When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion Of The 1960s- Another Look – "The Battle Of The Sexes-Round 235"-For Cindy P., Class Of 1968

When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion Of The 1960s- Another Look – "The Battle Of The Sexes-Round 235"-For Cindy P., Class Of 1968

 

From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin

 

With A 2015 Introduction By Sam Lowell

 

If you did not know what happened to the late Peter Paul Markin who used to write for some of the alternative newspaper and magazine publications that proliferated in the wake of the 1960s circus-war/bloodbath/all world together festival/new age aborning cloud puff dream, won a few awards too and was short-listed for the Globe Prize this is what is what. What is what before the ebb tide kind of knocked the wind out of everybody’s sails, everybody who was what I called “seeking a newer world,” a line I stole from some English poet (Robert Kennedy, Jack’s brother, or his writer “cribbed” the line too for some pre-1968 vision book before he ran for President in 1968 so I am in good company.) I will tell you in a minute what expression “the Scribe,” a named coined by our leader, Frankie Riley, which is what we always called Markin around the corner we hung out in together in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in our hometown of North Adamsville, used to describe that change he had sensed coming in the early 1960s. Saw coming long before any of the rest of us did, or gave a rat’s ass about in our serious pressing of the moment, you know our existential angst moment although we did not call it that until later when the Scribe went off to college and tried to impress us with his new found facts, his two thousand new found facts about guys like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, worries about girls (all of the existential problems angst including about bedding them, or rather getting them in back seats of cars mainly), dough (ditto the girl existential thing to keep them interested in you and not run off with the next guy who had ten bucks to spend freely on them to your deuce, Jesus) and cars (double ditto since that whole “bedding” thing usually hinged on having a car, or having a corner boy with some non-family car to as we used to say, again courtesy of the Scribe via scat bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, “doing the do.”

 

All I know is that ebb tide that caught Markin kind of flat-footed, kind of made him gravitate back toward his baser instincts honed by every breathe he took as a kid down in the projects where he learned the facts of life, the facts of fellaheen life which is what one of our junior high school teachers called us, called it right too although we were the urban versions of the downtrodden shanty peasants but they were kindred no doubt, is still with us. So maybe being, having been a “prophet, ” being a guy who worried about that social stuff while we were hung up on girls,  dough and cars (him too in his more sober moments especially around one Rosemond Goode), wasn’t so good after all. Maybe the late Markin was that kind of Catholic “martyr saint” that we all had drilled into us in those nasty nun run Sunday catechism classes, maybe he really was some doomed “n----r” to use a phrase he grabbed from some Black Panther guys he used to run around with when he (and Josh Breslin) lived in Oakland and the “shit was hitting the fan” from every law enforcement agency that could put two bullets in some greasy chamber to mow down anybody even remotely associated with the brothers and the ten point program (who am I kidding anybody who favored armed self-defense for black men and women).

 

Here is a quick run-down about the fate of our boy corner boy bastard saint and about why stuff that he wrote forty or fifty years ago now is seeing the light of day. I won’t bore you with the beginnings, the projects stuff because frankly I too came out of the projects, not the same one as he did but just as hopeless down in Carver where I grew up before heading to North Adamsville and Josh who was as close as anybody to Markin toward the end was raised in the Olde Saco projects up in Maine and we are both still here to tell the tale. The real start as far as what happened to unravel the Scribe happened after he, Markin, got out of the Army in late 1970 when he did two things that are important here. First, he continued, “re-connected” to use the word he used, on that journey that he had started before he was inducted in the Army in 1968 in search of what he called the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (he put the search in capitals when he wrote about the experiences so I will do so here), the search really for the promise that the “fresh breeze” he was always carping about was going to bring. That breeze which was going to get him out from under his baser instincts developed (in self-defense against the punks that were always bothering him something I too knew about and against his mother who was truly a dinosaur tyrant unlike my mother who tended to roll with the punches and maybe that helped break my own fall down that Markin fate ladder) in his grinding poverty childhood, get out from under the constant preoccupation with satisfying his “wanting habits” which would eventually do him in.

