On the Road by Jack Kerouac

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An account of jazz loving, panhandling deadbeats, minor criminals, highly libidinous and philandering fellows driving or hitching rides across USA. There are some brilliant bits and colurful descriptions in the narrative

Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.
… On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty, she mellowed and rolled, till the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows – and still we rolled.

And is this the inspiration for midichlorians?

The orgone accumulator is an ordinary box big enough for a man to sit inside on a chair: a layer of wood, a layer of metal, and another layer of wood gather in orgones from the atmosphere and hold them captive long enough for the human body to absorb more than a usual share. According to Reich (and I am currently reading Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past by David Reich - no connection!) orgones are vibratory atmospheric atoms of the life-principle. People get cancer because they run out of orgones. Old Bull thought his orgone accumulator would be improved if the wood used was as organic as possible, so he tied bushy bayou leaves and twigs to his mystical outhouse. It stood there in the hot, flat yard, an exfoliate machine clustered and bedecked with maniacal contrivances.

A Jazz aficanado’s overview of the jazz scene prevailing at that time

Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Elridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety – leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother’s woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swingling Baise and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the rest – Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonius Monk and madder Gillespie – Charlie Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal from his mouth he blew the greatest; and his hair grew longer and he got lazier and stretched out, his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and today as he wears his thick-soled shoes so that he can’t feel the sidewalks of life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy getout phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night.

There are occasional whacky philosophical interludes

He was reaching his Tao decisions in the simplest direct way. ‘What’s your road, man? – holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an everywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?’

When music transcends

‘More Mambo Jambo,’ ‘Chattanooga de Mambo,’ ‘Mambo Numero Ocho’ – all these tremendous numbers resounded and flared in the golden, mysterious afternoon like the sounds you expect to hear on the last day of the world and the Second Coming. The trumpets seemed so loud I thought they could hear them clear out in the desert, where the trumpets had originated anyway. The drums were mad. The mambo beat is the conga beat from Congo, the river of Africa and the world; it’s really the world beat. Oom-ta, ta-poo-poom. The piano montunos showered down on us from the speaker. The cries of the leader were like great gasps in the air. The final trumpet choruses that came with drum climaxes on conga and bongo drums, on the great mad Chattanooga record

As a Desi, I cannot really identify with the America of the Forties, hence the three stars – although the book is regarded as a modern American classic.

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