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
From The
Archives Of “American Left History”-An Analysis And A Summing Up After His
First Year By Site Manager Greg Green-Poor Peoples Campaign
November 14,
2018 marked the first anniversary of my officially becoming site manager at
this publication and in acknowledgement of that tight touch first year I
started going back to the archives here from the time this publication went to
totally on-line existence due to financial considerations in 2006. (Previously
from its inception in 1974 it had been hard copy for many years and then in the
early 2000s was both hard copy and on-line before turning solely to on-line
publication.) This first year has been hard starting with the residue of the
“water-cooler fist fight” started by some of the younger writers who balked at
the incessant coverage of the 1960s, highlighted in 2017 by the 50th
anniversary commemorations of the Summer of Love, 1967 ordered by previous site
manager Allan Jackson. They had not even been born, had had to consult in many
cases parents and the older writers here when Allan assigned them say a review
of the Jefferson Airplane rock band which dominated the San Francisco scene at
the height of the 1960s. That balking led to a decisive vote of “no confidence”
requested by the “youth cabal” in the Jackson regime and replacement by me. You
can read all about the various “takes” on the situation in these very archives
from the fall of 2017 on if you can stand it. If you want to know if Allan was
“purged,” “sent into exile,” variously ran a whorehouse in San Francisco with
old flame Madame LaRue or shacked up with a drag queen named Miss Judy Garland
or sold out to the Mormons to get a press agent job with the Mitt Romney for
Senate campaign after he left here it is all there. I, having been brought in by
Allan from American Film Gazette to
run the day to day operations as he concentrated on “the big picture” stayed on
the sidelines, didn’t have a vote in any case since I was only on
“probation.”
A lot of the
rocky road I faced was of my own making early on since to make my mark, and to
look toward the future I came up with what even I now see as a silly idea of
trying to reach a younger demographic (than the 1960s devotees who have
sustained this publication since its founding). I went on a crash program of
having writers, young and old, do reviews of Marvel/DC cinematic comic book
characters, graphic novels, hip-hop, techno music and such. The blow-back came
fast and furious by young and old writers alike and so the Editorial Board that
had been put in place in the wake of Allan’s departure called a halt to that
direction. A lot of the reasons why I am presenting the archival material along
with this piece is both to see where we can go from here that makes sense to
the Ed Board and through that body the cohort of writers who grace this
publication and which deals with the reality of a fading demographic as the
“Generation of ’68” passes on. Additionally, like every publication hard copy
or on-line, we receive much material we can’t or won’t use although that too
falls into the archives so here is a chance to give that material a “second
life.”
One Last Time-At The Ebb Tide Of The 1960s- With Helter-Skelter Charles Manson Who Passed At 83 In Mind
By Greg Green
[Recently, shortly after the death of Charles Manson [November, 2017] was announced and then later when I felt under some pressure at the time to write a bit more about the 1960s than I was aware of at the time which had more to do with the beginnings of the internal struggle over the direction this site was taking and going to take, as something an introduction of myself into this space, I wrote two shorter versions of this piece.
I felt those pieces were as much about my understanding of went on, and what went wrong, in that big 1960s “jail-break” that the then administrator of this space Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin on this site) now deposed and off in “exile” (his term according to Sam Lowell his close friend who wound up as the lone older writer siding with the “Young Turks” as they styled themselves in the internal struggle) somewhere in Utah looking for a by-line in some Salt Lake newspaper was looking at from me when he was in charge. That was before a sudden vote of no confidence was taken by the whole staff at the urging of the younger writers whom he had brought in over the past several years but who were in their words, under-utilized and narrowly directed to write, as I was asked to do as well, about the turbulent 1960s whether they knew or cared a damn about those times or not. I, who had come over from the American Film Gazette where I had held a similar position, was supposed to take over the day to day management of the site and pass out assignments under Allan’s guidance, found myself asked to run the whole operation without him after the vote (with the assistance of the newly–formed editorial board, an organization which Jackson had virtually ignored during his tenure).
