***Tales From The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In The
Time Of The Hard Motorcycle Boys-With Kudos To Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Several
years ago I was trying to finally reconcile myself, after many false starts, un-kept
makings-up, and bewildering events that would take me back to square one in
that effort, with the hard upbringing I had had in my old working-class town of
North Adamsville south of Boston. Hard economically since we were the poorest
of the poor, the marginally working at a place where that group met the lumpen
elements, literally met the jack-rollers, drifters, grifters, and midnight
sifters (night sneak thieves for the unknowing), and other riffraff who preyed
not on the rich, or even the middle-class up the road but the closest targets,
the easy targets, the working poor, us. Hard too, hard to not understand why
those outrageous wanting habits (for a room of my own, for a typewriter, for
when I came of age a car, for, well, you get the idea, wanting habits) could
never be satisfied and when I squawked about it as I did, did squawk there is
no other way to put it, all hell came raining down on my head from my mother, mainly.
So it took a long while to not cringe every time I tried once I got out from
under to make my peace with the old neighborhood, with that wanting habit business
(wanting habits still there), with my family or what was left of it after I
finally reconciled myself to certain facts that some things in this world are
not going to be explained, maybe can’t.
One of the helpful tips I got from a
gal who had gone through her own wanting habits childhood was by talking about
some of the old neighborhood things I remembered from those days. One time I
happened to mention to some new friends that in high school in the early 1960s
I had been drawn to and repulsed by the hard ass motorcycle guys from Boston.
Guys, white guys, who called themselves the Devil’s Disciplines from around Dorchester,
who roamed at will through the streets of our town to get to Adamsville Beach. That
beach the nearest point to the ocean in the area and also complete with plenty secluded
parking areas and a magnet for good-looking young women (high school girls mainly)
who spent their daytime summer hours sunning themselves in order to looked well-tanned
when the night time was the right time. And you can figure out what the right
time and what was done in that right time yourselves. Naturally I, and sometimes
some guy friends, car-less would sit on the seawall and see what was what. These
friends I mentioned that romance of the bike to, a couple of them from working
class neighborhoods themselves, looked at me askance when I said that I had
been drawn to outlaw motorcycle guys what with their reputation for murder,
mayhem, drugs, mayhem, or did I say that already. Looked leery at me a guy who
has spent his life arguing against the degradation of human life and those who
would treat it as cheaply as those outlaws seemed to do. And was not exactly a
poster boy for Harley-Davidson.
Of course that later wisdom was gathered
after the initial romance of the outlaw that exploded in straight-laced red
scare Cold War America wore off but early on I could have gone that way if I
had been a little tougher, no, a lot tougher. Oh yeah, and could do anything,
except for once, do anything besides ride on the back seat of a bike. See that beach
was a local rendezvous for bikers, babes, and watching “submarine races” after
midnight. Not all of those three things came together and maybe none together
depending on who was down there any given night. Who meaning what young women,
and what kind, were drawn to that locale when those guys, sometimes in two
by two formation sometimes four
depending how confrontational they wanted to be with the cops and the square citizenry,
with their chrome-infested bikes came to a stop. It was also the place where
poor ass corner boys with no bikes but also with no cars, not even a clunker
(are you kidding we half the time did not have the wherewithal for a “father
car” much less for some kid to go cruising looking for the heart of Saturday
night) sat stone-faced on the seawall that protected the boulevard from the
furies of Mother Nature when she decided to give humankind a lesson, a good
dunking. Sat stone-faced wondering what would happen if, for once, I had access
to a chopper and one of girls from notorious Five Point ready to do my bidding.
Those Five Point girls were known, high school known, at least from that Monday
morning before school boy and girl restroom talk, to be happy to accommodate
those love-starved bikers, and at least one, Marie, was according to an old
girlfriend of mind who heard the talk in that Monday morning lounge, ready for
more, ready to turn up a guy’s toes, maybe, more than one, guy not toes. So
that was one of the “drawn to” parts. Especially when they came in formation
scaring the citizenry, no cops to be found with a mile of the beach, and the
girls looked lustily their way.
