This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
ILA Must Fight for Safety!-New Jersey Docks: Death Trap
On August 7 at about 1:20 p.m., 49-year-old longshore worker Judy Jones was struck by a top loader used to move shipping containers around the APM terminal at Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. Her leg was severed and she bled to death waiting for an ambulance to arrive. There are no medical or ambulance facilities on the docks and the nearest trauma center hospital is about eight miles away in Newark. Reportedly it took more than half an hour for the ambulance to arrive.
From a longshore family, Jones was a member of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Newark Local 1233, as is her brother, Wayne Jones. A veteran dock worker with 18 years experience, on the day she was killed she was a “holdman,” working containers on the dock. As reported by the Blueoceana website, in order to take a bathroom break, she had to get to a restroom 400 yards away. Jones was struck while walking through the busy terminal amid the many moving vehicles and equipment that transfer the containers (which can weigh up to 30 tons). Longshoremen told WV that there are no designated pedestrian walkways at the APM terminal (although the company is no doubt slapping some paint on the pavement after the fact) and that APM is the only major container terminal in the area that does not provide a passenger vehicle for “holdmen” to safely move about the terminal.
Cargo traffic at the New York-New Jersey (NY-NJ) port has increased almost 20 percent in the last decade, but the terminal area for handling this cargo has remained the same. The bustling container storage areas are jam-packed, and longshoremen are under tremendous pressure to keep the containers moving in and out of the yard. The drivers of the massive container-handling machines—top loaders, straddle carriers and transtainers—have limited visibility. Transtainer operators often have to rely solely on safety sensors and cameras (assuming they’re working).
On top of the speedup, ILA members on the Jersey docks work grueling amounts of overtime. During the busy summer season, it is common for workers to put in over 100 hours a week. According to the Journal of Commerce, overtime accounts for a staggering 61 percent of ILA work hours at the NY-NJ port. Unlike other ports with fixed work shifts, ILAers here work open-ended shifts until the ship is finished, which can be 24 hours or more (punctuated by breaks).
Longshoring ranks high among the most dangerous industries, but under these intolerable conditions of speedup and fatigue, avoidable accidents that maim and kill are inevitable—it’s industrial murder. In 2012, Earline Brundage, another woman member of Local 1233, died after being pinned between two containers, an accident ascribed to mechanical failure. With 24-hour operation, the port bosses care more about keeping the equipment in use than about safety inspections and preventative maintenance.
For the shipping companies—not least at the APM terminal, which is owned by Maersk, the world’s largest shipping conglomerate—injuries and the loss of life are simply collateral damage in pursuit of higher profits. This expresses the brutal reality of the relationship between the working class and the capitalist class: workers, even relatively better-paid ones, sell their labor power to survive; capitalists, who own the means of production, extract their profits from workers’ labor. How much profit the bosses extract from the workers under capitalism is determined by the struggle between labor and capital. In addition to limiting wages, the bosses seek a longer and more labor-intensive workday to boost profits. The union is supposed to be a basic defense organization of the workers to fight not only for higher pay and benefits, but also for better working conditions. Especially in industry and transport, it is safety that provides a direct measure of a union’s strength.
In this regard, the ILA leadership evades its own responsibility for enforcing safety standards against the bosses, while instead blaming the victim. In a Facebook statement mourning the death of Judy Jones, the ILA wrote that ILAers “will, in her memory, redouble their efforts to use only safe and designated walkways whenever they find themselves involved in pedestrian activities at any marine terminal.” But there were no “safe and designated walkways” at APM! The top loader driver has recently been charged with DUI. Blaming both the victim and the driver serves to divert attention from the company’s culpability.
Blaming the workers is standard for the bosses. But the union tops also place the responsibility for safety on individual members who are under tremendous pressure from the company to “get the job done” without delays. Workers are in a Catch-22 situation: facing company retribution if they flag too many safety issues, while facing company discipline and courting disaster if safety considerations are ignored. What is needed is to mobilize the collective strength of the union to enforce safety.
The push for increased productivity is felt by dock workers across the country, but working conditions are not quite as onerous on the West Coast. International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) bureaucrats are not fundamentally different from their ILA counterparts in failing to actively enforce safety, but the legacy of the 1934 West Coast maritime strike and San Francisco general strike is still a living heritage despite the many givebacks by the ILWU tops over the decades. The 1934 strike was won by mobilizing the mass strength and solidarity of longshoremen, seamen, teamsters and others in opposition to the forces of the capitalist class enemy. (For more on the 1934 strikes, see our new pamphlet, Then and Now.)
The main gain of the 1934 strike was that the union got control of the hiring hall, giving the union power over job allocation. The union hiring hall means employers cannot arbitrarily victimize or blackball workers for refusing to work under unsafe conditions. In disputes over safety, individual ILWU members covered by the master longshore contract have the contractual right to “stand by” (stop work) until a union rep arrives and the issue is resolved. They also work an eight-hour shift with a maximum of two hours overtime possible (but only if the ship is scheduled to sail at the end of the shift).
The ILWU and ILA both ultimately rely on joint company-union safety committees and arbitrators to adjudicate safety issues. But safe working conditions require constant vigilance and struggle against the employers. Longshoremen need their own union safety committees with representatives that have the authority to shut down unsafe work on the spot. Excessive overtime, which causes fatigue and accidents, is encouraged by ILA tops. British labour eight-hour-day advocates used to say: “Accidents come in the eleventh hour.” ILA higher-ups function like labor brokers in that union dues are based on a percentage of the income of each longshoreman, so premium overtime pay greatly increases the dues base.