Jackson ran a funny mix, a core group of writers whom he had either known since high school and who had been exposed to the Peter Paul Markin who was the guy who Allan was trying to honor by using his name as his moniker and who was a big influence on that whole group exploring all kinds of situations in the 1960s or had met in hotbed places like San Francisco, LA, the Village, Harvard Square after high school when everything according to the older guys exploded and you had to take sides from drugs to sex to wars. Then several years ago he brought in those young guys (and a few gals but they were mostly stringers, free-lancers) who knew nothing of the 1960s but were force-pressed to write about subjects related to that time which they only vaguely had heard about (or again cared about). His argument to the younger writers something not necessary to throw at the old guard “true-believer” older writers was that this was a watershed period, a period when many were “washed clean” and the period needed to be dealt with accordingly.
So the gist of my article was as much about Allan and the older writers being “washed clean” by the experience as about what the criminal mind of someone like Charles Manson who while a sensational figure and a prime example of what went wrong with the 1960s when the still thriving cultural counter-revolutionaries took to the offensive and needed an example to feed off of when that moment ebbed. Some of the writers in this space like Sam Lowell, Frank Jackman, Bart Webber, Si Lannon, and Josh Breslin knew the real Markin, known to them as always as “Scribe” either from the North Adamsville neighborhood where they grew up or met him as a result of a very fateful (according to Sam Lowell’s estimate in any case) decision that he made during the turbulent days of the Summer of Love in 1967. That year and that event marked them all once Scribe was able to fire them up to head out west to San Francisco the epicenter of the whole explosion and consummate the jail-break.
I am, like Zack James, Jack Jamison, Bradley Fox, Jr. and Lance Lawrence at least a decade removed from that 1960s experience and sensibility and that second-hand knowledge was reflected in the original articles. I had no axe to grind with those times. But neither did I bow down to what guys like Frank, Sam, and Josh told me about their experiences. That said, Allan Jackson the then supposedly soon to be retired administrator and something of a guiding light in this space (and the on-line version of The Progressive American) suggested after several talks that I expand my article somewhat to include his and the others reflections of the 1960s in order to give a more rounded approach to those days and events. As I did with that second article I do here as well-Greg Green]
***********
A couple of writers in this space, I think Zack James and Bart Webber, have spent a good amount of cyber-ink this past summer commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the San Francisco-etched and hued Summer of Love in 1967. The million things that occurred there from free concerts in Golden Gate Park by the likes of Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and the Grateful Dead, names that I recognized although I was not familiar with their music (the free concert concept in line with a lot that went on then under the guise of “music is the revolution” and the recruits would be those who got turned on by the music, straight or doped –up, and lived by it too), to cheap concerts at the Avalon and Fillmore West (the beginning of an alternative way to entertain the young in formerly rundown arenas which would keep ticket costs down and provide indoor night space for those same young patrons against predators and cops), to plenty of drugs from Native American ritual peyote buttons to Owsley’s electric Kool-Aid acid much written about by “square” Tom Wolfe in a book dealing with writer Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (I think that should be capitalized at least I have always seen it that way in books) to high end tea, you know, ganga, grass, marijuana, which you can smell even today at certain concerts in places where the stuff is legal or the young don’t give a fuck who knows they are smoking stuff, communal soup kitchens (to curb those midnight ganga cravings taking a tip from the old hobo, bum, tramp railroad “jungle” camps and just throwing everything in a stew pot and hope for the best), to communal living experiment (say twelve people not related except maybe some shacking up sharing an apartment or old house and dividing up tasks and expenses or in country on an old abandoned farm not very successful although I hear in Oregon and Vermont if you look closely enough will find the “remnant”), communal clothing exchanges (via ironically given the pervasive anti-war sentiments Army-Navy Surplus or Goodwill/Salvation Army grabs)and above all a better attitude toward sexual expression and experience (the “pill” helping ease the way, the drugs too and a fresh look at the Kama Sutra no doubt) reached something like the high tide during that time.
