BEATNIK - Dobby Gillis Show

As with any popular movement, leave it to Hollywood to find a way to exploit it

 

This is a really good thread. I will be 63 in May and remember the show, but I sure don't remember individual episodes! Mostly I just remember Dobie saying "WOORK!!"
Speaking of Beatniks and Hippies - how would the "Greasers" fit into this - or were they just a local (Wisconsin) thing? When I was in grade school the older kids (maybe 5 years older than me) all thought they had to be greasers. Black pants, white tee shirt - cigarette pack rolled up in the sleeve if they could get away with it - cleats in your shoes so they clicked when they walked down the halls - hair slicked back in a "DA" style - a comb in your side pocket so it stuck out enough to see it - and a real mean look on your face, never smile.
I think the greasers would have been more the "car" or "hot rod" types than beatniks.

 

I'm gonna be 63,grew up in NJ near NYC.In Junior HS we wore tight black jean pants,dark color T shirts and engineer boots,greaser hair.By the time we got into HS,1962 or so,the greaser look had softened into the North Jersey Italian hood look,nicer pants,a pullover knit shirt or a ****on type shirt,dress shoes.The other crowd was dressed more like the Chino pants and ****on down shirt college bound types,like Dobbie Gillis.
Most guys who were gearheads were in the middle,kinda blended both styles.But their were hoods and college types that like cars.
I went to NYC many times as a kid and saw Beatnik types walking around in the Village.
My beatnik 4 year older sister went with a lot a car guys,beatnik or greaser types.One boyfriend had the "backdown" 50 Ford,louvers in the hood,some sort of Flattie engine,gl***packs.He would wind it up ,then back off the gas for the sound effect.I thought that car was so ****ing cool.

 

Maybe Von Franco will chime on on beatnik pinstriper/paint formulator/tattooer/3wheeler St. John Morton (of course, Franco's a beatnik hisself)

 

I think everone knows someone nick named Mayard or Cooter,oh the influence of TV on our culture. Remember the episode were Maynard had a pet rooster that got 2cc's of vitamins? CC's was mistaken for cup/cup, bird grew to 8 feet.

 

Ya gotta remember this was the McCarthy era, so there was a commie under every body's bed. If you didn't look and act exactly like John Q Citizen the subversive label was quickly applied.
I think the term 'Beat' is grounded in the free form Jazz known as Be-Bop.
Also... artist Stanley Mouse and Kelly seemed to float freely between Hot Rod art and concert posters.

 

Thats the one i was talking about! it was wrecking the store & old man Gillis shot it!!lol
JimV

 

huh?!?!?!?!?!

 

Without beatniks there would be no ...

 

lets see, there were beatniks , hippies, freaks with spike hair, now rappers with there pants on the ground, o i forgot, hotrodders,

 

Just think about it.If it weren't for Maynard G.Krebs,or Big Daddy Roth,using the "Beatnik" term,we wouldn't have one of the most coolest car clubs around,which I am very good friends with most of them.

Like the logo goes"F.B.B.F"

 

The one episode I remember Maynard said " I just bought four hubcaps off a Corvette ,someday I'll get a car to match" He was actually better as Gilligan.

 

Like, the beatnik culture had an influence of hotrodding, daddy-o, just as society in general has. And a lot of people think the beatnik fad transitioned into the hippie thing - well, not really but kinda. My 'at a glance' memories of the beatniks is of course the Maynard G Krebs look - goatee, bongos, and a certain anti-establishment at***ude - and kids in school trying to imitate him. One-liner memories of hippies was tie-dye, campfire songs and wacky tobaccy. There's bunches more to both fads, of course.

But I don't think Dobie Gillis and the McCarthy era were same, other than it was during the high-anxiety times right in the middle of the Cold War. I didn't check but I think "Tail Gunner Joe" was gone by about '54 or '55, while The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis didn't come on TV till what - '58 or '59? We were still doing the "duck and cover" drills in grade school though!

GREAT thread, it sure brings back good memories for days long gone, much like our cars do!

 

Wanted and top dollar paid for.
"Maynard G. Kebbs" bobbing head.
Any condition.

Also any information leading to the acquisition or the afore mentioned head will be handsomely compensated.

