Sunday, March 25, 2018

Out In The Hip-Hop 90s Night- The Roy Bluff-Laura Perkins Trilogy

Out In The Hip-Hop 90s Night- The Roy Bluff-Laura Perkins Trilogy     

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman


I knew Roy Bluff in the old days, got to know him a little in the late 1980s, when he was just singing for nickels and dimes in front of the Park Street Subway Station in downtown Boston. He was a tall, good- looking guy, longish hair and an unkempt short scruffy beard which could not hide a certain jut-jawed look. Not a city boy look but something out of the plains, a certain Sam Shepard the actor/playwright look, a cowboy, look although he was attired in second- hand work clothes, flannels like a lumberjack, considered de riguer if you were working the subway circuit. I would stop and listen to that arresting hip-hop sound that he produced on his electrified acoustic guitar combined with his old time social concern lyrics like some juked- up latter day Woody Guthrie angel saint as he mesmerized the small crowds (including me) that passed him by. I sensed, maybe at times slightly and at other times more forcefully, that his act, that what he had to say and the way he wanted to say it “spoke” to lots of things that were bothering us, the young and not so young, in those days. Things that needed saying and we needed some kind of angel saint herald to make sense of it all.

I also knew that such an act, such a sound, basically a throw-back to some fathers and mothers sixties high drug culture madness had no chance, nada, of interesting any mainstream record company since they were trying, trying like hell, to  dump this genre from their catalogues as so many loss- leaders good for tax write-offs and not much else. I knew this first hand since my girlfriend then was Shana Buck, yes, that Shana Buck if you are at all familiar with the white girl blues mama scene who struggled for years in small cafes, high school auditoria, once a month Universalist/Unitarian church basements and sluggish “open mic” gin mills looking to fill their joints on off-nights before she was “discovered” (and after we had parted ways). That was the scene that stared Roy Bluff in the face. I knew, and after we talked for a while once he saw me around the station pretty often, that he kind of knew it too. Later as he started to move up the food chain in the music business, the niche business created by the advent of CDs, I would review his work for various newspapers and small magazines pushing his name around.

Occasionally, after he got bigger, after he left Boston and based himself in New York City to be near the action I would hear about him and his antics. The ones the world, or rather that niche world that followed him knew about already; the drunken nights, the drunken brawls (not always the same thing as the nights but close), the drugs and that big messy covered up drug bust, the outrageous on stage antics and, of course, the women. But mostly I would hear about this woman, this Laura Perkins, who kind of broke him from some of his self-destructive ways, his booze, dope, and dames ways and who also fended the critics off whose vulture status drove Roy crazy when they didn’t “get” what he was trying to do.

What I didn’t know about, and maybe nobody really did or if so only a few like his road manager/doormat Benny Freed knew, was the tensions between Roy and Laura that led to their recent troubles, and led Roy to some private hospital with an undisclosed ailment. Although I no longer wrote for the public prints I was interested in piecing together the story, or as much of it as I could. I, nobody, could talk to Roy, so I worked an end around. I contacted that old flame Shana Buck, who was now under contract to Roy’s label, Ducca Records, to see what she could dig up. Some stuff, honest information stuff not tabloid muck, from her sources. Shana, always resourceful, dug up a fair amount but has thus far refused to be identified in any way as the source. So what follows is my sketch of what happened between Roy and Laura based on the information she gave me about how to get the information I was after. I bear complete responsibility for what is said below, and what is not. Frank Jackman                    

***********

No Limit

He, Roy Bluff, then, back in what he and everybody else called the hip-hop night, back in the late 90s of the last century and the early years of this century, and I quote “could have had his pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary fashion interest.” Reason, reason according to one Roy Bluff : Roy Bluff (he actually spoke of himself in the third person like that on occasion), a guy who had scrabbled and scrambled hard for a long time finally hit his stride, finally got the big pay-off for all those lonely half-filled rooms, all those small make-shift café stages, all those dank church basements replete with intermission homemade baked goods sold to help defray coffeehouse expenses, all those play louder than the drunks at midnight bars, when his brand of hip-hop folk-rock became a craze, got a hearing from eager young college students looking for an added sound to their hip-hop repertoire and a segment of young blacks breaking from the nihilistic gangsta rap that was choking off the musical lines of their generation. Got his big ass break when Dave Beck, the big recording producer for Ducca Records, happened to need a midnight drink, maybe two, after a long and frustrating studio session, heard him at the El Segundo Café in Long Beach, tapped to the beat, and gave him a shot.

Of course being a record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff for one night (maybe two but Roy was moving fast, fast as a man could to catch the rising wave so usually the classic one night stand held forth). He would drone on and on about how in the old days (the old beat down, fellahin days eking out dimes and donuts before the passing crowds at Park Street, Central Square, Harvard Square) women might sent a smile his way, or a frown, but no way were they giving keys to some nobody who they hadn’t seen on television, radio, or records. But such is life.      

By the way Roy’s real name is Ronald Smith, but the performance stage, musical performance, ah, concert artist stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths back then and so one night earlier in his career, one night after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a Memphis bar, the Be-Bop Club over off Beale, he “christened” himself with that manly name despite losing that fight, losing it badly to a smaller wiry man,

So it wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man can be called beautiful in this wicked old world, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women, lots of women wanting to be with a star. Yes, on that basis he had run through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads, especially a couple of wild red-headed Irish sisters, college students, young professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was on edge city.

Until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, to give her a name, although he called her “sweet angel,” called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best of him. And he, Roy Bluff he, said without a stammer or any sense of guile that wherever the winds would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that was just the way it was almost from the first, and he accepted that sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes.

Usually before a show, a couple of hours before, maybe, right in some  pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, he would be in a sly grin mood and so, as he set himself up for the night’s work he would go through the maybes. The maybes being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love ‘em and leave ‘em guy as he was at pains to tell all who would listen, mainly the paid help or some media guys who had to listen to get the real story he or she was looking for, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura Perkins, got under his skin. And so the maybes it was.
The first maybe was that Laura was not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his excuses, his frailties, and his rages against the night (although he always admitted that she tried like hell to temper them). Roy would laugh to himself as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, that judgmental was just not the way she was built.

Christ, as Roy thought back to that first night’s meeting, he had just got into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was drinking back then. He was working his first major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small concert halls and large ballrooms throughout the country (no more dank church basements and crowded three table cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff). Some customer at the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him about it, told him loudly. Roy, having been drinking (and smoking a little reefer) all day, responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura did not really know who Roy was but her girlfriend, Patty Lyons, dear Patty, had heard his first album and was crazy to see him in person and so she had persuaded Laura to tag along.

As the pair walked in they observed the finishing seconds of the melee between Roy and that customer, saw that, according to what Patty said to Laura at the time, it was just Roy being Roy as part of his growing rough-edged legend, and then stopped at the bar to pick up drinks. As they passed the stage where Roy was starting to tune up his guitar on their way to their table Laura stopped for the second and gave him a look, a look that said yeah I might take a ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine, Maine born and bred, a Mainiac for god’s sake), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and all, gave one back, also attracted. Later, just before he started his second set he asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself.

Yeah, yeah that was the start. After Roy had finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All he knew was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway.
Maybe it was that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his second set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for her girlfriend Patty too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Funny, he was still then grabbing whatever caught his eye before she said that, and what guy who was starting to get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy. But after that he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they later called the “suitcase” pledge although he never told her that, never told her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened. At least he liked to think of it that way, that he had taken the pledge.   

Maybe it was that Laura would refuse the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She only wanted a quiet moment alone with him away from the helter-skelter of his public life. One night when he and she had been smoking a little dope and she was “mellow” and ready to shed a little of her private thoughts she had told him about a man, an older man (older being twenty-five she being eighteen at the time, but more that she was unworldly or really not ready to accept the wicked old world on harsher terms and so malleable) who had lavished her with gifts, money, some jewelry (later found to be some reject stuff) only to confess one night that he was married and as part of that package had beaten her up as he walked out the door after she had called the whole thing off. She said if what she and Roy had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.

Maybe it was as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as they saw him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters that they, yes, they had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say “sell-out.”

Maybe it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.
Maybe it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse. Mental not physical, although one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized, he almost did so out of some hubristic rage. Laura waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.

And maybe, just maybe, Roy would finish up with something he told Laura directly on a “sweet angel” night it was that out in the awestruck thundering night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing muck-filled rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was…


One’s Own Private World

Out of some sense of just trying to make things connect, make sense of her life, make the jumble of thoughts she had about leaving him, about leaving Roy, about pulling up stakes and going out and starting over Laura Perkins began to keep a diary. Sure she had like many a lonely schoolgirl, or many a budding literary figure, kept little nonsense diaries filled with longings and daydreams when she was young, when she came of age, when the welter of the world’s burdens fell on her shoulders and she, shy and reticent by nature, needed some way to express the confusions that made up her life about parents, boys, sex. Mostly, as she reflected now at another turning point, what to do, or what not to do about sex. She had that figured as well as any teenager had in this mega-information age, but what to do with her life was what ailed her now.

