Jack Kerouac is the common bond that connects Dylan, Springsteen, Mitchell, and many other musical recording artists whose legacy either started in his lifetime or blossomed in his wake. <i>Kerouac On Record: A Literary Soundtrack</i>, edited by Simon Warner and Jim Sampas, is a compelling and comprehensive collection of academic studies that successfully spotlights the connective tissue between Kerouac and the music he loved, like the Bop jazz of Charlie Parker and Lee Konitz or Chet Baker's vocals and Miles Davis's mastery of the cool jazz trumpet style, and the music he might never have imagined would have followed in his wake.

PopMatters

Packed with well-researched articles, some fascinating interviews and an extensive discography this is a book aimed at the scholar but one that will also appeal to all serious music lovers.

Americana UK

Editors Simon Warner and Jim Sampas have gathered together a series of essays that inform and expand on what we know about this [musical] aspect of Jack Kerouac ... There are interviews. Bob Dylan is discussed. Van Morrison. Bruce Springsteen. There is a long conversation between Simon Warner and Jim Sampas about all the Kerouac themed albums ... You’ll want them all. A hefty, lovingly produced book. Contentious stuff is said. But it adds to the sum of knowledge and so they have done good work.

Beat Scene

The book is a lively and fascinating collection of essays, interviews and musings.

Jazz Journal

<i>Kerouac on Record</i> is a tantalizing new collection of essays and interviews on the interrelations between Jack Kerouac and music – both the music he heard and was inspired by in his 'bop prosody', and the music later artists have been inspired by him to produce, either as settings of his works or as intertextual companion pieces extending the life span of those works by recontextualizing them for new generations of listeners and readers. Warner and Sampas have brought together some of the most engaging writers in the fields of literary and cultural Beat Studies, as well as some of the most articulate voices within the music community: critics, producers, music archeologists, and lyricists. This blend of perspectives and registers makes for an unusually engaging reading experience as one traipses through the manuscript, high on 'life, joy, kicks, darkness, music' as Kerouac himself memorably put it in <i>On the Road</i>.

Bent Sørensen, Associate Professor of English, Aalborg University, Denmark, and Member of the Advisory Council of the European Beat Studies Network

With his ear for language, accents, riffs, and affinity for the spontaneous improvisation of the highly trained musician, Kerouac’s prose and verse dances with an undeniable musicality that has kept readers across the globe coming back to his works again and again. Many of these readers, as it turns out, have been musicians. This collection brings together a series of essays that, taken together, strive to convey the profound, long-lasting, and yet underappreciated force of inspiration Kerouac represents to a half century of recorded music.

Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, USA

<i>Kerouac on Record</i> identifies and analyses the conversations that take place across time and space between the King of the Beats and the jazz, country, rock, pop, and punk troubadours that see him as inspiration, crank, life coach, and master of rhythm. This book will change the way we think of Kerouac's work and provide us with fresh ears to hear anew the music that is indebted to his writing and life.

Daniel Kane, Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Sussex, UK

Warner's and Sampas’s encyclopedic collection represents a vital contribution to Beats scholarship. This is not just because the range of interactions between Kerouac’s work and genres of popular music – from jazz to country to punk – is dazzling, but also because it insists on seeing the Beats’ creativity as interdisciplinary from the start, and on the need for Beats criticism to follow suit. As a model of this approach, it is exemplary, with contributions from poets, rock critics, literary scholars, playwrights and many others. This is a book with a wide appeal to anyone interested in Kerouac, the Beats and popular music, and one that will quickly become indispensable to scholars in these fields.

James Peacock, Senior Lecturer in English and American Literatures, Keele University, UK, and co-editor of The Clash Takes on the World: Transnational Perspectives on the Only Band That Matters

Bringing together Beat studies with popular music studies, and ranging high and low from jazz to rock, blues to punk, this rich eclectic mix of scholarship and interviews is the book for anyone remotely interested in the counterpoint of Kerouac and music: it’s a book as big as its sometimes fraught but always fascinating subject, and absolutely in tune with it.

Oliver Harris, Professor of American Literature, Keele University, UK, and President of the European Beat Studies Network

Following <i>Text and Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture </i>(2013), Simon Warner partners with Literary Executor of the Estate of Jack Kerouac, Jim Sampas, to go deeper into his exploration of the connections between the great figures of the Beat generation and the music of the so-called 'rock era.' Interspersed with exclusive interviews of the likes of Lee Konitz, Graham Parker, Lester Bangs, and Allen Ginsberg, the twenty chapters are signed by an impressive array of journalists, music industry professionals, rock critics, writers, film makers and academics from all over the world. Addressing such issues as the influence of jazz on Kerouac’s 'spontaneous prose' style, the lineage between his 'Beat bop prosody' and Patti Smith’s 'punk rock poetry,' or his inspiring 'the myth of the American road' in Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics, they shed light on what appears to be a two-way relationship between popular music and the work of the author of On the Road. As Warner puts it: 'if, for Kerouac, it was jazz that would have the principal impact, then it was rock on which the writer would have the main effect.'

Olivier Julien, Lecturer in the History and Musicology of Popular Music, Paris-Sorbonne University, France

Warner and Sampas’ collection of essays provides an indispensable and long-overdue account of the music that shaped Kerouac and his writing, as well as an analysis of how a generation of musicians like Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Patti Smith were influenced by Kerouac. With its well-researched articles, in-depth interviews, and extensive discography and song list, <i>Kerouac on Record</i> is a must-read for scholars, fans, and music lovers alike.

Erik Mortenson, Senior Lecturer, Wayne State University, USA