 

Markin had made a foolish decision, foolish in retrospect although he when I and others asked about whether he would have done things differently if he had known what the hell-hole of Vietnam was all about was ambivalent about the matter, to drop out of college (Boston University) after his sophomore year in 1967 in order to pursue his big cloud puff dream, a dream which by that time had him carrying us along with him on the hitchhike road west in the summer of love, 1967, and beyond. Of course 1967, 1968, 1969 and other years as well were the “hot” years of the war in Vietnam and all Uncle Sam and his local draft boards wanted, including in North Adamsville, was warm bodies to kill commies, kill them for good. As he would say to us after he had been inducted and had served his tour in ‘Nam as he called it (he and the other military personnel who fought the war could use the short-hand expression but the term was off-bounds for civilians in shortened form)  and came back to the “real” world he did what he did, wished he had not done so, wished that he had not gone, and most of all wished that the American government which made nothing but animals out of him and his war buddies would come tumbling down for what it had done to its sons for no good reasons.

 

And so Markin continued his search, maybe a little wiser, continued as well to drag some of his old corner boys like me on that hitchhike road dream of his before the wheels fell off. I stayed with him longest I think before even I could see we had been defeated by the night-takers and I left the road to go to law school and “normalcy.” (The signposts: Malcolm X’s, Robert Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King’s assassinations, hell maybe JFK’s set the who thing on a bad spiral which kind of took the political winds out of any idea that there would not be blow-back for messing with the guys in power at the time, the real guys not their front-men, the politicians; the rising tide of “drop out, drug out, live fast and die young” which took a lot of the best of our generation off giving up without a fight; the endless death spiral of Vietnam; the plotted killings of Black Panthers and any other radical or revolutionary of any color or sex who “bothered” them; and, the election of one master criminal, Richard Milhous Nixon, to be President of the United States which was not only a cruel joke but put paid to the notion that that great unwashed mass of Americans were on our side.) Markin stuck it out longer until at some point in 1974, 1975 a while after I had lost touch with him when even he could see the dreams of the 1960s had turned to dust, turned to ashes in his mouth and he took a wrong turn, or maybe not a wrong turn the way the wheel of his life had been set up but a back to his baser instincts turn which had been held in check when we were in the high tide of 1960s possibilities. (Josh Breslin, another corner boy, although from Olde Saco, Maine who had met Markin out in San Francisco in the summer of love in 1967 and who had also left the road earlier just before me was in contact until pretty near the end, pretty close to the last time in early 1975 anybody heard from Markin this side of the border, this side of paradise as it turned out since he lived out in California where Markin was living at the time confirmed that Markin was in pretty ragged mental and physical condition by then).           

 

Markin had a lot invested emotionally and psychological in the success of the 1960s “fresh breeze coming across the land” as he called it early on. Maybe it was that ebb tide, maybe it was the damage that military service in hell-hole Vietnam did to his psyche, maybe it was a whole bunch of bad karma things from his awful early childhood that he held in check when there were still sunnier days ahead but by the mid-1970s he had snapped. Got involved in using and dealing cocaine just starting to be a big time profitable drug of choice among rich gringos (and junkies ready to steal anything, anytime. anywhere in order to keep the habit going). Somehow down in Mexico, Sonora, we don’t know all the details to this day a big deal Markin brokered (kilos from what we heard so big then before the cartels organized everything and before the demand got so great they were shipping freighters full of cold cousin cocaine for the hipsters and the tricksters and big for Markin who had worked his way up the drug trade food chain probably the way he worked his way into everything by some “learned” dissertation about how his input could increase revenue, something along those lines) went awry, his old time term for something that went horribly wrong, and he wound up face down in a dusty back road with two slugs to the head and now resides in the town’s potter’s field in an unmarked grave. But know this; the bastard is still moaned over, moaned to high heaven.

