An Encore -When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time

An Encore -When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Sometimes Sam Lowell and his “friend” (really “sweetie,” long time sweetie, paramour, significant other, consort or whatever passes for the socially acceptable or Census Bureau bureaucratic “speak” way to name somebody who is one’s soul-mate, his preferred term) Laura Perkins whose relationship to Sam was just described at the end of the parentheses, and righteously so, liked to go to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich to either cool off in the late summer heat or in the fall before the New England weather lowers its hammer and the place gets a bit inaccessible and too windswept to force the delicate Laura into the weathers. That later summer  heat escape valve is a result, unfortunately for an otherwise Edenic environment of the hard fact that July, when they really would like to go there to catch a few fresh sea breezes, is not a time to show up at the bleach white sands beach due to nasty blood-sucking green flies swarming and dive-bombing like some berserk renegade Air Force squadron lost on a spree captained by someone with a depraved childhood who breed in the nearby swaying mephitic marshes (mephitic courtesy of multi-use by Norman Mailer who seemed to get it in every novel- if you don't what it means look it up but think nasty and smelly and you will close-okay).


The only “safe haven” then is to drive up the hill to the nearby robber-baron days etched Crane Castle (they of the American indoor plumbing fortune way back) to get away from the buggers, although on a stagnant wind day you might have a few vagrant followers, as the well-to-do have been doing since there were the well-to-do and had the where-with-all to escape the summer heat and bugs at higher altitudes. By the way I assume that “castle” is capitalized when it part of a huge estate, the big ass estate of Crane, now a trust monument to the first Gilded Age, not today’s neo-Gilded Age, architectural proclivities of the rich, the guy whose company did, does all the plumbing fixture stuff on half the bathrooms in America including in the various incantations of the mansion. 

Along the way, along the hour way to get to Ipswich from Cambridge Sam and Laura had developed a habit of making the time more easy passing by listening to various CDs, inevitably not listened to for a long time folk CDs, not listened to for so long that the plastic containers needed to be dusted off before being brought along, on the car's improvised  CD player. And as is their wont while listening to some CD to comment on this or that thing that some song brought to mind, or the significance of some song in their youth.  One of the things that had brought them together early on several years back was their mutual interest in the old 1960s folk minute which Sam, a little older and having grown up within thirty miles of Harvard Square, one the big folk centers of that period along with the Village and North Beach out in Frisco town, had imbibed deeply. Laura, growing up “in the sticks,” in farm country in upstate New York had gotten the breeze at second-hand through records, records bought at Cheapo Records and the eternal Sandy's on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge and a little the fading Cambridge folk scene through breathing in the coffeehouse atmosphere when she had moved to Boston in the early 1970s to go to graduate school.     

One hot late August day they got into one such discussion about how they first developed an interest in folk music when Sam had said “sure everybody, everybody over the age of say fifty to be on the safe side, knows about Bob Dylan, maybe some a little younger too if some hip kids have browsed through their parents’ old vinyl record collections now safely ensconced in the attic although there are stirrings of retro-vinyl revival of late according a report I had heard on NPR."

Some of that over 50 crowd and their young acolytes would also have known about how Dylan, after serving something like an apprenticeship under the influence of Woody Guthrie in the late 1950s singing Woody’s songs imitating Woody's style something fellow Woody acolytes like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot never quite got over moved on, got all hung up on high symbolism and obscure references. Funny guys like Jack actually made a nice workman-like career out of Woody covers, so their complaints about the "great Dylan betrayal, about moving on, seen rather hollow now. That over 50s crowd would also know Dylan became if not the voice of the Generation of ’68, their generation, which he probably did not seriously aspire in the final analysis, then he would settle for the master troubadour of the age.

Sam continued along that line after Laura had said she was not sure about the connection and he said he meant, “troubadour in the medieval sense of bringing news to the people and entertaining them by song and poetry as well if not decked in some officially approved garb like back in those olden days where they worked under a king’s license if lucky, by their wit otherwise but the 'new wave' post-beatnik flannel shirt, work boots, and dungarees which connected you with the roots, the American folk roots down in the Piedmont, down in Appalachia, down in Mister James Crow’s Delta, and out in the high plains, the dust bowl plains. So, yes, that story has been pretty well covered.”  

Laura said she knew all of that about the desperate search for roots although not that Ramblin’ Jack had been an acolyte of Woody’s but she wondered about others, some other folk performers whom she listened to on WUMB on Saturday morning when some weeping willow DJ put forth about fifty old time rock and folk rock things a lot of which she had never heard of back in Mechanicsville outside of Albany where she grew up. Sam then started in again, “Of course that is hardly the end of the story since Dylan did not create that now hallowed folk minute of the early 1960s. He had been washed by it when he came to the East from Hibbing, Minnesota for God’s sake (via Dink’s at the University there), came into the Village where there was a cauldron of talent trying to make folk the next big thing, the next big cultural thing for the young and restless of the post-World War II generations. For us. But also those in little oases like the Village where the disaffected could pick up on stuff they couldn’t get in places like Mechanicsville or Carver where I grew up. People who I guess, since even I was too young to know about that red scare stuff except you had to follow your teacher’s orders to put your head under your desk and hands neatly folded over your head if the nuclear holocaust was coming, were frankly fed up with the cultural straightjacket of the red scare Cold War times and began seriously looking as hard at roots in all its manifestations as our parents, definitely mine, yours were just weird about stuff like that, right, were burying those same roots under a vanilla existential Americanization. How do you like that for pop sociology 101.”

