This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Veterans For Peace strongly condemns the recent announcement that up to 15,000 active duty military personnel may be sent to the U.S. southern border. These troops will join the additional National Guard units that were sent last year, increasing the militarization of our borders at an alarming rate. Our immigration laws and enforcement tactics have long been at a crisis point and we are now witnessing an even more draconian surge in the use of force to prop up failed policies.
Veterans For Peace calls on all our members and all veterans who see the inhumanity and injustice of the current policies to call their Congressional Representative and Senators to demand the military be pulled back from the border and that the members of the approaching caravan be treated with dignity and processed according to international humanitarian standards as refugees. We call on all service members participating in the border deployment to follow the long American tradition of listening to their conscience and remember that they have no obligation to follow illegal orders. (For questions on military rights, contact the GI Rights Hotline or Courage to Resist)
The U.S. government's claim that active duty troops are providing only innocuous support services are misleading. This is the introduction of U.S. military force as a deterrent to those who are pursuing their rights as asylum seekers fleeing from extreme poverty and violence in their homelands, much of it due to U.S policies. The U.S. is required under international humanitarian standards to welcome those seeking refuge.
Veterans For Peace recognizes that these orders did not happen in a vacuum, but represent a long history over several administrations of racist and violent policies that has perpetuated U.S. wars across the world and horrific domestic policies that created ICE, massive immigration detention centers and a wall that already splits towns and separates friends and families. However, the Trump administration has escalated, at an alarming pace, the implementation of new dangerous measures. President Trump is moving to fulfill on the promises of his campaign that caused an upsurge of hateful sentiment in our nation and spurred a rise in fear and anger.
Additionally, Veterans For Peace is not only concerned about the safety of individuals and families fleeing violence and the increased militarization of the border but we are extremely concerned about the continued disregard of federal law. Federal law, namely the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibits the deployment of active duty troops on domestic soil and the U.S. Government continues to ignore laws in favor of increasing militarization of U.S. domestic policy.
As military veterans from WWII to the current era of conflicts, who have trained for, and in many cases, fought in U.S. wars, we know that current U.S. policies have not only failed to bring peace but are morally bankrupt and we do not believe that more military at the border is rooted in justice or compassion.
It is more important than ever that veterans stand up, speak out and organize to disrupt the dangerous escalation of racist and unjust policies, both at home and abroad. We, as veterans, know that peace is possible, but only if resources are directed towards caring for one another, not perpetuating militarization across the globe.
As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –
By Seth Garth
A few years ago, starting in August 2014 the 100th anniversary of what would become World War I, I started a series about the cultural effects, some of them anyway, of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets, writers and other cultural figures. Those culturati left behind, those who survived the shellings, the trenches, the diseases, and what was then called “shell shock,” now more commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is duly recognized, and compensated for at least in the United States by the Veterans Administration in proven cases reacted in many different ways. Mainly, the best of them, like the ordinary dog soldiers could not go back to the same old, same old, could not revive the certitudes of the pre-war Western world with it distorted sense of decorum and went to what even today seem quirky with moderns like Dada, Minimalism, the literary sparseness of Hemingway, and so on. I had my say there in a general sense but now as we are only a few months away from the 100th anniversary of, mercifully, the armistice which effectively ended that bloodbath I want to do a retrospective of creative artistic works by those who survived the war and how those war visions got translated into their works with some commentary if the spirit moves me but this is their show-no question they earned a retrospective.
