An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

There were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities, those that he thought would bring some small honor to his name, that he would rather not forget, things that defined his life, gave him that “fifteen minutes of fame,” if only to himself and his, that everybody kept talking about that everyone deserved before they departed this life. That “fifteen minutes of fame” business which he thought had been uttered by the Pop-artist Andy Warhol in one of his prankster moments, one of his New York high society put-downs, was fine by him even if it had been the result of some small honor thing.

The subject of that small honor done in the spurt of his youth that had defined a lot of what came later is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated from North Adamsville High School, around the time that he realized that the big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust out over the land, over America. (His world view did not encompass the entire world or what was the same thing the "youth nation" part of that view but later after making plenty of international connections from here and there he could have said he was waiting for that breeze to bust out over the world.)

It was not like Edward was some kind of soothsayer, like some big think tank thinker paid well to keep tabs on social trends for those in charge so they didn’t get waylaid like they did with the “rebel without a cause” and “beat” phenomena or anything like that back in the 1950s that had them all scared like hell that society was going down in the ditch. No, it was like he could read tea leaves or tarot cards like some latter day Madame La Rue who actually did read his future once down at the Gloversville Fair when she had come to that location with her daughter, Gypsy Anne, one hot August week when he was about twelve. Madame that day read that he was made for big events. The big event that he was interested in just then was winning a doll, a stuffed animal or something like that for dark-haired, dark-eyed just starting to fill out  Gypsy Anne at the Skee game of which he was an expert at.

(For those clueless about Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit youths around carnivals, small time circuses, or penny-ante amusement parks, the game is simplicity itself once you get the hang of it and play about 10,000 hours’ worth of games you roll small balls, which come down a chute once you pay your dough, or credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked nowadays, and you roll them like in bowling up to a target area like in archery and try to get a ton of points which gives you strips of coupons to win a prize depending on high your score is, and what you want. Like I say, simple.) 

And Edward did win his Gypsy Anne a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his heroics down by the beach when she gave her best twelve year old “come hither” look, not the last time he would be snagged by that look by her or any other women later (and by the way “copped a little feel” from that starting to fill out shape of hers and he finally solved, no, he solved for that one minute that budding girls turned to women were as interested in sex, or at least being “felt up” as the other guys around Harry’s Variety Store had told him  they were if approached the right way).  No way though that tarot reading when he was twelve left an impression, left him with that vague feeling about the big breeze coming, not then when his hormones drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while thereafter.

That big breeze blowing through the land thing had not been Edward’s idea anyway, not his originally although he swore by it once he thought about the possibilities of breaking out of Podunk North Adamsville, but came from “the Scribe,” the late Peter Paul Markin, a corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys on Thornton Street where he occasionally hung out in high school since he had been childhood friends with the leader of that crowd, Frankie Riley. Markin, despite a serious larcenous heart which would eventually do him in, read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the jail-break thing on lonesome Friday nights when all the guys were waiting, well, just waiting for something to happen in woebegone North Adamsville where the town mainly went to sleep by ten, or eleven on Friday and Saturday night when Jack Slack’s closed late.  (For the younger set, Doc’s Drugstore, the place where he and Frankie hung in their younger days as well, the place where they all first heard rock and roll played loud on Doc’s jukebox by the soda fountain, every night was a nine o’clock close just when things were getting interesting as the shadows had time to spank vivid boy imaginations and you wonder, well, maybe not you, but parents wondered why their kids were ready to take the first hitchhike or hitch a freight train ride out of that “one-horse town” (an expression courtesy of the grandmothers of the town, at least the ones he knew, mostly Irish grandmothers with corn beef and cabbage boiling on their cast-iron stoves and smirks on their faces, if grandmothers could have smirks over anything, about how dear the price of everything was if you could get it a very big problem, including for Edward’s Anna Riley, where he first heard the words).

Here is where that big breeze twelve million word description thing Markin was talking about intersected with that unspoken trend for Edward (unknown and unspoken since the corner at Jack Slacks’ did not have a professional academic sociologist in residence to guide them since those “hired guns” were still hung up on solving the juvenile delinquency problem and so as usual were well behind the curve  and Markin, the Scribe as smart as he was, was picking his stuff up strictly from newspapers and magazines who were always way also behind the trends until the next big thing hit them in the face). Edward’s take on the musical twists and turns back then is where he had something the kids at North Adamsville High would comment on, would ask him about to see which way the winds were blowing, would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes to hear based on his recommendations.

Even Markin deferred to him on this one, on his musical sense, the beat or the “kicks” as he called then although he, Markin, would horn in, or try to, on the glory by giving every imaginable arcane fact about some record’s history, roots, whatever which would put everybody to sleep, they just wanted to heard the “beat” for crying out loud. Edward did have to chuckle though when he thought about the way, the main way, that Markin worked the jukebox scene since he was strictly from poverty, from the projects, poorer even than Edward’s people and that was going some if you saw the ramshackle shack of a house that he and his four older brothers grew up in. The Scribe used to con some lonely-heart girl who maybe had just broken up with her boyfriend, maybe had been dateless for a while, or was just silly enough to listen to him into playing what he wanted to hear based on what Edward had told him.

