When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -The Moment Bobby Blue “Blues Hour” Blew The Lip Off The Po’ White Corner Boy Night-Damn Right

When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -The Moment Bobby Blue “Blues Hour” Blew The Lip Off The Po’ White Corner Boy Night-Damn Right   

By Zack James

[Zack James has been on an assignment covering the various 50^th anniversary commemorations of the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind something of a watershed year rather than his brother Alex and friends “generation of ‘68” designation they have wrapped themselves around) and therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the demographical-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through his paces. Greg Green, site manager]    

Alex James was the king of rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a “think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million years ago, or it like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical experiences which have left me as a stepchild to five  important musical moments, the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute of the early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock, along the way and intersecting that big three came a closeted “country outlaw moment” initiated by father time Hank Williams and carried through with vengeance by singers like Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt, and Waylon Jennings, and Muddy Waters and friends blues as the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring for this and other publications. I am well placed to do since I was over a decade too young to have been washed over by the movements. But that step-child still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.

This needs a short explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother, born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls, me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in the dirt- poor working- class Acre, as in local lore Hell’s Acre, section of North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player (the now ancient although retro revival way to hear music then) and he was forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend back then called “the great jailbreak.”     

A little about Alex’s trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe 1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis (and maybe others as well but Alex always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd.) Quickly that formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats. That same Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t, was the guy who turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned about the emerging acid rock scene (drugs, sex and rock and roll being one mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time. (The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him later to the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service while more than the others unhinged him and his dream.) The blues part came as mentioned as a component of the folk minute, part of the new wave rock revival and on its own. The country outlaw connections bears separate mention these days.  

       

That’s Alex’s story-line. My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day at some law firm  as some  kind of lacky, and went to law school nights studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and knocked on his door to get him quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his record player   Jerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out. I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen. What happened then, what got me mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when he had first heard such and such a song.

Although the age gap between Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew him since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not just a question of say, why Jailhouse Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going, why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock with his Rocket 88 and how obscure guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop rhythm and blues was one key element. Another stuff from guys like Hack Devine, Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their country roots not the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music.

I have already mentioned that night Alex startled me while we were listening to an old Louvain Brothers song, I forget which one maybe Every Times You Leave, when he said “daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in the mud Appalachia had put the hillbilly mountain music stuff in our genes. It took me a long time, too long to do our father any good but I finally  figured out a few years ago that DNA stuff, why of late I see, really see where the hillbilly  good old boy hills and hollows Saturday night local hooch courage red barn dance fit in on the long arch of classic rock and roll as it passed through the likes of Elvis, Carl Perkins, Lenny Ladd, Jerry Lee, Old Slim Fanon, Texas Mac Devlin, Warren Smith and a whole list of guys and a couple of gals like Belinda Wales and Sara Webb. What the hell did I know then when stuff like that hillbilly mountain had plenty to do with estrangements from distance father, righteous hillbilly from down in the muds or not.

Alex,  okay King Alex, then completed the third leg of my classic roots of rock and roll on another night when he had I guess if I recall correctly had had another tough day grinding up some legal sweat somebody up the food chain in that sullen law office he worked in while doing that hard-ass (I will give him that) law school nights got credit for from some judge whose law clerk actually read the thing and wrote the decision based on Alex’s work (I am telling no tales out of school everybody these days knows that the higher up the food chain you are including SCOTUS the less writing of legal decisions you do which makes that law school education pretty damn expensive way up on the top for some poor benighted parents who thought they were doing the right thing). That night he asked me if I ever remember hearing some music on the radio, the family radio to boot, when our parents were on one of their rather infrequent nights out meaning when Dad had steady work and Ma was not afraid going out would break the family bank, that came booming out Chicago, always at night, usually Saturday or Sunday DJed by Brother Blues out of WAJB.   

I had to plead that I hadn’t until he mentioned a song called Little Red Rooster which I remember from his Stones collection but which he said had actually been written by a guy named Willie Dixon who was associated with a couple of brothers at Chess Records in Chicago who recorded had Howlin’ Wolf doing it and making a smash hit of it of the R&B charts (fuck it even the music was segregated by race on those record popularity charts). That is when Alex told me that he had first heard the song on that Chicago station on a program called Brother Blues’ Blues Hour (which was actually two hours each Saturday and Sunday night on nights when it came in clear enough to hear). Of course the ghost of Peter Paul Markin has to enter into the lists on this one (that ghost as new site manager Greg Green has found out during his short tenure and has commented on hovers over everything including its share of former site manager Allan Jackson’s demise giving Greg his job). Alex didn’t discover Brother Blues and his show Markin had one night up in his room on his transistor radio which is the way the young of Markin’s and Alex’s generation got to listen to the music of their lives without nosey parents interfering just as today one way kids do is listen to their MP3s or iPods.

Somehow on Markin’s radio the winds were just right one Sunday night when he was really trying to get WMEX the local max daddy rock and roll station and Brother Blues popped up. Markin went crazy listening to Muddy Waters, Howlin’s Wolf, Jimmy Smith, Mamma Smith, Memphis Minnie, Big Mama Thornton and a whole raft of other blues singers whose beat seemed so much like lets’ say where Chuck Berry or Randy Rhodes was coming from, that R&B-etched back beat that formed over half of all classic rock. So Alex and Markin would listen whenever the winds were right (more in winter than summer) and got an education about this branch root of the blues. Alex made this point blank to me (again via Markin who gave it to him point  blank) when he mentioned the famous smash hit Elvis made of Hound Dog (a strange song for a guy who girls, women too, married women, sweated over in between bouts of swooning but that understanding by me would only come later) and then played Big Mama Thornton’s version from the early 1950s where she made a three dollars on her version but ripped the thing apart, had every Tom, Dick and Harry jumping the jump.  

Of course ignorant as I was at the time Alex had to clue me to the difference between the root roots of the blues in the country, down in the sweat swamp Delta plantation Saturday night white lightening brave juke joint no electricity dance (probably no different except color, the eternal race issue always just below or on the surface at all times in America) guy with some beat up Sear& Roebuck-ordered guitar  making the joint jump. He gave me a whole slew of names like Robert Johnson, Charly Patton, Son House, Ben Jamison, Mississippi John Hurt, a few Big Bills, a couple of Slims Memphis and Kansas City and a lifetime’s interest in that sound. That interest though as important as it was as the root of the roots of the blues really only hooks up to classic rock when the blues move north, move up what did Alex call it, oh yeah, moved up the Mississippi out of the sweated South and had an electric cord to put on that guitar and blow the place away (the liquor and  hooch fight over dames would stay the same). Names like Muddy Waters, that same Howlin’ Wolf, Ben Attuck, Little Jimmy (and a ton of other Littles), Junior Wells and the like. Yes Alex, you went by the numbers and I am going to pass on point blank to the good people reading this to give the real skinny on the music of your generation, on what caused that big wave coming down upon the land in your time.         

The selection posted here culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.   

[Alex and I had our ups and downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley). Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017 when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the production values.]