The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-In The Time Of The Be-Bop Baby Boom Jail Break-Out-The Cats Are Still Rocking –With The Chiffons He’s So Fine In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-In The Time Of The Be-Bop Baby Boom Jail Break-Out-The Cats Are Still Rocking –With The Chiffons He’s So Fine In Mind

By Allan Jackson

[A while back, maybe a couple of modern introductions ago I mentioned that out in the corner boy night a lot, a very lot if one can use such a term, of the talk was about girls, and not just the local girls who gave us more hard times and hard luck than you could imagine (that hard times and hard luck having a lot to do with them to use a crude term of art of the corner boy times not “coming across” meaning exactly if you were, are, a teenage boy no sex, or worse no “do the do” as we called after we heard the old blues master mad monk Howlin’ Wolf use the term in one of his blues songs, which might be expected after they got you all worked up although that did not preclude, not preclude at all lying our asses off saying we got whatever we wanted from some sullen frail of interest. That too a very lot part of the stifling corner boy night around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” where we working class boys from the Acre section of North Adamsville hung when we weren’t doing something). We also talked, endlessly talked when the Scribe was on the run, when he wanted to dazzle us with one of his two thousand arcane facts about other faraway girls, girls which I would later following Mick Jagger call the girls with the faraway eyes.

The big category in high school though, this long before the Scribe dragged us out to the West Coast at the time of the Summer of Love uprising in 1967 were the golden dream girls of Southern California, the ones that the Beach Boys were endlessly writing songs about and   which in our vapid imaginations made us hunger for those seemingly easy blonde, tanned, long-legged surfer girls who according to urban legend or against our from hunger minds were ready to do the do at the drop of a hat. Nice dream if not the reality, well, no the reality for me anyway as much as I loved the ocean and figure that I could have learned to surf, learned to fret about not having a little deuce coup, fret about that perfect wave and such. That was then though, the dream time which made our many girl-less nights, our many no come across nights a little less onerous.     

Here’s the funny part, the part that drove me to re-think about that phantom surfer girls experience when the real deal went down. When we did get to the West Coast a few years later after high school we could see the sea change in dramatic form, in the form of “Butterfly Swirl” for one who can stand in for what I want to mention today about the genesis of this sketch. Butterfly Swirl, obviously not her real name but a moniker I think Josh Breslin, who had an affair with her as did others from our crowd, put on her since she was a flaming light for our sore eyes, real name Kathy Callahan, from Carlsbad about forty miles north of San Diego whom we met when we were riding Captain Crunch’s merry prankster yellow brick road converted bus to psychedelic travelling caravan home down into La Jolla. La Jolla one of the surfing kingdom’s hot spots.

In 1963 said she, we, would probably not come within ten thousand miles of each other-Carlsbad surfer girl and North Adamsville corner boys not matter what our desires, our Beach Boy-etched desires. In 1967 though there was convergence in an odd way. Butterfly really was the classic surfer girl of the day all blonde, corn-fed great figure as opposed to her Okie forebears who left the dust bowl to seek the Garden of Eden written with hunger on every face, the bluest of blue eyes but most importantly she had imbibed the whole surfer culture which meant then, not now when you can’t tell the gender of the surfer until they come ashore and take off their wetsuits, waiting on some forlorn beach looking beautiful if bored until your surfer boy found his perfect wave-which usually took all day. That bored part is what got Butterfly to come over to the bus and ask what we were about, whether we had dope which she had heard about, the answer yes, and where we were headed. Anyplace. That night, no the next night Butterfly fed up with waiting around those forlorn beaches decided to travel with us for a while. Those travels, her affairs for the few months she was with us have been detailed elsewhere. Like I have said before-wasn’t that a time. A time when surfer girls and hippies plied the same sodden path. But also like I said before the road, the long winding road seeking that newer world that the Scribe was always yakking about wasn’t for everybody and it wasn’t for Butterfly who having flown the coop for a while went back to her perfect wave surfer boy. Yeah, but wasn’t that a time. Allan Jackson]          

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Everybody knew, everybody who got within fifty feet of him, distance enough for him to bellow out some 1950s song, sometimes on key sometimes off depending on his pipes since he had not been gifted with perfect pitch, knew that Jimmy Jones had been on some kind of childhood nostalgia kick back in 2012 when he went wild or as he said more soberly at the time, “I have recently been on a tear in reviewing individual CDs in an extensive commercial Rock ‘n’ Roll series and have kicked out the jams doing that deed.” Done so for a purpose to be described now. Well, hell, you already know if you knew Jimmy back in the day, back when that rock and roll music was just coming off the presses as fast a discretionary spending teenagers could get their hands on the latest be all and end all number, or like I did when I met him about twenty years ago when he was married to my sister Jenny, his third and hers too so there was no crying about what to expect, or not expect out of that institution, that it had to be about some woman.

A lot of the nostalgia gag, given that Jimmy had just turned seventy at the time, and frankly should have been past such childish things had been a result of running into Melinda Loring, an old classmate and one time dream flame in high school, Hampton Falls High up in New Hampshire, although nothing had come of it then. Nothing had come of it after he, having been properly warned off after inquiring of some guys at school about whether she had a boyfriend or not, important information to avoid the fatal faux pas of making a “move” on somebody who was “taken” that she was “unapproachable,” had moved on.

There are books that could be written, and maybe they have already, about the subtle and not so subtle codes in that old time mating ritual but I think Jimmy had it about right to move on rather than test the waters and become the tittle at some Monday morning before school girls’ locker room talkfest where such an indiscretion would have been the kiss of death for him for the rest of his high school time. See too Melinda confirmed that information when he ran into her at some class reunion thing or I think he said it was the class celebrating all those who had survived three score and ten having gained some wisdom from two broken marriages. Get this though and you may not find it in any code book but maybe just the book of getting on in life she said that she was not “unapproachable” to Jimmy now.

And so they had had a short affair, a few month thing not exactly a fling but not exactly forever, an affair that just didn’t have the will power to survive on both parts, her with her incessant need to plan in detail their every move for the next three years and he by an incessant need after his own three failed marriages to keep running away from the serious commitment that she craved. However during the high life of the affair Jimmy felt that he needed to go back and retrace their musical times, felt as was his wont that he had to trace every blessed song (and bellow them out as well) from their youth in order to impress her with his sincerity. See that was his style, his way to work the woman scene back then and it worked, worked on girls who were as nerdy as him but not genuine foxes like Melinda (and looking at an old high school yearbook photograph, no, not the silly class picture where everybody looked like they had just done five to ten for armed robbery at the state pen, even the girls, but one of her as an officer some club, the Glee Club I think, confirms that “fox” designation).

And so the affair, or whatever it was in each of their minds, might not have lasted but his CD review work has a certain lasting quality that he insisted that I read. See I knew guys like Jimmy in high school, nerdy guys who had to know every blessed thing about some subject or they felt stupid or incomplete but you had better ask your shrink about that, and being the same age roughly knew the music (unlike my sister Jenny who was ten years younger and so knew “acid rock” and later stuff) and so I became something of a sounding board as he “discovered” each new selection. Oh yeah, and in case you don’t remember I would have been a guy who warned Jimmy off of Melinda back in the day, and that little recent affair they had as well except I was in California then, and so he said I “owed” him. In the interest of full disclosure, and Jimmy knows this opinion of mine so I am not telling tales out of school. See I too was a guy who was interested in a girl, Diana Wilson, and another classmate had warned me off her as “unapproachable” except I did not move on and faced a few Monday morning before school girls’ locker room bashings (again showing how important intelligence is to have before making some fatal blushing move).       

Jimmy told me a lot of his reviews had been driven by the artwork which graced the covers of each CD, both to stir ancient memories and reflect that precise moment in time, the youth time of the now very, very mature (nice sliding over the age issue, right?) baby-boomer generation who lived and died by the music. And who fit in, or did not fit in as the case may, to the themes of those artwork scenes. The series basically went from about 1955 to 1965 the time now called the age of classic rock and roll. One year, the year I want to hone in on, 1959, Jimmy found the artwork a case of the latter, of the not fitting in.

