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
In
Search Of Sam Spade-Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town-A Book Review
Book
Review
By
Sam Lowell
Dashiell
Hammett: Nightmare Town, edited by Kirby McCauley, Martin Greenberg, and Ed
Gorman, 1999
In
an earlier review of some of Dashiell Hammett’s less familiar work to be
mentioned below I noted that there was no question most crime detection writers,
readers too, since the 1920s or so owe, whether they acknowledge the fact or
not, a huge debt of gratitude to pioneer hard-boiled private detective crime
detection writer Dashiell Hammett (Raymond Chandler and a few other associated
with the Black Mask magazine too but let’s stick with Hammett here since
we are reviewing a book about him and his early work). Owe it as well whether
they followed his model or not (and most have done so one way or another
whether creating detective books or creating for the screen detectives). His
model of detectives who unlike previous models were made of ordinary clay, did
their detection, their job as a business, as a livelihood rather than as an
amateur sport while clipping stocks and bonds coupons, got in trouble with the
public cops as much as work with them (or picked up their leavings when they
dumped the case in the cold files), had a work-a-day code of conduct which was
more or less followed, chased after a few windmills, and made almost every
mistake in the book pursuing that blind-folded lady with the slightly- tipped
scales. Grabbed a few dames, you know frails, in the a bargain.
In
many ways Sam Spade, the private eye extraordinaire of The Maltese Falcon, who
had a trial run in this compilation under review, Nightmare Town, in three short stories is the epitome of that model
which Hammett developed. Working out of a fly-by-night no front office in
Frisco town with his soon to be late partner Miles Archer Sam got mixed up in
plenty of drama despite his low-key workaday manner. (Archer a partner that he
hated, hated so much he had Archer’s name taken off the office door right after
his murder and partner whose wife, to his subsequent regret, he was playing
around with). Naturally when a dame, not Archer’s wife but a serious piece of
work, entered into the picture there are bound to be problems, especially if
she is a femme fatale like Brigid.
But Sam bought the ticket, took the ride. Played his hand very close to the
vest when the bodies started piling up and all led to the pursuit of some
stupid bird, some stuff that dreams were made of.
But
here is where Hammett broke the new ground. Sam was something of a windmill
chaser, needed to see some justice for old Miles who fell in the line of duty
when all was said and done. Worked that moral code closely too, that code that
said if you are doing private detection as a business then you had better not
be addled by some lying skirt and her confederates if only because leaving
something un-avenged is bad for business, bad for the profession. Here’s the
beautiful part though once he tagged Brigid as the body-counter, once he figured
that playing along with her would be a lifetime of looking over his shoulder.
He let her take the tumble, take the big step off since she tried to play him
for a sap. Made the cops look silly too when they tried to frame him and he
gave them the case all tied up in a bow without their help. Yeah, Sam had all
the angles covered.
Creating
fictional detectives (or any characters that will draw an interest from the
reading or film public) that break the mold did not come out of thin air but
was a process started from Hammett’s first writings in the early 1920s when he
got serious about writing stories as a profession (after being a number of
things including soldier in World War I and a Pinkerton private detective
himself. I recently reviewed a book, Dashiell Hammett: Lost Stories, that
detailed through some long forgotten early stories (as of 2005) the history of
those early efforts, how they acted as a catalyst to the later more famous work
like those produced here and in the process provided a very impressive
chronology of their literary history (and the ups and downs of Hammett getting
his work published as well).
Most Hammett
aficionados know that his reputation rests mainly on The Maltese Falcon, The
Thin Man, three other novels, the Continental Op series and a bunch of
detective stories in the famous Black Mask magazine and that output
occurred in a relatively short span from the early 1920s to about the early
1940s and then he sort of fell off the earth as far as his new literary
production went (he died in 1961). The stories in this compilation represent a
further maturation of his work and of his characters, particular Spade and the
Thin Man. In that earlier review the editor (Vince Emery) created charts
throughout the book which featured what he called Hammett-isms, literary
devices, mannerisms, commonly used expressions and the like Hammett used which
showed something I had suspected is true of most writers who have published
more than a couple of works-they stand by, one may say fall in love with, some
tried and try concepts throughout their careers. These stories confirm a lot of
those classic Hammett-isms noted by Emery.
It
is interesting to see even in these later stories how Hammett was writing about
ordinary people for ordinary people. Making his detectives working stuffs like
in the real world. Creating believable situations, moral and professional, that
real detectives might confront (with a little literary license of course to
spice up the drama). And created characters who placed him in the pantheon of
American literature in the twentieth century. In the Lost Stories review I asked the generic question that any more
specialized work begs-Do you need to this book? There I said no. You needed to read the five major
novels first and you had better make The Maltese Falcon the first one if
you want to know what it was like to be present at the creation of the
hard-boiled private detective, know what it was like when men and women wrote
such works for keeps. Then when you became a Hammett aficionado grab that book.
That is even truer here with Nightmare
Town.
