Jack Kerouac Novel Jack Kerouac Novel Last Edited: 23rd March, 2015 This essay has been submitted by a student. This is not an example of the work written by our professional essay writers. Jack Kerouac was an innovative storyteller in literature during the mid-twentieth century (Biographical). His second novel, On the Road, inspires and justifies people who wander around, hitchhiking from car to car, place to place. These wanderers are just lost in life and are on a search to find their inner free spirit (Maerz). This novel is one of living life to the fullest, n exceptions and no excuses. It's full of experience and adventure; always being on the road (Hasappi). On the Road was published in 1957 and caused much discussion. Kerouac once said, “I got sick and tired of the conventional English which seemed to me to be so ironbound in its rules, so inadmissible with reference to the actual format of my mind... If you don't stick to what you first thought, and to the words the thought brought, what's the sense of bothering with it anyway...?” (Miller 2049).

Kerouac's backbone to this novel was the idea of “The New Vision” which introduced concepts that later became the start of the Beat movement. Kerouac's creativeness in writing and his inspirations made him a key element of the Beat Generation. Kerouac's search for an American identity is evident throughout his journeys in On the Road. Critic Dan Jacobson believes that Kerouac's On the Road is intriguing; not for its content, but for its writing style. The simplicity and open mindedness is attractive, not the adventures and craziness (Nyren 267). Kerouac believed in having a loose and lyrical formation of writing (Hicks). He improvised like jazz musicians do, writing whatever came to mind without revision (Hicks). Kerouac thought revision was somehow lying (Lelyveld). He called his own writing style “spontaneous prose” (Miller 2049). He didn't select his words or limit himself of anything. He let his mind run free and wrote things down exactly as they came to him (2049). His book takes on similar qualities as jazz; looking for somewhere to be.

He would listen to jazz and take it as an inspiration. Just like a jazz musician takes in a deep breath and plays high and low notes, Kerouac would breath and write on the spot. If he messed up, so be it because that was the flow of thinking. A loving critic of Kerouac's, Gilbert Millstein brought him immediate attention by stating that Kerouac has produced “some of the most original work being done in this country. It is a historic occasion... the exposure of an authentic work of art” (Biographical). Kerouac's style was so unique that he even wrote an outlined paper of the process of free association called “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (Biographical). He used many real life people as the characters in his novels. His writing revolved around his and his friends' experiences (Miller 2049-50). “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time,” was thought and written by Kerouac (Lelyveld). On the Road is full of difficulty and simplicity according to the critic Phoebe Adams (Nyren 266).

On the Road not only describes Kerouac's own behaviors and attitudes rejecting American values, but allows him to observe America (Jack Kerouac). This book is based on the character Red Moultrie (Neal Cassady in real life) and his journey with Sal Paradise (Kerouac) searching for self in America (Watson 130). Almost all of Kerouac's works were autobiographical. His outlook on life was religious and tragic (Asher). According to John Brooks from the New York Times, Kerouac tends to overwrite. However, he uses a truthful thematic framework in his works. Kerouac allows the flow of life to lead him (Nyren 266). Cassady and Kerouac's drug-induced car rides across America were the inspiration for On the Road. The narrator, Sal Paradise's style describes a lifestyle based on alcohol, beauty, jazz, sex, drugs, and mysticism. The key influence for the novel was a search for spiritual liberation (Jack). There is little fiction in his novels as most of Kerouac's friends are recognizable in his work (Lelyveld).

Kerouac's attempt to create a book based on American Realism was overtaken by personal metaphors and writing tools (Watson 130). The mid-twentieth century in America was culturally re-awakened by Kerouac and his friends through literature, painting, music, and society (Hicks). On the Road is Kerouac's story about his search for an ideal way of life to fulfill the romantic individualism. He wants to get away from the conformity of post-World War II life in America. Life on the road was a better idea to him than settling down for his search for identity (Biographical). One of his most important themes of the novel is man's struggle as a lost post war youth trying to get somewhere in life (Nyren 266). Kerouac found his identity and got somewhere in life by becoming an innovative writer and a contributor to the Beat Generation. In 1944, Kerouac and his group of Beat originators, Ginsberg, Carr, and Burroughs, began to envision “The New Vision.” This idea was full of youth and creating a sense of a new civilization.

