For Bob Dylan *The Long Ago It Seems “Age Of Obama” Talkin’ Blues-

Click On Title To Link To Erato (Greek Muse Of Poetry, although she may be blushing) Wikipedia entry.

The “Age Of Obama” Talkin’ Blues

I don’t know if the music of this message comes out the same on the page as the music in my head as I write it but I send my thanks to Mr. Woody Guthrie who made an art form out of the talking blues, and to Mr. Bob Dylan for continuing the tradition.


A Talkin’ Blues, Of Sorts

I’ve got the blues, and I’ve got ‘em bad.
I’m out here ramblin’, scamblin’ and far from home.
Not from the wood and brick shelter that has never failed to provide some sustenance in good weathers, or bad.
Nah, not that home.
No, I’m talking about being far from my American home that I have long loved.
And, at times, had to hate.
The home that I have fought to change since my youth.
To fight for that social utopia that always seemed to be just over the next mountain.
The one that our forebears long ago fought to create by a revolution and preserve by civil war.
And that we now need to update.
Yes, that one.
Today, though, I feel like an exile on Main Street.
And I’m starting to feel a hating spell coming on.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.

Strange, not that long ago I thought I smelled a sweet, fresh wind drifting across the political oceans.
Hell, it seems like just yesterday that it cooled my brow after some forty or so years of being out in the wilderness condition.
That was sure a strong little breeze that I had not felt since my youth back in the days of the fight for “new frontiers” and the times of “seeking newer worlds”.
I thought, at last, I was finished with my exile on Main Street.
But, damn.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.

Back then I never got tired of saying, to all who would listen, that this breeze that went by the name of “Hurricane Obama”.
It swamped all before it and although I knew it was not the breeze that would lift all boats it was the one that would bring the next breeze that would.
I kept my own heart still easily enough because I knew that this was not, after all, my breeze.
But the people I wanted to reach, the ones that will create that social utopia that I have longed dreamed of, did have their hearts fluttering.
And, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, still like what they see in Washington.
As for me though,
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.


That was then and this is now.
Now we are saddled with Obama- sized wars, “good wars” we are told in the Af-Pak (or is it Pak-Af?) theater where more money, materials and manpower are going down the drain.
I need hardly mention the “bad war” in Iraq.
To even speak of that little mess in this Age is so very passé among those in the know.
It is no longer mentioned in polite society.
Yet again we are being asked to pay the piper for the errant dreams of the American imperium.
And a compliant, complaisant so-called anti-war Congress is ready to grease the skids.
When the right answer, just like when a sated kid asks for more, is to “just say no”.
I am ready to scream to high heaven against these war budgets.
No, there is now no question now.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.

And there is more smoke and mirrors.
This regime is fully committed, and gladly, to putting major triage on the moribund capitalist system that got us into this current mess in the first place.
We are told that somehow if capitalism fails the very low bar stress tests imposed on it then all of us will go to hell in a hand basket.
I say, rather, if your system failed then move on over and give the rest of us a chance to breathe. Let our dreams get an airing.
But the Commander-in- Chief of the American enterprise and his cronies don’t get it.
And so I need not wonder about the why.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.

Day by day it becomes clearer that the people in charge are clueless about what to really do on the pressing needs of the day.
Healthcare proposals that will not produce health.
Education that does not educate.
Jobs that are not jobs but makeshift.
Hopes tied in ribbons that turn out be merely press releases.
And the elephant in the room.
Black faces in high places or not,
Blacks and Latinos are still at the back of the bus.
This is the age of the technocrat, the bureaucrat and the chattering class.
Tomorrow they say.
After this, that or the other thing is done, they say.
And then tomorrow, tomorrow.
I may be alone today confronted with this agenda.
I am adrift in the Age of Obama.

Know this though:
the blow back is coming.
Substance will out over style.
Here is the real deal.
A man like Malcolm X spoke more “truth to power” in one day than Obama ever did in his whole sorry life.
I am embarrassed to even mention their names on the same page.
Yet there is hope.
I see some small signs even now.
People are starting to wake up, just a little, to their still empty wallets,
to their very much here today-gone tomorrow jobs,
to their constant struggle to keep a roof, any roof, over their heads and
… to question the why of their shattered dreams.
If I was wrong to think that last year’s breeze was the breeze of my youth, damn, I do not want what is happening now to be the breeze of my old age.
Hell, I am ready to fight for that next new breeze right now.
Then I will not be adrift in the Age of Obama.