But that girl longing stuff was
eternal, whether bikers existed in the universe or not. Eternal out in front of
corner boy hang-out Salducci’s Pizza Parlor trying to cadge some time with girls
going in for an evening slice of pizza and soda (if a girl ordered onions on top,
I, we, would know to forget her that night because she had already determined
not a damn thing was going to happen, that night, and we constantly worked for
the minute on this subject, or earlier in junior out in front of Doc’s
Drugstore waiting for the girls to go inside and spend their nickels, dimes and
quarters playing the jukebox on songs they (we) heard on American Bandstand and could not get enough of, or at some woe
begotten school dance hoping for that last chance last dance with that girl you
have made your eyes sore over, or maybe just in the corridor checking out some
girl with that furtive glance that we had worked into a science.
The “drawn to” part of the motorcycle
guys for me really was that they were “cool,” outlaw guys with those big
motorcycles blazing and I fancied myself a rebel. These guys could give a f- -
k if school kept or not (just an expression since most of these guys from what
I heard had dropped out of school or if they stayed in school then they were over
at Boston Trade working the kinks out of some motor problem, or grabbing school
property shop stuff to sell to get gas money together. While my form of
alienation was totally different from theirs, or I liked to think that, they
were nonplussed by the trappings of bourgeois society circa 1960. Made their
own society, kept their own counsel, had no fear of the cops, had no fear of
dying when I talked to one guy once who told me “jail or the streets it don’t
make no different to me as long as I have my dope, my woman, and my hog when I
am on the streets. Oh yeah, and they show the “colors” when my time comes, and
I don’t care when that is.” Cool. Existential philosophers, even old brother
Jean Genet a true outlaw himself, pouring out a torrent of words could not
express the plight of the modern mass man who has fallen through the cracks in
the post-World War II golden age better that that doomed biker. Of course that
is me later rationalizing my attraction, then it was just guys who got lots
respect, no, better, fear by just stepping on the clutch. Got even more
fearsome in my eyes when I found out that a couple of guys from my street,
tough guys in their own right and who had allegedly committed a couple of armed
robberies of local gas stations to get their bikes, were rejected by the Boston
guys, the Disciples, for being “pussies.” Jesus.
Yeah so for a while the outlaws had me
in thrall. Then the “repulsed by” part came in, the part where they had no
rules at all. One night, a summer night, hot, sweaty (at least it must have
been humid because I was sweaty), sultry, a night with no good omens to
recommend it about a dozen Disciples
rode in formation to the beginning the beach, the area where during the day the
local families would bring the kids, maybe have a picnic, a barbecue, and would
leave plenty of trash in the trash barrels stopped and began to systematically
light the barrels on fire, and then started tearing the benches and picnic
tables apart and throwing the wood on the fires. The cops came about an hour
later after the fires had flamed out.
Worse they would, not that night as far as I know since they seemed to
be intent on pure destruction, pick on regular guys sitting in their cars (or
their father-borrowed car) trying to “make” their dates (and hassle those dates
too with ugly language and gestures which appalled most of them). Here is the
kicker though they thought nothing of beating up guys for just looking the
wrong way at them. And that is not just filler for this story but based on
personal experience. One night I was pissed off at something, probably some
beef with Ma, or maybe just pissed off to be pissed of like I was a lot of time
in those days. And most of the times when I was pissed off I would head to
Adamsville Beach. Walking, of course, it wasn’t far, maybe a mile or so from
the house. And wound up sitting alone down at the biker end of the beach. And
get this just kind of staring absent-mindedly in the bikers’ direction. Well
one guy, a tall, thin guy with a chip on his shoulder (but I only though of
that later) came over to me and asked why I was looking at him, or his girl. I
said as I stood up to try to explain I wasn’t looking at anybody or anything
but thinking about stuff because I was pissed off. He didn’t like that answer
because then without warning or another word he kicked me in the groin and
walked away saying “if you are pissed off don’t come here and bother me, got
that?” Yeah, I got it. Got it about fifteen minutes later when the pain finally
subsided. In the end I feared them more than saw them as heroic figures, but still
that was a close thing.
Fast forward.
A couple of years ago, now like I said generally
reconciled with my roots, I got in contact with the reunion committee for my
class at North Adamsville which after the 40th anniversary reunion
had put together a website for classmates to communicate through. One of the sections
on the site was for interactive messages about whatever subject came into your
head. I had just seen, or seen again, the classic 1950s motorcycle film, Marlon
Brando’s The Wild Ones, and the
generational, our generation, our generation of ’68 “hippie” free as the wind
classic, Easy Ride. So I was hopped up
to ask a question about motorcycles, about what people had to say about them.
But I put the question a little differently from that straight motorcycle talk because
I was, once again, in thrall to that old biker time experience (forgetting that
kick in groin).
