******The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

******The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

 

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

Laura Perkins was talking to her daughter, Emily Andrews one afternoon in April when she went to visit her and the grandkids up in Londonderry that is in New Hampshire, after returning from Florida, down Naples way. Laura had spent the winter there, a pilgrimage she had been doing the past five years or so since she, New England born and bred had tired, wearily tired of the winters provided by that section of the country and joined the “snow bird” trek south. Been doing more of the winter since she retired as a computer whizz free-lance consultant a couple of years ago. Emily the first born girl from the first of her three marriages who now had a couple of kids of her own although she has retained as is the “new style,” post-‘60s new style anyway, of women retaining their maiden name, or went hyphenated, kept Andrews in the bargain although Laura had given that name up minute one after the divorce which was messy and still a source of hatred when Emily’s father’s name is mentioned and thereafter kept her maiden name through the subsequent two marriages and divorces. During the conversation Laura commented to Emily, having not seen her for a while, on how long and straight she was keeping her hair these days which reminded her of the old days back in the romantic early 1960s when she used to hang around the Village in New York at the coffeehouses and folk clubs listening to lots of women folksingers like Carolyn Hester, Jean Redpath, Thelma Gordon, Joan Baez, Sissy Dubois and a bunch of others whose names she could just then not remember but whose hair was done in the same style including her own hair then.

Laura looked wistfully away just then touching her own now much shortened hair and colored a gentle brown with highlights, how much and for how long only her hairdresser knew and she, the well-tipped hair-dresser, was sworn to a secret Omerta oath even the CIA and Mafia could admire in the interest of not giving into age too much, especially once the computer whizz kids started showing up younger and younger either looking for work or as competitors. Meanwhile Emily explained how she came to let her hair grow longer and straighter (and her own efforts to keep it straighter) against all good reason what with two kids, a part-time accounting job and six thousand other young motherhood things demanded of her that would dictate that one needed a hair-do that one could just run a comb through, run through quickly.       

“Ma, you know how when you get all misty-eyed for your lost youth as you call it you are always talking about the old folk days, about the days in the Village and later in Harvard Square after you moved up here to go to graduate school at BU, minus Dad’s part in that time which I know you don’t like to talk about for obvious reasons. You also know, and we damn made it plain enough although you two never took it seriously, back when we were kids all of us, Melinda and Peter too, hated the very sound of folk music, stuff that sounded like something out of the Middle Ages and would run to our rooms when you guys played the stuff in you constant nostalgia moments. [That Middle Ages heritage, some of it, at least the rudiments, actually was on the mark if you look at the genesis of say half of the Child ballads which a folk enthusiast by that name in the 1850s over on Brattle Street in Cambridge collected, a number of ballads which ironically got picked up by the likes of Joan Baez in the late 1950s and played at the coffeehouses like the Club 47 and Café Nana just down from that Brahmin haven street. Or if you look to the more modern musicologists like the Seegers and Lomaxes who went down South, down Appalachia way, looking for roots music you will find some forbears brought over from the old country, the British Isles, that can be traced back to those times without doing injury to the truth.]

“Well one day I was in Whole Foods and I hear this song over their PA system or whatever they call it, you know those CDs they play to get you through the hard-ass shopping you need to do to keep the renegade kids from starvation’s door. The song seemed slightly familiar, folkie familiar, so I asked at the customer service desk who was singing the song and its name which I couldn’t quite remember. Of course the young clerk knew from nothing but a grey-haired guy, an old Cambridge radical type, a professor-type now that I think about what he looked like probably teaching English Lit, a guy you see in droves when you are in Harvard Square these days doddering along looking down at the ground like they have been doing for fifty years, standing in the same line as me, probably to return something that he bought by mistake and his wife probably ran his ass ragged until he returned the damn thing and got what she wanted, said it was Judy Collins doing Both Sides Now.  

That information from the professor, and that tune stuck in my head, got me thinking about checking out the song on YouTube which I did after I got home, unpacked the groceries, unpacked the kids and gave them their lunches. The version I caught was one of her on a Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest series from the 1960s in black and white that was on television back then which I am sure you and Dad knew about and she had this great looking long straight hair. I was envious. Then I kind of got the bug, wanted to check out some other folkie women whose names I know by heart, thank you, and noticed that Joan Baez in one clip taken at the Newport Folk Festival along with Bob Dylan singing With God On Our Side, God-awful if you remember me saying that every time you put it on the record-player, had even longer and straighter hair than Judy Collins.

“There she was all young, beautiful and dark-skinned Spanish exotic, something out of a Cervantes dream with that great hair. So I let mine grow and unlike what I heard Joan Baez, and about six zillion other young women did, including I think you, to keep it straight using an iron I went to Delores over at Flip Cuts in the mall and she does this thing to it every couple of months. And no I don’t want you to give me your folk albums, as valuable as they are, and as likely as I am to get them as family heirlooms when as you say you pass to the great beyond, please, to complete the picture because the stuff still sounds like it was from the Middle Ages although Dylan sounded better then than I remember, better than that croaking voice he has now that I heard you play one time on your car radio when we were heading up to Maine with you to go to Kittery to get the kids some back to school clothes.”        

Laura laughed a little at that remark as Emily went out the door to do some inevitable pressing shopping. After dutifully playing with Nick and Nana for a couple of hours while Emily went to get some chores done at the mall sans the kids who really are a drag on those kinds of tasks and after having stayed for supper when Sean got home from work she headed to her own home down in Cambridge (a condo really shared with her partner, Sam Lowell, whom she knew in college, lost track of and then reunited with after many years and three husbands at a college class reunion).