He said on the cover (actually he showed me the cover after he described the thing since I just had to see it), a summer scene (always a nice touch since that was the time when we had least at the feel of our generational breakout), two blondish surfer guys, surf boards in tow, were “checking out” the scene. A term back then, maybe now too, meaning only one thing in summer, hell, in any season, meaning checking out the frails (a localism that got started as far as Jimmy knew by his corner boy, Frankie Kelly, who had about twenty different names for girls, so many that he and the other corner boys could not keep up).

The two blonde surfers, although not all surfers were blonde even though I think all their girlfriends were out there in sunny California, were just the front. Just the frosting, okay. The important scene although not pictured (except a little background fluff to inform you that you are at the beach, the summer youth beach and no other, the place where oldsters, even old hipsters in the black night let out for a day of sun are not welcome here, and certainly not the tortuous family beach scene with its lotions, luggage, lawn chairs, and tacky hot dogs and tepid hamburgers, longings, longings to be elsewhere in early teen brains), can only mean checking out the babes, girls, chicks, or whatever you called them in that primitive time before we called them sister, and woman. No question that this whole scene had been nothing but a California come hinter scene. One thinks ahead to warm night breezes and souped-up cars traveling the boulevard (also not pictured) looking, and looking hard like we all did, and not just in cool breeze California for the heart of Saturday night.

No way that it has the look of Eastern pale-face beaches, family or youth. This is nothing but early days California dreamin’ cool hot days and cooler hot nights with those dreamed bikini girls. These surfers, if that is what they are calling themselves are, no question “beach bums,” inventing themselves in classic Hollywood-driven California style, little did we know in the frigid East unless we had relatives or friends there that whole sub-cultures, or what would be called sub-cultures by the hoary academics who wanted to explain everything, of surfers, hot-rodders, outlaw bikers valley boys, and later girls, out there waiting for the winds to blow eastward. No way that they are serious surfer guys, certainly not Tom Wolfe’s Pump House La Jolla gang where those surfers lived for the perfect wave, and nothing else better get in the way. For such activity though for avoiding becoming a prune waiting on those perfect waves needed rubberized surf suits complete with all necessary gear. In short these guys are “faux” surfers. Whether that was enough to draw the attention of those shes they are checking out Jimmy said he would leave to the reader’s imagination.

And what caused Jimmy not to fit into that scene other that the fact that he was not blonde, had not known until he actually when out there in the mid-1960s that surfers as a culture even existed, and as we know had been rebuffed before he started by a fetching girl who probably, no definitely, in summer was one of those bikini-clad frails. Eastern version. Believe it or not Jimmy was afraid, or at least half afraid, of the ocean even though he had grown up (as had I) a stone’s throw from the ocean all his growing up times. I had actually gone many times to the beach with him when he was married to Jenny (and we were talking not always coterminous) and had forgotten that I had never seen him go in the water. There was a reason for him not going into the water, although he said that he would go in when the spirit moved him or he was hot, just not over his head.

Reason: when Jimmy was about eight or nine he had almost drowned when he lived on the other side of town, down at the treacherous Snug Harbor Beach. That summer shortly after school got out he had been out swimming on a decent day, not a threatening day at all, and had lazily drifted out with the tide. While there he grabbed on to a floating log, a telephone pole, and drifted some more until he realized that he was pretty far out for a kid who was not a good swimmer. Typical kid’s move though as he started back for shore he let go of the log as he swan back. Swimming for a while and getting tired he knew he could not make it back and started to go down. Somehow his older brother, Sam, saw what was happening and called for help to the swimming instructor who was stationed at the beach that day. She went out and saved him before he went down for the third time. When she got him ashore and revived him he thanked her and scurried off totally embarrassed. And also made his brother swear not to tell their mother. So that was why he was cold to that 1959 cover art. Why he could not relate to the surfers, beach bums or whatever they were trying to pull off. 

Oh yeah, get this, the woman who saved him was Melinda Loring’s mother and Melinda had been on the beach that day sitting with her mother since she was too young to be left at home. She had watched the whole episode, and vividly remembered that her mother was both shaken and elated. Shaken since Jimmy was very close to drowning and elated because she had acted coolly and saved a life, her first save. The way Jimmy found out about that connection was when he mentioned that he had gone to Snug Harbor Elementary School and Melinda thought back the times when she would accompany her mother to the beach which was near the school.  Melinda had mentioned in an e-mail about her mother saving an eight or nine year old boy at the beach and that was that. One of the things Jimmy said to Melinda before they started dating, while they were still feeling each other out about getting together, was that they might as well get together since they had already “met.” Melinda laughed and agreed. During their short time together both thought for a while that the “meeting” at the beach when they were eight or nine meant that their thing was “written in the stars.” It was not but Jimmy said don’t blame the sea for that.            

As for the music that Jimmy was crazy for Melinda to know about, the 1959 music that backs up this cover art that didn’t quite fit well that didn’t fit either, really. As Jimmy said we were clearly in a trough as anybody who had heard the shift in musical tone on the transistor radio that provide the source of most of our music and formed our tastes knew. The golden age of rock with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, and Chuck Berry was fading, fading fast into what Jimmy said when he described the music scene back then could only be called “bubble gum” music. (Strangely or maybe not, Melinda told Jimmy she liked the Fabian -Bobby Vee – Bobby Darin-Everly Brothers stuff that dominated that year and a few years after which may have been an omen but maybe Jimmy was just exhibiting sour grapes about the affair and not a fair evaluation of what these guys were doing except they were “pretty” to the girls who grabbed their fan magazines).

Jimmy said sure he listened to it (and so did I), listened to it hard on his old transistor radio (as did I), mainly because that was all that was presented to us. It would be a while until the folk, folk rock, British invasion, and free expression rock (aka “acid” rock) engulfed us. Jimmy said the bulk of this CDs contents attested to our marking time. There were, however, some stick-outs there that have withstood the test of time. They include: La Bamba, Ritchie Valens; Dance With Me, The Drifters; You’re So Fine (great harmony),The Falcons; Tallahassee Lassie (a favorite then at the local school dances by a New England boy  who made good), Freddy Cannon; Mr. Blue (another great harmony song and the one, or one of the ones, anyway that you hoped, hoped to distraction that they would play for the last dance), The Fleetwoods; and, Lonely Teardrops, Jackie Wilson (a much underrated singer, then and now, including by this writer after not hearing that voice for a while). So that was Jimmy take on the music year 1959.

Oh yeah I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this. After a recent trip to the Southern California coast I can inform you that those two faux surfer guys are still out there and still checking out the scene. Although that scene for them now is solely the eternal search for the perfect wave complete with full rubberized suit and gear. Forget the girls part.  Moreover their days as cover art material have taken a turn for the worst, No artist would now, or at least I hope no artist would, care to rush up and draw them. For now these brothers have lost a step, or seven, lost a fair amount of that beautiful bongo blonde hair, and have added, added believe me, very definite paunches to bulge out those surfer suits all out of shape. Ah, such are the travails of the baby-boomer generation. Good luck though, brothers.

Yet Again On Bond, James Bond-Will The Real 007 Please Stand Up- Daniel Craig’s “Casino Royale” (2006)-A Film Review

Yet Again On Bond, James Bond-Will The Real 007 Please Stand Up- Daniel Craig’s “Casino Royale” (2006)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

Casino Royale , starring Daniel Craig, Judith Dench, 2006

[I am not a guy who endlessly speaks about how this and that was better in the old days although surely some stuff was and some stuff today is unquestionably better as well. After yet another firestorm around this freaking two bit 007 Bond, James Bond series which site manager, Greg Green, the guy who figures what films to review and by whom in an effort, a futile effort if you ask me, to reach the younger more action film-oriented crowd I am coming to believe that maybe in the old days when the Hollywood studios sent out the press releases on films they were releasing and you took it from there better. A film reviewer, critic, acrobat or whatever you want to call him or her only had to if he or she was in his or her cups, had snorted too much cocaine or was off on a tryst for a few days just snipped off the top, added a couple of synonyms, added his or her name and sent it along for payment to whatever publication was footing the fool’s bill. (Those the days when we were getting paid by the word and could depend on some 3000 word minimum on a press release especially when the writer when crazy describing the plot. Now I can’t even charge for this foolish in brackets introduction part of the review which maybe longer than the review itself and certainly to me at least more interesting.)

