Bob Donlin Off the Road

Only photo I could find of Rae
Anne and Bob Donlin, some
years after I knew them

I discovered this typescript in my archives (by which I mean boxes of random pages, photos, menus, programs, newsprint, matchbooks, letters and rejection slips), which notes that this piece appeared in the Cambridge alternative weekly The Real Paper in November 1975.  So that is the present of the following piece, about a modest and genial man I knew who did not seem to have been what he had been: an intimate of Kerouac and Ginsberg in the notorious Beat Generation 1950s. It's slightly altered for clarity for contemporary non-Cambridge readers.

At the time I knew Bob Donlin only as the owner of Passim, where I often went in the evenings to hear musical acts, mostly as a music writer and later an editor for the alternative weekly the Boston Phoenix, as well as a writer for other music publications.  Bob was always very kind to me, and I always got a great table.  I was so close to the ravishing Maria Muldaur that when her microphone cable separated from her mike, I leaned down and picked it up for her.  

When I discovered his connection to the Beat Generation icons (noted in the beginning of the following piece), my request for an interview was the first he accepted.   

How much must I add to identify the people he talks about?  Jack Kerouac burst on the literary scene with his novel On The Road, published in 1957, though the events he recounted happened years before. He famously wrote it quickly on a typewriter, on rolls of paper he'd created so he wouldn't have to stop to change pages.  So he became famous for spontaneous writing, which influenced his contemporaries first of all, especially Allen Ginsberg.  However, before that mad dash to the finish line of On the Road, he'd already written outlines, notes and partial drafts for years in preparation.  It was also heavily edited for publication.

Kerouac's books fictionalized travels and experiences with friends also identified with the Beat movement such as Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder (in The Dharma Bums especially.)  Young readers responded to the freewheeling prose and life, as well as the innocence and spiritual searching.  The 1950s culture in general saw its freedom a different way--in sexual behavior, drinking and drug use he depicted.  The Beat Generation became controversial, titillating and inspiring.  It went a long way to changing American writing.

Allen Ginsberg's most famous long poem was Howl, which he introduced at the legendary San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955, along with five other Beat poets, which Bob Donlin witnessed.  Quickly published by the quickly created City Lights Press (of the City Lights Bookstore in the North Beach area of San Francisco, operated by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti) it was briefly banned for obscenity. It is now world famous. Ginsberg became a guru of the 1960s counterculture, and a leader in the antiwar movement.  He was a prolific poet of international standing, reviving interest in William Blake and Walt Whitman, spread awareness of Eastern influences (Buddhist and Hindu), and during his long life he became an eminence in American poetry and the poetic tradition.  I heard him read several times in different places, and finally met him in the late 1980s. He died in 1997.

Neal Cassady was not a writer (except of letters, many of which were later collected and published) but Kerouac wrote about him more than he did anyone else.  He had a second hit of fame in the psychedelic sixties as the driver of Ken Kesey's bus on its tour described in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

By the time I wrote this piece I'd read most of Kerouac novels published to that point, and heard Ginsberg and Gary Snyder read.  In 1969 I'd attended a reading in Berkeley that reunited several of the Six Gallery poets as well as other poet friends.  When I interviewed one of those Six Gallery poets much later--Michael McClure--he remarked that this 1969 reading was a memorable occasion and the last time that group read together. 

The place Bob and Rae Anne Donlin created on the premises of the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge still exists fifty years after this article, now called Club Passim.  It seems to have a similar mission.  

There were a few things I didn't know at the time, principally that Donlin was himself writing poetry and fiction when his beatnik brothers and sisters were.  This is confirmed by a rediscovered note by Jack Kerouac, asking to see a Donlin story.  He never brought it up in our conversations.  I also didn't know he turned up as a character in at least one Kerouac novel, though not part of the main action.  He also didn't specifically mention what folk singer Elijah Wald asserted in a 2017 remembrance, that he was a "reformed alcoholic."   If true, it adds another subtext to this piece.

Donlin also became known for his discerning ear in the musicians he decided to book at Passim.  He wasn't infallible, however, as he reputedly rejected a young singer-songwriter named Bruce Springsteen. Bob Donlin died in 1996.

(P.S. The weird changes in font that follow are a mystery to me.  I've tried everything--Blogger just keeps getting harder to work with.)

 

I would never have known if I hadn’t seen that book. I was in the Harvard Bookstore, idly flipping through Ann Charter’s volume of 1950s photographs, Scenes Along the Road, when I spotted what looked like a strangely familiar face. But no. It couldn’t be. Not in that group—not in a photo of  Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and—the caption said— “B. Donlin.”

