In Honor Of The Frontline Defenders Of The International Working Class-From Our Forebears The Diggers Of The English Revolution-The World Turned Upside Down

In Honor Of The Frontline Defenders Of The International Working Class-From Our Forebears The Diggers Of The English Revolution-The World Turned Upside Down

A YouTube film clip of Billy Bragg (Known In This Space As Narrator Of Woody Guthrie And His Guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists )performing The World Turned Upside Down.

 

An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere! ********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.

The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.

Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low–end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obama-care reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy. Support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For 15.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.

Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution workers the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of retail stores. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012 labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example that I can recall- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).  

*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, I argued that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. Not Another War In Iraq! No Intervention In Syria! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East! Stop The Bombing Campaign! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!  

U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.

U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.

Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets by going to prison. The only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.

*Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.  

Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!

This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.

Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.

Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!

Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.

Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.

Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

  

In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

 

THE FOLLOWING IS A SONG BASED ON THE DIGGER EXPERIENCE IN 1650

If John Milton was the literary muse of the English Revolution then the Diggers and their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, were the political muses.

The World Turned Upside Down

We will not worship the God they serve, a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve.

In 1649 to St. George's Hill

A ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people's

will

They defied the landlords, they defied the laws

They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.

We come in peace, they said, to dig and sow

We come to work the lands in common and make the waste

ground grow

This earth divided we will make whole

So it may be a common treasury for all "**

The sin of property we do disdain

No man has any right to buy or sell the earth for private gain

By theft and murder they took the land

Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command

They make the laws to chain us well

The clergy dazzle us with heaven, or they damn us into hell

We will not worship the God they serve,

a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve

We work and eat together, we need no swords

We will not bow to masters, nor pay rent to the lords

Still we are free, though we are poor

Ye Diggers all, stand up for glory, stand up now!

From the men of property the orders came

They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers'

claim

Tear down their cottages, destroy their corn

They were dispersed - only the vision lingers on

Ye poor take courage, ye rich take care

This earth was made a common treasury for everyone to share

All things in common, all people one

They came in peace - the order came to cut them down

WORDS AND MUSIC BY LEON ROSSELSON, 1981

 

*A Communist Before His Time –Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Colonies in the English Revolution

 

DVD REVIEW

Winstanley, starring Miles Harriwell, directed by Kenneth Brownlow, 1975

The time of the English Revolution in the 1640's, Oliver Cromwell's time, as in all revolutionary times saw a profusion of ideas from all kinds of sources- religious, secular, the arcane, the fanciful and the merely misbegotten. A few of those ideas however, as here, bear study by modern left-wing militants. As the film under review exemplifies, True Leveler (a. k. a. Diggers) Gerrard Winstanley's agrarian socialist utopian tracts from the 1640's, the notion of a socialist solution to the problems of humankind has a long, heroic, and storied history. The solutions presented by Winstanley had and, in a limited sense, still do represent rudimentary ways to solve the problem of social and economic distribution of the social surplus produced by society. Without overextending the analogy Winstanley's tract represented for his time, the 1600's, what Communist Manifesto represented for Kaarl Marx's time-and ours-the first clarion call for the new more equitable world order. And those with property, those who controlled and gained from the means of production, hated both men with the same amount of venom, in their respective times.

One of the great advances Marx had over Winstanley was that he did not place his reliance on an agrarian solution to the crisis of society as Winstanley, by the state of economic development of his times, was forced to do. Marx, moreover, unlike Winstanley, did not concentrate on the question of distribution but rather on who controlled the means of production a point that all previous theorists had either failed to account for, dismissed out of hand, or did not know about. Thus, all pre-Marxist theory is bound up with a strategy of moral as well as political persuasion as a means of changing human lifestyles. Marx posed the question differently by centering on the creation of social surplus so that under conditions of plenty the struggle for daily survival would be taken off the human agenda and other more lofty goals put in its place. Still, with all the True Levelers' weaknesses of program and their improbabilities of success in the 1640's militants today still doff our hats to Winstanley's vision.

Notwithstanding the utopian nature of the experiment discussed above the filmmaker, Kenneth Brownlow, and his associates here have painstakingly, lovingly and with fidelity to the narrative and detail that are known from the researches of the likes of Christopher Hill and George Sabine, among others, that make for an excellent snapshot of what it might have been like up on Winstanley's St. George's Hill long ago. Two things add to that end.

