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
Support The Class-War Prisoners During The
Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build
The Resistance
By Josh Breslin
My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal
I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent
supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to
social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the
international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the
organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were
being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost
abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and
Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent
times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the
NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning
(formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who
have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist
bastards.
Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this
time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend
program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise
these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many
years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on
have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who
would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous
lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia
and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black
liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola
Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and
anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and
student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage
battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years
ago we lost Hugo Pinell, George
Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others,
other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to
mention here but remembered.
Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One
year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th
Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note
how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned
there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for
class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s
(although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation
fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San
Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the
American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in
the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in
places from Oakland to New Haven, as represented by two of the Omaha
Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle,
the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case
today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground
who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against
American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left,
abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles
from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I
could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have
paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s
and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the
ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it
was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off
the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since
just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners,
have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a
quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter
realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the
other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down.
The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor
Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those
fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do
the same now at the holidays and throughout the year.
The class-war prisoners
must not stand alone.
PDC
Box 99 Canal Street Station
New York, N.Y. 10013
Google Partisan
Defense Committee for more information and updates
When The King Of Rock And
Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The
Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -The Moment Bobby
Blue “Blues Hour” Blew The Lip Off The Po’ White Corner Boy Night-Damn
Right
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 rather than his brother Alex and friends
“generation of ‘68” designation they have wrapped themselves around) 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 demographical-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 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 fiveimportant 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, along the way and intersecting that big three came a closeted
“country outlaw moment” initiated by father time Hank Williams and carried
through with vengeance by singers like Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt, and
Waylon Jennings, and Muddy Waters and friends blues 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 since I was over a decade too young to
have been washed over by the movements. 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 Acre, as in local lore Hell’s Acre, 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 now
ancient although 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 back then 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.)
Quickly that 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. That same
Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t, 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 later to
the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service while more than the others unhinged him
and his dream.) The blues part came as mentioned as a component of the folk
minute, part of the new wave rock revival and on its own. The country outlaw
connections bears separate mention these days.
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 somekind 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 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 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 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 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.
I have already mentioned
that night Alex startled me while we were listening to an old Louvain Brothers
song, I forget which one maybe Every
Times You Leave, 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 hillbilly
mountain music stuff in our genes. It took me a long time, too long to do our
father any good but I finallyfigured
out a few years ago that DNA stuff, why of late I see, really see where the
hillbillygood old boy hills and hollows
Saturday night local hooch courage red barn dance fit in on the long arch of
classic rock and roll as it passed through the likes of Elvis, Carl Perkins,
Lenny Ladd, Jerry Lee, Old Slim Fanon, Texas Mac Devlin, Warren Smith and a
whole list of guys and a couple of gals like Belinda Wales and Sara Webb. What
the hell did I know then when stuff like that hillbilly mountain had plenty to
do with estrangements from distance father, righteous hillbilly from down in
the muds or not.
Alex,okay King Alex, then completed the third leg
of my classic roots of rock and roll on another night when he had I guess if I
recall correctly had had another tough day grinding up some legal sweat
somebody up the food chain in that sullen law office he worked in while doing
that hard-ass (I will give him that) law school nights got credit for from some
judge whose law clerk actually read the thing and wrote the decision based on
Alex’s work (I am telling no tales out of school everybody these days knows
that the higher up the food chain you are including SCOTUS the less writing of legal
decisions you do which makes that law school education pretty damn expensive
way up on the top for some poor benighted parents who thought they were doing
the right thing). That night he asked me if I ever remember hearing some music
on the radio, the family radio to boot, when our parents were on one of their
rather infrequent nights out meaning when Dad had steady work and Ma was not
afraid going out would break the family bank, that came booming out Chicago,
always at night, usually Saturday or Sunday DJed by Brother Blues out of WAJB.
