The First Black President, President Of Rock And Rock- Chuck Berry: The Great Twenty-Eight- A CD Review

CD Review

By Associate Music Critic Lance Lawrence

The Gr

eat Twenty-Eight: Chuck Berry, Chess Records 

Today I want to talk about presidential politics. No, not that lame excuse for an election process that occurred in 2016. That Hillary and Donald battle royal for who is in charge of being in charge. Forget that stuff. I want to talk today about is who was, who is, the person who has qualified to be the leading candidate for the title of the president of rock and roll (small letter ‘p” signifying the truly democratic process of selection in this important matter). Of course when you talk about who was who in rock and roll you have to go back to what is now called in the promos and ads, the demographically targeted promos and ads, the “classic age” of rock. The period roughly from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. That said, the passing earlier in 2017 year of the legendary rocker Chuck Berry has placed this question once again on the front burner, at least in my circles.

As usual in such matters the controversy has come to the fore in reaction to the various tributes and obituaries on the life of Chuck Berry and his place in the history of rock and roll. During that period I made so bold to suggest that in the long run Chuck Berry’s influence on the development of rock and roll as it came out of that very special black-centered rhythm and blues of the late 1940s and early 1950s stuff that, truthfully most whites except a few hipsters around café society New York and on the fringes of North Beach and slinky LA on the Coast had no clue even existed. That despite the fact that many of the songs that we have come to associate with classic rock and roll like Hound Dog, One Night With You and Shake, Rattle and Roll  burned the trail during that period.

Naturally when names are named in culturati circles, especially academic circles, somebody is always ready almost by reflex or by some overweening desire to make a name for his or her self at the expense of some tribal bigwig to throw mud at your finely tuned and reasoned premises. Needless to say that happened here in discussing the influence of Chuck Berry as well except from an unexpected source. Zack James, a fellow music critic in this space and at the American Music Gazette, decided he could hold his tongue no longer and sent me an e-mail basically challenging my sanity for believing that anybody but Elvis, and I do not believe that I need to add a last name for everybody to know of whom I speak, was the leading figure in that magical moment called 1950s rock. Of course I could have dismissed Zack’s idea out of hand since he got his knowledge about rock and roll second-hand, hell for all I know third-hand or from reading the liner notes, from listening to his older brother Alex’s records in the mid-1960s well after the heyday of the movement I am talking about. I decided though that I couldn’t let that notion about who was who stand without a response.

I am one who, belatedly, has come to recognize that Elvis (again I don’t think I need to mention a last name but if you need one just ask your parents or grandparents and you will get your answer in two seconds flat) was indeed the “king” of rock and roll. He took, as Sam Phillips the legendary founder of Sun Records and first finder of Elvis in old Memphis town who has been quoted many, many times as saying, the old black rhythm and blues songs and put a white, a white rockabilly, face on the genre and made the crossover in a big way. So I will not argue that point with Zack. Will not argue either that his act, those swirling rotating off their axis hips make all the girls, hell, all the women sweat. Point Zack.                          

But see I am a good republican (with a very purposeful small ‘r”) and as such I believe that the “divine right of kings,” the theory that Zack is apparently working under was discredited a few hundred years ago when Oliver Cromwell and his crowd took old Charles I’s head off his shoulders. And while I would have wished no such fate for the “king” his influence other than for purely sentimental reasons these days is pretty limited.

A look at this CD selection will tell a more persuasive tale. Sure early Elvis, Good Rockin’ Tonight, Jailhouse Rock, It Alright, Mama spoke to 1950s teenage angst and alienation read: lovesickness, but beyond that he kind of missed the boat of what teenagers, teenagers around my way and around Zack’s older brother’s way, wanted to hear about. Guys wanted to hear about anyway. Cars, getting girls in cars, and hanging out at places like drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants looking for girls. In short thoughts of sex and sexual adventure. This may seem kind of strange today. Not the sex and sexual adventure part but the car and drive-ins part.

Those were the days of the “golden age” of the automobile when every guy, girls too, wanted to learn how to drive and get a car, or at least use the family car for those Friday and Saturday night cruising expeditions for which we lived. (I hear anecdotally all the time about 20 somethings who don’t have their driver’s license and are not worried by that horrendous fact. Could care less about car ownership in the age of Uber and Lift. Madness, sheer madness).  Cars for running to the drive-in to check out who was at the refreshment stand, cars for hitting “lovers’ lane if you got lucky. For that kind of adventure you needed something more than safe Elvis, safe Elvis who made your own mother secretly sweat so you know where he was at. Say you found some sweet sixteen, found some sweet little rock and roller, say you found that your parents’ music that was driving you out of the house in search of, say you were in search of something and you really did want to tell Mister Beethoven to hit the road. Needed some help to figure out why that ever-loving gal was driving you crazy when all you really wanted to worry about was filling the gas tank and making sure that heap of your was running without major repairs to cramp your style.             

Take a look at the lyrics in the selections in this CD: Maybelline, Sweet Little Sixteen, Sweet Little Rock and Roller, Nadine, Johnny B. Goode, Roll over Beethoven. Then try to tell me that the man with the duck walk, the man with the guitar from hell, the man who dared to mess with Mister’s women (hell we have all been beaten down on that one since Adam’s time, maybe before) one Chuck Berry didn’t speak to us from the depth of the 1950s. Hail to the Chief.     

In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859- *The Civil War: The Second American Revolution- Honor Abraham Lincoln!-A Guest Commentary

*The Civil War: The Second American Revolution- Honor Abraham Lincoln!-A Guest Commentary
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22750

Click On Title To Link To Gary Wills' "New York Review Of Books" Article Entitled "Lincoln's Black History" For A Different Take on Mr. Lincoln.

Guest Commentary

Workers Vanguard No. 938
5 June 2009


The Civil War: The Second American Revolution

Honor Abraham Lincoln!

By Bert Mason

The following was written as a contribution for a Spartacist League internal educational series.

February 12 marked the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Since the days of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of scientific socialism, revolutionaries have held Lincoln in high esteem. His world-historic achievement—the single most important event in American history
—was to lead the North in a horrendously bloody civil war that smashed the Southern Confederacy and abolished slavery in the United States. In “Comments on the North American Events” (7 October 1862), Marx wrote with characteristic eloquence:

“Lincoln is a sui generis figure in the annals of history. He has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, no cothurnus [dignified, somewhat stilted style of ancient tragedy], no historical trappings. He gives his most important actions always the most commonplace form. Other people claim to be ‘fighting for an idea,’ when it is for them a matter of square feet of land. Lincoln, even when he is motivated by an idea, talks about ‘square feet.’ He sings the bravura aria of his part hesitatively, reluctantly and unwillingly, as though apologising for being compelled by circumstances ‘to act the lion.’…

“Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance—an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!”

