The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night-Out In Pooh’s Corner

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night-Out In Pooh’s Corner

By Allan Jackson

[As I mentioned in the introduction to the last sketch, the one about the bakery smells that have memory aflame even fifty years  later the spirit that animated this whole series of sketches had a name-a name of Peter Paul Markin, always known as Scribe, who was our mad monk driving force to break out of the old Acre working class neighborhood of growing up North Adamsville where we all might have stayed like a lot of others unto this day and “died” on the vine in the process. The “pooh’s corner” reference is from a Jefferson Airplane song from the days when we all went, one way or another, one time or another, out to California to see what was what in those crazy 1960s days. None of us, probably not even Bart Webber, would have gone out there on our own without Scribe’s imprimatur his influence that way was so strong. We had some wild times, some bad times, but mostly memorable times, although all agree that when we think of those time we not only shed a small tear for our lost youth but for the lost Scribe.

Part of my recent taking on the by-line to this series was the hard fact that I wrote or seriously edited almost everything in the series. Probably worked one way or another on every freaking line. However I didn’t write everything as the by-line below for Josh Breslin indicates. On this sketch I did not want to do it myself since it involved a lot about me and my relationship to “pooh’s corner” and it would ring false if I wrote it in the third person. So I contacted Josh as he will explain below and since he was a writer on his own dime for half the small press and off-beat journals on the American landscape I asked him to do the project. Moreover Josh was there almost every step of the way including “stealing” my surfer girl girlfriend of the time Butterfly Swirl right from under me one night when we were on our “honeymoon” (Josh will explain below) so who better to write it.

Not only was Josh there in those turbulent 1960s times but he also knew the Scribe, had met him out there before any of the rest of us had gone out the first time so he too will shed a small tear for our lost comrade-and curse the bastard to high heaven too for leaving us in the lurch. Josh, by the way, has added gravity since we have always since those days called him one of our own, one of the North Adamsville corner boys. Nobody ever complained about it either. Allan Jackson]  

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

A while back, maybe three years ago now, I was sitting in the Sunnyvale Grille in Boston where I was visiting my old time merry prankster friend, Allan Jackson, where we got into a hot and heavy discussion about the kind of songs that turned us on back in the 1960s when we had come of musical age. We had young kids’ stuff grown up on the classic Elvis-Jerry Lee-Chuck-Bo-Roy stuff but that was mainly copped from our older brothers and sisters, the ‘60s sounds and their attendant political connections were our real age time. I had met Allan out in California after I had hitched out there in the mid-1960s just after I had graduated from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine. He was going under the moniker Flash Dash then , don’t laugh, for a while I was the Prince of Love, those monikers used in abundance as a way to break from our traditional-bound pasts, to break from the old neighborhood corner boy stuff, on the a way to make our own newer world. (Allan would later in a fit of nostalgia or something go back and us Peter Paul Markin as his moniker on the Internet in honor of his our fallen comrade so it wasn’t just in seeking new worlds 1960s where alias worked their magic.) That night Allan had a couple of his recently reunited North Adamsville High old corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins and Sam Lowell, and a guy he met after he had just graduated from high school, Frank Jackman, who was from Hull about twenty miles south of North Adamsville all of whom I had previously met one time or another out in the “Garden of Eden,” which is what we called our search back then and which came up California for all of us then whatever happened later.

Now the reason that I have mentioned who was in attendance at that “meeting” (really an occasion to have a few drinks without the bother of womenfolk around for a short time and without the lately more pressing need not to drink and drive impaired since Allan was in town for a conference and had been staying at the Westin a short walk down the street) is that each and every participant was a certified member of the generation of ’68. That generation of ’68 designation meaning that all were, one way or another, veterans of the political wars back then when we tried to “turn the world upside down” and got kicked in the ass for our efforts and, more importantly here, veterans of the “hippie” drug/drop-out/ communal experiences that a good portion of our generation imbibed in, if only for a minute. And thus all were something like “experts” on the question that was pressing on Allan’s mind. That question centered on what music “turned” each guy there on. Not in the overtly sexual way in which the question asked might be taken today but while they were being “turned on.” Turned on being a euphemism plain and simple for getting “high,” “stoned,” “ripped” or whatever term was used in the locale that you frequented, for doing your drug of choice.              

See Allan, full name Allan Chester Jackson but nobody in his old high school corner boys crowd called him that, nor did I or do I here, had this idea that rather than the common wisdom Beatles, Stones, Doors, Motown influence that when the deal went down the Jefferson Airplane was the group that provided the best music to get “turned on” by. By the way since she will enter this story at some point the only one that I can think of who called Allan that three name combo was a girl, what we call a young woman now, whom we met, or rather he met, and then I met and took away from him, Cathy Callahan, out in La Jolla in California, who went under the moniker Butterfly Swirl back in the 1960s. She thought, clueless California sunshine ex-surfer guy girl, the three name combo was “cute” like Allan was some Brahmin scion rather than from his real working-class neighborhood roots. But that was a different story because as he said, she “curled his toes,” curled mine too, so she could call him (or me) any damn name she wanted.     

Naturally there was some disagreement over that premise but let me tell you what the mad monk Allan was up to. See, as a free-lance journalist of sorts, he had shortly before our meeting taken on an assignment from a generation of ’68-type magazine, Mellow Times. A ’68-type magazine meaning that it was filled with full-blown nostalgia stuff: New Mexico communes where kids strictly from suburban no heartache homes tried to eke, the only word possible for such exertions, an existence out of some hard clay farming; outlaw bikers who guys like gonzo writers like Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe made infamous, or rather more infamous; acid head freak-outs in the Fillmores of the East and West sipping weird drug concoctions out of Dixie cups and getting twisted to the high decibel music up front; merry pranksters riding shotgun to the new dispensation taking more than a few over the high side with them; the Haight-Ashbury scene from the first “all men and women are brothers and sisters” days of sharing on the soup kitchen lines to the gun, drug shoot-up bitter end; Golden Gate Park days when that park had more kites, more bubbles, more wha-wha than any other park in the world; psychedelics from drugs to art; retro- art deco styles like the lost children were channeling back to the “lost generation” Jazz Age jail-breakers as kindred; and, feed the people kitchens in the good days and bad, Sally or Fugs, that kind of thing from that period.

Allan, well known to a select audience of baby-boomers for his previous work in writing about the merry prankster hitchhike road, what he had called in one series that I had read-The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- in which he had used me as a stick drug-addled figure from Podunk who didn’t know how to tie his own shoes until he came under the god-like Jackson spell, was given free rein to investigate that question under the descriptive by-line- Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night -that was to head the series of articles the magazine proposed that he work on. Here is Allan’s proposed introduction to the series that he gave us copies of that night: 

“This is another tongue-in-cheek commentary, the back story if you like, in the occasional entries under this headline going back to the primordial youth time of the 1960s with its bags full of classic (now classic) rock songs for the ages. Now many music and social critics have done yeomen’s service giving us the meaning of various folk songs, folk protest songs in particular, from around this period. You know they have essentially beaten us over the head with stuff like the meaning of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind as a clarion call for now aging baby-boomers back to rise up and smite the dragon, and a warning to those in charge (not heeded) that a new world was a-bornin’, or trying to be. Or better his The Times They Are A-Changin’ with its plaintive plea for those in charge to get hip, or stand aside.  (They did neither.) And we have been fighting about a forty year rearguard action to this very day trying to live down those experiences, and trying to get new generations to blow their own wind, change their own times, and sing their own plainsong in a similar way.”

