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
Once Again….Then-With The Carver High
School Class of 1962 In Mind
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Jack Dawson as he prepared to get ready
for his 50th high school class reunion (or rather prepared to think
about going to the event) in the early days of January, 2012 wondered out loud
to his old friend Josh Breslin, a guy from Olde Saco whom he had met out in the
California great blue-pink American West night back in the mid-1960s after he
had graduated from high school himself, whether their parents or grandparents
had in their 50th anniversary times wondered, wondered out loud
about all the changes, social changes that had taken place in their lifetimes.
Since for both men that was a moot question as both sets of parents and
grandparents had long gone to earth they could only speculate. Josh thought
that his own Irish-French-Canadian (mother nee LeBlanc) parents and before them
his F-C grandparents (he never met his paternal grandparents) pretty much acted
like social change was a social disease and kept to the various old country
ways (and old America ways too). Maybe, Josh thought, it had to do with the
isolated existences in mill-towns, both Olde Saco and Carver being such
worn-out towns, working hard and keeping their own counsel (no “airing dirty
linen in public” the order of the day) and that particular Catholic fatalism which
they were both exposed to as kids that attached to everything and drove both
men crazy when they were trying to jail-break out of the old time mold.
One night over high-shelf scotches,
gone were the days of heavy drug use which got them acquainted back in the day
and prior to that cheap low-shelf whiskies and lower shelf rotgut wines, in the
Sunnyvale Grille in downtown Olde Saco across from the famous Jimmy Jack’s
Diner on Main Street they decided to play a game about the changes they could
recall from back then. First off was the change in attitude toward drugs which
back then were seen as the province of dead-beat junkies and odd-ball New York
hipsters (read jazz musicians, read black people). They had to laugh when Jack
said they probably ingested more drugs all the “beats” combined. Another was
the change from fag-baiting guys who seemed girlish and dyke-baiting once they
had understood the idea of different strokes for different (none of their
forebears would have understood the whole gay marriage phenomenon). Josh
mentioned attitudes toward cigarettes, especially since that was “cool” in
searching for girls and both having been long-time heavy smokers who had only
quit after many tries shook their heads at that idea. Of course the whole thing
with women (then girls) had gone topsy-turvy with woman now in professions like
the law and medicine that were unheard of and while both their mothers had
worked (in the respective town mills) and so had been working Moms that was a
necessity then to keep the families afloat and had been the cause of many
caustic comments by guys whose mothers did not work, did not need to work.
Jack and Josh went on that way for a
while until they ran out of broad-based big ticket social subjects to think
about, ran out ofbooze too as the hour
got late and Jimmy the bartender wanted to close up. So as they walked up the
street to Josh’s house about ten blocks away they started on the silly stuff.
Stuff in high school like why did the boys and girls have separate gym classes,
why were there separate sex bowling teams for Christ sake. Why girls could not
run track like they had done (before that “cool” smoking stuff shifted their
priorities). Why girls could only play half-court basketball. Big question: why
even on a friendly date was the guy, them, poor as church mice guys, supposed
to pay for everything and “dutch treat” was considered bad form, very bad form
even when the girls had plenty of dough. It went on like that until they got to
Josh’s house and then they having exhausted the subject started talking about
whether Jack was going to his class reunion. Yeah, there was plenty of
wondering going on that night, wondering too about whether when their kids were
getting ready for their 50th anniversary high school class reunions
they would be wondering about their what their respective fathers made of their
times.
[In the event Jack Dawson decided for a
host of good reasons not to go to his class reunion which really is a story for
another day. Josh, Class of 1965, is still up in the air about the question
from last report.]
The Last Time I Saw Paris-Ernest Hemingway’s A
Moveable Feast-An Encore
Book Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, MacMillan
Publishing, New York, 1964
A while back I wrote a short review of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s last work, the unfinished The Last Tycoon, which was published
posthumously in 1941 where I commented that the publisher had done something of
a disservice to the great writer’s name by publishing something that was not
completed and that would not, on the internal evidence, add to his place in the
American literary pantheon (he make its either under the old dead white men
version or the modern, more inclusive pantheon on the strength of The Great
Gatsby alone). I stated that at most the publication would over the long haul
be grist for academic studies and not the general reading public and so it has
proved except for the brief flare-up around the initial publication and the
much later film version of the book. I also mentioned in that review a
comparison with the book under review, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast,
also published posthumously in 1964 which had been completed and could with the
normal editing make sense to publish.
I noted that, moreover, the subject matter of
Hemingway’s efforts, his take on the post-World War I American (and others)
ex-patriate scene in Paris among the “lost generation” during the decade of the
1920s provided plenty of useful information about those times for the general
reader as well as some interesting tidbits and leads for the academic reader. I
think that is the key different in the publishing history of the two
works.
Hemingway, a
“veteran” of World War I, newly and apparently happily married to his first
wife, Hadley, felt alienated from the American scene back home, felt alienated
from his journalistic career undertaken to make a living, and joined the exile
to Paris to see what it was all about, and maybe write some things, who knows maybe
the great American novel (he had the ego for such a project, no question).
Hemingway became something of the prototypal creative artist living in
“splendid squalor” in the crowded quarters of literary Paris with its cafes and
cabarets. So much of the book, maybe too much, is spent on his travels around
Paris and France, his various skiing expeditions, and endless descriptions of
the foods and wines, cheaply bought, that he and his comrades ate.
