In The Days When Parlor Pink Private Detectives Ruled The Roost- The Film Adaptation Of Crime Novelist Agatha Christie’s “The Pale Horse” (1997)- A Review

In The Days When Parlor Pink Private Detectives Ruled The Roost- The Film Adaptation Of Crime Novelist Agatha Christie’s “The Pale Horse” (1997)- A Review     

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Pale Horse, starring Colin Buchanan, based on the crime novel of the same name by Agatha Christie, 1997  

[In the interest of continuity although this review was written well after a previous one by Sarah Lemoyne reviewing Dick Powell’s Varsity Show I have placed it here today with hers since the pair are still in the throes of their “dispute.” Greg Green, site manager]   

This is no pun I am on my high horse, pale or otherwise, today. No, not about this so-called dispute between my old friend from high school day Seth Garth’s young protégé or whatever else they have decided to call her relationship with him Sarah Lemoyne. Mentor is the word I think they have been using to try to cover up whatever is going on there. When Seth Garth is involved, as in the interest of transparency I will admit was true of me as well when I was younger, when it comes to women younger or older don’t believe a word of “just friends” noise, a word of denial. That is when you double down on a guy like Seth as I have learned from bitter experience in the days when he would think nothing of sweeping up some woman I was interested in with no moral qualms whatsoever. Would laugh at an expression like “moral qualms” a term unknown to hard corner boys from the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville and by extension in the cutthroat world of film reviewers where if you don’t cut somebody’s idea, some witty insight, some weird take on a film then you are not long for the profession. Why else would anybody put up with such doings when you are only giving your subjective opinion for the world to feast on (and now on the downside of the Internet experience have to put up with all kinds of dingbat thoughts from average citizens who know think that based on having seen a film that gives them the right, the god-given right to read some of the stuff to bore the rest of us with their ill-considered “takes” on the spot).    

In any case that is not what I am after today although I continue to steam, mighty puffs of steam, over the now almost libelous comments Ms. Lemoyne has made about who has, or hasn’t, written my reviews for me other than myself once I moved up the film review food chain many years ago. Totally libelous and subject to legal action if I was that kind of guy but I am not a snitch is the false accusation that long ago I used the studio press releases as my reviews with just the top snipped off and mailed in to whatever publication I was writing for at the time. I have just mentioned the cutthroat nature of our profession, so I am inured to such misinformation about my career. I will admit Ms. Lemoyne writes good reviews and had enough sense to go to Seth as a mentor or whatever he is to her at the office or elsewhere, but I can handle these young and hungry types since that is exactly where I started out trashing the legendary film critic Walt Wilson when he was riding high and now nobody remembers his name. What has me burning up today is one Greg Green’s lame attempt to bring back parlor pink private detectives with this review of the film adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s crime novels The Pale Rider. (Pale rider a reference from the Bible meaning death a not unimportant part of the plot line in both the novel and the film which diverts from the novel in several ways but is on point about the death part, plenty of it and who the hell the pale rider is when the deal, the final deal, goes down)

Everybody knows, everybody seriously interested film noir which hinges in many cases on the plots of crime novels, knows that I have written what many, except apparently the totally ignorant Ms. Lemoyne who was not even born when I made my big splash and whom Seth should have wised up, call the definitive book on film noir. I like to think that the reason for that status was my ground-breaking work on the private detective novel on film with its moody, dark scenarios and hang-by the fingernails twists and turns before the crummy felons get some quick and rough justice from our mere mortal no superhero bombast gumshoes.  Moreover that noir explosion and the work of crime novel writers like Jim Jenson, Jack Cullen, and above all Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett had put paid to the old-fashioned amateur detective sitting around waiting for the villain to out of shame or something throw up his or her hands and come clean, come to justice without so much as by your leave. Take a warming cell or the big step-off for their errors in judgment while the crafty amateur goes off to lunch or on holiday after such strenuous work.

