Birth Of The Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant Garde

by Lewis MacAdams

Overview

Miles Davis and Juliette Greco, Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan and William Burroughs.
What do all these people have in common? Fame, of course, and undeniable talent. But most of all, they were cool.
Birth of the Cool is a stunningly illustrated, brilliantly written cultural history of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s — the decades in which cool was born. From intimate interviews with cool icons like poet Allen Ginsberg, bop saxophonist Jackie McLean, and Living Theatre cofounder Judith Malina, award-winning journalist and poet Lewis MacAdams extracts the essence of cool. Taking us inside the most influential and experimental art movements of the twentieth century — from the Harlem jazz joints where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker invented bebop to the back room at Max's Kansas City when Andy Warhol was holding court to backstage at the Newport Folk Festival the night Bob Dylan went electric, from Surrealism to the Black Mountain School to Zen — MacAdams traces the evolution of cool from the very fringes of society to the mainstream.
Born of World War II, raised on atomic-age paranoia, cast out of the culture by the realities of racism and the insanity of the Cold War, cool is now, perversely, as conventional as you can get. Allen Ginsberg suited up for Gap ads. Volvo appropriated a phrase from Jack Kerouac's On the Road for its TV commercials. How one became the other is a terrific story, and it is presented here in a gorgeous package, rich with the coolest photographs of the black-and-white era from Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, and many others.
Drawing a direct line between Lester Young wearing his pork-pie hat and his crepe-sole shoes staring out his hotel window at Birdland to the author's three-year-old daughter saying "cool" while watching a Scooby-Doo cartoon at the cusp of a new millennium, Birth of the Cool is a cool book about a hot subject...maybe even the coolest book ever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780684813547
Publisher:	Free Press
Publication date:	02/05/2001
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Lewis MacAdams is the author of ten books of poetry, a film documentarian (What Happened to Kerouac?, Eric Bogosian's FunHouse, and the Battle of the Bards), and an award-winning writer for Rolling Stone, Actuel, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and L.A. Weekly, among others.

Interviews

An Interview with Lewis MacAdams

Q: As you note in your preface, as a kid in Texas you felt that it would be really "cool" to be in New York. When you finally got to New York, did you find it as cool as you had imagined? If so, what made it cool to you? Do you still feel that New York is the epitome of cool, and why?

A: I don't think I ever thought about the idea of cool in my life until I started writing Birth of the Cool. The thing that most drew me to New York was its energy and artists. What I didn't say in the introduction to Birth of the Cool was that after I'd stood at the one intersection in downtown Dallas that had buildings tall enough to form a canyon, imagining myself in New York, I'd go down the street to the Commerce Street News Stand, the one place in Dallas you could buy Lita Hornick's Kulchur Magazine with its writings by people like Frank O'Hara and LeRoi Jones. It was to be somebody like them that made me want to come to New York. And, of course, the city as it appeared in Allen Ginsberg's Howl. I love New York as much, if not more, now than I ever did; and it still seems to me, at age 56, an inexplicable accident that I don't own a house on Gramercy Park. I think cool is probably too personal a commitment to be applicable to a city.

Q: Is cool as a cultural force good or bad?

A: As a cultural force I think cool is a very good thing. I think it promotes alertness, discernment, respect for others, and a certain bemused quality that prevents one from becoming too fanatical. I would refer you to Robert Farris Thompson's pioneering essay "An Aesthetic of the Cool" cited in my book, that among Yoruba people in West Africa, cool drumming was considered more socially responsible than hot drumming because "cool" drummers were more concerned with the needs of the dancers than "hot" drummers were. On the other hand, as Marlene Kim Connor points out in her book What Is Cool? cool can definitely increase distancing and become an armor that inhibits feeling relationships.

Q: With so many artistic genres to cover, you are bound to have to leave out some important personalities. How did you choose the stories to tell? Who were the biggest names that you didn't mention, and why not?