When she got home Sam, making her chuckle about what Emily said about that guy in the line at Whole Foods looked like and tarring Sam with that same brush, working on some paper of his, something about once again saving the world from the endless wars of the American government (other governments too but since as he said, quoting “Che” Guevara, always Che, about living in the heart of the beast the American government), the climate, nuclear disarmament, social inequality at home and in the world, or the plight of forgotten political prisoners, which was his holy mantra these days now that he was semi-retired from his law practice was waiting, waiting to hear the latest Nick and Nana stories instead she told him Emily’s story. Then they started talking about those old days in the 1960s when both she and he (he in Harvard Square having grown up in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston and her in the hotbed Village growing up in Manhattan and later at NYU where they went to school as undergraduates) imbibed in that now historic folk minute which promised, along with a few other things, to change the world a bit.

Laura, as Sam was talking, walked to a closet and brought out a black and white photograph from some folk festival in 1963 which featured Joan Baez, whom the clueless media always looking for a single hook to hang an idea on dubbed her the “queen of folk (and Dylan the king),” her sister Mimi Farina, who had married Richard Farina, the folk-singer/song-writer most poignantly Birmingham Sunday later killed in a motorcycle crash and Judy Collins on stage at the same time. All three competing with each other for the long straight hair championship. Here’s part of what was said about the picture that night, here’s how Laura put it:    

“Funny how trends get started, how one person, or a few start something and it seems like the whole world follows, or the part of the world that hears about the new dispensation anyway, the part you want to connect with. Remember Sam how we all called folk the “new dispensation” for our generation which had begun back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, slightly before our times when we caught up with it in college in 1964. So maybe it started in reaction to the trend when older guys started to lock-step in gray flannel suits. That funny Mad Men, retro-cool today look, which is okay if you pay attention to who was watching the show. In the days before Jack and Bobby Kennedy put the whammy on that fashion and broke many a haberdasher’s heart topped off by not wearing a soft felt hat like Uncle Ike and the older guys.”

“Funny too it would be deep into the 1960s before open-necks and colors other than white for shirts could be worked in but by then a lot of us were strictly denims and flannel shirts or some such non-suit or dress combination. Remember even earlier when the hula-hoop fad went crazy when one kid goofing off threw a hard plastic circle thing around his or her waist and every kid from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon had to have one, to be tossed aside in some dank corner of the garage after a few weeks when everybody got into yo-yos or Davey Crockett coonskin caps. Or maybe, and this might be closer to the herd instinct truth, it was after Elvis exploded onto the scene and every guy from twelve to two hundred in the world had to, whether they looked right with it or not, wear their sideburns just a little longer, even if they were kind of wispy and girls laughed at you for trying to out-king the “king” who they were waiting for not you. I know I did with Jasper James King who tried like hell to imitate Elvis and I just stepped on his toes all dance when he asked me to dance with him on It’s Alright, Mama.”  

“But maybe it was, and this is a truth which we can testify to when some girls, probably college girls like me, now called young women but then still girls no matter how old except mothers or grandmothers, having seen Joan Baez on the cover of Time (or perhaps her sister Mimi on some Mimi and Richard Farina folk album cover)got out the ironing board at home or in her dorm and tried to iron their own hair whatever condition it was in, curly, twisty, or flippy like mine, whatever  don’t hold me to all the different hairstyles to long and straight strands. Surely as strong as the folk minute was just then say 1962, 63, 64, they did not see the photo of Joan on some grainy Arise and Sing folk magazine cover, the folk scene was too young and small back in the early days to cause such a sea-change.”

 Sam piped up and after giving the photograph a closer look said, “Looking at that photograph you just pulled out of the closet now, culled I think from a calendar put out by the New England Folk Archive Society, made me think back to the time when I believe that I would not go out with a girl (young woman, okay) if she did not have the appropriate “hair,” in other words no bee-hive or flip thing that was the high school rage among the not folk set, actually the rage among the social butterfly, cheerleader, motorcycle mama cliques. Which may now explain why I had so few dates in high school and none from Carver High. But no question you could almost smell the singed hair at times, and every guy I knew liked the style, liked the style if they liked Joan Baez, maybe had some dreamy sexual desire thing about hopping in the hay, and that was that.”                   

“My old friend Bart Webber, a guy I met out in San Francisco  when I went out West with my old friend  Josh Breslin in our hitchhike days with whom if you remember I re-connected with via the “magic” of the Internet a few years ago, told me a funny story when we met at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston one time about our friend Julie Peters who shared our love of folk music back then (and later too as we joined a few others in the folk aficionado world after the heyday of the folk minute got lost in the storm of the British Beatles/Stones  invasion).”

“He had first met her in Harvard Square one night at the Café Blanc when the place had their weekly folk night (before every night was folk night when Eric Von Schmidt put the place on the map by writing Joshua Gone Barbados which he sang and which Tom Rush went big with) and they had a coffee together. That night she had her hair kind of, oh he didn’t know what they called it but he thought something like beehive or flip or something which highlighted and enhanced her long face. Bart thought she looked fine. Bart, like myself, was not then hip to the long straight hair thing and so he kind of let it pass without any comment.”

“Then one night a few weeks later after they had had a couple of dates she startled him when he picked her up at her dorm at Boston University to go over the Club Blue in the Square to see Dave Van Ronk hold forth in his folk historian gravelly-voiced way. She met him at the door with the mandatory straight hair although it was not much longer than when he first met her which he said frankly made her face even longer. When Bart asked her why the change Julie declared that she could not possibly go to Harvard Square looking like somebody from some suburban high school not after seeing her idol Joan Baez (and later Judy Collins too) with that great long hair which seemed very exotic, very Spanish.”

“Of course he compounded his troubles by making the serious mistake of asking if she had her hair done at the beauty parlor or something and she looked at him with burning hate eyes since no self-respecting folkie college girl would go to such a place where her mother would go. So she joined the crowd, Bart got used to it and after a while she did begin to look like a folkie girl, and started wearing the inevitable peasant blouses instead of those cashmere sweaters or starched Catholic school shirt things she used to wear.”     

