This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Out In The Still Night-Be-Bopping With
Decca Records
CD Review
By Zack James
Decca Rock, various artists, Lyceum
Records, 1997
Nowadays with huge media conglomerates
running the gamut from old-fashioned fading into the digital night print newspapers
to fast forward social media sites it hard to imagine that back in the day,
back when what is now called classic rock and roll, the Elvis-Chuck Berry-Jerry
Lee –driven day that most of the stuff of legends was produced by small “mom
and pop” record companies that were looking for that one Elvis star to take off
with. Were crazy to get their produce, their simple-minded 45RPMs to the DJs,
the guys, and it was mostly guys on the rock stations, that after Alan Freedman
make the profession respectable for a while were the lynchpin to getting that
jump start.
Everybody knows, everybody at least who
cared about the history of the music that made a generation jump, made the
generation that came of age in the hard-bone 1950s, the ones now called
baby-boomers, made everybody rock, and roll, in a different way from their
forbears, the story of Sun Records, a good example of nothing but a little mom
and pop operation except the guy who ran it, the legendary Sam Phillips had a
big idea. That idea was to get a white guy who could sing about six different tight
assed ways stuff that was coming out of rhythm and blues, gospel, hell, Saturday
night juke joint no electricity but plenty of illegal whiskey and sharp knives country
blues if it came right down to it, all black-based music that jumped like
crazy. Then Elvis came through the door all snarly and swivel-hipped and the
rest was easy street for everybody. That is what drove a label like Decca
Records which was the primo rhythm and blues operation around and which had some
jump cross-over success with white guys like Bill Haley when he went to heaven
and blasted Gabriel with big black sound sexy saxs and fast paced rhythm.
Sun and Decca’s success spread the lust
for gold like a prairie fire. That was quick success had been Johnny Blade’s
dream, Johnny Ballo, Johnny B., whose little scat operation, Ducca Records out
of New Haven, was based on just that idea that drove Sam Phillips to
distraction, except wanted Johnny B. wanted the guy to come through the door to
be an Italian Stallion, a kindred, or at worst maybe some Connie Francis
wannabe. See Johnny came into the record producing game kind of late, got some
dough from sources better left unsaid, you know the guys who talk low and funny
and have crooked noses so he needed a big hook, needed to have some fishnet to
grab some talent and see what shook out. That is when he hit on the idea of
running some talent searches around New England, maybe the whole Northeast if
things came to that but at least New England. But tiny Ducca Records, which
like a lot of operations was mostly about kids crazy to hear themselves on
vinyl forking over a few bucks to have a platter produced or maybe if there was
some talent maybe a local hit for a week or two until the fickle Italian girls
moved on, wasn’t strong enough to draw flies on its own so in the various
locations where Johnny Blade wanted to run his show he had to get the local
rock station that kids listened to, got their ideas about what was what in rock
and what was what in the stuff advertised on those stations as added hooks.
The whole idea was pretty sound if it
could get off the ground. Go to a place like Boston, get WMEZ, the giant-sized
rock station drawing all the ads from record stores to drive-in restaurants and
so grabbing plenty of teen discretionary dollars, on board, have six or seven
regional contests with the hook of a final shoot-out in Boston, maybe at the
Garden and a record contract and dough, a thousand bucks, pretty good dough
then if only walking around money today. Of course to get WMEZ on board, really
get Be-Bop Benny the king of Boston DJs on board, Johnny had to grease some
palms. Which he eventually did in an operation which to this day is better left
unspoken of, and the idea was off.
This is how it played out in a place
like North Adamsville where one of the Boston Regional contests was held. The
set-ups were the same in each locale mostly, maybe a little more polish in the
bigger towns. Put up plenty of posters announcing the event, have the local
small audience radio station announce the thing, have high school kids passing
out leaflets at every junior high and high school. Get the Word out in that
mysterious but impeccable way teenagers had, probably still do have now that
they can go universal with the new technologies, of spreading the news through
the grapevine which would be the envy of the CIA and the NSA combined. The
event usually was held in a local well-known location school auditorium, or
space like that. At North Adamsville about twenty five acts signed up to perform,
too many since about twelve worked out better in keeping audience interest for
a couple of hours and Johnny B. learned after the Portsmouth fiasco that a little
screening of the goofs helped too. At Portsmouth some ass drag queen, some
transvestite, tried to get in doing Connie Francis stuff. Christ that was all
he needed (today such an act would have its own appeal but that was then and so
“Connie” got the boot). There would be an afternoon audition to screen out the
bum acts, the guys who couldn’t sing a note, and you would be surprised how
many over time filled that category, goofs, guys who stuff on a dare, or maybe
to impress some girls, the girls who could sing, sing like nightingales but who
were ugly, sorry this is the way it was. Getting down to a dozen Johnny B. found
out was pretty easy and those who didn’t made it got free tickets so that is
probably what they wanted anyway. It was that last dozen, actually probably the
last half dozen which caused the judging panel heartache.
