In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- George Mann - Songs of the IWW and Utah Phillips - May 15 In Boston-Tell Me Utah Phillips- Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails?

If I Could Be The Rain I Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go-Round At 83

By Music Critic Bart Webber

Back the day, back in the emerging folk minute of the 1960s that guys like Sam Lowell, Si Lannon, Josh Breslin, the late Peter Paul Markin and others were deeply immersed in all roads seemed to lead to Harvard Square with the big names, some small too which one time I made the subject of a series, or rather two series entitled respectively Not Bob Dylan and Not Joan Baez about those who for whatever reason did not make the show over the long haul, passing through the Club 47 Mecca and later the Café Nana and Club Blue, the Village down in NYC, North Beach out in San Francisco, and maybe Old Town in Chicago. Those are the places where names like Baez, Dylan, Paxton, Ochs, Collins and a whole crew of younger folksingers, some who made it like Tom Rush and Joni Mitchell and others like Eric Saint Jean and Minnie Murphy who didn’t, like  who all sat at the feet of guys like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger got their first taste of the fresh breeze of the folk minute, that expression courtesy of the late Markin, who was among the first around to sample the breeze.

(I should tell you here in parentheses so you will keep it to yourselves that the former three mentioned above never got over that folk minute since they will still tell a tale or two about the times, about how Dave Van Ronk came in all drunk one night at the Café Nana and still blew everybody away, about catching Paxton changing out of his Army uniform when he was stationed down at Fort Dix  right before a performance at the Gaslight, about walking down the street Cambridge with Tom Rush just after he put out No Regrets/Rockport Sunday, and about affairs with certain up and coming female folkies like the previously mentioned Minnie Murphy at the Club Nana when that was the spot of spots. Strictly aficionado stuff if you dare go anywhere within ten miles of the subject with any of them -I will take my chances here because this notice, this passing of legendary Rosalie Sorrels a decade after her dear friend Utah Phillips is important.)

Those urban locales were certainly the high white note spots but there was another important strand that hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and some of the other upstate colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s, run by the late Lena Spenser, a true folk legend and a folkie character in her own right, where some of those names played previously mentioned but also where some upstarts from the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like the late Bruce “Utah” Phillips (although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing about and rounded out his personality). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of 83.

Yeah, came barreling like seven demons out there in the West, not the West Coast west that is a different proposition. The West I am talking about is where what the novelist Thomas Wolfe called the place where the states were square and you had better be as well if you didn’t want to starve or be found in some empty arroyo un-mourned and unloved. A tough life when the original pioneers drifted westward from Eastern nowhere looking for that pot of gold or at least some fresh air and a new start away from crowded cities and sweet breathe vices. A tough life worthy of song and homage. Tough going too for guys like Joe Hill who tried to organize the working people against the sweated robber barons of his day (they are still with us as we are all now very painfully and maybe more vicious than their in your face forbear). Struggles, fierce down at the bone struggles also worthy of song and homage. Tough too when your people landed in rugged beautiful two-hearted river Idaho, tried to make a go of it in Boise, maybe stopped short in Helena but you get the drift. A different place and a different type of subject matter for your themes than lost loves and longings.  

Rosalie Sorrels could write those songs as well, as well as anybody but she was as interested in the social struggles of her time (one of the links that united her with Utah) and gave no quarter when she turned the screw on a lyric. The last time I saw Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at the majestic Saunders Theater at Harvard University out in Cambridge America at what was billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel road. (That theater complex contained within the Memorial Hall dedicated to the memory of the gallants from the college who laid down their heads in that great civil war that sundered the country. The Harvards did themselves proud at collectively laying down their heads at seemingly every key battle that I am aware of when I look up at the names and places. A deep pride runs through me at those moments)

Rosalie Sorrels as one would expect on such an occasion was on fire that night except the then recent death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill (and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job banging out the blues unto the heavens) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always remember the crystal clarity and irony of her cover of her classic Old Devil Time that night -yeah, give me one more chance, one more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain and thoughts of washing herself down to the sea whenever I hear her name. RIP Rosalie Sorrels 

George Mann - Songs of the IWW and Utah Phillips - May 15
by Boston IWW

Email: wbumpus62 (nospam) comcast.net (verified) 02 May 2011
A fundraiser for encuentro 5 sponsored by the Industrial Workers of the World

Sunday, May 15 @ 2:00 PM (Utah Phillip's birthday)
encuentro 5
33 Harrison Avenue, 5th floor in Chinatown

Suggested Admission $5-$12, no one turned away for lack of funds!
A fundraiser for encuentro 5 sponsored by the Industrial Workers of the World

Sunday, May 15 @ 2:00 PM (Utah Phillip's birthday)
encuentro 5
33 Harrison Avenue, 5th floor in Chinatown

Suggested Admission $5-$12, no one turned away for lack of funds!

