Music magazine malaise: Another one bites the dust

It was bad news for yet another established music magazine in the last week; not quite a magazine in the sense that Q or New Musical Express or Kerrang! may be regarded so, but, nonetheless, a title that had enjoyed six years of existence and which will very soon disappear from the news-stands for good.

The Observer Music Monthly appeared on a four-weekly cycle as a colour supplement to the oldest of all British Sunday newspapers though one, like virtually all of its newsprint chums, facing somewhat calamitous times.

Not only was the Observer a significant loser in the most recent circulation figures – the numbers that keep the advertisers happy and the financial wheels turning. It also revealed that it was haemorrhaging something in the region of £10,000 a day which few companies of medium scale can survive for too long. After all, that adds up to some £300,000 a month and £3.5m a year.

So, John Mulholland, the affable Irish editor who was once my live rock reviews editor on the Observer’s daily sister paper the Guardian, had the recent, and unenviable, task of announcing that three of the Sunday publication’s mags would be axed in the name of economy.

The special edition aimed at women, the sport-focused monthly and the music-inclined instalment were all deemed surplus to requirements as the chill wind of downturn continues to blow down the corridors and up the stairwells of the newish headquarters of a beleaguered newspaper group.

I mourn the passing of any print project but this one – and, by that, I mean the music magazine – I was particularly sorry to see fall off the edge. I remember going along to the launch of this venture in autumn 2003 at Waterstone’s in Manchester, as editor Caspar Llewellyn Smith and two prominent writers on rock – John Harris and Paul Morley – joined the small bandwagon that would trumpet this  fresh and enterprising concept.

Here was a magazine that could report and review the music world with a determined independence, unfettered or unflustered by major label or industrial interests, as it sheltered under the commercial awning of the bigger, then apparently quite sustainable, publishing company.

Half a dozen years on, and 74 editions later, another thing occurs to me as I refer to Waterstone’s. Was that the last time I wandered into that tremendous bookshop on Deansgate, a place where, not too long ago, I could be spotted probably at least twice a month, always leaving with a new novel or a pop paperback?

Today, I wait, like tens of thousands of others, for those cardboard cartons from Amazon, most likely having scoured their Marketplace service before painlessly credit-carding the purchase. Trips to the city were fun but also tangled by the hassle of traffic and parking, crowds and queueing. The web has banished such aggravations.

Last week, heading for a Friday evening concert in the same city, I endured the ultimate motorist’s nightmare: towed away minutes after finding an empty spot on one of the main roads on the filthiest, wettest night of the season. It then cost me a nifty £140 to recover my vehicle and a missed gig, penance for infringing a night-time loading bay on an empty street. Who the hell does all this nocturnal delivering, I groaned.

It also struck me, as I now regret the imminent death of OMM, how often did I buy the Observer in the the last couple of years? Probably not more than once a month in recent times – and principally for the music mag – whereas for the previous 25 years I shelled out for a newspaper pretty well every day.

Print culture is a land under daily, nightly, attack. When I am asked by my students today, how can I get into journalism, I have to change my previously encouraging mode. Once, last year, the year before, I told them this world was very difficult to break into.

I would reveal how I, rather a long time ago, had to write – yes, hand-write – 78 letters to any and every newspaper title I could track, searching for a starting position. Even then, I got a mere two replies – one rejection  and one interview which led, thankfully, to that first post in the profession.

Previously, I’d said to young, would-be scribes that as long as they were determined, flexible and versatile, could put up with, long, and frequently unsocial, hours for relatively modest pay, and could gather a substantial portfolio of published by-lined work before they left university, they might, just might, secure an opening.

Such optimism, now properly tempered by real-world pragmatism, no longer has much to recommend it. Jobs go, expire, by the hundred, by the month, and newspapers, particularly, seem unable to stem this worrying downward spiral. In the realm of the music magazine, too, the new millennium has already seen several, one-time stalwarts of the sector – Melody Maker, The Face and Smash Hits – hit the buffers.

As for the Observer and the Guardian, both have been beacons of liberal reporting and progressive promotion, making newspapers interesting, exciting, entertaining and saleable. They have drawn on potent lay-outs, striking design, eye-catching fonts and brilliant photography to frame their always excellent editorial content. And the cycle of magazines, in the case of the Sunday version, was a further appealing ingredient in the mix.

The two newspapers enjoy massive web readerships; tens-of-millions of unique visitors click on each day, each week, leaving their actual, hard copy circulations – somewhere in the region of 300,000 per issue – looking almost irrelevant. But how can you transform that half-interested, passing trade into truly engaged customers, happy to pay up to keep the boat afloat?

The Times announced today that from next spring a paywall will be erected which will allow people to buy into the web version of the paper on a daily basis – or they won’t be able to read it at all. The Guardian and Observer brand – potent, stylish, global – should be strong enough to head the same way, I expect, and start to make its commendable product economic once more.

But what a shame that a splendid piece of innovation in the shape of OMM and its range of fellow mags has been axed before the fiscal model to potentially save them has been properly devised and fully installed.

How rock re-tells its own histories

Rock’n'roll has always been conscious of its history, self-conscious even: either more than happy to embrace and trumpet its own heritage or, on the contrary, quite determined to tear down the signs and strains of the past, best demonstrated by the kind of scorched earth policy that British punk adopted for a few years in the 1970s.

The American end of that cultural explosion was rather different. If CBGBs shook the US out of its stadium rock complacency, the artists who set that downtown house on fire – performers like Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine and David Byrne – didn’t reject their history but were steadfast in their attempts to take the best of it and then re-shape it.

Such thoughts left me musing on the ways in which popular artists occasionally attempt the telling of such chronologies – and not just in the things they say but in the actual songs they pen. There aren’t that many self-reflective accounts of the story of pop but there are a few interesting examples worth re-visiting.

The Beatles’ ‘Glass Onion’, from 1968, was an early re-presenting of their own myth with Lennon dipping into fragments of the combo’s recent catalogue to paint an amusing, maybe acerbic, portrait of a group who actually wanted to be a band no more, even if they did stagger on for a year or two after his delicious autobiographical doodle.

But there is hardly a better example of the craft of self-celebration than a record from the same era. The Mamas and the Papas’ ‘Creeque Alley’ is an engrossing and witty wander through the emerging scene that preceded the rise of John Phillips’ briefly dazzling vocal outfit with most of the names from Village’s folk revival to LA’s soft rock boom wandering on to the musical stage at some point.

Thus Phillips and his wife Michelle, Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty tell sweetly harmonised, rags-to-riches tales of the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Byrds and Barry Maguire as part of their own rise to the top of the transatlantic charts from the mid-1960s.

