Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness is a 1997 spoken word tribute album performed by various artists in tribute to late beat poet Jack Kerouac. Kerouac died at the age of 47 from cirrhosis of the liver, brought on by excessive alcohol consumption . The star-filled album features performances of Kerouac's work often backed to music. The music is of a variety of styles due to the large amount of performers contributing to the album. Notable performers include: Michael Stipe, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Depp and Patti Smith amongst others. Ginsberg's performance of "The Brooklyn Bridge Blues" is missing the final tenth chorus. This was due to a faxing machine error which stuck the last pages together when Ginsberg was faxed the lyrics. The final chorus is read by Eric Andersen instead, recorded on a DAT recorder from the Brooklyn Bridge.
Read more about Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness: Track Listing, Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words kicks, joy and/or darkness:
“The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
“Work is an essential part of being alive. Your work is your identity. It tells you who you are. It’s gotten so abstract. People don’t work for the sake of working. They’re working for a car, a new house, or a vacation. It’s not the work itself that’s important to them. There’s such a joy in doing work well.”
—Kay Stepkin, U.S. baker. As quoted in Working, book 8, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)