AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Saturday, October 20, 2018

The High White Note Blowing Out To The China Seas-The Film Adaptation Of Pearl S. Buck’s “China Sky” (1945)- A Review

DVD Review

By Josie Davis

China Sky, starring Randolph Scott, Ruth Warrick, Ellen Drew, Anthony Quinn, 1945

Although I am fairly new to the film reviewing business, to journalism in general having just finished up my graduate program at Boston University’s School of Communications I find it hard to believe what the older writers keep telling me as words of advice. To watch my back, to watch out for fellow reviewers who will skewer my work just to get ahead, just to beat someone in what they have all called a cutthroat, drag down business. The idea behind their cautions seems to center on the notion that nobody really needs to read a film review, everybody has a subjective point of view on the subject matter of a film and the only way to get out from under the rock is to take dead aim at somebody else’s work in order to do what they call “move up the food chain.”

Here is what is ironic about all of what they say. I was assigned this old- time film, China Sky, by the site manager mostly because nobody else wanted to do the review and because if I messed up, the site manager’s words, nobody would notice some raw rookie errors anyway. After viewing the film I was puzzled, could not figure out how to write the review up since the film seemed very dated and weird. Weird since the film, as the title indicated, was about and set in China during World War II, during the time Japan was trying to make all of Asia its feeding grounds. Yet several of the main actors like Anthony Quinn known to me from a cinema class where we watched and critiqued Zorba the Greek who were obviously not Chinese were made up to look that way rather than have real Chinese actors in the roles.

One day at the water cooler I introduced myself to some older writers who were talking about the modern film Black Panther and when I had an opportunity I asked what I should do about the odd film I had been given to review. Most of them, actually all of them except Si Lannon, walked away after basically telling that it was my problem and that if I wanted to get ahead in the profession I had better figure out a way to deal with the film or they would be more than willing to rip it apart to show me how tough this “racket” really was. Si told me not to listen to them because that was all an act. They just didn’t want to be bothered “mentoring” a rookie on a turkey like China Sky. Si gave me some advice which I think is reflected in this review-if all else fails then use the old “slice of life” fall back. By that he meant if I couldn’t figure a “hook” is what he, they call it to just go on and on about the plotline of the film and move on. Thanks, Si who is proof that whatever else some people in this business are not out to cut everybody else’s throat.

I remember, because I asked my mother, that my grandmother used to have many of Pearl S. Buck’s books on her shelf. I might have glanced through a couple, I remember one The Good Earth I started to read but gave it up because it was hard to follow when I was a teenager, didn’t speak to me about the China I had heard about. I believe that most of Buck’s books were based on China experiences and represented a Western missionary come to help the heathens to the good life way of looking at that then benighted country. China Sky falls into that same category. I have already mentioned the use of Western actors in some roles as Chinese but also that the Chinese people are portrayed as mere props for the in this case Americans to bring into the modern world.

Si told me to get the “boy meets girl” part out of the way first. I already knew from the tons of films that I had seen in classes and on my own that an extraordinary number of films, especially from Hollywood back in the 1930s and 1940s depended on that theme. Here that theme got a serious work- out in the relationship between the two doctors, one male, Thompson, played by ruggedly handsome Randolph Scott and one female, Durant, played by quietly beautiful Ruth Warrick. From scene one, where he is absent off in America to raise money for medical equipment everybody and their sister and brother knows she loves him. But that love is thwarted first by their professional relationship and secondly when the good doctor does appear he has a brand- new wife, Laura, played by fetching Ellen Drew. Done for. No, through the course of the film as Laura cannot adjust to the wartime deprivations and misery Doc Thompson starts to see the light, starts to see that he had made a mistake and should have taken his fellow doctor will all hands. But brave Doc Durant will just pine away and be the good soldier.

