The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of
’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-One
Night With You- Sam’s Song –With Elvis’ One Night
Of Sin In Mind
Introduction by Allan Jackson
[It wasn’t every day in every way
although some days it was a close thing about girls, about sex really, on the
Tonio Pizza Parlor corner where the Acre high school boys by right of accession
high out in the fetid North Adamsville night (fetid in summer mostly from the
sink of sea air and mudflats not far away, not far enough away anyhow.
Sometimes we talked sports, mostly about the grand feats of the Boston Celtics
and the collection of bums who played for the Red Sox. Sometimes it was, when
Scribe was on his holy high horse, about ideas, about this fucking new wave
that he sensed, correctly sensed if you can right down to it, that was going to
sweep through American youth nation and right a few wrongs, bring the Acre boys
along in its wake which is what kept Scribe going until even he realized that
we were doomed and he fell off the planet. But as could be expected of young
men who had time on their hands, not much money, not much access to a car in
the golden age of the automobile which was the calling car to get dates we
spoke of female conquests, real and imagined. Even Timmy Riley who would later
win fame as the best Miss Judy Garland drag queen in San Francisco got caught
up in it although I don’t remember him talking much about girls although that
might be me remembering later when he had come out of the closet.
Of course, half of those so-called
conquests, especially the “going all the way” and you know what that means and
if you don’t ask a parent and what we later called “doing the do” were totally
bullshit, never happened or if they did happen did so at a much lower level of
sexual excitement than the speaker indicated. Maybe guys, gals too, these days
have the same kind of pressures around sex and sex’s relationship to popularity
and the like that we had although I truly hope not for their sakes but back in
the day, back in the early 1960s day before things broke through somewhat later
in the decade as we got a little looser and less fragile, there was tremendous
pressure to have conquests. Especially in the corner boy night. But the logic
of no dough, no car, no prospects would lead one to think that sexual escapades
were far and few between. Which many years later most of us candidly admitted
was true. But see then we were all lying like crazy, all blowing smoke about
what we did or did not do with that gal we were pining for. But there must have
been something like an unwritten law that nobody would challenge anybody’s
assertions on their sexual prowess.
All of this foreplay to lead to the one time
that Scribe caught me out, caught me out big time. I had this serious crush on
Lydia Pringle who everybody’s idea of beauty and smart too which is where I
figured I had my shot. I aimed directly at her about literature, art, music
whatever I could come up with to impress her during lunch and a couple of times
after school. Eventually we decided by mutual agreement to have a date, a movie
date, something cheap anyway because I know I was always short on dough. We had
a great time and all but I was so timid around her that I didn’t do anything
close to sexual. Naturally all the guys were anxious to hear what was what with
Lydia and what did we do. Just as naturally I lied and said we had fooled
around which was shorthand for French kissing and some under the clothes
groping. That got me some cache with the guys. That is until Scribe spoiled my
play. See for some reason almost every gal in school confided in Scribe, maybe
thought he was safe or an older brother. Apparently Lydia went up to him one
day and asked why I was so shy around her, didn’t try to do anything. Oops!
Scribe to keep his place in the social line-up called me on it one Friday night
when all of us were totally broke or totally dateless. Yeah, now that I think
about the matter I really do hope guys, and gals, don’t have to go through all
of that now. Allan Jackson]
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Sam Lowell thought it
was funny how things worked out sometimes in such a contrary fashion in this
wicked old world. Not his expression that “wicked old world” for he preferred
of late the more elastic and ironic “sad old world” but that of his old time
North Adamsville corner boy Peter Markin who will be more fully introduced in a
moment (Markin aka Peter Paul Markin although nobody ever called him that
except his mother, as one would expect although he hated to be teased about it by
every kid from elementary school on including girls, girls who liked to tease him,
tease him when they wanted to show their interest usually, and his first
ill-advised wife, Martha, a heiress of the local Mayfair swells who tried, unsuccessfully
since they sensed right away that he was not one of them, to impress her leafy horse
country Dover suburban parents with the familiar waspy triple names).
