Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1920s German Left Communist Leader Karl Korsch-Lenin and the Comintern (1924)

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
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Karl Korsch 1924

Lenin and the Comintern (1924)

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First Published: in Internationale, 1924
Translated by Roy Jameson
Source: Class Against Class;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, for marxists.org 2009;


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I
The first item on the agenda of the Fifth World Congress of the Communist International reads: "Lenin and the Comintern. On the Basic Principles and Propaganda of Leninism." This indicates not only a commitment by the Congress to the spirit of Leninism and a widely perceivable declaration of the will of the participants to solve all questions which stand before them in the spirit of true Leninism. This does not merely indicate that particular problems which have entered into the focal point of the struggle in the last year of the Communist International in Central and Western Europe, and which appear later on in the agenda, should be taken care of from the beginning before the analysis of the economic situation which fills out its second item. Certainly the most important task of the present developmental period of the Communist International, among all of the tasks of the Central and West European and American Communists, consists in the task assigned us by Lenin: "conquering the majority of the most important strata of the working classes." Moreover, this task which is not yet resolved can only be truly solved in the spirit of Leninism: that is, concretely in the spirit of those "consequences" which Lenin derived in a most impressive manner at the end of his classic writing on Radicalism-the infantile sickness of communism-out of the history of the Russian Bolsheviks and out of the experiences of the European parties. "The main task of contemporary communism in Western Europe and America" lies today, in the year 1924, just as Lenin expressed it four years ago, after three years of the so-called united front tactics, now even more obviously than then, in "finding, feeling, and realizing the concrete plan of the not yet entirely revolutionary measures and methods which will lead the masses to a real, decisive, last great revolutionary struggle." But the solution of this practical main task of the Leninists is relevant to an entire row of items on the agenda, and no single one in particular, and only in this sense does it also serve all other tasks with this first item, which speaks of the "Fundamentals and Propaganda of Leninism." It comes down to the following: Today the entire Comintern, after the shattering event of the death of its great founder and leader, V. I. Lenin, can now first show, and must, that it is able and willing to take on the inheritance of Lenin, both theoretically and ideologically, to preserve, to enliven, and to further develop in the present situation the "spirit" of Lenin in its theory and praxis as historical reality, as Leninism. Thus in this manner the Comintern must replace the dead Lenin in his theoretical ideological function through a large powerful collective of living Leninists.[1]

In setting "Lenin and the Comintern" on the agenda of the Fifth World Congress, the executive committee has declared before the entire world that towards the fulfillment of this great task-a wholly colossal task that has never before in world history been set before a party in this form-not only the natural main inheritors of Lenin, the Russian Bolshevik party, but all the other sections of our great Communist party, the Communist International, should theoretically and practically work together. And the Congress itself will have to take the first important steps down this path; its task will be, clearly and completely and in detail, to formulate the slogans of the "Propaganda of Leninism" (which in the agenda are only indeterminately indicated) in a manner valid for the entire Comintern; to point each section of the International to the particularly important individual tasks according to their situation and their state of development, and to determine the larger guiding principles by which the solution of all these tasks is to be carried out.

But the importance of the first item on the agenda of the Fifth World Congress extends much further. One should make clear to oneself that with the closer determination of the manifold partial tasks out of which the "Propaganda of Leninism" is composed, the Congress will have taken a position with regard to the question of "Leninism" only according to the, if we may express it so, technical side, Obviously, this technical side of the question also has an inordinately large importance: The "Propaganda of Leninism" constitutes an important part of the great Communist total task of the "Organization of the Revolution." And, of course the fulfillment of precisely this propagandistic task shows itself to be in those sections of the Communist International which have not yet won state power (that is, therefore, in all European and American sections already under legal, but probably at first under illegal conditions) inordinately more difficult than in the proletarian Soviet Union. In those lands it will therefore, for the most part, have to take on entirely different forms-exactly conforming to the particular situation of each land - which by all means need a more precise explication and determination through the highest organ of the Communist International, the world Congress, But these more or less technical questions comprise in no way the kernel of the matter.

In reality the method of the Bolshevik theory as such is placed on the agenda by the inclusion of the question, "Lenin and the Comintern, On the Fundamentals and the Propaganda of Leninism." Through the clarification of the “Basic Principles of Leninism," and the development of a system of Leninistic propaganda based on these principles in all sections of the Communist International, the entire Comintern should be smelted ideologically into one firm unity, on the common basis of the revolutionary Marxian method in that form which the theoretician of Bolshevism Lenin, "restored" it and oppose it to the falsification and confusions of the so-called Marxists of the united Second International. The third item of the agenda, the Program of the Communist International, as well as the method of our revolutionary Bolshevist theory, is placed before debate in the question of "Leninism."

II
Will the Fifth World Congress be able to solve this immensely important, but at the same time immensely difficult task? Will it be able to formulate the methodological fundamentals of Leninism so sharply and correctly that a methodical and systematic Leninistic propaganda can be constructed on this basis? Will the process of ideological unification within the Communist International have progressed enough to allow all sections and groups of the Comintern to unite in a commitment to one theoretical method which in its essential features is identical for all?

Here immense difficulties arise which nearly exclude a radical solution of the task. On the one hand, we cannot yet at all speak of a unitary commitment in the various sections of the Communist International, and particularly in the German Communist party, to "Leninism" as "the" sole valid method of Marxian theory. On the other hand, in relation to the question, in what the essence of "Leninism" as a method consists, (even among those who count themselves as Leninist), there exist presently several views which depart from one another in essential features. A large number of leading and other Marxian theoreticians who belong to the organization of the Communist International and are prepared in their practical politics to act "according to Lenin," soundly reject in theory the principle of the method of Lenin as "the" restored method of "scientific Marxism." They recognize the Leninist method as one method of orientation, sufficient for the practical-political purposes of the proletarian class struggle in the present period (that is, in a period which in international scope and in European and American national scope, does not yet represent the period of the seizure of political power) - but do not recognize it as the most concrete and truest method of materialistic dialectics, as the restored method of revolutionary Marxism. For them the valid method is either the method of the founder of the German Communist party, Rosa Luxemburg, or they declare the Leninist as well as the Luxemburgian method to be one-sided, and want to recognize only the method applied by Karl Marx in his scientific period of maturity as the true Marxian method. It is not possible in this short essay to even begin a thorough debate with these absolute opponents of the Leninist method (as one, or "the" method of scientific Marxism). This task shall be taken up in the following issues of this journal in the collective work of as large a circle of Communist theoreticians as possible. For the present we suffice ourselves with the observation that the political praxis of Bolshevism and the restored form of revolutionary Marxian theory (by Lenin) builds such an indivisible cohesive whole that we are not able to see how, for example, one can bring it about to take, in regard to the role of the Communist party for the proletarian revolution, as "practical politician," the Communist standpoint on the resolution of the Second World Congress, and simultaneously as "scientific Marxist" to comprehend the relationship between the economic development and the proletarian class struggle in the specific Luxumburgian form of the dialectical materialist method. It seems to us that solely from the standpoint of the wholly "materialistic" materialism of Marx, "restored" by Lenin and advanced one step further, which also comprehends human sensuous activity and praxis as such in its objectifying reality, can the Bolshevist version of the "role of the party" be recognized. On the other hand, from the standpoint of the Luxemburgian dialectic, which on its practical side is not nearly so "materialistic" a dialectic as the Leninist one, there is always a painful remnant of "subjectivism," as regards the Leninist account of the role of the party. But be this as it may, so much seems clear: a resolution on the "Basic principles of Leninism," and a system of "Leninist Propaganda," which could be collectively agreed upon at the Fifth World Congress by Luxemburgian and Leninistic Marxists (to this must be added, thirdly, those Marxists who recognize neither the Luxernburgian further development nor the Leninistic restoration of the Marxian method as genuine and complete Marxism) would unavoidably remain just as unsatisfactory as a Communist program overwhelmingly agreed upon by these same theoreticians for the entire Communist International. The complete clarification of the relation between the Luxemburgian and the Leninistic methods of Marxian theory comprises the indispensable presuppositions for the determination of the "Basic Principles and Propaganda of Leninism."