 

Things don't change too much over the years, do they? I'm old enough to remember the beats. Original thinkers like Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, etc. Eventually popular culture catches up to them and you get the bongo-playing, beret-wearing, Daddio-Maynard G. Krebbs version shown on TV. The surfer culture turns into Gidget, Hippies and Rock get pictured as the Partridge family, drug addled idiots on Dragnet, or the Monkees. Whatever vanguard movement there is out there eventually gets "co-opted" (can you tell how old I am?) into the mainstream and eventually just becomes another part of popular culture. Remember when having a tatoo was "out there"? There are really very few trend setters in life. By the time the rest of us learn of them and begin to emulate them, they've already moved on.

 

With all due respect to the beatniks.c.c.......WTF dont any of you all remember the tv series where denver the beatnik drove a custom taxi???? circa 1968

 

The 'Beatniks' of the '50's became the 'Hippies' of the '60's who became the ***hole liberals and 'Greenies' of today! Totally misguided, totally against the internal combustion engine and totally against automotive freedom!.

They all have their head up their *** to this day!

They are all the hot rod's worst enemy.....(AND MINE!)

 

can you say "axe to grind"?

do yourself a favor and page through "on the road" with an open mind. if you find something besides pure adulation of just about every facet of that real american culture us old car nuts dig so much, you need better gl***es.

movements influence movements, but one thing doesn't just become another. beats didn't wake up one day and decide, as a group, to start wearing beads and driving squarebacks. by that logic, traditional hot rods became factory hot rods which became muscle cars which became tubbed neon-colored billet-laden prostreet eyesores, so screw traditional hot rods. doesn't make sense.

 

I had a great uncle who was a greaser in his younger days and rocked the same at***ude right up to the day he died. Always had a hot rod too. He was always my favorite uncle but one of the scariest guys I ever met. Always wore biker boots, levis, suspenders, and a white t shirt. Always slicked back hair. Taught me to "respect a car as if it were a broad. Be good to them and they'll be good to you." Husband, Father,Marine, Korean war vet, proud Irish son of a ***** is what his headstone says.

 

Oh please, you sound so lame here.Boy, imagine people caring about water polution & clean air!! What has happen to the world?
And get it right , its "tree hugers" not "greenies"! Greenies had there day on march 17th.
JimV

 

Let's shed one light on the definition of Beatnik,shall we?

Beatnik, a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s, was a synthesis of the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s into violent film images and a cartoonish misrepresentation of the real-life people and the spirituality found in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical fiction. Kerouac spoke out against this misdirected detour from his original concept.
<script type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[ if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } //]]> </script> History

Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948, generalizing from his social circle to characterize the underground, anticonformist youth gathering in New York at that time. The name came up in conversation with the novelist John Clellon Holmes who published an early Beat Generation novel, Go (1952), along with a manifesto in The New York Times Magazine: "This Is the Beat Generation"<sup id="cite_ref-0" cl***="reference"></sup> In 1954. Nolan Miller published his third novel, Why I Am So Beat (Putnam), detailing the weekend parties of four students.
The adjective "beat" was introduced to the group by Herbert Huncke, though Kerouac expanded the meaning of the term. "Beat" came from underworld slang—the world of hustlers, drug addicts and petty thieves, where Ginsberg and Kerouac sought inspiration. "Beat" was slang for "beaten down" or downtrodden, but to Kerouac, it also had a spiritual connotation as in "bea***ude". Other adjectives discussed by Holmes and Kerouac were "found" and "furtive." Kerouac felt he had identified (and was the embodiment of) a new trend ****ogous to the influential Lost Generation.<sup id="cite_ref-1" cl***="reference"></sup><sup id="cite_ref-2" cl***="reference"></sup>
In "Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation" Kerouac criticized what he saw as a distortion of his visionary, spiritual ideas:

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way—a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word "beat" spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America—beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization...<sup id="cite_ref-3" cl***="reference"></sup><sup id="cite_ref-4" cl***="reference"></sup>
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Kerouac explained what he meant by "beat" at a Brandeis Forum, "Is There A Beat Generation?", on November 8, 1958, at New York's Hunter College Playhouse. Panelists for the seminar were Kerouac, James A. Wechsler, Princeton anthropologist Ashley Montagu, and author Kingsley Amis. Wechsler, Montague and Amis all wore suits, while Kerouac was clad in black jeans, ankle boots and a checkered shirt. Reading from a prepared text, Kerouac reflected on his beat beginnings:

