*****When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind

*****When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind

 

 

Wait until the war is over
And we're both a little older
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Unborn living, living, dead
Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And it's all over
For the unknown soldier
It's all over
For the unknown soldier
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Comp'nee, halt
Present, arms
Make a grave for the unknown soldier
Nestled in your hollow shoulder
The unknown soldier
Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And, it's all over
The war is over
It's all over
War is over

Well, all over, baby
All over, baby
Oh, over, yeah
All over, baby

Ooh, ha, ha, all over
All over, baby
Oh, woah, yeah, all over
All over, heh
Add song meaning

Songwriters
Robbie Krieger;John Densmore;Jim Morrison;Ray Manzarek

From The Pen of Zack James

There was no seamless thread that wrapped the counter-cultural dominated 1960s up tightly, wrapped it up neatly in a pretty bow all set for posterity except for the media types who lived day by day in those merciful times for scraps to feed the teletype hot wires and by on-the-make politicians who to this day attempt to make capital making sport of what in the final analysis was a half-thought out desire to create the “newer world” that some old-time English poet was harping about. That seamless thread business had been distracting Frank Jackman’s attention of late now that a new generation of media-types are at hand who want to refight that social battle and the politicians are whipping   up the raw meat good old boys and girls and the staid as well to provide the troops for that new battle against some phantom in their heads. Despite all the rhetoric, despite all the books written disclaiming any responsibility by those who led the march, despite all those who have now “seen the light” and have hopped back into the fold in academia and the professions (in fact that march back to what everybody used to call bourgeois society started the day after the whole movement ebbed or the day they got their doctorates or professional degrees) there was some question even in Franks’ own mind about whether “the movement” for all its high gloss publicity and whirlwind effect dominated the play as much as he and his kindred had thought then or can lay claim to these forty plus years later.

Place plenty of weight on Frank’s observation, maybe not to take to the bank but to have some knowledge about the limits to what a whole generation in all its diversity can claim as its own mark on society and history. Place plenty of weight for the very simple reason that he went through the whole thing in almost all of its contradictions. Had been raised under the star of parents who slogged through the Great Depression although that was a close thing, a very close thing for some like Frank’s parents who were desperately poor. His poor besotted mother having to leave home and head west looking, looking for whatever there was out there before coming back home with three dollars in hand, and maybe her virtue how can you ask that question of your mother when you wouldn’t think to look at her when young, later too, that she was capable of sex, not the sex you had at your pleasure with some sweet Maryjane. His father out of the Southern winds, out of tar-roof shack of a cabin, half naked, down in the coal-rich hills and hollows of Appalachia, the poorest of the poor, leaving that desperate place to seek something, some small fame that always eluded him. They together, collectively, slogged through the war, World War II, his father through Pacific fight, the most savage kind, had his fill of that damn island hopping and his mother waiting, fretfully waiting for the other shoe to drop, to hear her man had laid his head down for his country in some salted coral reef or atoll whatever they were. Get this though, gladly, gladly would lay that head down and she if it came right down to it would survive knowing he had laid that precious head down. That was the salts they were made of, the stuff this country was able to produce even if it had very little hand in forming such faithful servants so no one would, no one could deny their simple patriotism, or doubt that they would pass that feeling on to their progeny.

Made that progeny respect their music too, their misty, moody I’ll see you tomorrow, until we meet again, I’ll get by, if I didn’t care music, music fought and won with great purpose. But Frank balked, balked young as he was, with as little understanding as he had, the minute he heard some serious rhythm back-beat absent from that sugary palp his parents wanted to lay on him and he would, young as he was, stand up in his three brother shared room (when they were not around of course for they older “dug” Patti Page and Rosemary Clooney, stuff like that) and dance some phantom dance based on that beat he kept hearing in his head, and wondered whether anybody else heard what he heard (of course later when it was show and tell time in the 1960s that beat would be the thing that glued those who were kindred together, funny they were legion). Caught the tail end of the “beat” thing that those older brothers dismissed out of hand as faggy, as guys “light on their feet” and gals who seemed black-hearted blank and neurotic. But that was prelude, that, what did somebody in some sociology class call it, the predicate.                      

As the 1960s caught Frank by his throat, caught him in its maw as he liked to call it to swishy-dishy literary effect he got “religion” in about six different ways. Got grabbed  when the folk minute held sway, when guys like Bob Dylan and Dave Von Ronk and gals like Joan Baez preached “protest” to the hinterlands, reaching down to places like Frank’s Carver, nothing but a working poor town dependent on the ups and downs of the cranberry business. At one time the town was the cranberry capital of the world or close to it. That up and down business depending too on whether people were working and could afford to throw in cranberry sauce with their turkeys come Thanksgiving and Christmas or would be reduced to the eternal fallback beans and franks. But see Carver was close enough, thirty or forty miles south of Boston to Beacon Hill and Harvard Square to be splashed by that new sound and new way of going on dates too, going to coffeehouses or if times were tough just hang around the Harvard Square’s Hayes-Bickford watching with fascination the drunks, hipsters, dipsters, grifters, winos, hoboes, maybe  an odd whore drinking a cup of joe after some John split on her, but also guys and gals perfecting their acts as folk-singers, poets, artists and writers.

Grabbed on the basis of that protest music to the civil rights movement down South, putting Frank at odds with parents, neighbors and his corner boys around Jack Slack’s bowling alleys. Grabbed too the dope, the hope and every girl he could get his hands on, or get this to tell you about the times since he was at best an okay looking guy, they could get their hands on him, on those bedroom blue eyes of his they called it more times than not, that came with the great summers of love from about 1965 on.

Here’s where the contradictions started get all mixed up with things he had no control over, which he was defenseless against. So grabbed too that draft notice from his friends and neighbors at the Carver Draft Board and wound up a dog soldier in Vietnam for his efforts. Wound up on cheap street for a while when he came back unable to deal with the “real” world for a while. That failure to relate to the “real” world cost him his marriage, a conventional marriage to a young woman with conventional white picket fence, a little lawn, kids, and dogs dreams which only had happened because he was afraid that he would not come back from “Nam in one piece, would never get to marriage for what it was worth. Grabbed the streets for a while before he met a woman, a Quaker woman, who saved him, for a while until he went west with some of his corner boys who had also been washed by the great push. Did the whole on the road hitchhike trip, dope, did communes, did zodiacs of love, did lots of things until the hammer came down and the tide ebbed around the middle of the 1970s. So yeah Frank was almost like a bell-weather, no, a poster child for all that ailed society then, and for what needed to be fixed.      

