Jack Kerouac made three sound recordings in the fifties, shortly after On the Road was published and he was a hot writer. He "performed" at Jazz clubs in New York and the recordings followed from these "performances." I guess that the first record must have done well enough because they made two more. The records were:
- Readings on the Beat Generation
- Blues and Haikus.
- Poetry for the Beat Generation
All three of Kerouac's recordings have recently been collected and put into a package called The Jack Kerouac Collection. This boxed set of 3 CD's is published by Rhino Records. I have a link to Rhino's page for this Here it is !!!
It's a nice package. It contains the three original records, plus some outtakes from the recording sessions not included in the originals, a "lecture" given by Kerouac at Brandeis University on the subject "Is there a Beat Generation?" and the set comes with a nice booklet about the recordings and about Kerouac in general.
All the sounds on the Kerouac Speaks page come from these recordings included in the Jack Kerouac Collection boxed set
The sound about Ginsberg comes from the piece Lucien Midnight: The Sounds of the Universe in My Window. Later it was called Old Angel Midnight
In the picture above, in the middle is Lucien Carr, Lucien Midnight in this universe, Ginsberg is at right and Kerouac to the left. It was 1959, before I was born.
The first sounds I put up were found sounds. I came across them at the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group BBS. They were in Mac sound file format. I translated them to .au format using ULAW (I think, or maybe Sound APP). These readings are in the bottom section of the Kerouac Speaks page. Most of the passages in this section come from October in the Railroad Earth, though not all of them.
The next to last section has sounds I recorded on my Mac and converted to .au files. The Kerouac singing sound is an outtake from the Blues and Haikus session. The "meaningless goof" sample is a passage from Visions of Cody called Neal and the Three Stooges. Note how in this passage he says "Neal knows his name" rather than "Cody knows his name." Kerouac wrote with using real names and changed them later before publication. This recording was made before Visions of Cody was published.
The third to last section sounds, the one that starts with taxicrabs...(I've put them up with the most recent additions at the top of the page) are from recordings of Old Angel Midnight. I also recorded these from the CD on my Mac and converted them to the .au files.
The section with "my heart broke..." ; "anyway, I wrote the the book..." and "I wish I was free..." are from, repectively Visions of Cody, Visions of Cody and Mexico City Blues.
I have recorded them in the most byte-sized economical manner so that they won't be too big and make you wait a thousand years to download them.
One place where you can buy the set is at amazon.com the on-line bookstore. This link will take you to their entry for the CD's. They also sell the set as 4 cassettes.
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March 17, 1998