This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
*In
Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Maliki Shakur
Latine
http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html
A link above to more information
about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement
Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war
prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag
Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found
Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of
the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of
the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site,
seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more
public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand.
Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan
Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense
organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of
advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that
spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement
list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all
serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these
brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and
disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old
Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of
class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise
incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their
cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to
your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make
this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All
Class-War Prisoners Now!
Hands Off Heroic Whistler-Blower Reality Winner-Julian Assange's Defense Of Her Actions Here we go again- We no sooner get the heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning out of the slammer, out of the clutches of the Army out in Fort Leavenworth than the Feds grab NSA contractor Reality (an appropriate name by the way) Winner for telling the world about Russian connections and Trump. Which by the way eight million Congressional committees and a DOJ Special Prosecutor are seriously looking into. None of them are facing any jail time from seeking to expose the truth. Hands off Reality Winner. Help defend her against the governmental monsters. It is rather appropriate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, in the crosshairs of an international cabal looking for his hide was one of the first to come out in defense of Reality Winner
When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away, Again And Again-“The
Quintessential Billie Holiday (Volume 1-1933-1935)”-A CD Review
CD Review
By Music Critic Seth Garth
The Quintessential Billie Holiday, Volume 1, 1933-19352,
Everybody, at least the everybodies who came of age in the
1950s and 1960s, had at least heard the sad life story and junkie death of the
legendary blue singer Billie Holiday. Knew that information either from having
read her biography, the liner notes on her records (vinyl for those who have
not become hip to the beauties of that old-fashion way to produce recordings in
the retro revival of that method), newspaper obituaries, or from the 1970s film
starring Diana Ross (lead singer of Motown’s Supremes). So everybody knew that
Lady Day had come up the hard way, had had a hard time with men in her life and
had plenty of trouble with junk, with heroin. Had turned her into some hustling
gal with dark lights out of a Nelson Algren story about her daddy making her
blues go away, had the “fixer” man making the pain going away for a moment. (I
believe that the Prez, the great saxophonist Lester Young who himself blew many
a high white note out to the China seas as the phrase went on the West Coast
when he was “on” gave her that name. Put lady and day together and it stuck. He
backed her up on many recordings, including here, and in many a venue,
including New York café society before they pulled her ticket. The name fit her
as did that eternal flower arrangement, sweet gardenia speaking of sexual
adventures and promise, in her hair)
Yeah, that is the sad part, the life and times part. But if
you listen to this CD under review like the other ones in this series and other
compilations that I am reviewing at this time while I am in a “from hunger”
wanting habits mood about Lady Day’s work like I get into every once in a while
about music that moved me, spoke to me. In this second volume in the series you
will also know why in the first part of the 21st century guys like
me are still reviewing her work, still haunted by that voice, by that meaningful
pause between notes that carried you to a different place, by that slight hush
as she envelopes a song which kept your own blues at bay. I repeat kept your
blues away whatever she suffered to bring that sentiment forward.
That last statement, those last two sentences, are really
what I want to hone in on here since Billie Holiday is an acquired taste, and a
taste which grows on you as you settle in to listen to whole albums rather than
a single selection spending half the night turning over vinyl, flipping tapes,
changing CDs if you don’t have multiple CD recorder, or grabbing the dial on an
MP3 player. Here is my god’s honest truth though. Many a blue night when I was
young, hell, now too, I would play Billie for hours, tune that vinyl over in my
case, and my own silly blues would kind of evaporate. Nice right.
Here is the not nice part, maybe better the not respectful
part for a sanctified woman’s voice and spirit. Once a few years ago I was talking to some
young people about Billie and, maybe under the influence of the Diana Ross film
or from their disapproving parents, kind of wrote her off as just another
junkie gone to seed. I shocked them, I think, when I said if I had had the
opportunity I would have given Billie all the dope she wanted just for taking
my own blues away. That is why we still
listen to that sultry, slinky, sexy voice today.