That night the twelve acts, some solo,
some various combinations of groups, would go through their paces, most would
get a thumbs down and go sit in the audience probably wondering why they didn’t
make the cut until the last two standing would duel it out against each other
and the judges would crown somebody, give them a fifty dollar honorary prize to
get them to Boston and of course that chance at a record contract. The North
Adamsville winners were a doo-wop trio of three girls, two Italian girls and a
Finnish girl who looked Italian so Johnny was pleased, who did a great cover of
He’s So Fine which everybody even
guys loved since it was about them, or so they thought when they girls with great
stage presence looked in the direction of every guy in the house and pointed their
fingers like that guy was the one they were singing about. They beat out a guy
who did a pretty good Elvis imitation on Heartbreak
Hotel, a little on the heavy side but with great sideburns but by then
Elvis was a little yesterday, had died or something was out of the rock mix anyway,
and Johnny Blade knew that he wasn’t going to make his pot of gold by sending
up guys doing Elvis imitator stuff. Those girls, the Melody Sisters would wind
up winning the Boston finals, would have a great hit with their record contract
song Blame My Baby and then fade into
oblivion, maybe as a lounge act or as housewives, who knows, as one of a group
of a million “one-hit” wonders. Johnny Blade, well Johnny’s dream didn’t work
out so well. See he got bopped for that pay-off that “payola” to Be-Bop Benny
and his Ducca Record label went down in flames. The guys with the crooked noses
were not happy. Such was life in the “mom and pop” record business. Decca,
well, Decca had Billie Holiday, Bill Haley and the Comets and a stack of others you can hear on
this CD compilation when the deal went down. Had their pot of gold, made plenty
of dough.
Click on the title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the Sacco and Vanzetti case, provided ere as background. As always with this source and its collective editorial policy, especially with controversial political issues like the Sacco and Vanzetti case, be careful checking the accuracy of the information provided at any given time.
COMMENTARY
HONOR THE MEMORY OF SACCO AND VANZETTI IN THIS THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THEIR EXECUTION BY THE COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS.
I HAD ORIGINALLY INTENDED TO BASE MY COMMENTARY ON THE RECENTLY (2006)RELEASED DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THESE TWO ANARCHISTS BUT I WAS NOT ABLE TO GET THE DVD IN TIME SO THAT THIS COMMENTARY IS BASED ON A REVIEW OF A BOOK I DID EARLIER THIS YEAR-JUSTICE CRUCIFIED, ROBERTA STRAUSS FEURERLICHT, MCGRAW-HILL, NEW YORK, 1977.
Those familiar with the radical movement know that at least once in every generation a political criminal case comes up that defines that era. One thinks of the Haymarket Martyrs in the 19th century, the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930's, the Rosenbergs in the post-World War II Cold War period and today Mumia Abu-Jamal. In America after World War I when the Attorney General Palmer-driven ‘red scare’ brought the federal government’s vendetta against foreigners, immigrants and militant labor fighters to a white heat that generation's case was probably the most famous of them all, Sacco and Vanzetti. The exposure of the tensions within American society that came to the surface as a result of that case is the subject of the book under review. I note that it is as much a polemic on American nativism and Puritan skullduggery as it is a thorough study of the particulars of the case. After reading the book those whose sense of the 1920’s in America was formed by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age will have to think again.
A case like that of Sacco and Vanzetti, accused, convicted and then executed in 1927 for a robbery and double murder committed in a holdup of a payroll delivery to a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920, does not easily conform to any specific notion that the average citizen today has of either the state or federal legal system. Nevertheless, one does not need to buy into the author’s thesis about the original sin of obtuse ‘righteousness’ that drove the Puritans forebears in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and therefore made it possible to railroad two foreign-born Italian anarchists in 1920 to know that the case against them 'stunk' to high heaven. And that is the rub. Even a cursory look at the evidence presented (taking the state of jurisprudence at that time into consideration) and the facts surrounding the case would force the most mildly liberal political type to know the “frame” was on. That standard response is the minimum one would expect of an author on this subject so long after the events. This author passes that test. Her sympathies lie with the two anarchists and by extension all those who suffered physical and psychological damage from the abysmal social, political and cultural attitudes of the American ruling classes and their henchmen toward the great ‘unwashed’.
Everyone agrees, or should agree, that in such political criminal cases as Sacco and Vanzetti every legal avenue including appeals, petitions and seeking grants of clemency should be used in order to secure the goal, the freedom of those imprisoned. This author does an adequate job of detailing the various appeals and other legal wrangling that only intensified as the execution neared. Nevertheless she does not adequately address a question that is implicit in her description of the fight to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. How does one organize and who does one appeal to in a radical working class political defense case?
The author spends some time on the liberal local Boston defense organizations and the 'grandees' and other celebrities who became involved in the case, and who were committed almost exclusively to a legal defense strategy. She does not, however, pay much attention to the other more radical elements of the campaign that fought for the pair’s freedom. She gives short shrift to the work of the Communists and their International Red Aid (the American affiliate was named the International Labor Defense and headed by Communist leader James P. Cannon, a man well-known in anarchist circles) that organized meetings, conferences and yes, political labor strikes on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti, especially in Europe. The tension between those two conceptions of political defense work still confronts us to day as we fight the seemingly never-ending legal battles thrown up since 9/11 for today’s Sacco and Vanzetti’s- immigrants, foreigners and radicals (some things do not change with time). If you want plenty of information on the Sacco and Vanzetti case and an interesting thesis about it’s place in radical history, the legal history of Massachusetts and the social history of the United States this is not a bad place to stop. In any case-Honor the Memory of Sacco and Vanzetti.
An Encore -When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Sometimes Sam Lowell and his “friend” (really “sweetie,” long time sweetie, paramour, significant other, consort or whatever passes for the socially acceptable or Census Bureau bureaucratic “speak” way to name somebody who is one’s soul-mate, his preferred term) Laura Perkins whose relationship to Sam was just described at the end of the parentheses, and righteously so, liked to go to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich to either cool off in the late summer heat or in the fall before the New England weather lowers its hammer and the place gets a bit inaccessible and too windswept to force the delicate Laura into the weathers. That later summer heat escape valve is a result, unfortunately for an otherwise Edenic environment of the hard fact that July, when they really would like to go there to catch a few fresh sea breezes, is not a time to show up at the bleach white sands beach due to nasty blood-sucking green flies swarming and dive-bombing like some berserk renegade Air Force squadron lost on a spree captained by someone with a depraved childhood who breed in the nearby swaying mephitic marshes (mephitic courtesy of multi-use by Norman Mailer who seemed to get it in every novel- if you don't what it means look it up but think nasty and smelly and you will close-okay).