But Markin was smooth in his way since he would draw a bee-line to the girl who just put her quarter in for her three selection on Jack Slack’s jukebox (Doc’s, sweet and kindly saint Doc whose place was a bee-hive after school for that very reason , had five for a quarter if you can believe that). He would become her “advisor,” and as the number one guy who knew every piece of teenage grapevine news in the town and whom everybody therefore deferred on that intelligence so he would let her “pick” the first selection, usually some sentimental lost love thing she could get weepy over, the second selection would be maybe some “oldie but goodie,” Breathless or At The Hop, which everybody still wanted to hear, and then on number three, the girl all out of ideas Markin would tout whatever song had caught his ear. Jesus, Markin was a piece of work. Too bad he had to end the way he did down in Mexico now lying in some unmarked grave in some town’s potter’s field back in the mid-1970s which guys from the old town were still moaning over.

That was Markin on the fringes but see Edward’s senses were very much directed by his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll in the early 1960s where he sensed what he called silly “bubble gum” music that had passed for rock(what high priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was always putting stuff in political bull form like that). Which, go figure, the girls liked, or liked the look of the guys singing the tunes, guys with flipped hair and dimples like Fabian and Bobby Rydell but was strictly nowhere with Edward. The breeze Edward felt was going to bury that stuff under an avalanche of sounds going back to Elvis, and where Elvis got his stuff from like Lonnie Johnson and the R&B and black electric blues guys, the rockabilly hungry white boys, and forward to something else, something with more guitars all amped to big ass speakers that were just coming along to bring in the new dispensation.

More importantly since the issue of jailbreaks and sea changes were in the air Edward was the very first kid to grasp what would later be called “the folk minute of the early 1960s,” and not just by Markin when he wrote stuff about that time later before his sorry end. Everybody would eventually hone in on Dylan and Baez, dubbed the “king and queen” of the moment by the mass media always in a frenzy to anoint and label things that they had belatedly found about out about and run into the ground.  But when folk tunes started showing up on the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Latham Street where the college guys hung out and where families went to a cheap filling dinner to give Ma a break from the supper meal preparations it was guys like the Kingston Trio, the Lettermen, and the Lamplighters who got the play after school and some other girls, not the “bubble gum” girls went crazy over the stuff when Edward made recommendations.

He had caught the folk moment almost by accident late one Sunday night when he picked up a station from New York City and heard Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs being played, stuff that Mr. Dasher his seventh grade music teacher had played in class to broaden youthful minds, meaning trying to break the Elvis-driven rock and roll habit. So that musical sense combined with his ever present sense that things could be better in this wicked old world drilled into him by his kindly old grandmother, that Anna Riley with her boiling kettles and smirks mentioned before,   who was an old devotee of the Catholic Worker movement kind of drove his aspirations (and Markin’s harping with the political and so-called historical slant triggered by his own grandmother’s devotion to the Catholic Worker movement added in). But at first it really was the music that had been the cutting edge of what followed later, followed until about 1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land. 

That fascination with music had occupied Edward’s mind since he had been about ten and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant clamoring for rock and roll records and later folk albums, concert tickets, radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well, frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, the Rosemary Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haynes and an endless series of male quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise, no, in order to end the family civil war, they had purchased a transistor radio at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.

One night, one late night in 1955, 1956 when Edward was fiddling with the dial he heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues although sort of, but a new beat driven by some wild guitar by a guy named Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care whether she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you need a name for what ailed young Edward Rowley, something he could not quite articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And so with that as a pedigree Edward became one of the town’s most knowledgeable devotees of the new sound.

Problem was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that names, Patsy this and Brenda that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.

So Edward was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he got caught later in high school up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although being in high school in North Adamsville far from New York City, far from San Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Edward would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school, “beatniks.”  So Edward had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a black beret (a beret that he kept hidden at home in his bedroom closet once he found out after his parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of On The Road on the Steve Allen Show that they had severely disapproved of the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Edward played that out until Daryl moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother).

Then came 1964 and  Edward was fervently waiting for something to happen, for something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a harbinger of what was coming.

That is where Edward had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol of clash that Edward knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a kid.  Here is what one episode of the battle sounded like:                   

“Isn’t that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs. Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back from his job working on repairing that ship up in Maine, if you know what is good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in North Adamsville households (and not just those households either but in places like Carver, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Ann Arbor, Manhattan, Cambridge any place where guys were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy, after they had taken a look at what their Victorian great-grandfathers grew and though it was “cool.” Cool along with new mishmash clothing and new age monikers to be called by after giving up their "slave" names.)

Of course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome storm after the long lonely mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the 1964 parent world was getting up in arms.