No, now she needed to keep tabs on what she was going to do about Roy Bluff and his internal, infernal, eternal needs that seemed beyond her grasp now that he had become something in the music business. Also apparently had made it his life’s ambition to drink a river of whiskey, and an acre of ganja (dope, marijuana for the unknowing), and taste every women with a skirt on (or maybe better off). She had put up with a lot, a lot of late and she knew she had to draw some line in the sand ever since that night that Roy, a head full of liquor and dope (cocaine, girl, snow you know), came within an inch of hitting her, maybe less, maybe less than an inch. Hence the diary to put those ten thousand conflicting thoughts together.

Laura had made it clear to one and that make no mistake Roy Bluff, weaknesses and all, was her man, was her man ever since that first night they met at the Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers several years before. But the grind of the road, the grind of the care and protection of one Roy Bluff rising star, the grind of his excesses had taken a toll and she needed to get things straight in her mind, needed to take a break from Roy-ing. As she prepared to write at length in her new found diary she began to think back to those first days when love was in full bloom, or the prospect of love was in the air. And here is the gist of what she wrote as she explained it to Benny Freed, Roy’s roadie, one night when she was “blue,” Roy Bluff blue. According to Benny she kept referring to various events in her diary as she did so some stuff may be a little off the mark but I think I got it about right:

Laura remembered back to the night that she and Roy had had their first fight as a starting point, maybe a few months after they became an “item” (my term not hers). Their first, uh, misunderstanding he called it. She more plain spoken and forthright called it a fight. It had not been long after the night she had told Roy in no uncertain terms that he was her man and so maybe he was trying to test her that night, trying to see what hold he held over her. A typical guy thing that has been going on since Adam and Eve, maybe before. It had been a tough night before a half-empty ballroom in Butte, Montana, half empty because even those hearty brethren would not fight five feet of snow swirling outside to hear a rising star. Catch him come spring one man quipped as he left to fight his own demon snows. That night whiskey-sated (maybe a little reefer too it was hard to avoid that mix in his head sometimes, or hers too when he introduced her to dope) he, Roy Bluff, said he could have had his pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary fashion interest.

Then he let loose with this tirade, parts of which he had used before on other tough nights, after some fling or other indiscretion. Reason: Roy Bluff (she thought it odd that he would when blasted speak of himself in the third person like he was some ghost-traveler), a guy who had scrabbled and scrambled hard for a long time finally hit his stride, finally got the big pay-off for all those lonely half-filled rooms, all those small make-shift café stages, all those dank church basements replete with intermission homemade baked goods sold to help defray coffeehouse expenses, all those play louder than the drunks at midnight, when his brand of hip-hop-infused folk-rock became a craze around the turn of this century. Got his big ass break too when Dave Beck, the big recording producer for Ducca Records, happened to need a midnight drink, maybe two, and heard him at the El Segundo Café in Long Beach and gave him a shot.

That night he went on and on about how being a record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff for one night, maybe two at the most he bragged since Roy Bluff was moving fast, as fast as a man could to catch the rising wave. He then said it wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man could be beautiful in this wicked old world that drew the women to him, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women. Appealed to Laura for that matter.

While he was fuming Laura thought that it was odd about his constant use of the third person since Roy Bluff was not his real name, although out of some male vanity, or something he failed to tell her that until a mutual musician friend of theirs gave her the skinny on it one night when she kept on hearing him call Roy Ron. His real name was Ronald Smith, but when he finally told her about the name thing after she had badgered him about it he merely said the performance stage, musical performance concert artist stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths just when he was starting out and so one night earlier in his career, one night after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a Memphis bar, the Be-Bop Club over off Beale, he “christened” himself with that more manly name.

Roy continued on that line about the women as he stated that he had run through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads, especially a couple of wild red-headed sisters, college students, young professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was on edge city. And so it went as he puffed himself up in his own mind as least. That was not a good night as he ranted on unto exhaustion.

Later full of bad booze and sorrows Roy, trying to make up, said that was his act until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, whom he called his “sweet angel,” called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best of him. And getting all misty-eyed like he did with her whenever his nerves were frayed from too much bad booze and far too much dope he said wherever the winds would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that was just the way it was almost from the first, and he said he accepted that- sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes. She merely waved him off having heard that line of defense (and contrition) before, by him and others. They did, to keep the Butte snows at bay they both agreed, Laura laughed as she said this to Benny, to make love that night.


Then Laura went off on another tangent, although it sounded to Benny like the same old song. She said Roy used to drive her crazy when he got into his “maybes” mood, something that had been happening a lot more of late. Usually he would bring it up to settle himself right at some pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, and he was in a sly grin mood. As he set himself up for the night’s work he would start. The maybes being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love‘em and leave ‘em guy, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura Perkins, got under his skin. She could almost recite the list by heart (and Benny, poor Benny could too having heard it every time on the road before a gig, including times, dangerous times, when Laura stayed home).

The first maybe was always that Laura was not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his excuses, his frailties, and his rages against the night (as she tried like hell to temper them and made a point, a strong point to Benny of not wanting to discuss those efforts since this talk was about leaving him and she wanted to interject some sunnier days into what she had to say as a counter-balance).

Roy would always laugh to himself, a sly gabby laugh that usually meant he was in good form for the night’s performance, as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, that judgmental was just not the way she was built.

Christ, as Roy described to her one time his thoughts back on that first night, he had just got into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was drinking heavily back then. He was working his first major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small concert halls and large ballrooms throughout the country (no more dank church basements and crowded three table cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff). Some customer at the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him about it, told him loudly.

Roy, having been drinking (and smoking a little reefer) all day, responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura told Roy one time to put him in his place a little when he was too full of himself that she did not really know who he was but that her girlfriend, Patty Lyons, dear Patty, had heard his first album and was crazy to see him in person and so she had persuaded Laura to tag along. The truth as she told it to Benny was that she had heard about Roy from a musician friend who had heard him at the Café Algiers in the Village a few weeks before the Yonkers gig and so had not so much tagged along as was intrigued by what she had heard about him. That musician friend, a woman, a woman whom Roy had slept with at it turned out, was the one who drew her attention to that jut-jawed cowboy aura and thus the intrigue.

She had given Roy a look, an honest look, a look that said yeah I might take ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine, Maine born and bred, a Mainiac of all thing she found out later by accident since Roy claimed he was from Wyoming when she had asked him that first night), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and all, gave one back, also attracted. Later, just before he started his second set he had asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself. Funny she reflected since she was a struggling student over at Pace University in Tarrytown at the time she would normally accept when a guy, almost any guy who looked like he might not be a crack head or crackpot, offered to buy her a drink, or two.

That was the start. After Roy had finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All she knew now was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway. He would always bring that up when they were in fight mode as some virtue that would not have occurred except for her and by implication that if she left him he would fall back on his wicked ways.

Roy loved to give a blow by blow description of what happened after that first night’s introduction. He would start with maybe it was that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for Patty too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (she said he said she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant, and she agreed, agreed she put it more elegantly than that ) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him.

Those were the days when Roy was still grabbing whatever caught his eye (including that female musician friend who tipped her to Roy’s attraction to women, a few times later on when he was solo on the road), and had reasoned what guy who was starting to get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy. But after that he said he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they later called the “suitcase” pledge although he never told her that, never told her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened. That’s the way he liked to tell it to anybody, including Laura, who would listen, neglecting the on the road one -night stands that she was painfully aware of  through the close-knit music grapevine, when she did not travel with him. But that was Roy.

Then Roy went on to speak of a something that totally befuddled him maybe. It was that she would refuse the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She only wanted a quiet moment alone with him away from the helter-skelter of his public life. One night when he and she had been smoking a little dope and she was “mellow” and ready to shed a little of her private thoughts she had told him about a man, an older man (older being twenty-five she being eighteen at the time, but more that she was unworldly or really not ready to accept the wicked old world on harsher terms and so malleable) who had lavished her with gifts, money, some jewelry (later found to be some reject stuff) only to confess one night that he was married and as part of that package had beaten her up as he walked out the door after she had called the whole thing off. She said if what she and Roy had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.

Then came the full-court Roy press. Maybe he would say as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as they saw him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters that they, yes they, had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say “sell-out.”
Which led in turn to maybe it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.

He would continue maybe too it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse, mental not physical, although one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized (and not long before she started keeping that diary), he almost did so out of some hubristic rage, she waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.
Then out of the blue one Roy Bluff a bundle of walking contradictions, all tongue-tied and timid floored her with this one tough night- and she quoted it from memory-“And maybe, just maybe, it was that out in the awestruck thundering night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing muck-filled rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was…”  And as the tears slowly formed as Laura finished up the quote she hit Benny with this. She thought, thought hard and fast that maybe, just maybe, she would give her walking daddy, her jut-jawed cowboy walking daddy just one more try.


