The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-One Night With You- Sam’s Song –With Elvis’ One Night Of Sin In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-One Night With You- Sam’s Song –With Elvis’ One Night Of Sin In Mind  

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[It wasn’t every day in every way although some days it was a close thing about girls, about sex really, on the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner where the Acre high school boys by right of accession high out in the fetid North Adamsville night (fetid in summer mostly from the sink of sea air and mudflats not far away, not far enough away anyhow. Sometimes we talked sports, mostly about the grand feats of the Boston Celtics and the collection of bums who played for the Red Sox. Sometimes it was, when Scribe was on his holy high horse, about ideas, about this fucking new wave that he sensed, correctly sensed if you can right down to it, that was going to sweep through American youth nation and right a few wrongs, bring the Acre boys along in its wake which is what kept Scribe going until even he realized that we were doomed and he fell off the planet. But as could be expected of young men who had time on their hands, not much money, not much access to a car in the golden age of the automobile which was the calling car to get dates we spoke of female conquests, real and imagined. Even Timmy Riley who would later win fame as the best Miss Judy Garland drag queen in San Francisco got caught up in it although I don’t remember him talking much about girls although that might be me remembering later when he had come out of the closet.  

Of course, half of those so-called conquests, especially the “going all the way” and you know what that means and if you don’t ask a parent and what we later called “doing the do” were totally bullshit, never happened or if they did happen did so at a much lower level of sexual excitement than the speaker indicated. Maybe guys, gals too, these days have the same kind of pressures around sex and sex’s relationship to popularity and the like that we had although I truly hope not for their sakes but back in the day, back in the early 1960s day before things broke through somewhat later in the decade as we got a little looser and less fragile, there was tremendous pressure to have conquests. Especially in the corner boy night. But the logic of no dough, no car, no prospects would lead one to think that sexual escapades were far and few between. Which many years later most of us candidly admitted was true. But see then we were all lying like crazy, all blowing smoke about what we did or did not do with that gal we were pining for. But there must have been something like an unwritten law that nobody would challenge anybody’s assertions on their sexual prowess.   

All of this foreplay to lead to the one time that Scribe caught me out, caught me out big time. I had this serious crush on Lydia Pringle who everybody’s idea of beauty and smart too which is where I figured I had my shot. I aimed directly at her about literature, art, music whatever I could come up with to impress her during lunch and a couple of times after school. Eventually we decided by mutual agreement to have a date, a movie date, something cheap anyway because I know I was always short on dough. We had a great time and all but I was so timid around her that I didn’t do anything close to sexual. Naturally all the guys were anxious to hear what was what with Lydia and what did we do. Just as naturally I lied and said we had fooled around which was shorthand for French kissing and some under the clothes groping. That got me some cache with the guys. That is until Scribe spoiled my play. See for some reason almost every gal in school confided in Scribe, maybe thought he was safe or an older brother. Apparently Lydia went up to him one day and asked why I was so shy around her, didn’t try to do anything. Oops! Scribe to keep his place in the social line-up called me on it one Friday night when all of us were totally broke or totally dateless. Yeah, now that I think about the matter I really do hope guys, and gals, don’t have to go through all of that now. Allan Jackson]          

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Sam Lowell thought it was funny how things worked out sometimes in such a contrary fashion in this wicked old world. Not his expression that “wicked old world” for he preferred of late the more elastic and ironic “sad old world” but that of his old time North Adamsville corner boy Peter Markin who will be more fully introduced in a moment (Markin aka Peter Paul Markin although nobody ever called him that except his mother, as one would expect although he hated to be teased about it by every kid from elementary school on including girls, girls who liked to tease him, tease him when they wanted to show their interest usually, and his first ill-advised wife, Martha, a heiress of the local Mayfair swells who tried, unsuccessfully since they sensed right away that he was not one of them, to impress her leafy horse country Dover suburban parents with the familiar waspy triple names).

Neither of those expressions referred to however dated back to their youth since neither Sam nor Peter back then, back in their 1960s youth, would have used such old-fashioned religious-drenched expressions to explain their take on the world since as with all youth, or at least youth who expected to “turn the world upside down” (an expression that they both did use although each in very different contexts) they would have withheld such judgments or were too busy doing that “turning” business they had no time for adjectives to express their worldly concerns. No that expression, that understanding about the wickedness of the world had been picked up by Sam from Peter when they had reconnected a number of years before after they had not seen each other for decades to express the uphill battles of those who had expected humankind to exhibit the “better angels of their nature” on a more regular basis. Some might call this nostalgic glancing back, especially by Peter since he had more at stake in a favorable result, on a world that did not turn upside down or did so in a way very different from those hazy days.  

The funny part (or ironic if you prefer) was that back then Sam had been in his youth the least political, the least culturally-oriented, the least musically-oriented of those corner boys like Markin, Jack Dawson, Jimmy Jenkins and “ding-dong daddy” leader Fritz Fallon (that “ding-dong max daddy” another expression coined, or picked up from somewhere by Peter so although he has not even been properly introduced we know plenty about his place in the corner boy life, his place as “flak,” for Fritz’s operation although Fritz always called him “the Scribe” when he wanted something written and needed to play on Peter’s vanity) who kept the coins flowing into the jukebox at Phil’s House of Pizza. That shop had been located down a couple of blocks from the choppy ocean waters of Adamsville Beach (and is still there although under totally different management from the arch-Italian Rizzo family that ran the place for several generations now run by some immigrant Albanians named Hoxha).

That made Phil’s among other things a natural hang-out place for wayward but harmless poor teenage corner boys. The serious “townie” professional corner boys, the rumblers, tumblers, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters hung around Harry’s Variety with leader Red Riley over on Sagamore Street far from beaches. Night haunting boys far from sweated sun, tanned daytime beaches, with their equally pale, black dress-etched “tramps,” well known in the in boyos network at the high school for those few adventurous enough to mess with an off-hand “from hunger” girl looking for kicks and a fast ride in some souped-up Chevy or on back of fat hog Harley, the bike of choice around the town. Although tanned daytime beaches rumors had it that the beach, the isolated Rock Island end, had been the site of more than one nighttime orgy with “nice” publicly virginal girls looking for kicks with rough boys down among the briny rocks. Rumors they remained until Sam ran into Sissy Roswell many years later who confessed that she and the “social butterfly” prom/fall dance/ yearbook crowd of girls that she hung around with on a couple of occasions had been among the briny rocks with the bad ass biker the summer after graduation when school social ladders and girls’ locker room talk didn’t mean a thing. Yeah, just like the Madonna tramps looking for kicks, looking for the minute wild side with guys that they would probably never see again and who could have cared less about their fake virginal status as long as the put out, put out hard and fast, before running off to college or finding some high-end stockbroker to pay the freight.   

Getting back to Harry’s though, a place where cops with their patrol cars parked conspicuously in front of the store during the daytime placed their bets with “connected” Harry who used the store as a shabby front for the bookie operation and to fence Red’s nighttime work (the store had about three cans of beans and a couple of cans of soup on the shelves but did have a great big Coca-Cola ice chest filled with soda and a classic Madame La Rue pinball machine). Fritz and the boys would not have gone within three blocks of that place. Maybe more from fear, legitimate fear as Fritz’s older brother, Timmy, a serious tough guy himself, could testify to the one time he tried to wait outside Harry’s for some reason and got chain-whipped by Red for his indiscretion. So the tame corner boys at Phil’s were more than happy to hang out there where the Rizzos were more than happy to have them spent dough on the jukebox and pizzas except on Friday family pizza night set up to give Mom a rest for once not until after nine (and Tonio Rizzo the zen-master pizza maker secretly, since these corner boys were, if tame, still appealing looking to passing girls glad to have then around at that hour to boost the weekend sales). Moreover this spot provided a beautiful vantage point for scanning the horizon for those wayward girls who also kept their coins flowing into Phil’s jukebox (or maybe a stray “nice” girl turned tramp after Red and his corner boys threw her over).

Sam had recently thought about that funny story that Markin had told the crowd once on a hot night when nobody had any money and were just holding up the wall at Phil’s about Johnny Callahan, the flashy and unstoppable halfback from the high school team (and a guy even Red respected having made plenty of money off of with local sports who bet with him on the strength of Johnny’s prowess any given Saturday although Johnny once confessed that he, rightly, avoided Harry’s after what had happened to Timmy Fallon). See Johnny was pretty poor even by the median working poor standard of the old neighborhoods in those days (although now, courtesy of his incessant radio and television advertising which continues to make everyone within fifty miles of North Adamsville who knew Johnny back in the day aware of his new profession, he is a prosperous Toyota car dealer, called Mr. Toyota,  down across from the mall in Hull about twenty miles from North Adamsville, the town where their mutual friend Josh Breslin soon to be introduced came from). Johnny, a real music maniac who would do his football weight-lifting exercises to Jerry Lee’s Great Balls of Fire, Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula and stuff like that to get him hyped up, had this routine in order to get to hear songs that he was dying to hear, stuff he would hear late at night coming from a rock station out of Detroit and which would show up a few weeks later on Phil’s jukebox just waiting for Johnny and the kids to fill the coffers, with the girls who had some dough, enough dough anyway to put coins into that jukebox.

