The Old Days In Gay “Closeted, Hell, Entombed ” Hollywood-With a New Book About AIDS Victim Hollywood 1950s He-Man Icon Rock Hudson-Even His Name Dripped Masculinity In Some Quarters In Mind

The Old Days In Gay “Closeted, Hell, Entombed ” Hollywood-With a New Book About AIDS Victim Hollywood 1950s He-Man Icon Rock Hudson-Even His Name Dripped Masculinity In Some Quarters In Mind 

By Seth Garth

Here is a link to a Terry Gross Fresh Air show on NPR about a book about the life and times of 1950s movie icon Rock Hudson by Mark Griffin All That Heaven Allows which forms the backdrop to this commentary:

https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/12/05/673714293/fresh-air-for-dec-5-2018-rock-hudsons-double-life

I suppose I am the one person of the old-time working poor Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville corner boys who should do this commentary on 1950s and before “gay” Hollywood through a book reviewed on NPR about the life and times of masculine icon Rock Hudson who dramatic announcement in the 1980s that he had AIDS brought new light (and more research money) on the disease because of his standing in the Hollywood firmament. I don’t usually put much stock in coincidences although they certainly exist so but I find it ironic that at nearly the same time I was listening to this Fresh Air  with Terry Gross interview that Allan Jackson was maybe three doors away from me writing his defense of himself against all kind of false accusations after he had been purged from his site manager’s job at this publication, including that he was the M.C. of a drag queen club out in San Francisco.      

As Allan subsequently detailed that false accusation, that slander and libel whether it was actionable in a court of law by some of the ”victors” in his ouster was purposefully put on as fact, really alternate fact, when he had wound up in San Francisco visiting his, our old friend and corner boy from highs school days Timmy Riley, now known far and wide in the world of “drag queens” as Miss Judy Garland and the proprietor of the so-called notorious KitKat Club which has since become a major tourist attraction in that city.  

What has come out only recently (although I and a couple of others who had put some money up knew what the situation was) is that Allan after Timmy had flee North Adamsville when he “came out” to his parents who would subsequently disown him and a few friends, a few corner boys remained in North Adamsville after high school scorned him to go to gay and drag queen friendlier San Francisco in the post-Stonewall period had loaned, had given Timmy the money to buy and refurbish the run-down KitKat Club in North Beach. (Although everybody in Frisco knows him as Miss Judy Garland we all still call him Timmy so let me stick with that name.) So, yes, Alan was staying with his old friend, and mine too, at one of Timmy’s apartments above the club which he also owned trying to jump start his life. So much for unverified “facts.”   

Allan mentioned in his introductory piece to a series on Jack Kerouac the 50^th anniversary of whose death will be commemorated in 2019 that when we were corner boys, when we were hanging around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in the early 1960s we would mercilessly gay-bait anybody who seemed the least bit, well, faggy, light on their feet, homo all the terms of approbation used at the time for gay-bashing. And here is what may startle the unwary reader Timmy Riley, football playing, rugged, pretty handsome and girl attractive was the leader of the pack. Moreover we did not, and I speak of this as both Allan and Timmy have with eternal shame, just talk the talk but would go down to Provincetown in high which we knew was “queer heaven” and not just gay-bash some poor unsuspecting guy but “lead” on to get somebody out in back of some bar and beat the shit out of the guy. And again Timmy would be in the lead. We were shocked, shocked to the core when we heard from Sonny Lewis that Timmy had “come out” had started painting his fingernails, and they had beaten him up one of the main reasons Timmy fled the town.   

What does all of this about an old gay and drag queen (they are not both the same, okay) corner boy from working class North Adamsville have to do with a famous movie star from our times like Rock Hudson. Well everything since, as the book and a documentary point out, Rock and a number of other he-man role male movie stars like Guy Madison, Rory Calhoun, and famously Tab Hunter had to stay deep, deep in the closet to maintain their livelihoods. To keep up the illusion, the movie theater illusion that every female movie-goer (and who knows now when you think about the matter some male movie-goers) that they could grab the guy for a boyfriend. Such was, and is, the Hollywood dream factory. Despite the fact that like the revelations long known in Hollywood about the “casting couch” culture which, male or female, depending on the predilections of the man in power, helped get you up the food chain the “gay community,” who was gay, who was sitting out in Malibu with a bunch of men, good looking athletic men without women.        

I am not sure how much trouble Rock got into, or avoided in having his male companionship and his affairs, before his public announcement of his AIDS condition (in those days a sentence of death) and the how and when he knew that he preferred men to women but we saw Rock, maybe not as the coolest guy around, maybe guys like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman were more our models of manliness, as a serious masculine figure especially when he was not doing that silly romantic comedy stuff that none of us could relate to. What I do know, do know from talking with both Timmy and Allan over the years that Timmy, and I assume Rock, paid a terrible psychic price for having to stay in the closet. Worse having to hide who they were, are against guys like the North Adamsville corner boys who were quick with fists and not understanding. So this does not do justice to the subject but RIP, Rock Hudson, RIP   

The Legend-Slayer Is Back- Legends Of The Old American West-The Saga Of Jake Walz’s Old Hoary Dutchman’s Gold Mine-Ida Lupino And Glenn Ford’s “Lust For Gold” (1949)-A Film Review

The Legend-Slayer Is Back- Legends Of The Old American West-The Saga Of Jake Walz’s Old Hoary Dutchman’s Gold Mine-Ida Lupino And Glenn Ford’s “Lust For Gold” (1949)-A Film Review

By Will Bradley

Lust For Gold, starring Ida Lupino, Glenn Ford, 1949  .  

You know we have today, damn throughout history really, had enough alternate fact distortions of events to fill a library, a major college or big city public library. I have been on a tear in 2017-2018 (and hopefully for the future as well as long I have site manager Greg Green’s confidence) debunking a whole raft of undeserved, overblown or just plain false legends which have been built out of whole cloth and have entered the books with devoted followers and a whole lot of people not devoted who believe based on nothing more than somebody’s conjecture, opinion. This is my answer to the increasing number of fellow staff members, including writers who have not been able to get their heads around the idea of legend-busting. This so-called ironic indifference in a publication looking for some historical truths and whose unspoken motto is – “speak the truth no matter how bitter.” Which is exactly right, exactly the right note I am trying to achieve. Take a back seat doubters, way back.  

I have elsewhere in a previous trifecta of legend-busting reviews mentioned I have had a descent amount of success, some very positive comments about how my reviews have enlightened some readers to think through their acceptance without thought of legends, of everything from belief in angels to a glowing acceptance of the Hollywood/ television view of the American Old West and the desperadoes, malcontents, drifters, con men and women, and everybody who headed west after busting out in the East. I will not go through the litany here of who I have taken down but I cannot go to busting the so-called Lost Dutchman’s Mine legend around ornery bastard Jake Walz who allegedly found the pot of gold and kept everybody else away-with hot lead- unless I mention my one significant failure, the Johnny Cielo legend. The only reason I am doing that here is that I have new proof, if anybody who is still defiantly attached to the press agent baloney around that hoary legend about one of the key elements to the Cielo legend will listen -Johnny taking 1940s film star and off-handedly beautiful Rita Hayworth to Barranca when he ran rough shot there with his airplane mail service fro big bucks .

