*Poet's Corner- In Honor Of John Brown- Stephen Vincent Benet's "John Brown's Body"

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In Honor of John Brown of Harper's Ferry

February Is Black History Month

The name John Brown, forever alive in the memory of all those who support black liberation struggles, has often been maligned by those forces who oppose black liberation both in his own day and in ours. Those opponents have more than adequate space for their views but in this space Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem “John Brown’s Body” gets a rightful place. Markin


Excerpts from

John Brown's Body

Stephen Vincent Benet

Army of the Potomac, advancing army,
Alloy of a dozen disparate, alien states,
City-boy, farm-hand, bounty-man, first volunteer,
Old regular, drafted recruit, paid substitute,
Men who fought through the war from First Bull Run,
And other men, nowise different in look or purpose
Whom the first men greated at first with a ribald cry
"Here they come! Two hundred dollars and a ka-ow!"
Rocks from New England and hickory-chunks from the West,
Bowery boy and clogging Irish adventurer,
Germans who learnt their English under the shells
Or didn't have time to learn it before they died.
Confused, huge weapon, forged from such different metals,
Misused by unlucky swordsmen till you were blunt
And then reforged with anguish and bloody sweat
To be blunted again by one more unlucky captain
Against the millstone of Lee.
Good Stallion,
Ridden and ridden against a hurdle of thorns
By uncertain rider after uncertain rider.
The rider fails and you shiver and catch your breath,
They plaster your wounds and patch up your broken knees,
And then, just as you know the grip of your rider's hands
And begin to feel at home with his horseman's tricks,
Another rider comes with a different seat,
And lunges you at the bitter hurdle again,
And it beats you again - and it all begins from the first,
The patching of wounds, the freezing in winter camps,
The vain mud-marches, the diarrhea, the wastage,
The grand reviews, the talk in the newspapers,
The sour knowledge that you were wasted again,
Not as Napoleons waste for a victory
But blindly, unluckily -
until at last
After long years, at fish-hook Gettysburg,
The blade and the millstone meet and the blade holds fast.
Book Seven
They came to the fish-hook Gettysburg in this way, after this fashion.
Over hot pikes, heavy with pollen, past fields where the wheat was high.
Peaches grew in the orchards; it was fertile country,
Full of red barns and fresh springs, and dun, deep uddered kine.
A farmer lived with a clear stream that ran through his very house-room.
They cooled the butter in it and the milk, in their wide stone jars;
A dusty Georgian came there, to eat and to go on to battle;
They dipped the milk from the jars, it was cold and sweet in his mouth.

He heard the clear stream's music as the German housewife served him,
Remembering the Shenandoah and a stream poured from a rock;
He ate and drank and went on to the gunwheels crushing the harvest.
It was a thing he remembered as long as the guns.

Country of broad-backed horses, stone houses and long, green
Meadows,
Where Getty came with his ox-team to found a steady town
And the little trains of my boyhood puffed solemnly up the
Valley
Past the market-squares and the lindens and the Quaker meeting-house

Penn stood under his oak with a painted sachem beside him,
The market-women sold scrapple when the first red maples
turned;
When the buckeyes slipped from their sheaths, you could gather
a pile of buckeyes,
Red-brown as old polished boots, good to touch and hold in the
hand.

The ice-cream parlor was papered with scenes from Paul and
Virginia,
The pigs were fat all year, you could stand a spoon in the cream,
-Penn stood under his oak with a feathered pipe in his fingers,
His eyes were quiet with God, but his wits and his bargain sharp.

So I remember it all, and the light sound of buckeyes falling
On the worn rose-bricks of the pavement, herring-boned, trodden
for years;
The great yellow shocks of wheat and the dust white road
through summer,
And in the fall, the green walnut shells, and the stain they left for a
while.

So I remember you, ripe country of broad backed horses,
Valley of cold, sweet springs and dairies with limestone floors;
And so they found you that year, when they scared your cows
with their cannon,
And the strange South moved against you, lean marchers lost
in the corn.
___________

Two months have passed since Jackson died in the woods
And they bought his body back to the Richmond State House
To lie there, heaped with flowers, while the bells tolled
Two months of feints and waiting.
A two edged chance
And yet a chance that may burnish a fallen star;
For now, on the wide expanse of the Western board,
Strong pieces that fought for the South have been swept away
Or penned up in hollow in Vicksburg
One cool spring night
Porter's ironclads run the shore batteries
Through a velvet stabbed with hot flashes.
Grant lands his men
Drives the relieving forces of Johnson away
And sits at last in front of the hollow town
Like a Huge brown bear on its haunches, terribly waiting
His guns begin to peck at the pillared porches,
The sleepy, sun spattered streets. His siege has begun
Forty-eight days that siege and those guns go on
Like a slow hand closing around a hungry throat,
Ever more hungry

The news creeps back to the watchers oversea.
They ponder on it aloof and irresolute.
The balance they watch is dipping against the South.
It will take great strokes to redress that balance again.
There will be one more moment of shaken scales
When the Laird rams almost alter the scheme of things,
But it is distant.
The watchers stare at the board
Waiting a surer omen than Chancellorsville
Or any battle won on Southern ground.

Lee sees that dip of the ballance and so prepares
His cast for the surer omen and his last stroke
At the steel-bossed Northern sheild. Once before he tried
That spear-rush North and was halted. It was a chance.
This is a chance. He weighs the chance in his hand
Like a stone, reflecting.
Four years from Harper's Ferry-
Two years since the First Manassas-and this last year
Stroke after stroke successful-but still no end.

He is a man with a knotty club in his hand
Beating off bulls from the breaks in a pasture fence
And he has beaten them back at each fresh assault,
McClellan-Burnside-Hooker at Chancellorsville-
Pope at the Second Manassas-Banks in the Valley-
But the pasture is trampled; his army needs new pasture.
An army moves like a locust, eating the grain,
And this grain is well-nigh eaten. He cannot mend
The breaks in his fence with famine or starving hands,
And if he waits the wheel of another year
The bulls will come back full-fed shaking sharper horns
While he faces them empty, armed with a hunger-cracked
Unmagic stick.......



Lincoln hears the rumor in Washington.
They are moving North.
The Pennsylvania cities
Hear it and shake, they are loose, they are moving north.
Call up your shotgun-militia, bury your silver,
Shoulder a gun or run away from the state,
They are loose, they are moving.
Fighting Joe Hooker has heard it.
He swings his army back across the Potomac,
Rapidly planning, while Lee still visions him South.
Stuart's horse should have brought news of that move
But Stuart is off on a last and luckless raid
Far to the East, and the grey host moves without eyes
Through crucial days.
They are in the Cumberland now,
Taking minor towns, feeding fat for a little while,
Pressing horses and shoes, paying out Confederate bills
To slow Dutch storekeepers who groan at the money.
They are loose, they are in the North, they are here and there.
Halleck rubs his elbows and wonders where,
Lincoln is sleepless, the telegraph-sounders click
In the War Office day and night
There are lies and rumors'
They are only a mile from Philadelphia now,
They are burning York-they are marching on Baltimore-

Meanwhile Lee rides through the heart of the Cumberland.
A great hot sunset colors the marching men,
Colors the horse and the sword and the bearded face
But cannot change that face from its strong repose.
And-miles away- Joe Hooker, by telegraph
Cals for the garrison left at Harper's Ferry
To join him. Elbow-rubbing Haleck refuses.
Hooker resigns command-and fades from the East
To travel West, fight keenly at Lookout Mountain,
Follow Sherman's march as far as Atlanta,
Be ranked by Howard, and tartly resign once more
Before the end and the fame and the Grand Review,
To die a slow death, in bed with his fire gone out,
A campfire quenched and forgotten.



Meanwhile, Lee rides through the heart of the Cumberland.
A great hot sunset colors the marching men,
Colors the horse and the sword and the bearded face
But cannot change that face from its strong repose.
And - miles away - Joe Hooker, by telegraph
Calls for the garrison left at Harper's Ferry
To join him. Elbow-rubbing Halleck refuses.
Hooker resigns command - and fades from the East
To travel West, fight keenly at Lookout Mountain,
Follow Sherman's march as far as Atlanta,
Be ranked by Howard, and tartly resign once more
Before the end and the fame and the Grand Review,
To die a slow death, in bed, with his fire gone out,
A campfire quenched and forgotten.
He deserved
A better and brusquer end that marched with his nickname,
This disappointed, hot-tempered, most human man
Who had such faith in himself except for once,
And the once, being Chancellorsville, wiped out the rest....



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


So Hooker goes from our picture - and a spent aide
Reaches Meade's hut at three o'clock in the morning
To wake him with unexpected news of command.
The thin Pennsylvanian puts on his spectacles
To read the order. Tall, sad-faced and austere,
He has the sharp, long nose of a fighting-bird,
A prudent mouth and a cool, considering mind.
An iron-grey man with none of Hooker's panache,
But resolute and able, well skilled in war;
They call hin "the dammed old goggle-eyed snapping-turtle"
At times, and he does not call out the idol-shout
When he rides his lines, but his prudence is a hard prudence,
And can last out storms that break the men with panache,
Though it summons no counter-storm when the storm is done.

His sombre schoolmaster-eyes read the order well.
It is three days before the battle.
He thinks at first
Of a grand review, gives it up, and begins to act.