Many opponents of revolutionary Marxism, from black nationalists to reformist leftists, have made a virtual cottage industry out of the slander that “Honest Abe” was a racist or even a white-supremacist. The reformist who impugns Lincoln for his bourgeois conceptions, which in fact reflected his time, place and position, does not hesitate for a moment to ally with unctuous “progressives” today who praise “diversity” while fighting tooth and nail to maintain the racial oppression and anti-immigrant chauvinism that are endemic to this most brutal of imperialist countries.

Take the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). In Cold Truth, Liberating Truth: How This System Has Always Oppressed Black People, And How All Oppression Can Finally Be Ended, a pamphlet originally published in 1989 and reprinted in Revolution (17 February 2008), the RCP writes:

“It is a lie that ‘Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves’ because he was morally outraged over slavery. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves (and not all the slaves at first, but only those in the states that had joined the southern Confederacy) because he saw that it would be impossible to win the Civil War against that southern Confederacy without freeing these slaves and allowing them to fight in the Union army.

“Lincoln spoke and acted for the bourgeoisie—the factory-owners, railroad-owners, and other capitalists centered in the North—and he conducted the war in their interests” (emphasis in original).

Aside from the scurrilous suggestion that Lincoln was not an opponent of slavery who abhorred that “peculiar institution,” the RCP rejects Marxist materialism in favor of liberal moralizing, denying that against the reactionary class of slaveholders and the antiquated slave system, the Northern capitalists represented a revolutionary class whose victory was in the interests of historical progress. Presenting the goals of the North and South as equally rapacious, the RCP neither sides with the North nor characterizes its victory as the consummation of a social revolution.

Indeed, the Civil War—the Second American Revolution—was the last of the great bourgeois revolutions, which began with the English Civil War of the 17th century and found their culmination in the French Revolution of the 18th. For the RCP, however, there is no contradiction whatsoever in condemning Lincoln as a representative of the 19th-century American bourgeoisie while doing everything in its power to embrace bourgeois liberalism today—from its antiwar coalitions with capitalist spokesmen to its implicit support for the Democratic Party and Barack Obama in the name of “drive out the Bush regime.”

Abraham Lincoln: Bourgeois Revolutionary

In the preface to his 1859 book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx wrote that in studying the transformation of the whole immense superstructure that arises from revolutionary changes in the economic foundation:

“It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”

The American Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, and Lincoln was both bourgeois and revolutionary at the same time—with all the contradictions this implies. Because the task of the Second American Revolution was to eradicate an antiquated social system based on chattel slavery and erect in its place the dominion of industrial capitalism based on wage labor from one end of the North American landmass to the other, it could not eradicate every form of class and social oppression—the hallmark of all propertied classes throughout the history of class society. As materialists, Marxists do not judge historical figures primarily based on the ideas in their heads but on how well they fulfilled the tasks of their epoch. While Lincoln had bourgeois conceptions—how could it be otherwise!—he was uniquely qualified to carry out the task before him, and in the last analysis he rose to the occasion as no other. That is the essence of his historical greatness.

While bestowing begrudging praise on Lincoln’s achievements with the left hand, the leftist critic often takes it back with the right. Lincoln, the critic will admit, opposed slavery; he came to see that a hard war was necessary and prepared to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. However, the critic is more concerned with Lincoln’s attitudes than his deeds: Lincoln was not John Brown, he was not Frederick Douglass, he was not Marx and Engels, he was not even as left-wing as his Treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase. For example, while Lincoln agreed with John Brown in thinking slavery wrong, he could not excuse Brown’s violence, bloodshed and “acts of treason” in attempting to seize the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry to spark a slave rebellion on the eve of the Civil War. Finally, the critic will argue, while Marx and Engels from 3,000 miles away knew that the American Civil War was about slavery, Lincoln and the Republicans sought to ignore the root of the problem and wage the conflict on constitutional grounds to save the Union. Such facts are indisputable, but they must be seen in their historical context.

In his Abraham Lincoln (2009), James M. McPherson remarks:

“Only after years of studying the powerful crosscurrents of political and military pressures on Lincoln did I come to appreciate the skill with which he steered between the numerous shoals of conservatism and radicalism, free states and slave states, abolitionists, Republicans, Democrats, and border-state Unionists to maintain a steady course that brought the nation to victory—and the abolition of slavery—in the end. If he had moved decisively against slavery in the war’s first year, as radicals pressed him to do, he might well have fractured his war coalition, driven border-state Unionists over to the Confederacy, lost the war, and witnessed the survival of slavery for at least another generation.”

Facing innumerable pressures when the war broke out in April 1861, Lincoln grappled with how to respond to them. But the pressures—as intense as they were—were not merely strategic in nature. As the president of a constitutional republic, Lincoln believed that it was his duty to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. While he detested slavery, he believed it was not his right to abolish it. That ideology flowed from the whole bourgeois constitutional framework of the United States.

In the first year of the war, Lincoln pursued a policy of conciliating the four border slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri—in an effort to retain their loyalty to the Union. Marx and Engels criticized this policy because it weakened the Union’s war effort and emboldened the slaveholders. However, did this policy stem from disdain for the enslaved black masses or from a desire on Lincoln’s part to let bygones be bygones—i.e., coexist with the slave South? No. It flowed from the whole previous history of the United States. In 1776, 1800 and even as late as 1820, the North and South had similar values and institutions. With the Industrial Revolution, however, the North surged ahead in virtually every area—railroads, canals, literacy, inventions—while the South stagnated. Yet the two regions remained part of the same nation, setting the stage for compromise after compromise. For a whole historical period, Lincoln was hardly alone in seeking détente. In 1848, even the more left-wing Salmon Chase rejected the view espoused by radicals in his Liberty Party that the Constitution empowered the government to abolish slavery in the states, preferring a bloc with antislavery Whigs and Democrats that would agitate merely for keeping slavery out of the territories.

While he conciliated the border states for a time, Lincoln stood firm against secession, countering his cabinet members’ willingness to compromise in the face of the Confederacy’s belligerence. After his fateful election in 1860, which set the stage for the secession of the Southern states and the Civil War, Lincoln reined in his future secretary of state William H. Seward for advocating support to the Crittenden Compromise, an attempt to allow slavery to flourish anywhere south of 36°30'. Then Lincoln rejected Seward’s proposal to abandon Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. Had it not been for Lincoln’s relentless efforts to goad his officers to fight and his stubborn support for Ulysses S. Grant in the face of substantial Northern opposition, the North might not have vanquished the slavocracy in that time and place. Lincoln’s resoluteness, his iron determination to achieve victory and his refusal to stand down to the Confederacy are hallmarks of his revolutionary role and enduring testaments to his greatness.

Borrowing from today’s terminology, one could argue that Lincoln began as a reformist, believing that the reactionary social system in the South could be pressured into change and that the institution of slavery would eventually wither on the vine. But he underwent a radical shift when bloody experience in the crucible of war—combined with the mass flight of the slaves to the Union lines—taught him that the nation could be preserved only by means of social revolution. In contrast to this remarkable personal transformation, the Great French Revolution required a series of tumultuous stages to reach its revolutionary climax, a protracted process that was marked by the domination of different and antagonistic groupings—from the Girondins to the Montagnards to the Committee of Public Safety. The Mensheviks were also reformists, but they didn’t become revolutionaries but counterrevolutionaries.