The way I posed the question since I
had an answer already in mind was asking about what classmates thought was the
classic working-class love song, the song that would “speak” to those old
times. Now North Adamsville was in those days a classic working-class suburb
dependent on factory and service jobs although there were pockets of middle-class-dom
as pictured in the glossy magazines so not everybody from school would
gravitate to the idea of the classic working class song. But enough would to
make the question worth asking. Moreover I was looking for something that might
speak to our working-class roots as well as the intricacies of the working-class
love ritual which I really believed (and still believe) is a different gradient
than the middle-class ritual. And so I motivated my question by presenting my
answer alongside. Here is what I had to say:
Okay here is the book of genesis, the
motorcycle book of genesis, or at least my motorcycle book of genesis which
drives my choice of great working-class love song, Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. But, before I get all that let
me make about seventy–six disclaimers. First, the whys and wherefores of the
motorcycle culture, except on those occasions when they become subject to
governmental investigation or impact some cultural phenomena, is outside the
purview of the leftist politics that have dominated my life. There is no abstract
leftist political line, as a rule, on such activity, nor should there be. (Some
of my best friends are bikers, okay, will that hold you.) Those exceptions
include when motorcyclists, usually under the rubric of “bad actor” motorcycle
clubs, like the famous (or infamous) Oakland, California-based Hell’s Angels
are generally harassed by the cops and we have to defend their right to be left
alone (you know, those "helmet laws", and the never-failing pull-over
for "driving while being a biker") or, like, going the other way,
since they are not brethren when the Angels were used by the Rolling Stones at
Altamont and that ill-advised decision represented a watershed in the 1960s
counter-cultural movement. Decisive some say and we have been fighting a
rear-guard action ever since. Or, more ominously, from another angle, when such
lumpen formations form the core hell-raisers of anti-immigrant,
anti-socialist, anti-gay, anti-women,
anti-black liberation fascistic demonstrations and we are compelled, and
rightly so, to go toe to toe with them. Scary yes, necessary yes, bikes or no
bikes.
Second, in the interest of full
disclosure I own no stock, or have any other interest, in Harley-Davidson, or
any other motorcycle company. Third, I do not now, or have I ever belonged to a
motorcycle club or owned a motorcycle, although I have driven them, or, more
often, on back of them on occasion. Fourth, I do not now, knowingly or
unknowingly, although I grew up in a working- class neighborhood like you did
where bikes and bikers were plentiful, hang with such types. Fifth, the damn
things and their riders are too noisy, despite the glamour and “freedom of the
road” associated with them. Sixth, and here is the “kicker”, I have been,
endlessly, fascinated by bikes and bike culture as least since early high
school, if not before, and had several friends who “rode.” Well that is not
seventy-six but that is enough for disclaimers.
Okay, as to genesis, motorcycle
genesis. Let’s connect the dots. A couple of years ago, and maybe more, as part
of a trip down memory lane, the details of which do not need detain us here, I
did a series of articles on various world-shaking, earth-shattering subjects
like high school romances, high school hi-jinx, high school dances, high school
Saturday nights, and most importantly of all, high school how to impress the
girls( or boys, for girls, or whatever sexual combinations fit these days, but
you can speak for yourselves, I am standing on this ground). In short, high
school sub-culture, American-style, early 1960s branch, although the emphasis
there, as it will be here, is on that social phenomena as filtered through the
lenses of a working- class town, a seen-better-days- town at that, our growing
up wild-like-the-weeds town.
One of the subjects worked over in that
series was the search, the eternal search I might add, for the great working-
class love song. Not the Teen Angel, Earth Angel, Johnny Angel generic
mush that could play in Levittown, Shaker Heights or La Jolla as well as
Youngstown or Moline. No, a song that, without blushing, we could call our own,
our working- class own, one that the middle and upper classes might like but
would not put on their dance cards. As my offering to this high-brow debate I
offered a song by written by Englishman Richard Thompson (who folkies, and folk
rockers, might know from his Fairport Convention days, very good days, by the
way), 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. (See lyrics below.) Without
belaboring the point the gist of this song is the biker romance, British
version, between outlaw biker James and black-leathered, red-headed Molly.