These men were inspired by books that were suggested by their mentor Burroughs such as Yeats's A Vision, Kafka's The Trial, Camus's The Stranger, and many others. The New Vision embodied creativity over morality, and seeing life from different perspectives. Two main beliefs were “Uncensored self-expression is the seed of creativity,” and “The artist's consciousness is expanded through non-rational means: derangement of the senses, via drugs, dreams, hallucinatory states, and visions” (Watson 38-40). The phrase the “Beat Generation” was coined when kerouac said, “So I guess you might say we're a beat generation” in a conversation with John Clellon Holmes (Watson 3). The word “beat” originally meant poor, down and out, dead-beat, and sad. It also described people who slept in subways. Now that word is stretching to include people who do not sleep in subways and have new gestures and new attitudes (Miller 2054). “Beat” stood for a person who wore a black beret, goatee, and black jeans or tights. “Beatniks” played bongos, drums, drank, and smoked marijuana.

They were the ones to use words like “Cool,” “Dig,” and “Crazy” (Watson 4). Kerouac became a representative for this generation aside from his job as a writer (Miller 2050). San Francisco and New York were originally regarded to as Beat movement towns with a bohemian feel. As the 1960's came along, this movement spread among the entire nation (Lelyveld). As one of the largest cultural movements, the Beat Generation spread from the literary world to the rest of the world. It's based on the individual and originality; throwing out the old rules and bringing in a new sense of living life (Crystal). The Beat Generation was strong, but only lasted a few years as the hippies were starting to emerge in the 1960's. Kerouac was opposed to the hippie movement and supported the war in Vietnam (npr). The Beat Generation was marked by interests in spiritual and inner freedon, and the reality of life (Watson 5). Kerouac revived the American romantic spirit of the individualism.

It was to full of the idea to fully live in the present and live an authentic and essential life (Hicks). On the Road's detailed experience of drugs and “joyriding” disturbed reviewers in the repressive McCarthy era (Biographical). During the 1950's, literary critics didn't take Kerouac or his work seriously and they objected to the Beat “fad.” They started to make fun of his work with hurt him tremendously (Jack Kerouac). Controversy on the novel came immediately after publication. The Saturday Review called the novel a “dizzy travelogue,” and others criticized the “uncouth” characters. The controversy came because of the shift in consciousness the novel brought. Because of this disturbance, Kerouac's achievements as a writer and Beat leader were not noticed (Biographical). Literary critics didn't see Kerouac's achievements as admirable (Lelyveld). As the Beat Generation emerged, critics paid less and less attention to Kerouac as a writer (Biographical). Only a few of the reviews were good ones, but this didn't stop Kerouac from becoming known because of all the publicity (npr).

Even though Kerouac has been attacked tremendously by critics who ignore his writing style and theme, he is still widely read today (Biographical). Many people relate and still read On the Road because Kerouac's life is like many out there in the world. While his novel portrayed him as a traveler and wanderer who was full of life, his private life was full of darkness and self-destruction. Kerouac's novel is still influential today because there are always going to be lost souls who trek across America to find something, anything. Kerouac is a lyrical inspiration to many musicians such as Bob Dylan and Aerosmith. His stories of travel and adventure relate to those of the rock ‘n' roll lifestyle. Rockstars go from town to town giving concerts, partying, and doing drugs (Maerz). Kerouac was born in 1922 to a working class, Catholic family. His parents were French-Canadian and he lived an average teenagers life (Hicks). He married twice and had an affair once, but each ended within a few months (Jack). Once Kerouac started to go downhill, he portrayed his misery to the world through his art and drinking habit (Jack Kerouac).

Even though Kerouac experimented a lot with drugs, he eventually became addicted to Benzedrine and alcohol (Jack). He couldn't deal with the fame and criticism so he resorted to alcohol. This lead him to his grave in 1969 (npr). Kerouac rejected middle-class American values and rebelled against the conformity of society (Lelyveld). The young generation of the 1950's saw America as oppressive and strict. Because of this, On the Road became a huge hit and a basic book to read for the youth in 1957. He wished to collect all his works into one single piece of work later in life and plug in real names and places (Hicks). Only hipsters, writers, and mystics truly understood the ways of his work at the time of publication (Jack). As Jess Ritter said in The Vonnegut Statement, “The greatest psychic migration of American youth since World War II can be charted by the novels they read and the novelists whose reputations they created... Kerouac and the Beats represent the psychic revolt of the 1950's” (Biographical).

The Essay: Stars in Stripes | The Independent Lifestyle The Essay: Stars in Stripes What do Audrey Hepburn, Lee Marvin, Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andy Warhol and Jean Paul Gaultier have in common? All have championed the cause of the Breton T-shirt. Trever Adams considers the `outsider' appeal of a fashion staple Friday 9 July 1999 23:02 BST Click to follow Indy Lifestyle Online Fashionable sailor outfit, Saint Tropez" reads the caption to a photograph of a young man wearing a Breton T-shirt, accessorised with a simple beret, and smoking a pipe in Adam magazine, August 1934. "Unfortunately," states the accompanying article, "we have encountered more than one man dressed like this on the Riviera. We urgently ask our friends to see that all grotesque individuals of this type vanish immediately." The editorial would prove to be in vain. A sea-change was taking place in French fashion and society, and it would propel the Breton T-shirt from undistinguished workwear to iconic fashion item. By the Thirties, Saint Tropez and the other Riviera resorts were enjoying a new, second wave of popularity.