First, the use of black and white highlights the bleak countryside (after all although the land was "common" it was waste that the landlord did not find it expedient to cultivate) and the pinched appearances of the "comrades" (especially the deeply-farrowed expressions of Miles Harriwell as Winstanley). Secondly, the director has used to the greatest extent possible Winstanley's own pamphlets that dealt with what was going on in Surrey and what his political purposes were (expressed as almost always in those days in religious terms- but taking land in common for use rather than profit is understandable in any language. I might add that the attempts to replicate the costumes of the period, the furnishings and the music round out a job well done.

Note: Part of this DVD contains a section on the hows and whys of the making of the film, including in-depth coverage of its making and commentary by Mr. Brownlow. You are getting this film for the Winstanley reenactment but this section is interesting if you are interested in filmmaking as well.

The Con Is On-In Honor Of Verbal Kint

The Con Is On-In Honor Of Verbal Kint

By Sam Lowell   

One night in Jack’s, the much frequented bar by Zack James’ old 1960s corner boys in Adamsville, he was telling a few of the guys, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins, Bart Webber, Frank Jackman maybe Kenny Jackson who stepped in for a moment, about a film that he had recently seen, a film that kind of made Kevin Spacey as an actor, titled The Usual Suspects (a title taken, consciously taken, from a line uttered by Claude Rains’ Vichy French gendarme character in the film classic Casablanca). The reason Zack was so hopped up on the film was that it featured Spacey as a very crafty con man. When they all heard that expression, that con man, the assembled crowd lifted their heads in unison. Even some thirty years later, thirty years from the time when they hung around Salducci’s Pizza Parlor and plotted their own cons, they responded that way to a type of criminal mind that they could still relate to even though any such criminal action on their own parts had been given up by the time they graduated from high school as being too hard to keep up once they had opportunities to escape that narrow corner boy con artist world. It was either Jack or Bart who chimed up and asked Zack to give them the “skinny” on the film, see what they had “missed” by not turning pro. See whether they would have worshipped the Kevin Spacey character Verbal Kint like a living god the way that they did the king hell king of the 1960s Adamsville night, Pretty James Preston.       

Zack agreed to tell the tale at least in outline although he was not sure that Pretty James Preston was in the same league as Verbal Kint, or would have been if he had decided to stick with con artistry rather than move on to more sullen criminal activity, move on to armed a robberies (and taking virtue from impressible young girls, a subject that was still on his mind whenever he thought about Pretty, especially after Pretty  had taken his girl Mimi Murphy away, away to who knows where after he fell down). The way that this Verbal Kint set up his game was to act like a small time con man, you know, taking old ladies for their insurance money, bait and switch stuff, flimflam stuff. Added in to those small time clips was to act the fool, ac the king’s court jester, act stupid and best of all put on the old “crip,” act, you know act all handicapped, disabled, or whatever they call a guy who looks like he would need help just to cross the street, that con men have been doing since Hector was a pup to get others to blow them off as so much wind.

In any case Verbal puts this little scam together, gave the cops anonymous information so that four other big time con men with specialized skills including the ability to work with heavy guns and other weapons, wound up in the same New York City police line-up with him. The key guy, the legendary Dean Keaton, who had been accused of half the big time hustles on the East Coast, was the guy Verbal hooked into leading the expedition. Hooked into the deal since Dean had declared himself out, said he was nothing but a straight and narrow dude. After a little work by Verbal, very little because no con man ever retires as long as he draws breathe, on Dean’s ego he fell, fell in as leader since the others were strictly guys who work aspects of a con, work as hired help, when it gets big, too big for them to plan in their simple blam, blam ways.              

