Once Again Despite The Tweeter Firestorm-In Honor Of The 150th Anniversary Of The Publication Of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868)-A Book Review-Of Sorts

Once Again Despite The Tweeter Firestorm-In Honor Of The 150^th Anniversary Of The Publication Of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868)-A Book Review-Of Sorts  

Book Review

By Alden Riley

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, Roberts Brothers, 1868

I have to admit I am a bit exasperated over the “firestorm” from Twitter and other sources over my original book review honoring the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women which I just found out has been made into a yet another film adaptation for a modern 21^st century audience far removed from the semi-nomadic existent back in the day before cellphones and Facebook. Sometimes you just can’t win in any quarters that is for sure. I wouldn’t mind if the prairie fire came from one comment but even side issue stuff raised some ire. Jesus. First, I mentioned- “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.”

Although as a free-lancer, a stringer I did not have a decisive vote in the vote of no confidence that replaced Allan Jackson, in the interest of the seemingly obligatory statement of transparency an old friend of some of the writers here from high school and anti-war Vietnam War soldier days, with Greg I do know from various sources, reliable sources, that among the younger writers their actions were seen as a fight to the death. That Allan had to go, that Greg had to take over the whole site manager operation and that a guiding hand Editorial Board had to be established so one person could not wield an iron hand over the whole operation in the future. All of this over the to me pretty harmless policy decisions of Allan to spent plenty of time in 2017 and 2018 commemorating the 50^th anniversaries of the many historically important events of that era beginning with the Summer of Love, 1967. 

At some point, maybe rightly if the extent of coverage projected by Allan is any indication the younger writers ire, who like myself at best knew of those events second or third hand rebelled, got some aid from old-timer Sam Lowell, also an old friend of Allan’s from high school days who decided it was time to “pass the torch” they were able to remove Allan from his post. According to Sam Lowell, who after all as “the father we never knew” of the rebellion should know, the talk around the water cooler was to fight to the finish, to sent Allan packing, no regrets. So now readers who have a partisan interest in defending the actions of the younger writers are up in arms arguing that their “gentile” actions were merely to force Allan to retire. I am done with the silly issue and Sam has agreed to reply to anybody who still feels that terms like “purge” and “exile” were exaggerations of what went on.      

Next up in the batting order a simple statement about Greg’s early stewardship and the pitfalls of following a legendary figure at this publication like Allan Jackson after his purge and exile-“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 the 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 current pop music, and review graphic novels. …”

I came on board shortly before this change of leadership while Greg was handling the day to day operations and Allan was making policy decisions, so I had a chance to see what Greg was trying to do to make his own mark, to become his own legend here just as he had been for many years over at American Film Gazette. In the beginning of the Green regime through Senior Film Editor Sandy Salmon I was getting some very good films, books, and music to review. Assignments like the Hammer film noir series pitting my take against Seth Garth’s, commemorating the various anniversaries of books like The Great Gatsby that had heretofore been staples of the Western literary canon and all kinds CD reviews from classic rock to world music.

Then the world caved in. Somehow Greg thought that what was needed to spruce up the publication, to appeal to a younger audience in the 21^st century rather than the hard-core Generation of ‘68 devotees who have sustained this publication since their own youths back in hard copy days through the current on-line version was to review comic book character films, video games and such, and rap and techno-music in its various mutations. A bad decision which even Greg knew was true as he retreated back to some more civilized material. The blow-back from readership was this seemingly orchestrated sycophantic echo about how I was being too hard on Greg for a momentary mistake, a good faith effort to reach a new audience, to try something new and that it had been,  and I will quote from one irate tweet “bad taste” to bring up that serious error of judgment now that Greg has righted the ship. Ho hum. 

I certainly have been around long enough in the publishing business now to know how to weather such storms but the next “fire storm,” really a tempest in a teapot to quote Sam Lowell on some internal controversy, a one- man crusade really was too much. Here is what I “wrongly” said- “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.”

Of course, the one-man crusade was one Allan Jackson, now a contributing editor doing encore presentations at this publication under the good graces of his old friend Sam Lowell and Greg. Apparently Allan does not have Greg and Sam’s good graces and let the whole shady rumored past year or so go to ground. No sooner had he seen my comments that he ripped out a few thousand word “essay” on my “libelous” statements concerning his whereabout after he got that proverbial boot in 2017. If anybody, and I worry about what you have been doing with your precious time if you have, has not seen Allan’s encore presentation introductions which are as self-serving as anything I have seen of late then a brief summary of his slights is in order. Under Allan’s tutelage all rumors were allegedly untrue or half-truths (a nice dodge when you are on the defensive, especially those unfamiliar with the intentionality rule in libel cases to tar the writer that scurrilous “half-truth” tag).