Belief in Johnny’s case, in his publicity agent legend, has always primarily depended on the hard fact that for a period, the period Johnny claimed to have Rita sharing his bed down in Central America, she had left Hollywood under mysterious circumstances and had not surfaced for a while. The documents I have, including lustrous photographs with dates of processing the negatives attached on the back as they did in the old days, prove that Rita was secretly playing footsie, house, whatever you want to call the liaison with the Aga Klan before they were married. Was in New York and or Morocco during that crucial time. As I speculated early on in my research Johnny had hook-winked, who knows maybe she was a willing accomplice getting free airfare south and away from whatever troubles she was running away from, some young gal from Hoboken down in the Jerseys, Sarah Miles, or at least that was the name she was using, who looked very much like Rita whom he had met either walking the streets or in some whorehouse in that town. The few photos of her, revealing photos for the 1940s from some men’s magazine show that her legs were not nearly as well-formed as Rita’s and that while you can never tell about a woman’s hair even now if they don’t want you to know she was a brunette. I can hear the aficionado disclaimers now that even if my information is true maybe, maybe an important doubt word trick used forever by con artists and press agents to set up alternate facts that maybe Rita had sent the Aga Khan Sarah in her place to be able to stay with Johnny in humid, sweaty Barranca bungalows. We shall wait for the bogus blowback.

I will admit that I had some early trouble with Zane Grey readers, hell, even Larry McMurtry brethren trying to cut down the legend of Link Jones, the baddest desperado who tried to con the world that he had changed, had become an upright citizen, that he had stopped being a ruthless gunslinger and no holds barred daytime bank robber. No question they should have strung him up, hung him high and this from a guy who doesn’t believe in the damn death penalty. The clincher there was Link’s prison confession to a fellow cellmate where he went out of his way, maybe even embellished his exploits, to make him seem a tough guy to a young kid just starting out on the wrong track. That said this saga of Jake (Jacob but nobody called him that, nobody still standing after saying that) Walz should be a lot easier to dispel since at least Link had been a man of the West. Jake had been an Eastern tin-horn from Europe failure heading west to avoid some German hoodlums who wanted his head.                                
So what is the big deal with Jake, with his longstanding legend that even my grandfather who first told me the story of how Jake had held off all-comers when they tried to “steal” his bags of gold (which he had in turn had gotten by wasting the real owners and his own partner, nice guy right) and had known Jake’s grandson, Brent, who retailed the legend (and who himself had spent a lifetime, or what seemed like a lifetime looking for the rest of what his grandfather had not hidden from plain view.) According to Brent his grandfather after busting out in the East headed West with an old prospector Winer who claimed he knew where a ton of already mined gold was located outside of what is now Phoenix. Other parties including a relative of the guy, the hombre, the Mexican who after all was only going home to what before the Gadsden Purchase had been part of his own country, who sweat mined the stuff were on the trail as well. Brent claimed that his grandfather had to kill that relative, had to kill that partner too or they would have killed him, shot him dead and left him for the buzzards. Sure thing, Brent.

The weird part, the part that has always made me wonder if all these Old West legends were produced solely in New York by lazy writers who couldn’t leave the comforts of their hotels, is what followed. What Jake had to do to keep his kale once he went into Phoenix to cash in with every hungry vulture in town ready to deal him low. The weirdest story was about some dame, some ex-whore, Julia something but don’t get hung up on names since everybody was using aliases then even the respectable citizenry, who was married to some grifter who couldn’t put two quarters together who took dead aim at Jake. Minus the husband part. She had been through from hunger long enough and wanted easy street, wanted to get out of stinking Phoenix, get out of Arizona which wasn’t even a state then and head to Frisco and the gay life of spoiled lady, mistress if that was the way things turned out.

She was going to use hubby as a decoy to keep Jake wondering about her, about whether her love was true. After a minute seeing Julia and hubby in the backstreets laughing together he got the dust out of his eyes and decided he had to kill the pair, or be killed. Legend has it that the bones of Julia and hubby are still guarding the empty plot where Jake’s gold had been. Nice guy right. They say, through Brent again, Jake roamed the hills at night keeping those who still thought there was still gold aplenty from entering. The reality is after the Julia bust-up Jake now John Walsh headed to Frisco and lived a life of splendor and only killing a couple more people who threatened his way of life by exposing him as another two-bit grifter. Another hoary legend down.                             

Jonah Raskin : Historian Eric Foner: A Contemporary View of America's Past

Jonah Raskin : Historian Eric Foner: A Contemporary View of America's Past

Historian Eric Foner. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

A Rag Blog interview:
Lincoln biographer Eric Foner
tells history from the bottom up

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2010

The award-winning American historian, Eric Foner, has often written about the Republican Party -- its origins, icon leaders, and tipping points -- but Foner himself is not now nor has he ever been a front man for the Republicans.

A popular professor of history at Columbia University since 1981, he is the author most recently of The Fiery Trial: American Lincoln and American Slavery, in which he charts both the strengths and weaknesses of our 16th-president, and depicts him as an original thinker and as an adept politician in near-constant evolution.

Revered by students and fellow historians -- a past president of the American Historical Association -- and reviled by right-wing ideologies, Eric Foner seems to have been destined to write history. His father, Jack Foner, was an American historian who was blacklisted for years; his uncle Phil Foner was also a historian who wrote about nearly everything and everyone in American history -- from 19th-century New York merchants to Frederick Douglass, Helen Keller, and the Black Panthers.

Like his father and his uncle, he is thoroughly immersed in the American past, and yet attuned to contemporary history as it unfolds today.

I met Eric Foner at Columbia in 1960 when we were both freshman, and members of Action -- a student-run organization and a forerunner of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -- that protested nuclear testing, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the policies of a paternalist administration.

Even in 1960, at the age of 17, he already knew he would go on to teach and to write about American history, to see it from the bottom up and from the point of view of the underdog: the slave, the worker, the immigrant.

Fifty years on, and at the start of the 50th anniversary of the 1960s -- an era that shaped his own view of history -- Foner continues to teach, write, and speak out on controversial political issues of the day. This interview was conducted over the long Thanksgiving holiday and ranged over a wide variety of topics -- from Lincoln to Obama and Karl Marx to revolution.


Almost every day I go on line there's another piece about Lincoln? Why is this?

Lincoln is so iconic a figure in American culture -- the self-made man, frontier hero, liberator of the slaves -- that everyone wants to claim him as their own. Also, because the issues of his day still resonate with ours, he somehow seems to be our contemporary in ways other figures of our past do not.

If you could channel Lincoln what do you think he'd say about Obama?

Historians don't like to answer questions like this. Lincoln would no doubt be pleased and surprised that a black man was elected president but on bailouts, gay marriage, Afghanistan -- who knows?

And about Sarah Palin?

All that I’ll say on that subject is that Lincoln had great respect for learning and expertise.

You have a new book out on Lincoln and slavery. Why did it take so long for someone to write a book about a subject that seems to obvious?