I could, and maybe someday will, tell you some tales about the profession, about big time film critics like Arthur Lemay, Heddy Harnett, and our own Sam Lowell which would make your hair stand on. The beauty of the scam was that the studio, or rather the screenwriter for the film who did double-duty writing up the press release since he or she at least had the story line down even if the film was based on a book and the author had disowned the film as being nothing like he or she had written hand, wasn’t going  to complain when the reviews were uniformly positive and the poor schmuck of a writer couldn’t claim any infringement since that would expose who wrote the damn thing so nobody kicked. Nobody except the audience who actually had to watch the ton of turkeys that had gotten undeserved thumbs up. Such is life.         

Now though in the age of alternate facts, fake news, extraordinary self-serving bullshit and a phalanx of flaks, flak-catchers and screwballs with monomania you have to at least pretend that you give a damn about most films on your own dime, have to actually watch or hire somebody to watch the damn things. And make pithy comment on such or risk the scorn of some, get this, cinematic studies freshman looking to make goodie points with some erstwhile professor who couldn’t make the real film industry cut. Get cut to pieces in some arty cinema journal which nobody reads, not any live audience, except maybe those kids whose parents paid out a ton of dough so their aspiring film critic could cast scorn on guys who have really done it for a living-and survived to tell the tale.

Of course having to actually look at the film and come up with some interesting slant comes with its own set of dangers as I learned when I made a few casual comments in my last 007 review neo-007 Danny Craig’s Skyfall. I mentioned Bond creator Ian Fleming’s affair with Queen Elizabeth back in the old days in the 1950s when her old man, Prince Phillip, yeah, the Duke of Earl, no, Edinburgh up in nowhere Scotland was off with his Protestant whore out in the moors, mentioned the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger’s, now Sir Mick Jagger, 1960s affair with the good queen immortalized in his tribute song Sister Morphine (and speculated that was how he got that vaunted knighthood), and orphan boy, stone-cold killer 007 Danny Craig’s later tryst with her majesty. None of this history, none as the old time actor Sydney Greenstreet was fond of repeatedly saying was schoolboy history nor Mr. Wells’ history but was history nevertheless. And unless you are that schoolboy which excuses you from knowing anything other than the Pablum they feed you in school then some kind of mock shock at the revelations seems extremely naïve. That is all I can take from the firestorm of criticism not from the usual suspects Phil Larkin and Will Bradley who were as surprised as I was that adults were clueless about the inner workings of the royal households of Europe. While it would take about a ten thousand page book to gather in all the infidelities and off-hand trysts of the incestuous and inbred European royalty shock over modern doings seems bizarre to me.

Let me go by the numbers. Look MI6 in the 1950s was not only the plaything of Soviet spy Kim Philby or of the so-called Homintern, the public schoolboys with a fondness for other boys in their youth carried over when they ran the spy organization and clubbed up with the likes of Auden, Spender, Isherwood and the Queen’s art collector Tony Blount but of serious if bureaucratic types like Fleming who were after the main chance. Fleming saw his road to upward mobility going through Windsor Castle so when he found out the Duke was playing footsie somewhere he took his shot. It was all over the papers at the time that the Virgin Queen, part two (that was a good one back in namesake Queen Elizabeth I times when everybody from the ill-fated Earl Of Essex to the stable boy was the subject of her “favors,” wink, wink) was seeing quite a bit of a junior MI5 officer and wondering whether he was giving her the high hat on Soviet intelligence-or what.

Sure the Fleming scandal was hush-hush in the days when you could count on the media to allude to goings-on and not spread every lurid photograph on the front page but the Jagger affair was much more public in the days when Mick, not the Queen, not Her Majesty was conning older women into his expansive bed. I think Charles said something about it (while he was mussing up his own pillows) but Phillip was pleased as punch since with the Queen shooting up with a known junkie he could run around with one of his Catholic whores for solace. I urge you to go back into the archives, especially the younger set not around when the Queen was eating magic mushrooms and such. I will say in her, their defense that I was appalled as anybody else when the rumor that Mick was cavorting with Queen Mother Mary went the rounds. Is there no decency in the world at all anymore.

The Danny Craig incident is a little more problematic since he was an orphan and was trained to be an old school stone-cold killer for God, Country and the Queen. I don’t know whether it was a mother fixation or his own version of that attraction to older women that Mick went through until he got older and started going the other bopping teenagers but Danny begged to be assigned to the Queen livery or whatever they call it in order to protect her from international terrorists, the IRA, Rupert Murdoch, the late Dennis Hopper whom she called her easy rider, or Prince Phillip once he got impotent and took up with some Quaker lass. That is all I can say for now and I hope that you don’t feel cheated by the film review after all the total truth information I have just laid at your doorsteps. Seth Garth]                  

*****

I really do feel these days that Big Brother is watching over me, and not the usual suspects NSA, CIA or FBI. And no I am not paranoid at least not in this instance where I know from whence my suspicions emanated. Big Brother has a name, two names, Phil Larkin and Will Bradley two fellow reviewers on this site who have also waded in on this seemingly never-ending 007 James Bond series which somehow site manager Greg Green thought might help boost readership among the spy thriller aficionados, especially the 24/7/367 action every minute tribe. Meaning of course that is the kids who those of us who knew better have had a big laugh over since the bastards don’t read toney reviews, don’t read at all as far as I can see. Phil and Will have, or had been having a running feud over who best portrayed the spirt of 007 on the screen the former a partisan of Sean Connery and the later Pierce Brosnan. No others need apply. How I got caught up in this madness was that I have been assigned the Daniel Craig 007 segment and off-handedly mentioned that their respective selections seemed to be the two best examples of the spirit of the Bond character if skewed away from Ian Fleming’s hard copy book hardball flame-throwers. That was like meat to the sharks, the great white probably, as both tried to use that benign comment to enlist me as a partisan on their respective sides.

Of course the reality has nothing to do with the merits of any individual Bond, James Bond actor, hell one of them could have taken Roger Moore if it came to that. It has everything to do though with turf, with moving up the food chain, in the profession which is done, no fooling, by blasting the inadequacies of your fellow’s review of some film or some character. I have characterized this as worse than the back-biting in the academy which is going some since those contenders as least have some intellectual position staked out and probably an array of learned papers and conferences at their beck and call. I have also mentioned that back in the old days, Phil would know this although twenty-something Will would not, we used to just grab our copy from whatever the studios put out, what they called press releases, and either worked from that or just put our names on it and sent it in.

Now it is all about “game,” about cutthroat competition anyway and in any place you can. Thus I was drawn into the abyss by these guys. The latest “play” on this game board was a passing remark I made about a recent Craig 007 review where I mentioned that the gratuitous and seemingly non-stop violence was over the top even for action-filled Bond vehicles. That unleashed a thunderclap of comment from both Phil and Will once again pointing out that their respective candidates got by with plenty of guile and charm and didn’t have to resort to over the top bang-bang and chase scenes to get the bad guys at bay.   

Which brings us to this Casino Royale segment of the Bond legend which was actually Daniel Craig’s first run at the role of the bulky muscled super-man spy. The problem for me was that somehow things got screwed up here in the assignment department and I was given the sequel to this episode first Quantum of Solace where they are many references back to the action and particular the Bond love interest, Vesper, who like a great many of the more serious Bond love interests from the very first film Doctor No has a fatal fate in store for her.  

