From The Archives-On The 50th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love”- “The Summer Of Love Experience” At DeYoung Art Museum In Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

On The 50^th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love”- “The Summer Of Love Experience” At DeYoung Art Museum In Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

By Special Guest Social Commentator Alex James 

[I noted in an earlier introduction to a commentary by my oldest brother Alex that I had been “commissioned” by him and the surviving corner boys who had made the treks west for the Summer of Love, 1967 to put together a tribute book on their experiences. Alex, a lot closer to the action of the 1960s than I ever could be having only been touched by the experience around the edges and mostly second-hand through stories and research is again today’s special guest commentator since the subject matter is again about the Summer of Love, 1967 its 50^th anniversary now being commemorated in places like San Francisco and Berkeley. His previous commentary had been about an exhibit at the Berkeley university museum entitled Hippie Modernism: the struggle for utopia and in that introduction I mentioned that he would be doing a commentary on an exhibition at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park entitled The Summer of Love Experience which had first sparked his interest when he saw an advertisement for the project on a passing Muni bus. He will discuss his take on that today.

To explain further that “commissioned” mentioned above has to do with compiling a wide ranging series of writings, sketches really, and reminisces on the theme of the “Summer of Love, 1967” to be made into a small tribute book in honor of his and his “corner boys” from the Acre section of North Adamsville long departed friend Peter Paul Markin. It was Markin who was the main connection between them and the events which transpired in the Bay Area that long ago and which arguably changed their lives forever. Of if not changed forever put a big kink in the way that they were originally heading.]              

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I might as well mention again as I did in the Hippie Modernism commentary that I am usually not much for writing outside of my business interests or I should say my law practice which is my business interest and leave the biting or witty commentary and penetrating social analysis my youngest brother, there were six of us to divvy up the social chores, Zack, who has made a career out of such endeavors. Except events this spring around the almost half-forgotten Summer of Love, 1967 which I, and the rest of the guys I hung around with all through public school, had been as Zack said one time “washed clean” by that extraordinary “new breeze” that got a big tailwind from that happening. “Happening” a word very closely associated with all the crazy, goofy, outlandish and in some sad instances pathetic things that went on when we were forced to head west and see what it was all about. “Forced” which is exactly the right word by one mad monk of a man, Peter Paul Markin, known as the “Scribe” from junior high school on after he had been given that moniker by the acknowledged leader of the Acre corner boys, Frankie Riley who has written something for the tribute book that Zack mentioned.

I mentioned in the previous article and it bears repeating here that Markin was a small letter “prophet” unlike a capital letter prophet like Allan Ginsberg who blew Markin away with his Howl in high school which he would recite to us when he was half drunk (or later half-stoned) and which we could have given a fuck about at the time since all we cared about was grabbing petty larceny dough, girls, and fast cars not always in that order, after all was said and done, what little good it ever did him in the long haul to “check out the new breeze coming over the land.”

All that will be, or already has been, detailed in the little tribute book we asked Zack to put together with his sketches on those times and our, the surviving corner boys’ remembrances, in honor of Markin. Like Zack said in his introduction I had been in San Francisco for a law conference and was walking up Geary Street and noticed an advertisement for the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park which was presenting an exhibition titled The Summer of Love Experience. Before I went to that exhibition I snuck over to Berkeley for their exhibit after I overheard a conversation between two old geezers about an exhibit over in Berkeley at the University art museum. They didn’t give the title of the exhibition at the time. Had just said it was about hippies. But when I went to look it up it had the title, the very interesting title-Hippie Modernism: the Struggle for Utopia I couldn’t resist before I left Frisco taking that exhibit in on two counts; it was an unusual way to describe a certain modernist artistic sensibility that I think we were trying to create and a very apt way to describe what the whole “seek a newer world” experience was about (a term Markin used incessantly via Robert Kennedy via Alfred Lord Tennyson when it counted when that man epitomized at the top what might have been before his assassination if the Molochs had been defeated), or what we thought we were trying to do. Zack has mentioned in a few of his sketches that we have faced more than forty years of blow-back from the Molochs (thank Allan Ginsburg’s Howl for that term) which show no signs of abating soon for not creating that utopia, or something close to it. He was right as rain on that score.               

So much for cutting up old touches now on to the DeYoung exhibit that was a lot less academically oriented as one would expect from a general audience production. I might mention here that at both Berkeley and DeYoung the overwhelming majority of the visitors were relics from the generation of ’68, people who had been through that amazing 1960s burn-out and had survived although I was shocked by the number of fellow seniors who were cane-bound, walker-bound, or roller-bound. Not a good sign for people who were probably somewhere between sixty and seventy-five. On the sunnier side I did make a coterie of people laugh when I asked whether this was an AARP meeting. I also wondered what today’s teens to twenty somethings would make of such an exhibit if they ever by accident found themselves in the bowels of the museum where the exhibit was being held. Probably like we did yawn and chortle over the odd way we carried on and what was the big deal anyway. But enough of that.      

What the folks at DeYoung had done was put together several rooms full of posters (posters which back in the day put up around town on walls and lampposts the old fashioned way to communicate, yeah primitive looked at now in the age of Internet/Facebook flash communications, and in selected known hippie hang-out bookstores and “head” shops if you my drift merely to advertise upcoming concerts but now at least the bulk of the selections certainly worthy of mention in the same breathe as pop art that came in the wake of the new dispensation), a glimpse of what the fashion of the day, hippie garb, looked like, photographs  and of course music which continues to define a lot of what was happening in that fateful summer of 1967 if not the whole damn decade.

Summer of Love is something of a misnomer in the sense that there had been a tremendous build-up all through 1966 and the spring of 1967 with an escalating number of concerts, festivals and social events like be-ins and “acid,” you know LSD, tests and would carry over at least until 1968. Markin had gone out there in the spring of 1967 after unwisely, very unwisely, dropping out of Boston University at the end of his sophomore year to “find” himself a thing a lot of kids were doing, according to one caption at least 100, 000 kids descended on the town during that period. Markin had come back in late summer to preach the word (that “preach” not always ironic since once he got the bug in his ear about something he would keep bugging us about it like in high school his always harping on Allan Ginsburg’s Howl  a poem that I have mentioned elsewhere the rest of us could have given a fuck about-then) and round up whoever he could to go back west with him. By the time he “recruited” me and a few others it was early fall so you can see the pull of the place held even after that actual summer was over.           