That morning a spy brings news to Lee in his tent
That the Union army has moved and is on the march.
Lee cals back Ewell and Early from their forays
And summons his host together by the cross-roads
Where Getty came with his ox-cart.
So now we see
These two crab-armies fumbling for each other,
As if through a fog of rumor and false report,
These last two days of sleepy, hay-harvest June.
Hot June lying asleep on a shock of wheat
Where the pollen-wind blows over the burnt-gold stubble
And the thirsty men march past, stirring thick grey dust
>From the trodden pikes-till at last, the crab-claws touch
At Getty's town, and clutch, and the peaches fall
Cut by the bullets, splashing under the trees.

That meeting was not willed by a human mind,
When we come to sift it.
You say fate rode a horse
Ahead of those lumbering hosts, and in either hand
He carried a skein of omen. And when at last,
He came to a certain umbrella-copse of trees
That had never heard a cannon or seen dead men,
He knotted the skeins together and flung them down
With a sound like metal.

Perhaps. It may have been so.
All that we know is-Meade intended to fight
Some fifteen miles away on the Pipe Creek Line
And where Lee meant to fight him, if forced to fight,
We do not know, but it was not where they fought.
Yet the riding fate,
Blind and deaf and a doom on a lunging horse,
Threw down his skeins and gathered the battle there.



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

The buttercup meadows
are very yellow
A child comes there
To fill her hands
The gold she gathers
Is soft and precious
As sweet as new butter
Fresh from the churn

She fills her frock
With the yellow flowers,
The butter she gathers
Is smooth as gold,
Little bright cups
Of new-churned sunshine
For a well behaved
Hoop skirted doll

Her frock's full
And her hands are mothy
With yellow pollen
But she keeps on.
Down by the fence
They are even thicker.
She runs, bowed down
with butter-cup gold.

She sees a rider.
His face is grey
With a different dust
He talks loud.
He rattles like tinware
He has a long sword
To kill little girls.

He shouts at her now,
But she doesn't answer.
"Where is the town?"
But she will not hear.
There are other riders
Jangling behind him.
"We won't hurt you youngster!"
But they have swords.

The buttercup fall
Like Spilt butter
She runs away.
She runs to her house.
She hides her face
In her mother's apron
And tried to tell her
How dreadful it was.

________

Buford came to Gettysburg late that night
...



- Fabulous shoes of Gettysburg, dead man's shoes,
Did anyone ever wear you, when it was done,
When the men were gone, when the farms were spoiled with the
bones,
What became of your nails and leather? The swords went home,
The swords went into museums and neat glass cases,
The swords look well there. They are clean from the war.
You wouldn't put old shoes in a neat glass case,
Still stuck with the mud of marching.
And yet, a man
With a taste for such straws and fables, blown by the wind,
Might hide a pair in a labelled case sometime
Just to see how the leather looked, set down by the swords....



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

Look at that column well, as it passes by,
Remembering Bull Run and the cocksfeather hats,
The congressmen, the raw militia brigades
Who went to war with a flag and a haircloth trunk
In bright red pants and ideals and ignorance,
Ready to fight like picture-postcard boys
While fighting still had banners and a sword
And just as ready to run in blind mob-panic....
These men were once those men. These men are the soldiers,
Good theives, good fighters, excellent foragers,
The grumbling men who dislike to be killed in war
And yet will hold when the raw militia break
And live where the raw militia needlessly die,
Having been schooled to that end.
The school is not
A pretty school. They wear no cocksfeather hats.
Some men march in their drawers and their stocking feet.
They have handkerchiefs round their heads, they are footsore
and chafed,
Their faces are sweaty leather.
And when they pass
The little towns where the people wish them godspeed,
A few are touched by the cheers and the crying women
But most have seen a number of crying women,
And heard a number of cheers.

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

That battle of the first day was a minor battle
As such are counted.
That is, it killed many men.
Killed more than died at Bull Run, left thousands stricken
With wounds that time might heal for a little while
Or never heal till the breath was out of the flesh.
The First Corps lost half its number in killed and wounded.
The pale-faced women, huddled behind drawn blinds
Back in the town, or in apple-cellars, hiding,
Thought it the end of the world, no doubt.
And yet,
As the books remark, it was only a minor battle.
There were only two corps engaged on the Union side,
Longstreet had not yet come up, nor Ewell's whole force,
Hill's corps lacked a division till evening fell.
It was only a minor battle.
When the first shot
Clanged out, it was fired from a clump of Union vedettes
Holding a farm in the woods beyond the town.
The farmer was there to hear it - and then to see
The troopers scramble back on their restless horses
And go off, firing, as a grey mass came on...



Reynolds is dead,
The model soldier, gallant and courteous,
Shot from the sadlle in the first of the fight.
He was Doubleday's friend, but Doubleday has no time
To grieve him, the Union right being driven in
And Heth's Confederates pressing on towards the town
He holds the onrush back till Howard comes up
And takes command for a while.
The fighting is grim.
Meade has heard the news. He sends Hancock up the field
Hancock takes command in mid-combat. The grey comes on.
Five color bearers are killed at one Union color.
The last man dying still holds up the sagging flag.
The pale faced women creeping out of their houses,
Plead withretreating bluecoats, "Don't leave us, boys,
Stay with us- hold the town." Their faces are thin,
Their words come tumbling out of a frightened mouth.
In a field, far off, a peaceable farmer puts
His hands to his ears, still hearing that one sharp shot
That he will hear and hear until he dies of it.
It is Hill and Ewell now against Hancock and Howard
And a confused wild clamor-and the high keen
Of the Rebel yell- and the sharp-edged bitter bullet song
Beating down men and grain, while the sweaty fighters
Grunt as they ram their charges with blackened hands.
Till Hancock and Howard are beat away at last
Outnumbered and outflanked, clean out of town,
Retreating as best they can to a fish hook ridge,
And the clamor dies and the sun is going down
And the tired men think about food.
The dust-bitten staff
Of Ewell, riding along through the captured streets,
Hear the thud of a bullet wound striking their general.
Flesh or bome? Death-wound or rub of the game?
'The general's hurt!" They gasp and volley their questions
Ewell turns his head like a bird, "No, I'm not hurt, sir,
But suppose the ball had struck you, General Gordon,
We'd have the trouble of carrying you from the field.
You can see how much better fixed I am.
It doesn't hurt a mite to be shot in your wooden leg."

So it ends. Lee comes on the field in time to see
The village taken, the Union wave in retreat.
Meade will not reach the ground till one the next morning.



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

So it ends, this lesser battle of the first day,
Starkly disputed and piecemeal won and lost
By corps-commanders who carried no magic plans
Stowed in their sleeves, but fought and held as they could.
It is past. The board is staked for the greater game
Which is to follow - The beaten Union brigades
Recoil from the cross-roads town that they tried to hold.
And so recoiling, rest on a destined ground.
Who chose that ground?
There are claimants enough in the books.
Howard thanked by Congress for choosing it
And doubtless, they would have thanked him as well had he
Chosen another, once the battle was won,
And there are a dozen ifs on the Southern side,
How, in that first day's evening, if one had known,
If Lee had been there in time, if Jackson had lived,
The heights that cost so much blood in the vain attempt
to take days later, could have been taken then.
And the ifs and the thanks and rst are all true enough
But we can only say, when we look at the board,
"There it happened. There is the way of the land.
There was the fate, and there the blind swords were crossed."



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You took a carriage to that battlefield
Now, I suppose, you take a motor-bus
But, then, it was a carriage and you ate
Fried chicken out of wrappings and waxed paper,
While the slow guide buzzed on about the war
And the enormous, curdled summer clouds
Piled up like giant cream puffs in the blue.
The carriage smelt of axle-grease and leather
And the old horse nodded a sleepy head
Adorned with a straw hat. His ears stuck through it.
It was the middle of hay-fever summer
And it was hot. And you could stand and look
All the way down from Cemetery Ridge,
Much as it was, except for the monuments
And startling groups of monumental men
Bursting in bronze and marble from the ground,
And all the curious names and gravestones.

So peaceable it was, so calm and hot,
So tidy and great-skied
No men had fought
There but enormous monumental men
Who bled neat streams of uncorrupting bronze,
Even at the Round Tops, even by Pickett's boulder
Where the bronze, open book could still be read
By the visitors and sparrows and the wind:
And the wind came, the wind moved the grass,
Saying...while the long light... and all so calm...

"Pickett came
And the South came
And the end comes,
And the grass comes
And the wind blows
On the bronze book
On the bronze men
On the grown grass,
And the wind says
'Long ago
Long
Ago'"

Then it was time to buy a paperweight
With flags upon it in decalcomania
And hope you wouldn't break it driving home


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Draw a clumsy fish-hook on a piece of paper,
to the left of the shank, by the bend of the curving hook,
Draw a Maltese cross with the top block cut away.
The cross is the town. nine roads star out of it
East, West, South, North.
And now, still more to the left
Off the lopped-off cross, on the other side of the town,
Draw a long, slightly-wavy line of ridges and hills
Roughly parallel to the fish-hook shank.
(The hook of the fish-hook is turned away from the cross
And the wavy line.)
There your ground and your ridges lie
The fish-hook is Cemetery Ridge and the North
Waiting to be assaulted-the wavy line
Seminary Ridge whence the Southern assault will come.

The valley between is more than a mile in breadth.
It is some three miles from the lowest jut of the cross
To the button at the far end of the fish-hook shank,
Big Round Top, with Little Round Top not far away,
Both ridges are strong and rocky, well made for war.
But the Northern one is the stronger, shorter one.
Lee's army must spread out like an uncoiled snake
Lying along a fence-rail, while Meade's can coil
Or halfway coil, like a snake clinging to a stone.
Meade has the more men and the easier shifts to make,
Lee the old prestige of triumph and his tried skill.
His task is-to coil his snake round the other snake
Halfway clung to the stone, and shatter it so,
Or to break some point in the shank of the fish-hook line
And so cut the snake in two.
Meade's task is to hold.


