Frank Book #2: On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Now Playing: A Love Supreme by John Coltrane

During my freshman year of high school, my band director approached me to gauge my interest in learning the alto saxophone. A member of the school’s jazz band was one of the best alto saxophonists in the state and was graduating in a few months and the director needed a few people to step up and replace her in the jazz band. At this point I had only played the clarinet but the jump to alto saxophone was supposed to be an easy one. However, I had no desire to learn a new instrument or to play in the jazz band. Jazz was old fart’s music anyway, why should I want to learn it? Upon hearing this, my director handed me her copy of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and told me to listen to it. I did. The next week, after surprisingly little begging, my mom bought me an alto saxophone and put me in lessons. I since have learn the tenor saxophone in order to attempt to play some Coltrane tunes. In my opinion, jazz is quite possibly the greatest genre of music ever.

What I enjoy about jazz are the subtleties of the music. How the music is based around how the musician feels. The same song played by the same musician on different nights can have completely different emotion. Jazz is a diary of the musician more so than any other genre, because it is pure and raw and unscripted. It is stream of consciousness. It is On the Road. The fast-paced-to-slow-paced-back-to-fast-paced-never-knowing-what-is-going-to-happen-next freedom.

This is the second time I have read the book and the five years since reading it the first time have led me to better appreciate and understand what Kerouac was trying to get across. In that time I have learned more about the history of jazz and listened to many more jazz albums. I have traveled the United States and the world and specifically, have visited New York and Denver. Plus, I have gone out and lived on my own. These experiences give me a new set of glasses to read the novel through.

I don’t know what to say about the novel except that it is an amazing book. I read it in less than 30 hours. It is a perfect snapshot of the post-WWII Beat generation. I can completely understand how it came to define the generation. While its themes aren’t as relevant today because homosexuality and drug use are better understood and more accepted, it can still be related to current events, 53 years after its publishing.

The two best examples of this are as follows:

“Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.”

Creepy 9/11 reference anyone? But seriously, the one passage that really struck me was this:

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the ragged madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.”

How accurate is that description? How often do we pose photos to show only the good and the happy? How often in family albums do you see photographs of people being beaten? We hide any disorganization or unhappy as best we can from not only others, but from ourselves as well.

That’s all I got.

This discussion isn’t detailed; it doesn’t ask questions of the book, it wouldn’t pass as a book report in school. But it doesn’t have to. On the Road is what it is. A perfect slice of American life as told by Jack Kerouac. It’s so good that it eventually killed him.

As always, post your thoughts.

- Frank