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
“Wasn’t That A Mighty Flood, Lord, That Blew All The People All Away”-The The Galveston Flood Of 1900 In Mind
By Greg Green
[Greg Green has come over from a similar job at the on-line American Film Gazette website to act as administrator of the American Left History and its associated blog sites. Welcome aboard.]
After a 2017 summer season of extraordinary hurricane actions and destruction in the Southeastern part of the United States, the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean, one would at least think, that those who do not see anything in this overwhelming climate change evidence would give pause. Those events have brought other earlier massive floods and storms in the Americas to the fore if only by comparison. On can think of the famous Johnston flood of 1927 and of the big bad one that blew over Galveston town 1900 that literally blew all the people all away, over 6000 of them. In those days there were climate deniers of a different sort, people in Galveston who did not believe that because they lived a little bit upland, a few feet above sea level that they would not get swept away. Just like the people and the Army Corps of Engineers believed that the levees would hold along the Mississippi when the big blow Hurricane Katrina came through in 2005 and turned them to sink mud.
We all now know plenty about individual stories during these modern horrific storms from acts of heroism to acts of ingenuity to dastardly acts of cowards taking advantage of the chaos to loot and create mayhem but I would have assumed that we would not be able to know what happened first hand in that 1900 Galveston. But I would have been fortunately wrong because the Rosenberg Library in Galveston commissioned an oral history of the survivors not at the time since there was no way to record such information but later when most of the survivors who had been young children in 1900 were themselves in old age.
Recently NPR’s Morning Edition had a segment highlighting that oral history and I provide a link here:
Not every person around today except maybe those in the Galveston area would be aware of the fury of that storm but I have known about its destruction for about thirty years now although not from an expected history source. I learned about it from a song, a folk song. My parents were both very early folkies in the late 1950s just a shade bit before the folk music revival exploded onto the scene in certain towns and on many college campuses. (My parents actually meet at a small folk concert in a small coffeehouse in Boston, Bailey’s, where they heard the legendary folk singer/songwriter Eric Saint Jean, who has been mentioned on this site on occasion when that folk minute comes up, strut his stuff.) I, like a lot of kids rebelling against their parents hated folk music with a passion.
My parents as long as they lived they were strong devotees of folk singer/songwriter Tom Rush whom they knew from his Club 47 days in Harvard Square. One of his signature songs from the time was his robust cover of Wasn’t That A Mighty Flood a tradition folk song. I first hear the song, kicking and screaming, when I was young and well after Tom Rush’s big folk time when he started doing yearly concerts around New Year at Symphony Hall in Boston. The rousing song now is one of the few that I actually know all the words too and can bear to listen to. Here are the lyrics and they express very concisely what went down in that terrible time:
WASN'T THAT A MIGHTY STORM
Chorus: Wasn't that a mighty storm Wasn't that a mighty storm in the morning, well Wasn't that a mighty storm That blew all the people all away.
You know, the year of 1900, children, Many years ago Death came howling on the ocean Death calls, you got to go Now Galveston had a seawall To keep the water down, And a high tide from the ocean Spread the water all over the town.
You know the trumpets give them warning You'd better leave this place Now, no one thought of leaving 'til death stared them in the face And the trains they all were loaded The people were all leaving town The trestle gave way to the water And the trains they went on down.
Rain it was a-falling thunder began to roll Lightning flashed like hellfire The wind began to blow Death, the cruel master When the wind began to blow Rode in on a team of horses I cried, "Death, won't you let me go"
Hey, now trees fell on the island And the houses give away Some they strained and drowned Some died in most every way And the sea began to rolling And the ships they could not stand And I heard a captain crying "God save a drowning man."
Death, your hands are clammy You got them on my knee You come and took my mother Won't you come back after me And the flood it took my neighbor Took my brother, too I thought I heard my father calling And I watched my mother go.
You know, the year of 1900, children, Many years ago Death came howling on the ocean Death calls, you got to go
"Wasn’t That a Mighty Storm" / "Galveston Flood"
It was the year of 1900 that was 80 years ago Death come'd a howling on the ocean and when death calls you've got to go
Galveston had a sea wall just to keep the water down But a high tide from the ocean blew the water all over the town
Chorus Wasn't that a mighty storm Wasn't that a mighty storm in the morning Wasn't that a mighty storm It blew all the people away
The sea began to rolling the ships they could not land I heard a captain crying Oh God save a drowning man
The rain it was a falling and the thunder began to roll The lightning flashed like Hell-fire and the wind began to blow
The trees fell on the island and the houses gave away Some they strived and drowned others died every way
The trains at the station were loaded with the people all leaving town But the trestle gave way with the water and the trains they went on down
Old death the cruel master when the winds began to blow Rode in on a team of horses and cried death won't you let me go
The flood it took my mother it took my brother too I thought I heard my father cry as I watched my mother go
Old death your hands are clammy when you've got them on my knee You come and took my mother won't you come back after me?
The Max Daddy Of The Concord Woods-The Bicentennial Of The Birth Of Walden’s Henry David Thoreau
By Fritz Taylor
I came to the mad monk of the Concord (Ma) woods, the prophet seeker of Walden Pond late, too late when the deal went down. Too late to help me get through the draft/Army war-circus that was for my generation called Vietnam, the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War where we torched, burned, blasted, bombed, belched seven shades of hell against people, excuse my English, who never did a fucking thing to me or mine. To anybody else’s “me and mine” in this country as I learned later, later when I started to connect, started to dig what this mad monk of the Walden had to say about bothering or not bothering other people just because some, excuse my English again, fucking jerk decided that he needed to prove who was king of the hill. Yeah, so you know I was incensed after I did my Vietnam torching, burning, blasting, bombing and belching seven shades of hell against people I had no quarrel with. I didn’t get “religion” until later.
