Just
Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The
Chapel Of Love In Mind
From
The Pen Of Sam Lowell
There
were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities, those that he
thought would bring some small honor to his name, that he would rather not
forget, things that defined his life, gave him that “fifteen minutes of fame,”
if only to himself and his, that everybody kept talking about that everyone
deserved before they departed this life. That “fifteen minutes of fame”
business which he thought had been uttered by the Pop-artist Andy Warhol in one
of his prankster moments, one of his New York high society put-downs, was fine
by him even if it had been the result of some small honor thing.
The
subject of that small honor done in the spurt of his youth that had defined a
lot of what came later is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in
September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost
before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated
from North Adamsville High School, around the time that he realized that the
big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust
out over the land, over America. (His world view did not encompass the entire
world or what was the same thing the young nations part of that view but later
after making plenty of international connections from here and there he could
have said he was waiting for that breeze to bust out over the world.)
It
was not like Edward was some kind of soothsayer, like some big think tank
thinker paid well to keep tabs on social trends for those in charge so they
didn’t get waylaid like they did with the “rebel without a cause” and “beat”
phenomena or anything like that back then, like could read tea leaves or tarot
cards like some latter day Madame La Rue who actually did read his future once
down at the Gloversville Fair when she had come to that location with her
daughter, Gypsy Anne, one hot August week when he was about twelve. Madame that
day read that he was made for big events. The big event that he was interested
in just then was winning a doll, a stuffed animal or something like that for dark-haired,
dark-eyed just starting to fill out Gypsy
Anne at the Skee game which he was an expert at. (For those clueless about
Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit around carnivals, small
time circuses, or penny-ante amusement parks, the game is simplicity itself
once you get the hang of it and play about 10,000 hours’ worth of games you
roll small balls, which come down a chute one you pay your dough, or
credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked now a days, and you
roll them like in bowling up to a target area like in archery and try to get a
ton of points which gives you strips of coupons to win a prize depending on
high your score is, and what you want. Like I say, simple.) And Edward did
win her a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his
heroics (and “copped a little feel” from that starting to fill out shape of
hers and he finally solved, no, he solved for that one minute that budding
girls turned to women were as interested in sex, or at least being “felt up” as
the other guys around Harry’s Variety Store had told him they were if approached the right way) down
by the beach when she gave her best twelve year old “come hither” look, not the
last time he would be snagged by that look by her or any other women later. No
way though that tarot reading when he was twelve left an impression, left him
with that vague feeling about the big breeze coming, not then when the hormones
drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while.
That
big breeze blowing through the land thing had not been Edward’s idea anyway,
not his originally although he swore by it once he thought about the
possibilities of breaking out of Podunk North Adamsville, but came from “the
Scribe,” the late Peter Paul Markin, a corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling
alleys on Thornton Street where he occasionally hung out in high school since
he had been childhood friends with the leader of that crowd, Frankie Riley, who
read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the thing on
lonesome Friday nights when all the guys were waiting, well, just waiting for
something to happen in woebegone North Adamsville where the town mainly went to
sleep by ten, or eleven on Friday and Saturday night when Jack Slack’s closed
late (for the younger set, Doc’s Drugstore, the place where he and Frankie hung
in their younger days as well, the place where they all first heard rock and
roll played loud on Doc’s jukebox by the soda fountain, every night was nine
o’clock at night just when things were getting interesting as the shadows had
time to spank vivid boy imaginations and you wonder, well, maybe not you, but
parents wondered why their kids were ready to take the first hitchhike or hitch
a freight train ride out of that “one-horse town” (an expression courtesy of
the grandmothers of the town, at least the ones he knew, mostly Irish grandmothers
with corn beef and cabbage boiling on their cast-iron stoves and smirks on their
faces, if grandmothers could have smirks over anything, about how dear the
price of everything was if you could get it a very big problem, including
Edward’s Anna Riley, where he first heard the words).
Here
is where that big breeze twelve million word description thing Markin was
talking about intersected with that unspoken trend for Edward (unknown and
unspoken since the corner at Jack Slacks’ did not have a resident professional
academic sociologist in residence to guide them since those “hired guns” were
still hung up on solving the juvenile delinquency problem and so as usual well
behind the curve and Markin, the Scribe as
smart as he was, was picking his stuff up strictly from newspapers and
magazines who were always way also behind the trends until the next big thing
hit them in the face). Edward’s take on the musical twists and turns back then
is where he had something the kids at North Adamsville High would comment on,
would ask him about to see which way the winds were blowing, would put their
nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes to hear based on his
recommendations.