That decade or so from about 1964 to about 1974 Frank decided as he got trapped in old time thoughts and as he related to his old friend Jack Callahan one night at his apartment in Cambridge as they passed a “joint” between them (some things die hard, or don’t die) was nevertheless beginning to look like a watershed time not just for the first wave immediate post-World War II baby-boomers like him, Jack, Frankie Riley, the late Peter Markin, Sam Lowell and a lot of other guys he passed the corner boy night with (the ones like him born immediately after the war as the troops came home, came off the transports, and guys and gals were all hopped up to start families, figure out how to finance that first white picket fence house and use the GI bill to get a little bit ahead in the world, at least get ahead of their parents’ dead-end great depression woes) who came of social and political age then washed clean by the new dispensation but for the country as a whole. More so since those of the so-called generation of ’68, so called by some wag who decided that the bookends of the rage of the American Democratic Convention in Chicago that year and the defeat of the revolutionary possibilities in France in May of that year signaled the beginning of the ebb tide for the whole thing, for those who are still up for a fight against the military monster who is still with us are continuing to fight a rearguard action to keep what little is left of accomplishments and the spirit of those time alive.

Thinking back a bit to that time, Frank as the dope kicked in, a thousand things, or it seemed like a thousand things, some things new in the social, economic, political or cultural forest came popping up out of nowhere in many cases, came together in pretty rapid succession to draw down in flames the dread red scare Cold War freezes of their  childhoods (that time always absurdly symbolically topped off by the sight of elementary school kids, them , crouched under some rickety old desk arms over their heads some air-raid drill practice time as if, as the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who are still alive from that time can attest to, that would do the slightest bit of good if the “big one,” the nuclear bombs hit.

Yeah, the Cold War time too when what did they know except to keep their obedient heads down under their desks or face down on the floor when the periodic air-raid shelter tests were performed at school to see if they were ready to face the bleak future if they survived some ill-meant commie atomic blast. (Personally Frank remembered telling somebody then that he would, having seen newsreel footage of the bomb tests at Bikini, just as soon take his  chances above desk, thank you, for all the good the other maneuver would do them.)

For a while anyway Frank and the angel-saints were able to beat back that Cold War mentality, that cold-hearted angst, and calculated playing with the good green world, the world even if they had no say, zero, in creating what went on. Not so strangely, although maybe that is why people drifted away in droves once the old bourgeois order reasserted itself and pulled down the hammer, none of those who were caught up in the whirl thought it would be for only a while or at least thought it would fade so fast just as they thought, young and healthy as they were, that they would live forever. But if you, anybody when you really think about the matter, took a step back you could trace things a little, could make your own “live free” categories of the events that chipped away the ice of those dark nights.

Start in with the mid-1950s if you like, which is where Frank liked to start dating his own sense of the new breeze coming through although being a pre-teenager then he told Jack he would not have had sense enough to call it that, with the heat of the black struggle for some semblance of civil liberties down South in the fight for voter rights and the famous desegregation of buses in Montgomery and the painful desegregation of the schools in Little Rock (and some sense of greater  equality up North too as organizations like the NAACP and Urban League pushed an agenda for better education and housing). Also at that same time, and in gathering anecdotal evidence Frank had found that these too are a common lynchpin, the first break-out of music with the crowning of rock and roll as the wave of the future (black rhythm and blues, scat, rockabilly music all mixed up and all stirred up), and the “discovery” of teen alienation and angst exemplified by sullen movie star  James Dean, who lived fast, and died fast a metaphor that would work its way through youth culture over the next generation. (And throw in surly “wild one” movie star Marlon Brando in The Wild One and a brooding Montgomery Cliff in almost anything during those days, take The Misfits for one, to the mix of what they could relate to as icons of alienation and angst .)   

An odd-ball mix right there. Throw in, as well, although this was only at the end and only in very commercial form, the influence of the “beats,” the guys (and very few gals since that Jack Kerouac-Neal Cassady-William Burroughs-Allen Ginsberg mix was strictly a male bonding thing) who listened to the guys who blew the cool be-bop jazz and wrote up a storm based on that sound, declared a new sound, that you would hear around cafés even if you did not understand it unlike rock and roll, the guys who hitchhiked across the American landscape creating a wanderlust in all who had heard about their exploits, and, of course, the bingo bongo poetry that threw the old modernists like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound out with a bang.

Then start to throw in the struggles against the old authority in places like Frisco town where they practically ran the red-baiters in the HUAC out of town (what Frank, and some of his friends although not the Carver corner boys except Markin, would learn to call “bourgeois authority working hand in hand with the capitalists”), the old certitudes that had calmed their parents’ lives, made them reach out with both hands for the plenty in the “golden age of plenty.”

Of course the biggest event that opened the doors for liberals, radicals, hell, even thoughtful conservatives was the sweet breeze coming down the road from Boston with the election of Jack Kennedy. Ike, the harmless uncle, the kindly grandfather, was for parents Frank wanted guys who set the buzz going, let them think about getting some kicks out of life, that maybe with some thought they would survive, and if they didn’t at least we had the kicks.

That event opened up a new psyche, that it was okay to question authority, whatever the limitations and shortness of the Camelot times with the struggles against some hoary things like segregation, the death penalty, nuclear proliferation, the unevenness of social life which would get propelled later in the decade with fight for women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the fight against the draft, the damn war in Vietnam that drove a nail into the heart of Frank’s generation. A river of ideas, and a river of tears, have been, and can be, shed over that damn war, what it did to young people, those who fought, maybe especially those who fought as Frank got older and heard more stories about the guys who like him didn’t make it back to the “real” world after “Nam, didn’t have a sweet mother Quaker lady like Frank to save them, those guys you see downtown in front of the VA hospitals, and those who refused to, that lingers on behind the scenes even today.

There were more things, things like the “Pill” (and Frank would always kid Jack who was pretty shy talking about sex despite the fact that he and Chrissie, his high school sweetheart, had had four kids when he asked what pill if you need to know what pill and its purpose where have you been) that opened up a whole can of worms about what everyone was incessantly curious about and hormonally interested in doing something about, sex, sex beyond the missionary position of timeless legends, something very different if the dramatic increase in sales of the Kama Sutra meant anything, a newer sensibility in music with the arrival of the protest folk songs for a new generation which pushed the struggle and the organizing forward.

Cultural things too like the experimenting with about seven different kinds of dope previously the hidden preserve of “cool cat” blacks and white hipsters (stuff that they only knew negatively about, about staying away from, thru reefer madness propaganda, thru the banning of some drugs that were previously legal like sweet sister cocaine and taunt Nelson Algren hard life down at the base of society in films like The Man With The Golden Arm), the outbreak of name changes with everybody seemingly trying to reinvent themselves in name (Frank’s moniker at one time was Be-Bop Benny draw what you will out of that the idea being like among some hipster blacks, although with less reason, they wanted to get rid of their  slave names)  fashion (the old college plaid look fading in the face of World War II army surplus, feverish colors, and consciously mismatched outfits and affectation (“cool, man, cool” and “right on’ said it all). More social experiments gathering in the “nation” through rock concerts, now acid-etched, new living arrangements with the arrival of the urban and rural communes (including sleeping on more than one floor in more than one church or mission when on the road, or later on the bum). They all, if not all widespread, and not all successful as new lifestyles all got a fair workout during this period as well.     