 

The second thing Markin did, after he decided that going back to school after the shell-shock of Vietnam was out of the question, was to begin to write for many alternative publications (and I think if Josh is correct a couple of what he, Markin, called “bourgeois” publications for the dough). Wrote two kinds of stories, no three, first about his corner boy days with us at Salducci’s (and also some coming of age stories from his younger days growing up in the Adamsville Housing Authority “projects” with his best friend, Billie Bradley before he met us in junior high school). Second about that search for the Great Blue-Pink American Night which won him some prizes since he had a fair-sized audience who were either committed to the same vision, or who timidly wished they could have had that commitment (like a couple of our corner boys who could not make the leap to “drugs, sex, rock and roll, and raising bloody hell on the streets fighting the ‘monster’ government” and did the normal get a job, get married, get kids, get a house which made the world go round then). And thirdly, an award-winning series of stories under the by-line Going To The Jungle for the East Bay Other (published out of the other side of the bay San Francisco though) about his fellow Vietnam veterans who could not deal with the “real” world coming back and found themselves forming up in the arroyos, along the rivers, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges of Southern California around Los Angeles. Guys who needed their stories told and needed a voice to give life to those stories. Markin was their conduit.

 

Every once in a while somebody, in this case Bart Webber, from the old corner boy crowd of our youthful times, will see or hear something that will bring him thoughts about our long lost comrade who kept us going in high school times with his dreams and chatter (although Frankie Riley was our leader since he was an organizer-type whereas Markin could hardly organize his shoes, if that). Now with the speed and convenient of the Internet we can e-mail each other and get together at some convenient bar to talk over old times. And almost inevitably at some point in the evening the name of the Scribe will come up. Recently we decided, based on Bart’s idea, that we would, if only for ourselves, publish a collection of whatever we could find of old-time photographs and whatever stories Markin had written that were still sitting around somewhere to commemorate our old friend. We have done so with much help from Bart’s son Jeff who now runs the printing shop that Bart, now retired, started back in the 1960s.

 

This story is from that first category, the back in the day North Adamsville corner boy story, although this one is painting with a broader brush since it combines with his other great love to write about books, film and music. This one about music, about doo wop, women’s side which always both intrigued him and befuddled him since the distaff side lyrics (nice combination term that Markin would have appreciated especially that distaff thing for women who also as this piece will speak to, befuddled him, befuddled him straight up. It had been found in draft form up in Josh Breslin’s attic in Olde Saco, Maine where he had lived before meeting Markin in the great summer of love night in 1967 and where he had later off the road stored his loose hitchhike road stuff and his writerly notebooks and journals at his parents’ house which he had subsequently inherited on their passings. We have decided whatever we had to publish would be published as is, either published story or in draft form. Otherwise, moaning over our brother or not, Markin is liable to come after us from that forlorn unmarked grave and give us hell for touching a single word of the eight billion facts in his fallen head.      

 

Here is what he had to say:                        

 

When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion Of The 1960s- Another Look – "The Battle Of The Sexes-Round 235"-For Cindy P., Class Of 1968

 

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin:

 

Several years ago, in response to a question on questionnaire sent by members of my 1964 high school class reunion committee, a question posed simply as this-did one prefer the Beatles or the Rolling Stones during one's high school days?- I answered in favor of the latter. Needless to say in recounting that experience I provided more than that simply either/or answer. Of course the answer begged the real purpose of the question which was whether I, or anybody else who answered the question was going to attend the fifth class reunion and the ‘come on” was that whichever band got the nod would be featured as the theme of the event. The short answer to the reunion question is that no, no, I would not be going as I was glad, glad as hell to shake the dust of old North Adamsville off my shoes, had travelled the great wide spaces of this land to do so, had imbibed in the drugged out, sexed out, dusted out, liquored out, beat band music out that was on offer in those spaces and the thought of returning to close-mouthed, ripped-apart, do your duty, get married, have kids, dogs, wives, white picket fences and by god don’t air your dirty linen in public North Adamsville was like thoughts of going back to prison, doing a hard nickel or dime for an armed robbery of some silly variety store. The long answer was that having done all that imbibing across the great divide, having dusted off my shoes, maybe better in the West sandals, having sowed my oats so to speak I had, wisely or not, dropped out of school, college, Boston University, the jury in my head is still out on that one, I got a friendly notice from my friend and neighbors at the draft board in North Adamsville and being as patriotic as the next guy, then, been inducted into the American Army in early 1969 and so at the time set for the reunion I was sweating my ass off trying not to killed out in the Central Highlands of  Vietnam so I would have to pass on a RSVP for the reunion.

