I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.
Alan Ginsberg was fabulous. The man is so filled with energy. He's 65 years old and he's just loaded with energy and charm and wit and his mind is constantly racing.
Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.
Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.
Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.
The Beat thing happened when I was younger. I used to run away from home, inspired by the Beats, like in '64 and '65.
People such as Hunter S. Thompson and the Beats were a huge influence on me, not just in what they were saying, but how they said it.
The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed.
Certainly the beat writers I've known who carried forward the original, you know, I'd say that came together in the 1940s and 50s. So I was inheriting in a way some of that ethos.
As I became very conscious and more aware of things I got very into the beatniks and that kind of stuff. They were very important to me for a few years.
To be able to play Jack Kerouac or Sal Paradise, it's mad to me.
I'm an amalgam of the 19th-century romantics and the beat poets.
I grew up poor in crappy situations... various crappy situations. What kept me sane was reading and music. I had so many different literary tastes growing up, be it fiction like Stephen King or Piers Anthony or non-fiction like reading Hunter S. Thompson essays or reading the Beats. I was a huge fan of the Beat movement.
Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.