(According to Josh Breslin who at the time was just out of high school and looking for something to do during the summer before his freshman year of college much to the chagrin of his hard-working parents who expected him to work that summer to help pay for tuition it was almost like lemmings to the sea the draw of San Francisco was so strong. For many kids like Josh and others he met out there aside from Scribe and the North Adamsville guys it really was something of a jail-break although I still can’t feel the intensity which drove Josh and the others to forsake, most for just a while, some family, career, settle down path during those admittedly turbulent times. My generation, and I was among the loudest up in Rockland, Maine where I grew up and where a cohort of the hippie-types encamped once the cities became too explosive, kind of laughed off the whole experiment as the hippies liked to say “ a bad trip,” a waste of time and energy. Although the idea of free or cheap concerts seems like a good idea especially when you see the ticket prices today for acts like Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones who were ready to perform gratis then, the rampant uncontrolled use of illegal drugs, the idea of communal living outside of say very safe dorm life, wearing raggedy second or third hand clothes which looked like and were out of some Salvation Army grab box or Army-Navy surplus store, the idea of even eating out of some collective stew pot of who knows what composition and unbridled and maybe unprotected sex seemed weird, seemed seedy when I would see these people on the streets in town when they came for provisions or whatever they were looking for that brought them to town.)
So as even Josh and a couple of others would admit not all of it was good or great even at that high tide which he personally placed at 1967 (others like Sam placed it at the Stones’ Altamont concert in 1969 and Scribe for his own reasons had placed it at May Day, 1971 when the government counter-attacked a demonstration in Washington with a vengeance and they took devastating amounts of arrests, tear gas, and billy-clubs) since casualties, plenty of casualties were taken, from drug overdoses to rip-offs by less enlightened parties to people leeching off the work of others who were doing good works providing energies to go gather that food, work that kitchen, rummage for those clothes, keep the house afloat with the constant turn-over of desperate “seeking” something people. (Allan chided me on this point originally because he did not believe that those he knew, he met were desperate, most had come from comfortable middle class homes and just wanted to shake things up a little before, which many, too many according to him did, going back to that lifestyle without a murmur when the tide ebbed.)
Not good either which was also noted by Zack James (who got the information from oldest brother Alex another veteran of 1967 who while on a business trip to San Francisco this spring stepped back into that halcyon past at a Summer of Love exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park) and which I used as a counter-argument to Allan’s wisp-of-the will attitude about desperate people flocking to the coast a photograph taken at a police station where one whole wall was filled with photographs from desperate parents looking for their runaway children. No so much the runaway part, all of those who flee west that year and the years after to break out of the nine to five, marriage, little white house syndrome were actually doing that, but the need to do so just then against the wishes, in defiance of those same parents who were looking for their Johnny and Janie. Who know what happened to them.
Frank Jackman, another writer in this space, basing himself on his friendship with Josh Breslin and with the latter’s with Scribe spent some time a few years back taking a hint from the gonzo writer Doctor Hunter Thompson trying to figure out when that high tide crested and then ebbed. The Scribe as far as I know the story himself a classic case of those who started with high ideals and breath of fresh air attitudes who wound up getting killed down in Mexico after a busted cocaine deal in the days after he became a coke head and was dealing and who now sleeps in a potter’s field grave down in Sonora. Years like 1968, 1969, 1971 came up as did events like the Chicago Democratic Convention in the summer of 1968, the disastrous Stones concert at Altamont in 1969, and May Day, 1971 in Washington when they tried to bring down the government if it would not stop the damn Vietnam War and got nothing but massive arrests, tear gas and police batons for their efforts. Those things and the start of a full-bore counter-revolution, mainly political and cultural which Frank has said they have been fighting a rear-guard action against ever since.
Whatever the year or event, whatever happened to individuals like Scribe and those forlorn kids in that police station photograph, there was an ebb, a time and place when all that promise from the high tide of 1967 to as Scribe would say seek a “newer world,” to “turn the world upside down” as Frank likes to say when recounting his youthful days out west and in New York City when he was starting out as a writer and make it fit for the young to live came crashing down, began to turn on itself. A time when lots of people who maybe started out figuring the new world was a-borning turned in on themselves as well. My very strong feeling after having had a small personal bout with cocaine when that was the drug of choice and you could hardly go anywhere socially without somebody bringing out a mirror, a razor and rolling a dollar and daring you not to snort just to be friendly maybe it was the drugs, too many drugs. Maybe too it was the turnover as those who started the movements headed back home, back to school and back to the old world defeated and left those who had nowhere to go behind (those photographs on that forlorn wall in that anonymous police station a vivid reminded that not everybody was “on the bus” as Allan mentioned was a term used frequently to distinguish the winners from the losers in those days).