It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in bea***ude and that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to it... Who knows, but that the universe is not one vast sea of comp***ion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?<sup id="cite_ref-5" cl***="reference"></sup>
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Kerouac's address was later published as "The Origins of the Beat Generation" (*******, June 1959). In that article Kerouac noted how his original beatific philosophy had been ignored amid maneuvers by several pundits, a**** them Herb Caen, the San Francisco newspaperman, to alter Kerouac's concept with jokes and jargon:

I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific . . . People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this.
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Stereotype

In her memoir, Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson described how the stereotype was absorbed into American culture:

"Beat Generation" sold books, sold black turtleneck sweaters and bongos, berets and dark gl***es, sold a way of life that seemed like dangerous fun—thus to be either condemned or imitated. Suburban couples could have beatnik parties on Saturday nights and drink too much and fondle each other’s wives.<sup id="cite_ref-6" cl***="reference"></sup>
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Kerouac biographer Ann Charters noted that the term "Beat" was appropriated to become a Madison Avenue marketing tool:

The term caught on because it could mean anything. It could even be exploited in the affluent wake of the decade’s extraordinary technological inventions. Almost immediately, for example, adverti*****ts by "hip" record companies in New York used the idea of the Beat Generation to sell their new long playing vinyl records.<sup id="cite_ref-7" cl***="reference"></sup>
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Lee Streiff, an acquaintance of many members of the movement who went on to become one of its chroniclers, believed that the news media saddled the movement for the long term with a set of false images:

Reporters are not generally well versed in artistic movements, or the history of literature or art. And most are certain that their readers, or viewers, are of limited intellectual ability and must have things explained simply, in any case. Thus, the reporters in the media tried to relate something that was new to already preexisting frameworks and images that were only vaguely appropriate in their efforts to explain and simplify. With a variety of oversimplified and conventional formulas at their disposal, they fell back on the nearest stereotypical approximation of what the phenomenon resembled, as they saw it. And even worse, they did not see it clearly and completely at that. They got a quotation here and a photograph there — and it was their job to wrap it up in a comprehensible package — and if it seemed to violate the prevailing mandatory conformist doctrine, they would also be obliged to give it a negative spin as well. And in this, they were aided and abetted by the Poetic Establishment of the day. Thus, what came out in the media: from newspapers, magazines, TV, and the movies, was a product of the stereotypes of the 30s and 40s — though garbled — of a cross between a 1920s Greenwich Village bohemian artist and a Bop musician, whose visual image was completed by mixing in Daliesque paintings, a beret, a Vandyck beard, a turtleneck sweater, a pair of sandals, and set of bongo drums. A few authentic elements were added to the collective image: poets reading their poems, for example, but even this was made unintelligible by making all of the poets speak in some kind of phony Bop idiom. The consequence is, that even though we may know now that these images do not accurately reflect the reality of the Beat movement, we still subconsciously look for them when we look back to the 50s. We have not even yet completely escaped the visual imagery that has been so insistently forced upon us.<sup id="cite_ref-8" cl***="reference"></sup>
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Etymology


Poster for The Beatniks (1960)


The word "beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958.<sup id="cite_ref-9" cl***="reference"></sup> Caen coined the term by adding the Russian suffix -nik after Sputnik I to the Beat Generation. Caen's column with the word came six months after the launch of Sputnik. Objecting to Caen's twist on the term, Allen Ginsberg wrote to the New York Times to deplore "the foul word beatnik," commenting, "If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of m*** communication which continue to brainwash man."
Beat culture

In the vernacular of the period, "Beat" indicated the culture, the at***ude and the literature, while the common usage of "beatnik" was that of a stereotype found in lightweight cartoon drawings and twisted, sometimes violent, media characters. This distinction was clarified by Boston University professor Ray Carney, a leading authority on beat culture, in "The Beat Movement in Film," his notes for a 1995 Whitney Museum exhibition and screening:

