The Louvin Brothers- If I Could Only Win Your Love-Where Do You Think Emmy Lou Harris Got Her Cover From?

When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -And Made It Stick-In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced The Wild Child Part Of Those Times  

By Zack James

[Zack James has been on an assignment covering the various 50^th anniversary commemorations of the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind something of a watershed year) and therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the demographically-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through his paces. Greg Green, site manager]     

Alex James was the king of rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a “think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million years ago, or it seems like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical experiences which have left me as a stepchild to three important musical moments, the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute” of the early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock  as the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring for this and other publications. I am well placed to do so since I was over a decade too young to have been washed over by the movements directly . But that step-child still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.

This needs a short explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother, born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls, me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in the dirt- poor working- class section of North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player (the ancient although now retro-revival  way to hear music then) and he was forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend in those days called “the great jailbreak.”      

 A little about Alex’s trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe 1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis, and maybe others as well but Alex always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd. Maybe it was true although Seth always claimed that he heard Big Joe Turner’s primo version of Shake, Rattle and Rock earlier and thus first to “discover” the roots of rock and Allan Jackson has claimed without proof that he saw Bill Haley and the Comets’ version in the Chalkboard Jungle and put them all to shame. We will let old wounds fester and move on.    

Quickly that experience formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats after the records companies and what he called “the authorities” put a stop to serious rock and gave forth singers , male and female, nay parent could love. That same Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t since although he was Alex’s best friend and was over the house a lot I never really knew except nothing good happened in the world without his imprimatur to hear these guys still sing his praises, was the guy who turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned about the emerging acid rock scene (“drugs, sex and rock and roll” being one mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time. (The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him shortly after to the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service which more than the others unhinged him and his dreams.)            

That’s Alex’s story-line. My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day at some law firm  as some  kind of lacky, and went to law school nights studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and knocked on his door to get him to quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his record player   Jerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out. I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen.

What happened then, what got me mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when he had first heard such and such a song.

Although the age gap between Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew him but since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not just a question of say, why Jailhouse Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going, why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock with his Rocket 88 and how obscure guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop rhythm and blues was one key element.

Another branch stuff from guys like Hack Devine, Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their country roots not to the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music. One night he startled me when he said “daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in the mud Appalachia had put the stuff in our genes. He didn’t call it DNA I don’t’ think he knew the term and I certainly didn’t but that was the idea. I resisted the idea then, and for a long time after but sisters and brothers look at the selections that accompany this so-called think piece the whole thing is clear now. I, we are our father’s sons after all. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed the idea lately-too late since my father who got exhausted from life early has been gone a long time now.                      

[Alex and I had our ups and downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) few years back when he was involved legally with the case and I was writing copy for the publications. Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017 when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the production values.]     

All that early music was mostly heard Alex told me at Tonio’s which I knew as a pizza place where the guys I hung around with would go after school for a slice of pizza and sodas and which then did not have a jukebox, had become more of a family place with no corner boys hanging out once the place had changed hands after Tonio had passed away. (They kept the name and it is still operating to this day after changing hands again now run by some guy from Armenia last I heard.) The funniest story from that Alex hang-out time was how they listened to the music in the jukebox for free when they were short of money. No, not some kicking the machine stuff but kind of romance stuff. You knew a girl part had to come with this since rock and roll really was the jailbreak music not only for the beat but for the social graces aspect of dealing with sex-the opposite sex, since you could dance without having to kill a girl with your step on toes feet.

What Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys, and who today is also a successful lawyer would do is con some girl into playing music that he, they wanted to hear when they were sitting at a booth and not hanging out side. (By the way not all the corner boys were successful take Markin’s fate getting killed down in Mexico in some hazy drug deal gone awry and a couple of guys who wound up in state prisons for armed robberies and such.) Frankie made this into an art form. See the girls seemed to have money to play the jukebox, had change, quarters since the play was three for a quarter. What Frankie who almost as well as Markin knew the whole “intelligence” on who was “going steady with whom” and the like would do is maybe go up to a girl who had just broken up with her boyfriend and ask her to play something dreamy, something to play to her angst or something. Then he went to work on the other two selections by asking the girl if she had heard say Jerry Lee Lewis’ Breathless. Alex said it never failed to work. Cute if kind of a hard sell if you think about it.          

Alex as is his way kind of mentored me around the various genre that had influenced him on his journey to adulthood. (Funny how the music of your youth sticks through life with you since he and I both agreed after a recent meeting where I was “grilling him,” his term not mine, on the subject of this piece and how I got my influences that we both still favor the music of our youth, still play it with a few off-beat newer things thrown in.) He is the one who informed me about the dearth, the death really of classic rock after Elvis went AWOL from life, Chuck Berry went to jail, and Jerry lee got too cousin cozy and a bunch of record companies caved into the moral authorities and parents and let only god-awful music over the airwaves. Which drove him first to the nascent folk music scene which Markin was instrumental in turning him on to and through exposure to those rooted musics to a serious appreciation of the blues.