Of course in the end Laura will fall down and the two fated doctors will come together. There is also a secondary love interest between the Chinese guerilla leader, played by Anthony Quinn in Chinese make-up and one of the nurses, also in Chinese make-up, which will also get happily resolved when the treacherous native doctor she is betrothed to is killed after betraying the hospital and town to a “wily” Japanese POW.

As already foreshadowed this film is a wartime romance set in World War II China when the Japanese were fighting for control of the whole vast country and the town where all the action takes place is near where the Chinese partisans have their supply dumps. Since the Japanese are trying to push through holding that position is a must for them. That however means that the town took a terrible beating from the Japanese air forces bombing the hell out of everything that moved-including the American-sponsored hospital. The wartime action spins around that senior Japanese POW who the guerrillas want to put on trial for war crimes. He, as an officer, tried every way to get information back to his side about the location of the supply dumps. Including playing on the racial and romantic animosities of the chief native doctor (who was actually Korean and whose unknown father was Japanese). Naturally the good guys led by Doc Thompson and the guerrilla chief beat back the bastardly Japanese. You already know the love story part where Doc Thompson’s desperate to leave wife acted as a foil for treachery with the Korean doctor in order to get her and Doc out of the country so that part is done.

Final note, footnote, for the “slice of life” idea from Si. We live in an age more concerned about what we call political correctness than back in the 1940s so some of the stereotypes are pretty raw. The superiority of Americans over mainly prop Asians. The contempt for the average people expressed by Laura. The wily treacherous Japanese and the sullen Korean. But above all that use of Western actors in Chinese make-up reminiscent of whites in blackface tells me that this film is certainly a period piece. That is that for a first review. Hope I survive.

The Answer My Friend Id Blowing (No Clipped “G”) In The Wind-The Influence Of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” On The “Generation of’68”-The Best Part Of That Cohort

[An encore of two pieces on this subject and like the Summer of Love, 1967 frenzy at this publication, time to move on and let others give their choices without further prompting. S.G. ]

By Seth Garth

No question this publication both in its former hard copy editions and now more so in the on-line editions as the, ouch, 50^th anniversary of many signature events for the “Generation of ‘68” have come and gone that the whole period of the 1950s and 1960s had gotten a full airing. Has been dissected, deflected, inspected, reflected and even rejected beyond compare. That is not to say that this trend won’t continue if for no other reason that the demographics and actual readership response indicate that people still have a desire to not forget their pasts, their youth.

(Under the new site manager Greg Green, despite what I consider all good sense having worked under taskmaster Allan Jackson, we are encouraged to give this blessed readership some inside dope, no, no that kind, about how things are run these days in an on-line publication. With that okay in mind there was a huge controversy that put the last sentence in the above paragraph in some perspective recently when Greg for whatever ill-begotten reason thought that he would try to draw in younger audiences by catering to their predilections-for comic book character movies, video games, graphic novels and trendy music and got nothing but serious blow-back from those who have supported this publication financially and otherwise both in hard copy times and now on-line. What that means as the target demographic fades is another question and maybe one for a future generation who might take over the operation. Or perhaps like many operations this one will not outlast its creators- and their purposes.)

Today’s 1960s question, a question that I have asked over the years and so I drew the assignment to address the issue-who was the voice of the 1960s. Who or what. Was it the lunchroom sit-inners and Freedom Riders, what about the hippies (which I counted myself as one for a time), was it SDS, the various Weather configurations, acid, rock, folk rock, folk, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Grace Slick, hell the Three Js-Joplin, Jimi, Jim as in Morrison and the like. Or maybe it was a mood, a mood of disenchantment about a world that seemed out of our control, which seemed to be running without any input from us, without us even being asked. My candidate, and not my only candidate but a recent NPR Morning Edition segment brought the question to mind (see above link), is a song, a song created by Bob Dylan in the early 1960s which was really a clarion call to action on our part, or the best part of our generation-The Times They Are A-Changin’.