That is the chess and the scheme of the wooden blocks
Set down on the contour map.
Having learned so much,
Forget it now, while the ripple-lines of the map
Arise into bouldered ridges, tree-grown, bird-visited,
Where the gnats buzz, and the wren builds a hollow nest
And the rocks are grey in the sun and black in the rain,
And the jacks-in-the-pulpit grow in the cool, damp hollows.
See no names of leaders painted upon the blocks
Such as "Hill," or "Hancock," or "Pender" -
but see instead
Three miles of living men - three long double miles
Of men and guns and horses and fires and wagons,
Teamsters, surgeons, generals, orderlies,
A hundred and sixty thousand living men
Asleep or eating or thinking or writing brief
Notes in the thought of death, shooting dice or swearing,
Groaning in hospital wagons, standing guard
While the slow stars walk through heaven in silver mail,
Hearing a stream or a joke or a horse cropping grass
Or hearing nothing, being too tired to hear.
All night till the round sun comes and the morning breaks,
Three double miles of live men.
Listen to them, their breath goes up through the night
In a great chord of life, in the sighing murmur
Of wind-stirred wheat.
A hundred and sixty thousand
Breathing men, at night, on two hostile ridges set down.

Jack Ellyat slept that night on the rocky ground
Of Cemetery Hill while the cold stars marched
And if his bed was harder than Jacob's stone
Yet he could sleep on it now and be glad for sleep

He had been through Chancellorsville and the whistling wood
He had been through this last day. It is well to sleep
After such days
He had seen, in the last four months,
Many roads, much weather and death, and two men fey
Before they died with the presence of death to come,
John Hrberdeen and the corporal from Millerstown.
Such things are often remembered, even in sleep.
He thought to himself as he lay on the ground,
"We got it hot today in that brick red town
But will get it hotter tomorrow."
And when he awoke
And saw the round sun risen in the clear sky,
He could feel that steam up from the rocky ground
And touch each man.
One man looked down from the hill,
"That must be their whole damn army," he said and whistled,
"It'll be a picnic today boys. Yes, it'll be
A regular basket-picnic." He whistled again.

"Shut your traps about picnics, Ace," said another man,
"You make me too damn hungry!"
He sighed out loud.
"We had enough of a picnic at Chancellorsville,"
He said, " I ain't felt right in my stummick since.
Can you make 'em out?"
"Sure," said Ace, "but they're pretty far."

"Wonder who we'll get? That bunch we got yesterday
was a mean shootin' bunch."
"Now don't you worry," said Ace,
We'll get plenty,"


A thin voice asid abruptly, "They're moving - lookit -
They're moving. I tell you - lookit -"
They all looked then.
A little cracking noise as of burning thornsticks
Began far away - ceased wholly - began again -
"We won't get it awhile," thought Ellyat. "They're trying the
left.
We won't get it awhile, but we'll get it soon.
I feel funny today. I don't think I'm going to be killed
But I feel funny. That's their whole army all right.
I wonder if those other two felt like this,
John Haberdeen and the corporal from Millerstown?
What's it like to see your name on a bullet?
It must feel queer. This is going to be a big one.
The Johnnies know it. That house looks pretty down there.
Phaeton, charioteer in your drunken car,
What have you got for a man that carries my name?
We're a damn good company now, if we say it ourselves
And the Old Man knows it - but this one's bound to be tough.
I wonder what they're feeling like over there.

Charioteer, you were driving yesterday,
No doubt, but I did not see you. I see you now.
What have you got today for a man with my name?"



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The firing began that morning at nine o'clock,
But it was three before the attacks were launched.
There were two attacks, one a drive on the Union left
To take the round tops, the other one on the right.
Lee had planned them to strike together and, striking so,
cut the Union snake in three pieces.
It did not happen.
On the left, Dutch Longstreet, slow, pugnacious and stubborn,
Hard to beat and justas hard to convince,
Had his own ideas of the battle and does not move
For hours after the hour that Lee had planned,
Though when he does, he moves with pugnacious strength.
Facing him in the valley before the Round Tops,
Sickles thrusts out blue troops in a weak right angle,
Some distance from the Ridge, by the Emmitsburg pike.
There is a peach orchard there, a field of ripe wheat
And other peaceable things soon not to be peaceful.

They say the bluecoats, marching through the ripe wheat,
Made a blue-and-yellow picture that men remember
Even now in their age, in their crack-voiced age.
They sat the noise was incessant as the sound
Of all wolves howling, when the attack came on.
They say, when the guns all spoke, that the solid ground
Of the rocky ridges trembled like a sick child.
We have made the sick earth tremble with other shakings
In our time, in our time, in our time, but it has not taught us
To leave the grain in the field.

So the storm came on
Yelling against the angle.
The men who fought there
Were the tried fighters, the hammered, the weather-beaten,
The very hard-dying men.
They came and died
And came again and died and stood there and died,
Till the angle was crumpled and broken in,
Sickles shot down, Willard, Barlow and Semmes shot down,
Wheatfield and orchard bloody and trampled and taken,
And Hood's tall Texans sweeping on toward the Round Tops
As Hood fell wounded...


When that last attack

Came, with its cry, Jack Ellyat saw it come on.
__________

They had been waiting for hours on that hard hill,
Sometimes under fire, sometimes untroubled by shells.
A man chewed a stick of grass and hummed to himself.
Another played mumbledeypeg with a worn black knife.
Two men were talking girls till they got too mad
And a sergeant stopped them.
Then they waited again.
Jack Ellyat waited, hearing that other roar
Rise and fall, be distant and then approach.
Now and then he turned on his side and looked at the sky
As if to build a house of peace from that blue,
But could find no house of peace there.
Only the roar,
The slow sun sinking, the fey touch at his mind....

He was lying behind a tree and a chunk of rock
On thick, coarse grass. Farther down the slope of the hill
There were houses, a rough stone wall, and blue loungy men.
Behind them lay the batteries on the crest.

He wondered if there were people still in the houses.
One house had a long, slant roof. He followed the slant
Of the roof with his finger, idly, pleased with the line.

The shelling burst out from the Southern guns again.
Their own batteries answered behind them. He looked at his
house
While the shells came down. I'd like to live in that house.
Now the shelling lessened.
The man with the old black knife
Shut up the knife and began to baby his rifle.
They're coming, Jack thought. This is it.
There was an abrupt
Slight stiffening in the bodies of the other men,
A few chopped ends of words scattered back and forth,
Eyes looking, hands busy in swift, well-accustomed gestures.
This is it. He felt his own hands moving like their's
Though he was not telling them to. This is it. He felt
The old familiar tightness around his chest.
The man with the grass chewed his stalk a little too hard
And then suddenly spat it out.
Jack Ellyat saw
Through the falling night, that slight, grey fringe that was war
Coming against them, not as it came in pictures
With a ruler-edge, but a crinkled and smudgy line
Like a childs vague scwarl in soft crayon, but moving on
But with its little red handkerchiefs of flags
Sagging up and down, here and there.
It was still quite far,
It was still a toy attack - it was swallowed now
By a wood and came out larger with larger flags.
Their own guns on the crest were trying to break it up
- Smoking sand thrown into an ant-legged line -
But it still kept on - one fringe and another fringe
And another and -
He lost them all for a moment
In a dip of ground.
This is it, he thought with a parched
Mind. It's a big one. They must be yelling all right
Though you can't hear them. They're going to do it this time.
Do it or bust - you can tell from the way they come -
I hope to Christ that the batteries do their job
When they get out of that dip.
Hell, they've lost 'em now,
And they're still coming.
He heard a thin gnat-shrieking
"Hold your fire till they're close enough, men!"
The new
lieutenant.
The new lieutenant looked thin. "Aw, go home," he muttered,
"We're no militia - What do you think we are?'

Then suddenly, down by his house, the low stone wall
Flashed and was instantly huge with a wall of smoke.
He was yelling now. He saw a red battleflag
Push through the smoke like a prow and be blotted out
By smoke and flash.
His heart knocked hard in his chest.
"Do it or bust," he mumbled, holding his fire
While the rags of smoke blew off.
He heard a thick chunk
Beside him, turned his head for a flicker of time.
The man who had chewed on the grass was injuredly trying
to rise to his knees, his face annoyed by a smile.
Then the blood poured over the smile and he crumpled up.
Ellyat reached out a hand to touch him and felt the hand
Rasped by a file.
He jerked back the hand and sucked it.
"Bastards," he said in a minor and even voice.

All this occurred, it seemed, in no time at all,
But when he turned back, the smoky slope of the hill
Was grey - and a staggering red advancing flag
And those same shouting strangers he knew so well,
No longer ants - but there - and stumblingly running -
And that high, shrill, hated keen piercing all the flat thunder.

His lips went back. He felt something swell in his chest
Like a huge, indocile bubble.
"By God," he said,
Loading and firing, "You're not going to get this hill,
You're not going to get this hill. By God, but you're not!"

He saw one man spin like a crazy dancer
And another fall at his heels - but the hill kept growing them.
Something made him look to his left.
A yellow-fanged face
Was aiming a picture over a chunk of rock.
He fired and the face went down like a broken pipe
While something hit him sharply and took his breath.
"Get back, you suckers," he croaked, "Get back there, you
suckers!"
He wouldn't have time to load now - they were too near.
He was up and screaming. He swung his gun like a club
Through a twlight full of bright stabbings, and felt it crash
On a thing that broke. He had no breath any more.
He had no thoughts. Then the blunt fist hit him again.