I had to plead that I
hadn’t until he mentioned a song called Little
Red Rooster which I remember from his Stones collection but which he said
had actually been written by a guy named Willie Dixon who was associated with a
couple of brothers at Chess Records in Chicago who recorded had Howlin’ Wolf
doing it and making a smash hit of it of the R&B charts (fuck it even the
music was segregated by race on those record popularity charts). That is when
Alex told me that he had first heard the song on that Chicago station on a
program called Brother Blues’ Blues Hour
(which was actually two hours each Saturday and Sunday night on nights when it
came in clear enough to hear). Of course the ghost of Peter Paul Markin has to
enter into the lists on this one (that ghost as new site manager Greg Green has
found out during his short tenure and has commented on hovers over everything
including its share of former site manager Allan Jackson’s demise giving Greg
his job). Alex didn’t discover Brother Blues and his show Markin had one night
up in his room on his transistor radio which is the way the young of Markin’s
and Alex’s generation got to listen to the music of their lives without nosey
parents interfering just as today one way kids do is listen to their MP3s or
iPods.
Somehow on Markin’s radio
the winds were just right one Sunday night when he was really trying to get
WMEX the local max daddy rock and roll station and Brother Blues popped up.
Markin went crazy listening to Muddy Waters, Howlin’s Wolf, Jimmy Smith, Mamma
Smith, Memphis Minnie, Big Mama Thornton and a whole raft of other blues
singers whose beat seemed so much like lets’ say where Chuck Berry or Randy
Rhodes was coming from, that R&B-etched back beat that formed over half of
all classic rock. So Alex and Markin would listen whenever the winds were right
(more in winter than summer) and got an education about this branch root of the
blues. Alex made this point blank to me (again via Markin who gave it to him
pointblank) when he mentioned the
famous smash hit Elvis made of Hound Dog
(a strange song for a guy who girls, women too, married women, sweated over in
between bouts of swooning but that understanding by me would only come later) and
then played Big Mama Thornton’s version from the early 1950s where she made a
three dollars on her version but ripped the thing apart, had every Tom, Dick
and Harry jumping the jump.
Of course ignorant as I was
at the time Alex had to clue me to the difference between the root roots of the
blues in the country, down in the sweat swamp Delta plantation Saturday night
white lightening brave juke joint no electricity dance (probably no different
except color, the eternal race issue always just below or on the surface at all
times in America) guy with some beat up Sear& Roebuck-ordered guitarmaking the joint jump. He gave me a whole slew
of names like Robert Johnson, Charly Patton, Son House, Ben Jamison,
Mississippi John Hurt, a few Big Bills, a couple of Slims Memphis and Kansas
City and a lifetime’s interest in that sound. That interest though as important
as it was as the root of the roots of the blues really only hooks up to classic
rock when the blues move north, move up what did Alex call it, oh yeah, moved
up the Mississippi out of the sweated South and had an electric cord to put on
that guitar and blow the place away (the liquor andhooch fight over dames would stay the same).
Names like Muddy Waters, that same Howlin’ Wolf, Ben Attuck, Little Jimmy (and
a ton of other Littles), Junior Wells and the like. Yes Alex, you went by the
numbers and I am going to pass on point blank to the good people reading this
to give the real skinny on the music of your generation, on what caused that
big wave coming down upon the land in your time.
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.
[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). 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.]
Legend-Slayer
Will Bradley Rides Yet Again-Pulls The Hammer Down On The Action Junkies Of The
So-Called "Justice League"-Drops Batman, Flash-Aqua-man, Wonder Woman and
Assorted Other Dopes Down Into The Abyss (2017)- A Film Review, Of Sorts
By Will
Bradley
No question
with this third straight debunking of overblown, fake or undeserved so-called
legends assignments I have now found my niche in this business. (see the “reviews”
of Man of the West the laying bare of
the legend of stone-cold killer Link Jones and The Man In The Iron Mask the ripping asunder of the legend of one D’
Artagnan and his three drunken comrades of the Musketeer outfit that protected
“sainted” Louis XIV for the other two anchors of this trifecta) Now have, since
he gave me the assignments and go ahead in the first place the confidence of
site manager Greg Green in case of any blowback. In case in our wicked divide
age and society any diehard aficionados of the various legends that I have,
documents and other proof in hand left totally deflated (with theone sour exception of so-called aviation
pioneer Johnny Cielo which has baffled me no end and which will be analyzed
below since finishing this nefarious Justice League gang will be short work) decide
that they have to do bodily harm of some sort to the messenger, to me and those
who are starting to cohere around me in this on-going crusade against fakers
from every age.
So, generally,
I am feeling very well now that I will have covered the old-time legends that
haunted a lot of the generation of ’68 dreams as kids, according to Si Lannon.