Irrespective of the conflict between the Luxemburgians and the Leninists, there exists no general agreement today on the question of the essence of Leninism as a theoretical method; or stronger, this agreement exists today even less than previously. And it is also entirely understandable that, at a time when as the consequence of an acute crisis the most important questions of Bolshevik praxis have become the object of a bitter factional controversy, the question of the theoretical method of Leninism has also to be pulled into the maelstrom of the struggle, for the methodological consciousness of a Marxian-Communist party does not stand outside of, or in any sense above, the praxis of the party, but rather builds an important constituent of this revolutionary praxis itself. We should therefore not wonder that we find again in the presently undertaken attempts at a determination of the methods of Leninist dialectics-undertaken by various sides-all the factions which today also practically oppose one another in the struggle over tactics and other practical-political questions inside the Comintern. Particularly interesting in this regard is an essay by the comrade Thalheimer, "On the Application of the Materialistic Dialectic by Lenin in Some Questions of the Proletarian Revolution," which appeared in volumes 1/2 of the new Communist journal Arbeiterliteratur.

III
Comrade Thalheimer wants to explicate the Leninist method, which according to him is nothing but the same Marxist method of materialist dialectics which Lenin applied with the same boldness and with the same foresight and exactness as Marx himself. He shall do this by the development of three particular questions: the question of proletarian dictatorship; the agrarian question, and the question of the nationalist and imperialist wars. The section on the question of the dictatorship ends with the statement that Lenin characterized the Soviet form of the state not as "the finally discovered political form" of the dictatorship of the working class, but rather only as "a new type" of state in which the possibility of deviating "species, varieties, forms" of this type is contained. The section on the agrarian question explains that Lenin, by his treatment of this question, has given "a particularly instructive and exact application of the materialist-dialectical method." (This application consists, according to Thalheimer's portrayal, in the fact that Lenin, in order to save the kernel of the matter of the proletarian revolution-that is, the transfer of the political power to the proletariat-allowed to let fall all "rigid" demands of the previous Bolshevist agrarian program and trust that in the course of "life" everything else would find itself "by itself" "as the result of the power of example, as the result of practical considerations.") In the third and last section Comrade Thalheimer characterizes Lenin's treatment of the national question as "a true model of concrete dialectical analysis." For Lenin, on the one hand, critically destroyed the falsifications of social patriotism, and on the other hand also stressed that under certain conditions even in Europe during the World War the transformation of the imperialist war into a nationalist war would be to be sure, "not probable" but was certainly nonetheless "theoretically not impossible."

It lies far from us to want to stand back even by one hair's breadth from the admiration with which Comrade Thalheimer appraises Lenin's solution to these three important and difficult questions. We must, however, very seriously raise this question: To what extent has Lenin in his treatment of these questions as portrayed by Comrade Thalheimer given such "particularly" instructive and exact model examples of the application of the materialist method of Marxism? In what, for example, consists the particularly instructive and exact use of the materialist dialectical method in the Leninist approach to the agrarian question? Karl Marx also, as is known, recognized the capability of the revolutionary class, as soon as they had raised themselves, "to find immediately in their own situation the content and the material of their revolutionary activity: to strike down enemies, to seize measures given by the need of war, to carry forward the consequences of their own deeds. They set no theoretical undertakings above their own tasks" (Class Struggles in France, Dietzsche edition, p. 31). The theoreticians and practitioners of the Russian Revolution could trust in the middle of the struggle to the immanent, unconscious and natural dialectic with the same right which permeates in "life" and in the revolutionary class struggle as a part of this life "from itself." But does he apply the dialectical method here, precisely where he (to speak with Marx) "denies theoretical undertakings"? Does he apply the dialectic thereby in a "particularly instructive" and "particularly exact" form?

We suggest, rather, that to the contrary, precisely the position is reached where the highly developed materialist dialectic, which according to its conception of the historical process of the proletarian revolution should be fully comprehended, reaches its limit, where the concrete historical process in its material living reality, to be sure, proceeds dialectically but at a certain point in the course of its process cannot be grasped by the dialectician, It belongs to the requirements of an exact theory of the Marxian method not to ignore the existence of this limit; but it is already too much when one wants precisely to see in this the actual kernel of the "materialist dialectics" of Marx and Lenin. Similarly, although in another way, Comrade Thalheimer constructs his two other chosen examples of Lenin's application of the Marxian method in a way which certainly belong to a true materialism, and in no sense to any metaphysical methodology, but nonetheless, for heaven's sake, does not make up the innermost essence of this dialectical materialist method, the main feature and the kernel of materialism, of Marxism and Leninism generally. And to this distortion of the essence of the Marxist-Leninist method, which he accomplishes concretely in his three examples, he further adds, in the introduction and in scattered remarks in his essay, an equally contorted general theory of the essence of this method. He exaggerates the Marxian basic principle that the truth is always concrete into the caricature that the results of materialist dialectical thought in Lenin as well as Marx could not at all, never, and in no form generally be valid beyond the momentary realm of experience out of which it is derived and for which it is determined-as if Marx (e.g, in his letter to Michailowski) and Lenin (e.g., in the introduction to "Radicalism," which has the subtitle: "In what form can one speak of the international importance of the Russian Revolution?") had not very exactly distinguished between those results of their materialist dialectical research which have such general importance and those which do not. What then is a "materialistic-dialectical" method worth which gives us nothing more than that which in some sense reaches out beyond the already known present experience? Or further, as Thalheimer expresses it, brings forth nothing more than historical results, on the one side theoretical reflections (!), analysis of a particular time, on the other only guidelines for the struggle of the proletariat, "likewise in a particular time"?

In reality this new method, created by Comrade Thalheimer and transformed out of the Marxist-Leninist materialist dialectic, has nothing more to do with the materialist dialectics. In his efforts to grasp the materialist methodology of Marx and Lenin totally "materially," as a method of a pure historical science of experience and practice, Comrade Thalheimer has already overstepped the limits of that which one can call materialist dialectics, and has achieved a completely undialectical historicism, positivism, and practicism. While Rosa Luxemburg, as we have indicated above, in her version of human praxis has not wholly become materialistic, and in this one respect has remained a Hegelian dialectician, Comrade Thalheimer, on the contrary, has driven out with the remains of the Hegelian dialectic at the same time everything dialectical in the methodology of Marxian science; the materialist dialectical method of Marx, which essentially is the concrete comprehension of the proletarian revolution as historical process and as a historical action of the proletarian class, transforms itself in Thalheimer into a merely passive, ideological "reflection" of solitary historical factuality’s diverse in time and place.

This theoretical falsification of the essence of the Marxist-Leninist dialectical method leads practically to a devaluation of all the results won by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and others through these methods. And it is fairly easy to see where this tendency towards the devaluation of the results of the Marxist-Leninist research method has come from and where it leads. Let us take the example, repeated a hundred times by Thalheimer that the Soviet state is characterized by Lenin only as a type with possible varieties and species. One can devalue the results of the Marxist-Leninist methodology so much only when one, whether consciously or unconsciously, wants to disengage oneself from these results. The conception of the Soviet state, as only one type of proletarian dictatorship, with a multiplicity of possible forms, makes it possible for the theoretician of "Leninism" to disengage himself from the "rigid" form of the council dictatorship (which is, according to Lenin, capable of further development, but is even so, "the" beginning of "the" socialistic form, of democracy!) and reach the various possible "species, varieties" and degenerations of this "type," for example, the Saxony "workers' government." And likewise with all other "results" of the Marxist and Leninist theory. If they all are purely "historical creations," bound to their particular historical presuppositions, applicable only to the relation of a particular time and land, then it is self-evident that under new relations, against new experiences, and changed political needs all of these previous "results" of Marxism would lose their validity and could and must be replaced by new knowledge and guidelines, in which these new situations now "are reflected" for the "Leninist" application of the materialist dialectic. In transforming the revolutionary dialectical materialism of Marx and Lenin into a no longer dialectical and therefore also no longer revolutionary (and the converse: no longer revolutionary and thus also no longer dialectical), purely historical, empirical science and practice, Comrade Thalheimer posits under the seductive clothing of "Leninism" actually a method which by tendency is opportunistic and reformistic in place of the revolutionary method of Marxism.