And so we, his Jack Slack’s bowling alleys hometown corner boys, Frank, and I were the “masses” for the purpose of Allan’s work. Free labor if you like for his little nostalgia music piece. And here is his rationale, or at least part of it that he sent in an e-mail trying to drag me from Portland down to Boston to beat the thing over the head with him:

“…Like I said the critics have had a field day (and long and prosperous academic and journalistic careers as well) with that kind of stuff, fluff stuff really. The hard stuff, the really hard stuff that fell below their collective radars, was the non-folk, non-protest, non-deep meaning (so they thought) stuff, the daily fare of popular radio back in the day. A song like Out At Pooh’s Corner. A song that had every red-blooded American teen-age experimenter (and who knows maybe world teen) wondering their own wondering about the fate of the song’s narrator. About what happened that night (and the next morning) that caused him to pose the comment in that particular way. Yes, that is the hard stuff of social commentary, the stuff of popular dreams, and the stuff that is being tackled head on in this series”

And so after succumbing to his blarney we sat at that table in the bar of the Sunnyvale Grille sipping high-shelf scotch and trying to work through this knotty problem that Allan had put before us. This problem of what moved us though the squeeze that we put our brains through back then. Allan brought something up that kind of set the tone for the evening. He mentioned that coming out of North Adamsville in 1964 he, Jimmy, and Sam, if they had been prophetic, could not have possibly foreseen that they would, like about half of their generation, or so it seemed, have imbibed deeply of the counter-culture, its communal values, its new-found habits, its ethos, its drug-centeredness, or its music. He explained (and Jimmy and Sam chimed in with comments as he proceeded) that in strait-laced, mostly Irish working- class neighborhoods like where they grew up in North Adamsville anything other than working hard to get ahead, “getting ahead” being getting some kind of white-collar city civil service job and finally breaking the string of factory worker generations, since they were in some cases the first generation to finish high school and have enough knowledge to take the exam to white-collar-dom, getting married, maybe to your high school sweetheart or some such arrangement, and eventually buying a slightly bigger house than the cramped quarters provided by the house you grew up in and have children, slightly fewer children than in the house you grew up in, was considered scandalous, weird, or evil.

But as Jimmy said after Allan finished up it wasn’t so much the neighborhood ethos as the ethos of the corner boy life, the life in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys up on Thornton Street. That life included plenty of under-age drinking, plenty of talk, mostly talk, of sex with pretty girls  (certainly more talk than any activity that actually happened-except in bravado Monday morning before school banter with every guy lying, or half-lying about what was done, or not done,  after the weekend’s exertions), and a view of the world perhaps slightly less rigid than the parents but still scornful of people of the opposite sex living together unmarried (and in high Catholic North Adamsville even divorced people were subject to comment, and scorn), scornful of guys who didn’t want to get married, sometime, and of the opinion that those who did dope, that dope being heroin, opium, or morphine which they knew about and not so much marijuana which just seemed exotic, were fiends, evil or beatniks. Not the profile of those who would later in the decade grow their hair longer that any mother’s most outlandish nightmare dream, wear headbands to keep the hair back, grow luxurious and unkempt beards, live in communes with both sexes mixing and matching, smoke more marijuana, snort more coke, and down more bennies, acid, and peyote buttons, and play more ripping music than the teen angel, earth angel, Johnny angel music heard down at Jack Slack’s jukebox. Everybody laughed after that spiel from Jimmy.

Those old time references got me to thinking about the days when we had headed west in the mid-1960s days, Markin first and then later Allan with various combination of corner boys including Sam, Frank and Jimmy, me, the first time solo and thereafter with Markin and others, the days when we were in search of Pooh’s Corner. Thinking along the lines of about Allan’s “theory” of the great turn on song for our generation, thinking about the search for the “garden,” the “Garden of Eden,” that we had picked up from a line in a Woody Guthrie song, Do Re Mi (meaning if you did not have it, dough, kale, cash, forget California Edens although at our coming of California age money was not a big deal, nobody had any and so we didn’t worry about it, unlike now). Of course everybody then knew the reference from the Jefferson Airplane’s song which contained those Pooh Corner references. I remember I first heard the song one night at the Fillmore, the rat’s end concert hall where everybody who had any pretensions to the new acid-etched music either played or wanted to play, and that was the Mecca for every person who wanted to think about dropping out of the rat race and try to get their heads around a different idea.

We had in any case all headed west maybe a couple of years after the big summer of love 1967 caught our attention. Markin had already been out there for a few months having hitchhiked from Boston in the early spring, had wound up in La Jolla down by the surfer Valhalla and had run into Captain Crunch and his merry band, a band of brothers and sisters who had been influenced by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to drop out, drop acid and “see the world” and their legendary former yellow brick road school bus, Further In, earlier in the decade and whose adventures had been the subject of a Tom Wolfe book. That Kesey-led experience, especially noticeable on the California coastal roads was multiplied a thousand fold once the jail-break hit full speed and Captain Crunch and his companion, Mustang Sally, had followed suit. It was never clear whether the Captain actually knew Kesey but he sure as hell was knee deep in the drug trade since the reason that he and the bus load had been in La Jolla was that he and his crew were “house-sitting” a safe house used by one of the southern drug cartels while the Captain was getting ready to head north to San Francisco and find out what was happening with the scene there. Markin had “signed on” the bus (in those days a common expression was “you are on the bus, or you are off the bus,’ and you were better off on the bus) since he had wanted to head to Frisco town from Boston anyway but the vagaries of the hitchhike road, a couple of long haul truck driver pick up the first which left him in Dallas and the second San Diego had brought him farther south. (In those days as I well knew you took whatever long haul ride you could get as long as they were heading west and got you some place on the California coast. I remember telling Markin, and he agreed that, I had never realized just how long a state it was, had been  clueless, until I had my first San Diego ride when I was looking to get to Big Sur several hundred miles up the coast which took me a couple of days of rides to get to.) 

This is the time when Allan (via Markin by the way) met Cathy Callahan, Butterfly Swirl, from Carlsbad up the road a few miles from La Jolla and who was then “slumming” in La Jolla after breaking up with her perfect wave surfer boyfriend and looking for, well, I don’t know what she was looking for in the end and neither did Allan, maybe just kicks, momentary kicks to see what she might be missing because after she got through with us she went back to that perfect wave surfer boyfriend. Go figure. But then people like Butterfly Swirl, ex-surfer boy girls, working-class guys like me from Podunk, Maine, ex-soldiers unable or unwilling to adjust to the “real world” after Vietnam, hairy-assed bikers who had taken some dope and mellowed out on their rage trip, college professors who saw what they were teaching as a joke , governmental bureaucrats who knew what they were doing was a joke, or worse, con men getting all worked up seeing all the naïve kids from nowhere who wanted to be hip and were easy marks for bad dope and bad karma , corner boys trying to break out of their corners looking for easy girls , the derelict doing what the derelict always do except not being castigated for it by those seeking the newer world, hot-rod junkies tired of their midnight runs and death, and the like were all taking that jail-break minute to see if they fit into the new dispensation so maybe it was just that. Most of them went back to whatever they were doing previously once the ebb began to catch up with us, once the bad guys put on a full-court press.

So Allan and Butterfly Swirl met, met at a party Captain Crunch was throwing at that safe house, a mansion from what Markin had told me.  This Butterfly Swirl was all legs, thin, blonde a then typical California surfer girl waiting on dry land for her surfer guy to get that  perfect wave and then go ball the night away before he/they got up the next day to look, he, for the next perfect wave. Definitely in the normal course of events not an Allan-type of young woman, his running to sad- sack Harvard Square intellectual types who broke your heart a different way when they were done with you, or mine either, French-Canadian or Irish girls, all virginal and pious for public consumption any way, also heart-breakers, but chalk it up to the times. So they met, got turned on to some great grass (marijuana, for the squares) and hit one of the upstairs bedrooms where she “curled his toes.”  And they were an item as the Captain and crew ambled north for the next few months until they hit a park on Russian Hill where they parked the bus for a few weeks.