Although for the life of me a couple of very wide generations removed from
those dope-addled bastards who are crying to the high heavens for Greg to move
the operation back to Boston so they can suck up all the dope in the world, or
what is available now that Massachusetts has weed up the ying-yang, I don’t
know why. Nor do I know why one of the older writers, Si, Sam, Seth, couldn’t
move away from the bong long enough to have taken a stab at breaking down the
encrusted press agent, publicity house bull built up around genuine bad guys
like Sherlock Holmes and his dear friend Doc, Robert Locklear aka Robin Hood,
Old West stone- cold killer Link Jones and the others I have knocked for a
loop. (By the way I am not claiming I have dented, not yet anyway,the ancient Greek and Roman bastards who had
serious guys like Homer, Ovid, Virgil running their press operations but I am
working on that as I write the problem, a big one, is that the documents have
either blown away with the wind or are inconclusive so al we have going is to
break down the Homer-Ovid-Virgil press agent noise not as easy as it sounds.)
Maybe since it required no heavy lifting but merely a sharp pen some newer ones.
Given their total default I am here to top off in this latest trifecta of
assignments Greg threw my way a modern, very modern set to debunk the silly
costume characters who call themselves, self-described is I guess the best way
to put it as the Justice League made up of junkies and con artists, with a
sleigh of hand artist thrown in.
Maybe I am
making too much of it, certainly some fellow reviewers have thrown a jaded eye
my way, but these successes in waking people up to what in the end is basically
not matter what time period some press agent, some publicity maven’s free fall
fantasy about whoever those pros were being well-paid to hype. Still it is nice
to be able to take credit for putting a bastard like Robin Hood down, crack Don
Juan’s totally fabricated exploits with the ladies, ditto one Johnny Casavova,
turned around slave-trade Captain Blood on his heels, blasted cheapjack humdrum
PI Sherlock Holmes or whatever name he is using these days and his dear friend
Watson, Wadkins, or whatever he finally decided his name was and took down Old
West legend Link Jones without a struggle.
Still, and I
have had fellow reviewer eyes gaze up when I even mention this name these days,
the legend of Johnny Cielo which I fully admit I have not been able to put the
slightest dent into which has me concerned not only about people’s ability to
swallow alternate facts completely but since Johnny’s case is relatively new
makes me wonder about how I will do against the Justice League mystique which
has had a massive build-up by their handlers. Bear with me a bit as I think out
loud about that bastard Cielo who has some pretty ardent if weird devotees. The
latest insult to anybody’s intelligence is the Friends of Johnny Cielo fan club
I guess you would call it have rounded up some campesino, some peasant from the
foothills of the Sierra Madre who claims that as a young man, a boy he
remembers seeing a Beechcraft plane flying low overhead going toward the higher
elevations where Fidel and the hermanos (and hermanas, lo siento for failing to
mention them ina previous review). As
far as any records that I know of Johnny Cielo never piloted a Beechcraft only
Piper Clubs like on that last fateful trip taking those well-heeled passengers
to Naples from Key West down in Florida so unless they have something more than
some vague recollections of a besotted peasant who some sixty years later
suddenly comes up with this cock and bull story I rest my case for now.
Although not breaking this silly legend still bothers the hell out of me.
But forward.
The last person, as least in the West, Western Civilization, as far as I knew
to come back from the dead was Jesus Christ. And even in his case there was, is
still plenty of controversy around the event witnessed only by his mother, some
whore and a few drunken Roman soldiers who by most estimates were sleeping off
hangovers when this resurrection supposedly occurred. So one really has to
suspend disbelief when a guy named Superman, a caped crusader he calls himself
when he is not on his day job as a reporter for some high circulation sensation
rag in a place called Gotham, aka Metropolis which to my mind, and that of
others I have talked to looks a lot like New York City comes back from the dead
to do battle with a bunch of other freaks against an old man, a guy named
Steppenwolf (not to be confused with the guy in a book by Herman Hesse or a
1960s rock group who played loud rock and roll around themes like denigrating the
pusher man and desperately seeking parental help against the monster, against
the government’s ’t all-out war against the Vietnamese and in the end against
its own young).
