When Mike Hammer Prowls The Slumming Streets Of LA Town-With The Film Adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s “Kiss Me Deadly” In Mind

When Mike Hammer Prowls The Slumming Streets Of LA Town-With The Film Adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s “Kiss Me Deadly” In Mind

By Social Critic Donald MacDonald 

    

“Don’t let anybody tell, anybody from LA, Los Angeles which what we who were actually born call our town out of respect, anyhow tell you that my man, my lover, my boss Mike Hammer isn’t the straightest daddy who ever put on shoe leather.” Those words from Mike’s long time “secretary,” confidante, bait and whatever else Mike Hammer needed on either side of the satin sheets Velma, Velma Proust which is as a good a name as any to call her since under Mike’s expert guidance she had assumed many names in their little bait and switch divorce case work. See Mike had been for those who have been on some other planet for the last fifty years or so the max daddy private investigator in LA, bar none back in the 1950s when such professionals were worth their salt before they all got boggled up with high technology gadgetry and the professional lost it high-end soul. Mike’s specialty, very profitable specialty, taking whichever side paid the most in divorce cases where adultery was the hook to freedom day. Adultery being the most common but mostly the only way to get a fucking divorce before in those marriage forever bullshit days. And Velma, luscious Velma, who could make a dead man rise from his condition was the bait on the male side, the opposite as a rule of his clients who were mainly women who were to gain by the alimony settlement and thus produced nice numbers for the operation.

Velma continued, “I don’t give a fuck about all that noise about Mike screwing every available dame, meaning every dame, in LA just for the sake of doing the deed. When the deal went down, when it looked like curtains for both of us, my daddy only had thoughts of me, me and the danger I was in. You might have remembered the Albert case, the case where a guy was trying to steal our, America’s, atomic secrets, weapons too for some third party, probably the Russian red bastards and my daddy had to step in and save me, and America. No, it was not the case of those goddam commies, the ones they put in the big step off ‘lectric chairs in New York, those Uncle Joe red bastards the Rosenbergs or whatever their names were, Jews though too. This was about Carl Albert the big art dealer who somehow figured that one big atomic score was worth ten million silly commissions for art’s sake. By the way I might as well tell you right now in case I forget to tell after I tell you my daddy’s off-hand heroics just so all you girls out there know the night my daddy saved me I showed him the best time he ever had, played the flute for him all night until he cried “uncle.” So even if he messes around sometimes like all virile men do you know he has my brand on him, has me deep inside him.

“The case was kind of strange from the get-go. Mike, my daddy, I will probably call him both and maybe a couple of times “that bastard” when he is lifting some other girl’s skirt was coming down the Pacific Coast Highway one night late from up in Monterrey where he had just scored on a big settlement for the wife of Harry Brant, yeah, that Brant, the one rolling in brewery dough who was so easy for me to pick up and get between the sheets that for once I felt sorry for a sucker. I offered after Mike got his nasty photographs of me going down on Harry to do him again I was so sorry for him. He turned me down flat but the offer still holds if he ever gets down Los Angeles way. Mike had also scored some serious “tea” so we could get high as kites when he got back into town.      

“Problem was he never got back that night, at least not in one piece. The way he told the story which at the time I found hard to believe but which later events proved to be true, even if not every bit of the truth came out of his beautiful two-timing mouth. As he was cruising down the ocean fresh highway some blonde dish, Cloris something, maybe Leachman, a Texas place of birth on her death certificate who turned out to have no clothes on under her raincoat stopped him in the middle of the road and gave him a story about how she had been held in Encino, in some funny farm for flipped out drug addicts and hard to handle dames whose husbands have them locked up and the key thrown away so they can go play daddy with some less hard to handle honey.                       

