Jack Kerouac And The Pettiest Of Petty Vandalism
now you can prank call maynard w kerns!
That’s a picture of Jack Kerouac’s listing in the St Petersburg, Florida phone book. Even though he long left this world, his name remained in the phone book up until a couple years ago (the phone number still rang until 1999, per this article in the St Pete Times). Why did they leave it there for so long? I have no clue – must’ve seemed like a cool thing to keep.
My friend Casey mentioned the phone book thing to me about seven or eight years ago, when I was still living across the bay in Tampa. When we went to St Pete a couple weeks later (to have some amazingly-cheap beer at the amazingly-awesome Emerald Bar), we found a payphone, grabbed the phone book and opened it up. Sure enough, there it was. I tore the page out of the phone book and put it in my pocket. My memory’s hazy, but I think we found another phone book so that Casey could do the same. I suspect there have been many St Pete phone books that have been vandalized in a similar fashion.
The page from that phone book has remained in my possession. I’ve changed addresses too many times to mention since leaving Tampa, so I’m surprised that that’s the case. I pretty much forgot about it until this week, when I started listening to One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Music From Kerouac’s Big Sur, the collaboration between Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard that uses Kerouac’s words from his book, Big Sur, for the lyrics.
The album’s been growing on me. I’m not much of a fan of either of these guys (and I’m not really much of a Kerouac fan, as my Beat appreciation extends more towards Allen Ginsberg and Greg Corso), so I dismissed it at first. Since I try to listen to everything at least twice before judging it (I call this my Ryan Adams Rule, which I explained earlier this year), I gave it another shot yesterday. I’m glad I did, because each new listen is revealing another great song. It was enough to remind me of the phone book listing, and to dig it out of my closet so that I could take the picture at the top of this post.
Here’s the lead-off track, sung by Gibbard:
Jay Farrar And Ben Gibbard – California Zephyr
Buy the album here. The documentary that served as the basis for this collaboration was released on October 20. Be sure to catch it if it hits your town.
And, uh, don’t vandalize phone books that you don’t own. I’m not proud of the choice I made on that day*, so I can’t condone such behavior.
*not really.
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