As Zack James, my and Seth’s old friend Alex’s youngest brother, has made clear in a number of astounding crime short stories about real private detectives this is no business for amateurs. I heartily agree since that profession is mainly about “repo” work the professional repo men can’t handle, bogus insurance claims, missing husbands or wives, looking for lost animals, dogs and cats mainly, and in the old days, peeping Toms on divorce cases involving sultry adultery (and which saved many a struggle P.I. before no fault divorce and just living together destroyed that part of the market leaving some guys, mostly guys, with nothing but hanging around a beaten down desk taking generous slugs from the low-shelf whiskey bottle in that bottom desk drawer). But on the screen, and in crime novels, those gumshoes, those peepers get the royal treatment, get the royal treatment if they are hard-nosed, tough, wind-mill chasers, skirt-chasers, heavy smokers and drinkers, and not afraid to take a slug or two, a roughing up for the good of the cause. Lenny Larkin was the epitome of the type who was also not afraid to whiplash a guy for looking at him the wrong way. Naturally when you mention Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe chasing a million wind-mills for some old general, or looking for some lady in the lake, or looking for big Moose’s lady friend comes to mind. Sam Spade of course from the Dashiell Hammett stable not only chased skirts, took a few punches for her, but when it was him or her he sent her over, sent her to the big step-off and the fuck with the stuff of dreams trying to own some freaking fake bird.

Which brings us to this little film. What we have here, a guy named Eric somebody does the last name matter since he is not going into the annals of private detection, no way. A damn sculptor, not even an amateur detective but a guy who makes art, modern art and not bad from the quick looks we get when he is around his art gallery, a guy who is trying to keep the noose from around his pretty head when he is accidently involved in a murder when he looked too much like the real felon and the coppers, the public coppers, as they will grabbed him and were ready to call it a day on the case. Sent him off with a smile claiming he wasn’t much of a sculptor anyway. Case closed.

They set this film in 1960s London so you get a modish crowd as background including two young women, one very rich and proper taking a ride down in class to give our Eric a run for his money but whom he spurns and another, Rhonda something does it matter her last name since she will not go down in the annals of private detection, no way. The latter he met at a funeral after her friend had died from what appeared to be some natural cause disease. The connection. The priest who was supposed to bring a message to a third party as the deathbed wish of another women who also appears to have died of natural causes is the guy whom Eric is supposed of have murdered and Rhonda friend’s name was on that message. Rhonda is not buying natural causes and so she is on board as an assistant sleuth. No femme fatale not at all but another freaking amateur detective to gum up the works. 

Later naturally as well there will be a love interest between these two and I can’t blame Eric on that score since she is one of those fetching types, yes, the ones who are not ice cold beautiful with personalities to match but the ones who an hour later you wonder what they are doing and are willing to do it with you. But just as naturally in these parlor pink private detection novels there is a red flag, although I hesitate to use that expression now that it is a catch word among the world’s growing population of conspiracy theorists. A prime suspect for this gumshoe pair centered on an eccentric wealthy art collector who had been chair-ridden since youth with polio. That was a ruse though, a cover for a very successful bank robbery in which the plotline involved taking the robbery proceeds and investing in art. Investing in a time when the art market was exploding, and he actually when “outed” as prime suspect for a while got to keep his ill-gotten gains. No, the real villain, the guy who in his psychopathic mind went over the edge was the attending physician of a number of patients who had been involved in what turned out to be an insurance fraud scheme with a few modern-day witches a la Macbeth and a bookie covering the insurance angle and the good doctor subtlety poisoning them using ordinary consumer goods like toothpaste as the murder weapons. 

Nice play, nice racket which any old Acre corner boy would appreciate but when Rhonda became the subject of the scheme and nobody knew how to cure her you know that mad monk doctor was doomed. It was the toothpaste, stupid. Get the freaking antidote asap. In the end Eric and Rhonda go off in the sunset their amateur private detection minute over. Not a minute too soon either.               

In Defense Of Inter-Species Love-“The Shape Of Water”(2017)-A Film Review

In Defense Of Inter-Species Love-“The Shape Of Water”(2017)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

The Shape of Water, starring Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones, 2017

By rights this review, the review of the 2018 Oscar for best picture The Shape of Water should have been done by Frank Jackman. While we no longer have specific titles to reflect our areas of various expertise Frank has long been the main political and cultural reporter on this publication. You ask how does a film about the improbable love affair between a disabled woman (a mute), a member of the human species, and a good looking if scaly creature from the lagoons down the Amazon warrant a political touch. Well beyond this seemingly blatant attempt to win “flavor of the month” status for yet another oppressed identity group there is the now wide- open question of whether we, meaning the human race should permit not only love between members of different species but permit different species marriage.