In the 19th century they had grown rich on their winter season, when the monied classes descended from across Europe to enjoy the mild climate in the opulent surroundings of grand hotels and villas. In the new century, fashion leader Coco Chanel began a cult of sun worship, which rapidly took off, spurred on by the spread of the railways and roads to previously inaccessible seaside resorts. A new, summer season was born. It was Chanel too who would prove to be instrumental in major changes to the way people dressed. She rejected the flummery of the belle epoque for the simple and the unstructured, drawing on traditional, working-class clothes and sportswear. It is said that while she was walking along the beach in Deauville with her lover and backer, Arthur "Le Boy" Capel, she had one of her greatest moments of inspiration. Borrowing his jersey sweater against the cold, she realised that, with a few snips of her cutter's scissors, it could be adapted as a chic, simple woman's top.

On the French Riviera, as American and European socialites mixed in their Thirties playground, the new style coalesced, clothes which were comfortable and appropriate to location, activity and climate - and not restricted by etiquette. It was "the product," writes Farid Chenoune in A History of Men's Fashion (Flammarion, 1993), "of rapid, multiple borrowings from fishermen's gear, sailors' uniforms, sports clothing and colonial dress, both military and civilian." Sailor outfits were particularly popular: their smocks, tunic-like garments in red or blue cotton with a V-neck that opened squarely on to the shoulder and back, worn over - or sometimes replaced by - the low-necked striped jersey with notched armholes that is the Breton T-shirt. This was typically worn tucked into duck bell- bottom trousers, which were belted with a silk sash and completed by long-laced espadrilles knotted above the ankle. A more sophisticated Thirties sailor style was the adoption of the Breton T-shirt worn with a cravat, beneath a blazer, over shorts and deck shoes, and topped off with a peaked naval cap.

A generation later, the Breton T-shirt had transmuted again. It survived the vagaries of the Second World War and re-emerged as a badge of avant- gardism and youth rebellion in the intellectual ferment of post-Liberation Paris. This was where Jean-Paul Sartre was expounding a new philosophy called existentialism in the bars of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and a new wave of artists were taking to the stage, from radical film-maker Jean Cocteau to actress and jazz icon Juliette Greco (who sang "Rien ne sera comme avant a Saint Germain des Pres"). Within a decade such figures, and the Saint-Germain-des-Pres "scene", had managed to attract a cult following worldwide. "A Frenchman in 1947," writes Andre Maurois in The Women of Paris (The Bodley Head, 1954), "could not arrive in New York, Rio, Tokyo or Bogota without being immediately asked by journalists, `What about Jean-Paul Sartre? And Juliette Greco?

And the Tabou?'" During the Occupation, Saint-Germain-des-Pres had been a Resistance stronghold; post-war it became a magnet for young people who refused to go back to the adult-oriented pre-war conformity. "All those young people read Jean- Paul Sartre and Albert Camus," writes Maurois. "They loved the poets and the philosophers." Their meeting place became a club called Tabou. The apocryphal story of the club's birth is that one night Juliette Greco had hung her coat on some railings in the Rue Dauphine but it had fallen off, and when she went to retrieve it she discovered a narrow stairway leading down to a former cellar bar. Together with her group of friends they rented the space and, on 11 April 1947, the Club du Tabou opened. Again a particular look came together here: "The young men with thick hair low over their foreheads," writes Maurois. "The girls with long hair down their backs. A lot of people wanted to see them," he adds.

"Juliette, with her deep, grave voice, slammed the door in the faces of those people who did not please her." Exclusivity added to the club's attraction. Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and publisher Gaston Gallimard became regulars. Tabou's reputation grew. It inspired other, similar cellar "nightclubs": the Lorient, the Mephisto, the Saint-Germain-des-Pres Club, Vieux-Colombier and Rose Rouge. In many ways, this was the birth of youth culture as we now understand it.