Excluded from Boston’s St. Patrick’s Parade were Veterans for Peace, as well as other LGBTQ groups. Included this year again are: OUTVets and Boston Pride
SOUTH BOSTON— Once again Veterans who have honorably served this country, many in times of war with decorations and wounds to prove it, are being denied from walking in the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. Veterans who have experienced war first hand and who now advocate and work for peace and peaceful resolution to conflicts – NEED NOT APPLY.
“It is shameful that the Allied War Veterans Council are once again disrespecting veterans on Saint Patrick’s Day by not allowing a small unit of Veterans For Peace to march in the traditional parade. What are they afraid of? Our rejection is solely based on the fact that we work for Peace,” stated Pat Scanlon, event organizer for VFP. “This continues to be an embarrassment to the City of Boston and the Boston Police Department who attempted to resolve the issue this year.”
On October 27th negotiations between Brian Mahoney, the then Commander of the Allied War Veterans Council, and Scanlon of Veterans For Peace, took place in Police Commissioner Bill Evan’s office to attempt to resolve the conflict. At the meeting, Veterans For Peace pared down their unit to simply a small contingent of between seventy-five and one hundred veterans, two banners, a couple of cars for disabled and elderly veterans, and flags. The lead banner would read, “Lieutenant Tony F. Flaherty U.S.N. Memorial Unit of Veterans For Peace,” named after their beloved member, long-time resident of South Boston who passed away peacefully in July. Tony at one time was best friends with John “Wacko” Hurley the long time Commander of Allied War Veterans Council. How fitting it would have been to honor both men, who held differing views on war and peace, with resolution of this long standing conflict.
At that time, a deal was struck in the Commissioner Evan’s office. The size and make up of VFP’s unit was acceptable. It was agreed that Veterans For Peace complied with all the stipulations and regulations of the AWVC application. The only thing left, according to Brian Mahoney was for the AWVC to vote to approve the agreement. Two months later the Council finally voted on three things: First, to ask OUTVets to remove the rainbow from their banner, second, to rescind the invitation to Boston Pride and deny their application and third, deny Veterans For Peace’s application. The then Commander of the AWVC, Brian Mahoney resigned at that moment in protest over the vote.
Two months later the Council finally voted on three things: First, to ask OUTVets to remove the rainbow from their banner, second, to rescind the invitation to Boston Pride and deny their application and third, deny Veterans For Peace’s application. The then Commander of the AWVC, Brian Mahoney resigned at that moment in protest over the vote.
Mahoney stated, “Veterans For Peace, are veterans, have complied with every stipulation of the parade’s application and have pledged to abide by all the rules and regulations as defined by the Council and should be allowed to march in the parade. They are being denied because of what they think and this is not right.”
Once word of this vote was made public, Sylvan Bruni, President of Boston Pride and long time ally of Veterans For Peace and one of the organizers of the inclusive alternative St. Patrick’s Peace Parade, was livid. Both he and Scanlon contacted Mayor Walsh and Commissioner Evan’s offices. Significant pressure was placed upon the AWVC from City Hall resulting in the Council quickly reversing themselves on their decision regarding Out Vets and Boston Pride. Both of these groups will march in the parade this year, but not Veterans For Peace.
Mahoney stated, “Veterans For Peace, are veterans, have complied with every stipulation of the parade’s application and have pledged to abide by all the rules and regulations as defined by the Council and should be allowed to march in the parade. They are being denied because of what they think and this is not right.”
On Tuesday, February 2, a meeting was held at the VFW Post in South Boston to reconsider Veterans For Peace’s application. Police Commissioner Bill Evans, Police Superintendent Bernie O’Rourke and Scanlon from Veterans For Peace made the case for VFP to be allowed to walk in the parade. Scanlon answered every question presented to him. He emphasized that Veterans For Peace would comply with all the rules and regulations as defined by the Parade Organizers. Commissioner Evans stated why it is important to resolve this issue and allow Veterans For Peace into the parade. The Commissioner also said, “the exclusion of these veterans is an embarrassment to the City of Boston.” That evening, after their guests had departed, by a vote of seven to six the AWVC once again denied Veterans For Peace to walk in the parade.
“This decision by the AWVC to exclude Veterans For Peace once again is not in keeping with the opinions of the vast majority of residents of South Boston, it is shameful and disrespectful of veterans,” said Scanlon. “They gave no reason for the rejection. One can only conclude that Peace is still a dirty word in South Boston, as least for the fifteen or so members of the AWVC. Boston has changed, the neighborhood has changed. People appreciate that some veterans who have experienced war first hand, are committed to and continue to work for peace.”
“…The City of Boston should take back the management of the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, making it open and accessible to all, allowing all to be part of the historic celebration of the patron saint of Ireland, Saint Patrick, especially our veterans.”—Bob Funke, the Coordinator of Veterans For Peace
Bob Funke, the Coordinator of Veterans For Peace, a two tour veteran of Vietnam, and recipient of two silver stars, three bronze stars and three purple hearts stated, “Veterans For Peace contends the shortening the parade does not go far enough to rectify the intransigence of the AWVC. The City of Boston should take back the management of the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, making it open and accessible to all, allowing all to be part of the historic celebration of the patron saint of Ireland, Saint Patrick, especially our veterans.” NOTE: In March of last year, TRT conducted an in-depth story about the AWVC and their “exclusive” parade, which only allowed OUT Vets and Boston Pride to march. Since then mentions were made that this year things would change and Boston Pride’s inclusion would help other LGBT groups to march this year. As of this date, no other LGBT group has been approved to march. Other TRT coverage of the St. Patrick’s Parade and the continuous exclusion of other groups, history, etc. can be found here.
