***Tales From The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood- The Rock Of The Generation Of ’68

 

 

From The Pen Of The Frank Jackman

My old running buddy, Brad Badger, running as members of the North Adamsville cross country and track teams all through high school mercifully completed, just completed that sweet ass liberation June of 1964 were primed for something to do that one hot, humid July night. Ready to jump, ready to go steady teddy, ready, well, jump ready to take our first freedom breath after completing a big rite of passage and dance the night away to the tunes that we had grown up with and the music that we were beginning to dig that was coming like some wicked ocean sea breeze blowing in from Adamsville Bay coming out some sire song to us. (That “dig” sweet water word a left-over from the tip of the “beat” boys era, you know Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady, Burroughs and the boys, era that we had gotten a tail-end whiff of and liked, so yeah, dig). Hell, we were ready to get the dust of the old town off our shoes if not ready to take that hitchhike road that we spent many a sultry sweaty summer night, no money in our pockets, no girls to ease the sultry sweaty night away, worse, no prospect of girls to ease that condition, worse still no car to blow that dust off our shoes  even as a trial run, talking about in front of the grey granite step of the old high school in order to search for the great blue-pink American night that we thought would cure what ailed us. When we went it would, would cure our hungers, for a while but that was music for the future.  

(Hitchhiking for those who are clueless, which could be quite a few since that art has not been fashionable and rightly so since the mid-1970s as the dangerous world out there on the roads got noticeably more dangerous, especially for young women and guys who did not look like football players, was merely sticking out your thumb on some woe begotten road and hope for the best. On certain roads you could wait minutes and some friendly van full of hippies would add you as one more to the crowd in the back, on others like one night in Winnemucca out in the Nevadas it was eight hours and sleeping on a desert roadside waiting.)     

I should also say that that running around, part one, the sports running as opposed to the running around town stuff I will get to in a minute was really not exactly right. We ran on those sports teams mentioned above but as far as running went Brad was a whizz, was a kid who if it had been maybe ten years later when running for fun, running to stay in shape  and top runners were treated like kings and queens, maybe better, really took off would have gotten a scholarship to some college in track. (As it was Brad was so desperate to shake that old town off, desperate to get the hell away from his family life that not long after the time of this tale he joined the Navy.) I, on the other hand, when it came to the meets would run out of gas, had what Brad said one time was the “slows,” and he was right. But enough of that because the other running around is what was driving us that night.         

Yeah, the running around town as fellow corner boys up at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor where our leader Frankie Riley held forth nightly, was what was driving us that night. See Brad and I had first met in elementary school down at the Adamsville “projects” where his family moved away from to Gloversville in the fifth grade and then came back to North Adamsville in the ninth grade. I had moved to North Adamsville in the seventh grade where I, a socially awkward kid, was taken under the wing by Frankie, the reigning prince of the junior high corner boys who met in front of Doc’s Drugstore across the street from North Adamsville Junior High. When Brad and I reconnected in ninth grade I, naturally, had brought him into the corner boy society, the high school corner boy society that held forth at the pizza parlor a sign of coming of age in the North Adamsville corner boy night.

I, if I had time, could tell you a million Frankie Riley-invested corner boy stories but this one is about Brad and me and our musical awakenings so I only need to stop here to say that Frankie’s part in this particular story is only that he lent us his boss ’59 two-tone Chevy (cherry red and white, the cherry red according to Frankie-speak meaning you know what for any young woman brave enough to get in that front passenger seat with our boy) to get to the Surf Ballroom weekly dance (Friday and Saturday night) down in Hullsville about twenty miles south of our town, also along the shore.      

See, and no disrespect to Frankie, or his sovereignty, but Brad and I were crazy to crazy to get down to the Surf Ballroom, like I said the one down in Hull on the South Shore, the one right next to the beach, not the one on the other side of Boston, in the north near the subway station in Revere where they, old-timers I guess, really did waltz/foxtrot/rhumba/swing ballroom dancing to while their time away. Forget all that parent music stuff what we were craving was to hear the latest sounds, the latest rock sounds that we had been craving to hear for about four years. We sensed, hell we talked about it enough on those sultry sweaty summer night high school steps earlier in the summer that a new dispensation in rock music was coming through the wilderness and we wanted in.

