YouTube is great - you'll find stuff on it you'd never see anywhere else.
Today's nugget is a clip from The Steve Allen Show, circa 1959, featuring Jack Kerouac reading some of his work while Steve and his band play the blues. There's also a little tidbit from Allen at the end regarding some behind-the-scenes Kerouac.
There is no way you'd ever see anything this slow or mellow on network TV now.
1 comment:
I have to say I was very surprised to see you post this -- my own Thanksgiving gift, I suppose. Poor Jack, so uncomfortable and drunk, trying so hard to sell the secret of himself.
The funny thing is he pulled a fast one on Steve Allen. What he is reading here is actually not from On The Road at all, but rather from an unpublish experimental novel he was writing at the time -- later published as Visions of Neal -- a dense dream-like swirl of non-linear observations ostensibly tied to his friendship with Neal Cassidy. The thing that's ironic about him reading this is that supposedly Steve Allen never knew that what Jack was reading was not actually from the book he was supposedly "hawking".
Poor Jack. I think I'll go read some of his writing right now.
Thanks for posting this.
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