It’s late 1959, in the Eisenhower era; a moment when postwar America is enjoying peace and plenty. Ribbons of multi-laned concrete criss-cross the country, as the interstate highway system started under the army general president has turned the US into an automobile-obsessive society (decimating the once mighty bi-coastal rail system). A baby boom is in progress. So too is a drift for many young married couples out of the city and into the new suburbs, where all is as homogenised and unmenacing as mass-produced white bread.
Television has become the new narcotic of choice for enervated stay-at-home mums and all those war veterans-turned-commuting executive dads. And a besuited, bespectacled talk show host named Steve Allen has become an early star of this fledgling medium. His show is mainstream entertainment – comic sketches, actors promoting their new films – with the occasional hipster indulgence. Allen sees himself as a public figure poised between popular and beatnik sensibilities, and one who plays jazz piano rather well. And on this night in 1959 there he is, live in the NBC studios in New York, talking about a jazz-and-words album he has just recorded with the hottest American writer of the moment: a certain Jack Kerouac, whose novel On the Road (published two years earlier) remains a global sensation. Then Kerouac steps forward, dressed in an open shirt and a jacket. He talks about how he wrote the novel in three weeks and reads a long quasi-lyrical passage to the accompaniment of jazz riffs being played live on piano by Steve Allen himself.
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