Looking at the poster art, there must have been a couple of hundred of them all together, beyond the artistic question of where they fit in as representative of the times culturally, I was amazed about how many concerts and festivals were being presented during those times. You could have gone to the Avalon, as we did, Fillmore, Golden Gate Park, also as we did on a whim on any given weekend and not been disappointed since some group was performing-for free or a couple of dollars-literally. One poster featuring an iconic group of the time, Jefferson Airplane, and a host of other well-known bands had been priced at five dollars. That is five dollars and that was for a three day concert-five dollars total. I mentioned in the Berkeley article that a few years ago I spent many hundreds of dollars getting so-so tickets for a Stones concert. I had to point out those ticket numbers to people standing around looking at the poster art and they couldn’t believe it either. The biggest thing that I noticed beyond frequency and ticket price was how many of the bands-that just mentioned Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Doors, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead were based in right in the area and that the sound that would define a generation’s musical taste had been created and nourished out there-on the cheap.                

I mentioned that there was also a lot of mannequin-etched fashions displayed and some of it was very good but somehow the presentation did not ring true. Maybe it was the mannequins all slender and appealing like live models these days and maybe it was the push to show high fashion back then for the celebrities and the well-off who wanted to show they were hip. But I recall that most of us wore tee-shirts and jeans boy and girls, and did not give a damn about fashion. Some people, me too when I was high and was on Captain Crunch’s magical mystery tour yellow brick road converted school bus, would create a momentary look, maybe wear a cowboy hat (me) or buckskin coat (Markin) or pretend they were pirates (Jack Callahan, the former high school football star who Markin somehow got to go out, and Bart Webber who actually had been getting ready to take over his father’s printing business) but usually we dressed simply(and changed less frequently than socially requirements would dictate especially after a three day high). Second-hand clothing from Goodwill, the Sallys and the like was a big deal and whoever was in charge of the production of these fashions had missed the point, had gotten the notion of what people were wearing from what say Neiman-Marcus thought was the “hippie” look. The only ones who went out of their way to be “dressy” were the drag queens in a grouping called the Cockettes which would hang around and look “beautiful” but that was for camp not a generation’s style.          

Above all though was the music of the times to be heard as you went around the various galleries complete with video effects making one, making me wish, I had a joint, you know some dope, you know getting high. I was tapping my toes throughout and totally flipped out when I heard the group It’s a Beautiful Day doing White Bird from their first album which I hadn’t heard in years and the Byrds’ doing Eight Miles High  I was ready to dance, dance and party down. As I mentioned earlier though my fellow veterans mostly looked like they couldn’t believe they had done such stuff when younger and looked so physically ravaged that there was no “party” in them. Markin in his happier days would not have been happy to see what that “fresh new breeze” he kept harping on had turned out to be like, what the survivors, the walking wounded looked like. But as I said in my last article and which is turning into something of a mantra for me this 50^th anniversary of Summer of Love-“Twas bliss to be alive.” See this exhibit if you are in Frisco town anytime between now and August 20, 2017.

[I did not want to put this last point in the main body of my article but one, just one, photograph still haunts me. It was a photograph from a 1968 police “runaway” board filled with photographs of runaways being sought be anxious and worried parents who were desperate to find their kids. Not all of the Summer of Love was beautiful and not every kid who went out west survived literally, some wound up in some mental ward. The kids all looked like any all-American kids, white kids, before the “devil” got to them. A lot of photographs were from high school yearbooks. Markin, who also looked mostly like the all-American boy except a little nerdish, sad to say was not alone in not surviving the whole experience.]   

       

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- From The IWW Archives-Boston IWW Endorses May 1st General Strike (2012)

Boston IWW Endorses May 1st General Strike

Posted on April 17, 2012by x359515


The Boston General Mem­bership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World wishes to publicly endorse and affirm its support for the US nationwide general strike called on May 1st 2012. Given our union’s century-long history of integral participation in the labor movement, we have annually ac­knowledged May 1st, or May Day, as the true International Workers’ Day; likewise, given the union’s principles of solidarity and direct action, we find it more than fitting to commemorate this especially prom­ising May Day with a general strike.

The profound purpose of any general strike, in fact, is couched in the IWW’s founding and very existence. It is self-evident that exploited people can only find relief by convincing our oppressors that there is no point in con­tinuing to grind our lives into the dirt. We can convince them two ways. The first way is to place indirect pressure, through the endless process of lobby­ing, lawmaking, voting, and hoping that bought-out politicians will represent us or that the bosses will ever feel negative pressure from a system designed for their benefit. If this first way worked, by now the United Nations would have mandated universal healthcare, abol­ished wage slavery, and outlawed capi­talism. No laws benefit­ing workers will ever be sufficiently enforced, because “law en­forcement” is always in the pocket of the wealthy. So we have before us the second way, which is direct action— the most pow­erful example of which is the strike. A successful strike within a workplace, industry, or region tells the resident op­pressor, whom in light of Occupy we may frame as the 1%, “You have no control over us.” If the bosses and the bankers have nobody to participate in their criminally abusive enterprises, then they are irrelevant. One or two suc­cessful strikes can threaten the 1% more than cops or lawyers ever will. There­fore it is this technique, among others, that the IWW keeps ready to use in defense of our membership and also in solidarity with all workers of the world.

However, as critics and par­ticipants of a strike are both quick to note, a strike is nothing without a criti­cal mass of participants and an ever-widening focus. While people may speak of strikes enthusiastically, it isn’t enough to send a one-time message to the 1%. Whatever we workers win by striking, if anything, can be taken away from us in an instant if we lack militant organization. A strike is merely sym­bolic if too few workers stand together; it is also only a small victory to secure a temporary contract rife with conces­sions, as many pro-capitalist unions tend to do. The US labor movement has been gutted for decades. We must rise above this. To quote our co-founder Bill Haywood, “That is what I want to urge upon the work­ing class; to become so organized on the economic field that they can take and hold the industries in which they are employed. Can you conceive of such a thing? Is it pos­sible? What are the forces that pre­vent you from doing so? You have all the industries in your own hands at the present time.”

Today our present membership similarly urges all workers: strike once, and then again, and again, and amidst all of this, ORGANIZE. UNIONIZE. Occupy your workplace. Make it be­long to you, not to the bosses, not to the 1%. The rising global resistance to ex­ploitation and injustice, which we have seen in the Arab Spring and Occupy, will be far more than a flash in the pan if we join together the full force of our economic might. We can dismantle this broken system through unwaver­ing organization, and the time to do so is NOW. And so, with that ideal in our hearts, we will see you in the streets of Boston for the general strike of May 1st, 2012, and for many more to come. SOLIDARITY FOREVER!