“One of the talents who was already there when hick Dylan came a calling, lived there, came from around there was the late Dave Van Ronk who as you know we had heard several times in person, although unfortunately when his health and well-being were declining not when he was a young politico and hell-raising folk aspirant. You know he also, deservedly, fancied himself a folk historian as well as musician.”    

“Here’s the funny thing, Laura, that former role is important because we all know that behind every  'king' is the 'fixer man,' the guy who knows what is what, the guy who tells one and all what the roots of the matter were like some mighty mystic (although in those days when he fancied himself a socialist that mystic part was played down). Dave Van Ronk was serious about that part, serious about imparting that knowledge about the little influences that had accumulated during the middle to late 1950s especially around New York which set up that folk minute. New York like I said, Frisco, maybe in small enclaves in L.A. and in precious few other places during those frozen times a haven for the misfits, the outlaws, the outcast, the politically “unreliable,” and the just curious. People like the mistreated Weavers, you know, Pete Seeger and that crowd found refuge there when the hammer came down around their heads from the red-baiters and others like advertisers who ran for cover to “protect” their precious soap, toothpaste, beer, deodorant or whatever they were mass producing to sell to a hungry pent-up market.  


"Boston and Cambridge by comparison until late in the 1950s when the Club 47 and other little places started up and the guys and gals who could sing, could write songs, could recite some be-bop deep from the blackened soul poetry even had a place to show their stuff instead of to the winos, rummies, grifters and con men who hung out at the Hayes-Bickford or out on the streets could have been any of the thousands of towns who bought into the freeze.”     

“Sweetie, I remember one time but I don’t remember where, maybe the Café Nana when that was still around after it had been part of the Club 47 folk circuit for new talent to play and before Harry Reid, who ran the place, died and it closed down, I know it was before we met, so it had to be before the late 1980s Von Ronk told a funny story, actually two funny stories, about the folk scene and his part in that scene as it developed a head of steam in the mid-1950s which will give you an idea about his place in the pantheon. During the late 1950s after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking road wanderlust adventure novel, On The Road, that got young blood stirring, not mine until later since I was clueless on all that stuff except rock and roll which I didn’t read until high school, the jazz scene, the cool be-bop jazz scene and poetry reading, poems reflecting off of “beat” giant Allen Ginsberg’s Howl the clubs and coffeehouse of the Village were ablaze with readings and cool jazz, people waiting in line to get in to hear the next big poetic wisdom guy if you can believe that these days when poetry is generally some esoteric endeavor by small clots of devotees just like folk music. The crush of the lines meant that there were several shows per evening. But how to get rid of one audience to bring in another in those small quarters was a challenge."


"Presto, if you wanted to clear the house just bring in some desperate “from hunger” snarly nasally folk singer for a couple, maybe three songs, and if that did not clear the high art be-bop poetry house then that folk singer was a goner. A goner until the folk minute of the 1960s where that very same folk singer probably in that very same club then played for the 'basket.' You know the 'passed hat' which even on a cheap date, and a folk music coffeehouse date was a cheap one in those days like I told you before and you laughed at cheapie me and the 'Dutch treat' thing, you felt obliged to throw a few bucks into to show solidarity or something.  And so the roots of New York City folk according to the 'father.'

Laura interrupted to ask if that “basket” was like the buskers put in front them these days and Sam said yes. And then asked Sam about a few of the dates he took to the coffeehouses in those days, just out of curiosity she said, meaning if she had been around would he have taken her there then. He answered that question but since it is an eternally complicated and internal one I having to do with where she stood in the long Sam girlfriend  pecking order (very high and leave it at that unless she reads this and then the highest) have skipped it to let him go on with the other Von Ronk story.

He continued with the other funny story like this-“The second story involved his [Von Ronk's] authoritative role as a folk historian who after the folk minute had passed became the subject matter for, well, for doctoral dissertations of course just like today maybe people are getting doctorates in hip-hop or some such subject. Eager young students, having basked in the folk moment in the abstract and with an academic bent, breaking new ground in folk history who would come to him for the 'skinny.' Now Van Ronk had a peculiar if not savage sense of humor and a wicked snarly cynic’s laugh but also could not abide academia and its’ barren insider language so when those eager young students came a calling he would give them some gibberish which they would duly note and footnote. Here is the funny part. That gibberish once published in the dissertation would then be cited by some other younger and even more eager students complete with the appropriate footnotes. Nice touch, nice touch indeed on that one, right.”

Laura did not answer but laughed, laughed harder as she thought about it having come from that unformed academic background and having read plenty of sterile themes turned inside out.       

As Laura laugh settled Sam continued “As for Van Ronk’s music, his musicianship which he cultivated throughout his life, I think the best way to describe that for me is that one Sunday night in the early 1960s I was listening to the local folk program on WBZ hosted by Dick Summer, who was influential in boosting local folk musician Tom Rush’s career and who was featured on that  Tom Rush documentary No Regrets we got for being members of WUMB, when this gravelly-voice guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, sang the Kentucky hills classic Fair and Tender Ladies. It turned out to be Von Ronk's version which you know I still play up in the third floor attic. After that I was hooked on that voice and that depth of feeling that he brought to every song even those of his own creation which tended to be spoofs on some issue of the day.”