“Mike was non-plussed by her story, thought she was crazy and was going to let her off at her request at the Greyhound Bus Station over in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles. Her story was that she was being held at the funny farm because she knew too much, knew about some secret stuff that would blow the lid off of the town if it ever got out. Knew the players and the bad guys as well. Turned out she was not bullshitting Mike because before they got within a mile of that bus station they were cut off by some bad guys and taken out in the desert and beaten for information. Cloris wouldn’t talk so she took the big kiss-off and Mike didn’t know a damn thing so before the night was out Mike, this Cloris, and Mike’s beautiful car were found in an arroyo. Cloris long dead, the car totaled and Mike all big wounds and broken ego.    

 “That broken ego part would not last for long because as Mike said no self-respecting private eye could let it go for professional reasons. He always would bring up the famous, maybe infamous, Miles Archer case where he took the big step-off from some dizzy dame up in Frisco and it was touch and go whether his partner, Sam, Sam Spade, was going to avenge his death or go along with the dizzy dame. Sam set the gold standard for P.I.s on that one when he turned the frill over and didn’t think twice about whether she would fry or not after she had led him a merry chase and had been the one who had actually pulled the trigger on skirt-crazy Miles. He said he would cry some tears on lonely winter nights over her but would get over it, get over it fast I figured. I often wondered whether Mike would feel the same way, move on fast if something happened to me but now I know that my daddy would cry real tears and that makes me feel good-and kind of horny.         

“Naturally Mike had to find out more about this Cloris, where she lived, who she was connected with. You know the ABCs that every serious P.I. figures out along the way-or gets bounced more often than not. Mike doesn’t mind tangling with bad guys but he is a sucker for even bad dames and that held him back for a while. Seems this Cloris lived in Los Angeles, in that Bunker Hill section of town, run down with whorehouses, strip joints and B-girl lure low-life bars complete with con artists and an occasional hipster who wanted to get kicks, dope or whatever else he or she might be into. I had a short time job at Eddie’s Bar, a famous hang-out for hipsters but I left shortly thereafter because as much as I like kicks just like the next girl the scene was too weird for me. I went over to Santa Monica near the pier working at The Grille where I picked Mike up one night and he took me out of that life-and put me in this crazy gumshoe life as it turned out.   

“This Cloris had a roommate, or who claimed to be her roommate, Gabby, who turned out to be the bad girl that Mike got caught up with before he found out who she really was, found out she was working for a guy named Sobern, Sobel something like that we never did find out his real name until after the fire when it came out Albert. Her play was to get Mike to protect her from the same bad guys as were after Cloris. She played Mike like a fiddle, he says no but I am sure she took him under the sheets before he consummated the contract, the job. The whole caper involved finding this small box that was supposed to be valuable and would put whoever had possession of it on easy street. Mike figured it was worth a shot and maybe he would get some serious dough for once without having to dirty his (and my) hands with low-rent dirty pictures in a divorce proceeding. To me it sounded like the same bullshit that Mary, Mary Astor I think her name was, threw at Sam Spade about a valuable bird, maybe a falcon, that was just there for the plucking. 

“This Gabby (and Sobel too) thought Cloris had given the box to Mike while she was in the car or at some point so Mike became a central target for the bad guys to follow. Eventually they got tired of following Mike and they picked me up, kidnapped me and took me to a beach house up near Malibu. That got my daddy’s attention alright, got how he felt about me straight for once in his crooked life. He found the small box in some gym locker but before he could do anything about it somebody, one of the bad guys grabbed it. So before the end the small box and I were in the same beach-house. One night Mike tailed Gabby there and that was that that. Well not quite. It seems that Gabby had as big eyes for the easy street as Sobel and she tried to get the damn thing away from him. What she didn’t know, maybe Sobel either, was the thing was radioactive, was a small sample of what any government, any rich individual would pay plenty for to have such power.