George Mann is a New York-based folksinger who sings songs from the last century of labor and social activism, and his own songs are powerful and funny takes on the state of the nation. He also writes songs of hope, healing, struggle and triumph, and for years he recorded and performed with Julius Margolin, who was 93 when he died in August 2009.

His latest CD is "Songs for Jules and Bruce," with songs dedicated to and inspired by both Julius Margolin and Bruce "Utah" Phillips. He also produced the "Until You Come Home" CD, which features such folk legends as Tom Paxton, Utah Phillips, Holly Near, Magpie, John Gorka and more singing about the experiences of war and of returning home. Inspired by the book "Voices of Vets," George created this CD to help welcome home our returning service members and recognize the sacrifices they and their families have made for our country.

also appearing: special guest performer Sergio Reyes of the Boston May Day Committee

Phone: (617) 469-5162 for more info
*******

From the American Left History blog:

Wednesday, May 20, 2009
*Tell Me Utah Phillips- Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails?

Click On Title To Link To Utah Phillips Webpage.

Commentary

I have been on a something of a Utah Phillips/Rosalie Sorrels musical tear lately but I want to pay separate attention to one song, Phillips’ “Starlight On The Rails", that hits home on some many levels- the memories of bumming around the country in my youth, riding and living free (or trying to), my on and off love affair with trains as a mode of transportation, and, of course the political struggle to fix what ails this country. And as Utah acknowledges below in introducing the song (from the Utah Phillips Songbook version) we get a little Thomas Wolfe as a literary bonus. Utah and I, in the end, had very different appreciations of what it takes to do this political fixin' mentioned above but we can agree on the sentiments expressed in his commentary and song.

Utah, aside from his love of trains as a form of personal transportation when he was “on the bum”, also was a vocal advocate for their use as mass transportation. He originally argued this proposition at a time when the railroads were losing passengers in droves to the great automobile explosion. Utah wrote a song for one of his sons “Daddy, What’s A Train?” on the demise of this more people-friendly form of getting around. Since then there has been, due to the mercurial economics of oil and some conscious social and environmental policy planning, something of a resurgence of the train as a means of transportation.

Nevertheless the saga of the train in this writer’s imagination remains more of a boyhood memory than an actuality today. I can still see those historic old names: Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, B&O, and Boston & Maine. I can still hear the whistle blow as the train comes into the station. The conductor’s yell of “All, aboard” or the station’s name. Those rattling sounds of wheels hitting the metal of the rails. But, mainly, I think of the slower times, the time to look at the scenery as the train ambles along and to understand the how, if not the why, of the contours of the way America sprouted up as it out moved in all directions from its Eastern shores.

I noted in a review of a PBS American Experience documentary, “Riding The Rails” (see archives, “Starlight On The Rails, Indeed”, November 4, 2008) growing up in the 1950’s I had a somewhat tenuous connection with trains. My grandparents lived close to a commuter rail that before my teenage years went out of service, due to the decline of ridership as the goal of two (or three) car garages gripped the American imagination in an age when gas was cheap and plentiful. In my teens though, many a time I walked those then abandoned tracks to take the short route to the center of town. I can still picture that scene now trying to hit my stride on each tie. As an adult I have frequently ridden the rails, including a cross-country trip that actually converted me to the virtues of air travel on longer trips.

Of course, my ‘adventures’ riding the rails is quite different than that the one looked at in the American Experience documentary about a very, very common way for the youth of America to travel in the Depression-ridden 1930’s, the youth of my parents’ generation. My own experiences were usually merely as a paying passenger, although when down on my luck I rolled onto a couple of moving trains. An experience not for the faint-hearted, for sure. But this was mainly slumming. Their experiences were anything but. The only common thread between them and me was the desire expressed by many interviewees to not be HERE but to be THERE. I spent a whole youth running to THERE. But enough of this- let Utah tell his story about the realities, not the romance of the rails.

Guest Commentary

Starlight On The Rails- Utah Phillips

This comes from reading Thomas Wolfe. He had a very deep understanding of the music in language. Every now and then he wrote something that stuck in my ear and would practically demand to be made into a song.

I think that if you talk to railroad bums, or any kind of bum, you'll see that what affects them the most is homelessness, not necessarily rootlessness. Traveling is all right if you have a place to go from and a place to go to. It's when you don't have any place that it becomes more difficult. There's nothing you can count on in the world, except yourself. And if you're an old blown bum, you can't even do that very well. I guess this is a home song as much as anything else.

