This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
The Answer My Friend Id
Blowing (No Clipped “G”) In The Wind-The Influence Of Bob Dylan’s “The Times
They Are A-Changin’” On The “Generation of’68”-The Best Part Of That Cohort
Link to NPR Morning Edition 'The Times They Are A-Changin" Still Speaks To Our Changing Times https://www.npr.org/2018/09/24/650548856/american-anthem-the-times-they-are-a-changin
By Seth Garth
No question this
publication both in its former hard copy editions and now more so in the
on-line editions as the, ouch, 50th anniversary of many signature
events for the “Generation of ‘68” have come and gone that the whole period of
the 1950s and 1960s had gotten a full airing. Has been dissected, deflected,
inspected, reflected and even rejected beyond compare. That is not to say that
this trend won’t continue if for no other reason that the demographics and
actual readership response indicate that people still have a desire to not
forget their pasts, their youth.
(Under the new site manager
Greg Green, despite what I consider all good sense having worked under taskmaster
Allan Jackson, we are encouraged to give this blessed readership some inside
dope, no, no that kind, about how things are run these days in an on-line
publication. With that okay in mind there was a huge controversy that put the
last sentence in the above paragraph in some perspective recently when Greg for
whatever ill-begotten reason thought that he would try to draw in younger
audiences by catering to their predilections-for comic book character movies,
video games, graphic novels and trendy music and got nothing but serious
blow-back from those who have supported this publication financially and
otherwise both in hard copy times and now on-line. What that means as the target
demographic fades is another question and maybe one for a future generation who
might take over the operation. Or perhaps like many operations this one will
not outlast its creators- and their purposes.)
Today’s 1960s question, a
question that I have asked over the years and so I drew the assignment to
address the issue-who was the voice of the 1960s. Who or what. Was it the
lunchroom sit-inners and Freedom Riders, what it the hippies, was it SDS, the
various Weather configurations, acid, rock, folk rock, folk, Tom Hayden, Jane
Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Grace Slick, hell the Three Js-Joplin, Jimi, Jim as in Morrison
and the like. Or maybe it was a mood, a mood of disenchantment about a world
that seemed out of our control, which seemed to be running without any input
from us, without us even being asked. My candidate, and not my only candidate
but a recent NPR Morning Edition
segment brought the question to mind (see above link), is a song, a song
created by Bob Dylan in the early 1960s which was really a clarion call to
action on our part, or the best part of our generation-The Times They Are A-Changin’.
I am not sure if Bob Dylan
started out with some oversized desire to be the “voice” of his generation. He
certainly blew the whole thing off later after his motorcycle accident and
still later when he became a recluse even if he did 200 shows a year, maybe
sullen introvert is better, actually maybe his own press agent giving out
dribbles is even better but that song, that “anthem” sticks in memory as a
decisive summing up of what I was feeling at the time. (And apparently has
found resonance with a new generation of activists via the March for Our Lives
movement and other youth-driven movements.) As a kid I was antsy to do
something, especially once I saw graphic footage on commercial television of
young black kids being water-hosed, beaten and bitten by dogs down in the South
simply for looking for some rough justice in this wicked old world. Those
images, and those of the brave lunch-room sitters and Freedom bus riders were
stark and compelling. They and my disquiet over nuclear bombs which were a lot
scarier then when there were serious confrontations which put them in play and
concern that what bothered me about having no say, about things not being
addressed galvanized me.
The song “spoke to me” as
it might not have earlier or later. It had the hopeful ring of a promise of a
newer world. That didn’t happen or happen in ways that would have helped the
mass of humanity but for that moment I flipped out every time I heard it played
on the radio or on my old vinyl records record-player. Other songs, events,
moods, later would overtake this song’s sentiment but I was there at the
creation. Remember that, please.
Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx-From The Archives- The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx
Workers Vanguard No. 1134
18 May 2018
TROTSKY
LENIN
The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx
(Quote of the Week)
May 5 marked the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. The excerpts below are taken from the beginning and conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, a seminal work that Marx co-wrote with his lifelong comrade, Friedrich Engels.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes....