In Search Of The American Plainsong- In Search Of The Fathers We Never Knew-For The Adonis Of The West-The Gangster-Poet Of Times Square-A Flower For The New Jersey Monk And Muddying The Merrimack Stone Age Tokay Dream -In Commemoration Of The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of Jack Kerouac-The Father We Did Know

      

Allan Jackson Introduction

I have been around the publishing, editing, writing business a long time so I know when the dime drops it can drop for thee. Know once a new technology, true ever since the printing press got invented there would be social shake-us. Know first-hand having been a couple of years back the subject of a vote of no confidence by the younger writers at this publication aided and abetted by my long-time hometown high school friend Sam Lowell who cast the deciding vote for my ouster based on his notion that “the torch had to be passed.”  Naturally I was pissed off although maybe in the end Sam was half-right to do what he did. We have spent our lives since mean streets North Adamsville youth days being half-right, and keeping some very close finishes from tumbling down that Jack and Jill hill, not Jack Kerouac’s but black lives matter hills which in the old days you could sneak by calling them mean ass negro streets and everything even those who seethed at the expression that way knew exactly what you mean.

In any case that is politics in this cutthroat business, and it comes with the territory so shed no lion eyes tears for my trouble fate. After the purge and my exile Sam sent out an olive branch to me in what he too called my “exile” and got me back here to do a plum kind of “of counsel” job doing the Encore Introductions to the very successful and sweated out The Roots Are the Toots rock and roll series which I fathered and which I claim was the best job of editing, cajoling, whipping, nagging, etc. I ever did in my long career.

That assignment though whetted my appetite to do more encore introductions (although definitely not looking to get back the site manager’s job which fell to Greg Green whom I actually brought in to do the day to day operation which I was heartily sick of and who wound up with the whole ball of wax) and I was fortunate enough to get Sam, now head of the Editorial Board put in place after my exile to ensure that there would not be a return to “one man” rule, to get me an assignment doing the encore intros for the Sam and Ralph Stories about the improbable life-long friendship and political activism of two very different working-class guys who met on the “battlefields” of the struggle against the Vietnam War.

Then, apparently, I pressed my luck when I asked to do the encore presentations for the Film Noir series which really was my baby despite the fact that Sam Lowell did all the heavy lifting and Zack James most of the best of the writings. I tussled with both Sam and Greg over this to no avail. Sam for obvious reasons wanted to do what he considered his baby and Greg because I don’t think he thought it was a good idea for me to be continuing to work here with some kind of official title even as a contributing editor which means really free-lance and good luck. I proved to be wrong and I should have slapped my hand on my head when I thought about it in this damn cutthroat business. Sam pulled rank, pulled his chair of the Ed Board card and Greg fell down and payed homage to his request. As the next best thing in the universe today I got this highly regarded assignment which Si Lannon was supposed to do but begged off of having been ill for a while and passed off to me.

Of course Searching for the American Songbook, the idea behind it anyway was, is very far from the devotion that we of the Generation of ’68, those who came of age in the mid-1950s paid to rock and roll, now called the classic age of rock and roll, the age begotten by fathers we never knew Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and a ton of other talent that got us on our dancing feet. Frankly, as Sam mentioned in one of his introductions, we were rebelling, naturally rebelling looking back on the times, against our parents’ slogging through the Great Depression and World War II music from the likes of Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters heard wafting (Sam’s forever-etched in the brain word) through the early 1950s house on the family radio. Having now gone through a couple of generations of changes in musical taste, guess what, those latter generations have up and rebelled against our “old fogie” music. What age and experience has taught though is that the mystical mythical American Songbook is a very big tent, has plenty of room for everyone. Even that music from our parents’ generation that sounded so “square” has made a big “comeback” even if the emotional roller-coaster for a lot of us who used that musical uprising as a big step toward our own understandings of the world have never quite calmed down, the battle of the generations never quite settled at anything but an “armed truce.” (Truth to tell the passing on of that parental generation has left many of us with things never said or conversely said in hardboiled anger that now can never be resolved.)         

Which brings us to the idea behind the idea. This series for the most part was Bart Webber’s “baby” since he was the first guy to “break-out” of the classic rock and roll music we lived and died for in the 1970s. No, that is not true, not true as many things are not true in dealing with events and personalities of guys from the old neighborhood, the old Acre section of North Adamsville. The driving force toward the big tent look at the American Songbook was done by one Peter Paul Markin, forever known as the Scribe, who was the first guy out of the blocks to make the connection between ancient blues and the roots of rock and roll. Was the first guy who caught the whiff of that “folk minute” from the early 1960s and dragged some of us in his wake. All Bart did was expand of those understandings to visit jazz, Cajun music, Zydeco, be-bop, and a host of other musical genre including those World War II pop hits that used to drive us crazy. Two things you need to know going forward-the sketches will be very eclectic as the big tent idea implies and the reason that Bart Webber was tagged with this assignment originally was the still bitter fact that the Scribe had given up the ghost long ago murdered through his own hubris and delusions down in Mexico on a busted drug deal in the mid-1970s. A big fall from grace, a very big fall which we still mourn today.

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Kenny Jackman heard the late Hazel Dickens (d. 2011) for the very first time on her CD album It’s Hard To Tell The Singer From The Song some years back, maybe 2005, when he was in thrall to mountain music after being hit hard by Reese Witherspoon’s role as June Carter in the film Walk The Line. At that time, he got into all things Carter Family unto the nth generation. A friend, a Vermont mountain boy, hipped him to Hazel during his frenzy and he picked up the CD second-hand in Harvard Square. (Really at Sandy’s located between Harvard and Central Squares, a folk institution around town where until recently Sandy had held forth since the early 1960s folk minute when everybody was desperately looking for roots music and that was the place to look first. Hazel’s You’ll Get No More Of Me, A Few Old Memories and the classic Hills of Home knocked him out. The latter, moreover, seemed kind of familiar and later, a couple of months later, he finally figured out why. He had really first heard Hazel back in 1970 when he was down in the those very hills and hollows that are a constant theme in her work, and that of the mountain mist winds music coming down the crevices. What was going on though? Was it 2005 when he first heard Hazel or that 1970 time? Let me go back and tell that 1970 story.

Kenny Jackman like many of his generation of ’68 was feeling foot loose and fancy free, especially after he had been mercifully declared 4-F by his friendly neighbors at the local draft board in old hometown North Adamsville (declared 4-F in those high draft days because he had a seriously abnormal foot problem which precluded walking very far, walking fast and far a skill that the army likes its soldiers to be able to do). So Kenny, every now and again, took to the hitchhike road, not like his mad man friend Peter Paul Markin with some heavy message purpose a la Jack Kerouac and his beat brothers (and a few sisters) but just to see the country while he, and it, were still in one piece no pun intended Kenny told me since the country was in about fifteen pieces then).

