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Lost Kerouac Work Unearthed

Rockers and poets breathe life into "Dr. Sax" screenplay

Graham Parker, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jim Carroll, Robert Hunter, Kate Pierson and Robert Creeley are among the musicians and poets who have lent their voices to Dr. Sax and the Great World Snake, a double-disc reading of a lost screenplay by legendary American writer Jack Kerouac. John Medeski of Medeski Martin and Wood contributed an

Medeski accompanies Kerouac original, jazz-flavored score to accompany the readings, and the CD package includes the Add to Favorites! screenplay's complete text, as well Email this story as illustrations by Richard Sala. Printer friendly version Producer Jim Sampas, a nephew of Kerouac's by marriage, discovered the screenplay while working for the Kerouac estate and got permission to develop and release the project through his Gallery Six Records. Medeski, Martin and Wood

"I wanted people who actually had a great sensibility for Kerouac's work and lotusecho writes: were good readers," says Sampas. "I'd been listening to old radio programs and I thought this would be a great way to introduce this work." Wowzers. I am still spellbound by the music I heard last night. The Desk, IllyB and Woody were definitely firing on all The screenplay is loosely based on Kerouac's 1952 novel Dr. Sax, which cylinders. The concert was held in features an array of fantastic characters like wizards and vampires. downtown Buckhead, a very trendy nightspot in north Atlanta. It was my first "Dr. Sax was a childhood vision he had," says Ferlinghetti, who read the part of visit to the Roxy ... the Wizard. "It was a kid's vision of this amorphous figure that floated around the landscape. A lot of critics made it into a lot of other things, a lot of symbolic things, but I don't think that's what he had in mind. It's like how critics of a POST | REPORT ABUSE painting will read what's written on the wall by the curator, and it's all things the painter never thought of when he was making the painting."

Sampas picked Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz to read the part of Dicky, in part because Janovitz lives in Massachusetts, striking distance from Kerouac's boyhood home of Lowell. "I don't know if I gave it a real Lowell accent, but Lowell has a very peculiar accent," says Janovitz. "There's a little slang in there and some French-Canadian dialect. Dicky is one of the pre-adolescent boys that roams around in this pack. The language is really of that time . . . almost like the Bowery Boys or the Little Rascals."

Per Kerouac's original intention, Sampas also plans to get a Dr. Sax and the Great World Snake film made. Kerouac, whose other writings included Beat Generation touchstones The Dharma Bums and On the Road, died in Florida in RollingStone.com: News: Lost Kerouac Work Unearthed Page 2 of 3

1969 from a gastrointestinal hemorrhage brought on by years of drinking. When you subscribe to Rolling Stone COLIN DEVENISH magazine. (April 30, 2003)

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