Even though Brad had moved away in elementary school before we could compare notes both of us agreed that we had been washed clean, had gotten that old time be-bop swing stuff that our parents listened to (and by control of the radio and record player force-fed us to listen to until we got our very own transistor radios to drown out that awful noise up in our respective bedrooms). You know that Frank Sinatra, Vaughn Monroe, Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page stuff that drove us up a wall with its mewing. Then came some whirlwind out of the south mainly, came like a hell-wind to hear our parents talk about it, came out of small record companies in Memphis, came all rocking and rolling there was no other word for it, came with swirling hips, came with sneers, came with guys playing guitar like their souls were on fire just to please, well, you know damn well, to please the young girls who were crowding the stages and thinking who knows what thoughts (we know now what thoughts and what they were willing to do to get some rocker’s attention). All we knew was that whatever air was left after guys like Elvis, Warren Smith, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, the Big Bopper, Eddie Corcoran, maybe a little Wanda Jackson, Jerry Lee, maybe Jerry Lee above all since he came roaring at us as we hit puberty, left the girls panting was we had better get on that train if we wanted to go anywhere with the girls, when we figured out we wanted to go with them. And so we did, did maybe by osmosis, or more likely after that eternally sprint home to watch the latest from American Bandstand to see what and who was hot.         

Then, I don’t know, the music died, or something about say 1959 or 1960 (yeah, maybe 1960 because then that four year wait makes sense). Well let me give you the obituary on the thing, although maybe you know it already, know what it was like when the parents or some parents anyway because it wasn’t us, pulled the hammer down. First Elvis died (or something like that since after he went into the Army he was never heard from again, not making serious rock and roll music but mainly odd-ball movies with improbable or non-existent plots where he was like some wooden Indian singing songs that our mothers could croon over, the kiss of death) Jerry Lee swooned (got waylaid really by some silliness about kissing cousins or something), and Chuck got caught with Mister’s women (a no-no then and barely tolerated now despite all the post-racial noise). I won’t even speak about the attritions through death, young death like Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper and other untoward things that happened when the music died. Hell we were not sociologists or musicologists we just knew the music died, knew it was beginning to creak like our parent’s music.

Yeah, we had been in a trough, had been sing-songing some lame slow beat love song heartache stuff, although we were no strangers either of us to that heartache stuff we were not going to let that get us down, not let our music be determined by some Brenda Lee/Patsy Kline/Lesle Gore/Fabian/Bobby Vee conspiracy to rob us of real rock. Jesus it was awful. Guys singing about their own true loves holding chaste hands in the movies and falling asleep, probably because it was some boring Elvis movie and worrying, Jesus, get this, worrying about their reputations like those chaste hands were what every guy, or every girl come Monday morning before school “lav” talkfest was trying to emulate. Jesus, or did I say that already. Worrying about some reputation instead of finding some righteous rock and roll Ruby who would dance on the tables until dawn. Yeah, you know you have gone back to the Stone Age, maybe before, when songs start sounding like good advice from your parents about the virtues of the straight and narrow.

How about this one, this song if it can bear the name, from out of necrophilia land about some bimbo (sorry there is no other way to describe her) after her guy got her out of his stalled car on some back road railroad track who goes back to the car with the train whistle blowing up yonder looking for some two-bit class ring. Yeah, sorry teen angel, sorry but I think he bought the thing at Woolworth’s, besides he had already given it to some Susie a few weeks before, asked for it back when he met you, when you broke them up. So yeah, two bit class ring. Get this next song though, one night some young thing had a fight with her guy (who knows what reason but probably sex, or really, no sex) and went off the deep end, went down to the perfectly harmless sea and threw herself in. But that is not the worst of it she wanted her guy to join her in this suicide pact, communicating through some siren song that has lured men for ages. Christ. It was only his good sense, but maybe that is giving him too much credit after what she put him through, he pulled her away from our mother, the sea.

Put that noise against the prospect of one night of sin (even if the damn record companies sanitized the thing as the “purer” “one night with you” every guy got the picture) or some hot girl leaving you breathless or you checking out some sweet little sixteen. Yeah, so there was definitely a trough, a depression in music land, teen section. Hell, it was only many, many years later when it did not really matter that we found out that it was really a musical counter-revolution but what did we know then we were not sociologists all we knew what the music on the transistors did not “speak to us,” ah, sucked.            

 

Like I said we started hearing some stuff, some stuff guys were singing over in England and places like that, singing stuff that we had had heard when we were kids, Chuck, Bo, Arthur Alexander stuff, stuff too that we were not that familiar with, serious black-etched blues stuff from guys like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon. Stuff that got our juices flowing again, made us want to turn those transistor radios up louder. And that is why that sultry sweaty summer night with borrowed Frankie car under our seats we were heading down to the Surf Ballroom to hear some local guys who were connected to the next big wave coming through. So sweaty from the drive down on this warm humid night we were ready for the next break-out that was just beginning to form with a bunch of guys from England pushing the envelope as the Surf came into view. Praise be.        

