The Latest From The "Fight For $15"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 And “Fight For $15” Are The Slogans Of The Day.

@gimmekimmy

@timfranzen

Click below to link to the Fight For $15 website  for the latest national and international labor news, and of the efforts to counteract the massively one-sided class struggle against the international working class movement.

http://fightfor15.org/april15/
 

 

Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now in the early 2000s unlike in their youth not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions, (or unions now rather consciously led by union leaders who have no or only attenuated links to past militant labor actions like strikes, plant sit-downs, hot-cargo struck goods, general strikes and such and would go into a dead faint if such actions were forced upon them and are so weakened as to be merely dues paying organizations forwarding monies to the Democratic “friends of labor” Party). They had come of political age as anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell. Ralph from the hard-shell experience of having fought for the beast in the Central Highlands in that benighted country and who became disgusted with what he had done, his buddies had done, and his government had done to make animals out of them destroying simple peasants catch in a vicious cross-fire and Sam, having lost his closest high school hang around guy, Jeff Mullin, blown away in some unnamed field near some hamlet that he could not pronounce or spell correctly. The glue that brought them together, brought them together for a lifetime friendship and political comity (with some periods of statutory neglect to bring up families in Carver, Massachusetts and Troy, New York respectively) the ill-fated actions on May Day 1971 In Washington when they attempted along with several thousand others to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. All those efforts got them a few days detention in RFK stadium where they had met almost accidently and steel-strong bonds of brotherhood from then on.     

They had seen high times and ebbs, mostly ebbs once the 1960s waves receded before the dramatic events of 9/11 and more particularly the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 called off what they had termed the “armed truce” with the United States government over the previous couple of decades. So Ralph and Sam were beside themselves when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011.  That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft of the movement which was not inconsiderable for a couple of months especially in hotbeds like New York, Boston, L.A. and above all the flagship home away from home of radical politics, San Francisco but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight it was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”). Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy,” Ralph having taken over his father’s electrical shop in Troy when his father retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960s that had been run by a hometown friend in his many absences. However having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly working-class towns, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled the roost, had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time as the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left for parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,” the more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.   

So Ralph and Sam would during most of the fall of 2011   travel down to the Wall Street “private” plaza (and site of many conflicts and stand-offs between the Occupy forces on the ground and then Mayor Blumberg and his itchy cops) which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity both for them personally and for their kind of politics. They were crestfallen to say the least when the thing exploded after Mayor Blumberg and the NYPD the police pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and across the world and police departments doing likewise acting in some concert as it turned out once the dust settled and “freedom of information” acts were invoked to see what the bastards were up to).

Of more concern since they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer having learned a painfully hard lesson on May Day 1971 and on a number of other occasions later when Ralph and Sam and their comrades decided to get “uppity” and been slapped down more than once although they at least had gone into those actions with their eyes wide open had been the reaction of the “leadership” in folding up the tents (literally and figuratively). Thereafter the movement had imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on toes, to let everybody do their own thing, do their own identity politics which as they also painfully knew had done   much to defang the old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.

Ralph and Sam in the aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think decided to put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of the basic political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them since radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had talked about it over drinks at Jack Higgins’ Grille in Boston more than once in their periodic reunions when Ralph came to town, how each generation had to face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to be “elder” tribal leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked.  Working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up something of a “national anthem” for what went on among the better elements of Occupy are some points that any movement for social change has to address these days and fight for and about as well. Sam, more interested in writing than Ralph who liked to think more than write but who contributed his fair share of ideas to the “program,” wrote the material up and had it posted on various site which elicited a respectable amount of comment at the time. They also got into the old time spirit by participating in the latest up and coming struggle- the fight for a minimum wage of $15 an hour although even that seems paltry for the needs of today’s working people to move up in the world:      

“Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers- Free All The Striking Fast Food Protesters!

Comments of a supporter of the “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers:

 

No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones.” Here we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Marts jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.

 

But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of descent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action. 

 

Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. And I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now.  I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles. 

 

Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union! 

******

With Unemployment Too High, Way Too High - The Call "30 For 40"- Now More Than Ever- The Transitional Socialist Program

Click Below To Link To The Full Transitional Program Of The Fourth International Adopted In 1938 As A Fighting Program In The Struggle For Socialism In That Era. Many Of The Points, Including The Headline Point Of 30 Hours Work For 40 Hours Pay To Spread The Work Around Among All Workers, Is As Valid Today As Then.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm

Guest Commentary

 

From The Transitional Program Of The Fourth International In 1938- Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours

Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.