Don McLean’s 1971 global smash ‘American Pie’ is a more oblique odyssey through the golden age of rock’n'roll and the developments of the early 1960s: his stanzas are more allegorical rather than actual though a close-reading of the song doesn’t take long to reveal its heroes – Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Dylan among them.

The punks on this side of the pond had their own histories to recount – inevitably barbed, predictably histrionic. And if the Clash, in a blistering sub-two minutes, exoceted rock’s greatest gods – Presley, the Beatles and the Stones – via the donner und blitzen of ‘1977′, it wasn’t too long before Strummer and co were on trial themselves for betraying this cultural revolution.

Crass had a rather more severe take on what it meant to be independent. Their ethos did not embrace the notion that you could wage the war from within. The Pistols signing dotted lines at EMI and A&M and Virgin and the Clash getting into bed with CBS was greeted with a studied vehemence by Penny Rimbaud and his angry brigade.

‘White Punks on Hope’ dismissed the liberal posturing of that band – ‘They can stuff their punk credentials/Cause it’s them that take the cash’ - and even the gestures of the Rock Against Racism movement as part of a capitalist con, a left wing/right wing spat that ignored the seed of the problem – class conflict. ‘Anarchy and freedom is what I want’ they intone with a venomous snarl.

Somewhat later, an American punk survivor called “Handsome” Dick Manitoba, leader of the Dictators, reflected a touch more nostalgically on the way the game had played out. In 2001, he looked back on the surge of energy that had turned his generation into Fab Four acolytes but then he bemoans the fact that Sgt Pepper had forced rock to grow up.

‘Who Will Save Rock and Roll?’ is a mournful, if perversely affectionate, vision of the way Murray the K sold Lennon & McCartney to the young USA before Iggy and the Stooges turned over the applecart and helped  inspire the New York revolution of the early 1970s. I suppose he made his own feelings plain eventually when, in 2005, he hooked up as vocalist with those infamous Detroit revolutionaries the MC5.

What of black music? Well, the great arc of African-American sounds that provided such a thrilling soundtrack to the 20th Century gave many of its singers and groups a powerful sense that they were part of crucial, vibrant tradition, a progressive struggle that helped carry a once manacled, then outcast, race from the social margins to the corridors of the White House.

In 1981, Chaka Khan took Dizzy Gillespie’s jazz standard ‘A Night in Tunisia’ and co-wrote a lyric to accompany the tune. The words to ‘And the Memory Still Lingers On’ provided a celebratory tour through the great names of the genre, embracing Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ellington and Coltrane and even Stevie Wonder along the way, an exuberant roll call of outstanding innovation.

Yet, in the midst of these reflections, there is one piece of compelling polemic that leaves them all in its long shadow: the extraordinary ‘Rock N Roll’ by the rapper Mos Def, as excoriating a tale of the past half century of music-making, of racial exploitation, as you are likely to encounter.

Released in 1999, it is a song of two parts, commencing with the coolest, smartest, laid back rap tribute to the greatest names from the black community, interwoven with a string of searing put downs to the groups who adopted their style, their voice, and made it palatable to the mainstream white audience, appropriation masquerading as appreciation.

Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, James Brown, Nina Simone and Hendrix, Bad Brains and Fishbone are the gods of this pantheon; Presley and the Stones, Limp Bizkit and Korn are mere pretenders, pale and diluted imitations of the genuine article. ‘Elvis Presley ain’t got no soul, Little Richard is rock and roll’ as the song insists.

The second half of the piece erupts into a furious, punk-like thrash in which the great urban centres of black creativity – Harlem and Atlanta, Compton and Detroit  -  are screamed, like a scorching mantra to the talent and the passion of a once downtrodden but now proud and upstanding people.

It is a history lesson like no other, one that emphasises the remarkable ability of music to inspire and commemorate but also the manner in which the socially vulnerable have often been easy prey to the commercial ambitions of the dominating power-brokers in our society.

‘Rock N Roll’ is raw-boned and heart-felt, supremely confident and utterly dazzling: a compelling triumph of both style and content and a sharply observed reminder of where most of the music we dig actually came from.

Comedy cracks: What happened to the alternatives?

There was a time, at the start of the 1980s, when comedy was widely dubbed the new rock’n'roll as a wave of young comedians, essentially in the wake of punk’s original and angry spasm, took to the stage and made the craft of laughter-making a credible pursuit once again.

The kind of DIY ethic that had prompted the Clash and the Buzzcocks to make music appeared to infuse, if a little belatedly, a generation of stand-ups who rejected the moribund mainstream and shared material that was frequently spiky, often political, and avoided the tired tropes of TV variety, end-of-the-pier and the fast-disappearing, last remnants of music hall.

Interestingly though, while many of the punks were genuinely working class characters – John Rotten and Mark E. Smith, Sid Vicious and Jimmy Pursey, for example – the surge of new comedy was largely driven by a brigade of middle class, university-educated graduates. If Alexei Sayle fiercely paraded his blue collar credentials within this emerging community, he was a unquestionably a rarity in the room.

The room in question, certainly at the start, was the Comedy Store in London’s Soho, a venue that attempted to capture some of the pioneering spirit of the comedy clubs that had found their feet in New York and San Francisco in the later 1950s and early 1960s.

These intimate and sophisticated night-spots – the Duplex in the Village, the Bay Area’s hungry i – were a platform for a fresh generation of post-war satirists – from Mort Sahl to Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen – to project their wry, and often acerbic, reflections of an America that was both commercially watertight and psychologically insecure, a capitalist dream haunted by nightmares of the nuclear annihilation and communist insurrection.

These aspiring British comedians were younger and less sophisticated than their US predecessors but they brought their brand of invective to bear with Margaret Thatcher, elected as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister in 1979, the principal target of their rancour, ridicule and abuse.

As the Tory right-wing held government and nation firmly in its grasp, there was plenty to get stroppy about – industrial decline, soaring unemployment, military spending, issues of racism and sexism – and the capital’s comic crew employed the weapon of laughter to defuse any notions that the fresh air of authoritarianism was going to revive a wilting patient any time soon.

Yet for all Sayle’s sardony, Ben Elton’s ribaldry, Jo Brand’s radical feminism and the subversive antics of Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, Thatcher’s reign of terror was barely rattled: she saw off the Argentines, repelled the striking miners and won the next two general elections to hold sway until her very own party dispensed with her services in 1990.

But, in this heated and controversial moment, the new comedy flourished. If you couldn’t bear the policies of the Conservative regime there was at least an outlet for your frustration; you could find a mirror for your misery in a string of sharp-witted jokesters whose routines – an interplay of observation and determined political correctness – were, by the end of that decade, regulars on the small screen, too.