And not just about hair styles either. But about midnight trips on the clanking subway to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this, folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired (male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing (both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat”  except on silly television shows and by “wise” social commenters who could have been “Ike” brothers and sisters, was yesterday’s news).

Mrs. Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Edward be like he was when he listened to Bobby Vinton and his Mr. Lonely or that lovely-voiced Roy Orbison and his It’s Over and other nice songs on the local teen radio station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker just then). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named Bob Dylan that had his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short skirt and her, well her… looks” (Mrs. Rowley like every mother in the post-Pill world refusing to use the “s” word, a throw-back to their girlish days when their mothers did not use such a word either and so everybody learned about sex is some strange osmotic way out in the streets, in the school boys' and girls' lavs Monday mornings before school when some Ben or Lisa would lie like crazy about their sex bouts weekend, and from older almost as clueless older brothers and sisters just like now.)     

Since Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up anyway, she let out what was really bothering her about her Eddie’s behavior, "What about all the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and Mississippi. And you and that damn Peter Markin, who used to be so nice when all you boys hung around together at Jimmy Jack’s Diner [Edward: corner boys, Ma, that is what we were and at Jack Slack’s alleys not Jimmy Jack’s that was for the jukebox and for checking out the girls who were putting dough in that jukebox] and I at least knew you were no causing trouble, talking about organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there. If your father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as you are. Worse though, worse than worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this country, leaving North Adamsville, defenseless against the communists with your talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t you have just left well enough alone and stuck with your idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s We’ll Sing In The Sunshine or that pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and Her Walk On By instead of getting everybody upset."

And since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors had mentioned the name Judy Jackson, Edward’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk, Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was let’s hear what was going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons that Edward was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy” and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any sceptics. Hear this:      

“Young lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,” barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just those mothers either but in places like Gloversville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any place where gals were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing their skirts a little shorter than mid-calf was the flash point) about their daughters dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in her head. She too working up a high horse head of steam continued, "And that Eddie [“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy to the neighbors, said Eddie], and his new found friends like Peter Markin taking you to those strange coffeehouses in Harvard Square with all the unwashed, untamed, unemployed “beatniks” instead of the high school dances on Saturday night. And that endless talk about the n-----s down South, about get books for the ignorant to read and other trash talk about how they are equal to us, and your father better not hear you talk like that, not at the dinner table since he has to work around them and their smells and ignorance over in that factory in Dorchester.  

And don’t start with that Commie trash about peace and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch of them and put them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about America."

Scene: Edward, Judy and Peter Markin were sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between them, and listening to a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none other than Eric Von Schmidt whose Joshua Gone Barbados and a couple of other songs would become folk staples and classics). Beside them cartons of books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when they head south this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are completed in June. (By the way Peter’s parents were only slightly less irate about their son’s activities and used the word “Negro” when they were referring to black people, black people they wished their son definitely not to get involved with were only slightly less behind the times than Mrs. Rowley and Mrs. Jackson and so requires no separate screed by Mrs. Markin. See Peter did not mention word one about what he was, or was not, doing and thus spared himself the anguish that Edward and Judy put themselves through trying to “relate” to their parents, their mothers really since fathers were some vague threatened presence in the background in those households.)

They, trying to hold back their excitement have already been to some training sessions at the NAACP office over on Massachusetts Avenue in the Roxbury section of Boston and had purchased their tickets for the Greyhound bus as far as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet others who will be heading south down to Mississippi goddam and Alabama goddam on a chartered bus. But get this Peter turned to Edward and said, “Have you heard that song, Popsicles and Icicles by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Edward made a very severe off-putting “no way” face. Yes, we are still in the time just before the sea change after which even Peter will chuckle about “bubble gum” music. Good luck on your journey though, young travelers, good luck.

*****This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind

*****This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind         

          

      

By Bradley Fox

Back in 2014, the summer of 2014 to hone in on the time frame of the story to be told, Josh Breslin the then recently retired old-time alternative newspaper and small journal writer for publications like Arise Folk and Mountain Music Gazette who hailed from Olde Saco, Maine was sitting with his friend Sam Lowell from Carver down in cranberry bog country out in Concord in the field behind the Old Manse where the Greater Boston Folk Society was holding its annual tribute to folksinger Woody Guthrie he had thought about all the connections that he, they had to Woody Guthrie from back in the 1960s folk minute revival and before. He mentioned that orphan thought to Sam whom he queried on the subject, wanted to know his personal take on when he first heard Woody. And as well to Laura Perkins, Sam’s long-time companion who had been sitting between them and whom Josh had an on-going half flame going back who knows how far but who had made it clear to Josh on more than one occasion that she was true blue to Sam although she had thanked him for the attention compliment. Sam was aware of Josh’s interest but also of Laura’s position and so he and Josh got along, had in any case been back and forth with some many collective wives and girlfriends that attracted both of them since they had similar tastes going back to ex-surfer girl Butterfly Swirl that they just took it in stride.  Here is what Sam had to say:   

Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out to chapter and verse. Like those church hymns like Mary, Queen of the May, Oh, Jehovah On High, and Amazing Grace that you were forced to sit through with your little Sunday best Robert Hall white suit first bought by poor but proud parents for first communion when that time came  complete with white matching tie on or if you were a girl your best frilly dress on, also so white and first communion bought, when you would have rather been outside playing, or maybe doing anything else but sitting in that forlorn pew, before you got that good dose of religion drilled into by Sunday schoolteachers, parents, hell and brimstone reverends which had made the hymns make sense.