Much of Beat culture represented a negative stance rather than a positive one. It was animated more by a vague feeling of cultural and emotional displacement, dissatisfaction, and yearning, than by a specific purpose or program. It would be a lot easier if we were only looking for movies with "beatniks" in them. San Francisco columnist Herb Caen coined the word (which by sarcastically punning on the recently launched Russian Sputnik was apparently intended to cast doubt on the beatnik's red-white-and-blue-blooded all-Americanness). And the m*** media popularized the concept. Dobie Gillis, Life magazine, Charles Kuralt, and a host of other entertainers and journalists reduced Beatness to a set of superficial, silly externals which have stayed with us ever since: goatees, sungl***es, poetry readings, coffeehouses, slouches and "cool, man, cool" jargon. The only problem is there never were any beatniks in this sense (except, perhaps, for the media influenced imitators who came along late in the history of the movement). Beat culture was a state of mind, not a matter of how you dressed or talked or where you lived. In fact, Beat culture was far from monolithic. It was many different, conflicting, shifting states of mind. The films and videos that have been selected for the screening list are an attempt to move beyond the cultural clichés and slogans, to look past the Central Casting costumes, props, and jargon the m*** media equated with Beatness, in order to do justice to its spirit.<sup id="cite_ref-10" cl***="reference"></sup>
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The news photo caption for this 1959 Venice, California event read: "Beatnik Beauties: Posing before a sample of beatnik art are contestants for the ***le of Miss Beatnik of 1959, which will be conferred Sept. 12 under sponsorship of the Venice Arts Committee. From left are Michi Monteef, Sammy McCord, Patti McCrory, Shaunna Lea and, in rear, Jan Vandaveer."<sup id="cite_ref-11" cl***="reference"></sup>


Since 1958, the terms Beat Generation and Beat have been used to describe the antimaterialistic literary movement that began with Kerouac in 1948, stretching on into the 1960s. The Beat philosophy of antimaterialism and soul searching influenced 1960s musicians such as Bob Dylan, the early Pink Floyd and The Beatles.
At the time that the terms were coined, there was a trend a****st young college students to adopt the stereotype, with men wearing goatees and berets, rolling their own cigarettes and playing bongos. Fashions for women included black leotards and wearing their hair long, straight and unadorned in a rebellion against the middle cl*** culture of beauty salons. Marijuana use was ***ociated with the subculture, and during the 1950s, Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception further influenced views on drugs.
By 1960, a small 'beatnik' community in Newquay, Cornwall, England (including a young Wizz Jones) had attracted the attention and the abhorrence of their neighbours, for growing their hair to a length that was then quite abnormally long (past the shoulders), for which they were interviewed by the BBC's Alan Whicker for national television.
The Beat philosophy was generally countercultural and antimaterialistic and it stressed the importance of bettering one's inner self over and above material possessions. Some Beat writers began to delve into Eastern religions such as Buddhism or Taoism. Politics tended to be liberal; with support for causes such as desegregation (although many of the figures ***ociated with the original Beat movement, particularly Jack Kerouac, embraced libertarian/conservative ideas). An openness to African-American culture and arts was apparent in literature and music, notably jazz. While Caen and other writers implied a connection with communism, there was no obvious or direct connection between the beat philosophy (as expressed by the leading authors of this literary movement) and the philosophy of the communist movement, other than the antipathy that both philosophies shared towards capitalism.
Beatniks in literature and film

The character Maynard G. Krebs, played on TV by Bob Denver in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-63), solidified the beatnik stereotype, in contrast to the rebellious, Beat related images presented by popular film actors of the early and mid-1950s, notably Marlon Brando and James Dean.

Jules Feiffer's ad art for the Beat musical The Nervous Set was used on the 1959 cast album (reissued in 2002).