He was down in the grass and the black sheep of night ran over
him....



On the crest of the hill, the sweaty cannoneers,
The blackened Pennsylvanians, picked up their rammers
And fought the charge with handspikes and clubs and stones,
Biting and howling. It is said that they cried
Wildly, "Death on the soil of our native state
Rather than lose our guns." A general says so.
He was not there. I do not know what they cried
But that they fought, there was witness-and that the grey
Wave that came on them fought, there was witness too.
For an instant that wheel of combat-and for an instant
A brief, hard-breathing hush.
Then came the hard sound
Of a column tramping-blue reinforcements at last,
A doomsday sound to the grey.
The hard column came
Over the battered crest and went with a yell.
The grey charge bent and gave ground, the grey charge was
broken.
The sweaty gunners fell to their guns again
And began to scatter shells in the ebbing wave.

Thus ended the second day of the locked bull-horns
And the wounding or slaying of the twenty thousand.
And thus night came to cover it.
So the field
Was alive all night with whispers and words and sighs,
So the slow blood dripped in the rocks of the Devil's Den.
Lincoln, back in his White House, asks for news.
The War Department has little. There are reports
Of heavy firing near Gettysburg-that is all.
Davis in Richmond, knows as little as he.
In hollow vicksburg, the shells come down and come down
And the end is but two days off.
On the field itself
Meade calls a council and considers retreat.
His left has held and the Round Tops still are his.
But his right has been shaken, his centre pierced for a time,
The enemy holds part of his works on Culp's Hill,
His losses have been most stark.
He thinks of these things
And decides at last to fight it out where he stands. ...



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




Wingate cursed with an equal stress
The guns in the sky and his weariness,
The nightmare riding of yesterday
When they slept in the saddle by whole platoons
And the Pennsylvania farmer's grey
With hocks as puffy as toy balloons,
a graceless horse, without gaits or speed,
But all he had for his time of need.
"I'd as soon be riding a jersey cow."
But the Black Horse Troop was piebald now
And the Black Horse Troop was worn to the blade
With the dull fatigue of this last, long raid.
Huger Shepley rode in a tense
Gloom of spirit that found offense
In all things under the summer skies
And the recklessness in Bristol's eyes
Had lost its color of merriment.
Horses and men, they were well-nigh spent.
Wingate grinned as he heard the "Mount,"
"Reckon we look sort of no-account,
But we're here at last for somebody's fight."
They rode toward the curve of the Union right.



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

At one o'clock the first signal-gun was fired
And the solid earth began to be sick anew.
For two hours then that sickness, the unhushed roar
Of two hundred and fifty cannon firing like one.

By Philadelphia, eighty-odd miles away,
An old man stooped and put his ear to the ground
And heard that roar, it is said, like the vague sea-clash
In a hollow conch-shell, there, in his flowerbeds.
He had planted trumpet-flowers for fifteen years
But now the flowers were blowing an iron noise
Through the earth itself. He wiped his face on his sleeve
And tottered back to his house with fear in his eyes.

The caissons began to blow up in the Union batteries....


The cannonade fell still. All along the fish-hook line,
The tired men stared at the smoke and waited for it to clear;
The men in the center waited, their rifles gripped in their hands,
By the trees of the riding fate, and the low stone wall, and the
guns.

These were Hancock's men, the men of the Second Corps,
Eleven states were mixed there, where Minnesota stood
In battle-order with Maine, and Rhode Island beside New York,
The metals of all the North, cooled into an axe of war.

The strong sticks of the North, bound into a fasces-shape,
The hard winters of snow, the wind with the cutting edge,
And against them came that summer that does not die with the
year,
Magnolia and honeysuckle and the blue Virginia flag.



Tall Pickett went up to Longstreet-his handsome face was
drawn.
George Pickett, old friend of Lincoln's in days gone by with the
blast,
When he was a courteous youth and Lincoln the strange shawled
man
Who would talk in a Springfield street with a boy who dreampt of
a sword.

Dreamt of a martial sword, as swords are martial in dreams,
And the courtesy to use it, in the old bright way of the tales.
Those days are gone with the blast. He has his sword in his hand.
And he will use it today, and remember that using long.

He came to Longstreet for orders, but Longstreet would not
speak.
He saw Old Peter's mouth and the thoughts in Old Peter's mind.
He knew the task that was set and the men that he had to lead
And a pride came into his face while Longstreet stood there
dumb.

"I shall go forward, sir," he said and turned to his men.
The commands went down the line. The grey ranks started to
move.
Slowly at first, then faster, in order, stepping like deer,
The Virginians, the fifteen thousand, the seventh wave of the
tide.

There was a death-torn mile of broken ground to cross,
And a low stone wall at the end, and behind it the Second Corps,
And behind that force another, fresh men who had not yet
fought.
They started to cross that ground. The guns began to tear them.


>From the hill they say that it seemed more like a sea than a wave,
A sea continually torn by stones flung out of the sky,
And yet as it came, still closing, closing and rolling on
As the moving sea closes over the flaws and rips of the tide.

You could mark the path that they took by the dead that they
left behind,
Spilled from that deadly march as a cart spills meal on a road,
And yet they came on unceasing, the fifteen thousand no more,
And the blue Virginia flag did not fall, did not fall, did not fall.

They halted but once to fire as they came. Then the smoke closed
down.
And you could not see them, and then, as it cleared again for a
breath,
They were coming still but divided, gnawed at by blue attacks,
One flank half-severed and halted, but the centre still like a tide.

Cushing ran down the last of his guns to the battle-line.
The rest had been smashed to scrap by Lee's artillery fire.
He held his guts in his hand as the charge came up the wall
And his gun spoke out for him once before he fell to the ground.


Armistead Leapt the wall and laid his hand on the gun,
The last of the three brigadiers who ordered Pickett's brigades,
He waived his hat on his sword and "Give 'em the steel!" he cried,
A few men followed him over. The rest were beaten or dead.

A few men followed him over. There had been fifteen thousand
When that sea began its march toward the fish-hook ridge and
the wall.
So they came on in strength, light-footed stepping like deer,
So they died or were taken. So the iron entered their flesh.

Lee, a mile away, in the shade of a little wood,
Stared, with his mouth shut down, and saw them go and be slain
And then saw for a single moment, the blue Virginia flag
Planted beyond the wall, by that other flag he knew.

The two flags planted together, one instant, like hostile flowers.
Then the smoke wrapped both in a mantle-and when it had
blown away,
Armistead lay in his blood, and the rest were dead or down,
And the valley grey with the fallen and the wreck of the broken
wave.

Pickett gazed around him, the boy who had dreamt of a sword
And talked with a man named Lincoln. The sword was still in
his hand.
He had gone out with fifteen thousand. He came back to his lines
with five.
He fought well till the war was over, but a thing was cracked in his
heart.


Then the word came and the bugle sang
And he was part of the running clang,
The rush and the shock and the sabres licking
And the fallen horses screaming and kicking.
His grey was tired and his arm unsteady
And he whirled like a leaf in a shreiking eddy
Where every man was fighting his neighbor
And there ws no room for tricks of the sabre
But only a wild and nightmare sickling.
His head felt burnt - there was something trickling
Into his eyes - then the new charge broke
The eddy apart like scattered smoke;
The cut on his head half made him blind.
If he had a mind, he had lost that mind.

He came to himself in a battered place,
Staring at Wainscott Bristol's face,
The dried blood made it a ferret's mask.

"What happened?' he croaked.
"Well, you can ask,"
Said Bristol, drawling, "But don't ask me,
For any facts of the jamboree.
I reckon we've been to an Irish wake
Or maybe cuttin' a johnny-cake
With most of the Union cavalry-corps.
I don't know yet, but it was a war.
Are you crazy still? You were for a piece.
You yelled you were destiny's long-lost niece
And you wanted to charge the whole Yank line
Because they'd stolen your valentine.
You fought like a fool but you talked right wild.
You got a bad bump, too."
ngate smiled
"I reckon I did, but I don't know when.
Did we win or what?"
"And I say again,"
Said Bristol, heavily, "don't ask me.
Inquire of General Robert Lee.
I know we're in for a long night ride
And they say we got whipped on the other side.
What's left of the Troop are down by the road.

We lost John Leicester and Harry Spode
And the Lawley boys and Ballantyne.
The Major's all right - but there's Jim Devine
And Francis Carroll and Judson White -
I wish I had some liquor tonight."

Wingate touched the cut on his head.
It burned but it no longer bled.
"I wish I could sleep ten years," he said.


Army of Northern Virginia, haggard and tattered,
Tramping back on the pikes, through the dust-white summer,
With your wounds still fresh, your burden of prisoners,
Your burden of sick and wounded,
"One long groan of human anguish six miles long."
You reach the swollen Potomac at long last,
A foe behind, a risen river in front,
And fording that swollen river, in the dim starlight,
In the yellow and early dawn,
Still have heart enough for the tall, long striding soldiers
To mock the short, half swept away by the stream.
"Better change our name to Lees Waders, boys!"
"Come on you shorty-get a ride on my back."
"Aw, its just we ain't had a bath in seven years
And General Lee, he knows we need a good bath."

So you splash and slip through the water and come at last
Safe, to the Southern side, while Meade does not strike;
Safe to the other roads, safe to march upon roads you know
For two long years. And yet-each road that you take,
Each dusty road leads to Appomattox now.