The only “safe haven” then is to drive up the hill to the nearby robber-baron days etched Crane Castle (they of the American indoor plumbing fortune way back) to get away from the buggers, although on a stagnant wind day you might have a few vagrant followers, as the well-to-do have been doing since there were the well-to-do and had the where-with-all to escape the summer heat and bugs at higher altitudes. By the way I assume that “castle” is capitalized when it part of a huge estate, the big ass estate of Crane, now a trust monument to the first Gilded Age, not today’s neo-Gilded Age, architectural proclivities of the rich, the guy whose company did, does all the plumbing fixture stuff on half the bathrooms in America including in the various incantations of the mansion.
Along the way, along the hour way to get to Ipswich from Cambridge Sam and Laura had developed a habit of making the time more easy passing by listening to various CDs, inevitably not listened to for a long time folk CDs, not listened to for so long that the plastic containers needed to be dusted off before being brought along, on the car's improvised CD player. And as is their wont while listening to some CD to comment on this or that thing that some song brought to mind, or the significance of some song in their youth. One of the things that had brought them together early on several years back was their mutual interest in the old 1960s folk minute which Sam, a little older and having grown up within thirty miles of Harvard Square, one the big folk centers of that period along with the Village and North Beach out in Frisco town, had imbibed deeply. Laura, growing up “in the sticks,” in farm country in upstate New York had gotten the breeze at second-hand through records, records bought at Cheapo Records and the eternal Sandy's on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge and a little the fading Cambridge folk scene through breathing in the coffeehouse atmosphere when she had moved to Boston in the early 1970s to go to graduate school.
One hot late August day they got into one such discussion about how they first developed an interest in folk music when Sam had said “sure everybody, everybody over the age of say fifty to be on the safe side, knows about Bob Dylan, maybe some a little younger too if some hip kids have browsed through their parents’ old vinyl record collections now safely ensconced in the attic although there are stirrings of retro-vinyl revival of late according a report I had heard on NPR."
Some of that over 50 crowd and their young acolytes would also have known about how Dylan, after serving something like an apprenticeship under the influence of Woody Guthrie in the late 1950s singing Woody’s songs imitating Woody's style something fellow Woody acolytes like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot never quite got over moved on, got all hung up on high symbolism and obscure references. Funny guys like Jack actually made a nice workman-like career out of Woody covers, so their complaints about the "great Dylan betrayal, about moving on, seen rather hollow now. That over 50s crowd would also know Dylan became if not the voice of the Generation of ’68, their generation, which he probably did not seriously aspire in the final analysis, then he would settle for the master troubadour of the age.
Sam continued along that line after Laura had said she was not sure about the connection and he said he meant, “troubadour in the medieval sense of bringing news to the people and entertaining them by song and poetry as well if not decked in some officially approved garb like back in those olden days where they worked under a king’s license if lucky, by their wit otherwise but the 'new wave' post-beatnik flannel shirt, work boots, and dungarees which connected you with the roots, the American folk roots down in the Piedmont, down in Appalachia, down in Mister James Crow’s Delta, and out in the high plains, the dust bowl plains. So, yes, that story has been pretty well covered.”
Laura said she knew all of that about the desperate search for roots although not that Ramblin’ Jack had been an acolyte of Woody’s but she wondered about others, some other folk performers whom she listened to on WUMB on Saturday morning when some weeping willow DJ put forth about fifty old time rock and folk rock things a lot of which she had never heard of back in Mechanicsville outside of Albany where she grew up. Sam then started in again, “Of course that is hardly the end of the story since Dylan did not create that now hallowed folk minute of the early 1960s. He had been washed by it when he came to the East from Hibbing, Minnesota for God’s sake (via Dink’s at the University there), came into the Village where there was a cauldron of talent trying to make folk the next big thing, the next big cultural thing for the young and restless of the post-World War II generations. For us. But also those in little oases like the Village where the disaffected could pick up on stuff they couldn’t get in places like Mechanicsville or Carver where I grew up. People who I guess, since even I was too young to know about that red scare stuff except you had to follow your teacher’s orders to put your head under your desk and hands neatly folded over your head if the nuclear holocaust was coming, were frankly fed up with the cultural straightjacket of the red scare Cold War times and began seriously looking as hard at roots in all its manifestations as our parents, definitely mine, yours were just weird about stuff like that, right, were burying those same roots under a vanilla existential Americanization. How do you like that for pop sociology 101.”
“One of the talents who was already there when hick Dylan came a calling, lived there, came from around there was the late Dave Van Ronk who as you know we had heard several times in person, although unfortunately when his health and well-being were declining not when he was a young politico and hell-raising folk aspirant. You know he also, deservedly, fancied himself a folk historian as well as musician.”
“Here’s the funny thing, Laura, that former role is important because we all know that behind every 'king' is the 'fixer man,' the guy who knows what is what, the guy who tells one and all what the roots of the matter were like some mighty mystic (although in those days when he fancied himself a socialist that mystic part was played down). Dave Van Ronk was serious about that part, serious about imparting that knowledge about the little influences that had accumulated during the middle to late 1950s especially around New York which set up that folk minute. New York like I said, Frisco, maybe in small enclaves in L.A. and in precious few other places during those frozen times a haven for the misfits, the outlaws, the outcast, the politically “unreliable,” and the just curious. People like the mistreated Weavers, you know, Pete Seeger and that crowd found refuge there when the hammer came down around their heads from the red-baiters and others like advertisers who ran for cover to “protect” their precious soap, toothpaste, beer, deodorant or whatever they were mass producing to sell to a hungry pent-up market.