IV
We have treated Thalheimer's conception of the Leninist method with such detail not only because Comrade Thalheimer has been named as the second speaker on the "question of the program" at the Fifth World Congress, and thus for that reason will be heard at the Congress with particular attention on the question of the essence of Leninism as methodology. More importantly, it was crucial to show by a typical example, in detail and clearly, that the attempt of a determination of the "Basic Principles of Leninism," and particularly a fixing of the essence of the Leninist method at the Fifth World Congress is hound up not only with great present difficulties, but beyond this also with certain dangers which are all the greater in so far as they remain very much unrecognized and unwatched precisely in this seemingly purely theoretical region, far removed from the practical struggle of the factions. Recently there have been attempts to smuggle in under the revered, revolutionary flag of "Leninism," various revisionistic, reformistic, opportunistic and liquidating contraband in the praxis and the theory of revolutionary communism. And in its innermost foundation the theory of Leninist method which Thalheimer has now formulated signifies only a false theory of a false political praxis. Just as the opportunist and reformist united front tactic is related to the revolutionary method of agitation and mass mobilization applied in Germany since the Leipzig Party Congress, so does the "Leninist" method of Thalheimer and his close comrades relate to the genuine method of revolutionary Leninism, that is to the dialectical method of revolutionary Marxism completed and restored by Lenin. The Fifth World Congress, in the explication of the fundamentals of this position, will have to erect particular protective walls against the rising flood of communist revisionism in the questions of the program and in the question of the Basic Principles of Leninism, just as with all other, immediately practical questions of Communist politics. By the fulfillment of this negative function it can powerfully counteract the threatening collapse of the completed method of revolutionary Marxist science restored by Lenin, which in its essence is nothing other than the theoretical consciousness of the revolutionary actions of the proletarian class. For a positive fixation of the essence of Leninism as method, the present moment in the development of the Comintern is just as little appropriate as for the fixation of a final Communist program, valid for an entire epoch of Communist politics.

Note

[1] More on this can be found in the last section of Zinoviev's essay, "V. I. Lenin--Genius, Teacher, Leader, and Human," nos. 31/32 of KI, and in a special essay by Bela Kun, "The Propaganda of Leninism," in no. 33.


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When All Hell Broke Out And The Army Half-Mutinied In The Heat Of The Vietnam War-One Generation of ’68 Story On The 50th Anniversary Of His Induction-And Maybe A Cautionary Tale-For The Army

When All Hell Broke Out And The Army Half-Mutinied In The Heat Of The Vietnam War-One Generation of ’68 Story On The 50th Anniversary Of His Induction-And Maybe A Cautionary Tale-For The Army    

By Frank Jackman

Some anniversaries like say the start of the French, American and Russian revolutions are world-historic events and should be given a nod to every five of ten years in a big way complete with updates on where they stand in the up and down of human history. (I remember being somewhat shocked when Zhou-En-Lai  the old Communist foreign minister under Mao who never was on the losing side of a faction fight remarking that the lessons of the French Revolution had not run their course in his time-today either.) Same with specific events related to decisive political events like the establishment (and demise) of the leftist historic Paris Commune of 1871 which gets commemorated in this publication every year hence such awkward designations as 144^th and so on. Then there is the purely personal political events commemoration like the one mentioned in the headline to this piece-the also decisive 50^th anniversary of my induction into the U.S. Army in January 1969 which in its own way has reverberated unto this day. (Strictly private personal events like birthdays, weddings, and new relationships are found in appropriate places in stories written for this and other publications by me and others some who like myself were “present at the creation” in 1974 when this whole business got started.)

I was, frankly, not going to make any effort to commemorate this personal event since the story has been told several times by various writers here who know what happened, and what by the same token, had happened to them in that unhappy youth time which ravaged this country to the core and we have been fighting a rearguard action ever since for not winning back then when the world was young and we were knee-deep in seeking a newer world.  That cohort of writers among those who I grew up with in the desperately poor Acre section of North Adamsville took different routes than I although we wound up in the same place after the dust was cleared-forevermore hostile to wars, and rumors of war which have plagued our existences since then.

The initial impetus for deciding to “tell all” about that military experience had been oddly in the response by several readers to a recent film review of the 2018 film The Post where I mentioned in passing my own way of opposing the Vietnam War when it counted as did heroic whistle-blower Dan Ellsberg in “leaking” what became The Pentagon Papers  to the public via the major newspapers. The gist of what these readers said is that they were unaware of my experience (a few related their own experiences at the time monotonously familiar) and that I should tell my story on my own hook, as a cautionary tale if nothing else.           

That readership urging would not have been enough though if on an assignment for another publication I had not landed in San Francisco to follow up on that story (and where I am writing this piece). As is not unusual these days San Francisco for me and other old time Acre corner boys like Alex James is flooded with memories of the late Pete Markin, another of the cohort I grew up with, who couldn’t go the distance, who fell down for a lot of reasons including sheer hubris and wound up with a couple of slugs in his head done in not so sunny Sonora, in Mexico when some outlandish drug deal which was going to put him on easy street went very wrong under circumstances which are still shrouded in mystery. Just the way the bastard would have liked it.  I was not thinking so much of Pete’s military service where he was fatefully in more ways than one drafted, also inducted into the U.S. Army about a year before I was but the halcyon days of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he was the first to partake in and dragged the rest of us, most of us I think except Brad Webber, out here to the Western end of the world, to the place where everything goes to the China Seas. 

I won’t go into detail on that 1967 experience, or on what amounted to Markin’s fateful decision to drop out of college to see what was happening out here which in turn led to that induction notice because I have, and others as well, especially when Allan Jackson, also one of the Markinp-dragged crowd was the site manager before being pushed out by the younger writers. The only thing I will say is that Pete was really a prophet when he somehow sensed early in the 1960s when the rest of us were worried about getting a car, getting laid, getting dough all mixed together he kept harping that a new breeze was coming-and then it came. Too bad the silly bastard that we still shed tears over every time we mention his name couldn’t have gotten out of his own way. Yeah, the silly beautiful bastard who has left us here to mourn him fifty years later.

Talking to the guys I am still in touch from back in the Acre as well as the few who write here on occasion, I have been taken aback by how much that whole period of the Vietnam War affected every guy who came of military age. I have mentioned the Acre already and the way the war devastated a lot of us. And not just in the Acre but our generation, our baby-boomer generation, what Sam Lowell was the first in our group to call the Generation of ’68 and that sticks out as the right way to put the matter now with some pride. Most of the stories though from the Acre are like Johnny Blade’s, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, 1946-1967 whose name is forever on the North Adamsville town hall memorial and down in black granite in Washington. Johnny could hardly wait to get into the Army, wait to get at the commies the government was always talking about who needed some killing and win himself some glory.

Johnny along with the recently departed Jimmy Higgins, who we are still shedding a few tears for our long last youth over, was the “muscle” for our corner boy corner in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor a valuable asset when trouble was around. Johnny Blade got all he asked for in Vietnam, and then some. Laid his head down, fell down in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta for no good reason. After I did what I did in the Army which will be described below it took a long time and the intervention of our old corner boy leader Frankie Riley to get Johnny’s parents to even talk to me, to stop disowning and disrespecting me in the neighborhood even after I long ago left the place.  