He spent many hours telling me about his experiences in the period of the Summer of Love which he had just barely escaped he said in order to go to law school. That music, the dope, the women, and the craziness almost got to him under Markin’s direction. I’let that stuff go for now maybe Alex can pick up the thread but I want you to listen to the music more than run the gauntlet of what was what and why.   

*********

The selection posted here culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.    

The Louvin Brothers When I Stop Dreaming audio-For The Midnight By That Lonesome Telephone Amigos

When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -And Made It Stick-In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced The Wild Child Part Of Those Times  

By Zack James

[Zack James has been on an assignment covering the various 50^th anniversary commemorations of the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind something of a watershed year) and therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the demographically-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through his paces. Greg Green, site manager]     

Alex James was the king of rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a “think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million years ago, or it seems like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical experiences which have left me as a stepchild to three important musical moments, the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute” of the early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock  as the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring for this and other publications. I am well placed to do so since I was over a decade too young to have been washed over by the movements directly . But that step-child still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.

This needs a short explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother, born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls, me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in the dirt- poor working- class section of North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player (the ancient although now retro-revival  way to hear music then) and he was forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend in those days called “the great jailbreak.”      

 A little about Alex’s trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe 1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis, and maybe others as well but Alex always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd. Maybe it was true although Seth always claimed that he heard Big Joe Turner’s primo version of Shake, Rattle and Rock earlier and thus first to “discover” the roots of rock and Allan Jackson has claimed without proof that he saw Bill Haley and the Comets’ version in the Chalkboard Jungle and put them all to shame. We will let old wounds fester and move on.    

Quickly that experience formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats after the records companies and what he called “the authorities” put a stop to serious rock and gave forth singers , male and female, nay parent could love. That same Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t since although he was Alex’s best friend and was over the house a lot I never really knew except nothing good happened in the world without his imprimatur to hear these guys still sing his praises, was the guy who turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned about the emerging acid rock scene (“drugs, sex and rock and roll” being one mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time. (The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him shortly after to the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service which more than the others unhinged him and his dreams.)            

That’s Alex’s story-line. My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day at some law firm  as some  kind of lacky, and went to law school nights studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and knocked on his door to get him to quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his record player   Jerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out. I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen.

What happened then, what got me mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when he had first heard such and such a song.

Although the age gap between Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew him but since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not just a question of say, why Jailhouse Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going, why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock with his Rocket 88 and how obscure guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop rhythm and blues was one key element.

Another branch stuff from guys like Hack Devine, Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their country roots not to the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music. One night he startled me when he said “daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in the mud Appalachia had put the stuff in our genes. He didn’t call it DNA I don’t’ think he knew the term and I certainly didn’t but that was the idea. I resisted the idea then, and for a long time after but sisters and brothers look at the selections that accompany this so-called think piece the whole thing is clear now. I, we are our father’s sons after all. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed the idea lately-too late since my father who got exhausted from life early has been gone a long time now.                      

[Alex and I had our ups and downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) few years back when he was involved legally with the case and I was writing copy for the publications. Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017 when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the production values.]     

All that early music was mostly heard Alex told me at Tonio’s which I knew as a pizza place where the guys I hung around with would go after school for a slice of pizza and sodas and which then did not have a jukebox, had become more of a family place with no corner boys hanging out once the place had changed hands after Tonio had passed away. (They kept the name and it is still operating to this day after changing hands again now run by some guy from Armenia last I heard.) The funniest story from that Alex hang-out time was how they listened to the music in the jukebox for free when they were short of money. No, not some kicking the machine stuff but kind of romance stuff. You knew a girl part had to come with this since rock and roll really was the jailbreak music not only for the beat but for the social graces aspect of dealing with sex-the opposite sex, since you could dance without having to kill a girl with your step on toes feet.

What Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys, and who today is also a successful lawyer would do is con some girl into playing music that he, they wanted to hear when they were sitting at a booth and not hanging out side. (By the way not all the corner boys were successful take Markin’s fate getting killed down in Mexico in some hazy drug deal gone awry and a couple of guys who wound up in state prisons for armed robberies and such.) Frankie made this into an art form. See the girls seemed to have money to play the jukebox, had change, quarters since the play was three for a quarter. What Frankie who almost as well as Markin knew the whole “intelligence” on who was “going steady with whom” and the like would do is maybe go up to a girl who had just broken up with her boyfriend and ask her to play something dreamy, something to play to her angst or something. Then he went to work on the other two selections by asking the girl if she had heard say Jerry Lee Lewis’ Breathless. Alex said it never failed to work. Cute if kind of a hard sell if you think about it.          