There are previous books on Lincoln and slavery but they tend to be either hagiographies -- he was born ready to sign the Emancipation Proclamation -- or prosecutorial briefs -- he was an inveterate racist. I think it requires someone from outside what a friend of mine calls the Lincoln-industrial complex to try to show the man in all his strengths and weaknesses, and how his views changed over time.

What does the reception to your book tell you about the state of our country today?

To the extent that people relate the book to the present it may reflect a longing for political leadership in which one can take pride and have confidence.

Was Lincoln a prophetic president? Did he see into the future and see the way U.S. society was developing?

Lincoln looked back more than forward. He thought of himself as fulfilling the promise of the American Revolution. He did not foresee the rise of the industrial state of the late 19th-century, which undermined many of his deep assumptions about the dignity of labor.

You became an historian in the 1960s. What do you see now as the impact of the 1960s as an historical era on the writing and the teaching of history?

The 1960s put on the agenda of historians, issues that had been very marginalized before then -- the history of race and racism; women's history; the history more generally of ordinary people, neglected groups. We are still trying to create a persuasive new overall view of U.S. history incorporating this expansion of the historical cast of characters.

You teach U.S. history to students now. Could you characterize how this generation views history and the past?

Like previous generations, they look to history for a sense of their own identity as individuals and Americans. Because students are today so much more diverse than in the past, so must history be.

American history is continually rewritten. Only recently I read a piece about the ways that the Boston Tea Party has been viewed through the ages. Which historical periods are rewritten and revised and rethought more than others?

Reconstruction after the Civil War has been revised most thoroughly by historians, although the general public has not really caught up. The role of slavery in American life has been completely rewritten. But every period is open to reinterpretation -- that's what historians do.

What do you think is the single most important thing we ought to learn from Lincoln?

Open-mindedness, willingness to listen to critics and not surround one's self with yes men, willingness to abandon ideas and policies that are not working and move to new ones, while maintaining one's core principles.

Karl Marx wrote about the U.S. in the 1850s; how astute was he about the U.S.?

Marx was a shrewd observer of the Civil War, understanding the revolutionary implications for the society of the emancipation of the slaves.

And on Lincoln?

Marx saw Lincoln as a man willing to take radical steps to achieve his goals, but to couch them in mundane language like a lawyer. He also saw freeing the slaves as an essential step toward liberating labor more generally.

Do you think it's impossible for there to be another civil war in the U.S. -- a third American Revolution?

Probably not. A third Reconstruction (the second being the civil rights movement) would be a good idea, however.

Are all the major events of our society behind us?

I doubt it. The most important things in history come as complete surprises. More surprises will come in the future.

[Jonah Raskin is a professor of communication studies at Sonoma State University.]

The Rag Blog

From The Partisan Defense Committee- Honoring a Class-War Prisoner Tom Manning 1946–2019-All honor to Tom Manning! Free Jaan Laaman- He Must Not Die In Jail ! The Last Of The Ohio Seven -Give To The Class-War Political Prisoners' Holiday Appeal

From The Partisan Defense Committee- Honoring a Class-War Prisoner  Tom Manning  1946–2019-All honor to Tom Manning! Free Jaan Laaman- He Must Not Die In Jail ! The Last Of The Ohio Seven -Give To The Class-War Political Prisoners' Holiday Appeal


  

Workers Vanguard No. 1159 23 August 2019 Honoring a Class-War Prisoner Tom Manning 1946–2019 After more than three decades of torment in America’s dungeons, class-war prisoner Tom Manning died on July 30 at the federal penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia. The official cause of death was a heart attack, but it was the sadistic prison authorities who were responsible for the death of Manning, one of the last two incarcerated Ohio 7 leftists. In retaliation for his unwavering opposition to racial oppression and U.S. imperialism and his continued political activism, the jailers treated his medical needs with deliberate indifference and delayed necessary medication. His comrade and former prisoner Ray Luc Levasseur bitterly remarked, “Supporters scrambled to get a lawyer in to see him, but death arrived first.” Although we Marxists do not share the political strategy of the Ohio 7, we have always forthrightly defended them against capitalist state repression. Born in Boston to a large Irish family, Manning knew firsthand the life of working-class misery. In a short autobiographical sketch appearing in For Love and Liberty (2014), a collection of his artwork, he described how his father, a longshoreman and a postal clerk, worked himself to death “trying to get one end to meet the other...he always got the worst end.” A young Tom shined shoes and sold newspapers, while roaming the docks and freight yards looking for anything that could be converted into cash or bartered. Later, he worked as a stock boy and then as a construction laborer. After joining the military in 1963, he was stationed in Guantánamo Bay and then Vietnam. After returning to the U.S., Manning ended up in state prison for five years. “Given the area where I grew up, and being a ’Nam vet,” he wrote, “prison was par for the course.” There he became politicized, engaging in food and work strikes and reading Che Guevara. As Levasseur observed in 2014, “When Tom Manning and I first met 40 years ago, we were 27 years old and veterans of mule jobs, the Viet Nam war, and fighting our way through American prisons. We also harbored an intense hatred of oppression and a burning desire to organize resistance.” Moved by these experiences, Manning joined with a group of young leftist radicals in the 1970s and ’80s. Early on, they participated in neighborhood defense efforts in Boston against rampaging anti-busing racists and helped run a community bail fund and prison visitation program in Portland, Maine. They also ran a radical bookstore, which the cops targeted for surveillance, harassment, raids and assault. The activists, associated with the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Unit in the 1970s and the United Freedom Front in the ’80s, took responsibility for a series of bombings that targeted symbols of South African apartheid and U.S. imperialism, which they described as “armed propaganda.” Some of these actions were directed against Mobil Oil and U.S. military installations in solidarity with the struggle for Puerto Rican independence by the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation). For these deeds, the Feds branded them “terrorists” and “extremely dangerous”—that is, issuing a license to kill. As targets of a massive manhunt, the young anti-imperialist fighters went underground for nearly ten years and were placed on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. Manning was captured in 1985 and sentenced to 58 years in federal prison. He was also sentenced to 80 years in New Jersey for the self-defense killing of a state trooper in 1981. The Ohio 7 became the poster children for the Reagan administration’s campaign to criminalize leftist political activity, declaring it domestic terrorism. In 1989, three of them—Ray and Patricia Levasseur and Richard Williams—were tried on trumped-up charges of conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government under the RICO “anti-racketeering” law and a 1948 sedition act. With Ray Levasseur and Williams (who died in prison in 2005) already sentenced to enough years to be locked up for the rest of their lives, the prosecution served no purpose other than to revive moribund sedition laws, which have been used historically to imprison and deport reds and anarchists. Despite the fact that the government spent nearly $10 million on the trial, the jury refused to convict. Manning spent half a lifetime in prison hell, marked by his torturers as a cop killer and brutalized for his left-wing political views. Stun-gunned, tear-gassed and dragged around by leg irons, he was kept in solitary for extended periods. Shortly after his arrest, he was body-slammed onto a concrete floor while cuffed to a waist chain and in leg irons, resulting in a hip fracture that was not repaired until years later. On a separate occasion, his right knee was permanently injured when five guards stomped on it. Yet another beating with his hands behind his back severely injured his shoulders. All in all, he had a total of 66 inches of scar tissue. But Manning remained unbroken. Among other things, he spoke out on behalf of other class-war prisoners, and he was also an accomplished artist behind bars. The actions of the Ohio 7 were not crimes from the standpoint of the working class. However, their New Left strategy of “clandestine armed resistance” by a handful of courageous leftists despaired of organizing the proletariat in mass struggle against the bourgeoisie. The multiracial working class, under the leadership of a revolutionary party fighting for a socialist future, is the central force capable of sweeping away the capitalist system and its repressive state machinery, not least the barbaric prisons. The Ohio 7 differed from the bulk of 1960s New Left radicals by their working-class origins and dedication to their principles; they never made peace with the capitalist order. Unlike most of the left, which refused to defend the Ohio 7 against government persecution, the SL and the Partisan Defense Committee have always stood by them, including through the PDC’s class-war prisoner stipend program. In an August 2 letter to the PDC, Manning’s lifelong comrade-in-arms Jaan Laaman (the last remaining Ohio 7 prisoner) eulogized: “Now Tom is gone. Our comrade, my comrade, who suffered years of medical neglect and medical abuse in the federal prison system, your struggle and suffering is now over brother. But your example, your words, deeds, even your art, lives on. You truly were a ‘Boston Irish Rebel,’ a life long Man of and for the People, a warrior, a person of compassion motivated by hope for the future and love for the common people, A Revolutionary Freedom Fighter.” All honor to Tom Manning! Free Jaan Laaman!