Now there are many things that this mad monk of the woods taught a candid world (candid when that word had some meaning) about how to preserve the earth, about taking about six steps back and chilling out in your over-stressed life but what grabbed me about the guy was that time when he went crazy over that bastard Jimmy Polk running his ass ragged going to war with the Mexicans. Another people we had no quarrel with and still don’t just because they want to come north to their homeland when you thing about the matter. Yeah, Henry David drove them crazy back in the day when he said he wasn’t pitching in dollar number one for that damn war. Took some jail time for his act of civil disobedience, for speaking truth to power, for setting an example that others later when they took a look at history and guys who did what they had to do did what they had to do.
Yeah left a legacy for later generations. Left it for guys like me who took a wrong turn-for a while. The other day thought I think I might have done old Brother Thoreau proud though. I and a group of Vietnam veterans who I associate were arrested for protesting and protecting some Mexican immigrants who the bastards were trying to deport even though they have been in Estados Unidos all their lives almost. That was my seventeenth arrest for an act of civil disobedience. Henry David your act back in the day did not go unremarked- Thanks Brother.
Be-Bop, Be-Bop Daddy-In Honor Of The Centennial Of The Birth Of The Mad Monk- Thelonious Monk
By Zack James
No question I was (and still am on nostalgia late nights) a child of rock and roll and while I was just a shade too young to appreciate what was driving my older brothers and sisters to blow their socks off screaming about the new dispensation brought forth by Carl, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Buddy and a fistful of other (and earlier influences like Big Joe Turner, Warren Smith, Smiley Jackson) I was washed clean in the afterglow of that time. Then the music died, got stale for a time and I, along with a billion other lost tween and teen souls, was looking for something to take the pain away from having to listen to Conway Twitty, Fabian, and Bobby Dee and Sandra Dee(I won’t even get into the beef I have with those guys who “stole” the hearts of the very girls I was interested in who would not give me a tumble since I was not their kind of “cute”). Later before the rock revival of the 1960s-the British Invasion for one thing I feasted on the folk minute.
But that was later. In between those times during the drought I got “hip” to jazz, to the cool ass max daddy of cooled-off jazz not the stuff that my parents were crazy for-you know Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey, the Duke, the Count, the Big Earl beautiful Fatah Hines (I would appreciate those pioneers a little late-about fifty years late). What caught my ear one night when I was flipping the dial on my transistor radio (look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t know what that life-saver was) and I caught a few strands of a piece on Bill Marlowe’s Be-Bop Jazz Hour (it was really two hours but hour probably sounded better in the show’s title). After that piece was over, really after several pieces were completed since the show unlike rock and roll shows was not inundated with commercials after every song Bill mentioned that those pieces had been performed by a guy he called the Mad Monk. Mentioned Thelonious Monk in a loving awestruck way as a max daddy of cool, very cool, maybe ice cold jazz. This I could listen to. Moreover the whole show was filled with cool jazz including guys like Charley Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charley Christian, the Prez, sweet Billy Holiday when she blasted outside the big band sound.
Get this though the real hook was that some guys like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burrows and a bunch of sidekicks were setting the cool ass jazz to poetry, to “beat” poetry that I was beginning to hear about. Started talking in clipped voices about there being new sheriffs in town-about the time of the hipsters come down to earth- that the thaw was on and that you had better get on board and some of us did-did catch the tail end of beat fever. But you cannot understand “beat” without paying dues to guys like the Monk who was born a hundred years ago this year. Could not understand “beat” if you didn’t “dig” the Monk on the piano searching for that high white note to blow the world out into the China seas. Thanks-brother.
Be-Bop, Be-Bop Daddy-In Honor Of The Centennial Of The Birth Of The Mad Monk- Thelonious Monk
By Zack James
No question I was (and still am on nostalgia late nights) a child of rock and roll and while I was just a shade too young to appreciate what was driving my older brothers and sisters to blow their socks off screaming about the new dispensation brought forth by Carl, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Buddy and a fistful of other (and earlier influences like Big Joe Turner, Warren Smith, Smiley Jackson) I was washed clean in the afterglow of that time. Then the music died, got stale for a time and I, along with a billion other lost tween and teen souls, was looking for something to take the pain away from having to listen to Conway Twitty, Fabian, and Bobby Dee and Sandra Dee(I won’t even get into the beef I have with those guys who “stole” the hearts of the very girls I was interested in who would not give me a tumble since I was not their kind of “cute”). Later before the rock revival of the 1960s-the British Invasion for one thing I feasted on the folk minute.
But that was later. In between those times during the drought I got “hip” to jazz, to the cool ass max daddy of cooled-off jazz not the stuff that my parents were crazy for-you know Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey, the Duke, the Count, the Big Earl beautiful Fatah Hines (I would appreciate those pioneers a little late-about fifty years late). What caught my ear one night when I was flipping the dial on my transistor radio (look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t know what that life-saver was) and I caught a few strands of a piece on Bill Marlowe’s Be-Bop Jazz Hour (it was really two hours but hour probably sounded better in the show’s title). After that piece was over, really after several pieces were completed since the show unlike rock and roll shows was not inundated with commercials after every song Bill mentioned that those pieces had been performed by a guy he called the Mad Monk. Mentioned Thelonious Monk in a loving awestruck way as a max daddy of cool, very cool, maybe ice cold jazz. This I could listen to. Moreover the whole show was filled with cool jazz including guys like Charley Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charley Christian, the Prez, sweet Billy Holiday when she blasted outside the big band sound.
Get this though the real hook was that some guys like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burrows and a bunch of sidekicks were setting the cool ass jazz to poetry, to “beat” poetry that I was beginning to hear about. Started talking in clipped voices about there being new sheriffs in town-about the time of the hipsters come down to earth- that the thaw was on and that you had better get on board and some of us did-did catch the tail end of beat fever. But you cannot understand “beat” without paying dues to guys like the Monk who was born a hundred years ago this year. Could not understand “beat” if you didn’t “dig” the Monk on the piano searching for that high white note to blow the world out into the China seas. Thanks-brother.
Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of his 1935 article, "On The Seventh Congress Of The Communist International".