Neither of those expressions referred
to however dated back to their youth since neither Sam nor Peter back then,
back in their 1960s youth, would have used such old-fashioned
religious-drenched expressions to explain their take on the world since as with
all youth, or at least youth who expected to “turn the world upside down” (an
expression that they both did use although each in very different contexts)
they would have withheld such judgments or were too busy doing that “turning”
business they had no time for adjectives to express their worldly concerns. No
that expression, that understanding about the wickedness of the world had been
picked up by Sam from Peter when they had reconnected a number of years before
after they had not seen each other for decades to express the uphill battles of
those who had expected humankind to exhibit the “better angels of their nature”
on a more regular basis. Some might call this nostalgic glancing back,
especially by Peter since he had more at stake in a favorable result, on a
world that did not turn upside down or did so in a way very different from those
hazy days.
The funny part (or ironic if you
prefer) was that back then Sam had been in his youth the least political, the
least culturally-oriented, the least musically-oriented of those corner boys
like Markin, Jack Dawson, Jimmy Jenkins and “ding-dong daddy” leader Fritz
Fallon (that “ding-dong max daddy” another expression coined, or picked up from
somewhere by Peter so although he has not even been properly introduced we know
plenty about his place in the corner boy life, his place as “flak,” for Fritz’s
operation although Fritz always called him “the Scribe” when he wanted
something written and needed to play on Peter’s vanity) who kept the coins
flowing into the jukebox at Phil’s House of Pizza. That shop had been located
down a couple of blocks from the choppy ocean waters of Adamsville Beach (and is
still there although under totally different management from the arch-Italian
Rizzo family that ran the place for several generations now run by some
immigrant Albanians named Hoxha).
That made Phil’s among other things a
natural hang-out place for wayward but harmless poor teenage corner boys. The
serious “townie” professional corner boys, the rumblers, tumblers, drifters,
grifters and midnight sifters hung around Harry’s Variety with leader Red Riley
over on Sagamore Street far from beaches. Night haunting boys far from sweated
sun, tanned daytime beaches, with their equally pale, black dress-etched
“tramps,” well known in the in boyos network at the high school for those few
adventurous enough to mess with an off-hand “from hunger” girl looking for
kicks and a fast ride in some souped-up Chevy or on back of fat hog Harley, the
bike of choice around the town. Although tanned daytime beaches rumors had it
that the beach, the isolated Rock Island end, had been the site of more than
one nighttime orgy with “nice” publicly virginal girls looking for kicks with
rough boys down among the briny rocks. Rumors they remained until Sam ran into
Sissy Roswell many years later who confessed that she and the “social
butterfly” prom/fall dance/ yearbook crowd of girls that she hung around with
on a couple of occasions had been among the briny rocks with the bad ass biker
the summer after graduation when school social ladders and girls’ locker room
talk didn’t mean a thing. Yeah, just like the Madonna tramps looking for kicks,
looking for the minute wild side with guys that they would probably never see
again and who could have cared less about their fake virginal status as long as
the put out, put out hard and fast, before running off to college or finding
some high-end stockbroker to pay the freight.