She Belongs To …


When a writer for Rolling Stone or one of those music-oriented magazines you see flooding the newsstands and supermarket check- out counters asked Ben Freed, the longtime road manager for Roy Bluff, the famous hip-hop-infused folk rocker, off the record, for his take on the latest Roy Bluff-Laura Perkins flare-up he answered like this:   

Sure I knew Roy Bluff on his way up, and Laura, Laura Perkins too when she came on the scene to help build his legend, but I will speak of her later. I knew that if he kept plugging away with his lyrics, his lyrics that spoke to our weird times, the late ‘90s, to the time of the seemingly end-time great plague in this world, wars, injustice, inequality, that he would break through the thickets of the music business and rise to the top, kicking ass and screaming all the way. I knew that if Roy just kept to his words, to his music, and left the other stuff alone he would be immortal. That other stuff being a huge reservoir appetite for high- shelf whiskey, high-grade dope, mainly marijuana but later, cocaine  and some opium, and any grade women. But that was what made him Roy, the other stuff, and it was not until later that I realized that without the other stuff, without living on edge city, without the high-wire act of his life that he could not produce those words that spoke to us. Nada, nothing.   

I first met Roy one night as he was working his way up in the music world at the Café Algiers in New York City, in the Village, where he was working out the kinks for a major tour that Ducca Records, a label that had just taken a chance on him and had signed him to do an album. The album finally produced the tour was put together to gain exposure for him in small concert halls and large hotel ballrooms and to promote (sell) the records, oops, CDs.  So I had been among the small group that showed up that night as he warmed up for the long haul road trip.

Now the Algiers was a smaller club than he would play on tour although frequented by serious music aficionados and some hanger-on second level celebrities, you know Village-wise artists and musicians like Manny Ray and The Kinksters and off-Broadway denizens like Mike Ester and Fiona Florin. During the break between sets Roy headed for the bar and his couple of shots of then low-shelf whiskey and a beer chaser. I, sitting at the bar, offered to buy him a drink in appreciation for what was a good performance, one that touched me at points, one that “spoke” to me in ways that mainline hip-hop artists did not at that point. He accepted and we talked further and then we talked later after the show when he again hit the bar. The long and short of it was that after a few nights of that at the Algiers I became something of a roadie for him (unpaid at first and then when he hit overpaid). So yeah I knew Roy for a while, a while before he hit it big, and before he met Laura on the way to hitting big. Roy, as everybody knows is more that capable of speaking for himself, of defending himself and his actions, small and large, infantile and immortal. So let him fend for himself.

Laura deep down was another story, and many a lonely Roy-ing night (a term we used for the care and protection of one Roy Bluff and his frailties) we shared a bottle or a joint, probably both, and commiserated over that man. One night, one night in Kansas City, after the show at the famous Hi-Hat Club, and after a particularly tough Roy-ing period for Laura when, against all good judgment, he had almost hit her when she tried to temper his furies she laid out some stuff for me about their relationship, about how it started and so I want to tell you my take on her story, on her flaming love for the Roy.  And yes I had a thing for Laura, still do as little good as it does me, so let’s get that off the table right now. Here goes:      

As always with Laura she was a little hesitant even after a few drinks to speak openly of her troubles, her sorrows, having been brought up in a tight-lipped Irish-Catholic household just outside of Yonkers. Tight-lipped as I knew from my own experiences with my I-C maternal grandparents was just another way of saying that you did not air your dirty line in public. And so Laura hesitated although she knew, or should have known, that I had strong evidence either from not being blinded by Roy or that he told me in his more lucid moments (read: not drunk or stoned) of what was, and was not, happening between her and Roy.

She started out talking about a diary that she had started keeping the previous few months out of some sense of just trying to make things connect, make sense of her life, make the jumble of thoughts she had about leaving him, about leaving Roy, about pulling up stakes and going out and starting over. She pulled it out of her purse because she said she wanted to look up some stuff that she might have forgotten or had put a certain way as she wrote it out so that I would know what she felt at the time.  As she read aloud to me one entry she laughed, a gorgeous Laura laugh, an infectious laugh she had when she was in high spirits and that everybody took shelter under. She had, like many a lonely schoolgirl, or many a budding literary figure, kept little nonsense diaries filled with longings and daydreams when she was young, when she came of age, when the welter of the world’s burdens fell on her shoulders and she, shy and reticent by nature, needed some way to express the confusions that made up her life about parents, boys, sex. Mostly, as she reflected that night at another turning point, what to do, or what not to do about boys. She had had that figured as well as any teenager had in this mega-information age, but what to do with her life was what ailed her. I blushed a little when she detailed some of her early sexual explorings, although she only made a couple of explicit references. Metaphor unlike with Roy, Roy when non-lyric producing, who swore and talked obscenely almost automatically, being her forte in talking about men, love, and sex.

So mainly Laura kept the diary because she felt she needed to keep tabs on what she was going to do about Roy Bluff and his internal, infernal, eternal needs that seemed beyond her grasp now that he had become something in the music business. Also apparently had made it his life’s ambition to drink a river of whiskey, and an acre of ganja (dope, marijuana for the unknowing), and taste every women with a skirt on (or she fumed maybe better off). She had put up with a lot, a lot of late and she knew she had to draw some line in the sand ever since that night that Roy, a head full of liquor and dope (cocaine, girl , snow you know the drill, or should), came within an inch of hitting her, maybe less, maybe less than an inch. Hence the diary to put those ten thousand conflicting thoughts together.

Laura made it clear, painfully clear, and drew a circle in the air as if to make sure there was no mistake about her feelings, Roy Bluff, weaknesses and all, was her man, was her man ever since that first night they met at the Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers several years before. But the grind of the road, the grind of the care and protection of one Roy Bluff rising star, the grind of his excesses had taken a toll and Laura needed to get things straight in her mind, needed to take a break from Roy-ing. Laura said that as she prepared to write at length in her new found diary she began to think back to those first days when love was in full bloom, or the prospect of love was in the air. Nights then when she was not “blue,” Roy Bluff blue.       

Laura spoke of how she remembered back to the night that she and Roy had had their first fight as a starting point. Their first, uh, misunderstanding he called it. She more plain spoken and forthright called it a fight. It had not been long after the night she had told Roy in no uncertain terms that he was her man and so maybe he was trying to test her that night, trying to see what hold he held over her. I thought as she mentioned it a typical guy thing that has been going on since Adam and Eve, maybe before.  I had used a variation on that theme myself when younger, maybe high school younger, testing some young pretty thing, testing just to be testing like testing the limits of outrageous behavior was the be-all and end-all of any relationship.

It had been a tough night before a half-empty ballroom in Butte, Montana, half empty because even those hearty brethren would not fight five feet of snow swirling outside to hear a rising star. She said one guy quipped right out catch him come spring as he left to fight his own demon snows. That night whiskey-sated (maybe a little reefer too it was hard to avoid that mix in Roy’s  head sometimes, or hers too when he introduced her to dope) he, Roy Bluff, said he could have had his pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary fashion interest.

The way Laura explained the way Roy said it was pretty stark but was pure Roy when he thought he was telling some kind of home truths.   Reason: Roy Bluff (he was prone, as many people noted, when he was sucking air, when  he trying to get out from under some bad boy thing, to use the third person to distance himself from the crap he was dishing out), a guy who had scrabbled and scrambled hard for a long time finally hit his stride, finally got the big pay-off for all those lonely half-filled rooms, all those small make-shift café stages, all those dank church basements replete with intermission homemade baked goods sold to help defray coffeehouse expenses, all those play louder than the drunks at midnight, when his brand of hip-hop-infused folk-rock became a craze. Got his big ass break when Dave Beck, the big recording producer for Ducca Records, happened to need a midnight drink, maybe two,  and heard him at the El Segundo Café in Long Beach and gave him a shot.

He went on and on about how being a record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff for one night, maybe two at the most he bragged since Roy was moving fast, as fast as a man could to catch the rising wave. The she confided in me something she did not think I knew. Roy Bluff is not his real name, although she said out of some male vanity, or something he failed to tell her that until a mutual musician friend of theirs gave her the skinny on it one night when she kept on hearing him call Roy Ron. His real name was Ronald Smith, but as he told her later when he finally admitted to the name change, the performance stage, musical performance concert artist stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths just when he was starting out and so one night earlier in his career, one night after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a Memphis bar, the Be-Bop Club over off Beale, he “christened” himself with that manly name. Depending on the day and whether he was looking for sympathy of not he either lost that fight to some giant or he won against that same giant using some juke moves.

So the hold Roy had over Laura, over me, wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man can be beautiful in this wicked old world, that drew the women to him, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women. Appealed to Laura for that matter as she had confessed on a previous occasion.


