Soundtrack Saturday

Jack Kerouac's On The Road was finally turned into a film in 2012 by Walter Salles (who had previously made The Motorcycle Diaries, an account of a youthful Che Guevara based on Che's book about travelling round South America). Other people had shown an interest in making a film out of On The Road- Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights back in 1979 and attempted to start shooting in 1995 but abandoned it. Before that Kerouac himself wrote to Marlon Brando to do it. Brando never replied. There was interest from Gus van Sant with Ethan Hawke and Brad Pitt lined up to play the main roles but nothing got off the ground. 

Coppola eventually hired Salles and Salles started shooting in 2010 with Sam Riley as Sal Paradise/ Jack Kerouac and Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty/ Neal Cassady. Riley had played Ian Curtis in Control, the Joy Division film. Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen, Steve Buscemi, Kirsten Dunst and Elizabeth Moss were all singed up, so it's an all star 2010s cast. The film looks good, the cinematography is good, the world of late 1940s USA and Mexico looks authentic, the attention to period detail is spot on. It feels like the 1940s, you can almost smell the cigarettes and the sweat, the grease of the engines, the tarmac, the streets of Denver, Jack's boots...

Much of filming was down on the run, on location, Salles in a car with a handheld camera alongside the car with Sal/ Sam and Dean/ Garrett inside. Hedlund described it as 'guerrilla filming' which sounds like it should be exactly what On The Road needs on the big screen. Despite this, there's something at the heart of the film that never quite connects, it never catches fire in the way it should. Hedlund is great as Dean as is Kristen Stewart as Marylou. Sam Riley's Sal/ Jack is decent if too much on the sidelines at times, not involved enough. As a film it looks good and some of the scenes work but overall it's too polite and doesn't capture the energy of the novel. Still, I liked it enough when it came out- I went on my own to a daytime screening at the Cornerhouse and have seen it at least once since then on DVD. 

On The Road is probably unfilmable really- the narrative, such as it is, doesn't really fit the standard three act arc and a version of On The Road that was entirely Kerouacian would be an impressionistic arthouse blur of road, poetry and jazz. 

The soundtrack though is very enjoyable, nineteen tracks that work really well as a whole piece- which is the sign of a good soundtrack. There are some period pieces (Slim Gaillard, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Son House), some instrumentals by soundtrack composer Gustavo Santaolalla and two minutes of Kerouac reading, mumbling, from the novel. 

Sweet Sixteen is fifty seconds that opens the soundtrack, the cast singing in a car, the sound of rubber tyres on tarmac and engine noise, a scene setter for the album. 

Sweet Sixteen

Roman Candles is  one minute twenty two seconds of rattling percussion and jazz piano from Gustavo Santaolalla, named for Kerouac's famous description in the novel- 

'The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles'

Roman Candles

Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker made Salt Peanuts in 1941, a bebop tune written by Gillespie with the vocal interjection of the title surrounded by trumpet, piano, double bass and Parker's alto sax. Charlie Parker was one of the key inspirations for Kerouac's writing, the reason he got the legendary roll of paper to feed into the typewriter so he could type without having to stop. 

Salt Peanuts

Son House's Death Letter Blues is a postcard from the distant past, Delta blues sung and played by one who lived it. Heavy. 

Death Letter Blues

'I don't think anyone can hear me, can you hear me now?', Kerouac mutters at the start of this, before finding his rhythm, 'New York, 1949...' and starts narrating the road trip and the search for Dean's father which is what Dean/ Neal is looking for all the time- an absent alcoholic father- and the perpetual motion that is at the heart of the novel. As a result the two minutes of Kerouac reading from On The Road on the soundtrack are an affecting and effective way to end it. 

Jack Kerouac Reads On The Road

The film and the novel both end with the unfinished search and Jack's reflection, back in New Jersey...

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”