Getting back to Harry’s though, a place
where cops with their patrol cars parked conspicuously in front of the store
during the daytime placed their bets with “connected” Harry who used the store
as a shabby front for the bookie operation and to fence Red’s nighttime work
(the store had about three cans of beans and a couple of cans of soup on the
shelves but did have a great big Coca-Cola ice chest filled with soda and a
classic Madame La Rue pinball machine). Fritz and the boys would not have gone
within three blocks of that place. Maybe more from fear, legitimate fear as
Fritz’s older brother, Timmy, a serious tough guy himself, could testify to the
one time he tried to wait outside Harry’s for some reason and got chain-whipped
by Red for his indiscretion. So the tame corner boys at Phil’s were more than
happy to hang out there where the Rizzos were more than happy to have them
spent dough on the jukebox and pizzas except on Friday family pizza night set
up to give Mom a rest for once not until after nine (and Tonio Rizzo the
zen-master pizza maker secretly, since these corner boys were, if tame, still
appealing looking to passing girls glad to have then around at that hour to
boost the weekend sales). Moreover this spot provided a beautiful vantage point
for scanning the horizon for those wayward girls who also kept their coins
flowing into Phil’s jukebox (or maybe a stray “nice” girl turned tramp after
Red and his corner boys threw her over).
Sam had recently thought about that
funny story that Markin had told the crowd once on a hot night when nobody had
any money and were just holding up the wall at Phil’s about Johnny Callahan,
the flashy and unstoppable halfback from the high school team (and a guy even
Red respected having made plenty of money off of with local sports who bet with
him on the strength of Johnny’s prowess any given Saturday although Johnny once
confessed that he, rightly, avoided Harry’s after what had happened to Timmy
Fallon). See Johnny was pretty poor even by the median working poor standard of
the old neighborhoods in those days (although now, courtesy of his incessant
radio and television advertising which continues to make everyone within fifty
miles of North Adamsville who knew Johnny back in the day aware of his new
profession, he is a prosperous Toyota car dealer, called Mr. Toyota, down across from the mall in Hull about twenty
miles from North Adamsville, the town where their mutual friend Josh Breslin
soon to be introduced came from). Johnny, a real music maniac who would do his
football weight-lifting exercises to Jerry Lee’s Great Balls of Fire, Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula and stuff like that to get him hyped up, had this
routine in order to get to hear songs that he was dying to hear, stuff he would
hear late at night coming from a rock station out of Detroit and which would
show up a few weeks later on Phil’s jukebox just waiting for Johnny and the
kids to fill the coffers, with the girls who had some dough, enough dough
anyway to put coins into that jukebox.
Johnny would go up all flirty and
virile to some “young thing” (a Fritz expression coped from Jerry Lee and not
an invention of Markin as Peter would later claim to some “young thing” that he
was trying to “score”). Maybe, depending on whatever intelligent he had on the
girl, maybe she had just had a fight with her boyfriend or had broken up with
him Johnny would be all sympathy, or maybe she was just down in the dumps for
no articulate reason like every teen goes through every chance they get,
whatever it took. Johnny, by the way, would have gotten that intelligence via
Peter who whatever else anybody had to say about him, good or bad, was wired
into, no, made himself consciously privy to, all kinds of boy-girl information
almost like he had a hook into that Monday morning before school girls’ locker
room talk-fest. Everybody already knew that he was hooked into the boys’ Monday
morning version and had started more rumors and other unsavory deeds than any
ten other guys. Spreading ugly rumors
about a guy whose girl he was interested in a specialty. But the guy was like
Teflon, nobody ever thought to take him out for his actions they were so
dependent on his information to keep their place in the social pecking order.
Now here is what Johnny “knew” about
almost every girl if they had the quarter which allowed them to play three
selections. He would let them pick that first one on their own, maybe something
to express interest in his flirtation, maybe her name, say Donna, was also
being used as the title of a latest hit, or if broken up some boy sorrow thing.
Brenda Lee’s I Want To Be Wanted,
stuff like that. The second one he would “suggest” something everybody wanted
to listen to no matter what but which was starting to get old. Maybe an Elvis,
Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee thing still on the jukebox playlist but
getting wearisome. Then he would go in for the kill and “suggest” they play
this new platter, you know, something like Martha and the Vandelas Dancing in the Streets or Roy’s Blue Bayou both of which he had heard on
the midnight radio airwaves out of Detroit one night and were just getting play
on the jukeboxes. And bingo before you know it she was playing the thing again,
and again. Beautiful. And Johnny said that sometimes he would wind up with a
date, especially if he had just scored about three touchdowns for the school, a
date that is in the days before he and Kitty Kelly became an item. An item, although
it is not germane to the story, who still is Johnny’s girl, wife, known as Mrs.
