When Rockabilly Rocked The Be-Bop 1950s Night-With Rock And Roll Ruby In Mind

When Rockabilly Rocked The Be-Bop 1950s Night-With Rock And Roll Ruby In Mind  

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

 

Hey, blame it on Warren Smith and a freshly heard Rock and Roll Ruby via YouTube automatic retro magic. Yeah, Ruby with her dancing slippers on and that beat in her head that she has no way to satisfy except to head out Tex’s Rib House way with Johnny Blaze and over beer and ribs, not necessarily in that order, listen to Tex’s jukebox and when the night air got filmy then jump onto that dance floor and be-bop some moves to beat the band. See Ruby had it bad, had whatever unhappiness or angst that was driving her just then out of control but she had to play it out, get it out of her system. And Johnny was only too proud, at first, to let Ruby do her thing, let Ruby dance to the beat and he could see envy in every gal’s eyes (and lust in every guy’s-with or without a date)  when she moved her dancing slipper feet. Those nights, at first, meant she would come across with a little something for Johnny after Tex’s closed and they headed to Red Rock for exercise of a different kind. Johnny didn’t even mind when one night Ruby took those slippers off and started dancing on the tables and later on top of the bar. Yeah, she came across, came across big time down at old Red Rock, made his ‘49 Hudson jump that night. Then something happened, nothing bad if you thought about it and had had some patience which Johnny had only in short supply. Ruby started going to Tex’s by herself, started dancing after a couple of beers and a few quarters in the jukebox, not looking for company either, Johnny would have raised hell over that but Johnny took a distant second place for long enough for him to see the writing on the wall, see it easier when Louella came sidling up to his car in school one day. Yeah, put Warren Smith down as a candidate, no question.    

 

Hell, blame it on Sonny Burgess burning up the world with Red-headed Woman, yah, now that I think of it blame it on him if you had something going with Ruby, or just thought Warren Smith was cute, too cute to slam. Yeah, Sonny got into something he couldn’t handle, caught a flash red-head, caught Rita. But unlike Ruby who after all was just another high school girl working out her teen angst problems on the dance floor, trying to make her body take the beat and put her in paradise. Rita, well, Rita if you don’t want to be too kind was a tramp, worked the dark light tables at Johnny Dee’s, loved to dance and drink, drink an ocean of whatever you wanted to pay for-beer to whiskey and back. Rita would show you that good time just like Ruby, although nothing as kids’ stuff as the back seat of a ’49 Hudson but under silky sheets (or at least clean linens) at the Last Change Motel (she had an arrangement with the manager there so if you wanted at her, and that red-head and slender snow-white body said you did then the Last Chance was where you went around the world). Yeah Rita would do you fine but damn she would eat up your whole paycheck with her wanting ways, with her oceans of booze appetites. The lonesome cowboys of the world found that out, Sonny Boy found that out quick, when he had a few nights dancing up a storm, drinking the oceans, and working the sheets at the Last Chance, found it out the hard way when he had no dough to bring home to the wife and three kids. Yeah, circle Sonny’s name if you want to, nobody will deny you your right.               

 

Hell, even put a circle around a mad dog middle of the night discussion with kindred Peter Paul Markin rekindled from childhood (or rather budding teen-hood) about who was who in the be-bop rock and roll firmament in the mid-1950s.That discussion held out in Pacifica one night when we heading south to Big Sur in Captain Crunch’s converted yellow brick road school bus which Markin had been on for a while in Frisco. I had hitched out there the summer of 1967 to see what was going on, going on with this summer of love business and run into the bus when it was parked in a small park on Russian Hill and I went up and innocently, well maybe not so innocently, for a joint and Markin was the guy I asked who produced a huge blunt in about twelve seconds. So I stayed with the bus all summer before heading back to hometown Olde Saco up in Maine in order to prepare to enter the state university that fall (in order to keep my ass out of the draft, out of the Army which a student deferment granted me although I had been sorely tempted to stay in the West and taken my chances. Markin had stayed out West rather than going back for junior year at Boston University and wound up facing the draft and Vietnam the next year  so I think I made the right decision).  