Is everything in this CD or in her overall work the cat’s
meow. No, toward the end in the 1950s you can tell her voice was hanging by a
thread under the strain of all her troubles, legal and medical. But in the
1930s, the time of her time, covering Cole Porter, Gershwin and Jerome Kern
songs with a little Johnny Mercer thrown in, the time of Tin Pan Alley songs
which seem to have almost been written just for her she had that certain “it”
which cannot be defined but only accepted, accepted gratefully. This first may
be a little more uneven that her later work when she teamed up with serious jazz
and blues players like the aforementioned Lester Young blowing out high white
notes to the China seas while she basked in the glow of the lyrics. But just check
out Miss Brown To You, What a Little
Moonlight Can Do, and the classic Sunbonnet
Blue and you will get an idea of what I am talking about. And maybe get
your own blues chased away
The Trump Administration announced it has given Defense Secretary Jim Mattis the authority to determine troops levels in Afghanistan. It is widely believed that Mattis favors sending several thousand more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Why? Perhaps to break the “stalemate” as described by the Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, Army General John Nicholson when describing the war to the Senate Armed Services Committee. In his June 13th testimony, Secretary Mattis told the same committee, “We are not winning in Afghanistan right now.”
Veterans For Peace calls for a different direction than more war. We call on Congress to stop funding war and demand a plan for a peaceful solution. We call on the President to immediately begin withdrawal of U.S. troops and take a new direction towards diplomacy and peace. And we call on the people of the U.S. to resist war and demand policies that foster peace and prosperity at home and in Afghanistan.
It should be clear after 16 years and the death of tens of thousands of people that no one is a winner in Afghanistan. There is no clear concept of what it means to win there. In fact, it is no longer clear why the U.S. continues to keep troops in Afghanistan and now is on the brink of increasing the number of men and women in harm's way.
The U.S. has claimed to be at war in Afghanistan to deny “terrorists” training and staging areas to attack the United States and to protect the people of Afghanistan. After this long period of war, what does the U.S. have to show for its military efforts?
Since the horror of September 11, 2001, the U.S. has been on a path of war, wreaking havoc on millions of people around the globe. Because of displacement, death and maiming of loved ones by U.S. wars, animosity towards the U.S. has increased and the world has become less safe. The animosity caused by the wars has created a larger pool of people willing to fight the U.S. In 2001 al Qaeda had limited influence and ISIL did not exist. Now Al Qaeda and ISIL have affiliated groups and sympathetic supporters around the globe.
The protection of the Afghan people has been a total failure. It has been widely reported that the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan found that there were 11,418 civilian casualties (3,498 deaths and 7,920 injured) between January and December 2016, an overall increase of 3 percent. An appalling number of those casualties were children – 923 deaths, and 2,589 injured – a 24 percent increase over record-high numbers from 2015. In addition, 3,535 coalition forces have died; three of which were recently killed as a result of an insider attack fire from an Afghan soldier. We must add to these losses all the people who are physically and psychologically broken and families torn apart.The human cost is immeasurable. But there is also a dollar cost to war. The U.S. has spent over $1 trillion in this failed and depraved effort in Afghanistan. These dollars represent lost opportunities to repair U.S. infrastructure, pay for healthcare, create jobs and address a host of human needs.
It is not too late for a different direction. War was always the wrong option. Perhaps it was not clear 16 years ago. It should be clear now more than ever!
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- “The King Of The Beats”-Jack Kerouac- The Road Down Hill After “On The Road”-“Big Sur”
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just kicks, stuff, important stuff has happened or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex thy called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well. So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind. The kind that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother Alex’s name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 just mentioned. Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly from hunger working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan that was for smooth as silk Frankie to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Jack Kerouac reading from his work. Always a treat whatever his literary fate.
Book Review
Big Sur, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Books, New York, 1992
Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.
As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s lesser work under review here, “Big Sur”, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”.
And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, “On The Road”, his classic modern physical and literary ‘search’ for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. The series, of which the book under review, “Big Sur”, bears the general title “The Legend Of Duluoz”. So that is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign of “Big Sur”.
The action of this novel, a relatively short narrative expression of Kerouac’s now famous spontaneous writing style, takes place in San Francisco and along California’s central coastline at Big Sur. Kerouac was there as a self-imposed retreat by him after the whirlwind of ‘success” of his major work “On The Road” in 1957 and the media’s subsequent proclamation of him as “King of The Beats”. Along the way he talks about the trials and tribulations surrounding his losing fight against alcoholism, his paranoias, his attempts to dry out, and his patterned misadventures, with and without women, mainly as a desperate response to the pressures and other problems associated with his new found, but not necessarily wanted, fame,
I have mentioned, in a DVD review of the excellent film documentary “What Happened To Kerouac?” that part of Kerouac’s “fall from grace” was using so much youthful autobiographical material composed, in retrospect, of basically similar experiences that there was only so much that the market could bear, especially the volatile youth market that would make up the mass base of his audience. That factor and the intense media blitz to single out the ONE authentic voice of the “beats”, his (because he was articulate, at least in the beginning, and handsome in a very television camera-friendly way unlike some of the other wild boys), for which his whole prior personal history left him ill-equipped. In any case he came crashing down.