By now, that older group of comics – an ageing school who had regarded mother-in-law gags and casual racism as integral to the role – had been largely displaced by the new breed and so, even if the over-riding power remained in Westminster, on BBC2 and Channel 4 there was now a platform for a bunch of bright sparks to wittily air social grievances beyond the smoky confines of a basement cellar.

After that, what had been once dubbed alternative comedy became something closer to big business. By the time Rob Newman and David Baddiel were selling out Wembley Arena in the early 1990s, the Edinburgh Fringe – the annual jamboree that represented a vigorous retort to the city’s official arts festival – was speedily re-tooled as a production line for the next generation of small screen national treasures: Steve Coogan, Frank Skinner, Harry Hill and Al Murray.

I followed these developments closely – still do, I guess, though rather less avidly – with my first visit to a New York comedy club in 1979, trips to the Comedy Store in the 1980s, then many years of going to Edinburgh, pretty well exclusively for the new comedians. In the end though, it just began to run out of steam for me. Or maybe I did for it.

I missed the amazing League of Gentlemen – until their hit TV series – and Mitchell and Webb – whose Peep Show is arguably the outstanding British sit-com of the last decade – in their early years honing their skills in the bar backrooms of that annual Scottish laughter fest. But, by then, the post-punk vitriol that had fired the original alternatives to grab the microphone had long since evaporated.

Observational commentary, like that which the Peep Show delivers in rich measure, and outlandish surrealism, which the League had in spades, remain mainstays of the contemporary comic landscape and audience-driven improvisation – often hilarious yet essentially manifesto free – has also carved out a significant following.

But just as rock music appeared to lose its political prerogative, so has comedy. As I head to my latest encounter with the current live scene, a trip to Jongleurs in Leeds tonight, I just wonder how much the BNP or economic recession, terrorist threats or the immigration debate, will feature in the entertainment on offer.

Not mellow but fruitful: HBO autumn fare back on track

Home Box Office has become the Esperanto of cutting-edge US television – the company’s two decade reign as king of the small screen epic, the advocate of Hollywood values for the box in the living room, shows little sign of abating.

Despite the natural demise of a string of its blockbuster series – Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire, to name just four – the wider project has been, by no means, knocked off course.

Instead, as the new autumn TV season arrives in the UK, one of HBO’s long-running successes, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and its latest hit production, True Blood, continue to prove that when it comes to attention-seizing comedy and drama, this particular outfit retains the golden touch.

There has been much media preamble trailing these two shows as the fever that has gripped American audiences is virally imparted to a transatlantic following. Most fuss has been attracted by Curb Your Enthusiasm’s decision to re-construct one of the greatest US television sensations of all – Seinfeld – within the plot arc of what is, in essence, a latterday spin-off series.

Larry David, the main protagonist of Curb, created Seinfeld with its star Jerry Seinfeld. When the plug was pulled, after almost ten years, on the low key adventures of a New York stand-up and his group of dysfunctional friends, David penned a new show in which he would be the central player.

For some this would have been the perfect ego-trip but David devised a character so curmudgeonly, so irascible, so misanthropic, that no one could accuse him of mere indulgence or of painting a portrait that was in any sense redeeming.

Rather, the viewer wonders constantly about the author’s self-loathing tendencies. In Curb, David, who carries his own name as the principal character, takes Woody Allen’s neurotic anxieties into new terrains and then appears to use this quirky TV vehicle as a form of confessional, Freudian couch.

The fact, too, that David is surrounded by a gaggle of real-life friends and fellow comics – Ted Danson and Richard Lewis, to mention only a couple – in these toe-curling vignettes confuses our voyeuristic experience still further.

So far, with the contrived Seinfield re-make a little down the line – David decides to re-assemble the cast and the show in a bid to win back his estranged wife – the new Curb has done little to allay our fears about the unsettling psyche of its maker. After the opening episode of season seven, his over-developed, miserablist sensibilities and life-defaming inclinations remain to the fore.

As his semi-autobiographical car-crash plays out, his new lover Loretta faces the onset of cancer and his best friend and manager Jeff has become sexually embroiled with a woman recently sprung from a mental asylum. Black comedy, more black than comic, applies; sickness and madness in equal measure beckon.

Yet the twists and turns of David’s relentlessly pessimistic life are curiously hard to resist: like a quasi-reality show about the Californian jet set – actors, writers, stand-ups – Curb’s downbeat drudgery perhaps reassures us that the high life is not as elevated or as sweet as we might all dream.

True Blood is something quite else. Southern gothic set in the ficitional Louisiana town of Bon Temps, in the very near future we must assume, this is a slick slice of vampire vaudeville. With larger than life characters, slash and scream set-pieces and some of the most torrid sex yet seen on mainstream television, this fevered fantasy has set pulses racing.

When the first episode of the second season was screened in the US earlier this year, HBO audience figures were only just behind the finale of the Mafia gangster masterpiece The Sopranos, a positive augury for those hoping this sweaty, swampy thriller will enjoy a long run.

The opening forays of the show have only just crept into the UK schedules so we will have to wait to see if the piece – the brain-child of Alan Ball, whose Oscar-winning flick American Beauty and another HBO monster, Six Feet Under, have made him a hot property – also lures us into into this exotic imaginary where blood-sucking and telepathy lend their twisted energy to a febrile backwoods community.

Ball’s canvas is both wide-ranging and richly disturbing, bringing to mind everything from Stoker to Poe, Gone With the Wind to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Poppy Z. Brite to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

That the leading man in the tale is played by English actor Stephen Moyer – another Brit in a major US show to follow Dominic West in The Wire, Anna Friel in Pushing Daisies and several more – certainly swells the interest for us. Add to that, that he is also having both an on-screen and off-screen love affair with co-star Anna Paquin and you have an extra frisson to this racy contemporary spin on Dracula’s near relations.

HBO takes risks – it has had its failures with the lavishly ambitious Carnivale, set in a 1930s travelling circus, a notable casualty – and its material is most definitely pushing at the boundaries of what used to be called taste. Yet if sex, violence and death have proved fertile topics for the station, then art over trash has also been an over-riding principle.

Curb Your Enthusiasm’s storylines are such unpromising laughter-makers yet there are so many opportunities for schadenfreude that we end up smiling anyway. True Blood has delved into legends with a long-standing fascination and simply gone for the jugular: lavish style and stylised acting, guts and gore and few-holds-barred bedroom action.

You might say, whatever it takes. But in the cut-throat land of American television, a subscriber service like Home Box Office has only one option: keep making unmissable shows for an adult audience and ignore the often over-sensitive temperaments of the advertisers on whose patronage the bigger, established channels still depend.