Like as well the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school (Farmer In The Dell, Old MacDonald, Ring Around Something) to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first dose of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year when you learned about Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, classic guys, Stephen Foster and a lot on stuff by guys named Traditional and Anonymous. Or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when a certain musician named Berry, first name Chuck, black as night out of Saint Lou with a golden guitar in hand and some kind of backbeat that made you, two left feet you, want to get up and dance, told Mr. Beethoven, you know the classical music guy, and his ilk, Mozart, Brahms, Liszt, to move on over there was a new sheriff in town, was certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things.

One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind causing westward treks to do re mi California in search of the Promise Land). Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square that is not where I first heard or learned the song (and where the song had gotten full program play complete with folk DJs on the radio telling you the genesis of a lot of the music if you had the luck to find them when you flipped the dial on your transistor radio or the air was just right some vagabond Sunday night and for a time on television, after the scene had been established in the underground and some producer learned about it from his grandkids, via the Hootenanny show, which indicated by that time like with the just previous “beat” scene which scared the wits of square Ike American that you were close to the death-knell of the folk moment).

No, for that one song the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school, down at Myles Standish in Carver where I grew up, when Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation class teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his loathed, our to die for, rock and roll which he thought, erroneously and wastefully he could wean us from with this wholesome twaddle) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter or other details on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan who sat at his knee, literally as he lay wasting away from genetic diseases in Brooklyn Hospital, Pete Seeger, the transmission belt from the old interest in roots music to the then new interest centered on making current event political protest songs from ban the bomb to killing the Mister James Crow South, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott who as an acolyte made a nice career out of continued worshipping at that shrine) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before that dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him.

He spoke in simple language and simpler melody of dust bowl refugees of course, being one himself, talked of outlaws and legends of outlaws being a man of the West growing up on such tales right around the time Oklahoma was heading toward tranquil statehood and oil gushers, talked of the sorrow-filled deportees and refugees working under the hot sun for some gringo Mister, spoke of the whole fellahin world if it came right down to it. Spoke, for pay, of the great man-made marvels like dams and bridge spans of the West and how those marvels tamed the wilds. Spoke too of peace and war (that tempered by his support for the American communists, and their line which came to depend more and more on the machinations of Uncle Joe Stalin and his Commissariat of Foreign Affairs), and great battles in the Jarama Valley fought to the bitter end by heroic fellow American Abraham Lincoln Battalion International Brigaders in civil war Spain during the time when it counted. Hell, wrote kids’ stuff too just like that Old MacDonald stuff we learned in school.     

The important thing though is that almost everybody covered Woody then, wrote poems and songs about him (Dylan a classic Song to Woody well worth reading and hearing on one of his earliest records), affected his easy ah shucks mannerisms, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way, three chords mostly, recycled the same melody on many songs so it was not that aspect of the song that grabbed you but the sentiment, that he gave to entertain the people, that vast fellahin world mentioned previously (although in the 1960s folk minute Second Coming it was not the downtrodden and afflicted who found solace but the young, mainly college students in big tent cities and sheltered college campuses who were looking for authenticity, for roots).                 

It was not until sometime later that I began to understand the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land for nickels and dimes and for the pure hell of it (although not all of the iterant hobo legend holds up since he had a brother who ran a radio station in California and that platform gave him a very helpful leg up which singing in the Okie/Arkie “from hunger” migrant stoop labor camps never could have done). That laconic style is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that “keep on moving” rolling stone gathers no moss thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath as he went along. Yeah, you could almost see old Tom, beaten down in the dustbowl looking for a new start out in the frontier’s end Pacific, mixing it up with braceros-drivers, straw bosses, railroad “bulls,” in Woody and making quick work of it too.      

Yeah, Woody wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of truth to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers, the forever night-takers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent from New York Harbor to the painted deserts, to the fruitful orchards, all the way to the California line, no further if you did not have the do-re-mi called America and how this land was ours, the whole fellahin bunch of us, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.             

Coming Of Age In World War II-Torn America- With The Film “Summer Of 1942” (1971) In Mind

Coming Of Age In World War II-Torn America- With The Film “Summer Of 1942” (1971) In Mind

By Fritz Taylor

Seth Garth, the once well-known free-lance music critic for many of the big music and specialty publications that have come and gone over the years since he first put pen to paper some forty years ago, including the long gone alternative press where he got his start and first breaks (literally put pen to paper, forget beauties of the world processors then), had been thinking about the old days a lot recently. Had been, having the luxury of semi-retired status, also doing a run through of films via the good graces of Netflix that he had first seen when he was a youngster sitting in the dark every week for the double feature at the old Strand Theater in his hometown of Riverdale, a town a few dozen miles from Boston. Or else films that due to publication commitments that he had not run through when they came out in the 1970s in the days when he was determined to catch the wave of being a music critic and missed many of those films, left them by the wayside.