The subculture surfaced on Broadway as musical comedy in The Nervous Set (1959) by Neurotica editor Jay Landesman and Theodore J. Flicker with music by Tommy Wolf and lyrics by Fran Landesman; this was the source of two jazz standards, "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" and "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men" (recorded by Gil Evans, Anita O'Day, Roberta Flack, Petula Clark, Rod McKuen, Shirley B***ey and others). The show opened with the song, "Man, We're Beat".
Stanley Donen brought the theme to the film musical in Funny Face (1957) with one Audrey Hepburn production number revamped into a Gap commercial in 2006. In yet another Madison Avenue manipulation, one of Jerry Yulsman's photographs of Kerouac was altered for use in a Gap print ad by airbrushing Joyce Johnson right out of the picture.
The Beat Generation (1959) made an ***ociation of the movement with crime and violence, as did The Beatniks (1960). The notion of violence or other criminality possibly arose because ******** outlaws and criminals were popularly portrayed as using many of the same jive terms in their speech, and this distortion could also be seen in popular TV shows with regard to hippies a few years later.
A**** the humor books, Beat, Beat, Beat was a 1959 Signet paperback of cartoons by Phi Beta Kappa Princeton graduate William F. Brown, who looked down on the movement from his position in the TV department of the Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn advertising agency.<sup id="cite_ref-12" cl***="reference"></sup> Suzuki Beane (1961), by Sandra Scoppettone with Louise Fitzhugh illustrations, was a Bleecker Street beatnik s**** of Kay Thompson's Eloise series (1956-59).
Tony Han****'s 1961 film The Rebel is about a London office clerk who moves to Paris to pursue his vocation as an artist of the Beat Generation; the film satirizes pseudointellectuals.
The Looney Tunes cartoon character Cool Cat is often portrayed as a beatnik, as is the banty rooster in the 1963 Foghorn Leghorn short Banty Raids. Similarly, the Beany and Cecil cartoon series also had a beatnik character, Go Man Van Gogh (aka "The Wildman"), who often lives in the jungle and paints various pictures and backgrounds to fool his enemies, first appearing in the episode, "The Wildman of Wildsville." Hanna Barbera's series Top Cat features Spook, a beatnik cat. In the animated series The Simpsons, the parents of character Ned Flanders are beatniks who have him placed in a mental ins***ution as a child after they have trouble disciplining his bad behavior (Complains his mother: "We've tried nothin', and we're all out of ideas!"). Also, in the animated television series, Doug, Doug's older sister, Judy Funnie, is characterized as a beatnik.
Ed "Big Daddy" Roth used fibergl*** to build his Beatnik Bandit in 1960. Today, this car is in the National Automotive Museum in Reno, Nevada.<sup id="cite_ref-13" cl***="reference"></sup>
Yes,this was taken from Wikipedia



I would say Beatniks had a major part in the automotive culture,if you look past what the stereotype of a m*** media Beatnik was.

 

And just to follow up,The Beatniks Car Club(Founded in 1992 by Jack Rudy),has contributed to our culture for the last 18 years by putting out some of the most insane traditional customs and hot rods by builders like Rick Dore, Brad Masterson,Alex Gambino,Jeff Myers,Gary Fioto,Dennis McPhail and a slew of others.

 

btt

 

Wow! I wonder what Maynard would have to say about all this?

 

That chick 2nd from the left looks like the lead singer from the 80's hair band Cinderella

 

I have never seen a thread move this fast in two days. Probably even fast enough to satisfy C***ady! On the Road ( The Original Scroll ) sits on my desk now and you Kerouac fans need to read it no matter how many times you have read the first published edition.
Hooligan63--that is an extremely noble effort you put forth in your dissertation. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

As a greaser turned beatik turned hippie turned jarhead turned just regular old guy, I have one piece of advice for the young man that started this thread and to all of his generation. While all this makes interesting reading on a slow news day, don't get hung up on HISTORY. It is too open for interpretation.

MAKE YOUR OWN HISTORY and don't worry about what we did. Move as FAST as you can toward the prize and let the chips fall where they may! Let others ponder what you did later........that is what Jack and Neal did!

Great thread,folks!!

Eddy from Dallas
a.k.a---you can call me any of those labels-anytime! Words are JUST words!

 

Dang

 

"This is some far out ****,man...."

Beatniks have always been creators. Music,Art, poetry,sculpture,literature. Hippies were burnouts!

 

Now that great right there.

 

What a great read! thank you all...

As a young 36 year old I can only figure Beatniks had no more a part of traditional car culture than any jocks, squares or nerds. Some of 'em were into cars, some weren't.


These ones however are certainly an influence