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Friday, October 02, 2015
From Socialist Alternative In Boston
Thursday, October 01, 2015
Mister James Dandy To The Rescue-With LaVern Baker In Mind
Mister James Dandy To The Rescue-With LaVern Baker In Mind
Mister James Dandy To The Rescue-With LaVern Baker In Mind
No question a lot of the classic works of rock and roll, say from the mid-1950s until the end of that decade were driven by those twangy guitars (hopefully provided by the genius of Les Paul and other pioneers working in their little garages in places like Nowhere, Texas trying to get more hyp out of that damn acoustic guitar, knowing, knowing like we all know now that whatever musical jail-break breeze was blowing was going to need plenty of electricity before it was through), those big blast sexy saxs blowing out to high heaven (think about that sax player who backed up Bill Halley on something like See You Later, Alligator and almost inhaled that sax driving that be-bopping first touch of rock coming out of about six musical traditions), and big brush back beat drums. Driven mainly by guys, hungry guys, guys with huge wanting habits trying to run away from the farms and small towns trying to break free from that life of farmer’s son or small store hardware clerk. Guys like Elvis, Chuck, Bo, Jerry Lee, Warren, Carl and a lot more. But in that mix, maybe somewhat neglected, intentionally or not, maybe there was no room for lilting voices when the music got all sweaty and from jump street, were female performers like Wanda Jackson (who really could have held her own with the big boys and had a fetching look to boot), Ruth Brown and the Queen of the popping fingers, Miss LaVern Baker.
Strangely the rise of the “girl” singers in rock and roll, usually in groups, did not really get a jump until toward the end of the 1950s decade but I would argue that LaVern Baker is the “godmother” who set the latter grouping up with her sweet life rhythm which had us all snapping our fingers. It is no secret that a lot of young guys then, a lot of guys like me with two left feet, almost instinctively overcame our shyness, overcame our desire not to be made fools of ourselves when something like LaVern Baker’s Jim Dandy popped out of the school dance DJs hands and on to that creaky old record player in that sullen gymnasium which passed for a dance floor come Friday night keep the kids off the streets time. Or come last dance chance time and having broken the ice, and hopefully no ankles or toes of that eyed partner (as for possible damage imposed on yourself, well, we all, guys anyway, learned early on around our streets that it is a dangerous world and that is that), you closed out the evening with her soulful version of Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow Night. There is still a lot to be written about the women of early rock and roll but Miss Baker is definitely in the mix.
[Another thing that could use some addressing is the fate of those artists who had center stage for a minute and then faded from mass view when the next best thing came along but who continued to perform out in the back streets, out in the bandstand bowling alleys, out in the motel lounges, out in the road houses. In the mid-1990s long after her heyday 1950s I heard LaVern Baker in a jazz bar in Cambridge. She had just gotten out of “rehab” for a knee or hip replacement, I forget which, and performed in a wheelchair, performed a lot of her old stuff and the highlight of the performance was a rousing version of Jim Dandy. Still working, still popping. I know my youthful memory fingers were popping that night.
Under My Thumb -A Minute With The Rolling Stones, circa 1966
Under My Thumb -A Minute With The
Rolling Stones, circa 1966
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Who knows when you get a beat in your
head, a musical beat that stays with you forever, or at least until a more
powerful beat comes along. At one time that position was held by the Five
Satins doing In The Still Of The Night,
a doo wop-ish classic from the 1950s which had repeating lines of doo-wop,
doo-wop, doo-wop unto infinity (or the end of the song) with a powerful
drumbeat and raging sax soloing every few bars. It had the additional staying
power of being tied into my very first teen age party, so-called petting
parties which were the place where the first few rushed, awkward, and haphazard
attempts to kiss a girl (or boy for girl) occurred. Tied as well to my first puppy
love, Thea Wallace, whom I was smitten with in sixth grade and who had invited
me to that party knowing full well that I was smitten by her having heard it through
the infallible teenage grapevine that would for pure information put the damn CIA
and the creepy NSA to shame for what the boy-girl love social order was in my
growing up town of Carver at any given moment. So yes I got (or gave) my first,
what did I call it above, rushed, awkward, and haphazard kiss from Thea. And we
had our moment, a short one even in the whirling dervish world of teenage “affairs.”