And that is where I had met Markin, Allan, and eventually Butterfly Swirl. I had stopped off at the park because somebody I met, a guy who had been on the Haight-Ashbury scene for a while, on Mission Street said that I could score dope, some food, and a place to sleep if I asked around up on the hill where the scene was not as frantic as around downtown and in Golden Gate Park. There was the bus, painted in the obligatory twenty-seven day-glo colors, just sitting there when I walked up and asked about a place to sleep. Allan, looking like some Old Testament prophet long unkempt hair and scraggly beard, army jacket against the chilled Bay winds, bell-bottomed trousers as was the unisex fashion then, beat-up moccasins, and looking like he had hit the magic bong pipe a few times too many, said “you can get on the bus, if youw want[A1] .” But mainly I remembered those slightly blood-shot fierce blue eyes that spoke of seeing hard times in his life and spoke as well that maybe seeking that newer world he was seeking would work out after all, he no longer has that fierce look that “spoke” to me that first time. That introduction started our now lifetime off and on comradely relationship. I think for both of us the New England connection is what drew us together although he was a few years older than me, had seen and done things that I was just getting a handle on. And strangely I think that being older helped when I “stole” young Butterfly Swirl away from him one night at the Fillmore where the Airplane were playing their high acid rock he was mad, mad as hell, when he did find out about us but he did get over it (and I, in my turn, got over it when she about a year later she went back to Carlsbad and her surfer boy).

The “strange” part mentioned above came about because Butterfly Swirl and Allan had been “married,” at the time, no, not in the old-fashioned bourgeois sense but having been on the bus together for a while one night Captain Crunch in his capacity as the head of the band of sisters and brothers “officiated” at a mock wedding held under his authority as “captain” of the adventure ship. While this “marriage” ceremony carried no legal weight it did carry weight on the bus for it meant that the pair were to be left alone in the various couplings and un-couplings that drove the sex escapades of all bus dwellers. Moreover Captain Crunch, a rather strange but upfront guy who was all for couplings and un-couplings at will, oh yeah, except when it came to his own barnyard and he would rant and rave at Mustang Sally, his longtime companion who as a free spirit in her own right made a specialty of picking up young guys who played in one of the burgeoning rock bands of the times, “curled their toes” and too made connections to get them gigs and stuff like that. The Captain was fit to be tied when Sally got her young guy wanting habits on. But what could he do, if he wanted her on the bus.

In any case the Captain who was not only mysteriously connected with the drug world, knew the mad max daddy of acid, Owsley, himself as well as the hermanos down south who trusted him as much as they could trust any gringo, but also had connections with the rising number of rock promoters on the West Coast decided to spring for a “honeymoon” for Allan(who was still going by the moniker Flash Dash at the time) and the Swirl. The honeymoon was to be a party before and during the Airplane’s next gig in San Francisco where had copped twenty tickets from the promoter for some service rendered, maybe a brick of grass who knows. But here is where things got freaky, this was also to be something of an old time Ken Kesey “electric kool-aid acid test,” particularly for Swirl who never had done LSD before, had never done acid, and was very curious. So the night of the concert a couple of hours before it was to start Captain gathered all around the bus then headquartered in Pacifica about twenty miles south of the city at another cartel safe house and offered whoever wanted to indulge some blotter. Flash and Swirl led things off, she trembling a little in fear, and excitement.  Then one and all, including me, took off in the bus for amble the Airplane show. (An amble which included picking up about six people on the Pacific Coast Highway road up, offering them blotter as well, and on the in-bus jerry-rigged sound the complete (then) Stones’ playlist which had people, including me, dancing in the back of the bus.

That was a very strange night as well because that was the night, the “honeymoon” night when Swirl freaking out on the acid trip. Good freaking out after she got over the initial fear that everybody has about losing control and about the very definite change in physical perspective that are bound to throw you off if you are not used to that pull at the back of your head, or you think is at the back of your head, after seeing gorgeous colors which she described in great detail, feeling all kinds strange outer body feelings as well. See she and I got together as I helped bring her down after Flash took off with some woman. Well just some woman at the time, although he eventually married her (and divorced her), Joyell, Joyell of the brown-eyed world. He had met Joyell initially in Boston but he had been seeing quite a bit since she had come to Frisco, come to get her Master’s degree at Berkeley, and whom he had run into at the concert. Yeah the times were like, a guy or gal could be “married,” or married and then have a million affairs, although usually not on their “honeymoon” but that was Allan, Allan to a tee, and nobody thought anything of it, usually, or if they did they kept it to themselves. We tried about six million ways to try to deal with breaking from our narrow pasts and I think we saw what would be scandalous behavior back in the neighborhoods as a way to do so, although in the end all Allan (and I) got was about three divorces, a bunch of love affairs and many, too many, flings. Here’s the laugher though the thing that brought Swirl back to earth that night was her “grooving” (yeah, we had our own vocabulary as well and you can check Wikipedia for most of the meanings) on the Airplane’s music, on Grace Slick’s going crazy on White Rabbit and assorted other great music from After Bathing At Baxter’s. (Swirl said she felt like Alice-In-Wonderland that night.) So in a way I have to agree with Allan about the effect that band had on us but I will be damned if fifty years later I am going to side with him after he left his “bride” standing at the altar. Even if I was the guy who caught her fall. Yeah such was life out in Pooh’s Corner, and I wish it were still going on, wish it a lot.                   

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 [A1]

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Frankie’s Carnival Time

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Frankie’s Carnival Time

By Allan Jackson

[I hope the need to constantly introduce myself and my circumstances are old hat by now that I have been permitted by the man who replaced me in my job on this site Greg Green to finish up this series with my own by-line and do not have to keep repeating that pronouncement. That agreement (negotiated by my old friend Sam Lowell from way back in high school days and those days an occasional writer on this site as well) while restricting what I might have to say about the internal struggle here in 2017 does allow me to comment, to defend myself, against some of the outrageous and frankly loopy rumors that have surfaced around my name after I was “purged.” I will continue to bat does these rumors working around the edges of last year’s internal struggle since in the last posting apparently I did not touch enough on last year’s fight to warrant a big red-pencil by current site manager Greg Green.    

Before I was allowed to have my own by-line in this series I had prevailed upon Jack Callahan, my old friend also from high school days and a big financial backer of this publication, to swat what rumors he could on my behalf. He did a great job but even he did not get all of the facts right in the rumor that I was “pimping” a twenty-something shapely blonde surfer girl out in La Jolla met where she was working as a part-time waitress to make ends meet while she searched for the “perfect wave.” Jack at least got it part right that I wasn’t pimping for her but he seems to have missed a communication from me about her real age, about what she really did beside her hobby of surfing and that no, she was not teaching me to surf. (Me a guy who truly loves the ocean but has been hesitant to swim over my head ever since I was eight years old and almost drowned and would have except the quick reaction of the woman lifeguard who saved my stupid young ass when I drifted too far out on a vagrant log that was carrying me along with the ebbing tides. So no, not at all on that surfing rumor.)