Allan didn’t try to weasel out of what everybody knew was true, that he had been purged and gone into exile like a beaten cur. Gone far away to try to “rebrand” himself where he was not well known. What he has argued, unconvincingly, is that he merely went West to seek work after he had been “blackballed” by some phantom network emanating from this publication along the East Coast. I have recently been given by our legal department five affidavits from publishers in New York and Boston who almost overnight after hearing of Allan’s untimely, their common term, ouster offered him jobs with increases in salary and less responsibility just to have his name on the masthead (and not on some other publication and mercifully not on ours). He allegedly needed money for his various ex-wife alimonies and the onerous college tuitions for his slew of good kids still in the higher education pipeline and has declared (at the notoriously accurate office water cooler) that no East Coast publisher would touch him with a ten- foot pole. In an age of the casual off-hand lie this is a whooper.   

We can dismiss the Mitt Romney press agent rumor out of hand since I looked at the archives for 2008 and 2012 and noted that Allan had skewered him and his white underwear fetish, his inability to keep to one single answer for more than ten minutes before flipping earning the sobriquet “Mr. Flip-Flop,” and his undying hatred for those who have not gouged the populace and not emulated his scorched earth policies at Bain Enterprises. At least I thought I could discount that rumor until I found out from Sam Lowell, who knows Allan like a book, when he went up to Olde Saco, Maine to offer Allan that Encore Presentation gravy job, that he told Sam that when he had landed in Salt Lake City out in the Utahs he approached the editors of the Salt Lake Tribune for a job to tide him over for a while. Here is the totally cynical part when you think about it. He intended to use that position to springboard himself onto Mitt’s campaign when he announced he was running for the U.S. Senate seat ancient Orrin Hatch was vacating. That is neither here nor there job-wise but his “pitch” was that since he had been an expert skewer of Mitt he would be the perfect guy to deflect any hard-ball stuff that those unruly ruffians might throw Mitt’s way. Yeah, cynical is right.

A man, any man, any woman for that matter has the right to have an affair with whoever they want and not have it published throughout the land. The rumor about Allan running a whorehouse, a high-end whorehouse for high-end Asian businessmen with a kinky streak, for a taste for a walk on the wild side, with an old flame, a woman who goes by the name Madame La Rue whose real name I have known for a while but will stick with her alias since my beef is with Allan not her was essentially true. From “an unnamed but reliable source who has asked to remain anonymous since he or she is not authorized to speak publicly about the matter” I found out that Allan landed in Half Moon Bay south of Frisco, the site of Madame’s house of ill-repute as Fritz Taylor put it in his ironic tone with the clothes on his back and not much else and Madame lend him a bunch of money, so-called lent him the money. Back in the day and I am not sure if it was before they split or after Allan (while still married to wife number two) had fronted Madame the dough to buy an old worn-out mansion on the shoreline, fix it up, grease some palms and other start-up costs-with no strings attached and no requirement to pay back. Nice, very nice. So Madame was just paying back that unrequired pay-back. That is the public story-the real story is that Allan acted as “master of ceremonies” at the place to earn his keep. I don’t know about you but that sounds an awful like pimp to me. Frankly I think Madame got the worse of the bargain for her outlay but I will keep mum about that since I am told they had started up their old torch while he was there before she booted him out for some unexplained reason.

Seth, Jack Callahan (who has done yeoman’s service funding this publication in the dark red ink days), Si Lannon, Sam, all Allan’s friend, his corner boys from the old Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville had the usual pre-Stonewall “fag” “light on his feet,” ‘fairy” vocabulary and social distain before they got enlightened about LGBTQI matters. The one person who I have not put in that mix but who was in the thick of the gay-baiting of certain people (and of each other as well accepted ritual in those hard macho days) is Timmy Riley. Timmy Riley who maybe as a defense mechanism of his own preferences suppressed himself as long as he was in the Acre, and before Stonewall at what cost we will never know. Timmy though turned into Miss Judy Garland, a drag queen, who subsequently has run the famous drag queen club in Frisco for many years. What people did not know was that Allan at some point when Timmy was down in the streets lend him the money to buy the Kit Kat Club in North Beach and from there he zoomed along to fame and fortune. So the story-the public story is that after Madame threw Allan out he went to Timmy with some sad tale and Timmy lend him some money. (All of this money supposedly to pay that damn alimony and those blood-sucker colleges, Allan’s expressions). The real story is that Allan, while living above the club in one of Timmy’s spare rooms declared himself “master of ceremonies” downstairs at the club. Yeah, right we can read between the lines.            