Of course like all post-Cold War products in this series the obvious bad guys are no longer Cold War Russian enemies or their allies but vague but widespread international criminal cartels who don’t care who or what they fund as long as the rate of return makes the grade. This one involves a young neophyte Bond working his way up the 00 chain. MI6 in the person of M, played by Dame Judith Dench, has given Bond the task of connecting the dots between a well-known financier of international terrorist organizations and that murky cartel.

In the end it is all about Bond’s ability to play high stakes poker with the high rollers, with that financier who made a serious mistake with an African mercenary group who let him invest their money in a scheme to short stock on an airline bringing out a new model which he has hired help to destroy and which James saves from destruction just in the nick of time. Hence our financier’s need for serious dough, a hundred million anyway. Bond, with the aid of fetching but as I have mentioned doomed Vesper, played by Eve Green, his “banker” from the British Treasury and later love interest through several travails including being poisoned by the financier’s girlfriend wins “the pot.” Not good, not good at all by that loser financier’s light and so Bond and Vesper are kidnapped to fork up the dough won at the gambling tables. Bond won’t give up the password to the Swiss account even under torture so as we later find out Vesper, now Bond’s lover, bargained with the bad guys for his life in exchange for the money. That did not sit well with Bond as he thought she had sold the whole operation out. According to M Vesper bargained the dough for the bastard ingrate Jimmy’s life. But that was later long after Vesper had died during the big final scene where Jimmy is facing off against the bad guys in Venice. Like I said the Bond character is hell on women, eye candy love them and leave them as earlier in the series and of late when there is some intimacy and sharing of emotions reflecting a difference sensibility these days.

I noticed when looking at the Internet to see how at the time reviewers critiqued this one they were very favorable in their estimations. A good number thought the change to a more original Ian Fleming book-based stone cold killer even if for a good old cause take made the grade. That and the romance for more than two minute copulation end. I have already mentioned that I thought the plot was thin against other efforts and that the violence and mayhem was way over the top. I guess I have to add now this reversion to a more originally Fleming conceived character did not sit well with me after what Sean had built up from day one. Phil and Will make of that what you will.             

                 

On The Anniversary Of The Start Of The American Civil War-Karl Marx’s View

On The Anniversary Of The Start Of The American Civil War-Karl Marx’s View  

Frank Jackman comment:

I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.

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Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1862

The English Press and the Fall of New Orleans

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Source: MECW Volume 19, p. 199;

Written: on May 16, 1862;

First published: in Die Presse, May 20, 1862.

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London, May 16

On the arrival of the first rumours of the fall of New Orleans, The Times, The Herald, The Standard, The Morning Post, The Daily Telegraph, and other English “sympathisers” with the Southern “nigger-drivers” proved strategically, tactically, philologically, exegetically, politically, morally and fortificationally that the rumour was one of the “canards” which Reuter, Havas, Wolff and their understrappers so often let fly. The natural means of defence of New Orleans, it was said, had been augmented not only by newly constructed forts, but by submarine infernal machines of every sort and ironclad gunboats. Then there was the Spartan character of the citizens of New Orleans and their deadly hatred of Lincoln’s mercenaries. Finally, was it not at New Orleans that England suffered the defeat that brought her second war against the United States (1812 to 1814) to an ignominious end? Consequently, there was no reason to doubt that New Orleans would immortalise itself as a second Saragossa or a Moscow of the “South”. Besides, it harboured 15,000 bales of cotton, with which it could so easily have kindled an inextinguishable fire to destroy itself, quite apart from the fact that in 1814 the duly damped cotton bales proved more indestructible by cannon fire than the earthworks of Sevastopol. It was therefore as clear as daylight that the fall of New Orleans was a case of the familiar Yankee bragging.

When the first rumours were confirmed two days later by steamers arriving from New York, the bulk of the English Ispro-slavery press persisted in its scepticism. The Evening Standard, especially, was so positive in its unbelief that in the same number it published a first leader which proved the Crescent City’s impregnability in black and white, whilst its latest news” announced the impregnable city’s fall in large type. The Times, however, which has always held discretion for the better part of valour, veered round. It still doubted, but, at the same time, it made ready for every eventuality, since New Orleans was a city of “rowdies” and not of heroes. On this occasion, The Times was right. New Orleans is a settlement of the dregs of the French bohème, in the true sense of the word, a French convict colony -and never, with the changes of time, has it belied its origin. Only, The Times came Post festum to this pretty widespread realisation.

Finally, however, the fait accompli struck even the blindest Thomas. What was to be done? The English pro-slavery press now proves that the fall of New Orleans means a gain for the Confederates and a defeat for the Federals.

The fall of New Orleans allowed General Lovell to reinforce Beauregard’s army with his troops; Beauregard was all the more in need of reinforcements, since 160,000 men (surely an exaggeration!) were said to have been concentrated on his front by Halleck and, on the other hand, General Mitchel had cut Beauregard’s communications with the East by breaking the railway connection between Memphis and Chattanooga, that is, with Richmond, Charleston and Savannah. After his communications had been cut (which we indicated as a necessary strategical move long before the battle of Corinth), Beauregard had no longer any railway connections from Corinth, save those with Mobile and New Orleans. After New Orleans had fallen and he was only left with the single railway to Mobile to rely on, he naturally could no longer procure the necessary provisions for his troops. He therefore fell back on Tupelo and, in the estimation of the English p ro-slavery press, his provisioning capacity has, of course, been increased by the entry of Lovell’s troops!

On the other hand, the same oracles remark, the yellow fever will take a heavy toll of the Federals in New Orleans and, finally, if the city itself is no Moscow, is not its mayor a a Brutus? Only read (cf. New York”) his melodramatically valorous epistle to Commodore Farragut, “Brave words, Sir, brave words!” But hard words break no bones.

The press organs of the Southern slaveholders, however, do not construe the fall of New Orleans so optimistically as their English comforters. This will be seen from the following extracts:

The Richmond Dispatch says:

‘What has become of the ironclad gunboats, the Mississippi and the Louisiana, from which we expected the salvation of the Crescent City? In respect of their effect on the foe, these ships might just as well have been ships of glass. It is useless do deny that the fall of New Orleans is a heavy blow. The Confederate government is thereby cut off from West Louisiana, Texas, Missouri and Arkansas.”

The Norfolk Day Book observes:

“This is the most serious reverse since the beginning of the war. It augurs privations and want for all classes of society and, what is worse, it threatens our army supplies.”

The Atlantic Intelligencer laments:

“We expected that the outcome would be different. The approach of the enemy was no surprise attack; it has long been foreseen, and we had been promised that, should he even pass by Fort Jackson, fearful artillery, contrivances would force him to withdraw or ensure his annihilation. In all this, we have deceived ourselves, as on every occasion when the defences were supposed to guarantee the safety of a place or town. It appears that modern inventions have destroyed the defensive capacity of fortification. Ironclad gunboats destroy them or sail past then) unceremoniously. Memphis, we fear, will share the fate of New Orleans. Would it not be folly to deceive ourselves with hope?”

Finally, the Petersburg Express:

“The capture of New Orleans by the Federals is the most extraordinary and fateful event of the whole war.”

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Ain’t Got No Time For The Harry’s Variety Corner Boys-With Jerry Lee Lewis’ Breathless In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Ain’t Got No Time For The Harry’s Variety Corner Boys-With Jerry Lee Lewis’ Breathless In Mind 

By Allan Jackson

[Sure I have put many a positive spin on my old corner boy Acre neighborhood growing up day in North Adamsville and have extended that wand plenty in comparing notes with other corner boy growing experiences like Josh Breslin’s up in Olde Saco, Maine and Fritz Taylor from up in New Hampshire (not the Fritz Taylor who occasionally writes in this space he was born down in Fulton County, Georgia where they didn’t have enough going to have a corner except some hayseed company general store best kept away from especially if Papa was behind in his land payments).