Laura laughed at Sam and the intensity with which his expressed his mentioning of the fact that he liked gravelly-voiced guys for some reason. Here is her answer, “You should became when you go up to the third floor to do your “third floor folk- singer” thing and you sing Fair and Tender Ladies I hear this gravelly-voiced guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, some Old Testament Jehovah prophet come to pass judgment come that end day time.”

They both laughed. 

Laura then mentioned the various times that they had seen Dave Von Ronk before he passed away, not having seen him in his prime, when that voice did sound like some old time prophet, a title he would have probably secretly enjoyed for publicly he was an adamant atheist. Sam went on, “ I saw him perform many times over the years, sometimes in high form and sometimes when drinking too much high-shelf whiskey, Chavis Regal, or something like that not so good. Remember we had expected to see him perform as part of Rosalie Sorrels’ farewell concert at Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2002 I think. He had died a few weeks before.  Remember though before that when we had seen him for what turned out to be our last time and I told you he did not look well and had been, as always, drinking heavily and we agreed his performance was subpar. But that was at the end. For a long time he sang well, sang us well with his own troubadour style, and gave us plenty of real information about the history of American folk music. Yeah like he always used to say-'when the tin can bended …..and the story ended.'

As they came to the admission booth at the entrance to Crane’s Beach Sam with Carolyn Hester’s song version of Walt Whitman’s On Captain, My Captain on the CD player said “I was on my soap box long enough on the way out here. You’re turn with Carolyn Hester on the way back who you know a lot about and I know zero, okay.” Laura retorted, “Yeah you were definitely on your soap-box but yes we can talk Carolyn Hester because I am going to cover one of her songs at my next “open mic.” And so it goes.                      

A PARABLE CONCERNING PROPERTY-From The Pen Of Bertolt Brecht

A PARABLE CONCERNING PROPERTY-From The Pen Of Bertolt Brecht  

A PARABLE CONCERNING PROPERTY


PLAY/BOOK REVIEW


THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE, BERTAOLT BRECHT, UNIVERSTIY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 1999


One of the master communist playwright Bertolt Brecht’s strengths as an artist was the ability to set up a moral dilemma and work it out to a conclusion, not always a satisfactory one, by play’s end. This is unusual in a seemingly orthodox follower of the old Stalinist 'socialist realist’ cultural program. This work nevertheless permitted Brecht to address an age-old question about the nature of property ownership, extending it from its natural and historic setting in land and chattels to the question of personal human ownership.

The question posed here is whether a child abandoned by its natural mother then found and raised by another women should go to the former or that latter. Nice dilemma, right? But Brecht, as seem in Mother Courage and other parables, is not above cutting right to the bone on moral questions. What makes this work a cut above some of Brecht’s more didactic plays is the way that he weaves the parable about the odd resolution of an ancient Chinese property dispute and places that ‘wisdom’ in context of a then current dispute between two Soviet-era communes.

In the ancient dispute the judge who is called upon to render judgment, using the circle as a medium to resolve the dispute, seems to be Solomonic but is really a buffoon. This is pure Brechtian irony. This says as much about Brecht's attitude toward property as it does about the old time Chinese justice system. The question of property rights as presented by Brecht and their value as a societal glue is also something the reader or viewer of this play should think about, as well.

Head To Washington To Support The Poor People's Campaign June 23rd-50 Years Is Too Long-People Get Ready

Letter From The Poor People’s Campaign Faithful Supreme Court Nine

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

6/12/2018 3:31 PM

To 

Dear Alfred, On Monday afternoon, we ascended the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court—clergy and people of faith, one of us for each of the nine justices responsible for deciding our nation’s most critical cases. The Rev. Dr. William Barber II had just been arrested on the street in front of the Court alongside nearly 80 other Poor People’s Campaign activists. And across the country, hundreds more were participating in nonviolent direct action to call for higher wages, union rights and fully-funded anti-poverty programs. We climbed the steps knowing that over the last five weeks, more than 2,000 people have been arrested as part of our revival of the Poor People’s Campaign, challenging systemic racism, poverty, the war economy and ecological devastation. We’ve been doing the work to get policy makers’ attention across the country—but now we need to get together in one place to show how big our movement has become. So on June 23, we’re taking the fight to D.C. for a Mass Rally to Stand Against Poverty and Systemic Racism. Come with us. We came to the Supreme Court to pray for the judges, who earlier in the day put a legal stamp of approval on voter suppression in A. Phillip Randolph Institute v. Husted and who, any day, are expected to rule in Janus v. AFSCME, a case that could make it easier for anti-worker extremists to rig the economy further by dividing working people. We formed a circle, held hands, bowed our heads, and then we prayed. We prayed to say to our nation’s capital and to the nine justices of this nation’s highest court that everyone’s life is sacred, that everyone has a right to live, to living wages, to love, to vote and to thrive. We cited sacred texts to say we are all each other’s keepers, and that workers who are exploited cry out. “We are here, God, because another law came down today, a law that denies the very fundamental rights of your people—the right to be free,” we prayed. “And when our rights to be free are violated, our voting rights, our housing rights, our labor rights, our education rights, we moral leaders, with you on our side, in front of this Supreme Court, do declare that we will continue to do your work.” We prayed over the voice of a Supreme Court police officer booming over a bullhorn, threatening us with arrest if we did not stop. And we continued to pray as the same Supreme Court that in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission upheld discrimination against the LGBTQI community under the guise of protecting religious freedom, arrested the nine of us for praying on their steps. One by one, we were placed in handcuffs, our religious collars and robes removed. We were kept in cuffs for nearly six hours, and then placed in cells without pillows, blankets or mattresses— but overrun with roaches, where we have been held overnight. We have not slept in jail, but instead we have continued the work of the Poor People’s Campaign, preparing for the great work ahead of us. The difficult conditions we are facing now will not stop us from speaking out. We vow to continue our fight and to continue to seek justice for those living with the least in this nation. Join us in D.C. on June 23 and be part of the thousands-strong crowd flooding the streets to Stand Against Poverty and Systemic Racism. Can’t make it? Share the rally with your Facebook friends here. Want to spread the word person-to-person by phone banking with us? You can do that too. Need a ride or have extra space in your car? We’ve created a map of shared buses and cars to take you to DC. Forward together, not one step back, The Faithful Supreme Court Nine The Rev. Liz Theoharis The Rev. Graylan Hagler The Rev. William Lamar The Rev. Jimmie Hawkins The Rev. Hershey Mallette Stephens Pastor Rob Stephens Roz Pelles Shailly Barnes Noam Sandweiss-Back Sent via ActionNetwork.org. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, please click here.