But here is the real cement, the really tragic cement for why that Five Satins
beat stayed for so long. See that record was playing at the very moment when we
kissed. And was the song in my head when I was mooning around walking past her
house hoping against hope for a sight of her for a while after she ditched me
(for some budding baseball player from what I heard). So, yeah, that beat died
hard.
But life, and some eternal need for a
beat in the head goes on, and as the fifties and Thea faded (although not
totally vanquished as this remembrance proves) I gathered another beat in my head
once the Stones swam on to the American shores as part of the British invasion.
(While it is not relevant to the sketch yes I favored the “from hunger” street fighting
stance of the Stones, my high school corner boys too, except Jimmy Jenkins who
was all twisted up by the Beatles, spoke to “from hunger” to working class boys on this side of the
ocean). This time their song Under My Thumb
drove me crazy. Naturally it had to do with a girl, well by then a young woman,
and had nothing to do with silly stuff like mooning over some misbegotten girl
who ditched me or whining about some rushed, awkward, haphazard kiss since I
had figured out that deal by then, or at least I acted like I had. No this one
had to do with my first marriage, my fatally misdirected marriage to Olivia
Simpson, whom I had met just after high school down at the Surf Ballroom in
Hull about twenty miles from home on the water where on Friday and Saturday nights
the Rockin’ Ramrods who did a lot of Stones covers played Under My Thumb and I asked her to dance (they also played bluesy
stuff too like Muddy Waters not a happenstance connection as I found out later
since the Stones worshipped Muddy and went to Chess Records, Muddy’s label, in
Chicago just to hang with him when they were on tour one time). That song acted
as some unholy mantra for a couple of years later we got married and everything
went downhill from there (except the merciful, merciful for both parties by
then, divorce). Here’s the hook though, the beat reason, that first dance night
Olivia jokingly said, at least I thought it was a joke when she laughed her
laugh, that she would have me under her thumb before long. Jesus
No Killer/No Spy Drones...
No Killer/No Spy Drones...
One night my friend from high school, Carver High Class of 1967 down in Southeastern Massachusetts Sam Lowell who I hadn’t seen in a while I were, full disclosure while having a few high-shelf whiskeys at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyvale Grille in Boston, arguing over the increasing use of and increased dependence on killer/spy drones in military doctrine, American military doctrine anyway. Me, well again for full disclosure I am a supporter of Veterans For Peace and have been involved with such groups, both veteran and civilian peace groups, since my own military service ended back during Vietnam War days. I follow the line of VFP that killer/spy drones are qualitatively a no better (or no worse) part of the modern military arsenal that any other weapon and need to be opposed with the same rigor as we do for nuclear weapons and other all the military hardware used in the seemingly endless wars the American imperium has dragged us into. (That “line” business in relationship to VFP is unlike various Marxist groups and quasi-Marxist collectives I hung around with in my younger days after discharge from the American Army a matter of choice rather than obligation. In those old-time organizations based on the concept of democratic centralism one, if one disagreed with the organizational “line” would if in the minority keep quiet in public about the difference. VFP, based on more broadly-based democratic principles reflecting a different mission and different way to change the world, has no such restrictions although arguing for support of killer/spy drones would put one in opposition with the goals of the organization and one would in good conscience have to consider whether continued membership was appropriate.
