And you probably don’t celebrate his birthday, anyway. Like an Egyptian saint, it’s the anniversary of his death, September 30, 1955, that is universally observed. His death, like some Asiatic mystery cult, ushered in an era of freakishness—any combination of sex and death being a genetic component of the seething teenage brain. An actor dies in a car crash and suddenly ... altars! Suicide pacts! Supernatural appearances! Fantastic rumors! He’s not dead but badly disfigured and living in New Mexico!

The Elvis sightings (a tabloid in my supermarket this week proclaims: "ELVIS DEAD AT 66"), the Jim Morrison cult—it all came from James Dean. A few years ago, vandals (disciples?) stole Dean’s gravestone three times (since returned) from the Fairmount cemetery. Lives read through such a dark glass lend themselves to fantastic fabrications and grotesque distortions. Nothing remotely like this had occurred in pop culture before James Dean. Today, the teen liebestod motif is one of pop’s sacraments.

All this, of course, only ensures Dean’s stature as the great-granddaddy of Pop. Heck, it’s almost as if his death brought on rock ’n’ roll. He died in September 1955 and in March 1956 Elvis hit the charts with "Heartbreak Hotel." The same way JFK’s assassination in November of ’63 is said to have sent the Beatles rolling the following January. An idol falls and the culture bursts into ecstatic whoops of song.

In any case, whether he would have liked it or not, rock ’n’ roll was surely fashioned around his image. Cool, defiant, romantic, sexy, and nutty—the X-factor that drives the Formula One sownzmobile of rock. Dean is the cat who defined the style and attitude of rock ’n’ roll’s politics of delinquency, the lone visionary of pop culture’s ongoing dream time, all those wild sounds zinging through our heads while we hold séances with a Stratocaster to pull them out.

If you’ve ever wondered what the soundtrack to Jimmy’s life might have been—what he listened to—as chance would have it, his record collection survives in tact. Get out! I’m not going to tell you where. Mostly, it consists of classical records—sets of 78s in those big clunky boxes you sometimes see at yard sales. Let’s see, among others, there’s a Mozart String Trio, Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde, Ravel’s L'Heure Espagnole, Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, and Honegger’s Jeanne D'Arc Au Bucher. Heavy, man, heavy.

While David Loehr—you know, the Dean of Denobilia from the James Dean Memorial Gallery in Fairmount, Indiana?—was opening one of those boxes, out fell "Sincerely" by the McGuire Sisters. An interesting coincidence this, because, without anybody ever knowing he’d owned the record, it got used on the track of the Altman movie, Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Way mysterioso, amigo. But Jimmy, the McGuire Sisters? Now if it had only been the Moonglows, we’d have had a cosmic wormhole into your rocky soul, brother.

Dean listened to jazz, too, but like his alpha-wolf contemporary, Jackson Pollock, he preferred mellow, cool jazz to the hard bop of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Anyway, what we’re talking about here is what Jimmy shoulda listened to, he being the prototype for rock poseurs from here to eternity, and here’s what I know about that. Eartha Kitt told me that Dean once sang "Tweedle Dee" to her in a cab, and Nicholas Ray insisted that he’d wanted to use a rock ’n’ roll track (never mind that rock didn’t enter the charts for another year) for the planetarium stairwell scene in Rebel. Aside from these testimonials (and bearing in mind that Kitt and Ray are well-known talented fabulists), there’s not much hard evidence that Jimmy was a rock fan.

But this is quibbling. You know that had he lived, he’d have been into rock ’n’ roll. How could a car-crazed kid like Jimmy have resisted "Maybelline"? Or the nuttiness of "Tutti Frutti" and "I Put a Spell on You," the tiki-bar cool of "Tequila," Fats Domino shakin’ like a bowl of jelly in a Mardi Gras float, Jerry Lee "the Killer" Lewis sneering from his pianer, Little Richard "the X-factor" Penniman making the knees freeze and the liver quiver, Bill Haley with his spit curl, and Chuck "Mann-Act" Berry motivatin’ over the hill.