Defend The NFL Football Players-Take a Knee Now More Than Ever RootsAction Team

Take a Knee Now More Than Ever

RootsAction Team

6/8/2018 9:25 AM

To  

The National Football League is now forbidding its players/employees from kneeling in protest of racist police violence during the national anthem. The NFL has created this policy without negotiating with the players' union and apparently without considering the First Amendment, but perhaps with an eye on the millions of dollars the Pentagon has quietly given it to celebrate militarism, and explicitly with an eye on pleasing bully-in-chief Donald Trump. Now more than ever, we need to encourage players to take a knee and protest -- and thank those who've already protested. Thank Athletes for Taking a Knee and Resisting Trump!  Share this action on Facebook  Share this action on Twitter Donald Trump has been very understanding of violent racists, but has the ugliest words for African American athletes who nonviolently protest a racist criminal justice system. In fact, he wants athletes fired for protesting, because they "disrespect our flag." Trump's bombast has spurred even more athletes to speak out against racial injustice and against Trump. Click here to thank those athletes who have taken a knee in protest -- or have joined in their defense. The U.S. military has paid the National Football League many millions of public dollars to praise the military. Until 2009 NFL football teams were not even on the field yet when the national anthem was played at games. The militarized culture of permanent wars for "freedom" has been eroding our rights and our freedom of expression steadily for years now -- to the point that when several athletes protested police killings, they were accused of "disrespecting our troops." Those athletes willing to protest racism and injustice are also taking a knee in defense of freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Click here to tell them we are grateful. We will deliver the petition with your signatures to the players union. After signing the petition, please use the tools on the next webpage to share it with your friends. This work is only possible with your financial support. Please chip in $3 now. -- The RootsAction.org Team P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others. Background: > Benjamin Sachs: The NFL’s “take a knee” ban is flatly illegal > Deadspin: Here's How NFL Teams Demonstrated During The National Anthem Today > Vice: Stephen A. Smith Points Out NFL's Paid Patriotism Problem > Dave Zirin: For the NFL, It Was Choose Your Side Sunday   www.RootsAction.org Unsubscribe

The Art Of The Defeated-“Inventur-Art In Germany-1943-1955 At The Harvard Art Museums-A Comment

The Art Of The Defeated-“Inventur-Art In Germany-1943-1955 At The Harvard Art Museums-A Comment

By Lenny Lynch

Of course I am way too young at thirty-five to have been affected by even the tremors of the post-World War II happenings in Western culture like a number of my older writer co-workers were in what in America was the “golden age” of lots of things. In talking to Sam Lowell, now a retired by still feisty former film editor here and Frank Jackman who still writes little sketches here as well about this art exhibit at the Harvard Art Museums which features the work of many German artists in various media they were quite surprised about how many of those artists dealt with struggling as a defeated nation. Strangely this included artists who were well-known anti-Nazi and anti-fascist who either had been in exile (those who could get out before the curtain came down and they were stuck), had been Jewish and yet had survived the camps somehow or had been stuck in Germany and worked their creative skills as best they could. Included too a catalogue of artists who showed up in the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibits of the late 1930s in Germany.

Two things stuck out that I carried with me from the exhibit. In the art world, the serious part, sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. A defeated nation, heavily bombed by Allied warplanes, huge destruction of infrastructure, hobbling along on American rations and black markets nevertheless provided room for artists to come up with new ways of creating art from other than traditional material like oils and canvass. Shingles, scrape metal, house paints and the like let these folks create some new ways of making art. The other thing that stuff out was that even in defeat and isolation many of these artists were aware of, took part in, and expanded the new theories in art in their work from expressionism to abstraction and colorism. Minimalism in sculpture. Interesting exhibit if you are in Cambridge sometime soon.     