“Big Sur” is, to my mind, an almost tragically self-conscious literary expression of that fall. And here the points just made really come into play. Sure, there is plenty of Kerouac introspective, some of it very perceptive as always. Of course, there will be plenty of evocative word play, be-bop feeling and other literary tidbits that add to our stock of literary language (including as an addendum, a poem/ranting/ocean sound bite- “Sea” (Sounds Of The Pacific Ocean At Big Sur). Naturally,as well, the cast of characters include a round-up of the usual suspects like Neal Cassady (here under the name Cody), his wife, his mistress, assorted lumpen-proletarian types and the literary West Coast “beats” that have peopled his previous works. But that is exactly the problem. These are no longer the poster boys of the post-World War II cultural scene. Pranks, misadventures, pratfalls and, oh yes, their Kerouac literary presentation as the voice of the “beats” don’t age well as the characters age. Cassady, at least partially, was able to adjust to the new winds blowing in the 1960s. Kerouac could not, or would not. Here is the simplest way I can put it- “On The Road” I NEEDED to read at one long sitting, “Big Sur” I took at small samples over a few days. Jack, I think, knew that was where he was, I now know it and you will too.
*For The Late Rosalie Sorrels- Another Rosalie Sorrels Potpourri-Idaho, Cafe Lena, Childhood Dreams and Such
If I Could Be The Rain I
Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go-Round
At 83
By Music Critic Bart
Webber
Back the day, back in
the emerging folk minute of the 1960s that guys like Sam Lowell, Si Lannon,
Josh Breslin, the late Peter Paul Markin and others were deeply immersed in all
roads seemed to lead to Harvard Square with the big names, some small too which
one time I made the subject of a series, or rather two series entitled
respectively Not Bob Dylan and Not Joan Baez about
those who for whatever reason did not make the show over the long haul, passing
through the Club 47 Mecca and later the Café Nana and Club Blue, the Village
down in NYC, North Beach out in San Francisco, and maybe Old Town in Chicago.
Those are the places where names like Baez, Dylan, Paxton, Ochs, Collins and a
whole crew of younger folksingers, some who made it like Tom Rush and Joni
Mitchell and others like Eric Saint Jean and Minnie Murphy who didn’t,
like who all sat at the feet of guys like Woody Guthrie and Pete
Seeger got their first taste of the fresh breeze of the folk minute, that
expression courtesy of the late Markin, who was among the first around to
sample the breeze.
(I should tell you here
in parentheses so you will keep it to yourselves that the former three
mentioned above never got over that folk minute since they will still tell a
tale or two about the times, about how Dave Van Ronk came in all drunk one
night at the Café Nana and still blew everybody away, about catching Paxton
changing out of his Army uniform when he was stationed down at Fort
Dix right before a performance at the Gaslight, about walking down
the street Cambridge with Tom Rush just after he put out No
Regrets/RockportSunday, and aboutaffairs
with certain up and coming female folkies like the previously mentioned Minnie
Murphy at the Club Nana when that was the spot of spots. Strictly aficionado
stuff if you dare go anywhere within ten miles of the subject with any of them
-I will take my chances here because this notice, this passing of legendary
Rosalie Sorrels a decade after her dear friend Utah Phillips is important.)
Those urban locales were
certainly the high white note spots but there was another important strand that
hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and
some of the other upstate colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s, run by the late Lena
Spenser, a true folk legend and a folkie character in her own right, where some
of those names played previously mentioned but also where some upstarts from
the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and
still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like the late Bruce “Utah” Phillips
(although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing
about and rounded out his personality). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels
who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of
83.
Yeah, came barreling
like seven demons out there in the West, not the West Coast west that is a
different proposition. The West I am talking about is where what the novelist
Thomas Wolfe called the place where the states were square and you had better
be as well if you didn’t want to starve or be found in some empty arroyo
un-mourned and unloved. A tough life when the original pioneers drifted
westward from Eastern nowhere looking for that pot of gold or at least some
fresh air and a new start away from crowded cities and sweet breathe vices. A
tough life worthy of song and homage. Tough going too for guys like Joe
Hill who tried to organize the working people against the sweated robber barons
of his day (they are still with us as we are all now very painfully and
maybe more vicious than their in your face forbear). Struggles, fierce
down at the bone struggles also worthy of song and homage. Tough too when
your people landed in rugged beautiful two-hearted river Idaho, tried to make a
go of it in Boise, maybe stopped short in Helena but you get the drift. A
different place and a different type of subject matter for your themes than
lost loves and longings.