Five, count
them five, cretins, five so-called bad asses, not including the previously
mentioned Superman, the criminally insane and probable sexual predator Batman,
some nerd on speed named Flash, a guy called Cyborg who was some kind of bionic
man, a woman named Wonder Woman who had some great moves and lets leave it at
that and a totally worthless geek named Aqua-man get in line to beat up on this
poor old man, this Steppenwolf, who is looking for what must have been the fountain
of youth, something like that and got nothing but grief for his efforts. Of
course as usual with guys and here for the first time I get to take down a
legendary woman they all have aliases, all trying to duck the law when all is
said and down so we will just use their monikers and leave it at that. The
story, at least the story on the police blotter when they were rounded up for
harassing an old geezer was that he, “Step” was working for some criminal
syndicate and so they had to snuff him out to purify the Earthian air. Yeah,
right. Old Step though should be filing an age discrimination suit any day now
and if there is any justice in this wicked old world he, or his estate, should
win against this vicious mob of geeks and losers. Should send this unworthy
tribe back to red state Kansas (Superman), the bat cave and dear Alfred
(Batman), deep dark Amazon, mother of the mother of rivers (Wonder Woman),
college (Flash), some hospital for a tune-up (Cy Borg) and that flaming
disaster Aqua-man to downtown Atlantis where they belong not out here in the
streets where things happen, happen when you don’t expect them to.
The King Of Rock And
Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The
Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -On That Old
Hill-Billy Down In The Hills And Hollows Come Saturday Red Barn Dance Father
Moment
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 rather than his brother Alex and friends
“generation of ‘68” designation they have wrapped themselves around) 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
demographical-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 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 fiveimportant 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, along the way and intersecting that big
three came a closeted “country outlaw moment” initiated by father time Hank
Williams and carried through with vengeance by singers like Willie Nelson,
Townes Van Zandt, and Waylon Jennings, and Muddy Waters and friends blues 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 since I was over a
decade too young to have been washed over by the movements. 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 Acre, as in local lore Hell’s Acre, 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 now ancient although 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 back then 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.)
Quickly that 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. That same
Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t, 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 later to
the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service while more than the others unhinged him
and his dream.) The blues part came as mentioned as a component of the folk
minute, part of the new wave rock revival and on its own. The country outlaw
connections bears separate mention these days.
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 somekind 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 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 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 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 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 Alex startled me
while we were listening to an old Louvain Brothers song, I forget which one maybe
Every Times You Leave, 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. Sons welded by twelve
millions unacknowledged ties to those lonesome hills and hollows where the coal
ruled and the land got crummy before its time and Saturday brought out red barn
fiddles and mandolins an stringed basses with some mad monk calling the tune
and the guys drinking home-made hooch and the girls wondering whether the guy would
be sober enough to dance, hell, to ask for the last dance something out of a Child ballad turned Appalachian mud by the
time it got to the sixth generation fighting the land. Knew that they were
doomed even if they could not appreciate in words their fate unless something like
World War II exploded them out of their life routine like it had Dad when Pearl
Harbor sent him Pacific War bound and then up north to guard some naval depot
near North Adamsville toward war’s end. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed
the idea lately-too late since our father he has been gone a long time
now.
Alex had the advantage of
being the oldest son of a man who also had grown up as the oldest son in his
family brood of I think eleven. (Since I, we never met any of them when my
father came North to stay for good after being discharged from the Marine after
hard Pacific War military service, I can’t say much about that aspect of why my
father doted on his oldest son.) That meant a lot, meant that Dad confided as
much as a quiet, sullen hard-pressed man could or would confide in a youngster.
All I know is that sitting down at the bottom of the food chain (I will make
you laugh if you too were from the poor the “clothes chain” too as the
recipient of every older brother, sister too when I was too young to complain
or comprehend set of ragamuffin clothing) he was so distant that we might well
have been just passing strangers. Alex, for example, knew that Dad had been in
a country music trio which worked the Ohio River circuit, that river dividing
Ohio and Kentucky up north far from hometown Hazard, yes, that Hazard of legend
and song whenever anybody speaks of the hardscrabble days of the coal mine
civil wars that went on down there before the war, before World War II. I don’t
know what instrument he played although I do know that he had a guitar tucked
under his bed that he would play when he had a freaking minute in the days when
he was able to get work (which was less frequently than I would have guessed early
one until Alex clued me in that non-job time meaning that he spent every waking
hour looking for work and had no time for even that freaking minute to play
some fretted guitar).