Needless to say such a tenuous lumpen existence as James leads to keep himself
“biked" cuts short any long term “little white house with picket fence”
ending for the pair. And we do not need such a boring finish. For James, after
losing the inevitable running battle with the police, on his death bed
bequeaths his bike, his precious “Vincent Black Lightning”, to said Molly. His
bike, man! His bike! Is there any greater love story, working class love story,
around? No, this makes West Side Story lyrics and a whole bunch of other
such songs seem like so much cornball nonsense. His bike, man. Wow! Kudos,
Brother Richard Thompson (the first name needed as another Thompson, Hunter,
Doctor Gonzo, of journalistic legend, cut his teeth on the Hell’s Angels)
Now despite my flawless logic and the
worthiness of my choice a few, actually a torrent of comments by fellow
classmates followed, after denying that our town was working-class, went on and
on about how Mark Dinning’s Teen Angel
with the girl falling through the cracks of life to save her guy’s class ring
from some speedy train, the Shirelles Leader
Of The Pack where the guy, big tough hellish biker, falls apart, goes not gentle
into that good night when the girl’s parents told her to drop the dude, even
Bruce Springsteen’s Jersey Girl ( I
admit Jersey is working class enough once you get away for the New York City
orbit) where the guy is trying to piece off his girl with trips to some two-bit
amusement park where I guess he figures she will give him whatever he wants if
he wins her a kewpie doll all were better choices. Jesus. Well, I grabbed the
ticket, I took the ride on that question.
Needless to say that exploration, that
haunted question, was not the end, but rather the beginning of thinking through
the great American night bike experience. And, of course, for this writer that
means going to the books, the films and the memory bank to find every seemingly
relevant “biker” experience. Such classic motorcycle sagas as “gonzo”
journalist, Doctor Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and other, later Rolling
Stone magazine printed “biker” stories and Tom Wolfe’ Hell Angel’s-sketched
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and other articles about California subset
youth culture that drove Wolfe’s work in the old days). And to the hellish
Rolling Stones (band) Hell’s Angels “policed” Altamont concert in 1969. And, as
fate would have it, with the then recent passing of actor/director Dennis
Hooper, the 1960s classic biker/freedom/ seeking the great American night film,
Easy Rider. And from Easy Rider to the “max daddy” of them all,
tight-jeaned, thick leather-belted, tee-shirted, engineer-booted,
leather-jacketed, taxi-driver-capped (hey, that’s what it reminds me of),
side-burned, chain-linked wielding, hard-living, alienated, but in the end
really just misunderstood, Johnny, aka, Marlon Brando, in The Wild One.
Okay, we will cut to the chase on the
plot. Old Johnny and his fellow “outlaw” motorcycle club members are out for
some weekend “kicks” after a hard week’s non-work (as far as we can figure out,
work was marginal for many reasons, as Hunter Thompson in Hell’s Angels
noted, to biker existence, the pursue of jack-rolling, armed robbery or grand
theft auto careers probably running a little ahead) out in the sunny California
small town hinterlands.(They are still heading out there today, the last time I
noticed, in the Southern California high desert, places like Twenty-Nine Palms
and Joshua Tree.)
And naturally, when the boys (and they
are all boys here, except for a couple of “mamas”, one spurned by Johnny, in a
break-away club led by jack-in-the-box jokester, Lee Marvin as Chino) hit one
small town they, naturally, after sizing up the local law, head for the local
café (and bar). And once one mentions cafes in small towns in California (or
Larry McMurtry’s West Texas, for that matter), then hard-working, trying to
make it through the shift, got to get out of this small town and see the world,
dreamy-eyed, naïve (yes, naive) sheriff-daughtered young waitress, Kathy, (yes,
and hard-working, it’s tough dealing them off the arm in these kind of joints,
or elsewhere) Johnny trap comes into play. Okay, now you know, even alienated,
misunderstood, misanthropic, cop-hating (an additional obstacle given said
waitress’s kinships) boy Johnny needs, needs cinematically at least, to meet a
girl who understands him.
The development of that young hope,
although hopeless, boy meets girl romance relationship, hither and yon, drives
the plot. Oh, and along the way the boys, after a few thousand beers, as boys,
especially girl-starved biker boys, will, at the drop of a hat start to
systematically tear down the town, off-handedly, for fun. Needless to say,
staid local burghers (aka “squares”) seeing what amount to them is their worst
1950s “communist” invasion nightmare, complete with murder, mayhem and rapine,
(although that “c” word was not used in the film, nor should it have been) are
determined to “take back” their little town. A few fights, forages,
causalities, fatalities, and forgivenesses later though, still smitten but
unquenched and chaste Johnny (and his rowdy crowd) and said waitress part,
wistfully. The lesson here, for the kids in the theater audience, is that biker
love outside biker-dom is doomed. For the adults, the real audience, the
lesson: nip the “terrorists” in the bud (call in the state cops, the national
guard, the militia, the 82nd Airborne, The Strategic Air Command, NATO, hell,
even the “weren't we buddies in the war” Red Army , but nip it, fast when they
come roaming through Amityville, Archer City, or your small town).