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat....
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers....
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
On Thursday, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's former lawyer, pleaded guilty in a Washington, D.C., court to lying to Congress about Trump's interests in Russia.1 Cohen admitted that his lies were intended to minimize links between Moscow and Trump.2 Trump reportedly planned to give a $50 million Moscow penthouse to none other than Vladimir Putin himself, a claim that Trump seemed to substantiate in tweets Friday morning, when he admitted to working on the Moscow project.3,4
And now, as Trump and his lapdog Rudy Giuliani escalate their attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation, it's being reported that it's Trump that is "Individual 1" in Mueller's recent court filings.5The Mueller investigation isn't just drawing in all of the cronies around Trump and his relatives, but focusing on the activities that Trump was engaged in directly. It raises the stakes—and as Trump feels more and more threatened, he might act with audacious recklessness to derail this investigation.
Will you chip in $3 a week to help MoveOn mobilize the grassroots pressure we need to protect the Mueller investigation? (MoveOn will bill your weekly donation once a month starting today. You can modify or cancel your weekly donation at any time.)
For more details on the Trump threat to the rule of law, see my message from earlier this week, below.
Dear fellow MoveOn member,
We're living through a slow-motion Saturday Night Massacre.
Jeff Sessions recused himself from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, so Donald Trump fired him.
Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was next in line to replace Sessions, but Trump didn't think he'd shut down the Mueller investigation, either.
So, instead, Trump installed as acting attorney general an unqualified lackey named Matt Whitaker, who has already said on CNN how he would go about ending the Mueller investigation—by starving it of funds. Whitaker is well-known in the Justice Department as a "White House spy," who will feed information about the investigation directly to Trump.6 (Let's be clear: Not only is Whitaker a Trump loyalist opposed to the probe, he also has his own record of shady business dealings and a history of attacking the values of non-Christian Americans.)
Congress must act now to protect the rule of law by passing bipartisan legislation to protect the Mueller investigation during the lame-duck session of Congress. And then, when Democrats take over the House in January, they need to begin oversight hearings immediately.
Will you chip in $3 a week to help MoveOn mobilize the grassroots pressure we need to stop Whitaker and protect Mueller?
Putting a stooge like Whitaker in charge of the Justice Department is shocking even by Trump standards. Whitaker tweeted out an article referring to the Mueller investigation as a "lynch mob."7 He's linked to a firm that scammed veterans out of their life savings.8 And the Justice Department won't even release his financial disclosure forms.9
But now that Trump has installed his lackey as acting attorney general, the next step is obvious: Trump will either order Whitaker to fire Mueller or simply allow Whitaker to implement his own plan of defunding the Mueller probe.
Either way, the very integrity of our democracy and rule of law are at stake.
That's why the American people are rising up against this grotesque abuse of power. MoveOn has a sharp campaign plan to keep the pressure on, including:
A media-grabbing "Guilty Pleas-ures" ice cream truck handing out free ice cream, with flavors like "Cocoa Conspirator" and "IndictMint Chip," and sharing real facts about the impact of the Russia probe. Everywhere it goes, the ice cream truck gets great press, and MoveOn has decided to keep it going, introducing new flavors like "Michael Waffle Cone Lied to Congress," and a new single-scoop "Individual 1" option.
Organizing extended protests in Washington, D.C. and around the country, following up on the more than 1,000 events that MoveOn members pulled off in the days after the Sessions firing.
Flooding Congress with calls to make sure Republicans know that they will be held accountable for Trump's abuses and to remind Democrats that their constituents expect them to fight.
Producing a raft of new shareable videos to explain in clear terms that people can understand what's at stake and why Trump's actions are so dangerous.
So much of this resistance is tied to the work that MoveOn members have been fueling for the past two years—and relies on MoveOn's continued investment, leadership, and mobilization.
MoveOn has proven time and again that its tactics are effective, but after a knock-down, drag-out midterm election, MoveOn needs our help to sustain this long-term fight.
Can you chip in $3 a week to help build and sustain the next stage of MoveOn's grassroots resistance?