However, if Frank had tackled this film from that approach he would have had a hell-broth of anti-gay, anti-same sex marriage crazies to contend with who would have claimed that they had been righteously right to oppose those rights because see where does the madness end and what about the sanctity of marriage when human pair with other sentient being. Jesus it would be a blood-bath and Frank would probably have to leave town or take an alias-maybe go out among the Mormons like Allan Jackson tried to do, allegedly tried to do from what later reports by him informed us happened and see if he could hustle some work with them.

So I drew the assignment as a favor to new site manager Greg Green since he wanted to cash in on a different variation on the “boy meets girl” theme that continues this one hundred plus years later to be a huge hook for Hollywood productions (and a big money maker too). And so you have what started out a mere curiosity by Elisa, played by Sally Hawkins, a “talking challenged” person (hell I don’t know what you call it although I know mute is far too cutting these days reminding me, and maybe one and all, of the timid person who came up to you in the street cards in hand claiming deafness and dumbness asking for cash donations. Asking especially when you had a date you were out to impress with your humanity and gave the person some change. Some of this I learned later when I was down on my luck was a classic scam but some of which is the only way to get cash for hard-pressed people with a disability in those days) when a mysterious creature from out in the Amazon (a creature straight out of the 1950s creep thriller The Creature From The Black Lagoon) who looks like maybe some missing link on the evolutionary trail is secreted in secret CIA-type operation location where she is a cleaning lady to try to figure out how to use the thing in the on-going Cold War then raging between the United States and the former Soviet Union.       

That curiosity about a sentient being also trying to survive in a troubled world will eventually turn into what between humans would be called love, and maybe in inter-species lingo as well. The problem is that the creature is being mistreated, mishandled by the agent in charge to the chagrin of Elisa and others including a scientist who is actually a Soviet spy. Moreover when the agent in charge is ordered to vivisect the amphibian all hell broke loose as Elisha plotted her honey’s great escape. After a few close calls and some fancy foot work Elisa gets her man out of harm’s way for a while. In the inevitable eventual confrontation before she can release her now ailing guy (not enough sea water to keep his strength up) to the open seas where he will be at home again they are both injured by that wicked Cold War agent who in return is wasted by the amphibian. Things work out okay though because this mad monk monster has some curative powers which gets he and his honey well in the open ocean. Things work out well but if and when “inter-species” marriages become the flavor of the month among progressives and others watch out all bets are off. But at least you know where the campaign got its start.      

When You Are Lost On The Great White Way, Broadway … And Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Varsity Show” (1937)-A Film Review

When You Are Lost On The Great White Way, Broadway … And Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Varsity Show” (1937)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

Varsity Show, starring Dick Powell and a bunch of Lane sisters, the inevitable last dance segment directed by max daddy (Seth Garth’s expression) Bugby Berkeley, 1937  

Sometimes you just can’t win when you try to be nice, try to stop a growing dispute with fellow colleagues in what everybody knows is a cutthroat go for the jugular “you are only as good as your last piece” somebody is lurking to take your place profession like film reviews in its tracks. Damn, can’t get any traction out of calling a truce so that you do not have to start off every film review, maybe every piece at this publication with what in normal times would be ho-hum stuff best reserved for titter around the office water cooler. Maybe what the older writers have told me, especially my mentor Seth Garth the film reviewing business does not allow for anything but cutthroat dog eat dog animus. Although that shouldn’t be so apparently to go up, and stay up, on the review food chain you must at least mortally wound whoever your competitor of the day is. For now this brewing confrontation must see the light of day if I am to protect my growing reputation and if I am to keep my hard fought place in the food chain since one Sam Lowell, whom I off-handedly characterized as wizened and in his dotage in my last review of a Dick Powell film from the 1930s Hollywood Hotel  had decided that I need “my comeuppance” over those remarks and what followed.     

Sam bogusly claims that my review of the Powell vehicle was not written, could not be written by me since my only source of information about the period of the 1930s and 1940s musical was my grandmother who was a child held on her mother’s knee back then watching these “feel good” films to get through some tough times. He has suggested that the only way this review could have been does as well as it was is if somebody more familiar with the times wrote the damn thing (his expression). Sam insinuated that the only person he knew who could handle such a review having done a series of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films was his old friend, still friend I assume, Seth Garth my kindly mentor had written the piece and that I put my by-line name on the thing and sent it in to Greg Green as my original work.