[From a News Release]
As March 17th Approaches- The Children of Easter 1916- A Moment In
History… For M.M, Class of 1964
Peter Paul
Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:
“A Terrible
Beauty Is Born”, a recurring line from the great Anglo-Irish poet William
Butler Yeats, Easter, 1916.
At the corner of Hancock Street
and East Main Street, forming a wedge in front of our old beige-bricked high
school, ancient North Adamsville High School now of blessed memory although
that hard fact was not always the case after passing through its portals but that
for another day, stands against all weathers a poled plaque, sometimes,
perhaps, garlanded with a flower of flag. From that vantage point, upon a
recent walk-by, I have noticed that it gives the old school building a majestic
“mighty fortress is our home” look. The plaque atop the pole, as you have
probably already figured since such plaques are not uncommon in our
casualty-filled, war-weary world, commemorates a fallen soldier, here of World
War I, and is officially known as the Frank O’Brien Square. The corners and
squares of most cities and towns in most countries of the world have such
memorials to their war dead, needless to say far too many.
That plaque furthermore now, as
it did not have to back in the 1960s, competes, unsuccessfully, with a huge Raider
red billboard telling one and all of the latest doings; a football game here, a
soccer game there, or upcoming events; a Ms. Something pageant, a cheer-leading
contest, a locally produced play; or honoring somebody who gathered some grand
academic achievement, won some accolade for a well-performed act and so forth.
In due course that billboard too will be relegated to the “vaults" of the
history of our town as well. This comment , however, is not about that possible
scenario or about the follies of war, or even about why it is that young men
(and now women) wind up doing the dangerous work of war that is decided by old
men (and now increasingly old women), although that would be a worthy subject.
No, the focus here is the name of the soldier, or rather the last name,
O’Brien, and the Irish-ness of it.
A quick run through of the names
of the students listed in, our yearbook, the Magnet for the Class of
1964, will illustrate my point. If Irish surnames are not in the majority, then
they are predominant, and that does not even take into consideration the half
or quarter Irish heritage that is hidden behind other names. My own family history
is representative of that social mixing with a set of Irish and English-derived
grandparents. And that is exactly the point.
If North Adamsville in the old
days was not exactly “Little Dublin”, the heritage of the Irish diaspora
certainly was nevertheless apparent for all to see, and to hear. More than one
brogue-dripped man or woman, reflecting newness to the country and to the town,
could be heard by an attentive listener at Harry’s Variety Store on Sagamore
Street seeking that vagrant bottle of milk (or making that bet with Harry’s
book on the sure-fire winner in the sixth at Aqueduct but we will keep that
hush since, who knows, the statute of limitations may still not have run out
yet on that “crime,” although the horse certainly did, run out that is). Or at
Doc Andrews’ Drugstore, yah, good old Doc over on the corner of Young Street
and Newberry seeking, holy grail-seeking that vagrant bottle of whiskey,
strictly for medicinal purposes of course.
And one did not have to be the
slightest bit attentive but only within a couple of blocks of the locally
famous, or infamous as the case may be, Dublin Grille to know through the mixes
of brogue and rough-hewn strange language English that the newcomers had
“assimilated.” To be fair, those same mixes could be heard coming piously out
of Sunday morning Mass at Sacred Heart or at any hour on those gas-guzzling,
smoked-fumed Eastern Mass buses that got one hither and fro in the old town.
That North Adamsville was merely a way-station away from the self-contained
Irish ghettos of Dorchester and South Boston to the Irish Rivieras, like
Marshfield and heathen Cohasset and Duxbury, of the area was, or rather is,
also apparent as anyone who has been in the old town of late will note.
And that too is the point. Today
Asian-Americans, particularly the Chinese and Vietnamese, and other minorities
have followed that well-trodden path to North Adamsville from way-station
Boston. They have made, and will make, their mark on the ethos of this
hard-working working-class part of town. So while the faint aroma of corn beef
and cabbage (and colorful, red-drenched pasta dishes, from the other main
ethnic group of old North Adamsville, the Italians) has been replaced by the
pungent smells of moo shi and poi and the bucolic brogue by some sweet
sing-song Mandarin dialect the life of the town moves on.
Yet, I can still feel, when I
haphazardly walk certain streets, the Irish-ness of the diaspora “old sod” deep
in my bones. To be sure, as a broken amber liquor bottle spotted on the ground
reminded me, there were many, too many, father whiskey-sodden nights (complete
with the obligatory beer chaser) that many a man spent his pay on to keep his
“demons” from the door. And to be sure, as well, the grandmother passed-down
ubiquitous, much dented, one-size-fits all pot on the old iron stove for the
potato-laden boiled dinner (that’s the corn beef and cabbage mentioned above
for the unknowing heathens) that stretched an already tight food budget just a
little longer when the ever present hard times cast their shadow at that same
door.