The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.

Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.

Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment,“structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.

Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.

************

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

With Roger McGuinn’s “Ballad Of Easy Rider” In Mind The Search For The Great Working-Class Love Song - With Richard Thompson’s Vincent Black Lightning, 1952 In Mind –Take Three

With Roger McGuinn’s “Ballad Of Easy Rider” In Mind The Search For The Great Working-Class Love Song - With Richard Thompson’s Vincent Black Lightning, 1952 In Mind –Take Three

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin:

Several years ago, maybe about eight years now that I think about it, I did a series of sketches on guys, folk-singers, folk-rockers, rock-folkers or whatever you want to call those who weened us away from the stale pablum rock in the early 1960s (Bobby Vee, Rydell, Darin, et al, Sandra Dee, Brenda Lee, et al) after the gold rush dried up in what is now called the classic age of rock and roll in the mid to late 1950s when Elvis, Jerry Lee, Buddy, Chuck, Bo and their kindred made us jump. (There were gals too like Wanda Jackson but mainly it was guys in those days.) I am referring of course to the savior folk minute of the early 1960 when a lot of guys with acoustic guitars, some self-made lyrics, or stuff from old Harry Smith Anthology times gave us a reprieve. The series titled Not Bob Dylan centered on why those budding folkies like Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Jesse Winchester and the man under review Richard Thompson to name a few did not make the leap to be the “king of folk” that had been ceded by the media to Bob Dylan and whatever happened to them once the folk minute went south after the combined assault of the British rock invasion (you know the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, hell, even Herman’s Hermits got play for a while),   and the rise of acid rock put folk in the shade (you know the Jefferson Airplane, the Dead, The Doors, The Who, hell, even the aforementioned Beatles and Stones got caught up in the fray although not to their eternal musical playlist benefit). I also did a series on Not Joan Baez, the “queen of the folk minute” asking that same question on the female side but here dealing with one Richard Thompson the male side of the question is what is of interest.

I did a couple of sketches on Richard Thompson back then, or rather sketches based on probably his most famous song, Vincent Black Lightning, 1952 which dove-tailed with some remembrances of my youth and my semi-outlaw front to the world and the role that motorcycles played in that world. Additionally, in light of the way that a number of people whom I knew back then, classmates whom I reconnected on a class reunion website responded when I posed the question of what they thought was the great working-class love song since North Adamsville was definitely a working class town driven by that self-same ethos I wrote some other sketches driving home my selection of Thompson’s song as my choice.

The latter sketches are what interest me here. See Thompson at various times packed it in, said he had no more spirit or some such and gave up the road, the music and the struggle to made that music, as least professionally. Took time to make a more religious bent to his life and other such doings. Not unlike a number of other performers from that period who tired of the road or got discourage with the small crowds, or lost the folk spirit. Probably as many reasons as individuals to give them. Then he, they had an epiphany or something, got the juices flowing again and came back on the road.  That fact is to the good for old time folk (and rock) aficionados like me.

What that fact of returning to the road by Thompson and a slew of others has meant is that my friend and I, (okay, okay my sweetie who prefers that I call her my soulmate but that is just between us so friend) now have many opportunities to see acts like Thompson’s Trio, his current band configuration, to see if we think they still “have it” (along with acts of those who never left the road like Bob Dylan who apparently is on an endless tour whether we want him to do so or not). That idea got started about a decade ago when we saw another come-back kid, Geoff Muldaur of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, solo, who had taken something twenty years off. He had it. So we started looking for whoever was left of the old folks acts (rock and blues too) to check out that question-unfortunately the actuarial tables took their toll before we could see some of them at least one last time like Dave Von Ronk.

That brings us to Richard Thompson. Recently we got a chance to see him in a cabaret setting with tables and good views from every position, at least on in the orchestra section, at the Wilbur Theater in Boston with his trio, a big brush drummer and an all-around side guitar player (and other instruments like the mando). Thompson broke the performance up into two parts, a solo set of six or seven numbers high-lighted by Vincent Black Lightning, and Dimming Of The Day which was fine. The second part based on a new album and a bunch of his well-known rock standards left us shaking our heads. Maybe the room could not handle that much sound, although David Bromberg’s five piece band handled it well a couple of weeks before, or maybe it was the melodically sameness of the songs and the same delivery voice and style but we were frankly disappointed and not disappointed to leave at the encore.  Most tunes didn’t resonant although a few in all honesty did we walked out of the theater with our hands in our pockets. No thumbs up or down flat based on that first old time set otherwise down. However, damn it, Bob Dylan does not have to move over, now.  Our only consolation that great working-class love song, Vincent Black Lightning, still intact.