Today, though, I’ve got the blues, and I’ve got ‘em bad. 

Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon

By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the dearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7^th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.

Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles  I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)

In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.         

The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.

I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.

For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.  

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.         

For Bob Dylan -Bringing It All Back Home, Indeed- Bob Dylan’s Later Work -"Time Out Of Mind"

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip (Actually A Very Interesting Series Of Still Photos) Of Bob Dylan Doing "Highlands".

CD Review

Time Out Of Mind, Bob Dylan, Columbia Records, 1997

The first paragraph of this review has been used to review other later Bob Dylan CDs.

Okay, okay I have gone on and one over the past year or so about the influence of Bob Dylan’s music (and lyrics) on me, and on my generation, the Generation of ’68. But, please, don’t blame me. Blame Bob. After all he could very easily have gone into retirement and enjoyed the fallout from his youthful fame and impressed one and all at his local AARP chapter. But, no, he had to go out on the road continuously, seemingly forever, keeping his name and music front and center. Moreover, the son of a gun has done more reinventions of himself than one could shake a stick at (folk troubadour, symbolic poet in the manner of Rimbaud and Verlaine, heavy metal rocker, blues man, etc.) So, WE are left with forty or so years of work to go through to try to sort it out. In short, can I (or anyone else) help it if he is restless and acts, well, ….like a rolling stone?

All of this is by way of introduction to the latest group of CDs from the vaults of one Bob Dylan’s vast repertoire of musical interests. I note that there is a touch of going back, way back, and a life times’ summing up driving the music. I also note the increased emphasis on the music that influenced him early on in his rise to fame and many tips of the hat to the so-called American Songbook that he seemingly knows by heart. While we are all familiar with the various periodizations of the Dylan musical trajectory- folk troubadour a la Woody Guthrie, hard rockster, semi-Christian evangelical, old vaudeville showman and sentimental (for him) songster it is good to see him return ever more to his beginnings. “Bringing It All Back Home”, “Blonde On Blonde” and “Blood On The Tracks” will probably be his monuments in the folk/rock/pop pantheons but some of the late work, especially some of the covers of the early blues men like Skip James and Blind Willie McTell will endure as well.

Stick outs here include; "Love Sick', a pathos-filled (excuse the expression) homage to a life time of 'gone wrong' love; the ode to aging children "Trying To Get To Heaven": and, the "Desolation Row" long, highly poetic "Highlands". This is a darkly beautiful aging Dylan album. So what else is new, right?

Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon

By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the dearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7^th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.

Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles  I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)

In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.         

The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.

I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.

For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.  

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.         

When Women Played Rock And Roll For Keeps- The Music Of Bonnie Raiit

When Women Played Rock And Roll For Keeps- The Music Of Bonnie Raiit

[The world of on-line editors and named bloggers is actually rather small when you consider what cyberspace can allow the average ingenious citizen to do. I have been highlighting some of the conversations between long-time music critic Seth Garth and some of his growing up in Riverdale (that is in Massachusetts west of Boston) friends as he/they discuss a various older CDs which reflect a certain period in their then youth lives growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Part of this latest series of sketches by me is based on information that Seth has provided comes under the sign of the Summer of Love, 1967 out on the West Coast, especially in the San Francisco and Bay area.      

I am a bit too young by about a decade to have had anything but a nodding acquaintance with the Summer of Love experience. That era’s music did not form the basis for my musical interests although I heard it around the house from older siblings but rather the music of the 1970s which when I get a little bored with book reviews or general cultural pieces I write about for various publications including this one I write some music reviews. Knowing that let me take a step back so that you will understand why I made that statement about the review world is really a small place.

