Hard Times Come Again No More -From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series

Hard Times Come Again No More -From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

As long as Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris had known each other they never spent much time or effort discussing their early lives, the events and happenstances of their coming of age. Maybe it was because they shared many personal similarities. Like their doggedness in pursuit when something important was on the line as it had been when Sam had vowed to fight against the war in Vietnam after his best friend, Jeff Mullins, who had been killed on the benighted battlefield there begged him in letters home to tell people what was really going on if he did not get back and Ralph having served in Vietnam had turned against the war that he had fought and tried to stop it every way he knew how and both men now in their sixties having put their lives on the line back then ahd stuck with the better instincts of their natures and were still fighting the good fight against the American government’s endless wars. Like their willingness to forgo life’s simple pleasures in order to provide for their families, a trait they had picked up from their own hard-working if distance fathers (they in turn if truth be told, or if you asked the collective broods of Eaton and Morris kids, courtesy respectively of two marriages and two divorces apiece, were hard-working and distance as well, more than a couple of them mad as hell about too and the cause some periodic mutual estrangements). Like, to speak of the negative side, to speak of the effects of their hard-scrabble existences and the pull of other guys when they were young their delights in the small larcenies of their high school corner boy existences in their respective growing up towns in order to satisfy some hunger. Those “sins” (since both had up in the Roman Catholic religion, a religion known for categorizing sins, great and small), made a close call, six, two and even, whether they would succeed or wind up in some jail doing successive nickels and dimes in the “life” (really not so small larcenies when one realizes that these were burglaries of homes, one of which in Sam’s crowd had been committed with at least one gun if in the pocket, at least at the ready).

Maybe it was the Catholic reticence to speak of personal matters, personal sexual manners with another male (probably Catholic female too on that side but let’s stick to male here) both having come up “old school” working-class Catholics when that meant something before Vatican II in the 1960s when the “s” word was not used in polite society, not used either, God no, from the pulpit (even when discussion came up of the obligation to, unlike the bloody Protestants with their two point three children, propagate the faith; have scads of children to bump up the Catholic population of the world). Maybe closer to home, to domestic home life, it was the “theory,” probably honored more in the breech that the observance, of “not airing one’s dirty linen in public” drilled into them by their respective maternal grandmothers, especially when the “s” word was involved (certainly no parents gave the slightest clues on that subject probably assuming that the birds and the bees story line would suffice and both men learned like millions of their generation of ’68 kindred about sex on the streets, most of it erroneous or damn right dangerous).

Maybe, and this was probably closer to the core than the other possibilities, men of their generation, men of the generation of ’68 as Sam, the more literary of the two called their generation after the decisive year when all hell broke loose, for good or evil, mostly evil, did not as a rule speak much about private hurts, about personal issues unlike the subsequent generations who seemingly to both men’s  amazement (and occasional chagrin) kept their lives as open books in a more confessional time. That “generation of ’68” designation by the way picked up from the hard fact that that seminal year of 1968, a year when the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and their allies put in shambles the lie that we (meaning the United States government) was winning that vicious bloodstained honor-less war, to the results in New Hampshire which caused Lyndon Baines Johnson, the sitting President to run for cover down in Texas somewhere after being beaten like a gong by a quirky Irish poet from the Midwest and a band of wayward troubadours from all over, mainly the seething college campuses, to the death of the post-racial society dream as advertised by the slain Doctor Martin Luther King, to the barricade days in Paris where for once and all the limits of what wayward students could do without substantial allies in bringing down a reactionary government, to the death of the search for a “newer world” as advertised by the slain Robert F. Kennedy, to the war-circus of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago which put paid to any notion that any newer world would come without the spilling of rivers of blood, to the election of Richard Milhous Nixon which meant that we had seen the high side go under, that the promise of the flamboyant 1960s was veering toward an ebb tide.

So the two men never spoke of various romantic interests. Never spoke of little rendezvous or trysts, never spoke of their two respective divorces much beyond recording the facts of the disengagements, and the animosity of the settlements which made nobody happy except the lawyers (although neither men were gripping since Sam’s old corner boy leader Frankie Riley performed “miracle” to get both men out from under the worse initial terms). Never spoke much about the difficulties of fatherhood for men who were so driven by the “big picture” world around them and, never spoke about the deep-seeded things that drove them both to distraction. At least that stance was true in their younger days when they had more than enough on their plates to try to keep the dwindling numbers committed to an all-out fight against the American military behemoth that had in a strange manner brought them together.    

Maybe too it could have been the way that they had “met,” that strange manner, a story that they have endlessly repeated in one form or another and which had been told so many times by Sam mostly in the old days in small alternative presses and magazines and more recently in 1960s-related blogs that even they confessed that everybody must be “bored” with the damn thing by now. So only the barest outline will suffice here since their meeting is not particularly relevant to the story except to help sort out this reticence about relationships business. Sam, an active opponent of the Vietnam War, and Ralph an ex-soldier of that war who had turned against the war after eighteen months of duty there and become an anti-war activist in his turn with Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) after being discharged from the Army “met” in RFK Stadium in Washington on May Day 1971 when they were down there with their respective groups trying to as the slogan of the time went “shut down the government, if the government did not shut down the war.”

For their ill-advised efforts they and thousands of others were tear-gassed, billy-clubbed and sent to the bastinado (ill-advised in that they did not have nearly enough people on hand and were incredibly naïve about the ability and willingness of the government to do any dirty deed to keep their power including herding masses of protestors into closed holding areas to be forgotten if possible although Ralph always had a sneaking suspicion the government would not have been unhappy seeing those bodies floating face down in the Potomac). Sam and Ralph met on the floor of the stadium and since they had several days to get acquainted were drawn to each other by their working-class background, their budding politics, and their mutual desire to “seek a newer world” as some old English poet once said. And so they had stuck together, almost like blood brothers although no silly ceremony was involved,  stuck politically mostly, through work in various peace organizations and ad hoc anti-war committees fighting the good fight along with dwindling numbers of fellow activists for the past forty plus years.                               

There were thick and thin times along the way as Ralph stayed close to home in Troy, New York working in his father’s high-precision electrical shop which he eventually took over and had just recently passed on to his youngest son and Sam had stayed in the Greater Boston area having grown up in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston building up a printing business that he had started from scratch and from which he in turn had just turned over to his more modern tech savvy print-imaging son, Jeff. The pair would periodically take turns visiting each other sometimes with families in tow, sometimes not and were always available to back each other up when some anti-war or other progressive action needed additional warm bodies in Boston, New York or when a national call came from Washington. Lately now that they were both retired from the day to day operations of their respective businesses and also now both after their last respective divorces “single” they have had more time to visit each other.