One night at Jack’s, his watering hole hang-out over in Riverdale that he increasingly frequented on his forays back to his old hometown to see if he could “channel” the past by being physically present on the old sacred soil (although not the Strand long ago turned into a condominium complex), Seth had mentioned to Brad Fox, an old friend from high school days who went through many of the experiences with him, that he had just reviewed a film, Summer of 1942, for Sal Davis the editor of Cinema Now who was looking for copy to fill a space quickly. The film which had been released in 1971 and was about coming of age, coming of sexual age during the early years of World War II. The big point he made to Brad, who had told Seth that he had seen the film when it came out but did not remember the details except that this foxy older woman played by Jennifer O’Neil had “robbed the cradle” and bedded a teenage boy, swore the film could have been about their generation, the generation of 1968 as easily as of 1942.      

Seth had mentioned, before giving Brad the details that he had missed about the film, he had started his review speculating on the fact that each generation goes through its coming of age period somewhat differently. “Coming of age’ in this context meaning after Brad had been unclear about what aspect of the term Seth meant, meaning the beginning the treacherous process of understanding all the sexual changes and commotions once you got to puberty. He said he had taken the one he, and Brad, had known about personally of coming of age in the early 1960s in the age of the “Pill,” of technology-driven space exploration and of some new as yet unspoken and undiscovered social breeze coming to shake up a lot of the old values, to turn the world upside down, from their parents’ generation. He said he tried to contrast that with the one before theirs, the one represented in the film about the coming of age of their parents’ generation. The generation that on one edge, the older edge went through the whole trauma of the Great Depression that brought barren days to the land and of slogging through World War II and at the other edge, the younger edge, missing the trauma of war and its particular stamp on those who survived went on to form the alienated youth who turned “beat,” rode homespun hot rods to perdition, grabbed a La Jolla perfect wave surf board, revved up hellish motorcycles to scare all the squares and come under the immediate spell of jailbreak rock and roll.

The funny thing at least on the basis of a viewing of the film on the question of dealing with sex, sexual knowledge and experiences there was a very familiar (and funny) sense that our parents who, at least in their case and the case of their growing up friends, went through the same hoops-with about the same sense of forlorn misunderstanding. (Of course in talking about parents and their sexual desire both Seth and Brad admitted they would have had a hard time linking up their own respective parents with sexual desire but their own kids if asked would probably say the same thing about them.)                  

Brad mentioned that his memory wasn’t so good of late and that although while they were talking he had been trying to dredge up some more facts about the movie other than the one he had mentioned earlier in the conversation about that sexy older woman cradle robber making Seth laugh that whatever the taboos were about intergenerational sex they both would have given their eye-teeth if some world-wise fox had come across their paths. Seth then went on to give Brad a rough outline of how the film had played out.

He told Brad that his habit of late was after viewing a film, particularly a film that he was being paid good dollars to produce a review on, was to go on-line and look up what somebody had to say about the film on Wikipedia.  Wistfully stated that service was something he wished had been around earlier in his career which would have saved him a lot of time in the library or looking at the archives of various publications of the time and allow him under the constant press of deadlines to be able to write better thought out copy. The story line of the film had been based on the essentially true-to-life experiences of a Hollywood screen-writer Hermie Raucher (played by Gary Grimes), coming of age 15, and his two companions, gregarious Oscy and studious Benji, known as “the Three Terrors,” three virginal teenage boys, who were slumming in the year 1942 at the beautiful but desolate end of an island retreat in the first summer of the American direct involvement in the Pacific and European wars after the Japanese bombings of Pearl Harbor. (The island had been Nantucket Island in the book published after the movie but had been filmed off desolate Mendocino in California). They like a million other virginal boys of that age during war or peacetime were driven each in their own way by the notion of sexual experimentation and conquest and so the chase was on.     

That chase had been on at two levels. The rather pedestrian one of seeking out young girls of their own age to see what shook out of the sexual tree and Hermie’s almost mystical search for “meaningful” love in the person of an older foxy woman, Dorothy, played by Jennifer O’Neil, who had been a young war bride staying on the island after her husband headed off to war. The “own age” part, funny in parts, driven mostly by pal Oscy’s overweening desire to “get laid” with a blonde temptress whom he finally got his wish with one night at the secluded end of the beach with his most experienced partner. On that occasion Hermie was shut out of any desire he had to do the same with her friend who was as bewildered by sex as he was. 