“By the way Laura let’s be clear on that Julie thing with Bart back in the early 1960s since his Emma goes crazy every time anybody, me, you, Bart, Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan mentions any girl that Bart might have even looked at in those days. Yeah, even after almost forty years of marriage so keep this between us. She and Bart went “Dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. They were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other enough to be more than very good friends after the first few dates but folk music was their bond. Just friends despite persistent Julie BU dorm roommate rumors what with Bart hanging around all the time listening to her albums on the record player they had never been lovers.

“Many years later she mentioned that Club Blue night to me since I had gone with them with my date, Joyell Danforth, as we waited to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with us to see if I remembered Van Ronk’s performance and while I thought I remembered I was not sure.

I asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing.”

As for the long-ironed haired women in the photograph their work in that folk minute and later speaks for itself. Joan Baez worked the Bob Dylan anointed “king and queen” of the folkies routine for a while for the time the folk minute lasted. Mimi (now passed on) teamed up with her husband, Richard Farina, who as mentioned before was tragically killed in a motorcycle crash in the mid-1960s, to write and sing some of the most haunting ballads of those new folk times (think Pack Up Your Sorrows). Julie Collins, now coiffured like that mother Julie was beauty parlor running away from and that is okay, still produces beautiful sounds on her concert tours. But everyone should remember, every woman from that time anyway, should remember that burnt hair, and other sorrows, and know exactly who to blame. Yeah, we have the photo as proof.           

Out In The Still Night-Be-Bopping With Decca Records

Out In The Still Night-Be-Bopping With Decca Records

CD Review

By Zack James

Decca Rock, various artists, Lyceum Records, 1997  

Nowadays with huge media conglomerates running the gamut from old-fashioned fading into the digital night print newspapers to fast forward social media sites it hard to imagine that back in the day, back when what is now called classic rock and roll, the Elvis-Chuck Berry-Jerry Lee –driven day that most of the stuff of legends was produced by small “mom and pop” record companies that were looking for that one Elvis star to take off with. Were crazy to get their produce, their simple-minded 45RPMs to the DJs, the guys, and it was mostly guys on the rock stations, that after Alan Freedman make the profession respectable for a while were the lynchpin to getting that jump start.

Everybody knows, everybody at least who cared about the history of the music that made a generation jump, made the generation that came of age in the hard-bone 1950s, the ones now called baby-boomers, made everybody rock, and roll, in a different way from their forbears, the story of Sun Records, a good example of nothing but a little mom and pop operation except the guy who ran it, the legendary Sam Phillips had a big idea. That idea was to get a white guy who could sing about six different tight assed ways stuff that was coming out of rhythm and blues, gospel, hell, Saturday night juke joint no electricity but plenty of illegal whiskey and sharp knives country blues if it came right down to it, all black-based music that jumped like crazy. Then Elvis came through the door all snarly and swivel-hipped and the rest was easy street for everybody. That is what drove a label like Decca Records which was the primo rhythm and blues operation around and which had some jump cross-over success with white guys like Bill Haley when he went to heaven and blasted Gabriel with big black sound sexy saxs and fast paced rhythm.          

Sun and Decca’s success spread the lust for gold like a prairie fire. That was quick success had been Johnny Blade’s dream, Johnny Ballo, Johnny B., whose little scat operation, Ducca Records out of New Haven, was based on just that idea that drove Sam Phillips to distraction, except wanted Johnny B. wanted the guy to come through the door to be an Italian Stallion, a kindred, or at worst maybe some Connie Francis wannabe. See Johnny came into the record producing game kind of late, got some dough from sources better left unsaid, you know the guys who talk low and funny and have crooked noses so he needed a big hook, needed to have some fishnet to grab some talent and see what shook out. That is when he hit on the idea of running some talent searches around New England, maybe the whole Northeast if things came to that but at least New England. But tiny Ducca Records, which like a lot of operations was mostly about kids crazy to hear themselves on vinyl forking over a few bucks to have a platter produced or maybe if there was some talent maybe a local hit for a week or two until the fickle Italian girls moved on, wasn’t strong enough to draw flies on its own so in the various locations where Johnny Blade wanted to run his show he had to get the local rock station that kids listened to, got their ideas about what was what in rock and what was what in the stuff advertised on those stations as added hooks.

The whole idea was pretty sound if it could get off the ground. Go to a place like Boston, get WMEZ, the giant-sized rock station drawing all the ads from record stores to drive-in restaurants and so grabbing plenty of teen discretionary dollars, on board, have six or seven regional contests with the hook of a final shoot-out in Boston, maybe at the Garden and a record contract and dough, a thousand bucks, pretty good dough then if only walking around money today. Of course to get WMEZ on board, really get Be-Bop Benny the king of Boston DJs on board, Johnny had to grease some palms. Which he eventually did in an operation which to this day is better left unspoken of, and the idea was off.                

This is how it played out in a place like North Adamsville where one of the Boston Regional contests was held. The set-ups were the same in each locale mostly, maybe a little more polish in the bigger towns. Put up plenty of posters announcing the event, have the local small audience radio station announce the thing, have high school kids passing out leaflets at every junior high and high school. Get the Word out in that mysterious but impeccable way teenagers had, probably still do have now that they can go universal with the new technologies, of spreading the news through the grapevine which would be the envy of the CIA and the NSA combined. The event usually was held in a local well-known location school auditorium, or space like that. At North Adamsville about twenty five acts signed up to perform, too many since about twelve worked out better in keeping audience interest for a couple of hours and Johnny B. learned after the Portsmouth fiasco that a little screening of the goofs helped too. At Portsmouth some ass drag queen, some transvestite, tried to get in doing Connie Francis stuff. Christ that was all he needed (today such an act would have its own appeal but that was then and so “Connie” got the boot). There would be an afternoon audition to screen out the bum acts, the guys who couldn’t sing a note, and you would be surprised how many over time filled that category, goofs, guys who stuff on a dare, or maybe to impress some girls, the girls who could sing, sing like nightingales but who were ugly, sorry this is the way it was. Getting down to a dozen Johnny B. found out was pretty easy and those who didn’t made it got free tickets so that is probably what they wanted anyway. It was that last dozen, actually probably the last half dozen which caused the judging panel heartache.