But know this that corner boy stuff had plenty of backside bad side. Had rough killer guys like the Red Hickey of the sketch below who could kiss your lips or give you the kiss of death and made you wish you never were born. Every Acre urban legend began and ended with some Red exploit just like every fresh breeze thing began and ended with the Scribe a few years after Red’s time, after Red went to the states the first time, but before he got caught in some fucking cops cross hairs down in the South robbing some goddam White Hen for nickels and dimes. The top urban legend story, the story that made him king of the hill around Harry’s Variety where the rough boys stood their ground and kept one foot against the placid brick walls that protected Harry from Red chaos was the time he chain whipped a guy within an inch of his life just because he was from some wrong corner, meaning any corner that Red did not control. Chain-whipped Loosey Goosey, that is the only name I knew him by so go with it, and Loosey was a member in good standing of Red’s corner boys just for not having his white tee shirt ironed like he was supposed to when they stood around the corner looking tough.

Sure it is easy to go chapter and verse on the real hood death battalion corner boys and have we simply bored corner boys with big dreams and swollen cocks look innocent by comparison. And maybe by comparison our hungry was not as great but we were no avenging angels, more like some exterminating angels out of some weird surreal Jean Cocteau play or the rough trade crowd around the waterfront in some Jean Genet our lady of the flowers moment. Sure the Scribe kept our, kept his head full of dreams and misty stuff that we could have given a fuck about listening too until much later when a lot for what he predicted came to fruition. But we also waylaid guys who tried to cut our turf, not chain-whipped but beaten bloody. You already know about our “exploits” with the fags down in Provincetown led by Timmy Riley, the guy who I mentioned before someplace who turned out to be gay and a flaming, his word, drag queen out in Frisco. Spent many a Scribe idea-Frankie Riley operational night doing the midnight creep around the darkened houses of the local version of the Mayfair swells. 

Why. Because we could do it, could get away with it one Scribe and Frankie put their heads. And because we were so poor and so desperate that we were willing to do a low-rent version of class war to prove our metal. So pull me up short if I make a myth out of the hard-boiled corner boyt night in the Acre. It wasn’t always pretty. Allan Jackson]      

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

Lewis Jerry Lee
Best Of Jerry Lee Lewis

Breathless

Now if you love me please don't tease
If I can hold then let me squeeze
My heart goes round and round
My love comes a tumblin' down
You leave me ahhhhhhh
Breathtess ahh !

I shake all over and you know why
I am sure its love honey thats no lie
Cause when you call my name
You know I burn like a wooden flame
You leave me ahhhhhh
Breathless!

OOOOOOOhhhhhh baby Oooooooh crazy!
Your much to much Honey I can't love you enough
It's alright to hold me tight
But when you love me love me riiiiighhhht!
Ah come on baby now don't be shy
This love was ment for you and I
Wind, rain, sleet or snow
I am gonna be wherever you go
You have left me ahhhh
Breathless !

PIANO & GITAR SOLO

WEeeeeeellll

oooooh baby mmmmnnn crazy
Your much to much
I can't love you enough
Well its alright to hold me tight
But when you love me love me right
Ah come on baby now don't be shy
This love was ment for you and I
Wind, rain, sleet or snow
I am gonna be wherever you go
You leave me ahhhh
Breathless Ah!

Riding down the old neighborhood streets a while back, the old North Adamsville working class streets, streets dotted with triple-deckers housing multiple families along with close-quarter, small cottage-sized single family houses like the one of Tim Murphy’s own growing to manhood time in the early 1960s. He reflected as he drove on how little the basic structure of things had changed with the changing of the ethnic composition of those streets. Sure many of the houses had been worked on, new roofs, new siding, maybe a deck add-on for the ritualistic family barbecue (barbecues that his family on the infrequent occasions that they actually had one were taken at Treasure Island a picnic area that provided pits for the grill-less like his from hunger family on the site), maybe an add-on of a room if that home equity loan came through (or the refinance worked out). The lawns, manicured or landscaped like some miniature English garden, reflected some extra cash and care that in his time was prohibited by the needs to fix up the insides first or save money for emergencies like the furnace blowing out in mid-winter. In all the tradition of keeping up appearances as best you could had been successfully transferred to the new inhabitants (keeping up appearances being a big reason work was done back then in those old judgmental Irish streets, maybe now too for all he knew).

Whatever condition the houses were in, and a few as to be expected when there are so many houses in such a small area were getting that run-down feel that he saw more frequently back in the day by those not worried by the “keeping up appearances” ethos, the houses reflected, no, exclaimed right to their tiny rooftops, that seemingly eternal overweening desire to have, small or not, worth the trouble or not, something of one’s own against the otherwise endless servitude of days. Suddenly, coming to an intersection, Tim was startled, no, more than that he was forced into a double-take, by the sight of some guys, some teenage guys hanging, hanging hard, one foot on the ground the other bent holding up the infernal brick wall that spoke of practice and marking one’s territory, against the oncoming night in front of an old time variety store, a mom and pop variety from some extinct times before the 7/11 chain store, fast shop, no room for corner boys, police take notice, dark night.

Memory called it Kelly’s (as almost every local institution was Irish called from that small dream of ownership and out of hard manual labor variety store to the Dublin Grille bar that transfixed many a neighborhood father, including his father Michael Murphy to the shanty born, or else had an Italian surname reflecting the other major ethnic group, and at times mortal enemies). Today the name is Chiang’s. From the look of them, baggy-panted, latest fashion footwear name sneakered, baseball cap-headed, all items marked, marked with the insignia (secretly, and with no hope of outside decoding) signifying their "homeboy" associations (he would say gang, meaning of course corner boy gang, but that word is charged these days and this is not exactly what it looked like, at least to the public eye, his public eye) they could be the grandsons, probably not biological because these kids were almost all Asians speckled with a couple of Irish-lookers, shanty Irish-lookers, of the ghost be-bop night guys that held Tim in thrall in those misty early 1960s times.

Yeah, that tableau, that time-etched scene, got Tim to thinking of some long lost comrades of the schoolboy night like the hang-around guys in front of Harry’s Variety several blocks away (Harry O’Toole, the most “connected” guy in the neighborhood after Jimmy Mulvey who ran the Dublin Grille, since he ran the local “book”), although comrades might not be the right word because he had been just some punk young kid trying to be a wannabe, or half-wannabe, corner boy and they had no time for punk kids and later when he came of age he had no time for corner boys being unlike his older brothers, Red and Digger, a serious student and not a hell-raiser like them giving Martha Murphy nothing but the miseries. (He gave Ma Murphy his own miseries later but that was when all of society, all youth nation society, was going through a sea-change and he just travelled in that stream to her angers and dismays, especially in his wardrobe and physical appearance.)

Yeah, that scene got Tim to thinking of the old time corner boys who ruled the whole wide North Adamsville night (and day for those who didn’t work or go to school, which was quite a few on certain days, because most of these guys were between sixteen and their early twenties with very jittery school and work histories better left unspoken then, or else if you wanted to make something of it they would oblige you with some fists). Yeah, got Tim thinking about where the white tee-shirted, blue-jeaned, engineer-booted, cigarette-smoking, unfiltered of course (Luckies the “coffin nails” of choice, sneering (learned from watching, closely watching and repeatedly Marlon Brando in The Wild One and James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause at the retro- Strand Theater up on Main Street), soda-swilling, Coke with a some kicks added, naturally, pinball wizards held forth daily and nightly, and let him cadge a few odd games when they had more important business, more important girl business, to attend to. Either a date with some hot “fox” sitting in some souped up car looking like the queen of the Nile or putting their girls to “work,” pimping them in other words. Tim had been clueless about that whole scene until much later, that pimping scene, he had just assumed that they were “easy” and left it at that. Hell he had his own sex problems, or really no sex problems although if he had known what he found out from Red and Digger he might have paid more attention to those “loose women.”