The “older woman” (in our circles she would have been a “cradle-robbing” older woman although she was only 22) notion of love is what drove him the moment he has set eyes on her when the trio was spying on her and her husband in their cozy cottage so he was “saving” himself for her. And after a series of innocent (and some goofy) encounters with Dorothy one night, after she has just found out that her husband had been killed in the war, she bedded him (there is no other honest way to put the matter). That was that though, for when Hermie subsequently went back to the cottage she had left the island and left him a more solemn young man.              

Having given Brad those details Seth mentioned that those were the main lines that got played out but what had made this film more than of ordinary interest to him was the whole lead-up, the whole “foreplay” if you will of the desire of the trio to be doing something about getting out of that dreaded virgin status. Said all the guys were fearful of being tagged with the “homo” tag and didn’t Brad remember how vicious teenage guys could be about the “manhood” question. Before he could go further Brad mentioned how when they were fourteen or fifteen he could not remember when how all the guys from around the corner that they hung on, including Seth used to “fag” bait him because he had refused to kiss Sarah Langley at a “petting” party and had actually run out of the house where the party was being held he had been so embarrassed. At the time he had been sweet on Jenny Price who had been at the party although nobody was aware of that situation. Nothing ever came of that desire and so he had spent some time living down the “fag” tag until he found Sandy Lee in junior year and she took him out of that status since she was something of a fox herself. Although nobody thought anything of calling another guy a “fag” as masculine craziness about sex and sexual identity erupted nobody seriously thought that the guys were gay or anything like that it was just a separation expression. Who knows who at the time really wasn’t interested in girls, wasn’t into “getting in their pants” although Seth speculated that some guys around the block must have since not a few guys lived at home with their mothers and were not seen with women companions.

Nowadays nobody would think twice about it although the usual baiting in school and among the jocks would still go on given the unchanged nature of certain heterosexual young males. Seth mentioned that he could not believe the pressure to “lose your virginity” that all the guys suffered through, although he admitted that it also took him a long time, long after the Christopher Street riots in the Village that began the serious modern gay rights movement to stop his calling gays “fags.” Not until his eyes were opened up when gay musicians and actors whom he interviewed and assumed were straight came out of the “closet.”  

Seth had laughed at the very realistic scenes when Hermie and Oscy picked up a couple of girls at the movie theater (playing Bette Davis and Paul Henried in Dark Voyage, a film that he actually had reviewed when it came out in a film retrospective at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square for the old Avatar alternative newspaper). The scene which showed the guys “feeling up,” or trying to, had been amazing with Oscy grabbing his just met girl almost from minute one and Hermie, missing the mark thinking his girl’s shoulder was her breast. Jesus. Brad laughed but reminded Seth that no way would that kind of thing have happened in their days since everybody, or almost everybody knew the drill at the Strand Theater Saturday matinee double-header or Saturday night date it did not matter. Some ancient tradition, hell, maybe going back to 1942 for all anybody knew about the original of the practice made it clear that those who sat in the orchestra were not going to “make out.” If they were in the balcony then whatever went on, went on from “feeling up” to blow jobs. It was solely a question of asking your date where she wanted to sit. That sealed the deal, and in many cases meant a last date.

Brad’s reminder of the old “policy” reminded Seth of the time that he was cray for Rosalind Green in junior high, they had gotten along well, had been a couple of chatterboxes in English class about books by a bunch of foreign guys to show they were “hip.” One day after a few weeks after all this “foreplay” Seth had finally asked her to a Saturday matinee (the usual strategy for dealing with a girl you were not sure would accept your date by making in the daytime to soften the blow) and she accepted. When after paying for their tickets and hitting the refreshment stand for popcorn and sodas he asked her where she wanted to sit she had answered “silly, of course the balcony why else would I have come with you.” Bingo. Of such events decent youthful memories are made. Brad on the other hand spent many hours in the orchestra section once he latched onto Betsy Binstock (whom he eventually married and was still married to) who was “saving” whatever she was saving for marriage. Okay, too-now if it did have Brad pulling his hair out then.       

Seth quickly mentioned the scene, the awkward scene, where Hermie was helping Dorothy with storing some packages and he got sexually excited, okay, okay, had an erection, by her off-hand helping hand touch since neither man wanted to talk about those nighttime wandering hands that came down when they got an erection.  Nor did he spent much time on the scene where the three friends “discover” what sexual intercourse is all about through the good graces of Benji’s mother’s medical books since that scene rang false in their old neighborhood where sexual information was passed from older brother or sister to younger, a lot of it wrong, very wrong when the girl had to go out of town to see “Aunt Emily” (a street expression that she was pregnant and had to leave town during her term usually not coming back) in other works right out on the streets. Nobody back in 1942, or 1962 expected uptight parents who were assumed to probably not have had sex to give any serious information except some twaddle about the birds and the bees.  And of course the fumbling by the numbers (off-screen) when Oscy has his first sexual experience with the girl he had picked up at the movies. That scene had little over the top and as reticent about talking about sex as parents were guys and gals might give an inkling about what they were doing behind the bushes but a “free show” was off the charts.