It is hard even now to overestimate how strong the ethos of the Cold War Red Scare night which gripped the childhoods and neighborhoods of the Generation of ’68 brethren. The Acre and as far as I can tell most neighborhoods in most cities we similarly smitten. We believed in whatever it was our government, mostly when it counted the WWII hero Grandpa Ike, POSTUS during the coldest periods of that freeze. Bought into some murky variation of the need to kill every Red under the bed, to turn in every mommy if she was a commie to keep the Russkies from our humble doors. To keep the satanic beasts from letting us breath the fresh air of so-called democracy and loveless capitalism. Even though we were literally the poorest of the poor with Markin’s family, no, I stand corrected Jimmy Higgin’s family down at the Bottoms section of the Acre near the river at the very bottom in a tiny shack of a house with five brothers and how they moved in the place after a recent visit for his funeral I don’t know.

This in the “golden age of the working man” we hear about now in retrospect, but it never came down to us, no way. Still we believed what we believed about whatever the civics and history books said and whatever our leaders worked out over us. If you don’t believe me ask your parents, grandparents but I hope not great-grandparents what it was like come air raid drill time during the present at the creation nuclear weapons time when we all huddled, worthlessly when you think about it, under desks, trash cans whatever would “protect” us from the blast. Yeah, we had powerful enemies and no quarter was to be given, none asked for either.         

This is the set-up for us, for the corner boys from Tonio’s Pizza Parlor and a million other locations like 125^th Street in Harlem, the working-class quarters of Toledo in Ohio, the wide swarths of the barrios of East LA, along the decimated and dishonored Hopi trail of tears out where the states are square. The guys, maybe not the smartest guys or the most well-read but at least not unpatriotic as we knew the term then. When the deal went down, whatever our sympathies, whatever we had intended to do- we went. My case was only slightly more problematic since I had a girlfriend who was adamantly and fervently against the war while I was more lukewarm in my opposition and needed the wake-up call of induction before I figured where I stood. I was in 1968 more interested in the real chance once Lyndon Johnson abandoned the field to get beautiful newer world ruthless Irish Bobby Kennedy elected POSTUS and I could proceed with my childhood dream of being a maker and shaker in the political world, what I would later call bourgeois politics but then my “meal ticket” out of that poverty I knew only too well.        

Things did not work out that way in that endlessly action-packed year where decisions had to be made on the fly or you would get left in the dust.  Sure, when that notice came to take my physical and then the notice to report for induction I had my doubts, had small, very small thoughts of not going like a lot of guys, the draft resisters but I couldn’t quite get there then. Besides, truth be told, where was I to get any support for such a bold step. Not from home, not from the blessed Acre, and not from the now mostly already in the military corner boys who were far from ready to bring down the government if necessary-then. Certainly not in the ethos of the neighborhood with a few guys, including Johnny Blade having already laid down their heads in some godforsaken jungle or rice paddy.

Certainly not in my family filled with veterans including my Marine Corps father having done their duty when called if they hadn’t volunteered out of hand like my father did come Pearl Harbor. It would be many years and much estrangement before my father, and by extension my mother, would finally see for me what I did was right-and honorable even if he, they believed in the war well pass anybody except may Senator Henry Jackson and AF of L-CIO President George Meany. So I went, went one cold winter morning in January very early and dark up to the Boston Army Base for induction.

Inducted and sent not as expected to Fort Dix in New Jersey where all the other corner boys did their basic training but to Fort Jackson down in South Carolina and from there to Fort Gordon in the red clay of Augusta, Georgia home of the Masters golf championship and ex-POSTUS Grandpa Ike’s favorite course, or at least that is where they let him play. That distance from home and some resources would make things harder in the end but let’s back up. Back up to that trip down to Fort Jackson where I stayed for about three days, three days when I realized two things, the obvious one that I had made a mistake by allowing myself to be inducted and there was no way I was going to Vietnam which even then had my name written in blood on it.  

Being in the South being far away from any support system, or advise I went through the basic training and then when I was given AIT as my military career assignment, AIT meaning Advanced Infantry Training down in Alabama I knew the die was cast, that I was up shit’s creek. Guys were being so chewed up and spit out in Vietnam that every AIT guy knew exactly where he was going once the training was completed. Vietnam just then was the only place in need of such services. Fortunately, as I would learn later when I met guys in the stockade, my orders allowed me thirty days leave before reporting to Fort Lewis out in Washington for transport to Vietnam.  Some guys were ordered immediately to Vietnam with not much time to do anything but kiss their asses good-bye, that is what one guy said. He had been sent under guard to Fort Lewis and left there only to go AWOL and a bunch of other stuff once he was released on the base. He went a different route for the same reason and would up as I in the same place-the only virtuous place in the military-the stockade.      

       

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was somewhat lucky that my number came up in 1969 rather than say 1966, 1967 since the anti-war movement in its radical activist end had expanded from supporting and making counselling available for draft-resisters to include military resisters as the war dragged on with no end in sight despite grand illusion lies by high military commanders that there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel-and there was when the North Vietnamese pulled the hammer down in, well, 1975 long after what happened to the Acre corner boys happened. Between the citizen soldiers, the rough and tumble eyes at least half opened draftees less and less eager to go to the quagmire as the reports came back to the neighborhood, or as the funeral trains got longer who were being impressed into the military and guys who had come back disillusioned or fucked-up the Army was getting less and less reliable. The anti-war movement began to see that you needed to get to the GIs if the war was going to stop. The government, certainly the Nixon government, was not going to stop the damn thing, not with “peace with honor” their eternal mantra.

That shift helped me personally for when I got back to North Adamsville I immediately contacted the Quakers at the Friends Meeting House in Cambridge. Well not immediately since I still had enough corner boy in me to check up with whoever was around and have a few drinks to drown my sorrows, and theirs. Also, that pesky anti-war girlfriend turned out to have, and I quote, a new-found respect for me now that I had “gotten religion,” my term, on the war. Was ready to do something and so was very, well very and let’s leave it at that. No, let’s leave it at a variation of the famous photograph of three fetching young women, women dressed for the times with the slogan “girls say yes, to guys who say no-to the draft. So yes, not exactly immediately.)

Funny, being in the heavily student Boston area a hotbed of anti-war sentiment where you could go to an anti-war march, rally or something any day of the week I was not sure where to go, who to see, and my girlfriend while an activist was not sure either. By something like a default I turned to the Quakers since I knew they were historically anti-war and had a vague notion picked up from one of the ubiquitous anti-war posters plastered in Harvard Square that they were offering military counselling to distressed G.I.s., to my situation.       

I do not remember all the details of the first meeting with the counsellor (who was not a Quaker but knew enough about military procedure to be of great service to me and others). Here is the outline of the plan he suggested as to options (“suggested” an important word since other terms might have led to serious legal, and political, repercussions) which should be enough to satisfy those who want to know my military service story. Since I had orders to go to Fort Lewis and wanted to stay in the Boston area to get help and be with connections that mattered, I had to go AWOL, absent without leave, a military crime treated lightly or seriously depending on the length of absence and other factors. Go AWOL for at least thirty days, better given Army bureaucracy, hell, any bureaucracy, in order to be “dropped from the rolls” out in Fort Lewis. Meaning I was essentially a free agent, free for a minute from those orders hanging over me. Then I was to turn myself in for punishment and reassignment. That turning in place by design Fort Devens about forty miles west of Boston and so a good place to work out my plans from.             

After turning myself in I was, beyond whatever paperwork and punishment would accrue from the AWOL charge, to put in paper work for a conscientious objector discharge. That a hard dollar once you were in the military and not based just then on some historic religion training like with Peace Quakers or Mennonites but not impossible. 1969, ,and going forward also turned out to lucky for me since various federal lower court decisions and even an important Supreme Court one which basically set the same standard for military COs as civilian were beginning to force the military to be more serious about such applications. I put in the application although I was too sanguine to expect much since a number of guys who I had met at Devens in the same boat as I were being turned down. As I was, having based my argument on a slight Catholic/ethical axis not what the tight-assed Army standard would regard as a CO. Turned down despite, and this would be important later, being declared by all the line of interrogators to be “sincere” in my beliefs.  That negative result meant I was to prepare myself for a reissue of orders to Fort Lewis and then to Vietnam.