[What Laura did not know which I did, and which she did not find out until later, after the night of our talk was that  Ronald Smith was not Roy’s real name either but Zebulon Jordan. The way I found out about it was the night, let’s see, yes, the first night he was busted for dope he tried to use Ronald Smith when I attempted to bail him out and the hick cops in Louisville couldn’t find that name at the address given on their computer and were going to hold him over until they could get something better on him. He coped to the Jordan name that night. All of which is neither here nor there now, except as the ten thousandth perfidious Roy thing, since he has had his name legally changed to Roy Bluff.]           


Roy continued on that line about the women he had had as he practically boasted to one and all that he had run through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads, especially a couple of wild red-headed sisters, college students, young professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was on edge city. And so it went as he puffed himself up in his own mind as least. Laura said that was not a good night as he ranted on unto exhaustion.   

Later that night full of bad booze and sorrows Roy, trying to make up, said that was his act until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, whom he called his “sweet angel,” called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best out of him. And waxing a little poetic he said wherever the winds would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that was just the way it was almost from the first, and he said he accepted that sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes. She merely waved him off having heard that line of defense (and contrition) before, by him and others. They did, to keep the Butte snows at bay, Laura laughed as she said this and I blushed, make love that night.  

Then she moved on to a pet peeve. Roy used to drive her crazy when he got into his “maybes” mood, something that had been happening a lot more of late. Usually he would bring it up to settle himself down at some pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, and he was in a sly grin mood. (I knew about the maybes to since I was his “sounding-board” many nights when he was unsure of his performance level, or unsure where he stood with Laura.)  As he set himself up for the night’s work he would start. The maybes being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love ‘em and leave ‘em guy, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura Perkins, got under his skin.

The first maybe was that Laura was not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his excuses, his frailties, and his rages against the night (as she tried like hell to temper them and made a point, a strong point to me of not wanting to discuss those efforts since this was about leaving him and she wanted to interject some sunnier days into what she had to say). She said Roy had told her he would laugh to himself as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, judgmental was just not the way she was built. She said she had let a little grin form on her face in recognition of that trait, a trait that she told me she was particularly proud of.

Then Roy would describe to her his thoughts on that first night, he had just gotten into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was drinking back then. He was working his first major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small concert halls and large ballrooms throughout the country (no more dank basements and crowded cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff). Some customer at the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him about it, told him loudly.

Roy, having been drinking (and smoking a little reefer) all day, responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura told him later that she did not really know who Roy was but her girlfriend, Patty Lyons, dear Patty, had heard his first album and was crazy to see him in person and so she had persuaded Laura to tag along. The truth was that Laura had heard about him from a musician friend who had heard him at the Café Algiers in the Village a few weeks before and so had not so much tagged along as was intrigued by what she had heard about him. That musician friend, a woman, a woman whom Roy had slept with as it turned out, and slept with after Laura’s entry into his life when their paths crossed on the road times when Laura stayed home, was the one who drew her attention to that jut-jawed cowboy aura and thus the intrigue.   

She had given Roy a look, an honest look, a look that said yeah I might take ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine, Maine born and bred although he had told her, truth, that he was from Wyoming), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and all, gave one back, ditto on the attraction look. Later, just before he started his second set he asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself. Funny she said since she was a struggling student over at Pace University in Tarrytown at the time she would normally accept when a guy, almost any guy who looked like he might not be a crack head or crackpot, offered to buy her a drink, or two.   

That was their start. After Roy had finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All she knew was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway. Roy would always bring that up when they were in fight mode as some virtue that would not have occurred except for her and by implication that if she left him he would fall back on his wicked ways.   

Then Roy would move on to a blow by blow description of what happened after that. He would start with maybe it was that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for her girlfriend too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (she said he said she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant, and she agreed, agreed she put it more elegantly than that ) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Those were the days when he was still grabbing whatever caught his eye (including that female musician friend), and had reasoned what guy who was starting to get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy. But after that he said he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they later called the “suitcase” pledge although he never told her that, never told her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened. A patent lie, no question.  

He would go on to speak of a maybe that totally befuddled him. It was that Laura would refuse the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She only wanted a quiet moment alone with him away from the helter-skelter of his public life. One night when he and she had been smoking a little dope and she was “mellow” and ready to shed a little of her private thoughts she had told him about a man, an older man (older being twenty-five she being eighteen at the time, but more that she was unworldly or really not ready to accept the wicked old world on harsher terms and so malleable) who had lavished her with gifts, money, some jewelry (later found to be some reject stuff) only to confess one night that he was married and as part of that package had beaten her up as he walked out the door after she had called the whole thing off. She said if what she and Roy had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.

Then Roy would give the full-court press.  Maybe it was as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as they saw him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters that they, yes they, had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say “sell-out.” Yes, she had protected him from the scavengers as I had, maybe better since she did not have to deal with them like I had to.
Which led to maybe it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.

Maybe too it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer  (and whatever else was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse, mental not physical, although remember that close call one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized (and not long before she started keeping that diary). She waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.

Then out of the blue one Roy Bluff a bundle of walking contradictions, all tongue-tied and timid mesmerized her with this- and she quoted it from memory-“And maybe, just maybe, it was that out in the awestruck thundering night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing muck-filled rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was… “And as the tears slowly formed as she finished the quote she floored me with this. She thought, thought hard and fast that maybe, just maybe, she would give her walking daddy, her jut-jawed cowboy walking daddy just one more try. 

Damn.






We’ve Got To Get Back To The Garden-Serpents And All-Dennis Covington’s ‘Salvation On Sand Mountain: Snake Handling And Redemption In Southern Appalachia” (1995)-A Book Review-Of Sorts

We’ve Got To Get Back To The Garden-Serpents And All-Dennis Covington’s ‘Salvation On Sand Mountain: Snake Handling And Redemption In Southern Appalachia” (1995)-A Book Review-Of Sorts

Book Review

By Bart Webber

Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handing and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, Dennis Covington, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995 
     
Josh Breslin had always been the running kind. Not the running kind in the famous country song by the late Merle Haggard The Running Kind where the unnamed narrator is ready to hightail it out some forlorn lonesome door at the first sign that he might have to settle down to some nine to five straitjacket life. Not for him. Nor is it that great American restlessness that physically drove plenty of forebears to run from the “civilized” East to seek fame and fortune or beat the law out to the great American blue-pink night West in the 19th century before Professor Turner’s frontier hit its limits, closed down on some Pacific Ocean splash. Josh Breslin until very recently had been running away from his past, from his heritage, from his what shall we call them-roots. From what made him tick for good or bad when the deal went down.         

Josh had for most of his life after he actually escaped his growing up home (the word he used when talking about this subject to his friend Lenny Lynch one night over drinks at Fisherman’s Wharf in York, Maine), house in the working class Five Corners section, the mill town factory section, of Olde Saco further up the road in Maine hard by the Sacco River maintained a studied ignorance of his roots, of where his people had come from. Really his father Prescott’s people since he could have hardly missed the French-Canadian roots on his mother’s nee LeBlanc side (and that of half the town) since she had come down from Quebec with his maternal grandparents and a whole shew of relatives from grand aunts and uncles on down.

Yes that father’s people question was buried deep in Josh’s  psyche to remained undisturbed until his was in his early 60s  when maybe taking some early accounting of his life he felt that he had a corner or two of his heart missing. Not that the taciturn Prescott ever really broached the subject, never brought in up at least in his presence that he recalled. (As it turned out when he did begin to research his roots his oldest brother Paul was a fountain of information since Prescott in the few times he felt expansive would confide in the eldest son.)

A few things kind of pushed Josh in that direction beyond that summing up process. He had gone back to the old town after an absence of many years when he had reconnected with an old high school friend Rene Dubois on Facebook and Rene had invited him up for a few days. During that stay Rene’s wife, Anne, had mentioned over dinner something about his father that stopped him in his tracks a bit when the subject came up about the fates of various relatives. His father had passed away in the mid-1980s after spending most of his adult life in Olde Saco, working in the mills before they headed South (and then off-shore) in search of cheaper labor and then whatever jobs an uneducated man could scrape up from what was left.

What Anne had mentioned that night at dinner was that Prescott had never really been accepted by the Five Corners people, by the hordes of French-Canadian transplants who worked the mills with him including Josh’s mother’s relatives. His father had been shunned and made fun of for his soft Southern accent (which Josh never really noticed). Apparently, later confirmed by Paul, his Kentucky birth, his not being a Roman Catholic in the days when that counted in the Five Corners section, and most of all not being French-Canadian (Quebecois now) were held against him. Josh was shocked since he believed that Prescott whatever else he was had been respected as a hard worker and under the circumstances a good provider for his family given what he had to offer.