On The Anniversary-If I Could Be The Rain I Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go Round At 83

If I Could Be The Rain I Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go Round At 83

By Music Critic  Bart Webber

Back the day, back in the emerging folk minute of the 1960s that guys like Sam Lowell, Si Lannon, the late Peter Paul Markin and others were deeply immersed in (and the former two never got over since they will still tell a tale or two about the times if you go anywhere within ten miles of the subject-I will take my chances here because this notice is important) all roads seemed to lead to Harvard Square, the Village down in NYC, North Beach out in San Francisco, and maybe Old Town in Chicago. That is where names like Baez, Dylan, Paxton, Ochs, and a whole crew of younger folksingers who sat at the feet of guys like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.  

But there was another important strand that hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and some other colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s where some of those names played but also where some upstarts from the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like Bruce “Utah” Phillips (although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing about). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of 83 in June 2017.

The last time I saw Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at what was billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel road. She was on fire that night except the then recent death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill (and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always remember her cover of Old Devil Time that night -yeah, give me one more chance, one more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain whenever I hear her name. RIP Rosalie Sorrels 

Good Morning, Vietnam-Indeed-The Trials And Tribulations Of One Adrian Cronauer

Good Morning, Vietnam-Indeed-The Trials And Tribulations Of One Adrian Cronauer

By Si Lannon     

I knew from the minute I picked up this guy Adrian Cronauer from the airport that no way was he going to last in our outfit. You can take it from me Eddie Garlick even after all these years, maybe because of all those years and the changes I have seen in this man’s, oops, just Army, that he had a “misfit” target written all over him. Our outfit if you could call it that was producing, well, hell, producing propaganda and glad tidings to the increasing number of troops coming in-country and in need of some easy listening on the Armed Forces Radio Station-Vietnam edition. You may think that once I laid that tag on you that I was some kind of radio personality myself or helped with production. No, how I got into that job, that mostly very good and “safe” job, safe as anything was in Vietnam in those days when even office help like was liable to be spraying M-16 ammunition out into the night sky just like the grunts was a fluke. Fortunately I got out of the country before the “shit really hit the fan,” excuse my language, when Mister Charlie owned the day and night. (Everybody for a long time said that “the night belonged to Charlie” what they didn’t tell you but you could figure out pretty quickly the day was his too but that was later) See my MOS, my training when I signed Uncle Sam’s papers, when I enlisted, was radioman, radioman not like what Cronauer and the others were doing but combat radioman out in the boondocks. Somehow the General, General Taylor, now long gone, said he needed a radio man and I was the one they picked or really I was there when the General said he needed a radio man and that was that. I was there and so I got that soft, well, kind of soft job after they found out I wasn’t any radio personality or a production guy they made me the driver, the go-fer. That is how I wound up at the airport greeting a real radio personality that the General had heard about, had heard do his thing and desperately wanted for his soldiers to listen to and take their minds off the fucking war (the General’s words not mine so you know he knew something was wrong from the beginning).               

So the minute I saw the bleary-eyed son of bitch come down the stairs of the plane all disheveled and looking like he had been on a three day drunk (it had actually been four) I knew he wouldn’t last and in a split second before he did his comedy thing to impress me I guess I started to panic that maybe this guy would take me down with him and I would wind up out in Pleiku where the other guys I came in-country with were located. So I started kind of stand-offish, tried to tell him about the “book” about regulations. It wasn’t like his was a brother, you know a guy from the neighborhood, from the “hood who you could tell what was what if you didn’t want to get your sorry black in a sling. The laugh was on me as you damn well know, or will know once I get through with this story. 

First of all Cronauer, nobody called him Adrian (and he told me once we had gotten to know each other that nobody but his mother called him that and he would usually not answer to the name even from her. I wouldn’t answer to Edward either from my mother knowing that I was in deep doo when she laid that name on me for some transgression) came over from some good awful place, Crete, or someplace like that and was Air Force whereas the rest of us were strictly Army, Regular Army. Second of all from minute one he had me both splitting a gut laughing and looking at him sideways like he was some guy from outer space. But see the General, General Taylor had heard him like I said he said the guys needed to hear a guy like Cronauer to get through as best they could.         

The real reason though, and I proved right in the end even though I did everything in my power to try to save him including getting the grunts, you know the guys who were going in and out of the boonies looking for Mister Charlie to send fan mail to get him back on the air was Sergeant Major Dickerson, the “Dick” as we called him behind his back. (I didn’t do any fighting although I did face gun fire and bomb explosions in my tour of Vietnam like a lot of guys not on the line, it was that kind of war, but I had nothing but respect for the enemy and would not call him the derogatory Charlie but always prefaced it with the honorific Mister to show my respects). Sergeant Major was all spit and polish, all rules and regulations, all-lifer, all the only good commie is dead commie so you knew, I knew the minute I saw Cronauer half out of uniform, hair too long and with a laugh a minute that he wasn’t going to go the distance, would fuck up somehow and made hash out of everything.

But while he was riding high one Airman Cronauer was beautiful was like a breath of fresh air in the Black Hole of Calcutta. The only thing I didn’t like in the few months that he was around was that he would always kid me about my turning the key to start the engine of the jeep when it was already running that I used to transport him around to his various doings. Being around him made me nervous and forgetful, always in the back of my mind figuring I was the fall guy, the expendable black guy. See General Taylor had personally assigned me to “look after” Cronauer since even the General knew he was loosely put together, a loose cannon. I guess even he didn’t know in the end how big a can of worms Cronauer would be after the Dick got through with him. 