The best scene of all though and it really showed the difference between then and now when the younger generations can grab condoms off the shelf at any drugstore or in some places right in schoolhouse restrooms (formerly “lav’s”) and who might not quite appreciate enough the scene where Hermie tried to buy “rubbers” at the local village drugstore from the jaded disbelieving druggist. Brad automatically remembered that scene once Seth recalled it. Remembered too, as he told a disbelieving Seth that night, his own confusion when he was in junior high and had found some condoms in a bottom bathroom drawer in his family house when he was looking for some band-aids. Had asked a kid at school, actually had shown a kid at school one and the kid had said they were like balloons you fill them with water and throw them at somebody. It was not until high school and he had begun his own sexual explorations (obviously not with his ever-loving Betsy) that he found out their real purpose and blushed silently about his parents’ sexual practices. Hence another example of the very general understanding about the young that their own parents never had sex. Whatever else being a youth today may be about in terms of trauma at least there is a hell of a lot of good information hanging out there on the Internet for the young to inquire into without embarrassment. 

Yeah, Seth gave Brad the word as they finished up that last round of drinks and began to head to their respective homes -watch this film and remember your own, either sex, torturous rumbling around coming to terms with sex.     

“To Be Young Was Very Heaven”- Sally Field’s "Hello, My Name Is Doris" (2015)

“To Be Young Was Very Heaven”- Sally Field’s "Hello, My Name Is Doris" (2015) 

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell 

Hello, My Name Is Doris, starring Sally Field, Max Greenfield, 2015  

You know if you watch enough movies and review them as well every once in a while a film will knock you for a loop. Take the film under review Sally Field’s Hello, My Name Is Doris. Now usually when the subject of a film is an older (oops, mature) woman who is involved romantically in any way with a younger man the natural assumption is (or used to be) that he was “her kept man,” “her handy man,” if you  want to invoke a blues expression, her rasping at faded youth, maybe a gigolo, maybe just looking for the main chance or she was on a lark merely “robbing the cradle” (the term used in my old corner boy neighborhood growing up but usually in reverse-guys around the corner once they got out of high school still sniffing around from “jailbait” if you get my drift). This one turns that idea, that 20^th century older woman pursuing a younger man idea in the early 21^st century on its head. Makes the whole thing of all things a romantic comedy-and socially okay.     

Now intergenerational sex (or sexual attraction as here) has always been a thorny issue as mentioned above. Here though mainly through AARP-worthy stalwart actor Sally Field’s extraordinary performance as the Doris of the title makes the idea the stuff of legitimate dreams.  (Field, who for the oldsters reading this will remember that she started as a flying nun in the 1960s, is thus no spring chicken). Takes the new-fashion idea that 60 is the new, let’s say 40, and runs with it. 

Here’s the play. Doris is a holdover from an old-line company which got bought up by some tech-savvy outfit. One day John is introduced to the staff as the new art director and thus starts Doris’ flights of fancy (although she had already “met” him in the elevator coming up). Now Doris is starting out kind of dowdy, definitely not “hip” having lived her pedestrian life caring for her now departed aged mother on Staten Island. And like dear mother had turned into an inveterate pack-rat. But she is smitten by John and come hell or high water she after attending a “power of positive thinking seminar” is ready to rock the boat of her humble and dreary existence and make her play.   

This fantasy though would only be a fantasy without the help of a feisty thirteen year old granddaughter of Doris’s best friend. You automatically know you are in the 21^st century because the way Doris will attempt to hook her man is via that feisty granddaughter’s use of Facebook to find out what makes dear John tick and that otherwise Doris would have been clueless if not for this timely intervention. Problem: a young good-looking upwardly mobile guy in New York City is not going to “friend” some dowdy AARPer so, like a lot of people on the Internet they make up a fake profile for Doris. Bingo it works. 

Works better when she finds out what his musical interests are and forms a live friendship through that association. Problem” John is already “spoken for” by a beautiful younger woman. Problem solved: that younger beauty breaks it off with John when she suspects he is fooling around with some assumed to be young woman on the Internet. Uh, Sally of course. Sally makes her big move but no way is John going for her except in her dreams (and maybe at the end). What makes this one worth watching is how Sally Field takes a tough subject and makes it seem totally normal and without overdoing the sappy pulling for emotion part. Attention all AARPers see this one-younger folks better ask your parents’ permission.   