But that is filler. What grabbed this reader were
the descriptions of his writing and reading work habits which were pretty
regular despite the wine, women, and song aspects that he tells us about. And
of that great bookstore/lending library run by Sylvia Beach which must have
been something to have been part of back then. Of course this little book is a
goldmine of information about “being at the creation” of the modernist artistic
movement which blossomed in Paris in the 1920s when he name drops meeting
almost every important cultural figure who passed through that town.Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford, Picasso, Ezra Pound
and on and on met usually at the home of fellow exile, Gertrude Stein, who is
even today underestimated as a gifted writer.And to put paid to this book plenty of gossipy stuff including a ton of
information about his hot and cold relationship with that F. Scott Fitzgerald
who name I invoked at the start of this review.Thanks for publishing this enjoyable, readable, informative book.
As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing”Ramp Up The War Drums-Again- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Incessant Escalations-- Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries From The Middle East! –Stop The U.S. Arms Shipments …
Frank Jackman comment:
I have already mentioned the night not long ago when my friend from high school, Carver High Class of 1967 down in southeastern Massachusetts, Sam Lowell, who I hadn’t seen in a while were, full disclosure while having a few high-shelf whiskeys at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyvale Grille in Boston, arguing over the increasing use of and increased dependence on killer/spy drones in military doctrine, American military doctrine anyway. I also mentioned which is germane here in discussing the broader category of the seemingly endless wars that the American government is determined to wage at the close of our lives so that we never again utter the word “peace” with anything but ironic sneers that I, again for full disclosure, am a supporter of Veterans For Peace and have been involved with such groups, both veteran and civilian peace groups, since my own military service ended back during Vietnam War days. For those not in the know that organization of ex-veterans of the last couple of generations of America’s wars has for over a quarter of a decade been determinedly committed to opposing war as an instrument, as the first instrument, of American policy in what it sees as a hostile world (a view that it has held for a long time, only the targeted enemy and the amount of devastation brought forth has changed).
I also noted Sam’s position, full disclosure he was granted an exemption from military duty during the Vietnam War period after his father had died suddenly in 1965 and he was the sole support, or close to it, of his mother and four younger sisters, was a little more nuanced if nevertheless flatly wrong from my perspective on the killer/spy drones. I thought his argument perhaps reflected an “average Joe” position of a guy who did not serve in the military and had not seen up close what all the “benefits” of modern military technology have brought forth to level whatever target they have chosen to obliterate and under what conditions. More importantly that Sam, who marched in any number of anti-Vietnam War parades with me after my service was over and I gave him the “skinny” on what was really going on in that war had in the post-9/11 period like many from our generation of ’68 had made a sea-change in their former anti-military positions. Something in that savage criminal attack in New York City against harmless civilians got the war lusts, yes, the war lusts up of people, good, simple people like Sam and lots of “peaceniks” from our generation to kill everything that got in our way. LBJ and Richard Nixon would have in their graves rather ironic smiles over that change of heart.
And those many who changed positions, who sulkily went along with whatever was “necessary,” including I remember one time a woman who identified herself as a Quaker who, I swear, asked plaintively on some radio talk show I was listening to whether we (meaning the American government and not her individually I assume but who knows) could not surgically nuclear bomb Al Qaeda from all memory. Sam got caught up in this war lust wave and has since, starting with his initial approval of the “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq, wound up in the end left with egg all over his face.
But Sam is nothing if not determined just like me to carry on in his views and so another night at Jack Higgin’s found us arguing over the more recent egg-in-face aspects of American war policy in the Middle East with the rise of ISIS, the demise of the failed states of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and the with it whatever rationale made the American government built a thing from which it had to run.
As is also usual these days like with the question of killer/spy drones we argued for a few hours or until the whiskey ran out, or we ran out of steam and agreed to disagree. The next day though, no, the day after that I again got to thinking about the issue of the debacle of American policy and while not intending to directly counter Sam arguments wrote a short statement that reflects my own current thinking the matter. Here it is:
“Nobel “Peace” Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama (and yes that word peace should be placed in quotation marks every time that award winning is referenced in relationship to this “new age” warmonger extraordinaire), abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate (not so strangely more Republicans than Democrats, at least more vociferously so) as internationally (Britain, France, the NATO guys, etc.), has over the past year or so ordered more air bombing strikes in the north of Iraq and in Syria, has sent more “advisers”, another fifteen hundred at last count (but who really knows the real number with all the “smoke and mirrors” by the time you rotate guys in and out, hire mercenaries, and other tricks of the trade long worked out among the bureaucratiti), to “protect” American outposts in Iraq and buck up the feckless Iraqi Army whose main attribute is to run even before contact is made, has sent seemingly limitless arms shipments to the Kurds now acting as on the ground agents of American imperialism whatever their otherwise supportable desires for a unified Kurdish state, and has authorized supplies of arms to the cutthroat and ghost-like moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to, quite a lot of war-like actions for a “peace” guy (maybe those quotation mark should be used anytime anyone is talking about Obama on any subject ).
Of course the existential threat of ISIS has Obama crying to the high heavens for authorizations, essentially "blank check" authorizations just like any other "war" president, from Congress in order to immerse the United States on one side in a merciless sectarian war which countless American blunders from the get go has helped create.
All these actions, and threatened future ones as well, have made guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue from the experience (and have become a fervent anti-warrior ever since), learn to think long and hard about the war drums rising as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world. Have made us very skeptical. We might very well be excused for our failed suspension of disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation (and the most recent hikes of whatever number for "training" purposes puts paid to that thought).