“The problem was that if anybody opened the box fully the damn thing would ignite. That is what happened when Gabby and Sobel were wrestling for control. The house began to burn, burn fast. My daddy yelled his head off to find where they had stashed me and he eventually found me. Found me and we ran like crazy away from that blazing inferno. I already told you what I did for my daddy that night. But you know I still wonder about that Gabby, about what she did to get Mike to do her dirty work for her. Maybe I will ask him someday, yeah, maybe.    

        

On The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967 -Jim Morrison and The Doors- WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

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

CD REVIEW

THE BEST OF THE DOORS, ELECTRA ASYLUM RECORDS, 1985


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

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

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

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

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

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"- Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”*Poet's Corner- Allen Ginsberg's "America"

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"- Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”*Poet's Corner- Allen Ginsberg's "America"

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

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.           

Commentary

There was a time when Allen Ginsberg's poetry 'spoke' to me and, and I am sure, to others from the "Generation of '68". His 'beat'/pacifist take on the struggle for power- heal thyself- rang through many heads-until the beasts got serious at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, and in other locales, before and after, as well. Still Ginsberg's mid-1950's poetry shook things up for lots of people. Here's why.

"America" by Allen Ginsberg, 1956

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. 
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the 
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

For The Late Rosalie Sorrels--In Pete Seeger’s House- The Real “Walk The Line” Couple, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash

For The Late Rosalie Sorrels--In Pete Seeger’s House- The Real “Walk The Line” Couple, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash

DVD Review

Rainbow Quest, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, Roscoe Holcomb, Jean Redpath, Shanachie, 2005

In a year that has featured various 90th birthday celebrations it is very appropriate to review some of the 1960’s television work of Pete Seeger, one of the premier folk anthologists, singers, transmitters of the tradition and “keeper” of the folk flame. This DVD is a “must see” for anyone who is interested in the history of the folk revival of the 1960’s, the earnest, folksy style of Pete Seeger or the work of the also tradition-oriented , although that fact was previously unknown to me, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash (she of the famous Carter Family tribe. How is that for traditional bloodlines?). This is not only a musical treat seeing the real subjects of the hit movie of a few years ago, “Walk The Line” that got me interested, at least somewhat, in Johnny Cash’s music but filled with information about the Carter Family that I have been interested in for a long time. Pete, by the way, couldn’t be more pleased in working with this pair and they regale us with some old Carter Family songs like “Worried Man Blues”.


Also included on this DVD is a performance by the legendary Kentucky mountain music man Roscoe Holcombe that John Cohen, a previously reviewed performer on this series with the New Lost City Ramblers, did great service to the folk revival by bringing out of the Kentucky hills in the early 1960s to the wilds of ….. Greenwich Village. Pete wears his “world music” hat in this segment as well as he also brings in Scottish folksinger Jean Redpath in to link up the music of the Scotch-Irish immigrant Kentucky hills and the old country. A nice folk history moment.

This DVD contains some very interesting and, perhaps, rare television film footage from two of Pete Seeger shows, packaged in one DVD, entitled “Rainbow Quest” (the whole series consists of six DVDs). Each show is introduced (and ends, as well) by Pete singing his old classic “If I Had A Golden Threat” and then he proceeds to introduce, play guitar and banjo and sing along with the above-mentioned artists.

One final note: This is a piece of folk history. Pete Seeger is a folk legend. However, the production values here are a bit primitive and low budget. Moreover, for all his stature as a leading member of the folk pantheon Pete was far from the ideal host. His halting speaking style and almost bashful manner did not draw his guests out. Let’s just put it this way the production concept used then would embarrass a high school television production class today. But, Pete, thanks for the history lesson.