That night the twelve acts, some solo, some various combinations of groups, would go through their paces, most would get a thumbs down and go sit in the audience probably wondering why they didn’t make the cut until the last two standing would duel it out against each other and the judges would crown somebody, give them a fifty dollar honorary prize to get them to Boston and of course that chance at a record contract. The North Adamsville winners were a doo-wop trio of three girls, two Italian girls and a Finnish girl who looked Italian so Johnny was pleased, who did a great cover of He’s So Fine which everybody even guys loved since it was about them, or so they thought when they girls with great stage presence looked in the direction of every guy in the house and pointed their fingers like that guy was the one they were singing about. They beat out a guy who did a pretty good Elvis imitation on Heartbreak Hotel, a little on the heavy side but with great sideburns but by then Elvis was a little yesterday, had died or something was out of the rock mix anyway, and Johnny Blade knew that he wasn’t going to make his pot of gold by sending up guys doing Elvis imitator stuff. Those girls, the Melody Sisters would wind up winning the Boston finals, would have a great hit with their record contract song Blame My Baby and then fade into oblivion, maybe as a lounge act or as housewives, who knows, as one of a group of a million “one-hit” wonders. Johnny Blade, well Johnny’s dream didn’t work out so well. See he got bopped for that pay-off that “payola” to Be-Bop Benny and his Ducca Record label went down in flames. The guys with the crooked noses were not happy. Such was life in the “mom and pop” record business. Decca, well, Decca had Billie Holiday, Bill Haley and the Comets and a stack of others you can hear on this CD compilation when the deal went down. Had their pot of gold, made plenty of dough.       

The Latest From Jobs With Justice In Massachusetts-The Fight For $15 Is Only The Beginning

The Latest From Jobs With Justice In Massachusetts-The Fight For $15 Is Only The Beginning

*SACCO AND VANZETTI-THE CASE THAT WILL NOT DIE, NOT SHOULD IT.

Click on the title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the Sacco and Vanzetti case, provided ere as background. As always with this source and its collective editorial policy, especially with controversial political issues like the Sacco and Vanzetti case, be careful checking the accuracy of the information provided at any given time.


COMMENTARY

HONOR THE MEMORY OF SACCO AND VANZETTI IN THIS THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THEIR EXECUTION BY THE COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS.

I HAD ORIGINALLY INTENDED TO BASE MY COMMENTARY ON THE RECENTLY (2006)RELEASED DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THESE TWO ANARCHISTS BUT I WAS NOT ABLE TO GET THE DVD IN TIME SO THAT THIS COMMENTARY IS BASED ON A REVIEW OF A BOOK I DID EARLIER THIS YEAR-JUSTICE CRUCIFIED, ROBERTA STRAUSS FEURERLICHT, MCGRAW-HILL, NEW YORK, 1977.

Those familiar with the radical movement know that at least once in every generation a political criminal case comes up that defines that era. One thinks of the Haymarket Martyrs in the 19th century, the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930's, the Rosenbergs in the post-World War II Cold War period and today Mumia Abu-Jamal. In America after World War I when the Attorney General Palmer-driven ‘red scare’ brought the federal government’s vendetta against foreigners, immigrants and militant labor fighters to a white heat that generation's case was probably the most famous of them all, Sacco and Vanzetti. The exposure of the tensions within American society that came to the surface as a result of that case is the subject of the book under review. I note that it is as much a polemic on American nativism and Puritan skullduggery as it is a thorough study of the particulars of the case. After reading the book those whose sense of the 1920’s in America was formed by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age will have to think again.

A case like that of Sacco and Vanzetti, accused, convicted and then executed in 1927 for a robbery and double murder committed in a holdup of a payroll delivery to a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920, does not easily conform to any specific notion that the average citizen today has of either the state or federal legal system. Nevertheless, one does not need to buy into the author’s thesis about the original sin of obtuse ‘righteousness’ that drove the Puritans forebears in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and therefore made it possible to railroad two foreign-born Italian anarchists in 1920 to know that the case against them 'stunk' to high heaven. And that is the rub. Even a cursory look at the evidence presented (taking the state of jurisprudence at that time into consideration) and the facts surrounding the case would force the most mildly liberal political type to know the “frame” was on. That standard response is the minimum one would expect of an author on this subject so long after the events. This author passes that test. Her sympathies lie with the two anarchists and by extension all those who suffered physical and psychological damage from the abysmal social, political and cultural attitudes of the American ruling classes and their henchmen toward the great ‘unwashed’.

Everyone agrees, or should agree, that in such political criminal cases as Sacco and Vanzetti every legal avenue including appeals, petitions and seeking grants of clemency should be used in order to secure the goal, the freedom of those imprisoned. This author does an adequate job of detailing the various appeals and other legal wrangling that only intensified as the execution neared. Nevertheless she does not adequately address a question that is implicit in her description of the fight to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. How does one organize and who does one appeal to in a radical working class political defense case?

The author spends some time on the liberal local Boston defense organizations and the 'grandees' and other celebrities who became involved in the case, and who were committed almost exclusively to a legal defense strategy. She does not, however, pay much attention to the other more radical elements of the campaign that fought for the pair’s freedom. She gives short shrift to the work of the Communists and their International Red Aid (the American affiliate was named the International Labor Defense and headed by Communist leader James P. Cannon, a man well-known in anarchist circles) that organized meetings, conferences and yes, political labor strikes on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti, especially in Europe. The tension between those two conceptions of political defense work still confronts us to day as we fight the seemingly never-ending legal battles thrown up since 9/11 for today’s Sacco and Vanzetti’s- immigrants, foreigners and radicals (some things do not change with time). If you want plenty of information on the Sacco and Vanzetti case and an interesting thesis about it’s place in radical history, the legal history of Massachusetts and the social history of the United States this is not a bad place to stop. In any case-Honor the Memory of Sacco and Vanzetti.