As I said earlier I was a little too young to appreciate the music of the Summer of Love first hand but my eldest brother Alex was not. Had in fact gone out to the West Coast from our growing up neighborhood the Acre section of North Adamsville that summer along with a bunch of other guys that he had hung around with since highs school. He wound up staying in that area, delving into every imaginable cultural experience from drugs to sex to music, for a couple of years before heading back to his big career expectations-the law, being a lawyer. The original idea to head west that summer was not his but that of his closest friend, the late Peter Paul Markin forever known in town and by me as the Scribe (how he got that is a long story and not germane to the Seth sage). The Scribe had dropped out of college in Boston earlier in 1967 when he sensed that what Alex said he had been yakking about weekly for years that a “new breeze,” his, the Scribe’s term, was going to take youth nation (and maybe the whole nation) by a storm and headed west. A couple of months later he came back and dragged Alex and about six others back west with him. And the rest is history.             

I mean that “rest is history” part literally since earlier this year (2017) Alex, now for many years a big high-priced lawyer after sowing his wild oats and get “smartened up” as he called it once the bloom of the counter-culture they were trying to create faded had gone to a business conference out in San Francisco and while there had seen on a passing bus an advertisement for something called the Summer of Love Experience at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. He flipped out, maybe some latent recoil from those long ago drugs, and spend one “hooky” afternoon mesmerized by the exhibit of poster art, hippie clothing, photographs and music. That was not all though. When he got back to Boston he contacted all the old neighborhood guys still standing who had gone out there in 1967 to put a small memoir book together. One night they all agreed to do the project, do the project in honor of the late Scribe who had pushed them out there in some cases kicking and screaming (not Alex at the time). That is when Alex, knowing that I have had plenty of experience doing such projects contacted me to edit and get the thing published. Which I did without too much trouble.    

The publication and distribution of that book while not extensive got around to plenty of people who were involved in the Summer of Love, or who knew the Scribe. And that is where Seth Garth comes in. While he was not part of the Summer of Love experience he did drift out west after college to break with his Riverdale growing up home in the early 1970s. As a writer he looked for work among the various alternative presses out there and wound up working first as a free-lancer and then as staff as a music critic for the now long defunct The Eye which operated out of Oakland then. Guess who also was working as a free-lancer there as well after he got out of the Army. Yes, the Scribe who was doing a series of articles on guys like him who had come back from Vietnam and couldn’t relate to the “real world” and had established what amounted to alternative communities along the railroad tracks and under the bridges of Southern California. So yeah it is a small world in the writing for money racket. Here is what Seth has to say right now. Zack James]     

CD Review

The Best Of Bonnie Raiit

By Zack James

Seth Garth and Jack Callahan who had been friends since highs school down in Riverdale after they returned from a whirlwind few months on the road on a magical mystery tour yellow brick road merry pranksters adventure out in California during the Summer of Love, 1967, were sitting in Jack’s, the local hang-out bar in Cambridge where the drinks were cheap and the conversation interesting, when a young woman stepped up to the small stage preparing to sing. Jack mentioned to Seth that she looked familiar, that flaming red hair a giveaway, and asked him if he could place the face. Seth who was beginning his long career as a music critic just then for The Eye whom he had contracted with when he was out in California blurted out that didn’t Jack remember seeing her, seeing Bonnie Raitt, on the Boston Common before they had taken off for California where she blew away the crowd with a cover of Down Highway 61. Jack laughed and said that he was so stoned that night that he wasn’t sure who he had heard (Seth reminding him that it had been an afternoon concert).                    

Of course Seth, as a budding music critic, expecting to ride the wave from folk to folk rock to what was now being called “acid” rock with all the strobe lights and dipping into the drug bag to bring out the right mood had done some basic research on Bonnie as an up and coming star who was riding her own wave of the new trend in having female singers lead the bands they were in. Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Amy Kline, Nicky Adams and then her. He had found out that Bonnie had dropped out of Radcliffe a little earlier in order to pursue her musical career as a result of the success of the Boston Common concert. He also had found out that her budding virtuosity with the slide guitar had come from sitting at the feet of country blues legend Mississippi Fred McDowell. So she had a pedigree. Still she a was only starting out and grateful that Jack’s had allowed her up on the stage a couple of years earlier where she had begun to hone her skills both at presenting a professional musical veneer and connecting with the audience. So the night Seth and Jack were sitting there at the bar drinking and talking about everything under the sun Bonnie was doing “pay back.” Performing for the old crowd, performing for Jack. 