It had been on Ralph’s last visit to Sam who now resided in Cambridge that he tentatively broached to him his interest in the genesis of a term Sam had always used, “wanting habits” as in “I had my wanting habits on” when he was talking about wanting some maybe attainable, maybe not but which caused some ache, some pain, created some hole in him by not having the damn thing just in the way he said it. Of course maybe Ralph had been “rum brave” that night since he had asked the question while he and Sam were cutting up old touches at “Jack’s” in Cambridge a few blocks from Sam’s place and were drinking high-shelf whisky at the time. That high shelf whisky detail is important to the story if only by inference since in their younger days when they were down on their luck or times were tight they would drink low-shelf rotgut whisky or worst to get them through some frost-bitten night. Now they could afford the booze from the top-shelf behind Jimmy the bartender’s back. Of course as well since both men had been attached to music since childhood the reason besides being close to home that Sam liked to hang at Jack’s was that it had a jukebox stacked full of old time tunes that you could not find otherwise outside of maybe Googling YouTube these days.

The selection on the juke when Ralph posed the question had been the Mississippi Sheiks’ Rent Day Blues, a personal favorite of Sam’s, about how the narrator in the song had no chance in hell to make the rent and the rent collector man was at the door. Ralph had mentioned to Sam that at least his family had never had to worry about that problem, as tough as money times were before his father landed some contracts to do electrical work for the biggest concern in the area, General Electric. Ralph’s family had been the epitome of 1950s “golden age” working-class attitudes buying into the Cold War red scare every child under the desk in case the Russkies blow the big one, the atomic bomb, keep the damn n----rs out of the neighborhood, get ahead but not too far ahead and all the other aspects of that ethos but they also had enough dough to not need to have every penny accounted for and begrudged. Sam looked stunned for a moment as Ralph described his childhood existence and told Ralph that while they were both working-class guys coming up that his family lived much closer to the depths of society, closer to the place where the working poor of Carver met the con men, rip-off artists, drifters, grifters, midnight sifters and refuge of society, down in the projects, not a pretty place.  

Ralph, at first, could not see where Sam was going with the talk but then Sam let out some of the details. See his father, Thornton, had been nothing but an uneducated hillbilly from down in the coalmining country in Appalachia, Kentucky, had worked the mines himself. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor he had jumped in with both hands and feet as a Marine seeing action, seeing plenty of action although Sam who had been off and on estranged from his family for many years before they had passed away did not find this out until later after his father died from an uncle, in all the big Pacific War battles they teach in high school. Thornton never ever talked about his war that much but did say one time when they were on speaking terms that between fighting the “Nips” (Thornton’s term popular among American G.I.s who faced the Japanese on the islands) and the coal barons he would take the former, the former gladly. Before Thornton was demobilized he had been assigned to the big naval shipyard over in Hingham, not far from Carver where his mother grew up. His mother, Delores, due to wartime shortages of manpower had worked in the offices there. One USO dance night they met, subsequently fell in love and were married and thereafter had a brood of five boys close together. Maybe not a today story but not that uncommon then.

But go back to that part about Sam’s father’s heritage, about coal-mining country. Where the hell in all the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was there room for a hard-working coalminer, a coal miner’s son. Delores had made it clear she was not moving down to the hills and hollows of Kentucky after one brief shocking humiliating trip there to meet Thornton’s kin, his expression, and he had no feeling for the place after being out in the big world so their fates hinged on Carver, or Massachusetts anyway. They took a small apartment in the Tappan section of Carver, the section on the edge of where the poor, the poor in Carver being the “boggers,” those who worked the cranberry bogs in season that the town was famous for, and the, what did Marx call them, the lumpen, the refuge of society meet. As more boys came they doubled up on everything but there is no air to breathe when seven people trample over each other in a small space. Moreover Thornton in the throes of the 1950s “golden age of the American worker” got left behind; was inevitably the last hired, first fired and was reduced to whatever was left, including time served in the bogs ( a personal affront to whatever dignities Delores had since she had been taught to despise the “boggers” in her polite society home).

That hand-to-mouth existence took its toll. At some point after repeatedly dodging the rent collector man the Eaton family was evicted from their small private apartment and they were reduced to the heap, the Carver public housing projects, the lowest of the low and recognized by one and all as such. Here is where that view of the world Sam assimilated got formed. The never having money, the battle of the six nights straight of oatmeal for supper and no lunch (in those days before the school lunch programs mercifully spared the worst of the hungers), some days  of nothing to eat but patience, the passing down of the too larger-sized older brothers’ clothing bought by a desperate mother at the Bargain Center and which had been out of fashion for many a year (causing baiting by the non-projects classmates who lived up the road about shanty Irish and worse, about being a “bogger’s” son).

While Sam was talking he suddenly remembered, as an example of how tough things were, one time to impress some girl, a non-projects girl, a daughter of a middle class professional man he thought, he had cut up his pants to seem like a real farmer at some school square dance and Delores beat him with a belt buckle screaming how dare he ruin the only other pair of pants that he owned. And that was not the only beating Sam took as Delores, who handled discipline, to spare the ever weary hard-pressed Thornton, became overwhelmed with the care of five strapping boys. And so Sam graduated to the “clip” at first to get some spare dough and later those larcenies that almost got him into the county clink doing nickels and dimes. After that spiel Sam buttoned up, would say no more as if to say that if he did then he would be far too exposed to the glare of the world’s eyes even if only Ralph’s.     

Ralph, ever being Ralph, thought for a couple of minutes about what Sam had disclosed and then simply said-“Sam, you earned your ‘wanting habits,’ earned them the hard way. I don’t need to know any more” Enough said.                

In The Twilight Of The Folk Minute- Peter Seeger And Arlo Guthrie In Concert In The Late 1980s

In The Twilight Of The Folk Minute- Peter Seeger And Arlo Guthrie In Concert In The Late 1980s

“Jesus, they charged me fourteen dollars each for these tickets to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. Remember Laura about ten or fifteen years ago when we saw Pete for five bucks each at the Café Nana over in Harvard Square. Oh yeah, and the price of an expresso coffee each for two people and I think maybe we shared a piece of carrot cake. We had been on a cheap date since I was still in law school over at New England, so a cheap date when I didn’t have much cash and at that time, just at the cusp of the women’s liberation movement taking wider hold, a guy was still mostly expected to pay. No “Dutch treat,” no Laura Dutch treat expected anyway especially on a first or second date, and definitely not that one when I had been intrigued by you early on and wanted to continue to see you. Around that same time, that same Spring of 1973, Arlo gave a free concert out on Concord Commons, remember” said Sam Lowell to his date Laura Peters and the couple they were standing in line with, Patrick Darling and Julia James, in front of Symphony Hall in Boston waiting for the doors to open for the Pete-Seeger-Arlo Guthrie concert that evening.

