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Planning my trip to MECCA

Dylan has recently been more forthcoming about his early influences. In both his autobiography, Chronicles, and the documentary film No Direction Home, he talks about the effect that reading Kerouac had on him.

He says that On the Road “had been like a bible for me. I loved the breathless, dynamic bop poetry phrases that flowed from Jack’s pen . . . I fell into that atmosphere of everything Kerouac was saying about the world being completely mad, and the only people for him that were interesting were the mad people, the mad ones, the ones who were mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn, all of those mad ones, and I felt like I fit right into that bunch.”

But Dylan adds: “One guy gave me a book that Woody Guthrie wrote called Bound For Glory, and I read it. I identified with that book more than I even did with On the Road.”

When Allen Ginsberg was travelling with Dylan during the Rolling Thunder Review tour of 1975 they visited Lowell, Massachusetts and stopped by Kerouac’s gravestone at Edson Cemetery, where, in a scene which appeared in the movie Renaldo and Clara, they read choruses from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. Ginsberg asked Dylan how he knew Kerouac’s poetry and Dylan replied: “Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.” Dylan mentions Mexico City Blues in his song Something’s Burning, Baby from the 1985 album Empire Burlesque.

Kerouac’s influence can also be heard on Dylan’s earlier album, Highway 61 Revisited. Two of the songs,Desolation Row and Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues include direct quotes from Kerouac’s novel Desolation Angels, including the phrases "the perfect image of a priest," "her sin is her lifelessness," and "Housing Project Hill." It is also informative to compare the song title Desolation Row and the phrase "junkyard angel" (used in another of the songs on the album -- From A Buick 6) with the title of Kerouac's book.

Desolation Angels was published in May 1965, and Highway 61 Revisited recorded in August 1965. The book was the first major Kerouac work to appear after Dylan began writing songs in the early 1960s. Clearly, Dylan was sufficiently affected by Kerouac's book that he chose to write those phrases into his new songs.

1. 1. Step1

      Take route 495 into Lowell.

2. Step2

   Exit onto Route 3A, a road which passes the cemetery.

3. Step3

   After you park your car on the street, enter Edson Cemetery gates at 1375 Gorham Street.

4. Step4

   Continue onto Lincoln Ave., walking towards the increasing street numbers until you reach 7th St.

5. Step5

   Walk half a block more. Kerouac's grave is halfway between 7th and 8th St.

Jack Kerouac Commemorative

http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/07jkgame.html

http://ecommunity.uml.edu/jklowell/index.html


Mexico City Blues: One possible reading idea

Kerouac Love

Current Quotations :

"Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end. "

I have often felt oblivious, blissfully ignorant, selective with what reality I choose to accept. So many "facts of life" and boring details, I often overlook. Usually, because I choose not to deal with them, and because the mundane awful details of life just drag me down. All I want is what pushes me to become better

“What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? -it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

Perspective. I will not claim to be the only person on the world who has dealt with leaving people behind. Most of my childhood was new houses, schools, churches, friends. Goodbye was always present, usually waiting to rear it's ugly head when I was feeling most comfortable with the lastest friendships I had developed. There is not rhyme or reason to having to move on. Only the feeling of hoping that "what comes is better than what came before".

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

Classic, beautiful, Kerouac. I have been in love with this quote since 7th grade when I first started really exploring who Jack was. It is the Hallmark of his writing, powerful, simple, and true.

"I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted."

YES.

"I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down." -- Jack Kerouac

"If you're working with words, it's got to be poetry. I grew up with [the books of Jack] Kerouac. If he hadn't wrote On The Road, the Doors would have never existed. Morrison read On The Road down in Florida, and I read it in Chicago. That sense of freedom, spirituality, and intellectuality in On The Road — that's what I wanted in my own work." -- Ray Manzarek, keyboard player, The Doors

"I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's." -- Bob Dylan

"Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he looked out the window and said, 'Walking on water wasn't built in a day.' Our goal was to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all." -- Allen Ginsberg