Happy 50th Birthday ON THE ROAD

Fifty years ago today, Jack Kerouac's autobiographical, stream-of-consciousness novel ON THE ROAD was published. Jack's book would not only define a generation, but enable future generations to define and refine their concepts of youth.

I first heard about Kerouac (1922-1969) two years after his death in 1971 while visiting Busch Gardens in the San Fernando Valley with my parents. At fifteen and a half, I had my learner's permit and was the designated driver. Two young fellows from Arizona were following Jack's advice to hit the road and had come to L.A. After spending the day drinking free beer with them, my father invited them to his Torrance nightclub where he introduced them to some "party girls." By all reports, they had an excellent time.

In the late 70's I started reading Kerouac. Like my mother, he was a French-Canadian Catholic and had grown up in a New England mill town. ON THE ROAD showed me how the autobiographical could become literature, how self-confession could be art. When I spent the most exciting and confusing summer of my life in 1981 San Francisco, reading Jack's THE SUBTERRANEANS, a story of an ill-fated romance set in North Beach, comforted me and gave direction to some of my own adventures. A year later, back at UCLA Graduate Film School, I would direct THE CONFESSION, an experimental video documentary where I told my version of my own romantic tragedy and intercut the testimony of several witnesses to the events. The video would eventually be included in an AFI national museum tour "Visions of U.S., the best of the 1st Annual Home Video Competition."

During the summer of 1985, I suffered from stress headaches and was prescribed codeine tablets that gave me constipation. As a result, I learned about the joys of eating lentils to clean out my colon. I didn't care for the way the codeine made me feel, so when I accompanied my parents on a trip to my mother's home town, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, I left the medication behind. But my headaches came with me. Despite the pain, I took a day trip to Lowell to see Kerouac's home town.

Kerouac wasn't as popular in 1985 as he is today. There were no historical markers, no "celebrity" maps, and no visible commercial exploitations of the Kerouac brand. All I had was my own research and a city map. But I found his grave, the home he grew up in, the church where he was baptized and eulogized, some of the bars he hung out in, and the clock at his high school where he made out with the real life "Maggie Cassidy."

For the rest of this month, I'll be publishing some of the photos I took that summer in Lowell. I haven't been back there or even to Rhode Island since then, and I'm certain the entire complexion of Lowell has changed to incorporate their golden boy. But here are some photos of Kerouac's Lowell before the deluge.