When The Blues Was Dues-Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth

When The Blues Was Dues-Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth  

  

 From The Pen Of Bart Webber

One night when Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris were sitting in the now long gone  Johnny D’s over in Somerville, over near the Davis Square monster Redline MBTA stop sipping a couple of Anchor Steam beers, a taste acquired by Sam out in Frisco town in the old days on hot nights like that one waiting for the show to begin Ralph mentioned that some music you acquired naturally, you know like kids’ songs learned in school. (The Farmer in the Dell, which forced you a city kid although you might not have designated yourself as such at that age to learn a little about the dying profession of family farmer and about farm machinery, Old MacDonald, ditto on the family farmer stuff and as a bonus the animals of the farm kingdom, Humpty Dumpty, a silly overweight goof who couldn’t maintain his balance come hell or high water although you might not have thought of that expression or used it in the high Roman Catholic Morris household out in Troy, New York where Ralph grew up and still lives, Jack and Jill and their ill-fated hill adventure looking for water like they couldn’t have gone to the family kitchen sink tap for their needs showing indeed whether you designated yourself as a city kid or not you were one of the brethren, etc. in case you have forgotten.)

Music embedded in the back of your mind, coming forth sometimes out of the blue even fifty years later (and maybe relating to other memory difficulties among the AARP-worthy but we shall skip over that since this is about the blues, the musical blues and not the day to day getting old blues).

Or as in the case of music in junior high school as Sam chimed in with his opinion as he thought about switching over to a high-shelf whiskey, his natural drink of late, despite the hot night and hot room beginning to fill up with blues aficionados who have come to listen to the “second coming,” the blues of James Montgomery and his back-up blues band. That “second coming” referring to guys like Montgomery and Eric Clapton, now greying guys, who picked up the blues, especially the citified electric blues after discovering the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim and James Cotton back in their 1960s youth, made a decent living out of it and were still playing small clubs and other venues to keep the tradition alive and to pass it on to the kids who were not even born when the first wave guys came out of the hell-hole Delta south of Mister James Crow sometime around or after World War II and plugged  their guitars into the next gin mill electric outlet in places off of Maxwell Street in Chicago, nursing their acts, honing their skills.  

Yeah, that hormonal bust out junior high weekly music class with Mr. Dasher which made Sam chuckle a bit, maybe that third bottle of beer sipping getting him tipsy a little, as he thought about the old refrain, “Don’t be a masher, Mister Dasher” which all the kids hung on him that time when the rhyming simon craze was going through the nation’s schools. Thinking just then that today if some teacher or school administrator was astute enough to bother to listen to what teenage kids say amongst themselves, an admittedly hard task for an adult, in an excess of caution old Mister Dasher might be in a peck of trouble if anyone wanted to be nasty about the implication of that innocent rhyme.  Yeah, Mr. Dasher, the mad monk music teacher, who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbooks so you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance and Home On The Range under penalty of being sent up to the front of the room songbook in hand and sing the damn things. Yes, you will remember such songs unto death. (Sam and his corner boys at Doc’s Drugstore found out later that Dasher  was motivated by a desperate rear-guard action to wean his charges away from rock and roll, away from the devil’s music although he would not have called it that because he was too cool to say stuff like that, a struggle in which he was both woefully overmatched by Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Bo, and the crowd and wasting his breathe as they all lived for rock and roll at Doc’s Drugstore after school where he had a jukebox at his soda fountain.)  

Ralph agreed running through his own junior high school litany with Miss Hunt (although a few years older than Sam he had not run through the rhyming simon craze so had no moniker for the old witch although now he wished he had and it would not be nice either). He added that some of the remembered music  reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around in the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in Ralph’s case was the music that got his parents through his father’s soldierly slogging on unpronounceable Pacific islands kicking ass and mother anxiously waiting at home for the other shoe to fall or the dreaded military officer coming up to her door telling her the bad news World War II. You know, Frank (Sinatra, the chairman of the board, that all the bobbysoxer girls, the future mothers of Sam and Ralph’s generation swooned over), The Andrew Sisters and their rums and coca colas, Peggy Lee fronting for Benny Goodman and looking, looking hard for some Johnny to do right, finally do right by her, etc. Other music, the music of their own generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what they wanted to hear when they had their transistor radios to their ear up in their bedrooms.