We walked along a road in Cumberland and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough. And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near. And the old hunger returned - the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.

Oh, I will go up and down the country and back and forth across the country. I will go out West where the states are square. I will go to Boise and Helena, Albuquerque and the two Dakotas and all the unknown places. Say brother, have you heard the roar of the fast express? Have you seen starlight on the rails?

STARLIGHT ON THE RAILS
(Bruce Phillips)

I can hear the whistle blowing
High and lonesome as can be
Outside the rain is softly falling
Tonight its falling just for me

Looking back along the road I've traveled
The miles can tell a million tales
Each year is like some rolling freight train
And cold as starlight on the rails

I think about a wife and family
My home and all the things it means
The black smoke trailing out behind me
Is like a string of broken dreams

A man who lives out on the highway
Is like a clock that can't tell time
A man who spends his life just rambling
Is like a song without a rhyme


Daddy What's A Train

Most everybody who knows me knows that I'm a train nut. In Dayton, Ohio, when I was 12 years old during the Second World War, there was a railroad that went close by Greenmont Village. A bunch of the kids and I built a fort out of old railroad ties, half dug in the ground and half above the ground. We let a bum sleep in there one night - I think he was the first railroad bum I remember meeting - came back the next day and it had been burned down. He'd evidently set it on fire or started it accidentally.

Playing around in that fort we'd see the big steam engines run by. The engineers would wave, and the parlor shack back in the crummy - that's the brakeman who stays in the caboose - would wave, too. Put your ear down on the rail and you could hear the trains coming. We'd play games on the ties and swing ourselves on the rails. Also we'd pick up a lot of coal to take home. I understand that during the Depression a lot of families kept their homes warm by going out along the right of way and picking up coal that had fallen out of the coal tenders.
This song is written for my little boy Duncan. His grandfather, Raymond P. Jensen, was a railroad man for over 40 years on the Union Pacific, working as an inspector. There's a lot of railroading in Duncan's family, but he hasn't ridden trains very much.



(sung to chorus tune)
When I was just a boy living by the track
Us kids'd gather up the coal in a great big gunny sack,
And then we'd hear the warning sound as the train pulled into view
And the engineer would smile and wave as she went rolling through;

(spoken)
She blew so loud and clear
That we covered up our ears
And counted cars as high as we could go.
I can almost hear the steam
And the big old drivers scream
With a sound my little boy will never know.

I guess the times have changed and kids are different now;
Some don't even seem to know that milk comes from a cow.
My little boy can tell the names of all the baseball stars
And I remember how we memorized the names on railroad cars -


The Wabash and TP
Lackawanna and IC
Nickel Plate and the good old Santa Fe;
Names out of the past
And I know they're fading fast
Every time I hear my little boy say.

Well, we climbed into the car and drove down into town
Right up to the depot house but no one was around.
We searched the yard together for something I could show
But I knew there hadn't been a train for a dozen years or so.

All the things I did
When I was just a kid-
How far away the memories appear,
And it's plain enough to see
They mean a lot to me
'Cause my ambition was to be an engineer.

Copyright ©1973, 2000 Bruce Phillips
Labels: ANARCHISM, communism, folk and politics, folk historian, folk revival, IWW, leon trotsky, Rosalie Sorrels, UTAH PHILLIPS


posted by Markin at 6:04 AM

3 Comments:
Jud said...
I miss Utah. I had the chance to meet him once when I was in college and he was doing a tour of the Deep South. In an ironic twist of fate, I had 'discovered' him only a few weeks prior in a cassette of his songs my dad had sent me. I went to his show and was captivated, bought a couple of IWW songbooks and had him sign one for my dad. Thanks for the memory and for helping keep the dreams alive.

8:26 PM


Skip Luke said...
I'm sure I saw him one time .... working as a telegraph operator at Tolono, Ill. on the Illinois Central where we crossed the old Wabash RR. (yes, that Tolono.) Guy with a beard, cowboy hat, and guitar gets off the Wabash passenger train and asks about a bus to Champaign. This was in the early 60's, IIRC. I didn't know anything about him at that time, but later when I became a fan and saw his picture, I am sure that it was him.

