Beatnik

I don't know where I saw that, but-

The Beatnik poet, Jack Kerouac, has a, one named after him.

Uh.

[laughs] This is the human side of astronomy if there ever was one.

Tremendous jazz in San Francisco, as good as there was anywhere in the world.

And you had the Beatniks, and the Beatniks were reading poems to jazz, and the marriage of poetry and jazz.

So I wrote a piece.

about Allen Ginsberg, which was an attack on the traditional left, and it was called Poet as Priest in Root & Branch, kind of a student lefty magazine, saying, listen, the old left was all wrong, and Ginsberg is right.

Yeah.

Beatnik's out to make it rich.

Oh, no.

Must be the season of the witch.

Jack Koziak, Allen Ginsberg, coffeehouses, poetry, jazz, bohemian living, rejection of conventional middle-class culture.

By about 1965 to 1967, the word hippie was becoming the new label, and the beatniks tend to disappear from the standard story.

I will also refer to them as the Beats, P-E-A-T-S, so they go by either Beatniks or Beats.

And Donovan knew exactly what he was referring to.

That's a different time.

And I think it was also called Beatniks at one point.

So Beatniks and then Nitos.

Let's do your first song, which you have alluded to.

Do you have a story that you would like to tell or would you like to dive right in? Seven Nation Army.

Converse would win a college scholarship but would never even finish high school, choosing instead to pack up and move to New York.

Being exposed to the counterculture of the Bohemians and the Beatniks in the 1950s, Converse started her music career in the exclusive Greenwich Village, New York scene.

In 1974, Connie Converse would go missing, and her disappearance would become as much of an enigma as much of her life was.

In 1954, a friend of Converse helped her record her first set of songs in the kitchen of their home.

Like there's...

I want to know more about when... 'Cause like Neal Cassady, he was as- mostly asso- well, he's b- dually associated with the Merry Pranksters and also the, like the original Beat generation.

Mm-hmm.

And I don't know enough about the, the man Neal Cassady to...

I want to, I want to know more about that arc from like hanging out with the Beat poets to, to driving Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters bus.

Yeah.

Like that dude has so many stories I'm sure, and I want to know, I want to know more of them, so I need to do my reading because I'm sure they are documented.

Has just a-

My memory is failing me now.

But if you look at those names and the projects that they pursued after – this is before the Beatniks got it.

This is before – by the way, the beatniks got it by one degree of separation.

Go figure.

Because we had stumbled across a PSA earlier that was kind of in that genre.

It was in late 60s, early 70s, and it was like Beatnik, Smoke and Pot.

As they do.

Yeah, I do that.