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
Thursday, December 13, 2018
From The Archives Of “American Left History”-An Analysis And A Summing Up After His First Year By Site Manager Greg Green-On The 60th Anniversary Of The North Adamsville Corner Boys' Graduation From Snug Harbor Elementary School-Damn Where Did The Time Go
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.”
The Old Days In Gay “Closeted, Hell,
Entombed ” Hollywood-With a New Book About AIDS Victim
Hollywood 1950s He-Man Icon Rock Hudson-Even His Name Dripped Masculinity In
Some Quarters In Mind
By Seth Garth Here is a link to a Terry Gross Fresh Air show on NPR about a book
about the life and times of 1950s movie icon Rock Hudson by Mark Griffin All That Heaven Allows which forms the
backdrop to this commentary: https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/12/05/673714293/fresh-air-for-dec-5-2018-rock-hudsons-double-life
I suppose I am the one person of the old-time working poor Acre
neighborhood of North Adamsville corner boys who should do this commentary on
1950s and before “gay” Hollywood through a book reviewed on NPR about the life
and times of masculine icon Rock Hudson who dramatic announcement in the 1980s
that he had AIDS brought new light (and more research money) on the disease
because of his standing in the Hollywood firmament. I don’t usually put much
stock in coincidences although they certainly exist so but I find it ironic
that at nearly the same time I was listening to this Fresh Airwith Terry Gross interview that Allan Jackson was maybe three doors away
from me writing his defense of himself against all kind of false accusations
after he had been purged from his site manager’s job at this publication,
including that he was the M.C. of a drag queen club out in San Francisco. As Allan subsequently detailed that false accusation, that slander and
libel whether it was actionable in a court of law by some of the ”victors” in
his ouster was purposefully put on as fact, really alternate fact, when he had
wound up in San Francisco visiting his, our old friend and corner boy from
highs school days Timmy Riley, now known far and wide in the world of “drag
queens” as Miss Judy Garland and the proprietor of the so-called notorious
KitKat Club which has since become a major tourist attraction in that
city. What has come out only recently (although I and a couple of others who
had put some money up knew what the situation was) is that Allan after Timmy
had flee North Adamsville when he “came out” to his parents who would
subsequently disown him and a few friends, a few corner boys remained in North
Adamsville after high school scorned him to go to gay and drag queen friendlier
San Francisco in the post-Stonewall period had loaned, had given Timmy the
money to buy and refurbish the run-down KitKat Club in North Beach. (Although
everybody in Frisco knows him as Miss Judy Garland we all still call him Timmy
so let me stick with that name.) So, yes, Alan was staying with his old friend,
and mine too, at one of Timmy’s apartments above the club which he also owned
trying to jump start his life. So much for unverified “facts.” Allan mentioned in his introductory piece to a series on Jack Kerouac
the 50th anniversary of whose death will be commemorated in 2019 that
when we were corner boys, when we were hanging around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in
the early 1960s we would mercilessly gay-bait anybody who seemed the least bit,
well, faggy, light on their feet, homo all the terms of approbation used at the
time for gay-bashing. And here is what may startle the unwary reader Timmy
Riley, football playing, rugged, pretty handsome and girl attractive was the
leader of the pack. Moreover we did not, and I speak of this as both Allan and
Timmy have with eternal shame, just talk the talk but would go down to
Provincetown in high which we knew was “queer heaven” and not just gay-bash
some poor unsuspecting guy but “lead” on to get somebody out in back of some
bar and beat the shit out of the guy. And again Timmy would be in the lead. We
were shocked, shocked to the core when we heard from Sonny Lewis that Timmy had
“come out” had started painting his fingernails, and they had beaten him up one
of the main reasons Timmy fled the town. What does all of this about an old gay and drag queen (they are not
both the same, okay) corner boy from working class North Adamsville have to do
with a famous movie star from our times like Rock Hudson. Well everything
since, as the book and a documentary point out, Rock and a number of other
he-man role male movie stars like Guy Madison, Rory Calhoun, and famously Tab
Hunter had to stay deep, deep in the closet to maintain their livelihoods. To
keep up the illusion, the movie theater illusion that every female movie-goer
(and who knows now when you think about the matter some male movie-goers) that
they could grab the guy for a boyfriend. Such was, and is, the Hollywood dream
factory. Despite the fact that like the revelations long known in Hollywood
about the “casting couch” culture which, male or female, depending on the
predilections of the man in power, helped get you up the food chain the “gay
community,” who was gay, who was sitting out in Malibu with a bunch of men,
good looking athletic men without women. I am not sure how much trouble Rock got into, or avoided in having his
male companionship and his affairs, before his public announcement of his AIDS
condition (in those days a sentence of death) and the how and when he knew that
he preferred men to women but we saw Rock, maybe not as the coolest guy around,
maybe guys like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman were more our models of
manliness, as a serious masculine figure especially when he was not doing that
silly romantic comedy stuff that none of us could relate to. What I do know, do
know from talking with both Timmy and Allan over the years that Timmy, and I
assume Rock, paid a terrible psychic price for having to stay in the closet.