Here is where the Quakers, and I will always love Quakers whatever theological differences we have, came to the rescue-they provided me with a lawyer, a lawyer who was building a reputation for getting military guys out of one kind of trouble or another, a new category of lawyer, a civilian lawyer going up against the Army justice system.  (Rather than depend on some Army JAG, Army lawyer, who was strictly a company man.) Although it was a close thing, a very close thing since there were those in the Army at Devens, lifers who hated me and wanted to take me to Fort Lewis under armed guard that lawyer was able to get a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) from a federal judge in Boston which kept me under that court’s jurisdiction while the merits of the case were being heard. Whee! (Those lifers were literally searching the fort for me to handcuff me and sweep me away the very day the TRO was issued before it took effect.)         

That lifer hatred was not just happenstance. You see once I got “religion” I no longer feared what would happen to me, no longer was a soldier, was an anti-war fire-eater. Once the Army breaks its hold on you, that fear of the stockade that very basic training sergeant warned you against anything was possible. One day before that TRO took effect and while I was waiting for something to move on my case I decided to join a Quaker-organized anti-war rally outside the front gate at Fort Devens. In uniform and during duty hours. Result: Special Court-Martial-the max, six months. Since my case was working its way slowly through the federal court system, I actually served that six months minus some good time.

Once I got out of the stockade on that charge I decided to continue my personal resistance and refused to wear the uniform. Result: Special Court-Martial-the max, six months. Toward the end of that second six months (plus pre-trial time in the stockade this time) that writ of habeas corpus came through and a few weeks later I was discharged, honorably discharged if you can believe that since the judge had decided the Army had screwed up not granting my CO application. Otherwise, who knows I might still be doing an endless series of six month sentences. Tough, yes, tough for lots of reasons, political and personal. But know this I would probably not fifty years later still be fighting the good fight against the endless wars of our times if I hadn’t had that baptism of fire. That can be the cautionary tale if you like.           

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Out In The Jukebox Saturday Night –Sweet Little Rock and Roller

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Out In The Jukebox Saturday Night –Sweet Little Rock and Roller

Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Out In The Jukebox Saturday Night –Sweet Little Rock and Roller

Chuck Berry – Sweet Little Rock 'n Roller Lyrics

Yeah, nine years old and sweet as she can be
All dressed up like a downtown Christmas tree
Dancin? And hummin? A rock抧抮oll melody
She抯 the daughter of a well-respected man
Who taught her to judge and understand
Since she became a rock抧抮oll music fan

Sweet little rock'n'roller
Sweet little rock'n'roller
Her daddy don抰 have to scold her
Her partner can抰 hardly hold her
Her partner can抰 hardly hold her
She never gets any older
Sweet little rock抧抮oller

Should have seen her eyes when the band began to play
And the famous singer sang and bowed away
When the star performed she screamed and yelled "Hooray!"

Ten thousand eyes were watchin? Him leave the floor
Five thousand tongues were screamin? 揗ore and More!? Br> And about fifteen hundred people waitin? Outside the door

Sweet little rock'n'roller
Sweet little rock'n'roller
Sweet little rock'n'roller
Sweet little rock'n'roller
Sweet little rock'n'roller
Sweet little rock'n'roller
Sweet little rock'n'roller

*********
Recently Josh Breslin,  my old travelling companion from the great yellow bus down the nirvana highways days out West in the late 1960s (the West is the best, get here and we will do the rest was the Jim Morrison-etched mantra driving us out there) told me, that he had, seemingly endlessly, gone back to his early musical roots, his coming of age in the 1950s golden age of rock (and mine too), now conceded even by him (me, I am agnostic on the question) to correctly carry the designation classic rock. Although Josh had his huff and puff sneaking out of the house at midnight heading via subway to Harvard Square to see if could be washed by the new breeze coming through the land folk music minute in the early 1960s that I can attest to when he later tried to foist the records off on me (you know the Village/Old Town/North Beach faded minute when all those guys and gals like Dylan/Baez/Collins/Odetta/Rush/Clancy Brothers/Van Ronk/Ochs/Paxton, Christ even old guard Pete Seeger and so on who had previously sung their hearts out for the basket in the up and coming coffeehouses and to move, or better if you believe the stories  Dave Van Ronk tells, clear the beat poetry crowds to bring in a new crowd got their chance to front). Had his blues phase, you pick ‘em country or electric, after he saw Howlin’ Wolf practically eating his harmonica on How Many More Years. Had as well an outlaw country cowboy second with Waylon and Willie. And still later did a retro Duke/Count/Charlie/Dizzy retro jazz thing although he has always claimed that he was always a child of his times, a “child of rock ‘n’ roll.” I believe him if that helps.

To show his adherence to that truth Josh had spent some time reviewing various compilations of a commercially produced classic rock series that went under the general title Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die. That task was not as easy as it would seem since those commercial interests have tapped into their demographic pool and have caught our generation, the generation of ’68 in a nostalgic mood, or in a retro- buying mood. Ready to buy fifteen volume sets just to get maybe thirty gems (if they have not caught onto iTunes or YouTube, an iffy proposition for our generation just on the edge of needing to be computer literate). So there are many (although with a fair amount of overlap) compilations out there honing in on the “oldies but goodies” bug that has infiltrated the AARP-worthy set. He has noted that while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes, you know novelty stuff like Purple People-Eaters or goof things like Who Wears Short Shorts, it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for our generation who had just started to tune into music. (We have talked a great deal about the various failures, one hit johnnies and janies, and the “never should haves,” although I hope not endlessly.) 

I had to laugh when Josh explained his take on the scene back then.  We had our own little world, or as some hip sociologist trying to explain that Zeitgeist today might say, our own “sub-group cultural expression.” I, Josh too maybe since we are working to mine the same memoires lately, have already talked about the pre 7/11 mom and pop corner variety store hangout with the tee-shirted, engineered-booted, cigarette (unfiltered, of course Luckies preferred) hanging from the lips, Coke, big- sized glass Coke bottle at the side, pinball wizard guys thing. And about the pizza parlor jukebox coin devouring, playing some “hot” song for the nth time that night, “hold the onions I might get lucky tonight,” dreamy girl might come in the door thing. Of course, the soda fountain, and…ditto, dreamy girl coming through the door thing, merely to share a sundae, natch. And the same for the teen dance club, keep the kids off the streets even if we parents hate their damn rock music, the now eternal hope dreamy girl coming in the door, save the last dance for me thing.

Needless to say you know more about middle school and high school dance stuff, including hot tip “inside” stuff about manly preparations for those civil wars out in the working- class neighborhood night, than you could ever possibly want to know, and, hell, you were there anyway (or at ones like them). Moreover, I clued you in, and keep this quiet, about sex, or rather I should say “doin’ the do” in case the kids are around, and about the local “custom” (for any anthropologists present) of ocean-waved Atlantic “watching the submarine races.”

That is maybe enough memory lane stuff for a lifetime, especially for those with weak hearts. But, no, your intrepid messenger Josh felt the need to go back indoors again and take a little different look at that be-bop jukebox Saturday night scene as it unfolded in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The jukebox scene where we usually heard some sounds for the first time and we either worked out some deal to buy the record at Smitty’s Record Shop up in Adamsville Square or cadged nickels and dimes to endlessly play the tune until it got worn out (or we got worn out hearing it and therefore moved on). Hey, you could have found the old jukebox in lots of places in those days. Bowling alleys, drugstores (drugstores with soda fountains- why else would healthy, young, sex-charged high school students go to such an old-timer-got-to-get medicine-for-the-arthritis place. Why indeed, although there are secrets in such places that I will tell you about some other time when I’m not jazzed up to talk about Josh  be-bop juke-boxing around the town), pizza parlors, drive-in restaurants, and so on. Basically any place where kids were hot for some special song and wanted to play it until the cows came home. And had the coins to satisfy their hunger.