I knew a B. Donlin in Cambridge, and he did happen to look like the young guy in the photo. He was Bob Donlin, owner and co-proprietor (with his wife, Rae Ann) of Passim, the basement restaurant and bookstore down in the quiet brick alley between the two hemispheres of the Harvard Coop.

But it couldn't be him--mild-mannered, soft-spoken Bob Donlin.  Maybe it was his black sheep brother Wild Bill Donlin, or crazy Bruce or some other embarrassment of some other Donlin family.  But the more I thought about it...

At Passim, this Bob Donlin also serves up folk music in the evenings in the old Cambridge Club 47 tradition, in the very room where a 17 year old singer named Joan Baez opened the 47, and Bob Dylan later played.  Maybe he did run around North Beach with those grinning wastrels some quarter century ago--those now famous grinning wastrels of the Beat Generation.

I'd known Donlin for a few years, so one day I just stopped by and asked him.  He grinned and admitted it all.  Yes, he had known Kerouac and Cassady, he had hitched back and forth across the country and gotten gloriously wasted while Allen Ginsberg howled his epoch-making poems.  But until now he'd always refused interviews about that part of his life.  He didn't want people getting the impression that he was still--well, a beatnik.

He didn't want people to think he is what he is not--as they did about Kerouac for years.  It bothered Kerouac, too, that ten years after he'd written On the Road and nearly twenty since those trips were over, some kid would read it as if it had just happened and when he showed up at Kerouac's door expecting to see the cool Beatnik King, he only found a shy, overweight, middle-aged man living with his mother.

Bob Donlin says he is a businessman now.  He likes to present good music at his club, but also likes to make a profit.  Still, he's decided that now he can talk about the old days, which he did to me with obvious relish. His memories are focused by a quiet pride, not so much about then as about now--because, unlike some of the people he hung with, he survived.

Survival was on his mind when we talked about his days in San Francisco and New York in the fifties. He had been close friends with Kerouac and Cassady especially, both of whom had less than happy endings. Cassady was found dead near railroad tracks in Mexico in 1967, with the cause of his death still unknown. Kerouac died in Florida in 1969, probably of alcoholism, at the age of 46.

They all lived as fast as they were reputed to—and as they were expected to. Donlin and a few others tried for a little balance. “I would leave San Francisco thoroughly wasted and go somewhere else, Las Vegas or Palm Springs maybe, and get a job for awhile,” Donlin recalled. “There were lots of times I would hit a town completely broke, with just a pair of tux pants and a white shirt so I could get a job as a waiter.” Then eventually he would return to North Beach, tanned and rested and sane, to begin another round of excitement and dissipation.

Donlin was born in the industrial city of Brockton, Massachusetts, which he left to “knock around and see what was happening” as the fifties commenced. He hitch-hiked across the country five or six times, once leaving Boston with six cents in his pocket. There was no cushiony counterculture with VW microbuses then, nor was spare-changing a normal rite of passage. So Donlin bummed rides and slept in the missions of small towns.

In 1953 or so, he met Allen Ginsberg in New York through a mutual friend (he doesn’t recall the year but remembers Ginsberg’s exact address at the time.) He remembers telling poet Charles Olson later that right from the start he felt that of all of them Ginsberg would be the one who would survive with his identity intact.“He had an extraordinary understanding, true compassion—and balance.”

Through Ginsberg, Donlin met everybody. He spent a lot of time with Kerouac, some of it in Mill Valley where Kerouac was writing and feeding everyone hot pepper tea and honey.

"Jack never should have been discovered,” Donlin said. “It was the worst thing that could have happened to him.” For awhile Kerouac played footsie with fame successfully. Just after he’d made the big time with a profile of him in Time Magazine, he was roaming around New York City with two reporters on his tail, including one from the New Yorker. He ran into Donlin at the Five Spot (the ultra hip jazz club at Cooper Square in the Bowery) and together they dumped the reporters and got drunk.

They went together the next morning to a scheduled photo session for Playboy magazine. “I was in it with Jack, and with these girls that Playboy sent,” Donlin said. “It was my claim to fame but they never printed the pictures.”

Later Donlin took Kerouac to catch his train back to Florida. On the way Kerouac stopped at a White Tower to buy a dozen of their famous cheap hamburgers to take with him. “I said, ‘Jack—you have money now. You can afford to have a good meal in the dining car, with a nice tablecloth and waiters serving you.’ But no, he would rather eat cold hamburgers all the way to Florida. That’s the way he was then.”