And during all this deluge Obama and company have been saying with a straight face the familiar (Vietnam-era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, or trying to, if you cannot rely on the weak-kneed Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now virtually non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to give whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be?
Now not every event in history gets repeated exactly but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time Vietnam vets who I like to hang around with might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq!–Stop The Bombings!- Stop The Arms Shipments!-Vote Down The Syria-Iraq War Budget Appropriations!
***
Here is something to think about picked up from a leaflet I picked up at a recent (small) anti-war rally:
Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war in Iraq or the victory of any side in Syria. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.
[Whatever unknown sister or brother put that idea together sure has it right]
“I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man”-With
Bluesman Skip James’ Devil Got My Woman In
Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Once somebody, I think it was the singer-songwriter Townes Van
Zandt who also hailed from Texas, asked the legendary bluesman Lightning
Hopkins what the blues were. What they meant to him, what they meant in the
great scheme of things. He answered quickly like he knew what was coming, what
Townes was going to ask like he had been asked the question many times, or had
thought about it a lot and had come up with this stock answer when asked the
question-“the blues ain’t nothing but a good woman on your mind.”Now the old reprobate, and he was from all
the tales about his doings indicate, probably had other answers or thoughts
about the blues like a woman getting you down, about Captain down on the Jim
Crow plantation always on your ass, about some hard luck story of money
ill-spent and about the morning after Jimmy Joe’s corn liquor hang-over but
that answer brought a number of other phrases from blues songs to my mind. Brought
to mind to try to define what the blues is, why it has “spoken” to lots of
people over time, including old time blues aficionados like me.
You name it, name your malady, and old time blues guys have coined
phrases to fit the bill. Not to neglect the female blues singers who in the
1920s and 1930s actually were more in demand that the old plantation-bound male
blues singers, but they might like Bessie Smith tell you that the blues are
“good man is hard to find” or that it is “hard to love someone when that
someone don’t love you” or maybe that she is looking for her nowhere around
daddy to “put a little sugar in her bowl” if she is feeling that way, feeling a
little salacious. But the best phrase from a female blues singer was to my mind
done by Sippy Wallace -“don’t advertise your man” meaning do not tell your
woman friends about your man’s virtues, physical or otherwise, or you will be
singing the blues.
All of the previous thoughts were brought to mind recently when I
was thinking about how important the blues were in my own life whenever I was
feeling downhearted. How they got me through a few rough spots. I had along the
way been thinking about my response back in the 1980s when I lived in a studio
apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston after my divorce (number two) and the young
guy downstairs from me, a good guy named Otty Venise, told me over drinks one
night at Charlie’s Den on Charles Street that Bessie Smith actually helped him
get over his blues. (He was having women troubles just then since his flame had
just ditched him for another man, an old boyfriend). And I had to agree that a
heavy dose of Miss Smith would chase some blues away. Chase some woman blues
away.
It is funny though that not all my blues memories revolve around
woman relationship troubles, hang-overs, no dough (due to the settlements from
those two divorces if nothing else), some sweat-filled dead end job, or the
troubles in the world just getting the best of me. Once the blues, or my use of
a phrase from a blues song got me into political hot water.
Now my politics are pretty far left, and pretty narrow. Mainly
around the fight to end the endless wars this country had immersed itself in
and the fight for some kind of social justice be it opposition to the death
penalty, an increase in the minimum wage or to free political prisoners here
and abroad. Stuff like that. Like I say narrowly focused but important. As part
of what I do to, especially in the age of the Internet and social media, is
make commentary on various issues via things like blogs (and now Twitter). Back
in the early part of the presidential campaign of 2008 when Hilary Clinton and
Barack Obama were going at each other tooth and nail for the Democratic Party
presidential nomination I was making plenty of commentary about each one. Not
that I favored either, like I said my politics are to the left of that party
even in the best of times. What did have me incensed (along with plenty of
others who wound up in the Obama camp, at least for a while) was Hilary’s vote
in 2003 for the Iraq War and her basic refusal to recant since she had egg all
over here face from supporting what turned out to be a bogus war, which she
knew, or should have known was bogus. Somebody, actually more than one person,
more than one feminist friend was all over me to support her as the first
serious woman presidential candidate (although in a face-off against the first
serious black presidential candidate that argument lost some of its steam).
Despite my known indifference to party politics. Between that pressure and a
book review of a fawning political biography of Hilary I got my dander up and
took up a line from the old bluesman Skip James’ Devil Got My Woman-“I’d rather be with the devil that be that
woman’s man.” Jesus did I take heat over that one not only from my feminist
friends who I expected it from in a sense but from the “don’t like” comments on
the book review despite the fact that I had given beside the glossing over of
the Iraq vote plenty of other reasons to not like the book, and not like the
candidate including a big dose of Clinton fatigue. As now in 2015 we will be subject
to plenty of both Clinton and Bush fatigue.
But leave it to the blues, to a blues woman, to bail me out of my
troubles. Once I was on the ropes and had to figure out some way to cut across
the sting on Hilary I had to check out some other blues lyrics to “get right.”
And I didn’t have to look far. One Rory Block, she of the younger generation of
blues aficionados who have taken to covering the old blues standards, actually
did her own female-etched version of the Skip James song except she sang-“I’d
rather be with the devil than be that man’s woman.” Thanks Rory, thanks a
million.