Toyota now.
But enough of this downstream stuff Sam
thought. The hell with Johnny and his cheap-jack tricks (although not to those
three beautiful touchdowns days, okay) this thing gnawing at him was about old
age angst and not the corner boy glory days at Phil’s, although it is about old
time corner boys and their current doings, some of them anyway. So yeah he had
other things he wanted to think about (and besides he had already, with a good
trade-in, gotten his latest car from Mr. Toyota so enough there), to tell a
candid world about how over the past few years with the country, the world, the
universe had been going to hell in a hand-basket. In the old day, like he kept
going back to, back in the day he was not the least bit interested in anything
in the big world outside of sports, and girls, of course. And endlessly working
on plans to own his own business, a print shop, before he was twenty-five.
Well, he did get that small business, although not until thirty and had
prospered when he made connections to do printing for several big high-tech
companies, notably IBM when they began outsourcing their work. He had
prospered, had married (twice, and divorced twice), had the requisite tolerated
children and adored grandchildren, and in his old age a woman companion to ease
his time.
But there had been for a long time,
through those failed marriages, through that business success something gnawing
at him, something that Sam felt he had missed out on, or felt he had do
something about. Then a few years ago when it was getting time for a high
school class reunion he had Googled “North Adamsville Class of 1964” and came
upon a class website for that year, his year, that had been set up by the
reunion committee, and decided to joint to keep up with what was going on with
developments there. He would wind up not going to that reunion as he had
planned, a long story about a slight ill-advised flirtation with an old flame
classmate although that too is not germane to the story here except as one more
thing that gnawed at him. But mostly in the end he could not face going home, came
to believe what Thomas Wolfe said in the title of one of his novels, you can’t
go home again).
After Sam had registered on the site
giving a brief resume of his interests and what he had been up to those past
forty years or so years Sam looked at the class list, the entire list of class
members alive and deceased (a rose beside their name signifying their passing)
of who had joined and found the names of Peter Markin. He had to laugh Peter
had been listed as Peter Paul Markin since everybody was listed by their full
names, revenge from the grave by his poor mother, and that leafy suburban first
wife who tried to give him Mayflower
credentials, he thought. He also found
the name of corner boy Jimmy Jenkins among those who had done so. (Jack Dawson
had passed away a few years before, a broken man, broken after his son who had
served in Iraq and Afghanistan had committed suicide, according to Peter, as
had their corner boy leader, Fritz Fallon, homeless, and found down along a
railroad trestle in New Jersey, after going through a couple of fortunes, his
own and a third wife’s).
Through the mechanism established on
the site which allowed each class member who joined to have a private cyberspace
e-mail slot Sam contacted both men and the three of them started a rather
vigorous on-line chat line for several weeks going through the alphabet of
their experiences, good and bad. The time for sugar-coating was over unlike in
their youth when all three would lie like crazy, especially about sex and with
whom in order to keep their place in the pecking order, and in order to keep up
with Fritz whom lied more than the three of them combined. Peter knew that,
knew it better than anybody else but in order to keep his place as “scribe” in
that crazy quill pecking order went along with such silly teenage stuff, stuff
that in his other pursuits he would have laughed at but that is what made being
a teenager back then, now too, from what Sam saw of his grandchildren’s trials
and tribulations.