Plenty of Frank’s kindred in retrospective would weigh the various combinations of events differently in figuring out how the uprising started just as plenty of them had their specific dates for when the tide began to ebb, when the mean-spirited and authoritarian began their successful counter-offensive that they still lived with for not taking the omens more seriously. (Frank’s ebb tide, as he had  described to Frankie Riley one time, was the events around May Day 1971 when they seriously tried, or thought they were seriously trying, to shut down the government in D.C. if it would no shut down the war and got nothing but billy-clubs, tear gas, beatings and mass arrests for their efforts. After those days Frank, and others, figured out the other side was more serious about preserving the old order than they were about creating the new and that they had better rethink how to slay the monster they were up against and act accordingly.)

Then Frank passed Jack a photograph that he had taken from a calendar put out by the New England Folk Song Society that his wife, Sarah, who worked to put the item out to raise funds for folk music preservation (see above) that acted as another catalyst for this his short screed, and which pictorially encapsulated a lot of what went then, a lot about “which side were you on” when the deal went down. This photograph Frank pointed out to Jack was almost impossible to imagine without some combination of that hell broth anti-war, anti-establishment, pro-“newer world” mix stirred up in the 1960s.

Three self-assured women (the “girls” of photograph a telltale sign of what society, even hip, progressive society thought about women in those slightly pre-women’s liberation time but they would learn the difference) comfortable with the loose and individualistic fashion statements of the day from floppy hats to granny dresses to bare legs, bare legs, Jesus, that alone would have shocked their girdled, silk stocking mothers, especially if those bare legs included wearing a mini-skirt (and mother dread thoughts about whether daughter knew about the pill, and heaven forbid if she was sexually active, a subject not for polite society, not for mother-daughter conversation, then she damn better well know, or else).

They are also uncomfortable about the damn Vietnam war, no, outraged is a better way to put the matter, that was eating up boyfriends, brothers, just friends, guys they knew in college or on the street who were facing heavy decisions about the draft, Canada exile, prison or succumbing to the worst choice, Frank’s choice if you could call his induction a choice what else could he have done gone to Canada, no,  military induction, at a heavy rate and they unlike their mothers who came through World War II waiting patiently and patriotically for their military heroes to come home, come home in one piece, have a very different sense of the heroic. A sense of the heroic going back to ancient times, Greek times anyway, when one group of women like their stay-at-home-waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop World War II mothers demanded that their men come home carried on their shields if they had to rather than speak of defeat. Others, the ones that count here, refusing their potential soldier boys any favors, read sexual favors, okay, if they went off to war, providing a distant echo, a foundation to make their request stand on some authority, for these three women pictured there.

Frank wondered how many guys would confess to the lure of that enticement if they had refused induction. His own wife, quickly married at the time was if anything more gung-ho about stopping the red menace than his parents. Frank did not refuse induction for a whole bunch of reasons but then he did not have any girlfriends like that sweet mother Quaker woman later, who made that demand, his girl- friends early on, and not just his wife if anyway were as likely to want him to come back carried on a shield as those warrior-proud ancient Greek women. Too bad. But Frank said to Jack as Jack got up ready to head home to Hingham and Chrissie that he liked to think that today they could expect more women to be like the sisters above. Yeah, more, many more of the latter, please as Frank and his comrades in Veterans for Peace continue to struggle against the night-takers in the nightmare world of endless war

IN THE SPRINGTIME OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

BOOK REVIEW

THE MEN WHO MADE THE NATION, JOHN DOS PASSOS, DOUBLEDAY AND COMPANY, NEW YORK, 1957

The title of this book gives away its age (it was originally written in 1957). No politically conscious publisher would dare present such an affront to today's sensibilities in the marketplace by not including others in the founding of the Republic. And they are right. That said, this little vignette into the foundation of the American Republic by John Dos Passos is still a very good read about the post-revolutionary struggle to form a frame of national government out of the welter of conflicting appetites raised by the formal independence from "Mother England". John Dos Passos, at one time a writer whose star was as bright as Ernest Hemingway's, seems to have slipped some in the literary pantheon but his classic USA trilogy and other works are unjustly neglected. Yes, I know as he grew older he grew more conservative and thus beyond the pale. Nobody was as shocked as I was, after having read his progressive socially conscious works on the Jazz Age in America and on Republican Spain, to find him in the early 1960’s as a sponsor of the reactionary Young Americans for Freedom. But enough of that. Let's get to this effort and what it means.

The events of the American Revolution and the process of building an effective national government from scratch today is covered with so much banal ceremony, flag- waving, unthinking sunshine patriotism and hubris it is hard to see the forest for the trees to the days when, as Lincoln stated, during that other great progressive action of this country's history- the Great Civil War of 1861-65 that this country was the last, best hope for civilization. Note this well- those men and women who rebelled against the king from Washington on down were big men and women out to do a big job. And they did it. A quick look at the political landscape today makes one thing clear. This country has no such men or women among its leaders today-not even close.

The usual cast of characters and defining events are here- the august, if somewhat fickle and prickly, Washington, the closet monarchist Adams, the not so closet monarchist Hamilton, the republican Jefferson, the fiery republican Madison, their hangers-on and underlings, their political fights and their differing conceptions of government. Dos Passos, as an experienced novelist, is able to bring these people alive, including lesser lights like Gouvernour Morris, Robert Morris (not related) and the Randolphs, with plenty of anecdotal musings about their strengths and weaknesses. For those familiar with the story of American nation building this book may not reveal anything new but for others- read on.

*A Rod Stewart Encore-"Gasoline Alley"

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Rod Stewart Doing "Gasoline Alley".

CD Review

The Best Of Rod Stewart, Rod Stewart, Mercury Records, 1976


Again the first paragraph (see "Every Picture Tells A Story" on this same date)above tells the Rod Stewart story. As noted there the main thing about a Rod Stewart song in the old days as reflected here is that energy he put into each song his own as here with “Maggie May” and “Every Picture Tells A Story” and “Gasoline Alley”, or covers like The Stones “Street Fighting Man”. In the end though, for me at least for male singers it is that gravelly voice that he brought to the performance highlighted here by “Mandolin Wind” and “Cut Across Shorty”.