Now ask me just ask me about my opinion, about supporting one
Hilary Rodham Clinton in 2016. You know the answer already. Sanctified too. As
to the more generic question-What is the blues? The blues is…
The Son Of
Dharma-With Jack Kerouac’s On The Road
In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam
Lowell
Jack Callahan thought
he was going crazy when he thought about the matter after he had awoken from
his fitful dream. Thought he was crazy for “channeling” Jack Kerouac, or rather
more specifically channeling Jack’s definitive book On The Road that had much to do with his wanderings, got him going
in search of what his late corner boy, “the Scribe, Peter Paul Markin called
the search for the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (Markin always
capitalized that concept so since I too was influenced by the mad man’s dreams
I will do so here. That “crazy” stemmed from the fact that those wanderings,
that search had begun, and finished, about fifty years before when he left the
road for the hand of Chrissie McNamara and a settled life.
But maybe it is best
to go back to the beginning, not the fifty years beginning, Jesus, who could
remember, maybe want to remember incidents that far back, but to the night
several weeks before when Jack, Frankie Riley, who had been our acknowledged
corner boy leader out in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys from about senior
year in high school in 1966 and a couple of years after when for a whole
assortment of reasons, including the wanderings, the crowd went its separate
ways, Jimmy Jenkins, Allan Johnson, Bart Webber, Josh Breslin, Rich Rizzo, Sam
Eaton and me got together for one of our periodic “remember back in the day”
get-togethers over at “Jack’s” in Cambridge a few block from where Jimmy lives.
We have probably done this a dozen time over the past decade or so, most
recently as most of us have more time to spent at a hard night’s drinking
(drinking high-shelf liquors as we always laugh about since in the old days we
collectively could not have afforded one high-shelf drink and were reduced to
drinking rotgut wines and seemingly just mashed whiskeys). The night I am
talking about though as the liquor began to take effect someone, Bart I think,
mentioned that he had read in the Globe up
in Lowell they were exhibiting the teletype roll of paper that Jack Kerouac had
typed the most definitive draft of his classic youth nation travel book, On The Road in honor of the fiftieth
anniversary of its publication in 1957. That information stopped everybody in
the group’s tracks for a moment. Partly because everybody at the table, except Rich
Rizzo, had taken some version of Kerouac’s book to heart and did as thousands,
maybe hundreds of thousands of certified members of the generation of ’68 did
and went wandering in that good 1960s night. But most of all because etched in
everybody’s memory were thoughts of the mad monk monster bastard saint who
turned us all on to the book, and to the wanderings, the late Peter Paul
Markin.
Yeah, we still moan
for that sainted bastard all these years later whenever something from our
youths come up, it might be an anniversary, it might be all too often the
passing of some iconic figure from those times, or it might be passing some place
that was associated with our crowd, and with Markin. See Markin was something
like a “prophet” to us, not the old time biblical long-beard and ranting guys
although maybe he did think he was in that line of work, but as the herald of
what he called “a fresh breeze coming across the land” early in the 1960s. Something
of a nomadic “hippie” slightly before his time (including wearing his hair-pre
moppet Beatles too long for working class North Adamsville tastes, especially his
mother’s, who insisted on boys’ regulars and so another round was fought out to
something like a stand-still then in the Markin household saga). The time of
Markin’s “prophesies” was however a time when we could have given a rat’s ass about
some new wave forming in Markin’s mind (and that “rat’s ass” was the term of
art we used on such occasions). We would change our collective tunes later in
the decade but then, and on Markin’s more sober days he would be clamoring over
the same things, all we cared about was girls (or rather “getting into their
pants”), getting dough for dates and walking around money (and planning small
larcenies to obtain the filthy lucre), and getting a “boss,” like a ’57 Chevy
or at least a friend that had one in order to “do the do” with said girls and
spend some dough at places like drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants (mandatory
if you wanted to get past square one with girls in those days).
Markin was whistling
in the dark for a long time, past high school and maybe a couple of years
after. He wore us down though pushing us to go up to Harvard Square in
Cambridge to see guys with long hair and faded clothes and girls with long hair
which looked like they had used an iron to iron it out sing, read poetry, and
just hang-out. Hang out waiting for that same “fresh breeze” that Markin spent
many a girl-less, dough-less, car-less Friday or Saturday night serenading the
heathens about. I don’t know how many times he dragged me, and usually Bart
Webber in his trail on the late night subway to hear some latest thing in the
early 1960s folk minute which I could barely stand then, and which I still
grind my teeth over when I hear some associates going on and on about guys like
Bob Dylan, Tom Rush and Dave Von Ronk and gals like Joan Baez, the one I heard
later started the whole iron your long hair craze among seemingly rationale
girls. Of course I did tolerate the music better then once a couple of Cambridge
girls asked me if I liked it one time in a coffeehouse and I said of course I
did and took Markin aside to give me some names to throw at them. One girl,
Lorna, I actually dated off and on for several month.