The Last Thing On My Mind-With Folksinger Tom Paxton’s Signature “Last Thing On My Mind” In Mind

The Last Thing On My Mind-With Folksinger Tom Paxton’s Signature “Last Thing On My Mind” In Mind

By Guest Writer Lester Landry

Eric Long didn’t know exactly how it had happened, didn’t know how the whole blessed thing fell apart after so many years together. Didn’t know that his sweetie, his “sweet pea” his pet name for her, his Mona, was so radically dissatisfied with their lives together the night that she laid out her future plans, future plans that did not include him. Had to take some journey of discovery to find her spiritual being Mona called it. He could never quite figure out what she meant by that since the “spiritual,” that New Age business that she lived by and for and he was leery, very leery of, was totally foreign to the way he operated in the world, the world of hard-boiled radical anti-war politics and taking heed, being guided by in fact, the notion that this was a dangerous world and watch out, watch your back (and she fragile and defenseless against the villains watch her back as well, maybe watched it too much and smothered her ability to breathe on her own). Could never quite talk the same language with her on those issues where to use an expression that she had come to use more frequently to describe their relationship of late they were like “two ships passing in the night,” could never get the idea that she was drowning in some Mona-made sea, that she was unsure of her place in the sun, and worst of all not sure of who she was. For him who knew exactly what he was about, well, maybe not exactly as it turned out but at least for public consumption he appeared to be driven by a set of specific tasks and orientations and so could not follow her on that path she has set for herself.  

Funny the night in question was their “wine date” night, a time they had established a couple of years before as a way to be together and share whatever there was to share, usually day to day stuff and not such a decisive split. That too had been predicated on a prior series of misunderstandings and falling apart that was only staunched for that precious moment by his willingness to join her in couples counselling (That “willingness” subject to his understanding that he was under the gun and that if he had not done as she had asked then that first lowering of the boom would have been the last and they would now have been separated for about two years now.)

Although at first he was as leery about this process as he was about the more outlandish and bizarre New Age therapies he actually had come to as he called it see that this was significantly different from what he had expected and had embraced the process whole-heartedly what he called “being in one hundred per cent” (they had unsuccessfully done the procedure many years before both agreeing then and now that the counsellor was not particularly helpful). The thrust of this new procedure was that it was less driven by trying to figure out what in their mutual troubled childhood pasts had made them both attracted to each other but also too scarred by those experiences to let the past slip away against their love for each other. So the counselling would spent each session looking for “today” ways that they could relate to each other and hence the “wine date” idea. Simple but effective since they previously either had a going out date or they did not really relate to each other in the vast amounts of time over the previous few years when both have effectively retired from the workaday world. Eric found the sweet wines a way to relax (a problem that as we shall find was the crux of what went south in the current lowering of the boom).                

Oh sure Eric as he told his friend Peter a few days later when the initial shock had worn off a bit he and Mona had had their problems over the previous few years but they were supposed to be working on getting closer like with that wine date business. For several years before that they had definitely been drifting apart, had become in his term “roommates” and hers “ships passing in the night” until one day on U.S. 5 just outside of San Diego he had exploded at her in the car telling her they couldn’t keep going on the way they were going, something had to give. The underlying reason for his outburst though was that he had kindled up a relationship with an old high school classmate whom he did not know in school but whom he had met on-line when he was searching for information about his high school class reunion that was coming up. In the back of his mind he was half-way ready to quit the whole thing himself. After that incident it had gotten pretty heavy with that old classmate but when push came to shove, when he was confronted with the thought of total separation and good-bye with his sweet pea he had backed off. The price for that thought, the price that he was willing to pay to stay with Mona was to go into couples counselling in which he gave what he thought, and more importantly she thought, was good faith effort to reconcile their differences, her grievances against him. That was the source of the wine date idea provided by the counsellor as way they were to make connections in a quiet and cozy environment. Eric thought when Mona lowered the boom on him this time that a lot of what was driving her as much as her need to find her own path in life was deep and unspoken continued resentment over that “affair” with the old classmate.   

The couples counselling went on for about a year until around the time they had gone to Paris, a place that she had never been to but had desired to go to since she was a young girl like a lot of romantic young girls sniffing the wonders of that town. They had had a great time there. But about a week after they came back Laura lowered the boom on him the first time. She wanted out under similar conditions to the latest episode. The result of letting him stay was for him to go into individual counselling which he agreed to do. He committed himself to a year in her presence but the year had not been up before this fatal night. That separation had been the last thing on his mind. Once he thought about Mona and his loss despite his good intentions Eric  couldn’t finish his story to Peter that night and maybe ever ….      

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –Paul Nash

As The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –Paul Nash 

By Seth Garth

A few years ago, starting in August 2014 the 100^th anniversary of what would become World War I, I started a series about the cultural effects, some of them anyway, of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets, writers and other cultural figures. Those culturati left behind, those who survived the shellings, the trenches, the diseases, and what was then called “shell shock,” now more commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is duly recognized, and compensated for at least in the United States by the Veterans Administration in proven cases reacted in many different ways. Mainly, the best of them, like the ordinary dog soldiers could not go back to the same old, same old, could not revive the certitudes of the pre-war Western world with it distorted sense of decorum and went to what even today seem quirky with moderns like Dada, Minimalism, the literary sparseness of Hemingway, and so on. I had my say there in a general sense but now as we are only a few months away from the 100^th anniversary of, mercifully, the armistice which effectively ended that bloodbath I want to do a retrospective of creative artistic works by those who survived the war and how those war visions got translated into their works with some commentary if the spirit moves me but this is their show-no question they earned a retrospective.