Johnny would go up all flirty and virile to some “young thing” (a Fritz expression coped from Jerry Lee and not an invention of Markin as Peter would later claim to some “young thing” that he was trying to “score”). Maybe, depending on whatever intelligent he had on the girl, maybe she had just had a fight with her boyfriend or had broken up with him Johnny would be all sympathy, or maybe she was just down in the dumps for no articulate reason like every teen goes through every chance they get, whatever it took. Johnny, by the way, would have gotten that intelligence via Peter who whatever else anybody had to say about him, good or bad, was wired into, no, made himself consciously privy to, all kinds of boy-girl information almost like he had a hook into that Monday morning before school girls’ locker room talk-fest. Everybody already knew that he was hooked into the boys’ Monday morning version and had started more rumors and other unsavory deeds than any ten other guys.  Spreading ugly rumors about a guy whose girl he was interested in a specialty. But the guy was like Teflon, nobody ever thought to take him out for his actions they were so dependent on his information to keep their place in the social pecking order.

Now here is what Johnny “knew” about almost every girl if they had the quarter which allowed them to play three selections. He would let them pick that first one on their own, maybe something to express interest in his flirtation, maybe her name, say Donna, was also being used as the title of a latest hit, or if broken up some boy sorrow thing. Brenda Lee’s I Want To Be Wanted, stuff like that. The second one he would “suggest” something everybody wanted to listen to no matter what but which was starting to get old. Maybe an Elvis, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee thing still on the jukebox playlist but getting wearisome. Then he would go in for the kill and “suggest” they play this new platter, you know, something like Martha and the Vandelas Dancing in the Streets or Roy’s Blue Bayou both of which he had heard on the midnight radio airwaves out of Detroit one night and were just getting play on the jukeboxes. And bingo before you know it she was playing the thing again, and again. Beautiful. And Johnny said that sometimes he would wind up with a date, especially if he had just scored about three touchdowns for the school, a date that is in the days before he and Kitty Kelly became an item. An item, although it is not germane to the story, who still is Johnny’s girl, wife, known as Mrs. Toyota now.

But enough of this downstream stuff Sam thought. The hell with Johnny and his cheap-jack tricks (although not to those three beautiful touchdowns days, okay) this thing gnawing at him was about old age angst and not the corner boy glory days at Phil’s, although it is about old time corner boys and their current doings, some of them anyway. So yeah he had other things he wanted to think about (and besides he had already, with a good trade-in, gotten his latest car from Mr. Toyota so enough there), to tell a candid world about how over the past few years with the country, the world, the universe had been going to hell in a hand-basket. In the old day, like he kept going back to, back in the day he was not the least bit interested in anything in the big world outside of sports, and girls, of course. And endlessly working on plans to own his own business, a print shop, before he was twenty-five. Well, he did get that small business, although not until thirty and had prospered when he made connections to do printing for several big high-tech companies, notably IBM when they began outsourcing their work. He had prospered, had married (twice, and divorced twice), had the requisite tolerated children and adored grandchildren, and in his old age a woman companion to ease his time.

But there had been for a long time, through those failed marriages, through that business success something gnawing at him, something that Sam felt he had missed out on, or felt he had do something about. Then a few years ago when it was getting time for a high school class reunion he had Googled “North Adamsville Class of 1964” and came upon a class website for that year, his year, that had been set up by the reunion committee, and decided to joint to keep up with what was going on with developments there. He would wind up not going to that reunion as he had planned, a long story about a slight ill-advised flirtation with an old flame classmate although that too is not germane to the story here except as one more thing that gnawed at him. But mostly in the end he could not face going home, came to believe what Thomas Wolfe said in the title of one of his novels, you can’t go home again).

After Sam had registered on the site giving a brief resume of his interests and what he had been up to those past forty years or so years Sam looked at the class list, the entire list of class members alive and deceased (a rose beside their name signifying their passing) of who had joined and found the names of Peter Markin. He had to laugh Peter had been listed as Peter Paul Markin since everybody was listed by their full names, revenge from the grave by his poor mother, and that leafy suburban first wife who tried to give him Mayflower credentials, he thought.  He also found the name of corner boy Jimmy Jenkins among those who had done so. (Jack Dawson had passed away a few years before, a broken man, broken after his son who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan had committed suicide, according to Peter, as had their corner boy leader, Fritz Fallon, homeless, and found down along a railroad trestle in New Jersey, after going through a couple of fortunes, his own and a third wife’s).

Through the mechanism established on the site which allowed each class member who joined to have a private cyberspace e-mail slot Sam contacted both men and the three of them started a rather vigorous on-line chat line for several weeks going through the alphabet of their experiences, good and bad. The time for sugar-coating was over unlike in their youth when all three would lie like crazy, especially about sex and with whom in order to keep their place in the pecking order, and in order to keep up with Fritz whom lied more than the three of them combined. Peter knew that, knew it better than anybody else but in order to keep his place as “scribe” in that crazy quill pecking order went along with such silly teenage stuff, stuff that in his other pursuits he would have laughed at but that is what made being a teenager back then, now too, from what Sam saw of his grandchildren’s trials and tribulations.

After a while, once the e-mail questions had worked their course, all three men met in Boston at the Sunnyvale Grille, a place where Markin had begun to hang out in after he had moved back to Boston (read: where he did his daytime drinking) over by the waterfront, and spent a few hours discussing not so much old times per se but what was going on in the world, and how the world had changed so much in the meantime. And since Markin, the political maniac of the tribe, was involved in the conversations maybe do something about it at least that is what Sam had hoped since he knew that is where he thought he needed to head in order to cut into that gnawing feeling. Sam was elated, and unlike in his youth he did not shut his ears down, when those two guys would talk politics, about the arts or about music. He now regretted that he had not listened back then since he was so strictly into girls and sports, not always in that order (which caused many problems later including one of the grounds for his one of his divorces, not the sports but the girls).

This is probably the place for Sam to introduce Peter Markin although he had already given an earful (and what goes for Peter goes to a lesser extent for Jimmy who tended to follow in Pete’s wake on the issues back then, and still does). Peter, as Sam has already noted, provided that noteworthy, national security agency-worthy service, that “intelligence” he provided all the guys (and not just his corner boys, although they had first dibs) about girls. Who was “taken,” a very important factor if some frail (a Fritz term from watching too many 1940s gangster and detective movies and reading Dashiell Hammett too closely, especially The Maltese Falcon),was involved with some bruiser football player, some college joe who belonged to a fraternity and the brothers were sworn to avenge any brother’s indignities, or worse, worse of all, if she was involved with some outlaw biker who hung out in Adamsville and who if he hadn’t had his monthly quota of  college boy wannabes red meat hanging out at Phil’s would not think twice about chain-whipping you just for the fuck of it (“for the fuck of it” a  term 

Jimmy constantly used then, and now, so it was not always Markin or Fritz who led the verbal life around the corner). Who was “unapproachable,”  probably more important than that social blunder of ‘hitting on” a taken woman since that snub by Miss Perfect-Turned-Up-Nose would make the rounds of the now legendary seminar, Monday morning before school girls’ locker room (and eventually work its way through Markin to the boys’ Monday morning version ruining whatever social standing the guy had spent since junior high trying to perfect in order to avoid the fatal nerd-dweeb-wallflower-square- name your term existence). Strangely Markin made a serious mistake with Melinda Loring who blasted her freeze deep on him and he survived to tell the tale, or at least that is what he had the boys believe. Make of this what you will though, Peter never after that Melinda Loring mistake, had a high school girlfriend from North Adamsville High, who, well, liked to “do the do” as they called it back then, that last part not always correct since everybody, girls and boys alike, were lying like crazy about whether they were “doing the do” or not, including Markin.

But beyond, well beyond, that schoolboy silliness Markin was made of sterner stuff (although Sam would not have bothered to use such a positive attribute about Markin back then) was super-political, super into art and into what he called culture, you know going to poetry readings at coffeehouses, going over Cambridge to watch foreign films with subtitles and themes at the Brattle Theater that he would try to talk about and even Jimmy would turn his head when he went on and on about French films, especially those films by Jean Renoir, and super into music, fortunately he was not crazy for classical music (unlike some nerds in school then who were in the band) but serious about what is now called classic rock and roll and then in turn, the blues, and folk music. (Sam still shuttered at that hillbilly folk music stuff Markin tried to interest him in when he thought about it).