Which brings us to one of those sketches I did based on Brother Thompson’s glorious Vincent Black Lightning. When I got home I began to revise that piece which I have included below. Now on to the next act in the great quest- a reunion of the three remaining active members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Jim Maria Muldaur, and of course Geoff at the Club Passim (which traces its genesis back to the folk minute’s iconic Club 47 over on Mount Auburn Street in Harvard Square. We’ll see if that gets the thumbs up.     

With Roger McGuinn’s“Ballad Of Easy Rider” In Mind, Take Two

This is the way Doug Powers told the story, Jeff’s story, the way he got it from Little Peach mostly, the road stuff, straight up, and then later when he checked up …

He, the ghost of… Peter Fonda he, Captain America he , Dennis Hooper he, Bill The Kid he, Hunter Thompson he, Doctor Gonzo on an Indian he, James Ardie he, Vincent Black Lightning he, hell, Sonny Barger or one of one hundred grunge, nasty mothers keep your daughters indoors under lock and key Hell's Angels brethren he (as if that would help, help once she, the daughter, saw that shiny silver sleek Indian , Harley, Vincent, name it, whatever and did some fancy footwork midnight creep out that unlocked suburban death house ranchero back door), Jeff Crawford he, Norton he, just wanted to drive down that late night Pacific Coast Highway. Where else in the American world could you have the hair-raising blown warm wind at your back and the sometimes hard-hearted, but mainly user-friendly, ocean at your right. Somehow Maine icy stretch Ellsworth Point did not make its case against that scenario. He knew those forlorn streets and back roads like the back of his hand but there was no going back, and no reason to since his divorce and his Ma dying.

Drive, ride really, motorcycle ride just in case you were clueless and thought that this was to be some sedan buggy family, dad and mom, three kids and Rover, car saga. Maybe with his new sweet mama behind holding on to her easy rider in back, holding tight, her breasts rising and falling hard against his waiting back, and riding, laughing every once in a while at the square world, his old square world (and hers too, she used to serve then off the arm while attending some dink college when he fell into her at the local breakfast place), against the pounding surf heading south heading Seals Rock, Pacifica, Monterrey, Big Sur, Xanadu, Point Magoo, Malibu, Laguna, Carlsbad, La Jolla, Diego, south right to the mex border, riding down to the sea, see. Riding down to the washed sea, the sea to wash him clean. Her, she had nothing to be washed, hadn’t been out in life long enough to build up soul dirts, except maybe a little off-hand kinky sex she picked up somewhere and had curled his toes doing so one night, and that didn’t count in the soul-washing department . Not in his book. Not some big old poet- wrangled washed clean either, some what did old ‘Nam Brad call it, some metaphor, if that was right, if that was how he remembered it, not for him, just washed clean.

Easy, Jeff thought, just an easy rider and his sweet, sweet mama, her hair, her flaming red hair, or whatever color it was that week (he didn’t care what color really just as long as it was long. He had had enough of short- haired women all boyish bobbed, all snarling every which way, all kind of boyish do it this way and that way, all tense, and making him tense. He liked the swish of a woman’s hair in his face all snarly and flowing and letting things take their course easy. A ‘Nam lesson.) blowing against the weathers, against the thrust of that big old Norton engine, all tight tee-shirt showing her tiny breasts in outline that a shirt or sweater made invisible (he didn’t care about big breasts, or small, like a lot of guys around the bar, the biker hang-out, where he hung out over in Richmond, the Angel Tavern, the one run by Red Riley,), tight jeans (covering long legs which he did care about), tight. Maybe a quick stop off at Railroad Jim’s over on Geary before heading to ‘Frisco land’s end Seals Rock and the trip south (and if Railroad wasn’t in then Saigon Pappy’s, Billy Blast or Sunshine Sue’s) to cope some dope (weed, reefer, a little cousin cocaine to ease that ‘Nam pain, the one Charley kissed his way one night through his thigh when he decided to prove, prove for the nth time that he, Charley, was king of the night) to handle those sharp curves around Big Sur, and get her in the mood (she, ever since that midnight creep out Ma’s back door over in Albany a few months before when he had challenged her to do so when he wanted to test her to see if she was really his sweet mama, craved her cousin, craved it to get her into the mood, and just to be his outlaw girl).