Sam’s position, full disclosure he was granted an exemption from military duty during the Vietnam War period after his father had died suddenly in 1965 and he was the sole support, or close to it, of his mother and four younger sisters, was a little more nuanced if nevertheless flatly wrong from my perspective. Perhaps reflecting an “average Joe” position of a guy who did not serve in the military and had not seen up close what all the “benefits” of modern military technology have brought forth to level whatever target they have chosen to obliterate and under what conditions. In the post-9/11 period he like many from our generation of ’68 had made a sea-change in their former anti-military positions and have embraced some form of selected approval of various aspects of current military doctrine. Starting with the initial approval of the “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq which in the end left egg all over his face. Sam, nevertheless, argued that the high degree of accuracy, the “cleanness” of the method, and the destruction of the specific object (his word, I would say person or place, mainly person) without high casualties on the American side (that reduction of “boots on the ground” argument which underpins much of modern doctrine in the wake of Vietnam and even Iraq itself) to fight the “war on terrorism” which disturbs his old age has made him a partisan of such weaponry.
As usual these days we argued for a few hours or until the whiskey ran out, or we ran out of steam and agreed to disagree. The next day though, no, the day after that I got to thinking about the issue and while not intending to directly counter his arguments wrote a short statement that reflects my own current thinking the matter. Here it is:
“Ever since the early days of humankind's existence an argument has always been made by someone and not always by the gung-ho warriors, many times rather by some safely-ensconced desk-bound soul who was too busy to become a warrior but was more than glad to let some other mother's son do the bitch work, that with some new technology, some new strategic gee-gad, warfare, the killing on one of our own species, would become less deadly, would be more morally justified, would bring the long hoped for peace that lots of people have yacked about in the abstract until some governmental decision to go to war gets their war blood up.
Those arguments are being retailed these days by the killer/spy drone aficionados who think they have found something new under the sun. Don't believe that false bill of goods, don't believe the insane war lies from warriors, arm-chair warriors, or the merely fearful, it is the same old killing machine that has gone on for eons. Killing from far way places like Nevada to the Middle East in war game rooms with screens set up like video games except tell that to the "sorry, collateral damage, no foul because not intended" victims who got in the way. Enough said and enough of killer drones killing and spy drones spying too.”
The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With The Late B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind
The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With The Late B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind
Here is the drill. Bart Webber had
started out life, started out as a captive nation child listening to singers
like Frank Sinatra who blew away all of the bobbysoxers of his mother’s
generation before he pitter-pattered the Tin Pan Alley crowd, Bing Crosby, not
the Bing of righteous Brother, Can You
Spare A Dime? but White Christmas
put to sleep stuff (and to his brother Bob and his Bobcats as well), the
Inkspots spouting If I Didn’t Care
and their trademark spoken verse on every song they touched, Miss Patti Page
getting dreamy about local haunt Cape Cod, Miss Rosemary Clooney telling one
and all to jump and come to her house, Miss Peggy Lee trying to get some no
account man to do right, do right by his woman, the
Andrew Sisters yakking about their precious rums and cokes (soft drinks), the McGuire
Sisters getting misty-eyed, the Dooley sisters dried-eyed, and all the big
swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother
Jimmy who had his own band) as background music on the family radio in the
1950s which his mother always had on during the day to get her through her
“golden age of working class prosperity and single official worker, dad, workaday
daytime household world” and on Saturday night too when that dad, Prescott, joined
in. Joined in so they could listen to Bill Marlin on local radio station WJDA
and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to
the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times
of the 1930s Great Depression and then right on its heels when they slogged
through (either in some watery European theater or the Pacific one take your
pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War
II.
Bart, thinking back on the situation
felt long afterward that he would have been wrong if he said that Delores and
Prescott should not have had their memory music after all of that but frankly
that stuff then (and now although less so) made him grind his teeth. But he, and his three
brothers, were a captive audience then and so to this day he could sing off Rum
and Coca Cola, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree (the Glenn Miller
version not the Andrew Sister’s) and Vera Lynn’s White Cliffs of Dover
from memory. But that was not his music, okay. (Nor mine since we grew up
in the same working class neighborhood in old Carver, the cranberry bog capital
of the world, together and many nights in front of Hank’s Variety store we
would steam about the hard fact that we could not turn that radio dial, or shut
off that record player, under penalty of exile from Main Street.)