For The Late Rosalie Sorrels-*The Roots Of The Roots- The Old Country (Somebody’s) Roots Music of Scotland’s Jean Redpath

For The Late Rosalie Sorrels-*The Roots Of The Roots- The Old Country (Somebody’s) Roots Music of Scotland’s Jean Redpath

CD Review

Jean Redpath, Jean Redpath, Philo Records, 1975

Not every roots artist that I review in this space as part of my task of doing my part to preserve and keep alive some of those traditions is on my A-list. Nor is every such artist someone who I have taken notice of from my own personal researches or predilections. That is the case with the Scottish balladeer under review, Jean Redpath. Of course I knew her name, as one must who knows something about the origins of the Child Ballads that form the basis of the music that was brought over to American in the initial WASP waves of immigration, especially after the victory in the American revolution. I also, vaguely, remember hearing her back in the days on those woe begotten Sunday nights when I scrumptiously listened to those folk radio shows I that became addicted to in my youth. What got me thinking about reviewing her work now, however, was a little more indirect, as sometimes happens in tracing the roots of American music.

I have just finished up reviewing a six series set (two one hour shows per set) of Pete Seeger’s 1960s black and white television folk show “Rainbow Quest”. The format of that show was, aside form some stellar solo performances by Pete, to bring in a guest, or guests, from some up and coming “rediscovered” traditional music genre. On one particular show he featured the legendary Kentucky mountain music banjo/guitar/vocalist Roscoe Holcomb (then recently discovered by Pete’s half-brother, the late Mike Seeger, I believe). Old Roscoe put on one hell of a show doing old time, but seemingly familiar, mountain tunes.

Familiar in the sense that one knew the lyrics (or some part of them) or the melody, or something about the songs. And then Pete brings out Jean Redpath who then proceeds to sing the same kind of songs as old Roscoe. You see that part of the American songbook that he was singing from came from his old country, the Scottish/Irish tradition reflecting the backgrounds of those who long, long ago came over stopped for a minute on the crowded coast then moved on and started their westward treks. In a sense then, as you will note here, Ms. Redpath is singing part of the American songbook. Or Roscoe was singing part of the Scottish songbook. Either way this is good stuff. Listen up.

Barbara Allen-Child Ballad-Variation

In Scarlet town where I was born
There was a fair maid dwelling
And every youth cried well away
For her name was Barbara Allen


Twas in the merry month of May
The green buds were a swelling
Sweet William on his deathbed lay
For the love of Barbara Allen


He sent a servant unto her
To the place she was dwelling
Saying you must come to his deathbed now
If your name be Barbara Allen


Slowly slowly she got up
Slowly slowly she came nigh him
And the only words to him she said
Young man I think you're dying


As she was walking oer the fields
She heard the death bell knelling
And every stroke it seemed to say
Hardhearted Barbara Allen


Oh mother mother make my bed
Make it long and make it narrow
Sweet William died for me today
I'll die for him tomorrow


They buried her in the old churchyard
They buried him in the choir
And from his grave grew a red red rose
From her grave a green briar


They grew and grew to the steeple top
Till they could grow no higher
And there they twined in a true love's knot
Red rose around green briar

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 inflamed 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.   

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Pete Seeger's The Emperor Is Naked Today

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Pete Seeger's The Emperor Is Naked Today       

During, let’s say the Obama administration or, hell, even the Bush era, for example  we could be gentle angry people over this or that notorious war policy and a few others matters and songs like Give Peace A Chance, We Shall Overcome, or hell, even that Kumbaya which offended the politically insensitive. From Day One of the Trump administration though the gloves have come off-we are in deep trouble. So we too need to take off our gloves-and fast as the cold civil war that has started in the American dark night heads to some place we don’t want to be. And the above song from another tumultuous time, makes more sense to be marching to. Build the resistance!

THE EMPEROR IS NAKED TODAY-O!

As the sun
Rose on the rim of eastern sky
And this one
World that we love was trying to die
We said stand!
And sing out for a great hooray-o!
Your child may be the one to exclaim
The emperor is naked today-o!

Four winds that blow
Four thousand tongues, with the word: survive
Four billion souls
Striving today to stay alive
We say stand!
And sing out for a great hooray-o!
Why don't we be the ones to exclaim
The emperor is naked today-o!