Yah, it was supposed to be easy, all shoreline washed clean (no metaphor stuff, remember, just ocean naked stuff), stop for some vista here (about a million choices, he would let her pick since this was her first run, her first working run), some dope there and then down to cheap Mexico, cheap dope, and a haul back El Norte and easy street, easy street, laying around with sweet mama, real name, Susan White, road moniker, Little Peach (an inside joke, a joke about a certain part of her anatomy that is all she would give out) until Red Riley needed another run, another run against the washed sea night.

Then it turned into one thing after another. He took a turn around Pacifica way too fast, went way over the edge with his right hand throttle (Little Peach so excited by this her first outlaw run she slipped her hands low, too low while he was making that maneuver, thinking, maybe, they were in bed and well you know things happen, distracting things, just bad timing) and skidded hair- pin twirl skidded off the on-coming road. Little Peach was hurt a little but the bike was dented enough to require some work at Loopy Lester’s (Red Riley had guys, bike magic guys, up and down the coast) back in Daly City. So delay.

A couple of days delay too, they ran into rain down around Big Sur, pouring rain and Little Peach moaned about it and they had to shack up in a motel for a couple of days, days looking at that fierce ocean. More delay. Then he made his first serious mistake, short on funds he decided to rob a liquor store in Paseo Robles. Hell, not decided, he was hard-wired compelled to make that decision, hard –wired by his whole sorry, beautiful life, his father (a drunk) then mother (none too stable, a product of those too close Maine family relationships and those long, bad ass Maine winter nights) left him Maine dumped, his whore first wife from over in Richmond cheating on him with every blue jean guy in town while he was in ‘Nam, his very real ‘Nam pain (while saving Brad’s, metaphor Brad’s city boy, college boy sorry ass when Mister Charlie decided, probably hard-wired too to come prove who was boss of the night), and, a little his dope habit (picked up courtesy of ‘Nam too, he had been  strictly always a whisky and beer man before). Little Peach, gentle in some womanly ways, no question, and the eternal ocean, gentle, when it co-operated, his only rays.

Hard-wired to just take now, take it fast, and get out fast. Hell, it was easy he had been doing since he was about sixteen and just needed that first Harley some Ellsworth guy was selling, selling cheap, since was headed to Shawshank for a long stretch. That time he wasn’t even armed, easy. As so it went. Easy, except that time down in Rockland where the clerk flipped the alarm and the cops were just a block away. Yah, he didn’t figure that one right, not at any point. That was when he got the choice- three to five in county or ‘Nam. He hadn’t messed with that kind of thing in California since he hooked up with Red’s operation about a month after he got out of the VA hospital over in ‘Frisco.

Trouble this time, the night he tried to rob the Paseo Robles liquor store, was the owner, and he identified himself as the owner, must have thought he was Charley, shot at him, nicking him in the shoulder. He grabbed the owner’s gun in the tussle and bang, bang. Grabbed the dough (almost five thousand dollars in that two bit town), and the extra ammo under the counter and roared off, Little Peach trembling, into the Pacific highway night.

A serious mistake, for sure, one the cops kind of pressed the issue on. They caught up with him just outside Carlsbad, South Carlsbad down near the airport road, near the state park camp sites, where he was resting up a little (bleeding a little too). He had left Little Peach back in Laguna to keep her out of it and with most of the dough, telling her to get out of town on the quiet, to use the dough to go back to school, and have a nice life. He was okay that she didn’t argue a lot about staying, or getting all weepy about his fate. She had been his ray and that was enough, enough for what was ahead. So alone, not wanting to face some big step-off  ahead, he wasn’t built for jails and chambers, not wanting to face another downer in his sorry, beautiful life, taking a long look at the heathered, rock strewn, smashing wave shoreline just below, he took out that damn gun, loaded the last of the ammo, doubled around to face the blockading police cars, and throttled –up his Norton. Varoom, varoom…

 

 

 

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

Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind

Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind  

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

You know sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, looked like difference from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence. Oh sure, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood and have it count has tried to march to its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of the decade, maybe the first part of the next. But what Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed. 

The way Sam told it one night at his bi-weekly book club where the topic selected for that meeting had been the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook was that he had been looking for roots as a kid. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of his generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree. Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So his generation had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different. That transistor radio for those not in the know was “heaven sent” for a whole generation of kids in the 1950s who could care less, who hated the music that was being piped into the family living room big ass floor model radio which their parents grew up since it was small, portable and could be held to the ear and the world could go by without bothering you while you were in thrall to the music. That was the start. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week.