You have to know something about Armed Forces Radio back in ’65, maybe any time but mostly the thing was about presenting “happy” news, maybe cover a press conference of some important figure who was in-country to see what was really going on (and never taking the blinders off to find out, never leaving MACV headquarters and definitely never asking the soldiers, the grunts, what the hell was going on while they were doing their whirlwind three day tours in-country while the guys were out there bleeding away) and play music like Ray Conniff, Percy Faith, I don’t know Guy Lombardo stuff our parents would did, would find appealing. And the guys, good guys really, who took their shifts, usually four hours unless they were covering for somebody, and gave what the Dick and Army regulations dictated to read and play. They even had two donkeys, two brothers who must have been orphans because no mother could love them (or have carried them in her womb) who red-penciled everything especially KIAs, and the lack of progress against Mister Charlie that was apparent to anybody except those idiot VIPs who had come in-country to see what it was all about and thought things were just fine-thank you.

Day one on air, no, minute one, Cronauer blew all of that away. Started off at six o’clock in the morning with his signature call-“Good Morning, Vietnam” but he would stretch those three words out for what seemed like an hour so you couldn’t help even at deadhead six in the morning smiling that this was something very different. Then he would do “mock” news reports, total bullshit of total bullshit, and then play something like James Brown, can you believe it, Brother James Brown. Needless to say the Dick blew his top, complained to General Taylor who told him to “fuck off” then because the men liked hearing Cronauer, and he did have a big breath of fresh air following. The General as you can gather was what you would call a soldiers’ General if you know what I mean mixed with the men, went out in the boonies to talk with them (unlike those General Staff guys who never came out of the bunker).          

What did Cronauer in, what did a lot of guys stuck in Vietnam then before there were too many guys hanging around in Saigon and everything got whorish was a girl, a beautiful Vietnamese girl who I told him was off-limits, was a no go. But Cronauer wouldn’t listen, spent every waking hour trying to figure out how to get next to this beauty, this Trinh. Including getting close to her brother Tran something I forget his full name, and it doesn’t matter since that was not his real name, his real Mister Charlie name as it turned out. As young as he was he was a cadre as we, meaning everybody including Cronauer found out-too late.  Although Cronauer didn’t see it that way he was basically asking this Tran to pimp for his sister. Nothing good could come of that, and nothing did despite the extensive wooing that Cronauer did.The cultural gap was too great unlike with the good-time girls who hung around the GIs at Jimmy Wah’s whoI will tell you about in a minute.

When push came to shove though nothing could save Cronauer. He had been too friendly with the natives as they say and the native had bitten him, had used his as a cover to blow up Jimmy Wah’s famous Saigon gin mill where GIs hung out. Blew up Jimmy’s place in broad daylight and this in 1965 so don’t tell me about what was what even then save that for the schoolboy histories, not the real deal. This Jimmy Wah was a character in his own right. Back in the hood, back in the 1960s hood anyway we called guys like that, black guys too on the low, Marys, maybe you called him a fag or “light on his feet,” a fairy or something although you couldn’t, wouldn’t and maybe shouldn’t get away with that these days at least in the public sphere of the all-volunteer Army where the gays and lesbians are crying out like crazy to be recognized for what they are and not discharged for their sexual orientation. The thing to know about Jimmy and Jimmy Wah’s joint was that he was “connected,” had some general who was his boyfriend and protector. A famous general too if I told you the name who Jimmy was “playing the flute for” if you know what I mean. That is why you could find good-time girls aplenty and GIs there at all times. That is why it was such an inviting target for Mister Charlie. And Cronauer with that beauty on his mind dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s for the whole mess.              

Not good, not good at all. Got me mixed up in it and almost ruined my career except the General had the Dick’s number and it was him that was hung out to dry not me. Cronauer, well, bad boy Cronauer got kicked out of the service for the good of the service as they say. Never did get too far with that Trinh before he became persona non grata in-country. Sent his young ass back to the States quick as a jack rabbit. End of story.   

Not quite. I heard that they are going to make a movie out of Cronauer’s crazy stay in Vietnam, going to get the comic Robin Williams to play Cronauer. I hope that it does okay but I will tell you nobody, nobody get it, could pull the antics that Cronauer did just out of the blue. I suppose when it comes out, they say next year, they say 1987 I will go to some theater not on base and watch it but I will know what the real deal was. Hey listen some nights I still wake up thinking about some antic that mad clown did on the air or out in the streets of Saigon. Always think even though I am a Sergeant Major myself here at Fort Meade with twenty-two down and eight to go about that last gift he left me. His farewell tape to the troops which I delivered on the radio. Got to do my own version of his Good Morning, Vietnam war cry, and got to feel for just one moment what it was like to have the world in your hands. Yeah, Cronauer was one hell of a guy, was a piece of work no question. You can take it from somebody who was there.  

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-On Entering North Adamsville High Redux , Circa 1960 –With Chubby Checker’s The Twist In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-On Entering North Adamsville High Redux , Circa 1960 –With Chubby Checker’s The Twist In Mind

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[Funny as larcenous as I was as a kid under the wanting habits guidance of my old friend Frankie Riley and the larcenous planning expertise of Scribe I was always a pretty good student, always liked to read. Except unlike Scribe who wore his knowledge very heavily on his shirtsleeves for the whole fucking wide world to see the son of a bitch I wish he were here right now so I could lambaste him in person I read on the low, on the quiet sneaking to the Thomas Adderley Library branch across town from the Acre so nobody would suspect what I was doing.