That mention of transistor radios got them yakking about that old instrument which got them through many a hard teenage angst and alienation night. That yakking reflecting their both getting mellow on the sweet beer and Ralph thinking that they had best switch to Tennessee sipping whisky when the wait person came by again if they were to make it through both sets that night. This transistor thing by the way for the young was small enough to put in your pocket and put up to your ear like an iPod or MP3 except you couldn’t download or anything like that. Primitive technology okay but life-saving nevertheless. Just flip the dial although the only station that mattered was WJDA, the local rock station (which had previously strictly only played the music that got all of our parents through their war before the rock break-out made somebody at the station realize that you could made more advertising revenue selling ads for stuff like records, drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants, and cool clothes and accessories than refrigerators and stoves to adults).

Oh yeah, and the beauty of the transistor you could take it up to your bedroom and shut out that aforementioned parents’ music without hassles. Nice, right. So yeah, they could hear Elvis sounding all sexy according to one girl Sam knew even over the radio and who drove all the girls crazy once they got a look at him on television, Chuck telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, that they all had to move over, Bo asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate, Buddy crooning against all hope for his Peggy Sue (or was it Betty Lou), Jerry Lee inflaming all with his raucous High School Confidential  from the back of a flatbed truck, etc. again.

The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste. Acquired by Sam through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s after flipping the dial one Sunday night once he got tired of what they claimed was rock music on WJDA and caught a Boston station. The main focus was on other types of roots music but when the show would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music the DJ would play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, Sam didn’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that folk minute then it made sense to play the real stuff.  (Sam later carried Ralph along on the genre after they had met down in Washington, D.C. in 1971, had been arrested and held in detention at RFK Stadium for trying to shut down the government if it did not shut the Vietnam War, had become life-long friends and Ralph began to dig the blues when he came to Cambridge to visit).

The real stuff having been around for a while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting. But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll (although parts of rock make no sense, don’t work at all without kudos to blues chords, check it out). So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden from view electric blues some time to filter through Sam’s brain.

What did not take a long time to do once Sam got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when he saw him perform. Once Sam had seen him practically eat that harmonica when he was playing that instrument on How Many More Years. There the Wolf was all sweating, running to high form and serious professionalism (just ask the Stones about that polished professionalism when he showed them how to really play Little Red Rooster which they had covered early on in their career as they had covered many other Chess Records blues numbers, as had in an ironic twist a whole generation English rockers in the 1960s) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band and playing like god’s own avenging angel, if those angels played the harmonica, and if they could play as well as he did. They both hoped that greying James Montgomery, master harmonica player in his own right, blew the roof off of the house as they spied the wait person coming their way and James moving onto the stage getting ready to burn up the microphone. Yes, that blues calling is an acquired taste and a lasting one.    

Searching 10,000 Years For A Hopi Warrior Dream-Once Again With The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.C Cannon In Mind

Searching 10,000 Years For A Hopi Warrior Dream-Once Again With The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.C

Cannon In Mind 

 

      

By Ronan Saint John

Gerald Scott was beset by ancient dreams of late, maybe not going back 10,000 warrior years like he liked to pretend, but maybe twenty years back (still you will know that he had ancient dreams, 10,000 year dreams when you bring a word like beset, his word, into the equation this early on). For back then, back in his youth he had dreamed the dream of 10,000 year warriors, along with his friends, Jack Lennon and James Lawson (not Jim or Jimmy not since childhood and mother’s call) when he first went west, went via some covered wagon dream as he and they, along with Sarah Mays (now Sarah Scott although she will when mad at Gerald revert to Mays but that is another story which she can tell at her leisure) landed in Joshua Tree out in the California high desert. The pack of them had just graduated from their respective colleges and as youth might do back then, now too, they decided to travel before settling down to whatever they would settle down to although college debt-bound these days probably not likely and rather work, work as a damn Starbuck’s barista if necessary to get the damn thing down before Social Security benefits come into play.

I won’t name the colleges, all four, since that too does not matter to our story and they can tell one and all about their four years at their leisure as well except that Gerald had taken a course in Native American history at his school. Had done so to fulfill an elective requirement at first but got so into what the real history of those many tribes were compared to the baloney he had been force-fed when he was a kid in school, on television and in the cinema when those benighted indigenous peoples were called Indians buying into the standard lie that these were the lost tribes of the Northwest Passage and Christopher Columbus’ misdirected signals to lay claim to the Americas (a name also reeking of illegitimacy but I will stop on this road for guys like Seth Garth and Frank Jackman of American Left History blog can run the rack on those injustices far better than I can). And so the trip with a few dollars, a few knapsacks, a few sleeping bags and a beat up but serviceable Toyota Camry purchased on the cheap from Sarah’s brother who was heading into the Army.      