But enough of me and
my youthful antics, and enough too of Markin and his wiggy ideas because this
screed is about Jack Kerouac, about the effect of his major book, and why Jack
Callahan of all people who among those of us corner boys from Jack Slack’s who
followed Markin on the roads west left it the earliest. Left to go back to
Chrissie, and eventually a car dealership, Toyota, that had him Mr. Toyota
around Eastern Massachusetts (and of course Chrissie as Mrs. Toyota). In a lot
of ways Markin was only the messenger, the prodder, because when he eventually
convinced us all to read the damn book at different points when we were all,
all except in our own ways getting
wrapped up in the 1960s counter-cultural movement (and some of us the
alternative political part too) we were in thrall to what adventures Sal
Paradise and Dean Moriarty were up to. That is why I think Jack had his dreams
after the all-night discussions we had. Of course Markin came in for his fair
share of comment, good and bad. But what we talked about mostly was how
improbable on the face of it a poor working-class kid from the textile mill
town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from a staunch Roman Catholic French-Canadian
heritage of those who came south to “see if the streets of America really were
paved with gold” would seem an unlikely person to be involved in a movement
that in many ways was the opposite of what his generation, the parents of our
generation of ’68 to put the matter in perspective, born in the 1920s, coming
of age in the Great Depression and slogging through World War II was searching
for in the post-World War II “golden age of America.”Add in that he also was a “jock” (no slur
intended as we spent more than our fair share of time talking about sports on
those girl-less, dough-less, car-less weekend nights, including Markin who had
this complicated way that he figured out the top ten college football teams
since they didn’t a play-off system to figure it out. Of course he was like the
rest of us a Notre Dame “subway” fan), a guy who played hooky to go read books
and who hung out with a bunch of corner boys just like us would be-bop part of
his own generation and influence our generation enough to get some of us on the
roads too. Go figure.
So we, even Markin when he was in
high flower, did not “invent” the era whole, especially in the cultural,
personal ethos part, the part about skipping for a while anyway the nine to
five work routine, the white house and picket fence family routine, the hold
your breath nose to the grindstone routine and discovering the lure of the road
and of discovering ourselves, of our capacity to wonder. No question that
elements of the generation before us, Jack’s, the sullen West Coast
hot-rodders, the perfect wave surfers, the teen-alienated rebel James Dean and
wild one Marlon Brando we saw on Saturday afternoon matinee Strand Theater
movie screens and above all his “beats” helped push the can down the road,
especially the “beats” who along with Jack wrote to the high heavens about what
they did, how they did it and what the hell it was they were running from.
Yeah, gave us a road map to seek that “newer world” Markin got some of us
wrapped up in later in the decade and the early part of the next.
Now the truth of the matter is
that most generation of ‘68ers, us, only caught the tail-end of the “beat”
scene, the end where mainstream culture and commerce made it into just another
“bummer” like they have done with any movement that threatened to get out of
hand. So most of us who were affected by the be-bop sound and feel of the
“beats” got what we knew from reading about them. And above all, above even
Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, Howl
which was a clarion call for rebellion, was Jack Kerouac who thrilled even
those who did not go out in the search the great blue-pink American West
night.
Here the odd thing,
Kerouac except for that short burst in the late 1940s and a couple of vagrant
road trips in the 1950s before fame struck him down was almost the antithesis
of what we of the generation of ’68 were striving to accomplish. As is fairly
well known, or was by those who lived through the 1960s, he would eventually
disown his “step-children.” Be that as it may his role, earned or not, wanted
or not, as media-anointed “king of the beats” was decisive.
But enough of the quasi-literary
treatment that I have drifted into when I really wanted to tell you about what
Bart Webber told me about his dream. He dreamed that he, after about sixty-five
kind of hell with his mother who wanted him to stay home and start that
printing business that he had dreamed of since about third grade when he read
about how his hero Benjamin Frankin had started in the business, get married to
Betsy Binstock, buy a white picket fence house (a step up from the triple
decker tenement where he grew up) have children, really grandchildren and have
a happy if stilted life. But his mother advise fell off him like a dripping
rain, hell, after-all he was caught in that 1960s moment when everything kind
of got off-center and so he under the constant prodding of Markin decided to
hit the road. Of course the Kerouac part came in from reading the book after
about seven million drum-fire assault by Markin pressing him to read the thing.
So there he was by
himself. Markin and I were already in San Francisco so that was the story he
gave his mother for going and also did not tell her that he was goingto hitchhike to save money and hell just to
do it. It sounded easy in the book. So he went south little to hit Route 6 (a
more easterly part of that road in upstate New York which Sal unsuccessfully
started his trip on. There he met a young guy, kind of short, black hair, built
like a football player who called himself Ti Jean, claimed he was French-
Canadian and hailed from Nashua up in New Hampshire but had been living in
Barnstable for the summer and was now heading west to see what that summer of
love was all about. Bart was ecstatic to have somebody to kind of show him the
ropes, what to do and don’t do on the road to keep moving along. So they
travelled together for a while, a long while first hitting New York City where
Ti Jean knew a bunch of older guys, gypsy poets, sullen hipsters, con men,
drifters and grifters, guys who looked like they had just come out some “beat”
movie. Guys who knew what was what about Times Square, about dope, about saying
adieu to the American dream of their parents to be free to do as they pleased. Good
guys though who taught him a few things about the road since they said they had
been on that road since the 1940s.