Up against it? Joe Orton’s lost Beatles script

The saddening death of Matt Lucas’ ex-civil partner this week – he was found hanged at his Edinburgh flat – brought to mind incidents in the lives of the very men the Little Britain star had been on the verge of re-creating when the devastating news caused him to step down from the lead role in a West End play.

Lucas, one of the highest profile comedians in Britain, for sure, but with a rising US reputation, too, was to have taken the part of Kenneth Halliwell, the lover of playwright Joe Orton, in the Simon Bent stage-work Prick Up Your Ears.

The play, based on John Lahr’s book of the same title, recounts the relationship of the two men, one which ended in hideous tragedy when Halliwell, allegedly jealous of his partner’s burgeoning fame, murdered Orton and then killed himself.

But, after previews, Lucas, having heard of the suicide of Kevin McGee, the man who was his husband for 18 months from 2006 but from whom he had secured a widely-reported divorce – the first same-sex celebrity parting of this kind – the actor withdrew from the production at London’s Comedy Theatre until further notice.

There were certainly common echoes in this tragedy – a homosexual friendship, a brilliantly successful half to a partnership, dark and violent ends. Yet Lucas and McGee lived in different times – to be gay in 2009 is a considerably different issue than in 1967 when Orton and Halliwell met their messy ends.

In fact, their deaths that year came, a little ironically, just a month after the Sexual Offences Act gave certain limited legal rights and defences to those in the homosexual community for the first time, after decades, centuries, of social discrimination and judicial harassment.

Yet, this whole sorry affair brought to my mind another related matter – the lost script that Orton was commissioned to pen for the Beatles, a band not far from the news themselves in the last month or so, at the height of their fame.

By the mid-Sixties, the group’s Midas touch had already delivered not only a string of massively impressive singles, albums and tours; they also had two major movie hits to their name and they – or their manager Brian Epstein, perhaps – were hungry for a third.

Joe Orton, the Leicester born actor-writer, was beginnning his ascent by this time, arguably the most talented and original young playwright in the UK of the period. His career had endured a curious blip at the start of the soon-to-be-but-not-yet swinging decade when he and Halliwell, also a would-be writer, were gaoled for defacing library books.

The library book scandal – which probably amused as much as it shocked – saw the pair fined and incarcerated for six months, a severity of punishment probably not unconnected to their sexual lifestyle, according to the accused, at least.

Their offence? The two had taken volumes from the shelves, replaced the standard covers with collages and cut-outs from other photos and magazines and concocted a series of bizarre re-makes worthy of their Dada predecessors. But this mildly subversive stunt had not impressed the courts and a period at Her Majesty’s pleasure ensued.

However, it was not long after their release that Orton’s creative talents were spotted by those who counted. The radio play The Ruffian on the Stair was broadcast by the BBC in 1964. Entertaining Mr Sloane appeared onstage in the same year and, by the time Loot premiered in 1966, the writer’s outrageously black comedy – embroidered with sparkling wit and outrageous sexual innuendo – had won critical acclaim and a growing audience.

It was around this time, too, that Orton was invited to pen the screenplay Up Against It for the Beatles in a bid to repeat the box office success of their previous movie blockbusters – the biographical cinema verite of A Hard Day’s Night and the madcap, international crime frolic that was Help!

What emerged from the writer’s imagination was later described, by the New York Times, as an attempt to combine the irreverent spirit of both those productions. But the screenplay was actually turned down – Epstein, a closet gay who would eventually die himself in the same month as Orton, was thought to have vetoed it – and the cinematic alliance of playwright and band did not proceed.

Thus the chaotic misadventures of a group of friends who become entangled in a scheme to assassinate the UK’s first woman PM, a plot both zanily improbable yet strangely prescient in its way, was never destined to transfer to the big screen

That US newspaper’s response actually appeared in a review of a musical version of the Orton piece which the highly talented, yet genuinely under-rated, songwriter Todd Rundgren actually brought to Broadway, 20 years ago next month, in November 1989.

The Times was not generous to this stage edition proposing that Rundgren had “composed an inferior pastiche of everyone from Brecht and Weill to Gilbert and Sullivan and proves totally unable to transform Orton’s wit into lyrics”.

In 1997, Up Against It made a further appearance as a BBC Radio Three play with Blur’s Damon Albarn, then riding the crest of the Britpop wave, cast in the role – originally earmarked for George Harrison – which Orton actually axed once the script had been rejected.

There seems little doubt that if Up Against It had been confirmed as the Fab Four’s third movie outing, Orton would have become a name known around the world. Whether that would have been because his unique view of life – its mores, obsessions and weaknesses – had caused the usual scandal or because he had given the biggest entertainers on Earth, a screenplay worthy of their talents, we will never know.

But in the days after another comic turn of a different era has suffered the most painful of losses, it is intriguing to reflect on where that rare Orton genius might have carried him if Kenneth Halliwell’s terrible envy had not taken its mortal revenge on that August night at the heart of the Summer of Love.

Forty years on: Kerouac pulse still beats

This month is the 40th anniversary of the death of a writer who inspired a generation or three to shake the dust off their lives and find themselves on their own picaresque journeys, aping the cross-country treks he had described in his most famous novel, On the Road, published in 1957.

Jack Kerouac became the personification of the Beat Generation, that gathering of novelists, poets and artists from both coasts of the USA which resisted the repressed and stifling hand of post-war, nuclear death-fearing, Commie-bashing America and preached a doctrine of peace and individualism, artistic experimentation, personal frankness and spiritual awareness.

Curiously, Kerouac, dubbed the King of the Beats after his best-selling travelogue-cum-fiction fired the imagination of tens of thousands of young men in their late teens and early twenties and prompted them to go out and discover broader horizons in a frenzy of hitch-hiking, was a conservative figure at heart.

While his friends, the committed junkie William Burroughs, the liberal campaigner Allen Ginsberg, the jailbird hustler Gregory Corso and lothario car thief Neal Cassady, largely lived on the edge – narcotically, politically, criminally and sexually – Kerouac endured a life riddled with Catholic guilt, expressed an undying love for his mother and a deep suspicion of all things anti-American.

Not that his life was short on paradox – he indulged in marijuana and benzedrine, loved women galore and left several, experienced homosexual relations, and even faced charges as an accessory to a murder in his young adult years. Yet he became, after the success of On the Road, an increasingly bitter, drink-ravaged critic of those very transgressive values that he and his friends had pursued during the 1940s and 1950s.

By the 1960s, as Ginsberg and Cassady, particularly, became protagonists in the new counterculture – the former as activist and leader, the latter as mythic figurehead – Kerouac retreated to middle and suburban America, often with his beloved mother, generally with bottle to hand, and enough invective against the hippies, their psychedelic drugs and revolutionary rhetoric to keep traditionalist fires well and truly stoked.