10:27 PM


Uncle Fred Wilson said...
Utah Phillips didn't write Starlight on the Rails, although he loved the song. It was written by Louise Scruggs for her husband Earl and Lester Flatt. Don't know where she got that kind of insight. Maybe through personal acquaintances. Uncle Fred Wilson

8:19 PM

From The Naval Archives-Captain Jacoby's Last Sail

By Seth Garth

Let me tell you a story, a story of greed, lust, sullen romance and the pretense of sex, all the usual things you expect the minute you start talking about the quest for anything valuable, valuable as long as human life is deeply discounted. In the end though this is a story about the heroic Captain Jacoby, the captain of the S.S. China Queen. Heroic not in this torrid story but previously when he commanded ships in World War I and later in the merchant fleet where he saved many a seaman’s life by his skills and by sheer bravery on his part. That, of course, before he got tangled up with a dame, with one crazy dame, Mary Astor, but don’t take that name too seriously because she went under about seven different names between the Orient, the China seas, and Frisco Bay. Yes, Mary and her quest for the golden fleece which brought Jacoby low.

Nobody has the whole story except maybe the Frisco cops, and a couple of reporters who dug a little into the story after bodies started piling up. Nobody could have the whole story especially Mary’s part since she took the big step-off a long time in one of California hellish gas chambers. Certainly Captain Jacoby couldn’t help us, at least according to one of the reporters since before he passed on, no, passed on is too simple a way to say it, died from his gunshot wounds administered by one Mary Astor,  he spilled what he knew, mainly that he had been taken in by a fragrance, by some gardenia fragrance. Well, it would it would not be the first time that some sober-minded guy laid down his head for a fragrance that left him smiling even as the life was pouring out of him.

The object of desire, Mary desire, a Ming vase, an error and thus almost priceless that had been stolen from the rich British owner in Shanghai. The error as in all such things like stamps and coins made the vase all the more valuable and desirable. Moreover it was encrusted with gems and gold. No one can fault Mary or the others who tried to grab the brass ring on the long trail for wanting to own the thing and live on easy street but a hell of a price was paid in the end. Here is where the bodies start piling up. Mary, working in a high-end whorehouse in Shanghai had the rich British owner, steel magnate Brian Ahern if you need a name as a client, a steady client, maybe his mistress such things being in a fog in high colonial British society, maybe now too. Ahern made the mistake, fatal mistake, of showing the piece to “from hunger” Mary. One night he paid for his mistake with a couple of heartless well-placed slugs in his head. Mary grabbed what did somebody in the cops call it-oh yeah, the stuff of dreams.         

     

That part is pretty straight forward. This next part is not, by no means. Mary was either working with some others who were financing the operation or some other thieves were after the vase at the same time. Could have been both or either from what I could tell. Mary, winsome, beautiful treacherous Mary played one faction against the other. One that Captain Jacoby was marginally involved with, taking certain materials out of China on the QT, was led by up and coming gangster Miles Archer. The other led by the well-known notorious international thief Sid Greenstreet. Having trouble keeping thing straight Mary had to waste a guy working for Sid, a guy named Floyd, no last name. Floyd it seems liking hard cash rather than cold hearts once in Mary’s confidence wanted the damn thing for himself. Then another guy, only known by the name The Kid acting on orders from Sid made the mistake of thinking that a dame could not be a crack shot. Fatal, very fatal. There may have been a few others wasted either by Mary or one of the factions but that is all secondary.     

What come first is that Mary through Miles Archer who at the time did not know Mary had the damn thing had made arrangements to get herself and the vase passage on the S.S. China Queen heading back to America, heading into Frisco town. That is where Captain and Mary mesh, where Jacoby made his fatal plunge over some silly fragrance. Here is how devilish this Mary was. She, as was her wont, gave the Captain her best “come hither” looks and actions eventually getting him in bed to seal the deal. Once hooked Mary told the Captain she had some family heirloom and could he keep it safe, and a secret. Gardenia-crazed he said sure.  That would be his downfall.

After landing in Frisco Mary went to see some people about selling the vase, getting onto that easy street she always dreamed of hitting all her fucking life. Meanwhile agents for both Archer and Greenstreet after they figured out where Mary had gone confronted the Captain. Confronted each other too with gunfire and real fire. The Captain was able to get the vase off the ship before it went totally to flames and brought it to Mary in her Post Street digs. Now knowing what the object was, and whose it was, he figured they would share in the profits. Wrong. The minute he even suggested that proposition Mary put a couple of slugs in him for good measure and fled. Somebody had heard the shots and that is how we know about the half-wise smile he had on his face as he passed on.    

We know Mary shortly after her flight was captured and eventually had her big step-off. The vase, well, that through the good offices of Sid Greenstreet was ransomed back to Brian Ahern. End of story. No. Somebody rightly thought Captain Jacoby should have some kind of memorial for his earlier brave actions and so funds were raised and there you have it. Don’t forget the fragrance part though.