Workers need a union leadership that understands that the interests of the workers and employers are directly counterposed and mobilizes the power of the union accordingly. Strong class-struggle unions are a necessary counterweight to the capitalist employers. But such self-defense can win only temporary victories as long as society remains organized for profit, in the hands of the capitalists. When workers take state power in their own hands, then worker safety, not profit, will govern the conditions in which industry operates.
Present At The Creation-Who Put The
Rock In Rock And Roll-The Teen Queens’ Eddie,
My Love (1955)
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Deep in the dark red scare Cold War
night, still brewing then even after Uncle Joe fell down in his Red Square
drunken stupor one night and never came back, so yeah still brewing after he
kissed off in his vast red earth, still brewing as a child remembered in dark
back of school dreams about Soviet nightmares under Uncle Joe wondering how the
kids got through it, and still brewing too when Miss Winot in her pristine
glory told each and every one of her fourth grade charges, us, that come that
Russkie madness, come the Apocalypse, come the big bad ass mega-bombs (of
course being pristine and proper she did not dig down to such terms as “big bad
ass” but let’s face it that is what she meant) that each and every one of her
charges shall come that thundering god-awful air raid siren call duck, quickly
and quietly, under his or her desk and then place his or his hands, also quickly
and quietly, one over the other on the top of his or her head, a small breeze
was coming to the land.
Maybe nobody saw it coming although the
more I think about the matter somebody, some bodies knew something, not those
supposedly in the know about such times, those who are supposed to catch the
breezes before they move beyond their power to curtain them. Take guys like my
older brother Franklin and his friends, Benny and Jimmy, who were playing some
be-bop stuff up in his room. (Ma refused to let him play his songs on the
family record player down center stage in the living room or flip the dial on
the kitchen radio away from her tunes of the roaring 1940s, her and my father’s
coming of age time, so up his room like some mad monk doing who knows what
because I was busy worrying about riding bicycles or something). Here’s the
real tip-off though he and his boys would go out Friday nights to Jack Slack’s
bowling alleys not to bowl, although that was the cover story to questioning
mothers, but to hang around Freddie O’Toole’s car complete with turned on amped
up radio (station unknown then but later found to be WMEX) and dance, dance
with girls, get it, to stuff like Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 (a great song tribute to a great automobile which nobody
in our neighborhood could come close to affording so reduced to cheapjack Fords
and Plymouths), and guys who even today I don’t know the names of despite YouTube
archival vaults giving everybody with every kind of musical inclination a blast
to the past ticket. Or, how about the times we, the family would go up to
Boston for some Catholic thing in the South End at Holy Cross Cathedral and
smack across from the church was the later famous Red Hat Club where guys were
blasting away at pianos, on guitars and on big ass sexy saxes and it was not
the big band sound my folks listened to or cool, cool be-bop jazz either but
music from jump street, etched in the back of my brain because remember I’m
still fussing over bikes and stuff like that. Or how about every time we went
down Massachusetts Avenue in Boston as the sun went down, the “Negro” part
before Huntington Avenue (an area that Malcolm X knew well a decade before) and
we stopped at the ten billion lights and all you would hear is this bouncing
beat coming from taverns, from the old time townhouse apartments and black guys
dressed “to the nines,” all flash dancing on the streets with dressed “to the
nines” good-looking black girls. Memory bank.
So some guys knew, gals too don’t
forget after all they had to dig the beat, dig the guys who dug the beat, the
beat of out of some Africa breeze mixed
with forbidden sweated Southern lusts if the thing was going to work out. And
it wasn’t all dead-ass “white negro” hipsters either eulogized by Norman Mailer
(or maybe mocked you never knew with him but he sensed something was in the
breeze even if he was tied more closely to an earlier sensibility) or break-out
“beats” tired of the cool cold jazz that was turning in on itself, getting too
technical and losing the search for the high white note or lumpens of all
descriptions who whiled away the nights searching their radio dials for
something that they while away the nights searching their radio dials for something
that they could swing to while reefer high or codeine low. If you, via hail
YouTube, look at the Jacks and Jills dancing they mostly look like very proper
well-dressed middle class kids who are trying to break out of the cookie-cutter
existence they found themselves but they still lookedpretty well-fed and well-heeled so yeah,
some guys and gals and it wasn’t always who you might suspect that got hip, got
that back-beat and those piano riffs etched into their brains.
Maybe though the guys in the White
House were too busy worrying about what Uncle Joe’s progeny were doing out in
the missile silos of Minsk, maybe the professional television talkers on Meet The Press wanted to discuss the
latest turn in national and international politics for a candid world to hear
and missed what was happening out in the cookie-cutter neighborhoods, and maybe
the academic sociologists and professional criminologists were too wrapped up
in figuring out why Marlon Brando was sulking in his corner boy kingdom (and wreaking
havoc on a fearful small town world when he and the boys broke out), whyJohnny Spain had that “shiv” ready to do
murder and mayhem to the next midnight passer-by, and why well-groomed and fed
James Dean was brooding in the “golden age” land of plenty but the breeze was
coming.
(And you could add in the same brother
Franklin who as I was worrying about bikes, the two pedal two kind getting
“from hunger” to get a Brando bike, a varoom bike, so this girl, Wendy, from
school, would take his bait, a girl that my mother fretted was from the wrong
side of town, her way of saying a tramp but she was smart as hell once I found
out about her a few years later after she, they had left town on some big ass
Norton but that is after the creation so I will let it go for now.)
And then it came, came to us in our
turn, came like some Kansas whirlwind, came like the ocean churning up the big
waves crashing to a defenseless shoreline, came if the truth be known like the
“second coming” long predicted and the brethren, us, were waiting, waiting like we had been waiting
all our short spell lives. Came in a funny form, or rather ironically funny
forms, as it turned out.