I could probably spend a good portion of what I have to say running circles around how this quartet finally got to the high desert out in Joshua Tree but guys like Jack Kerouac, who influenced my father in his time to head out to California in the 1960s when he was young himself, Benny Gold, Lester Lawrence and a million other literary travelers have beaten the paths out to the west already. Like I say this is about a 10,000 year vision not some ill-begotten travelogue with AAA ratings. I do have to mention the last leg, the last leg before sunny and hot California desert because the route they travelled was through the states that are square, as the writer Thomas Wolfe put when he was noting something very different about the folk out there, the usurpers, those who stand on somebody else’s land and memory. They had done a circuitous route around the four states where Native Americans still had some existence, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona. At Gerald’s urging they stopped along the way at every reservation area they came across, especially the Hopi reservation which joins those four states together.

Gerald had told the other three that he had had a strange dream one night when they were outside Grand Island, Nebraska about a dance in which they, the three men, were participating in someplace in the West in some canyon where the night fire was flicking off the canyon walls and that flickering was driving the men to more fervent dancing. Beyond that Gerald did not, could not, find meaning in what that dream portended. Except he thought it had meant something about his growing affinity for those long-lost warrior kings who were crucified by the trail of tears the white man, he and his people, had brought upon some other people’s land. And so the search for what that all meant. Since nobody was in a hurry to get home or get to ocean California which meant at some point turning back East and whatever they were going to do lives, everybody consented to the route.             

That route would indeed portend something because along the way they wound up in Gallup, New Mexico during August and were just in time for the annual Intertribal gatherings at Red River Junction. They camped just outside the state park there on Friday and the next day spend the day learning about Native American tribal lore from the various tribes gathered at the site. One of the things that caught Gerald’s attention, as it did the others including Sarah, was the mesmerizing effect of the tribal dancing. Dancing that when it counted back in the day prepared the warriors to confront whatever enemy of the day was to be fought-other tribes or the encroaching white man with his womenfolk and youngsters. The rhythm, the warrior beat filled their heads, although this was not spoken of until later, until after they reached Joshua Tree, with their own warrior dreams, maybe pipe dreams is a better way to put the situation.      

Back at the campsite that night as the sun was setting and the heat of the dusty day was settling down when they came to their site they, Gerald first from the way I heard the story, noticed a medium-sized camper with many logos, or what looked like logos on it, a fire going and a few what looked like older men sitting around a big drum with sticks playing to a methodical beat and chanting something that he could not understand (and never did, then or later). They decided to get closer which none of the men around the drum objected to. When the men took a break one of the younger men waved the four devotees over and asked how they liked it, asked if they had gone to the Intertribal. Yes, on both counts. He introduced himself as Jack Two Feathers and asked their names, where they were from, and why they were there. Gerald explained the Native American interest part.

Then Jack Two Feathers mentioned that it was the tradition of his tribe, the Hopi, to enhance their drumming, enhance their connection with their ancestors, and, laughingly, just to get high to use peyote buttons. The Hopis had had trouble with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other law enforcement agencies over the use of the substance which they, the Hopis, claimed was part of their religious experience and thus protected under the white man’s United States Constitution. They would lose that argument in the United States Supreme Court but among the young, and some of the older fearless men they still carried out the peyote tradition.

Jack Two Feathers asked them if they had ever tried peyote and Gerald mentioned that his father had told him that he had as a proper 1960s young hippie type, but he had not. None of the others had either. They all agreed, once Jack Two Feathers calmed them down about the effects of the substance, to try some once he told them that it would increase their spiritual well-being to see what it was all about. Jack Two Feathers passed out some stuff that looked like mushrooms or something and told them to chew the stuff well. After about an hour, and after Jack Two Feathers had rejoined the older men around the drum who were ready to continue their drumming ceremony, the buttons began to kick in.