That folk music was how Peter had first met Josh Breslin, still a friend, whom he introduced to Sam at one of their meetings over at the Sunnyvale Grille. Josh told the gathering that Markin had met him after high school, after he had graduated from Hull High (the same town where Johnny Callahan was burning up the Toyota sales records for New England) down at the Surf Ballroom (Sam had his own under twenty-one memories of the place, some good, some bad including one affair that almost wound up in marriage). Apparently Josh and Peter had had their wanting habits on the same girl at one Friday night dance when the great local cover band, the Rockin’ Ramrods held sway there, and had been successively her boyfriend for short periods both to be dumped for some stockbroker from New York. But their friendship remained and they had gone west together, gone on that Jack Kerouac-drenched On The Road for a number of years when they were trying their own version of turning the world upside down on. Josh also dabbled (his word) in the turning upside down politics of the time.

And that was the remarkable thing about Peter, not so much later in cahoots with Josh because half of youth nation, half the generation of ’68 was knee-deep in some movement, but in staid old North Adamsville High days, days when to just be conventionally political, wanting to run for office or something, was kind of strange. See Peter was into the civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and social justice stuff that everybody thought he was crazy to be into, everybody from Ma to Fritz (and a few anonymous midnight phone-callers yelling n----r-lover in the Markin home phone).  He had actually gone into Boston when he was a freshman and joined the picket-line in front of Woolworth’s protesting the fact that they would not let black people eat in their lunchrooms down south (and maybe Markin would say when he mentioned what he was up to they were not that happy to have blacks in their northern lunchrooms either ), had joined a bunch of Quakers and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (a term then in use for airhead blue-haired lady do-gooders with nothing but time on their hands) calling on the government to stop building atomic bombs (not popular in the red scare Cold War we-are-fighting- against- the- Russians-terror North Adamsville, or most other American places either), running over to the art museum to check out the exhibits (including some funny stories about him and Jimmy busting up the place looking at the old Pharaoh times slave building Pyramids stuff uncovered by some Harvard guys way back), and going to coffeehouses in Harvard Square and listening to hokey folk music that was a drag. (Sam’s take on that subject then, and now.) So Peter was a walking contradiction, although that was probably not as strange now as it seemed back then when every new thing was looked at with suspicion, and when kids like Peter were twisted in the wind between being corner boys and trying to figure out what that new wind was that was blowing though the land, when Sam and the other corner boys, except Jimmy and sometimes Jack would try to talk him out of stuff that would only upset everybody in town.

But here is the beauty, beauty for Sam now that he was all ears about what Peter had to say, he had kept at it, had kept the faith, while everybody else from their generation, or almost everybody, who protested war, protested around the social issues, had hung around coffeehouses and who had listened to folk music had long before given it up. Markin had, after his  Army time, spent a lot of time working with GIs around the war issues, protested American foreign policy at the drop of a hat and frequented off-beat coffeehouses set up in the basements of churches in order to hear the dwindling number of folk artists around. He had gotten and kept his “religion,” kept the faith in a sullen world. And like in the old days a new generation (added to that older North Adamsville generation which still, from the class website e-mail traffic he received when classmates found out they were in communication had not gotten that much less hostile to what Peter had to say about this wicked old world, you already know the genesis of that term, right), was ready to curse him out, ready to curse the darkness against his small voice.

One night when Peter and Sam were alone at the Sunnyvale, maybe both had had a few too many high-shelf scotches (able to afford such liquor unlike in the old days when they both in their respective poverties, drank low-shelf Johnny Walker whiskey with a beer chaser when they had the dough, if not some cheapjack wine), Peter told Sam the story of how he had wanted to go to Alabama in high school, go to Selma, but his mother threatened to disown him if he did, threatened to disown him not for his desire to go but because she would not have been able to hold her head up in public if he had, and so although it ate at him not to go, go when his girlfriend, Helen Jackson, who lived in Gloversville, did go, he took a dive (Peter’s words).

Told a redemptive story too about his anti-war fight in the Army when he refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in an Army stockade for a couple of years altogether. (Sam thought that was a high price to pay for redemption but it may have been the scotch at work.) Told a number of stories about working with various veterans’ groups, throwing medals over Supreme Court barricades, chainings to the White House fence, sitting down in hostile honked traffic streets, blocking freeways complete with those same hostile honkings, a million walks for this and that, and some plain old ordinary handing out leaflets, working the polls and button-holing reluctant politicians to vote against the endless war budgets (this last the hardest task, harder than all the jailings, honkings, marches put together and seemingly the most fruitless). Told too stories about the small coffeehouse places seeing retread folkies who had gone on to other things and then in a fit of anguish, or hubris, decided to go back on the trail. Told of many things that night not in a feast of pride but to let Sam know that sometimes it was easier to act than to let that gnawing win the day. Told Sam that he too always had the gnaw, probably always would in this wicked old world. Sam was delighted by the whole talk, even if Peter was on his soapbox. 

That night too Peter mentioned in passing that he contributed to a number of blogs, a couple of political ones, including an anti-war veterans’ group, a couple of old time left-wing cultural sites and a folk music-oriented one. Sam confessed to Peter that although he had heard the word “blog” he did not know what a blog was. Peter told him that one of the virtues of the Internet was that it provided space (cyberspace, a term Sam had heard of and knew what it meant) for the average citizen to speak his or her mind via setting up a website or a blog. Blogs were simply a way to put your opinions and comments out there just like newspaper Op/Ed writers or news reporters and commentators although among professional reporters the average blog and blog writer were seen as too filled with opinions and sometimes rather loose with the facts. Peter said he was perfectly willing to allow the so-called “objective” reporters roam free to state the facts but he would be damned if the blog system was not a great way to get together with others interested in your areas of interest, yeah, stuff that interested you and that other like-minded spirits might respond to. Yeah, that was worth the effort.

The actual process of blog creation (as opposed to the more complex website-creation which still takes a fair amount of expertise to create) had been made fairly simple over time, just follow a few simple prompts and you are in business. Also over time what was possible to do has been updated for ease, for example linking to other platforms to your site and be able to present multi-media works lashing up say your blog with YouTube or downloading photographs to add something to your presentation. Peter one afternoon after Sam had asked about his blog links showed him the most political one that he belonged to, one he had recently begun to share space with Josh Breslin, Frank Jackman and a couple of other guys that he had known since the 1960s on and who were familiar with the various social, political and cultural trends that floated out from that period. 

Sam was amazed at the topics that those guys tackled, stuff that he vaguely remembered hearing about but which kind of passed him by as he delved into the struggle to build his printing shop. He told Peter that he got dizzy looking at the various titles from reviews of old time black and white movies that he remembered watching at the old Strand second-run theater uptown, poetry from the “beat” generation, various political pieces on current stuff like the Middle East, the fight against war, political prisoners most of whom he had never heard of except the ones who had been Black Panthers or guys like that, all kinds of reviews of rock and roll complete with the songs via YouTube, too many reviews of folk music that he never really cared for, books that he knew Peter read like crazy but he could not remember the titles. The guys really had put a lot of stuff together, even stuff from other sites and announcements for every conceivable left-wing oriented event. He decided that he would become a Follower which was nothing sinister like some cult but just that you would receive notice when something was put on the blog.

Peter also encouraged him to write some pieces about what interested him, maybe start out about the old days in North Adamsville since all the guys mined that vein for sketches. That is what Peter liked to call most of the material on site since they were usually too short to be considered short stories but too long to be human interest snapshots. Sam said he would think about the matter, think about it seriously once he read the caption below:                                                                           

“This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of our interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hardworking, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn our attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.”

Sam could relate to that, had something to say about some of those songs. Josh Breslin laughed when he heard that Sam was interested in doing old time rock and roll sketches. He then added, “If we can only get him to move off his butt and come out and do some street politics with us we would be getting somewhere.” Peter just replied, “one step at a time.” Yeah, that’s the ticket. 

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-On Entering North Adamsville High Redux , Circa 1960 –With Chubby Checker’s The Twist In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-On Entering North Adamsville High Redux , Circa 1960 –With Chubby Checker’s The Twist In Mind

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[Funny as larcenous as I was as a kid under the wanting habits guidance of my old friend Frankie Riley and the larcenous planning expertise of Scribe I was always a pretty good student, always liked to read. Except unlike Scribe who wore his knowledge very heavily on his shirtsleeves for the whole fucking wide world to see the son of a bitch I wish he were here right now so I could lambaste him in person I read on the low, on the quiet sneaking to the Thomas Adderley Library branch across town from the Acre so nobody would suspect what I was doing.