Came one time, came big as 1954 turned
to 1955 and a guy, get this, dressed not in sackcloth or hair-shirt but in a
sport’s jacket, a Robert Hall sport’s jacket from the off the rack look of it
when he and the boys were “from hunger,” playing for coffee and crullers before
on the low life circuit, a little on the heavy side with a little boy’s regular
curl in his hair and blasted the whole blessed world to smithereens. Blasted
every living breathing teenager, boy or girl, out of his or her lethargy, got
the blood flowing. The guy Bill Haley, goddam an old lounge lizard band guy who
decided to move the beat forward from cool ass be-bop jazz and sweet romance
popular music and make everybody, every kid jump, yeah Big Bill Haley and his
Comets, the song Rock Around The Clock.
Came a little more hep cat too, came
all duck walk and sex moves, feet moving faster than Robert Hall-clad Bill
could ever do, came out of Saint Loo, came out with a crazy beat. Came out in
suit and tie all swagger. Came out with a big baby girl guitar that twisted up
the chords something fierce and declared to the candid world, us, that
Maybelline was his woman. But get this, because what did we know of “color”
back then when we lived in an all-white Irish Catholic neighborhoods and since
we heard what we heard of rock and rock mostly on the radio we were shocked
when we found out the first time that he was a “Negro” to use the parlance of
the times, a black man making us go to “jump street.” And we bought into it,
bought into the beat, and joined him in saying Mister Beethoven you and your
brethren best move over.
Came sometimes in slo-mo, hey remember
this rock and roll was an ice-breaker with a beat you didn’t have to dance close to with your partner and
get all tied up in knots forgetting when to twirl, when to whirl, when to do a
split but kind of free form for the guys (or gals but mainly guys) with two
left feet like me could survive, maybe not survive the big one if the Russkies
decided to go over the top with the bomb, but that school dance and for your
free-form efforts maybe that she your eyeballs were getting sore over would
consent to the last chancelast dance
that you waited around for in case she was so impressed she might want to go
with you some place later. But before that “some place later” you had to
negotiate and the only way to do was to bust up a slow one, a dreamy one to get
her in the mood and hence people have been singing songs from time immemorial
to get people in the mood, this time Earth
Angel would do the trick. Do the trick as long as you navigated those toes
of hers, left her with two feet and standing. Dance slow, very slow brother.
Came sometimes in very slo-mo if you
could believe my older brother Franklin and the stories that he would tell us
younger guys, not in 1955 remember we were worried about two-wheel bikes then
but later when we came of age and were salaciously curious about the girl scene,
what made them tick, about how he scored with this or that girl, put the moves
on this way or that on some other one and some girl’s panties came tumbling
down as if by magic. Although I should have been a little suspicion of
Franklin’s big sky talk because when my time came the problem of garter belts
and girdles would make that quick panties coming down a little suspect, no,
very suspect when I had a hard enough and cumbersome enough time unhooking some
silly training bra. Jesus.
But here is the big truth, the skinny. See
Franklin was not, most guys were not including me, very honest about sex and
about sexual conquests when guys got together on the corners at Jack Slack’s or
Doc’s Drugstore or in the guy’s gym locker room or in the school’s boys’ lav
Monday morning. No guy wanted to seem to be “light on his feet” one of the
kinder expressions we used for gay guys in the days when “fag-baiting” was
something of a rite of passage so guys would lie like hell about this or that
score. Later when you would find yourself doing the very same thing you would
find that about sixty to seventy percent, maybe more, of what guys said about
conquests was b.s.
In any case one time Franklin was hot
after this girl, Betsy Sanders, who even when I wasn’t that into girls (before
I came of age, not that “light on my feet” if that is what you are thinking)
was “hot,” definitely pretty and smart and just plain nice. She had a
reputation, according to Franklin, of being an “ice queen,” no go, but he said
that only made him want to go after her more. One high school dance night,
maybe the Spring Frolic of 1955, Franklin went stag, although stag with six or
seven other guys, as did a lot of guys because that kind of dance was set up by
the school to have everybody mix and mingle unlike the prom let’s say which was
strictly couples or stay home and wait by the midnight phone for some lost
Janey or Jack. Of course Betsy was there, with a few of whatever they call a
cohort of single girls, looking at hot as hell, all flouncy full length dress
and some smell to drive a man wild, jasmine Franklin thought.
These school dance things like I said
were held occasionally by the school to keep an eye on what was happening to
their charges with this rock and roll craze beginning to stir up concerns (the
churches also held them for the same reason). Basically a “containment” policy
of “if you can’t fight them, keep two eyes on each and every one of them” copied
I presume from the Cold War foreign policy wonks like George Kennan who ran the
anti-Soviet establishment in Washington. So the thing was chaperoned unto
death, had some frilly crèche paper decorations to spice up the woe begotten
gym which didn’t really work, some refreshments to cool out the tranced dancers
periodically, and a lame DJ, a young goof teacher recruited because he could
“relate” to the kids who “spun” the platters (records for the unknowing) on a
dinky turntable with an equally woeful sound system. None of that meant a thing
because all that mattered was that there were boys and girls there, maybe
somebody for you and music, music to dance to. Yeah.
Now as Franklin weaved his story it
seems that the usually reserved Betsy was in high form (according to Franklin
she looked like maybe she had had a couple of drinks before the dance not
unheard of but usually that was guys but we will let that pass), dancing to
every fast dance with lots of guys, not hanging with any one in particular,
getting more and more into the dancing as the night went on. Franklin
approached her after intermission to dance Bill Haley’s latest big one, Rock Around The Clock, the one that
everybody went to the Strand Theater up the Square to see that really lame
movie about J.D.s, Blackboard Jungle, just
to see him and the Comets blast away and she accepted. Danced very
provocatively from what Franklin said, gave moves only the “fast” girls, the known
school tramps threw into the mix and that was that until the end of the night
when last chance last dance time came.