Men - have failed
Power has failed, with papered gold.
Shalom - salaam
Will yet be a word where slaves were sold
We say stand!
And sing out for a great hooray-o!
We yet may find the way to exclaim
The emperor is naked today-o!

Originally titled "As the Sun"
Words and Music by Pete Seeger (1970)
(c) 1977, 1979 by Fall River Music Inc.

For The Late Rosalie Sorrels-Starlight On The Rails, Indeed-In Honor Of The Hobo King Utah Phillips

For The Late Rosalie Sorrels-Starlight On The Rails, Indeed-In Honor Of The Hobo King Utah Phillips   

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 

DVD REVIEW

American Experience: Riding The Rails, PBS Productions, 1998

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 above-mentioned abandoned tracks to take the short route to the center of town. As an adult I have frequently ridden the rails, including a cross-continental trip that actually converted me to the virtues of air travel. Of course, my ‘adventures’ riding the rails is quite different than that being looked at in this 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 merely as a paying passenger. Theirs was anything but. The only common thread between them and me is the desire expressed by many interviewees to not be HERE but to be THERE.

This tale of a significant number of youth in the 1930’s is held together by film footage of the time, some nice background music from the likes of Jimmy Rodgers and Doc Watson that evokes the ‘romance of the rails’ and ‘talking head’ interviews with the itinerant travelers, male and female. Despite various motives, from the desire to leave the parents’ house to being thrown out during those tough times, the stories they tell are of cold nights in open box cars, overcrowded jails, beatings by the ever present railroad "bulls" and the struggle to find a little work in order to be able to move on to the next locale and maybe some ‘peace’. Mainly this was the eternal heading West of the famous Professor Frederick Turner Jackson thesis- with this proviso- by then the land had run out and maybe the possibility of the dreams. A few interviewed are still driven by the lore of the rails, many had no regrets but mainly this is a very interesting trip down memory lane in a time before the automobile became readily accessible to teenagers.

No review of the life of the rails can omit the special jargon developed by those on the road, the ‘class distinctions' (hobo, bum, and tramp) between them and the rough and ready ‘code of honor’ of the rails (honored more in the breach than in the practice from what I can gather). This tradition has survived best in song by the likes of Woody Guthrie in any number of his songs written in the 1930’s, the classic Elizabeth Cotton song "Freight Train" and the work, including a song with the same title as the headline to this piece, of the recently deceased old Wobblie, folksinger, writer and rail rat extraordinaire Utah Phillips. Starlight On The Rails, indeed!

Daddy What's A Train? Utah Phillips

Daddy what's a train? Is it something I can ride?
Does it carry lots of grown-up folks and little kids inside?
Is it bigger than our house? Well how can I explain
When my little boy and girl ask me "Daddy what's a train?"

When I was just a boy and living by the track
Us kids would gather up the coal in big 'ole gunnysacks
Then we heard the warning sound as the train pulled into view
The engineer would smile and wave as she went rolling through

She blew so loud and clear, we had to cover up our ears
And we counted cars just as high as we could go
I can almost hear the steam those big old drivers scream
A sound my little kids will never know

Daddy what's a train? Is it something I can ride?
Does it carry lots of grown-up folks and little kids inside?
Is it bigger than our house? Well how can I explain
When my little boy and girl ask me "Daddy what's a train?"

I guess the times have changed, kids are different now
'Cause some don't even seem to know the milk comes from a cow
My little boy can tell the names of all the baseball stars
I remember how we memorized the names on railroad cars

The Wabash and the TP, Lackawanna, the IC
The Nickel-Plate and the good old Santa Fe
Just names out of the past, I guess they're fading fast
Every time I hear my little boy say

Daddy what's a train? Is it something I can ride?
Does it carry lots of grown-up folks and little kids inside?
Is it bigger than our house? Well how can I explain
When my little boy and girl ask me "Daddy what's a train?"