On one of these trips he found himself stranded just outside Norfolk, Virginia at a road-side campsite. Feeling kind of hungry one afternoon, and tired, tired unto death of camp-side gruel and stews he stopped at a diner, Billy Bob McGee’s, an old-time truck stop diner a few hundred yards up the road from his camp for some real food, maybe meatloaf or some pot roast like grandma used to make or that was how it was advertised. When he entered the mid-afternoon half-empty diner, he sat down at one of the single stool counter seats that always accompany the vinyl-covered side booths in such places. But all of this was so much descriptive noise that could describe a million, maybe more, such eateries. What really caught his attention though was a waitress serving them “off the arm” that he knew immediately he had to “hit” on (although that is not the word used in those days but “hit on” conveys what he was up to in the universal boy meets girl world). As it turned out she, sweetly named Fiona Fay, and, well let’s just call her fetching, Kenny weary-eyed fetching, was young, footloose and fancy free herself and had drawn a bead on him as he entered the place, and, …well this story is about Hazel, so let us just leave it as one thing led to another and let it go at that.

Well, not quite let’s let it go at that because when Kenny left Norfolk a few days later one ex-waitress Fiona Fay was standing by his side on the road south. And the road south was leading nowhere, nowhere at all except to Podunk, really Prestonsburg, Kentucky, and really, really a dink town named Pottsville, just down the road from big town Prestonsburg, down in the hills and hollows of Appalachia, wind-swept green, green, mountain mist, time forgotten. And the reason two footloose and fancy free young people were heading to Podunk is that a close cousin of Fiona’s lived there with her husband and child and wanted Fiona to come visit (visit “for a spell” is how she put it but I will spare the reader the localisms). So they were on that hell-bend road but Kenny, Kenny was dreading this trip and only doing it because, well because Fiona was the kind of young woman, footloose and fancy free or not, that you followed, at least you followed if you were Kenny Jackson and hoped things would work out okay.

What Kenny dreaded that day was that he was afraid to confront his past. And that past just then entailed having to go to his father’s home territory just up the road in Hazard. See Kenny saw himself as strictly a Yankee, a hard “we fought to free the slaves and incidentally save the union” Yankee for one and all to see back in old North Adamsville. And denied, denied to the high heavens, that he had any connection with the South, especially the hillbilly south that everybody was making a fuse about trying to bring into the 20th century around that time. And here he was with a father with Hazard, Kentucky, the poorest of the poor hillbillies, right on his birth certificate although Kenny had never been there before. Yeah, Fiona had better be worth it.

Kenny had to admit, as they picked up one lonely truck driver ride after another (it did not hurt in those days to have a comely lass standing on the road with you in the back road South, or anywhere else, especially if you had longish hair and a wisp of a beard), that the country was beautiful. As they entered coal country though and the shacks got crummier and crummier he got caught up in that 1960s Michael Harrington Other America no running water, outhouse, open door, one window and a million kids and dogs running around half-naked, the kids that is vision. But they got to Pottsville okay and Fiona’s cousin and husband (Laura and Stu) turned out to be good hosts. So good that they made sure that Kenny and Fiona stayed in town long enough to attend the weekly dance at the old town barn (red of course, run down and in need of paint to keep red of course) that had seen such dances going back to the 1920s when the Carter Family had actually come through Pottsville on their way back to Clinch Mountain.

Kenny buckled at the thought, the mere thought, of going to some Podunk Saturday night “hoe-down” and tried to convince Fiona that they should leave before Saturday. Fiona would have none of it and so Kenny was stuck. Actually, the dance started out pretty well, helped tremendously by some local “white lightning” that Stu provided and which he failed to mention should be sipped, sipped sparingly. Not only that but the several fiddles, mandolins, guitars, washboards and whatnot made pretty good music. Music like Anchored in Love and Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, stuff that he had heard in the folk clubs in Harvard Square when he used to hang out there in the early 1960s. And music that even Kenny, old two left-feet, one way out of whack, draft-free out of whack, Kenny, could dance to with Fiona.

So Kenny was sipping, well more than sipping, and dancing and all until maybe about midnight when this woman, this local woman came out of nowhere and began to sing, sing like some quick, rushing wind sound coming down from the hills and hollas (hollows for Yankees, okay, please). Kenny began to toss and turn a little, not from the liquor but from some strange feeling, some strange womb-like feeling that this woman’s voice was a call from up on top of these deep green hills, now mist-filled awaiting day. And then she started into a long, mournful version of Hills of Home, and he sensed, sensed strongly if not anything he could articulate that he was home. Yes, Kenny Jackson, Yankee, city boy, corner boy-bred was “home,” hillbilly home. So Kenny did really hear Hazel Dickens for first time in 1970, see.

[As for Fiona Fay she stayed on the road with Kenny until they headed toward the Midwest where she veered off home to Valparaiso in Indiana, her hometown as Kenny headed west to California, to Big Sur and a different mountain ethos. They were supposed to meet out there a couple of months later after she finished up some family business. They never did, a not unusual occurrence of the time when people met and faded along the way, but Kenny thought about her and that wind-swept mountain dance night for a long time after that.]    

The Geometry Of Innocence -The 100th Anniversary Of The Bauhaus In Wiemar Germany After World War I

The Geometry Of Innocence -The 100^th Anniversary Of The Bauhaus In Wiemar Germany After World War I

By Laura Perkins

I get to do this short commemoration of the Bauhaus in Germany from 1919 to about 1933 by default. Or because I am currently running an on-line series on art works entitled Traipsing Through The Arts. Although we have no official section titles and have not had them for a while I am the “art go-to person” (maybe an official title like art editor would be better but that is not a battle I want to fight right now when I am being besieged by half the American arts cabal from curators to gallery owners  for my unorthodox views of my self-selected artists). I actually know, or I should say knew, since I have hustled myself through the small Bauhaus exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the more expansive one at the Harvard Museums next to nothing about the movement except for a few names like Gropius and Moholy-Nagy. (Who knows what other museums with even the most tenuous links to the Bauhaus will roll out their red carpets for the commemoration like happened a couple of years ago with the Summer of Love, 1967 where even the MFA had a dinky exhibit down in the dungeon of the American Arts wing closeted from view along with the Native American and Mezo-American art.)   

Aside from learning about the very real connections between Harvard and the movement brought on by the exile of many of the figures associated with the school once Hitler and his wreaking crew pulled the hammer down I was surprised to see how many modernist painters like Klee and Kandinsky passed through the doors either as teachers or students. Also the link between the Bauhaus and the famous Black Mountain College down in North Carolina which produced a significant number of culturati. (Frankly the first reference I knew about Black Mountain was not the college but one of Bessie Smith’s blues, Black Mountain Blues, which is a very different take on that location.)

More than anything else though I was fascinated by how important geometric figures were to that movement not only in the obvious architectural and design areas but in the art. Especially the work of Joseph Albers who would later help found Black Mountain College. That is why I titled this sort piece “geometric of innocence” since 1919 nobody, or almost moody knew what hell was coming down when the Wiemar Republic fell down.

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-*Poet's Corner- W.H. Auden's "Spain 1937"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the poet W. H. Auden.

Markin comment:

This selection was culled from an online search and comes from course given at Brown University by the professor listed at the end. I hope this is a proper acknowledgement of my source. Oh ya, and kudos to Auden too.