*****When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time

An Encore -When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

Sometimes Sam Lowell and his “friend” (really “sweetie,” long time sweetie, paramour, significant other, consort or whatever passes for the socially acceptable or Census Bureau bureaucratic “speak” way to name somebody who is one’s soul-mate, his preferred term) Laura Perkins whose relationship to Sam was just described at the end of the parentheses, and righteously so, liked to go to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich to either cool off in the late summer heat or in the fall before the New England weather lowers its hammer and the place gets a bit inaccessible and too windswept to force the delicate Laura into the weathers. That later summer  heat escape valve is a result, unfortunately for an otherwise Edenic environment of the hard fact that July, when they really would like to go there to catch a few fresh sea breezes, is not a time to show up at the bleach white sands beach due to nasty blood-sucking green flies swarming and dive-bombing like some berserk renegade Air Force squadron lost on a spree captained by someone with a depraved childhood who breed in the nearby swaying mephitic marshes (mephitic courtesy of multi-use by Norman Mailer who seemed to get it in every novel- if you don't what it means look it up but think nasty and smelly and you will close-okay).



The only “safe haven” then is to drive up the hill to the nearby robber-baron days etched Crane Castle (they of the American indoor plumbing fortune way back) to get away from the buggers, although on a stagnant wind day you might have a few vagrant followers, as the well-to-do have been doing since there were the well-to-do and had the where-with-all to escape the summer heat and bugs at higher altitudes. By the way I assume that “castle” is capitalized when it part of a huge estate, the big ass estate of Crane, now a trust monument to the first Gilded Age, not today’s neo-Gilded Age, architectural proclivities of the rich, the guy whose company did, does all the plumbing fixture stuff on half the bathrooms in America including in the various incantations of the mansion. 

Along the way, along the hour way to get to Ipswich from Cambridge Sam and Laura had developed a habit of making the time more easy passing by listening to various CDs, inevitably not listened to for a long time folk CDs, not listened to for so long that the plastic containers needed to be dusted off before being brought along, on the car's improvised  CD player. And as is their wont while listening to some CD to comment on this or that thing that some song brought to mind, or the significance of some song in their youth.  One of the things that had brought them together early on several years back was their mutual interest in the old 1960s folk minute which Sam, a little older and having grown up within thirty miles of Harvard Square, one the big folk centers of that period along with the Village and North Beach out in Frisco town, had imbibed deeply. Laura, growing up “in the sticks,” in farm country in upstate New York had gotten the breeze at second-hand through records, records bought at Cheapo Records and the eternal Sandy's on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge and a little the fading Cambridge folk scene through breathing in the coffeehouse atmosphere when she had moved to Boston in the early 1970s to go to graduate school.     

One hot late August day they got into one such discussion about how they first developed an interest in folk music when Sam had said “sure everybody, everybody over the age of say fifty to be on the safe side, knows about Bob Dylan, maybe some a little younger too if some hip kids have browsed through their parents’ old vinyl record collections now safely ensconced in the attic although there are stirrings of retro-vinyl revival of late according a report I had heard on NPR."


Some of that over 50 crowd and their young acolytes would also have known about how Dylan, after serving something like an apprenticeship under the influence of Woody Guthrie in the late 1950s singing Woody’s songs imitating Woody's style something fellow Woody acolytes like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot never quite got over moved on, got all hung up on high symbolism and obscure references. Funny guys like Jack actually made a nice workman-like career out of Woody covers, so their complaints about the "great Dylan betrayal, about moving on, seen rather hollow now. That over 50s crowd would also know Dylan became if not the voice of the Generation of ’68, their generation, which he probably did not seriously aspire in the final analysis, then he would settle for the master troubadour of the age.

Sam continued along that line after Laura had said she was not sure about the connection and he said he meant, “troubadour in the medieval sense of bringing news to the people and entertaining them by song and poetry as well if not decked in some officially approved garb like back in those olden days where they worked under a king’s license if lucky, by their wit otherwise but the 'new wave' post-beatnik flannel shirt, work boots, and dungarees which connected you with the roots, the American folk roots down in the Piedmont, down in Appalachia, down in Mister James Crow’s Delta, and out in the high plains, the dust bowl plains. So, yes, that story has been pretty well covered.”  

Laura said she knew all of that about the desperate search for roots although not that Ramblin’ Jack had been an acolyte of Woody’s but she wondered about others, some other folk performers whom she listened to on WUMB on Saturday morning when some weeping willow DJ put forth about fifty old time rock and folk rock things a lot of which she had never heard of back in Mechanicsville outside of Albany where she grew up. Sam then started in again, “Of course that is hardly the end of the story since Dylan did not create that now hallowed folk minute of the early 1960s. He had been washed by it when he came to the East from Hibbing, Minnesota for God’s sake (via Dink’s at the University there), came into the Village where there was a cauldron of talent trying to make folk the next big thing, the next big cultural thing for the young and restless of the post-World War II generations. For us. But also those in little oases like the Village where the disaffected could pick up on stuff they couldn’t get in places like Mechanicsville or Carver where I grew up. People who I guess, since even I was too young to know about that red scare stuff except you had to follow your teacher’s orders to put your head under your desk and hands neatly folded over your head if the nuclear holocaust was coming, were frankly fed up with the cultural straightjacket of the red scare Cold War times and began seriously looking as hard at roots in all its manifestations as our parents, definitely mine, yours were just weird about stuff like that, right, were burying those same roots under a vanilla existential Americanization. How do you like that for pop sociology 101.”

“One of the talents who was already there when hick Dylan came a calling, lived there, came from around there was the late Dave Van Ronk who as you know we had heard several times in person, although unfortunately when his health and well-being were declining not when he was a young politico and hell-raising folk aspirant. You know he also, deservedly, fancied himself a folk historian as well as musician.”    