And as if to put paid to that ebb tide there were all the revelations that something had desperately gone wrong when cult figure and madman leader of a forsaken desert tribe of the forgotten and broken Charles Manson who died the other day [November 2017] after spending decades in prison had been exposed for all the horrible crimes he had committed or had had his followers commit. Allan, Frank, Josh, Sam and I am sure Scribe if he were around would write that off as an aberration, a fluke. Still sobering thoughts for those guys like Frank and Josh who are still trying to push that rock up the hill toward that “newer world” that animated their youth.
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.
Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance
By Josh Breslin
My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal
I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.
Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.
Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven, as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year.
The class-war prisoners must not stand alone.
PDC
Box 99 Canal Street Station
New York, N.Y. 10013
Google Partisan Defense Committee for more information and updates
From The Living
Archives Of Boston Veterans For Peace-They Ain't Your Grandfather's Veterans- From The Executive Committee-Signing Up For
Civil Disobedience Training May 5th
By Site Manager Greg
Green
[Ralph Morris who has
lived in Troy, New York most of his life, been raised there and raised his own
family there, went to war, the bloody, horrendous Vietnam War which he has made
plain many times he will never live down, never get over what he did, what he
saw others do, and most importantly for the long haul, what his evil government
did with no remorse to people in that benighted country with whom he had no
quarrel never was much for organizations, joining organizations when he was
young until he came upon a group formed in the fire of the Vietnam War protests
-Vietnam Veteran Against the War (VVAW) which he joined after watching a
contingent of them pass by in silent march protesting the war in downtown
Albany one fall afternoon. Somebody in that contingent with a microphone called
out to any veterans observing the march who had had enough of war, had felt
like that did to “fall in” (an old army term well if bitterly remembered). He
did and has never looked back although for the past many years his affiliation
has been with a subsequent anti-war veterans’ group Veterans for Peace.
Sam Eaton, who has
lived in Carver, Massachusetts, most of his life, been raised there and raised
his own family there, and did not go to war. Did not go for the simple reason
that due to a severe childhood accident which left him limping severely thereafter
he was declared no fit for military duty, 4-F the term the local draft board
used. He too had not been much for organizations, joining organizations when he
was young. That is until his best friend from high school, Jeff Mullins, died
in hell-hole Vietnam and before he had died asked Sam that if anything happened
to him to let the world that he had done things, had seen others do things, and
most importantly for the long haul, what his evil government did with no
remorse to people in that benighted country with whom he had no quarrel. As
part of honoring Jeff’s request after Sam found out about his death he was like
a whirling dervish joining one anti-war action after another, joining one ad
hoc group, each more radical than the previous one as the war ground away,
ground all rational approach vapid, let nothing left but to go left, until the
fateful day when he met Ralph down in Washington, D.C.
That was when both in
their respective collectives, Ralph in VVAW and Sam in Cambridge Red Front,
were collectively attempting one last desperate effort to end the war by
closing down the government if it would not shut down the war. All they got for
their efforts were tear gas, police batons, arrest bracelets and a trip to the
bastinado which was the floor of Robert F. Kennedy stadium which is where they
would meet after Sam noticed Ralph’s VVAW pin and told him about Jeff and his
request. That experience would form a lasting friendship including several
years ago Sam joining Ralph’s Veterans for Peace as a supporter, an active
supporter still trying to honor his long- gone friend’s request and memory.
No one least of all
either of them would claim they were organizing geniuses, far from it but over
the years they participated, maybe even helped organize many anti-war events.
One day their friend, Josh Breslin, who writes a by-line at this publication, and
who is also a veteran asked them to send some of events they had participated
in here to form a sort of living archives of the few remaining activist
groupings in this country, in America who are still waging the struggle for
peace.