 

Of course under “false pretenses” perhaps I nevertheless went on and on about how the Stones' blues-driven early rock numbers “spoke” much more to my boy teenager alienation and angst, girl angst if you must know, than the more “happy music” the Beatles originally produced. How something like the Willie Dixon-drawn and Howlin’ Wolf-etched Little Red Rooster and Can’t Get No Satisfaction reached some place in me that I Want To Hold Your Hand could not touch. I   also noted that, as a general proposition, the earlier male rockers of the period from Elvis with his sassy sexy One Night With You (and better the One Night Of Sin version that got bootleg play for a while out of a Chicago radio station I could get on late Sunday nights, Mr. Be-Bop’s Blues Hour on my up in my room transistor radio), Jerry Lee Lewis (and that classic scene from an otherwise B-movie cautionary moral play about the don’t of drug use with him ripping up the town on the back of a flatbed truck with High School Confidential ), Bo Diddley(putting in a very serious bid on the question who put the rock in rock and roll) and Chuck Berry (announcing to a candid nation, teen nation the only one that counted, the only one that he was speaking to that Mister Beethoven and his brethren had best move over since a new high sheriff of music was in town, him)“spoke” more to me, for those same reasons, than the girl doo-wop (the term of the times) vocalists with their generally wistful, whimsical lyrics about the age old boy-meets-girl relationships, and their pratfalls.

 

That simple, or I thought simple, observation from now seemingly ancient youth brought a storm of protest from an unexpected (well, now that I think about it, not so unexpected) source, my current dear companion, what people are now starting in a less Victorian-splashed time to call my "significant other” (rather than mistress, fancy woman, whore or whatever else they call two people who cohabitate without rings and such). She lambasted my male-based choices unceremoniously and challenged me to really listen to the great female vocalists from those days. And I did, although somewhat haphazardly. And thereafter I, in this space, posed the Beatles/Stones question for the distaff side. Brenda Lee or Patsy Cline? At the time I did that somewhat artificially because I was actually pretty unfamiliar with their works. And, as it turned out, ditto for most of the young female vocalists of that period. So more recently I have been on something of a learning, or rather re-learning binge (re-learning because of, course, fixated on my transistor radio up in my room to keep out parental and sibling noise I had heard most of the girl vocalists back then, their songs just didn’t register). To answer the question I posed though, no question Patsy Cline was the “max mama” of the late 1950s song night before her untimely death.

 

All of the above is just a roundabout, very roundabout way, of getting to the core of this review. One of the great features of the Rock ‘N’ Roll Era series that I have spent some time memory lane covering is the cover art work. And that remained true on the 1960s: Jukebox Memories compilation. The cover portrayed a very much Brenda Lee/Wanda Jackson/Leslie Gore wannabe young female vocalist surrounded by a standard rock trio backing up her vocals. And that sent me flashing back to those tunes, those girl tunes. And I will just repeat here what I mentioned as a result of listening to about ten girl doo wop group or just straight girl solo vocalist records. As you will not doubt see I have “got religion”:

 