Rosalie Sorrels could
write those songs as well, as well as anybody but she was as interested in the
social struggles of her time (one of the links that united her with Utah) and
gave no quarter when she turned the screw on a lyric. The last time I saw
Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at the majestic
Saunders Theater at Harvard University out in Cambridge America at what was
billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel
road. (That theater complex contained within the Memorial Hall dedicated to the
memory of the gallants from the college who laid down their heads in that great
civil war that sundered the country. The Harvards did themselves proud at
collectively laying down their heads at seemingly every key battle that I am
aware of when I look up at the names and places. A deep pride runs through me
at those moments)
Rosalie Sorrels as one
would expect on such an occasion was on fire that night except the then recent
death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill
(and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job banging out the
blues unto the heavens) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always
remember the crystal clarity and irony of her cover of her classic Old
Devil Time that night-yeah, give me one more chance, one
more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain and
thoughst of washing herself down to the sea whenever I hear her name. RIP
Rosalie Sorrels
CD Review Walking, Talking, Singing Storytelling-The Old Traditions
What Does It Mean To Love, Rosalie Sorrels, Green Linnet, 1994 The first paragraph here has been used in reviewing other Rosalie Sorrels CDs in this space. “My first association of the name Rosalie Sorrels with folk music came, many years ago now, from hearing the recently departed folk singer/storyteller/ songwriter and unrepentant Wobblie (IWW) Utah Phillips mention his long time friendship with her going back before he became known as a folksinger. I also recall that combination of Sorrels and Phillips as he performed his classic “Starlight On The Rails” and Rosalie his also classic “If I Could Be The Rain” on a PBS documentary honoring the Café Lena in Saratoga, New York, a place that I am also very familiar with for many personal and musical reasons. Of note here: it should be remembered that Rosalie saved, literally, many of the compositions that Utah left helter-skelter around the country in his “bumming” days.” I am on something of a Rosalie Sorrels streak after getting, as a Christmas gift, a copy of “Strangers In Another Country”, her heart-felt tribute to her recently deceased long time friend and old working class warrior Utah Phillips. Thus, in the interest of completeness as this is the ‘last’ Rosalie Sorrels CD in my possession to be reviewed I will make some a couple of comments. I need not mention Rosalie’s singing and storytelling abilities. Those are, as always, a given. I have noted elsewhere that Rosalie and the old curmudgeon Phillips did more than their fate share of work in order to keep these traditions alive. Old Utah handled the more overtly political phase and Rosalie, for lack of a better expression, the political side as it intersected the personal phase. That informal division of labor is on full display on this CD as Rosalie sings and tells stories of her childhood, her children’s childhoods, stories of other family members and some wisdom that you can take or leave, but at least consider. Fair enough. Of course this reviewer, as a man who loves the oceans, got hooked by this woman of the Rocky Mountain West, by her snippets of stories on a child’s eye view of that first ocean experience (“I have watched and respected the solitude of a child”). So I had to listen to the rest. And so we hear about waltzing with bears, apples and pears, cats and scats, broken tokens and a few other of her observations about growing up to be sane in a seemingly irrational world. And not doing to badly by it as well. Not Rosalie’s most interesting work but worth a listen.