Periodically, since we
are something of a clearing house and historic memory for leftist activities,
we will put their archival experiences into our archives. As mentioned above
Sam and Ralph “met” each other down in Washington, D.C. during the May Day
anti-war demonstrations of 1971 when out of desperation clots of anti-war
radicals, veterans and civilians alike, tried unsuccessfully to shut down the
government if it would not shut down the war. They “met,” their in forever
quotation marks not mine, on the floor of Robert F. Kennedy football stadium after
they had been arrested along with members of their respective collectives,
Ralph’s VVAW and Sam’s Red Front Brigade after getting nothing but tear gas,
police batons and a ride in the paddy wagon for their efforts. What they were
doing, what for each of the them, according to Josh Breslin who met them
shortly after they got “sprung,” also then a member of VVAW and also arrested but
had been held in a D.C. city jail, were their first acts of civil disobedience.
The first of a long time of such actions which is the lead in to the archival
material presented in this piece.
Josh, who introduced
the pair to me several years ago when I first came on board to manage the day
to day operations of this publication after Allan Jackson, aging and ready to
retire, brought me on board for that purpose so he could work on where the
publication was heading. He mentioned the Washington action as their calling
card although then, in 1971, I was about a decade too young to have realized
what they were doing and how important it was for their future political
trajectories, their political commitments to “fight the monster,” their term,
on the questions of war and peace and other social issues. Not have realized,
not having done any such actions how important civil disobedience, or the
threat of such actions was, is to their political perspectives.
By the way, as Josh
was at pains under pressure from Ralph and Sam, to report to me that May Day
action was not the first attempt by either man to “get arrested,” to “put their
bodies on the line” as Sam articulated it to me one night when we were putting
this piece together. May Day was just the first time when the cops, National
Guard, Regular Army was willing, with a vengeance, to take them up on the offer.
Both men had tried repeatedly to get arrested “sitting down” at their
respective local draft boards in Carver and Troy in order to warn off young men
on signing up for the draft. Maybe it was the nature of the times but the local
police would not arrest them.]
And here in 2018 they go
again
From The Executive
Committee-Signing Up For Civil Disobedience Training May 5th –use
this thread to reply
As many of you know
Chapter 9 is committed to supporting the efforts of the Poor Peoples Campaign
which is planning a series of weekly actions from mid-May to mid-June (see
below for the now well-worn pitch by Coordinator Dan Lane to inspire us to work
hard on this). Smedley and others are organizing the War Economy actions around
Memorial Day weekend. Those actions include the possibilities of civil
disobedience and risk of arrest.
The National Poor
Peoples Campaign coalition has insisted that those who may be committed to acts
of civil disobedience have prior training as part of that commitment. There
have already been several sessions in Boston and out in the Western part of the
state. The next session is scheduled for Saturday May 5th. If you
are interested in participating in this session contact Allan Jackson through this thread for more details.
Thank you, the Executive Committee
The campaign has a
series of tasks that need to be done centered on this first action. See
attached list. Jeff and I, and I assume Dan in spirit, have committed Smedley
to coordinate the Safety section that day. (Beyond that we will see but I
suspect we will also do so for the War Economy Week as well). This is stuff
that we do all the time and seemed like our natural intersection point which
allows Smedley and others to be recruited to various tasks which they are
comfortable with.
We are looking for a
vote to confirm that we are on board as an organization to coordinating this
safety section of the May 14th action. Later Al
I guess when I said we
do this stuff all the time I assumed that was self-explanatory but the key
thing is that we coordinate to make sure the event goes off safely and that we
protect our people in all ways as we do in our own demonstrations, marches,
etc. This is not a peace-keeping type situation where we expect the Alt-Right,
etc. but more keeping things together so all the actions including the direct
actions go as smoothly as possible which means those who take on tasks like
marshaling and such will not risk arrest.