"Mandolin Wind"
(rod stewart)
W
When the rain came I thought you'd leave
cause I knew how much you loved the sun
But you chose to stay, stay and keep me warm
Through the darkest nights Ive ever known
If the mandolin wind couldnt change a thing
Then I know I love ya

Oh the snow fell without a break
Buffalo died in the frozen fields you know
Through the coldest winter in almost fourteen years
I couldnt believe you kept a smile
Now I can rest assured knowing that weve seen the worst
And I know I love ya

Oh I never was good with romantic words
So the next few lines come really hard
Dont have much but what Ive got is yours
Except of course my steel guitar
Ha, cause I know you dont play
But Ill teach you one day
Because I love ya

I recall the night we knelt and prayed
Noticing your face was thin and pale
I found it hard to hide my tears
I felt ashamed I felt Id let you down
No mandolin wind couldnt change a thing
Couldnt change a thing no, no

The coldest winter in almost fourteen years
Could never, never change your mind

And I love ya
Yes indeed and I love ya
And I love ya
Lordy I love ya

*Every Picture Tells A Story, Don’t It- The Early Music Of Rod Stewart

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Rod Stewart Doing "Maggie May"

CD REVIEW

Every Picture Tells A Story, Rod Stewart, Mercury Records, 1971

I have spent some time in this space going over the litany of rock & roll groups and individuals who collectively formed the musical consciousness of my generation, the “Generation of ‘68”. The Rolling Stones, The Doors and the Beatles immediately come to mind. The performer under review, Rod Stewart, now known more for his fine (mostly) crooner covers of old time pre-rock songs fits into the second layer of those who entertained us and made us scream for more rock & roll. And, someone can add to this to refresh my memory, Rod Stewart was one of the early proponents of the rock concert as entertainment extravaganza in the old English music hall tradition. I can remember going to a Rod Stewart concert in the old days where he had circus acts, complete with fireworks and colored smoke in between his performances (and maybe as part of the performance as well). Such visual effects are practically de rigueur these days but then it was unusual.

Be that as it may the main thing about a Rod Stewart song in the old days as reflected in this CD is that energy he put into each song his own as here with “Maggie May” and “Every Picture Tells A Story”, or covers. In the end though, for me at least for male singers it is that gravelly voice that he brought to the performance highlighted here by “Mandolin Wind”.


The Best Of Rod Stewart, Rod Stewart, Mercury Records, 1976

Again the first paragraph above tells the Rod Stewart story. As noted there the main thing about a Rod Stewart song in the old days as reflected here is that energy he put into each song his own as here with “Maggie May” and “Every Picture Tells A Story” and “Gasoline Alley”, or covers like The Stones “Street Fighting Man”. In the end though, for me at least for male singers it is that gravelly voice that he brought to the performance highlighted here by “Mandolin Wind” and “Cut Across Shorty”.


Rod Stewart - Gasoline Alley

I think I'm goin' mad and it's makin' me sad,
it's a yearnin' for my old back door.
I realize maybe I was born to lead,
better swallow all my silly country pride.
Goin' home, runnin' home,
down the gasoline Alley where I started from.
Goin' home, and I'm runnin' home,
down the Gasoline Alley where I was born.
When the weather's better and the rails unfreeze,
and the wind won't whistle `round my knees,
I'll put on my weather suit and catch you in the train.
I'll be home before the milk's upon the door.
Goin' home, runnin' home,
down the gasoline Alley where I started from.
Goin' home, and I'm runnin' home,
down the Gasoline Alley where I was born.
(instrumental)
But if anything should happen and my plans go wrong
should I stray to the house on the hill,
let it be known that my intentions were good,
I'd be singing in my alley if I could.
And if I'm goin' away and it's my turn to go,
should the blood run cold in my veins,
just one favor I'd be askin' of you,
don't bury me here, it's too cold.
Take me back, carry me back,
down to Gasoline Alley where I started from.
Take me back, won't cha carry me home,
down to Gasoline Alley where I started from?

Mandolin Wind lyrics
(Rod Stewart)

When the rain came I thought you'd leave
'cause I knew how much you loved the sun
But you chose to stay, stay and keep me warm
through the darkest nights I've ever known
If the mandolin wind couldn't change a thing
then I know I love ya
Oh the snow fell without a break
Buffalo died in the frozen fields you know
Through the coldest winter in almost fourteen years
I couldn't believe you kept a smile
Now I can rest assured knowing that we've seen the worst
And I know I love ya
Oh I never was good with romantic words
so the next few lines come really hard
Don't have much but what I've got is yours
except of course my steel guitar
Ha, 'cause I know you don't play
but I'll teach you one day
because I love ya
I recall the night we knelt and prayed
Noticing your face was thin and pale
I found it hard to hide my tears
I felt ashamed I felt I'd let you down
No mandolin wind couldn't change a thing
Couldn't change a thing no, no
The coldest winter in almost fourteen years
could never, never change your mind
And I love ya
Yes indeed and I love ya
And I love ya
Lordy I love ya

Every Picture Tells A Story lyrics

Spent some time feelin' inferior
standing in front of my mirror
Combed my hair in a thousand ways
but I came out looking just the same

Daddy said, "Son, you better see the world
I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to leave
But remember one thing don't lose your head
to a woman that'll spend your bread"
So I got out

Paris was a place you could hide away
if you felt you didn't fit in
French police wouldn't give me no peace
They claimed I was a nasty person
Down along the Left Bank minding my own
Was knocked down by a human stampede
Got arrested for inciting a peacful riot
when all I wanted was a cup of tea
I was accused
I moved on

Down in Rome I wasn't getting enough
of the things that keeps a young man alive
My body stunk but I kept my funk
at a time when I was right out of luck
Getting desperate indeed I was
Looking like a tourist attraction
Oh my dear I better get out of here
'for the Vatican don't give no sanction
I wasn't ready for that, no no

I moved right out east yeah!
On the Peking ferry I was feeling merry
sailing on my way back here
I fell in love with a slit eyed lady
by the light of an eastern moon
Shangai Lil never used the pill
She claimed that it just ain't natural
She took me up on deck and bit my neck
Oh people I was glad I found her
Oh yeah I was glad I found her

I firmly believe that I didn't need anyone but me
I sincerely thought I was so complete
Look how wrong you can be

The women I've known I wouldn't let tie my shoe
They wouldn't give you the time of day
But the slit eyed lady knocked me off my feet
God I was glad I found her
And if they had the words I could tell to you
to help you on the way down the road
I couldn't quote you no Dickens, Shelley or Keats
'cause it's all been said before
Make the best out of the bad just laugh it off
You didn't have to come here anyway
So remember, every picture tells a story don't it

