The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Where Have The Girls Gone- When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion, Circa 1964- With Ruby And The Romantics Our Day Will Come In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Where Have The Girls Gone- When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion, Circa 1964- With Ruby And The Romantics Our Day Will Come In Mind

A YouTube film clip of Ruby & The Romantics performing the classic, Our Day Will Come.

Our day will come
And we'll have everything.
We'll share the joy
Falling in love can bring.

No one can tell me
That I'm too young to know (young to know)
I love you so (love you so)
And you love me.

Our day will come
If we just wait a while.
No tears for us -
Think love and wear a smile.

Our dreams have magic
Because we'll always stay
In love this way
Our day will come.
(Our day will come; our day will come.)

[Break]

Our dreams have magic
Because we'll always stay
In love this way.
Our day will come.
Our day will come.

********

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[Not every sketch in this series was predicated on some incident which one of my growing up corner boys in the working poor Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville about thirty miles south of Boston as the crow flies. Some of the sketches that I commissioned or wrote myself under the pen name of Peter Paul Markin, a moniker used in honor of a late corner boy who taught us all a lot by who let it all slip away after his military service in Vietnam who he (we who also went) never recovered from, were taken from other places and other circumstances. The sketch below was, if I remember correctly, done after Josh Breslin, noted that one of the pathologies of the working poor, or some of the working poor, is a strong inclination to lie, lie seriously as well as just for the sake of lying. Now Josh was not an Acre corner boy although he came from working poor corner boy culture up in the old mill town of Olde Saco up in Maine so he knew from where he spoke. We had met Josh through Markin out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 when he, they, we headed out there to see what was happening. For the North Adamsville corner boys it was all about Markin pulling us out kicking and screaming if you can believe that.

But all of that Summer of Love, 1967 business has been endlessly written about here and that “overkill” was allegedly one of the reason that I was fired as site manager from this publication and not germane to Josh’s point about the chronic lying that went. He mentioned at the time that this sketch was written by him that he was thinking of the situation with Johnny Logan one of his hang around guys (corner boys really although Josh said unlike us that they never called or thought of themselves by that term). Johnny had come from an even poorer family than Josh’s which according to Josh was saying something. Josh was not sure about Johnny early childhood but he knew that Johnny was always behind the eight ball in school, in church, in sports and so he assumed that Johnny had developed the lying habits in reaction to his terrible home life from early on if he was that way in junior high school when they met and became fast friends.

They never spoke about it much, still don’t on the infrequent occasions when Josh heads back up to Olde Saco for a visit to the old town. Josh knew this much though except for his name, and maybe under some circumstances even then, Johnny would lie about almost anything. For example from very early on Josh found out that Johnny would tell people he met that he was from Kennebunkport (yes, the place where old man Bush, the first one, has his summer place) a swanky place with some cache for people who knew about the place. Would constantly lie about almost everything about himself from how well he did in sports (not well) to attending church (not much) to saying how many girlfriends he had and what he did with them (not many and not much respectively). Now all of this may seem like kids’ stuff except what happened is that Johnny would always get himself into trouble when he was called on stuff and as could be expected had very few lasting friendships since his lying spilled over to larceny and such most often than not. For example that Kennebunkport business got him in trouble when somebody went to “visit” him at the address he had given in order to collect some money he had lent Johnny. Somehow the guy traced back and found Johnny and forced him to repay the loan.

Josh had a million examples like that but the one that kind of stuck in my mind was when several years ago, maybe a decade now Johnny who had a serious drinking problem decided to sober up and join Alcoholics Anonymous. You would think that under those collective circumstances Johnny would come clean in order to start fresh. Not so. Johnny made up lies about his Army service (which is where he claimed he started drinking to excess), about his marriages (two not three), about his children (none not two), about where he lived as an adult (Massachusetts not California) and on and on. Now all of this may not be attributable to growing up poor in America since you can always use the old chestnut that others have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps but you have to at least reckon that his reaction to the hostile world outside was shaped by that experience. That is what I think anyway. Allan Jackson]         

