Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind

Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind

By Lance Lawrence  

[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 previous site administrator Peter Markin 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]

[Although I am a much younger writer I today stand in agreement with Bart Webber and Si Lannon, older writers who I admire and whom I have learned a lot from about how to keep it short and sweet but in any case short on these on-line sites. Originally I had agreed with both men as far as Phil Larkin’s, what did, Si call them, yes, rantings about heads rolling, about purges and would have what seems like something out of Stalin’s Russia from what I have read about that regime were  dubious at best. Now I am not so sure as I have heard other younger writers rather gleefully speaking around the shop water cooler about moving certain unnamed writers out to pasture-finally in the words of one of them.

In any case the gripe the former two writers appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board is what I support. As Bart first mentioned, I think, if nothing else this disclaimer has once again pointed told one and all, interested or not, that he, they have been “demoted.”  That I too as Si pointed out while I chafed as an Associate Book Critic and didn’t like it am now just another Everyman. Although this is the first time I have had the disclaimer above my article I plead once should be enough, more than enough.

In the interest of transparency I was among the leaders, among the most vociferous leaders, of what has now started to come down in the shop as urban legend “Young Turks” who fought tooth and nail both while Alan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin as blog moniker for reasons never made clear, at least to me) was in charge and essentially stopping young writer developing their talents and when we decided that Allan had to go, had to “retire.” (I am sure Phil Larkin will take those innocent quotation marks as definite proof that Allan was purged although maybe I should reevaluate everything he has said in a new light.) But I agree with Bart and Si’s sentiment that those on the “losing” end in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle had taken their "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. That fact should signal the end of this embarrassing and rather provocative disclaimers. Done. Lance Lawrence}    

Sometimes a picture really can be worth a thousand words, a thousand words and more as in the case Howlin’ Wolf doing his Midnight creep in the photograph above taken from an album of his work but nowadays with the advances in computer technology and someone’s desire to share also to be seen on sites such as YouTube where you can get a real flavor of what that mad man was about when he got his blues wanting habits on. In fact I am a little hesitate to use a bunch of words describing Howlin’ Wolf in high gear since maybe I would leave out that drop of perspiration dripping from his overworked forehead and that salted drop might be the very thing that drove him that night or describing his oneness with his harmonica because that might cause some karmic funk. So, no, I am not really going to go on and on about his midnight creep but when the big man got into high gear, when he went to a place where he sweaty profusely, a little ragged in voice and eyes all shot to hell he roared for his version of the high white note. Funny, a lot of people, myself for a while included, used to think that the high white note business was strictly a jazz thing, maybe somebody like the “Prez” Lester Young or Duke’s Johnny Hodges after hours, after the paying customers had had their fill, or what they thought was all those men had in them, shutting the doors tight, putting up the tables leaving the chairs for whoever came by around dawn, grabbing a few guys from around the town as they finished their gigs and make the search, make a serious bid to blow the world to kingdom come. Some nights they were on fire at blew that big note out in to some heavy air and who knows where it landed, most nights though it was just “nice try.” One night I was out in Frisco when “Saps” McCoy blew a big sexy sax right out the door of Chez Benny’s over in North Beach when North Beach was just turning away from be-bop “beat” and that high white, I swear, blew out to the bay and who knows maybe all the way to the Japan seas. But see if I had, or anybody had, thought about it for a minute jazz and the blues are cousins, cousins no question so of course Howlin’ Wolf blew out that high white note more than once, plenty including a couple of shows I caught him at when he was not in his prime.         

The photograph (and now video) that I was thinking of is one where he is practically eating the harmonica as he performs How Many More Years (and now like I say thanks to some thoughtful archivist you can go on to YouTube and see him doing his devouring act in real time and in motion, wow, and also berating father Son House for showing up drunk). Yes, the Wolf could blast out the blues and on this one you get a real appreciation for how serious he was as a performer and as blues representative of the highest order.

Howlin’ Wolf like his near contemporary and rival Muddy Waters, like a whole generation of black bluesmen who learned their trade at the feet of old-time country blues masters like Charley Patton, the aforementioned Son House who had his own personal fight with the devil, Robert Johnson who allegedly sold his soul to the devil out on Highway 61 so he could get his own version of that high white note, and the like down in Mississippi or other southern places in the first half of the twentieth century. They as part and parcel of that great black migration (even as exceptional musicians they would do stints in the sweated Northern factories before hitting Maxwell Street) took the road north, or rather the river north, an amazing number from the Delta and an even more amazing number from around Clarksville in Mississippi right by that Highway 61 and headed first maybe to Memphis and then on to sweet home Chicago.  

