ever could. What holds it finally all together are words , one after another, as he plays, moves, with their sound, follows their lead, shifting from English to Franco-American joual , nonsense to sense, reflection to immediate sight and intimate record. He spoke no English until he was five. He wrote incessantly, carrying usually a small spiral notebook in his back pocket so as to âsketchâ what occurred on the spot. He was in that old way âserious.â He really believed in words.
So one will read here his various recording, invention, improvisation, story. Yet all will be mistaken, misunderstood, if there is not the recognition that this remarkable person is living here, is actual in all that is written. Another poet, Alice Notley, wrote some years after Jack Kerouacâs death in 1969 a poem of singular power, âJack Would Speak through the Imperfect Medium of Alice.â This is its close:
Â
. . . The words are all only one word the perfect
wordâ
My body my alcohol my pain my death are only
the perfect word as I
Tell it to you, poor sweet categorizers
Listen
Every me I was & wrote
were only & all (gently)
That one perfect word
âRobert Creeley,
Buffalo, N.Y.
In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicianâs spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of the time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses.
Itâs all gotta be non stop ad libbing within each chorus, or the gig is shot.
âJack Kerouac
SAN FRANCISCO BLUES
1ST CHORUS
I see the backs
Of old Men rolling
Slowly into black
Stores.
2ND CHORUS
Line faced mustached
Black men with turned back
Army weathered brownhats
Stomp on by with bags
Of burlap & rue
Talking to secret
Companions with long hair
In the sidewalk
On 3rd Street
San Francisco
With the rain of exhaust
Plicking in the mist
You see in black
Store doorsâ
Petting trucks fartingâ
Vastly city.
3RD CHORUS
3rd St Market to Lease
Has a washed down tile
Tile entrance once white
Now caked with gum
Of a thousand hundred feet
Feet of passers who
Did not go straight on
Bending to flap the time
Pap page on back
With smoke emanating
From their noses
But slowly like old
Lantern jawed junkmen
Hurrying with the lump
Wondrous potato bag
To the avenues of sunshine
Came, bending to spit,
& Shuffled awhile there.
4TH CHORUS
The rooftop of the beatup
tenement
On 3rd & Harrison
Has Belfast painted
Black on yellow
On the side
the old Frisco wood is
shown with weatherbeaten
rainboards & a
washed out blue bottle
once painted for wild
commercial reasons by
an excited seltzerite
as firemen came last
afternoon & raised the
ladder to a fruitless
fire that was not there,
so, is Belfast singin
in this time
5TH CHORUS
when brandâs forgotten
taste washed in
rain the gullies broadened
& every body gone
the acrobats of the
tenement
who dug bel fast
divers all
and the divers all dove
ah
little girls make
shadows on the
sidewalk shorter
than the shadow
of death
in this townâ
6TH CHORUS
Fat girls
In red coats
With flap white out shoes
Monstrous soldiers
Stalk at dawn
Looking for whores
And burning to eat up
Harried Mexican Laborers
Become respectable
In San Francisco
Carrying newspapers
Of culture burden
And packages of need
Walk sadly reluctant
To work in dawn
Stalking with not cat
In the feel of their stride
Touching to hide the sidewalk,
Blackshiny lastnight parlor
Shoes hitting the slippery
With hard slicky heels
To slide & Fall:
Breboac! Karrak!
7TH
So one will read here his various recording, invention, improvisation, story. Yet all will be mistaken, misunderstood, if there is not the recognition that this remarkable person is living here, is actual in all that is written. Another poet, Alice Notley, wrote some years after Jack Kerouacâs death in 1969 a poem of singular power, âJack Would Speak through the Imperfect Medium of Alice.â This is its close:
Â
. . . The words are all only one word the perfect
wordâ
My body my alcohol my pain my death are only
the perfect word as I
Tell it to you, poor sweet categorizers
Listen
Every me I was & wrote
were only & all (gently)
That one perfect word
âRobert Creeley,
Buffalo, N.Y.
In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicianâs spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of the time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses.
Itâs all gotta be non stop ad libbing within each chorus, or the gig is shot.
âJack Kerouac
SAN FRANCISCO BLUES
1ST CHORUS
I see the backs
Of old Men rolling
Slowly into black
Stores.
2ND CHORUS
Line faced mustached
Black men with turned back
Army weathered brownhats
Stomp on by with bags
Of burlap & rue
Talking to secret
Companions with long hair
In the sidewalk
On 3rd Street
San Francisco
With the rain of exhaust
Plicking in the mist
You see in black
Store doorsâ
Petting trucks fartingâ
Vastly city.
3RD CHORUS
3rd St Market to Lease
Has a washed down tile
Tile entrance once white
Now caked with gum
Of a thousand hundred feet
Feet of passers who
Did not go straight on
Bending to flap the time
Pap page on back
With smoke emanating
From their noses
But slowly like old
Lantern jawed junkmen
Hurrying with the lump
Wondrous potato bag
To the avenues of sunshine
Came, bending to spit,
& Shuffled awhile there.
4TH CHORUS
The rooftop of the beatup
tenement
On 3rd & Harrison
Has Belfast painted
Black on yellow
On the side
the old Frisco wood is
shown with weatherbeaten
rainboards & a
washed out blue bottle
once painted for wild
commercial reasons by
an excited seltzerite
as firemen came last
afternoon & raised the
ladder to a fruitless
fire that was not there,
so, is Belfast singin
in this time
5TH CHORUS
when brandâs forgotten
taste washed in
rain the gullies broadened
& every body gone
the acrobats of the
tenement
who dug bel fast
divers all
and the divers all dove
ah
little girls make
shadows on the
sidewalk shorter
than the shadow
of death
in this townâ
6TH CHORUS
Fat girls
In red coats
With flap white out shoes
Monstrous soldiers
Stalk at dawn
Looking for whores
And burning to eat up
Harried Mexican Laborers
Become respectable
In San Francisco
Carrying newspapers
Of culture burden
And packages of need
Walk sadly reluctant
To work in dawn
Stalking with not cat
In the feel of their stride
Touching to hide the sidewalk,
Blackshiny lastnight parlor
Shoes hitting the slippery
With hard slicky heels
To slide & Fall:
Breboac! Karrak!
7TH
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