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One of the central events in Europe during this period was the Spanish Civil War. Here is Auden's poem on the subject, which we will read in its proper place during the course:

Spain

W. H. Auden (1937)


Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.


Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.


Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
The chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles.


The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.


Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.


Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greece,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
'0 my vision. 0 send me the luck of the sailor.'


And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
'But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire.'


And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: 'Our day is our loss. 0 show us
History the operator, the
Organizer, Time the refreshing river.'


And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
'Did you not found the city state of the sponge,'


'Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene, 0 descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend.'

And the life, if it answers at all, replies from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city:
'0 no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

'Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

'What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.'

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fisherman's islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city,
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like birds to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movement of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young poets exploding like bombs)
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candle-lit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say alas but cannot help or pardon.

To send e-mail to Robert Scholes click on the address Robert_Scholes@brown.edu
Created: April 7, 1998, Updated May 5, 1998- Brown University

Those That Sing, Sing-Meryl Streep’ “Florence Foster Jenkins” (2016)-A Film Review

Those That Sing, Sing-Meryl Streep’ “Florence Foster Jenkins” (2016)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Florence Foster Jenkins, starring Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, 2016

F. Scott Fitzgerald once suggested that the rich, and by that he meant the super-rich of his day, the heirs of the robber barons, although we won’t dwell on that point here, are very different from you and me. And in a lot of ways that observation has the ring of truth. But after viewing this film under review, Meryl Streep’s Florence Foster Jenkins, there are apparently some things that all of us seek. In this case some fame for having something other than money. The desire to sing. But as our main character, the lady of the title, played as always to perfection by Meryl Streep, painfully found out in the end not even gads of money can buy a voice that is worthy of performing outside the upstairs attic of your house, if you have an attic. Therein lies the tale to be told here. That and the last few words of the film when Ms. Jenkins’ finds out the inescapable truth the hard way-maybe she couldn’t sing, but she did.   

Here’s the scoop. The scion of some old time robber baron turned respectable, Florence Foster Jenkins, the role played by Meryl Streep, had been a rabid supporter of the New York City culture scene in the first part of the 20^th century up to her death during World War II going as far as to start up clubs to promote, well, to promote her singing. Harmless enough although perhaps a little self-indulgent given the deeper social concerns of the 1930s and the build up to war. The catch though is that dear Florence was tone deaf, couldn’t carry a note to the next room let alone before a serious concert audience. Except for many years she denied her incapacity on the basis that she loved singing so that must be enough to pull her out of her drawing room. And was aided, aided big time by her husband Saint Clair, played by Hugh Grant, (her second husband, the first the Jenkins of her three name monte gave her syphilis which she suffered from for fifty years a remarkable feat of endurance in itself whatever her lack of singing prowess). Every time Florence reared her head and wanted to show her stuff in public Saint Clair had to round up the captive audience and spread plenty of money around. A tough job but in the end he really did do it for love.

Still there was the standing problem of her inability to sing. During the film she got into one of her periodic urges and hired an up and coming composer/pianist who was to accompany her in this latest endeavor. Of course the guy was “from hunger” and was glad to grab the dough until he actually heard her. There was plenty of back and forth between him and Saint Clair along the way but in the end he bought into the delusion. Bought into the idea that he would be playing Carnegie Hall after all. Well you can’t keep something as serious as tone deafness and inability to reach the high note quiet forever when people, people who were not part of the entourage, paid or friends, show up at the concert. Especially any self-respecting newspaper music critic. And that is what did Florence and maybe shortened her life by a severe reaction to the knowledge that people had always been laughing at her. I don’t think old Saint Clair or the myriad of hangers-on did her any favors by their actions. But there you have it. The rich can buy some time while the rest of us are sheltered in our antics. Excellent story line and excellent performances by Streep and Grant because it must be hard to sing so poorly and to coddle such efforts as acting chores.                   

Folk Music For Aging Children- The Music Of Judy Collins And Friends

Folk Music For Aging Children- The Music Of Judy Collins And Friends

CD Review

Wildflower Festival, Judy Collins, Eric Andersen, Tom Rush, Arlo Guthrie, Wildflower Records, 2003


Okay, just when you thought there could not possibly be any more country folk, urban folk, suburban folk, folk rock, rock folk, semi-folk, or quasi-folk music from the folk revival of the early 1960 to review here I am again reviewing some of the stars of that time-in their dotage. Well, maybe not dotage, but we are all, including Judy Collins, Eric Andersen, Tom Rush, and Arlo Guthrie, getting a little long in the tooth, and no one can dispute that hard fact. The real question is whether the artists in this compilation still have it, at least for those of us in that dwindling, graying, arthritic, prescription-needing folk audience that fills the small church basement “coffee houses” on this planet. And they do. Still have it, I mean.

That said, this little Wildflower Festival setting in 2003 provided Judy and her guests with a chance to show their stuff, new and old. Now, for those who have heard Judy Collins sing back in the day the question is why she did not challenge Joan Baez for the “queen” of folk title. She had the voice, the style, and the looks (ya, that WAS important, even then) to do so. I have been running a “Not Joan Baez” series and will deal with that question there at some other time but her work here is pretty good, especially her well-known cover of Ian Tyson’s “Someday Soon”. Eric Andersen, who I have already looked at in a “Not Bob Dylan” series hold forth on his “Blue River”. Tom Rush, ditto, on “The Remember Song”. Finally, Arlo, whom I have covered in relation to his father’s, Woody Guthrie, music “steals” the show here with his storytelling, notably the kids’ story, “Mooses Came Walking”.

Someday Soon
Ian Tyson

There's a young man that I know whose age is twenty-one
Comes from down in southern Colorado
Just out of the service, he's lookin' for his fun
Someday soon, goin' with him someday soon

My parents can not stand him 'cause he rides the rodeo
My father says that he will leave me cryin'
I would follow him right down the roughest road I know
Someday soon, goin' with him someday soon

But when he comes to call, my pa ain't got a good word to say
Guess it's 'cause he's just as wild in his younger days

So blow, you old Blue Northern, blow my love to me
He's ridin' in tonight from California
He loves his damned old rodeo as much as he loves me
Someday soon, goin' with him someday soon

When he comes to call, my pa ain't got a word to say
Guess it's 'cause he's just as wild in his younger days

So blow, you old blue northern, blow my love to me
He's ridin' in tonight from California
He loves his damned old rodeo as much as he loves me
Someday soon, goin' with him someday soon
Someday soon, goin' with him
© 1991

An Encore Presentation-In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind

An Encore Presentation-In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind 

I know your leavin's too long over due
For far too long I've had nothing new to show to you
Goodbye dry eyes I watched your plane fade off west of the moon
It felt so strange to walk away alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