They went where the jobs were, went where the ugliness of Mister James Crow telling them sit here not there, walk here but not there, drink the water here not there, don’t look at our women under any conditions and on and on did not haunt their every move (although they would find not racial Garden of Eden in the North, last hired, first fired, squeezed in cold water flats too many to a room, harassed, but they at least has some breathing space, some room to create a little something they could call their won and not Mister’s), went where the big black migration was heading after World War I. Went also to explore a new way of presenting the blues to an urban audience in need of a faster beat, in need of getting away from the Saturday juke joint acoustic country sound with some old timey guys ripping up three chord ditties to go with that jug of Jack Flash’s homemade whiskey (or so he called it).

So they, guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Magic Slim, Johnny Shines, and James Cotton prospered by doing what Elvis did for rock and rock and Bob Dylan did for folk and pulled the hammer down on the old electric guitar and made big, big sounds that reached all the way back of the room to the Red Hat and Tip Top clubs and made the max daddies and max mamas jump, make some moves. And here is where all kinds of thing got intersected, as part of all the trends in post-World War II music up to the 1960s anyway from R&B, rock and roll, electric blues and folk the edges of the music hit all the way to then small white audiences too and they howled for the blues, which spoke to some sense of their own alienation. Hell, the Beatles and more particularly lived to hear Muddy and the Wolf. The Stones even went to Mecca, to Chess Records to be at one with Muddy. And they also took lessons from Howlin’ Wolf himself on the right way to play Little Red Rooster which they had covered and made famous in the early 1960s (or infamous depending on your point of view since many radio stations including some Boston stations had banned it from the air originally).Yes, Howlin’ Wolf and that big bad harmonica and that big bad voice that howled in the night did that for a new generation, pretty good right.  

When The Bolsheviks Went Into The Trenches To Stop Russian Continued Participation In World War I, Circa 1917

When The Bolsheviks Went Into The Trenches To Stop Russian Continued Participation In World War I, Circa 1917

By Lance Lawrence    

[Sam when he was telling the story, Frank Jackman’s story, to his longtime companion Laura who knew some of the outline of Frank’s military service,  had to bring her up to speed on some of the specifics which the reader may as well be interested in although Frank a few years early had written a detailed summary of the whole affair for the Progressive Nation magazine when they were doing a series on Vietnam veterans and wanted the perspective of an anti-war soldier who while in the military became a military resister. (While every serious civilian peace activist then, or now, honors those who “got religion” as Sam likes to call it on the issues of war and peace after their military service was completed the military is the special category that marks off this story from theirs.) 

Here in quick outline is what Sam told Laura. Frank had been drafted in 1969 in the heart of the Vietnam War, had allowed himself to be inducted with a slight anti-war feeling but not enough to do anything else about so accepted induction in the Army. (Sam, just to set the record straight had been drafted in 1968 had served a year, actually thirteen months with a month R&R in Hawaii, in Vietnam as an 11 Bravo, an infantryman, a grunt, “cannon-fodder” as Frank would say, and saw other do, and he did things which still cause restless nights.)  

About three days into basic training down south down in notorious Fort Gordon near Augusta, Georgia which all recruits go through Frank realized that he had made a big mistake, a very big mistake, since whatever seemingly slight anti-war feeling he had previously expressed had actually been a pretty powerful opposition to war but only had been awakened by the actual experience of Army life. Frank would always tip his hat later to those draft resisters who had formed their powerful opposition to war before facing induction and under the threat of several years of federal prison. Nevertheless, being no place where he could seek help and not sure what help he needed he went through both basic training and, and this is important, Advanced Infantry Training, the same training that Sam had gone through about a year earlier, meaning training as an infantryman, grunt, “cannon-fodder” as he came to call it. That meant no question in the post-Tet summer of 1969 when the Army was desperate for replacements after suffering heavy casualties and the only place on the good green planet when 11 Bravo skills were in anything like serious demand was in Southeast Asia orders to Vietnam. At the end of that training with a month’s leave before reporting to Fort Lewis, Washington for transit that was exactly what happened.                     

While home, still not sure what he was going to do, he got in touch with the Quakers up in Cambridge who he had found out were doing counselling for G.I.s in exactly his situation. The option presented which applied to him out of several not good paths to choose from, after a technical AWOL (absent without leave, a no no) to get dropped from the rolls for not reporting to Fort Lewis, was to turn himself in at the nearest Army post which was at Fort Devens out in Ayer, Massachusetts and apply for Conscientious Objector (CO) status. A long shot as the counsellor made clear but the route he had to follow if he expected relief. At that time the Army was turning down virtually all such applications whatever basis for the beliefs, sincere or not. Frank was turned down on the basis of his Catholic just war theory and moral and ethical objections none of which then were viable as reasons for discharge, and as the next step the Quakers had gotten him a lawyer who was very interested in testing these kind of Army turndowns in federal court on writs of habeas corpus. That was one strand of the Frank case which in the end would be the way that he got out of the Army via granting of a writ in civilian court and received an honorable discharge as a result since the court ruled the Army had acted arbitrarily and capriciously in turning down his admittedly sincere application.   