Maurois explains that the new, young women club regulars "wore their hair long because they could not afford to go to the hairdressers; they wore men's trousers because they could not afford stockings; they wore black jerseys with rolled-collars because they could not afford to send light-coloured woollens to the cleaners; they looked like `an unknown woman from the Seine' because they were hungry and sad." Farid Chenoune adds, "Sartorial slovenliness - worn trousers, crumpled corduroy, dirty shirts, torn sweaters, sagging socks, unshined shoes - became part of a street-level existentialism." Le Monde's fashion writer criticised the "dirty sloppiness of Sartre-followers". Saint-Germain fashion fused run-of-the-mill middle-class wear - loose, hand-knitted sweaters and scarves, corduroy jackets and trousers, whatever was available despite the shortages - with US army surplus and other items obtained from GIs, such as blue jeans.

Saint-Germain was where the first wide-cuffed black jeans, ski pants, dark truckers' sweaters with zippers and, of course, black turtleneck sweaters, all first appeared. These young existentialists also adopted their own version of the American T-shirt which was then starting to appear: the Breton T-shirt. The look is captured in a feature entitled "French High Life in a Low Cellar, French Teen-Agers Swing Out at the Club Lorient", in The Picture Post of 13 March, 1948. Photographs by Joe Pazen show a variety of girls in striped tops - V-necked, turtle-necked and crew-necked with three-quarter-length sleeves, teamed with ski pants, wide plaid skirts and matching socks. Across the West, versions of the existentialist philosophy and look were adopted and adapted. In Britain the former was popularised through Colin Wilson's best-selling 1956 study of alienation, The Outsider. In the latter, actors such as Juliette Greco - who in addition to her singing career was a fixture of the films of Cocteau and Marcello Mastorianni - inspired the style of the early Modernists in Britain.

"We never smoked but we would light up a Gauloise just to be seen with it," remembers shoe designer Johnny Moke in Mods by Richard Barnes (Eel Pie Publishing). "We all got into the French films and magazines, but [my friend] Les went berserk. He used to wear a striped jumper and beret and eat garlic and everything. He started to learn French. We saw him once sitting in the Aldgate Wimpy holding up a copy of Le Soir. When we went in and joined him we saw that he was really reading the Sunday Pictorial which he had concealed between the middle pages. It was all a pose. There was even a time when we saw him walking around wearing his beret and a striped jumper and carrying a loaf of French bread under his arm." In the US the beat movement emerged, which came with an array of beatnik gear: beards, turtlenecks, berets, bongos.

By 1960 the look was already being satirised in MAD magazine, while the 6 May, 1962 issue of pin-up magazine Scamp ran a photo-story entitled "One Night with a Beatchick", following Joannie Grant, wearing an open-to-the-navel striped Breton top and side-knotted neckerchief, on a journey through "the LA beat section", a jaunt which takes them into an existentialist bookshop, a modern poetry reading and ends in a typical espresso coffee house, all part of the nightly "scene" with a " beatchick". The Breton T-shirt was a key strand in the nascent T-shirt culture. In the American version it was white, an article of clothing appropriated from US forces' attire. In the film The Wild One (1953), which was banned in Britain until 1968, it is Marlon Brando's white T-shirt with the cigarette packet rolled up in one sleeve which is now seen as iconic, but co-star Lee Marvin's character, wearing the striped Breton-style T-shirt, had its own emotive power at the time, and in many ways his was the darker character.

Both Brando, who, incidentally, was close to Juliette Greco at this time, and Marvin play outsiders, rebels, who ride into town on their bikes, kicking up dust in the face of the establishment and conservative America in general. Producer Stanley Kramer had been inspired by an article in Harper's on the 1947 take-over of the town of Hollister by 4,000 bikers. As Yves Lavigne writes in Hell's Angels, "He saw the outlaw biker as America's last individualist, a motorised bohemian ... Kramer helped make outlaw bikers, epitomised in real life by the Hell's Angels, the symbol of rebellion for two generations." Legendary biker Frank Sadilek, inspired by the film, drove to Hollywood to buy the blue-and-yellow striped, long-sleeved T-shirt that Marvin wore in the movie, and became president of the Hell's Angels San Francisco chapter from 1955 to 1962. His appearance, writes Lavigne, established the archetypal biker look: the gold earring, the clip-on nose ring, purple- dyed beard and that T-shirt which he would wear until it fell to pieces.

A uniquely American variation on the striped T-shirt at this time, the prison uniform, also signified the outsider in the public's mind. The title track of the Elvis Presley film Jailhouse Rock (1957) features Elvis in striped prison outfit in a sequence often held up as the pinnacle of rock'n'roll choreography: it was a heady combination of outlaw music and styling at this early date in his career. Hollywood began its love affair with France in the mid-Fifties. In many ways this flurry of films harked back to the looks and fashions of the Thirties. Costume designer Edith Head ensured that Alfred Hitchcock's comedy-thriller To Catch A Thief (1955) opened with Cary Grant's hero- of-the-Resistance-come-retired-cat-burglar wearing a Breton-style long- sleeved T-shirt teamed with a red and white polka-dot cravat and grey trousers.