After a while, once the e-mail
questions had worked their course, all three men met in Boston at the Sunnyvale
Grille, a place where Markin had begun to hang out in after he had moved back
to Boston (read: where he did his daytime drinking) over by the waterfront, and
spent a few hours discussing not so much old times per se but what was going on in the world, and how the world had
changed so much in the meantime. And since Markin, the political maniac of the
tribe, was involved in the conversations maybe do something about it at least
that is what Sam had hoped since he knew that is where he thought he needed to
head in order to cut into that gnawing feeling. Sam was elated, and unlike in
his youth he did not shut his ears down, when those two guys would talk
politics, about the arts or about music. He now regretted that he had not
listened back then since he was so strictly into girls and sports, not always
in that order (which caused many problems later including one of the grounds
for his one of his divorces, not the sports but the girls).
This is probably the place for Sam to
introduce Peter Markin although he had already given an earful (and what goes
for Peter goes to a lesser extent for Jimmy who tended to follow in Pete’s wake
on the issues back then, and still does). Peter, as Sam has already noted,
provided that noteworthy, national security agency-worthy service, that
“intelligence” he provided all the guys (and not just his corner boys, although
they had first dibs) about girls. Who was “taken,” a very important factor if
some frail (a Fritz term from watching too many 1940s gangster and detective
movies and reading Dashiell Hammett too closely, especially The Maltese Falcon),was involved with
some bruiser football player, some college joe who belonged to a fraternity and
the brothers were sworn to avenge any brother’s indignities, or worse, worse of
all, if she was involved with some outlaw biker who hung out in Adamsville and
who if he hadn’t had his monthly quota of
college boy wannabes red meat hanging out at Phil’s would not think
twice about chain-whipping you just for the fuck of it (“for the fuck of it”
a term
Jimmy constantly used then, and
now, so it was not always Markin or Fritz who led the verbal life around the
corner). Who was “unapproachable,”
probably more important than that social blunder of ‘hitting on” a taken
woman since that snub by Miss Perfect-Turned-Up-Nose would make the rounds of
the now legendary seminar, Monday morning before school girls’ locker room (and
eventually work its way through Markin to the boys’ Monday morning version
ruining whatever social standing the guy had spent since junior high trying to
perfect in order to avoid the fatal nerd-dweeb-wallflower-square- name your
term existence). Strangely Markin made a serious mistake with Melinda Loring
who blasted her freeze deep on him and he survived to tell the tale, or at
least that is what he had the boys believe. Make of this what you will though,
Peter never after that Melinda Loring mistake, had a high school girlfriend
from North Adamsville High, who, well, liked to “do the do” as they called it
back then, that last part not always correct since everybody, girls and boys
alike, were lying like crazy about whether they were “doing the do” or not,
including Markin.
But beyond, well beyond, that schoolboy
silliness Markin was made of sterner stuff (although Sam would not have
bothered to use such a positive attribute about Markin back then) was
super-political, super into art and into what he called culture, you know going
to poetry readings at coffeehouses, going over Cambridge to watch foreign films
with subtitles and themes at the Brattle Theater that he would try to talk
about and even Jimmy would turn his head when he went on and on about French
films, especially those films by Jean Renoir, and super into music, fortunately
he was not crazy for classical music (unlike some nerds in school then who were
in the band) but serious about what is now called classic rock and roll and
then in turn, the blues, and folk music. (Sam still shuttered at that hillbilly
folk music stuff Markin tried to interest him in when he thought about it).
That folk music was how Peter had first
met Josh Breslin, still a friend, whom he introduced to Sam at one of their
meetings over at the Sunnyvale Grille. Josh told the gathering that Markin had
met him after high school, after he had graduated from Hull High (the same town
where Johnny Callahan was burning up the Toyota sales records for New England)
down at the Surf Ballroom (Sam had his own under twenty-one memories of the
place, some good, some bad including one affair that almost wound up in
marriage). Apparently Josh and Peter had had their wanting habits on the same
girl at one Friday night dance when the great local cover band, the Rockin’
Ramrods held sway there, and had been successively her boyfriend for short
periods both to be dumped for some stockbroker from New York. But their
friendship remained and they had gone west together, gone on that Jack Kerouac-drenched
On The Road for a number of years
when they were trying their own version of turning the world upside down on.