COMMENTARY
NO LEFTIST MOURNS THE DEATH OF THE ‘BUTCHER’ OF THE POPULAR FRONT ALLENDE GOVERNMENT-BUT, FOR HIS CRIMES AGAINST THE CHILEAN WORKING CLASS HE SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DIE IN BED
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT
Today, Monday December 11, 2006, brings news of the death of old age of the notorious Chilean dictator, General Pinochet, infamous as the “butcher” of the democratically elected Popular Front government of Socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. As a result of the Pinochet-led coup against that government thousands of his fellow citizens and some foreign nationals were rounded up and executed, imprisoned or forced into exile. Not a pretty picture and goes a long way to explaining why his political opponents (as well as victims) are dancing in the streets of Santiago today. The real tragedy , however, was that he was able to rule so long and get away with his role in that suppression without having to face the wrath of his victims, mainly leftists and working class trade unionists. He should not have died in his sleep. However, that is not what is important about the Chilean events. In fact the passing of the General and the details of his nefarious career are best left to The New York Times obituary writers. Pinochet’s death, however, brings back to this writer the need to outline the lessons to be learned by militant leftists about what happened over thirty years ago with the rise and fall of Allende’s Popular Front government in Chile- and how to avoid those same mistakes again.
Why is such an analysis important today? For those who have been attentive to the developments in Central and Latin America there is every indication that some big battles by the working class and its allies are on the agenda, some have already occurred as in Mexico. Right now this is being played out mainly on the parliamentary level with the election of left nationalists and ‘soft’ socialists in such places as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Chile, Peru and the near victory of Obrador in Mexico. In the grand scheme of things the first impulses of the masses to the left almost inevitably take parliamentary form and this wave appears to be no exception. That is why it is necessary for militants to be prepared and forewarned about reliance on a parliamentary strategy on the road to socialism- it aint going to happen on that road, boys and girls.
The following paragraphs are taken from my review of Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (see April 2006 archives) and sums up the experience of popular fronts in the modern era. Trotsky is all his later writing was adamantly opposed to participation in such formations by revolutionaries and he was not wrong on this issue. The experience of the Russian revolution, the only revolution that has overcome the problem of the popular front, should be etched in every militant’s mind.
Trotsky-
“All revolutions, and the Russian Revolution is no exception, after the first flush of victory over the overthrown old regime, face attempts by the more moderate revolutionary elements to suppress counterposed class aspirations in the interest of unity of the various classes that made the initial revolution. Thus, we see in the English Revolution of the 17th century a temporary truce between the rising bourgeoisie and yeoman farmers and pious urban artisans who formed the backbone of Cromwell’s New Model Army. In the Great French Revolution of the 18th century the struggle from the beginning depended mainly on the support of the lower urban plebian classes. As these revolutions demonstrate later after the overturn of the old order other classes through their parties which had previously remained passive enter the arena and try to place a break on revolutionary developments. Their revolutionary goals have been achieved in the initial overturn- for them the revolution is over.
They most commonly attempt to rule by way of some form of People’s Front government. This is a common term of art in Marxist terminology in the modern era that is used to represent a trans-class formation of working class and capitalist parties which ultimately have counterposed interests. The Russian Revolution also suffered a Popular Front period under various combinations and guises supported by ostensible socialists, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, from February to October. One of the keys to Bolshevik success in October was that, with the arrival of Lenin from exile in April, the Bolsheviks shifted their strategy and tactics to a position of political opposition to the parties of the popular front. Later history has shown us in Spain in the 1930’s and more recently in Chile in the 1970’s how deadly support to such popular front formations can for revolutionaries. The various parliamentary popular fronts in France, Italy and elsewhere show the limitations in another less dramatic but no less dangerous fashion. In short, political support for Popular Fronts means the derailment of the revolution or worst. This is a hard lesson, paid for in blood, that all manner of reformist socialists try deflect or trivialize in pursuit of being at one with the ‘masses’. Witness today’s efforts, on a much lesser scale, by ostensible socialists to get all people of ‘good will, etc.’, including liberal and not so liberal Democrats under the same tent in the opposition to the American invasion of Iraq.”
A shorthand way to put this accumulated experience can be expressed this way. No political support to popular front formations. Military support to such formations against right-wing military attack or imperialist intervention. That, my friends, is sound revolutionary policy. Forward.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Ruling-Class Vendetta Against Chelsea Manning Continues
In May, the courageous truth-teller Chelsea Manning was released from prison after being tortured by the Obama regime for seven years for exposing U.S. imperialist war crimes. We have defended Manning since the start of her ordeal and welcomed her release. For Obama, commuting her sentence in the dying days of his presidency was a cheap and cynical move to burnish his “legacy.” Half a year later, the vindictive American ruling class has made clear that it’s not done with her yet.
In September, Harvard University invited Manning to be a visiting fellow at its Kennedy School of Government and then rescinded the invitation the very next day. Manning was disinvited after CIA director Mike Pompeo, calling her an “American traitor,” cancelled an appearance on campus and former deputy CIA director Michael Morrell resigned his own fellowship in protest. Manning responded on Twitter: “This is what a military/police/intel state looks like the @cia determines what is and is not taught at Harvard.”
Indeed, the CIA, NSA, FBI and military are deeply intertwined with Harvard, the most prestigious think tank for U.S. imperialism and training ground for the children and trusted agents of the bourgeoisie. Harvard, like most of the country’s top universities, has a long history of educating, hiring and honoring Washington’s torturers and war criminals. When Harvard’s Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School opened its doors in 1966, its first honorary associate was Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Other Harvard luminaries include Professor Louis Fieser (the inventor of napalm), Henry Kissinger (like McNamara, an architect of mass murder in Vietnam) and Professor Richard Hernnstein (co-author with Charles Murray of the racist tract The Bell Curve). The surprise about Manning’s brief fellowship was not that it was cancelled but that it was offered in the first place! CIA, military off campus!