Legal experts from both political parties say that Whitaker's appointment is illegal, and Democrats have filed a lawsuit to stop it.10 Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has threatened to add the Mueller protection bill to must-pass spending legislation to prevent a government shutdown.11
The reason that Democrats in Congress are standing strong is because they've heard our voices. Within hours of Trump firing Sessions, MoveOn members organized more than 1,000 rallies all over the country, which were attended by more than 100,000 people.
MoveOn members are ready to hit the streets again—and, in the meantime, have been hitting the phones, protesting at local events, getting TV coverage, and flooding social media every step of the way to defend the investigation and demand real accountability for Trump and the truth about Russia. It's now just as critical that MoveOn help protect Mueller's work, push Democrats in the House to use every tool at their disposal to hold Trump accountable, and force Whitaker to recuse—or, even better, have him removed from his unconstitutionally-appointed position.
We must keep up the pressure. This is perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy and rule of law that we've seen in a generation, and we need to demand that Republicans join Democrats in passing legislation to protect the Mueller investigation during the lame-duck session of Congress, and then make sure that Democrats begin investigations when they take over the House in January.
Will you chip in $3 a week so that MoveOn can answer this constitutional crisis with the intensity of public outrage that this moment demands?
Contributions to MoveOn.org Civic Action are not tax deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. This email was sent to Alfred Johnson on December 2nd, 2018. To change your email address or update your contact info, click here. To remove yourself from this list, click here.
In 1934, the labor movement in the United States was at a low ebb; the Knights of Labor and Industrial Workers of the World had been smashed earlier in the century, and the CIO had yet to make an appearance. But that year, four major strikes occurred that had an impact on the labor movement for years to come:
*
The Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio
*
The San Francisco general strike
*
The Minneapolis Teamsters strike
*
The textile workers strike
We'll review the history of these four strikes and discuss the lessons they may hold for today's labor movement.
Sponsored by Boston Labor Solidarity Committee - bostonlsc.wordpress.com/contact
In Honor Of The 150th
Anniversary Of The Publication Of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868)-A
Book Review
Book Review
By Alden Riley
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott,
Roberts Brothers, 1868
I thought things were supposed to
change around here with the changing of the guard, otherwise known at least
among the younger writers as the purge and exile of the previous site manager
Allan Jackson and his replacement by Greg Green after a bitter internal fight
with no holds barred and no prisoners taken in the fall of 2017. The idea was
to let the younger writers spread their wings, learn to fly and not do dreary
pieces like the 24/7/365 1960s nostalgia hippie revival regime under
Jackson.And for a while there was a
breath of fresh air around the place, around the formerly hostile water cooler
which drives the social life of many operations and this one is no exception.
Then Greg, I think to show he was his own boss, his own operator came up with
the silly, silly even to Will Bradley who originally presented idea before thinking
better of it, that to appeal to a younger, eventually non-existent audience,
that the publication would feature film reviews of Marvel/DC comic book
characters gone to screen, serious analysis of rap and pop music, and review
graphic novels.Over the top silly stuff
since that phantom audience wouldn’t touch a high-brow publication if they were
paid to do so and even then it would be Seth’s six, two and even that would rouse
them. They get their ideas, information, style elsewhere.
We younger writers in our turn
rebelled at that fantastic imposition and Greg retreated mostly gracefully
under the blowback and let us do our own thing. Then Allan Jackson whom we all
though had perished, gone to pot, dope pot, was working for Mitt Romney out in
Utah Mormon country, running a whorehouse with an old flame in East Bay or
living with an old former hometown corner boy turned “out” drag queen in San
Francisco depending on which rumor you believed at the moment, showed up to do
a series of encore presentations of material he had produced over the years in
order to get back that older audience which had sustained the publication
through good times and bad. Invited by Greg via old geezer Sam Lowell and the Editorial
Board. Something has happened to Greg since Allan’s return, maybe he is under
the Svengali influence of the man but now we are all expected to write “outside
the box” meaning material that we know damn little about and could care even
less about. Hence I have been assigned to do a book review of Louisa May
Alcott’s Little Women in honor of the
150th anniversary of its original publication.
