{"id":4791,"date":"2009-08-06T11:11:10","date_gmt":"2009-08-06T11:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.influx.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=4791"},"modified":"2023-01-23T10:09:24","modified_gmt":"2023-01-23T10:09:24","slug":"neal-cassady","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adrianflux.co.uk\/influx\/features\/neal-cassady\/","title":{"rendered":"Neal Cassady: Saint of the Holy Road"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After the second world war, things changed fast in America. Legions of middle-class families abandoned the big cities and built comfortable lives in the suburbs. Few individuals seem prepared to break the chrome-clad, dollar-stamped mould. But one that did was Neal Cassady.<\/p>\n

And ironically he sought freedom in two things as American as cherry pie: the road and the automobile.<\/p>\n

Cassady\u2019s 1940s exploits with cars have been immortalised in Jack Kerouac<\/a>\u2019s classic novel, On The Road<\/a>, whose hero, Dean Moriarty, is a thinly disguised portrait of a working-class kid from Denver. Cassady was later recruited to drive writer Ken Kesey and his \u2018Merry Pranksters\u2019 bus, \u2018Further\u2019. That day-glo painted 1939 International Harvester, as recorded in Tom Wolfe\u2019s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,<\/a> took off around America\u2019s west coast in the mid-sixties introducing the world to the then-legal LSD insurgency. It was fitting: a man considered to be a central inspiration of the hippy movement had won himself a place behind the wheel of its primary automotive symbol.<\/p>\n

He has been remembered as spontaneity itself and never more so than when he was behind the wheel. \u201cWhen you went riding with him,\u201d said Jerry Garcia <\/a>of the Merry Pranksters\u2019 house band, The Grateful Dead, \u201cit was to be afraid as you could be, to be in fear for your life. You\u2019d be racing around San Francisco at 50 or 60 miles per hour, up and down those streets with blind corners everywhere and he\u2019d cut around them in the wrong lane and make insane moves in the most intense traffic situations. He could see round corners. And while he was doing this he\u2019d be talking to everyone in the car at once and dialling in the radio and fumbling with a roach.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kerouac used the frantic kinesis of his road-buddy as an extended metaphor: \u201cThe most fantastic parking lot attendant in the world, Cassady could back a car 40 miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop at the wall, jump out, race among fenders, leap into another car, circle it 50 miles an hour into a narrow space, back swiftly into a tight spot, snap the car to a stop so that you could see it bounce as he flies out, then clear to the ticket shack, sprinting like a track star, ticket in hand, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner\u2019s half out, start the car with the door flapping and roar off to the next available spot, arc, pop in, brake, out, run; working like that without pause eight hours a night – in greasy wino pants with a frayed fur-lined jacket and beat shoes that flap.\u201d<\/p>\n