As for marshals which
will be VFPers and others we would make sure they know what they are doing and
are easily identifiable to the marchers and close by as civilian observers when
the direct actions start. I am assuming Dan Luker would be the lead marshal on
this. De-escalators would be picked to troubleshoot any problems in the crowd
or from the sidelines keeping things calm. As we know from our own marches straggles
can get lost, etc. so somebody needs to take up the rear and make sure our
people get to where they need to go.Legal observers would be from National Lawyers Guild and we would make
sure they know who we are and we know who they are and report any incidents to
them. Medics would be street medics we have worked with before who tend to run
their own operation but we would keep lines open with them. We would make sure
we have adequate supplies of water and other materials and assign someone to be
in charge of that along the route, at rally and gets cleaned up. All of this is
just a broad outline and will get better flushed out if we take charge and as
the overall strategy unfolds.
As I write this I
realize once again that this is all stuff we have done before except we will be
working with many other people on this.
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 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.
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 finallyfigured
out a few years ago that DNA stuff, why of late I see, really see where the
hillbillygood 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
pointblank) 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 guitarmaking 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 andhooch 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.]
On The 50th Anniversary of the May Days in France in 1968
By Frank Jackman
Allan Jackson labeled the post-World War II generation that came of age in the 1960s the “Generation of ’68.” A lot of things happened that year, including our respective draft call notices for induction in those days when a whole generation of young men, pro or anti-war had decisions to make not always easy or right). We both in retrospect should have refused to do so but you learn a few things in this wicked old world and that is worth something. This publication in any case has publicized a fair part of the world-historic occasions from Tet 1968 in January on through to the seminal 1968 elections.
A lot of the reason that Allan tagged us as the Generation of ’68 though was not for the jangle of events in general but in homage to the events in France in May and June of 1968 which kind of got everything shifted to the left-for a while. There, in Paris first as usual and then the outlying areas, the radicalized students first and then the students and workers came within a hair’s breathe of turning the world upside down, of making the newer world we were all looking for and which the many times mentioned Markin, the Scribe, whose name Allan had used as a moniker on this site in honor of his fallen friend mentioned many times not always to good effect. You cannot look at the period without seeing the treacherous role of the Communist Party, the organization which was supposed to represent the workers, in the stillborn nature of what happened. Unfortunately “almost” is usually not good enough when you are trying to overthrow the “king” and the moment which might have shifted Western history a little bit differently on its axis passed. That notion is history in the conditional of course but a definite possibility. Certainly in the objective sense if nothing else revolution was in the air-if you could keep it. We now know two things about that Paris and French uprising. Revolutionary moments are few and far between and, at least in the United States where nothing even close to a revolutionary period was in play whatever a small chunk of the radicalized young thought, defeat has put us in a forty plus year cultural war against the accumulated night-takers which we have not won and are still fighting almost daily.
The Paris days though have a more personal frame of reference since at the time, in 1968, neither Allan nor I were anything but maybe left liberals and not much interested in revolutions and the like. We come by our “Generation of ’68” credentials by a more roundabout way although the events in Paris, the visual example possibilities of revolution play a role later. As mentioned above both Allan and I accepted induction into the Army at different points in 1969 after receiving our draft notices in 1968 (which puts us in a different class of ’69 connected with Vietnam which I won’t go into now). We both came out of the Vietnam War experience very changed in many ways but most directly by a shift in our political perspectives. Neither of us whatever our feelings about the war in Vietnam while students were active in the anti-war movement. Mostly after the Summer of Love experiences out in California in 1967 we were what might be called life-style hippies or some such. Like I said the Army experience changed that. Mainly before that we cared about girls, having sex with girls, and getting an occasional drug connection.
When we got our respective discharges we were all over the place both as to life style and political seriousness. That is where the Paris days in 1968 came into play. It was obvious by 1971 that massive, mostly student-led, peace marches were not going to end the war. What to do next preoccupied the minds of many of the better elements of that movement. That is where 1968 came in. A cohort of radicals and others started thinking about something like a united front between students and workers strange as that sounded then, and now come to think of it, like what almost brought the French government down.