Along with that I never had much trouble, again like Scribe and to a certain degree Frankie as well adjusting as we entered each new school on our way to graduation. Always was kind of ho-hum about it unlike in the story below where Frank Jackman who I am sure did not want to see this sketch come to life since he would deny the whole thing on seven sealed bibles who literally sweated his ass off each time he moved up the ladder and not just in high school entry days either. Maybe it was because I had some other burdens I was carrying that seemed heavier, weighed heavier on the grand scale that I was so non-plussed every time a teacher or a corner boy expressed how hard the next step up the food chain was. We had plenty of corner boys pass through who couldn’t handle school, were not students in any sense you could call them students so they just dropped out like my brother Timmy and got lost in the shuffle. I wonder what happened to Richie, Brain, Buzz-saw (you don’t want to know on that one), and Jack Devlin. Yeah, I would like to know. Allan Jackson}             

The Twist (Yo Twist)

Song by Fat Boys, Chubby Checker

1.     Come on baby
Let's do the twist
Come on baby
Let's do the twist
Take me by my little hand
And go like this

Ee-yah twist
Baby, baby twist
Ooh yeah, just like this
Come on little miss and do the twist

My daddy is sleepin'
And mama ain't around
Yeah, daddy just sleepin'
And mama ain't around
We're gonna twisty twisty twisty
Till we tear the house down

Come on and twist
Yeah, baby twist
Oooh yeah, just like this
Come on miss and do the twist
Ee-yah

Yeah, you should see my little sis
You should see my my litlle Sis
She really knows how to rock
She knows how to twist

Come on and twist
Yeah, baby twist
Oooh yeah, just like this
Come on little miss and do the twist

Yeah, rock on now
Yeah, twist on down
Twist
('Round and 'round and 'round)

A few years ago, maybe four or five now, around the time that Frank Jackman (always Frank and not Francis since that was too much like that St Francis who was good to animals and stuff and no self-respecting corner boy wanted that tagged to his name besides the formal name sounded kind of faggy, hey that’s what we called guys before we knew better who were kind of girlish although I used queer more, when the guys talked about names one night, also not Frankie since that name was taken up in his crowd) and Frankie Riley (always Frankie and not Francis for the same reason as Frank but also Frankie because he had always been called Frankie since time immemorial to distinguish him from his father Frank, Sr.) his Jack Slack’s bowling alleys corner boy chieftain all through high school in North Adamsville had been commemorating, maybe better to say comparing notes, on their fiftieth anniversary of entry into that school in the ninth grade. Frank had written a remembrance of the first day of school freshman year. He had written it at the behest of a female fellow classmate, Dora, for a class website where she was the webmaster which she and a few others had established so that those from the Class of 1964 who wished to, those who were able to, could communicate with each other in the new dispensation of cyberspace.

That remembrance, one of a series of sketches that he eventually did, and on recent inquiry from Jimmy Jenkins another classmate and ex-corner boy comrade, Frank has stated that he stood by that “sketch” characterization, centered on the anxieties that he had on that first day about making a brand new impression on the freshman class, about changing his junior high school quasi-“beatnik” style, his two thousand fact barrage that he would lay on anybody who would listen. A style change that lots of guys and gals have gone through when faced with a new situation, although the people he was trying to impress had already been his classmates in that junior high school and were painfully aware of the previous way that he had presented himself, presented himself  under Frankie’s direction, to the world.

When Frankie at the time read what Frank had written, a thing filled with new found sobbing, weeping, and pious innocence he sent him an e-mail which brought Frank up short. Frankie threatened in no uncertain terms to write his own “sketch” refuting all the sobbing, weeping, piously innocent noise that Frank had been trying to bamboozle their fellow classmates with. The key point that Frankie threatened to bring down on a candid world, the candid world in this instance being the very curious Dora for one, and her coterie of friends who had stayed in contact with each other since high school since they all still lived in the area (except in winter, now retired winter, and most headed to Florida, mainly around Naples), to be clear about was the case of Frank Jackman and one Lydia Stevenson. Or rather the case, the love-bug case he had for her. That, and not some mumble-jumble about changing his act which he never really did since you could always depend on Frank going on and on with one of his two thousand arcane facts that he tried to impress every girl he ran across in high school with and to dress like he had just come walking in from post-beat Harvard Square, was the very real point of what was aggravating him on that long ago hot endless first Wednesday after Labor Day morning.

See Frank had gotten absolutely nowhere with Lydia, nowhere beyond the endless talking stage, and thus nowhere, in junior high but he was still carrying the torch come freshman year and fifty years later he still felt that fresh-scented breathe and that subtle perfume, or bath soap, or whatever it was she wore, breezing over him (maybe it was perfume stolen from Ma’s dresser top, he these days liked to think she had made that thief to drive him crazy, crazy with her girlish wiles). Or maybe her curse, a North Adamsville curse that he claimed at one point that Lydia cast on him since he never had then a girlfriend from school, or from North Adamsville for that matter, always from some other town. Not in high school anyway.

The currency of that fresh breeze that occupied his mind may have been pushed forward by his getting back in touch with classmates. And as fate would have it, the thrice-married Frank, never one to say never to love had as a result of getting back in touch with classmates on the website had a short fruitless affair with another classmate, Laura, who had been a close friend of Lydia’s in junior high school and told him a couple of things about what Lydia had thought about Frank. Laura confirmed that Lydia had expected Frank to ask her out in junior high school but also after the affair had run its course unconsciously confirmed by that failed affair that Lydia’s curse was still at work fifty years later. And it is that missed opportunity to fall under the sway of that Lydia scent that will drive this short sketch, hell, forget Frank and his sketch business, this short piece.                  

This is the way Frank described to me what happened after Frankie sent that fatal e-mail that might expose his long hidden thoughts: 

“Frankie, for once listened patiently as I finished my story, the one that he say was filled to the brim with sobbing, weeping, whining bull about starting anew and being anxious about what would happen, and which he threatened to go viral on, immediately after I was finished let out with a “Who are you kidding Jackman that is not the way you told me the story back then.” Then he went on. “I remember very well what you were nervous about. What that cold night sweats, that all-night toss and turn teen angst, boy version, had been about and it wasn’t first day of school jitters. It was nothing but thinking about her. That certain "she" that you had kind of sneaked around mentioning as you had been talking, talking your his head off about filling out forms, getting books, and other weird noises, just to keep the jitters down. The way you told it then, and I think you called me up right after school was out to discuss the matter, was that while on those pre-school steps you had just seen her, seen her with the other North Adamsville junior high girls on the other side of the steps, and got all panicky, got kind of red-faced about it, and so you are going to have to say a little something about that. And if you don’t I will.” 

Frankie continued along this line, stuff which seemed to be true but which made me wonder how a guy who when we met at the Sunnyville Grille over in Boston for a few drinks to discuss this and that, not the Lydia thing but our corner boy exploits, couldn’t remember where he left his car keys and we had to call AAA to come out and find them on his driver’s side seat. Jesus.  Here’s what he was getting at.

“See, I know the previous school year, late in the eighth grade at North Adamsville Junior High, toward the end of the school year you had started talking to that Lydia Stevenson in art class. Yes, that Lydia who on her mother’s side from was from some branch of the Adams family who had run the jagged old ship-building town there in North Adamsville for eons and who had employed my father and a million other fathers, and I think yours’ too if I am not mistaken, for a while anyway, around there and then just headed south, or to Greece or someplace like that, for the cheaper labor I heard later. She was one of the granddaughters or some such relation I never did get it all down. And that part was not all that important anyway because what mattered, what mattered to you, was that faint scent, that just barely perceivable scent, some nectar scent, that came from Lydia when you sat next to her in art class and you two talked, talked your heads off.

“But you never did anything about it, not then anyway although you said when we talked later about it you had this feeling, maybe just a feeling because you wanted things to be that way but a feeling anyway, that she had expected you to ask her out. Asking out for junior high school students then, and for freshmen in high school too because we didn’t have licenses to drive cars, being the obligatory "first date" at Jimmy Jack's Shack (no, not the one off Adamsville Boulevard, that's for the tourists and old people, the one on Hancock up toward the Square is the one I am talking about). You said you were just too shy and uncertain to do it.