Was Lincoln a Racist?

Although it is beyond dispute that Lincoln occasionally appealed to racist consciousness and expressed racist opinions, the record is not as cut-and-dried as the typical liberal moralist or his leftist cousin will assert. Before a proslavery crowd in Charleston, Illinois, during the fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas on 18 September 1858, Lincoln declared:

“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Yet two months earlier in Chicago, Lincoln had insisted, “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position; discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

However, more important than these words were Lincoln’s actions in defense of the slaves, the freedmen and the black troops in the Union Army. For example, in the autumn of 1864, pressure mounted for Lincoln to consummate a prisoner exchange that would exclude black soldiers. Some Republican leaders warned that Union men “will work and vote against the President, because they think sympathy with a few negroes, also captured, is the cause of a refusal” to exchange prisoners. Ignoring these threats, Lincoln’s agent in the exchange negotiations asserted, “The wrongs, indignities, and privations suffered by our soldiers would move me to consent to anything to procure their exchange, except to barter away the honor and the faith of the Government of the United States, which has been so solemnly pledged to the colored soldiers in its ranks” (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom [1988]).

That’s not all. Confronting growing defeatist sentiment in the North, the grim prospect of defeat in the impending 1864 presidential elections and a cacophony of demands to abandon the Emancipation Proclamation from Democrats and even staunch Republicans, Lincoln stood firm. In response to fulminations such as “Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President,” Lincoln responded, “If they [the black soldiers] stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Emphasizing the point, he maintained, “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will.”

In the last months of the war, the emancipation of the slaves began to raise broader political and economic questions. When reports filtered northward of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s indifference toward the thousands of freedmen that had attached themselves to his army, Lincoln’s war secretary Edwin Stanton traveled to Savannah, Georgia, in January 1865 to talk with Sherman and consult with black leaders. As a result of Stanton’s visit, Sherman issued “Special Field Orders, No. 15,” which granted the freed slaves rich plantation land belonging to former slaveholders.

Indignantly protesting that Lincoln valued the restoration of the Union over the emancipation of the slaves, the RCP cites his famous letter to Horace Greeley of 22 August 1862, which declared: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” The RCP neglects to add that a month later, on September 22, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Commenting on this momentous event, Marx called Lincoln’s manifesto abolishing slavery “the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American Constitution.”

What was more important for Lincoln’s cause, Union or emancipation? The very question betrays a subjective idealist approach that ignores the objective reality of the time. The two tasks had become inextricably intertwined in the reality of a war that pitted a modern industrial capitalist mode of production in the North against an archaic agrarian slave system in the South. Restoration of the Union required emancipation, and emancipation required a Union victory. For embodying and melding those two great tasks, Lincoln will forever occupy an honored place in history.

Much Ado About Colonization

An oft-repeated theme among Lincoln’s detractors is that the 16th president—a racist to his bones, they assert—was dedicated above all else to deporting the freed black slaves to distant shores. The most caustic purveyor of this timeworn slander is Lerone Bennett Jr., executive editor emeritus of Ebony and the author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000). Bennett shrieks that “Abraham Lincoln’s deepest desire was to deport all black people and create an all-white nation. It’s—sounds like a wild idea now and it is a wild idea, but from about 1852 until his death, he worked feverishly to try to create deportation plans, colonization plans to send black people either to Africa or to...South America, or to the islands of the sea” (interview with Brian Lamb, 10 September 2000, www.booknotes.org/transcript/?programID=1581).

Lincoln did not invent the idea of colonization. Schemes to remove black people from the United States went back to the American Colonization Society, which was founded in 1816. Very much a product of his times, Lincoln was long a supporter of colonization because he believed that the ideal of racial harmony in America was impossible. Although reprehensible and misguided, Lincoln’s colonization schemes were motivated not by racist antipathy toward black people but by his perceptions of enduring white racism in America. In the course of meeting with black leaders at the White House on 14 July 1862, Lincoln declared:

“You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated….

“Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoy. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best, when free; but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.”

— cited in “Report on Colonization and Emigration, Made to the Secretary of the Interior, by the Agent of Emigration” (1862)

It is therefore not surprising that Lincoln advocated colonization most strenuously at the very moment that he was preparing his Provisional Emancipation Proclamation following the watershed Union victory at Antietam, which Marx said “decided the fate of the American Civil War.” With his colonization proposals, Lincoln sought to sweeten what many whites considered the bitter pill of black emancipation.

However indefensible the idea of colonization was, Lincoln insisted that it must be voluntary. Even then, blacks overwhelmingly rejected colonization as both racist and impractical, holding anticolonization meetings in Chicago and Springfield to protest it. Indeed, Frederick Douglass declared in September 1862: “Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” One of the administration’s two concrete moves to implement colonization, the Île à Vache fiasco, led to the deaths of dozens of freed blacks. However, when Lincoln learned of the disaster, he did the honorable thing and ordered the Navy to return the survivors to the United States.

Besides free blacks and Radical Abolitionists, many other contemporaries of Lincoln were incensed at his colonization efforts. Publications like Harper’s Weekly considered the proposal to resettle millions of people to distant shores insane. In Eric Foner’s words, “For what idea was more utopian and impractical than this fantastic scheme?” (“Lincoln and Colonization,” in Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, ed., Eric Foner [2008]).

By the waning days of the war, Lincoln’s utterances on colonization—if not his attitude—had evolved. In a diary entry dated 1 July 1864, Lincoln’s secretary John Hay remarked, “I am glad that the President has sloughed off the idea of colonization.” But much more to the point than attempts to decipher Lincoln’s attitudes is the indisputable fact that Lincoln’s policies on the ground were progressively rendering his colonization schemes a dead letter. Foner writes that in 1863 and 1864, Lincoln began to consider the role that blacks would play in a post-slavery America. He showed particular interest in efforts that were under way to establish schools for blacks in the South Carolina Sea Islands and in how former slaves were being put to work on plantations in the Mississippi Valley. In August 1863, he instructed General Nathaniel P. Banks to establish a system in Louisiana during wartime Reconstruction in which “the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new.”

Historian Richard N. Current wrote, “By the end of war, Lincoln had abandoned the idea of resettling free slaves outside the United States. He had come to accept the fact that Negroes, as a matter of justice as well as practicality, must be allowed to remain in the only homeland they knew, given education and opportunities for self-support, and started on the way to complete assimilation into American society” (cited at “Mr. Lincoln and Freedom,” www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org). Indeed, on 11 April 1865, following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln gave a speech in which he declared that literate blacks and black Union Army veterans should have the right to vote in a reconstructed Union—an early step toward the 14th Amendment and citizenship for the freed slaves.