 

That Pacifica night, stoned out of our minds we had heard on the Captain’s state of the art stereo system (with its own generator system working off the bus battery or something very neat we all thought) Carl Perkin’s Blue Suede Shoes, although Markin later insisted that it was Elvis on the speakers and we got into how we went crazy for that stuff when we heard it even though we were about ten years old at the time. He, as was his habit, argued that some guy named Jimmy Smith had recorded the first rockabilly record at Sam Phillips’ Sun Record studio, Rocking Shakedown, and I, as was my habit then in order not to get gobbled up by Markin’s two thousand at-hand even when stoned facts had argued for Big Red Sims’ Boulder Break-down. Memories of that night had got me thinking about the whole genre and thus this little sketch. (Markin proved right that night, as he did many times before Vietnam and the drugs made him weird which led to his tragic fate a few years later down in Sonora, Mexico, when I later found out that Jimmy Smith had recorded that song, had made it a hit, a one-record wonder hit and so you have it).          

 

Damn, blame it Warren Smith, Sonny Burgess, Markin, or on the retro-fueled Stray Cats but under no circumstances blame it on me for lighting up cyberspace with a bag full of rockabilly gumbo.       

 

The last time that I discussed rockabilly music in this space was a couple of years ago when I was mulling over the work of artists like Elvis, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, when they were young and hungry, from hunger really, and fed into our jailbreak hunger after years of listening to parent Sinatra, Como, Page and the Ink Spots ad infinitum, who got their start at Sam Phillips’ famed Sun Records studio in Memphis. Part of the reason for those thoughts was my effort to trace the roots of rock and roll, the music of my coming of age, and that of my generation, the generation of ’68. Clearly rockabilly was, along with country and city blues from the likes of Robert Johnson, Skip James , Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and pre-Tina Ike Turner (think Rocket 88 among other be-bop stuff) and rhythm and blues from the likes of Big Joe Turner (think, big think and don’t spare anything, Shake, Rattle and Roll) a part of that formative process. The question then, and the question once again today, is which strand dominated the push to rock and roll, if one strand in fact did dominate.

 

I have gone back and forth on that question over the years. That couple of years ago mentioned above I was clearly under the influence of Big Joe Turner and Howlin’ Wolf and so I took every opportunity to stress the bluesy nature of rock. Recently though I have been listening, and listening very intently, to early Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis and I am hearing more of that be-bop rockabilly rhythm flowing into the rock night. Let me give a comparison. A ton of people have done Big Joe Turner’s classic rhythm and bluish Shake, Rattle, and Roll, including Bill Haley, Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee. When I listen to that song as performed in their more rockabilly style those versions seem closer to what evolved into rock. So for today, and today only, yes Big Joe is the big daddy, max daddy father of rock but Elvis, Jerry Lee, and Carl are the very pushy sons.

 

And that brings us to the treasure trove of rockabilly music that I think you should listen to, the stuff the big boys came and gave us, gave us at all back forty barns dances, high school last chance dances, and country fair jamborees, the stuff the big boys listened to too to get an idea or two, and maybe helped to create.  I have already done enough writing in praise of the work of Sam Phillips and Sun Records to bring that good old boy rockabilly sound out of the white southern countryside. I noted that for the most part those who succeeded in rockabilly in say 1954, or 55 had to move on to rock to stay current with the youth wave (the disposable income/allowance post- World War II youth wave, mainly girls, who bought those luscious 45 RPM records and put those nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes and, and, sometimes, pretty please sometimes, let the likes of  cash-lite Josh Breslin up in Olde Saco and P.P. Markin in North Adamsville help them make their selections, okay) and so the rockabilly sound was somewhat transient except for those who consciously decided to stay with that sound.

 

The best example of that, other than those mentioned above, is Red Hot by Bill Riley and His Little Green Men, an extremely hot example by the way. If you listen to his other later material it stays very much in that rockabilly vein. In contrast, take High School Confidential by Jerry Lee Lewis. Jerry Lee might have started out in rockabilly down in that Cajun mishmash Louisiana swamp but this number (and others) is nothing but the heart and soul of rock (and a song, by the way, we all prayed would be played at our junior high school dances to get things, you know what things, going). Case closed.