A: I told the stories that interested me, and that illustrated some of the points I was making about cool. Some of the stories I knew -- or thought I knew -- before I wrote the book. Others I learned in the writing. I think maybe some people who read this book will know some (but not all) of the stories as well or better than me; but this book isn't written primarily for them. I set out to write a book for an audience who know few if any of these tales, for whom the characters I describe exist primarily in legend -- people my kids' ages, from nine to 29. When I was first trying to sell Birth of the Cool, I turned down one editor who saw this book as nostalgia. I guess I need to emphasize I never met the majority of the people I write about in Birth of the Cool. One of the reasons I wrote this book was that while reading David Halberstam's The Fifties I realized that I wanted to do a cultural history of the period that saw Allen Ginsberg as a more important and influential character than president Eisenhower. There's a lot of incredibly cool people whose stories aren't in this book, some for reasons of economy and focus. I had to eliminate most of the relationship between psychiatry and cool, and with it a lot I'd written about Karen Horney, the first great woman psychiatrist, and her late-life friendship relationship with D. T. Suzuki and Zen. I had to leave out a lot of great stuff about Wilhelm Reich and his influence on the Beats. I cut out an entire chapter which told the story of the battle to stop Robert Moses from putting a four-lane highway through Washington Square, the defining moment in the history of the Village Voice. That was painful. Probably the person I most regret not getting in there was filmmaker and Village voodoo queen Maya Deren. But what are you gonna do?

Q: Speaking of omissions, some reviewers have criticized your omission of women: Why are there so few women's stories in this book? And the women who do appear seem to do so because they are married or otherwise linked to someone cool (Juliet Greco, Joan Vollmer, and Nico, for instance) and do not themselves seem to be cool. Are women simply not cool?

A: I suspect that the main reason is that Birth of the Cool is so autobiographical. As a young artist (and most of the characters in Birth of the Cool are young artists), coming from a place where I never knew an artist, it was crucial for me to learn how to be one.... Without ever thinking about it, I was drawn to the aura and teachings of men, and those concerns tend to predominate in this book. But you ask another, more intriguing question: Can women be cool? Today, obviously anyone can be cool, because cool is part of the culture. But historically, cool has been almost a male biological imperative, a survival mechanism from the days of slavery. What makes you think I don't see Juliet Greco, Joan Vollmer, and Nico as cool? I'm sure that's why Miles Davis, William Burroughs, and Andy Warhol were attracted to them.

Q: Can you talk a little about the connection between what's cool and what's commercial? Many of the progenitors of cool were specifically trying to experiment and not to be tied to creating works that were popular. Is something commercial by definition not cool?

A: I think it's inaccurate to say that people like Billy Eckstine and Miles Davis weren't trying to sell their music. Or that Jackson Pollock didn't want to be famous. I don't believe cool is something money can buy. That's where I disagree with Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool. But you can definitely sell the idea of cool.

Q: Why did you decide to end the book with the moment when Bob Dylan goes electric? What happened after that? Who counts as cool in the '60s and '70s and beyond? Do you feel we've gained or lost "coolness" as a society?

A: I wanted to trace the idea of cool as it moved from the culture's cutting edge to its mainstream. Once cool was everywhere, I'd accomplished what I set out to do. The book ends with Dylan "going electric" for a bunch of reasons. I love Bob Dylan's music, and I wanted to see if I could write something fresh about an event -- his 1966 Newport Folk festival show -- that had already been saturated in printer's ink. I think that night Dylan relieved cool permanently of its coterie status and cool entered the mainstream. Dylan was cool even when he was rich and famous.

Q: Since the notion of cool is bound up with the notion of rebellion, it seems natural that the movement should become politicized in the Cold War, as you've explored in your discussion of the antiwar protests that Judith Malina, Dorothy Day, and others participated in. Was there a political element to cool before that point? And did it extend to anything other than antiwar activism? Racism, for example, was a major issue that the jazz and the bebop pioneers had to contend with -- did they deal with this issue in their art?