Then of course since we are speaking
about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and
roll which Bart “dug” (his term since he more than the rest of us who hung around
Jimmy Jack’s Clam Shack on Main Street [not the diner on Thornton Street, that
would be later when the older guys moved on and we stepped up in their places
in high school] was influenced by the remnant of the “beat” generation minute
as it got refracted in Carver via his sneak trips to Harvard Square) seriously dug to the point of dreaming his own
jailbreak dreams about rock star futures (and girls hanging off every hand,
yeah, mostly the girls part as time went on once he figured out his voice had broken
around thirteen and that his off-key versions of the then current hits would
not get him noticed on the mandatory American
Bandstand ) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for him, us,
to be able to unlike Bart’s older brother, Prescott, call that stuff the music
that he, I came of age to. Although the echoes of that time still run through his,
our, minds as we recently proved yet again when we met in Boston at a ‘60s retro
jukebox bar and could lip-synch quote
chapter and verse One Night With You (Elvis version, including the
salacious One Night Of Sin original), Sweet Little Sixteen (Chuck
Berry, of course), Let’s Have A Party ( the much underrated Wanda
Jackson), Be-Bop-a-Lula (Gene Vincent in the great one hit wonder night
but what a hit), Bo Diddley (Bo, of course, who had long ago answered
the question of who put the rock in rock and roll), Peggy Sue (too soon
gone Buddy Holly) and a whole bunch more.
The music that Bart really called his
own though, and where we parted company since I could not abide, still can’t
abide, that whiny music dealing mainly with death, thwarted love, and death, or
did I say that, accompanied by, Jesus, banjos, mandos and harps, was the stuff
from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with his, our coming of
chronological, political and social age (the latter in the sense of
recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred,
out there beside us filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek
solidarity with which neither of us tied up with knots with seven seals connected
with until later after getting out of our dinky hometown of Carver and off into
the big cities and campus towns where just at that moment there were kindred by
the thousands with the same maladies and same desire to turn the world
upside down). By the way if you didn’t imbibe in the folk minute or were too
young what I mean is the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter
Family coming out of Clinch Mountain, Buell Kazell (from Harry Smith Anthology
of American Folk Music times), Jimmy Rodgers the Texas yodeler who found
fame at the same time as the Carters in old Podunk Bristol, Tennessee, the old
country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country collected by Child in
Cambridge in the 1850s and taken up in that town again one hundred years later
in some kind of act, conscious or unconscious, of historical affinity), the
blue grass music (which grabbed Bart by the throat when Everett Lally, a
college friend of his and member of the famed Lally Brothers blue grass band
let him in on his treasure trove of music from that genre which he tried to
interest me in one night before I cut him short although Everett was a cool
guy, very cool for a guy from the hills and hollows of Appalachia), and the
protest songs, songs against the madnesses of the times, nuclear war, brushfire
war in places like Vietnam, against Mister James Crow’s midnight ways, against
the barbaric death penalty, against a lot of what songwriter Malvina Reynolds
called the “ticky-tack little cookie-cutter box” existences all of us were
slated for if nothing else turned up by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom
Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. Bart said that while he was in college (Boston
College, the Jesuit school which was letting even heathen Protestants in as
long as the they did not try to start the Reformation, again) the latter songs (With God On Our Side, Blowin’ In The Wind,
The Time They Are A-Changing, I Ain’t Marching No More, Universal Soldier and
stuff like that) that drove a lot of his interest once he connected their work
with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the
Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which he has written plenty about elsewhere and need
not detain us her where he hung on poverty nights, meaning many nights).