In the 1956 musical Funny Face - which manages to rhyme Sartre with Montmartre - Hollywood went so far as to recreate the Paris cellar clubs and dressed Audrey Hepburn in a black turtleneck sweater and ski pants - plus, of course, a Breton T-shirt. In America in the mid-Sixties, the Breton T-shirt became a favourite of the artist Andy Warhol. A decade earlier, Picasso - another painter who intuitively understood the power and significance of public image - was famously photographed wearing the same item. A link between Warhol and the post-war beats can be found in Edie, by Jean Stein and George Plimpton (Jonathan Cape, 1982), a biography of troubled, drug-addict Warhol actress Edie Sedgwick. In it, Factory stalwart Danny Fields talks about Ondine, the star of several Warhol movies and the subject of Warhol's novel, A. "Ondine was around a lot at this period, always ready for some Factory party. He was one of the first great Mole People - those who moved through a transitional stage from beatnik into a more stylised and campy version.

We called them Mole People because they only seemed to come out at night; they all wore black - black turtlenecks, pants. Some leather. Their skins were light, and they were very intense. A lot of them were into dance. A sort of severe kind of night-time creative craziness. Ondine came out of that." On display at the exhibition "The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion" at the Barbican last year, in the section "Silver Factory Style", were Warhol's jacket, over his blue and white striped Breton T-shirt, with a pair of black jeans and his Centenari & Zenelli "Beetle Boots"."Around 1963," explained the accompanying note, "Andy Warhol invented a new personal style. As he shifted his focus to painting, film-making and the production of rock music and happenings, his look included leather jackets, jeans, boots, sunglasses and a silver-sprayed wig." Warhol's clothes at this time represent a merging of European outsider and American outlaw figures.

In Billy Name - Stills From the Warhol Films by Debra Miller (Prestel, 1994), the photographer Name tells Miller that "all the significant Factory regulars in 1965 had the same red-and- white striped shirt". It is the classic Breton, however, which best encapsulates the look of Warhol, and of Edie Sedgwick, whom Warhol met in 1965 at a party given by the producer Lester Persky. Poet and art critic Rene Ricard recalls in Edie, "Edie and Andy! You should have seen them. But you did see them! Both wearing the same sort of thing - boat-neck, striped T-shirts. Andy wore black corduroy jeans, banana-shaped high-heeled boots. Edie was pasted up to look just like him - but looking so good! The T-shirt. The black stockings. Long earrings. Just the most devastating, ravishing beauty." In May 1965 Warhol filmed Kitchen, starring Edie, Rene Ricard and Roger Trudeau.

The film - a crude psychodrama shot on a single set with Edie and several half-dressed studs - was intended as a vehicle for Sedgwick, and throughout she is dressed in the trademark Breton and black tights. This look has remained a shorthand for Warhol's Sixties style, but it was almost instantly iconic. The pop artist Roy Lichtenstein recalls in Edie, "My wife Dorothy and I went to a Hallowe'en costume party given by the painter Adele Weber, dressed as Andy Warhol and Edie ... Andy does exactly what I don't do. He was his art. His studio was his art, and a lot of other people." Lou Reed and John Cale of the Velvet Underground, a group which was initially styled and produced by Warhol, were also regularly photographed wearing Breton T-shirts. The band had met Warhol in 1965 following an appearance at Cafe Bizarre. He had invited them to join The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a performance mixture of music, films, light shows and dancing. It was Warhol who suggested adding the actress/singer Nico to the band's line- up.

A decade later, in 1976, the Velvet Underground were to be felt as one of the key influences on the birth of punk rock in Britain, and the Breton T-shirt followed the music, entering into another subculture of outsiders, in particular in the look of pre-Gothic Siouxsie of Siouxsie and the Banshees, whose styling mixed Juliette Greco with pre-war Berlin. Edie Sedgwick's final celluloid outing for Warhol was Ciao! Manhattan (1971), a sort of thriller shot in black and white and set in New York, in the Sixties, intercut with a contemporary, colour study of a desperate Edie living out her last days in California, beneath a tent that is held over a drained swimming pool. In this temporary home, Edie is surrounded by objects and photos from her happier past, including a Breton T-shirt, which spills over from an open drawer. Shortly after this film was shot, Edie Sedgwick died, aged 28. By then Andy Warhol had moved on, successfully, to a new phase and a new look.

