“A lot of people have asked me, why did I write that book, or any book,” he begins. “At that time I made a note to book him on this show,” Allen says, “because I thought you would enjoy meeting him.” After answering a few “square questions” by way of introduction - it took him three weeks to write On the Road, he spent seven years on the road itself, he did indeed type on a continuous “scroll’ of paper, and he would define “Beat” as “sympathetic” - Kerouac reads from the novel that made his name, accompanied by Allen’s piano. Not only did he know of the Beats, he joined them, at least for one collaboration: “Jack and I made an album together a few months back in which I played background piano for his poetry reading.” That was Poetry for the Beat Generation, the first of Kerouac’s trilogy of spoken-word albums that we previously featured here on Open Culture back in 2015.
In 1954, his co-creation The Tonight Show made him the first late-night television talk show host, and consequently applied pressure to stay atop the cultural currents of the day. A novel titled On the Roadbecame a bestseller, and its author, Jack Kerouac, became a celebrity: partly because he’d written a powerful and successful book, but partly because he seemed to be the embodiment of this new generation.”Īs the novelists and poets of the Beat Generation were gradually gaining renown, Allen was fast becoming a national celebrity. Earlier in that decade, Allen says (sprinkling his monologue with a few notes here and there), “the nation recognized in its midst a social movement called the Beat Generation. In other words, if you’ve been looking for the most late-nineteen-fifties clip in existence, your journey may have come to an end. The video above shows us Jack Kerouac giving a reading, accompanied by the jazz piano stylings of evening television variety-show host Steve Allen.
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