When History Collides With Cinematic License-The Strange Saga Of “Green Book” (2018)-A Film Review

When History Collides With Cinematic License-The Strange Saga Of “Green Book” (2018)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Frank Jackman,

The genesis of this film review of the Oscar-winning Best Picture Green Room at this publication is indeed a strange saga. The review was originally assigned to younger writer Sarah Lemoyne who after viewing it told the assignment editor that she did not feel that she could do an adequate review because she was totally clueless about the social and racial reality, North and South in 1962 the period which anchors the film. She did not know, could not believe that in those days black people, then called Negroes mostly (or worse “n” worse in redneck society and not just there) could not find public accommodation in the South (housing, dining, going to the restroom for Chrissake). Had to depend on the prior experience Green Book to navigate the Jim Crow South, and not just there when travelling below the Mason-Dixon line. Sarah although she was aware of the historic black civil rights movement had no idea that it was a fight for the ability not only to vote, but to eat (many Woolworth 5&10 sit-ins for example), sleep (separate but not equal hotels) or piss (very visible signs at toilets saying where “colored” could do so) wherever you landed in this great country. Having told her story to the assignment editor he decided that one of the older writers, me, should do the review to have someone do the piece who at least have some connection with those uproarious times.

(In Sarah’s defense she did a recent article on the Frida Kahlo-Toulouse-Lautrec  using her art classes background to pick up some very interesting information about this pair and their troubled relationship something I don’t know anything about so things have worked out okay in that regard although I will admit I still wonder how a true Latina beauty life Frida ever got her claws into the ugly debauched Toulouse, and why.)  

Frankly, and this only adds to the strangeness of the saga around putting this review out, I had my own personal hard time trying to figure out a “hook” to latch onto here. This centrally is a story in post-Black Lives Matter terms about “travelling while black” down in the South in the days when that was at best an iffy proposition and one had better have an updated copy of the Green Book at the ready. Obviously, any cinematic story, fiction or as here based on a true story, can be worked any way the director and producers want to with the story.1962, 1963, 1964 and 1965 were the heart of the black civil rights movement, the time especially in the North when people started to hear about alarming stuff going on against black people in the South in their movement to vote and get rid of Jim Crow which had started to build up steam in the mid-1950s.

Probably the most dramatic event that appeared on the black and white television most of us looked those days was when the cops down in Birmingham, Alabama (a city where the main characters here finished their trip at before heading North) fire-hosing and putting the rabid dogs on young black children protesting the Jim Crow conditions. The film while dealing with some individual manifestations of what was faced by the lead character Don Shirley as he tried to navigate the rigid routine racism rules of the South pretty much ignored the social turbulence that drove him to make his own racial statements. I will give examples below as I dissect the story line.     

Adding to this conundrum is what had been called elsewhere by other commentators the “white savior” or buddy aspects of the film. The lowly driver saving the boss’ ass in reverse. Those points probably would make more sense if I gave a run at the storyline which in the end as far as worthwhile entertainment went was well worth the couple of hours of viewing. Tony Lip, not Tony the Lip by the way, is an Italian, well let’s call him a handyman, in the old days and enforcer, who keeps order when the crazies get their liquor highs and weed-infested higher up at the Copa, Copacabana the now long- gone bright light night club in New York City run by very “connected” guys. Apparently there was no union to force concessions or concern for employees’ fortunes by management when the joint was closed for repairs for a couple of months (and it really was a joint with over-the-top prices for cheapjack liquor, some say watered down to just above apple juice level and so-so surf and turf entrees featuring music by otherwise unemployable singers like Bobby Rydell (nee Rizzo, maybe Ratso’s spawn) after he had his moment of fame on the rock charts when rock and roll was in one of its periods of decline). See though Tony Lip was from hunger, had a wife a couple of kids to support and therefore needed some kind of work. A guy in Lip’s line of work though is pretty limited into what he can take on although the guys in the neighborhood, the capos as it turned out would have provided him with plenty of work helping guys sleep with the fishes. (courtesy of some beautiful Godfather’s okay).

Word gets around though when you have a guy like Lip who can handle himself and keep standing and so he gets a referral for a driver’s job, you know, a chauffeur. That may seem beneath a guy like Lip’s abilities but there was a hitch. Two really, no three. First the guy he was supposed to drive for, the famous pianist Don Shirley, was in a memorable term for black people among Italians then although I had heard the “n” word used more among the Italian guys I knew who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in North Adamsville when I was in high school which I will use, an eggplant. Secondly Lip made it very obvious that he did not like eggplants (a dramatic scene when a couple of black guys were working in his house and given water in glasses by his wife caused Lip to seize up and throw the damn things in the trash barrel). Thirdly, this so-called high-toned piano player planned a concert tour of the South in 1962 when all hell was breaking out down there with the explosion of the black civil rights movement to prove, well, to prove that with a certain personal dignity that he was ready in his private way to break Jim Crow. (By the way down in deep Jim Crow territory they had only slightly less love for Italians, Roman Catholic Italians, than eggplants, blacks so Lip will have to be ready not only to enforce for Din but keep his own ass dry).

This Don Shirley, trained in Leningrad by the best they had (now Saint Petersburg so remember we are also talking about deep in the Cold War) who learned some manners and some, well, airs too. Don would be what Harold Cruse called using the respectful term of the time, the “new Negro” or W.E.B. Dubois “the talented tenth” who would lead the struggle to break Jim Crow and attain some level of racial equality. The problem, the 1962 problem for Don is that his aloofness from his people left him with some serious identity problems “solved” by many bottles of Cutty Sawk. He stated his case pretty well one Lip confrontational night when he in anguish said he was not black enough, white enough, or man enough (finding out he was gay via police lock-up gay interlude) for anybody. His alienation hit home (and also made me mad) when Lip had stopped the car for some reason when they were in the Deep South and some woe begotten share- croppers were tending the fields across the way. They and Don might have been on two different planets. The mad on my part was at the film’s director/producers for it was exactly people like those sharecroppers, working people in those Birmingham steel mills and along the waterfronts who were the backbone, the infrastructure of the movement. Some short-change there.   