After that fiasco in Utah with those perfidious Mormons, hell, I might as well tar the whole lot with Mitt Romney’s brush when all is said and done, I was a bit desperate, a bit down thinking I would never get another job except maybe as an elderly bag guy at some suburban super-market making small change chat with the blue-haired ladies on Senior discount days so I headed where I, where we, the old high school and 1960s gang that were still around would head, to California. To Carlsbad first when my third wife, Mimi, and I had a condo time share arrangement which I gave up when we were divorced but the memories were too much and I drifted south toward La Jolla another well-known refuge spot for the old gang.

One day I really was famished and I decided to head over to Dave’s Diner where I knew that I would get a good generous portion meal and would not have to wash dishes to pay the freight. One great thing about diners is they universally have counters and swivel seats for single diners which I always appreciated since I would have felt foolish sitting alone at a table or in a booth. I sat down as usual and started looking at the menu as the waitress, yes I know waitperson or wait staff, came by and asked if I wanted coffee. Normally I would just say no and that would be it but that day feeling out of sorts I mentioned that I loved coffee but my system no longer could take it after years of drinking about ten cups a day.      

She, Damask, her name a true California-type name, responded that she couldn’t drink coffee either despite serving all day and that the two of them would put Starbuck’s out of business. Something in the way she said that was appealing, and since the place wasn’t every busy at that hour they chatted in and out of servicing time at her station. The long and short of it was that I just told my story, told it in a funny enough manner that she appreciated what I was talking about. As I paid my bill and was ready to leave I just threw caution to the wind and asked her if she would like to have dinner with me since I was all alone and would appreciate the company. She surprised me when she said yes but also when she suggested that Scudders well-known to me and the old gang as well would be nice. Nice and pricey as well but my credit cards were still in good shape.  

The dinner went great and as we parted she mentioned that she was going surfing in the morning at La Jolla Point and maybe I could join her and she could show me how to surf. Naturally I said yes. That next morning I did some shoreline surfing but I never really got the hang of the thing. That wasn’t important anyway since what was important is that we spent that whole day together and the night too. The delightful night but you knew that already.

What you don’t know because Jack got it wrong somehow was that Damask was not some twenty-something blonde surfer girl bimbo, sorry, of legend that the old gang, including me used to dream about in those 1960s Beach Boy summer nights. She was blonde, California blonde so it is always up in the air about the origins, shapely and thirty-something, late thirty-something although I guess whoever saw her on Facebook though she was younger and I did too. Here is the part that is hard to get around if you are not a serious California denizen. There is a whole sub-culture of people of all ages, male and female now, whose central lifestyle focus revolves around the sun and surf. That was, is, Damask’s situation. Moreover she is not some dimwit but a person who is working on a degree in physical therapy so she can get out of the diner racket knowing that is a dead-end. Strange to people who know me, strange for the high pressure guys and gals who I have known over the years to get down on but there it is.    

The other point that got screwed up in the translation is that whole question of my “pimping” for her to get dough. Outrageous. Damask told me that when she was younger she did some whorehouse hustling but that was done long ago. What people made a deal out of was the fact that all of a sudden I had dough, dough for alimony, for those infinite college tuitions and figured what they wanted to figure. Dirty minds. The way I got the dough and this will scotch another rumor was that before I left California to head East after Damask agreed that she would come out when I got settled I headed to San Francisco looking for dough. Looking for dough from Miss Judy Garland. Not the real Judy Garland who obviously has been dead for ages but a drag queen (that is how she likes to be describes when persforming just Timmy, a gay guy when not-not Jack’s transvestite) by the name of Timmy Riley. Timmy Riley from our old growing up neighborhood who was so much in the closet in the 1960s that he had to head out to San Francisco to be among his/her “people,” among the night life of North Beach. Timmy had a very tough time of it before he opened up the Shipwreck, a venue for drag queens that has become one of the most popular spots in the town for nightlife. Timmy got the money to get the place from me and I had been sending him money for years on the sly not telling the guys what had happened to him and where he was. I went to Frisco to borrow money from Miss Judy Garland to get back on my feet. And got it. So much for living high on opium with a drag queen. Fuck the rumors. Allan Jackson]       

******

An old man walked, walked haltingly down a North Adamsville street, maybe Hancock Street, or maybe a street just off of it, maybe a long street like West Main Street, he has forgotten which exactly in the time between his walking and his telling me his story. A street near the high school anyway, North Adamsville High School, where he had graduated from back in the mist of time, the 1960s mist of time. A time when he was known, far and wide, as the king, the king hell king, if the truth be known, of the schoolboy be-bop night. And headquartered himself, properly headquartered himself as generations of schoolboy king hell kings had done previously, at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor as was his due as the reigning schoolboy king of the night. But that schoolboy corner boy king thing is an old story, an old story strictly for cutting up old torches, according to the old man, Frankie, yes, Francis Xavier Riley, as if back from the dead, and not fit, not fit by a long shot for what he had to tell me about his recent “discovery,” and its meaning.

Apparently as Frankie, let us skip the formalities and just call him Frankie, walked down that nameless, maybe unnamable street he was stricken by sight of a sign on a vagrant telephone pole announcing that Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show was coming to town and setting up tent at the Veteran’s Stadium in the first week in June, this past June, for the whole week. And seeing this sign, this vagrant sign on this vagrant telephone pole, set off a stream of memories from when the king hell king of the schoolboy corner boy night was so enthralled with the idea of the “carny” life, of this very Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show carnival life, that he had plans, serious plans, to run away, run away with it when it left town.

Under this condition, and of course there was always a condition: if Ma Riley, or Pa Riley if it came to it, although Pa was usually comfortably ensconced in the Dublin Pub over on Sagamore Street and was not a big factor in Frankie’s life when it came time for him to make his mark as king hell king, just bothered him one more time, bothered about what was never specified at least to me. Of course they never did, or Frankie never let on that they did, bother him enough to force the issue, and therefore never forced him on the road. But by then he was into being the corner boy king so that dream must have faded, like a lot of twelve year old dreams.

In any case rather than running away with the carnival Frankie served his high school corner boy term as king hell king, went to college and then to law school, ran a successful mid-sized law practice, raised plenty of kids and political hell and never looked back. And not until he saw that old-time memory sign did he think of regrets for not having done what he said that “he was born for.” And rather than have the reader left with another in the endless line of cautionary tales, or of two roads, one not taken tales, or any of that, Frankie, Frankie in his own words, wants to expand on his carnival vision reincarnation and so we will let him speak :

Who knows when a kid first gets the carnival bug, maybe it was down in cradle times hearing the firecrackers in the heated, muggy Fourth Of July night when in old, old time North Adamsville a group of guys, a group of guys called the “Associates,” mainly Dublin Pub guys, and at one time including my father, Joe Riley, Senior, grabbed some money from around the neighborhood. And from the local merchants like Doc over at Doc’s Drug Store, Mario over at Estrella’s Grocery Store, Mac, owner of the Dublin Pub, and always, always, Tonio, owner of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor. What they did with this money was to hire a small time, usually very small time, carnival outfit, something with a name like Joe’s Carny, or the like, maybe with a merry-go-round, some bumping cars, a whip thing, a few one-trick ponies, and ten or twelve win-a-doll-for-your-lady tents. On the side maybe a few fried dough, pizza, sausage and onions kind of eateries, with cotton candy to top it off. And in a center tent acts, clown acts, trapeze acts with pretty girls dangling every which way, jugglers, and the like. Nothing fancy, no three-ring circus, or monster theme amusement park to flip a kid’s head stuff. Like I say small time, but not small time enough to not enflame the imagination of every kid, mainly every boy kid, but a few girls too if I remember right, with visions of setting up their own show.