“Why? Well you said it was because you came from the “wrong side of the tracks” in the old town, over by the old abandoned Old Colony tracks and she, well like I said came from a branch of the Adams family that lived over on Elm in one of those Victorian houses that the swells are crazy for now, and I guess were back then too. That is when you figured that if you studied up on a bunch of stuff, stuff that you liked to study anyway, then come freshman year you just might be able to get up the nerve to ask her to go over to Jimmy Jack's for something to eat and to listen to the jukebox after school some day like every other Tom, Dick and Harry did then.

“.... So don’t tell me suddenly, a bell rang, a real bell, students, like lemmings to the sea, were on the move, especially those junior high kids that you had nodded to before as you took those steps, two at a time. And don’t tell me it was too late then to worry about style, or anything else. Or make your place in the sun as you went along, on the fly. No, it was about who kind of brushed against you as you rushed up the stairs and who gave you one of her biggest faintly-scented smiles as you both raced up those funky granite steps. Yeah, a place in the sun, sure.”

And so there you had Frank satisfying Frankie enough with his agreement to make public on the class website the gist of his stubborn e-mail. Funny though as much time as they spent talking about it back in the day and then when they resurrected it a few years ago Frank never did get to first base Lydia in high school, although she sent him a few more of those big faintly-scented smiles which Frank didn’t figure out until too late. Within a couple of weeks of the school opening Lydia was seen hand in hand with Paul Jones, a sophomore then, the guy who would lead North Adamsville to two consecutive division football championships and who stayed hand in hand with him until she graduated. Frank had had a few girlfriends in high school, Harvard Square refugees like himself who went crazy for his two thousand facts but they were not from the town. The few times Frank did try to get dates in school or in town, get to first base, he was shot down for all kinds of reasons, a couple of times because he did not have a car and the girls had not the slightest interest in walking around on a date, a couple of times he was just flat stood up when the girls he was to date took the next best thing instead. Yeah, the Lydia hex sure did him in. And after that Laura disaster don’t say he wasn’t jinxed, just don’t say it around him.       

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Out In Pooh’s Corner-With The Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Out In Pooh’s Corner-With The Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit In Mind

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[It is funny, and not in a gleeful way, how those wanting habits I have been thinking about lately which drove a lot of my youthful activity down at the base of society down among the poorest of the poor worked itself. Like I said not in a gleeful. I suppose everybody, at least in America from top to bottom has wanting habits of some sort but I would argue if only from anecdotal evidence that those striving are more intense down below if only because the success rate is very low when the deal goes down. Take my own family, my two brothers, one older the other younger making me the middle child which has some sociological tendencies of its own. We were always short of something, some money thing, for clothes, food, and rent but mainly extras, simple extras like a cheapjack transistor radio from now mostly gone under Radio Shack which even kids in the projects of North Adamsville where I and my brothers came of age had to listen to their rock and roll in the privacy of their rooms, shared or single. We never had enough extra money to get one.      

That situation affected my two brothers in slightly different but in the end fatal. My older brother Teddy started out very young stealing money, coins mainly at the beginning, from our mother’s pocketbook. Many a time he, and a few times we three, in my mother’s rage at Teddy were thrown out of the house for his transgressions. And that was when we were not even teenagers, a situation today which would some child social service agency on her case. Now this petty larceny if you wanted to get technical about the matter would not universally lead to a life of crime and other factors came into as well but Teddy became a career armed robber (first unarmed but then he “graduated”). He never said this to me personally but I assume he was working on premise that his targets were where the money was an idea made famous by legendary bank robber Willie Sutton. Teddy did half his life in some jail, county or state, before at some point later in life he just couldn’t keep up with the life, couldn’t do the time anymore from what he told me.  

My younger brother Kevin went a different way which did not become noticeable until his early twenties. He had started into taking drugs, early on before they were commonly used by members of generation, the generation of ’68 generically. Somehow, they had made him feel better about himself from what he told me before he lost it. Did some dealing, did some exotic synthetic drugs the net effect was that his personality changed dramatically, and he started on a long series of stays in mental institutions for serious disorder, disorders triggering anti-social criminal acts which led him eventually to state hospital for the criminally insane where he died. No pretty.

Where does all that leave me. Well I was as capable of robbing my mother’s pocketbook as Teddy was and later took a ton of drugs but the real tipping point was in high school when my clean cut, but larcenous corner boys led by Frankie Riley under plans by Scribe would burgle town rich houses. So, my own experience was a very close thing as well. But these days I am haunted by something else now that my two brothers are gone. One out of three is very poor odds for those coming out of the bottom of society and in my case a very close thing. That my friends are the pathologies of growing up desperately poor in America back in the day, now too. Allan Jackson]       

******************

A while back, maybe three years ago now, I was sitting in the Sunnyvale Grille in Boston where I was visiting my old time merry prankster friend, Frank Jackman, where we got into a hot and heavy discussion about the kind of songs that turned us on back in the 1960s when we had come of musical age. We had young kids’ stuff grown up on the classic Elvis-Jerry Lee-Chuck-Bo-Roy stuff but that was mainly copped from our older brothers and sisters, the ‘60s sounds and their attendant political connections were our real age time. I had met Jackman out in California after I had hitched out there in the mid-1960s just after I had graduated from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine. He was going under the moniker Flash Dash then , don’t laugh, for a while I was the Prince of Love, those monikers used in abundance as a way to break from our traditional-bound pasts, to break from the old neighborhood corner boy stuff, on the a way to make our own newer world. That night Frank had a couple of his recently reunited North Adamsville High old corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins and Sam Lowell, and a guy he met after he had just graduated from high school, Josh Breslin, who was from Hull about twenty miles south of North Adamsville all of whom I had previously met one time or another out in the “Garden of Eden,” which is what we called our search back then and which came up California for all of us then whatever happened later.

Now the reason that I have mentioned who was in attendance at that “meeting” (really an occasion to have a few drinks without the bother of womenfolk around for a short time and without the lately more pressing need not to drink and drive impaired since Pete was in town for a conference and had been staying at the Westin a short walk down the street) is that each and every participant was a certified member of the generation of ’68. That generation of ’68 designation meaning that all were, one way or another, veterans of the political wars back then when we tried to “turn the world upside down” and got kicked in the ass for our efforts and, more importantly here, veterans of the “hippie” drug/drop-out/ communal experiences that a good portion of our generation imbibed in, if only for a minute. And thus all were something like “experts” on the question that was pressing on Frank’s mind. That question centered on what music “turned” each guy there on. Not in the overtly sexual way in which the question asked might be taken today but while they were being “turned on.” Turned on being a euphemism plain and simple for getting “high,” “stoned,” “ripped” or whatever term was used in the locale that you frequented, for doing your drug of choice.              

See Jackman, full name Francis Xavier Jackman but nobody in his old high school corner boys crowd called him that, nor did I or do I here, had this idea that rather than the common wisdom Beatles, Stones, Doors, Motown influence that when the deal went down the Jefferson Airplane was the group that provided the best music to get “turned on” by. By the way since she will enter this story at some point the only one that I can think of who called Frank that three name combo was a girl, what we call a young woman now, whom we met, or rather he met, and then I met and took away from him, Cathy Callahan, out in La Jolla in California, who went under the moniker Butterfly Swirl back in the 1960s. She thought, clueless California sunshine ex-surfer guy girl, the three name combo was “cute” like Frank was some Brahmin scion rather than from his real working-class neighborhood roots. But that was a different story because as he said, she “curled his toes,” curled mine too, so she could call him (or me) any damn name she wanted.  

Naturally there was some disagreement over that premise but let me tell you what the mad monk Jackman was up to. See, as a free-lance journalist of sorts, he had shortly before our recent meeting taken on an assignment from a generation of ’68-type magazine, Mellow Times. A ’68-type magazine meaning that it was filled with full-blown nostalgia stuff: New Mexico communes where kids strictly from suburban no heartache homes tried to eke, the only word possible for such exertions, an existence out of some hard clay farming; outlaw bikers who guys like gonzo writers like Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe made infamous, or rather more infamous; acid head freak-outs in the Fillmores of the East and West sipping weird drug concoctions out of Dixie cups and getting twisted to the high decibel music up front; merry pranksters riding shotgun to the new dispensation taking more than a few over the high side with them; the Haight-Ashbury scene from the first “all men are brothers” days of sharing on the soup kitchen lines to the gun, drug shoot-up bitter end; Golden Gate Park days when that park had more kites, more bubbles, more wha-wha than any other park in the world; psychedelics from drugs to art; retro- art deco styles like the lost children were channeling back to the “lost generation” Jazz Age jail-breakers as kindred; and, feed the people kitchens in the good days and bad, Sally or Fugs, that kind of thing from that period.
Jackman, well known to a select audience of baby-boomers for his previous work in writing about the merry prankster hitchhike road, what he had called in one series that I had read-The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- in which he had used me as a stick drug-addled figure from Podunk who didn’t know how to tie his own shoes until he came under the god-like Jackman spell, was given free rein to investigate that question under the descriptive by-line- Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night -that was to head the series of articles the magazine proposed that he work on. Here is Jackman’s proposed introduction to the series that he gave us copies of that night: 

“This is another tongue-in-cheek commentary, the back story if you like, in the occasional entries under this headline going back to the primordial youth time of the 1960s with its bags full of classic (now classic) rock songs for the ages. Now many music and social critics have done yeomen’s service giving us the meaning of various folk songs, folk protest songs in particular, from around this period. You know they have essentially beaten us over the head with stuff like the meaning of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind as a clarion call for now aging baby-boomers back then to rise up and smite the dragon, and a warning to those in charge (not heeded) that a new world was a-bornin’, or trying to be. Or better his The Times They Are A-Changin’ with its plaintive plea for those in charge to get hip, or stand aside.  (They did neither.) And we have been fighting about a forty year rearguard action to this very day trying to live down those experiences, and trying to get new generations to blow their own wind, change their own times, and sing their own plainsong in a similar way.”