Manning’s crime in the eyes of the capitalist rulers? In 2010, she leaked files that cast a spotlight on the war crimes of U.S. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most well known of these is the graphic aerial video, dubbed “Collateral Murder,” that shows a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship massacring at least twelve civilians in Baghdad in 2007, including two Reuters staffers, while the pilots gloated over the carnage.
Soon after Harvard disinvited Manning, the government of Canada, Washington’s junior imperialist partner to the north, barred her from entering that country, stating, “If committed in Canada, [Manning’s] offence would equate to…Treason.” On October 8, the liberal New Yorker magazine joined the post-prison vendetta against Manning during its annual festival in New York City. Manning’s fight for transgender people’s rights has earned her a huge following. She featured prominently in the festival program and the venue was filled with admirers.
New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar, who conducted an interview with Manning, was tolerant of her as a transgender activist, but sought to reduce her exposures of U.S. imperialist barbarity to a question of “transparency in government.” The gloves really came off when MacFarquhar began channeling the military prosecutors at Manning’s kangaroo court. She badgered Manning with implications that she had supposedly endangered lives by leaking a trove of war logs and diplomatic cables to Julian Assange.
Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is still trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he sought asylum in 2012 after Swedish prosecutors demanded his extradition on bogus accusations of “rape”—in fact allegations of unprotected sex in what were by all accounts consensual relations. Despite the Swedish authorities dropping the case in May, London police have said they will arrest Assange for violating his bail if he leaves the embassy. The risk is high that Britain would extradite him to the U.S.
Liberals like MacFarquhar have long considered Assange dangerous because, unlike “legitimate” bourgeois mouthpieces like the New York Times, he refuses to redact the material WikiLeaks publishes. Democrats have come to despise Assange even more after WikiLeaks released a trove of emails last year—hacked by “the Russians,” so the story goes—from the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, which supposedly helped Trump win the presidency.
Manning batted back the verbal barrage from MacFarquhar and gave as good as she got. When the journalist accused the former military intelligence analyst of releasing government files without knowing what was in them, Manning angrily objected: “I did know what was in them. I worked with this information every day.” Her interrogator persisted: “But the 250,000 documents, did you not fear that it might hurt someone?” Manning shot back: “Absolutely not.” Signaling to the audience that MacFarquhar was retailing the government frame-up against her, Manning retorted that the leaked files show “people dying and people getting killed and people suffering, and on a massive, incredible scale.”
Manning’s path to her courageous act of self-sacrifice was a long and winding one. Before joining the Army, Manning explained, she struggled with being transgender and even thought that joining the military might make her “not Trans.” Seeing the violence in Iraq on television, she decided to join up, hoping to “make a difference.” It was wishful thinking, she said, but she was only 18. Manning was trained to do statistical data analysis, but the data became real people when she deployed to Iraq. She graphically described the horror, and the normality, of it all: “It was like drinking from a firehose,” a firehose of “death and destruction and mayhem just every single day.”
Elements of Manning’s personal history parallel those of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who is in exile in Russia. Inspired by Manning, in 2013 Snowden released documents exposing the sweep and scope of the global electronic spying activities of the U.S. and its allies. Both Manning and Snowden started out as my-country-right-or-wrong patriots. Over time, each was compelled by conscience to risk everything by taking a stand to expose crimes routinely committed by the U.S. government. By unmasking the bourgeoisie’s everyday lies, intrigues and wanton slaughter, brave individuals like Manning, Snowden and Assange, while far from being revolutionaries, have done a great service to workers and the oppressed throughout the world. Hands off Assange! Drop all charges against Snowden!
Manning has a keen appreciation of the stark social inequalities in the U.S. As MacFarquhar warmed her up with softballs before pressing her to admit to treason, Manning revealed that she is not enamored of the fact that nowadays there is so much focus on marriage equality. She asked rhetorically: how is marriage equality going to help homeless gay and transgender people? How was it supposed to help Manning herself when she was homeless on the streets of Chicago? A puzzled MacFarquhar asked: “What would have helped you in that situation?” Manning shot back: “Housing!”
Chelsea Manning is a fighter and a hero. Working people and the oppressed internationally are in her debt for revealing details of imperialist machinations. But, despite the revelations by Manning, Assange and Snowden, U.S. imperialism by its nature will continue to commit atrocities on a daily basis. The whole system of capitalist exploitation and war must be swept away through workers socialist revolution.
Free All The Political Prisoners-From Those Outside The Walls To Those Inside-Its The Same Struggle-Build The Resistance This holiday time of year (and Political Prisoner Month each June as well) is when by traditions of solidarity and comradeship those of us who today stand outside the prison walls sent our best wishes from freedom to our class-war sisters and brothers inside the walls and redouble our efforts in that task. Don't forget Mumia, Leonard Peltier, Reality Leigh Winner, The Ohio 7's Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman and all those Black Panther and other black militants still be held in this country's prisons for risking their necks for a better world for their people, for all people.
The Founding Myths From
Mother Africa And The African-American Diaspora-Professor Henry Louis Gates And
Maria Tatar Hold Forth-“The Annotated
African-American Folktales”
By Jeffery Jones
[As of December 1, 2017
under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought
in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site
administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of
some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the
habit of assigning writers to specific topics like film, books, political
commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in
this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a
short-lived experiment designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation
of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade”
all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]
[I am fairly new to
working on this site although I got the full treatment concerning the internal
dispute alluded to above about the short-comings which led to the demise of Allan
Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin) long time administrator. I will after some further
reflection put my “two cents” worth in but for now the only comment I have is
about the dearth of black writers here and subject matter except the heroic
civil rights struggles from the 1960s. Strange, or maybe not so strange since
Jackson (and the real Markin) had cut their eyeteeth supporting those struggles
in the 1960s both in Boston and by heading down south. Jeff Jones]
I think it was Joseph
Campbell a man who spent something like a lifetime studying world-wide
foundation myths, and if not him then somebody like him doing the same kind of
research, who noted that all societies across all the civilizations since
humankind started wondering, wondering about this place they found themselves
and why have created foundation myths to keep them going in good times and bad.