Or maybe it was when this very same Jim Byrd, a dark-haired, dark-skinned (no, not black, not in 1950s North Adamsville, christ no, but maybe a gypsy or half-gypsy, if that is possible), a friendly guy, slightly wiry, a slightly side-of-his-mouth-talking guy just like a lawyer, who actually showed me some interesting magic tricks when I informed him, aged eight, that I wanted to go “on the road” with him first brought his show to town. Brought it to Veteran’s Stadium then too. That’s when I knew that that old time Associates thing, that frumpy Fourth of July set-up-in-a-minute-thing-and-then-gone was strictly amateur stuff. See Jim’s Carny had a Ferris wheel, Jim had a Mini-Roller Coaster, and he had about twenty-five or thirty win-a-doll, cigarettes, teddy bears, or candy tents. But also shooting galleries, gypsy fortune-telling ladies with daughters with black hair and laughing eyes selling roses, or the idea of roses. And looking very foxy, the daughters that is, although I did not know what foxy was then. Oh yah, sure Jim had the ubiquitous fried dough, sausage and onion, cardboard pizza stuff too. Come on now this was a carnival, big time carnival, big time to an eight-year old carnival. Of course he had that heartburn food. But what set Jim’s operation off was that central tent. Sure, yawn, he had the clowns, tramp clowns, Clarabelle clowns, what have you, and the jugglers, juggling everything but mainly a lot of whatever it was they were juggling , and even the acrobats, bouncing over each other like rubber balls. The big deal, the eight- year old big deal though, was the animals, the real live tigers and lions that performed in a cage in center stage with some blonde safari-weary tamer doing the most incredible tricks with them. Like, well, like having them jump through hoops, and flipping over each other and the trainer too. Wow.

But now that I think about it seriously the real deal of the carny life was neither the Associates or Jim Byrd’s, although after I tell you about this Jim’s would enter into my plans because that was the carnival, the only carnival I knew, to run away with. See what really got me going was down in Huntsville, a town on the hard ocean about twenty miles from North Adamsville, there was what would now be called nothing but an old-time amusement park, a park like you still might see if you went to Seaside Heights down on the Jersey shore. This park, this Wild Willie’s Amusement Park, was the aces although as you will see not a place to run away to since everything stayed there, summer open or winter closed. I was maybe nine or ten when I first went there but the story really hinges on when I was just turning twelve, you know, just getting ready to make my mark on the world, the world being girls. Yes, that kind of turning twelve.

But nine or twelve this Wild Willie’s put even Jim Byrd’s show to shame. Huge roller-coasters (yes, the plural is right, three altogether), a wild mouse, whips, dips, flips and very other kind of ride, covered and uncovered, maybe fifteen or twenty, all based on the idea of trying to make you scared, and want to go on again, and again to“ conquer” that scared thing. And countless win things (yah, cigarettes, dolls, teddy bears, candy, and so on in case you might have forgotten). I won’t even mention that hazardous to your health but merciful, fried dough, cardboard pizza (in about twenty flavors), sausage and onions, cotton candy and salt water taffy because, frankly I am tired of mentioning it and even a flea circus or a flea market today would feel compelled to offer such treats so I will move on.

What it had that really got me going, at first anyway, was about six pavilions worth of pinball machines, all kinds of pinball machines just like today there are a zillion video games at such places. But what these pinball machines had (beside alluring come-hither and spend some slot machine dough on me pictures of busty young women on the faces of the machines) were guys, over sixteen year old teenage guys, mainly, some older, some a lot older at night, who could play those machines like wizards, racking up free games until the cows came home. I was impressed, impressed to high heaven. And watching them, watching them closely were over sixteen- year old girls, some older, some a lot older at night, who I wondered, wondered at when I was nine but not at twelve, might not be interfering with their pinball magic. Little did I know then that the pinball wizardry was for those sixteen year old, some older, some a lot older, girls.

But see, if you didn’t already know, nine or twelve-year old kids were not allowed to play those machines. You had to be sixteen (although I cadged a few free games left on machines as I got a little older, and I think the statute of limitations has run out on this crime so I can say I was not sixteen years or older). So I gravitated toward the skee ball games located in one of those pinball pavilions, games that anybody six to sixty or more could play. You don’t know skees. Hey where have you been? Skee, come on now. Go over to Seaside Heights on the Jersey shore, or Old Orchard up on the Maine coast and you will have all the skees you want, or need. And if you can’t waggle your way to those hallowed spots then I will give a little run-down. It’s kind of like bowling, candle-pin bowling (small bowling balls for you non-New Englanders) with a small ball and it’s kind of like archery or darts because you have to get the balls, usually ten or twelve to a game, into tilted holes.

The idea is to get as high a score as possible, and in amusement park land after your game is over you get coupons depending on how many points you totaled. And if you get enough points you can win, well, a good luck rabbit’s foot, like I won for Karen stick-girl one time (a stick girl was a girl who didn’t yet have a shape, a womanly shape, and maybe that word still is used, okay), one turning twelve-year old time, who thought I was the king of the night because I gave her one from my “winnings,” and maybe still does. Still does think I am king of the hill. But a guy, an old corner boy guy that I knew back then, a kind of screwy guy who hung onto my tail at Salducci’s like I was King Solomon, a guy named Markin who hung around me from middle school on, already wrote that story once.

Although he got one part wrong, the part about how I didn’t know right from left about girls and gave this Karen stick girl the air when, after showering her with that rabbit’s foot, she wanted me to go with her and sit on the old seawall down at Huntsville Beach and according to Markin I said no-go. I went, believe me I went, and we both practically had lockjaw for two weeks after we got done. But you know how stories get twisted when third parties who were not there, had no hope of being there, and had questionable left from right girl knowledge themselves start their slanderous campaigns on you. Yes, you know that scene, I am sure.

So you see, Karen stick and lockjaw aside, I had some skill at skees, and the way skees and the carny life came together was when, well let me call her Gypsy Love, because like the name of that North Adamsville vagrant telephone pole street where I saw the Byrd’s carnival in town sign that I could not remember the name of I swear I can’t, or won’t remember hers. All I remember is that jet-black long hair, shiny dark-skinned glean (no, no again, she was not black, christ, no way, not in 1950s Wild Willie’s, what are you kidding me?), that thirteen-year old winsome smile, half innocent, half-half I don’t know what, that fast-forming girlish womanly shape and those laughing, Spanish gypsy black eyes that would haunt a man’s sleep, or a boy’s. And that is all I need to remember, and you too if you have any imagination. See Gypsy Love was the daughter of Madame La Rue, the fortune-teller in Jim Byrd’s carnival. I met her in turning twelve time when she tried to sell me a rose, a rose for my girlfriend, my non-existent just then girlfriend. Needless to say I was immediately taken with her and told her that although I had no girlfriend I would buy her a rose.

And that, off and on, over the next year is where we bounced around in our “relationship.” One day I was down at Wild Willie’s and I spotted her and asked her why she wasn’t on the road with Jim Byrd’s show. Apparently Madame LaRue had had a falling out with Jim, quit the traveling show and landed a spot at Wild Willie’s. And naturally Gypsy Love followed mother, selling flowers to the rubes at Wild Willie’s. So naturally, naturally to me, I told Gypsy Love to follow me over to the skees and I would win her a proper prize. And I did, I went crazy that day. A big old lamp for her room. And Gypsy Love asked me, asked me very nicely thank you, if I wanted to go down by the seawall and sit for a while. And let’s get this straight, no third party who wasn’t there, no wannabe there talk, please, I followed her, followed her like a lemming to the sea. We had lockjaw for a month afterward to prove it. And you say, you dare to say I was not born for that life, that carnival life. Ha.