That night Alex also
mentioned something that hit home once he mentioned it. He said that Dad who
tinkered a little fixing radios, a skill learned from who knows where although
apparently his skill level was not enough to get him a job in that industry,
figured out a way to get WAXE out of I think Wheeling, West Virginia which
would play old country stuff 24/7 and that he would always have that station on
in the background when he was doing something. Had stopped doing that at some
point before I recognized the country-etched sound but Alex said he was
spoon-fed on some of the stuff, citing Warren Smith and Smiley Jamison
particularly, as his personal entre into the country roots of one aspect of the
rock and roll craze. Said further that he was not all that shocked when say
Elvis’s It’s All Right Mama went off
the charts since he could sense that country beat up-tempo a little from what
Smith had been fooling around with, Carl Perkins too he said. They were what he
called “good old boys” who were happy as hell that they had enough musical
skills at the right time so they didn’t have to stick around the farm or work
in some hardware store in some small town down South.
Here is the real shocker,
well maybe not shocker, but the thing that made Alex’s initial so-called DNA
thought make sense. When Alex was maybe six or seven Dad would be playing
something on the guitar, just fooling around when he started playing Hank
Williams’ mournful lost love Cold, Cold
Heart. Alex couldn’t believe his ears and asked Dad to play it again. He
would for years after all the way to high school when Dad had the guitar out
and he was around request that Dad play that tune. I probably heard the song
too. I know I heard Come All You Fair and
Tender Ladies from the original Carter family or one branch of it. So,
yeah, maybe that DNA business is not so far off. And maybe, just maybe, over
fifty years later we are still our father’s sons. Thanks, Dad.
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.
[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). 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.]
Searching For The American Songbook- When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind
Wait until the war is over And we're both a little older The unknown soldier
Breakfast where the news is read Television children fed Unborn living, living, dead Bullet strikes the helmet's head And it's all over For the unknown soldier It's all over For the unknown soldier Hut, hut, hut ho hee up Hut, hut, hut ho hee up Hut, hut, hut ho hee up Comp'nee, halt Present, arms Make a grave for the unknown soldier Nestled in your hollow shoulder The unknown soldier Breakfast where the news is read Television children fed Bullet strikes the helmet's head And, it's all over The war is over It's all over War is over
Well, all over, baby All over, baby Oh, over, yeah All over, baby
Ooh, ha, ha, all over All over, baby Oh, woah, yeah, all over All over, heh Songwriters Robbie Krieger;John Densmore;Jim Morrison;Ray Manzarek
From The Pen of Frank Jackman
There was no seamless thread that wrapped the 1960s up tightly. A thousand things, or it seemed like a thousand things, came together in pretty rapid succession to draw down in flames, for a while anyway although none of us though it would on be for only a while just as we thought that we would live forever, or at least fast, the dread red scare Cold War freezes of our childhood. But you could traces things a little, make your own “live free” categories of the events that chipped away the ice of those dark nights.
Start in with the mid-1950s if you like with the heat of the black struggle for some semblance of civil liberties down South with fearless ladies refusing to go to the back of the bus (and some sense for equality up North with students and young people mainly wondering what to do and getting an idea of how deep the racial divide was then as now when they started doing solidarity work for the freedom riders and standing tall picketing Woolworth’s telling them to let black people eat at their freaking lunch counters if they wanted too, if they couldhanlde the food is what I though), the first break-out of music with the crowning of rock and roll as the wave of the future (black rhythm and blues, scat, rockabilly mixed all stirred up), the “discovery” of teen alienation and angst exemplified by movie star James Dean, who lived fast, and died fast a metaphor that would work its way through youth culture over the next generation. An odd-ball mix right there. Then start to throw in the struggles against the old authority, the old certitudes that had calmed our parents’ lives in places like Frisco town where they practically ran the red-baiters in the HUAC out of town, but of course the biggest event that opened the doors for liberals, radicals, hell even thoughtful conservatives was the sweet breeze coming down the road from Boston with the election of Jack Kennedy.