Maggie May lyrics
Wake up Maggie

I think I got something to say to you;
it's late September and I really should be back at school.
I know I keep you amused
but I feel I'm being used

oh
Maggie
I couldn't have tried anymore.
You lured me away from home
just to save you from being alone.
You stole my heart and that's what really hurts.
The morning sun
when it's in your face
really shows your age

but that don't worry me none
in my eyes you're ev'rything.
I laughed at all of your jokes
my love you didn't need to coax

oh
Maggie
I couldn't have tried anymore.
You lured me away from home
just to save you from being alone.
You stole my soul
that's a pain I can do without.
All I needed was a friend to lend a guiding hand

but you turned into a lover
and
Mother
what a lover !
You wore me out.
All you did was wreck my bed
and in the morning kick me in the head

oh
Maggie
I couldn't have tried anymore.
You lured me away from home
'cause you didn't want to be alone.
You stole my heart
I couldn't leave you if I tried.
I suppose I could collect my books and get back to school.
Or steal my daddy's cue and make a living out of playing pool.
Or find myselfe a rock and roll band that needs a helpin' hand.
Oh
Maggie
I wish I'd never seen your face.
You lured me away from home
just to save you from being alone.
You stole my heart and that's what really hurts.
The morning sun
when it's in your face
really shows your age

but that don't worry me none
in my eyes you're ev'rything.
I laughed at all of your jokes
my love you didn't need to coax

oh
Maggie
I couldn't have tried any face

you made a first-class fool out of me

but I'm as blind as a fool can be

you stole my heart but I love you anyway.
Maggie
I wish I'd never seen your face.
I'll get on back home one of these days.

*****Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind

*****Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

You know sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco Bay Area Town and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, looked like difference from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence. Oh sure, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood and have it count has tried to march to its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of the decade, maybe the first part of the next. But what Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed. 

The way Sam told it one night at his bi-weekly book club where the topic selected for that meeting had been the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook was that he had been looking for roots as a kid. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of his generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree. Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So his generation had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different. That transistor radio for those not in the know was “heaven sent” for a whole generation of kids in the 1950s who could care less, who hated the music that was being piped into the family living room big ass floor model radio which their parents grew up with since it was small, portable and could be held to the ear and the world could go by without bothering you while you were in thrall to the music. That was the start. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week.

Sam’s lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music, well, cheaply alone or on a date. Basically as he related to his listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs).

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Muddy River Boys, and some bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school and had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement of Jimmy Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.                                 

As Sam warmed up to his subject he told his audience two things that might help explain his interest when he started to delve into the reasons why fifty years later the sound of that finely-tuned fiddle still beckons him home. The first was that when he had begun his freshman year at Boston University he befriended a guy, Everett Lally, the first day of orientation since he seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what was going on. See Everett was from a small town outside of Wheeling, West Virginia and this Boston trip was only the second time, the first time being when he came up for an interview, he had been to a city larger than Wheeling. So they became friends, not close, not roommate type friends, but they had some shared classes and lived in the same dorm on Bay State Road.

One night they had been studying together for an Western History exam and Everett asked Sam whether he knew anything about bluegrass music, about mountain music (Sam’s term for it Everett was Bill Monroe-like committed to calling it bluegrass). Sam said sure, and ran off the litany of his experiences at Harvard Square, the Village, listening on the radio. Everett, still a little shy, asked if Sam had ever heard of the Lally Brothers and of course Sam said yes, that he had heard them on the radio playing the Orange Blossom Express, Rocky Mountain Shakedown as well as their classic instrumentation version of The Hills of Home.  Everett perked up and admitted that he was one of the Lally Brothers, the mandolin player.

Sam was flabbergasted. After he got over his shock Everett told him that his brothers were coming up to play at the New England Bluegrass Festival to be held at Brandeis on the first weekend of October. Everett invited Sam as his guest. He accepted and when the event occurred he was not disappointed as the Lally Brothers brought the house down. For the rest of that school year Sam and Everett on occasion hung out together in Harvard Square and other haunts where folk music was played since Everett was interested in hearing other kinds of songs in the genre. After freshman year Everett did not return to BU, said his brothers needed him on the road while people were paying to hear their stuff and that he could finish school later when things died down and they lost touch, but Sam always considered that experience especially having access to Everett’s huge mountain music record collection as the lynchpin to his interest.             

Of course once the word got out that Everett Lally was in a bluegrass group, played great mando, could play a fair fiddle and the guitar the Freshman girls at BU drew a bee-line for him, some of them anyway. BU, which later in the decade would be one of the hotbeds of the anti-war movement locally and nationally but then was home to all kinds of different trends just like at campuses around the country, was filled with girls (guys too but for my purposes her the girls are what counts) from New York City, from Manhattan, from Long Island who knew a few things about folk music from forays into the Village. Once they heard Everett was a “mountain man,” or had been at Brandeis and had seen him with his brothers, they were very interested in adding this exotic plant to their collections. Everett, who really was pretty shy although he was as interested in girls as the rest of the guys at school were, told Sam that he was uncomfortable around these New York women because they really did treat him like he was from another world, and he felt that he wasn’t. Felt he was just a guy. But for a while whenever they hung out together girls would be around. Needless to say as a friend of Everett’s when there were two interested girls Sam got the overflow. Not bad, not bad at all.        

But there is something deeper at play in the Sam mountain music story as he also told the gathering that night. It was in his genes, his DNA he said. This was something that he had only found out a few years before. On his father’s side, his grandfather, Homer, whom he had never met since after his wife, Sam’s grandmother, Sara died he had left his family, all grown in any case, without leaving a forwarding address, had actually been born and lived his childhood down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, down near the fabled Hazard of song and labor legend before moving to the North after World War I. Here is the funny part though when his father and mother Laura were young after World War II and at wits end about where his grandfather might be they travelled down to Prestonsburg in search of him. While they stayed there for a few months looking Sam had been conceived although they left after getting no results on their search, money was getting low, and there were no father jobs around so he had been born in the South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts. So yes, that mountain music just did not happen one fine night but was etched in his body, the whirlwind sounds on Saturday night down amount the hills and hollows with that sad fiddle playing one last waltz to end the evening.                  

Elvis Has Definitely Left The Room-Sideman Scotty Moore Passes At 84

Elvis Has Definitely Left The Room-Sideman Scotty Moore Passes At 84

  


Present At The Creation


When Rockabilly Rocked The Be-Bop 1950s Night- “Rock This Town-Volume 2”- A CD Review


Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Wanda Jackson performing her classic Let's Have A Party. CD Review

Rock This Town, Volume 2, various artists, Rhino Records, 1991



The bulk of this review was used to review Volume 1 as well:

The last time that I discussed rockabilly music in this space was a couple of years ago when I was featuring the work of artists like Elvis, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis who got their start at Sam Phillips’ famed Sun Records studio in Memphis. Part of the reason for those reviews was my effort to trace the roots of rock and rock, 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 Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Ike Turner and rhythm and blues from the likes of Big Joe Turner, a part of that formative process. The question then, and the question once again today, is which strand dominated the push to rock and rock, 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 the more rockabilly style by them 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 this treasure trove of rockabilly music presented in two volumes of which this is the second; including material by those who have revived, or kept the rockabilly genre alive over the past couple of decades. 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. There I noted that, for the most part, those who succeeded in rockabilly had to move on to rock to stay current and so the rockabilly sound was somewhat transient except for those who consciously decided to stay with it. Here are the examples that I used for volume one and they apply here as well:

“…the best example of that 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 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 middle school dances to get things moving).” Enough said.

