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
It Do Not Mean A Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing-With Swing-master Benny Goodman In Mind
CD Review
By Zack James
“Jesus, now that you mentioned Mr. Lawrence, our seventh grade music teacher, I am starting to remember some other stuff about the guy, about what a creep he was trying to break us from our unbreakable bond with rock and roll,” Seth Garth said to Jack Callahan as they both hoisted their three, or was it fourth, double scotch with water chaser, an old habit for both of them since the chaser made the drink last longer in the old days when they were short of dough and were sipping their drinks to stretch out the evening. The gist of what Seth had told Jack was in response to Jack’s remembering the very first time that they had heard Woody Guthrie and what song they had learned first. That gist of talk was based on Seth, an old time folk music critic, mainly for The Eyeout on the West Coast having recently seen in a folk magazine the announcement that the Smitstonian/Folkway operation was finally putting out a treasure trove in four CDs of some Woody Guthrie songs recorded by Moses Asch during World War II. Seth for the life of him could not remember what song he had heard and when of Guthrie’s and so he had called upon Jack to meet him at their favorite watering hole the Erie Grille in Riverdale where they both were now residing (and after varying absences had grown up in the town). Jack had answered that it had been in Mr. Lawrence’s seventh grade music class and the song had been the alternative national anthem-This Land Is Your Land.
The method to Mr. Lawrence’s madness, to ween the kids off of rock and roll, had gone beyond trying to foist silly folk music off on them but to drown them in any other kind of music he could think to distract, or attempt to distract them with, especially during lunch when they played their transistor radios and drove him crazy with their rock and roll. A few times, if you could believe this he tried to get them interested in jazz, in swing music, what each and every one of them considered the music that their parents listen to and which had driven them to the transistors in the first place. Worse, worse of all he had tried to get his charges interested in the music of Benny Goodman, the so-called “king of swing.” That was all Seth needed to hear as he blurted out in front of the class “My mother and father dance to that pokey stuff on Saturday nights and they are barely moving when they dance. I am not going to listen to that here.” Needless to say Seth stayed after school a number of afternoons for his transgression. But he felt vindicated in what he had uttered and took the punishment like a soldier.
Still it did no good as Mr. Lawrence played something called Blue Skies which was his parents’ “their song.” Something else by a guy named Cole Porter that Benny Goodman made famous. It got no better when Mr. Lawrence played stuff with Peggy Lee because to his mother’s chagrin his father had “crush” on old Peggy and Seth had to secretly admit that she was kind of sexy looking at that.
But that was then. A few nights after Seth and Jack were cutting up old touches, after drinking themselves to melancholia, Seth went to the library and picked up an old Benny Goodman CD with plenty of American Songbook stuff on it. Guess what old Seth, old rock and roll devotee Seth with an overhang of folk, blues, and a little mountain music started to pop his fingers to the beat, started laughing to himself that he know knew what they meant when they said “it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing.” And they were right. Just ask Benny.
Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of The Rolling Stones performing "Street Fighting Man".
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
Markin comment:
According to legend, and perhaps it was merely in his own mind at that, the model for Mick and Keith's street fighting man here was the old time "New Left" revolutionary, Tariq Ali, the 'terror' of the British establishment back in the day. These days though I note that Mr. Ali is front and center in the thick of social-democratic politics, as presented in such journals like "The New Left Review", as they are filtered through the British, and European, prism. How the mighty have fallen, although hardly a unique story from the turbulent 1960s.
Street Fighting Man Lyrics
(M. Jagger/K. Richards)
Ev'rywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy
But what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy London town
There's just no place for a street fighting man
No
Hey! Think the time is right for a palace revolution
'Cause where I live the game to play is compromise solution
Well, then what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy London town
There's just no place for a street fighting man
No
Hey! Said my name is called disturbance
I'll shout and scream, I'll kill the king, I'll rail at all his servants
Well, what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy London town
There's just no place for a street fighting man
No
***The Wheels Of Capitalism In Its Swaddling Clothes- Fernand Braudel’s View Book Review Civilization & Capitalism:15th-18th Century, Fernand
Braudel, Harper&Row, New York 1979
Karl Marx, the 19th century revolutionary socialist and dissector of the
underpinnings of the capitalist mode of production, is most famous for his
inflammatory pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, a programmatic outline
of, and rationale for, the socialist reconstruction of society beyond the
current capitalist market system. Not as well known, and certainly not as
widely read, was his equally important Das Capital that, painstaking,
gives a historical analysis of the rise of capitalism based on the
appropriation of surplus value by private owners. Where Marx worked in broad
strokes to lay out his theory relying mainly on (and polemizing against)
bourgeois economists the work under review, the second volume of a three volume
study of the evolution of capitalism, Fernand Braudel’s Wheels of Commerce,
fills in the spaces left by Marx’s work. Although Braundel, of necessity, tips
his hat to Marx’s insights his work does not depend on a Marxist historical
materialist concept of history, at least consciously, although in its total
effect it is certainly comparable with that interpretation of history.