Laura sheepishly nodded that she remembered the Café Nana event since she had been entirely willing, knowing that Sam was in law school and broke and she had already gotten a job as a CPA at John Hancock and was making money, to go “Dutch treat” that night but Sam had insisted he pay and she did not press the issue since she too had been intrigued by him. She failed to mention that she had not gone with him to see Arlo on the Commons since Sam had apparently forgotten that he had taken his ex-wife, Josie David, to that concert at a time when they were trying to reconcile or get divorced but she did not want to bring that up although Julia had looked in her direction when Sam mentioned that Commons concert since she and her date, some guy from Sam’s Law school had gone along and had witnessed reason two hundred and twenty-seven why they eventually got divorced. That tense moment passed with the men both oblivious. This in any case would be the first time Pete and Arlo had appeared together since Newport a number of years back. This also the first time this foursome had seen either of them in a good number of years since Pete Seeger had gone to upstate New York and had been spending more time making the rivers and forests up there green again than performing and Arlo was nursing something out in Stockbridge. “Maybe, Alice,” Patrick said and everybody laughed at that inside joke. 

Sam continued along that line of his about “the back in the days” for a while, with the three who were still also something of folk aficionados well after the heyday of that music in what Sam called the “1960s folk minute” nodding their heads in agreement saying “things sure were cheaper then and people, folkies for sure, did their gigs for the love of it as much as for the money, maybe more so. Did it, what did the grizzled folk historian cum folksinger-songwriter Dave Van Ronk call it then, oh yeah, for the “basket,” for “from hunger” walking around money to keep the wolves from the doors. To piece off the landlord or roommate for another week or month. For a room, a small room usually giving the economics of coffeehouse ownership, to play out whatever saga drove them to places like the Village, Harvard Square, North Beach and their itch to make a niche in the booming folk world where everything seemed possible. Everything seemed possible if you had any kind of voice to the left of Dylan’s and Van Ronk’s own, could play three chords on a guitar, or a la Pete work a banjo, a mando, or some other stringed instrument, and write of love, sorrow, some dastardly death deed, or on some pressing issue of the day.”

After being silent for a moment Sam got a smile on his face and said “On that three chord playing thing I remember Geoff Muldaur from the Kweskin Jug Band, a guy who knew the American folk songbook as well as anybody then, worked at learning it too, as did Kweskin himself, learned even that Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music stuff, all eighty some songs, or the ones customers would listen to, stuff which meant you had to be serious, saying that if you could play three chords you were sure to draw a crowd, a girl crowd around you, if you knew four or five that  meant you were a serious folkie and you could even get a date from among that crowd, and if you knew ten or twelve chord you could have whoever and whatever you wanted. I don’t know if that is true since I never got beyond the three chord thing but no question that was a way to attract women, especially at parties.” Laura, never one to leave something unsaid when Sam left her an opening said in reply “I didn’t even have to play three chords on a guitar, couldn’t then and I can’t now, although as Sam knows I play a mean kazoo, but all I had to do was start singing some Joan Baez or Judie Collins cover and with my long black hair ironing board straight like Joan’s I had all the boys come around and I will leave it to your imaginations about the whatever I wanted part.” They all laughed although Sam’s face reddened a bit at the thought of her crowded up with guys hanging over her although he had not known her back then in the folk minute since she had lived in Manhattan then and he had grown up and lived Carver about thirty miles south of Boston but only later in the early 1970s.                     

Those reference got Julia thinking back the early 1960s when she and Sam went “Dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. (Sam and Julia were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other but folk music was their bond and despite persistent Julia BU dorm roommate rumors what with Sam hanging around all the time had never been lovers). She mentioned that to Sam as they waited to see if he remembered and while he thought he remembered he was not sure. He asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing like something out of the sea, or like the cry of the banshees.

Club Blue had been located in that same Harvard Square that Sam had mentioned earlier and along with the Café Nana, which was something of a hot spot once Dylan, Baez, Tom Rush and the members of the Kweskin band started hanging out there, and about five or six other coffeehouses all within a few blocks of each other (one down on Arrow Street was down in the sub-basement and Sam swore that Dylan must have written Subterranean Homesick Blues there). Coffeehouses then where you could, for a dollar or two, see Bob, Joan, Eric (Von Schmidt), Tom (Rush), Phil (Ochs) and lots of lean and hungry performers working for that “basket” Sam had mentioned earlier passed among the patrons and be glad, at least according to Van Ronk when Julia had asked him about the “take” during one intermission, to get twenty bucks for your efforts that night.

That was the night during that same intermission Dave also told her that while the folk breeze was driving things his way just then and people were hungry to hear anything that was not what he called “bubble gum” music like you heard on AM radio that had not been the case when he started out in the Village in the 1950s when he had worked “sweeping out” clubs for a couple of dollars. That sweeping out was not with a broom, no way, Dave had said with that sardonic wit of his that such work was beneath the “dignity” of a professional musician but the way folk singers were used to empty the house between shows. In the “beat”1950s with Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, and their comrades (Dave’s word reflecting his left-wing attachments then) making everybody crazy for poetry, big be-bop poetry backed up by big be-bop jazz the coffeehouses played to that clientele and on weekends or in the summer people would be waiting in fairly long lines to get in. So what Dave (and Happy Traum and a couple of other singers that she could not remember had mentioned) did was after the readings were done and people were still lingering over their expressos he would get up on the makeshift stage and begin singing some old sea chanty, some obscure Child ballad (those ballads later a staple in the folk world because you could cover them as public domain items and frankly because they were usually long and filled up a short playlist if you were not feeling well or were pressed for something to perform), or some slavery day freedom song in that raspy, gravelly voice of his which would sent the customers out the door. And if they didn’t go then he was out the door. Tough times, tough times indeed.             

Coffeehouses too where for the price of a cup of coffee, maybe a pastry, shared, you could wallow in the fluff of the folk minute that swept America, maybe the world, and hear the music that was the leading edge then toward that new breeze that everybody that Julia and Sam knew was bound to come what with all the things going on in the world. Black civil rights, mainly down in the police state South, nuclear disarmament, the Pill to open up sexual possibilities previously too dangerous or forbidden, and music too, not just the folk music that he and she had been addicted to but something coming from England paying tribute to old-time blues with a rock upbeat that was now a standard part of the folk scene ever since they “discovered” blues guys like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Bukka White, and Skip James. All the mix to turn the world upside down. All of which as well was grist to the mill for the budding folk troubadours to write songs about.