And so Brad and me, courtesy of that savior Frankie’s lent car, headed down on Route 3 to Hullsville looking, looking for our lost musical roots found (oh yeah, and girls too don’t forget that and don’t worry we were not pure “philosopher-kings, would not have known the intellectual concept behind the term but that girl part will come later, and not much later at that). Hungry, damn hungry for a sound that two guys who were not the most social guys (you know into every dance committee, every prom thing, school newspaper, civic improvement program, or Great Books Club aficionados), certainly not the best dressed (black chino pants, sneakers, off-fashion plaid shirts bought at the “Bargie” by penny-saving mothers, so no to that best dressed thing), or had much success with girls, girls from school anyway although more so with unknown girls on those nights over in Harvard Square where our not best dressed kind of fit in with the folk minute that the place would become famous for along with the Village and North Beach out in Frisco or down at the Surf where our line of patter about the new breeze in music coming in to wash us clean got us a hearing from kindred girls who like I said got tired of music their mothers could “dig.”

Looking for that sound that drove our younger years when even if we did not get all the lyrics knew that that be-bopping sound of those guitars (think of those guitars flailing on Be-Bop-A-Lula and those wailing sexy saxes on Bill Haley’s stuff like Rock Around The Clock) and which we heard could be found at the Surf Ballroom with a local group that was doing covers of those very same English groups (who remember were covering the American classics from the mid-1950s that they were just discovering, for example, that Little Red Rooster of Howlin’ Wolf that the Stones had just covered or the Beatles’ covering Sweet Little Sixteen).

As we hit the strategic beach parking lot across the street from the entrance to the ballroom we noticed the lines already fully-formed waiting to get in and noticed as well that as usual those lines had many more girls, usually in groups of three or four, that guys who tended to show later after they had struck out elsewhere, or were getting up their “liquid” courage in cars parked in that same lot we were parked in. (These guys were clueless that the gals in line would already be “picked up” well before their courage kicked in by guys like Brad and me who would confront them early and not smell like a distillery even if we had been drinking but keep that tip to yourselves.) See the parking lot was very strategic in a lot of ways. Underage guys and gals, including those late crashers who will also strike out here, sorry guys, could sit in their cars and drink some ill-bought liquor. Ill-bought by some wino down the road who would get whatever you wanted as long as he got his bottle of Thunderbird wine as his “tip” or on some nights local guys over twenty-one would hang around ready to take orders but they usually catered to the girls who wouldn’t deal with a wino but who might tumble to a guy who could buy liquor, and have a “boss” car. Mostly the booze was not beer which you would be hard –pressed to get by the bouncers with on your breath but cheapjack Southern Comfort that you could drink straight up without any added stuff and could drink without ice in a pinch or some vodka for those who were worried about some mother breathalyzer test when they got home.     

The Surf Ballroom was that night, as it had been all summer every Friday and Saturday night, packed, packed with a sweaty, sulky, steaming mass of aficionados to hear the old time religion, to hear the Rockin’ Ramrods split the universe, split the universe into “the squares” (no explanation necessary almost from time immemorial just look at you parents) and “the hip” (not short for hippie, not then, not in July 1964, that longer term would come a few years later when the acid-edged summer of love and its aftermath brought yet another new breeze through the land and we thought we could change the world through the agency of music that opened up our brains to new experiences. Then it was just a beat word signifying, signifying what-cool, okay, signifying ding-dong daddy, signifying be-bop baby). There was no room for squares that night. That sweaty night filled with bad booze (since the Surf catered to teenagers who could not drink in twenty-one year old Massachusetts the drinking as I said was done outside in the beach parking lots). But that bad booze stuff can be passed by because this night day we are talking about rock and roll not what liquor got one into the mood) and low-slung drugs (maybe pot, tea or whatever you called it in your neighborhood just starting to rear its head in the teenage crowd even out in the suburbs but then the drug of the month more probably bennies, diet pills, you know speed easy enough to get from some friendly doctor to help solve your weight problem, if you had one, or had a friend who had one). Yeah so any squares who might have slipped through the cracks, didn’t know what they were getting into, if  they were present then they were hugging the walls, doing that wall-flower thing that have done since they invented dance hall walls or just as likely, seeing as they were teenagers and maybe inventive going undercover a little as hip.