Along with that I never had much trouble, again like Scribe and to a certain degree Frankie as well adjusting as we entered each new school on our way to graduation. Always was kind of ho-hum about it unlike in the story below where Frank Jackman who I am sure did not want to see this sketch come to life since he would deny the whole thing on seven sealed bibles who literally sweated his ass off each time he moved up the ladder and not just in high school entry days either. Maybe it was because I had some other burdens I was carrying that seemed heavier, weighed heavier on the grand scale that I was so non-plussed every time a teacher or a corner boy expressed how hard the next step up the food chain was. We had plenty of corner boys pass through who couldn’t handle school, were not students in any sense you could call them students so they just dropped out like my brother Timmy and got lost in the shuffle. I wonder what happened to Richie, Brain, Buzz-saw (you don’t want to know on that one), and Jack Devlin. Yeah, I would like to know. Allan Jackson}             

The Twist (Yo Twist)

Song by Fat Boys, Chubby Checker

1.     Come on baby
Let's do the twist
Come on baby
Let's do the twist
Take me by my little hand
And go like this

Ee-yah twist
Baby, baby twist
Ooh yeah, just like this
Come on little miss and do the twist

My daddy is sleepin'
And mama ain't around
Yeah, daddy just sleepin'
And mama ain't around
We're gonna twisty twisty twisty
Till we tear the house down

Come on and twist
Yeah, baby twist
Oooh yeah, just like this
Come on miss and do the twist
Ee-yah

Yeah, you should see my little sis
You should see my my litlle Sis
She really knows how to rock
She knows how to twist

Come on and twist
Yeah, baby twist
Oooh yeah, just like this
Come on little miss and do the twist

Yeah, rock on now
Yeah, twist on down
Twist
('Round and 'round and 'round)

A few years ago, maybe four or five now, around the time that Frank Jackman (always Frank and not Francis since that was too much like that St Francis who was good to animals and stuff and no self-respecting corner boy wanted that tagged to his name besides the formal name sounded kind of faggy, hey that’s what we called guys before we knew better who were kind of girlish although I used queer more, when the guys talked about names one night, also not Frankie since that name was taken up in his crowd) and Frankie Riley (always Frankie and not Francis for the same reason as Frank but also Frankie because he had always been called Frankie since time immemorial to distinguish him from his father Frank, Sr.) his Jack Slack’s bowling alleys corner boy chieftain all through high school in North Adamsville had been commemorating, maybe better to say comparing notes, on their fiftieth anniversary of entry into that school in the ninth grade. Frank had written a remembrance of the first day of school freshman year. He had written it at the behest of a female fellow classmate, Dora, for a class website where she was the webmaster which she and a few others had established so that those from the Class of 1964 who wished to, those who were able to, could communicate with each other in the new dispensation of cyberspace.

That remembrance, one of a series of sketches that he eventually did, and on recent inquiry from Jimmy Jenkins another classmate and ex-corner boy comrade, Frank has stated that he stood by that “sketch” characterization, centered on the anxieties that he had on that first day about making a brand new impression on the freshman class, about changing his junior high school quasi-“beatnik” style, his two thousand fact barrage that he would lay on anybody who would listen. A style change that lots of guys and gals have gone through when faced with a new situation, although the people he was trying to impress had already been his classmates in that junior high school and were painfully aware of the previous way that he had presented himself, presented himself  under Frankie’s direction, to the world.

When Frankie at the time read what Frank had written, a thing filled with new found sobbing, weeping, and pious innocence he sent him an e-mail which brought Frank up short. Frankie threatened in no uncertain terms to write his own “sketch” refuting all the sobbing, weeping, piously innocent noise that Frank had been trying to bamboozle their fellow classmates with. The key point that Frankie threatened to bring down on a candid world, the candid world in this instance being the very curious Dora for one, and her coterie of friends who had stayed in contact with each other since high school since they all still lived in the area (except in winter, now retired winter, and most headed to Florida, mainly around Naples), to be clear about was the case of Frank Jackman and one Lydia Stevenson. Or rather the case, the love-bug case he had for her. That, and not some mumble-jumble about changing his act which he never really did since you could always depend on Frank going on and on with one of his two thousand arcane facts that he tried to impress every girl he ran across in high school with and to dress like he had just come walking in from post-beat Harvard Square, was the very real point of what was aggravating him on that long ago hot endless first Wednesday after Labor Day morning.

See Frank had gotten absolutely nowhere with Lydia, nowhere beyond the endless talking stage, and thus nowhere, in junior high but he was still carrying the torch come freshman year and fifty years later he still felt that fresh-scented breathe and that subtle perfume, or bath soap, or whatever it was she wore, breezing over him (maybe it was perfume stolen from Ma’s dresser top, he these days liked to think she had made that thief to drive him crazy, crazy with her girlish wiles). Or maybe her curse, a North Adamsville curse that he claimed at one point that Lydia cast on him since he never had then a girlfriend from school, or from North Adamsville for that matter, always from some other town. Not in high school anyway.