Ti Jean whose did not
look that old said he was there with them, had blown out of Brockton after
graduating high school where he had been an outstanding sprinter who could have
had a scholarship if his grades had been better. Had gone to prep school in
Providence to up his marks, had then been given a track scholarship to Brown,
kind of blew that off when Providence seemed to provincial to him, had flew to
New York one fine day where he sailed out for a while in the merchant marines
to do his bit for the war effort. Hanging around New York in between sailings
he met guys who were serious about reading, serious about talking about what
they read, and serious about not being caught in anything but what pleased them
for the moment. Some of this was self-taught, some picked up from the hipsters
and hustlers. After the war was over, still off-center about what to do about
this writing bug that kept gnawing at him despite everybody, his minute wife,
his love mother, his carping father telling him to get a profession writing
wasn’t where any dough was, any dough for him he met this guy, a hard knocks
guys who was something like a plebeian philosopher king, Ned Connelly, who was
crazy to fix up cars and drive them, drive them anyway. Which was great since
Ti Jean didn’t have a license, didn’t know step one about how to shift gears
and hated driving although he loved riding shot-gun getting all blasted on the
dope in the glove compartment and the be-bop jazz on the radio. So they tagged
along together for a couple of years, zigged and zagged across the continent,
hell, went to Mexico too to get that primo dope that he/they craved, got drunk as
skunks more times than you could shake a stick, got laid more times that you
would think by girls who you would not suspect were horny but were, worked a
few short jobs picking produce in the California fields, stole when there was
no work, pimped a couple of girls for a while to get a stake and had a hell of
time while the “squares” were doing whatever squares do. And then he wrote some
book about it, a book that was never published because there were to many
squares who could not relate to what he and Ned were about. He was hoping that
the kids he saw on the road, kids like Bart would keep the thing moving along
as he left Bart at the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge on their last ride
together.
Then
Bart woke up, woke up to the fact that he stayed on the road too short a time
now looking back on it. That guy Ti Jean had it right though, live fast, drink
hard and let the rest of it take care of itself. Thanks Markin.
You Will Pay-With
The War Tax Resisters League In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam
Lowell
Steve Whipple and Brad Lucas had never had many arguments in their long
association together. That “association” business to not put a too formal spin
on the matter started long ago when they were first introduced at the
children’s session of the York Hill Friends’ Meeting in Salem. While Sam had
drifted away from the Quakerly ways in the late 1960s after many fitful nights
and more than a few “heated” arguments with his late parents who had, to use a
term of the times, freaked out, when he decided to quit the traditional
Friends’ Meeting House in Cambridge and join the break-away younger set who met
at the Harvard Divinity School and had never looked back they had remained
steadfast friends even though Brad still kept the faith at York Hill. Of course
brought up under the guidance of the “inner light” the tendency of the two men would
have been to reason things out and if things could not be reasoned out then
they would agree to disagree and let the matter rest or until the situation
changed enough to warrant a change of heart on one or the other’s part.
For the most part that is how they maintained their long-term friendship which
beyond the association business already mentioned which they had no say in
since their respective parents had belonged to the same York Hill Meeting had
survived relatively unscathed by modern standards. Brad had supported Steve
when he broke away from the Cambridge Meeting although he was not altogether
sure of why the young radical Quakers needed to seek another space except like
a lot of their generation one of the ways of expressing one’s independence was
to automatically do the opposite of what one’s parents were doing. Brad had
done the same when he decided to pursue an academic career rather than join his
father in his accounting business. Brad had also supported Steve when at the
height of the draft resistance despite the almost automatic military exemption
that young Quaker men were entitled to as a historically recognized pacifistic
religion he had refused to register in order to gain that exemption. As it
turned out the government despite threats over his failure to register never prosecuted
the case (probably assuming that some judge would throw the thing out for wasting
governmental resources when there were plenty of non-Quaker draft resisters
with no such history to fill the bastinado). And Steve in his turn had
supported Brad when he decided that he would do “alternative service” out among
the Puma Indians in Arizona rather than resist.
So just two gentle angry guys going about their respective businesses and
keeping some kind of connection to the peace movement that they were almost
from birth organically attached to. That is until the Iraq War blew up in their
faces back in 2003 (really as the war clouds were forming in 2002 since they
were among the first in Boston to publicly at Park Street Station, an historic
protest location on the Boston Common, come out of their shells in the
aftermath of 9/11 and say “no” to Bush 43’s damn war intentions). No, there had
been no question about the need to organize and protest to the high heavens
about the bogus reasons for the war but rather after the “slam-dunk victory”
what to do when the pre-war mass opposition had dissipated.
See Steve and Brad were if nothing else children of the 1960s anti-war
explosion in America as the senseless, merciless and bloody Vietnam War dragged
on devouring the flower of both American and Vietnamese youth for no known
purpose on the American side anyway (they were both somewhat sympathetic to the
national aspirations of the Vietnamese despite the blood spilled). They had
been as very young men (along with their respective parents) among the first
few thousands (maybe less) who had marched through Central Park in New York under
the auspices of the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee calling for an
immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam to the hoots and catcalls of
“commie, reds, and traitors” by jeering passers-by. But they had also witnessed
the increasing opposition from the young, mainly students, mainly men subject
to draft induction and their friends and supporters, to the professors and
academics, to elements of the political leadership, to the working-class
people, and eventually to the housewives who stirred in righteous indignation.
Finally as well in a sign that the whole project was doomed the anti-war fever got
to the rank and file soldiers who had fought and bled in the war. So a growing
and massive opposition evolved over time, maybe too long a time but evolved.
Both men had been (have been) befuddled by the lack of opposition in the
streets (where such matters as war and peace are resolved one way or the other)
over time as the Afghan and Iraq debacles dragged on and on. It was almost in
exact inverse relationship to the build-up of opposition over Vietnam. And
hence Brad’s dilemma, or rather the government’s as he liked to put it.