I mentioned earlier that there is continuing controversy around the themes of this film, the Lip “white savior” aspect. No question that the unworldly Don Shirley would have never gotten out of the South then, Green Book guidance or not, without an enforcer like Lip. For example, one night Don decided to go for a drink in some redneck bar in Kentucky and would have been beaten to death without the timely intervention of Lip. There were many other situations like that as well especially when Don decided to go cruising for some gay love (and wound up in the jailhouse). This saving his ass by Lip time after time is the genesis of the “white savior” criticism.

As is well know there have been a million versions of the budding buddy story (and in post-Thelma and Louise times on the distaff side as well.) This pairing is as improbable as it gets as the upscale (hell he has an apartment over Carnegie Hall) black man meets street smart and street surviving (as important) Lip. They also may have been on different planets starting out but through the two months they are together they become, I guess, friends, although on the historical record and despite captions at the end stating they were friends until they died there is some question about that. Sometimes though you can like a film despite sensing something is out of kilter. That is the case here and although other films were Oscar-worthy this one doesn’t have anything to apologize for in that regard.

 

Life In The Parisian Literary Set Circa the Belle Epoque-Kiera Knightley’s Biopic “Colette” (2018)-A Film Review DVD Review

Life In The Parisian Literary Set Circa the Belle Epoque-Kiera Knightley’s Biopic “Colette” (2018)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont 

Colette, starring Kiera Knightley, Dominic West, 2018

There was always something fascinating about the Belle Epoque, so-called in France the site of the film under review, Colette,  in the late 19^th century before World War I destroyed all illusions, or almost all illusions that civilization, Western civilization anyway was heading onward and upward in a permanent progressive way. An age when, for the times, anything went at least in the major cities and at least in places like Paris which was the epitome of the major trends. It was an age, the age in the United States called the Age of the Robber Barons or the Gilded Age when previous moral and economic norms went out with the wind. An age when a frisky young writer like the woman who became known by her last name as Colette could show her stuff. A time too when a woman like Colette could blossom (some would say blossom as a writer and be any women’s whore at the same time but that be something of an anachronism).     

Colette, played by British actor Kiera Knightley last seen in the seemingly endless Pirates of the Caribbean films now played out, more than played out, is a young women from the sticks, from out in the country who has caught and been captivated by one nefarious and unscrupulous in the end Willy, played by Dominic West, who fancies himself a literary entrepreneur. Really a middle-man for others who write for him and he reaps the glory-and dough. Before long he beds and weds Colette, brings her to Paris and finds that she can write, can write under his imprimatur. The ups and downs of the literary life get something of a workout here as Willy promotes the hell out of his new-found product. That will work for a while although in the end in a panic over some bad financial decisions he will go down the tubes.

That is the high society and high literary part, but this film is also a let’s call it coming of age, coming into one’s own sense for Colette as she stirs through the Parisian social jungle. She was rumored to have had an affair with the demonic painter and epitome of the period’s decadent moral climate Toulouse-Lautrec although I could not pin that down. Rumor, this from Sarah Lemoyne who has a by-line at this publication and who recently did a piece on Lautrec and another love affair of his with the painter Frida Kahlo, that he was shacked up with Colette and her lesbian lover Missy after having seen them at the Moulin Rouge, his regular hang-out and been the only man in the crowd who did not boo or go loco when they kissed as part of their stage act to pay their rent. So take that for what it is worth.        

Perhaps fifty years ago the part of the film about that torrid love that dare not speak  its name, that lesbian love would have been either left out or done by allusion. Some convenient Boston marriage trope although Missy running around in men’s clothing was a coded reference among the upper classes that she was a daughter of Sappho. Colette as it turns out was at least bisexual, although the tender moments of the film tend toward those lesbian affairs and so the film deals with that aspect of her life as well as her going out on her own as a stage performer with her lover in a not well-received revue. (The Moulin Rouge the place where Willy had dropped all his cash trading in on Colette’s name and where she allegedly caught Toulouse’s eye) How much of this is based on fact and how much on the cinematic needs of a period biopic I don’t know but I found that aspect of the film much more compelling that the wrangling and anguish Colette had to deal with from the ruthless and desperate Willy who really was a scoundrel and ne’er- do-well. A reading of a little of Colette’s literary output though makes me wonder what the hoopla was about on her novels but so it goes. Well done job by Knightley and West in the acting department here. .   

When Art Deco-dence Blossomed Full Flower In The Fin-de-Siècle World Before World War I-A Magical Realistic Moment

When Art Deco-dence Blossomed Full Flower In The Fin-de-Siècle World Before World War I-A Magical Realistic Moment  

By Sarah Le Moyne  

Not all irony should be left on the historical cutting room floor. Sometimes what today is called the interpersonal, or maybe the ravishing rages given the cast of characters ant the times they floated on the earth, on the always with us culturati front should get their dime’s worth put into the mix. Take the case of two famous artists whose names I will not mention for now for my own reasons from different countries, cultures and frankly classes who after their love affair died (Jesus, don’t ask either if that is what they had or we will never get to the ironic part) had not seen each other for years finally re-met under third party auspices and started that crazed ravishing rage business all over again. The last I had heard the endless ravishing rages had not changed and they were to be legally separated amid some talk about restraining orders and who gets custody of the paintings and sketches done by each respective side during their affair, ah, recent time together. (Don’t even ask either about who gets what on the royalty breakdown since even their respective lawyers would be hard-pressed to unravel the judge’s order or we will really never get to that vaunted ironic part).      

It is fortunate that we don’t have to depend on history in the round, their personal histories, or for that matter the histories of their respective times, about how they met and what happened to break up what one Parisian wag of the time called “an affair made in heaven.” The old catch-all of rumor, innuendo, lies, press agent baloney, what is now called alternate facts and best of all fake news will see us through. History stands humbled before the rising storm.

