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Beat Culture and the Grateful Dead

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Beat Culture and the Grateful Dead Beat Culture and the Grateful Dead OVERVIEW ESSENTIAL QUESTION How did beat writers like Jack Kerouac influence the Grateful Dead’s music? OVERVIEW Note to teacher: The handout in this lesson contains descriptions of drug use. Our hope is that the language used, which quite often details the repulsive nature of addiction rather than glamorizing it, will paint a realistic, and not desirable picture of drug use. However, we suggest reviewing the handout and making a plan for using it with your classroom before working with the lesson. In post-WWII America, a radical new movement took over the literary world. Anchored by writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, the Beat Generation, as they came to be known, viewed conventional American culture with disillusionment. They embraced things like free sexuality and drug use, explorations of Eastern religion, and a shirking of materialism in favor of a liberated lifestyle. One of the era’s most definitive works, Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road, explores these themes through a semi-autobiographical road trip across America. By the 1960s, the ideals expounded by the Beats were perhaps no better exemplified in musical culture than by the Grateful Dead. For their 30-year career, the Grateful Dead embraced the liberating, always-on-the-move lifestyle promoted by works such as Kerouac’s On the Road. The band eschewed industry conventions by becoming a perpetual “road band,” gaining a reputation not through chart hits, lavish studio recordings, or flashy media appearances, but via ceaseless touring and adventurous, inclusive,and always-changing live performances. In this lesson, students will examine how the Grateful Dead exemplified the countercultural ideals promoted by Beat Generation writers by watching clips from Long Strange Trip, reading passages from Beat Generation writers, and brainstorming the ways the Grateful Dead’s approach to music was inspired by the Beat Movement. LONG STRANGE TRIP: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD BEAT CULTURE AND THE GRATEFUL DEAD OBJECTIVES Upon completion of this lesson, students will: 1. KNOW (KNOWLEDGE): 2. MASTERY OBJECTIVE • Beat figures Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, • Students will be able to define the ideals Diane Di Prima, Neal Cassady, Joyce of the Beat countercultural movement by Johnson, and Herbert Huncke examining the philosophical and aesthetic connections between Beat writers and the • The band the Grateful Dead, and the Grateful Dead. influence Beat Culture had upon them • How Jack Kerouac and the Grateful Dead rejected social norms ACTIVITIES PRE-TICKET ACTIVITY (OPTIONAL): 1. This lesson works best if students are in the process of reading Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. MOTIVATIONAL ACTIVITY 1. Show Image 1, On the Road Scroll. Tell students that this was Jack Kerouac’s first draft for On the Road. Ask students: • Do you think this is how most authors create a first draft? Why or why not? • What might have inspired Kerouac to take such an unconventional approach to writing a novel? (Encourage students to consider the ways an unconventional writing process might lead to an unconventional novel.) • Writers in Kerouac’s time used typewriters, which require the manual insertion of each page. How might have writing onto a continuous scroll affected how Kerouac composed On The Road? • Kerouac envisioned his writing style as “spontaneous prose.” What do you think this means? In what ways might it be different from how other authors often compose? How might have writing on a long scroll helped Kerouac achieve “spontaneous prose”? • What challenges might have writing on a scroll presented compared to writing on a single piece of paper? What about compared to today’s standard of writing on a computer? How might have confronting such challenges helped Kerouac as a writer? • How might Kerouac’s notion of “spontaneous prose” inspire other means of expression, such as art or music? LONG STRANGE TRIP: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD BEAT CULTURE AND THE GRATEFUL DEAD PROCEDURE: list of values, both positive and negative, 1. Play Clip 1, Dennis McNally, Jack Kerouac, and that Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers Jerry Garcia. Ask students: embraced, based upon the excerpts in handout 1 (the list might include values such • Based on what you learned in this clip, as freedom, nonconformity, or hedonism). who are the Grateful Dead? While brainstorming, encourage students to think about On the Road as well as the • How did Dennis McNally become excerpts they read in their groups. Write the involved with the band? What did he values discussed in class on the board. Ask share in common with singer Jerry students: Garcia? • How are the values that Beat writers 2. Tell students they will examine the specific embraced represented in their writing? ways beat writers such as Jack Kerouac How is it represented in On the Road? inspired Jerry Garcia. Arrange students into groups. Pass out one page from Handout 1 • How might these values have been - Introduction to Beat Writers to each group. represented in other artistic practices, Tell the class that Kerouac was a member such as visual art or music? of the Beats, a countercultural literary group in the 1950s that drew inspiration from one 4. Play Clip 2, “Being Alive Means to Continue to another. Ask each group to read their page as Change.” Ask students: a group, then ask each group: • In the clip, how does Jerry Garcia define • What beat figure did you read about? “being alive?” • Why was this figure important to the Beat • Based on Garcia’s emphasis on change Movement? and spontaneity, what might have a Grateful Dead concert sounded like? • What kinds of topics did they write about? 5. Show Image 3, Grateful Dead Set Lists. Ask students: • Based on the excerpt you read, could you describe this figure’s writing style? • What is being depicted on this image? • What role did the writer play in Jack • Where did these three concerts take Kerouac’s life? place? What was the time frame for these three concerts? How many concerts did • How might the writer have influenced Grateful Dead perform per day? Jack Kerouac’s writing style? • What do you notice about the songs • What similarities did you notice between presented between these three concerts? the excerpt you read and On The Road? 6. Inform students that this information comes 3. Show students Image 2, On the Road from a website which allows fans to catalog Excerpts, and read aloud each excerpt as the songs the band played at every concert, a class. Then, as a class brainstorm a LONG STRANGE TRIP: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD BEAT CULTURE AND THE GRATEFUL DEAD including a space for people to make • Based on the evidence presented in this comments. Ask students: image, how might the Grateful Dead live by Jerry’s idea that to be constantly • What observations might you make changing is to be alive? about Grateful Dead fans, based on their comments? What might they like about • In what ways does the Grateful Dead’s the band? approach to playing concerts relate to the ideals set forward by the Beat • Why might the fans be so dedicated to Generation? cataloging the Grateful Dead’s concerts, and archiving recordings of their many concerts? SUMMARY ACTIVITY 1. Return to the list of values the class brainstormed earlier in class. Ask students: • Do you see any values in this list that could equally be associated with the Grateful Dead? • How might have ideals of the Grateful Dead and the Beat Generation be similar? • Both the Beats and the Grateful Dead valued spontaneity and freedom, but many of the Beat writers were addicted to drugs. Jerry Garcia died due to complications from drugs and alcohol. In what ways could drugs be associated with freedom? Based on the excerpts you read today, in what ways might drugs be associated with bondage? EXTENSION ACTIVITIES 1. Write two essays about a memorable trip you once took. Write the first essay in “spontaneous prose,” or a stream-of-conscious style. For the second essay, take what you wrote in the first one and edit it into a shorter, more structured piece. What did you like or not like about this process? What do you like and dislike about each of your essays? How do the different approaches to writing affect your final product? 2. Watch the video “Diane Di Prima Reads Revolutionary Letters #29 & #19” (https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=S3mI197fm3g&feature=youtu.be). Write a poem and recite it in a similar style as the video. Then, write a brief reflection on the ways performing a poem differs from writing one. 3. One of William Burroughs’ preferred writing strategies involved the “cut-up,” a creative writing project perhaps first described by 20th Century Romanian poet Tristan Tzara. Following the Tzara’s instructions below, create your own cut-up poem. To make a Dadaist poem: • Take a newspaper. LONG STRANGE TRIP: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD BEAT CULTURE AND THE GRATEFUL DEAD • Take a pair of scissors. • Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem. • Cut out the article. • Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag. • Shake it gently. • Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag. • Copy conscientiously. • The poem will be like you. • And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar. LONG STRANGE TRIP: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD BEAT CULTURE AND THE GRATEFUL DEAD COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading (K-12) Reading 1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
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