The other more important strand, the one which makes sense of why Frank startled Sam by affirming his pride in what he had done in the military one night soon after he had gotten out and more recently reconfirmed several weeks ago was his increasing commitment to the cause of peace, to stopping the massacres in Vietnam. One day he decided not without feelings of extreme anxiety to join a demonstration those Quakers from Cambridge were putting on at the front gates to the fort. During the duty day and in uniform both illegal. That action lead to his first special court-martial where he drew and served a six month sentence, or rather almost six months with a couple of weeks chopped off for good conduct. Sam had to Laura explained some of the specific details of that case previously about how the military authorities pretty high up in the fort conspired to try to ship him off under guard to Fort Lewis for transit to Vietnam something that

was only averted by a time temporary restraining order from that federal court in Boston. Also explained how Frank in his defense of his actions in open court had read into the record Bob Dylan’s searing Masters of War which drove the judges apoplectic.  

Stockade sentence one down Frank had clearly what he called “gotten religion” about war and peace during this whole process and almost immediately after he got out one Monday morning early on the weekly parade field where everybody lined up he came storming out of the barracks in civilian clothes carrying a sign “Bring The Troops Home.” That brought a second Special court-martial in which he drew another six month sentencing serving almost all of it before the writ of habeas corpus came through releasing him from the Army’s clutches. Otherwise Frank had mentioned one time he might still be in the stockade the way he was feeling and the Army was obliging him in his determination to break the chains holding him to the Army.

Another night Frank would tell Sam and some other friends that after he first turned himself in long before he served serious time he had felt relieved of the fear that troubles most people into thinking twice about doing what their heart tells them to do for fear of incarceration. He, not having been entangled with the law previously had had to stay in a naval prison cell in Boston subsequently a State Police holding cell before being transported to a short pre-trial detainment cell in the post stockade, after turning himself in as an AWOL. That very few days of initial imprisonment acted as a catalyst since a lot of the fear of jail time, which is nevertheless hard time to do no matter what anybody says, is a fear of the unknown and of stories heard from childhood about not doing this or that unless you wanted to wind up behind bars where they might lock you up and throw away the keys. The first taste relieves that anxiety. He made everybody laugh that night when he related how every freaking dumb-ass drill sergeant in basic training and AIT would warn their charges that any willful misconduct would wind them up in Fort Leavenworth, the maximum security hard-ass hard time place for the incorrigible. After surviving that first small bout, that mere taste Frank recalled that he would keep repeating to anybody who would listen- “hey, what do you want to do wind up in Leavenworth” when they threatened to put him away for keeps. A strange way to lose your fear of being locked up in the slammer but a nice cautionary tale. Lance Lawrence]

******

You never know, especially if you have lived in this wicked old world long enough, when some ancient memory long buried will come up and bite you. Not literally but make you sit up and take notice nevertheless. Take the case of one Frank Jackman, a writer, something of an inventor, and for our purposes one of those guys whom he, when in writing mode, has called a member in good standing of the Generation of ’68, a turbulent war time, roller coaster of emotion time which deeply formed many a baby-boomer. Oh yes and for our purposes since we will be speaking of war and what the hell to do about stopping it as we approach the final year of the 100^th anniversary of the First World War, the so-called war to end all wars, a full-fledged Army veteran. A veteran of a certain type not to be found in the cheap dollar a hard liquor drink bars adjacent to your local American Legion or Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting hall.        

This is the way Frank told Sam Lowell, a friend from high school down in North Adamsville, south of Boston also a veteran but of the more traditional type, except also minus the cheap bar stuff one night over a couple of drinks at The Grotto in downtown Boston near the Seaport District. (A story Sam would tell his longtime companion Laura, Laura Perkins as well after setting up the story with a brief Frank Jackman introduction outlined above.) Frank had, as mentioned previously, startled Sam by opening up the conversation with a statement that he had always been understatedly proud of his Army record, what he had done for the cause of peace in his very small individual way, when, using old familiar language from their growing up poor Acre section of town, the deal went down. (Sam had automatically thought after hearing that sentiment that Frank should be rather than understatedly have been “understandably” proud of that record wishing he had done something similar when he time had come to face his demons.)

Sam was a bit confused by Frank’s comment nevertheless since while both men were Army veterans and whatnot they seldom of late had talked about those experiences much less what lessons Frank as the more political type of the two had drawn from that experience. He asked Frank why he had brought up that point since they long ago had agreed that Frank had done the right thing during his Army time (and that Sam to his everlasting regret had not but nobody pushed that point then or now). What had caused that recollection to surface once more was a recent “controversy,” what Sam usually called “a tempest in a teapot” when whatever the problem was it was minor in the great scheme of things. This would prove the case as well but Sam could see where Frank would be incensed by the implications of what went as a result of that minor event in the great scheme of things.

