Free The Real Mad Men by Andrew Cracknell Page B

organised by musicians like Ornette Colman.
    More accessible were the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck and Lester Young. But perhaps the best evocation of the jazz of the era, hypnotising the hip crowd at Birdland and the Village Vanguard, was thepoignant foggy moan from the trumpet of Miles Davis, the man Kenneth Tynan called ‘a musical lonely hearts club’.
    It could hardly have been in greater contrast to that other massive trend in music; in 1954 Bill Haley and the Comets released ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and the dance hall, the record player and the juke box would never be the same again.
    The visual and performing arts were even more explosive. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and friends in the New York School threw paint around in an excitable way never seen before, creating the genre known as Action Painting. Meanwhile, for a very different audience, Mark Rothko was commissioned to paint a set of murals for the opulent new Four Seasons restaurant.
    Between Tenth and Twelfth Street, in reaction to the stultifying and exclusive establishments of Fifty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue, artist-owned galleries gave an outlet to every experimental idea. Artists like Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg were collaborating with poets and musicians such as John Cale in the phenomena of the Happening, a partially free-form, audience-participation performance art (which gave rise to a misplaced lingerie ad of the time, a woman floating in space with the headline ‘I dreamt I was at a Happening in my Maidenform bra’).
    And in the mid 1950s an art director at Benton & Bowles asked the name of the hopeful blonde female illustrator who’d just shown her folio to a colleague in the office next to his. ‘That wasn’t a chick,’ he laughed, ‘I’ve got his name somewhere… er… Andy Warhol.’
    In the Village book shops and coffee houses, jazz/poetry fusions were achingly hip. Jack Kerouac appeared with a jazz group at the Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue in 1958 and recorded readings of his prose and poetry with the saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. Free-form impromptu poetry readings – one notably earnest performance was a reading of the Manhattan telephone directory – were a regular, if often meretricious, stimulus for impressionable young minds.
    From the early 1950s, Washington Square had been the focus for the emerging folk scene, with groups and individual folk singers gathering for impromptu open-air sessions. Thriving, it spread to specific clubs and by 24 January 1961, fresh from the Midwest, the 19-year-old Bob Dylan knew enough to head for the Café Wha? at 115 MacDougall Street. He blew in, snow on his coat, and asked to perform a few Woody Guthrie songs. It was his first appearance in the city.

    A party at Andy Warhol’s studio, The Factory (231 East 47th Street), New York, August 1965
    At the Gaslight Club, a ‘basket house’ (so-named because the artists’ remuneration was the cash in the basket passed round amongst the patrons), Allen Ginsberg recited ‘Howl’, his terrifyingly powerful evisceration of everything he felt America had become. Earlier, in the same club, Jack Kerouac had read from On the Road .
    Cinemas were showing Rebel Without a Cause and On the Waterfront , dramatising youthful angst and alienation, while The Seventh Seal and Seven Samurai intrigued audiences with a growing appetite for foreign directors with a completely different feel for film. At the theatre, Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman all penetrated themes embedded deep within society – and all won Pulitzer prizes.
    As for literature, you took your pick from books, essays or poems from William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Ayn Rand, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Richard Yates, John Cheever, Isaac Asimov,