So Dean pulled the guys through a couple of capers, soft and easy money like falling rain, got them so they didn’t mind working with each other, getting them to trust each other as much as one thief can trust another which is none too far. Then Verbal sprung his trap. Brought in this guy, a mouth-piece for a Mister Big to tell them if they knew what was good for them they would do Mister Big’s bidding. (That Mister Big had a name which they all recognized, recognized as somebody not to cross, not to say no to if he wanted you for a caper, but Zack didn’t feel the need to say the name since all the guys knew every real caper had some real banker/backer and so the actual name was not important, just the fear he could put on if you didn’t co-operate like with Pretty James Preston when he got his “wanting habits” on as Zack used to call  it when Pretty needed dough for some frail or his bike, man, his bad-ass bike) They collectively balked for a minute but once the mouth-piece laid out the plan, or rather the dough involved, a dope deal of course with the numbers his was putting out, and the consequences for them and their loved ones if they didn’t they came on board.

The caper involved an exchange of dough for a boatload of dope with a group of bad guys from Europe and Latin America. The thing went awry as Verbal had planned from the beginning with nothing but gun fire and explosions, all boom, boom around with only Verbal and some other guy surviving. Verbal surviving with all the dough when the deal went down.

Here is the beauty of the caper though, the getting away with it part that always is the tip-off of whether a con works, or some guy named Verbal Kint  did a ton of time and they throw away the key for good measure. Naturally the feds, FBI, Customs, once the boom, boom came into play wanted to find out what the hell happened so they interrogated Verbal mercilessly. The FBI offered immunity for Verbal’s story seeing him as the day labor not the boss whom they assumed was Dean Keaton. So Verbal gave them what they wanted, a beautiful story line made out of pure cloth about the whole thing being set-up by a unknown Mister Big under penalty of personal destruction for not co-operating. And the best part as he spinned his tale Verbal giving them Dean Keaton as the Mister Big. And so Verbal walked, walked away from his cripple act too. See old Verbal was really Mister Big if anybody was asking. The Feds had egg all over their faces. Good. As Zack said that the guys ate it up. Jack, who was still hustling Toyotas as Mister Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts and so not so far from his youthful cons as he might have thought but who had a good sense of who had the goods and who didn’t when they were kids said right out of the blue that old Verbal would have had Pretty James for lunch and had time for a nap.         

All the time Zack though was relating the story line he was thinking about damn Pretty James and his antics. Not his antics which every guy who hung around Salducci’s (and before that Doc’s Drugstore over on Newbury Street when they were in elementary school and Harry’s Variety Store in junior high school to show the corner boy progression as each grouping came of age) came to admire and wonder at (except when they had been the “victim” of Pretty’s’ con, or had been the fall guys when some scam didn’t work and they had been out some dough that he had inveigled them into “lending” him) but those that cut him personally to the quick. The times when he was a kid and Pretty made a sap out of him more than once but more importantly, more leaving him feeling like Pretty should burn in the gates of hell for what he did to, and with, Mimi Murphy as much as he admired him as a kid.       

Sure the sap stuff was kids’ stuff, you know grabbling Zack’s milk money along with the others in order to buy something, maybe rings, and then selling them to the kids, including Zack at a jacked up price although much less than what they would cost at the jewelry store. What nobody knew, nobody but Zack after he figured it out was that Pretty was grabbing the milk money for “walking around” money and doing the “five-finger” discount, “clipping” the rings. (That “Pretty” moniker had been hung on him in elementary school from a remark a teacher had made about him being too pretty, and he was, to be a bad boy, little did she know. He would only answer then to Pretty James Preston or somebody would get a fistful of knuckles as Jimmy Jenkins found out soon enough but later he would answer to just Pretty, especially when the girls called him that.). Or the time in junior high when he started raffles in school with kids’ grabbing tickets left and right to win television sets, radios, recorder players. And then holding the drawings with a rigged tumbler with fake name winners. Pretty just kept the dough because there were no winners, no merchandise either. He had made up all the names in the tumbler and thrown away all the other names. Beautiful.

Here is the real beauty of Pretty though on as he refined that basic scam- when he was running a classic pyramid scheme, a Pozzi deal really. He would sell the tickets say for a dollar a piece, collect maybe fifty or hundred bucks and the hold a “drawing.” There would be one prize some beat Radio Shack transistor radio maybe worth ten bucks and that was that. Of course junior high kids didn’t know how much the damn thing cost could care less, cared only that they had not won. Next day, hell, the very next morning before school Pretty had new tickets ready for the suckers. This drawing though got him a couple of hundred bucks and he distributed a couple of radios and a television. See he had worked a deal with some of the older guys who were hanging around Salducci’s Pizza Parlor before they graduated to something else and were doing the midnight creep around town, the midnight creep being B&E in the nighttime to certain houses which had televisions or warehouses with the same. The deal was they would sell him the merchandise whatever it was and he would cut them into a share of the profits from the raffles. That racket got Pretty most of the way to sixteen, got him plenty of admiration once he took us under his wing and let others be the “suckers” grabbling cheapjack stuff from his raffles.              