Of all things almost fifty years later the big deal was over Frank’s discharge, his official DD214 which for all military personnel is the summation of one’s service time and discharge. What enabled you to be called veteran by friend and foe alike, and what entitled you to certain governmental benefits reserved for those in veteran status. If you can believe this would come up with what you already know from above about whether he was even a veteran. Sam gasped in disbelief but held up comment because he wanted every gory detail of this charge.

Both men, each from a different place but each having “gotten religion” on the issues of war and peace, began shortly after Frank’s discharge which was later than Sam’s to work with various anti-war veteran groups like the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Sam did that kind of work for a while and even today if Frank asks him he will show up at an anti-war rally against American aggression in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or the ever-growing threat of war in places like Iran and North Korea. But mostly he was bogged down with work, with three ex-wives and a parcel of kids who almost broke him with college tuition and left the politics to Frank. Frank as well would have periods of political inactivity due to a lot of the same reasons Sam had except he would stick with it more for the long haul-those periods of inactivity he called an “un-armed truce” with the war-monger. Particularly Frank (and Sam for a longer while than usual having finally gotten that parcel of well-behaved kids through college which had nearly broken him having a little more free time) became incensed and energized over the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Iraq invasion of 2003 and wound up joining the local chapter of another veteran’s peace group, Veterans Peace Action (VPA), in Boston. And that is where “the rubber hit the road” as one of Sam’s expensively-trained at his almost breaking point expense college boys would say.      

Frank, as anybody who read the introduction could see a mile away, once he is committed to something is in “all the way.” That was his approach to VPA once he decided to join up. That joining up process as previously with VVAW and other later organizational affiliations meaning no paper membership but an activist’s commitment and for a few years, several years actually, there was no problem, no political problem. When Frank had joined he had specifically joined the local VPA chapter since there was an option to join the local, the national organization or both. He opted for the local since he felt, and still feels that the national organization is something that he would be merely a paper member of which did not interest him in the least. Things seemed okay until a local member with ties the national organization who let’s call him as Frank did “the Inquisitor-General” began an individual campaign a few years ago directed mainly at Frank declaring that he was not a member of VPA since he has not, had never, paid dues to National (he did faithfully to the local chapter as well as contribute extra funds for various campaigns another usual step when he was “all in”). The Inquisitor-General as it turned out was right when Frank checked that matter out. Was right as far as that fact went although the local held to its long-time which was reaffirmed in their subsequently enacted by-laws that one could be a local member without being a National member as long as one, with various hardship exceptions, paid local dues. Mostly bureaucratic hokum as the whole thing drifted like smoke from his mind.

Not so the Inquisitor-General (let’s call him to save cyberspace I-G for simplicity’s sake hereafter). He would periodically badger Frank about his “non-membership” usually via e-mail since while the I-G may have been an organization stickler he played other than poster child “thorn in the side” no active role in the local organization. Had his base of support to the extent that he had any in the national office VPA bureaucracy.  Then about a year ago the I-G amped up his campaign, decided for his own nefarious reasons or his own delusions, or maybe both, that if Frank didn’t apply for National VPA membership which required proof of military discharge, that vaunted DD214 that he was “hiding” something ( that proof of discharge a requirement of the local chapter as well but being a looser not as well organized volunteer organization with fewer resources and less procedural hurtles had never asked Frank, or many others for that matter, for discharge papers upon becoming members). He was hiding something, something nefarious in a veterans’ organization of any stripe, that he was possibility not a veteran. Frank sensing a twisted turn in events in order to protect himself had quickly contacted the State Adjutant-General’s Office to get a copy of his discharge since he no longer had a copy at home. A few days later it came via e-mail and he forwarded that copy to the local executive committee which was the appropriate place to verify his status under normal circumstances. End of story as Sam was famous for saying.

Not quite, actually not by a long shot. The I-G as far as Frank could tell never pressed the issue further that year. Several weeks ago the I-G again pressed the issue not only to Frank but to the Executive Committee once again defaming Frank as possibility not a veteran. The executive committee or the members who overlapped from the previous year told the I-G that they had seen Frank’s discharge and that was that. As you now know that was not the case. The I-G essentially defaming the committee in the process wanted a copy of the discharge which he as a merely marginal member of the local VPA was emphatically not entitled to view for privacy reasons among others. He kept up a drumbeat including to Frank to produce the DD214 although Frank had a long-standing policy of not responding to anything from the I-G for any reason after few blow-outs a few years previously. On this particular issue Frank was adamant that he needed no “good conduct certificate” by the I-G (or any other entity including the local and National branches of VPA) as a stand-up anti-war soldier. Without going further into the silly rather continuously repetitive details at some point not yet concluded the Executive Committee started expulsion proceedings against the I-G and Frank has retained a lawyer to begin a defamation suit in Massachusetts court.           