She started her first set with Hound Dog Taylor’s The Sky Is Crying and McDowell’s Highway 61 and the rest would be history. A history which is well documented in this compilation from those classics to Fairport Convention member Richard Thompson’s The Dimming of the Day.            

*On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Labor Party In The United States- A 1932 Article

Click on title to link to a 1932 article by Leon Trotsky about his early thoughts on the Labor Party question in the United States. He also had a more extensive discussion in 1938 down in Mexico with American Socialist Workers Party leaders about the question which can be found on the other blog entry for this date or by Googling the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for 1938.

The Good Heist-With “The Bank Job” (2008) In Mind

The Good Heist-With “The Bank Job” (2008) In Mind

DVD Review

By Zack James

The Bank Job, starring Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, 2008

Recently I did a short review of the film adaptation of writer con-artist’s Clifford Irving’s The Hoax about his take (remember he was a con artist and so his fast-talking-writing should be taken for what it is worth) on his con of a major publishing company over an “autobiography” of the reclusive eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes back in the early 1970s and mentioned that everybody loves a con. Everybody except the person con of course. That notion can be extended, was extended in my old working-class growing up Acre section of North Adamsville, to include high profile bank robberies. In those days the big deal was the then never solved great Brink armored car robbery of the early 1950s where it turned out one of the participants had lived in the neighborhood at one time. So when Pete Markin tagged me to do a short piece on  the film under review The Bank Job about an equally famous bank robbery in London in the early 1970 I was all in.     

Usually the genesis of a bank robbery (aside from the famous bank robber Willie Sutton’s response to the question of why he robbed banks for a living- because that was where the money was) is to grab some quick dough and split. Average stuff. In this film, based on a true story, although it is hard to separate fact from fiction according to the historical record, the motives are a little bit trickier. Oh sure the guys who are touched for the job have that motivation-have that wanting habits hunger but this one has a catch to it. See the robbery is just supposed to be a front for getting some very juicy photographs of a member of the royal family, a royal princess acting the slut. (According to my sources that part is make-believe courtesy of the thriller-crazed producers and not a bad motive at that if you hold any republican sympathies. In any case given the batch of whores, whore-mongers, homos and lesbians when that was not cool, dope fiends, junkies, sex addicts, lunatics, mad men, philanders and the like who have made up the royal family and nobility that would not be so far-fetched. And those are from the good side of the families the others’ depravity starts from there.) Maybe nowadays with 24/7/365 celebrity exposure that would be nothing for royals to bother with but back then it was enough to get certain secretive governmental agencies on the move to cover the damn thing up-to bury it deep. That was the story then anyway make of it what you will.

The whole play came about because one neighborhood working class woman, Martine, played by Saffron Burrows, who took a turn at modeling had been stopped with a hell-broth of drugs in her suitcase at the airport.  So she needed to get out from under any way she could since female prison life would quickly turn her into somebody’s honey and she would not have looked good in prison garb anyway. Fortunately she had a lover-boyfriend from MI5 who was in need of a favor. Seems that a sneaky fiery black nationalist leader, Michael X, had the vaunted photographs in question in a safety deposit box for further use-blackmail, trade for freedom, you know the rest. Also in need of a favor was Terry, played by Jason Statham, a hard-pressed auto body shop owner and small time hood. The man, men, he needed a few confederates for this caper, and the moment meet. Martine cons Terry into this fantastical notion of robbing a bank (naturally the Baker Street branch bank where the safety deposit box is located) to get out from under-to get him and his family on easy street. At first he balks but then facing a blank wall future he bites.        