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

`

All I Have To Do Is Dream - The Everly Brothers - Lyrics-Happy Birthday Don-To be Young Was Very Heaven In That Time

Everly Brothers- "All I Have To Do Is Dream/Cathy's Clown" 1960 (Reelin'...Happy Birthday Don-To be Young Was Very Heaven In That Time

Never Like This Don Everly-Happy Birthday

Yesterday Just Passed My Way Again by Don Everly-_Happy Birthday

On The 60th Anniversary Of The Death Of Buddy Holly-*Stonesmania- The Rolling Stones When The Earth Was Young- "The London Years Compilation"

Not Fade Away on YouTube 


Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the Rolling Stones performing "Street Fighting Man". Yes, indeed.

CD Review

The London Years, 3 CD compilation, The Rolling Stones, Abkco Records, 1989

Hey, in 2009 no one, including this reviewer, NEEDS to comment on the fact that The Rolling Stones, pound for pound, have over forty plus years earned their place as the number one band in the rock `n' roll pantheon. Still, it is interesting to listen once again to the guys when they were at the height of their musical powers (and as high, most of the time, as Georgia pines). This album from their most creative period from 1964 to 1971, moreover, unlike let us say Bob Dylan who has produced more creative work for longer, is the `golden era" of the Stone Age. While this CD compilation has a fistful (or two) of "greatest hits" from this period and there are no really bad tracks here but the stick outs are "Jumpin' Jack Flash", "Sympathy For The Devil"( as always), "19th Nervous Breakdown", "Little Red Rooster", "Ruby Tuesday "Street Fighting Man" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want". Ain't that the truth on that last one. And on and on. For aficionados you will have all their early hits in one spot, for the novice you get a full sense of their golden age.

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 Big Bopper - It's the Truth Ruth-On The 60th Anniversary Of His Death

Big Bopper - Chantilly Lace-On The 60th Anniversary Of His Death

RITCHIE VALENS - "COME ON, LET'S GO!" (1958)-On The 60th Anniversary Of His Death

Ritchie Valens - We Belong Together-On The 60th Anniversary Of His Death

Buddy Holly - Everyday-On The 60th Anniversary Of His Death

Buddy Holly - Not Fade Away-On The 60th Anniversary Of His Death

Buddy Holly - Peggy Sue Live-On The 60th Anniversary Of His Death

On The 60th Anniversary Of The Death Of Buddy Holly-In Honor Of The Late Rocker Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Possible-*Coming Of Age, 50s Style-One More Time

The Legends of Rock-Buddy Holly

In Honor Of The Late Rocker Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Possible-*Coming Of Age, 50s Style-One More Time

In Honor Of The Late Rocker Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Possible-*Coming Of Age, 50s Style-One More Time


CD Review

Oldies But Goodies, Volume Four, Original Sound Record Co., 1986

I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.

Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.

So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer and, and perhaps some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s compilation “speak” to (and here some early 60s songs as well). Of course, Bob Dylan’s It Aint Me Babe. Carl Perkins original Blue Suede Shoes (covered by and made famous by, and millions for, Elvis). Or the Hank William’s outlaw country classic I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue (or, like Chuck Berry and Fat Domino from this period, virtually any other of about twenty of his songs).

But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voice, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic A Teenage Prayer (although what we were praying for, and why will be very different for each rememberer) fills the bill. Hey, I didn’t even like the song, or the singing, but she said yes this was what you waited for so don’t be so choosey. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?

********
Teenage Prayer Lyrics

My friends all know it
How I adore him
I whisper to angels
What I'd do for him
He is the answer
To a teenage prayer

He won't go steady
The crowd has told me
But I keep waiting
To have him hold me
Why won't you listen
To a teenage prayer?

I await by the window at seven
And chill when my thrill passes by
His kiss could send me to heaven
Into his arms I would fly

My girlfriend Betty tells me he's lazy
But i know Betty loves him like crazy
He is the answer
To a teenage prayer

Yes
He is the answer
To a teenage prayer

On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-*From The Pen Of Rosa Luxemburg-The Famous "Junius Pamphlet" Of 1915

Click on title to link to Rosa Luxemburg's famous anti-war work, the "Junius Pamphlet". Still makes the key anti-war points for today. Listen up!

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-In The Time Of The Hard Motorcycle Boys- With Marlon Brando’s The Wild One In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-In The Time Of The Hard Motorcycle Boys- With Marlon Brando’s The Wild One In Mind

THE CHEERS

"Black Denim Trousers"

He wore black denim trousers and motorcycle boots
And a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back
He had a hopped-up 'cycle that took off like a gun
That fool was the terror of Highway 101

Well, he never washed his face and he never combed his hair
He had axle grease embedded underneath his fingernails
On the muscle of his arm was a red tattoo
A picture of a heart saying "Mother, I love you"

He had a pretty girlfriend by the name of Mary Lou
But he treated her just like he treated all the rest
And everybody pitied her 'cause everybody knew
He loved that doggone motorcycle best

He wore black denim trousers and motorcycle boots
And a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back
He had a hopped-up 'cycle that took off like a gun
That fool was the terror of Highway 101

[Instrumental Interlude]

Mary Lou, poor girl, she pleaded and she begged him not to leave
She said "I've got a feeling if you ride tonight I'll grieve"
But her tears were shed in vain and her every word was lost
In the rumble of his engine and the smoke from his exhaust

Then he took off like the Devil and there was fire in his eyes
He said "I'll go a thousand miles before the sun can rise"
But he hit a screamin' diesel that was California-bound
And when they cleared the wreckage, all they found

Was his black denim trousers and motorcycle boots
And a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back
But they couldn't find the 'cycle that took off like a gun
And they never found the terror of Highway 101

*********

Okay here is the book of genesis, the motorcycle book of genesis, or at least my motorcycle book of genesis. But, before I get to that let me make about seventy–six disclaimers. First, the whys and wherefores of the motorcycle culture, except on those occasions when they become subject to governmental investigation or impact some cultural phenomena, is outside the purview of the things I generally discuss. I am much more comfortable with the ins and outs of boy meets girl (or really boy longs to meet girl) in various 1950s growing up teenage settings like at the drugstore soda fountain either sipping sodas or absent-mindedly listening to some selections on Doc’s jukebox, doing the stuff in drive-in theaters or drive-in restaurants or down by the shore getting all moony and spoony watching the “submarine races.”  But for all of their bad press, for all that every mother feared for her daughter’s safety when they were within fifty miles of town, for all a mother’s feat that she would lose her Johnny to the gangs I have been fascinated by motorcycles since my early youth when these were definitely outlaw vehicles.

Frankly there is no political rule, no political line, as a rule, on such activity, for or against, nor should there be. Those exceptions include when motorcyclists, usually under the rubric of “bad actor” motorcycle clubs, like the famous (or infamous) Oakland, California-based Hell’s Angels are generally harassed by the cops and we have to defend their right to be left alone (you know, those "helmet laws", and the never-failing pull-over for "driving while biker") or, like when the Angels were used by the Rolling Stones at Altamont and that ill-advised decision represented a watershed in the 1960s counter-cultural movement. Or, more ominously, from another angle when such lumpen formations form the core hell-raisers of anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-black liberation fascistic demonstrations and we are compelled, and rightly so, to go toe to toe with them. Scary yes, necessary yes, bikes or no bikes.

With that out of the way. Second, in the interest of full disclosure I own no stock, or have any other interest, in Harley-Davidson, or any other motorcycle company. Third, I do not now, or have I ever belonged to a motorcycle club or owned a motorcycle, although I have driven them, or, more often, on back of them on occasion. Fourth, I do not now, knowingly or unknowingly, although I grew up in working-class neighborhoods where bikes and bikers were plentiful, hang with such types. Fifth, the damn things and their riders are too noisy, despite the glamour and “freedom” of the road associated with them. Sixth, and here is the “kicker”, I have been, endlessly, fascinated by bikes and bike culture as least since early high school, if not before, and had several friends who “rode”. Well that is not seventy-six but that is enough for disclaimers.

Okay, as to genesis, motorcycle genesis. Let’s connect the dots. A couple of years ago, and maybe more, as part of a trip down memory lane, the details of which do not need detain us here, I did a series of articles on various world-shaking, earth-shattering subjects like high school romances, high school hi-jinx, high school dances, high school Saturday nights, and most importantly of all, high school how to impress the girls( or boys, for girls, or whatever sexual combinations fit these days, but you can speak for yourselves, I am standing on this ground). In short, high school sub-culture, American-style, early 1960s branch, although the emphasis there, as it will be here, is on that social phenomena as filtered through the lenses of a working class town, a seen better days town at that, my growing up wild-like-the-weeds town.

One of the subjects worked over in that series was the search, the eternal search I might add, for the great working-class love song. Not the Teen Angel, Earth Angel, Johnny Angel generic mush that could play in Levittown, Shaker Heights or La Jolla as well as Youngstown or Moline. No, a song that, without blushing, one could call our own, our working class own, one that the middle and upper classes might like but would not put on their dance cards. As my offering to this high-brow debate I offered a song by written by Englishman Richard Thompson (who folkies, and folk rockers, might know from his Fairport Convention days, very good days, by the way), Vincent Black Lightning, 1952. (See lyrics below.) Without belaboring the point the gist of this song is the biker romance, British version, between outlaw biker James and black-leathered, red-headed Molly. Needless to say such a tenuous lumpen existence as James leads to keep himself “biked" cuts short any long term “little white house with picket fence” ending for the pair. And we do not need such a boring finish. For James, after losing the inevitable running battle with the police, on his death bed bequeaths his bike, his precious “Vincent Black Lightning,” to said Molly. His bike, man. His bike. Is there any greater love story, working class love story, around? No, this makes West Side Story lyrics and a whole bunch of other such songs seem like so much cornball nonsense. His bike, man. Wow! Kudos, Brother Thompson.