Alex as is his way kind of mentored me around the various genre that had influenced him on his journey to adulthood. (Funny how the music of your youth sticks through life with you since he and I both agreed after a recent meeting where I was “grilling him,” his term not mine, on the subject of this piece and how I got my influences that we both still favor the music of our youth, still play it with a few off-beat newer things thrown in.) He is the one who informed me about the dearth, the death really of classic rock after Elvis went AWOL from life, Chuck Berry went to jail, and Jerry lee got too cousin cozy and a bunch of record companies caved into the moral authorities and parents and let only god-awful music over the airwaves. Which drove him first to the nascent folk music scene which Markin was instrumental in turning him on to and through exposure to those rooted musics to a serious appreciation of the blues.

He spent many hours telling me about his experiences in the period of the Summer of Love which he had just barely escaped he said in order to go to law school. That music, the dope, the women, and the craziness almost got to him under Markin’s direction. I’let that stuff go for now maybe Alex can pick up the thread but I want you to listen to the music more than run the gauntlet of what was what and why.   

*********

The selection posted here culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.    

The Louvin Brothers- I Wonder Where You Are Tonight-From Deep In The 1950s American Songbook

Louvin Brothers I Can't Keep You in Love with Me-For Anybody Who Ever Did The Midnight By The Phone Miseries

When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -And Made It Stick-In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced The Wild Child Part Of Those Times  

By Zack James

[Zack James has been on an assignment covering the various 50^th anniversary commemorations of the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind something of a watershed year) and therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the demographically-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through his paces. Greg Green, site manager]     

Alex James was the king of rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a “think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million years ago, or it seems like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical experiences which have left me as a stepchild to three important musical moments, the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute” of the early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock  as the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring for this and other publications. I am well placed to do so since I was over a decade too young to have been washed over by the movements directly . But that step-child still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.

This needs a short explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother, born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls, me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in the dirt- poor working- class section of North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player (the ancient although now retro-revival  way to hear music then) and he was forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend in those days called “the great jailbreak.”      

 A little about Alex’s trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe 1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis, and maybe others as well but Alex always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd. Maybe it was true although Seth always claimed that he heard Big Joe Turner’s primo version of Shake, Rattle and Rock earlier and thus first to “discover” the roots of rock and Allan Jackson has claimed without proof that he saw Bill Haley and the Comets’ version in the Chalkboard Jungle and put them all to shame. We will let old wounds fester and move on.    

Quickly that experience formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats after the records companies and what he called “the authorities” put a stop to serious rock and gave forth singers , male and female, nay parent could love. That same Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t since although he was Alex’s best friend and was over the house a lot I never really knew except nothing good happened in the world without his imprimatur to hear these guys still sing his praises, was the guy who turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned about the emerging acid rock scene (“drugs, sex and rock and roll” being one mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time. (The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him shortly after to the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service which more than the others unhinged him and his dreams.)            

That’s Alex’s story-line. My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day at some law firm  as some  kind of lacky, and went to law school nights studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and knocked on his door to get him to quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his record player   Jerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out. I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen.

What happened then, what got me mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when he had first heard such and such a song.

Although the age gap between Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew him but since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not just a question of say, why Jailhouse Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going, why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock with his Rocket 88 and how obscure guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop rhythm and blues was one key element.

Another branch stuff from guys like Hack Devine, Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their country roots not to the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music. One night he startled me when he said “daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in the mud Appalachia had put the stuff in our genes. He didn’t call it DNA I don’t’ think he knew the term and I certainly didn’t but that was the idea. I resisted the idea then, and for a long time after but sisters and brothers look at the selections that accompany this so-called think piece the whole thing is clear now. I, we are our father’s sons after all. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed the idea lately-too late since my father who got exhausted from life early has been gone a long time now.                      

[Alex and I had our ups and downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) few years back when he was involved legally with the case and I was writing copy for the publications. Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017 when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the production values.]     

All that early music was mostly heard Alex told me at Tonio’s which I knew as a pizza place where the guys I hung around with would go after school for a slice of pizza and sodas and which then did not have a jukebox, had become more of a family place with no corner boys hanging out once the place had changed hands after Tonio had passed away. (They kept the name and it is still operating to this day after changing hands again now run by some guy from Armenia last I heard.) The funniest story from that Alex hang-out time was how they listened to the music in the jukebox for free when they were short of money. No, not some kicking the machine stuff but kind of romance stuff. You knew a girl part had to come with this since rock and roll really was the jailbreak music not only for the beat but for the social graces aspect of dealing with sex-the opposite sex, since you could dance without having to kill a girl with your step on toes feet.

What Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys, and who today is also a successful lawyer would do is con some girl into playing music that he, they wanted to hear when they were sitting at a booth and not hanging out side. (By the way not all the corner boys were successful take Markin’s fate getting killed down in Mexico in some hazy drug deal gone awry and a couple of guys who wound up in state prisons for armed robberies and such.) Frankie made this into an art form. See the girls seemed to have money to play the jukebox, had change, quarters since the play was three for a quarter. What Frankie who almost as well as Markin knew the whole “intelligence” on who was “going steady with whom” and the like would do is maybe go up to a girl who had just broken up with her boyfriend and ask her to play something dreamy, something to play to her angst or something. Then he went to work on the other two selections by asking the girl if she had heard say Jerry Lee Lewis’ Breathless. Alex said it never failed to work. Cute if kind of a hard sell if you think about it.          

Alex as is his way kind of mentored me around the various genre that had influenced him on his journey to adulthood. (Funny how the music of your youth sticks through life with you since he and I both agreed after a recent meeting where I was “grilling him,” his term not mine, on the subject of this piece and how I got my influences that we both still favor the music of our youth, still play it with a few off-beat newer things thrown in.) He is the one who informed me about the dearth, the death really of classic rock after Elvis went AWOL from life, Chuck Berry went to jail, and Jerry lee got too cousin cozy and a bunch of record companies caved into the moral authorities and parents and let only god-awful music over the airwaves. Which drove him first to the nascent folk music scene which Markin was instrumental in turning him on to and through exposure to those rooted musics to a serious appreciation of the blues.

He spent many hours telling me about his experiences in the period of the Summer of Love which he had just barely escaped he said in order to go to law school. That music, the dope, the women, and the craziness almost got to him under Markin’s direction. I’let that stuff go for now maybe Alex can pick up the thread but I want you to listen to the music more than run the gauntlet of what was what and why.   

*********

The selection posted here culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.    

Louvin Brothers - Every Time You Leave=When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -And Made It Stick-In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced The Wild Child Part Of Those Times

When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -And Made It Stick-In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced The Wild Child Part Of Those Times  

By Zack James

[Zack James has been on an assignment covering the various 50^th anniversary commemorations of the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind something of a watershed year) and therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the demographically-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through his paces. Greg Green, site manager]     

Alex James was the king of rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a “think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million years ago, or it seems like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical experiences which have left me as a stepchild to three important musical moments, the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute” of the early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock  as the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring for this and other publications. I am well placed to do so since I was over a decade too young to have been washed over by the movements directly . But that step-child still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.

This needs a short explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother, born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls, me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in the dirt- poor working- class section of North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player (the ancient although now retro-revival  way to hear music then) and he was forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend in those days called “the great jailbreak.”      

 A little about Alex’s trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe 1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis, and maybe others as well but Alex always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd. Maybe it was true although Seth always claimed that he heard Big Joe Turner’s primo version of Shake, Rattle and Rock earlier and thus first to “discover” the roots of rock and Allan Jackson has claimed without proof that he saw Bill Haley and the Comets’ version in the Chalkboard Jungle and put them all to shame. We will let old wounds fester and move on.    

Quickly that experience formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats after the records companies and what he called “the authorities” put a stop to serious rock and gave forth singers , male and female, nay parent could love. That same Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t since although he was Alex’s best friend and was over the house a lot I never really knew except nothing good happened in the world without his imprimatur to hear these guys still sing his praises, was the guy who turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned about the emerging acid rock scene (“drugs, sex and rock and roll” being one mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time. (The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him shortly after to the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service which more than the others unhinged him and his dreams.)            

That’s Alex’s story-line. My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day at some law firm  as some  kind of lacky, and went to law school nights studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and knocked on his door to get him to quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his record player   Jerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out. I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen.

What happened then, what got me mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when he had first heard such and such a song.

Although the age gap between Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew him but since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not just a question of say, why Jailhouse Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going, why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock with his Rocket 88 and how obscure guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop rhythm and blues was one key element.

Another branch stuff from guys like Hack Devine, Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their country roots not to the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music. One night he startled me when he said “daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in the mud Appalachia had put the stuff in our genes. He didn’t call it DNA I don’t’ think he knew the term and I certainly didn’t but that was the idea. I resisted the idea then, and for a long time after but sisters and brothers look at the selections that accompany this so-called think piece the whole thing is clear now. I, we are our father’s sons after all. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed the idea lately-too late since my father who got exhausted from life early has been gone a long time now.                      

