Neal Cassady: Drive He Said

 

King of the Road

“Twenty years of fast living - there's not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don't do what I have done." - Neal Cassady

If he was just a clown, a hyperactive dunce, a celebrity buddy, he would have been abandoned by  American literature. But Neal Cassady always makes into the footnotes. He’s always there, On the Road with Kerouac or On the Road with Kesey or wherever – he always seems to be moving, vibrating, jabbering and anxious to devour Life just before it devours him.

Cassady & Kerouac: Hit the road Jack

He drives the beatniks. He drives the hippies. He drives a neon-noir zeitgeist into the perfumed arms of flower power. He belongs to mid-century America (I like Ike but I dig Kennedy), a post-war Huckleberry where the Mississippi meets macadam. And like all travelers who know the real purpose of moving, he never takes baggage because the game is about escaping, not finding.

- 1968. His last breaths of life fog cold metal of a railway track at night. There he is, under a Mexican moon, hanging on, alone, the Holy Goof slowly slips behind the wheel for a velvet drive to the stars.

Always keep moving

Elvis Presley: 1968 Comeback Special. “I have no need for all this.”

It’s true, Elvis was never the same after he came back from the Army in 1960. There was a knowing in the famous lopsided smile, a restlessness fueled by something other than youth.

The "final"performance

The songs came and were forgettable; the films even worse. The hippies didn’t even wears shoes, let alone blue suedes.

Eight years passed by. He dyed his hair blue/black and became an eccentric relic, more a novelty than an entertainer.

For reasons known only to a Robert-Johnson-Cross-Roads shaman, the gods handed Elvis one last chance and he didn’t even know it.

A television special would have been unthinkable before. But this was not ‘before’. The producer noticed that Elvis liked to sit with his buddies and just play the old songs. So why not do some of that?

And it became the first unplugged segment in pop music.

It didn’t take long for Elvis to go off script. In a way, he was always off script, something all the others (Bobby This or Frankie That) never really got.

Off the grid. No auto-tune. Full bore.

Watch him. He slides off the grid and swings a trapeze up to his long dormant talent. Suddenly he has hold of an electric guitar with no strap. Doesn't stop him. Deep in his Memphis soul he must know this could be it, the Final Performance, no matter how long he lives.

Clad in black leather, with no vocal overdubbing and no auto-tune and no reverb and no backup singers, he becomes what he always was - among the best rock singers of the twentieth century, and one of a few genuine pop culture icons.

Today, it is impossible to hear him sing ‘Trying to Get to You’ and not notice how careful superbowl-style pop music has become. This is the mother-lode. The high-water mark. Pre-punk. The gold standard. 

Whatever rock was supposed to be, it doesn't get better. Rock critic Greil Marcus watched the show that night with a friend, who at one point turned to him and said, shocked, "He's doing all this with just three chords? Impossible."

And then, he leaves the stage forever. Just like that. Resigned to bedazzled white jumpsuits and ill-health, going through karate-kid motions and praying for an early release.

Savage. Mindless. Real.

Later, he writes a note to himself (to what he was and what he is to become) not to be shared, but discovered after his death:

-          “I feel so alone sometimes. The night is quiet for me. I'd love to be able to sleep. I'll probably not rest. I have no need for all this. Help me, Lord.”

A Tragic Confluence: Charles Manson and the Danse Macabre

It was a terrible, tragic confluence of illness, character, and chronology. And Charles Manson's mental state prospered.

 


We all began as kids...

His messengers were much like him – outsiders, dispossessed, the psychotic, the poor and desperate. Yet under the shambling guise of California hippies, replete with guitars-by-the-bonfire, no-money, communal living and free love, they murdered with glee.

Manson knew the end of the world was nigh, that African-Americans were plotting to subsume white culture, that he was the only guy who recognized this and the only way to get control was to ignite a race war – to kind of get the jump. Hence, ‘Helter Skelter’, a term he borrowed from his very own personal prophets, the Beatles, a term that, for Manson, implied a significant military strategy.

So he'd sent out his Zombie-Hippies at night, and they would return to the compound/commune fresh from successful sprees of premeditated, debauched murder. One of his victims was over eight months pregnant. Manson became a proud, energetic leader. He had plans to expand.

All of this happened just a few months before Woodstock. Flower Power had grown a malignant, creeping vine yet no one noticed. Manson demonstrated how fragile the whole leaderless, youth-based, drug-oriented subculture really was.


Mental illness in full flight

Whereas Bonnie and Clyde wouldn’t have had much of a career in our retina-ID, DNA, chopper-patrol, insta-cash, WiFi world, so Manson, without the off-the-grid, tie-dyed infrastructure of late 60s California, would have been just another sick hipster, hustling street corners, knocking off dime stores, to be killed in a knife fight at the back of a pool hall at 3 a.m. and forgotten forever.

The times don’t always make the man. And the man doesn’t necessarily make the times. (When it goes wrong, they embrace and whirl each other across the floor in a danse macabre while the rest of us line the walls, Easter Island-like, to witness a timeless, terrible harmony.)

Sometimes they make each other.