Worse having to hide who they were, are against guys like the North Adamsville
corner boys who were quick with fists and not understanding. So this does not
do justice to the subject but RIP, Rock Hudson, RIP
The Legend-Slayer Is Back- Legends Of
The Old American West-The Saga Of Jake Walz’s Old Hoary Dutchman’s Gold Mine-Ida
Lupino And Glenn Ford’s “Lust For Gold” (1949)-A Film Review
By Will Bradley Lust For Gold, starring Ida Lupino, Glenn
Ford, 1949 . You know we have today, damn throughout
history really, had enough alternate fact distortions of events to fill a
library, a major college or big city public library. I have been on a tear in
2017-2018 (and hopefully for the future as well as long I have site manager
Greg Green’s confidence) debunking a whole raft of undeserved, overblown or
just plain false legends which have been built out of whole cloth and have
entered the books with devoted followers and a whole lot of people not devoted
who believe based on nothing more than somebody’s conjecture, opinion. This is
my answer to the increasing number of fellow staff members, including writers
who have not been able to get their heads around the idea of legend-busting.
This so-called ironic indifference in a publication looking for some historical
truths and whose unspoken motto is – “speak the truth no matter how bitter.”
Which is exactly right, exactly the right note I am trying to achieve. Take a
back seat doubters, way back. I have elsewhere in a previous trifecta
of legend-busting reviews mentioned I have had a descent amount of success,
some very positive comments about how my reviews have enlightened some readers
to think through their acceptance without thought of legends, of everything
from belief in angels to a glowing acceptance of the Hollywood/ television view
of the American Old West and the desperadoes, malcontents, drifters, con men
and women, and everybody who headed west after busting out in the East. I will
not go through the litany here of who I have taken down but I cannot go to
busting the so-called Lost Dutchman’s Mine legend around ornery bastard Jake
Walz who allegedly found the pot of gold and kept everybody else away-with hot
lead- unless I mention my one significant failure, the Johnny Cielo legend. The
only reason I am doing that here is that I have new proof, if anybody who is
still defiantly attached to the press agent baloney around that hoary legend about
one of the key elements to the Cielo legend will listen -Johnny taking 1940s
film star and off-handedly beautiful Rita Hayworth to Barranca when he ran rough
shot there with his airplane mail service fro big bucks . Belief in Johnny’s case, in his
publicity agent legend, has always primarily depended on the hard fact that for
a period, the period Johnny claimed to have Rita sharing his bed down in
Central America, she had left Hollywood under mysterious circumstances and had
not surfaced for a while. The documents I have, including lustrous photographs
with dates of processing the negatives attached on the back as they did in the
old days, prove that Rita was secretly playing footsie, house, whatever you
want to call the liaison with the Aga Klan before they were married. Was in New
York and or Morocco during that crucial time. As I speculated early on in my research
Johnny had hook-winked, who knows maybe she was a willing accomplice getting free
airfare south and away from whatever troubles she was running away from, some
young gal from Hoboken down in the Jerseys, Sarah Miles, or at least that was
the name she was using, who looked very much like Rita whom he had met either
walking the streets or in some whorehouse in that town. The few photos of her,
revealing photos for the 1940s from some men’s magazine show that her legs were
not nearly as well-formed as Rita’s and that while you can never tell about a
woman’s hair even now if they don’t want you to know she was a brunette. I can
hear the aficionado disclaimers now that even if my information is true maybe,
maybe an important doubt word trick used forever by con artists and press
agents to set up alternate facts that maybe Rita had sent the Aga Khan Sarah in
her place to be able to stay with Johnny in humid, sweaty Barranca bungalows. We
shall wait for the bogus blowback. I will admit that I had some early trouble
with Zane Grey readers, hell, even Larry McMurtry brethren trying to cut down
the legend of Link Jones, the baddest desperado who tried to con the world that
he had changed, had become an upright citizen, that he had stopped being a
ruthless gunslinger and no holds barred daytime bank robber. No question they
should have strung him up, hung him high and this from a guy who doesn’t believe
in the damn death penalty. The clincher there was Link’s prison confession to a