Josh said a lot of it was to kill time waiting for this or that, although the basic reason was these were all places where you could show off your stuff, and maybe, strike up a conversation with someone who attracted your attention as they came in the door. I agree with the latter point although the real killing time didn’t come until we hit the Army, and later. Here is where Josh showed me he was not kidding about his devotion to classic rock when one night at a local bar in Cambridge he showed me the cover artwork on one compilation showed dreamy girls waiting around the jukebox for their platters (records, okay) to work their way up the mechanism that took them from the stack and laid them out on the player. That said to me “There is your chance, boys, grab it,” like in the old days. See these were girls just hanging around the machine. Some cashmere-sweatered, beehive-haired (or bobbed, kind of), well-shaped brunette (or blond, but I favored brunettes in those days) chatting idly was worth at least a date if you moved fast or, more often, a telephone number to call. Not after nine at night though or before eight because that was when she was talking to her boyfriend. Lucky guy, maybe.

But after looking at that artwork (worthy of Edward Hooper, for the clear visual message it sent, believe me) I reminded Josh where the real skill came in. That was when you were just hanging casually around the old box, especially on a no, or low, dough day waiting on a twist (slang for girl in our old working- class neighborhood) to come by and put her quarter in (giving three or five selections depending what kind of place the jukebox was located in) talking to her friends as she made those selections. Usually the first couple were easy, some now faded old boyfriend memory, or some wistful tryst remembrance, but then she got contemplative, or fidgety, over what to pick next. Then you made your move-“Have you heard Only You?” NO! “Well, you just have to hear that thing and it will cheer you right up.” Or some such line.

Of course, you wanted to hear the damn thing. But see, a song like that (as opposed to Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Rock and Roller, let’s say) showed you were a sensitive guy, and maybe worth talking to … for just a minute, before the “I got to get back to my girlfriends, etc., etc.” line came at you. Oh, jukebox you baby. And guess what. On that self-same jukebox you were very, very likely to hear some of the songs on the compilation Josh showed me. Let me mention the stick outs (and a few that worked some of that “magic” mentioned above on tough nights). The other “has beens” you don’t have to waste your time on:

Oh Julie, The Crescendos (a great one if you knew, or thought you knew, or wanted to believe that girl at the jukebox’s name was Julie); Lavender Blue, Sammy Turner (good talk song especially on the word silly dilly billy word play); Sweet Little Rock and Roller, Chuck Berry (discussed above, and worthy of consideration if your tastes ran to those heart-breaking little rock and rollers. I will tell you about the ONE time it came in handy for me sometime); You Were Mine, The Fireflies; Susie Darlin’, Robin Luke (ditto the Julie thing above); Only You, The Platters (keep this one a secret, okay, unless you really are a sensitive guy). So, yeah, Josh is a “child of rock ‘n’ roll” in good standing. How about you? 

[You should know one thing about Josh, and it is as true of him today as it was in Big Sur or down in La Jolla when we were running the yellow brick road out West. Once he gets onto something he will see it through until the end. That is the case with his recent passion to remember his “child of rock ‘n’ roll” youth. I mentioned, I think, that he had just completed a review of the multi-volume Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die series that he had shown me one compilation from, the one with the girls hanging around the jukebox waiting, waiting for something.

Well there are many compilations out there (and as Frank will gladly tell you there is a fair amount of overlap between competing sets) but what Frank is looking at now is the series titled The Golden Age of Rock. When he mentioned that one night when we were sitting on a couple of barstools at Rich’s, the “oldies but goodies” place in downtown Boston, having a drink he also added that he thought that I should assist him in future efforts since I was a member in good standing of that generation as well. It took all my persuasive powers to disabuse him of the notion that I needed to hear about two hundred, maybe three hundred songs, many which I did not like, in order to get that maybe thirty gems that I, we, died for back then. So I turned him down but when I got home I thought if the artwork was as good at jogging the memory as that jukebox scene, well, maybe…]          

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- When The Sea Changed -With Elmore James’ Look On Yonder Wall In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- When The Sea Changed -With Elmore James’ Look On Yonder Wall In Mind  

Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

*******

When The Sea Changed -With Elmore James’ Look On Yonder Wall In Mind  

Elmore James – Look On Yonder Wall Lyrics

Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
I got me another woman, baby, yon' come your man

Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
I got me another woman and, uhh, baby, yon' come your man

Your husband went to the war,
And you know it was tough, uhh
I don't know how many men he done killed,
But, I know he done killed enough.
Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
I got me another woman, now baby, yon' come your man

Oh yeah
I love you baby, but you just can't treat me right,
Spend all my money and walk the streets all night
But, look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
I got me another woman, and baby, yon' come your man

Songwriters: ELMORE ELMO JAMES, MARSHALL SEHORN

Look On Yonder Wall lyrics © GULF COAST MUSIC LLC
…who knows when he first began to notice the difference, notice that the music, his parents’ music, the stuff, as they constantly told him, that got them through the “Depression and the war,” (that Depression being the Great Depression of the 1930s when all hell broke loose and guys and gals were on the ropes, on the road, onto sometime they could never figure out and the war, World War II in which they slogged through or waited anxiously at home) on his ears. Of course they, his parents specifically, no question, and their kindred later designated the “greatest generation” by younger fawning pundits and now considered accepted wisdom as they have begun to die off and no longer play on center stage although this sketch is about his generation, the self-designated generation of ’68, so we will let that issue pass. The parents having gained that distinction for having suffered the pangs of hunger, displacement, the struggle for survival, the train smoke and broken dreams heading west (hell maybe in any direction that was not where they lonesome, separate, at luck’s end were) looking for work, looking for a new start in the 1930s. Then gathering themselves up when the war clouds turned into live ammunition lined up to fight whatever evil had reared its head in this wicked old world in the 1940s, or waited at home fretfully reading the casualty lists as they were posted in home towns across America.

Of course like every generation since they invented that term “generation” and put some special onus on each one going back to Adam and Eve, maybe before, they had their own tribal music to get them through the tough spots, to dance to or just to find some secluded spot and listen to. And that would have been fine with him that secluded spot idea (although at the first grating on the ears time he was too young to be aware of what that secluded spot stuff portended but he picked the idea up easily later when he came of age, girl noticing came of age) except he had to face that big old family RCA console radio plucked right down in the living room every day blaring away while his mother did her housework, his father listened after work, and  they both got all dreamy together over WJDA every Saturday night when for five hours, five hours count them, the station endlessly played “the songs that got them through the Depression and the war.”  Jesus.             

Still although it was a daily plague on his ears he was not sure when he noticed that he had had enough of silky-voiced Nat King Cole all smooth and mellow and ready to put him to sleep (or worse), the Inkpots spouting off  and gumming things up by talking the lyrics for half the song on If I Didn’t Care or his mother’s favorite I’ll Get By (the song she said that got her through the war what with her working as a clerk down at the Naval Depot in Hullsville at the time his father was Marine island-hopping in the Pacific and while she fretted over those casualty list postings in front of the Daily Gazette office), Bing Crosby (not the 1930s Bing of Yip Harburg’s Brother, Can You Spare A Dime but the later pretty-boy mellow White Christmas stuff) and the like. He had moreover become tired unto death of the cutesy Andrews Sisters and their antic bugle boy, rum and Coca-Cola, under the apple tree music, tired of Frank (later called the “chairman of the boards” but still way too placid for him although he remembered his mother showing him a photograph of perfectly sane looking girls in bobby-sox swooning all over the place to get next to him at some theater in New York City ), Frankie (Lane okay) and Dean (before Jerry), tired of Tony fly me to the moon, Benny and his very tired clarinet Buddha swing, the whole Harry James/Jimmy Dorsey/Tommy Dorsey/Duke/Count/Earl/King and whatever other royalty they could latch onto big band sound and even blessed Charley/Dizzy/Miles be-bop, be-bop jazz (stuff that he would later, way later, crave when he went “beat” joined, joined late that big beat fellahin world Jack Kerouac was always going on and on about). Yes, yeah, tired unto death craving some sound that moved him, some sound that he could sway his rigid locked-up boyish man hips to. A break-out for sure.

