There are few figures with a contacts book as deep and as rich as Harvey Kubernik. For more than 30 years, he has patrolled the hinterland of American popular music wearing many different guises – as journalist, broadcaster, producer, musician and entrepreneur - and that multiple personality has allowed him insights into the rock monolith that not many would equal. He’s one of those names well known in the business but whose public profile is relatively low and this collection of face-to-face conversations reflects that: major artists will occasionally share thoughts with him that they may not have unveiled to a fellow musician. There is a trust and a rapport between subject and interrogator.

But if Kubernik is well-connected through a network he has assiduously cultivated over decades, it is also worth stressing his central role in the establishment of a relationship between the literary and popular music cultures, and particularly that dialogue relating to the Beat writers. He has overseen dozens of spoken word albums and his key role as project coordinator on the seminal Jack Kerouac Collection, the three-CD set for Rhino Word Beat released in 1990, gathering a body of crucial recordings by the novelist, should be regarded as one of the key resources for this field of study.

Along the way his writing credits have graced significant US publications like Crawdaddy!, Goldmine and HITS, leading UK magazines such as Melody Maker and Mojo and he contributed to the important anthologies, the Rolling Stone Book of the Beats and Drinking with Bukowski. Add to that a period as a session percussionist with Phil Spector and a time as A&R director for MCA on the West Coast, and you start to get a sense of the eclectic nature of his achievement.

But what about This is Rebel Music, his first monograph? And why that title? Kubernik explains that his volume pays credit to a familiar phrase from Bob Marley first – and there is a concluding chapter in the book on reggae archivist Roger Steffens which touches upon the Wailers’ history and legacy – but also to Spector’s production of the Gene Pitney song ‘He’s Rebel’ from the early 1960s. Furthermore in the course of more than 200 pages he does gather a veritable gallery of rule-breakers – from Grace Slick to Chrissie Hynde, Marianne Faithfull to Keith Richards.

The format is, however, far from revolutionary but easily digestible. The author presents a short introduction to each self-contained interview and then just lets the tape roll, to offer an essentially unmediated exchange. The Q&As, he points out, owe a debt to the writer Stanley R. Greenberg “who inaugurated the genre of docudrama for television in the early 1970s, and who liked to call them the ‘theater of fact’” (p xi).

It is also worth stressing that for those interested in pursuing the interface between novels and poetry and rock music, at several points in the text, principally the sections on poet Allen Ginsberg, ex-Door Ray Manzarek and Faithfull, Kubernik adds further grist to this particular mill, with figures such as Michael McClure and William Burroughs, even Dante and Shakespeare, surfacing in the discussions that take place.

The conversations are friendly and informal affairs yet you do get the sense that Kubernik’s intent is always to coax rather than corner his prey, not a bad move if you want a subject on your side, but not necessarily the best way into which to generate scintillating copy.

In addition, he frequently intercedes to remind Ray Manzarek or Grace Slick or Andrew Loog Oldham of his own walk-on parts in the various histories they unwrap together and that chummy incestuousness grates occasionally. Yet the upside is that the individuals being questioned do, intermittently, open up in a revealing way. Slick’s relationship with Jim Morrison, Ginsberg’s links with Dylan, even Steve Van Zandt’s connection to the TV mob series The Sopranos, are illuminated by the chatty interplay.

Also on the plus side is the fact that most of these conversations are recent ones, arising in the main from the later 1990s and early 2000s, thus deflecting the possible accusation that Kubernik has merely unearthed some ancient and dusty C90s, commissioned a belated transcriptions and shoved them together between hard covers as an afterthought, a gratuitous cash in. That said, I feel there could have been more useful contextualisation, more analysis, and what the subjects tell him. With a little more journalistic dissection of the answers, this book may have had a slightly less hagiographic tone, perhaps, and more helpful to our critical studies.

Ultimately though, Kubernik believes utterly in the value of his so-called “InnerViews”. He never undersells his own collection: “This anthology breathes because it is an exact document of a moment, and involves quest and disclosure, thus making it very pure oral history. There’s nothing that is manipulated in terms of text and tone. In today’s short attention society, people are revealed here because of what they are saying, not because what someone is saying about them” (p xv).

“This is Rebel Music involved surf and turf wisdom, and it doesn’t involve illusion and delusion. It involves the actuality of the people. It’s a whole era I’m bringing up for examination. It’s a big basketball court and everyone’s on my team.. […] ..The people are alive inside the raw questions and responses” (ibid). What might read like a publicist’s blurb is merely an extract from Kubernik’s own introduction, his own sturdy selling of the material.

I like Harvey Kubernik for his enthusiasm and his energy, for his attainments on a wide front, his passion for popular culture, and, to its credit, this new publication does provide an engaging entree to an impressive cast of high-profile players he has encountered over a long stretch and with whom he has, patently,established a good working association. The fact that some have now passed on – Ginsberg and Jack Nitzsche, for instance – adds value to the document, for sure.

Yet my principal gripe is that the author’s decision to let the musicians and artists speak for themselves loses the reader the opportunity to enjoy more of Kubernik’s own interpretation of the material on offer. More of his personal reflections on the raw data he collects would have been welcomed, a conclusion maybe to to bookend each chapter. Maybe, you know, it’s time for a Kubernik autobiography to annotate this lively slice of ethnography. 

Note: This is Rebel Music is the inaugural volume of the CounterCulture Series from the University of New Mexico (http://www.unmpress.com)