Alongside this arc of juvenile adventure, literary celebrity then painful decline, Kerouac rarely stopped writing and the autobiographical factions he published between 1950 and 1968, the last one the year before his premature demise, charted most of the detail of this extraordinary saga – smalltown boy, emerging athlete, Ivy League student, merchant seaman, rail brakeman and inveterate wanderer – in prose that was vivid, vital and often ground-breaking in its structure and its expression.

Kerouac grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, a one-time thriving textile mill-town which underwent the same disastrous decline that Britain’s northern industrial centres experienced in the latter half of the last century. While the writer left the place several times – for New York, the West Coast and Florida to name just a few of his escape hatches – he made a final and permanent return to the town, when he died aged 47, to be buried there in October 1969.

At the end of July, I joined Kerouac’s nephew, the record producer Jim Sampas, and the film director Curt Worden on a visit to Lowell and to the writer’s grave, a modest, metal tablet flat to the ground in a Catholic cemetery quite large enough to require roads to carry you around its criss-cross routes, and thousands of memorial stones.

It was a visit, on an overcast but balmy summer’s day, that brought to mind that moment in 1975 when Dylan and Ginsberg, by then good friends, took time out from the Rolling Thunder Revue to pay their respects at the location where Kerouac had been interred. They recited poetry and briefly sang, each, in their way, indebted to the model of creativity that this novelist had provided to both these men at seminal stages in their lives.

Sampas is related to Kerouac by family marriage. His Aunt Stella, who became Kerouac’s wife in 1966, is buried alongside her late husband. Jim, who met Jack as a toddler, and his Uncle John, who manages the literary estate, have spent much of the last couple of decades engaged in work to both protect and promote the Kerouac legend.

Around the turn of the new century, Sampas worked on several albums which paid homage to the writer’s legacy. The albums drew involvement from an amazing cast of performers – from Patti Smith to Johnny Depp, Jeff Buckley to Tom Waits, Joe Strummer to Graham Parker, John Cale to Jim Carroll.

They were complemented by a string of key Beat survivors – Ginsberg, Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti – in a series of recordings which tapped into Kerouac’s prose, his articles, his verse, and set them against rock, punk, folk and blues.

Now Sampas and Curt Worden have embarked on their biggest Kerouac project so far – a documentary film based on one of man’s darkest novels accompanied by a soundtrack album created by two of the great talents of the current US indie scene.

One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur is both movie and CD. Worden has directed the 90-minute film tribute which reflects on a passage in the novelist’s life at the start of the Sixties when acclaim had left him exhausted and psychologically bereft and alcohol had drained his writerly spirit.

He hoped that a sojourn in Ferlinghetti’s remote, Monterey mountain cabin, would renew his waning constitution and get his fraught mind and typewriter fingers back in gear. The attempt barely achieved its objectives but did provide another potent stream of dramatic material, much of it painfully downbeat, which emerged as his latest novel not long after.

The musical accompaniment, eschewing the usual jazz score that tends invariably to connote Kerouac’s life and times, is composed by Jay Farrar, member of alt.country legends Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt, with Ben Gibbard, the leader of independent darlings Death Cab for Cutie.

The songs, intriguingly, take verbatim text from the Big Sur saga and wrap those lyrical lines in a blend of roots and blues, folk and Americana. Rich in atmosphere and sensitive to their subject, the work stands up both as incidental music to the documentary but also in its own right.

Sampas, who shares production credits on the album with his musician collaborators, says that Farrar, who is the principal architect of the material on disc though he and Gibbard work together throughout, tapped into a creative approach that had been one of Kerouac’s touchstones as an author: spontaneous prose and that essentially existential notion of  “first thought, best thought”.

“I found Jay’s methodology fascinating, the spontaneous manner in which he worked, the quick-shot style. He felt he wrote his best songs that way,” Sampas explains to me. This speedy working proved mightily productive. “It flowed so naturally that we ended up laying down 10 of the songs in little more than two days,” he says with a note of surprise.

The film, overseen by one-time NBC war cameraman turned film-maker Worden, brings together a blend of insightful interviews and breathtakingly atmospheric panoramas, eye-witness memoirs and finely-observed urban cameos, to tell the tale of those few weeks surrounding Kerouac’s escapade on the Californian slopes above the Pacific Ocean.

Attached to the musical backdrop, it is a high quality affair: visually powerful and emotionally affecting. “It is a compelling story, one that unfolds when Jack’s life had come undone,” Worden remarks.

The film will enjoy a limited theatrical release in the US from October 20th after premieres in New York and LA a few days earlier. It will also be issued on DVD and the soundtrack will come out on CD. There are a also a range of versions, too, which include both film and album and even one edition with a copy of the Kerouac novel included.

The project, coinciding with that four-decade anniversary since Kerouac finally gave up the ghost, proves that the reputation of this penman hardly died with him. Interest in his life and his canon remains high with his wide range of work in print and in demand from readers.

The enthusiasm of a younger generation of musicians to commemorate his prolific output and highly eventful life story suggests that there will soon be another wave of hitch-hiking young men – and no doubt women – heading out to look once more for America and maybe finding themselves along the contemporary highway.

People who died: Jim Carroll’s last diary entry

I can’t quite recall when I first came across Jim Carroll. It was probably around the mid-Seventies when the hip, young gunslingers of the New Musical Express were perennially opening up fresh cultural vistas and plugging new names and exotic-sounding talents from the other side of the Atlantic – acts like the Shirts, Mink DeVille, Tuff Darts and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.

In those days, it was easy enough to keep track of the British music scene by catching a couple of gigs a week – always making sure you saw the supports so you’d know who’d be up and coming in the next six months – and scouring the record shops and second hand stores for both singles and albums. The big labels rationed their releases and the independents were only just finding their feet so, if you were smart and kept your ears open, you didn’t miss much.

But the US was just a land of the imagination. You could see Graham Parker or the Clash or Tom Robinson or Eddie and the Hot Rods and buy their latest releases but, as punk erupted in Britain around 1976, the American scene seemed a world away, a musical haven that could only be enjoyed vicariously, principally by consuming those red-hot, front-line reports by writers like  Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray who covered the latest developments at CBGBs in New York City.

Yet things moved quickly. During 1977, the groups who had been shaking up the Bowery in the toughest neighbourhood of Manhattan – Talking Heads, Television, Blondie and quite a number of others – released their key debut long players and were speedily dispatched to England on tour to promote them. And there was certainly sense in this – while America itself was barely aware of this new wave of homegrown music-makers, British fans were already briefed by the sharp-witted, weekly rock press and hungry to see them live.