Rumor, and rumor will stink this whole piece up to the high heavens, variously had him, the well-noted Parisian artist, meeting her, the equally well-known Arte Popular Sonora artist in the famous Tampico Cantina down in sunny Mexico where she was hustling for dough, they called it in those days the Spanish equivalent of bar-girl, whore is probably closer to the nub, before she got that famous Arte Popular accolade business. He was there for his health but mainly to see if he could break than serious lanadum habit cooling out on some high end weed (marijuana) but according to some sources to make a big score of cocaine and pay some back rent in those high-end Parisian apartments he kept getting bounced out of for non-payment. A few, maybe savvier that the rest who believed whatever his publicists at Goncourt put out, said he was fascinated by the idea of soft Mexican women unlike the bony skinny Paris dolls when he heard about a famous junkie whore in a book by Jack Kerouac. The twine that held this version together was that what attracted him to her was that she was taller than he was, his diminutive five foot statue and that what attracted her (other than he was a foreigner, and had the look of money, dinero about him despite his obvious jones look and unattractive appearance) was that she was taller than him by an inch.

Of course  that was all art world press agent bullshit , probably from the Shane Gallery whose main claim in the art world was that it had Sal Dino as its paid flak-catcher who could have hyped Marcel Duchamp as anything from the cutting edge of modern art to the mastermind behind the latest from American Standard in toilet fixtures, produced later to go along with whatever joint exhibitions they trying to sell stuff at. The cash nexus ruled even in those precincts.

Here is where it gets weird. Rumor, again, around Paris was that this painter who loved to hang around the Parisian demimonde smoking from his famous opium bong pipe carried everywhere in the days when nobody gave a fuck what you smoked, drank, inhaled in those precincts least of all the coppers, the gendarmes had been having an affair with the writer Colette (one name only) who was working in the Moulin Rouge on an act with her lesbian girlfriend, some dubious nobility fluff named I believe Missy, when she noticed him after she, Colette,  had finished kissing said Missy which caused a scandal even in those liberal airs. He was the only one who applauded, and she aimed headfirst for her “little man” with the bong pipe. Furthermore, the story went, he had set up “house” with Colette, Missy and whoever came running around thinking that he was the second coming of her Willy who had left Colette high and dry when the money spicket ran out from sales of her teenage romance novels. With such high overhead he had incurred in order  to make the bills for a while he had put together a million posters with her and Missy strolling like man and wife (you figure that one out, figure who was man and who was wife when both donned mannish boy attire) for all of proper Paris to see and gaze, male gaze at.         

Weirder still was the rumor, always rumor, that the sunny Sonora senorita at that time, the same time was having an affair with depending on the source, usually some scumbag from the Hearst newspaper chain before Charles Foster Kane took over and made it a fashion rag for his next mistress, the photographer Edward Weston, the muralist David Siqueiros and most likely as far as I am concerned the ancient Diego Rivera who had picked her up in Viva Sampone’s Gallery in Acapulco after remarking coyly about her eyebrow. (Yes one eyebrow or so it looked, she made it look too, with that Mex-Tex, metizo, look which drove men from Parisian artists to Mexican banditos crazy, loco okay. The wildest rumor of all, the one that I discredited the most was that she had gotten her hooks into the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and only his death at the hands of a Stalinst agent broke off the affair right there in the Blue House with Diego painting some big ass mural about obreros and braceros down in his own studio. (As it turned out that affair actually had happened  but had been buried in the archives until the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s by even the most hardened Stalinists since they all, all the old Russian revolutionaries from Lenin on down kept their ten million affairs and dalliances private, very private.)            

[Let me make this make the following an aside because there were seven million other rumors all murky, very murky, like our Parisian painter when down and out was pimping for the famous Madame La Rue near the Versailles Palace on the avenue to make rent money, that he was having an affair with the husband of some weird Russian countess whom he had met through Missy who she had been having an affair with while with Colette, that he was shipping high-grade opium from China on barges in the Thames provided, the barges, by his junkie friend James Whistler who took his payment in kind. A little less weird since he actually was there at the time was that he was running on the sly a whorehouse, bordello they called it, in Buenos Aires. It goes on and on and who is around to separate it out or why since he was not a guy who defended his reputation very well. Who knows half the stuff was probably bullshit since he was close friends with Leon Le Blanc the society columnist for Le Figaro. Any mention of his name would jack up the prices for his original art and cause a run on the posters every college kid wanted for their lonely garret walls.

As for her, as for the Flower of Tampico, her sudden rise in the art world left little room for investigation since even rumors have to have an edge of truth or did in those days, now longed for in an age when such “quaint” ideas are out the window. A lot of it centered on her relationship with the Soviet Ambassador but such things are tricky especially in light of what happened to Leon Trotsky later with some agent with a trusty ax and some very murky stuff around her personage, her role in the whole affair and what she told the federales (all bullshit but again not known until they yanked open the Soviet KGB archives). Mostly, despite a good Catholic girl upbringing, she tramped around, had been a bar-girl maybe did a stint at some Sonora whorehouse and headed to Mexico City where she started to paint in her off-hours and where she would meet Diego Rivera who already had some “cred” in the art world. The whole Rivera episode is murky, some say they were married others that she was living with some Matilde lover in what in America in those days would be called a Boston marriage and showed up when Diego was exhibiting exhibited as his marida. Let’s leave it that they knew each other, they shared space in the big ass Blue House together and he was sad when she passed away and left him with some vieja mistress to console him. So you can see the need for an aside right here.]               

If you follow this story, tall tale if you like, that Parisian painter, hell, let’s give him a name since everybody knows the shortest painter in Paris who also was a junkie and had about a dozen social diseases  was Toulouse-Lautrec had made a “connection,” had gotten some high-grade cocaine and offered it to the Sonora senorita, hell, let’s give her a name too because although there were many short Arte Popular Mexican  women artists only one had one eyebrow and worked her way up the art world via the Tampico Cantina, Frida Kahlo. She accepted and once they found out they both liked James Abbott McNeil Whistler’s moody paintings they got along very well.