Of course Sam is looking for tit for tat since he knows that almost everybody in the office over the age of ten knows that he has a very large reputation going all the way back to the 1960s of having somebody write his reviews for him, usually stringers, usually female stringers to boot or in desperation after some three day drunk or cavorting just used the studio publicity department press releases and signed his name to the document. I hear one time and if I am libeling him so be it he was cavorting with some stringer on a three- day toot or something like that and sent the press release in without clipping the studio name off the top. His old buddy, another one of the half dozen or so guys from high school days who have written for this publication over the years, editor Allan Jackson published it as is Sam’s star was so high back then.  Seth Garth has been kindness itself in helping me up the ladder in the business and had provided suggestions but that is it. I write my own material.  Period.

More grating, more insidious is that Sam has taken up the salacious office water cooler gossip about some relationship beyond the mentoring one between Seth and myself implying that I would get ahead on his coattails if I was nice to Seth. In that Hollywood Hotel review I made it quite clear that Seth and I had merely a professional relationship and that it would be absurd for me to have a personal relationship with a person old enough to be my grandfather. I, moreover, mentioned that my companion has been having fits over these rumors and we have had some shouting matches when she heard the last product out of the rumor mill. Sam, the treacherous little wizened bastard, that wizen thing always gets to him from what Seth has told me has been spreading the word that something is up between us ever since he out of that kindness I mentioned before took me to dinner one night.

Sam’s hook, Sam’s fucking “hook” that is he is forever yakking about as necessary to draw a reader in as if that wasn’t lesson one taught in journalism graduate school is that Seth is just living out the life of Johnny Silver. Johnny, who I don’t know from Adam, is one of their infamous and constantly talked about 1960s high school corner boys who Seth wrote about in a long series of short pieces when he got tangled up with a graduate student from Penn State after they had “met” on Facebook a few years ago. That romance, that intergenerational sex, between the pair who are still together is the hook Sam used to imply that his old corner boy Seth was making the same kind of moves on me. Don’t these guys, maybe gals too but I don’t know about that, ever think anything can be anything other than some sex scheme when guys and gals are out together. Like I said my companion went wild when she heard I had gone to dinner with Seth since he received an e-mail about it from “anonymous.” I know there will be more in this war of words but I will say Seth was right when he told me Sam was not above anything and to be careful. He said he had known the wizened (a joke between Seth and I now when we are referring to Sam in our mentoring sessions) Sam too long to expect any quarter to be given. I have come a long way in a short time, with Seth’s help, so I will not play the wilting violet. To the review.                     

Boy meets girl. Well if you want my opinion that is essentially what this well-worn Hollywood trope is working overtime on when you get to the close of Varsity Club. This a college-based piece of fluff in the days when college entrance was very circumscribed and mainly for the children of the elite, of those who have already made it. Number one in making it was Chuck, Dick Powell’s role, an alumnus of some private small maybe denomination Middle America school like Kenyon or Oberlin Winfield College, who has made it big on Broadway although at the start of the film he is on cheap street after producing a few flops, the kiss of death to backers of such efforts. Meanwhile back at his old alma mater where they are revolting, not revolting against the injustices and inequalities of the Great Depression that my dear grandmother had to survive with lots of trauma, but against an edict by the head of the music/drama department that the annual varsity show should not disturb the dead. Not keep anybody awake. Be pure vanilla meaning no cavorting (which would  by reputations leave both withered Sam and sweetie Seth out), no close boy-girl scenes and above all even in fully-clothed post-Code days no references to sex, or maybe even biology.       

The kids (although most look much too old to have been in college then although today they would not stand out with the demographic mix these days with people going to college for lots of reasons, mostly serious, at older ages to get ahead in the world a bit) don’t know what to do until some bravo latches onto the idea that they contact good old Chuck to see if he can’t bring the thing into the 20^th century. After plenty of built-up, a few songs, a budding romance with a sorority sister, one of the famous Lane sisters but I am not sure if it was the one he snagged in Hollywood Hotel he falls short, cannot move the production forward. Then led by Professor Fred Waring (and his Pennsylvanians in tow) the whole cast winds up in New York City, on the big white way where they will put on a bootleg production since the staid college stage is out. Aside from the boy-girl thing between Powell and Lane the virtue, the reason for existence of this mercifully short film is the Bugby Berkeley show-stopper finale choregraphed to perfection in the way that he and very few others could do. Finis. Well, no, anybody who was not old and wizened maybe a shade bit senile in his dotage could tell in two seconds that this review was written by me, by Sarah Lemoyne. Got it.        

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

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

By Zack James

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

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

      

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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