Julie made her companions laugh as they stood there starting to get a little impatient since the doors to the concert hall were supposed to open at seven and here it was almost seven fifteen (Sam had fumed, as he always did when he had to wait for anything, a relic of his Army days during the Vietnam War when everything had been “hurry up and wait”). She had mentioned that back then, back in those college days when guys like Sam did not have a lot of money, if worse came to worse and you had no money like happened one time with a guy, a budding folkie poet, Jack Dawson, she had a date with you could always go to the Hayes-Bickford in the Square (the other H-Bs in other locations around Boston were strictly “no-go” places where people actually just went to eat the steamed to death food and drink the weak-kneed coffee). As long as you were not rowdy like the whiskey drunks rambling on and on asking for cigarettes and getting testy if you did not have one for the simple reason that you did not smoke (almost everybody did then including Sam although usually not with her and definitely not in the dorm), winos who smelled like piss and vomit and not having bathed in a while, panhandlers (looking you dead in the eye defying you to not give them something, money or a cigarette but something) and hoboes (the quiet ones of that crowd  who somebody had told her were royalty in the misfit, outcast world and thus would not ask for dough or smokes) who drifted through there you could watch the scene for free. On any given night, maybe around midnight, on weekends later when the bars closed later you could hear some next best thing guy in full flannel shirt, denim jeans, maybe some kind of vest for protection against the cold but with a hungry look on his face or a gal with the de riguer long-ironed hair, some peasant blouse belying her leafy suburban roots, some boots or sandals depending on the weathers singing low some tune they wrote or reciting to their own vocal beat some poem. As Julie finished her thought some dressed in uniform guy who looked like a doorman in some foreign castle opened the concert hall doors and the four aficionados scampered in to find their seats.                 

…as they walked down the step of Symphony Hall having watched Pete work his banjo magic, work the string of his own Woody-inspired songs like Golden Thread and of covers from the big sky American songbook and Arlo wowed with his City of New Orleans and some of his father’s stuff (no Alice’s Restaurant that night he was saving that for Thanksgiving, he said) Sam told his companions, “that fourteen dollars each for tickets was a steal for such performances, especially in that acoustically fantastic hall” and told his three friends that he would stand for coffees at the Blue Parrot over in Harvard Square if they liked. “And maybe share some pastry too.”     

Out In The Corner Boy Be-Bop Night-With Jersey Boys In Mind

Out In The Corner Boy Be-Bop Night-With Jersey Boys In Mind   

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell 

 

Frank Jackman’s old friend Jack Dawson, his old friend from corner boy days starting in the fifth grade down in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston in the 1950s, had a while back written a short review about seeing the film Jersey Boys. With the wizardry of modern technology Frank had had the review placed in a blog dedicated to all things retro 1950s and 1960s (two slightly different retros but guys like Frank and Jack squeeze both eras.) Prior to Jack’s viewing the film with his lovely wife, Anna, Frank had told him a summary of the plot-line (and the song playlist) one night when they were having one of their periodic “watering hole” get- togethers to cut up old touches at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston when Frank was in town for a conference. Based on that exchange Jack was determined to see the film. A few days later after seeing the film, seeing how a bunch of “from hunger” working class kids from Jersey (but given the plot-line it could have been lots of places including the “projects” down in Carver where he had come of age), how they made it big, made their fifteen minutes of fame and then some Jack started to think about those old days. About the days when chance had caused him to meet Frank at Myles Standish after his family had moved from Clintonville a few miles away in the summer before fifth grade and the two of them along with a couple of other corner boys, Red Radley and Jimmy Jenkins, in sixth grade created their own (imitative) doo-wop group in an attempt to break out of their youthful jails and gain their own fame (although their standard had not been fifteen minutes but infinity, or when the girls started gathering around, whichever came first).    

What got Jack thinking along those lines was something Frank’s long-time companion, Laura, whom he had seen the film with, had told Frank. She said to him that she had had trouble “getting into” the story line at the beginning because as Frank told Jack before he gave him the details of the film the scenes were far too removed from her own strait-laced middle-class upbringing in Manhattan. Laura did said that she assumed that part of the film’s story line, the part about the furious growing up “from hunger” strivings of the guys who would become the Four Seasons out in the 1950s New Jersey night, had dovetailed with Frank’s experiences in his own youth and as well with the kind of things he have been writing about from that period of late. The kind of things that Frank wrote about after Jack and he discussed various incidents in growing up absurd in the 1950s at their “watering hole” sessions which they initiated after they had then recently rekindled their friendship after many years of going their own ways. Laura had been right about that part, about going back to the mist of time and grabbing some thoughts about how those days had formed Frank, for better or worse, no question. And that feeling got through to Jack as well.

Frank’s had told Jack when he asked why he was writing some many sketches about the past, also placed in retro blogs dedicated to such reflections, that his purpose in writing about the old days had not been to put paid to some ghosts of the past as a lot of guys they knew were interested in doing by physically revisiting growing up hometowns like Josh Breslin going back up to Olde Saco in Maine and getting the wits scared out of him that somebody might recognize him at every turn he made, like brawny Bart Webber going back to Carver to re-flame old sport’s dreams by attending the home football games with other old geezers from his high school, or like one of their other pals, Jimmy Jenkins, who had gone to his (their) fiftieth class reunion at Carver High and came away more depressed than anything since all the old gang, those still walking, talked about was various medical conditions and their grandchildren which left him cold. No, that part was done with this late in the game and the fates had called their shots on that saga already. Moreover Frank said he certainly had not intended to evaluate, Jesus, not to always evaluate, how this or that thing that happened back then turned the great Mandela wheel any particular way but merely to put together some interesting tidbits for Jack, Jimmy, and a couple of other of his later acquaintances Josh and Phil Larkin who were also from the same era when everybody got together at the Sunnyville, or at the Kennebunk Pub up in Maine where Josh lived when they all tired of the city and needed to be washed clean by the ocean spray off the fearsome blue-green Atlantic Ocean. 