Of Real Golfers and Fakahs- A Cautionary Tale

Of Real Golfers and Fakahs- A Cautionary Tale

By Si Lannon

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the now deposed and self-exiled previous site administrator Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul  Markin on this site) was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[As the above notice has indicated the former site administrator, Allan Jackson, an old friend of mine from high school days and a man whom I supported during the recent intense bitter internal struggle at this site which centered on future direction and purpose, has been deposed and banished to exile (self-banished according to him but seen differently by the survivors). Because the fight was along generational lines, self-styled “Young Turks” and branded “old-timers” as much as anything else new administrator Greg Green, with the endorsement of the newly-revived Editorial Board, has decided to let each combatant give their take on the issues at dispute, if they so desire. The reasoning as far as a I know is to clear the air and to let the reading public know what goes on behind the scenes of every publishing operation, old-fashioned hard copy and new-fangled social media driven before any material sees the light of day.

I have no serious gripe about Allan’s tenure except that I did notice he got more set in his ways as he got older. Was less inclined to “go off the reservation” with any new idea presented to him to expand the subject matter which forms the living experience of the American scene.  What I am about to speak of though, hopefully without setting off an avalanche of gripes about the old regime, is related to the subject of today’s post, sports, specifically golf, my favorite sport. Sports, including golf, something which Allan was adamantly against posting material on reasoning that there were an infinite number of sports outlets putting an infinite amount of information about every possible sport or game and we did not need to, could not, compete against that reality. Furthermore although this site is about important nodal social, political and cultural happenings in America which includes an overweening love of sport by significant segments of the population he would pass on assigning or accepting any sport-related posting.

As a general proposition for the direction of this site I would, and did, agree with him on that. Except my sports perspective was not the television, radio, on-line professional and top amateur stuff but down in the average American trenches. How an average Joe goes about the business of doing some sport, again specifically golf, which I enjoy and having been a member of a golf club long enough have plenty of “slice of life” material. No go, no go until recently that is which I will mention in a minute.             

What busted me up, almost at one point busted up our friendship which has been pretty solid since high school many, many years ago was that several years ago, Allan was all over the idea of having a significant sports angle posted on this site. And not some “literary” (his term stolen from the real Peter Paul Markin, a big friend in our youth) touch like Ring Lardner did with his baseball series around the title You Know Me, Al  in the early 20^th century or Damon Runyon with betting horses (or betting on anything) in a million shrewd short stories centered on old Broadway a little later.

Allan’s idea, reflecting his personal interest in college football, was to write, or have somebody write weekly commentaries during the college football season every fall. And for a couple of years, this before I started writing regularly for this site, I guess he thought he had cornered the wisdom on the “sports” market. Thought that doing so would make American Left History more relevant to some anonymous “average Joe” who would then pick up on the various historical and political points which are the hallmark of the site. The hook? Project the winners of each week’s games. Not just the winner’s but as always in sports, certainly in football, provide a numbered point spread for the readers to use when making their bets elsewhere.

There were two problems with that approach. First Allan, unlike the real Markin always known as Scribe, didn’t know the first thing about football, at least what college teams to focus on for betting purposes. Here is how bad I heard it was (he would never talk about it to me when I came on board or when we went out for a few drinks with the other surviving high school guys). Alan actually would run a line on the Harvard-Yale game like anybody outside those two schools gave a fuck about the point spread. Was clueless about such teams as Miami (which he thought was Miami of Ohio and wondered why nobody wanted to bet when they played Kent State) and had no idea outside a certain devotion to Notre Dame about serious big-time college football (our “subway” fan Irish neighborhood “go to” team from way back even when they sucked during our high school days team). Worse, that second problem, was that readers were complaining about a guy whose percentages against the point spread had been about ten percent even doing such an operation. One reader told him to use a Ouija board, a couple have his wife make the picks and numbers out a grab bag, stuff like that. 

After a pile of those complains Allan suddenly stopped, stopped cold before the bowls season started the second season. Never to let another live sports piece muddy this site. Until recently when after something like a civil war between us he granted me a reprieve. Let me do a “slice of life” piece about an amateur, very amateur, golf tournament that some friends at my golf club were participating in. I didn’t ask but I assume since the war clouds were looming on the internal disputes after one of the younger writers flat-out refused to write a CD review on Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volume l2 declaring it nothing but mishmash and a distraction that he was trying to shore up support from the older writers as the “Young Turks” were throwing down the gauntlet. When I asked Greg Green about doing a short follow up piece after the smoke settled, the one below, he said such, said maybe I should do a whole series of “slice of life” vignettes if I could jumble the thing up with other sports as well as golf.  Si Lannon]           

********

This screed, let’s call it a screed since I am up in arms about what I consider a dastardly deed provoking screed time in me,  is being written on Saturday morning December 9, 2017 from “not the golf course, that expression to be explained posthaste since “weenie,” there is no other way to put it, Frog Pond PGA Golf Professional Robert Kiley  declared yesterday December 8^th the end of the golf season as we know it due to what he called, seemingly in panic, a snow emergency demanding all entrances and exits to the property under penalty of death be shuttered for the year since some foul-mouthed weatherman, oops, weatherperson had predicted the first snow of the season. A first snow that however was not projected to start until mid-morning on the 9^th.   

Well maybe not under penalty of death on the question of entering the property since we are all paid up members who actually “own” the course through our initiation fees and bond and are entitled to enter all year and play golf weather permitting all year as well using temporary green in the winter, but remember this is a screed. He nevertheless has certainly placed himself as a self-serving “weenie” since when the course “closes” for the year he hightails it down to Naples, Florida and golfs his brains out while we all suffer the “hot stove” winter golf roundtable blues until blissful come hither March. And certainly “panic” is an appropriate expression under the circumstances trusting in some holy goof weatherman, person whatever whose error rate is higher than any golfer’s score. (We by the way for those looking for harsher, rougher words use “weenie” rather than some other derogatory term since golf, unlike rough-hewn sports like bowling and badminton, is a gentlemanly and gentlewomanly pursuit and rather civilized except the vast “open secret” of the not too pleasant fates awaiting the golf balls used to further the sport’s aims.