Maybe it had been because he was showing serious signs of growing pains, of just being a pain like his parents had taken to calling him more and more often lately, and just wanted to be by himself up in his room (as the oldest boy he got the single room once the family moved to the new three bedroom house from that cramped apartment over on Elmer Street where all three boys had to sleep in one room and there were more fights over that fact mercifully done now) and let the world pass by until his growing pains passed by. It started one day in 1956 as far as he could remember the first time that he asked his parents to turn off the radio, or turn off WJDA, or turn on this new station that one of the kids at school was talking about coming out of Boston, WMEX the call letters he thought. This kid, Richie, a good kid who knew a lot about music swore that one of the commercials on the show was about Max’s Drive-In over on the other side of North Adamsville and a place where his parents had taken him and his brothers for burgers and fries which if you could believe this was the new “hot” spot because Max had installed speakers in each stall so that every hip guy and swaying gal could listen to WMEX while munching on a burger or swallowing a French fry. Listen to stuff that was Frank-Benny-Duke-Bing-less. Something was in the wind.    

Something may have been in the wind but he was still filled with all kinds of teen angst and alienation (no, he did not use those terms to describe his condition and only learned the terms much later after much turmoil, a few beefs with the parents, and after reading a Time magazine article about kids today going to hell in hand basket what with hanging around corners in white tee-shirts and snarls, doing crazy stuff to pass the time of day and listening although he was foggy on the music they described but it sounded interesting which is why he picked up the article from his father’s chair in the first place). Mainly though what was on his mind had been about his growing so fast, fast and awkward, too fast and awkward to figure out what this new found interest in girls was all about. Last year, last year before his parents’ music grated on his ears, they were nothing but giggly girls and a bother but now he could see, well, he could see that they might be interesting to talk to if he could find something to say. Could maybe ease his way in with some music talk like that good guy Richie did. All he knew was that life was tough and made tougher by his parents always saying no, no in principle like there was no other possible answer.    

But here is the funny part his parents, like he found out later when he figured out how parents worked, parents always do and had worked it out as a science, switched up on kids. See one day to placate him (or, heaven forbid, to keep him out of sight and therefore out of mind) they, his usually clueless parents, had gone to the local Radio Shack store and bought him a transistor radio so that he would be able listen to music up in his room rather than lie around the living room all night after his parents had gone to bed changing the dials, their dial settings, looking for some other stations, looking for WMEX to see if Richie was right about Max’s Drive-In, on that damn old family RCA radio which had formed the center piece of the room before the television had displaced it. This transistor radio was a new gizmo, small and battery-powered, which allowed the average teenager to put the thing up to his or her ear and listen to whatever he or she wanted to listen to away from prying eyes. Hail, hail.

And that little technological feat saved his life, or at least help save it. The saving part was his finding out of the blue on one late Saturday night Buster Brim’s Blues Bonanza out of WRKO in Chicago. Apparently, although he was ignorant of the scientific aspects of the procedure, the late night air combined with the closing down of certain dawn to dusk radio stations left the airwaves clear at times to let him receive that long distance infusion. Buster was a mad man monk talking in a drawl like maybe he was from down south, talking jive, talking a line of patter with sing-song words, words that he would later recognize as from the be-bop vocabulary pushed into the orbit of this rock and roll thing some DJ invented (DJs the guys who spun the platters-played the records for the squares who don’t know) for the new sound that was putting a big crimp in vanilla popular music. He immediately sensed that the music emanating from that show had a totally different beat from his parents’ music, a beat he would later find came out of some old-time primordial place when we all were born, out of some Africa cradle of civilization. Then though all he knew was that the beat spoke to his angst, spoke to his alienation from about twelve different things, spoke to that growing pains thing. Made him, well, happy, when he snapped his fingers to some such beat. What he was unsure of, and what he also did not found out about until later, was whether this would last or was just a passing fancy like those Andrews Sisters his parents were always yakking about.

What he didn’t know really was that though that little gizmo he had been present at the birth of rock and roll. Was right at the place where that be-bopping sound was turning into a sway by white guys from the farms down in Tennessee, getting refined by some black guys from the Delta, being turned out by some urban hep-cats from New Jack City and anybody else who could get his hips moving to the new time beat. Geez, and all he thought he was doing was snapping his fingers until they were sore to Elmore James’ Look On Yonder Wall…                

[Sam Lowell, the “he” of the sketch to give him a name, although after looking the story over it really could have been an almost universal teen story in the 1950s from all accounts including that quota of angst and alienation and the vast number of transistor radios sold to clueless parents to placate their unruly tribe, later in life, the way I heard the story, actually became enthralled with the music of his parents’ generation for a while. Kind of saw that they needed that “no ripples” “sentimental journey” waiting by the mailbox, I’ll get by, if I didn’t care” music to get through their tough spots. Of course he also had had his early 1960s folk minute affair, his later 1970s outlaw country cowboy minute and his 1990s be-bop jazz revival so it is hard to tell how deep or how sincerely he imbibed that parents’ music moment. He told a friend of mine, a friend who told me the original story, that whatever else he was still a “child of rock and roll” when the deal went down. Oh, except now via iPods rather than transistor radios.]   

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-They Shoot CD Players (Or iPODs) Don’t They- With Elvis’ Version Of Harbor Lights In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-They Shoot CD Players (Or iPODs) Don’t They- With Elvis’ Version Of Harbor Lights In Mind

Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Harbor Lights Lyrics
(words & music by H. Williams - J. Kennedy)

I saw the harbor lights

They only told me we were parting

Those same old harbor lights

That once brought you to me.

I watched the harbor lights

How could I help it?

Tears were starting.

Good-bye to golden nights

Beside the silvery seas.

I long to hold you dear,

And kiss you just once more.

But you were on the ship,

And I was on the shore.

Now I know lonely nights

For all the while my heart keeps praying

That someday harbor lights

Will bring you back to me.

***********

Some people have asked, although I am not one of them, if there was music before 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, before what is now called the classic age of the genre. Usually such people are young, or were born well after what is now called the classic age of rock and roll became the classic age. So they ask was there music before hip-hop nation beat down the doors, or if any other genre that has struck their interest like techno-rock that might have formed the basis for their question. In fact having thought about the question for a while I got jolted one day when I listened on the radio to an interview with a famous classic rock star who put the question a different manner-will rock and roll ever die? His answer, and this is the part that shocked me for a moment, was there would always be a niche, a niche for Chrissakes, for rock even as now it has moved from the center of the music universe. The shock coming from my own impression that rock and roll as an old time song had it would never die. So rock will fade to the sidelines and be just another piece of entertainment like our pre-rock parents and their swing and jitter-buggery.    

But rock, rock as I knew it, I, Frank Jackman, who lived for the latest 45 RPM records (those were single song two- sided pieces of vinyl which you can find examples of on YouTube when somebody puts a classic rock song up) to hit the stores along with my corner boys was the basis for the question back then. Back in the 1950s when the world was young and America, young America, still had that capacity to wonder before the lamp went out in the next decade. Wonder just like Scott Fitzgerald pointed out about those who founded places like New York City, the Mecca for a lot of things, including the production of those 45 RPM records that I mentioned. People like those Dutch sailors with the Van names must have felt when they saw that “fresh green breast of the new world” coming up the Long Island Sound. And wondering rightly so since what we heard before, heard to perdition was some vanilla stuff that our parents liked but I will get to that later.

In other words time, new millennium time, has left classic rock for the aficionados or for, well, old fogies, you know the AARP-worthy denizens whose demographics form the basis for rock musical compilations and “oldies but goodies” revivals with now ancient heartthrobs from back in the day who have lost a step or three coming out on some massive dwarfing stage bright lights lit and lip-synch, yes, lip-synch their greatest hits (or hit in the case of those important musical one-hit johnnie and janies who formed more of the industry than usually is acknowledged). But there, believe it or not, but “take my word from me” like old Rabbit Brown used to say his song James Alley Blues, were other types of music, music that helped formed rock and roll that I found out about later after I had had my fill of 45 RPM records and corner boys and wanted to dig into the history of the American songbook, see what drove earlier generations of the young to seek their own jailbreak out from their parents music.     