That event opened up a new psychological twist (twist since Smilin’ Jack was not exactly Lenin or Trotsky or guys like that who really shook up the old order), that it was okay to question authority, whatever the limitations and shortness of the Camelot times with the struggles against some hoary things like segregation, the death penalty, nuclear proliferation, the unevenness of life which would get propelled later in the decade with fight for women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the fight against the draft, the damn war in Vietnam that drove a nail into the heart of the generation. There were more things, cultural things and experimentations with new lifestyles that all got a fair workout during this period as well.
Plenty of us in retrospective would weigh the various combinations of events differently in figuring out how the uprising started just as plenty of us have our specific dates for when the tide began to ebb, when the mean-spirited and authoritarian began their successful counter-offensive that we still live with today for not taking the omens more seriously.
And then we have a mind's eye photograph to grace this short screed. This photograph is almost impossible to imagine without some combination of that hell broth mix stirred up in the 1960s. Think this-three self-assured women comfortable with the loose and individualistic fashion statements of the day from floppy hats to bare legs, bare legs that would have shocked a mother who all corseted up dreamed a World War II dream of nylons, and would do quite a bite to get her hands on such womanly finery. Uncomfortable about the damn Vietnam war that was eating up boyfriends, brothers, just friends at a heavy rate and they unlike their mothers who came through World War II waiting patiently and patriotically for their military heroes to come home, come home in one piece, have a very different sense of the heroic. A sense of the heroic going back to ancient times when one group of women demanded that their men come home on their shields if they had to rather than speak of defeat and others providing a distant echo for these three women pictured here who refused their soldier boys any favors if they went off to war. That says it all enough said.
Legend-Slayer
Will Bradley Rides Yet Again-Don’t Believe All That Alexandre Dumas Nonsense
About “One For All, All For One”- Leonardo DeCaprio, Jeremy Iron, Gerard
Depardieu and Gabriel Byrne’s “The Man In The Iron Mask” (1998)- A Film Review,
Of Sorts
By Will
Bradley
Recently I
started back on my now seemingly etched in stone niche of slaying undeserved,
false or overblown legends like Robin Hood, Don Juan, early aviator Johnny
Cielo and what I consider my greatest achievement, taking down the stinking
rank Old West’s desperado bank robber and stone-cold killer Link Jones,although it still remains to be seen if I can
break the spell that the Old West has on the American imagination. I have
admitted that I while I have made significant inroads into breaking my
following, breaking the general public a little too from the responses our site
manager has received, from most of these fakes I have been stalled, have been
bush-whacked to use a term I used in the Link Jones piece in the case of Johnny
Cielo, the so-called early aviation innovator and test pilot, whose spell still
lingers.
The Cielo
legend still lingers over the crowd that believe that Johnny hustled guns and
supplies to Fidel and his band of hermanos in the hills of Cuba when it counted
in the late 1950s and refuse to believe that he was nothing but a two-bit bush
pilot and tourist guide. Maybe it is because the demographic of this
publication, the now hallowed (and fading) generation of ’68 as Sam Lowell
calls his brethren cut its teeth on Johnny’s legend linked together with their
starry-eyed admiration for Fidel and Che in the old days watching according to that
same ancient Sam Lowell on black and white television those guys riding into
Havana on New Year’s Day, 1959. I am far too young to have even heard of Johnny
Cielo until a free-lance reporter friend of mine who having been stood up by
some people on another story found some guy who knew Johnny in Key West and
bought his bull hook, line and sinker. Took the Johnny exploits whole based on
some rummy’s DTs story that had so many holes in it that I almost didn’t have
to do research on it. For example, I was able to grab the still extant copy of Johnny’s
manifest on his last flight which showed him attempting to fly well-heeled
passengers from Key West to Naples in Florida before the plane, a Piper Club,
fell down in the Gulf of Mexico). Case closed if not the legend.
Now I have I
found addition information that part of my problem for not making any inroads in
the Cielo legend is that the rummy, Billy Bradley, had been interviewed by Mike
Thomas, yes, that Mike Thomas who has interviewed everybody who is anybody
somehow read either my reporter friend’s fluff piece on Johnny or my slash and
burn on the Cielo legend and decided to investigate (or really have his people
do the legwork as far I know he hasn’t done any such work for years since his
ratings went from zero to a million when he exposed the famous actor Lenny
Grove as a two-bit ex-convict who hustled his ass on the street to make his coffee
and cakes before he hit Hollywood ). The problem for me is that letting that
rummy spout his bull on the Mike Thomas
Show put things up in the air, put “may or maybe not” in play rather than
what really happened with documentary proof. It would not be the first time
such things have obscured the truth.