[Alex and I had our ups and downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) few years back when he was involved legally with the case and I was writing copy for the publications. Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017 when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the production values.]     

All that early music was mostly heard Alex told me at Tonio’s which I knew as a pizza place where the guys I hung around with would go after school for a slice of pizza and sodas and which then did not have a jukebox, had become more of a family place with no corner boys hanging out once the place had changed hands after Tonio had passed away. (They kept the name and it is still operating to this day after changing hands again now run by some guy from Armenia last I heard.) The funniest story from that Alex hang-out time was how they listened to the music in the jukebox for free when they were short of money. No, not some kicking the machine stuff but kind of romance stuff. You knew a girl part had to come with this since rock and roll really was the jailbreak music not only for the beat but for the social graces aspect of dealing with sex-the opposite sex, since you could dance without having to kill a girl with your step on toes feet.

What Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys, and who today is also a successful lawyer would do is con some girl into playing music that he, they wanted to hear when they were sitting at a booth and not hanging out side. (By the way not all the corner boys were successful take Markin’s fate getting killed down in Mexico in some hazy drug deal gone awry and a couple of guys who wound up in state prisons for armed robberies and such.) Frankie made this into an art form. See the girls seemed to have money to play the jukebox, had change, quarters since the play was three for a quarter. What Frankie who almost as well as Markin knew the whole “intelligence” on who was “going steady with whom” and the like would do is maybe go up to a girl who had just broken up with her boyfriend and ask her to play something dreamy, something to play to her angst or something. Then he went to work on the other two selections by asking the girl if she had heard say Jerry Lee Lewis’ Breathless. Alex said it never failed to work. Cute if kind of a hard sell if you think about it.          

Alex as is his way kind of mentored me around the various genre that had influenced him on his journey to adulthood. (Funny how the music of your youth sticks through life with you since he and I both agreed after a recent meeting where I was “grilling him,” his term not mine, on the subject of this piece and how I got my influences that we both still favor the music of our youth, still play it with a few off-beat newer things thrown in.) He is the one who informed me about the dearth, the death really of classic rock after Elvis went AWOL from life, Chuck Berry went to jail, and Jerry lee got too cousin cozy and a bunch of record companies caved into the moral authorities and parents and let only god-awful music over the airwaves. Which drove him first to the nascent folk music scene which Markin was instrumental in turning him on to and through exposure to those rooted musics to a serious appreciation of the blues.

He spent many hours telling me about his experiences in the period of the Summer of Love which he had just barely escaped he said in order to go to law school. That music, the dope, the women, and the craziness almost got to him under Markin’s direction. I’let that stuff go for now maybe Alex can pick up the thread but I want you to listen to the music more than run the gauntlet of what was what and why.   

*********

The selection posted here culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.    

John Riley

Sail Away Lady

The Brazos River

Willie Moore

Finnegan's Wake

John The Revelator

Fair Nottamun Town

Cane Blues

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- *The ABC's Of Socialism- From American Socialist Workers Party Founder James P. Cannon

Click on title to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives.

BOOK REVIEW

NOTEBOOK OF AN AGITATOR- JAMES P. CANNON, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1971


If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of the writings of James P. Cannon that was published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.

In the introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, especially after his long collaboration working with Trotsky. The period under discussion- from the 1920’s when he was a leader of the American Communist Party to the red-baiting years after World War II- started with his leadership of the fight against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and then later against those who no longer wanted to defend the gains of the Russian Revolution despite the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution. Cannon won his spurs in those fights and in his struggle to orient those organizations toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure- in his prime which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.


I note here that among socialists, particularly the non-Stalinist socialists of those days, there was controversy on what to do and, more importantly, what forces socialists should support. If you want to find a more profound response initiated by revolutionary socialists to the social and labor problems of those days than is evident in today’s leftist responses to such issues Cannon’s writings here will assist you. I draw your attention to the early part of the book when Cannon led the Communist-initiated International Labor Defense (ILD), most famously around the fight to save the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti here in Massachusetts. That campaign put the Communist Party on the map for many workers and others unfamiliar with the party’s work. For my perspective the early class-war prisoner defense work was exemplary.

The issue of class-war prisoners is one that is close to my heart. I support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee, Box 99 Canal Street Station, New York, N.Y 10013, an organization which traces its roots and policy to Cannon’s ILD. That policy is based on an old labor slogan- ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ therefore I would like to write a few words here on Cannon’s conception of the nature of the work. As noted above, Cannon (along with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern and Cannon’s long time companion Rose Karsner who would later be expelled from American Communist Party for Trotskyism with him and who helped him form what would eventually become the Socialist Workers Party) was assigned by the party in 1925 to set up the American section of the International Red Aid known here as the International Labor Defense.