A dishonest charlatan that considers Lincoln no better than Hitler, Lerone Bennett brings the very concept of scholarship into disrepute. In disgust at Bennett’s diatribes, one critic, Edward Steers Jr., sarcastically titled his review, “Great Emancipator or Grand Wizard?” And McPherson wrote that while Lincoln “was not a radical abolitionist, he did consider slavery morally wrong, and seized the opportunity presented by the war to move against it. Bennett fails to appreciate the acuity and empathy that enabled Lincoln to transcend his prejudices and to preside over the greatest social revolution in American history, the liberation of four million slaves” (“Lincoln the Devil,” New York Times, 27 August 2000).

Honor Lincoln— Finish the Civil War!

At times, Frederick Douglass was highly critical of Lincoln’s moderation and his relegation of black people to the status of what he called “step-children.” But Douglass also saw another side of the 16th president. In his autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882), the great abolitionist wrote of his meeting with Lincoln at the White House in 1864:

“The increasing opposition to the war, in the North, and the mad cry against it, because it was being made an abolition war, alarmed Mr. Lincoln, and made him apprehensive that a peace might be forced upon him which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines. What he wanted was to make his proclamation as effective as possible in the event of such a peace.… What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and, at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing of a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel States, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.”

Rather than weigh the “good” Lincoln against the “bad” in search of the golden mean, Marxists must seek to understand that he was a bourgeois politician in a time of war and revolution—“a big, inconsistent, brave man,” in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois (cited in Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Was Lincoln a Racist?” The Root, available at www.theroot.com/views/was-lincoln-racist).

With the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president, bourgeois media pundits are acting as if he is the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln. Billboards show a huge portrait of Lincoln with Obama’s face superimposed on it. Obama takes the presidential oath on Lincoln’s Bible. Liberal students go a step further, preferring Obama over Lincoln because Lincoln, they assert, was a racist who would have disapproved of a black president. In fact, U.S. imperialism’s current Commander-in-Chief has as much in common with the bourgeois revolutionary Abraham Lincoln as British prime minister Gordon Brown has with the great English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell or French president Nicolas Sarkozy has with the French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre.

In condemning Lincoln as a racist and besmirching his supreme role in the liquidation of slavery, fake leftists like the RCP surely must have a hard time with Marx’s November 1864 letter to Lincoln on behalf of the First International congratulating the American people for his re-election as president (see accompanying box). By declaring that the European workers saw the star-spangled banner as carrying the destiny of their class, was Marx forsaking the red flag of communism? Not at all. For Marx and the workers of the Old World, Lincoln’s re-election guaranteed the irreversibility of the Emancipation Proclamation; it meant that the Union Army—first and foremost its “black warriors”—did not fight in vain. And they understood that with the demise of the slave power, the unbridled growth of capitalism would lay the foundation for the growth of the American proletariat—capitalism’s future gravedigger.

At bottom, the impulse to denounce Lincoln and to minimize his monumental role in history denies that political people—even great ones—are constrained by objective reality. If only poor Lincoln had not lacked the necessary will to eradicate all forms of racial oppression! As Marx explained, “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859]). The elimination of racial oppression in all its forms was not possible in 1861 or 1865 because the objective means to accomplish it were not yet present—the unfettered growth of industrial capitalism in America and the development of the working class.

Lincoln accomplished the task placed before him by history: the abolition of slavery. He could do so despite, and because of, the conceptions in his head. The task of Trotskyists—revolutionary Marxists—is different. Our aim is proletarian revolution. Our perspective is revolutionary integrationism. While opposing every manifestation of racist oppression, we underline that liberating black people from racial oppression and poverty—conditions inherent to the U.S. capitalist system—can be achieved only by establishing an egalitarian socialist society. Building such a society requires the overthrow of the capitalist system by the working class and its allies. This is possible only by forging a revolutionary, internationalist working-class party that champions the rights of all the oppressed and declares war on all manifestations of social, class and sexual oppression. That task will be fulfilled by a third American revolution—a workers revolution.

Happy Birthday Mississippi John Hurt- *Sweet and Low- The Blues of Skip James-Part Two

Happy Birthday To You-

By Lester Lannon

I am devoted to a local folk station WUMB which is run out of the campus of U/Mass-Boston over near Boston Harbor. At one time this station was an independent one based in Cambridge but went under when their significant demographic base deserted or just passed on once the remnant of the folk minute really did sink below the horizon.

So much for radio folk history except to say that the DJs on many of the programs go out of their ways to commemorate or celebrate the birthdays of many folk, rock, blues and related genre artists. So many and so often that I have had a hard time keeping up with noting those occurrences in this space which after all is dedicated to such happening along the historical continuum.

To “solve” this problem I have decided to send birthday to that grouping of musicians on an arbitrary basis as I come across their names in other contents or as someone here has written about them and we have them in the archives. This may not be the best way to acknowledge them, but it does do so in a respectful manner.    

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Skip James Doing "Hard Times Killin' Floor Blues". Wow.


The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James-1930, Skip James, Yazoo, 1994


The contents of this CD only confirm Skip's power. His great falsetto voice accompanied by guitar or piano (as a nice change up) hold forth here. Interestingly, the CD features newer arrangements of several songs from James' 1931 Paramount recording, like the well-known title track "Devil Got My Woman" that got me into political trouble (this is the most fervent rendition of several that I have heard on various CD compilations). There are also some moodier songs for piano here like the "22-20 Blues" and "Illinois Blues”. Also featured here is the classic “I’m So Glad” that Cream turned into a rock classic. The killer on this one though is the haunting “Cherry Ball Blues”. Here is the “skinny” though on James. Like a number of blues artists you have to be in the mood and be patience. Then you don’t want to turn the damn thing off. That is the case here.

Vietnam Veteran Fritz Taylor’s Rockport Fourth Of July-2017

Vietnam Veteran Fritz Taylor’s Rockport Fourth Of July-2017

By Associate Moderator Jonathan Prince

[Those who are familiar with this site and a number of on-line media platforms with which he is associated may have noted that Peter Paul Markin has been for the past decade or so the moderator of this site. Some may also know the background story about the original of his on-line moniker which honors his long lost friend of the same name, the real life Markin, who taught him many things before he fell down to his own hubris, maybe his whole genetic infrastructure, in Mexico in a hail of gunfire over a busted drug deal in the mid-1970s. As one can assume by the time frame of many of his stories of his youth (and of course of the real Markin as well) the moderator is getting up there in age and as with the case of film critic Sam Lowell is ready to give up the day to day chores associated with moderating this busy site. Jonathan Prince, the son of an old college friend Leonard, and a recent college graduate himself, has volunteered to help out with the moderator and reporting roles as things move into transition.  