This last chance last dance as I know
from personal experience is a very dicey thing, especially if you have been
eying a girl all night and she says “no”-end of evening. See this was a slow
one so you could maybe make a last minute pitch or negotiate what was what
after the dance. Franklin said he went up to Betsy and asked her for that dance
when Mister Miles, that lame DJ I told you about already, announced that the
Moonglows’ Sincerely a song he really
liked. Here’s her answer-“Yes.” And
so they danced and while dancing she allegedly wondered out loud why he had not
asked her to dance other dances that night, she expected him to do since she
had heard through the super-reliable “grapevine” that he was interested in her.
Bingo. The rest of the dance consisted of negotiations about her getting her
cloak, about giving the guys and gals they respectively came with the heave-ho and
heading toward old Adamsville Beach in Franklin’s Hudson, really our father’s car
borrowed for the evening. Down there while he did not go into all the juicy
details about what they did, or didn’t do, she let him have his way with her
(that “panties came tumbling down” business). Of course that kind of stuff
happened all the time with good boys and girls, and bad but when Franklin asked
Betsy what stirred her up she said the music and dancing got her going, made
her all loose and everything she couldn’t explain it all but she got all warm.
Enough, okay.
Enough except what always bothered me
about what parents, the authorities, hell, even older guys on the street,
thought about rock and roll as the devil’s music came to mind. Some communist
plot to “brainwash” the youth of America and make them Kremlin stooges was hard
to figure when a girl like Betsy, an All-American girl if there ever was one,
who later in life ran for Congress, unsuccessfully, as a Republican, got all
warm when the drums started rolling the intro and the guitars built up that
back-beat. Hard to make sense of the idea that maybe the Moonglows should have
been brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee of the times or
something for singing a doo wop classic like Sincerely, a last chance last dance song. Yeah, that has always
bothered me.
Came in very, very slo-mo for some
guys, guys like me who even with big brothers to guide the way were after all
is said and done rather clumsy picking up the first few tips (well “half guide
the way” since a lot of what Franklin said about the ease of girl conquests was
so much hot air, same with other guys but worse, worse than the hot air was the
bad, plain wrong information about sex, sexual activity, which he, they had
learned like everybody else from the streets, certainly not out of up-tight “asexual”
parents who were not telling us anything, nor the churches and definitely not
at school although some teachers would allude to stuff but you had to be pretty
slick to pick it up. All this information, misinformation really, was far more
dangerous that just plain ignorance as Franklin, and I, almost learned the hard
way, very closely indeed).
Who knows when you get that first
inkling, you know the exact date, when those last year’s girls who were nothing
but sticks (that was our dividing line then, “sticks” and “shapes”) and
bothered you endlessly when you were just trying to ride your bike or
something, maybe reading a book in school turned into being well kind of
interesting and had something to say after all. It wasn’t necessarily coming of
age time, puberty, but close when all the confusion started, all the little
social graces began to count. So, yeah, in fifth grade, toward the end of the
year, I was smitten, smitten by Theresa Wallace, my first flamed out flame. So
Theresa and rock and roll kind of go hand in hand in my mind since around that
time I also started getting that rock beat in my head that Franklin kept
telling me that would come at some point.
Naturally with no social graces to
speak of the whole heart-throbbing thing with Theresa was a source of endless
confusion. Of course as probably is true of half the guys and gals in the world
I kept my feelings to myself, would moon, pine, twist, turn, and whatever else
a smitten person does without quite knowing what to do about the feelings.
Except to kind of be surly toward her in class, and, and, endlessly walk by her
house at all hours, all kid hours, in the hopes that I might see her and she
might wave, or something. Yeah, no social graces. Then one day the logjam
broke, she spoke to me, asked me if I wanted to go to her birthday party the
next week. Yes. Although the abruptness going from nowhere to being invited to her
house kind of startled me (later I had heard that Slim Jackson, a friend of
mine, whom I casually mentioned to that Theresa seemed nice told some girl that
fact and it eventually got through the super-speed teen grapevine that I
“liked” her).
And so the party was be held in the
family room down in the basement of her house (which in the specific case of
her house also served as the air raid shelter with signs, supplies, and defense
materials which made me realize that I would rather take my chances above
ground when I saw that included in the supplies were a record player and
records of Patti Page, Frank Sinatra, Harry James, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller
and the crowd, yeah, I would definitely take my chances above ground with that
scenario) and was to be unchaperoned meaning no adults would be in the room
(although present, very present upstairs). I don’t know about now, about the
customs of the young in these matters now, but then these pre-teen parties were
called “petting parties” where somehow the first fresh bout of serious kisses
were to be bestowed, or at least the first few innocent kisses. I was scared,
scared two ways first that I would not be able to do the “deed” and secondly
that if I was close to a girl how my grooming fit in, how I smelled and looked,
something like that before we all got wise to mouthwash, deodorant and hair
oil.
See it wasn’t only in sex matters that
my parents were deficient but grooming and health matters as well what with
five growing boys and nothing going my mother just didn’t give us the word. I
know one guy at school said I smelled funny one day. And I probably did
although I don’t know the why of it, maybe not washing under my underarms or
something. So one of the things that Franklin was straight on was hygiene which
he got from a friend of his when he was my age who had told him that he smelled
and hipped him to what guys had to do to keep from being rogues. He clued me in
on showering (really just an attached hose to the bathtub in our house), a
little deodorant (nobody told me I smelled after that), a little Listerine (although
the first time I used it I almost threw up since I used about half a bottle)
and Wild Root Crème Oil for my always cowlick-driven unruly hair. I was off,
thanks that one time Franklin (there would be other later times when I lent him
money, cars, and other stuff that I never got back when I would curse his name,
still do)
If you think that party of Theresa’s
was some big Mayfair swell debutante affair well you know right now you are
wrong but it was okay. About a dozen or fifteen kids, a couple more girls than
boys but that was alright then (maybe now too), all dressed up and clean
smelling presided over by Theresa who had a pretty dress on and who when she
greeted me (and everybody else so don’t make a big deal out of it) smelled like
I don’t know what, not perfume I don’t think but some exotic bath soap. Nice.