Brad (Steve too but he would have taken a different tack) had frankly had
his fill over the previous several years of lonely small vigils on busy
intersections around Boston or on the Common, had had his fill of teach-ins and
shout-outs in university halls, had had his fill of arrests chained to the
fence in front of the White House on snowy December days and humid spring
nights in opposition to the various escalations and calls from troop withdrawal
from Iraq and Afghanistan (calls still necessary under the theory of endless
war by both the Bush and Obama administrations and probably the way things are
going the next one too). So in 2011 he decided on his own as a symbolic material
gesture of personal witness (which is the way the Quakerly like to put the
matter) to stop paying his federal taxes, his war taxes as he called them,
stopped being complicit with the war governments in the only real way that a
private citizen acting on his or her own could protest the endless wars.
The government, the IRS as the main collection agency of the government, is
very jealous of is prerogative as far as collecting dough to keep the
government running goes. So naturally when Brad had done the various maneuvers
necessary to perk the government’s interest as to why a single-tax payer guy
with a substantial income was not paying any taxes they went after him, tried
all the various means they had to tie up every resource they could of his in
order to get their blood money. The whole case is still in litigation and it
has been a see-saw battle between Brad and the IRS so we will not know the
final toll for a while. That part is not important, or of only lesser
importance, compared to Steve’s getting “mad,” angry or whatever word you want
to use to show that Steve though (thinks) that Brad’s actions were foolhardy
and in the language of their youth, “elitist” and off-the-charts.
See Steve when he moved away from Quakerly ways also moved away from that
“personal witness” business as a poor substitute for building mass actions (or
trying to which is as important to him). That is why for the first time in a
long time Steve and Brad have had an argument that has been brewing for a while
now. Maybe an argument which will last as long as the endless wars. Yeah, maybe
that long.
[The story of the brother in the leaflet above, Matthew Hoh, presents
another aspect of Brad Lucas’ argument. Personally I follow Joe Hill- Don’t
mourn, organize!]
In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
No Regrets, narrated by Tom Rush and whoever else he could corral from the old Boston/Cambridge folk scene minute still around, 2014
I know your leavin's too long over due For far too long I've had nothing new to show to you Goodbye dry eyes I watched your plane fade off west of the moon It felt so strange to walk away alone
No regrets No tears goodbye Don't want you back We'd only cry again Say goodbye again
The hours that were yours echo like empty rooms Thoughts we used to share I now keep alone I woke last night and spoke to you Not thinkin' you were gone It felt so strange to lie awake alone
No regrets No tears goodbye Don't want you back We'd only cry again Say goodbye again
Our friends have tried to turn my nights to day Strange faces in your place can't keep the ghosts away Just beyond the darkest hour, just behind the dawn It feels so strange to lead my life alone
No regrets No tears goodbye Don't want you back We'd only cry again Say goodbye again
A few years ago in an earlier 1960s folk minute nostalgia fit I, at the request of my old time friend, Bart Webber, from Carver, a town about thirty miles south of Boston and close enough to have been washed by the folk minute, did some reviews of other male folk performers from that period. Other than Bob Dylan who is the iconic never-ending tour performer most people would still associate with that period, people like Tom Rush who lit up the firmament around Cambridge via the Harvard folk music station, Dave Von Ronk the cantankerous folk historian and musician, Phil Ochs who had probably the deepest political sensibilities of the lot and wrote some of the stronger narrative folk protest songs, Richard Farina who represented that “live fast” edge that we were bequeathed by the “beat” and who tumbled down the hill on a motorcycle, and Jesse Collin Young who probably wrote along with Eric Andersen and Jesse Winchester the most pre-flower child lyrics of the bunch.
Bart had just seen a fragile seeming, froggy-voiced Bob Dylan in one of stages of his apparently never-ending concerts tours and had been shaken by the sight and had wondered about the fate of other such folk performers. That request turned into a series of reviews of male folk-singers entitled Not Bob Dylan (and after that, also at Bart’s request, a series entitled Not Joan Baez based on some of the same premises except on the distaff side (nice word, right, you know golden-voiced Judy Collins and her sweet songs of lost, Carolyn Hester and her elegant rendition of Walt Whitman’s Oh Captain, My Captain, Joan’s sister Mimi Farina forever linked with Richard and sorrows, and Malvina Reynolds who could write a song on the wing, fast okay, and based as well on the mass media having back then declared that pair the “king and queen” of the burgeoning folk music minute scene).
That first series had asked two central questions-why did those male folk singers not challenge Dylan who as I noted the media of the day had crowned king of the folk minute for supremacy in the smoky coffeehouse night (then, now the few remaining are mercifully smoke-free although then I smoked as heavily as any guy who though such behavior was, ah, manly and a way to seen “cool” to the young women, why else would we have done such a crazy to the health thing if not to impress some certain she) and, if they had not passed on and unfortunately a number have a few more since that series as well most notably Jesse Winchester, were they still working the smoke-free church basement, homemade cookies and coffee circuit that constitutes the remnant of that folk minute even in the old hotbeds like Cambridge and Boston. (What I call the U/U circuit since while other church venues are part of the mix you can usually bet safely that if an event is scheduled it was will at a U/U church which is worthy of a little sketch of its own sometime in order to trace the folk minute after the fanfare had died down and as a tribute to those heart souls at radio stations like WCAS and WUMB and in places like Club Passim whose efforts have kept the thing going in order to try to pass it on to the younger generations now that demographics are catching up with the folkies from the 1960s heyday). Moreover, were they still singing and song-writing, that pairing of singer and writer having been becoming more prevalent, especially in the folk milieu in the wake of Bob Dylan’s word explosions back then. The days when the ground was shifting under the Tin Pan Alley Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ Jerome Kern kingdom.