A huge cry, a howl almost came up when the Ramrods came on stage blaring out Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven at one time almost an anthem of teen nation telling the old fogies that yeah sure we love your classical music-in music class- but on ocean-drenched sultry steamy Friday nights we crave rock and roll, Mr. Chuck, thank you. Naturally they followed up along that line with other classics like Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock but get this they interspersed this stuff with old time serious blues, electric blues that I learned more about later but which just then was new and strange sound. Somehow the Stones and Beatles who were becoming everyday names in music seemed like they had crashed some Maxwell Street, Chicago record store and grabbed every blues platter in sight and so the Ramrods had picked up on that movement. So when they did Howlin’ Wolf’s Little Red Rooster picked up via the Stones (a song that at that time was banned in Boston, banned on the radio stations for its too close sexual innuendos which might get some besotted teen all stirred up, Jesus. Like even the lowliest square knew this barnyard metaphor sex stuff from that whether they were going to anything about it or not). They closed the first set with Bo Diddley’s, well, Bo Diddley  a song that had special meaning to me from “projects” days when my old friend Billy Curran tried to cover the thing and almost got run out of the hall he was singing the song in because Billy was white and Bo, well, Bo was black as night. Yeah, that was the way it was in those projects, and not just there either.                          

So that Surf night we had plenty of old and new stuff to listen to in the world of rock and roll, and nothing about teen angels, earth angels, johnny angels or dippy girls running into the sea but I don’t want to go on and go about the playlist as that was only once aspect of why we were down there that night. See we heard that there were plenty of girls there that had also gotten weary of angels, dippy girls doing dippy things, guys bleeding their hearts out in song to a bestirred world and were looking for the same break-out that was driving us crazy. Girls who danced all rock and roll wild like they were direct descendants of old Warren Smith’s Rock and Roll Ruby back in the day. And they were there, and they had had their drinks out in the parking lot before the doors opened (and at intermission went out, ink-stamped to get back in again, and drank that Southern Comfort or vodka to keep the flames going).

So Brad and I had our dancing shoes on and danced with quite a few young women who seemed to be there to dance and not necessarily looking to be picked up. They were easy to talk to, loved when I talked about the new breeze blowing and about how we were all heartily fed up with the old music that was putting us to sleep but every other young woman seemed to be “slumming,” Friday night slumming with girlfriends while their boyfriends were, I don’t know, doing some silly thing so I know I was not getting to first base with any of them. Not an unusual situation then, or now maybe. Some nights I would wind up with five telephone numbers and sometimes none. This looked like a none night.

Except for one young gal, Rosalind, whom I noticed during the second set and who seemed to be out of place there. Seemed like Harvard Square, maybe Cambridge Common which was even then starting to pile up with guys with beards and girls with pale blue- eyed dreams, would be her hang-out spot. She had a wreath of flowers and multi-colored ribbons in her hair, not unusual and in some quarters on a Saturday night say at the Fillmore in Frisco almost required on young women who wanted to be “hip,” or even get a guy to look at them later in the decade but not in style around our way then, and was wearing a very short dress showing off her long thin legs to good effect.

Most young women that night would have been wearing a starched blouse and some kind of dress maybe just slightly above the knees which was considered daring then and there. That outfit representing a certain probity but also reflecting without making a big deal absolute about it the Catholic modest girl thing since most of the young women there were from Catholic heavy places like North Adamsville and the church via parents dictated proper dress. By the way Brad and I went out of our ways to avoid the NA girls we saw at the dance, and there were plenty of them just like us trying to break out of the old town’s grip and not wanting more than to tacitly recognize fellow townies, except to give the NA wave of recognition. (Not the “nod” that was reserved for guys you knew a little but were not your corner boys but maybe you had seen them around, okay guys, for sure.) Like I said we were tired of that old town and were ready to break-out.  Rosalind also had a kind of carefree sway about her, what I would come to recognize as that California laid-back style that would drive a lot of activity later in the decade as we picked up the musical vibes coming from the West Coast. For me though that sway spoke of come hither moments (and as I would later find out the sway was aided by having just done a few tokes outside before the dance started).

Naturally I asked her to dance, she agreed, and we seemed to connect after that dance was over once I started talking my talk about the new breeze and about how I thought she looked like some Botticelli angel (yeah, I had my lines down then even when the woman as here confessed that she did not know who Botticelli was). I asked for another dance and we kind of jitterbugged to Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally.