Stick outs here on Volume 2 include: C’mon Everybody, Eddie Cochran (probably better known for his more bluesy, steamy, end of school rite of passage Summertime Blues, a very much underrated performer whose career was cut short when he was killed in a car accident; Let’s Have A Party, Wanda Jackson (one of the few famous women rockabilly artists in a very much male-dominated genre); Red Hot ( a cover of the famous one by Bill Riley featured in Volume 1), Robert Gordon and Link Wray; Rock This Town (title track from the group that probably is the best known devotee of the rockabilly revival), The Stray Cats.

Elvis Is Really Gone Now-Sideman Scotty Moore Passes At 84

Elvis Is Really Gone Now-Sideman Scotty Moore Passes At 84  

Click on link to Rolling Stone obituary for legendary Elvis sideman Scotty Moore


http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/scotty-moore-elvis-presley-guitarist-dead-at-84-20160628




Present At The Creation


The Birth Of Rock 'n' Roll


One For The Money: The History Of Rock And Roll, Bill Haley and various artists, Intrepid, 2005



Over the past several months I have spend some time reviewing recording artist from my youth, the 1950’s, the youth of the Generation of ’68 that is now taking a certain political beating once again from those who cringe at the notion that we could have fundamentally changed the way we do the collective business of running this society. But that is a story for another day. What I want to do here is recommend this very nice DVD that in capsule form addresses all the issues, or at least all that I think are important, about the genesis of rock 'n' roll, its meaning for my post-World War II generation growing up in the 1950’s and how the forces of social reaction put, or tried to put, a cap on the natural rebelliousness of the original rock 'n' roll sound.

This documentary addresses affirmatively the issue of the roots of rock and roll as deriving from the blues and later in the early 1950’s rhythm and blues from the likes of Louis Jourdan and Big Joe Turner. It further pays, as it must, tribute to the early efforts of the likes of Sam Phillips and his Sun Record operation in Memphis and that of the Press Brothers Chess Records in Chicago to create breakout music with a distinctive sound that was not Frank Sinatra or Doris Day, the music of our parents’ generation. It also pays tribute to the promoters of rock like Alan Freedman who was a key in popularizing rock for the wider white audience that was necessary to make it a national and international phenomenon. Most importantly, this film documents the very conscious attempt by parents, religious and governmental figures abetted by the record industry to bring rock under control with the creation of the “teen idols” like Ricky Nelson Fabian, Bobby Vee, etc. at the end of the 1950’s. As I have pointed out elsewhere we had to go through that experience to really appreciate the difference when groups like The Rolling Stones hit the scene in the 1960’s. We were waiting to exhale, and none too soon.

Probably the most important reason to view this DVD though is to get, under one roof, a look at all the various performers who made up the original rock ensemble. Big Joe, Bill Haley, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Buddy, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and on and on. Like I say if you want a quick one hour overview of an important cultural phenomenon of our collective history this is the one for you. Then branch out to review the individual performers. Fifty years later a lot of this stuff still sounds good. And that is not just me saying that but young kids, desperate for a sound that jumps at them, that I have run into lately as well. Kudos.

WHEN AMERICA DEFENDED ENLIGHTENMENT VALUES

BOOK REVIEW

REVOLUTIONARY CHARACTERS: WHAT MADE THE FOUNDERS DIFFERENT, GORDON S. WOOD, PENQUIN, NEW YORK, 2006

In earlier times this writer has been rather blasé about the American Revolution tending to either ignore its lessons or putting it well below another revolution- The Great French Revolution, also celebrated in July- in the pantheon of revolutionary history. However, this is flat-out wrong. We cannot let those more interested in holiday oratory than drawing the real lessons of the American Revolution appropriate what is the hard fought property of every militant today. Make no mistake, however, the energy of that long ago revolution has burned itself out and other forces-militant leftists and their allies- and other political creeds-the fight for a workers party and a workers government leading to socialism- have to take its place as a standard-bearer for human progress. That task has been on the historical agenda for a long time and continues to be our task today.

That said, the eminent, if not preeminent, historian of the American revolutionary period Gordon S. Wood has written a collection of sketches which every militant leftist should read in order to get a handle on where the great promise of that American democratic experiment has gone fatally off track. It might be the current paucity of political leadership, it might be the ongoing frontal attack on the Enlightenment values that this country was founded on but this writer finds himself drawn to restudy the lives of the participants and the revolutionary history of the founding of this country. Yes, revolutionary-that is the operative word here and it fits. That action was what was necessary to turn royal subjects into citizens and the Founders rose to the occasion. Make no mistake these were big men (and women, although Mr. Wood strangely, in this day in age, does not include any in this study), from Washington on down, with big ideas that are for the most part codified in the frame of government, a genuine Enlightenment document, - the Constitution and, as importantly, the Bill of Rights. It is necessary, as always, to add that this document is severely marred, among other problems, by the capitulation to slavery and the race question embedded in it that has plagued this country to this day. But that is a question for another time.

Mr. Wood concentrates on the founders here- Washington, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and Hamilton. There are no closet socialists here, or for that matter, radical democrats such as Sam Adams, Tom Paine or James Otis. Nor are there nods to the plebian masses that made the revolution and stuck by it through thick and thin. Those types of studies more closely fit the reviewer’s own predilections. Nevertheless, on his own chosen ground Mr. Wood has brought the leadership cadre of the American Revolution to life and done an admirably job of discussing the virtues and anxieties of those men. Notably, there is a great divide between the Founders concepts of civic virtue, use of the public square and civic disinterestedness in comparison to what passes for the leadership of the country today. You know that we are in trouble when John Adams, a not so-closet-Tory, looks damn good in comparison to today’s open reactionaries.

The field of historical writing, like other fields of social research, has gone through various trends in appreciation of the role of leadership and of the masses. Until fairly recently the rage was to look closely at the role of the masses in social struggles. Those studies are still desperately needed. However, I do not believe that it is accidental that today’s trend is to rethink the leadership question in the American Revolution at a time when there is such an obvious lack of it. Some of Mr. Wood’s judgments about particular leaders can be disputed but the overall impression is that these men were not faking their Enlightenment values; in short, they for the most part put their lives on the line for this little democratic experiment. And they were not wrong. As stated above, we need to defend those hard fought for rights- and move beyond them. Read this book.