The currency of that fresh breeze that occupied his mind may have been pushed forward by his getting back in touch with classmates. And as fate would have it, the thrice-married Frank, never one to say never to love had as a result of getting back in touch with classmates on the website had a short fruitless affair with another classmate, Laura, who had been a close friend of Lydia’s in junior high school and told him a couple of things about what Lydia had thought about Frank. Laura confirmed that Lydia had expected Frank to ask her out in junior high school but also after the affair had run its course unconsciously confirmed by that failed affair that Lydia’s curse was still at work fifty years later. And it is that missed opportunity to fall under the sway of that Lydia scent that will drive this short sketch, hell, forget Frank and his sketch business, this short piece.                  

This is the way Frank described to me what happened after Frankie sent that fatal e-mail that might expose his long hidden thoughts: 

“Frankie, for once listened patiently as I finished my story, the one that he say was filled to the brim with sobbing, weeping, whining bull about starting anew and being anxious about what would happen, and which he threatened to go viral on, immediately after I was finished let out with a “Who are you kidding Jackman that is not the way you told me the story back then.” Then he went on. “I remember very well what you were nervous about. What that cold night sweats, that all-night toss and turn teen angst, boy version, had been about and it wasn’t first day of school jitters. It was nothing but thinking about her. That certain "she" that you had kind of sneaked around mentioning as you had been talking, talking your his head off about filling out forms, getting books, and other weird noises, just to keep the jitters down. The way you told it then, and I think you called me up right after school was out to discuss the matter, was that while on those pre-school steps you had just seen her, seen her with the other North Adamsville junior high girls on the other side of the steps, and got all panicky, got kind of red-faced about it, and so you are going to have to say a little something about that. And if you don’t I will.” 

Frankie continued along this line, stuff which seemed to be true but which made me wonder how a guy who when we met at the Sunnyville Grille over in Boston for a few drinks to discuss this and that, not the Lydia thing but our corner boy exploits, couldn’t remember where he left his car keys and we had to call AAA to come out and find them on his driver’s side seat. Jesus.  Here’s what he was getting at.

“See, I know the previous school year, late in the eighth grade at North Adamsville Junior High, toward the end of the school year you had started talking to that Lydia Stevenson in art class. Yes, that Lydia who on her mother’s side from was from some branch of the Adams family who had run the jagged old ship-building town there in North Adamsville for eons and who had employed my father and a million other fathers, and I think yours’ too if I am not mistaken, for a while anyway, around there and then just headed south, or to Greece or someplace like that, for the cheaper labor I heard later. She was one of the granddaughters or some such relation I never did get it all down. And that part was not all that important anyway because what mattered, what mattered to you, was that faint scent, that just barely perceivable scent, some nectar scent, that came from Lydia when you sat next to her in art class and you two talked, talked your heads off.

“But you never did anything about it, not then anyway although you said when we talked later about it you had this feeling, maybe just a feeling because you wanted things to be that way but a feeling anyway, that she had expected you to ask her out. Asking out for junior high school students then, and for freshmen in high school too because we didn’t have licenses to drive cars, being the obligatory "first date" at Jimmy Jack's Shack (no, not the one off Adamsville Boulevard, that's for the tourists and old people, the one on Hancock up toward the Square is the one I am talking about). You said you were just too shy and uncertain to do it.

“Why? Well you said it was because you came from the “wrong side of the tracks” in the old town, over by the old abandoned Old Colony tracks and she, well like I said came from a branch of the Adams family that lived over on Elm in one of those Victorian houses that the swells are crazy for now, and I guess were back then too. That is when you figured that if you studied up on a bunch of stuff, stuff that you liked to study anyway, then come freshman year you just might be able to get up the nerve to ask her to go over to Jimmy Jack's for something to eat and to listen to the jukebox after school some day like every other Tom, Dick and Harry did then.

“.... So don’t tell me suddenly, a bell rang, a real bell, students, like lemmings to the sea, were on the move, especially those junior high kids that you had nodded to before as you took those steps, two at a time. And don’t tell me it was too late then to worry about style, or anything else. Or make your place in the sun as you went along, on the fly. No, it was about who kind of brushed against you as you rushed up the stairs and who gave you one of her biggest faintly-scented smiles as you both raced up those funky granite steps. Yeah, a place in the sun, sure.”

And so there you had Frank satisfying Frankie enough with his agreement to make public on the class website the gist of his stubborn e-mail. Funny though as much time as they spent talking about it back in the day and then when they resurrected it a few years ago Frank never did get to first base Lydia in high school, although she sent him a few more of those big faintly-scented smiles which Frank didn’t figure out until too late. Within a couple of weeks of the school opening Lydia was seen hand in hand with Paul Jones, a sophomore then, the guy who would lead North Adamsville to two consecutive division football championships and who stayed hand in hand with him until she graduated. Frank had had a few girlfriends in high school, Harvard Square refugees like himself who went crazy for his two thousand facts but they were not from the town. The few times Frank did try to get dates in school or in town, get to first base, he was shot down for all kinds of reasons, a couple of times because he did not have a car and the girls had not the slightest interest in walking around on a date, a couple of times he was just flat stood up when the girls he was to date took the next best thing instead. Yeah, the Lydia hex sure did him in. And after that Laura disaster don’t say he wasn’t jinxed, just don’t say it around him.