I will keep
at it although I have been asked by more than one colleague why I am so intent,
other than that holding on to that niche which in this cutthroat business of
“you are only as good as your last piece” is not unimportant as even they
recognize, on breaking myths, legends and alternative facts. Fortunately, I
have another assignment today busting up an old legend that also has refused to
die, the baloney about the three musketeers and their supposed exploits and their
admittedly clever slogan “one for all, all for one.” Their press agent or
publicity people hit pay-dirt on that gem making it that much harder to legend-bust.
That “supposed exploits ” though should alert
the reader to more revelations about this crowd of fakers although as usual
with this business some people will gladly keep to their silly illusions and
believe the legends until the bitter end.
This
musketeer stuff is beautiful, is tailor-made to be busted. I don’t know about
the reader but in high school we were required to read this Dumas stuff, The Man In The Iron Mask stuff although
it had a different name and was not so unbelievable as the actual legend that
has grown since that time. All the musketeers, all four, D’ Artangan (not his
real name which would have conveyed the idea that he was some kind of noble, of
the sword or of blood, but Jean Rous, a farmer's son in Brittany, plus three
other drunks and rowdies, Artemis, Arthos, Porthos which were apparently their real
names according to the records of what then was the Ministry of Interior, the cops,
were sworn to serve the King of France, and not just any king in their time but
the well-known autocrat Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King, philander, despot
and grinder of the peasantry whose work kept him in over the top lavish
luxury.And for a long time this quaded
(sic)brethren feasted off the crumbs from the king’s larder, his wine cellar
mainly. This is the king, this is the crowd in a more democratic time we are
supposed to root for, supposed to pay homage to their stellar defense of king,
country and wine cellar with a few tavern wenches and off-hand ladies-in-waiting
thrown in. Give me a break.
Apparently
though the three underling musketeers had a falling out with Lou, had been cut
off from access to the wine cellar and milady’s palace bedrooms and so began the
long process of staging something like a palace revolt against the monarch
under a banner of “free wine, free wenches” although they masked this in some
plebeian “give alms to the people and be nice.” Usual plot, and usual trick up
to create that legend. That in this case “all for one, one for all,” which became
the exclusive copyright of the three underlings when D’Artagnan decided to
stick with the king for his own purposes. For as it turned out filial duties
but more on that in a moment.
We all know
what a bastard Louis XIV was, how his policies and appetites started the long
train wreck that would wind up in the glorious French Revolution later in the
next century. How could you possibly defend that bum of the month. That is
where the iron mask deal comes in. According to legend Louis’ mother had twins
one dying in childbirth leaving only bastard, bastard in more ways than one,
ugly Lou. What these musketeers, Artois mainly, figured was to get a guy who
looked like Lou and do a bait and switch. As it turned out Lou did have a brother
Phil who looked enough like him to pass in the dark although they were not
twins. Not satisfied that Phil would play along he found a guy from Brittany
who was the spitting image of Lou and so after a little off-hand swash-buckling
with Lou’s loyal personal guard the switch was made.
The kingdom
prospered, or rather the king and his courtesans prospered, although the new
Lou was as much a son of a bitch and as nasty as old Lou. The main thing is
that the three musketeers took at the credit for the coup, D’Artangan stuck
with the king almost to the end then realizing what a bastard Lou was switched
sides. Here is the funny part, Lou was his son as it turned out since he has
been going under the sheets with the Queen Mother back in the day and took a
hard thrust to the heart for his majesty, his new his majesty, Phil, the rest
of the guys had full access to the wine and women under the new monster. Yeah,
one for all, all for one. Bullshit.