Needless to say that exploration was not the end, but rather the beginning of thinking through the great American night bike experience. And, of course, for this writer that means going to the books, the films and the memory bank to find every seemingly relevant “biker” experience. Thus, readers of this space were treated to reviews of such classic motorcycle sagas as “gonzo” journalist, Doctor Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and other, later Rolling Stone magazine printed “biker” stories and Tom Wolfe’ Hell Angel’s-sketched Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and other articles about California subset youth culture that drove Wolfe’s work in the old days). And to the hellish Rolling Stones (band) Hell’s Angels “policed” Altamont concert in 1969. And, as fate would have it, with the passing of actor/director Dennis Hooper, the 1960s classic biker/freedom/ seeking the great American night film, Easy Rider. And from Easy Rider to the “max daddy” of them all, tight-jeaned, thick leather-belted, tee-shirted, engineer-booted, leather-jacketed, taxi-driver-capped (hey, that’s what it reminds me of), side-burned, chain-linked wielding, hard-living, alienated, but in the end really just misunderstood, Johnny, aka, Marlon Brando, in The Wild One.

Okay, we will cut to the chase on the plot. Old Johnny and his fellow “outlaw” motorcycle club members are out for some weekend “kicks” after a hard week’s non-work (as far as we can figure out, work was marginal for many reasons, as Hunter Thompson in Hell’s Angels noted, to biker existence, the pursue of jack-rolling, armed robbery or grand theft auto careers probably running a little ahead) out in the sunny California small town hinterlands.(They are still heading out there today, the last time I noticed, in the Southern California high desert, places like Twenty-Nine Palms and Joshua Tree.)

And naturally, when the boys (and they are all boys here, except for couple of “mamas”, one spurned by Johnny, in a break-away club led by jack-in-the-box jokester, Lee Marvin as Chino) hit one small town they, naturally, after sizing up the local law, head for the local café (and bar). And once one mentions cafes in small towns in California (or Larry McMurtry’s West Texas, for that matter), then hard-working, trying to make it through the shift, got to get out of this small town and see the world, dreamy-eyed, naïve (yes, naive) sheriff-daughtered young waitress, Kathy, (yes, and hard-working, it’s tough dealing them off the arm in these kind of joints, or elsewhere) Johnny trap comes into play. Okay, now you know, even alienated, misunderstood, misanthropic, cop-hating (an additional obstacle given said waitress’s kinships) boy Johnny needs, needs cinematically at least, to meet a girl who understands him.

The development of that young hope, although hopeless, boy meets girl romance relationship, hither and yon, drives the plot.  Oh, and along the way the boys, after a few thousand beers, as boys, especially girl-starved biker boys, will, at the drop of a hat start to systematically tear down the town, off-handedly, for fun. Needless to say, staid local burghers (aka “squares”) seeing what amount to them is their worst 1950s “communist” invasion nightmare, complete with murder, mayhem and rapine, (although that “c” word was not used in the film, nor should it have been) are determined to “take back” their little town. A few fights, forages, casualties, fatalities, and forgivenesses later though, still smitten but unquenched and chaste Johnny (and his rowdy crowd) and said waitress part, wistfully. The lesson here, for the kids in the theater audience, is that biker love outside biker-dom is doomed. For the adults, the real audience, the lesson: nip the “terrorists” in the bud (call in the state cops, the national guard, the militia, the 82nd Airborne, The Strategic Air Command, NATO, hell, even the “weren't we buddies in the war” Red Army , but nip it, fast when they come roaming through Amityville, Archer City, or your small town).

After that summary you can see what we are up against. This is pure fantasy Hollywood cautionary tale on a very real 1950s phenomena, “outlaw” biker clubs, mainly in California, but elsewhere as well. Hunter Thompson did yeoman’s work in his Hell’s Angels to “discover” who these guys were and what drove them, beyond drugs, sex, rock and roll (and, yah, murder and mayhem, the California prison system was a “home away from home”). In a sense the “bikers” were the obverse of the boys (again, mainly) whom Tom Wolfe, in many of his early essays, was writing about and who were (a) forming the core of the surfers on the beaches from Malibu to La Jolla and, (b) driving the custom car/hot rod/drive-in restaurant-centered (later mall-centered) cool, teenage girl–impressing, car craze night in the immediate post-World War II great American Western sunny skies and pleasant dream drift (physically and culturally). Except those Wolfe guys were the “winners”. The “bikers” were Nelson Algren’s “losers”, the dead-enders who didn’t hit the gold rush, the Dove Linkhorns (aka the Arkies and Okies who in the 1930s populated John Steinbeck’s Joad saga, The Grapes Of Wrath). Not cool, iconic Marlin-Johnny but hell-bend then-Hell Angels leader, Sonny Barger.

And that is why in the end, as beautifully sullen and misunderstood the alienated Johnny was, and as wholesomely rowdy as his gang was before demon rum took over, this was not the real “biker: scene, West or East. Now I lived, as a teenager in a working-class, really marginally working poor, neighborhood that I have previously mentioned was the leavings of those who were moving up in post-war society. That neighborhood was no more than a mile from the central headquarters of Boston's local Hell’s Angels (although they were not called that, I think it was Deathheads, or something like that). I got to see these guys up close as they rallied at various spots on our local beach or “ran” through our neighborhood on their way to some crazed action. The leader had all of the charisma of Marlon Brando’s thick leather belt. His face, as did most of the faces, spoke of small-minded cruelties (and old prison pallors) not of misunderstood youth. And their collective prison records (as Hunter Thompson also noted about the Angels) spoke of “high” lumpenism. And that takes us back to the beginning about who, and what, forms one of the core cohorts for a fascist movement in this country, the sons of Sonny Barger. Then we will need to rely on our street politics, our fists, and other such weapons.

Vincent Black Lightning 1952

Said Red Molly to James that's a fine motorbike
A girl could feel special on any such like
Said James to Red Molly, my hat's off to you
It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952
And I've seen you at the corners and cafes it seems
Red hair and black leather, my favourite colour scheme
And he pulled her on behind
And down to Boxhill they did ride

Said James to Red Molly, here's a ring for your right hand
But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man
I've fought with the law since I was seventeen
I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine
Now I'm 21 years, I might make 22
And I don't mind dying, but for the love of you
And if fate should break my stride
Then I'll give you my Vincent to ride

Come down, come down, Red Molly, called Sergeant McRae
For they've taken young James Adie for armed robbery
Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside
Oh, come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside
When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left
He was running out of road, he was running out of breath
But he smiled to see her cry
And said I'll give you my Vincent to ride

Says James, in my opinion, there's nothing in this world
Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed girl
Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do
They don't have a soul like a Vincent 52
He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys
He said I've got no further use for these
I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome
Swooping down from heaven to carry me home
And he gave her one last kiss and died
And he gave her his Vincent to ride

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Out In The Be-Bop Drive-In Movie Night– With Doris Troy’s Just One Look In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Out In The Be-Bop Drive-In Movie Night– With Doris Troy’s Just One Look In Mind

Sketches From The 

Just One Look Lyrics

Just one look and I fell so hard
In love with you Oh Oh

I found out how good it feels
To have your love Oh Oh

Say you will, will be mine
Forever and always Oh Oh

Just one look and I knew
That you were my only one Oh Oh

I thought I was dreaming
But I was wrong Oh yeah yeah
Ah but I'm gonna keep on scheming
Till I make you, make you my own

So you see I really care
Without you I'm nothing Oh Oh
Just one look and I know
I'll get you someday Oh Oh

Just one look
That's all it took hah just one look
That's all it took woah just one look
That's all it woah baby you know I love you baby
I'll build my world around you come on baby

**********

You know it’s funny how a kid, a guy kid I will let the gals speak for themselves, picked up the various signals, the various nods and looks relating to being cool back in the day, back in the late 1950s, early 1960s day. Cool with guys and cool with girls for they were two very different things. Probably each generation develops out of necessity, or self-defense, its own set of signals but while I was reviewing an “oldies but goodies” rock and roll compilation from the early 1960s I latched onto Doris Troy’s Just One Look to get me thinking about the ways we rather silently communicated what we were about.

The strange thing about the signals, let’s just call it that but I mean nods and looks, was early on when you were just a wet-behind-the-ears kid, say around elementary school no later, your signals tended to be straight up, you liked this or that, didn’t like this or that, thought he or she was a dope, etc. and that was the end of it. Or maybe not the end of it if in your honesty some bigger kid decided to take umbrage and box your ears to show his or her displeasure in a more visceral way. Then almost by osmosis, or maybe design, I am not sure which, you curbed your tongue a little and began with the silent signals.

The first one I clearly remember from down at the old Adamsville housing projects neighborhood was when my best friend in elementary school, Billy Bradley, stopped telling me I was his best friend but instead when we saw each other in the hallways during school he would just give me a slight nod of his head. At first I thought he was putting the freeze on me or something until I asked him about it after school one day. He said he had learned from his older brother, Prescott I think, that guys did not just keep going around saying they were friends when they got older but gave the nod to acknowledge that fact. And so the nod. Once I picked up on it that was that. All through school until graduation, maybe later, the nod became the way guys, guys who thought other guys were cool, addressed each other. Especially guys you did not know well, maybe just played pick-up ball with, maybe just hung around the soda fountain at the drugstore listening to the juke-box, maybe just saw walking down the street and maybe had nothing to say but giving the nod expressed your appreciation of other guy’s guy-ness.      