An Adieu (Until The 60th Anniversary) To The Summer Of Love, 1967 Under The Sign Of The Times When Women Played Rock And Roll For Keeps- The Music Of Bonnie Raitt

An Adieu (Until The 60th Anniversary) To The Summer Of Love, 1967    Under The Sign Of The Times When Women Played Rock And Roll For Keeps- The Music Of Bonnie Raitt

By Zack James

[The world of on-line editors and named bloggers is actually rather small when you consider what expansive infinite cyberspace can allow the average ingenious citizen to do. Or collective of citizens in this case, collective of people who in a previous age, maybe twenty years ago would be found writing for hard-copy publications like Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and especially American Film Gazette and the Folk Music Review, the latter which actually covered more than folk music in its time, but its name reflected where it had come from. Now they are writing for on-line publications like this one and the on-line American Film Gazette which like a lot of hard copy operations had fallen on revenue hard times and to keep going had to flow with the times and go on-line. What this new technology has allowed me to do which otherwise would have been a good idea thrown in the office waste paper basket by any shrewd hard copy editor is to do a series highlighting some of the conversations between long-time music critic Seth Garth and some of his growing up in North Adamsville (that is in Massachusetts south of Boston) friends as he/they discuss various older CDs which reflect a certain period in their then young lives growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

An important component of the series of sketches is based on information that Seth has provided me has come under the sign of the Summer of Love, 1967 out on the West Coast, especially in the San Francisco and Bay area. Two periods stand out in these conversations as far as the effect of musical trends among guys who came up in the Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville and saw some relief from their “from hunger” lives as Si Lannon, one of the corner boys put it. When hitting their teenage years the explosion best explained by the rise of rock and roll on their radios, and later at school and church dances, when the authorities, school and church, tried to put a cap on their energy and keep them away from hard sexual fantasies unleashed by the new dispensation. Above all the names of the king of kings, Elvis, mad hatter Chuck Berry, wild and wooly Jerry Lee Lewis stand out. The other, which is reflected in the title of this piece, is a second wave of rock and roll, slightly different after the first stage had been exhausted and had been replaced by what Seth called “bubble gum’ music very much connected with the 1967 Summer of Love which hit Seth and his crew like a lightning bolt. Hit so hard that through one means or another, one person or another, one personal intervention or another that it drove the crowd out to the West to “see what was going on.”  A million other kids, mostly high school and college kids, from places like Lima, Ohio, Bath Maine, Boise, Idaho and of course Peoria, Illinois broke loose for a while and did the same thing, looked for something new in “drug, sex, rock and roll” and whatever else anybody could come up with to stem the flush of youth nation alienation and angst. So guys like the Scribe, Seth, Si, Frank Jackman, and my oldest brother, Alex, rode the wave, went out to “edge city” (Alex’s expression picked up from somewhere), went “walking with the king” (an expression culled from Doctor Gonzo the late Hunter S. Thompson) and mostly lived to tell the tale. Their later Vietnam War experiences and returns to the “real world” would not be so gentle.       

      

I am a bit too young by about a decade to have had anything but a nodding acquaintance with the Summer of Love experience. That era’s music did not form the basis for my musical interests although I heard it around the house from older siblings but rather the music of the 1970s which when I get a little bored with book reviews or general cultural pieces I write about for various publications including this one I write some music reviews. Knowing that let me take a step back so that you will understand why I made that statement about the review world is really a small place.

As I said earlier I was a little too young to appreciate the music of the Summer of Love first- hand but my eldest brother Alex was not. Had in fact gone out to the West Coast from our growing up neighborhood the Acre section of North Adamsville that summer along with a bunch of other guys that he had hung around with since highs school. He wound up staying in that area, delving into every imaginable cultural experience from drugs to sex to music, for a couple of years before heading back to his big career expectations-the law, being a lawyer. The original idea to head west that summer was not his but that of his closest friend, the late Peter Paul Markin forever known in town and by me as the Scribe (how he got that is a long story and not germane to the Seth sage). The Scribe had dropped out of college in Boston earlier in 1967 when he sensed that what Alex said he had been yakking about weekly for years that a “new breeze,” his, the Scribe’s term, was going to take youth nation (and maybe the whole nation) by a storm and headed west. A couple of months later he came back and dragged Alex and about six others back west with him. And the rest is history.            