In any case it is approximately 9:30 AM and I stepped outside for a minute and actually had a flake, one flake, hit my nose. I don’t like to cast aspersions on a man’s manhood especially when he holds the ticket to a person’s season-long entertainment but couldn’t certain rugged individual golfers of my acquaintance, my infamous 6:06 club, named as such for the usual tee time which we start playing at most of the season, that is 6:06 AM by the way so you know these rugged individuals are also old rugged individuals, have faced that one, possibly two snowflakes, and played a robust round at “the Frog” before the heavens erupted.   

Enough of moaning and groaning about short golf seasons though after all in New England unlike Florida or Arizona the serious season has to come to an end at some point. What I am up in arms about is the line in the sand that was drawn yesterday between real golfers and fakahs (what in the rest of the English- speaking world outside of Boston are called fakers). For the uninitiated modern day notice is by ever quick-mail even in ancient golf world and one and all were informed of the closing by e-mail early Friday morning. Certain real golfers, 6:06 Club golfers, knowing the end was near, showed their metal by dropping everything they were doing once the clarion call panicky weenie e-mail came over cyberspace from Golf Central to announce a cease-fire in place. One guy, Sand-bagger Jackson, the moniker tells all, came running from the netherworld of the City of Presidents where he was working diligently on yet another report. Another, Kevin Zonk, moniker also tells a lot, put down pen abruptly and called a halt to yet another so-called earth-shattering conference about some bogus crisis in the health care system to heed the call to arms and yet another, Redoubtable Steve, came speeding from out of nowhere some fifty miles away ready to let the environment in this wicked old world go asunder to get one final fix, to have one final stab at the brass ring. 

On the other side, and by now one and all know what side that is, there are certain guys, okay a certain guy, Kaz, who apparently knows only three letters, who in the interest of making mere filthy lucre debased themselves, no, himself, in order to do mundane things like cover mortgage payments, pay the armed bandits for upcoming educational expenses with daughter college loaming and the like. Now like I said I am not one to cast aspersions on a man’s manhood but what else can one think could be the reason for such an obvious no show. Especially when in the crucial final Frog Pond betting scheme, five dollar a man quota, a certain guy from the City of Presidents found fifteen dollars on the ground, or so it seemed like it.

Later Si Lannon  

    

One Last Time-At The Ebb Tide Of The 1960s- With Helter-Skelter Charles Manson Who Passed At 83 In Mind

One Last Time-At The Ebb Tide Of The 1960s- With Helter-Skelter Charles Manson Who Passed At 83 In Mind

By Greg Green  

[Recently, shortly after the death of Charles Manson [November, 2017] was announced and then later when I felt under some pressure at the time to write a bit more about the 1960s than I was aware of at the time which had more to do with the beginnings of the internal struggle over the direction this site was taking and going to take, as something an introduction of myself into this space, I wrote two shorter versions of this piece.

I felt those pieces were as much about my understanding of went on, and what went wrong, in that big 1960s “jail-break” that the then administrator of this space Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin on this site) now deposed and off in “exile” (his term according to Sam Lowell his close friend who wound up as the lone older writer siding with the “Young Turks” as they styled themselves in the internal struggle) somewhere in Utah looking for a by-line in some Salt Lake newspaper was looking at from me when he was in charge. That was before a sudden vote of no confidence was taken by the whole staff at the urging of the younger writers whom he had brought in over the past several years but who were in their words, under-utilized and narrowly directed to write, as I was asked to do as well, about the turbulent 1960s whether they knew or cared a damn about those times or not. I, who had come over from the American Film Gazette where I had held a similar position, was supposed to take over the day to day management of the site and pass out assignments under Allan’s guidance, found myself asked to run the whole operation without him after the vote (with the assistance of the newly–formed editorial board, an organization which Jackson had virtually ignored during his tenure).

Jackson ran a funny mix, a core group of writers whom he had either known since high school and who had been exposed to the Peter Paul Markin who was the guy who Allan was trying to honor by using his name as his moniker and who was a big influence on that whole group exploring all kinds of situations in the 1960s or had met in hotbed places like San Francisco, LA, the Village, Harvard Square after high school when everything according to the older guys exploded and you had to take sides from drugs to sex to wars. Then several years ago he brought in those young guys (and a few gals but they were mostly stringers, free-lancers) who knew nothing of the 1960s but were force-pressed to write about subjects related to that time which they only vaguely had heard about (or again cared about). His argument to the younger writers something not necessary to throw at the old guard “true-believer” older writers was that this was a watershed period, a period when many were “washed clean” and the period needed to be dealt with accordingly.    

So the gist of my article was as much about Allan and the older writers being “washed clean” by the experience as about what the criminal mind of someone like Charles Manson who while a sensational figure and a prime example of what went wrong with the 1960s when the still thriving cultural counter-revolutionaries took to the offensive and needed an example to feed off of when that moment ebbed. Some of the writers in this space like Sam Lowell, Frank Jackman, Bart Webber, Si Lannon, and Josh Breslin knew the real Markin, known to them as always as “Scribe” either from the North Adamsville neighborhood where they grew up or met him as a result of a very fateful (according to Sam Lowell’s estimate in any case) decision that he made during the turbulent days of the Summer of Love in 1967. That year and that event marked them all once Scribe was able to fire them up to head out west to San Francisco the epicenter of the whole explosion and consummate the jail-break.        

I am, like Zack James, Jack Jamison, Bradley Fox, Jr. and Lance Lawrence at least a decade removed from that 1960s experience and sensibility and that second-hand knowledge was reflected in the original articles. I had no axe to grind with those times. But neither did I bow down to what guys like Frank, Sam, and Josh told me about their experiences. That said, Allan Jackson the then supposedly soon to be retired administrator and something of a guiding light in this space (and the on-line version of The Progressive American) suggested after several talks that I expand my article somewhat to include his and the others reflections of the 1960s in order to give a more rounded approach to those days and events. As I did with that second article I do here as well-Greg Green]      

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A couple of writers in this space, I think Zack James and Bart Webber, have spent a good amount of cyber-ink this past summer commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the San Francisco-etched and hued Summer of Love in 1967. The million things that occurred there from free concerts in Golden Gate Park by the likes of Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and the Grateful Dead, names that I recognized although I was not familiar with their music (the free concert concept in line with a lot that went on then under the guise of “music is the revolution” and the recruits would be those who got turned on by the music, straight or doped –up, and lived by it too), to cheap concerts at the Avalon and Fillmore West (the beginning of an alternative way to entertain the young in formerly rundown arenas which would keep ticket costs down and provide indoor night space for those same young patrons against predators and cops), to plenty of drugs from Native American ritual peyote buttons to Owsley’s electric Kool-Aid acid much written about by “square” Tom Wolfe in a book dealing with writer Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (I think that should be capitalized at least I have always seen it that way in books) to high end tea, you know, ganga, grass, marijuana, which you can smell even today at certain concerts in places where the stuff is legal or the young don’t give a fuck who knows they are smoking stuff, communal soup kitchens (to curb those midnight ganga cravings taking a tip from the old hobo, bum, tramp railroad “jungle” camps and just throwing everything in a stew pot and hope for the best), to communal living experiment (say twelve people not related except maybe some shacking up sharing an apartment or old house and dividing up tasks and expenses or in country on an old abandoned farm not very successful although I hear in Oregon and Vermont if you look closely enough will find the “remnant”), communal clothing exchanges (via ironically given the pervasive anti-war sentiments Army-Navy Surplus or Goodwill/Salvation Army grabs)and above all a better attitude toward sexual expression and experience (the “pill” helping ease the way, the drugs too and a fresh look at the Kama Sutra no doubt) reached something like the high tide during that time.

