Jay Farrar, Ben Gibbard team up to channel Jack Kerouac
The work of Beat writer Jack Kerouac has inspired 3 generations of songwriters and musicians, in various genres — folk, rock, jazz, blues, country, and beyond.
From left, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and Jay Farrar of Son Volt perform at the first night of the Ann Arbor Folk Festival.
Autumn de Wilde
For most of them, the touchstone was Kerouac’s iconic work “On the Road,” his 1957 chronicle of the emerging Beat movement. And that book, driven by the restless, kinetic energy of Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness prose, probably had more impact on rock ‘n’ roll songwriters than any other book of its era.
But for their recent collaboration, Jay Farrar (leader of Son Volt) and Ben Gibbard (who helms Death Cab for Cutie) instead tackled another Kerouac book, “Big Sur” — a memoir by Kerouac that was a thinly veiled recollection of the period in his life when he dropped out of the public eye and moved into a friend’s cabin in the woods of Big Sur, California, in an attempt to get sober.
Almost all the songs on the resulting album, “One Fast Move Or I’m Gone,” were written by Farrar, although that wasn’t the original plan. Initially, the project, as conceived by Kerouac’s nephew, Jim Sampas, called for many different artists to write and record songs for the soundtrack to a documentary about that period of Kerouac’s life. Farrar was asked to write a couple of songs, but in a 5-day burst of inspiration, he cranked out 10 songs instead.
So, it suddenly became strictly a Farrar-Gibbard project. “I guess after I wrote all those songs, Ben and I were the last 2 men standing,” jokes Farrar, who will be joined by Gibbard and their backing band on Friday for a set at the first night of the Ann Arbor Folk Festival at Hill Auditorium.
Farrar is one of those who were greatly impacted by Kerouac’s work. “’On the Road’ left a big impression on me,” says Farrar during a recent phone interview. “It really laid out the template for writers and artists and musicians. Life on the road is life intensified, and it can provide the perfect conditions for creating. And I really identified with his style, and his approach to writing, which was to just bang out the first thought that comes into your head, and go from there.”
But prior to the soundtrack project, Farrar had never read “Big Sur.” Once he did, though, he drew a different kind of inspiration. “It’s definitely a cautionary tale,” says Farrar — because Kerouac was not able to get sober. His alcoholism and depression eventually snuffed his previous optimism and robust personality. “But what was so amazing about the book is that Jack was still out there — living, and cognizant of his problem — and able to chronicle all of it, honestly.”
The words to the songs on the disc are based on Kerouac’s prose in the book — and in many cases, Farrar literally took Kerouac’s words and tweaked them to fit song structures. And after Farrar wrote the first 2 songs, “I got so caught up in the spirit of working with his actual words and thoughts and contexts, that there was sort of an element of a kid being let loose in a candy store,” he says. “‘Big Sur’ resonated with me very differently, because I read it at a later age — at an age that was pretty close to Jack’s age when he wrote about those experiences. So, it had a deeper meaning to me.”
Musically, the record sounds like something akin to Son Volt crossed with the Jayhawks: It’s definitely got that sometimes-wistful, sometimes-languid country-folk-rock sound that both bands have mastered. Plus, Gibbard’s voice occupies a higher register than Farrar’s laconic, gritty delivery — much like, in the Jayhawks, Gary Louris’s swooning, higher-pitched voice soared, while his bandmate Mark Olson provided an earthier counterpoint.
The music is mainly driven by sinewy but mostly-restrained electric guitar — and by oft-mournful pedal steel — the latter of which really helps give the songs a sense of place. “Yeah, we decided pretty early on that the pedal steel would be prominent on these tracks — that it would really add to the overall aesthetic,” shares Farrar. “Because, at that point, Kerouac headed west, and the pedal steel is sort of emblematic of the west.”
Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard performing "These Roads Don't Move" last fall in New York:
Although Farrar wrote almost all of the songs, he says that Gibbard’s contribution was significant. “Ben’s vocal interpretations of several of the songs were much better than what I would have done, and he also had a lot of great ideas about how the songs should be structured,” says Farrar.
“And Ben has a higher level of musicianship than I do. At one point, I was talking about having to call around and get a drummer, and he said, ‘Well, you know, I play the drums, too.’ So he ended up playing drums on all the tracks.”
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The band for the Folk Fest show, besides Farrar and Gibbard on guitars, will include Mark Spencer (Farrar’s current Son Volt bandmate) on pedal steel and keyboards; Nick Harmer (Gibbard’s Death Cab mate) on bass and Jon Wurster (Superchunk, Bob Mould, The Mountain Goats) on drums.
In the mid-’00s, after Son Volt had been on hiatus for several years while Farrar focused on solo albums and performances, Farrar revived the band with a revamped lineup. The first 2 albums by the overhauled ensemble were rangy, alt-country/roots rock efforts, but the most recent disc, “American Central Dust,” released in mid-’09, was more austere and acoustic-based.
“Yeah, on that last record, I wanted to get away from going back and forth from acoustic to electric guitar, so I strictly played acoustic,” says Farrar. But that doesn’t mean future Son Volt records will necessarily follow that template.
“No, I don’t know yet what the next Son Volt record will sound like,” he asserts. “Because, once you do a record like that, the pendulum often swings the other way again.”
Watch the trailer for the documentary “One Fast Move or I’m Gone”
Kevin Ransom, a free-lance writer and critic who covers music for AnnArbor.com, previously interviewed Jay Farrar for the Ann Arbor News in 2001. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.