"Boston and Cambridge by comparison until late in the 1950s when the Club 47 and other little places started up and the guys and gals who could sing, could write songs, could recite some be-bop deep from the blackened soul poetry even had a place to show their stuff instead of to the winos, rummies, grifters and con men who hung out at the Hayes-Bickford or out on the streets could have been any of the thousands of towns who bought into the freeze.”
"Presto, if you wanted to clear the house just bring in some desperate “from hunger” snarly nasally folk singer for a couple, maybe three songs, and if that did not clear the high art be-bop poetry house then that folk singer was a goner. A goner until the folk minute of the 1960s where that very same folk singer probably in that very same club then played for the 'basket.' You know the 'passed hat' which even on a cheap date, and a folk music coffeehouse date was a cheap one in those days like I told you before and you laughed at cheapie me and the 'Dutch treat' thing, you felt obliged to throw a few bucks into to show solidarity or something. And so the roots of New York City folk according to the 'father.'
Laura interrupted to ask if that “basket” was like the buskers put in front them these days and Sam said yes. And then asked Sam about a few of the dates he took to the coffeehouses in those days, just out of curiosity she said, meaning if she had been around would he have taken her there then. He answered that question but since it is an eternally complicated and internal one I having to do with where she stood in the long Sam girlfriend pecking order (very high and leave it at that unless she reads this and then the highest) have skipped it to let him go on with the other Von Ronk story.
He continued with the other funny story like this-“The second story involved his [Von Ronk's] authoritative role as a folk historian who after the folk minute had passed became the subject matter for, well, for doctoral dissertations of course just like today maybe people are getting doctorates in hip-hop or some such subject. Eager young students, having basked in the folk moment in the abstract and with an academic bent, breaking new ground in folk history who would come to him for the 'skinny.' Now Van Ronk had a peculiar if not savage sense of humor and a wicked snarly cynic’s laugh but also could not abide academia and its’ barren insider language so when those eager young students came a calling he would give them some gibberish which they would duly note and footnote. Here is the funny part. That gibberish once published in the dissertation would then be cited by some other younger and even more eager students complete with the appropriate footnotes. Nice touch, nice touch indeed on that one, right.”
Laura did not answer but laughed, laughed harder as she thought about it having come from that unformed academic background and having read plenty of sterile themes turned inside out.
As Laura laugh settled Sam continued “As for Van Ronk’s music, his musicianship which he cultivated throughout his life, I think the best way to describe that for me is that one Sunday night in the early 1960s I was listening to the local folk program on WBZ hosted by Dick Summer, who was influential in boosting local folk musician Tom Rush’s career and who was featured on that Tom Rush documentary No Regrets we got for being members of WUMB, when this gravelly-voice guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, sang the Kentucky hills classic Fair and Tender Ladies. It turned out to be Von Ronk's version which you know I still play up in the third floor attic.After that I was hooked on that voice and that depth of feeling that he brought to every song even those of his own creation which tended to be spoofs on some issue of the day.”
Laura laughed at Sam and the intensity with which his expressed his mentioning of the fact that he liked gravelly-voiced guys for some reason. Here is her answer, “You should became when you go up to the third floor to do your “third floor folk- singer” thing and you sing Fair and Tender Ladies I hear this gravelly-voiced guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, some Old Testament Jehovah prophet come to pass judgment come that end day time.”
They both laughed.
Laura then mentioned the various times that they had seen Dave Von Ronk before he passed away, not having seen him in his prime, when that voice did sound like some old time prophet, a title he would have probably secretly enjoyed for publicly he was an adamant atheist. Sam went on, “ I saw him perform many times over the years, sometimes in high form and sometimes when drinking too much high-shelf whiskey, Chavis Regal, or something like that not so good. Remember we had expected to see him perform as part of Rosalie Sorrels’ farewell concert at Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2002 I think. He had died a few weeks before. Remember though before that when we had seen him for what turned out to be our last time and I told you he did not look well and had been, as always, drinking heavily and we agreed his performance was subpar. But that was at the end. For a long time he sang well, sang us well with his own troubadour style, and gave us plenty of real information about the history of American folk music. Yeah like he always used to say-'when the tin can bended …..and the story ended.'
As they came to the admission booth at the entrance to Crane’s Beach Sam with Carolyn Hester’s song version of Walt Whitman’s On Captain, My Captain on the CD player said “I was on my soap box long enough on the way out here. You’re turn with Carolyn Hester on the way back who you know a lot about and I know zero, okay.” Laura retorted, “Yeah you were definitely on your soap-box but yes we can talk Carolyn Hester because I am going to cover one of her songs at my next “open mic.” And so it goes.
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Sippie Wallace performing her classic, Women Be Wise (also covered by Bonnie Raitt and Maria Muldaur among others). Markin comment:
Well I will just let Sippie tell it like it is for once. Truth. Without further comment. Okay. lol in cyber-slang. ****** Wallace Sippi
Women Be Wise
Women be wise, keep your mouth shut Don't advertise your man Don't sit around gossiping Explaining what he really can do Some women now days Lord they ain't no good They will laugh in your face They'll try to steal your man from you
Women be wise, keep your mouth shut Don't advertise your man
Your best girlfriend Oh she might be a highbrow Changes clothes three time a day But what do you think she's doing now While you're so far away? You know she's lovin your man In your own damn bed... You better call for the doctor Try to investigate your head
Women be wise, keep your mouth shut Don't advertise your man
Women be wise, keep your mouth shut Don't advertise your man Now don't sit around girls Telling all your secrets Telling all those good things he really can do Cause if you talk about your baby Yeah you tell me he's so fine Honey I might just sneak up And try to make him mine
Women be wise, keep your mouth shut Don't advertise your man -- Don't be no fool! Don't advertise your man Baby don't do it!