When “The King” Became The King-Elvis- July 5, 1954

When “The King” Became The King-Elvis- July 5, 1954-Take Two  

 

 

 

Frank Jackman comment:

You never know what will turn up when you read the newspaper, for those who still do, or what you will pick up as a nugget via the Internet if you don’t. The other day, July 5^th I happened to glance at the “This date in history” spot in the Boston Globe and noticed that it highlighted one Elvis Presley complete with be-bopping accompanying photograph from the session that on July 5, 1954 recorded That's All Right, Mama and the nowhere Blue Moon of Kentucky on the B side of the 45 RPM record (for those who know not of records I direct you to the relevant section in Wikipedia) in Sam Phillips’ Sun Records studio in Memphis and the rest was rock and roll history. By the way maybe today we need to use Elvis’ last name for identification but in my generation all you needed to say was “Elvis” or “the king” and that was all everybody, every coming of age in the 1950s teenager and maybe a few stray outraged parents who saw the incarnation of the devil’s work in him needed to know to know exactly who you were talking about.

No question we are today in the shadow of July 5, 2015 very far removed from the “from hunger” good old boy rockabilly side of the origins of rock and roll delivered to us by the likes of Elvis, Carl Perkins, Warren Smith, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sonny Burgess, far removed from a time now called with a shutter the classic age of rock and roll to distinguish it from post-1964 rock and its progeny. Moreover rock as a genre has undergone many permutations and transformations on its way to a well-deserved if now somewhat faded niche in history.

But for one moment, one brief moment in the long history of music, we, those of us who came of age in the 1950s were proud to say that we had been present at the creation. Had been there at the sea-change.  Proud to say enough of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Patty Page, Andrews Sisters, McGuire Sisters, damn, enough of the musical sensibilities that got our parents through the dusty “from hunger” 1930s Great Depression and slogging fitfully and fretfully through World War II that we were force fed on the family radio. Yes, enough of that sound that made us grind our teeth after we had heard something new on our fugitive transistor radios held close to our ears away from prying parents, something with a be-bop-a-lula, be my daddy, shake that thing, take me to the sock hop beat. And Elvis gave us a big chuck of that beat, made us pick up our feet, snap our fingers.            

Get this though, and this is the true value of that notice in the Globe, as I thought about my own introduction to Elvis. Some of us if we were boys went into that new dispensation kicking and screaming, we the boys with two left feet. Worse, much worse, were thoughts about how to the girls that were beginning to go from last year’s nuisances to, well, interesting, said we didn’t compare with dreamy Elvis no matter how much we slicked back our hair, moved our cranky non-swivel hips or tried to imitate that sullen sneer. That patented sneer the girls who were just kicking and screaming every time they saw those hips swivel said that they wished could, no, they would die to, take off his face. Yeah, no question, those were troubled coming of age times, tongue-tied, two left feet, afraid, no, scared every time a school sock hop came along and you hoped to high heaven that you would not have to embarrass yourself by unchaining those cranky teenage hips of yours in front of some girl who had made your eyeballs sore looking at her all night. But from that moment on we said rock and roll would never die. And now through the good offices of YouTube it never will. So a retro-thanks to Elvis even if I still can’t move those hips of mine worth a damn.        

 

IN THE TIME OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE

REMEMBER THE BASTILLE, BUT HONOR ROBESPIERRE AND SAINT JUST

BOOK REVIEW

PARIS IN THE TERROR, JUNE 1793-JULY 1794, STANLEY LOOMIS, J.B. LIPPINCOTT, NEW YORK, 1964

This year marks the 217th anniversary of the beginning of the Great French Revolution with storming of the Bastille. An old Chinese Communist leader, Zhou Enlai, was asked by a reporter to sum up the important lessons of the French Revolution. In reply he answered that it was too early to tell what those lessons might be. Whether that particular story is true or not it does contain one important truth. Militants today at the beginning of the 21st century can still profit from reading the history of that revolution.

The French Revolution, like its predecessor the American Revolution, is covered with so much banal ceremony, flag- waving, unthinking sunshine patriotism and hubris it is hard to see the forest for the trees. The Bastille action while symbolically interesting is not where the real action took place nor was it politically the most significant event. For militants that comes much later with the rise of the revolutionary tribunals and the Committee of Public Safety under the leadership of the left Jacobins Robespierre and Saint Just. Although the revolution began in 1789 its decisive phases did not take place until the period under discussion in this review, that is from June 1793 with the expulsion of the (for that time moderate) Girondin deputies from the National Convention.

That event ushered in the rule of extreme Jacobins under Robespierre and Saint Just through the vehicle of the Committee of Public Safety. That regime, the Republic of Virtue, as it is known to militants since that time and known as the Great Terror to the author of the book under review and countless others, lasted until July 1794. It was in turn ousted by a more moderate Jacobin regime (known historically as the Themidorian Reaction, a subject of fascination and discussion by militants, especially the Bolsheviks, ever since).

Robespierre’s and Saint Just’s overthrow in 1794 stopped the forward progression of the revolution although it did not return it back to the old feudal society. The forces unleashed by the revolution, especially among the land hungry peasantry, made that virtually impossible. In short, as has happened before in revolutionary history, the people and programs which supported the forward advancement of the revolution ran out of steam. The careerists, opportunists and those previously standing on the sidelines took control until they too ran out of steam. Then, not for the first or last time, the precarious balance of the different forces in society clashed and called out for a strongman. Napoleon Bonaparte was more than willing to be obliging when that time came.

Mr. Loomis takes great pains to disassociate himself not just from the excesses of the period (the executions) but seemingly the whole notion of democratic revolution at that time. He essentially favors a constitutional monarchy, and let the revolution stop there. In short, a regime run by a Lafayette-type- but with brains. Great revolutions, however, do not go halfway, despite the best laid plans of humankind. That said, why would militants read this book which paints everyone to the left of the most moderate Girondists as some kind of monster or at least an accomplice? If militants only read pro-revolutionary tracts then they are missing an important part of their education- the fight against patented bourgeois mystification of events. The terror in Paris is a question that needs to be dealt with critically by us while we defend the members of the Committee of Public Safety in their efforts to defend France against internal hostile elements of the old regime and the counterrevolutionary Europe powers. And at the same time defend the Committee’s program of social democracy initiated in order to maintain their base among the sans-culottes.