 

Other stick-outs included Ooby Dooby, Roy Orbison (although he has a ton of better songs later like Moving On); Blue Suede Shoes (the teeth-cutting, max daddy of rockabilly songs), Carl Perkins; Susie-Q (right at that place where rockabilly and blues meet to form rock and a classic come hither song), Dale Hawkins; Party Doll (another great junior high school dance song), Buddy Knox;  Come On, Let’s Go (bringing just a touch of Tex-Mex into the rockabilly mix), Ritchie Valens; and, the national anthem, Summertime Blues by the great and underrated Eddie Cochran.  Enough said  

Present At The Creation-With Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock In Mind

Present At The Creation-With Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock In Mind

Deep in the dark red scare Cold War night a small breeze was coming to the land. That dark red scare Cold War night was still brewing even after Uncle Joe fell down in his Red Square drunken stupor one night in 1953 and never came back, 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, that each and every one of her charges should come that thundering god-awful air raid siren duck, quickly and quietly, under his or her desk and then place his or her hands, also quickly and quietly, one over the other on the top of his or her head. Yeah that was what the fresh breeze was up against. Some serious disquiet in the land

Maybe nobody saw the breeze coming although the more I think about the matter somebody, some bodies knew something, not those supposedly in the know about such fresh breeze times, those who are supposed to catch the breezes before they move beyond their power to curtail them. But guys like my friend Bart Webber’s older brother Franklin and his friends, Benny and Jimmy, who were  playing some strange beat rhythm and blues, rockabilly, stuff they called rock and roll up in his room, up his room like some sainted mad monks.

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 who dug the beat, the guys eulogized by Norman Mailer or all about the 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. Wasn’t all about the fellahin of this good green earth, of all descriptions, who whiled away the nights searching their radio dials for something that that they could swing to while reefer high or codeine low. It was too about proper well-dressed middle class kids who were trying to break out of the cookie-cutter existence they found themselves in so it wasn’t always who you might suspect that got hip, got that back-beat and those piano riffs etched into their brains.

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 not just by mad man poet Yeats and his Easter, 1916 mind proclaiming a terrible beauty is born, and the brethren, us, were waiting, waiting like we had been waiting all our short spell lives.

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 picked up from when he and the boys were “from hunger,” playing for coffee and crullers on the low life circuit in back alley bars,  a guy 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 in other forms, 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 with two left feet who 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 chance  last 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 that 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 the rage 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.   

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. 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.  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 corners and exploring the mysteries of the universe, or at least of some 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 where teens, boys and girls, mixed and matched in the drive-in movie night.             

Yeah, we were just a little too young for all that even if we can legitimately claim to have been present at the creation. But we would catch up, catch up with a vengeance.

Down In The Delta Muds-With County Blues Man Son House In Mind

Down In The Delta Muds-With County Blues Man Son House In Mind

By Jack Callahan

No question the country blues guys, and here I am talking about the guys because you know down in the Mister James Crow South where the blues came into royalty out of the sweats of Mister’s planation, out of the Saturday night juke joint sweats of another kind, it was the guys who bore the brunt of the blues tradition although the blues women, your Bessie and a ton of other Smiths, Memphis Minnie, Sweet Maybelline, Little Ida Simms got the big crowds in the cities and on the circuit, carried a ton of baggage with them. Sang of those temptations until their voices got sore. Talked code words about Captain this and Mister that and their sweated suns which they would not utter short of a strange fruit tree, talked about a two-timing woman who you just spent your last dime on going off with your best friend, talked about taking the measure of that best friend out of his hide if he ever caught up with him, or her, talked being on the low-down, the old style low-down, talked about Mister’s prison too his James Crow prisons all wrapped up in a bow.

 

 

The guys who came out of the muds, out of that silted delta mud oozed out of the south-flowing Big Muddy flowing to the sunless seas, the guys who made the first “race records” that got recorded back in the 1920s, maybe slightly earlier and who to a man had sorrow stories, or created sorrow. Yeah down in the muds a blues guy like Son House did every kind of thing to keep himself afloat, and got the miseries too. Of course it always, always involved, and this is no kidding in his case women, booze, a jack-roll fight over some woman or the thought of some woman, and fighting off the devil in horror of the lord in the sweated sulky night.   

Now I would have taken all of this story-telling about wine, women and song with the grain of salt, would have dismissed it out of hand like a lot of stuff you hear in the urban legend night about stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with cities, would have brought it down to the level of some old-timer legend except I actually saw this incident I want to tell you about. Want to tell you about Son’s burden, about that fight with the devil that he lost more than won happen when I was a kid, a kid back in the 1960s and I got caught up with the big folk explosion that carried a lot of us along who were looking for roots music and if the blues, the muddy Delta blues ain’t roots music then nothing in America is. 