The hours that were yours echo like empty rooms
Thoughts we used to share I now keep alone
I woke last night and spoke to you
Not thinkin' you were gone
It felt so strange to lie awake alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

Our friends have tried to turn my nights to day
Strange faces in your place can't keep the ghosts away
Just beyond the darkest hour, just behind the dawn
It feels so strange to lead my life alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

From The Pen Of Zack James 

A few years ago, maybe more like a decade or so, in an earlier 1960s folk minute nostalgia incantation fit Sam Eaton, who will be described further below, had thought he had finally worked out in his head what that folk moment had meant in the great musical arc of his life. Had counted up, had taken up and put value on its graces, did the great subtractions on its disappointments, that lack of beat that he had been spoon fed on in his head having heard maybe in the womb the sweats of some backbeat that sounded an awful lot like a band of the devil’s bad ass angels giving battle to the heavens, and got his head around, his expression, its clasps with certain young women, some absolute folkie women met in the Harvard Squares of the heated horny sex night and loves too not always with folkie women but just the muck of growing up and taking what came his way. So he had taken a back-flip, his expression, when he was required not out of his own volition like that great prairie fire burning before in his youth about why he felt after all these years that he needed to go back to what after all was a very small part of his life now that he was reaching four score and seven, going back over the terrain of a small part of the musics that he had cultivated since early childhood.

Some of those musics from his parents’ slogging through the Great Depression and World War II be-bop swing big band Saturday night get your dancing slippers on imposed on his tender back of brain not to be revived and revisited until many years later when he had heard some ancient Benny Goodman be-bop clarinet backing up a sultry-voiced Peggy Lee getting all in a silky sweat rage because her man like a million others was not a "do right" man but had been chasing her best friend the next best thing when he got his wanting habit on and Peggy turned ice queen when he ran out of dough after shooting craps against the dealer and decided he had been wrong to dismiss such music out of hand. Some of the music along the edges of his coming of  age from that edgy feeling he got when he heard the classic rock that just creeped into his pre-teen brain and lingered there unrequited until he found out what in that beat spoke to his primordial instincts, what caused his feverish nights of wonder, of what made him tick, of what he had missed.

Folk, the folk minute he deeply imbibed for that minute, at least the exciting part of the minute when he heard, finally heard, something that did not make him want to puke every time he turned on the radio, put his ill-gotten coins, grabbed from mother’s pocketbook laying there in wait for his greedy hands or through some con, some cheapjack con he pulled on some younger kids in Jimmy Jakes’ Diner jukebox to impress a few of the girls in town who were not hung up on Fabian or Bobby, heard something very new in his life and so different from the other musics that he had grown up with that he grabbed the sound with both hands. He thought that sweating a decade ago where he done a few small pieces to satisfy his literary sense of things and put them in a desk drawer yellow, frayed and gather dust until he passed on and somebody put the paper in a wastebasket for the rubbish men, thought he had ended those thoughts, closed out the chapter.

Recently though he did another series of short citizen-journalist sketches of scenes from that period for various folk music related blogs and social media outlets. Sam had done that series at the request of his old time friend, Bart Webber, who will also be described in more detail below, from Carver, an old working-class town about thirty miles south of Boston which at the time was the cranberry capital of the world or close to it, and close enough to Boston to have been washed by the folk minute that sprouted forth in Harvard Square and Beacon Hill in Boston.

Sam and Bart, who in their respective youths had been very close, had been corner boys together when that social category meant something, meant something about extreme teen alienation and angst combined with serious poverty, dirt poor poverty as in hand-me-down older brother clothes, as in no family car for long periods between old wreak of cars, of many surly peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, many Spam suppers, all fashioned to make these young men forever talking about big break-outs, about getting something for them and theirs but also for big candy-assed dreams too all put paid to, as one would expect of sons of “boggers,” those who cared for and harvested those world famous  cranberries, but also close because that was the way that corner boys were then, “having each other’s backs” was the term they used which confused even the best of the social scientists who investigated the phenomenon when that corner boy life meant juvenile delinquency, meant some unfathomed anger, some lack of socialization, some throwback to primeval muds, to some rising of the unkempt heathens they were payed to watch out for. Meant as well worry to those in power who were trying to weld society as one piece of steel to fight the internal and external red scare Cold War fight against the faithless, fang-toothed Ruskkie reds wielding nuclear weapons from the hip.

Like a lot of high school friends the cement that bound them in high school, that alienation, that comradery, those best left unsaid larcenous moments, the “midnight creeps” in Bart’s words when somebody asked him later what had made him and the corner boys put their reputations at risk for such small gain, a fact which also played a part in that “having each other’s back” broke apart once they graduated, or rather in their case once they had sowed their wild oats in the 1960s, those wild oats at the time meaning “drugs, sex, and rock and roll” combined with drifting the hitchhike road west in what one of their number, the late Pete Markin, called the search for the great blue-pink American West night.

Sam had stayed out in the West longer than the others except Markin and Josh Breslin whom he and Markin had met on a yellow brick road merry prankster bus before he drifted back East to go to law school and pursue a professional career. Bart had returned earlier, had gotten married to his high school sweetheart and had started up and run a small successful specialty print shop in hometown Carver based on the silk-screening tee-shirt and poster craze. They would run into each other occasionally when Sam came to town but for about twenty years they had not seen each other as both were busy raising families, working and travelling in different circles. One night though when Sam had been sitting in Jimmy Jakes’ Diner over on Spring Street in Carver having a late dinner by himself after having come to town to attend the funeral of a family member Bart had walked in and they then renewed their old relationship, decided that some spark from high school still held them together if nothing else that they both had been deeply formed, still held to those old corner boy habits toward life whatever successes they had subsequently enjoyed.

Along the way to solidifying there new relationship they would alternate meetings, some in Carver, some in Boston or Cambridge where Sam lived. On a recent trip to Boston to meet Sam at the Red Hat at the bottom of Beacon Hill Bart had walked pass Joy Street which triggered memories of the time in high school when he and his date who name he could not remember but she was a cousin of Sam’s “hot” date, Melinda Loring, who they went to school with and whom Sam was crazy to impress even though Melinda was not the daughter of a “bogger” but of school teachers and so from among the town’s better element and he was constantly on eggshells that she would toss him aside once she had figured out he was just another Fast Eddie corner boy trying to get into her pants, had taken them on a cheap date to the Oar and Anchor coffeehouse which stood at the corner of Joy and Cambridge Street to hear Lenny Lane. Lenny was an up and coming folk singer whom Sam had met on one of his clandestine midnight trips to Harvard Square on the Redline subway to hang out at the Hayes-Bickford.