Yeah, Tim got to thinking too about Harry’s, old Harry’s Variety over there near his grandmother’s house (on his mother’s side, nee Riley) over there in that block on Sagamore Street where the Irish workingman’s whiskey-drinking (with a beer chaser), fist-fighting, sports-betting after a hard day’s work Dublin Grille was located. Harry’s was on the corner of that block. Now if you have some image, some quirky, sentimental image, of Harry’s as being run by an up-and-coming just arrived immigrant guy, maybe with a big family, trying to make this neighborhood store thing work so he can take in, take in vicariously anyway, the American dream like you see running such places now forget it. Harry’s was nothing, like he had said before, but a “front.” Old Harry, Harry O’Toole, now long gone, was nothing but the neighborhood “bookie” known far and wide to one and all as such. Even the cops would pull up in their squad cars to place their bets, laughingly, with Harry in the days before state became the bookie-of-choice for most bettors. And he had his “book”, his precious penciled-notation book right out on the counter. But see punk kid Tim, even then just a little too book-unworldly didn’t pick up on that fact until, old grandmother, Jesus, Grandmother Riley who knew nothing of the world and was called a saint by almost everybody, everybody but husband Daniel Riley when he was in his cups “hipped” him to the fact.

Until then Tim didn’t think anything of the fact that Harry had about three dust-laden cans of soup, two dust-laden cans of beans, a couple of loaves of bread (Wonder Bread, if you want to know) on his dust-laden shelves, a few old quarts of milk and an ice chest full of tonic (now called soda, even by New Englanders) and a few other odds and ends that did not, under any theory of economics, capitalist or Marxist, add up to a thriving business ethos. Unless, of course, something else was going on. But what drew Tim to Harry’s was not that stuff anyway. What drew him to Harry’s was, one, his pin ball machine complete with corner boy players and their corner boy ways, and, two, his huge Coca Cola ice chest (now sold as antique curiosities for much money at big-time flea markets and other venues) filled with ice cold, cold tonics (see above), especially the local Robb’s Root Beer that Tim was practically addicted to in those days (and that Harry, kind-hearted Harry, stocked for him).

Many an afternoon, a summer’s afternoon for sure, or an occasional early night, Tim would sip, sip hard on his Robb’s and watch the corner boys play, no sway, sway just right, with that sweet pinball machine, that pin ball machine with the bosomy, lusty-looking, cleavage-showing women pictured on the top glass frame of the machine practically inviting you, and only you the player, on to some secret place if you just put in enough coins. Of course, like many dream-things what those lusty dames really gave you, only you the player, was maybe a few free games. Teasers, right. But Tim had to just watch at first because he was too young (you had to be sixteen to play), however, every once in a while, one of the corner boys who didn’t want to just gouge out his eyes for not being a corner boy, or for no reason at all, would let him cadge a game while Harry was not looking. When he thought about it though, now anyway, Harry was so “connected” (and you know what he meant by that) what the hell did he care if some underage kid, punk kid, cadged a few games and looked at those bosomy babes in the frame.

Yeah, and thinking about Harry’s automatically got Tim thinking about Daniel (nobody ever called him that, ever) “Red” Hickey, the boss king of his schoolboy night at Harry’s. Red, the guy who set the rules, set the style, hell, set the breathing, allowed or not and when, of the place. He didn’t know if Red went to some corner boy school to learn his trade but he was the be-bop daddy (at least all the girls, all the hanging all over him girls, called him that) because he, except for one incident that Tim will mention below, ruled unchallenged with an iron fist. At least Tim never saw his regular corner boys Spike, Lenny, Shawn, Ward, Goof (yes, that was his name the only name Tim knew him by, and he liked it, that is Goof like his moniker), Bop (real name William) or the Clipper (real name Kenny, the arch-petty Woolworth’s thief of the group hence the name) challenge him, or want to.

Yeah, Red, old red-headed Red was tough alright, and has a pretty good-sized built but that was not what kept the others in line. It was a certain look he had, a certain look that if Tim went to the trouble of describing it now would go way overboard  describing it as some stone-cold killer look, some psycho-killer look but that would be wrong because it didn’t show that way. But that was what it was. Tim thought he had better put it this way. Tommy Thunder, older brother of his junior high and high school best friend and a corner boy king in his own right, Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, a big bruiser of a legendary North Adamsville football player and human wrecking machine who lived a few doors up from Harry’s went out of his way not to go near the place. See, Red was that tough.

Red was like some general, or colonel or something, an officer at least, and besides being tough, he would “inspect” his troops to see that all and sundry had their “uniform” right. White tee-shirt, full-necked, no vee-neck sissy stuff, no muscle shirt half-naked stuff, straight 100% cotton, American-cottoned, American-textiled, American-produced, ironed, mother-ironed Tim was sure, crisp. One time Goof (sorry that’s all he knew him by, really) had a wrinkled shirt on and Red marched him up the street to his triple-decker cold-water walk-up flat and berated, berated out loud for all to hear, Goof’s mother for letting him out of the house like that. And Red, old Red like all Irish guys sanctified mothers, at least in public, so you can see he meant business on the keeping the uniform right question.

And like some James Dean or Marlon Brando tough guy photo, some motorcycle disdainful, sneering guy photo, each white tee-shirt, or the right sleeve of each white tee-shirt anyway, was rolled up to provide a place, a safe haven, for the ubiquitous package of cigarettes, matches inserted inside its cellophane outer wrapping, Luckies, Chesterfields, Camels, Pall Malls, all unfiltered in defiance of the then beginning incessant cancer drumbeat warnings, for the day’s show of manliness smoking pleasures.

And blue jeans, tight fit, no this scrub-washed, fake-worn stuff, but worn and then discarded worn. No chinos, no punk kid, maybe faux "beatnik," black chinos, un-cuffed, or cuffed like Tim wore, and Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, king of the faux beatnik junior high school night, including among his devotees Tim, a little too bookish Tim, who was as tough a general, colonel, or some officer anyway, as corner boy Red was with his guys. Frankie example: no cuffs on those black chinos, stay home, or go elsewhere, if you are cuffed. Same kingly manner, right? Corner boys blue-jeaned and wide black-belted, black always, black-belt used as a handy weapon for that off-hand street fight that might erupt out of nowhere, for no reason, or many. Maybe a heavy-duty watch chain, also war-worthy, dangly down from those jeans. Boots, engineer boots, black and buckled, worn summer or winter, heavy, heavy-heeled, spit-shined, another piece of the modern armor for street fight nights. Inspection completed the night’s work lies ahead.

And most nights work, seemingly glamorous to Tim’s little too bookish eyes at the time, was holding up some corner of the brick wall in front or on the side of Harry’s Variety with those engineer boots, one firmly on the ground the other bent against the wall, small talk, small low-tone talk between comrades waiting, waiting for… Or just waiting for their turn at that Harry luscious ladies pictured pinball machine. Protocol, strictly observed, required “General Red” to have first coin in the machine. But see old Red was the master swayer with that damn machine and would rack up free games galore so, usually, he was on that thing for a while.

Hey, Red was so good, although this is not strictly part of the story, that he could have one of his several honeys right in front of him on the machine pressing some buttons and he behind pressing some other buttons Red swaying and his Capri-panted honey, usually some blond, real or imagined, blonde that is depending on the bottle, swaying, and eyes glazing, but he thought he had better let off with that description right now, as he was getting a little glassy-eyed himself at the thought, and because like he said it was strictly speaking not part of the story.

What is part of the story is that Red, when he was in the mood or just bored, or had some business, some girl business, maybe that blond, real or imagined, just mentioned business would after Tim had been hanging around a while, and Red  thought he was okay, give him his leftover free games.