I mean that “rest is history” part literally since earlier this year (2017) Alex, now for many years a big high-priced lawyer after sowing his wild oats and get “smartened up” as he called it once the bloom of the counter-culture they were trying to create faded had gone to a business conference out in San Francisco and while there had seen on a passing bus an advertisement for something called the Summer of Love Experience at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. He flipped out, maybe some latent recoil from those long- ago drugs and spend one “hooky” afternoon mesmerized by the exhibit of poster art, hippie clothing, photographs and music. That was not all though. When he got back to Boston he contacted all the old neighborhood guys still standing who had gone out there in 1967 to put a small memoir book together. One night they all agreed to do the project, do the project in honor of the late Scribe who had pushed them out there in some cases kicking and screaming (not Alex at the time). That is when Alex, knowing that I have had plenty of experience doing such projects contacted me to edit and get the thing published. Which I did without too much trouble.   

The publication and distribution of that book while not extensive got around to plenty of people who were involved in the Summer of Love, or who knew the Scribe. And that is where Seth Garth comes in. While he was not an integral part of the Summer of Love experience, having stayed out there only through the summer, he did drift out west after college to break with his Riverdale growing up home in the early 1970s. As a writer he looked for work among the various alternative presses out there and wound up working first as a free-lancer and then as staff as a music critic for the now long defunct The Eye which operated out of Oakland then. Guess who also was working as a free-lancer there as well after he got out of the Army. Yes, the Scribe who was doing a series of articles on guys like him who had come back from Vietnam and couldn’t relate to the “real world” and had established what amounted to alternative communities along the railroad tracks and under the bridges of Southern California. So yeah it is a small world in the writing for money racket. Here is what Seth has to say right now. Zack James]    

A lot of the musical switch-over from what is now termed classic rock and the later, let’s for convenience sake, call it acid rock although that is too narrow a term for what really went on was a shift in the role of women in the latter scene, as lead singers and as instrumentalists in their own right. In the earlier period women’s rock, girl music as it was called then centered on doo wop, do lang harmony of small groups of three or four women, many black but certainly not exclusively so. Somebody from mystical Tin Pan Alley would write the music and lyrics and the doo wop would flow. Mostly girl/teen anguish/alienation and boy trouble stuff. Great now in re-hearing according to Seth and the guys but then iffy. The point Seth made was that latter gals like Alcie Frye, Grace Slick, Harley Devine, Janis Joplin, and many others broke into the hard male world of rock and roll on their own terms-mainly. Led groups, featured, played instruments and made it safer for women to crack that crazy doped-up world.         

The subject of this piece, Bonny Raitt, fit that same mold even if she did not lead any famous bands like Jefferson Airplane or Big Brother and the Holding Company. She honed her craft, learned to play slide guitar under the tutelage of one Mississippi Fred McDowell the max daddy    

of country blues where it counted down in the Jim Crow Delta country. Learned how to keep the crowd interested, how to go through her paces, hang onto the quest for the high white note every musician dreams big dreams at night about. Seth had met her at Jack’s over in Cambridge just after he had gotten back from San Francisco and saw what potential she had, saw how she could work like seven dervishes just like the guys. Sat and watched her, sat and drank hard whiskies with her and saw the rising star up close and personal. A little later he would be backstage on the Boston Common, the year 1968, when she broke through in a concert series the City of Boston was running to keep a lid, or try to keep a lid on, the new age of rock and roll which they totally could not comprehend having stopped their rock around Elvis before the Army time. What more needs to be said fifty years later she still rocks.

(By the way as is the way with these old time North Adamsville corner boys including my brother they still like to tout the “big score,” the sexual conquest really related to this or that event. In the case of the Bonnie Raitt concert he was able to bring his new girlfriend of the time backstage with him and she was so thrilled that later that night she let him have his way with her, no sweat. Whether that was true or not since most corner boys lied like crazy about sexual conquests I don’t know but I am passing this on as information from Seth)      

On The Sixtieth Anniversary Of Her Death-Lady Day-Billie Holiday- She Took Our Pain Away Despite Her Own Pains- For Sax Man Johnny Hodge's 112th Birthday-Blowing The High White Note-The Giants of Jazz- Studs Terkel-Style

Click on the title to link to a "Sunday Boston Globe", December 13, 2009, review of a new biography of Louis Armstrong.

BOOK REVIEW

Giants of Jazz, Revised edition, Studs Terkel, Thomas Crowell Company, New York, 1975

Recently I have been on a tear reviewing the works of the now departed Studs Terkel. As is the case, usually, when I get “hot” on an author I grab everything I can get my hands on and read it in no particular order. That is the case here. Terkel, widely known and deservedly so, as the author of oral histories concerning the pressing social issues of class, race and gender of working people (in the main)in America was also in his earlier career a popular Chicago disc jockey concentrating on jazz (and a little blues and folk as they intersected jazz). I had not previously known of that part of Studs’ life and only became aware of it through reading his last work, a memoir of sorts but really a series of connected vignettes, “Touch and Go” (well worth reading by the way as background to his interest in the jazz figures highlighted here). Previously my knowledge of jazz was formed by the likes of Nat Hentoff and John Hammond. Apparently I have to revise this list to include Studs. Why?