The party itself was the standard music, guys and girls dancing (sometimes two
girls dancing together but never guys remember that ‘light on your feet” jab),
a little nice food, party food, kid party food, finger food and of course the
cake, the birthday cake and Happy Birthday song. What was different, at least
for me were these two little remembrances as this. Every few records when
people were not dancing the lights would go out. That was the cue, although at
first I was clueless, for everybody to grab somebody of the opposite sex to
give a kiss to, an innocent kiss okay. Some girl, and I still am not sure who
but it was not Theresa of the exotic bath soap smells, gave me my first
official opposite sex boy-girl kiss. I bridled a little at first since I didn’t
realize that was what was going on but it was okay, yeah, okay. So that was one
thing. The other was toward the end of the party Theresa came up to me and a
little coquettishly (although I didn’t know such a word or what it meant then)
asked me to save the last dance for her. No problem. And the last dance, well
you know what it was if you have paid attention to the title of this piece The
Platters’ Only You. Only You and the
lights went out during the song and Theresa planted a long kiss on my chaste
lips, yeah, nice. We were an “item” for a while, maybe a month a long time as
such things went then and then a new guy came into town, some tow-headed kid
that all the girls went crazy over and I was reduced to sitting by the lonely
midnight phone waiting in vain for some call to come my way.
Came in, well how should I put it, in
awkward ways, ways around the way the world whirled, the American world in that
cold, cold war night where lots of things were hidden from view. Things like
race, class gender that are upfront and talked about in a usually rational
manner today. Here’s what I mean as race, maybe class too, intersects with rock
and roll, with who put the rock in rock and roll. And that is not a rhetorical
question, or not only a rhetorical question because sixty years out it is still
relevant as least in an historical perspective. We found out the hard way, or
my best friend, Steve Malloy, in elementary school down in the Carver projects
where we grew up at least until we came of age found out the hard way. And I
learned my lesson from him.
See when that rock beat got into our
heads, got in like my older brother Franklin said in one of the few times he
was absolutely right about something, something important, it came in our heads
listening to the radio, car, family living room (although not much in my family
since Ma forbade it and I, we, would only play the radio, WMEX, of course when
she and Pa were out), later, have mercy on our private up-in-our-rooms
transistor radios so what we heard was what we knew about. The sounds all had a
classic beat, at least the serious rock beat one, whoever was singing played
to. I don’t know that we were all that curious about what the singers looked
like at that point, except maybe Elvis who we did know what he looked like from
seeing him on the Ed Sullivan Show (a
variety acts show popular on Sunday nights then). I don’t think so, it was
really the music that moved our souls.
In any case lots of guys, guys who
could sing, not me, guys like Steve Malloy were always crooning away, always
trying to sing like one, or more of the voices that we heard on the radio.
Steve was particularly interested in those imitations because he really did
have a great voice and if you closed your eyes you could almost heard the
similarities. He was also like the rest of us in the projects, from hunger. He,
once he got the Elvis rags-to-riches story down (and lots of girls too), was
driven by the idea that he would be the next big thing in rock, or if not the
next big thing then soon.
And that idea was not as fantastic as
it sounded because in those days a lot of record companies and radio stations
were sponsoring rock talent shows like they did back in the 1920s when they
were looking for new talent to fill the airwaves. So one night WJDA, the local
rock station (at least they played one show for four hours in the afternoon
with DJ Tommy Swirl spinning the platters), staged a talent show up in the
center of town looking for the next best thing that maybe they could latch
onto, or at least expand their listening audience to the young in order to sell
soda, soap, and sundries. So Steve was pumped, thought this would be the first
break-through minute for him. But what to sing, whose style to project. He,
even I knew this, that there would for guy singers be a ton of Elvis-imitators,
and since he didn’t particular like Elvis at that moment since he had lost a
girl to a guy who that girl said looked all dreamy like Elvis he decided on Bo
Diddley who was all the craze with his song Bo Diddley that had this great beat
to it.
So the night of the talent show Steve
and maybe twenty other guys and maybe fifteen girls of all ages, all young
ages, showed up to perform with a few obviously looking like Elvis imitators
what with the long sideburns and slick backed hair in his style.Steve told me as we walked in that he felt
pretty good about his chances and that he was glad he chose Bo to separate
himself out. Steve was about number eight on the list and so we fidgeted
through the first seven acts, a few pretty good but most awful. Then it was
Steve’s turn, Steve dressed in his best (and only) sport’s jacket looking like
any teenage kid from Carver in those days, and he started to sing Bo’s song.
About half way through though, Jack Kelly, an older guy from the projects, who
was known as nothing but a hoodlum yelled out “Hey the kid is trying to sing a
n----r jungle voodoo song.” That broke the whole mood, Steve barely
finished.
Needless to say Steve did not win (and
probably would not have as three sisters stole the show with some Connie
Francis cover) but after that he “got back in line” doing Elvis stuff since he
knew Elvis was white. But his heart was no longer in it, and a while later his
voice changed and he lost whatever rock energy he had. But he, we learned the
hard way about the vagaries of race, learned the very hard way how important
the black sound that even Elvis was stealing from was to what put the rock in
rock and roll.