That started Josh in a tailspin, started him thinking more seriously about what the hell he had grown up in, what his poor benighted father had to endure and maybe explain a little why he had never been interested before in his roots. Not so unnaturally, given that Josh has spent almost all his adult life writing for various publications small and large, mostly specialty journals and small press publications, his other impetuses were from books. One from re-reading a book by Michael Harrington written in the early 1960s and said to be a book that President Kennedy had taken as a signpost for eliminating poverty in America, The Other America. Re-reading that book brought back a painful memory from high school which Josh had also kind of suppressed since then.

The Harrington book centered on rural poverty among whites (what were called “white trash” in some quarters) in the hills and hollows of Appalachia. Mentioned by name the town in Kentucky, Hazard, that his father had been born and grew up in and that was one of the most severely depressed and forsaken areas in the region with all the pathologies inherent in poverty running full force. That brought on a remembrance of the time in high school that the headmaster around Thanksgiving time had come on the P.A and announced that the school was sponsoring a food and clothing drive for the impoverished citizens of Hazard. He had turned about twenty shades of red because the whole class knew that his father was from that town. He had left school early that day he was so embarrassed.                   

The other book that got him thinking about his father’s roots, his roots and how they had affected the course of his life was a strange book about fundamentalist religious people down in the rural South, down in Appalachia who practiced snake-handling as part of their religious observance-as part of their acceptance of the strange ways of their savior Jesus Christ. (They also practiced speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands.) The book Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handing and Redemption in Southern Appalachia by writer Dennis Covington hit a nerve in a couple of ways. Mr. Covington too was, as a result of his exposure to snake-handling when he was on an assignment, thinking hard about his roots, about his own people’s from Appalachia’s relationship to these exotic practices.

The other was a direct reference in the book to Hazard, to people in that area into religious snake-handling as part of their bid for salvation, his people, his father’s people who knows. That really hit home when Josh’s brother Paul mentioned that before Josh was born Prescott and their mother Delores had taken him down to Hazard to see if things could work out there, see if there was work for uneducated ex-soldier. Paul wasn’t sure of the reasons but things didn’t work out, their mother either didn’t like the set-up or was homesick. This was the kicker though when Paul and Josh worked the numbers. The numbers worked out that Josh had been conceived down in Hazard. The both laughed when Paul mentioned that Josh has those hills and hollows in his DNA.     

The book made him wonder though, wonder without any proof one way or the other, whether Prescott had known or delved into the practice of snake-handling as part of his growing up religious practice. But that was sort of secondary since his father (or Paul when he asked) never mentioned anything like that when he was growing up. Mainly Josh knew that Prescott was not a Roman Catholic and not much else. Had agreed to raise his kids in the Roman religion (there would have been hell to pay if he had not in Catholic-dominated Five Corners). Knew now that Prescott had paid a price for being different, for being from a very different people and that got Josh speculating on what those people were like-and how they had marked him. Had marked him without his every having met any of his father’s people. None from grandparents down to siblings.                     

Mr. Covington was much closer to getting some concrete results in seeking his roots having grown up in the South, having been able to trace certain parts of the family, or at least family residences which coincided with “burnt over” snake-handling observance territory at some point in the 20th century. Got so involved in the people that he was covering, his “people” despite his very different professional path and despite his academic writing background, that he took the leap and did some snake handling himself. But Josh thought that was very different from what he wanted to think through since part of Mr. Covington’s search involved a quest for spiritual, if not religious, meaning in his own life. Josh just wanted to know if those traits, those staying very close to his recent roots inherited from his father (which he never acknowledged when Prescott was alive) were in his DNA.          
          
He wondered what isolated in the boondocks existence led people to carve out a very precise way in which they took their religion, took their Jesus Christ as their exemplar. Didn’t know much of the outside world but knew their Bible front and back. Knew enough that they would be tempted by the serpents (those snakes anyway) in order to get back to the Garden, get out of exile East of Eden. What degree of faith permitted snake-bitten men and women to trust in something enough that they would not seek medical help but “trust in the Lord.” They might not if met be his people, people he could talk to but they certainly were his “people.” He would have to thank Mr. Covington for pushing him on some unknown path back to those etched roots.

Honor The Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The Anniversary Of The Historic First World Congress Of The CI

Honor The Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The Anniversary Of The Historic First World Congress Of The CI
Markin comment:


Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.

No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.

The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.



First Congress of the Communist International
The Platform of the Communist International

Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.


6 March 1919; reporters: Eberlein and Bukharin
The contradictions of the capitalist world system which were hidden deep within it have burst forth with tremendous force in a single huge explosion – the great imperialist world war.

Capitalism tried to overcome its own anarchic nature by organising production. Instead of numerous enterprise-owners competing with one another, powerful associations of capitalists (syndicates, cartels, trusts) were created; banking capital united with industrial capital; economic life as a whole came under the influence of the finance-capital oligarchy, its power and its organisation giving it exclusive dominance. Free competition gave way to monopoly. The individual capitalist was transformed into a member of a capitalist association. Organisation took the place of reckless anarchy.

But, while in each individual country the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production gave way to capitalist organisation, at the level of the world economy, the anarchy, the competition and the contradictions intensified. The struggle between the largest and most organised exploiting states led, with iron necessity, to the horrors of the imperialist world war. Greed for profit drove world capital to fight for new markets, new spheres of investment, new sources of raw material, and the cheap labour power of the colonial slaves. The imperialist states which divided the whole world between them, turning many millions of African, Asian, Australian and American proletarians and peasants into beasts of burden, had, sooner or later, to discover the real, anarchic nature of capital in a full-scale conflict. This was how the greatest crime of all – the murderous World War – came about.

Capitalism also tried to overcome the contradictions of its social structure. bourgeois society is a class society. Capital in the great ‘civilised’ powers wanted to veil its social contradictions. By plundering the colonial peoples, capital was able to buy off its own hired slaves. It created a community of interest between the exploiters and the exploited at the expense of the oppressed colonies – of their yellow, black and red-skinned populations. In this way. the European and American working classes were tied to their imperialist ‘fatherlands’.

But when war came, this method of bribery, previously securing the patriotism of the working class and its spiritual servitude, had the opposite effect. Peace between classes was finally paid for by physical annihilation, the complete enslavement of the proletariat, terrible repression, impoverishment and physical degeneration and world famine. Civil peace was shattered. The imperialist war turned into a civil war.

A new system has been born. Ours is the epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the Communist revolution of the proletariat.

The imperialist system is collapsing. There is unrest in the colonies and among the small nations which have recently gained independence. This is a time of proletarian uprisings, and of triumphant proletarian revolutions in some countries. The imperialist armies are demoralised, the ruling classes are completely incapable of continuing to govern. Such is the present state of affairs throughout the world.

Human culture has been destroyed and humanity is threatened with complete annihilation. There is only one force able to save humanity and that is the proletariat. The old capitalist ‘order’ has ceased to function; its further existence is out of the question. The final outcome of the capitalist mode of production is chaos. This chaos can only be overcome by the productive and most numerous class – the working class. The proletariat has to establish real order – Communist order. It must break the rule of capital, make wars impossible, abolish the frontiers between states, transform the whole world into a community where all work for the common good and realise the freedom and brotherhood of peoples.

World capital, on the other hand, is preparing for the final battle. Behind the cover of its ‘League of Nations’ and pacifist chatter, it is making a last attempt to piece together the capitalist system now in the process of spontaneous disintegration and to direct its energies against the steady advance of the proletarian revolution.

The proletariat must reply to this new and gigantic conspiracy of the capitalist classes with the seizure of political power. The workers must use this power as a weapon against their class enemies and as a lever to effect the economic reconstruction of society. The final victory of the world proletariat signifies the beginning of the real history of human liberation.

The Conquest of Political Power
The conquest of political power by the proletariat means the destruction of the political power of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois state apparatus with its capitalist army commanded by the bourgeois – Junker officers, with its police and gendarmerie, its gaolers and judges, its priests and civil servants is the strongest weapon the bourgeoisie possesses. The capture of state power must not mean simply a change of personnel in the ministries, but the elimination of the hostile state apparatus, the concentration of real power in the hands of the proletariat, the disarming of the bourgeoisie, the counter-revolutionary officers and the White Guard, and the arming of the proletariat, the revolutionary soldiers and the Red Workers’ Guard; the removal of all bourgeois

judges and the organisation of a proletarian court; the abolition of the rule of the reactionary civil service and the creation of new proletarian organs of administration. The victory of the proletariat is guaranteed by the disruption of the enemy’s power and the organisation of proletarian power. The bourgeois state apparatus has to be shattered and a proletarian state machine constructed. Only when the proletariat has finally broken the resistance of the bourgeoisie and is clearly the victor can former opponents be gradually brought under control and made to contribute to the construction of communist society.

Democracy and Dictatorship
The proletarian state is, like every other state, an apparatus of repression, but its repression is directed against the enemies of the working class. Its purpose is to break, once and for all, the resistance of the exploiters, who will stop at nothing in their desperate struggle to drown the revolution in rivers of blood. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which gives this class the leading position in society, is, however, a temporary form of government.

