Recently on my Facebook feed I saw this photo by Ken Regan of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts. So I did some research on it. Here is some of what Sean Wilentz wrote about that day in Chapter Two of his book Bob Dylan in America:
“Dylan had performed the night before at the University of Lowell, on a tour of New England with a thrown-together troupe of new friends and old, including Ginsberg, which called itself the Rolling Thunder Revue. Ginsberg, who became excited when the tour buses reached the city, met up with some of Kerouac’s relatives and drinking buddies and tried to immerse Dylan’s entourage in Kerouacian lore. … At Edson Cemetery, Ginsberg recited not from Kerouac’s prose but from poetry out of Mexico City Blues, including ‘54th Chorus’ - invoking specters, fatigue, mortality, Mexico, and John Steinbeck’s boxcar America, while he and Dylan contemplated Kerouac’s headstone. … Dylan knew the poems, Ginsberg later claimed. ‘Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul in 1959,’ Dylan told him. ‘It blew my mind.’ It was the first poetry he’d read that spoke his own American language, Dylan said—or so Ginsberg said he said. Maybe, maybe not. Without question, though, Dylan read Mexico City Blues and was deeply interested in Beat writing before he left Minneapolis for New York. (Like other Beats and hipsters, his friend Tony Glover ordered a paperback copy of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch from France, where it had been published by Olympia Press in Paris in 1959 as The Naked Lunch— uncertain whether the book, deemed obscene by American authorities, would clear customs. The book indeed arrived, and Glover lent it to Dylan, who returned it after a couple of weeks.) And Dylan’s involvement with the writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the rest of the Beat generation is nearly as essential to Dylan’s biography as his immersion in rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and then Woody Guthrie. ‘I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected,’ Dylan said in 1985. ‘It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti … I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic … it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.’”
Sam Shepard, who had joined the troupe ostensibly to write the screenplay for a movie Dylan planned to make of the tour, was also at the cemetery that day just outside the frame of the photo above. I often say that I - in my life and in my career -have lived just outside the frame of fame. Indeed, I have only been in the presence of Bob Dylan once and it was one of the most incongruous moments in a life strung together, it seems at times, by just such moments. It was at one of the late Sandy Gallin’s now legendary Christmas parties at his magnificent Beverly Hills home. Madonna brought Michael Jackson as her date that night. Dolly Parton and a Black gospel choir lining the staircase sang us a Christmas song. Marianne Williamson led us in prayer. When I was a young actor I had a been in a production of Equus with Tony Perkins and I was relieved to run into him and his wife Berry Berenson there so I could have someone to comfortably hang with in a corner. But before I ran into them, I spotted Mary Ann Mobley and her husband Gary Collins standing by a sofa with puffs of smoke rising around them. I am the kind of guy who recognized Mobley because she was from Mississippi as am I. I had always been fascinated by her when I was a boy because she had been Miss America and then came out of Hollywood to be an actress. She had escaped. She had even been in a couple of movies - Girl Crazy and Harum Scarum - with Elvis Presley, another Mississippi boy. I walked over to introduce myself to Mobley and Collins but as I did I realized that the smoke rising around them was not from cigarettes but from marijuana. None of us mentioned the smoke but as I talked to Mary Ann about Mississippi, I looked down to see who was sitting on that sofa smoking that pot. It was Bob Dylan sitting between two young Black women with whom he was sharing his joint. I made Tony and Berry laugh when I told them that story. It makes me smile now thinking about it. I wish I knew the Black women’s names. I should have asked for a puff but yet again Mississippi stood in the way.
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