         

During this whole nightmarish Kafkaesque/1984 process Frank had a chance to think through not only his pride in his individual actions against the American war machine during the Vietnam War but his changing attitude not toward the personal actions themselves but to their effectiveness. That is in a sense the real reason, if one was necessary since the question of discharge for him was finished the day he received his discharge back in February of 1971, Frank had kept his personal history “on the low” as they say in another context. That leads us finally to the title of this piece, the why of the Bolshevik way to stopping war in its tracks at the soldier, grunt, cannon-fodder on the ground.        

You see, and the first time Sam heard Frank mention this he freaked out, Frank has come to believe that pride or not he should have when ordered to Vietnam gone there and seen what he as an anti-war soldier could do to stop the war “in the trenches” taking a phrase from World War I. His later model the Bolsheviks, at that 1969 time their anti-war policies unknown to him, who Frank thought correctly ordered their male members if inducted or dragooned into the Czarist armies to accept that induction under penalty of expulsion from the organization (a policy of later Bolshevik-descended organizations including the Communist and Socialist Workers parties in their better days in the United States).

Not for the Bolsheviks the refusal of the draft notice as occurred in America with wide-spread refusal on an individual basis. Refusal by the kind of politically adept young men whom if they had been inducted and accepted orders to Vietnam en masse could have perhaps shifted the balance. Shifted it even more drastically than in the actual case where the American Army in Vietnam in 1969 no end in sight, no victory in sight, nothing but useless deaths in sight was half-mutinous. Had, as individual soldiers Frank met in VVAW and VPA would confirm from refusal to go beyond the minimum ordered march to FTA on their helmets to laying wasted under marijuana and other refined killer drugs. Was an army even to, maybe especially to, the top generals, a spent force and which would take an all- volunteer and several years to put back into fighting trim.

Such actions by those young men, by Frank, might have shortened the war by years. Of course such speculation would depend on whether such numbers would have been permitted to go, whether in Frank’s individual case he would have landed in a unit that would listen to him, whether he might like many others have landed in mutinous Long Binh Jail (LBJ). One thing Frank knew as this 100^th anniversary of the last year of the First World War was coming into focus collective action beat individual acts of conscience six, two and even. He laughed as he thought about how insignificant the I-G’s nonsense mattered in the great scheme of things except he had to be stopped in his tracks like any other miserable wannbe big fish in a little pond. Somethings never change.       

In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind

In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind    

By Lance Lawrence 

[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 previous site administrator Peter Markin 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]

[Although I am a much younger writer I today stand in agreement with Bart Webber and Si Lannon, older writers who I admire and whom I have learned a lot from about how to keep it short and sweet but in any case short on these on-line sites. As far as Phil Larkin’s, what did Si call them, yes, rantings about older writers heads rolling, about purges and the like seem like something out of Stalin’s Russia from what I have read about that regime and are dubious at best. The gripe the former two writers have about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board is what I support. As Bart first mentioned, I think, if nothing else this disclaimer has once again pointed told one and all, interested or not, that he, they have been “demoted.”  That I too, as Si pointed out, while I chafed as an Associate Book Critic and didn’t like it am now just another Everyman. Although this is the first time I have had the disclaimer above my article I plead once should be enough, more than enough.

In the interest of transparency I was among the leaders, among the most vociferous leaders, of what has now started to come down in the shop as urban legend “Young Turks” who fought tooth and nail both while Alan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin as blog moniker for reasons never made clear, at least to me) was in charge and essentially stoped young writer developing their talents and when we decided that Allan had to go, had to “retire” and bring in Greg Green and surrounded him with an Editorial Board. (I am sure Phil Larkin will take those innocent quotation marks around retire as definite proof that Allan was purged.) But I agree with Bart and Si’s sentiment that those on the “losing” end in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle had taken their "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. That fact should signal the end of these embarrassing and rather provocative disclaimers. Done.  Lance Lawrence] 

************ 

Recently in discussing Sam Lowell’s relationship with mountain music, the music from down in the hills and hollows of Kentucky where his father and his people before him had lived dirt poor for generations eking almost nothing out of the land that had been abandoned decades before by some going west driven spirits who played the land out and moved on, some moving on until they reached ocean edge California, Bart Webber noticed that he had concentrated a little too heavily on Sam’ s father’s  Kentucky hills and hollows. There were places like in the Piedmont of North Carolina with a cleaner picking style as exemplified more recently by Norman Blake who has revived the work of performers like Edda Baker and Pappy Sims by playing the old tunes. Also places like the inner edges of Tennessee and Georgia where the kindred also dwelled, places as well where if the land had played out there they, the ones who stayed behind in there tacky cabins barely protected against the weathers, their lack of niceties of modern existence a result not because they distained such things but down in the hollows they did not know about them, did not seem to notice the bustling outside world.