We climbed into the car, drove down into town
Right out the depot house, but no one was around
We searched the yard togheter 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 those memories appear
I guess it's plain to see they still mean a lot to me
'Cause my ambition was to be an engineer

Daddy what's a train? Is it something I can ride?
Does it carry lots of grown-up folks and little kids inside?
Is it bigger than our house? Well how can I explain
When my little boy and girl ask me "Daddy what's a train?"

Starlight On The Rails

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?




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 ramblin'
Is like a song without a rhyme.

Copyright ©1973, 2000 Bruce Phillips


FREIGHT TRAIN
(c) 1957 by Elizabeth Cotten. Sanga Music

Chorus:
Freight train, Freight train, run so fast
(rep.)

Please don't tell what train I'm on
They won't know what route I've gone

When I am dead and in my grave
No more good times here I crave
Place the stones at my head and feet
Tell them all that I've gone to sleep.

When I die, Lorde, bury me deep
Way down on old Chestnut street
Then I can hear old Number 9
As she comes rolling by.

Urban Mix And Match (and Mismatch)-Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986)-A Film Review

Urban Mix And Match (and Mismatch)-Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell, Film Critic Emeritus

Hannah and Her Sisters, starring Woody Allen, Mia Fallow, Diane Wiest, Barbara Hershey, written and directed by Woody Allen, 1986

I hope to the love of god that I am not going on another extended Woody Allen run like I did about ten years ago when I went crazy and reviewed about ten of his later production, mostly stuff shot elsewhere which tended to my mind to be lesser works once he left the confines of his beloved New York City and its environs. Here we are back home, back in the city with Woody, Mia Farrow and an ensemble cast going through the trials and tribulations of modern bourgeois personal relationships in the 1986 film Hannah and her Sisters.

Of course every film and every family it appears needs a rock, a person to make some sense of the whole swirl of the madness that is modern life. That is Hannah’s role, like it or not. The film is anchored by a time frame between a couple of Thanksgivings, a time for family gatherings and bondings (although not in the Lowell household unfortunately but this is Hannah and her sisters story so we will move on). And anchored by the seemingly rocklike Hannah, Ms. Farrow’s role. But not all is right in heaven, in New York City theater success and stable family life. Seems Hannah’s very stability had set everybody’s teeth on edge. For a time anyway. First to flee the reservation is Hannah’s husband Eliot (played by the ubiquitous and perennial star Michael Caine) who is head over heels for-well, for Hannah’s comely sister Lee, played by Barbara Hershey (comely in a very 1960s hippie chick understated kind of way-the kind of gal we guys all hoped to meet out on the hustings and share a joint with). They go through their paces without any resolution because the hamstrung Eliot can’t bear to leave the cocoon, leave what is good and solid about Hannah.

Lee in turn had left her mentor lover played by Max Von Sydow for that hot affair with Eliot once she realized that the reclusive man was dragging her down, drowning her ability to find herself. Holly, the third sister, is another reclamation job, who is saved by Mickey played by Woody Allen once the dust settled. (Mickey in turn had been married to Hannah at one time so there is plenty of room for the problems of social in-breeding). In the end after a couple of years of mix and match (really mismatch) fury things settle down around that deeply symbolic Thanksgiving table. Not Woody’s best by any means although it was a great financial success and he was able to get a few licks in about the insanity of trying to keep your head above water in this modern urban world. Enough said.                 

On The 60th Anniversary Jean-bon Kerouac's "On The Road"- “Desolation Angels”-Book Review

On The 60th Anniversary Jean-bon Kerouac's "On The Road"- “Desolation Angels”-Book Review

Book Review

Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac, Coward McCann, 1965

I have been on something of a Jack Kerouac “tear” over the past year or so since I started re-reading and reviewing his works and thinking through their influence on my own literary tastes around the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of his death (and re-reading, additionally, those of his “beat” generation friends, among the most prominent, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti , Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder who also helped form those tastes and who find their way, under alias and alibi, into Desolation Angels). As noted previously this “tear” got its start “accidentally” with a trip on totally unrelated business that I took last summer to his hard-edged, hard luck, hard-times, hard-visioned, seen better days, ram-shackled, big two-hearted Merrimac River, water-powered, dust-choking textile-spinning and tannic acid-fumed shoe old working class mill town, Lowell, Massachusetts.