There is where things have gone awry
with Greg’s I am sure Allan-inspired approach. The only thing I knew about Louisa
May Alcott, and this second-hand through Sandy Salmon when he was Senior Film
Editor and I was his associate editor was that her father, Bronson Alcott, was
a wild man, had run amok at Brooks Farm, the holy of holies in the pre-Civil
War Transcendentalist movement, you know Emerson, Thoreau and other Buddha-like
figures who ran around Cambridge, mainly Brattle Street telling naked truths
naked. Bronson has run through whatever dough he had from his inheritance and had
fathered, some say illegimately, a bunch of children by various female denizens
of that isolated farm including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife and had had an
affair with Herman Melville’s brother. Such things are hard to pin down but all
I know for sure is that he claimed Louisa May and three other young women as
his children. Lacking DNA testing who knows. So old Bronson was a certified wild
man no doubt but that was hardly enough knowledge to help ‘the hook” of this
famous book which in its time was a best-seller and a standard for young girls
and young women’s bedside reading.
Here is where things get weird though
Sandy who knew Allan Jackson when they both were much younger and had worked the
free-lance stringer racket we all go through before getting our so-called cushy
by-lines at American Film Gazette
asked him what sources I should go to for a look at the lingering influence of
the book on modern girls and young women. Told Sandy to tell me to ask my
sister, Ellen, when she had read the book and what she had thought of it. Here
is the honest truth Ellen had never heard of the book, didn’t know who or what
I was talking about and when I told her the outline of the story she laughed,
smirked and laughed saying “are you kidding” who had time to read such old-time
melodramas. Failing there I figured that I would work my way back so I mentioned
the book I was reviewing to my mother who told me that my grandmother had read
her the book at night before bed but she didn’t remember much except there were
four sisters who grew up and got married or something like that and were good
wives except one who died young of some strange disease. She said ask my
grandmother. Bingo. Grandma quoted me chapter and verse without hesitation
until I asked how the book influenced her. She told me those were different times,
more restrictive times even against her growing up times in the 1930s so she would
have to pass on the influence question. She was only a little shocked that my sister
knew nada about the book and my mother only a little more. So I am going to
take a stab and say as a 150th anniversary honor-women you have come
a long way since those homebody marriage child-rearing times.
I had to think awhile, had to ask
Seth Garth who is good at this kind of question and his old flame Leslie
Dumont, both fellow writers here what was it about the novel that would have
appealed to young girls and women up at least until my grandmother’s growing up
times. And why when I later asked some other female contemporaries they came up
as blank as my sister on even having heard of the book. Leslie said it best, or
at least better. Those were male dominated times and so even the least amount of
spunk, independence by say Jo, who is the
character in the book who pretty much represents Louisa May’s profile was like
a breath of fresh air even to young girls and women who knew the score, knew
they would be driven back into the cave if they got too brave. Seth, who was
more than willing to defer to Leslie’s judgment took a more historical approach
saying there was nothing in the plotline that dealt with eternal truths so that
such a novel would have a limited life-span except in the groves of academia where
a couple of generations of Ph.ds could get worked up about the social meaning
of it all.
That is about it except to briefly trace
the story line, or lines since there are actually two main threads, the almost
universal family-centered expectations for women and Louisa May’s struggle to
get somebody to survive into strong independence co-managership of the family
along with a thoughtful husband. Oldest sister Meg is pretty conventional,
beautiful and domestic preaching to the younger sisters’ choir about the need
to be civilized and good God-fearing wives. Jo, Louisa May’s character is
strong-willed and thoughtful and will make the marriage that Alcott thought
should be appropriate for her times and class. Beth is something of a cipher, musical
but early on sickly who dies young from the after effects of horrible scarlet
fever so no real lesson can be drawn from her life. (Funny how these Victorian
novelists, male and female, have to have some frail sickly female character
hovering in the background.) Amy, the youngest, is the closest to the character
that let’s say my daughter could relate to if she ever finished reading the
book which she adamantly refused to finish after reading about a third of it and
declaring the thing utterly boring even the
Amy character who struggle for artistic self-expression is very similar to her
own feelings about what she wants out of life. As Sam Lowell has stated on many
occasions-a slice of life circa the 1860s-that is the “hook.”