I am not sure if Bob Dylan started out with some oversized desire to be the “voice” of his generation. He certainly blew the whole thing off later after his motorcycle accident and still later when he became a recluse even if he did 200 shows a year, maybe sullen introvert is better, actually maybe his own press agent giving out dribbles is even better but that song, that “anthem” sticks in memory as a decisive summing up of what I was feeling at the time. (And apparently has found resonance with a new generation of activists via the March for Our Lives movement and other youth-driven movements.) As a kid I was antsy to do something, especially once I saw graphic footage on commercial television of young black kids being water-hosed, beaten with police clubs and bitten by dogs down in the South simply for looking for some rough justice in this wicked old world. Those images, and those of the brave lunch-room sitters and Freedom bus riders were stark and compelling. They and my disquiet over nuclear bombs which were a lot scarier then when there were serious confrontations which put them in play and concern that what bothered me about having no say, about things not being addressed galvanized me.

The song “spoke to me” as it might not have earlier or later. It had the hopeful ring of a promise of a newer world. That didn’t happen or happen in ways that would have helped the mass of humanity but for that moment I flipped out every time I heard it played on the radio or on my old vinyl records record-player. Other songs, events, moods, later would overtake this song’s sentiment but I was there at the creation. Remember that, please.

***********

Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon

By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the drearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7^th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.

Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise given where she came from, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked although I only knew her slightly since she was “in” with the social butterfly crowd which we Acre boys avoided like the plague, or they avoided us take your pick). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation here and which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)

In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.

The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting scared out of their wits with guns running amok and getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.

I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.

For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.

In The Age Of Tweeter Rant-Defend The Enlightenment Like Your Life Depended On-It Does-“A Royal Affair” (2012) Better-“En Kongelig Affaere”-A Film Review

DVD Review

BY Fritz Taylor

“A Royal Affair” Better-“En Kongelig Affaere”

I have on more than one occasion mentioned that I am a child of rock and roll, a child of the classic age of rock in the 1950s which was the first jailbreak movement that led my Generation of ’68 “astray” (in the very best sense of the word). I am, as becomes more necessary to declare each day in this crazy world of alternate facts, lies, and low-grade bullshit as my grandfather was fond of saying when he was pissed off at what passed for civil discourse in his time, a child of the Enlightenment. Yes the 18^th century movement of men and women who under great pressure (and maybe the pains of torture and exile) tried to bring some rational discourse to the way people were governed, the way people in civil society dealt with other and some kind of funny idea that equality of person was something humankind could and should aspire to achieve.

Now being a good old boy growing up from down in Fulton County, Georgia there was no way that I started out life as a child of the Enlightenment unlike the ease which I slipped into being a child of rock and roll. That my friends came courtesy of Uncle Sam, specifically his “request” that I lay down my life for him in the jungles of Vietnam back in1966-1967. (That “request” business really a gag since I volunteered under duress, the duress being directed from a military proud grandfather, the same one fond of saying low-grade bullshit when he was pissed, although subsequently I would come to understand that almost every young man of my Generation of ’68 made decisions under duress under the thunder clouds of a seemingly endless war.)

I was as gung-ho as any previous generation of Taylor male-until-until I got over there, got in -country and came to realize before my eighteen months tour was over (I extended for another six months against the normal year to get an early out they were offering both to get re-ups and to get grunts to stay in country against all good sense) that I had no quarrel with these people and nobody else really did either. That would lead to my post-military service “conversion” to getting on the right side of the angels, getting to understand a whole bunch of stuff like the Enlightenment, a word when I was a kid I had probably never heard of-certainly didn’t act upon any of its ideas. Those lessons though just didn’t come out of the blue but through my involvement with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), you know, the organization ex-Secretary of State John Kerry helped organize in his sunnier days and through coming north to Boston and then west to Frisco. My first “tutor” has a name, the late Peter Paul Markin who I met down in Washington on a G.I. anti-war march and when he fell down of his hubris and what he called “wanting habits” writers here like Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Josh Breslin picked up the slack.