Of course the day to day folk stuff, the hanging out at coffeehouses, hanging out at midnight Hayes-Bickford where for the price of a cup of dissolute coffee you could listen to guys and gals pound their energies out to the winos and weirdos who populated the place checking out the next big thing as he or she tried to hone her art was over in Harvard Square in Cambridge, one of Meccas. But if you wanted to immerse yourself in the bigger picture then you had to head for Newport down in Rhode Island about fifty miles from where I grew up in Carver. And the bigger picture in say 1962, 1963 was the “discovery” of a lot of old-time country blues guys by folk aficionados who headed South looking for those damn roots that they would hear about when some white guys like Dave Van Ronk or Geoff Muldaur would play something they heard from somebody who had “gone South” to dig it out. In the process finding these old-time guys that guys like Harry Smith and the Lomaxes, father and son, had recorded early on and who then fell under the radar. And while they had fallen under the radar some of them, the younger ones who had stayed in the South and had not gone to Detroit or Chicago with the migration, were still very much alive. Not only alive but with some skills still left and they were brought up to Newport to thrill the young urban mainly college students who were crazy for the blues they had heard on records or like I said the folk performers who were doing covers of their work. There were some very famous sessions where guys like Son House, Bukka White, Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt would, sweating pouring out of them with those ancient National steel guitars, duel among themselves for the honor of being the king of the country blues. And those sessions were great, a great karmic energy time which you can actually still see on YouTube if you have the inclination.

But there was also a session that I attended, kind of fell into when I heard that one of the younger guys who had headed north and got wrapped up in the electric blues, Howlin’ Wolf, was playing in one of the small studios set aside to produce stuff with some sidemen and the idea was they would record the stuff live and see what happened. Well there were maybe twelve or fifteen of us, people kept coming in and out so an exact number was hard to put a finger except a couple of guys sitting there in awe (beside me) were James Montgomery and Big Bill Timmons, when Wolf got his head of steam up to do How Many More Years practically eating the harmonica on the piece.

Wolf was a perfectionist, a serious professional musician, and something in the performance did not sit well with him so he wanted a retake. Just as they started up again, Smokey Jim as it turned out blowing a big high white note sexy sax to key the thing, Son House came walking in a little raggedy, a sway that did not go with sobriety, and the deep red of his eyes betrayed him. Whiskey drunk, whiskey sorrows for sure. He started to sing along slightly off-kilter in that measured moaning voice of his when he was sinning and then Wolf stopped himself in his tracks and started berating the legendary bluesman (legendary to all our young white urban mostly student devotees eyes) for being nothing but a worn out drunk who needed to get the hell out of the room if he knew what was good for him. Started talking some Booker T. race pride stuff way before Malcolm came fiercely on our horizons (we were still King boys and girls then in one person, one vote days). Some guy, some friend of Wolf’s came and escorted him out.  Gave him the boot really.

What did we know of that Son House whose Dead Letter Blues was all the craze in Cambridge who had had a life-long struggle with booze, that it had at one point killed his career. Here’s the big point though one time in the Village a couple of years later he told us, red in the eye that night too that he had had a life-long struggle with the devil he called it, the booze, and the devil won more often than not. Said it more in sorrow that anger although he was just rambling along about his life, about the women who had left him, some two-timing, some tired of the beatings, some just tired of the smell of booze, about the preacher man declaiming in front of his congregation that rolled their eyes when he would talk about this struggle between good and evil. And his story wasn’t that unusual as we started getting the background of these guys. James Crow, woman, booze, the Captain, the Mister, some back alley street-fighting, name it.  Yeah, they carried some serious baggage.                

*****In The Beginning Was... The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

*****In The Beginning Was... The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

 

Who knows how it happened, how the jug bug craze got started in the folk minute of the 1960s, maybe it happened just like in the 1920s and early 1930s when “jug” got a boost by the likes of the Memphis Jug Band, The Mississippi Sheiks, and about twelve other state-named Sheik groupings using home-made weapons, uh, instruments, picked up from here and there, a jug here, a triangle there, fashion a kazoo of wood or grab a metal one at Woolworth's 5&10 there (got you on that one folkies, right, but they along with Sears & Roebuck's catalogue and maybe Marshall Fields' too sold all manner of musical instruments and before the folk boom of the 1960s when with disposable income [read: allowances and parents of means ready to indulge a few fantasies through their kids] which allowed kids to buy instruments from music stores a lot of guys, guys like Hobart Smith, Homer Jones and Matthew Arnold got their instruments handed down to them or some desperate mother or father like Guy Davis,' Son House's, Cliff Mathers', and Slim Parsons' ordered straight from the catalogue not the finest instruments but those guys spoke highly of their first store-bought instruments even when they could afford better when they made their marks), pluck a worn out grandmother's washtub there and come up with some pretty interesting sounds. Yeah, once you listen to the old stuff on YouTube these days where the Memphis Jug Band has a whole video file devoted to their stuff, same with a lot of the others, you could see where that period might have been the start of the big first wave.