This assignment, an assignment which is basically a job of reportage about Fritz Taylor’s take on the Fourth of July celebration in the old time fishing town and now something of a tourist Mecca Rockport out on ocean edge Cape Ann in Massachusetts , is his first attempt at getting his feet wet on the job. It is rather fitting that Jonathan has had Fritz Taylor’s current story as his first assignment since Fritz was the first subject of the real Peter Paul Markin’s series of articles in the early 1970s for the now long gone East Bay Other out in Oakland. That series detailed how a bunch of Vietnam veterans from all over and for all kinds of personal reasons who could not deal with coming back to the “real” world after Vietnam came together down in Southern California and formed what they would now call an alternate community among the arroyos, under the bridges and along the railroad tracks. Bruce Springsteen later titled one of his songs Brothers Under The Bridge about that same experience and that seems to fit as well as any other for what went on back then. Not a bad way to cut your reporting teeth. Peter Paul Markin]     

Fritz Taylor is a marching mad man. A marching mad man with a purpose. Funny it had not always been that way. He had not always been that way. Back home as a youth in Fulton County, Georgia he would moan and groan if had to walk the half mile to the nearest grocery store to get provisions for his large family’s meals. Later, when he came of age and could not justify staying around the house and enlisted in the Army just as the war in Vietnam was coming to a boiling point, he would gripe, piss and moan he called it, about having to walk all over half that benighted country for most of his tour of duty.      

That war, that Vietnam experience which would change him forever when he got back to the “real” world, also changed his attitude toward walking, walking “with the king” he calls it now since he has gotten on the right side of the angels about the issues of war and peace. Of course as with a lot of guys back then, guys who fought and suffered every kind of stress and disorder, that wisdom did not come easy, and it was a close thing that it came at all. The dope he craved to take the pain away, the pain of living, almost did him in a few times. Like a lot of guys too he gave up to dope and to whatever other stuff was ailing his mind his wife and kids, his good paying job as a trucker, and his cozy place just waiting for him in society as a veteran. He had been one of the first guys to head to Southern California to be what he now calls “a brother under the bridge” after he ran into a friend who had served with him in the Forth Infantry up in the Central Highlands. It was down in the camp along the railroad track outside Westminster where Peter Paul Markin [the real Markin] first ran into Fritz and he had agreed to be interviewed for a story to run in an alternative newspaper in Oakland [the East Bay Other] where Markin was working at the time.                 

That was the early 1970s and while he wished that getting to know Markin, a fellow veteran, through that interview Fritz fell down, his term, many times to the lure of various drugs, in the end cocaine, before he got clean. He confessed to me that before then he could have “given a fuck” about thinking about wars, or peace for that matter. Getting clean helped him to be able to see that whatever was bothering him about what he had done in Vietnam and later to his social circle was the root of what bothered him. (He got what he called great help from the VA, from a therapist they provided which helped him work out some of what had enraged him for so many years). From there he, slowly, came to believe that if he was to have peace within himself that he would need to “spread the word,” again his term. Then Fritz began in the early 1980s to look around for groups that were doing peace work.             

By this time he had settled in Baltimore, gone to community college and had become a computer technician (paid for by the GI Bill), met a nice woman with a couple of kids and they were living together. This woman, Heather, now Heather Taylor, knew a few Quakers from a literacy campaign she had worked on with them and she got Fritz in touch with them. That had not really worked out because Fritz did not feel himself to be a pacifist nor did he feel comfortable with the plainness of the sect and its ways of living in this wicked old world.    

In 1987, or 1988, Fritz was not sure which, while living in a town just outside of Boston where he and Heather relocated so he could get a better job in what he had heard was the booming Hi Tech industry he ran into a guy with a Veterans for Peace tee shirt on in Harvard Square. This guy, Lenny Block, was headed to a Central America solidarity rally on Cambridge Common and he invited Fritz along. As it turned out that was to be his first serious peace march where he “walked with the king” since after the rally the participants were heading to the State House in Boston several miles away to publicize the situation in Central America and the United States government’s nefarious involvement in that troubled area of the world.         

And that, fast forward, had been how almost twenty years and plenty of worn shoe leather later one Fritz Taylor was spending the ebbing Fourth of July day in Rockport, Massachusetts as part of a combined VFP and affiliated peace group contingent in the annual town parade. This had not been Fritz’s first Rockport march, he reckoned it was his fourth or fifth so he knew what to expect (not Heather’s either who while not very “political” stood on the right side of the angels on the peace issue and marched with him in this parade). The crowds as usual were both respectful of the veterans as veterans and generally receptive to the peace message they were bringing to the fore with their array of dove-centered white flags flapping in the ocean breeze creating quite a stirring sight.        

That former part of the sentence about the crowd response is what bothered Fritz, had for a while in many locations, the part about respecting veterans as veterans. That respect was in Rockport that day, in the past and in other locations, signified most graphically by one expression-“Thank for your service.” While on march it was hardly appropriate to single out those who expressed themselves that way and ask what they meant. So Fritz suffered in silence about what the crowds were really responding to, a patriotic or peace strain. Fritz had been through a lot in Vietnam and what it had done to his psyche, been down in the ditch in Southern California with other lost souls from that war, had gone to the depths in drug addiction before being washed clean so he was more than usually bothered by the thought that those who used the thank you expression were honoring his tour of duty in Vietnam.     

This year Fritz decided that he would ask a few of the spectators once the parade was over what they meant since he would still get through the VFP tee shirt he was wearing those thanks. He stopped one older person and asked frankly what she meant by her compliment. She said for his service to his country and the peace aspect was just so much frosting. Another spectator agreed. A few others thought it “cool” that veterans were marching for peace. A mixed bag. The final response from a person he asked gave an unequivocal response that he believed for service to the country and not anything to do with peace. This gave Fritz an idea, an idea he tested out that very nice. Anytime somebody threw the expression of thanks for his service at him he would reply-“Yes, for my service now.” Fritz chuckled as he thought about how many more marches this new-found expression would get him through. A lot he hoped.        

Aint Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Streets Making All That Noise -With the 1982 Film “Diner” In Mind

Aint Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Streets Making All That Noise -With the 1982 Film “Diner” In Mind

By Lance Lawrence

[Seemingly 2019, the fiftieth anniversary year for many things important in my life and the lives of the still standing corner boys from in front of Tonio’s  Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the Acre section of North Adamsville like Sam Lowell, Frank Jackman, Seth Garth and Josh Breslin are being bombarded with sad-eyed remembrances, and a few glad ones too  (that latter named individual) not really an Acre corner boy but we “adopted” him after we ran into him out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 since the “Bottoms” where he grew up in Olde Saco up in Maine was just a French-Canadian version of Tonio’s corner boys)

It probably started when Sam Lowell decided that he would try to put a committee together from his Veterans Peace Action group who would help compile what is projected to be an archival effort to gather remembrances from the many members of that organization who did some or all of their military service in 1969 during the Vietnam War like he did. Put those writings in some kind of book form. And for the less literary types maybe a video to gather in their thoughts as oral history. (That fact, hard fact now that many members of VPA from World War II and Korea have passed on finally making the committee realize that the Vietnam-era veterans were heavily concentrated after 1968, after even the lousy government knew the war was lost. Those who served earlier, like their World War II fathers and uncles, had a different take, a more patriotic view of their service.)