Jim Carroll was both a part of this scene and apart from it. The great poet-cum-rocker, a New Yorker in every essential sense, actually left the city some time before the CBGBs sound exploded. In fact, Carroll, after enjoying extraordinary acclaim at the end of the Sixties and the start of the Seventies, had quit his home town for California in 1973.

Why? Well this teen prodigy, whose abilities as a street poet and a nascent literary star had already won praise from Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac before he was even 20, had decided finally to try and escape his demons. Carroll, a High School basketball ace, had become hooked on heroin from his teenage years. His departure for California was a device to help him kick the habit.

Whether Carroll ever successfully found the cure is open to conjecture but there is no doubt that while he was away he embarked on resurgent adventures that would see his special talent as a poet revived and coupled to the power of rock’n'roll. After he appeared on stage with Patti Smith,  his long-time friend and rock-poet in her own right, he decided that the best way to express his artistic manifesto was through his own band.

In 1978, Carroll would not only form the group that would carry his name. He also issued what would prove to be his signature work, The Basketball Diaries, an emotionally powerful and sometimes torrid memoir of his youthful years as ambitious sportsman, apprentice junkie and would-be writer. Filmed in 1995, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the central, autobiographical role, the book confirmed its author as a rare case: someone who could both live on the edge and then find the dazzling prose to document that experience.

By now, punk, new wave and the legend of CBGBs were well established and the Jim Carroll Band were able to ride this rising tide of interest in a frenetic rock style that was fast, furious and pared down to the basics. The act’s 1980 debut album Catholic Boy spawned the hit single ‘People Who Died’, a potent and certainly harrowing reflection on the casualties of narcotics row. It was a scene the writer of the lyric knew only too well.

Yet, when the death of Carroll was revealed on September 11th, it was quite surprising to think that this precocious adolescent and then hard-living adult, who had stood too close to the flame too many times, had survived to 60, not a grand old age in contemporary terms but a mark we may not have predicted for him when he was showing all the signs of an early demise in those dangerous, touch-and-go times.

One thing that Carroll did do, before a heart attack took him as he wrote at his New York desk, is chalk up a full and colourful existence: one that stretched from Andy Warhol’s Factory, through the fertile Lower East Side poetry scene and then on to the great rock renaissance that ran from the early 1970s to the turn of the 1990s, from the New York Dolls to Seattle grunge.

Carroll connected several eras in the Manhattan cultural underground: from the Velvets – he worked in Warhol’s film studio – to the Beats – he became friendly with Allen Ginsberg through the St. Mark’s Poetry Project – and the punks – he was closely linked to the downtown sounds of Patti Smith, sharing both accommodation and, for a time, a romance with the other major rock bard.

His final years were less dynamic than his hyperactive decades of productivity as writer and rocker. Working on the manuscript of a final novel called Triptych, a book that had been some 20 years in the making, he became something of a loner. Struck by pneumonia a couple of years before, he was also struggling with some pressing domestic matters – a poor physical condition, record company litigation and some tax issues – Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitar accompanist who played with Carroll on a few occasions, revealed when I spoke to him in the days after the news.

Another friend, the poet Anne Waldman, also a close collaborator with Ginsberg, told me: “Allen was impressed with his accomplishments. Worried about him, at times, as we all did. The Methadone was a deadening necessity. But Jim was sharp, alert, funny and  could still loop you around  with some great stories and monologues. He had some enlightened humour about his own self. Women adored him, though it was hard to be totally enfolded in his increasingly reclusive life.”

Back to the Futurism…plus citizen Koons

The cultural capitals of the globe parade their art today in the way they once showed off their cathedrals and palaces. Those great reclaimed hunks of stone – Tate Modern – or shards of re-shaped metal – the Guggenheim in Bilbao – or the concrete snail shell that is New York’s original Guggenheim all represent an engaging alliance of style and content: monumental structures that contain and convey the treasures of the 20th Century’s magnificent creative adventure. The buildings lure you into their lair and then enchant you with their bounty.

I went art hunting this summer and caught me quite a bit; caught, that is, the pleasure and surprise of seeing a timeless Picasso and an eternal Matisse in the flesh at MOMA in New York City. Or Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural fantasies, some even realised, stretched out on paper and carrying his very own signature. Not to mention the splashes and flashes of pure colour – inspired by nothing more than the spectrum of the domestic paint chart – that formed the theme of Tate Liverpool’s current touring show.

Yet, to return to London after too long a gap is to encounter the place that seems most art-rich at present. If Paris once ruled the roost, if Manhattan took over for the two decades after World War II, it is the city on the Thames that has seized the initiative in the last 15 years. It has possessed the four key ingredients – galleries, dealers, auction houses and, yes, artists even – to bring the eye of the art storm back to Europe and into spaces, large and small, where painting and sculpture seem to be at their most active and fertile and inventive.

Plainly the public investment in Tate Modern, the continuing private enthusiasm of Charles Saatchi to sponsor new and untested talents, and the legacy of the YBAs – those Young British Artists who set the pulses racing over a decade ago with their Royal Academy Sensation show – have all combined to keep the London pot boiling.

Damien Hirst, the greatest name to emerge from that rush of fresh blood in the mid-1990s and now not only the most recognised creative force but also the most valuable under the hammer, has been a vital cog in this aesthetic machine, half fuelled by hard cash and half by bright ideas.

However, the two exhibitions which caught my immediate attention were the product not of the UK but other lands. They featured pieces – and ideas – around a century apart, both radical in their utterly contrasting manner: one political in purpose, the other about as far from notions of the political as you can imagine, at least in any reforming or revolutionary sense.

Futurism is a wonderful Tate Modern show, sited in the huge former power station of Bankside, opened in 2000 as the major shop window for great art of the previous hundred years. The exhibition gathers some fascinating canvases from the movement alongside an impressive body of documents and publications. But it also strives assiduously  to place this style in its wider context.

This is commendable because Futurism for all its verve, flair and energy – you can see it in the paintings, you can feel it in the sculptures – is a largely discredited moment. Why? Because its broadly Italian founders praised the technology of the new age with such intemperate indiscretion that war machines – the planes and tanks which represented the latest generation of combat hardware – were uniformly lauded alongside cars and trains, electricity and the ever-rising city.

Nor were the Futurists merely abstract in their praise of technology that brought such terrible destruction: in its carnage, these artists saw their twisted ideological dreams played out. They believed that on the battlefield, the power of their ideas – action over passivity, the masculine over the feminine, militarism over pacifism – could be literally – and viscerally – enacted.