Maybe though back in the 1960s somebody, a few musicians, got together and figured here was something that folk-crazed kids, a very specific demographic not to be confused with all of the generation of ’68 post-war baby boomers coming of age rock and roll jail break-out but those who were sick unto death of the vanilla rock and roll that was being passed out about 1960 or so, get this, music that more than one mother, including my mother, thought was “nice” and that was the kiss of death to that kind of music after the death of classic Elvis/Chuck/Bo/Jerry Lee rock for a while before the Brits came over the pond to stir things up and the West Coast acid-eaters ate enough of the drug to sink the Golden Gate Bridge or at least the park and headed east in the Second Coming of rock and roll (not to be confused with the Christian second coming which would signify the end of the world as we know it or with Yeats' mystical version with the seven-headed dragon staring you in the face so stay away from those who want to travel that route) so they started tinkering. Maybe, and remember the folk milieu perhaps more widely that the rock milieu was very literate, was very into knowing about roots and genesis and where things fit in (including where they, the folkies who also a vision about a kinder, gentler world all mixed in until heads got busted in goddam Mississippi goddam, got their heads busted on Fifth Avenue in NYC for calling for an armed truce to the Vietnam War, got their heads busted come May Day 1971 when all the evil spirits in the world rose to bust a certain kind of dream) somebody in the quickly forming and changing bands looked up some songs in the album archives at the library, or, more likely from what later anecdotal evidence had to say about the matter, found some gem in some record store, maybe a store like Sandy’s over between Harvard and Central Squares in Cambridge who had all kinds of eclectic stuff if you had the time and wherewithal to shuffle through the bins. Institutions like Sandy's and a lot of towns had such oases even some unknown name ones like Larry's in Portland, Maine and Sukie's out in Eire, Pennsylvania if you can believe that sustained many for hours back then in the cusp of the 1960s folk revival when there were record stores on almost every corner in places like Harvard Square and the Village in the East you could find some gems if you searched long enough and maybe found some old moth-eaten three volume set Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and came up with The Memphis Jug Band and K.C. Moan or the Sheiks doing Rent Man Blues, maybe Furry Lewis on Kassie Jones (although sometimes the search was barren or, maybe worse, something second hand by Miss Patti Page singing about Cape Cod Bay all moony for the parents or try to hustle our young emotions but traipsing a dog in front of us, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing about sixteen tons, tons of coal and breaking your back too, or good god, some country bumpkin George Jones thing like I couldn't even give you a title for stared you in the face).

From there they, the jug masters of the revival, found the Cannon’s Stompers, the Mississippi Sheiks or the Memphis Jug Band, could be the way to prosper by going back to those days if they kept the arrangements simple, since that was what allowed the jug bands to prosper in the commercial markets of those days, keep the melody so simple that every working stiff and every forlorn housewife had the tune coming out of the sides of their brains and that was that. See, everybody then was looking for roots, American music roots, old country roots, roots of some ancient thoughts of a democratic America before the robber barons and their progeny grabbed everything with every hand they had on their fetid bodies. Let’s make it simple, something that was not death-smeared we-are- going-to-die-tomorrow if the Ruskkies go over the top red scare bomb shelter Cold War night that we were trying to shake and take our chances, stake our lives that there was something better to do that wait for the foreordained end.

And that wide awake search was no accident, at least from the oral history evidence I have held from those who came of age with me in that time after having grown up with rock and roll and found in that minute that genre wanting.  Some went reaching South to the homeland of much roots music, since those who were left behind or decided out of ennui or sloth to stay put kept up the old country British Isles Child ballad stuff (their own spin on the stuff not Child’s Brattle Street Brahmin rarified collection stuff) and found some grizzled old geezers like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, Homer Jones, Reverend Jack Robinson and the like, who had made small names for themselves in the 1920s when labels like RCA and Paramount went out looking for talent in the hinterlands.