“As I also noted in that earlier review [referring to a review of girl doo wop compilations] one problem with the girl groups, and now with these generic girl vocals for a guy, me, a serious rock guy, me, was that the lyrics for many of the girl group songs, frankly, did not “speak to me.” After all how much empathy could a young ragamuffin of boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks like this writer have for a girl who breaks a guy's heart after leading him on, yes, leading him on, just because her big bruiser of a boyfriend is coming back and she needs some excuse to brush the heartbroken lad off in the Angels' My Boyfriend’s Back. Or some lucky guy, some lucky Sunday guy, maybe, who breathlessly catches the eye of the singer in the Shirelles' I Met Him On Sunday from a guy who, dateless Saturday night, was hunched over some misbegotten book, some study book, on Sunday feeling all dejected. And how about this, some two, or maybe, three-timing gal who berated her ever-loving boyfriend because she needs a good talking to, or worst, a now socially incorrect, very incorrect and rightly so, "beating" in Joanie Sommers’ Johnny Get Angry.

 

So you get the idea, this stuff could not “speak to me.” Now you understand, right? Except, surprise, surprise foolish, behind the eight- ball, know-nothing youthful guy had it all wrong and should have been listening, and listening like crazy, to these lyrics because, brothers and sisters, they held the key to what was what about what was on girls’ minds back in the day, and maybe now a little too, and if I could have decoded this I would have had, well, the beginning of knowledge, girl knowledge. Damn. But that is one of the virtues, and maybe the only virtue of getting older, getting maybe a little wiser than some punk kid stuff rag. Yah, and also get this- you had better get your do-lang, do-lang, your shoop, shoop, and your best be-bop, be-bop into that good night voice out and sing along to the lyrics here. This was our teen angst, teen alienation, teen love youth and now this stuff sounds great.

And from girls even.”

 

P.S. Oh, you thought I was finished. Well with the review, yes, but there is still that little nagging question of that companion, that “significant other,” lambasting me about my male youth choices. Well sometimes one cannot win. The gist of her indignant argument, as you now know, centered on my alleged testosterone-driven choices of male Rock 'n' Roll bands to the exclusion of kinder, gentler music-in short, choices that women might prefer. As mentioned above I took her point to heart. But explain this. In the summer of 1972 I attended a Rolling Stones concert. Now who do you think was standing beside me shaking her ass, my ass, everybody’s ass for all she was worth? So much for that testosterone theory. Moreover, who imprisoned me at the concession stand practically at gunpoint (just kidding), until I bought her a sassy little Stones T-shirt as a memento of the occasion? Enough said. I rest my case.

 

Here Are Some Lyrics For Brenda and Patsy So You Can Make An Informed Decision On These Burning Questions Of The Day.

 

Brenda Lee - I'm Sorry lyrics

Lyrics to I'm Sorry :

I'm sorry, so sorry

That I was such a fool

I didn't know

Love could be so cruel

Oh, oh, oh, oh

Uh, oh

Oh, yes

You tell me mistakes

Are part of being young

But that don't right

The wrong that's been done

Spoken:

(I'm sorry) I'm sorry

(So sorry) So sorry

Please accept my apology

But love is blind

And I was to blind to see

Oh, oh, oh, oh

Uh, oh

Oh, yes

You tell me mistakes

Are part of being young

But that don't right

The wrong that's been done

Oh, oh, oh, oh

Uh, oh

Oh, yes

I'm sorry, so sorry

Please accept my apology

But love was blind

And I was too blind to see

(Sorry)

 

She's Got You Lyrics

Artist: Patsy Cline

I've got your picture that you gave to me

And it's signed with love just like it used to be

The only thing different, the only thing new

I've got your picture, she's got you

I've got the records that we used to share

And they still sound the same as when you were here

The only thing different, the only thing new

I've got the records, she's got you

I've got your memory, or, has it got me?

I really don't know but I know it won't let me be

I've got your class ring that proved you cared

And it still looks the same as when you gave it, dear

The only thing different, the only thing new

I've got these little things, she's got you

I've got your memory, or, has it got me?

I really don't know but I know it won't let me be

I've got your class ring that proved you cared

And it still looks the same as when you gave it, dear

The only thing different, the only thing new

I've got these little things, she's-got-you