fellow cellmate where he went out of his way, maybe even embellished his
exploits, to make him seem a tough guy to a young kid just starting out on the wrong
track. That said this saga of Jake (Jacob but nobody called him that, nobody
still standing after saying that) Walz should be a lot easier to dispel since at
least Link had been a man of the West. Jake had been an Eastern tin-horn from
Europe failure heading west to avoid some German hoodlums who wanted his head. So what is the big deal with Jake, with
his longstanding legend that even my grandfather who first told me the story of
how Jake had held off all-comers when they tried to “steal” his bags of gold (which
he had in turn had gotten by wasting the real owners and his own partner, nice
guy right) and had known Jake’s grandson, Brent, who retailed the legend (and
who himself had spent a lifetime, or what seemed like a lifetime looking for
the rest of what his grandfather had not hidden from plain view.) According to
Brent his grandfather after busting out in the East headed West with an old
prospector Winer who claimed he knew where a ton of already mined gold was
located outside of what is now Phoenix. Other parties including a relative of the
guy, the hombre, the Mexican who after all was only going home to what before
the Gadsden Purchase had been part of his own country, who sweat mined the
stuff were on the trail as well. Brent claimed that his grandfather had to kill
that relative, had to kill that partner too or they would have killed him, shot
him dead and left him for the buzzards. Sure thing, Brent. The weird part, the part that has always
made me wonder if all these Old West legends were produced solely in New York
by lazy writers who couldn’t leave the comforts of their hotels, is what
followed. What Jake had to do to keep his kale once he went into Phoenix to cash
in with every hungry vulture in town ready to deal him low. The weirdest story
was about some dame, some ex-whore, Julia something but don’t get hung up on
names since everybody was using aliases then even the respectable citizenry,
who was married to some grifter who couldn’t put two quarters together who took
dead aim at Jake. Minus the husband part. She had been through from hunger long
enough and wanted easy street, wanted to get out of stinking Phoenix, get out
of Arizona which wasn’t even a state then and head to Frisco and the gay life
of spoiled lady, mistress if that was the way things turned out. She was going to use hubby as a decoy
to keep Jake wondering about her, about whether her love was true. After a minute
seeing Julia and hubby in the backstreets laughing together he got the dust out
of his eyes and decided he had to kill the pair, or be killed. Legend has it that
the bones of Julia and hubby are still guarding the empty plot where Jake’s gold
had been. Nice guy right. They say, through Brent again, Jake roamed the hills
at night keeping those who still thought there was still gold aplenty from
entering. The reality is after the Julia bust-up Jake now John Walsh headed to
Frisco and lived a life of splendor and only killing a couple more people who
threatened his way of life by exposing him as another two-bit grifter. Another
hoary legend down.
In Commemoration Of The Centennial Of French Composer Claude Debussy's Death (1862-1918)-The End Of An Era
By Fritz Taylor
I am a child of rock and roll having come of age in the 1950s when names like Elvis, Carl Perkins, Big Joe Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis lit up the firmament, gave meaning to me and what I found out later was to a lot of my generation from places far from Fulton County down in Georgia where Taylors have lived for generations. I was and am still somewhat clueless about classical music, about highbrow music which is somewhat like the right way to put what we thought of such music. (I won’t say the real thing since I don’t want to offend any highbrow types who might peruse this publication. So I was fit to be tied ( I am being polite) when site manager Greg Green decided I would be the perfect person to have put his name, his good name I will have you know on a commemoration piece in the centennial year of the death of the composer Achille-Claude Debussy over in France in 1918.
Here is Greg’s reasoning though which told me a lot about Greg and will tell you something too. 1918 was also the year that Leonard Bernstein was born and he came up with, or somebody came up with, the bright idea that the pair should be book-ended with Debussy as the end of old time impressionist-etched classical music favored before World War I (my usual reference point for 1918) and Bernstein’s as the new age aborning take on classical music -for the masses. And with that slight observation I can say no more on this subject. Nor will I.