So there was history there, certainly for the individual members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Jim, Geoff Mulduar, Mel Lymon, Maria Muldaur, Fritz Richmond , the most famous and long-lasting of the 1960s jug groupings, all well-versed in many aspects of the American Songbook (hell, I would say so, say they were well-versed, even old tacky Tin Pan Alley Irving Berlin, smooth Cole Porter and the saucy Gershwin Brothers got a hearing from them and if they could simple those damn complicated Tin Pan Alley melodies they took a shot at those as well), history there for the taking. All they needed was a jug, a good old boy homemade corn liquor jug giving the best sound but maybe some down in the cellar grandpa jug from the old days of Ball jars and crockery, a found washtub grandma used to use before she got that electric washer from the old garage where she put it against a rainy day when she might have to use it again when hard times came again as they usually did, a washboard found  in that same location, a triangle from somewhere, a kazoo from the music store, some fiddle, a guitar, throw in  a tambourine for Maria and so they were off, off to conquer places like Harvard Square, like the Village, like almost any place in the Bay area within the sound of the bay.

And for a while the band did conquer, picking up other stuff chimes, more exotic kazoos, harmonicas, what the heck, even up-graded guitars and they made great music, great entertainment music, not heavy with social messages but just evoking those long lost spirits from the 1920s when jug music would sustain a crowd on a Saturday night. Made some stuff up as they went along, or better, made old stuff their own like Washington At Valley Forge, Bumble Bee, Sweet Sue from Paul Whitman and plenty of on the edge Scotty Fitzgerald Jazz Age stuff that got people moving and forgetting their blues. Here is the beauty of it unlike most of the 1920s first wave stuff which was confined to records and radio listening, a lot of the rarer stuff now long gone lost, you can see the Kweskin Jug Band back in the day on YouTube and see the kind of energy which they produced when they were in high form (music that they, Jim and Geoff anyway, still give high energy to when they occasionally appear together in places like Club Passim in Harvard Square these days). Yeah, in the beginning was the jug… 

*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Updated-September 2015  

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).

That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.

I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.

At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.

At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.

Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015).  Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).   

At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming (expected in the Winter, 2016) . A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere.

 

On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.) 

[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea

Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27^th birthday in December with a rally (as we did this past December for her 28^th birthday).

More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)

Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.     

We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.

After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.              

 
  

From The “Brothers Under The Bridge” Series-“The Sign Of The Easy Rider”

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin:

In the first installment of this series of sketches space provided courtesy of my old 1960s yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod, that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this sketch from 1979 fits this description, had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind.

Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, as is the case here with Doug Powers , who went way out of his way to avoid talking much about ‘Nam, or about how he wound up in the hobo camps in the late 1970s after heading west from Ohio in the early 1970s, but who wanted to talk about his biker friend from Maine, not a Hell’s Angel-type biker just a guy who liked to ride, ride free, a guy who had gotten him (and a few other guys too) through the ‘Nam hellhole, Jeff Crawford, and about his life on the road, on the biker road, and of his sorry, beautiful life ( Jeff’s forever expression). I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Jeff’s sign was that of the easy rider.
*********
Additional comment for this sketch:

Usually when a guy told me a story he was either telling his own story, or that of somebody who he had first-hand knowledge about. Stuff that could be readily verified, or at least could be checked out in some detail. Doug Powers was drying out in a Sally shelter in San Diego in late 1976 when he saw the news on the shelter television that Jeff had made his last ride. All the details about the guy fit,‘Nam veteran, Norton bike, from Maine, living up in Albany, suspected drug smuggler, about 30 years old and so once he got clean (for a while) he drifted north to check up on what had happened to his old amigo. So this is the way Doug Powers told me the story, Jeff’s story, the story of his big ride, the way he got it from Little Peach, Jeff’s last sweet mama and the one who was with him on that journey, told him the road stuff, straight up, so some of stuff probably has the old hearsay problem, although later when he checked up, checked against stuff that he knew about Jeff from ‘Nam days and after it held up well enough. Held up well enough when I checked too.