That sixteen was important because something turned in Pretty, not the con part, no way, he lived for the con, but his whole attitude toward society changed quite a bit from basically seeing the whole world as fair game for his various basically harmless if morally dubious grifts fits to “carrying a chip on his shoulder.” Started see the whole world as his to exploit whatever way he wanted. His scams got more ingenious but also more perverse. Moreover at sixteen he got his big ass motorcycle which he got by some fucked up scheme. Somehow he thought that bike, and it was a great big monster, a British bike not a Harley pig bike make him king of the world. Made him fast, which it did. That sixteen was the year he did his first robbery, armed robbery to boot, nothing big just a local gas station where he scared the gas jockey so much that when it came time for him to identify Pretty he suddenly got amnesia, couldn’t remember what the guy looked like. And Pretty did not wear a mask, and the jockey knew exactly who Pretty was since he would fill up the bike’s tank there all the time. Pretty became an urban legend off of that one.        

That sixteen though was the time that Pretty started treating his corner boys like shit though. That would have been okay probably but it still stuck in Zack’s gut after all the years Pretty had been dead and Mimi had been missing that Pretty had taken Mimi away from Zack right in front of his eyes. Zack had been cultivating his relationship with the pretty, nicely-shaped, red-headed Mimi, known around as one of those Irish Catholic girls in the neighborhood who had the rosary in her hand and a Bible between her knees and so Zack had played it slow and by the book unlike with other girls who he tried to fuck the first night, the first date or the second. Yeah he had it bad for her. One summer afternoon between sophomore and junior year Zack and Mimi had been walking along Adamsville Beach when a big boom motorcycle came up behind them and Zack knew it could only be Pretty whom he had not seen in a while since he had dropped out of school in the spring saying to everybody that he didn’t need any more school education since he knew how he was going to make his bones. That was just after the famous armed robbery at the local gas station. Pretty didn’t say one blessed word to Zack or Mimi but just nodded toward Mimi to get on the back of his bike. And just like that she did. That night from the scuttlebutt in the girls’ lav at school according to Zack’s sister who had been friendly with Mimi she let Pretty have his way with her.

For a while, a couple of years, he would see Mimi and Pretty usually on the back of one of Pretty’s bikes (one of them after a while including a big old Vincent Black Lightening another British bike that was supposed to be super-fast) and then he didn’t see or heard anything for a while until the time of the great Riverdale National Bank robbery, or rather attempted robbery, where Pretty was gunned down by a fleet of Riverdale coppers after being winged by some bank security guard who must have thought that the money was his own that was being stolen. The newspaper said witnesses had seen a pretty red-head across the street from the bank who looked frightened at what had happened. She had fled, Mimi had fled and while Zack had heard a rumor that she was for a time up in Portland working as a model or in some whorehouse, or doing something around there he never tried to find out and she never came back to Adamsville even for her parents’ funerals. Zack had to chuckle, a bitter chuckle, as he thought about what Jack had said about how even now old Verbal would have had Pretty for lunch and had time for a nap. Little good that knowledge would ever do Zack though.       