Josh also dabbled (his word) in the turning upside down politics of the time.
And that was the remarkable thing about
Peter, not so much later in cahoots with Josh because half of youth nation,
half the generation of ’68 was knee-deep in some movement, but in staid old
North Adamsville High days, days when to just be conventionally political,
wanting to run for office or something, was kind of strange. See Peter was into
the civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and social justice stuff that
everybody thought he was crazy to be into, everybody from Ma to Fritz (and a
few anonymous midnight phone-callers yelling n----r-lover in the Markin home
phone). He had actually gone into Boston
when he was a freshman and joined the picket-line in front of Woolworth’s
protesting the fact that they would not let black people eat in their
lunchrooms down south (and maybe Markin would say when he mentioned what he was
up to they were not that happy to have blacks in their northern lunchrooms
either ), had joined a bunch of Quakers and little old ladies in tennis
sneakers (a term then in use for airhead blue-haired lady do-gooders with
nothing but time on their hands) calling on the government to stop building
atomic bombs (not popular in the red scare Cold War we-are-fighting- against-
the- Russians-terror North Adamsville, or most other American places either),
running over to the art museum to check out the exhibits (including some funny
stories about him and Jimmy busting up the place looking at the old Pharaoh
times slave building Pyramids stuff uncovered by some Harvard guys way back),
and going to coffeehouses in Harvard Square and listening to hokey folk music
that was a drag. (Sam’s take on that subject then, and now.) So Peter was a
walking contradiction, although that was probably not as strange now as it
seemed back then when every new thing was looked at with suspicion, and when
kids like Peter were twisted in the wind between being corner boys and trying
to figure out what that new wind was that was blowing though the land, when Sam
and the other corner boys, except Jimmy and sometimes Jack would try to talk
him out of stuff that would only upset everybody in town.
But here is the beauty, beauty for Sam
now that he was all ears about what Peter had to say, he had kept at it, had
kept the faith, while everybody else from their generation, or almost
everybody, who protested war, protested around the social issues, had hung
around coffeehouses and who had listened to folk music had long before given it
up. Markin had, after his Army time, spent
a lot of time working with GIs around the war issues, protested American
foreign policy at the drop of a hat and frequented off-beat coffeehouses set up
in the basements of churches in order to hear the dwindling number of folk
artists around. He had gotten and kept his “religion,” kept the faith in a
sullen world. And like in the old days a new generation (added to that older
North Adamsville generation which still, from the class website e-mail traffic he
received when classmates found out they were in communication had not gotten
that much less hostile to what Peter had to say about this wicked old world,
you already know the genesis of that term, right), was ready to curse him out,
ready to curse the darkness against his small voice.
One night when Peter and Sam were alone
at the Sunnyvale, maybe both had had a few too many high-shelf scotches (able
to afford such liquor unlike in the old days when they both in their respective
poverties, drank low-shelf Johnny Walker whiskey with a beer chaser when they
had the dough, if not some cheapjack wine), Peter told Sam the story of how he
had wanted to go to Alabama in high school, go to Selma, but his mother
threatened to disown him if he did, threatened to disown him not for his desire
to go but because she would not have been able to hold her head up in public if
he had, and so although it ate at him not to go, go when his girlfriend, Helen
Jackson, who lived in Gloversville, did go, he took a dive (Peter’s words).
