Grave Diggers

In 1975, “on a crisp scarlet-ocher November afternoon at Edson Cemetery in Lowell, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visited Jack Kerouac’s grave, trailed by a reporter, a photographer, a film crew, and various others (including the young playwright Sam Shepard). Dylan had performed the night before at the University of Lowell, on a tour of New England with a thrown-together troupe of new friends and old, including Ginsberg, which called itself the Rolling Thunder Revue. Ginsberg, who became excited when the tour buses reached the city, met up with some of Kerouac’s relatives and drinking buddies and tried to immerse Dylan’s entourage in Kerouacian lore.” Sean Wilentz describes the scene in “Bob Dylan in America,” his upcoming meditation on the singer, which is excerpted on newyorker.com. At the cemetery, Wilentz writes, Ginsberg recited “poetry from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, including “54th Chorus”— invoking specters, fatigue, mortality, Mexico, and John Steinbeck’s boxcar America, while he and Dylan contemplated Kerouac’s headstone.”
Goings On: Culture Pick: Grave Diggers : The New Yorker