Of course guy-girl signals were in another universe. No way you gave a girl, I think any girl whether you liked her or not, whether you cared whether she lived or died or not, the nod. No way, first they would not be privy to what that nod meant probably thinking you had some neck problem but as usual with girls you needed a much more elaborate signal system whether you were trying to score or not. Here too there was a shift around late elementary school, right around the time girls went from being nuisance sticks to, well, interesting. Before that time you would just say something unkind and they would do the same in turn, or they would beat you up depending on their mood. But thereafter to show your interest you had to develop your best furtive glance. There were variations on this but the basic idea was that if you were trying to hone in on some lovely say hanging around that drugstore listening to the jukebox with everybody else you casually shot a slight glance her way, enough for her to see that you had glanced her way but not enough to think that you were so uncool as to stare at her with your tongue open. The trick though was to see if she was also going to take a peek your way. If so then the game was on, if not then if you were called on it, although this rarely happened, you could use that neck problem thing to bail you out. Such were the ways of young love. However the older you got the more signals you developed which one Doris Troy, blessed Doris Troy gave us the ABCs on. 

See here is how it worked out in the trenches. Out in the drive-in movie night once those furtive glances paid off, or promised to pay off. A whole galaxy of options opened up. I remember being struck by the appropriateness of the cover artwork on that CD that I reviewed one time that “spoke” exactly to this drive-in night. I had been on a tear in reviewing individual CDs in an extensive commercial rock and roll series called Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die. The artwork which graced the covers of each item, both to stir ancient memories and reflect that precise moment in time, the youth time of the now very, very mature (nice sliding over the age issue, right?) baby-boomer generation who lived and died by the music. And who fit in, or did not fit in as the case may be, to the themes of those artwork scenes. The one for the 1963 CD compilation was a case of the former, of the fitting in. On that cover, a summer scene (always a nice touch since that was the time when we had at least the feel of our generational break-out) we are placed at the drive-in, the drive-in movies for those of the Internet/Netflicks/YouTube generations who have not gotten around to checking out this bit of Americana on Wikipedia, with the obligatory 1950s-early 1960s B-movie monster movie (outer space aliens, creatures from the black lagoon, blobs, DNA-damaged dinosaurs, foreign-bred behemoths a specialty) prominent on the screen.

Oh sure, everyone of a certain age, a certain baby-boomer age, a generation of ’68 age, has plenty of stories to tell of being bundled up as kids, maybe pre-set with a full set pajamas on to defend against the late sleepy-eyed night, the sleepy-drowsy late movie night, placed in the car backseats and taken by adventurous parents (or so it seemed) to the local open air drive-in for the double feature. That usually also happened on a friendly summer night when school did not interfere with staying up late (hopefully keeping awake through both films). And to top it all off you got to play in the inevitable jungle jim, see-saw, slide, swing set-laden playground during intermission between the films while waiting, waiting against all hope, for that skewered, shriveled hot dog, rusty, dusty hamburger, or stale, over-the-top buttered popcorn that was the real reason that you “consented” to stay out late with the parents. Yah, we all have variations on that basic theme to tell, although I challenge anyone, seriously challenge anyone, to name five films that you saw at the drive-in that you remembered from then-especially those droopy-eyed second films.

In any case, frankly, I don’t give a damn about that kid stuff family adventure drive-in experience. Come on, that was all, well, just kids' stuff. The “real” drive-in, as pictured on that cover art just mentioned is what I want to address. The time of our time in that awkward teen alienation, teen angst thing that only got abated by things like a teenage night at the drive-in. Yeah, that was not, or at least I hope it was not, you father’s drive-in. That might have been in the next planet over, for all I know. For starters our planet involved girls (girls, ah, women, just reverse the genders here to tell your side of the experience), looking for girls, or want to be looking for girls, preferably a stray car-full to compliment your guy car-full and let god sort it out at intermission.

Wait a minute. I am getting ahead of myself in this story. First you needed that car, because no walkers or bus riders need apply for the drive-in movies like this was some kind of lame, low-rent, downtown matinee last picture show adventure. For this writer that was a problem, a personal problem, as I had no car and my family had cars only sporadically. Fortunately we early baby-boomers lived in the golden age of the automobile and could depend on a friend to either have a car (praise be teenage disposable income/allowances) or could use the family car. Once the car issue was clarified then it was simply a matter of getting a car-full of guys (or sometimes guys and gals) in for the price of two (maybe three) admissions.

What? Okay, I think that I can safely tell the story now because the statute of limitations must have surely passed. See, what you did was put a couple (or three guys) in the trunk of that old car (or in a pinch one guy on the backseat floor) as you entered the drive-thru admissions booth. The driver paid for the two (or three tickets) and took off to your parking spot (complete with ramp speaker just in case you wanted to actually listen to the film shown on that big wide white screen). Neat trick, right?

Now, of course, the purpose of all of this, as mentioned above, was to get that convoy of guys, trunk guys, backseat guys, backseat floor guys, whatever, to mix and moon with that elusive car-full of girls who did the very same thing (except easier because they were smaller) at the intermission stand or maybe just hanging around the unofficially designated teen hang-out area. No family sedans with those pajama-clad kids need apply (nor would any sane, responsible parent get within fifty paces of said teens). And occasionally, very occasionally as it turned out, some “boss” car would show up complete with one guy (the driver) and one honey (girl, ah, woman) closely seated beside him for what one and all knew was going to be a very window-fogged night. And that was, secretly thought or not, the guy drive-in dream. As for the movies. Did they show movies there? 

Enough said. And enough too of furtive glances…for now.  

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When Be-Bop Bopped In The Doo Wop Night-With The Classics Til Then In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When Be-Bop Bopped In The Doo Wop Night-With The Classics Til Then In Mind

Til Then Lyrics

doo-doo-doom) (doo-doo-doom) (doo-doo-doom)
(rep-reddah-rep)
(doo-doo-doom) (doo-doo-doom) (doo-doo-doom)
(rep-reddah-rep)

[Intro continues behind each verse]

Till then, my darling, please wait for me
Till then, no matter when it may be
One day I know I'll be home again
Please wait (till) till then

Our dreams will live though we are apart
Our love will always stay in our hearts
Till then, when of the world will be free
Please wait for me

Although there are oceans we must cross and mountains that we must climb
I know every gain must have a loss, so pray that our loss is nothing but time

Till then, we'll dream of what there will be
Till then, we'll call on each memory
Till then, when I will hold you again
Please wait till then (ooh)

**********

Sure I have plenty to say about early rock ‘n’ roll, now called the classic rock period in the musicology hall of fame. Yeah, I know I have already talked some ears off, maybe yours, about how hard-pressed Mississippi plantation workers (semi-slaves the way the pay-out came down at the  end of the year) gathered around on some sweaty Saturday night to hear Big Bill, Big Jack, Big Little, or Big somebody belt the blues out of some whiskey bottle in some broken down juke joint, and left enough of an impression that that dark boy in the corner, kind of shy but very inquisitive about that beat took it north-ward and put it in an electric outlet and you could see the audience, the woman audience part, swaying that sway that meant they got it, got that rif (and maybe said thanks that shy young brother in their own swaying way). I know too that I have left some ears kind of staggered after mouthing off about who Jesse Lee and Billy Bob, a couple of plain ordinary good old boys maybe heard a far off echo of that electrified music and started riff-ing on their own in places like Memphis and Mobile waiting to be discovered as the next be-bop daddy musical white negro (Norman Mailer’s term, hipster term, not mine but it fits) all young and hungry, ready to play for free, or nickels just to get out of the small town Saturday night and jump.  

So yeah I have talked some, some about the big broad trends coming out of the mid-century muck (mid-20^th century just so you know) and within that say I have spent a little time, not enough, considering its effect on us on the doo-wop branch of the genre. Part of the reason for the “not enough,” once I thought about it was that obviously back in those mid-1950s jail-breakout days I did not (and I do not believe that any other eleven and twelve-year olds did either), distinguish between let’s say rockabilly-back-beat-drive rock, black-based rock centered on a heavy rhythm and blues backdrop, and the almost instrument-less (or maybe a soft piano or guitar backdrop) group harmonics that drove doo-wop. Even now that stuff is better left to the aficionados and musical intelligentsia, the guys who make dough putting the stuff in some boxed-in historical perspective. 

All I knew, all any of us knew when our knees started to tremble, maybe wobble is better, to the new beat that came out of some Mother Africa from whence we came, was that it was not my parents’ mannered Tin Pan Alley by-the-numbers music, not close. Get this too as a selling point it did not hurt that they, those same parents, got nervous, very nervous, anytime it was played out loud in their presence. Forever “turn it down” (or father “turn the damn thing down”) raced along with each song. Fortunately, some sainted, sanctified, techno-guru developed the iPod of that primitive era; the battery-driven transistor radio. No big deal, technology-wise by today’s standards, but get this you could place it near your ear and have your own private out loud without parental scuffling in the background. Yes, sainted, sanctified techno-guru. No question.

What doo-wop did though down in our old-time working-class housing projects neighborhood, and again it was not so much by revelation as by trial and error, is allow us to be in tune with the music of our generation without having to spend a lot of money on instruments or a studio or anything like that. Strictly built for po’ boys like us. First of all where the hell would we have gotten the dough, when we were stretched grabbing nickels and dimes, stealing really okay, from Ma’s pocketbook just to keep the juke-box at Sandy’s Diner going, for such things when papas were out of work, or were one step away, and there was “max daddy” trouble just keeping the wolves from the door. Bills and repo men the bane of every family’s existence. (Worse, worse though when papas could not take it anymore and just split, long-gone daddy split with or without some barroom frill or got nasty drunk with the paycheck and left Ma with empty Friday night envelopes and nothing to stave off the collectors.)