This Little Peach, by the way, this sweet mama easy rider woman of Jeff’s whom he met at Ginny’s Coffee Shop in Albany, California where he hung out for breakfast, where she was serving them off the arm, was at the time of her telling just returning to school at San Francisco State where she was an excellent student if that helps any in making the story more trustworthy. It’s worth mentioning too that like a lot of us then Little Peach was young, restless, working, going to school, living at home with mother, no boyfriend to speak of, a little unlucky in previous affairs and so when she saw Jeff, a little older which she liked, not a rough guy from appearances, seemingly a free spirit with that Norton, once he started giving her a look, starting paying attention to her, started making his moves she was ready, ready to jail-break, to ready to be his sweet mama, no regrets.
*********
He, the ghost of… Peter Fonda he, Captain America he , Dennis Hooper, Billy The Kid he, Hunter Thompson he, Doctor Gonzo on an Indian he, James Ardie he, Vincent Black Lightning he, hell, Sonny Barger or one of one hundred grunge, nasty mothers keep your daughters indoors under lock and key Hell's Angels brethren he (as if that would help, help once she, the daughter, saw that shiny silver sleek Indian , Harley, Vincent, name it, whatever by and did some fancy footwork midnight creep out that unlocked suburban death house ranchero house back door to meet with that power), Jeff Crawford he, Norton he, just wanted to drive down that late night Pacific coast highway. Where else in the American world could you have the hair-raising blown warm wind at your back and the sometimes hard-hearted, but mainly user-friendly, ocean at your right. Somehow Maine icy stretch Ellsworth Point did not make its case against that scenario. He knew those forlorn streets and back roads like the back of his hand but there was no going back, and no reason to since his divorce and his Ma dying.

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

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

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

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

A few more days delay too, they ran into rain down around Big Sur, pouring rain and Little Peach moaned about it and they had to shack up in a motel for those few days, days looking at that fierce ocean. She loved it, had never been that far south but to him just more delay. After those mishaps, he then made his first serious mistake, short on funds he decided to rob a liquor store in Paseo Robles, the nearest town big enough to have a liquor store large enough to rob. Hell, he had not decided to do that deed (never telling Little Peach who would have cried bloody hell about it), he was hard-wired compelled to make that decision, hard –wired by his whole sorry, beautiful life, his father (a drunk) then mother (none too stable, a product of those too close Maine family relationships and those long, bad ass Maine winter nights) left him Maine dumped, his whore first wife from over in Richmond cheating on him with every blue jean guy in town while he was in ‘Nam, his very real ‘Nam pain (while saving Brad’s, metaphor Brad’s city boy, college boy sorry ass when Mister Charlie decided, probably hard-wired too to come prove who was boss of the night), and, a little his dope habit (picked up courtesy of ‘Nam too, he was strictly always a whisky and beer man before). Little Peach, gentle in some previous unknown, unknown to him, womanly ways, especially for her age, no question, and the eternal ocean, gentle, when it co-operated, his only rays.

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

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

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

****The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-The Cause That Passes Through The Prison Walls-With The Old International Labor Defense in Mind

****The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-The Cause That Passes Through The Prison Walls-With The Old International Labor Defense in Mind   

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Sam Eaton had to laugh when he heard the news, the news live and in person on cable news by the current Attorney-General of the United States (no names needed since this is the position of every one of those guys, and now gals when primed by curious reporters who if they have done their homework already know the answer) that there are “no political prisoners in the United States prison systems, certainly not the federal systems and as far as is known not in the states either.” And on some level, not on the level of candid truth but some level lower than that, the A-G in question (and all previous A-Gs) is right since every prisoner, every political prisoner is behind bars for some “crime” against society’s norms. Take the case of Chelsea Manning (known until her thirty-five year sentencing to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas for multiple conviction against military and federal law as Bradley Manning thereafter as Chelsea in case there is any confusion about who we are talking about) which was the case the A-G in question was referring to in that newspeak commentary. Private Manning, is the heroic Army soldier who blew the whistle to Wiki-leaks on the atrocities committed by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan and the duplicity of the Hillary Clinton-run State Department even before Benghazi. The charges against Chelsea  were “crimes,” you know “stealing” government files and “committing” acts of espionage but her motivation had nothing to do with crime, at least crimes that working people and leftists need worry about. Her leaks were a breath of fresh air in counter-point to the “slam-dunk’ mentality that has pervaded both the Bush II and Obama administrations. But Chelsea is nevertheless a political prisoner with a capital “P.”         