As the resistance of the bourgeoisie is overcome, its property expropriated, and its members gradually drawn into working for society, so the proletarian dictatorship disappears, the state withers away and the division of society into classes is ended.

So-called democracy, i.e. bourgeois democracy, is nothing but the veiled dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The much-vaunted ‘general win of the people’ is no more a reality than ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’. Classes exist and they have conflicting and incompatible aspirations. But as the bourgeoisie represents an insignificant minority it makes use of this illusion, this imaginary concept, in order to consolidate its rule over the working class. Behind this mask of eloquence it can impose its class will. The proletariat, which forms the vast majority of the population is, on the contrary, completely open about using the class power of its mass organisations and Soviets to eliminate the privileges of the bourgeoisie and guarantee the transition to the classless, communist society.

Bourgeois democracy consists essentially of a purely rhetorical and formal recognition of rights and freedoms, which are in fact inaccessible to the working people – the proletariat and semi-proletarian elements – on account of their lack of material means. The bourgeoisie at the same time has every opportunity to use its material means, its press and organisation to cheat and deceive the people. However, the new type of state power, known as the Soviet system, ensures the proletariat the opportunity of guaranteeing its rights and freedom in practice. Soviet power provides the people with the best palaces, houses, printing works, stocks of paper, etc. for their press, and clubs for their meetings. Only such measures make proletarian democracy really possible. It is only on paper that bourgeois democracy and its parliamentary system give the masses the opportunity to participate in the running of the state. In actual fact, the masses and their organisations have absolutely no access to real power and are denied any genuine participation in the state administration. Under the Soviet system it is the mass organisations, and through them the masses themselves, that are running things, inasmuch as the Soviets attract an ever-increasing number of workers into government. This is the only way the entire working population can gradually be drawn into the work of state administration. The Soviet system is thus based on the mass organisations of the proletariat, on the Soviets themselves, the revolutionary trade unions, the cooperatives, etc.

The separation of legislative and executive power and the absence of the right of recall, characteristic of bourgeois democracy and parliamentarianism, widen the gulf between the masses and the state. The Soviet system, with its right of recall, the combination of legislative and executive power and the consequent position of the Soviets as working bodies, is able to link the masses with the administrative organs. This link is further strengthened by the electoral system which is based on production units rather than artificial territorial constituencies.

Thus the Soviet system makes possible genuine proletarian democracy – a democracy for the proletariat, by the proletariat, and against the bourgeoisie. In this system the industrial proletariat is guaranteed a privileged position as the leading, best organised and politically most mature class, under whose hegemony the level of the semi-proletarian elements and the poorer peasants in the rural areas is gradually raised. The industrial proletariat must use its temporary privileges to free the poorer petty-bourgeois masses in the countryside from the influence of the rural kulaks and bourgeoisie, to organise and draw them to the cause of communist construction.

The Expropriation of the Bourgeoisie and the Socialisation of Production
Given the dissolution of the capitalist system and capitalist labour discipline, and the present state of relations between classes, the re-construction of the economy on the old basis is impossible. Workers’ struggles for wage increases, even where successful, do not result in the anticipated rise in living standards, because the rising prices on all consumer goods cancel out any gains. The living conditions of workers can only be improved when production is administered by the proletariat instead of the bourgeoisie. In countries where the crisis situation is clearly insurmountable the militant fight for better wages inevitably develops into a bitter struggle which tends to escalate. The continued existence of the capitalist system is consequently impossible. Before the productive forces of the economy can be raised the resistance of the bourgeoisie has to be broken. This must be done as swiftly as possible, since bourgeois rule prolongs the death agony of the old society, creating the danger of the complete destruction of economic life. The proletarian dictatorship must expropriate the big bourgeoisie and landowners and make the means of production and exchange the common property of the proletarian state.

Communism is now rising from the ruins of the capitalist system; this new system is the only way out of the historic crisis that faces humanity. Opportunists who put forward the utopian demand for the reconstruction of the capitalist economic system in order to defer socialisation only postpone a resolution of the crisis and create the possibility of utter ruin. Communist revolution is the best – is indeed the only possible – means by which society’s truly productive force, the proletariat, and society itself can be saved.

Proletarian dictatorship does not involve any sharing out of the means of production and exchange. On the contrary, the greatest possible centralisation of the productive forces and the subordination of all production to a single plan is the aim.

The first steps towards the socialisation of the whole economy include: the socialisation of the apparatus of those big banks at present controlling production; the seizure of all the economic institutions of the capitalist state by bringing them under the control of proletarian state power; the nationalisation of all industries organised in syndicates and trusts and of those branches of industry in which the concentration and centralisation of capital makes nationalisation technically possible; and the nationalisation of agricultural estates and their transformation into publicly managed agricultural units.

As regards the smaller holdings, the proletariat must gradually amalgamate them in ways appropriate to their size.

It must be emphasised that small properties will not be expropriated and force will. not be used against small property-owners who do not exploit hired labour. This layer must be drawn into the sphere of socialist organisation gradually. Example and practice will show them the advantage of the new system, which frees the small peasant from the economic yoke of the kulaks and the landowners, and the urban petty bourgeoisie from the weight of taxes (the cancellation of state debts is an important measure in this connection) etc.

In the economic sphere, the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship can be carried out only to the extent that the proletariat is able to create centralised organs for the management of production and introduce workers’ management. In its attempt to achieve this goal the proletariat will have to make use of those mass organisations which are most closely connected with the production process.

In the sphere of distribution the proletarian dictatorship must replace trading by a fair distribution of products. Measures necessary to this end include the following: the socialisation of large commercial enterprises, the transfer of all bourgeois state and municipal organs of distribution to the proletariat, introduction of control over large co-operative associations, whose organisational apparatus will still have a big economic significance in the transitional period, the gradual centralisation of all these organs and their transformation into a single system, responsible for the rational distribution of products.

In the sphere of distribution, as in that of production, qualified technicians and specialists are to be used once their political resistance has been broken and they prove themselves prepared to work with the new system of production instead of capital.

The proletariat has no intention of oppressing these people – on the contrary, it will give them, for the first time, the opportunity to develop their creative energies. Under the proletarian dictatorship the separation of physical and mental labour, characteristic of capitalism, will be superseded by their integration, and in this way labour and science will be unified. Besides the expropriation of factories, mines, estates, etc., the proletariat must also put an end to the exploitation of the population by capitalist landlords, placing the large houses in the hands of the local Soviets, moving workers into the apartments of the bourgeoisie, etc.

In the course of effecting these great changes, Soviet power must steadily build up a huge administrative apparatus and centralise its organisation, and, at the same time, draw increasing layers of the working people into direct administrative work.

The Road to Victory
The revolutionary epoch demands that the proletariat use methods of struggle capable of focusing its militancy – namely, methods of mass struggle which lead logically to direct confrontation and open battle with the bourgeois state machine. All other methods, including the revolutionary utilisation of the bourgeois parliament, must be subordinated to this aim.

An essential condition of victory in this struggle is that the proletariat make a break not only with the outright lackeys of capital and the hangmen of the Communist revolution, such as the right-wing social democrats, but also with the ‘centre’ (the Kautskyites), which abandons the proletariat at the critical moment to compromise with its avowed enemies.

It is vital at the same time to form a bloc with members of the revolutionary workers’ movement – certain syndicalist elements, for example – who, in spite of the fact that they did not earlier belong to the socialist party, have more or less accepted the platform of the proletarian dictatorship through Soviets.

There are several factors which make the creation of a truly revolutionary and proletarian Communist International essential: the growth of the revolutionary movement in all countries, the danger that the revolution will be suppressed by an alliance of the capitalist states, the attempts by the parties of the social-traitors to unify their ranks (the establishment of the scab ‘International’ in Berne is an example) and so better serve Wilson’s League of Nations and finally, the absolute necessity of co-ordinating proletarian action.

Only an International, capable of subordinating so-called national interests to the interests of international revolution, will organise aid on an international scale, for without economic and other kinds of mutual support the proletariat is not in a position to build a new society. Unlike the scab socialist International, the International of the Communist proletariat will support the exploited peoples of the colonies in their struggle with the imperialists, in the knowledge that this action will promote the final collapse of the world imperialist system.

At the outbreak of the world war the capitalist criminals maintained that they were concerned only with the defence of their fatherland. It was not long, however, before German imperialism showed its brutal nature in a series of bloody actions in Russia, the Ukraine and Finland. Now it is the Entente powers who are being exposed, even in the eyes of the most backward layers of the population, as international robbers and murderers of the proletariat. Together with the German bourgeoisie and the social-patriots, and with hypocritical phrases about peace on their lips, they use their tanks and brutalised, barbaric colonial troops in an attempt to crush the revolution of the European proletariat. The White Terror unleashed by the bourgeois cannibals is indescribable. Its victims in the working class are innumerable. The bravest fighters, including Liebknecht and Luxemburg, have been lost.