And, of course, there was the
great secret cultural relic; the relentless, never-ending struggle to keep the
family “dirty linen” from the public eye, from those “shawlie” eyes ready to
pounce at the mere hint of some secret scandal. But also this: the passed down
heroic tales of our forebears, the sons and daughters of Roisin, in their
heart-rending eight hundred year struggle against the crushing of the “harp
beneath the crown” (and even heathens know whose crown that was); of the
whispered homages to the ghosts of our Fenian dead; of great General Post
Office uprisings, large and small; and, of the continuing struggle in the
North. Yes, as that soldier’s plaque symbolizes, an Irish presence will never
completely leave the old town, nor will the willingness to sacrifice.
Oh, by the way, that Frank
O'Brien for whom the square in front of the old school was named, would have
been my grand uncle, the brother of my Grandmother Riley (nee O'Brien) from
over on Young Street across from the Welcome Young Field.
You
Can’t Get There From Here- With The Appalachia Hills And Hollows In Mind
By
Zack James
“Damn,
those shacks we just passed by looked like they could have come out of some
John Steinbeck or Erskine Caldwell novel from the dustbowl, tobacco road 1930s
or something, ” Bradley Fox, shaking his head, mentioned to his companion,
Sarah Simon, as they travelled down Highway 7 toward Prestonsburg, and “home.”
That “home” rightly in quotation marks since Bradley Fox for whom this journey
had been planned had never to his conscious knowledge been to that town in his
life. Had for many years never even though to go there until his brother,
Jamison, told him a story about how when he, Jamison, was young, about a year
old, back in 1946 or so, their parents, Bolton and Delores Fox, had taken a
trip from Riverdale in Massachusetts where Delores had grown up and which had
been their residence after they got married when Bolton was discharged from the
Marines, and gone down to Prestonsburg where Bolton had grown up to see if
prospects there for work and living were any better than in post-World War II
Riverdale. The textile mills which had sustained that town’s economy for most
of the previous century were heading out, were heading south and would
eventually leave for foreign shores as the century progressed and so staying
pat looked like a wasted option.
The
intriguing part was that Delores had been pregnant with Bradley when this
attempted move took place and so although he was only in the womb he had been
“home” to the Appalachian hills and hollows before he breathed his first air
breathe. What made the story all the more dramatic was that Yankee born and
bred Bradley, or he liked to present himself to the world that way, always was
ashamed, or if not ashamed then always hiding that element of his roots, from
where his father came from. Like his father had had any say where he had come
from. This distain would come out on anything from Bolton’s slightly southern
drawl which would made Bradley’s friend laugh whenever they heard that (calling
Bolton damn “reb” and other silly stuff until Bradley no longer brought friends
around until high school when Bolton’s accent was seen as “cool” if not by
Bradley then by his friends who thought-since Bolton was not their father-that
Bolton was cool in the language of the time.
His
feelings of shame came out as well when Bradley was old enough to recognize
that his father, when he was able to find work, got the short end of the stick,
got into that last hired, first fired (or rather laid-off, pink-slipped which
meant the same thing) syndrome which meant that there was never enough of
life’s goods around in good times or bad. Bradley resented that, resented that
because of those shortage his family abode looked like, especially in
over-grown summer, those Dorethea Lange photographs he had seen in a magazine
of some places down south, down in Appalachia, down not too far from where he
and Sarah were heading on State Highway 7.
Yeah
times had been tough for Bradley, when he got “caught,” got caught out when
Jack Kennedy whom he idolized for being everything his family was not decided
to do something not only about improving the lives of black people down south,
which he was okay with, but with the poor benighted “white trash” as well. The
whole thing from what he gathered later had been started when guy named Michael
Harrington wrote a book, The Other
America, about poverty in white bread Appalachia and mentioned
Prestonsburg, Christ, Prestonsburg of all places and him with a birth
certificate which showed his father’s place of birth that very same place. That
was not the worst of it though because nobody really needed to know, or
probably gave a “rat’s ass” an expression that he and his boys used excessively
then about where his father was born and raised and what his condition of life
had been if some damned school do-gooders didn’t decide that the citizens,
students anyway, should put together a clothing drive for the poor misbegotten
residents of Prestonsburg and have that campaign announced day after day for
several weeks over the P. A system at school making him feel like crawling
under the seat in homeroom when that announcement for goods came over the
loudspeaker.