*********** 

As I mentioned in a review of a two-volume set of, for lack of a better term, girl doo wop some of the songs which overlapped in a six volume series, I have, of late, been running back over some rock material that formed my coming of age listening music (on that ubiquitous, and very personal, iPod, oops, battery-driven transistor radio that kept those snooping parents out in the dark, clueless, and that was just fine, agreed), and that of my generation, the generation of ’68. Naturally one had to pay homage to the blues influences from the likes of Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, and Big Joe Turner. And, of course, the rockabilly influences from Elvis, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and Jerry Lee Lewis on. Additionally, I have spent some time on the male side of the doo wop be-bop Saturday night led by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on Why Do Fools Fall In Love? (good question, right). I noted there that I had not done much with the female side of the doo wop night, the great ‘girl’ groups that had their heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s before the British invasion, among other things, changed our tastes in popular music. I would expand that observation here to include girls’ voices generally. As there, I make some amends for that omission here.

As I also noted in that earlier review one problem with the girl groups, and now with these generic girl vocals for a guy, me, a serious rock guy, me, was that the lyrics for many of the girl group songs, frankly, did not “speak to me.” After all how much empathy could a young ragamuffin of boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks like this writer have for a girl who breaks a guy’s heart after leading him on, yes, leading him on, just because her big bruiser of a boyfriend is coming back and she needs some excuse to brush the heartbroken lad off in the Angels' My Boyfriend’s Back. Or some lucky guy, some lucky Sunday guy, maybe, who breathlessly catches the eye of the singer in the Shirelles' I Met Him On Sunday from a guy who, dateless Saturday night, was hunched over some misbegotten book, some study book, on Sunday feeling all dejected. And how about this, some two, or maybe, three-timing gal who berated her ever-loving boyfriend because she needs a good talking to, or worst, a now socially incorrect, very incorrect and rightly so, "beating" in Joanie Sommers’ Johnny Get Angry.

And reviewing the material in that volume gave me the same flash-back feeling I felt listening to the girl doo wop sounds. I will give similar examples of that teen boy alienation for this volume, and this approach drove the reviews of all six of these volumes in the series. I won’t even go into such novelty silly songs as the title self-explanatory My Boy Lollipop by Barbie Gaye; the teen angst hidden behind the lyrics to Bobby's Girl by Marcie Blane; or, the dreamy, wistful blandness of A Thousand Stars by Kathy Young & The Innocents that would have set any self-respecting boy’s, or girl’s, teeth on edge. And prayed, prayed out loud and to heaven that the batteries in that transcendent transistor would burn to hell before having to continue sustained listening to such, well, such… and I will leave it at that. I will rather concentrate on serious stuff like the admittedly great harmonics on Our Day Will Come by Ruby & The Romantics that I actually, secretly, liked but I had no one to relate it to, no our to worry about that day, or any day, or Tonight You Belong To Me by Patience & Prudence that I didn’t like secretly or openly but gave me that same teen angst feeling of having no one, no girl one, belonging to, me.

And while today it might be regarded as something of a pre-feminist feminist anthem for younger women, You Don't Own Me by Lesley Gore, was meaningless for a guy who didn’t have girl to own, or not own, to fret over her independent streak, or not. Moreover, since I was never, at least I never heard otherwise, that I was some damsel in distress’ pining away boy next store The Boy Next Door by The Secrets was wrapped with seven seals. And while I had many a silent, lonely, midnight waiting by the phone night how could Cry Baby by The Bonnie Sisters, Lonely Blue Nights by Rosie & The Originals, and Lonely Nights by The Hearts give me comfort when even Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry hard-rockin’ the night away could not console me, and take away that blue heart I carried like a badge, a badge of almost monastic honor. Almost.

So you get the idea, this stuff could not “speak to me.” Now you understand, right? Except, surprise, surprise foolish, behind the eight- ball, know-nothing youthful guy had it all wrong and should have been listening, and listening like crazy, to these lyrics because, brothers and sisters, they held the key to what was what about what was on girls’ minds back in the day, and maybe now a little too, and if I could have decoded this I would have had, well, the beginning of knowledge, girl knowledge. Damn. But that is one of the virtues, and maybe the only virtue of age. Yah, and also get this- you had better get your do-lang, do-lang, your shoop, shoop, and your best be-bop, be-bop into that good night voice out and sing along to the lyrics here. This, fellow baby-boomers, was our teen angst, teen alienation, teen love youth and now this stuff sounds great.

And from girls even.