Jack Kerouac joins Steve Allen: Poetry and Piano
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Beautiful and bleak at the same time. He was nervous and reluctant to be there, it was the culmination of a lifetime’s love/hate relationship with fame. When he finally stepped into that literal spotlight, he was no longer up to the task of navigating it. By that point he was pushing 40, a cynical and paranoid alcoholic in a slow steady spiral to an early death about 10 years later. Well past his legendary youthful escapades around the country and world. He wrote about how he bailed on these rehearsals to go get drunk at a bar around the corner. He didn’t believe in rehearsals or rewriting, of course.
But once he cracks that book it’s like he escapes into it and takes on his younger and more optimistic and even idealistic self, and he makes it sing. A lifetime of wandering and searching for answers, companionship, fame, respect, love… it all flickered for him in that moment, and the world was granted just a glimpse, and so was he. There’s a sense of comfort, serenity, and satisfaction which was always so elusive for him. It was a brief moment of peace in that reading. And then it dissolved and faded into the shadows again.
It’s always been a very raw and bittersweet, very human clip.
But once he cracks that book it’s like he escapes into it and takes on his younger and more optimistic and even idealistic self, and he makes it sing. A lifetime of wandering and searching for answers, companionship, fame, respect, love… it all flickered for him in that moment, and the world was granted just a glimpse, and so was he. There’s a sense of comfort, serenity, and satisfaction which was always so elusive for him. It was a brief moment of peace in that reading. And then it dissolved and faded into the shadows again.
It’s always been a very raw and bittersweet, very human clip.