That "cheap" part of the cheap date thing was important since Bart and Sam were as usual from hunger on money in the days when around Carver, probably around the world, guys paid expenses on dates, girls just looked beautiful or if not beautiful glad to not be forever hanging around the midnight telephone waiting for some two-timing guy to call them up for a date, and so short of just hanging at the Hayes for free watching weirdoes, con men, whores plying their trade, drunks, winos and occasional put upon artists, poets, writes and folk-singers perfecting their acts on the cheap, for the price of a couple of cups of coffee, a shared pastry and a couple of bucks in the “basket” for the performer you could get away with a lot especially when Bart was doing Sam a favor with that cousin (and worse could have gotten in trouble if Besty Binstock, his high school sweetheart. found out he was two-timing her although the two-timing involved the possibility of some off-hand sex with that cousin who was supposed to be “easy” but that in another story although come to think of it the situation could serve as another  prime example of “having each other’s back” when one of them was up against it).

Bart remembered that he had been very uncomfortable that night since he had had some feelings of guilt about two-timing (and lying to) Betsy starting out, had had trouble talking about anything in common, school, sports, the weather, with that cousin since she said she was doing Melinda a favor in order that she could go to Boston with Sam which Melinda’s mother would have balked at if she had told her they were going into Boston alone, going into Boston with a “bogger” alone. Moreover she knew nothing, cared nothing for folk music, didn’t even know what it was, said she had never heard of the thing, was fixated on Bobby Vee, dreamy guys, or something like that. What made that date worse was that Bart too then could hardly bear the sound of folk music, said repeatedly that the stuff was all dreary and involved weird stuff like murder and mayhem done on the banks of rivers, in back alleys, on darkened highways just because some woman would not come across, Jesus, strangely thwarted love reminding him of Sam’s forlorn quest for Melinda which seemed like some princess and pauper never the twain shall meet outcome, or hick stuff about home sweet home down in some shanty town in some desolate cabin without lights or water which sounded worse than Boggertown, singing high holy Jehovah stuff that made him wince, and of the hills and hollows in some misbegotten mountains made his teeth grind. So not a good mix, although it did turn out that the cousin was “easy,” did think he was dreamy enough to have sex with (with their clothes mostly on which was how more than one quicky one night stand wound up down by the boathouse near the Charles River after they had split from Sam and Melinda after the coffeehouse closed and that helped but had been the result of no help from the folk music they half-listened to but more some dope that she had in her pocketbook after she had passed a joint around to get things going.            

After telling Sam about his recollections of Joy Street and that cousin, whose name was Judy Dennison Sam told him and who Sam had gone out with and agreed was a little sex kitten once she was stoned, Bart started asking some questions about folk music. Sam said he was not finished with that Judy story, told Bart that fling was after the thing with Melinda had passed due not to class distinctions but to that hard fact that she was saving “it” for marriage, and had been very glad that he had that run around with Judy and was not sorry he did. Bart started in again and asked Sam a million questions about various folk-singers and what had happened to them, were they still playing, still alive since Sam although he did not have the same keen interest of his youthful folk minute still kept small tabs on the scene, the now small scene through his long-time companion, Laura Perkins whom he met one night at the Café Nana several years before when Tom Tremble was playing there after Sam had not heard him in about forty years.

The reason for Bart’s interest given that above he had said that the genre made his teeth grind was that after that night with Judy Bart did go on other double dates with Sam and Melinda, and later Suzanne when she was Sam’s next flame and a real folkie, to folk places and while he still would grind his teeth at some of the stuff he did develop more tolerance for the genre, especially if the date Sam set up was a real foxy folkie girl (thinking on it now he couldn’t believe how unfaithful he had been to Betsy in those days but she too was saving “it” for marriage and some of those young women were very willing and had apartment or dorm rooms too).

The upshot of all of Bart’s questions was that Sam found that he was not really except for Tom Tremble who had lost his sweet baby James voice, forgot lyrics and had “mailed it in” that night he had met Laura and was cold “stonewalled” by the audience but possibly motivated by that old folkie feeling, or maybe just feeling sorry for a guy who had a big local following back in the day when the “basket” went around everybody put some dough in, Sam and Laura included, and a couple of other guys up on what had happened to the old-time folkies since for years he had merely listened on radio station WCAS and when that station went under WUMB out of U/Mass-Boston or listened to records, tapes or CDs. (Sam got big points from Laura that first night when he panned Tom, who Laura had never heard before being enough younger not to have been bitten by the folk minute craze and she agreed that Tom had “mailed it in”.) Since Sam was not all that familiar with what had happened to most of them he thereafter did some research, asked Laura some questions to lead the way and wound up writings that series of sketches. One series entitled Not Bob Dylan about the fate of prominent male folk-singers was a direct result of the Sam and Bart conversation. Here’s what he had to say about Tom Rush who back in the day he knew best from hanging around the old Club 47 on Mount Auburn Street:     

“…Other than enigmatic Bob Dylan who is the iconic never-ending tour male performer most people would still associate with that folk minute period they would draw a blank on a list of others who also were aspiring to make names for themselves in the folk milieu. I am not talking about guys like Lenny Lane who had one hit and then went back to graduate school in biology when he couldn’t get another contract, when his well ran dry, or like Tom Tremble who had a big local following around the old Club Nana when it was on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge not where it is now on Brattle Street but who did mainly covers and just never broke out or Mike Weddle who had good looks, a good stage presence, had the young women going crazy but who just walked away one day when some good looking woman from Radcliffe came hither and he “sold out” to her father’s stockbroking business.

I’m talking about people like Tom Rush from New Hampshire who lit up the firmament around Cambridge via the Harvard campus folk music station, Dave Von Ronk the cantankerous folk historian and musician who knew more about what happened in the early, early days in the Village at the point where “beat” poetry was becoming passe and folk was moving in to fill in the gap, Phil Ochs who had probably the deepest political sensibilities of the lot and wrote some of the stronger narrative folk protest songs, Richard Farina who represented that “live fast” edge that we were bequeathed by the “beats” and who tumbled down the hill on a motorcycle, and Jesse Collin Young who probably wrote along with Eric Andersen and Jesse Winchester the most pre-flower child lyrics mid-1960s hippie explosion before folk got amplified of the bunch.

My friend Bart had just seen a fragile seeming, froggy-voiced Bob Dylan in one of stages of his apparently never-ending concerts tours up in Maine and had been shaken by the sight and had wondered about the fate of other such folk performers. That request turned into a series of reviews of male folk-singers entitled Not Bob Dylan (and after that, also at Bart’s request, a series entitled Not Joan Baez based on some of the same premises except on the distaff side (nice word, right, you know golden-voiced Judy Collins and her sweet songs of lost, Carolyn Hester and her elegant rendition of Walt Whitman’s Oh Captain, My Captain, Joan’s sister Mimi Farina forever linked with Richard and sorrows, and Malvina Reynolds who could write a song on the wing, fast okay, and based as well on the mass media having back then declared that pair the “king and queen” of the burgeoning folk music minute scene).