There seemed as the committee gathered steam to be a strange confluence of other, seeming unrelated events which further triggered those 1969 thoughts. The obvious, to me at least, one was the totally different world represented by Woodstock (an event that I was slated to go to but we couldn’t get through. By the way I had done my naval service directly out of high school, so I was done with that by 1968). Less obvious but more critical to what Sam was attempting to do with this program was being contained by a professor from Yale who was running a touring exhibition complete with and book about the anti-war GI Resistance that sprung up and became more public in 1969 and did a great deal to slow down, a little, the war machine. Finally Sam heard  on NPR a segment about the famous Life magazine issue that featured photographs of all the military men killed in Vietnam in one week in June 1969. One of the guys featured was a kid from a town near us, Quincy, who with his buddies dropped out of high school, joined the Marines and he laid his head down there. Very different from the stuff my corner boy guys were thinking. 

All that was in the background but for me, for my remembrances what triggered my sad ass thoughts was when he mentioned the names of the late Pete Markin and the still standing Frank Jackman. Pete (whose name brings a tear to my eye every time I say or write it) was this whirling dervish who kept bugging us about a new day coming, a new breeze coming across the land. Yeah, a guy with big fat dreams, a guy who saw if we beat the bastards back maybe, just maybe, desperately poor people like those of us who grew up in the Acre back in the 1950s and 1960s might get a break. Had us believing all that stuff. Forcing us to coffeehouses in Cambridge, poetry sessions on Joy Street on Beacon Hill (and on lonesome Friday nights reciting, reciting if you can believe this, Allan Ginsberg’s Howl  a poem we dismissed then, and here I am using the term of art of the times, as nothing but a fag joke when all we cared about was girls, cars, and sex, heterosexual sex), and more willingly drove us crazy until we agreed to join him out in San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967.

But as Sam said in his recent musings about 1969 Pete could talk the talk but in the end despite his enormous cloud puff dreams he could not walk the walk. Without going into detail after Pete was drafted, went to Vietnam, saw and did stuff he seldom talked about all the stuffing kind of went out of him. He drifted, got into drugs, sobered up for a while and then falling down again wound up in Southern California with what would later be called “brothers under the bridge,” guys who couldn’t relate to the “real world” after Vietnam and created their own alternative communities under bridges and near railroad tracks, places like that. Leave it to Pete though as in tough shape as he was in to gather in the stories of these guys and win some literary award for doing so. In the end though he never lost that hunger he knew from about day one of his life, the hunger of not having enough, of not being on easy street. That hunger would drive him to Mexico and some ill-thought out deal to jump on easy street through some busted drug deal. All he got for his efforts was a lonesome place in some potter’s field in Sonora, and a million tears of what might have been.

Yeah, Pete fell down, fell down hard and once the glow of the 1960s began to fade, guys like Sam and a few others who wish not to be named went to drugs and booze to take the pain away and which I can say took Sam and the rest several attempts and many years to get sober from. Still we had, what we now call our bright shining light, we had Frank Jackman who Sam mentioned in that article about Life magazine’s somber photo array who had traveled a different course from those guys who laid down their precious heads in the summer of 1969. That “now” part with Frank Jackman coming from our not understanding then what he did in the summer of 1969 in agonizingly deciding to refuse the orders to Vietnam the Army laid on him. No, that is not right either it was not some misunderstanding of Frank’s way but as Sam pointed out a visceral hatred for what he was doing. I would be the first to see what Frank had done and accepted responsibility for after he got out of the stockade (read Sam’s article to get some details of how Frank wound up in the stockade, courted that result in fact) But other guys, guys like Sam, took several years to reconcile with our quiet corner boy. See whether we liked it or not once you were in the military you did as ordered even when you knew it was dead ass wrong. Maybe if Frank had resisted, been a draft resister we would have thought better of him and his work but probably not since we didn’t like the draft resisters centered around Arlington Street Church in Boston any better however right they turned out to be in the end.        

Realistically the only corner boy who could have gotten away at the time with what Frank did was Pete Markin, on some theory that he was a flake and it made sense for him to resist. But see he didn’t resist, didn’t think much of what Frank did either until he found himself among the “lost boys” down in the arroyos and canyons of Sothern California and realized how brave Frank had been to take on the monster almost alone.  

Below is a review of a very different earlier group of forever corner boys. I wonder if they would shed a tear even today for a fallen comrade like Pete, Pete Markin was fell down in the big mess of history.]          

*******

Recently I was watching a DVD from 1982, Diner, a film about a bunch of guys in 1959 Baltimore who hung out at, well, a diner and hence the title of the film. The cast of the film was a veritable who’s who of male stars (and one female Ellen Barkin) who came of cinematic age in the 1980s, guys like Mickey Rourke and Kevin Bacon who are still putting their shoulders to the wheel in the film industry. What had attracted me about the film from the blurb you get on each film these days from Amazon, Netflix, hell, even blogs from citizen film reviewer strutting their stuff in a democratic age  was beside the diner motif which is always attractive to me and which I will discuss in more detail below was the idea that these guys were still hanging together in their early twenties when the old corner boy high school days when hanging for guy like them were well past (and a few years later for me and my guys). Well past compared to nine to five work ethos, marriage, marry young ethos, kids, not too many like their parents but also done at a young age and that ever present sickle hanging over your head-“how the fuck did I get into this action.”          

I had watched this film with a friend, Sam Lowell, whom I have known since our corner boy days in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston back in the early 1960s. Sam Lowell is a fairly well-known, or used to be fairly well-known, free-lance music and film critic for lots of publications great and small, some lone gone and some still around like Rolling Stone before he consciously started slowing down as he has reached retirement age. In the interest of full disclosure he was the guy who said I would like the film and would I come over, watch with him, and compare notes with him after the film was over. He was writing what he called a “think” review for American Film Today about “buddy” films which had something like a heyday in the 1980s between the guys who starred collectively in this film, the Brat Pack and those who came of cinematic age through the various film adaptations of S.E. Hinton’s male-centered buddy” films, guys like Matt Dillon you know. So after the showing we compared notes the most important one which we both agreed and which he used in his review was how many of the actions of the corner boys were very much like ours although we were younger than them when we did them (in the film they weren’t called “corner boys” nor did they call themselves that but that my friends is what they were-no question as Sam likes to say)  

Here’s what Sam said about that key question:

“Hey, around my way, around my growing up working class neighborhood out in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston in the early 1960s they called them, anybody who thought about the matter like some errant sociologists wondering about alienation among the lower classes, or acted on the premise like the cops who kept a sharp eye on any possible criminal activity corner boys. We called ourselves corner boys with a certain amount of bravado and without guile since we hung, what the heck, we hung on the corners of our town. (Corner boys which would be immortalized in Bruce Springsteen’s song, Jersey Girl, with the line. “aint got no time for corner boys down in the street making all that noise” and that was the truth-the “making all that noise” part. Also the S.E. Hinton books which we did not know about, as least I did not know about and I was “the Bookworm” along with “the Scribe” so I knew about what was what with books. The other guys could have given a fuck about books except maybe porn stuff or comics).