That said, every place Mr. Loomis places a minus we do not necessarily place a plus. We need to do our own sifting out of revolutionaries from the pretenders. Mlle. Corday by all accounts was a royalist at heart before she murdered Marat. Marat was by all accounts a fanatic. You cannot, however, make a revolution without theses Marat types. A combat-type revolutionary party, if such a party existed in Paris at the time which this writer does not believe did exist, would rein a Marat in. Danton is still an equivocal character who wanted to stop the revolution at his threshold. A Danton-Robespierre political bloc could have carried the revolution over some tough spots. That was not to be. The fault lies in the personality of Robespierre. Moreover, the execution of the leading Hebertists was a serious mistake, as it weakened the Committee’s base of support among the sans-culottes.

Robespierre and Saint Just are portrayed here as little more than monsters. But without those two figures the contours of the revolution would have been different, if it had survived the Coalition military forces arrayed against it at all. The question of the military defense of the revolution and its requirements domestically takes short shrift in Mr. Loomis’s account. That is the book’s abiding error. Robespierre headed the key administrative component of that defense. Saint Just was instrumental in the military aspect of that defense. One can rightly ask, with the possible exception of Carnot, who else could have organized that defense? One should moreover note that a revolution brings to the fore all kinds of personalities, not all of them as well- adjusted as modern humankind (sic) - it however, can never be reduced solely to that factor. Thus, militants should look for other sources elsewhere in order to find ammunition in defense of Robespierre and Saint Just. Apparently, according to Mr. Loomis and others, they are in need of defending. Nevertheless, they are worthy of honor in any militant’s revolutionary pantheon. Enough said.

*****Then and Now-A Pamphlet On The American Labor Struggles Of The 1930s

*****Then and Now-A Pamphlet On The American Labor Struggles Of The 1930s

 

Workers Vanguard No. 1072 7 August 2015 New Spartacist Pamphlet   Newly available for purchase is our publication Then and Now, which explains how class-struggle leadership made a key difference in three citywide strikes in 1934. We reprint below the pamphlet’s introduction describing its contents.   The “Then and Now” article in this pamphlet addresses the crucial political lessons of the 1934 strikes by Minneapolis truckers, maritime workers on the West Coast and Toledo auto parts workers. Waged amidst the all-sided destitution of the Great Depression, these strikes, like others that year, confronted the strikebreaking forces of the capitalist state. A key difference was that these strikes won. What made this outcome possible is that their leaders were, at the time, committed to a program of class struggle. Unlike other trade-union leaders of that day—and today—they did not buy into the notion that the workers had interests in common with the employers, their political parties or their state. Instead, these strikes were fought by mobilizing the mass strength and solidarity of the workers in opposition to the forces of the capitalist class enemy.   The review of Bryan Palmer’s book Revolutionary Teamsters provides a more in-depth study of the Minneapolis truckers’ strikes, which were led by the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America (CLA). Here they confronted the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) governor of Minnesota, Floyd Olson, who commanded the allegiance of many workers with his often radical-sounding, friend-of-the-little-guy rhetoric. The FLP postured as a “third party” alternative to both the Democrats and Republicans, but it was no less a capitalist party.   This is effectively addressed in the 1930 article “The Minnesota F.L.P.” by Vincent Dunne, who went on to become a central leader of the truckers’ strikes. As Dunne makes clear, the two-class Farmer-Labor Party was based on the subordination of the workers’ struggles to farmers and other petty-bourgeois forces “whose political outlook is bounded by the illusion that it is possible to achieve security under the capitalist order.” After an on-again, off-again alliance with the Democratic Party, the FLP finally merged with the Democrats in 1944.   Dunne and other CLA leaders of the Minneapolis strikes had been armed for battle against farmer-labor populism by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who in the early 1920s had intervened to pull the young American communist movement back from giving political support to the capitalist “third party” candidacy of Robert La Follette, a maverick Republican Senator from Wisconsin. The excerpts from Trotsky’s introduction to his book, The First Five Years of the Communist International, summarize his opposition to this opportunist course which, if pursued, would have politically liquidated the fledgling Communist party.   Today, what remains of the gains that were won through the momentous class battles of the past continues to be ravaged in a one-sided class war enabled by trade-union misleaders, who have long forsaken the very means through which the unions were founded. The working class, the poor, black people, immigrants and countless others at the bottom of this society have paid the price in busted unions, broken lives and all-sided misery.   To be sure, it is not easy for the workers to win in the face of the forces arrayed against them. Many strikes, even very militant ones, will lose. But as was demonstrated in the three 1934 strikes addressed in this pamphlet, when important working-class battles are won it can dramatically alter the situation. These victories inspired a huge labor upsurge later in the 1930s that built the mass industrial unions in this country.   Hard-fought strikes can provide an important school of battle for the workers in which they learn the power of their collective strength and organization and begin to understand the class nature not only of the capitalist system but of the government, laws and political parties that defend its rule. But while able to strike important blows against the conditions of the workers’ exploitation, trade-union struggle on its own cannot end that exploitation. To win that war there must be a struggle for working-class power under the leadership of a revolutionary party that can arm the workers with the understanding and consciousness of their class interests in the fight to emancipate labor and all of the oppressed from the bondage of capitalist exploitation.

 

Spartacist League/U.S.

Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA

Frank Jackman comment on the labor Struggles of the 1930s:

Everybody, everybody who has been around for the last generation or two and has been breathing knows that the rich have gotten richer exponentially in the one-sided class war that they have so far successfully been pursuing here in America (and internationally as well). We really do not need to have the hard fact of class thrown in our faces one more time by the dwindling band of brave pro-working class leftists who must be legitimately perplexed by the lack of push-back, lack of basic trade union consciousness that animated those of a couple of generations ago to at least fight back and win a few precious gains. Or to have those of the think tank crowd of craven sociologists and make-shift policy wonks who are always slightly behind whatever the current reality is and well behind on what the hell to do about it if they would dream of lowering themselves to such considerations tell us of their recent discovery that the working classes (and the vaunted middle too) are getting screwed to put in working class language. What we really do need to have is some kind of guidance about how to fight back, how to get some room to breathe and figure out a strategy to win some class battles, small, large, hell, any size if for no other reason than to get the capitalists, mostly finance capitalists these days to back off a bit in that relentless drive to push everybody else to the bottom.

So it is very good, and very necessary, that this informative and thought-provoking pamphlet, Then and Now, goes back to the 1930s, the last serious prolonged struggle by the American working class as a class. Goes back and discusses those three very important class battles of 1934 –Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco all led centrally by “reds,” by those who had some sense that they were joining  in episodes of the class struggle and were willing to take their lumps on that basis. It probably would have seemed crazy to those militants that over 75 years later that their battles would be touted as the last great struggles of the class and that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be looking over their exploits with a certain admiration (and maybe puzzlement too since they have not seem such uppity-ness, ever). It speaks volumes that today’s leadership of the organized working class in the trade unions is clueless, worse, consciously works to keep everybody under their thumbs clueless about the battles that gave them their jobs. But that should not stop the rest of us from picking up some pointers. Read this one-and act.