Nothing particularly dramatic happened that night except they were mesmerized by the beat of the drum, mesmerized by some younger Hopis who started to dance to the beat of the drums and would go into a fever pitch, and they did not come down from their highs to finally go to sleep until almost dawn. Packing up the next afternoon to head toward Joshua Tree via the Arizona desert and the Grand Canyon Jack Two Feathers came by their laden car and passed a small packet of peyote buttons to Gerald saying that maybe some time they too would see the face of sorrow, the faces of warrior-kings who had roamed at will in these their lands before the white man’s greed took it all away and left nothing good behind. Maybe even have a spiritual journey out of the experiences as well.               

Fast forward to Joshua Tree a couple of weeks later and a couple of late night until dawn peyote button rounds flames flickering against the grey, beige, red clay canyon walls, the three men bare-chested while some others met drummed and Gerald and the others finally found out what Jack Two-Feathers meant, felt that 10,000 year ancient warrior dream and would be forever changed by the experience. Gerald laughed as they started heading home about whether he should tell his father what happened. Nah, he would never believe the tale.

Once Again On The Dog Soldiers Of The Vietnam War Class Of 1969-When Frank Jackman Went Down In The Mud Refusing To Go To Vietnam-And Survived To Tell The Tale

Once Again On The Dog Soldiers Of The Vietnam War Class Of 1969-When Frank Jackman Went Down In The Mud Refusing To Go To Vietnam-And Survived To Tell The Tale

By Frank Jackman  

[As some readers know Frank Jackman the subject of this sketch is a writer at this publication. Full disclosure taken care of on that score I was in a quandary about who should write the piece which concerns Frank’s actions in the military back in the 1960s during the height of the Vietnam War. The natural selection would have been Sam Lowell or Si Lannon both men who knew the details of the story intimately once Frank, a few years after the experience in maybe 1976 they say, felt he could tell the story to guys he had grown up with. They were, having also served in Vietnam, as perplexed as Scribe who had just passed away down in Mexico had been when he was in Vietnam and had heard what Frank been up to back home.

Moreover Frank, after years, decades really of being quite about his story just like a lot of his fellow veterans who did go to Vietnam taking a page from the way their fathers had dealt with their World War II experiences, had when he “came out of the closet” for his own reasons retold them the story one night a few months ago when they were having a few drinks after a movie. This all led me to think that somebody else had to do the job, had to tell the story from a fresh perspective but who knew enough about the military from his own experience to not have to run to Sam or Si every minute to see what this or that meant. As it turned out the dime turned to one Francis James Jackman to tell the tale, to get the nod. Greg Green]  

On Vietnam War Class Of 1969

Funny these days, this year every other day it seems we are being inundated with 50^th anniversary commemorations of a hell of a lot of events. A lot of events in rapid succession for those of us who are of the Generation of ’68 who won our spurs that year. Starting almost as a portent of things to come the year started out with the anniversary of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam with a combination of North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese National Liberation Front fighters trying to decisively kick ass, kick the foreign presence out of their beloved country. Not succeeding in a direct sense, the war would drag on one way or another for another seven years but making it clear that there was no “light at the end of the tunnel” for the cocky American military commanders and politicians to crow about. Almost as an afterthought it forced the humiliating resignation of one Lyndon Baines Johnson, President of the United States (POSTUS in twitter-speak), and war-monger in chief. Then the other shoe seemingly dropped on all our best dreams for a newer world. First Martin, then Bobby. The horror of the Chicago Democratic National Convention which made the whole world watch while the country turned in on itself. Picked sides, a process which still not has abated as we step into a cold civil war which on a dime under the current regime could turn hot in an instant, and then the final humiliation of Richard Milhous Nixon, a confirmed Cold War warrior as POSTUS.      

So yes, plenty for the Generation of ’68, those still standing and those who still give a damn about those bloated youthful dreams to think about but today I want to speak of another generation. The Vietnam War Class of 1969 which I am a proud member of although not the way you might think. This remembrance comes by virtue of running into an extraordinary number of fellow veterans, not all Veterans for Peace or others who still adamantly keep their anti-war credentials out front and in public, whose time of service in Vietnam was somehow related to the year 1969. There must have been something in that period, there was in the aftermath of Tet and no victory, which clicked with me since it coincided with my time as well. I have until the last few years never spoken much about my trials and tribulations about my service during the Vietnam War period.

