Jack Kerouac was a junior at Columbia when he met Lester Young in 1943. Kerouac had started listening to jazz in Harlem clubs. “They shared a cab from the Village up to Minton’s Playhouse, the nightclub in the Hotel Cecil on 118th Street where the bebop revolution was percolating,” writes Martin Torgoff in Bop Apocalypse. Edie Kerouac-Parker, Jack’s first wife, claimed that Young introduced the 21-year old Kerouac to marijuana. Although the image of them riding in a taxi seems like a metaphor for bebop’s influence on Beat writers and their style, the lives of black jazz musicians and young Beats rarely intersected. What they had in common was the routine of scoring and using drugs.
The narrative begins in the 1930s with clandestine pot smoking among musicians. In 1971, Louis Armstrong, who according to Torgoff “smoked it practically every day for the rest of his life,” talked about those early days: “We did call ourselves vipers, which could have been anybody from all walks of life that smoked and respected gage. That was our cute little name for marijuana, and it was a misdemeanor in those days. Much different from the pressures and changes the law lays on a guy who smokes pot … The respect for gage will stay with me forever. I have every reason to say these words and am proud to say them.”
As a journalist of pop culture, Torgoff excels at limning the broader significance of pop phenomena – and is happy to digress beyond the terms of his book’s subtitle. The chapter on Lester Young and Billie Holiday depicts the stylish duo in the studio but also visiting the clubs in Harlem. Then comes Charlie Parker: “He loved drugs from his first high, and every time he tasted something new he displayed an addict’s natural proclivity for doing it in eve-growing quantities … He would use amphetamines in one form or another for the rest of his life … As club manager Tutty Clarkin remarked, ‘When Bird was sixteen he looked thirty-eight. He had the oldest-looking face I ever saw.’” Heroin actually became more plentiful after Congress outlawed its production and use in 1924 – and in 1937, Parker became addicted at age seventeen.
Torgoff devoted a chapter to artists and drugs in Can’t Find My Way Home (2004) which examined how drugs became pervasive in American culture between 1945 and 2000. Bop Apocalypse purports to pull a tighter focus on musicians and writers – but it plays out as a series of fleeting portraits, and the reader has to put up with some clunky phrasing along the way. This is the sort of book one writes by reading what everyone else has written and repackaging it.
From Parker, he leaps to Herbert Huncke, “the man who first put the word beat in what became known as the Beat Generation.” Kerouac depicted him this way in his first novel, The Town and the City,: “He had the look of a man who is sincerely miserable in the world.” When William Burroughs showed up, they all took off on Benzedrine. Torgoff then pivots back to Parker, on July 29, 1946 – a failed recording session, followed by Bird’s arrest in his hotel and his committal to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. As for Billy Holiday: “By 1946 Lady was using so much heroin that she needed a tuna-fish can to cook it up before shooting it. When she couldn’t find a vein or her arm got infected, she would hit herself in the fingertips or the veins of her vagina.”
Robert Benchley once cracked, “A great many people have come up to me and asked how I managed to get so much done and still look so dissipated.” Bop Apocalypse relishes the dissipations of its subjects even while suggesting that it is all so very tragic. Torgoff is less interested in how much they all got done. As long as you enter knowing that he trades on lurid habits and has much less to say about the music or literature produced by its subjects, you won’t be disappointed.
As Torgoff reveals, he was a druggie during his teen years – and clearly, his intention in Bop Apocalytpse is to avoid any suggestion of glamor or romance in the junk-lives of his subjects. Kerouac may have romanticized jazz and beat-life, but in the end the tenuous link between jazz musicians and Beat writers dwindles to the weird sight of Burroughs appearing in a Nike commercial.
[Published by da Capo Press on January 31, 2017, 448 pages, 16 b&w photos, $25.99 hardcover]