All she knew of him at the time was that he was a degenerate (having read Le Figaro and its social columns too closely) who did posters for various, let’s call them entertainers, in the Paris nightlife. She did not know that he actually painted. All he knew of her was that she was the best bar-girl in Tampico and that she drew very strange but beautiful in a weird way drawings and paintings of, well, of herself, of her indigenous people and of the flora and fauna around sunny Mexico with a specialty on death masks and monkey faces. They got along famously until she wanted to go to Paris and he was afraid that his ill-defined past would catch up with him once she landed and found a welcoming committee of Colette and Missy and who knows who else on the docks. He was fine with the arrangement until she started getting recognition as a famous Mexican artist who could out-paint him six, two and even. Those earth shattering plates would move far apart until he blew town leaving a huge hotel bill in the name of the French ambassador (which was paid by the way by the French government after some wrangling and threats since now he was a “national treasure” just like the degenerate Degas) and she took up without the next best thing (which is all I can say since I don’t know who was next on her dance card except it wasn’t Trotsky that was later).      

   

They say that no good deed ever goes unpunished, intentionally or not. A million years later some hungry, maybe from hunger but I don’t think I have seen one yet unlike artists, curator trying to move up the food chain in the art cabal decided since their had been a dramatic shift in American demographics with an upswing in the Latino population around the country and around Boston that a nice exhibit centered on Frida Kahlo and her circle would be a good idea once the Museum of Fine Arts grabbed her famous Two Peasant Women painting on the cheap. Done. That success fueled a mini-Frida craze and that very same now certainly not from hunger curator cadged the idea a of bigger exhibit, a few more Frida paintings, some Mex-Tex, metizo arts and crafts filler and the inevitable works of that hard-pressed circle of friends. Bingo, the cash nexus boomed.      

The mix? That exhibit idea got another very hungry curator thinking after some research about the twisted love affair between the two that the museum should “exploit” with an exhibition of Toulouse’s material, the usual half dozen paintings, a million posters and the usual suspects, circle of friends and contempories as filler. Sounded great from the art cabal to the well-heeled patrons to the average goer. Except when Frida heard that “he” was coming (she refused to dignify him using his name) she started crying, screaming to the high heavens (in Spanish so watch out) that he was an unreconstructed) junkie whose art world was full of hopheads, lunatics and airheads (English translation). More-he couldn’t draw worth a damn and what he drew was not art, not the people’s art anyway but for the Mayfair swells who hadn’t a clue to what art really was except it wasn’t those silly posters he kept putting out for his friends in the gutters of Paris. Worse, worst of all she invoked what had happened to Leon Trotsky as his fate as well all for Comrade Stalin and the beautiful Russian Garden of Eden. (She apparently had not heard the news of the demise of both Stalin and that Garden.)

He, well, he when he heard he would have to play second fiddle to his Flower of Tampico started to get all misty-eyed at first, reached for his big ass bong pipe and sailed into a dream. Then a few days later when he heard that she cursed him, that she put the pox on him, mentioned that Trotsky stuff and then that he was nothing but a parvenu hustling poor women out on the avenue and drew like a second-grade student with erratic crayons flipped out. Started calling her whore and whore’s offal. Said the day of the dead stuff was strictly out of some silly John Donne poem which she probably had never read and that ao called monkey of the people and endless self-portrait stuff was beneath art. So they parted, parted with that final acrimonious lawsuit that in the end only enriched the art cabal and the fucking lawyers.         

“To Be Young Was Very Heaven”-With The 50th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967” In Mind-Alex James' Story

“To Be Young Was Very Heaven”-With The 50^th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967” In Mind-Alex James' Story  

Revised Introduction by Zack James

[I was about a decade or so too young to have been washed, washed clean to hear guys like Peter Paul Markin, more on him below, tell the tale, by the huge counter-cultural explosion that burst upon the land (and by extension and a million youth culture ties internationally before the bubble burst) in the mid to late 1960s and maybe extending a few year into the 1970s depending on whose ebb tide event you adhere to. (Markin’s for very personal reasons having to do with participating in the events on May Day 1971 when the most radical forces tried to stop the Vietnam War by shutting down the government and got kicked in the teeth for their efforts. Doctor Gonzo, the late writer Hunter Thompson who was knee-deep in the experiences called it 1968 around the Democratic Party convention disaster in Chicago. I, reviewing the material published on the subject mostly and on the very fringe of what was what back then would argue for 1969 between Altamont and the Days of Rage everything looked bleak then and after.)

Over the next fifty years that explosion has been inspected, selected, dissected, inflected, infected and detected by every social science academic who had the stamina to hold up under the pressure and even by politicians, mostly to put the curse of “bad example” and “never again” on the outlier experimentation that went on in those days. Plenty has been written about the sea-change in mores among the young attributed to the breakdown of the Cold War red scare freeze, the righteous black civil rights struggles rights early in the decade and the forsaken huge anti-Vietnam War movement later. Part of the mix too and my oldest brother Alex, one of Markin’s fellow corner boys from the old neighborhood is a prime example, was just as reaction like in many generations coming of age, just the tweaking of the older generations inured to change by the Cold War red scare psychosis they bought into. The event being celebrated or at least reflected on in this series under the headline “To Be Very Young-With The Summer of Love 1967 In Mind” now turned fifty was by many accounts a pivotal point in that explosion especially among the kids from out in the hinterlands, like Markin an Alex, away from elite colleges and anything goes urban centers.   The kids, who as later analysis would show, were caught up one way or another in the Vietnam War, were scheduled to fight the damn thing, the young men anyway, and were beginning, late beginning, to break hard from the well-established norms from whence they came in reaction to that dread.