(According to Josh Breslin who at the time was just out of high school and looking for something to do during the summer before his freshman year of college much to the chagrin of his hard-working parents who expected him to work that summer to help pay for tuition it was almost like lemmings to the sea the draw of San Francisco was so strong. For many kids like Josh and others he met out there aside from Scribe and the North Adamsville guys it really was something of a jail-break although I still can’t feel the intensity which drove Josh and the others to forsake, most for just a while, some family, career, settle down path during those admittedly turbulent times. My generation, and I was among the loudest up in Rockland, Maine where I grew up and where a cohort of the hippie-types encamped once the cities became too explosive, kind of laughed off the whole experiment as the hippies liked to say “ a bad trip,”  a waste of time and energy. Although the idea of free or cheap concerts seems like a good idea especially when you see the ticket prices today for acts like Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones who were ready to perform gratis then, the rampant uncontrolled use of illegal drugs, the idea of communal living outside of say very safe dorm life, wearing raggedy second or third hand clothes which looked like and were out of some Salvation Army grab box or Army-Navy surplus store, the idea of even eating out of some collective stew pot of who knows what composition and unbridled and maybe unprotected sex seemed weird, seemed seedy when I would see these people on the streets in town when they came for provisions or whatever they were looking for that brought them to town.)     

So as even Josh and a couple of others would admit not all of it was good or great even at that high tide which he personally placed at 1967 (others like Sam placed it at the Stones’ Altamont concert in 1969 and Scribe for his own reasons had placed it at May Day, 1971 when the government counter-attacked a demonstration in Washington with a vengeance and they took devastating amounts of arrests, tear gas, and billy-clubs) since casualties, plenty of casualties were taken, from drug overdoses to rip-offs by less enlightened parties to people leeching off the work of others who were doing good works providing energies to go gather that food, work that kitchen, rummage for those clothes, keep the house afloat with the constant turn-over of desperate “seeking” something people. (Allan chided me on this point originally because he did not believe that those he knew, he met were desperate, most had come from comfortable middle class homes and just wanted to shake things up a little before, which many, too many according to him did, going back to that lifestyle without a murmur when the tide ebbed.)  

Not good either which was also noted by Zack James (who got the information from oldest brother Alex another veteran of 1967  who while on a business trip to San Francisco this spring stepped back into that halcyon past at a Summer of Love exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park) and which I used as a counter-argument to Allan’s wisp-of-the will attitude about desperate people flocking to the coast a photograph taken at a police station where one whole wall was filled with photographs from desperate parents looking for their runaway children. No so much the runaway part, all of those who flee west that year and the years after to break out of the nine to five, marriage, little white house syndrome were actually doing that, but the need to do so just then against the wishes, in defiance of those same parents who were looking for their Johnny and Janie. Who know what happened to them.

Frank Jackman, another writer in this space, basing himself on his friendship with Josh Breslin and with the latter’s with Scribe spent some time a few years back taking a hint from the gonzo writer Doctor Hunter Thompson trying to figure out when that high tide crested and then ebbed.  The Scribe as far as I know the story himself a classic case of those who started with high ideals and breath of fresh air attitudes who wound up getting killed down in Mexico after a busted cocaine deal in the days after he became a coke head and was dealing and who now sleeps in a potter’s field grave down in Sonora. Years like 1968, 1969, 1971 came up as did events like the Chicago Democratic Convention in the summer of 1968, the disastrous Stones concert at Altamont in 1969, and May Day, 1971 in Washington when they tried to bring down the government if it would not stop the damn Vietnam War and got nothing but massive arrests, tear gas and police batons for their efforts. Those things and the start of a full-bore counter-revolution, mainly political and cultural which Frank has said they have been fighting a rear-guard action against ever since. 

Whatever the year or event, whatever happened to individuals like Scribe and those forlorn kids in that police station photograph, there was an ebb, a time and place when all that promise from the high tide of 1967 to as Scribe would say seek a “newer world,” to “turn the world upside down” as Frank likes to say when recounting his youthful days out west and in New York City when he was starting out as a writer and make it fit for the young to live came crashing down, began to turn on itself. A time when lots of people who maybe started out figuring the new world was a-borning turned in on themselves as well. My very strong feeling after having had a small personal bout with cocaine when that was the drug of choice and you could hardly go anywhere socially without somebody bringing out a mirror, a razor and rolling a dollar and daring you not to snort just to be friendly maybe it was the drugs, too many drugs. Maybe too it was the turnover as those who started the movements headed back home, back to school and back to the old world defeated and left those who had nowhere to go behind (those photographs on that forlorn wall in that anonymous police station a vivid reminded that not everybody was “on the bus” as Allan mentioned was a term used frequently to distinguish the winners from the losers in those days).           

And as if to put paid to that ebb tide there were all the revelations that something had desperately gone wrong when cult figure and madman leader of a forsaken desert tribe of the forgotten and broken Charles Manson who died the other day [November 2017] after spending decades in prison had been exposed for all the horrible crimes he had committed or had had his followers commit. Allan, Frank, Josh, Sam and I am sure Scribe if he were around would write that off as an aberration, a fluke. Still sobering thoughts for those guys like Frank and Josh who are still trying to push that rock up the hill toward that “newer world” that animated their youth.  

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-*Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Billie's Fifteen Minutes Of Fame

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bill Haley and The Comets performing Rock Around The Clock to aid a little flavor to this entry.


Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Billie’s Fifteen Minutes of Fame
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5fsqYctXgM


CD Review

The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: 1956: Still Rockin’, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1989


I, seemingly, have endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing this Time-Life classic rock series that goes under the general title The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.

And we, we small time punk in the old-fashioned sense of that word, we hardly wet behind the ears elementary school kids, and that is all we were for those who are now claiming otherwise, listened our ears off. Those were strange times indeed in that be-bop 1950s night when stuff happened, kid’s stuff, but still stuff like a friend of mine, not Billie who I will talk about later, who claimed, with a straight face to the girls, that he was Elvis’ long lost son. Did the girls do the math on that one? Or, maybe, they like us more brazen boys were hoping, hoping and praying, that it was true despite the numbers, so they too could be washed by that flamed-out night.