That first series (as had the second) had asked two central questions-why did those male folk singers not challenge Dylan who as I noted the media of the day had crowned king of the folk minute for supremacy in the smoky coffeehouse night (then, now the few remaining are mercifully smoke-free although then I smoked as heavily as any guy who though such behavior was, ah, manly and a way to seen “cool” to the young women, why else would we have done such a crazy to the health thing if not to impress some certain she)  and, if they had not passed on and unfortunately a number have a few more since that series as well most notably Phil Ochs of suicide early, Dave Von Ronk of hubris and Jesse Winchester of his battle lost over time had come, were they still working the smoke-free church basement, homemade cookies and coffee circuit that constitutes the remnant of that folk minute even in the old hotbeds like Cambridge and Boston. (What I call the U/U circuit since while other church venues are part of the mix you can usually bet safely that if an event is scheduled it will be at a U/U church which is worthy of a little sketch of its own sometime in order to trace the folk minute after the fanfare had died down and as a tribute to those big-hearted souls at radio stations like WCAS and WUMB and in places like Club Passim whose efforts have kept the thing going in order to try to pass it on to the younger generations now that demographics are catching up with the folkies from the 1960s heyday). Moreover, were they still singing and song-writing, that pairing of singer and writer having been becoming more prevalent, especially in the folk milieu in the wake of Bob Dylan’s word explosions back then. The days when the ground was shifting under the Tin Pan Alley Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ Jerome Kern kingdom.   

Here is the general format I used in that series for asking and answering those two questions which still apply today if one is hell-bent on figuring out the characters who rose and fell during that time: 

“If I were to ask someone, in the year 2005 as I have done periodically both before and after, to name a male folk singer from the 1960s I would assume that if I were to get any answer to that question that the name would be Bob Dylan. That “getting any answer” prompted by the increasing non-recognition of the folk genre by anybody under say forty, except those few kids who somehow “found” their parents’ stash of Vanguard records (for example, there were other folk labels including, importantly, Columbia Records which pushed the likes of Dylan and John Hammond forward) just as some in an earlier Pete Seeger/Weavers/Leadbelly/ Josh White/Woody Guthrie records in our parents’ stashes. Today’s kids mainly influenced by hip-hop, techno-music and just straight popular music.

And that Dylan pick would be a good and appropriate choice. One can endlessly dispute whether or not Dylan was (or wanted to be since he clearly had tired of the role, or seemed to by about 1966 when he for all intents and purposes “retired” for a while prompted by a serious motorcycle accident and other incidents) the voice of the Generation of ’68 (so named for the fateful events of that watershed year, especially the Democratic Convention in America in the summer of that year when the old-guard pulled the hammer down and in Paris where the smell of revolution was palpably in the air for the first time since about World War II, when those, including me, who tried to “turn the world upside down” to make it more livable began to feel that the movement was reaching some ebb tide) but in terms of longevity and productivity, the never-ending touring until this day and releasing of X amount of bootleg recordings, the copyrighting of every variation of every song, including traditional songs, he ever covered and the squelching of the part of the work that he has control over on YouTube he fits the bill as a known quality. However, there were a slew of other male folk singers who tried to find their niche in the folk milieu and who, like Dylan, today continue to produce work and to perform. The artist under review, Tom Rush, is one such singer/songwriter.”

“The following is a question that I have been posing in reviewing the work of a number of male folk singers from the 1960s and it is certainly an appropriate question to ask of Tom Rush as well. Did they aspire to be the “king” of the genre? I do not know if Tom Rush, like his contemporary Bob Dylan, started out wanting to be the king of the hill among male folk singers but he certainly had some things going for him. A decent acoustic guitar but a very interesting (and strong baritone) voice to fit the lyrics of love, hope, and longing that he was singing about at the time, particularly the No Regrets/Rockport Sunday combination which along with Wasn’t That A Mighty Storm and Joshua Gone Barbados were staples early on. During much of this period along with his own songs he was covering other artists, particularly Joni Mitchell and her Urge For Going and The Circle Game, so it is not clear to me that he had that same Dylan drive by let’s say 1968.

I just mentioned that he covered Joni Mitchell in this period. A very nice version of Urge For Going that captures the wintry, got to get out of here, imaginary that Joni was trying to evoke about things back in her Canadian homeland. And the timelessness and great lyrical sense of his No Regrets, as the Generation of ’68 sees another generational cycle starting, as is apparent now if it was not then. The covers of fellow Cambridge folk scene fixture Eric Von Schmidt on Joshua Gone Barbados and Galveston Flood are well done. As is the cover of Bukka White’s Panama Limited (although you really have to see or hear old Bukka flailing away on his old beat up National guitar to get the real thing on YouTube).”

Whether Tom Rush had the fire back then is a mute question now although in watching the documentary, No Regrets, in which he tells us about his life from childhood to the very recent past (2014) at some point he did lose the flaming “burn down the building fire,” just got tired of the road like many, many other performers and became a top-notch record producer, a “gentleman farmer,” and returned to the stage occasionally, most dramatically with his annual show Tom Rush-The Club 47 Tradition Continues held at Symphony Hall in Boston each winter. And in this documentary appropriately done under the sign of “no regrets” which tells Tom’s take on much that happened then he takes a turn, an important oral tradition turn, as folk historian. 

He takes us, even those of us who were in the whirl of some of it back then to those key moments when we were looking for something rooted, something that would make us pop in the red scare Cold War night of the early 1960s. Needless to say the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge gets plenty of attention as does his own fitful start in getting his material recorded, or rather fitful starts, mainly walking around to every possible venue in town to get backing for record production the key to getting heard by a wider audience via the radio and to become part of the increasing number of folk music-oriented programs, the continuing struggle to this day from what he had to say once you are not a gold-studded fixture.

“Other coffeehouses and other performers of the time, especially Eric Von Schmidt, another performer with a ton of talent and song-writing ability who had been on the scene very, very early on who eventually decided that his artistic career took first place, get a nod of recognition.  As does the role of key radio folk DJ Dick Summer in show-casing new work (and the folk show, picked up accidently one Sunday night when I was frustrated with the so-called rock and roll on the local AM rock station and flipped the dial of my transistor radio and heard a different sound, the sound of Dave Von Ronk, where I started to pick up my life-long folk “habit”).

So if you want to remember those days when you sought refuse in the coffeehouses and church basements, sought a “cheap” date night (for the price of a couple of cups of coffee sipped slowly in front of you and your date, a shared pastry and maybe a few bucks admission or tossed into the passed-around “basket” you got away easy and if she liked the sound too, who knows what else) or, ouch, want to know why your parents are still playing Joshua’s Gone Barbados on the record player as you go out the door Saturday night to your own adventures watch this documentary and find out what happened to one Not Bob Dylan when the folk world went under.