They all, all the hills and hollows people, just kept plucking away barely making ends meet, usually not doing so in some periods, and once they had abandoned cultivating the land these sedentary heredity “master-less men” thrown out their old countries, mainly the British Isles, for any number of petty crimes, but crimes against property and so they had to go on their own or face involuntary transportation they went into the “black god” mines or sharecropping for some Mister to live short, nasty, brutish lives before the deluge. But come Saturday night, come old Fred Brown’s worn out in need of paint red barn the hill people, the mountain people, the piedmont brethren, hell, maybe a few swamp-dwellers too, would gather up their instruments, their sweet liquor jugs, their un-scrubbed bare-foot children or their best guy or gal and play the night away as the winds came down the mountains. This DNA etched in his bones by his father and the kindred is what Sam had denied for much of his life.          

But like Bart said when discussing the matter with Sam one night sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it had crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco. Crashed out by word of mouth at first and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who got his word from Diana Nelson who got it from a cousin from North Adamsville nearer Boston who frequented the coffeehouse on Beacon Hill and Harvard Square hipped her to this new folk music program that he had found flipping the dial of his transistor radio one Sunday night.

See Sam and Diana were tucked away from the swirl down in Carver about thirty miles as the crow flies from Boston and Cambridge but maybe a million social miles from those locales and had picked up the thread somewhat belatedly. He, along with his corner boys, had lived in their little corner boy cocoon out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner figuring out ways to get next to girls like Diana but who were stuck, stuck like glue to listening to the “put to sleep” music that was finding its way to clog up Jimmy Jack’s’ hither-to-fore “boss” jukebox. Christ, stuff like Percy Faith’s Moon River that parents could swoon over, and dance to. Had picked the sound up belatedly when they were fed up with what was being presented on American Bandstand and WJDA the local rock station, when they were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, and looked different from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence.

Oh sure, as Bart recognized once he thought about it for a while, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood a century or so ago and have it count has tried to draw its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of that decade, maybe the first part of the next. That big picture is what interested him. What Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed and they were fighting an unsuccessful rearguard action against the night-takers and he was forced to consider other issues. And Sam had been like that ever after. 

The way Sam told it one night a few years back, according to Bart, some forty or so years after his ear changed forever that change had been a bumpy road. Sam had been at his bi-weekly book club in Plymouth where the topic selected for the next meeting was the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak then since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook. He had along with Bart and Jack Dawson also had been around that time discussing how they had been looking for roots as kids. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of their  generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree.

Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave had spilled them onto these shores was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So their generation had had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he had started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different after Diana had clued him in about that folk music program. Although for a while he could not find that particular program or Carver was out of range for the airwaves. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he fortunately had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week and so it was before long that he was tuned in.

His own lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music to comply with whatever necessary FCC mandates went with the license.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a new guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music. Those coffeehouses were manna from heaven, well, because they were cheap for guys with little money. Cheap alone or on a date, basically as Sam related to his book club listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs.

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on the radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys, Norman Blake just starting his rise along with various expert band members to bring bluegrass to the wider younger audience that did not relate to guys like Bill Monroe and his various band combinations, and some other bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school. He furthermore had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement too of Bobby Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.  

Then one night, a Sunday night after he had picked up the Boston folk program station on the family radio (apparently the weak transistor radio did not have the energy to pick up a Boston station) he was listening to the Carter Family’s Wildwood Flower when his father came in and began singing along. After asking Sam about whether he liked the song and Sam answered that he did but could not explain why his father told him a story that maybe put the whole thing in perspective. After Sam’s older brother, Lawrence, had been born and things looked pretty dicey for a guy from the South with no education and no skill except useless coal-mining his father decided that maybe they should go back to Kentucky and see if things were better for a guy like him there. No dice, after had been in the north, after seeing the same old tacky cabins, the played out land, the endless streams of a new generation of shoeless kids Sam’s father decided to head back north and try to eke something out in a better place. But get this while Sam’s parents were in Kentucky Sam had been conceived. Yeah, so maybe it was in the genes all along.          

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

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 previous site administrator Peter Markin 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 noted in a review posted here (and in the on-line version of American Folk Gazette) on Woody Guthrie’s forever influence on generations of folk musicians if not other genres as well I agreed with Bart Webber in a previous article of his about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board. If nothing else this disclaimer has been attached now to a fourth article I have contributed in this space which has once again pointed told one and all, interested or not, that I have been “demoted”  from Associate Book Reviewer to Everyman. Not directly, no not directly from this crew. No matter how tough Allan Jackson was, and he was, he spoke his mind and let the devil take the hinter post. So once again I plead once would have been enough, more than enough.