Came in different flavors too, had
different root as we would call it now all messed together to give a different
beat. You had the rhythm and blues which drove a lot of the early stuff you
know the Ike Turner Rocket 88 stuff,
Big Joe Turner swinging and swaying that big ass of his to beat the band on Shake,
Rattle and Roll, had guys like Jimmy Preston way back in the late 1940s putting
in a bid to go into history as the “first rock and roll” song although you can
see stuff going all the way back, going back to certain riffs (not whole songs
I would say) in the 1920s with Furry Lewis, Lonnie Johnson guys like that who latter
guys, Elvis (think Tomorrow Night,
That’s When Your Heartache Begins)especially would cover with their own
twists and step up the beat for the whole song.
Or take something like Rockabilly which
a whole lot of good old boys, white boys okay, from places like Tennessee and
Mississippi from hunger farm boys and small town kids would speed up some Les
Paul riffs throw a few Saturday night barroom brawl Sunday morning confess all
to Preacher Jack and get the girls to come around, come close if they looked
good and has some sassy ass licks in and some Rock and Roll Ruby was born. So
those big time sounds mixed and mended together to give a great new sound.
But get this, there were other sounds
that mixed and matched, Bo Diddley of slurred memory mentioned above down in my
growing up town with a definite Afro-Carib thing that bounced a little showing
some other possibilities. Cajun too. Down in sweat filled Lafayette and Lake
Charles where another of my high school friends, corner boys really, Rene
Dubois, was born, where he learned to say pretty things like Jolie Blon in
blasphemous crooked French and the girls down there, the cheris’ he called them
went wild over him. (Not so in old Carver where his father had been transferred
to as an oilrig guy when Nantucket Sound was being fished for oil exploration
and Rene was taken for a redneck, a good old boy from the sticks, this in a
town where half the population one way or the other was connected to the
cranberry bog for which it was known, boggers for crying out loud and rednecks there
were as thick as thieves). But Rene was not just into the Cajun stuff because
his father, since he had spent a great deal of time fishing for oil in the Gulf
of Mexico would take Rene with him when he went to New Orleans. Would take him
to the joints down in Frenchtown, down on the avenue.
I don’t think the story held up from
what I was able to gather (for one Fats name was not Jack Reed and depending on
when he said he had been there Lenny’s would not have been open)by the time he changed it about sixteen
times. But if it did happen then thanks Fats, thanks for the big ass piano addition
to rock, our homeland rock and roll. And sorry about how Katrina took all your
archives down the river.
Came in funny ways too. You know, like
I said about my boyhood friend Steve Malloy and his wake-up call trying to
imitate Bo Diddley, guys, young guys like us, me, were always trying to imitate
whoever we saw or heard about, even though my voice then was too reedy and I
had no basic sense of rhythm (which hurt later when I discovered the blues,
straight blues and tried to play them on guitar to no avail, sounded like some
third rate white bread boy from nowhere).
Still as little invested as I was in
success as a way to get out of the projects, get out of cheap street, Steve
wasn’t the only one who tried to cover somebody’s song, tried for the brass
ring, or maybe more correctly get an in with the girls who seemed a lot more
interesting than before the rock storm blew in (maybe the wiggle and gyrations
evoked some primitive sexual tom-tom but that is too much speculation some
sixty years out. I tried too, a little, in the period before Steve’s fatal stab
at fame mentioned above. Like I said in those days some radio station, locally
WJDA no question, some record company, some independent company like Ducca or the
Chestnut labels, were sponsoring talent shows to see if they could latch onto
the need big thing coming down the rock pipeline.
In my case though it was the town
fathers who were sponsoring the talent show, for their own nefarious reasons as
I found out later when I got the political bug and such details interested me.
See those harried town fathers (and it was mosyly male then) were as concerned
as the guys in the White House, as J. Edgar Hoover over in FBI, that rock and
roll was getting out of hand and that it softened up America against the
hard-boiled red menace, or worse, made their own kids, made their own daughters
susceptible to the “s-x” word and so they sponsored weekly dances, usually on
Saturday nights at the town hall auditorium to, like the schools and churches,
keep an eye or three on the doings of the young. One of the town fathers came
up with the idea of the talent show as a way to draw crowds to the dances and
keep the kids occupied during intermission. Furthermore, the draw to entry for
money hungry “from hunger” kids who probably never had seen so much dough at
one time was a prize of fifty dollars and, more importantly, especially to guys
like Steve but the idea filtered down to the rest of us, that you would get to
sing a few songs as the feature at the next dance, or an upcoming one. So a lot
of kids, me, signed up for the thing and put out our stuff for prizes and
glory.
For some reason that year I had been
waylaid when I heard Miss La Verne Baker doing her Tweddle Dee, a tune that was a big hit for her in 1955 but which I
had only hear later as I picked the rock bug properly. That song in her version
had been very jumped up and also was great to dance to. More to the point that
I had in my head constantly during that time. Plus, get this for teen insight,
I figured that since I was covering a female singer on a song that really
either sex could sing (later I heard both Big Walter Sidney and Manny Gold do
great versions of the song with a little slower tempo) I would get some points
for novelty.
The night of the dance/talent show I am
talking about I was ready after several hours of practice and some coaching by
Steve (who really did have a great native music sense and if thing had turned
out better, if he had played his musical hand out instead of getting into that
crime time scene he might have blossomed into something). I wanted to look good
too for my big first show and in those days that meant wearing a sports jacket
and shirt and tie. I was okay on the shirt and tie since that is what I wore to
Mass each Sunday morning but our family being poor as church mice, maybe
poorer, I didn’t have a sports jacket since we had with five boys a tradition
of brother hand-me-downs and I was not big enough then to fix into any older
brother’s jacket without looking like a hobo. I moaned and groaned to Ma, and
after she said “no” I even moaned and groaned to Pa and you didn’t moan and
groan to him unless it was a big deal.