This series came about because my already mentioned oldest brother, Alex James, had in the spring of 2017 taken a trip to San Francisco on business and noticed on a passing Muni bus that the famed deYoung Museum located in the heart of Golden Gate Park, a central location for the activities of the Summer of Love as it exploded on the scene in that town, was holding an exhibition about that whole experience. That jarred many a half forgotten memory in Alex’s head. Alex and his “corner boys” back in the day from the old Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville, a suburb of Boston where we all came of age, had gotten their immersion into counter-cultural activities by going to San Francisco in the wake of that summer of 1967 to “see what it was all about.”

When Alex got back from his business trip he gathered the few “corner boys” still standing, Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Ralph Kelly, and Josh Breslin (not an actual North Adamsville corner boy but a corner boy nevertheless from Olde Sacco up in Maine whom the tribe “adopted” as one of their own) at Jimmy’s Grille in North Adamsville, their still favorite drinking hole as they call it, to tell what he had seen in Frisco town and to reminisce. From that first “discussion” they decided to “commission” me as the writer for a small book of reflections by the group to be attached alongside a number of sketches I had done previously based on their experiences in the old neighborhood and in the world related to those times. So I interviewed the crew, wrote or rather compiled the notes used in the sketches below but believe this task was mostly my doing the physical writing and getting the hell out of the way once they got going. This slender book is dedicated to the memory of the guy who got them all on the road west-Peter Paul Markin whom I don’t have to mention more about here for he, his still present “ghost” will be amply discussed below. Zack James]              

To the memory of the late Peter Paul Markin on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary year of the Summer of Love, San Francisco, 1967

[Although this small tribute book is dedicated to the memory of Peter Paul Markin from the corner boys days of the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville and will have contributions from all the surviving member of that tribe there are other corner boys who have passed away, a couple early on in that bloody hell called Vietnam, Ricky Russo and Ralph Morse, RIP brothers, you did good in a bad war, Allan Jackson, Allan Stein, “Bugger” Shea and Markin’s old comrade, Billy Bradley. You guys RIP too.]          

By Alex James

Let’s get this whole, I will put it in capitals just like the sociologists of the event and whoever puts anything about it on YouTube, Summer of Love.1967 thing straight. This whole turning away for a while by most of us corner boys from the Acre from the “square” nine to five, little white picket fence with kids and dogs thing was totally and solely the work of one Peter Paul Markin. Markin whom our acknowledged leader Frankie Riley dubbed the “Scribe” and I will call him that hereafter was the first one of us to get a whiff of the fresh breeze as he called it of something new and different coming down the road. Excuse my language but while the rest of us on those strange and sometimes oddly eventful Friday and Saturday were worrying about getting enough dough together for a date, or if without a date getting one, or if with a date getting some action from the chick, getting laid, “doing the do” as we called it the Scribe was like some fucking prophet proclaiming the new day coming. And seriously all through high school we could have given a fuck about what he was talking about.       

Don’t get me wrong the Scribe was a good guy to have a round most days and while no way he could lead the guys, even now the idea is totally preposterous, he, aside from that “new day coming” bullshit was a straight up guy. Was the guy we looked to, including Frankie, to tell us what was going on right then. That “right then” was whatever scheme he had figured out, okay, what con or midnight sneak job he had figured out, legal or illegal mostly the latter, for us to get money to have a shot at those dates and a shot at “doing the do.” Moreover since behind that larcenous, grand larcenous if there is such a term little head of his he was a conduit to the girls. See he was the “sensitive” guy, the guy who liked poetry and literature which we could have given a fuck about but which a lot of girls at school and around town were into and they would flock around him and tell him stuff-like who they liked or didn’t like. Liked and didn’t like among the corner boys especially and he would pitch or not pitch for us. The funny part like with the larcenous schemes which no way would he execute but left to Frankie’s fiendish organizing Markin never had dates with those girls, none in town either. He would run over to Harvard Square find some “folkie” chick he called them and some of them were foxes, were bowled over by his knowledge of folk music and by his prophecy that some new breeze was coming that girls like that went crazy for at the time.              

That is all stuff though while we were in high school mostly although Markin’s Harvard Square rendezvous thing continued after we graduated from old North Adamsville High in 1965. Of course like any group in high school once everybody graduated (a couple of our guys didn’t until 1966 for some reason not germane here) they went to a degree in their own directions mostly to work, a few like Frankie and the Scribe to college. But we would gather, whoever was around, several times a year for the next couple of years to keep in touch and to “keep the flame” as the Scribe called it lit. Things just went along for most of us like they had for our parents, start working, work your way up some ladder, or get started anyway, get more steady in the girl department (although no guy I knew, corner boy or not, passed on a stray encounter whether they were seriously “going steady’, engaged or married for that matter), began that uphill climb toward marriage, kids, pets and the picket fence.

All of us except the late Ricky Russo who had volunteered right out of high school and would become an Airborne Ranger in Vietnam before being blown away in some stinking village in the Central Highlands were scared as hell of the draft which lingered over our heads (a couple of other corner boys beside Ricky would volunteer when the sense they were to be called up and another guy, Allan Jackson, “volunteered” through the justice system after being caught stealing six cars out of the local car dealership lot one drunken night by having the option of five years in the can or go into the Army thrown at him)      

Then in the early spring of 1967 the Scribe shocked all of us by telling us that he was quitting college, quitting Boston University to go “find himself” out West, out in California, out in San Francisco although that destination came later. Remember this is a working class kid whose folks had no dough for college, none not with five boys to raise, who got a scholarship and some other financial deal to go giving that all up  to “find himself.” We all knew a girl, a wild Irish girl, Mary Shea, had gotten into his head and had gone West already but to give up that scholarship and to face the draft straight up with the loss of his student exemption was crazy and we told him so. He just said to us the “new day” was here and he did not want to miss the opportunity. He would take his chances with the draft. A fateful, a very fateful, decision which would eventually lead to his downfall.              