It is important to note here that Cannon’s selection as leader of the ILD was insisted on by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) because of his pre-war association with that organization and with the prodding of “Big Bill’ Haywood, the famous labor organizer exiled in Moscow. Since many of the militants still languishing in prison were anarchists or syndicalists the selection of Cannon was important. The ILD’s most famous early case was that of the heroic anarchist workers, Sacco and Vanzetti. The lessons learned in that campaign show the way forward in class-war prisoner defense.

I believe that it was Trotsky who noted that, except in the immediate pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods, the tasks of militants revolve around the struggle to win democratic and other partial demands. The case of class-war legal defense falls in that category with the added impetus of getting the prisoners back into the class struggle as quickly as possible. The task then is to get them out of prison by mass action for their release. Without going into the details of the Sacco and Vanzetti case the two workers had been awaiting execution for a number of years and had been languishing in jail. As is the nature of death penalty cases various appeals on various grounds were tried and failed and they were then in imminent danger of execution.

Other forces outside the labor movement were also interested in the Sacco and Vanzetti case based on obtaining clemency, reduction of their sentences to life imprisonment or a new trial. The ILD’s position was to try to win their release by mass action- demonstrations, strikes and other forms of mass mobilization. This strategy obviously also included, in a subordinate position, any legal strategies that might be helpful to win their freedom. In this effort the stated goal of the organization was to organize non-sectarian class defense but also not to rely on the legal system alone portraying it as a simple miscarriage of justice. The organization publicized the case worldwide, held conferences, demonstrations and strikes on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. Although the campaign was not successful and the pair were executed in 1927 it stands as a model for class war prisoner defense. Needless to say, the names Sacco and Vanzetti continue to be honored to this day wherever militants fight against this system.

I also suggest a close look at Cannon’s articles in the early 1950’s. Some of them are solely of historical interest around the effects of the red purges on the organized labor movement at the start of the Cold War. Others, however, around health insurance, labor standards, the role of the media and the separation of church and state read as if they were written in 2006. That’s a sorry statement to have to make any way one looks at it.

SOME OF THE BOOKS REVIEWED HERE MAY NOT BE READILY AVAILABLE AT LOCAL LIBRARIES OR BOOKSTORES. CHECK AMAZON.COM FOR AVAILABILITY THERE, BOTH NEW AND USED. YOU CAN ALSO GOOGLE THE JAMES P. CANNON INTERNET ARCHIVES.

*********


Intellectuals and Revolution
James P. Cannon
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, Oct.-Nov. 1992. This 1961 letter to George Novack was found among the papers of the late George Weissman. The “M.” referred to is the well-known radical sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962). Mills was the author of numerous works including The Power Elite (1956) and The Marxists (1962). The book discussed here is his controversial best seller, Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960).
Published in Building the Revolutionary Party, © Resistance Books 1997 Published by Resistance Books 23 Abercrombie St, Chippendale NSW 2008, Permission for on-line publication provided by Resistance Books for use by the James P. Cannon Internet Archive in 2005.
Transcription\HTML Markup: Andrew Pollack


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear George:

This is to acknowledge receipt of your letter and Evelyn’s lively note of February 9 about your meeting with M. This is certainly interesting and important news. It is also gratifying to hear that a conversation between us about M. a year or so ago led, in a chain of actions and reactions, to your visit at his home.

But you are not quite accurate when you attribute my earlier suggestion that you undertake a serious and critical evaluation of M.’s work to my “customary generosity.” This explanation is a bit too generous on your part. The truth, which I began to love and revere in my earliest youth and which, in my later years, I am beginning to worship, compels me to admit that my motive was a little more complicated and devious than you make it. If I had anything to do with it, two other reasons for my proposal strike me as more plausible and closer to the truth.

In the first place, I recognized that you had studied M.’s writings and related material more attentively and thoroughly than I had and were better qualified as a Marxist scholar to analyze them. In the second place, when there is a big job of work to be done my lifelong reflex has been to look around for someone else to do it. In this instance, as in many others, you happened to be the one I pointed at. Now don’t get the idea that this disclaimer is another example of my well-known modesty. My general procedure in these matters is just a sly, Irish trick of turning the defects of ignorance and laziness into merits. I have been getting away with this sort of thing for years and years. And, strangely enough, the movement has benefited most of the time, while I have acquired a reputation as a nice guy who finds jobs for other people. In addition, as a sort of bonus, I have had the special indulgence to loaf and ruminate without being harried too much by my Irish conscience.