After that summary you can see what we
are up against. This is pure fantasy Hollywood cautionary tale on a very real
1950s phenomena, “outlaw” biker clubs, mainly in California, but elsewhere as
well. Hunter Thompson did yeoman’s work in his Hell’s Angels to
“discover” who these guys were and what drove them, beyond drugs, sex, rock and
roll (and, yah, murder and mayhem, the California prison system was a “home
away from home”). In a sense the “bikers” were the obverse of the boys (again,
mainly) whom Tom Wolfe, in many of his early essays, was writing about and who
were (a) forming the core of the surfers on the beaches from Malibu to La Jolla
and, (b) driving the custom car/hot rod/drive-in centered (later mall-centered)
cool, teenage girl–impressing, car craze night in the immediate post-World War
II great American Western sunny skies and pleasant dream drift (physically and
culturally).
Except those Wolfe guys were the
“winners”. The “bikers” were Nelson Algren’s “losers”, the dead-enders who
didn’t hit the gold rush, the Dove Linkhorns (aka the Arkies and Okies who in
the 1930s populated John Steinbeck’s Joad saga, The Grapes Of Wrath).
Not cool, iconic Marlin-Johnny but hell-bend then-Hell Angels leader, Sonny
Barger.
And that is why in the end, as
beautifully sullen and misunderstood the alienated Johnny was, and as
wholesomely rowdy as his gang was before demon rum took over, this was not the
real “biker: scene, West or East.
Now I lived, as a teenager, in a really
marginally working- poor, neighborhood of North Adamsville that I have
previously mentioned was the leavings of those who were moving up in post-war
society. That neighborhood was no more than a mile from the central
headquarters of Boston's local Hell’s Angels (although they were not called
that as I said they were Devil’s Disciples). I got to see these guys up close
as they rallied at various spots on our local beach or “ran” through our
neighborhood on their way to some crazed action. The leader had all of the
charisma of Marlon Brando’s thick leather belt. His face, as did most of the
faces, spoke of small-minded cruelties (and old prison pallors) not of misunderstood
youth. And their collective prison records (as Hunter Thompson also noted about
the Angels) spoke of “high” lumpenism. And that takes us back to the beginning
about who, and what, forms one of the core cohorts for a fascist movement in
this country, the sons of Sonny Barger. Then we will need to rely on our leftist
politics, and other such weapons. But for now bad ass bikler James and his
perfect working-class love gesture to his benighted red-headed Molly rule the
roost.
*************
ARTIST: Richard Thompson
TITLE: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
Lyrics and Chords
Said Red Molly to James that's a
fine motorbike
A girl could feel special on any
such like
Said James to Red Molly, well my
hat's off to you
It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952
And I've seen you at the corners and
cafes it seems
Red hair and black leather, my
favorite color scheme
And he pulled her on behind
And down to Box Hill they did ride
/ A - - - D - / - - - - A - / : / E
- D A /
/ E - D A - / Bm - D - / - - - - A -
- - /
Said James to Red Molly, here's a
ring for your right hand
But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a
dangerous man
I've fought with the law since I was
seventeen
I robbed many a man to get my
Vincent machine
Now I'm 21 years, I might make 22
And I don't mind dying, but for the
love of you
And if fate should break my stride
Then I'll give you my Vincent to
ride
Come down, come down, Red Molly,
called Sergeant McRae
For they've taken young James Adie
for armed robbery
Shotgun blast hit his chest, left
nothing inside
Oh, come down, Red Molly to his
dying bedside
When she came to the hospital, there
wasn't much left
He was running out of road, he was
running out of breath
But he smiled to see her cry
And said I'll give you my Vincent to
ride
Says James, in my opinion, there's
nothing in this world
Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed
girl
Now Nortons and Indians and
Greeveses won't do
They don't have a soul like a
Vincent 52
He reached for her hand and he
slipped her the keys
He said I've got no further use for
these
I see angels on Ariels in leather
and chrome
Swooping down from heaven to carry
me home
And he gave her one last kiss and died
And he gave her his Vincent to ride