“Here’s the funny thing, Laura, that former role is important because we all know that behind every  'king' is the 'fixer man,' the guy who knows what is what, the guy who tells one and all what the roots of the matter were like some mighty mystic (although in those days when he fancied himself a socialist that mystic part was played down). Dave Van Ronk was serious about that part, serious about imparting that knowledge about the little influences that had accumulated during the middle to late 1950s especially around New York which set up that folk minute. New York like I said, Frisco, maybe in small enclaves in L.A. and in precious few other places during those frozen times a haven for the misfits, the outlaws, the outcast, the politically “unreliable,” and the just curious. People like the mistreated Weavers, you know, Pete Seeger and that crowd found refuge there when the hammer came down around their heads from the red-baiters and others like advertisers who ran for cover to “protect” their precious soap, toothpaste, beer, deodorant or whatever they were mass producing to sell to a hungry pent-up market.  



"Boston and Cambridge by comparison until late in the 1950s when the Club 47 and other little places started up and the guys and gals who could sing, could write songs, could recite some be-bop deep from the blackened soul poetry even had a place to show their stuff instead of to the winos, rummies, grifters and con men who hung out at the Hayes-Bickford or out on the streets could have been any of the thousands of towns who bought into the freeze.”     

“Sweetie, I remember one time but I don’t remember where, maybe the Café Nana when that was still around after it had been part of the Club 47 folk circuit for new talent to play and before Harry Reid, who ran the place, died and it closed down, I know it was before we met, so it had to be before the late 1980s Von Ronk told a funny story, actually two funny stories, about the folk scene and his part in that scene as it developed a head of steam in the mid-1950s which will give you an idea about his place in the pantheon. During the late 1950s after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking road wanderlust adventure novel, On The Road, that got young blood stirring, not mine until later since I was clueless on all that stuff except rock and roll which I didn’t read until high school, the jazz scene, the cool be-bop jazz scene and poetry reading, poems reflecting off of “beat” giant Allen Ginsberg’s Howl the clubs and coffeehouse of the Village were ablaze with readings and cool jazz, people waiting in line to get in to hear the next big poetic wisdom guy if you can believe that these days when poetry is generally some esoteric endeavor by small clots of devotees just like folk music. The crush of the lines meant that there were several shows per evening. But how to get rid of one audience to bring in another in those small quarters was a challenge."



"Presto, if you wanted to clear the house just bring in some desperate “from hunger” snarly nasally folk singer for a couple, maybe three songs, and if that did not clear the high art be-bop poetry house then that folk singer was a goner. A goner until the folk minute of the 1960s where that very same folk singer probably in that very same club then played for the 'basket.' You know the 'passed hat' which even on a cheap date, and a folk music coffeehouse date was a cheap one in those days like I told you before and you laughed at cheapie me and the 'Dutch treat' thing, you felt obliged to throw a few bucks into to show solidarity or something.  And so the roots of New York City folk according to the 'father.'

Laura interrupted to ask if that “basket” was like the buskers put in front them these days and Sam said yes. And then asked Sam about a few of the dates he took to the coffeehouses in those days, just out of curiosity she said, meaning if she had been around would he have taken her there then. He answered that question but since it is an eternally complicated and internal one I having to do with where she stood in the long Sam girlfriend  pecking order (very high and leave it at that unless she reads this and then the highest) have skipped it to let him go on with the other Von Ronk story.


He continued with the other funny story like this-“The second story involved his [Von Ronk's] authoritative role as a folk historian who after the folk minute had passed became the subject matter for, well, for doctoral dissertations of course just like today maybe people are getting doctorates in hip-hop or some such subject. Eager young students, having basked in the folk moment in the abstract and with an academic bent, breaking new ground in folk history who would come to him for the 'skinny.' Now Van Ronk had a peculiar if not savage sense of humor and a wicked snarly cynic’s laugh but also could not abide academia and its’ barren insider language so when those eager young students came a calling he would give them some gibberish which they would duly note and footnote. Here is the funny part. That gibberish once published in the dissertation would then be cited by some other younger and even more eager students complete with the appropriate footnotes. Nice touch, nice touch indeed on that one, right.”

Laura did not answer but laughed, laughed harder as she thought about it having come from that unformed academic background and having read plenty of sterile themes turned inside out.       

As Laura laugh settled Sam continued “As for Van Ronk’s music, his musicianship which he cultivated throughout his life, I think the best way to describe that for me is that one Sunday night in the early 1960s I was listening to the local folk program on WBZ hosted by Dick Summer, who was influential in boosting local folk musician Tom Rush’s career and who was featured on that  Tom Rush documentary No Regrets we got for being members of WUMB, when this gravelly-voice guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, sang the Kentucky hills classic Fair and Tender Ladies. It turned out to be Von Ronk's version which you know I still play up in the third floor attic. After that I was hooked on that voice and that depth of feeling that he brought to every song even those of his own creation which tended to be spoofs on some issue of the day.”

Laura laughed at Sam and the intensity with which his expressed his mentioning of the fact that he liked gravelly-voiced guys for some reason. Here is her answer, “You should became when you go up to the third floor to do your “third floor folk- singer” thing and you sing Fair and Tender Ladies I hear this gravelly-voiced guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, some Old Testament Jehovah prophet come to pass judgment come that end day time.”

They both laughed. 

Laura then mentioned the various times that they had seen Dave Von Ronk before he passed away, not having seen him in his prime, when that voice did sound like some old time prophet, a title he would have probably secretly enjoyed for publicly he was an adamant atheist. Sam went on, “ I saw him perform many times over the years, sometimes in high form and sometimes when drinking too much high-shelf whiskey, Chavis Regal, or something like that not so good. Remember we had expected to see him perform as part of Rosalie Sorrels’ farewell concert at Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2002 I think. He had died a few weeks before.  Remember though before that when we had seen him for what turned out to be our last time and I told you he did not look well and had been, as always, drinking heavily and we agreed his performance was subpar. But that was at the end. For a long time he sang well, sang us well with his own troubadour style, and gave us plenty of real information about the history of American folk music. Yeah like he always used to say-'when the tin can bended …..and the story ended.'