Added to that though were later myths, first passed down orally in cultures
which did not have written languages or as the case here when African slaves
were denied under penalty of death reading and writing skills, created to
explain why things turned out as they did. How to survive in the dreaded
diaspora when stolen away from Mother Africa where strangely, and to some
incomprehensible if not downright scary, all subsequent civilizations
emerged.
All of this to point to
a recent gigantic anthology of African-American both in Africa where a lot of
the material originated and then got transmuted by the slavery experience
mainly in the American south edited by Professor Henry Louis Gates out of
Harvard University and folklorist Maria Tatar where they go root and branch to
the cross-transmission from the old countries via the horrible Middle Passage
to the plantation death knell. Along the way they have done a great service to
line up, and not shabbily either, these myth-drawn folktales right alongside
more universal myth tales from Christianity, from Greek days, and from ancient
India and China times. Sustaining people hungry for some hope of salvation if
not in this life then as Gates mentioned “fly away time.”
To get a full hearing,
an earful of not just what Professor Gates and Ms. Tatar have to say but how
listeners responded to those foundational tales in their own lives when
prompted by the show’s ideas I have linked up the NPR On Point show where the pair
held forth:
Searching
For The American Songbook - In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute-With The Joy
Street Coffeehouse In Mind-Introduction
Introduction
Sketches
by Jack Callahan
[As of December 1, 2017
under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought
in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site
administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of
some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the
habit of assigning writers to specific topics like film, books, political
commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in
this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a
short-lived experiment designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation
of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade”
all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]
[As many readers may
know now and if not then the above note should inform you in general there had
been a serious shake-up on this blog site (which is linked in with several
related although independent other websites that have cross-posted relevant
materials) with the untimely, untimely by my lights, ouster of long time
administrator Allan Jackson (who as is not unusual in cyberspace for all kinds
of reasons simple or nefarious used the moniker Peter Paul Markin, a name which
has much meaning to me but which will be explained soon by either Zack James,
formerly the cultural czar here, or the new administrator Greg Green so I will
move on). Although his current whereabouts are unknown to me since what some of
us call a “purge” which will also be gone into by others at some later point Allan
and I go back a long way to our high school days in seriously working poor
North Adamsville (he said we met in junior high school but I don’t remember him
that far back). We have been permitted, encouraged in fact to air our
perspectives about what has gone on over the past several months (years really
but things have come to a head in this period).
I always got along with
Allan even in high school when he stood deep in the shadow of the real Peter
Paul Markin whose name he appropriated for his on-site moniker and whom he
feared above all for being both intellectually smarter than him and more larcenous.
I don’t want to tell tales out of school but will say that I stood by Allan in the
recent onslaught against his management mostly by the younger writers who
dubbed themselves somewhat dramatically as the “Young Turks” like nobody ever
used that designation before and am sorry to see him go.
On one point though
and this can be taken as either a new introductory point or as a second introduction
where Allan and I locked was over this project that I started several years ago
to look back to the folk minute of the early 1960s as my vivid part of
discovering the American songbook that I was interested in. I wished to
continue well beyond what I had started and he had posted but he put a stop to
the series when he told me that he needed me more for political work and so scrubbed
what I was doing.
As it turned out the
real story behind Allan’s denial of my project was that he was putting together
his own series in the days when he used to write material for the site and solely
manage as he has done the past couple of years entitled “Not Bob Dylan” (and
later another series “Not Joan Baez”) and wanted no competition for his folk minute
work. When I asked Greg Green, by the way no fan of folk music which he said
made him want to throw up since he heard it constantly in his growing up home
from his old folkie parents who had it on the recorder player or tape deck all
day, if I could revive the series he gave me the green light. So I have an initial
very good opinion of him and the new direction. Maybe like the younger writers
kept harping on Allan’s time had come but I still miss the old bastard wherever
he is these days. Jack Callahan]
********
(Praise be work-saving
computers below is the original introduction I had written before I was dragooned
into other work. It reads well enough to start with only a couple of points
needing updating.)
*********
I recently completed
the second leg of this American Songbook series, sketches from the time of my
coming of age classic rock and roll from about the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s,
a series which is intended to go through different stages of the American
songbook as it has evolved since the 19th century, especially music
that could be listened to by the general population through radio, record
player, television, and more recently the fantastic number of ways to listen to
it all from computers to iPods. This series was not intended to be placed in
any chronological order so the first leg dealt, and I think naturally so given
the way my musical interests got formed, with the music of my parents’
generation, that being the parents of the generation of ’68, those who
struggled through the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the
1940s.
This third leg is
centered on the music of the folk minute that captured a segment of my
generation of ’68 as it came of social and political age in the early 1960s. It
is easy now to forget in the buzz of the moment that this segment was fairly
small to begin with cluttered up people who stayed with it for a few years and
then like the rest of us got back to the new rock and roll driving by the British
“invasion” and the West Coast “acid” rock that was taking center stage by the
time of the summers of love in the mid to late 1960s. Today when talking to
people, to those who slogged through the 1960s with me, those who will become
very animated about Deadhead experiences, Golden Gate Park Airplane goings on,
their merry-prankster-like “on the bus” experiences, even death Altamont when I
ask about the influence of folk they will look at me with pained blank
expressions or cite ritualistically Bob Dylan confirms how small and where that
folk minute was concentrated.
Early on though some
of us felt a fresh breeze was coming through the land, were desperately hoping
that it was not some ephemeral rising and then back to business as usual,
although we certainly being young did not dwell on that ebb tide idea since
like with our physical selves we thought our ideas once implanted would last
forever. Silly kids. Maybe it was the change in political atmosphere pulling us
forward as men (and it was mostly men then) born in the 20th century
were beginning to take over from the old fogies (our father/uncle/godfather Ike,
General Ike, Ike Eisenhower and his ilk)
and we would fall in behind them. Maybe it was the swirl just then being generated
questioning lots of old things like the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) red scare investigations, like Mister James Crow in the South and
the ghettos of the North, like why did we need all those nuclear bombs that
were going to do nothing but turn us into flames. Maybe it was that last faint
echo of the “beats” with their poetry, their be-bop jazz, their nightly
escapade trying to hold onto that sullen look of Marlon Brando, that brooding
look of James Dean, that cool pitter-patter of Alan Ginsberg against the
night-stealers, and Preacher Jack, Jean-bon Kerouac, pushing us on to roads not
taken. Heady stuff, no question.