The proletariat must defend itself at all costs. The Communist International calls the whole world proletariat to the last fight. We must meet arms with arms, force with force.

Down with the Imperialist Conspiracy of Capital!

Long Live the International Republic of Proletarian Soviets!

"A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose"- Gertrude Stein In Exile

"A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose"- Gertrude Stein In Exile




BOOK REVIEW

March Is Women’s History Month

The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Vintage Books, New York, 1990


Okay, Gertrude so there was no there, there in Oakland. (I agree, having lived there for a period at a much later time-San Francisco, however, is a different matter). So, by hook or crook, Miss Gertrude Stein gets herself (along with her older brother) by a circuitous route to turn of the century Paris (turn of the 20th century that is) and becomes not only an international literary and cultural figure in her own right but a veritable magnet for every "advanced' bourgeois cultural tendency in the then known Western civilized world. Starting with the nova Paris anti-academy art world as the likes of Picasso, Braque and Matisse and their schools take it by a storm on through to the sparse World War I years when the flower of European culture was almost destroyed to a re-emergence in the aftermath of that war with "lost generation" types like Hemingway and Fitzgerald we get a bird's eye view of important trends in modern cultural history during the first third of the 20th century. And of Stein's own struggle to get the kind of literary recognition she craved and desired.

What we do not get is anything that, even with the looser standard for such endeavors in the beginning of the 21st century, that we recognize as autobiography either of the ostensible subject of the book, Stein's long time companion (to use a quaint term of the time for two women living together) Alice B. Toklas or Ms. Stein herself. Nor as we suppose to. What we are treated to is a `modern' writing sensibility trying to free up the language (and grammatical constrains) from their 19th century moorings. More conventionally we are given a travelogue, gossip column, some helpful hints and some very witty writing that gives tidbits of what Ms. Stein thought of literature, her place in it and the place of others in her literary pantheon.

In some sense this book, while quite readable even today, is not for the faint-hearted, or those who are not modern Western literature majors or readers of something like "The New York Review Of Books". Fortunately I am a devoted reader of that magazine and therefore the seemingly hundreds of literary figures that Stein `name drops' along the way I had at least passing familiarity with. Some of the many art figures that passed through I was less sure of. What is clear is that Ms. Stein's `mobile salon' (for lack of better words to trace this pair's movements) and her literary achievement here is an echo from a bygone era. Nobody today, as least in the circles I run in or want to run in, could stand up to the `precious' visits by English and other celebrities that dropped in Stein's residences. Or the standard variations on the European grand tour by American college students or young marrieds that made a stop obligatory. Or the stifling aimlessness and routinism of many the various denizens of the Paris of the day, famous or not. But in a world that currently suffers from serious disconnects with its cultural past it is interesting to read about those who had time to "do' the literary scene. But, mainly, get this book for some very clever writing by Ms. Stein.

Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind

Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind  





By Seth Garth 

[Bernie, O., we will avoid his last name since he has recently retired from the force and we will let him enjoy his peace, after twenty-five of decent and honorable service. The “force” for those who are clueless any police department but here the Bay City Police Department a comfortable California seaside town as its name would indicate, although not as sleepy a town as the seaside designation would connote, That last phrase about Bernie, we can skip the “O” now that we can without rancor leave him to his peace was at one time up for grabs. Had been challenged back when he had been on the force maybe five years in the days before the war (World War II) when anything went in the fair city from gambling, dope, un-bonded booze and women, women who would take you around the world or around the block where a male confederate with a handy blackjack waited in earnest for any unsuspecting goof, not Kerouac’s unsuspecting holy saintly beaten down by the grind of modern society and left to rust along the empty roadside goof either but just some drunken wayward tourist who thought he still had that old sex appeal that his Martha used to brag to her friends about.

And that anything goes, the dope to girls action, especially that latter category since he had started out as a hustling jack-roller grabbing marks some whore he was working with was steering his way was strictly the bought and paid for territory of one Eddie Miles, Mister Edward Raymond Miles when they let him into the swanky Bay City Golf Club-or else- but plain run of the mill gangster Eddie now. We can use his last name since he is finishing up the last five years of a twenty-five year gaff at the Q for plenty of stuff-extortion, pandering, armed this and that,  everything except the one the jury couldn’t pin on him-murder one, murder for hire if you want the full kick. They had a raw assistant D.A. assigned to the case since everybody had the case down to a shoo-in for sure and the D.A. had his own set of problems having let a few Eddy non-murder crimes go under the sea (and “sponsoring” Eddie in that swanky club where he was ostracized after the rap sheet on Eddie became public- probably would have been worse except it is always good to have a D.A. sweating and forgetting stuff-criminal or country club).   

Bernie, Bernie O. when you think back about those days was the straightest rightest cop that ever put on shoe leather in Bay City. The problem back those twenty some years ago was that every other freaking cop on the force was “on the take” to Eddie, or knew guys on the take to Eddie which was the same thing. Somebody, without a shred of evidence had fingered Bernie as a bad cop in Eddie Miles hip pocket. Bought and paid for- a tough charge to defend against when everybody was on the take and wanted to cover their asses. Of course in those days a cop, a five year cop anyway, couldn’t pursuit a case on his own where he had been accused of corruption. Against Department policy. A great set-up for a set-up. So he clamped Phil Marlin, a guy who had been on the force with him, had gone through the academy with Bernie but had been fired for insubordination, fired good, when he wouldn’t tumble to looking the other way when one of Eddie’s boy took some underage girl into a backseat out on the back roads of the Pacific Coast Highway for a blow job and whatever else she was offering-or he was taking. Phil had turned private investigator, private dick, keyhole peeper to most cops. Took the case strictly as a favor to Bernie, no charge, you see, that was how tight they had been back when they had each other’s back in the days they were flat-footing beat cops down in the tough Five Points neighborhood.

Bernie had been in on the bust of Eddie Miles, after the Staties had taken over based on what Marlin had dug up from the sewer and they insisted that Bernie be in on the nab so he had some satisfaction that he was cleared by his own actions. The problem for Bernie and for Marlin came later when Marlin decided he wanted to tell the story to the general public-maybe as a cautionary tale, maybe to show how fragile a grip every human has on life, or maybe he just wanted his name up in lights in some fake private dick’s hall of fame. What Marlin did was get this writer, kind of well- known for writing racy pulp fiction crime detection novels, a guy named Raymond Chandler, to “ghost” the story for him. Between Marlin’s vivid imagination and Chandler’s excessive literary license they balled the whole story up, balled it up pretty bad. So Bernie with his own leisure time, his peace time, hired me to “ghost” his true version of the case-the Eddie Miles bust. The only thing that Bernie and Marlin, the late Phillip Marlin who had his check cashed down in sunny Mexico one back alley night when he was looking for a fugitive named Terry Manning, agreed on was that Bernie had handed him a private job for General Guy Sternwood. Yeah, Sternwood the guy who turned the La Brea tar pits into gold-for himself and his. He was having trouble with one of his wild daughters and needed a guy who could handle the fix he had been put in by her posing for raw, today they would say kinky, nude photographs and guys were looking for dough, serious dough for the negatives-or else. Here is how it really played out from that agreed point on.             

****
Marlin had shown up at the General’s mansion one sunny summer afternoon up in the hills of Bay City far from the humidity and dust and far from the sight of those still-producing oil pumps that got him the place on the hill. Before he could be invited into the General’s bedroom (the General would enumerate more health issues than seemed possible for a breathing human being and he had been under doctor’s to keep to his bed, his now bed-office) he was confronted by one of the wild daughters, the younger one Carol. She had asked him, once she had looked him up and down in a way usually reserved for guys and figured him for a tumbler, if once he had finished talking to her father he wanted a good time in her room. She also told him that she did not care what her father wanted she wanted those nude photos circulated, wanted to be a Hollywood starlet just like Eddie Miles had promised. Wanted all the boys to get big in the pants when they snuck a peak at her luscious body doing nasty little things (and it was luscious according to Marlin-Bernie rated her as a good afternoon fuck and then get the hell out of town).

Phil had told Bernie, and more importantly had told Chandler who retailed the story, that he never had gone into her room after speaking with the General with whom he had accepted the assignment to act as go-between to Eddie in order to get the freaking photos and negatives back to be burned. According to Norris, the trusty butler, a guy who had no ax to grind then, was the General’s eyes and ears in those days (and was stealing him blind since he had control of household checking accounts-like manna from heaven if a guy knew how to fudge the books just so and old Norris had the game down pat) told him that he had seen Marlin coming out of Carol’s room disheveled and glassy-eyed like she had taken him around the world.