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
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.]
[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the now deposed and self-exiled previous site administrator Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin on this site) was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]
[As the above notice has indicated the former site administrator, Allan Jackson, an old friend of mine from high school days and a man whom I supported during the recent intense bitter internal struggle at this site which centered on future direction and purpose, has been deposed and banished to exile (self-banished according to him but seen differently by the survivors). Because the fight was along generational lines, self-styled “Young Turks” and branded “old-timers” as much as anything else new administrator Greg Green, with the endorsement of the newly-revived Editorial Board, has decided to let each combatant give their take on the issues at dispute, if they so desire. The reasoning as far as a I know is to clear the air and to let the reading public know what goes on behind the scenes of every publishing operation, old-fashioned hard copy and new-fangled social media driven before any material sees the light of day.
I have no serious gripe about Allan’s tenure except that I did notice he got more set in his ways as he got older. Was less inclined to “go off the reservation” with any new idea presented to him to expand the subject matter which forms the living experience of the American scene. What I am about to speak of though, hopefully without setting off an avalanche of gripes about the old regime, is related to the subject of today’s post, sports, specifically golf, my favorite sport. Sports, including golf, something which Allan was adamantly against posting material on reasoning that there were an infinite number of sports outlets putting an infinite amount of information about every possible sport or game and we did not need to, could not, compete against that reality. Furthermore although this site is about important nodal social, political and cultural happenings in America which includes an overweening love of sport by significant segments of the population he would pass on assigning or accepting any sport-related posting.
As a general proposition for the direction of this site I would, and did, agree with him on that. Except my sports perspective was not the television, radio, on-line professional and top amateur stuff but down in the average American trenches. How an average Joe goes about the business of doing some sport, again specifically golf, which I enjoy and having been a member of a golf club long enough have plenty of “slice of life” material. No go, no go until recently that is which I will mention in a minute.
What busted me up, almost at one point busted up our friendship which has been pretty solid since high school many, many years ago was that several years ago, Allan was all over the idea of having a significant sports angle posted on this site. And not some “literary” (his term stolen from the real Peter Paul Markin, a big friend in our youth) touch like Ring Lardner did with his baseball series around the title You Know Me, Al in the early 20th century or Damon Runyon with betting horses (or betting on anything) in a million shrewd short stories centered on old Broadway a little later.
Allan’s idea, reflecting his personal interest in college football, was to write, or have somebody write weekly commentaries during the college football season every fall. And for a couple of years, this before I started writing regularly for this site, I guess he thought he had cornered the wisdom on the “sports” market. Thought that doing so would make American Left History more relevant to some anonymous “average Joe” who would then pick up on the various historical and political points which are the hallmark of the site. The hook? Project the winners of each week’s games. Not just the winner’s but as always in sports, certainly in football, provide a numbered point spread for the readers to use when making their bets elsewhere.
There were two problems with that approach. First Allan, unlike the real Markin always known as Scribe, didn’t know the first thing about football, at least what college teams to focus on for betting purposes. Here is how bad I heard it was (he would never talk about it to me when I came on board or when we went out for a few drinks with the other surviving high school guys). Alan actually would run a line on the Harvard-Yale game like anybody outside those two schools gave a fuck about the point spread. Was clueless about such teams as Miami (which he thought was Miami of Ohio and wondered why nobody wanted to bet when they played Kent State) and had no idea outside a certain devotion to Notre Dame about serious big-time college football (our “subway” fan Irish neighborhood “go to” team from way back even when they sucked during our high school days team). Worse, that second problem, was that readers were complaining about a guy whose percentages against the point spread had been about ten percent even doing such an operation. One reader told him to use a Ouija board, a couple have his wife make the picks and numbers out a grab bag, stuff like that.
