The vibe of each is late-night boozy slurs and purejazz club finger-snapping. Sampas’ latest Kerouac homage, though, a documentarytitled One Fast Move or I’m Gone,offers a collaboration, the first between Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab forCutie and Jay Farrar of Uncle Tupelo. The duo trades off singing duties on thesparse Farrar-penned tracks of generic acoustic chord changes, pedal steel andlight drums, borrowing the breathless prose of Big Sur.
Certainly one of Kerouac’s dreariest works, thenovel would seem to be a genuine match for Gibbard’s sad-sap whine or Farrar’sflannel gruffness. But along with lack of light, the prose lacks the usualamount of Kerouac’s whirly-wind sentence structure. The resultant songwritingtends toward forced turns of phrase, nothing in the way of rhyme scheme and,overall, a general feeling of half-baked Beat genuflection.
As a writer so steeped in poetry, Kerouac’s oeuvredefinitely holds actual tunes, somewhere, but not here. Lost in the mix is thenovel’s entire characteristic: despair-on-the-rocks, blow-by-blow ravages ofalcoholism, celebrity-fatigue. Big Sur is actually the Kerouac period of being “sickand tired of all the endless enthusiasms of new young kids trying to know me.”And the earnest lilt of the likes of “California Zephyr” is clearly of the On the Road Kerouac of yore.
But maybe most at odds with the writer is theoverriding sound of One Fast Move. Asit arrives so pristine, so white, so nerdish and mopey, Kerouac, that“yeah”-saying champion of spontaneity and raging late-night bop, would probablyhate it.