When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away, Again-“The Quintessential
Billie Holiday (Volume 2)”-A CD Review
CD Review
By Music Critic Seth Garth
The Quintessential Billie Holiday, Volume 2,
Everybody, at least the everybodies who came of age in the
1950s and 1960s, had at least heard the sad life story and junkie death of the
legendary blue singer Billie Holiday. Knew that information either from having
read her biography, the liner notes on her records (vinyl for those who have
not become hip to the beauties of that old-fashion way to produce recordings in
the retro revival of that method), newspaper obituaries, or from the 1970s film
starring Diana Ross (lead singer of Motown’s Supremes). So everybody knew that
Lady Day had come up the hard way, had had a hard time with men in her life and
had plenty of trouble with junk, with heroin. Had turned her into some hustling
gal with dark lights out of a Nelson Algren story about her daddy making her
blues go away, had the “fixer” man making the pain going away for a moment. (I
believe that the Prez, the great saxophonist Lester Young who himself blew many
a high white note out to the China seas as the phrase went on the West Coast
when he was “on” gave her that name. Put lady and day together and it stuck. He
backed her up on many recordings, including here, and in many a venue,
including New York café society before they pulled her ticket. The name fit her
as did that eternal flower arrangement, sweet gardenia speaking of sexual
adventures and promise, in her hair)
Yeah, that is the sad part, the life and times part. But if
you listen to this CD under review like the other ones in this series and other
compilations that I am reviewing at this time while I am in a “from hunger”
wanting habits mood about Lady Day’s work like I get into every once in a while
about music that moved me, spoke to me. In this second volume in the series you
will also know why in the first part of the 21st century guys like
me are still reviewing her work, still haunted by that voice, by that meaningful
pause between notes that carried you to a different place, by that slight hush
as she envelopes a song which kept your own blues at bay. I repeat kept your
blues away whatever she suffered to bring that sentiment forward.
That last statement, those last two sentences, are really
what I want to hone in on here since Billie Holiday is an acquired taste, and a
taste which grows on you as you settle in to listen to whole albums rather than
a single selection spending half the night turning over vinyl, flipping tapes,
changing CDs if you don’t have multiple CD recorder, or grabbing the dial on an
MP3 player. Here is my god’s honest truth though. Many a blue night when I was
young, hell, now too, I would play Billie for hours, tune that vinyl over in my
case, and my own silly blues would kind of evaporate. Nice right.
Here is the not nice part, maybe better the not respectful
part for a sanctified woman’s voice and spirit. Once a few years ago I was talking to some
young people about Billie and, maybe under the influence of the Diana Ross film
or from their disapproving parents, kind of wrote her off as just another
junkie gone to seed. I shocked them, I think, when I said if I had had the
opportunity I would have given Billie all the dope she wanted just for taking
my own blues away. That is why we still
listen to that sultry, slinky, sexy voice today.
Is everything in this CD or in her overall work the cat’s
meow. No, toward the end in the 1950s you can tell her voice was hanging by a
thread under the strain of all her troubles, legal and medical. But in the
1930s, the time of her time, covering Cole Porter, Gershwin and Jerome Kern
songs with a little Johnny Mercer thrown in, the time of Tin Pan Alley songs
which seem to have almost been written just for her she had that certain “it”
which cannot be defined but only accepted, accepted gratefully. Don’t believe
me and just check out A Fine Romance, The
Way You Look Tonight, The Foolish Things and the classic Summertime from the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess you will get an idea of
what I am talking about. And maybe get your own blues chased away
An Encore-Remembrances Of Things Past-With Jeff Higgins’ Class Of 1964 In Mind
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
There was always something, some damn thing to remind Jeff Higgins, Class of 1964, a fateful year in his life and not just because that was the year that he graduated from North Quincy High School down in outer edge of the Southeastern corner of Massachusetts. He had recently, well, let's call it 2014 because who knows when some iterant reader might read this and because that as will be pointed in a second has significant for why Jeff Higgins thought that it was "one damn thing after another" when dealing with that class issue. If you did the math quickly in your head while I was pointing to the significance you would know that year represented the fiftieth anniversary of the his graduation from high school, then as now if less so a milestone on the way to serious-minded adulthood, and furthermore had gone through something of a serious traumatic experience which left him numb every time something came up about that year, some remembrance. If you knew Jeff in 1964, and even if did not you knew somebody like Jeff since every high school class had a Jeff case and moreover his experience was not that uncommon, then you know form whence I speak. Hey, let's say you didn't know him back then in 1964 but only in 2014 that would tell you the same tale, with his three messy divorces and several affairs from flings to some more serious relationships along with scads of children and grandchildren now from the marriages not the affairs. Guess what you would know that it was about a woman, always about a woman, he eternally afflicted as old as he was from coming of age time to coming to the end-times.
