Television host Steve Allen plays the piano on this and it forms a moment of unusual beauty. Here’s Jack Kerouac, our latter day Whitman, singing the body electric in old school San Francisco. He uses the word “fellaheen” a half century before middle eastern class and sectarian struggles would dominate the headlines. Something in this opening seems to pay homage to Fitzgerald’s Gatsby comments on “the hour of a profound human change.” Hunter S. Thompson would later seem to echo some of this Kerouac vibe in his own later comments about San Francisco in the Wave Speech.
“There was a little alley in San Francisco back of the Southern Pacific station at Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy afternoons with everybody at work in offices in the air you feel the impending rush of their commuter frenzy as soon they’ll be charging en masse from Market and Sansome buildings on foot and in buses and all well-dressed……..”