A working Riverdale definition: corner boys: those without much dough, those without a weekend date and no money for a weekend date even if a guy got lucky enough to draw some female companionship, someone who didn’t care about a “boss” car, the ’57 two-toned preferable red and white Chevy the boss of “boss” to sit up front in and would accept the bus as a mode of transportation, thus seldom lucky since only nerdy girls or whatever we called girls with brains but no looks would descend to that level, hung around blessed Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Down” (the corner of Adams and Jefferson Streets and don’t ask me why it was called that it just was as far back as anybody remembered including my maternal grandparents who were born there) and, well, hung out. Hung out trying to do the best we could which involved mostly the aforementioned girls and larcenies, or plans for larcenies. And if defeated in either endeavor any particular night then there was always a couple of slices of Tonio’s secret formula pizza sauce to die for delight and a small Coke. Just so you know really hung around in late high school planning larcenies great and small (great the theft of some young woman’s virtue, small the midnight creeps through back doors but maybe no more should be mentioned since perhaps the statute of limitations has not run out).      

So when I saw the film under review, Diner, with a cast of up and coming actors who all went on to other films and saw that they were five guys, count ‘em six, who in 1959 in the great city of Baltimore hung around a diner talking the talk in between bites of French fries and gravy (against our culinary choice of pizza slices) I knew that they were kindred spirits. Knew that despite the several years different in time since they were all twenty-something gathering together for a wedding of one of their members around Christmas time they were from the same species… “

That pretty much summed up the main point we discussed that night, and during subsequent nights as well, but there were others, other stories that were stirred up from that viewing. Some long forgotten, and maybe that was just as well but other which one or the both of us remembered out of some fog of war moment. Since Sam was writing a generic review a lot of what he and I talked was “left on the floor” as we used to call the bullshit stuff we would throw out without batting an eyelash on lonesome John weekend nights and in summer almost every night. Those stories, some of them anyway, the ones I was involved in I decided to write down in a journal, a diary if you like that word better, and present the next time the surviving members of our crowd got together to cut up old touches (an old-fashioned word we used all the time but when I used it once with the sister of corner boy the late Al Stein she claimed to have never heard the expression before). So here goes guys and although I was not like the Bookworm or the Scribe back in the day I later turned into a late-blooming voracious reading and I hope you picked up the habit too.               

Sam mentioned in passing in his review about how hanging around guys in Baltimore and Riverdale were totally committed to betting on almost anything. Part of that betting trait was the need to “make a score,” make some dough for immediate dates but a lot of it was a real idea that the roll of the dice was going to be the only way to get out from under. Sure a lot of it was betting on sports outcomes especially on the then lowly Red Sox and high-riding Celtics but nothing was off-limits from what, as happened in the film, you would or would not get from a girl in the way of sex (we had our fair share of “ice queens” and in high school I had more than my fair share unless the other guys, as usual, were lying like bastards about what they were “getting”) to the most famous, or infamous bet of all-the night Frankie bet Sam on how high Tonio could throw the pizza dough to soften it up before making the crust.

I should explain that while I would later be partial to diners in the days in the later part of the 1960s when I was a regular Jack Kerouac “on the road” hitch-hiker grab rides from lonely for company truck drivers and I learned almost every diner, good or bad, stop at or avoid, from Boston to Frisco town back then we hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in high school. Located at the corner of Jefferson and Adams “up the Downs” which Sam mentioned in his review and I need not speculate here why that section of town was called that Tonio’s was where we spent our driftless after school hours. (The corner boy progression in town was Harry’s Variety Store across from Riverdale Elementary which I was not part of since my family did not move to the town Iwas in  junior high school then Doc’s Drugstore with his great jukebox in junior high and then onto Tonio’s. This progression was recognized by one and all as rights in the corner boy rites of passage.) So we knew lots about Tonio and his operation and while the cops and other merchants around didn’t care to see us coming Tonio, an immigrant from Italy and maybe something of a corner boy, or whatever they called them over there, was happy to see us. Said that we brought in business-the girls with plenty of dough to spent on food and the jukebox while “disdaining” the riffraff-us.

To make a long story short one Friday night our acknowledged leader, Frankie Riley, now a big time lawyer in Boston was looking for dough and knew Sam had some from caddying at the Point Pond Golf Course the previous weekend. So he was in a betting mood. Here was his bet. High or low, and I forget and Sam had too what the standard was, about where Tonio’s pizza dough would be flung when he was making his pizzas for the night. The thing was, and this was a hard and fast rule that I do not remember ever being broken, once a guy called a bet the other guy, or guys had to take the challenge. So the bet was on. Every time Sam called high Tonio would go low and visa versa. That night Sam lost five bucks and his chance to have a date that weekend. Frankie got to go on his first date with Johanna Murphy whom he would eventauly marry (and divorce). The “hook’ that caught Sam that night-the “fix” was in. Frankie whom Tonio liked the best of all of us, treated almost like a son, had spoken to Tonio before Sam came in. You can figure out the rest. Corner boy, strictly corner boy stuff.                   

[A while back we, a bunch of us who knew Markin who wrote the sketch below back in sunnier days, in hang around corner boy high school days and afterward too when we young bravos imbibed in the West Coast dragon chase he led us on in the high hellish mid-1960s summers of love, got together and put out a little tribute compilation of his written sketches that we were able to cobble from whatever we collectively still had around. Those writings were from a time when Markin was gaining steam as a writer for many of the alternative magazines, journals and newspapers that were beginning to be the alternative network of media resources that we were reading once we knew the main media outlets were feeding us bullshit on a bun, were working hand in glove with big government, big corporations, big whatever that was putting their thumbs in our eyes.

On big series, a series that Markin was nominated, or won, I don’t remember which an award for, which I will tell you about some other time was from a period toward the end of his life, a period when he was lucid enough to capture such stories. He had found himself out in Southern California with a bunch of homeless fellow Vietnam veterans, no homeless was not the right word, guys from ‘Nam, his, their word not mine since I did not serve in the military having been mercifully declared 4-F, unfit for military duty by our local draft board, who having come back to the “real” world just couldn’t, or wouldn’t adjust and started “creating” their own world, their own brethren circle, such as it was out along the railroad tracks, rivers and bridges. Bruce Springsteen would capture the pathos and pain of the situation in his classic tribute-Brothers Under The Bridge.  Markin’s series was called To The Jungle reflecting both the hard ass jungle of Vietnam from which they ahd come to the old-timey hobo railroad track jungle they found themselves in.     

Yeah, those were the great million word and ten thousand fact days, the mid to late 1960s, and after he had gotten back from Vietnam the early 1970s say up to 1974 or so when whatever Markin wrote seemed like pure gold, seemed like he had the pulse of what was disturbing our youth dreams, had been able to articulate in words we could understand the big jail-break out he was one of the first around our town to anticipate. Had gathered himself to cut the bullshit on a bun world out.