Deep In The Urban Folk Revival
Minute-With New York’s Washington Square Circa 1964 In Mind
CD Review
By Zack James
Washington Square Folk Songs, various
folk artists live or in studio, 1999
Nobody was quite sure what to make of
Seth Garth when he went off the rails, became a folkie, got caught up in what
the musicologists called the urban folk revival of the early 1960, the folk
minute as he would later refer to it when it was superseded by the British bad
boys invasion, folk rock and acid rock later in the decade. What all the guys
around his corner, Jimmy Jack’s Diner in Riverdale, being behind the curve, behind
the Seth curve had called a “beatnik.” What did they know of beatniks except
the stuff they saw Maynard G. Krebs-caricatured on television or seen in some
goof magazine with kids from New Jersey wearing black everything on weekend
foragings in the Village. No, Seth, and he would the first to tell you, was not
a beatnik, was not draw to the remnants of that scene as it filtered down to
teenage corner boy society. Could, as the guys around the corner said, give a
rat’s ass about poetry except as a futile exercise in English class. And could
give an equal rat’s ass about cool ass Charlie Parker-Dizzie jazz which the “beats”
dug since he was almost a chemically pure example of the child of rock and roll
that every parent worried to perdition about before they got the situation
under control (by flooding the yellow-backed record companies with angry
letters of complaint about the savage music they were producing which were
turning their children into, into sex fiends).
Everybody was surprised, really
surprised when Seth started listening to stuff like Where Have Al The Flowers Gone and some old corny stuff traditional
music they called it likeStewball they had all laughed, including
Seth, at in seventh grade music class when Mr. Lawrence tried, might and main,
unsuccessfully to ween they off their devotion to rock and roll. And here was
Seth acting like the ghost of Mr. Lawrence saying that he grooved on old prison
convict Lead Belly’s Good Night, Irene.
Fortunately for him nobody then cared enough, gave a rat’s ass about his new
turn since there were more important things about Seth that kept him in corner
boy favor. Things like having the confidences of most of the girls in school
who would tell him things they would not even tell their best girlfriends, sex
stuff of course when they spotted a boy they might like to take a run at and Seth
would act as the go-between.
So Seth was something of an enigma, a
guy that had always been hard to figure out, a guy who you wouldn’t figure looking
at his slender scrawny built, his now slightly too long hair (too long by Mrs.
Garth’s standards anyway), his jut-jawed face and his odd-ball blue eyes in a
brown-eyed world as a corner boy. As a guy who was as likely to harbor
felonious thoughts as he was at attempting to figure out his place in the new
trends in music in youth nation as the 1950s turned into the 1960s. He had been
the first, along with the acknowledged leader of the Jimmy Jack corner, Johnny
Blade, to “terrorize” the jewelry and department stores in downtown Riverdale
with his trail of “clips,” you know “five-finger discounts,” ah, come on, you
know petty larceny. First, as well, to pull a midnight creep along with Johnny
and a couple of other guys into the Mayfair swells section of town to grab
whatever was pawn worthy, you know, breaking and entering in the nighttime,
hell, burglary. Was said as well to have been part of an armed stick up of poor
Jimmy Jenkins the night gas jockey at Eddie’s Esso Garage on Trover Street
which he never denied and which went in to the annals as urban legend around
town.
None of these events ever caused him
legal trouble but neither did it figure he would go folkie on the boys. Yeah,
Seth was a walking contradiction, a guy who kept his own counsel, a guy who
kept those evil thoughts always lurking below the surface in check enough to
avoid the law. A guy he met later one night in Harvard Square when that area
was a hub of the emerging folk scene, a guy named Markin, who lived in North
Adamsville a dozen towns over from Riverdale had called it “keeping the wanting
habits in check.” See Markin, like Seth, was from hunger, had grown up poor and
so he sensed what Seth could only sputter out before Markin called his hurts
and bruises by their right name. So it was always a battle between Seth’s
“better angels of his nature” and those endless “wanting habits.” In the end
they did Markin in and almost got Seth as well.
Just then though Seth was all hopped up
on the folk scene, sensed that that was where the music was heading for the
part of youth nation that wanted to break out of the boxes. Boxes Seth was
desperate to break out of himself. See along with that larcenous sulking heart
he was trying to make his mark in the world, trying for what some wag later
would call his “fifteen minutes of fame.” He wanted in his better moments to be
a music critic knowing early on that he had no marketable musical talents by
voice or instrument but had an ear and eye for trends. That desire held him in
check for a while, allowed him to mix with a lot of people, New York
intellectuals, music school denizens, college professors, small record company
producers, Jewish kids from New York transplanted to the college scene around Boston
when that was a cottage industry who in an earlier time he would not have given
rat’s ass about.
The folk turn had all started one
night, one late Sunday night, when Seth had been trying to find his favorite
rock station, WMEX, out of Boston on his transistor radio (which he had stolen
from Radio Shack including the batteries) and it had come in all fuzzy, what he
would later find out would be airwave interference by stronger radio station
signals. As he turned the dial he heard an odd song, a song called No Regrets by a guy named Tom Rush (whom
he would see in person and interview many times later) which caught his
attention. Then a couple of other songs that he knew were not rock songs until
the announcer, the DJ, came on and identified them as Where Have All The Flowers Gone by Pete Seeger and Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds and
then identified himself as Bill Marlowe host of the Bill Marlowe Folk Hour (although it was actually a two hour show)
out of WMAR in Providence, a college station of some sort. That night the whole
thing started for Seth, he started drawing in his mind that this was his niche,
or his opening to that critic’s profession that he was looking for.