So of course there was music before rock, I had better say classic rock so nobody gets confused, and I have taken some pains to establish the roots of rock back to Mississippi country blues around the turn of the century, the 20^th century, when all those freed slaves who thought they were economically free and not just manacle-free wound up working for Mister in his twenty-eight thousand acres of the best bottomland in Mississippi for a pittance. Kept in line, and here is where the bitch of the thing is by a guy, well, not really a guy but a way of life, a legal, political, economic and social way of life, named after a guy maybe, one Mister James Crow, and so those freed blacks who slaved on Mister’s land had to blow off steam and that was the basic of the blues, and I don’t mean blues like when a guy has a good girl who done him wrong on his mind. Hell that problem was easy to solve. What I mean is when Mister, or his Captain, pushed the pace all week (half a day Saturday included) and every worthy buck and every good-looking gal, big thighed or not, hit Jimmie Jack’s juke joint to listen to some itinerant brother with a broken down guitar (hell maybe just a board and string if times were tough) wail away about that damn Captain, his, the singer’s, unfaithful women and about how “the devil’s gonna get him” if he didn’t stop chasing those very women, drinking that applejack, and gambling his wages away in some back alley crap shoot, for nickels and dimes in the pot (and some of Jimmie Jack’s homemade brew) and got the crowd swaying and clapping their hands to the beat on See See Rider or Mississippi Highwater Rising. Yeah, that’s the start. Okay.

Too far back for you, too much root? Okay let’s travel up the river, the Big Muddy, maybe stop off at Memphis for a drink, and to nurse the act, before hitting the bitch city, Chicago, hog butcher, steel-maker and every other kind of tool and appliance-maker to the new industrial world just ask Carl Sandburg. But also maker by proxy of the urban blues, those old hokey plantation Son House/Charley Patton/ Blind Blake (and a million other guys with Blind in front of their names) juke joint Saturday night full of homemade blues turned electric with the city and turned guys like plain boy Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf (you would laugh at their real names although you would not do that in their presence, especially the Wolf because he would cut you bad, real bad) into the kings of  Maxwell Street and all the streets around with back-up and all putting just the right twist on Look Yonder Wall, Rocket 88, Hoochie Goochie Man and Little Red Rooster (with kudos to Willie Dixon on that one too but first heard not by Wolf but by the “classic” rock the Stones, so how is that for cache). So, yeah, electric blues as they traveled north to the heartland industrial cities

Jazz too maybe a little Duke and Benny swing as it got be-bopped and hurried up the beat, for the drum action, for the “it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing” that took over after a while once the old tine Scott Fitzgerald Jazz Age got waylaid by the Great Depression and World War II. But Dizzy, Charlie, Thelonius too with that cool, detachment mood that spoke to the beat down, the beaten down, the big blast beaten fellahin world. Certainly throw in rhythm and blues, north and south, throw in big time one Mister Big Joe Turner toot-tooting his sweet mama to Shake, Rattle and Roll that had all those alienated, angst-ridden white guys (whether they knew they were alienated or not like some model James Dean) lined up to cover the damn thing. Yeah guys like Elvis (when he was young and hunger working the hayride circuit for nickels and dimes, and an off-hand willing woman), Bill Haley when he needed to kick his act up a notch, and Jerry Lee when he needed to put fire into that piano.

Then came alone a strange mix and match, rockabilly as it came out of the white small town South, Tupelo, Biloxi, Lake Charles, Lafayette, a little Cajun thrown in. Jesus, the smaller the town it seemed the more the guys wanted to breakout, wanted to push the envelope of the music, wanted to get away from that “from hunger” look, wanted that big bad Caddy they saw in the golden age of the automobile magazines. Came out with those same boys lining up to sing Joe Turner, hungry Elvis, Carl, Johnny, Jerry Lee, to sing black along with that good old boy Saturday night moonshine tucked in the back seat of that bad ass Chevy looking, looking for danger, and looking for women to sing to who were looking for danger. Country boys, yeah, but not hokey George Jones country boys these guys wanted to breakout of  Smiley’s Tavern over on Highway One, wanted girls to dance on the tables, wanted guys to get up and dance with those Rubys and red-headed girls. Yeah, they mixed it and matched like big time walking daddies (and I hear had fun doing it, hell, it beat eking out a living clerking at Mister Smith’s feed store.  

What rock and roll owed little to, or at least I hope that it owes little to, is that Tin Pan Alley/ Broadway show tune axis part of the American songbook. You know Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Oklahoma, Singing in the Rain, Over The Rainbow stuff. That part of the songbook seems to me to be a different trend away from that jailbreak song that drove us wild and one that was reflected in a CD compilation review I did one time (for the young, maybe the very young, CDs were discs loaded with a bunch of songs, some you liked, maybe three, and the  rest you had to buy as well because you desperately wanted those three not like today when you just hopped on some site to grab something you liked one at a time and download it, presto), The 1950s: 16 Most Requested Songs, which really was about the 16 most requested song before the rock jailbreak of the mid-1950s. Yeah, not exactly stuff your parents liked but stuff that maybe was good if you a “hot” date that did not turn out well and you listened to it endlessly on your defeated way home. Yeah, let’s be clear about that, that stuff your older brothers and sisters already halfway to that place where your parents lived swooned over, not you.

I have along the way, in championing classic rock as the key musical form that drove the tastes of my generation, the generation of ’68, contrasted that guitar-driven, drum/bass line driven sound to that of my parents’ generation, the ones who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought or waited impatiently at home World War II, and listened to swing, jitter-buggery things and swooned (they really did check YouTube if you don’t want to take my word from me) over big bands, brass and wind swings bands, Frank Sinatra, the Andrews Sisters and The Mills Brothers, among others. In other words the music that, we of the generation of ’68, heard as background music around the house as we were growing up. Buddha Swings, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, Rum and Coca-Cola, Paper Dolls, Tangerine, and the like. Stuff that today sounds pretty good, if still not quite something that “speaks” to me. That is not the music that got us moving to break out and seek a newer world, to try to scratch out an existence in a world that we had not say in creating and dream, dream do you hear me, about turning the world upside down and keeping it that way for once. I remember writing in that review that the music in that compilation drove me up a wall and I was ready to shoot my CD player, the instrument that I heard it on, once I heard it (younger reader just put “shoot your iPod” and we will be on the same page.

No, this was the music that reflected, okay, let’s join the cultural critics’ chorus here, the attempted vanilla-zation (if such a word exists) of the Cold War Eisenhower (“I Like Ike”) period when people were just trying to figure out whether the Earth would survive from one day to the next. Not a time to be rocking the boat, for sure. Once things stabilized a bit though then the mad geniuses of rock could hold sway, and while parents and authorities crabbed to high heaven about it, they found out that you could let that rock breakout occur and not have everything wind up going to hell in a hand basket. Mostly. But this music, these 16 most requested songs were what we were stuck with before then. Sure, I listened to them then like everyone else, everyone connected to a radio, but this stuff, little as I knew then, did not “speak” to me. And unlike some of that 1940s stuff still does not “speak” to me.

Oh, you want proof. Here is one example. On that compilation Harbor Lights was done by Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra. This was cause number one for wanting to get a pistol out and start aiming. Not for the song but for the presentation. Why? Well, early in his career Elvis, when he was young and hungry while he was doing his thing for Sam Phillips’ Memphis Sun Records operation, covered this song. There are a myriad Elvis recordings during the Sun period, including compilations with outtakes and alternative recordings of this song. The worst, the absolute worst of these covers by Elvis has more life, more jump, dare I say it, more sex than the Kaye recording could ever have. No young women would get all wet, would get all sweaty and ready to throw their underwear at the drop of a hat for Sammy’s version. Elvis you know or heard about what women were ready to do. Case closed. And the compilation only got worse from there with incipient things like Frankie Lane’s I Believe, Johnny Mathis’ It’s Not For Me To Say, and Marty Robbins’ (who did some better stuff later) on A White Sports Coat (And A Pink Carnation). And you wonder why I ask whether they shoot CD players. Enough said.