As they came to the admission booth at the entrance to Crane’s Beach Sam with Carolyn Hester’s song version of Walt Whitman’s On Captain, My Captain on the CD player said “I was on my soap box long enough on the way out here. You’re turn with Carolyn Hester on the way back who you know a lot about and I know zero, okay.” Laura retorted, “Yeah you were definitely on your soap-box but yes we can talk Carolyn Hester because I am going to cover one of her songs at my next “open mic.” And so it goes.                      

***From Out In The Be-Bop Blues Night- Sippie Wallace's "Women Be Wise"

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Sippie Wallace performing her classic, Women Be Wise (also covered by Bonnie Raitt and Maria Muldaur among others).
Markin comment:

Well I will just let Sippie tell it like it is for once. Truth. Without further comment. Okay. lol in cyber-slang.
******
Wallace Sippi

Women Be Wise

Women be wise, keep your mouth shut
Don't advertise your man
Don't sit around gossiping
Explaining what he really can do
Some women now days
Lord they ain't no good
They will laugh in your face
They'll try to steal your man from you

Women be wise, keep your mouth shut
Don't advertise your man

Your best girlfriend
Oh she might be a highbrow
Changes clothes three time a day
But what do you think she's doing now
While you're so far away?
You know she's lovin your man
In your own damn bed...
You better call for the doctor
Try to investigate your head

Women be wise, keep your mouth shut
Don't advertise your man

Women be wise, keep your mouth shut
Don't advertise your man
Now don't sit around girls
Telling all your secrets
Telling all those good things he really can do
Cause if you talk about your baby
Yeah you tell me he's so fine
Honey I might just sneak up
And try to make him mine

Women be wise, keep your mouth shut
Don't advertise your man --
Don't be no fool!
Don't advertise your man
Baby don't do it!

Deep In The Urban Folk Revival Minute-With New York’s Washington Square Circa 1964 In Mind

Deep In The Urban Folk Revival Minute-With New York’s Washington Square Circa 1964 In Mind

CD Review

By Zack James

Washington Square Folk Songs, various folk artists live or in studio, 1999 

 

Nobody was quite sure what to make of Seth Garth when he went off the rails, became a folkie, got caught up in what the musicologists called the urban folk revival of the early 1960, the folk minute as he would later refer to it when it was superseded by the British bad boys invasion, folk rock and acid rock later in the decade. What all the guys around his corner, Jimmy Jack’s Diner in Riverdale, being behind the curve, behind the Seth curve had called a “beatnik.” What did they know of beatniks except the stuff they saw Maynard G. Krebs-caricatured on television or seen in some goof magazine with kids from New Jersey wearing black everything on weekend foragings in the Village. No, Seth, and he would the first to tell you, was not a beatnik, was not draw to the remnants of that scene as it filtered down to teenage corner boy society. Could, as the guys around the corner said, give a rat’s ass about poetry except as a futile exercise in English class. And could give an equal rat’s ass about cool ass Charlie Parker-Dizzie jazz which the “beats” dug since he was almost a chemically pure example of the child of rock and roll that every parent worried to perdition about before they got the situation under control (by flooding the yellow-backed record companies with angry letters of complaint about the savage music they were producing which were turning their children into, into sex fiends).   

Everybody was surprised, really surprised when Seth started listening to stuff like Where Have Al The Flowers Gone and some old corny stuff traditional music they called it like Stewball they had all laughed, including Seth, at in seventh grade music class when Mr. Lawrence tried, might and main, unsuccessfully to ween they off their devotion to rock and roll. And here was Seth acting like the ghost of Mr. Lawrence saying that he grooved on old prison convict Lead Belly’s Good Night, Irene. Fortunately for him nobody then cared enough, gave a rat’s ass about his new turn since there were more important things about Seth that kept him in corner boy favor. Things like having the confidences of most of the girls in school who would tell him things they would not even tell their best girlfriends, sex stuff of course when they spotted a boy they might like to take a run at and Seth would act as the go-between.    

So Seth was something of an enigma, a guy that had always been hard to figure out, a guy who you wouldn’t figure looking at his slender scrawny built, his now slightly too long hair (too long by Mrs. Garth’s standards anyway), his jut-jawed face and his odd-ball blue eyes in a brown-eyed world as a corner boy. As a guy who was as likely to harbor felonious thoughts as he was at attempting to figure out his place in the new trends in music in youth nation as the 1950s turned into the 1960s. He had been the first, along with the acknowledged leader of the Jimmy Jack corner, Johnny Blade, to “terrorize” the jewelry and department stores in downtown Riverdale with his trail of “clips,” you know “five-finger discounts,” ah, come on, you know petty larceny. First, as well, to pull a midnight creep along with Johnny and a couple of other guys into the Mayfair swells section of town to grab whatever was pawn worthy, you know, breaking and entering in the nighttime, hell, burglary. Was said as well to have been part of an armed stick up of poor Jimmy Jenkins the night gas jockey at Eddie’s Esso Garage on Trover Street which he never denied and which went in to the annals as urban legend around town.

None of these events ever caused him legal trouble but neither did it figure he would go folkie on the boys. Yeah, Seth was a walking contradiction, a guy who kept his own counsel, a guy who kept those evil thoughts always lurking below the surface in check enough to avoid the law. A guy he met later one night in Harvard Square when that area was a hub of the emerging folk scene, a guy named Markin, who lived in North Adamsville a dozen towns over from Riverdale had called it “keeping the wanting habits in check.” See Markin, like Seth, was from hunger, had grown up poor and so he sensed what Seth could only sputter out before Markin called his hurts and bruises by their right name. So it was always a battle between Seth’s “better angels of his nature” and those endless “wanting habits.” In the end they did Markin in and almost got Seth as well.               