Sure, some kids, some kids like my corner boy elementary school boyhood friend Billy, William James Bradley, were crazy to put together cover bands with electric guitars (rented occasionally), and dreams. Or maybe go wild with a school piano a la Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, or Fats Domino but those were maniac aficionados. I remember one time Billy was so hopped up on the fame game that in the height of the Elvis craze when all us other boys were busy growing side-burns and perfecting our sneers (sneers meant for some young thing, in our neighborhood and in that time meaning stick girls who had not gotten their forms yet, to wipe off into the sunset) he tried to hop on the Bo Diddley bandwagon. Hop on that bandwagon until one cruel school talent show night he learned the hard facts of the racial divide in a northern white housing project by one of the older boy rednecks and returned to Elvis-land with the rest of us. Billy, never say die Billy, also trying to break out with a Bill Haley and the Comets routine which worked okay around the neighborhood where all the girls went nuts but got him nowhere when a regional new talent show came through town and he was all geared up to win except the suit jacket his mother had jerry-rigged for the occasion fell apart about half way through his performance. Yeah, Billy had it bad.

Even Billy though, when the deal went down, especially after hearing Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers was mad to do the doo-wop and make his fame and fortune on the cheap. (No need for instruments, cheapjack jackets or racial taunts.) The cover art on a doo wop compilation I once reviewed in an old time rock and roll series made that poor boy and girl point beautifully. No not some Karl Marx brotherhood of man thing or Adams Smith all ships rising if one guy rises. Nothing that heavy, please. The cover showed a group of young black kids, black guys, young guys who looked “from hunger” too like us and who looked like they were doing their doo wop on some big city street corner (maybe Brooklyn, maybe the old days Bronx, maybe uptown Harlem Saturday night). And that made sense reflecting the New York City-derived birth of doo-wop and that the majority of doo-wop groups that we heard on the AM transistor sister radio were black. But the city, the poor sections of the city, white or black, was not the only place where moneyless guys and gals were harmonizing, hoping, hoping maybe beyond hope, to be discovered and make more than just a 1950s musical jail-breakout of their lives. Moreover, this cover art I speak of also showed, and showed vividly, what a lot of us guys were trying to do-impress girls, impress them on the cheap with some harmonies and moonlight and maybe a little side chatter too (and maybe visa-a-versa for girl doo-woppers but they can tell their own stories).

Yes, truth to tell, it was about impressing girls that drove many of us, Billy included, Christ maybe Billy most of all, to mix and match harmonies. And you know you did too (except remember girls just switch around what I just said). Yah, four or five guys just hanging around the back door of the old South Adamsville Elementary School on hot summer nights, nothing better to do, no dough to do things, maybe a little feisty because of that, and started up a few tunes. Junior corner boys with no corner because, well, because true corner-dom required a drugstore, a mom and pop variety store, or maybe if you were lucky a pizza parlor to be real corner boys and we did not have such institutions within five miles of our isolated peninsula projects. Billy, who actually did have some vocal musical talent (he did a very servable Bo Diddley although no way did he have that Afro-Carib beat down being as I later tried to figure out just a tad too white to have immersed his soul in that milieu and also did, if not a son of Bill Haley act if you don’t count the clothes flying off, then close very good job), usually sang lead, and the rest of us, well, doo-wopped. (Sha-sha-do-be-doo, okay just in case you thought I was kidding.) We knew nothing of keys and pauses, of time, notes, or reading music we just improvised. Worked on stuff kind of by osmosis or something and over the course of a summer we started to jell a little (And to keep in that jell mood I kept my changing to a teen-ager, slightly off-key voice on the low, on the very low.)

Whether we did it well or poorly, guess what, as the hot sun day turned into humid night, and the old sun went down just over the hills, first a couple of girls, then a couple more, and then a whole bevy (nice word, right?) of them came and got kind of swoony and moony. And swoony and moony was just fine. And we all innocent, innocent dream, innocent when we dreamed, make our virginal moves. But, mainly, we doo-wopped in the be-bop mid-1950s night. And a few of the songs previously mentioned in that reviewed CD compilation could be heard in that airless night. The stick outs: Deserie, The Charts; Baby Blue, The Echoes; Till Then, The Classics; Tonight (Could Be The Night), The Velvets. And of course Why Do Fools Fall In Love although Billy did not make any mistake this time since he had seen Frankie and his boys on American Bandstand  and so did no imitation.

As for the girls as summer turned to school times on certain humid hot late August nights you could hear a mix and match of young male and female voices like they too had imbibed Billy’s dream, had seen that fame and fortune coming their way and they wanted in on it, if for no other reason than to get out of the projects. Or maybe I dwell too much, after the fact project too much, and they just wanted to bathe in the jail-break night we all knew was coming with the new rock dispensation.

Yah, I know everybody wants to know what happened to Billy since the name does not instantly come to mind when one thinks of the legends of classic rock, or doo wop bop. Well, Billy was wired for that success that always eluded him and after a while, after a few too many failures, bad moves or poor judgment he lost interest in being the president of rock and roll and turned to a life of small-time crime (even there he could not breakthrough since that life was just as “rigged” as everything else if you were not connected), got caught a few times and then I lost contact where he was and what he was doing. Whatever it was he still made many a project kid, including this kid, feel good for a couple of summers crooning out the tunes and bringing the girls around. Thanks Billy, thanks a lot.     

Yah, bop the doo wop

The Trials And Tribulations Of Legendary Artist Jasper Johns-The Double Yoke Of Being A Closeted Gay Man And Growing Up In Bible- Belt Southern America-It Was A Close Thing.

The Trials And Tribulations Of Legendary Artist Jasper Johns-The Double Yoke Of Being A Closeted Gay Man And Growing Up In Bible- Belt Southern America-It Was A Close Thing.

By Ronan Saint James


Ordinarily I would not put the relationship between an artist and where he or she grew up and under what conditions under too strong a microscope letting happenstance and innate ability run its course as more determinative. But a recent trip to the South, close to where the artist under discussion, legendary Jasper Johns he of the Amerikkka flags, figures symbols, maps and other stuff hanging out of his artwork like the inevitably spending a life measured by coffee spoons and hence the need for coffee cans, grew up made me realize how close a thing it was that he escaped from the desperate ghost town he grew up in down in Allendale, South Carolina.

The first thing you notice, no, that I noticed in one town, Travelers Rest, I passed through was how many Baptist churches there were in a few mile area. I counted something like fifteen along one short stretch which seemed impossible given the size of the town and the actual population. Without knowing whether this number of churches represented a church for each person in the town or reflected various arcane theological differences it seemed frankly weird.

Living in a Northeastern secular cultural enclave, a bubble if you like, this bears more observation and study. All I know is that it goes a long way in describing why we are as Frank Jackman of this publication has described on many occasions a cold civil-these are partisans on the other side. Unless we can bridge some unbridgeable gap the die seems to be cast-and not our way necessarily so we had better dig in and organize like our lives depended on it.        

Of course when you talk about the South, about this South that a gay man like Tennessee Williams wrote plays about and the general attitude of Baptists and other evangelical toward gays then you have to address the long-term lovers’ relationship between Johns and fellow artist Ricard Rauschenberg and can totally understand why Johns had to flee that berg for his life in the closeted gay life 1950s. As a post-Stonewall, almost post-gay marriage man I feel though I have very little understanding how hard it must have been to thrive under those South Carolina circumstances. So hats off brother, hats off to your art too which has given me many an enjoyable and thoughtful moment.    

Love Among The Smart Set-Part Three-Jason Bateman’s “The Longest Week” (2014)- A Film Review

Love Among The Smart Set-Part Three-Jason Bateman’s “The Longest Week” (2014)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Writer Greg Green

The Longest Weekend, Jason Bateman, Olivia Wilde, Billy Crudup, 2014

Readers who have been even marginally attentive over the past weeks know that I have taken over as the site administrator here after Allan Jackson’s retirement (what his old friend and betrayer by casting the decisive to kick him down the road like a can Sam Lowell called with a smirk “putting him out to pasture” which in old “neighborhood speak” meant as he has been spouting recently “purge”) and to get a feel for the job, for what people are writing film reviews about and why I took on a review myself of the 1930s classic The Libeled Lady about the rich and their predilections which I gave a rousing thumbs down to for its quirky and silly premise. The same Sam Lowell whose decisive vote basically got me this job in a subsequent review of another Mayfair swell saga (his term not mine) Preston Sturgis’ The Palm Beach Story took me to task for not drooling over these classic smart set screwball comedies and gave his reasons why. I didn’t expect to keep the dispute going but recently I have had an opportunity to see a film, The Longest Week, which graphically illustrates my point about the thinness of those smart set comedies.

Look the plotline is short and sweet when you think about it. A poor little rich boy, played by Jason Bateman, who is hunkered down in his upscale parents’ swanky Manhattan apartment in the course of a week, a week in which those same parents decide to divorce and leave him hanging, finds himself evicted from said apartment, out of dough, out of luck, out of friends and in love with a beauty, played by Olivia Stone, all the while dealing with his silly plight in a funny way that young audiences today looking at a tough future can relate to but also laugh at. Especially when that foxy lady turns and twists between him and his friend including sleeping with both of them. This is the kind of film we should be, we will be, spending more time reviewing as well as spy thrillers and comic book super-hero films. Let the classics which about twelve people are interested in now mostly cinematic academics with time on their hands go by the board. Forward.