After the song was over we went to a side table to talk. She told me her name, that she was from California, had come East to go to Boston University to major in English Lit (always a good selling point for me) and had heard the Ramrods play in Boston one night and came down to dance the night away (and while talking gave off that knowing look that she was drug high I had begun to be able to recognize as different from the glassier alcohol look that I got from most girls then. Also gave that come hither look like she didn’t mind if she didn’t go back to her apartment in Boston alone, although that could have been my desire stretching things out a bit). She also told me that there were lots of guys (not too many woman except as vocalists, one especially who was tearing up things, Grace Slick) who were putting bands together with a new sound, a sound based on the old time rock and roll (which she said she loved), a sound in tune with the increasingly obvious drug scene out there in California where the music had to connect with whatever drug was percolating in your head. We talked for a while like that about musical trends but I kind of put it in the back of my mind then (not to return until a few years later when I first heard the Jefferson Airplane and went crazy, filled with drugs percolating in my head crazy). What I was interested then for openers was figuring out how to get her out into Frankie’s car that night for a few drinks and then take her home (to her apartment) if things worked out that way.

Then up steps on Brad Badger who seemed to know her and said hello to her ignoring me which I should have recognized as a telltale sign that he was on the move. It seems that Brad had danced with her earlier in the evening, had afterward gotten involved with talking to a couple of guys he knew, had gone out to the car and had a few drinks, vodka so mother would not smell it on his breath if he struck out that night after he headed home head hanging down, and had had a lot of the same conversations as she and I had (we would compare notes later. Brad however never got into the drug scene, never got into the Airplane and other such groups but that is a different story). So Rosalind sat there and alternatively danced with us for the rest of the second and the last set. I wound up getting the very last dance, the Kingsmen’s Louie, Louie just then the dance anthem of the month. Off of that sweaty dance I asked her if I could take her home. She said no that she had agreed to go home (her apartment, okay) with Brad. Damn, that meant that I would not only not get her where I wanted her but I would have to hustle a ride home with somebody heading toward North Adamsville since the buses were no longer running at that midnight hour. And since our old corner boy ethos dictated that “three was company,” too much company when one guy “scored,” that was that.  And so Brad and Rosalind had an affair for most of the rest of the summer, a few weeks anyway.  Mainly I did not see him during that time, although he always had a big grin on his face when he stopped by the pizza parlor to see his corner boys in passing.   

Of course that was not the end of the story. Apparently Brad’s charms only lasted so long with Rosalind and her West Coast “cool” manner. (Brad was not a college guy, not going to college and was not a literary type like her and so they probably wound up not having much to talk about whatever that big grin meant. What the hell you know what it meant.)  Toward the end of August she dumped Brad, reasons unknown. Not a hard thump but clearly Brad was hanging around the pizza parlor more around Labor Day so we all knew something was up. A couple of weeks later he joined the Navy which he was going to do anyway although I had thought not so soon. We never did talk about whether Rosalind hurried up the “getting out of town” process, ever.

One Friday night about the first part of October I went down to the Surf with Frankie (in Frankie’s car of course) after Brad had gone to basic training out in the Great Lakes someplace and was sitting at one of the tables checking out the scene before the Ramrods went on for their first set. Somebody tapped me from behind and it was Rosalind with a big smile, a big dope-invested smile and asked me if she could sit down. I said sure and we talked for a while (she never mentioned Brad for whatever breeze reason she had and I never mentioned him either as I was trying to “score” with her. That “disappearing a guy” too was part of our corner boy ethos).        

One Friday night about the first part of October I went down to the Surf one Friday night with Frankie (in Frankie’s car of course) and was sitting at one of the tables checking out the scene before the Ramrods went on for their first set. Somebody tapped me from behind and it was Rosalind with a big smile, a big dope-invested smile and asked me if she could sit down. I said sure and we talked for a while (she never mentioned Brad and I never mentioned him either as I was trying to “score” with her. That too was part of our corner boy ethos).        

The long and short of it was that I wound up taking her home (to her apartment) in Frankie’s car naturally. (Frankie as king hell king of the pizza parlor corner boys had made up most of the rules that we lived by and so had to live with that. Frankie wound up getting a ride home from his on and off girlfriend, Joanna, so things were cool.) We had an affair for a couple of months, walking and talking about literature a lot, going to Harvard Square, the beach, places like that, I was having a great time once I got used that California cool, until just before Christmas break when she said would be going back to California. That cool by the way included a desire, a strong desire to not make commitments and not get serious which was kind of okay with me. Kind of. That is when she told me she had a boyfriend back there, a UCLA guy, whom she might want to get back together with and so she broke off our thing. I never saw her again, although I called a couple of time after break. I wondered what happened to her for a while then moved on. What I, we, don’t have to wonder about was how right, how in tune with the music of the generation of ’68 she had been. The Airplane, the Byrds, the Doors, switched up acid-drenched Stones and Beatles, and a million other drug-induced bands proved her point. I picked up on it too. I wonder if she ever mentioned me to that guy she went back to or to whoever the next guy was. Nah, forget I said that.