Well, this I know, boy and girl alike tuned in on our transistor radios (small battery- operated radios that we could put in our pockets, and hide from snooping parental ears at will) to listen to music that from about day one, at least in my household was not considered “refined” enough for young, young pious you’ll never get to heaven listening to that devil music and you had better say about eight zillion Hail Marys to get right Catholic, ears. Ya right, Ma, like Patti Page or Bob (not Bing, not the Bing of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? anyway) Crosby and The Bobcats were supposed to satisfy our jail break cravings.

In many ways 1956 was the key year, at least to my recollection. And here is why. Elvis may have been burning up the stages, making all the teenage girls down South sweat, making slightly older women sweat and throw undergarments too, and every guy over about eight years old start growing sideburns before then but that was the year that I actually saw him on television and started be-bopping off his records. Whoa. And the same with Bill Haley and the Comets, even though in the rock pantheon they were old, almost has-been guys, by then. And Chuck Berry. And for the purposes of this particular review, James Brown, ah, sweet, please, please, please James Brown (and the Flames, of course) with that different black, black as the night, beat that my mother (and others too) would not even let in the house, and maybe not even in our whole white working class neighborhood. But remember that transistor radio and remember when rock rocked.

Of course all of this remembrance is just so much lead up to a Billie story. You know Billie, Billie from “the projects” hills. William James Bradley to be exact. I told you about him once when I was reviewing a 30th anniversary of rock film concert segment by Bo Diddley. I told the story of how he, and we, learned first hand down at the base, the nasty face of white racism in this society. No even music, and maybe particularly not even music, was excepted then from that dead of night racial divide, North or South if you really want to know. Yes, that Billie, who also happened to be my best friend, or maybe almost best friend we never did get it straight, in elementary school. Billie was crazy for the music, crazy to impress the tender young girls that he was very aware of, much more aware of than I was and earlier, with his knowledge, his love, and his respect for the music (which is where the innocent Bo Diddley imitation thing just mentioned came from although that story was later than the story I want to tell you now).

But see we were projects kids, and that meant, and meant seriously, no dough kids. No dough to make one look, a little anyway, like one of the hot male teen rock stars such as Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis. Now this “projects” idea started out okay, I guess, the idea being that returning veterans from World War II, at least some vets like my father, needed a leg up in order to provide for their families. And low rent public housing was the answer. Even if that answer was four-family unit apartment buildings really fit for one family, one growing three boy family anyway, and no space, no space at all for private, quiet dreams. Of course by 1955, ‘56 during the “golden age” of working class getting ahead (or at least to many it must seem so now) there was a certain separation between those who had moved on to the great suburban ranch house dream land and those who were seemingly fated to end up as “the projects” fixtures, and who developed along the way a very identifiable projects ethos, a dog-eat-dog ethos if you want to know the truth. It ain’t pretty down at the base, down at the place where the thugs, drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters feed off the rough-edged working poor.

That didn’t stop Billie, or me for that matter, from having our like everybody else dreams, quiet spaced or not. In fact, Billie had during his long time there probably developed the finest honed-edge of “projects” ethos of anyone I knew, but that came later. For now, for the rock minute I want to speak of, Billie was distractedly, no beyond distraction as you will see, trying to make his big break through as a rock performer. See Billie knew, probably knew in his soul, but anyway from some fan magazine that he was forever reading that old Elvis and Jerry Lee (and many of the rockers of the day, black and white alike) were dirt poor just like us. Rough dirt poor too. Farm land, country, rural, shack, white trash, dirt poor which we with our “high style” city ways could barely comprehend.

And there was Elvis, for one, up in big lights. With all the cars, and not junkie old fin-tailed Plymouths or chromed Fords but Cadillacs, and half the girls in the world, and all of them “hot” (although we did not use that word then), or so it seemed. Billie was hooked and hooked hard on that rock star performer fantasy. It consumed his young passions. And for what purpose? If you answered to impress the girls, “the projects” girls right in front of him, hey, now you are starting to get it. And this is what this little story is about.

This was late 1956, maybe early 1957, anyway it’s winter, a cold hard winter in the projects, meaning all extra dough was needed for heat, or some serious stuff like that. But see here old Billie and I (as his assistant, or manager, it was never clear which but I was to be riding his star, no question) had no time for cold, for snow or for the no dough to get those things because what was inflaming our minds was that a teen caravan was coming to town in a few weeks. No, not to the projects, Christ no, but downtown at the high school auditorium. And what this teen caravan thing was (even though we were not officially teens and would not be so for a while) was a talent show, a big time talent show, like a junior American Bandstand television show, looking for guys and girls who could be the next teen heartthrobs. There were a lot of them in those days, those kinds of backwater talent shows and maybe now too.

This news is where two Billie things came into play so you get an idea of the kind of guy he was back then. First, one night, one dark, snowy night Billie had the bright idea than he and I should go around town and take down all the teen caravan announcement advertisements from the telephone poles and other spots where they were posted. We did, and I need say no more on the matter. Oh, except that a couple of days later, and for a week or so after that, there was a big full-page ad in the local newspaper and ads on the local radio. That’s one Billie thing and the other, well, let me back up.

When Billie got wind of the contest he went into one of his rants, a don’t mess with Billie or his idea of the moment rant and usually it was better if you didn’t, and that rant was directed first to no one else but his mother. He needed dough to get an outfit worthy of a “prince of rock” so that he could stand out for the judges. Moreover the song he was going to do was Bill Haley and The Comet’s Rock Around The Clock. I will say he knew that song cold, and the way I could tell was that at school one day he sang it and the girls went crazy. And some of the guys too. Hell, girls started following old Billie around. He was in heaven (honest, I on the other hand, was indifferent to them, or their charms just then). So the thought that he might win the contest was driving him mad (that same energy would be used later with less purpose but that story is for another day)

Hell, denim jeans, sneakers, and some old hand-down ragamuffin shirt from an older brother ain’t going to get anyone noticed, except maybe to be laughed at. Now, like I said, we were no dough projects boys. And in 1956 that meant serious problems, serious problems even without a damn cold winter. See, like I said before the projects were for those who were on the down escalator in the golden age of post-World War II affluence. In short, as much as he begged, bothered and bewildered his mother there was no dough, no dough at all for the kind of sparkly suit (or at least jacket) that Billie was desperate for. Hell, he even badgered his dad, old Billie, Senior, and if you badgered old Billie then you had better be ready for some hard knocks and learn how to pick yourself up off the ground, sometimes more than once. Except this time, this time something hit Old Billie, something more than that bottle of booze or six, hard stinky-smelling booze, that he used to keep his courage and television-watching up. He told Mrs. Billie (real name, Iris) that he would spring for the cloth if she would make the suit. Whoopee! We are saved and even Billie, my Billie, had a kind word for his father on this one.