This radio station WMAR didn’t always
come in every Sunday, it all depended on those frantic vagrant airwaves but
came in enough that Seth got a sense of what kind of music he was interested in
(and would be sure to go the next day to Slappy’s Record Store downtown and
look in the small “folk” bin and grab what he could grab (still working the
“clip” when he could. Later he would get his folk materials at Sandy’s outside
of Harvard Square but by then he had called a truce to his larcenous ways and
actually paid for the records). More importantly Bill Marlowe would announce
during his show the various folksingers and folk clubs, you know coffeehouses, and
when and where they were playing. That had led to his first foray into Harvard
Square to the Club Nana to see Big Bill Bloom in the days before he had made it
big on the folk scene. Also the place where he had met the doomed Markin.
But Harvard Square was only a stepping
stone of sorts, an outpost although an important one, since the epicenter of
the folk world really was in the Village in New York City as the coffeehouses there
turned almost on a dime from long lines waiting outside “beat” poetry and jazz
venues to the new folk craze which was just then starting to form its own long
lines at certain clubs like the Gaslight where a few years before guys and gals,
folksingers were used to put people to sleep and insure that they would leave
quickly so the next entourage of poetry and jazz devotees could be ushered in.
And that was how one Friday night he met Cindy Sloan, how he subsequently took
his first of many trips to the Village then and later in college when he got a
few free-lance assignments to cover some lesser artists working to perfect
their acts that guys like Lenny Samuels and Benny Gold didn’t want to sully
their critical facilities covering.
This Cindy was a folksinger, had a
pretty good voice, and was a freshman at NYU who had come up to Cambridge one
weekend to do a gig, perform in an “open mic.” Places like the Club 47 and Club
Nana were strictly for the professionals, for those who were getting paid to
perform no matter what the pittance the cash-strapped club owners working on
close margins could foist off on them. Seth though met Cindy at the Club Blue,
then unlike later when Dave Von Ronk’s presence gave it the cache to move up
the folk food chain because Nick Cave let Dave run up a tab and not pay for his
booze, a lesser club where the draw was no cover charge and as long as you had
a coffee, or some drink, in front of you that allowed you to stay in that seat.
In short a cheap date which many guys, including Seth, prayed for when they
were checking girls out, some of who made that love of folk music a condition of
their interest unless the chick was really foxy then other more obvious factors
came into play. The other draw was that the performers, all amateurs from
hunger, got to perform a three song set to perfect their art (or got the
thumb’s down which meant playing out in the mean streets with passersby
purposely avoiding you andyour tin cup like you were some cripple or something in
front of the Coop or worse in the lifeless dungeon of the subway where you
competed with the noise from the on-rushing train which you usually lost).
After each performer was done “the hat” was passed around and that was the way
money, if any, was made that night by the performers.
Now Cindy, all regulation long-ironed
straight hair a la Joan Baez and her sister, Mimi, peasant blouse, skirt, short
as was getting to be the style, and the equally regulation sandals had a lovely
voice, did a lot of high soprano Baez and Judy Collins old Child ballad covers
and after her set got several dollar so in the scheme of things did pretty well
for herself. But there were a million Joan Baez wannabes then and Seth thought
that Cindy would be hard pressed to make a career out of her avocation. That
was one of his first insights into what the folk music deal was all about, what
it was all about from a critic’s standpoint. About who had “it” and what they
were going to do about it. Of course when Cindy had finished her set and had
for no known reason sat down at Seth and his friend Jack Callahan’s table he
made no mention of that observation. Rather he went to work pumping her for all
the information he could get from her about the folk scene in the Village and
the scene in Washington Square near NYU where on an given Saturday or Sunday
many young men and women were trying out their skill sets for the passing
audiences (the hat or cup or guitar case as always in front for any stray
donations). Also as was his nature when attractive girls, folkies or not, were
around he flirted with her like crazy. That night he stayed with her in her
friend’s Cambridge apartment where she was crashing for the weekend. That night
they just endlessly talked and it was that night Cindy invited Seth down to see
her in New York (they would not get under the sheets until later when they were
in her dorm room off of Washington Square).
That is how one Seth Garth became
knowledgeable about the Washington Square folk scenes, plural since there was
something of a division between those who were stuck in maybe the 17th
century with old-timey ballads and those who wanted to fiercely proclaim some
social or political message via the lyrics they were writing like crazy to make
sense of the 20th century world the others were clueless about, and
why he had first-hand experience with many of the artists who graced this CD.
As for Cindy, she and Seth saw each other occasionally that year until he
graduated from high school and she moved on to some other college guy, but as
he predicted, she tried for a few years to break into the paying folk performer
milieu but then gave it up and returned to her career as a biologist. A very
good one from what Seth heard when he ran into one day when he was on
assignment for The Eye.
From The Class Struggle Archives-Stop The Trans-Pacific Partnership-Then- And Now Too!
Stop The Sweetheart Deals For International Big Business-Organize the Unorganized Internationally-Built The International Workers Front!
Building A Thing From Which You Have To Run-With The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) In Mind
By Sam Lowell
“I’m not a Luddite, I’m not a guy who thinks we should go back and live in the caves, fearful of beasts, natural disasters, smirking shadows on the walls, bemoaning fate dealt by some unmerciful god. Not a guy either, maybe even less so these days when we are trying to downsize our lives, Melinda and me, who needs the latest gadget to prove that he has made something of himself in his ordinary clay life,” Josh Breslin told his three companions (plus that down-sizing- crazed Melinda) one night as they sat across from each other in Lenny’s, the best place by far in Portland (east side America version up in Maine not tree-hugger-crazed Oregon) for super local wines and equally super crabs and clam-cakes. They, Frank Jackman, Zack James, and Jimmy Jenkins were in Maine as guests of their old-time friend Josh who after many years of living in Cambridge down in Massachusetts when he had finished up a half-bright feet of ordinary clay career as an independent writer for half the unread radical magazines and journals in the country. You know the ones that every half-sensate intellectual or wannabe had on his or her coffee table to display come small intimate party time to show-off to their compatriots how “hip” they are (and Josh in his more candid moments grateful for those guilt-edged subscription bases which helped with alimony, child support and college tuitions for two ex-wives and four bright kids, two and two).