Now what does all of this talk of Enlightenment have to do with reviewing a Danish film, in English A Royal Affair assigned to me by site manager Greg Green for whatever reason he thought I would be suitable for doing such heavy lifting. Folks that have seen my name here know that I am something of a military and social justice writer and not a damn film reviewer like Sam Lowell who has spent his whole freaking career blasting out pieces about every kind of god-awful film. The “hook” Greg used was that part of the plot-line of the film was an attempt by people at the Danish court, royal or otherwise to bring Enlightenment values to that benighted country out in the boondocks of Europe and others with vested property and proprietary interest to stop them. I accepted the assignment on that basis maybe in the back of my head figuring I could control my ranting about the damn tweeter storms that have racked civil society in America to its core.

Oh yes, I better confess if that is the right word that beside being a child of rock and roll and of the Enlightenment I am a child of republican (small “r” please note) meaning I defend various forms of republican governmental rule against monarchies, constitutional or otherwise, royalty, the nobility and every damn hanger-on who floats to the surface. So why accept the assignment. Simple that republican ideal was not so-widespread in the middle of the 18^th century the time of story-line of this film. At that time Enlightenment ideas were just raising their head in the world and got germinated in the bowels of the old society by certain free-thinking people. So this hatred of the monarchy, remember please King George III all you Jacks and Jills who devour everything coming out of English court-life these days has been an acquired taste for generations coming down to me. The characters here, some of them commoners some royal, don’t question that aspect of governance-that is for later times and larger uprisings than court intrigues.

I have taken a particular slant on this production based on some historical truths around bringing Enlightenment ideas to backwater Denmark. The film itself based on a Danish historical novel about the times-about the sullen reign of mentally disturbed King Christian VII, his English princess wife and a commoner, a doctor goes into another direction and I could if I was Sam Lowell, better, Laura Perkins, have dwelled on the menange between the three chief characters and left it at that. The frame for this one cries out for that treatment since the whole affair, royal or otherwise, is presented from Queen Caroline Matilde’s point of view as she writes to her children on her deathbed about why she has not seen them for a long time.

I have had my say so as Sam always says a little summary is in order. Christian and Caroline, who are cousins, but what else is new with European royal in-breeding. Those interconnections never stopped them from cutting each other to bits. World War I could have just as easily been called the “Cousins’ war” which for its time was the bloodiest conflagration ever seen. A betrothal was arranged and Caroline became the Danish queen having a son by the king. The king who was probably every psychiatrist’s poster child for an assortment of strange mental disturbances was more of a whoremonger and frill than a husband to the well-educated and talented Caroline. That is the predicate for the personal tragedies that follow. Doctor Struensee, a commoner, a German which meant a foreigner then, a low-key man of the Enlightenment was brought in to attend to the king. They became fast friends once the good doctor saw he could have influence over the erratic king in order to push his agenda. Problem, big problem, is that over time Struensee and Caroline become fast friends, very fast indeed, having a child together, a girl who is passed off as the king’s progeny.

That cuckolded king notion lets the anti-foreign, anti-reform nobility and another arm of the royal family take the high ground spreading rumors among the common folk that the doctor is running the show and the Queen is egging him on. In the end the threads favoring the Enlightenment were too weak to hold against the old regime and so the doctor and Queen meet bad ends, bad fates. Her losing her children and exile and the Doc having his head taken from him by the executioner’s axe. The only hope is for the future-that the younger generation in the person of the royal prince will do better. And he does. Such are the vagaries of history. Well-done with English subtitles, a tight script and beautiful film work.