Even
Markin deferred to him on this one, on his musical sense, the beat or the
“kicks” as he called then although he, Markin, would horn in, or try to, on the
glory by giving every imaginable arcane fact about some record’s history,
roots, whatever which would put everybody to sleep, they just wanted to heard
the “beat” for crying out loud. Edward did have to chuckle though when he
thought about the way, the main way, that Markin worked the jukebox scene since
he was strictly from poverty, from the projects, poorer even than Edward’s
people and that was going some if you saw the ramshackle shack of a house that he
and his four older brothers grew up in. The Scribe used to con some
lonely-heart girl who maybe had just broken up with her boyfriend, maybe had
been dateless for a while, or was just silly enough to listen to him into
playing what he wanted to hear based on what Edward had told him. But he was
smooth in his way since he would draw a bee-line to the girl who just put her
quarter in for her three selection on Jack Slack’s jukebox (Doc’s, sweet and
kindly saint Doc whose place was a bee-hive after school for that very reason ,
had five for a quarter if you can believe that). He would become her “advisor,”
and as the number one guy who knew every piece of teenage grapevine news in the
town and whom everybody therefore deferred on that intelligence so he would let
her “pick” the first selection, usually some sentimental lost love thing she
could get weepy over, the second selection would be maybe some “oldie but
goodie,” Breathless or At The Hop, which everybody still wanted
to hear, and then on number three, the girl all out of ideas Markin would tout
whatever song had caught his ear. Jesus, Markin was a piece of work. Too bad he
had to end the way he did down in Mexico now lying in some unmarked grave in
some town’s potter’s field back in the mid-1970s which guys from the old town
were still moaning over.
That
was Markin on the fringes but see Edward’s senses were very much directed by
his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll in the
early 1960s where he sensed what he called silly “bubble gum” music (what high
priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was
always putting stuff in political bull form like that) that had passed for
rock. Which, go figure, the girls liked, or liked the look of the guys
singing the tunes, guys with flipped hair and dimples like Fabian and Bobby
Rydell but was strictly nowhere with Edward. The breeze Edward felt
was going to bury that stuff under an avalanche of sounds going back to
Elvis, and where Elvis got his stuff from like Lonnie Johnson and the R&B
and black electric blues guys, the rockabilly hungry white boys, and forward to
something else, something with more guitars all amped to big ass speakers that
were just coming along to bring in the new dispensation.
More
importantly since the issue of jailbreaks and sea changes were in the air
Edward was the very first kid to grasp what would later be called “the folk
minute of the early 1960s,” and not just by Markin when he wrote stuff about
that time later before his sorry end. Everybody would eventually hone in on
Dylan and Baez, dubbed the “king and queen” of the moment by the mass media
always in a frenzy to anoint and label things that they had belatedly found
about out about and run into the ground. But when folk tunes started showing
up on the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Latham Street where the college
guys hung and where families went to a cheap filling dinner to give Ma a break
from the supper meal preparations it was guys like the Kingston Trio, the
Lettermen, and the Lamplighters who got the play after school and some other
girls, not the “bubble gum” girls went crazy over the stuff when Edward made
recommendations.
He
had caught the folk moment almost by accident late one Sunday night when he
picked up a station from New York City and heard Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie
songs being played, stuff that Mr. Dasher his seventh grade music teacher had
played in class to broaden youthful minds, meaning trying to break the
Elvis-driven rock and roll habit. So that musical sense combined with his ever
present sense that things could be better in this wicked old world drilled into
him by his kindly old grandmother, that Anna Riley with her boiling kettles and
smirks mentioned before, who was an old devotee of the Catholic Worker
movement kind of drove his aspirations (and Markin’s harping with the political
and so-called historical slant triggered by his own grandmother’s devotion to
the Catholic Worker movement added in). But at first it really was the music
that had been the cutting edge of what followed later, followed until about
1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land.
That
fascination with music had occupied Edward’s mind since he had been about ten
and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity
decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his
parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant
clamoring for rock and roll records and later folk albums, concert tickets,
radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on
constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well,
frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, The Rosemary
Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank
Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haynes and an endless series of male
quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise,
no, in order to end the family civil war, they had purchased a transistor radio
at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.
One
night, one late night in 1955, 1956 when Edward was fiddling with the dial he
heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing
this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues
although sort of, but a new beat driven by some wild guitar by a guy named
Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only
was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care
whether she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you
need a name for what ailed young Edward Rowley, something he could not quite
articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And
so with that as a pedigree Edward became one of the town’s most knowledgeable
devotees of the new sound.
Problem
was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time
went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view
one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that
names, Patsy this and Brenda that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock
and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that
WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.
So
Edward was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the
same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night
since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had
a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he
got caught later in high school up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a
hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although
being in high school in North Adamsville far from New York City, far from San
Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Edward
would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it
out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school,
“beatniks.” So Edward had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with
flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a black beret (a beret that
he kept hidden at home in his bedroom closet once he found out after his
parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of On The
Road on the Steve Allen Show that they had severely disapproved of
the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret
always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them
seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Edward played that out until Daryl
moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a
persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some
military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was
the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother).