In any case the Scribe dropped out put a knapsack or two together, maybe that second thing was a bedroll and headed West, hitchhiking like some Jack Kerouac On The Road character, bum we called it. The Scribe in high school had made us all read the book, or parts of it, or he would read parts of it to us but mostly we could have given a fuck about hitchhiking and old timer adventurers and 1940s passe cars although Dean Moriarty the king of the road seemed cool to me. We all wanted cars, fast cars, and not sticking our thumbs out on some desolate road waiting for some desperate pervert to pick us up. (The Scribe’s cross-country hitchhike run would be the first of many that he, and all the rest of us who headed west in his wake, would take before the ebb tide set in and you just couldn’t depend on that mode of transportation to get you across town never mind across country.) So the Scribe was in Frisco town when the whole thing exploded, when drugs became a serious part of youth nation life, when the music got amped up and the chains that held previous society, or the youth part anyway or maybe I had better say part of the youth part since most young people as it turned out went about their square lives being square (it would take the rest of us, or most of the rest of us, a while, a few years anyway to get back in harness), when consensual sex became a lovely experience rather than just hormonal hunger (although that came into it too) and other ways of organizing your life were explored (not all for the better but mostly if you could keep the pyschos and crazies at bay).        

The Scribe hitchhiked back to the Acre in late summer on a mission. Get his square, hanging around mopping, nowhere corner boys to pack up and head west on another run. I was between jobs, between girls and bored enough to jump when the Scribe called the tune. (The dope he brought back for us, we “liquor heads” to try helped once the initial fear and hassle of drugs and the old junkie stigma evaporated in a haze). Frankie would also go out on that trip although I think his first trip out like Josh’s was on the stinking five or six day Greyhound bus out (that experience would get both men on the hitchhike road thereafter after dealing with that craziness). And everything was in late 1967 for the most part as advertised. I went back and forth for the next couple of years but mostly staying out there after we hooked up with mad man savior helmsman Captain Crunch and his magical mystery tour bus but I think Josh will deal with that episode so I will end here. 

End here except to say I believe we all were, maybe still are grateful that the Scribe put us on the road, had given us a few years of breaking out, jail breaking out of our doomed Acre existences. Everybody who went out after the Scribe survived for a long while except Ralph Morse who died in the swampy stinking Mekong Delta and of course Ricky Russo who never got a chance to go West with us before his death. And except sad to say the Scribe whose decision back in the spring of 1967 to “find himself”’ would several years later wind up costing him his precious life in a dirty dusty backroad down in Sonora, Mexico with two slugs in his head after what apparently was a busted drug deal since we never got conclusive information about exactly what had happened before we were warned off by the Federales down there.

Fateful since the Scribe was eventually drafted in late 1968 and having then no serious reason not to accept induction did so and wound up in Vietnam which changed him in many ways that he could not have imagined back in 1967. He like a lot of guys who were in what they called ‘Nam had trouble adjusting to the “ real” world coming back and he drifted into this and that writing assignment out in the West Coast for a while, did the remarkable “Brothers Under The Bridge” series about guys, veterans, like him living out there in their alternative community under the bridges, along the railroad tracks and aside the arroyos for the East Bay Eye, long defunct, had a wife for a while and was living with our old adopted corner boy Josh Breslin when he got seriously into a cocaine addiction. Began “running” product back and forth to Mexico at a time when cocaine was becoming the drug of choice and the beginning of the serious cartels. The last Josh knew the Scribe was down south of the border doing a run or trying to put a deal together. Something went wrong on one end or the other and the Scribe now rests in a potter’s field down in Sonora and still missed, crazy missed as we used to call it when we hadn’t seen somebody we loved for a while. Well he is still crazy missed by this guy. Thanks for the fresh breeze Scribe, thanks.           

Folk Rock’s Elder Statesman- Neil Young- Back In The Days

Folk Rock’s Elder Statesman- Neil Young- Back In The Days

CD Review

Harvest, Neil Young and various sidemen, Reprise Records, 1972

I have mentioned in a previous review of the work of Neil Young, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”, that pound for pound in those days he and Crazy Horse stood tall in the rock pantheon. Maybe not as tall as the Stones or The Doors but somewhere in the mix. Now, getting close to forty years later, Neil has morphed into folk rock’s elder statesman and still puts out some creative work. That is not what interests me now though, at least not directly. What is interesting about this “Harvest” CD is how much of the best work here reflects where Neil Young was heading after that brilliant “heavy rock/psychedelic rock” flash of work with Crazy Horse (and his work before that with several other groups). Some of the songs like the classic “Heart Of Gold”, “Old Man” and “Words” could have fit very nicely on, say, his fairly recent “Prairie” CD. And that, my friends, is indeed a compliment.


"Heart Of Gold"

I want to live,
I want to give
I've been a miner
for a heart of gold.
It's these expressions
I never give
That keep me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
Keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.

I've been to Hollywood
I've been to Redwood
I crossed the ocean
for a heart of gold
I've been in my mind,
it's such a fine line
That keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
Keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.

Keep me searching
for a heart of gold
You keep me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm growing old.
I've been a miner
for a heart of gold.

Jim Morrison and The Doors- WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

Jim Morrison and The Doors- WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

Zack James comment: My oldest brother, Alex, who was in the thick of the Summer of Love along with his corner boys from North Adamsville above all the later Peter Paul Markin who led them out to the Wild West said that the few times that he/they saw The Doors either in Golden Gate Park at free, I repeat, free outdoor concerts or at the Avalon or Fillmore which were a great deal more expensive, say two or three dollars, I repeat two or three dollars that The Doors when they were on, meaning when Jim Morrison was in high dungeon, was in a drug-induced trance and acted the shaman for the audience nobody was better. Having been about a decade behind and having never seen Morrison in high dungeon or as a drug-induced shaman but having listened to various Doors compilations I think for once old Alex was onto something. Listen up.         