Bill Haley & His Comets - Rock Around The Clock Bandstand 1960

When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -And Made It Stick-In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced The Wild Child Part Of Those Times

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) 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 demographically-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 seems 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 three 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 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 so since I was over a decade too young to have been washed over by the movements directly . 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 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 ancient although now 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 in those days 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. Maybe it was true although Seth always claimed that he heard Big Joe Turner’s primo version of Shake, Rattle and Rock earlier and thus first to “discover” the roots of rock and Allan Jackson has claimed without proof that he saw Bill Haley and the Comets’ version in the Chalkboard Jungle and put them all to shame. We will let old wounds fester and move on.

Quickly that experience 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 after the records companies and what he called “the authorities” put a stop to serious rock and gave forth singers , male and female, nay parent could love. That same Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t since although he was Alex’s best friend and was over the house a lot I never really knew except nothing good happened in the world without his imprimatur to hear these guys still sing his praises, 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 shortly after to the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service which more than the others unhinged him and his dreams.)

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 to 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 but 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 branch 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 to 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. One night he startled me 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 stuff in our genes. He didn’t call it DNA I don’t’ think he knew the term and I certainly didn’t but that was the idea. I resisted the idea then, and for a long time after but sisters and brothers look at the selections that accompany this so-called think piece the whole thing is clear now. I, we are our father’s sons after all. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed the idea lately-too late since my father who got exhausted from life early has been gone a long time now.

[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) few years back when he was involved legally with the case and I was writing copy for the publications. 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.]

All that early music was mostly heard Alex told me at Tonio’s which I knew as a pizza place where the guys I hung around with would go after school for a slice of pizza and sodas and which then did not have a jukebox, had become more of a family place with no corner boys hanging out once the place had changed hands after Tonio had passed away. (They kept the name and it is still operating to this day after changing hands again now run by some guy from Armenia last I heard.) The funniest story from that Alex hang-out time was how they listened to the music in the jukebox for free when they were short of money. No, not some kicking the machine stuff but kind of romance stuff. You knew a girl part had to come with this since rock and roll really was the jailbreak music not only for the beat but for the social graces aspect of dealing with sex-the opposite sex, since you could dance without having to kill a girl with your step on toes feet.

What Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys, and who today is also a successful lawyer would do is con some girl into playing music that he, they wanted to hear when they were sitting at a booth and not hanging out side. (By the way not all the corner boys were successful take Markin’s fate getting killed down in Mexico in some hazy drug deal gone awry and a couple of guys who wound up in state prisons for armed robberies and such.) Frankie made this into an art form. See the girls seemed to have money to play the jukebox, had change, quarters since the play was three for a quarter. What Frankie who almost as well as Markin knew the whole “intelligence” on who was “going steady with whom” and the like would do is maybe go up to a girl who had just broken up with her boyfriend and ask her to play something dreamy, something to play to her angst or something. Then he went to work on the other two selections by asking the girl if she had heard say Jerry Lee Lewis’ Breathless. Alex said it never failed to work. Cute if kind of a hard sell if you think about it.

Alex as is his way kind of mentored me around the various genre that had influenced him on his journey to adulthood. (Funny how the music of your youth sticks through life with you since he and I both agreed after a recent meeting where I was “grilling him,” his term not mine, on the subject of this piece and how I got my influences that we both still favor the music of our youth, still play it with a few off-beat newer things thrown in.) He is the one who informed me about the dearth, the death really of classic rock after Elvis went AWOL from life, Chuck Berry went to jail, and Jerry lee got too cousin cozy and a bunch of record companies caved into the moral authorities and parents and let only god-awful music over the airwaves. Which drove him first to the nascent folk music scene which Markin was instrumental in turning him on to and through exposure to those rooted musics to a serious appreciation of the blues.

He spent many hours telling me about his experiences in the period of the Summer of Love which he had just barely escaped he said in order to go to law school. That music, the dope, the women, and the craziness almost got to him under Markin’s direction. I’let that stuff go for now maybe Alex can pick up the thread but I want you to listen to the music more than run the gauntlet of what was what and why.

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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.

Chubby Checker & California Jubilee in "Let's Twist Again"