Big Sur was Jack Kerouac's post-fame novel. On the Road had turned him into one of the voices of his generation, and the demands of sudden celebrity were too much for him. Living in New York, he drank heavily and got jumped outside a bar, so he moved to San Francisco, where he continued to drink heavily. Finally he decided to sober up and remove himself from the society that wanted increasingly larger pieces of him, so he trekked out to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in the wilds of Big Sur, where he dried out in seclusion and tried to right himself. He also wrote a thinly veiled fictional account of his experiences-- about the big demons, like addiction and messing with his friend's mistress, but also about the simple pleasures of washing dishes and meeting donkeys in Bixby Canyon-- called Big Sur, which only furthered his celebrity.
Kerouac's sojourn to Big Sur is the subject of a new documentary by Curt Worden and a new album by Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, both of which are titled One Fast Move or I'm Gone. The doc is a fawning appreciation of one of the most romanticized writers of the 20th century, and it never lets the actual man obscure the accepted myth of troubled genius. Farrar actually appears in the movie, performing "San Francisco" while seated on the floor of a hotel room next to an unmade bed, and the scene plays like his version of rock-and-roll fantasy camp. Even so, he and Gibbard approach the album less as a soundtrack than as a kind of Mermaid Avenue project, constructing songs from snippets of Kerouac's prose and setting them to languid acoustic arrangements.
The album actually follows the novel somewhat faithfully, opening with Gibbard and Kerouac crossing America on the California Zephyr: "I'm on the California Zephyr, watching America roll by," Gibbard sings painting Kerouac as the most matter-of-fact writer imaginable. In both the doc and the album, the Beat writer is more idea than individual, and he seems burdened with everything that his readers and fans project onto him. For Farrar, who wrote all but the title track on One Fast Move, Kerouac embodies certain notions of America and Americana that jibe with his post-Uncle Tupelo output; Kerouac is Woody Guthrie with a typewriter. Once upon a time, however, Farrar was a punk in suburban America who displayed no compunction about hammering out loud and fast arrangements of old country tunes. Over the ensuing 20 years, he's grown increasingly reverent and deferential toward his heroes, which (like the worshipfulness of the doc's talking heads) saps Kerouac of his countercultural menace. Worse, it makes for an album about as listenable as a graduate seminar paper. On most of these self-serious songs, Farrar brings his usual unwavering gravity, but only on "Low Life Kingdom" does he find a melody strong enough to highlight that burr of a voice.
For an album about a doc about a book about going into the wilds of California, One Fast Move sounds awfully sleepy. Taking a cue from Kerouac's spontaneous approach to writing, Farrar and Gibbard recorded the songs over a five-day period, with Earlimart's Aaron Espinoza at the helm. Trouble is, it sounds that way. Lacking the earnestness in folk-rock that comes so easily to him in indie pop, the Death Cab singer takes on Kerouac's words and Farrar's melodies, but he sounds ill-suited for the setting and so can't do much with "California Zephyr" and "Williamine". Still, the title track, which is his only songwriting credit, captures some of the novel's antsy restlessness, drawing out the title as a low-key bluesy howl.
What this album about the so-called King of the Beats lacks is, well, a beat. Gibbard plays drums on just a few tracks, but he just hangs back timidly, barely even keeping time. The songs remain sedentary rather than hitchhike, steal a car, run, or hop a freight. This particular disregard is unfortunate, especially since the documentary takes great pains to point out the rhythmic quality of Kerouac's prose, which splattered words across the page the way Pollock applied paint to canvas. As a result, you don't get much sense of how his words sound, what they do, or what they can mean. For that, skip both the album and the doc and just read the book.