He said, which was true, that we did
not have money for a sports coat for a one night gig, or maybe for any reason,
I forget, but he would spring for material at the cheap-jack Bargain Center,
the local Wal-Mart of its day, if my mother would make one. Now my mother was
no seamstress but she agreed to do so and that Saturday night I had a
presentable sports jacket on although I couldn’t say much for the beige color. I
had tried it on as she was workingon
the material and earlier that night and the fit seemed okay.
I was number six on the list and so
like all performers I was sitting there fretting during the first set of DJ
record shuffling waiting impatiently for the intermission to arrive to strut my
stuff. I felt pretty good even though I knew that Steve, who was on at number
two, would do much better that me, which he did doing a nice version of a song
that I forget what it was, some ballad, maybe Love Me Tender. Then in my turn I got up, went to the make-shift
stage and started to sing and the crowd when they realized what the song was
started chapping along. Then the other shoe fell off. This is what I found out
later when I asked my mother about the jacket. She had gotten busy doing some
family things and so only quickly sewed the sleeves to the body of the jacket
figuring that would be good enough. Like I said before the jacket looked and
felt good enough to me so there was no reason to say anything or ask any
questions about it. That night though about half way through my act as I was
making some motions, some odd-ball gyrations, responding to the crowd’s
clapping one of the sleeves came off, then a few minutes later the other came
off. They flew right into the crowd, mostly to the girls in front. The place
went wild. They all figured that this stunt was part of the act. Well I
finished, barely, and was finished. A girl singing some Fontaine Sisters’ song,
maybe Sincerely I was so fluttered I
just kind of head my head down to avoid dealing with reality, won, Steve second
and my career was over. Over because of what happened that night which I had no
desire to repeat but over also because like Steve not too long after my voice
changed and it was not a good change for singing even if it did sound more
manly.
Get this though, at school the next
week, Monday the girls, including one of
the girls who caught one of the sleeves, were all around me, thinking my act
had been cool, and for a time I was basking in that glory. Ah, wasn’t that a
time.
Came in baffling ways too if you were
trying to figure out the love game, the odd way in which the game switched up
with frequent chances for seemingly unknown reasons when teenagers fell in and
out of love, or one party might, for reasons that were never explained, or
maybe couldn’t be explained but which left gaping holes in hearts nevertheless (other stuff baffled us too but really until
later events like dealing with the military draft and whether to go in or not,
a not unique question for the youth, the young guys, of my generation, whether
or not to marry that gal who stole your heart and later whether or not to
divorce when stealing hearts was not enough and other rough choices dealing
with the intricacies of the boy-girl thing seemed to take up an extraordinary
amount of time). Trying to figure out the lyrics anyway, how they could serve
as cautionary tales of sorts since we took the narrative as part of the action.
At least some songs did, songs like Leader of the Pack which even for kids
who knew nothing about motorcycles, couldn’t ride one if they tried, were
afraid of the bandit road, avoided the Hell’s Angels types with their big hogs down
at the beach come sunset Saturday night, bad boys and all instinctively sided
with the brother of the song (and her too, she would be left behind when the
Leader went over the edge) when everybody knew that the reason the pair broke
up was because the freaking parents were so class conscious about staying above
the riffraff that squeezed the life out of that relationship. I know I always hoped
she would run off with the next leader after her man took the fall. How about He’s So Fine, where the girl narrator is
tripping all over herself to figure out how she is going to take some guy into
her life, a shy guy (or at least that is his public persona, a good ruse which
was not a bad girl-catcher from what guys, and gals, have told me since it made
the guy seem like the sensitive type and maybe would not paw all over the girl the
first night), a guy who other gals are looking at so that the race is on. The
most beautiful part though that she is not only not going to give up on the guy
but will do anything he asks, up to and including abdicating her throne if he
asked (and if she was a queen to be able to do such an act). Yeah, young love.
Now that you have the idea take the
case of Eddie, My Love which always intrigued,
always made a guy like me who hung around more than one midnight phone hoping
against hope for a call to sooth my savage soul, done by a number of different
groups but the best seemed to me to be the Teen Queens to grab the pathos of
the situation.
Here’s the gist of the story line, hardly
the first time such action has happened in the love game. This Eddie of the title,
obviously a fly-by-night kind of guy, has flown the coop, had gone off
somewhere to take care of some business of unknown quality. Something about getting
a job, a good job in another state so he can support his dear widowed mother in
her hours of dotage need. At least that is what he told the narrator, his
unnamed love interest (we could call her Betty or Sue or Maryanne but no need
really since this one is an eternal question). Of course, young and somewhat
innocent, she believed each and every word he said about coming back to her in
a short time. But that short time has turned into a long time and she still
hasn’t wised up to the hard fact that Eddie is gone. Long gone and on to the
next conquest. And it wasn’t because he did not have dime to make a call on a
public telephone or didn’t have three cents for a stamp to mail a letter. He
took what he could from her, which was everything she, or any girl, had to give
and went off into the night. She though had it bad, had let her Eddie get under
her skin and so she was pining away and in the normal course of events, teen
drama events, has thoughts of suicide or just dying of a broken heart, take
your choice.
(Amazing the number of songs from that time
which put everything, every boy-girl thing on the razor’s edge like that, my choice
for the top on that one is Endless Sleep where
after some silly spat, although I know, I know all those disagreements from
where to go bowling Friday night to talk about “doing the do” had instant urgency,
the girl, in the old days I would have said bimbo and would not have been far
off the mark but in today’s more refined atmosphere just girl, ran down to the
sea and jumped into the swirling fierce waves letting old King Neptune take her
wherever he chances to go. Calling lover boy to come join her. Jesus. And the
guy, a bimbo of the male persuasion, goes into after her to save her. Double
Jesus.)