So about a woman this time, this eternally afflicted time,named Elizabeth Drury whom he had had a brief puff of air affair with in that same 2014 but which had seemingly vanished in his dust of memory until he went up in the attic to clean up some stuff. (By the way Elizabeth not Liz, which would show a certain informality, a certain good sport and not standing on ceremony or Betty, a nickname which conveyed continued childhood in those days as old as a woman might be, so no way she was not anything but a proper Elizabeth-type, who held maybe Queen Elizabeth I, you know the so-called Virgin Queen, the one who ruled England for a long time and had more lovers than you could shake a stick at but all we knew then was that she was the Virgin Queen, as her model, even in high school.) Yeah finally getting rid of most of stuff which had been gathering dust, maybe mold for years, in anticipation of selling his house and moving to a more manageable condo, down-sizing they call it in the real estate trade, and found a faded tattered copy of his class’ remembrance card. You know those time vault cards that card companies like Hallmark, the source of this one, put out so that people, or this case the whole class by some tabulations, can put down favorite films, people, records, who was President, and other momentous events from some important year like a high school graduation to be looked at in later years and ahhed over. That yellowed sheet brought back not just memories of that faded long ago year but of Elizabeth in the not so faded past. So, yes, it was always some damn thing, always some damn woman thing.
Maybe we had better take you back to the beginning though, back to how the year 1964 and the woman Elizabeth Drury had been giving one Jeffery Higgins late of North Quincy nothing but pains. Jeff had been for many, many years agnostic about attending class reunions, had early on after graduation decided that he needed to show his back to the whole high school experience which was a flat-out zero once he thought about every indignity and hurt he had suffered for one reason or another, and to show that same back to the town, a small hick town anyway which needed to be fled to see the big old world. A lot of that teenage angst having to do with his humble beginnings as a son of a “chiseler,” not meant as a nice term, a father who worked in the then depleting and now depleted granite quarries when there was work for which the town was then famous and which represented the low-end of North Quincy society. The low-end which others in the town including his fellow classmates in high school who were as socially class conscious as any Mayfair swells made him feel like a nobody and a nothing for no known reason except that he was the son of a chiseler which after all he could not help. Of course those social exclusions played themselves out under the veil of his not dressing cool, living off the leavings of his older brothers, living off of Bargain Center rejected materials not even cool when purchased, you know, white shirts with stripes when that was not cool, black chinos with cuffs like some farmer, ditto, dinky Thom McAn shoes with buckles for Chrissake, just as his younger brothers lived off his in that tight budget world of the desperate working poor, of his not having money for dates even with fellow bogger’s daughters, and hanging corner dough-less, girl-less corners with fellow odd-ball bogger outcasts. So Jeff had no trouble drifting away from that milieu, had no trouble putting dust on his shoes to get out and head west when the doings out west were drawing every wayward youth to the flame, to the summers of love.
And there things stood in Jeff’s North Quincy consciousness for many years until maybe 2012, 2013 when very conscious that a hallmark 50th class reunion would be in the works and with more time on his hands as he had cut back on the day to day operation of his small law practice in Cambridge he decided that he would check out the preparations, and perhaps offer his help to organize the event. He had received notification of his class’ fortieth reunion in 2004 (which he had dismissed out of hand only wondering how the reunion committee had gotten his address for while he was not hiding from anything or anyone he was also not out there publicly since he did not have clients other than other lawyers whom he wrote motions, briefs, appeals and the like for, until he realized that as a member of the Massachusetts bar he would have that kind of information on his very publicly-accessible bar profile page) so via the marvels of modern day technology through the Internet he was able to get hold of Donna Marlowe (married name Rossi) who had set up a Facebook page to advertise the event.
That connection led to Jeff drafting himself onto the reunion committee and lead directly to the big bang of pain that he would subsequently feel. Naturally in a world filled with social media and networking those from the class who either knew Donna or the other members of the committee or were Internet savvy joined the class’ Facebook page and then were directed to a class website (as he found out later his generation unlike later ones was on the borderline of entering the “information superhighway” and so not all classmates, those still alive anyway, were savvy that way). On that website set up by tech savvy Donna (she had worked in the computer industry at IBM during her working career) each classmate who joined the site had the ability to put up a personal profile next to their class photograph like he had done on many other such sites and that is where Jeff had seen Elizabeth Drury’s profile and a flood of memories and blushes.