So
Bradley Fox had a serious history of denial about one half of his roots (the
Delores half was pure Riverdale Irish and thus he could “pass” and
unfortunately his father Bolton P. Fox went to an early grave being reconciled
with his son over that silly stuff). It took a long time, too long, and too
much estrangement, too many missed chances to right wrongs before he realized
that simple truth that his father could not help where he had been born anymore
that Bradley could be. By the time he realized that, realized that his father
was good and honest man who never got break number one in his life it was too
late. But that sense that he had committed a grave injustice to the man never
stopped haunting him. And hence the trip south “home”
Maybe
it was that father guilt, maybe it was Sarah continuously telling him over the
previous decade that he needed to physically confront his fears and maybe it
was that mountain music that lately he had been drawn too. The music of the
Saturday night barn dance down in the hills and hollows with the mist coming
down over the mountains to blanket the night, music to take the sting out of
Willie’s White Thunder and to let those young lovers do their courting ritual
in peace. Whatever combination prevailed one day a few months after Bradley had
given up the day to day operation of his roofing company to his younger son he
cell-phoned Sarah and asked her if she would be willing to go south with him.
She made him laugh when she said that was her in the front of his house with
the car motor running so get moving. And so they did. That didn’t stop Bradley
as they headed south of the Mason-Dixon Line from feeling queasy, very queasy
as they approached the Ohio River and entered into coal country with its
beauty, starkness, and decay all mixed up. Then he saw those tar-paper shacks
with their open air window and old papas sitting on the bent porch, kids and
animals running every which way and he thought back to those photographs from
his youth and started to get those old-time feelings of disgust. No this would
not be an easy trip “home,” not easy at all.
*****Searching For The American Songbook - In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute-The Joy Street Coffeehouse In Mind
Introduction
Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
I recently completed the second leg of this series, sketches from the time of my coming of age classic rock and roll from about the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, a series which is intended to go through different stages of the American songbook as it has evolved since the 19th century, especially music that could be listened to by the general population through radio, record player, television, and more recently the fantastic number of ways to listen to it all from computers to iPods. This series was not intended to be placed in any chronological order so the first leg dealt, and I think naturally so given the way my musical interests got formed, with the music of my parents’ generation, that being the parents of the generation of ’68, those who struggled through the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s.
This third leg is centered on the music of the folk minute that captured a segment of my generation of ’68 as it came of social and political age in the early 1960s. It is easy now to forget in the buzz of the moment that this segment was fairly small to begin with people who stayed with it for a few years and then like the rest of us got back to the new rock and roll that was taking center stage by the time of the summers of love. Today when talking to people, to those who slogged through the 1960s with me, those who will become very animated about Deadhead experiences, Golden Gate Park Airplane going-ons, their merry-prankster-like “on the bus” experiences, even death Altamont when I ask about the influence of folk they will look at me with pained blank expressions or cite ritualistically Bob Dylan confirms how small and where that folk minute was concentrated.
Early on though some of us felt a fresh breeze was coming through the land, were desperately hoping that it was not some ephemeral rising and then back to business as usual, although we certainly being young did not dwell on that ebb tide idea since like with our physical selves we thought our ideas once implanted would last forever. Silly kids. Maybe it was the change in political atmosphere pulling us forward as men (and it was mostly men then) born in the 20th century were beginning to take over from the old fogies (our father/uncle/godfather Ike and his ilk) and we would fall in behind them. Maybe it was the swirl just then being generated questioning lots of old things like the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) red scare investigations, like Mister James Crow in the South andthe ghettos of the North, like why did we need all those nuclear bombs that were going to do nothing but turn us into flames. Maybe it was that last faint echo of the “beats” with their poetry, their be-bop jazz, their nightly escapade trying to hold onto that sullen look of Marlon Brando, that brooding look of James Dean, that cool pitter-patter of Alan Ginsberg against the night-stealers. Heady stuff, no question.
Maybe too since it involved cultural expression (although we would be clueless to put what we felt in those terms, save that for the folk music academics complete with endnotes and footnotes after the fire had burned out) and our cultural expression centered around jukeboxes and transistor radios it was that we had, some of us, tired of the Fabians, the various Bobbys (Vee, Darin, Rydell, etc.), the various incarnations of Sandra Dee, Leslie Gore, Brenda Lee, etc., wanted a new sound, or as it turned out a flowing back to the roots music, to the time and place when people had to make their own music or go without (it gets a little mixed up once the radio widened the horizons of who could hear what and when). So, yes, we wanted to know what on those lonely Saturday nights gave our forebears pause, let them sit back maybe listen to some hot-blooded black man with a primitive guitar playing the blues (a step up from the kids’ stuff nailed one-eyed string hung from the front porch but nowhere near that coveted National Steel beauty they eyed in the pawnshop in town just waiting to rise up singing), some jazz, first old time religion stuff and then the flicker of that last fade be-bop with that solid sexy sax searching for the high white note, mountain music, all fiddles and mandolins, playing against that late night wind coming down the hills and hollows reaching that red barn just in time to finish up that last chance slow moaning waltz. Yes, and Tex-Mex, Western swing, Child ballads and the “new wave” protest sound that connected our new breeze political understandings with our musical interests.
The folk music minute was for me, and not just me, thus something of a branching off for a while from rock and roll in its doldrums since a lot of what we were striving for was to make a small musical break-out from the music that we came of chronological age to unlike the big break-out that rock and roll represented from the music that was wafting through many of our parents’ houses in the early 1950s.