Back in Europe, the Breton T-shirt has once more been reclaimed and reinvented in the modern era and again it retains an outsider status. In 1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder filmed a version of Jean Genet's 1953 novel Querelle de Brest which chronicled the exploits of seductive homosexual sailor and cunning murderer George Querelle in Brittany's largest naval port. In Querelle, the dreamlike Fassbinder version, the late Brad Davis (Midnight Express) takes the title role, dressed in Breton-T shirt, long coat and sailor's cap. The film has been described by Gary Morris in Bright Lights Film Journal as a "kitschy wonderland of fetishized homosexual romance, cluttered with archetypal gay imagery from leather men to sailors to a tortured fag hag played by Jeanne Moreau." An artistic spin on the Breton T-shirt came a few years after Querelle in the highly stylised work of French photographer-artists Pierre et Gilles. In pictures such as Helen et Stephane (1990), they play with the stereotypical perception of the French as young lovers in berets and Breton T-shirts.

In 1990 Pierre et Gilles produced, for a book cover, a portrait of the fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier wearing a Breton T-shirt and holding a bunch of daisies, against a background of blue sky and a gilt Eiffel Tower, all within a ring of daisies. Gaultier has said, "I would very much like to live in a world of the kind Pierre et Gilles see, and to be the way they have portrayed me. They are photographers of an especially uncommon kind: true artists without commercial constraints, with a universe entirely their own." Their picture of Gaultier has become the most celebrated image of him. A version of this T-shirt look is seen again with his perfume Le Male, which was launched in 1993 and comes in a bottle shaped as a muscular torso clad in a Breton T-shirt. His previous, women's scent, JPG, was bottled within a corseted female form shaped "in memory of his well-endowed grandmother", and comes in a casing which looks like a tin can, evoking Warhol's pop-art soup cans.

For Gaultier, the Breton T-shirt has become a trademark in his development of the perfect public pop persona, coupled with the kilt, Doc Marten's and bleached blond hair. In many ways, he is like Asterix - cartoonlike, rebellious. And of course the province of Gaul, which was such a thorn in Caesar's side, was essentially modern- day Brittany, home of the Breton T-shirt. In a sense Gaultier has succeeded in his desire to live like that Pierre et Gilles picture. He is outrageous, but acceptable as only a true pop icon can be, because the world now expects and wants him to be the image he presents - like Warhol. In a diary entry from 26 March, 1985 Warhol writes, "When I wear my Stephen Sprouse jackets, I think I finally look like people want Warhol to look ... " As a contemporary aside, Gaultier's recent magazine advertisements featured an illustration of two women: in the foreground Juliette Greco, and in the background, Audrey Hepburn. The story comes full circle.

The Breton T-shirt can be worn with no regard or knowledge of its history or status or it can be worn precisely with the intention of imbuing the wearer with the associations of all those who have worn it before. It is both a cliched way of "doing French" and a garment that is still as everyday French as a packet of Gauloise or Gitanes, with which, in terms of iconography, it has much in common - all manage to retain their status despite mass production. The Breton T-shirt remains a badge of the outsider despite also being available in various guises and cuts by a host of fashion designers, from Paul Smith (for whom the top has remained a collection staple) to Agnes B, and by mail order to the wearers of catalogue-casuals. It crosses gender and sexuality, and it continues to step from deck to dock, from studio to street. A version of this article first appeared in `Influence'.

For details write to `Influence', Burbage House, 83 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3BS More about: Berkeley | Winston Burton Winston Burton IN SEARCH OF JIMI HENDRIX By Winston Burton Should we erect a statue of Jimi Hendrix in Berkeley, California? Whaddaya think? In September, 1967 I started my freshman year at Philadelphia Community College where I proceeded to major in “Jimi Hendrix”. Together with a group of friends, I spent that first semester getting high, cutting classes and listening to music. I went from a “B” student, Motown and button down shirts in high school – to bell bottoms, headbands and Jimi, in a blink of an eye (4F’s and an I to be exact)! In those days there was an active military draft and I didn’t realize until later that if you flunked out of school, and lost your college deferment, more than likely you were headed for Viet Nam. I had stumbled on Jimi that summer. I was the only person I knew, and surely the first in my neighborhood to have a copy of Jimi’s debut album, “Are You Experienced”.

A friend of mine worked at a local “soul” station (WDAS), and used to give me newly released records to screen before they were played on the air. To this day WDAS probably still hasn’t played a Hendrix tune! Jimi got very little, if any, air time on “black” radio stations even though he was a gifted blues player, and toured with funk bands like Sam & Dave, Little Richard, and the Isley Brothers. When me and my friends, Arnie and Arnold, first heard that Hendrix album it was all over! We had grown up with the Stylistics, Delfonics, and Temptations. We were now listening to Bob Dylan, and even Frank Zappa, but we had never heard any thing like Jimi before. Jazz was the teacher, funk is the preacher, and Jimi combined it all with his psychedelic guitar licks, and took us to another world. I packed that precious album from house to house and party to party turning on everyone I knew, and couldn’t believe that some folks didn’t get it!