There are a thousand old worn out working class towns like Lowell that, by now, dot the great American highway night, towns formed before the great American mid-20th century pre-Interstate highway night (roughly). The pink blue sky westward trek (and back, as well) hard thumb up traveling, shoe leather-beating, rucksack-hanging, good luck diner/gas station-finding, coffee slurping, highway and back road by-way Lowell towns night, as sang out in various “on the road” chapter passages of Desolation Angels formed Jack Kerouac’s vision. And he sang of that good night, as Walt Whitman sang of the great American 19th century night as those same now forsaken towns began to rise and spit out all manner of thing, for delight or approbation. That worn out working class town, always just below the surface of the Kerouacian word play, and its fellaheen-driven ethos, moreover, was just the kind of town that I grew up in so unless it is something in the water around here in Massachusetts then it is no “accident” that old “beat” brother Kerouac “speaks” to me. And “speaks” loudly. Desolation Angels, in any case, stands in that tradition.

You see then why, when the deal goes down, down and dirty, I know Jack Kerouac. Oh no, not the way his many “beat” writer friends did , at least those who peopled, as in Desolation Angels, his many tell-the-truth-fast, quick judgment, acid-etched observations on the fly fast, write what you see and write it fast, “real” novels. Not, for sure, like renaissance Raphael did(Gregory Corso), poet of the streets, the streets of San Francisco poetry renaissance as well as homeboy streets of hard ethnic New York City, of the fast poem buck, of wine and women, of the sing to the masses whether they like it or not, mad man of a poet. Or not like Bull did (William Burroughs) of the dark, drear, dope-infested ding-dong daddy, shoot-‘em-up daddy, walking daddy, gong, bong, hash pipe-heavy, opiated dream world hiding out in the open in Tangiers (although it could have been anywhere, dope follows no flag, New Orleans, Houston, somewhere, although not old home St. Lo) waiting with open arms for Kerouac to take his “on the road” show international. And not like super-mantra, om-om-om om-ish poet Irwin (Allen Ginsberg, of San Francisco garage yell to the America ocean’s floor and mountain’s top Howl and New Jersey mother, death-be-not-proud cadenced Kaddish fame), who also sang that Kerouac-like Whitmaneque song of good fellowship, of death to the machine, of death to the death-machine, of death to the cardboard night, of the break-out Patterson night (or nights), and the break-out machine America, as well. And most certainly not like Cody (Neal Cassady) foot-clutched, brake-pedaled, “look ma, no hands”, “road” warrior extraordinaire to the great American expanse, day or night. (Although by the time of this novel the Ti Jean and Cody trails were heading in different directions, very difefretn directions.) There were others who knew him back on those lonely, down-at-the-heel, provocative post-World War II New York streets, friends of Ginsberg, of Burroughs and assorted hangers-on. That interconnectedness is the stuff of legend but well before my time, although I heard the echoes of that struggle, that fellaheen “beat” struggle, in my own youthful efforts to break out of the straightjacket of the 1950s childhood when my time of my time came in the 1960s.

