Desolation Angels

Desolation Angels may refer to:

Desolation Angels (album)

Desolation Angels is the fifth studio album by hard rock band Bad Company. The album was released on March 17, 1979.Paul Rodgers revealed on In the Studio with Redbeard (which devoted an episode to Desolation Angels) that the album's title came from the novel of the same name by Jack Kerouac.

Desolation Angels was recorded at Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, England in late 1978. It is considered the last strong album by Bad Company, mostly because it contains their last major hit, "Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy," written by Paul Rodgers and inspired by a guitar synthesizer riff that Rodgers had come up with.

"Gone, Gone, Gone", written by bassist Boz Burrell, also received substantial airplay on rock stations. It was the first of only three songs he ever wrote for the band, but is widely revered as one of the band's finest compositions. The album reached No. 3 on the Billboard album charts in 1979 and went Platinum in 1979 and Double Platinum subsequently.

A cover version of "Oh, Atlanta", written by Mick Ralphs, was recorded by Alison Krauss and appears on her 1995 album Now That I've Found You: A Collection. The original version was used in the open to The Nashville Network's 1993 broadcast of the Motorcraft 500 when ABC (which originally had the broadcast) could not find time to air the race, postponed six days by a snowstorm in the Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Desolation Angels (novel)

Desolation Angels is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac, which makes up part of his Duluoz Legend. It was published in 1965, but was written years earlier, around the time On the Road was in the process of publication. According to the book's foreword, the opening section of the novel is almost directly taken from the journal he kept when he was a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade mountains of Washington state. Much of the psychological struggle which the novel's protagonist, Jack Duluoz, undergoes in the novel reflects Kerouac's own increasing disenchantment with the Buddhist philosophy with which he had previously been fascinated.

Character key

All of Kerouac's Duluoz legend's characters were based on others that were present within his life.

Kerouac was not particularly conscientious about masking the identities of his friends in this work. Partway through Chapter 91, there is the line, "'Who wants to ride freight trains!' -Gregory- 'I dont dig all this crap where you ride freight trains and have to exchange butts with bums-'". Somehow both Kerouac and the editors missed that "Gregory" was not changed to "Raphael". Similarly, the locals of Tangiers call Old Bull Hubbard (Burroughs) "Boorows" in Chapter 52 of Book 2. In Chapter 43, he refers to "...the Sundays in Neal Cassady's writings..." The editors may have ignored this, since it refers to Neal as a writer instead of a friend. In Part 1 of Book 2 the locals are said to call Old Bull Gaines (Garver) "Senor Gahr-va". And in Chapter 80, the discussion of the meanings of Urso and Pomeray's names leads to a less than clear comparison to the name Corso.