After a pile of those complains Allan suddenly stopped, stopped cold before the bowls season started the second season. Never to let another live sports piece muddy this site. Until recently when after something like a civil war between us he granted me a reprieve. Let me do a “slice of life” piece about an amateur, very amateur, golf tournament that some friends at my golf club were participating in. I didn’t ask but I assume since the war clouds were looming on the internal disputes after one of the younger writers flat-out refused to write a CD review on Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volume l2 declaring it nothing but mishmash and a distraction that he was trying to shore up support from the older writers as the “Young Turks” were throwing down the gauntlet. When I asked Greg Green about doing a short follow up piece after the smoke settled, the one below, he said such, said maybe I should do a whole series of “slice of life” vignettes if I could jumble the thing up with other sports as well as golf. Si Lannon]
********
This screed, let’s call it a screed since I am up in arms about what I consider a dastardly deed provoking screed time in me, is being written on Saturday morning December 9, 2017 from “not the golf course, that expression to be explained posthaste since “weenie,” there is no other way to put it, Frog Pond PGA Golf Professional Robert Kiley declared yesterday December 8th the end of the golf season as we know it due to what he called, seemingly in panic, a snow emergency demanding all entrances and exits to the property under penalty of death be shuttered for the year since some foul-mouthed weatherman, oops, weatherperson had predicted the first snow of the season. A first snow that however was not projected to start until mid-morning on the 9th.
Well maybe not under penalty of death on the question of entering the property since we are all paid up members who actually “own” the course through our initiation fees and bond and are entitled to enter all year and play golf weather permitting all year as well using temporary green in the winter, but remember this is a screed. He nevertheless has certainly placed himself as a self-serving “weenie” since when the course “closes” for the year he hightails it down to Naples, Florida and golfs his brains out while we all suffer the “hot stove” winter golf roundtable blues until blissful come hither March. And certainly “panic” is an appropriate expression under the circumstances trusting in some holy goof weatherman, person whatever whose error rate is higher than any golfer’s score. (We by the way for those looking for harsher, rougher words use “weenie” rather than some other derogatory term since golf, unlike rough-hewn sports like bowling and badminton, is a gentlemanly and gentlewomanly pursuit and rather civilized except the vast “open secret” of the not too pleasant fates awaiting the golf balls used to further the sport’s aims.
In any case it is approximately 9:30 AM and I stepped outside for a minute and actually had a flake, one flake, hit my nose. I don’t like to cast aspersions on a man’s manhood especially when he holds the ticket to a person’s season-long entertainment but couldn’t certain rugged individual golfers of my acquaintance, my infamous 6:06 club, named as such for the usual tee time which we start playing at most of the season, that is 6:06 AM by the way so you know these rugged individuals are also old rugged individuals, have faced that one, possibly two snowflakes, and played a robust round at “the Frog” before the heavens erupted.
Enough of moaning and groaning about short golf seasons though after all in New England unlike Florida or Arizona the serious season has to come to an end at some point. What I am up in arms about is the line in the sand that was drawn yesterday between real golfers and fakahs (what in the rest of the English- speaking world outside of Boston are called fakers). For the uninitiated modern day notice is by ever quick-mail even in ancient golf world and one and all were informed of the closing by e-mail early Friday morning. Certain real golfers, 6:06 Club golfers, knowing the end was near, showed their metal by dropping everything they were doing once the clarion call panicky weenie e-mail came over cyberspace from Golf Central to announce a cease-fire in place. One guy, Sand-bagger Jackson, the moniker tells all, came running from the netherworld of the City of Presidents where he was working diligently on yet another report. Another, Kevin Zonk, moniker also tells a lot, put down pen abruptly and called a halt to yet another so-called earth-shattering conference about some bogus crisis in the health care system to heed the call to arms and yet another, Redoubtable Steve, came speeding from out of nowhere some fifty miles away ready to let the environment in this wicked old world go asunder to get one final fix, to have one final stab at the brass ring.
On the other side, and by now one and all know what side that is, there are certain guys, okay a certain guy, Kaz, who apparently knows only three letters, who in the interest of making mere filthy lucre debased themselves, no, himself, in order to do mundane things like cover mortgage payments, pay the armed bandits for upcoming educational expenses with daughter college loaming and the like. Now like I said I am not one to cast aspersions on a man’s manhood but what else can one think could be the reason for such an obvious no show. Especially when in the crucial final Frog Pond betting scheme, five dollar a man quota, a certain guy from the City of Presidents found fifteen dollars on the ground, or so it seemed like it.
We all know in the year 2018 that it is impossible to create a human being, maybe any being, out of spare stitched up human parts, and a few jolts of electricity. At least I hope everybody short of say Hannibal Lecter, Lucy Lane or some such holy goof who thought he or she could “do God’s handiwork” on the cheap, out of some “how to manual” knows the ropes enough to have figured that out. You have to go big time MIT scientist and MGH doctor routes running through DNA, RNA, genetic matching and such to do what back in the day only a scary primitive amateur guy working in some foreboding isolated mountain retreat would even dare to contemplate. Back in that 1818 day when Mary Shelley (she of the thoroughbred breeding via Earth Mother feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and French Revolution-saturated anarcho- philosopher William Godwin and later channeling Romantic era poet husband Percy Shelley who hung around with ill-fated heroic Lord Byron and that crowd ) wrote her iconic classis Frankenstein former idea, the stitch and sew part, seemed pretty far out on the surface and would go on to sell scads of books to titillate and disturb the sleep of fevered.