Remember boys and girls all these critics of my review have said not word one about the impact, or lack of impact, of the Ms. Alcott’s book on me, or the world of literature. And before I mention what they have said, or not said there is yet another firestorm they had been more than happy to enflame. This is the offending section-“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…”

I need not stand on the silly defense that the information I got about the old wild man Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s beloved if looney father, was gathered from Sandy Salmon, my boss. I refer the reader, and especially those readers who have decided out of some serious naivete to defend this lout, Sol Sandburg’s classic and some say definitive book on Bronson Alcott and the whole Brook Farm ménage In The Time Before Hippie Times; The Brook Farm Commune. Reading the book made even my jaded ears ring. Sure there were serious things going on in the ante bellum period in America, up in cold New England where the least of it was that they stopped believing in the eternal Father, Son, Holy Ghost trifecta, stopped believing in God if you really delve into the Universalist doctrine without flinching. Started a whole movement called if you can believe this the Transcendentalist movement which let’s face it would draw as many wooly-headed minds as intellectual giants like Thoreau and Emerson. The streets of Cambridge were filled with cranks con-men and drifters of no repute who were ready to listen to anybody except maybe Martin Van Buren about how to break out of the nine to five rat-trap circa the 1840s.

This mayhem was a perfect foil for a flake like Bronson Alcott (who also had several aliases to cover his various bigamous marriages both before Brook Farm and after so when I pose the question of who were actually Bronson’s prodigy I wasn’t blowing smoke although the four Alcott sisters, including literary Louisa May, seen to have been his legitimate daughters-all others including the bastard raised by Nathaniel Hawthorne are different stories). No money, no standing, no anything yet he was able in those odd times to ingratiate himself with a ton of intellectual heavyweights and eventually have a soft landing at Brook Farm where he literally went amok, went crazy with laudanum, morphine, hemp (what we call marijuana), opium anything coming off the China sea Yankee clippers that could be ingested. Had those two billion affairs and whatever number of children and walked away with not so much as a by your leave when the place folded due to corruption, malfeasance and general hubris. Some say he was later kept by a woman who ran a whorehouse next to the Parker House in Boston since he was so dope-addled that he was unemployable and needed whatever alms would provide for the children he would claim as his own. A shabby, shabby man and Sol Sandburg nailed the bugger, put him in the deadbeat hall of fame. This is the guy all those irate tweeters have been defending unto death for the sake of Louisa May’s reputation. But enough.  

Like I said a minute ago nothing about the fucking book, not word one about what to their young impressible lives and I can only conclude, male or female, these tweeters have had nothing better to do with their time that throw cyberspace bombs my way to cover the very hard fact that except for an occasional Seven Sisters Lit major nobody has read the book since about 1960, maybe 1950. That said, that truth uttered why did nobody bother to froth-mouthed respond to my take on the book’s place, or non-place, in the expanded Western canon. In the interest of completeness I will retail what I have written previously in the forlorn hope somebody might pick a real literary fight in L.M. ‘s defense:    

“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 again saying “are you kidding” who had time to read such old-time melodramas. Failing that avenue 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 150^th 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 (and the unspoken truth was to end the shameful lusts and lechery of one Bronson Alcott). Beth is something of a cipher, musical but early on sickly who died 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.”      

Jean Ritchie - Sweet Sorrow in the Wind-The First Lady Of The Mountains-The First Lady Of The Hills And Hollows Wind-Swept Saturday Night Red Barn Dance-So Long, Jean Ritchie-A Belated RIP

The First Lady Of The Mountains-The First Lady Of The Hills And Hollows Wind-Swept Saturday Night Red Barn Dance-So Long, Jean Ritchie-A Belated RIP

