There I was, age 13, eyes shut tight listening intently to Frampton Comes Alive over and over, as some kind of pubescent mantra that helped cushion the dementia of just how badly I wanted to whisk Bambi, the beautiful cheerleader, away from the wedge of peach melba that was the handsome, hunky football hero. . .

I was daydreaming of taking her out behind the 7 11 to drink Boone's Farm strawberry-apple wine and kiss until our mouths were raw. ZZZZRRRIIIPP!! was the sound I heard that ripped me from that tender moment. My brother Danny,10 years my senior and on the verge of committing fratricide, having had more than enough of 'Do You Feel Like We Do?', promptly seized the vinyl off the record player and with a violent heave chucked the sacred album into the cluttered abyss of my room.

'No more,' he hissed. 'I can't let you listen to that shit anymore!'

I sat there snarling at him in that deeply expressive way that only teens possess,decompressing too fast back into reality. He grabbed a record out of his own collection and threw it on.

'Try this. . . you're better than that stuff. You don't have to listen to that shit just ’cause other kids do.'

'OK, fucker,' I thought, 'bring it on.. .let's have it!' The music started. . . guitar, fretless stand-up bass, flutes and some creep pining away about '. . .venturing in the slipstream...between the viaducts of your dreams. . .' Fuck this, I thought, this is pussy music they're not even plugged in! Those guitars aren't electric! The song went a bit further, 'Would you find me. . . would you kiss my eyes. ... to be born again?. . .' The words began to hit home; they didn't play that kind of stuff on the radio, and as the melody of the song settled in, I was starting to get kind of used to it. Shit! I even liked it. It was a sound I hadn't really ever given any attention to before, because of my innate fear of groups such as America, Seals and Crofts and, most of all, the dreaded Starland Vocal Band. I didn't give half a fuck about a horse with no name, summer breezes or afternoon delights! I needed space to be filled!!! Filled with sound. . . distorted guitars, drums, feedback and words. . . words that meant something. . . sounds that meant something!

I found myself rooting wildly through my brother's record collection as if it were a new-found treasure, a monumental discovery that no one especially no one my age could know about or understand. I listened to it all! The soundtracks to A Clockwork Orange and Last Tango In Paris, Bob Dylan, Mozart and Brahms. .. The whole shebang! I couldn't get enough. I had become like some kind of junkie for the stuff and a regular pain in the ass to my brother. I wanted to know all that he did. I wanted to know everything that rotten white-bread football brute didn't. I was preparing to woo that fantastic little ra-ra girl out of the sunlight of the ice-cream parlour and into my nocturnal adolescent dreamscape.And so began my ascension (or descension) into the mysteries of all thingsconsidered Outside. I had burrowed too deep into the counterculture of my brother's golden repository and, as years went by, he would turn me on to other areas of his expertise, sending me even further into the dark chasm of alternative learning.

One day he gave me a book that was to become like a Koran for me. A dog-eared paperback, roughed up and stained with God knows what. On The Road, written by some goofball with a strange frog name that was almost unpronounceable for my teenage tongue, had found its way from big brother's shelf and into my greedy little paws. Keep in mind that in all my years of elementary school, junior high and high school, possibly the only things I'd read up to that point were a biography of Knute Rockne, some stuff on Evel Knieval and books about WW11. On The Road was life-changing for me, in the same way that my life had been metamorphosised when Danny put Van Morrison's Astral Weeks on to the turntable that day. I was probably about 15 by this time, and the cheerleader had begun to fade from my dreams. I didn't need her now. I needed to wander. . . whenever and wherever I wanted!

I'd found myself at the end of my rope as far as school was concerned; there seemed no particular reason for me to stay. The teachers didn't want to teach, and I didn't want to learn from them. I wanted my education to come from getting out there in the world, moving among the other vagabonds who had had the same sneaking suspicion I had, that there would be no great need for high-end mathematics, nope. . . I was not going to be doing other people's taxes and going home at 5.37pm to pat my dog's head and sit down to my meat-and-two-vegetable table, waiting for Jeopardy to pop on the glass tit, the Pat Sajak of my own private gameshow, in the bellybutton of the universe, Miramar, Florida. A beautiful life, to be sure, but one I know I was destined not to have, thanks to big brother Dan and the French-Canadian with the name Jack Kerouac.