Bart said a lot of the drive toward
folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution
that he kept hearing on his transistor radio during that early 1960s period
with pretty boy singers (Fabian, a bunch of guys named Bobby, the Everly Brothers)
and vapid young female consumer-driven female singer stuff (oh, Sandra Dee, Brenda
Lee, Patsy Cline, Leslie Gore say no more). I passed that time, which I agree
was a tough time in the rock genre that drove our desires, playing my classic
rock and roll records almost to death and worn down grooves and began to hear a
certain murmur from down South and out in Chicago with a blues beat that I
swear sounded like it came out of the backbeat of rock. Of course both of us being
nothing but prime examples of those alienated teenagers whom the high-brow
sociologists were fretting about, worried that we were heading toward nihilism
and not sure what to do about it, worried about our toward going to hell in a
handbasket, like our hurts and depressions were what ailed the candid world I
would not have characterized that trend that way for it would take a few
decades to see what was what. Then though the pretty boy and vapid girl music
just gave me a headache. Bart too although
like I said we split ways as he sought to seek out roots music that he kept
hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once he found a station
(accidently) which featured such folk music and got intrigued by the sounds.
Part of that search, my part but I
dragged Bart along a little when I played to his roots interests after he found
out that some of the country blues music would get some play on that folk music
station, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the
blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know, Chicago
blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down
south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were
brought up to Newport to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of
Son House the mad man preacher-sinner man, Skip James with that falsetto voice
singing out about how he would rather be the devil than to be that woman’s man,
Bukka White (sweating blood and salt on that National Steel on Aberdeen
Mississippi Woman and Panama Limited of course Creole Belle candy
man Mississippi John Hurt.
But those guys basically stayed in the
South went about their local business and vanished from big view until they
were “discovered” by folk aficionados who headed south looking for, well,
looking for roots, looking for something to hang onto and it took a
younger generation like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose
photograph graces this sketch, the late B.B. King, to move north, to follow the
northern star to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis going up
river) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away
just by playing like they too had made their own pacts with the devil. And made
a lot of angst and alienation just a shade more bearable.
B.B. King was by no means my first choice
among electrified bluesmen, Muddy Waters and in a big way Howlin’ Wolf got
closer to the nut for me, got closer to that feeling that the blues could set me
free when I was, well, blue, could keep me upright when some woman was two-timing
me, or worst was driving me crazy with her “do this and do that” just for the sake
of seeing who was in charge, could chase away some bad dreams when the deal
went down. Gave off an almost sanctified sense of time and place, after a hard
juke joint or Chicago tavern Saturday night and you showed up kind of scruffy
for church early Sunday morning hoping against hope that the service would be
short. B.B. might not have been my number one but he stretched a big part of
that arc. Praise be.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
In The Time Of The Two-Timing Woman-That Damn Two-Timing Woman-With A Red Cadillac And A Black Mustache In Mind
In The Time Of The Two-Timing Woman-That
Damn Two-Timing Woman-With Red Cadillac
And A Black Mustache In Mind
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Jack Sydney had a long good-bye memory,
a memory attached to some instant replays when some event, some name, some
place, hell, something brought him up quickly. Yeah, Jack had been cursed by
that long good-bye memory more than once to his sorrows none more so than when
a song did the dirty deed. It always amazed him how he had since he was a
growing up kid back in the 1950s, back when he was present at the creation,
present when the music of his generation, rock and roll, got blasted over the
airwaves (although he was a bit too young to fully appreciate that fact) that
some song would remind him of stuff he had buried in the back of his mind. Some
song like the one he had heard the other night when he was eating out with his
long-time companion, Emily Ross, at Diamond Jack’s Café over in Cambridge and
heard, of all things, Warren Smith’s version of A Red Cadillac And A Black Moustache which reminded him of long
good-bye memory Josie Davis, his first serious love back in Carver down in
Southeastern Massachusetts, down in the bogs, the cranberry bogs which for a
long time he was ashamed to admit he was from, hating the very name “bogger”
forever attached to the place even now when it is nothing but a bedroom
community for high tech people working up the road on U.S. 495 where he grew
up. But Jack has other business today,
long good-bye memory business.
Now the lyrics to the song are pretty
standard stuff for rock or popular music. A guy goes away for some reason, a gal
gets fretful, or some other wide-eyed guy sees a chance to make his play, or
both and there you have it. There you have it for the first guy who is now irrevocably
single, at least until he gets over the hurt or some soft fluff comes his way.