When The King Of Rock And
Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The
Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -On That Old
Hill-Billy Down In The Hills And Hollows Come Saturday Red Barn Dance Father
Moment
By Zack James
[Zack James has been on an
assignment covering the various 50th anniversary commemorations of
the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind
something of a watershed year rather than his brother Alex and friends
“generation of ‘68” designation they have wrapped themselves around) and
therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on
those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own
generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been
present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the
demographical-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young
too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period
which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute
breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as
well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also
too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid
rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the
legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through
his paces. Greg Green, site manager]
Alex James was the king of
rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and
no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a
“think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million
years ago, or it like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year
anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical
experiences which have left me as a stepchild to fiveimportant musical moments, the birth of rock
and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute of the
early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which
for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock, along the way and intersecting that big
three came a closeted “country outlaw moment” initiated by father time Hank
Williams and carried through with vengeance by singers like Willie Nelson,
Townes Van Zandt, and Waylon Jennings, and Muddy Waters and friends blues as
the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls
the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring
for this and other publications. I am well placed to do since I was over a
decade too young to have been washed over by the movements. But that step-child
still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.
This needs a short
explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother,
born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest
brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls,
me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in
the dirt- poor working- class Acre, as in local lore Hell’s Acre, section of
North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and
remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor
Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked
for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American
prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept
himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player
(the now ancient although retro revival way to hear music then) and he was
forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what
was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend back then called “the
great jailbreak.”
A little about Alex’s
trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late
Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four
connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in
the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it
reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they
never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of
larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music
coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe
1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis (and maybe others as well but Alex
always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd.)
Quickly that formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until
the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats. That same
Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t, was the guy who
turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in
Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled
in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made
what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in
his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west
to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned
about the emerging acid rock scene (drugs, sex and rock and roll being one
mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he
would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid
successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time.
(The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at
the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him later to
the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service while more than the others unhinged him
and his dream.) The blues part came as mentioned as a component of the folk
minute, part of the new wave rock revival and on its own. The country outlaw
connections bears separate mention these days.
That’s Alex’s story-line.
My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come
back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day
at some law firmas somekind of lacky, and went to law school nights
studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole
bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing
stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and
knocked on his door to get him quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his
record playerJerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out.
I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a
blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on
her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen. What happened then, what got me
mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my
own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly
interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high
school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in
gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when
he had first heard such and such a song.
Although the age gap between
Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew
him since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in
college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and
out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not
just a question of say, why Jailhouse
Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or
what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had
happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label
which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith,
Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going,
why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my
toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how
Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock
with his Rocket 88 and how obscure
guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop
rhythm and blues was one key element. Another stuff from guys like Hack Devine,
Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to
its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing
he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy
Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their
country roots not the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red
barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with
some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from
the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music.
One night Alex startled me
while we were listening to an old Louvain Brothers song, I forget which one maybe
Every Times You Leave, when he said
“daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in
the mud Appalachia had put the stuff in our genes. He didn’t call it DNA I
don’t’ think he knew the term and I certainly didn’t but that was the idea. I
resisted the idea then, and for a long time after but sisters and brothers look
at the selections that accompany this so-called think piece the whole thing is
clear now. I, we are our father’s sons after all. Sons welded by twelve
millions unacknowledged ties to those lonesome hills and hollows where the coal
ruled and the land got crummy before its time and Saturday brought out red barn
fiddles and mandolins an stringed basses with some mad monk calling the tune
and the guys drinking home-made hooch and the girls wondering whether the guy would
be sober enough to dance, hell, to ask for the last dance something out of a Child ballad turned Appalachian mud by the
time it got to the sixth generation fighting the land. Knew that they were
doomed even if they could not appreciate in words their fate unless something like
World War II exploded them out of their life routine like it had Dad when Pearl
Harbor sent him Pacific War bound and then up north to guard some naval depot
near North Adamsville toward war’s end. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed
the idea lately-too late since our father he has been gone a long time
now.