Of course lately Jack had begun, feeding off Frank’s tidbits as well as that film, writing sketches about his own musical coming of age time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the time frame that the Four Seasons had blossomed. Strangely both Frank and Jack agreed that except for the classic doo wop be-bop song, Sherri, they were not fans of the Four Seasons although unlike other groups and singers of the time Jack did not hate their sound. What had perked Jack’s big interest in this film had been the almost chemically pure corner boy aspect, Jersey corner boy aspect, which was not at all unlike his (and Frank’s) Carver corner boy growing up saga.        

In fact at certain points the early story of the guys who formed the core of the original group, Frankie, Tommy and Nick was so very, very similar to parts of Jack’s corner boy experiences that he had to laugh. The options for corner boys, guys who grew up “from hunger” in the working class neighborhoods, usually “the projects,” around the country had those same options mentioned early in the film once they came of age, the Army one way or another many times under some judge’s “trying to make a man out you” threat of the Army or jail, for those who rap sheets were too long to warrant options then just jail or for a guy they knew, Slammer Johnson, who was as tough as they come at age twelve and even older guys, serious corner boys who knew a thing or two about whipsaw chains and brass knuckles, the reformatory, or become famous. Jack knew that part, knew that “wanting habits” hunger that all the young guys in Carver were trying break from, break from when they saw Elvis or Jerry Lee burning stages up and so he and the boys had tried the latter, the fame game, at one point.

It all started in the summer before sixth grade when doo wop was all the craze after Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had asked the magic question-why do fools fall in love- and drove the song by the same name to the top of the charts. There were other guys groups (doo wop girls’ groups too who were cruising to the top the charts but the Carver guys really weren’t interested in them because there was no way they could get anything to help them break-out from paying attention to girl groups, yeah, foolish guys) that hit it big, the Five Satins, The Dubs, The Chasers, The Be-Bop Boys and a bunch of others, mostly black guys (and an occasional girl mixed in) which they knew were hitting it big from watching American Bandstand in the afternoons after school. Dick Clark and that Bandstand was in elementary school anyway, in elementary school at the time when they were getting hipped to music was mandatory to see who was who in the teenage song firmament, see what guys were wearing, see what dances guys were expected to know how to do, sweaty palms and two left feet not withstanding, and, and what chicks looked cool on the show. That last maybe the biggest draw of all as everybody rushed home after school to catch the show.     

Funny the black group thing was not a big deal, or Jack and the others didn’t think much about it since the only time they saw black people was on television. Jack would never really since a live black person until years later when he ran track and would run against black guys in the big meets up in Boston Garden. Other than grabbing tips, like having the lead singer off to the side, everybody having the same outfit, the harmony guys snapping their fingers to the beat, and staying on beat with the lead singer they had no racial options about the music and they,  meaning mainly Jack at first, figured their niche would be as white guy doo-woppers so they would be working a different street. (Jack and Frank, later in high school, when the civil rights movement was on the television every night practically would get a very rude awaking both within their families and among their fellow students and neighbors when they expressed the slightest sympathy for the black liberation struggle but back in sixth grade there was nothing to it)  That niche was not all thought out in such a refined manner as Jack was now recalling in retrospect but what was thought out was that fame part, thought out big time.   

That summer before sixth grade right after school got out for the summer was when the Myles Standish corner boys’ natural leader, Red Radley, driven to distraction by the notion of fame, got them together around their corner every night to practice. Since there had not been any stores to stand in front of holding up the wall in the “projects” where they lived like in the pictures they had seen on music magazines they looked through up in the main library up in Carver Square their corner had been in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School. On hot summer nights the back was all lit up brightly since the night basketball leagues would be holding forth across the field from the gym entrance where they hung out. So under “the street lights” just like those New York City and Philly street corner guys they sang. Sang the doo-wop craze stuff which Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had started and which Red following Jack’s lead about the white boy doo-wop niche figured they could cash in on.

For a couple of weeks they practiced like crazy each night, no paying much attention to much else except exchanging fantasies about what kind of suits they would by, how to act when the crush of the crowds came on, what to do with swooning girls, kids’ stuff dream stuff. But mainly the practiced, trying like hell to work a smooth harmonious sound on the material they covered, covered by Frank copying down the lyrics each time a song they wanted to cover came on WMEX the local rock station (fortunately the big hits got played endlessly each cycle so Frank mainly got the words but on few he missed a couple and so they just incorporated what was there) with Red in the lead. Red really did have the best voice, really could project his voice, and Jack thinking back thought Red with some work and breaks could have made a nice career maybe as a lounge act out of his talent.      

That doo wop practice worked, well, worked for what their other purpose was, gathering interesting girls around them. See, a lot of this doo wop jail break out had to do with sexual stirrings, with this cohort of corner boys finally noticing that those shapeless girls from fifth grade class like Cindy, Linda, Bessie, Rosalind (Jack’s favorite), some of them, were starting to get shapes and who the year before had been noting but nuisances but now were, well, interesting. So each night all through that summer as day turned to night Red and the Roosters (nice name, right) crooned, kept working on their timing, and talking about their look, their niche.

At first they were left all by themselves, maybe the older serious basketball players would chuckle as they left the courts, but then one night a couple of girls, girls they knew from class were standing maybe fifty yards away up against a fence not hiding or anything but just kind of listening and swaying back and forth to the songs. (Jack thought the song they were working on was Little Antony and the Imperials Tears On My Pillows, although he would not swear to that. In any case that was the song that got him a dance with Rosalind so maybe he was confusing the two situations.)

A few nights later there would be several girls, including sixth grade girls and one from the other fifth grade class, Lorna who they called Lorna Doone for no particular reason but who was hot, standing at that fence. Jack thought that night if they did a song that all the girls could join in on they might come closer. So they switched up and did the Tune-Weavers’ tear-jerker Happy Birthday Baby everybody knew and was easy to sing. Sang it several times. The girls came running on the excuse that they thought it was somebody’s birthday, somebody who needed consoling. Yeah, it was like that in the innocence boy-girl thing then, probably still is. The summer passed that way with the boy-girl thing working its virginal way through the old neighborhood just like since Adam and Eve time, maybe before. Jack never got to Rosalind then only later after school started and then she moved to another town and that ended his first serious love affair. Frank even with his two left feet got a date for the movies with Bessie, and Jack thought Red (with that mass of red hair), the best looking guy of the bunch from what the girls said but maybe that was just because they wanted get near the lead singer, as always, had gone “steady” with Lorna for a while until Red kind of went off by himself.           