Braudel digs deep into the infrastructure of medieval society to trace the
roots of capitalism to the increased widespread commerce that the rise of
rudimentary production of surplus goods permitted. He highlights, rightly I
think, the important role of fairs, other lesser adjunct forms of commercial
endeavor like peddling and shop keeping, and the rise of fortunately located (near
rivers, the ocean, along accessible roadways) cities committed full-time to
creating a market for surplus goods being produced in the those cities, on the
land and, most importantly, in far-off places. Naturally, such activity as the
creation of markets kept creating demand for more and varied products making
more expansive (and expensive) journeys necessary. The opening of wide-flung
trade routes, over land and on the seas, exploited by merchant-adventurers (in
the widest sense of that term) thereafter became practical, if still highly
risky, for those committed to those activities.
Needless to say in a densely written six hundred page volume the number of
examples of commercial endeavors (some presented in more than in one context)
that Braudel highlights is beyond anything a short review could do justice to.
A quick outline here will have to suffice. The already noted rise of a merchant
class ready to do business over great stretches and under trying circumstances;
the still controversial basis for the rise of a distinct capitalist ethic that
drove the markets(think Max Weber and the Protestant ethic); the importance of
double bookkeeping of accounts and the introduction of bills of exchange to
facilitate payment; the exploitation of vast colonial areas for minerals and
other natural resources such as gold and silver used as physical value in every
day market exchanges; the rise and fall of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism
based on the gold and silver mines and slave trade; the successive rises of the
Dutch and English colonialisms based on that slave trade and control of the sea
lanes; the rise of joint-stock companies and other forms of collective
capitalist ventures; the introduction of a stock exchange to place value on
those enterprises; the increased role of a national state in the emergence of
capitalism as defender of private property, as purchaser of goods, and insurer
of last resort against hard times; the shifts in class status away from feudal
norms and rise in class consciousness in society; and, the applicability of the
capitalism to non-European societies such as Japan, and non-Christian cultures
such as Islam.
Just to outline some of the topics as I have just done will give one a sense
that this is an important work (and act as an impetus to read volume one and
three) for those who want to get the feel of what the dawn of capitalism looked
like. And for those who want to move beyond capitalism a very good companion to
that not widely read Das Capital of Marx.
***Out
In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street
Making All That Noise-The Complete North Adamsville Corner Boy Stories
A YouTube film clip of Tom Waits
performing his song Jersey Girl that formed part of the inspiration for
this post.
Ah, corner boys down those mean streets, down in those mean Adamsville
streets, making all their noise, producing all their hopeless hubris, swirling
all around just to stay in one place. Yes, now fifty years later it is easy to
dismiss those guys, write them off as losers, wannabe somethings, and guys to
turn your back to but there was a time, a time day and night, when they, the
corner boys, ruled, ruled my imagination, and, and almost caught me in their
fix. Oh, for those who are clueless on the great stream corner boy night that
probably no longer exists except in wayward urban ghetto/barrio corners, or
some mall-less hick small town this was the mode of existence for guys, working
-class guys, with no dough, no hopes of getting dough (getting dough legally
anyway), or maybe, just plain not wanting to work for dough like drudge
fathers, uncles and older brothers and hang out in the mom and pop variety
store, drugstore, pizza parlor, bowling alley corner waiting,… yah, mainly
waiting.
You will get it all wrong if you think though it was all waiting, sipping
Coke waiting, smoking some endless cigarette smoke waiting, white tee-shirt, (a
leather jacket against the wind on colder nights), jeans, engineer boots, wide
black-buckled belts (useful in combat as well as holding up pants), maybe a
chain handing down. The uniform, or else.
You will get it all wrong because you will have missed the patter, the
constant patter, the dream patter that animated those sidewalk nights, those
dreams, pipe-dreams maybe, of jail-break out working- class life, of moving
“uptown” one way or another. You would have heard such talk if you walked by
Harry’s Variety on any given night, some guy taking a pinball wizard break to
tell how his luck is going to change any day now. Or leader Red, Red Hickey,
mapping out the night’s midnight creep work, shortcut to the good life work, at
least to keep the heap running and honey in clover. Of cars, stolen or refinished,
mainly stolen. Yah, and talk of sex, of what this girl would do and that one
wouldn’t, and why to go with those cars. A rough crowd not to be trifled with
for certain, but from the edges fascinating to watch, and learn about some
stuff, some stuff never mentioned at home.