Their particular doctrine of modernity – a faith in the sleek, the fast, the streamlined, the brutal even – would, they hoped, victor over the gentler, kinder aesthetic sermons of the past. And in the bloody struggles of the First World War this clique of artists were able to experience their aspirations vicariously as machines joined men in the fiercest conflict ever known. One, Umberto Boccioni, would even meet his red-meat fate within that barbed-wire abbatoir.

Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, a principal figure in the Futurist family, proposed “a total modernisation of contemporary culture in line with the advances in technology, philosophy and anarchist politics. Most controversially, he celebrated war as a means of political change and dismissed contemporary feminism,” as the gallery’s excellent supporting notes explain.

Fellow travellers Giacomo Balla,  Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini saw Nietzsche’s theories of the superman as appealing and it is little surprise that their philosophical and artistic concerns provided both inspiration and succour to the Fascist regime that Benito Mussolini would impose on the Italian people from 1922.

The ideas were terrifying yet the art is often thrilling, a paradox of the highest order. Yet the Tate, by connecting Futurist themes to the work of the France-based Cubists, the British Vorticists  and the Russian Cubo-Futurists, show how often the narrative of history all too often insists on black and the white tale-telling over the muddier waters of grey.

Arguably the most important artistic figure of the whole century, Pablo Picasso had a bearing on the art that Marinetti, Severini and Russolo produced and the Spanish painter even name-checked a number of participants in this dynamic, if misguided, movement in one of his famous collages of spring 1914 which also incorporates a copy of the Futurist newspaper Lacerba.

This revelatory Futurism exhibition, on until September 20th, reminds us that in the churning waters of art and politics, culture and ideology, there is always rather more than one story. Retrospection has largely condemned Marinetti and co to the dustbin; this show reconsiders their legacy with an intellectual dispassion.

Dispassion is also the order of the day for the cutting-edge contemporary artist Jeff Koons, an heir to neo-realism, a post-Pop giant, conceivably a latterday Warhol, presenting a show called Popeye Series, a reference, of course, to the spinach-eating strongman of cartoon strip fame who has just turned 80.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the diminutive though muscle-bound sailor. When I was three years of age, maybe just four, I would rise well before dawn to await the doormat arrival of my weekly fix of a kids’ mag called TV Comic, which showcased a curious mix of US and UK small screen stars when the medium was in its infancy. The cover king though was Popeye, battling the witless Bluto and holding on to the affections of Olive Oyl.

Simultaneously, as the monochrome Fifties turned into the Technicolor Sixties, Roy Lichtenstein was adapting comic book frames for his own, heavily pixellated blow ups and Warhol was sketching another strip hero, Dick Tracy, for his silkscreens. So Popeye’s turn was always likely to come and so it’s been proved.

Half a century on from my childhood obsession with the merchant-scrapper, Koons produces a show at the Serpentine Gallery that is high on eclectism if a little short on actual thread, though it was curiously reassuring to see the over-developed forearms, the corncob pipe and the excrutiating scowl take their place within a number of distracting, if over-busy, collage canvases. That said, Popeye is somewhat over-shadowed here in a way he never was on television or in newsprint. For the most fascinating thing about this display is surely the sculptures.

Koons has taken a number of children’s blow-up beach toys – a lobster, a whale, a bug as swimming ring – and recreated every curve and fold, every minute detail, of the inflatable in immaculately turned aluminium. The effect is deliciously disorientating: you want to squeeze each lilo, you want to feel the smoothness of the light metal. But you can do neither – the ‘do not touch’ police are particularly on their toes here; the tactile is terribly taboo on this occasion, which is something of a shame.

The artist has made – with the aid, for sure, of a crack and talented team – a set of delightful visual jokes. Banal and inane on one level, they are wonderfully entertaining on the other. They are both puns to delight the eye and optical illusions of sorts, a great use of the artistic imagination, reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s brilliant soft sculptures of the Sixties but with the conceit in exact reverse.

Do they say much about childhood? About ephemerality? About consumerism? About play? They may say a little about all of those things but this artist-as-trickster, this sculptor-as-mischief-maker, this craftsman-as-conman, is more concerned with art for its very own sake. The Futurists, in the their terrible naivety, thought they could change the world. Koons can only change our facial expression. And a smile definitely beats the prospect of a world governed by techno terror.

Inside Hotel Cornucopia: I do want to go to Chelsea

It may have lost its title as the tallest building in Manhattan as long ago as 1899, but there is little doubt that, for most of the 20th Century, the Chelsea Hotel retained its reputation as the highest. Its multi-colourful story as home to both cultural giants and subterranean renegades, marks it as a place where experiment – with drugs and with drink, with creativity and with life – was little less than an everyday event.

Certainly, if you’ve an interest in rock’n'roll, a concern with literature and poetry, or just a general fascination with American culture and the arts, there are few more intriguing spots to spend time than the building that has been a base for a gallery of authentic artistic greats and also a place where a parade of notorious roisterers let their hair – and guard – down.

Among those who have taken up residence at the West 23rd Street premises over several eras are author Thomas Wolfe, playwright Arthur Miller and composer Virgil Thompson. Throw in, too, that extraordinary triumvirate from the other side of the Atlantic – poet Dylan Thomas, novelist Brendan Behan and the Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious – and you begin to get a flavour of the eclectic and exotic clientele to whom the Chelsea has merrily opened its doors.

And that still excludes an array of stellar names who have also enjoyed a relationship with this 12-storey, late Victorian, and still remarkably solid, monument. Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Janis Joplin, Ryan Adams and Rufus Wainwright have all had connections; so have the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke.

Andy Warhol set his infamous flick The Chelsea Girls, with star Nico, here and Woody Allen has used it as a location. Nor should we forget that ultimate English eccentric Quentin Crisp, author of The Naked Civil Servant and inspiration for Sting’s ‘Englishman in New York’, who took a room for decades. Then there’s Dee Dee Ramone’s bizarre novel, Chelsea Horror Hotel, set on-site.

I’d never been to the Chelsea till this summer, only imagined its famed gothic stairwell, the extended, pale lemon corridors and the nooks and crannies where typewriters were furiously tapped, canvases were daubed, and hard liquor and harder stuff still were imbibed to keep the creative juices flowing and the party in full swing.

Today, the hotel has conceded something of its louche and austere air. The lobby is splendid, in essence an extraordinary exhibition space where idling residents sit in the shadow of an impressive and diverse art collection – a digitally pixellated re-make of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a familiar Larry Rivers’ painting based on a Dutch cigar box and a series of amazing hanging sculptures that make the foyer feel more fairground than waiting room.