In a funny way the bank job is actually not only clever planned but despite a couple of glitches and close-calls a relatively easy job done by creating a tunnel from an adjoining shop to the vaults. Beautiful. Then all hell breaks loose once the job is done and the photographs secured.  See everybody and there aunt and uncle has something to hide from all that hidden cash and jewels to a listing of all the crooked cops on a local mobsters pay-roll. Between the governmental agents, the mobsters, the cops and who knows who else Terry and his comrades are led a merry chase. But in the end the resourceful Terry works his way out of danger and is allowed to keep the ill-gotten goods and seek a new life somewhere out of fetid London. Martine blows town with her cut. The royals dodge yet another scandal and the mobster and the crooked cops take a fall, a hard fall. But the hard criminal life is not for everybody and not everybody made the grade. One gang member got wasted for not giving up his comrades. That’s the way it is down on the edge. Whatever its closeness to what really happened before, during and after this caper on Baker Street (Sherlock Holmes’ street-right) the movie was well-done           

For Bob Dylan *One More For The Aficionados- The Soundtrack From "No Direction Home"

Click On Title To Link To YouTube"s Film Clip Of Bob Dylan Performing The Classic Symbolist Effort "Desolation Row".

One More For The Aficionados

Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series, Volume 7 (2CD set), soundtrack to “No Direction Home”, Bob Dylan and others, Columbia Records, 2005.

I have spilled no little ink on the question of the value of various bootleg products, genuine basement tapes, fake basement tapes, etc. that have come out of over the years detailing the career of the premier folk troubadour of his times, Bob Dylan. The core of my argument is that if you have limited cash resources, time or energy (or, heaven forbid, aren't all that into him) then getting copies of his earlier albums rather than some of the more esoteric compilations is the way to go. That said, I recently touted the virtues of Volumes 1-3 (in one set) of this bootleg series for those with a little extra money to spend. While the current bootleg volume, the soundtrack to "No Direction Home", is certainly historically important it does not measure up in importance to the previously mentioned set. If you have to make a choice here get the DVD rather than the CD.

Of course the problem with the DVD is that, as with most documentaries the music is incidental so that while you get a feel for the music of early Dylan, only occasionally do you get to see a clip that runs through the whole song. Thus, if the DVD whets your appetite to hear more then you need to decide on getting the early albums or this CD. So it will really depend on whether you are an aficionado or not. However, for those who already have the early albums this is a pleasant addition to the collection. Plenty of alternate versions of classics like "Desolation Row", "Visions Of Johanna", "Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues", "Masters Of War", and some early things that round out the CD and DVD like an early tribute to Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and a very early Dylan song "I Got Troubles". What is not to like, right?

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Copyright ©1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

Blowin' In The Wind

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

How many years can a mountain exist
Before it's washed to the sea?
Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Copyright ©1962; renewed 1990 Special Rider Music


Like A Rolling Stone

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it
You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Copyright ©1965; renewed 1993 Special Rider Music

CHIMES OF FREEDOM

Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1964 Warner Bros. Inc
Renewed 1992 Special Rider Music

Far between sundown's finish an' midnight's broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An' for each an' ev'ry underdog soldier in the night
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

In the city's melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden while the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin' rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an' forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burnin' constantly at stake
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind
An' the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an' blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an' cheated by pursuit
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Even though a cloud's white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An' the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An' for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Starry-eyed an' laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an' we watched with one last look
Spellbound an' swallowed 'til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse
An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

MASTERS OF WAR

Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1963 Warner Bros. Inc
Renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon

By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the dearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7^th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.

Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles  I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)

In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.         

The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.

I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.

For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.  

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.         

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Yemen is Massachusetts’ war. Rally to protest Raytheon’s support for war crimes in Yemen and the U.S.-Saudi push for war with Iran Tuesday, October 16 @ 5pm – 6pm Raytheon BBN Technologies Building Corner of Concord Ave and Moulton Street, Cambridge

Yemen is Massachusetts’ war.

Rally to protest Raytheon’s support for war crimes in Yemen

and the U.S.-Saudi push for war with Iran

Tuesday, October 16 @ 5pm – 6pm

Raytheon BBN Technologies Building

Corner of Concord Ave and Moulton Street, Cambridge

(On the right as you head out Concord ave. from the Fresh Pond Circle toward Belmont. Directly across from the entrance to the Neville Nursing Home. The address is 10 Moulton St. Parking is available a block down Moulton St. on the right.  There is a wide sidewalk where we can stand.)