Maybe too since it
involved cultural expression (although we would be clueless to put what we felt
in those terms, save that for the folk music academics complete with endnotes
and footnotes in bigh dissertations to warm their night-fires after the fire
had burned out) and our cultural expression centered around jukeboxes and
transistor radios it was that we had, some of us, tired of the Fabians, the
various Bobbys (Vee, Darin, Rydell, etc.), the various incarnations of Sandra
Dee, Leslie Gore, Brenda Lee, etc., wanted a new sound, or as it turned out a
flowing back to the roots music, to the time and place when people had to make
their own music or go without (it gets a little mixed up once the radio widened
the horizons of who could hear what and when). So, yes, we wanted to know what
on those lonely Saturday nights gave our forebears pause, let them sit back
maybe listen to some hot-blooded black man with a primitive guitar playing the
blues (a step up from the kids’ stuff nailed one-eyed string hung from the
front porch but nowhere near that coveted National Steel beauty they eyed in
the pawnshop in town just waiting to rise up singing), some jazz, first old
time religion stuff and then the flicker of that last fade be-bop with that solid
sexy sax searching for the high white note, mountain music, all fiddles and
mandolins, playing against that late night wind coming down the hills and
hollows reaching that red barn just in time to finish up that last chance slow
moaning waltz. Yes, and Tex-Mex, Western swing, Child ballads and the “new
wave” protest sound that connected our new breeze political understandings with
our musical interests.
The folk music minute
was for me, and not just me, thus something of a branching off for a while from
rock and roll in its doldrums since a lot of what we were striving for was to
make a small musical break-out from the music that we came of chronological age
to unlike the big break-out that rock and roll represented from the music that
was wafting through many of our parents’ houses in the early 1950s.
In preparing this
part of the series I have been grabbing a lot of anecdotal remarks from some
old-time folkies. People I have run into over the past several years in the
threadbare coffeehouses and cafes I frequent around New England. You know, and
I am being completely unfair here, those guys with the long beards and unkempt
balding hair hidden by a knotted ponytail, flannel, clean or unclean, shirt
regardless of weather and blue jeans, unclean, red bandana in the back pocket,
definitely unclean and harmonica at the ready going on and on about how
counter-revolutionary Bob Dylan was to hook up the treasured acoustic guitar to
an amp in about 1965 and those gals who are still wearing those shapeless flour
bag dresses, letting their hair grow grey or white, wearing the formerly “hip”
now mandatory granny glasses carrying some autoharp or other such old-time
instrument like they just got out of some hills and hollows of Appalachia (in
reality with nice Ivy League resumes after their names and affirmative action-driven
jobs-that to the good) arguing about how any folk song created after about 1922
is not really a folk song both sexes obviously having not gotten the word that,
ah, times have changed. In short those folkies who are still alive and kicking
and still interested in talking about that minute (and continuing to be unfair
not much else except cornball archaic references that are supposed to produce
“in the know” laughs but which were corny even back then when they held forth
in the old Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford of blessed memory).
For those not in the
know, or who have not seen the previously described denizens of the folk night
in your travels, folk music is still alive and well (for the moment, the
demographic trends are more frightening as the dying embers flicker) in little
enclaves throughout the country mainly in New England but in other outposts as
well. Those enclaves and outposts are places where some old “hippies,”
“folkies,” communalists, went after the big splash 1960s counter-cultural
explosion ebbed in about 1971 (that is my signpost for the ebb, the time when
we tried to “turn the world upside down” in Washington over the Vietnam war by
attempting to shut the government down and got nothing but teargas, police
sticks and thousands of arrests for our troubles, others have earlier and later
dates and events which seemed decisive but all that I have spoken to, or have
an opinion on, agree by the mid-1970s that wave had tepidly limped to shore).
Places like Saratoga, New York, Big Sur and Joshua Tree out in California,
Taos, Eugene, Boise, Butte, Boulder, as well as the traditional Village,
Harvard Square, North Beach/Berkeley haunts of memory.
They survive, almost
all of them, through the support of a dwindling number of aficionados and a few
younger kids, kids who if not the biological off-spring of the folk minute then
very much like those youthful by-gone figures and who somehow got into their
parents’ stash of folk albums and liked what they heard against the current
trends in music, in once a month socially-conscious Universalist-Unitarian
church basement coffeehouses, school activity rooms booked for the occasional
night, small local restaurants and bars sponsoring “open mics” on off-nights to
draw a little bigger crowd, and probably plenty of other small ad hoc
venues where there are enough people with guitars, mandos, harmonicas, and what
have you to while away an
evening.
There seems to be a
consensus among my anecdotal sources that their first encounter with folk
music back then, other than when they were in the junior high school music
class where one would get a quick checkerboard of various types of music
and maybe hear This Land Is Your Land in passing, was through the radio.
That junior high school unconscious introduction of Woody Guthrie’s This
Land Is Your Land had been my own introduction in Mr. Dasher’s seventh
grade Music Appreciation class where he inundated us with all kinds of songs
from everywhere like the Red River Valley and the Mexican Hat Dance.
For his efforts he was innocently nicknamed by us “Dasher The Flasher,” a
moniker that would not serve him well in these child-worried times by some
nervous parents.
A few folkies that I
had run into back then, fewer now, including a couple of girlfriends back then
as I entered college picked up, like some of those few vagrant younger
aficionados hanging around the clubs, the music via their parents’ record
collections although that was rare and back then and usually meant that the
parents had been some kind of progressives back in the 1930s and 1940s when
Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Pete Seeger and others lit up the
leftist firmament in places like wide-open New York City. Today the parents, my
generation parents would have been in the civil rights movement, SDS or maybe
the anti-war movement although the latter was drifting more by then to acid
rock as the foundational music.