* * *

I think I agree entirely with everything you say in your letter in evaluation of M. He is different. As you know, I have always had a low, not to say contemptuous, opinion of the contemporary American intelligentsia. And that is not simply a carryover of the anti-intellectualism of my young Wobbly days. After I became a communist and recognized that the thinkers and leaders of the Russian revolution, like their own mentors before them, were all intellectuals, I made a serious effort at “thought reform” on the subject. But I must say that the intellectuals of our time in this country, particularly those who have made pretensions to radicalism, have done their best to keep me from going overboard.

Experience and observation over a long time have taught me two things about the American intellectuals in general, and the academicians in particular. They lack modesty, which is the precondition for learning things they don’t already know, especially about the dark interiors of social problems which have been explored by others but remain an undiscovered country for them. Supplementary to that defect, and holding them back from serious exploration, is the plain and simple fact that they have no guts. They want to keep out of trouble.

In the book of Catholicism, which I studied as a boy, there are three types of sins. The first are venial (small) sins, such as my own—work-dodging, procrastination, self-indulgence, shooting pool on Sunday, etc.—which are easily forgiven and which one can even forgive oneself after a few prayers, if a priest isn’t available. Then there are mortal sins, such as murder, blasphemy, adultery, etc. These can be forgiven by a priest if serious penance is done, but the mortal sinner must still serve time in purgatory before entering heaven. The third sin is the sin against the Holy Ghost. For that there is no forgiveness, and there is no place to go but to hell. Well, cowardice is a sin against the Holy Ghost! Or, to turn it around and switch from the catechism to Ben Johnson: “Courage is the first virtue, because it is the condition for the exercise of the other virtues.”


* * *

For quite a while I have regarded M. as a maverick on the academic range; his manifest courage and honesty seemed to separate him from the herd. Then his book about Cuba showed another and most attractive side of his character. I read it attentively, and kept assessing it as I went along, on two levels.

On one level it is an absorbing and moving exposition of the revolutionary process in Cuba, as the leaders of the revolution see it. And, to my mind, reading between the lines of their letters transmitted through M., they see more, and have studied and thought and reflected more about what they are doing, than they explicitly acknowledge in the letters.

They explain that they represent a new generation, starting from scratch, without the weariness and disillusionment that paralyzes the older generations of the radical movement. But they couldn’t have said that if they had not previously thought and reflected about it. They must have noticed that their youth gave them the energy and drive that youth alone can give, and that their simple ignorance, in contrast to the miseducation and disillusionment of their elders, had a certain positive side. They had less to unlearn.

They frankly say they are improvising as they go along. But the remarkable thing is that they have made the right improvisations almost every time, and keep in step with the revolution as it continues to develop. And this course has been continued since the book was written. Castro’s speech at the United Nations on the mainsprings of imperialism was the speech of a man who has picked up Lenin’s theory somewhere; maybe from the book itself. Then, in the press reports the other day Castro was quoted as saying—for the first time explicitly, as far as I know—that the socialist system is superior to the capitalistic system, and that in a resumption of normal diplomatic relations the United States would have to take this Cuban position into account.

From all this I got the impression that the Cuban leaders knew more about revolutionary theory than they claimed to know when they were talking with M., and that they know even more now, and are still learning.


* * *

On the other level, M. revealed himself as a man more clearly in this book than ever before. I kept saying to myself as I turned the pages from his introduction to his summary: “This intellectual really cares about the hungry people of the world. He worries, as he says himself, not about the sweeping revolution, but with it. He is even capable of anger—that holy emotion of rebels and revolutionists—about injustice, oppression, lies, and hypocrisy. What a dangerous wild man to be running loose on the American campus!”

His book moved me deeply. I kept thinking of writing him a note of thanks and appreciation. But with my usual procrastination and bashful reluctance to intrude on strangers, I put it off.


* * *

I would like here to make a brief comment on the important point dealt with inconclusively at the end of your talk with M. For convenience I will first quote a paragraph from your letter:


“If the Soviet economy is more productive, is it not then historically superior?” I asked. “What do you mean by historically superior?” he asked. “That it can produce more goods, more wealth, in less time with less labor per person.” “Yes, I think it can be more efficient but that is not for me the only test of historical superiority. More important is the moral, cultural, and intellectual superiority.” The discussion ended when I added that without a superior capacity for material production there couldn’t be a superior cultural superstructure.

I don’t think the apparent disagreement should be left in that stalemate. The question is more subtle, more complicated. And, for my part, I can see merit in both your criterion and that of M. They should be reconciled, not contrasted.