Raytheon (with plants in Waltham, Cambridge and other Mass. locations) provides Saudi Arabia with the bombs and technology that are a major cause of thousands of deaths and the physical destruction responsible for:

• A raging cholera epidemic with 2,100 dead of cholera so far and 900,000 infected
• Millions are on the edge of war-caused famine - including 400,000 children.
• Terror from the sky caused by 16,749 air raids so far – 15 every day (sources: Doctors without borders; Save the Children; World Health Org; OCHA; UNICEF)

Raytheon’s weapons, technology and its 50 year relationship with the brutal Saudi regime have devastated the people of Yemen.

Meanwhile Raytheon is pressuring the U.S. government to let is sell even more of its bombs to Saudi Arabia as its profits skyrocket. (Boston Globe 6/14/18)

As the host to this behemoth of the military industrial complex, Massachusetts is the technology hub for Saudi Arabia’s war crimes against people who have done us no harm.

For information contact the Raytheon Campaign (Veterans for Peace, Mass. Peace Action, Friends Meeting at Cambridge, American Friends Service Committee): 617-354-2169 or 617-623-5288

Right here in Massachusetts, Raytheon goes to war together with Saudi Arabia – to create the “greatest human rights crisis in the world today” in Yemen

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Everybody Loves A Con Man (Or Woman)-With Richard Gere’s “The Hoax” In Mind

Everybody Loves A Con Man (Or Woman)-With Richard Gere’s “The Hoax” In Mind  

DVD Review

By Book Critic Zack James

The Hoax, starring Richard Gere

Everybody loves a con man (or at the headline states con woman as well although there tend to be fewer of them in the deep rich history of this art form). Everybody that is except the guy (or gal) being conned. That egg on the face person most definitely does not love a con although he or she gets what they deserve in my book. I have seen some beautiful work in my time. The time when Eddie Murray took some hungry greedy stockbroker for a cool million when a million was something on non-existent stock, nada. Or that time when Conrad Vedt a seemingly mild mannered non-entity took the local syndicate for five mil and got away with it (although he did spent some serious time looking over his shoulder before the coast was clear). The big one though at least the one I was close to, knew some of the players, was when Jack Kiley took down a couple of high-end Las Vegas gamblers for something like ten million all by himself. The stuff of legends. And that brings us to the film under review the rough film adaptation of writer Clifford Irving’s book about his big time literary scam of the so-called billionaire when a billion was serious money Howard Hughes “autobiography” The Hoax. (Although the thought occurs to me why would you believe what a con artist has written about himself-oh well.)  

Clifford Irving, played by Richard Gere, understood the first rule of the con-go big or don’t go at all. It is not worth the time or energy to do the con for chicken feed although I have known back in the old Acre section of my growing up town North Adamsville guys to do cons for chicken feed. A serious con like the one Irving tried to pull for a million bucks and maybe more if things had worked out on a well-known if reclusive public figure working the literary scam which meant bucking a high-end publishing company also meant possible jail time if the thing went south on him. Which in the end as everybody now knows it did dragging his wife and his closest collaborator down with him in the gutter-into jail time.       

       

Still you have to like the brass of the guy taking a shot at immortality in the con artist pantheon-a place not for the faint-hearted. First he had to get a big enough target for his appetites which seemed to narrow down to Howard Hughes for no better reason than he saw his name on a magazine cover and figured he could use that notorious reclusiveness of Hughes’ to work his magic. Of course the second rule of the con is to talk fast on your feet and be plausible which Irving did with relish starting with his agent and working up the food chain to the big-time publishing company executives. The dicey part or one of the dicey parts was that the potential publishers advised by their platoon of lawyers were going to be looking for some proof and a lot of the film dealt with working around that problem. But see the third rule of the con or maybe it really is the first rule once you get a bead on human nature as it has evolved over the last few millennia is to understand how to play to a  little greed or some vanity advantage over your competitors. Bingo here. 

The other dicey part which in the end did Irving and his compadres in was the blow-back from the super security conscious Hughes empire.  Irving almost had it made but just couldn’t work out that last kink about how to grab the dough-the fatal check-which needed to be cashed with Hughes’ name on it. Tough break. Yeah, everybody loves a con. Conrad Vedt, Jack Riley and Eddie Murray would have been proud.   

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