Now that was the “innocent” part of Red, the swaying pinball wizard, girl-swaying, inspector general part. But see if you want to be king of the corner boy night you have to show your metal once in a while, if for no other reason than the corner boys, the old time North Adamsville corner boys might be just a little forgetful of who the king hell corner boy was, or as Tim will describe, some other corner boy king of some other variety store night might show up to see what was what.

Tim must have watched the Harry’s corner boy scene for a couple of years, maybe three, the last part just off and on, but he  only remembered once when he saw Red show “his colors.” Some guy from Adamsville, some tough-looking guy who, no question, was a corner boy just stopped at Harry’s after tipping a couple, or twenty, at the Dublin Grille. He must have said something to Red, or maybe Red just knew instinctively that he had to show his colors, but all of a sudden these two were chain-whipping each other. No, that’s not quite right, Red was wailing, flailing, nailing, chain-whipping this other guy mercilessly, worse, if that is possible. The guy, after a few minutes, was left in a pool of blood on the street, ambulance ready. And Red just walked way, just kind of sauntering away.

Of course that is not the end of the Red story. Needless to say, no work, no wanna work Red had to have coin, dough, not just for the pinball machine, cigarettes, and soda, hell, that was nothing. But for the up-keep on his Chevy (Chevy then being the “boss” car, and not just among corner boys either), and that stream of ever-loving blond honeys, real or imagined blonde depending on the bottle, he escorted into the seashore night. So said corner boys did their midnight creep around the area grabbing this and that to bring in a little dough. Eventually Red “graduated” to armed robberies when the overhead grew too much for little midnight creeps, and graduated to one of the branches of the state pen, more than once. Strangely, his end came, although Tim only heard about this second- hand, after a shoot-out with the cops down South after he tried to rob some White Hen convenience store. There is some kind of moral there, although Tim thought he would be damned if he could figure it out. Red, thanks for those free games though.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Real Scoop Behind Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?-With Martha and the Vandellas- Dancing In The Streets In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Real Scoop Behind Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?-With Martha and the Vandellas- Dancing In The Streets In Mind

By Allen Jackson

[Not everybody including myself from the now halcyon days of the Generation of ’68, those now called baby-boomers and beginning to fade fast had an easy and successful transition when the bright flame that we thought that as the Scribe put it via Robert Kennedy and him via Alfred Lord Tennyson “to seek a newer world” had not arrived, had gone to ground. I have mentioned my own problems coming back from Vietnam to what we called the “real world” as did Scribe and a few others I know. The Scribe, the portent guy, the fortune-teller, the soothsayer around our corner boy way growing up went down in flames early, went to seed in drugs and bullet shells, as has been describe by me and others over the past several years here as well all who mourned that lying, crazy, beautiful son of a bitch and whom we all still miss like crazy even fifty years later. I also did a whole series on that “transition” problem with thoughts of Scribe in mind in the late 1970s after I had gotten through the roughest part of coming to terms with the “real world” and could deal with a bunch of guys, returning veterans who still couldn’t cope and were holed up down in Southern California living as best they could along railroad tracks and under bridges.

Fuck, excuse the language although I don’t swear often this remembrance of fate of Scribe, of the returning veterans from that god awful war which we still don’t have a grip on today as the Ken Burns documentary makes ominously clear, of the children of the light who succumbed to whatever was burning in their mixed-up brains, of the likes of Ellen Carroll who gave all the love she had to anybody who wanted it or could hold her long enough to garner in that love and then wound up turning tricks as Madame La Rue in some souped up whorehouse in Frisco catering to Asian business who wanted to walk on the wild side of her love, of beautiful growing up corner boy Timmy Riley who turned himself into the reincarnation of Miss Judy Garland once he fled that growing up neighborhood and freedom to be what he was, of the million riders on Captain Crunch’s’ yellow brick road school bus buzzing up and down the Pacific Coast Highway looking for that inner light the Quakers were always talking about one time when I went to sanctuary with them in the depths of my despair and I stayed calm for a while as my rages against the night, against the night-takers abated a bit.     

Fuck, and I don’t give a damn if you excuse my swearing twice in one short piece right this minute my inner light which has guided me somewhat has evaporated as I think about those bastard night-takers, those hired guns of the ruling classes, those guys and gals who have spent the past forty or so years fighting a winning battle against all we were trying to do to turn the world upside down, to bring a little rough-hewn justice to this un-sceptered orb. Raging about the beloved Scribe wasted down in Mexico, Lenny whose last name I never did get or if I did it was not his real name who threw himself under a train before my eyes out in that lost brothers under the bridge Southern California land when he thought he was still in ‘Nam and there was in-coming, beautiful Rizzo from our own corner boy nights who was so gung-ho he actually enlisted right out of high school and now holds a place of honor on black granite down in Washington-and in the town square and who never had that chance to go to Frisco with us in the Summer of Love, 1967 and get his head turned around, of all those lost boys down in the sullen nights, of all the lost girls in those same sullen nights, and all the stark naked runaways who photographs dotted the lost and missing bulletin boards, mostly high school graduation pictures all that frantic parents had, of half the police stations from Chicago to the Coast. Of course as well the fate of Billy Bradley who too had his own dreams and now has only fifty year remembrance.

Yes, not all who entered the cave went the distance some were just slumming anyway but damn we have had our share of casualties in that night-taker reckoning. Allan Jackson]  

*******

This sketch takes place in the 1970s at the outer edge of the time of the Generation of ’68 musical jail  break-out  started in the mid-1950s with the roll out of classic rock but is driven, and driven hard, by the music of the early 1960s when the grifter described here first came of age and hence its inclusion.

“Hey, brother, can you spare a dime?,” (or sister now something unheard of back in the day, back in the early 1960s, when some cop might pinch you at her request for disturbing the fair sex  for  being unseemly in public asking a proper lady for anything. Now here in the go-go 70s any human form is qualified for the hustle where every low-rent guy takes a shot figuring maybe to get something so the other party, particularly women, can get you out of their faces and move on) followed by “Got an extra cigarette, pal (or gal, ditto the sister thing except unlike back in the day, pal or gal, in the new age, as likely as not, probably has no butts, has no “cigs,” doesn’t touch the stuff ever since the Surgeon-General’s report put the fear of God into lots of people)?”

Yah, Billy Bailey, William James Bailey, used-to-be brash corner boy, a contender for the title of king hell king of the corner boy night around Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, “up the downs” back in North Adamsville in the old days, the old days these days being the early 1960s before smart and brash corner boy Frankie Riley put an end to that dream by trumping all upstarts since  he was “in” with the shop owner, certainly had the panhandler lingo down, down pat, after only a few days on the bum. Funny during these few days on the bum this time he would almost blush when he thought back to the days when he used to laugh in the faces of swollen-faced raggedy-assed guys trying to pan-handle him for dough, trying to bum a smoke, and here he was with the brethren. Hustling maybe a little cleaner in attire that the brethren since he had not gotten down to second-hand Sally goods yet (that Sally for the clueless is not somebody’s aunt but the Salvation Army which took in many a stew bum without question when they were on the skids and nobody else would take them in so throw some change in the bucket the next time you see them around Christmas time in some shopping mall ringing their ubiquitous bells)although a few more weeks with constant use of the few clothes that he did have might have him howling. Hustling too with cleaner breathe since he did not drink (that jones long over and done with substituted by several subsequent joneses including his current burden. He still felt that contempt for the buggers since he “knew” that a few days of this street work and he would be off the skids, on his feet again and then able to go back to laughing at the brethren, a good laugh too, while they pipe-dreamed their lives away.