That brings me back to the additional point I in my last review that those of us who defended Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin for a blog moniker) in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle have taken our "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. I noted Going on and on about the internal purging process, and while for public consumption he has “retired” I know enough from youthful left-wing politics which at the organizational, turf, level could be as crazy as any bourgeois political fights without the advantage of some material to now know that is what happened to the poor bastard is a disservice. Moreover what originally appeared to me to be the rantings of a cranky old man (I am an old man but usually not cranky) by Phil Larkin, who in the interest of transparency is an old growing up friend, about a purge of older writers, or maybe a putting them on the back-burner seems more rational each day. Si Lannon]    

**********

A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s. After some thought I pinpointed the first time to a seventh grade music class (Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called Dasher the Flasher just for rhyming purposes but which with today’s sensibilities about the young would not play very well) when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of music made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land.

In thinking about when I first heard Pete Seeger sign I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time I heard the emerging folk minute. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being play in the fall of 1962 on the Boston stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.          

After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene. In those days, the early 1950s I think, The Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare brush. Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized. Interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday jug and head to the juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle. Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook. 

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.            

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 previous site administrator Peter Markin 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]

[I agree with Bart Webber in a previous article about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board. If nothing else this disclaimer has been attached now to three articles I have contributed in this space which has pointed told one and all, interested or not, that I have been “demoted”  from Associate Book Reviewer to Everyman. Once would have been enough, more than enough.

Those of us who defended Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin for a blog moniker) in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle have taken our "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. Going on and on about the internal purging process, and while for public consumption he has “retired” I know enough from youthful left-wing politics which at the organizational, turf, level could be as crazy as any bourgeois political fights without the advantage of some material to now know that is what happened to the poor bastard is a disservice. Disinterested readers who want to read the main piece without disruptions are nevertheless presented with this excess baggage under some theory that it is informative about such inner social media workings seems rather preposterous in this day in age. Si Lannon]    

 *******

     

Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through (when you would have rather been outside playing before you got that good dose of religion which made the hymns make sense), like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first does of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year, or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things. One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind.    

Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square (and got full program play complete with folk DJs and for a time on television via the Hootenanny show) that is not where I first heard or learned the song. No for that one song I think the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school where Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his, rock and roll) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. Almost everybody covered him then, wrote poems and songs about him, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way that he took song to entertain the people with.                 

It was not until sometime later that I got the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land. That is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that keep on moving thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath  as he went along. Wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting west to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of true to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent called America and how this land was ours, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.             

Down And Out In Gotham Town- “Batman” (1989)-A Film Review

Down And Out In Gotham Town- “Batman” (1989)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Batman, starring Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, 1989

WTF. Yeah WFT I am still standing although for the life of me I don’t why after the screed I ran through in the last film review I did if you could call it that Marvel Comics’ The Avengers. WTF too that I am still doing kids’ silly super-hero comic book airheads turned to the multi-plex screens all because everybody, boy or girl from the look of things, between the age of a about eight to twenty-one no longer can sit through the twenty minutes it takes to read a comic book. Said kids will only sit through a couple of hours of swill, as long as the dialogue doesn’t exceed short sentences and grunts, there is kick-ass action every thirty seconds for no apparent reason, and there is an ample supply of vat- tubbed butter-drenched popcorn and gigantic refillable soda cups.

Although you and I both know if you have been following this race to the bottom of filmdom being forced on me with this brainless twit stuff that this is the first stages of a purge by the recently installed new leadership which seems to be making every effort to get rid of the old writers who held this operation together in the days when the assuredly purged, don’t believe that voluntary retirement stuff, Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin on this site) was made to fall on his sword. We who voted for his retention, meaning against the installation of the new pope Greg Green and his flunky Ed Board, are expected to follow suit. And assuredly as well the quickest way to get rid of senior writers is to give them assignments picking up the popcorn tubs and soda cups after a bunch of lazy kids who won’t read.          

Here is the latest Greg Green has ordered me put on “probation” and hence this disciplinary assignment from hell  (yeah, yeah through the Ed Board but even those know nothing eight to twenty-one year olds know this has the earmarks of the “boss” making the decision and not some hireling nonsense). The reason? Well off that last review if not the first one there are a million possibilities. Start off with my WFT that might offend those eight to twenty year olds who emphatically don’t read much less review screed-like film review. Even there PG parents don’t care as long as they don’t hear their precious Jills and Johnnies don’t use that language around the house. How very liberal. But strangely, or maybe not so strangely since “teacher’s pet” Kenny Jacobs mimicking me started using salty language that is not the reason. Although given this new crew’s kind of left-handed way of doing things since Allan’s purge now that they have wind in their sails that could be the disguised reason. Probably not though since in some weird modern let’s be hip and let everything but the very worse language slide through they are catering to that younger crowd which see the whole thing as picturesque. How very liberal.       