CD REVIEW

THE BEST OF THE DOORS, ELECTRA ASYLUM RECORDS, 1985


In my jaded youth I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The origin of that interest first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House , Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James, then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Roy, Big Joe and Ike, and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, folk music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Joan Baez, etc. I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music and so on. The subject of the following review, Jim Morrison and the Doors, is an example.

The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derives from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of the Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. Some of that influence is apparent here in this essentially greatest hits album.

More than one rock critic has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here. What a reviewer with that opinion has to do is determine whether any particular CD captures the Doors at their best. This reviewer advises that if you want to buy only one Doors CD that would be The Best of the Doors. If you want to trace their evolution more broadly, or chronologically, other CDs do an adequate job but they are helter-skelter. This CD edition has, with maybe one or two exceptions, all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll for keeps.

A note on Jim Morrison as an icon of the 1960’s. He was part of the trinity – Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young. The slogan of the day (or hour)- Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then. Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including this writer, felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.” Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well. Whatever excesses were committed by the generation of ’68, and there were many, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents, exemplified by one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty years of “cultural wars” in revenge by his protégés, hangers-on and their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. Enough.

For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"

For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50^th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"

By Lance Lawrence

[In the interest of today’s endless pursue of transparency which in many cases covers up the real deal with a few fake pieces of fluff I admit that I knew Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Janet always called me and those I knew Jan now late daughter (she died in 1996)  whom he never really recognized as his despite the absolute likeness and later testing for whatever cramped reason and which took its toll on her with like her father an early death, met out in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur off the famous Pacific Coast Highway. We, a group of us from the Boston area who had been told by some guys from North Adamsville, about forty miles south of Boston who we met through Pete Markin* who I went to Boston University with before he dropped out in the Summer of Love, 1967 about Todo and how it was a cooler place down the road from Big Sur which had become inundated with holy goofs and tourists and a rip off. That s is still true today although the rip-off part is submerged since it in no longer a hippie Garden of Eden except among those who were so stoned that couldn’t find their ways out of the hills above the ocean and have wound up staying there as models for what the 1960s were all about (and what I remember hearing a few parents tell their children to avoid at all costs-oh, to be very young-then)

We had been staying at a cabin owned by the writer Steven Levin (mostly novels and essays for publications like City Lights and Blue Dial Press and regional literary journals) when one Saturday night we held a party and in walked Jan then maybe seventeen or eighteen, nice and who wanted to be a writer like her dad. The hook for me to meet her was the Boston-Lowell connection (one of the few times being from Boston did me any good). We became friendly the few days she stayed at the cabin (at my request) and I saw her a few times later. I was having my own troubles just then and as the world knows now she had a basketful from that crass rejection by her father and frustrations at not being taken seriously as a writer always following in her father’s two-million-word shadows. Funny it did not take any DNA testing for me to see that she was pure Kerouac in features and frankly from what I read of his style that too.    

I also knew Allan Ginsberg in his om-ish days when we fired up more than one blunt (marijuana cigarette for those who are clueless or use another term for the stick) to see what we could see out in the National Mall where he would do his sleek Buddha Zen mad monk thing and later Greenwich Village night where he did serious readings to the Village literary set. I was just a little too young to have appreciated his Howl which along with the elegant Kaddish (for his troubled late mother) fully since the former in particular was something like the Beat anthem to Kerouac’s On The Road bible. He had kind of moved on from beat and was moving on from hippie a bit as well and it would not be until later when the dust settled that he would go back to the later 1940s and early 1950s to explain to a candid audience including me over grass and some wine what it was all about, what drove the startlingly images and weird noises of that former poem. (Which I have read and re-read several times as well as through the beauty of YouTube has him reading forming background while I am working on the computer.) 

This piece first appeared in Poetry Today shortly after Allan Ginsberg’s Father Death death without accordion and caused a great deal of confusion among the readers, a younger group according to the demographics provided to me by the advertising department when I was trying to figure out where the thing got lost in the fog, why these younger folk missed some terms I took for granted with which every reader was at least vaguely familiar. Some readers thought because I mentioned the word “cat” I was paying homage to T.S. Eliot generally recognized in pre-Beat times as the ultimate modernist poet. Meaning for Eliot aficionados the stuff that Broadway used to make a hit musical out of although it would have been better if they, either the confused young or the Broadway producers had counted their lives in coffee spoons. That cat reference of mine actually referred to “hep cats” as in a slang expression from the 1940s and 1950s before Beat went into high gear not a cat, the family pet.

Some readers, and I really was scratching my head over this one since this was published in a poetry magazine for aficionados and not for some dinky survey freshman college English class, that because I mentioned the word “homosexual” and some jargon associated with that sexual orientation when everybody was “in the closet” except maybe Allan Ginsberg and his Peter although they were in friendlier Frisco mainly thought I was referring W.H. Auden. There had been some coded words for the sexual acts associated with homosexually then, and maybe in some older sets still in use  Jesus, Auden, a great poet no question if not a brave one slinking off to America when things got too hot in his beloved England in September 1939 and a self-confessed homosexual in the days when that was dangerous to declare in late Victorian public morality England especially after what happened to Oscar Wilde when they pulled down the hammer was hardly the only homosexual possibility. That despite his game of claiming every good-looking guy for what he called the “Homintern.” Frankly I didn’t personally think anybody even read Auden anymore once the Beats be-bopped.