That radio by the way
would be the transistor radio usually purchased at now faded Radio Shack by
frustrated parents, frustrated that we were playing that loud unwholesome rock
and roll music on the family record player causing them to miss their slumbers,
and was attached to all our youthful ears placed there away from prying parents
and somehow if you were near an urban area you might once you tired of the
“bubble gum” music on the local rock station flip the dial and get lucky some
late night, usually Sunday and find an errant station playing such fare.
That actually had
been my experience one night, one Sunday night in the winter of 1962 (month and
date lost in the fog of memory) when I was just flipping the dial and came upon
the voice of a guy, an old pappy guy I assumed, singing a strange song in a
gravelly voice which intrigued me because that was neither a rock song nor a
rock voice. The format of the show as I soon figured out as I continued to
listen that night was that the DJ would, unlike the rock stations which played
one song and then interrupted the flow with at least one commercial for
records, drive-in movies, drive-in theaters, maybe suntan lotion, you know
stuff kids with disposable income would take a run at, played several songs so
I did not find out who the singer was until a few songs later.
The song was
identified by the DJ as the old classic mountain tune “discovered” by Cecil
Sharpe in the hills and hollows of Appalachian Kentucky in 1916 Come All You
Fair And Tender Ladies, the singer the late Dave Von Ronk who, as I found
out later doubled up as a very informative folk historian and who now has a
spot in the Village in New York where he hailed from named after him, the
station WBZ in Boston not a station that under ordinary circumstances youth
would have tuned into then since it was mainly a news and talk show station,
the DJ Dick Summer a very central figure in spreading the folk gospel and very
influential in promoting local folk artists like Tom Rush on the way up as
noted in a documentary, No Regrets, about Rush’s fifty plus years in
folk music. I was hooked.
That program also
played country blues stuff, stuff that folk aficionados had discovered down
south as part of our generation took seriously the search for roots, music,
cultural, family, and which would lead to the “re-discovery” of the likes of
Son House (and that flailing National Steel guitar that you can see him flail
like crazy on Death Letter Blues on YouTube these days), Bukka White
(all sweaty, all feisty, playing the hell out of his National face up with
tunes like Aberdeen, Mississippi Woman and Panama, Limited) Skip
James (all cool hand Luke singing that serious falsetto on I’d Rather Be The
Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man which got me in trouble more than one time
with women including recently), and Mississippi John Hurt (strumming seemingly
casually his moaning Creole Belle and his slyly salacious Candy Man).
I eventually really
learned about the blues, the country stuff from down south which coincides with
roots and folk music and the more muscular (plugged in electrically) Chicago
city type blues that connects with the beginnings of rock and roll, which will
be the next and final leg of this series, straight up though from occasionally
getting late, late at night, usually on a Sunday for some reason, Be-Bop
Benny’s Blues Hour from WXKE in Chicago but that is another story. Somebody
once explained to me the science behind what happened on certain nights with
the distant radio waves that showed up mostly because then their frequencies
overrode closer signals. What I know for sure that it was not was the power of
that dinky transistor radio with its two nothing batteries. So for a while I
took those faraway receptions as a sign of the new dispensation coming to free
us, of the new breeze coming through the land in our search for an earthly
Eden. Praise be.
(That Club 47,
subject a few years ago to its own documentary, was the spawning grounds and
the testing ground for many folk artists like Dylan, Baez, Rush, Von Schmidt,
Paxton, and Eric Saint Jean an up and coming performer who got laid low early
taking too much sex and too much cocaine before it was the drug of choice among
the heads, to perform and perfect their acts before friendly appreciative
audiences that would not heckle them. The Club which has had something of a continuous
history now operates as a non-profit as the Club Passim in a different location
in Harvard Square near the Harvard Co-Op Bookstore.)
The beauty of such
places for poor boy high school students like me or lowly cash-poor college
students interested in the folk scene was that for the price of a coffee,
usually expresso so you could get your high a little off the extra caffeine but
more importantly you could take tiny sips and make it last which you wanted to
do so you could hold your spot at the table in some places, and maybe some
off-hand pastry (usually a brownie or wedge of cake not always fresh but who
cared as long as the coffee, like I said, usually expresso to get a high
caffeine kick, was fresh since it was made by the cup from elaborate
copper-plated coffeemakers from Europe or someplace like that), you could sit
there for a few hours and listen to up and coming folk artists working out the
kinks in their routines. Add in a second coffee unless the girl had agreed to
an uncool “dutch treat,” not only uncool but you were also unlikely to get to
first base especially if she had to pay her bus fare too, share the brownie or
stale cake and you had a cheap date.
Occasionally there
was a few dollar cover for “established” acts like Joan Baez, Tom Rush, the
Clancy Brothers, permanent Square fixture Eric Von Schmidt, but mainly the
performers worked for the “basket,” the passing around of the hat for the cheap
date guys and others “from hunger” to show appreciation, hoping against hope to
get twenty buck to cover rent and avoid starving until the next gig. Of course
since the audience was low-budget high school students, college kids and
starving artists that goal was sometimes a close thing and accordingly the
landlord would have to be pieced off with a few bucks until times got better.
For alienated and
angst-ridden youth like me (and probably half my generation if the information
I have received some fifty years later stands up and does not represent some
retro-fitted analysis filtered through a million sociological and psychological
studies), although I am not sure I would have used those words for my feelings
in those days the coffeehouse scene was the great escape from household
independence struggles of which I was always, always hear me, at the short end
of the stick.