I had found the teachers, the soundtrack and the proper motivation for my life. Kerouac's train-of-thought writing style gave great inspiration for a train-of-thought existence for better or for worse. The idea to live day to day in a 'true pedestrian' way, to keep walking, moving forward, no matter what. A sanctified juggernaut

Through this introduction to Kerouac, I then learned of his fellow conspirators Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Hunke, Cassady and the rest of the unruly lot. I dove into their world full on and sponged up as much as I possibly could of their works. The 'Howl' of Ginsberg left me babbling like an idiot, stunned that someone could regurgitate such honesty to paper Burroughs's Naked Lunch sent me into fits of hysterical laughter, with the imagery of talking assholes and shady reptilian characters looming, never far behind. Cassady's The First Third rants on beatifically like a high-speed circular saw. The riches I walked away with from these heroes,teachers and mentors are not available in any school I've ever heard of. Their infinite wisdom and hypersensitivity were their greatest attributes, and in some cases as I believe it was with Kerouac played a huge part in their ultimate demise.

I had the honour of meeting and getting to know Allen Ginsberg for a short time. The initial meeting was at a soundstage in New York City, where we were both doing a bit in the film The United States Of Poetry. I was reading a piece from Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, the '211th Chorus', and as I was rehearsing it for camera, I could see a familiar face out of the corner of my eye: 'Fuck me,' I thought 'that's Ginsberg!!!' We were introduced, he then immediately launched into a blistering rendition of said chorus, to show me the proper way for it to be done. 'As Jack would have done it!' he emphasised.

I was looking straight down the barrel of one of the most gifted and important poets of the 20th century, and with all the truth and guts I could muster, I said, 'Yeah, but I'm not reading it as him, I'm reading it as me. It's my interpretation of his piece.' Silence a LONNNGG silence. Tick tock tick tock tick tock. . .

I was smiling nervously, my eyes sort of wavering between his face and the floor. I sucked down about half of my 5,000th cigarette of the day in a monster drag and filled the air with my poison. It was at that point that I remembered his 'Don't smoke!' song. . . oops. . . too fucking late now, boy, you done stepped in shit! I looked at Ginsberg, he looked at me, the director looked at us both as the crew looked at him, and it was quite a little moment, for a moment there. Allen's eyes squinted ever so slightly and then began to twinkle like bright lights. He smiled that mystic smile, and I felt as though God himself had forgiven me a dreadful sin.

After the shoot, we took a car back to his apartment on the Lower East Side and had some tea. He was gracious enough to speak to me about the early years with Kerouac, Cassady and the others. We spoke of many things, from the cost of a limo ride to the high-pitched voice of Oscar Wilde; he had a recording of Wilde reading The Ballad Of Reading Gaol. He flirted unabashedly and nonstop for the duration of my visit, even allowing me to smoke, as long as I sat next to the kitchen window and exhaled in that direction. He kindly signed a book to me and a couple of autographs (one for my brother, of course), and then I made my way back to the hotel, only to have already received a call from him, inviting me to some kind of something or other.

From that day forward, we stayed in touch with each other over the next few years, and even spent time together. Our communication continued until our final conversation, which was just three days before he passed on. He called me to say he was dying, and that it would be nice to see each other again before he checked out. He was so calm and peaceful about it that I had to ask how he felt given this situation. He gracefully said it was like a ripple on a sea of tranquility. He then cried a little, as I did; he said, 'I love you,' and so did I. I told him I would get to New York as soon as possible, and fuckin' A, I was gonna go the call came only days later. Ginsberg was a great man, like his old pals, who had paved the way for many,and many more to come.

The contribution of these people goes way beyond their own works. Without On The Road, 'Howl' or Naked Lunch, for example, would we have been blessed with the likes of Hunter S Thompson and Bob Dylan? Or countless other writers and poets of that calibre who were born out of the Fifties and Sixties? Where would we be without modern classics such as Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas or 'The Times They Are a-Changin'? So much has happened to me in the 20 years since I first sat down and took that long drag on Kerouac's masterpiece. I have been a construction labourer, a gas station attendant, a bad mechanic, a screen printer, a musician, a phone salesman, an actor, and a tabloid target but there's never been a second that went by in which I deviated from the road that ol' Jack put me on,via my brother. It has been an interesting ride emotionally and psychologically taxing but a motherfucker straight down the pike. And I know that without these great writers' holy words seared into my brain, I would most likely have ended up chained to a wall in Camarillo State hospital, zapped beyond recognition, or dead by misadventure. So in the end, what can anyone. . . scholar, professor, student or biographer. . . really say about these angels and devils, who once walked among us, though maybe just a bit higher off the ground?