See here is where things broke down. Sure Red and the Roosters could draw the local girls in, girls who, well, had sexual stirrings too but here is what had happened. Their problem was, unlike Frankie and the Four Seasons from the get-go, they really did not have any serious raw musical talent (except Red) and did not as Frankie and his guys did really have a new angle on the music of the times. Moreover Frank’s voice changed about mid-way through sixth and threw everything off (later Jack’s and then Jimmy’s did too but that was after the group broke up). So, sadly, this edition of the corner boys broke up in the summer before junior high. Red was bitter since he more than the rest of them was staking his life, his break-out from the ‘from hungers,” on musical fame.

Red would a little later after they moved on to junior high turn against any musical aspirations, get himself into a new career path, the life of crime, which had Jack and to a lesser extent Frank in its thrall for a while, remember they were from hunger too, before they backed off but it was a close thing, very close. Both of them had been “look-outs” when Red began his “clip” five-fingers discount rampage of the various stores up in Carver Center and Jack had worked with Red one night when they jack-rolled a drunk for fifty bucks. Frank and Jack soon moved away from that business though once they realized it was too much work and they felt too much anguish over what they were doing to make a career out of that life.     

Red would go on to form another corner boy crowd with some older tougher boys who hung around Jimmy Jack’s Diner based on midnight creeps and some of those corner boys later wound up in the Army, a couple dead in Vietnam for their troubles names now etched in black marble down in Washington and on a granite monument on Carver Commons, or in jail (including Billy later who did a nickel’s worth for an armed robbery after he failed to make a half-hearted one more chance career singing alone and who in the end wound up on the short end of a shoot-out with the cops trying to rob a two-bit White Hen down in some godforsaken town in North Carolina after a second nickel stretch for another armed robbery).       

Jack as he thought about Red as he had not done so in a long time, thought about those last parts of the Carver corner boy story, the parts about the fate of the Reds of the world as against the luck of the Four Seasons thought the difference was important because no matter how “from hunger” you are you need the talent and the quirky niche in order to survive in the musical world. Even then as Jack noted in that review he had written and as became apparent as the film unfolded fame is a very close thing. A couple of twists one way or another and the fifteen minutes of fame is up, gone. And fame as Frankie Valli and the boys found out the hard way despite their hard work doesn’t shield you from life’s woes as the break-up of the group, Frankie’s daughter’s death and the financial problems created by “from hunger” Tommy who thought the money would rain in their faces forever attest to. Not an unfamiliar fame story but one worth seeing once again. And telling the Carver corner boys story too.   

[By the way as the film moved on to the performance parts the when the Four Seasons started getting some breaks, got a natural song-writer, and got tight and in synch both Laura and Anna said they did settle in and liked the rest of the film. And why wouldn’t they as children of that time as well the Carver corner boys when they were glued to their transistor radios up in some bedroom listening to the aforementioned Sherri, other like Dawn, Walk Like A Man,  Rag Dog, Big Girls Don’t Cry and all the rest that drove the young girls wild back then.]

From Veterans For Peace In Massachusetts-Stop The Damn Endless Wars

From Veterans For Peace In Massachusetts-Stop The Damn Endless Wars

The Reasons Why- 

Some Numbers To Consider 

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.                   

      

Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through with your little Sunday best suit or best dress on when you would have rather been outside playing, or maybe doing anything else but sitting in that forlorn pew, before you got that good dose of religion drilled into by Sunday schoolteachers, parents, hell and brimstone reverends which made the hymns make sense. Like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school (Farmer In The Dell, Old MacDonald, Ring Around Something) to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first dose of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year when you learned about Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, classic guys, Stephen Foster and a lot on stuff by guys named Traditional and Anonymous. Or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when a certain musician told Mr. Beethoven and his ilk to move on over certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things. One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind).    

Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square that is not where I first heard or learned the song (and got full program play complete with folk DJs on the radio telling you the genesis of a lot of the music if you had the luck to find them when you flipped the dial on your transistor radio or the air was just right and for a time on television, long after the scene had been established in the underground and some producer learned about it from his grandkids, via the Hootenanny show, which indicated by that time like with the just previous “beat” scene that you were close to the death-knell of the folk moment). No for that one song the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school, down at Myles Standish in Carver where I grew up, when Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation class teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his loathed, our to die for, rock and roll which he thought, erroneously and wastefully he could wean us from with this wholesome twaddle) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter or other details on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan who sat at his knee, literally, Pete Seeger, the transmission belt from the old interest in roots music to the then new interest, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott who as an acolyte made a nice career out of worshipping at that shrine) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. He spoke of dust bowl refugees of course, being one himself, talked of outlaws and legends of outlaws being a man of the West growing up on such tales right around the time Oklahoma was heading toward tranquil statehood and oil gushers, talked of the sorrow-filled deportees and refugees working under the hot sun for some gringo Mister, spoke of the whole fellahin world if it came right down to it. Spoke, for pay, of the great man-made marvels of the West and how those marvels tamed the wilds. Spoke too of peace and war (that tempered by his support for the American communists, and their line which came to depend more and more on the machinations of Joe Stalin and his Commissariat of Foreign Affairs), and great battles in the Jarama Valley in Spain where it counted. Hell, wrote kids’ stuff too just like that Old MacDonald stuff we learned in school.     

The important thing though is that almost everybody covered Woody then, wrote poems and songs about him (Dylan a classic Song to Woody well worth reading and hearing on one of his earliest records), affected his easy ah shucks mannerisms, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way, three chords mostly, recycled the same melody on many songs so it was not that aspect of the song that grabbed you but the sentiment, that he gave to entertain the people, that vast fellahin world mentioned previously (although in the 1960s folk minute Second Coming it was not the downtrodden and afflicted who found solace but the young, mainly college students in big tent cities and sheltered college campuses who were looking for authenticity, for roots).                 

It was not until sometime later that I began to understand the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land for nickels and dimes and for the pure hell of it (although not all of the iterant hobo legend holds up since he had a brother who ran a radio station in California and that platform gave him a very helpful leg up which singing in the Okie/Arkie “from hunger” migrant stoop labor camps never could have done. That laconic style is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that “keep on moving” rolling stone gathers no moss thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath as he went along. Yeah, you could almost see old Tom, beaten down in the dustbowl looking for a new start out in the frontier’s end Pacific, mixing it up with braceros-drivers, straw bosses, railroad “bulls,” in Woody and making quick work of it too.      

Yeah, Woody wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of truth to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent from New York Harbor to the painted deserts, to the fruitful orchards, all the way to the California line, no further if you did not have the do-re-mi called America and how this land was ours, the whole fellahin bunch of us, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.             