Sam’s lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music, well, cheaply alone or on a date (basically as he related to his listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs).

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys, and some bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school and had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement of Jimmy Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.                                 

As Sam warmed up to his subject he told his audience two things that might help explain his interest when he started to delve into the reasons why fifty years later the sound of that finely-tuned fiddle still beckons him home. The first was that when he had begun his freshman year at Boston University he befriended a guy, Everett Lally, the first day of orientation since he seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what was going on. See Everett was from a small town outside of Wheeling, West Virginia and this Boston trip was only the second time, the first time being when he came up for an interview, he had been to a city larger than Wheeling. So they became friends, not close, not roommate type friends, but they had some shared classes and lived in the same dorm on Bay State Road.

One night they had been studying together for an Western History exam and Everett asked Sam whether he knew anything about bluegrass music, about mountain music (Sam’s term for it Everett was Bill Monroe-like committed to calling it bluegrass). Sam said sure, and ran off the litany of his experiences at Harvard Square, the Village, listening on the radio. Everett, still a little shy, asked if Sam had ever heard of the Lally Brothers and of course Sam said yes, that he had heard them on the radio playing the Orange Blossom Express, Rocky Mountain Shakedown as well as their classic instrumentation version of The Hills of Home.  Everett perked up and admitted that he was one of the Lally Brothers, the mandolin player. Sam was flabbergasted. After he got over his shock Everett told him that his brothers were coming up to play at the New England Bluegrass Festival to be held at Brandeis on the first weekend of October.

Everett invited Sam as his guest. He accepted and when the event occurred he was not disappointed as the Lally Brothers brought the house down. For the rest of that school year Sam and Everett on occasion hung out together in Harvard Square and other haunts where folk music was played since Everett was interested in hearing other kinds of songs in the genre. After freshman year Everett did not return to BU, said his brothers needed him on the road while people were paying to hear their stuff and that he could finish school later when things died down and they lost touch, but Sam always considered that experience especially having access to Everett’s huge mountain music record collection as the lynchpin to his interest.             

Of course once the word got out that Everett Lally was in a bluegrass group, played great mando, could so a fair fiddle and the guitar the Freshman girls at BU drew a bee-line for him, some of them anyway. BU, which later in the decade would be one of the hotbeds of the anti-war movement locally and nationally but then was home to all kinds of different trends just like at campuses around the country just then, was filled with girls (guys too but for my purposes her the girls are what counts) from New York City, from Manhattan, from Long Island who knew a few things about folk music from forays into the Village. Once they heard Everett was a “mountain man,” or had been at Brandeis and had seen him with his brothers, they were very interested in adding this exotic plant to their collections. Everett, who really was pretty shy although he was as interested in girls as the rest of the guys at school were, told Sam that he was uncomfortable around these New York women because they really did treat him like he was from another world, and he felt that he wasn’t. Felt he was just a guy. But for a while whenever they hung out together girls would be around. Needless to say as a friend of Everett’s when there were two interested girls Sam got the overflow. Not bad, not bad at all.        

But there is something deeper at play in the Sam mountain music story as he also told the gathering that night. It was in his genes, his DNA he said. This was something that he had only found out a few years before. On his father’s side, his grandfather, Homer, whom he had never met since after his wife, Sam’s grandmother, Sara died he had left his family, all grown in any case, without leaving a forwarding address, had actually been born and lived his childhood down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, down near the fabled Hazard of song and labor legend before moving to the North after World War I. Here is the funny part though when his father and mother Laura were young after World War II and at wits end about where his grandfather might be they travelled down to Prestonsburg in search of him. While they stayed there for a few months looking Sam had been conceived although they left after getting no results on their search, money was getting low, and there were no father jobs around so he had been born in the South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts. So yes, that mountain music just did not happen one fine night but was etched in his body, the whirlwind sounds on Saturday night down amount the hills and hollows with that sad fiddle playing one last waltz to end the evening.                  

 

***On The Nature of True Love-In Search Of The Great Working Class Love Song- With Donna Walker, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, In Mind

This song is from YouTube performed by Thompson, although a stronger version is done on a cover by folk singer Greg Brown not there.