We’ve Got To Get Back To The Garden-Serpents And All-Dennis Covington’s ‘Salvation On Sand Mountain: Snake Handling And Redemption In Southern Appalachia” (1995)-A Book Review-Of Sorts

We’ve Got To Get Back To The Garden-Serpents And All-Dennis Covington’s ‘Salvation On Sand Mountain: Snake Handling And Redemption In Southern Appalachia” (1995)-A Book Review-Of Sorts

Book Review

By Bart Webber

Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handing and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, Dennis Covington, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995 

     

Josh Breslin had always been the running kind. Not the running kind in the famous country song by the late Merle Haggard The Running Kind where the unnamed narrator is ready to hightail it out some forlorn lonesome door at the first sign that he might have to settle down to some nine to five straitjacket life. Not for him. Nor is it that great American restlessness that physically drove plenty of forebears to run from the “civilized” East to seek fame and fortune or beat the law out to the great American blue-pink night West in the 19^th century before Professor Turner’s frontier hit its limits, closed down on some Pacific Ocean splash. Josh Breslin until very recently had been running away from his past, from his heritage, from his what shall we call them-roots. From what made him tick for good or bad when the deal went down.         

Josh had for most of his life after he actually escaped his growing up home (the word he used when talking about this subject to his friend Lenny Lynch one night over drinks at Fisherman’s Wharf in York, Maine), house in the working class Five Corners section, the mill town factory section, of Olde Saco further up the road in Maine hard by the Sacco River maintained a studied ignorance of his roots, of where his people had come from. Really his father Prescott’s people since he could have hardly missed the French-Canadian roots on his mother’s nee LeBlanc side (and that of half the town) since she had come down from Quebec with his maternal grandparents and a whole shew of relatives from grand aunts and uncles on down.

Yes that father’s people question was buried deep in Josh’s  psyche to remained undisturbed until his was in his early 60s  when maybe taking some early accounting of his life he felt that he had a corner or two of his heart missing. Not that the taciturn Prescott ever really broached the subject, never brought in up at least in his presence that he recalled. (As it turned out when he did begin to research his roots his oldest brother Paul was a fountain of information since Prescott in the few times he felt expansive would confide in the eldest son.)

A few things kind of pushed Josh in that direction beyond that summing up process. He had gone back to the old town after an absence of many years when he had reconnected with an old high school friend Rene Dubois on Facebook and Rene had invited him up for a few days. During that stay Rene’s wife, Anne, had mentioned over dinner something about his father that stopped him in his tracks a bit when the subject came up about the fates of various relatives. His father had passed away in the mid-1980s after spending most of his adult life in Olde Saco, working in the mills before they headed South (and then off-shore) in search of cheaper labor and then whatever jobs an uneducated man could scrape up from what was left.

What Anne had mentioned that night at dinner was that Prescott had never really been accepted by the Five Corners people, by the hordes of French-Canadian transplants who worked the mills with him including Josh’s mother’s relatives. His father had been shunned and made fun of for his soft Southern accent (which Josh never really noticed). Apparently, later confirmed by Paul, his Kentucky birth, his not being a Roman Catholic in the days when that counted in the Five Corners section, and most of all not being French-Canadian (Quebecois now) were held against him. Josh was shocked since he believed that Prescott whatever else he was had been respected as a hard worker and under the circumstances a good provider for his family given what he had to offer.

That started Josh in a tailspin, started him thinking more seriously about what the hell he had grown up in, what his poor benighted father had to endure and maybe explain a little why he had never been interested before in his roots. Not so unnaturally, given that Josh has spent almost all his adult life writing for various publications small and large, mostly specialty journals and small press publications, his other impetuses were from books. One from re-reading a book by Michael Harrington written in the early 1960s and said to be a book that President Kennedy had taken as a signpost for eliminating poverty in America, The Other America. Re-reading that book brought back a painful memory from high school which Josh had also kind of suppressed since then.

The Harrington book centered on rural poverty among whites (what were called “white trash” in some quarters) in the hills and hollows of Appalachia. Mentioned by name the town in Kentucky, Hazard, that his father had been born and grew up in and that was one of the most severely depressed and forsaken areas in the region with all the pathologies inherent in poverty running full force. That brought on a remembrance of the time in high school that the headmaster around Thanksgiving time had come on the P.A and announced that the school was sponsoring a food and clothing drive for the impoverished citizens of Hazard. He had turned about twenty shades of red because the whole class knew that his father was from that town. He had left school early that day he was so embarrassed.                   

The other book that got him thinking about his father’s roots, his roots and how they had affected the course of his life was a strange book about fundamentalist religious people down in the rural South, down in Appalachia who practiced snake-handling as part of their religious observance-as part of their acceptance of the strange ways of their savior Jesus Christ. (They also practiced speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands.) The book Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handing and Redemption in Southern Appalachia by writer Dennis Covington hit a nerve in a couple of ways. Mr. Covington too was, as a result of his exposure to snake-handling when he was on an assignment, thinking hard about his roots, about his own people’s from Appalachia’s relationship to these exotic practices.

The other was a direct reference in the book to Hazard, to people in that area into religious snake-handling as part of their bid for salvation, his people, his father’s people who knows. That really hit home when Josh’s brother Paul mentioned that before Josh was born Prescott and their mother Delores had taken him down to Hazard to see if things could work out there, see if there was work for uneducated ex-soldier. Paul wasn’t sure of the reasons but things didn’t work out, their mother either didn’t like the set-up or was homesick. This was the kicker though when Paul and Josh worked the numbers. The numbers worked out that Josh had been conceived down in Hazard. The both laughed when Paul mentioned that Josh has those hills and hollows in his DNA.     

The book made him wonder though, wonder without any proof one way or the other, whether Prescott had known or delved into the practice of snake-handling as part of his growing up religious practice. But that was sort of secondary since his father (or Paul when he asked) never mentioned anything like that when he was growing up. Mainly Josh knew that Prescott was not a Roman Catholic and not much else. Had agreed to raise his kids in the Roman religion (there would have been hell to pay if he had not in Catholic-dominated Five Corners). Knew now that Prescott had paid a price for being different, for being from a very different people and that got Josh speculating on what those people were like-and how they had marked him. Had marked him without his every having met any of his father’s people. None from grandparents down to siblings.                     

Mr. Covington was much closer to getting some concrete results in seeking his roots having grown up in the South, having been able to trace certain parts of the family, or at least family residences which coincided with “burnt over” snake-handling observance territory at some point in the 20^th century. Got so involved in the people that he was covering, his “people” despite his very different professional path and despite his academic writing background, that he took the leap and did some snake handling himself. But Josh thought that was very different from what he wanted to think through since part of Mr. Covington’s search involved a quest for spiritual, if not religious, meaning in his own life. Josh just wanted to know if those traits, those staying very close to his recent roots inherited from his father (which he never acknowledged when Prescott was alive) were in his DNA.          

          

He wondered what isolated in the boondocks existence led people to carve out a very precise way in which they took their religion, took their Jesus Christ as their exemplar. Didn’t know much of the outside world but knew their Bible front and back. Knew enough that they would be tempted by the serpents (those snakes anyway) in order to get back to the Garden, get out of exile East of Eden. What degree of faith permitted snake-bitten men and women to trust in something enough that they would not seek medical help but “trust in the Lord.” They might not if met be his people, people he could talk to but they certainly were his “people.” He would have to thank Mr. Covington for pushing him on some unknown path back to those etched roots.