As a member of the "Generation of ’68" my tastes were formed by blues, folk and early rock & roll and only incidentally by jazz. However, once one delves into the roots of all of these forms one can only understand their attractions when one sees the influences all those forms had on each other. Without going into a dissertation on the subject (useless in any case) jazz is a core beat that expressed one form of music that had its roots in the South , among blacks and was a reflection of the rural life that was being left behind as America became more industrialized. Jazz is the music of the city, as blues is (before World War II) the music of the southern countryside. But enough. Read Studs and you can see how the music developed (and was retarded as well by the rules of racial separation as it spread to whites looking for real music, other than the likes of the Paul Whitman Orchestra or Tin Pan Alley, after World War I).

Many of the names of the performers highlighted here have are the classic expressions of the jazz idiom. King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, "The Empress" Bessie Smith. "The Duke" (Ellington), "The Count" (Basie), "Lady Day" (Billie Holiday). Yes this is the royalty of jazz. For those who follow this space you already know of my devotion to Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. Less well know is my devotion to the “King of Swing” Benny Goodman of the Peggy Lee days in the 1940’s, Dizzy Gillespie of be-bop in the early 1950’s and Duke Ellington of the early 1940’s. Well, if you want to know more about them read on. By the way, this little book’s formatting is an early example of Studs Terkel’s easy style that he would work into an art form when he went full bore at his oral history interviews later. The only fault I would find here is that Studs is a little light on female singers. No Peggy Lee of the Benny Goodman days, no Margaret Whiting, no Helen Morgan, No Ivy Anderson. Oh well, I have always been a 'sucker' for a "torch singer". Maybe, Studs, except for Billie, wasn’t.

Notes From The Jazz Age- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise (1920)-A Book Review

Notes From The Jazz Age- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise (1920)-A Book Review

Book Review

By Zack James   

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, New York, 1920     

Josh Breslin, the old time cultural critic, mostly in the music and film milieu but occasionally with an adventurous foray into the printed word which had caused him more anguish from angry authors, had to laugh a couple of years back when approaching retirement after many years of free-lance journalism for publishing houses, small presses and an occasional off-beat journal he decided that he would review a wide selection of books by authors long dead. As one might expect he would therefore not have to deal with those troublesome and irate authors since they would have been long in the grave and beyond care for what some early 21^st century adventurer might have to say, or not say, about some literary gem. Or so he thought when he attempted to do a short review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early coming of age novel, This Side Of Paradise.     

Now everybody, everybody that counted for Josh anyway, mostly other reviewers and their hangers-on knew that The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s masterwork, knew that it was one of the great classics of the old-time “dead white men” pantheon. He would not when reviewing Paradise try to take that masterpiece away from its proper place in the literary pantheon but instead to tweak a few laconic noses he decided to argue that Paradise was on a level with Gatsby, that it should book-end the classic. Published such deliberate effrontery in several small literary journals and more importantly the literary blog, American Musings, a blog which several well-paid professional book reviewers, college professors, semi-literate high school English teachers, a smattering of graduate students in American Literature and most importantly a cohort of doctoral and post-doctoral literary lights out to make a reputation as gunslingers in the mad dash of that lightless world read and wrote for. Naturally the damn thing caused something of a fire storm as a result. Maybe you did not hear about it if you are not a devotee of such endeavors and just went about your life in ignorance of such earth-shattering blazes. But in that good night circle guns were drawn and ready, acid was added to the pen of many who saw that they could take down a two-bit has-been reviewer who obviously had not read anything since about age twelve-except maybe comic books.

That was the exact reaction that Josh had expected, had savored the prospect of igniting on fire. Had worried, worried to perdition that when he wrote the review nobody, no sensible person could, give a rat’s ass (his corner boy expression never entirely dismissed from his adult vocabulary) a couple of books almost one hundred years old from a guy who was on that “dead white men” extinction list mentioned above. He smiled with secret glee when the first review by a lonely undergraduate student who was trying to muscle herself up the food-chain by condemning Josh to East of Eden took him to task for even mentioning both books in the same universe much less in the same small breathe. Dared Josh to come up with one paragraph, one which she put in bold-face for emphasis as if Josh was some errant schoolboy that came up to that last couple of paragraph when voice Nick talks after Gatsby’s bloody demise about the feeling of those long ago Dutch sailors who came upon the “fresh, green breast of land” that would later become Long Island and had upon viewing had enflamed their sense of wonder. A paragraph she had written her freshman term paper on for American Literature which the professor had given her an A on-so there.