Told a redemptive story too about his
anti-war fight in the Army when he refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in an
Army stockade for a couple of years altogether. (Sam thought that was a high
price to pay for redemption but it may have been the scotch at work.) Told a
number of stories about working with various veterans’ groups, throwing medals
over Supreme Court barricades, chainings to the White House fence, sitting down
in hostile honked traffic streets, blocking freeways complete with those same
hostile honkings, a million walks for this and that, and some plain old
ordinary handing out leaflets, working the polls and button-holing reluctant
politicians to vote against the endless war budgets (this last the hardest
task, harder than all the jailings, honkings, marches put together and seemingly
the most fruitless). Told too stories about the small coffeehouse places seeing
retread folkies who had gone on to other things and then in a fit of anguish,
or hubris, decided to go back on the trail. Told of many things that night not
in a feast of pride but to let Sam know that sometimes it was easier to act
than to let that gnawing win the day. Told Sam that he too always had the gnaw,
probably always would in this wicked old world. Sam was delighted by the whole
talk, even if Peter was on his soapbox.
That night too Peter mentioned in
passing that he contributed to a number of blogs, a couple of political ones,
including an anti-war veterans’ group, a couple of old time left-wing cultural
sites and a folk music-oriented one. Sam confessed to Peter that although he
had heard the word “blog” he did not know what a blog was. Peter told him that
one of the virtues of the Internet was that it provided space (cyberspace, a
term Sam had heard of and knew what it meant) for the average citizen to speak
his or her mind via setting up a website or a blog. Blogs were simply a way to
put your opinions and comments out there just like newspaper Op/Ed writers or
news reporters and commentators although among professional reporters the
average blog and blog writer were seen as too filled with opinions and
sometimes rather loose with the facts. Peter said he was perfectly willing to
allow the so-called “objective” reporters roam free to state the facts but he
would be damned if the blog system was not a great way to get together with
others interested in your areas of interest, yeah, stuff that interested you
and that other like-minded spirits might respond to. Yeah, that was worth the
effort.
The actual process of blog creation (as
opposed to the more complex website-creation which still takes a fair amount of
expertise to create) had been made fairly simple over time, just follow a few
simple prompts and you are in business. Also over time what was possible to do
has been updated for ease, for example linking to other platforms to your site
and be able to present multi-media works lashing up say your blog with YouTube
or downloading photographs to add something to your presentation. Peter one
afternoon after Sam had asked about his blog links showed him the most
political one that he belonged to, one he had recently begun to share space
with Josh Breslin, Frank Jackman and a couple of other guys that he had known
since the 1960s on and who were familiar with the various social, political and
cultural trends that floated out from that period.
Sam was amazed at the topics that those
guys tackled, stuff that he vaguely remembered hearing about but which kind of
passed him by as he delved into the struggle to build his printing shop. He
told Peter that he got dizzy looking at the various titles from reviews of old
time black and white movies that he remembered watching at the old Strand
second-run theater uptown, poetry from the “beat” generation, various political
pieces on current stuff like the Middle East, the fight against war, political
prisoners most of whom he had never heard of except the ones who had been Black
Panthers or guys like that, all kinds of reviews of rock and roll complete with
the songs via YouTube, too many reviews of folk music that he never really
cared for, books that he knew Peter read like crazy but he could not remember
the titles. The guys really had put a lot of stuff together, even stuff from
other sites and announcements for every conceivable left-wing oriented event.
He decided that he would become a Follower
which was nothing sinister like some cult but just that you would receive
notice when something was put on the blog.
Peter also encouraged him to write some
pieces about what interested him, maybe start out about the old days in North
Adamsville since all the guys mined that vein for sketches. That is what Peter
liked to call most of the material on site since they were usually too short to
be considered short stories but too long to be human interest snapshots. Sam
said he would think about the matter, think about it seriously once he read the
caption below:
“This space is noted for politics
mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social,
economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the
place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II
be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of our interest over the past
several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of
popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind,
hardworking, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest
to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk
music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break
rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn our
attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter
under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig
up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back
in the day.”
Sam could relate to that, had something
to say about some of those songs. Josh Breslin laughed when he heard that Sam
was interested in doing old time rock and roll sketches. He then added, “If we
can only get him to move off his butt and come out and do some street politics
with us we would be getting somewhere.” Peter just replied, “one step at a
time.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.