In preparing this part of the series I have been grabbing a lot of anecdotal remarks from some old-time folkies. People I have run into over the past several years in the threadbare coffeehouses and cafes I frequent around New England. You know, and I am being completely unfair here, those guys with the long beards and unkempt balding hair hidden by a knotted ponytail, flannel, clean or unclean, shirt regardless of weather and blue jeans, unclean, red bandana in the back pocket, definitely unclean and harmonica at the ready going on and on about how counter-revolutionary Bob Dylan was to hook up the treasured acoustic guitar to an amp in about 1965 and those gals who are still wearing those shapeless flour bag dresses, letting their hair grow grey or white, wearing the formerly “hip” now mandatory granny glasses carrying some autoharp or other such old-time instrument like they just got out of some hills and hollows of Appalachia (in reality mostly with nice Ivy League seven sisters resumes after their names)arguing about how any folk song created after about 1922 is not really a folk song both sexes obviously having not gotten the word that, ah, times have changed. In short those folkies who are still alive and kicking and still interested in talking about that minute. And continuing to be unfair not much else except cornball archaic references that are supposed to produce “in the know” laughs but which were corny even back then when they held forth in the old Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford of blessed memory where budding songwriters wrote on etched napkins the next great Kumbaya hit, non-songwriters tuned up their Yamaha guitars by ear, by ear, Jesus, to play for the “basket” out in the mean streets after they had their fill of the see-through coffee provided by the place, small-voiced poets echoed Ginsberg eve of destruction sonnets, and new guard writers wore down pencil stubs and erasers catching all the sounds and hubris around them mixed with sotted winos, sterno bums , con men, hustlers, misguided hookers, and junkies to fill the two in the morning air.
For those not in the know, or who have not seen the previously described denizens of the folk night in your travels, folk music is still alive and well (for the moment, the demographic trends are more frightening as the dying embers flicker) in little enclaves throughout the country mainly in New England but in other outposts as well. Those enclaves and outposts are places where some old “hippies,” “folkies,” communalists, went after the big splash 1960s counter-cultural explosion ebbed in about 1971 (that is my signpost for the ebb, the time when we tried to “turn the world upside down” in Washington over the Vietnam war by attempting to shut the government down if they refused to shut down the war and got nothing but teargas, police sticks and thousands of arrests for out troubles, others have earlier and later dates and events which seemed decisive but all that I have spoken to, or have an opinion on, agree by the mid-1970s that wave had tepidly limped to shore). Places like Saratoga, New York, Big Sur and Joshua Tree out in California, Taos, Eugene, Boise, Butte, Boulder, as well as the traditional Village, Harvard Square, North Beach/Berkeley haunts of memory. They survive, almost all of them, through the support of a dwindling number of aficionados and a few younger kids, kids who if not the biological off-spring of the folk minute then very much like those youthful by-gone figures and who somehow got into their parents’ stash of folk albums and liked what they heard against the current trends in music, in once a month socially-conscious Universalist-Unitarian church basement coffeehouses, school activity rooms booked for the occasional night, small local restaurants and bars sponsoring “open mics” on off-nights to draw a little bigger dinner crowd, and probably plenty of other small ad hoc venues where there are enough people with guitars, mandos, harmonicas, and what have you to while away an evening.
There seems to be a consensus among my anecdotal sourcesthat their first encounter with folk music back then, other than when they were in the junior high school music class where one would get a quick checkerboard of various types of music and maybe hear This Land Is Your Land in passing, was through the radio. That junior high school unconscious introduction of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land had been my own introduction in Mr. Dasher’s seventh grade Music Appreciation class where he inundated us with all kinds of songs from everywhere like the Red River Valley and the Mexican Hat Dance. For his efforts he was innocently nicknamed by us “Dasher The Flasher,” a moniker that would not serve him well in these child-worried times by some nervous parents.
A few folkies that I had run into back then, fewer now, including a couple of girlfriends back then as I entered college picked up, like some of those few vagrant younger aficionados hanging around the clubs, the music via their parents’ record collections although that was rare and back then and usually meant that the parents had been some kind of progressives back in the 1930s and 1940s when Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Pete Seeger and others lit up the leftist firmament in places like wide-open New York City. Today the parents, my generation parents would have been in the civil rights movement, SDS or maybe the anti-war movement although the latter was drifting more by then to acid rock as the foundational music.
That radio by the way would be the transistor radio usually purchased at now faded Radio Shack by frustrated parents, frustrated that we were playing that loud unwholesome rock and roll music on the family record player causing them to miss their slumbers, and was attached to all our youthful ears placed there away from prying parents and somehow if you were near an urban area you might once you tired of the “bubble gum” music on the local rock station flip the dial and get lucky some late night, usually Sunday and find an errant station playing such fare.