That was before Markin took the big fall down in Mexico, let his wanting habits, a term that our acknowledged high school corner boy leader Frankie Riley used incessantly to describe the poor boy hunger we had for dough, girls, stimulants, life, whatever, get the best of him. Of course Frankie had “cribbed” the term from some old blues song, maybe Bessie Smith who had her habits on for some no good man cheating on her and spending all her hard-earned dough, maybe Howlin’ Wolf wanting every gal he saw in sight, skinny or big-legged to “do the do” with that Markin also had turned us onto although I admit in my own case that it took me many years, many years after Markin was long gone before I appreciated the blues that he kept trying to cram down our throats as the black-etched version of what hellish times were going through in the backwaters of North Adamsville while the rest of the world was getting ahead. Heading to leafy suburban golden dreams while we could barely rub two dimes together and hence made up the different with severe wanting habits-even me.  

From what little we could gather about Markin’s fate from Josh Breslin, a guy from Maine, a corner boy himself, who I will talk about more in a minute and who saw Markin just before he hit the lower depths, before he let sweet girl cousin cocaine “run all around his brain, the say it is going to kill you but they won’t say when” let the stuff alter his judgment, he went off to Mexico to “cover” the beginnings of the cartel action there. Somewhere along the line the down there Markin decided that dealing high heaven dope was the way that he would gather in his pot of gold, would get the dough he never had as a kid, and get himself well. “Well” meaning nothing but his nose so full of “candy” all the time that the real world would no longer intrude on his life. Somehow in all that mixed up world he had tried his usual end-around, tried to do either an independent deal outside the cartel, a no-no, or stole some “product” to start his own operation, a very big no-no. Either scenario was possible when Markin got his wanting habits on and wound up dead, very mysteriously dead, in a dusty back street down Sonora way in 1975, 1976 we don’t even have the comfort of knowing that actual date of his passing.

Those were the bad end days, the days out in Oakland where they were both staying before Markin headed south when according to Josh he said “fuck you” to writing for squally newspapers and journals and headed for the sweet dream hills. But he left plenty of material behind that had been published or at the apartment that he shared with Josh in Oakland before the nose candy got in the way. That material wound up in several locations as Josh in his turn took up the pen, spent his career writing for lots of unread small journals and newspapers in search of high-impact stories and drifted around the country before he settled down in Cambridge working as an free-lance editor for several well-known if also small publishing houses around Boston. So when the idea was proposed by Jack Callahan to pay a final written tribute to our fallen comrade we went looking for whatever was left wherever it might be found. You know from cleaning out the attics, garages, cellars looking for boxes where an old newspaper article or journal piece might still be found after being forgotten for the past forty or so years.

The first piece we found, found by Jack Callahan, one of the guys who hung around with us corner boys although he had a larger circle since as a handsome guy he had all the social butterfly girls around him and as a star football player for North Adamsville High he had the girls and all the “jock” hangers-on bumming on his tail, was a story by Markin for the East Bay Other about the transformation of Phil Larkin from “foul-mouth” Phil to “far-out’ Phil as a result of the big top social turmoil events which grabbed many of us who came of political, social, and cultural age in the roaring 1960s. Markin like I said before had been the lead guy in sensing the changes coming, had us following in his wake not only in our heads but his gold rush run in the great western trek to California where a lot of the trends got their start.

That is where we met the subject of the second piece, or rather Phil did and we did subsequently too as we made our various ways west, Josh Breslin, Josh from up in Podunk Maine, actually Olde Saco fast by the sea, and he became in the end one of the corner boys, one of the North Adamsville corner boys. But before those subsequent meetings he had first become part of Phil’s “family,” and as that second story documented also in the East Bay Other described it how Josh, working his new life under the moniker Prince Love, “married” one of the Phil’s girlfriends, Butterfly Swirl. The third one in the series dealt with the reality of Phil’s giving up that girlfriend to Prince Love and the “marriage” and “honeymoon,” 1960s alternative-style that cemented that relationship.

Yeah, those were wild times and if a lot of the social conventions accepted today without too much rancor like people living together as a couple without the benefit of marriage, same-sex marriage, and maybe even friends with benefits let me clue in to where they all started, or if not started got a big time work-out to make things acceptable. But that was not all he wrote about, just the easy to figure a good story about 1960s. Markin also wrote about those wanting habits days, our growing up poor in the 1950s days which while we had no dough, not enough to be rich was rich in odd-ball stuff we seemingly were forced to do to keep ourselves just a little left of the law, very little sometimes. Naturally he wrote about the characters like the one here, Stew-ball Stu, whom I hope doesn’t read this sketch if he is still alive because he might still take umbrage and without Markin around he might come after me with a wrench or jackknife, who we young boys, maybe girls too but then it was boys’ world mostly looked up to. The actual Stew-ball Stu he sued here was from a story told to him by Josh Breslin long after he shed his 1960s moniker of Prince Love when Markin was looking for corner boy stories. But believe me while the names might have been different old North Adamsville had its own full complement of Stus.        

For those not in the know, for those who didn’t read the first Phil Larkin piece where I mentioned what corner boy society in old North Adamsville was all about Phil was one of a number of guys, some say wise guys but we will let that pass who hung around successively Harry’s Variety Store over on Sagamore Street in elementary school,  Doc’s Drugstore complete with soda fountain and more importantly his bad ass jukebox complete with all the latest rock and roll hits as they came off the turntable on Newport Avenue in junior high school and Salducci’s Pizza “up the Downs” in high school, don’t worry nobody in the town could figure that designation out either, as their respective corners as the older guys in the neighborhood in their turn moved up and eventually out of corner boy life.

More importantly Phil was one of the guys who latter followed in “pioneer” Markin’s wake when he, Markin, headed west in 1966 after he had finished up his sophomore year in college and made a fateful decision to drop out of school in Boston in order to “find himself.” Fateful in that without a student deferment that “find himself” would eventually lead him to induction into the U.S. Army at the height of the Vietnam War, an experience which he never really recovered from for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do directly with that war but which honed his “wanting habits” for a different life than he had projected when he naively dropped out of college to see “what was happening” out on the West Coast.

Phil had met, or I should say that Josh had met Phil, out on Russian Hill in San Francisco when Josh, after hitchhiking all the way from Maine in the early summer of 1967, had come up to the yellow brick road converted school bus (Markin’s term for the travelling caravan that he and Phil were then part of and which the rest of us, including even stay-at-home me for a few months ) he and a bunch of others were travelling up and down the West Coast on and had asked for some dope. Phil was the guy he had asked, and who had passed him a big old joint, and their eternal friendship formed from there. (Most of us would meet Josh later that summer as we in our turns headed out. Sam Lowell, Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins and me all headed out after Markin who had “gone native” pleaded with us to not miss this big moment that he had been predicting was going to sea-change happens for a few years.) Although Markin met a tragic end murdered down in Mexico several years later over a still not well understood broken drug deal with some small cartel down there as a result of an ill-thought out pursuit of those wanting habits mentioned earlier he can take full credit for our lifetime friendship with Josh.-Bart Webber]