Here is the general format I used in that series for asking and answering those two questions which still apply today if one is hell-bent on figuring out the characters who rose and fell during that time:
“If I were to ask someone, in the year 2010 as I have done periodically both before and after, to name a male folk singer from the 1960s I would assume that if I were to get any answer to that question that the name would be Bob Dylan. That “getting any answer” prompted by the increasing non-recognition of the folk genre by anybody under say forty, except those few kids who somehow “found” their parents’ stash of Vanguard records (for example, there were other folk labels including, importantly, Columbia Records) just as some in an earlier Pete Seeger/Weavers/Leadbelly/ Josh White/Woody Guthrie records in our parents’ stashes. Today’s kids mainly influenced by hip-hop, techno-music and just straight popular music.
And that Dylan pick would be a good and appropriate choice. One can endlessly dispute whether or not Dylan was (or wanted to be since he clearly had tired of the role, or seemed to by about 1966 when he for all intents and purposes “retired” for a while prompted by a serious motorcycle accident and other incidents) the voice of the Generation of ’68 (so named for the fateful events of that watershed year, especially the Democratic Convention in America in the summer of that year when the old-guard pulled the hammer down and in Paris where the smell of revolution was palpably in the air for the first time since about World War II, when those, including me, who tried to “turn the world upside down” to make it more livable began to feel that the movement was reaching some ebb tide) but in terms of longevity and productivity, the never-ending touring until this day and releasing of X amount of bootleg recordings, the copyrighting of every variation of every song, including traditional songs, he ever covered and the squelching of the part of the work that he has control over on YouTube he fits the bill as a known quality. However, there were a slew of other male folk singers who tried to find their niche in the folk milieu and who, like Dylan, today continue to produce work and to perform. The artist under review, Tom Rush, is one such singer/songwriter.”
“The following is a question that I have been posing in reviewing the work of a number of male folk singers from the 1960s and it is certainly an appropriate question to ask of Tom Rush as well. Did they aspire to be the “king” of the genre? I do not know if Tom Rush, like his contemporary Bob Dylan, started out wanting to be the king of the hill among male folk singers but he certainly had some things going for him. A decent acoustic guitar but a very interesting (and strong baritone) voice to fit the lyrics of love, hope, and longing that he was singing about at the time, particularly the No Regrets/Rockport Sunday combination which along with Wasn’t That A Mighty Storm and Joshua Gone Barbados were staples early on. During much of this period along with his own songs he was covering other artists, particularly Joni Mitchell and her Urge For Going and The Circle Game, so it is not clear to me that he had that same Dylan drive by let’s say 1968.
I just mentioned that he covered Joni Mitchell in this period. A very nice version of Urge For Going that captures the wintry, got to get out of here, imaginary that Joni was trying to evoke about things back in her Canadian homeland. And the timelessness and great lyrical sense of his No Regrets, as the Generation of ’68 sees another generational cycle starting, as is apparent now if it was not then. The covers of fellow Cambridge folk scene fixture Eric Von Schmidt on Joshua Gone Barbados and Galveston Flood are well done. As is the cover of Bukka White’s Panama Limited (although you really have to see or hear old Bukka flailing away on his old beat up National guitar to get the real thing on YouTube).”
Whether Tom Rush had the fire back then is a mute question now although in watching the documentary under review, No Regrets, in which he tells us about his life from childhood to the very recent past (2014) at some point he did lose the flaming burn down the building fire, just got tired of the road like many, many other performers and became a top-notch record producer, a “gentleman farmer,” and returned to the stage, most dramatically with his annual show Tom Rush-The Club 47 Tradition Continues held at Symphony Hall in Boston each winter. And in this documentary appropriately done under the sign of “no regrets” which tells Tom’s take on much that happened then he takes a turn, an important oral tradition turn, as folk historian.
He takes us, even those of us who were in the whirl of some of it back then to those key moments when we were looking for something rooted, something that would make us pop in the red scare Cold War night of the early 1960s. Needless to say the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge gets plenty of attention as does his own fitful start in getting his material recorded, or rather fitful starts, mainly walking around to every possible venue in town to get backing for record production the key to getting heard by a wider audience via the radio and to become part of the increasing number of folk music-oriented programs, the continuing struggle to this day from what he had to say once you are not a gold-studded fixture.
Other coffeehouses and other performers of the time, especially Eric Von Schmidt, another performer with a ton of talent and song-writing ability who had been on the scene very, very early on who eventually decided that his artistic career took first place, get a nod of recognition. As does the role of key radio folk DJ Dick Summer in show-casing new work (and the folk show, picked up accidently one Sunday night when I was frustrated with the so-called rock and roll on the local AM rock station and flipped the dial of my transistor radio and heard a different sound, the sound of Dave Von Ronk, where I started to pick up my life-long folk “habit”). So if you want to remember those days when you sought refuse in the coffeehouses and church basements, sought a “cheap” date night (for the price of a couple of cups of coffee sipped slowly in front of you and your date, a shared pastry and maybe a few bucks admission or tossed into the passed-around “basket” you got away easy and if she liked the sound too, who knows what else) or, ouch, want to know why your parents are still playing Joshua’s Gone Barbados on the record player as you go out the door Saturday night to your own adventures watch this film.