There were a few others who were presented as candidates as the person I was championing. James Lawson because some of his exploits were similar to the ones I described but those events were hardly rare in the burned over 1950s down in the mud of society. Jack Weir because of some West Coast references. Jeffery Stein, the poet of the new age shtetl because of the dope, the new religion for the lonely and the lonesome. All wrong. That poet had a name an honored name Allan Ginsberg who howled in the night at the oddness and injustice of the world after saying Kaddish to his mother’s memory and not be confused with this bag of bones rough crowd who refused to learn from the silly bastard. This piece was, is for ALLAN GINSBERG who wrote for Carl Solomon in his hours of sorrow just before he went under the knife in some stone- cold crazy asylum and I now for him when he went under the ground. Lance Lawrence]

*(We have, those of us who knew Markin back in the 1960s when he hung around the Cambridge coffeehouses with his cheap date girlfriends (he was a scholarship boy who had no money, came from some slack family house so coffeehouses, the ones with no admission charges and cheap coffee to maintain a seat), have often wondered whether Markin and Kerouac would have gotten along if they had been of the same generation. That generation born in the 1920s, his parents’ generation if not lifestyle. From Markin’s end would Jack have been the searched for father he had never known. From Jack’s end whether the two-million question Markin would have clashed or meshed with the two-million- word Kerouac. I know as early as in the 1980s when I was dating an English Literature graduate student from Cornell that Jack was in bad odor as a literary figure to emulate and subsequently anybody who wanted to be “school of Kerouac found hard sledding getting published. This is probably worthy of a separate monogram in this 50^th anniversary year of the passing of Kerouac.) 

***********

I have seen the best poet of the generation before mine declare that he had seen that the best minds of his generation had turned to mush, turned out in the barren wilderness from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums. Saw the same Negro streets he saw around Blue Hill Avenue and Dudley Street blank and wasted in the sweated fetid humid Thunderbird-lushed night (and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in unison “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice” and ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price-ready to commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. Thought that those angel-headed hipsters, those hep cats hanging around Times, Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares crying in pools of blood coming out of the wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for their liquor, stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of Harvard Square where they hustled young college students, young impressionable college students whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed students, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream of conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of the fervid elites but anytown, Levitttown of those who would escape to Boston or Wisconsin to face the angel of death up front and say no go, pass, under luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.

Saw hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who nevertheless has Protestant lusts in their pallid hearts but unrequited (here’s how-they would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and leave with both and some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious fluids and according to Norman Mailer world-historic fucks which would product the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away). Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl in not East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some sullen fair-skinned and blonded Protestant girls who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities and just feel good stuff. All three varieties and yes there were more but who knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home, Tantic card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro streets but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of death at arms’ length. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets and slamming singsters fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two- line rhymes got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no more.                    

Saw the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s own angel. Some Norman Mailer white hipster turned her on to a little sister and then some boy and she no longer warbled but did sweet candy cane tricks for high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make her his mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like she was still a freaking warbler, a freaking virgin or something instead of “used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the dream doper man, the Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean angel-abandoned death watch streets but who knew that one night at the Hayes (everybody called it just that after they had been there one night), one after midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke dreams and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks. So please, please, hard times come again no more.              

I have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip  to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all.

On The Anniversary Of The Death Of The Doors' Jim Morrsion- AND AGAIN-WE WANT THE WORLD, AND WE WANT IT NOW! - The Music Of Jim Morrison And The Doors

On The Anniversary Of The Death Of The Doors' Jim Morrsion- AND AGAIN-WE WANT THE WORLD, AND WE WANT IT NOW! - The Music Of Jim Morrison And The Doors

Zack James comment: My oldest brother, Alex, who was in the thick of the Summer of Love along with his corner boys from North Adamsville above all the later Peter Paul Markin who led them out to the Wild West said that the few times that he/they saw The Doors either in Golden Gate Park at free, I repeat, free outdoor concerts or at the Avalon or Fillmore which were a great deal more expensive, say two or three dollars, I repeat two or three dollars that The Doors when they were on, meaning when Jim Morrison was in high dungeon, was in a drug-induced trance and acted the shaman for the audience nobody was better. Having been about a decade behind and having never seen Morrison in high dungeon or as a drug-induced shaman but having listened to various Doors compilations I think for once old Alex was onto something. Listen up.         

From American Left History

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

*AND AGAIN-WE WANT THE WORLD, AND WE WANT IT NOW! - The Music Of Jim Morrison And The Doors 
CD Review

Waiting For The Sun, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Rhino, 2007

Since my youth I have had an ear for American (and other roots music), whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The origin of that interest first centered on the blues, then early rock and roll and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, folk music. I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. The subject of the following review is an example.

The Doors are roots music? Yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derives from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of the Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native American culture. Some of that influence is apparent here.

More than one rock critic has argued that at their best the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here. What a reviewer with that opinion has to do is determine whether any particular CD captures the Doors at their best. This reviewer advises that if you want to buy only one Doors CD that would be The Best of the Doors. If you want to trace their evolution other CD’s, like this “Waiting For The Sun” album do an adequate job. Stick outs here include: the anti-war classic "The Unknown Soldier," “Love Street,” and "Spanish Caravan".

A note on Jim Morrison as an icon of the 1960s. He was part of the trinity – Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix who lived fast and died young. The slogan- Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And we liked that idea. Then. Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And creative. Even the most political, including this writer, among us felt those cultural winds and counted those who espoused this vision as part of the chosen. Those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change without a political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

MARK THIS WELL. Whatever excesses were committed by the generation of ’68, and there were many, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents at the time, exemplified by one Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. 40 years of ‘cultural wars’ by his protégés in revenge is a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. Enough.

The Unknown Soldier Lyrics

Wait until the war is over
And we're both a little older
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Unborn living, living dead
Bullet strikes the helmet's head

And it's all over
For the unknown soldier
It's all over
For the unknown soldier, uh hu-uh

Hut!
Hut!
Hut ho hee up!
Hut!
Hut!
Hut ho hee up!
Hut!
Hut!
Hut ho hee up!
Comp'nee,
Halt!
Pree-sent arms!

Make a grave for the unknown soldier
Nestled in your hollow shoulder
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Bullet strikes the helmet's head

And, it's all over,
The war is over.
It's all over, war is over.
It's all over, baby!
All over, baby!
All, all over, yeah!
Aah, hah-hah.
All over, all over, babe!
Oh! Oh yeah!
All over, all over!
Ye-e-e-ah…