Maybe because we were from the working class, really a notch below, the working poor, this idea sounded good to us although knowing what working class life was really like unlike many of the middle class students we had our doubts about the viability of the strategy. As it turned out not only are revolutionary moments fleeting but mass action moments short of that are as well and so nothing really ever came of that idea. Still if you think about it today if you could get the kids who are in political motion these days not matter how inchoate to join up with some radical workers (leftist workers not though who gave their endorsements by voting against their immediate and long term interests to one Donald J. Trump, POTUS in tweet speak) we could shake things up. History doesn’t really repeat itself but if something rises up out of all of this current movement by the young which is where you have to look for starters looking back at the Paris days, looking back to those barricades in 1968 would not be a bad idea.
From The
Archives Of “American Left History”-An Analysis And A Summing Up After His
First Year By Site Manager Greg Green-A Song- I'll Be Here In The Mornin'
November 14,
2018 marked the first anniversary of my officially becoming site manager at
this publication and in acknowledgement of that tight touch first year I
started going back to the archives here from the time this publication went to
totally on-line existence due to financial considerations in 2006. (Previously
from its inception in 1974 it had been hard copy for many years and then in the
early 2000s was both hard copy and on-line before turning solely to on-line
publication.) This first year has been hard starting with the residue of the
“water-cooler fist fight” started by some of the younger writers who balked at
the incessant coverage of the 1960s, highlighted in 2017 by the 50th
anniversary commemorations of the Summer of Love, 1967 ordered by previous site
manager Allan Jackson. They had not even been born, had had to consult in many
cases parents and the older writers here when Allan assigned them say a review
of the Jefferson Airplane rock band which dominated the San Francisco scene at
the height of the 1960s. That balking led to a decisive vote of “no confidence”
requested by the “youth cabal” in the Jackson regime and replacement by me. You
can read all about the various “takes” on the situation in these very archives
from the fall of 2017 on if you can stand it. If you want to know if Allan was
“purged,” “sent into exile,” variously ran a whorehouse in San Francisco with
old flame Madame LaRue or shacked up with a drag queen named Miss Judy Garland
or sold out to the Mormons to get a press agent job with the Mitt Romney for
Senate campaign after he left here it is all there. I, having been brought in by
Allan from American Film Gazette to
run the day to day operations as he concentrated on “the big picture” stayed on
the sidelines, didn’t have a vote in any case since I was only on
“probation.”
A lot of the
rocky road I faced was of my own making early on since to make my mark, and to
look toward the future I came up with what even I now see as a silly idea of
trying to reach a younger demographic (than the 1960s devotees who have
sustained this publication since its founding). I went on a crash program of
having writers, young and old, do reviews of Marvel/DC cinematic comic book
characters, graphic novels, hip-hop, techno music and such. The blow-back came
fast and furious by young and old writers alike and so the Editorial Board that
had been put in place in the wake of Allan’s departure called a halt to that
direction. A lot of the reasons why I am presenting the archival material along
with this piece is both to see where we can go from here that makes sense to
the Ed Board and through that body the cohort of writers who grace this
publication and which deals with the reality of a fading demographic as the
“Generation of ’68” passes on. Additionally, like every publication hard copy
or on-line, we receive much material we can’t or won’t use although that too
falls into the archives so here is a chance to give that material a “second
life.”
I'll Be Here In The Mornin'
DGD
There's no stronger wind than the one that blows down a lonesome railroad line
A7
No prettier sight than lookin' back at a town you left behind
DGD
But there's nothin' that's as real as the love that's in my mind.
A7G
Close Your Eyes I'll Be Here In The Mornin'
A7GEmA7
Close your eyes I'll be here for awhile.
There's lots of things along the road I'd surely like to see
I'd like to lean into the wind and tell myself I'm free
But your softest whispers louder than the highway's call to me
Close Your Eyes I'll Be Here In The Mornin'
Close your eyes I'll be here for awhile.
All the mountains and the rivers and the valleys can't compare
To your bluely dancin' eyes and yellow shinin' hair
I could never hit the open road and leave you lyin' there
Close Your Eyes I'll Be Here In The Mornin'
Close your eyes I'll be here for awhile.
Aw lay your head back easy love and close your cryin' eyes
I'll be layin' here beside you when the sun comes on the rise
And I'll stay as long as the cuckoo wails and the lonesome Blue Jay cries.
