellious writers, young activists, drug addicts etc. I also like him because he’s a witty writer with an opinion, yet not biased. Rather than repeat redundant facts about Rock & Roll, he has the soul, the understanding of it all, to tell one huge intertwining story.

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With books like this (not exactly a novel), I don’t read them start to finish. My mind jumps a lot, you never know what food for thought you’ll open up to. Here’s one of my fav sections about the Beat generation that I marked from Stories Done:

Allen Ginsberg not only made history- by writing poems that jarred America’s consciousness and by insuring that the 1950′s Beat movement would be remembered as a considerable literary force- but he also lived through and embodied some of the most remarkable cultural mutations of the last half century. As much as Presley, as much as the Beatles, Bob Dylan or the Sex Pistols, Allen Ginsberg helped set loose something wonderful, risky and unyielding in the psyche and dreams of our times. Perhaps only Martin Luther King Jr.’s brave and costly quest had a more genuinely liberating impact upon the realities of modern history, upon the freeing up of people and voices that much of established society wanted kept on the margins. Just as Dylan would later change what popular songs could say and do, Ginsberg changed what poetry might accomplish: how it could speak, what it would articulate, and whom it would speak to and for. Ginsberg’s words- his performances of his words and how he carried their meanings into his life and actions- gave poetry a political and cultural relevance it had not known”…

…John Lennon changed his spelling of the group’s name, Beetles, to Beatles, in part as tribute to the spirit of that inspired artistry.

Without the earlier work of Ginsberg and Kerouac, it is possible that these 1960′s artists might not have hit upon quite the same path of creativity- or at least might not have been able to work in the same atmosphere of permission and invention.

But the most important thing that these men shared was a sense that, in the mid-1940′s, there were great secrets lurking at America’s heart, that there were still rich and daring ways of exploring the nation’s arts and soul- and that there was a great adventure and transcendence to be found by doing so. Indeed, America was about to change dramatically, but the significance of that change wouldn’t be fully understood or reckoned with for another twenty years.