For me, 1967 to 1968 was a period of music, indulgence, and promiscuity; a slice of time, after birth control pills and before AIDS. It was a time of free-speech, free-love and free-fall. People called us Hippies! Some mistakenly called us Beatniks. We were not Beatniks, nor the children of Beatniks. We were more like their younger brothers and sisters. To us, Beatniks liked to wear berets, dress down, listen to poets, folk music, bongos, drink espresso, and give a one-finger salute to society. We liked our hair long, our music loud, our clothes louder, drank Red Mountain wine, and gave a two-finger salute. Jimi was our high priest. The term “Heavy Metal” came from someone describing Jimi’s sound, “like heavy pieces of metal falling from the sky.” Forget Eric Clapton, Van Halen, and The Who? Springsteen the Boss? They were all good, but Jimi is arguably the best of all time. He was a virtuoso on his instrument, and is still without peer.

A poet who wrote his own lyrics and the greatest showman on stage I ever saw. He played guitar behind his back, between his legs, with his teeth and even burned the damn thing on stage. Imagine all that, and remember Jimi was only on the scene for four years. He started playing when he was 15, and played guitar for only 12 years before he died at 27. My second semester in school I was able to raise my grades dramatically (2C’s, 3D’s) and continue to avoid the draft. There was a rumor going around that Jimi Hendrix was coming to town to play at the Electric Factory. It turned out to be true. The Electric Factory used to be an actual factory in downtown Philadelphia. It was a large but intimate open space with a single stage and was painted in psychedelic colors. There were no chairs, tables or kitchen, and they didn’t sell alcohol. You stood, sat or lay on the concrete floor. People went there for one reason – to hear music loud, and in your face. I had been there several times to see Vanilla Fudge, Woody’s Truck Stop, The Chambers Brothers, and my favorite band, Lothar and the Hand People.

Instead of security guards there were about 15 large guys dressed in Karate uniforms. They were all bald-headed and walked around in bare feet. There were very few disturbances at the Factory, no matter how loaded the crowd Back then you didn’t get tickets beforehand at Ticket Master or on-line, you just showed up – first come, first served. They would pack you in like sardines if they had to. This was a time when you and your dog could still ride in the back of pick-up trucks, most cars didn’t have headrests, and you could still smoke in maternity wards. They didn’t worry much about occupancy codes or Fire Marshalls. The night of the show, Arnie had a date with a girl named Ellie who hooked me up on a blind date. Ellie had been talking about her girl friend for awhile and I was looking forward to meeting her. When I finally met Georgette I was pleasantly surprised. She was cute, shapely, and plus she had her own car. We headed off to the show, making a momentary stop at a friends house on the way to get nice. Believe it or not the line to get in wasn’t that long.

This was before Jimi played the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock, where the rest of the country finally caught on to the phenomenon. The atmosphere inside the Electric Factory was truly electric. With the flashing strobe lights, kaleidoscopes, day glow paint and huge speaker’s blaring, it was like an indoor thunderstorm, without the rain. And then Jimi appeared. I don’t remember the day, time, what opening acts there were, and only vaguely what Jimi was wearing. (Those who say they remember everything that happened in the sixties weren’t really there!) I do remember that he had silk scarves tied around everywhere – his head, his neck, his waist, his arms, even his legs. When he finally started tuning up on stage the Factory got even more electric. Jimi tuning up was as good as some bands whole show. The crowd started going wild! People were screaming out different songs they wanted to hear. Jimi stepped to the microphone and said, “I know what I’m gonna play,” and launched right into Purple Haze! When Jimi first came on stage, Georgette, Arnie, Ellie, Arnold and I were sitting in front.

As he started to play we all stood up to avoid being stomped. In that first song Jimi pulled out all the stops. He was playing behind his back, between his legs, with his teeth, and it looked like sparks were leaping off of his guitar strings. With those huge Marshall Speakers staring straight at us it sounded as if there were 10 people on stage rather than three (Mitch Mitchell was on drums and Noel Redding on bass). The next thing I knew someone was kicking me in my side with a bare foot. I looked up to see a huge guy, with a bald head and karate suit on. I said, “Man are you crazy, I’m trying to dig the show”. He said, “The show’s been over for an hour – you got to go.” I looked around and there were about ten people still there, lying on the floor next to me, where hundreds had been earlier. My friends, Arnie and Arnold, were also equally being jostled about while Georgette and Ellie were nowhere to be found. Don’t ask me what happened! A lifetime’s worth of anticipation over in ten minutes. Maybe I kissed the sky!