Veterans For Peace National Convention

Veterans For Peace 30th Annual Convention

 

Veterans For Peace National Convention

http://www.vfpnationalconvention.org/  

 

VFP 2015 Annual Convention

August 5-9, 2015

 

 

 

Keynote Banquet Speaker:  Seymour Hersh  

 

Scheduled Speakers

Sylvia Aurora

Dr. Kathleen Barry

Phyllis Bennis
Majorie Cohn

Ben Griffin

Dr. Thao Ha

Willie Hager

Le Ly Hayslip
Ray McGovern
Dr. Akiko Mikamo
Miko Peled

Dylan Ratigan
Pedro Rios
Claude Anshin Thomas

Col. Ann Wright

 

 

 

Hosting Chapter: Hugh Thompson Memorial Chapter 091 -
San Diego - CA

 

 

 

 

Please remember these special events:

• Wednesday evening: Film “Pictures from a Hiroshima Schoolyard”
• Thursday evening:  “Peace at Home, Peace Abroad” community  panel discussion
• Friday evening:  San Diego Harbor Dinner Cruise and Golden Role visitation
• Saturday evening:  Annual Veterans For Peace Banquet
• Sunday morning:  Reconciliation Ceremony and Bowl Burning

   

The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

 

 

 Click below to link to the Justice For Lynne Stewart website

http://lynnestewart.org/

Although Lynne Stewart has been released by “Uncle” on medical grounds since the winter of 2014  after an international campaign to get her adequate medical attention her case should still be looked at as an especially vindictive ploy on the part of the American government in post-9/11 America to tamp down on attorneys (and others concerned about the fate of "los olvidados," the forgotten ones, the forgotten political prisoners)  who  have been zealously defending their unpopular clients (and political prisoners). A very chilling effect on the legal profession and elsewhere as I have witnessed on too many occasions when legal assistance is desperately needed. As a person who is committed to doing political prisoner defense work I have noted how few such “people’s lawyers” there around to defend the voiceless, the framed and “the forgotten ones.” There are not enough, there are never enough such lawyers around and her disbarment by the New York bar is an added travesty of justice surrounding the case. 

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s there were, relatively speaking, many Lynne Stewarts. Some of this reflecting the radicalization of some old-time lawyers who hated what was going in America with its prison camp mentality and it’s seeking out of every radical, black or white but as usual especially black revolutionaries, it could get its hands on.  Hell, old time lawyers who hated that in many cases their sons and daughters were being sent to the bastinado. But mostly it was younger lawyers, lawyers like Lynne Stewart, who took on the Panther cases, the Chicago Democratic Convention cases, the Washington May Day 1971 cases, the military resister cases (which is where I came to respect such “people’s lawyers” as I was working with anti-war GIs at the time and we needed, desperately needed, legal help to work our way in the arcane military “justice” system then, and now witness the Chelsea Manning travesty of justice case) who learned about the class-based nature of the justice system.

Then like a puff those hearty lawyers headed for careers and such and it was left for the few Lynne Stewarts to shoulder on. Probably the clearest case of that shift was with the Ohio Seven (two, Jann Laamann and Tom Manning, who are still imprisoned) in the 1980s, working-class radicals who would have been left out to dry without Lynne Stewart. Guys and gals who a few years before would have been heralded as front-line anti-imperialist fighters like thousands of others were then left out to dry. Damn.      

******

The following paragraph is a short description of the Lynne Stewart case from the Partisan Defense Committee 2013 Holiday Appeal  when she was a recipient of a stipend by the class-war prisoners’ defense organization, the Partisan Defense Committee, as part of their solicitation for funds to continue their work of seeing those of our people behind bars are not forgotten.

“Lynne Stewart is a lawyer imprisoned in 2009 for defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart is a well-known advocate who defended Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state. She was originally sentenced to 28 months; a resentencing pursued by the Obama administration more than quadrupled her prison time to ten years. As she is 74 years old and suffers from Stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and back, this may well be a death sentence. Stewart qualifies for immediate compassionate release, but Obama’s Justice Department refuses to make such a motion before the resentencing judge, who has all but stated that he would grant her release!”

*********

Update 2015: Lynne Stewart still fighting the good fight since her release still has pressing continuing medical needs and the need for funds to get that attention is also of continuing concern so click on to the link on the site where you can help defray her medical expenses.

Join CODEPINK, United for Justice with Peace, and other activist organizations to protest the RE/MAX Convention in Boston August 8-11!

alli -- Join CODEPINK, United for Justice with Peace, and other activist organizations to protest the RE/MAX Convention in Boston August 8-11! When: Monday, August 10 at 3:30pm 7pm Where: Hynes Convention Center: 900 Boylston Street, Boston, MA, 02115 Contact: Info@justicewithpeace.org  617 383-4857 RE/MAX Israel sells settlement homes that are built on confiscated Palestinian land. These settlements are in direct violation of international law. RE/MAX International and RE/MAX Israel profit from the continuing land theft from and dispossession of Palestinians. There are RE/MAX agents in the U.S. who refer clients to RE/MAX Israel brokers and agents to buy properties in illegal settlements. Simply put, RE/MAX is an occupation profiteer! Join CODEPINK and United for Justice with Peace to say NO to RE/MAX's illegal actions. We demand that RE/MAX agents and brokers should not sell, rent or advertise properties that are built on illegally seized land. Members of the RE/MAX network should not refer clients to agents and brokers who are involved with such illegal properties. We hope you’ll join us for the protest in Boston, and check out www.boycottremax.org for more information about the campaign! For justice in Palestine, Mike and the CODEPINK team

Once Again On The 1960s Folk Minute-The Cambridge Club 47 Scene

Once Again On The 1960s Folk Minute-The Cambridge Club 47 Scene

 

 

 

Joshua Breslin had not been the only one who has recently taken a nose-dive back in time to that unique moment from the very late 1950s, say 1958, 1959 when be-bop “beatnik” complete with beret and banter was giving way to earnest “folkie” in the clubs that mattered around the Village (Gaslight, Geddes), Harvard Square (Club Blue, Café Blanc) and North Beach (Ernie’s, The Hungry I) to the mid-1960s when folk music had its minute as a popular genre. The best way to describe that turn, by way of the late folk historian Dave Von Ronk, was that earlier in that period, especially the period after Allen Ginsburg’s Howl blew the roof off modernist poetry and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road had the Army-Navy surplus stores cleaning out their rucksack inventories, when “beat poets” held sway and folkies were hired to clear the room between readings he would have been thrown in the streets if his voice and quirky folk songs did not empty the place. But then the sea-change happened and Von Ronk would be doing three full sets a night and checking every folk anthology and misty record store recordings to get enough material. People may dispute the end-point of that minute like they do about the question of when the turn the world upside down counter-cultural 1960s ended as a “youth nation” phenomenon but clearly with the advent of acid-etched rock (acid as in LSD, blotter, electric kool aid acid test) by 1967-68 the searching for and reviving of the folk roots that had driven many aficionados to the obscure archives like Harry Smith’s anthology, the recording of the Lomaxes, Seegers and that crowd had passed.