I won’t bore you with the details of Mrs. Billie’s (there you have me calling her that, I always called her Mrs. Bradley, or ma’am) efforts on behalf of Billie’s career. Of course the material for the suit came from the Bargain Center located downtown near the bus terminal. You don’t know the Bargain Center? Sure you do, except it had a different name where you lived maybe and it has names like Wal-Mart and K-Mart, etc. now. Haven’t you been paying attention? Where do you think the material came from? Brooks Brothers? Please. Now this Bargain Center was the early low rent place where I, and about half the project kids got their first day of school and Easter outfits (the mandatory twice yearly periods for new outfits in those days). You know the white shirts with odd-colored pin-stripes, a size or two too large, the black chinos with cuffs, christ with cuffs like some hayseed, and other items that nobody wanted some place else and got a second life at the “Bargie.” At least you didn’t have to worry about hand-me-downs because most of the time the stuff didn’t wear that long.

I will say that Mrs. B. did pretty good with what she had to work with and that when the coat was ready it looked good, even if it was done only an hour before the show. Christ, Billie almost flipped me out with his ranting that day. And I had seen some bad scenes before. In any case it was ready. Billie went to change clothes upstairs and when he came down everybody, even me, hell, even Old Billie was ooh-ing and ah-ing. Now Billie, to be truthful, didn’t look anything like Bill Haley. I think he actually looked more like Jerry Lee. Kind of thin and wiry, lanky maybe, with brown hair and blue eyes and a pretty good chin and face. I would say now a face that girls would go for; although I am not sure they would all swoon over him, except maybe the giggly ones.

So off we go on the never on time bus, a bus worthy of its own stories, to downtown and the auditorium, even my mother and father who thought Billie was the cat’s meow when I brought him around. Billie’s father, Old Billie of the small dreams, took a pass on going. He had a Friday night boxing match that he couldn’t miss and the couch beckoned (an argument could be made that Old Billie was a man before his time in the couch potato department). However all is forgiven him this night for his big idea, and his savior dough. We got to the school auditorium okay and Billie left us for stardom as we got in our rooting section seats. A few minutes later Billie ran up to us to tell us that he was fifth on the list so don’t go anywhere, like out for a cigarette or something.

We sat through the first four acts, a couple of guys doing Elvis stuff (so-so) and a couple of girls (or rather trios of girls) who did some serious be-bop stuff and had great harmonies. Billie, I sensed, was going to have his work cut out for him this night. Finally Billie came out, prompted the four-piece backup band to his song, and he started for the mike. He started out pretty good, in good voice and a couple of nice juke moves, but then about half way through; as he was wiggling and swiggling through his Rock Around The Clock all of a sudden one of the arms of his jacket fell off and landed in the front row. Billie didn’t miss a beat. This guy was a showman. Then the other jacket arm fell off and also went into the first row. Except this time a couple of swoony girls, girls from our school were tussling, seriously tussling, each other for it. See, they thought it was part of Billie’s act. And what they didn’t know as Billie finished up was that Mrs. Billie (I will be kind to her and not call her what Billie called her) in her rush to finish up didn’t sew the arms onto the body of the jacket securely so they were just held together by some temporary stitches.

Well, needless to say Billie didn’t win (one of those girl trios did, and rightly so, although I didn’t tell Billie that). But next day, and many next days after that, Billie had more girls hanging off his arms than he could shake a stick at. And you know maybe Billie was on to something after all because I started to notice those used-to-been scrawny, spindly-legged, pigeon-toed giggling girls, their new found bumps and curves, and their previously unremarkable winsome girlish charms, especially when Billie would give me his “castoffs.” So maybe his losing was for the best. My for the best.

Happy Birthday To You-***Singing The Blues For His Lord- The Reverend Gary Davis Is On Stage

Happy Birthday To You-

By Lester Lannon

I am devoted to a local folk station WUMB which is run out of the campus of U/Mass-Boston over near Boston Harbor. At one time this station was an independent one based in Cambridge but went under when their significant demographic base deserted or just passed on once the remnant of the folk minute really did sink below the horizon.

So much for radio folk history except to say that the DJs on many of the programs go out of their ways to commemorate or celebrate the birthdays of many folk, rock, blues and related genre artists. So many and so often that I have had a hard time keeping up with noting those occurrences in this space which after all is dedicated to such happening along the historical continuum.

To “solve” this problem I have decided to send birthday to that grouping of musicians on an arbitrary basis as I come across their names in other contents or as someone here has written about them and we have them in the archives. This may not be the best way to acknowledge them, but it does do so in a respectful manner.    

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Reverend Gary Davis playing Children Of Zion on Pete Seeger's 1960 television show Rainbow Quest.

CD Review

Twelve Gates To The City: Reverend Gary Davis: In Concert 1962-1966, Shanachie Records, 2000

I have mentioned many of the old time black male country blues singers in this space, for example, Son House, Bukka White and Skip James. I have also mentioned the close connection between this rural music, the routine of life on the farm (mainly the Mississippi Delta plantations or sharecropping) and simple religious expression in their works. The blues singer under review meets all of those criteria and more. The Reverend Gary Davis, although not as well known in the country blues pantheon, has had many of his songs covered by the denizens of the folk revival of the 1960's and some rock groups, like The Grateful Dead, looking for a connection with their roots. Thus, by one of the ironies of fate his tradition lives on in popular music. I would also mention here that his work was prominently displayed in one of the Masters Of The Blues documentaries that I have reviewed in this space. That placement is insurance that that the Reverend's musical virtuosity is of the highest order. As an instrumentalist he steals the show in that film. Enough said.

Stick out songs here are the much-covered Samson and Delilah (most famously, I think, by Dave Van Ronk), Cocaine Blues (from when it was legal, of course), Twelve Keys To The City and the gospelly Blow Gabriel and Who Shall Deliver Poor Me.

Some Biographical Information From the Back Cover Of This Album

Durham, North Carolina in the 1930's was a moderate sized town whose economy was driven by tobacco farming. The tobacco crop acted somewhat as a buffer against the worst ravages of the Depression. During the fall harvest, with its attendant tobacco auctions, there was a bit more money around, and that, naturally, attracted musicians. Performers would drift in from the countryside and frequently took up residence and stayed on. Two master musicians who made Durham their home, whose careers extended decades until they become literally world famous, were Reverend Gary Davis and Sonny Terry.

REV. GARY DAVIS

Reverend Gary Davis was one of the greatest traditional guitarists of the century. He could play fluently in all major keys and improvise continually without repetition. His finger picking style was remarkably free, executing a rapid treble run with his thumb as easily as with his index finger and he had great command of many different styles, representing most aspects of black music he heard as a young man at he beginning of the century. Beyond his blues-gospel guitar, Davis was equally adept at ragtime, marches, breakdowns, vaudeville songs, and much more. Born in Lawrence County, South Carolina in 1895, Davis was raised by his grandmother, who made his first guitar for him. Learning from relatives and itinerant musicians, he also took up banjo and harmonica. His blindness was probably due to a congenital condition. By the time he was a young man he was considered among the elite musicians in his area of South Carolina where, as in most Southern coastal states, clean and fancy finger picking with emphasis on the melody was the favored style. Sometime in the early 1950's, Davis started a ministry and repudiated blues. In 1935, he recorded twelve gospel songs that rank among the masterpieces of the genre. In 1944, he moved to New York where he continued his church work, and sometimes did some street singing in Harlem. By the early 1960's, with the re-emergence of interest in traditional black music, Davis finally received the recognition and prominences he so richly deserved.