Alex had the advantage of
being the oldest son of a man who also had grown up as the oldest son in his
family brood of I think eleven. (Since I, we never met any of them when my
father came North to stay for good after being discharged from the Marine after
hard Pacific War military service, I can’t say much about that aspect of why my
father doted on his oldest son.) That meant a lot, meant that Dad confided as
much as a quiet, sullen hard-pressed man could or would confide in a youngster.
All I know is that sitting down at the bottom of the food chain (I will make
you laugh if you too were from the poor the “clothes chain” too as the
recipient of every older brother, sister too when I was too young to complain
or comprehend set of ragamuffin clothing) he was so distant that we might well
have been just passing strangers. Alex, for example, knew that Dad had been in
a country music trio which worked the Ohio River circuit, that river dividing
Ohio and Kentucky up north far from hometown Hazard, yes, that Hazard of legend
and song whenever anybody speaks of the hardscrabble days of the coal mine
civil wars that went on down there before the war, before World War II. I don’t
know what instrument he played although I do know that he had a guitar tucked
under his bed that he would play when he had a freaking minute in the days when
he was able to get work (which was less frequently than I would have guessed early
one until Alex clued me in that non-job time meaning that he spent every waking
hour looking for work and had no time for even that freaking minute to play
some fretted guitar).
That night Alex also
mentioned something that hit home once he mentioned it. He said that Dad who
tinkered a little fixing radios, a skill learned from who knows where although
apparently his skill level was not enough to get him a job in that industry,
figured out a way to get WAXE out of I think Wheeling, West Virginia which
would play old country stuff 24/7 and that he would always have that station on
in the background when he was doing something. Had stopped doing that at some
point before I recognized the country-etched sound but Alex said he was
spoon-fed on some of the stuff, citing Warren Smith and Smiley Jamison
particularly, as his personal entre into the country roots of one aspect of the
rock and roll craze. Said further that he was not all that shocked when say
Elvis’s It’s All Right Mama went off
the charts since he could sense that country beat up-tempo a little from what
Smith had been fooling around with, Carl Perkins too he said. They were what he
called “good old boys” who were happy as hell that they had enough musical
skills at the right time so they didn’t have to stick around the farm or work
in some hardware store in some small town down South.
Here is the real shocker,
well maybe not shocker, but the thing that made Alex’s initial so-called DNA
thought make sense. When Alex was maybe six or seven Dad would be playing
something on the guitar, just fooling around when he started playing Hank
Williams’ mournful lost love Cold, Cold
Heart. Alex couldn’t believe his ears and asked Dad to play it again. He
would for years after all the way to high school when Dad had the guitar out
and he was around request that Dad play that tune. I probably heard the song
too. I know I heard Come All You Fair and
Tender Ladies from the original Carter family or one branch of it. So,
yeah, maybe that DNA business is not so far off. And maybe, just maybe, over
fifty years later we are still our father’s sons. Thanks, Dad.
The selection posted here
culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces
of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their
stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.
[Alex and I had our ups and
downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom
passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same
wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning
(formerly Bradley). Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017
when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective
corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San
Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of
Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the
production values.]
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Woody Allen’s Take The Money And Run.
DVD Review
Take The Money And Run, Woody Allen, 1969
This is an early film of comedian /actor/director Woody Allen starring himself in the lead as Virgil Starkwell, a bungling wannabe bank robber whose hijinks land him in prisons, in bed with a lovely girl and the halls of academia as an expert on crime. In this film we can see the outlines of Woody’s seemingly endless love affair with early black and white crime and film noir classics. There is a little more use of sight gags here than in his later films but through it all Woody is still the funny bumbling New York Jewish kid that a long series of films will explore in greater detail. The use of an old time newsreel announcer to describe and set the framework of the film and detail the action is an interesting twist. Not the best Woody Allen film but a good look at the niche that he created for himself in American urban comedy/ social commentary cinema.