 

Sam had to laugh again about the nefarious and spurious doing of the American justice machine (thoughts on that “machine” bringing to Sam’s mind the words of sardonic comic Lenny Bruce, a man not unfamiliar with that system and in his own way a political prisoner as well about how “in the hall of justice the only justice is in the halls-nicely said, Brother, nicely said) when a few nights after this newscast he was sitting in Jack’s, the long-time radical hang-out bar in Harvard Square which he frequented, talking to Ralph Morris who had come to town on one of his periodic visits from his home in Troy, New York about what he had heard that other night. And this was not mere idle talk between that pair because the whole Easton-Morris friendship had its start when they were political prisoners of a sort back on May Day 1971 when they had met on the floor of RFK Stadium in Washington for the “crime” of disorderly conduct and creating a public nuisance when they and thousands of others tried to shut down the American government if it did not shut down the Vietnam War which they were desperately for their own reasons trying to stop. So, yes, they were “criminals,” maybe just petty criminals by the standards of the charges but no way in hell had they hitchhiked from Cambridge and Albany, New York respectively (and wherever else those thousands came from and how they got there) to “walk in the streets” of D.C. for the hell of it, to litter the boulevards with leaflets let, to thumb their noses at the government, or the like. Sam and Ralph that day had been political prisoners with a small “P” nevertheless. (They would later do some actions in solidarity with the Black Panthers, with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and with the African National Congress in South Africa which would “win” them their capital “Ps.”)      

 

All of this old-timey bar talk had a purpose though (they by the way were no strangers to strong drink as part of their political camaraderie from early on in their working-class lives but now they drank high-shelf stuff delivered by Jimmy the bartender rather than that rotgut low-shelf, no-shelf Thunderbird wine and Southern Comfort which got them through their no dough youths). Or rather two purposes. First, Ralph had come to town to join Sam in the annual Sacco and Vanzetti commemoration in honor of the two anarchist political prisoners who had been railroaded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to their executions on August 23, 1927. Troy and most other places in the nation and the world paid have paid no particular attention to such events but in Boston the scene of the crimes against the two immigrant anarchists there had been a generally on-going commemoration since the 1920s, although not always on in the streets like the past several years. Over their long and hard fought battles around prisoners’ rights which formed a majority of the work they had done over the years, in good times and bad, Sam and Ralph made sure that they attended this commemoration.

 

The second event that brought Ralph to town was a conference to be held in Boston to see about reviving the old International Labor Defense (ILD), the 1920s Communist International (CI)-initiated political prisoner defense organization which coincidentally had cut its teeth when founded in 1925 on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Under the circumstances over the past quarter of a century plus for the international working class not so much reviving it exactly as in the old days since the organization had gone out of business in 1946 a few years after Joe Stalin over in Russia had liquidated the Communist International as part of some Soviet foreign policy sop to his allies in World War II (the CI had pretty much gone out of the business of directing international revolution well before than anyway) but reviving the spirit that drove it in its best days around the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the Angelo Herndon case, a bunch of other lesser well known labor cases like that of Tom Mooney and assorted IWWers (Industrial Workers of the World, Wobblies) and most famously the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s.

 

In those days as Sam had mentioned while talking to Ralph at Jack’s since he had been looking up information about the old ILD, what it did and how it was organized (and how much the old American Communist Party/CI controlled the operation in its sunnier days) the ILD had had no problem living up to the idea of a non-sectarian labor defense organization that took on the tough cases, the political cases and tried to garner union and progressive support in America and internationally through the CI to free the class-war prisoners behind the walls. Sam and Ralph had been involved in many cases of political prisoners on the seemingly endlessly dwindling left, especially black liberation fighters and labor organizers but those operations usually concerned a specific political prisoner (like the Manning case) or were run as campaigns by particular organizations which tended to “protect” their turf, protect their unique relationship with their poster child political prisoner.

 

While both Sam and Ralph had been snake-bitten a few times when somebody called a conference only to find out that the operation was being built to “protect turf” or using the campaign as an organizational recruiting tool (Sam mentioned that someone should tell such organizations and individuals with ideas like that to give pause since the recruitment rate, or better the retention rate of such projects after a while is abysmal) they liked the call for this one which included a bunch of small leftist organizations and some independent labor organizers and unions. Whether absent an international organization with the resources of the old CI a new ILD could catch fire is problematic. There in any case with the downward pressure of social flare-ups likely in the near future certainly is a need for such an organization. Ralph made Sam laugh as they finished their last high-shelf whisky that night by saying –“Hell there aren’t any political prisoners, I have it on the authority of the U.S. A-G.” But just in case those A-Gs were being less than candid they agreed that they would show up bright and early for the meeting the next morning.