What gets varied up is how it happened, and why the guy went out of town and
why that gal could not stay true. That’s what was eating at Jack that night,
and Emily who knew the story of Josie cold since she had been with Jack a
number of years before when she had heard it in his company the first time and so
she knew he would be morose about the damn thing, probably have him down for a
few days. But she was that soft fluff way about Jack and that too was that.
Here’s why Emily had that feeling about
her fate for the next few days. Jack had grown up in “bogger” family in his
growing up town of Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston. That
derisive term “bogger” reflecting the part of the town’s population wedded to
the cranberry bogs for which it was then famous, the derisive part being that
the boggers were the working poor of the town mainly living in the town’s
“projects” (public housing) in the rough-hewn neighborhoods adjoining the vast
cranberry plantations. So no question that Jack was “from hunger” and like
Josie whom he had met at a school dance during sophomore year at old Carver High
(now meshed in with a regional school), they had done the twist, the dance,
together and wound up dancing the last chance last dance together, Sam Cooke’s You Send Me and from then on they were
an “item” (and an item of school “lav” gossip since Jack was so-so looking but
Josie was a beauty all dark-eyed, full-breasted, nice figure, and shining blues
eyes so everybody assumed that Jack had some other quality, some “doing the do”
quality from the scuttle-bud that escaped the girls who had turned Jack down
and the guys who had ogled Josie. In the case they were “doing the do” after
the summer of sophomore year but kept very quiet about it and, according to
Josie later when she confided in a girlfriend Jack had no special quality that
love-making way but she loved him anyway)
So they went through high school like a
lot of kids went through high school in the early 1960s before the great
cultural break-out that was forming out in some quarters then, Cambridge, Manhattan,
Grosse Point, Ann Arbor, Madison, Denver (a little) L.A. and always, always Frisco
town, but not Carver, Christ not Carver, and would blossom later in the decade.
The “norm” in Carver, then strictly a working-class town was high school
graduation, usually, get married, have kids, maybe a little house a little
bigger than the one you grew up in and that was that (if you were not a bogger
then you worked the shipyards, skilled labor work mostly, about ten miles away,
that occupation putting you significantly ahead of the lowly boggers). Jack,
although not scholar, could work with his hands and so got a job at the Hingham
shipyard as a welder. With that in hand he and Josie had planned to get married
in a couple of years after high school when they had saved up enough from his
job and hers as a bank clerk.
Then the other shoe dropped. The curse
of Jack’s generation landed on his head, he was drafted, drafted with the damn
war in Vietnam heating up to a froth, so he was sure to go and he was a little
afraid of that. In places like Carver then, and all through the war, probably
now too if they still had a draft if you were called you went (in places like
Nashua, New Hampshire, Daly City, California, the Bronx in New York City,
Detroit, you went, none of the draft-dodging stuff or running away to Canada or
someplace). And so Jack went, went with doubts but went, got his regulation
bald haircut at Army Basic down at Fort Dix, then advanced infantry training at
Fort Benning, and then with a month’s leave order to report to Fort Lewis in
Washington for transport to Vietnam.
Naturally nobody was happy about Jack’s
going, not with the casualty figures growing higher each week despite all the
blah, blah from Saigon headquarters and the White House, especially the White
House which seemed to be in cloud cuckoo land about the prospects of victory, but
nobody thought to challenge anything and naturally as well Josie swore to be
true, would be waiting for him with open arms when he got home and they could
proceed with their lives.
That rather commonplace plan was in
effect for the first six months Jack was in Vietnam, getting weekly letters
from Josie which boosted him up, and then the letters stopped. Worse, his
letters to her would be returned as “not at address.” Jack then wrote to his
mother asking her to find out what had happened to Josie, was she sick or
something. Asked his friends more frantically what had happened. No Josie,
gone.