Yet, even with a gentrified glint, the Chelsea endures as a working project with a special atmosphere. As a functioning hotel, it remains more bohemian than boutique and continues to provide rooms for those operators who would find scant welcome at more traditional inns. There are flats allocated to artists, photographers and musicians; there is a pure Addams Family roof-space, as well, with the Deco splendour of the Empire State Building incongruously in view, where movie-making goes on.

But the long-held practice of long-term lets is in decline; the hotel is now more about bedrooms and suites of rooms to hire for a night or a few days rather than a quasi-apartment block or a co-op community for those outside the social mainstream with books to write or songs to pen or paintings to complete.

The Chelsea changed ownership not too long ago and the commercial prerogative, while not overwhelmingly obvious or stiflingly apparent, appears to be higher on the agenda than when Sixties rock bands made it a natural port of call, a spot to crash and burn, on hitting the spires of Manhattan.

Furthermore – a sign of the times, for sure – the hotel now runs occasional tours, three-hour epics that are well worth the $40 entry fee. Jerry Weinstein, who has worked for the venue for many years, is the maître d’ and leads a group up and down, around and about, this kaleidoscopic labyrinth, where history hangs heavy and most of the white-washed walls carry artworks by past – and even present – tenants.

The pleasure is that the Weinstein tour opens doors, of course, and various Chelsea artists had agreed to meet the touring group in their studios. American experimental film-maker Sam Bassett, the British painter David Remfrey and Portuguese camerawoman Rita Barros were along several practitioners who played host, showed their work in progress and answered questions about what they do and life in this celebrated building.

Ethan Hawke’s suite, now vacated, offered an insight into New York life for a well-established and cultish actor. The rooms – living room, sleeping quarters, kitchen, bath-room – are furnished with tasteful if life-worn pieces, period objets that are more Fifties chic than contemporary flash.

The faded, jaded demeanour of the upper levels convinces you that drama still lurks around that unlit corner, beyond that shaded doorway. When you are reminded, too, that Sid Vicious’ girl-friend Nancy Spungen did die in the hotel and see the room where this junk-tinged tragedy was enacted, the Chelsea evokes the spine-tingling nuances of a pulp detective novel or the submerged menace of a film noir thriller.

If there is a certain quality of cob-webbed salon or the ambience of a rather run-down conservatoire, the somewhat world-weary shabbiness cannot conceal that flavour of genuine mystery or obscure the vein of authentic magic that feeds your imaginings: as your own footsteps echo on the stairs, you can hardly help recalling that you walk in the imprint of Wolfe and Cohen, Miller and Joplin, Arthur C. Clarke and Sam Shepard. And that is an unmissable, if vicarious, thrill.

Finally, do not miss out on the hostelry next door, once the tour ends. El Quijote is a long-barred, deep-set drinking hole and restaurant where the beer is cold, the Margaritas are served in huge pitchers and the tapas are excellent, a perfect way to mope away an afternoon and reflect on the Chelsea Hotel and its unique cast of players.

On the bus: Memories of a Greyhound summer

The news that the iconic Greyhound Bus is to debut in the UK in September raised golden memories of an amazing summer, several decades ago, when vehicles bearing that famous name carried me on a three month adventure through the highways and byways of North America.

The escapade is still burnt on my memory but it seems as if I travelled in another age. At one time trains, then buses, would have been the usual way to traverse the thousands of miles that crisscross the USA. Today, most travellers needing to make an essential journey would, I’m sure, choose the plane.

But in the 1970s, the bus seemed still to rule the roost and the road. And for two recent graduates, juggling their nickels and dimes, the Greyhound was an economic option – just under $300 (then not much more than £120) purchased an open ticket for twelve weeks of travel. Plus, of course, the buses took you to corners and outposts that you would never have gone near by utilising the nation’s airports.

The other great recommendation, too – and this will seem paradoxical – is that the buses took you so long to get anywhere. For the average American, keen to reach family or a loved one or friends, the Greyhound may not have quite lived up to its name. Never that speedy, the seemingly eternal treks across the great wide continent may have appeared disconcertingly inconvenient.

But for my friend and me, these stretched-out odysseys gave us two great benefits – hour upon hour of views of the town and the city, the plains and the mountains, the rivers and the deserts. But, much more usefully, they gave us a free place to stay for the night.

From May to August, we took our extended trek and, for other than maybe half a dozen occasions, we bedded down for our kip in our seats as the Greyhound headed into the neon night, the forever darkness, allowing its two English customers a chance to catch up on their shut-eye.

It’s also worth saying that, at that time, transatlantic travel was only newly affordable. Freddie Laker’s Skytrain had led to a price war with the traditional carriers like BA and, for the first time, someone like me could scrape together the cash to fly to New York.

And scrape pretty well covers it. For almost a year after I left university behind, I toiled as a labourer on a local building site for £1 an hour wages and, by saving hard, managed to secure just enough to cover air fare, the bus pass and very modest living expenses.

The fact that Anglos were not seen that often over there – at least, once you got beyond Manhattan – made the journey all the more intriguing. Serving staff in a Mid-West McDonald’s – the burger chain hadn’t arrived in the UK then and was a cheap staple in my pre-vegetarian days – would be amazed to hear your accent. “Please say that again,” would be the delighted response to your request for fries!

The bus became a kind of home-from-home as we followed the fantastically detailed and reliable timetables, enormously complicated listings of destinations and connections, running seven days a week and 24 hours a day. Stop-offs in remote Southern villages or Rocky Mountain settlements conjured up the real America we were seeking though, of course, the depots and stations of Chicago and LA, Nashville and El Paso provided their own distinct visions of this multi-cultural continent.

There was craziness, too – no attempt to replicate, however loosely, the 1940s escapades of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, fictionally recounted in the 1957 novel On the Road, would have been without incident, and so it proved.

Picked up by a gay Colombian called German on my first night in the Big Apple – the innocence of youth! – led to my waking up the next morning on the tiled floor of Port Authority, the huge bus terminal in the heart of New York, with scant memory of too many beers and wild detours through the Lower East Side.

Chasing women we’d met on a bus took us hundreds of miles out of our way to the lost ranges of Montana; transport police waved guns menacingly at us when we jumped train barriers without the money to buy tickets in San Francisco; and a journalist warned us to leave Lowell, Kerouac’s place of birth and death, as soon as we were able with our long-hair all too likely to attract redneck attention.

There were dozens of such interludes – meeting poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Frisco, catching Elvis Costello on tour backed by Mink DeVille on the West Coast, seeing Scorsese’s The Last Waltz in a deserted movie house in Baton Rouge, visiting Canada and Mexico and so much more. And, most nights, settling into the relative comfort of a Greyhound seat to sleep and await the next turn in the road, the next twist in our twenty-year old lives.