Just then though Seth was all hopped up on the folk scene, sensed that that was where the music was heading for the part of youth nation that wanted to break out of the boxes. Boxes Seth was desperate to break out of himself. See along with that larcenous sulking heart he was trying to make his mark in the world, trying for what some wag later would call his “fifteen minutes of fame.” He wanted in his better moments to be a music critic knowing early on that he had no marketable musical talents by voice or instrument but had an ear and eye for trends. That desire held him in check for a while, allowed him to mix with a lot of people, New York intellectuals, music school denizens, college professors, small record company producers, Jewish kids from New York transplanted to the college scene around Boston when that was a cottage industry who in an earlier time he would not have given rat’s ass about.

The folk turn had all started one night, one late Sunday night, when Seth had been trying to find his favorite rock station, WMEX, out of Boston on his transistor radio (which he had stolen from Radio Shack including the batteries) and it had come in all fuzzy, what he would later find out would be airwave interference by stronger radio station signals. As he turned the dial he heard an odd song, a song called No Regrets by a guy named Tom Rush (whom he would see in person and interview many times later) which caught his attention. Then a couple of other songs that he knew were not rock songs until the announcer, the DJ, came on and identified them as Where Have All The Flowers Gone by Pete Seeger and Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds and then identified himself as Bill Marlowe host of the Bill Marlowe Folk Hour (although it was actually a two hour show) out of WMAR in Providence, a college station of some sort. That night the whole thing started for Seth, he started drawing in his mind that this was his niche, or his opening to that critic’s profession that he was looking for.      

This radio station WMAR didn’t always come in every Sunday, it all depended on those frantic vagrant airwaves but came in enough that Seth got a sense of what kind of music he was interested in (and would be sure to go the next day to Slappy’s Record Store downtown and look in the small “folk” bin and grab what he could grab (still working the “clip” when he could. Later he would get his folk materials at Sandy’s outside of Harvard Square but by then he had called a truce to his larcenous ways and actually paid for the records). More importantly Bill Marlowe would announce during his show the various folksingers and folk clubs, you know coffeehouses, and when and where they were playing. That had led to his first foray into Harvard Square to the Club Nana to see Big Bill Bloom in the days before he had made it big on the folk scene. Also the place where he had met the doomed Markin.           

But Harvard Square was only a stepping stone of sorts, an outpost although an important one, since the epicenter of the folk world really was in the Village in New York City as the coffeehouses there turned almost on a dime from long lines waiting outside “beat” poetry and jazz venues to the new folk craze which was just then starting to form its own long lines at certain clubs like the Gaslight where a few years before guys and gals, folksingers were used to put people to sleep and insure that they would leave quickly so the next entourage of poetry and jazz devotees could be ushered in. And that was how one Friday night he met Cindy Sloan, how he subsequently took his first of many trips to the Village then and later in college when he got a few free-lance assignments to cover some lesser artists working to perfect their acts that guys like Lenny Samuels and Benny Gold didn’t want to sully their critical facilities covering.  

This Cindy was a folksinger, had a pretty good voice, and was a freshman at NYU who had come up to Cambridge one weekend to do a gig, perform in an “open mic.” Places like the Club 47 and Club Nana were strictly for the professionals, for those who were getting paid to perform no matter what the pittance the cash-strapped club owners working on close margins could foist off on them. Seth though met Cindy at the Club Blue, then unlike later when Dave Von Ronk’s presence gave it the cache to move up the folk food chain because Nick Cave let Dave run up a tab and not pay for his booze, a lesser club where the draw was no cover charge and as long as you had a coffee, or some drink, in front of you that allowed you to stay in that seat. In short a cheap date which many guys, including Seth, prayed for when they were checking girls out, some of who made that love of folk music a condition of their interest unless the chick was really foxy then other more obvious factors came into play. The other draw was that the performers, all amateurs from hunger, got to perform a three song set to perfect their art (or got the thumb’s down which meant playing out in the mean streets with passersby purposely avoiding you andyour tin cup like you were some cripple or something in front of the Coop or worse in the lifeless dungeon of the subway where you competed with the noise from the on-rushing train which you usually lost). After each performer was done “the hat” was passed around and that was the way money, if any, was made that night by the performers.            

Now Cindy, all regulation long-ironed straight hair a la Joan Baez and her sister, Mimi, peasant blouse, skirt, short as was getting to be the style, and the equally regulation sandals had a lovely voice, did a lot of high soprano Baez and Judy Collins old Child ballad covers and after her set got several dollar so in the scheme of things did pretty well for herself. But there were a million Joan Baez wannabes then and Seth thought that Cindy would be hard pressed to make a career out of her avocation. That was one of his first insights into what the folk music deal was all about, what it was all about from a critic’s standpoint. About who had “it” and what they were going to do about it. Of course when Cindy had finished her set and had for no known reason sat down at Seth and his friend Jack Callahan’s table he made no mention of that observation. Rather he went to work pumping her for all the information he could get from her about the folk scene in the Village and the scene in Washington Square near NYU where on an given Saturday or Sunday many young men and women were trying out their skill sets for the passing audiences (the hat or cup or guitar case as always in front for any stray donations). Also as was his nature when attractive girls, folkies or not, were around he flirted with her like crazy. That night he stayed with her in her friend’s Cambridge apartment where she was crashing for the weekend. That night they just endlessly talked and it was that night Cindy invited Seth down to see her in New York (they would not get under the sheets until later when they were in her dorm room off of Washington Square).              

That is how one Seth Garth became knowledgeable about the Washington Square folk scenes, plural since there was something of a division between those who were stuck in maybe the 17^th century with old-timey ballads and those who wanted to fiercely proclaim some social or political message via the lyrics they were writing like crazy to make sense of the 20^th century world the others were clueless about, and why he had first-hand experience with many of the artists who graced this CD. As for Cindy, she and Seth saw each other occasionally that year until he graduated from high school and she moved on to some other college guy, but as he predicted, she tried for a few years to break into the paying folk performer milieu but then gave it up and returned to her career as a biologist. A very good one from what Seth heard when he ran into one day when he was on assignment for The Eye.