A: Cool is inherently political. Racism and the need to deal with it permeated every aspect of the birth of the cool; and I hope that my book makes it clear that racism killed Chano Pozo just like it killed Denzil Best, the drummer on the original Birth of the Cool sessions who OD'd on smack. I tell the story of Judith Malina and Dorothy Day's month in a jail cell together at the Women's House of D not only for the pleasure of celebrating some of the cool's heroes, but because it led to the creation of the Living Theater's play The Connection, which I think was the moment when cool expanded to include whites. I did point out one direct link between the antinuclear and civil rights movements: Just days after doing his time in the Tombs alongside the other war resisters, Bayard Rustin went down to Montgomery, Alabama, to help Martin Luther King organize the bus boycott.

Q: Being cool always seems to matter more when you are young. Do you think that's really true, and why is that?

A: I think everything matters more when you're young, when you're composing your trajectory. That's why I wanted to write about these particular characters at that particular time in their lives. I think that being cool really mattered to William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg when they were young.

Q: Do you think you've had a cool life?

A: Let me just finish doing the dishes so I can think. My feeling is that cool is always provisional. Cool is always bestowed by one's peers. I mean, it's not cool to do something because you think it's cool, right? Writing about the birth of the cool was probably the uncoolest thing I could have done.

Q: So, in ten words or less, what is your definition of cool?

A: Cool is a knowledge, a way of life.

Editorial Reviews

Jann Wenner editor and founder of Rolling Stone I've always been a fan of Lewis MacAdams's writing. He brings the eye and ear of a poet and the heart of a journalist to his work.

Kurt Loder MTV I loved this book, which is so redolent of the periods it covers. The history of hip, from the beginning. Lewis MacAdams connects all the dots — Monk and Miles, Burroughs and the Beats, Pollock and Sartre and Warhol and Dylan — in this vivid chronicle of the birth of a new postwar culture, high on art and Zen and heroin, too. The saga of the crazed jazz conguero Chano Pozo is worth the price of purchase alone.

Andrei Codrescu NPR commentator and author of Messiah The elusive quality of "cool" needed a poet to keep it still long enough to glimpse its awesome pervasiveness. For generations of Americans, "cool" has been the alternative to hypocrisy, the creative challenge to boredom, the hallmark of distinction. What began as the search for an attitude of defiance and beauty on the part of some Black musicians became a veritable "cool rush" in the last decades. Lewis MacAdams charts the complex flows of this cultural force from its underground roots to its present ubiquitousness. This is a cool book written by one of America's coolest poets.

Jim Carroll author of The Basketball Diaries This book's a dead-on hit. MacAdams combines a reporter's sense for research with a poet's voice. It's not just the facts he comes up with, but that the facts are so entertaining.

Rubin Martinez author of The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond and associate editor of Pacific News Service Birth of the Cool reads great, and connects dots that somehow have become disconnected over time. From the ethereal breath of jazz players to the inimitable gait of zoot suiters, from beatific bards searching for satori to pop musicians hiding their pain behind the baddest of shades, cool is not just highest sign of American signage; it is the very house of our being. Cool smashes the border between high and low art, cuts across the lines of race and class, provides a link between peoples and places with little in common other than their desire to reimagine themselves through style and create a language for that which cannot be spoken. MacAdams's cool prose — an epic yet restrained ode — delivers the aesthetic history of twentieth-century America and prepares us for the cool to come.

Robert Farris Thompson Professor of History of Art at Yale University The Doctor of Cool-ology's text is in and it's witty, informative, and rich — essential reading for anyone following American popular culture.

From the Publisher

What is cool? Is cool about swagger? Aloofness? Not giving a damn? Is it about being good and knowing it? Is it personified by dark glasses and leather jackets? These are the questions posed by Lewis MacAdams in Birth of the Cool, a glorious examination of the culture of cool and what it has meant in the latter half of the 20th century. In order to answer these questions -- and in essence, articulate the indefinable -- MacAdams, a seasoned journalist and poet, studies icons of cool such as Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Judith Malina, and Jack Kerouac.

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