That actually had been my experience one night, one Sunday night in the winter of 1962 (month and date lost in the fog of memory) when I was just flipping the dial and came upon the voice of a guy, an old pappy guy I assumed, singing a strange song in a gravelly voice which intrigued me because that was neither a rock song nor a rock voice. The format of the show as I soon figured out as I continued to listen that night was that the DJ would, unlike the rock stations which played one song and then interrupted the flow with at least one commercial for records, drive-in movies, drive-in theaters, maybe suntan lotion, you know stuff kids with disposable income would take a run at, played several songs so I did not find out who the singer was until a few songs later. The song was identified by the DJ as the old classic mountain tune “discovered” by Cecil Sharpe in the hills and hollows of Appalachian Kentucky in 1916 Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, the singer the late Dave Von Ronk who, as I found out later doubled up as a very informative folk historian and who now has a spot, a street last I heard, in the Village in New York where he hailed from named after him, the station WBZ in Boston not a station that under ordinary circumstances youth would have tuned into then since it was mainly a news and talk show station, the DJ Dick Summer a very central figure in spreading the folk gospel and very influential in promoting local folk artists like Tom Rush on the way up as noted in a recent documentary, No Regrets, about Rush’s fifty plus years in folk music. I was hooked.
That program also played country blues stuff, stuff that folk aficionados had discovered down south as part of our generation took seriously the search for roots, music, cultural, family, and which would lead to the “re-discovery” of the likes of Son House (and that flailing National Steel guitar that you can see him flail like crazy on Death Letter Blues on YouTube these days), Bukka White (all sweaty, all feisty, playing the hell out of his National face up with tunes like Aberdeen, Mississippi Woman and Panama, Limited) Skip James (all cool hand Luke singing that serious falsetto on I’d Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man which got me in trouble more than one time with women including recently), and Mississippi John Hurt (strumming seemingly casually his moaning Creole Belle and his slyly salacious Candy Man).
I eventually really learned about the blues, the country stuff from down south which coincides with roots and folk music and the more muscular (plugged in electrically) Chicago city type blues that connects with the beginnings of rock and roll, which will be the next and final leg of this series, straight up though from occasionally getting late, late at night, usually on a Sunday for some reason, Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour from WXKE in Chicago but that is another story. Somebody once explained to me the science behind what happened on certain nights with the distant radio waves that showed up mostly because then their frequencies overrode closer signals. What I know for sure that it was not was the power of that dinky transistor radio with its two nothing batteries. So for a while I took those faraway receptions as a sign of the new dispensation coming to free us, of the new breeze coming through the land in our search for an earthly Eden. Praise be.
If the first exposure for many of us was through the radio, especially those a bit removed from urban areas, the thing that made most of us “folkies” of whatever duration was the discovery and appeal of the coffeehouses. According to legend (Dave Von Ronk legend anyway) in the mid to late 1950s such places were hang-outs for “beat” poets when that Kerouac/Ginsberg/Cassady flame was all the rage and folkies like him just starting out were reduced to clearing the house between shows with a couple of crowd-fleeing folk songs, or else they got the boot and the remnants of street singer life forlorn “basket” in front trying to make rent money.
The beauty of such places for poor boy high school students like me or lowly cash-poor college students interested in the folk scene was that for the price of a coffee, usually expresso so you could get your high a little off the extra caffeine but more importantly you could take tiny sips and make it last which you wanted to do so you could hold your spot at the table in some places, and maybe some off-hand pastry (usually a brownie or wedge of cake not always fresh but who cared as long as the coffee, like I said, usually expresso to get a high caffeine kick, was fresh since it was made by the cup from elaborate copper-plated coffeemakers from Europe or someplace like that), you could sit there for a few hours and listen to up and coming folk artists working out the kinks in their routines. Add in a second coffee unless the girl had agreed to an uncool “dutch treat,” not only uncool but you were also unlikely to get to first base especially if she had to pay her bus fare too, share the brownie or stale cake and you had a cheap date.
Occasionally there was a few dollar cover for “established” acts like Joan Baez, Tom Rush, the Clancy Brothers, permanent Square fixture Eric Von Schmidt, but mainly the performers worked for the “basket,” the passing around of the hat for the cheap date guys and others “from hunger” to show appreciation, hoping against hope to get twenty buck to cover rent and avoid starving until the next gig. Of course since the audience was low-budget high school students, college kids and starving artists that goal was sometimes a close thing and accordingly the landlord would have to be pieced off with a few bucks until times got better.
For alienated and angst-ridden youth like me (and probably half my generation if the information I have received some fifty years later stands up and does not represent some retro-fitted analysis filtered through a million sociological and psychological studies), although I am not sure I would have used those words for my feelings in those days the coffeehouse scene was the great escape from household independence struggles of which I was always, always hear me, at the short end of the stick. Probably the best way to put the matter is to say that when I read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, over a non-stop weekend I was so engrossed in the page after page happenings, I immediately identified with Holden Caulfield whatever differences of time, place and class stood between us and when asked my opinion of him by my English teacher I made her and the whole class laugh when I said “I am Holden Caulfield”), or when I saw The Wild One at the retro-Strand Theater in downtown Carver I instinctively sided with poor boy Johnny and his “wanting habits” despite my painfully negative experiences with outlaw motorcycle guys headed by local hard boy Red Riley who hung out at Harry’s Variety Store as they ran through our section of town like the Huns of old. If I had been able to put the feelings into words and actions it would have been out of sympathy for the outcasts, misfits, and beaten down who I identified with then (not quite in the Jack Kerouac beaten down hipsters or night-dwellers who survived with a certain swagger and low hum existence sense). So yeah, the coffeehouses offered sanctuary.