Zack James

Earlier in bthe year (2018) I did an extended series on the role that my oldest brother, Alex, straight Alex not Alexander as you might expect, played on my early
musical development growing up in the 1970s. He, as many of the older writers who either started this publication back in the mid-1970s or were grafted onto the staff by former site manager/editor Allan Jackson have done, cut his teeth
on, or as he put it recently when commenting on the series, he was “present at the creation” of rock and roll, now called the classic age, the 1950s and early 1960s. The series was originally supposed to deal solely with that influence
channeled through him. The was before a feeling of late that other unarticulated influences based on what Alex taught me had some say in the matter. When we were discussing that feeling one night, along with a general discussion about the various threads which contributed to the genre, Alex
pulled me up short when he mentioned how “our father’s music, mountain music, hillbilly music,” had played a role in the development of rock and roll. Had also contributed to the emergence of the folk scene in the early 1960s which
Alex had also taken a small part in through his best friend, Peter Paul Markin, who was crazy for the stuff and was always sneaking over to Harvard Square, sometimes
with Alex in tow, on weekend nights. 

According to Alex, again via Markin, people, young people, some of them anyway, were looking for authentic music, roots music, traditional music. In this case music that
came over from the British Isles maybe Europe and planted itself down in the hills and hollows of Appalachia especially. There was a convergence of  “academic” interest by certain college types along with a desire to learn some new music by poring through the music down in the hills and hollows. Alex’s remarks, his placing my unarticulated feelings in a context connected to our father got me permission from the site manager, currently Greg Green, to extend that
rock and roll series to see what fit in and what didn’t from mountain music. My scurrying around looking for material got me looking straight at the music of Jean Ritchie far from rock and roll but close, very close to our father’s roots
music.

Something in her voice, in her lyrics, in her mournful playing of the dulcimer “spoke” to me, connected me with my father and where he had come from not matter that we
had been very distance from each other long before he passed away. I had heard her music before when I went through my own period of interest in folk music in
the early 1980s at a time when I had had what Alex has called my “outlaw country moment” when guys like Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt and gals like Jessie Logan and Emmy Lou Harris got me interested in that genre. Along the way I explored a few other sub-groups like Tex-Mex, Western Swing with Bob Wills and Milton Brown and bluegrass with the likes of Earl Monroe and Kitty Diamond. Songs from the mountains too.

So yes as Alex intuited I, we, had via some strange transplanting of DNA had turned out to be our father’s sons, had the hills and hollows, the Saturday red barn dance complete with fiddles and mandos, maybe a sweet dulcimer,  hidden in some recesses of our brains ready to come out, come out too late for us to thank him, but come out nevertheless. Which finally brings us back to why I am writing this secular elegy to Jean Ritchie. Somehow, despite paying close attention to the passing of various authors, writers, film people and singers and song-writers in this space dedicated ‘keeping the torch burning” the passing of Jean Ritchie got short shrift at the time. I make slight amends here.

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 -The Moment Bobby Blue “Blues Hour” Blew The Lip Off The Po’ White Corner Boy Night-Damn Right

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 -The Moment Bobby Blue “Blues Hour” Blew The Lip Off The Po’ White Corner Boy Night-Damn Right   

By Zack James

[Zack James has been on an assignment covering the various 50^th 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 five  important 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 firm  as some  kind 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 player   Jerry 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.

I have already mentioned that 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 hillbilly mountain music stuff in our genes. It took me a long time, too long to do our father any good but I finally  figured out a few years ago that DNA stuff, why of late I see, really see where the hillbilly  good old boy hills and hollows Saturday night local hooch courage red barn dance fit in on the long arch of classic rock and roll as it passed through the likes of Elvis, Carl Perkins, Lenny Ladd, Jerry Lee, Old Slim Fanon, Texas Mac Devlin, Warren Smith and a whole list of guys and a couple of gals like Belinda Wales and Sara Webb. What the hell did I know then when stuff like that hillbilly mountain had plenty to do with estrangements from distance father, righteous hillbilly from down in the muds or not.

Alex,  okay King Alex, then completed the third leg of my classic roots of rock and roll on another night when he had I guess if I recall correctly had had another tough day grinding up some legal sweat somebody up the food chain in that sullen law office he worked in while doing that hard-ass (I will give him that) law school nights got credit for from some judge whose law clerk actually read the thing and wrote the decision based on Alex’s work (I am telling no tales out of school everybody these days knows that the higher up the food chain you are including SCOTUS the less writing of legal decisions you do which makes that law school education pretty damn expensive way up on the top for some poor benighted parents who thought they were doing the right thing). That night he asked me if I ever remember hearing some music on the radio, the family radio to boot, when our parents were on one of their rather infrequent nights out meaning when Dad had steady work and Ma was not afraid going out would break the family bank, that came booming out Chicago, always at night, usually Saturday or Sunday DJed by Brother Blues out of WAJB.   