And so we, his Jack Slack’s bowling alleys hometown corner boys, Josh, and I were the “masses” for the purpose of Frank’s work. Free labor if you like for his little nostalgia music piece. And here is his rationale, or at least part of it that he sent in an e-mail trying to drag me from Portland down to Boston to beat the thing over the head with him:

“…Like I said the critics have had a field day (and long and prosperous academic and journalistic careers as well) with that kind of stuff, fluff stuff really. The hard stuff, the really hard stuff that fell below their collective radars, was the non-folk, non-protest, non-deep meaning (so they thought) stuff, the daily fare of popular radio back in the day. A song like Out At Pooh’s Corner. A song that had every red-blooded American teen-age experimenter (and who knows maybe world teen) wondering their own wondering about the fate of the song’s narrator. About what happened that night (and the next morning) that caused him to pose the comment in that particular way. Yes, that is the hard stuff of social commentary, the stuff of popular dreams, and the stuff that is being tackled head on in this series”

And so after succumbing to his blarney we sat at that table in the bar of the Sunnyvale Grille sipping high-shelf scotch and trying to work through this knotty problem that Frank had put before us. This problem of what moved us though the squeeze that we put our brains through back then. Frank brought something up that kind of set the tone for the evening. He mentioned that coming out of North Adamsville in 1964 he, Jimmy, and Sam, if they had been prophetic, could not have possibly foreseen that they would, like about half of their generation, or so it seemed, have imbibed deeply of the counter-culture, its communal values, its new-found habits, its ethos, its drug-centeredness, or its music. He explained (and Jimmy and Sam chimed in with comments as he proceeded) that in strait-laced, mostly Irish working- class neighborhoods like where they grew up in North Adamsville anything other than working hard to get ahead, “getting ahead” being getting some kind of white-collar city civil service job and finally breaking the string of factory worker generations, since they were in some cases the first generation to finish high school and have enough knowledge to take the exam to white-collar-dom, getting married, maybe to your high school sweetheart or some such arrangement, and eventually buying a slightly bigger house than the cramped quarters provided by the house you grew up in and have children, slightly fewer children than in the house you grew up in, was considered scandalous, weird, or evil.

But as Jimmy said after Frank finished up it wasn’t so much the neighborhood ethos as the ethos of the corner boy life, the life in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys up on Thornton Street. That life included plenty of under-age drinking, plenty of talk, mostly talk, of sex with pretty girls  (certainly more talk than any activity that actually happened-except in bravado Monday morning before school banter with every guy lying, or half-lying about what was done, or not done,  after the weekend’s exertions), and a view of the world perhaps slightly less rigid than the parents but still scornful of people of the opposite sex living together unmarried (and in high Catholic North Adamsville even divorced people were subject to comment, and scorn), scornful of guys who didn’t want to get married, sometime, and of the opinion that those who did dope, that dope being heroin, opium, or morphine which they knew about and not so much marijuana which just seemed exotic, were fiends, evil or beatniks. Not the profile of those who would later in the decade grow their hair longer that any mother’s most outlandish nightmare dream, wear headbands to keep that hair back, grow luxurious and unkempt beards, live in communes with both sexes mixing and matching, smoke more marijuana, snort more coke, and down more bennies, acid, and peyote buttons, and play more ripping music than the teen angel, earth angel, Johnny angel music heard down at Jack Slack’s jukebox. Everybody laughed after that spiel from Jimmy.

Those old time references got me to thinking about the days when we had headed west in the mid-1960s days, Frank with various combination of corner boys including Sam, Josh and Jimmy, me, the first time solo and thereafter with Frank and others, the days when we were in search of Pooh’s Corner. Thinking along the lines of about Frank’s “theory” of the great turn on song for our generation, thinking about the search for the “garden,” the “Garden of Eden,” that we had picked up from a line in a Woody Guthrie song, Do Re Mi (meaning if you did not have it, dough, kale, cash, forget California Edens although at our coming of California age money was not a big deal, nobody had any and so we didn’t worry about it, unlike now). Of course everybody then knew the reference from the Jefferson Airplane’s song which contained those Pooh Corner references. I remember I first heard the song one night at the Fillmore, the rat’s end concert hall where everybody who had any pretensions to the new acid-etched music either played or wanted to play, and that was the Mecca for every person who wanted to think about dropping out of the rat race and try to get their heads around a different idea.

We had in any case all headed west maybe a couple of years after the big summer of love 1967 caught our attention. Frank  had already been out there for a few months having hitchhiked from Boston in the early spring, had wound up in La Jolla down by the surfer Valhalla and had run into Captain Crunch and his merry band, a band of brothers and sisters who had been influenced by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to drop out, drop acid and “see the world” and their legendary former yellow brick road school bus, Further In, earlier in the decade and whose adventures had been the subject of a Tom Wolfe book. That Kesey-led experience, especially noticeable on the California coastal roads was multiplied a thousand fold once the jail-break hit full speed and Captain Crunch and his companion, Mustang Sally, had followed suit. It was never clear whether the Captain actually knew Kesey but he sure as hell was knee deep in the drug trade since the reason that he and the bus load had been in La Jolla was that he and his crew were “house-sitting” a safe house used by one of the southern drug cartels while the Captain was getting ready to head north to San Francisco and find out what was happening with the scene there. Frank had “signed on” the bus (in those days a common expression was “you are on the bus, or you are off the bus,’ and you were better off on the bus) since he had wanted to head to Frisco town from Boston anyway but the vagaries of the hitchhike road, a couple of long haul truck driver pick up the first which left him in Dallas and the second San Diego had brought him farther south. (In those days as I well knew you took whatever long haul ride you could get as long as they were heading west and got you some place on the California coast. I remember telling Frank, and he agreed that, I had never realized just how long a state it was, had been  clueless, until I had my first San Diego ride when I was looking to get to Big Sur several hundred miles up the coast which took me a couple of days of rides to get to.) 

This is the time when Frank met Cathy Callahan, Butterfly Swirl, from Carlsbad up the road a few miles from La Jolla and who was then “slumming” in La Jolla after breaking up with her perfect wave surfer boyfriend and looking for, well, I don’t know what she was looking for in the end and neither did Frank, maybe just kicks, momentary kicks to see what she might be missing because after she got through with us she went back to that perfect wave surfer boyfriend. Go figure. But then people like Butterfly Swirl, ex-surfer boy girls, working-class guys like me from Podunk, Maine, ex-soldiers unable or unwilling to adjust to the “real world” after Vietnam, hairy-assed bikers who had taken some dope and mellowed out on their rage trip, college professors who saw what they were teaching as a joke , governmental bureaucrats who knew what they were doing was a joke, or worse, con men getting all worked up seeing all the naïve kids from nowhere who wanted to be hip and were easy marks for bad dope and bad karma , corner boys trying to break out of their corners looking for easy girls, the derelict doing what the derelict always do except not being castigated for it by those seeking the newer world, hot-rod junkies tired of their midnight runs and death, and the like were all taking that jail-break minute to see if they fit into the new dispensation so maybe it was just that. Most of them went back to whatever they were doing previously once the ebb began to catch up with us, once the bad guys put on a full-court press.