I know Jack Kerouac. Although not as a latter day academic prier into each Kerouac word ever written or even as a latter-day devotee of his spontaneous prose writing style. Certainly not as an adherent of his standoffish, sideline view of life and consciously apolitical (maybe, more appropriately, anti-political) lifestyle, as that was embarrassingly emphasized in a famous segment on old prep school chum William F. Buckley’s Firing Line public television show where he went out of his boozy, woozy, floozy way to dump on the counter-cultural movement (“hippies”, okay) of the 1960s. From early on in my youth I was more likely, much more likely, to be immersed in reading things like The Communist Manifesto (if only to dismiss it out of hand-then) and had no time for reading a simple “beat” travelogue like On The Road although I was personally struggling along those same lines to ‘find myself’ (sound familiar ?), to find that great American night. Later I would devour the thing (repeatedly) along with the rest of his major works like Dharma Bums, Visions Of Cody, Big Sur, Doctor Sax and others. None more so, after On The Road, than Desolation Angels.

I know Jack Kerouac. I know, like Kerouac did, as a youth painfully but now with a sense of deep pride, what being from the lower edges of the working class was all about. One does not easily shake off the slow incremental deathblows to the psyche of avoiding authority, avoiding challenges to the status quo, avoiding failure by being a non-starter and most of all avoiding negative public (read neighborhood) notice. I, moreover, know, physically and emotionally, the very constricted ethos of the old time New England mill towns and the working class quarters of Manchester, New Hampshire, Saco, Maine and in Massachusetts Waltham, Lawrence, Quincy and Jack’s own beloved river-divided, brick on brick-piled mill town of Lowell. Without going into great detail, after all this review is about Kerouac, I know in great personal detail the effects of that clannish French-Canadian and Gallic Catholic cultural gradient as it worked it way through the working class base of many of those above-mentioned mill towns. Moreover, some of that detailed knowledge of mine is directly linked to the city of Lowell that factored so much into Kerouac’s life and writings (and death, the city has a small urban park named after him in the center of town and people, I am told, still go to visit his grave there).

Most of all, though, I know Jack Kerouac because a generation, more or less, after him I was, like a million others who formed the “Generation of ‘68”, taking to the ‘road’, some road, in search of personal destiny, greater consciousness, some political wisdom, the truth, a little look at the great continental expanse, or just trying, and trying with both hands, to get out of the stunted, shunted, dark night, memory-fogged family house. The previously disdained apolitical “On The Road” became something of a personal bible for me in that minute, as like Whitman before him, Kerouac tried to do by interior monologue, but more importantly, by physically putting some space between the here of whatever was bothering him and the there of some inner peace (that he, at least from what I can tell, never found). The road I took then, or later, was not Jack’s road. Or Dean Moriarty’s road. But, thanks Jack for On The Road, The Dharma Bums, Doctor Sax, Visions of Cody, the present Desolation Angels, and a bunch of other books that got me through many a sleepless night as I tried to find the keys to the kingdom.

Here is the real “skinny” though. Jack, as media-proclaimed ‘leader’ of the “beats” (and, in retrospect, he really was the most talented and original of the lot) never overcame all those crooked river-flow, old time dusty mill town anxiety-producing, drawing on generations of suffering ignoble anonymity-beating down, Lowell night whispers. And the wheels, his wheels, driven as well by that old devil alcohol, came off. The effects of that cloistered, repressed working class youth, as surely as if he had spent thirty years in the mills, began to take its toll. The final section of Desolation Angels in which he travels, in "style" on a Greyhound bus (“on the road, part ten, part whatever”) with his mother (dear memere) from Florida to California in search of peace only to run back a few weeks later here reflect that inner drive to withdraw, to go home to mill town memere and quiet.

Moreover, a recent re-reading of some of Dharma Bums gives at least some clue to what else happened to this superior and innovative writer in that dark night sixties Jack by-passed American road. He was, after all, as the work that is remembered today will attest to, a young, very young, writer writing for the young about youthful experiences. There is only so much fresh inner-directed material that that market can absorb from one writer. The aging media celebrity Kerouac, sadly, could not, or would not, face the fact of aging and shift gears. I have already given my kudos elsewhere for that youthful work of his. That will have to do here.

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Richard Mafundi Lake,

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Richard Mafundi Lake,



http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html



A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month 

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!