That last point, the point about Josh’s writing for many of the glossy and un-glossy publications of the past half century is important since the subject under discussion that night that bought out a spark of Josh’s old confrontational self was the recent passage by the United States Congress of President Obama’s negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trans-Pacific that is with everybody who wanted in on the cozy deal, for oligarchs, big business and governmental bureaucrats except the elephant in the room, China (formerly known in Josh’s and his kindred’s youth as Red China, to distinguish it from the “real” China of the day-Taiwan). This whole pact was meant as nothing else than as a move to counter growing Chinese influence in that section of the world to the advantage of the United States, to the serious advantage of the United States.
Josh, and his fellows at table, all politicos, mostly left of the Democratic Party leftists, not so much independents which in the current coin of political usage means independent but subject to selecting between those two non-choices, elephants (no relations to China, an elephant in the room of a different sort) and donkeys (not asses, which are a different animal no matter how appropriate a mascot they might rightly be) but the kind who might support Ralph Nader in his various candidacies, Cindy Sheehan, Bernie Sanders if he ran as an independent socialist had spent plenty of hours opposing previous international big-business rip-offs. Rip-offs like super-rip off of the Mexican peasant NAFTA, CAFTA and Frank’s favorite, LAFTA (who being born and raised in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston made everybody chuckle when he said it-LAFTAH, like a response to a joke, a poor joke on the peasants and urban poor of South America).
They had not taken up their opposition to these accords so much as pro-working class opponents like a lot of national and international labor organizations who saw, correctly saw good jobs going out of their countries of origin, to lower wage areas without benefit to those new employees and the lowering of the standard of living of those left behind-the now much vaunted and talked about increasing international standard of living gaps between rich and poor. Although not much done about that situation, much done about smashing the gap by a radical redistribution of wealth, for all the talk, plenty of parlor talk.
But let’s get back to Josh and Lenny’s and that statement that he made about not being a Luddite, not being a “back to primeval nature guy,” not being a material objects-collector which raised a few eyes in the room since they had all, all the men had met in San Francisco in the late 1960s when they were all interested in turning the world upside down. Breaking for the lust for a ton of dough and all that brought with it. Still were but with a more measured if less passionate thrust. (Josh had met Melinda after his second painful and costly divorce in the late 1980s and he ever after wished that he had met her back in the 1960s when it would have changed lots of things for the better-if nothing else saving costly alimonies, child support and college tuitions).
Jimmy, who had been the last to go west to California and the last to meet Josh, to be introduced to him by Jimmy’s hometown friend along with Frank and Zack from Carver High School the late, long lamented Pete Markin got the ball rolling he let out, “Hey Josh weren’t you the guy who after a couple of years on Captain Crunch’s yellow-brick road bus wanted to settle down in New Mexico or one of those square states and set up a communal farm, did so for a couple of months before scurrying back to San Francisco. Didn’t you also say another time that living on that primitive yellow-brick road bus was too “bourgeois” and that you were talking off with Butterfly Swirl to live in a cave in Todo el Mundo just south of Big Sur and abandon the decadent world to commune with nature (and commune with foxy Butterfly Swirl who knew how to “play the flute” for you which is a whole other story for another day). And weren’t you the guy who said that the down-pressed of the world had the right idea about keeping things simple, and that you “renounced” all worldly possessions, except what you could carry in your rucksack-and that damn typewriter of yours.
Everybody chuckled at Jimmy’s remarks, Jimmy whose sharp wit kept the Carver guys laughing in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor all through high school had hit the nail on the head. (Melinda didn’t chuckle not having heard the story before but who would get filled in later that night by Josh, except about Butterfly Swirl and her charms, leaving her wishing that she had known him back then as well.) Everybody expected that Josh would say something back but he just kept what he called (according to Melinda) his own counsel and let it pass. Let Frank go back to that time and tell one and all that they all had, under Markin’s cryto-mysto- Catholic-etched “from hunger” influence, been willing to break with their youthful dreams, become one with the fellahin as Markin called them before finding out the world-historic reality that every farm boy, maybe every farm girl, their stuck-on-the-land mothers and fathers too, wanted to get the fuck off the land at just the time that a big portion of 1960s youth nation was ready to go “live off the land.”
Frank continued in that same vein, “Hell even those of us from the “from hunger” Atlantic neighborhood, the neighborhood where most of the “boggers,” the guys who worked in the cranberry bogs which employed half the town were ready to forsake our “bourgeois” dreams, our mothers’ dreams that we get nice civil service jobs and move up the ladder one step above them to live more simply, to live in some intentional communes where all would be shared out among all those who put in their fair share to make the thing work.”
With that remark Josh said he had agreed with Markin back then since he had grown up in the same kind of town, except the big deal was textiles which had when he was a kid left first to head south in America and then overseas leaving guys like his unskilled labor father with not much left to dignify his life except hustling for every job he could land to keep four hungry growing boys, him and his three brothers, from the county farm. That in the end, after the fall, after he, they and their kindred had been defeated by the greed-heads in the early 1970s was why he had opposed all those unequal trade pacts, why he to belatedly honor his father and his desperate attempts to gain dignified employment, fought tooth and nail against their ratifications.