Now this selection of the Teen Queen song
was not random on my part because, and this may have been one of the reasons
that the song was popular, popular among those young teen-agers, mainly girls
who tended to buy these kinds of record (and most records), because while the
story line might be specific to that poor gal and her Eddie the saga hardly was
unique, a guy going off into the night after he has had his way is the stuff of
drama and novels since the love game began, since Adam and Eve, maybe before.
See my corner boy Frankie Riley had a sister, Emily, a nice girl from what I could
see when I saw her around or went over to Frankie’s house, pretty in a little
girl sort of way but quiet too quiet for me who turned out to like kind of neurotic
talkative girls and not the silent types) that had an Eddie story and while she
finally got over it from what Frankie said it was a close call about whether
she would go over the top or not, you know go down to the very nearby sea at Adamsville
Beach to be specific. Frankie, after he coaxed the story out of her when she
was mopping around for weeks and he noticed that no guys had not been around the
house for a while, looked high and low for the guy but never found his
whereabouts, and I’ll bet six, two, and even that today Frankie would still
give the guy a beating for what he had done if he ever surfaced around Carver
where Frankie still lives and practices law.
I don’t know all the details since
Frankie never got the whole story although he figured out the “take advantage”
part pretty quickly once he knew the score (having been just slightly more honorable
about things with girls than the Eddie guy). Seems Emily had a boyfriend, a
local guy, Kenny Jenkins, Jimmy Jenkin’s, who I knew from the corners a little,
a young second cousin or something who I knew from the corners a little, she
had met in school and had been going with for about a year, most of junior and
senior year. A good guy according to
Jimmy. I don’t know if marriage was in the picture or anything like that,
although in those days guys and gals going steady for that long usually wound
up married in the job-marriage-kids cycle from that town at that time.
In any case Kenny was “from hunger”
just like the rest of us from that part of town and so had no car and they
would walk to the movies, the drive-in restaurant at the edge of town
(definitely not “cool” since you went to that spot not for the cardboard
hamburgers, flat soda and greasy French fries, awful food, really, but to be
seen, seen in some “boss” car if possible but not walking into the parking
area. That was for “losers.”
One late spring night they were sitting
on the picnic benches that walkers were reduced to in order to eat their meals
a guy, a guy on a motorcycle, not a Harley but an Indian, a real fast bike, no
question, a guy named Lance Harding Frankie found out later, who was known to
be something of a lady-killer and a good looking guy even if he was nothing but
motorcycle bad news came up to Emily and Kenny and asked Emily if she wanted a
ride. And without saying a word to Kenny she just got on the back of Lance’s
bike and was off into the night. (There is some dispute about whether he
actually asked the question or just looked in Emily’s direction and gave a nod
buteither way it should have told Kenny
something was wrong in their relationship, Emily was looking for the next best
thing to come along and she was just killing time with him.)
After that Emily was out all summer
with Lance doing whatever they were doing and Kenny was from nowhere, a loser.
Since you know the theme of Eddie, My
Love and the aftermath of Emily’s affair you know Lance blew town one day
and that was that. Well not quite that was that since not only was Emily pining
away all fall but she was also in the “family way” to use an expression from
that time and had to go see “Aunt Betty” out in Kansas, the expression used
when a girl left school to have her baby. Yeah, the love game was baffling back
then, now too come to think of it.
Despite all these great hits that came
our way that first big rock and roll year when it kind of came out from the
underground here is the funny thing, funny since we were present at the
creation, present in spite of every command uttered by Miss Winot against it,
declaring the music worse than that Russkie threat if you believed her (a few
kids, girls mainly, did whether to suck up to her since she would take their
entreaties although boys were strictly “no go” and I know having spent many a
missed sunny afternoon doing some silly “punishment” for her). We were just too
young to deeply imbibe the full measure of what we were hearing. See this
music, music we started calling rock and roll once somebody gave it a name
(super DJ impresario Alan Freed as we found out later after we had already
become “children of rock and roll”) was meant, was blessedly meant to be danced
to which meant in that boy-girl age we who didn’t even like the opposite sex as
things stood then were just hanging by our thumbs.
Yeah, was meant to be danced to at
“petting parties” in dank family room basements by barely teenage boys and
girls. Was meant to be danced to at teenage dance clubs where everybody was
getting caught up on learning the newest dance moves and the latest “cool”
outfits to go along with that new freedom. Was meant to serve as a backdrop at
Doc’s Drugstore’s soda fountain where Doc had installed a jukebox complete with
all the latest tunes as boys and girls shared a Coke sipping slowly with two
straws hanging out in one frosted glass. Was meant to be listened to by corner
boys at Jack Slack’s bowling alley where Jack eventually had set up a small
dance floor so kids could dance while waiting for lanes to open (otherwise
everybody would be still dancing out in front of O’Toole’s “boss” car complete
with amped-up radio not to Jack’s profit). Was meant to be listened to as the
sun went down in the west at the local drive-in while the hamburgers and fries
were cooking and everybody was waiting for darkness to fall so the real night
could begin, the night of dancing in dark corner and exploring the mysteries of
the universe, or at least of Miss Sarah Brown. Was even meant to be listened to on fugitive
transistor radios in the that secluded off-limits to adults and little kids
(us) where teens, boys and girls, mixed and matched in the drive-in movie night
(and would stutter some nonsense to questioning parents who wanted to know the
plot of the movies, what movies, Ma).
Yeah, we were just a little too young
even if we can legitimately claim to have been present at the creation. But we
will catch up, catch up with a vengeance.