*****In The Twilight Of The Folk Minute- Peter Seeger And Arlo Guthrie In Concert In The Late 1980s

*****In The Twilight Of The Folk Minute- Peter Seeger And Arlo Guthrie In Concert In The Late 1980s

“Jesus, they charged me fourteen dollars each for these tickets to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie and I got them by coming over here to the box office on my lunch hour instead of being gouged by Tick-Pik for three extra bucks apiece for god knows what purpose since it is not like this concert thing was a “hot ticket” like they were the Stones or Springsteen where you expect to be gouged and if you want to see them bad enough you cough up the extra dough, Sam Lowell was telling his companion and their two friends just that moment. After a pause to think through where he wanted togo with his thoughts he continues, “Remember Laura about ten or fifteen years ago when we saw Pete for five bucks each at the Café Nana over in Harvard Square and he put on a hundred dollar show unlike what I hear about him lately that age is catching up with him, he must be in his seventies, and he talks more than plays and sings.” (Laura nodded her head in agreement.) “That was when Hank, Hank Jacobs, the owner, used to bill all the big folk acts for cheap money because the folk minute was decidedly over and most of them were “from hunger” then and didn’t want to work for the “basket” like when they were kids on the way up so would jump at the opportunity to play and I guess he treated them okay from what Dave Von Ronk said one night when he was featured there. Those were the days when just because it was the Square you could still draw a crowd of people like us who used to “cruise” the folk minute scene in the early 1960s to hear those guys play and still carry the torch for such music that went along with our political ambitions and our desire to break out of that mold which was descending on us to come back to earth for a while.” (Laura laughed at that mention of “cruise” since it was a new term, kind of sexually charged,  not used back in the day when it was just “hanging out” they were doing when they went to the coffeehouses or peace marches.)

“Oh yeah, and the price of an expresso coffee each for two people and I think maybe we shared a piece of carrot cake was maybe another three bucks. You had to have something in front of you to keep your seat or unless it was a slow night Hank would scowl at you and make you think that you had done something criminal by taking the seat of a customer who would buy some wine and maybe a light meal which they served then. Beside the carrot cake was good, I think his wife, Stella, made it from scratch and Laura would eat a fork-full and I would have the rest as you can tell from my slightly expanded form.” (Laura laughed the knowing laugh of too many latter carrot cakes after he stopped jogging a few years back when his knees started giving out from the pounding he took over on the asphalt at Fresh Pond where he used to run.)

“We had been on a cheap date since I was still in law school over at New England, maybe second year so it was probably 1972 (Laura corrected him saying 1973), a cheap date when I didn’t have much cash and at that time, just at the cusp of the women’s liberation movement taking wider hold, a guy was still mostly expected to pay. No “Dutch treat,” no Laura Dutch treat expected anyway especially on a first or second date, and definitely not that one when I had been intrigued by you early on and wanted to continue to see you.” (Laura’s face reddened and then she put on a bright smile).

“Around that same time, that same Spring of 1973, Arlo gave a free concert out on Concord Commons, remember” Sam said to his date Laura Peters and the couple they were standing in line with, Patrick Darling and Julia James, in front of Symphony Hall in Boston waiting for the doors to open for the Pete-Seeger-Arlo Guthrie concert that evening.

Laura once Sam came off his soap-box as she always called it, especially when he was in a “folk minute” frame of mind and wanted to impress everybody within hearing distance of his arcane knowledge of lots of folk history including remembering the wrong dates and usually what they ate, or didn’t eat, but spot on when it came to the acts and their play lists for the evening then rather sheepishly, for her, nodded that she remembered the Café Nana event since she had been entirely willing, knowing that Sam was in law school and broke and she had already gotten a job as a CPA at John Hancock and was making money, to go “Dutch treat” that night but Sam had insisted he pay and she did not press the issue since she too had been intrigued by him.  That sheepish part was because she recalled that back then, back before she got involved with the edges of the women’s liberation movement and tried to change was perfectly willing to let the guy pay, expected him to pay even if he was from hunger. So Sam was not that far off but she never liked to let him play that “from hunger” thing too strongly and so she had her say. Yeah, she thought to herself that was the way her father had done it with her mother and her mother had passed on that wisdom to her.

Laura had failed to mention, failed to mention under the circumstances that they were standing in a public place with friend who did not need to know Sam “forgot” that she had not gone with him to see Arlo on the Commons since Sam had taken his ex-wife, Josie Davis, to that concert at a time when Josie and Sam were trying to reconcile or get divorced but she did not want to bring that up although Julia had looked in her direction when Sam mentioned that Commons concert since she and her date, some guy from Sam’s law school had gone along and had witnessed reason two hundred and twenty-seven why Sam and Josie eventually got divorced when Josie had badgered Sam about buying a house when he got his first job and would not let it go. With another year in school and bar exams in front of him she was thinking about that stuff. Yeah, so long Josie.  That tense moment passed with the men both oblivious.