Kind of had done my own version of what got me to write this piece. The direct impetus has been a remark made by a couple of Marine Vietnam veterans who had known each through their wives for a dozen years yet never mentioned that they had both been in Vietnam. Another is a remark made by a fellow peace walker on the Maine Peace Walk in 2017 who had gone through two marriages without his now ex-wives knowing that he had been in Vietnam. It was that kind of war. Even for those who resisted.

Hell, it was only few years ago and only when she asked that my wife, Cindy, found out about the details of my own struggles with the war although she knew I had been in the Army, and that I had been a military resister. Yes, my class of 1969 story involves my going to the stockade for over a year (not including times during the actual year and one half of the struggle when I was confined to base, barracks, orderly room) for what amounted to refusing to go to Vietnam as an 11 Bravo, as an infantryman, as what we called “cannon fodder” after I had been given orders to report to Fort Lewis in Washington for transit to Vietnam.  I won’t go into the details of that experience for this sketch is about the class and not my personal travails other than this. I was never proud of anything more in my life than what I did with my “fifteen minutes” of fame and still feel that way as I hope the reader understands.  

Maybe I was quiet about my experiences since afterwards, and still somewhat today I think I made a mistake despite my personal pride in what I did, a political mistake in not going to Vietnam. Among other things 1969, maybe before but certainly post-Tet 1968 when even guys in the White House and Pentagon knew the game was up (they just dragged it out not wanting to be the guys who “lost” Vietnam a not unimportant consideration among that crowd), was a time when the American Army at home and in Vietnam started to see some serious blow-back from the ranks about what the hell they were fighting and dying for and getting kind of surly about it too. The more anecdotal evidence from guys who were there after they got back to the real world with everything from FTA on their helmets to not saluting officers( worse , worse for the officers, of fragging officers) to not going far when called to go on patrol to going AWOL in county to doing bags of dope to all kinds of individual acts of subordination putting them in jail harm’s way in infamous Long Binh Jail (LBJ after the POTUS), especially from that cohort that I have honed in on, guys from the post-Tet era the more I think I could have raised more than individual heartburn among the brass. Although half the brass at Fort Devens wanted to chew my ass in a grinder and tried to ship me out under armed guard but were folded by a judge in the Federal Court in Boston who granted a Temporary Restraining Order just as they were about to come after me. Even stateside I ran into guys who having done their tour in Vietnam were so angry about the deal they had been dealt they wound up in the Special Detachment Unit where I spent my non-stockade time for discipline.  So, yes, over the years I think I got a little quiet about the matter.   

Maybe ten, twelve years ago I started coming around Veterans for Peace, around after the second Iraq War when I had seen them on Armistice Day parading with their patented white on black dove embroidered flags flying in the wind going up Tremont Street in Boston and asked about why they were being separated from the main body of the parade by police motorcyclists, you know the average American Legion, VFW crowd that at least then formed the core of the march. The guy I talked said that the reason they couldn’t march with the main body of the parade was those guys didn’t want peace flags and “peaceniks” in their parade. Okay, my kind of people, sign me, well let me talk a while and then sign me up. The rest is history.

Well not quite because remember I am talking about the military class of 1969 which I am a part of. Over the years I found that despite my different Army experience that the guys who joined VFP were not all that different from me, from my growing up experiences and from my reluctance to resist the draft which I had thought about (although not Canada, not exile, I loved, love this country it is the damn governments I hate). Take Drew from Ohio who never told his two wives that he had been in Vietnam in 1969. Take David from out in Washington state, out in the Eastern Washington farm country part, apple country, who went into the Army in 1969 because that was the only way he was going to get to college. Take Peter from the corner boys down outside Philly who dropped out of college in 1968 and decided to join in 1969 to avoid the draft. Take Donald from Omaha who had never seen a black guy in person until the Army but who in ‘Nam, that is what they are entitled to call it not me, was as tight as tight could be with Tiny from South Side, Chicago until he got blown away saving Donald’s ass and whose name now is forever etched on a black granite down in Washington and forever in Donald’s heart. Take ‘Doc’ who in order to get his medical school bills paid got hoodwinked into going Army and wound up in a field hospital for the casualty-heavy 101^st Airborne Brigade. Sure, a ton of guys did what they did and came home and forgot it or tried to. Sure, a bunch of guys were proud of what they did and will let you know about it. But know this there were a bunch of  guys in that Class of 1969 who got “religion” on the questions of war and peace-and haven’t forgotten about that hard learned lesson.