Yeah, this was strictly temporary because his ship would come in before he wound up on cheap street like the boyos hanging around the Common swilling rotgut wine (or maybe low-rent whiskey if the day’s take was good) smoking tobacco “roaches,” butt end really off the ground and pissing all over themselves. However every once in a while he would get a funny feeling, kind of turn up his collar a little more, push his baseball cap lower on his head, put on sunglasses ( a real no-no in the pan-handler racket since you want the “marks” to see your desperate eyes, your pleading desperate eyes, to close the deal. Besides sunglasses might make them feel you just blew in from the coast) when he realized that he was on the bum in his own home town, his ever-lovin’ roots, Boston. (His growing up hometown of North Adamsville close enough so that he did not have to tell people who asked the name of the town and could get by with Boston unlike if he was from Lowell or Lawrence or places like that.) Sure he had been on the bum a few times, nothing big, once on the Mission in Frisco (where in the same day he walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and that night slept, slept newspaper for a pillow sleep, under that edifice), a couple of times on Larimer Street in Denver before they gentrified the damn place and along the arroyos down in Los Angeles with a bunch of Vietnam veterans like himself who unlike him couldn’t adjust to the “real” world. 

Yeah, those were a few days’ bums, maybe a week, couple of weeks, no more than a month and then back to the world. Short falls, maybe drunk too much and jobless, later maybe too much gambling on run-out horses and dogs (and no money coming in to feed the habits once he got behind), maybe some twist threw him over for a steady guy after he wore out his welcome (and her pocketbook). On the bum this time, this time though a real fall, in hock and up to his ass in debt, mostly big score no-go dope on credit deal debts,  when he had tired of drunk risks, gambling risks, frail risks,  guys looking for him, not Boston guys thankfully, well, looking for him to pay up. During the long days of pan-handling this time though he would think back to the old days, the days before the “falls” when hustling dough was just for some short money, pick up some spare change, to wander into free campsite, Volkswagen bus pick-up sharing stews, brews and dope hitchhike roads looking for the great blue-pink American West night with some honey, some Angelica honey, bum like a few years back.

Angelica, the proto-type of his sexual desire in those days, all Midwest blonde, slender, frisky, proud and sensible, traipsing after him across half the continent before going home to Indiana and then later joining him in southern California before she decided on white picket fences and kids. Sweet kiss, baby, you were probably right when that last night you said your gallant knight was made of sawdust. Yeah, that was a while back, late 1960s back when even he sensed the world might be turned upside down. Hoped maybe he and his would get a fair shake in the world even though more pressing personal issues drove his days and nights. 

Those days, those days after the hellish army routine, the ‘Nam bummer, the ‘Nam bummer before he hightailed it with the arroyos brothers who couldn’t face the “real” world down in L.A. he practically made a religion, yah a religion out of living “free,” living out of the knapsack(oddly an old World War II surplus job found at Snyder’s Army and Navy the kind which he father had told him he carried all thorough Europe when it was time to kick ass with the Nazi), living under bridges (not “arroyo brother” bridges but nice, meaning girl company nice, sleeping bag also Army surplus and light campfires and fine stews), no sweat, if need be. But those “golden days” dried up a few years back and now here in 1976 he was facing a real skid row choice. How it happened he will get to along the way but first let’s set the parameters of what 1976 panhandling, to put an eloquent name on it for “bumming”, shiftless bumming , looked like and how to survive in the new age of everybody me-ing themselves, even with people who were not on the bum. Christ, lord the times were hard, hard times in old Babylon, no question.

See, a guy, a guy who called himself “Shorty” McGee for obviously physical reasons but who knows what his real name was, maybe he didn’t remember either after all the rum-dum sterno heat years and the endless backsides of skid row haunts, that he had hitched up with for a minute, an overnight minute at the Salvation Army Harbor Lights Center over in the South End kind of hipped him to the obvious tricks of the new down-at the-heels road. Like putting the two requests, got any change and “got a cig,” together when you were panhandling. See, Shorty said it was all a matter of psychology, of working the crowd, the downtown crowd, the bustling workaday Park Street Station crowd hurrying to and fro looking for quick lunches, maybe a minute shopping spree in Jordan Marsh’s or Filene’s, and the Copley Square sunning themselves crowd on the benches across from the library maybe reading a book or feeding the pigeons, right to get you out of their sights and back to whatever sweet thing they were doing. So you endlessly put the two requests together, time after time after time, and always. And what happened was that when they turned you down for the dough ( as happened a lot), or maybe took you literally and pieced you off with just a dime, Christ a dime that wouldn’t even buy a cup of joe, or could feel good about themselves, if they smoked, smoked cigarettes anyway, by passing you a butt. Billy thought, nice, this Shorty really does have it worked out just about right. Of course dimes and drags were not going to get him out from under, not this time.

Well, rather than leaving the reader out in the dark, Billy Bailey this fair 1976 spring was not just on the bum, but on the lam as well, keeping his head very far down just in case there were some guys who were looking for him, or worst, the cops, in case some irate victim of one of his scams took a notion to “fry his ass.” Of course he was counting on them, those victims, being mainly friends and acquaintances, of not putting “the heat” on him since he had already promised through the grapevine that he would make restitution. But we are getting a little ahead of the story, let’s step back.

The early 1970s were not kind to “free spirits” the previous name for what on this day were “free-loaders” and Billy, well, got behind in his expenses, and his bills, his ever expanding bills. But see the transition from free “s” to free “l” caught him off-guard, moreover he was just then in the throes of a fit of “the world owes me a living,” a serious fit. Why? Well see, he as a pauper son of the desperate working poor, “felt” that since he missed out on the golden age benefits of his youth that he was to make up the difference by putting the “touch” on the richer friends that he had acquired through his doing this and that, mainly high-end drug connections (not really rich but richer since the really rich were hunkered down behind about fifteen layers of fortresses, physical and legal, and as some writer who knew what he was talking about really were different that you and me, no question).

The long and short it was that he work the deal this way, this way once he got his hard wanting habits on first he would “borrow” money off Friend A under some scam pretext of putting it to good use, usually using some exotic drug story as the front (yes, his own good use, including several long airplane fight trips to California and other points west-no more hitchhike roads for this moving up the food chain lad) and then borrow dough off Friend B to cover some of his debt to Friend A. Something like an unconscious classic Ponzi scheme, as it turned out. And then when he got to Friend X or somewhere around there things got way too complicated and he started “kiting” checks, and on and on as far deep into his white- collar crime mind as he could think. That could only go on a for a short while and he calculated that "short while" almost to the day when he would have to go “underground” and that day had sprung up a couple of weeks before.

So it took no accountant or smart-ass attorney to know that dimes and drags were not going to get him back on his feet. Nor were many of the schemes that Shorty had outlined over at Harbor Lights as ways to grab quick cash. Hitting the poor boy charity circuit, good mainly one time, grabbing stuff on credit using somebody’s credit card gained through guys who sold fake credit cards and then selling the stuff quick and deeply discounted. Some check finagling. All things that really took sunnier times to work and squeak maximum benefit from. These were chicken feed for his needs, even his immediate needs, although some of the scams would fill the bill for a rum-dum or life-long skid row bum. But here is the secret, the deep secret that Billy Bailey held in his heart, after a few nights on bus station benches, cold spring night park benches, a night bout under the Andersen Bridge over by old haunt Harvard Square (girl-less and with no cozy sleeping and stew campfires), and a few nights that he would rather not discuss just in case, he finally figured out, figured out kicking and screaming, that the world did not owe him a living and that if he wanted to survive past thirty he had better get the stardust and grit out of his eyes. But just this minute, just this undercover spring 1976 minute, he needed to work the Commons. “Hey, brother, hey sister, can you spare a dime?” “Pal, have you got an extra cigarette?”

Postscript: Not all wisdom ends happily, and not all good intentions grow to fruition. Yes, Billy paid off his debts to his friends, mostly. However, Billy Bailey was killed while “muling” in a drug war shoot-out in Juarez, Mexico in late 1979 trying to do an independent score when the bad boy Mexican and South American cartels were bundling things up. Found face down with two in the back of the head. Just like Markin, the Scribe bought it the same way and with the same hubris, no, let’s call it the same fucking wanting habits. Yeah, Billy Bailey had moved down the chain a lot since the days when he was a contender for the king hell king of the corner boy night. So cry a tear for Billy too.