This in any case would be the first time Pete and Arlo had appeared together since Newport a number of years back. This also the first time this foursome had seen either of them in a good number of years since Pete Seeger had gone to upstate New York and had been spending more time making the rivers and forests up there green again than performing and Arlo was nursing something out in Stockbridge. “Maybe, Alice,” Patrick said and everybody laughed at that inside joke. 

Sam continued along that line of his about “the back in the days” for a while, with the three who were still also something of folk aficionados well after the heyday of that music in what Sam always and endlessly called the “1960s folk minute” nodding their heads in agreement saying “things sure were cheaper then and people, folkies for sure, did their gigs for the love of it as much as for the money, maybe more so. Did it, what did the grizzled folk historian cum folksinger-songwriter Dave Van Ronk call it then, oh yeah, for the “basket,” for “from hunger” walking around money to keep the wolves from the doors. To piece off the landlord or roommate for another week or month.

Begged for a room, a small room, a stage and bunch of mismatched chairs, usually giving the economics of coffeehouse ownership, to play out whatever saga drove them to places like the Village, Harvard Square, North Beach and their itch to make a niche in the booming folk world where everything seemed possible. Everything seemed possible if you had any kind of voice to the left of Dylan’s and Van Ronk’s own, could play three chords on a guitar, or a la Pete work a banjo, a mando, or some other stringed instrument, and write of love, sorrow, some dastardly death deed, or on some pressing issue of the day.

 

After being silent for a moment Sam got a smile on his face and said “On that three chord playing thing I remember Geoff Muldaur from the Kweskin Jug Band, a guy who knew the American folk songbook as well as anybody then, worked at learning it too, as did Kweskin himself, learned even that Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music stuff, all eighty some songs, or the ones customers would listen to, stuff which meant you had to be serious, saying that if you could play three chords you were sure to draw a crowd, a girl crowd around you, if you knew four or five that  meant you were a serious folkie and you could even get a date from among that crowd, and if you knew ten or twelve chord you could have whoever and whatever you wanted. I don’t know if that is true since I never got beyond the three chord thing but no question that was a way to attract women, especially at parties.” Laura, never one to leave something unsaid when Sam left her an opening said in reply “I didn’t even have to play three chords on a guitar, couldn’t then and I can’t now, although as Sam knows I play a mean kazoo, but all I had to do was start singing some Joan Baez or Judie Collins cover and with my long black hair ironing board straight like Joan’s I had all the boys come around and I will leave it to your imaginations about the whatever I wanted part.”

They all laughed although Sam’s face reddened a bit at the thought of her crowded up with guys hanging over her although he had not known her back then in the folk minute since she had lived in Manhattan then and he had grown up and lived Carver about thirty miles south of Boston but had only met her later in the early 1970s when the Josie thing was going bad and she had brought smiles to his face when he needed somebody to do that awesome task.                      

Those reference got Julia thinking back the early 1960s when she and Sam went “Dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. (Sam and Julia were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other but folk music was their bond and despite persistent Julia BU dorm roommate rumors what with Sam hanging around all the time had never been lovers). She mentioned that date to Sam as they waited to see if he remembered and while he thought he remembered he was not sure. He asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing like something out of the sea, or like the cry of the banshees.

Club Blue had been located in that same Harvard Square that Sam had mentioned earlier and along with the Café Nana, which was something of a hot spot once Dylan, Baez, Tom Rush and the members of the Kweskin band started hanging out there, and about five or six other coffeehouses all within a few blocks of each other (one down on Arrow Street was down in the sub-basement and Sam swore that Dylan must have written Subterranean Homesick Blues there). Coffeehouses then where you could, for a dollar or two, see Bob, Joan, Eric (Von Schmidt), Tom (Rush), Phil (Ochs) and lots of lean and hungry performers working for that “basket” Sam had mentioned earlier passed among the patrons and be glad, at least according to Van Ronk when Julia had asked him about the “take” during one intermission, to get twenty bucks for your efforts that night.