Josh, again acting as the provocateur, in return cited the dance scene in the club in Minneapolis with Amory and his prey, Isabelle, as he attempted against all convention to grab a small kiss from her sweet lips. Argued that after all Paradise was about the roamings and doings a young adult trying to figure out his place in the world and who was finding it not easy to find his niche. Josh contrasted that with the too uppity habits of a small-time hood from nowhere USA hustling whatever there was to hustle trying to step up in class out with the big boys and got pushed back down the heap once he got in over his head with Daisy and what she stood for-wealth, conformity and letting the servants clean up the mess.        

That comment seemed to have put that earnest undergraduate in her place since she went mute before Josh’s logic but no sooner had that dust-up settled down that Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby. Pointed out that  the novel was an authentic slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I scene and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary efforts of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the novel represented the Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances. So the battle raged.    

Josh laughed as the heavy-weights from the academy went slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder when he, having had a few too many scotches at his favorite watering hole, Jack’s outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel and put Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison. Let the sparks fly.   

Stop The Endless Wars-Listen To The Gals And Guys Who Have Been There-Veterans For Peace-VFP

Stop The Endless Wars-Listen To The Gals And Guys Who Have Been There-Veterans For Peace-VFP

By Frank Jackman

Recently I wrote a comment in this space about “street cred,” anti-war street cred in that case placing the anti-war organization Military Families Speak Out directly in the front line of those who have earned that honor, earned it big time as those of us, even many veterans like myself could expect out in those mean sullen anti-war streets. In that comment I had placed Military Families in the same company as those from my generation, my war generation, the Vietnam War, who too “got religion” on the questions of war and peace and who ran into the streets in the late 1960s and early 1970s to put muscle into that understanding. I noted that there was no more stirring sight in those days than to see a bunch of bedraggled, wounded, scarred, ex-warriors march in uniform or part uniform as the spirit moved them, many times in silent or to a one person cadence, in places like Miami and Washington with the crowds on the sidelines dropping their jaws as they passed by. Even the most ardent draft-dodging chicken hawk in those days held his or her thoughts in silence in the face of such a powerful demonstration.       

That was then and now is now. Now that spirit of military-borne   resistance resides a greying, aging, illness gathering relatively small group of veterans who have formed up under the dove-tailed banner of Veterans for Peace (VFP). While that organization is open to all who adhere to the actively non-violent principles stated below who are veterans and supporters the vast bulk of members are from the Vietnam era still putting up the good fight some forty plus years later. Still out on the streets with their dove-tailed banners flailing away in some off-hand ill-disposed wind stirring those crowds on the sidewalk once again. Still having that very special “street cred” of those who had have to confront the face of war in a very personal way. Listen up.

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-”Beat” Writer’s Corner- A Jack Kerouac Potpourri

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-”Beat” Writer’s Corner- A Jack Kerouac Potpourri

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just kicks, stuff, important stuff has happened or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation.  Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex thy called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well. So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind. The kind that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother Alex’s name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly from hunger working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan that was for smooth as silk Frankie to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.          

Book Review

The Portable Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac, edited by Ann Charters (also a Kerouac biographer) Penguin Books, New York, 1995

Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.

“As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s lesser work under review here, “Big Sur”, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”.

And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, “On The Road”, his classic modern physical and literary ‘search’ for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title “The Legend Of Duluoz”. Excerpts, in some cases like from “On The Road” large excerpts, from those dozen or so works form the core of this compilation,” The Portable Jack Kerouac”. That is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign of this six hundred page ‘teaser’.

And 'teaser' is exactly the right word, for anthologies in general, but Kerouac’s work in particular. I have tried in previous reviews to start to distinguish between what you NEED to read of Kerouac’s and what is merely repetitious. The editor, who is very familiar with Kerouac’s work both a devotee and something of an early and definite biography, has taken pains to give excerpts from all the main volumes mentioned above like “Dharma Bums”, “Maggie Cassady” , “Vanities Of Duluoz” and the like. The problem for me is that they just whetted my appetite. However for the novice this should be the place to start AFTER you have read the master work “On The Road”. As for self-styled aficionados like myself what is probably more interesting is various miscellany, poems, interviews and the like that give a better sense of this tormented working class fellaheen's writing thoughts. Nicely done for an anthology.