Or, on other corners, the gang around Doc’s Drugstore, a place where all the
neighborhood boys, all the sixteen- year old boys, and maybe some girls too,
all the plaid-shirted, black-chinoed, “cool”, max daddies came of drinking age,
for medicinal purposes of course. They could tell of magic elixirs from rums
and raw whiskies, and confess, yes, confess that that whisky taste was nasty.
Or on earlier, easier corners, really not corners, but the back of old
Adamsville South Elementary School, when Billie Bradley would wind us up, a few
wayward boys with dreams, musical dreams, Elvis riches dreams, and begin to
sing in a low voice, then a little higher and we would back him up, drawing, drawing
like lemmings from the sea, girls, stick girls and shapes, but girls and that
was dream enough for twelve- year old boys with wanderlust, or maybe just lust
in their hearts
Or, even holy of holies, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor up the Downs when Frankie,
Francis Xavier Riley, was king of the night (and a few days too) and I was his
lord chamberlain. Maybe he'd tell us of some pizza dough secrets, or how to
snag a girl with just the right jukebox combination. But no, no one has come
forth to spew their whitewashed stories almost a half a century later so I must
tell the tales. Probably, on some of the stuff, some of the kiddish schoolboy
night stuff, those old corner boys don’t realize that the statute of
limitations ran out, and ran out long ago. But that’s not my problem.
Ah, corner boys down those means streets, down in those mean Adamsville streets,
making all their noise. Ah.
******* Harry's Variety Store
Riding down the old neighborhood streets a while back, the old North
Adamsville working- class streets, streets dotted with triple-deckers housing multiple
families along with close-quarter, small cottage-sized single family houses
like the one of my own growing to manhood time. Houses, moreover, that
reflected, no, exclaimed right to their tiny rooftops that seemingly eternal
overweening desire to have, small or not, worth the trouble or not, something
of one’s own against the otherwise endless servitude of days. Suddenly, coming
to an intersection, I was startled, no, more than that I was forced into a
double-take, by the sight of some guys, some teenage guys hanging, hanging
hard, one foot on the ground the other bent holding up the infernal brick wall
that spoke of practice and marking one’s territory, against the oncoming night
in front of an old time variety store, a mom and pop variety from some extinct
times before the 7/11 chain store, fast shop, no room for corner boys, police
take notice, dark night. Memory called it Kelly’s, today Kim’s. From the look
of them, baggy-panted, latest fashion footwear name sneakered, baseball
cap-headed, all items marked, marked with the insignia (secretly, and with no
hope of outside decoding) signifying their "homeboy" associations (I
would say gang, but that word is charged these days and this is not exactly what
it looked like, at least to the public eye, my public eye) they could be the
grandsons, probably not biological because these kids were almost all Asians
speckled with a couple of Irish-lookers, shanty Irish-lookers, of the ghost
be-bop night guys that held me in thrall in those misty early 1960s times.
Yah, that tableau, that time-etched scene, got me to thinking of some long
lost comrades of the schoolboy night like the hang-around guys in front of
Harry’s Variety, although comrades might not be the right word because I was
just some punk young kid trying to be a wannabe, or half-wannabe, corner boy and
they had no time for punk kids and later when I came of age I had no time for
corner boys. Yah, that scene got me to thinking of the old time corner boys who
ruled the whole wide North Adamsville night (and day for those who didn’t work
or go to school, which was quite a few on certain days, because most of these
guys were between sixteen and their early twenties with very jittery school and
work histories better left unspoken, or else). Yah, got me thinking about where
the white tee-shirted, blue-jeaned, engineer-booted, cigarette-smoking,
unfiltered of course, sneering, soda-swilling, Coke, naturally, pinball wizards
held forth daily and nightly, and let me cadge a few odd games when they had
more important business, more important girl business, to attend to.
Yah, I got to thinking too about Harry’s, old Harry’s Variety over there
near my grandmother’s house, over there in that block on Sagamore Street where
the Irish workingman’s whiskey-drinking (with a beer chaser), fist-fighting, sports-betting
after a hard day’s work Dublin Grille was. Harry’s was on the corner of
that block. Now if you have some image, some quirky, sentimental image, of
Harry’s as being run by an up-and-coming just arrived immigrant guy, maybe with
a big family, trying to make this neighborhood store thing work so he can take
in, take in vicariously anyway, the American dream like you see running such
places now forget it. Harry’s was nothing but a “front.” Old Harry, Harry
O’Toole, now long gone, was nothing but the neighborhood “bookie” known far and
wide to one and all as such. Even the cops would pull up in their squad cars to
place their bets, laughingly, with Harry in the days before the state became
the bookie-of-choice for most bettors. And he had his “book”, his precious penciled-notation
book right out on the counter. But see punk kid me, even then just a little too
book-unworldly didn’t pick up on that fact until, old grandmother, jesus,
grandmother “hipped” me to it.