That was the serious part of the evening, the righteous political part but when Melinda left the table to go to the Women’s Room Josh signaled to the assembled men, now a bit “in their cups” after a night of wines and seafood to come closer and admit that he had left Todo el Mundo when Butterfly Swirl decided to go back to “civilization” down in Carlsbad where she haled from, decided to go back to be a surfer boy’s girl he made a swift shift in his plans. Josh flushed when he wistfully murmured to the assembled that Butterfly Swirl sure knew how to “play the flute.” Some things never change about guys, even serious guys.
One night when Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris were sitting in Johnny D’s over in Somerville [this night was several years before the recent 2015 announcement that that central spot for the blues tradition and up and coming newer musical genre was closing after a forty year run], 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 and picked up by Ralph along the way when drinking his life-time scotch whiskey became verboten after a bad medical check-up about ten years before Ralph mentioned that some music you acquired kind of naturally. A lot of their conversations of late, the last few years as they slid into retirement Ralph giving the day to day operations of his specialty electrical shop over to his youngest son and Sam giving the day to day management of his high volume printing business to his longtime employee, Jimmy Jones, who held the place together at the beginning while Sam headed West with a gang of other Carver corner boys in search of the great blue-pink American West night that animated much of the late 1960s had centered on their lifetime of common musical interests (except folk music which Sam came of age with, caught the drift as it came through Harvard Square where he would hang out to get out of the house when tensions boiledo to some extent but which mostly even with Bob Dylan anti-war protest songs made him grind his teeth.
By naturally Ralph meant, you know like kids’ songs learned in school. Songs like The Farmer in the Dell, which forced you a city kid like Ralph born and raised in Troy, New York a strictly working class town then, and now,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 all the animals of the farm kingdom and their distinctive noises that still rattled Ralph’s head on hard drinking night if he got melancholy for his tortured childhood; Humpty Dumpty, a silly grossly overweight holy goof of the rankest order, an egghead to boot and that didn’t mean intellectual, far from it, who couldn’t maintain his balance come hell or high water although you might not have thought of that expression, that hell or high water expression, or used it in the high Roman Catholic Saturday-go-to-confession-to confess those damns, hells, and fucks that had entered you vocabulary through osmosis and Sunday-go-to-communion-to-absolve-all-sins Morris household out in Troy where Ralph still lives; and, 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 but thinking about it later what were they really doing up there. All this total recall, or mostly total recall showing indeed whether you designated yourself as a city kid or not you were one of the brethren, etc. you have embraced that music as a child 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 sketch is about the blues, the musical blues and not the day to day getting old blues).
Sam nodded his head in agreement then chimed in with his opinion the music of junior high school as he thought, looking behind the bartender’s head to the selection of hard liquors displayed with the twinkle of an eye, about switching over to a high-shelf scotch whiskey, Haig &Haig, 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. (Sam unlike Ralph suffering no medical warning about the dire consequences to his system about throwing down a few shots since his health was in better shape than Ralph, Ralph having taken a beating in that department with whatever hellious chemical his government, or rather the American government for which he refused to take any credit or blame, was throwing on the ground of Vietnam from the nightmare skies during that long, bloody lost war).
That “second coming” referring to guys, 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, getting back to junior high, Sam thinking about 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 had gotten him tipsy a little, as he thought about the old refrain, “Don’t be a masher, Mister Dasher” which all the kids hung on the poor, benighted man 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 said amongst themselves, an admittedly hard task for an adult in any era, 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 on the side in those days, not unlike these days, when teachers couldn’t live on their teaching incomes led an old-time, old time to Sam and his classmates Benny Goodman-style swing and sway big band at special occasions and as a regular at the Surf Ballroom over in Plymouth on Friday nights), who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbooks. Thus you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance, God Bless America, 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 the 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. And they were not putting their three selections for a quarter to hear hokey Home on the Range.
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 as he chuckled to himself and turned a little confession red although he not been into that stifling confession box on his gamy knees in many years, and it would not be nice either). Ralph 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 against the Nips (his father’s term for the dirty bastard Japanese) 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, guys like Frank (Sinatra, the chairman of the board, that all the bobbysoxer girls, the future mothers of Sam’s 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 or could hardly wait to hear when the jukebox guy came into Doc’s to put the latest selections in (and to have his hand greased by Doc for “allowing” those desperately desired songs onto his jukebox to fill his pockets with many quarters, see he was “connected” and so along with the jukebox hand over fist money-maker cam the hand).
That mention of transistor radios got Ralph and Sam 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 thinking that they had best switch to Tennessee sipping whisky when the wait person came by again since they had moved from the bar to a table near the stage to get a better view of the band if they were to make it through both sets that night (and Ralph thinking, just this once, just for this bluesy night he would “cheat” a little on that scotch whiskey ban). This transistor thing by the way for the young who might wonder what these old geezers were talking about since it was clearly not iPods 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, her word whether she knew the exact meaning or not, meaning all hot and bothered, 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 Berry telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, all had to move over because there was a new sheriff in town. Bo Diddley asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate. Buddy Holly 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, WBZ and later WCAS. 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 Sam although he would shutter his ears if Sam played some folk stuff).
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 (and plenty taken away when the soldiers and sailors, white soldiers and sailors came home on the overcrowded troop transports looking to start life over again and raise those families they dreamed about in the muds of Europe and the salty brine of the atoll Pacific). 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, think about Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 and Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll, 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 down in Newport when everybody who was anybody that high school and college kids wanted to hear in that folk minute showed up there. 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 while American rockers were basically clueless until the Brits told them about their own roots music) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band. 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. And he and his band did just that. Yes, that blues calling from somewhere deep in the muds is an acquired taste and a lasting one.