But I never saw Jimi Hendrix live or Georgette again. As the months went by I was becoming more and more politically aware. My older brother got me involved in the civil rights and the anti-war movement. I went to demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, be-ins and love-ins. Meanwhile, back in my old neighborhood in West Philadelphia, the brothers that weren’t being sent to Viet Nam were turning on, tuning in and dropping out. We went from drinking Thunderbird and singing doo–wop songs on the corner to Marvin Gay, Curtis Mayfield, The Last Poets, and smoking Acapulco Gold. Because of my newly found political consciousness and activities, my grades started falling again and I realized it was time to leave. So with the draft board in full pursuit, I packed up my fringe jacket, moccasins, flowered shirts, jeans, bell bottoms and LP’s and headed for California. I loaded up my pimped out Chevy van, complete with milk crate shelves, AM radio, 8 track tape player, organic air conditioner, and said goodbye to Philadelphia. Some friends said I should fly to California, it’s quicker and it’s easier.

I said you can’t find Mecca on an airplane; you’ve got to drive for the experience. After two weeks of driving, one blown engine, nothing on the radio, and 3,000 miles, I was standing on the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were still going strong. Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi were still alive, and I was standing in the middle of the summer of love! Thirty seven years later, my freak flag long retired, I was lounging on a leather couch in my house in Berkeley listening (rocking) to Jimi Hendrix. It was that same album, “Are You Experienced” that I had gotten from WDAS many years ago and never returned. Somehow it had survived several trips across the country, and years of turmoil in between, with only a few scratches. It was the first day of a well deserved three-week vacation and I’m wondering what I should do. My wife walks in and says, “Could you turn that down”. “It’s already turned down”, I respond.

A fan of Hendrix herself, she asked, “Do you still get off on Jimi like you use to, now that you don’t get high anymore?” “After the first time you get high you’re always high, you’re changed, and you’re never the same. At least now I understand the lyrics,” I told her. “I know what we should do on vacation – let’s find Jimi Hendrix”. She said, “What does that mean”. I answered, “I don’t know.” My wife said she heard there’s a Jimi Hendrix museum in Seattle, where he was born, and maybe we should fly there. I said you can’t find Jimi on an airplane; you have to drive for the experience. A week later we were headed north in our pimped out Volvo station wagon, complete with leather seats, climate control, CD’s, and DVD player in the back for our two kids. After two days of driving, nothing on the radio, and 900 miles, we arrived at the Experience Music Project (EMP) next door to the Space Needle. On the first floor there was a small theater that played a loop of Hendrix live concerts every hour.

One of the concerts featured Jimi playing in Berkeley, California. Upstairs there was a room full of Hendrix memorabilia from his childhood, concerts and recording sessions. There were glass cases with Jimi’s Jewelry, scarves and outfits he wore on stage. There was a wall with over 30 Hendrix album covers, even though he only made four records while he was alive. We stayed for several hours. I could’ve stayed all day but my kids were getting restless. We went looking for other signs of Jimi in the city. My wife came upon a used bookstore where she found an obscure copy of a book about Jimi’s life. Down the street from the bookstore we located the only statue of Jimi Hendrix in the city of Seattle. It was small, about five feet high and depicted Jimi playing guitar on his knees. It was near the local community college and seemed out of place, with no relevance to anything around it. The next day we drove to Renton, Washington, just outside of Seattle, to the cemetery where Jimi is buried. It was the only cemetery my kids have ever been to. There is a McDonald’s restaurant in the front.

Inside the cemetery, on a manicured open field, is an above ground tomb and the remains of James Marshall Hendrix. People had left flowers, messages, and even a half-smoked marijuana cigarette on top of Jimi’s tomb. My journey was over, and as we headed home to Berkeley I realized that my search for Jimi Hendrix ended by reminding me of my own mortality…my past, who I am and maybe where I’m going. Should we erect a statue of Jimi Hendrix in Berkeley? Jimi was only on the music scene for about four years, and one of his most famous and best known shows was recorded live at the Community Theater in downtown Berkeley. We should erect a statue of Jimi in front of the theater and put a kiosk next to it. People will visit from all over the world! We could sell-tie dye shirts, silk scarves, posters, and Jimi Hendrix CD’s, donating the money to the music programs at the local public schools. What do you think? Today, September 18th, 2005, is the 35th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death. Winston Burton

Question: What group of people wore berets and turtlenecks, played bongos, and smoked marijuana?
Answer: Beatniks