From an American Left History blog review of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall- … Hey, haven’t I already reviewed this movie. No, sorry that was Manhattan another in the line of very witty Woody Allen movies. But the point is this it is the same subject that Woody addressed there even though chronologically Annie Hall came first by a couple of years and received the lion’s share of kudos and awards. As virtually always Allen is intent upon commenting on New York life and its intellectual trends and the ups and downs of relationships, mainly with women. Here he adds a flourish by contrasting old New York (in the 1970’s) to up and coming California as the cultural mecca of the American empire. And, as should be the case, New York wins. Add to that the perennial issue of Woody’s struggle with ‘interpersonal’ relationships and his angst-driven desire to understand the modern world and you have a very fine social commentary of the times. Needless to say Woody’s love interest Annie Hall (as played by his then paramour Diane Keaton) keeps him hopping. As does an ensemble cast that works well together as foils for his ironic and savage humor. The only surprise in revisiting this film recently is how well Keaton plays her role as an up and coming torch singer. Of course, I have always been a sucker for torch singers but that is another matter. Some of the humor may seem dated and very 1970’s New Yorkish. Some of Woody’s mannerism and use of sight gags may seem like old news. But this is a film to watch or re-watch if you have seen it before.
And hence…
Small Time Crooks
Everyone I hope recognizes that, if one lives long enough, that one is bound to start recycling ideas. That is the case here with Woody Allen’s partial revival of his early film classic Take the Money and Run, with a class twist. Here Roy (Allen’s character) is just as dimwitted as old Virgil of Take the Money but as an older and wiser man he knows when to quit (for a while anyway). So when Roy and his associates’ attempted bank robbery is foiled by his bugling his wife’s successful cookie shop cover operation sees them through the rough spots, again for a while. After a trip through the wilds of bourgeois New York the couple, after some disasters personal and financial, goes back to the old tricks of the trade. I am not altogether sure what this says about class mobility in a democratic society but Roy please do not call me for your next caper. Funny, in Allen’s way, in spots but not his best in this genre.
From The
Archives Of “American Left History”-An Analysis And A Summing Up After His
First Year By Site Manager Greg Green-When Veterans Dared To Be Arrested At Their Encampment On Memorial Day (They Weren't)
November 14,
2018 marked the first anniversary of my officially becoming site manager at
this publication and in acknowledgement of that tight touch first year I
started going back to the archives here from the time this publication went to
totally on-line existence due to financial considerations in 2006. (Previously
from its inception in 1974 it had been hard copy for many years and then in the
early 2000s was both hard copy and on-line before turning solely to on-line
publication.) This first year has been hard starting with the residue of the
“water-cooler fist fight” started by some of the younger writers who balked at
the incessant coverage of the 1960s, highlighted in 2017 by the 50th
anniversary commemorations of the Summer of Love, 1967 ordered by previous site
manager Allan Jackson. They had not even been born, had had to consult in many
cases parents and the older writers here when Allan assigned them say a review
of the Jefferson Airplane rock band which dominated the San Francisco scene at
the height of the 1960s. That balking led to a decisive vote of “no confidence”
requested by the “youth cabal” in the Jackson regime and replacement by me. You
can read all about the various “takes” on the situation in these very archives
from the fall of 2017 on if you can stand it. If you want to know if Allan was
“purged,” “sent into exile,” variously ran a whorehouse in San Francisco with
old flame Madame LaRue or shacked up with a drag queen named Miss Judy Garland
or sold out to the Mormons to get a press agent job with the Mitt Romney for
Senate campaign after he left here it is all there. I, having been brought in
by Allan from American Film Gazette
to run the day to day operations as he concentrated on “the big picture” stayed
on the sidelines, didn’t have a vote in any case since I was only on “probation.”
A lot of the
rocky road I faced was of my own making early on since to make my mark, and to
look toward the future I came up with what even I now see as a silly idea of
trying to reach a younger demographic (than the 1960s devotees who have
sustained this publication since its founding). I went on a crash program of
having writers, young and old, do reviews of Marvel/DC cinematic comic book
characters, graphic novels, hip-hop, techno music and such. The blow-back came
fast and furious by young and old writers alike and so the Editorial Board that
had been put in place in the wake of Allan’s departure called a halt to that
direction. A lot of the reasons why I am presenting the archival material along
with this piece is both to see where we can go from here that makes sense to
the Ed Board and through that body the cohort of writers who grace this
publication and which deals with the reality of a fading demographic as the
“Generation of ’68” passes on. Additionally, like every publication hard copy
or on-line, we receive much material we can’t or won’t use although that too
falls into the archives so here is a chance to give that material a “second
life.”