So Frank and Butterfly Swirl met, met at a party Captain Crunch was throwing at that safe house, a mansion from what Frank had told me.  This Butterfly Swirl was all legs, thin, blonde a then typical California surfer girl waiting on dry land for her surfer guy to get that  perfect wave and then go ball the night away before he/they got up the next day to look, he, for the next perfect wave. Definitely in the normal course of events not a Frank-type of young woman, his running to sad- sack Harvard Square intellectual types who broke your heart a different way when they were done with you, or mine either, French-Canadian or Irish girls, all virginal and pious for public consumption any way, also heart-breakers, but chalk it up to the times. So they met, got turned on to some great grass (marijuana, for the squares) and hit one of the upstairs bedrooms where she “curled his toes.”  And they were an item as the Captain and crew ambled north for the next few months until they hit a park on Russian Hill where they parked the bus for a few weeks.

And that is where I had met Frank, and eventually Butterfly Swirl. I had stopped off at the park because somebody I met, a guy who had been on the Haight-Ashbury scene for a while, on Mission Street said that I could score dope, some food, and a place to sleep if I asked around up on the hill where the scene was not as frantic as around downtown and in Golden Gate Park. There was the bus, painted in the obligatory twenty-seven day-glo colors, just sitting there when I walked up and asked about a place to sleep. Frank, looking like some Old Testament prophet long unkempt hair and scraggly beard, army jacket against the chilled Bay winds, bell-bottomed trousers as was the unisex fashion then, beat-up moccasins, and looking like he had hit the magic bong pipe a few times too many, said “you can get on the bus, if you want.” But mainly I remembered those slightly blood-shot fierce blue eyes that spoke of seeing hard times in his life and spoke as well that maybe seeking that newer world he was seeking would work out after all, he no longer has that fierce look that “spoke” to me that first time. That introduction started our now lifetime off and on comradely relationship. I think for both of us the New England connection is what drew us together although he was a few years older than me, had seen and done things that I was just getting a handle on. And strangely I think that being older helped when I “stole” young Butterfly Swirl away from him one night at the Fillmore where the Airplane were playing their high acid rock he was mad, mad as hell, when he did find out about us but he did get over it (and I, in my turn, got over it when she about a year later she went back to Carlsbad and her surfer boy).

The “strange” part mentioned above came about because Butterfly Swirl and Frank had been “married,” at the time, no, not in the old-fashioned bourgeois sense but having been on the bus together for a while one night Captain Crunch in his capacity as the head of the band of sisters and brothers “officiated” at a mock wedding held under his authority as “captain” of the adventure ship. While this “marriage” ceremony carried no legal weight it did carry weight on the bus for it meant that the pair were to be left alone in the various couplings and un-couplings that drove the sex escapades of all bus dwellers. Moreover Captain Crunch, a rather strange but upfront guy who was all for couplings and un-couplings at will, oh yeah, except when it came to his own barnyard and he would rant and rave at Mustang Sally, his longtime companion who as a free spirit in her own right made a specialty of picking up young guys who played in one of the burgeoning rock bands of the times, “curled their toes” and made connections to get them gigs too and stuff like that. The Captain was fit to be tied when Sally got her young guy wanting habits on. But what could he do, if he wanted her on the bus.

In any case the Captain who was not only mysteriously connected with the drug world, but knew the mad max daddy of acid, Owsley, himself as well as the hermanos down south who trusted him as much as they could trust any gringo, but also had connections with the rising number of rock promoters on the West Coast decided to spring for a “honeymoon” for Frank (who was still going by the moniker Flash Dash at the time) and the Swirl. The honeymoon was to be a party before and during the Airplane’s next gig in San Francisco where he had copped twenty tickets from the promoter for some service rendered, maybe a brick of grass who knows. But here is where things got freaky, this was also to be something of an old time Ken Kesey “electric kool-aid acid test,” particularly for Swirl who never had done LSD before, had never done acid, and was very curious.
So the night of the concert a couple of hours before it was to start Captain gathered all around the bus then headquartered in Pacifica about twenty miles south of the city at another cartel safe house and offered whoever wanted to indulge some blotter. Flash and Swirl led things off, she trembling a little in fear, and excitement.  Then one and all, including me, took off in the bus to amble the Airplane show. An amble which included picking up about six people on the Pacific Coast Highway road up, offering them blotter as well, and on the in-bus jerry-rigged sound the complete (then) Stones’ playlist which had people, including me, dancing in the back of the bus.

That was a very strange night as well because that was the night, the “honeymoon” night when Swirl freaked out on the acid trip. Good freaking out after she got over the initial fear that everybody has about losing control and about the very definite change in physical perspective that are bound to throw you off if you are not used to that pull at the back of your head, or you think is pulling at the back of your head, after seeing gorgeous colors which she described in great detail, feeling all kinds strange outer body feelings as well. See she and I got together as I helped bring her down after Dash Flash took off with some woman. Well just some woman at the time, although he eventually married her (and divorced her), Joyell, Joyell of the brown-eyed world. He had met Joyell initially in Boston but he had been seeing her quite a bit since she had come to Frisco, come to get her Master’s degree at Berkeley, and whom he had run into at the concert. Yeah the times were like that, a guy or gal could be “married,” or married and then have a million affairs, although usually not on their “honeymoon” but that was Frank, Frank to a tee, and nobody thought anything of it, usually, or if they did they kept it to themselves. We tried about six million ways to try to deal with breaking from our narrow pasts and I think we saw what would be scandalous behavior back in the neighborhoods as a way to do so, although in the end all Frank (and I) got was about three divorces, a bunch of love affairs and many, too many, flings. Here’s the laugher though the thing that brought Swirl back to earth that night was her “grooving” (yeah, we had our own vocabulary as well and you can check Wikipedia for most of the meanings) on the Airplane’s music, on Grace Slick’s going crazy on White Rabbit and assorted other great music from After Bathing At Baxter’s. (Swirl said she felt like Alice-In-Wonderland that night.) So in a way I have to agree with Frank about the effect that band had on us but I will be damned if fifty years later I am going to side with him after he left his “bride” standing at the altar. Even if I was the guy who caught her fall. Yeah such was life out in Pooh’s Corner, and I wish it were still going on, wish it a lot.                                                               

Who Is That Dancing With Rita Hayworth?-Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly’s Cover Girl (1944)-A Film Review

Who Is That Dancing With Rita Hayworth?-Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly’s Cover Girl (1944)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

Cover Girl, starring Rita Hayworth. Gene Kelly, Phil Silvers, 1944     

Turnabout is fair play or at least that is what we learned when we were kids and maybe there is something to the matter. The turnabout here is who is watching who in the film under review the 1944 musical Cover Girl. That watching part was predicated by a remark my longtime friend, companion and fellow writer here Sam Lowell mentioned in a review he did of an earlier musical featuring the dancing pair of Fred Astaire and the female dancer here the vivacious Rita Hayworth. Yes that Rita Hayworth who half the guys, the G.I.s in the muds of World War II Europe or on forsaken Pacific atolls has photos of, pin-ups in the lingo of the times, hanging somewhere to remind them of well, let’s just say reminded them of home. Sam had made a big deal of having previously gushed over Fred’s exquisite and strong-legged dancing in previous efforts with former partner Ginger Rogers where he was the focal point of whatever creation was being performed. Not so when Rita came on board since Sam was at one with those guys in the muds and on those damn forsaken atolls and according to my father who was there they really had pin-up dreams, well let’s just leave it at that.     

Needless to say, that there, as here, although I am bound by my contract to say a few words about the plot of the film, what Sam always called the skinny and that seems right in dealing with musicals the mere presence of Rita as the much sought-after Cover Girl of every dream made the dancing of the usually physically very present Gene Kelly from nowhere. That, my friends, as much as a feminist as I like to think about myself as being in these troubled times is my opinion as well. On this showing. Since Sam and I watched this one together (he would have pouted for about three weeks if he didn’t get his Rita fix) I remarked to him how much Rita’s mere presence in a scene lighted the whole thing up. And this a film over seventy years old.      

Here is that skinny I was mentioning above that I am duty-bound to run through although I have already given anybody, male or female, the reason to see the film if that is what is holding anybody back. Rita and Gene, Rusty and Danny, are slowly working their way up the dancing food chain via Danny’s Brooklyn nightclub (that location unlike today when everything is coming up roses in that borough, a snub, a reference to the backwaters of New York City, nowhere in other words) but mainly they are in love and can go either way on the climb up the ladder business. As long as they have each other. That is until a Mayfair swell, a Manhattan Mayfair swell was slumming one night at Danny’s after seeing Rita apply for the cover girl cover of the title. Then the chase is on. It seems that Mayfair swell was all set to marry Rusty’s grandmother, also a dancer back in her day, who looked amazing like Rusty how did they do that, and thus showing some DNA connection to granddaughter, but she a free-spirit and the bane of Mayfair swell’s mother flew the coop, left him at the alter. A sad but hardly unique tale.