And you know he’d have flipped for all that great r&b—Big Joe Turner, Otis Rush, Amos Milburn, and Louis Jordan. Probably knew most of this stuff, right? C’mon, he was a hep cat. And if he wasn’t, please don’t tell me about it. In any case, it all began with Dean.

And Elvis. Jimmy and Elvis were twins suckled on a she-wolf’s pungent milk. That wild, umbilical thing they both had with their moms—it’s all right, ma, I’m only bleeding. But we have seen the promised land and will cross over Jordan and bring the Teen Dream to all the peoples of the world, hallelujah! Jimmy, like some Egyptian god, gave birth to Elvis; Elvis is James Dean’s cursed love child, a voodoo doll, cauled in a placenta of darkness and honky-tonk black light, dancing on the faultline of America’s national nervous breakdown.

Yeah, and lay some Gene Vincent on us, babe. Gene and his Blue Caps be-bop-a-lula-ing down lonely street in their leathers, revving their custom Harleys at the head of the juvenile delinquency chapter of crazy-mamas and psycho boys who call the highway "my way" and tool through drive-in burger joints for fries and floats to cool their overheated brain pans from last night’s rumble.

As for Buddy Holly, James Dean was Buddy Holly. It’s as if he split like an atom and one half of him went to Hollywood to make movies and the other half lit out for Texas to play in a rock ’n’ roll band. You think it’s a coincidence they both died in crashes? Try and keep up.

"Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On" is just James Dean on a handful of Dexies. You’re hearing the rush of the fifties right there, boy, in Jerry Lee Lewis’s threshing-machine piano—pure, high-octane, V-8 adrenaline. Pink Cadillacs with chrome shark fins, big busty blondes, and pedal-to-the-metal blast off. And remember to drink some water with that stuff, son.

Here we might throw in a torch song by his platinum-twin, Marilyn, just to mellow out the birthday celebrations.

The pool lights throw aqua shadows on the palm trees, a hint of a breeze off the ocean is blowing the chenille curtains, a shaker of vodka martinis sweats on the glass kidney-shaped coffee table, high heels are tossed recklessly on the shag carpeting in front of the fake fire burning in the fieldstone fireplace, and there’s a little Marilyn in the night, cooing "I Wanna Be Loved By You" in her breathy, do-it-to-me-baby, bad little girl voice—and if that ain’t the objective correlative of sex, I don’t know what is.

Marilyn and Jimmy, did you hear? They got hitched in Hollywood Heaven. I swear. Elvis performed the ceremony right there at the Wedding Bells Chapel in Las Vegas. Afterwards they sipped Mai Tais at the Golden Nugget and retired to their heart-shaped bed in the honeymoon suite on the top floor of the Aladdin Hotel. And that’s the way it should be, when the gods make love....

Maybe we can even get Jimmy himself to play a little something. Yeah, he could make those bongos bop, man. Just ’cause it’s his birthday, I’m gonna take you to a place we all go in our whacked-out brains, the best minds of our generation, dig?

Okay, now, try and maintain your cool here, man. I don’t want all the with-it cats and kicky kittens thinkin’ I’m hangin’ with squares, dig. You’re in some Beat grotto and, like, this cat in a goatee is howling about the eleventh floor of his consciousness to a jungle-rhythm bongo beat. It’s dark in here—candles in Chianti bottles, dig—so you can’t quite make out the dude wailing on the bongos. Beret, Ray-Bans, a Gauloise dangling from his lower lip. Is that—? Naw, you’re saying to yourself, it can’t be him. Man, what would James Dean be doing telegraphin’ on bongos in the Existential Cafe? Then again, where else but here, at the Being & Nothingness junction, would a cool cat like him be hangin’ out?

C’mon, get with it. Dig that way-out beat. Crazy, man, crazy! As he finishes "Dean’s Lament," all the cool chicks in their Juliette Greco black dresses and undertaker make-up do the slow one-hand Zen clap; they want to climb into his silk-lined coffin and watch celestial movies, authored & angeled in heaven with him for, like, ever.