I like the Modern Prometheus part of her title better since like I said science was pretty primitive on that count, not much better that the Greeks creation from earth’s laden clay process, about the way our brother was put together in a slapdash manner but provided an impetus to further discovery. Today where through genetic engineering we have a better understanding of science and medicine who knows what the possibilities are for good or evil. Although at times we need to treat science, maybe medicine too, like a thing from which we have to run. (Example, a very current example, running the rack on discovering everything there is to know about the atom and then have such a discovery threatening a hostage world with nuclear weapons once the night-takers latched on to the military possibilities. At that point running away from the results of the creation like cowardly Victor Frankenstein doesn’t mean a thing, not a thing.)
Still Mary Shelley was onto something, some very worthy thoughts about human beings, about sentient and sapient beings, about where women fit into the whole scheme of things if we can at the flip of a button create life without human intervention which has already accrued to us today in marginal cases and probably would have shocked her 19th sensibilities. A better result if humankind can make itself out of odd spare parts, a little DNA splicing here and there, that also puts a big crimp in the various ideas about God and his or her tasks once he or she becomes a sullen bystander to human endeavor. Not a bad thing not a bad thing at all. But the most beautiful part of her story is the possibility, once again, that we may get back to the Garden to retrofit that Paradise Lost that the blind revolutionary 17th poet John Milton lost his eyesight over trying to in verse form how we lost our human grace. Yeah, tell us that we might be able to get back to the Garden. Nice choice Ms. Shelley.
We know, or at least I know, that Frankenstein aka Modern Prometheus, has gotten a bad rap. Prometheus remember him from subtle Greek mythology and how he was able to create his brethren out of clay. Nice trick. Better, the brother did not leave humankind hanging by offering the gift of fire to move human progress at a faster clip. To keep the race from cold and hunger. Took a beating from psychopath Zeus for his lese majeste by having to roll that rock for eternity. Mister Frankenstein really has been misunderstood especially since the rise of the cinema starting from that first libelous presentation in 1931 which turned him from that misunderstood and challenged youth who was orphaned by a unfit “father” into a scary monster who made kids afraid on nighttime shadows on bedroom walls. There are a million ways that piece of bad celluloid got it wrong but if you will he remember actually learned English, despite being “born” out in the wilds of 19th century Germany, so movie audiences could understand what he was saying. Does that sound like a monster to you? I thought not.
The bad ass in the whole caper is this dolt Victor Frankenstein, the human so-called scientist who built a thing from which he had to run like some silly schoolgirl. If the guy had the sense that God, yes God, gave geese he would not have abandoned his brethren, his avenging angel. Wouldn’t have started a string of murders for which he not his so-called “monster” was morally responsible for. Instead the dink just let the bodies stack up like a cord of wood as he let his “creation” get out of control.
On this site my fellow writer Danny Moriarty has recently taken it upon himself to smash what he has called the unearned reputation of one Lanny Lamont, aka Basil Rathbone, aka Sherlock Holmes the so-called deductive logic detective who also let innocent bodies pile up before he got a bright thought in his dope-addled head about how to stop the carnage. That Danny’s take, Danny not his real name by the way but an alias he had been forced to use to protect himself and his family who have been threatened by a bunch of hooligans who are cultist devotees and aficionados of this Lanny Lamont known as the Baker Street Irregulars.
I don’t know enough about the merits of Danny’s crusade to decide whether he too is also an avenging angel, a blessed brethren in the fight for human progress against the night-takers, against the “alternate fact” crowd. But I do know that the idea behind what he is trying to do is solid. In his case the bare knuckle blowing up of an undeserved legend. This bicentennial year of the existence our beautiful Mister Frankenstein, the Old Testament avenging angel, I am proud to defend his honor against all the abuse he has taken for far too long. That may be a tough road but so be it.
Mary Shelley started something for us to think about on letting things get out of hand though and now we have to try to put the genie back in the bottle.