Mayfair swell is not just any bourgeois playboy turning gray but the publisher of Cover Girl magazine which every good-looking young woman who had any ambitions that way would die to be on. Naturally, despite six million false denials, Rusty wanted in. Got in and got on the first rung of the ladder to high society, New York style. Sans Danny, or so it seemed. Mayfair swell even set Rusty up with an up and coming Broadway producer in the days when Broadway was the be all and end all of real acting, of the legitimate theater as they used to tout the tag. Rusty bought into the whole plan, including marriage to said producer. You know where all this substitution is heading so you know that in the end she jilts the guy just like granny did in her time and goes running back to blues struck Danny. I will never ever not say when reviewing a musical that the plotline is nada, not a thing and the thing is the dance and the lyrics to the music. Except here it is really Rita going through her paces. Sorry Gene you will get your chance in An American In Paris so don’t fret.             

In The Matter Of Robert Mitchum-Redux-Janet Leigh and Robert Mitchum’s “Holiday Affair” (1949)-A Film Review

In The Matter Of Robert Mitchum-Redux-Janet Leigh and Robert Mitchum’s “Holiday Affair” (1949)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

Holiday Affair, starring Janet Leigh, Robert Mitchum, Wendell Corey, 1949   

In 2017 Sam Lowell a fellow writer in this space and who before his retirement from the day to day operations of the film review department had been the chief film reviewer here (and at Progressive Nation and American Film Gazetteer respectively before that) literally went crazy commemorating the centennial of the birth of the well-known 20^th century actor Robert Mitchum. Sam’s take on Mitchum centered on his durability as an actor having been featured in over one hundred films in his long and honorable career and in his best roles his durability in seeking a little rough justice in this wicked old world (Sam’s term) with a build built for heavy lifting, for taking a punch or seven or a couple of slugs if it came to that. What in those days, maybe was known too although I haven’t seen the term used much recently as called “beefcake” complete with maybe not film relevant bare chested shots of his barren chested physique to set the female audience’s hearts a-flutter (mine too when Sam and I watched a few films in 2017 as part of the retrospective Sam did on Mitchum. He most famously and creditably showed that durability in films like the classic Out Of The Past with Jane Greer  where he got twisted in a knot trying to deal with a wanton gun-simple femme and yet died with a smile on his face when things went south on him.

Naturally in a career and at a time when studio contracts were the norm hunk, yes, hunk Robert did a number of films which did not display that durability and that chest and the film under review Holiday Affair is one of them. In this one Robert playing a guy named Steve is kind of a drifter after World War II like a lot of guys then and now who had trouble settling down to the nine to five life after years of combat. Moreover he had a dream of building boats out in his native California. Unfortunately that dream career was on hold since he was slumming along as a toy department salesman in a large New York City department store at Christmas time (hence the “holiday” part of the title the “affair” part is not what you think but a come on for the unwary) when the action begins. From there the thing turns into another variation of the classic tried and true boy meets girl formula that has been a hallmark of half the films ever produced in Hollywood land.        

Enter Jane, played by Janet Leigh a comparison shopper for a rival department store who is under orders to buy a train set in said toy department but who is rather ham-fisted about the whole thing so Steve know what she is up to, especially when next day she shows up to return the item (after emotionally tearing up her young son Timmy who thought that was a present for him but which working mother war widow could not afford). He should have reported her to his floorwalker but after she gave him a sob story about being the sole support of young son Timmy he fell on his sword and did the honorable thing and gave her a refund. Which cost his job.

That could have been the end of the story and nobody would have cried but naturally they meet again and Steve starts putting the classic moves (in those cinematic days “classic moves” play) and the full press. Problem, Carl problem, played by Wendell Corey a staid if stand-up lawyer who can offer Jane stability and upward mobility if not reciprocal love on her part since she is still in a fog over the loss of her late husband. The threesome (not ménage) play out their respective roles with Carl finally seeing the writing on the wall that she only has eyes for Steve (without inspecting the beefcake since there is not one such scene in this one). After some indecision and a serious egging on by Timmy who is indifferent to Carl but who goes for Steve in a big way especially after he bought him that coveted train set Jane chases him down on a train heading west to California where he will finally pursue that boat-building dream. You know thought Sam is right Robert was built for heavy-lifting and an occasional punch or slug this gooey good guy stuff is not what made his career. Them is the facts, Jack.             

In The Golden Age Of The Musical-Miss Judy Garland And Mickey Rooney’s “Babes On Broadway” (1941)- A Film Review

In The Golden Age Of The Musical-Miss Judy Garland And Mickey Rooney’s “Babes On Broadway” (1941)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Zack James

Babes On Broadway, starring Miss Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, 1941

I don’t want to get into how I wound up doing this review since I am neither a fan of Broadway musicals nor much into older black and white movies but I do feel the need to mention that I mentioned to Greg Green, the current site manager, that somebody should do a review of a Miss Judy Garland film in light of what Allan Jackson has recently said about one of the reasons that he went to San Francisco among other places out West after he was disposed of in an internal fight at this publication in 2017. That reason Allan had wound up in that town was to borrow, if possible, since he still had pressing alimony and college tuition payments due some money from Madame La Rue or Miss Judy Garland two people he had helped in the pass to tide him over until better times.

That Miss Judy Garland part was not the real song and dance Judy Garland but a drag queen, a gay guy, Timmy Riley whom he had known in the old growing up days in the Acre section of North Adamsville where they grew up. Where I grew as well knowing these guys only through my oldest brother, Alex, who was friends with all of them in high school. Timmy too although he had only found out about Timmy being gay and being a drag queen (not necessarily the same thing at all) quite recently since Timmy had flown the old town in the late 1960s a few years after high school when he could no longer suppress his real desires once his parents disowned him and kicked him out of the family house (and went to their respective deaths cursing his unhallowed devil name with specific requests that he not be allowed to attend their funeral Masses or anything else when they passed). On that basic I made my suggestion to in a way honor Timmy and his early travails and to see why he gravitated, as other drag queens have, toward the character of Miss Garland on the runway. I didn’t volunteer for the job but here I am with it nevertheless.

The late 1930s, 1940s really were the golden age of the musical, the song and dance centered genre as witnessed here and as witnessed in the slew of films done by Fred Astaire with a few dance partners. One would be hard-pressed to think of such an array of talent doing song and dance stuff much pass the 1950s with Gene Kelly and his various partners. Now such doings come as a surprise after some smash hit on Broadway begs to be taken to the silver screen. Part of it is that Tin Pan Alley folded long ago as did the treasured art of serious songwriting for popular non-teen  consumption. Names like Cole Porter, the Gershwin Brothers, Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern, of course, Irving Berlin and the like (although this musical production songwriting cohort was anchored by Brother, Can You Spare A Dime writer Yip Harburg who would later take serious heat when the Red Scare scalp-hunters were in vogue looking under every bed for commies).        

This film moreover in the time-honored Hollywood tradition (emulated by others when Hollywood ruled the roost alone) was part of a trilogy dealing with this same subject matter-mainly star-struck kids trying to make it on the Great White Way and never having to return except in triumph to Hoboken, Peoria, Winnemucca, Richmond, Albany and all points east and west. Let’s face it the song and dance part is what 1941 audiences paid good money for not some has-been half-assed script which wouldn’t hold together on its own without the music. So Tommy, Mickey’s role is the ball of fire (literally if on name only) ready to bring Broadway to her knees if can only get a “hook,” something to hang his hat on for an idea. See even though he thought he was a ball of fire there were twelve million others as well and, well, the producers weren’t looking for untried young kids from nowhere.

Lightbulb idea. Perform a show on their own. For a cause, for charity (helping inner city kids get some fresh country air for a few weeks the hook). The thing got off the ground no problem especially when the romantic interest Penny, Miss Garland’s role, comes on board after deep-sixing the big freeze she had for old Tommy at first. Needless to say after the twelve necessary snafus that threatened to cancel the show were cleared the thing worked and all aboard went to real Broadway and the big lights. For today’s audience though the last segment, the last bright idea would not go down well, not at all. Tommy, Penny, and a whole lot of white breads don blackface to perform a minstrel show. WTF. 

WTF as well is why Timmy Riley who I barely remember but who was at our house many times decided that he would hitch his star as a drag queen to that of Miss Garland. She could sing and dance but there was something not there there that I could not quite put my finger on but was scratching my head over when I thought about it later. In any case as Allan Jackson told me Timmy is running the number one drag club in Frisco and turning away tourist business dying to see the show like crazy. And yes Timmy lent Allan the money to keep the wolves from his door just like Allan did when Timmy was on the ropes.