That was the night during that same intermission Dave also told her that while the folk breeze was driving things his way just then and people were hungry to hear anything that was not what he called “bubble gum” music like you heard on AM radio that had not been the case when he started out in the Village in the 1950s when he had worked “sweeping out” clubs for a couple of dollars. That sweeping out was not with a broom, no way, Dave had said with that sardonic wit of his that such work was beneath the “dignity” of a professional musician but the way folk singers were used to empty the house between shows. In the “beat”1950s with Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, and their comrades (Dave’s word reflecting his left-wing attachments then) making everybody crazy for poetry, big be-bop poetry backed up by big be-bop jazz the coffeehouses played to that clientele and on weekends or in the summer people would be waiting in fairly long lines to get in. So what Dave did (and Happy Traum and a couple of other singers that she could not remember he had mentioned) was after the readings were done and people were still lingering over their expressos would be to get up on the makeshift stage and begin singing some old sea chanty, some obscure Child ballad (those ballads later a staple in the folk world because you could cover them as public domain items and frankly because they were usually long and filled up a short playlist if you were not feeling well or were pressed for something to perform), or some slavery day freedom song in that raspy, gravelly voice of his which would sent the customers out the door. And if they didn’t go then he was out the door. Tough times, tough times indeed.             

Coffeehouses too where for the price of a cup of coffee, maybe a pastry, shared, you could wallow in the fluff of the folk minute that swept America, maybe the world, and hear the music that was the leading edge then toward that new breeze that everybody that Julia and Sam knew was bound to come what with all the things going on in the world. Black civil rights, mainly down in the police state South, nuclear disarmament, the Pill to open up sexual possibilities previously too dangerous or forbidden, and music too, not just the folk music that he and she had been addicted to but something coming from England paying tribute to old-time blues with a rock upbeat that was now a standard part of the folk scene ever since they had “discovered” blues guys like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Bukka White, and Skip James. All the mix to turn the world upside down. All of which as well was grist to the mill for the budding folk troubadours to write songs about.

Julie made her companions laugh as they stood there starting to get a little impatient since the doors to the concert hall were supposed to open at seven and here it was almost seven fifteen (Sam had fumed, as he always did when he had to wait for anything, a relic of his Army days during the Vietnam War when everything had been “hurry up and wait”). She had mentioned that back then, back in those college days when guys like Sam did not have a lot of money, if worse came to worse and you had no money like happened one time with a guy, a budding folkie poet, Jack Dawson, she had a date with you could always go to the Hayes-Bickford in the Square (the other H-Bs in other locations around Boston were strictly “no-go” places where people actually just went to eat the steamed to death food and drink the weak-kneed coffee).

As long as you were not rowdy like the whiskey drunks rambling on and on asking for cigarettes and getting testy if you did not have one for the simple reason that you did not smoke (almost everybody did then including Sam although usually not with her and definitely not in the dorm), winos who smelled like piss and vomit and not having bathed in a while, panhandlers (looking you dead in the eye defying you to not give them something, money or a cigarette but something) and hoboes (the quiet ones of that crowd  who somebody had told her were royalty in the misfit, outcast world and thus would not ask for dough or smokes) who drifted through there you could watch the scene for free.

On any given night, maybe around midnight, on weekends later when the bars closed later you could hear some next best thing guy in full flannel shirt, denim jeans, maybe some kind of vest for protection against the cold but with a hungry look on his face or a gal with the de riguer long-ironed hair, some peasant blouse belying her leafy suburban roots, some boots or sandals depending on the weathers singing low some tune they wrote or reciting to their own vocal beat some poem. As Julie finished her thought some dressed in uniform guy who looked like a doorman in some foreign castle opened the concert hall doors and the four aficionados scampered in to find their seats.                 

…as they walked down the step of Symphony Hall having watched Pete work his banjo magic, work the string of his own Woody-inspired songs like Golden Thread and of covers from the big sky American songbook and Arlo wowed with his City of New Orleans and some of his father’s stuff (no Alice’s Restaurant that night he was saving that for Thanksgiving, he said) Sam told his companions, “that fourteen dollars each for tickets was a steal for such performances, especially in that acoustically fantastic hall” and told his three friends that he would stand for coffees at the Blue Parrot over in Harvard Square if they liked. “And maybe share some pastry too.”