Poets’ Corner-In The Aftermath Of World War I- Poets Take A Stab At Visually Understanding A Broken World After the Bloodbath
By Lenny Lynch
I don’t know that much about the Dada movement that swept through Europe in the early part of the 20th century in response to the creation of modern industrial society that was going full steam and the modern industrial scale death and destruction such mass scale techniques brought upon this good green earth by World War I. (Foreshadowed it is agreed by the industrial carnage at places like Cold Harbor in the American Civil War, the butchery of the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent river of blood by its own rulers of the Paris Commune and the Boer War.) The war to end all wars which came up quite short of that goal but did decimate the flower of the European youth, including vast swaths of the working class. Such massive blood-lettings for a precious few inches of soil like at the Battle of the Somme took humankind back more than a few steps when the nightmare ended-for a while with the Armistice on November 11, 1918. An event which in observing its centennial every serious artist should consider putting to the paint. And every military veteran to take heart including the descendants of those artists who laid down their heads in those muddy wretched trenches. Should reclaim the idea behind Armistice Day from the militarists who could learn no lessons except up the kill and fields of fire ratios.
I don’t know much but this space over this centennial year of the last year of the bloody war, the armistice year 1918 which stopped the bloodletting will explore that interesting art movement which reflected the times, the bloody times. First up to step up George Groz, step up and show your stuff, show how you see the blood-lusted world after four years of burning up the fields of sweet earth Europe making acres of white-crossed places where the sullen, jaded, mocked, buried youth of Europe caught shells and breezes. Take one look Republican Automatons. Look at the urban environment, look at those tall buildings dwarfing mere mortal man and woman, taking the measure of all, making them think, the thinking ones about having to run, run hard away from what they had built, about fear fretting that to continue would bury men and women without names, without honor either.
Look too at honor denied, look at the handless hand, the legless leg, the good German flag, the Kaiser’s bloody medal, hard against the urban sky. The shaky republic, the republic without honor, shades of the murders of the honest revolutionary Liebknecht walking across Potsdam Plaza to go say no, no to the war budget and grab a hallowed cell the only place for a man of the people in those hard times and gallant Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, mixed in with thoughts of renegade burned out soldiers ready for anything. Weimar, weak-kneed and bleeding,would shake and one George Groz would know that, would draw this picture that would tell the real story of why there was a Dada-da-da-da-da movement to chronicle the times if not to fight on the barricades against that beast from which we had to run.
The Bolshevik-Led October Revolution-Lessons- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Anniversary Of His Death- The Defense of the Soviet Union and the Opposition (1929) Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.
The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right?
Note: For this 70th anniversary memorial I have decided to post articles written by Trotsky in the 1930s, the period of great defeats for the international working class with the rise of fascism and the disorientations of Stalinism beating down on it. This was a time when political clarity, above all, was necessary. Trotsky, as a simple review of his biographical sketch will demonstrate, wore many hats in his forty years of conscious political life: political propagandist and theoretician; revolutionary working class parliamentary leader; razor-sharp journalist ( I, for one, would not have wanted to cross swords with him. I would still be bleeding.); organizer of the great October Bolshevik revolution of 1917; organizer of the heroic and victorious Red Army in the civil war against the Whites in the aftermath of that revolution; seemingly tireless Soviet official; literary and culture critic: leader of the Russian Left Opposition in the 1920s; and, hounded and exiled leader of the International Left Opposition in the 1930s.
I have decided to concentrate on some of his writings from the 1930s for another reason as well. Why, with such a resume to choose from? Because, when the deal went down Leon Trotsky’s work in the 1930s, when he could have taken a political dive and sought some safe literary niche, I believe was the most important of his long career. He, virtually alone of the original Bolshevik leadership (at least of that part that still wanted to fight for international revolution), had the capacity to think and lead. He harnessed himself to the hard, uphill work of that period (step back, step way back, if you think we are “tilting at windmills” now). In that sense the vile Stalinist assassination in 1940, when Trotsky could still project years of political work ahead, is not among the least of Stalin’s crimes against the international working class. Had Trotsky lived another ten years or so, while he could not have “sucked” revolutions out of the ground, he could have stabilized a disoriented post-World War communist movement and we would probably have a far greater living communist movement today. Thanks for what you did do though, Comrade Trotsky.
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 50th 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” rockas 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 firmas 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 playerJerry 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.
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 50th 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” rockas 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 firmas 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 playerJerry 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.
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 50th 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]
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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” rockas 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 firmas 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 playerJerry 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.
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