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VIII-“Bumbling Down The Primrose Lane”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “The Woman In Green” (1945)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VIII-“Bumbling Down The Primrose Lane”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “The Woman In Green” (1945)-A Film Review

DVD Review 

By Bruce Conan

The Woman In Green, starring Lanny Lamont (aka Basil Rathbone aka Sherlock Holmes, aka a million other aliases to be discussed below), the Fixer man (aka John Watson, MD, aka John Watkins, aka Nigel Bruce also to be discussed below), 1945   

Okay no more Mister Nice Guy, no more trying to be reasonable with these felons, miscreants, dopesters, grifters, grafters, con men, whores, pimps and murderers of the nefarious group the Baker Street Irregulars who work out of London town as far as I know but who seemingly have tentacles all over the world, or at least to the United States where they have attempted to hunt me down. Apparently they have something of a central committee, or organizing center, the notorious Kit Kat Club a known hang-out for degenerates and riff-raff of all sorts who people the tables at the place and have ever since King George III’s day. Now that my family is finally safe and beyond the reach of these craven fiends I can take off the kid gloves, can reveal what everybody knows by now and which these Irregulars fear to become public knowledge. Their idol Lanny Lamont (really their idle if you think about how little detective work he actually did once he turned over the hard dirty work to the real if corrupt coppers at Scotland Yard) aka Basil Rathbone aka Sherlock Holmes is an impostor, nothing but a parlor pink amateur sleuth that even Agatha Christie laughed at without embarrassment. Him and his buddy Doc Watson aka Doc Fixer Man were a great deal more than roommates, were the stately queens of England if you get my drift.

I have been chastised, berated, called a political Neanderthal, a homophobe and that is just the nice things by what I can only consider is a slander/libel campaign run by the Irregulars to dismiss me and my fact-driven contentions. That alone tells me I am on to something since this Irregular cohort is made up of those who are the most degenerate devotees of the Lamont legend, those who are into unspeakable blood rituals in order to sate their unholy desires (as is standard operating procedure now that I have uncovered his real identity after great efforts refuse to call him anything but his given name Lanny Lamont born in the West End slums of London to an unwed mother who attempted to abandon him at birth).

I have decided in any case to take on the legend hereafter strictly on the basis of competence, of ability to do private detection and will leave out further reference to the unholy and then scandalous relationship, the “sin that dare not speak its name” between these two, ah, roommates. That means that I will give up all the proof I directly gathered from the archival journals of the Kit Kat Club that they were members in good standing of that hell-hole nefarious operation and almost bankrupted the place with their fiendish opium habits and their unbridled unnatural lusts. So be it.   

Finding the real name, that Lanny Lamont name on the birth certificate though I cannot give up since that really is the initial lynchpin for what seemed totally wrong from the beginning about this brittle character who went by a million names (Basil Rathbone, like that moniker could be a real name be serious, Lytton Strachey, Sailor Jack when he was plying the trade among the rough waterfront sailors, Benny Worth, Harry Smyth, not Smith, and a half dozen others). Claimed to be a private detective. I looked up the International Private Detection Association membership lists and the London private detective licensing lists from the 1920s to the 1950s. No Lanny Lamont or any of the other aliases, nothing. I did find a Lanny Lamont who served time in Dartmoor Prison in the 1930s for drug trafficking, assault, carrying a concealed weapon and a raft of other minor charges. (Also made the connection of how Lanny and Fixer Man met, by the way the only other name I found on him was John Watkins, having met in Dartmoor when he was serving a long stretch for practicing medicine without a license, performing illegal abortions, selling illegal drugs, and sodomy.) The clincher though was a thorough run through all the London telephone directories for those years (a task that will be harder to do with all the singular cellphone use now and in the future).Yeah you guessed it no Lanny or any other name. Nowhere. And certainly not on Baker Street his, their last known address. An old lady had lived in his claimed residence by herself since her husband died during most of that time.                

I could go on with all the lies and deceit but I said that I would take Lanny on his own ground, take him apart as a parlor pink amateur detective that a kid like Jimmy Olson who is just starting could beat six ways to Sunday on a case and have time for lunch and a nap. Take this Women in Green case where this fraud tried to take down heroic Professor Moriarty, tried to pin the so-called ‘finger” murders on that much maligned man. First off Lanny and Fixer Man were so stoned out of their gourds for weeks at a time that they did not know thing number one about the “finger” murder spree until it had grabbed four young innocent random women in its net. Sat around swilling booze when he could have nailed somebody for the job pretty quickly even if he had to fake the evidence. Pin it naturally on a woman and just as naturally a good looking blonde who looked like she liked to get under the silky sheets without too much effort. Of course Lanny could have cared less about running that route but he just let the bodies pile up like a cord of wood until he got done with his high.

While every detective private or public, was on this case to protect womanhood if nothing else Lanny waited for the daughter of one of the guys who thought he had murdered a young woman to show up at his door. Had the tell-tale surgically sawed off finger in a box in his pocket. Five down, make it six when that guy took the fall. That woke Lanny up a little, not Fixer Man though he persisted on a landudum high until Lanny was in danger of falling of a roof and then he started crying for his man. After what seemed like six months Lanny finally had an idea-finally figured that somebody was manipulating the killers somehow-although how was a book sealed with seven seals. Then one of the guys who was sent to kill Fixer Man (it was probably a busted drug deal but the case went into cold case history and was never solved) screwed up and Lanny finally caught on. The guys were hypnotized and the “finger” in the box in their pockets was to blackmail them when they couldn’t figure out whether they had killed the young woman that belonged to the finger or not.

Naturally Lanny’s number one suspect was much put upon Professor Moriarty since they were sworn enemies since Kit Kat Club days when the good Professor “took” some guy away from Lanny according to an old-time reprobate member who remembers those battles for the young guys which were fierce. Lanny confronted the Professor but he blew Lanny off with the suggestion that he will take the Fixer Man away from him. Lanny in terror backs off. The long and short of it is that Lanny never really was able to pin the murders on the Professor who had an alibi any way that he had been in Scotland. Here is what Lanny never figured, never thought through. What about the blonde dish, what about maybe she had something to do with it. She had after all been seen right in the Pembroke Club with the last murderer where he was sucking up scotches. Not until the bodies were sky high did he take a run in that direction. And didn’t, I repeat didn’t, like any red-blooded private detective from the 1940s take a run at her under the sheets before turning her over. Let Scotland Yard take the tough collar while he pranced around in exotic drug high. Yeah, a fake and fraud. Where is Sam Spade when you need him.       

          

The So-Called Unmasking Of The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part IX-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Dressed To Kill” (1946)-A Film Review

The So-Called Unmasking Of The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part IX-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Dressed To Kill” (1946)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

Sherlock Holmes: Dressed To Kill, starring Basil Rathbone which is the well-known screen name for the actor who played Holmes in this British series, Nigel Bruce who did have his medical license suspended for a time for prescribing too many opium-laced drugs but who was given a suspended sentence and never saw the inside of Dartmoor Prison unlike the congenital thief in this film, 1946   

[I have mentioned more times than I care to remember that not everybody who starts out in the film review, film criticism if you have an academic bent and want to upscale the profession, makes it to the end. The profession eats its own, has more treachery per square inch that the denizens of academy with all their conferences and learned papers and incessant back-biting ever thought off. A professor, let’s say a professor of cinematic studies, would last about two minutes in this dog eat dog business. That is why a lot of them spent their two minutes and then headed fast to the groves of academia.

Like I was telling somebody recently in dealing with a bunch of fellow reviewers who work at this publication it was a lot easier in the old days when the studios would pass out their so-called press releases. You just rewrote from there or if you were drunk and hungover just signed your name on top either way mercifully you did not have to actually watch the stinker. Which many of them, too many to count, were. (My estimate of the ratio is that about one in ten even rates a review and that might be too high of late.)  