Donlin blamed the image-merchandizing as much as anything. “The Kerouac who liked to wake up in the morning lying on the ground, hearing the hummingbirds—nobody was interested in that Kerouac.”

Donlin knew Cassady too, but their times together didn’t include quiet mornings in Mill Valley. They went to the races, drank wine, did pills, and generally were always on the go. Cassady amazed everyone, including Donlin, with his energy and his interests. “He was into everything,” he said. “He was talking about stuff like Edgar Cayce years before anyone else was. Two days with Neal was like six months with anybody else.”

Donlin hadn’t seen Cassady for the five years before his death but he wonders whether Cassady was really speeding until the end because he wanted to, or because his legend was so strong that no one could let him change.”

Change was on Bob Donlin’s mind when he talked about the old days. Although he spoke with obvious enthusiasm, it’s clear he knew that particular life couldn’t last—or at least he couldn’t last living it.

He sees value in those times now, as having broken the cultural ice of the fifties, allowing for the more expansive changes of the sixties. But by 1963 the rambling life was getting to him. Fortunately, while working at the Gate of Horn folk club in Chicago, he met someone who could help him get off the road: Rae Anne. They went to Provincetown together and then came to Boston, not expecting to stay.

“I’d gone through all these scenes, experienced all these things—and I thought now I should do something,” Donlin explained. So he and Rae Anne ran an expresso and sandwich place on Bolyston Street in Cambridge called the Harlequin. Then the Club 47 closed and a Boston doctor and his wife opened a bookstore and coffee shop on the premises they called Passim. (People pronounce “Passim” as if it were the name of some Turkish opium den. Actually it is Latin, a literary term referring to a subject that occurs throughout a book, hence can’t be precisely located.) After a few months they gave up and the Donlins took over.

Maria Muldaur

Donlin had seen a lot of folk clubs and knew many of the folk musicians that played the circuit, so it was natural that he would want to present music. But he had also observed that the steady success of a music club was not in its music but in its food: a good food operation would always pay the bills.

So the Donlins got their food scene going first and gradually introduced the music. In the four years since they began they’ve had big names—like Jackson Browne, Maria Muldaur, Eric Anderson and Leon Redbone—but they also showcase local talent, like Chris Smithers, Paul Geremia and Ina May Wool.

For awhile Donlin did press parties and showcases with the big record companies, but a certain “alienation of affections” occurred, he said, and so he deals mostly with the artists and their managers now.

“I’m kind of an existentialist business,” he said. “People in this business who think about money all the time expect you to think the same way. But I could lose this place tomorrow and it wouldn’t change my life.”

It’s not likely to happen. Passim is a going concern, with lunches in the afternoon, records, art prints and some hand-crafted jewelry on sale in addition to the coffee and the music.

For all the problems, Donlin maintains a lively interest in the music scene and what is left of the counterculture. His quiet demeanor also veils a slightly hipper version of the old New England dry wit. A local (Jewish) rock writer once complained in print of Donlin’s penchant for presenting young Jewish folk-singers. The writer received a telegram from Donlin the same day inviting him to attend Passim’s upcoming “All-Goy Review.”

As an April Fool’s prank, I planted an item in one of our weeklies intimating that the then-reclusive superstar Bob Dylan had decided to quit show business and return to his roots at the old Club 47, beginning with a stint there as a dishwasher. At Passim one night soon afterwards, Donlin came over to my table to thank me for keeping the lid on the Dylan story. “He starts next week,” he confided. I think he probably noticed that the woman sitting next to me was the most popular DJ at the hippest Boston radio station at the time.

Another photo from that day at City Lights, this time with caption handwritten
by Allen Ginsberg

We talked of those old days a couple of times at a table in Passim (with a skeptical Rae Anne occasionally drifting by and shooting him warning looks when he got too enthusiastic), so it sometimes felt strange to listen to him recalling carousing with Kerouac while I was staring at a blackboard proclaiming “Today: Minestrone Soup. Hot Indian Pudding with Ice Cream”—and knowing this was the same guy who owned that blackboard.

Still, as he spoke of the casualties of the beatnik fifties and I thought of the lost members of my own sixties generation, I kept hearing that line of Neil Young's:  "Some get strong, some get strange, but sooner or later it all gets real: Walk on."  After something like 11 years on the road, Bob Donlin paid more dues than most.  He's got it together now, so more power to him.