I had to plead that I hadn’t until he mentioned a song called Little Red Rooster which I remember from his Stones collection but which he said had actually been written by a guy named Willie Dixon who was associated with a couple of brothers at Chess Records in Chicago who recorded had Howlin’ Wolf doing it and making a smash hit of it of the R&B charts (fuck it even the music was segregated by race on those record popularity charts). That is when Alex told me that he had first heard the song on that Chicago station on a program called Brother Blues’ Blues Hour (which was actually two hours each Saturday and Sunday night on nights when it came in clear enough to hear). Of course the ghost of Peter Paul Markin has to enter into the lists on this one (that ghost as new site manager Greg Green has found out during his short tenure and has commented on hovers over everything including its share of former site manager Allan Jackson’s demise giving Greg his job). Alex didn’t discover Brother Blues and his show Markin had one night up in his room on his transistor radio which is the way the young of Markin’s and Alex’s generation got to listen to the music of their lives without nosey parents interfering just as today one way kids do is listen to their MP3s or iPods.

Somehow on Markin’s radio the winds were just right one Sunday night when he was really trying to get WMEX the local max daddy rock and roll station and Brother Blues popped up. Markin went crazy listening to Muddy Waters, Howlin’s Wolf, Jimmy Smith, Mamma Smith, Memphis Minnie, Big Mama Thornton and a whole raft of other blues singers whose beat seemed so much like lets’ say where Chuck Berry or Randy Rhodes was coming from, that R&B-etched back beat that formed over half of all classic rock. So Alex and Markin would listen whenever the winds were right (more in winter than summer) and got an education about this branch root of the blues. Alex made this point blank to me (again via Markin who gave it to him point  blank) when he mentioned the famous smash hit Elvis made of Hound Dog (a strange song for a guy who girls, women too, married women, sweated over in between bouts of swooning but that understanding by me would only come later) and then played Big Mama Thornton’s version from the early 1950s where she made a three dollars on her version but ripped the thing apart, had every Tom, Dick and Harry jumping the jump.  

Of course ignorant as I was at the time Alex had to clue me to the difference between the root roots of the blues in the country, down in the sweat swamp Delta plantation Saturday night white lightening brave juke joint no electricity dance (probably no different except color, the eternal race issue always just below or on the surface at all times in America) guy with some beat up Sear& Roebuck-ordered guitar  making the joint jump. He gave me a whole slew of names like Robert Johnson, Charly Patton, Son House, Ben Jamison, Mississippi John Hurt, a few Big Bills, a couple of Slims Memphis and Kansas City and a lifetime’s interest in that sound. That interest though as important as it was as the root of the roots of the blues really only hooks up to classic rock when the blues move north, move up what did Alex call it, oh yeah, moved up the Mississippi out of the sweated South and had an electric cord to put on that guitar and blow the place away (the liquor and  hooch fight over dames would stay the same). Names like Muddy Waters, that same Howlin’ Wolf, Ben Attuck, Little Jimmy (and a ton of other Littles), Junior Wells and the like. Yes Alex, you went by the numbers and I am going to pass on point blank to the good people reading this to give the real skinny on the music of your generation, on what caused that big wave coming down upon the land in your time.         

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.]    

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200^th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts 

A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source  2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21^st century on the 200^th anniversary of his birth:

http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/

By Seth Garth

Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a pup (somebody unknown’s expression).

Frank then went chapter and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, when he mentioned the old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now remembered golden age of the 1950s.     

Then as the thaw came, or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics). I am not sure if he began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971 where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.

That is enough of the political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank, however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. The guy who gives out the assignment and who has had more than one person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as you need to about Franks’ “cred.”

My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was purged from that position, was interested much more in “”human interest” stories than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank would meandering into, no, would get in knee deep.     

(For the record some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he somehow almost incongruously had been plenty of information about or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)

Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket, in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views  pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go, because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.        

Like I say Scribe described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later.

Here is a better example of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was descripting, Scribe had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources, one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.         

What this history teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.

So this little sketch really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary socialism held for the 19^th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too) extending into the greater part of the 20^th century fell down, went to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.

To finish up on this sketch though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older people what that protest was all about.

Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.