For others (and me too on occasion) those establishments also provided a very cheap way to deal with the date issue, as long as you picked dates who shared your folk interests. That pick was important because more than once I took a promising date to the Joy Street Coffeehouse up on Boston’s Beacon Hill where I knew the night manager and could get in for free who was looking for something speedier like maybe a guy with a car, preferably a ’57 Chevy or something with plenty of chrome, and that was the end of that promise.For those who shared my interest like I said before for the price of two coffees(which were maybe fifty cents each, something like that, but don’t take that as gospel), maybe a shared pastry and a couple of bucks in the “basket” to show you appreciated the efforts, got you those hours of entertainment. But mainly the reason to go to the Square or Joy Street early on was to hear the music that as my first interest blossomed I could not find on the radio, except that Dick Summer show on Sunday night for a couple of hours. Later it got better with more radio shows, some television play when the thing got big enough that even the networks caught on with bogus clean-cutHootenanny-type shows, and as more folkies got record contracts because then you could start grabbing records at places like Sandy’s in between Harvard and Central Squares.
Of course sometimes if you did not have dough, or if you had no date, and yet you still had those home front civil wars to contend with and that you needed to retreat from you could still wind up in the Square. Many a late weekend night, sneaking out of the house through a convenient back door which protected me from sight, parents sight, I would grab the then all-night Redline subway to the Square and at that stop (that was the end of the line then) take the stairs to the street two steps at a time and bingo have the famous (or infamous) all-night Hayes-Bickford in front of me. There as long as you were not rowdy like the winos, hoboes, and con men you could sit at a table and watch the mix and match crowds come and go. Nobody bothered you, certainly not the hired help who were hiding away someplace at those hours, and since it was cafeteria-style passing your tray down a line filled with steam-saturated stuff and incredibly weak coffee that tasted like dishwater must taste, you did not have to fend off waitresses. (I remember the first time I went in by myself I sat, by design, at a table that somebody had vacated with the dinnerware still not cleared away and with the coffee mug half full and claimed the cup to keep in front of me. When the busboy, some high school kid like me, came to clear the table he “hipped me” to the fact that nobody gave a rat’s ass if you bought anything just don’t act up and draw attention to yourself. Good advice, brother, good advice.)
Some nights you might be there when some guy or gal was, in a low voice, singing their latest creation, working up their act in any case to a small coterie of people in front of them. That was the real import of the place, you were there on the inside where the new breeze that everybody in the Square was expecting took off and you hoped you would get caught up in the fervor too. Nice.
As I mentioned in the rock and roll series, which really was the music of our biological coming of age time, folk was the music of our social and political coming of age time. A fair amount of that sentiment got passed along to us during our folk minute as we sought out different explanations for the events of the day, reacted against the grain of what was conventional knowledge. Some of us will pass to the beyond clueless as to why we were attuned to this music when we came of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which we too like most of our parents had not created, and had no say in creating. That clueless in the past about the draw included a guy, me, a coalminer’s son who got as caught up in the music of his time as any New York City Village Jack or Jill or Chi Old Town frat or frail. My father in his time, wisely or not considering what ill-fate befell him later, had busted out of the tumbled down tarpaper shacks down in some Appalachia hills and hollows, headed north, followed the northern star, his own version, and never looked back and neither did his son.
Those of us who came of age, biological, political, and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a jail-break on all fronts and that included from the commercial Tin Pan Alley song stuff. The staid Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he our parents’ organizer of victory, their gentile father Ike). Hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had restless night’s sleep, a nightmare that, he or she, was trapped in some fashionable family fall-out shelter bunker and those loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Yelling in that troubled sleep please, please, please if we must die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential. And as we matured Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind.
We were moreover, some of us anyway, and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dreams, ready to cross our own swords with the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby, sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear in this quarter, quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a newer world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded by the new dispensation and slogged through the 60s decade whether it was in the civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down were kindred. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone.
The truth of each sketch is in the vague mood that they invoke rather than any fidelity to hard and fast fact. They are all based on actual stories, more or less prettified and sanitized to avoid any problems with lose of reputation of any of the characters portrayed and any problems with some lingering statute of limitations. That truth, however, especially in the hands of old-time corner boys like me and the other guys who passed through the corner at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys must always be treated like a pet rattlesnake. Very carefully.
Still the overall mood should more than make up for the lies thrown at you, especially on the issue of sex, or rather the question of the ages on that issue, who did or did not do what to whom on any given occasion. Those lies filled the steamy nights and frozen days then, and that was about par for the course, wasn’t it. But enough of that for this series is about our uphill struggles to make our vision of the our newer world, our struggles tosatisfy our hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in our youthwe dreamed by on cold winter nights and hot summer days.