       

You might think that daring them to print the damn review after skewering not only the film’s reasons for existence but basely calling the whole thing an empty shell would be the reason. After all a bad review, which by the way Alan Jackson cared less about which way the review went as long as it was well-written and less than three thousand words (so he didn’t have to pay a premium bonus number of words in cyberspace being meaningless). This crew from what I have heard in order to grab some extra revenue is taking “advertisements” from the movie companies in this space. And the surest way to lose such lucrative emoluments is to have one of your writers declare their whole operation a house of cards However Greg mentioned to I think Lance Lawrence that these modern day studios still work on the old premise that the only bad publicity is no publicity.     

You might, and again be wrong, that skewering the characters and their personal identities would draw the line and put me beyond the pale. Calling patriotic Captain America a brawny brainless twit who would be hard-pressed to figure out how to use a spoon if he ever had occasion to use one. Ditto the Hulk except dumber when he goes off the deep end and turns into a green balloon-ish cretin. Calling beautiful Thor a wooden head, as wooden as those Valhalla Viking ships that faded from history fast. Sorrowfully calling Black Widow nothing but a commie bitch, eye candy for the jet set, and not to be trusted under any circumstances. Mutants, social misfits and rogues all. Even the brainy Ironman who in the end didn’t want to play ball, got all crazy and stuff.       

No, the reason if you can believe this that I am on “probation’ is that as has been standard policy at this site since the old days when Sam Lowell, now really retirement but of late muzzled, ruled the roost as official Senior film critic, a title now abolished in the new ‘democratic’ era I did not give an adequate plot-line summary. What? What plot beyond kick-ass bad guys every thirty seconds in between gulps of soda or throated popcorn for the audience and don’t get any scratches on the uniforms or one’s person. Does it matter if the “enemy” is Hydra or Thor’s aunt? No, I think not and so there is the very real substance to my feeling that my days in this space are numbered. Once they say they have a pressing assignment for me out with the exiled Allan Jackson out in Utah I can kiss my ass good-bye.    

That brings to the so-called plot-line of this Batman film from 1989. I am doomed anyway so once again I will say –what plot. Batman, played by mild-mannered Michael Keaton in between bouts of going under the Wayne mansion downy billow beds with investigative reporter Kim Basinger has a run-in or seven with the Joker, played by living maniac Jack Nicholson, who got caught short in an acid vat after killing his mobster boss. In the end, ho-hum, the Joker takes the big fall, takes the trip six feet under. Any more plot-line summary than that Greg Green can sue me. Enough said.     

The Battle Royale Cometh-The Dogfight For The Soul Of The Democratic Party-Call It Between Sleepy Joe Biden And Feel The Bern Sanders And You Would Not Be Far Off

The Battle Royale Cometh-The Dogfight For The Soul Of The Democratic Party-Call It Between Sleepy Joe Biden And Feel The Bern Sanders And You Would Not Be Far Off

By Alan Jackson

                                                                               

I have been around the political and cultural commentary business for a long time so nothing surprises me much when readers come out of left-field to have their say. That was the case recently from several readers who got up on their hindlegs when I mentioned, in passing, that a bigtime fight was brewing underneath the struggle for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. I mentioned, again in passing, that the corporate Democrats have had such a stranglehold on the party that it has become a fossil, has forgotten how to use its majority to actually win and forestall all the bullshit coming from the right. Has become the party of the donor class (or part of it), lobbyists, media mavens, and fussy insider bureaucrats who could not find their ways pass the Beltway with three tries.

No question that the Democrats have never claimed to be anything but a pro-capitalist, pro-corporate globalization party including one presidential candidate who has made a mantra out of declaring she is a “capitalist to the bone.” But in other times, and not to far back, they used to at least use the fig leaf of being a “people’s party.” (That “not too far back” being on the long side the New Deal and short side some variation of the Great Society.) Hence the alienation of former traditional bases like the working class, especially the working poor. The task as they have seen it is to get out the vote on election day and then do business as usual.    

Enter a new approach, an approach that reflects the very real damage Republicans have done to the electorate through voter suppression, increased hoops to pass through to register to vote and getting to the ballot box itself. That is to realize that many constituencies are hungry to have a say in history. Groups that have been neglected or not seen as reliable and worthwhile prospects to organize (from the comfort of Washington offices to be sure). In short what has become known as the Phillips thesis where rather than concentrate on some white working-class voter who might listen to the message, really a mythical figment of the Beltway imagination the party go after the young and energetic en masse, communities of color in all their diversities and the working poor (those who are working two and three jobs to put food on the table).        

So yes two very different ideas of how to avoid in the short term another Trump four years, four years unchained and long term to confine the Republicans to the dustbin of history. These ideas got their first serious workout in the Clinton-Sanders clash for the 2016 Democratic nomination but not everybody, including me, saw how much the corporate Democrats were out of step with the times and could not muster enough energy to beat a second-rate third rate bum of the month like Donald J. Trump. In every way as we head into the 2020 campaign season this fight which has been a long time coming is going to be played out as the race falls between Sleepy Joe Biden and Senator Sanders (with an outside chance of Senator Warren carrying some grassroots water). More later.