The way the story from here got pieced
together from his mother’s, his friends’ efforts then and later when he came
back to the “real” world Jack’s own investigation was that Josie had run off to
parts unknown with a guy, a guy from Cohasset, a guy named Jason Warren although
that name meant nothing to Jack and it could have been any name attached to Josie’s
fate, who seemed to have money and a car. It seemed that Josie was getting
bored just sitting at home waiting for Jack, or her own other shoe to fall if
Jack was killed and their lives together were to be cut short and when asked by
her girlfriend, Nancy Jackson, to go to the Surf Ballroom down in Hull to hear
a local rock and roll cover band she agreed. There she met this guy Jason who
was good-looking, dressed well (Jack was careless in his dress) and had one dark
green new Mustang all the rage then and wound up (secretly) meeting him places
all along the South Shore of Boston, including times she was writing to Jack
about all their future plans together.
Then one day Josie just disappeared,
told her parents she was heading west to meet Jack when he came back home to
America. Which should have set alarm bells off although given the times perhaps
not since everybody who had bus fare, train fare, expensive plane fare or even
a thumb was heading west to see what the new dispensation was all about but Josie
had not exhibited much interest in that counter-cultural movement or at least
she said noting remarkable about it. The alarm part being that Jack was not due
to get back to the “real” world for five months when she left. Josie did sent
one postcard from saying she was fine, had met a man and was going off with him
for a “new” life away from damn Carver. After that nothing. Nada. Jack tried
and tried to find her trail to no avail, tried to work the Jason angle but his
parents were as baffled as he was about what happened, didn’t know he had a steady
girl since he had brought no one to the house before he left around the same time
as Josie. Saved some dough and about a year after he got back and still
perplexed and angry he hired a detective in Denver to see if there were any
leads to follow. The only evidence was that she had maybe, maybe, been in a
commune around Boulder for a time but she was travelling alone then, had if it
was her gone the whole hippie road, including some serious drug use given what
one commune member said was her physical condition by then. And she was never
heard from again. (Neither was Jason, according to his anguished family
when Jack would periodically check in.)
Jack was shattered for a long time and
then one day he went into a record shop to buy a Jefferson Airplane album and
saw a 45 RPM Sun Record copy of Warren Smith’s Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache and remembering the lyrics
purchased it. Played it over and over again for a long time. After a while he
got over the loss of Josie, or though he had. Had even recently looked on
Facebook to see if he could any trace of her. Emily was hoping that he would,
hoping hard for some word. And you wonder why Jack Sydney flinches every time
he hears that song. You would too if you were in his shoes.
I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind
I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind
They say that the blues, you know, the quintessential black musical contribution to the American songbook along with first cousin jazz that breaks you out of your depression about whatever ails you or the world, was formed down in the Mississippi muds, down in some sweat-drenched bayou, down in some woody hollow all near Mister’s plantation, mill, or store. Well they might be right in a way about how it all started in America as a coded response to Mister’s, Master’s, Captain’s wicked perverse ways back in slavery times, later back in Mister James Crow times (now too but in a different code, but the same old Mister do this and not that, do that but not this just like when old James ran the code). I do believe however they are off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows (those who survived the horrendous middle passage without being swallowed up by the unfriendly. Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp civilizations when Mister’s forbears were wondering what the hell a spoon was for when placed in their dirty clenched fingers, still wondered later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.
Uprooted you hear but somehow that beat, that tah, tat, tah, tah, tat, tah played on some stretched string tightened against some cabin post by young black boys kept Africa home alive. Kept it alive while women, mothers, grandmothers and once in a while despite the hard conditions some great-grandmother who nursed and taught the little ones the old home beat, made them keep the thing alive. Kept alive too Mister’s forced on them religion strange as it was, kept the low branch spirituals that mixed with blues alive in plain wood churches but kept it alive. So a few generations back black men took all that sweat, anger, angst, humiliation, and among themselves “spoke” blues on juke joint no electricity Saturday nights and sang high collar blues come Sunday morning plain wood church time. Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guys who went to their graves undiscovered in the sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals. Some sisters like Odetta, big-voiced, who made lots of funny duck searching for roots white college students mainly marvel that they had heard some ancient Nubian Queen, some deep-voiced Mother Africa calling them back to the cradle of civilization.
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