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


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

********
As noted in the headline, the search for the great working class love song, was prompted by a question that I had been asked about before from old North Adamsville high school classmates in the recent past- what music were you listening to back in the day? Back in the early 1960s day when the music was exhausted and we were waiting, waiting impatiently, or I was, for some fresh breeze to come from somewhere when Elvis died (or might as well have), Jerry Lee was busted up with some second cousin, Chuck was out of circulation for messing with Mister’s women, and we were stuck with a batch of songs and singers who made us want to head back to mother womb 1940s music that at least had good melodies. Well, for me at least that subject is totally exhausted. I no longer want to hear about how you fainted over Teen Angel, Johnny Angel, or Earth Angel. Christ there were more angels around then than could fit on the head of a needle or fought it out to the death in John Milton’s epic revolutionary poem from the seventeenth century , Paradise Lost.

Moreover, I have had enough of You're Gonna Be Sorry, I'm Sorry, and Who's Sorry Now. What was there to be sorry about, except maybe some minute hurt feelings, some teenage awkward didn’t know how to deal with some such situation or, in tune with today’s theme, some mistake that reflected our working class-derived lacks, mainly lacks of enough time, energy and space to think things over without seven thousand parents and siblings breaking the stream. And a little discretionary dough would have helped(dough for Saturday night drive-ins, drive-in movies, hell, even Saturday night dance night down by the shore everything’s all right) to take some teen angel somewhere other than the damn walk to seawall down Adamsville Beach.

And no more of Tell Laura I Love Her, Oh Donna, and I Had A Girl Her Name Was Joanne, or whatever woman's name comes to mind. Old sweet woman, sweet mama. sweet outlaw mama, Red Molly, all dolled up in her black leather (and set off by her flaming red hair making every boy dream, dream restless night dreams, until James took over and then you had best not look, not if you wanted to keep your place in the sun, or breathe to find your own leather tight woman. Guys tried, guys tried and failed as guys will, so be forewarned. ) put them all to shame, yah, puts them all to shame. So it is time, boys and girls, to move on to other musical influences from our more mature years, say from our post-traumatic stress high school years.

But why, as the headline suggests, the search for the great working class love song? Well, hello! Our old town, our old beloved North Adamsville, was (and is, as far as I can tell from a very recent trip back to the old place) a quintessential beat down, beat around, beat six ways to Sunday working class town (especially before the deindustrialization of America which for North Adamsville meant the closing of the shipyards that has left it now as a basically low-end white collar service-oriented working class town, dotted with ugly, faux-functional white collar office-style parks to boot). The great majority of us came from working class or working poor homes. Most songs, especially popular songs, then and now, reflect a kind of "one size fits all" lyric that could apply to anyone, anywhere. What I was looking for was songs that in some way reflected that working class ethos that is still in our bones, that cause our hunger even now, whether we recognize it or not.

Needless to say, since I have posed the question, I have my choice already prepared. As will become obvious, if you have read the lyrics, this song reflects my take on the corner boy, live for today, be free for today, male angst in the age old love problem. However, any woman is more than free to choice songs that reflect her female angst angle (ouch, for that awkward formulation) on the working class hit parade.

And a fellow female classmate did proposing Bruce Springsteen’s version of Jersey Girl and here is my response:

Come on now, after reading these lyrics above is any mere verbal profession of undying love, any taking somebody on a ride at some two-bit carnival going to make the cut. I am thinking here of another working class song suggested to me by a female classmate , Bruce Springsteen's cover version of Tom Waits’ Jersey Girl where they go down to the Jersey seashore to some amusement park to while the night away in good working class style, cotton candy, salt water taffy, win your lady a doll, ride the Ferris wheel, tunnel of love, hot dog, then sea breeze love , just like our Paragon Park nights, some buying of a gold ring like every guy on the make is promising to do for his honey if she…, or some chintzy, faded flowers that melt away in the night, or with the morning dew going to mean anything? Hell, the guy here, bravo James, is giving her, his Red Molly, HIS bike, his bike, man. No Wild One, Easy Rider, no women need apply bike night. HIS bike. Case closed.

And you think, big deal he gave her his bike as a dying declaration, that such an action is so-so and just a guy trinket love thing, not the stuff of eternity. No way. I KNOW of at least one female, noted above in the dedication, who might relate to this song. I also know at least one male, who shall remain nameless, who snuck out the back door of old North Adamsville High with another classmate, a female classmate, to ride his bike during school hours back in the day. So don't think I have forgotten my medication, or something, when I call this a great working class love song. Romeo and Juliet by what’s his name is nothing but down in the ditch straight punk stuff compared to this. And I repeat, for the slow learners here, the guy, my boy, my corner boy James, in the song gave her HIS bike, man. That is love, no question.