Probably the best way
to put the matter is to say that when I read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in
the Rye, over a non-stop weekend I was so engrossed in the page after page
happenings, I immediately identified with Holden Caulfield whatever differences
of time, place and class stood between us and when asked my opinion of him by
my English teacher I made her and the whole class laugh when I said “I am
Holden Caulfield”), or when I saw The Wild One at the retro-Strand
Theater in downtown North Adamsville if one could call it that term I
instinctively sided with poor boy Johnny and his “wanting habits” despite my
painfully negative experiences with outlaw motorcycle guys headed by local hard
boy Red Riley who hung out at Harry’s Variety Store as they ran through. If I
had been able to put the feelings into words and actions it would have been out
of sympathy for the outcasts, misfits, and beaten down who I identified with
then (not quite in the Jack Kerouac beaten down hipsters or night-dwellers who
survived with a certain swagger and low hum existence sense).
So yeah, the
coffeehouses offered sanctuary. For others (and me too on occasion) those
establishments also provided a very cheap way to deal with the date issue, as
long as you picked dates who shared your folk interests. That pick was
important because more than once I took a promising date to the Joy Street
Coffeehouse up on Boston’s Beacon Hill where I knew the night manager and could
get in for free who was looking for something speedier like maybe a guy with a
car, preferably a ’57 Chevy or something with plenty of chromes, and that was
the end of that promise. For those who shared my interest like I said
before for the price of two coffees(which were maybe fifty cents each,
something like that, but don’t take that as gospel), maybe a shared pastry and
a couple of bucks in the “basket” to show you appreciated the efforts, got you
those hours of entertainment. But mainly the reason to go to the Square or Joy
Street early on was to hear the music that as my first interest blossomed I
could not find on the radio, except that Dick Summer show on Sunday night for a
couple of hours. Later it got better with more radio shows, some television
play when the thing got big enough that even the networks caught on with bogus
clean-cut Hootenanny-type shows, and as more folkies got record
contracts because then you could start grabbing records at places like Sandy’s
in between Harvard and Central
Squares.
Of course sometimes
if you did not have dough, or if you had no date, and yet you still had those home
front civil wars to contend with and that you needed to retreat from you could
still wind up in the Square. Many a late weekend night, sneaking out of the
house through a convenient back door which protected me from sight, parents
sight, I would grab the then all-night Redline subway to the Square and at that
stop (that was the end of the line then) take the stairs to the street two
steps at a time and bingo have the famous (or infamous) all-night
Hayes-Bickford in front of me. There as long as you were not rowdy like the
winos, hoboes, and con men you could sit at a table and watch the mix and match
crowds come and go. Nobody bothered you, certainly not the hired help who were
hiding away someplace at those hours, and since it was cafeteria-style passing
your tray down a line filled with steam-saturated stuff and incredibly weak
coffee that tasted like dishwater must taste, you did not have to fend off
waitresses. (I remember the first time I went in by myself I sat, by design, at
a table that somebody had vacated with the dinnerware still not cleared away
and with the coffee mug half full and claimed the cup to keep in front of me.
When the busboy, some high school kid like me, came to clear the table he
“hipped me” to the fact that nobody gave a rat’s ass if you bought anything
just don’t act up and draw attention to yourself. Good advice, brother, good
advice.)
Some nights you might
be there when some guy or gal was, in a low voice, singing their latest
creation, working up their act in any case to a small coterie of people in
front of them. That was the real import of the place, you were there on the
inside where the new breeze that everybody in the Square was expecting took off
and you hoped you would get caught up in the fervor too. Nice.
As I mentioned in the
rock and roll series, which really was the music of our biological coming of
age time, folk was the music of our social and political coming of age time. A
fair amount of that sentiment got passed along to us during our folk minute as
we sought out different explanations for the events of the day, reacted against
the grain of what was conventional knowledge. Some of us will pass to the
beyond clueless as to why we were attuned to this music when we came of age in
a world, a very darkly-etched world, which we too like most of our parents had
not created, and had no say in creating. That clueless in the past about the
draw included a guy, me, a coalminer’s son who got as caught up in the music of
his time as any New York City Village Jack or Jill or Chi Old Town frat or
frail. My father in his time, wisely or not considering what ill-fate
befell him later, had busted out of the tumbled down tarpaper shacks down in
some Appalachia hills and hollows, headed north, followed the northern star,
his own version, and never looked back and neither did his son.
Those of us who came
of age, biological, political, and social age kicking, screaming and full of
the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s
Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a jail-break on all fronts and that
included from the commercial Tin Pan Alley song stuff. The staid Eisenhower red
scare cold war stuff (he our parents’ organizer of victory, their gentile
father Ike). Hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time we were
forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads down
too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy and
set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had restless
night’s sleep, a nightmare that, he or she, was trapped in some fashionable
family fall-out shelter bunker and those loving parents had thoughtfully
brought their records down into the abyss to soothe their savage beasts for the
duration. Yelling in that troubled sleep please, please, please if we must die
then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential. And
as we matured Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind.
We were moreover,
some of us anyway, and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift
dreams, ready to cross our own swords with the night-takers of our time, and
who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby, sweet ruthless Bobby of more than
one shed tear in this quarter, quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking
a newer world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded by the new
dispensation and slogged through the 60s decade whether it was in the civil
rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle
to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came
down were kindred. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and
the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched for, drifted out
into the ebbing tide. Gone.
The truth of each
sketch is in the vague mood that they invoke rather than any fidelity to hard
and fast fact. They are all based on actual stories, more or less prettified
and sanitized to avoid any problems with lose of reputation of any of the
characters portrayed and any problems with some lingering statute of
limitations. That truth, however, especially in the hands of old-time corner
boys like me and the other guys who passed through the corner at Jack Slack’s
bowling alleys must always be treated like a pet rattlesnake. Very
carefully.
Still the overall
mood should more than make up for the lies thrown at you, especially on the issue
of sex, or rather the question of the ages on that issue, who did or did not do
what to whom on any given occasion. Those lies filled the steamy nights and
frozen days then, and that was about par for the course, wasn’t it. But enough
of that for this series is about our uphill struggles to make our vision of the
our newer world, our struggles to satisfy our hunger a little, to stop
that gnawing want, and the music that in our youth we dreamed by on cold
winter nights and hot summer days.