All this intro talk to say that something has happened to Bruce Conan, or whatever name he was using in this Sherlock Holmes debunking mania he got himself caught up in. The last review of his I had seen maybe Part Four (I think I saw that his last one was Part VIII Greg Green supplied the Part IX in the title so assume I was correct) he was using the name Danny Moriarty so it could have been any name-except his real one which I will not divulge out of fear for his safety or his wrath if he resurfaces anytime soon.    

When I say the vague “something has happened to Bruce” that is exactly what I mean. He did not show up at the Ed Board meeting last week to turn in and have his latest review worked over. Greg Green asked me to pinch-hit for him. All I know is that Bruce was setting himself a very tall task trying to bump old Sherlock Holmes down a peg or two. How many times have I, you, we uttered “elementary, my dear Watson” to some rattled-brained holy goof who was clueless about everything including which was his or her left hand. Yes, a tough task indeed. I think the job might very well have driven him over the edge, he was certainly kind of paranoid when I would ask him how his crusade was going. Didn’t want to talk about it much and although he said he trusted me what about the “others” they could be working for those “damn Irregulars” (his term). 

Before the reader goes off the deep end along with Bruce in conspiracy theory speculation I very much doubt that the crew known as the Baker Street Irregulars according to him but who I found out after a little investigation is actually called the Sherlock Holmes Preservation Society (SHPS) had anything to do with his disappearance. The SHPS is NOT a group of nefarious criminals, pimps, whores and dope fiends but well-respected Holmes (and Conan Doyle) scholars. They are very perturbed I guess would be the word that Bruce has denigrated Holmes and Watson as bullshit amateur parlor pink private detectives. Incensed that he had “outed” them from their homosexual closets, something that a spokesperson told me the Society was well aware of but was keeping private out of respect for their respective relatives and for the hard fact that it was irrelevant to their adventures in sleuthing. But that spokesperson also assured me that they would take care of Bruce in the public prints not in some dark alley like they were agents of the dastardly Professor Moriarty or like in the old days a group of Stalinist thugs. I believe them because I think now that I am armed with that information poor Bruce got caught up in something that was too big for him, something that drove him over the edge.    

That is where the treachery of the business comes into play. As some readers may know there was a big internal power struggle inside this publication last year which resulted in a dramatic change of site leadership and the addition of a watchdog Editorial Board. The new leadership wanted livelier coverage of, well, of everything from politics, culture to reviews and that after the rather lax atmosphere toward the end of the last regime’s time meant to get a bit more edgy. One form of that edgy feel I am very familiar with and may be the reason that I was assigned this review is a continuing “battle” between two reviewers here over who is more representative of the 007 James Bond cinematic character Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan. Another manifestation is old time reviewer Sam Lowell’s reported change of heart about the virtues of Bette Davis as an actress from Oscar-worthy to nothing but a repetitive same old untamed shrew and hack actress.

I think fellow film reviewer Laura Perkins was on to something when she mentioned in that Bette Davis business that the “boys” were trying to one up each other like in the old neighborhood where some of them grew up (even if not the same neighborhood the same ethos, mostly working class). What I called, not her, please, a “pissing contest.” Bruce a less stable character than the ones that I have mentioned got himself up in lather as well when he decided to pick on poor misbegotten Holmes. That unseen pressure and the yardstick that he used to declare who was a real private detective from the 1930s and 1940s got him in too deep. His standard, a good one but hardly universal, for a private eye were guys like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe two tough as nails guys who weren’t afraid to throw a punch, take a slug, take a few whiskey shots from the bottom of a hacked up desk drawer and bed an off-hand dangerous femme before hand-delivering the villains personally to the clueless public coppers. Of course the bloodless Holmes and the hapless and laughable Watson pale by comparison but that was hardly after all this time a reason to go on the warpath.          

A few examples should close this introduction out until we find out the fate of insecure and frantic Mr. Conan. He was on fairly safe grounds when he left his “critique” of Sherlock (whom he called Lanny Lamont after a while which I will get to in a minute) when he noted that the guy couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a gun, let the bodies pile up sky high before his vaunted deductive reasoning kicked in and when he let the public coppers grab the bad guys instead of handling the task himself. (Bruce went crazy and maybe rightly so when Holmes let some innocent fourteen year old girl get wasted for no reason except his own sloth.) Where he went off the track was when he started “investigating” Holmes’ background, started looking at records and such which led him into that Baker Street Irregular trap.         

First off was the not really surprising fact that Sherlock Holmes was not his real name, nor was Basil Rathbone a name he used on occasion to keep the bad guys guessing. Bruce claimed to uncover proof that the guy’s real name was Lanny Lamont who was born in the slums of the West End of London of an unwed mother who shunted him off to a charity orphanage. This is where Bruce really started breaking down. The first crack may have been his “discovery” that nobody named Holmes had ever lived on Baker Street in London. That suspicious fact led him astray though. See everybody in London knew that Holmes was an alias but also knew that his real name was Lytton Strachey, a gentleman born and bred. Bruce was so crazed to “get the goods” that he traced the trail the wrong way working on that Rathbone lead. Tough break.        

The worst thing though and here I agree with the Sherlock Holmes Preservation Society’s take on the matter even if as was obvious to even the most naïve Holmes and Watson were more than just roommates, were homosexual lovers, today gay, in a time that was socially and legally dangerous what of it. Pulling this rather cold and unattractive pair out of the closet just because they didn’t take a run as Sam did with Brigid or Phillip with some thumb-sucking Candy and a few other dishes in their professional work. Strangely as well since he admitted openly that if this was the situation today nobody, including him, would think anything of it. Would yawn it off. I know Greg Green and a couple of others were concerned with the allegations and worried about law suits from their respective estates. Worried too about image having taken early stands in favor of gay rights and self-sex marriage. Bruce can sort it out if and when he surfaces. For now here is a straight review of Sherlock Holmes: Dress to Kill without conspiracy theories and Irregular goblins.  

Willie Sutton the legendary bank robbery cowboy angel rides was often quoted as having been asked by the coppers after he was caught why he robbed banks. Easy answer when you think about it-that’s where the money is, or was before all sorts of things made bank robbing kind of old-fashioned in the brave new world of white collar fingerless crime. That same premise at one remove is where this Holmes adventure leads. Why steal bank note plates from the Chancellery of the Exchequer (Treasury in America)-that’s how to make the money. That is the logic behind a congenital thief in Dartmoor prison. (Remember neither Holmes nor Watson spent time there unlike Bruce’s contention that that was where the pair met and became lovers and partners in crime solutions.)  

That thief got them out of the jail via some three music boxes-not a bad decoy but the damn things wound up in an auction and sold to highest bidders. The race then becomes between the clueless Sherlock and the brains of the criminal enterprise that wants those boxes to unlock a secret code necessary to go into the printing business in a very profitable way with very low overhead and that criminal . Of course the idea that the villain, the brains of the operation, is a female would have had   Bruce apoplectic, would have had him beside himself when Sherlock didn’t make play number one for her before he sent her over. Like I said a private detective’s love life, of whatever preference, is not germane to the solution of the crimes. Now this Hilda who ran the operation, played by Patricia Morison really was a 1940s-style femme and Sam and Phillip would have a field day with her but she still had to go down, had to take the big step for her actions, including a fistful of murders along the. Sherlock was able to snag the last music box and keep the Bank of England from going under in a bale of counterfeit pounds. The only knock I have on Sherlock’s efforts is that as Bruce pointed out he lets the bodies pile up before he can figure stuff out. That and why the hell he has a holy goof like Watson dragging him down.