Then
came 1964 and Edward was fervently waiting for something to happen, for
something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things
started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a
harbinger of what was coming.
That
is where Edward had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass
him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol
of clash that Edward knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older
that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a
kid. Here is what one episode of the battle sounded
like:
“Isn’t
that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs.
Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back
from his job working on repairing that ship up in Maine, if you know what is
good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in North
Adamsville households (and not just those households either but in places like
Carver, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Ann Arbor, Manhattan, Cambridge any place
where guys were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little
longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion
had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was
later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy, had taken a
look at what their Victorian great-grandfathers grew and though it was “cool.” Cool
along with new mishmash clothing and new age monikers to be called by.)
Of
course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one
was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the
Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome
storm after the long mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry
Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the
1964 parent world was getting up in arms.
And
not just about hair styles either. But about midnight trips on the clanking
subway to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this,
folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired
(male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing
(both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being
well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat”
except on silly television shows and by “wise” social commenters who could have
been “Ike” brothers and sisters, was yesterday’s news).
Mrs.
Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Edward be like he was when he
listened to Bobby Vinton and his Mr. Lonely or that lovely-voiced Roy
Orbison and his It’s Over and other nice songs on the local teen radio
station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what
everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker just
then). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named
Bob Dylan that has his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short
skirt and her, well her… looks” (Mrs. Rowley like every mother in the post-Pill
world refusing to use the “s” word, a throw-back to their girlish days when
their mothers did not use such a word either and so everybody learned about sex
is some strange osmotic out in the streets, in the school lavs, and from older almost
as clueless older brothers and sisters just like now.)
Since
Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up anyway, she let out
what was really bothering her about her Eddie’s behavior, "What about all
the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and
Mississippi. And you and that damn Peter Markin, who used to be so nice when
all you boys hung around together at Jimmy Jack’s Diner [Edward: corner boys,
Ma, that is what we were and at Jack Slack’s alleys not Jimmy Jack’s that was
for the jukebox and for checking out the girls who were putting dough in that
jukebox] and I at least knew you were no causing trouble, talking about
organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there.
If your father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and
maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as you are. Worse though, worse than
worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this
country, leaving North Adamsville, defenseless against the communists with your
talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t you have just left well enough alone
and stuck with your idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make
kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s We’ll Sing In The Sunshine or that
pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and Her Walk On By instead of getting
everybody upset."
And
since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors had mentioned the name Judy Jackson,
Edward’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk,
Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was
let’s hear what was going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons
that Edward was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy”
and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any
sceptics. Hear this:
“Young
lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for
all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,”
barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North
Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just those mothers either but in
places like Gloversville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any
place where gals were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing their skirts
a little longer than mid-calf was the flash point) about their daughters
dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically
telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in
her head. She too working up a high horse head of steam continued, "And
that Eddie [“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy
to the neighbors, said Eddie], and his new found friends like Peter Markin
taking you to those strange coffeehouses in Harvard Square with all the
unwashed, untamed, unemployed “beatniks” instead of the high school dances on
Saturday night. And that endless talk about the n-----s down South, about get
books for the ignorant to read and other trash talk about how they are equal to
us, and your father better not hear you talk like that, not at the dinner table
since he has to work around them and their smells and ignorance over in that
factory in Dorchester. And don’t start with that Commie trash about peace
and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch of them and put
them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about
America."
Scene:
Edward, Judy and Peter Markin were sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square
sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between them, and listening to
a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none
other than Eric Von Schmidt whose Joshua Gone Barbados and a couple of
other songs would become folk staples and classics). Beside them cartons of
books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when they head south
this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are
completed in June. (By the way Peter’s parents were only slightly less irate
about their son’s activities and used the word “Negro” when they were referring
to black people, black people they wished their son definitely not to get
involved with were only slightly less behind the times than Mrs. Rowley and
Mrs. Jackson and so requires no separate screed by Mrs. Markin. See Peter did
not mention word one about what he was, or was not, doing and thus spared
himself the anguish that Edward and Judy put themselves through trying to
“relate” to their parents, their mothers really since fathers were some vague
threatened presence in the background in those households.)
They,
trying to hold back their excitement have already been to some training
sessions at the NAACP office over on Massachusetts Avenue in the Roxbury
section of Boston and have purchased their tickets for the Greyhound bus as far
as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet others who will be heading
south down to Mississippi goddam and Alabama goddam on a chartered bus. But get
this Peter turned to Edward and said, “Have you heard that song, Popsicles
and Icicles by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Edward made a
very severe off-putting “no way” face. Yes, we are still in the time just
before the sea change after which even Peter will chuckle about “bubble gum”
music. Good luck though, young travelers, good luck.