Until then I didn’t think anything of the fact that Harry had about three
dust-laden cans of soup, two dust-laden cans of beans, a couple of loaves of
bread (Wonder Bread, if you want to know) on his dust-laden shelves, a
few old quarts of milk and an ice chest full of tonic (now called soda, even by
New Englanders) and a few other odds and ends that did not, under any theory of
economics, capitalist or Marxist, add up to a thriving business ethos. Unless,
of course, something else was going on. But what drew me to Harry’s was not
that stuff anyway. What drew me to Harry’s was, one, his pin ball machine
complete with corner boy players and their corner boy ways, and, two, his huge Coca
Cola ice chest (now sold as antique curiosities for much money at big-time
flea markets and other venues) filled with ice cold, cold tonics (see above),
especially the local Robb’s Root Beer that I was practically addicted to
in those days (and that Harry, kind-hearted Harry, stocked for me).
When Mister Beethoven Got Rolled Over-With The Music Of Mister Chuck Berry In Mind
CD Review
By Zack James
Chuck Berry: The Definitive Collection, Chuck Berry, Chess Records, 2006
You never know when two or more old guys, two or more mature forget the old at your peril gals too but this one is about guys, will gather down memory lane or what will trigger that big cloudburst. Seth Garth and Jack Callahan two old time friends from high school in Riverdale had an abiding interest in music successively rock and roll, the blues and folk music (never losing interest in any in the process just that one would wax and wane at any given time). Seth had eventually become as an early part of his journalistic career been a music critic for the now long defunct The Eye, an alternative newspaper out in the Bay Area in the days when he, Jack and a few other guys like Phil Larkin headed out there to see what everything was all about.
Recently though Seth and Jack, and occasionally Phil would get together and talk music shop at the Erie Grille where they would down a few scotches to level out (their expression). One night they had been at Seth request discussing the first time they had heard the legendary Woody Guthrie sing his songs, or one of them anyway. As it turned out Seth had drawn a blank on when that might have occurred and he begged Jack to think the matter through since he was preparing an article, an unpaid article, for the American Folk Music Review and needed a frame of reference. Jack had come up with the answer-in Mr. Lawrence’s seventh grade music class when he put on Woody and a bunch of other stuff to try to ween them off rock and roll which he hated (and which they loved, loved to perdition). Seth had accepted that answer (although later he contacted Phil and Phil reminded him about the song This Land Is Your Land covered by the Weavers with Pete Seeger in Miss Winot’s fourth grade class on her cranky old record player and he would use that source in the article).
All this talk of that fateful seventh grade music class, and Mr. Lawrence, is probably what solidified everybody in the class to their devotion to rock and roll. But that was a hard fought and paid for devotion. A few days after the night with Jack at the Erie Grille Seth woke up from a nap thinking about the time in Mister Lawrence’s class when he was being crazy about Beethoven, wanted the class to appreciate classical music.Seth, Jack and Phil had had enough and started in one class singing Chuck Berry’s throwing down the gauntlet Roll Over Beethoven and the class cheered them in. Of course in this penalty-ridden world Mr. Lawrence took his revenge and the trio spent several afternoons after school since they refused to apologize for their outbursts. Seth smiled to himself-Yeah, rock and roll will never die. To prove that assumption just listen to Mister Chuck Berry’s gold star compilation here. And be prepared to do something rash.
She Came Out Of The Karoo-The Music Of Tony Bird-A Review
CD Review
By Zack James
Sorry Africa, Tony Bird, 1986
During the 1980s Seth Garth had been taking on more and more purely political assignments for the New Times Gazette, a successor newspaper to the old alternative The Eye for which he had gotten his first jumps in journalism as the film and music critic. It wasn’t that he had lost interest in covering the happenings in the world of independent cinema and the edges of popular music but that in that period there were political trends around the struggles for liberation in Central and South America and Southern Africa that for the first time since the slowdown of the Vietnam War back in the early 1970s that required attention. And so Benny Gold, his editor from back in The Eye days who had moved on with the Gazette assigned him more and more of those political assignments with the idea that he would weave those in with some off-beat cultural pieces.