It is elementary that “a superior capacity for material production is the necessary basis for a superior cultural superstructure.” Even the Cuban leaders, who don’t profess to be practicing Marxists, know that and are working night and day to improve productive capacities to provide the means for all the other things. But in my opinion, there is also merit in M.’s concern for “moral, cultural, and intellectual superiority,” because it cannot be taken for granted that this will follow automatically from the reorganization of the productive system. This aim must be deliberately stated and consciously fought for all the time.

The fullest democracy in the transition period, institutionalized by forms of organization which assure the participation and control of the working people at every stage of development, is an indispensable part of our program. This has to be not merely stated, but emphasized. It distinguishes us from, and puts us in irreconcilable opposition to, the “economic determinists” and the totalitarians. It is the condition for the most efficient and rapid development of the new productive process.

And no less important, perhaps even more important: This full and free democratic participation of the working people, in all stages and all phases of the social tranformation during the transition period between the old society and the new, is the necessary condition for the preparation of the people for citizenship in a genuinely free society. It is not enough to learn to read and write and produce material things in abundance. That’s only the starting point. People have to learn how to live abundantly. That means they have to learn how to be free in body, mind, and spirit. Where else can they learn that but in the school and practice of ever-expanding democracy during the transition period?

In view of the way things have turned in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, this part of our Marxist program—workers’ democracy as the only road to preparation for the socialist society of the free and equal—must be given particular emphasis in all our propaganda and all our arguments with people who are dissatisfied with capitalism, but don’t want to exchange it for totalitarian slavery.

If we fail to emphasize this fundamental feature of our Marxist program; if we omit it or slur over it in our expositions of the superiority of nationalized and planned economy; if we neglect to speak of freedom as the socialist goal—we will never win the American workers and the new generation of intellectuals for the revolutionary fight. And we won’t deserve to.


* * *

My thoughts have turned increasingly to this side of the problem of social transformation in recent years. My speech on “Socialism and Democracy” at our 1957 convention (later repeated at the West Coast Vacation School and subsequently published as a pamphlet) was a first response to the questions troubling many people shaken up by the Khrushchev speech and the Polish and Hungarian events. Our discussion of the Chinese revolution during the past two years has pushed me to think more deeply on the subject, and I will probably have more to say later.

Here I will briefly state my settled conviction, as an orthodox Marxist, in one question and one answer: Will the development of the productive forces by a system of planned economy, under a totalitarian regime of regimentation and thought control, automatically lead to the socialist society of the free and equal? My answer is No, Never! The workers must achieve their own emancipation; nobody will do it for them and nobody can. If anybody is looking for a fight on this basic postulate of Marxism, just tell him to knock the chip off my shoulder. From this point of view, it appears to me that M.’s concern, which I fully share, for the “moral, cultural, and intellectual superiority” of the new society—and by that I have to presume that he means a free society—contradicts his denial of the role of the working class as the decisive agency of social change. This stands out all the more glaringly if we recognize that the transformation of society is not accomplished by the single act of revolution, but requires a transition period during which people change themselves while they are changing society.

If the workers are unable to carry through this historical task, it has to be assigned to some kind of elite. But then we come to the embarrassing questions: Will this uncontrolled elite be benevolent? Will it extend freedom, purely from goodness of heart and nobility of intentions? Or will it curtail freedom until it is stamped out entirely? Experience so far in the history of the human race in general and of this century in particular, speaks powerfully for the latter assumption. I don’t know whether George Orwell’s 1984 was intended as a prophecy or a warning. But if one grants or assumes that the workers are unable to take control of public affairs and keep control, it is most logical to assume that Big Brother will eventually take over. This is not a new thought of mine, or even of Orwell’s. Trotsky bluntly posed this alternative twenty-one years ago in In Defense of Marxism.

He didn’t believe it would happen that way, and neither do I. The working class cannot be written off until it has been definitively defeated on a worldwide scale. That hasn’t happened yet in Europe and America, or in the Soviet bloc, as the events of 1956-57 gave notice.

In this country, where the issue will finally be decided, the working class in basic industry, previously atomized and without experience in organization, showed great power in the thirties. That is too recent to forget. The uprising which culminated in the constitution of the CIO was a semi-revolution. It could have gone much farther if there had been adequate leadership. The workers—who need an “elite” to lead, but not to substitute—have marked time and even lost some ground since then; but they have not been defeated in open conflict.

In my opinion, it would be rash and “unscientific” to assume, in advance of the showdown conflict, that they will be defeated. But if one does assume that, he should not shrink from recognizing the horrifying alternative which first Trotsky, and later Orwell, posed—and quit talking about the future good society of the free and equal. Under such a regime it would be unlawful even to think about such things.

Fraternally,
James P. Cannon