That is the real reason Marlin never got anywhere trying to get those photographs back. He would always argue that the General was maybe hot to trot to get the pictures after all he could hardly face his social equals when his daughter was front and center in some low-rent “girlie” magazine (where in the end they would wind up courtesy of Carol sending an agent to one of those publications begging them to put them in the magazine). But the real reason he hired Marlin was he was looking to find out what had happened to his trusted confidante, Rex Randall, who had apparently run off with Eddie Miles’ girlfriend to parts unknown. (Phil had dismissed the run away and elope story as so much eyewash but Bernie knew, had reason to know that Eddie was carrying a big torch for the broad and who knows what he might have done with Rex). Rex a guy Phil knew from the days when Rex was managing a guy in Half Moon Bay dope operations and grapping all the ass he could from young things who were ready to do anything to get something for the head-anything. Bernie knew of him but even then knowing about Eddie’s big torch figured that Rex was sleeping out in the bay somewhere with a sack of rocks tied to him.                

So Phil went through the paces, went through the motions of trying to earn his big bonus-attached (not for the Rex part-for the fucking nude pics), and had met Laura the older daughter as he was leaving his sister’s room. He always claimed he never met her then but had been in the General’s bed-side office after having swigged a couple of high-shelf brandies to seal the deal and then left to pursue justice some such bullshit. Although she wasn’t as photograph pretty as her younger sister Carol she was just as wild, her lovely vices gambling and cases of scotched devoured. Needless to say the story gets jumbled up again when Marlin later denied that he tumbled to her bedroom eyes proposition but Norris once again put paid to that lie since early the next morning he had seen Marlin, disheveled, glassy-eyed and looking sexually-sated (how Norris knew that was the case in England where he had learned the butler trade he had had his fill of such meanderings from the nobility that he had been in service  to-said they had the morals of a great white shark-none). The worse part of that tryst with Laura was that he had spilled the beans about the General’s desire to see what had happened to Rex to Eddie Miles whom she was in hock to for gambling debts at his off-shore casino (and as it turned out had been trying to get out from under by fucking Eddie and a couple of his boys to death-yeah, the morals of a shark- a resourceful girl no question).

Marlin after having his fill of the Sternwood young women then “got to work,” hit the library to see about old rare books and their provences since he assumed that the photos of Carol would wind up in some high-end antique bookstore used as a front for select clientele to “borrow” such fare (some of them when the lists became public later friends of the General who must have gloated and a veritable who’s who at the Bay City Golf Club-yeah, the morals of a shark all the way around). (It was only later that Carol got that agent to hustle his photo-ass to the “girlies” once they had been used at Eddie’s trial since they “belonged” to her). Phil did a perfunctory search of all the old-timey bookstores in town, got nowhere and laid low for a few days before telling the General he was hot on the case and told him that he needed some walking around money to go to Eddies’ casino off-shore. Norris set him up with a cool thou-not bad for walking around money-then anyway. 

One night, the first night he ran into one Eddie Miles, he also ran into Laura losing a load at the tables but smiling about it as she gave him a come hither look that would snow (later when they were in closer proximity she offered to take him out to her car for a little off-hand tryst-which after he had finished up with Eddie he gladly took her up on funny how that time appeared on his bill when it came time to close up accounts with Norris. Services rendered. So another glassy-eyed night with a Sternwood sister. He had gotten nowhere asking Eddie Miles where his wife was and about the rumor that she had taken a powder with Rex-the General’s confidante.  Getting nowhere fast on this case. Getting nothing on Eddie either. 

Then the great break-through although it was really only Marlin falling into something after another guy, a guy he could have saved by all the evidence but he had gotten “cold feet” when the deal went down. It seems that one of the clerks, Iris, a comely female clerk that he had taken into the stockroom one rainy afternoon, at Ye Olde Bookstore had had a boyfriend who had been acting as an agent for Eddie Miles in trying to unload Carol’s sulky nude photos. Somehow he had had trouble moving the merchandise and Eddie dumped him-dumped him literally in the bay for some purpose-or np purpose. Oh, not Eddie personally-Edward Miles did not do his own dirty work but had his number one boy, The Camino Kid, a bad-ass no question throw a sack over the boyfriend’s head and put a few stones in the mix and let him sink and sleep with the fishes off the bow of  Eddie’s casino liner. Nice boy. The girlfriend after getting friendly with Phil that afternoon loosened up by a few drinks had spilled the beans about the boyfriend number one after she had got herself another beau. To even the score with Eddie though she was ready to tell Marlin where Eddie’s wife was-for a couple of hundred bucks to blow town with. Marlin agreed and was to meet the new beau, a square little guy who probably was too short for that ravishing clerk.        
                 
That boyfriend number two, Harry, wasn’t any luckier than number one since he was acting as go-between for Iris with Marlin (Iris a girl who had her charms apparently but who always left standing unlike her beaus). They were supposed to meet at Harry’s office but the Camino Kid got there first while Phil was hiding in an anteroom. The Kid’s chore that day to get Harry to clam up about Eddie’s wife’s whereabouts. The little guy held out though-Iris must have had something he had not noticed that afternoon in the stockroom. Yeah, paid with his life for protecting his honey while Marlin stood breathless in the next fucking room. Here is where the wheels turned though. The cops, Bernie and his partner, were tailing the Camino Kid since the Iris’ boyfriend number one washed up on shore tied up in a sack just the way the Camino Kid liked to finish up his handiwork. They were able to follow him to the backroads of Ocean City the next town over where he stopped at an old house set back from the road. Waiting at the door was Eddie Miles’ wife. No sign of Rex though.         

Earlier back at Harry’s office Marlin had gotten out of his deep freeze long enough to follow Bernie’s police vehicle to that lonely country road. That is why Marlin claimed he took the Camino Kid out. That the fire -power that did the Kid in when he resisted arrest and started ban-banging had come from his weapon. Claimed he “saved” Bernie’s partner who was a dead man if he hadn’t shot the Kid first. Since he was using a police special (he had never turned in his gun when he was fired from the cops figuring he would need a weapon as a private dick) who the hell would have known. Bernie knew for a fact that he had winged the Kid and then doubled-down on him. He had heard no additional shots. Chalk one bad guy gone up for Bernie if you are keeping score. That action is what got him in on the deal when the Staties went after Eddie Miles and his henchmen.


As for Rex, well, here is where things get weird, where what the rich or do not do gets sealed with seven seals. Carol, and Marlin should have seen this coming given his own experiences with the girls, had killed Rex one afternoon when he would not give her a tumble. Carol did not like not being obeyed when she had her wanting habits on. That is why Marlin got taken around the world that day he went into the General’s hire. Laura had covered up for her sister-also why he gotten taken around the world by her. They had him figured as a sex-addled guy and they knew their mark. Marlin out of respect for the old man and his troubles with those wild sisters let it ride. Let the old man fade into his endless sleep not knowing he had sired two monsters. Before he left that hillside mansion though he made sure he got his full rate and expenses. That’s the real “skinny” forget all that other self-serving stuff.          

Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- A Folk Revival, Revival? - “A Mighty Wind”- A Film Review

Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- A Folk Revival, Revival? - “A Mighty Wind”- A Film Review




A "YouTube" film clip from the movie "A Mighty Wind".


DVD Review

A Mighty Wind, 2003





One of the strands of leftist cultural expression, apart from the central struggle to get people fighting for a workers party that fights for a workers government, that this space has attempted to explore and give some meaning to is the folk revival of the 1960s that was a critical nodal point in this writer’s turn away from mainstream popular culture. Now, as an attentive reader might well know, I have reviewed more well-known folk figures like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger than one could shake a stick at. I have also paid plenty of attention to lesser figures like Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, as well as reaching back to the iconic figures from the mist of time that motivated those revivalist performers, like Harry Smith and the Lomaxes, John and son Alan. In short, I have paid my dues and have treated that folk revival with proper respect.

Not so this mostly witty sent-up of a film that takes on the whole revival of the folk revival question head first, and gives it a big boot in the behind. The story line, such as it is, and which is not really the factor that keeps this thing moving, is that an old folk music agent has died, leaving a request to his erstwhile dutiful son to try to bring the top three acts that he acted as agent for back for one more shot in the limelight. Nothing wrong with that premise, unless of course it is merely done to take a crack at the pocketbook of the nostalgically-inclined sector of the now aging folk music component of the post-World War II “boomer” generation. And this film does just that, doing a nice job of putting-on the whole PBS-like public television apparatus that thrives on just such events to satisfy their demographics, and helps raise that every constant need for cash from its listeners.

Of course, as is to be expected, it is no easy thing to get the three groups to cooperate, especially the star attraction, Bob and Joan, oops, Mitch and Mickey. Along the way there are more sent-ups: where the folk niche fits in today’s download-driven music market; the problems with aging voices; and the dippy doings of some of the folk musak entertainers. This one is for laughs, and although some bits are corny, intentionally or not, there is enough to keep you interested for the one and one half hours that the movie has you in its grip. From a guy who takes his folk music straight, and with no nonsense, that means something.