One night he had been in the Open Space, a new music club in the Village [Greenwich Village]that had previous been a coffeehouse, a popular one, the Unicorn, to hear a new guy out of Africa who Seth was told had an interesting beat, had combined the sounds of Mother Africa with more popular Western music. This was the kind of off-beat combination that he was sure Benny Gold would go for. As the MC for the evening announced the performer, Tony Bird, he was surprised that out came on the stage a young white man backed up by an all black group of sidemen. Seth had known that there were some, not enough, white youth who were supporting the various black liberation struggles in Southern Africa, particularly in South Africa but he was not prepared for a white musician to surface who supported those struggles although he should have known that fact going in.
Tony Bird let everybody in the place know where he was coming from when he started singing a very heartfelt and upbeat song, Sorry Africa, taking on the burden on his shoulders of expressing sorrow at the way the white man, the way his people had treated the ones they had conquered one way or another. Very moving.
What had gotten Seth that night though and he was as surprised at this as he was that Tony Bird was a white African man was a song that he finished up with, She Came From The Karoo. The Karoo being the outback in the country he came from. What was strange about the song was that except that the locale was Africa it could have been a song of love and lost in America. More to the point was the vision that Seth had of the woman Tony was speaking of, a woman who came out of the msit with a red sundress on and effected all around her with her bright Botticelli smile and demeanor. Seth thought that little idea, the idea that a woman could spark such imagination out in the bush was the hook that he would use in his article. That and that Tony Bird, a balck liberationstruggle fighter in his own right had no apologied to give to Africa.
“You never know where music, the muse of music if that is the right way to say it, if it is not redundant” Seth Garth said to his old friend Bartlett Webber one night when they were discussing various musical trends and commitments over a few drinks at Friday’s in downtown Boston. Seth had just been commenting on the hard fact that the guys and gals who were holding up the blues traditions of the quintessentially black musical form were mostly then younger whites who had gotten their baptisms of fire back in the early 1960s maybe the 1970s when as part of the British invasion of rock groups (the Beatles and Stones mostly) who worshiped at the feet of the old bluesmen and as part of the folk revival of the early 1960s when the young were looking for roots music and hit upon some old time country blues singers they got hooked on this genre.(That worship at the feet was no mere expression since as august a group as the Rolling Stones made their way to Chicago, made their way to legendary blues label Chess Records, made their way to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.)
Seth went on, “You know with very few exceptions, maybe in the old days guys like Taj Majal and more recently Keb ‘Mo young blacks were running away from their blues is dues contributions, except the hip-hop artists who were savoring those blues as backdrop to their new language experiences.” Bart nodded his head not so much because he was as knowledgeable as Seth about musical trends, he wasn’t, but because ever since Seth had turned him on to various non-rock and roll forms of music such as these blues and folk music he had deferred to him on such subjects.
That deference to Seth had not been happenstance since for early in his journalistic career starting with the American Folk Gazette when he was still in college he had been a music critic most frequently and profitably before it folded long ago when the ebb tide of the 1960s faded the prestigious The Eye. Moreover although Bart was a true aficionado Seth would be the one to lead the way forward musically ever since the old days back in Riverdale when Seth had been the guy who turned the crowd they hung around with to that folk music that was coming over the horizon. He would take the lead here as well ever since both men had attended a concert at the Garden by Big Bill Bloom, the legendary folksinger from the 1960s. Both men had agreed to walk out of the performance before the encore as a protest to the hard fact that Big Bill could no longer sing, was practically talking the lyrics through. That experience got Seth onto the trail of an idea. He wanted to check out all the singers still standing from back in the day who were still performing and rate them on the question of whether they still had “it.”As it turned out some did like David Bromberg and his band who burned up the joint one night downtown. The late Etta James didn’t, didn’t have it. And so the quest.
That quest was now centered more particularly on the fading fast few blues masters still around. That is where Seth began to see that break in the black blues tradition as two generations or more removed from Southern country life or hard inner city industrial madness which had brought a couple of generations north in search of a better life and the music needed to pick up as well bringing forth the whole electric blues scene that hummed cities like Chicago and Detroit in the early 1950s. That brought them to this-B.B. King and Eric Clapton, one of those British invasion guys were going to perform together at the Garden in a week or so.
At the concert Seth and Bart had been apprehensive when they saw ancient B.B. and his latest version of Lucille being escorted to a seat on center stage with Eric Clapton to the side. Not to worry though the work they did was a great success. Seth mentioned to Bart though that he was not sure where the new generation would get their blues fromsince they would never go away just like rock androll once guys like Eric passed away. This CD was their work-okay.