As an anecdote, one that he would use whenever the subject of his own sea-change came up, in support of that dateline that is the period when Josh stopped taking his “dates” to the formerly ubiquitous home away from home coffeehouses which had sustained him through many a dark home life night in high and later when he escaped home in college, cheap poor boy college student dates to the Harvard Square coffeehouses where for the price of a couple of cups of coffee, expresso then a favorite since you could sip it slowly and make it last for the duration and rather exotic since it was percolated in a strange copper-plated coffee-maker, a shared pastry of unknown quality, and maybe a couple of dollars admission charge or for the “basket” that was the life-support of the performers you could hear up and coming talent working out their kinks, and took them instead to the open-air fashion statement rock concerts that were abounding around the town. The shift also entailed a certain change in fashion from those earnest flannel shirts, denims, lacy blouses and sandals to  day-glo tie-dye shirts, bell-bottomed denims granny dresses, and mountain boots or sneakers. Oh yeah, and the decibel level of the music got higher, much higher and the lyrics talked not of ancient mountain sorrows, thwarted love, or down-hearted blues over something that was on your mind but to alice-in-wonderland and white rabbit dreams, carnal nightmares, yellow submarines, satanic majesties, and wooden ships on the water.             

Some fifty years out others in Josh-like fits of nostalgia and maybe to sum up a life’s work there have been two recent documentaries concerning the most famous Harvard Square coffeehouse of them all, the Club 47 (which still exists under the name Club Passim which traces its genealogy but to that Mount Auburn Street spot in a similar small venue near the Harvard Co-Op Bookstore off of Church Street).

One of the documentaries put out a few years ago (see above) traces the general evolution of that club in its prime when the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Eric Von Schmidt, the members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band (the forming of jug bands, a popular musical form including a seemingly infinite number bands with the name Sheik in them, going back to the early 20^th century itself a part of the roots revival guys like Josh were in thrall to), and many others sharpened up their acts there. The other documentary, No Regrets (title taken from one of his most famous songs) which Josh reviewed for one of the blogs, The American Folk Minute, to which he has contributed to over the years is a biopic centered on the fifty plus years in folk music of Tom Rush. Both those visual references got Josh thinking about how that folk scene, or better, the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene kept Josh from going off the rails, although that was a close thing.        

Like about a billion kids before and after Josh in his coming of age in the early 1960s went through the usual bouts of teenage angst and alienation aided and abetted by growing up “from hunger” among the very lowest rung of the working poor with all the pathologies associated with survival down at the base of society where the bonds of human solidarity are often times very attenuated. All of this “wisdom” complete with appropriate “learned” jargon, of course figured out, told about, made many mistakes to gain, came later, much later because at the time Josh was just feeling rotten about his life and how the hell he got placed in a world which he had not created (enforced when questioned by one Delores Breslin with Prescott Breslin as a behind-the scenes back-up) and no likely possibilities of having a say what with the world stacked against him, his place in the sun (and not that “safe” white collar civil service job that Delores saw as the epitome of upward mobility for her brood), and how he didn’t have a say in what was going on. Then through one source or another mainly by the accident of tuning in his life-saver transistor radio, which for once he successfully badgered to get by threatening murder and mayhem if he didn’t when all his corner boys at Jimmy Jack’s Diner had them, on one Sunday night to listen to a favorite rock and roll DJ that he could receive on that night from Chicago he found a folk music program that sounded interesting (it turned out to be the Dick Summer show on WBZ, a DJ who is featured in the Tom Rush documentary) and he was hooked by the different songs played, some mountain music, some jug, some country blues, some protest songs. Each week Dick Summer would announce who was playing where for the week and he kept mentioning various locations, including the Club 47, in Harvard Square. Josh was intrigued, wanted to go if only he could find a kindred for a date and if he could scratch up some dough. Neither easy tasks for a guy in high teen alienation mode.           

One Saturday afternoon Josh made connections to get to a Red Line subway stop which was the quickest way for him to get to Harvard Square (which was also the last stop on that line then) and walked around the Square looking into the various clubs and coffeehouses that had been mentioned by Summer and a few more as well. You could hardly walk a block without running into one or the other. Of course during the day all people were doing was sitting around drinking coffee and reading, maybe playing chess, or as he found out later huddled in small group corners working on their music (or poetry which also still had some sway as a tail end of the “beat” scene) so he didn’t that day get the full sense of what was going on. A few weeks later, having been “hipped” to the way things worked, meaning that as long as you had coffee or something in front of you in most places you were cool Josh always chronically low on funds took a date, a cheap date naturally, to the Club Blue where you did not pay admission but where Eric Von Schmidt was to play. Josh had heard his Joshua Gone Barbados covered by Tom Rush on Dick Summer’s show and he had flipped out so he was eager to hear him. So for the price of, Josh thought, two coffees each, a stretched-out shared brownie and two subway fares they had a good time, an excellent time (although that particular young woman and Josh would not go on much beyond that first date since she was looking for a guy who had more dough to spend on her, and maybe a “boss” car too).

Josh would go over to Harvard Square many weekend nights in those days, including sneaking out of the house a few time late at night and heading over since in those days the Red Line subway ran all night. That was his home away from home not only for cheap date nights depending on the girl he was interested in but when the storms gathered at the house about his doing, or not doing, this or that, stuff like that when his mother pulled the hammer down. If Josh had a few dollars make by caddying for the Mayfair swells at the Carver Country Club, a private club a few miles from his house he would pony up the admission, or two admissions if he was lucky, to hear Joan Baez or her sister Mimi with her husband Richard Farina, maybe Eric Von Schmidt, Tom Paxton when he was in town at the 47. If he was broke he would do his alternative, take the subway but rather than go to a club he would hang out all night at the famous Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford just up the steps from the subway stop exit. That was a wild scene made up of winos, grifters, con men, guys and gals working off barroom drunks, crazies, and… almost every time out there would be folk-singers or poets, some known to him, others from cheap street who soon faded into the dust, in little clusters, coffee mugs filled, singing or speaking low, keeping the folk tradition alive, keeping the faith that a new wind was coming across the land and they, Josh, wanted to catch it. Wasn’t that a time.