In high school Jeff had been smitten by Elizabeth, daughter of a couple of school teachers who worked in the upscale Marshfield school system and therefore were stationed well above the chiselers of the town. But in things of the heart things like class distinctions, especially in democratically-etched America, are forgotten, maybe not rightly or fully forgotten when the deal goes down but there is enough of façade to throw one off if one gets feeling a certain way, gets the love bug, and sometime in the genes makes one foolhardy. That had almost happened to Jeff in Elizabeth's case, except his corner boy Jack Callahan had put him wise, had kept him from one more teenage angst hurt. Jeff and Elizabeth had had several classes together senior year and sat across from each other in English class and since both loved literature and were school-recognized as such they had certain interests in common. So they talked, talked in what Jeff thought was very friendly and somewhat flirty manner (or as he thought later after the youthful lame had burned out and he drifted west maybe he just hoped that was the case) and he had "formed an intention" (that is the way he said it the night he related the story to me so forgive the legal claptrap way he said it) to ask her out even if only to Doc’s Drugstore for an after school soda and a listen to the latest platters on Doc’s jukebox which had all the good stuff that kids were dancing to in those days. He figured from there he could work up to a real date. But sometimes the bumps and bruises of the chiseler life left one with a little sense and so before making attempts at such a conquest Jeff consulted with Jack Callahan to see if Elizabeth was “spoken for” (Jeff’s term if you can believe that like this was some 17th century Pilgrim forebears time). See Jack, a star football player even if he was also a chiseler's son got something of an exemption from the rigid routine of the social structure of the senior class just by being able to run through defensive lines on any given granite grey autumn afternoon and so had excellent “intelligence” on the whole school system’s social network, in other words who was, or was not, spoken for. (By the way that “grapevine” any high school grapevine, maybe middle school too would put the poor technicians at the CIA and the spooks at NSA to shame with the accuracy of the information. It had to be that resourceful and accurate otherwise fists would fly.) The word on Elizabeth, forget it, off-limits, an “ice queen.” So Jeff saved himself plenty of anguish and he moved on with his small little high school life.
Seeing Elizabeth's name and profile though that many years later made him curious, made him wonder what had happened to her and since he was now again “single” he decided he would write a private e-mail to her profile page something which the website was set up to perform and which the reunion committee was recommending the still standing alumnus to do. That “single” a condition that he now considered the best course after three shifts of alimony, child support and college tuitions made him realize that it was infinitely cheaper to just live with a woman and be done with it. Jeff wrote a short message asking whether she remembered him and she replied that she very well did remember him and their “great” (her term) conversations about Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton. That short message and reply “sparked” something and they began a flurry of e-mails giving outlines of their subsequent history, including the still important one to Jeff whether she was “spoken for.” She was not having had two divorces although no kids in her career as a professor at the State University. Somehow these messages led Jeff to tell her about his talk with Jack Callahan. And she laughed not at the “intelligence” which was correct but not for the reasons that Jack gave (her father was an abusive “asshole,” her term for her standoffishness and reputation as an “ice queen”). She laughed because despite her being flirty when they talked in English class, at least that was what she thought she was attempting to do because she certainly was interested when they would talk Jeff had never asked her out and then one day just stopped talking to her for no known reason. Damn.
They say, or at least Thomas Wolfe did in the title of one of his novels-you can’t go home again but neither Jeff nor Elizabeth after that last exchange of e-mails about the fateful missing chance back in senior year would heed the message. They decided to meet in Cambridge one night to see if that unspoken truth had any substance. They did meet, got along great, had many stories to exchange and it turned out many of the same interests (except golf a sport which relaxed Jeff when he was all wound up but which Elizabeth’s second husband had tried to teach her to no avail). And so their little affair started, started with great big bursts of flames but wound up after a few months smoldering out and being blown away like so much dust in the wind once Elizabeth started talking about marriage. Jeff was willing to listen to living together but his own strange marital orbit had made him very strongly again any more marriages. So this pair could not go home again, not at all, and after some acrimonious moments they parted.
Jeff knew that was the best course, knew he had to break it off but it still hurt enough that any reference to 1964 made him sad. As he took a look at the sentiments expressed in that tattered yellowed document he had a moment reprieve as he ahh-ed over the information presented. Had he really forgotten that there was no Vice President then since there was no Vice-Presidential succession when Lyndon Johnson became President after the assassination of home state Irish Jack Kennedy. That My Fair Lady was a popular Broadway show then as now. That the Beatles had appeared on Ed Sullivan’s Show and done a film, that Chapel of Love had been a hit that year as well. That 1964 was the year the Mustang that he would have died for came out into a candid world. That gas was only about thirty cent a gallon, and that another Elizabeth, Elizabeth Taylor, married one Richard Burton for the first time (although not the last). And on that sour note he put the yellowed tattered document he had accidently come across in the trash pile with other tattered documents. He would remember things past in his own way.
